The Strange Politics of TV's Alcatraz and Person of Interest

There is only one institution in America with any reach. Only one that really shapes culture. Only one that reflects, and changes it. No, its not churches. Hardly anyone goes to Church any more. Nor is it politics, unaffiliated people are growing and will soon outnumber Republicans. There is only one institution that matters. That is television. True, it does not have the reach it had with only three networks, and no cable tv. But there it is, 17 million people watched the Golden Globes. It is, outside sports and a few other live events, a mostly female-gay ghetto. But it still shapes the attitudes and cultural assumptions of most women. Which brings us to Fox's Alcatraz and CBS's Person of Interest. Both are shows with somewhat strange politics. Alcatraz wants to indict the White male America of the past, for well being White and Male. Not sufficiently multicultural. Meanwhile Person of Interest posits that icky White beta males are the main threat to personal security in NYC, and Black men and women NEVER EVER commit crimes. Why? Because their viewers are nearly all female, and that is what that audience wants.


First, Alcatraz. seen in the trailer below:



Basically, a young White girl with a pixie haircut, and no discernible man in her life, but "hot" (this IS San Francisco, after all), is recruited by a semi-evil cranky old White guy, to work with a "diverse" team of well, a fat Mexican comic book fan and "Professor" and some Indian chick to solve the mystery of why everyone disappeared from Alcatraz. Sub-plots include the wicked, bad White guy who killed her first, less fat Mexican cop partner, who is her ... grandfather! And also the Indian doctor being a time traveler or something, she shows up in a flashback in 1960 in Alcatraz.

The whole thing is laughable, with hard-case WWII vet and Alcatraz con meekly doing what "they" (a voice on a telephone) tells him to do, because well that's what bad, dangerous White guys do. Or guys from 1963 suddenly knowing that they are being watched by video surveillance cameras. Or that time-travelers would use that to ... hire hitmen. Of course!

It is naturally, chick crack. Women love this stuff, the good (puzzles, women love puzzles as any Agatha Christie fan knows), and the bad (basically the semi-lesbian, fat Mexican guy, and the cranky old guy have to chase down evil White male America from 1963 and imprison it). There's a metaphor there, and its very obvious. The shows creators feel the old, straight White male working man's San Francisco is an affront to reality, and want to bring it back to life just to imprison it. Again, chick crack: importance and unraveling the mystery without any responsibility or duty. To country, justice, family, or anything. Or sorting that out. Nope, just easy moral victories over cartoon bad guys. Because everyone knows, that in San Francisco, the most horrible crimes are committed by ... White guys.

Nope, the words of SFPD Captain Michael Biel on the causes of San Francisco's 11 murders in 2011 are:

But police Capt. Michael Biel told the board’s Public Safety Committee the killings are unrelated and do not represent a specific crime wave. Biel said only one of the 11 homicides committed so far this year has been gang-related. Most of the rest, he said, involved social acquaintances and ongoing disputes over money or drugs.

Now, what sort of person kills casual acquaintances in disputes over money and drugs? Oh I know, I know! White guys. Usually icky beta males or lower class blue collar guys. After all, we all know the crime waves WWII vets committed (one of the bad guys in Alcatraz is a WWII vet who stole to feed his family).

Person of Interest, after an interesting start, has followed the path of pandering to the female audience's prejudices. While the pilot played with expectations, the icky beta male White guy being the victim, the "hot" woman being the killer, the main plot, bad corrupt White cops framing innocent Black victims had a noticeable subtext. All the cops were fat, bad looking ethnic White guys, Italians, Irish, and not the handsome good guys.



The most recent episode was the most laughable, embodying Eric Cartman's South Park Dictum that Black people can do no wrong. The character, the person of interest, is a beautiful Dominican woman who is a struggling lawyer, trying to free innocent Black cons wrongfully sent back to prison by their corrupt (again fat and unattractive Italian) parole officer. So the person at Child Protective Services can get a kick-back on falsely claimed kids cared for by the foster parents. The conspirators? A middle aged White couple and ... yes! An Icky White Beta Male. The "twist" is we are supposed to suspect, briefly, a noble Black woman who runs the place. Not the icky White beta male who expresses a romantic interest in the beautiful Dominican woman.

