Amerika

• A spectre haunts Europe and the world. It is Replacism

  The change in people, ethnic substitution, the Great Replacement, is by far the most important event in the history of our country since it has existed, because, with another people, the history, if it continues, will no longer be the history of France. France has always marvellously assimilated individuals who wanted to be assimilated. It cannot — it simply cannot — assimilate peoples, much less peoples who are hostile, demanding, even hateful and conquering. It requires a peerless form of vanity and complete ignorance of what a people is to think that with a changed population, another people, France would still be France. In the present situation, all words are liars but the most mendacious of all is “French”. There are no “French” jihadists, for example. If they are jihadists then they are not French.

• Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought

  The swiftness with which rational thinking declined after the 1970’s is astounding. In its place arose post-modernism, characterized by “scepticism, subjectivism, or relativism” and “a general suspicion of reason”.[9] But it gets worse … post-modernism is giving way to “post truth”. In direct contrast to rational thinking, a post-truth culture abandons “shared objective standards for truth” and instead, stands on appeals to feelings and emotions, and what one wants to believe.[10] People can now “identify” themselves as something which flat-out contradicts science and rational thinking and, in many cases, receive the full support and backing of governments and educational systems. Not only do people feel they have a right to believe what they want, but any challenge to that belief, even if supported by truth and logic, is unacceptable and offensive.

• Liberalism: a bad idea and how to cope with it

  And on this basis he defined a properly Conservative approach to reform. “In a progressive country change is constant”, he explained, “and the great question is, not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines. The one is a national system; the other is a philosophic system.” Sometimes he called it a liberal or a “cosmopolitan” one.

• Trump Got His Wall, After All

  In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall.

  As noted on Amerika:

  This “invisible wall” does not make headlines but it is designed to avoid doing that because as soon as the Left gets wind of it, they will obstruct it. Instead, like a master of ceremonies, Trump has us all focused on the physical wall while behind the scenes, the invisible wall goes up silently

• The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising

  Tadelis suggested an experiment: stop advertising for a while, and let’s see whether brand keyword advertising really works…Together with his team, he carefully analysed the effects of the ad stop. Three months later, the results were clear: all the traffic that had previously come from paid links was now coming in through ordinary links. Tadelis had been right all along.

  As noted on Amerika:

  Silicon Valley has been dodging that one for some time, and their solution has been to cultivate a fanatical audience of SJWs instead of a broader audience of normal people. That in turn has helped enforce a split: on the internet, you are either a fanatical Leftist or someone who is skeptical of the internet. That skepticism has fueled questioning about the value of social media and internet use as an activity, especially since it represents to this generation what daytime television did to the 1980s: people with no purpose, not much hope, and very little else to do.

• radical book club: what Righties can do

  On the Left, the base is focused less on pure electoral power than on capturing Institutions and pressuring for power directly. This has actually worked out quite well for them, and provides a foundation from which to press for electoral power. On the Right, the base is focused on evangelism: saying, repeatedly and without means for enforcement, what it believes people should do. This approach has worked out much less well. Righty action is mostly devoted to electioneering, meaning that a Righty base that wants change gets no practice in the mechanics of obtaining it, unless they serve on campaigns which are by definition mostly run by establishment types. This suits the Righty establishment just fine.

  The Right dislikes the Leftist method because it is inherently dishonest. A better method is to infiltrate institutions and start turning them Right-wing. We do not need an organized movement like the Left, but a tacit agreement to take over and always push Rightward.

• The Faces Of Justice Democrats, Who Herald ‘The Death of The Old America’

  To hasten that goal, Shahid targets voters in districts that are “majority non-white and economically diverse.” Justice Democrats like him hope “to mobilise infrequent voters in the less-white and less-rich parts of the district to vote,” so as to, presumably, bring about the desired change. The JD has the “experience, the infrastructure, the people and the coaching” to achieve transformative results.

• Hollywood Not Sending Us Their Best

  In the brain of a “queer, Jewish feminist,” the thought process is: I personally don’t enjoy this perfectly traditional, masculine, Anglo-Saxon sport of hunting; therefore, I will portray American male hunters as butt-raping their own sons.

• We’re heading for a Singapore-style Brexit, no matter what Boris does

  To summarise, even if Boris opts for the softest of soft future relationship models, the EU’s regulatory zeal is likely to drive the UK to diverge in terms of regulation, thereby truly becoming the ‘competitor’ Angela Merkel fears. And so it would be the EU that would drive the UK toward becoming a ‘Singapore on Thames’ (even if Singapore is actually not as deregulated as sometimes assumed).

