27 thoughts on “What the Deuce is Going On?”

1. Not clear what accountability without authority is. I can’t think of any examples other than scapegoating a minor official, eg Fabulous Fab instead of Lloyd Blankfein.

   • Go hang out with some 4 year old girls. You’ll see. “I’m not going to be your friend anymore!”

   • My wife tasks me with jobs where I will be held accountable for quality, but I am given no authority in how work will be done. I assume this also happens a lot in other areas of life.

     My current solution is to demand strict instructions and follow to the letter to avoid actual accountability.

2. I am gently amused that the phrase “the buck stops here” has a missing parens.

3. Which is sadder, that #1 has to preface every rational discussion of these subjects or that such disclaimers still won’t suffice?

   • ” consensus-driven to the point of repressing unpopular ideas; ”

     Isn’t that also the opposite of “consensus-driven”? If you fabricate “consesus” by suppressing preferences, how much do you really care about agreement?

4. Christina Hoff Sommers is the best on this subject. Her book “The War Against Boys” solidified her fame, and quite deservedly IMO. She is a feminist and a Democrat and she believes that the changes to the system Cowen praises are destroying little boys. Other countries are doing something about the explicit bias against boys, the U.S.’s politically-correct elite is practically damning them to a life of mediocrity for (entirely fictional) “crimes.” Only their parents can save them.

5. Yeah, I agree with #2. I would add, re: feminized culture, more focus on effort and intention, too little on results/products.

6. A different take.

7. Ha, I think both Tyler and Arnold have colored the issue via the oppressor-oppressed lens!

   Whereas the whole thing can be easily explained by the simple evolutionary nature of sexual reproduction: men are diverse (across IQ, brute force, every other characteristic), women are closer to the mean of the distribution and act as natural selection agents (selecting males possessing whatever characteristics are most useful in the current environment as mates).

   Now that there is a regime jump to a new environment (robots etc), the majority of males are obsolete and will be discarded (living with parents, no mates). A demographic recession will follow until the males more adapted to the environment (artists? entertainers? Obama?) will spread. What the obsolete males will do until they die out is interesting but the time is against them (old people don’t start revolutions). Still, if some meme that mobilize them catches on we may see war as their last hurrah (see the pointless confrontations with Russia, China).

   • “Now that there is a regime jump to a new environment (robots etc), the majority of males are obsolete and will be discarded (living with parents, no mates).”

     Except that beta males supposedly loved by the feminist left don’t actually reproduce. White knighting doesn’t lead to the production of offspring.

8. Judging by the comments to Cowen’s post, I am hardly the only one who finds his hypothesis to fall very short of the mark, and to the point that it’s clear this is one of those times when there is some ulterior motive in communicating something other than the text’s face value.

   If we are taking the question seriously, and I was at a keyboard then I could explain the two points below in detail. But since I am tapping this out, I’ll merely state what I think is going on.

   1. Cultural: Over-rapid frog boiling, so it jumps out of the pot (Gurri’s revolt of the public): Elites move the culture like a tug boat pulls a cruise ship, but sometimes there is too much tension in the chain. Either the tug boat forgets its limitations and tries to go too fast, or the issue hurts the cruise passengers more than the tug captains, and so they are especially stubborn about it and just drop anchor. An example of the first (moving too fast) is the out of control escalations of PC codes and creepily coercive revolution in norms related to sexuality. An example of the second (opposing class interests) is immigration. There is no doubt that immigration is the political story of this election cycle, and yet notice Cowen didn’t mention it. In general, the institutions that influence broad public opinion – and the social-psychological mechanisms by which they do so – have limits, and we are rubbing up against them at present.

