Monday, January 23, 2012

Charles Murray and the White Class Divide


Charles Murray has an article in the WSJ outlining America's class divide. Murray notes the emergence of the "Super Zip Codes" that all go to the same elite schools, hold the same elite jobs, live in a very few elite cities, and live a life very different from that of the rest of the country. While at the same time among Whites, a lower class has emerged that is outside the cultural traditions and values of this country. He calls it the "Super Zips" vs. "Fishtown" (a White working class part of Philly). Arguing that both have become hereditary stations, for a number of reasons, and for an informal moral campaign to change that.

While Murray is superb in describing the situation, he shies away (from Political Correctness, ingrained chivalry, or other reasons such as fear) from accurately describing the reason for the emergence of two hereditary classes, and the action needed to break them apart, and increase personal social mobility.


Why the Super Zips Emerged



Murray notes that the United States has always had an elite. But that only recently have the payoffs for being "smart" been so large, and permanent. This is a familiar argument, one made many times in the Financial Times, and one not very intellectually rigorous. Simply because the elites are characterized by heredity, not smartness. Indeed, the dirty secret is that the elites are not very smart at all.

Elites are concentrated in the media, entertainment, the law, politics, government, "activism" and a few other areas where heredity, being born to the "correct" parent(s), personal connections, wealth, and "proper" opinions on a whole host of issues is everything. Not cognitive ability.

You will find almost no elites in professions such as engineering, computer science, entrepreneurship, and the like. Apple Computer, Dell, Starbucks, Oracle, were all formed by non-elites from middle class backgrounds or worse. Microsoft remains the only major technology company arguably founded by a child of the elite. Elites do not work as petroleum engineers, geologists, physicists, electrical engineers, and medical researchers, all highly demanding cognitive professions.

Angelo Codevilla argues in the American Spectator that the Ruling Class of America, Republican and Democrat, all go to the same national schools, share the same interests, intermarry, and form the same social class:

No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."


The Ruling Class, or the Super Zips, are not very smart. They have managed to run America into the ground, while in search of temporary votes to keep out those who they HATE HATE HATE (Average White middle class and working class Americans) of any power, courted disaster. Detroit is 47% illiterate, among adults. Hispanics do little better, and remain like Blacks utterly dependent on money transfered and opportunities taken from White middle and working class people to well, non-Whites.

In other words, the entire Elite political system is dependent on, sustained good times for everyone to smooth over the massive transfer of wealth and opportunities from average White people to non-Whites (and elites). And given those demands, the elites have made economic recovery impossible — no oil drilling, no oil pipelines, green dreams of failed solar manufacturing, strangling business regulations, and crony capitalism. When faced with the obvious danger — a White middle/working class populist revolt, the elites, the Super Zips, the Ruling Class, did little to avert it. Not even allowing victories and military dominance (that gives relief in cheaper oil if crushing the Iranians) to satisfy the pride and desire of the populists. Arrogant over-reach characterizes the elites. Who ran sub-prime into the ground, and with it the Nation, from which state it is unlikely to recover for decades.

Codevilla argues implicitly that Murray's answer to the Super Zips rise is "schlock sociology" worthy of Thomas Friedman and David Brooks:

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.


Codevilla compares the US elites unfavorably to France:

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.


Where Codevilla goes wrong in describing the emergence of the Ruling Elite, the Ruling Class, the Super Zips, is describing the emergence in political terms, i.e. being merely the heirs of Wilsonian upper-crust elitism. But the elites of today are nothing like those of Wilson's day, holding attitudes towards race, sexual mores, nationalism, crime, punishment, wars, and everything else that are at opposite ends of the spectrum from the old Progressive Elites. Yes elites have always entrenched themselves in crony capitalism and regulations, tension between them and the ordinary people being as old as the Whiskey Rebellion.

He describes the hatred of traditional religion, of marriage, and the family, and the worship of big government. Which is held to be able to re-order society at will, but never win wars abroad.

There is a word for people who hold such views. The natural basis for the Super Zips. The Ruling Class. The New Elites. We call them ... women.

Specifically, White professional women. A new class, never seen before in America's history. With lots of money, lots of disposable income. Hostile to traditions and values of the "old America" and in particular, the military. Desirous of a New America, multicultural, multiracial, united in opposition to "Dead White Men" and icky, horrible, Beta White males. Fond of eternal apologies (name any elite dominated by men fond of apologizing itself, name any group of women not fond of ritual and thus meaningless abasement).

The growth of the New Elites, the Super Zips, the Ruling Elites, and their attitudes has been one that has been driven by the emergence of women into new territory. It is a fundamental truism that everything has its cost. Liberation of women from drudgework, from early marriage and early deaths (often in childbirth), from non-participation in the nation's affairs, from entering into and being amply rewarded from the workforce, has helped create a modern West (in the US and Europe) that is more robust, more wealthy, and more fair in many ways. But everything costs, and the cost of the emergence of women has been the creation of a hereditary elite, a ruling class of princes, kings, queens, princesses, dukes, and what not. The Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Disney-esque fantasy, complete with adult Oprah-ized "Wise Black Woman" companionship, pushing the interests of White Professional women to the exclusion of everyone else outside the female-Elite coalition.

