Mostly I agree with this but a couple of points you don’t make explicit but need to make explicit:
1) High IQ as NOT correlated with being a better person in any moral sense: you point out that the elites are the ones who engage in all kinds of horribly dishonest behavior in order to win status games and have no self-awareness about how justified the resentment against them is.
2) Eventually this elite foolishness becomes very seriously damaging—that point has now been reached in a way that the proles can’t possibly ignore with the drag queen and transgender ideologies being VERY FORCEFULLY PUSHED ON THEM AND HARMING THEIR CHILDREN.
This is a five-alarm fire, culturally. It is fine that you understand the elites, but you don’t condemn them enough where they need to be condemned.
How and why are these things harming children? Your answer cannot assume the religiously derived premise that pre-pubescent children have some sort of pure sexless ideal human souls which will inevitably be sullied and suffer lifelong trauma from knowing that sexual intercourse is a thing that exists which most humans engage in.
i am mostly w you in re the drag shows, i think it's really just an almost-subjective question of where to draw the line.
like, i wd be fine showing something pornographic to a 20yr old, then maybe possibly a 16yr old, but then somewhere lower i start to feel gross (i'm guessing we all have lines somewhere.)
and not to equate drag shows w porn (esp of the hardcore variety), but we do have to admit drag is often highly sexualized and people will have different ideas of when and how they want to expose their children to sexuality.
also, none of this occurs in a vacuum and it seems what's happened is that the Queer Theory people have grabbed the wheel of the movement (i mean the people who see being gay not as just a way to live but as an explicitly Left smash-the-system political statement) and they seem to want to rub people's noses in alternative sexuality in their endless crusade to steamroll norms and make yesterday's stigma into today's virtue.
And i think they're playing with fire and could be instigating an ugly backlash. (and i say this as someone who's never voted Republican but has been to 100s of drag shows.)
Er, actually the anthropologists claim that in really authentic hunter-gatherer societies all the youngest kids know everything about sex, as the whole family sleeps in the same hut. And 16-year olds in modern societies are generally sexually mature, though not socially so much, and honestly interested about this topic. Have you been a 16-year old?
This reminds me so much of men in the 90s claiming gays could trick people into homosexuality.
Dude, when you turned thirteen, you could tug yourself silly over an unclothed mannequin. YOU LIKE WOMEN. The Taliban would not be able to beat that out of you.
To the extent that pre-pubescent children are sexual beings, the question remains whether (or to what extent) this concern is within the purview of the family, or of the State.
And parents in this country can still decide which school to send their children to, or to homeschool them. If that ever stops being so, you would certainly have a valid point - but until then, any parent who doesn't like what their kids are exposed to can simply take them elsewhere.
Not sure such a laborious "opt-out" should be necessary unless the State arrogates "exposure" to sexuality unto itself by default. Why shouldn't the default be to consider sexuality a private matter best left to the purview of the family (in all its diverse manifestations)?
Not in states with charter school laws, which is almost all of them (and it seems unlikely that public schools in the Dakotas and Nebraska would do anything that could be considered "woke").
How do you justify prosecuting parents for "child abuse" if they bring THEIR OWN kids to Drag Queen Story Hour? One needn't subscribe to (or support) Gender Ideology to recognize the problem involved here.
Why do you think I am justifying such prosecution? I think there is a harmful agenda behind the drag queen story hours, and I think many parents are unaware of how harmful it is and are making a serious mistake, but I said nothing about prosecuting them for child abuse.
Transgender surgeries, performed on minors, are a different thing, that are in my opinion harmful enough for the legal system to get involved.
Both are harmful enough to merit legal system involvement. Don't get hung up on physical mutilation as abuse. Drag queen shows are a step in grooming towards sex abuse, child porn, etc. I'm not suggesting arresting every parent who brings their kid to one, but it is a pattern of behavior that must be watched and curbed for the long-term health of the child.
It's fascinating to me how many people who reply here think that the country is teetering on the edge of mandating mass gender transition. Serious question, do you guys know any liberals in real life? It's like if I thought every rural American had a Nazi flag in their closet.
When you have nothing to lose, you can let it all hang out. When you have a lot to lose, you hide crimes better or find ways to skirt accountability. The crimes still happen. Look at pHarma and "public health." They aren't robbing liquor stores, but they're committing loads of far worse crimes.
Maybe it would be better to say that the correlation between IQ and morality is only very weak, at best. Or perhaps that certain kinds of evil are better suited to different IQ ranges. If it turned out to be the case that higher IQ was correlated with a greater likelihood to support child castration (euphemistically termed "gender affirming care"), and vice versa, that wouldn't entirely surprise me. It also wouldn't change which side of this "debate" is the right one.
Mostly agree, my biggest difference is in step two as follows:
1. Politicians and bureaucrats are punished much more for errors than they are rewarded for good deeds (negativity bias and/or slave morality).
2. While egalitarian ideologies diminish the reaction to both errors and good deeds, this is beneficial to politicians and bureaucrats due to 1. Counterintuitively this is more beneficial the further up the hierarchy you go since the effect of 1. becomes stronger.
3. Even if people do not consciously realize 2., the more egalitarian ones survive in their roles or climb up with higher probability than non-egalitarians.
Excellent analysis. The skeleton in the cupboard is race. The large majority of whites vote and act in a colorblind fashion. Upper-, middle- and lower class blacks are 100% ethnonepotist - on a jury, they will vote to exonerate the criminal solely based on the skin color. Ditto resource distribution. This cannot continue forever.
How funny, I posted this (below) in January 2021. Yours is obviously much better.
"A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.
The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.
The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.
I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think."
"The idea that poor people are always the victims of forces beyond their control has become the standard way to discuss inequality and poverty."
Poor whites are held accountable. The kid who drove into a violent mob and caused a woman's death at the Charlottesville riot in 2017 was sentenced to I think 300+ years. Blacks, on the other hand, murder people in cold blood all the time and receive much lighter sentences.
After Kneeling Nancy and the 2020 Saint Floyd riots (apparently covid doesn't bother BLM/antifa rioters) hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into NGOs like the NAACP. Nothing comparable to any police involved death of whites, as white oriented groups are reviled as racist and pure evil. Jared Taylor, for instance, at American Renaissance, is an academic who isn't irrational at all but merely states the obvious. It's actually kind of funny that whites, and only whites, are supposed care about what other groups think about them and are terrified of being called racist. This great fear has no precedence to my knowledge and exists no where else.
White artists, composers and even fashion designers are now being accused of "cultural appropriation" and non-whites are demanding recognition in the work or censorship. Meanwhile, their accusers appropriate whites' various inventions, medical treatments, language, clothes, music, etc.
People nowadays who brush off race or pretend there is some sort of equivalent derangement when discussing social/cultural issues seem, to me, to be in deep denial. From my point of view race (and sex) are at the very heart of any analysis. Ignoring them just seems bizarre. And no, I'm not in fear of lower class competition. I simply believe white people are a unique group who are in a spiritual death spiral and are unable to maintain their sacred spaces. Sad.
That said, I appreciate your attempt to wade into this miasma.
If I can extrapolate a bit on the points our host made, I don't think there's a single more important or more strongly held belief among our elites than White Guilt, White Shame and/or the general idea that when it comes to Black people, all Good Whites support BLM and affirmative action etc and never raise a peep of criticism against Black people.
I think this may just be the ultimate tribal class and status marker and helps explain why Good Whites always speak about Black people in these solemn reverential tones, and then get quickly angry and defensive when asked to explain any particular belief. (I had a writer friend visiting me from brownstone Brooklyn recently and when I showed her my home and said "This is the master bedroom," she blanched and said I wasn't allowed to say that!)
