The Rise Of Trump Studies

Politico: There’s a measure of irony in that Trump’s candidacy—grounded in an anti-elite message and regular bashing of the political correctness “crap” rooted on college campuses—is such a boon to professors. Though Trump flaunts his academic bona fides—the degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an exceptional vocabulary (“I know words. I have the best words.”)—his almost proud indifference to detail and accuracy has made him perhaps the least popular candidate among the American professoriate in recent memory. None of the two dozen professors and student researchers interviewed for this story signaled they were a Trump supporter…

By research standards, the Trump phenomenon is still young, but fields are littered with the certainties it’s already shaken. For political scientists, Trump’s primary and caucus victories challenge the reigning belief that a strong party institution is the ultimate key to electoral success. For communications pros, his freewheeling use of social media and a penchant for saying things that alienate different segments of society shatter assumptions about what should kill a presidential campaign. Trump has even put his own imprimatur on the conspiracy theory playbook that typically targets powerful people and institutions. He has dropped the Obama birther shtick he peddled in 2012 in favor of a rhetorical dog whistle the size of a tuba that attacks far more vulnerable populations like Mexican immigrants and Muslims.

Trump’s candidacy is also a cannonball aimed straight at perhaps the most influential book on electoral politics in the past decade: The Party Decides, which argues establishment insiders ultimately determine who wins a presidential nomination, despite the primary voting process. Martin Cohen, the James Madison University political science professor who co-authored the book, has found his work the subject in recent months of an intense online debate over whether its findings hold up—or whether Trump’s success, in blunt defiance of his own party’s elders, is undercutting the entire idea. “Certainly, he’s had an impact on the way we think about politics and how they are supposed to work,” Cohen acknowledged, while still insisting that more study needs to be done to assess whether Trump is just an aberration who doesn’t change the fundamental findings spelled out in his book’s thesis…

Of course, academics like MacWilliams aren’t shying away from revealing some of their early findings. After all, the media beast is hungry and the opportunities for self-promotion are abundant while Trump’s campaign is still at the center of the political world. And there are numerous outlets hungry for their kind of analysis, from the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog to Vox, Huffington Post and Politico Magazine.
“I feel like a prostitute,” said Restad, the Oslo-based professor who earlier this month wrote an essay for the London School of Economics’ website about how American exceptionalism has returned with a force via the Trump candidacy. “If you put Trump in a title people will click on it.”

…Obviously, nobody knows what will happen at the conclusion of the 2016 election, but some are already focusing on what would be the ultimate research bonanza: a Trump presidency, perhaps the strangest and least predictable political development in American history. Last month, for example, University of Virginia law professor Michael Livermore published a commentary predicting Trump “would face huge challenges in effectively overseeing the executive branch and pursuing a coherent policy agenda.”
But the very thing that makes Trump so interesting from a scholar’s standpoint also makes him impossible to pin down conclusively: He keeps producing a steady stream of surprises.
“The way I like to describe it to my friends is to imagine we were astrophysicists and there’s this weird blob of ectoplasm that seems to defy all laws of time and space,” Oliver said. “We’re desperately trying to get our instruments out to measure it while it’s going on.”

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How To Find The Right Rehab

Here is one of the questions on paperwork hospital routinely hand out to those seeking recovery from addiction:

* Does the treatment program also address sexual orientation and physical disabilities as well as provide age, gender and culturally appropriate services?

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Ben Southwood: How far a child is allowed to walk on their own, then vs. now

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VDARE: ‘Turns out the guys from Porky’s trying to look into the girls’ room were actually civil rights heroes’

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Separated at birth:

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Not from The Onion:

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* Leon Wolf: “I block Trump supporters on sight. There’s no real point in treating them like actual people, I’ve learned.”

VDARE: Literally dehumanizing rhetoric is fine, as long as it’s directed against people who support Donald Trump.

* Alice: White privilege = being held responsible for the acts of your ancestors by folks who accept no responsibility for the acts of their children.

* Weird how collective punishment is an incomprehensibly barbaric notion up to the moment it’s turned against white people.

* Conservative Pundit: All I can say to a party contemplating Trump is: “Good luck winning the general without my genius punditry and my consulting expertise!”

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Free Speech and Islam — In Defense of Sam Harris

Jeffrey Tayler writes: “It’s gross! It’s racist!” exclaimed Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s Real Time in October 2014, interrupting the neuroscientist “New Atheist” Sam Harris. Harris had been carefully explaining the linguistic bait-and-switch inherent in the word “Islamophobia” as “intellectually ridiculous,” in that “every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people.” The result: progressives duped by the word shy away from criticizing the ideology of Islam, the tenets of which (including second-class status for women and intolerance toward sexual minorities) would, in any other context, surely elicit their condemnation.

Unwittingly, Affleck had confirmed Harris’ point, conflating religion with race. In doing so, the actor was espousing a position that can lead to a de facto racist conclusion. If you discount Islamic doctrine as the motivation for domestic violence and intolerance of sexual minorities in the Muslim world, you’re left with at least one implicitly bigoted assumption: the people of the region must then be congenitally inclined to behave as they do.

There was a disturbing irony in Affleck’s outburst. Few public intellectuals have done as thorough a job as Harris at pointing out the fallacies and dangers of the supernatural dogmas of religion, for which far too many are willing to kill and die these days. An avowed liberal (who plans to vote for Hillary) Harris is the author of, among many books, the groundbreaking The End of Faith. Yet Affleck seemed predisposed to regard him with hostility, possibly because Harris, at least for some on the Left, has acquired a toxic reputation — one stemming from what amounts to a campaign of defamation involving, by all appearances, a willful misrepresentation of his work, plus no small measure of slipshod “identity politics” thinking.

Harris has been lambasted as, among other things, a “genocidal fascist maniac” advocating “scientific racism,” militarism, and the murder of innocents for their beliefs, as well as racial profiling at airports, a nuclear first strike on the Middle East, plus, of course, Islamophobia and a failure to understand the faiths he argues against. (This is just a partial list.) The result? Harris has had to take measures to ensure his personal security, with negative ramifications in almost every area of his life. “I can say that much of what I do,” he told me in a recent email exchange, “both personally and professionally, is now done under a shadow of defamatory lies.”