That is what all that wealth, power, and stability cost — long term instability by a Ruling Class driven entirely by feedback loops of making Upper and Near-Upper Class White women happy. After all, the Ruling class as Codevilla notes, appeals to be "smarter" and more "moral" than the other guys. That's an appeal to female tastes. Name a football coach who pushes that he's more moral than his opposition, or "smarter" in terms of dress, comportment, and so on. Cleverness, devious tricks, and such like (when employed for your side) appeal to men in sports, business, and the military. Appeals to moral authority and general intelligence do not. Which is why Patton ironically meant as a hit piece is popular among conservative men and "the Help" among SWPL, Professional White women. It is why tough old football coaches are beloved by male sports fan and Oprah by White women.

The Super Zips emerged because the class that provided the support, the balance, White professional women, emerged. Yes Welfare made things worse, as did crony capitalism and credentialism. But the key had always been, the post-War emergence of White professional women, newly liberated, hostile to the old ways that kept them out of power, eager to embrace personal sexual liberation, disdainful of male peers who lacked sexiness (nearly all of them, because they were equal) and thus enamored of anything and everything foreign and non-White. "Authentic" came to mean foreign and exotic, and "White" a synonym for "boring" because newly liberated White women found them so, and through massive consumerism driven mostly by their buying decisions, shaped through advertising the culture to what it is today.

In the early 1960's, commercials ran on national television wherein housewives, even of working men at factories, agonized over the quality of their coffee. Today you have commercials where rock-climbing professional women eschew marriage for outdoor adventure. With their "boyfriend." And no one says anything. Because the culture changed so much. Organically, all around the West, all at the same time.

The Super Zip emergence is probably best shown by the old WB/CW television show "Gilmore Girls," and the current CW show "Gossip Girl." Both appeal to young women, the former depicts a glamorous young single mother and her hot young bright daughter, who gets into Yale. The mother dumps her long-time devoted blue collar hunk boyfriend for the guy who got her pregnant at 16, and never did anything for her or her daughter, but is rich and arrogant and an Alpha jerk. The daughter tellingly dumps a younger version of said blue collar guy, who worships her, for a rich and drunk jerk after he humiliates the blue collar guy. The female audience went NUTS for this, and could not get enough of it. They loved the rich, arrogant bastards because they were rich and arrogant. Inherited money too, which was the best kind. "Gossip Girl" does away with even the pretense of small-town-ish life, with glamorous soap opera hook-ups among the spoiled rich kids of Manhattan.

The very things that enrage the mostly White male non-elites, makes the elites extremely attractive to the female White professionals. Who under the elites have done well, to the point where income, education, and other status-markers are higher for White women than men.

Black voters will reliably vote Democratic (Elite) about 98% or so. Year after year. Hispanics vote around 70% for elites. White men and blue collar White women, on the short end of the stick, vote 70% non-elite (or against the most elite candidate). Those who swing, significantly, from elite to non-elite, are White professional women. The good news is that they can be persuaded to vote against Dems (always the elite candidate) some times. The bad news is that they require elite characteristics in candidates to do so: Scott Brown, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush. Handsome and tall are best, at least not "angry" or "ideological" which is a Beta Male turn-off. Women voters outside the White blue collar group want fairy tales, handsome princes, and tales of hierarchy and aristocracy. In real life as in stories of vampire queens, kings, and princes. That is why the elites emerged.

Neither Codevilla nor Murray get that.

The Emergence of Fishtown



Murray notes that "Fishtown" or the hereditary lower class White hangouts have decisively rejected the idea of regular church attendance, marriage before kids, education, and males in the workforce. What Murray does not get, because perhaps he is an older male with attitudes and chivalry formed from another country (the past) is how the sexual revolution impacted all these things.

Just as most White professional women (seriously, lurk about on ANY Television discussion forum, to see the attitude) HATE HATE HATE Christianity because of its cultural limits on female sexuality, so too do lower class women. The modern era after WWII, with cheap and easy contraception, anonymous urban living (less so now with Facebook and Twitter), high personal mobility, radically increased income and freedom for women, meant a sea-change in how women viewed sex, love, marriage, and kids.

Basically, any woman that wants sex, and is half-way attractive, can have sex any time she wants with an Alpha male. Commitment and love is another thing, but sex is not. Sex with the most desirable of men (aggressive, dominant assholes) is there any time. The only threat is Christianity. Islam is a distant fire, limiting only Muslim women (who most White women don't really care about anyway) as they see it. Some pastor saying "don't be slutty and stupid" is a direct threat, because their parent(s) might echo it. No one wants to be shamed like Snooki. The popularity of Jersey Shore is as a vehicle for White women of all classes to laugh at Snooki and how stupid she is. She is the guido version of a minstrel show. Appealing mainly to women.

Of course lower class women don't attend church. Who wants a lecture on staying away from bad boys, when they are so, so sexy?

Marriage for kids is for losers, among White lower class women, not because of welfare (though it hardly helps) but because of sexiness among men. The sexiest of men, are those who are aggressive, dominant, hyper-masculine, and so naturally women want kids by them. There is not enough reason to hold out for commitment (the sexy men won't commit) and the non-sexy men who offer commitment just are not sexy enough. It is not welfare (most White blue collar women in Fishtown work, and quite hard too). It is their own income plus no social pressure (because of anonymity, and independence of income) to stay away from bad boys that drives high rates of illegitimacy (and low rates of church going).

In times past, women would compromise because lowering the bar on acceptable sexiness was the only way to have a family. Now they can earn enough, with marginal government assistance, to have kids by sexy bad boys all they want. That's better, as Roissy notes, than a lifetime of a beta male's devotion. As the proprietor of Heartiste notes, "five minutes of Alpha beats five years of Beta."