I think this reflects the fact that when it comes to modern history and morality (esp for Americans) the Big Bang is WW2/Holocaust and Slavery/Jim Crow. It is really very rare when a political debate starts and moral issues arise that one or 2 of these episodes don't get mentioned.
And I think that because the elite need for separation has become more intense now that our NYT/NPR/PBS class wants desperately to be seen and known as opposed to all things Deplorable, these moral taboos and guideposts have become only more hardened and electrified.
I would maybe tweak that and say WW2 has replaced Genesis, Hitler (and people who replicate his bigotry) has replaced Satan, the Hero's Journey (whether it's going from sinful to blessed or becoming a Promethean benefactor of humanity) has been replaced by triumphing over bigotry or "negativity" and becoming your Authentic Self™, and for God, it's either Mammon, the State (when it's controlled by your team), or really most likely the aforementioned Self, which is the one universal object of worship left standing.
Whites fear the severe violence and social punishment enacted against those labeled as "racists", they don't fear the label itself. If we had laws preventing employees from being fired over social media posts, and preventing mobs of protestors from gathering outside private citizens homes, then Whites wouldn't be keeping their heads down.
Thanks for your response. My problem with that is enacting laws will only validate the term "racism." But no one knows what it means. If it means believing a group is superior to another then all those white liberals who live in expensive neighborhoods would be considered racist. Or liking, say, western folk or classical music to hip-hop. Why wouldn't that be racist? By enacting such laws you would be playing their game. Best thing to do is say everybody's "racist" and void the entire slander.
Alex, some dude the other day called me a "white liberal." I didn't give it no thought at the time, but now I'm here and you're talkin' about white liberals and expensive neighborhoods. So right now I'm askin' if I'm such a hotshot white liberal why the hell am I livin' in this tarpaper and aluminum shithole? Where's MY expensive neighborhood. Sheeeet..
Alex, you got to honky up brother! Honkies--or white people as you call'em---are indeed "a unique group." But White World began it's spiritual death spiral when Rome collapsed, the old pagan gods were forsaken (at your peril!), and everybody got all Jesusey and shit. Apollo, Aurora, Bacchus---baby, these cats not only had the Big Meow but everything was Under Control!
And you say sacred spaces! You got a room where there's toilet paper? Well, there you go then...
Step 4 seems to be your strongest section. But maybe that is just my own bias showing.
Buzzfeed should have a quiz that tells you what class you belong to based on education, income, taste, identity, etc. Where would it put me? White, cis, straight, millenial, male, married, Father, $130k income, graduate level education (non-elite or Ivy), christian who works out, likes hunting, votes knowing his vote doesn't matter but feels cathartic, reads Hanania.
I would guess high-prole or upper middle striver. But I know a lot upper-middle strivers and I'm not that smug and insecure. Ok maybe a little smug but not in the same way. Like, I don't need to see myself in the free city lifestyle magazine attending a banquet sniffing my own farts...yeah, definitely high prole.
Anyone who reads(emphasis here) Hanania is in the upper class even if our sympathies lie with the lower class. Perhaps we are the right wing version of champagne socialists.
I find the generalization of all conservatives/right-wingers/etc. as mouth-breathing idiots who can't even read to be a bit strange. Likewise, I'm quite well educated (well enough to be sitting here reading this stuff, I guess), and if you only looked at my demographics on a piece of paper, you'd probably guess me for a Democrat voter. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I wonder if this perception that there are no Republican voters with an IQ above 80 is enforced by the extreme online censorship regime. True "proles" may live in social circles where they can proudly proclaim their love for Trump on Facebook and not have to care who sees it or what they think. As for me, I'm very careful to hide my political beliefs from my co-workers. I've lived most of my life in enemy territory, so to speak. So while my feelings are very strong, I've generally been quiet for the sake of self-preservation.
Well, in my personal experience from dealing with fellow wrong-thinkers, I haven't observed them to be any less intelligent/thoughtful/etc. than average. Likewise, if liberals are the "high IQ" super smart people, one would expect them to show it in how they engage on these topics, but again, my personal observations have been completely the opposite. I have observed two modes of liberal engagement with their opposition--snide, smug derision, or wailing emotional histrionics. I can't remember the last time I saw a liberal attempt to engage conservative ideas in good faith. I'm not sure that I've ever seen it. Where is this high-minded intellectual prowess that they are supposed to have?
Again, always possible there are selection biases at work, but I think I would like to see some actual evidence for the assertion that Republicans are stupid, rather than empty assertions that echo liberal stereotypes.
I think you've mis-interpreted a key tenet of this essay which is that he is referring to caricatures of each side. He is making the point that the most prominent flag bearers for each side fit his central theory and that everyone else engaged in the culture war on the periphery chooses sides in relation to these caricatures. As such, hes not making the case that conservatives are low IQ mouth breathers but that the most prominent ones, like QAnon, election deniers, birtherism truthers are.
I laughed at that because 'merchant' is an actual antisemitic slur the alt-right was using a few years back and Jews are much more prominent on the Brahmin Left.
You are too far gone if you imagine words such as "merchant" to be slurs. The biggest problem we have are that people who belong in mental hospitals are imagining bias everywhere, and they want to take action against the evils in their minds. There are every few actual racists in the US. Many of them are people of color. I have seen some serious anti-Semitism on the left, but never on the right. It would be strange to see London-style protests with Nazi and Palestinian flags.
The reality is that the left elite use racism as a an extortionary instrument of power. If you listen to them, all they talk about is power. I miss the old liberals who actually loved this country and its people. I am no fan of Trump, but the current state of the Democratic Party hurts me deeply. A never-ending séance on racism does not benefit anybody save the Al Sharpton's of the world. Working people need a party on their side, not Trump. Today they have no one. The real risk is that a true populist movement comes in. It does not require much support to successfully manage a coup. Trump does not have the balls, but this era is preppy people for a potential future none of us want.
This essay oozes disdain for the "lower classes" from which the author firmly distances himself. Predictably he shoots a few arrows at the "proles" who supposedly reject COVID jabs only because jab pushers are Woke. The author is too protective of his social status (and too proud of his long-winded theory) to risk acknowledging Big Pharma's takeover of the CDC and NIH.
I think Hanania is committed to maintaining a self-image of neutrality. He needs to see himself as someone who does not play for either team. As a part of this, he must find at least a couple points on which he can criticize the right. Of course, the state of reality these days is that siding with the left over the right on pretty much anything tends to require that you deny the very obvious, buy into a bunch of hateful lies about race/gender/whatever, and so on.
The vaccine fills this niche as an issue where he can side with "the science" and at least maintain some semblance of intellectual honesty. He knows he certainly won't be taken seriously if he started buying into left-wing narratives on nearly anything else. It is notable, though, that while he makes his clotshot support clear, I don't think he has written an actual article dedicated to explaining how and why he holds this position. If he truly wanted to establish his Supreme Centrist credentials, I think that's what he should do. Sneering about it in passing while refusing to engage substantively is what "the liberal elites" do, and could go a long way towards alienating right-wing readers, I'd imagine (I know it certainly has this effect on me).
Intriguing to be sure, but maybe I missed something, but I found myself thinking that the whole analysis is too divorced from outcomes. Maybe it is me just reverting back to the materialist/economic view of things, but there are trillions of dollars at stake in the outcomes of elections. 2022-era Left/Elites parties disproportionately direct those resources towards cities, blue states, universities (and their graduates via loan forgiveness), nonprofits, Federal and international bureaucracies, and foreign aid/adventurism, whereas 2022-era Right/Populists basically starve all of that in favor of general business and personal tax cuts, protectionism/tariffs, family supports, rural areas, and military buildups. These aren't small matters, it's not uncommon that people pay 30-40%-50+% of their income in taxes, and whole segments of the economy are based either directly or indirectly in some kind of government support. The economic stakes in the regulatory state might be even bigger still.
