Never Apologize

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

The left doesn’t believe in culture. It confuses it with race, which is why it accuses people of racism if they object to specific aspects of a culture: how they treat women, or gays, or other races.

To them — as to Hitler, from what I understand, and no, that’s not argument ad-Hitlorum, it’s just an observation — culture is like race or sub-race, bred in the bone. If you are descended from a certain type of person, you’ll belong in a certain way.

That confusion is manifested with their referring to behaviors from Western, post industrial culture as “white supremacist.” (And by the way, I know what I speak of with “post industrial”. You can track the presence or absence of such things as punctuality, quality control, etc by when a country was industrialized. They were present in England before they were present in Germany. In fact Germans were considered pretty sloppy until industrialization.)

There is no race to culture. There might be certain genetic traits that help or hinder your adaptation to a culture. My MIL, once, in exasperation (and I don’t understand why, btw) told me if I’d been born in an Islamic culture, I’d never have lived past adolescence. She was probably wrong. I’d have learned to keep my mouth shut. And my introverted awkwardness is masked in the US by the fact that I was raised in an hyper-social culture. There, they recognize me as introverted and odd, but here my halfway-adaptation to Portuguese culture in childhood makes most people think I’m extroverted. (They don’t see the exhaustion and all physical symptoms of the flu afterwards, while I recover from a con. Took me a while to figure out what it was. I assumed it was con crud, until I realized the same happened after a dinner out with friends.)

If — as many people do — I adopted a child from Africa, or China, as an infant, or probably (though this is less well-studied than one would like) any time under 3 years of age and raised him or her, the child would be American sub-genus geek. (Even better for this example is “if I adopted a frozen embryo from Africa or China and carried the baby to term. — even though or course I personally can no longer do that.) Because the child would be American, shaped by American culture and the English language.

That the left doesn’t understand culture is bizarre and puzzling, and probably the fault of Gramsci, who tried to revive Marxism by making “people who tan” the bearers of natural communism, when the workers of the world failed to unite. (Note that idiotic patch on the non-functional Marxist program only “works” because most people in the west have spent no time in third world countries living as locals. Living there working for NGOs or being tourists doesn’t count. IF looked at objectively the people of the world who can tan are probably among the most racist and less likely to “unite” but never mind. The entire Marxist fantasy is a patch quilt of idiocy and wishful thinking.) This requires them the deny culture as a shaper of outcomes and societies, and fixate on race and the fixed pie.

It is responsible for utter idiocy like “the global majority” which if China isn’t lying about its population figures (what are the chances of a totalitarian regime lying? Come on, man!) is Han, but if China is lying as it always does doesn’t exist. Because there is not majority of “Can tan from light brown to dark black”. Those people don’t consider themselves one. In fact, in Africa tribes we have trouble telling apart will tell you they’re completely different races. And Portugal before the highway would tell you it’s at least three races. (The highway means a lot more intermingling.)

But culture exists, like gravity exists. No amount of jumping off a window screaming “I don’t believe in gravity” will save you from going splat. And no amount of imagining culture is just some cute ethnic dishes, the way you wear your clothes, or folkloric dances will save you from being beheaded when you go on a bicycle tour of the Middle East. Or getting beaten up in an alley in Lisbon because you looked at some guy’s woman the wrong way. Or being robbed and killed in an “ethnic” area of Paris.

Of course culture is more than those extremes. Culture is what shapes you before you can even speak. (Hence my thing above about how we’re not really sure how much is there before 3 years of age. Three years of age was the accepted age under which conquerors desiring to obliterate the culture wouldn’t kill children. But who knows?) See above where I’m naturally introverted and have issues reading social signals, but few people in the US can see that, because to survive in an hyper social culture where everyone lives in everyone else’s pockets I had to learn and adapt. I don’t know when that set in, but I don’t remember working at it. (And I remember working to steal my mom’s smile, because mine was unnatural. I.e. I learned to imitate her smile. At around eight.)

Culture shapes you. It shapes you at an unspoken level. You might choose to break that shape later, to acculturate to another culture, or simply to another way of being, but that is work, and takes effort.

And a lot of what goes into culture is …. never spoke of. The way you walk. The clothes you wear at what age. What a mom is. What a grandmother is. What a father does and doesn’t do. What a man is. What a woman is.

Even across the vast expanse of western culture, there is a lot of variation in those “unspokens.” It will amuse people here (probably) that until recently (and only because mom can’t, really) dad refused to walk anywhere carrying a plastic bag. You know, your average grocery bag with stuff in it. On his way from the bus from work (or driving but that was different, because he wouldn’t walk through the village carrying a bag) he’d stop at grandma’s every day. And sometimes she’d have vegetables, or eggs or something to send to us. But he wouldn’t carry it down. He couldn’t. That was unmanly.

I have no clue why. But he way he reacted to it, that was something imprinted so deeply he could not break it. (And yes, Portugal is Western culture, though industrialized late.)

Marxism has been taking a hammer to western culture for the last 100 years. It started by questioning/mocking minor things at the edge. Some of them things we in the US don’t really give a hang about, but which are huge in the rest of the world, like class distinctions. Ways of dressing.

Then it progressed to bourgeois morality. And there is a reason that “bourgeois” is the worst insult in a Marxist’s vocabulary. The bourgeois work ethic and sense of morality is the greatest opposition to its nonsense. The noblemen, most of whose descendants are now communism, always had the morality of rutting goats, so they were at home with Marxism. And they never understood money, and certainly never created wealth. It is the bourgeois that stand as the epithome of Western culture, in opposition to Marxism.

This is particularly so because bourgeois are NOT noblemen and not born to privilege. Trying to reinvent bourgeois virtues as “privilege” is another of the left’s “saves” that are stupid and mentally twisted. Being punctual isn’t privilege. Saving money isn’t privilege. Learning useful trades isn’t privilege and teaching your kids to read isn’t privilege. All of them are values and behaviors that can be adopted by anyone of any race and any social class. Yes, they might be harder if not learned in childhood, but they aren’t impossible to acquire.

And the point here is that Bourgeois virtues and Western Civilization, with all their “narrow minded” assumptions about men and women, and children, and behavior, with their beliefs in decency and hard work and thrift have lifted more people out of poverty than any other culture in the world or in history.

In particular, the version of these values as embodied in America has lifted more people out of poverty and fed more of the world than any other civilization or culture in history.

So, where does “never apologize” come from?

If there is a weakness to “right wing” art (no, it’s not true that people to the right of Lenin are less creative. That impression was fostered by people in control of the establishment who kept artists to the right of Lenin from being published/publicized/seen. This is the equivalent of cutting someone’s vocal cords then saying they naturally can’t speak.) as it makes its first tentative steps onto the mass market, it’s a tendency to try to explain fundamental values of Western civilization; trying to justify why the nuclear family is important, or why father’s matter, or how free market improves things.

All art that devolves into apology is inferior. We’re seeing that with the wokerati (Though the fact that they were promoted for reasons other than merit doesn’t help those poor rats). But more importantly, why are you apologizing for/explaining the most successful culture in the history of the world?

Culture is that which is. Just because the left is now crazily attacking the most basic assumptions, beyond what is man and what is woman to “What is human” — you might not want to look up “cakeself” — doesn’t mean we have to explain the basics to them.

They weren’t reasoned into their position. They were scared, propagandized and screamed into it. The beacon they chase is acceptance, not rationality.

