freakin’ maoists

You can start beheading the dissent, rather than merely firing them.

He once wrote that “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.”

Well, it did give us a much more sensible immigration policy. And 1924-1965 America was pretty damn great.

1/ ‘He once wrote that “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.” After that, he suggested, things went south because, among other things, women were given the right to vote.’

Er… The 1920’s was the first decade in which women had the right to vote throughout the US. In various states and territories women had had the right to vote starting in 1869. At the time of the ratification of the 19th amendment very few states had zero women’s suffrage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

2/ As I’ve said before, if Trump-Thiel type libel laws are enacted this website may be in trouble. Beware of what you wish for…

In all seriousness, what could that author possibly have had in mind in writing those two sentences, one next to the other?

Is he really so dense, or so deeply into some twisted ideology, that he can’t see the glaring contradiction?

But if he does see the contradiction, why doesn’t he at least remark on the fact that the two views are in contradiction?

Is this how far gone the NY Times has become?

The target sentence looks like it was edited; it probably originally read “militant progressives” and then “will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought”; then “progressives” got red-penciled and replaced by “open mindedness”, because, hey, who could be more open minded than progressives who are so accepting of things like SSM, open immigration, open enrollment, open to any new tweak on sexual identity, open to the idea that genetics is irrelevant to intelligence, open to the idea that IQ does not exist, and open to the idea that the only reason social or economic equality does not exist is because of those shadowy hordes of old white men with mattresses full of cash that they ought to be sharing.

Anyone who is not similarly open to new ideas or to having new things placed in their bodily orifices is obviously a bigot and deserves to be destroyed. Cotton Mather could not be any more self-righteous.

I’m sure these are the kinds of things wealthy Silicon Valley types talk about when they are on the wine train having a $500 brunch, unless it is when they are wondering why are those African Americans on the train so exuberant, and shouldn’t they be allowed to ask them to be a bit more quiet?

Wow! NYT succinctly summed it up.

We have this dominant culture that takes extreme close-mindedness that severely punishes any deviation of thought and successfully labels it as extreme open-mindedness. They can turn any logical thought inside out through language and it is maddening. It’s sarcastically funny when they slip up and admit it.

Thiel has been an active and hardcore right-libertarian since he was in college. He cares about politics much more than the apolitical money-grubbers and apathetic non-voting asians that make up much of SV. He is probably the closest thing in America to an alt-right billionaire.

In the USA, billionaires are our royalty who can do whatever they want. Nobody will not want to do business with him because of his politics.

Manjoo stated on twitter that the phrase is “deliberately ironic”. I’m pretty sure he’s trolling the kind of people who read the times and nod approvingly.

I agree, that goes beyond funny into creepy:

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

Or is it just a little Straussian wink that he slipped past the editors?

Reminds me of this line from Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley:

NYT Indian Muslim hack accuses German – American techie of being a Nazi. Shurely shome mishtake. It’s usually the former who are the Nazis!!

You mean the dust bowl and the Great Depression, followed by getting bombed by the Japanese and finding ourselves in the biggest war in history?

If this was deliberate and “ironic”, then the author had an obligation to put in few transition words to clarify the irony.

This is reportage, not satire or parody.

Best Manjoo twitter comment: “I pegged two guys at the next table”

https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/586209042449637376

The Red Scare, Prohibition, Organized Crime, Depression, Pearl Harbor, World War Two, The Bomb, The Second Red Scare, The Korean War, UFO’s, More Bomb Scare, Brainwashing Scare, Civil Rights Violence, Even More Bomb Scare, Castro, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy Assassination, More Civil Rights Violence, Vietnam, Watts ……

Bring back the good old days!

More mass confusion on how the world works from the left. The same industry and area that they are constantly accusing of sexism, racism, and elitism is now the vanguard of leftist thought in business apparently. I have read other posts saying Trump opposing illegal immigration would kill high tech because forty percent of business in the Valley were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, despite the complete non-existence of Mexicans and Central Americans, much less illegal immigrant Mexicans and Central Americans in Silicon Valley. No one says that virtually all the people in the industry that come from abroad come from South Asia, East Asia, Europe, and even the white population of South Africa ( More on that later ) . There is also a strong libertarian contingent in the Valley and always has been and Thiel is part of that, just more outspoken politically about it ( He was a big backer of Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 ). Blacks and Latinos are practically non-existent in any leadership, technology, or founder capacity in the Valley at all ( I say practically because I don’t know for a fact that the number is zero, but I suspect it is, notwithstanding the fact the NYT found a black libertarian in the valley who founded a wait for it…. non-profit, a tech captain of industry indeed! ).

In fact you could argue there are more white South Africans contributing to tech in the valley and elsewhere than there are native born American blacks. Just off the top of my head there is PayPal alums David O. Sacks, Elon Musk, and Roelof Botha, all major movers and shakers in the valley as well as Mark Shuttleworth, who founded the Linux software giant Ubuntu in the UK. I saw recently a list of the top 100 VC’s in the US from Forbes magazine with photos, what was there was overwhelmingly white and Asian, overwhelmingly male, ( Among the roughly one third that were Asian, only two were women ) and a few white women, no Barry’s, Michelle’s, or Loretta’s to be found anywhere on the list. When the NYT and other SJW’s get riled up about the workforce demographics of tech giants like Apple and Facebook they count the numerous Asian tech guys working in the valley as white for purposes of moral condemnation, but now because the MSM wants to blackball Thiel, suddenly everyone is the valley is a closeted liberal. I also love them calling Trump a technological ignoramus? And Clinton is a masterful tech guru? Well we know both Obamas, Barry and Michelle, were instrumental founders of the PayPal Mafia, that group that went on to found dozens of startups in the Valley, No, oops, I’m sorry, that was Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, two stale pale males from Germany and South Africa that did that, so easy to get successful tech entrepreneurs and affirmative action driven community activists who never practice law confused with each other, they are so similar.

I think “open-minded” is Newspeak for “dogmatic adherent to the latest leftist intellectual fashions”

So Thiel supported Hogan against Gawker, in a case that was tried in a court of law and Hogan won. See how un American that is, I guess

Let’s reread that part again:

people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought

How much more open-minded can you get than that?

This is why they have won. They can write illogical nonsense like this and it just goes on and on and there is no one or no authority to challenge it.

We didn’t start the fire!

I agree it just has to be a Straussian wink. It’s the ‘accepted schools of thought’ that gives it away. P.c. Nazis do not think of their dogmas as accepted schools of thought. Quite the contrary, they prefer to think of themselves as embattled seers,

I just noticed the LOL button, but I’ve used up my button allotment. Damn.

severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought

Nah, more like sperginess.

The Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and WW2 all took place after the 1920s.

The wine train does t actually sound that ritzy

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/04/20/black-women-kicked-off-napa-valley-wine-train-settle-racial-discrimination-case/83280120/

I wonder what the Silicon Valley bigwigs really think about IQ. They seem to be hiring more or less on the basis of it (specifically, talent at STEM-type fields).

The resulting employees have the expected diversity: besides whites, there’s lot of Chinese and Indians. Women are underrepresented and so are blacks and Hispanics.

So they’re hypocrites.

I support their right to hire as they please, but they need to realize that they can’t pass for “progressives” unless change their hiring practices.

Your remark was not funny…I pushed the LOL button by mistake.

Farhad Manjoo was born in South Africa the year its first nuclear device was built.

He wrote a book called something like Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.

I for one welcome our new ecclesiastical millennial high tech overlords and wait with bated breath for each new pronouncement on what I should be thinking on every topic for the next five minutes. Subject to change at any time (like Kindle is “updated” without anybody noticing). But the punishment (the ostracism/banishing gulag) always the same.

Oh, SP. You’ve been reading Howard Zinn again.

Were Orwell to rise healthful from the grave, one day of looking round, of Noticing, would give him a fatal heart attack.

I was about to push the LOL button for baited breath

I don’t think you need to read Howard Zinn to know how paranoid everyone was in the ’50’s and ’60’s, if you grew up then. Khrushchev banging his shoe, promising to bury us, Sputnik, Tsar-Bomba, everyone building fallout shelters in the backyard, duck and cover drills at school, the Christmas I got a Civil Defense truck for a gift, and couldn’t figure out what the hell it was for, everyone watching the sky during the Missile Crisis, grown ups talking about brainwashing techniques, etc. It was our daily bread.

No. Orwell, rising from the grave and looking around, would just say, “Didn’t listen, didja? See ya’ll in Hell, suckas!”

This is why they have won.

No. They have not won. They are losing. This is evidence that their philosophy is a ‘dead man walking’.

They might sell their barnyard runoff as a fine wine to the wide-eyed college sophomores, and the sophomoric herd of independent minds who follow them. But anyone smarter than a halfwit will recognize the bilge for what it is.

I looked at his Twitter feed. I think he was referring to the “militant open-mindedness” as ironic. I think he still doesn’t see the contradiction between that sentence and the next.

If I were Trump, on January 20, 2017, I would levy punitive taxes on Silicon Valley. Not just profits, but capital accumulation and especially a confiscatory tax on moral preening.

We could pay off the national debt before April 15, 2017 with a tax on Silicon Valley moral preening.

If this was deliberate and “ironic”, then the author had an obligation to put in few transition words to clarify the irony.

This is reportage, not satire or parody.

Disagree. He was very obviously being droll, there is no question about it, by putting two assertions next to each other that were very carefully worded to be almost exact mirror opposites and then even hyperbolizing a bit to increase the tension. In fact, without attribution I’d assume this was something Steve wrote himself in his typically witty way of getting to the marrow and pith of more “straight” NYT pieces.

Penicillin, air conditioning, the polio vaccine, Glenn Miller, Tracy & Hepburn, Joe DiMaggio, the interstate highway system, Dunkin’ Donuts, jet air travel, “Peanuts,” The Beach Boys, John Wayne, Walmart, Apollo 11, the Internet, FedEx, the iPod,

…..

Give up all that?

“The Red Scare, Prohibition, Organized Crime, Depression, Pearl Harbor, World War Two, The Bomb, The Second Red Scare, The Korean War, UFO’s, More Bomb Scare, Brainwashing Scare, Civil Rights Violence, Even More Bomb Scare, Castro, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy Assassination, More Civil Rights Violence, Vietnam, Watts ……

“Bring back the good old days!”