So yeah sure a lot of the culture war is essentially tribalism, with the tribes being motivated in large part by psychological animosities held by the extremes, but not sure you can divorce that from the huge actual stakes that are involved in these conflicts.
It often is when it comes to American politics. This is the biggest misconception about the Federal government. The system would work better if it were only monetary interests. The problem lies in all the true believers and fanatics about their silly causes.
These factors come into play, particularly the idea of women having an increased voice/role in societies. However, too many, particularly on the left, fail to recognize that actual differences in thought process, values, etc exist between men and women how those differences affect each of those areas.
However, you are missing the forest for the trees. It boils down to a 1 main idea and most everything else in an outgrowth of it:
The rich and powerful have zero real accountability. They are corrupt and manipulate the system for their benefit while screwing everyone else over. They buy or are the politicians and can manipulate the law through the system they built to protect themselves. Need a simple example? Who are/were Epstein's clients? Why arent they being prosecuted? Why does the mainstream media have no interest in finding out who they are?
Because the people mentioned above have no accountability, none of the issues, problems, complaints of the majority are addressed. Sometimes, at best, they are thrown crumbs and told be happy about it. The 'elite' do whats in their best interest which makes the situation worse for the rest.
And it might not be quite so bad if those elites were actually elite, but they arent. They are terrible at their job. Nearly all of our major problems, both domestically and internationally are their fault.
Nearly every major foreign issue weve dealt with since WWII was a direct result of their previous action. Iraq, Iran, Bin Laden, Saddam, Russia, China, all direct results of actions we have taken in an attempt to solve a previous 'problem'.
Our domestic issues like budget problems, social security, expensive medicine, failing education, rising poverty, again direct results of the decisions and actions (or lack thereof) of those same set of 'elites'.
Always playing games instead of legitimately attempting to solve a problem. Worrying about who got credit and if it would help the other side too much. Inserting poison pills into something that might be good. Only supporting ideas where they can benefit beyond just doing their job. Writing loopholes that you can drive a convoy through so it appears they are doing something. Crafting legislation with no benchmarks or tracking to see if what they are forcing on is effective or efficient.
And a media that only challenges opposition politicians just enough and at certain times to stoke some angry, but never really to force the issue or truly hold some accountable.
This corruption has reached a level that is approaching too much for people to tolerate anymore. The problems, debt, etc is has created and allowed to build is reaching a breaking point.
TLDR Double standards, hypocrisy, and corruption of the rich, media and politicians (the so called 'elites') has reached a point where its so blatant and frankly incompetent that people are reaching a breaking point.
I assure you that if you actually worked in government, you would see that this is not true. Rich people are not manipulating the system. It is interest groups. The unions here, the women's groups there, the tech bros here, the hardware guys there, the software firm here, the eco-idiot group #1 here, eco-idiot group#2 there,..., econ idiot group #N overe there,...
All the groups are led by true believers. They all have the answers. You never see any rich assholes pushing people around. Senators would never take shit from them. Yet, they do bow down before the Sierra Group or the AFL-CIO or AmCham.
The problem is all the true believers. The abortion issue is a great example. This is a non-problem that causes so much heat and distraction. The people who care, it is their whole life. They drive the narrative. For any legislation, the people who benefit or lose out circle the wagons and get their rifles out. Look at how the ISP's have driven policy at the FTC. Another example would be how the mega-banks influence Dodd-Frank to basically draw a wide, deep mote around their industry preventing any new entrants, all at the taxpayer's expense.
Interest groups move policy, not individuals. No self-respecting Congressman would every let some rich asshole tell him what to do. It does not happen. You need to understand that there are no "right" answers, only trade-offs. The people who want policy A not only benefit from it, but they think it is what America needs. The people against it feel the same way. The environmental groups display this the best. They all hate each other. Some hate nuclear power, while others hate carbon and support nuclear power. Some want to preserver rural life and family farms, while other KNOW that the RIGHT choice is to let all the land go fallow so the natural world returns. They are all convinced that they are on the right side of creation itself.
Politics would be so much easier if it were all about self-interest. It is so much easier to work that out compared to the crazies who work at non-profits and NGO's. The first thing I would do if I were king for a day is to end non-profit status and require all organizations to pay taxes and publish where their revenue comes from. That would do a lot of good. If that is not possible, I would cap pay at non-profits to $50,000 per year, and only allow any individual to have one job at any non-profit (no multiple jobs). Over time inflation would only let rich jerks work at these and dramatically reduce their efficacy.
Embarrassingly bad analysis. If you want to understand the rural/urban divide dynamic look to Henry George, he understood and explained it perfectly. It is indeed economic (despite your shoddy article) and is due to land rentierism gradually consolidating all wealth into the hands of the urban at an exponentially faster rate than rural and exurban (in an entirely parasitical way I might add, although the urban are not actually aware of this mechanism). This is due to the inelastic supply of land (land in the economic sense, not merely the colloquial sense) resulting in urban monopolization being the fastest guarantor of (rentier) wealth increase despite being its least taxed. It would take a small booklet to properly explain the dynamic but you can search YouTube for "for the land is mine dvd restored" and the first result will be a decent primer. Professor Henry Dodson has two YouTube channels further expounding on all aspects of Henry George's theory, and then of course there's "Progress and Poverty," George's magnum opus. As an aside, culture is largely an export of capital accumulation via advertising and other corporate commercial interests. If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from capital accumulation. Our culture is not something that arises organically, it is something developed and foisted with intentionality.
If your analysis is correct, then liberals are making a huge mistake by absorbing ideologies like Ibrahim Kendi’s that are simplistic enough to be accessible to low class whites. In doing so, they enable the lower class to engage the ideas themselves, which in this case are straightforwardly rubbish.
Additionally, as people with lower cognitive abilities proliferate in the elite (due to non merit based admission) and bring their simplistic ideologies to bear on their institutions, then the genuinely high IQ will be faced with a quandary: (1) fool themselves into believing that the high class ideology is coherent, (2) form their own group, (3) shamelessly take on absurd intellectual positions for status, or (4) publicly adopt the intellectual positions while subtly signaling their disagreement. (1) can only be done in a quasi-religious manner. (2) is basically what happened with the intellectual dark web. Despite what conservatives claim, I think (3) is quite uncommon except among politicians. (4) is what most people will do.
Kendism is not that simple. You need to believe disparities mean discrimination. But if blacks are over represented in sports it doesn’t count. Also it doesn’t count when Asians do better than whites at standardized tests. It’s a complex ideology, as it pretends to have certain principles but deviates from them in predictable ways if you’ve got the intelligence and inclination to keep up.
I think it can be reasonably approximated as “disparities mean unjust discrimination if and only if blacks and Latinos are ‘winning.’” That’s the only real element that’s caught on with liberals, which isn’t cognitively demanding to grasp or refute.
Liberals don't really have a choice when it comes to supporting "critical race theory" and the like, though. Because their worldview rests on pseudo-worship of minorities and the various implications that entails (blank slate theory, denial of individual agency except maybe for Straight White Men, etc.), any genuine pushback or criticism of someone like Kendi would threaten the entire belief structure.
We can see this borne out predictably in public discourse, as anyone who dares to question The Narrative in even the most innocuous forms is immediately labeled a White Supremacist and cast out into the darkness. Even if the person is non-white him/herself! White Guilt is a foundational premise of the entire ideology, so if you even just suggest that maybe white people aren't the ultimate evil, you're no longer welcome in the club.