   2. Economic: The current system (fair to say ‘neoliberal global order’ – the worldwide convergence into a narrowing band of ‘mixed econony’ welfare states with ‘tempered, managed democracy’) is showing it’s age and is inflexible in not adapting to a low growth, increasingly automated, Average Is Over world. The system was designed to depend on future prosperity which, to the extent we are still enjoying it, did not come in the expected form. A lot of the past decisions which painted us into various corners are looking increasingly unwise, reckless and even corrupt in hindsight, but it is proving too difficult to ‘renegotiate the deal’. There has been something like a ‘stock market correction’ on the ‘bubble of optimism from crude extrapolation and momentum-based wishful thinking’ of the Great Moderation and that is very destabilizing politically in both rich counties and poor. In particular, the failure of many developing counties to converge as was once hoped and adapt to the new emerging economic reality is creating a significant number of failing states and domestic turmoil and upheaval. The current political- economic model at work in most of the world is not well suited to dealing with low-sum scenarios (with increasingly concentrated distribution of income) and has long relied upon broad growth for proof of legitimacy itself when ideology is impotent or obviously fraudulent (as in China), and to bail out policy mistakes and social frictions by rising tides lifting all boats.

   The longer it takes to find a new equilibrium, reset expectations, and make people feel content ‘in their place’ rather than agitating them towards envy and resentment, the worse it is going to get.

   But people have been trained to seek redress through the political system, and if the perception is that ‘what we got now ain’t working’ then they will be more open to figures outside the usual range of what the elite gatekeepers usually allow to be on offer. Indeed, they may demand conspicuous, costly signals from these candidates that prove they are committed to being outside the ‘business as usual’ political range.

   The trouble is, the system has a longstanding defect in a profitable but parasitical political niche in which agitation towards discontent, resentment, and envy is an effective political formula, and provides an incentive too tempting to resist without levels of elite coordination we simply do not have.

   • Well put.

   • “But since I am tapping this out’

     impressive

9. Like Tyler’s post on Medicoors and Three Percenters, I took it as a bit of a trolling attempt. Lines like this are the dead give away of trolling:

   “And if you think, as I do, that the incidence of rape is fairly high, perhaps this shouldn’t surprise you.”

   Tyler shouldn’t quit his day job though, what works for Trump ain’t working so well for him.

   Anyway, your response is pretty good, especially #2.

   For a quick male perspective this was linked to me the other day. I don’t get the impression this person doesn’t like living in a “nice” world. Rather, he’d do anything to live in a “nice” world, and dislikes the forces de-civilizing it. It’s a classic masculine white male trying to impose order on the barbarians. I also had a horde of orcs try to rip me off my bicycle once, so it hits home.

   Source:
   Last week we listed our house for sale.

   It’s not that we’re leaving Maryland- not yet, anyway. It’s not that we’re struggling to meet the payments. It’s not that owning a house is too much to manage in terms of maintenance and we want to downsize. It’s not that we’re starting a family or anything like that. And it’s not, as we’d hoped when we bought it that we’re trading in our modest starter house for a much nicer one in a better neighborhood.

   For us, the decision to sell is entirely a sociopolitical one. We don’t want to live in Baltimore City anymore. While identity politics were in full swing and the city was busy voting for Pugh, Young, Pratt and Mosby (who are bumbling incompetents at best and criminals at worst) we were busy voting with our wallet and our feet. We’re giving up home ownership in the city voluntarily to go rent an apartment in Towson, two miles above the city line and an entire world away.

   This is the part of these kind of posts where we’re supposed to give a long list of reasons why Baltimore City is a civil and political disaster. We could give you in links the career highlights of the politicians we just mentioned, and there are some doozies in those highlights to be sure.

   We could conjure a very long list of Baltimore’s social problems but we’re not going to do that. Anyone who’s lived in Baltimore City for more than a month is acutely aware of virtually all those problems, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone anywhere who thinks things are going just great in Baltimore. Besides, a year ago- even before the rioting, we wrote extensively about the city’s problems and the difficulties we’ve faced living here on a permanent basis as a home-owning, middle aged, middle class adult. In more than twelve months since, the state of the city, and the state of our neighborhood in particular has declined even further.

   This is the part where we’re meant to link extensively to recent news articles on various topics so that you can see it’s not just our imagination. The way these things work, we’d be sure to put the most horrific and impossible phrases in the hyperlink text, so that they jump out on the page in red and you can see piece by piece the violence and trauma and pathos that goes on in Baltimore every day. Off the top of our head maybe we’d mention the home invasions of the elderly, the bands of machete and shotgun wielding thieves (separate bands of thieves, you understand… one with machetes and another with shotguns!), the little girls under ten shot on their front porches a block or two away from our own porch, and the alarmingly high number of homeowners who have shitwater rising up out of toilets and flooding their basements regularly here. We’re not going to do that either. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of trauma, and a lot of very literal shit. Take our word for it.

