Appropriate that which is Appropriate

It’s important to understand we’re in the appropriation phase of “civil rights”, a period of wealth confiscation and privilege transfer from white to non-white. From culture to commerce new terms and limits are being rationalized as necessary racial justice as professions, cultural domains and even physical spaces are carved out from which whites are to be excluded. The language is all theory and romance (and sinister; at some point black “scholars” started talking about the white “role”in the New America to come) but the result is very much material and economic.

It began in earnest with the Obama Administration, and was well on its way to finalizing a sort of post-white order, with whites serving as a legacy oppressor even as their numbers dwindled. Most importantly it was about the orderly transfer of that wealth and power–it had to go to the right people after all. Needless to say Trump derailed all that, if only for the moment.

This is what all this talk of cultural appropriation and representation is about. It’s why Google is convulsing right now under its own attempts to transfer half of its employment opportunity to favored groups. It’s everywhere, and a proper economic analysis of its cost, and the costs to come if we continue on this path, would probably make our collective head explode.

The initial fervor that greeted Obama’s rise was based for many whites on the notion it would solve America’s race problem, reassuring black Americans finally of our sincerity and inspiring them to do better. It’s as if the average liberal really understands it isn’t white racism holding people back; he just thinks black people don’t know it yet. Once they do, things will sort out. Eight years after Obama black people show less signs of catching on. The myth of white racism is more jealously held than ever.

If blacks generally hadn’t been paying attention to the culture’s positive encouragement Obama certainly had. He took up the archetype he learned on TV and it worked better than any amount of authenticity. A little fake inflection here, a little pretending to like hip hop there. Authenticity is overrated.
The notion that he, in turn, would inspire, finally, black America to pull its weight resembled something like an economic stimulus program, without even the temporary bump. The “Obama Effect” purported to find its positive effects, and quickly fizzled out. Another social justice perpetual motion machine never got going.

Not that blacks weren’t inspired by Obama’s election. Urban blacks responded right away, discovering and improvising on the flash mob concept. There was a new confidence and energy in black America, but it wasn’t expressed by black America becoming more law abiding and successful, whiter; it was expressed–but of course–by more confident blacks being blacker.  As usual, blacks had a whole different idea of what things meant than their white “allies”.

Their position as a group will not be improved through thrift and industry–even if mere discipline and effort were all it took to equalize us economically and every which way, in so succeeding it would remove the source of black America’s unique power and position: their suffering.
But they can’t compete with whites at being white and most importantly they don’t want to. What they want is to be themselves, to assert themselves, to mold their world–just like anyone else–to make it more amenable and less alien. You can’t blame them.
Authenticity–the authenticity Obama lacks, can never attain, is more important than any quality of life metric. To the extent to which the average person feels alienated from his culture–and who doesn’t now?–might be directly proportional to the degree to which that culture has been absorbed by other cultures. Consider the degree to which black culture has molded American culture.
Black America’s position as a group is improved through political power–they’ve already managed to carve out an out-sized degree of autonomy and influence purely through political action and demagogy. That demagogy–BLM and the rest of what passes for black civil rights–complements perfectly the pre-existing violence and mayhem that produce its martyrs.

The malice behind Obama’s toothy grin came out after the Democrats got pummeled hard in Obama’s first mid-terms. The fake gloves came off. The Trayvon Martin campaign was whipped up heading into the 2012 elections and produced Black Lives Matter, by 2016, whipped into a frenzy by the presidential campaign, its supporters were assassinating the same police working security at its demonstrations.
At the same time the seemingly petty grievances grew greater in number and fury. In Google trends the term “cultural approproation” went from obscurity to relevance 2012 with Obama’s second presidential run, increased up to the administration’s second mid-term elections and remains at that plateau now in the time of Trump.

Even the kitsch element in black politics, always profound, got cornier–Ta Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me came out it 2015.

Another conversation we won’t have: the failure of the promised Obama Effect and the scandal of the actual Obama Effect. The reality is racial resentment has gotten so much worse over the last eight years it’s hard to measure because the terms of debate have had to change that much to keep up with it–resistance not being an option.

The effect of eight years of Obama has been to render the race problem insoluble. On the good side, his policies and rhetoric hastened the rise of the alt right and Trump.

Death Wish

The trailer for the upcoming Death Wish remake has me holding out hope Eli Roth flubbed it and made a good, relevant even, film.