Yes, bring them back. Because we were then still One People and, at least until 1965, we had presidents and legislators who cared about us Americans and identified as one of us, and they kept out the Turd – oops! – Third World. And none of us was forced to submit to Diversity Commissars or Airport Government Goon humiliation, or to parrot lies about Islam or minorities’ uncivilized, loathsome behavior.

I was alive and aware in the 1950’s, and I don’t remember grownups – even my teachers – being paranoid about nukes or anything else. In those days that brand of Chicken Little “The Sky Is Falling!” pearl-clutching hogwash came only from Nervous Nelly finger-wagging liberals. My grade school had none of the “Duck and Cover” hysterics either.

Grownups back then were proud of their WWII service, and they were proud that through the Depression they were poor but never criminal or predatory.

One day – this was around 1960-61 – I asked my Dad (a professional fireman), “Aren’t we going build a fallout shelter?” Dad love-tapped me on the back of my head and said, “Help your mother with the dishes, take out the garbage, then get busy on your homework.”

There was just one big nuke scare – the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – and that lasted for maybe a whole fortnight, yet I never saw or heard grownups freaking out over it; and when it was over no one but the finger-wagging liberals gave nukes a second thought. Paranoia, my you-know-what – all of that came from universities’ Marcusian-Frankfurt School moles and the liberals who already dominated what was already beginning to become Enemedia-Pravda.

At the very least, Apollo 11, FedEx, and the Ipod seem to fall outside the 1965 limit originally proposed.

Remember, the idea is that between 1924-1965 immigration was suspended such that America was monocultural. But I know that wasn’t true, because I had many neighbors, babysitters, and business associates of my parents who were refugees from communism, Nazism, Hungary ’56, Cuba, and so on.

I have nothing against the ’50’s and ’60’s. It was an exciting time to be alive. But it wasn’t paradise.

Glad I’m not the only one to have thought that.

You guys just don’t get it

Tolerance means NOT tolerating intolerance

“The Red Scare,……”

You mean the very real infiltration and subversion of the U.S. Government, and Hollywood, by communist agents? That “Red Scare”?

That just goes to show that two people can live at the same time and have completely different takes on the matter. But I have to call you some of these things.

Everyone’s father was a WW2 or Korean vet, many were both. Many of them did not come back from the war unscathed. They were precisely the types that were borderline alcoholics and many of them had failed marriages, and then another marriage, in the ’60’s. And just as many were depressed about their memories, and had trouble readjusting. Sloan Wilson’s “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is a good evocation of that, and the movie is just as good. Maugham’s “Razor’s Edge” (book and movie) and Neville Shute’s “Chequer Board” is also a good evocation (as was “On the Beach” — book and movie.) To call that Frankfurt School stuff is simply ignorant.

Many of the adults I knew as a child were conservative, even right wing, they were the kinds who always talked about the John Birch Society, the communist threat, the North Korean brainwashing techniques, and it was, of course, ubiquitous in the popular culture. The JBS was not a liberal organization.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a little part of the nuclear paranoia, but it was also a part of the election campaign in 1964 (Daisy commercial) as well as popular films (Strangelove, Fail Safe), as was the notion of corruption in Washington (Advise and Consent, Best Man, Seven Days in May — interestingly, all three hingeing on whether or not to reveal a scandal.) All of those films were based on books that were extremely popular.

I won’t even bother to list the very large number of science fiction stories, collections, novels, and films that pursued themes of nuclear holocaust.

It’s true that back then we didn’t have the problems we have now. But as I said in my other post, it was not a golden age.

“At the very least, Apollo 11, FedEx, and the Ipod seem to fall outside the 1965 limit originally proposed. ”

It was 1965 America that made Apollo 11 possible. 1969 was still – for the most part – “1965 America”. The Brazil-with-nuclear-weapons that America will soon become would never have been able to pull that off.

Thiel is certainly an heir to the title of Silicon Valley father. Co-founded pay-pal and turned his early $500,000 investment in Facebook into hundreds of millions. Also an early stage investor in Spotify, Palantir, Airbnb, and Lyft.

He had a run-in with Condi when he was a student at Stanford:

Thiel is the co-author, with David O. Sacks, and with a foreword by the late Emory University historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, of the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford … The book is critical of political correctness in higher education and the consequent dilution of academic rigor. It “drew a sharp rebuttal from then-Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice,” with Rice joining Stanford’s then president in writing “They (the two former students) concoct a cartoon, not a description of our freshman curriculum” and that Thiel and Sacks’ “commentary was demagoguery, pure and simple.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/04/20/black-women-kicked-off-napa-valley-wine-train-settle-racial-discrimination-case/83280120/

It could be a pretty good racket for blacks. Pick some activity that is enjoyed by the SWPLy crowd. Act black–or at least a little bit black–to wreck the experience for them. Management will want to enforce SWPL norms to keep their customers happy … so eventually they’ll need to come and ask you to quiet down or move or leave or something. Refuse to comply easily to prompt escalation. Then when the hammer comes down a bit and you’re forcibly moved, tossed, etc. … allege discrimination and sue! The kicker is that the organization providing this SWPLy service has to keep its SWPLy cred–they can’t be “discriminatory” or anti-black–so they really have to fold their tent and settle.

It’s a great racket. It does require some subtlety. You can’t be such an a*hole, that everyone–including customers, witnesses, potential lawyers and juries–would all just flat out agree that you should have been arrested. But you do need to push it to the point you’re wrecking the experience for the SWPLy types and management has to deal with you.

Still there’s a clear disconnect between what the SWPLy folks actually like and their ideological commitment to being good people. So there’s an arbitrage opportunity there.

At this point, I’m pretty convinced about the way in which those two sentences were intended. That interpretation is what I regard as the worst possibility: namely, they conform strictly to SJW ideology.

Spelling it out, the author is indeed saying, and sincerely, that the people of Silicon Valley are “militantly open-minded”. But what he means by that is what a SJW would mean by it: that they are “open-minded” to all the standard, protected identity groups. In the second sentence, this very idea is being exemplified, exactly as an SJW would do so. Namely, these exemplary people exact a “militant” punishment on someone — Brendan Eich — because he wasn’t properly “open-minded” toward such a protected identity group, namely gays, in his opposition to Prop 8.

Yes, we are there. That is what these words mean in the current year, and all they mean.

God save us.

Though Silicon Valley has well-known problems with diversity in its work force, people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Yes, programmers are way up there on the sperg scale. “mmerrmmm, yyesssss, I program it to jump, and it asks hhhoowwww hhhhighhhh, no backtalk, mmmmyessss.”

You mean the dust bowl and the Great Depression, followed by getting bombed by the Japanese and finding ourselves in the biggest war in history?

On the other hand, we won the biggest war in history, constructed Hoover Dam, made brilliant films (Citizen Kane, Red River, The Searchers, The Wizard of Oz, Philadelphia Story, etc), wrote excellent novels (The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Absalom, Absalom!, The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep, Guard of Honor, Light in August, The Professor’s House , etc), invented the transistor, broke the Sound Barrier, created the Interstate Highway System, launched the Space Program, etc, etc.

Plus, 1924-65 was an epoch of maximum Asabiyya in the USA. It’s been nothing but downhill ever since.

Silicon Valley: where everyone “thinks different” in the same way.

Though Silicon Valley has well-known problems with diversity in its work force, people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought

I mean, that by itself deserves a second quote. JHFC, I’m dyin here.

Farhad Manjoo

Er…BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Stop it man, you’re killin me!

“It’s true that back then we didn’t have the problems we have now. But as I said in my other post, it was not a golden age.”

And Athens in the time of Pericles wasn’t an unblemished time either. Neither was Rome under Trajan, or England under Queen Victoria. None-the-less, all those eras have been described as “golden ages”. The 1960s WAS a golden age, by any standard that is applicable to civilizations built by mortal men.

There is Apple’s first employee Bill Fernandez (also employee #8 Chris Espinosa, although he’s clearly of Conquistador-American descent).

The Red Scare, Prohibition, Organized Crime, Depression, Pearl Harbor, World War Two, The Bomb, The Second Red Scare, The Korean War, UFO’s, More Bomb Scare, Brainwashing Scare, Civil Rights Violence, Even More Bomb Scare, Castro, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy Assassination, More Civil Rights Violence, Vietnam, Watts ……

Bring back the good old days!

On the other hand, the WASP elite was still in charge, America had a European majority population (and people wanted it to stay that way), national cohesion was high, we invented the transistor, made Citizen Kane, defeated the Japanese in the Pacific, broke the Sound Barrier, launched the Space Program, painted Early Sunday Morning, wrote The Great Gatsby, etc, etc, etc,

Compare that to now, where our nation allows Hispanic Mestizos to stream across our borders, and our elites are incompetent traitors…..

things went south because, among other things, women were given the right to vote

Not surprising from a homo.

In all seriousness, what could that author possibly have had in mind in writing those two sentences, one next to the other?

Making the trollery as unsubtle as possible?

“Check this out guys, this is how far editorial standards have slipped, even at NYT”?

Manjoo stated on twitter that the phrase is “deliberately ironic”. I’m pretty sure he’s trolling the kind of people who read the times and nod approvingly.

He was rrrREAL subtle about it, too, boy. That’s really pushing hard on the boundaries of irony.

Or is it just a little Straussian wink that he slipped past the editors?

WINK? WINK? Struassian?

In the immortal words of Triumph the Comic Insult Dog:

“I mean come on man. I mean really man.”

This is easily the funniest shit ever printed in the NYT.

*Bows to Manjoo*

It was 1965 America that made Apollo 11 possible. 1969 was still – for the most part – “1965 America”. The Brazil-with-nuclear-weapons that America will soon become would never have been able to pull that off.

Quite so. The capital that had been built up by pre-’65 America was still in play.

No, I’m sorry, I lived through it, I wouldn’t call it a golden age, especially after JFK was shot, and definitely by 1966: no more Golden Age. Just too fractious and violent, on every level. You know what was a Golden Age? The ’80’s.