Some of the most effective counter to the present nonsense is the writings of Agatha Christie. Yes, she was a woman of her time, and gives way too much importance to heredity. She also treats communism as a sort of cute adolescent posturing, meaning not much. (I’m not actually sure that would be an error to do.)

We should do art as art. We should do art by being us. Right, paint, create as a product of Western culture and frankly the bourgeoisie. (Most of you aren’t descended from the nobility, or if you are you’re many generations removed. You’re descended from the scrappy people who raised themselves by learning and hard work.)

Write your assumptions, not as just so stories, but as the background of your stories.

And when the left objects (sensitivity readers are one of the most idiotic things ever) laugh at them.

“But the west had slavery!” “So did every human culture ever. many still do. Shut up child, the adults are talking.” “But the west is racist!” “So is every culture ever in the world, and some are way more so. Go away and grow up.” “But capitalism is unfair!” “And communism kills. Just stop being an idiot.” “But traditional morality and monogamy are stodgy” “Yeah, but we don’t collect STDs and our kids tend to be saner.” “You’re repressed.” “You’re insane.” (Or in Nero Wolfe’s pithy comment “Humans are more than the appetites they share with dogs.)

Don’t bother to refute their positions. They don’t really have positions. They have sneering and infantile discontent.

Write what and who you are — not literally. Not all of us are Obama, so “interesting” that we can write multiple autobiographies. Also, none of us have publishers who will pay us millions as baksheesh and eat the losses — and make it a good story. Ignore the left and treat them as the crazy people they are.

Write REALITY and don’t bother trying to explain other races are also racist, or that women aren’t inherently peaceful.

Write the truth in the light of Western culture and Western values.

And the truth shall set you free.

212 thoughts on “Never Apologize”

  3. Right now, if you want to be a radical then the best way to do that is to encourage girls and young women, er persons who menstruate, that Motherhood is a valid career choice. So long as you have a husband around who can earn money for the family

    2. Way back before she became a senator, Elizabeth Warren was the coauthor of a book called “The Two-Income Trap.” Amongst other things, that book explained exactly why it’s important to have one income being the only necessary income in a relationship—in short, you’re better off spending a second income on completely frivolous items than relying on it, because when bad things happen (and bad things do happen), you need to be able to have that second person step up to the plate, ready to take on the income responsibility.

      It also had a rather interesting comment about how the price of housing is directly related to the quality of schools, which is a subtle support of homeschooling, if you would like to take it that way.

      1. Some years ago, the Montgomery (Maryland) County School System won the Baldrige Award, the national quality award. Dr Townsend, the superintendent spoke at the local section of the American Society for Quality. He said “There is an unwritten but very real contract between me and the county taxpayers. They give me plenty of money to run the school system, and I deliver an excellent educational system that keeps property values high.”. Unfortunately, the deal no longer seems to be in place.

        1. That reminds me of a fascinating small-scale study on taxes and complaints about taxes that was done some years back. It turns out that folk who complain about high taxes are actually complaining about lack of perceived value; places with high tax rates but good returns (good schools, safe policing, good roads) had few complaints, but those with poor returns complained no matter the level of taxation.

          Which means that taxpayers are actually pretty savvy. They’re not complaining about high taxes because of [insert tax-hungry governmental talking point], they’re wanting to get value for their money.

          1. places with high tax rates but good returns (good schools, safe policing, good roads)

            Which pretty much describes Plano; Dallas, not so much.

  5. Well, akshully, they do have a model for something that maps to culture. Ancient oppressive super conspiracies.

    Much about their behavior becomes explicable once one realizes that a) they actually believe critical theory b) seriously, they really do c) the critical theory model of fraud, conspiracy, and compulsion by trickery seems like it may be verifiably opposite of reality.

    There are a few broad behavioral trends that result. i) You bring them information, and they assert that it was fabricated by an ancient super conspiracy. ii) They will lie to you, pointlessly, stupidly, and maliciously, because they believe that they can also pull off a super conspiracy. iii) They don’t consider themselves bound by any agreement with you. If they previously believed that they did? You were tricking them as part of the ancient super conspiracy. If they were coerced into delivering? Oppression. Anyway, since you are part of the ancient super conspiracy, you voided the deal first by witchin’ them.

    One of the examples of this is them refusing to acknowledge that the ‘appropriate use of force’ calculation exists, and refusing to believe that we might include it in our decision making. Thus the random (to us) bursts of outrage at our ‘hypocrisy’ when they trot out an event, and we fail to process it in the way that they expect us to. Their predictive model of us is incorrect, their manipulations fail, and it is all our fault, a nefarious super conspiracy on our part, we outmatched them this time, but temporarily, and it is not at all an expected result of flaws in their methodology.

    1. They acknowledge the “appropriate use of force”, and are quite willing to drop accusations of using too much force like a hammer on their enemies. But what they consider “appropriate” is affected by the beliefs of the target of the force. The more unlike them you are, the more and deadlier level of force is considered acceptable.

      1. It is blind tribalist nonsense that is entirely unlike our own concept of that calculation.

        They filter it through utility to the cause, and a bunch of power abstractions that do not exist.

        Anyway, I am apparently in multi part essay mode at the moment.

    2. Honestly, I think they’re incapable of differentiating between like cases. Not just with regard to use of force calculations, but in general. It’s a hazard of the collectivist mindset. There is no “look at the facts and see the differences between each situation and the implications thereof”, it’s “every x that involves y is the same x.”

      1. Judging differences between cases is the definition of discrimination.

        Which they believe is always double plus ungood.

      2. [snip]There is no “look at the facts and see the differences between each situation and the implications thereof”, it’s “every x that involves y is the same x.”[/snip]

        Which goes right along with tribalism and collectivism.
        They see skin color, wealth level, sex, kind of car driven, etc., and they automatically assign assumed beliefs and behavior. If those assumed beliefs and behaviors are in line with their own, then they assume that person is part of their tribe. But once the half Hispanic half black lady with green dyed hair driving a Subaru tells them she voted otherwise, she is not just an instant outsider, but a heretic, outcaste, unclean, and traitor.
        They don’t see people. They see widgets. Critical thought and analysis is not required for widgets – there are only ones that work and defectives.

  7. “but if China is lying as it always does”

    As I’m sure you’re already aware, the China experts are of the opinion that China’s birth numbers are inflated. The only wildcard in the mix would be the year that the restrictions on the number of children a family could have were removed. There was a population bump that year, and it’s possible that the published numbers might have actually been close to accurate for that one year. And even if they were inflated, there’s a good chance that they weren’t as inflated as they’d been in other years. But the following year, the official numbers dropped back down to where they normally are.

    1. Somewhat off topic, I’ve been reading The Three Body Problem, which begins with a vivid account of the impact of the Chinese Red Guards/Cultural Revolution on a Physics Professor and his family, and the struggle sessions they were put through…It seems amazingly close to what is happening today in US academia…Frightening really!

      1. The biography I listened to included descriptions of the “self-criticism sessions” and “struggle sessions” that Mao implemented. The crap that I’ve heard about happening at the CRT training courses is pretty much the exact same techniques.

  8. It is thinking in abstractions that are wildly different than the abstractions/labels/feelings that a critical portion of your audience is thinking in.

    Case study, random terrorism by communists during the Cold War. Abstraction that they were thinking in, immiseration theory of revolution. As power worshippers, to them the senior official was responsible for everything that happened in a territory, so if bad things are made to happen, the senior official will be blamed, and they have set up conditions to replace that official. They understood that others would consider the murder of young children to be bad.