That hope got a little more slender reading Roth’s defense of it from the predictable anticipatory outrage. Like the original, the film can’t escape the charge it’s “fascist”:

 “…many on social media have taken issue with the clip, with some branding its depiction of violence as “fascist propaganda”. The movie’s director, Eli Roth, has now hit back, arguing that the movie is “not about race” and that those accusations were not his intent when making the movie. 

 “I got to say, it’s just the ‘alt-right’ amount of controversy, because that was the number one trending video on YouTube this morning,” he told TMZ.
 “Do I like it? You know what, I’m really proud of the movie, and when people see the movie in context, I think this is all going to evaporate.” 

“Everyone is very sensitive, everyone is ready to take a stance against something, but c’mon guys. You have to be aware of your audience, if you want to handle that subject matter, you have to be smart about it. And we do.

 “When you see the film, you’ll see exactly how we handle the killing, how it’s not about race. It’s about good, it’s about bad. He’s going after bad guys, he’s going after the guys that did this to him. But you know what, everybody gets a taste of justice in this movie.”

Roth’s lame-punning name-checking of the alt right shows just how much times have changed. Before Trump the average normie didn’t know from “alt right”; now it’s a Thing. But the director has another problem: he might accidentally create the first alt right classic.

It’s remarkable: just as with the original, the film’s liberal detractors now are reading race into the story for us, and making the “racist” assertion that crime is necessarily a black problem.

The first film over-represented white or white-ish bad guys, including the primary villains. Roth’s trailer reassures us almost all of the villains are white, and the one black bad guy we see getting smoked we can confidently tie to the adorable black waif in the hospital who tells Bruce Willis about the drug dealer who won’t let him walk to school (the Ice Cream Man).

It’s enough for some to see a white guy wielding a gun, of course, but in rejecting the authors’ proffered white villains, the liberal critics are comically implying the worst, essentially saying: of course you’re talking about black criminals. You’re not dealing with morons here.

The first Death Wish came out in 1974. The very first–let’s call it–urban fascist western came out in 1971, Dirty Harry. That film followed the same pattern, sort of controlling for race to make it about “crime” by making it ultimately a story of a white hero and a white villain.
Somewhere along the line this genre went away; now you couldn’t make Dirty Harry. But then I would have thought that of Death Wish. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what the film’s detractors are saying: you can’t make that film now.

The Left wasn’t buying it then and they aren’t buying it now: these films were right wing paranoid fantasies about black urban savagery. Of course they’re right about everything but the paranoia part.
By 1970 white America had gotten its first real taste of the black boot. The riots of the late sixties and the first massive pulse of black crime released by enlightened policy and liberal judges was emptying out the inner cities; white America was still being introduced to the humiliation of black malice. Of course we wanted a film about a gunslinger who goes in and straightens them out (and still waiting, really).

The “fascist” charge was always pointless. The problem then, as now, is you’re not allowed to offend blacks. Call the films racist (by implication, again) all you want, they are, I don’t care, but Callahan–like Paul Kersey–is a rogue set against the state and society. Do the stories of Kersey and Callahan impugn the liberal state, and imply the necessity of authoritarian control? That might qualify them as “fascist”, but I think only if you think liberal democracy can inflict no degradation on society and order that is too great.  There’s never been a better time for a revisiting of these films, but they would have to be “fascist” and certainly racist to be worth a damn.

Both films are laments of the helplessness of modern man in the urban environment at the onset of the Seventies, abandoned by a corrupt state to the mercy of a perverse and cruel enemy. It’s forty-odd years on, and the America facing the catastrophe of black urban violence now seems positively quaint in comparison. The enemies have only multiplied.

Dirty Harry introduced the trope that became a cliche–the bad guy gets out on a technicality because of a liberal judge. Well, was the US legal system not letting a lot of bad guys out on the streets in the name of liberality in the Seventies?  The liberal critics were entirely right that the films arise out of white fear of black crime. That, to them, is enough. They wouldn’t allow then that this fear was justified; they won’t allow it now, four decades later.

 It’s still enough, only now, where there was once the dull, cheery confidence of those disastrously naive Norman Lear-era liberals we have the mean, unflinching paranoia of black Twitter and the whole brood of aggrieved they somehow spawned. Not a one of them bears a resemblance to their nice white parents. They must have adopted them from the Third World somewhere.