Why that plot point? Because it confirms what most of the White female audience "knows" with religious certainty. ALL Black people are noble and good, and never ever EVER commit crimes, it is racist to think so. The REAL threat is icky White beta males who might even **GASP** ask them out. How awful. Of course they are murderers and corrupt.

How does this willful denial of reality exist? Because most White women have no real contact with actual real, Black male criminals in urban areas. Or noble Hispanics. Those who do, like Alexandra "Asians in the Library" Wallace are not real happy about being second class citizens at best, harassed and threatened at worst. Black ex-cons are not in reality, noble guys trying to "turn their life around" for their son. They are in fact, brutal and dysfunctional and totally without much hope for anything else but aging out of violence. Productive and trustworthy members of society they are not.

This makes the show far different from the 1980's "Equalizer" which was also set in NYC. There, brutal Chinese kidnap or Dominican drug gangs ruled places, or organized crime, or various drug rings. While there were plenty of evil White guys, the beta male White guy was often the one the Equalizer (the incomparable Edward Woodward, sorely missed) protected. Heck even glamor-show "Miami Vice" had no problem in depicting the reality of the drug trade then, mostly Columbian drug lords. But back then, more men watched television, and therefore pandering to female-led PC was not the main concern.



One of the subtexts is that the bad guys are really bad because they are ... racist. "Framing" Black guys for committing the crimes that evil Blue Collar White guys of Ethnic Origin or Beta Male White guys do. I've seen that particular plot point three times on the show this season. That's no accident, undoubtedly the audience responded and it got repeated.

If you don't like PC, you have to destroy TV. Period. Or remake it into a place where shows fear offending .... beta male White guys, and Blue Colar guys of Ethnic Origin.

Either destroy female-led consumerism (by promoting female thrift and value-buying) or start suing the hell out of these production companies and networks for defamation of class. Sue and sue and sue and sue. Sue till the cows come home. And then sue some more. Attrition warfare against an enemy with limited time and money. Force them to abandon the shaping of culture to feed the White female professional viewpoint at its worst not best.

Puzzle stuff? I'm with the female viewers on that one. Its fun! Why not? Character development (but not by icky sex or "shocking" turns to "evil" out of comic books and soap operas) are also a positive development due to women viewers. But lets have an end to the chasing down and imprisonment of the Straight White male past, and icky Beta Male or White Ethnic guy as villain wrongfully framing innocent Black ex-cons. I'd rather watch vampires, witches, and fantasy characters out of "Grimm." Its more believable.
...Read more

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

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

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

What the Help Says About America and Obama

The movie "the Help" has of this writing (Friday, Aug 26, 2011) made approximately $82 million at the box office, against a production budget of only $25 million and a publicity budget quite likely of $30 million. The movie is well on its way to being at least mildly profitable, though nothing like the big-budget winners of say, Iron Man and Iron Man 2 or the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. But still, the movie has been successful. It is worth noting the reasons why the movie (and before it New York Times best-selling novel) has succeeded in what the movie says about America ... and Obama's chances of being re-elected.


Of course, a good deal of the movie's success has to do with counter-programming. It is quite simply the only chick-flick available now. Women like to go to see movies too, and the idea of say, sitting through Cowboys and Aliens or some other action film doesn't appeal to them. In the same way that Jason Statham movies often take advantage of being the only action flick around, this movie benefits from savvy scheduling. The success of the novel, of course is reflective that the bulk of the book-buying public are women. No one would argue that Twilight is a work of great mastery, but women ate up that stuff like crazy. Romance novels from Barbara Cartland on have sold well, and if instead of Fabio on the cover there is the thrill of a hunky, glittery-gay vampire lurking inside the novel, well that's just the market working to serve a hungry readership and audience.