Remember, the idea is that between 1924-1965 immigration was suspended such that America was monocultural. But I know that wasn’t true, because I had many neighbors, babysitters, and business associates of my parents who were refugees from communism, Nazism, Hungary ’56, Cuba, and so on.

And those people were expected to conform to Anglo norms.

Additional bit about Thiel: though born in Germany, he moved with his family to South Africa as a little kid and began school in what was then SouthWest Africa.

I don’t think you need to read Howard Zinn to know how paranoid everyone was in the ’50′s and ’60′s,

Whereas nowadays, we’re looking for racists under our beds……

Silicon Valley employees pay a lot of the California state income taxes, and capital gains taxes on those stock options. Our fair state has suffered from the Gold Rush mentality since the Gold Rush, as seen in the screwy fiscal system. When the Valley and the state are booming, tax revenues pour in. When they aren’, the Gov’ner and Assembly thrash around to manipulate accounts and cut non-mandated (e.g., K-12 funding) items. That tax regime has led to such long term follies as the UC and CSU tuition increases, offset a little by foreign students paying higher prices.
The Valley companies like the ever-patriotic Apple manipulate their transfer pricing and ownership (some have Double Irish Dutch Chocolate with room for a double shot and cream). Make ’em all pay by changing the tax code.

Now we are cheating; the whole idea is how idyllic America was when it was restricting immigration from 1924 to 1965: if you are going to say that well, on some conceptual level, 1965 was “really” 1969, then on the same conceptual level, I will just take a deep drag and say, “Outtasight man.”

On second read, the NYT author was being sarcastic.

Of course today sucks. But I am old, so I am entitled to say that, moreover, I am expected to say that. I wonder how much life experience colors all this.

My mother, for example, considered the late ’30’s and the war as the most exciting time of her life. My father, his time in Korea, bar none. My one grandfather probably didn’t enjoy any decade: he worried too much. But one ggrandfather, born 1865, always talked about the Gay ’90’s (he died before I was born.)

Born in the early ’50’s, I’d say the ’60’s were the most exciting. The ’70’s the most cringe inducing (almost compares to today). The ’80’s the most ample and quiet; followed by the ’90’s which were probably just as good but I missed it because I was raising a family. I don’t think there’s been much good times since 2001.

The Red Scare, Prohibition, Organized Crime, Depression, Pearl Harbor, World War Two, The Bomb, The Second Red Scare, The Korean War, UFO’s, More Bomb Scare, Brainwashing Scare, Civil Rights Violence, Even More Bomb Scare, Castro, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy Assassination, More Civil Rights Violence, Vietnam, Watts

The Browning of America, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, The Cultural Gulag, Affirmative Action, War on Whites, War on the Family, The Great Recession, 9/11, Invade the World, Invite the World, War on Terror, War on Drugs, Cocaine, Heroin, Meth, Crack Wars, Surveillance State, 20 Trillion in Debt, The Great Outsourcing, Television as Sewer, The White Death, World War LGBT, Putnam’s Withdrawal, “Homosexual Marriage,” Kulturkampf…

Lets see how open minded they are when a narcoterrorist gang sets up shop there? And what would a progressive global village be without a giant mosque? You really don’t have to boycott Apple, China can now market their own iProducts at half the price. Maybe they can call it the uLose? Tim Cook is too busy with social issues to care about profitability anyway.

I would levy punitive taxes on Silicon Valley. Not just profits, but capital accumulation and especially a confiscatory tax on moral preening

Please remember a little fact that bears repeating: Mitt Romney- New Englander, successful businessman in the most intellectually-prestigious line of business work, MIT graduate, and probably the most excellent all-around person to run for President in decades, was not even the SECOND most popular candidate for President in 2012 among Google employees. What chance, then, does a typical religious right (Cruz), Southern-fried (Huckabee), or intellectually mediocre (Rubio) GOP candidate have, then?

Funny sad or funny ha-ha?

Forgot the Housing Crisis…

And UFOs.

Farhad Manjoo was the NYT reviewer for the season of Silicon Valley that this clip appeared in, which was season 2. I’m sure he saw it and the line in the article is an echo of the exchange from the show.

In my area, NE Ohio, 1945-1980 or thereabouts was unquestionably a Golden Age for wages, salaries, and defined-benefit pensions. I recall a hard-working school janitor from around 1970, barely literate, who by his mid-20s had married, bought a new Mustang, and was making mortgage payments on a house he’d bought from his family.

Nowadays? Most people commenting here and elsewhere know that America has gone way wobbly.

How does subject “Farhad manjoo” have a job writing for the new York times? The prole has the shallow political insight of a CNN discussion panelist. Sveral of his passages make no sense linguistically. He introduces a concept then does not elaborate on it for example,

“The speech could spoil what had been growing areas of overlap between the Republicans and the tech industry.”

Which areas were starting to overlap? The subcontinental prole provides no examples. It’s as if he is using an unessecary figure of speech simply to relate the two concepts of “republicans” and “tech industry”. He has no knowledge of republican platforms, no insight into tech industry trends, and no contemplation of how those two abstracts may relate to each other meta-politically. What he wrote is something a pre schooler would write. It would be better translated as “republicans were getting more techy,” or as “the tech industry was becoming more republican-ish.” A superficial relation of two nouns.
Now read the rest of that paragraph.

“In the Obama years, much of Silicon Valley has become very close to Democrats. This year there was an opportunity for a Republican to make overtures to tech — but with Mr. Trump, that chance seems to have passed.”

What? What? What is the author even saying? How has silicon valley “become close” to Democrat party platforms? Is he saying that people who work in Silicon Valley are left leaning neck bearded faggots? If that’s what you are trying to say than say it! And what overture was there possibly to be made for republicans? This author is an imbecile! He barely has a grasp of our language! He can process his thoughts only in terms of broad cultural concepts and political memes. Is that what it takes to write for the new York times? So what does that paragraph as written be him translate to? Because I am a linguistic genius and an absolute cynic, it disheartens me to translate it for you.

“Republicans were getting techy. Circa obama, silicon valley was becoming democrat-ish. Republicans had a chance to get techy this year. But alas, Trump. :'( ”

I struggle to read the rest of it. This dude can’t speak english. I’m almost certain that he is writing sanskrit into Google and pressing the translate button. Why does this mouth breathing simeon get its name to grace the national paper of record? Why not I, woe is me! I can cap a window frame, I can solve a partial differential equation, and I can write my way out of at least a literary requirement. This shitbag can parrot memes and loosely relate broad cultural concepts. The subcontinental creature gets a salary with benifits for its amazing talent. No wonder New York is dying as the cultural center of the country. A well deserved death.

“I was born in Canada, and just about everything that works in my own deranged Dominion (as Stephen Harper once suggested to his befuddled London hosts) came from the Mother Country. Germany, Italy, France et al gave us better art, music, food, women, but it is the English-speaking world that has seeded and grown liberty on every corner of the earth – property rights, self-government, fair courts, laws of contract, free speech… And through the last century it is the English-speaking world that has defended and fought for those liberties when the rest of the west has turned to dark and crude perversions.” – Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com/6803/the-last-of-england

I’m almost certain that he is writing sanskrit into Google and pressing the translate button.

He writes better than many CSEE types I’ve come across in the valley. I’m a math guy myself—pace.

Sanskrit? Manjoo is Muslim, so Arabic or Persian is what you should posit.

Also, I’ve met Peter Theil. He may be a billionaire, but he’s a piece of work. Bad vibes from the guy. I don’t mean the usual alpha male hyper-successful guy mean and tough vibes, which I’ve come across on Wall Street, but twisted bad.

Remember, this is the guy who secretly funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker, because he was sulking about their having ‘outed’ him in an article where they exposed his hypocrisy in hiding his gayness to get Saudi startup money.

This being America, he had no grounds to sue for slander—Gawker had the First Amendment on its side. So he funded a false flag attack of maximal catty destructive vindictiveness.

Yet, at the same time, he is proudly out in his everyday professional life in the Valley and indeed, celebrates it at the convention.

And all this would have been prevented if we had only had more immigrants?

Like we don’t have more UFO’s now.

Organized Crime … Civil Rights Violence … Watts

You use these examples in a debate against the side that says a homogenous society is better than a diverse one? Importing more immigrants willl suppress organized crime?

I recall a hard-working school janitor from around 1970, barely literate, who by his mid-20s had married, bought a new Mustang, and was making mortgage payments on a house he’d bought from his family.

The bittersweet internet meme ‘Old Economy Steven’, created to express millennial disappointment on having missed out on those times, brilliantly captures the America we used to have, even into the 1970s, for a lot of people.

If you are old enough to remember the era, you’ll see that all of the examples have the ring of truth.

http://www.quickmeme.com/Old-Economy-Steven/page/1/

In contrast, I was born in 1980, and I think that Anglo-America has been in a death-spiral for decades.

Now we are cheating; the whole idea is how idyllic America was when it was restricting immigration from 1924 to 1965: if you are going to say that well, on some conceptual level, 1965 was “really” 1969,

What was good in 1969 was due to the old order.

You know what was a Golden Age? The ’80′s.

1986 Immigration Amnesty. One of the most loathsome crimes ever committed against Anglo-America.

Of course he doesnt. He can’t speak English very well.

I think ’80s were good, though I would pick ’90s as the Golden Age. Sadly, any rational analysis will show that we will never be as golden as the ’90s again. 21st century is all downhill from there.

These are prices from 1976/2016 Indianapolis.

One gallon gas 39c/2.40c
A new Volkswagon Beetle $4000/20k
A Big Mac, fries, and soda $1/6
A gallon of milk $1/3
A t-shirt $2/4
Wrangler jeans $6/17
A 10 speed Schwinn $50/150
A suburban 3000 square foot 5 bd with a 20000 sq ft yard- 60k/200k
Postage stamp 8c/46
Dinner for four at a Chinese restaurant $20/60
A very nice hard wood dinner table set $2000/4000
Indianapolis Star newspaper 10c/50c, but about free online.
A gallon of apple cider $2/4
Tuition at IU $4000/11,000
A minicomputer $5000/free
An experienced high school teacher $12,000 per year/70,000

At least high school teachers have it better.

