RSS
A few more observations from the 2018 midterms:
– We hear a lot about the educational divide. Democrats are increasingly winning the college-educated while Republicans are increasingly winning those without college degrees.
That’s descriptive when it comes to whites (including Jews). It’s not so with non-whites, though:
– While higher educational attainment is inversely correlated with voting Republican among whites, higher income remains positively correlated with it.
Today’s archetypal Republican is the master plumber who owns twenty work trucks. The archetypal Democrat is the barista at Starbucks with a PhD in women’s studies. The master plumber’s doctor and the his employees fall somewhere in between.
– Sixteen nations, under no god, divisible, with liberty and justice for none. These disUnited States of moribund America:
Ignore the crazy talk about political dissolution on the horizon. What do you mean people living in America don’t agree on anything? They agree on this, that the country is becoming more and more divided by the day! Really, nothing to worry about. Just fifty million more Africans, fifty million more Latin Americans, fifty million more Asians, fifty million more Muslims and everything will be perfectly fine!
– Relatedly, the decline of the moderate (full exit polling data was unavailable for 2002 and appears to be incomplete for 2010 as well):
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Persian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
The black educational divide looks small enough there that it's probably just noise, as for the Hispanics, it might be explained by the correlation between college education and belonging to one of the more conservative groups like Cubans, Colombians or Venezuelans.
"doctor and his employees
Boy, talk about "heritage America"!
Doctors are low level employees now — barely able to tell nurses what to do given that they're all, nurses, doctors and everyone else in contact with patients, "health care deliverers" subservient to the explosively bloated bureaucracy's insatiable hunger for more government money, and all encumbrances that go with it.
It would be interesting to see how people define "liberal" and "conservative" in polls showing "conservatives" outnumbering "liberals" by a relatively constant margin as they both increasingly absorb "moderates".
It would be interesting to see how people define "liberal" and "conservative"
__________________________________
Yes, indeed. That's eye-catching. Simple extrapolation says "we win." I don't think it's quite that simple.
Why not?
It's an old story: the people pass a law preserving this or that societal standard, the commanding heights of culture and judiciary overrule it by fiat. Been going on my whole life.
I find that a tremendously encouraging graph. I don't want to have to live through continental Yugoslavia, but if it happens, Stalin did say that quantity has a quality all its own.
Epi, what do you Think about Ron Unz's thesis that the US will follow California and that there won't be much disharmony. He makes a parallell to Pete Wilson in that the GOP had a short-lived moment of immigration activism but this denied down and racial relations are now good.
@ Anonymous:
Speaking for myself not AE, and without predicting the future, I note that California has a number of unique factors that make it a poor bellweather for the rest of the US. These include:
– An extreme bubble economy based on the output of Hollywood and Silicon Valley and the accompanying bubble tax base which can subsidize and hide an awful lot of disfunction
– Quality of life factors like climate and beauty that keep residents with options in state beyond the point at which that is economically "rational"
– A preportionally small and politically irrelevant black population
– Distorting measures like extreme rent control and property taxes capped at 1978 levels
For those reasons I don't buy the 'California can be a model for the future of your state' idea.
Both Romney/Clinton and Obama/Trump voters will have to become consistent Republican voters, in addition obviously to Romney/Trump voters. The "suburban" white voters who dislike Trump mostly dislike his style rather than his policies, in my estimation. The party needs leaders with the policies of Trump and the demeanor of Kasich.
Why does it never occur to any GOP politician that perhaps we should *raise* the fertility rate of GOP-voting demographics?
https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-2020-presidential-election-chances-86143c8b-9045-414d-b61a-80d67be9107a.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic
@ Jim:
"how people define "liberal" and "conservative" "….
Trouble is, "liberals" mostly came to mean, in the Obama years, SJWist implicit, but emphatic, hate of whites and Western Civ, esp. its males.
And now, they focus this hate against Trump, the best known "champion" of (DWMs and) Live WMs.
Whereas, "conservative" now mostly means (only) some vague discomfort, with this ever-more spiteful SJWism.
While "conservatives" are bitterly divided (e.g. between CivNats and alt-Right), about such issues as the JQ, "liberals" increasingly know that they hate all of Western Civ (esp. LMWs, incl. Jews), and esp. CivNats and alt-Righters.
This above reply to Jim was from me.
I messed up the login.
Trust in institutions (h/t Greer)
https://bakercenter.georgetown.edu/aicpoll/
Major warning signs for a push against Big Tech, normies are not drinking from the same well as activists. Only Facebook has collapsed in trust.
GOP needs to get over this military worship, no one with politically incorrect opinions will ever make general in this country. Good sign that GOP voters hold the press in contempt, GOP pols need to catch on. No elected GOP official should ever talk to a left-wing media source. GOP voters trust colleges more than unions, that needs to change.
Hats off to the 32% of Millenials and some Zeds that are sceptical of democracy. Most of these people are probably DSA-communists rather than LKY-style fascists, but that's a rare positive indicator.
A substantial number of Dems think that "millions of illegal votes were cast in '16". Two possible conclusions, one that they don't care, two that they think it was Russia that made the illegal votes.
snorlax,
Yeah, it's not definitive one way or another. Among "people of color" on the whole though there is a positive correlation between educational attainment and voting R. Not sure what if anything this means beyond the fairly obvious point that being liberal has more virtue-signalling value among whites than it does among non-whites.
Jim,
It wasn't that clearly written but what I meant was that the master plumber's employee and also the master plumber's doctor are both somewhere in between the master plumber and the women's studies barista.
Duke,
Sadly I suspect that "conservative" in this context would look a lot like "moderate" ten years prior and "liberal" twenty years prior.
Anon/Jig,
Are racial tensions low in California? Lower than they were a couple decades ago, maybe, because the state is less black now than it was then, but outside of the South I'm not sure of a state I'd identify as having more racial issues than California does. When it comes to Coalition of the Fringes internecine fighting–between blacks and Hispanics, and between blacks and Asians–I'm not sure any state in the country has it worse than California does.
The state is also, despite a lot of desirable real estate, financially unsalvageable. Only Illinois is arguably in worse shape than California is. Without Hollywood and Silicon Valley–which the rest of the country doesn't have–the state would be bankrupt without a line of credit.
bates,
I think you're spot on. Trump is a transitional figure who has provided a template. More savvy operators are taking notes.
