Reconsidering Sexual Repression

Science Fiction Author and Blogger Eric S. Raymond has a post up on Reconsidering Sexual Repression. Basically his point is that we will likely have to give up two of the following three things: family formation, sexual equality (women equal to men in all legal and social and cultural forms), and sexual liberty (no restrictions legal or social in any way of women's sexual activity). Raymond believes that giving up family formation is out of the question, so that the other two must go, by giving up sexual equality, in the form of "submissiveness" to men. Raymond of course is quite wrong (and considers the question only from the viewpoint, and a skewed, "White Knight" perspective at that, of women). But still it is quite interesting to see an older man struggle with the obvious, that the sexual order of the day is simply unsustainable.


Now, Raymond is wrong because women have already given up family formation. Women, of all races, and classes, are bailing on the nuclear family and having single motherhood instead. Women are doing this by choice, deliberate choice, because women have pretty much complete control over their own fertility. If they don't want to get pregnant, condoms, the pill, the morning after pill (a girl of maybe, 15 was there with her mother getting it at my local pharmacy about a year ago, proud and giggling, Mexican of course), various patches (heavily advertised on TV), and more. Plus of course abortions. If women did want to have kids, there are plenty of guys out there who are husband material. They just are not as sexy as the bad boys.

No, women are choosing, in various amounts among different races and classes, but still broadly choosing single motherhood with bad boys over marriage with some boring Beta Male who does nothing but provide and lacks that sexy domination women crave.

Black women moved from 24% illegitimacy in the 1960's, to over 70% nationally today, and over 90% in the urban core. Hispanic women moved from 17% illegitimacy in 1980 to over 50% today. Charles Murray's talk at the AEI on the State of White America had the following highlights:

Women in the upper 20% of income still got married and had kids, illegitimacy was only 4-5% for this group.
Women in the middle 40% of income had a 20% illegitimacy rate.
Women in the lower 20% of income had a 40% illegitimacy rate.

Clearly, there are a bunch of things going on. If you have a lot of money, being Beta is not an impediment to marriage. You can still be "Alpha" and have all those unsexy qualities women loathe: idealizing or pedalizing your mate, telling her constantly you love her, never checking out other women, never instilling uncertainty about the relationship, never being that guy other women want to have ... all that and more can be done and a marriage maintained if you are in the upper 20% of income. Being even a mini-master of the Universe makes a man by definition, sexy to women. Even his wife! So she won't divorce him, and will marry him in the first place. Since other men defer to him, due to his wealth and power, he's sexy! Thus worth having.

And of course, being married to him means a summer cottage in the Hamptons, heck summer as a verb not a season.

For women in the middle class, that increasingly is not in the cards. Raymond is correct, women find men who are their equal ... unsexy. No woman, anywhere, wanted a man who was her equal. That's a ticket to palookaville. Or single motherhood. If women in the Upper Classes have their pick of the mini-masters of the Universe, middle class women have Joe from Accounting. And no one wants Joe. He does not intimidate anyone, he does not boss any one around, no one fears him, he's not made of money, and thus power. Nothing. Why bother?

Shame, social inertia, a desire for security, those things still have limited White Middle class women to "only" 20% illegitimacy. But the tide cannot be held back forever.

Consider lower class White women. The ones most in need of a husband, to add another income to the table, to provide help in child rearing, to provide an extra security level. These women have reached near Hispanic/Mexican levels of illegitimacy. Why?

One reason is, that the men around them are not equal ... they're inferior! And no one wants inferior men. The only men they find even remotely sexy are those men ... other men are afraid of, and for good reason. The thugs. The bad boys. The crazy ones. These seem to be the only guys White Working Class women find suitable for impregnating them.

And lets review, shall we? Condoms. The Pill. The Patch. The Morning After Pill. Abortion. No woman gets pregnant by a guy she does not want to be pregnant by, in a sustained and deliberate choice. The same is true for Black women, who actively choose the thuggiest of thugs, because that is the only kind of man they find sexy -- one that other men fear. Mexican women are the same, consistently choosing for fathers, not the decent and hardworking men around them, which yes there are many still who would make them excellent husbands and fathers, but the dangerous gang-bangers and thugs.

As Roissy points out, Anders Brevik, who killed over 70 people, most of them defenseless teens, is getting mountains of love letters. If Chicks Dig Jerks, and they do, they dig even more thugs, bad boys, and violent men. As Roissy put it:

As everyday observation to those with the eyes to see demonstrates, the primary motivation is women’s love for unrepentant, rule-breaking assholes. That is the elemental, core female hindbrain algorithm that governs all other lustful dispositions and is the catalyst for her mate choice decisions.

Women love assholes because they are assholes. Because it inspires in women those emotions that most delight their pleasure centers. And that, based on the reaction it engenders from civilized men and women alike, is the truth too scary to contemplate.

Women love assholes. Any perusal of Twilight, or the other vampire chick-lit, will tell you that. As will any Rom-Com. This is just hard-wired. But it is not what you think. Because women did not always have the urge for assholes.

When women had significant social inequality, but mostly full legal equality, most women did not swoon for jerks. Assholes and thugs did not make women aroused. The comment by "Bounder" on Roissy's post Chicks Dig Jerks: Prison Edition would have been from Planet Bizarro fifty years ago:

I’m an attorney (fuck you too) and this impulse is even more pronounced among the alpha lawyer women. Frequently female attorneys are caught sexing their scumbag clients.

It starts early. HRC [Human Rights Coalition -- ed] has inmate letter writing campaigns and tons of female law students attend spending their 130+ IQs writing to 75 IQ scumbags. It is beyond fucking hilarious.

The female passion for thugs is one unknown, mostly, to men and women of about fifty years ago or more. It is entirely due to women being fully socially and culturally as well as legally equal to men. If not, in fact, superior.

Raymond is right, women find men their equal to be ... unsexy. Hence the "sexy" TV shows set in the 1960's, Mad Men and Pan Am and Playboy Bunny Club. Where the big shots are sexy master of the universe, and women compete to be his number one squeeze. Today Mr. Big would find a sexual harassment lawsuit, a workplace hostile to women finding, and all the men would be sexually invisible because they would not be the sexy guys higher up in the totem pole but men at the same position if not in fact, significantly lower down.

Almost no woman (with any options at all, any!) will find a man her equal even remotely sexy. None will find a man inferior to him sexy.

And as we've seen, no woman will have kids with a man she finds unsexy. But certainly will have kids on her own with men she finds sexy but knows won't stick around.

Raymond looks at it from the wrong angle: how can society get women a good husband? Given that women have now gotten the best of all possible worlds: maximum access to sexy men, and single motherhood with said sexy men. This is exactly what women wanted, because they in fact created it. They chose, actively, the men they slept with. And they chose to have kids with them, knowing them unlikely in the extreme to stick around and marry them and raise kids. Women, collectively, of their own free will, chose to trade sexy now and kids with sexy now over some guy sticking around. Figuring that they will be happier with kids by an Alpha, even dirt poor, than married and middle class with some icky Beta Male. Who lacks even the most tiny bit of sexiness.

Women don't want husbands ... of men who are equal. Nor are men bailing out of marriage. Women choose, and choose increasingly except for Upper Class White women (a tiny demo by the way) ... bad boys and single motherhood. Women are only interested in buying marriage if the man is sexy. Submission? They already have to offer that ... to the bad boys. Thats part of just admission into his bedroom.

Raymond's problem is his mental model. He assumes women want the things they wanted, in 1950, when significant but not unbridgeable social inequalities made most men fairly sexy to most women, and thus helped maintain the nuclear family and marriage. The men they would marry, were all relatively sexy, because they themselves while not subservient chattel, had significant social inequalities.

Now, women will NOT COMPROMISE ON THE SEXY. Not a bit. Men must be sexy to be considered for sex, and then marriage. All the re-jiggering of gender equality (and thus sexual freedom for women) won't address that, and is unlikely anyway. Women are no more going to demand, that they be now made socially unequal in any way, to their male peers. Why would they? What's in it for them? Having had a taste of the most Alpha of Alphas, be it the hipster jerk of Williamsburg for Middle Class White women, or the true thug for Working Class women of all colors, why would they go back? How can they go back? How can society re-make itself, depending on female consumer spending, so that most ordinary men are sexy enough for women to consider sleeping with and then marrying?

Please.

So family formation in the nuclear way is over. Family means, for Black women, a single mother and two children or more, each with different fathers (Black women lead the nation at more than 50% of all births of a second or later child to a different father than the previous). Of course, that makes for an interesting sibling dynamic, one fraught with rivalry more than love. But its damn sexy, dammit, for the women involved.

Family, for Mexican women, means basically the same thing, just not as much as quickly. For Working Class White women, it is closing in on the Black family model, and it is even for the Middle Class White women.

Which means just as in the Black demographic, you will see, rapidly growing, a lot of men who never married, and remain outside of both sex and reproduction. These are life's losers, and their way to "win" is to thug it up, as much as possible, because if other men fear them, women will love them. Yes, that is the equation.

Children, meanwhile, will live in a chaotic, threatening, and violent situation. One in which power is defined by the ability and willingness to deploy as much violence as possible as unexpectedly as possible. They will be poor, and their prospects very poor. The way in which people reproduce is the man becomes a sexy killer, and the most brutal of them gets the most beautiful girl. Men who are insufficiently violent, brutal, and ruthless get weeded out one or another from reproduction, only the most violent reproduce, and none take an interest or care in their children. This is the way in which most of humanity has lived, for most of its existence, and is a poverty-factory though one that produces for women some very sexy men. Men reliably more powerful and with higher status than themselves.

This is the ugly truth of it. Western Civilization is built upon repression. NOT as feminists say, half-truthfully, on female repression. But upon repression of women's ability to get the sexiest men. Western Civilization requires soaking up all those men who create violence and poverty into marriage. Into making them stakeholders directly into society, by giving them a small family, all their own, which they will mostly (not always but mostly) work themselves to death to keep and improve. Just as Napoleon ended the French Revolution and made peasants into ultra conservative Frenchmen by giving them small plots of land, so too did the nuclear family make most men into conservative, society improvers. Not ugly conquer-or-die gamblers.

Western Civilization means the end of sexy. The end of sexy men, anyway, as the supply of those truly sexy, the Alphas, who dominate other men and make them afraid, are limited in the extreme. And their ability to create massive harems is also limited. Thus, yes, Western Civilization does depend on sexual repression, but of unlimited choice by women of ultra sexy men. The supply of ultra-sexy men is limited, as are the options for Alphas, and women in Western Civilization have had the restriction on creating a vast pool of thugs, bad boys, and the like to choose from.

Moreover, if they had kids by these men, they'd pay the consequences (other men would not help them or help raise their kids). Lacking a husband, they'd starve, to put it bluntly. Critically, other women would not care, either.

Women were mostly free, to choose from any number of men, even though they could not create a vast pool of sexy men (rogues, outlaws, bad boys, thugs). They had far greater rights than that of other women, in other cultures, races, and places. Their rights increased, not decreased, over time, unlike that of say Muslim women. Women just had to choose wisely, for risk elimination as well as sexiness. Women had to trade-off on the qualities that made them aroused (violent domination of other men, or simply domination and increased status relative to them) versus those that would keep them clothed and fed: faithfulness, agreeableness, income, and ability.

What women could not do is create underwriters for the risk of bad boys, as the modern welfare state does today. Yes, in that sense women were suppressed, as people of Ancient Athens were suppressed by lacking Ipads and free Wi-Fi and streaming video. If a woman chose a bad boy, she chose all the risk. Women taking on the risk are quite capable of making informed judgments on that matter.