The only way out (if there is one) is through. Eventually, enough people will have to re-orient their worldview into something that doesn't rest on White Guilt on a central defining principle. There's not going to be a half-measure where the left somehow says "okay, we'll have some white guilt, but not *that* much white guilt, that's going too far!" That isn't quite how these trends work. Ideas like these tend to go to their breaking point before a critical mass of people finally give up on them.
My entire immediate and outside family seems to be an outlier in your theory, which I understand can't cover every situation, but seems strange to me. First, if higher IQ is associated with the elite and those elite look down on lesser IQ population, why aren't black people also looked down upon if they are poor or for what reason are they being used? Second, as an upper middle class family that "clings to" traditional values, has Master's Degrees (IQ) and votes for Trump because the left is too far gone while our poorer, less educated family members always vote D into office because they are afraid of losing benefits, I wonder how many other Republicans are out there in my situation that aren't taken seriously because it is assumed we are too stupid to understand politics? Not in a personal sort of way, just wondering as a matter of facts. Sorry for the run-on sentences (as my mind races) 😄
I think the absence of elite contempt towards blacks is explained in part by the tendency for those to have the most contempt for those just one rung below them.
"If higher IQ is associated with the elite and those elite look down on lesser IQ population, why aren't black people also looked down upon if they are poor or for what reason are they being used?"
I don't mean to sound glib or crass, but my guess is that for most Whites Black people don't exist as flesh-and-blood humans but only as abstract symbols.
For the Left, they're symbols of our oppressive past and the failures of the political present (and victims of those evil bigoted Bad Whites); for the Right, they're the dark dangerous Other always about to commit a crime. (But I do think overt rightwing racism has declined massively in the past 1-2 generations.)
But either way, they exist mostly as weapons for each White Tribe to use against each other, as ways to indict each other's political visions. (And also this is partially bc most Whites don't really know any Black people, at least not closely.)
Very nice explanatory. I never thought of it that way. 🤔 Something to think about, for sure. As someone who has always lived in a 50/50 State, I know plenty of both races, but not other minority races very well.
Black people? Historical guilt. Slavery and Jim Crow were real things, after all. (It's also a way to rhetorically flog the white lower class.)
These are aggregate statements, individual people can definitely be cross-pressured, and until recently economic factors were a much larger driver as you point out.
Hanania himself is obviously a (very bright) conservative intellectual, and I'd bet a considerable degree of exasperation at the political views of his intellectual peers and intellectual status of his political peers drives his work.
I didn't categorize you as a liar. Asked you to consider that people who don't share your politics might perhaps think you're anything but dumb. "Mendacious" has a bit more nuanced meaning than simply "liar."
In this particular epoch it's common (unfortunately) for people with opposing allegiances and who are otherwise at cross purposes with one another, to think the worst---from "dumb" to "mendacious."
No, I knew you weren't specifically speaking of me. I was asking for a clarification of use. I appreciate the thought, was just trying to marrow down your thoughts process.
Good God, it is much more simple - the elites have enough power to impose that power and spread their increasing mental illnesses . . . the stupid succumb, while the opposition comes from those that recognize the utter bullshit that the upper classes embrace. And it is bullshit.
I agree with most of this. I think it mostly explains the professional-managerial class and the white fraction of the working class, though.
I would add that billionaires, because they can donate millions of dollars, can actually become rational actors in swaying politics by donating enough money to a candidate to make them do what they want.
There ain't no such thing no more as the "working class," and to reference the "white fraction of the working class" is beyond paradoxical, it marks you as...well, hell I don't know what it marks you as it just don't make no sense. The white working class, or any other color of working class for that matter ain't workin' no more and if they are workin' it's for peanuts, crackerjack and a pack of Pall Mall reds.
The motive: Resentment against the possibility of losing your social status against social climbers. When Napoleon stripped German guildsmen of their privileges of closed markets, their outcompeted sons became the nucleus of German Romanticism, painting Republicanism as Anti-German, treacherous, and, ultimately, Jewish. More often than not, today's culture warriors are descendants of the culture-defining class. E.g. When a white person is chastising himself for his "white-privilege" such awkward looking performances of self-degradation aren't aimed at himself, but at those lesser whites as he is effectively cordoning off the upper social stratosphere: You can not join unless you bow down first.
There is some cluelessness there as well. Many people who speak about white privilege are often shocked to learn that not every what family has servants and a summer home in Nice or the Amalfi coast. There are a whole lot of rich people, and they are blissfully unaware of anyone outside of their social circle. Then there are the mass of ladies desperate to get into that class who emulate them and throw themselves at the men of that class. I have had women scream at me and call me manipulative because I did not explain that my family is not obscenely wealthy. Who on earth assumes someone is from wealth and privilege? It would appear quite a few sleazy women trying to marry up in Manhattan. There is an entire ecosystem that caters to those people. They have total control of the Democratic Party now. It explains a lot.
In terms of explaining why Darwinism was dethroned by Boasian anthropology and egalitarianism in general, you seem to be ignoring the elephant in the room. The egalitarianism of today’s elites revolves mainly around race/ethnicity; race-based egalitarianism became a central ideology for the elites when the elites became disproportionately Jewish in the 1960s. Jews tend to loathe (for obvious reasons) any claims of group differences based on race, so evolutionary psychology was fiercely attacked by many Jewish intellectuals (with notable exceptions of course). In addition, Jews also fear a white Christian majority (again, for obvious reasons), so they embraced (anti-democratic) mass non-white immigration to dilute white power. In several important 20th intellectual movements (Marxism, Freudianism, Boasianism, etc.), Jews are thought leaders, not merely followers, so it is Jewish “aesthetics/morality” that tends to influence gentile elites, less so the other way round. This is what drives the loop you described and explains the weirdness of a Brahmin elite embracing black rednecks as solely victims of white supremacy. Lastly, Brahmin elites tend to be neurotic and favor the stability of state/corporate sinecures to the unstable income and challenges of life within the Merchant elite.
"...Lastly, Brahmin elites tend to be neurotic and favor the stability of state/corporate sinecures to the unstable income and challenges of life within the Merchant elite..."
You've thrown down some excellent sentences in your previous posts, but this is one is winner-winner, chicken dinner.
Mostly I agree with this but a couple of points you don’t make explicit but need to make explicit:
1) High IQ as NOT correlated with being a better person in any moral sense: you point out that the elites are the ones who engage in all kinds of horribly dishonest behavior in order to win status games and have no self-awareness about how justified the resentment against them is.
2) Eventually this elite foolishness becomes very seriously damaging—that point has now been reached in a way that the proles can’t possibly ignore with the drag queen and transgender ideologies being VERY FORCEFULLY PUSHED ON THEM AND HARMING THEIR CHILDREN.
This is a five-alarm fire, culturally. It is fine that you understand the elites, but you don’t condemn them enough where they need to be condemned.
How and why are these things harming children? Your answer cannot assume the religiously derived premise that pre-pubescent children have some sort of pure sexless ideal human souls which will inevitably be sullied and suffer lifelong trauma from knowing that sexual intercourse is a thing that exists which most humans engage in.
Mutilating children seems pretty harmful to me. The idea that transgender nonsense is harmless is surprising to say the least!