“Now we are cheating”

No, just being historically literate. If you think that Apollo 11 was sui generis, and not the product of 1924-1965 America, which produced it, then you are the one who is high. Do you maintain that three-year olds were responsible for landing men on the Moon?

As America had very few Muslims during 1924-65, one could hardly say it had Asabiyya. Thankfully, it had none. Just like it had no jihads and no Sharia.

Due to the US alliance with Saudi Arabia, I think we’d have problems with Islamists even without a ’65 immigration act. Up until 9/11 the US government routinely ignored immigration laws when it came to Saudis anyways – they could pretty much get away with anything. To avoid those problems there would have to have been a Soviet takeover of the Arabian Peninsula or at least a takeover by some pro-Soviet regime like in Iraq or South Yemen, with the Sauds overthrown. That would also have meant we’d have gotten our act together on energy much earlier than we did, which would have been beneficial for the US economy, and which would have made for a more functional society. Would’ve also meant a richer, more functional Mexico, so less illegal immigration to the US.

If you weren’t alive for the greatness of the old America, you can hardly be considered to have expertise on it.

And your lack of expertise shows.

“No, I’m sorry,”

It doesn’t matter if your sorry or not. You’re still wrong.

“I lived through it, I wouldn’t call it a golden age, especially after JFK was shot,”

So? Who cares? Half the country didn’t even vote for him. I seriously doubt that Kennedy getting shot really had a big impact on most people. I know – people say it did. I think they’re full of it.

“You know what was a Golden Age? The ’80′s.”

You seem to be mistaking comfort with greatness. A golden age is not generally considered golden because everyone is fat and happy.

More immigrants will suppress black crime

“”things went south because, among other things, women were given the right to vote””

“Not surprising from a homo.”

………..or from someone who has simply paid attention to how women vote.

I think 1965 America also made the ipod possible. Integrated curcuits, hard discs, static ram, LCD displays. Would have used alkaline batteries though.

“I don’t think you need to read Howard Zinn to know how paranoid everyone was in the ’50′s and ’60′s, if you grew up then.”

Maybe you were especially paranoid. You seem to be projecting a lot on to that age that I don’t necessarily see was there. It seems to me there’s a lot more paranoia in common currency today: pretty much any conspiracy theory, no matter how half-baked, has a significant following today.

Wrong. Manjoo is a petty, smug, indoctrinated Leftist who completely buys into the Narrative.

There is no irony here, except that Manjoo wrote a book called True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.

“More immigrants will suppress black crime”

How’s that work? Do blacks simply disappear as immigrants arrive?

Immigration will not suppress black crime. Immigrants will just absorb a greater share of its impact.

Although I don’t support open borders. Lawful immigration only. And no Muslims. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, pagans, etc. only. We need an amendment to deny Islam the status of a religion. Trump might support this.

Stop noticing the incoherence of our beliefs you racist!

Google, under pressure for its low diversity numbers, addressed the issue by making groundskeepers and janitors employees instead of outsourcing the work.

Of course, Google is much more racially diverse than The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gawker and other media outlets complaining about the lack of diversity in the tech sector. This is because, for the media at least, Asians are no longer a minority because, well, because.

So it goes.

Whites in America have gone soft and degenerated. Latinos and Asians (both East and South) are a lot less tolerant of black violence.

Apollo 11 was made possible because America embraced Nazi rocket scientist immigrants.

“Apollo 11 was made possible because America embraced Nazi rocket scientist immigrants.”

1.) It was pre-1965 America that could, and would, and did embrace german emigre rocket engineers. It would never happen today.

2.) The contribution of Germans to America’s space program is over-rated. They were good. They were very good. They were however, perhaps, not indispensible.

Classic quote from Mason Harrison, the token Silicon Valley Republican whose strategy is to surrender: “… it almost seems like [Trump] has gone out of his way to smite Silicon Valley leaders on the issues they care about.”

No shit, Sherlock. Trump recognizes these Silicon Valley leaders are the enemy. He’s not going to pander to them, he’s going to attack them. That’s how politics works.

I was alive and aware in the 1950′s, and I don’t remember grownups – even my teachers – being paranoid about nukes or anything else.

I don’t remember any of that paranoia either.

In the event that Trump & Thiel have their way, the odds that iSteve faces censorship are exactly 0.0%.

Trump, and presumably Thiel as well, wants British libel laws.

if iSteve was UK based instead of US based, could it survive without lawsuits or other government sanctions?

Trump, and presumably Thiel as well, wants British libel laws.

if iSteve was UK based instead of US based, could it survive without lawsuits or other government sanctions?

A lack of British style, plaintiff-friendly, libel laws in America did not stop a super rich, vengeful Peter Thiel from bankrupting Gawker anyway—by secretly massively funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit on a completely separate matter and thus using it to accomplish his goal.

It’s a model for the American plutocracy for the future.

Freedom is Slavery!
And Ignorance is Strength.

I grew up during the Cold War, there was little paranoia outside of the military and certain segments of the defense industry. People were much more plain spoken, PC/MC and feminism was unheard of outside of urban cesspits like NYC or Hollywood.

Personal freedoms were much greater as well and people were more optimistic. There was no quasi-military police with APC’s and machine guns.

Our factories were busy churning out goods and keeping Americans employed. Pickup trucks in CA still had gun racks with guns in them. City parks were still safe for white kids and the national parks were just great. College was dirt cheap.

Good times.

The NYT makes it their mission to hire simpletons of a darker color like TNC and this particular SE Asian oaf.

Understand the NYT is a propaganda organ first and foremost. Accuracy and intellectual rigor are not important. Think of it as the Ministry of Truth.

The fact is most people see through for the shit paper it is and avoid it, hence it’s dependence on billionaire sugar daddies to keep it and other bird cage liners like it afloat.

I suspect Sailer references the NYT so as to see what the narrative is the elite wants to shove down our collective throats. One thing about the elite, they’re not hiding their intentions anymore(and haven’t for quite a while). Whether the WSJ or TNR they’re quite open about things. Heck the TNR printed several op-eds about how working class whites need to die off faster to make room for all the 3rd woldlers the business types are importing.

And yes New York is dying as are most urban centers. All full of indigestible 3rd worlders and millions of angry blacks who hate everyone. These centers are all pressure cookers kept viable only by aggressive policing and a endless stream of welfare funds. Should either cease so will those cities.

“Everyone’s father was a WW2 or Korean vet, many were both. Many of them did not come back from the war unscathed. They were precisely the types that were borderline alcoholics and many of them had failed marriages, and then another marriage, in the ’60′s. And just as many were depressed about their memories, and had trouble readjusting.”

Not as common as is commonly misconstrued, because just one-sixth of U.S. Army personnel, and one-quarter of U.S. Marine Corps personnel, saw combat. The vast preponderance of men served in support units, and millions of them never left the United States.

“Many of the adults I knew as a child were conservative, even right wing, they were the kinds who always talked about the John Birch Society, the communist threat, the North Korean brainwashing techniques, and it was, of course, ubiquitous in the popular culture.”

I never knew an adult who, except in casual reference in more conversation – perhaps while the TV news was on, “talked about the John Birch Society, the communist threat, the North Korean brainwashing techniques.” In fact, until I began college in 1968 and heard it from a professor, I’d never heard an adult so much as mention the John Birch Society.

As far as “ubiquitous in the popular culture” went, methinks you’ve allowed the “popular culture” to eclipse in your mind the reality – what the twenty postwar years were actually like for adults and upwardly mobile young people: the optimism of those times was a huge solid high for the most Americans ever. (The 80’s were no prize in the optimism department as housing prices took off, as we were increasingly told not what we could do, but what we could no longer do – and should no longer do; and remember when apartment rents shot up because so many apartment buildings and complexes rushed to cash in on becoming condos? – how about the savings & loan scandal that fleeced millions out of their savings? – how about the 1986 Illegal Immigration Amnesty?). Tell us, please, where today do you see widespread, thoroughly shared optimism?

“It’s true that back then we didn’t have the problems we have now. But as I said in my other post, it was not a golden age.”

Oh, no, my dear SPMoore8: it was precisely a Golden Age.

1) Ordinary Americans’ purchasing power was never higher, before or since: peak purchasing power

2) Wages continued to rise

3) Jobs were so plentiful that you could walk out of one, and the next day get a new job, and for most jobs you didn’t need a résumé; and you could house, feed, and educate a family on most jobs. Also, if you took a job you liked, you enjoyed every confidence you would work it until you’d retire comfortably on its pension and benefits. And millions of American teens and college students worked ample summer jobs, often menial jobs that taught solid virtues

4) Unprecedented numbers of ordinary Americans could and did afford one-family homes; and rents were also very affordable; and atop all that Americans socked away solid savings – the complete opposite of today’s spreading indebtedness, insolvency, and rash of bankruptcies. Up to about 1970, banks paid depositors 5% interest on deposits – try finding that rate today

5) College tuition was affordable – no one I’d heard of had taken out a loan to send their children to college

6) Pro sports were still a game. Yes, they were businesses, but no league would even think to hire criminals, or to pony up considerable sums to cover up players’ or coaches’ crimes or disgusting behavior. Even media of that time – as liberal as they were – maintained a probity that makes today’s media foulness and enforcement of p.c. (which has replaced genuine, cultivated virtue with a fascist code) look pretty awful

7) Movies and TV were not vehicles for smut or foul language

8) There was nothing of today’s burdensome, intrusive, obtrusive Anarcho-Tyranny

9) Everyone could and did speak freely, without fear of being penalized, because there were no Diversity Commissars or Social Media Shaming mobs. No one then was so “offended” by another’s speech that he telephone-summoned the entire neighborhood to mass en masse at the “offending” speaker’s home. And someone disciplined, punished, or fired for a speech “violation” was unheard of

10) The illegtimacy rates of Whites and blacks were much lower; and many more dads had jobs than dads have today

11) Schools (and media) had not yet become Indoctrination Gulags. Campuses were bucolic, safe whereon civilized and genuine free, open debate flourished. A well-rounded education in Western Civilization was the norm, and so was pride in America and in being American. Student misbehavior received well-deserved punishment – and the overwhelming majority of parents supported such condign punishment

12) Children – including high school students – were still regarded, rightly, as children, and not as “young people” with “something to say”; and no student of any race ever read aloud – or even in private silence – a pathetic ethnomasochist screed

13) The U.S. enjoyed massive positive balance of trade (a negative trade deficit would have had Americans up in arms), solid, steady economic growth, and widespread domestic prosperity; national debt was low, manageable, and still under control; and GDP per capita was (if I recall correctly) at an all-time high, as trade protectionism kept American industries humming and kept Americans employed

14) For all those liberal “The Sky Is Falling” books & films you listed, there were others that countered or refuted their doom-&-gloom: Strategic Air Command; A Gathering Of Eagles; The Great Escape; Ben-Hur; The Ten Commandments; The Alamo; The Robe; Mister Roberts; The Longest Day; & many more such

15) There was none of today’s nonstop saccharine worship, elevation, importation or imposition of inimical Third World “cultures”

16) Common courtesy was common; there was none of today’s knee-jerk indulgence in smearing, in contemptuous accusations of “hate” and “evil” and “Hitler”; and there was no such Orwellian thing as a “hate crime”

17) Americans enjoyed broad trust in one another, and Americans had faith in the future and faith in the affordability of attaining the American Dream through conscientious hard work: everything was Looking UP!