So what is likely to happen? More of the same. Birthrates will continue to fall, because women will chase sexy men, of whom there are either just a few, their bosses, the local thugs, Alphas who play in a rock band and have a drug habit, the handsome player. They'll choose single motherhood with the last Alpha guy they can have, fairly late, over marriage and family with a Beta Male fairly young. Thus guaranteeing small family sizes (another component by the way of single motherhood). Welfare is likely to collapse as Whites as well as Blacks and Hispanics demand it, under economic recession that becomes permanent. Creating a sudden drop-off of reproduction for all, as Welfare simply ceases to exist like the Roman Empire in the West around 400 AD. You can't have kids with bad boys, if there is on one to pick up the tab.

Life will get a lot more violent. For everyone. And there will be a race to the bottom for sexy, as delineated by violence. Since in an economic recession, the only way to make other men your inferior is to make them fear you. Men won't stop wanting sex, and the idea that women will return to social inequality no matter how small or marginal is quaint. And as dead as the England where Vicars get around on bicycles (instead of Mosques proclaiming Allah).

What will be interesting (in a Dark Ages sort of way) is the changes brought upon by birthrate collapse, all across the board. Now, the Welfare state subsidizes kids by Mexicans, and to a lesser extent Blacks. A birthrate akin to Whites (generally outside of Welfare for racial, cultural, and legal reasons) means social collapse. A Detroit writ large, ever more portions of cities abandoned to wilderness, smaller and smaller cities, less and less technology, and flight to security where ever "lords" may rule by utter violence. Just like the last Dark Ages.

Is this "all women's fault?"

No. It is no one's fault. It was not the Roman Emperors, nor the people, nor the gladiators, nor those who crucified saints, nor those who bribed Goths, or Vandals, or Huns, for the collapse of the Roman Empire. It just happened, because Romans stopped having kids, and many more died of the plague, of bad harvests and starvation, and so they could not hold onto anything. Bad Emperors came and went, and so did good ones. There just weren't enough Romans, as Roman women had fewer and fewer children, and the Empire became more and more slave and less and less free.

Women did not sit down and take a vote, to destroy Western Civilization. Women did not ask for the pill, the condom, the patch, and more to be invented. They did not ask for social anonymity, high mobility, and the destruction of social repression and cohesion (the two go together). Women did not ask for the modern consumer and media culture. Women did not ask for men to be brought DOWN to their equal or lower.

Yes women in the main agree with most or all of these things, but that is beside the point. Women just want what they want: men who are sexy, which means men who are higher than they are socially. That's hard-wired, it cannot be changed, it is part of women's innate biology. Women ARE flexible in how they pursue sexiness in men, just as men are flexible in how they pursue sexiness in women, for that matter.

The ugly truth is, no one man or woman is willing to admit, that wealth, power, and Western Civilization is built upon sexual repression. Not a total repression of women, but of Alpha men, women's ability to create vast pools of sexy Alpha men (in practice this means thugs) and the ability to get others to underwrite the risk of sexy men.

Western Civilization means NO SEXY MEN. Or damned few, at any rate. No wonder most women HATE HATE HATE Western Civilization. Who finds guys like Norman Borlaug, Jonas Salk, or Philo T. Farnsworth sexy? As opposed to say, Pele, Khadaffi, Carlos the Jackal, or Vladimir Putin? Western Civilization is the long slow grind, the constant search for new advantages, requiring massive amounts of nerdy, focused men who search for advantage because they like it, and are good at it, and need to ... feed their families. Thus nerdy obsessions turn to the Green Revolution, not World of Warcraft. Polio Vaccines not Angry Birds. The invention of Television not Magic the Gathering. Real technology to accomplish something of value, creating Western Advantage, not trivial past-times for men outside the mate market.


...Read more

Netflix and the Big Mistake

Way back in the 1980's, before he was a washed up politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger made a career out of spouting corny one liners.



In perhaps the greatest (Arnold movie anyway) movie ever made, "the Last Action Hero," Arnold told Claudius he made a "Big Mistake." Right now, Netflix is making a big mistake. The Christian Science Monitor thinks Netflix is creating Qwikster just to sell it. Again, Big Mistake.


America is not ready for streaming, and may remain unready for decades to come. Streaming requires cheap and easy bandwidth, which in turn requires a lot fat, high-capacity connections to the average consumer, already paid for and competing with other connections to offer low cost connectivity. Most internet service providers have usage caps, that impose fairly high fees past certain amounts of downloaded data. Heavy streaming of movies will blow past those caps and make the cost of connecting to the internet very pricey. That's a dubious proposition when people are buying cable packages without ESPN to save $30 to $40 a month.

America is a big, spread out country. Unlike mostly urban places where Netflix has expanded (Canada, Argentina, South Korea), most people in America still live in spread out suburbs. It will take a long time for high speed internet to be built out to those areas, and even longer for the data pipes to be fully paid for, and face competing connectivity offerings. Yes Amazon, and Google, and other people are thinking of offering their own data plans, but let us be realistic. Are they able to cover people in suburban Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis? Plus everywhere in between?

Then too, Netflix faces extremely high costs in signing content deals for streaming. While Netflix can simply go out and buy DVDs if it has to, and has done so (as has Redbox), for a fixed and limited cost, and rent those discs out, streaming the content requires very pricey arrangements with content providers. Who having rapidly diminished revenue streams from TV sales, DVD sales and rentals, no real bump from Blu-Ray, and not much from global ticket sales or 3-D, are not in the mood to do anything but raise prices or build their own streaming center. [This is short-sighted, and guarantees piracy the way the lack of Itunes in the fragmented, Napster era guaranteed widespread music piracy, but that is another story.] Hollywood needs to make money, and they figure on doing it through streaming one way or another.

Meanwhile, those people wanting high definition video, or 3-D (for those who have it) will find Blu-Ray discs far more friendly. You can stop it and watch when you want, there is no stuttering or jitter on limited bandwidth networks, no pricey bandwidth cap fees, and the family can watch as much as it wants before returning the disc.

Yes, the troubles with the Post Office make the costs of the physical disk market potentially higher, but far lower than the endlessly increasing streaming. In a far-flung nation like the United States, the advantage of delivering entertainment on a physical disk still outweighs that of a network.

Yes this is the old "floppy net" or "sneaker net" way of moving files around, on a physical disk hand-carried to device that can read them. In this case, not computer files but DVD and Blu-Ray discs. This business model still works, generates a lot of cash, and will for quite some time.

Reed Hastings is still living in the mini-dot-com boom. When Facebook and Groupon were valued at billions despite not turning a profit at all, apparently. People don't have the money, to spend on pricey streaming plans. No matter how convenient they are, business-wise, requiring almost no people. Hastings can obviously see, "hey no mailing centers, no people opening and sealing envelopes, very little in the way of employees, hey cost savings." That's diving for nickels and dimes and ignoring dollars on the table. Anyone can open a streaming business, heck why wouldn't content owners go with Hulu, many of which are still partners in the deal, or Amazon, or Apple, or Microsoft, or any number of partners who can give them a better deal?

Meanwhile Netflix already has loyal customers, who have liked and used the DVD by mail rental service because of its cheap price and wide selection. To get into that business requires opening up and training employees to operate mailing centers, regionally. It requires lots of publicity and marketing. Netflix has a lot of expertise running their mailing centers, which are the core of their business. None at all really running streaming which places like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Hulu know a lot better than Netflix.

Sometimes nobody here can play the game, as Casey Stengel said of the hapless Mets. Or, "Big Mistake." Maybe even, "Not to be!"
...Read more

TV's New Fall Season: Hollywood's Sidebet

The Washington Times has a post up about TV's New Fall Season and how it consists of mean women and weak men. To summarize the story (go ahead, read the whole thing), men are mostly weak and loserish, unless they are hot studs, and women are "sassy" and "empowered" who sleep around a LOT, with the few men who are sexy (dominant, assertive Alpha A-hole men). There is a reason for that. It sells. TV is basically a land of commercials, wrapped around a few minutes of entertainment. Oh, yes, basic cable channels, and HBO/Showtime/Cinemax (commercial free) derive most of their money from cable subscription fees, not ads. And the commercial free channels like HBO get all of their money from subscription fees. But that is changing. Time-Warner cable is now offering a package excluding ESPN that costs around $30-$40 a month, compared to around $73 a month. Continued growth will rely on not a bottomless pit of cable and satellite rights fees passed onto strapped consumers, but ads. Even P&G is prepared for the "hourglass" shaped consumer demographic, lots of really poor people and a few high-earning consumers.

What is wrong with America (and the West) is nothing less or more than its consumer culture, which based almost entirely on the female consumer has pushed bad behavior to the limit, while trying its best to eradicate the best of female actions.


Most women, most of the time, in the West, have been fairly conservative. Yes movements like the Temperance Movement, Prohibition, and the like have catered to the desire to tell other people how to live their lives, something of overwhelming emotional value to upper class White women in America. But most women most of the time were focused on saving money, preparing for household expenses, improving the lives of their children, and wanting a better life for their sons and daughters than they themselves had. This made women in the West a mostly conservative force, wary of great social change, and deeply invested for the most part in their children. Yes there were bad mothers, and bad fathers, but for the most part the nuclear family and very limited consumer spending held back the forces of rapid social decay. This at a time when most women did at least some work outside the house, and for farm wives in particular, labor alongside men in many times and places. In the Depression, women worked even more outside the house, part-time, to keep households together.

Here is what the Washington Times had to say about the new Fall Season:

Unlike their broke, wimpy male counterparts, the women on these shows are mostly strong and self-sufficient, and critics describe them with glowing words such as “assertive,” “edgy” and, heaven help us, “sassy.” However, what these women actually are, generally speaking, are utterly awful human beings. They may be inspired by “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw, but they act like Samantha, openly bragging about how badly they treat men. They make the sorts of crude jokes that are rightly decried when men make them on prime-time network TV, yet are celebrated for women as signs of emancipation. “Whitney,” “Are You There Vodka?” and “2 Broke Girls,” for instance, all have one-line zingers where the punch line is “vagina.”

The male characters are largely relegated to being ornaments, comic foils or villains. Those that aren’t wimps or fools are dashing rakes - embodiments, in a way, of the old virgin/whore dichotomy turned upside down. In Fox’s “New Girl,” which premiered Tuesday at 9 p.m., post-“Glee,” star Zooey Deschanel’s character has to find a new apartment because she catches her boyfriend cheating. Similarly, the titular “2 Broke Girls” become roommates only because one catches her “sleeps until 4:00” boyfriend cheating on her, and the other has a father who goes to jail for his Bernie Madoff-like crime.

TV’s women of fall, on the network sitcoms especially, are vain, selfish, shallow and controlling — a generation of “Mean Girls” grown, not surprisingly, into mean women.

You see this stuff because advertisers like it. And they like it because they have done quite a bit of market research showing that their female target audience, younger women, like it too. A lot. The ads on these network shows are in support of the idea that women are empowered, Sex in the City types, who can sleep around, with dashing rake-hell men, bond with lots of "you go girl" female friends, and dismiss the 90% of the male sex that lacks the sexiness required.

CBS's "the Good Wife" has a flavor of it, a glamorous depiction of the sexy betraying bad husband (but one that every woman wants) and an older woman still turning heads. A prime-time soap opera.



There is nothing wrong with consumerism, as long as it is not taken to excess. But the storylines blend seamlessly into the ads, of a society defined by consumption and where the type of consumption determines the type of person the lead (female) characters are: beautiful, glamorous, important, because they are consuming a particular type of man, or for the younger set, hot, sexy, desirable because they have the hottest bad boys and sleep around a lot.