• The Decade Tech Turned Dystopian

  The 2010s should be remembered as the decade tech turned dystopian. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened just as Washington was out to lunch. D.C. has been dysfunctional and divided, but politicians also agreed long ago that their default setting would be to allow innovation from private enterprises without question. Since Bill Clinton’s 1996 proclamation that the “era of big government is over,” corporations have gotten the benefit of the doubt. That has been particularly true of tech companies.

• A Path to Submission: Michel Houellebecq, Sex, and History

  It is in the deregulation of sexuality that Houellebecq sees the breakdown of modern liberalism. History will not end till sex has lost its power, and it will not do that, not naturally. Deregulation is the right word, for it is “the extension of the domain of the struggle” found in capitalism into a sexual marketplace, as the protagonist puts it in the writer’s first, too didactic work, titled in English as Whatever. Sexual liberalism, as recent concerns about a millennial “sex drought” has brought into the public conscience, can result in a kind of wealth inequality perhaps as drastic as and parallel to that produced by the global economy.

  Read our review of Serotonin.

• The Enemies of Writing

  Politicians and activists are representatives. Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves. But today, writers have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community. Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers. In the most successful cases, the cultivation of followers becomes an end in itself and takes the place of actual writing.

• The people trying to save scents from extinction

  But these particular smells, while omnipresent to those living in the city, will not be around forever. “What we increasingly see is the arrival of a transnational aromascape or flavourscape,” says Rhys-Taylor. “It is pretty much the same in every global city now: smell of pulled pork, flat whites, roasting coffee beans is an increasing one, microbreweries. There is a global constellation of transnational aromas and flavours associated with a transnational class, people that move around from city to city.”

• Ethnic Studies 101: Playing the Victim

  García Peña’s disclaimers are not reassuring to readers seeking a history of the Dominican Republic, which, in the loosest sense, her book allegedly provides. But the repudiation of “evidence-based” arguments is understandable here, since the Dominican Republic and its island neighbor Haiti pose a problem for the ethnic-studies mindset. Ethnic studies is devoted to a single proposition: history consists of one unending assault on peoples of color by whites. But black Haitians and mestizo Dominicans fought to subjugate each other throughout the nineteenth century. Haiti sought to colonize its neighbor; it expropriated Dominican land and taxed without representation.

• I’m raising children in an interracial relationship – it’s painfully clear why Meghan and Harry really left

  Race has increasingly become more salient in the current turbulent political climate, and so racial anxiety has also increased manifold. In the case of an interracial couple, such politics can be heightened due to societal pressure and expectations.

• Colleges Dupe Parents and Taxpayers

  According to Minding the Campus, Penn State University’s Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students employs 19 diversity people. Top college diversity bureaucrats earn salaries six figures, in some cases approaching $500,000 per year. In the case of the University of Michigan, a quarter (26) of their diversity officers earn annual salaries of more than $100,000. If you add generous fringe benefits and other expenses, you could easily be talking about $13 million a year in diversity costs. The Economist reports that University of California, Berkeley, has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

  Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5 depending on the college.

• Was 2019 the Year of Peak Entitlement Mentality?

  So what explains the gargantuan budget deficits? During good times, spending on many programs meant to alleviate poverty and economic hardship typically goes down. But not as much anymore. Ever-easier eligibility for programs like food stamps has deviated from the program’s original intent. Medicare and Medicaid expansion have guaranteed that the programs will continue growing and adding to the deficit, whether times are good or bad.

• Jews felt safe in Germany, too

  The Mean Girls of your high school run half our Congress.

  Imagine more districts bringing us more Omars, Tlaibs and AOCs. What country will this be?

  We are a good people…but suppose the 20 to 40 million illegals go voting? Equally so the millions here legally, but here with an ancestral grudge.

• I campaign for the extinction of the human race

  It’s true that society would be greatly diminished without children, but it isn’t right to create them just because we like having them around. People worry that we won’t have enough workers to support pensioners, but economic systems are artificial and can be adjusted. We don’t need to breed more wage slaves to prop up an obsolete system. If we go extinct, other species will have a chance to recover.

• What Plato Would Have Said

  Second, he would have questioned our ability to translate our various scientific and technological achievements into greater human happiness; also, he would have wondered whether enabling so many incurably sick and/or handicapped people to stay alive, sometimes even against their will, is really the right thing to do.

  Third, he would have observed that, the vast number of mental health experts notwithstanding, we today are no more able to understand human psychology and motivation better than he and his contemporaries did. As the French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, there was (and still) an uninvited guest seated among us: the human mind.

  Fourth, he would have noted that we moderns have not come up with works of art—poetry, literature, drama, rhetoric, sculpture, architecture—at all superior to those already available in his day. Not to Aeschylus. Not to Sophocles, not to Euripides, not to Aristophanes. Not to Demosthenes, not to Phidias and Polycleitus. Not to the Parthenon.

• What Unites Republicans May Be Changing. Same With Democrats.