Social justice has taken on the role of vigilante, punching nazis, assembling mobs, assassinating cops; and it won’t have any cinematic vigilante justice that isn’t socially conscious. Of course at this point many a story has been degraded by social justice, and we can expect it’s only the beginning.

Will it be that Eli Roth “ruined” Death Wish by laying it on too thick?
Or will it be that he couldn’t help himself?

He doesn’t even have to cast racially accurate bad guys. The Left helpfully reminds us if not who he’s talking about who he should be talking about. They document it for posterity. Without them, future generations might read from these films that crime really wasn’t a black thing in our time.

Don’t be Google

And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and the ass turned aside out of the way, and went into the field: and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into the way.
–Numbers, 22:23

The notorious Google memo Gizmodo calls an “anti-diversity screed” (elsewhere it’s a “fulmination”, “sexist twaddle”, and, even, “lengthy”) is neither. It opens with a sort of standard genuflection to diversity that seems earnest enough (not that being earnest would be enough). Somehow despite seeing and outlining the impossibility of diversity as a reality, the author and his defenders accept its necessity as a goal. The goons who shut them down while shouting nonsense only look like the stupid ones. They get it: the way in which diversity efforts fail–women and minorities proving inadequate–reveals the absurdity and injustice of diversity as a goal.

“If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.” He pleads. But the real problem is we can’t have an honest discussion that doesn’t ultimately reveal there is no problem. Indeed, if the honesty goes long enough, we might find that diversity as an idea is the problem. Even, maybe, diversity is a problem. Monsters dwell here. That’s why you can’t even draw maps of this place.

The problem here is the problem with “white privilege” entire: if you accept the inherent value of enlightened Western values over ignorance and hunger, and you accept the idea that this West is nonetheless uniquely hostile to such as blacks (for one)–this dissonance is conventional opinion–then you necessarily imply blacks aren’t as well suited for enlightenment values. This is why we can’t have nice conversations. The floor always ends up strewn with our prettiest lies. But we should have them. For one thing, those enlightenment values are being pawned off to pay the interest on our debt to black America, as the West and the US are deformed to meet their cruder biases and values. From the black vantage, civil rights are rationalized ethnic warfare contorting the law and culture to conform to black values.

That’s why the line, for the moment, holds against honest public conversations about any of it. But social justice is like football. You have to move the ball. So its proponents keep advancing. Anything else is taking a knee, truth be damned. 

If the memo author’s sentiments in favor of diversity are real, they are about to be a severe stress test such as an engineer can appreciate and understand. Of course all bets are off when we’re talking social justice. If the hammer comes down at Google–and the standard move is to double-down every time the Narrative is challenged: “sensitivity” training, firings, expansion of diversity efforts and staff–I suspect that faction of discontented White–and likely Asian–men will grow in size and impatience.

How big is the discontent? How “angry” are the white males? They’ve been incanting “white male anger” into the electronic ether so long they are about to conjure it up in reality. It’s long overdue. The scandal isn’t the excess of white male anger it’s the absence of it.

Consider the absurdity of Danielle Brown, thirty-something, riding her triumph in increasing “diversity” in just two years as diversity honcho at Intel (“…hit its goal of retaining diverse employees, with a 15 percent exit rate for women and people of color compare to a 15.5 percent exit rate for employees in majority groups”), without a technical background, dismissing out of hand the memo (which doesn’t deserve a link) because it’s inconsistent with the values and needs of the company at which she’s yet to occupy an office. In her role as the social justice equivalent of a Soviet political officer.

Her linkedin page suggests she was saved from having to rely on her own education in finance and sales by being plucked out of relative obscurity at the biotech firm Gilead (she was the bomb in Gilead) and put on the diversity fast track (Intel’s “accelerated leadership” program) in 2011. Six years later she’s a VP at Google, and if she doesn’t know computer code from the DaVinci Code it doesn’t matter; she’s in charge of the conversation. Nice work if you can get it.

That work involves maintaining a culture of shaming and coercion. The memo writer complains:
“While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.”

Update: The author has already been sacked.

That culture of shaming is going to have to get a lot harsher. I suspect Google will take measures to root out like-minded individuals where it can and rely on the power of the non-disclosure agreement. The company is on its way to becoming Scientology.


