Last week Tucker Carlson broke a carefully guarded conservative taboo and called out our elites for their role in destroying american families. Much of the reaction has been a predictable demand to stop holding our elites accountable and get back to blaming the working class, especially white working class men, for not being elite. At National Review David Bahnsen* complained in Tucker Carlson Is on the Wrong Side of the Crisis of Responsibility that the real problem is that weak men are screwing feminism up:
Carlson seems to suggest that our system itself is to blame for individual shortcomings, and that collective restructuring of free institutions will alleviate and cure those shortcomings. This is simply not reflective of conservatism, or of founding ideology.
…
I do my own argument no good to try to set the record straight about those barbs Tucker launched: His motive was to set the tone rhetorically and emotionally, and he did so effectively, even if dishonestly.
…
Our happiness was not taken away by a bad trade deal or a policy shortcoming, as bad as some policies and laws surely are. The pursuit of happiness is necessarily integrated with character, and the demoralization of our country has been a vicious cycle for a generation now. It does us no good to sit and play “chicken or egg” about this when our communities are in such disarray. No one who cares deeply for American families, blue-collar workers, and those who are on the outside looking in in today’s globalized and changing economycan plausibly claim that it is NAFTA’s fault that those young men playing Fortnite for eleven hours a day do not have shining neighborhoods. If we say that NAFTA hurt their desire to spend time more productively, we must discuss labor dynamism, not accept basement-dwelling and video-game addiction as the logical outcomes to changing economic circumstances. There has been a social deterioration in much of working-class white America—one that is not Wall Street’s fault, not private equity’s fault, not China’s fault, and not Washington, D.C.’s fault.
It is because I care for the plight of families in America, as Tucker no doubt does as well, that I cannot tell the disenfranchised: “Someone did this to you, and someone else will have to make it right.” Pretending that cultural deterioration was merely the byproduct of a disinterested or malignant ruling class is disingenuous and dangerous. Tucker appears to declare illegitimate the suggestion that those who are flourishing in the modern economy, which includes himself and myself, care for those who do not. Yet while it is patently false that those who are succeeding are always and forever aloof, I appreciate Tucker’s call that decision-makers should focus on expanding opportunity for those who have been left behind.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty wrote in Tucker Carlson’s Populist Cri de Cœur:
On any given weeknight, Tucker Carlson will sit down in front of the cameras at Fox News and say some bizarre or silly things (Beware the Gypsies!) or downright repugnant things, like that poor immigrants “make our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” But a lot of people are buzzing about Carlson’s opening monologue from Thursday night, a long and winding journey through what troubles the United States of America as 2019 dawns. Our Kyle Smith calls it “galvanizing” and a “populist cry of dissatisfaction that is underlain by certain grave truths.”
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Leaders may want those things for us, but we should have no illusion that they can provide those things for us. Dignity, purpose, self-control, independence, and deep relationships have to come from within, and get cultivated and developed by our own actions. Good parents and relatives, teachers and communities can all help cultivate that, but it all starts with the individual — and if the individual isn’t willing to try to cultivate that, no one else can cultivate it for him.
But not all of our conservative elites chose to double down on blaming the masses for the results their own policies had created. Brad Wilcox went to The Atlantic and concluded in What Tucker Carlson Gets Right:
Just as Carlson suggested in his monologue, conservatives need to think more seriously about the role that contemporary capitalism, public policy, and culture have played in eroding the strength and stability of working-class family life. Americans share a collective responsibility for solving some of our most pressing social problems—and elites need to come to acknowledge their personal responsibility for bridging the class divide that has emerged on so many fronts.
This is significant because Wilcox is one of the elites shaping national policy on marriage. In the past he has been (mostly) reliable in blaming men and arguing that what we need is not to discard the new legal and social model of marriage that works only for the elites, but for the working class to become elite so the new model will work for them too. For Wilcox to end up even halfheartedly on the wrong side of the wedge Carlson is driving between conservative elites is very dangerous for the status quo.
This may seem like a tempest in a teapot, and it is certainly possible that it will blow over before it becomes too powerful to disperse. So far the discussion is only whether elite economic policy and cultural mores are driving the destruction of the american family. So far, no one is openly questioning the wisdom of the legal mechanisms we’ve put in place to actually destroy families, or the legal incentives we’ve put in place to encourage women to destroy (or never form) their own families. We replaced marriage with a new central family model, the child support model, without discussing the wisdom of this change, or even acknowledging that we did so. So far no one, not even Carlson and Wilcox, has had the poor taste to bring this up. But this is the real danger of the discussion. If we are allowed to discuss the responsibility our elites have in destroying the family, and are allowed to proceed with the assumption that public policy should encourage stable marriages, sooner or later we will get around to the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room. Our elites need to shut this conversation down, and they need to shut it down fast. So far they haven’t been able to do so.
On a related note, large corporations are trying to silence Carlson by boycotting his program. As Vox Day notes, we should respond to this by boycotting the corporations who are trying to punish Carlson.
*Correction: the original version of this post incorrectly named David French as the author of the David Bahnsen article Tucker Carlson Is on the Wrong Side of the Crisis of Responsibility.
See Also:
- Why aren’t men responding to economic signals?
- Jim Geraghty on the beauty of the threatpoint.
- Will Wilcox and the men of National Review respect you in the morning?
- America is destroying the Hispanic family.
- Let them become elite.
- Our family policy is designed to terrify married fathers.
- Debtors prisons are an essential tool of our new public policy.
- NY Times Happy Talk About Divorce & Doubling Down
- How we came to embrace illegitimacy.
- Does Shaunti Feldhahn’s rosy divorce data prove that no fault divorce is working out pretty well after all?
- How to close the gender pay gap once and for all.
Go MGTOW. This shit is baked into the cake now. It must burn, there is no other way.
David French is a moron. The fact that he didn’t make it as an attorney speaks for itself. He lacks integrity to the truth, is a sophist, and is blinded by his hatred to trump. I’m not sure if he still has standing as an elder in the PCA, but he is embarrassing.
He acts like he speaks for regular people, and the south. The truth is that he lives in an incredibly wealthy community (one of the few in the nation that is growing), sends his kids to insanely expensive private school, and does not speak for TN. He hasn’t driven 10 minutes away from his town to see the poverty and dilapidation of the south, or how drugs has affected the region.
The moron also thinks marijuana use has declined since the 1970s.
Ill also note that the very fact a materialistic economy produces emptiness and rampant drug use is an obvious sign that the system has flaws.
In 2016, Bill Kristol was pushing David French to run as the “Never Trump” independent candidate for president: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/who-david-french-n583886
Like an increasing number of people, I don’t “watch TV”. However late last year I viewed a YT segment in which Carlson was interviewed by Ben Shapiro. Carlson stated he opposed self-driving trucks for reasons beyond safety; it’s one of the few jobs that a high school graduate can still get. Given Carlson’s background growing up in La Jolla that was surprising. The more standard response from a conservative would be something like “They should all learn to code Java” or something equally fatuous.
We are not supposed to discuss such policies in public. It is not seemly, for the reasons Dalrock laid out very clearly: it leads in time to touching some untouchable topics, such as the divorce industry and feminist equalist equalism.
PS: I skimmed David French’s babble. His choices during the 2016 election proved him to be foolish, and I’m cutting back on my reading of fools lately. It’s like putting sugar in my coffee – no good comes of it, some harm comes of it, etc.
Red Lobster is the latest diatribe to part ways with Tuck. I traveled a good distance to sample the closest RL a few years ago and was underwhelmed. Longhorn’s filet and lobster tail combo is better anyway.
It is very interesting that downscale chain restaurants are pulling adverts from Carlson’s segments on Fox, because they are directly opposing their own interests. Therefore those company executives place a higher priority on virtue signaling than on their company profits…rather curious thing for “capitalists” to do.
I tend to avoid chain eateries for various reasons. A few minutes off of the Interstate often finds a local family-run place with equal or better food at fair prices. Since I haven’t set foot in an iHop for years and have never even stepped inside a Red Lobster, does my non-participation in their business still count as part of the boycott?
The elites hear Tucker and be like:
We’ve awoken from our slumber and see what our elites have intentionally done to us.
(Think Theodan and Wormtoungue if you need a visual.)
And they aren’t all leftists. Corporate globalist Republicans are co-conspirators. This is what Tucker pointed out. Much respect to him!
Men of the West, rise!
The more standard response from a conservative would be something like “They should all learn to code Java” or something equally fatuous.
Reminds me of Bill Kristol’s callous swipe at the “white working class.” He essentially admitted he wants them replaced with “new Americans.”
Kristol cares more for Israelis than for “white working class” Americans, though the latter are allegedly his fellow countrymen.
OT: Now we’re dangerous.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/american-psychological-association-deems-traditional-masculinity-harmful-could-lead-to-sexual-harassment
How long before the FauxNews mask slips off and they fire Tucker?
Let’s also keep in mind that the U.S. has not had a “free market” economy since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created and we eventually ended up with a bunch of bernakifed fiat. Free trade doesn’t involve encyclopedia-size trade agreements; nor does it have the U.S. open its markets to other countries that are allowed to keep theirs closed to U.S. products.
Much of what Tucker is calling out is not the result of the free market, but symptoms of meddling either directly by the government or indirectly through government-dependent institutions. Likewise, the 1965 immigration law passed by Congress is not “open borders,” either. But you don’t hear open border advocates critiquing it, or even acknowledging it.
What that means is that those who defend the status quo aren’t defending the free market or the policies, per se- they’re defending the results of policies they’ve implemented while trying to avoid admitting that this was the intended outcome all along.
Yeah, I have to agree with the previous comment.
Tucker Carlson’s statements, and this response from the conservative media and writers, just substantiates what the MGTOW crowd have been saying for years. Men really are their own jailers.
It’s remarkable to witness in black and white long schrift the mental acrobatics and rhetorical contortionism performed by public figure conservatives to ignore and deny what has been blatantly smacking them in the face.
I still have yet to hear a compelling, persuasive argument against a modern day man’s decision to go MGTOW. That conscious decision is making more an more sense every single day, especially if he lives in the United States.
1. Remain single.
2. Refuse to marry.
3. Refuse to cohabitate
4. Do not sire children.
5. Focus on yourself (self-improvement) and your purpose (which could be career, philanthropy, or hobbies). Keep what you earn.
6. And wait for your Savior. While waiting, don’t be at all surprised if in the meantime your new Langobardic-like, hedgemonic neighbors impolitely and rather insistently show you the qibla, where you must direct your new prayers going forward.
“How long before the FauxNews mask slips off and they fire Tucker?”
Not long, but I suspect Tucker is building his own brand right now (Plan B) and knows the score.
“Reminds me of Bill Kristol’s callous swipe at the “white working class.””
((Bill Kristol)) is not one of us. Neither is that other idiot Kevin Williamson.
Isn’t he carrying the network like oreilly did?
The Question says:
January 9, 2019 at 11:09 am
Yup. Exactly. Hard to believe that any conscious human being with a functioning brain stem still swallows all the obfuscating rhetoric
It’s worth noting that Kristol’s mag The Weekly Standard is out of business and the National Review won’t be far behind. I don’t know anyone under 40 who knows what the National Review is much less pays attention to what they write. They were all hysterically against Trump and he crushed their candidates. Tucker is wisely positioning himself to have a career and be relevant without Fox. The old media is dying.
Neither is that other idiot Kevin Williamson.
I laughed my ass off when Williamson got canned from some new job over his ‘insensitive remarks’.
I also love how Williamson can write an article blaming poor rural people for their plights and how they should move to the city and get REAL jobs, all while that jackwagon draws checks from ailing magazines that draw their money largely from donations.
Milton Friedman was 100% correct. The Federal Reserve has always been a very bad idea for the American economy and the financial well-being of our citizens.
But not nearly as bad as the 19th Amendment.
Tucker Carlson, religious conservatives all start clenching their buttcheeks when you dare mention this fact. Doesn’t make it any less true though.
We simply would not have as intrusive, pervasive and overreaching nor as tyrannical a federal, state and municipal government without it. We would also not have over half of our industriousness stolen by state and federal and municipal tax laws. We would not witness an engorged unsustainable welfare state, a feminine primary K-12 and secondary education system, no fault divorce laws, destruction of the family unit, negative marriage rate, negative birth rate. All of this because politicians have to pander to incessant complaints, demands, hypergamy and emotional thinking of female voters.
“OMG, well that’s just misogyny!”.
Is it? OK, so let’s just keep doing the same stuff as we have for the last 60 years and then expect different results. Let’s not remove the same shitty tires, wheels and dilapidated brakes on this mother and let’s just sitback and pray and hope it doesn’t careen into the ditch and explode.
Neither is that other idiot Kevin Williamson.
I don’t dignify his tripe by clicking to read it, but last I heard, he was freelancing after having been booted from TheAtlantic (a “conservative” writing for The Atlantic? Now THAT’S scraping the barrel bottom in desperation). That’s also, I believe, the third (at least) publication that has canned him in as many years. How does someone that obviously incompetent as a writer still maintain a readership?
It really is. But I am always amazed how
https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/2018-ratings-cnn-is-one-of-cables-10-most-watched-networks-across-total-day/387953
The total emptiness of the cuckservative ideology is on full display.
David French thinks he is heroic by being the thousandth person to pile onto to anti-video-game bandwagon.
Jim Gay-ratty, in infamously clueless literal cuck (he married a single mother and brags about it) actually bashed Carlson for his views on the need to control illegal immigration. At this point, what difference is there between Jim Gay-ratty and Nancy Pelosi?
Brad Wilcucks may only have been less misandric in this instance by accident. Everything about him, from his physiognomy to his work output (one article per year) is highly misandric. He jumped in wholesale in bashing men for the campus rape hoax (and never backpedaled once the hoax was exposed) and has recently taken to hectoring individual male celebrities about getting married (even if they were divorce-raped before). If he was somewhat distanced from the pure cuckservative view of David French and Jim Gay-ratty, it was by accident, and will be quickly reversed.
