Can You Blame Women for Pushing Back Against Hookups?

All good conservatives are opposed to the college campaign against "rape culture." Inspired by a "Dear Colleague" letter from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the nation's college campi have now become a due-process-free zone as college administrators harass college men for failing to observe the new liberal rules of "yes means yes" where sexual relations are concerned.

But then I read this click-bait article in Vanity Fair, "Tinder and the Dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse" by Justin Bishop, about young millennial professionals hooking up in New York City using Tinder and similar social media tools.

It is, as they say, a meat market out there, and the girls don't like it.

Now it is my experience with women that when they don't like something they "share" with their friends and then they get angry about it, and then they find manipulative ways of getting back at the source of the anger.

Call me sexist if you like.

It is clear from Justin Bishop's article that Tinder and the other hookup apps play directly into the male lust for the hunt. And it seems that girls have to play along, because. Well, because women always play along.

But then the girls go back to their apartments and their dorms and their sororities, whatever, and they talk and text with their friends. Or they run into an activist from the Womens Studies department.

And this gives the angry young girl, whether a "Jackie", a Mattress Girl, or just a nobody Jane Doe, a way to do something about the nameless anger she is feeling on account of being treated like a piece of meat.

And really, who can blame her? All young women carry within them the very fount of human life, the most precious thing that humans possess. And yet these days young women are treated like sexual prey, courtesy of smartphones and smartphone apps, and are led to believe that unless they submit to this oppression they won't ever get a man. Or be popular. Or something.

Now a sensible person would say that maybe the recreational sex meme of the sexual revolution is a big part of the problem. Sex is serious, dead serious, and the rituals and culture around sex lies at the very center of any human culture. You mess with sex and you mess with the very center of human existence.

A sensible person would say that if you throw off all the rules around sex that the ensuing chaos will demand new rules. And it is telling that the new rules now being enforced on campus essentially say that a young woman cannot be considered a responsible actor where sex is concerned. She must be protected by older and wiser people and shielded from the consequences of imprudence or a desire to be nice. Which is exactly what the old rules under the evil old patriarchy said.

So maybe every human society ends up with some sort of culture of female innocence and modesty. Because in every human society young unmated women and women with children really do need protection from male predation.

Ya think?

Reagan Democrats and Trump Democrats and the End of Free Stuff

In the fall of 1979, writes Jeffrey Lord, nobody took Ronald Reagan seriously. “The American people are not going to elect a seventy-year-old, right-wing, ex-movie actor to be president.” said Carter chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan.

But in November 1980 Ronald Reagan won the presidency by nearly 10 points over Jimmy Carter even though liberal Republican John Anderson ran as an independent. How did Reagan win? With the "Reagan Democrats." They were "Blue collar, working class, largely Catholic and ethnic" that had voted 20 years earlier for Jack Kennedy.

The Reagan Democrats were pissed off. And why? Because all the free-stuff promises the Democrats had been using to buy their votes for the previous 50 years were crumbling into dust Stagflation, they called it. So they were angry. So they voted for the Eevil Republicans.

Jeffrey Lord cites a poll showing Donald Trump doing well in Iowa.

But as in 1980 with Reagan, it doesn’t take much imagination to think that Trump’s overwhelming lead in categories like those with less than a college education or those earning less than $50,000 bodes well for his ability to win Democratic votes in considerable numbers.

 In other words there's a good chance that a lot of Democrats are really pissed off this election cycle. So there's a good chance they will vote for the Eevil Republican.

It makes sense, because it's hard to see the genuine Republican base -- national security conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives -- getting excited about Trump.

But really, what did those Trump Democrats think would happen when Obama went ahead with a job-throttling Obamacare, a job-throttling payoff to state and local governments with the stimulus, a job-throttling Dodd-Frank regulation of the banks, and a job-killing green energy agenda?

Kevin D. Williamson puts the question squarely in a piece on the China meltdown. He talks about how the Ex-Im Bank lent money for top employees of China's biggest bank to fly executive jets built by a company owned by Goldman Sachs.

