Why The West Collapsed: Case Study Sweden

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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

What does Sweden itself say:

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

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

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

Or, as Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in the Atlantic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at the ads below:



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

Steve Sailer noted wisely:

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



...Read more

Weimar Cities: No One Dies For A Target Ad

Ed Driscoll notes in his post Decline of the West, that City Journal writer Claire Berlinski writes about Weimar Cities being particularly fertile for lasting contributions to world culture, not the least because they are doomed. While the main part of Driscoll's post concerns Joel Kotkin's piece on why West is doomed to lose to China and India, not the least of which is the West no longer believes in much of anything (that works). This latter point is worthy of another post, but one of the most annoying cliches is the doomed city creating great art.

This just isn't so. Besides, no one ever died for a Target Ad. Multiculturalism and PC may be status climbing tools, but no one really loves it. Weimar Cities produce edgy art that no one really loves or even remembers much. Even if the art is PC and multicultural (i.e. denigrates the West).


In order to create lasting art that moves people, across time and cultures, artists need both stability (it is hard to create art when survival takes precedence) and the ability to get paid (and earn a living). This is why great art, art that still moves people (as opposed to stirring snobbery tendencies in edgy and hip trendoids) is associated with stable societies, that had a means of paying artists.

The extraordinary outburst of creativity in the Italian Renaissance cities in the 1400's, is due to their relative stability (for the time) coupled with the ability to actually pay artists. Other places had perhaps greater stability, but not the patronage network (and various strong men eager to display their positive attributes by commissioning works). Later, power, stability, and patronage shifted north, to places like Amsterdam, or London, with artists from Vermeer to Rembrandt to Turner creating lasting works of art.

But it is in the 19th and 20th Centuries that the hypothesis of the Weimar City, doomed and knowing it, creating great art as it dies, is proven wrong. Consider art people have actually heard of, and loved. Throughout the ages. From Sherlock Holmes, to Peter Pan, to Charles Dickens, to Beatrix Potter, to Winnie the Pooh, to Harry Potter, to Narnia, to Lord of the Rings, to Mr Toad and "Wind in the Willows," a certain type of Englishness still holds the world's imagination. Perhaps no more powerful (and tragically sad) statement can be made than a young girl at Beslan, who reported that she prayed that Harry Potter would come with his invisible cloak to rescue them all. She didn't want an Angel to rescue her. Or a hip, gay, trendy and uber-PC Multicultural spokesman. Nor a combination of Michael Moore, Sean Penn, and Alec Baldwin. She wanted Harry Potter. The very model of a young English boy filled with magical goodness.

All of this, created by Englishmen, in and around London's metropolitan area, or Oxford, with the work they did either paid for by publishers, in the case of Arthur Conan Doyle and Dickens, often serialized first in newspapers and magazines, or subsidized by University professorships (Tolkein and Lewis). That power, so evident that people of a foreign language and culture, turn to it for comfort facing near certain death and horror, of a fundamentally decent Englishness, has greater pull than anything done by Bertolt Brecht or Kurt Weill. No one in great distress turned to the songs of "Threepenny Opera" for comfort and fantasy. The doomed children of Beslan did not dream that Mack the Knife would come rescue them (the whole point of Mack is that he doesn't rescue anyone, he's just a thug). Threepenny Opera perhaps being the most accessible and well known piece of art from Weimar. No matter how edgy, hip, and despairing, the work of Weimar artists from F.W. Murnau and Georg Grosz and Brecht and Weill, pale before the power, emotionally and intellectually, of the comfort of the "English Vision."

Sherlock Holmes offers the prospect of hyper-rationality coupled with artistic instinct and moderated by solid English heroism (Watson), the ability to uncover and punish wickedness, no matter how bizarre and sordid and hidden. Winnie the Pooh, the Wind in the Willows, and Beatrix Potter offer a stylized and comforting version of the English countryside, for children and adults. Peter Pan, a vision of one last childhood adventure on the verge of adulthood, and the fantasists of Tolkein, Lewis, and Rowling, offer a particularly English assurance that decency can still win out over depravity no matter how powerful. This fundamental decency and optimism has power still, even as the worlds its creators lived in no longer exists (and modern Britain slides into Dalrympian levels of depravity and post-Christian post-Nationalism).

Who was it that the UN turned to, in order to produce a pamphlet to warn children in former war zones of the dangers of discarded land mines? Why, Superman and Wonder Woman! Not Mack the Knife or Dr. Caligari, nor Dr. Mabuse.

And that leads to the other problem with the doomed city hypothesis: the extraordinary output of first London and England, from around the late 1700's through the early 20th Century, followed by the pulp and pop energy of America, offer in both volume and emotional power, so much art and culture that both in sum dwarf everything ever produced by "doomed cities" facing a Weimar future. It's like the Sun itself versus a candle. No contest.

Consider the extraordinary burst of heroes created, in just a few years, by supremely talented writers and artists when it became clear that the youth of America loved weird and strange heroes. From 1938 (and the first publication of Superman) through the early 1940's, Batman, Captain America, Hawkman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and more were created. Characters famous, and loved still. In the 1960's, a similar short burst created the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, and more. Again, still loved today. All from a city, New York, that was among the more stable, and safe, in the Western World. A city still mostly middle and working class (and majority White). Monocultural, and not buffeted by the "diversity" that Berlinski champions in her piece.

Then of course, there is music. While Rock music was not created in Memphis, Tennessee, the Sun Records songs recorded by Elvis Presley in July 1954 certainly helped popularize it, and led to an explosion, again in the US and Britain, of Rock styles and music. Musicians came from all sorts of cities, from Liverpool, or Memphis, or London, or Los Angeles (the Doors and X), or Minneapolis (Prince and the Replacements), larger cities like New York and London. None fit the description of dying Weimar cities. While the decaying remnants of Imperial British Liverpool are long gone, we can hear the echoes of what it was, in the songs of the early Beatles. Just like you can hear Memphis in the early songs of Elvis Presley, or what 1980's Los Angeles was like in the early songs from X, or what New York was like at the same time from the Ramones. All have an emotional pull and staying power that simply obliterates that of even the most accessible Weimar stuff (and Threepenny Opera is stunning in its craftsmanship, it just isn't very fun to listen to much). After all, the Music, and "Dream Police" (to steal from Cheap Trick) won't arrest you if you choose to listen to Brecht and Weill, instead of say, Presley and McCartney. Just very few people do.

