Tag Archives: Politics

A Compromise on Refugees

The left want to bring third-world refugees to first-world countries so they can show compassion. The right wants to keep them out so their daughters don’t get raped. so why not a compromise? Why don’t we create a sponsorship program?

In the sponsorship program a particular citizen can sponsor a refugee (or a legal immigrant, we can apply this to all immigration). The sponsor then becomes legally responsible for the new immigrant. When the immigrant/refugee first enters the country, the sponsor is responsible for providing housing, food, clothing, and other such necessities to their sponsored immigrant until the immigrant is able to do so themselves.

Once the immigrant is established, he can never access any public service during his life time; if the immigrant ever requires welfare, subsidized housing, health care, public schooling, etc., the sponsor is responsible for providing such services for the immigrant. If the immigrant ever does access a public service, the sponsor is shall owe the state for the cost of the service.

If the immigrant ever commits a crime, the immigrant will be immediately deported, while the sponsor receives any punishment (including jail time and/or the death penalty) that the immigrant would have received in the immigrant’s place.

I think this is a fair compromise.The left is allowed to display their compassion for the world to see, and the right doesn’t have to worry about immigrants being parasites on taxpayer dollar or leftists importing criminal immigrants who will rape their daughters. I’m sure the left will gladly open their own homes and wallets to help these poor refugees, and I’m sure being responsible for the immigrant’s criminal activities will never inconvenience the leftist as all these refugees are peaceful and law-abiding.

The 51st State

A conservakin implied I’m not cosnervative because I said single-payer health care is not the worst thing in the world.

So, I’m going to take a round about way to explain Canada and why single-payer is not good but not horrible, but why this might not necesasrily work for the US.

Contrary to what most believe English Canada is conservative, it always has been. The US has always been the liberal. When the US revolted against the British in order to install Puritan liberalism Canada was mostly French Catholic at the time and was wary of Puritan anti-Catholicism, so it refused to join the revolt and remained a British possession. The loyalists, Americans who opposed the revolution, moved to Canada because and formed the core of English Canada. At the very beginning, Canada was founded by conservatives who were opposed to the revoutionary liberalism of the Americans.

Almost a hundred years after the American Revolution, Canada became indpendent in 1867. The process was slow because of the inherent distrust fo the loyalists for republicanism and mob rule. Until 1931, the UK still had the power to legislate for Canada. It wasn’t until 1982 that Canada was allowed to modify its own constitution and introduced a Bill of Rights. The Queen is still the Head of State and technically legally owns Canada.

Until the late-70’s Canada was a liberal-conservative country, in the Burkean sense. It conserved its institutions, had a free-market, and reformed slowly. The Liberals were pro-free market, anti-government interventionism, and pro-responsible government. The Conservatives were aristocratic, in favour of noblesse oblige and organic community.

That changed in 60-70’s. During that time, Quebec had the quiet revolution, and its moved from traditional Catholic social doctrine to French socialism and an independence movement began. The Liberal Party under Pearson and Trudeau moved from classical liberalism to social liberalism and the New Democratic Party formed as a social-democratic party from an older farmer’s party.  In the Progressive Conservative Party the Blue Tory (neo-liberal) faction began to arise in the traditionally Red Tory (aristocratic). The Blue Tories continued to grow stronger and eventaully eliminated the Red Tories in 2003 with the creation of the Conservative Party.

Around this time, English Canada, or at least the populous and powerful southern Ontario region, adopted US puritan liberalism and combined it with Quebec’s French socialism to outholy the American puritans.

Also up until this time, Canada was an imperial dependency of Great Britain. The Suez Crisis in 1956 and the development of NORAD in 1958 marked when Canada began to move from Britain’s Sphere to the US’ Sphere. This process was completed in 1982, when Canada officially became its own country and informally became an imperial dependency of the US.

Since WW2, Canada has joined pretty much every American war except for Vietnam and Iraq. In Afghanistan, Canadian troops were literally airlifted over by the US. Our military has been consistently and severly underfunded, as we rely on the US to protect us. NORAD made us an integral part of the US continental defence system, while the NATO partnership basically made Canada’s military a semi-independent arm of the US military. The Canadian and Americans markets are integrated through NAFTA and over two-thirds of out exports are to the US, much of which are just raw materials. OUr cultural products are almost entirely American in origin (despite fairly useless Canadian content regulations).

Despite the nationalist left’s posturing (and yes that exists, and essentially it is ‘we hate America and love socialist health care’), or any practical purposes, Canada is essentially a somewhat indpendent 51st of the US, and the left are the one’s forcing American liberal culture on the US.

Despite having adopted the American revolutionary puritan spirit and trying to outrun the US in the holiness competition, this is not natural to English Canadians. Canadians are pragmatic converts to the faith, not natural zealots, like our American breathern.

This manifests in different ways.

First, Trudeau is the only real radical who has ever led Canada. He combined adopted English puritanism and French socialism to enlarge the state. Under him came a huge bloat in government. But beyond that, all our leaders have generally been moderate, non-radical liberals or conservatives. Change, while always moving left, has generally been small, sane, incremental increases rather than radical, half-baked changes.

Example in point, health care. Canada has single-payer, public health insurance, which is technically more socialist that Obamacare’s mandatory private insurance. But even in it’s Trudeaupian radicalness, the Public Health Act is a short, sane 14-page document that basically says provinces need to offer universal comprehensive public health insurance to receive federal health funding. It mostly followed the lead of what provinces were already establishing on their own and the actual implementation was left up to the provinces. On the other hand, Obamacare is a 900-page monstrosity detailing every last specific of dozens upon dozens of provisions and forces them upon the states, willing or not, and has had to be rewritten by the Supreme Court twice, just to be feasible.