   Another necessary part of this essay is the one where we run the numbers. In a different set of hyperlinks we could show you the census data which say that Baltimore is still losing population. We could highlight the affordability crisis by comparing rents and home values to income, and we could do the old compare-and-contrast that certain media outlets love which show inequality increasing and all sorts of social and economic disparities in very tight quarters on a map. We could write reams on the property tax rate and how those taxes are pissed away freely on things like casinos and auto races and light festivals… And shiny new mini cities for the rich like Harbor Point and Port Covington. We could even cite some projections to back up our opinion that the way to fix inequality is not to add more cloistered rich people to go alongside the huge concentrations of poverty. But it’s tiresome. By this point in the essay you’re probably done clicking links anyway.

   Even if we cited all those numbers they wouldn’t do much good. We’re just going to say it plainly: crime is up. We don’t want to hear what anyone has to say about national statistics on violent crime: we don’t live all over America- we live in Baltimore Maryland USA where crime is UP. We don’t want to hear about what crime was in the 1990′s either. We remember the 90′s thank you very much, and we are no longer living in them. We live in 2016 when crime is UP. And we definitely don’t want to parse out the differences between major and minor crimes or talk about arrest rates or any of that. The kinds of crimes that are really fucking scary and traumatic and serious are UP. Just today there were two separate domestic disputes that spilled into the street on our block. One went unreported. We called 911 on the other and no cops ever showed.

   They’re even inventing new kinds of violent crime in Baltimore now. Our whole life we never heard of bump-and-rob carjackings. Now they’re commonplace. Phone snatches? Never happened until a few years ago. Besides, there’s just no way of knowing how much crime is out there. People only call the cops for a fraction of crimes, and the cops only bother to file reports in a fraction of those, just as we were reminded yet again today.

   Finally there’s the part where we breathlessly list off all the positive qualities about Baltimore. Nope. Startups, Tech, luxury apartments, fancy restaurants, the JFX Farmers’ Market, Johns Hopkins & MICA, nightlife… these are all more trouble than they’re worth. We still like being able to bike to the ballpark, but honestly we liked it a lot more when a ticket cost half what it does now and bicycling was safer.

   But before we end this post and start packing up boxes we want to tell you what the last straw was: it was the murder of Robert Ponsi.

   Ponsi, 29, was riding his bicycle home from work in January when six kids ran up to his bike and stabbed him to death in a robbery. As a city resident, one who did not confine himself to the White L, Ponsi was street smart enough to recognize what was happening to him. He got off his bike and made a heroic attempt to fight off his attackers, but even at six on one these pieces of shit were too cowardly to fight and one pulled a knife and stabbed him. At nine o’clock. He laid bleeding in pain in a hospital until 4 am when he died.

   This murder was right around the corner from our house. We had been chased by a gang of kids a block away from the spot where Ponsi was killed shortly before it happened. It’s not a stretch to say that could have been us. Two weeks ago we attended a public safety meeting specifically on the topic of gangs of teenagers attacking cyclists. It was highly discouraging to say the least. In the two years since we wrote about the problem in this post, it is safe to say it’s gotten worse. Not only could Ponsi have been us, but the same thing could yet happen to us at any time. After all, three of those very same attackers are still not arrested- still hanging around the neighborhood. Presumably they’re still enrolled in high schools, and are showing up to class and sitting next to good kids. Maybe your kids.

   We’ve also heard it said more than a little in public that a murder like this should not garner more interest or concern than any other murder and that this one has been picked up by the media because of white Baltimoreans’ own racism. We call bullshit on that. The fact is that all murders are not created equal. Some victims are targeted because of choices they’ve made in life. Some victims, like McKenzie Elliott, are not targeted at all but are just a chaotic sort of tragedy. But Robert Ponsi was targeted because a bunch of violent scumbags thought he’d make a good victim. That’s both more terrifying and more outrageous than most murders and it’s not racism to say so.