Education, and males in the workforce, are directly related to sexual rewards on the lower class. Bad boys who work part time, deal casual drugs, engage in fruitless endeavors to "make it as a musician" and layabout, get the best women. The most beautiful, the youngest, the most fertile, the most willing. Often some of the most intelligent too. Bad boys, casual criminals, are sexier. That is why they dominant fantasies oriented towards women, be they vampires or warlocks or whatnot.

The path to sex, and fatherhood, is based on not life in the work-force and provider beta loser-dom. But rather pure male sexiness. This is the model in the Black ghetto and Mexican barrio. It is how most of the world orders itself sexually and socially. It is how most families are formed, and have been formed, in human history. It optimizes for female satisfaction, at the expense of wealth formation for all but a few.

A man who observes the behavior of the women around him, from an early age, at Fishtown, learns hard lessons. Regardless of what women say, the most beautiful and desirable of them, those who can have any man, give themselves to the casual, bad boy criminal lay-abouts. What you reward, and perhaps no reward is worth more, you get more of. What you punish (dutiful providership and steady blue collar work among men) you get less of.

What Murray misses is the sexual component. Late marriage by a woman in her mid-thirties with many, many sexual partners (between 30 and fifty is not out of the question), kids by another man or men, often ending in divorce, is not the same as the passionate devotion of a sixteen year old beauty, a virgin or near virgin, who only has eyes for you. And will happily bear you a child. Newsflash, young women are more beautiful than the older ones.

This is borne out by Murray's own statistics. The Super Zips live 1950's lives. They might have "only" $10 million dollars, and rest assured the drudge on Wall Street is not sexy, as being sexy takes hard work (George Clooney basically works all the time to be sexy, as does Brad Pitt, and your local drug dealer). There is not enough time for Wall Street mid-level honchos to be sexy, they are busy making money. But as "the Nanny Diaries" showed, "enough" money to buy say, a Summer home in the Hamptons, or at least rent one in the Summer, and all sorts of social settings, can mitigate un-sexiness among husbands. Can cause at least regular church going (the women have already sold out sexy for the Hamptons and society) and legitimate child-birth.

For the super-rich, well the money is no object, so marriages don't last long and like Hollywood demonstrates, illegitimacy is no barrier. The Middle class is increasingly sliding towards the sexy vs. money side of things. The lower class has no hope of upward mobility (here illegal immigration has taken its toll on White blue collar wages). So that's a problem.

Women WILL trade sexy men for men with money. Will sacrifice that sexiness, that thrill of danger, that pure excitement (and even real danger, as Rihanna again pursuing Chris Brown for another Ike Turner style beat-down shows). But it takes money. Real money. Even for the Middle Class, a nice condo is no longer enough. Not even a nice house. All that frenzy over marble and granite counter-tops was really the frustration of the middle class wife or girlfriend over her man's lack of sexiness. Drowned with status consumption.

In the current situation, it takes a house (at least rented, preferably owned) in the Hamptons or about $10 million or so annual income to keep the nuclear family intact. That's the amount of money most, though certainly not all, White women require for monogamy and abjuring sexy men.

[Note, I am sure "not all women are like that." Who cares? I am describing the collective actions of White women as a whole, in society, for both good — such as increased wealth, productivity, resiliency, and stake-holders, and bad — collapse of church-going, the nuclear family, men in employment, and the rise of the elites, the Super Zips in strangleholds on most institutions of this nation. This is not a conspiracy, or the actions of "devious Jews" or "Gramscian Frankfurt School theorists" making a "long march" through institutions, nor even "women are evil." Because they are not. However, neither are women comprised of pure good and supernatural wisdom, collectively. Women, like men, respond to incentives, for either society's good or bad. I would not say a woman pursuing a bad boy and having kids with him outside marriage is "wrong" individually. In a free country it is her choice. But the social cost is horrendous, when normalized and free of stigma.]

Solutions



Murray rightly eschews Big Government solutions to this problem. Though he notes correctly that America should reform Welfare to remove incentives to single motherhood. He is correct for a campaign to make the old, church going, nuclear family, men in the workplace, value education America return to Fishtown. But he leaves Super Zips alone.

Murray is only partly right, in the solutions because again he does not understand the cause — the sexual liberation of women, and the concentration of wealth and power among Upper Class White women, who switch votes based on personal attributes of candidates. Thus, getting their way, more often than not (the power of being the deciding votes).

Fishtown won't embrace those old virtues, unless the sexual liberation of women is matched by social stigma for choices that while maximizing individual happiness for the woman, causes disaster upon society. It must be a campaign directed by women, for women, with perhaps the involvement of a few Alpha males. Beta males must and should stay directly out of it. The Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) campaign is a good one. Women respond to this social pressure and stigma very well, perhaps because being part of the group is far more important than for men. Everyone knows "loner" men and they form the backbone of male oriented entertainment from John Wayne to Jason Bourne. Women on the other hand are never depicted as loners in anything directed at them. They might form their own groups, but never set themselves off deliberately and permanently the way loner men heroes in movies do.

The solution is simply on the behavioral front, "don't be slutty. Don't be Snooki." Delivered by almost exclusively women, with a few sexy Alpha guys. That's it. A simple message. But one powerful given women's group behavior. [Which is both a weakness, and strength, forming the backbone of the Temperance and Prohibition and Civil Rights and Feminist and Environmental movements.]