This is generally the case. Canada creates short, sensible, incremental laws that leave the details and implementation up to professional bureaucrats or the provinces, while the US creates insane, bloated, radical laws that address everything related or unrelated in detail.

The second is race. Canada is divided by region: southern Ontario thinks it rules the rest of Canada, if it even deigns to notice we exist, the West resents the East, and Quebec hates everybody. These regional divides define Canadian politics, but because they are regional they mostly don’t matter in everyday life. Our conflict is a distant thing with those folks over there. While we have some minor racial troubles, particularly concerning Aboriginals, race is not that big a deal in Canada.

In the US race is everything. All conflict is essentially racial conflict and evevrything must address race. There are two large minority groups each making up about 12% or so of the population. It’s white republicans vs everybody else. So, there’s constant pressure to keep pushing the racial divides and keep the holiness competition moving. In Canada, our largest racial minorities are well-behaved East Asians and South Asians (each at about 5%) and some struggling aboriginals (~4%), who live largely on reserves anyways. So, while there’s some racial nonsense in universities, in the real world Canada, race doesn’t really matter. A few neighbourhoods might be bad, but nothing compared to US ghettos.

The third is bureaucracy. Canada’s bureaucracy, while having all the problems a normal bureaucracy has, is a professional bureaucracy made up of competent people. Most civil servants have to undergo some form of testing when entering the civil service and it is seen as a public service to enter the bureaucracy. The politicians mostly leave the bureaucrats alone. This ensures that the Canadian bureaucracy is generally functional if inefficient.

On the other hand, the US bureaucracy operates on a spoils system and is essentially seen as an opportunity to plunder. The politicians appoint the bureaucrats for political reasons rather than professionalism and race issues eliminated testing for competency. So, the bureaucracy is dysfunctional looting rather than simple inefficiency.

Fourth immigration. Immigration in Canada is generally done on a merit basis. Other than a small number of refugees, the people allowed in are either competent job seekers or the families of said job seekers and immigration is generally spread out among varying countries. Illegal immigration is a relatively minor problem. In the US immigration is based on a lottery, Mexicans are the thoroughly dominant immigrants, and illegal immigration is a major problem. Canada does not share America’s fling the borders open attitude.

Finally, Canadian politicians rationally attempt to fix problems, even the liberals are sane in this regard. For example, in the 90’s Canada experienced a debt crisis. The ruling Liberal Party made large cuts to public and introduced some new taxes and eliminated the deficit and tamed the debt in a few years. Since then, the federal budgets have been more or less balanced and the debt growing but stabilized. Meanwhile, US politicians continue to ignore their debt and deficit and continue to ramp up spending without being able to pay for it.

So, while Canada has adopted socialism, it is not the wild-eyed fanatical puritanism of the US, but rather a pragmatic socialism. Even there though the US and Canada’s level of socialism is not that much different. While Canada’s tax levels are 10 percentage points higher, the US actually now has slightly higher government spending levels than Canada because the US funds its spending with debt rather than taxation.

So, now back to the original point. In Canada, single-payer health care is not the worst thing in the world. It’s probably less efficient than a fully free market one would be and tax levels are somewhat higher because of it, but in terms of health care, it not really that bad for most people. A few people have longer wait times for ‘elective’ surgeries, family doctors can be difficult to find in some place, and there’s the rare person who gets overlooked in the emergency room, but mostly it works fine. While the comparative effectiveness of the US and Canadian systems has been debated endlessly, essentially health outcomes are not really all that different once you account for race and obesity, and the Canadian system is cheaper overall.

The question is, though, if this could actually be applied to the US. The Canadian single-payer system more-or-less works because the government is basically functional. The US bureaucracy is basically dysfunctional. Look at Obamacare, regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of a theoretical mandatory subsidized health insurance system, the actual applied system is one giant unworkable clusterfuck. I find it highly unlikely that the US would adopt a sane approach to a single-payer system.

Would the US federal government ever be able to create a simple 14-page law that says the states only get federal health funding if they provide comprehensive public insurance? Doubtful. Even if by some miracle they did, there is no way it would be competently and professionally run.

Hail the Donald!

Land is wary of the Trump enthusiasm from some of the NRx crowd, and rightfully so, we can’t become demotist around here. Being one who occasionally joins in on the Trump enthusiasm, I thought I’d respond. I should note that I’m Canadian and can’t vote in the US and that I wouldn’t vote even if I could, but here’s why NRx should support Trump.

Before I begin, Trump won’t win and even if he does, not much will change (except maybe the wall). No matter how popular Trump becomes, he won’t win the presidency. I doubt he’ll even win the Republican primary. There is no way the Cathedral will let him win; they will do everything in their power to destroy him, and it will work. If, by some miracle, their efforts fail, Trump will lose against the bureaucracy and if he manages to get past the bureaucracy, the Supreme Court will shut him down. Nothing real will change (except maybe the wall). Whatever minor changes he gets through will be reversed a decade later.

#1: lulz: Everybody worth hating hates Trump. Lapping up their tears as he succeeds beyond what anybody expected is a worthwhile endeavour in its own right. There are two things that makes me consider voting and liberal tears is the second (gun freedom is the first). Sure voting means nothing, but it sure is fun to watch liberals suffer when their candidate loses.