    But, beyond the theory obsession, and the choice of theory, their mistake is that they failed to realize, that as a religious community, concerned mainly with their relationships with their fellow believers, that they do not grok the many people in many cultures who care about kinship networks. And, not caring about the abstract academic label of ‘kinship network’, but about specific people within their own one.

    So, whether a market place bombing or a deliberate specific murder, the murder of a young child pisses off a) the actual kinship network of the young child b) the kinship networks of children who survive that attempt c) anyone and everyone who realizes that the communists are mad dogs, that will endanger everyone’s own kinship network.

    So, they were fighting against people in a culture, and most people in that culture had kinship networks, and instead of being the same type of blind power worshipper, can work out that the bad things are being done by crazy people. Because they are not theory obsessive enough to see reality only in terms of ‘power’ abstractions. Those ‘exceptions’ were a large enough part of the audience, the population, that the communist manipulation failed catastrophically for them.

  9. “dad refused to walk anywhere carrying a plastic bag”

    It’s like a purse in the US. A guy in the US will carry a laptop bag. He might carry a diaper bag (and loudly note that it is such). But he will never carry a purse, even though a purse with a shoulder strap is very similar to the other two things I listed.

    On that note, one newspaper comic strip (Baby Blues, iirc) had a Sunday strip in which the father finds the perfect diaper bag. It’s a white bag with “This is a diaper bag! It is not a purse!” written on the side in great big red letters.

    1. I used a sports bag as a diaper bag.
      Not for my own comfort, but because my wife refuses to carry a purse. She didn’t want it mistaken as such.

    2. I’ll go to gun shows wearing a Civil War haversack. Works great for buying magazines and such.

      1. Yeah, “satchels” and the like (which includes haversacks) are also fine. Which is pretty much my point. No matter how much like a purse the bag is, it’s fine so long as it’s not actually a purse. But if it’s a purse, then no self-respecting male would be caught dead using it.

        1. In Portugal, and a lot of other places, I think they want the man to have his hands free for a gun, sword, knife, etc. He is supposed to be on guard duty.

          I think class or.position also has something to do with it – ie, a man whose job is to carry heavy things can carry things.

    3. My diaper bag was digicam, purchased at an Army surplus store. It was the only thing I found big enough to carry diapers, two changes of clothes per kid, a change of shirt, burp rags, some entertainment to keep kids quiet, a firearm, my wallet, and other stuff that would have gone in my purse, but that I am small and did not need to have to carry two freakin’ bags.

    4. Eh. I have a “tactical man purse.”
      It’s OD green with MOLLE loops, and holds small trauma kits, candy for the kids, spare magazines, batteries, small toys, flashlights, and anything else I might think I need.
      But I have kids. I have carried a pink and purple diaper bag without shame or self-consciousness.

      1. My favorite diaper bag so far is a tacti-cool luggage backpack.

        It made the fluffy pink blanket with sparkles show up soooo well….

  10. Wow! This is great, “….people in control of the establishment who kept artists to the right of Lenin from being published/publicized/seen. This is the equivalent of cutting someone’s vocal cords then saying they naturally can’t speak.)” Forgive me (some of you; some who have read my books will understand), but this SPEAKS to me. Ever since I stopped writing ‘entertainment’ and delved into writing about today’s America and the water, that is, culture, we swim in, I have, or more accurately, my books have, been disappeared. Not just by the Left literati, but by so-called ‘conservative’ book sites and publishers. One thing you must give the Left is that they epitomize ‘all for one and one for all,’ while our side (the few conservative book publishers there are and conservative ‘stars’ and pundits)… while our side embodies ‘I got mine, you get yours,’ or ‘everyman or woman for themslelves.’

    Knowing that I would get nowhere, I would never send my books to book blogs as they’re controlled by the Marxist/pervert tribe. So I’ve spent a lot of time and money pitching my books to ‘conservative’ spokespeople and influencers, some on TV, some in Radio and some in print, AND… have gotten pretty much nothing in return… so far.

    Please don’t consider this ‘whining,’ I’m simply stating what is. It would be whining if not for the fact that I’ve been writing novels since 1972 and have and will, never give up writing about the world I live in. But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry about it, and, yes, bitter. The situation we have, as you’ve stated, IS, very much like what writers and thinkers in the old Soviet Union were confronted with. And so we have ‘literary’ fiction bereft of thinking and real ideas and full of infantile garbage about sex and politics.

    Anyway, I feel your anger and it resonates loudly with me. Keep on wrting!

    1. Okay, a note: I get people asking me to read their books/promote them ALL THE TIME. Other than the book promo here, and the occasional insty link, I’ve not done much.
      That is because the last few years have been h*ll and I’m trying to get healthy enough to work again.
      I’m unlikely to be able to read everyone’s books, anyway. So, I promote with no disclosure of reading status.
      THere are other plans…. but right now, see “life was eaten by issues.” It’s probably going to take a year or so just to fix the health, let alone the rest.
      BUT yeah. we are marginalized.

          1. I’ve heard that argument before. The claim is that color is a function of latitude, not ancestry.

            That’s what used to be called Lamarckian evolution, or in the USSR, Lysenkoism.

            Put 100 Irish men and women in isolation and I don’t care if they are in Ghana, they will not have children who look like Martin Luther King. Put 100 African Americans in isolation in Greenland and they won’t have children who look like Larry Bird.

            3. Skin color is a function of latitude among isolated sedentary populations who have lived in an area over many generations. Melanin content optimizes over time through evolutionary pressures for the best combination of Vitamin D absorption and protection against skin cancer.

              Despite being closer to the equator, spending more time outside, and often wearing less clothing, black Africans are one tenth as likely than whites to get skin cancer. On the other hand, three quarters of black Americans and two-thirds of Hispanic Americans are vitamin D deficient, as compared to less than twenty percent of whites. (Whites also have the lactose tolerance mutation, which also helps with getting enough vitamin D.)

              Take your tribe of Ghanas to high latitudes and leave them isolated there for dozens of generations, and the ones who survive rickets will lighten up considerably. The Irish in low latitudes will have a better chance of staying lighter, simply because skin cancer tends to kill adults, not children, and can be reduced with cultural practices like long, flowing robes. But even there there’ll be evolutionary pressure toward darker skin and better heat tolerance.

              1. Actually we don’t have a really clear view of “racial characteristic” acquisition.
                The Eskimos would seem to refute this. And “not enough time” makes not much sense, but…… it definitely isn’t lamarkian.
                The other thing is that yeah, there’s skin color changes, and eye color and hair texture, but that’s about it.

                1. My take: to the extent that there are any “races” of humans, said races are defined not by phenotypic traits like skin color (which as noted is heavily influenced by environment), but by genetic mutations like lactose tolerance, alcohol tolerance, moisture value of earwax, pain tolerance, carrying recessive gene for rare diseases like sickle-cell anemia, etc. These lineages have recognizable traits that distinguish them from other lineages of humans. Obviously, there should be no moral or status value attached to belonging to any lineage, and I’m unfamiliar with any examples of significant intelligence or mental healthiness being linked to a gene unique to certain lineages.

                  At the same time, I have to recognize that being a descendant of, among many other peoples, French Canadians, means that I’m a carrier for Tay-Sachs. That makes me and my fellow descendents of French Canadians, Arcadians, Cajuns, and Ashkenazi Jews slightly different from all other humans. Is that difference enough to call us a race? Probably not. But it is the closest thing to “race” one can find among humans. Unlike the Ghanans in far north example, who will eventually lighten up in skin tone over time, (probably not to Viking levels, but likely enough to pass as to anyone but a racial grievance studies major) Ghanans wouldn’t acquire the same genetic conditions simply by living in the same environment as the current
                  or historic carriers.