  Trump is defending the identities of people who align themselves with the GOP, and this is a more powerful connection and reason to back him than pure ideological concerns. In defending Trump, conservative voters are really defending themselves.

  The journalist Ron Brownstein refers to the GOP as the “coalition of restoration,” trying to fight against a “coalition of transformation” led by Democrats. Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, has described Trump as the defender of a “white Christian America” that sees itself in decline. In a recent speech, Attorney General Willam Barr praised the “Judeo-Christian values that have made this country great” and warned that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.”

• Finland Is a Capitalist Paradise

  More astonishingly, Finnish capitalists also realized that it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive — and this would build a more beneficial labor market. These programs became the universal taxpayer-funded services of Finland today, including public health care, public day care and education, paid parental leaves, unemployment insurance and the like.

• 5 important things happening in South Africa today

  • The Department of Basic Education has refuted reports that 300 South African schools are dropping maths – saying only 49 schools have dropped the subject between 2018 and 2019, due to a shortage of teachers. The claim, first published in the City Press this past week, was made by an Afrikaans association of teachers, which the department claims it hasn’t heard of. The figures were from 2014, the departments says. The schools still offer maths literacy. [702]
  • AfriForum has laid a formal complaint against president Cyril Ramaphosa and other government officials at the UN, over remarks about farm murders in South Africa. After US president Donald Trump spoke of white farm murders in South Africa in 2018, Ramaphosa denied that such a thing was happening, calling the US president misinformed. Other officials, such as Lindiwe Sisulu, then the minister of international relations, attacked AfriForum as a group spreading lies. AfriForum is seeking a retraction, and a commitment to deal with the problem.

• Stop hiding behind safety of our screens

  In this age dominated by screens, we have become more prone to sitting in our cars, houses and workplaces and watching the world at a safe remove. From our couches, it’s easy to have an opinion about everything. From that safe perspective, we know everything and we can comment, sometimes brutally, without fear of being called out.

  It’s an age of anonymity masquerading as connectivity. We seem to be more global, more in contact with people who may live hundreds of miles away. We can date people we’ve never even met.

  But in reality, we are hiding behind the safety of our screens, posting only photos that frame us as we want to be seen, using screen names and judging people in the online arena that we would never criticize if they were standing on front of us.

• No, Jesus was not a socialist

  That question cannot be answered without a reliable definition of socialism. A century ago, it was widely regarded as government ownership of the means of production. Jesus never once even hinted at that concept, let alone endorsed it. Yet the definition has changed over time. When the critiques of economists such as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman demolished any intellectual case for the original form of socialism, and reality proved them to be devastatingly right, socialists shifted to another version: central planning of the economy.

• Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda

  Instead of characters driven by real feelings, therefore, the guiding hand of “normalcy” pulls the characters along through narratives — and unsurprisingly, that idea of “normalcy” doesn’t have a lot of room for the true diversity of American experiences.

• Eternal Recurrence

  Saini presents the usual assorted, fallacious arguments employed by emotional researchers against race. She notes that the concept of ‘race,’ in historical terms, is a relatively ‘new’ one. But this has no bearing whatsoever on whether dividing humanity up into breeding populations that differ genetically from other populations as a result of geographical isolation, cultural separation, and endogamy, and which show patterns of genotypic frequency for a number of inter-correlated characteristics compared with other breeding populations (the essence of ‘race’) allows correct predictions to be made. If so doing does allow correct predictions to be made, then ‘race’ is as much a ‘scientific’ category as any other.

• Royalists pine for days of empire in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

  “Ideally, in the long run, we should move to a parliamentary system and then establish that the head of state be a monarch,” she said. “The monarchist system is good for one reason: Because the monarch is not concerned about the next election. He will always care more about the next generation, which is something most politicians today don’t care about.”

• What the Hell Just Happened?

  I believe this all has a practical application in today’s political and societal climate. Thanks to social media, first world culture believes that it must be recognized individually; people want to respond to every insult and prove that their opinion has merit. But if an opinion has merit, it needs little to no defense. Those who care about the moral and cultural degradation of modernity have the upper hand, as the laws of nature and the universe back them up.

• Finding sanity in a stampede of agitrolling, fauxrage and verbiflage

  The reason is that the major platforms seem to have devised their algorithms to suit the prevailing narrative based on neo-Marxist identity politics, resulting in a profound double standard. It is apparently acceptable to attack, and even threaten, certain categories of people, such as straight, white men, on social media. But it is not okay to question which pronouns should be used for people who identify as transsexual.

• What’s Paleo, and What’s Not

  Although paleos believe in universally applicable moral standards, they insist that rights are historic and attached to particular societies with their own histories. Paleoconservatives also believe the U.S. was founded as a “constitutional republic,” not as a “liberal democracy.” Perhaps most controversially, they stress lines of continuity extending from the civil rights and immigration legislation of the 1960s to the cultural and political transformation of our country that is now going on. Often attacked as racists or xenophobes, the Cassandra-like paleos are neither. They have boldly pointed out developmental connections that others choose to ignore.

