Feminization

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.” Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers’s resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria. 

This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

Of course, an even bigger part of the problem are low status men, often raised by single moms with an ax to grind against her own low status mate that she abandoned, or low status dads who pedestalized their women inculcating a terrible, terrible attitude in these additional low status men. They are reliably even worse than the women.

More from the article:

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies. 

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine. 

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

And another snippet:

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic. 

A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.

If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive. 

And one more snippet:

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?  

And it's worth pointing out that the article was written by a woman.

Isaiah 3:12 "As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths."

Doesn't mean much until you start to notice other patterns that suddenly puts in its proper context, doesn't it? Anyway, I recommend reading the whole article. There's more. And there's more that she doesn't even talk about. No mention of how over-educating women and preparing them for careers takes them out of their best marriagable window and is tied very closely with lack of marrying, lack of children, and all kinds of anxiety and depression, not to mention lonely, frustrated old maid old age—which they quixotically blame on men rather than on their own poor behavior, poor decisions or poor judgement. 

As the article says, though; stop propping up the enforced feminization with the force of government, and it'll go away quickly. The question is; how much pain do we all have to suffer before it becomes obvious that it needs to be done? Most people still don't accept this, because most people refuse to recognize obvious patterns that make them feel bad.

ESR and me

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned;”

The part of me that was once an idealistic anti-racist liberal marching for civil rights died its final death last night as I watched the video of Irina Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail, being fatally stabbed in the throat from behind by a black savage I refuse to name.

What has finally broken me is, incidents like that aren’t even a surprise anymore. The frequency of brutal, senseless murders by “African-Americans”, both individually and in predatory mobs, has risen exactly as rapidly as social and coercive controls on their behavior have weakened.

Meanwhile, for anybody who’s wondering, American whites still have about the same crime rate as Switzerland. When enforcement of norms disintegrates, only intelligent people with low time preference still act civilized.

As I’ve watched us sliding down the civilizational failure gradient, the question I’ve been increasingly unable to dismiss is this: was the whole ugly apparatus of racial repression – segregation, sundown towns, lynchings -really just senseless hatred? Or was it a rational containment strategy evolved under pressure from living alongside a large, visually distinct population of low-IQ savages?

I think I know the answer now. And I hate knowing it. I preferred my innocence.

It doesn’t do any good to protest that this particular savage was “mentally ill”, whatever you think that means. The mobs that routinely form to beat up and kill whites unwary enough to wander onto their turf aren’t psychotic, unless all Blacks are psychotic.

Yes, yes, I know. If you were to select a population of whites for the same distribution of IQ and time preference as American Blacks, and then coddle them, scholarship out their brightest kids for four generations, and tell them all of their failures are society’s fault, you’d get the same level of pathology and violence in about the time it took you to say “dyscultural and dysgenic”.

That doesn’t matter. We’re not dealing with that hypothetical. We’re dealing with reality. The reality is that we have a predation problem that will only be solved when our actual population of low IQ savages is contained again. Creatures like Irina’s murderer, cognitively unable to participate in civilization, must be subject to either segregation or repression so brutal that they live in fear of it.

I don’t really want to live in the kind of society that can do either these things. But Irina Zarutska’s murder is the seal on my realization that there are no longer soft options, only hard choices.

I’d prefer the one where armed citizens routinely shoot down creatures like that at the time of the attempted crime, or immediately after it. All the alternatives seem far worse.

No, ESR. That's nice but naive. Four generations of passive incentives isn't nearly enough to turn white people behavior into black people behavior. We certainly have our own natural man, and it's bad enough, but it's not the same as Third World natural man. It's a completely different thing, and it would require either much more active and aggressive stimulus, or a multiple generations-long breeding event that changed genetic behavior. The first time around for white people, it took the better part of a thousand years to turn our savage ancestors into more civilized modern Western civilization.

Women's suffrage

From Kat Rosenfield, whoever she is, and her substack: (And this is somewhat edited/cut by me, without annotation, so if you want the whole unfiltered thing, follow the link.)