                    1. Dare I ask which one has it?

                      I mean, we all know you’re a reformed succubus who takes her coffee with cyanide. 🙂

                    3. Amen.

                      I almost feel like I already know Dan, Robert, and Marshall. I can’t wait to actually meet Dan and Marshall this weekend.

        2. My cats as a matter of fact are on a tear: they threw my laptop on the floor from a height. (Probably Havey, playing with the mouse) and then they threw up on the stairs. The only reason they’re still alive is that they threw up not-on-the-new-but-not sealed steps. They’re now hiding. In retaliation, I haven’t given them breakfast.

        4. Funny, since I was thinking of this as the only sort of “apology” one should give to progs:

          😉

  11. “you might not want to look up “cakeself”

    Don’t, unless you want to lose all faith in sanity and reason.

  12. Does “I’m sorry you are a *dumbass?” count as apologizing? Asking for a friend.

    * Insert appropriate zinger/label.

    1. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think you actually believed what you just said.”

      “You really meant what you said? How unfortunate.”

      “Hmmm. Let me ask you a casual question. Have you ever actually thought about the things you just said?”

      2. I love the way how burning sarcasm smells in the morning …
        It smells like … victory!
        Or at least, a way of administering a sick burn to your local proggie…

  13. I cannot write didactically to save my life. I am, however, noticing a “top-down control will really bork things up” theme emerging. (SO weird, watching “things I never meant to say” popping out of my subconscious and bludgeoning me. Anyway.)

    I’ve watched a few of the “hire a sensitivity reader” crowd get published. They seem to get more joy out of the validation/”teacher noticed me!” than the creation.

  14. “(They don’t see the exhaustion and all physical symptoms of the flu afterwards, while I recover from a con. Took me a while to figure out what it was. I assumed it was con crud, until I realized the same happened after a dinner out with friends.)”
    So, what you’re saying is the rest of the world makes you sick and tired (~_^)

    1. I come from a family of intraverts, so I actually thought that was normal. I can remember that it came as a revelation to me that people could go to parties and not get tired and worn out, but actually be energized.

      1. That’s literally the (good) definition of extrovert vs. introvert. The extrovert gets energy from interacting with people; the introvert expends energy interacting with people.

        Note that anyone, even public-facing actors, can be introverts. And some of us extreme extroverts will completely understand not seeing introverts for years at a time, because they’re peopled out.

        1. My sister just visited us with five of her eight children, a friend of the 10 year old, and all three of my other’s sister’s children. I dearly love all of these people but they also exhaust me.

      2. I had a friend complaining of burnout once: “I don’t know, I just want to go work at a call center for six months or something until I feel better.” I was…speechless.

            1. Had she, in fact, ever worked at a call centre? Being cussed at by strangers day after day for minimum wage is not conducive to anyone’s mental health, no matter how extraverted they may happen to be.

              I’m not saying you’re lying, I just have a hard time believing she is on the high road of strict veracity.

              1. I have no idea, actually. She was an Internet friend, but I know she’d done all sorts of People-Involved-Things which I shuddered to even consider. 🙂

                (I telemarketed for three whole days during my summer temping excursions. Explained politely to the lady at the temp office that YES, I would rather work in the factory instead and somebody else could come be on the phone all day. Apparently I was rather good at it, which was the scary part.)

      3. There are some cultures that have a high degree of introversion. The classic I am familiar with is the New Englander, generally rather curmudgeonly with a very high barrier of privacy. Fairly tight knit families, but even there excessive exuberance or sharing is highly frowned upon. Send a main line New Englander out into say the US Midwest which is a far more extroverted culture and they become confused/panicked as people try to (gasp, Horror) talk to them. Similarly a Midwesterner moving to New England becomes baffled and upset at how unfriendly the natives are. Much friction occurs at the interaction points of cultures where assumptions are violated or worse yet false cognates show up.

  15. Anyway, the skill of lying/manipulation.

    This is very definitely a skill, and one that is somewhat specific to types of manipulation, and to specific audiences.

    A person’s basic personality types can be anywhere from very suited, or very unsuited for the thinking involved. The manipulator works with an audience model, and tests ideas against it, and the rate of generation can be fast or slow, depending. But, there a re a wide range of possible audience models, and you have a different generation rate depending on which one you work with. Some audience models predict the actual audience very poorly.

    So, often our side says ‘look how many lies they tell’, and are impressed or intimidated. While lies are always destructive, they are not always effective in producing the manipulation desired.

    Left speed may partly be audience models that are distinctly unsuited to actually producing the results that they want.

  16. Aristotle considered that rule by the middle class was the apex of political development. They were wealthy enough to have skin in the game, to enjoy a level of comfort…but it was all conditional on good behavior. The rich could buy their way out of trouble, the poor had nothing left to lose. The middle class had to get it right – so they developed a disciplined lifestyle.

    The Marxists stole the wrong page from Rousseau, fell in love with the pathologies of the lower class. As I’ve said before, what Western Civilization needs today is a good helping of Horatio Alger.

    1. Exactly – the comfortable middle class has the leisure space, energy and a comfortable income so that they can be interested in public affairs. The poor are trodden upon, and have all their time and income taken up in brute survival, the wealthy can buy their way out of difficulties.
      The middle class has to get it right.
      And that is why they have to be destroyed by the proggies, so that the proggies can have it all their way, with a noble class and a serf class.

  17. “You’re descended from the scrappy people who raised themselves by learning and hard work.”

    Hell, I AM the scrappy person who raised himself by learning and hard work. Which is why I’m seriously considering writing a memoir. Let’s just say that I was in on the ground floor of the development of unmanned aviation 25 years ago.

  18. Consider having headings subheadings and images for such a lengthy post. Or, subdivide it. Too many subtopics and not well-organized. Made some good points, but most were lost in the weeds.

    1. Ed. D? Education department? Doctor of education?
      Lady, if you’re not smart enough to follow the reasoning, you’re excused.
      I’m sure there are picture books at your level.

    2. ….?

      It’s a blog.

      Not a glossy magazine.

      Worse, the essay style doesn’t lend itself to headings and subheadings; the organization is completely different.

      1. Frankly if I wrote papers instead of blog posts, this blog would have no followings. Also, I would have to give citations. And while I could find them, doing only a post a month would miss the mark.
        And again other people — 6k of them? — seem to follow this blog fine.
        So, maybe she needs comics books? Or board books?
        Shrugs.

      2. Foxfier – consider not only what the person you’re responding to has for a degree, but also that she feels it necessary to include it in a blogpost reply.

        1. :sigh: Kinda like the folks whose social accounts all inform you that they’re an author, as they go about being a bad advertisement for their books?

          You’re probably right.

    4. If you think THIS was a “lengthy post,” then you’re obviously not here often. This was short.
      Also, what grade of English class did you stop at? Fifth grade? Fourth?
      Pretty much none of us need headings and subheadings before each paragraph to summarize the words so we know what we’ll be reading. Nor do we require illustrations; we are well past the point of needing images to hold it attention or explain the page pictorially. If you indeed find the above missive difficult to follow, then I suffer to think what “education” actually goes along with your three letter suffix.

