Quote of the Day

With both political parties over the last few decades, there has developed a more ‘team sport’ mentality of voters within their respective parties supporting the candidate of their side regardless of how the economy is treating them and their families.

Alex Beene
A financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin
October 22, 2024

It has been decades since I went to a public sporting event. The rate of my watching professional ball games on T.V. is probably right at one every 10 years. I can feel the emotional pull, but I find the level of emotional involvement by the audiences frightening. This is what people are like when their mask drops just a little bit. Given just a little different circumstances and these same people would cheer on “their” gladiator team as they fought another team to the death. Or lined up all the capitalists next to a ditch to be shot.

That type of emotion served a useful purpose over the millennia. But like fire it is a troublesome servant and a fearful master*. Our political parties have leveraged it to great effect, and I think it has essentially taken over. Look at the political rallies with thousands of yelling people. Look at both sides totally convinced the other side is evil. Both sides may be more right than wrong in their description of the other.

I look at the political landscape and see overwhelming evidence supporting my need for an underground bunker in remote Idaho.

* George Washington didn’t really say anything like this. See:

• Government Is Like Fire, a Dangerous Servant and a Fearful Master – Quote Investigator®
• FACT CHECK: Did George Washington Call Government ‘A Dangerous Servant And A Fearful Master’? | Check Your Fact

Quote of the Day

The left isn’t stupid.

…

They do actually learn from their mistakes, which is why you see so many pitches for Harris sprout up everywhere on social media, get pushed for a day or a week, then vanish at they utterly fail to get the slightest traction.

What you’re seeing here is a combination of low information, and a severely constrained set of moves.

The modern left actually has no idea what a high-testosterone, low-time-preference, heterosexual white man thinks, acts, and talks like, because they don’t have any in their camp to talk to.

And even if they did have a correct mental picture of such a man, they would be unable to craft an appeal to him without mortally offending their base, because their entire appeal to that base revolves around hatred of such men, envy of such men, and the desire to use the state to rob them.

That is why this ad appears to be, and probably is, the result of a bunch of thirtysomething white women, and effeminate gay black men, sitting in a room asking each other “what do white dudes like?”, then shrugging their shoulders and searching “man stuff” on google.

Then plugging it in into the mouths of professional actors, who appear very accustomed indeed to having other people’s stuff plugged into their mouths.

All in a lead-up to the same tired appeals to guilt, honor, and shame that didn’t work for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

They’ve painted themselves into a corner, and are making the only moves they can make. They don’t understand what masculinity is, they only know that they hate it, their voters hate it, and they want to change the definition of it to make it go away.

And this is the situation from which they are forced to try to craft an appeal to that very masculinity.

Is it any wonder that republicans, conservatives, libertarians, etc, are reposting this video endlessly to point and laugh at?

So why, exactly, does this ad fail so badly?

After all, men do work on cars, deadlift things, like steak, etc. Why, then, does this whole screed come off as so fake and unmasculine?

It is cargo-cult masculinity.

Like south Pacific islanders ignorantly making dirt runways and control towers out of lashed-together sticks, hoping to bring the cargo planes back, leftists try to invoke masculinity by imitation of its trappings, with no understanding of its core.

So what is the core of masculinity?

I’ll explain.

And don’t worry, I won’t be helping the leftists. Even if they didn’t hate me too much to listen, and even if they were capable of understanding, they would be unable to use this knowledge to their purposes, any more than vampires could take shelter from the sunlight in a church.

Masculinity is the two essential functions of a man.

Men build.

And men fight.

All the other traits and aspects of masculinity… strength, courage, leadership, wisdom, judgement, initiative… are secondary. They are for a purpose. We have them so that we can build better, and fight better.

A man builds things, first to ensure his own survival and that of his tribe, and then, later, to improve their quality of life.

The accumulation of the things he has built, and the knowledge of how to build them, is what we call “civilization”, not because it really has anything to do with cities in the long run, but because cities were one of the first really big important things that men built, and for a long time, cities were where most of the building got done.

When a man builds, or is trying to build, civilization, he stores up value. This means that sooner or later someone who did not build those things will try to take them for himself.

Then a man must fight.

That is why men exist. That is what means to be a man.

(Women have their own set of essential functions.)

However, the modern left is unable to leverage this knowledge, because the modern left is rooted in resentment of the fact that high-testosterone, low-time-preference men own everything, because they built everything, and can defend it.

Therefore their entire platform is based on taking away stuff from those men, and giving it to people who didn’t build it or fight to preserve it.

They cannot praise those men, because that would imply that building and fighting deserved rewards, not robbery.

They cannot empower those men, because then they would build more stuff, which they would then own.

They cannot appeal to those men, because what those men want is opportunities to build things, and the right to keep what they earn.

The left is, at its core, a collective effort to loot civilization, so its builders and defenders will always be the enemy. And they can try to trick the enemy into voting for them, but they can never promise and deliver anything substantial to them, because that would undermine their cause.

Ultimately non-producers cannot be given an equal voice in the management of civilization, because as the store of value builds, the temptation to use that power to do the easy work of looting, rather than the hard work of building, becomes overwhelming.

This is why the modern left, unlike the old left, will never be masculine.

Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X, October 12, 2024

I had not heard the claim, “Men build things and fight”, before. As an engineer, it is hard for me to see past my own biases and refute this claim.

Thoughts?

Quote of the Day

We are faced with two prospects as of January 2025: the need for massive civil resistance in the face of unleashed repression, and what we might call “left federalism”—as in the ability of governors and legislatures in states like California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York to nullify federal edicts and keep democracy going. A frightening prospect of ever-increasing confrontation, but it may be all we have in the face of the coming juggernaut.