In movies, of course, it is not even close. Weimar cities produce horror and other films that film geeks know and love, but don't come close to satisfying people the way, say, "Toy Story" did, or a film about a guy trapped in skyscraper filled with terrorists, as he cuts them down one by one. And that is the key difference between Weimar Cities and those that actually produce great and lasting art of meaning.

Weimar Cities are filled with despair (naturally) and what little is produced, shows the despair. Few artists can produce anything meaningful, and powerful, to most people's lives, in such situations, lacking any regular patron in any realistic manner, and without much prospect of long-term stability. Meanwhile stable cities, and not necessarily even great ones, can produce art that moves people throughout time. Elvis Presley will be loved and remembered by billions of people, as long as his recordings survive. F W Murnau, is a mere footnote, an in joke for art-movies that few see. And it is the optimism, the sunny spirit, be it of the fundamentally fair-play, decent English variety, or the brasher, mix-up Southern version of Elvis, or the weird pulp vision of comic books, or the brash can-do attitude even when there is little to do, of the 1970's "Rockford Files." Even the downbeat Jim Rockford had something to look forward to. He may have lived in a trailer, but it was his, it was at the beach, and at the end of the day, fishing with your Dad beat pretty much everything else.

And that points to the flaw in the idea that Weimar Cities create great art. No one is inspired by, much less willing to die for, a Target Ad of carefully multicultural, multi-racial, multi-confessional people playing about in John Lennon's "Imagine." Long after everything but the melody is forgotten, people will still love the old heroes. King Arthur, or Beowulf, at the dawn of European civilization, trying to keep order as the Roman Empire fell and the monsters rushed in. Huns, and Goths, and Angles, Saxons, Jutes, pagans all, practicing bloody sacrifice. Or Robin Hood, El Cid, Roland, and Ivanhoe, slightly after, fending off Vikings, or marauding Muslims, or the tyranny of the feudal princes, in reclaiming ancient liberties lost but not forgotten.

This is why JRR Tolkein and CS Lewis still have power, they evoke the Dark Ages or Medieval past, and show up over and over again. The scene where the Fellowship of the Ring glide past giant, broken statues of ancient kings, would have been familiar to Dark Ages warlords passing by the ruins of Roman Aqueducts, things they could no longer build, much less maintain. So too, the obsession with the fall of the Roman Empire, which shows up in such various forms as the films of John Carpenter ("Ghosts of Mars," "Assault on Precinct 13"), the Road Warrior/Mad Max films, and many others, the images of civilization being overwhelmed by illiterate barbarians who can create nothing, only destroy. The desire to preserve what was left, resonates still (Tolkein's "White City" in the Lord of the Rings is oh so obviously Constantinople).

Thus King Arthur is always the same, the once and future king who preserves the last, best of the West and the Roman Empire against the Darkness. Robin Hood is always the same, a rogue fighter for freedom and ancient liberty lost to a tyrant. The character might have a light saber (and be called either Luke Skywalker or Obi Wan Kenobi) instead of an old fashioned sword, but he's still the same in essence. The Count of Monte Christo might be Charlie Crews (in NBC's late series "Life") or he might be "the Cape" coming this Sunday on NBC. He is still the same.

Because the West is still the same. People fundamentally don't believe in PC, or Multiculturalism, or diversity. Shiva is not more popular than Superman, in the West. People read Harry Potter, not magical realist novels like "One Hundred Years of Solitude." And there is a reason for that. People want heroes. Heroes who share their fundamental concerns: will there be something I did that lives after me? Will I matter? Did I change anything? Will the language I speak, the beliefs my people hold, my people themselves, live on or will they be subsumed by alien peoples and beliefs and languages?

This is why Sherlock Holmes is always a proper Victorian Gentlemen at 221 B, Baker Street. And why people love him far more, in the West, than say, "Super Barrio." People want and need heroes. Neither Weimar Cities, nor the tragic hipsters of TV and movie multiculturalism who emulate the Weimar crowd, can create them. Much less heroes about both ordinary Westerners and Western civilization.

Yes, Captain America can in his current owners be turned into a raving hyper-liberal. And more waify ass-kickers "sticking it to the man" be put on TV. But sales figures and ratings don't lie: the audience for it is marginal, compared to straight out heroism, from say the latest Batman films to Iron Man to "Taken." Because no one will die for a Target Ad of multiculturalism. Kotkin is right that something is wrong in the West. It is at least in part, its entertainment, which derides Western heritage and culture and tradition, in order to rectify past wrongs of Segregation and Slavery (both paid in full, in blood, a long time ago). The culture on offer, of endless debasement and cringing apologies in service of the Target Ad that never ends, is not of any real interest to anyone. No matter how much it copies the form of Max Schreck.


...Read more

Decline of the West: Why Part One

Nearly every conservative commentator agrees on the West's decline. Whether it is Ann Coulter, or Victor Davis Hanson or Mark Steyn, Belmont Club or the lesser-known but just as well written Takuan Seiyo and Fjordman, who also posts at Gates of Vienna, all agree the West is beset by specific ills.

Among the ills are, multiculturalism, political correctness, statism, socialism, a spineless response to Islam and Jihad, phony "Green" scams and Global Warming humbuggery, and a general collapse of total standards in culture, morals. Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote "Life at the Bottom," and writes at City Journal as well, has written often of the total collapse of all standards and morals in modern Britain, from the underclass to the Upper Class, as part of this collapse of the West.