The attacks against Harris have emanated predominantly from a prominent yet persistent handful of supposed progressives (and their peons), among whom are the religion scholar and media personality Reza Aslan, and the journalists from The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald (famed for transmitting Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations to the world) and Murtaza Hussain. Lately, with Harris’ publication of Islam and the Future of Tolerance, they have even taken aim at his coauthor and friend, the onetime Islamist turned reformer Maajid Nawaz.

Nonetheless, Harris’ own words, conveyed through his books, podcasts, blog posts, interviews, and Twitter feed, bely the attacks, which can be as mean-spirited as they are groundless and muddled. They have tainted the debates we need to conduct about Islam and terrorism in particular, but, more generally, the danger religious fundamentalism poses to our constitutionally secular republic and to the largely post-Christian countries of Western Europe now confronting huge inflows of Muslim migrants. The sum effect is to leave us all less well-off, less safe. And certainly more confused.

The charge of insufficient religious expertise is the least substantial, but nonetheless worth dispensing with, given that it could potentially be leveled at any nonbeliever disagreeing with faith’s precepts. In a 2007 debate, for instance, Reza Aslan accused Harris of having a “profoundly unsophisticated” view of religion, and of relying on Fox News as his “research tools” – an assertion that can be disproved by just opening The End of Faith, a meticulously compiled treatise with 237 pages of text (in the paperback edition) followed by sixty-one pages of footnotes and twenty-eight pages of bibliography listing some six hundred sources. In this opus, Harris walks us through the many follies of faith (mostly Christianity and Islam), but one key message transpires: belief guides behavior. A self-evident proposition no reasonable person would argue with.

Which has not stopped Reza Aslan from doing just that. Writing in relation to Harris’ skirmish with Affleck, Aslan has stated that religion “is often far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices” and that “people of faith insert their values into their Scriptures,” with other, often contingent factors causing them to act as they do. So when ISIS guerrillas behead their captives, justifying their bloodshed by proclaiming jihad and citing verses from the Quran, by Aslan’s definition we cannot blame the doctrine of jihad or the contents of Islamic scripture, but must seek out other motives. This is prima facie obfuscatory, because it involves discounting the testimony of the perpetrators themselves.

The “genocidal fascist maniac” moniker was born of a certain @dan_verg_ on Twitter (account since suspended), and retweeted by Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald. The tweet misquoted, without context, a line from Harris’s The End of Faith: “Some beliefs” — “propositions” in the original — “are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.” Which suggests Harris might endorse the death penalty for thought crime.

Yet context is critical and deprives the words of controversy. As is clear in reading the text, Harris was discussing terrorism and how to deal with the likes of Osama bin Laden, a fanatically committed ideologue with the capacity and demonstrated willingness to order others to murder on the basis of his (religious) beliefs. (Harris was not, thus, proposing death for thought crime.) Following the last line cited above, Harris wrote: “Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others . . . . If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense.” (Italics mine.)

Note “If they cannot be captured.“ The beliefs in question? Not surprisingly, those of jihad and martyrdom, the primum mobile for the 9/11 hijackers (and so many other Islamist terrorists since then). As Harris went on to note, 9/11 proved “beyond any possibility of doubt that certain twenty-first-century Muslims actually believe the most dangerous and implausible tenets of their faith.” This is a truism, not evidence of an Orwellian mindset, and it underlies the U.S. government’s targeted assassinations of radical Muslim clerics and Al Qaeda and ISIS commanders, carried out before such people have a chance to harm Americans. Such killings are, to be sure, controversial, but the proposition that belief in certain tenets of Islamic doctrine can lead to murderous behavior is not.

Read more.

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Conservative Pundit: ‘Our conservative principles are absolute and universal, drawing fervent support from all races and nationalities’

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More from Conservative Pundit on Twitter:

* My favorite game is where my Democrat friends admit millions of D voters to the country, and I try to convert some trivial fraction of them.

* Sad commentary on the GOP’s failed outreach to naturally conservative communities like Mexicans and jihadis.

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* Letting savages pour over your borders and rape women in the streets is like a shortcut to the moral high ground.

* Germany knows the true test of democracy is whether your country takes in millions of violence-prone Third Worlders.

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* I hope the GOP can sleep at night knowing its likely nominee upsets our wise and beneficent global overlords.

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* I bet if Trump were in charge we would have gone from gay-is-mental illness to illegal-to-not-bake-gay-wedding-cakes in a single lifetime.

trannie

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Do White Lives Matter?

Rabbi Nachum Shifren emails his list April 14: In America today, there’s some things you just don’t say. I will say them…

I taught for 25 years in arguably the worst school district in the nation: Los Angeles Unified (?). I endured racists and incompetents of all colors. During my tenure standards disappeared, being replaced with the mantra of “diversity” and “cultural sensitivity.” One could sense a certain element of “pay back” from minority low and upper-level administrators against an entire educational system that once was the envy of the world. Gradually pride in America and American exceptionalism gave way to the chalkboard of revisionist history. Suddenly our Founding Fathers were “racists”, the bedrock of our freedoms and individual liberties, the Constitution, became a means of enslavement by the White Man.

As an inner city teacher, my students were Black with a large percentage of Latinos. As my career came to a close, increasingly violent confrontations surfaced. Tires slashed, graffiti-smeared car windows, and death threats dared. At one point, the failure rate of my classes was over 70%. Nothing to be proud of, despite herculean attempts to stem the tide: tutorials were offered to failing students, before and after school. My breaks during school hours never saw me lounging in the cafeteria. I remained at my desk for those that needed help. But when the day known as “back-to-school-night” came, out of 150 students, 4 parents dropped by, not to see what their kids were learning, or how they could improve academically, but rather to complain about their student’s failing grades.

“He/she never told me there was any homework!” was the common refrain.
“But she comes to class!?” one naive parent’s transparent dysfunction surfaced.

As I witnessed the increasing deterioration around me, and unabashed dumbing down of curriculum, I realized I was in a war zone. The pressure to comply with feel good prompts from administrators frazzled at having to explain how $18,000 per student per year is being wasted, became unbearable for many teachers. This explains the 7-year average turnover rate of today’s schoolteachers. Ever ridiculous demands to turn my class into “rappers” and “break-dancers” from one administrator were enough to challenge every ounce of an educator’s dignity and integrity.

What is here being described is the bitter experience of tens of thousands of teachers, trapped in a system of corruption and racism, not daring to expose the horrific truth of America’s inner city schools today. Americans cannot, dare not, confront the present reality that not just white teachers, but Whites in any capacity, are under the gun.

