Many of the regular commenters here had decided to continue their discussion on the generic Open Thread, but had thought they might be unhappy about some of the other commenters there. Also, the auto-approval list that AE had previously set up wouldn’t be operative, introducing some delays and also placing extra work on our moderators.

Therefore, I’ve to split that Open Thread and establish this separate one for the AE community, conveniently located with the other AE posts and having all the regular benefits. I’ve also relocated those initial comments here. This thread will be restricted to the AE Community of approved commenters, and others will not be allowed to post here. — Ron Unz

***Note to readers and commenters*** The blog is now archived and inactive. Ron Unz has created a comment thread for the intellectually diverse community of commenters to continue open discussions on whatever topics they deem interesting. The blog and thread will no longer be moderated and will only be accessible to previously approved commenters who have been active in past threads. As long as it is regularly participated in, it will remain open. When–or if!–it dies down, it too will go dormant.

Turn pressure to power, turn stress to strength, and never lose your curiosity or your playfulness!

—

Isonomy yes, but respect? It is earned, says rebel yell:

If someone can run faster or do better math than me, they have superior skill and I can respect that definition of meritocracy. “Honors to the strong,” as the Romans said. But no one should have superior rights to mine or claim that their life has more moral value than mine or anyone else’s. Our elites like to hold up their Ivy League degrees as proof they should rule over the rest of us. Nonsense. My rulers should be people I choose, who represent my interests, and are accountable to me.

Auctoritas is on life support. Maybe it’s just as well. Rulers are overrated.

Triteleia Laxa makes an astute if crass observation:

In an age when vibrators are sold on the high street, I am astonished that people can convince themselves that women merely like sex as something to trade for romance.

After acceding to the assertion that men and women aren’t necessarily from different planets when it comes to enjoying sex, we won’t get too carried away. Wency on why the general experiences of men and women differ on dating apps:

I think women in our society just don’t go after men nearly to the degree men go after women. A woman saying, “I *need* a man!” is viewed as somewhat gauche nowadays, while in yesteryear it might have been as obvious and non-controversial a statement for a maiden to make as “My car *needs* gas.”

Instead, men are viewed as more of a “nice to have”. “I’d *like* a man. And I’d *like* a coffee maker that also does espresso.”

Men, for one, aren’t really given this message that finding a mate is unimportant. And two, even if we were, it’s not in our nature to listen to such things as much as women do.

What’s the male pro-independence equivalent to a woman needing a man like a fish needs a bicycle? Rhetorical, I think.

And again on the about leftism’s century-long twirl:

Leftism started out the 20th century more on the side of order and conformity (seeking to regiment and rationalize society according to scientific/industrial principles and pushing back against somewhat chaotic and organic traditionalism), then sometime in the mid-20th flipped to the side of chaos and nonconformity (pushing for free speech and free love and a thousand wacky ideas against a modernist gray-suited conservative consensus) and in the form of Wokeism is now once again on the side of order and conformity (restricting free speech and free thought and allying with Woke Corporations and the Woke Military-Industrial Complex).

In a touching tribute to a man’s love for his wife, Twinkie provides an excuse to cover three different marital situations:

My wife and I are in our early 50’s. We both feel strongly that, were one of us to die, the other would not remarry, but would devote himself or herself to the children.

She and I had a “start-up” marriage (as opposed to a “merger” marriage). She married me when I was penniless and was nothing but potential (the first time my parents visited us in our 1 BR apartment, they told me that we looked like children playing house). I love her so intensely and she is so much a part of me and I of her that I don’t think I could ever give the same kind of love, affection, or trust to another woman. And if I couldn’t have that kind of a powerful bond, I don’t think I’d want another as a wife.

Were she to die before I, I would do my best to raise our children well, hopefully watch them have families of their own, and then I would be happy to see her again, God willing.

In addition to start-up (both partners are unestablished, starting out and generally younger) and merger marriages (both partners are established, financially independent and generally older), there is also the acquisition marriage. One partner is established (and probably older) while the other is getting started (and probably younger). The acquisition marriage is presumably the most challenging of the three to maintain over time.

This COTW roundup will be the blog’s concluding act. After many years through various iterations and authorship, it has run its course. When the comment window closes on this post, it will move into the archives. See you around the interwebs, friends.

On the fourth of July, Americans celebrate the freeing of their country from the binds of the British. In the same way whites cannot be victims of racism because racism equals prejudice plus power, the idea of one group of whites attaining freedom from another group of whites is an affront to the concept of liberation. The freedom blacks gained from the abolition of slavery is a more significant form of liberation than the freedom colonial aristocrats gained by breaking away from the British empire. So of the two American independence days, Juneteenth is more important.