#2: The destruction of the Republican Party. The Republican establishment are afraid and are doing what they can to try to stop him, but Trump speaks for the base. By trying to destroy him the GOP will destroy itself. If Trump somehow wins the nomination, the establishment will have suffered a huge blow and maybe the base can use it to clean house and heighten the ideological conflict. But in the more likely event the GOP rigs things against Trump (as they did with Ron Paul) and Trump loses, the GOP’s credibility will be destroyed. How many libertarians were alienated by the GOP’s treatment of Ron Paul? (How much did his treatment do to drive some to NRx?) And he was just a small side candidate. How fully will the base be alienated when the GOP destroys Trump? Unless Trump pussies out (and he does not seem the type to do so), Trump’s run could spark a bloodbath in the GOP no matter what the result. One of NRx’s goals is to get conservatives to realize that the GOP is no more than the controlled opposition who exist to lose and Trump could be a catalyst for endarkenment.

#3: Immigration. Immigration is the issue all the elites try to suppress. Trump is bringing it to the forefront and the people are responding. When he gets shut down and it is further drilled in that their elites hate them, how much endarkenment will that engender among the masses?

#4: Flowing from this: the truth of democracy. If the Trump train starts chugging for real: the Cathedral will bring all the rigging, all the slandering, all the viciousness, all the lawfare, etc. it can against Trump and his supporters and he will almost inevitably lose. How many of his supporters will realize how much of a sham democracy is as this occurs? How many people will people will come to understand the Cathedral and its ways through this?

#5: The Wall. If against all odds Trump wins, the wall will go up. There is no way I could see him back down from it, as the wall is his campaign, and I can’t see anybody who will be able to bring a clear enough threat against him to stop him. Once the wall is up, bureaucratic self-preservation will keep it up.  The wall is good because collapse is coming; it is nigh unavoidable. The question is the conditions under which the collapse comes. Living out in Asia, Land may be mostly insulated when the American Empire (and its dependencies: the Commonwealth and the EU) implode, but for those of us who refuse to leave our homeland the on-the-ground conditions when the collapse occurs do matter quite a bit. There are two main issues relevant to collapse: immigration and guns. Guns is obvious: will we have the ability to defend and hold our own when the happening goes down? This issue has mostly been won in the US and is the only real victory conservatives have ever achieved. When the happening occurs, people will inevitably split along tribal lines: when this happens how many of them will there be at war with us? The wall will lessen the number of them and maybe savagery can be prevented or at least mitigated.

#6: The punishment. Trump is both rich enough and bombastic enough to punish those activists attacking him. He’s already suing Univision for $500M and is threatening to sue the Hispanic Media Coalition and NBC for dropping him. Trump has the resources to really bring the heat against those who cave to activists and show that there are consequences for bowing to liberalism.

#7: The fluke. Have you read Caliphate by Tom Kratman? In it, a future-history tells of not-Patrick Buchanan winning the presidency and establishing a dictatorship through manipulation of presidential powers that freezes the decline. While he probably won’t do that, Trump is a wild card. I wouldn’t put much past him if he had the opportunity. If somehow he wins, you never know what could happen. (King Trump, anyone?)

As for the man himself:

Sure, Trump may be clownish, arrogant, and self-aggrandizing, but it’s an honest arrogance. The entire system holds you in contempt and wants to destroy your culture; every wanna-be chekist, SJW, bureaucrat, and politician is arrogant enough to think they should be able to dictate what you think, what you say, what you eat, what guns you can own, what you buy, what you drive, etc. Compared to that contempt, that insufferable, smug, all-consuming arrogance hidden under a thin veil of ‘the greater good’, a bit of honest old-fashioned arrogance is a breath of fresh air. As for clownishness, nothing Trump has done or could do could possibly compare to ‘a thrill up my leg’ and the outright worship everybody bestowed upon Obama 8 years ago. Democratic politics is clownish by its very nature; Trump is the only influential person awake enough to see it.

Sure, it’s hard to tell what is theatre and what is real, but it’s honest theatre. Everybody knows Trump is playing to the audience and he’s not even trying to conceal that he is. Compare that to the democratic theatre we regularly have. The GOP pretending to stand for something, the barely concealed corruption of the iron triangle, the farce of a democracy where Judge Roberts can single-handedly rewrite the law, the delusion we are free when we pay taxes even serfs and slaves of bygone days would think harsh. At least Trump’s show is a fun spectacle, rather than mind-killing, soul-draining drudgery of lies that is our normal politics.

So, however much you hate democracy, however useless you know politics is, however doomed you think we are, you should still agree:

Viva la Trump!

Cultural Evolution Response

Scott has a post where he fails to see the dangers of gay marriage to cultural evolution:

First, he distinguishes between two types of cultural evolution and concludes:

Consider: one Inuit tries the red berries and discovers they make her sick. Out of pure self-interest, she decides not to eat them again, and tells her friends the same. Also out of self-interest, they decide not to eat them; those who think they can get away with eating them anyway are quickly disabused of the notion. The taboo against eating red berries quickly spreads throughout the culture.

Marriage doesn’t seem to work that way. If one person decides not to marry in the usual way, it doesn’t necessarily hurt that person. They might have lots of affairs, and enjoy them. Or they might get gay married, and enjoy that.

Here he misses the obvious: STD’s.

About 1.2 million Americans have HIV; about 658,000 have died.

On gays specifically, one-fifth have it.”Although MSM represent about 4% of the male population in the United States, in 2010, MSM accounted for 78% of new HIV infections among males and 63% of all new infections. MSM accounted for 54% of all people living with HIV infection in 2011, the most recent year these data are available… Since the epidemic began, an estimated 311,087 MSM with an AIDS diagnosis have died, including an estimated 5,380 in 2012.”

About 1.8% of men identify as gay, which would mean that about 2,725,200 men in the US are gay. Over about thirty years, over a tenth of the homosexual population has died of AIDS. Most of that was front-loaded in the 80’s; currently there’s a yearly mortality rate of about 2 in 1000. The only reason this isn’t massively worse is because scientists developed drugs to combat the disease.