Among the Latino students in my classes, many if not most were illegal aliens. One day my principal, himself a Latino, asked me to come to his office immediately (it couldn’t wait till after school).

“Mr. Shifren, can I have the keys to your classroom?” he asked, unceremoniously.
“One of our students has accused you of threatening to shoot him,” he blandly went on.

I was incredulous. He was using the “terrorist act” against me, believing a straight-F student over the teacher. The “La Raza” community activists had schemed to transform an illegal alien troublemaker into a victim of white racism.

This scandal plays itself out daily in thousands of classrooms throughout the country. Very few teachers are prepared emotionally or financially (lest they lose their mortgages or find themselves black-balled by the politically corrupt school district, with their careers in shambles, and all the hype about “changing America” a pathetic illusion, destroyed in one instant on the alter of “students of color”) to deal with this reality. Meanwhile, white flight has turned our government schools into third world education-free zones, where if you made a surprise visit you’d never suspect you were in America.

Lakisha was my best student, a true American success story. I was shocked one day when she revealed to me, with tears in her eyes, that she “had” to leave the school.

“You’re doing tremendous work here, I don’t understand it” I said, saddened as I was dumbfounded.
“Other students are harassing me, calling me an “oreo”, she said. ‘White on the inside, black on the outside!'”

The one means of survival for teachers has recently been denied them: many districts, pressured by the catapulting rates of graduation (50% in L.A.) of “students of color”, have instituted an insidious plan to prevent teachers from expelling students for rowdy and uncivil behavior . Translation: when one of my students was sent to the dean’s office for stabbing another student, she was immediately sent back to class with the following note: “you may not deprive our students of an education!”

And so it goes. Racist apologists increasingly move to the forefront of society, blaming the plunging math and English scores on lack of “self esteem” due to White/societal indifference. Note: we never hear about our grandparents’ lack of self-esteem, coming to American from distant lands with the clothes on their backs. Sans ESL courses, no community activists, or racist incitement to quash their thorough immersion into the English language and american culture. Yet, their children went on to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, providing the bulwark of the most prosperous society in the world.

The last 8 years of the Obama era has seen a precipitous increase in the war against Whites in America. Any mayhem or civil unrest can find its source as determined by whistle blowers of “white racism.” Any pretext for rioting and looting is met with total silence where non-Whites are involved

Question: How have the communist and progressives succeeded in marginalizing White America, while allowing for a steady erosion of standards and accountability at all levels?

Many are the factions of useful idiots, a consortium of tenacious marauders along with the ACLU, a battery of civil rights lawyers, and the malevolent disgruntled, that have tied the hands of America, forcing compliance with Hussein Obama’s pledge to transform the nation. The obstacles are daunting: from local city councils, school boards, state legislatures and down the line to Congress and the Justice Department, the clock is ticking.

The examples of attacks against White America are many: Ferguson, the Confederate flag, the recent Supreme Court decision to count illegals in redistricting (the death knell of the middle class), the “Dream Act”, the wave of illegals storming the border, the refusal to come to terms with Islamic terror, the introducing of Ebola patients onto american soil, Common Core (it’s author admitted it was the antidote to “White privilege”), the outrage of the “New Black Panthers'” violence toward white voters, the issuing of drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens from Mexico and not requiring them to drive with liability insurance (if you’re white and you’re stopped without such insurance, your care will immediately be confiscated and assigned a $300 fine.) When questioned about the blatant unfairness of this policy, LAPD Chief Bill Bratton commented: “If you don’t like it, move somewhere else!”, and the mother of all deceptions, the documented illegal smuggling of Muslim “refugees” via UPS cargo planes and surreptitiously released into unsuspecting civilian populations without background checks, ad nauseum. Note: Christians in the Middle East are undergoing a genocide. Why are we not hearing about their resettlement? Answer: they’re Christians, let ’em burn in Hell! And burn, they are. Not one word of empathy from our Golfer in Chief. He knows that they will not fit into his narrative of transforming America, no expectations of raping white women, inciting violence among the middle class, voting for leftist candidates, breaking the treasury with welfare issues, housing, food stamps, etc.

The king coward himself, Eric Holder, disgraced his justice department and his sacred duty by whipping out the race card at every opportunity when black thugs were dealt with by the authorities. No amount of grand jury testimony about the facts would dissuade his racist agenda. Like some sort of racist cabal, one could expect herrs Sharpton, Jackson, and the NAACP lackeys to extend their carbon footprint to every city where a white officer had confronted black hooliganism.

All the while, Whites were raped, murdered, and harassed with flash mobs descending on parks and shopping malls, pillaging and destroying–it’s all been caught on film dozens of times, we know it, we see it, it’s there. Where is the opposition to this fascism? Like the deer in the headlights that they are, they will never say the truth: this is a war against Whites.

“OTM” has become a household term, sort of. Border officials warn of an increasing number of Other Than Mexicans infiltrating through the porous southern border. OTM, a.k.a., jihadists, The degree of nonchalance about this scandal can only be interpreted thusly: Only Whites and Christians need be concerned. The same government that is mandated to our security, is the one paving the way to another 911. And they ALL tell us to get ready for another major terror attack!
George Orwell must be sweating bullets in his grave….We know with certainty we’ll be hit, yet we’re perilized by fear: NOT of dying in some nuclear holocaust, not by having our wives or children raped or assaulted, not by a fifth column sworn to destroy us–no, we can deal with a certain level of mass destruction aimed at the heartland. Our REAL fear is identifying and stopping our sworn enemies: muslim jihadists and their domestic facilitators and apologists.

One thing is clear: if these mobs of haters and killers were white Christians, the embarrassing scene being played out before our very eyes would have been resolved yesterday. Let’s stop to think: the 911 hijackers were here illegally on visas that had expired. There are over 100,000 middle easterners, many from countries who are openly hostile to us, that are here illegally. We do nothing. Worse, Obama and his water carriers are planning on bringing hundreds of thousands of Syrians to America. Again, people who haven’t been vetted and are not suited to our culture, mores, and constitutional way of life. But let the American taxpayer foot the bill…those of still working our 2 or 3 jobs to stay alive. Their billionaire brothers in Saudi Arabia , Qatar, Bahrain and Dubai are not suckers, not like us. They refuse to take in the “refugees”, since they know the problems they’ll have to deal with. Ironically, their argument, “let them stay in Syria!”, is right on the money. Yet when Americans with sense utter those very words, they’re met with cries of “racism.” But the point is, the wave of Muslims washing onto our shores has nothing to do with “relief”, as the abandonment of the Christians in the Middle East clearly shows. The whole purpose is to first destroy the Republican party, and then to neutralize and transform America and its white population. Recent reports of “Black Lives Matter” folks creating havoc with Palestinians in Israel is another example of racism on display. And how are Black activists from Chicago, with the highest homicide rate in the US, highest unemployment rates, highest incarceration rates, able to waltz over to the Middle East and cause grief there? Answer: gotta address the Jewish racism. Not even a Kafka could make sense out of this nonsense….

