Recently I have become very interested in status games. This began with the observation that educated people prioritize status particularly highly (working class people care about money but not so much about status). Then I began looking into the status dynamics in groups of women and female hierarchies, even within bureaucracies and corporations and human resources departments. The tldr here is that women try to maintain the appearance of consensus and placid agreement, and tend do their status competition maneuverings below the surface. Modern people of all kinds, man or women, seem to operate according to this playbook within our institutions. Whether it’s the Ivy League protests last year, or the L. A. fires, or the dysfunction within the DOE or USAID, we’ve seen a distinct lack of leadership and accountability and honesty. Things really didn’t use to be this way, you know.
Status games are, of course invisible. They’re almost unspeakable. When was the last time you heard an educated person say that vocalizing certain ideas or posting certain tweets might negatively affect their status? Everyone knows this is the case, but no one will say it. Few even know that they know it. They tell themselves a story about how and why they disagree with those ideas or that tweet, in order to sidestep the responsibility to be true to their profession and to avoid expressing their own personal beliefs.
When political ideas become wrapped up with status signals we have a serious problem. This unholy confluence leads to a situation in which millions of people come to ‘believe’ certain things, because they’re told to believe them by other high-status people (celebrities, journalists, NY Times editors, researchers), and no one tries to examine their priors or introduce any counterfactuals. That would ruin the party. That might affect one’s status! The only enemy in this scenario is the loner who tries to intervene, or challenge the consensus, even if they do so gently and courteously. There is no dissent or criticism which can be tolerated in this scenario. Thousands of people have found this out the hard way.
Here’s how you know that status games are in effect in your social environment: do people become angry or defensive when you ask probing questions about certain topics? If you bring up sincerely credited counterexamples do people begin to question your character or your motives? Do you find people gossiping or bullying or using ad hominem attacks or passive aggression to try and shut down inquiries or skepticism? Are trainings or leadership roles or administrative mechanisms being leveraged in order to control the expression of certain opinions or observations?
This new reality is so pervasive we barely even see it now. It’s as invisible to us as air, yet it’s a recent phenomenon and would strike historical interlopers (as it strikes people from other cultures) as deeply strange and pathological.
As I said, I’ve been reading about this for months and observing it (without knowing exactly what I was looking at) for years. It’s truly a frightening revelation when one begins to understand that people are using ‘beliefs’ (expressed opinions) as chess pieces on a grand and invisible (and largely unconscious) game board. I knew that people used political ideas as a bonding agent, to bring themselves closer to others and to unite against outside threats. Now I know that they also use them to burnish their own reputation and ingratiate themselves with bureaucracies and leaders and peers, even anonymous ones online. This happens a million times each and every day, and it’s becoming more frequent.
As for the millions of people who are directly affected by these ideas and their attendant policies? Immigration contracts and criminal sentences and teacher incentives and administrator jobs and environmental regulations? What about the hordes of hoi polloi who must suffer under the yolk of the technocracy? Well, they’re pretty much forgotten. In a sense they are not real. The only real dimension for many of these people is the social dimension, and the only real project is the project of building and maintaining consensus, and accruing status. There could never be a situation in which an uncomfortable fact would have to be expressed against the will or feelings of the group because the group is always right, even when it’s not. It’s a kind of totalitarian ethos, without the brutal state machinery behind it (although that is slowly being built). That is one of the main drivers of expertise gone awry-bureaucracies perpetuating absurd claims about childhood education or entertainment or sociology or epidemiology. A flawed idea becomes the consensus opinion, and there is simply no mechanism to challenge or amend it. This is how you have $400 million video games which are pulled after 2 weeks, and $500 million Hollywood films which barely make a quarter of that, and ideas about criminal justice and nutrition and gender which are obviously incorrect (or at least incomplete) being propounded with the faith of the zealot.
If you come to be regarded as a threat to this project you will be destroyed, without mercy. And the people who destroy you will persist in the unassailable belief that they are doing the right thing. After all, the group is with them. You’re on your fucking own.