And yes, the "help" even in say, early 1960's Jackson Mississippi was far more likely to be named Frigidaire, or Kitchenmaid, or Hoover, than anything else. Few American housewives had domestic servants of any kind, back then, and even fewer today. Those who do tend to be on the rich side of things. The reality is that Rich and Powerful Black Men employ domestic servants, and these servants tend to be illegal aliens from Mexico. Not downtrodden Black women in the 1960's caring for White babies. The real "help" was automation, and machines, that made domestic life entirely different, in rich countries first and then poor nations. Hans Rosling remembers how in Sweden, his grand-mother cried when she got her first Washing Machine:



Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, garbage disposals, vacuum cleaners, all made domestic life far easier for the 1950's housewife. Allowing her to work outside the home in the 1960's and onward. The help was not oppressed maids in middle class houses. It was machines, that transformed the brutal work of women in the house to one of manageable chores. Meanwhile Desegregation happened not because of some noble crusade by White women and Black people, but because Whites had already left places like Jackson and New Orleans, for suburban places far from Blacks. The cheap automobile, provided by Ford, GM, and Chrysler, allowed people to move far away from the urban life, including far away from Black people, and live in air-conditioned isolation, away from the hustle and bustle.

This process had begun, first in places like New Orleans, when the St. Charles Streetcar started running in 1835. People moved out to the more genteel, and isolated places along St. Charles (originally where just a few Plantations and houses stood). The same was seen in London, where the commuting process along regional railways started around the same time. If you could avoid living in the city, it was better. Less polluted and stinking (before the advent of modern sewage systems, the city meant chamber pots emptied out onto the street, and of course horse manure everywhere), people moved out to the country the way only Kings and Emperors had before. Technology is wonderful, it allows ordinary people to get wealthier!

In the 1950's, people moved out of cities like New Orleans and Jackson, MS for the suburbs. In New Orleans, the White middle class moved to Jefferson Parish, or Metarie (home of Britney Spears), or even North Shore outposts like Slidell. Air conditioning and television replaced sitting on the front porch, desperately trying to catch any evening breeze, and gossiping with the neighbors. The great roaring White Middle Class withdrawal from public life dates to about that time.

So nope, the picture "the Help" paints of an oppressive domestic serfdom in the South in the Sixties was false. Whatever semi-serfdom operates today, is the province of celebrities and powerful people, any number of which are Black as well as White. Nearly all Americans cook their own food, wash their own cars, care for their own babies, and have no desire to change. Their only wish -- more powerful technology to make each task easier.

Rather, the key to understanding "the Help" is the basic plotline. A young White woman, Eugenia Phelan, nicknamed "Skeeter" returns from College to investigate where the maid who raised her has disappeared to, and discovering a systematic series of racial oppression ... writes a gossip book about the mal-treatment of the maids by her mother's friends, and their scandals and secrets to boot!

Yep, no standing up to violent abuse by police dogs and firehoses on national television. No investigation of secret killings and burials of civil rights workers by police, at the risk of her life. No non-violent resistance to segregation's uglier practices, with predictable violent consequences. Nope. The protagonist ... writes a gossip book. The protagonist avoids "getting married" (her mother's big dream for her) and instead succeeds in being an "important writer."

In the movie, things are even clearer. The heroine is played by the much younger and hotter Emma Stone, while the bad women are played by older actresses. If you wanted a clearer picture of what "Civil Rights" today meant, you could not find one. Civil Rights amounts to a constant status-struggle by hip young women to over-turn the older women's status and seize it for their own. This story is why the book sold so many copies, to female readers, and why the movie was successful, apart from chick-flick scheduling in the middle of "testosterone action Summer."

For a significant portion of the White, professional, and female demographic, it is always 1963. But that 1963 is not the real version, but rather a fantasy construction of place where they and their projections are the heroes, defeating the forces of evil by ... writing a gossip book.

That's pretty thin. True, Obama does well with White College-educated Women, and poorly with all other Whites:

College Educated White women: 56% approval.
College Educated White men: 38% approval.
Non-College White women: 34% approval (lowest).
Non-College White men: 35% approval.