The frequency of this is negligible. Orders of magnitude more kids die in car wrecks. Should we ban cars?
i am mostly w you in re the drag shows, i think it's really just an almost-subjective question of where to draw the line.
like, i wd be fine showing something pornographic to a 20yr old, then maybe possibly a 16yr old, but then somewhere lower i start to feel gross (i'm guessing we all have lines somewhere.)
and not to equate drag shows w porn (esp of the hardcore variety), but we do have to admit drag is often highly sexualized and people will have different ideas of when and how they want to expose their children to sexuality.
also, none of this occurs in a vacuum and it seems what's happened is that the Queer Theory people have grabbed the wheel of the movement (i mean the people who see being gay not as just a way to live but as an explicitly Left smash-the-system political statement) and they seem to want to rub people's noses in alternative sexuality in their endless crusade to steamroll norms and make yesterday's stigma into today's virtue.
And i think they're playing with fire and could be instigating an ugly backlash. (and i say this as someone who's never voted Republican but has been to 100s of drag shows.)
Er, actually the anthropologists claim that in really authentic hunter-gatherer societies all the youngest kids know everything about sex, as the whole family sleeps in the same hut. And 16-year olds in modern societies are generally sexually mature, though not socially so much, and honestly interested about this topic. Have you been a 16-year old?
Isn’t the age of consent 16 in most states?
no, 18.
Ok groomer.
This reminds me so much of men in the 90s claiming gays could trick people into homosexuality.
Dude, when you turned thirteen, you could tug yourself silly over an unclothed mannequin. YOU LIKE WOMEN. The Taliban would not be able to beat that out of you.
To the extent that pre-pubescent children are sexual beings, the question remains whether (or to what extent) this concern is within the purview of the family, or of the State.
And parents in this country can still decide which school to send their children to, or to homeschool them. If that ever stops being so, you would certainly have a valid point - but until then, any parent who doesn't like what their kids are exposed to can simply take them elsewhere.
Not sure such a laborious "opt-out" should be necessary unless the State arrogates "exposure" to sexuality unto itself by default. Why shouldn't the default be to consider sexuality a private matter best left to the purview of the family (in all its diverse manifestations)?
Where's the anti-woke billionaire to offer free private right-wing schools for the masses?
Zuckerberg did a huge charter school initiative, which largely flopped.
Not in states with charter school laws, which is almost all of them (and it seems unlikely that public schools in the Dakotas and Nebraska would do anything that could be considered "woke").
How do you justify prosecuting parents for "child abuse" if they bring THEIR OWN kids to Drag Queen Story Hour? One needn't subscribe to (or support) Gender Ideology to recognize the problem involved here.
Why do you think I am justifying such prosecution? I think there is a harmful agenda behind the drag queen story hours, and I think many parents are unaware of how harmful it is and are making a serious mistake, but I said nothing about prosecuting them for child abuse.
Transgender surgeries, performed on minors, are a different thing, that are in my opinion harmful enough for the legal system to get involved.
Both are harmful enough to merit legal system involvement. Don't get hung up on physical mutilation as abuse. Drag queen shows are a step in grooming towards sex abuse, child porn, etc. I'm not suggesting arresting every parent who brings their kid to one, but it is a pattern of behavior that must be watched and curbed for the long-term health of the child.
What is the alternative "legal system involvement" you're proposing if not arrest?
Why would a man dressed as a princess outfit harm a child any more than a woman dressed as a pirate? Kids like make believe.
It's fascinating to me how many people who reply here think that the country is teetering on the edge of mandating mass gender transition. Serious question, do you guys know any liberals in real life? It's like if I thought every rural American had a Nazi flag in their closet.
When you have nothing to lose, you can let it all hang out. When you have a lot to lose, you hide crimes better or find ways to skirt accountability. The crimes still happen. Look at pHarma and "public health." They aren't robbing liquor stores, but they're committing loads of far worse crimes.
Maybe it would be better to say that the correlation between IQ and morality is only very weak, at best. Or perhaps that certain kinds of evil are better suited to different IQ ranges. If it turned out to be the case that higher IQ was correlated with a greater likelihood to support child castration (euphemistically termed "gender affirming care"), and vice versa, that wouldn't entirely surprise me. It also wouldn't change which side of this "debate" is the right one.
They are better at manipulating others into accepting their conduct, that's all.
Mostly agree, my biggest difference is in step two as follows:
1. Politicians and bureaucrats are punished much more for errors than they are rewarded for good deeds (negativity bias and/or slave morality).
2. While egalitarian ideologies diminish the reaction to both errors and good deeds, this is beneficial to politicians and bureaucrats due to 1. Counterintuitively this is more beneficial the further up the hierarchy you go since the effect of 1. becomes stronger.
3. Even if people do not consciously realize 2., the more egalitarian ones survive in their roles or climb up with higher probability than non-egalitarians.
Seeing slave morality as rooted in negativity bias is a very intriguing idea.
You are 100% correct on this.
Excellent analysis. The skeleton in the cupboard is race. The large majority of whites vote and act in a colorblind fashion. Upper-, middle- and lower class blacks are 100% ethnonepotist - on a jury, they will vote to exonerate the criminal solely based on the skin color. Ditto resource distribution. This cannot continue forever.
How funny, I posted this (below) in January 2021. Yours is obviously much better.
"A theory: social classes don't like their immediate neighbors. At least for the classes in the middle.
The upper-middle class doesn't like the rich, whom they perceive as plutocrats who rig the system. They also don't like the lower-middle class, whom they see as ignorant and bigoted. But they speak fondly of the poor, whom they regard as having been cheated by an unfair system.
The lower-middle class, meanwhile, disdains the upper-middle class for their perceived elitism and entitlement. And in turn they don't like the poor, whom they consider lazy freeloaders who don't want to work. However, they have no problem with the very rich, whom they feel have earned their wealth.
I don't know what the very rich or the very poor think."
The upper middle class like the black poor not the white poor
Ya, until their Prius is jacked by a couple of gangbangers.
Wisdom here
Gotta admit that's pretty good!
"The idea that poor people are always the victims of forces beyond their control has become the standard way to discuss inequality and poverty."
Poor whites are held accountable. The kid who drove into a violent mob and caused a woman's death at the Charlottesville riot in 2017 was sentenced to I think 300+ years. Blacks, on the other hand, murder people in cold blood all the time and receive much lighter sentences.
After Kneeling Nancy and the 2020 Saint Floyd riots (apparently covid doesn't bother BLM/antifa rioters) hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into NGOs like the NAACP. Nothing comparable to any police involved death of whites, as white oriented groups are reviled as racist and pure evil. Jared Taylor, for instance, at American Renaissance, is an academic who isn't irrational at all but merely states the obvious. It's actually kind of funny that whites, and only whites, are supposed care about what other groups think about them and are terrified of being called racist. This great fear has no precedence to my knowledge and exists no where else.
White artists, composers and even fashion designers are now being accused of "cultural appropriation" and non-whites are demanding recognition in the work or censorship. Meanwhile, their accusers appropriate whites' various inventions, medical treatments, language, clothes, music, etc.
People nowadays who brush off race or pretend there is some sort of equivalent derangement when discussing social/cultural issues seem, to me, to be in deep denial. From my point of view race (and sex) are at the very heart of any analysis. Ignoring them just seems bizarre. And no, I'm not in fear of lower class competition. I simply believe white people are a unique group who are in a spiritual death spiral and are unable to maintain their sacred spaces. Sad.
That said, I appreciate your attempt to wade into this miasma.
If I can extrapolate a bit on the points our host made, I don't think there's a single more important or more strongly held belief among our elites than White Guilt, White Shame and/or the general idea that when it comes to Black people, all Good Whites support BLM and affirmative action etc and never raise a peep of criticism against Black people.