A Times investigation has revealed that Muslim extremists have ‘seized control of entire wings’ in many prisons in Britain. Segregation units intended to isolate terrorists are instead allegedly being used to house inmates who refuse to join Islamist gangs, as it’s the only way to ensure those inmates aren’t beaten up or killed by the Islamists (who should be the ones being housed in those units). Sharia courts have been set up inside. Religious rules are enforced with floggings and violence. Etc. And, of course, staff are reluctant to intervene for fear of being labelled Islamophobic.
This would be bad enough in a third world nation - but we’re talking about a major Western democracy in the 21st century, and one that is not majority Muslim. Yet it has barely registered in public consciousness as a major issue. In fact, our political class are far more animated about an imaginary Netflix show (Adolescence), designed to mirror their pre-existing ideological beliefs, than they are about this actually existing real world problem.
A bizarre state of affairs, and one that is not likely to get any better any time soon if free discussion of the problem continues to be stifled and dodged in the name of ‘tolerance.’
End note: I have written a series of 9 essays exploring the spread and intersection of Islam, extremism, and progressive groupthink. They’re in my page, beginning with ‘terror and its apologists’. Please give them a read. If you want to support my efforts to push back against this stuff, paid subs are a big help. Cheers.
If feminism is anything, every argument against it is valid.
A concept cannot be falsified if its definition constantly shifts. Feminism suffers from semantic slippage veering into incoherence. When I argue that it’s disempowering, someone inevitably says my definition of feminism isn’t true and constructs a straw man assuming I’m against women’s legal equality. If you can’t land on a definition, then what I consider feminism is as valid as anyone else. An unfalsifiable argument is a fallacy, and most of what I believed when I was younger rests on fallacies. Feminism gives women an excuse for not rising above our socialization born of historically patriarchal structures. I’m asking women to stop clinging to excuses about “structural sexism” for not meeting our potential. A concept’s definition cannot be a moving target. If feminism is about empowerment and equality, why did I start succeeding to this degree in life after casting it off?
Germany, and to a lesser extent other Western European countries, is becoming rigid, hysterical, and slightly totalitarian, as it tries to impose its elite, utopian values upon a population among whom these ideas are increasingly harmful and unpopular.
A real democratic government would change to reflect the will of the people. Germany has chosen to demonize, repress, and censor the opinions of its people. What kind of opinions? ‘Far-right’ notions, like: border security is essential, public safety is important, different cultures are different… that kind of thing.
CDU/CSU leadership did have a brief flash of insight back in January, when they reached across the firewall to vote with the AfD on legislation to restrict migration. Back then at least, they knew they had to show the left parties they had other options, or they would be destroyed in coalition negotiations with any potential “democratic” partner. Leftist activists took to the streets and Merz rapidly retreated, returning to his standard denunciations of the AfD and pledging never to vote with them again. In return for a measure of mercy from Antifa, Merz voluntarily led his party into a trap, ceding all possible leverage over a radicalised SPD, who will force the Union parties to swallow one poison pill after the other.
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If the CDU can’t remove the AfD from the board – and probably even if they can - their future looks very dismal. If present numbers hold, the only conceivable government in 2029 would be the dreaded Kenya coalition, consisting of CDU/CSU, SPD and Greens all together. The compromises and failures the Union would be forced to swallow in that scenario would be even worse than the compromises and failures they’re swallowing now. Their punishment would be accordingly harsher. The CDU established the firewall as a defensive mechanism, to discourage their own voters from defecting to the AfD. Now the firewall has become a great cudgel against the Union, and a major source of the AfD’s strength.
Society gets better by a process of evolution. We need to attempt experiments, evaluate results carefully, keep what works, and discard failed experiments and outmoded practices.
Our world is complex, so that evaluating the results of social experiments is increasingly difficult. I think that some of our experiments with sexual behavior, gambling, and recreational drug use are not working well. Repressive alternatives could be worse, but I think we ought to take stock of how these experiments are working, accounting for how they affect different people. Not everyone is skilled at managing short-term risks.