*correction: hyper-consumerist not materialist.
The economy consists of both the material and the non-material. It cant survive without the material.
Where things went wrong is when people started abandoning the non-material and switched to consumerism. As in constantly buying more and more stuff just because they could. At the same time they sacrificed things like time with the family, for working, just so that they can afford more things.
*an infamously clueless literal cuck.
Jim Gay-ratty is the flamboyantly clueless husband of a single mother who openly admits that he lives under a daily threatpoint (and rationalizes that this is good for marriage). He created one of the most embarrassing videos of all time, the ‘Ward Cleaver is a Stud!’ video.
See, you’re doing the right thing by boycotting companies whose business practices you don’t like, and at the same time associating yourself with their competitors.
My honest assessment of the situation is that Western men should not expect any changes or reforms to come within the current system. They should not make any long-term plans based on that assumption.
It will have to collapse first. Change is likely to be impossible. There are too many people with too much invested into that system for one reason or another. If you threaten it, suddenly everyone comes after you. The system is like a dying hydra that will lash out at anyone who challenges it.
They can attack Tucker all they want for what he says and drive him out, but that is like attacking the weather man for pointing out that it is going to rain because there are dark clouds on the horizon. That won’t stop the clouds, or the rain. Neither Tucker nor any one person is the cause of what is to come.
This is why it doesn’t bother me that Mr. Carlson is approaching this problem from an economic angle.
Economics hinges on incentives. People (in general) react fairly predictably to incentives. The reactions may, or may not, be rational (they rarely are when the incentives are perverse), but they are predictable.
If a person digs through the reactions, he’ll eventually get to the incentives… if he possesses the fortitude to keep digging.
Let’s pray that God will grant Mr. Carlson the fortitude to keep digging, and the boldness to honestly report what he finds. And yes, let’s support him, and boycott his attackers, as long as he keeps doing so.
Reminds me of Bill Kristol’s callous swipe at the “white working class.” He essentially admitted he wants them replaced with “new Americans.”
I wouldn’t put it past Kristol to gleefully check for updates on the Fentanyl death stats, in the hope that 2018 had an even higher toll than 2017.
The left finally found a crisis that kills off Republican voters (unlike AIDS or abortion). They can hardly believe their luck.
“Hard to believe that any conscious human being with a functioning brain stem still swallows all the obfuscating rhetoric”
Not hard. I have friends who would agree 100% with Tucker yet still think Star Whores is awesome.
I think you have to look at it this way.
If somebody has to tell them so you need to send an emissary to deliver the “gosh, that’s not very nice!” news, then yeah, you might as well be that bow-tie wearing, frat boy-esque, pencil-neck geek Tucker Carlson to do it for you.
Also, while you gents were at work:
https://www.soapoperanetwork.com/2018/06/daytime-talk-ratings-the-talk-and-the-view
PROGRAM AVERAGES TOTAL VIEWERS WOMEN 25-54(000)/Rtg WOMEN 18-49(000)/Rtg
ABC’s “THE VIEW” 2,767,000 454,000/0.7 322,000/0.5
CBS’ “THE TALK” 2,418,000 374,000/0.6 263,000/0.4
@Anon
I had forgotten about the bolded part. Thanks for reminding me. I’ve added that post to the list of links at the bottom of the OP.
Many “Conservative Traditionalists” are neither, or work from fantasy “traditions” they know nothing about. They are often “the other feminism.”
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Red Lobster and LongHorn are both Darden Restaurants.
I used to be a daily reader of NRO and a paid subscriber to NR Digital. I didn’t leave them — they left me. With the successive bannings of Coulter, Derbyshire, Steyn and others, I slowly (too slowly) awakened to the realization that the conservatism they were selling was to paraphrase 2 Timothy 3, “holding to a form of [conservatism] although they have denied its power.”
NR and everyone still associated with it is dead to me now.
From the link to Dalrock’s post about Geraghty’s life under threatpoint. Cam Edwards speaking:
When my wife and her kids moved from New Jersey to Oklahoma, it’s not like anyone had any expectations that he would be able to come visit on a regular basis. Still, regular phone calls or letters to the kids would have been nice. When a birthday or a holiday would go by with no contact, I would see the looks of disappointment on the faces of my kids. I’d get so angry that I’d write letters to him that I never sent (eventually we wouldn’t even know where to send them). The fact that child support was sporadic (to say the least) didn’t bother me. We could take care of our family without his money. What killed me was seeing my kids go from disappointment that they didn’t hear from their biological father to the resigned expectation that he was going to let them down again. Eventually, on one rare occasion when he called, my daughter declined to talk with him. The next time he called, my son followed his sister’s lead. Their dad never called back.
Imagine the deliberate cruelty involved in making it as difficult as possible for the father to be a father, then putting the entire blame for the failure on him. You’ve stripped him of virtually all involvement with his children, reduced him to checks, gifts and phone calls, and now that you’ve totally gutted his role, it’s all his fault if he gives up? The malevolence of that is chilling. Yet that’s the common expectation.
Bryce Sharper, in your Kevin Williamson clip, Williamson says that “these dysfunctional, downscale communities … deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets.”
Yet the poorest community in the U.S. is the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish, Village of Kiryas Joel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_York
About 61.7% of families and 62.2% of the population were below the poverty line … According to 2008 census figures, the village has the highest poverty rate in the nation, and the largest percentage of residents who receive food stamps….
Kiryas Joel meets Williamson’s criterion of an “economically negative asset.” Yet would anyone at National Review say that any Jewish community “deserves to die”?
On the contrary, Kiryas Joel is de facto exempt from state laws that harm Christian families and communities, making it easy for large, traditional Jewish families to thrive. No stated enforced diversity, or refugee resettlements, or tranny librarians for them.
The state allows them to put up anti-feminist signs:
The village abides by strict Jewish customs and its welcome sign asks visitors to dress conservatively and to “maintain gender separation in all public areas”.
Housing discrimination laws apparently don’t apply:
In 1989, the village forbade any property owner from selling or renting an apartment without its permission. Teitelbaum elaborated that “anyone that rents without this permission has to be dealt with like a real murderer … and he should be torn out from the roots.”
And they enforce “strong family values” with violence, which they feel safe to freely admit:
some of the village’s young men took it upon themselves to act violently against dissidents because they could not bear to hear the grand rebbe criticized … “Someone not following breaks down the whole system of being able to educate and being able to bring up our children with strong family values,” Weider told The New York Times in 1992. “Why do you think we have no drugs? If we lost respect for the Grand Rabbi, we lose the whole thing.”
An “economically negative asset,” subsidized and protected by the state. Whereas Christian “economically negative assets” “deserve to die.”
@Dalrock:
a point of attribution. The lead article you quoted is by David L. Bahnsen writing in NR. Bahnsen quotes and borrows liberally from David French, as well as from Geraghty and Ben Shapiro. But Bahnsen, not French, authored the block quotes you’ve got up there partially in bold.
Cloudbuster: I used to be a daily reader of NRO and a paid subscriber to NR Digital. I didn’t leave them — they left me
I let my NR subscription expire over a decade ago.
Long ago, I subscribed to Chronicles, a paleo-con mag. It’s been a while since I read them, but they might be worth a re-subscription: https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/
Day in and day out we watch America’s unholy deceitful traitors in the form of Democrats and RINOs with their non-biblical Marxist anti-Christ globalism and anti-Americanism; disingenuous revisionist post-modernism; fallacious relativism and pluralism pushing every false made-up ideology and immorality which they corrupt academia and culture with while hypocritically systematically persecuting genuine Christians who won’t compromise orthodoxy, whites who won’t self-hate, males who still behave like males ought, and the thought which comes to my mind transcends mere boycotting. I say give them NOTHING but take EVERYTHING from them.
They’ve destroyed the social contract and now are whining that men are not doing what they did in the past. There is no point anymore. They’ve killed off what it means to be a real father, what it means to be a man and in some cases, for most men, the very reason for living and struggling through this life.. i.e. family, this is why I spread MGTOW, it at least gives the average man the option to go it alone and find some sort of contentment in his lot in life. It can often really save a man’s life. These ‘conservatives’ offer nothing but shame and scorn.. what more do they want now?
It’s over, done, there is nothing more to talk about with them.. let the chips fall where they may…
I had some internal debate on this post, but I think it gets to the real issue about western civilization and Christianity.
I’ve seen all the arguments for MGTOW. I understand the risks of marriage. I understand the risks of having children. I understand the risks of wrongthink. I’m not going to judge the merits of the arguments.
Yet for those enjoying the decline poolside, unmarried, with no children, I say this: When a new order emerges I sincerely hope that you will have committed your body to battle so that those who have family and children can build a new nation on your valor and sacrifice.
The future does belong to those who show up. If you don’t show up, I have neither care nor compassion for you. If you do show up, then you have my respect as a man.
It does come down to kinship loyalty.
IQ by age 25 is 80% genetic (with the 20% being eating paint chips, malnourishment, and abuse; nothing really can increase it).
What do you do with those of average intelligence? Previous systems relied on them being rule followers and having a decent life and having a family. They could do work and be net contributors to society.
But if as business owner you want even more profit, you could bring in cheap foreign labor (or convince all women that they should also be working). Now goods can be a bit cheaper (and you sell more for more net profit) but the split of value created can be tilted upwards as bossing around desperate foreign labor or agreeable desperate women is easier then organized native unions.
I used to be a serious free market libertarian, but it is quite easy to optimize consumer preferences towards family destruction. All the iPhones in the world doesn’t stop people from committing suicide in a societal wasteland.
@asaph
See, you’re doing the right thing by boycotting companies whose business practices you don’t like, and at the same time associating yourself with their competitors.
It’s the Iron Bank Principle: If a party in whom you had been investing ends up being unable to pay you back, you not only end the material support that you had been giving them, you also seek out their most promising new adversaries so that you can start financing them to be their replacement overlords.
It’s high time that more men started doing this with modern institutions; It’s certainly not like they haven’t been running a similar operation on us for years already.
I’m not MGTOW as I’m still perusing marriage but with my standards it is possible that it will never happen.
Guy in my Bible study was engaged to get married and they all thought I was absolutely insane to bring up how unsubmissive the woman is as a redflag and that getting a prenub is a good idea. This guy is well over 6ft, very fit SWAT officer and just replied “sometimes you just have to make a decision, you just have all this theoretical knowledge; you’ve never been married.” They didn’t care that knowledge came from men with experience, just that I was saying it as a single guy.
Now his married life is a hellhole of verbal abuse and fighting, and he is treading water until a divorce comes from either one.
Had to leave the Bible study as I couldn’t stand being ignored every week and hearing guys complain about the same problem every week and never attempting any solutions.
OT: Doug Wilson visited by FBI:
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/my-little-visit-from-the-fbi.html
Sure, federal officials questioning someone over a half-joke is concerning from a civil liberties perspective, but no Christian should be using such (literally) incendiary language just because the public school system has a lot of rot.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like he learned anything from this experience, and is in fact proud of agitating someone enough that federal agents got involved. Only a select type of malcontent would publicly acknowledge such an incident, let alone unremorsefully brag about it.
AnonS
This guy is well over 6ft, very fit SWAT officer
It is possible to be a very masculine man, a leader, an Alpha in the world….but so blind to reality at home about women as to become a virtual doormat. I have seen this in my personal social circle, where men who went to combat in the sandbox came home to contentiousness and eventual frivorce.
Now take that same scenario and change it to a man with a blue collar job such as manufacturing or warehouse work who gets laid off when part of the company is offshored, while his wife works for the county. What’s likely to happen when she earns more, or all, of the family budget? That ties directly to Tucker Carlson’s essay referenced in the OP.
Pivoting back to “public alpha, private doormat again: This fact ties in to the “unless they are Christian” thread. It’s quite possible to be a man that is respected by other men and attract a woman, who then develops a fine case of resentment and contempt. Looking forward to Bnonm and Foster’s essays on this.
Essays. Not tweets. More than 250 chars and longer than a single paragraph.
AnonS: They didn’t care that knowledge came from men with experience, just that I was saying it as a single guy.
Stephen Crane was born in 1871, and never fought in the Civil War. Yet Civil War veterans praised his Red Badge of Courage for its accuracy and verisimilitude.
Crane was able to accurately recreate the feelings and experiences of Civil War veterans by interviewing, and closely listening to, dozens of Civil War veterans. Thus his novel reads as if written by someone who had lived through the Civil War.
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Anonymous Reader on January 9, 2019 at 2:53 pm
On the ground, I’ve seen many dozens of combat vets come home to an empty bank account and a bedroom full of his wife’s new lover. In many cases new beaux is driving the soldier’s vehicle around town.
Your “public alpha, private doormat” point is dead on also. Our slang is “Can’t run a one-whore whore house.” These guys often come to work and double down on the alpha behavior to compensate and get themselves and others into serious trouble. Not theoretical, real. I was nearly one of these guys 15 years ago but for an elder coworker who ‘splained it to me. Par for the course of not understanding female nature.
vfm7916 wrote Yet for those enjoying the decline poolside, unmarried, with no children, I say this: When a new order emerges I sincerely hope that you will have committed your body to battle so that those who have family and children can build a new nation on your valor and sacrifice.
Why? These men have been rejected by our people, and treated half as disposable garbage and half as a source of funding for the privileged classes of minorities and women. So why should we then expect him to “man up” and act as cannon fodder for that same group, as it transitions to something that might be better?
I understand sacrificing for others, but treating men as both despicable and as owing you something is not reasonable.
I think we should consider ourselves lucky if such outcasts merely do not actively try to destroy their oppressors.