The yearly death rate in 1995 before the drugs was about 17 in a 1000. (Assuming gays still accounted for 54% of cases and were 1.8% of the population). By comparison, the death rate due to OD by cocaine addicts is about 4 in a 1000, while the death rate of smokers due to smoking-related disease is about 11 in a 1000. That’s not even including other STD’s, which are also not as deadly/disfiguring as they used to be thanks to modern medicine.

Homosexuality is a huge health risk kept mostly in check by modern medicine.

Not to mention that Scott ignores reproduction entirely.

But beyond that, we can go to the second type, the group selection form of cultural evolution.

So I interpret it as a different claim: a culture that allows gay marriage will, for various reasons, become weak and unsuccessful. Then it will be crushed by other cultures, either militarily, economically, or in a sort of marketplace of ideas where people convert to or assimilate into the other culture because it’s more attractive and successful.

Note that THIS IS REALLY DIFFERENT FROM THE FIRST TYPE OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION. In fact, it might be diametrically opposite. For example, gay sex may be lots of fun – and as people figure this out and tell their friends, it will be positively selected through the first type of cultural evolution. But it might weaken a culture’s Moral Fabric – in which case it will be negatively selected through the second type of cultural evolution.

There is no distinction between the two, which is obvious when he talks here:

How long is a “generation” in cultural evolution? Rome lasted a thousand years, Byzantium another thousand. It took about three hundred years for Christianity to replace paganism in Rome; Enlightenment values have been replacing Christianity for three hundred years already and aren’t nearly done. Any sort of evolutionary process that involves waiting for Rome to fall is a process that will take way longer than human history to come to any sort of conclusion… Communism, which basically took all of the worst ideas in history, combined them together into a package deal, and said “Let’s do all of these at once”, took almost a century to collapse, and still hasn’t collapsed in a couple of places.

These were not static societies; they went through numerous dynasties, governments, wars, coups, splits, expansions, and so on. Cultural evolution never stopped: his ‘generation’ had uncounted evolutions. These civilizations adapt to outside pressures. failure to adapt leads to doom, but having a failing policy then fixing it internally can stop doom before it occurs.

For an example, take Rome in the Punic Wars. They were at a disadvantage because they had no fleet when they started. They adapted by creating a fleet, then eventually won. Had they not created a fleet, it may have been Carthage destroying Rome.

Cultural adaptation is different than genetic adaptation and can not be calculated the same way. Genetic adaptation necessarily happens one generation at a time because genetics can only be transmitted by procreation. Cultural adaptation does not as it is not bound by procreation; there are no generations.

(Not to mention that ‘coming to a conclusion’ would put Scott’s generation as the equivalent of an extinction. How long did it take for the Dodo’s to ‘come to a conclusion?’ As well there is survival bias. Scott is only looking at the major, successful, civilizations.  What of all those city-states Rome conquered or destroyed? Rome was the one that survived; the life of the conquered was probably shorter. But these are tangential to the real error).

Finally, he acknowledges a third type:

Actually, this leaves out a possible third kind of cultural evolution, where cultures try good ideas, learn to like them, and stick with them; or try bad ideas, learn to hate them, and stop… Likewise, there’s a cultural evolution argument that we tried traditional sexuality, that made a lot of people unhappy, and now we’re trying something else. It’s unclear how this is different from the Maoism example in a way that makes jettisoning Maoism good, but jettisoning traditional sexuality bad.

The difference is traditional sexuality is not an idea being tried. Traditional sexuality is (in some form) how every civilization that has been successful has made itself and how our civilization has been for millennia. Traditional society is a healthy dog; Maoism is the bright idea to chop off 2 of its legs and see what happens; gay marriage is removing of one of its testicles and seeing how that works out. The latter might no be as immediately debilitating, but if his other testicle is already gone, he won’t be reproducing.

****

For a taste of gay marriage cultural changes, just look at all the effects of other similar evolutions (divorce, acceptable fornication, etc). High bastardry rates, plummeting marriage rates, and a plummeting birth rate. We’ve gotten to the point where simply to keep things running because we’re not having enough children, we import foreigners with different cultures to work for us; foreigners who are gradually replacing us.

That’s cultural evolution in action. White Americans have adopted policies that have made them evolutionary dead ends and will soon be replaced in their own country, after adopting the other peoples’ cultures through multiculturalism.

****
Scott put another post up with some responses after I had written this one. It doesn’t address the issues I raise. Also, I know I still have to respond to Scott from about a year back. I have the post half-written, I just never quite finish it.

Jim Crow

Lynching Deaths 1882-1968 (87 Years)

Whites: 1297 – 14.9/year
Blacks: 3445 – 39.6/year

Homicides 2013:

Black on Black: 2245
Black on White: 409
White on Black: 189
White on White: 2509

Homicide Rates 1964 (per 100,000)

Nonwhite: 22.9
Whites: 2.7

Homicide Rates 2015 (per 100,000)

Black: 31.4
White: 4.5

Imprisonment Rate 1926 (per 100,000)

Black: 106
White: 36

Imprisonment Rate 2012 (per 100,000)

Black: 463  (198251/42,750,000)
White: 88   (172,843/195,148,000)

Poverty Rate 1959

Black: 55.1
White: 18.1

Poverty Rate 2013

Black: 27%
White: 10%

Bastardry Rate 1965

Black: ~25%
White: ~5%

Bastardry Rate 2013

Black: 72%
White: 36%

Children in Broken Homes Rate 1965

Black: 25%
White: ~8%

Children in Broken Homes Rate (Unmarried minus Cohabiting) 2013

Black: 44%
White: 13%

****

During Jim Crow, blacks were generally safer, had stronger families, and were less likely to commit a crime or be jailed, but had double the poverty rate they do now. If so, how can the social dysfunction be blamed on poverty? Also, are they necessarily better off?

