“Don’t worry. Many women learn to embrace this parasite. They name it, dress it up in tiny clothes, arrange playdates with other parasites.†– House
But my parasite kept looking over its shoulder. I guess it was a nervous tick.
I recall seeing a story about twenty years ago about a Native American tribe, the Pima. This particular tribe had gone through periodic famines over the course of their existence since they lived in a desert with little water and no Kwik-E Marts®. They had, through surviving those continual famines, developed a resistance to dying when there was no food for an extended period of time. This makes sense – those who were susceptible to starvation starved; those who were thriftier with their metabolism lived.
Nowadays, the Pima have the distinction of suffering from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. Those biological traits slowed their metabolism enough to save them from starving in a famine. Those same traits, in a food-rich world, are now killing them.
That’s one description of a trait that while good in an environment of scarcity isn’t so good in an environment filled with Twinkies™, Ruffles™, and two-liter Coke™ bottles.
What got me thinking about all this?
What do you call it when a diabetic won’t follow directions? Insulince.
Eaton Rapids Joe shared several thoughts with me a few weeks back in an email exchange. I’m certain I’m not taking this in the direction that he had originally intended, so don’t blame him for this piece.  For me to write about a topic, it has to come together in my mind. One of the ideas he shared sparked my imagination. Here it is, in Joe’s words: “Biologists make the case that periods of easy living followed by harsh purges accelerate evolution.  Their reasoning is thus: many features in isolation are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features that in isolation are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.â€
If you’re not reading Joe’s stuff, you really should be (LINK). He’s thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, and funny. His comment resulted in me thinking, and although I wandered pretty far off of his original point, I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration.
Is evolution overkill? Did it defeet the porpoise?
As I started thinking not about biology, but about society, and the traits that either make society work, or destroy it – rather than organisms, I wanted to think about group survival strategies.
Society is made up of individuals, so I thought I’d look at the individual traits that lead to a successful societal strategy. When I looked at positive human traits, two immediately come to mind:
- Altruism
- Empathy
These have been common throughout most of the history of the United States. They’ve been common in other places, too, but I’m going to focus on America.  These traits were the basis for and result of a “high-trust†society. A high-trust society is one where most interactions aren’t governed by regulations, or kin groups, or hierarchy, or law. Where I live, there’s no law that says you have to stop and help someone whose car broke down. It’s just something we do.
I heard that Shetland ponies are the least trusted horse, at least according to the Gallop poll.
Likewise, for most of the history of the United States, welfare wasn’t a government program – people were helped because groups of ordinary citizens donated their time and effort to help them. This had a benefit – it was a healthy outlet for the altruism, and empathy that most people felt. It was virtuous for the person helping, and the person being helped.
Government started to take over the role of private charity in the 1930s, and completed the job in the 1960s. The insidious part of government-based charity is that it does two things:
It turns the act of charity into taxation. Charity moves from being a voluntary program into a mandatory feature supported by taxes. Last time I checked, if I decided I didn’t want to support ‘charity’ by paying taxes, men with guns and bad attitudes would take my money and then give me free room and board at a Federal Camp for Wayward Wilders for five to ten years. This removes all virtue for taking part in charity. Forced charity isn’t charity, it’s extortion.
That’s bad enough.
But it gets worse.
Crabs don’t donate to charity. They’re shellfish.
The second thing that forced charity does? When a person gives another person help, they’re often grateful – it’s human working with human. When a government agency gives that same person help, they’re resentful. Why? There is no end to the needs an individual has – and when government doesn’t give them as much as they think they deserve they feel resentment. Let’s face it – nearly every government welfare program sucks – it’s just enough to get by in ratty conditions. Not only that, these same programs are designed to create an angry perpetual victim class by being easy to stay on and difficult to escape.
Add in the impersonality of the cities. Mix with a globalized economy and a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers. Dollop in a bit a host of useless yet expensive college degrees. Toss in a diversity of cultures and religions not seen since the late Roman Empire while vilifying the common culture of the last 250 years through the government education system.
Stir.