But hardly anyone understands WHY the West has declined. Declined so rapidly, so thoroughly, and so completely. The few who have tried to analyze the "why," mainly Seiyo and Fjordman, have gone astray. It is their belief that a few cultural Marxists have seized control of society, and created in Seiyo's words, a group of "Pod People" (from the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and it's many remakes). Obviously, Cultural Marxists exist, and they can be found in your nearest University faculty, in various NGO's connected to government, and even as a recipient of Bill Gates $2 billion in grants, such as Rick Ayers, brother of Bill Ayers and himself a fugitive from justice for seven years.

But these cultural Marxists don't have magical powers of "evil." If people find their ideas deeply attractive, something must be deep at work all over the West, to transform society so clearly and completely in less than fifty years.

Rather than some magical powers of persuasion, unstoppable, or deep conspiracy, or anything of that nature, what has happened all over the West, from Japan and Coastal China to Italy to Norway to the United States, is a broad set of changes, mostly demographic, that have tilted the West towards Multiculturalism, political correctness, and general weakness in all areas along with a general cultural collapse in music, arts, entertainment, and morals.

These broad trends are:

• A huge increase in wealth, through global manufacturing, spurring a global consumer environment


• The collapse of manufacturing in the West


• The so-called "Gentry" of Western nations becoming impossibly rich, and therefore influential outside their limited numbers


• The decline of the middle and working classes in the West


• The Pill, Condom, increased female earning, and anonymous urban living, leading to the death of the nuclear family


• The fragmentation of unifying mass communication institutions and media


• Consumerism, advertising, marketing, and mass media becoming a gay and female ghetto


• Lack of "affordable family formation" leading to hedonism instead of old Western cultural values

Let us examine these factors, and see how they created the decline of the West by undermining the West's fundamental advantage: how people cooperate, in high-trust networks, stemming from widespread nuclear families. Since the secret of the West's advance for nearly a thousand years, from 1000 AD to 1965 or so, is the story of the spreading and deepening of the nuclear family and the resulting cooperation among people in nation-states, driving ever greater increases in wealth, technology, and military, social, and cultural power.

Wealth

As in my post The Bailout, America and the West has since 1945 experienced an exploding GDP, even with intermittent recessions, as the graph below from the St. Louis Federal Reserve makes clear:



Oil Prices have remained mostly low for most of that period, not only in the US but globally:



Source: WTRG

The low oil prices allowed the export of manufacturing jobs to the lowest cost labor (and safety and environmental standards) nations. First, Japan and South Korea in the twenty years following World War Two, and then later to Taiwan, then China, Vietnam, and finally India. Textiles, consumer electronics, computer chip manufacturing, cars, whole classes of manufacturing where the lowest cost labor and least regulations meant lower cost, moved overseas. First from the US, then from Europe and even Japan. Indeed, Pioneer is considering closing it's production of televisions. Nissan will slash 20,000 jobs, but industrial output and employment in Japan has been declining for decades.

Cheap oil prices meant that producers with lowest labor costs could produce "disposable" products such as $25 DVD players, often at big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, with minimal transport costs. Companies like Komatsu and Caterpillar, which produce expensive, relatively long lasting, and complex earth moving equipment, were still competitive with lower labor cost Chinese and Indian manufacturers. But for the most part, the story of the Post-War global economy has been a growing abundance of cheap, disposable consumer goods of no particular value, but easily affordable. Enabled by cheap oil and relative peace and stability world wide. No submarines sinking cargo containers and ending global shipping.

The US Navy's dominance, and protection of world-trade, and cheap oil fueling massive cargo ships, created the global consumer economy. This global consumer economy in turn created a tremendous amount of wealth, among shippers, manufacturers, companies contracting out manufacturing under their labels, marketing professionals, and so on. With this wealth, naturally, came power. Political power, resting not in Western countries, but in many cases across their borders or entirely outside it.

It's easiest to see this effect by comparing the world of 1955 and 2005. In 1955, the economy was mostly American, the rest of the world still recovering from WWII and much of it Communist, outside global trade except for basic commodities. The world economy was dominated by GM, Ford, Chrysler, Motorola, Philco, and so on. Cars, televisions, radios, office machines, clothes, and so on were mostly manufactured in America, with the exception of a few cheap imports from Japan or Germany. In 2005, very little was manufactured in America, and even Ford, GM, and Chrysler had half or more of the content of their automobiles manufactured and assembled abroad. Nearly all consumer electronics and computers were imported, mostly from China, and of cheap quality. In 1955, most consumer goods, particularly electronics, were expensive. In 2005, most consumer goods, especially electronics, were cheap.

This global consumerism is not limited to America, or Europe either. Ford plans to sell it's Fiesta model in China mainly to young, affluent, and female consumers. This at a time when 70,000 factories are closing and there is 20 million unemployed in China. Not surprising, either, since global consumerism like all massive global trade systems, creates winners and losers.

The winners are those who can act as middle men in various trade systems, or have pursued the lowest cost strategy by moving production to the cheapest nations. It is not surprising that the vast amounts of wealth created by Nike, or Apple, or Microsoft, which has also moved production (software development) to India, have resulted in massive gains in political power. Middle men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Nike's Phil Knight, replaced old-line moguls at GM, Ford, and Boeing. It's worth noting that neither Apple, nor Nike, nor Microsoft actually make anything in the US. Merely act as branding middle men, and hip designers.

Even less surprising is that this political power is expressed in support of soft multiculturalism, of the sort Bill Gates expresses (releasing mosquitoes into a ballroom conference on aid to the Third World, explaining that First World people should fear being infected as well). [The mosquitoes, he assured his audience later, were sterile.] Power and political influence shifted towards Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, whose fortunes depend mostly on a cheap labor force overseas, and good relations with repressive and anti-American foreign governments. It is no surprise at all that both men are substantial donors to Barack Obama, and various left-wing causes. Nor is it shocking that the fortunes of Nike, or Google, or other major international companies, depending on foreign labor almost exclusively, have embraced political correctness (Google famously refuses to celebrate most American holidays on their home page, particularly Veterans Day or Memorial Day, while celebrating the birthdays of Edvard Munch and Arthur Conan Doyle). Hardly anyone at Google is American, and the few who are embrace the culture that depends on cheap foreign labor, either the H1-B variety or actually outsourced. Microsoft is no better, having been rapidly transformed by the falling stock price (and Sarbanes-Oxley requiring the expensing of stock options) from American born, relatively well compensated software engineers, to Indian and Chinese H1-B Visa holders, with the notorious habit of squeezing out the few remaining American developers once Indian or Chinese program managers are hired in a division.

