The End?

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Luke Ford

There’s an enormous appetite among right-wingers I know to believe that the Derek Chauvin verdict represents the end of America (Tucker Carlson taps into this yearning). I don’t share this apocalyptic vision. Do you have a theory for why so many people want to believe that America is done?

My view is that people who are convinced the end is nigh are immature. They need drama because their lives are empty, and they can’t handle things in public life not going their way because they are weak. I’m not impressed by the caliber of people who think America is over. They remind me of those old authors who proclaim the book is dead because nobody is reading their books.

Scott McConnell replies: “Yeah, conviction on negligent manslaughter was the right thing for crappy policing, but murder conviction was in the cards. If the left wins the midterms though, that would be worrisome. But there is a nascent left wing totalitarianism arising, scary and explains why.”

Bird: “I think if I could sum up the unease at the verdict, it’s that it seems like all the rioting and destruction has been rewarded and affirmed.”

Bud: “There won’t be any one signifier of the end of America as we know it. its like growth of tumor, occurs in increments. People like to look at symbolic events though to better understand a progression that occurs more like movement of the hour hand of a clock; inevitable, and imperceptible, but pointing out that the hour hand crossed the six, is not irrational.”

Troy: “Because the mob now gets a vote in jury deliberations. Add to that the fact that the Right has zero institutional power, and that we’re well into the Age of Decadence.”

Bud says:

I don’t think it is Chauvin alone. I think the right has long felt the establishment and especially the police and business were there natural allies. So whether it is the continued jailing of low flight risk non violent offenders for their acts at the Capitol on January 6, the quick lionization of Brian Sicknick as a martyr (even though he himself was a Trump supporter or sympathizer and his brother and mother denied early on that he died because of being hit by a fire extinguisher) to the point where he lay in state in the Capitol and was cited in the articles of impeachment. To the media and politicians who exploited and misreported what happened to him failing to apologize. To major corporations criticizing voting law changes. To persons who donated money to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense being doxed and in the case of a police officer fired and fundraising platforms being denied to conservative issues, to the continued expansion of CRT in all aspects of our society especially the military and military academies. These things make right wingers realize (1) they have little power compared to the left and (2) that entities they thought they could rely on are not their friends.

It is against this backdrop that the right wingers are fearful of the worst consequences of the Chauvin trial. They don’t focus on whether what Chauvin did was worthy of prosecution. (If you watched Tucker Carlson last night he had a police officer on who said that all police should know that keeping a suspect in a prone position with weight on them can cause positional asphyxiation and that once Floyd was handcuffed and on the ground Chauvin had no reason to continue to exert force on him in a prone position. Tucker quickly ended the segment because he thought the officer was going to speak about how the Chauvin verdict would lead to police not doing their jobs). They do focus on whether there was fair trial and whether there was mob justice with the jury being intimidated in finding a guilty verdict to avoid riots.

I don’t know whether what happened at the Chauvin trial is an aberration, a precedent or part of a trend. It is clear that the general belief among non conservatives is wrong about the criminality of young black males, about the number of blacks killed by the police and the prevalence of systematic racism in America. I think what the right wingers fear is the (1) the police will be defunded or if not defunded essentially neutered to the point where they will fear to use force even when called for for fear that they will lose their jobs and pensions and perhaps end up in jail, leaving law abiding citizens and their property at risk. (2)They also fear that the “rule of law” is under attack because the ordinary rules for deciding what acts the district attorney considers to charge and what charges to bring is being taken over by politicized district attorneys who focus more on police “misdeeds:” than run of the mill crimes. (3) and they fear that mob justice prejudges the guilt of the accused officer and through demonstrations and perceptions that failure to convict will lead to riots, intimidate jurors to convict.

I think you are wise not to jump to conclusions about this, and of course right now conservatives are terribly suspicious about the motives of those in power and perceive much of what is going on as an attempt to marginalize them, such as weeding out conservatives in general (although extremists in particular) from the military.

I am much more concerned about the possibility of war between Russia and Ukraine and China and its neighbors (especially Taiwan) with the possibility the U.S. will become involved. I fear that whether either prevails or the U.S. rebuffs them, too much is on the line for the losing side and it will be easy to get to nuclear war.

I think the reaction of at least some blacks to the police shooting in Columbus, certainly reinforces those who are fearful of the consequences, not only of the Floyd trial, but by the black attitude toward policing. It is troubling that so many, from Valerie Jarrett to Lebron James consider this to be an example of racism even though it is likely that the officer saved the lives of two other black girls who were the intended victims of the stabber. This jumping to conclusions is closer to the Red Queen’s approach in Alice in Wonderland with off with their heads first and trial second.