There is no one to oppose Obama and his push to national (White) suicide. The Republicans, far from being a “loyal opposition”, have kowtowed to his every whim. Their cavalier attitudes regarding their treachery and abandonment of their core beliefs is on record. Obama’s, and the left’s intentions on bringing a massive Third World wave into America goes unopposed, as they’ve stymied the conversation masterfully using the race card. Not even America’s survival is open for discussion, truly remarkable. We’re chided by Obama about being paranoid about absorbing a few “grandmothers and children”, yet we see clearly that the vast majority of “refugees” are single, young Muslim men, unskilled at anything except furthering the plot to destroy White, middle class America without firing a shot. And that’s the point: they need not subdue America through force of arms; they’ll be given free rein at the ballot box. There is no normal country in the world that would concede to such a suicidal plan.

The fact that the FBI has identified at least 30 armed encampments of Muslim extremists within our borders bothers no one. The fact that they’re still free to operate shows the effectiveness of Islamist PR in stymying debate about our national security.
Very few Republicans have been willing to step up, especially after they saw Michelle Bachmann eviscerated by the pro-Islamist lobby. The practice of “seeding” Islamists into middle class communities proceeds unabated, with the help of Christians and Jewish “charity” groups, who are getting big bucks from the government, and serve as a smoke screen to deflect from where the responsibility lies about the breakdown of our society and security. But there’s good news: Out of the 1.5 billion Muslims world-wide, it is estimated that only 1% of them (1.5 million) will attempt to blow themselves up as shahids, or martyrs, in order to neutralize the west and establish their long-cherished caliphate.

I gave a speech on the steps of city hall in Dearborn, Michigan (Youtube: “Rabbi Shifren speaks in Dearborn Before Muslim Mobs), home to over 100,000 Muslims. This was not Teheran or Mogadishu, but if not for the vigilance of the local police during my speech, my fate well could have been at the hands of a vicious mob.

The Egyptians were able to accomplish what our country doesn’t have the guts to do: outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood and their network of jihadists. Instead, we wine and dine them in the West Wing, where our muslim president lectures us on “peaceful Islam.”

As the first president of the American Communist Party aptly stated: “Americans will never accept Communism, but they will accept liberalism. And behold: we have a presidential candidate whois a devotee of Saul Alinsky, whose “Rules for Radicals” is her mantra in her quest to destroy the country! The overt cooperation between radical jihadists and the Left to vanquish America is in full gear. And again, the communist/progressives are little worried about jihadists designs, as long as they are instrumental in bringing down the White middle class.

As of this writing, China, Mexico, and the rest of the world are mortally afraid of a new spectre: it isn’t ISIS or worldwide Muslim terror; it isn’t the horror of a dirty bomb falling in the hands of our enemies; it isn’t the transformation of America into a third world nation, without borders or national resolve; nor is impossible national debt on anybody’s mind. No, the only thing haunting America and the rest of the world, is Donald Trump- the perfect storm.

The latest news is that Black Lives Matter, NAACP, and other leftist hispanic groups will be assembling the most massive protest against the probable nominee, Trump. They promise violence, a show of force that will be “unprecedented”. Against the legally nominated candidate? And what about all those Americans whose vote will be denied? Is their only crime that they were born White?

Virginia responds: “Thank you so much for speaking truth even in the face of great danger to yourself. You are a true hero! I was part of LA Unified many years ago as a student at Venice High School and even then I could see the race war going on. I am an immigrant from Argentina and am white but I am also of Hispanic roots. I was bullied by chicanos and blacks and still have bad memories of those times. Since then, the situation with whites and “people of color” is exactly what you describe in an essay of yours I just read. The purpose of all this is to destroy good people, destroy the United States and other very diabolical agendas.”

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The Sexual Market

From the Chateau: Forget the free market economy. The sexual market is the one market to rule them all. As if my preening weren’t already supremely ostentatious, here’s a recent SCIENCE! study confirming another Heartiste axiom: every human interaction and transaction is downstream from the existential struggle to find a quality mate, fuck, and procreate.

Fewer romantic prospects may lead to riskier investments

Encountering information suggesting that it may be tough to find a romantic partner shifts people’s decision making toward riskier options, according to new findings from a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Environmental cues indicating that one will have a relatively difficult time finding a mate can drive people to concentrate their investment choices into a few high-risk, high-return options,” says psychological scientist Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan, lead author on the research. “This is true even when the decisions people are making are not explicitly relevant to romantic outcomes.”

I’ve received some scoffing from spergy types projecting their spergitude onto this ‘umble outpost of love concerning the assertion often made here that the sexual market governs, consciously or subconsciously it doesn’t really matter, the machinations and ultimately the outcomes of the more palpable activity that takes place in the economic market. But here we have a study proving the truth of the CH observation that ripples and undercurrents of sexual compulsion and romantic desperation are the “invisible loin” that guides all human behavior in the secondary market of the economy and its supporting markets (like academia).

“This is exactly opposite from the pattern of investing we would predict if we assumed people were using an economically ‘rational’ decision strategy,” Ackerman explains. “From an evolutionary perspective, if the options are to do whatever it takes to find a romantic partner or risk not finding one, the more rational choice may be to do whatever it takes.”

This is a stone cold truth that no libertardian like Alex Tabbarak or Cheap Chalupas will ever get. Humans aren’t rational actors; they’re rationalizing actors. And what they rationalize are choices, in all spheres of transaction, that directly or indirectly improve their chances of landing that alpha male or that hot babe.

In a second online study, 105 participants read a newspaper article discussing demographic trends in the U.S. They then evaluated stock packages with equivalent values (e.g., 100 shares in 8 companies, 200 shares in 4 companies, etc.) and chose which package they would invest in.

Again, the data showed that both male and female participants who read about unfavorable sex ratios opted for riskier investments, choosing more shares in fewer companies, than those who read about favorable ratios.