216,
Steve Sailer has been writing about how affordable family formation is the GOP's winning ticket, politically. They won't listen. It's why we call it The Stupid Party.
Likely they think it was illegal aliens and they don't care (or tacitly support).
AE,
California has a top income tax rate of 13%, while Texas and Florida have no state income tax. What happens when a perma-left government is installed in those states and moves to impose CA-level wealth redistribution and gun banning?
If you are right-wing and you hate CA politics, you could cash out of higher real estate values and move to another state. If that occurs at a nationwide level, its Belarus or bust.
"Both Romney/Clinton and Obama/Trump voters will have to become consistent Republican voters, in addition obviously to Romney/Trump voters. The "suburban" white voters who dislike Trump mostly dislike his style rather than his policies, in my estimation. The party needs leaders with the policies of Trump and the demeanor of Kasich. "
Dude, hardly anyone actually likes the substance of what's happened under Trump. In that must-read Unz article, he succinctly details how Trump's policies are largely in line with what the GOP has been doing (with the cooperation of Silents and Boomers) for 40 years. The only difference is that fear of China has given us some token trade reform (though fittingly enough, some of the new manufacturing in the US is actually being done by foreigners, see Foxconn), but that's propably on account of the Pentagon wanting to turn up the heat on China, as opposed to actual concern for worker well-being. Net immigration levels probably are only going to be slightly smaller than the record highs first seen in the late 1980's and very early 1990's, with a brief pause before levels soared under GW Bush and in Obama's second term.
There's been more tax cuts for the wealthy, as if they deserve them, and this after 40 years of neo-liberalism have clearly led to the wealthy stealing from the lower class, off-shoring jobs or on-shoring foreign workers, and doing nearly nothing to stop the overall emphasis on inflating irresponsible bubbles related to finance and real estate.
I hate to be a name caller, but only a culture warrior derp or an autistic white nationalist could actually believe at this point that the continuation of social darwinism at the hands of the GOP is going to pay off for our well-being in the long run. Nobody is going to give a fuck about abortion, tax cuts for the rich, or blaming non-whites for dummocrat success when our economy and overall fiscal health are wracked by military pork, piss-poor wages (or no jobs at all for some), massive debt levels, impossible to afford health care, and housing that's like 20X more expensive than what it was in the 1970's(the last decade before elites starting goosing up property values). This is not going to end well, financially or politically for America. Americans were patient in the 1930's because our leaders did a decent job in the 1910's and 1920's (really, dating back to Teddy Roosevelt busting trusts even before those decades).
The Dems still suck, too, but the good news is that the liberal party almost by default cares more about the sentiment of young voters than does the conservative party. The conservatives born in the 1940's-1960's are going to "principal" their party to the political margins not because of racial demographics, but because they've refused to relent in their worship of social Darwinism (attacking gov. programs, safety net spending, infrastructure spending, labor unions, regulation of banks, regulation of immigration, and progressive taxation).
Eventually, the Dems will knock off the anti-white BS once they see how many white Millennials have switched affiliation since 2016. Millennials are already congenial to economic liberalism (and don't give a fuck about cultural issues to anywhere near the same degree that people over 50 do). It's not difficult to welcome them back into the fold. Whining about younger generations "stealing" your party's clout because muh racial demographics durrrr!!!! isn't going to make any difference, nor are you being intellectually honest considering that ethnically similar American generations have not always been xeroxes of each other. Don't let Silents and Boomers tell you that a 100% white millennial generation is going to be the same as their own generations. That's imbecilic and naive.
For the Reaganite horseshit about muh tax dollars goin' to lazy blacks, keep in mind that in the ethnically diverse 1930's-1960's, Americans reach a (relative) consensus that to run a half-way decent country, that meant putting muh tax dollars toward social welfare programs and regulation of business practices and industry, so as to keep the playing field more honest, less cut-throat, and less liable to produce corruption and treason (it's clear that in the last 30 years, corporate America has habitually sold Americans out and in the process opened us up to being spied on and exploited by foreigners).
BTW, the idea that non-whites are stealing the West Coast would come as a shock to residents of Washington and Oregon who've been voting Democrat in pres. elections since 1988. These are states that were 90% white in the early 90's. Once the Cold War waned, they largely fell out of step with the GOP.
Per patronage theory, and (white) ethnic folkways, The Pentagon still mattered a great deal to California in the late 80's, so they voted GOP in 1988. CA had more patronage with the military than did Washington or Oregon. In addition, the coastal Northwest has whites that are more puritan/Nordic than the more Scots-Irish whites who still played a big role in the culture of Southern and Central California in the 1980's (Orange County became notorious for it's Neo-Nazi punk culture by about 1980).
"Steve Sailer has been writing about how affordable family formation is the GOP's winning ticket, politically. They won't listen. It's why we call it The Stupid Party."
I'm coming around to the idea that AFF is over-rated, in so far as the GOP's patronage network has narrowed further and further to the Plains, the lightly populated upper Western interior/Alaska, and to the generally affordable Southern states. California was much more expensive to live in, in the 1980's, than say, Minnesota. Yet which state voted GOP more often in the 1970's and 80's? We also can see that whiter and more Scots-Irish Appalaicha has generally been more amenable to economic liberals than has the blacker and more Cavalier Deep/Coastal South. AFF has never been difficult in Appalachia, but modern political patronage has resulted in one party overdoing cultural liberalism (the Dems) which has alienated The South/Appalachia, while the other party (the GOP) overdoes economic conservatism, thereby alienating tons of working and middle class people who don't depend on oil, agriculture, or the military to make a living. And of course, the cultural conservatism of the GOP alienates many well-educated people.
The reason the GOP is dying on the vine is because they've narrowed patronage to family values cucks (who are disproportionately lower middle class and old), military installations and veterans, and the oil and farm industries neither of which employ all that many people (one DUH! thing is that media, entertainment, and non-military tech have at least managed to grow and employ more people, including Americans, than they did 10-20 years ago, meanwhile agribusiness has seething contempt for Americans, because they still resent how much American slaughterhouse workers made in the 1960's and 70's). One GOP patronage sector has contracting employment opportunities for Americans (ya know, people who vote), while the Dem aligned sector(s) have employment growth. Hell, you can hardly blame social media employees for trying to tilt elections to the Dems, given that, ya know, the GOP is effectively irrelevant to their sector. BTW, while the GOP bitches about media and tech not being on their side, what are they doing to rein in arrogant and corrupt elites in agribusiness and the Pentagon? The GOP's sectors are, on the whole, more damaging to us. True, Wall Street has a bit of a lean to the Left, but the reason our national deficit is at insane levels is because of Pentagon pork, which has begat foolish coups and wars around the globe.
