We are living an age when any reference to women runs the risk of violating the “victimhood” rights of feminist women.

What is “Victimhood?” It was explained by two sociologists in 2014.

We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

The “Honor Culture” requires that one avenge insults to preserve honor. The law and third parties are avoided and this culture is typical of areas where law and authority is mostly absent. A classic example is the American West in the Age of the Frontier. As law and authority became available, the culture gradually changed to one of The Culture of Dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling. Lawyers have made this culture ubiquitous, even in war.

Now, we have a new phenomenon.

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As a promised follow-up to the original posting, I’ll be conspicuously attired in something resembling this (but without the hood). Well, and pants, shoes, etc. Also, there is a slight chance that I will actually talk my way into the tour of what I am calling Pierce the Younger, but it is to end at 4 PM tomorrow.

NB: Sunday afternoon is likely to be wet. I am investigating the availability of some kind of water-repellent device, ideally collapsible for easy transport and storage.

I have written previously about the melt-down of the last Hugo Awards (here and here) so I don’t think I need recapitulate the whole multi-year saga. If you are seriously into science fiction, you already know, if you aren’t, it’ll merely be of minor academic interest. I keep coming back to as a writer with a mild interest in science fiction generally, and a slightly more intense one in how a particular progressive and insular mind-set manages to warp the heck out of book publishing and marketing the same to the masses, and because I have on-line acquaintances who are passionately interested in the matter. These interests tend to be infectious, I’ll have you know.

It had begun to seem in the last few years – especially to science fiction fans – that what was being published, marketed, and lauded by the critical luminaries in science fiction circles was actually not terribly readable. It was increasing precious, depressing, literary in the worst interpretation of the word (pretentious, pointless and prizing showy effects in the use of language over plot, characterization and possibility) and that the gender, skin color and sexual/political orientation of the author mattered more than being able to write a cracking good yarn. Too many books were, in Sarah Hoyt’s phrase, grey goo – the written-word equivalent of Filboid Studge.
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In her memoirs, Russian combat pilot Anna Egorova remembered her mother ”kneeling before the icons, as she firstly listed all our names, the names of her children, begging God for health and wisdom for us, and then at the end of each prayer repeating: ‘God save them from slander!’”  She didn’t understand that word ‘slander’ in her childhood, Egorova wrote, but after her brother was sent away as An Enemy of the People, “it was exposed before me in all its terrible nakedness.”

I was reminded of Egorova’s story by a recent article by Richard Rahn titled The high cost of slander:

Endless cruelties have been and continue to be committed on the basis of group slander. The communists and socialists imprisoned and slaughtered many of their merchant and property-owning citizens on the basis of a gross slander, not to mention what the Nazis did to the Jews. In America, blacks, gays, many ethnic groups and women were first stereotyped, then slandered, and then discriminated against. But the fashion of which groups of individuals can be slandered has changed to such people as Wall Street bankers; pharmaceutical, coal and oil company executives; conservative scholars; those who question the global warming establishment; and white males, among others.

The general rule that one is innocent until proven guilty goes back at least to ancient Roman law: Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat — “Burden of proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies.” Over the centuries, not only individuals, but whole classes of people, have been denied this basic human right. The oppressors normally begin by slandering a group, and then use the slander to discriminate and ultimately persecute — and, unfortunately, this persists even in America.

If one listens to Bernie Sanders’ rants, somehow all of those who work on Wall Street are far greedier than most other Americans. It is also obvious that he has no idea of what the functions of financial markets are, nor the disaster that would occur without them. Yes, there are plenty of unethical and incompetent people on Wall Street, as there are in Washington and in most other places in America. That does not justify indicting all who work in a particular industry and a particular place. The ignorant attacks on the financial industry have resulted in increasingly costly and destructive regulation, which increases the risk in the financial system rather than diminishing it.

RTWT.  Indeed, much political writing and speech these days is reminiscent of the two-minute hate sessions which were a feature of the totalitarian society portrayed in Orwell’s 1984.  Any day on Facebook, one can see the sharing and sometimes the origination of extreme and even vile assertions about individuals and whole groups…usually people and groups that are Designated Targets, similarly to Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984.