    5. This, ladies and gentlemen, is modern academia in a nutshell. Here we have a person who (a) has a doctorate in a garbage subject, (b) advertises that doctorate to the world instead of keeping decently silent about it, (c) can’t read a simple text, (d) thinks that’s the author’s fault, (e) is rude enough to complain about it in a peremptory tone, as if marking a term paper by a backward child.

      No, ‘Doctor’ Ember, it is you who are the backward child in this company. I would feel sorry for you, but pity is wasted on the self-satisfied.

          1. Not everyone with an education doctorate did garbage things with his thesis. But sadly, it’s the way to bet.

            And it is sad, because the neurology and psychology folks are doing lots of interesting things on how to improve learning. But the incentives to get an education doctorate are not usually ones leading to useful research.

    7. We thank you for your concern, madam. But surely there is a bridge somewhere bereft of your presence? I hear the clippety-clop of billy-goat hooves in the distance…

    1. Must be giants around. After all, it is a giant who says, “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

  21. One of these days, I’m going to be able to write the scene where one of these kinds of idiots runs right into the wrong sort of person. Right now, it’s an Imperial battleship in orbit.

    “I’m sorry,” Captain Ransom replied, quietly. “I’m sorry that things have put us into this place. After I have warned you exactly what was going to happen when you did something like this. That actions have consequences-you have acted, now I am going to be the consequences. I’m very sorry that you have wrapped around you, like all cowards, a shell of ablative meat that for the most part does not want to be there, serving a way to hedge your bets in the most stupid,” he half-yelled this word, “way possible.” He took a deep breath, and resumed his calm, quiet tone. “And, I am very, very sorry that they are all going to die because there is no easier way to get rid of you other than hitting your little bunker complex with a kinetic energy weapon.
    “Oh,” and Ransom shrugged. “I just want you to understand something else. The KEW is going to land right on you in ten seconds from…now. After all, it’s the thought that counts.”

    1. North Korea was screwing with necromancy in one of my books, despite huge spacecraft orbiting over their territory. They fell to the Machine Empire in ten minutes. Zero casualties. Aliens showing off, you know. >:D

      1. North Korea decided to play the game of “fuck around, find out” when the Second Imperium moved in.

        “Fucked around”-tried to do a coup de main of South Korea with tactical nukes and “insurrectionists,” backed up with black-market fabbers building laser and plasma weapons, including giving their tanks plasma cannons and PD systems.

        “Found out”-Six hours later, they were on the wrong end of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th Legions. Nearly four thousand grav tanks-including over a thousand Powell-class heavy grav tanks, backed up by veteran fully-augmented infantry in powered armor backed up with combat drones, artillery firing hypersmarts and conventional rounds, and having orbital recon and drone platform support.

        Four legions. One heavy legion, two standard, and a light legion. North Korea ceased to exist as a military in a day, and most of that was rounding up the few survivors and the city fighting. The short insurrection lasted a month, but that was mostly because they had to sift their catch so completely (the joy of verifier technology).

            1. Does the existence of grammar nazis imply the existence of grammar antifa?

              Descriptivists

              1. Dangit… there were supposed to be open/close shudder tags around ‘Descriptivists’

                sometimes web text entry makes me want to go back to BookMaster.

            2. ^ THIS! As a grammar nazi (who is far from perfect, grammatically speaking) I find this very helpful. Sometimes I lose patience with these grammar of faux pas, but I can legitimately tell the difference between fingers that miss a letter and brains that miss the thought. Well, most of the time, anyway.

      2. Well, I AM going to do a fundraiser in July, but the problem is I can’t have someone copyedit before it goes up. It’s a problem of coordinating with my schedule, even if I make enough to pay someone.
        Well…. I’ll look into it if the fundraising goes okay.

      3. I second that motion. We’re getting a ton of free shite from someone who makes her living doing this for m.o.n.e.y. I don’t care if it’s in crayon and everything’s misspelled. Or in Portuguese.
        I’ll translate.

  24. All cultures are NOT equal. Some cultures are inferior to others. Diversity is not a net plus, in fact, diversity is mostly a distraction and a net negative. People of the Left are NOT morally superior. Bourgeois (middle class) is without pretense.

    No one is allowed to flourish under the current administration, instead, they expect each of us to grovel for table scraps. They would rather that each of us was cold, hungry, and poor.

    2. If all cultures were equal it would be impossible for a culture to improve because no matter what change is made, the past culture is equal to the future culture.

    3. This is only logical. Humans are easier to herd when they are cold, hungry and poor. The elite wants to see you JUMP for that table scrap. “Good doggy, here’s a milkbone.”

      Really not going to turn out well, know what I mean?

  25. Over the past few years, most video entertainment that my wife and i have consumed has been from India and Korea. Cultural differences galore! And if you don’t understand them, then a lot of plots don’t make sense, so as I’ve learned some of these things and then gone back and re-watched shows I watched early on now with a somewhat more understanding frame of reference they make a lot more sense.

    As an example, in Korea, during an introduction you give your name and your age. How one addresses another person is all in relation to age difference (are they older, younger, or the same age?), so you have to know everyone’s age (and they yours) in order to even be able to speak. This is a big part of why they consider anyone born in the same calendar year to be the same age regardless of whether they were born 364 days apart — it simplifies the older/younger/same determination.

    It took me a few months to realize that what I thought was just some weird and bothersome (to me) thing in every new show I watched when people first met was actual a rather significant cultural requirement. And that doesn’t even get into hierarchies of seniority from school/university and work which have their own forms of address.

    It’s not helped by the fact that the subtitles always translate all those various forms of address with their subtle hints of relationship status and seniority as the person’s name, so you have to learn to pick up those sounds on your own, even if you aren’t really learning the language in your watching.

    For me, it seems so weird, but for them, it’s so fundamental that it’s built into their very language.

    1. Over the past few years, most video entertainment that my wife and i have consumed has been from India and Korea.

      One of my favorite things to do when I’m killing time is to watch Indian movies on YouTube with the automatic translation to English in the subtitles.

      Always a howl and cry fest due to the inane inabilities of the AI. Plus the films are better than the schlock that comes from Pedo-wood.

  26. Weirdly, I agree with the conclusions, but not the premises.

    Race has real effects and is easy to change in a few generations. Culture ditto viz the effects, but is nearly inexorable.

    So the modern Marxists have managed to screw the pool completely.

    1. Culture is way tougher than race. We don’t know what race does. The human species is inbred as all heck. No, seriously. We have very little variation. And you cannot tell a man’s race under the microscope.
      Sure, some regions of the world have lower IQ or whatever, but that connects to nutrition and culture too. You can’t tell. YOU CAN’T TELL.
      You can believe it makes a difference, but that’s eugenics. That’s a lefty game.

      1. Not under a microscope, but you can build an AI to predict just fine from bone and musculature.

        I think IQ is mostly bogus (a red herring) as you know, so I cannot speak to that.

        And I am 100% in agreement viz culture. People obsess over race for three reasons: They need an excuse to dehumanize (slavers), they want an easy fix (foolish), or they think they’ve been gaslit (true, but unhelpful)

        I no longer care whose game it is. Tell the truth and shame the devil. See also: Tone police.