   There are also people in this town who would blame us personally for abandoning it, and for not fighting harder and doing more to make our neighborhood a better place. Perhaps they themselves should volunteer to head up the years long boondoggle it takes just to close one problem bar in this neighborhood, and personally risk the sort of threats and harassment one comes in for when one does volunteer for something like that.

   Let’s pause to take a look inside some Waverly community meetings. CityPaper columnist Kate Drabinski did just that at a Waverly safety forum…

   “The first 28 minutes (I timed it) were for the public officials to tell themselves and all of us what a great job they’ve been doing. [The mayor] SRB told us how hard she’s been listening and how much change she’s been making. She gently chided the City Council members in attendance about not yet calling for her vote to increase funding for rec centers, as if we were all going to quickly forget about the ones that have closed under her watch. There was some ego stroking for the lieutenants and commanders and lieutenant commanders, gentle laughs shared among these city officials as we all sat in our chairs, waiting for our turn to ask questions.

   A man who called 911 to report a burglary in progress asked why no one every picked up the phone. A 79-year-old woman from Ednor Gardens asked if after three or four years of calling the Department of Public Works, the police, the mayor’s office, her city councilmember, could crews finally come clean up the mess on her street made after a repaving effort. A man from up York Road asked if, when the cops bring their tactical vehicle to the neighborhood, they could maybe think about the unsafety they bring to the blocks around said tactical vehicle. A woman complained about the time somebody in the city set up a floodlight outside her house that shined into her kid’s bedroom, and no city agency would agree that they’d done it, so it took days to find someone to turn it off. Won’t happen again, she was promised.”

   In a subsequent column about a different Waverly meeting Drabinski paints a picture of a gathering that is equally exasperating and ineffective. It’s hard to get past eye rolling phrases like ‘enforced poverty,’ ‘mass incarceration’ or ‘the violence of civic abandonment.’ Look, this isn’t goddamn Gilmor Homes or the deepest ghetto. People choose to live here. We chose to live in this neighborhood, and presumably Drabinski did too. But anyway if you can get past her decrying Capitalism and harkening back to Slavery you get to the point of the meeting where attendees voice the opinion that we need to raise each others’ kids and cook each other spaghetti.

   It’s entirely possible that one of the very same people voicing those opinions was Thomascine Greene, the mother of the kid charged with doing the stabbing in the Ponsi case. The Sun profiled Greene shortly after Ponsi was killed, and we had quite a few issues with the way the whole thing was portrayed.

   First of all, Greene is described as an activist. We’re going to call bullshit on that, too. Attending a few community meetings only makes one an activist in the most general sense of the word. The article doesn’t cite anything she’s done beyond going to meetings, although we imagine it would’ve had there been any more substantial activism to cite. The Waverly Improvement Association is pretty ineffective, weak and small. Hell, we’ve been to civic meetings ourselves, haven’t we? Did we not march and protest too? If Greene is an activist she’s no more of one than the Chop or anyone else you’d care to name. We also want to say that especially in the last year there’s been a sort of holy righteousness associated with activism here in Baltimore. It’s all bullshit. Calling someone an activist doesn’t magically imbue them with grace and righteousness.

   We also noticed that the article says Greene is 66. So if she’s actually the boy’s mother that would mean she was 50 when she had him. We think this is unlikely and we believe she’s probably his grandmother. So it seems likely that the boy’s mother/father are not present, possibly having some serious problems of their own. But even if Thomascine Greene didn’t fail as a parent with the boy’s mother/father she certainly failed with him. Her quotes in that article like “It’s not hard for me to wrap my head around it” and “My eyes don’t go around corners” make us hit the ceiling every time we read them. Here’s someone who shows up at meeting to bitch and moan about “why won’t they do anything for these kids?” but she herself is in charge of one of those kids and strikes us as a lazy failure of a parent.

   If she or anyone else thinks we’re going to make the world a better place by volunteering to cook her spaghetti and raise her son, who’d just as soon kill us as look at us, she’s wrong.