Authority

Legitimate authority, as the name suggests, requires both authority and legitimacy. Authority is the ability to carry out your will, particularly through the use of others, while legitimacy is the general acceptance that your should be able to enact your authority. Authority without legitimacy is tyranny and will only hold as long as the threat of violence holds, which admittedly can be a long time.

Legitimate authority flows naturally from healthy hierarchical structures. The ur-example of legitimate authority is fatherhood which flows naturally from healthy family structures and collapses in unhealthy structures. Other forms of natural legitimate authority are generally forms of fatherhood: monarchs are the political fathers of their nations, elders are simply fathers who have unofficially adopted a tribe, while ecclesiastical authorities are spiritual fathers of their flocks. Some domain-specific authorities arise naturally from ability or knowledge and adopt many aspects of fatherhood to their specific domain: warband leaders, gangs, teachers, mentors, etc. These natural authorities flow from basic human social and hierarchical instincts and are the building blocks of civilization.

Healthy authority is generally these forms of natural authority.

There are also unnatural forms of legitimate authority. Modern democracy is the greatest example of this. It is an unnatural system derived from numerous artificial and unnatural social constructs, yet is accepted as legitimate by most of the citizens within the democracies. Democracies also tend to be unhealthy precisely because it is unnatural.

Unnatural authority is not necessarily bad, per se, but because it is unnatural, it has higher bar to clear when it comes to legitimacy and it is more likely to be dysfunctional. Legitimacy flows from God and from the people; it is not the will of the people, but the people ruled by an authority must recognize the legitimacy of an authority. Natural authority by default confers legitimacy: children do not question the right of the father to rule them until these child naturally grows to an age to rule themselves, and even then, children still accept their father’s advice and guidance. The biggest threat to natural authority is the abuse or neglect by the authority. In cases where a natural authority is abusing or neglecting his duties, legitimacy breaks down and the ruled will rebel to be replaced by either anarchy or a new legitimate authority.

Unnatural authority does not automatically confer legitimacy. Legitimacy comes through either earned merit or persuasion. Intellectual leaders and recognized experts generally gain their legitimacy as authorities in their domains through the demonstration of knowledge and skill related to their specific domains. Business leaders and the rich earn their authority through performance in the free market. Democratic leaders gain their legitimacy through persuasion, using the methods propaganda and bribery, hence the omnipresent state and state instruments in any democracy constantly trumping the virtues of democracy and providing bread and circuses. The main problem with unnatural authority is that it is much easier to persuade than it is to earn. A bribe or a piece of propaganda is easier than decades of labour excelling at an area of expertise. So, unnatural authorities will tend to drift towards manipulation over merit to obtain legitimacy.

Cracked’s Gay “Marriage” Article

I read this article on “5 Reasons ‘Traditional Marriage’ Would Shock Your Ancestors” by one Kathy Benjamin on Cracked, considered responding and decided against it, because ‘what’s the point?’ Then somebody asked me on Ask.FM to respond, so here it goes.

The article’s main flaw (other than it being obvious left-wing evangelization with a complete dearth of humour on a supposed humour site) was that it cherry-picked every small edge case in Western history to draw a pattern for the gullible while ignoring larger realities.

Now onto something more thorough.

#5. People Didn’t Marry Young

First, yes they did, even if we accept the author’s own misrepresented data. In the US the average age of first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men. This is actually younger than Western Europe where age of first marriage is almost invariably over 30 for both men and women. The highest age Kathy cites are: 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27 (in England, where the average age is now 32.1 & 30), a difference of 2-4 years. Her other link points to a 1890 high of 22 for women and 26 for men, a difference of 3-5 years. 2-5 years is a rather significant difference.

Other than this Kathy simply distorts what the links say:

In general, the marriage age in Western Europe has stayed constant. English records from the 1600s show that brides were usually 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27.

Click the link:

Age of First Marriage

The mode (ie. ‘usually’) for women is given as 22, the median as 22.75. The mean was 23.5. So, 22 was the usual age and half of women married at 22 or earlier; there were just some outliers who married later pulling the average above. Bu even if we use the mean, women in Britain in the 1600s still married 4 years earlier than the US today (and 6.5 years earlier than the UK today).

For men the relative situation is much the same Mode: 24, Median: 25.5, Mean: 26.5.

We can see Kathy doesn’t really understand statistics.

When colonists in early America started getting married slightly younger, it was considered odd enough that Benjamin Franklin commented on it.

Here she gives the impression that Franklin was like ‘wow man, those Yankees are like so far out there.’ If you follow the link, you see that Benjamin Franklin simply looked at the subject and found that yes, Americans had earlier marriages and that settled European cities were not naturally replacing themselves due to low wages preventing family formation. If anything, he’s commenting on the self-destruction caused by the (conditions causing) later marriages of the settled European cities. (Side note for NRx: Franklin noticed that cities are demographic shredders back in 1814).

But the marriage age in America soon settled back into the normal pattern, and by 1890, most couples were getting married in their mid-to-late-20s again.

Again read the link. Marriage age rose from 20 to 22. After which it shrunk again.

If you read the earlier .pdf (Table 2, p. 28), female marriage age peaked in 1880-1900 at 23 (after a civil war which pretty much destroyed an entire generation of young men) after which it declined steadily reaching a low of 20 in 1960. It wasn’t until 1980 that the marriage age again reached what it was in the post-bellum period. So, by “the normal pattern” she means an anomalously high few decades around the turn of the century following a civil war which destroyed the supply of single young men.

