Many of the social problems which plague our society are effectively invisible to the culture. Some problems are openly discussed of course: sexism and violence against women, drug addiction, homelessness. Some developments are not ‘problems’ at all (at least not in the normal policy sense) but are treated as urgent matters for concern and energy by the Blob: anti-feminist content online and its increasing popularity with boys and young men, suspicion of government institutions, and a loss of faith in scientific research. These aren’t driving any violence, or directly imperiling or impoverishing many peoples’ lives. If we lived under a rational policy regime such developments wouldn’t even make a list of priorities. However, these trends are inconvenient to our rulers, and so they’re endlessly discussed on the news and in culture, and they absorb a tremendous amount of time and money in the worlds of media and education and policymaking.
Then there are the problems which are invisible: they’re massive causes for social degradation and have far-reaching implications for the wealth and safety and happiness of citizens, but examining them might provoke uncomfortable questions or realizations, and so they’ve been placed in a kind of invisible (but universally-understoof) ‘off-limits’ category within the professional managerial class. Widespread corporation discrimination against men. The growing rates of single motherhood. The catastrophic rates of criminality and recidivism in certain poor communities among a relatively small number of highly anti-social young men. The epidemic of psychological pathology among teenage girls.
As we’ve seen in the reaction to the Los Angeles riots, civil disturbance and violence are treated very differently if the organizing motivations are congruous with the Blob agenda versus opposed to it. Just imagine if fires and assaults were being perpetrated by anti-immigrant organizations right now (such organizations don’t actually exist - although anti-immigration organizations do - but pretend as if they did). This double standards applies to social problems as well. Single motherhood drastically increases rates of delinquency and violence and academic failure, and these problems cascade down through the generations, creating new children and new problems and new sources of pain for the community. The data is clear and the conclusions (for anyone who chooses to look) unavoidable but the solutions do not accord with the goals of the Blob, and the problem is largely of its own making. It cannot be discussed and, among most educated people (the people who run our society and most of our important institutions) it will not.
Decades ago there were liberal blind spots and sensitives, but as institutions have become more homogenous and ideologically rigid, those blind spots have swelled, into an entire vision of society and of reality. Stepping outside that conceptualization or countering it or even questioning it is often not permitted. Entire organizations have been conditioned to think in a certain way. Those few who were inclined and willing to entertain dissenting ideas have already left, or they never entered in the first place. In some cases they have been forced out.
May 6, 2025
Zero good faith. Zero effort to describe; a full court press to reframe and distort and misdirect.
Epley is also a gifted mindreader, and she knows for a fact that no one actually cares about the sex trafficking of minors. They’re just pretending: “The Republicans have pushed on this message not because it’s valid, but because they know that clutching pearls works to rile constituencies up.” What’s the evidence for this? The evidence is that she says so. Pushing to prevent minors from being sold to adults for sex obviously isn’t valid, she says flatly.
There’s plenty more to be said about this, if we want to be tedious and go sentence by sentence identifying sleazy rhetorical maneuvers, false fact claims, and logical fallacies, but you don’t have to eat the whole egg to know that it’s rotten. This professional journalist exists to prevent knowledge and understanding. She’s a barrier to information. That’s her job. And that’s why so many Californians don’t see what they need to fix. Their only connection to state politics is that OH NO THE MEAN REPUBLICANS ARE BEING WEIRD AGAIN. Ban the sex trafficking of minors? You mean VICIOUSLY ATTACK GAY PEOPLE!?!?!?
Dear God, we were tired. That’s how we knew we were great parents: we’d reached Level 5 exhaustion. Moms were putting in 50 percent more time with their kids than parents did in the 1960s; dads— twice as much. We must be doing a better job.
And yet by objective measures, we weren’t. We had replaced one set of problems for another. Everything we were doing felt so virtuous. Everything we were producing seemed so broken.
We have reached a pivotal moment in the culture wars. The left is scrambling. Their donors have always understood the need to invest in culture and propaganda, but are frustrated that both their messages and messengers are awful. They can’t buy authenticity, humor, and original creative ideas. Yet they are willing to light ungodly amounts of money on fire to regain their dominance. What makes them foolish also makes them dangerous.