Free expression and isonomy are foundational to a functioning liberal democracy. Without free expression there is no liberalism and without isonomy there is no democracy:

Is our age the first in the country’s history wherein younger cohorts are less classically liberal than their elders are? There is no clear racial, gendered, or political confound. To the extent that it is anything, it is generational.

A century ago, it was easy to tell Catholics and Protestants apart in America. Unless they are coming out of church, it’s difficult to do so now. One major reason for this is the high rate of intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants over the last few generations. Is a similar trend taking place among Jews and gentiles today (excluding the Orthodox, who constitute a bit under 10% of the American Jewish population)? The data suggest so:

To oversimplify, half of Jews under the age of 50 are half-Jewish. That’s an oversimplification because it assumes Jewishness is ethnic rather than religious. There are of course those with one ethnically Jewish parent who consider themselves to be Jewish and others who have one ethnically Jewish parent but do not consider themselves to be Jewish at all. The latter will have been largely excluded from the survey this data is drawn from.

That technical consideration aside, this is a sea change from sixty or seventy years ago. It helps explain why there is some convergence in test scores among younger Jews and gentiles compared to older cohorts and also why younger Jews tend to be less politically left-leaning than older Jews do.

The cup overflows with thought provoking reactions for this COTW. Wency on the drop in the stock price of liberal white women:

White feminists have endured a series of intra-left losses these last few years. World War T has cost them on both sides: MtFs (for whom abortion is at most a theoretical issue) have labeled them “TERFs” and taken much of the feminist high ground from them, while a number of butch left-leaning would-be lesbians have instead gone FtM and “non-binary” and attached themselves more to the LGBT wagon than the feminist one. All the while blacks (whose prestige within the Democratic Party is as high as ever) remain wary of white feminists and label them “Karens”.

Democracy is a zero sum game. That’s why it generates so much anger and resentment.

Wency again on the two most famous dystopian novels of the 20th century (with Fahrenheit 451 occupying the Bach position as a third option against Mozart and Beethoven):

Which dystopia rings more true as a possible vision of the future: the quasi-Communist 1984 or the quasi-liberal Brave New World? I read both of them as a teen in the Clinton years, and I had little doubt: the latter, even though it was written earlier. A couple of decades later, and that appears even more true to me today. I remember being astonished, at first, how old Huxley’s book was, that it predated the Sexual Revolution. Only the weird references to “Ford” really gave it away.

I could perhaps argue though that Huxley’s vision is less evil: I suppose I would prefer to live under it than Orwell’s. But then again, maybe that’s what makes Huxley’s world most threatening to the soul. If a boot is to stamp on our faces forever, then 1984‘s ending aside, maybe I could find it in myself to hate Big Brother and yearn for what could have been. But if we’re merely provided with a crass but comfortable life of selfish hedonism, and never allowed or taught to value attachments like family, then perhaps I’d find myself content with it, and I hate that idea even more.

Unless an authoritarian sadist, 1984 is pure dystopia. On the other hand, there are more than a few people who, if honest with themselves, might view Brave New World as something closer to utopia. They live like it is.

Drawing from his own fieldwork, nebulafox offers insights into hard drug addiction and approaches to help people break free of it:

Many junkies are sincere when they tell you they want to clean up. They aren’t lying to you or attempting to manipulate you. They believe it: in that moment. But their brains are “short-circuited” from addiction. Some junkies do become aware of this dynamic over time, and it’s often a highly depressing realization that leads to further abuse. If you don’t even trust yourself to that extent, you aren’t likely to think you are worth saving.

Detox, in many ways, is the process of repairing and rebuilding neural networks necessary for performance that the addiction destroyed.

So, the good news from that is, it’s possible for the junkie to clean up. They have to want it and know the responsibility lies with them, of course, and some don’t. But many sincerely do. The bad news is, the average person with average willpower who is dealing with a severe addiction is unlikely to have the faculties necessary to break it on their own, especially if they lack meaningful social networks or support. They need a highly regulated environment surrounded by people who care in the “right” way in the right amount: i.e, they genuinely want to see the junkie detox, but don’t have emotional ties that might lead to indulgence. They also can’t just sit around and focus on detoxing constantly: which is a mistake a lot of programs make. They need to rebuild the psychological scars that led to and/or fueled the addiction.

For men in particular, lifting weights is a great therapeutic tool because it emphasizes control and power.

The vulpine again on why an Iranian desire for nukes is rational:

Gaddafi: gave up his nukes. Sodomized and left in ditch.
Saddam: had his nuclear reactor blown up by Israel. Eventually lynched.