But even White College Educated Women, prone to using Black people in internal dramas over status with other White women (there are few male characters in the movie and book "the Help") ... need to eat. Or buy gas. Or clothes. All of which have gone up in price under Obama while wages and earnings remain stagnant.

Obama benefited from a perfect storm in 2008. An economic collapse and a Republican opponent who wanted to lose to gain the respect of the NYT and his daughter, who HATES HATES HATES Sarah Palin (echo of "the Help" by the way, you can see its power). Now instead of running against the Man, he IS THE MAN. Americans want results, not a symbol. Largely, people have tuned him out. His speeches tend to be followed by yet another drop in popularity or approval. Obama lost White men voters, but gained in White women voters in 2008's Presidential election, to carry the day when adding all non-White votes on top of College Educated White women voters.

Yes, there are plenty of White College Educated women willing to play eternal status games, with "enemies" like Sarah Palin, or Michelle Bachman. But as long as say Republicans avoid nominating women who bear a resemblance to say, Sissy Spacek (one of the villains in "the Help") and focus on economics and Obama's responsibility for the same, status-games will not save Obama. No matter how much women like Meghan McCain want to gossip about Sarah Palin types. "Change begins with a Whisper" (the tagline of the movie "the Help") but Hope and Change have left folks without much change ... in their pockets.

Obama seems to be basing his entire re-election campaign on appealing to the inner "Skeeter" of his White College Educated Female supporters. While it is true that he allows them to play moral superior to those they have rivalries with (again see Meghan McCain and Sarah Palin) that's thin soup these days. "The Help" shows how the Civil Rights struggle ends. In farcical idiocy, akin to the severely retarded and deformed Hapsburg Emperor who cried "I am the Emperor, and I want noodles!" at a state banquet.

The Help won't help Obama.
...Read more

Arrow of Desire: Sexy Not Dependable Men

A couple of recent articles in both Larry Auster's site and the Wall Street Journal show how the arrow of female desire in America (and really the West) has changed over the years. Towards Sexy not Dependable men. It is a massive shift, one likely irrevocable, with profound impact on family formation, wealth creation and retention, and national power. A massive preference for "sexy men" means basically an America and a West that is poor, violent, generally static, and unable to innovate around and over problems.


First, the view from the Upper Middle Class. Susan Gregory Thomas is a writer for the WSJ, Washington Post, MSNBC, and other news outlets. Her memoir of growing up as one of the children of Boomer Divorce, and the cost, is worth quoting from:

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend.

The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents' marriages.

Thomas talks of her search to avoid divorce and the pain it brings. Yet, by marrying a guy who was dependable, and solid, a guy she takes pains to praise, it is clear that ... she had no sexual desire for him at all. A boring Beta Male, no matter how good at taking care of kids, running the house, cooking, and all that, inspires nothing but contempt. She notes she had not slept with her husband for years. The contempt for lack of sexiness oozes off the page:

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I'd never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn't the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.
…
To allow our own marriages to end in divorce is to live out our worst childhood fears. More horrifying, it is to inflict the unthinkable on what we most love and want to protect: our children. It is like slashing open our own wounds and turning the knife on our babies. To consider it is unbearable.
…
But marriages do dissolve, even among those determined never to let it happen. After nine years, my husband and I had become wretched, passive-aggressive roommates. I had given up trying to do anything in the kitchen and had not washed a dish in a year. My husband had not been able to "find time" to read the book I had written. We rarely spoke, except about logistics. We hadn't slept in the same room for at least two years, a side effect of the nighttime musical bed routine that parents of so many young children play in semiconsciousness for years on end.

Yet I never considered divorce. It never even entered my mind. I was grateful that my babies had a perfect father, for our family meals, for the stability of our home, for neighborhood play dates.