Neil Gaiman appears to be a pretty bad guy. That's not actually what this essay is about, but I know people are going to ask — what about the man, are you defending the bad man — so let's just get it out of the way, the bad man is so extremely bad. He’s so bad that I don't even care if he broke the law, at this point; if the best defense for your behavior is "But she consented to eating her own **** and vomit!," if you find yourself saying anything even in the ballpark of that statement, you need either therapy or Jesus or both. Neil Gaiman gets a big thumbs down from me, he gets zero stars. I would certainly not have sex with him and I don't think you should, either.

I mean, unless you really want to, but ah, there it is: even if you say so, how can we know you're telling the truth?

There's a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he's doing. Gaiman says he's struggling: he's heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. "I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed," he writes.

"It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn't mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much. But also, we know this because she didn't mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that's what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we've been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can't assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

So close, and yet refusing the see the very question that she begged or its obvious and inevitable conclusion! For the entirety of human history until very recently; the last couple of generations or so, literally everyone in the world knew that about women and treated them accordingly. Sure, sure; women have agency. They're ultimately responsible for their own decisions, same as everyone else. But women are fundamentally different than men, and our desire to treat women and men as interchangeable widgets in the social sphere, the work sphere, the political sphere, and elsewhere was always based on a fundamentally flawed and incorrect baseline assumption, and was therefore fundamentally doomed to failure before it even started. It only kinda sorta worked as long as it has because Western Civilization is a nice civilization, and was able to indulge some bad ideas for a time before they metastasized to a dangerous level.

https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2020/06/fall-of-empire-thy-name-is-woman_30.html

Women's lib, even the very first wave of feminism and women's suffrage a hundred+ years ago now, was always the wrong idea. And men gave women what they wanted, to be treated kinda sorta like fake men, even though that's not really want they wanted and it's actually been a disaster for them. Just look at mental issues the modern working woman faces, for instance! Women coveted what they imagined men had, but women are not men, and women and men both should have been content with a very workable status quo that was actually in harmony with divine intent for the roles women and men should have in an idealized, divine society.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng

The world is fallen, so human societies will inevitably give way to entropy and decay. However, rarely can we draw to clear and bright a line to that decay from a conscious decision made at a societal level to erode the roles of men and women and blend them together, treating women like fake men and treating men (sometimes) like women, and allowing women and their "natural woman" instincts be treated as if they were good instead of bad inclinations that need to be contained and bridled. Our current discourse frequently refers to toxic masculinity, and while it exists, the phrase has become a joke because all masculinity is confused for toxic masculinity, and toxic femininity is treated as a desirable rather than dystopian state of being.

Liberal women

Borrowing from another post someone else made. In fact, mostly quoting him explicitly.

I wonder if they’ve ever considered how not behaving like horrifically unpleasant control freaks ready to take offense or administer a retarded lecture at the drop of a hat might make people more willing to spend time with them? Almost certainly not. They probably haven’t considered how actively uglifying themselves with ridiculous haircuts, piercings, and venomous hair colors makes them unattractive to others either.

It’s interesting to see how the conservative women are not only more soundly based, but more socially successful.

At the risk of sounding like a pedantic sperg, just a bit, I tend to find that conservative and liberal are not as meaningful as they used to be. But they still serve as a kind of self-sorting activity, if nothing else. Plenty of liberal women can be more or less pleasant, even if they believe stupid things, and plenty of conservative women aren't pleasant even if they more or less believe sensible things about political and social issues. Political and social issues are almost certainly correlated with personality issues, but it's not a 1x1 correlation, and I personally know plenty of exceptions. But Vox Day is also certainly correct; the problem with liberal women feeling lonely is a problem almost entirely of their own making. If they'd quit being so terrible to be around, they'd likely be much less lonely. 

It's also gotta be the people that they hang around. The whole point of liberalism is that it attracts people who 1) are envious and resentful of people who are happier or more successful than they are, 2) hate normal behavior and social norms and nihilistically want to tear them down, 3) desperately want to feel morally superior to people around them, and 4) in general is attractive to people who are narcissistic, immature, and/or psychologically broken in some way. This doesn't help them feel less lonely; even if they are hanging out with other people, the other people tend to be narcissists and complainers; self-absorbed and completely lacking in empathy. It doesn't help your loneliness to hang around with people like that.