18) Standards held: there was no Affirmative Action absurdity or any other race-based set-asides or preferences – to get ahead one had to make the grade, had to show that one had the goods and could cut the mustard

19) Perpetual Adolescence was not the rule, but was the extreme exception. There were no Trekkies, no mohawks, no piercings or tattoos, no goth or zombie “lifestyles” – and, aside from some military men and veterans, anyone who wore a tatto or had any part of their bodies (except for women’s earlobes) pierced was rightly regarded as gutter trash to avoid, or as an oddball to be, at best, tolerantly humored

20) The overwhelming majority of adults didn’t enthuse about, or endlessly analyze, or even much discuss pop music, or follow the antics of pop group members, or jaw endlessly or ludicrously emulate pop stars or pop culture: adults had more important things to do with their minds and their time, and so did children. TV/mass media had yet to completely monopolize people’s attention, time, or energies

21) Appliances and other goods were often repaired or mended, often in the home (thrift was still a common virtue); or you took your shoes to the shoemaker, you took your radio or toaster to the appliance shop; much less was then disposable. Mending work employed millions, often in their own Mom & Pop shops

22) If you’d told someone in those days there’d be a multi-decades-long, multi-mega-billions of dollar taxpayer-funded War on Drugs because scores of millions of Americans would abuse God knows how many kinds of illegal and prescription substances, he’d have directed you to an asylum: “Why would Americans want to take illegal drugs?!”

23) Welfare was still an embarrassment; welfare rolls were much, much shorter; and the number of taxpayer-funded welfare programs you could count on the fingers of one hand

24) The middle class was large and growing; today’s rump middle class verges on extinction. The wealth inequality gap was much smaller than today’s vast wealth gulf – so too was the power gap smaller, and political power was far more balanced between the top and ordinary Americans. Our elites were note nearly so remote from or so alien to us as they now are, because they were still of us

25) Infrastructure was still growing: the Interstate Highway System became reality; the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge; the World Trade Center. Today infrastructure crumbles.

26) Last but not least: Americans were still 90% White and both Whites and blacks were overwhelmingly Christian – the Protestant Ethic held, but soon would perform its swan song. That much homogeneity was its own reward, its own most widely-ever shared blessing.

Compared to today, the 1950’s and early 1960’s were an American Paradise, a genuine Golden Age. By every measure of civilization – except those of improved appliances and today’s improved (though far more costly) medicine – for the largest proportion of Americans ever, those days had today beat by several parsecs.

Perhaps Mr. Unz could add a not LOL button?

New York Times went full “Behead Those Who Say Islam Is Violent”! How appropriate!

Pick some activity that is enjoyed by the SWPLy crowd. Act black – or at least a little bit black–to wreck the experience for them. Management will want to enforce SWPL norms to keep their customers happy … so eventually they’ll need to come and ask you to quiet down or move or leave or something. Refuse to comply easily to prompt escalation. Then when the hammer comes down a bit and you’re forcibly moved, tossed, etc. … allege discrimination and sue! The kicker is that the organization providing this SWPLy service has to keep its SWPLy cred–they can’t be “discriminatory” or anti-black–so they really have to fold their tent and settle.

I’ve been wondering if there some way of doing this to Pokemon Go. Energise black malcontents to attack it, see the game withdrawn and watch the white/Asian nerds fold and repudiate something they love and then pull off the silk cover to reveal . . .it was all a hoax.

(Go to youtube, you’ll see that the Pokemon flash mobs are essentially 100% white/Asian – mostly male as well. It’s a sitting duck!)

All I know about 50’s and 60’s America (which is not much) is from watching What’s My Line on Youtube.

I’l just say the wimmin are very classy, even the workin class ones.

There are strangely many immigrant contestants, Europeans (German war brides etc) but also Asians and Central Americans, even before 1965. (((Coincidence?))) Or were they invited for their novelty value?

The host John Daly (a South African) btw went on to work for RFE/RL, a Cold War propaganda outlet.

One thing I know for sure – the Trump phenomenon is making thousands of satirists redundant.

This MSM cognitive dissonance has become increasingly desperate the past few years, but this has to be one of the first examples I’ve seen where they don’t try to separate the contradictory statements with even a few buffer sentences. The intelligentsia’s illness must be in terminal stage.

Let’s just hope it’s the intelligentsia that’s doomed and not Western Civ as a whole.

I’m a little skeptical about Peter Thiel myself, but the way he blew up Gawker, bankrupted Nick Denton, and put all its antifa scribblers out of work is awesome. Plus the Thiel Fellowship that pays 24 talented youngsters NOT to go to university but work and learn instead is also awesome. He’ll have to do a lot of wrong to counterbalance those feats.

Life in America prior to 1965 was superior for 95% of the people who were here then, almost all whites except the hyper-wealthy, and most blacks, and most of the others. The only Muslims here were a few oil sheiks, but the kind of Muslims we have now would probably have found it somewhat less to their liking. Orientals in general and Chinese in specific might have been a little worse off because no AA and no government programs for blacks and mestizos they can occasionally exploit and get rich off.

Homosexuals-they did exist then-had to keep it “on the down low”, and opportunities for the most promiscuous sex for them were probably much less. They were probably better off healthwise for it, because even with no AIDS, they had syphilis, hepatitis, and of course mechanical damage to the anus and rectum, and the surgeries for that were far cruder. Most homosexuals accepted the fact they were a tiny minority and that the rest of us did not need to know how they were or what they did with equanimity. Those that didn’t, a minority of a minority, had to move to a place where that sort of thing could be done more or less openly. Lesbians were more open as lesbianism “wasn’t a thing” in people’s minds. If two women lived together, well, that just made them friends, not girl-girl friends. Women could dance with other women all the time and no one thought of it. Plausible deniability was incredibly simple-unless they went around telling everyone they were lesbians, or were munching each other out on the front porch, well, they were not lesbians as far as anyone but other lesbians or beatniks or male homoisexuals knew or cared.

Illegitimacy simply didn’t exist for middle class people. A girl who “got caught” married the guy, some cuck she could talk into it or put it up for adoption. It could be “taken care of” if the girl had no scruples and enough money, but it never entered most girls’ mind to do that. The very poor and the very rich, then as now, did just what they wanted. If you were rich you sham-married a guy and divorced him and kept custody if you wanted, and there were always men who’d go along: if they were gay they’d do it for cover (they didn’t actually have to, you know, consummate the marriage-bloody sheets off the balcony are not a White thing, and even if they were….) and otherwise if just poor would take a pay packet or two to do it.

Middle class people did not use illegal drugs. Period. There was alcohol, of course, and women especially could get doctors to prescribe barbiturates and amphetamines easier than now, but overall there was much less abuse.

Pornography and “filthy” music and comedy records did exist-but were kept under the counter at any establishment and even their existence was unknown to most underage people and most women. Most men had either nothing to do with them or they would watch a “smoker” (a 16mm film of, almost always, one man and one woman “doing it”) with a bunch of frat or lodge brothers, fully clothed and usually puffing frantically on cigars, or-a littlemore common in mixed party company-would play “party records” like Rusty Warren, risque but not over the top filthy. Black and hillbilly raunchy records somewhat more explicit did exist and again were vended discreetly. (The famous outro to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”-‘you’d make a dead man come’- was pilfered from 1930s “hokum blues” records, that one by one Lucille Bogan ((Shave ‘Em Dry,1935)). YouTube features most of these raunchy blues records for those of a musico-sexological bent.)

Certainly, because so many women were full-time homemakers, and because of the lack of computer automation, jobs were plentiful. Any white male, almost, and also any white female who wasn’t married or whose kids were grown, and any black of any intelligence and determination could find a job. They all paid a lot more in relation to housing costs.

You repaired torn or frayed clothes, most appliances and electrical items, and so forth, instead of throwing them out. Furniture was a bigger investment than today, if bought new, but it was all solid wood and held up a lot better. If it broke, you repaired it. People ate at home a lot more and women were expected to cook and sew well. The prospect of steady home cooked meals rivalled even the prospect for legit sex in the minds of many men contemplating giving up on bachelorhood.

In all, if you were a person with an animus against the social mores of the time, or could exploit things like affirmative action and the welfare-warfare state, you might be better off now. And if you had a medical condition treatable now not treatable in 1965, you are better off now. But most normal people would have been much happier in 1965. I know I would.

In 1965 you would have needed a heavy truck to move a hard drive. And it might have held one or two songs.

There was core memory, but enough to hole one song would have been millions of dollars and again needed at least a pickup truck to haul it.

LCDs were a seventies thing. In the sixties they had Nixie tubes, or dot matrix displays or CRTs displaying letters in fixed fonts. Teletype was the low end solution.

However: they did have analog tape, and really it was pretty good if good practices were used. Several tape cartridge or cassette formats as well as open reel existed, and it was better then MP3 quality if you bought a good playback machine.