Golden Archers

“Drunk girls wait an hour to pee…”
–LCD Soundsystem, Drunk Girls

Steve Sailer on America’s Current Year Qualified Navy:

Boys like everything about projecting (in the physical sense, rather than that useful Freudian sense of “projection”). That’s why many (male) toddlers will immediately pick up a stick as soon as they step outdoors and brandish it about like the winning Killer Ape in 2001. 

The latest Navy supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, launched its first jet this week, in another demonstration of the Pentagon’s ability to project power globally. But the Ford’s seamen are not to project so much lavatorily. 

But while urinals are being installed in the Ladies Rooms of luxury resorts, urinals are not being installed in the latest American aircraft carrier. From Business Insider: 

The Navy’s newest, most sophisticated aircraft carrier doesn’t have urinals Amid all its upgrades and advances, the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is lacking one feature: urinals. Every bathroom on the Ford is, for the first time, gender-neutral, equipped with flush toilets and stalls, according to Navy Times. Bathroom-design experts have said sit-down toilets are less sanitary…

Seamen will have to project their stream (and woe to the aged, er, hand) more accurately and carefully on the pitching high seas now. Brings to mind an unfortunate association from youth, obliterating the enemy flotilla of Dad’s unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette butts, before they could turn the tide of the war or my stream failed.

But Steve is on to something regarding projection and the act of urination. Camille Paglia was here years ago. From her Sexual Personae:

Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by urination, one of male anatomy’s most efficient comparmentalizations. Freud thinks primitive man preened himself on his ability to put out a fire with a stream of urine [I’m willing to bet I’m not the only American youth to witness one or more of his fellows demonstrating their ability to, say, clear a brick wall]. A strange thing to be proud of but certainly beyond the scope of a woman [thus a source of, mostly, unspoken female resentment, a small but significant tributary contributing to feminism’s Amazon], who would scorch her hams in the process. Male urinatinon really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. 

Harper’s magazine ran a pre-print excerpt with that part about transcendance, with a get-a-load-of-this wink, before the book was published and landed like a small meteor in 1990. She goes on:

The cumbersome, solipsistic character of female physiology is tediously evident at sports events and rock concerts, where fifty women wait in line for admission to the sequestered cells of the toilet. Meanwhile, their male friends zip in and out (in every sense) and stand around looking at their watches and rolling their eyes. Freud’s notion of penis envy proves too true…

I’ve personally known women who were nearly obsessed with the penis–this is not salacious, they were objectively fascinated with, and amused by, its non-sexual workings. Male appreciation of the vagina is necessarily fraught, channeling, I suspect, fear of disease for one thing into such as the vagina dentata myth.

One of the impulses behind feminism, I believe, and one for which I have sympathy, is the need for women to retreat from and recover from the company of men. Men are exhausting, precisely because we are so different from women, of course, and in the worst way for feminism: men act (they project), and women contain, as in pregnancy–indeed, in the sex act the man projects and the woman draws.

The penis is reassuringly comic in its vulnerability: it’s exposure to the elements (and reaction to them), its reliance on the mechanics of the erection, its homely appearance, its double-duty as ignoble drain spigot and intrepid ram-rod. Tragic, too. The whole masculine tragedy is in the penis: in its endless rising in assertive hope, reaching the goal only to fall back spent, lessened, always “leaving it on the field”, equally diminished whether victorious or vanquished. The penis, like a man, is expected to achieve; the woman to receive and rate. How’s that for inequality?

There’s no room for that in the Current Year, but politicizing the inherent inequality of our plumbing is perfectly consistent with feminist notions of fairness. Thus it was inevitable that it would be assailed as a political problem. Bathroom equity became a small “thing” a long time ago when women started lobbying for more restrooms, or the right to use men’s rooms, to equalize the time burden. The Seat Liner Ceiling was set to be assailed. Whatever came of that I don’t know, but obviously it’s now superseded, and made incoherent, by the trans movement for bathroom “equality”.
Momentum is taking us to something like borderless bathrooms–you can’t discriminate in any fashion, so all are open to all, by law. As Bill Murray says, “cats and dogs, living together…”

But the broader movement really doesn’t care about women’s rights, and has performed an end-around feminism’s project of creating a privileged identity for biological women, and is of course going after the very idea of sexual identity. Don’t envy the fun and convenience of the outtie, girls; lots of girls have them, now. What do you mean they don’t? Current Year.