On the incentive fronts, blue collar White guys, and White collar White guys, need to have incomes raised. Women will understandably fight tooth and nail to deny any reduction in their wealth (I would too) so that's a non-starter. But concrete action can be taken to increase earning power of White guys: deport illegal aliens (and their kids); increase military spending particularly ship and plane building; eliminate most legal immigration (and H1-B visas and variants); put import quotas on (increase local factory production); increase the ability to file and make money off patents (money to backyard tinkerers). Oil and energy production must be increased, vastly, and spending on various government make-work stuff killed.

These are all things that are difficult, but achievable. None will happen overnight, but all have the possibility of being enacted.

The most important strategic objective, however, is destroying the Hereditary Super Zips. A few observations are in order. Hollywood used to be filled with guys like Mel Brooks. A guy from nowhere, who rose to fame on writing really funny things, and pushing the envelope, not in just dirty words or taboos violated ,but form. "Get Smart" was the first zany sitcom, based not on a family but a complete idiot who parodied the James Bond smooth spy guy. Don Adams is another out of that mold, a guy who survived Guadalcanal and was a Parris Island Drill Instructor. Nowadays, comedy in Hollywood is very restricted to the Harvard Mafia. Want a job writing for the Simpsons, or Conan O'Brien? Better have graduated from Harvard. Only South Park, created by a couple of guys from Colorado, fits the old Brooksian Hollywood open to new talent that produces.

To destroy the Super Zips, it is necessary to destroy its ecosystem, the female driven consumerism. And all that is needed to do that is frugalism replacing consumerism. Buying only when needed, and on value and price, not status. The dirty secret of the Super Zips is how dependent either directly or indirectly they are on female-driven consumerism. Network and Cable TV, much of the movies, advertising, marketing, and whole swaths of government depend on either direct expenditures or indirect revenues and taxes derived from that. If Americans and particularly American women just bought say, 40% less, entire major portions of the Super Zips would collapse. Others, particularly Hollywood, would rely on entertaining people rather than just a profitable sub-group (see "the Help" the book and movie, and Oprah's career).

For the Super Zips will not go away quietly. They are happy to wreck America to get one more day in power.

36 comments:

Anonymous said...

It all comes down to the Frankfurt School. One way to attack the super elites might be to point out that their ideology is based on a bunch of miserable nerdy beta germans from the 1910s.

Off topic Whiskey are you familiar with this blogger:

http://vidrebel.wordpress.com

He sees the USA losing embarrassingly to Iran

Anonymous said...

"But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile."

Yep.
I had a 5 years of solid work experience, 3.95 Undergrad GPA and A 99th percentile GMAT score. I applied to 5 Ivy-League MBA programs and got immediate rejection letters from all of them. No interviews, no calls, nothing - not a damn thing.

There is a reason why the online application form at Harvard asks about who your parents are, and what they do for a living.

Anonymous said...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090532/Haitian-man-freed-Obama-halted-deportations-earthquake-went-murder-people.html

Whiskey said...

Video Rebel guy lives in a fantasy world. Iran for decades has pursued a nuclear weapons program, and Israel is a nation of less than 5 million people, who want nothing more than to be left alone and will take any credible deal to get it.

Its all "the Jews" instead of the real issue: technology spread so even a place like Iran or North Korea can get nukes and kill US and European cities. No credible policy exists to prevent Iran's nukes from happening, or contain them with nukes. It is merely kick the can down the road because the cost of dealing with it short-term is too politically high. That's the road France and the UK went down. Ike, Churchill, De Gaulle, and various Nazi generals all wrote afterwards that the French police force could have overthrown Hitler in 1934 when he broke the Treaty of Versailles and re-militarized the Rhineland. Because the German Army consisted only of a few thousand poorly armed men.

As Machiavelli says, when illnesses and threats to the body politic are hard to diagnose, they are easily fixed. The remedies cost little, and prognosis is good. When the illness is readily apparent to everyone, often times there is no hope. Its like catching cancer -- find it early and you can stop it before it spreads. Find it too late, you are dead quickly.

As for Iranian success, yes short term Iran CAN close the Gulf, and sink several US Carriers. They will take heavy losses but they don't care about that. What would Obama do? I think he wants US defeat, so he can discredit the military, turn it into another Union (he has plans to unionized the Military and turn into SEIU with artillery and tanks). Obama WANTS $200-$300 a barrel oil. He HATES this country, and figures he will cruise to victory against Newt even with the economy in total, absolute depression. Worse than the 1930's.

He governs like he was in Chicago -- a cheap anti-American hack who never paid a price for that. So yeah, I would not be shocked at a short term Iranian victory. However I think he underestimates his power, he might be overthrown by impeachment/conviction, out of desperation, and at extreme cost the Gulf retaken. And Iran destroyed.

But yeah War with Iran is coming. They want and must have oil far above $100 a barrel to pay their goons. Thus they need war and to close the Gulf (they'll ship overland to China and still make money at ~$200 a barrel or so).

CamelCaseRob said...

Can you fix this sentence?

"They have managed to run America into the ground, while in search of temporary votes to keep out those who they HATE HATE HATE (Average White middle class and working class Americans) of any power, courted disaster."

Anyway, it's a very long post and will require some mulling over.

Anonymous said...

Whiskey....

Without nukes Iran can't sink USN carriers.