The problem with all of this is that the consumption at some point has to end. No one save the very rich can live a life of consumption without saving. The entire "model for life" promoted by the entertainment wrapping the commercials does not work, for much of anyone outside of say, Mick Jagger, for very long. Sleeping around a lot guarantees sex with Alphas, but not commitment, and a life of single motherhood at best, not the fabulous families envisioned in Sex and the City. Most straight men are not falling over themselves to be the fabulous gay boyfriend of some new girl on the sexual marketplace. Most women who sleep around can get easy sex but little commitment from any worthwhile man. Most women past the age of forty don't turn heads, they make men want them to move, so they can see the hot young thing behind them.

Nothing in America's culture will change until and unless its consumer culture changes. This means ad-supported TV, which influences pretty much every part of society due to its massive reach and its stature of the bread and butter of Hollywood (movies are glamorous, TV production pays the bills). All that is a chicken and egg riddle.

Women in the past were naturally conservative because life revolved around marriage, kids, family, and above all, saving for that life. Savings, and the most prudent, cost efficient consumption meant women were an innate force for conservatism. Seizing the "Commanding Heights" of culture and politics and society: Professional White Collar White women, is not easy given the profound shift to consumption and not saving.

Steve Sailer noted this commercial:



"Suzanne Researched This," about how buying a McMansion is possible by bullying your fat stupid and weak husband. Notice there is nothing about value and saving. Indeed the consumption is all about overcoming the dumb husband, who is not able to see how cool the granite counter-tops are.

In some ways, this culture is the bill due from a near 70 years of uninterrupted peace and security, built through the Cold War duopoly of nuclear weapons and force, the stability from two coalitions desiring to minimize conflict. Allowing consumption to run rampant. The sort of broad social change brought about by television, rising wealth levels, easy contraception, urban anonymity, and highly personally mobile society. All of which seems to be coming to an end.

What is interesting about the CBS show "Person of Interest" is not just how masculine it is, but how it points out that the very technology that allowed anonymous, urban living is now taking it away. Surveillance cameras, massive government and commercial databases, plus of course Facebook, Google, and the rest leave bare most lives to anyone with any determination to pry them open. For any purpose, any time.



Yes there is the obligatory "Good female Black cop" to meet diversity quotas, but she's mostly irrelevant (and shown to be fairly useless, as she does nothing to stop crimes from happening). The producers, JJ Abrams and the brother of Chris Nolan, Jonah Nolan, talked about the approach in London and New York.

Which brings us to the latter show, "Person of Interest." Much is made, fairly directly, of the impact of 9/11 and how the attack made people aware that their lives were not as safe or secure as possible. While there is no footage shown, 9/11 changes the lives of the two male lead characters forever. And the technology used to combat terrorism is inevitably used (in the show, for good) to combat lesser crimes, in fact stopping them before they start. With two completely disconnected from society men, aiming to "be there in time." While flawed in execution, the concept and what the show is about, is so striking.

Inevitably the society of the Good Wife, 2 Broke Girls, and Are You There Vodka, Its Me Chelsea cannot co-exist with that of Person of Interest. Something has to give. And what will give is which ever notion is proven strongest. By ongoing events. TV currently holds that the future is mostly known. More of the same, a big fabulous party thrown for everywoman who can pursue granite countertops, or a fabulous life in the big city, or be sexy well past forty, if she's just fabulous enough. Because security and safety and things like water, power, electricity are all assumed. And that therefore there is a large appetite for shows depicting fabulous consumption in fabulous manners by fabulous women.

The minor side bet, made by some interesting people in Hollywood, is that this is not the case. That society will enter into a prolonged period of shortages, of water, of power, of food, of basic safety, and there is an appetite for shows about broken men finding redemption and meaning (and lawful revenge) by stopping worse things before they start. Basically a whole-hearted endorsement of pre-emption in crime and anything else because … technology gives us the tools to understand and predict behavior much more thoroughly.

Color this the Moneyball of Crime Dramas. The show is not about consumption, or money, sex and power. It is about above all an idea, that imperfect though it may be the way to stop horrible things (and take a moral revenge for 9/11) is to intervene with all the tools used to fight Al Qaeda. Not to put them aside in favor of Hope, Change, and fabulous girlfriends and clothes and men. But to use them, wisely, because there are many, many bad people out there.

That this show was made at all, much less that CBS put it on, is staggering. Yes Hollywood is mostly betting on Sex and the City. But it has made some interesting side bets.



...Read more

A New Hollywood Creative Paradigm?

Hollywood is still mostly trapped in its view of itself and society. A stale, 1960's era view of themselves as the good enlightened, struggling against a repressive, McCarthyist people and populace. A group of the true saved enlightened saints, against a dark and evil American people. But recently a glimmering of change is sprouting through Hollywood. Oh don't worry … they still hate America and Americans. But their attitude about themselves is changing. Partly this is due to economics and technology, but partly because of how they see themselves. The change is mostly in the ranks of producer/director/writers, not actors, of course, but it is quite interesting.

The change is that instead of seeing themselves as the new Puritans, "saints" who persevere against a repressive, sexually and politically, "evil White male" regime, the new crowd sees themselves as Batman. Who everyone wants to save them, by extreme violence, while condemning them for doing so if they ever get caught.


Mostly, of course, I'm talking about the Nolan Brothers, and JJ Abrams. The Nolans are famous for the Batman movies, which endorse pre-emption and snooping and all sorts of vigilante violence. Abrams has joined with Jonah Nolan, Christopher's brother, to produce "Person of Interest," perhaps the most unsettling and for what it is, revolutionary conservative show on television.

Nolan's Batman, famously, exists in a world and a city that has failed. Gotham is a pit, decaying into corruption. The cops, save one man, Gordon, are corrupt. Criminals run everything. The few honest District Attorneys are slaughtered, or driven insane, and cannot function. Judges routinely send criminals into a revolving door nuthouse. Nothing works, which is why Batman is needed. He exists because no one else will save Gotham. Leaving it to him, and whatever methods he himself finds appropriate or not. The only lines he follows are ones he draws himself.

You can immediately see the appeal for Hollywood's creative people. All their institutions are failing or have failed. The Studio system that gave them money, a budget, people, and told them what to do are long gone. Have been for nearly forty years. What replaced them, the Agent system, is failing. People are not buying DVDs anymore, nor are Blu-Ray sales fixing the deficit. TV rights are down, foreign sales have been no help with massive piracy, and 3-D is a gimmick whose time has now definitively passed. As Chris Nolan says, film-makers and audiences have spent nearly a century getting ordinary films right, and knowing how to see them. You can't watch 3-D with vision problems (most of the audience), on an Iphone or Ipad, or on ordinary TVs, where people most want to watch movies.

Nothing has worked, and so a few creative people have cast themselves as vigilante heroes. Determined to save the city (Hollywood) from the forces of darkness and violence (foreclosing on the Malibu beach-house) by whatever means required (appeasing the audience with traditional heroes). This earns them disdain from the populace (Hollywood's in-crowd) but they are extra heroic and mavericky.

I'm sarcastic, but that is the process. And more are joining them. Captain America and Thor, no matter what their problems, were straight ahead super-heroic. Therefore, ultra-mavericky when everyone wants to be the hip new happening guy who is the toast of the town and ticks off audiences. Fear, desperation, and a desire to stand out have led the Nolans and others to make movies that appeal to ordinary people with heroics and a distance from the Hollywood mores of "you stupid hicks, your 1950's values stink!"

Person of Interest takes that even further. It is astonishing that a conventional liberal like Abrams is even associated with it (he executive produces). In a key scene, the character Finch explains to the character played by James Caviezel, what he did for the government. Finch, he tells the man he hopes will work with him, developed a software system that would sift through everything. All the phone calls, emails, bank account activity, surveillance videos, supermarket purchases, everything, in daily life, that records activity in a database. And it would look for things, to predict violent acts about to happen.

The public, he says, wanted no more 9/11s. They just did not want to know how it was done. The government having given itself permission to read any e-mail and listen to any phone call, after 9/11, used his program to find out terrorist plots. But he tells the Caviezel character, there was a problem. The program found other things, mundane murder plots not associated with mass casualty terrorism. So he threw those away, but later came back and had the system send him just the social security numbers, of those people who were of interest. They could be the killers, they could be the victims, he could not tell because all he could safely send himself was the social security numbers.

Here there is another failure. The government could, if it wanted to, stop the murders from taking place. As the Finch character tells Reese (Caviezel), while crimes of passion or the heat of the moment cannot be prevented, those plotted over days and weeks and months, often can, because the plotters leave clues that his system can spot. But the government only cares about mass murder terror plots. Because that is the only concern of the public.

Caviezel's character is a former CIA man, presumed dead, who killed a lot of terrorists and enablers after 9/11. He himself, like Batman, decides where he will draw the lines, and what he will or will not do. He does not like killing people, but is good at it. A burnt out and bitter man, he finds redemption in saving people who can be saved but the system lacks the will and ability to save.

The pilot was based on a screenplay developed by Abrams and Nolan, and is pretty revolutionary. The government, far from being an omnipresent fascist state, does the bare minimum to protect a public that wants to pretend it doesn't know what is being done. Again into the gap of failure, by the government AND the people, rush the heroes using new technology and will power, to "be there in time," to stop murders. The pilot tested off the charts, the highest of any drama pilot in 15 years, with "crazy broad appeal you don't usually see," so much so that CBS moved CSI aside for it, and won its timeslot in the premiere with 13 million viewers.

What Hollywood is very cautiously nibbling around the edges of, is that PC and Multiculturalism and restraint and all that, don't work. More 9/11s don't happen because lots of people get killed by drone strikes, combat patrols, and the like aided by outsourced torture, lots of software sweeps of bank accounts, phone calls, emails, travels, airline tickets, and more, plus human intel from forces needing US help/protection/assistance against enemies. Not by a heavy dose of hope and change. More like lots of drone strikes and SEAL missions never publicized, which the public would like to ignore.

Ultimately this is not sustainable, and the lone hero model while very dramatic has its own limitations, as actual policy. Which Hollywood's creative types understand because no one makes a movie by themselves. Indeed the series raises all sorts of questions. Are we willing to tolerate thousands of murders, each year, because we don't want to have intrusive, software-spying? If a couple of guys using the software can save that many, why not the police using it at will?

Naturally, this only around the edges. There is the PC heroic Black female cop. The usual "corrupt White cop ring" though the hot young female prosecutor is corrupt, the schlumpy divorced White guy is the intended victim not the killer. PC still reigns supreme in some areas. No one is asserting a broad-based challenge yet.

But … the whole point of the show is that the good guys use the ever-present surveillance technology (the hero Reese snoops a lot on targets electronically) to stop crimes from happening. In the pilot, they save three lives. They stop murders by not just breaking but obliterating every law, rule, and criminal procedure on the books. They step in because the government will not. The heroic Black female cop is shown as always three steps behind, not knowing who she is pursuing, or even why the hero acts as he does.

Let us put it this way. Not even JJ Abrams believes in Hope and Change and the West Wing anymore. Instead it’s a couple of vigilantes stepping in where the FBI or NYPD will not.
...Read more

Pinker's Violence Fantasy: the Truth About War and Violence in the Post Cold War Age

The WSJ's article by Steven Pinker Why Violence is Vanishing illustrates the desperate nature of Liberals and the Modern Western Society (which is profoundly Liberal in the modern, PC sense). Wanting desperately to believe that there is no more reason to fight, sacrifice, and empower nasty and dangerous men to protect us, and build nasty and dangerous weapons, the hope is that by clapping real hard for fairies, ala Peter Pan, we can believe and make it so.