The Kims: successfully develops nukes. Endures the horror of mean Hollywood movies and YouTube videos being made about them.
Pakistan: successfully develops nukes. Actually gets away with harboring Bin Laden.

The mullahs draw the logical conclusion from the above about how much nuclear programs are worth, and (given what happened to Mubarak, a guy who was America’s friend for almost as long as the mullahs have been America’s enemies) how much you should trust anything Washington DC has to say.

John Johnson on how the reigning neo-liberal order of the brave new world we’re living in manufactures consent:

I saw this in college where very few students could conceive of professors being dishonest for the sake of politics. Most people assume that really smart people somewhere have already done all the work and it isn’t their place to question the result. This is argument from authority which is a logical fallacy that liberals have not only mastered but have entire areas of study entirely built around it. We saw this with the Wuhan virus where the liberal media said that it couldn’t have come from a lab because the WHO and all kinds of other experts said so. That actually isn’t an argument.

Riffing on the observation that it was not the existence of slavery but the ending of slavery that made America rich, TomSchmidt notes not only is slavery immoral, it’s also inefficient:

The bill was being paid even while it was active. It’s like hiring employees with intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation: you have to keep upping the dopamine dose for the latter. With slaves, you have to turn your energies to controlling them, a negative task, from the ones of innovating and growing.

That’s why Alexis D’T noted the extrinsically motivated slave lands as largely barren. They were suffering, but the elites that benefitted from the system kept it in place. Just like English commoners were kept a lot poorer by the Empire using the wealth of the industrial revolution to control India. The common man got no economic dividend from it, but the grifter class at the top of the British Empire did.

Dfordoom provides a pithy outline of weaponized wokeness in action:

[Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden] put the interests of bankers and billionaires ahead of the interests of the rest of us. That makes them pretty far right economically in my book.

To me that’s what neo-liberalism amounts to – looking after the interests of bankers and billionaires while using social left policies to distract us from the economic issues. With most neo-liberals the social policies (antiracism, LGBT nonsense, etc) are motivated by pure cynicism.

The doomer on how echo chambers are a feature of rather than a bug in social media:

Social media is re-creating the conditions of pre-industrial society in which people would spend their whole lives in a tiny social bubble and never have any exposure whatsoever to the wider world or to anyone outside their own immediate social circle. Ironically for most people the world of social media is like living in a tiny village and never interacting with outsiders and never becoming aware that such things as history and culture exist.

V.K. Ovelund on how neo-liberalism is neither purely capitalist nor socialist, but something more like crony capitalist with occasional showers of helicopter money for the rabble, managed by elites convinced they’re doing good:

I suspect that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden see socialism through the Cold War prism of their generation and, thus, are sincere in their regard for capitalism as they understand it. They are also sincere in their desire that capitalists repay that regard with campaign cash and other favors. (If the CEO gets to retire with a net worth of $300 million, then what’s a mere $30 million for a good friend?)

Working Class on how on an all volunteer military allows the empire to wage its forever wars in ways it could never get away with under conscription:

With the abandonment of conscription after VietNam and the fall of the Berlin Wall, endless war became something that happens on television. For Americans, with the notable exception of our veterans, endless war abroad is a background noise forgotten in the midst of domestic culture wars. The woke are mostly silent regarding war and peace. They are engaged with real problems like pronouns and of course, white supremacy.

What’s the over-under on US troop presence in Afghanistan at the end of September?

In a few generations, that is. The Orthodox don’t yet comprise one-in-ten American Jews, though they will soon and their representation will continue to increase from there. In many respects, non-Orthodox Jews view the Orthodox like liberal whites view white Trump supporters–as deplorables. Orthodox Jews voted for Trump by a 2-to-1 margin.

But while the fertility and outmarriage rates of liberal whites and white Trump supporters are roughly similar, these things are not comparable between non-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews.

Here are three graphs comprised of data taken from Pew’s extensive recent report on Jewishness in America illustrating as much:

Outmarriage is extremely rare among Orthodox Jews. Among married non-Orthodox Jews, though, fewer than half marry other Jews. And the trend towards outmarriage has accelerated rapidly over time. Among Jews married before 1980, 82% married someone who is Jewish. Among Jews who have married in the last ten years, however, only 39% married another Jew. The outmarriage rate is likely to keep increasing, as most non-Orthodox Jews have no problem with their descendants marrying non-Jews:

Not only are non-Orthodox Jews mostly marrying gentiles and are fine with their progeny doing the same, they aren’t making many progenies. Non-Orthodox fertility in the US is well below replacement (indicated by the horizontal green line):

It’s even lower than significantly below replacement white gentile fertility. Strange strategy for world domination, that!