Van Gosse
July 11, 2024
The Democrats Are Slow-Walking Into Fascism (msn.com)

Interesting. They envision:

Trump will then be entitled to claim an overwhelming mandate for his authoritarian rule: concentration camps for millions of undocumented people, a purge of the federal civil service, deploying the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his opponents, and so much more.

Which, of course, there were not even hints of this in his first term. But the Obama and Biden administration did give us numerous examples of this sort of behavior.

It appears to me they are working themselves up into a frenzy such that things could get “spicy” in early November.

I would like to be in an underground bunker in Idaho for a week or two after election day.

Quote of the Day

schools should include a class called Truth Is Hard, where u get bombarded with examples of confused eyewitnesses, incorrect public outrages, studies that failed to replicate, super convincing arguments that fall apart with one additional fact u didn’t expect, etc.

Aella @Aella_Girl
Posted on X March 27, 2022

Nice idea. But I don’t think it would ever be accepted in todays K-12 schools. There are far too many people who have false beliefs which they could not tolerate being faced with overpowering evidence of their falsehood. It would disrupt the social order.

At the college level classes which include similar material do, or at least used to, exist. The book Is it really so?: A guide to clear thinking, no longer in print, was used in one of the classes I took in college. It was written by the grandfather (or perhaps great uncle) of one of my college classmates. A few days ago I went looking for it in my library and I could not find it. I’ll look again someday. I remember it as being like a one hour read. I would like to read it again.

By the same author I also had, and perhaps still have, Who Should Have Children?: An environmental and genetic approach. It is still in print. I find it to have the potential to be far more threatening to the social order. But, I expect that is not how the majority of people see it.

Quote of the Day

A comment I am now unable to locate pointed out that fake-working-class trustafarians can be identified by their subscription to a mythical idea of what poverty is.

[this is the comment he was looking for]

The sound of a poor neighborhood in the United States is not the shouts and laughter of children at play, the music floating from the open window of abuela’s kitchen as she makes empanadas, the chatter of men playing dominos on a folding table on sidewalk.

It is the shriek of a child as his single, crack-addict mother beats him, the ceaseless barking of the vicious and unsocialized pitbull in the fenced-off yard, the unmuffled exhaust of the cheap sports car with peeling paint as it pulls up across the way to disgorge a trio of angry drunks.

To this observation, I would add:

The socialist trustafarian’s idealized notion of poverty is drawn not only from Hollywood, but from socialism’s own profoundly wrong ideas about what poverty is and where it comes from.

Middle and upper class socialists think poverty is lack of money.

Thus, whenever they are confronted with a member of the underclass, or, more often, the abstract idea of a member of the underclass, they think he is them, minus money.

And that’s how they expect him to act, right up until the point they get stabbed.

This is also why they think the problem of poverty can be solved simply by taking money from those who have it, and giving it to those who don’t.

Now, at some times, in some parts of the world, this sort of poverty may indeed have existed. When economic conditions are so depressed that great swathes of otherwise-functional people are poor, then they may, indeed, build vibrant, functional neighborhoods with a strong sense of community.

But in a capitalist, or capitalist-adjacent system, that’s not what happens. Sure, becoming wealthy is always hard, and often needs to be a multigenerational process, but capitalist systems do not hold talented, stable, high-agency people in utter poverty for long.

In capitalism, poverty is lack of the ability to secure an income.

This means that poor areas in first world capitalist countries are not filled with cheerful urchins selling newspapers, but with people who have some issue preventing them from being functional wage-earners.

Typically this has to do with mental health, addiction, or life skills. And it means that poor neighborhoods, in, say, the US, aren’t just filled with broke people, they are filled with people who do antisocial things.

You cannot fix this by moving resources around.

And if you subscribe to a mental model (socialism) that ascribes virtue to poor people, and evil to rich ones, then you end up having to do absurd mental gymnastics to try to characterize every prosocial behavior, such as training your dog not to bark, and not running the leaf blower at 0730, to be acktshoeally problematic in some weird way.

The wealth of the wealthy comes from inhabiting a culture, and subculture, where social encounters are a source of opportunities and mutual benefit, rather than conflict. Measurable financial wealth is important, yes, but it is downstream of existing, and functioning, in this sort of high-trust, cooperative, networked society.

Some behaviors of wealthy people are a consequence of wealth. But others are a cause of it, and still others are symptoms of more fundamental attitudes that lead to it.

And one of the major reasons why people buy houses in expensive neighborhoods is so avoid inconsiderate people.

Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X June 16, 2024

I found this resonated well with my half-baked view of things. I have thought, perhaps, a big problem with very poor cultures was they have a very poor sense of time. In particular, there is no urgency in getting things done.

I have done reasonably well for myself. My station in life, my wealth, my children, my spouse, etc. are significantly above average. I see a fair number of people who have not, and will not, do well in life. In almost all of those cases I can quickly point out a half dozen or more things they could have done or should do, or not do, to make their lives much better. But they can’t seem to do them. They keep making what I think are stupid decisions and blame others for the poor outcomes.

These are simple (to me anyway) things like show up to work on time. Get things done. Don’t use (or use very little) recreational drugs including alcohol and tobacco. Be presentable to your employer and customers. Don’t complain about problems, find solutions to problems and/or get the help of others to implement your solutions and/or help find solutions. Don’t insist on being weird.

Your mileage may vary.