Pinker notes, accurately enough, that the growth of agricultural states and enforcement technology (swords, spears, arrows, etc.) allowed centralizing monarchs to cut down hunter-gatherer personal violence which was horrendous and daily. Enlightenment Monarchs in Europe further cut down violence that was constant and grinding by eradicating banditry, enforcing laws, and promoting safety. This is why native European martial arts and weaponry, including staff fighting, knife fighting, bludgeon fighting, and unarmed combat disappeared save Savate in Marseilles, an ultra-violent port that kept that art alive until the Twentieth Century turned it into a sport. All of this is true.

But what Pinker does not contemplate, is how violence particularly in Europe and China was compressed. True Renaissance peoples did not slaughter each other personally as Dark Ages people did, let along hunter gatherers … most of the time. But a third of German speakers were killed in the Thirty Years War 1618-1648 and the terms Magdeburg Quarter entered the terminology of Europe. In China, the Taiping Rebellion wiped out 20 million people between 1850 and 1864.

Technology and new social orders tended to suppress day to day violence. Neighbor did not stick a spear into neighbor, because he had run off with a daughter or wife. Disputes were adjudicated by the state, even in Aztec Mexico. Bernal Diaz Del Castillo in his "Conquest of Mexico" first-hand account notes how Montezuma spent hours every day listening to people who came before him to judge disputes, this from a people who practiced ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism (as did, notes Diaz del Castillo, all their neighbors and the allies of the Spanish).

BUT … when the state loses control, or warfare becomes "total" with new weaponry that makes old orders obsolete, as in the 1600's, or again in the 1940's, horror emerges. Ordinary Japanese men, often under strict orders from high commanders NOT to engage in rape, pillage and murder, and facing an advancing enemy, spent all their time doing so. The destruction of Manila as American forces advanced in contravention of the commanding officer's orders is one example. Done by men who would not have dreamed of ever doing that in Japan. The violence exacerbated by a civilian population accustomed to obeying orders and unable to offer any real resistance anyway.

Violence, by being so rare, becomes almost viral when it does break out, infecting people with horrific results. There is a scene in the otherwise tedious and boring movie "the Debt," where the villainous Nazi doctor says he knew they would succeed when Jews handed over their children. Von Wallenstein and Tilly were hardly nice men. But they would have found it inconceivable to boast of such a thing, because for them, violence was a path to glory. The idea, of killing children as a means to become a famous and accomplished man would have seemed like … madness. One only became famous by fighting a powerful foe that could certainly destroy you. There was nothing to be found of glory in killing children, old men, women, and defenseless men. Though certainly they did that, on attacks on towns, their views of violence was that their glory came in open battle against a foe well able to defeat them.

Now we come to the heart of Pinker's argument. Like the "War Nerd" Gary Brecher, Pinker believes that somehow humans have stopped becoming violent, and that war will no longer break out because, well dammit human nature changed. He hand-waves the wars and civil wars that have broken out since the end of the Cold War and nuclear duopoly, including the Iran-Iraq War in the twilight of the Cold War, the Central African Wars of 1998-Present (about ten million dead or so), the Sri Lankan Civil War, the constant wars in Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Afghan War, 9/11 and the prospect for non-state violence not seen since the Treaty of Westphalia (growth of non-state militias). Pinker points to globalization and trade, ignoring that some societies are permanent losers in that unless they …

USE WAR TO CONQUER OTHER PEOPLES.

Look at Egypt. It cannot as Spengler/David P. Goldman notes, feed its people, manufacture anything worth buying, or produce literate people let alone engineers and other college graduates who are employable. All it has is War. The hope of conquering Israel, taking the Mediterranean gas fields, and then going on to conquer perhaps weak Italy, rich in resources, slaves, food, land, and without any meaningful defenses or even the will to defend itself.

Egypt, in order to survive without war, would have to deep six all of Islam, spend its time studying math and science not heaving their butts into the air five times a day, use the scientific method not something written in the Koran to figure out the world, teach their women to read and write, outlaw polygamy, give women equal rights, allow religious freedom and intellectual freedom, and promote a national concept of hard work and studying. Egypt would have to copy … China. And they cannot even be China, much less South Korea, Japan, or Finland. All that would destroy nearly everything that makes Egyptian society. The same goes for nearly all of the Muslim world, which would have to cease being Muslim if it is to eat, unless it makes war.

What Pinker does not realize, is that the AK-47, easy GPS, nuclear weapons from Pakistan, Iran, China, and so on, allow a vast equalization. Pakistan can cow the US, attacking our embassy in Kabul according to Admiral Mike Mullen in sworn Congressional Testimony, because they have nukes and we are afraid of them. The same is true for all those North African regimes. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya cannot feed their people. But they can cross the Med in boats, come ashore in Italy, France, and Spain, and simply take over. Killing any who object. That's violence, and violent enslavement. Which awaits Europeans who have a toy/pretend military and no will to use even that.

An example of Pinker's blinkered, utopian views are below:

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.
For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money.
A third peacemaker has been cosmopolitanism—the expansion of people's parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and mass media. These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.

The War Nerd has said the same thing, and much the same was said in … 1913. Britain and Germany simply traded too much with each other to go to War. This was also said in 1938, and of the US and Japan in 1940, which had considerable trade.

What neither the War Nerd nor Pinker really understand is how much of a loser globalization makes a lot of societies and people. Now Egypt, as Spengler notes, has to compete with China for food. As does, note, the US. The US can compete, because it is a richer society. Egypt cannot. So it is starve or war. Egypt will choose … war. Because the cost of War has gone down.

Most "loser societies" do not believe that they will pay any real price for War, and discount their enemies ability to match their "fighting spirit" and willingness to win. Advantages in jet planes or nukes are discounted, and perhaps not too unrealistically. Israel in 1973 had nukes, and Egypt still attacked it. Israel at one point faced annihilation by Egypt, and did not face nukes. If Israel did not use them, in its then greatest hour of need, would it ever? [Likely, not.]

Western societies are often, for the most part, unable to offer violence in any meaningful way. Save fantasy violence in movies, and the idea expressed in recent TV shows and movies that the public wants violence done on its behalf to be safe, no more 9/11's, but does not want to know how it was done or who did it. The violence is kept secret. No bodies in Afghanistan show, nor in Iraq now, though there are plenty. Still even less coverage of people killed by drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, tribal Pakistan, and rumored, Kenya, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

Meanwhile "loser societies" remain immersed in violence. Violence in unimaginable and unreported ways permeate every inch of daily life, particularly in Muslim society and Latin American society. Santa Muerte or a thinly Catholicized Aztec Death-God, demanding human sacrifice, is rising, with people being tortured and killed over Twitter comments. Often the mass violence has no purpose save the satiating of the killers desires for murder and death. Given the widespread prevalence of human sacrifice and cannibalism that the Conquistadors found in Mexico (not just the Aztecs, EVERY TRIBE DID IT), you might argue that Mexico is reverting to pre-Columbian violent type.

Muslims have daily violence in their society on a deeply personal level, widespread, as well. Women are genitally mutilated, often honor killed, rape is done by judicial punishment, hanging and stoning to death for adultery is on the rise, child brides are increasing, and so is violence between Shia and Sunni, and against all non-Muslims unlucky enough to live in lands filled with Muslims in any number. This is the advantage, so Muslim thinkers and Mexican Drug cartel members alike, view versus the weak and soft West which is unable and unwilling to deal out violence except when it can massively pretend it is not.

Pinker and Brecher alike share in my view, a fundamental flaw by accepting the past as an absolute prediction of the future. They overestimate trade and cosmopolitanization. As Mark Steyn notes, the arrow of civilization does not go one way, women in Cairo in the graduating class of the University looked modern in 1959, and still fairly modern in dress in 1979. Today they are muffled in Burquas. Kabul in the 1950's had women in modern dress in record shops.

Most of the world's population lives in a place where people worship Santa Muerte, or the governments urge them to please on no account kill and eat Pygmies or Albinos for magic powers, or where women are honor killed because they talked to the wrong boy. These are places where commerce means only poverty, because now they must pay more for food and everything else, and they have nothing to sell. These are places where violence is a way of life, constant and casual, and where it is viewed as the best way to get ahead in life.

Globalization has hotwired these places right into Western civilization, and they are not being removed any time soon. Violence, and disturbing violence, are only going to increase. Why? Because the State is a joke, unable to stop violence any more (quick how many Flash Mobs have been crushed) and only able to send middle class people to jail for improperly filling their recycle trash bins. While all the while lacking any external measures to deal with violence except things done in secret and willingly ignored.

Pinker, and Brecher, are state of the art circa say, 1975. Today, they don't grasp that failing states all over the globe (particularly in the West where violence to suppress greater violence is not allowed against non-Whites, see the London riots) running hand in hand with moral pretensions, are easy pickings for failed societies that live in violence. For now, the great majority of Santa Muerte's violence stays South of the Border. That is unlikely to remain so, any more than Muslim violence will remain mostly outside of the West either.
...Read more

Mr. EBT and the Death of the Welfare State

One of the most fascinating things about the internet is how it collapses different cultures, events, and people into an "endless now" entirely outside the mainstream media's attempt to edit and control the news that people receive. The video on Youtube linked by Drudge today ("My EBT" by "Mr. EBT") promises an incendiary repudiation of not just Obama, but every Democratic policy since LBJ.




Clive Crook at the Financial Times believes only a "move to the middle" can save Obama's Presidency, but Obama encapsulates much of what the Democratic Party has become: the Anti-White Guy/anti-White Middle Class party.

Democrats rely on gerrymandered districts, with Black and Hispanic voters, and state and nationwide, on Black votes around 95%+, and Hispanic votes around 65-70%+, to win. With a about 30% of the White vote, this is often enough. And the coalition of the anti-White votes and the White elite (Steve Sailer's "hi-lo" team-up) is based on transferring money from middle class voters to Black/Hispanic patronage politicians, and folks like Mr. EBT.

At a time when unemployment is at record highs, families are stressed by ever rising food and energy and clothing costs, Clive Crook does not get it, nor do most of the establishment. Voters among the White middle and working class have rejected the Welfare State because the Welfare State does not exist for them. The Welfare State exists for Mr. EBT. A man incapable of earning a living or doing much of anything, other than "keeping it real, dog." The Bismarckian Welfare State, giving ordinary workers a direct stake in the State, by getting various checks and benefits, regularly, is gone. Taken up by race-based Welfare and a permanent Jihad against the White working and middle class.

It is Mr. EBT on the lower end, making life miserable for pretty much everyone, and various enthusiasms of the White Elite Upper Classes, such as "green" lunacy, hideously expensive electricity rates, banning private autos (but not limousines), flights for the average person (but not private jets) and the like.

There is no more money to be gotten out of the White middle and working class, without a French Revolution style fight over taxation. There is no legitimacy or trust or desire to fund a Welfare State oriented around Mr. EBT. This video, a trivial affair, may yet be the opening start of the widespread repudiation of the Welfare State. Drudge has linked to it from the top of his page. The NYT obviously does not want anyone to see it, nor does the rest of the media. But the very act of the Drudge Report alone (which dwarfs the page views of say, the NYT or CNN) linking it and millions of voters and taxpayers seeing it, is revolutionary.

There is no going back to the Welfare State. The Tea Party exists because ordinary White working people, of some money or struggling means, just don't believe the government exists for any other purpose other than to take money from them and give it to Mr. EBT. Barack Obama and his policies just to borrow a Marxist phrase, sharpen the contradictions and class warfare (with overt racial underpinnings) between the hi-lo team up and the White majority. White guilt and shame are poor foundations for that sort of coalition, and the "swipe, swipe" of Mr. EBT may just start the beginning of the end of the Welfare State. You cannot ask the majority of the nation to make themselves patsies forever.
...Read more

Nintendo's Best Bet: Kid Friendly E-Readers

Nintendo's DS with 3-D is a failure. Fears by parents (who buy the things, after all) over seizures and the like limited its sales. Another round of price cuts from $249 to $169, have failed to boost sales. Nintendo has always been the cheaper, affordable, and kid-friendly (no violent stuff for parents who buy the systems anyway) gaming system. That strategy, along with intensive in-house development and integration, has allowed Nintendo to survive when other systems dropped out, were absorbed, or destroyed by larger competitors (mostly Sony and Microsoft). Now of course cheap games on Iphones are really hurting both the Wii and 3DS. But Nintendo has a secret weapon, if only it unleashes it. Books!