The way the game works is that

Money is lent on concessionary terms to make transactions happen for politically favored businesses and investors on the theory that the resulting economic activity will be worth the costs.

As in student loans and Chinese apartment blocks and 100% mortgage loans to sub-prime borrowers and solar power and wind turbines and solar roof collectors and farm subsidies and so on.

The point is that eventually any market distortion is going to bite someone in the butt. Hard. And it is not rocket science.

There isn’t any way around this: If you distort markets, you will, eventually, discover that everybody has taken out second mortgages on their Chinese ghost-town vacation condos to invest in tulip bulbs.

And then everybody gets really pissed off and demands that the government Do Something.

When it was the Doing Something that caused the problem in the first place.

Hey, people, this is not that hard. Everything the government does, everything, is a distortion of the economy and will damage people and their livelihoods. Especially when the music stops and it turns out that their aren't enough chairs to go around. 

Opt Me Out, Baby!

OK, you tell me. How do we get out of the vicious circle of the modern administrative state. We are all pissed off by intrusive bossy government. But hands off my Medicare! That's the way the world-wide Trump phenomenon works.

We talk about African Americans trapped on the liberal plantation, but what about the rest of us?

The truth is that we are all trapped in subordination to the administrative state, because we are all forced to pay for the benefits in our payroll taxes whether we like it or not, and then we all demand that we get our payoff.

Which means that we are all chained to The Man. We are trapped by the System.

Mencius Moldbug of the Dark Enlightenment has some uncomfortable words about this.

First, the King's law is that either a human being is a free, taxpaying yeoman, or a ward. A ward is any dependent - anyone not responsible to provide for his or her support. The general principle of wardship is that every ward must have a patron, who is responsible for supporting the ward, authorized to direct and discipline the ward, and liable for the ward's offenses. This is not my idea - it is straight out of Roman law.

Note how in the administrative state the patron/ward relationship has got all messed up. The patrons, Poo-Bahs of the administrative state, make the rest us pay for their wards, but they don't properly "direct and discipline" their wards. They tell the rest of us that we are "liable for the ward's offenses" because racism, or injustice, or something.

You can see the problem. These days we are all wards, because we are all, every one of us, dependent on the state. We depend of free education for our kids. And free education has made education so expensive that most ordinary middle-class people can't imagine finding the money for private school. Tied to the payroll taxes of Social Security we don't have any money left over for saving for retirement (or any other purpose) so we are grateful for the security of that government check when we hit our 60s. We can't imagine doing without it. And so on.

So we can't get started in the quest to get free of the fetters of the liberal administrative state because we can't imagine bearing the expense of freedom.

The solution is staring us right in the face. We have to have the courage to demand the right to "opt out." Mothers are already doing this with home-schooling. They look at what the government school does to their children and they can't allow it to continue. So they take their kids out of school and teach them at home. These mothers find, of course, that children are programmed to grow up and learn the things they need to become responsible adults. Home-schooled children turn in better test results and as for being "socialized," well since they have been around adults all their lives instead of bullies and mean girls at school, they have been socialized to operate in the adult world, not the Lord of the Flies world of the government school.

Now we need to extend the "opt out" concept to Social Security and Unemployment and Workers Comp. on the model that I am a free person and I have the right to provide for myself and for my family without the government forcing me to do it the "Navy way" like they forced John Wayne in The Fighting Seabees.

But isn't that kinda selfish? Yes, it is. And if you look at politics you find that everyone, from the noblest ruling-class scion down to the most helpless teenaged single mother, wants the government to give money or power to them, and screw everybody else.

Never mind selfish: would it work? Well, it would certainly work. Just as home-schoolers have found that children naturally want to grow up to independence, we know that adult humans naturally want to save against a rainy day. It takes government education to make children hate learning and it takes government payroll taxes to get adults to stop saving from their wages.