• Historians destroy the NYT “1619 Project,” but it will still be used in K-12 classrooms

  This past week, several prominent historians, including Gordon Wood and James McPherson, wrote a letter to the NYT explaining that what the paper has published under its 1619 Project has included major factual errors and demanded that the paper print corrections. The professors specifically noted that if the paper left the material unchanged, it might be responsible for convincing a generation of school children to believe things about the nation’s history that were demonstrably untrue.

• Is artificial-womb technology a tool for women’s liberation?

  For Firestone, artificial wombs would eliminate a crucial condition that currently ensures women’s oppression by neutralising the heavily gendered process of reproduction. Though there exist indisputable biological differences between the sexes, she argued that this difference becomes oppressive in the unfair division of reproductive labour and its naturalisation through the ideal of the nuclear family. But if foetuses were to develop in artificial wombs, women would finally be free to pursue their interests and desires outside of their reproductive duties.

  Let’s just clone up great people from two centuries ago and produce tens of thousands of them.

• Noel Ignatiev’s Long Fight Against Whiteness

  In 1967, he composed a letter to the Progressive Labor Party that outlined his views. “The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been historically, white chauvinism,” Ignatiev wrote. “White chauvinism is the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.” He argued that it would be impossible to build true solidarity among the working class without addressing the question of race, because white workers could always be placated by whatever privileges, however meaningless, management dangled in front of them. The only way to change this was for white working-class people to reject whiteness altogether. “In the struggle for socialism,” Ignatiev wrote, white workers “have more to lose than their chains; they have also to ‘lose’ their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the material base for the split in the ranks of labor.”

• Donald Trump: Rogue leaders never calculated he would be this strong

  What President Trump did was to make it perfectly clear to the largest terrorist regime worldwide that it was a zero-sum game; that Americans would not be besieged on his watch without consequences. Iran is not accustomed to that.

• Freedom Is Meaningless Under Insurmountable Debt

  As the Thirteenth Amendment scholar Lea VanderVelde writes: “What is the difference between owning a man and owning his services,” if his services—his labor—are all he has? How different is it, truly, to hold and force a woman to work until she pays off her debt, from garnishing the wages of a woman who cannot keep up with a loan at 300 percent interest?

  To be sure, this modern form of debt peonage doesn’t restrain one’s body—one’s physical freedom to move from place to place. But in the eyes of Howe and his fellow Republicans, its power is over something fundamental to liberty: the right to one’s future income.

• Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts

  While social media and partisan news has allowed more voices to be heard, it also means we are now surrounded by more people manipulating what facts make it to our newsfeeds. We’d draw a different conclusion—or even just a more nuanced picture—if we were given all the information on an issue, not just the parts that best benefit a particular viewpoint.

• Managing in Four Worlds: Culture, strategy and transformation

  There is something profoundly wrong in today’s world. We now live in a world of such a complexity and diversity that there is little possibility of achieving constructive sustained governance with existing concepts of organization. People everywhere are growing desperate for a renewed sense of community. Shared purpose and principles leading to new concepts of self-governance at multiple scales, from the individual to the global, have therefor become essential. In terms of the four worlds from a macro perspective, the exclusively competitive western business ethic is now hopelessly obsolete. As such it needs to be replaced by a cosmopolitan ethic enacted by a transcultural business world: made up first of competitive western enterprise; secondly of sustainable northern institutions, thirdly of Chaordic eastern business eco systems; and finally Co-operative southern (africa) community.

• The Case For Cohousing: Where Responsibilities Are Shared And Life Is A Little Less Lonely

  When I was a kid, I thought my parents’ ideas about community were a little weird. But now I realize what’s weird is being conditioned by society to not know your neighbors at all.

  What’s weird is feeling deep anxiety about climate change and the gutting of the middle class and the desire to build a wall, instead of extending a hand across a fence. What’s weird is buying everything from an e-commerce behemoth or driving to a big box store to pick up a single item that is sitting in your neighbor’s house unused. What’s weird is being disconnected from the people that live next door; to forget how much we will rely on each other when something bad happens.

• Low-fat diet linked to lower testosterone levels in men

  “We found that men who adhered to a fat restrictive diet had lower serum testosterone than men on a nonrestrictive diet,” according to the report by Jake Fantus, MD, of the Section of Urology, Department of Surgery, University of Chicago Medicine and colleagues from the Department of Urology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and the Department of Surgery, NorthShore University Health System. “However,” the researchers add, “the clinical significance of small differences in serum T across diets is unclear.”

Tags: linkpost, outliers