A Confederacy of Dindus

HBO announces it’s developing an alternative history of the South. The show-runners from something called Game of Thrones, that appears to have had a bit of success, are writing and producing. Let the games begin. They’re White Guys!

If only it were so; I’m always a little depressed for our side to learn, as so often, it’s just another pair of talented Jews. Of course you would never know it–the average normie doesn’t, and if he did, he wouldn’t allow himself to think it relevant. That is, the average white normie–the only demographic not allowed a self-interested response.
The real outrage is that whites and American history get screwed twice: by the Jewish writers pushing an anti-white narrative, and then when those same writers are deployed as “white” straw men. This isn’t just a case of the latest silly outrage, either. This was a skirmish in our ongoing, disguised ethnic warfare, a looting.
HBO hasn’t started shooting and can be counted on to do two things: hire more black “talent” to go with the two black writers they brought in already as window dressing, and be much more wary about the content of the show. HBO is already acceding to the bullying.

Another alternative history show about an independent black American country has been revealed to be in the works at Amazon. In an alternate present a small independent black country has won its independence in the South. Someone joked on Twitter they could call this state “Liberia” (at this rate, if it’s made in two years, it will feature pyramids levitating on futuristic rockets, and eventually be shown in schools).

 Salon:

 During Sunday’s episode of “Game of Thrones,” #OscarsSoWhite creator April Reign and her swath of followers took to Twitter to express their disappointment with the network’s decision. Reign argued the series is racist as it ignores the systemic enslavement black people currently face.

 The irony in Joy Reid’s response trailed like a piece of toilet paper from her oblivious heel: “It plays to a rather concrete American fantasy: slavery that never ends, becoming a permanent state for black people. Repugnant.”
The “concrete fantasy” that “slavery never ends” has become the founding myth of the black American nation. Slavery “systemic”, and in the reality of mass incarceration. Critical race theory of course doesn’t stop there.

It’s not clear whether someone like Reign or Reid understands that Weiss and Goldman could be expected to express something like this, better and more persuasively than any black writer. They’ve publicly committed to making of their intriguing idea fashionable political propaganda (no attendant controversy).
It’s a relatively new sub-genre: if history can be retconned (as Steve Sailer likes to say) in fiction to create the illuison of, say, black achievement, the present can also be pro-conned in such but-only-if alternative history story.

But it doesn’t matter to blacks. Weiss and Goldman themselves probably get it better than black activists, who tend toward stereotypically emotional analyses and arguments.

The history of the South, for starters, is now a sort of cultural property, proprietary to black Americans. It is a material power grab in the disugised ethnic warfare that is modern America. We can expect more of it, and more creative attempts to formalize and expand it. In a fit of absentmindedness we’re creating a regime of non-white privilege, with blacks at the apex.

A Narrative’s Progress

The project to erase the West–globalism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, the “Narrative”–is like a revolutionary army that’s advanced too far too fast. It is stretched thin. It’s gotten too far out ahead of popular acquiescence and demographic change. The unified horror of the vast mainstream of punditry in reaction to Trump’s Poland speech revealed the extent to which the elite felt, with some comfort, that white Americans had already been killed off, rendered passive or are complicit in their demise. Mostly what offends, appalls and terrifies is the thought of a primordial enemy roused.

What had been a neat trick–manufacturing consent in the populace for radical social change by presenting the illusion of it first in film, television and media news, creating and occupying the moral high ground, worked quite well as long as things kept moving in the right direction. Conservative reaction would happen, was helpful even, became  a useful fall guy for the Narrative, creating the illusion of progress against ignorance, but would never challenge its core assumption–blank slate theory holding racial and sexual differences meaningless–until Trump came along offering an alternative.

What my cynical self suspects will save the Narrative after all is apathy. That there is no popular movement taking to the streets to defend Trump against the open coup progressing against him contradicts what I just asserted. What is surreal about the times isn’t Donald Trump as president (and as the last defender of the West), or the absurdity of BLM against a backdrop of black hate, or even the trannies; what defies reality is the fact we put up with it all.