No, the real point is: How many people would actually buy into the "opt out" concept and demand to fund their own rainy-day fund and their own retirement? Are there enough people to make this into a winning political issue?

That is the question. The only way to find out is to try.

Because the alternative, to live life as a dependent ward, means that you live under the authority of a patron. And the patron gets to tell you when it is time to work, when it is time to eat, when it is time to go home.

Just like Verdi's father insists, far too late, in The Life of Verdi. "I am the father, and I decide when it is time to go."

Tying Trump, Berlusconi, UKIP, Le Pen Together

On the view of Reihan Salam of National Review, Donald Trump is just one of a number of protest candidates and parties that have been emerging in recent years in western democracies (H/T PowerLine). Here's the money quote in "Why Donald Trump Isn't Going Away" in Slate.

Britain’s Labour Party has been devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party, but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state.

Or this:

The Danish People’s Party went from the far-right fringe to become Denmark’s second-largest party by combining anti-immigration sentiment with a commitment to protecting social programs that serve native Danes. 

See what is going on here? The electorates of the western democracies were promised cradle-to-grave social benefits forever. That's what they thought was the deal. But really, the educated Ruling Class had other ideas, because no ruling class wants to just sit there a manage Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid for the rest of time. So we had to have green energy; we had to have gay marriage; we had to have immigration; we had to have sanctuary cities.

The electorate of the western democracies look at all this and they see the shaking of the foundations.

Now the right thing for the electorate to do would be to say: take your social benefits and shove it. Take your immigration and shove it. Take your everything else and shove it. We are a free people, you and I.

But they can't. They can't give up on the benefits. And why should they? They've paid those swingeing taxes on labor all their working lives. Why should they give it all up when they paid their dues?

The Trumps and the Berlcusconis and the Farages and the Le Pens are all saying that you can keep your benefits and dump immigration and dump political correctness too.

But they are lying. The problem is not immigration. It is not even political correctness. The problem is the benefit state. Unless you reform that and contract the size of the state then you haven't started to solve anything.

The telling point is Britain's UKIP and its drift towards "largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state." UKIP understands that it doesn't get to compete as a major party unless it promises to keep the benefit checks coming.

Back in 2010 our liberal friends were wont to sneer at the Tea Party. The Tea Partiers were talking a big line about limited government and the Constitution, they said, but it was still "hands off my benefits." They were right to sneer. Reform of the current mess begins and ends with the shrinking of the benefit state.

Instead we have Hillary Clinton promising to solve the problem of student debt by increasing government spending and regulation on higher education to make higher education more "affordable."

The Trump phenomenon shows that people are all exercised that "something is wrong." But the people are still a country mile away from doing anything about it.

The market economy is a system -- and it is a brutal system -- whereby you must adjust yourself to the market every day if you want to prosper. There is no free lunch and no place to hide, but the market economy delivers prosperity and a rough sort of justice for those that submit to its hegemony.

The government is a system -- and it is a brutal system -- whereby you capture political power and promise yourself and your supporters perpetual pensions that continue forever without regard to the economic facts on the ground. Free lunches all round, and don't worry about the future! It ends like Greece and Argentina, or even Venezuela.

Every day each of us makes the choice, whether to serve our fellow humans and hope for a reward, or vote for a politician that offers free stuff. Most of us, most of the time, choose the latter.

We all will, of course, get exactly what we deserve.

#BlackLivesMatter Means More Race Politics

If you are sick to death of Donald Trump I have a proposition for you. Let's talk about Black Lives Matter instead. Did you know that Black Lives Matter is George Soros funded?

I get the problem. Blacks are disproportionately arrested by police. If you are black or liberal or both you figure this disproportion is a manifestation of institutional racism, and you want it to end. You demand that it end.

And now we read about a detention center in deep blue Chicago that visits horrible indignities on the 82% of its inmates that are black. How's that Blue Model working out for ya?