While America offers fertile ground for examining the money shifts to globalist businesses and figures, the similar rise in Germany of Adidas, in Britain of Saatchi and Saatchi, and the collapse of say, Triumph, BSA, and Goldstar Motorcycles, and Germany's Leica, offer the lesson that this process repeated itself over and over again in the West. Globalist middle-men like Britain's advertising giant won and manufacturers based locally like Triumph or Leica lost.

Collapse of Manufacturing in the West

Along with the rise of global trade based on cheap consumerism, and the massive money shifts to the winners like Microsoft, Nike, and Apple, has been the decline of manufacturing in the West. Takuan Seiyo in a recent article notes the decline of the San Francisco of Hitchcock's films, set in 1957-1963, including Vertigo and The Birds. But I want to refer to an earlier film Dark Passage, made in 1947, when San Francisco was a mostly working-man's town. A town of mostly White, Blue collar workers. A vanished San Francisco when US manufacturing, and it's labor force of mostly (but not exclusively) White men wielded considerable power. What's astonishing about this film is how ordinary and belonging working class White men are, in San Francisco. A town on film at least, of cheap boarding houses and apartments, of no great beauty and charm, of no glamor and excitement, of utter ordinariness.

One of the unseen, but huge transformations, has been that of what Joel Kotkin called the Gentrification of the Democratic Party, and the decline of blue-collar, lunch bucket unionism (which itself was mostly a White male affair). It's astonishing now, to look back upon "liberal" politics of Hubert Humphrey, Pat Brown, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and see how oriented it was towards White Working Class union men. Not because these politicians had some innate orientation towards the working class "goodness" of that group, but because that is where the balance of power existed.

Harry Truman beat Dewey on the strength of that White, Blue Collar unionism. Which itself rested on massive employment at places like Ford Motor Company, or Bethlehem Steel, or Lockheed, or McDonnell-Douglass. Jobs that paid good money, and created a large class of men who wanted stability, continued high wage employment, and the kind of American exceptionalism that drove the success of their employer.

As money and power shifted away to low-cost manufacturing countries, and with it employment and power, we could see many Pat Brown types succeeded by well, Jerry Brown. Tribune of the Marin County Gentry. Pushing the obsessions of those with inherited wealth, a concern to run other people's lives (for their general moral improvement of course), and constant status-mongering which is a feature of life among the wealthy, Brown (the very lesser) has been a fixture of California politics since the 1970s.

This is why Pat Brown built the state of California, with it's freeways and (then) world-class university system, and Jerry Brown presided over the start of it's demise, with political correctness, fawning over murderers and criminals, "small is beautiful," and other concerns of the Gentry. Neither were saints or sinners, and both politicians were arrows pointing directly where the power and the money were. For Pat Brown it was the dockworkers and autoworkers of the day (yes, once upon a time cars were manufactured in California). For Jerry Brown it was Silicon Valley millionaires to billionaires, and the old money of San Francisco.

This process, to one degree or another, played itself out in Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and pretty much all of the West.

Decline of the Middle Classes

That the middle classes are in decline in the United States (and across the West) cannot be doubted. Housing affordability is part of that, which in turn is driven by two factors: price of housing, and income.

Housing prices all across the West, from Ireland to France to the UK to America, have risen. They have risen the most in coastal or capital cities, with severe constraints on expansion, and lots of relatively educated, young, and ambitious people flooding into them. New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, and Los Angeles typify these job centers in the US, and London, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona typify them in Europe. Housing is less expensive in regional centers, away from the big money, and larger groups of young people. Cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City have all grown through this appeal of cheap land. But the cheap land comes with lower salaries, and less opportunity to meet particularly younger, educated, professional women.

Meanwhile, real income has declined as a measure of housing affordability. Wage increases have not kept pace with inflation, and outside bubble occupations, such as software engineers in the Dot-com bubble, or real estate people in the housing bubble, actually declined in real purchasing power excluding consumer electronics (and before biofuel idiocy, food). It does a prospective husband no good to have a closet full of X-box equipment and no ability to purchase a house.

Even with the decline of housing prices, most properties remain without buyers, because income is so uncertain. The ability to buy a home, after all, is a bet that earnings for thirty years or so will be stable enough to provide enough money to cover the mortgage. Since the 1970's, the economy has been on one bubble after another, without sustained productivity growth and industrial production and exports that drive broad wage increases and thus wealth across the broad spectrum of the populace.

In short, the West has gotten poorer, mostly, in the most important things: the ability to buy a house and start a family. The move away from broad industrial production is the reason why.

Death of the Nuclear Family

Along with the lack of affordable housing, has come a profound shift in the way men and women relate to each other and form families. Or rather, fail to form families.

First off, women are increasingly having children as single mothers, as the 2006 US Census Survey on women and fertility shows. Depending on how you add things up (note page 6 of the PDF) "not married" can mean living with an unmarried partner or not, and can be either 36% or 41% of all births within the last twelve months of the Survey. I incline to the 41% figure (adding up the 35.5% of not married and 4.8% of "living with unmarried partner"). But to each his own. As noted in the report and elsewhere, births to Black women are 70% illegitimate, and 90% in the urban core, and among Hispanics it is approaching 50%.

The "good news" is that the Census Bureau is responding to these numbers by redefining "legitimacy" as a member of the opposite sex who resided in the household for at least a week. So if Mom's boyfriend stays over that long, the birth is reclassified as "legitimate" or with a claimed father. Political Correctness at it's finest.

Men and women used to get married far younger in the West. At far higher rates. See my posts here for example. Now, the trend is the opposite. Children are delayed, and when they come single motherhood is often a choice.