Thus far neither party wants to engage in populist expansion of patronage, which would cause both parties to rise in esteem comparable to what they generally enjoyed in the late 1930's-1980's (severe legislative gridlock did not become a problem until the 1990's, due to Boomers having more clout and the end of the Cold War)
TL;DR: AFF is a rough proxy for regions that include the GOP's patronage networks.
Feryl,
The left has stolen several elections in WA/OR, made easy by the fact that the states use all mail ballots. WA has a major naval base (Kitsap) and a major army base (Lewis). The GOP does bad in part because the unions (Boeing) are stronger. The states are also tax oddities, WA has no income tax, OR has no sales tax.
The big shift was the importation of visa workers by the tech industry, and the corresponding chain migration. As West Coast states, there is also a legacy Asian/Hispanic population. There has also been lots of Hispanics brought in in the agricultural interior. The GOP wins these areas thanks to siesta culture. Also the migration of Californians into these states that don't want to leave the West Coast.
If Gingrich hadn't cucked out on immigration, these areas would still send GOP Senators from time to time in the way that demographically similar Wisconsin does. Rural whites may have taken some of the tech jobs, or the tech industry may have a bigger presence in the Midwest.
The GOP lost the WA state Senate in an election between a Manka Dhingra and a Jinyoung Eungland.
"Eventually, the Dems will knock off the anti-white BS once they see how many white Millennials have switched affiliation since 2016. Millennials are already congenial to economic liberalism (and don't give a fuck about cultural issues to anywhere near the same degree that people over 50 do). "
C'mon man, no one can be that dense. As whites shrink as a portion of the population, it signals weakness. That means that anti-white sentiment identifies.
The shift from 2016 to 18 wasn't Romney voting Millenials deciding that they really need a student loan bailout from Ocasio Cortez. The Romney voters that flipped to Clinton are middle class suburban GenX/Boomers that loathe the GOP for cultural reasons, specifically in Kansas they want a lavishly funded education sector.
If the GOP nominee in 2020 is Nikki Haley, yes, I'd vote Dem down the ballot. But barring a recession setting in, the Dems will at best maintain their existing Millenial edge which has to do with lingering rage over Iraq/Recession.
We can point out that straight white male Gavin Newsom won the CA Governorship. But he was the only white male on the Dem ticket. The entire existence of the Dems is anti-white racism. Nothing else unifies them. This only changes if a younger generation of non-whites shames the older generation for being anti-white. But why would they? National Review won't even do it. And why else would whites feel "less guily" in a more leftist future?
It never ceases to amaze me that white conservatives lament whites who don't "understand" why they ought to vote for the GOP. Gee, maybe if it was that obvious, they'd actually do it. Perhaps if de-regulation and regressive taxes hadn't wrecked the working class in the 1990's, and eventually the middle class in the 2010's, more whites would be willing to drop their skepticism of the GOP. Trump won some of these people by saying something besides "tax cuts" and "de-regulation", but has since lost most of them (and in turn, some feel alienated by both parties) by not delivering the goods.
"Are racial tensions low in California? Lower than they were a couple decades ago, maybe, because the state is less black now than it was then, but outside of the South I'm not sure of a state I'd identify as having more racial issues than California does. When it comes to Coalition of the Fringes internecine fighting–between blacks and Hispanics, and between blacks and Asians–I'm not sure any state in the country has it worse than California does."
I think some "woke" Boomers like Unz realize that Millennials have righted many of the wrongs of the late 1960's-1990's. Back then, aging people were often afraid of teenagers and young adults, because of how bad crime and violence got. "Rumbles" involving rowdy bands of teenagers (including white ones) were not uncommon at that time, and many kids more or less enjoyed the possibility of scaring other people, esp. adults, even if they didn't necessarily mean any real harm. When movies like The Warriors (1979), Boulevard Nights (early 80's), and Boyz in the Hood (1991) were released, theaters often became sites of brawls, knifings, and shootings. Death Wish and Dirty Harry were popular with older audiences, who wanted to fight back against the seemingly endless wave of young criminals.
As for CA being less black, well, in urban areas across America there was utter carnage from the mid-1970's-mid 1990's, including areas that were very Hispanic. Tensions between black and Hispanic neighborhoods were very high during that era. NYC also had a lot of NWNB diversity by the late 70's, which didn't appreciably make things any better. Gentrification tied to the 80's Wall Street boom in NYC helped the city's crime rates fall faster than in other places in the early 1990's, said gentrification priced out difficult people of all races.
"C'mon man, no one can be that dense. As whites shrink as a portion of the population, it signals weakness. That means that anti-white sentiment identifies."
America's non-WASP population soared in the early 20th century, but that didn't give the Dems any greater impulse to demonize WASPs. The whole New Deal coalition was built on smoothing out ethnic and regional differences by focusing on economic populism.
Granted, our elites are much stupider now than they were in the 1930's. Therein lies the problem. Both parties may never take a hint about the right thing to do, but even then, the Dems have several obvious advantages built-in, none more so than the GOP's stance on innumerable economic and cultural issues being dreadfully embarrassing to many people born since the mid-1970's. You've got one party sponsoring some perhaps misguided or ineffective legislation to reform the situation, while one party puts itself in a major hole right off the bat by not even going as far as to acknowledge certain realities that most normies are aware of. To use one example, scientific understanding of the basic concept of evolution was common among the middle-upper class GI Generation; by the 1980's, the Christian Right (at the behest of Silents and Boomers) was attacking the very concept of evolution, on the grounds that it erred from bible teachings and gave room for the idea that man descended from apes. The Millennial generation is the generation that is the most rational and least devoted to religious ideology since the GIs.We've all been there before, talking to people over 45-50 years old, trying to get them to listen to reason, but they instead inject sentiment, ideology, and personal affect/experience in order to beat us rhetorically. It's frustrating, but in a well-functioning era, older adults would be heartened by younger people who are capable of feats of logical thought and understanding of the tangible realm. That's what happened in the 1920's-1950's, when once zealous and emotional older generations became respectful of the scientific and intellectual achievements of GIs. Nowadays, arrogant blowhard Boomers keep giving us one reason after another to hate their stubbornness and ignorance (hey Christian Right morons, ya think attacking the concept of evolution will remain electorally viable?)