Now, if you are going to offer these outcasts something tangible, should they survive the struggle, that would be reasonable. Apparently the North offered blacks who fought for them in the civil war pay and freedom. Tangible and easily understood.
What are you going to offer the outcast, who has no wife or children? A pat on the head?
Unless we can think of something reasonable to offer, we should not expect much, beyond whatever comes due to the charity naturally present in most men.
AnonS:
I’m not MGTOW as I’m still perusing marriage but with my standards it is possible that it will never happen.
Try fishing in a different pond. If you live in a sewer, and thus see no enticing fish, go elsewhere. I had to go half-way around the world to find a good pond.
VFM,
My lack of children was not my own choice. I also invested almost 30 years in a marriage my wife blew up unilaterally.
No family with children is doing squat for me now. Why should I fight so they have it well, at least in the specific?
And then they will defend hiring Sanjay and Pajeet to replace them once they have 5 years of experience and want more than $60k. Because free markets and stuff.
Then the morons will cheerfully complain when the masses flirt with Socialism.
Yet for those enjoying the decline poolside, unmarried, with no children, I say this: When a new order emerges I sincerely hope that you will have committed your body to battle so that those who have family and children can build a new nation on your valor and sacrifice.
The future does belong to those who show up. If you don’t show up, I have neither care nor compassion for you. If you do show up, then you have my respect as a man.
You’ve been around these parts long enough to know better. Take your shaming and go somewhere else.
The future does belong to those who show up. If you don’t show up, I have neither care nor compassion for you. If you do show up, then you have my respect as a man.
And you won’t. Just the usual childish shaming language and denial.
I’m sure they have a blonde who is looking for attention ready to say he sexually harassed her.
We should learn by now that outer appearances and large finances don’t mean a man knows how women operate.
And then they will defend hiring Sanjay and Pajeet to replace them once they have 5 years of experience and want more than $60k. Because free markets and stuff.
This is an anti-misandry blog. Race Trashionalism is really just an extension of feminism, and is a detour taken by those too weak-willing to become red pill. Race Trashionalism is also a left-wing ideology due to the left-wing economic views espoused by its adherents.
In the tech industry, it is generally accepted that strong performers have no need to worry about outsourcing and H1-B replacements (and can often profit from their presence). Only the bottom of the performance curve competes directly with the $60K crowd. In Silicon Valley, tons of $300K software jobs continue to go unfilled.
“When a new order emerges I sincerely hope that you will have committed your body to battle so that those who have family and children can build a new nation on your valor and sacrifice.”
^ I don’t care how old I am, I’ll stand with you for that mission.
Everyone is right.
Our laws create incentives that destroy marriage and disincentize men to work. We incentivize women to divorce or delay marriage. The laws and culture we swim in is garbage.
However, as much as I hate to say it French is also right. If you put goods outside your store they are easier to steal. But few suddenly do steal them. It’s still a choice. If our society (which is us) was good it would reform laws that hurt families, stop encouraging sex outside marriage, honor and inspire men. On average it’s not good. But that doesn’t excuse any individual for their choices. It certainly impacts the margin like crazy.
French is just oblivious to legal and moral incentives and thinks that’s all their is an individual standing against the world likely and free. People raised in Japan love rice. People raised in a degenerate culture are more likely to be degenerate. Few can stand outside their civilization as extra culture pioneers – although that is what Christianity calls us to do. But everyone and especially Christians shouldn’t be so naive as to imagine the world we live in is easy to over come.
Boys playing Fortnite all day are responding to incentives. It’s hard for anyone to rise above it especially when the reward of rising above it is a beat down by laws and culture. But still Christians must get back up. I know I need to do that more often and take responsibility for my failings.
Anon,
Most of the industry works outside of SV, but you already knew that smart guy…
@ Kevin
Yeah, but the entire purpose of government is to provide righteous incentives.
Instead, our government – at every level – provides perverse incentives. French’s entire job is to analyze government, identify where it’s failing, and propose better solutions.
How does a man whose entire job is to analyze the incentives that government provides miss those very incentives?
Here’s another problem with French’s “analysis”. The communities he denigrates were in steep decline long before “Fortnite” existed. In fact, they were already in decline before Atari existed, so video games can’t be the cause.
So, once again I ask; how does a man whose entire job is to analyze the incentives that government provides miss those very incentives?
We all see those incentives. Is it possible that we’re all better at French’s job than French is? Or, is his job something other than identifying those perverse incentives? And, if that’s the case, then what’s his actual job?
Removing a man’s authority in marriage was pretty much removing the incentive to it.
The marital laws that are currently crafted…they knew what they were doing to destroy it.
@GW,
I don’t think Wilson needs to learn a lesson from this. After all, it was satire. The offending words were not his: he quoted two dead people: H. L. Mencken and John Lennon. You might as well investigate the high school teacher who quotes Shakespeare: “‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Besides, the government schools do need to dry up and blow away. After all, they are the places where the earliest seeds are sown for aberrant sexuality and snowflake socialism.
How does a man whose entire job is to analyze the incentives that government provides miss those very incentives?
So, once again I ask; how does a man whose entire job is to analyze the incentives that government provides miss those very incentives?
But this is what it means to be a conservative.
Take the case of Brad Wilcucks. His entire job is to save marriage by analyzing the impact of existing policies around marriage and expected impact of new ideas. Yet not once has he pointed out that ANYTHING is wrong with divorce and child custody laws. Yet, he has a cushy sinecure at a university, for which he only has to produce one article per year (which is nearly identical to the one from the previous year).
Il Deploro,
Most of the industry works outside of SV, but you already knew that smart guy…
Which has nothing to do with my point.
The point is, if you can’t even clear the tier that the lower-end H1-Bs are at, you are a bottom-tier software professional, and your problems are not the fault of someone who does the same work for less.
To blame H1-Bs (and you seem to think H1-B is an ethnic group. That ain’t no country I ever heard of; do they speaking English in H1-B?) for your inability to hack it in the field is identical to when cuckservatives blame video games for men not willing to sign up for a rigged Marriage 2.0 arrangement.
Race Trashionalism = feminism. Plain and simple.
Where did you go?
If you were married for 30 years, how did you not have not have children? Isn’t that what was marriage invented for in the first place. Did you guys never talk about it? Are you infertile?
Dang, the more I read the comment section, the more questions I end up with.
Good catch Deti! I’ve made a correction with a note at the bottom.
Anon,
I am well clear of where most H1-Bs are, but that’s irrelevant. Half of any group are below average. The government should not be introducing competition there of all places. Contrary to what you might think, most people simply cannot be a top producer in anything. No matter what career they’re in, they will simply be “at best, kinda average.” The idea that talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not is absolute garbage.
No, it’s you who are being a cuck on this because you think most of these men are just losers who won’t man up and do the extra work required to be a “rockstar” or “10x developer” or whatever you want to call it. The fact is, they can’t be that because it requires natural talent and work ethic working together.
And why should they work that much harder when they’ll either be driven out by cheaper labor or aged out? You really just can’t connect the dots on how you are precisely like the cucks that gutted all of the incentives for men to work hard to be providers and then wonder why they aren’t. Yet the worst part is, you even defend the process that helps to disincentivize men while calling everyone else cucks.
You are really that lacking in self-awareness, aintcha? I never made this about race. In fact I knew when I used those two names that someone here would bite the bate to virtue signal.
I’ve worked around H1-Bs. It was sick watching how they had to kowtow to management. Those poor guys worked longer and harder for less pay than they would if they were a permanent resident alien. Worst part was, they weren’t even stupid. They were just mediocre, normal guys like the guys you think deserve to be abused because they “can’t hack it.”
The National’s Review’s job is to defend what the top 1% donor class has done to the rest of the country. They’re doing their job.
@ferrikeer
No shaming there, simply a statement of hope and a statement of consequences.
@Ray6777
No kidding. Just read the NRO article’s author’s bio line:
David L. Bahnsen is the founder and chief investment officer of the bicoastal Bahnsen Group wealth-management firm, a trustee at the National Review Institute, and the author of the new book Crisis of Responsibility: Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It
So clearly, the donors had to take the wheel for this. I mean, we can’t take the risk that David French would read his Bible and conclude that the atomized liberal individualism of Ayn Rand-worshiping MBAs and our current marriage laws are wicked and evil.
I see Il Deplorevolissimo speaking THE objective truth in an uncompromising manner. I love it!
@Dale @BillyS
Sorry, should have combined the comment with my above, but you two have a very similar thought, which is broken down to “What’s in it for me?”
My response is a simple question: Do you believe in God and Jesus Christ?
I’m going to assume you do. Since that’s so, you believe and have faith in something greater than yourself. You are in service to God. People serve in many ways throughout history; priesthood, ministry, family, bearing children, killing evil people, etc. It’s in service to something greater than themselves, and that’s part of what’s being destroyed.
If anyone denied their service to God and yet still expected to make it into heaven there’s pretty good scripture on what will happen. In the same manner if you deny the foundation stones of Western civilization, stand aside and enjoy the decline, do not expect to benefit in the least when people who have not done so build something new.
If you choose to go MGTOW, great! What are you going to do that will help those who don’t? If you had a marriage go bad, such as Dale describes, that sucks. It does not invalidate marriage. What are you going to do that’s positive to support other’s marriage? That can be in church, volunteering, counseling, whatever. I don’t know, or care. Do something.
Again, it ain’t shame. If you want to inherit the kingdom you damn better well fight for it. As I noted above, there’s all kinds of ways to fight for Christianity and Western Civilization. Those that do have my respect.
Jeff Bezos and wife McKenzie to divorce after 25 years of marriage. “Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO worth $137 billion, to divorce wife of 25 years”: https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeff-bezos-amazon-ceo-worth-137-billion-to-divorce-wife-of-25-years
“The split could lead the costliest divorce is history, even if the couple doesn’t divide the money equally. There are no reports indicating the couple has a prenuptial agreement, meaning the wealth accumulated during their marriage would have to be split evenly.”
Dalrock
Correct. But I genuinely believe that most traditional conservatives (who are “elite”) are not even aware that the majority of white working class men who are NOT elite have no way to BECOME elite no matter what they do. That type of not-so-nicey-nice reality is absent in the minds of many men who write for National Review. I am happy that Tucker (“WHO CARES?!?!”) Carlson has finally come around to the world of reality.
Baby steps. Right now, keep the government shut down Mr President.
> No shaming there, simply a statement of hope and a statement of consequences.
They’re complaining about shaming because your statement of consequences makes them feel ashamed.
Which is not a problem with your words, but with their own posture with respect to life. If they had proper posture, your words would not make them feel bad. They would be feeling pride in their own courage and honor in facing the injustice of this world regardless of what you said.
MGTOW is rational, but it is not praiseworthy.
Jeff Bezos was the richest man on the planet last year, at least on paper when the price of AMZN was higher. He’s still got to be in the top 5, so I’m sure he can afford to hire a whole sharknado of lawyers if he needs to, so how the divorce settles out is kind of moot. The relevant question for the manosphere: “Is this another rich public Alpha / private Beta like Elon Musk”, or is it something else?
Just to tie back to the OP: how many of AMZN’s employees in the various distribution network and cloud data centers are on food stamps / EBT? The correct number should be very close to zero, but what is the actual number?
Anon, by “race trashionalism” do you include nationalism and populism? The kind that Trump promised, but hasn’t much delivered on yet?
I think we can use some nationalism (America First in trade and no wars for foreign interests) and populism (American People first, rather than foreigners and the elite).
I say this as the son of European immigrants. Back in the day, immigrants strove to learn English, pay taxes, and “become American.” Corny though it might sound, my father was proud to pay his taxes. But it seems that today’s immigrants enter so as to air their grievances and demand entitlements.
Government makes policies. We should push for policies that are nationalist, populist, and anti-feminist. There’s no contradiction there.
@vfm
I have no problem with the men quietly going mgtow, as usually they just can’t find a decent woman. Have a good friend in that category.
If a Christian man realizes women aren’t interested in him and he is not willing to do the necessary work to get one, but still serves God, well why would I tell him what to do with his life at all?
As for the ones who think claiming mgtow as a label earns them sympathy, it’s kind of like tattooing “Loser” on your forehead and getting mad when people point and laugh.
Real MGTOW’s who quietly do their thing I have a lot of sympathy for; I could see myself there if things had been different, and if the wife left, who knows…
Il Deploro claims :
I never made this about race.
Yet above he said :
And then they will defend hiring Sanjay and Pajeet to replace them once they have
You have beclowned yourself by making it about ethnicity. You would apparently not have a problem if the H1-Bs that replace you are from Ukraine or Belarus.
I’ve worked around H1-Bs. It was sick watching how they had to kowtow to management. Those poor guys worked longer and harder for less pay than they would if they were a permanent resident alien.
On this, I agree. They have zero power in relation to their employer, and are in indentured servitude for years. The H1-B program exploits the worker and displaces a domestic person too. The program should be done away with. If those workers are needed, give them a Greencard and pay them market wage.
But it is not about race. Even if the H1-B program were abolished, the number of Indians, Chinese, and Filipinos coming here would be about the same.
RPL,
We should push for policies that are nationalist, populist, and anti-feminist. There’s no contradiction there.
There is. Any real damage to ‘feminism’ can only be done through a small-government ideology. The two are inseparable. Remember that 70-80% of all government spending is a net transfer from men to women. Female suffrage are what created all these entitlement programs. Two-thirds of all non-military government employees are women.
Hence, the only ideology that can accommodate red-pill thought within a democracy is libertarianism. Similarly, no libertarian really is one unless he is willing to say that women are the supreme obstacle in the path of any true small-government vision.
Anon, libertarianism … been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, served as a delegate to several LP conventions. Now I’ve moved on.
Incidentally, America First means no foreign aid, no wars for foreign interests.