The typical path for a young woman in 1960, say, was to graduate from college, work for a few years, marry a man, probably 6-7 years her elder, have two kids, return to the workforce at some point. Now for a young woman, in 2009, it is to graduate from college, work for twenty years, a great many love affairs but no real desire to pair off with a "good enough" man rather than the perfect guy, and one designer eugenic yuppie baby, through IVF, or adoption from China.

The Pill, the condom, rising incomes for women, anonymous urban living, as Roissy in DC has noted [Don't let the Pick Up Artist stuff scare you off, he has startling insights into how dysfunctional the male-female relationship has become] enable women worldwide to achieve a seeming utopia, what City Journal writer Kay Hymnowitz has termed the "New Girl Order" of consumer goods, control over their own fertility and sexuality, fashionable clothes, independence, and all around fabulousness! Just look at how Ford in China is targeting "Mei" (the personification of their customer) for sales of the Fiesta. Even in the land of "Little Emperors" and male preference, Ford would believe that sales lie in the New Girl Order.

But like every other utopia, there is a catch. Falling Total Fertility Rates, in countries wherever there is enough female earning power, urban anonymity, and availability of the pill and condom, are the result. Italy, Spain, and Greece have point of no return TFRs. Around 1.1. White Britain and the US have under 2.1, the replacement rate, around 1.9 or so. Even places like Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran, of all places, certainly no feminist paradises, have TFRs of 1.7 or so. The rates are available at the CIA World Factbook, you can look it up!

This happens because women often delay marriage until well into their thirties, when excess baggage on both parties, rather limited attractiveness, and the dilution of the effect of bonding hormones released during sex make a high divorce or break-up rate (for those never marrying but cohabitating) a near certain thing. A man or woman with many, many sex partners will not have any practical hope of bonding with one partner. Certainly not when both have far less limited attractiveness compared to their salad days, when sheer physical attraction could get them over inevitable bumps in the relationship. Even worse of course is the pairing of a woman with many, many sex partners, and a man with relatively few.

Women spend most of their time single, and as a consequence care intensely about what their peers think of them. This bleeds over into men's relationships as well, any young man who is single knows well the importance of looking the "correct way" for whatever fashion holds, and having the "correct" opinions and accessories to have any success in the dating market.

I submit for your amusement: Victoria Beckham hates Straight Guys (most young White women do), Young British Women more promiscuous than men (not sure I believe this one, but data to back up Roissy's general first-hand observations about the dating scene), Britain the most promiscuous nation (this one I believe), same here, the Death of Dating, Certain women regard Drew Peterson as a Catch, and my all time favorite NY Times Redefines Family.

Now, by no means should these links be taken as endorsement that women are somehow "bad" or that they hold responsibility for the decline of the West. But I don't think any casual observer can say that the lack of social institutions, mores, and limits on women's (and men's) actions, sexual expression, and behavior has been a positive result. We see in these links the expression of hatred towards straight White men, general promiscuity that prevents any possibility of a happy marriage, the death of dating and judging the opposite sex on behavior, decorum, character, and other things other than pure physical animal attraction, and murderous thuggishness as the attractive markers of men for women. To round everything out, we have Single Motherhood by choice.

No single factor other than the collapse of how men and women relate to each other, and the inability to form even the nucleus of a nuclear family (lacking only the capital to start having children in a house of their own), explains the fall of the West.

Women live in a constant status competition, for fabulous clothes and pecking order. No article encapsulates this than the recent Marie Claire article "Why I Left My Beta Husband"

A few years ago, my husband, Mark, and I were at one of those hip downtown restaurants sipping mojitos and nibbling on lime-spiked seviche when one of my bosses appeared from a cloud of Cuban-cigar smoke and patted my shoulder. When I introduced him to Mark, he naturally asked what he did for a living. We both froze.

"I do some freelancing," Mark said.

"He studied film at NYU," I said at the same time.
Mark looked at me and shrugged. "I stay home with our daughter," he said, as my colleague quietly balked.

"He makes it possible for me to do my job," I said, laughing. But inside, I was mortified. Technically, I had it all back then, including a gorgeous toddler and a cool job.

What I didn't have was a husband I felt proud of.

Which is the social landscape women inhabit, all the time, of the constant pressure to be hip, cool, trendy, and of course with the correct accessories, Apple computer laptop, fair trade latte, and husband that impresses your boss.

This forms the social landscape of the culture at large, as appeals to women dominate the consumer products industry and the dating market of course. Seeing as how there are more men pursuing single women than single women pursuing men.

Women of course, hate Beta men. See Roissy's blog for more details, especially the comment on top by T AKA Ricky Raw, on the attitude of women towards the Mo Rocca types. Women really do hate most men, because after all, most men are indeed "Beta." Victoria Beckham might be extreme, but most women would share at least some of her attitudes.

It's easy to see why. Beta guys with no social dominance and status hit on them on all the time, and when they don't hit on them, they stare at them or other, unwanted attention. They also provide competition for the limited amount of high paying "cool" jobs that women either occupy or hope to move into, and worst of all, don't excite them. "Boring" is basically a synonym for White Guy among women. Gay men are "fabulous" without having any desire for them, don't block the access of the Alpha man, and are "interesting" in a way that boring guys who work in the office without status just are not.

These two measures, the constant unwanted attention from guys "beneath" them, and competition for scarce top jobs and status, account for how White women are always keen to sign up for a good dose of anti-White male bashing and discrimination. Not just Robert Reich, but most White women, would agree that "No White Men Need Apply" for bailout money, or much of anything.

If there was a process designed to create an alliance of women, gays, non-Whites, in attacking the traditions, cultures, and political alliances of the West as it was before 1965, it would be hard to top the current arrangements. Dear readers, please do not take my words for this. Check out yourself any of the following sites, and explore the attitudes of women towards Barack Obama, traditional Judeo-Christian culture, traditional morals, White men, the military, political correctness, and more therein. Explore: TMZ.com, Televisionwithoutpity.com, and Dlisted.com .

Do not just take my word for it, see for yourself.