I think this may just be the ultimate tribal class and status marker and helps explain why Good Whites always speak about Black people in these solemn reverential tones, and then get quickly angry and defensive when asked to explain any particular belief. (I had a writer friend visiting me from brownstone Brooklyn recently and when I showed her my home and said "This is the master bedroom," she blanched and said I wasn't allowed to say that!)
I think this reflects the fact that when it comes to modern history and morality (esp for Americans) the Big Bang is WW2/Holocaust and Slavery/Jim Crow. It is really very rare when a political debate starts and moral issues arise that one or 2 of these episodes don't get mentioned.
And I think that because the elite need for separation has become more intense now that our NYT/NPR/PBS class wants desperately to be seen and known as opposed to all things Deplorable, these moral taboos and guideposts have become only more hardened and electrified.
"...I don't think there's a single more important or more strongly held belief among our elites than White Guilt, White Shame..."
Our elites got to be elites because they have no shame and certainly not "white guilt" ---whatever that is.
I would maybe tweak that and say WW2 has replaced Genesis, Hitler (and people who replicate his bigotry) has replaced Satan, the Hero's Journey (whether it's going from sinful to blessed or becoming a Promethean benefactor of humanity) has been replaced by triumphing over bigotry or "negativity" and becoming your Authentic Self™, and for God, it's either Mammon, the State (when it's controlled by your team), or really most likely the aforementioned Self, which is the one universal object of worship left standing.
Either way, it's a fun game to play.
Then how do you explain leftist antisemitism?
Whites fear the severe violence and social punishment enacted against those labeled as "racists", they don't fear the label itself. If we had laws preventing employees from being fired over social media posts, and preventing mobs of protestors from gathering outside private citizens homes, then Whites wouldn't be keeping their heads down.
Thanks for your response. My problem with that is enacting laws will only validate the term "racism." But no one knows what it means. If it means believing a group is superior to another then all those white liberals who live in expensive neighborhoods would be considered racist. Or liking, say, western folk or classical music to hip-hop. Why wouldn't that be racist? By enacting such laws you would be playing their game. Best thing to do is say everybody's "racist" and void the entire slander.
Alex, some dude the other day called me a "white liberal." I didn't give it no thought at the time, but now I'm here and you're talkin' about white liberals and expensive neighborhoods. So right now I'm askin' if I'm such a hotshot white liberal why the hell am I livin' in this tarpaper and aluminum shithole? Where's MY expensive neighborhood. Sheeeet..
Alex, you got to honky up brother! Honkies--or white people as you call'em---are indeed "a unique group." But White World began it's spiritual death spiral when Rome collapsed, the old pagan gods were forsaken (at your peril!), and everybody got all Jesusey and shit. Apollo, Aurora, Bacchus---baby, these cats not only had the Big Meow but everything was Under Control!
And you say sacred spaces! You got a room where there's toilet paper? Well, there you go then...
Step 4 seems to be your strongest section. But maybe that is just my own bias showing.
Buzzfeed should have a quiz that tells you what class you belong to based on education, income, taste, identity, etc. Where would it put me? White, cis, straight, millenial, male, married, Father, $130k income, graduate level education (non-elite or Ivy), christian who works out, likes hunting, votes knowing his vote doesn't matter but feels cathartic, reads Hanania.
I would guess high-prole or upper middle striver. But I know a lot upper-middle strivers and I'm not that smug and insecure. Ok maybe a little smug but not in the same way. Like, I don't need to see myself in the free city lifestyle magazine attending a banquet sniffing my own farts...yeah, definitely high prole.
Anyone who reads(emphasis here) Hanania is in the upper class even if our sympathies lie with the lower class. Perhaps we are the right wing version of champagne socialists.
I find the generalization of all conservatives/right-wingers/etc. as mouth-breathing idiots who can't even read to be a bit strange. Likewise, I'm quite well educated (well enough to be sitting here reading this stuff, I guess), and if you only looked at my demographics on a piece of paper, you'd probably guess me for a Democrat voter. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I wonder if this perception that there are no Republican voters with an IQ above 80 is enforced by the extreme online censorship regime. True "proles" may live in social circles where they can proudly proclaim their love for Trump on Facebook and not have to care who sees it or what they think. As for me, I'm very careful to hide my political beliefs from my co-workers. I've lived most of my life in enemy territory, so to speak. So while my feelings are very strong, I've generally been quiet for the sake of self-preservation.
Well, in my personal experience from dealing with fellow wrong-thinkers, I haven't observed them to be any less intelligent/thoughtful/etc. than average. Likewise, if liberals are the "high IQ" super smart people, one would expect them to show it in how they engage on these topics, but again, my personal observations have been completely the opposite. I have observed two modes of liberal engagement with their opposition--snide, smug derision, or wailing emotional histrionics. I can't remember the last time I saw a liberal attempt to engage conservative ideas in good faith. I'm not sure that I've ever seen it. Where is this high-minded intellectual prowess that they are supposed to have?
Again, always possible there are selection biases at work, but I think I would like to see some actual evidence for the assertion that Republicans are stupid, rather than empty assertions that echo liberal stereotypes.
I think you've mis-interpreted a key tenet of this essay which is that he is referring to caricatures of each side. He is making the point that the most prominent flag bearers for each side fit his central theory and that everyone else engaged in the culture war on the periphery chooses sides in relation to these caricatures. As such, hes not making the case that conservatives are low IQ mouth breathers but that the most prominent ones, like QAnon, election deniers, birtherism truthers are.
I don't see any reason why the same wouldn't be true in reverse, though. Do the ranks of Antifa strike you as having much brainpower within them?
I love your self-awareness. I'd like to have you as a neighbor.
I laughed at that because 'merchant' is an actual antisemitic slur the alt-right was using a few years back and Jews are much more prominent on the Brahmin Left.
Maybe Hanania was having a little fun. :)
You are too far gone if you imagine words such as "merchant" to be slurs. The biggest problem we have are that people who belong in mental hospitals are imagining bias everywhere, and they want to take action against the evils in their minds. There are every few actual racists in the US. Many of them are people of color. I have seen some serious anti-Semitism on the left, but never on the right. It would be strange to see London-style protests with Nazi and Palestinian flags.
The reality is that the left elite use racism as a an extortionary instrument of power. If you listen to them, all they talk about is power. I miss the old liberals who actually loved this country and its people. I am no fan of Trump, but the current state of the Democratic Party hurts me deeply. A never-ending séance on racism does not benefit anybody save the Al Sharpton's of the world. Working people need a party on their side, not Trump. Today they have no one. The real risk is that a true populist movement comes in. It does not require much support to successfully manage a coup. Trump does not have the balls, but this era is preppy people for a potential future none of us want.
I mean, it is, but from what I can tell four months later I wasn't that upset and I thought it was Hanania having fun.
This essay oozes disdain for the "lower classes" from which the author firmly distances himself. Predictably he shoots a few arrows at the "proles" who supposedly reject COVID jabs only because jab pushers are Woke. The author is too protective of his social status (and too proud of his long-winded theory) to risk acknowledging Big Pharma's takeover of the CDC and NIH.
I think Hanania is committed to maintaining a self-image of neutrality. He needs to see himself as someone who does not play for either team. As a part of this, he must find at least a couple points on which he can criticize the right. Of course, the state of reality these days is that siding with the left over the right on pretty much anything tends to require that you deny the very obvious, buy into a bunch of hateful lies about race/gender/whatever, and so on.
The vaccine fills this niche as an issue where he can side with "the science" and at least maintain some semblance of intellectual honesty. He knows he certainly won't be taken seriously if he started buying into left-wing narratives on nearly anything else. It is notable, though, that while he makes his clotshot support clear, I don't think he has written an actual article dedicated to explaining how and why he holds this position. If he truly wanted to establish his Supreme Centrist credentials, I think that's what he should do. Sneering about it in passing while refusing to engage substantively is what "the liberal elites" do, and could go a long way towards alienating right-wing readers, I'd imagine (I know it certainly has this effect on me).