Damage, yes. Their vital spaces have more armor than our Iowa class battleships.

For the most part Tehran is saber rattling solely for the purpose of getting crude prices up.

Iran's REAL threat is European wide civil disruption: Car-B-Ques.

Paris was convinced that Tehran had a big hand in ramping up Car-B-Ques. Stories on the Web indicated that Iranians were supplying 'youths' with gasoline at a time it was forbidden to fill gasoline cans at service stations. The 'youths' simply rolled over on the Iranians when the police nabbed them.

Likewise, Israel fears the Hez because they 'fight' with feral tactics.

The falling out between the Hez and Hamas appears to be real. Money IS the mother's milk of politics.

The Wan is more Gonnabee than anything else.

Which is why the clean-up crew is going to have their hands full.

Most Gonnabees in an executive role destroy the enterprise. So it's fortunate that there's a LOT of ruin in the United States.

little dynamo said...

Anyway, it's a very long post and will require some mulling over.

but worth mulling

i'll go w CCR get back to you on this one

Whiskey said...

There was a Pentagon War Game involving Iranian Forces vs. US forces in the Gulf. It ended with the Iranians sinking US carriers and warships, and requiring thousands of lives and loss of capital ships to clear them out.

The way the wargamers worked, was adopting Alexander's Indus River strategy. Alexander marched his troops to the river, had them perform maneuvers, and then retired. For 14 straight days. On the fifteenth he attacked. The wargamer "Iranians" used harassing swift boats to toe right up but not over the line of getting shot, to wear down by attrition attention and focus of US Navy crews. Then, launch without warning attacks from the swift boats. Which would be all wiped out, but acceptable for the Iranians. Combined with hardened missiles (which would be launched) that are quite sophisticated (French, Chinese, and Russian supplied) at least one carrier sunk, other capital ships sunk, and temporary control of the Gulf goes to Iran. Eventually in the War Game the US Navy sends other carriers, which stand off from the choke-points and pound everything moving with continual air assault, reducing the Iranians.

US forces are under very restrictive ROE. The Iranians know this, the wargamers taking the place of the Iranians took advantage of it, the US Navy is doubtless concerned. Geography favors the Iranians short term because Hormuz is a narrow choke point. It is even possible for wooden Dhows with little radar signature to sail out and dump mines, the place is only 25 miles across.

james said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
james said...

Society is now too safe and boring for women. To get their human fix for violence, and their female fix for drama and excitement, they invite it into the home via a bad boy.

Look at English soccer and English Rugby. When violence is pervasive in the external environment(the field of play ie rugby), one is less likely to desire or have violence in one's own environment(the grandstands like in soccer).

When a woman's field of play is too safe outside the house, she is more likely to desire violence, drama and excitement in her home environment, and she satisfies this desire with a bad boy.

Anonymous said...

Whiskey...

It's worse than that.

The REAL strait is only 2.5 miles wide ... at best.

The rest of the mileage is TOO SHALLOW for VLCCS.

As for ULCCs... they HAVE to go to Yanbu -- in the Red Sea. No ULCC can transit the strait, it being too shallow.

The only realistic way for Iran to get those shots off is if we're stupid enough to keep sailing carriers into the gulf.

Which see: the Wan and our SoS. (!)

Other than this one pride of flag exercise...

We need to stop sending the big stuff in harm's way.

Back in the 80's it was rudely discovered that VLCCs have THICKER steel than Iowa Class BBs. (!)

So it came to be that our BBs would hide behind VLCCs -- using them as mine sweepers -- even as we were 'escorting' them.

You may go back and take a peak at the old DoD photos released back then.

The war game did leave out one thing: Iran is a serious importer of FOOD.

To cut off the gulf means to commit national sepuku. Can Tehran belly up to it?

Whiskey said...

Anon my guess is that Iran will bet that enough food can be trucked in from China in exchange for oil to make it avoid total starvation. The people in the cities abhor the regime anyway, so them starving is a plus. Considering they sent something like 100,000 boys under the age of 11 as human minesweepers during the Iran-Iraq war to certain death, yeah they think this way. They were called the Basij, and wore plastic "keys to heaven" around their necks.

Dr. Grzlickson said...

"As for Iranian success, yes short term Iran CAN close the Gulf, and sink several US Carriers."

That's news to me and the rest of the US defense industry. They can perhaps close the straits for a matter of days (hours more likely), and they have a snowball's chance in hell of hitting one carrier, let alone sinking several. Please stop with your naval analysis now.

No Show said...

Whiskey's view is simple:

Iran is a perceived threat to the Jews of Israel therefore they are America's Number 1 defense issue.

White women are a social/political threat to White "beta males" therefore the America's Number 1 domestic issue.

It's alwyas the same.

Dr. Grzlickson said...

Good Lord. Your first statement (re: Iran sinking Aircraft Carriers) was so ridiculous I didn't even notice the rest of that paragraph. You are now tinfoil hat material.

"What would Obama do? I think he wants US defeat, so he can discredit the military, turn it into another Union (he has plans to unionized the Military and turn into SEIU with artillery and tanks). Obama WANTS $200-$300 a barrel oil. He HATES this country, and figures he will cruise to victory against Newt even with the economy in total, absolute depression. Worse than the 1930's.

Dr. Grzlickson said...

"There was a Pentagon War Game involving Iranian Forces vs. US forces in the Gulf."