…
Mark Gallogly is one of the Democrat megadonors backing the astroturfing projects. He is the ultimate institutionalized crony. After making a fortune on the climate grift in private equity and advising Obama/Biden/Kerry, he now serves on the boards of Columbia University. Like Mark Carney, he sacrificed one of his children to the trans cult. His daughter Nell now calls themself Niko and works at NYT as a reporter focused on DEI/ESG. In three generations the family went from Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island, to Wall Street billionaire, to “resistance” journalist. The old elite is castrating itself.
The fact that Trump served four years and none of the worst predictions came true should have, at minimum, recalibrated the moral math.
It should have changed the calculus about what level of distortion, manipulation, and institutional betrayal was justified in order to stop him. Because once you've seen the man in power and he wasn’t what you feared—yet you still commit to deception, still push a candidate you know isn’t mentally fit—then it’s not about Trump anymore.
It’s about something else.
At that point, TDS stops being a reaction to Trump’s behavior and becomes a justification for your own.
…if you look at small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, a lot of men in these communities will organize sporting contests or games in which young men, in particular, can display their physical prowess. The men who perform the best in these kinds of contests and sporting games tend to have more sexual partners, more numbers of children, and so on. There’s a great book called Manhood in the Making by the anthropologist David Gilmore, and he writes about the Mehinaku—an indigenous tribe in a remote part of Brazil. This community, the Mehinaku, regard themselves as a nonviolent society because they don’t actually go into conflict with other neighboring tribes. They go out of their way to be peaceful, but within this community, despite the fact that they don’t go to war with other communities, they organize wrestling matches among the young men. If you refuse to participate as a young man in these wrestling matches, everyone else makes fun of you. They mock you, they tease you. During the matches, often the participants who are the most vocal and enthusiastic—people who are cheering it on the most—are young women. They enjoy watching these matches, because it’s a way to assess physical ability. From that whole evolutionary perspective, it’s a way to assess genetic quality. How physically capable are you? Are you tough? How are your reflexes? How smart are you? How clever are you? Are you able to defeat someone who’s larger than you?
This is also the case in the modern world too. If you look at sporting events, I was just at a Knicks game this past weekend, and it’s funny: you study enough evolutionary psychology, then you see these star athletes who, objectively, you strip away all the bells and whistles, and these are just guys throwing a ball around. But you see they have cheerleaders there who are cheering them on. In the audience, you see groupies. You see women who are intrigued by these guys. We’ve set up in our large, modern, industrial society the same kinds of games and contests, not just in sports of course, but in work and occupations and all these other kinds of things. If you look at rates of marriage, men in the top socioeconomic brackets are far more likely to get married, far more likely to have children compared to men who are lower down the ladder. Women seem to like men who are admired and respected by other men.
When some of us blacks refuse to leave the confines of black culture to integrate into the broader Europe-based cultural framework that surrounds us, we risk disempowerment by disconnecting from a larger collective brain.
I encountered the concept of a collective brain while reading Joseph Henrich’s 2015 book The Secret of Our Success. He describes it as the accumulated knowledge of a community’s individuals, passed down through generations, forming the foundation of its culture.
…there exists a racial grievance industry that profits by perpetuating the belief that racism is an inescapable, omnipresent force. This narrative suggests that black individuals will never be fully accepted, reinforcing a sense of perpetual victimhood.
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As a center-left liberal, I find it troubling when figures such as Al Sharpton and others persistently frame racism as though we were still living in the 1950s. While racism is a factor in many societal issues, it is not the sole cause of all our challenges. Issues such as the high percentage of children born into single-parent households — approximately 70% — and the 45% being raised without fathers are rarely addressed, despite their significant impact on our community’s well-being.
…
Henrich illustrates the power of a larger collective brain by comparing Pacific Island populations. He shows that islands with smaller, less interconnected populations tend to lose cultural and technological advancements over time. Applying this perspective, anyone can see that the 12% of the U.S. black population faces inherent challenges if segregated from the 62% majority of non-Hispanic, Euro-descended whites.
[The Let’s Be Blunt campaign] is also an example of how others in public affairs are exploiting vulnerable victims for their own ends rather than cynically sweeping them up in political campaigns.
The campaign forms part of an increasing trend of victim-led campaigns. These leverage sympathetic cases, especially those in the national spotlight, to push for poorly thought-out reactions. They are used to drive campaigns that would not get a hearing on their own merits. These campaigns often pursue bad or muddled policy objectives. Beyond that, they can unfairly co-opt people thrust into the limelight by their own trauma and keep them there, advancing a cause that they don’t necessarily understand.