        1. The… We’re very mixed up. Not just Americans. Everyone. You can guess. But AI’s suck at predicting race. Or much of anything. They can recognize sex, weirdly. (So much for Ancillary thingy.)
          It’s just really really hard to take genetics from culture, nutrition, etc.
          You MIGHT be able to make STATISTICAL guesses, but that tells you nothing about the individual.
          I mean, look at me. I’m highly improbable. 😉

          1. Not all AI fail to predict race…
            https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-can-detect-race-when-clinicians-cannot-increasing-risk-of-bias#:~:text=May%2018%2C%202022%20%2D%20Researchers%20have,may%20accidentally%20exacerbate%20health%20disparities.
            Of course his looks like a learning/self refining AI. These are always exciting and a bit unpredictable. One of the Professors I had in college told this story. He had done some early AI image processing as in the 70’s and forward the analysts were getting buried as more and more imagery became available. The programmers job was to create an analysis program to spot tanks. They did this with a self learning/self teaching AI feeding it images and correcting its results until they had a 95%+ level of detection. They then got some more images that had not been used in the training sequences. At first all was well and the AI was tagging tanks left right and center. But then the AI started crying wolf, there were images known to contain no tanks or in some cases no vehicles whatsoever that the AI claimed had tanks. They then worked with the analysts and realized that ALL the initial bank images of tanks had been taken on very sunny days, and the tank free images had been taken on cloudy days. What the AI had actually detected was the lighting differences… It may be the above AI is doing something similar.

          2. One strand of my ancestors were German. They were invited to Russia to buffer from the Turks. For generations, they stayed German. 130 years ago they came to America. Within a few years they became American. This is prior to WWI. This was the melting pot. Now the fruit salad will kill us.

            I am an American.

          3. Took an internet quiz once that claimed it could guess your sex based on the answers to some questions. It was 86% sure of the wrong thing when I finished. And there were a lot of questions where the outcome was based on the ‘feel’ or ‘connotation’ of the words used. Which is very, very culture/region specific. This test, which couldn’t even predict me (granted, I’m odd as they come), wouldn’t have worked at all in another culture where the implications or emphasis of certain words would be totally different.

        2. “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
          A thousand times this. More and more I think just saying true things is really important.

        3. I think racism is a convenient proxy for tribalism and tribalism is pretty hardwired into humanity.

          1. Agreed. It’s used as a proxy for actual vices in the same way that global warming is a proxy for pollution. Fighting fake sin, and promting fake virtues is so much more profitable (and apparently emotionally satisfying) than tackling the real ones. Bonus! You never have to worry about charity or the brotherhood of man breaking out so movements like Solidarity are obviated, and the Ceaucescus of this world’s heads feel more secure. Fighting the fake keeps the real divisions and hatreds stoked.

          2. Marxism started out with class because in Marx’s European background class was practically genetic: You were born into whatever class, and your children would be too, unless there was a total upheaval. Unfortunately, class never really worked in America, and worked even less well as American influence increased.

            So they had to find another “born” classification, and thus race, sex, and now sexuality and “gender” were used because you couldn’t change the way they were “oppressed” without another total upheaval.

            1. If you follow true crime and Doe identification, you will quickly find out that forensics with bones, and without DNA, is a lot less reliable than DNA phenotyping. And even phenotyping only does so much.

              For example — is someone Hispanic or Native American? Or are they allegedly White, but with a side order of Hispanic or Native American ancestry? Or Siberian native?

              The really embarrasing ones are when a biological male is misidentified as a biological female, or vice versa. Depending on the person and what bones are missing, you can get very bad results.

              Same thing with age, whether or not there were past pregnancies, etc.

              And matching bites or dental work… well, that’s pretty iffy, and it wasn’t helped by a lot of scammers or well-meaning idiots who worked as expert witnesses on dental cases. There are some good ones, but there were a lot of bad ones.

              1. Yes, I read a lot of true crime forensics. I know how bad all that gets. Same with paleontology, where they can’t get DNA.
                Heck, my family would kick at being considered anything but white, but most of my body is a hodge podge and if I am tan and have a perm, everyone in the US assumes I’m black.

        4. IQ is a negative predictor, very low IQ matters, a lot, the rest hardly at all. The thing is that you don’t need IQ tests to test for very low IQ, so IQ tests are useless.

          1. Eh, mostly. They’re not granular, and fuzzy out at the margins. You might be correct, though, that the need (or want) for a rough predictor of “teachability” by the business and professional worlds is a symptom of a social disfunction that would be wiser to address. Instead of using the IQ tests (like SATs or ASVABs et al.) as a patch.

            I doubt that IQ exists at all except as a proxy for a bunch of other stuff (including) teachability. It is important to acknowledge that all the other stuff exists, however, because the game in play is getting people to justify and internalise denying reality. The IQ is bogus (probably) claim, just as “IQ is Science!” (maybe… a little) are both counters in that game. One I am done playing.

      2. I found this article very interesting, ignore the investment stuff just the marshmallow test stuff.

        https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/what-marshmallow-test-means-todays-market

        in the original 1970’s test they were looking for innate or maybe permanently established habits through early childhood. And that’s what they found.

        The more recent variation, with the delivered or undelivered craft supplies, showed that the kids would change behavior from one reliable experience with the test administer. So there was no deference in ability to defer gratification but rather just different logical strategies depending on personal experiences.

        IQ tests are probably the same way. People are in general very smart about things close to themselves.

          1. Precisely. “Races” were an invention of leftists and other aristocrats who wanted slaves and even tried to use the Bible to justify it.

            1. Oh, that’s convincing.

              Sorry, but the usage of ‘race’ in biology (as a taxonomic division below subspecies) has no application to H. sapiens. None of the relevant distinguishing factors – chromosomal, geographic, or physiological – apply.

              The only race we belong to, in the strict biological sense, is the human race.

                1. You have no argument. You have no evidence. You have nothing except disagreement.

                  Name one reason why anyone should believe you are right about this, or admit you’re wrong.

            1. We’re too homogenous.

              Found an article where folks went into the genetic levels.

              Using chimps — which have 5 traditional subspecies, three of them classified as races due to differences– they’ve got more genetic variance between the sub-group populations than humans do between any two “races.” We’ve got most of our variation among individuals in populations. (they sorted out to 52 detectable ancestries/lineages)

              https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/

              1. I don’t recall the exact source, but I read in this past year that any two males of homo sapiens are more genetically similar to each other (ditto any two of the Fair Sex*) than either is to the other, even to his own sister or her own brother. I couldn’t say if that’s quite true– the source said something like a 95% match at least for males– but it seemed to back the premise that our “Races” are literally only skin-deep.

              2. That’s a really interesting article, Foxfier. Thank you. I wish I had the cycles to give it the attention it deserves. The authors make a good case thus far for the redefinition of vertebrate sub-species. I haven’t gotten to their examination of pygmy tribes or the any Australian aborigines, but, as Mrs. Hoyt pointed out earlier, the latter might no longer be isolated by a combination of distance and preferential mating habits, so it might be moot.

                1. :sympathy:

                  It’s definitely the week for too-tired-to-read-this-stuff.

                  I was mostly delighted that someone actually did a decent attempt at sciencing the hotbutton.

            2. I’d tend to think that as long as interbreeding is possible, it would be impossible to maintain differences that may occur from time to time.

            3. The only observed human population that was isolated anything like long enough to produce a ‘race’ in the biological sense was the Australian aborigines, and they don’t exhibit enough difference from other H. sap. populations to count.

              1. Race in the biological sense is a continuum of marked and reproducible phenotypic differences, among a common species. In that respect the human species has races. It is only interesting insofar as severe isolation (the pygmy tribes come to mind) creates them. As noted in an earlier comment, these races do not last: race is the easiest thing to disrupt among humans. Culture on the other hand, is quite the challenge. Nonetheless it exists. What is interesting to me is the ways in which subcultures attempt to use social tools to mimic the effects of isolation.