No NATO membership. No UN membership. No mideast wars (which are really for Israel’s benefit, not ours). The Iraq War cost trillions, not to mention the lost lives and limbs.
Imagine if we pursued an America First foreign policy. No more world policeman. Trillions saved. Much smaller deficit. Much smaller military.
“The future belong to those that show up.”
Truth.
The elephant in the room is this: should Christian men have children without getting married?
My personal answer is ‘yes’. Marriage and divorce as run in these United States is an ungodly mess. I do not fault men for opting out of this legal morass and still having kids.
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7817
I have no problem with the men quietly going mgtow, as usually they just can’t find a decent woman. Have a good friend in that category.
There’s clearly two or maybe three categories of mgtow. Frivorced men who aren’t interested in trying again, for example. Once burned, twice shy. The Huck Finn types who are basically in the “no gurls allowed!” club; not homosexual, just lots of other things interest them. Then there’s kind of a subgroup that you mentioned, who just never found a decent woman that was compatible. Seems to me that these types could legitimately participate in the full church going life. [1]
The visible, obnoxious, in-your-face “GIRLS ARE MEAN AND BAD AND WILL TAKE YOUR STUFF!” types or the black-pill “no hope, no hope” version are what is most visible currently. These men can be a real problem, because they can and will jam up comments in a forum with their personal issues. That’s probably the group that most people don’t want to be around, and it is understandable.
[1] I admit that I know a few men who for whatever reason never married. Not homosexual, not necessarily asexual, just never quite happened to be in the right mental and physical place at the right time. Some men grow up painfully shy and never quite get over it. Other men spend their youth and 20’s living pretty large, then sober up (literally) later on, but don’t quite ever fit in with a married culture. Some of the men I know are active churchmen.
In fact, I’m thinking now of one man in particular. Anyone here have a problem with a churchgoing, Bible studying bachelor, who has led men’s Bible groups, has taught High School Sunday school, who works for money as a plumber and has done unpaid, volunteer plumbing jobs for charity and for his church when needed? He’s been like that for over 10 years, probably longer. So…he’s not “part of the future” in the sense of raising children, does that mean he just a contemptible “nothing” because of that?
Having illegitimate children won’t fix the mess either. In fact the way the divorce laws are set up is one of the reasons why out of wedlock births have got to the level they are.
Marriage 2.0 and the injustice laws need to be trashed. That’s the only fix.
Just to tie back to the OP: how many of AMZN’s employees in the various distribution network and cloud data centers are on food stamps / EBT? The correct number should be very close to zero, but what is the actual number?
Based on what I’ve read from several sources, MASSIVE numbers of Amazon employees (IIRC, something on the order of 30-35 percent) are on food stamps or some form of public assistance. I’ve also read that it’s a dreadful company to work for in terms of working conditions and general employee QOL. Company HR policy appears to border on criminally abusive (if what I read about two pregnant female employees being disciplined for having miscarriages and missing work is true, Bezos and his inner circle should be under federal investigation for labor and civil rights law violations).
Bezos has always presented himself as a first class scumbag, so any legal setbacks he or his company suffers will result in not one tear shed by me.
ncidentally, America First means no foreign aid, no wars for foreign interests.
No NATO membership. No UN membership. No mideast wars (which are really for Israel’s benefit, not ours). The Iraq War cost trillions, not to mention the lost lives and limbs.
Imagine if we pursued an America First foreign policy. No more world policeman. Trillions saved. Much smaller deficit. Much smaller military.
Yep. These are all small-government ideals.
But is is not just he military budged that should be slashed by 50% (or more). ALL government spending should be slashed by 50%. Watch feminism and all other types of leftism evaporate.
Of course, this is impossible in a society that is nearly a century into female suffrage (or, more specifically, non-taxpayer voting).
Follow up (backward) after the affirmative action Norway warship sinks:
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Female soldiers talk next to a CV90 combat vehicle at the armored battalion in Setermoen, northern Norway on August 11, 2016. Norway has become the first NATO member to have compulsory conscription for women as well as men in the army. Recently, the first batch of army recruits joined the ranks in The Armored Battalion in the Norwegian Army located in Setermoen in northern Norway.
At Ease, Ladies! Norway Discovers Women Undermine Army’s Fighting Ability
VIRAL
11:36 01.12.2017
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As the percentage of women in the Norwegian Armed Forces is steadily rising as a result of a campaign for gender equality, questions have been raised about the combat efficiency of the Scandinavian country’s defenses.
Norway became the first European nation to introduce universal conscription in the name of gender equality, which is still met with various reactions. The crusade to make the army more gender-inclusive is “perfectly fine,” but then it is only natural to accept the fact that the nation’s fighting ability is falling, Colonel Lieutenant Harald Høiback argued.
“Armed combat and military actions are an activity very demanding in terms of power and stamina. It can imply returning fire for a few hours from a covered position. A unit’s combat ability is therefore projected to decline even when well-trained women are being recruited at the expense of well-trained men,” Harald Høiback wrote in a comment in the Armed Forces Forum.
First Female Recruits of Norway’s Army
© AFP 2018 / KYRRE LIEN
Girls in Charge? Norwegian Army Deploys Women to Protect Country From ‘Russian Aggression’
In a comment to national broadcaster NRK, Høiback stressed that he personally is in favor of women in the armed forces, even though diversity issues come at the cost of decreased combat effectiveness.
“All in all, having women in the vanguard has been an impossibility in all societies and at all times. I believe there are good reasons for it,” Harald Høiback told NRK.
Høiback stressed the fact that boys on average are stronger and faster, which is why historically there has been few women in combat units.
“If you spend more time and effort recruiting women into combat units, you can run into situations, where women are not strong enough to get their fellow soldier out of a burning tank or onto the deck of a frigate or something,” Høiback said.
Needless to say, Høiback’s view was immediately challenged by fellow defense officials, as Norway has taken systematic efforts to boost the percentage of ladies in the Armed Forces under former Defense Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide.
Researcher Nina Rones at the Norwegian Defense Research Institute (FFI) argued that Høiback’s reasoning was largely based on myths.
“It’s not all about physique alone. Both organization and communication equipment are important in combat. Nor is it true that men have advantages over women in all bodily areas. Regarding so-called ‘ultra stamina,’ there is a lot of research showing that women are actually doing better than men,” Rones said, adding that women are equally good or even better when it comes to shooting.
https://sputniknews.com/viral/201712011059593798-norway-women-army-combat-efficiency/
Jonathon Castle
The elephant in the room is this: should Christian men have children without getting married?
My personal answer is ‘yes’. Marriage and divorce as run in these United States is an ungodly mess. I do not fault men for opting out of this legal morass and still having kids.
This is not workable in practice[1]. The only churches that would tolerate it are going to be squishy things like that “Lutheran” woman out in Denver collecting purity rings. Any culturally and theologically conservative church (no girl preachers, all male leadership, etc.) would not go along with that for very long. Oh, unfortunately they might tolerate a babymomma or two, but not the man. Living together? There would be big pressure to get married. Some of the men here can fill in the gaps in my text. Perhaps Hmm has an opinion.
Now, leaving the theology of your question to one side, don’t kid yourself. The child support model exists outside of marriage. Plenty of men who never married are paying child support. All it takes is being named as “Parent B” on the birth certificate. The state has an interest in monetary support for children and they will collect or imprison.
So back to marriage. It’s all probabilities. Sort of like keeping living quarters prepared for possible bad situations: keeping an up to date first aid kit, up to date fire extinguisher, working locks and so forth. Vettting is essential (see the “Interviewing a wife” articles on this site), having a Frame of iron is essential, being firmly grounded in reality is essential, and so forth. This topic is always ongoing somewhere.
Trying to raise children in the US outside of a marriage is a bad idea, first of all for the kids themselves and second of all for any man involved.
[1] Not to get into details, but the concept of “having children without being considered married, but being in their life/lives” was hashed out at Rollo Tomassi’s a couple of years back. The state is waaaay ahead of you.
“Having illegitimate children won’t fix the mess either.”
It’s a partial solution to one man’s desire to be a father. None of us acting individually can solve the world’s problems.
All we can do is navigate this fallen world the best we know how.
Using the word ‘illegitimate’ indicates a belief that God approves of how marriage is conducted here. That he approves of the wife as head of the household, no fault divorce, stripping fathers of their children.
No man. Rather I think the legal and cultural practices of modern marriage is what is illegitimate.
The laws will never be changed as long as the 19th Amendment is still in force under the US Constitution. It would have to be formally repealed first.
Then you can potentially abolish the massive welfare state, no fault divorce, family courts with no due process rights and the subsequent alimony, child custody and unaudited child support payments, plus put an end to publicly funded abortions.
But you and I know abolishing the 19th Amendment will NEVER EVER happen. Too many cuckservatives and thirsty manginas in the way.
It will have to all burn, just like Rome did. And millions will have to die.
Consolation prizes? Islam and a second Dark Age.
Now, I don’t want to wear Ebenezer Scrooge pajamas, set entire libraries and server rooms on fire, pray toward Mecca, and live in 2nd century, bone crushing, Bronze Age poverty the rest of my life.
But that seems to be the trajectory we’re on regardless.
God and Jesus, if they are really up there, are most watching all of this with their arms folded, or laughing their asses off.
There’s no consolation for you and I, knowing that it was men who did all of this stupid right to themselves.
“This is not workable in practice. The only churches that would tolerate it…”
I see what you’re saying, but part of the problem is that churches are carrying water for an unbiblical form of marriage.
They have sadly lost moral authority on this key issue.
“don’t kid yourself. The child support model exists outside of marriage.”
Yes. But alimony does not.
“Trying to raise children in the US outside of a marriage is a bad idea, first of all for the kids themselves and second of all for any man involved.”
It’s not ideal. But with a divorce rate of 45%..at some point men have to say ‘no, we’re not going to keep sacrificing ourselves defending feminist marriage.’
Feminist marriage HAS to be rejected. It’s bad for women – they hate it. It’s bad for children. And it’s horrible for men.
The church isn’t doing it, but men are rightly rejecting feminist marriage on their own.
@ Jonathan
Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
And lean not on your own understanding;
6 In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He shall direct your paths.
7 Do not be wise in your own eyes;
Fear the Lord and depart from evil.
8 It will be health to your flesh,
And strength to your bones.
Proverbs 14:12 There is a way that seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death.
Anon,
Indians favor hiring other Indians if at all possible. I have seen that happen too many times to doubt it now. Raw skill helps, but that is only for the top end of skill. Most people (by definition) are not at the top end and tech takes a lot more skill to do really well at.
I do dispute Tucker’s opposition to driverless trucks on jobs grounds however. We should go back to horses if we really want to employ more low tech workers. Progress happens. Bowing to other countries is not necessary however. Those are different issues.
BillyS,
Indians favor hiring other Indians if at all possible.
The trashionalist websites claim this (as well as of Chinese, etc.), but it is obviously not true. For one thing, to believe this is to believe that they are passing over more qualified candidates just so that they can hire from their own group. To believe this is also to believe that such a company would not lose out to competitors that hire meritocratically.
Which means those who claim this are making the same claim that feminists make when whining about the imaginary ‘pay gap’ – that every CEO (even if female) is so sexist that they do not hire women over men even though women cost only 77% of what men cost.
Such a claim is also similar to the claim by white nationalists that pro sports selects black athletes ahead of whites even if the white athlete could do better.
Lastly, if 50% of the people in software are Indian, it may seem that they are hiring Indians specifically, but they aren’t – that is just half of the workforce to begin with it.
Last I checked, Google and Microsoft both had Indian CEOs, but neither company is disproportionately Indian relative to the industry average.
VFM,
My strong faith is the only thing that has kept me going since my divorce. It certainly hasn’t been the churches I have been in, one of which I was kicked out of because I tried to challenge their do nothing attitude and other things on the issues.
I fail to see a Scriptural mandate to care for families that do nothing for those outside themselves. I would not be the only one in that scope, but I would certainly be one of them. Most modern Christians, even those building families, are very self focused and have no right to demand any kind of support.
Read my blog if you want to see some of what I am doing, though I am writing less than I should be. I have found talking in person to others to be a largely fruitless and unproductive effort, and I certainly have tried that. Even connecting with others is next to impossible. Yet you will be a poser and claim a Scriptural mandate for still more time wasting? Yeah, right.
SirHamster,
When did you learn mind reading? I have plenty of things that make me feel bad now and VFM’s claims are not among them. Don’t try again though. You do have a problem connecting with reality it seems.
The groups are not the same, but we should be able to eliminate the H1B program completely if what you say is true, right?
Jonathan,
You are foolish if you think a man could avoid the State holding him in a financial vice for those children you say he can magically have outside marriage. Is he going to do that without a woman involved? What is going to keep her from taking the children and demanding money at some point? Some here have proposed surrogacy in the past, but that has other flaws and still requires someone’s eggs.
It will also scar most children for life keeping them from God’s plan of a mother and a father, thus it is no proper Biblical solution, however much you may wish it to be that. We live in a mess.
I would disagree with those saying things will never change. The current system may last far longer than anyone expects, but it will eventually fail since it will run out of others to steal money from to support the farce, whether women vote or not. You can’t vote in eternal prosperity.
Anon,
I already noted that I saw this with my own eyes. I have almost certainly worked in tech longer than you have. Give it a rest. You must be Indian yourself and want to hide the truth. Why is that?
BillyS,
I already noted that I saw this with my own eyes. I have almost certainly worked in tech longer than you have.
But I am certainly higher in the pyramid that you are, even if your seniority exceeds my 20 years.
At any rate, I told you why that cannot possibly be true, for to claim that this is happening is to make the same ‘arguments’ that feminist make when asserting that the ‘pay gap’ is due to some innate misogyny by men. Or the arguments that White Nationalists make when saying black dominance of team sports is due to political pressure to select more blacks than merit warrants.