The result is chaos. The altruism and empathy which worked so well in that high trust society of the past now work against society. Add in that the problems are actually in the process of being solved: as an example, the black poverty rate has dropped over 30% between 1988 and 2018.
What to do with all of that altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic energy?
Whoever had “go crazy in an orgy of destruction and violence†fueled by misdirected virtue is the winner.
Is it riot season or COVID season? I want to make sure I have the right decorations up.
I thought a bit about how Antifa® and the Marxist portion of Black Lives Matter™ grew. The traits of altruism and empathy, generally good, have allowed them to grow. Heck, even more than allowing them to grow, they’ve increased the growth rate. In any sane society, neither of these groups would be tolerated.
Why?
Though born of misdirected virtue, Antifa© and BLM® have their own traits. They contribute nothing to society. They’re destructive, and feed off of the energy and resources provided to them by productive people. In the long run, they may even kill off the productive society that created them.
There’s a word for an organism living in this niche. The name for that organism is parasite.
It becomes increasingly likely that Antifa™ and BLM® will leave city after city economically destroyed. Who would want to move to Minneapolis right now? Portland? Seattle? The governments of those forever Democrat-controlled cities has been tailor-made for incubating the parasite class.
Well, now that Antifa® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it?Â
The District Attorneys in those Leftist cities are crucial to this incubation – criminals aren’t charged with felonies, but are let off with the lightest of charges. Unless, of course, they are people defending themselves from the parasite class. If that happens, the greatest possible charges will be conjured up, and damn the circumstances. Defending yourself from a parasitic criminal mob on your own private property is something that simply can’t be allowed.
Parasites generally are quite healthy as long as they don’t kill the host. The mosquitoes I fed tonight didn’t kill me – just left me with a few bumps that will itch for a day or so. But it looks like the traits of altruism and empathy may have done more damage than the famine resistance of the Pima.
See, John, there you go again displaying your whiteness by talking about charity. Whether freely given or coerced by government, merely meeting the needs of the needy is just one more method of white supremacy. I have learned this truth from Sippin The EquTEA:
https://medium.com/@eec/this-equity-picture-is-actually-white-supremacy-at-work-59f4ea700509
What I have learned over the last few months from Twitter is that being a decent human being is a sign of White supremacy and must be stamped out.
Who needs charity anymore? Marx says cut out the middleman of bureaucracy and let the needy help themselves to the money they need!
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1285360296224157697
At 0:10, look closely and notice the skin color of the guy in the red Nike hoodie who has initiated this cash grab. Here is how white allies can at last go beyond white supremacy and “level the playing field” for the black, er Black man.
And Arthur, it’s “white supremacy”, not “White supremacy”. You obviously aren’t reading enough Twitter yet. 🙂
https://apnews.com/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f
I should have guessed. Have they outlawed the tyranny of alphabetical order yet?
Altruism and empathy are usually more strongly associated with women than men. When you look around at prominent leadership in 2020, it is overwhelmingly women or effeminate men (ex. Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland, an obvious sissy). This is true in most organized religious organizations, corporate America, non-profit groups, government and “education”.
The traits of empathy and altruism have their place. It is empathy that makes my wife a good mom and a lack of empathy that makes my kids go see mom when they need a shoulder to cry on instead of dad, who is full of earthy wisdom like “suck it up” and “life’s not fair”. Men care about what you did, women care about how you feel. That is why women tend to gravitate to family practice and OB/GYN and men to surgery, lady doctors want you to feel better and build relationships, guy doctors want to get in, fix what is wrong and move to the next patient.
The combination of the two makes humanity whole. When the balance shifts too far one way? Chaos.
Sometimes you have to do something “just because” and it doesn’t matter how it makes other people feel. We are clearly in a time when empathy and altruism, often misplaced and suicidal, dominate our public sphere. At the same time we keep importing people from the least altruistic and empathetic cultures in the world.
What could go wrong?
Arthur,
Your analysis is well done. Yet a woman’s empathy and altruism wanes when cities
burn and people are injured. A woman may well reserve her kindness for family
and neighbors rather than violent criminals. Break the law and harm others? I won’t
waste a moment on them.