Steve Sailer writes:

Why does America in the early Biden Era appear to be coming apart at the seams?

One clear reason is because our culture is increasingly based on the sacralization of blacks.

For example, the ruling party has, in all seriousness, transformed itself into what I jokingly called The Black Party.

Thus, we are supposed to treat the late George Floyd as a holy martyr:

But raising any group above criticism just encourage them to behave worse.

And Americans don’t like blacks because they are perfect but because they are (ever so) human.

Thus, America’s Establishment culture at the moment is a little bit like a cult that would declare Shia LaBeouf the perfect being. But Shia keeps behaving like an imperfect human. So ever more frantic rationalizations are required.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Where were all those riots that you guys predicted would happen?

Looks like you were wrong and owe People of Colour and there allies an apology!

How is treating Blacks with respect and dignity “worship”?

Just because many folks are not standing for their murder and maltreatment doesn’t mean that they are being worshipped.

* The most important thing to happen in the last week was not the Chauvin case. It was Florida’s anti-riot bill, which stiffens penalties for those involved in disruptive, violent riots. Block an interstate? That’s now a felony. Tear down a statue? That’s 10 years. If a city tells its police to stand down during a riot, they lose civil immunity. On the other hand, someone who drives through a crowd blocking a street now has civil immunity in Florida.

The reality is that conservatives can stop the violence at any point in their state legislatures. Pass bills that disbar and adjudicate local DA’s who refuse to enforce the law. Pass bills against teachers who spread CRT and add them to public child endangerment registries.

This can all be turned around immediately. The issue, of course, is the Boomers. They overwhelmingly focus on local taxes to the exclusion of anything else. They think defending your culture is low-rent and harsh.

* There is a Big Market in “White Nationalist Detectors”.

A mysterious box with inscrutable electronics, they flash lights and beeb at random, leading to hilarious situations.

Meanwhile, Anti-Asian Hate News. (Dot-Asians still not affected in spite of their hopes to get a hitch on that particulr bandwagon).

‘I’ll f*** you up’: Man who racially abused Olympic karate ace Kokumai and told her to ‘go home, stupid b****’ is arrested (VIDEO) (arrested in another incident, that is)

Subhuman Fatso be lucky he’s still got his teeth and balls.

“I don’t know which was worse, a stranger yelling and threatening to hurt me for no reason or people around me who witnessed everything and not doing a thing,” she said at the time.

Welcome to Whitey Domain where “Doing Something” gets you arrested.

* ‘He was so nervous’: Ukrainian tennis queen Elina Svitolina says she was as ‘surprised’ as fans by on-off lover Monfils’ proposal

* This cognitive dissonance is going to cause a massive economic breakdown in our cities. You cannot destroy law and order in a big city and expect it to survive in any economic sense. Jobs will not come back if it’s not even safe to go to your job in a big city because blacks are allowed to rob anyone they please on the street. Apartment, house, and retail rents will plunge like a rock when people flee to safety.

Ultimately, cities will end up being cheap places to live again, but it will be the Wild West–except the law-abiding will not be allowed to carry a gun to protect themselves and their families. This will not work. The West became civilized because decent people were given the right to self-defense. Liberals have taken this away from decent people in their enclaves.

Our cities will become places of pure, nightmarish, post-modern anarchy thanks to Democrats. Many of these loons you can’t reason with at all are Millennials, the kids of the radical leftwing of the Baby Boomers. These Millennials are even crazier and have a more cult-like mentality than their parents. There are enough of them that their votes are going to destroy the nation.

* The very origin of the modern police force in London (“Bobbies”) was based on the concept that the police are not a military occupation force composed of foreign mercenaries and should be drawn from the community that they serve. Peel’s maxim was “the police are the public and the public are the police.” In most middle class American towns, the police are drawn from the local inhabitants and proudly live among them. Having a cop as your neighbor is considered a good thing.

Of course this only works if the community that they serve prefers law and order over rampant criminality. This is the basic equation – does the community on average have more to gain from the protection that they receive from the police than they have to lose by being subjected to the requirements of the law? The more property you own, the more law abiding you and your family are and the more you value your own life and the safety of your loved ones over your freedom to take revenge on your enemies, the more likely it is that the benefits of being policed will outweigh the drawbacks. Here is a hint on the first factor: the average net worth (assets – debts) of American blacks is approximately zero. I will leave to the reader the exercise of determining how the other two factors are distributed among the races.