Plus, you did not address this :
Last I checked, Google and Microsoft both had Indian CEOs, but neither company is disproportionately Indian relative to the industry average. This alone refutes your ill-supported accusation.
but we should be able to eliminate the H1B program completely if what you say is true, right?
Of course it should be eliminated. If these workers are needed, bring them in on Greencards and give them a market wage. If an employer in unwilling to do that, then they don’t need these workers badly enough. There should be no Frankensteined immigraton policy.
Oscar,
Great verses. For me, “navigating life the best we know how” includes studying the Bible, fellowship, and prayer.
Without that, I agree we’re utterly lost. (Look at our society.)
I don’t know where you are on this question, but I am surprised that men here will – for years and years! – talk about everything that is wrong with modern ‘marriage’ and how the enemy has corrupted it.
…and then conclude you should get married!
Talk about cognitive dissonance.
BillyS,
I already noted that I saw this with my own eyes.
Well, it is easy to produce 1000 feminists that will each say that they have seen with their own eyes that women are paid just 77% of men for exactly the same job. Hence, your standard of proof is one they can pass a thousand times over.
Remember, what you claim is impossible just like the ‘pay gap’ that feminists bray about is impossible. One cannot be true unless both are true (thankfully, they are not).
Jonathan Castle,
You seem to be unaware that the collections regime that exists for ‘child support’ is even more unfair and brutal than anything pertaining to alimony and asset division. Most men here would agree that a man can destroy his freedom and finances more thoroughly by having a child with a woman, than by marrying a divorcing a woman after a childless marriage.
i) They decide how much you pay, as a percentage of what you *could* earn, so the tab runs up even if you are unemployed.
ii) If you can’t pay, you go to jail. Even if there is a recession and you just cannot get another job, you go to jail.
iii) They may confiscate your drivers license and passport (which makes it harder for you to work, but your tab does not stop).
iv) You do not get to see your kid, even though you are paying.
v) There is no accountability on the woman to spend the money on the child. She could feed the kid the bare minimum of white rice just to keep it alive, and use the money for shopping.
You obviously have no idea how the child support collection regime works. If you did, you would not possibly think your hare-brained idea is ‘good’.
“I already noted that I saw this with my own eyes.”
^ I have as well. I watched large numbers of technical support jobs offshored away from American workers to foreign workers, I watched large numbers of information systems, programming, technical documentation, and other related jobs given to foreign workers imported on visa. Tech contracts started being rerouted away from U.S. companies to foreign ones. And that’s just the technology sector. Simultaneously, many other sectors were being decimated as the U.S. was hollowed out of jobs, capital investment, and invention/innovation to the detriment of U.S. workers and the U.S. national interest.
I remember the first to go were tech support jobs. In the early 90’s, when GATT was still in force before the WTO replaced it and Bush’s NAFTA had not been ratified into law by Clinton, you couldn’t call a tech company in the U.S. and find anything other than an American on the other end of the phone. The reverse is almost the case today.
VFM said:
“Yet for those enjoying the decline poolside, unmarried, with no children, I say this: When a new order emerges I sincerely hope that you will have committed your body to battle so that those who have family and children can build a new nation on your valor and sacrifice.”
As a MGTOW I am no longer “disposable for “your” society.
Since you are propping up the system by conforming,well.it’s on you,ain’t it.
Nope,nope,nope,
There is no room for a person like me in your world,I sure as hell am not going to
‘Sacrifice” any goddamn thing to help you along,when all your kind did was slash my Achilles heel. ( social outing
There is no tribe,and only one g-d,in the form of Debt notes.
Jam that in your pipe and sm0ke it.
Anon,
You libertarian morons are one of the factions that championed the destruction of Marriage 1.0. Back in the real world, libertarians are strongly aligned with feminism. Libertarians are the leading supporters of full free trade, open borders, etc. that annihilate the wages of blue collar men in the name of “muh freedumbz.” You people are quite literally part of the problem. There are no libertarians who are fundamentally allies of normal, average men just looking for a place in society. You people don’t even believe in nation-states because that’s “state-worshiping collectivism.”
All you’re doing here is engaging in your own little purity spiral, which will end up in one of two ways. Either you will reject libertarianism as a bullshit, anti-male, anti-Western ideology that it is or you will embrace it with all of its toxicity and be like the rest.
In response to two different subjects.
On Christians having children out of wedlock:
“The world must be peopled!” So said Benedick in “Much Ado”. But he, who pledged early on to be an eternal bachelor (an early literary MGTOW), said it as he was considering marriage to Beatrice.
From the perspective of my conservative church, there would be no toleration of a Christian man or woman member who set out to have children out of wedlock. Such would be excommunicated and disfellowshipped. As for those who come to the church for whom it is a fait accompli, if it was a couple we would push for their marriage and not allow them into membership until they did. If it was a woman with a child out of wedlock, she would not become a member if she didn’t show signs of repentance. Likewise for a single man (although if he didn’t have children along and the sin was not obvious, we probably wouldn’t know it if he didn’t reveal it). Being a fairly young church (20 years), we haven’t come up against much of this at all (yet) (thankfully!)
On MGTOWs (voluntary or involuntary) and heritage:
We had a Norwegian Bachelor Engineer who never had the chance to get married, even though he desired it as a younger man. When he reached age 60, he came to the pastor and said that, though God had not seen fit to give him children or grandchildren, he would like to consider the children of the church his grandchildren, and contribute to their welfare. Since he was frugal and a good investor, he paid for our church building, and when he died three years ago he left most of his legacy (more than a million dollars) to the church to help continue their ministry. He has left a most valuable heritage.
BillyS,
He’s probably just some typical young white libertarian who works in tech and hasn’t had a manager give him the “up or out” insinuation yet because some MBA is licking his chops at the idea of replacing him with several younger guys on the theory that “4 guys with 5 years experience each = 1 guy with 20.”
As a libertarian, he cannot admit that meritocracy, taken to its logical conclusion, is a form of enshrining biological determinism into our society. Note that he avoided my points about how most men simply cannot be “high producers” because they lack the intelligence and talent.
BillyS,
“You must be Indian yourself and want to hide the truth. Why is that?”
Anon consistently defends the country of India and individual Indians (dot not feather). He consistently slurs any Anglo’s that try to organize and stick up for their countries and culture.
Therefore, I am 99% sure he himself is an Indian in North America.
Had Jeff Bezos and his wife been British and been domiciled here Mrs Bezos would not as has been reported be in receipt of a half or even a third of his accumulated wealth and though I cannot say what that sum might be we would only be looking at Millions not Billions. The Divorce laws in England are ruinous for middling-class men, irrelevant to working-class men (who have neither the means or intention of paying) and highly beneficial to the super-rich for all the man has to do is place the former wife in the situation she would have been in had there been no divorce and thus a few million is more than enough to achieve that parity.
No greater sport than watching our betters come to grief. Apparently Mrs Bezos is a novelist (yawn) and an executive director of her own anti-bullying charity (yawn). I am presently locked-out of Amazon. Don’t know why other than to observe that their software is defective.
As a libertarian, he cannot admit that meritocracy, taken to its logical conclusion, is a form of enshrining biological determinism into our society. Note that he avoided my points about how most men simply cannot be “high producers” because they lack the intelligence and talent.
This is more or less true, but there is no way around it, even if one is not an ideological libertarian. Fact of the matter is that as things become more automated we will not need many middle and low skill people any longer — we will need some of them, but not nearly as many of them as we needed in the past. Either we make those people higher skill, or we make less of those people somehow, or we have some kind of socialism. This is why I think socialism is coming, in one form or another.
John Zmirak’s got an interesting article about this at The Stream: https://stream.org/tucker-carlson-half-right/
His argument is that the laws that were passed to end racial discrimination in hiring and pay also put an end to the practice of paying married men a family wage, which had been common before then. It’s going to be tough politically for anyone mainstream to question something that’s bound up with the Civil Rights movement in people’s minds.
@ Jonathan
If studying the Bible is part of “navigating life the best [you] know how”, then you should know that the Bible gives Christians two options: get married, or stay celibate. No one is telling you to get married.
Bee,
I had the same thoughts about Anon.
David Bahnsen should go back and reread everything his father ever wrote. Greg Bahnsen was one of the finest theologians of the 20th century and David’s apple fell too far from that tree.
@Oratorian
Thanks! I’ll check it out, but I’m initially skeptical because the data I’ve seen indicates that companies weren’t paying men a special wage. From your explanation he isn’t talking about affirmative action based on sex, but on race. But if companies were deliberately paying married men more than their competitive wage, this would have shown up in the data once it became illegal:
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/better-datachart-on-the-history-of-the-wage-gap/
On the flip side, with the number of black men who have kids out of wedlock and who would benefit from a general “father bonus” you would likely get a lot of black men backing it.
Maybe things are changing, however slowly – see this article in today’s WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rights-resistance-11547078513
I think real resistance and demand for change is finally starting to gain traction as the conservatives and Christians finally are starting to wake up, look around, and realize how much they have given up in the spirit of good will and cooperation. The losses are not sustainable, and must be re-balanced or all heck is going to break loose…..Civil War II fought with real bullets rather than rhetoric and lawsuits as it is being fought today
BillyS
Tucker’s opposition to driverless trucks on jobs grounds however. We should go back to horses if we really want to employ more low tech workers.
C’mon, that’s a false choice, binary thinking. There are more subtle reasons to question self-driving semi’s and other vehicles such as safety. But his point should be obvious: there’s more to an economy than a few cents more earnings per share on a stock price. Cultural cohesion is also affected, and has been for the last 20+ years.
Humans are not interchangeable parts. That’s one of the subtle issues that the main stream media and the elites do not want to be discussed, or even acknowledged. Because it leads to other questions about the nature of men and women…
Too much libertarianism can lead to a soulless place where humans are just interchangeable parts.
Even the old aristocracy at least had the concept of noblesse oblige staring them in the face.
Billy S: Indians favor hiring other Indians if at all possible.
Anon: The trashionalist websites claim this (as well as of Chinese, etc.), but it is obviously not true.
It’s not “obviously not true.” I, and others I’ve spoken to, have seen anti-white discrimination with our own eyes.
I’ve several times worked in office situations in the entertainment business where I was the only gentile. I thought it odd that everyone was Jewish except me, but I thought, well, they hired me, so they don’t discriminate. Then I’d learn that they thought I was Jewish. (I look Jewish, and have an East European accent.)
Jewish executives like to “help nice Jewish boys and girls” get a foot in the door. And they feel more comfortable among their own. They will occasionally knowingly hire a gentile (especially if it’s a pretty woman), but there’s a reason people behind the camera — agents, managers, casting directors, producers, executives, lawyers, accountants — are overwhelming (maybe 80 – 90%) Jewish.
People of every background flock to Hollywood to work there. Do you think Jews “just happen to be most qualified” in an over whelming majority of cases?
For one thing, to believe this is to believe that they are passing over more qualified candidates just so that they can hire from their own group. To believe this is also to believe that such a company would not lose out to competitors that hire meritocratically.
What is “merit”? Is there no benefit to working in an office with people who are like you? None of the friction that diversity brings. Everyone celebrates the same holidays. No one complains about a hostile work environment because they feel out of place. You think alike. You help each other. If they move up, they’ll help you move up.
Diversity creates friction. People afraid to speak. Constant threats of lawsuits and HR complaints. Diversity makes a company less competitive
What is merit? You have two job candidates. One types a bit faster, has a bit higher GPA. But the other one is like you. You’ll like get along in the office. He won’t feel angry over “past discrimination” or “centuries of persecution.” He’ll take direction more easily, and bring a better attitude into the office because he is like you. So, who brings more “merit” to the job?
Jews, Indians, blacks, gays, trannies, women are far more likely to hire their own kind than are straight, white, gentile men. Only the latter feel a guilty need (and legal pressure) to pass over their own kind, placing them at a competitive disadvantage
@Hmm.
Re: Wilson.
You know that. And I know that. The general public does not. Even your average Christian won’t interpret this type of language as an important attack on the spiritual and moral decay of an overly pagan institution but will think of school shootings and violence against children.
It’s a terrible look to have the FBI come visit you, and his openness about this whole thing is par for the course for him.
Note as well that companies keep hiring women, even with the productivity reduction that brings. Being less that optimally productive does not guarantee failure, especially in today’s work environment.
Anon:
“You obviously have no idea how the child support collection regime works. If you did, you would not possibly think your hare-brained idea is ‘good’.”
Haha, I wish! I’be been paying child support for 6 years and the ex is dragging me to court at present to bleed me further.
(Her case is weak but her greed is great.)
Nevertheless, i’m “showing up for the future” through three kids that are thriving.
Most men very much want kids and just have to find the best way to do that given all the risks.
I’m saying that _not_ marrying takes some of that risk off the table – not all. If you do get married, there are other strategies to further minimize risks (and increase your chance of a happy marriage.)
AR,
I definitely question self-driving trucks from a safety point, but that is not what Tucker proclaimed. I also agree that we need to not enable money gains by a limited few (whatever the amount of the money). That is a different issue however.
Anybody here ever read “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville? It’s a great book. 800+ pages in small type, though, and dense with information.
The way de Tocqueville describes the pre-Civil-War USA, the only government the average person interacted with was the city, or county government. To the average American – according to de Tocqueville – the state government was distant, and the federal government was virtually inconsequential.
That sounds pretty awesome to me.
Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, and we’re not going back to that model, unless something unforeseeable and drastic happens. But, even if we could return to that model, there is no political solution to what ails our culture. The only true solution is spiritual.
In fact, the only reason that model worked at all is that the people who instituted it were devout Christians. As de Tocqueville observed, the European proponents of freedom rejected Christianity as a source of oppression, while Americans embraced it as the source of freedom.