Once you understand, most women will be single their entire lives, their social and emotional lives fed by a bunch of Alpha men, who decrease in frequency and duration as they age, and are transient in any case, and "friends" who are nearly all female, and replace the nuclear family, but require a constant struggle to maintain status-pecking order, things become clear. The dominance of political correctness, a fashion in opinions, mirrors that of fashion in shoes. Wacky fads, including "Green" mania and Global Warming, and the hatred of the White guy it all makes sense.

Even the desirable nature of men such as Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Drew Peterson, Chris Brown, and Roman Polanski becomes clear. Women, no longer needing to, on their own account, and not having social institutions and mores forcing them to, do not judge men by what they do and the content of their character revealed by action. Rather, they judge them based on how much status and social dominance they possess. A Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a 13 year old, can be lionized by a female documentary director. Because he's famous and other famous people think he's cool.

This represents, by the way, a radical shift in how women viewed men. Enabled by the pill, condom, anonymous urban living, and the ability to live their own lives free of integration into a stable community (and fearing censure of same). Take away any two of these and women would revert back to what they were before. And such men would have much to fear from women on any jury.

Nor can the male sex escape censure. Britain's New Year looked like this. The inevitable result of men competing for women on social dominance quickly degenerating into pure thuggery. Just as bad were the drunken women falling apart into stupors on the sidewalk, and being left there, defenseless.

The failure to defend women, in either the Virginia Tech shooting (healthy young adult males did not feel their female classmates were worth dying for, and simply sat passively waiting to die) or the Montreal Massacre years earlier, are canaries in the coalmine. They along with the spate of horror movies showing young women killed (instead of young men killing the monster and well, marrying them or what have you) are part of the disconnect between men and women.

Increasingly, men are defaulting to a passive, disconnected mode when it comes to women. This is worthy of a separate post, but in brief men are largely unable to compete with the few "Alpha" types and women, increasingly, will share the Alphas among themselves, in a "soft" polygamy and choose single motherhood if they have any children at all. This is the downside of the "New Girl Order" and the changes wrought by contraceptive technology and urban living.

Women are not "bad" or responsible for the fall of the West. But the massive shifts in their behavior and lack of nuclear family formation due to the collapse of how men and women related, are indeed a large part of the decline of the West. Ann Coulter was right in that Single Mothers, and the general pain they create in poverty, early sexual contact, teen motherhood, promiscuous behavior, do indeed on average create crimes and misery. For a Black Blogger's take on this, do not fail to check out The Myth of the Ghetto Alpha Male at the Rawness.

Since this is a very long post, I will add my thoughts on how fragmentation of the mass media, consumerism and the capture of marketing and advertising by and for women, and the rise of hedonism to replace the nuclear family, have contributed to the decline of the West.

But in short, I think massive technological changes have created the decline of the West. The pill, condom, urban anonymous living, great mass consumerism wealth accruing to middle men elites, decline of industrial production in the West, and status mongering among single men and women account for pretty much all the decline of the West.
...Read more

The Bombay World

The Jihadist, terror attacks in Bombay, which have at latest report have as many as 300 feared dead, are the symbol of the problems of the modern world. For most of the Twentieth Century, threats to Western nations were from industrialized, modern powers. Either other Western nations, such as the Kaiser's or Furhrer's Germany, or Soviet Russia, or modernized Asian nations such as Tojo's Japan or Mao's nuclear armed China. Failed nations and states like Pakistan or Somalia were not considered threats. What armies did they have? What navies? What strategic air forces or ICBMs? That of course has all changed, mostly without anyone noticing it until now. When it must be noticed.

The problem is that the diffusion of modern technology, like the AK-47, across the globe allows even failed societies like Pakistan to export their troubles to neighbors, or even distant places. Like England or the United States. Technology has become so cheap and widely available that even places that can't produce it on their own can buy the technology in the global marketplace. The United Nations in 2001 estimated that an AK-47 could be purchased in many places in Africa for as little as $6. That is the price of something that is a commodity. While doubtless prices have risen since that report, the ubiquity of the AK-47 worldwide is proof that Western nations no longer have technology advantages.

From what is known, by reporting from various sources, the Bombay assault was planned for a year in advance. Training was conducted in Kashmir and Rawalpindi (the military heart of Pakistan). The attack team consisted of between ten and possibly as many as twenty men. Considerable logistics support was required, to stash arms and water and ammunition inside the hotel, and other places, and keep the hotel staff away from the rooms or prevent them from reporting the arms and water caches. Targets were carefully surveilled, and the targets included the very obscure Lubavitcher Jewish Center in Bombay, which was unmarked and unknown to nearly all of Bombay (so much for security by obscurity). The gunmen operated in pairs, in the manner of US Marines and other American combat infantrymen. The gunmen, according to the survivor, expected to survive and escape. The goal, according to the survivor, was to kill as many people as possible, the number that the attackers desired to reach was 5,000 people.

India is a nation of about a billion people. The "demands" of the group claiming responsibility, the Deccan Muhajideen, were for the entire Indian subcontinent to be put under Islamic rule and Sharia Law. It was not of course, a serious demand. The purpose of the attack was not hostage-trading, or publicity for demands. Or even killing to achieve a political objective from the target, i.e. "negotiations" or giving in to demands that did not require great sacrifices from the target. No, the killing was all about raising an exile army. Liberals consistently ask "Why do they hate us?" and Conservatives answers are often "They hate us for our freedoms." Neither provide a good answer for why Bombay's atrocities took place. It is not about us, it is about them.