Again, it's not a complete 1x1 correlation; there are still some foolish nice people who think liberalism "sounds nice" so that's why they identify as liberals. But that's a vanishing breed, and most of those people don't call themselves liberals or self-identify by their politics anymore anyway. If they ever even did. Liberals, more and more, are shrill, unlikeable, dysfunctional people who surround themselves with other shrill, unlikeable, dysfunctional people.

"Meritocracy" and class warfare

I was going to write a discussion of this interesting Brooks article, but before I got around to it, the Z-man did, and Vox Day did. They both have something interesting to say about it, and it's both not only congruent with each other, but also approaching it from a totally different perspective to come to a similar conclusion. I'll quote sections of the Z-man's post on it.

Brooks speaks as a member of the meritocracy, which he defines as the highly educated and highly connected urban class that runs the institutions. His column is mostly a self-congratulatory call to action to address the growing unrest.

The place to start is the assumption on behalf of Brooks and no doubt his intended readership that he is a member of the meritocracy. He ticks many of the boxes he repeatedly insists are requirements of the meritocracy. He is the child of wealthy foreigners, and he went to the right schools. He has avoided anything that looks like productive labor. He has no loyalty to his host country. He sent his son off to serve in the army of a foreign country.

By the standards of the people who throw around the term “meritocracy” as a compliment, David Brooks is a good example. The question is what service is he rendering to the ruling class? He has no useful skills, and he has never tried to do anything that requires sacrifice on behalf of the ruling class. His career looks like the life of a self-indulgent fop from the British literature. What has David Brooks ever done to merit consideration of the ruling class?

The first clue is a quote from Thomas Edsall he uses in his post to explain why he and his fellow meritocrats aligned against Trump. “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.” That right there captures the Cloud People – Dirt People divide.

ed note: An admission that the "conservatives" of the Establishment are as progressive as the Left that they pretend to oppose.

Opposing Trump was never about practical things like the priorities of government or the general welfare of the people. It was class struggle. The meritocratic class view their membership in that class as a sign of their moral goodness. Their ability to worm their way through the labyrinth of credentialling mechanisms in order to fill up their resume with the best associations is proof of their virtue. A perch at the New York Times is no different from an assigned seat in the front pews.

Hatred of Trump, and it was real hate, was a defense of the optimates versus the populares on purely class grounds. The problem is the optimates are a polite fiction, a fig leaf for the tiny ruling elite at the top of the system. The role of thoroughly impractical men like David Brooks is to maintain both a moral code that benefits the ruling elite and to provide a barrier between the optimates and the populares. Trump crossing that barrier was viewed as a violation of this system’s integrity.

That is the heart of the Brooks post. The headline is misleading as at no point does he genuinely suggest the meritocrats are the bad guys. Instead, he explains how people could possibly make this mistake, because their highly exclusionary systems do seem to violate their alleged moral code. Note he quickly moves along to the part his readers expect from a Brooks column. That is the part where he says the Dirt People are undereducated rubes who need to be put in their place.

In fairness, he probably sensed this and finished with “We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?” Fools grabbed onto this thinking it revealed some genuine self-reflection and perhaps a sign that the managerial elite is coming around to the criticisms leveled at them. In reality, it was another blow on the shofar to rally the people of the meritocracy.

That is how the Cloud People view things. Like the children of Israel camping in the wilderness of Sinai, they await the final instructions. They have seen the destruction of the Dirt People and they can see the ultimate end of their leader. What comes soon is the Promised Land where the meritocrats will build a kingdom of priests and a holy nation that serves the gods of the new religion. The Dirt People will be gone and what will remain is the righteous led by the meritocrats.

That is the purpose of these men of the meritocracy. Their role is to keep the dream alive and encourage the elites to push forward and faster. Whether any of this is possible is never considered. Those debates are left to the Dirt People and once they are gone, all doubt will be gone. In the end, the meritocracy is nothing more than a cheering section for a system that serves elite interests at the expense of the people and nations on which they feed.