And yet there is Trump, and there is the fact the only political way out for him is to pursue the policies that got him elected. Losing on Obamacare is nothing compared to losing on immigration. The counterrevolution he represents tripped the Narrative up, if only for the moment, by suddenly presenting an alternative. It’s way too easy to submit to the lethargy of electronic culture, and it’s still too easy to get by economically; the Narrative should have been home free. Early triumphalism may have doomed it and opened the way for Trump.

(Personally I recall one particular moment, a minor controversy: a black host on one of the liberal cable outlets said something dismissive about white people trying to regain their demographic health, something about breeding; a panel of POC mediocrities sat smiling nervously. They knew it would be controversial, but they were far more afraid of the lead POC mediocrity to say anything. You had to see it, perhaps, but the moment was grim, and I can’t imagine a white person viewing it without, not alarm but outrage.)

Trump suddenly presented an option and it seemed, to too many, an easy one. Simply elect him and sit back. His own bombastic self-promotion hasn’t helped. But the fact is he is in out of his depth–arguably less Obama and Bush II, but they had help. Trump has needed to convert more mainstream politicians, somehow cobble together a competing elite adopting nationalism.

We’re seeing now the historic, still hard to believe Trump election victory was the easy part. He presented that sudden option but it can’t be viable without either significant defections from the mainstream to Trump’s nationalism or popular demonstrations in the streets.

Abandoning the Bitches

The controversy regarding the whiteness of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was predictable enough. I imagine at this point it’s routine for studios to take into consideration the now inevitable controversy surrounding any story deemed “too white”.
The films we get are watered down or ruined by an increasingly harsh regime of representation, but the greater effect is what we don’t see: the many works that simply cannot be made for this reason. Helps to be Christopher Nolan; would a less profitable director get to make this film? How soon until no one can make it?

Social justice deems three or more whites gathering unmolested a conspiracy in itself; feminism deems the same for men. Black violence is why we can’t have nice things. Female resentment is why we can’t have guy things. That’s not quite how the New Yorker would put it, but:

But my main issue with Dunkirk is that it’s so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it’s not like I need every movie to have “strong female leads.” Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams “men-only”—and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I’m wrong about not liking it. If this movie were a dating profile pic, it would be a swole guy at the gym who also goes to Harvard. If it was a drink it would be Stumptown coffee. If it was one of your friends, it would be the one who starts his sentences with “I get what you’re saying, but…”

As Al Bundy, in his hard-earned wisdom, explained years ago, nothing drives women madder than the thought of you having fun without them. Worst of all is the thought they aren’t even on your mind. This, along with Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism, is what feminism is really All About.

Rant

Capitalism is the ultimate conqueror, because it has nothing to defend. Tethered to no principle, place or people, it is infinitely adaptable. It thrives under nationalism as well as revolution (as in the triumphant anti-nationalist revolutionary phase we’re in now), in peace as well as chaos. It’s less a system of integrated parts than it is aggregated behavior establishing economic hierarchies. These hierarchies can be overturned, wealth can be transferred (at great destruction here, great profit there), but the “system” churns on and through its platforms, barely perturbed.

Its putative opposite, communism, could adapt only at risk. Capitalism is “threatened” by “excessive” government control, commerce can be stifled with regulation and entire nations beggared by bad policy, but capitalism thrives without and floods back in the moment legal, social or political barriers are taken out of its way. Communism trying to adopt a bit of capitalism ends up untenable, as in the Soviet Union, or a nominal farce, as in China. In the social democracies of Europe socialism has long needed capitalism more than capitalism needs it. Capitalism needs more consuming humans there. Capitalism needs migration. Socialism complies, has at hand, conveniently enough, the identity politics which it now wages against the interests of traditional labor. The old working class hero hasn’t just been replaced; he’s now the heavy, and in our electronic equivalent of the old Soviet posters of heroic working folk he’s been pasted over by Minorities, Women and Gays.

But it seems we’re running out of principles and people to sacrifice to capitalism.

Fear, Hate and the Narrative

Eight long months running a convenience store earned a Korean eight years hard time after he shot fleeing shoplifter Jakeel Mason in the back:

Mason went into the store last week after Kim went outside to tell a group of loitering men to go away, prosecutors say. Surveillance video shows Mason trying to steal cigarettes behind the counter and Kim pulling out a gun as he walked back in, according to authorities. 

Mason was looting the store while Kim was distracted by his friends outside. Kim came back in and drew his gun.