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An Intellectual Prestige Hierarchy
An organization or group can have a hierarchy based on prestige or one based on dominance. In a prestige hierarchy, those lower down look up to those higher up with admiration and respect. In a dominance hierarchy, those lower down look at those higher up with fear and resentment.
Our intellectual institutions, notably universities, ought to be prestige hierarchies. Instead, the social justice movement, using DEI and its related dogmas, has transformed these institutions into dominance hierarchies. This is dysfunctional in many ways. It reduces the respect for truth. It reduces the respect for elites. We need to try to restore the role of merit and truth-seeking in our intellectual institutions.
What began as a backlash against progressive sanctimony has metastasized into a self-sustaining ecosystem of grift, where yesterday’s degenerates rebrand as today’s moralists, and principles are as disposable as last season’s Twitter avatars. Witness the OnlyFans-to-Oath Keepers pipeline: influencers who pivot from hawking adult content to peddling constitutional fetishism, swapping fishnets for flag pins the moment the algorithm blinks. These modern Elmer Gantries—part televangelist, part dropshipping huckster—peddle “anti-Marxist” coffee and AR-15 decals while sermonizing about family values. For them, virtue is not a principle but a subscription service, loyalty measured in clicks and conversion rates.
Vigorous disagreement among supporters of different ideologies and parties is not necessarily problematic for liberal democracy. What is problematic is when partisans view and treat their opponents as illiberal, harmful actors, who do not deserve the protection of liberal procedural rights and norms (PRN), which include both formal-legal rights such as free speech, due process, and equal treatment under the law, and non-legal norms such as journalistic impartiality and academic objectivity, which are associated with fair procedures in a liberal democracy.
When competing groups of partisans exercise differential power in mainstream bureaucratic institutions, they may violate liberal PRN in different ways. To the extent that supporters of one party or ideology dominate institutionally, and view members of the opposing party as illiberal, they can exercise institutional power to marginalize opposing viewpoints and information. Conversely, to the extent that members of the opposing party view mainstream institutions as biased and oppressive, they reject them turn to alternative outlets. Non-mainstream media offer both substantive information suppressed in elite institutions, and unsubstantiated information and conspiracy theories that fuel grassroots support for radical disruption.
In America’s post-1960 culture war politics, partisan identity is significantly defined by one’s view of the nation’s political and religious founding, as heroic and inspiring or oppressive. Progressive-leaning Democrats often view the nation’s white, male, Christian-dominated past as problematic and champion its challengers, while conservatives take the opposite position.
Apr. 9th, 2025
This study indicates that vaccinated people (against flu) had a significantly HIGHER chance of getting the flu than unvaccinated people.
…it is likely a good portion of the signal of a negative vax efficacy is caused by behavior: the same people who like the vax like testing.
There’s more evidence of this. Turns out the hospital employs 75% females. And that in their models being a man is protective against flu! We don’t see the raw data—another unfortunate common failing—but the signal for males in the models is not small, with hazard rates around 0.7 (meaning less chance for having flu).
My dear readers, men man up more than women. Yes, even in these Equality-mad times. Women like testing and being sick more than men. Women like being vaxed more than men. All on average, of course. Also, those in clinical jobs, which of course are exposed to more illnesses but also with greater ease and facility of being tested, were also more prone to flu.
My wife and I were at a tableful of smart, well-educated twenty-somethings — friends of the bride and groom. The wedding, with all its hope and aspiration, had put them in mind of the future. As young people should, they wanted to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well.
But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.
Here’s an unpleasant truth for women: Evolutionary research tells us that female bonds are built on shared goals and activities. They’re more intense and more fragile than male friendships because they evolved for a different purpose—child-rearing as a group. But after fifty years of progressivism and social theory, we’ve convinced ourselves we can distort basic psychological needs and bend the arc of womanhood.
We numb the dissonance with aesthetic reels and romanticize friendship, longing for the teen sleepovers—chasing an idealized version of the hormonal, high-drama bonding sessions. The result is a generation of lonely women.