E-books are becoming the dominant way in which Americans buy books. Its convenient, fast, and much, much cheaper. With library lending already here for e-pub (Nook and the like) and coming for the Kindle (mobi format), you don't even have to go to your Library. Just download the book from your computer. E-books are cheap, with many free versions of the classics, and other low-cost options of back catalog books. Nintendo has seriously missed an opportunity.

Currently Amazon is the dominant e-reader, but it has an appeal mostly to older, and female consumers. No surprise there, Women account for 80% of the fiction market. Look at the Kindle Ads on TV. They all feature (hot young) women. A kids oriented reader, cheap and good enough, would do well. Particularly if it played kid-friendly, non-violent games (parents are not too keen on shoot-em-up, beat the prostitute to death, games like Grand Theft Auto) and was ... cheap.

Right now, the Kindle with Special Offers is at $114. Of course it needs a cover, and a light for night-reading. But that's cheap. Nintendo could offer a DS, without 3-D (who cares, really) for around $120 with a larger screen, in color, aimed at combining kids reading with educational games. Chess, backgammon, Go, Chinese Checkers, Scrabble, and the like. Currently people are laboriously hacking "homebrew" solutions to read books on their Nintendo DS systems. That's ridiculous. Nintendo ought to offer a cartridge for them, sold off their own website and through retailers, to read e-books. While using their own advantage (in-house engineering staff) to combine cheap/easy gaming and e-books. Bonus if the system reads both e-pub and Kindle mobi format.

E-readers are all targeted at adult women, and that leaves boys and young girls out in the cold. There is a market gap, in which Nintendo can challenge the Ipad and Iphone. No one wants to read a novel on their phone, or much less have their kid reading Treasure Island on it while they need to make a call. A price point of say, $120 that includes games no parent could object to ("Chess makes your kids smarter") and a way of transferring e-books already purchased onto the system, is a no brainer. [Likely a usb-adapter to connect a cartridge to a computer, in a simple file transfer system.] Meanwhile take money put on the table by current Nintendo DS users who would go to the trouble of doing a "homebrew" system. Allow the current DS systems to become e-readers officially, with a Nintendo sanctioned and supported cartridge.

The 3-D bet has obviously failed. Time for Nintendo to do something else. Someone will make a kid-oriented E-reader. It might as well be them.
...Read more

Anna Faris and What's Your Number: Redefining Female Sexuality

The Wall Street Journal recently did a story on Anna Faris and her new movie "What's Your Number?"

Produced by New Regency for $25 million and distributed by 20th Century Fox, the movie centers on the sexual exploits of Ally Darling (Ms. Faris), a hard-partying young woman who resolves to track down all of her exes—with the help of a hunky amateur sleuth, played by Mr. Evans—in an attempt to avoid sleeping with more than 20 men in her lifetime.
...
Still, the idea of such a promiscuous lead character was enough to give some studio executives pause. "We had conversations like, 'Is 19 better than 20?' " says Ms. Smith. Ms. Faris wanted to go in the other direction, suggesting to screenwriters Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden that the number of past sexual partners be raised to 50. "They were like, 'No, 20's fine,'" she says.

A slew of new movies centering on women behaving badly have been released or are in the works. Hollywood is aiming them straight at female audiences, and they reflect a redefinition of female sexuality.


Some of these movies have been failures. Crazy, Stupid Love has made only $78 million domestically, as of this writing, and only $21 million in foreign revenues, according to Box Office Mojo. The movie cost $50 million to make and another $30 million or so to market, so the movie is likely a net loss, but not one that is a terrible drag (studios always get considerably less than gross revenues, taking around 75% of the first week end revenue and around 50% of the revenue thereafter domestically, and often selling foreign rights at a fixed fee in concert/bundling with other films). The movies are cheap to make, and Hollywood facing huge drops in DVD revenue, no rescue in 3-D, and no great rescues in streaming, is looking to cut costs and find a formula for making cheap movies they can sell and make profits on, even with reduced margins.

In addition, many studio execs are now courting female audiences, an easy transition from the female orientation of TV, from which many mid-level execs have made their transition. While Network heads and production studio heads in TV remain mostly male, the execs under them are often women, which makes sense given that most people watching television are in fact, women. Male-oriented films are a risk. They can hit big, like the Batman films under Christopher Nolan, 300, Taken, the Transformer movies, and some of the Marvel films. Or they can fail spectacularly, like Green Lantern, or Green Hornet, or Cowboys and Aliens. When the movies fail, they do so at a great cost -- the movies require expensive action sequences, often pricey CGI, and represent considerable downside risk. Since most execs don't share in the upside, they tend to want to hedge their downside. This as much as anything accounts for the desire to make a lot more chick-flicks, just raunchy ones.

What is interesting is that the films are redefining sexuality among women, particularly in acceptable behavior, but that there are still limits. Faris wanted the "number" to be 49 sexual partners, and the lead want to avoid sleeping with 50 not 20 men. The screen writers took a more conservative tack, wanting only 19 partners for the lead, not 49. But the limits are being pushed outward, not inward. This reflects in my view a fundamental unhappiness that modern Western women have with their men. Women in the West have moved to far greater heights, than compared to women in any other time and culture. But they remain unhappy, they want "more" from their men. If they live lives richer and more fulfilled in many ways than Cleopatra, they want Caesar or Marc Antony. Not boring old Beta Male Bill in the cubicle next door.

"Crazy, Stupid Love" falls into this category. The plotline concerns the lead character, played by Steve Carrell, who is having dinner with his wife, played by Julianne Moore. She tells him she's unhappy, is having an affair with a co-worker (played by Kevin Bacon), and wants a divorce. They had married as high-school sweethearts and Moore is the only woman Carrell's character had slept with. The rest of the movie concerns Carrell working with a younger, Pickup Artist mentor (Ryan Gosling), to become attractive to women, and gently rebuffing the 17 year old babysitter who has a crush on him to his 13 year old son's dismay. All so he can "win back" his ex-wife who Carrell's character admits to, "was responsible" for the break-up of their marriage by ... not being sexy enough and desired by other women.

The largely failed, because of course it wasn't attractive to men, and women don't want to go back to a guy who failed initially at being sexy. If a man fails in that regard, women want to trade up. This is the appeal of George Clooney, or Brad Pitt. They ARE already sexy, and therefore are the goal to which female protagonists largely aspire in their movies. Besides, most women would prefer Kevin Bacon to Steve Carrell, fantasy wise. But it is interesting in how Hollywood perceives women's interests, and so far as women are generally unhappy with the state of men today in the West (not sexy enough) that is relatively accurate.

TV is even getting into the act, with Are You There Vodka, It's Me, Chelsea based on the memoir by Chelsea Handler and starring Laura Prepon ("That 70's Show") as Chelsea. The lead character is wildly promiscuous, and often drunk. Set to debut mid-season on NBC, the show like Sex and the City is unapologetic about serial sexual behavior by the attractive female lead. Hollywood in both movies and TV is betting that women are comfortable with portraying lots of sexual partners for women as something not to be ashamed of, at least as long it is below a magic number. That's pretty revolutionary, in terms of what women themselves have defined in the West as acceptable sexuality.

Underlying the promiscuity, in both Sex and the City, and the Handler book and TV series (as well as the Faris movie) are the unhappiness the female leads encounter with the men in their lives. It was Tiger Woods who cheated on Swedish supermodel Elin Nordgren, not the other way around. It is George Clooney who dumps his girlfriends, not the other way around. It is Leonardo Di Caprio, who dumps his girlfriends, not the other way around. Women in the West are desperately searching for a dominant, Alpha A-hole they can keep, and since the price these men extract is casual sex, that is what drives an ever expanding sexual partner count for modern Western Women. As I noted back in 2010,, author Julie Klausner's "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others" details her tawdry sexual encounters searching for that elusive, dominant Alpha A-hole male:

Like most of us, she spent her twenties ricocheting from douchebag to douchebag, and she reveals every crappy moment in her dating memoir I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others. As expected, there are tons of laugh-out-loud lines delivered from Klaunser's sharp-wit pen. More surprisingly is how cringeworthy tales of blow jobs with goths and bedbug-infested one-night stands are followed with sage observations. For instance, she points out the stark difference between guys and men. (As she writes, if Mad Men was called Mad Guys, it'd star Joe Pesci and not Jon Hamm.)
...
Historically, leading men, at least in comedy, have featured either the feckless or the boorish: the Fred Flintstones and Bullwinkles and then useless beta males. In my book, I say date guys like Rowlf and Fozzi and not Kermit. Let me think about it.
...
It's the teenage boys I'm worried about. They're not going to college in numbers. They're going to be angry -- depending on who's coming back from the war. There are charities for girls and I'm all for that, but ultimately, the real problem is the epidemic of inferior men - which is basically what my book is about.

Women have been trying to tell men in the West what is wrong. They just are not sexy enough, dammit! Useless, inferior, beta males. That's why they sleep with hipsters, trustafarians, indie rockers, and felons. Ricocheting as the reviewer (herself a young woman) from douchebag to douchebag. Hollywood is dialed into that complaint, itself being populated in middle and near upper level management, by women. Who share the same complaint. Its one thing if say, your husband is Robert Downey Jr. He's a big time movie star. He's Iron Man, or Sherlock Holmes! It is quite another if your husband or boyfriend is some corporate drone, who does not excite respect or more importantly, desire among your girlfriends. If your girlfriend does not want to sleep with him, he's a useless, inferior, beta male.

This is why Hollywood is worth examining. Hollywood tends to respond poorly, like GM before it, to demands by its customers, but it does respond. How it operates, and what it produces, tells you at least what elite women are thinking, and the men around them as well, in terms of how society functions and how they think it ought to function. So far at least, Hollywood (and publishing) recognize that the large amounts of sexual partners their attractive leading ladies (Klausner is not bad looking, Handler quite attractive in her twenties, Prepon a classic leading lady, Faris quite attractive, Moore still turns heads at age 52) end up with in films/stories is a result of there being too few Alpha A-hole men that are willing to commit. To be that reformed bad boy (like Downey Jr.) that has both domesticity, but not too much, an edge like a fighting dog that is well trained.

That this is not a realistic expectation, for the 99.99% of women who lack the supermodel beauty of say, Giselle Bundchen needed to attract a Tom Brady in the first place, has not yet penetrated. But clearly women are not happy with all these partners, preferring in the main to have one great, sexy, dominant, super-guy. And complaining when they don't get one.

The male part of the equation is of course ignored, but Hollywood being a gay-female ghetto that is to be expected.
...Read more

Addendum to Whiskey's Law

In Why The West Collapsed: Case Study Sweden, I proposed "Whiskey's Law" which states that the degree of Multiculturalism and PC in a society is directly related to the amount of equality between men and women, and particularly between men and women of the elites. That the greater the equality between the sexes, all other things being equal, the more loathing of the civilization, culture, heritage, race, religion, and so on will occur in the society. And the greater emphasis on Multiculturalism, PC, and in particular an attempt to import non-Western peoples. A society that has social superiority between (particularly younger) women and their male peers will therefore all other things being equal, will be plagued by PC and Multiculturalism. Naturally, as with all social science theories, this remains merely a theory, and subject to constant revision. In my view, however, any attempt to explain the collapse of the West into PC garbage, must fit the facts, and explain the variance, why some societies are more PC than others.