Some people hate their childhood and hometown and then project this idea on others. Our host is trying to distance himself from his own life.
Intriguing to be sure, but maybe I missed something, but I found myself thinking that the whole analysis is too divorced from outcomes. Maybe it is me just reverting back to the materialist/economic view of things, but there are trillions of dollars at stake in the outcomes of elections. 2022-era Left/Elites parties disproportionately direct those resources towards cities, blue states, universities (and their graduates via loan forgiveness), nonprofits, Federal and international bureaucracies, and foreign aid/adventurism, whereas 2022-era Right/Populists basically starve all of that in favor of general business and personal tax cuts, protectionism/tariffs, family supports, rural areas, and military buildups. These aren't small matters, it's not uncommon that people pay 30-40%-50+% of their income in taxes, and whole segments of the economy are based either directly or indirectly in some kind of government support. The economic stakes in the regulatory state might be even bigger still.
So yeah sure a lot of the culture war is essentially tribalism, with the tribes being motivated in large part by psychological animosities held by the extremes, but not sure you can divorce that from the huge actual stakes that are involved in these conflicts.
Following the money is never wrong.
It often is when it comes to American politics. This is the biggest misconception about the Federal government. The system would work better if it were only monetary interests. The problem lies in all the true believers and fanatics about their silly causes.
These factors come into play, particularly the idea of women having an increased voice/role in societies. However, too many, particularly on the left, fail to recognize that actual differences in thought process, values, etc exist between men and women how those differences affect each of those areas.
However, you are missing the forest for the trees. It boils down to a 1 main idea and most everything else in an outgrowth of it:
The rich and powerful have zero real accountability. They are corrupt and manipulate the system for their benefit while screwing everyone else over. They buy or are the politicians and can manipulate the law through the system they built to protect themselves. Need a simple example? Who are/were Epstein's clients? Why arent they being prosecuted? Why does the mainstream media have no interest in finding out who they are?
Because the people mentioned above have no accountability, none of the issues, problems, complaints of the majority are addressed. Sometimes, at best, they are thrown crumbs and told be happy about it. The 'elite' do whats in their best interest which makes the situation worse for the rest.
And it might not be quite so bad if those elites were actually elite, but they arent. They are terrible at their job. Nearly all of our major problems, both domestically and internationally are their fault.
Nearly every major foreign issue weve dealt with since WWII was a direct result of their previous action. Iraq, Iran, Bin Laden, Saddam, Russia, China, all direct results of actions we have taken in an attempt to solve a previous 'problem'.
Our domestic issues like budget problems, social security, expensive medicine, failing education, rising poverty, again direct results of the decisions and actions (or lack thereof) of those same set of 'elites'.
Always playing games instead of legitimately attempting to solve a problem. Worrying about who got credit and if it would help the other side too much. Inserting poison pills into something that might be good. Only supporting ideas where they can benefit beyond just doing their job. Writing loopholes that you can drive a convoy through so it appears they are doing something. Crafting legislation with no benchmarks or tracking to see if what they are forcing on is effective or efficient.
And a media that only challenges opposition politicians just enough and at certain times to stoke some angry, but never really to force the issue or truly hold some accountable.
This corruption has reached a level that is approaching too much for people to tolerate anymore. The problems, debt, etc is has created and allowed to build is reaching a breaking point.
TLDR Double standards, hypocrisy, and corruption of the rich, media and politicians (the so called 'elites') has reached a point where its so blatant and frankly incompetent that people are reaching a breaking point.
I assure you that if you actually worked in government, you would see that this is not true. Rich people are not manipulating the system. It is interest groups. The unions here, the women's groups there, the tech bros here, the hardware guys there, the software firm here, the eco-idiot group #1 here, eco-idiot group#2 there,..., econ idiot group #N overe there,...
All the groups are led by true believers. They all have the answers. You never see any rich assholes pushing people around. Senators would never take shit from them. Yet, they do bow down before the Sierra Group or the AFL-CIO or AmCham.
The problem is all the true believers. The abortion issue is a great example. This is a non-problem that causes so much heat and distraction. The people who care, it is their whole life. They drive the narrative. For any legislation, the people who benefit or lose out circle the wagons and get their rifles out. Look at how the ISP's have driven policy at the FTC. Another example would be how the mega-banks influence Dodd-Frank to basically draw a wide, deep mote around their industry preventing any new entrants, all at the taxpayer's expense.
Interest groups move policy, not individuals. No self-respecting Congressman would every let some rich asshole tell him what to do. It does not happen. You need to understand that there are no "right" answers, only trade-offs. The people who want policy A not only benefit from it, but they think it is what America needs. The people against it feel the same way. The environmental groups display this the best. They all hate each other. Some hate nuclear power, while others hate carbon and support nuclear power. Some want to preserver rural life and family farms, while other KNOW that the RIGHT choice is to let all the land go fallow so the natural world returns. They are all convinced that they are on the right side of creation itself.
Politics would be so much easier if it were all about self-interest. It is so much easier to work that out compared to the crazies who work at non-profits and NGO's. The first thing I would do if I were king for a day is to end non-profit status and require all organizations to pay taxes and publish where their revenue comes from. That would do a lot of good. If that is not possible, I would cap pay at non-profits to $50,000 per year, and only allow any individual to have one job at any non-profit (no multiple jobs). Over time inflation would only let rich jerks work at these and dramatically reduce their efficacy.
Embarrassingly bad analysis. If you want to understand the rural/urban divide dynamic look to Henry George, he understood and explained it perfectly. It is indeed economic (despite your shoddy article) and is due to land rentierism gradually consolidating all wealth into the hands of the urban at an exponentially faster rate than rural and exurban (in an entirely parasitical way I might add, although the urban are not actually aware of this mechanism). This is due to the inelastic supply of land (land in the economic sense, not merely the colloquial sense) resulting in urban monopolization being the fastest guarantor of (rentier) wealth increase despite being its least taxed. It would take a small booklet to properly explain the dynamic but you can search YouTube for "for the land is mine dvd restored" and the first result will be a decent primer. Professor Henry Dodson has two YouTube channels further expounding on all aspects of Henry George's theory, and then of course there's "Progress and Poverty," George's magnum opus. As an aside, culture is largely an export of capital accumulation via advertising and other corporate commercial interests. If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from capital accumulation. Our culture is not something that arises organically, it is something developed and foisted with intentionality.
If your analysis is correct, then liberals are making a huge mistake by absorbing ideologies like Ibrahim Kendi’s that are simplistic enough to be accessible to low class whites. In doing so, they enable the lower class to engage the ideas themselves, which in this case are straightforwardly rubbish.
Additionally, as people with lower cognitive abilities proliferate in the elite (due to non merit based admission) and bring their simplistic ideologies to bear on their institutions, then the genuinely high IQ will be faced with a quandary: (1) fool themselves into believing that the high class ideology is coherent, (2) form their own group, (3) shamelessly take on absurd intellectual positions for status, or (4) publicly adopt the intellectual positions while subtly signaling their disagreement. (1) can only be done in a quasi-religious manner. (2) is basically what happened with the intellectual dark web. Despite what conservatives claim, I think (3) is quite uncommon except among politicians. (4) is what most people will do.
Kendism is not that simple. You need to believe disparities mean discrimination. But if blacks are over represented in sports it doesn’t count. Also it doesn’t count when Asians do better than whites at standardized tests. It’s a complex ideology, as it pretends to have certain principles but deviates from them in predictable ways if you’ve got the intelligence and inclination to keep up.