Westhawk believes that the attack, like 9/11 organized by Al Qaeda, is all about mobilizing the Caliphate. The attack, in other words, was designed to create a backlash against Muslims in India and create a religious-ethnic war between India and Pakistan. This is only partly right. What Westhawk misses are the goals of men like Ayman Al-Zawahari and Osama bin Laden. As amply documented in Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," the goal of both Al-Zawhari and Bin Laden was to create an exile Army. An exile Army capable of overthrowing the regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where each could then rule his native land. This is the big flaw of Islam, in that there is no other path to power in Islamic societies except sitting out in exile somewhere, and organizing a coup, or assassinations of the leaders. There are no peaceful paths to power, by political organizing, as there is in the West. There is no accommodations, for powerful forces, as there is in say, China or Japan, in a more consensus-driven environment (and ruthless suppression of those who do not cooperate). Thus, Islamic society, heavily influenced by it's polygamy and "Big Man" society, with a chief who runs everything and owns everything, and everyone else below, predictably creates these exile forces. Algeria is plagued by the GIA and GSPC, Egypt by Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda, Morocco by Al Qaeda, Indonesia by the Jemaah Islamiyah, and so on. Pakistan is the worst, with an alphabet soup of terrorist groups, all fighting for influence and power. Each group is hoping to overthrow the current regimes, using Islam as a lever (and the convenient tactic of labeling the current regime as "infidel") and assembling it's own exile Army and group of supporters inside the nation.

Simply put, these men want power. The power of the ruler. They aim to get it. And the way they get it is by demonstrating they are winners.

Wright demonstrates how Al-Zawahari and Bin Laden only fitfully arrived at the "winning" model for assembling lots of men, money, and supporters inside their target country. At first, both tried assassination attempts and terrorism against the regime. Egyptian Islamic Jihad had a series of failed attempts to kill Mubarak, and attacks against tourists in Southern Egypt and elsewhere. Osama's attacks against Saudi regime figures, and agitation got the same results as Al-Zawahari's Egyptian endeavors. Police crackdowns, imprisonment of supporters, execution of a good many suspected backers, and very visible failure. Funding and support from backers dried up. Men stopped coming to the camps in Sudan, or Somalia, or Pakistan. Their host nations got nervous and informed them that perhaps they would find a better climate elsewhere, under pressure from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Then, with the tactic of killing lots of Americans, with impunity, both Al-Zawahari and Osama bin Laden found men and money pouring into their camps. Al Qaeda went from an obscure bunch of "losers" who were nowhere near the vanguard of Islamic Jihad to the leaders. This success of course attracted considerable American retaliation in the end, and put both men on the run and unable to take full advantage of their ability to raise money and men and gain followers inside their target nations (for takeover). But every would-be usurper and terrorist leader took notice. To gain the lion's share of money and men, one must successfully attack and kill lots of Westerners.

The danger of American retaliation could be finessed in several ways. First, by not claiming direct responsibility, and using a cover organization, while covertly spreading the word that it was, indeed, your own that directed the attack. Second, by banking on the election of Muslim-friendly (if not Muslim himself) Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States, who has written in his autobiography "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" that he would "stand with Muslims" rather than America in the event of a Muslim attack on the US. Third, by manipulating the desire for legalistic "proof" in Western societies before any action in retaliation for an attack takes place. By carefully choosing men who have no direct connection to a terrorist group, there can be no "proof" that a terrorist group was responsible.

Meanwhile, the advantage for any would-be terrorist kingpin for pulling off such an attack is great: he can very likely receive tens of millions of dollars at least from Gulf oil interests, and others, around the Muslim world. Not the least of which is the money that can be raised from Muslims in the West. It is alleged that much of the financing for the Bombay attack came from Muslims in Britain. It is further alleged that some of the dead attackers were British Citizens as well. At least the former seems plausible and the case of the latter is bolstered by the number of British Muslim Citizens (and Canadians, for that matter) captured or killed in the battlefields of Afghanistan in the last seven years. This is not surprising, a recent poll reveals that forty percent of British Muslims want Sharia Law in the UK. A full twenty percent had sympathy for the 7/7 bombers.

The problem for the West, and other non-Muslim societies, is that there are too many would-be "Big Men" sitting out in exile, figuring that they can quite reasonably expect to at least run their own lucrative private Armies, if only they can figure out a way to kill lots of non-Muslims and get away with it. This has of course, always been the case for Islamic societies, while both Western and Eastern societies have largely done away with exile leaders since well, Napoleon.

What has changed is the ability of technology, and the weakness of both Western and Eastern societies, which depend on cooperation and non-violence, to make this desire of Muslim exile leaders quite possible.

In examining the Bombay Jihadist atrocities, the relative cost of the operation is not high. Almost any well organized terrorist group could pursue it, at relatively little risk. The surveillance of the targets was relatively low risk, even if discovered the PC attitudes of most nations and screaming of "profiling" particularly America and Europe, would lead to charges being dismissed. Try again with another target. Groups of two men, five to six teams in all, could produce enough reporting and raw data to plan an effective attack. The cost for the surveillance could be as little as $20,000.

The training of the men who would carry out the attack, and their careful selection, would take more time, but would not cost much. AK-47's are ubiquitous and easily obtained in places like Pakistan, or Somalia, or many other parts of the world. Creating mock-ups of the targets, screening the men, training them, providing them with meals and sleeping arrangements, could very likely be done for only $70,000. The largest cost component of this phase would be security and investigations of the proposed attackers.

Next comes the plausible deniability. Care must be taken to feed appropriate intelligence agencies fake plans, intentions, and so on. Perhaps fake denunciations of schismatic people conducting the training in case of their involvement being revealed. Payoffs and bribes to the local authorities, must also be considered. This could be a sum as little as $80,000.

After that, comes the positioning of the arms and other supplies used in the attacks. The difficulties encountered by the Bombay attackers in coming from sea (the Indian Coast Guard nearly caught them) means that it is unlikely this means will be pursued further. It is more likely that the arms will be smuggled in or purchased piecemeal off the black markets, one at a time. This is likely to cost around $130,000 or so. Perhaps more in societies with a larger, more robust police presence, and concentrated geography, perhaps less in places with a more spread out geography and less able police. The aim being to keep the arms and attackers separate until right before the attack begins, for maximum surprise and effectiveness.

Finally, comes the infiltration of the attackers. Ideally they should enter the country through normal commercial means, as many of the 9/11 Hijackers did, though under assumed identities. They would be indistinguishable from the mass of people moving in and out of modern Western societies. The cost for this would be only $20,000 or so. Very cheap.