The Let’s Be Blunt campaign is a British public awareness/reform effort which has reacted to recent stabbings in that country with the recommendation that knife points in Britain should be dulled. Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the REAL problem (hundreds of daily crimes, most of them committed by immigrants or their children). Ironically, the ‘Let’s Be Blunt’ campaign refuses to be blunt about the real drivers of this problem.
This is simply another example of our nearly pathologically subjectivist culture: feelings matter and personal impulses reign. If bad things are happening we should migrate towards the solutions that make us feel like good people (and make us feel safer) while ignoring the facts on the ground. We should react towards the people who introduce facts with with anger and disdain. Feelings rule.
As has become customary, the cartel parties voted to deny the AfD a vice-presidential post in the new Bundestag. The Vice Presidents oversee parliamentary debate and issue calls to order. As long as the AfD have no representatives in this position, the vice presidents of the cartel parties can misuse their office to sanction the AfD selectively without fear of reprisal. They do this primarily by issuing AfD representatives an inordinate number of calls-to-order for the slightest trivialities. Pundits then argue on the basis of these disproportionately issued calls-to-order that the AfD have no respect for parliamentary debate and are therefore undemocratic. This tiresome game has been going on for years.
The cartel have also joined forces to deny the AfD all committee chairmanships. These are traditionally awarded to each party in proportion to its strength in the Bundestag. As the second-strongest party, the AfD has a claim to six chairmanships. By keeping the opposition out of committee leadership, the cartel hopes to minimise the ability of the AfD to shape legislation and also to exercise oversight. As the largest opposition party, the AfD would ordinarily receive the chairmanship of the powerful Budget Committee. The idea is that the parliamentary opposition should control this committee in particular to exercise oversight over government spending. Happily, the SPD, the CDU and the CSU helped exclude the AfD from this post, in one stroke both defending democracy and also clearing the way to spend taxpayer money with just a little bit less supervision. It is always fun to see how incentives align like that.
That is all a prelude to the latest childish pettiness – a kindergarten fight over who gets to play with the colourful wooden blocks...
Checks out. A large slice of the PMC is pure bloat; endless meeting culture is a related symptom. Both browser tabs and meeting culture are the result of risk aversion preventing actual progress toward meaningful goals. The very people who ardently say they want to improve society are often dead weight themselves.
According to Brownmiller, “That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool [the penis] must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent” (p. 209).
Brownmiller argued that all men benefit from the existence of rape because, as she surmised, all men enjoy dominance and seek to profit from women’s fear. No surveys, no psychological studies, no documentary evidence, and not even any sound logic was offered to support this contention. The minority of men who rape simply came to stand in for the majority of men in the world.
If this sounds like a thoroughly ideological proposition based on an anti-male contempt so profound it never occurred to Brownmiller to prove it or test it against alternative hypotheses, that’s because it was. And it is truly shocking that so many reviewers never subjected Brownmiller’s preposterous claims to the interrogation they deserved. Brownmiller’s book was welcomed with glowing reviews and chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the Outstanding Books of the Year. In 1976, Brownmiller was featured on the cover of Time magazine as one of 12 “Women of the Year.”
America has had a rough go at it in the past few decades. While many are doing just fine, there is a mass awakening, an awakening from a delusion of a kind. That America is slipping through the fingers of deterioration. Cities are dingy and dirty. Small towns are losing their charm. Public spaces belong to the detritus.
What America needs to do is solve problems, from the basic to the highly complex. From the conceptual to the personal. The country needs to take a good long look in the mirror to find out where the country is, how it got there, and where it wants to go.
Freddie de Boer:
Counterintuitivity remains the Spice Melange of national media, the grease that slicks the axles of the car of journalism and commentary, a car which coincidentally is sputtering around with a blown-out tire and bad alternator. And so while they’ll grudgingly publish Bad Thing is Bad, and once in a decade or so Good Thing is Good, Good Thing is Bad is what really gets them hard. It helps when you have a topic like adoption, which is uncritically embraced as an act of God’s love by flyover country people and which is easily folded into narratives about the New Colonialism, which is just like the old colonialism except instead of going to foreign countries and murdering and enslaving brown people in order to steal their resources, adoptive parents take on the lifelong responsibilities of parenting vulnerable children to whom they have no genetic ties. Adoption is monstered because many people believe passionately in the good of adoption, giving the affair what we call a “hook” in the biz, and in this way over time all good things will be monstered.