In practice, “riskier strategies” for women amounts to what we see today on college campuses, where women outnumber men 60-40. The zeitgeist is a sexual pornucopia for a few alpha men getting the milk for free without buying the cow, and a lot of disappointment and depression among marginally pretty women who thought they could turn that fling into a thing.

The fact that sex ratio had an impact on decisions that were not directly linked with mating success suggests that sexual competition elicits a general mindset geared toward achieving the largest possible reward, regardless of the risk involved.

Polygyny, as is the norm throughout Africa, can induce the same risky investment strategizing from men as can an unfavorable sex skew. When a few men lock up many women, each individual man has an incentive to throw caution to the wind to be one of those few winner men.

As such, the researchers argue, these findings could have implications for decision making in domains as diverse as retirement planning, gambling, and even making consumer purchases.

Executive Summary: The meaning of life is to ….

COMMENTS:

* Even more interesting to compare post-pubescent eunuchs with castratos. Testosterone “therapy” for F2M transgender LARPers changes both the physical structure and effective function of the brain, in the usual stereotypes.

And those changes are irreversible, so a trans-trans-woman is not the same as a cis-woman. She still thinks more like a cis-man. Therefore, a male castrated before puberty could be expected to behave differently than one castrated after, whose surge of testosterone triggered routines that may continue to run after they are no longer capable of achieving their purpose.

Similarly, one hypothesis is that childless women are destroying white nations because their barrenness triggers risk-seeking routines for rape babies, and that this continues after menopause — even though that would be irrational — because there is no way for natural selection to work on the infertile.

* “Gender Ideology Harms Children” (statement from the American College of Pediatricians (“ACP”))

Among other points stated by the ACP:

“3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V).5 The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.

4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. . . .

5. According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

7. Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT – affirming countries. . . .

8. Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.”

* Sperg Risk Strategy Exhibit A – Elliot Rodger.

“I knew I was always destined for great things. This must be it! I was destined to be the winner of the highest lottery jackpot in existence. I knew right then and there that this jackpot was meant for me. Who else deserved such a victory? I had been through so much rejection, suffering, and injustice in my life, and this was to be my salvation.

With my whole body filled with feverish hope, I spent $700 dollars on lottery tickets for this drawing. As I spent this money, I imagined all the amazing sex I would have with a beautiful model girlfriend I would have once I become a man of wealth.

Without the prospect of becoming wealthy at a young age, I had nothing to live for now. I was going to be a virgin outcast forever. I realized that I had to start planning and preparing for the Day of Retribution, even though I hadn’t yet had any idea of what day that would be.”

* “The meaning of life is to fuck…”

I wonder if there’s some correlation between the innate sense of restraint of northern European stock and restraint in fucking. Children born in the spring would have the best chance of surviving the first few months of life, and of being strong enough to survive to following winter. This would mean the the ideal time of year to fuck would be early summer. The flip side is that couples that favored fucking in early summer would be more likely to pass on their genes.

Contrast this with r-selected type people from equatorial regions where children have an equal chance of surviving year round, and frivolous fucking is the norm.

Just wondering…

* You know you can really have that truth shoved in your face by doing a simple experiment. Observe the people at your local “upscale” grocery store one day, then visit a run-down discount grocery store on the next. In my experience you’ll see an average attractiveness difference of like 3-4 points on a 10 scale.

* Yup. I used to live in Beverly Hills and the ladies there were gorgeous. Would dress well, showing God-given cleavage at times in lovely sundresses.

Moved 5 miles south. Eesh

And this was before the proliferation of yoga pants, aside from actually doing yoga.

Now I’ve got the United Nations supermarket in my ghetto area and you’ll see one hot Latina or Armenian girl dolled up out the 1000s of fatassery there.

I was south of Pico Blvd which is ’nuff said.

Surprising how shit can deteriorate in such close proximity.

For those not in CA, do a google maps “drive” on Sunset Blvd from east to west and be amazed at the transition.

* “I saw a nature show about lions once. The alpha male had control of all the females, and if he caught a beta lion trying to get it on with one of his females, the alpha would give the beta a thrashing. But the betas still have needs, ya know? So the betas would slink around in the shadows, watch the alpha, hang out on the periphery and maybe skip a hunt to be alone with the pride. Then, when the alpha was not around and would not catch them, they would jump in and grab a quick one from one of the females.“

“Cruz’s efforts to get delegates reminds me of that. He slinks around on the periphery, not trying to get them by overtaking Trump directly and becoming an alpha. No, he’s still a beta, but he’s trying to get what he wants the sneaky way, the beta way. The Cruz way.”

* 25% of women in the US are on anti depressants. They are all on them at my work and very open about it. My neighbor told me her gorgeous 16 year old had a breakdown and her and her five friends are all in therapy for self harm. WTF is going on?

* Four Reasons:

-Women are being told to act in a way that is completely the opposite of how they want to behave.

-Women love attention, and self-harm gets them that (drama queen teens).

-Shrinks describe any behavior that is normal as “depressive” in need of “medication and therapy.” Because the science is a joke and their pockets need a lining.

-Lack of strong men around (neutered by society) to give them a rock to lean on.

* At least 30% have what is now called histrionic personality disorder. Research the history and meaning of the words “hysteria” and “hysterical.” Any man who has known at least 4 women has experienced it.

They do not belong in the office environment other than as secretaries and typists in the former sense of those professions. (They do not belong in an office under the current Jew-feminist brainwashing idea that they are equal and should be the senior partner in the corner office. They know this in their hearts, hence the internal conflict.)

It is obvious that women should not vote or dominate the national discussion on talk news shows. All civilizations for 12,000 years have known this.

“Histrionic personality disorder is characterized by a long-standing pattern of attention seeking behavior and extreme emotionality. Someone with histrionic personality disorder wants to be the center of attention in any group of people, and feel uncomfortable when they are not. While often lively, interesting and sometimes dramatic, they have difficulty when people aren’t focused exclusively on them. People with this disorder may be perceived as being shallow, and may engage in sexually seductive or provocative behavior to draw attention to themselves.”

In other words, attention whores.

The new DSM is getting rid of “Personality Disorders” because they’re too d@mned descriptive of the reality of the situation [i.e. too politically incorrect; shine too much light on Eskimo perfidy, etc], and because the insurance companies refuse to pay for PDs. Fortunately, at least for the time being, Wikipedia still has some good overviews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_B

Any female co-worker given responsibility suffers anxiety because of it. They just cannot lead or handle any responsibility.
They hate deadlines. They cannot deal with that either and this field is interior design so a female type of job.
A poster on another thread said it well…they live in a world man has created…working in buildings man has created. Women cannot handle cars either. Any bad choices I see on the road I always look around to see who the driver is and it’s always a woman.