Also, notice that this high was the age of 23, which is still almost a half-decade lower than the average age is now.

Also, notice that the earliest time here is the 1600’s. So, she’s ignoring millennia of Western Civilization prior to this; not to mention she ignores anything outside of England. You can read about the uniqueness of Germanic marriage patterns here.

As can be seen, Kathy is simply incorrect across the board.

#4. Marriages Were Short

Ancient Greece and Rome both allowed divorce, and the most famous divorcee of all time is certainly Henry VIII, whose first one occurred in 1534.

Yes, the Pagans did divorce, but in Rome, it was not at-will, it was at-fault and solely the right of the husband, at least for the first few centuries (ie. before Rome declined). Once Rome began declining, calls to end easy divorce were implemented. In Greece, while divorce was allowed, monogamy was still the rule.

Are these really the models Kathy wants to hold up as an example?

King Henry was one person. Anecdotes /=data, especially when said anecdote is a historically significant king because of his divorces.

John Milton, the poet most famous for Paradise Lost, also wrote four books on how awesome divorce was in the 1640s… Inevitably, religious figures freaked out and tried to ban them.

First, she undermines her own point here; she says that Milton was the exception at the time not the rule. But beyond that, read the link:

To Milton, canon law was just another weapon used by the “Great Whore” against men, and since the English church continued to enforce such laws governing marriage and divorce, she was the whore’s accomplice. Milton wants to restore manly dignity to the practice of marriage, first by restoring the power of divorce exclusively to husbands, and second by insisting that marriage is principally a kind of friendship much like the manly friendships described by Socrates in the Symposium and Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics–a kind of enlightened heteroerotic pederasty. Milton’s zeal against canon law is the same as his zeal against bishops–the goal is to restore manliness to English Christianity. This is why he has no patience with the widespread European Protestant notion that divorce should be allowed to wives as a protection from abusive husbands. Milton wants to liberalize divorce, but for men, not for women.

Milton was closer to an extreme MRA than anything. I wonder why Kathy would hold him up as a model?

In America, the 1870 census revealed such a high number of divorces that the government ordered a report on the subject.

She’s being very disingenuous here. Read the link, flip to p. 138. This crisis of divorce was caused by a increase (157% increase over 20 years) in divorce that was still a low rate of divorce. New Hampshire had the highest average divorce rate, at 1 divorce per 10 marriages, meanwhile Maryland had 1 divorce per 62 marriages.

The divorce crisis was caused by divorce rates ranging from < 1% to 10%. A far cry from today’s 40-50%.

By the 1920s, divorce was so common that society was convinced marriage would soon be a thing of the past.

By “so common“, she means a peak rate of 16% (1/6) during 1929, which you might remember as the year of Black Friday and the start of the Great Depression. So even when the economy was being annihilated, the high divorce rate was still only 16%, as compared to 40-50% today.

And yet here we are almost 100 years later, and people are still fighting for the chance to get hitched.

Actually, marriage rates have been in free-fall since the 1970’s or so. Marriage is dying.

#3. Single-Parent And Blended Families Were Always Normal

Here she makes the argument that because people in the past experienced the tragedy of the deaths of spouses we should be fine with destroyed families. I don’t think I need to comment too much on that.

Her concluding argument is this:

And in the 1950s, those halcyon days of supposedly perfect families? Between divorce, death, and sex outside of marriage, 22 percent of kids were still being raised by a single parent. If being raised by one gender ruins children, our ancestors were screwed.

Yes, because the boomers are the models of health. That’s why the 60’s were such a peaceful time, and that’s why they have such healthy families, never use drugs, never commit suicide, and are never depressed.

#2. Procreation Wasn’t Everything

People much smarter than me have pointed out how ridiculous this is. What about couples where one partner is infertile? Or couples where the woman has gone through menopause? Are those marriages also totally invalid?

Her argument is literally that because we don’t police edge cases we should therefore overthrow our our entire understanding of and tradition of marriage.

In the Middle Ages, some couples took this to the extreme. Catholic men and women could enter “Josephite marriages” where they lived together as husband and wife, but never got it on.

Some people make deep, extraordinary spiritual commitments to dedicate their lives to God while denying themselves sex therefore sex and marriage have nothing to do with procreation.

Her next argument is literally a lot of people have murdered their children, therefore marriage has nothing to do with procreation.

Then it is that people use contraception therefore marriage has nothing to do with procreation.

These arguments aren’t even worth refuting. They aren’t even really arguments, just random, barely unconnected statements designed to elicit emotional impressions in the gullible.

#1. Gay Marriage Has Always Existed

Gay marriage was not uncommon in Ancient Rome; even the Emperor Nero publicly married at least two men.

Neither were raping slave boys and pederasty. Also, is Nero really the role model you want to look up to here?

But even among the people fine with raping young boys, gay marriage a joke and not officially recognized:

Same-sex weddings are reported by sources that mock them; the feelings of the participants are not recorded. Both Martial and Juvenal refer to marriage between men as something that occurs not infrequently, although they disapprove of it. Roman law did not recognize marriage between men, but one of the grounds for disapproval expressed in Juvenal’s satire is that celebrating the rites would lead to expectations for such marriages to be registered officially.

She goes on:

During the Ming Dynasty in China, it was not uncommon for older men to marry young men and bring them into their families as official sons-in-law.

Not Western civilization.

Both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic church allowed “brother-making” in which two totally straight single guys had an official ceremony telling everyone what good friends they were and how they were going to live together and pray together but totally not do any guy-on-guy stuff.