Neil Howe and David Kaiser (two Boomers) have acknowledged that scientific literacy among politicians has been plummeting over the last 40 years, as one proudly ignorant generation (Boomers) insists that we get elites who are long on blather and short on knowledge of how stuff actually works. They said the GIs largely created the cult of the expert, the studied and careful analyst, in the 1920's-1950's, which Boomers grew up resenting as impersonal, cold, and inhumane.
"The left has stolen several elections in WA/OR, made easy by the fact that the states use all mail ballots. WA has a major naval base (Kitsap) and a major army base (Lewis). The GOP does bad in part because the unions (Boeing) are stronger. The states are also tax oddities, WA has no income tax, OR has no sales tax."
Perhaps the GOP just says "fuck it" WRT these states, since they lack the correctly flavored "values voter". The GOP, in an era of increasing division based on "values", is extending a middle finger to the West Coast by giving so much clout to fundamentalist imbeciles who peak in the South, and also have a sizable presence in the Midwest. No matter one's stand on matters morality, is finding one's fellow Americans to be that sinful worth the loss of regional unity? Again, the culture and generation's that gave us New Deal America, which then persisted into the early 80's, was about economic security, not about giving the floor to religious whackos (or atheist crusaders, for that matter).
Nonetheless, I don't think the GOP is that stupid as to jeopardize an entire region by letting fraud slide. Which leaves one probablility: the rise of the Religious Right, and end of the Cold War, alienated the West Coast, w/the more Nordic northern coast exiting the party in 1988, and the more Scots-Irish California exiting in 1992.
216,
When de Leon closes the gap with Feinstein completely we will find out. We won't have to wait all that long.
Feryl,
I've seen zero evidence that older people care more about social issues than younger people do. No one cares about social issues as much as millennials do according to every poll I've ever seen on the subject. Vox, HuffPo, etc–all these millennial webzines are virtually nothing but non-stop culture war stuff (of which I'm including issues of race and gender). The economic treatment is rarely anything beyond "all people deserve a living wage".
I also have to push back on the pro-regulation stuff, even if it lets the mask slip a bit. I run a business and have nearly fifty employees now (thanks to some of those stupid regulations, it likely won't ever actually get to fifty). I have to deal with government officials a couple of times a month on average, more frequently during certain times of the year. They are nearly all incompetent seat warmers and the few who do have something on the ball are lazy. None of them add any value to anything. That's not just a lolbertarian talking point, it's the story you'll get from just about everyone who deals with government officials in any capacity on a regular basis. Anecdotally I will push back against the stereotype of them being DMV assholes–most are pleasant and cheery or at least not especially unfriendly.
Maybe there is something structural there that can be systematically changed, though I'm not sure what it is. Most of these do-nothings are paid quite well, with generous benefits and ridiculously easy jobs that don't require them to do anything. They are less white than the broader population but the overall assessment isn't attributable to that alone.
Re: the military, Hawaii and Washington have two of the largest military presences in the country (per capita and absolutely). My social circle is mostly middle/upper middle class white. A lot of the guys are in tech because it has a big presence where I live. They hated Kevin Yoder for the H1B scam he ran on behalf of the tech companies, but I rarely get the sense that people vote based on perceived special benefits for the sectors they're in.
One of the reasons I stopped reading Agnostic (besides him regularly being wrong about so much) is that he sees everything through an almost Marxist lens. That's not what motivates most people. Hell, most millennials will tell you that's not what motivates them if you ask!
"If Gingrich hadn't cucked out on immigration, these areas would still send GOP Senators from time to time in the way that demographically similar Wisconsin does. Rural whites may have taken some of the tech jobs, or the tech industry may have a bigger presence in the Midwest."
Well, The Midwest has a low profile. It attracts relatively few elites compared to the Northeast, South, and West Coast, and that's probably as good an explanation as any for why media/entertainment/tech have for the most part not really made that big of a presence in the Midwest. To that point, the Roseanne revival did best in the Midwest, while the South avoided it. As I recall, Roseanne takes place in Chicagoland, which is the elite capital of the Midwest….And yet….Even Chicagoland Midwesterners have a different flavor than what you find in NYC, Atlanta, or San Francisco. Less pretensions, less bullshit.
Agnostic made the point that sitcoms set in the 1970's and 80's weren't afraid to be set in the Midwest (WKRP in Cincinnati, Mary Tyler Moore, Laverne and Shirley, Bob Newhart etc.). And Bob Newhart and the actor who played Andy Travis were all legit Midwesterners. As you get to the 1990's, status consciousness has risen so high that Roseanne is the exception to the rule set by Frasier (Seattle, spun away from the East Coast setting of Cheers), Friends/Seinfeld (NYC), Full House (San Fran), etc.
Dating back to the 80's, however, you see an obvious growing "hype" surrounding the non-Midwest. Mariel boat-lift era Miami defined the early 1980's (with the Cuban arrivals being perhaps the first major immigration slap in the face of native born Americans after the calm of 1925-1979), NYC defined the late 1980's, and Seattle defined the early 1990's. Fittingly, director Micheal Mann, a native of Chicago, had a 1981 movie set in Chicago (Thief), but subsequent works (Miami Vice, Manhunter, Heat) all heavily feature Florida or California.
"I also have to push back on the pro-regulation stuff, even if it lets the mask slip a bit. I run a business and have nearly fifty employees now (thanks to some of those stupid regulations, it likely won't ever actually get to fifty). I have to deal with government officials a couple of times a month on average, more frequently during certain times of the year. They are nearly all incompetent seat warmers and the few who do have something on the ball are lazy. None of them add any value to anything. That's not just a lolbertarian talking point, it's the story you'll get from just about everyone who deals with government officials in any capacity on a regular basis. Anecdotally I will push back against the stereotype of them being DMV assholes–most are pleasant and cheery or at least not especially unfriendly."
Yes, it's not the quantity, it's the quality. I recently heard another business owner say that since the 80's it's been harder and harder to run a business. Mind you, the super elite big companies can afford to higher lawyers and consultants to comply with or ward off regulation. But that's just more evidence that in a corrupt era, things are run in such a way as to the big elites continue to hang onto, or have more of, the privilege they started out with. Which comes at the expense of lower class people.