You are now a certified hack by citing Millenium Challenge. Let's take the extreme worst-case scenario out of tens of thousands of such games and label it a certainty. I doubt you know how wargames are conducted.

Also, why are you even responding to that idiot first commenter? Look at his link

Conquistador said...

Great piece whiskey. Your take on the world is some of my favorite stuff to read.

little dynamo said...

Murray fails for the same reason the WSJ and the rest of Medea fail: they cant call a spade a spade, fearing PC-retribution from the National Organization of Shovels and their enabler government

“Angelo Codevilla argues in the American Spectator that the ruling class, Republican and Democrat, all go to the same national schools, share the same interests, intermarry, and form the same social class”

that’s always been the true purpose of the Ivy League, private female colleges, and their associated fast-track-to-power prep schools – to form an interconnected, insulated club that concentrates power and wealth in closed networks . . . surprisingly, it only takes a few hundred folks in the right government, media, educational, intelligence and military positions to dominate the west

theyve craftily used feminism and affirmative action/multi-culti to divide and conquer, destroying the middle class, fatherhood, and masculinity (minor side-issues to them, until SHTF)


“There is a word for people who hold such views. The natural basis for the Super Zips. The Ruling Class. The New Elites. We call them ... women. Specifically, White professional women.”

bingo

this is the demographic that made, and makes, the satanic bargain, and keeps the Emasculated Elite in riches and power

who announced the america was “A Woman’s Nation”?

super-elite skankess Maria Shriver

whose money and connections organized and funded the 1848 Seneca Falls Conference?

the american old-money Coffin clan (with help from other old-money families)

who funded/funds the endless u.s. fem-organizations?

Rockefellers et al

on and on it goes, but anybody who points it out is a nutcase conspiracy “theorist”

“pushing the interests of White Professional women to the exclusion of everyone else outside the female-Elite coalition. That is what all that wealth, power, and stability cost — long term instability by a Ruling Class driven entirely by feedback loops of making Upper and Near-Upper Class White women happy ”

exactly – WPW hold the wealth, spend the money, and control the votes that justify and validate the Sistem; making WPW happy (empowered and enriched) is the ONLY thing that now matters

toss in the Rainbow Factor (gays and “minorities) with the elite/WPW demographic, and you have an economic and cultural bloc that cannot be addressed (much less actually reformed) by ANY political or legal means

of course, Murray and the WSJ, being beneficiaries/lackeys of that bloc, arent about to point this out

little dynamo said...

“What Murray misses is the sexual component. Late marriage by a woman in her mid-thirties with many, many sexual partners (between 30 and fifty is not out of the question), kids by another man or men, often ending in divorce, is not the same as the passionate devotion of a sixteen year old beauty, a virgin or near virgin, who only has eyes for you. And will happily bear you a child. Newsflash, young women are more beautiful than the older ones.”

not a problem

we’ll just deny and criminalize male biology; hopefully in a couple years we’ll have laws establishing age-of-consent to be whatever age any WPW happens to be at any time – who cares, after all, the only lives destroyed are those of non-elite males, who deserve it after millions of years oppressing women

your analysis of the Problem is v good, but the Solutions not so much – you cant really believe that the THOUSANDS of female-power orgainizations (in the u.s. alone!) are suddenly going to convert to criticize-females organizations? never happen – women ONLY organize for their personal and collective benefit, tho they use “common-good” propaganda to cloak their selfish motives

“To destroy the Super Zips, it is necessary to destroy its ecosystem, the female driven consumerism. And all that is needed to do that is frugalism replacing consumerism. Buying only when needed, and on value and price, not status.”

status-seeking by females, materially and otherwise, is the true engine of the modern west, and the tie that binds the modern merchant-elite and the collective feminine together in a doomed axis of power and privilege

this alliance will never be ended voluntarily, and only the most traumatic disaster (i.e., one that affects women and elites, not merely unempowered males) would even budge this alliance, much less dissolve it

a thoughtful overall analysis tho, youll make an excellent admin when the war's over

Mormon Man said...

"The solution is simply on the behavioral front, "don't be slutty. Don't be Snooki." Delivered by almost exclusively women, with a few sexy Alpha guys. That's it. A simple message. But one powerful given women's group behavior. [Which is both a weakness, and strength, forming the backbone of the Temperance and Prohibition and Civil Rights and Feminist and Environmental movements."

This is easier said than done. Even in the Mormon community - which is extremely culturally conservative.

A few years ago the head of the Relief Society (the women's organization in the LDS Church) made a comment alluding to simple house chores like ironing clothing equating to being a good mother and the women in the Church were up in arms about it.

I don't know if it's possible to have even a few influential women try to convey that message without being slaughtered by the sisterhood. It seems the momentum is too great to turn back.

Anonymous said...

Whiskey,

One important question. Is it really your argument that ideas - ideas regarding political philosophy, economics and most importantly ethics and morality - are not what are responsible for the growth of the American welfare state, the American regulatory state, and the American central bank and its inflated paper money? Is your argument that what is the *FUNDAMENTAL* cause of America's woes is female hypergamy?

So, in your view the centuries long developments on the various epistemologies that dominate the modern West and the egalitarian political philosophies that are the result of secularizing Christian ethics; all this means nothing. Society is just thrown around by females seeking bad boys?

Do you see how warped and reductionistic that is? Can you see that? No fan of Larry Auster am I, but he mocks you for this type of reductionistic blather.