The problem is best illustrated by my American Thinker piece "Why Don't Liberals Care about Black-on-Black Killing" on Jill Leovy's book Ghettoside about murder in the black LA ghetto. Even as a card-carrying liberal, Leovy tells how hard it is to get witnesses to testify against gang members when they shoot and murder. The police are really frustrated that the folks in the ghetto won't testify against the gang members. So the police compensate by arresting young blacks for "broken windows" offences. The black community gets really frustrated by that.

But liberals like New York mayor Bill de Blasio really hate "broken windows" policing. They think it is racist. Only trouble is that "broken windows" policing lowered the crime rate in big cities wherever it was tried, big time. Murder in New York City peaked at 2,605 in 1990 and was then brought down to 648 in 2013 by police chiefs like Bill Bratton and mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.

Now, under liberal Bill de Blasio, crime is up. Why? Because liberals are harassing the police for harassing the hoodlums, and so the police aren't keeping the hoodlums off the street.

But yesterday, on the anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, police in Ferguson, Missouri shot a black man they say was shooting at them.

So, if Black Lives Matter, what do we do? Do we clamp down on the police and tell them to stop harassing young black men for street misdemeanors? Or do we double down on "broken windows" policing?

The truth is that, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a vicious circle about the oppression of the lower class in the city. On the one hand, the new immigrants to the city tend to be unskilled and more violent than seasoned city dwellers. So they are low paid and discriminated against by employers. On the other hand, the violent young men provoke demands for a police crackdown on hoodlums, and the crackdown is used by radical activists to mobilize the lower class for marching and protesting.

My solution is to help the lower class socialize to the ways of the city and the market economy. Then they will all become boring middle-class jobholders and householders. But there are always radical organizers that believe the problem is injustice. And there are always marginal young men drawn to the excitement of the dawn raid.

Last weekend we saw the disruption of a Bernie Sanders rally by Black Lives Matter protesters. Does that mean that the Democratic Party will be pushed left by a new outbreak of radicalism?

But the last time we had a lot of black protest was back in 1967-68, and we know how that turned out for the Democrats.

One fine day America's blacks will all be boringly bourgeois and working and married-with-children, and we will be worrying about something else.

But that time is not yet.

Is This The Obama Sinking-Ship Moment

Immediately after the 2014 midterms I predicted that, at some point in his last two years in office, Democrats would desert President Obama to save their political skins as they contemplated life after Obama. The extraordinary Democratic Party discipline would break down.

Could the Iran deal be the straw that breaks the camel's back? I say that because of today's news that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is breaking ranks and deciding to vote against the president's Iran deal.

"After deep study, careful thought and considerable soul-searching, I have decided I must oppose the agreement and will vote yes on a motion of disapproval," Schumer wrote in a 1,600-word post on the website Medium.

OK. It could be that the fix is in and that Obama doesn't need Schumer's -- or any other Jewish Democratic vote.

Or it could be that the dam is breaking and Democratic legislators are jumping ship. 

Crude Insults to Women a Blow Against PC, Donald?

Back in the day, a gentleman never made crude comments about women. Because he just didn't.

Then came the Sexual Revolution and suddenly everyone was talking about sex.

But you know what? Women don't like talk about body parts. They didn't like it in the old days in the Age of Modesty and they don't like it now in the Age of the Hookup.

One of the reasons for the strength of Political Correctness is that something had to be done about the "let it all hang out" attitude of the Sixties. Oh, of course, the left exploits it mercilessly as part of their project to destroy bourgeois culture. But that's what they do: exploit anything to score a political point and name and shame the opposition.

The whole "rape culture" and "microaggression" game works because women really don't like the male culture of the public square. They don't like public knock-down drag out fights; they don't like public insults. Women prefer to fight at one remove, talking about people confidentially behind their backs. So if men won't curb their tongues and their hands out of a male code of honor then women will arise and write sexual harassment into law.

So when Donald Trump explains away his gratuitous insults to women with "I don't frankly have time for total political correctness" he is blowing smoke.

Gratuitous insults to women are bad behavior, in any culture. Period.

The man who insults women publically is not a sexist. He is just a boor.