So, So Good

I had a different blog post in mind today, but when I saw this, I just had to share it. I'll be laughing about it all day.

"You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being." - Evelyn Waugh pic.twitter.com/b7O6HYVaQD

— Catholic Thinker (@ThinkerCatholic) January 15, 2019

Solzhenitsyn Destroys Dawkins And Harris

Modern atheists love to talk about evolutionary ethics and hate being confronted by the mountains of corpses from people mercilessly slaughtered by atheist regimes like the Nazis and other socialists. Their evolutionary ethics says that kindness and cooperation are evolutionarily superior and, in the end, will out-compete ruthlessly selfish cultures.

If only that were true.

I just finished volume 1 of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. In the Gulags, there were three classes of people. There were zeks, the political prisoners, thieves, genuine criminals and there were guards. The thieves stole things from the zeks and sold them to the guards for food and booze. It was a very tight economy and worked well for everyone but the zeks. The zeks weren't able to organize a revolt against this system and protect their possessions except in extremely rare cases. The zeks, read: you and me, were robbed and then died in the labor camps.

Doesn't this show evolutionary superiority? Why isn't this the natural end of atheist Man? It certainly was the end of evolution for scientific socialism. The same thing is happening today, different only in style, in socialist Venezuela. It makes a complete mockery of all of the fairy tale twaddle about Christian ethics being equally available from evolution the modern atheists yap about. They're all just whistling past the graveyard.

And what a graveyard it is!

If America Was Built On Slavery

... and we got rich, why didn't the Soviet Union get richer?

Following up on yesterday's drivel, today we'll look at the Secular Left's assertion that our wealth comes from the labors of slaves. Our sources will be The Gulag Archipelago and the biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

We all know the Antebellum South used slaves, primarily for agricultural work. To paraphrase president Lincoln, the slaves worked and the wealthy plantation owners reaped the rewards. Prior to the Civil War, General Forrest was a slave trader. According to his biography, in the late 1850s, a slave typically sold for $1,000 which translates into $30,000 today. By way of comparison, the cows shown below cost about $2,000 each.

The link for those cows is perishable, but here's the site where you can find cattle for sale.

That means you could buy 15 cows for the price of 1 slave. That's pretty expensive. Slaves were long-term investments and could be sold if you needed to raise cash to pay bills. Any punishment marks on a slave reduced his sale price because it marked him as difficult to manage. You could punish your slaves, but you did your best not to leave marks. That limited your options in forcing him to work harder. Killing them outright was financial insanity.

The socialist Soviet Union had slaves as well. Their endless streams of political prisoners fed their canal projects, gold mines and timber operations with plenty of slaves. Soviet slaves were free. All the State had to do to get another slave was arrest someone. As Solzhenitsyn notes multiple times in Gulag, labor camp sentences had nothing at all to do with guilt or innocence. Those words were meaningless in the socialist Soviet Union.

Aside: Soviet POWs captured by the Germans in the massive encirclements of 1941 were given 10-year sentences en masse when they were liberated. They were sent from the slave labor camps of Nazi Germany directly into the slave labor camps of the socialist Soviet Union.

Free slaves meant that the socialists in the Soviet Union could work their slaves to death without concern for their value. No punishments were forbidden to them for the same reason. Unlike the South, which could no longer import slaves, initially thanks to the efforts of evangelical Christians and the white sailors in the British Royal Navy, the Soviets could get more slaves any time they wanted. They didn't have to use the existing slaves as breeding stock.

Not having to breed new generations of slaves made the socialists' slave operations even more efficient. There were no expectant mothers that had to be given light work or no work. There were no nursing mothers and no infants and children to feed, returning no work. The socialists' slaves were all adults of working age. Every calorie of food spent on their upkeep was translated into free labor.

So if America owes its wealth to slavery, but Southern slaves were more expensive to buy and maintain and Southern slaves couldn't be treated as badly, why didn't the socialist Soviet Union flourish and become wildly successful? It had all the things the Secular Left tells us lead to prosperity. On the plus side, it was socialist, which we're told improves everything. On the minus side, it had plentiful and inexpensive slaves, which they say build mountains of profits for their owners. Instead, it collapsed, an utter failure.

Something from the Secular Left doesn't add up.

The Soviet Union Was Indeed Socialist

At Jordan Petereson's suggestion, I'm listening to The Gulag Archipelago these days. I find it absolutely enthralling. I can't turn it off when I'm in the car. Lots of things are occurring to me as I listen, but instead of trying to summarize them all in one post, I'll drag them out to the annoyance of you, my readers. You're welcome.

The first thing is that the USSR was indeed socialist. When confronted with the mountains of dead, modern socialists retort that it wasn't true socialism.

The objection is irrelevant.

The retort misses the point.

Consider:

• They had free healthcare.
• They had free education.
• They had free housing.
• They had guaranteed jobs.
• Profits, such as they were, were handed over to the State.

Finally, their income inequality was a fraction of ours. Pick a Soviet year and then sum up the total net wealth of all of the big dudes of the Party. I would bet dollars to donuts that their total wealth wouldn't come within a tenth of what Bill Gates has today. Ergo, their income inequality was less than ours, a strong measure of socialism, if socialists are to be believed.

Socialism isn't judged on cruelty or injustice. It's an economic system wherein everyone shares everything pretty much equally. No system in real life is totally one thing or another, so the fact that it had imperfections isn't an indication that it wasn't socialist, it only shows that the USSR existed in the real world. The piles of corpses mean nothing when judging if they were socialist or not. It's like saying an apple isn't an apple because its tree is lopsided.