Genetics and doctrine

I'm often amused, bemused and a bit crestfallen when members of the Church are unable to (or more accurately, unwilling to) accept things that are real, data-driven, and yet which challenge beliefs that they cling to. Not doctrinal beliefs, but beliefs that are often just as core to their identity as doctrinal beliefs are, and which in their own interpretation, they've wrapped up with doctrine, or garnished their folk beliefs with a doctrinal flourish, so that they can't tell the difference between them. This leads them to dismiss or reject actual data, because they believe that it conflicts with doctrine, when in reality it does not; it only conflicts with their interpretive mingling of doctrine and whatever philosophies of men they've tied them too.

Often this segment of members is part of the big plurality of members (maybe even majority, sadly) that often fall under the rubric of something Nephi warned us of in 2 Nephi 28:21 "And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell." Those who refuse to acknowledge how thoroughly the devil has infiltrated and poisoned our society against righteousness are often blinded in many other ways too; usually because they're too caught up in their worldly identity of some kind. Although perhaps that's not entirely fair. Nephi also said, to his brothers after his own vision where he saw his father's vision, that the wicked take the truth to be hard. But aren't we all wicked, fallen, and in need of repentance? My experience is that everyone takes some truth to be hard, because we're just not in a position to accept it. In fact, quite clearly we cannot accept truth unless we are prepared for it. Not just doctrinal truth, but any truth. We reject political, ideological, social, cultural, or scientific proof that we're not ready to receive just as readily as we reject doctrinal truth we're not ready to receive. If we can even comprehend what is being said to us, we can't fit it into our existing framework or understanding, so we reject it or dismiss it rather than accept it and accept that our existing framework or understanding needs to adapt to accept this new data. It's the work of a lifetime to constantly grow, line upon line, precept upon precept, until we come to a full understanding, and we can't be expected to understand things that are beyond us until we've built up every line and precept necessary to accept the next one.

Anyway, that's a bit rambly, but I know what I'm going to post next is going to be controversial to many, because it won't fit with their framework. But... it's true nonetheless. Let me preface this just a bit by making an analogy. 

Abraham famously bore Isaac, right, his son and heir. Isaac himself bore two sons, Jacob and Esau, and Jacob, after being renamed Israel, bore twelve sons of his own, which are the basis for the tribes of Israel. God covenanted with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Israelites became the covenant people, endowed with certain blessings. Abraham and Isaac obviously had other children as well, however. Abraham had children with Hagar and with Keturah. Isaac, as noted above, bore Esau, who was along with his uncles above, the father of nations. Did God love these people less than the Israelites? I believe not, because that would be contrary to God's own word. He loves all of his children, and puts all of them in the environment that they need to be in to reach their potential on Earth, and prepare themselves for the best eternity that they can. So, if one group of people, one genetic lineage, has access to blessings that another does not, it is because that situation will be of most benefit to both groups of people in the eternal long run. People and peoples are not interchangeable widgets, where one is the same as another, and God knows that even better than we do, tailoring the environment perfectly to the person who is to receive it in this mortal life. "All are alike unto God" should not be interpreted as "all are the same unto God." We are all alike in that God values us, and wants us all to flourish, and has tailored our mortal experience to best allow us to do so.

Now, of course, this doesn't justify ignoring the plight or suffering of people or peoples in hard times, but it does mean that we shouldn't engage in virtue-signaling hand-wringing about the lack of equity in the world too. People who take it upon themselves to "change the world" by trying to bring about equity and whatever in broad strokes tend to be arrogant and full of hubris and self-righteousness, so full of their own self-importance that they don't care that their crude "solutions" to problems like poverty, opportunity, or whatever are actually breaking more than they fix. In reality, it is beyond the reach of the vast majority of people to even fix themselves, and help their immediate family, friends and maybe community. The very tiny super-minority of people who can actually go abroad and make some kind of change for the better among strangers should be supported and applauded, but few of us should aspire to that. Beams and motes and all that. We've all got enough of our own problems still.