A biting critique of recent public arguments by liberal academics, by Seth Barrett Tillman:

There is a final possibility. Apparently, some non-originalists believe they are part of a victimized, long-suffering, powerless, discrete, insular intellectual minority. As Professor Jack Balkin, a prominent commentator (but not one of the Alliance-for-Justice-350), wrote:

Accepting that opposition as the proper frame for debate just locks liberals into a clever rhetorical strategy created by movement conservatives in the 1980s, who wanted to put themselves on the side of the American constitutional tradition, and liberals on the outside looking in. [here] [here] (emphasis added)
 
and,
 
The notion that in order for liberals to believe in a living Constitution they have to reject originalism in all of its forms is the biggest canard ever foisted on them. [here] [here] (emphasis added)[3]

In this intellectual milieu, signing a letter you do not really believe is not hypocrisy: it is virtue. Thus, signing such a letter is the natural and justified response of victims to an unfair world imposed upon them by malevolent intellectual forces which have deformed reasoned, public debate. That’s not hypocrisy: that’s something else entirely. I am going to refrain from characterizing that reason, but I expect the public will take the hint.
 
Is it any wonder that millions of Americans vote for Trump?

Worth reading in its entirety.

From Seth Barrett Tillman’s new post about western cultural confidence (and the lack thereof):

Our administrative unit’s official motto is: Health, Fairness, Environment, Culture. So it should not surprise you that we chose you among other applicants seeking to immigrate to our (now your) prefecture because you have (as far as we can discover) no strongly held views, on anything. We believe that (former) outsiders like you from distant regions add to our ever-growing cultural diversity, but we seek to do so in a way that guarantees our social cohesion.
 
In the event that you violate a minor domestic regulation (i.e., under Schedule 1 and its annex) and you are under 18, you will be assigned community service and ordered to apologize to any victims of your wrongdoing (should they remain alive). If you violate a major domestic regulation (i.e., under Schedule 2 and its annex) and you are over 18, you will be sent down for correction, but we cannot send you back to your former prefecture, as it is in political disarray and your human rights may be threatened by your return there. Your statutory right to residence vests after 60 days; your statutory right to vote in municipal elections vests after 6 months; your statutory right to vote in prefecture-wide elections and for an inter-prefecture delegate vests after 1 year…

Highly recommended.

Conservatism Is Winning In The States

What Alexis de Tocqueville observed over 150 years ago remains true today—states are laboratories of ideas. It’s here on the state level where ideas are created, fought over, tested, implemented, and either succeed or fail. When it comes to conservative ideas in the states, we are winning.

While presidential candidates were insulting each other’s appendages, West Virginia became the 26th Right to Work state. While the FBI was investigating candidates, North Carolina passed major tax cuts. While pundits cried that both major parties had lost their way, Missouri passed paycheck protection. Conservatism is winning in the states. Don’t let it go unnoticed.

 .

There is no state that highlights conservative victories better than Wisconsin. Just five years ago Wisconsin turned a billion-dollar deficit into a multi million-dollar surplus. Act 10 may have grabbed headlines across the country as protestors occupied the capitol for months, but the story did not end there.

 .

Over the past year conservatives have passed reforms less controversial than Act 10 but just as important to taxpayers across the state. Last year they passed Right to Work to guarantee workers the freedom to join a union or not. Wisconsin reformed the prevailing wage law, which will save our local communities millions of dollars on the cost of building new schools and roads. Wisconsin reformed the marriage penalty to reduce taxes on working families, froze tuition at the UW for the forth straight year, and passed occupational licensure reform that gives a hand up to some of the hardest working Wisconsinites.

There will be a competition to identify the best value design of mini reactors – called small modular reactors (SMRs) – and paving the way “towards building one of the world’s first SMRs in the UK in the 2020s”. There is no shortage of contenders, with companies from the US to China and Poland all wooing the UK with their proposals.

With a crucial UN climate change summit in Paris imminent, the question of how to keep the lights on affordably, while cutting emissions, is pressing.

SMRs aim to capture the advantages of nuclear power – always-on, low-carbon energy – while avoiding the problems, principally the vast cost and time taken to build huge plants. Current plants, such as the planned French-Chinese Hinkley Point project in Somerset, have to be built on-site, a task likened to “building a cathedral within a cathedral”.

Remember the standard:
“If you are going to cover a song, rip it apart a bit and make it your own.”
Changes, by David Bowie:

And a remake by Lewis and Clarke:

I saw this one while perusing Jeff Carter’s excellent blog, Points and Figures, which you should take a look at every day. It particularly struck me today as I am going through some big changes in my life right now. Some good, some bad, but in the end, as my daughter keeps telling me, “everything will be just fine”.

Barack Obama is fond of describing government this way.