Yes, women are behaving terribly. And yes, women are hypergamous in that their biology puts them in the position to respond to men with high value attributes; that latter part is scaled to cultural norms for better or worse, civilized or barbaric (ie inner city blacks). But none of that explains why the welfare state was accepted by every country in the West. Why the regulatory model was accepted everywhere. Why central banking was accepted everywhere. Or why the original 18th and 19th century market liberalism was rejected and scoffed at in every Euro-American country.

To answer all those questions, you need philosophy first and foremost. Then you need intellectual history and then you need economic science and its history. Without those, all you can do is try to give your great answers to the deepest questions of the universe based on female hypergamous instincts.

Really Whiskey. I like you. You've definitely left the reservation in your own way and there is value to your ravings. But they are ravings and they are limited.

"There are more things that are dreamt of in heaven and hell then exist in your philosophy."

So true.

D.Bandler
Sympathetic to HBD but critical

PS Needing 10 million per year salary to get a pretty white women for marriage. I'm sure there are white women that believe they could get that price. But they are few and far between. The question to be asked is at what age do most white women marry and to whom. My guess is that women marry in the range of 32 - 38 and they marry Betas or Greater Betas; the kinds of guys they wouldn't look at 10 years earlier. I'd also wager that they are not living in 10 million dollar mansions in the Hamptons or Miama Beech. My guess is that most women realize that the alpha bad boy obsession really only has a shelf life for them from 16 to 32; high 30s if they are of rare beauty.

Whiskey said...

Last Anon -- the $10 million is to marry and STAY MARRIED. Divorce rates are few in the upper incomes of NYC, as noted by both the Nanny Diaries and the experience of a Park Slope woman who DID get divorced ... pursuing a more sexy Alpha ... and got ostracized.

When SERIOUS money formation is involved, people husband it. They respond to incentives.

Yes Auster is not perhaps a fan, but most people are not influenced by either ideas or philosophy. Do you honestly think that say, the tens of millions of Obama voters had much thought of Gramscian Long Marches?

My argument at least rests on TECHNOLOGY altering how Western Society conducts itself. It does not rely on either conspiracies of the Jewish, or Marxist Frankfurt School, or anything like that, and is entirely consistent with how technology has altered the West BEFORE: 1. The Moldboard Plow; 2. The Printing Press; 3. Gunpowder; 4. the Steam Engine; 5. The Internal Combustion Engine.

Just to take one example, Gunpowder, it destroyed the traditional Knight-nobility based dominance in European Warfare and caused the mass army, with MASSIVE increase in scale, in very short order. James Burke in the Connections series shows how army sizes (a few thousand for Henry V, 100 thousand for Wallenberg) increased by an order of TEN in just a few hundred years.

I think it would be folly to look at anything BUT technology first and foremost for its effect on human society.

Whiskey said...

If you look at say, Japan, and their Edo Era, technology (firearms) was banned because it made both Shoguns and Samurai obsolete. That did not end well.

What I am saying is that TECHNOLOGY (the Pill, Condom, Television, private cars) changed society (easy, consequence free sex, anonymous urban living, improved female income) that led to VAST social changes in an enormous scale.

WHY did the ENTIRE Western World embrace some form of socialism? Basically to mitigate risk. Much of the Western World HAD something, which made it more conservative, and wanting to preserve it rather than roll the dice and come up a winner (which is attractive when you're starving or near it).

The Twentieth Century brought enormous, destructive change upon people's lives, and they wanted to mitigate the risk, particularly women who HAD SOMETHING too, sexual freedom, and did not wish to lose it. Men chose this also because once you are middle class there is little incentive to move up and great fear of moving down.

Socialism is a hedge against disaster, the government as ultimate backstop. Bismarck learned that, as did FDR, Mussolini, and Hitler.

The Super Zips simply became removed from the interest of the people in a way in which, say John J. Rockefeller of Standard Oil or Ike never was, because technology enabled women for the first time (or I should say, a subset, White Professional Women) to play an outsized role in shaping consumerist culture, and thus most of the culture.

Madison Avenue trumps the Frankfurt School. Who matters more, the guy putting the message in front of you day after day, or the Professor who rants in front of you once a week for a Semester?

The Western World is in a mess, all around, because technology drove deep social changes that led the elites to be hostile to most of its people, with Professional White Women (who existed at no other time and place in Human History) as their narrow base.

If you wish to end this, simply end consumerism. It will all come crashing down, as the Empire of Advertising depends on consumption.

Anonymous said...

A lot of men are wising up to the fact that marrying women in their 30s is a bad move. Let's say your a greater beta. You are a professional but not rich. Maybe you make low six figures. And your in ok shape but not a model. Why get married to a girl in her 30s?

In truth I date a lot of girls in their 30s. They are usually easier to talk to, they are a bit more grown up. But they put out after three dates and most of them don't seem to be good candidates for marraige and motherhood (though many have a biological alarm going off). If I can get sex and companionship off and on without marraige, I'll do it.

Anonymous said...

"Back in the 80's it was rudely discovered that VLCCs have THICKER steel than Iowa Class BBs. (!)

So it came to be that our BBs would hide behind VLCCs -- using them as mine sweepers -- even as we were 'escorting' them.

You may go back and take a peak at the old DoD photos released back then."

No. 1). Oil tankers have, since 1978, been required to have double hulls. This makes them effective minesweepers since a mine detonation would not cause sinking/oil spills.