* “The happiest women I know are housewives with good husbands and several children”.

Bingo.

Few on this earth will ever comprehend – let alone match – the abject misery of a 42 year old woman who sacrificed her fertility window for meaningless corporate advancement, only to be tortured for the rest of her life by the laughter of other people’s children.

* You could finish construction of The Wall this afternoon. It would still be 30 years too late.

“Perhaps a President Trump would build a wall to Uranus… or maybe he wouldn’t. Though such speculation isn’t what’s most relevant. The foreign majority is now born domestically each day, and the annual population equivalent of Montana supplements white Americans legally. At some point a huge border wall just becomes a monument. You don’t lock doors inside your own house. And you won’t maintain a fence to keep Mexicans out of northern Mexico. Once pressure equalizes, no one needs an airtight seal.

But all of that is far beyond the reckoning of most conservatives, who still consider 90% of the Earth’s exploding population as “minorities.” The notion that their national inheritance was stolen while they drooled at football games only seems to emerge in brief moments of lucidity.”

* Walking to work one morning, you see a woman making eyes at you from inside her front door of her house. It’s slightly open and you see she’s showing skin.

You have a choice:

1) Keep walking to work, arrive on time, get paid, buy food, eat well tonight.
2) Go inside, fuck the woman, arrive late for work, lose job, don’t eat, starve for the next two months.

If it came down to such a stark choice — if you could know all of these consequences — which do you choose?

According to Maslow, you choose #1. The basic needs of food, water, rest, and warmth are first-tier needs. He placed “intimate relationships” on the third tier.

Maslows_Hierarchy_of_Needs

* Why don’t you include your fantasy option:

#3 — feral dindu breaks-and-enters the house, rapes you, takes a nap, wakes up, calls his boy D’arflavius on his Obama-phone, goes down to the liquor store to buy a forty, then picks up some ice cream and potato chips with his EBT card and goes home to watch his flatscreen TV in his free govt-supplied apartment waiting his baby momma to bring by some money from the child-welfare checks to buy some crack with.

Posted in Sex | Comments Off on The Sexual Market

What Can We Learn About Diversity From The Mess In Houston

From the Chateau: File this latest salvo in the Diversity + Proximity = War reference list: a lovefact-filled article about the intersection of natural disasters with minority rule.

For the second time in a year, Houston — the fourth largest city in the US and the largest in Texas — is under water. While the rainfall was huge, the response was poor. No actual solutions are being discussed in the media. The reason for this blackout brings together troubling issues of race, population, environmentalism and industry.

AnalysisYouWillNeverHearOnNPR.txt

Contrary to most stereotypes of Texas, Houston is a diverse cosmopolitan city that is 75% non-white — and climbing. Most of these non-whites are Hispanics from Central America, Asians, Indians and African-Americans. The latter group is declining as it is pushed out of its traditional neighborhoods by gentrification and its replacement in traditional sources of income by Hispanics and Asians.

Typical SWPL secretly thinks, “Yay! Crime will go down with fewer blacks!” What typical SWPL never imagines: “There are more ways to feel like a stranger in your own land than by the number of muggings you have to tolerate.”

While gentrification gets a bad rap in New York, here it is beloved by minorities on an individual level and bemoaned on a collective level. Individuals do not mind getting $400,000 for a house they paid $50,000 for only a decade or two ago, but groups notice the “diversity tension” which is that they feel like aliens in their own communities. At a certain crucial threshold, the original group simply moves out en masse.

“Alien-ness” is a concept our leftoid anti-White genocidists ought to consider in terms beyond glowing approval. Every race on earth* — yes, even GoodWhite liberals — feels more comfortable living among its own kind.

*With the possible exception of blacks, who love moving into White-run cities for the gibs and then bitching about White racism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the people of every race on earth feel more warmth and harmony toward neighbors who look like themselves.

Affirmative action dominates the construction industry where it overlaps with government. Where the private sector is dependent on cheap Hispanic labor to make larger profits, the government agencies give preference to minority- and woman-owned businesses. As a result, public works projects frequently move slowly and involve high costs, as seen with union labor in the past.

In addition, minority standards of construction are more like those one would find in Mexico or Vietnam. The development industry has standardized nearly every form of construction as a result. Homes are made of standard wooden frames designed to fit a pattern, covered in insulation and sheetrock, and then filled with pre-fabricated fixtures, door frames, floors, cabinets, doors and wiring. These are designed to be idiot-proof and quick to install. This enables the industry to use unskilled labor as if it were skilled, saving costs.

“Idiot-proof” = “dull shoebox houses”. Funny how a push for race and sex Diversity™ has resulted in a notable lack of housing design diversity.

Most renovation and much of construction is done through the use of “day laborers,” or mostly Hispanic men who sit at the edges of the parking lots of Home Depot and Loewes and other home construction businesses. Trucks pull up, shout out an offer for the day’s work, and then pick up a half-dozen men to go do a job. These groups follow a kind of “buddy system” where if at least one member of the group has some experience, the rest go along with it and do what he says. A network of mostly white but also Asian and African-American “contractors” make a good living by hiring day laborers, paying them relatively little, and taking the profits which are widened by lower labor costs.

Consequently standards of construction have plummeted. Homes fall apart; doors hang at odd angles; mysterious fires are more frequent. Since government is now also minority-dominated, each group represents itself. If the workers at a home that falls down are Hispanic, and the government officials investigating are Hispanic, the event is more likely to be classified as mysterious instead of a solution found.

Corruption, malfeasance, incompetence, bribery, nepotism… these are the curses of Diversity shoved down the throat of White America (getting less White by the day). Sad! At least the lawyers will have plenty of work. (((heh)))

A whole second string of industry has sprung up with pale Asian and white experts who are called in at high cost to fix what the contractors and city inspectors missed.

When things go south, bring the White men out.

The result is that a city with little infrastructure has more than doubled its population, changed its character and abilities from that of a mostly English-German city to a mostly Hispanic-Asian one, and has paved itself in roads, parking lots and driveways. The resulting changes have been vast. Air currents now move far to the north of the concrete wasteland, changing weather patterns and resulting in hotter temperatures; here, summer begins in April and ends in mid-September. Water runoff has become a large problem but the public works are not up to the task, so it floods.