   Look, we live here in the neighborhood. That YMCA she mentions is pretty nice and there’s a brand new library nearby. Greene says that programs at the Y are too hard to access. That’s bullshit. We’ve been a member of that Y. It’s right there. The programs are scheduled and published well in advance. They do their level best to make it inclusive, especially during after-school hours. If her kid wasn’t using the Y it’s because she was too goddamn lazy to walk over there and enroll him in something. This neighborhood may not be the best, but again it’s not Gilmor Homes or something. You can walk to a lot of shit from here and what you can’t walk to is a short bus ride away. The whole city and large parts of the county are easy to access.

   Ms Greene would have you believe that her son wanted to steal Ponsi’s bike because there’s nothing else for him to do. If Prince Greene had wanted a bicycle he should have walked himself down Guilford avenue to BYKE collective which exists solely to let kids earn free bikes and teach them how to maintain them. He could have looked into Jam Squad, Velocipede, or Baltimore Youth Cycling or any of several other groups. If Ms Greene wanted something for her kid to do she should have taken it on herself to go find these things which are out there and are accessible and are trying to reach kids exactly like hers.

   There are plenty of families in Ednor Gardens and Waverly whose kids are not out robbing and murdering people so we really don’t want to hear about how she’s way down in the poverty hole. Another kid arrested in that attack lives in Ednor Gardens which means his house and block are probably nicer than our own, in Waverly.

   There was much made at the time about Prince Greene’s former involvement in a debate club. He was generally portrayed in a way that, frankly, black children rarely are in crime stories. But we suspect that portrayal may have been misleading. We heard it said online by a kid who knew Greene that he was involved in debate only briefly, and lost interest in school around age 13 or 14. A 12 year old in a too-big tie and a shiny pair of hush puppies was not the same kid lying in wait for Ponsi at the corner of Venable Avenue. That article said he was in the sixth grade at Loyola Blakefield. Do you know what tuition is at Loyola Blakefield? It’s twenty thousand fucking dollars a year. The idea that this kid had no resources, lived in dire poverty and couldn’t have helped getting caught up by the streets just doesn’t hold water.

   We don’t know what happened in Prince Greene’s life between the time he was in debate club at a fancy county private school and the night he killed Ponsi. We’re not going to speculate on the events of his life. But if Thomasine Greene had been a better parent, had forced her kid to stay involved in debate club at whatever school he attended last year, and checked his homework every night and known his friends and who he was running with he might be in school right now and not jail. Whatever it is that leads a kid to make these choices it is sad, but we don’t know or particularly care what was going on in Prince Greene’s life. We’re just glad he’s been arrested and charged.

   We say all this because it’s too easy to believe the media narrative. It’s too easy take the blame off of criminals because they’re young. It’s too easy to shake your head and wring your hands and pretend a kid like that doesn’t know he’s doing wrong by stealing and stabbing and that he had no choice.

   But when you’re on the ground in Waverly, when you’ve put your life’s savings into a house just off Greenmount, one of the hardest and oldest racial dividing lines in all of America, when you’re hyperaware of absolutely everything that goes on around you real life doesn’t always match the media narratives. We wish life weren’t that way but wishing doesn’t make it so.

   We’ve been a crime victim multiple times in Baltimore City. We’ve had many friends who have been victims of crimes. It’s not all abstract statistics and it’s not all drug dealers getting what they had coming. In the last four years alone we’ve had half a dozen friends who were victims of serious violent crimes up to and including murder and attempted murder. Some of them were attacked by gangs of teenagers. Not a week goes by that we don’t scroll through our Twitter feed and see that someone we follow has been a crime victim… and we can think of at least 3 recent instances where the same people were victims of two separate crimes. When you live in this city it is not a question of whether you’ll be a crime victim, it’s a question of when and how severe your next victimization will be. We’ve had to watch our back every single time we step out of the house since the day we moved in here and we’re fucking tired of it.

   Baltimore, and Waverly, could have given Prince Greene a better life than the one he ended up with. But it can’t give us the kind of life we’ve worked hard to build and know that we deserve for ourselves. We’re going to take the first step toward living that life in Baltimore County.