Bureaucratic bloat has be dealt with, as does legalism. But that would require flushing out the useless Silents and Boomers (Silents far exceeded earlier generations in producing lawyers, and Boomers have followed the same path), who so often act in such a way as to justify their ego and (too-big) salary, rather than doing any thing that's actually useful.
Per usual: Never have two generations been given so much, yet done so little that's worth a damn, as the Silents and Boomers.
Agnostic himself has said that he refuses to get involved with any institution on an academic or intellectual level, because he knows that the older personnel aren't listening to, let alone stepping aside for, younger generations. You need only re-read generational cycles and history, to get the picture: We went from competence and grace in leadership (GIs), to timidity and insecurity (Silents, who started the plastic surgery revolution), to bluster far exceeding knowledge or compassion (Boomers). Gen X-ers and Millennials have been frozen out from any lasting influence, and by the time older generation's have finally died off, this country might be a smoking crater.
I've seen zero evidence that older people care more about social issues than younger people do. No one cares about social issues as much as millennials do according to every poll I've ever seen on the subject. Vox, HuffPo, etc–all these millennial webzines are virtually nothing but non-stop culture war stuff (of which I'm including issues of race and gender). The economic treatment is rarely anything beyond "all people deserve a living wage".
That's all SJW horse-shit targeting an extremely niche audience, who's affluence gives them great cultural visibility.
And Christ, is whining about feminism or racism less agreeable than the apocalyptic rantings of middle-aged people that you must remember from the 80's and 90's? Being told that heavy metal and RPG's would send you to hell is the kind of thing that Gen Z probably finds so barbarically stupid that they wouldn't believe it was commonplace just 30 years ago. BTW, culture war hysteria drastically rises with income among Millennials. That's the opposite pattern you see with Boomers, within whom the most retarded rantings were loudest from the working class, who always whined that their paycheck was going to lazy porch monkeys, and that Boy George on MTV was telling their kids that it was ok to be gay.
And I hate to patronize, but you have to break free of the chains that Boomers place on you. The Boomers have no right to judge any other generation, nor do they deserve to hold onto the power that they had no business being given in the first place.
AE,
A certain part of Millenial rage (though perhaps as we are better behaved, we are just a little bit upset) is rooted in student loan repayments, which are also sapping fertility*
I agree with you that most Millennials are not particularly anti-corporation, WokeCapital has made sure of it. Most people probably want a job and stock options at Google, they don't want to dismantle it and unionize the successor corporations. But a point in the other direction is that DSA is now probably the most popular political organizations on campuses. One point in the direction of the well behaved Millenials restoring civic organizations.
The GOP made major errors in not tying the corporate tax cut to any better behavior by corporations. An incentive could be given for corporations to pay off student loans, grant worker representation on boards, and bar the use of diversity programs. The oddity of the press of the tax cut is that everyone indicates it went to the rich, when most of the cuts were to the corporate rate rather than the individual which are actually "temporary". The average Millennial probably can't explain the links to stock buybacks.
One surprisingly under reported part of the tax cut was the estate tax cuts, which should presumably attract the highest anger (beside the Cuck Inc. position that it targets "farmers"). The Clinton plan was pushing considerable increases in the estate tax, which presumably will test well in the even more anti-oligarch electorate of 2020. The Senate GOP would be wise (heh) to cough this up and a 44% top bracket to the Dem House in exchange for the revenue being sent into entitlements.
216,
I wonder how much of DSA's popularity on college campuses is due to its platform of forgiving student loan debt and making college free. It is hard to compete with that but I'm skeptical of its staying power.
Feryl,
Yes, I think it is less agreeable than the 90s flipouts because this cannot be placated. There is almost literally nothing a heterosexual white man can do to please HuffPo/Vox. It's no longer about behaviors–however absurd the concerns about the behaviors were–it's now about identity, something that cannot be escaped. In the 80s and 90s, the schoolmarms scolded you for what you did. Now the new church ladies at Vox scold you for who you are. That's worse.
Feryl,
What do you make of the rising labor participation rate of senior citizens? Should we raise retirement age to 70? Or lower it back to 65 and make it mandatory? (our generations retire at 67).
Feryl,
And please don't worry about patronizing or otherwise potentially being insulting. I know you always come from a place of good faith and I would never take anything you write in any other way than that.
WRT regulation, keep in mind that it isn't the principle that people are always reacting to these days, it's the actual practice. GOP rhetoric about busting through regulation had greater appeal when that rhetoric was used during a time of greater prosperity (the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's). One must keep in mind, however, that continuously repeating the same crap for decades on end will become a turn off, because many people will start to wonder, "what's really happening in practice"? In practice, the 80's-2000's were an era of GOP dominance and middle class driven social Darwinism, where regardless of ostensible ideology or goals, the cold reality is that leadership and institutions were failing on account of generational sociopathy and delusion. But back then, nobody really cared because enough people were getting enough to get by.
In the 1970's, we were at an ideological stand-still because people thought they were doing worse than they were in the 1950's and 60's, yet it wasn't clear how to proceed. Once the 1980's economic boom took off in 1983, that's when the middle class totally bought into the idea that weakening organized labor, cutting taxes on rich people, and off-shoring more jobs was acceptable….Because it worked for a decent number of people. But decades on, the neo-liberal program when taken too far becomes a disaster for working to middle class people. No where is that more evident than in health care, in which the dreaded "socialist" countries have governments minding the store and preventing it from being robbed by cold-hearted CEOs, while capitalist paradise (crony capitalist) America lets most people get raped.
"Yes, I think it is less agreeable than the 90s flipouts because this cannot be placated. There is almost literally nothing a heterosexual white man can do to please HuffPo/Vox. It's no longer about behaviors–however absurd the concerns about the behaviors were–it's now about identity, something that cannot be escaped. In the 80s and 90s, the schoolmarms scolded you for what you did. Now the new church ladies at Vox scold you for who you are. That's worse."
According to Pat Buchanan and Ron Unz (and well, just about anyone giving you an objective history of the late 60's and 70's), we have a long…..A real long way to go before this country's interpersonal thermostat is turned up to the level it was at around circa 1970, when according to Pat, there were bombings in the 4 digit range (four!) across America.