I just spoke to a leftist loved one who claims America “isn’t necessarily a safe place to live anymore.” This person lives in an affluent, low-crime neighborhood, generations & oceans away from times and places where power only changes hands through civil wars or political assassinations.
But because he consumes nothing but partisan media, maintains a politically homogenous friend group, & arrogantly dismisses counter-evidence from the few non-leftist voices in his life (🙋🏾♀️), he feels “unsafe” despite being objectively safer than the majority of people in this world/throughout human history.
Pride and confirmation bias will rob you of your sanity and your capacity for joy if you let it. I thank God daily for breaking me out of the miserable echo chamber I used to inhabit, and giving me eyes to see beyond the ridiculous narratives that populated it.
What’s most pathetic isn’t that Herring said these things. It’s that he's convinced even himself that he believes them. He believes that sex is a social construct, that stating otherwise is bigotry, and that anyone who questions fashionable middle-class manners deserves ridicule. He's not alone, of course. Stewart Lee, Aisling Bea, Bill Bailey, Sara Pascoe, Bridget Christie, Josie Long... a generation of comedians fell for one of the most destructive hoaxes of our time. And worse, they used their platforms to promote it.
The hoax, of course, is gender ideology: the belief that sex is not binary, that male and female are feelings, that the most basic truths about human biology are hateful. It’s a belief system without internal logic or external evidence, sustained only by intimidation and the illusion of consensus.
It’s done immense damage. To free speech. To comedy. To journalism. But most tragically, to children—especially autistic children, nascent gay children, children struggling with trauma, or discomfort, or ordinary adolescence.
at a certain point we really need to stop being surprised at how much of the “progressive” social and even hard sciences have become utterly fraudulent.
it’s not an outlier. this is the overwhelming mode and there is a clear and obvious reason why and why such practice so often concentrates in the “progressive” subgroup.
It's demanding that everyone, upon entering a public institution, sheds their extra-institutional entitlements.
Integration means adaptation from both sides.
We told men their old codes of exclusivity were unacceptable.
We must now tell elite women:
Your cultivated sense of gendered entitlement – the expectation of automatic belief, immunity from rigorous challenge, the use of emotional leverage as a primary tool – is equally unacceptable within the walls of governance.
California is the petri dish in which nearly all fraudulent election practices are hatched and perfected. The Golden State has now, with a political revolution waiting in the wings, taken a page out of the playbook of neighboring Oregon and mandated cheat-by-mail for all future elections. California perfected ballot harvesting, which is the secret sauce for maximizing mail-in election turnout, particularly for brain-dead, senile political retreads who embrace policy that destroys prosperity and increases lawlessness. Additionally, the voter rolls are completely filthy and now loaded with bloat to give the appearance of a Democrat superstate.
No, people don’t continually vote for the Democrats’ tyrannical agenda. California is not doubling its own voting power in two decades and turning the rest of the west blue without destroying all integrity associated with its elections.
Scientists going back as far as Darwin have argued that women are the more beautiful sex - the reverse of what we find in most other species. As I like to put it, when it comes to physical attractiveness, females in our species have the larger peacock’s tail. Consistent with this idea, a new meta-analysis finds that, across the globe, both sexes consider women’s faces more attractive than men’s.
Why are women more beautiful? Here’s an excerpt from my last book, The Ape That Understood the Universe, where I argue that it stems from men’s stronger preference for good looks in a mate.
Earlier, I touched on the idea that mate preferences are not merely products of evolution; they’re also causes of evolution. Peahens prefer males with dazzling tails, and as a result, males’ tails evolve to be more and more dazzling with each passing generation. What happens, then, when men have a stronger preference than women for a good-looking mate? And what happens when women have a stronger preference for a mate possessing wealth and status? The answer is that men and women, in effect, selectively breed each other for the traits they most want in a partner.
This might explain a number of unique and otherwise inexplicable facts about our species – facts that would bamboozle our alien scientist. In many species, including many birds, lizards, and insects, the males are gaudy and ornamented whereas the females are drab and sensibly “attired”: They blend in with the background rather than standing out and risking grabbing the ravenous attention of a passing predator. In our species, if anything, it’s the other way round. To see what I mean, look at any modern Western wedding; it’s the woman who dresses in the most expensive, extravagant outfit, while the man dresses in a standard-issue penguin suit. The bride, in other words, is the peacock, the groom her drab sidekick. This is a puzzling reversal of the usual pattern in nature. Whereas humans see male peacocks as more aesthetically appealing than peahens, an aesthetically-inclined peacock (or alien scientist) would probably see women as more aesthetically appealing than men. We certainly seem to; that’s why beauty pageants are usually competitions among women. The fact that men place more weight on a mate’s appearance might explain where the sex difference in attractiveness originally came from. Just as humans selectively bred fruit to be sweeter and dogs to be friendlier, men selectively bred women to be the better-looking sex.