                To the extent that TENS is not just an amusing Just So story, it is recent, and local.

  27. Sometimes the funniest cultural cues will pop up. When I got my first job in the aerospace industry, at about 30, with two children, I came home from my first day with an unexplained feeling of enormous confidence and accomplishment. The next morning I realized, it was the picture badge. I grew up, from about 4 years old, in a suburb where essentially all the husbands worked for major gov’t contractors. And wore little plastic picture badges clipped to their shirts. So somewhere in my head, that’s what dads did. They put on their badge, and went to work, and now I was finally a dad.

    1. You just reminded me of my Papa. He worked for Boeing for 32 years, and had a tasty crew cut for much of it. He used butch wax, that orange paste in a jar. More to the point, he was an engineer and wore his picture badge on his left pocket.

  28. “Those people don’t consider themselves one. In fact, in Africa tribes we have trouble telling apart will tell you they’re completely different races.”

    For “Africa” you can also substitute:
    South America; North America; Celtic nations; British Isles (do NOT call a Welsh person English, Irish, or Scots): Middle East (do NOT call a Persian an Arab).

    And don’t call a born&bred (or bread, probably sourdough) Texan a Yankee.

    1. Q: What do you call a person who called a Scotsman an Englishman?

      A: A Dead Person.

      😈

    4. Sourdough? That’s not solely a traditional Texas thing, but a pioneer thing due to lack of store bought yeast or good starters.

      Bread, cornbread, and tortillas are probably the three main breads of the state. Bread due to the European immigrants, German and Czech, that come through Galveston in the 1800’s. Cornbread due to southern heritage and crops. Tortillas put the Mex in Tex-Mex. Not to mention pastries made from potatoes.

      And don’t call a native Texan anything but a Texan. Unless it’s one of our various scumbag politicians. You can call them whatever you wish.

  29. “But he wouldn’t carry it down. He couldn’t. That was unmanly.”

    The explanations offered for why men were conditioned to be wary of encumbering their weapons arm with baggage are plausible. The “manliness” or not of certain activities is well-established in all societies (with the corresponding division of “womanliness” of course), even though circumstances and rationales might be all over the map.

    As for “tribal customs” – even the English have them.

    George Orwell, in his book “The Road to Wigan Pier”, a report on the situation of the industrial working class communities (mostly colliers) in Lancashire and Yorkshire before World War II (note: it was miserable!), devotes some attention to the cultural forces involved. Unemployed men would sit at home watching their wives do back-breaking, time-consuming, housework (as it was at the time) without ever offering to help, and without ever being asked, because that was not their job.

    Sometimes families buck the trends, though, especially in America.
    My grandfather, who was raised as a cowboy in the early 20th century, insisted on a tradition that I did not know was somewhat unique until after I left home. When Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner (lunch, really) was over, he herded all the menfolk into the kitchen to clean up, because the women had done the cooking and it wasn’t fair to make them do both.
    Some grumbling about football start times was occasionally heard, but there were no defectors.

    Addendum:
    In the context of recent discussions on socialism, Communism, etc., the book is also a great source for responses to the inane assertions of today’s leftists, although Orwell could never quite bring himself to agree with his own analysis.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier

    The second half is a long essay on his middle-class upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, questioning British attitudes towards socialism. Orwell states plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism, but feels it necessary to point out reasons why many people who would benefit from socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong opponents.

    Orwell’s book is a fascinating, and in some ways excruciating, frank look at real people and how they live, work, and think. It deserves to be as well-known today as “1984” and “Animal Farm” because it is in many ways the “Silmarillion” underlaying them.

    The Wiki article is a fair summary of the book, with some helpful background.

    This section is one of those “rhyming history” things – read “Walmart shoppers in America” for working class in England.

    According to Christopher Hitchens, the allegation of having said “the working classes smell” in The Road to Wigan Pier became a recurring criticism of Orwell from critics on the Left, despite it not being his personal sentiment. “As his published correspondence shows, every time Orwell wrote anything objectionable to the Left, up would come this old charge again, having attained the mythic status that placed it beyond mere factual refutation.” In the book, according to Hitchens, Orwell instead refers to it being “middle-class people, such as his own immediate forebears, [that] were convinced that ‘the working classes smell’.”[30]

    1. There are differences even when there IS ‘smell’. The kid at school who didn’t have a chance to bathe between dealing with the animals on the farm and getting on the bus has an odor, true, but an honest one. The fellow who has toiled long and hard has a smell, true, but again, an honest one. But the most unpleasant is the dishonest smell of someone simply too lazy to deal with the problem despite opportunity, and this is ‘funk’ in the worst sense. It is to aroma as the poetry considered worse than Vogon are to language.

      It’d be easy to say things of certain conventions (“Your case reeks of disinfectant!” “Be grateful.”) but the case that comes to mind is the fellow who upon entering the convenience IMMEDIATELY triggered an ‘OMG NO’ reaction from multiple yards distant. He reeked of stale cigarette smoke. As in the fellow need to do laundry and to bathe, and perhaps shower in the clothes he was wearing for starters. Now, you COULD put this down to ox being non-smoker.. EXCEPT.. the fellow behind him complained (after Mr. Stinky left) and HE bought 3 packs of Marlboro red 100’s. When the heavy smoker says someone reeks badly of stale tobacco…. well now.

      1. I once worked with a guy who drank a dozen or more shots of espresso. Per day. He stank of stale coffee in a way I’ve never encountered before or thank-God since.

        (He was also a roaring petty tyrant of a man. I found decaf espresso beans and swapped ’em one day. Warmed my evil little heart.)

        1. That is a lot of caffeine. The Ld50 in humans is thought to be in the 150-200mg/kg body mass, best guess is thats 760+ mg of Caffeine so he was well clear of that (usual way to die of caffeine poisoning is to be mixing it into something in raw form and screw up the measurement) but that has got to be hell on BP and heart rate. And as you noted it makes you cranky as heck…

        3. Did he smoke? It turns out nicotine is an antagonist to caffeine, which is why most doctors tell you to cut down on coffee when suiting smoking. Without the nicotine your sensitivity to caffeine goes through the roof.

      2. There was an encounter with a couple of funk-tastic smokers in a super large big box store that gagged customers and employees alike. The paint counter lady lost her breakfast even though she was a 100 yards away.

        Now I’ve dug up septic systems in August, had to clear out vacant houses full of cat shit and abandoned fridges full of bio-hazards, been in the field without real showers for days, but I’ve never encountered live humans that smelled so bad that I lost my appetite for a week and dropped 7 pounds.

        This smell was worse than the evil in Nancy Pelosi’s heart.

        As far as we can speculate, these individuals hadn’t bathed in decades, ate a case of beans and a jar of pickled eggs, rolled in road-kill skunk, then hot-boxed their truck during the drive from Kentucky to DFW chain-smoking several grosses of cigarettes apiece.

        Yes, the Haz-Mat crew from the local fire department did show up wearing OBA gear.

        1. Puts me in mind of the late great Jim Backus, when he played an old prospector in a dream sequence on Gilligan’s Island. He came into town, grizzled and dirty, having finally struck it rich, and every time he talked to one of the townspeople, the same exchange of dialogue occured:

          ‘I haven’t had a bath in forty years.’

          ‘I know!’