Mason put his hands up and Kim backed him up against a shelf inside the store, the prosecutor statement’s say. Then, Kim tucked the gun into his waistband and punched Mason in the face, prompting a brief struggle as Mason tried to get away, according to the prosecutors’ account. 

Mason ran towards the door and grabbed a pack of cigarettes on his way out, authorities say. That is when, according to prosecutors, Kim got up from the ground, pulled his gun from his waistband and shot him twice in the back. 

Kim invoked self defense against a second degree murder charge

Kim said before his arrest he had feared for his life and claimed Mason had pushed him to the ground and tried to grab his pistol.

Surveillance video did not support Kim’s account.
Fearing for one’s life when confronted with a fierce American black elicits less and less sympathy with liberal Washington state judges, and apparently neither does the state of siege that contributed to Kim’s fear and, probably more importantly, anger. Less than two months ago an armed member of Mason’s community tried to kill Kim’s wife in a shootout:

Surveillance video shows Seul Lim, 30, giving a masked man some cash before pulling a gun from behind the register. Lim can be seen firing at the robber, later identified as Tyrone Prophet Jr, 23, and missing.
Prophet promptly fires back and hits her in the abdomen before fleeing. Lim went to the hospital and came out the following day as the bullet didn’t hit any organ. Kim told Kiro 7 at the time that his wife was ‘a tough cookie’.
Prophet was later charged with first-degree assault and robbery. Investigators say the two shootings are not related. ‘We know that just the previous month his wife was shot during a robbery, Troyer told Q13 Fox.
‘We understand that probably leads to high emotions. ‘But if you’re going to carry a weapon you have the responsibility of carrying that weapon.
We can’t have shoplifts turn into homicides.’ 

Note the “first degree assault” charge. He’ll be out before the husband.

Are the shootings unrelated, as the police say? What do they mean when they say it?

 They’re certainly related in the mind of the once law-abiding Kim, but not in the way we once allowed, in a less tolerant nation, in human terms, that is, Kim is not allowed his anger or his fear. He is–and it isn’t hyperbole!–denied his humanity. We’re all being denied our humanity, when we’re not allowed justified fear, when we’re not allowed to return hate. In this environment to be “racist” is to be human. A human with a normal sense of self-regard and preservation.

That the Latino policeman who shot Philando Castile was visibly terrified (thinking he was confronting an armed robbery suspect) immediately prompted a Narrative response: Fear, like modesty and the inner city, would have to be sacrificed to accommodate our most fearsome people.

Fear is under ideological assault (if Trump does nothing but restore the judiciary as much as possible, he will have been worthwhile) and of course anger has long been denied white America in its perpetual state of siege regarding blacks. This new American value is one of the few newcomers are still expected to adopt, not the old-school pioneer hardiness of the Kims, of all those Kims out there in their little Fort Apaches, constrained from defending themselves too heartily lest the cavalry be called in on them.

What sort of psychological distortions, in the individual and in the group, are worming their way through us as a result of this unnatural state of affairs? Here the truth is openly suppressed and the suppression of that truth every day yields casualties: the killed, the robbed, the raped, the corrupted. Is the durability of mainstream and liberal America’s black fetish really just a surrender, a surrender to the stronger, the bolder, even the unique stupidity of blacks, the physicality, above all the audacity to not give a shit about whether you are right but to assert yourself; a surrender all dandied up as Justice, ameliorated by drugs, electronic beats, ease, always, still somehow, material ease and indulgences at every turn.

There is no precedent. White America is beaten down: routed from popular culture, terrorized on the streets, beaten on the sports field, cuckolded by her skanks, silenced by the media, slandered in the culture and, always, condemned.

A people who’ve lavished on black Americans the wealth and admiration white America has given, a people who created the very structures that allowed that black success: professional sports, recorded music, shit, commerce; for that same people to endure black America’s ongoing war against us, after having given that praise, surrendered it, having surrendered to the seductions of black culture; to be told then that this unequal state of affairs isn’t a result of–God no!–blacks being ungenerous, and no, it isn’t what everyone suspects, that black charisma emanates from the same well as black savagery; all against the backdrop of the flash mob, the urban torture kidnappings, the sex and drug trafficking, the moral degradation that no one dares name….