But then, one evening, I found myself where I vowed I'd never be: miserable, in tears, telling my husband that we were like siblings who couldn't stand each other rather than a couple, and listening as my husband said he felt as though we had never really been a couple and regretted that we hadn't split up a decade earlier. "I'm done," he said. It was as if a cosmic force had been unleashed; the awful finality of it roared in like an enormous black cloud blotting out the sky, over every inch of the world. It was done.
…
I had married the kindest, most stable person I'd ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.

No, "divorce did not just happen." Any more than sex with an Alpha Male "just happened." Even with every reason to remain married, the woman divorced because a non-sexy, non-dominant male, is simply too repellent for most women to stomach for very long. Even Upper Middle Class ones with strong emotional reasons to remain married (note her imagery comparing divorce to slashing her babies with knives, strong stuff). But the pull of an Alpha male, and sex with one, was simply too strong. She married the kindest, most stable person she'd ever known. And grew to loathe him, as a sexless sibling, instead of a sexy man.

How many men can be sexy, all the time? Not even I'd wager, Antonio Banderas or Brad Pitt. A normal man, domesticated and involved in child-rearing, will not be sexy for long. No man, not even Brad Pitt, looks sexy changing diapers. Or cooking dinner. Or taking care of kids. Those are the unsexiest things a man can do, besides World of Warcraft and Cosplay. Well, maybe Star Trek and Star Wars nerdery qualifies too.

Then there is the view from the White working class. Larry Auster has the story of one Roderick Shonte Dantzler, who in Grand Rapids Michigan, killed seven people, including an ex girlfriend, her sister, her sister's daughter, his ex-wife, his daughter, and his ex-wife's mother and father. Before killing himself (he got the order wrong, he should have killed himself first). Sad and ugly though this is, it is not unusual, and the cross-racial issue is not as important as Auster thinks it is. Here in Southern California, not a day goes by without the same story playing out, only all the victims and the perpetrator are Latinos, generally Mexican immigrants (illegals) with little or no English skills. Here is one from the Orange County Register. Here is another.

No, what I found remarkable was that Roderick Shonte Dantzler, a man on anti-psychotics, in and out of prison, with no visible means of support, a man who threatened to set his own mother's house on fire, had a daughter by a much younger woman, and three attractive ex-girlfriends. The man's daughter, who he murdered, was by simple math conceived by her mother when she was 16 or so, as Larry Auster reports.
Dantzler married her ... while he was in prison. For shooting five times at a car with a (White) couple in it, in a road-rage incident. One would think this would prove to be a barrier to romantic love, but apparently not. Again, and I cannot stress this enough, a man with a prison record, no visible means of employment, on anti-psychotic medications, a man who threatened to burn his own mother's house down ... has three ex-girlfriends. One of whom he married and conceived a child by.

Note, not one weird/crazy woman found him attractive. By all accounts three working class White women found this guy attractive enough to become his girlfriend. None of the women were repulsive, each could have easily found more dependable, more reliable, and certainly less dangerous men to date and or marry. Yet they chose -- this guy. It is remarkable.

What is going on?

Among the White working class women, no less than among Black women, or Latino women, illegitimacy is rising. And the reason is, these women all demand sexy men. Sexy men don't stick around. They don't do dishes, cook dinners, help raise kids, contribute to the household, and certainly never change diapers. That's for loser Beta Males. Sexy men are well, sexy. And for working class women, that means T-H-U-G-S. That was true for Black women, by the early 1960's, and exploded by the late 1960's. For Latino women, it shifted sometime in the mid 1980's, judging by illegitimacy rates of only 17% in the 1980s, compared to over 50% today (Black women today have national illegitimacy rates of over 70% nationwide and over 90% in the urban core). For Working Class White women, illegitimacy is over 40%, according to Charles Murray.

A Black family, contrary to "noble Platonic lies" that TV advertising, movies, and the like tell us, is a single Black mother with two or more illegitimate kids by different fathers. This is not a recipe for a happy life for children. Kids of different fathers generally hate each other, and any observer of either faculty politics or dynastic politics knows that when kids fight, over trivial scraps of affection by a single mother, the effect is like a Plantagenet bloodbath, only with faculty politics low-stakes. Someone dies not for reasons of state, and dynasty, but because Mom favors the half-brother more.