This isn't to say that communist or fascist goon squads can't arise, and create the worse social atmosphere that America has seen since, not the early 1970's, but rather, the 1870's and ensuing decades, when the Klan peaked and the lingering bitterness over the Civil War and Reconstruction resulted in:
-An assassination of President Lincoln
-Frequent vigilante killings and torture, most famously of "uppity" blacks but really, there were plenty of other victims too
-Massive levels of social and economic inequality, which weren't widely appreciated until circa 1900, and even at that it wasn't until the Great Depression that all elites agreed to change their ways.
Boomers are on the verge of pushing America to it's lowest social and political point since the late 19th century.
AE,
The growing bimodal distribution of wealth is an economic phenomenon that has been observed across countries. That more than anything is why DSA, Corbyn, Ardern, have arisen. The NDP and AUS Labor appear riven with factionalism right now, but all it takes is a charismatic leader to repeat the process. A point against Feryl that Trudeau is still popular despite being a centrist on fiscal matter, social matter is beloved by youth.
Youth in tuition-free EU countries seem to go towards the Greens, but the far-left is showing a slight increase in polling. Euroboomers are not usually that into the extremist parties, except in the UK. Important to note that youth are not particularly inclined to the far-right, its a GenX working class phenomenon. Continuing the "well behaved Millennials meme", perhaps we are showing how non-ideological we are by favoring the problem-solving Greens (I would vote for an right-wing pro-nuke Green Party, fwiw)
"I agree with you that most Millennials are not particularly anti-corporation, WokeCapital has made sure of it. Most people probably want a job and stock options at Google, they don't want to dismantle it and unionize the successor corporations. But a point in the other direction is that DSA is now probably the most popular political organizations on campuses. One point in the direction of the well behaved Millenials restoring civic organizations."
Millennials heard about the Boomer unrest of the 60's and 70's, and lived through the nihilistic "wilding" of young Gen X-ers in the 80's and 90's.
It's hard to defend PC, but in defense of people born in the 80's, they remember the crude and nasty culture of teen Gen X-ers and are probably horrified by anything that smacks of the debased and degrading culture of the MTV Generation.
Boomers and X-ers were much more willing to aggressively attack authority structures and group-wide things. It's possible that Millennials want to avoid this excessive individualism, and reassert the importance of hierarchical boundaries and team-work (to move far beyond the 1970's chaos culture of "fluid" understanding of power dynamics, and certainly way beyond the culture of competitive insecurity and power seeking that the Boomers embraced in the 80's and have only shied away from recently due to sheer age). Remember the 80's sitcom called "Whose the Boss"? That's something that Boomers and X-ers frequently fought over; even as youngsters, those generations remember fighting with their siblings about who would get the last slice of pizza.
Of course, this chaotic and/or greedy approach to leadership and organization structure has led to our institutions being bloated, incoherent, wasteful, and even outright exploitative of the vulnerable.
Ultimately, WA and OR do not have the military as a fundamental part of their regional identity. It's not like it is in the South, where men frequently point out that every generation of their family, dating back to the colonial days, served. Nor is it like the Plains farm belt, a region that has always been tethered to large scale agriculture.
The West Coast was lightly settled before circa 1900. The military assumed a large presence there during the major WW2 effort, and the military remained a powerful force to local culture there well into the 1980's. Subsequent to the Cold War fading in the very late 80's, the West Coast continued to see massive growth, but it would be industries NOT fully connected to the military that really took off in the 1990's and subsequent decades.
So I'd still put West Coast alienation down to cultural factors (Religious Right annoying people) combined with economic factors (the military dominance of the West Coast's personality from circa 1945-1990 showing no signs of revival).
As for Hawaii: Whatever. It's the least culturally American American state.
Northeast: Finance first, media/entertainment/tech second.
South: Military first, but a rising presence of media/entertainment/tech.
West Coast: Tech first, everything else a distant second.
Midwest: Agriculture first, but this is of less value to the older, more populated states in the region. (e.g. Ohio, Indiana, Detroit, and Michigan).
A more realistic take on AE's dream scenario: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/maybe-its-time-for-america-to-split-up.html
Some Boomers wonder why the GOP loses elections
https://capitalandmain.com/will-new-york-fund-amazon-subsidies-or-student-debt-relief-1113
"Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim announced that he will introduce legislation to slash New York’s economic development subsidies and use the money to buy up and cancel student debt — a move he said would provide a bigger boost to the state’s economy."
If the rump of the NY GOP knows whats good for them, they vote with the socialists against the deal.
And demand self-determination as the next order of business.
AE I have a lot of experience with California and trust me, racial tensions are low. Granted it is almost all "artificial" but that's the situation.
Primarily, you have lack of proximity. If your view of California is NWA, Too short, Compton, Oakland, and the LA riots, update it!
Gentrification and immigration have pushed downscale blacks out of the places anyhwere near where whites and Asians live. They now live in certain remote enclaves on the far edge of the LA conurbation and the Bay Area – towns like Riverside, Adelanto, and Richmond that a visitor to California will never see, and a resident of the coast will only ever drive through. It's the end of a process that NY, DC, and Chicago are only beginning, and completely the opposite of the Midwest and South.
Asians don't raise a fuss and Hispanics tend not to either. And for those that do, it's California so activists are bought off with government and corporate sinicures.
I agree with AE that the social divisions are worse now than in the 90s and probably than the 60s-70s. If people aren't rioting and bombing as much now, its because they are pacified, for now, with social media, Netflix, pRon, and video games.
How can you compromise with a Vox editor? In addition to what AE pointed out about some classes of people being irredemable based on who they are, Ezra Klein literally said to Sam Harris that some topics (basically anything to the right of Biden) are not allowed to be discussd, under penalty of social ruin and violence. There is no middle ground.
Meanwhile the alt-right and Paleo-right are openly stating things (for example HBD and young Earth creationism, respectively) that they were only cagey about in decades past.
I see no avenue for compromise, which is especially depressing for a heterodox thinker like myself.
The emergence of the new media of printing led to 300 years of ideological conflict and death – the emergence of social media may lead to the same.
Unlike AE though I don't think that splitting ths US on red-blue lines will solve the problem. Can Steven Miller coexist with an antisemitic alt-righter? Can Farrakhan coexist with a Silicon Valley nerd? We would need like 10-12 countries.
Primarily, you have lack of proximity. If your view of California is NWA, Too short, Compton, Oakland, and the LA riots, update it!