I think it can be reasonably approximated as “disparities mean unjust discrimination if and only if blacks and Latinos are ‘winning.’” That’s the only real element that’s caught on with liberals, which isn’t cognitively demanding to grasp or refute.
It is because they don’t say that’s what they’re doing, you need to infer it.
Even a 4 year old can tell when the teacher's playing favorites.
Liberals don't really have a choice when it comes to supporting "critical race theory" and the like, though. Because their worldview rests on pseudo-worship of minorities and the various implications that entails (blank slate theory, denial of individual agency except maybe for Straight White Men, etc.), any genuine pushback or criticism of someone like Kendi would threaten the entire belief structure.
We can see this borne out predictably in public discourse, as anyone who dares to question The Narrative in even the most innocuous forms is immediately labeled a White Supremacist and cast out into the darkness. Even if the person is non-white him/herself! White Guilt is a foundational premise of the entire ideology, so if you even just suggest that maybe white people aren't the ultimate evil, you're no longer welcome in the club.
The only way out (if there is one) is through. Eventually, enough people will have to re-orient their worldview into something that doesn't rest on White Guilt on a central defining principle. There's not going to be a half-measure where the left somehow says "okay, we'll have some white guilt, but not *that* much white guilt, that's going too far!" That isn't quite how these trends work. Ideas like these tend to go to their breaking point before a critical mass of people finally give up on them.
My entire immediate and outside family seems to be an outlier in your theory, which I understand can't cover every situation, but seems strange to me. First, if higher IQ is associated with the elite and those elite look down on lesser IQ population, why aren't black people also looked down upon if they are poor or for what reason are they being used? Second, as an upper middle class family that "clings to" traditional values, has Master's Degrees (IQ) and votes for Trump because the left is too far gone while our poorer, less educated family members always vote D into office because they are afraid of losing benefits, I wonder how many other Republicans are out there in my situation that aren't taken seriously because it is assumed we are too stupid to understand politics? Not in a personal sort of way, just wondering as a matter of facts. Sorry for the run-on sentences (as my mind races) 😄
I think the absence of elite contempt towards blacks is explained in part by the tendency for those to have the most contempt for those just one rung below them.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Nice! I get it. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I think my son and I are contrarions, and most definitely Libertarians. I enjoyed the article.
"If higher IQ is associated with the elite and those elite look down on lesser IQ population, why aren't black people also looked down upon if they are poor or for what reason are they being used?"
I don't mean to sound glib or crass, but my guess is that for most Whites Black people don't exist as flesh-and-blood humans but only as abstract symbols.
For the Left, they're symbols of our oppressive past and the failures of the political present (and victims of those evil bigoted Bad Whites); for the Right, they're the dark dangerous Other always about to commit a crime. (But I do think overt rightwing racism has declined massively in the past 1-2 generations.)
But either way, they exist mostly as weapons for each White Tribe to use against each other, as ways to indict each other's political visions. (And also this is partially bc most Whites don't really know any Black people, at least not closely.)
Very nice explanatory. I never thought of it that way. 🤔 Something to think about, for sure. As someone who has always lived in a 50/50 State, I know plenty of both races, but not other minority races very well.
Black people? Historical guilt. Slavery and Jim Crow were real things, after all. (It's also a way to rhetorically flog the white lower class.)
These are aggregate statements, individual people can definitely be cross-pressured, and until recently economic factors were a much larger driver as you point out.
Hanania himself is obviously a (very bright) conservative intellectual, and I'd bet a considerable degree of exasperation at the political views of his intellectual peers and intellectual status of his political peers drives his work.
Maybe you're taken seriously but considered mendacious, not stupid.
Why would I lie? Or, why would it be assumed I would be lying?
I didn't categorize you as a liar. Asked you to consider that people who don't share your politics might perhaps think you're anything but dumb. "Mendacious" has a bit more nuanced meaning than simply "liar."
In this particular epoch it's common (unfortunately) for people with opposing allegiances and who are otherwise at cross purposes with one another, to think the worst---from "dumb" to "mendacious."
No, I knew you weren't specifically speaking of me. I was asking for a clarification of use. I appreciate the thought, was just trying to marrow down your thoughts process.
Good God, it is much more simple - the elites have enough power to impose that power and spread their increasing mental illnesses . . . the stupid succumb, while the opposition comes from those that recognize the utter bullshit that the upper classes embrace. And it is bullshit.
I agree with most of this. I think it mostly explains the professional-managerial class and the white fraction of the working class, though.
I would add that billionaires, because they can donate millions of dollars, can actually become rational actors in swaying politics by donating enough money to a candidate to make them do what they want.
There ain't no such thing no more as the "working class," and to reference the "white fraction of the working class" is beyond paradoxical, it marks you as...well, hell I don't know what it marks you as it just don't make no sense. The white working class, or any other color of working class for that matter ain't workin' no more and if they are workin' it's for peanuts, crackerjack and a pack of Pall Mall reds.
No one smokes Pall Mall's anymore, and here in Chicago, cigarettes are insanely expensive. Everyone drives down to Indiana to buy them.
The motive: Resentment against the possibility of losing your social status against social climbers. When Napoleon stripped German guildsmen of their privileges of closed markets, their outcompeted sons became the nucleus of German Romanticism, painting Republicanism as Anti-German, treacherous, and, ultimately, Jewish. More often than not, today's culture warriors are descendants of the culture-defining class. E.g. When a white person is chastising himself for his "white-privilege" such awkward looking performances of self-degradation aren't aimed at himself, but at those lesser whites as he is effectively cordoning off the upper social stratosphere: You can not join unless you bow down first.
There is some cluelessness there as well. Many people who speak about white privilege are often shocked to learn that not every what family has servants and a summer home in Nice or the Amalfi coast. There are a whole lot of rich people, and they are blissfully unaware of anyone outside of their social circle. Then there are the mass of ladies desperate to get into that class who emulate them and throw themselves at the men of that class. I have had women scream at me and call me manipulative because I did not explain that my family is not obscenely wealthy. Who on earth assumes someone is from wealth and privilege? It would appear quite a few sleazy women trying to marry up in Manhattan. There is an entire ecosystem that caters to those people. They have total control of the Democratic Party now. It explains a lot.
In terms of explaining why Darwinism was dethroned by Boasian anthropology and egalitarianism in general, you seem to be ignoring the elephant in the room. The egalitarianism of today’s elites revolves mainly around race/ethnicity; race-based egalitarianism became a central ideology for the elites when the elites became disproportionately Jewish in the 1960s. Jews tend to loathe (for obvious reasons) any claims of group differences based on race, so evolutionary psychology was fiercely attacked by many Jewish intellectuals (with notable exceptions of course). In addition, Jews also fear a white Christian majority (again, for obvious reasons), so they embraced (anti-democratic) mass non-white immigration to dilute white power. In several important 20th intellectual movements (Marxism, Freudianism, Boasianism, etc.), Jews are thought leaders, not merely followers, so it is Jewish “aesthetics/morality” that tends to influence gentile elites, less so the other way round. This is what drives the loop you described and explains the weirdness of a Brahmin elite embracing black rednecks as solely victims of white supremacy. Lastly, Brahmin elites tend to be neurotic and favor the stability of state/corporate sinecures to the unstable income and challenges of life within the Merchant elite.
"...Lastly, Brahmin elites tend to be neurotic and favor the stability of state/corporate sinecures to the unstable income and challenges of life within the Merchant elite..."
You've thrown down some excellent sentences in your previous posts, but this is one is winner-winner, chicken dinner.