Now, many stay deeply loyal to their single friend groups well into their thirties, trying to preserve that same intensity. Dissapointed when the bonds constantly break. But that loyalty makes it harder to prioritize a man, a family, a future. Adulthood isn’t supposed to look like adolescence with a paycheck—it has to evolve. We are not primed to still be single in our 20s.
Mothers are lonely too. Our lives are fragmented—job moves, divorce, rising obligations, no extended family around. We used to form friendships around everyday life with children. Not which office we’re asigned.
Female friendship works when it supports the everyday life you’re actually living, not the one you’re nostalgic for.
Participants were significantly better at solving syllogisms when the correct answer was consistent with their own political beliefs, and significantly worse when it favored the opposing ideology. Political ideology literally impairs your ability to reason.
The shallowest of all social fantasies are those which everyone knows to be fantasies, but which are maintained because they’re pleasant for some to hear.
This fantasy dissipates at the slightest stimulus: minor arrest, fight, public rudeness… it disappears altogether.
It is not real.
Apr. 10th, 2025
There seems to be an asymmetry between the standards and values of single men and single women. There’s DEFINITELY an asymmetry in priorities.
Many women date and travel and ‘explore’ in their 20’s… and only begin looking for marriage well into their 30’s, when their romantic value has begun to plunge. They use the standards and experiences of their 20’s to judge their older relationships, and find that they’re not feeling that sense of excitement, and novelty, and CHEMISTRY.
Well, duh. You’re getting into middle age. If you’re still looking for chemistry you might get lucky, or you might end up alone for the rest of your life.
Feminism and culture lied to you.
Apr. 11th, 2025
Objective facts and morality aren’t valid… unless they’re the facts we assert, or the morality we teach.
Basically: all TRADITIONAL notions of logic and ethics and hierarchy are illegitimate (but only if they’re Western!). Is this a coincidence? No. This is a concerted and planned effort to erode our society, so it can be replaced. With what? Well… they’re a little hazy on that…
Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A fascinating new paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias.
Narcissistic guilt now stands as the default form of guilt for large swaths of the West. One might assume that it absolves its holders from personal requirements, but this is not the case. Instead of demanding personal acceptance of responsibility and repentance, it requires performative display, consensus joining and participation in social rituals of expiation. Importantly, it requires the near constant shifting of any personal feelings of guilt onto external events and narratives. Thus feeling guilt over black slavery in 19th century antebellum America absolves one from guilt over, say, fornicating with your friend's boyfriend, cheating on a test, callously supporting policies that harm and disenfranchise your American neighbors, etc. The thing about slavery is that you, personally, had no choice in the matter; transferring guilt to this sort of thing removes the burden of responsibility traditional guilt imposes on one's choices.
Narcissistic guilt is a bonanza for opinion makers and politicians of all sort. The ability to mass mobilize guilt for pretty much anything, even if it doesn't involve the actual responsibilities of one's supporters is a powerful tool. Want to import 20 million dependents and garrison them in your power centers? Just show a picture of a dead kid somewhere and you get instant compliance. Want to suppress resistance to political riots? Cherry pick a video of a cop manhandling a criminal of the appropriate demographic and play it on a loop.
A disturbing case just happened in Illinois. Girls, who didn’t want to use the girls changing room because a boy, who said he was a girl, was in the changing room as well, decided they weren’t going to use the locker room to change into their physical education uniform that day.
The following day school staff decided to take action. Three women, Joanna Ford, Cathy Van Treese, and Ginger Logemann, decided the correct course of action would be to march all the young women down into the locker room and attempt to force them to strip in front of this boy, with them standing there.
This went on for an entire week, and only one girl, in the face of this clear violation of her rights, ran out of that locker room and refused to change. The school didn’t just say “We’re not giving you gym credit if you don’t change into your gym clothes” they marched them into the locker room in an attempt to force them to undress.
And the most insane part about it is these school administrators think that they are the moral ones, that they are in the right, that they are not the ones who are bullies because the girls not undressing in front of this individual are “bullying” him.
These women look normal enough. Kind, inviting, warm, someone you wouldn’t think twice about leaving your kids with, so why on earth would these three women be so downright cruel? There have been a lot of women who, cruelly in one form or another, have bullied women who dare wish to decide they want privacy and fair competition in sport.