Gentrification and immigration have pushed downscale blacks out of the places anyhwere near where whites and Asians live. They now live in certain remote enclaves on the far edge of the LA conurbation and the Bay Area - towns like Riverside, Adelanto, and Richmond that a visitor to California will never see, and a resident of the coast will only ever drive through. It's the end of a process that NY, DC, and Chicago are only beginning, and completely the opposite of the Midwest and South.
Asians don't raise a fuss and Hispanics tend not to either. And for those that do, it's California so activists are bought off with government and corporate sinicures.Replies: @Maus
Hey Jig, I'm betting you live in the coastal strip. Take a weekend vacation to the Central Valley. Half of Bakersfield (east of Hwy 99) looks like Mexico. Crime, particularly by Mexican gangs, is out of control. The white, more educated and affluent folk live west of Hwy 99 protected by a de facto apartheid. But it won't last as Hispanic demographics eventually swamp the city. Ask Victor Davis Hanson, he'd tell you that's what has already happened to the towns that cluster around Fresno, where populations that are 80-90% Mexican refuse to assimilate, demand considerable public resources, flood the schools with low-IQ students that have no hope of any job but agricultural labor awaiting them etc. Fewer blacks in CA decidely does not mean racial problems are reduced or manageable or amenable to any other pollyannaish stance. The state is going brown and down.
Jig,
We've passed the point of compromise quite some time ago. Don't be upset, that's how these things go.
This all could have been avoided if the average person was capable of understanding what they read in their history books. Anyone who thinks diversity is a strength needs a brick applied to their cranium until common sense returns.
"Jig, I'm betting you live in the coastal strip. Take a weekend vacation to the Central Valley. Half of Bakersfield (east of Hwy 99) looks like Mexico. Crime, particularly by Mexican gangs, is out of control. The white, more educated and affluent folk live west of Hwy 99 protected by a de facto apartheid. But it won't last as Hispanic demographics eventually swamp the city. Ask Victor Davis Hanson, he'd tell you that's what has already happened to the towns that cluster around Fresno, where populations that are 80-90% Mexican refuse to assimilate, demand considerable public resources, flood the schools with low-IQ students that have no hope of any job but agricultural labor awaiting them etc. Fewer blacks in CA decidely does not mean racial problems are reduced or manageable or amenable to any other pollyannaish stance. The state is going brown and down."
Is this really the case, or do you want it to happen? It's Alt-Reich fan-fic to compare the behavior of people under 40 these days (no matter their race) to what teens and young adults were doing in the 1970's. Another key difference is that these days, a lot of aging Boomers are still flying off the handle and shooting up country concerts, getting divorces, doing murder-suicides, and so forth. Whereas in the 60's and 70's, almost all of the trouble was caused by people under 40.
The 70's Zebra murders involved an organization of black radicals targeting and killing whites at random in San Francisco. Because of tight lips, and perhaps prosecutor cowardice, it's not clear just how many people did the killing, and how many victims there were, due to the variety of victims and differing causes of death, and blacks being uncooperative. But at least it's known that there was a conspiracy to pull this off, whereas in modern times I don't think anything comparable has happened (random d-bags going on shooting rampages is a horse of a different color).
It's possible that things could turn really ugly at some point, but we aren't there yet.
"Hats off to the 32% of Millenials and some Zeds that are sceptical of democracy. Most of these people are probably DSA-communists rather than LKY-style fascists, but that's a rare positive indicator."
I think "democracy" is conflated with neo-liberal crony capitalism, and giving too much leniency to corrupt assholes (meanwhile, Millennials are most against mass incarceration because they understand it to be yet another example of lower class people getting the shaft while elites keep skating away). Also, "democracy" has come to mean individualism, which people under 40 associate with the degeneracy of today's older generations.
I think that late Gen X-ers and Millennials want to get the bad taste of the neo-liberal era out of their mouths, and if that means taking away voting rights, free speech, confiscating wealth, etc. than so be it.
While there may be a loud minority of young Alt-Righters who want fascist totalitarianism, Millennials by and large skew much closer to hard Leftism. This also is in keeping with historical/cultural cycles; aging Boomers demanded (and received) economic conservatism and (relative) cultural conservatism (the child abuse hysteria and Satanic panic of the 80's and 90's, rejection of Gen X nihilism, ramped up hostility toward street criminals and abortion in comparison to the 60's and 70's, etc.). The neo-liberal and Christian Right era of the 1980's-present is vehemently despised by Millennials (even the Alt-Right has a majority skeptical of the importance of traditional religion). Keep in mind that Reagan era values were a conscious backlash toward the growing liberalism of the 1930's-1970's.
We're on a pendulum. The Pendulum swung Left in the 1930's-1970's. It swung Right in the 1980's-2010's. As is evidenced by the Koch Bros guiding the GOP to great success in the early-mid 2010's, see the Freedom Caucus, continuing high immigration levels, Trump being forced to align with the neo-liberals and the Pentagon establishment, Clinton and Obama being two term Dem presidents who failed to raise welfare payouts, increase labor union strength, or reform health care (Hilary's tentative single payer initiative was blasted and strangled in the crib by the 1990's establishment) .
The pendulum must now swing to the Left; it's just a question of when or if Boomers will allow it to happen gracefully. If Boomers won't let the pendulum swing, younger generations will be furious at Boomers for not doing the right thing.
O/T
https://twitter.com/AJBPlugz/status/1062787973945659393
A bad argument made by people that should know better. Black unemployment is 6%, white unemployment is 3%. 6% is not full employment. Full employment has still not been reached in the whole economy given that U6 is two points above 5%. The Black U6 rate is still probably around 10%+.
Cernovich goes full cuck
Notice me, mainstream media! Buy my snake oil, Boomercons!
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1062889143716302848
The paradox of today's partisans (who skew older and/or more educated) is how clueless they are about politicians who belong to the me-too party. The democrats became the me-too GOP in the GOP dominated paradigm of the 1990's, in order to survive. It's how Clinton got two terms, and left office a reasonable popular president (as did Reagan, who got the ball rolling). Clinton was fully on board with off-shoring, de-regulation, gutting of welfare, and mass incarceration. Only a complete imbecile poisoned by modern partisanship would call Clinton a more liberal president than Eisenhower or Nixon (neither of whom halted the Civil Rights revolution, or shredded the social safety net, or dismantled organized labor via de-regulation and high immigration levels). When the Dems were the dominant party, in the 1950's-1970's, Eisenhower and Nixon had to heed the public's desire to protect workers, the poor, and even criminals.