Despite his years of reading, Malcolm remains oblivious to basic Enlightenment ideals of tolerance or pluralism. He’s a totalitarian at heart: If something is bad – whether it’s promiscuity or racism – he wants to stamp it out by political means: violence and brainwashing.
Most strikingly, however, Malcolm never deeply reflects on the chief evil he condemns: “discrimination.” He never moves beyond the simplistic theory that racism is nothing but arbitrary malevolence. Notice his reaction to German courtesy:
My brother Muslim and I both were struck by the cordial hospitality of the people in Frankfurt. We went into a lot of shops and stores… My brother Muslim, who could speak enough German to get by, would explain that we were Muslims, and I saw something I had already experienced when I was looked upon as a Muslim and not as a Negro, right in America. People seeing you as a Muslim saw you as a human being and they had a different look, different talk, everything.
My question: If these hospitable German shop-owners moved to Malcolm’s Harlem, how long would their ecumenical attitude have endured? A week? A day? An hour? Based on Malcolm’s description of Harlem’s population, it’s clear that the German shop-owners would quickly become the victims of property crime, if not violence. Before long, they would be suspiciously eyeing their black customers – sparking a cycle of mutual recrimination.
Given Malcolm’s street smarts, I have to think he’d make the same prediction. But then he’d be just a step away from realizing that much of what he reduces to Satanic hate is actually applied statistics.
In his new book The Geek Way, Andrew McAfee quotes Marc Andreessen as having tweeted:
The most serious problem in any organization is the one that cannot be discussed
McAfee stresses that when top executives make it clear that a certain topic is taboo, there is a good chance that the firm is vulnerable on that issue, both financially and morally. He argues that openness and transparency are better for the organization, even if in the short run it makes executives uncomfortable.
I think that we can interpret the political tension in the United States and Western Europe in Andreessen’s terms. The political elites do not want to discuss the issue of how to handle large-scale migration of people from the global South to the global North. Underlying this is an unwillingness to discuss cultural differences between the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and the rest. And an unwillingness to favor the former over the latter. Consequently, these leaders face populist revolts, surprising them with Donald Trump, Brexit, Geert Wilders, and the Irish anti-immigrant riot. On the latter, Ed West writes,
It is hardly surprising that trust in the media has plummeted when news organisations report events so dishonestly, a dishonesty that becomes second nature to utopian regimes in which reality is so distant from the idea. After a while, honest discussion simply becomes impossible.
Ireland’s prime minister has since demanded that Irish people stop linking immigration and crime, but there is a very simple solution to this – publish the crime figures, and openly debate them. What they’d show is that some immigrant groups have much higher crime rates than the native population, while some have lower, but the overall trend in Europe is negative - even if immigration is by no means the main cause of rising crime (in Ireland’s case, rates of violence shot up in 1990s, before mass migration).
Either people in our society bear primary responsibility for working, following laws, and being sexually responsible… or they don’t. You don’t want in live in the irresponsible society. Believe me.
These claims are PRESUMED to be illegitimate. The ideas are equated with ‘misogyny’, despite the fact that the two things are very different. The idea that most women should be wives and mothers first is seen as hopelessly regressive among educated people.
Unfortunately, those people have failed to develop a healthy, functional alternative. Educated women pay poorer women (never men!) to watch their kids and clean their homes.
The motherhood penalty refers to the supposed workplace disadvantages faced by women after they have children: lower wages, fewer opportunities, and a reduced chance of getting promoted. These disadvantages are thought to stem from biased perceptions that mothers are less competent and committed.
Several studies have reported such a bias, finding that the same person is rated less favorably when described as a mother than when described as childfree. Now, however, a large multi-study paper has thrown this conclusion into question. Across four experiments covering nearly 5,000 participants, Christopher Petsko and colleagues found no evidence at all of a motherhood penalty in worker evaluations. On the contrary, they uncovered a consistent parenthood boost: a tendency for people to evaluate parents, both men and women, more positively than their unencumbered counterparts…
This is quite the line up James! Thank you for including my latest on cults!