Latino/Mexican families are rapidly approaching this point of no-return.

So too, are White working class families. This group is getting to it later, and slower, than the other groups, but it is getting there all the same. The train might be a bit late, but the same hellish destination awaits.

Even worse, so are White Middle and Upper Middle Class families heading for disaster. Thomas deludes herself that the price for her sexual satisfaction is not her children's best interests. A "happy divorce" is an oxymoron. No matter what, at best kids face a group of "instant siblings" in the case of remarriage who will all hate each other, despise the "new parent" and compete constantly for attention, love, and affection. That is the best case. The worst case is a parade of men, who have no interest or affection for the kids, and the formation of a new family by the ex-husband and the abandonment of the old one. A "shared family" is no family at all. Men simply seek to create another one to replace the one they lost. With the kids falling into the cracks, from which they never get out.

Steve Sailer has posted perhaps the best column he's done yet. On why there is no real "diversity" among the Women's (and Men's) US Soccer teams. Among his points is that the concerns of modern, Upper Class White parents is high parental AND paternal investment in kids, particularly daughters (to keep them away from sexy men who will get them pregnant at age 16 like Roderick Dantzler). With an emphasis on wholesome, outdoor sports that lead to College scholarships, not pro sports careers, and a lily-White, Upper Class environment. No Thugs, bad boys, goons, Chavs, etc. allowed.

And this is because the economic environment is incredibly competitive. As blogger Half-Sigma has written (be sure to check out his bios on the NYT writers, he's covering them all and so far they are all well connected, well-born, hereditary wealthy upper class folks which explains a lot) unless you are an economic winner, meaning the right school, the right career, the right grades, the right connections, the right attitude ... everything can blow up in your face. The winners win big, but unless you are an exceptionally talented athlete, actor, singer, or entertainer, you better be part of the prepare from Grade School track of Upper Middle Class striver. A man like say, Thomas Edison arise from poverty, to become powerful and rich and famous. Not today. It is tick all those boxes, make sure it's an Ivy or near Ivy (Stanford, Univ. of Chicago, Northwestern, NYU). Make sure its the right career, working for the right folks. Doing the right things. The littlest mistake can derail a career before it ever starts.

And this means, upward mobility requires two parents. Economic success, merely standing in place, doing no worse than your Upper Middle Class parents, means an intact nuclear family. Unfettered by divorce and the demands of multiple families, child support and the like. No parade of men, abandoned kids, and replacement families. This is something that Park Slope society knows well.

The same Susan Gregory Thomas who crowed about how she dumped her Beta Male Hubby (for a hotter hunk, btw), became a persona non-grata among the Park Slope mommies:

After all, she had gone from Park Slope matron, complete with involved husband (“We had cracked the code of Gen X peer parenthood”) and gut-renovated brownstone, to “a Red Hook divorcée,” she said, remarried with a new baby and two children-of-divorce barely out of preschool. “All of a sudden, this community I’d lived in for 13 years became this spare and mean savannah,” she said.

It was as if, she said, everyone she knew felt bad for her but no one wanted to be near her, either. Even though adultery was not part of the equation, Ms. Thomas said, “I feel like I have a giant letter A on my front and back.”

That a woman who has been divorced should feel such awkwardness and isolation seems more part of a Todd Haynes set piece than a scene from “families come in all shapes and sizes” New York, circa 2011. But divorce statistics, which have followed a steady downward slope since their 1980 peak, reveal another interesting trend: According to a 2010 study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.

For this cross section of American families — in the suburban playgrounds of Seattle, the breastfeeding-friendly coffee shops of Berkeley, Calif., and the stroller-trodden streets of the Upper West Side — divorce, especially for mothers with young children underfoot, has become relatively scarce since its “Ice Storm” heyday.

There is a reason for that:

The shift contains an economic as well as a social component.
“That this change has occurred mainly among the affluent suggests it’s not just a reaction to the divorce epidemic of the ’70s,” Dr. Cherlin said. “The condemnation of divorce is also coming from the group that is most confident it can make its marriages succeed, and that allows them to be dismissive of divorce.”