In the same way that Black society is worth studying, because Blacks collapsed much faster into illegitimacy than Hispanics, Whites, and Asians, so too are places like Sweden, or the United Kingdom. Any remedy that seeks to reverse say, illegitimacy will find far greater effectiveness if it can first understand why the Black nuclear family so rapidly ceased to exist, and why Asians have the lowest rate of illegitimacy among racial groups in the US. Whiskey's Law is only a theory, one I offer for testing and revision, to understand why PC and Multiculturalism is so strong in some places and not in others, and how to remedy the situation.

There are of course limits. Switzerland may have a greater social distance between men and women (women only got the vote over all Cantons in 1971), or it may be that direct democracy simply limits elites. It is however quite odd that elites in the West conspire in the "hi-lo" team-up as Steve Sailer noted, with the low part of the team-up being foreigners. A commenter from India noted that the elites in India have basically brushed off the middle class, noting they have hundreds of millions of votes from poor people, and thus don't have to listen to middle class concerns. But India did not see the need to import impoverished foreigners against their own people, nor has similar "hi-lo" team-ups in places like say, Thailand, or Portugal or Ireland or Hungary resulted in mass immigration, even when in some cases the amount of poor people is relatively low compared to the middle class. It seems odd that elites in the West would seek to import aliens in every way to their nations, given the overt threat to replacing them, which they themselves recognize. The famous quote in Sweden by a high ranking Socialist party member that when Muslims become the majority they will treat Swedes well. Who really believes that?

Other nations that have low amounts of PC and Multiculturalism may be reflecting direct democracy and limits on elites, rather than higher amounts of inequality socially between men and women. But it does seem quite odd that elites in places like Sweden loathe themselves and their nation, while in say, Japan the elites love Japan and all aspects of being Japanese. As do say, Italians and being Italian, even or especially among the elites. Italian elites as far as I know, don't go around disparaging Verdi or Da Vinci and saying they were nothing but trash for being "Dead White Men." Nevertheless the usefulness or not of "Whiskey's Law" remains in its power to describe and PREDICT what societies will be riven by self-hatred and thus PC and Multiculturalism, and which societies will be relatively free of it.

I must also point out that what (under Whiskey's Law) Western Women are seeking, and particularly Elite Western Women, is not a Hitlerian "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" society, (children, kitchen, church) but one in which men are sexier. If most men are equal, socially, they need to be sexier in other areas. When men do things women say they want, like share household chores, change diapers, cook dinners, do the dishes, etc. they must be far sexier. If today's women's grandmothers were satisfied with men who were faithful, loyal, loving and dependable, and their mothers with men who were faithful, loyal, loving, dependable, and charming and intelligent, today's women demand men who are faithful, loyal, loving, dependable, charming, intelligent, and most of all SEXY!. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo Di Caprio can afford to change diapers, or take care of kids, or be a "Kitchen Bitch" if they want to -- they're big time hot celebrity men who most of the female population wants to have sex with, they can afford it. Today's men, cannot, without an extra effort to become far sexier than they already are.

This accounts in my view, for the failure of the nuclear family in the West, seen first among Black people. Most men cannot be George Clooney, by definition. And being a sexy dominant A-hole who is also charming, in other words "Game" as defined by the various pickup artists, such as "Mystery," or Neil Strauss (aka "Style") or Roissy, is akin to becoming an accomplished martial artist. It takes massive dedication, constant practice, extended training, and astonishing amounts of discipline. Time that competes with all other demands.

Women when made equal to most men, don't want a return to social inequality at lower, previous levels. They do not want a return to being "barefoot and pregnant" in the kitchen. Indeed if you look at the movie "Bridesmaids" which plays on female fears of status and romance, the lead character is insecure because she's unemployed, suddenly, loses her boyfriend, and looks like nothing compared to a successful friend. Women want to keep their careers which mark them successful, competent, and important, outside romantic relationships. Women know, that they will not always be pretty (the error many women consistently make is overestimating their time that they will be pretty). They do not want, despite the popularity of Mad Men, and other projects mining that territory (correction, "Pan Am" is being shown on ABC, not NBC, "Playboy Club" is on NBC), to return to the days of female social inequality. Women in the West merely want sexier men. Sexy being defined as dominant, cocky, arrogant, amusing, always having the right words to say, and being desired by all other women around them.

The ability of men in the West to become what women want, that level of sexiness, is probably quite limited. A few pick up artists and their followers, if they practice diligently, can become that kind of man. Which women find quite satisfying. Probably more common will be the "Situation" type approach, the muscle-guido combination which is found in the site Hot Chicks With Douchebags. It probably does not matter which approach is taken, the recovery of the West hinges on women finding Western men sexy and therefore worthy of defense and admiration. If most men become like the Situation, well it does not matter in the short term, because then PC and Multiculturalism would die down. Most Western Women finding their men quite sexy, because now even if they were roughly equal in pay, status in the company, and so on, working alongside them in a cubicle next door, many women would want them. Therefore, they are by definition desirable. And thus, worthy of defense.

PC and Multiculturalism, therefore, as defined as part of "Whiskey's Law" is merely the overt disgust of most Western women particularly those in the elites with the non-sexy nature of the men who are mostly equal to them. If not outright inferior in social stature, a dweeby guy being inferior to a hot chick, even if the dweeby guy is a relatively high earning accountant and the hot chick works at a Starbucks. The way then to kill PC and Multiculturalism, if "Whiskey's Law" is at all an accurate model for explaining those phenomena, is to make most men far sexier. Thus erasing the reason for PC/Multiculturalism among (particularly) elite women.

Can the West be saved? I think yes, but it will not be saved by acts of bravery, it is sad that no one remembers or cares about 9/11 and the heroic sacrifices of the firemen and police that day, or the passengers who fought back on Flight 93. Women particularly in the elite do not lust after them. Instead of Special Ops fighters, firemen, cops, and ordinary men thrust into heroism, women lusted after sparkly gay vampires (Twilight) or more brutal kinds (Tru Blood). Justin Bieber and Robert Pattinson are objects of lust. Not firemen and cops.

Rather, the West will be saved by men like the Situation, or Roissy, or those who follow either path. To become sexy. Like it or not, the fundamentals of human nature still apply. Women will defend men they find desirable and sexy, no matter what they do. Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, all behaved criminally or poorly, but women defend them because they are the big-shot big man dominant A-hole that most crave. [Not all women crave the A-hole, but enough do to make that behavior the dominant preference in women in the West.] No amount in justifiable pride in the considerable achievements of the West, which in total add up to far higher than any other civilization, will save the West. Women don't care about that any more than they find the ability of male nerds to create amazing technology sexy. Rather it is the social dominance by being attractive to the broadest range of women that has the only possibility of saving the West. One Pickup Artist or Douchebag at a time.
...Read more

Steroids Are Bad For You

Submitted without comment:

...Read more

Why The West Collapsed: Case Study Sweden

The case study method has much to recommend it. There are many theories as to why the West has collapsed, into Multicultural, PC-driven weakness. But no Western nation has collapsed as quickly, and as completely, as Sweden. As the above video notes, the constitution no longer requires citizenship to hold high or sensitive office, and the constitution now requires multiculturalism. As the speaker notes, Swedes are now (or their elites are) ashamed of being ... Swedish. And are attempting to replace Sweden and the Swedish Identity with something else, as rapidly as possible. Sweden as the "rape capital of Europe?" Swedish (and other) feminists don't mind. They certainly do not blame the perpetrators: Muslims in Sweden. Deportation of Iraqi Christians but not Muslims? Lying about who perpetrates rapes in Sweden. Hmm. Where have I seen something like that before?


The Case Study Method is not without its flaws, but has quite a number of benefits:



When the Harvard Business School was started, the faculty quickly realized that there were no textbooks suitable to a graduate program in business. Their first solution to this problem was to interview leading practitioners of business and to write detailed accounts of what these managers were doing. Cases are generally written by business school faculty with particular learning objectives in mind and are refined in the classroom before publication. Additional relevant documentation (such as financial statements, time-lines, and short biographies, often referred to in the case as "exhibits"), multimedia supplements (such as video-recordings of interviews with the case protagonist), and a carefully crafted teaching note often accompany cases.

In my view, doing a "mini-case study" on Sweden is beneficial to understanding WHY the West has collapsed, and what can be done about it.

There are several main theories floating around on the various parts of the "Right" or one should say, non-Left. The first blames PC and Multiculturalism on The Frankfurt School, of committed and hyper-competent Cultural Marxists who globally changed the culture to one of PC and Multiculturalism, and led people like Swedes to loathe themselves and worship ... Muslims. The second is that old-time favorite, "It's the Jews you idiot! What was the question." Here the Jews ... used mind-control rays to control a global population in the West, including places historically Jew-Friendly like Germany and France, to ... loathe themselves and import lots of Muslims. Who are notably Jew-friendly. Those "devious Jews!" What will they think of next? [That's sarcasm for those not getting it.] Variations of these two theories blame politicians in search of votes, who import immigrants, or feminism, or the like. Elitism, and a disconnect are blamed. While some of these elements contain partial explanations, in my view they are merely attributes of a much broader, wider element.

Which is massive social change driven by new technology, which in turn drives new economic winners and losers, power-grab opportunities, and a fundamental restructuring of the social order in the West. This has happened before.

The Protestant Reformation, with Martin Luther's 95 Thesis nailed to the Cathedral door in 1517, or Henry VIII in 1529, happened against a backdrop of increasing Catholic Church corruption (Pope Alexander had numerous mistresses and illegitimate children) and insatiable demands for more money (to build massive Cathedrals in Rome and hire massive amounts of mercenaries to build the Papal States). But whereas Jan Hus was burned at the stake, and John Wycliffe was declared a heretic after his death, the Protestants mostly made their break with Rome stick. Scandinavia, Switzerland, much of Germany (the Northern Parts), and the United Provinces which rebelled against Catholic Spain from 1568-1609, all broke successfully from Rome. Northern France was partly Protestant, but did not remain so for long.

Whereas Cathars and other break-away groups such as the Waldensians largely failed, the Protestants in Northern Europe mostly succeeded. Why?

The success was driven by a number of factors, crucially including technology, and involving ... money. The Printing Press allowed, the upper classes, the most critical being the new Merchant Houses, to read the Bible for themselves. Not needing a Priest to explain for them what Christianity was about. A pre-literate Church, the Catholic Church, could not long compete with great Merchant Houses that had their own Bibles and wished to direct their own priests with their own money in their own way (hint: the most Godly were not the Popes and Priests of Rome, but the ... Merchant Houses. Did not God favor them with commercial success?) But just as important as the printing press were gunpowder and Atlantic sailing vessels.


Already by the 1200's, places like Bruge, or the Hanseatic League, had grown very, very rich. Off the wool trade from England, and the fur, timber, and iron trade from Scandinavia, respectively. Letters of credit from these great Merchant Houses were good, as good as gold from the Kings of Europe, and perhaps better, since the former were prone to debasing their currency with too much lead in their coins. The great late Medieval churches in places like Bruge attest to the power and influence the region in the Belgian and Dutch lowlands possessed. As do surviving churches and houses in Northern Germany built around the same time. These places were already rich. And they got richer, particularly in the Netherlands, when trade with the East via great galleons and Atlantic going cargo ships commenced, and with the West with the appearance of sugar. Sugar was particularly important, a century later William Blake did the portrait of a West Indies Sugar Baron having his morning rum poured by a West Indian Slave girl, note how Blake has made the Baron look like a Turkish potentate (the parallel is not meant to be flattering). Sugar was immensely valuable, being rare and unable to be grown in quantities outside the tropics. The Netherlands prospered under what were for the times, enormous riches. Northern Germany meanwhile remained a center of trade with Scandinavia, offering furs, amber, iron, and above all timber (for ships of all types) as well as firearms, clocks, wrought iron, and porcelain. The amount of money was just staggering.