As President Obama said the other day, those who start businesses succeed because of their individual initiative – their drive, hard work, and creativity. But there are critical actions we must take to support businesses and encourage new ones – that means we need the best infrastructure, a good education system, and affordable, domestic sources of clean energy. Those are investments we make not as individuals, but as Americans, and our nation benefits from them.

That was a reaction to Romney’s criticism of his silly comment.

I prefer the quote attributed to Washington.

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

Now, we see a new imposition.

The Department of Labor says its so-called fiduciary rule will make financial advisers act in the best interests of clients. What Labor doesn’t say is that the rule carries such enormous potential legal liability and demands such a high standard of care that many advisers will shun non-affluent accounts. Middle-income investors may be forced to look elsewhere for financial advice even as Team Obama is enabling a raft of new government-run competitors for retirement savings. This is no coincidence.

Labor’s new rule will start biting in January as the President is leaving office. Under the rule, financial firms advising workers moving money out of company 401(k) plans into Individual Retirement Accounts will have to follow the new higher standards. But Labor has already proposed waivers from the federal Erisa law so new state-run retirement plans don’t have the same regulatory burden as private employers do.

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Claire Berlinski is very pleased with the response to the GoFundMe page in support of her new book ($9700 as of this writing) as well as the strong interest in the crowdfunding investment possibility.

A conversation between Claire and her brother Mischa suggests some grounds for cautious optimism about the future of this country:

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Merle Haggard is dead.
God rest his soul.
The last and greatest of the musical titans finally falls.
Possibly the greatest of them all, in our national history, at capturing in music the hard, Jacksonian core of America.
Merle Haggard riding his bicycle as a kid, too young to get in, hanging around by the back door, to hear Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, part of a continuity that stretches back to the peopling of the American backcountry, and beyond that to the bloody world of the English border, and poor and proud people who made their own music.
Merle lived hard. Nine lives at least.
If you are not yet a Merle Haggard fan, get that way.
Merle Haggard, we will never forget you.
We will never stop loving your music.

Below is a list of the books, ebooks, music and videos that Chicago Boyz readers viewed and/or ordered in March 2016 via Amazon links on this blog. (A cumulative list of Chicago Boyz readers’ Amazon purchases is here.)

Your book and non-book Amazon purchases help to support this blog via the Amazon Associates program. Chicago Boyz earns a percentage on all of your Amazon purchases as long as you get to the Amazon site by clicking on Amazon links on this blog (including the Amazon banner in the blog header, the link under the Amazon banner, and even Amazon links on Chicago Boyz for products other than the ones that you want to buy).

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Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit has a guest post by Drieu Godefridi that is essentially a follow up to my March 24th, 2016 “Belgium — The Failed State in the Heart of Europe” piece.

It is unsurprisingly titled “Guest Post: More Terrorist Attacks Likely in Failed State of Belgium.”

Please go give Jim Hoft’s site some “linkie love” while checking out the full post, but before you go, this portion of that post bears immediate and close reading —

It is thus obvious that the Belgian government is in a shambolic state at every level, from the local to the federal, and from the executive branch to the judiciary.
 
Of course none of this would have been possible without the policy, in place now for 30 years, to open Belgian citizenship — and the borders — to hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. This open invitation has been extended mainly to Muslim countries, instigating the creation, ex nihilo, of huge Muslim communities in the cities of Brussels, Antwerp and every other Belgian city. Radicalized or not, fundamentalist of not, peaceful or not, these communities tend, in Belgium as anywhere else, to impose their political-religious credo.
 
A study by the WZB Social Science Center (Berlin), published last year in the “Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies”, indicates that half the Muslims in Belgium, France and Austria are fundamentalists, i.e. they think that Muslims should return to the roots of their faith; that there is only one interpretation of the Koran; and that Muslim law should supercede civil (or common) law, (“Religious Fundamentalism and Hostility against Out-groups. A Comparison of Muslims and Christians in Western Europe”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 41, N°1, 33-57). This Weltanschauung (or concept of the world) is irreconcilable with the rudiments of our Western civilization, or for that matter any society which is not strictly Islamic. To assert that Islam—which is much more than simply a religion—has nothing to do with the current spate of terrorist attacks in Europe is a psychotic denial of reality.

Denial of reality is at the heart of the “European Union” project, which has Brussels as its capital.

That is why the “Belgium — The Failed State at the Heart of Europe” meme is spreading. It is obvious to all this will not end well…but end it will.

And its passing will be marked with fire and blood.