It is a humiliation that cannot be endured. So far the response has been, sadly, the reason the “cuck” epithet is so apt, and so likely to stick around: the mediocre mass (and the mediocre mass of our elite) just want to play some part in the fun. Sit in the corner and jack off? March for BLM? Is there a difference?

You’re not allowed to hate those who are waging war on you. You’re not even allowed to fear them. It’s a surrender; how much is self-imposed is the question.

Of course:

No one was there on behalf of Mason. 

Mason couldn’t raise a single friend or family member to defend his life. But the Narrative was there, weeping copiously and crushing a man.

Art and Power

A few days ago I posted on the subject of comedy. To continue on that subject.

A sort of personal fad of mine right now is the idea of art as essentially liberation–not catharsis freeing us from our repressive selves, but from our repressive systems. I don’t mean to, and I don’t think it’s the role of art to, attack repression as such; society is repression. The necessity is to relieve it, or expose its absurdity, its distortions. But the ultimate end is still truth. Ideally it’s the lifting of social burdens and relief from convention’s obscuring white noise, if only in the context of the performance, for the weary psyche seeking it out.

Nowadays this might be claimed under the title “transgressive”, and it looks at first glance as if there’s a lot of transgression going on. Everywhere they tilt at patriarchal windmills and swoon before racist straw men, all under the banner of Truth.

Needless to say tradition as such has been routed culturally at the same time (and by, for that matter) mainstream entertainment’s economic globalization. The complementary nature of capitalism and the Left wasn’t recognized at first, it had to assert itself as the natural, overwhelming phenomenon it is. But what began as natural symbiosis has matured into open conspiracy. It’s worth noting the sweet deal capitalism gets–it gives up nothing, while the Left has abandoned, served up for their former enemies really, the working class.

Commerce and the Left have taken over popular art, in a sort of unspoken compromise. Like the old joke about the Soviet Union–the government pretends to pay workers pretending to work–now the liberated pretend to be oppressed by those who pay them. And as with their Soviet counterparts, real work isn’t getting done and high functionaries are getting wealthy producing an inferior product for which there’s no competition. It’s the Ribbentrop Molotov pact and we–the people–are Poland.
A dull pessimism takes hold in us, cowed on every side to accept a never-ending narrative of emerging, aggressive identities claiming a grievance against a shrinking center. Transgression, as practiced, is all now a Sailerian Who, Whom demonstration of-ironically–supremacy. So there is a curious lack of necessary vitality in even the dazzling technological marvels Hollywood produces with ever greater commitment to the dominant narrative and ever greater watering down to appeal to a global audience (the same thing, really).

Art, contrary to hoary conceit, does not exist to shock. This is a perversion; the artist should pursue the truth despite its tendency to shock. We’ve elevated the gratuitous shock, invoking “transgression”, which is not the same thing. It’s undeniable art loses vitality without an element of pushing, or transgressing, against something significant. Tradition’s significance is waning rapidly. Most popular entertainment engages in at least slight fake transgressions against tradition, done up as historical bogeymen–the patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia.

But does the mainstream artist today, despite working on behalf of power and convention against a beaten but formidable historic enemy, really betray his mission? If he truly believes he is on the side of right, his role is precisely that of the artist in a fascist system. And as they see it despite modesty and patriarchy’s present submission they remain dangerous and toxic, likely to reform and rebound at any time–and this makes sense. We should expect they will; all of history up to the last century can’t be wrong. The problem is, and the Left will never concede this, is how, and by whom, that reassertion will take place. But allowing for their delusion, there is nothing sinister about it. More irony, of course, is the resemblance to a fascist state of affairs–art and culture in service to a prevailing order and closed to threats to that order. Must be nice.

The Left just won’t admit it’s in charge. Because not being in charge is how it got to be in charge. That is, the various movements based on grievances against the Western tradition, with the black American “struggle” center (and it’s difficult to imagine our predicament being possible without our black citizens and their affinity for “suffering”) are how power was seized. The Left’s narrative boils down a sort of selective Christian reading: the powerless are worthier than the powerful. Forget that it’s always been bullshit, and a front for, among other things, ethnic warfare; nobody lasts by easing up once they’re in power. The hope among the vast part of the population that is apolitical but acquiescent (the silent majority, nodding in assent!) has always been, I suspect, that the advancement of sexual liberation and minority rights would level off, find reason, lay down arms as ground was won.
It’s long past the point of denying this won’t happen.