Very very glad we left the city near a decade ago. Fine people that mind their own business,
(no judgements) and help out if your car ends up in a ditch on and icy road. The only disturbances
I suffer are peoples’ roosters calling out and some dog barking now and then. No sirens or cops
rushing to and fro. A slice of Heaven on earth, and a continuous sense of gratitude. Try it if it
isn’t too late.
We already live out the country, at our current little homestead for the last decade, and have built strong ties in the community. I am afraid that you are in a distinct minority among women in America in 2020.
I was able to score a mercenary job with the MN DNR.
Woman “leaders” pretty much down the line with the exception of Division of Forestry Director and my nominal supervisors.
I enjoy doing the job for as long the system lasts, as I get to work from home (probably til end-of-year) and get out in the woods fairly regularly, but the level of abject fear about Wu Ping Qoff and Climate Change while injecting Diversity-Equity-Inclusion is off-the-charts.
This whole state system is teetering undering fem-rule, while those away from the cities (almost all white) are pretty much just waiting for it all to crash to get them off their backs and live their lives.
No, there are no “leaders” nor “master plan”, but there is social cohesion from a shared upbringing and culture.
And that may be enough.
My last three bosses in the corporate world were two women and one soft man. From the time I started in the corporate world in the mid 90s to when I left in 2014, a span of almost two decades, the percentage of women in management skyrocketed.
More and more people like me, White folks living out in the country and watching things fall apart, are at the stage of hoping things collapse sooner rather than later. In my 40s now, I am better suited to survive a society wide collapse than I will be in 20 years. It’s going to happen anyways, might as well get it started now.
That may be enough. Working from home sure doesn’t hurt, either.
And, at this point we are totally long empathy and altruism. The downside is that generally cures itself.
But the cure normally isn’t fun.
Great observation about the role of the district attorneys in this mess!
It takes at least two to make the system work, the police and the district attorney. If the district attorney is a leftist, diligent and aggressive policing won’t help much. Arrest all you like, the leftist DA will just let them go or barely charge.
In addition, many of these district attorneys are elected, and very few pay attention to the district attorney candidates at voting time. This is an oversight that some with wealth exploit and fund leftist candidates for this role knowing they’ll sneak in and do just as much damage to a city as if there were hardly any police.
This is why it’s vital for the Feds to be in these cities, not so they can be the new police as some claim, but so these criminals can be charged in the Federal system.
More on the DA problem in today’s post. Bad things. And it’s been planned for years.
a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers
There is no way to avoid competing with humans located outside your country. If you seal the border with an iron curtain you get the lousy results of East Germany. Borders to keep out workers or their work product are always a harm.
A country is not a family with 350 million members and a house yard the size of a continent. Human psychology doesn’t make country members relate to each other like family members.
I don’t think anyone said competition is bad. But the premise that if you let in a bunch of ‘off the books’ immigrants in, they will depress everyone else’s wages is true.
Anecdotal to be sure, but in my over 40 years of being in the work force, I have seen it first hand. Back when I was in HS, a summer job might be working in the fields on a tree farm, mowing the fields, fertilizing the trees, pruning, ect. Now, most if not all of those jobs are done by immigrants. HS kids won’t go out and bust their ass in the hot summer sun for barely over minimum wages.
In construction, for the first 10 or 15 years of my career, wages were steadily rising. But once ‘off the books’ immigrants got into it, wages stagnated and in some cases were depressed. The reason being that employers found that when they didn’t have to pay for benefits and in in some cases, liability insurance, they could underbid competitors who played by the rules, for pennies on the dollar.
To have a competitive work force, the same rules have to be followed by all sides. An apt analogy might be a baseball game where one team has to bat against a pitcher who throws 95 MPH fastballs and the other team gets to hit off a tee placed on home plate.
What is especially relevant is that price levels in this country are the result of decades of modern society. How much a house costs, or rent for an apartment, or a new car, is based on first world wages and expectations. When you bring in people with no connection to our society who are willing to live at much lower standards of living and work for drastically lower wages, of course it is going to depress wages. Telling working class Americans that the lifestyle they were led to believe could be theirs is out of reach because they have been replaced by third world serfs who will work cheaper isn’t a recipe for a stable society.