"In 1994, President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which offered states billions in funding for new prisons – but only if they adopted “truth in sentencing laws” that would reduce prisoners’ eligibility for parole. The law also established mandatory life-sentences for people convicted of a third violent felony, among other punitive measures. By the end of the Clinton presidency, the number of people in America’s prisons rose by nearly 60%, according to the Brennan Center for Justice."
Bill Clinton was a reactionary/social Darwinist wet dream. But that's what Boomers in the 1990's wanted. He made it easier to be gay in the military? So fuckin' what.
Contd:
Everyone involved in the Alt-Right is basically doomed.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/clark-brothers-accused-of-planning-race-war-followed-alt-right-figures-richard-spencer-jack-posobiec
Can we please put to bed, once and for all, the tradcon/Boomercuck/partisan non-sense that the last several decades were "liberal"? As opposed to what, Adolf Hitler's Germany? The Chicago School version of Chili?
How thick does your skull have to be to not understand that the last 30 years have been dreadful for labor unions, the rights of criminals, and artistic expression (which is constantly being attacked for not delivering the right "moral message", whereas in the 1960's and 70's nobody cared about being lectured about the Manichean ideology that both the Left and Right bought into in the 80's and 90's; in fact, simply stating the objective reality of existence and not getting your panties in a bunch about "morality" was something that the GI Generation heavily promoted in the 1920's-1970's, which blowhard Silents and Boomers rejected in the 1980's). I read a good history of the 1950's-present written by a Gen X-er, who pointed out that PC arose in the Reagan 80's (because moralistic Boomers thought it was evil to say unflattering things about certain groups of people), than solidified into place in the 1990's (when shit for brains sentiment totally superseded any concern for objective reality).
*Chile
So 33% republicans enjoy wishful thinking?
"Can we please put to bed, once and for all, the tradcon/Boomercuck/partisan non-sense that the last several decades were "liberal"? "
Why yes, all sorts of "natural conservatives" were added to the population. A revival of piety has consumed previously debauched seculars.
The Right doesn't have a single F500 or a single R1. GOP electoral dominance has amounted to some tax cuts and some wars. Was that the revealed preference of GOP voters? Then perhaps we deserve everything we are getting. But I live in a society where I cannot publicly espouse right-wing views without threat of impoverishment or violence.
Do the names Marcuse, Adorno and Horkimer mean anything to you?
Trouble in paradise:
"This was not the sense observers had two years ago when Donald Trump outperformed past Republican presidential candidates with union households and carried a string of states that formed the backbone of the old industrial Midwest. But his message—hostile to both trade and immigrants—went against the grain of Koch-style economic orthodoxy. While certain working class voters did gravitate toward Trump, the midterm election results in Wisconsin and elsewhere suggest that they have not been convinced by his party’s economic agenda and may even have soured on Trump himself. According to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released earlier this year, Trump’s support among union voters has fallen 15 points. "
Uh-oh. https://newrepublic.com/article/152210/backlash-gops-union-bashing-begun-earnest
The article brings up the FoxConn fiasco:
– It's a foreign manufacturer
– It's a massive gov. expenditure on dubious grounds (in fact, the largest sum ever officially given to a foreign company)
– The putative 13,000 jobs created is questionable, left unsaid is that many of these jobs that actually exist are going to foreigners, which Agnostic pointed out months ago.
If this is all the Trump regime can do for us, then forget it; we aren't making anything great by matching or surpassing the treasonous and cruel policies of the 1990's.
"The Right doesn't have a single F500 or a single R1. GOP electoral dominance has amounted to some tax cuts and some wars. Was that the revealed preference of GOP voters? Then perhaps we deserve everything we are getting. But I live in a society where I cannot publicly espouse right-wing views without threat of impoverishment or violence."
It's all semantics, as I've become fond of saying. You can slap the words "right" or "left" onto anything, but it doesn't change the substance of policy and the results thereof. The economic trends of the last 40 years are a defiant rejection of New Dealism; it matters not that some people bitch that they didn't get everything on their wish list (e.g., Boomers wanting to shoot lazy welfare bums on sight). This is objective reality. Boomers railing endlessly against social welfare programs, criminals, infrastructure spending, progressive taxation, etc., and then electing politicians who made good on promises to make a break from the liberal mid-century, is also an objective fact.
As for the current repressive atmosphere, blame cultural conservatives for hyping up Manichean narratives that rationalize demonizing and bullying those deemed to be "evil" or insufficiently dedicated to goodness. This has caused an entire generation to be hated (Gen X-ers) for it's disinterest in religion and moral campaigns (which were driven by blowhard Silents and Boomers). Political Correctness really became a terrible problem in the Reaganite paradigm, not the FDR paradigm that persistent into the 1970's. An era of cultural liberalism encourages personal and creative expression ahead of fealty to rigid moral ideology; where does PC lie on this spectrum? PC destroys creativity and objective statements. All rigid moral systems run head-first into intellectual freedom and objectivity; see: Galileo, and modern evolution deniers.
Another wonderful example of Manichean ditzyness is natalism. Post-1980 conservatives would rather that the world be (over) populated with people, of any type, rather than acknowledge that we need to have sensible controls on the world's population. The early 1970's were the height of concern for the drawbacks of endless human growth, which was based on understanding of science and basic arithmetic. The Reagan admin. became notorious for it's proudly ignorant personnel, who'd often say things that were flat out not true, and the result of brain dead ideology and/or wishful thinking. If they trended towards conservative friendly ignorance, than later waves of Dems would hardly distinguish themselves either, what with nary a single prominent Dem publicly invoking concern for the world's rising population raising the possibility of Malthusian limits. The neo-liberal Right recognizes no limits to growth of capital, industry, and consumption. The neo-liberal Left are such pussies that they can't say anything that would be construed as unflattering to the third world.
@ Feryl
Very good, on neo-liberal Righties and Lefties kowtowing to 3rd World etc. natalism.
No doubt, the MSM will push us, to pay to feed the "starving" bastards.
Jig,
As a heterodox thinker, you're better able to see that there is no conceivable way of reversing this. Unless true supremacy is what you're after, political dissolution should be an attractive option.
Maus,
brown and down
Ha!
216,
I've never posted about anything he's done because there is no there, there. It's been obvious to me from the beginning.