So the total cost of $320,000 give or take, could be estimated to produce around $20 million in funds raised from sympathetic Gulf interests and Jihadist networks in Europe and America. It certainly is risky. But then so is sitting out in the desert in Pakistan, hoping to overthrow the Egyptian or Saudi government, or the Pakistani government for that matter. Men who will take that risk, will take this risk. The only trick is to avoid retaliation by the Americans, who are at this point the only forces capable (well, besides the Chinese and Russians) of producing misery for the men who would plan the attacks.

The widespread affordability of cheap but reliable AK-47's, grenades and other weaponry, makes this tactic of mass-killing by sudden assaults likely to be repeated. Until they stop working, which means they fail to produce money and men and supporters at "acceptable" levels of risk for the plotters. Which means in turn that the plotters don't end up dead.

The likely targets would not at first be American. India was chosen for a reason. It was next door to Pakistan, it had poor security, and exiting to Pakistan was theoretically possible. Indeed if there were twenty not ten attackers, then ten have escaped. The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, France, Britain, are all convenient targets. All these nations lack any meaningful ways of killing the plotters, which to them is the only thing that matters in considering such attacks. Neither Britain nor France will nuke Pakistan. Certainly not over an attack that "merely" kills 5,000 people. These societies present a "free shot" for men who wish to become Caliph.

Which brings to mind the irony of how technology has created this situation. In the movie "The Man Who Would Be King," Sean Connery and Michael Caine use their superior technology (repeating rifles) and military know-how to become kings of "Kafiristan" (in reality the last pagan outpost in Afghanistan before it was conquered in 1895-96 by Muslims). Their reign as "Kings" comes to an end, however, when they are revealed to be men not gods, and the Kafiris turn on them. In that instance, the superior technology of the West enabled for a while, the Connery and Caine characters to pose as Gods and rule as Kings.

Now, cheap transportation from anywhere in the Globe, and cheap and available weaponry, means that the Man Who Would Be King is not a some ex-Sergeant Major of the British Army in India, looking for an easy target, but an ambitious exile from Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or perhaps a native Pakistani, who would be King himself. And his means is not seizing a weak, broken place like Kafiristan, separate and outside of modern technology. No, the ambition is to be like Reza Khan, who rose from an officer in the Persian Kossack Army, to Shah. Or Saddam Hussein, who rose from a simple assassin in the Baath Party to undisputed leader of Iraq. Or Gamel Abdel Nasser, or any one of the strong men who control the Muslim world. Muslim history and particularly modern Muslim history is littered with examples of people who assembled an exile and internal army and staged coups to become undisputed rulers of their countries. All that is needed is men and money.

Both readily available to anyone who can attack Westerners with impunity.

So these types of attacks will not end any time soon. If anything they will only increase. Because they are the quickest path to power in the Muslim world.

These attacks are not about Israel, or Jews, or Freedom, or why they hate us. It is about power and money, pure and simple, and enabled by modern technology along with the limits of the West.

However, like everything else, it will not last forever. The West has been coasting on the internal peace and prosperity bought by cheap energy, as documented in my post The Bailout, along with a lack of any serious threat impacting security and safety. The Soviet Nuclear Threat was largely neutralized by America's nuclear arsenal, creating a stand-off. Soviet Marines did not pose a constant threat of landing in New York City or Barcelona and massacring holiday shoppers in a shopping mall. Success and managing the one threat facing the West depended on cooperation and signaling (to the Soviets) a lack of any aggressive intent.

That is now changed. It is quite possible and eventually likely, that holiday shoppers or stadium-goers or attendants at Mass, or any other large public event could be massacred by Jihadis intent on killing as many infidels as possible, just so their masters and planners can assemble an exile Army.

This will change Western society in profound ways just as the threat of global nuclear war with the Soviets helped produce a deep and profound feminizing influence on the West (which was in some ways deeply beneficial).

First, in culture we will see a shift away from consumerism and status (which mean nothing if there is a realistic chance of being shot up by a jihadi in a large social setting) towards independence and self-reliance. Since those are the traits that provide success when realistically threatened by sudden violence at any moment. We will see a celebration of the spread out suburbs, which are unattractive targets to gunmen, and a disdain for the "loser" cities and concentrated urban areas.

The cry of the Indian photographer of "I wish I had a gun" will be felt more sympathetically. India has strict gun control laws, and the idea that armed Jihadis will be stopped by making sure their targets are unarmed will be deeply unappealing. The alliance of women, progressives, Blacks, Hispanics, etc. who are anti-gun ownership by ordinary people, will not change. However, their influence as more and more shootings happen, particularly in European nations with strict gun control, and horror stories of defenseless victims, is likely to wane.

SWAT teams and police units are likely to be the last line of defense. Even in compact cities like New York City, there simply won't be enough police to combat the attackers. Particularly if the police face multiple attacks to spread out their response. Politically, cities will be the last to allow hand gun possession by licensed legal owners. Because of the political alliances inherent in urban politics (women, gays, non-Whites).

However, that will just reverse the trend of "new urbanization" or the move to the cities. Instead, the safe suburbs, and shopping online, will dominate. Places that allow licensed concealed carry will have more people moving into them, and those that don't (in the US) will not. In Europe, it is likely that people will simply carry concealed and highly illegal weapons.

These attacks will not fundamentally threaten Western civilization. However, they will significantly change it. When people face the prospect of being killed at random in public places, they change their behavior. We are likely to see a switch from centralized, SWAT type response, while people wait to be killed, to a series of gunfights with the attackers. We are also likely to see the development of more powerful firearms that can stop attackers quickly, and alternatives to firearms that promise the same (vortex ring weapons, sonic weapons, microwaves, etc). Particularly as body armor becomes part of the attacker's gear.

After all, SWAT is designed to respond to fairly infrequent, violent threats. That type of protection, based on a centralized and governmental response, does not work (and certainly did not) when faced by a large number of attackers over a dispersed area.

The threat from the attackers is distributed and decentralized. It is likely that the response to the threat to be effective will be decentralized and distributed also.
...Read more