In military developments, gunpowder had changed the way in which Europeans fought. Medieval Kings did not have heavy monetary requirements. Feudal arrangements pushed most of the need to support fighting men onto barons and other great lords, who maintained the mounted knights, and other fighting men, through massive landed estates. In an era where coins were scarce to non-existent, and armies were small, consisting of a core of highly trained (often for decades) and heavily armored mounted fighting men, backed by a fairly disciplined and skilled set of archers, pikeman, and men at arms, power lay with the great lords, mostly, not the Kings. As one English King named John found to his sorrow at Runnymeade. Kings had neither the means (cash on hand) nor the ability to train and retain fighting men year-round, on their own. Thus feudal states were relatively weak, relatively decentralized, and also fairly land-based. Charlemagne, for all his power, was never able to crush Viking incursions, much less meet them on the open sea, in battle. The great King and Emperor mostly just paid the Northmen off.

Gunpowder changed all that. Now, great Merchant Houses could and would fund Kings and Princes to their liking. With professional, year round armies made up not of hideously expensive mounted knights who required twenty years of training, but various middling class and peasants, trained by officers on a few simple tasks with a musket, made easier by ... the printing press which could print out training manuals from the finest military minds of Europe. Bombards and cannon meant high curtain walls and castles were no match for a King with a professional army at his back, and engineering (low, earthen walls to absorb cannon fire, and star forts providing cross-fire) supplanted feudal levies and knights. This meant power shifted to Kings, and those who aided Kings with money. The Merchant Princes, in other words.

The Catholic Church, with its fat system of monasteries and landed estates, were a tempting target not only to Henry VIII, but others who wished to sell all those lands, for quick and easy cash, and had willing buyers (Merchant Princes) with cash on hand. Buyers who moreover would now be bonded to the Ruler, because a Catholic return would lose the buyers their lands and perhaps their heads. Yes Henry had a need to get a quickie divorce or five, but there was all that money to be made. What would the Pope do, send an Army? Or Navy? Now Henry had a big navy, with big guns on board, staffed by professional sailors, who could use compasses to navigate (along with Astrolabes and star charts).

So, in places with Merchant Houses (who never ruled, but nevertheless provided critical financial support for Kings and Rulers they approved of in the North), lots of tempting Church lands, Kings wanting to challenge the Pope, and many able men willing to join in and fight, the Protestant Revolution worked out quite well. In places like Switzerland (ample for defense, and with few great landed estates and many merchant houses) even nearness to the Pope was no problem. While Spain, far from the Pope, had no merchant houses to speak of, no Kings with a cash problem solved only by selling off Church lands (in Spain there was no one able to buy them anyway), and so remained quite Catholic.

It was not JUST the printing press. It was gunpowder, and the Merchant Houses (providing cash to all those big armies with lots of peasants and middling class men with muskets instead of knights run by feudal levy), and big sailing ships carrying cargo (which made the Merchants even richer) that fueled and made certain the Protestant Revolution in those places. All together, had rapidly changed Catholic Europe (in 1492, Europe was completely and it would seem, irrevocably Catholic) into one that was either Protestant or Catholic, and divided among Protestants also.

How then, does Sweden of today, undergoing now a change as profound as that from Catholic Europe in the early 1500's, compare?

Sweden, has almost no Jews. Sweden has been hostile, in fact, to Jews throughout most of its Christian history (few Jews at all ventured into Viking Scandinavia). Though Sweden had few Jews in its history, it has been reliably anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish, since the founding of Israel in 1948. Casual anti-Semitism characterized 19th Century Sweden, and Sweden of course like Switzerland collaborated heavily with the Nazis to avoid invasion and occupation. Meanwhile, Italy with its overtly anti-Muslim Lega Nord, under Mussolini did the bare minimum to assist the Nazi's Final Solution. Primo Levi's mother and sister rode out the War in their Roman apartment. Their neighbors shopped for them. No Italian of course, would have ever trusted their government, Fascist, Communist, or anything else. Or wanted any contact whatsoever with the government, in any way. While Sweden has had up to recently, a fairly non-corrupt, fairly efficient, government. But Switzerland is made up of mostly German speakers, who collaborated with the Nazis, and has a government that is efficient and not very corrupt.

Switzerland of course has passed restrictions on Muslim immigration, and minaret building. While possessed of crazy impulses (lawyers for plants, mandatory sex lessons for kindergartners) like most of Europe, Switzerland has passed several anti-Muslim measures (to be fair it has more direct democracy bypassing elites than say, Sweden). But comparing Sweden, or Switzerland, or Itay, or Germany, one finds not much Jewish influence or presence, and relatively large doses of PC and Multiculturalism. If it was "the Jews you idiot, what was the question?" then one would expect that a lack of Jews in say ... Germany would make that nation, and also Sweden, and Switzerland, a paragon of anti-PC, anti-Multiculturalism. Yet Sweden and Germany are fairly PC and Multiculturalism driven, Sweden being by far the worst of any nation on Earth, and yet lacking totally in Jews. Germany, being notably not ... Jew friendly to put it mildly, is also PC and Multiculturalism-driven. Under a recession and fiscal hard times, not a single German politician has proposed "Let's kick out immigrants and spend the social welfare on ourselves!"

Nor does the explanation of Frankfurt School cultural Marxists hold water. Real, actual hard-core Marxists have a way of dealing with things. Shooting people. Stalin, Chavez, Castro, Guevara, the Kims, all deal with opposition by ... shooting people. Sometimes after torture. In East Germany they built a giant wall, a Secret Police goon squad, and kept prisons well stocked. Male-oriented tyrannies always do this. Violence is the stock in trade, and there are huge goon squads operating under brutal patronage rules to enforce compliance. Indeed, real Hollywood Marxists called before the HUAC hearings who refused to testify (but were card-carrying members of the Communist Party) never loathed being White or male. Or thought that America should disband itself into a Mestizo driven Mexico Norte. Tom Joad was not a "hillbilly zombie," but the moral conscience of America. Johnny may have got his gun, but Dalton Trumbo did not reject violence, just for capitalism's sake. The socialist paradise that Trumbo and Schulberg and the rest envisioned was mostly White, and mostly working-class. Just with them at the top, not Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner.

Besides which, how can you sell self-loathing to people who don't already hate themselves? How can most people be induced to hate themselves? Most people don't hate themselves, indeed they mostly love themselves. Often, far too much, where the mirror becomes their own God. If subliminal advertising and the like were all powerful, half the cars sold in America would still be GM-made. As they were in the early 1960's. Telling men and women of a country that their heritage, race, religion, history, culture, language, and everything else is worthless, and that obviously failed Third World cultures are superior, are a tough sell. Most people just have too high a regard for themselves. Imagine going to Boston, and telling people in Sports Bars that the Red Sox and Patriots are worthless and should be disbanded, that they should all become Yankees and Jets fans. How many patrons would actually say, "Gee, that's right. I HATE the Sox and Pats. Go Jets! Go Yanks!"

There is no magic button to mind-control masses of people. The more a group desperately asserts something to be true, creates memory holes, and the like the more resistance they create (not the least of which is that young, hungry and ruthless men of ambition are freed by an ever-changing past to seize power and create their own realities in which they are the heroes). Power runs from patronage, fear, control, tradition, and the interplay of these factors combined. Machiavelli had it more right than Orwell in writing the Prince. Neither Stalin nor the BBC could create a "New Man."

Rather, if you look at Sweden, one thing stands out. Like the Kingship of Henry VIII, or the splendid defense of the Mountains and pikeman in Switzerland, or the great wealth in the United Provinces. Women.

Or rather, the nearly full equality, and perhaps even minor social superiority, of Swedish women to Swedish men.

In no other place, are women as fully socially equal to men as in Sweden. Sweden was not always like this, mind, as anyone reading Ibsen (a Norwegian but Norwegian society was at the time akin to that of Sweden) could attest. But starting in the post-WWI era, in 1921, women gained unlimited suffrage (as in the American West, Swedish women had in certain places limited suffrage in the late 19th Century). Norway granted universal suffrage in 1913, Great Britain in 1928, the US in 1920, and in 1971 for Switzerland (all cantons, universally).

Naturally, suffrage alone does not mean equal or slightly superior moral status for women. Mexico has had equal suffrage since 1953, and no would would assert full social equality for women there. But Sweden has gone farther than most nations in making women socially equal, most of the time, to most men, most of the time, if not in fact socially superior. The Feminist Initiative proposed to ban marriage, and generated visits and donations from Jane Fonda, and a member of ABBA (Benny Andersson). Swedish Kindergartens make boys wear dresses:



Swedish journalist Kurt Lundgren had a noteworthy story on his blog this week. A friend told him about a magazine published by Lärarförbundet, the Swedish Teachers’ Union, the largest union for teachers and heads of schools in the country. The magazine, aimed at preschool teachers who take care of children between the ages of 0-6 years old, included recommendations to not only promote “gender equality” but also “sexual equality” at this tender age.
...
In a kindergarten in Stockholm, the parents were encouraged by the preschool teachers - apparently ideological pioneers - to equip their sons with dresses and female first names. There are now weeks in some places when boys HAVE TO wear a dress. Lundgren considers this sexual indoctrination as worse than the political: “The political nonsense is seeking to alter opinions - the sex freaks seek to alter the children’s personality, their mentality and their entire constitution.”
...
“When sexual equality was promulgated, and it was decided that a woman’s place was not at home but out at work, there was a rapid change in the language. The customary Swedish for housewife is husmor, which is honourable; it was replaced by the neologism hemmafru, literally ‘the-wife-who-stays-at-home’, which is derogatory. Within a few months, the mass media were able to kill the old and substitute the new term. By the end of 1969, it was almost impossible in everyday conversation to mention the state of housewife without appearing to condemn or to sneer. Swedish had been changed under the eyes and ears of the Swedes. Husmor had been discredited; the only way out was to use hemmafru ironically. Connected with this semantic shift, there was a change in feeling. Women who, a year or so before, had been satisfied, and possibly proud, to stay at home, began to feel the pressure to go out to work. The substitution of one word for the other had been accompanied by insistent propaganda in the mass media, so that it was as if a resolute conditioning campaign had been carried out. Very few were able to recognize the indoctrination in the linguistic manipulation; in the real sense of the word, the population had been brain-washed.”
...
In Sweden, it is thus unacceptable if girls are presented with pink ice-creams or Barbie dolls because this reinforces gender stereotypes, but the burka is just fine. Meanwhile, Sweden is in the midst of the most explosive rape wave in Scandinavian history, largely caused by immigration. While Swedish girls are called “whores” by Muslim immigrants, Swedish boys are told to wear a dress and study queer theory.

Sweden is supposedly the most “gender equal” country in the world. It’s also one of the nations most eagerly (at least officially, all other viewpoints are banned) embracing Multiculturalism. Promoting “sexual equality” alongside a rapidly growing Muslim minority is going to become an increasingly challenging balancing act.

What does Sweden itself say:

Sweden has one of the highest levels of gender equality in the world. This is based on the belief that a more just and democratic society results from women and men sharing power and influence equally. A well developed welfare system makes it easier for both sexes to balance their work and family life.