There are many forms of “propaganda” that leftists place stock in (I’m using “propaganda” very broadly; nevermind whether this is a proper use of the word), which I generally find dumb. Let’s look at some examples of propagandist beliefs …
Participation trophies: Children will feel bad if they lose a competition, and feelings are what really matter. Children will do better in the future if we make them feel good, which we can do by just giving everyone a trophy, or some kind of prize, regardless of their performance.
My comments: How stupid do you think your children are? They’re not going to think that they achieved something just because you gave them a trophy. If everyone gets it, they’re going to notice that everyone got it, and therefore that it means nothing.
They’ll also notice that you’re trying to deceive them, so they shouldn’t trust you, and at some point they might infer that they can’t trust any awards, honors, and compliments that adults give out, since adults are dishonest.
What really matters to your child’s future performance in any given endeavor is not how he feels at the moment, but things like his innate level of talent and the amount of work he puts in.
Telling people that they’re good at something they’re not is destructive and not compassionate. People need to know the actual facts about their abilities in order to rationally plan their futures. They don’t need patronizing lies or propaganda.
It doesn’t matter if someone momentarily feels slightly disappointed when they realize that they’re bad at something. Children are not babies. They’re not going to collapse into a gibbering puddle if they feel slight disappointment for a few seconds. (Even babies aren’t babies in this sense.) Growing up means accepting reality, even when it is mildly unpleasant. Why does it often seem like the kids are more grownup than the adults?
Be honest: do you want a life of safe classroom time and office work and noncompetitive sports and expensive vacations… and nothing else? Do you want childless and self-indulgent relationships, dinner dates, and a society which is intricately managed, in which no one is anyone’s fault and no one is allowed to climb too high or to think differently? More importantly, do you want a culture created by people who want this?
Men are leaving the culture and exiting the system… and i is grinding to a halt. No amount of therapists and guidance counselors and nonprofit executives and artists and professors and researchers can keep the engine going. You need soldiers and builders and fighters and iconoclasts. Why don’t the advocates of social construction and sexual equivalency rise to the challenge? It’s simple: they can’t. They’re too anxious and too conformist.
Let men do what men do, or we will all suffer from their absence.
Leighton Woodhouse:
Oakland’s Mayoral Race Is a Litmus Test for the Left
It’s been a tough few years for Oakland, California. Crime has risen, businesses and major league sports teams are fleeing the city, prostitutes are soliciting customers in front of elementary schools, and deranged “stunt” drivers have taken over residential streets, causing mayhem. Voters have responded with fury, recalling progressive mayor Sheng Thao after just two years in office.
Today in The Free Press, Bay Area journalist Leighton Woodhouse reports on the race to replace Thao. The establishment wants former Representative Barbara Lee, who cemented her left-wing bona fides in 2001, when she was the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force after 9/11. Oakland voters remember her fondly for that. But the candidacy of Loren Taylor—a moderate former city council member who made his mark opposing efforts to defund the police—is gaining steam. As Leighton reports, this is no ordinary mayoral election. It’s a referendum on the progressive politics that have dominated Oakland since the Black Panthers set up shop in the 1970s. The question is: Have voters finally had enough?
the whole point of all this propagandistic positioning is to unify a tribe against another tribe it sees as subhuman.
this is what makes the coming cognitive crisis so acute and intense and why it so easily leaps from target to target and why it’s trivial to take a former hero and refashion them into an instant villain.
i was speaking to a longtime friend who recently moved to europe (for work, not for politics) about how the US felt better, easier, looser, more fun and more pleasant and that those of a more libertarian or conservative bent were finding it much easier to just speak and live.
she shared this idea with a friend in LA who, predictably, is having the opposite experience because they live at the epicenter of the cognitive dissonance spiral of people losing the plot and spinning out.
contempt and cognitive breakage has driven the neighbors past reason or civility.
The traditional gender pay gap is shrinking - and in some cases, flipping into reverse. In the UK, for instance, young women now earn more on average than their male peers.