From this perspective, splitting up with tender, vulnerable children in the mix is seen as a parental infraction.

“I’ve definitely experienced judgment,” said Priscilla Gilman, author of a new memoir, “The Anti-Romantic Child,” which deals in large part with her 2006 divorce. “Everyone said: ‘Isn’t there anything more you can do? Your kids need you to be together. They’re so little.’ ” At the time, Ms. Gilman knew only one other person who was divorced. “I had progressive, feminist friends. None of them were getting divorced, none of them.”

Several divorced women suggested that the news of their marital unraveling seemed to unnerve other couples in their social circles, prompting unease about their own marriages. (That anxiety may not be entirely unfounded. One study out of Harvard, Brown and the University of California, San Diego, last year found that divorce actually is contagious: when close friends break up, the odds of a marital split among their friends increase by 75 percent.)

“There has been a striking shift in both beliefs and behavior towards marriage among educated and affluent Americans,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project. “There’s a tacit or explicit recognition among well-educated parents that their kids are less likely to thrive if Mom and Dad can’t be together.” [Emphasis added]

Is this, then, the revenge of the children-of-divorce generation, rebelling against the experiences of their mothers and fathers? When I asked people who divorced in their 20s and 30s while researching my 2002 book, “The Starter Marriage,” about why they divorced with such alacrity, the response was near universal: “I wanted to do it before it was too late — before we had kids.”

Whereas their parents were divorce pioneers in the ’70s, unsure of how marital dissolution affected children and letting caution blow in the wind, today’s splitting couples are viscerally aware of how divorce feels to a 7-year-old.

A good deal of the reason for divorce is of course, sex:

In another unexpected twist, some divorced women say they detect an unspoken envy. Other wives and mothers, they explained, were “battling it out” while dealing with the unceasing tasks of wifedom, motherhood and work.

“What I get from a number of married women in my community is jealousy of my new lifestyle,” Dr. Monet said. “Dating, going to yoga five times a week, having time for myself. Raising young kids with a spouse doesn’t afford you much time.”

But in a place like Brooklyn, income divided among two households means that your kid ends up in Public school. Where life is hell for White kids. Even in gentrified Brooklyn. Heck the property boom in the Financial District of Manhattan is partly due to the fact that there are few schools there that are not White-majority. No Upper Class woman wants their kids beaten or worse at school, where wolfpacks roam and teachers merely babysit. That won't get them into Harvard, or at worst, NYU. It means CCNY, or low-level proletarian living. Which in NYC metro area, is hellish indeed, for working-class Whites who moved down not up.

Hence the social disapproval of divorce, the shunning of the divorced women (by other women afraid it is catching). Its all about making sure your kid does not become worse off. In a place like Brooklyn the pressures to stay together to avoid the non-White underclass are strong. Even so, a non-trivial number of women in that milieu follow their urges. Note that Susan Gregory Thomas quickly had another kid with her new husband to cement the bond. [It is highly likely that half siblings will hate or at least deeply resent each other, family is not merely a random collection of people dropped in on a household. The older kids are not the new Husband's, he's unlikely to give a damn about them compared to his own, generally speaking. And the Wife has to keep new Hubby happy, he's the one she threw over the old guy for. Her older kids are unlikely to get much compared to the new kid, in that situation. After all, they came from an "inferior" father she rejected in favor of a "sexy" guy. She's already made the calculation that she could and would do better. And at event, she's unlikely to be the face launching a thousand ships, as women that age generally don't even launch second glances. She's stuck with her choice and it will always come down, in general terms to the choice she made. Older kids be damned.]

Clearly, the women of Park Slope, Brooklyn, are fighting a valiant and determined fighting retreat, a vigorous defense that Lee, or Napoleon, would have applauded. A defense that however, is as doomed as those notable military leaders conducted. Ultimately, not even the desire to do better by one's children is a force that can contend with female desire. Desire is what it is, women want, and have always wanted, sexy men. They are now in a position to get, exactly what they want. And they will get it.