Gender equality is a cornerstone of Swedish society. It means that women and men have the same opportunities, rights and obligations in all areas of life. It implies that they can work and support themselves, combine work and care of their children on the same terms, and that neither sex in a relationship need worry about being subjected to abuse or violence.

In the Global Gender Gap Report 2008, Sweden was one of the world leaders in equality. The report, drawn up at the initiative of the World Economic Forum, measures equality in four areas: economics, politics, education and health. It can be read at www.weforum.org.

Or, as Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in the Atlantic:

Some of us stay married because … what else is there? A lonely apartment and a hot plate?

That said, it’s clear that females are dissatisfied—more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it’s the apparently stable men (comfortable alone in their postfeminist den with their Cook’s Illustrated and their porn) who are Old Worlders, and the Girls’ Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders. They most embody what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,” or l’inquiétude du caractère. (Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.”)

Double X (a feminist blog) echoed Tsing Loh's lament of the "Kitchen Bitch" in deriding men who are equal and do the laundry, housework, and cooking.

I propose "Whiskey's Law" in which the degree of a nation or society's embrace of Multiculturalism and PC is related directly to the amount of equality and even social superiority between women, on the one hand, and men on the other. That the more most women are equal or slightly superior to most men, the more the society will broadly embrace PC and Multiculturalism. And that further, the more the ELITES are equal among genders, or women elites are slightly superior to most (but not all) male elites, the more the elites will whole-heartedly embrace Multiculturalism and PC.

In my view Sweden, because of its simultaneous embrace of PC and Multiculturalism on the one hand, and female equality on the other hand, is the perfect case study.

Women have been telling men in the West for years, for decades really, what is wrong with the West. It just does not have enough sexy men. And sexy men do not mean metrosexuals. It does not mean guys with rock hard abs, the result of relentless diets and millions of crunches, and a semi-gay attitude (that's half of young male Hollywood). Sexiness is not related to being a blow-dried contestant on American Idol. It is about dominance. Women are hard-wired to crave dominance. Need it, want, do anything for it. Including import lots of dominant Muslim men, in the hope of transforming the nation into a place filled with dominant, sexy A-holes that women crave.

Filled with loathing for a nation, its culture, its society, its history? Heck that describes the average woman's view of the West on a Saturday night when she's pestered by Beta males at the bar and Alpha males ignore her. Women are ruthless in judging a society that does not produce sexy men, and offers nothing else but empty consumerism in its place. No, women did not always HATE HATE HATE Beta males. But largely, they do now. The plague of Multiculturalism, of PC, of the hatred of the West, is almost entirely that of Western women rejecting the "Kitchen Bitch," the man who is roughly equal to her (or even, slightly socially inferior since he must pursue and she must accept/reject).

Look at the ads below:



They worked because though women were broadly equal (and had the voting rights to prove it), even a housewife whose husband worked in a factory craved his approval -- he was her social superior. And thus sexy. Women had the slight inequality, socially, that made for a "sexy sweet spot." See the furor over Mad Men (women love it, with its sexy bad cad who is superior to all those secretaries) and NBC is attempting to clone it TWICE with a series about 1960's Pan Am Flight Attendants and a Playboy Club (with sexy bunnies hoping to score the sexy bad boy lead).

Steve Sailer noted wisely:

Returning to these complaints about disparate impact on women in the executive suites, let me point out that one mechanism that thins the ranks of women in the executive suites is that as young women climb the corporate ladder, they come into less and less contact with the dweebier guys down the ladder and more and more contact with the most powerful and ambitious men at the top. Women don't generally love working in the macho atmospheres found higher up, but a lot of them do fall in love with individual macho executives, whom they often marry. And then they tend to downsize their own careers (since their husbands make so much money) to concentrate on helicopter mothering their children. 

I recall one young woman at my old company who was shooting up the corporate ladder until she became a direct report to the single most brilliant youngish executive. After awhile, he left his wife and kids to marry her, and then she started concentrating less on her own career and instead on the promoting the career of her very high income, very high potential new husband.

Women want and need sexiness in their men. Which means a dominant, Alpha A-hole. Few men in the West can fill that role, but there was enough social inequality that even Steve's described dweeby male counterparts (who are essential in producing and maintaining a modern, technology driven society) were sexy enough (to secretaries and lower-level status co-workers) that marriages were not the sole province of hot young women and the superstar young execs, but between near but not total equals.

That near but not total equality has been the "Secret Sauce" of the West's success. Preventing male in-fighting over women that retards Muslim polygamous societies, and weak polygamy found in West Africa that reduces male involvement in children to basically, none at all. With kids being left to sink or swim in an environment actively hostile to sustained, focused effort on anything abstract.

Sweden fell because women, pushing for full equality, got it. There is nothing men in the West like to do, for the most part, than please women. This is why the West produces so many "nice guys" that women find detestable.



"Nice guys" are required for technology to keep advancing. One of the factors limiting technological advance is that a man may find some limited financial or intellectual rewards being "a nice guy" into technology, or pour all his effort into being a sexy bad boy. Being a bad boy is work, it takes near total waking hour effort for most men to maintain that posture, since it is not natural and must be honed like a martial art.

Sweden got the equality that women craved, and also that the consumer products industry needs. Women make 85% of all consumer purchases we are told. The business empires of L'Oreal, of Benetton, of "Seven for All Mankind" and other luxury $500 jeans, all depend on an independent, late child-bearing woman who spends money on luxury items weekly instead of baby related stuff. Most women would prefer the baby, but only from a sexy guy. Most of the men in the West, prior to full social equality, were sexy enough to make Alpha pursuit a bone-head affair. Why spend all the time, like say, Monica Lewinsky, aimlessly pursuing an Alpha, when you can have a perfectly sexy guy at home? You might not get a chance at a Ferrari, but Ford Mustang is fun enough to drive, and you won't have to share it. Most men in the West were Ford Mustangs, due to the slight social inequality amidst the sexes.

Now, the Ford Mustangs have disappeared. So "five minutes of Alpha beats five years of Beta" as Roissy says, is a reasonable way of behaving to most women. Look at Lewinsky:

Monica, apparently, is desperately trying to live down her past.

The insider told the Enquirer: 'She's alone most of the time and is pretty much a social pariah.'

The source claims Monica has more or less given up on finding love.' Monica still feels like she's the punchline to a dirty joke,' the source said.' The publicity over her affair with Clinton ruined her chances of ever finding a decent guy.

In June she made a rare outing with a small dinner party at Lucy's El Adobe Cafe in Hollywood.

An eyewitness told the Enquirer that gawkers at other tables were making jokes at her expense, while she looked emotionless. 'She stared at her food throughout the dinner and uttered maybe three sentences, the eyewitness said. 'It was a very awkward, uncomfortable evening.'

In March, MailOnline.com told how Monica is reportedly still in love with him and 'always will be'.

‘Monica still hasn’t got over Bill and would take him back in a second,’ a friend told the Enquirer.

‘She told me: “There will never be another man in my life that could make me as happy as he did".

Well of course. And that is the reason for the collapse of the West in a nutshell. Sweden exemplifies it the most. Collapsing Christianity, allows near unlimited sexual freedom, as women abandon it in droves, and can trade casual sex with Alphas even when relatively fat. Meanwhile their male peers look like a bad bet, and increasingly find aging cougar types such as the Nice Guy hating woman in the video above, a poor bet compared to online porn found on the internet. Women in the West react in turn, by pushing for massive importation of "sexy dominant guys" who are "real men" and hope they can "have it all." A Western society run by what amounts to sexless drones at the bottom of the status heap (Joe Average White guy) doing the Dirty Jobs (as Mike Rowe found) or the technocracy stuff like maintaining power grids, sewer lines, and the like. While "noble lies" about mythical Black scientists prop up the desperate excuse making for the non-Western "Alpha Males."

Thought experiment. Pop in the various excuses Amy Winehouse made publicly, about ex-husband bad boy drug abuser Blake, into quotes in defense of Multiculturalism and PC by various leftists. What would be the effective difference? As Theodore Dalrymple noted (but lacked the courage to explain further), his young female patients, and his older female patients, and even his professional nurses, spurned nice guys with skilled trades (plumbers, carpenters) in favor of violent, abusive bad boys constantly. Until they reached menopause and the end of their sexual desire. If they ended a relationship with one, they found another just like him. Always with the same scars from fighting, tattoos proclaiming a love of violence, and aggressive dominant behavior. And the same excuses, time after time.

Sweden is importing basically, Muslim bad boys, making excuses for rapes and assaults, embracing PC, and loathing its history, culture, and values, because it is run in the main part to appeal to women (if not run by them directly) and there is nothing Women in the West HATE HATE HATE more than a Beta male. Or a Beta Male society. It wasn't always so, but it is today.

It is absolutely striking how female oriented this process is. Yes, there are no female Prime Ministers in Sweden (ever). No Merchant Prince ran England, or the United Provinces, either. Yet that did not negate the very real power of these Merchant Houses, who could raise lots of money for the King or Prince. Or not. Who always had to be carefully considered, because the King and the Prince did not rule absolutely. If women do not rule, and they do not, in the West, their power is among the first. It has to be considered. Their interests and reactions calculated.

And it is striking how PC and Multiculturalism are enforced. No shootings, goon squads, torture, and the like as in male-run oligarchies and repressive regimes. Instead, ostracism, ridicule, civil sanctions, and the like. Stalin would not have bothered with any of that, he'd have simply shot 20 million people or so. Women do poorly with violence, try to avoid dealing it out personally (because they lack intimidation) and though they might love completely those who deal out the violence, even when it rebounds (as it often does) on them, they prefer not to be part of the sharp end. There are few women who want to be cops, fighter pilots, combat infantrymen, and the like. Women whatever their human faults, do not share the bloodlust and desire for killing that men mostly do. Nor indeed are they good at it, either.

So there it is. The Case Study of Sweden, as defined by its fundamental attributes: Gender Equality, and the resultant self-loathing. As Roissy pointed out,

Also from yesterday’s post, commenter Sebastian Flyte highlighted women’s natural inborn revulsion for beta males with the example of the fun bar game Marry Shag Kill:


Another aspect I’m increasingly seeing – WOMEN ARE PITILESS ABOUT BETAS. 
Most gamers who run the routine “murder, marry, shag” quickly realise this.  For those who don’t, you and the girl point at various people around the bar and state whether you would murder them, marry them, or shag them. 

Sometimes I point at wallflowers and guys with no game. I normally just feel bad for them, there-but-for-the-grace-of-god and so forth, me a year ago, he just needs to learn… but women_are_brutal.  Murder of course, but they embellish it further with unflattering observations on their penis size, acne, relationship history, masturbation habits… the vitriolic hate they have for these guys, it’s scary.  If a couple of alphas walked in and started ripping on the betas, women would join in.

I have noticed the same thing with women when I play Marry Fuck Kill with them. After an initial hesitancy, they get comfortable playing and suddenly the claws and fangs are out, revealing in high definition surround-sound glory their barely submerged joyous hate for the hapless beta male.

The nicer ones might try to think of alternate ways to dispose of the losers.
“Uuumm… yeah I guess I would kill him [pointing at rumpled shirt herb]. Do I really have to kill him? Ew, yuck, could we just have him shot into space or something? Or moved to China?”

If the guy is really emanating the stench of loserness, her killing instinct sharpens:
“Yeah, kill him. Oh god, yes, just kill him.”

If you want to understand how the West was lost, any bar scene will enlighten you. Once, ordinary women were slightly below ordinary men. And craved their acceptance, even of their coffee. Now the men crave acceptance from THEM. And will not get it. There is nothing like the contempt by women for non-sexy men. Hence, a desire to import a whole lot of people, who are not Western, to play status moralizing games (the Help, other "Nice White Lady" moral uplift dramas) or provide "real men."



...Read more