Progressive Totalitarianism

In his book The Snapping of the American Mind, David Kupelian asks the following painful question that millions of Americans like myself have pondered for years and will ponder for some time to come as America slowly rips itself apart. Kupelian writes, “How could it be that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and bled – and many died – on foreign shores to contain an evil and metastasizing ideology variously called communism, Marxism, socialism, collectivism, or statism, and yet now, just a few years later, we would gaze up at the pinnacle of power in our own country and behold leaders in thrall to essentially the same core ideology we fought and died to protect strangers from?”
 
The answer to this is can be found within the culture itself and more specifically within America’s youth who have seemingly embraced the concept of socialism with little to no understanding of what socialism even is. Yet, like frogs slowly boiling to death in the cesspools that have become our college campuses, our nation’s youth collectively embrace the ideology that will destroy them while demanding that they be “protected” from opinions that run contrary to their beliefs.

I have this issue with one of my daughters. She’s very sweet and very hard working, but like everyone who has lived she has struggled at times and dealt with situations that seemed completely unfair. She wonders why Bernie’s ideas won’t work. Why shouldn’t lots more thing be free for everyone? Why can’t that work? She received little or no history education in school, and obviously no economics. Of course, there are reasons for that. And what history they do hear is more likely to be Howard Zinn than Steven Ambrose. Without understanding the history of these movements, you cannot understand where all this leads. And they don’t recognize the road on which they are treading.

Summers:

Instances of anti-Semitism by this standard are ubiquitous in American academic life. Nearly a dozen academic associations have enacted formal boycotts of Israeli institutions and in some cases Israeli scholars. Student governments at dozens of universities have demanded the divestiture of companies that do business in Israel or the West Bank. Guest speakers and even some faculty in their classrooms compare Israel to Nazi Germany and question its right to continued existence as a Jewish state.
 
Yet, with very few exceptions, university leaders who are so quick to stand up against microagressions against other groups remain silent in the face of anti-Semitism. Indeed, many major American universities, including Harvard, remain institutional members of associations that are engaged in boycotts of Israel. The idea of divesting Israel is opposed only in the same way that divesting apartheid South Africa was opposed — as an inappropriate intrusion into politics, not as immoral or anti-Semitic.

He’s right.

Martin Kramer goes further:

Larry Summers asks why universities sniff out every trace of prejudice, but look the other way when it comes to anti-Semitism. “University leaders who are so quick to stand up against microagressions against other groups remain silent in the face of anti-Semitism,” he writes, especially when it takes the form of Israel-hatred. My answer: Jews themselves hesitate to use the A-word. Why? It’s not supposed to exist anymore. And if you’re not for yourself, no one will be for you.

He’s right too. Western leftists who don’t hesitate to make reckless, ignorant statements about supposed apartheid in Israel, an open society with gay pride parades and anti-Israel Muslims in the legislature, are circumspect about the commonplace human-rights horrors of Iran and the Arab world.

The unwillingness of liberal American Jews to call out anti-Semitism on the Left reminds me of the unwillingness of self-described liberals/progressives to acknowledge the effectiveness or moral justification of armed self-defense in response to criminal violence.

From Wiki:

“Bei Mir Bistu Shein” (Yiddish: בײַ מיר ביסטו שיין‎, “To Me You’re Beautiful”) is a popular Yiddish song composed by Jacob Jacobs (lyricist) and Sholom Secunda (composer) for a 1932 Yiddish comedy musical, I Would If I Could (in Yiddish, Men Ken Lebn Nor Men Lost Nisht, “You could live, but they don’t let you”), which closed after one season at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn, New York City. The score for the song transcribed the Yiddish title as “Bay mir bistu sheyn”. The original Yiddish version of the song (in C minor) is a dialogue between two lovers.

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Claire Berlinski wants to write a sequel to her important book Menace in Europe, which I reviewed here.  She hopes to do this via a  self-publishing and investment model, under which people will make contributions toward the estimated $60,000 cost of the project and receive in return a percentage of the profits.

Obviously, it will take some work to structure a deal like this properly and in compliance with all relevant regulations.  In the meantime, Claire is doing some initial fundraising via GoFundMe–see the link at Brave Old World.  Contributions here, which will go especially toward development of the project website, are straight donations without expectation of any financial return.  However, you do get the benefit, as Claire notes, of helping to replace the New York Times and similar publications as gatekeepers of the news.