I bet (White) environmentalists are pissed about this assault on nature and good taste. What do they have to say?

Where have environmental groups been in this whole process? Environmental groups are staffed by trust fund kids from the dying white establishment and the diversity/affirmative action hires who accept the lower pay for shorter hours. This pairs people with no sense of reality with people who could care less about being effective. […]

Environmental groups have followed a strategy of trying to save species rather than trying to save land. […] As a result, the species there are overpopulated and dying off, and very little land is set aside for nature.

WELP

To fix the problems of Houston and its flooding would require interventions that are politically unsustainable. Some developments would have to be removed to make way for more open land, which would not be park land and so would anger local residents. These communities would likely be either traditional minority communities in the process of gentrification, at which point the remaining minority residents would be rallied to protest “racism,” or new communities which minority groups hope to move into to live the American Dream™. Any action to cut down on concrete and over-development would also anger the oil and development industries.

Low-High versus Middle. The story of 21st America. May God Emperor Trump save us all from the coming Sheeeeeiit Death.

In Houston, we see a microcosm of the problem in the West: incompetent and morally rotten whites exploiting the situation for personal gain, including the importation of cheap third-world labor to make those profits fatter, paired up with a community more like that of Mexico or Vietnam where people simply do not care and cannot fix these problems. For all it is like winning the lottery: money pouring through the door for easy work, so enjoy it and forget about tomorrow.

I bolded a part that deserves more emphasis in discussions about immigration and open borders. Fact is, many nonWhite migrants and invaders from the less pleasing nations of the world are habituated to extreme apathy by the lifestyles they were accustomed to in their homelands before they absconded to the US to make anchor baby great again. Vast regions of the world are populated by blissfully ignorant peasant stock and bootlicker strivers who, through habit or disposition, accept “the way things are” even when that way means living in squalor and watching on the sidelines as a nepotistic parade of crooks and con men loot their nation’s fisc.

So a hearty congratulations to America’s ruling class for diligently overseeing the importation of tens of millions of these apathetic cheap labor cogs and public teat sucklers! You’ve got your obedient indentured brown servants who will consume your cheap Chinese-made throwaway trinkets and nail-by-number plasticine death-trap houses while dutifully voting your oligarch lefty buddies into office for lifetime, and generational, terms of nation-destroying service. And you also enjoy the self-aggrandizing benefit of fewer and fewer salt of the earth Whites remaining who are the only group capable of successfully rebelling against your depredations and ousting you from power.

But that was the point all along. And that’s why a revolution looms, despite your best efforts to quash it under a mountain of hivemind equalist agit-prop with the help of your SJW useful toolbags.

Posted in Diversity | Comments Off on What Can We Learn About Diversity From The Mess In Houston

Prince, RIP

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I have to admit it was embarrassingly recently that I found out Prince was black (and I think I only found that out from one of those lists commemorating prominent African Americans that casts as wide a net, on the one-drop principle, as possible). I wonder after the few decades of gangsta rap and hip-hop since Prince’s career started, and the subculture associated with those genres taking root, what the likelihood is of seeing another aspiring black musician finding a similar cultural niche in funk-rock fusion and gender ambiguity.

* And of course, everyone’s favorite half-blood Prince in DC had to chime in on this latest black event, so everyone would know he was black and relevant.

* So glad Obama chimed in on this.

After all, who could forget FDR’s moving elegy after Glenn Miller died, or JFK’s heartfelt tribute to Marilyn Monroe?

What a trivial, trashy, essentially empty society we have become.

* Something that really struck me reading one of the obit articles today was that Prince supposedly only required three hours of sleep a night, and he used this to great productive advantage. Thinking of this I was reminded of the striking similarities between him and Napoleon.

Don’t laugh – it’s not crazy. Both possessed exceptional intelligence, and more importantly vision. Both were driven and ambitious, and didn’t play by the rules and chafed against the established order. Both were famously short, extremely energetic (Prince would often play concerts, and then after the concerts would then go to a club and play several hours MORE) and most tellingly both required very little sleep. Napoleon also only needed 3 -4 hours a night and essentially perfected the cat nap , and there are tales of him trying to force his generals to stay up all night while he discussed strategy, and they would inevitably fall asleep on him one by one, which didn’t anger him but only served to demonstrate his superiority.

Now I’m an engineer, and have no background in biology or genetics, but I can recognize a pattern when I see one. So, Steve (or someone else) – what do these to have in common in their metabolism, genetics or brain chemistry? (step two after identification: duplication). Although, I also can’t help but wonder what toll this eventually takes on the body…

* Starts from the top. He comments on every major pop culture event. I think he’s secretly very active on Twitter. His admin. is openly very active on Twitter and mans it around the clock for him.

When the Donald Sterling broke over the weekend Obama was on a foreign trip in Asia. During a press conference a few hours after it broke on Saturday he was asked & he knew enough about the story to comment.

Sen. Corker was asked on a Sunday morning show he replied he hadn’t heard about it and couldn’t comment. He commented hours after clock boy broke and it was limited to the Twitter where it broke for a day.

The white Americans that voted for Obama unknowingly voted for cultural decline & standards. He said he’d fundamentally transform Ameruca and he has done just that.

* All four of his grandparents were black and all four were born in Louisiana. Probably linked to mulattos or Creoles down there but he’s not mixed in the common sense. He didn’t have a white parent.

* Prince is the reason why all men should learn how to play guitar. Extremely short ( right around 5 feet, if not below), skinny, runty body, ugly face. He basically looked like Chris Kattan with dark hair and a weird Dracula skin washed-out. If a girl met a guy who looked like him she would laugh at him and push him off her.

Yet put a guitar in his hands and the dude got chicks going crazy over him.

Prince to me represented to me the last of the blacks who didn’t believe in “black” music v. “white” music. He played guitar on stage and his style was a cross between Bowie’s weirdness and Mick Jagger’s moves. His songs were a bit too poppy to be hard, but he also secretly wrote some hits under different names. And he was the last—Lenny Kravitz is a corporate-created chick rock loser. Prince was actually respectable. And his brilliant weirdness was so calculated yet came off so well–he definitely owed Bowie a lot, but so many later folk stole it from him. Madonna is often cited as being a direct descendant of Bowie in the “weird for the sake of attention” category, but she actually got about half her act from Prince.