10. Before more Turchin, I recommend:

    “The Evolution of Civilizations” Carroll Quigley (1961) [Liberty Fund ed. 1979] – still in print, available there.

    Also – I suggest that there may not be so much “anti-government” as there is ire at the mis-use of the mechanisms of government, particularly its necessary coercive powers.

    After all it is the USE people make of governments – governments don’t “do things” people use governments to do things. Motive matter.

11. As posted at MR:

    What is going on?”

    What we are observing, in Western Civilization, is the acceleration of the recession of individuality which began around the mid-20th century (the denigrations of the value of individual life); the advent of “mass man” (Ortega y Gasset & Oakeshott) the institutionalization of “popular” governments -and- the anti-individual, with its need for “leaders” and “Leadership.”

    Such recessions have been recurrent phenomena in Western Civilization as it came together from fragments of the Classical and other precedents, absorbing or being assimilated into amorphous (‘barbaric”) cultures during (proportionately) widespread movements of peoples over the Eurasian continent and ultimately overseas.

    With the diminutions (and actual suppressions) of the forces of individualities inter acting to establish any available points of cohesions, fragmentation of social orders and the civilization their cohesions establish is well underway (“with weigh on”); with accompanying conflict and violence, of which the last century may be a lesser precursor.

    Added: We are also observing currently the extensive and increasing flows of humans, dispersing globally, in something approaching the proportions of prior fragmentations.

12. As a big fan of MR, it’s probably the worst post I’ve ever seen on that blog.

    Most of the factual premises, let alone their ad hominen-laced interpretations, are wrong.

    For example it was widely publicized that, when disaggregated, the Deaton & Case study shows that outcomes for white females are trending downwards the most.

    As another example, anyone paying attention to US politics is aware of the fact that women under 35 prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton.

13. War and Peace and War is a great book, highly recommended.

    His thesis is that concentration of wealth produces high inequality; people get envious, social cohesion falls. Elite overproduction also produces too many elites without access to social status. Inequality makes it worse even, so cohesion among the elite collapses. The result is war. War produces cohesion through an evolutionary process (armies which don’t have it don’t win the war). War ends, peace ensues. Rince and repeat.

14. I also would recommend Peter Turchin’s book, though I never read it carefully or even all the way through. It seemed serious enough with a lot of data behind it.

    He draws on the concept of asabiyyah and takes it seriously.

15. Another Good Source:

    Is It Getting To Be About the Time When the #NeverTrumpers Should Go Radio Silent?

    Previously there were possible real-world scenarios which justified the continuing anti-Trump position:

    1. A dark horse white knight makes an 11th hour entry and runs third party.

    This is now virtually impossible, and soon will be entirely impossible. By the way, the application to get on the ballot in Texas has already passed — so, um, good luck with this one.

    2. Trump would prove so toxic in the polls that it would cause the party to do whatever was necessary to install a new candidate, even at the expense of blowing up the party to do it.

    I thought this one was more likely than the previous one. I had hopes for this one. I predicted that if Trump continued doing disastrously at the polls, the party would in fact react like a hive of bees killing and ejecting an intruder insect.

    However, Trump is not doing too badly in polls lately. Now, sure, the usual caveats apply: Hillary hasn’t gotten her own base-unification boost, it’s early yet, Trump’s problems are obvious except for all the problems we don’t know about yet, etc.

    However, the hopes that Trump would fare so poorly at the polls that it could be used to show the base We had no choice but to do this appear to be diminished.

    Now, I don’t like Trump. Should his numbers go down further — or should some horrifying skeleton emerge from his gilded closets — I’d support the Warrior Bees Attack and Eject the Interloper scenario.

    But it appears unlikely at the moment. Not impossible, but unlikely.

    So I have to ask: At this point, what is the point of the #NeverTrump impulse?

    Do you guys actually want Hillary Clinton in office, as Ben Howe, possibly just being baiting and trollish, said a few weeks back?

    You want more lies? More Benghazis? More jailed video makers?