Communism followed by oligarchy:

Omsk   (Map)

Arkhangelsk  (Map)

These are obviously depressed areas. Interesting, however, the number of comments along the lines of ‘Same here!’ I have no idea how representative this is, though I’ve read that things are very bad in Russia these days. Sanctions are currently biting in making things even worse. Remember to be grateful for where you live and what you’ve inherited.

(My browser auto-translates to English with the Google Translate for Chrome plugin.)

Diagnosis: rhinitis medicamentosa.

I have previously written posts about a coming doctor shortage.

They assume that primary care will be delivered by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. They are probably correct as we see with the new Wal Mart primary care clinics.

This is all well and good. What happens when a patient comes in with a serious condition ?

The health policy “experts” have been concerned to train “lesser licensed practitioners” and have pretty much ignored primary care MDs except to burden them with clumsy electronic medical record systems that take up time and make life miserable.

I repeatedly ask medical students if they would choose a career in primary care if it would completely erase their student loan debt. A few hands go up, but not many. In fact, for a while now, the federal government has dedicated millions of dollars to repaying loans for students who choose primary care. Yet residency match numbers show that the percentage of students choosing primary care is not increasing. Though loan forgiveness is a step in the right direction, medical students realize that by choosing a more lucrative specialty, they can pay off their loans just fine.

I proposed years ago, a health reform that resembled that of France where medical school is free. It could be arranged that service in primary care, low income clinics would give credit against student loans. Nothing happened. Except physician income has declined. And tuition has increased.

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Part 3: More On Why The Senate Has Not Defaulted On Its Purported Constitutional Duty

Part 4: Why Senate Inaction As A Response To A Presidential Nomination Is Constitutional

I link to Seth’s posts because he is a friend and his ideas are generally worth paying attention to.

America’s incompetently planned and led wars in the Middle East have acted as a biological process of evolutionary selection that has been creating nastier and more lethal terrorist organizations. This has happened because of the fecklessness of America’s political leaders. (Bing West covers that political fecklessness and the selective pressures on our Islamist enemies in his article America the Weak.)

Nowhere is this selective pressure seen better than with the evolution of ISIS and its adoption of “Auftragstaktik”‏ in order to execute terrorist operations.

“Auftragstaktik”‏ is a German military term that is loosely translated in English as “Mission Tactics”. According to the UK Daily Mail, the terrorist organization ISIS has adopted “Auftragstaktik”‏ as a central organizing theme because Western signals intelligence destroyed other Islamic terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda that tried to be more centrally directed.

ISIS figured out that if you give a leader resources, a target, and a time to get it done, then tell him to get it done however he can, you will get big, nasty and above all successful terrorist attacks in western nations, because such methods do not require detectable electronic communications.

See this UK Daily Mail clip:

The bloodthirsty militant group admitted to following the technique in a recent issue of Dar al-Islam, its French-language propaganda magazine.
 
It was this strategy of warfare that led to the November 13 Paris attacks, in which 130 people died, and the Brussels bombings two weeks ago that killed another 32.
 
The doctrine was first developed in the early 19th century in Prussia in response to the state’s crushing defeat against Napoleon.
 
This new theory of war – which gave troops the skills to respond to rapidly changing circumstances in the heat of battle – was then refined by general Carl von Clausewitz.
 
Later fellow Prussian general Moltke the Elder further tweaked his theory, ushering in a new way of commanding modern-day armies.
 
Today, similar tactics form a crucial component of the U.S. and UK armies military training.
 
The February ISIS article, which was devoted almost entirely to the Paris bombings, explained that its jihad in Europe encompasses three types of attacks.
 
This includes ambitious mass slaughter plots carried out by operatives sent from ISIS headquarters in the Middle East, to lone-wolf attacks by people with no connection whatsoever to the group.
 
It even cited a historical German infantry manual from 1908 as its inspiration.
 
The soldiers’ manual stated: ‘There is nothing more important than educating the soldier to think and act for himself.
 
‘Autonomy and his sense of honor push him to do his duty even when it is not in front of his superior.’
 
According to SOFREP.com, this style of warfare – known in the U.S. as mission-type tactics – translates to: ‘Here is your target, here are your assets, go get it done.’
 
This, ISIS claimed, allowed its cells to inflict terror in Europe with ‘complete tactical autonomy’ and leaves little evidence that can link back to their commanders.

This ISIS “Auftragstaktik”‏ model will be replicated and improved upon. This will not end well.

We have sowed the wind, now we reap the whirlwind.

Discuss.