Three year olds did not put us on the moon, but a bunch of immigrants played a leading role.

Remember, the whole premise is that America declined after 1965 due to immigration reform.

Let’s have a conversation about race = Listen to me and start thinking the way that I tell you to think.

More

Of course the German scientists were indispensable (not all Nazis). They designed the rockets.

Certainly we could have done it ourselves but that would have required at least some time lag.

We didn’t “embrace” German scientists, we kidnapped them and snuck them into the country.

Thanks:)) What’s extraordinary, also, is that low-income people in my area could live okay.

My Dad, a steel mill electrician and sometime electrical contractor, had working for him an older émigré guy whose regular job was night watchman at a junkyard. That was the early 1960s. I’m guessing the émigré guy made $1 an hour as a watchman. (The scrapyard was almost surely not unionized.) Toss in a little OT, and maybe no more than $500 a year working for my Dad, and the guy made maybe $3000 a year tops.

Still, he and his wife lived in a modest, but reasonably maintained apartment in a very safe neighborhood atop a TV repair shop. He didn’t own a car, but the investor-owned bus company of the time ran some of its bus routes 22 hours out of 24 (I checked). They paid cash for what little medical attention they needed.

I’m sure plenty of people can tell me that 2016 is rip-roaringly better than, say, 1961, but I’m not sure of that. Thanks again.

I appreciate your bringing up one of Trump’s weaknesses: his lack of familiarity with legal, as opposed to operational, matters.

Perhaps the balance that Pence adds to the ticket extends to the fact that Pence is a lawyer.

Robert Spencer made quite a bit of the fact that Trump was critical of the Drawing Muhammad contest in Garland, Texas in 2015. Spencer felt Trump did not have an appreciation of the fact that freedom of speech has to be exercised in order to be maintained.

My own opinion is that matters are sufficiently critical that Trump is absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to have a warning of the negative, as well as the positive, aspects of one’s choice.

. But anyone smarter than a halfwit will recognize the bilge for what it is.

This by itself will not save us.

Your question on whether the author of the Time’s piece realized the contradiction made me go back and re-read it. I noticed that the author included not two, but three contradictions in close proximity:

1)Though Silicon Valley has well-known problems with diversity in its work force
2)people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness
3)It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought.

Notice the author didn’t say Silicon Valley was open-minded. He said they prided themselves on open-mindedness, which is an entirely different matter.

My conclusion is that the author was well aware of the contradiction between thought and reality, and made it as plain as possible without actually making an analysis of it. Nevertheless, I have gained a respect for the author, Farhad Manjoo, who after all, reported on what the reality was.

the John Birch Society, the communist threat, the North Korean brainwashing techniques, and it was, of course, ubiquitous in the popular culture.

I don’t remember very many people discounting the basic premise of The Manchurian Candidate, it was considered serious drama, not sci-fi or fantasy.

Farhad tweets that he meant it ironically

https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/755870332427395072

All I know about 50′s and 60′s America (which is not much) is from watching What’s My Line on Youtube.

Get your hands on some MAD magazine paperbacks from that era.

You’re welcome.

I only know the Peter Thiel name as a Silicon Valley zillionaire, but I didn’t know anything about “twisted bad” vibes. Can you elaborate, or link to some references? I’m okay if you can’t. I do know the feeling of meeting someone important where your instincts pretty much tell you to get away, even if you can’t articulate why.

Thiel wrote something like “welfare beneficiaries and women are notoriously tough for libertarians.” The many libertarian meetings I attended and spoke at in the 1990s pretty much never disparaged any of our fellow citizens. We tried to build in-group solidarity by detailing how the smother state infringed on our capacity as moral actors and sovereign citizens. We were all wise enough to know, without quite working at it, that all of us have been compromised by, as we saw it, government gone wrong. For libertarians, welfare beneficiaries and women are no more “tough” than subsidized corporations or middle-incomers enjoying tax preferences and job security through taxpayer bailouts.

The Toilet Paper of Record

Not as bad as he makes it sound, but I do recall the time, when I was a kid and we were living in Boston’s Back Bay in the early 60s, an upstairs neighbor whose husband worked at Hanscom AFB said he called her and told her to go to her mother’s place in Western Mass. for the week.

We spent the week at my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod.

I too was born in the early ’50s. It makes me sad that my children will never understand how great things were in this country before 2000 and how everything was ruined. When I was a teenager, summer jobs were yours for the asking. In my 20s through 40s, there was plenty of high-paying work available in my field.

Young Americans face a very bleak future. Most of them have no idea what’s wrong because the propaganda is relentless and effective.

I met a black programmer in the valley once who, while not founder level, was high enough level that he had presented on technical topics at industry events. Unfortunately don’t remember his name.

Gawker delenda est. Gawker was 100% enemy propaganda. I don’t care who salted Gawker’s fields, so long as they are barren and waste.

If only Slate and Salon could suffer the same fate.

Mr. Zuckerberg loves a free and open exchange of ideas. They just better damn well align with his own. After all, all open-mindedness is equal. But some open-mindedness is more equal than others.

The closer we get to the election, the more we can expect mainstream-media to resemble The Onion.

Gee, I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s and all I remember is the tremendous community that existed, and the fact that rich and poor went to school together, played ball together, and lived together….No one paid the slightest attention to world politics…

Why don’t we just say that U.S. culture peaked in 1965 then began its decline primarily due to LBJ’s pen?

“Of course the German scientists were indispensable (not all Nazis). They designed the rockets.

Certainly we could have done it ourselves but that would have required at least some time lag.”

Your second sentence contradicts your first. If it could have been done without them, they were not indispensible.

The Germans did not “design the rockets”. They ran the organization that oversaw the design and testing of the boosters. Detailed design and fabrication of the Saturn V and Saturn IB were done by contractors: Boeing, Chrysler, etc. The engines were built by Rocketdyne. To say they (the Von Braun team) were indispensible is to make a claim that cannot be proven.

In any event, it is does not make whatever case you are trying to make about immigration. Von Braun’s team were exactly the kind of people who could have and would have been admitted to the U.S. under the immigration laws of the U.S. of the time. It’s not like they were illiterate campesinos from Guatemala.

“We didn’t “embrace” German scientists, we kidnapped them and snuck them into the country.”

We didn’t “kidnap” them. They voluntarily surrendered to the U.S. Army. They were happy to come here.

You might try knowing more about whereof you speak before speaking.

“Three year olds did not put us on the moon, but a bunch of immigrants played a leading role.”

Immigrants from northwestern Europe. Immigrants who differed little from many Americans already here, and indeed differed little from the founding stock.

“Remember, the whole premise is that America declined after 1965 due to immigration reform.”

And it did. “After 1965” does not mean “immediately after 1965”. It means “after 1965”. You are the one who spergily assumed that people meant “on the very day after Hart Cellar was signed”. 1969 was not materially different from 1965., because the ethnic content of the nation had not changed in that time. The law was on the books, but it had yet to have a deleterious effect on the nation. If you do not recognize such a simple point, then you must be an idiot. So what IS your point, anyway?

And by the way “reform” is a loaded word masquerading as a neutral one. Hart Cellar didn’t “reform” the country’s immigration laws – it wrecked them.

The initial idea was that the period 1924-1965 was paradise. My rebuttal was that, among other things, there was a chronic fear of communists and nuclear holocaust. This doesn’t mean that people couldn’t sleep at night. It means it was a common subject of discussion, it was commonly talked about in the media, in magazines, books, TV, and film.

I’d say the fear of nuclear holocaust was at least as common as the fear of terrorism since 9/11.
To be sure, different people, then and now, would be affected differently.

For those who say, “I don’t know nothin’ about no John Birch Society”, the fact is, a lot of the political climate of the ’50’s and ’60’s is incomprehensible without an awareness of the fear of communist infiltration and nuclear war.

For example: the entirety of HUAC, the Hollywood Ten, Loyalty Oaths, the execution of the Rosenbergs, Joe McCarthy, the Korean War and the Vietnam War are incomprehensible without an awareness of the Red Scare and the Bomb Scare. Not mention films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

No question that the US today seems much worse off than 50, 60 years ago. But I am self-aware enough to realize that at least part of this is due to the fact that I am getting old and am set in my ways. There’s a flip side to this, too: I wouldn’t want my children or people in their teens, 20’s, or 30’s to be this pessimistic about their future. I mean, 90% of survival is attitude.

But once again the initial premise was that the period 1924-1965, a time period when supposedly we weren’t allowing any immigrants in, was a golden age. It was better in some respects — 50’s and 60’s definitely — but had its flaws, as well.

Does anyone know, for real, about the political views of the rank and file programmers in the valley?

It’s glibly asserted how “progressive” it is all the time, but given how much social cost there is to public identifying non-anonymously against those positions, that doesn’t seem like proof of much of anything.

I know that Zuckerberg is patting himself on the back nearly hard enough to snap his arm off for all his virtue signalling about Black Lives Matter. I know Tim Cook has done some proLGBT stuff. Googles Homepage is pretty identity politics left these days. The Brendan Eich case said some important things about Mozilla’s culture.

So if you wanted to convince me that the folks at the top of the food chain WHO ARE WILLING TO PUBLICLY STAKE OUT POSITIONS are pretty uniformly of this particular set of viewpoints, you’d get no push back from me.

But… from reading hackernews.com and reddit.com/r/programming, I get the strong impression that lots and lots of rank and file folks are actively antagonistic to a lot of the current diversity groupthink, and in fact plenty verge on being alt-right (or are at least sympathetic to some of their arguments). In fact, I remember at some point, after one too many identity politics furors on hackersnews where way too many people were antagonistic to the side of the activists, the folks in charge had to install some much more heavy handed moderation and loudly proclaim that their startup incubator, YCombinator, were instituting this and that diversity initiatives.

I would assume there was a strong alt-right presence there, just based on the tech circle I’m in online, the general evolution of people who had been Ron Paul-style libertarians before, etc… But I’m not physically out there.

I missed the paranoia growing up, and we had a bomb shelter included in the house my father built in ’64. It was a precaution, like buckling seat belts which started showing up in cars in the ’60s. Paranoia strikes me as revisionist history.