    More Transgendered Bathrooms and Co-Ed showers? More Title IX redefinitions? More Deal Colleague letters? More Social Rape Justice hoax prosecutions?

    More executive power grabs? More lying to federal judges by Administration officials? More contempt by Attorneys General and Directors of the IRS?

    More illegal orders to release terrorists and give Iran the bomb?

    More millions of illegals amnestied?

    Remember, in the Jose Ramos debate, Hillary Clinton vowed that not a single illegal alien would be deported, ever, except for those proven to have committed murder.

    More foreign policy ineptitude? More rolling into Libya without a plan and announcing like a 15 year old boyman that “We came, we saw, we kicked some ass”?

    More Lois Lerners? More weaponization of government?

    More hidden secret email accounts? More giving national security secrets to the Chinese to keep Hillary’s “yoga routines” out of the hands of the taxpayers?

    More illegal executive actions to ban guns? The woman has vowed to overturn Heller, you know.

    More liberal Justices? When I flipped to hardcore anti-Trump myself a few months back, it was due to Trump’s horrifying poll numbers and the grim probability he’d lose and we’d get 3-5 liberal justices. Enough to seal the Republic’s fate.

    Well, flash forward two months, and Trump isn’t doing too badly in the polls. He might even have a decent shot at winning. At yet the “Principled Conservatives” who ought to be the most concerned about gifting the Supreme Court to the liberals for the next sixty years are blowing the subject off like it’s just a big lark.

    Excuse me?

    Please explain to me the continuing hardcore commitment to #NeverTrump.

    Is it…

    1. Disliking the fact that the Upper Middle College Educated Class controlled the party for decades, and made a sport of ignoring the Working Class, but now the Working Class has reasserted itself and taken over and the members of the displaced Upper Middle College Educated Class just can’t stand not being in a poll position any longer?

    2. Showing off to one’s liberal comrades that one isn’t One Of That Kind of Conservative? That is, Virtue Signaling?

    3. Attempting to save one’s professional reputation? I get this one myself — someone asked me why I was so anti-Trump, and I said the man was so vulgar, stupid, and crass that he made it necessary to oppose him simply to preserve one’s professional standing.

    So I get that idea. I get that idea an awful lot.

    But we happen to be talking about the Republic at this point.

    One of two people will be president in January — Hillary Rodham Clinton, a sociopath who was a corrupt politician even before she entered politics (remember Whitewater? Her $100,000 cattles future trading) or Donald Trump.

    What is the fear, here? That Donald Trump might be nearly as bad as Hillary Clinton certainly will be?

    Name one issue on which Hillary Clinton is superior to Trump. The most I ever here is “We don’t know what Trump will do, he could be just as bad as Hillary.”

    Oh? He could be that bad?

    Look, Drew asked a while ago: What makes obviously liberal-cultural-values Republicans actually Republicans, apart from habit?

    Maybe it’s time for the great re-sorting to begin. It’s time for actual Democrats, who are most comfortable with Democrats, and feel the most affinity for Democrats, to make their party allegiance official and simply declare for Hillary Clinton and join the Democratic Party.

    Because I cannot see any “conservative” continuing to say “Oh yeah, I want to expand Dear Colleague directives to college and put more men in kangaroo court trials for hoax rapes just to show those Trump people how little I think of their ilk.”

    Enough. Enough.

    You don’t have to get on Team Trump, and you don’t have to love him. Trump did not suddenly become well-informed or virtuous simply because he won the nomination.

    However, at the moment, he is the only plausible tool by which we can prevent President Hillary Clinton, and if that isn’t enough to at least get you to bite your tongue or find some other interest (politics isn’t especially interesting, you know; there are a thousand fields more interesting and rewarding), then you’re not merely #NeverTrump, you’re closer to #NeverReallyAConservative.

    Believe me, if Trump tanks in the polls, or if some really terrible info comes out about him (which I think is fairly likely), I’ll be the first guy explaining to the Trumpheads why we must pull the bathtub drain on Trump to save the Republic.

    But we’re not at that moment.

    And yet all around me I see people who are far too over-proud of their Upper Middle Class Background willing to elect Hillary Clinton just to prove they graduated (or at least attended) college.