After Prince, black musicians concentrated on just singing/rapping and dancing and being “hard” and “tough” (or, if they sang sex songs, being “smooth” and “playas”). No guitars on stage, no sign they played any music by hand. Which, ironically, is a throwback to country music : for years, country music bands were strongly discouraged from playing their instruments on stage; instead they were to sing into the microphone while the band played for them. Alabama talks about it had to argue to have their guitars and drums with them instead of just looking like the Statler Bros. And considering rap is just a form of fast-talking country music from the 60s and 70s, it means rappers are just aping country white dudes in style.

* Prince did remind me a bit of Bowie, but without the perverse, wretched drug patina. As a performer, Prince seemed a bit exotic, perverse in a goofy way, but entirely safe, almost suburban.

Sheila E was suburban as it gets. It trumped her attempt at “sluttiness.” I just didn’t believe her. I believed her like I believed Olivia Newton John, in that, she might suck dick on occasion, but she’s not a bona fide dick-sucker.

All his girls had the same underlying suburbaness. Real sluts, like Madonna, would have eaten him alive if they shared the stage. His “rock” style was supported onstage by girls playing wannabe sluts, who could never really challenge him. He seemed to attract the same sensibilities in his audience. Suburbanites with too much makeup, hair relaxer, or silly clothes, or people who liked to watch others doing the same.

Suffice to say, if I were a dad with a teenage daughter, I wouldn’t be too worried about her attending a Prince concert.

He deferred to funk, which is rooted in blues, but Prince always had a bit of a light-heartedness in spite of his posings that always makes his music enjoyable. You can throw his music on anytime. I think Black Eyed Peas, back in the day, owe him an inspirational debt. “Hey Ya” was very “Princey.”

* A tragic fact about Prince is that about 20 years ago his then-wife gave birth to a boy who was monstrously deformed. Prince didn’t release many details, let alone photos, but it was obvious that the deformities were far beyond any hope of repair. It was pretty much a relief when the infant died after a few days.

*
1. Pop music is all about freshness/newness. As a pretty shallow artistic endeavor, pop music survives on giving kids their own “sound” to define their lives by. After a few years, the kids realize(even if they never admit it) that’s it’s shallow, and move on. so the next crop comes in. Old hit makers are interchanged for new ones. This is also why the few long-lasting pop radio stars have adopted the “David Bowie/Madonna” method of changing their look and “persona” every 3-5 years—-stay fresh, be weird again, get attention! (or not giving away any information. the pop star Vitaman C is in her 40s but plays to teenagers and keeps her personal life hidden)

The record companies of the 1950s realized this, and started the whole radio-rock-star movement we still have today. Teenagers + disposable income + time at home=a mint for a record company that has the next “new” star the kids can cheer for. And the best part is the new stars generally age out with their audience so the record company doesn’t have to pay the star more if they’re smart, they just go get a new one.

2. Most musicians, after hitting it big, end up having fights with their record companies. Record Companies are notorious for screwing the royalties and money out of young, eager musicians who just want to make the radio. Then the young musicians realize the can make a poop-ton more on touring than on records. So once the musician gets enough hits under his belt to justify headlining a tour, they tend to avoid big record contracts and tour a lot more.

Record companies have had a huge problem with making money off male-centered bands (as in rock) because they tend to become tour megastars quickly. So the record companies invented rap, which requires radio play to become big. Rappers have slowly worked their way off the record company teat and become more tour-oriented, but being a rap star is still tied to massive payola/music company promotion/radio play—much more so than rockers.

* CNN and MSNBC were celebrating Prince tonight as a progressive activist, gay icon and Black resistance leader when I think he more rightly belongs in an eccentric category of his own. The obituaries seem to be conspicuously avoiding his staunch religious beliefs and his charming inscrutableness. Like Bowie, he really blazed his own path and that should be respected. There should be room in society for eccentric artists who defy easy categorization.

* Did they mention Prince’s Reaganite anti-Soviet phase?

* Prince seemed have been able to look out for himself in that snake pit called the music industry but, yes, Chyna was yet another person used up and spit out by the mass entertainment beast.

* Prince had a redeeming innocence I thought, despite his music being genuinely dirty for its time–and that’s part of what made it great. Of course, if gangsta and Beyonce were the inevitable consequence of us boomers indulging those relatively early stirrings of explicit pop, I’m not sure it was worth it, to say the least.
I like that he stayed in his beloved home state of Minnesota.
The unique thing about Prince maybe was he was equal parts Minnesota nice and black soul.

* It’s interesting how classical composers generally got better and better with age – perhaps up to 70 ish at least, and sometimes beyond (of course there are exceptions like Charles Ives or Sibelius). With popular music only a tiny handful have produced anything creative after their early 30′s, and the ones who did were the ones who broke from the faddishness of the industry that you describe – e.g Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Perhaps popular traditions just have a whole bunch of incentives NOT to innovate or push forms to the limit and those who transgress are just sidelined. The so called popular exceptions like Bowie and Madonna strike me as feigning growth – in style and posture – but not in musical exploration.

With the death of the classical tradition (let’s say with the death of Shostakovich in 1975) we’ve really lost a whole dimension of interest in life – the value of exploring forms in radical, unexpected ways. It’s the conservatism of popular music that’s depressing to me (and I don’t mean its overt politics obviously).

* That Killers stuff is pretty good.

There’s good music being made.

The difference is the new stuff don’t make a difference.

Rock has been exhausted of new directions.

So, there’s plenty of good stuff but no ground-breaking stuff.

Beach Boys, Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Floyd, Byrds, Neil Young, Bowie, Velvet Underground, and etc were creating new sounds and styles. They captured the imagination and shaped the culture.

But now, Rock has pretty much stalled in breaking out into new directions. Sure, there’s still distinct and eccentric stuff. But they are not game-changers.

Also, the cultural narrative is now mostly focused on Industry Pop, so even much of good rock music don’t get discussed except in alternative venues.

There was a time when Rock Criticism favored the artists over industry product. Rolling Stone magazine didn’t give much cover to stuff like Shaun Cassidy and Olivia Newton John even though they had huge hits. They favored more serious acts.
But that’s all gone. Front and back, the critical discussion is now mostly over Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and etc.

Same with movies. There’s still excellent movies made, but the main critical discussion is about the Product.
In the 60s, critics liked stuff like 007 movies but the main discussion was about more serious stuff. No longer.

Posted in Blacks, Music | Comments Off on Prince, RIP