For women in the working class, that is likely to be thugs-a-plenty. Men like Dantzler, of any race really. [Proof positive, somewhat tangentially, of lack of White racism against Blacks -- no consequences of any not happened to either Dantzler or the White women he dated, married, and impregnated (before killing two of them and their entire families) because of the relationships. No beatings, no threats, no cross burnings, nothing.] The important thing is sexy. Which for the working class means violent thuggery.

For women in the Upper Middle Class (and Middle Class) that is likely to be defined as stud-hopping. A fortunate few will land new guys, who hopefully will never make the mistake of actually doing any housework or caring for the kids. Women say they want it, but it makes men unsexy -- and women will never forgive that mistake. Not ever. Stud Hopping makes women happy, but at the expense of producing kids who are able to compete in a vicious, extremely competitive world where mistakes are punished ruthlessly and there is no real margin for error.

The way the world used to work, how lower to middle to upper classes formed their families, and nearly all save the top Aristocrats and Royalty (who were as distant and as alien as movie stars and pop stars are today) was that desire played a part, but only a part, in family formation. Certainly men had to have some sexiness in them. But Mr. Darcy was not the best dancer, nor the most witty speaker, nor the man who simply dominated the room by being the biggest thug. The Jane Austen model while flawed in many ways functioned well by not ignoring or sidestepping female desire, but requiring women to master their own desire. Even with full voting rights, and other liberty, women until the pill, condom, urban living, and highly mobile anonymity retained the essentials of the Jane Austen model. Which meant a deliberate trade-off, sacrificing some sexiness in men, for more stability and support, with the knowledge that even the sexiest man will grow old, gray, and unsexy. As will they too, if they are lucky.

Sexy was part of the demands on men, but not the only thing, and women would be relatively happy for just a bit of sexy, now and then, in exchange for stability and support.

That was blown apart by technology. Allowing women unheard of mobility, including physical mobility, anonymity, easy contraception, and welfare for the working class, not much lifestyle changes in the middle and upper classes. Yoga classes, dating, and such still go on. Divorce does not mean sleeping in a car, with cans of dog food for dinner. Even highly educated, professional Upper Class women will divorce when the burden of unsexy husbands are too great, and of course when an Alpha male is on the horizon, available.

The valiant, and unprecedented brave fighting retreat waged by the women of Park Slope, might last for a full twenty years or more. But eventually they too will fall. Brought down by untrammeled, unrestricted, unmoderated female desire. For sexy men. Family has changed, irrevocably. Family is now, whatever guy Mom has shacked up with, for now, and who likely does nothing and contributes nothing but being sexy. Which is a full time job in and of itself. Being sexy is not easy, just ask the Situation.

So we are looking, twenty or thirty years out, at a total collapse of the White working, middle, and EVEN Upper Classes. With only intact Asian families (where divorce is not unknown but strongly discouraged) as the knowledge elite, and hereditary aristocrats (the Murdochs, the Kennedy clan, the Clintons perhaps, and so on). America and the West will soon resemble say, in social structure, Brazil or Venezuela instead of say, Sweden. A collapse, fairly rapidly, of the White middle class into lumpenproletarianism, is something no one among the political and cultural elite has considered. If Gen X hated the Boomers for divorcing, what will the kids of Gen X feel towards both the non-White population that makes them easy lunch, and the chaotic family situation that led them to vastly reduced status from their parents? [Take Thomas's kids for an example. The older ones are unlikely to get much resources invested in them, or inherit much -- the younger one is likely to get it all. Write that out big among the next generations.]

The answer is not likely to marching jackboots (which in any event required a modern, middle class industrial power on the part of Germany, machine guns do not simply create themselves, nor do Stutkas or Panzers). But rather a grinding, feuding-style set of violence familiar to Mark Twain or any observer of the Hatfields and McCoys. That is where the arrow of desire will fall.
...Read more