Anyway, all of this is to say that peoples are different. Not just in terms of culture and superficial physical differences, but in terms of actual genetics, behaviors, and capabilities. Again; does that mean God loves some people more than others? No, it means that some people need a completely different environment to flower spiritually than others.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much you're aware of PCA charts, but they are charts that use data points to map genetic difference. This is quite interesting:

From a doctrinal standpoint, I don't think it really makes any difference to notice that sub-Saharan Africans, i.e., the "black race" which is certainly very accurate in spite of the spirited denials that scientists will make about their being such a thing as race, are significantly separated genetically from a cluster or arc that includes literally every other population on earth. Africans in this sense should be seen as sub-Saharan Africans, as north Africans, while not shown, will tend to cluster with west Asians and Europeans. Which makes sense given that many millennia of interchange we know about between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

It also raises some interesting questions about the fact that the Lord did not see fit to give the Priesthood to the black race until the 70s, when the Brethren, in earnest prayer, finally felt that the time had come. Church historians, or at least many of them, including those who wrote the article on the Church website on Race and the Priesthood chalk it up to cultural views and a mistake on the part of early Brethren, who were unable to look past their own cultural perspective to see the current cultural perspective of people as interchangeable widgets. 

I'm not so sure. I don't think the Lord simply allowed a mistake to persist; I think it was his plan all along that things unfold the way that they did. The Lord is usually very efficient, and things that happen often kill many birds with one stone. Even if the cultural perspective of Brigham Young or others played a role in how it played out, it probably also met other needs that the Lord needed met. 

Anyway, that's really neither here nor there, other than that the knowledge that there's a big genetic rift between the black race and the rest of humanity as we know it today begs the question. If there's a genetic difference, with attendant genetic predisposition to different behaviors than everyone else (and there is voluminous data that there is), then does that mean that we shouldn't be surprised to see a different path to eternal glory? Heck, I see a different path to eternal glory between me and my own brothers. The Lord has an individual plan for each of us, but who we are genetically and culturally is part of that path. And who we are genetically and culturally makes a huge difference in our behavior patterns. Speaking of data: https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-black-struggle-reader.html

I'm aware that the shallow will immediately dismiss all of this and suggest that its racist. Hence my lead-in; although I'm not a Ben Shapiro fan, he's right about one thing: facts don't care about your feelings. As a corollary, these facts don't interfere with doctrine either. God is no respecter of persons. In the parable of the talents, the guy who turned two talents into four got the exact same reward as the guy who turned five talents into ten. And I'm not suggesting that white people have five talents and black people two or anything like that. The reality is more nuanced than the parable; it's not that we have a different quantity of talents, but rather that our talents are different from each other's. But that doesn't matter; if we make the most of the talents and situation that we have, we can qualify for the same exaltation. On the other hand, if we covet the talents and situation of others, we are in a bad place with regards to eternal progression.

The data involved here is convincing to those who are prepared to accept the truth. And it does have consequences for what kind of society we can and should attempt to build that will be fair to all and have a shot at long-term success as a society. But if we persist in the delusional idea that we're just interchangeable widgets with no cultural, genetic or behavioral differences between us that are more than superficial, we're setting ourselves up for failure, because we're in denial about one of the most salient points of creating a successful society; how to account for diversity that actual means some kind of significant difference. (The data also strongly suggests that racism, as most people believe it to be, is a hoax and a shakedown racket. Similar data can be compiled for sexism, although that's beyond the scope of this blog post.)

I think the Nephites and Ammonites did it best. They had friendly relations with each other. They went to and fro between each others lands in trade and other travel. The Nephites gave the Ammonites lands of their own and protected them from Lamanite aggression, even as the Ammonites supported the Nephite armies. But they didn't just give up on their differences, either. The Ammonites had their own lands, in Jershon and later elsewhere, where they could practice their own culture and set up their own societies. Which, in many ways, were more successful than the Nephite ones, at least for a time.

One of the more important Z-man posts

The New Iron Curtain

I'll be editing so I'm not just copy-pasting the entire thing, but this is something that everyone in America needs to realize. The courts are not your friend. They are not your last resort. They are not going to give you a fair trial. They have been weaponized—illegally, sure, but who's going to tell the courts that they're acting illegally when they're the ones who determine who's guilty or liable or not?—against normal Americans and time-honored American customs. The American government, from top to bottom, has become an abusive spouse; defined by their abuse of the American people. Sadly, too many of the American people are in denial about the fact that they play the role of a battered spouse with Stockholm Syndrome in this metaphor. Although, of course, that's often the role that the battered spouse plays; making excuses. "He only hits me because he loves me."