* This insanity does not afflict all Americans but rather only the Left leaning portion. Of course this includes most of our political and academic establishment, clergy, media and entertainment industry so their influence and visibility is very high.

But there is a very large segment of the population (close to half) for which the sacralization of blacks holds no appeal. Among say white men above the age of 30, I would say that this includes the vast majority.

But (except for a few loudmouths whose bread is buttered at the Democrat table) I would venture to say that most white women, Asians and Latinos are not exactly wild about this either. At the very least, they think that THEY deserve a place of honor on the diversity totem pole somewhere near blacks and well above the status of detested white men. While on its face, this should not warm the hearts of white men, if examined closely it provides opportunities to drive a wedge into the Coalition of the Fringes. As the political and economic spoils from minority status increase, so does the incentive for the thieves to fall into infighting regarding how to divide up the loot.

* The late Lawrence Auster’s “First Law of Majority-Minority Relations” seems relevant, here:

The worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctness in covering up for that group.

And then there’s his first corrolary to that Law:

The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group’s bad behavior.

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The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale by James Atlas

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2017 book:

* Janet Malcolm: “The biographer is writing a life, not lives, and to keep himself on course, must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to the full humanity of everyone else. As he turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography, he cannot worry about the people who never asked to be dragged into his shaky enterprise.”

* He [Edmund Wilson] had his weaknesses. He could be naïve; the timing of To the Finland Station , an excitable defense of the Russia Revolution, happened to coincide with Stalin’s consolidation of power, preparing the way for the Terror. He had a tin ear for poetry, tending to overpraise mediocrities like Phelps Putnam, and opportunistic enthusiasms; he crassly praised the work of Anaïs Nin in order to get her into bed. And he had blind spots: “Must we really, as his admirers pretend, accept the plight of Kafka’s abject heroes as parables of the human condition?”

* It wasn’t only the number of women Wilson “bedded” that got on my nerves. It was his insistence on recording the mechanics—what Richard Ellmann called “the precise anatomical convolutions”—at great and annoying length in his journals. Wilson’s cold clinical accounts of sex made Kinsey seem like Henry Miller. I was startled not only by his profligacy but by his potency: at the age of seventy-four, he seduced the bibulous New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt on a couch at the Princeton Club and also managed to work in a hot affair with his dentist’s wife. He seemed to have no taboos, even dabbling in bondage and discipline. (He briefly owned a whip). He was a prodigious engine; women marveled at what one described as his “bull-like physical stamina.” He was so insatiable that I sometimes wondered how he could have slept with so many women while reading as many books as he did. And it didn’t even sound like fun. Cyril Connolly, reviewing Memoirs of Hecate County , complained of the “insect monotony” of its couplings. It’s not enough to say that Wilson was clinical; he could be downright creepy. He described his penis as “meaty” and compared his mistress’s feet to “moist little cream cheeses.” * 10
But the biggest obstacle was Wilson himself. He was hard to like: one of his wives described him as “a cold fishy leprous person.” Could I spend years of my life with a subject who, even in the company of his wife and daughter, read at the dinner table? He was anti-Semitic; he was rude to waiters. He found no merit in Anthony Powell. It finally dawned on me: what I felt was more complex than “distaste” or “dislike”—it was a question of compatibility. Was Edmund Wilson someone through whose eyes I would come to see life in a new and different way? Did he possess qualities of temperament or character that would remain fresh throughout the many years it takes to write a major biography? In short, did he interest me?

* When he [Mark Harris] calls the novelist’s home, Bellow’s three-year-old son picks up the phone and, mistaking Harris for his often absent father—Bellow is in the midst of one of his divorces—announces that he loves him: “I could not but tell him that I loved him, in turn, and I think that I fooled him with my voice.”

* You can never read the same book twice.

* The problem with biography is that the biographer’s age inevitably affects the way he sees his subject. As that vantage changes, so does his viewpoint. A biography written by a forty-year-old will be more unforgiving, less sensitive to his subject’s pain, than a biography written by a sixty-year-old. I’d been at work on my book for three years, and I was a different person from the person I’d been when I started…

* Bellow was a man for whom the world was becoming unfamiliar and confusing, overrun by a youth culture with beliefs and customs of its own—a man, in short, who was growing old. But his contention troubled me all the same: was it possible that even Saul Bellow’s work would fade from the collective memory, that Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King (the “three H’s,” he liked to call them) would one day molder on the shelf beside the works of Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck?