  30. Those who would be Masters hate ANYONE but themselves. They use the cudgel of conformity as a weapon to unite the masses beneath them – but those who wield it shall feel the blows when the Masters take it back.

    1. Yes. The SA helped the Austrian Corporal take power and were eliminated quickly because they also had stories about ‘Dolf and the boys at “Summer Camp”…

  31. And if all those excellent reasons don’t make the case, as they should, there is simple self-preservation.

    Show your belly to these jackals and they’ll tear your throat out. Apology shows weakness and they sense it and attack in a pack. Those who have bent the knee are not forgiven and not accepted, at best they are left on their chain. Those who have stood their ground get the ten minute’s hate and then the jackals move on to an easier target.

    The cultural vandals will accept no compromise. Surrender or stand tall and take the punishment.

  32. This is well taken. One does not explain or apologize for morality in a story, one PRESENTS it, or the lack of it.

    I’ve never been a fan of “Right Wing” stories with their homilies and their apologias. When I write, the Good Guy characters resist the temptation to do wrong and thus they triumph. The Bad Guys will do anything to win, and therefore they always lose. That’s how it is. We do not have any “everybody does it” bullsh1t in my books.

    Reason being of course that “everybody” -doesn’t- do it.

    95% of people don’t cheat the law, they don’t cheat each other, they don’t weasel out of contracts, they don’t loot during natural disasters, and et cetera. They are civilized people and behave in a moral way, even when nobody is looking. That’s why the USA and the rest of Western countries have been able to resist all this corruption in high places. 95% refuse to play that game.

    The other 5% please to call themselves Marxists. They are lying scum, and we revile them. May they all contract boils.

    1. 95% is too high.

      My observation is that it’s no higher than 75% due to the destruction of high-trust culture in the US over the last three generations. Or look at the influx of people from low trust/high stakes cultures from the East and South.

      And the other 30% isn’t totally Marxist. Some are just uncultured/unpunished since society has deliberately been engineered to decline to non-Western levels by the left.

      Example:
      https://www.revolver.news/2022/06/the-entire-hood-came-out-to-beat-this-man-senseless-and-steal-his-car/

      1. Nope. Sorry dude, your numbers are -way- off.

        https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2019/06/worth-repeating-50-of-crime-happens-in.html

        TL/DR, 50% of all crime in the USA happens in 2% of the counties. The entire rest of the country is the other half. Also, the 2% is still misleading, because in those “bad” counties most of the crime is confined to areas of a few blocks. The rest of the town is virtually crime-free in comparison.

        You, good sir, are a victim of Liberal propaganda. Don’t believe the hype.

      2. We can’t actually observe at the scale of the whole population.

        What we can see ourselves, and process in a reliable way, is only ever a very small number of people. That may be a good sample of a small community, but is necessarily meaningless at the scale of the US.

        Forex, hanging around a really bad community, or a really good community, leads to an inaccurate extrapolation of a wider group.

        Inferences about larger groups are statistical, and depend on the soundness and honesty of the statistics. IF those stats are sufficiently fiddled with, one cannot make any really sound inference about the whole.

        This is an information problem, and really well founded answers require a bit of caution and care.

        My answers are much too swingy, and prone to following my moods.

    2. The rate of psychopathy in the population is around 5%. The error rate is probably quite high, but the studies tend to be attracted to that figure. of course, it’s not equally distributed. Prison, DC, Hollywood, and Wall Street have much higher rates with those higher rates similar across the countries that were measured. Psychopathy is a very useful trait for climbing the slippery pole,

  33. I do love our Melting Pot. Generations of immigrants and Native Americans clustered in various neighborhoods.

    Once in a while, an Indigenous Native I’ve known since childhood will refer to “stolen land” and other such grievances, and it bugs the hell out of me.
    His bloodline includes a white Russian Priest who was beloved by the Natives. I suppose my friend is simply parroting the party line. He is a Democrat, born and raised.

    He asks how we (the whites) got our land.
    I’m tempted to say: Would you have preferred ethnic cleansing?

    But, my dear Grampa fled his homeland due to ethnic cleansing and would be horrified if I said that to my friend.

    Instead, maybe I’ll say: We gave you Russian trading beads and rifles, and you gave us land you thought was worthless. You even showed us where the gold was. You told us we were stupid to set up camp there, because the fishing and the weather were terrible. But look what happened. The immigrants stuck gold! Now get with it and praise the white in your bloodline.

  34. Those glowies in khakis from Patriot Front are back in the news. Apparently they were all in a U-Haul, heading for some “Pride” event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho… okay, picture that one… and then the sheriff stopped their U-Haul and arrested their butts.

    Apparently some concerned citizen saw them loading up into the U-Haul in a hotel parking lot, and called the sheriff.

      1. Everyone in the store yesterday was laughing about the feds arresting each other.

    3. What is the world coming to when my first question was, “How many of them are Fibbies?” There is such a shortage of ‘White Supremacists’ and ‘racist homophobic hate crimes’ they have to make up fake ones.

      I do find these ‘pride protests’ tiresome, but I simply don’t care enough to protest against them. They can do their thing if only they’d leave me alone to do mine.
      ———————————
      There are forms of stupidity that businesses can’t indulge in. There are no such limitations on the stupidity of government.

      1. The Daily Mail had mugshots. The arrested founder of the group, and most of the group members arrested, had serious family resemblances, so I would say they were mostly the guy’s male cousins, nephews, siblings, etc.

        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10910279/PICTURED-Members-Patriot-hate-group-arrested-planning-riot-Idaho-Pride.html

        The founder is 23. Two years ago, he would have been 21. Let’s ask ourselves how likely this is. Also look at their preferred personal styles, and see how well they fit with khakis and expensive identical shoes.

        The article said the group had separate chapters elsewhere, so that’s probably the Fibbies.

        1. Huh. The mugshots have been shuffled around now, so the family resemblance guys are mixed throughout the group and harder to see. Lovely.

          Oh, and the founder guy allegedly founded the group in 2017, when he would have been 17 or 18. Not impossible, maybe, but not super-likely.

  35. There is a photo online alleging to show one of these buzz-cut young men holding a megaphone with “FBI,” on the side. Edited? Don’t know enough about image editing to say. I do know one lady on Twitter was calling them, “astroturf.”
    But it does seem clumsy. Very much the, ” This is what a neo-Nazi group should look like,” rather than the messy, individual sorts of dress a real group would have.
    BTW, one truly amusing bit of imagery (in a savage sort of way) was the video of a support-group biker gang getting between reporters and the Uvalde families at one of the funerals. Very polite, very firm….and one guy in the background with leathers, a gray beard down to his waist and a hungry expression behind the spokesman, just….waiting.

  36. I very much agree that writing for entertainment should actually entertain the reader. Even those ideas I agree with can overload a story and make it unenjoyable.

    There are things that people do that help them to accomplish the things they want. That the progs have decided that Western Culture is too white and needs to be abolished, but still want all the benefits of Western Culture, seems very childish to me. Western Culture works for the things it stresses needing to be done. If those things aren’t things you want to do, don’t expect to reap the benefits of them.

    As for the being bourgeois, I covered that a few years ago on my own blog. https://westfargomusings.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/i-am-bourgeoisie/

  37. Some people, like Bill Clinton, draw energy from other people. Glad-handing a crowd rejuvenates him. Public speaking is a joy because the crowd feedback is uplifting.

    Some people, like you and me, give energy to other people. Attending a dinner party exhausts us. Public speaking is a chore because being ‘on’ for the whole the crowd is draining.

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