Mark Yuray was right. Kathy has been so indoctrinated in homosexuality that she can’t even conceive that men may have close friendships, even formalized ones. Here’s more on why this is nonsense.

Single women living together has always been more acceptable than men cohabiting (because women don’t have sex drives, right?), but that doesn’t mean that all female “roommates” tried to hide their bean-flicking activities from their neighbors. Many of them were open about their relationships, and both the women involved and their friends considered the couples married, whether they had gone through a ceremony or not. In the late 1800s, these relationships were called Boston Marriages. In at least one case, Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant were considered a “common household” under the law for tax purposes. In Spain in 1901, Elisa Sanchez Loriga pretended to be a man in order to marry Marcela Gracia Ibeas. Despite needing to use deception, after they were found out, the marriage was still allowed to stand.

Her argument is really: ‘because women could live with friends, everybody loved lesbianism’. She then finds 2 cases were may have been accepted. Two. Do I really even need to comment on the extreme cherry-picking being done here?

If you want to admit you don’t like the idea of same-sex marriage because it makes you think of sex that makes you feel icky, feel free to say it. I’m sure everyone would feel better knowing how much you fixate on their bedroom antic?

I am highlighting this merely to show how ignorant this woman is. Oh yes, not wanting to destroy 2 millennia of tradition and engage in a massive court-forced social engineering experiment is because ‘yuck!’. Not wanting the persecutions of Christians and Christian churches who refuse to recognize this farce (and even homosexuals know it is a farce given that half of their “marriages” are open) is because ‘icky’. Not wanting to condone the behaviour that leads to deadly plagues is all about “eww’. And that’s not even touching religious reasons as I know those won’t mean anything to leftist nihilists.

I know modern leftists don’t have deep reasons for their beliefs and mostly just base it on whatever emotions the most recent Gawker article stirred in their shallow hearts, but they should at least have the common decency not to project their emotion-driven shallowness on everybody else.

Do the right thing. Make America as progressive in civil rights as South Africa.

Yes, let us emulate this self-destructing land of rape and murder.

****

To put to death this topic, gay marriage would be, at best, shocking to anybody in Western Civilization from the fall of Rome up until a couple decades ago.

For an example, let’s just take the cause de jeur: gay “marriage”, which is now, in 2015, supported by “moderate” “conservatives” and is currently illegal to oppose in any real way in some states. In 2008, just 7 years ago, “moderate” liberal Obama opposed it. In 1996, less than 20 years ago, “moderate” liberal Clinton signed a law banning gay “marriage”. In the 1980’s, only gay radicals were pressing for “marriage”, in the 1970’s not even most gay activists were for gay “marriage”. Before that, it was hardly ever even mentioned. In 1962, just 50 years ago, sodomy was itself illegal in every state. In 1953, less than seven decades ago, just mentioning gay marriage or writing about homosexuality was considered obscene. Just over two centuries ago sodomy merited a death penalty (although these laws were rarely enforced and went beyond just homosexuality). In the 1500’s, the debate was between whether the church or the king would execute homosexuals. Talking of homosexual “marriage” at this time would have been seen as insanity.

Leftists can make up whatever bullshit emotionally-driven arguments they want when they force their social engineering experiments on normal people, but the least they could do is stop lying about our ancestors. There has been no place for homosexual “marriage” in Western Civilization since the church shut down the Roman’s anal rape of slave boys.

The Centre Doesn’t Exist

A couple weeks back I showed why conservatism is always doomed to fail. A healthy reaction within the overton window is necessary for society to not continuously degenerate. Moderate conservatives who oppose ‘right-wing extremists’ and try to set them as outside the are the enemy of all conservatism as they are rigging the game in the liberal’s favour. As well, given the way our overton window is framed, compromise is always a liberal victory and a conservative loss; any conservative advocating compromise is advocating his own loss. That is reason enough to dislike conservative moderates.

But my point today is not to talk just about conservatives moderates, but rather to talk about centrists and moderates as a whole. It is popular in our society to oppose “extremism”. Politicians are expected to be reasonable, and to find a balance between the partisan divides of left and right.

But this is a false idea. There is no such thing as a political centre.

Radish created a graphic of the left-to-right spectrum:

Now, the graphic may not be perfect (ex: I think Andrew Jacksonshould have been a bit more right), but it shows the main point, our overton window is a narrow slice far to the left of most of history.

In other words, someone who held the same views as a centrist today would have been moderate liberal a decade ago, a liberal 30 years ago, a socialist 70 years ago, a communist a century ago, a bomb-throwing anarchist two centuries ago, and insane four centuries ago.

For an example, let’s just take the cause de jeur: gay “marriage”, which is now, in 2015, supported by “moderate” “conservatives” and is currently illegal to oppose in any real way in some states. In 2008, just 7 years ago, “moderate” liberal Obama opposed it. In 1996, less than 20 years ago, “moderate” liberal Clinton signed a law banning gay “marriage”. In the 1980’s, only gay radicals were pressing for “marriage”, in the 1970’s not even most gay activists were for gay “marriage”. Before that, it was hardly ever even mentioned. In 1962, just 50 years ago, sodomy was itself illegal in every state. In 1953, less than seven decades ago, just mentioning gay marriage or writing about homosexuality was considered obscence. Just over two centuries ago sodomy merited a death penalty (although these laws were rarely enforced and went beyond just homosexuality). In the 1500’s, the debate was between whether the church or the king would execute homosexuals. Talking of homosexual “marriage” at this time would have been seen as insanity.

This is not an argument on the merits or demerits of homosexual issues, but rather an illustration. What is the moderate position?