As John Adams stated:
Il Deploro,
Either you will reject libertarianism as a bullshit, anti-male, anti-Western ideology that it is or you will embrace it with all of its toxicity and be like the rest.
How clueless could you possibly be?
Big government is what is anti-male. Most government spending is a direct transfer from men to women. Most government employees are women. Big government and income tax grew as soon as women got the right to vote.
Get a clue. Only moochers fear a small govt/low tax society.
Note as well that companies keep hiring women, even with the productivity reduction that brings. Being less that optimally productive does not guarantee failure, especially in today’s work environment.
Given that most industries in the West are devolving into oligopolies, it matters less and less over time how “competitive” individual businesses are in terms of “giving the customer what they want” (i.e., a quality product or service for decent value). The prevailing attitude of most companies nowadays is “they’ll take whatever crap we choose to give them, and on OUR terms, or they can go get screwed by our ‘competitors’ for the same price. Whatever.”
Few companies, especially large corporations, suffer any repercussions to the bottom line with this attitude. See the U.S. domestic airline industry for Exhibit A.
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Anon,
Most government spending is now a direct transfer from the young to the elderly, a significant percentage of whom are men. Vox Day, not you, has it right, that the current arrangement–which libertarians love–is designed to force young women to work so old men can fart around and play golf in old age.
I don’t fear a small government/low tax society either. Your response is as idiotic as a Socialist accusing of being afraid of sharing. We know damn well that that is not the only thing that will happen with the libertarian program. Full open borders, no barriers on outsourcing, marriage is whatever two or more people call it, etc.
You’re not fooling anyone here. Many of us are ex-libertarians and know that your society will look a lot like what the left offers but with “more freedom.”
@GW: Doug Wilson’s last paragraph in his article is his attack on those who would consider a visit by the FBI “a terrible look”. He seems to believe that Christians will inevitably draw the attention of hostile authority, and that (within limits) is part of God’s design. So do we flee, duck and cover to avoid it, or embrace it?
Which attitude is summed up by church historian Tertullian: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”?
Anon: Big government is what is anti-male. …
There is nothing inherently pro- or anti-male, in big or small government.
Today, Western governments are controlled by anti-male (and, yes, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-Christian) cliques. It wasn’t always so. It needn’t always be so.
Only moochers fear a small govt/low tax society.
Moochers? Really? Please, get your nose out of the Atlas Shrugged and face reality. Ayn Rand was a mystic. The flip side of Marx. Both of them hated Christianity, and tried to supplant it with their own materialistic religions. Atheistic religions, but still, religions.
No one arguing as a liberatarian could rightly argue against divorce whenever a person desired it either.
ys: No one arguing as a liberatarian could rightly argue against divorce whenever a person desired it either.
On the contrary, one can justify virtually anything from a “libertarian” standpoint.
Libertarians say that contracts, voluntarily entered into in a free market, must be enforced. Thus, if two people (or three, or ten) contract for lifetime marriage, then those people should be forced to live together, if one of them sues to uphold the contract.
I’ve even heard libertarians theorize that people can voluntarily sell themselves into slavery.
Libertarianism can get quite kooky. It can justify virtually anything, provided it was voluntarily agreed upon in a free market.
RPL-
That is true, and right now libertarians would argue that the outcome of divorce is “known” as a possibility, therefore permissable.
As a philosophy it errs in thinking we humans can rightly govern ourselves. We need laws. Those laws need a source and that source is the Word of God.
And that’s a key reason why libertarianism is not a viable solution.
He is not raising his own children, but he is raising children by teaching them in Sunday School and giving them an example of a bachelor lifestyle that is focused on building up his own community through volunteering and charity.
That is praiseworthy. No shame.
@BillyS
If you are bothered by criticism, that is because the criticism affected your feelings.
My comment is not addressed to you. It is not personal. If you take it as personal mind-reading criticism, that is how you chose to interpret it.
I was talking about the people who complained about VFM’s claims. If you did not complain, it is not about you. If you did complain: you are a man, don’t complain.
“This is why I think socialism is coming, in one form or another.”
^ Let’s hope it comes in the form of employee owned companies and customer owned retail rather than centralized Marxism. As for the robots, tax the hell out of businesses that use them.
^ Let’s hope it comes in the form of employee owned companies and customer owned retail rather than centralized Marxism. As for the robots, tax the hell out of businesses that use them.
Under current socioeconomic conditions, entrepreneurship/self-employment on a large scale is inevitable. The key and the challenge will be to get government the hell out of the way.
Anon @ 12:05 am
“Indians favor hiring other Indians if at all possible.”
“The trashionalist websites claim this (as well as of Chinese, etc.), but it is obviously not true. For one thing, to believe this is to believe that they are passing over more qualified candidates just so that they can hire from their own group.”
You have trouble believing that? More qualified candidates were passed over for the first wave of Hindus to be hired in the first place. The White Elites probably expected that Hindus would finish the white extinction on their own so their fingerprints wouldn’t be the ones left on our throats.
“Well, it is easy to produce 1000 feminists that will each say that they have seen with their own eyes that women are paid just 77% of men for exactly the same job. Hence, your standard of proof is one they can pass a thousand times over.”
That’s because it’s true women are paid less. The pay gap disappears only when you correct for women leaving the workforce early in their careers and preferring to work in cube farms. Those feminists have malfunctioning brains, not malfunctioning eyes.
“Such a claim is also similar to the claim by white nationalists that pro sports selects black athletes ahead of whites even if the white athlete could do better.”
EVERY employer in America prefers to hire blacks instead of whites in order to protect themselves from racial harassment and qualify for special status with the government.
“Lastly, if 50% of the people in software are Indian, it may seem that they are hiring Indians specifically, but they aren’t – that is just half of the workforce to begin with it.”
The industry went from zero percent Hindu to FIFTY percent Hindu in two decades… and straight to the top positions. That’s either massive racial favoritism or the discovery that Ganesha’s holy language is Javascript.
“Last I checked, Google and Microsoft both had Indian CEOs, but neither company is disproportionately Indian relative to the industry average.”
Emphasis mine. Do not gaslight us. Speaking of Sundar Pichai, Vox Day has a post up about the Hindu-style caste system in the Goolag.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/12/who-would-have-thought-it.html
…
Red Pill Latecomer @ 10:05 am:
“I, and others I’ve spoken to, have seen anti-white discrimination with our own eyes. … I thought it odd that everyone was Jewish except me, but I thought, well, they hired me, so they don’t discriminate. Then I’d learn that they thought I was Jewish. (I look Jewish, and have an East European accent.)”
Heh. Did they fire you on the spot or wait for your next evaluation?
“What is “merit”? Is there no benefit to working in an office with people who are like you? None of the friction that diversity brings. Everyone celebrates the same holidays. No one complains about a hostile work environment because they feel out of place. You think alike. You help each other. If they move up, they’ll help you move up.”
+1
@ Sir Hamster. Well said.
@BillyS:
Thanks for telling me that you’d been through a divorce. You have my compassion. Thanks for your faith too, you have my respect.
Deplorabilissimo made a similar point in referring to Objectivist randian MBA’s in regard to your point about families that help no one else. It’s one of the flaws of Objectivism that Nationalism, Traditionalism, and community are denigrated. In the same way, families that don’t help out other families are contributing to the problem. Yet a self-supporting but closed family is in a much smaller way contributing to the health of a civilization in that they are not taking resources from others, are continuing to produce citizens and Christians (one hopes), voting, etc. That probably does not merit active support, but it certainly does not merit opposition.
I do actually agree with you that talking in person does not work in most cases, especially when you’re in a blue enclave. I don’t claim a Scriptural basis for what I’m saying, but I do have a faith and civilizational basis for doing so. You are right that talking rarely does anything. Works tend to emphasize the point better. @Anonymous Reader’s buddy is a good example of someone who’s works match their faith, and they’re serving God in an alternate fashion that’s worthy of respect.
@anon
“Last I checked, Google and Microsoft both had Indian CEOs, but neither company is disproportionately Indian relative to the industry average.”
Rephrased: Water is wet, but it’s only wet relative to the rest of the ocean.
@Johnathan Castle:
You have my compassion and respect, for whatever that’s worth on the internet.
That is not quite true ys.
A marriage would be a voluntary contract and even libertarians believe voluntary contractual obligations should be enforced. We don’t do that today of course, but that is a core element of marriage.
Did they fire you on the spot or wait for your next evaluation?
Entertainment gigs are often for fixed periods of time (i.e., the length or season of a film or TV series’s production).
One time, I revealed that I was not Jewish. I was kept on till the end of production, and let go with everyone else. I was not rehired when production resumed, though some of the other people were. No proof of anything. Shakeups are normal between periods of hiatus.
Later on, I would keep quiet if people thought I was Jewish. Didn’t claim to be, but didn’t correct them if they thought I was.
@BillyS
I do dispute Tucker’s opposition to driverless trucks on jobs grounds however. We should go back to horses if we really want to employ more low tech workers. Progress happens.
Most of the people who took issue with Tucker when he said that he’d gladly ban driverless trucks missed a much bigger point behind his statement. Listen again to what he said in that interview:
This isn’t just about employment, it’s about how a societal change is specifically going to affect men in their role as husbands and fathers. Can you think of any time in recent memory in which a major figure in politics, the media, or even the church has said that when we’re dealing with a broad social change we need to keep in mind how it will affect this group? I can’t. In fact, the usual message towards them has tended to go something like this: Men need to be strong. Men are replaceable. So when changes come to a society, its men had better be able to adjust to the latest “progress,” and if they can’t then they probably don’t deserve to be around at all. In short, pretty much the same message that David French offered in his response to Carlson:
“We must not create a victim class of angry citizens. We must not tell them falsehoods about the power of governments or banks or elites over their personal destinies.” But guess what? Governments do have some power over your destiny. That’s kind of why they exist to begin with. And they’ve already shown that they’re more than happy to put their finger on the scale when doing so will get them a result they want. Just consider how they’ve already altered the laws concerning divorce, domestic violence and child support in order to appease the cause of feminism. David French’s response to this is . . . to insist on even more responsibility and dutiful behavior from the men. That’s going to ring hollow to a lot of men, especially when you remember that both he and some of the same crowd he runs with have had a somewhat different reaction when a government policy affects a group other than men. Just consider the words of his friend, fellow National Review contributor, and fellow Never Trumper Russell Moore:
. . . And keep in mind that’s from a supposed “religious leader.” The “conservatives” clearly have no problem with changing the actions of government in order to improve the outcomes of women, including (and maybe especially) those who made choices that are going to be bad for their society. Why is it that they can’t seem to stomach the idea of acting with similar magnanimity when it comes to the nation’s men?
Tucker Carlson is far from perfect and he may end up being wrong on more than one government policy. But right now he’s also one of a rare few who advocates for his society to give men a stake in its future, instead of insisting that they dutifully serve as an expendable lab rat for whatever new social experiment their leaders have planned for themselves. If people, and men in particular, have responded positively to his ideas and his commentary, I suspect that this is the big reason why. Damn shame that more of our leaders can’t seem to learn from this example.
Link to the Moore statement is here (at about 37 minutes in): https://www.9marks.org/interview/race-political-partisanship-and-the-unity-of-the-church/
In fact, the only reason that model worked at all is that the people who instituted it were devout Christians. As de Tocqueville observed, the European proponents of freedom rejected Christianity as a source of oppression, while Americans embraced it as the source of freedom.
Yes. de Tocqueville famously observed in his book something to the effect of “America is great because it is good”, meaning, its people were devout Christians. While they didn’t practice it perfectly, because no one ever does, they still tried to adhere to the Calvinist ethic of belief in God, regular worship, hard work, proper priorities, and (at least outward) sexual morality. And those values took first place in, and were foundational for, all of America’s institutions of the time: Religion, government, business, law, and education.
Go ask the folks at Gab about the non-power of banks, credit card processors, etc. to crush an inconvenient startup into the ground if you think they have no power to make someone’s business destiny.
DA,
Societal change happens. That is not a valid reason to oppose it. Otherwise we would still be riding horses or walking everywhere.
You don’t support or encourage it for other reasons, but you cannot stop technology per se just because it will change the way things work.
I am not stupid enough to believe they can all go work in IT, let alone write code, but things will change and low skilled jobs will eventually go away. The bottom end always has to adapt, just like the rest of us.
Keep in mind that truck driving jobs didn’t exist 150 years ago.
@CL It will have to all burn, just like Rome did. And millions will have to die.
Consolation prizes? Islam and a second Dark Age.
Roman civilization did not die, it’s capital just moved east, and the empire continued another 1000 years before it was conquered by the Mohammedans. We know it as the Byzantine empire, but both they and the Mohammedans considered it the Roman empire. It was splendid! It had enormous political power, huge economic wealth, and was highly civilized. It was also a true Christian empire if you can ever speak of such.
I still have not figured out how come almost no one in the Western world was educated on this, but I deeply suspect it has to do that the RCC didn’t want to undermine it’s own declared primacy and the accompanying political power.
Oh, and the “Dark Ages” are a derogatory term invented by some anti-Christian “Enlightenment” figures, and finds no basis in history.
I employ a simple model how societies should run: evil should be constrained, power balanced between all stakeholders to benefit all. The societies that do this best are nationalist, tripartite, democratic societies. In such a setup government should serve the interest of the people. Free market economy seems to function best, but it can only function if government enforces the conditions for such a free market.
As for libertarianism: it assumes free markets spontaneously form and need no intervention of governments, which is not true. Furthermore having a free market is not a goal in its own, but only insofar it serves the interest of the people of a nation.
For the same reason, governments should control multinational corporations, as these tend to try to operate as entities without ANY national obligation. The corporate entity is a terrible and undemocratic legal monstrosity. It is not without reason most corporations lobby for globalism with governments, or sponsor such initiatives. Remember, the root of ALL evil is the lust for money, and lust for money is EXACTLY what is driving almost 100% of corporations.