* Most of the time I didn’t mind our unequal stature and talents: Go, you be the genius. But sometimes I felt: What about my life? Doesn’t it count, too? There comes, inevitably, a moment of rebellion, when the inequality begins to chafe. Biographers are people, too, even if we’re condemned to huddle in the shadow of our subjects’ monumentality. All the same, self-abnegation has its limits. A thousand pages along, a decade in, the biographer cries out: What am I? Chopped liver?

* By the time I left, I was way over my limit of Bellow exposure—the amount of time I could spend around him before I got Bellow burnout. So much concentration, combined with the suppression of self, was exhausting.

* “There will be tears before bedtime,” the critic John Gross had predicted when he learned that I was writing a biography of Bellow. And so there would.

* Edmund White, the biographer of Jean Genet, called biography the revenge of the little people on the big people.

* In A. S. Byatt’s Possession , a scholar named Mortimer Cropper delivers a lecture entitled “The Art of a Biographer” in which he offers a persuasive vindication of his craft: “Biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it’s human.”

* So what is the biographer’s purpose? Primarily, I would say, to show what other factors—besides genius—contributed to the making of the writer’s life, the genesis of his books, the social and literary influences that formed them. Richard Ellmann described the connection this way: “Affection for one leads to interest in the other, the two sentiments tend to join, and the results of affection and interest often illuminate both the fiery clay and the wrought jar.” The fiery clay is the life, and the wrought jar is the work that gives it form.

* A nother way the biographer/subject relationship can go wrong: you start out a friend of your subject and end up hating him, as Lawrance Thompson did in his notorious biography of Robert Frost. Every biographer is familiar with this train wreck; Jay Parini, Frost’s most sympathetic biographer, called it “a three-volume assault on Frost’s character in the shape of a literary biography.” Thompson died before he could complete the third volume, to the relief of all concerned, and it was finished by his student R. H. Winnick, but the damage was done. His biography stands as a monument to the danger of writing about someone you know.
It began as a promising match. Thompson wasn’t just Frost’s biographer; he was the authorized biographer, appointed by Frost after he read an admiring book Thompson had written on his poetry. The admiration was apparently provisional, since it didn’t prevent Thompson from giving a hostile review to a play of Frost’s in the Times Book Review or, stranger still, having an affair with Frost’s mistress, Kay Morrison, the wife of Theodore Morrison, a poet and professor of English at Harvard. Now that’s access. Is it enough to call this a conflict of interest, or is it transgressive?
“Thompson’s intimacy with Kay allowed him to participate in and even change the course of the life he was writing,” wrote Jeffrey Meyers, one of Frost’s many biographers. He urged Morrison to reject Frost’s proposals of marriage and be “tough” with him, even though Thompson knew—it was his job to know—every detail of their affair. * 13 I can’t help wondering what their pillow talk was like.

* I was deep into my Bellow now, asserting my freedom—the freedom that art grants the biographer to “kick around the facts,” as Dwight had put it. Not to fabricate them, but to choose and order them in such a way that they create a likeness—a likeness that was mine. Foolishly and generously, out of kindness and vanity, innocence and egotism, Bellow had allowed me a glimpse of his many-selved character. For the better part of a decade, I had observed and made notes. The data had been collected. That work was done. Ahead lay the harder work: making sense of it.

* “No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways, he has to elbow his way through the world, giving and receiving offence.”

* Bellow had three sons: Greg, Adam, and Dan.
He also had three disciples: James Wood, Leon Wieseltier, and Martin Amis. These three were—I won’t say pseudo-sons, because their affection for Bellow was so deep as to be almost filial—but surrogate- or substitute- or perhaps alter-sons, whose love was uncomplicated by anger and the unruly demands of hereditary sons. Easier to choose your sons than to deal with the ones you have.

* “How, really, could the drama of paternity have competed with the drama of creativity?” asked Wood. For Bellow, “The writing was the living.”

* Maybe it could have been fixed if I’d written the book now, toward the end of my life, and known more about its capacity to wound. Maybe it could never have been fixed. The key to writing biography is the capacity to be empathic; Holmes’s image of the biographer extending “a handshake” toward his subject stayed with me. At some point, without realizing it, I had withdrawn my hand.

* Anyway, it’s not as if he got away with it. There was a lot of wear and tear. He was battered by alimony fights and operatic love affairs. As a father, he was a disaster. Even Janis, whose love for Bellow was unconditional, acknowledged in an interview after his death that “he failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around.”