So let us agree that, whatever their faults, the Soviets were socialist. More tomorrow.

Plus, their East German pals had cool cars like the Trabant.

You Know You're Winning When Old People Are Put Back To Work

Wow.

KANAZAWA, Japan—Because demographics are supposed to be destiny, Japan was long ago consigned to stagnation with its aging population and rock-bottom birthrate.

But in recent years Japan has defied destiny. Since 2012, its working-age population has shrunk by 4.7 million, yet the number of people working has surged by 4.4. million, the critical ingredient in what is now Japan’s second-longest economic expansion since World War II. The proportion of the population in the labor force has risen sharply since 2012, by more than in any other major advanced economy.

Japan is refreshing its labor force from three often-neglected pools: the elderly,women and foreigners.

Dig the chart.

This looks like the Axis powers near the end of the war, after they'd killed off all of their young men. Anyone they could lay their hands on was thrown into the factories to try to keep production levels up. This isn't healthy and it's not sustainable.

It's fine to keep working as long as you can. I'm getting up there in years and I don't plan on sitting in a rocking chair all day long any time soon. Still, if you're counting on codgers, coots and curmudgeons to drive an economic expansion, you've got rocks in your head.

I suppose they could always try having babies.

Nah. We're way past those traditionalist, patriarchal ways. The next thing to try will be robots. Lots and lots of robots.

MGTOW, Weakness And Sex Dolls

I've become fascinated by the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement, in part because I'm seeing it in the social circles of some of our sons. I'm also interested because it shows a level of (cold-blooded) sophistication that I lacked when I was young. Finally, I know a few young ladies who are struggling to find husbands.

I read something the other day that shined a whole new light on MGTOW and modern feminism for me. It was an article in a British newspaper about men who have bought expensive sex dolls. Here's the part that got to me.

'I hug Kristal when I'm lonely or have had a hard day'

Nick, 33, places his doll his doll Kristal next to him in bed if he feels lonely.

He also admits he gives her a hug after a bad day.

The truck driver from Ontario, Canada spent £6,205 on his dream woman from top-selling doll manufacturer, Abyss Creations in March 2017.

He feels weakness and has an innate need to turn to a woman, his woman, for comfort. Almost all men have this need. We know we're supposed to be strong and courageous and driven all the time, but we just can't do it. To varying degrees, we all have times of self-doubt and fear. You can't show that to the world, which is why men aren't supposed to cry. You have to have a soft place, a soft person as a refuge when things get to be too much.

Almost all of the guys who write the MGTOW articles or record the Red Pill, men's rights videos are ultra-alphas. Fear and self-doubt have been banished from their lives. They're trying to teach other men how to do the same thing, how to suppress the need for a woman's softness. "Don't show any weakness in front of her!" is the message repeated ad nauseum.

Don't pay attention to the alphas. They're such a small percentage of the population as to be irrelevant. Your daughter will not land an alpha. She needs a large pool of not-quite-so-alpha young men to give her choices in her search for a husband. Pay attention to those guys and what's happening to them. As Kurt Schlichter might say, watch what's happening to the Normals.

Normal men also deeply crave the admiration and respect of a woman. You need to be her hero, her knight in shining armor, the one she looks to when she's weak or frightened. It's built into us by nature.

Now dig this.

When I watch TV these days, I pay close attention to the ads. What message are they sending young men? Last night, while watching Jeopardy!, I saw an ad where an older woman, looking like she was in her late-60s, was practicing boxing. Boxing. Her husband simpered admiringly at her. That's the same message that the new Captain Marvel movie gives.

"We don't need you. There is no unique role for you to fulfill. We don't value what you can do because we can do it all ourselves."

What is the Normal dude supposed to do? He's already a little timid around women, fearing rejection. Over and over, he's being told the woman isn't going to be his partner, she's not going to complete him, she's going to compete with him and best him. He's already uncertain from constantly competing with the men around him, what's a woman going to give him other than more competition and plenty of attitude?

What guy needs that?

And so the truck driver turns to a sex doll, something he can at least pretend wants to comfort him. He can fantasize that he is a man it respects and admires. He can make believe he gives it something it needs, something it doesn't have. It's heart breaking.

The saddest part is that the Normals of both sexes are craving what men and women have always craved. The equation between them hasn't changed since Cleopatra's time. It's only the Secular Left Elites who see the world in this new, hostile-to-men way. Since they control all of the media, the academy and entertainment, the Normals don't get to interact with each other without swimming in the Secular Left's pool of sexual hate.

Hence, some Normal men are going their own way.

Arguing With Losers

... while ignoring the scoreboard is a stupid thing to do.

Harvard has segregated commencement ceremonies.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”

Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.

Harvard is about as far to the left as a university can get without being Berkeley. The next time someone from the Secular Left starts shouting about race, suggest that they get their own house in order before yelling at everyone else. After all, if a far-left extremist institution like Harvard, after 4+ years of indoctrinating, err, teaching its students still has them yapping about "the struggle to be black at Harvard," then they're not in any position to lecture anyone about race, especially when they're practicing segregation.

Shorter version, suitable for Twitter retorts: I don't take racial advice from segregationists.

I'm guessing that even the most dyed-in-the-wool Bengals fans wouldn't be trying to suggest that they were better than the Saints in this 51-14 massacre. Scoreboard, baby.