Multinationals try to move work from a nation to low-wage countries, and at the same time want to take advantage of all the benefits of access to the “free market” of that nation, without contributing. They are basically “freeloading” on these nations.
For all the terrible things the Chinese government does, it does one thing right: it strategically manages its national interest all over the world, cleverly playing multinationals; any multinational who wants access to the Chinese “free market”, needs to pay, either by sharing essential knowledge, providing work for the Chinese, or otherwise. They cleverly “sell” access to their “free market”, knowing that such access is worth a lot.
Most Western societies are extremely stupid in this regard, and their governments are betraying their people on a massive scale, completely ignoring the interests of their people.
It is not in the interest of the people to let multinationals keep on operating like they do, nor to allow them to hire cheap labor while operating on national markets, as replacement for the same people of these nations.
If we need a big government to uphold the interests of the people, so be it!
@ Paul
None of which matters, because demographics is destiny, and the Chinese government screwed that up royally.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/01/04/asia-pacific/social-issues-asia-pacific/chinas-population-shrinks-first-time-70-years-despite-two-child-policy-experts/#.XDCXmc9KjOQ
Big government, and its inevitable smothering, and shackling of its population, has been a major factor in the decline and fall of nations and empires from Rome, to Byzantium (they don’t call convoluted bureaucracies “Byzantine” for no reason), to the present, and that will never change.
“Under current socioeconomic conditions, entrepreneurship/self-employment on a large scale is inevitable. The key and the challenge will be to get government the hell out of the way.”
^ socioeconomic conditions change and present socioeconomic conditions are where more than fourteen million U.S. workers now own over 6,500 businesses in the form of ESOPs, a dramatic growth from a few decades ago. There are various other collective business models besides, some of which are also already being implemented both in the private for-profit and cooperative non-profit sectors.
I’d like to see a customer owned online model supplant Amazon as well. Getting government “out of the way” is necessary when dealing with the political left as they are wholly married to centralized government Marxism. But a completely unregulated or misregulated “free” market has always led to oligarchy accompanied by more classfulness than is acceptable as wealth and power amasses into the hands of a few at the top in sectors that occurs.
Unfortunately a completely unregulated or misregulated “free” market has been the mantra of the neoconservatives, who displaced the paleoconservatives in the 1990s, until Donald Trump became president and started implementing his agenda and reforming the GOP.
@Johnathan Castle
Nothing about what I said indicated that God approves how marriage is conducted today. The state set up marriage this way…God didn’t.
But face the truth…having illegitimate children is fornication which God disapproves as well.
@Red Pill Latecomer
Especially true of forced diversity. I dont think voluntary diversity will have the same problems provided that none are leftist or influenced by leftist ideology.
“The elephant in the room is this: should Christian men have children without getting married?”
No, but what the government calls marriage is not marriage, so no need to take out a marriage license, so far as God is concerned.
GunnerQ,
More qualified candidates were passed over for the first wave of Hindus to be hired in the first place. The White Elites probably expected that Hindus would finish the white extinction on their own so their fingerprints wouldn’t be the ones left on our throats.
That is a pretty weird conspiracy theory, given that Indians are only 1% of the US population, and, like other Asians, don’t get affirmative action.
Those feminists have malfunctioning brains, not malfunctioning eyes.
The same is true for those who imagine ethno-centric hiring practices. As I told other upthread, if 50% of the people in a profession are of one group, a lot will be hired no matter what.
The industry went from zero percent Hindu to FIFTY percent Hindu in two decades…
er…. that is because Indians starting pursuing software just recently. Plus, remember that American kids stopped going into STEM because so many of them are raised by single mothers (which virtually precludes a kid even imagining STEM as a career other than SJW extortion). Red-pill people know this to be the case.
I thought you were red pill. Remember that it takes considerably more political maturity and intellectual horsepower to realize that misandry is the greatest problem of our age. The primitive hardwiring of most human brains is wired to excuse women of everything, while automatically hating other tribes. Hence, anti-misandry is the Rolls Royce of ideologies, while race/ethno-centrism is just crude “muh tribe, muh tribe” ooga booga chanting that is just a force strengthening feminism. Don’t devolve down to that.
Anon: if 50% of the people in a profession are of one group, a lot will be hired no matter what.
But how did they get to be 50%? Tribal networking and nepotism, which by definition discriminates against other tribes.
Anon: anti-misandry is the Rolls Royce of ideologies, while race/ethno-centrism is just crude “muh tribe, muh tribe” ooga booga chanting that is just a force strengthening feminism.
“Muh tribe, muh tribe,” is an effective strategy for advancing tribal members. If all tribes but one do it, then that one tribe is at a competitive disadvantage. I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament.
“Ethno-centrism” enables tribes to dominate certain fields, and effectively lock out others. And no, a “true free market” will not prevent discrimination. Discrimination is part of the free market. People do it because it benefits the in-group. The benefits (to those who practice it) outweigh the costs.
If all other tribes do it, your tribe must too, if only in self-defense.
@Oscar None of which matters, because demographics is destiny, and the Chinese government screwed that up royally.
… which is due to their awful forced abortion policy for decades. As I said, the Chinese government has many faults. In the one aspect I mentioned, they are doing excellent!
And, when looking at birth-rates in many countries, a lot of them are in the same situation.
But principally I have no problem with low birth rates, as long as they are somewhat above 2. The countries who calculate with birth rates and see problems with them, usually make a lot of assumptions on how future debt and taxes needed to financed, and conclude they need a lot more people to keep inflating the debt bubble! For all practical purposes, due to increased labor efficiency, societies don’t need high birth-rates.
@Oscar Big government, and its inevitable smothering, and shackling of its population, has been a major factor in the decline and fall of nations and empires
I don’t believe that big governments necessarily smother and shackle its population. It happens when balancing of powers is not in place, or power is misused (revolts etc.). All these ancient nations had no such balancing of powers. Many of their inhabitants were not much more than slaves.
Empires, with or without “big governments”, rise and fall for many reasons, but mostly due to wars, even wars on its own people. The Roman government was actually very small, and was just a small layer on top of previously existing national bureaucracies. And as I argued elsewhere, the Byzantines WERE the Roman empire, and the attack of Mohammedans has been the MAJOR cause of its fall.
But even the most carefully crafted governmental system can be screwed up by large scale immoral behavior.
Oh, and by the way, one reason why governments have been pushing for women to enter the workforce, is to increase the number of people in the workforce, and increase taxes. Stay-at-home moms don’t pay taxes, and don’t labor for the profit of corporations.
“The elephant in the room is this: should Christian men have children without getting married?”
Men can’t have children. Only women can. Rephrase the question.
Should Christian men get women pregnant that they are not married to?
I think it is pretty clear that the Bible says that sexual activity should happen only between folks who are married to each other.
But there are a lot of children out there that need a foster parent or someone to adopt them. Christian men could do this, and then hire a woman to come and care for them.
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https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/feminism-responsible-for-the-fall-of-rome/
Feminist ideology may also have contributed.
Parallels to the modern West are striking.
You’re obviously not red-pilled if your reaction to nationalism is to call it just crude “muh tribe, muh tribe” ooga booga chanting. That is slightly more polite than how a blue-haired land whale who runs around campus asking “hi, do you have a minute to discuss feminism” like a JW would describe it.
Once you grow out of binary thinking, you’ll realize that forced diversity and feminism are two wings of the same bird of prey, not one feeding the other.
Feminist ideology may also have contributed.
Parallels to the modern West are striking.
It’s a broader pattern in late-in-life civilizations.
Glubb’s “Fate of Empires” is a good resource ( http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf ) which describes the various common factors shared by empires which are in decline. The rise of women is mentioned there, but it doesn’t play a starring role as a cause, but more of a secondary symptom.
Unwin’s “Sex and Culture” has a somewhat different view, saying that one of the core elements of a civilization’s decline is in later (wealthier) stages when sexual morality is relaxed, which always results in an increase in the status of women ( https://archive.org/details/b20442580 ).
Basic trend: as civilizations peak they become very wealthy, which leads to a decrease in virtue, a growth in avarice and “softness”, and inclination to liberate women sexually, all of which tends to lead to a civilization’s eventual decline as compared with competitor civilizations who are at earlier, “hungrier”, stages in their life cycle. Of course this has never played out with a civilization that has WMDs.
You think false allegations are limited to married women? Try adopting some kids from a rough background and you can learn its joys even more!
The system doesn’t support adoptive parents either. I am also convinced that honorable foster parents have a harder time than scummy ones, just like marriages. That is another area that is really broken, harming many in the process.
@ Paul
Then you haven’t been paying attention.
No such thing as an empire without a big government.
That is laughably absurd.
And one of the major reasons the Byzantines were unable to defend themselves from the Muslims is that – like their Western counterparts – their massively bloated bureaucracy made life unbearable for their subjects, which caused many of their subjects (including the Copts) to side with their enemies.
anti-misandry is the Rolls Royce of ideologies
What an analogy…
Anyone who says that loving your own people is stupid has been enchanted by some serious rhetoric.
Il Deploro,
You’re obviously not red-pilled if your reaction to nationalism
You truly have no clue. All race and ethno-centric ideologies contain an immense amount of whiteknighting, and the entire ideology by its very nature mandates giving women an extreme amount of power with no commensurate accountability. One merely has to go to any White Trashionalist website to see the rather extreme level of woman-worship.
Remember that relative to obsolete human hardwiring from prehistoric times, it takes the greatest amount of modernization to arrive at anti-misandry. The extreme opposite is true of crude ‘muh tribe, muh tribe!!’ ooga booga chants, which is where the less intelligent visitors to the androsphere often detour into.
Boxer was extremely good at explaining why race nationalism is really just feminism. If Dragnet drops by, he is good at explaining this as well.
crude ‘muh tribe, muh tribe!!’ ooga booga chants, which is where the less intelligent visitors to the androsphere often detour into.
Okay, your shaming has convinced me. Next time I’m the victim of another tribe’s discrimination, I’ll remember that he’s really only hurting himself.
I guess that tribes who are dominant in certain fields are the ones who are suffering the most.
Anon says,
“Come on, whites, don’t act in your own self interests. That’s feminism pal!”
Did Anon say if he was Indian or not?
A White Trashionalist, on this very blog, once said that paternity fraud is acceptable as long as a white baby is produced :
http://www.antifeministtech.info/2011/11/white-nationalists-want-white-women-to-trap-white-women-with-oops-pregnancies/
The Trashionalist was then surprised that Dalrock and the rest of us did not agree.
These degenerates are no friend of men given their encouragement of paternity fraud. They think everything is 100% nature and 0% nurture, and fatherhood has no value in and of itself.
More from PM/AFT (a white guy) :
White Nationalism is a goddess cult.
This, of course, is true for any race that thinks race-centric and ethno-centric ideologies are the cornerstone of thought. These ideologies are nothing but crude forms of the Female Imperative.
@Oscar their massively bloated bureaucracy made life unbearable for their subjects
Your mentioning of the Copts is pointing NOT to bureaucracy, but actually to another aspect: theology. It considered the Copts and also other Christian groups as heretics after the council of Chalcedon and they were persecuted.
As for the reason of conquest of the Byzantine empire; it had been under Mohammedan attack for about 500 years. Initially the empire was already weakened due to the Sassanid wars, making it an easier prey.
, which caused many of their subjects (including the Copts) to side with their enemies.
http://britishorthodox.org/miscellaneous/the-coptic-orthodox-church-under-islam/
“The accusation that the Copts had aided the Arab invaders was long ago exploded by A.J. Butler in his study The Arab Conquest of Egypt (1902). They were in fact too weakened by persecution and lacking in leadership to play any significant communal rôle at this stage”
As for the reason of conquest of the Byzantine empire; it had been under Mohammedan attack for about 500 years. Initially the empire was already weakened due to the Sassanid wars, making it an easier prey.
Also, after the Western Church broke relations with the Eastern Church, the Western powers became increasingly reluctant to aid the Eastern Empire against the Islamic incursions. By the time the situation became critical, the break was quite solidified, and the Eastern Empire was pretty much isolated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Byzantine_wars
“The prolonged and escalating Byzantine–Sassanid wars of the 6th and 7th centuries and the recurring outbreaks of bubonic plague (Plague of Justinian) left both empires exhausted and vulnerable in the face of the sudden emergence and expansion of the Arabs.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Byzantine_wars#/media/File:Map_of_expansion_of_Caliphate.svg
Mohammedan conquests from 622-750
If you count the whole period of Mohammedan aggression against the Byzantine empire (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Ottoman_wars), it would span from 622 to 1479, beyond the sack of Constantinople in 1453, a period of 857 years.
“According to Islamic historians, Monophysites [Byzantine name for most non-Chalcedonian Christians] and Jews throughout Syria welcomed the Arabs as liberators, as they were discontented with the rule of the Byzantines.”
Even if these Islamic sources were true (which I severely doubt, given other sources), it indicates only a passive role of the inhabitants.
“Politico-religious events (such as the outbreak of Monothelitism, which disappointed both the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians) had sharpened the differences between the Byzantines and the Syrians. Also the high taxes, the power of the landowners over the peasants and the participation in the long and exhaustive wars with the Persians were some of the reasons why the Syrians welcomed the change.”
No mention of them being discontent because of, as you claimed, their massively bloated bureaucracy made life unbearable for their subjects
https://answering-islam.org/history/byzantine_responses.html
“Initially Islam was a political rather than a religious threat to the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox Church. As the threat of Islam (as a religion) increased so did the religious response by the ecclesiastical authorities.”