Anyway, on to the Z-man's post, or at least portions of it:

Since about the time he took over the primetime slot for Fox News, people have been predicting that Fox would fire Tucker Carlson. The regime toadies said he would be fired due to his reckless heresy. He talked about taboo topics and questioned official dogma, which can never be allowed. The so-called conservatives repeated the same lines, as is their habit. Normal people, of course, know that anyone speaking truth to power is not going to last long in the modern media.

It turns out that Tucker was not fired for anything he said in particular, but most likely as a result of the lawsuit Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems. It is possible that as part of the settlement, Fox agreed to get rid of people hated by the regime. The first to go was Dan Bongino, who was sacked before the ink was dry. Carlson got the axe Monday morning, which suggests it took them a while to find evidence to fire him with cause, thus voiding his contract.

On the other hand, the lawsuit could simply have frightened or embarrassed the plutocrats who own Fox News. They are regime members, after all, which means they care first and foremost about regime opinion. Tucker has no doubt been a problem in this regard for a long time. This embarrassing lawsuit, punishment by the regime for Fox not falling in line, may have frightened the Murdoch clan. Firing Tucker is a way to win back support of their social class.

The most likely explanation is that Fox either agreed to clean house as part of the settlement or they got the message being sent by these lawsuits. Fox getting sued over election stuff is ridiculous, but the full might of the regime was brought to bear so that it was clearly impossible for Fox to get a fair trial. The judge ruled against them at every turn, so Fox had no choice but to settle. There is another case out there as well, so they have to play ball or face bankruptcy.

This may seem farfetched but consider that the New York Times was sued by Sarah Palin for defamation and won, despite their own emails admitting that they defamed Palin and did so knowingly. Granted, the judge in the case told the jury to rule in favor of the Times, but it is a good example of how the courts treat the media. It is incredibly hard to sue the media, even when they willingly lie about you. Yet somehow the court went the opposite way in this Fox News case.

What is happening right in front of our eyes is the weaponization of the court system by the regime to suppress dissent. They cannot shut down a cable channel or throw their hosts in prison, but they can lawfare into bankruptcy any organization that violates the ideology of the regime. In other words, they told Rupert Murdoch that he can run his operation as he sees fit, but they will sue him into the poorhouse if he steps out of line or fails to get rid of people who violate regime dogma.

This is merely the highest profile example of this new control mechanism. The Alex Jones case is another example. Jones was tagged with a billion in damages for saying nutty things about the school shooting in Connecticut. Like the Fox News case, the particulars were just an excuse to force Jones into a morality play in which he was the villain, and the jury was instructed to condemn him. He never stood a chance at trial because the trial was rigged from the start.

New York did the same trick to the National Rifle Association. They used the court system to batter them into bankruptcy. This is made easier by a court system filled with judges who think this is a great idea. Even if a judge is uncomfortable with these Stalinist tactics, they understand power. If they want to stay on the bench or move up the ranks, they have to do what the regime demands. If the regime can take down Fox News, they can take down a judge.

Lawfare is not a new thing. Shakedown operations like the alphabet soup gang have been using lawfare for decades. They would jurisdiction shop for a court that would hear their novel legal theory. Then they would judge shop for one of their co-ideologues and before long a heretic is in an unwinnable court case. The most recent example of this sort of grift is the Charlottesville civil cases. The whole stinking affair was an affront to civil society and the rule of law.

What is happening now is that these small-time rackets have been institutionalized into a tool of the regime. Since they can use the court to take away all of your money for any reason they like, they can suppress the speech they dislike by threatening to impoverish anyone that entertains unapproved speech. Since the law is the last resort for the weak seeking protection from the powerful, the regime has effectively closed off the last civil route to challenging regime policies and programs.

In effect an iron curtain is descending across American society. On one side are the regime leaders and their toadies. They get to indulge in the material benefits of the shrinking American pie. On the other side are the common people struggling to come to terms with what these people have done to their country. For now, the real power of that iron curtain is that the people on the losing side refuse to believe it is there and instead keep operating under the old rules.