    Even on a day when the IG reveals that Hillary Clinton is a criminal, the Never Trumpers continue to Never Trump.

    They’re living in a bubble world made of their own spite and ego.

    Reality is what it is. It’s not always pretty and it’s never ideal.

    But the choice is between Hillary Clinton — a fucking psychopathic monster, liar, and caudilla-in-waiting — and Donald Trump, a narcissistic buffoon.

    Easy call.

    Just put you ego to the side and remember this election isn’t about your ego, it’s about America and our shared future.

    • “Please explain to me the continuing hardcore commitment to #NeverTrump.”

      1. I haven’t seen it.
      2. Because we have no proof he isn’t worse than Hillary. I know it is hard to believe.

      • Actually, all we have to go on is Trump’s promises to be worse, but the reassurance that all his proclamations are lies.

        You think his wall means he cares about immigration. It really only means he is not serious about immigration.

        Sure, he may do a lot of crazy trolling once in office. But on the other hand, he won’t need you anymore. So, in Trump USA, maybe he trolls you.

16. Of course he calls the FPO “nazis”, because they are against mass immigration. If that’s all it takes to be a Nazi, then the great majority of the countries in the world are Nazi countries. I mean, in Japan, there isn’t a single major party that is in favor of mass immigration. Would Tyler call Japan a nazi country? If he was intellectually consistent he would. But he isn’t intellectually consistent. He’s either cynically repeating the current elite propaganda or he has been successfully brainwashed.

17. I thought _War and Peace and War_ was interesting, and some variant of its main thesis was fairly plausible, nonobvious, and somewhat supported by Turchin’s evidence. But I don’t see any good way to justify Turchin’s apparent desire to limit the asabiya-corroding effects of inequality to inequality of wealth as opposed to privilege.

    From memory, he described a French king destroying a wealthy order of knights and confiscating their wealth naturally increasing asabiya among his subjects. That being a natural pattern would explain a lot, and in fact would seem to explain much too much: acts and patterns of kleptocracy are not uncommon and seem more negatively correlated with asabiya than positively.

    From first principles it would be a surprising coincidence if all the historical peoples Turchin analyzes happen to have had compelling undocumented motives to acquire the artificially narrow focus on nominal monetary inequalities that has become fashionable in modern academia as modern academia has become ever more solidly left while shilling for foreign nomenklatura, becoming substantially a creature of the state, and ascending several tiers into the new commanding heights. And beyond that general skepticism, I know of catchy things written long ago and popular long ago that tend to cast doubt on the idea, like the story of David and Bathsheba, the retort of Cheirisophus (“I have heard you Athenians are clever hands […]”,http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1170/pg1170.txt) to Xenophon, and “when Adam delved and Eve span” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_%28priest%29). So it seems more like a policy-driven-evidence-making talking point than a natural interpretation of what we know of history.

18. Upon further reflection, I don’t think Tyler’s piece holds up under scrutiny. He’s correct that most males today are fish out of water, but it’s hard to see how a gender divide is primary reason for the days social agitation.

    Consider:

    1). As far as I know women are doing just as badly as men.

    2). The real divide seems to follow class lines, not gender lines. Ie, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.

    3). The class divide holds true even when you account for race.

    4). Male brutishness is an excessive personality trait today, but it’s certainly not the only one that’s causing trouble. In many ways it’s not particularly problematic because it’s expression seems to be pretty contained, hence the reason it’s expressing itself in politics.

    Neuroticism and loss aversion strike me as the personality traits that are most over-expressed today, and I think the bulk of it is due to women.

    • Technically everything is due to women. Not just within our species, but among the mammals and the vertebrates from which our species evolved. That’s how sexual selection works. Millions upon millions of women, stretching back millions of years, actually created the brutes that Tyler is attacking (lowering the status of).

      Put it this way: Tyler thinks he’s attacking men. That’s a winning move in the status competition that he can’t help competing in. But everything in biology is the way it is now because it, you know, got that way. He thinks he’s attacking men, but men are just what women selected and created and are responsible for. Tyler’s misogyny is the really interesting thing. How come Tyler hates women so much?

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