“The concept of Arabs [Muslims] as violent and aggressive was the overriding view of both religious and secular authors. They understood Islam as encouraging the already violent tendency of the Arabs. The Byzantines often portrayed themselves as innocent victims of Muslim aggression. The Byzantines maintained a status quo with Islamic states and were even willing to ally themselves to them. The cultural achievements of Islam did not impress the Byzantines whatsoever. Due to their tradition of Classical scholarship, direct descent from the Ancient Greeks and the idea that they were a continuation of the Roman Empire, the Byzantines maintained their cultural and ethical superiority throughout the period of cultural contact. “
@Oscar The Roman government was actually very small
That is laughably absurd.
Maybe you’re partially right. I was thinking of classical Romans, which built a thin layer of Roman government on top of existing national government/bureaucratic structures in conquered territories. I was not aware of later reforms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_finance
“With Diocletian [~AD 300] came a series of massive reforms, and total control over the finances of the Empire fell to the now stronger central government. Tax reforms made possible a real budget in the modern sense for the first time. Previously it had issued the tax demands to the cities and allowed them to allocate the burden. From now on the imperial government driven by fiscal needs dictated the entire process down to the civic level.”
“The comes sacrarum largitionum was a figure of tremendous influence. He was responsible for all money taxes, examined banks, ran the mints and mines everywhere, weaving mills and dye works, paid the salaries and expenses of many departments of the state, the upkeep of imperial palaces and other public buildings, supplied the Courts with clothing and other items. To accomplish these many tasks, he was aided by a large central staff, a regional field force and small staffs in larger cities and towns.”
Although it mentions that in later era some of these reforms were rolled back. The [Western] Roman Empire lasted to about 480, only 180 years after the Diocletian reforms of ~300 that introduced a bigger government. Which is of course only a small period compared to the whole period of Roman government.
My point of big government is however, that if the people REQUIRE a big government to serve their interests best, there’s nothing wrong with it. Of course in the context of the conditions I mentioned: balancing of powers, with government SERVING the needs of the people.
@Novaseeker Also, after the Western Church broke relations with the Eastern Church, the Western powers became increasingly reluctant to aid the Eastern Empire against the Islamic incursions.
Not only did they not come to the aid of the Byzantines, the Western powers were often the enemies of the Byzantines (the Venetians etc.), and even attacked Constantinople and sacked it in 1204 and divided it among themselves during the 4th crusade, from which the Byzantine empire never really recovered.
@ Paul
If you believe any human, or group of humans, once given that power will use it for his/their neighbors’ good, and not to enrich him/themselves and grab even more power, then you’re ignoring both the Bible’s teachings on human nature, and a million stories from history. There are exceptions, like Cincinnatus, but Cincinnatus is still revered 2,400 years later precisely because men like him are so infinitesimally rare.
For reference purposes, I found a very nice overview of “Byzantine” history which also sheds light on the differences between the “Western” and “Eastern” church and its political alliances, as well as on the position of the Russian empire.
https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HIST101-11.1-ByzantineEmpire-FINAL.pdf
@Oscar If you believe any human, or group of humans, once given that power will use it for his/their neighbors’ good, and not to enrich him/themselves and grab even more power
No, I fully agree with you. That’s why I stressed the importance of balancing of powers, with e.g. a tripartite democratic system. ONLY in such a scenario I don’t mind a big government IF it is REQUESTED by the people to serve their interests. Think for instance upholding of consumer protection laws, traffic infrastructure maintenance, hospitals and health care, education, fundamental research, foreign policy, military and police protection etc.
But I’m fully aware that for all practical purposes, a government with a truly balanced power distribution is hard to find, not even in modern western states such as the USA.
Paul,
That is what the US system attempted to do and it still failed.
The maxim that “government governs best which governs least” is almost always true. Any idea that “big government” can protect anything of value for long is completely false.
@BillyS
Well, I don’t expect flawless governments anyway. Sin is too strong for that.
But by the same token, small governments are also not a guarantee to protect anything of value.
As for the USA specific; power has been dislodged from the people, and the election of Trump has somewhat shifted the balance, but in the end, Trump will also not be able to bring lasting changes.
Remember “drain the swamp!”? That explicitly promised to remove career power politicians from their positions. Trump failed to do that. “Hillary for prison”? No such thing at all.
So my I don’t mind big or small governments as much as I mind balancing of power, which in my opinion is truly critical, and gives the best results.
The current system in the USA is flawed in many ways:
1. financing of campaigns of political candidates by (foreign) entities, buying influence.
2. no identification of rightful voters
3. indirection elections by states instead of direct elections by the people
4. only two parties
5. paid lobbyists
6. lobbying corporations (should be banned, if you cannot vote, you should not be able to lobby)
@ Paul
That’s a fantasy. Once ensconced in power, those in power find ways to grab more at the expense of the governed. Laws, structures and balances of power don’t stop them. And if you haven’t learned that lesson yet… well, that’s why we are where we are today.
@Oscar
Oh well, I disagree. In a true democracy the power is controlled by the vote of the people. If leaders mess up, they loose votes and have to go. Of course not all power is controlled by government, especially not by small governments. It’s an illusion to think that small governments solve the power problem.
In our current society globalists are pushing towards dissolving of nation states and governments, big and small, are to be replaced by an undemocratic system of governance. Many multinationals are happy to join.
On a global scale national governments function as an intrinsic balancing of power. If that balancing is removed and power is transferred to a single global government, things will get much worse, because power will be more unbalanced.
Paul,
You incorrectly rely on others to protect what only individuals can protect.
@BillyS
It’s only a romantic fantasy to think an individual is able to protect his interests against all powerful opponents. That’s only possible for a limited number of cases, including making moral choices, For instance, even guns cannot protect against litigation by an opponent with deep pockets, especially if these are impersonal legal entities such as corporations.
The idea of the “lonesome cowboy” or the “superhero” or the “self made man (The American Dream)” are just myths that reinforce the idea that an individual is able to overcome all difficulties in live against powerful opponents by his own. In reality it’s only with the help of others that you’re able to survive at all. Even preppers have to assume the absence of a powerful opponent in their survival scenarios. Such help of others IS society. We need it. And we need (God given! See e.g. Rom 13) governments. And my point is that historically speaking we know that (outside of a theocracy) democracies with balancing of powers serve the interests of people best.
Look, I understand the whole sentiment of feminism using government to enforce their goals, which is true. And I understand the frustration and hardships many of us here have personally experienced because of that. And I’m all for changing that. But I don’t see it as an argument against governments.
Reality is, in a democracy the majority is able to enforce their ideas upon the minority. Therefore,
what we’re talking about is the power of ideas, and on a spiritual level, the immoral behavior by a majority of people, because they’re following the wrong ideas.
Our only hope for society to change, is to change ideas. The beautiful thing is; that IS something that can start at the individual level. Unfortunately, we even find many churches as our opponents. But places like this blogs are where we exchange ideas AND we let our own ideas be changed by the ideas of others. Personally, I’ve learned a lot since I discovered this blog about a year ago. And I share what I’ve learned with others, trying to change their ideas.
In the end, we may or may not succeed to change ideas, the ultimate personal goal is to follow Christ in obedience, being aware that we most likely encounter suffering because of it.
@Paul
Indeed. What you propose must have as its prerequisite is that the Nation is under the Kingship of Christ.
Nations who bows their knees before the Emperor(King of Kings) Jesus. For without the Monarchy of Christ and ultimate allegiance to him that well balanced Government will fail.
@Paul
”Oh well, I disagree. In a true democracy the power is controlled by the vote of the people. ”
Thoughts on Swiss Direct Democracy?
@Paul
“Immortal King of Ages Lord Jesus Christ, our God and Savior,” they declared at the ceremony, “bowing our heads before You, King of the Universe, we acknowledge Thy dominion over Poland, those living in our homeland and throughout the world. Wishing to worship the majesty of Thy power and glory, with great faith and love, we cry out: Rule us, Christ!”
https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/polish-bishops-and-president-duda-declare-christ-king-poland
@ Paul says:
January 12, 2019 at 5:58 pm
Because you ignore both the Bible’s teaching on human nature, and the lessons of history.
And when a charismatic psychopath comes along, and tempts gullible people like you with goodies which, of course, he’d only ever use for the good of the people, you grant him all the power to accomplish the things you want him to accomplish, and then when you tell him you’d like him to give up that power, he simply refuses.
And you’ll never learn. Which is why we are where we are.
You don’t even recognize the problem. THAT is the illusion.
@ info
Switzerland has one of the smallest governments on Earth, and consistently scores near the top of the “Human Freedom Index”, and the “Index of Economic Freedom”. That doesn’t fit well with Paul’s assertions, does it?
Switzerland has one of the smallest governments on Earth, and consistently scores near the top of the “Human Freedom Index”
Of course. Few countries have done more things right, over a longer period, than Switzerland.
Now, their sector focus can’t work for a country much larger than them, but the small government structure and philosophy certainly could (in theory).
I bet single motherhood (which is impossible without big government) is vastly lower in Switzerland than other Western countries.
Regarding the H-1B visa debate above, it is well-documented that H-1B visa holders are on average inferior in quality to Americans. And yes, hiring of H-1B visas unequivocally hurts Americans. Please read Dr. Norman Matloff for data and analysis: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
I am amazed as to the love-in for Switzerland. It is one of the most disunited of countries and also one of the most totalitarian as well as being expansionist: want to wash your car on a Sunday – no chance. I have been there though I cannot say that my brief time in one of the cantons produced any great insight. It is of course as much of a Feminist hell as everywhere else with apparently far worse immigration problems than where I am – so much for Democracy. It lacks individuality. but they do have a lot of guns. What Mr Trump might call a fake country.
One additional comment on H-1B visas: The H-1B visa program is a non-immigrant program, and therefore should be an easy target for elimination. The argument that opponents of the H-1B program are against free markets is patently absurd, because the cost of earning a degree in the countries of origin of H-1B visa holders is approximately 1-10% of earning a nominally comparable degree in the US. As others have said, a major goal of globalism is to demand first-world prices for goods and services, while paying third-world wages. The field is intentionally unfair, as the advantage only flows one direction. Like feminism, globalism constantly demands “equality” but really means advantage for it’s chosen group, at the expense of others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
” Citizens have more power than in a representative democracy.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Switzerland
“The aim is to avoid the concentration of power in a forum, which allows a moderation of state power and the easing of the duties of the federal state.”
Given the successfulness of the Swiss, it supports my point of the balancing of powers as the most important factor in determining how well a government serves its people.
Their more direct democracy seem to work very well, given the examples I’ve seen where impopular government measures are being countered by people’s initiatives to change those.
So I’m still with balancing of powers first, and let the people decide about the size their government should have.
@Oscar you grant him all the power to accomplish the things you want him to accomplish
Of course not, that would violate my principle of balancing powers first. And as in the example of the Swiss, he WOULD be evicted.
But in the end, there is not a single system that can prevent a corruption of power under all circumstances. It’s just not possible.
And of course it’s always great to listen to Viktor Orban’s viewpoints (although he has a tendency to use lots of words). He strives for a Christian Nationalist country, where the majority of the people will democratically want to support the upholding of Christian values.
https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/08/say-goodbye-to-the-entire-elite-of-68/
Wow! A bit of good news from both Poland and Hungary. Hopefully it sticks.
I joined Catholic Answers Forum today, for a few hours. I got three quick posts in before I was suspended for a month. They say I violated the rules on all three. On one I quite politely asked a woman who was not interested in having sex with her husband because she is busy and tired, and he had looked at porn, if it was possible that her husband was feeling sexually unfulfilled by her avoiding sex. I got wrote up for harassment. On the other two I tried to help a couple of folks and got wrote up for offering psychiatric advice, when I was merely quoting a Doctor, and giving my own testimony, and encouraging people to stay married and work through their issues with folks specifically trained to correct their partner’s psychological issue.
SMH I tried.
My adventures in Catholicism didn’t last long. LOL
@Paul
>Our only hope for society to change, is to change ideas.
Except, of course, for how the historical record clearly shows otherwise. Social change is driven by technological change. We’re in the hole we’re in now because of The Pill, and the industrialized automation of women’s housework, and similar reasons. Social change needs technological change to be feasible.
So if we do have only one hope for society to change, it is comparable men’s liberation, which is finally starting to accelerate to parity, thanks to what? Technological improvements liberating men.
If people really wanted to improve things, they’d be investing in that, promoting it, advancing it themselves. But almost nobody *really* wants to liberate men.
Technological change is not value-free, nor independent of changes in society. Therefore changing of ideas DOES impact the direction of technological change, Furthermore, many devices still require moral choices when using them. Hence change of ideas still rules.
>Technological change is not value-free, nor independent of changes in society. Technological change is not value-free, nor independent of changes in society. Therefore changing of ideas DOES impact the direction of technological change,
[shrug] So what? Nobody here is claiming otherwise.
The counterpoint being made was that your characterization of ‘changing ideas’ as the “only hope for society to change” was extremist nonsense. Again, it’s not the only way, and if there were an “only” way, it would be men’s liberation through technological advance. Social change needs technological change to be feasible. Unless and until men are once again competitively empowered relative not just to women but to their communities, all the ‘changing hearts and minds’ woo-woo kumbaya goodfeelz nonsense in the world isn’t going to do jack crap.
>Furthermore, many devices still require moral choices when using them. Hence change of ideas still rules.
Except, of course, for how technology expanding liberty increases the range, nature, and other characteristics of available choices, and thus no, changing ideas doesn’t rule. Politics may be downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of technology.
I saw a couple minutes of FOX tonite, Tucker Carlson was dumping on the FBI brass, the little snakes. He did good.
@Acksiom The counterpoint being made was that your characterization of ‘changing ideas’ as the “only hope for society to change” was extremist nonsense. Again, it’s not the only way, and if there were an “only” way, it would be men’s liberation through technological advance.
Technological advance does not automagically liberate men, that’s an illusion. Technology is part of culture (versus nature).
And as for “the only hope”, that must of course be read in the context of the discussion.
“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”