The American people are not just economic units that can be replaced by other economic units. Replacing one people for another is having a disastrous impact on our nation and it is hurting everyone other than the wealthiest in our society.
To have a [level playing field in the labor market], the same rules have to be followed by all sides.
I’m not arguing for two sets of legal rules, where the H1B visa employee has enough economic alternatives banned to be just one step above indentured. I’m not arguing for prison slave labor. But if SomeOtherCountry has turned their EthnicMinority into slaves to make iWidgets for export, then our labor force must adapt and do something else for a living than make domestic iWidgets. Attempting to alter the behavior of people in SomeOtherCountry with tariffs is always worse for us; tax collection is never an improvement. Nobody ever reveals what those protectionist tariff-taxes are spent on, do they? They certainly aren’t spent building a BrandNewAllRobotSteelMill.
Back when I was in HS
Right after WWII, low-skill US assembly line workers temporarily had middle class incomes because the USA had bombed all the competing first world factories into rubble. That’s not the steady-state result. Was it Irish laborers in New York who rioted because the free Black laborers were competing on price?
How much a house costs, or rent for an apartment, or a new car, is based on
…how much taxes, regulations, and other parasitic makework penalties they can convince you are important. The actual cost of constructing a building or an automobile has plummeted down into the “I can afford it as a hobby” range. For example, https://copenhagensuborbitals.com is constructing a manned suborbital rocket, redoing project Mercury, as a hot rod club. But working class Americans can’t erect a steel building kit on a slab and live in it?
That kind of libertarian gobbledygook used to sort of make sense until I really started thinking about it. Then I realized how dumb it is.
Do you live in a steel building on a slab? I don’t and I have no interest in doing so just so the shareholders of some corporation can make a few more bucks by importing people to do American jobs cheaper than Americans are willing to do them. Meanwhile as all of these cheap laborers come to the U.S. and eventually have children who are magically American citizens, we are on the verge of seeing single party control in America and kissing most of our most cherished civil liberties goodbye. I guess it is all worth it though as long as the banksters and hedge fund managers get a nice bonus.
Our economic policies should have one goal and one goal only: benefiting the American people.
(i)The actual cost of constructing a building or an automobile has plummeted down into the “I can afford it as a hobby” range.(/i)
Bullshit. You must be in the one percent. Have you shopped for a new vehicle or average home lately? The median home value where I live, rural SC, is $171,000. That’s not ‘hobby money.’ In other states, it’s much higher, over half a million for the average home in California.
A new or late model used car costs up in the range of $30,000 and up. That’s for a decent sized family vehicle or in my case, pickup truck. That’s not ‘hobby money.’ And yes, you can get sub compact vehicles for about half that, great for a single person who’s just getting started, but not worth a damn for a family of 4.
You say tariffs we set are bad and maybe they are in the short term. But they are good if they bring trading partners to the bargaining table where we can use our leverage to make deals that are more advantageous to American citizens and companies.
This administration has rolled back hundreds if not thousands of BS rules and regulations that previously made it hard for entrepreneurs to start businesses, and people and companies to build new homes and manufacturing plants.
Building a steel frame building on a concrete slab…sure, after you get permission from the EPA, get permission from the city/county for any land use/ zoning variations. Pay for access to the sewer system and for city water. Good for you if you live out in the country where you can put in a septic system and dig a well. Oh yeah, you have to pay special fees to do that too. Then you have to purchase a building permit before you can start construction.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that having to get a construction permit is necessarily a bad thing. If everyone has to follow the same codes, you get a safer building. (There’s that premise of everyone having to follow the same rules again.) I’m just saying that some of the extra fees and regulations are unnecessary and sometimes make home construction for the average person cost prohibitive.
That kind of libertarian gobbledygook used to sort of make sense until I really started thinking about it. Then I realized how dumb it is.
Those two sentences don’t falsify any of my points. It could be true, but you haven’t shown me an argument which proves that.
Do you live in a steel building on a slab?