Funny-strange, bizarre.

I’m a rebel (nonconformist, etc.) just like all of my friends.

You use these examples in a debate against the side that says a homogenous society is better than a diverse one? Importing more immigrants willl suppress organized crime?

It’s best not to assume any honesty on Moore’s part. Or right-of-center politics, for that matter.

Not only were the German scientists often forcibly detained, they were snuck into the US over the Mexican border.

Many German research facilities and personnel had been evacuated to these states, particularly from the Berlin area. Fearing that the Soviet takeover would limit U.S. ability to exploit German scientific and technical expertise, and not wanting the Soviet Union to benefit from said expertise, the United States instigated an “evacuation operation” of scientific personnel from Saxony and Thuringia, issuing orders such as:

On orders of Military Government you are to report with your family and baggage as much as you can carry tomorrow noon at 1300 hours (Friday, 22 June 1945) at the town square in Bitterfeld. There is no need to bring winter clothing. Easily carried possessions, such as family documents, jewelry, and the like should be taken along. You will be transported by motor vehicle to the nearest railway station. From there you will travel on to the West. Please tell the bearer of this letter how large your family is.

By 1947 this evacuation operation had netted an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family members. Those with special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers, such as one code-named DUSTBIN,[18] to be held and interrogated, in some cases for months.

A few of the scientists were gathered up in Operation Overcast, but most were transported to villages in the countryside where there were neither research facilities nor work; they were provided stipends and forced to report twice weekly to police headquarters to prevent them from leaving. The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive on research and teaching stated that technicians and scientists should be released “only after all interested agencies were satisfied that all desired intelligence information had been obtained from them”.

On November 5, 1947, the Office of Military Government of the United States (OMGUS), which had jurisdiction over the western part of occupied Germany, held a conference to consider the status of the evacuees, the monetary claims that the evacuees had filed against the United States, and the “possible violation by the US of laws of war or Rules of Land Warfare”. The OMGUS director of Intelligence R. L. Walsh initiated a program to resettle the evacuees in the Third World, which the Germans referred to as General Walsh’s “Urwald-Programm” (jungle program), however this program never matured. In 1948, the evacuees received settlements of 69.5 million Reichsmarks from the U.S., a settlement that soon became severely devalued during the currency reform that introduced the Deutsche Mark as the official currency of western Germany.

John Gimbel concludes that the United States put some of Germany’s best minds on ice for three years, therefore depriving the German recovery of their expertise.

There’s a lot more at the below, and associated entries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Right, just like Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, the Bedford Incident, On the Beach, Planet of the Apes, and many many other things were “revisionist history.” Come to think of it, “revisionist history” helped LBJ win the election in 1964:

You need the Grammar Alert button for that. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bated-breath.html

1969 was not materially different from 1965., because the ethnic content of the nation had not changed in that time.

Okay, if you are going to say that the “Golden Age” (now concentrated into the ’50’s and ’60’s) extends for some years beyond 1965, then you have to add (to Watts and the beginnings of the Vietnam War)

1. The entire Vietnam War
2. The entire skein of race riots in the ’60’s, along with the Black Panthers
3. First _and_ Second Wave Feminism
4. Gay Rights (Stonewall, 1969)
5. All of the assassinations and riots 1967-1972
6. Caesar Chavez, American Indian Movement, and several other similar things

— might as well throw Watergate in there, too

Now recompute the “Golden Age”

Saying the US could have gotten to the moon without the German scientists who ran our rocket and space program is like saying that the Germans could have developed a nuclear bomb. It’s a meaningless counterfactual that doesn’t take into consideration the fact they the US did not, and Germany did not.

Since the US in fact did use German scientists to construct our rocket systems, including in the space race, it follows that the contribution of the German scientists was essential, since, we didn’t do it without them.

To hypothesize that, maybe, perhaps, sorta kinda, on the 12th of Never, we would have done it without them is a meaningless counterfactual that you introduced.

On the other hand, it’s not as though either rocket science or nuclear weapons is the exclusive domain of a bunch of Western eggheads. It could have been done by anyone, eventually, as we know by things like the Pakistani nuclear program, the Chinese space program, etc.

Can you explain what “Watergate” was other than a D.C. hotel?

The quality of the NYT’s writing is dropping along with its circulation and revenue. How can something that practically never existed be extinct?

The US had Robert Goddard doing rocket work in the 1920s and we ignored him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard

How about a bad grammar button and no-lol button?

You’re reading too much into it. That “pride themselves on” is a thought cliche, and merely a verbal construction. He didn’t mean to call attention to the distance between their pride and reality.

Pretty much accurate. I will add that the Catholic Church was very powerful in cities with a large Catholic population. Their power derived from their school systems and churches that were well attended. The WASP establishment called the important shots. Just look at who the top politicians and military leaders were during WW2. Northern European Protestants were and this continued for decades after WW2.
Those below the WASP establishment (Catholics, Jews, blacks) knew their place and were happier than today. All three had much greater community cohesion and that’s for sure!
The economy was a genuine producer oriented economy. Lots of jobs due to lack of automation. (as you said)

My dear SPMoore8, no one is claiming that the Golden Age was without problems or issues.

The plain fact is that for the most ordinary Americans ever, national unity was a given, and that everyday life was golden and overflowing with opportunity and optimism, and that following that Golden Age, things for most Americans began to go downhill, and that since the emergence of the Sixties’ “counterculture” and its later giving birth to the Rosemary’s Baby of political correctness, and since Perpetual Mass Third World Imminvasion and the sellout of American industries and Americans’ jobs, everyday life has gotten much, much worse for ordinary Americans.

In that Golden Age few ordinary Americans went about wringing their hands over nukes or “brainwashing,” or suffering endless People of Conscience lectures from adults – or, for that matter, from wet-behind-the-ears children who hate American ordinariness and prefer imposing upon us the Multi-Culti Diversity Über Alles/Globalism-supremacist regime under which jobs, wages, and opportunities have been increasingly shrinking and vanishing and optimism is now but a hollow meme of Enemedia-Pravda propaganda programming (hence Mr. Trump’s meteoric political rise).

The Operation Paperclip rocket scientist matter is a red herring, as the Soviets also dragooned German scientists into the service of Communism. Most of all, employing German scientists showed that our elite were still of us and that our elite still looked out for and used every available resource for “the common defense.” Today, on the other hand, our elite not only import millions of fractious and inimical foreigners who add noting and subtract a great deal from our people, society, polity and domestic well-being, but also have the gall to hold foreigners up to our faces to shame us for our “nativism” and “xenophobia,” and “Islamophobia” and “Racism.” You cannot imagine a 1950’s-60’s president inviting a long-term openly boastful illegal immigrant to his State of the Union address the way that Obama not only invited, but showcased, a long-term illegal immigrant at his SOTU.

There’s the crux: in the Golden Age our leaders in politics, journalism, media and the academy were still our leaders, while today they’re our betrayers – they’re cosmopolitan Globalist snob sellouts who do everything they can to Divide & Rule and exploit us; and in the Golden Age the academy and mass media were still on our American side – on the side of ordinary Americans, while today the academy and Enemedia-Pravda spew no end of anti-ordinary American and pro-foreigner, pro-Open Borders, pro-Perpetual Mass Third World Imminvasion, pro-Islam, pro-betrayal, pro-subsidizing illegitimacy, anti-Free Speech, anti-Second Amendment, pro-Invade the World-Invite the World, pro-Multi-Culti-Diversity Über Alles, and hateful shaming of ordinary Americans propaganda.

Everything that was good and widely shared in the Golden Age for the most ordinary Americans ever is today turned upside-down.

“Latinos and Asians (both East and South) are a lot less tolerant of black violence…”

And yet, when it comes time to vote, they consistently side with blacks against whites.

So what’s up with that?

In all seriousness, what could that author possibly have had in mind in writing those two sentences, one next to the other?

Candid, he’s–pretty obviously–tweaking the good thinking audience. Or at least it would be pretty obvious if not for the sort of lunacy–homosexual Jews or black women ranting–we get served up these days.

The clear “tell” is the construction of 2nd part of the contradiction:

It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought

More straight up in line with orthodoxy this could have been written “will punish conservatives” or “will punish those against tolerance” or “will punish those against diversity”, etc. etc. Instead he intentionally wrote it as if ripped from the description of some Orwellian dystopia with “deviations” and “accepted schools of thought”.

Great conversation, SP, thanks (also to our host and others).

I grew up in the #2 target for Soviet ICBMs, so this nuke stuff hit us pretty intimately.

However look at what you are saying:

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a little part of the nuclear paranoia, but it was also a part of the election campaign in 1964 (Daisy commercial) as well as popular films (Strangelove, Fail Safe), as was the notion of corruption in Washington (Advise and Consent, Best Man, Seven Days in May — interestingly, all three hingeing on whether or not to reveal a scandal.) All of those films were based on books that were extremely popular.

I won’t even bother to list the very large number of science fiction stories, collections, novels, and films that pursued themes of nuclear holocaust.

You are saying that mass culture was rife with nuclear HOLOCAUST.

SP, I have a little rainy-day fun thing for you. Look up:

–the top 20 people involved with the Manhattan Project/development of atomic weapons.

–the top 20 atomic spies (US to USSR).

–the top 10 people (fewer are openly recorded) who developed Tsar Bomba

Take that list of names, and wash it through the Coincidence Detector.

Then look up the top people involved in the Nuclear Freeze.

I submit to you the hypothesis that nuclear HOLOCAUST was a psy op (likely genetic rather than conspiratorial in origin) against mainstream Americans. After all, Americans–whose most numerous ethnic group was Germanics–were viewed as having kicked everyone’s asses in Round Two of the white-on-white civil war of the 20th century. And if the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that Germanics must be reined in By Any Means Necessary.

Then Hollywood turned US Army platoons into concatenations of diversitopians. But let’s not digress there.

In another thread, our host mentions Seven Days in May, as you do.

Directed by (((John Frankenheimer))). Screen play by (((Rod Serling))). Produced by (((Seven Arts Productions))) [(((Ray Stark))) and (((Kenneth Hyman)))]. Distributed by (((Joel Productions))) [(((John Frankenheimer))) and (((Kirk Douglas)))].