For most of English history, the execution of homosexuals would have been seen as normal, it would have been the centrist position. Just decriminalizing homosexuality is in itself, regarding the full scope of English history, an extremely liberal act. Those “moderate” “conservatives” petitioning the Supreme Court are neither. They are extreme leftists.

This is why the political centre doesn’t exist. A centre has to exist in relation to opposite points and there are no true opposing points. There are just two points near each other constantly shifting ever leftward, with the overton window currently situated between the extreme left and the even more extreme left.

A moderate stance is not a virtue and centrists are the most unreasoning. Because there is no point or range that could reasonably be called “the centre”, political centrism or moderation is ideologically bankrupt. They have latched onto nothing real, but instead have allowed society to dictate their beliefs to them. They are either hollow pragmatists, opportunists, or too unthinking to have actually developed a a coherent ideological framework for themselves.

Conservatism is Always Doomed

Let us posit that society is at point “X” on a particular issue.

The conservative position is to conserve X.

The liberal position is to ‘progress’ to X+10.

We can posit there are some hardcore conservatives that wish to conserve X-10, the society of a few years back.

We can also posit that some hardcore liberals wish to progress to X+20.

Now we posit an overton window is accepting of the range: hardcore conservative to hardcore liberal. There are some rightests who want x-50 and some leftists who want x+50, but these are radicals and fall outside the overton window, the debate is generally kept to the conservatives and liberals, with the hardcore of each allowed a voice but being outside the mainstream.

From this we now see the range of acceptable opinion is from X-10 to X+20, while the mainstream and centrists would be be in the range of X to X+10.

Any positive deviation from X is a liberal victory and a conservative defeat. The liberals might want X+10, but X+5 is still better for them, while X+5 is still farther away from the X conservatives are conserving.

Yet the moderate opinion is almost always X+Y, it is never X-Y, and only rarely just X. So, the vast majority of acceptable choices are conservative losses and liberal gains, while non-loss is the best a conservative can realistically hope for.

The conservative will almost always lose this game.

Of course, the game is never a single competition; in real life it always iterated. In an iterated game, the conservative will always lose eventually.

****

To make matters worse for the conservatives, is that after the conservatives have lost, the centre changes.

Let use say the game is played and a compromise was reached, neither the conservatives nor the liberals got everything they wanted and the decision to implement X+5 was reached. After a few years or a decade or two, point X+5 has become the new norm for society, point “Y”. A conservative is now conserving point Y.

The game is now being played over the territory of Y to Y+10.

If one more compromise results in a decision to implement Y+5, it has come to the point where where liberals have obtained X+10, while the conservatives have lost completely.

As more iterations occur, society will always move towards the liberal position, with only slight slowdowns and the rare win of hardcore conservatives.

****

So in any political body where conservatism and liberalism are the opposed choices, conservatism is always doomed.

To not lose the conservatives have to win completely every single time. Compromise is always a long-term liberal gain and conservative loss. Any liberal win is almost always permanent, while any conservative win will likely be lost after a few more iterations.

The only way for society to not become perpetually more liberal is to make conservatism the centre. If conservatism is not the political centre, the game is always rigged in the favour of liberals.

Conservatism is always doomed.

For any society to not inevitably become increasingly liberal, reaction must always be posed against liberalism, with conservativism as the centre.

Any conservative who opposes reaction is setting himself up for a loss. Reaction is the proper opposition to liberalism, conservatism is not.

****

* All numbers used are arbitrary and meaningless, useful for only for illustrative purposes.

Feminism is About Equality…

Feminism is about equality or feminism is about equal rights is a common motte used by feminists. I’ve already shown how that is not true and shown the ideological reasons feminists like to push this bit of drivel, so go read that if that’s what your looking for.

Instead, today I’m going to show that anybody using this phrase inherently recognizes that equality is meaningless conceptual nonsense, or possibly that they simply grossly ignorant of that of which they speak.

Feminism has gone through a number of evolutions. There have been three major evolutions of feminism: the first focusing on suffrage and prohibition, a second focusing on domesticity, patriarchy, and access to the workplace, and the third is more diffuse but tends to focus on empowerment and abolishing gender roles.

Just in these very broad outlines we can see the contradictions of various form of feminism. First wave feminism and prohibition were virtually indistinguishable, yet one of today’s large post-feminist empowerment crusades is the “right” of women to get as irresponsibly drunk as they want without having to take responsibility for any actions taken while drunk. The need to dress sexily for men was on of the shackles of patriarchy the second-wave tried to throw off, while self-proclaimed feminist sluts of the third-wave are arguing for their right to dress as whores without being judged for it.

When you add in all the various permutations of feminism the contradictions abound even more: Sex-positive feminists and anti-porn feminists, TERFs and queer theory feminists, liberal feminists and radical feminists, equity and gender feminists, choice feminists and actual feminists, etc.

Given the vast array of what feminists desire, we can now see why equality is meaningles nonsense. If feminism is about equality that means equality is simultaneously defined as banning alcohol, getting irresponsibly drunk, dressing like a slut, not dressing like a slut, having lots of heterosexual sex, making pronography, avoiding non-lesbian sex, people with penises are men, those same people with penises are women, being economically independent, not being economically independent, being given equal access to the workforce, and being given preferential access to the workforce.

To anybody with two brain cells to rub together, this mess of contradictions means equality is simply a nonsense phrase with no real meaning besides some vague Orwellian exo-semantic feelings of ‘good’.

Anybody saying feminism is about equality either believes assumes equality is a meaningless word, has not actually thought of what they’re saying, is ignorant of even the basics of feminist thought and history, or is dishonest.