I would if I could. Probably a Quonset hut type so it would be good against hurricanes. I got as far as being qualified for a mortgage as a self-builder of a Structural Insulated Panel kit house, completion guaranteed by the kit factory’s General Contractor. Met Miami wind code, had the docs for that, toured one already built in the county. Steel box ridge beam, open span, highly insulated because it didn’t have much air leakage. Erect in a week with a forklift and a buddy after the slab is poured. Would have gotten me an occupancy permit for one third of what the ordinary stick built houses were selling for, then I could have built walls inside at my convenience.
That project is too cool.
Great points.
Great discussion points, Anon!
Sure there is! Borders, tariffs, and trade restrictions do it all the time – if we had free trade now, the trade treaties wouldn’t be 3,000 pages long.
I’ll agree that East Germany was sub-optimal, and I’m not arguing for autarky. But we don’t have to consent to iPhones being made in China unless we want to – I read once upon a time that only saved about $5 per phone.
There is an economic cost to this, but also an economic benefit. A healthy middle class should also include a healthy factory population, too. It matters.
A country isn’t a family – sure. But a nation is, it’s in the name, and speaks to birth. If it didn’t matter, we could replace everyone in the United States with 350 million people at random and expect the same outcome.
But we can’t.
Thank-you for the very kind words!
Joe, thank you for the inspiration.
Portland is one of the whitest cities in the US. I live in one of the Blackest counties of the US. As far as I know, everybody gets along pretty well here. I’ve talked with cops of various ethnicity, and I’ve had sketchy neighbors of various ethnicity. I’m beginning to think that the white Portland protesters are so racist that they’re afraid of the Blacks they don’t know and are desperate to appease them before “justice is done regarding their guilty white privilege”.
One of the racist principles that they implicitly endorse is that “Black” is a category apart from the rest of us. Was Barack Obama the son of a Kenyan man and an American woman, or was he just “Black”? I’ve heard that white supremacists were excited about the potential of DNA testing to trace the origins of their “awesome whiteness”, until too many tests came back affirming at least one drop of African blood in their system. So, in their absurd racial classification system, they were “Black”.
The DNA testing companies have admitted to falsifying their results to make almost every white person a little bit black.
I didn’t know that but I would have bet everything I owned that those tests were rigged. How does someone who comes from a European family that came after the end of slavery and never had a single African ancestor end up with African ancestry? I suspect that they can identify the dominant traits and then just randomize the rest to make it seem like we are all related.
How does a European family include African ancestry? Simple. Africa and Europe have been geographically connected, and trading with each other, for all of history. I more interesting question is, “why are they NOT more homogeneous?” My hunch is that dark-skinned people couldn’t survive at high latitudes, due to impaired vitamin-D synthesis and resulting health effects (esp. respiratory illness), and light-skinned people couldn’t tolerate the direct sunshine near the equator. But that wouldn’t keep a dark-skinned sailor from leaving some DNA behind in Antwerp, London, or Copenhagen.
Do you have a citation for that? I’ve been looking around, and found lots of fraud claims about “DNA and medical issues”, or “does one qualify for a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise if the DNA says 6% indigenous and 4% African”, and the under-representation of non-Europeans in the databases, but nothing about bogus DNA reports indicating false ancestry.
But my real point is, there’s no objective standard for deciding who is Black and who is white, and who is Other.
Me? I start with Marxists.
And I’m working on a Marxist post. Probably three weeks out.
The genetic misfire spawn of sixties poseurs who became the man in order to burn it all down. They have no plan other than the old stale enrich ourselves and most favored apparatchiks.
Useful idiots really believe that they will rule over fiefdoms like Gauleiters and won’t figure it out until the firing squad is pulling the bolts back.
The elect Joe Biden or these cities will burn extortion is laughable but we’ve reached full mongoloid and anything is possible.
The turd worlders and Red Guards true believer purity fanatics won’t be controlled by the CPUSA.
Even if the basement hologram is pushed across the finish line to warm a seat for comrade Kamala or Duckworth this won’t end well.
They still want to burn it down – and their grandkids are doing it . . . .