One thing BlackRock’s voracious acquisition of residential real estate across the country at rates far in excess of market listings indicates is that the econoclysm we’re early on in won’t be a repeat of 2008. Inflation isn’t transitory, it’s perennial. If the Fed had any intention of raising rates, BlackRock wouldn’t be paying 30% above asking for houses.

If the Fed raises rates, the housing bubble bursts. Large numbers of adjustable rate mortgage rate holders default. They’re only a small fraction of borrowers. What about all those homeowners who have locked in rates?

They’re still unable to sell for what they’re able to now. Homeowner A would like to sell his $300k house with a 3% mortgage rate to prospective buyer B. A’s monthly mortgage payment is $2,000. New mortgage origination rates are a lot higher now, though. B’s monthly payment on that $300k home, at 8%, is $3,000 a month. That’s a grand more than A is paying for the same property. For B to afford A’s life, the $300k house is going to have to sell for $200k so B can get the same $2,000 monthly payment A currently has. Though A has a great rate for the times, if his house will only sell for $200k now and prior to the price drop he only had $50k of equity in the house, he’s underwater on his fixed rate mortgage. There will be many such cases.

Is BlackRock or JP Morgan really going to pay $400k for A’s $300k house when monetary tightening will push the listing of that house down to $200k in a few years? If Big Finance knows the Fed isn’t going to fight inflation–and the incestuous nature of these the Fed and the banks that own it is legendary, so they know what the Fed has in mind–it also knows nominal prices of everything will go up. Prices will increase at accelerating rates. There will be an abundance of dollars and shortages of everything else, including residential real estate.

The important thing in that situation–the situation we’re in now, because the Fed not only won’t fight inflation, it can’t fight inflation–is to gobble up as much of the real estate market as possible, whatever the price. The money to buy is borrowed for free anyway.

Free money to acquire residential property and then rent that property out for? Sounds like a pretty nice perpetual income stream for asset management conglomerates to get their hands on. Those perpetual income streams are lucrative, very lucrative. Just ask Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, or Pfizer! And if it doesn’t pan out the way BlackRock would like it to, they’ll just get bailed out by their friends at the Fed and the Treasury.

You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. UBI will cover the subscriptions you need to live, albeit with nothing left over at the end of the month. It’s a new spin on an old arrangement. Get used to the term “neo-feudalism”. It’s going to come up a lot in the coming years.

Consumer prices beat consensus estimates for the fifth consecutive month. Again, we’re told it’s transitory. It was another bad month of weather for the harvests just like it’s another bad month for the cost of cars. Even if the annualized rate falls back from 6% to 2%–which it won’t–it wouldn’t be transitory. Transitory requires the second part of the year to come in at a deflationary -2%. That’s how things get back 2% for the year. Easy peasy, ha!

Or maybe not ha!. Treasury yields fell on the CPI beat. The 30-year is down on the week, paying a measly 2.15%. The Fed is going to tighten so hard nominal prices will fall! If consumer price decreases are coming, a guaranteed 2%+ return is the perspicacious play!

In seriousness, tie your money up for 30 years to earn an equivalent real yield of -4%? Who would possibly be so dumb?! AT&T dividends are thrice that. Nobody who isn’t a central bank is going to buy long-term treasuries. Lender of last resort takes on a new meaning!

The TreasureFed is holding rates down because if they were allowed to clear the open market, rates would fly up to 5% or 10%, sending the economy crashing in a way that makes 2008 look like a walk in the park by comparison. The longer rates are artificially held down despite ever-increasing trade and budget deficits, the more the rest of the world will pull out of the dollar market.

The dollar’s demotion will be painful. Americans’ monetary standard-of-living will decline. It’s been a year now and it’s still hard to know if the things you’re looking for at the grocery store will be there. As it becomes increasingly clear that the perpetual shortages of products and labor are no more transitory than inflation is, prices will rise substantially to reflect reality. It’s nice when the house or the 401(k) goes up 10% in a year. It’s not so fun when the price of bread and milk do.

As America becomes less culturally and ancestrally Western, the orientation of the country’s foreign policy will correspondingly move away from the West and towards the rest:

Zoomers and millennials are modestly less favorably inclined towards Western leaders than older generations. And they’re much less hostile towards putatively authoritarian–putatively because Ontario, Canada is locked down harder than just about anywhere else on the planet at the moment–non-Western countries than their elders are.

The last item on the x-axis shows the mean favorability advantage the leaders of the four Western countries have over the leaders of the three non-Western countries, by age cohort. The differences are stark. They will manifest substantially in the future, particularly once the boomers pass on.