* I had never been able to convince myself that it was justifiable for Bellow to diminish his friends and family members by making them “material.” When Dave Peltz reprimanded him for putting a story Peltz had told him in Humboldt’s Gift , Bellow lectured him about the sanctity of the artist: “I should think it would touch you that I was moved to put a hand on your shoulder and wanted to remember you as I took off for the moon.”
I remain unpersuaded by the casuistical argument put forward by James Wood: “The number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than could be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.” Was I missing something in this creepy moral calculus? Was Wood suggesting that it was okay to hurt your own wives and friends and children in the service of literature? “Does the reader care that Dave Peltz was a little wounded?” I did. Dave was my friend.

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Youtube’s Moderators Can’t Read On A Sixth Grade Level

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Luke Ford

Watch the deleted video below:

From my March 4, 2021 video above:

00:00 Trump Has Been Good For The GOP, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html
06:15 Sanford Levinson: How Much Do Elections Matter?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMpzTEnfrHY
11:00 Rush Limbaugh’s legacy, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/rush-limbaugh-is-still-dead/
16:40 Dr. Seuss nonsense, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/this-weeks-dr-suess-nonsense/
22:00 A Failure of Governance in Texas, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/a-failure-of-governance-in-texas/
36:00 Tom Landry: Prisoner of his Own Myth, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-09-bk-367-story.html
1:09:00 Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design, https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1220&context=fss_papers
1:26:20 Fidelity to law & constitutional dictatorship, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0X2NRjeoM4
1:28:30 Gad Saad: My Chat with Jordan Peterson – Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KF2cwcADtU
1:36:00 Covid-19 death rates 10 times higher in countries where most adults are overweight, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-rate-intl/index.html
1:41:00 QAnon is not going anywhere, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-qanon-has-attracted-so-many-white-evangelicals/?ex_cid=538twitter
1:48:00 The Reality of Electoral Fraud, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-reality-of-electoral-fraud/
1:50:00 A Return to the (Lack of) Evidence of Significant Fraud, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/a-return-to-the-lack-of-evidence-of-significant-fraud/
2:08:00 We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html
2:18:00 #501: Steven Pressfield on The Artist’s Journey, the Wisdom of Little Successes, Shadow Careers, and Overcoming Resistance, https://tim.blog/2021/02/26/steven-pressfield/
2:41:00 In the summer of 1995, I began working on a documentary about what women want, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzBnpmJyauY
2:50:00 What Women Want 20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgFouRg8Bj0
2:56:00 What Women Want 34.5, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxJ6JwJ9J0Q
2:58:00 Stormy Daniels in Feb. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDy10Tzwdqw

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Turning to content creators for mental health support (4-20-21)

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Luke Ford

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/04/19/streamers-mental-health/
https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rioters-left-feces-urine-in-hallways-and-offices-during-mobbing-of-us-capitol/
https://fakenous.net/?p=2154
https://fakenous.net/?p=2134 “The first thing to understand about humanity is that most human beings have very little character. They have minimal moral motivation (https://fakenous.net/?p=272), and weak internal motivations in general. They are easily swayed by circumstances, especially by people around them. So the reason why your neighbor doesn’t grab your wallet or punch you in the face when you annoy him is not that it would be wrong to do so. The reason is that it’s against the social norms — he doesn’t see other people doing that, he knows that other people would disapprove of it, and society might punish such behavior. That’s really the main reason.

People’s allegiance to social norms is emotional, not intellectual. They just feel like they have to follow the norms. So they’re not very subtle about it — e.g., people aren’t very good at distinguishing good social norms from bad ones. Also, some of the norms are vague and general, like “Treat people with a certain level of respect, even when you disagree with them.”

The most valuable thing that America has — the thing that makes things go better in innumerable ways than the way they go in 99% of other societies — is not its wealth, nor its particular laws and policies, nor even its Constitution. The most valuable thing is a set of norms and institutions that managed to take hold and become stable. Or at least metastable.”

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Where Do I Trust The New York Times? (4-20-21)

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Luke Ford

Martin Gurri writes: Slouching Toward Post-Journalism: The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.

Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting.

The digital age exploded this business model. Advertisers fled to online platforms, never to return. For most newspapers, no alternative sources of revenue existed: as circulation plummets to the lowest numbers on record, more than 2,000 dailies have gone silent since the turn of the century. The survival of the rest remains an open question.

Led by the New York Times, a few prominent brand names moved to a model that sought to squeeze revenue from digital subscribers lured behind a paywall. This approach carried its own risks. The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?

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