2). The US did not use BB's to escort tankers during Operation Earnest Will (1987).

3). DDG's, FFG's, and CG's have always had tin hulls as the premium is placed on speed.

4). Iowa-class battleships have hulls 1.5" thick, and are fortified by an anti-torpedo "belt" 12" thick; under-deck plates 7" thick, and turret armor 19" thick.

Anonymous said...

Madison Avenue trumps the Frankfurt School. Who matters more, the guy putting the message in front of you day after day, or the Professor who rants in front of you once a week for a Semester?

Wrong. Madison Avenue is shaped by the Frankfurt school and the legions of university professors it has influenced. A nation and a culture is a mirror of its universities and its leading intellectuals. The Hollywood scripts you rightly condemn as well as the television commercials are *ALL* the product of the ideas coming out of the universities. Multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, social democracy, social justice, deconstructionism (literary), living-Constitution, welfare-statism, egalitarianism, white privilege-ism, nation-building (Just-War theory), moral relativism, skepticism, etc, etc, ad nauseum. These are all the dominant theories emanating from the Humanities departments. That is why Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the culture is what it is.

Those who control the universities control the culture. The Left controls academia. The rest is academic. No pun really intended.

D. Bandler

rickl said...

I remember reading a blog comment awhile back that made the case that the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" was actually an extended metaphor for the Frankfurt School, and how it sought to break down sexual morality and promote hedonism. (The main character's name was "Dr. Frank-N-Furter".)

It sounds bizarre, but it was a long and detailed analysis and made a lot of sense. I wish I had a link.

Anonymous said...

You use the word sexy too much and it makes your writing irritating and long-winded. Consider being more concise and knowing when to end the goddamn post. Jesus Christ that was painful to read through. Your writing is very, very boring and long-winded.

no mo uro said...

D. Bandler-

I share with you the one legit critique of Whiskey's otherwise brilliant insight and analysis. The host seems to have a willful desire to acknowledge the role of the Gramscian termite in our current trouble, and a need to purposefully minimize the influence of delayed fuse meme bombs from the Frankfurt school era right through the KGB and Comintern efforts through the 1990's.

All of the things he says about the corrosion of women are true. College "educated" white women have great power and have used it to set up a country which absolves them from even the possibility of any negative consequences for a sexually promiscuous life - welfare, affirmative action, easy abortion, easy no-fault (read: man's fault) divorce.

But in the absence of a fertile philosophical environment, they go nowhere, for the most part. Readily available birth control and voting rights existed for at least two generations before the wheels came off the wagon. Why didn't those women in those generations act this way back then? Answer: strong Judeo-Christian values were universal and adherence to same were expected (ESPECIALLY amongst women), community and family mattered more than self, and outcome egalitarian, Marxist economic societal models were universally recognized as evil and impractical. It was only when those women went to college and were indoctrinated by Gramscians that the change really happened.

Yes, the rise of consumerism was largely pushed by women. People of both sexes in the 1920's did not think that home ownership or college education are rights, as women (and the men in servitude to them) do now. But even that has been the result to one extent or another of marketing by a media populated almost exclusively by leftists who have redefined journalism from "reporting the news to" using the bully pulipt of the press to effect social change.

But what those like Whiskey - people who feel that the long march through the institutions has had little effect on things - fail to realize is that in an age of highly realistic mass visual media, a very few people controlling the imagery can have astonishing impact far beyond their numbers. Most of the human race has not evolved effective thought patterns to filter out the BS, yet, and the left has understood this at least since Kennedy's campaign in 1960.

Exhibit A is the "Rural Purge", where a group of leftist, anti-Christian TV execs terminated an entire lineup of highly profitable shows on a network and replaced them with less profitable ones, basically for ideological reasons. Exhibit B is an actress who looks like Sarah Palin saying that she can see Russia from her house and millions of people assuming that Palin herself said it. The list of exhibits, truth be told, is huge.

Ironically, Whiskey hits the truth of this without realizing it, or incorporating it into his unified theory. He correctly points out the role of technology in making the changes to our society and in proving his theories. Well and good - that's spot on. But it is also technology that makes the Gramscian thing so powerful. The man (or woman) in the bully pulpit of the professor's lectern, or the newscaster's chair, has power far, far beyond and in excess of all but the most powerful marketing strategies.

And what if, as you point out, the people in charge of those marketing strategies on Madison Avenue got their marching orders from the lectern or newschair in the first place?

This needs to be considered, always.

Columnist said...

Feminism rests on abortion. Use abortion to destroy Hispanics and Blacks. If necessary, demand forced abortion.

Columnist said...

Also, to prevent Car-B-Ques: cut off hands. That is what they themselves would do.

Anonymous said...

Whiskey, the big farmers in California have bilionaires of dollars in Revene, they are corporate farms and the Koch brothers make more money than most folks in Silcon Valley. The farmers and oilmen are not poor as the left will point out to you. The corporate farm owners met in Irvine not Bakersfield. In fact Texas has not Hispanic mainly white and big Asian counties like Fort Bend which has a higher income than Orange County. OC has the Newport Beach area wealthy Republicans there. Whiskley stop pretending that all wealthly counties are Democratic they are not. In fact in OC the wealthiest cities with the excpetion of Laguna Beach usually vote Republican while the poorer cities vote Dem mainly beacuse of the Hispanics. In fact Don Bren a moderate Republican head of the Irvine Company is more wealthy than the Hollywood crowd.

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