There are three heroes in the movie: (((Kirk Douglas))) as the lone dissenting-voice stoical chiseled-features blonde hero Marine. (((Martin Balsam))) as the president’s aide. And the impeccably Angl0-Saxon Frederic March as the President, who is admirable but also presented as old and weak and needing younger, more virile men to stiffen his judgment.

With two exceptions every white person in the movie is a stooge, a traitor, an operator, outright corrupt, or a fascist. Those two: Edmund O’Brien as a Suthin Democrat–a lush–and Ava Gardener–a slut and a lush.

Anyone who based his or her views of the US military on this propaganda was pwned bigtime. But I know many did. The big marketing hook for Seven Days in May was that “The Pentagon didn’t want the film made!” But we never hear why.

As for nuclear ickyflicks:

Dr. Strangelove–well, that’s a pretty WASPtastic production. Except for the director, who gave it its tone of ridiculing white male warriors from the highest to the lowest ranks.

Fail-Safe–(((Sidney Lumet))) directing and producing along with (((Max Youngstein))). Screenplay by (((Walter Bernstein))). Run down the (((production list))) for yourself.

And then a passel of goy actors…except for the cocktail party Nazi, Professor Groeteschele…played by, oy vey ist mir, (((Walter Matthau))).

SP, it’s one thing for a people to have its own view of history. Some people’s histories are obsessed with holocausts–animal flesh, human flesh, entire cities. Some have other dreams. Mine is a bunch more space telescopes and being left alone to explore and develop my North Sea/Arctic/Siberian/Neanderthal potential. The Restraining Sword of the mighty fathers is part of that.

The problems come in when the People Of The Book have no Book other than victimization and suffering. Then turn around and tell us that WE are the problem, for not bending knee and neck to their Narratives.

There was paranoia, indeed.

And whence did “paranoia” originate as a technical, then later a mass marketed term? And by whom? And for what purposes?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7659596

can’t tell if irony or serious

Instead he intentionally wrote it as if ripped from the description of some Orwellian dystopia with “deviations” and “accepted schools of thought”.

Yes, the NYT author Manjoo was clearly being critical of the supposed “open mindedness”. Sarcasm isn’t normal for those types of articles, but the exaggerated language shows Manjoo’s intent.

It could have been done by anyone, eventually, as we know by things like the Pakistani nuclear program, the Chinese space program, etc.

As if they could have developed it independently.

Most of Pakistan’s nuclear program was imported from Western countries. The uranium was imported, the design was a copy of fat man, the centrifuge parts were imported. There was only a little final assembly in Pakistan by scientists educated in Western universities. Should

Atoms for Peace
…
The United States then launched an “Atoms for Peace” program that supplied equipment and information to schools, hospitals, and research institutions within the U.S. and throughout the world. The first nuclear reactors in Iran, Israel and Pakistan were built under the program by American Machine and Foundry (AMF, a company more commonly known as a major manufacturer of bowling equipment).
…
Under Atoms for Peace related programs the U.S. exported over 25 tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to 30 countries, mostly to fuel research reactors, which is now regarded as a proliferation and terrorism risk.

The Other Bomb: Pakistan’s Dangerous Nuclear Strategy
…
The program got a significant boost when A.Q. Kahn, a metallurgist working in the Dutch subsidiary of the British-based Uranium Enrichment Company (URENCO Group) returned to Pakistan in 1975. Khan brought with him blueprints for various centrifuge designs and a broad array of business contacts. By buying individual components rather than complete gas centrifuges, he was able to evade existing export controls and acquire the necessary equipment.

Provided of course, that the immigrants are themsemselves black. Unless you propose an immigration scheme that would exclude blacks. Then you’re halfway there.

But what if the immigrants all vote for liberal democrat? How will that suppress black crime, if immigrants tip the scales and Hillary gets elected? How is California’s blacks doing?

Nah. Just math–the fractional proportion declines with a larger denominator, but the crime isn’t suppressed.

In the late ’90s there was a tech/science magazine (I no longer remember the name) that published a 50-year anniversary issue commemorating the invention of the transistor. It reported (or claimed) that a cell phone built with these original integrated circuits would’ve been the size of the Washington Monument. A lot has changed.

“Life in America prior to 1965 was superior for 95% of the people who were here then…”

Every generation wears rose colored glasses and remembers the “good ol’ days” without realizing that similar problems that existed then as now.

“The only Muslims here were a few oil sheiks…”

No. Around 80,000 immigrants who emigrated between 1950–1965 were members of the established elite in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq who fled due to popular revolutions and the new regimes that came with them.

Prior to this time period, Arabs immigrating here were Lebanese and Syrian.

“Illegitimacy simply didn’t exist for middle class people.”

Not true.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J059v12n01_07?journalCode=wphs20

http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/illegitimacy.htm

“Middle class people did not use illegal drugs. Period. There was alcohol, of course, and women especially could get doctors to prescribe barbiturates and amphetamines easier than now, but overall there was much less abuse.”

Well, if there was “much less abuse”, then there was illegal drug use. Regardless, there was drug abuse among the middle class.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/buyers/socialhistory.html

Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, the Bedford Incident, On the Beach, Planet of the Apes

,
are fiction. I wouldn’t call them history, “history,” or “revisionist history.”

I get your point about distinctions regarding what and when was a ‘golden age’ in the US. Yet paranoia is anxiety approaching delusion and irrationality. Perhaps looking back, you think folks were over-reacting (paranoid) vis-à-vis LBJ’s daisy-cutter commercial–and that certain interests, whether in politics or Hollywood, were trying to scare the bejesus out of everyone. Possibly true. I just don’t recall people being paranoid. Tapping into visceral emotions is an age-old practice–it just strikes me as a technique far more in use today. If the ’50s/’60s represented paranoia, then we’re well past delusion today. Which also is possibly true.

Pyrrhus, Born in ’46, graduated HS ’64 , College ’68, and I agree with your community remarks, but we cowered under our desk during nuclear attack drills, every public building had a Civilian Defense Shelter, the Cold War was at its coldest, our president was assassinated and the Viet Nam war raged. otherwise everything was copasetic.

Good gig for the early adopters. And good for us. But not scalable. Though the Democrats have tried to evade the strictures of reality, the fact is reality is a harsh mistress.

Around 80,000 immigrants who emigrated between 1950–1965 were members of the established elite in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq who fled due to popular revolutions and the new regimes that came with them.

Mistakes were made. Now is the time to rectify them, before their consequences get worse.

But what if the immigrants all vote for liberal democrat?

We need an immigration moratorium.

I am 100% serious.

If you want to understand what was in the news, and how it was satirized, read old issues of MAD from that time period. It is a primary source, i.e. “an artifact, diary, manuscript, autobiography, log book, report, official document, a recording or photo, or other source of information that was created by a person involved near or at the time, event or with the person(s) under study.” (Wikipedia)

You’ll learn about how Madison Avenue was lampooned during the so-called “Mad Men” era. You’ll learn about how young people saw Ike, LBJ, and other figures from that time.

I don’t joke about stuff like this.

Have I made my seriousness get through?

We might get serious after a major American city is covered by a mushroom cloud. But I doubt it.

Agree.

Let us just consider the murder rate.

Put time on the independent axis, and put murder per 100K on the dependent axis. Check the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient over time. It was on a nice negative-valued decline producing a lovely glide path from the early 1800s down to the 1960s. (Right through the Great Depression).

Amazingly, in the 1960s, that wonderful period of the perturbations and reverberations of the Warren Court, the murder rate made a big comeback

Tell me, SP, are you in favor of an increasing murder rate?

I thought you were on our side. Was I mistaken?

Mad Magazine gave kids outside New York a good look at life in the Big Apple, and at a wonderful sense of humor. Vicarious thrills that made me look up the word vicarious, and then there was the incomparable Don Martin!

I’m was quite unsure when I posted that, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have refrained from doing so, based on the libertarian principle you cite—of never disparaging one’s fellow citizens.

Still, I’m entering my seventh decade and am not much of an emotive or touch-feely guy when it comes to people but that one singular reaction of mine sticks in the memory. I felt the need to put my hand up when his name was cited. Regardless of my feelings about Gawker, I’m against the plutocracy using its money to subvert, from personal pique, citizen protections that are constitutionally mandated.

People here have cited his “Don’t Go to College” scholarships. While admirable, they are a small scale program. We’ll have to see if any useful conclusions can be drawn from it. He has other good works and ideas, too, I’m sure. Perhaps best to let him have a good, long run and see what he’s got and what kind of man he is after some years have elapsed.

I think it is also worth noting that not only is MAD magazine useful for people today to understand those time but also that people back then used it as a primary resource to make sense of the times and events they were living in and experiencing in America.

Written by mostly a bunch of wiseass Jewish New York cartoonists and satirists, it nevertheless not at all ethnically or geographically provincial and was deeply insightful, ironic, self-aware and right on target, issue after issue, year after year through the later 1950s and the 1960s. Even a cartoon feature as slight as Spy vs. Spy was subversive of cold-war paranoia, in a pretty direct way.

I loved all of it—down to the minute cartoons sprinkled in the margins of the pages. And yes, it was side-splittingly funny, though that may not come through, after half a century.

The Russians had Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and they most ignored him at first, but in Germany, von Braun and the rest paid close attention to his detailed suggestions and concepts.

Notwithstanding that, the Soviet Army did use battlefield rocketry to a far greater extent than the Allies in WWII, though, of course, the technology required is cruder than that required for space flight. Later on, Tsiolkovsky was hailed as a hero in the Soviet Union.

“Our” Germans, von Braun and his colleagues, were greatly helped by the fact that the US managed to capture V2 rockets intact and transported them home. The Soviets captured a few German rocket scientists, too, but it was a thinner and more fragmented intellectual asset that they won, relative to us. Nevertheless, a dozen years after the war, they had a slight edge on us in rocketry used for space flight.

Famous tech hoodoo Don Lancaster is constantly riffing on the inerrancy, essential coolness and importance of MAD magazine. MAD was, let’s face it, for kids…..I agree it occasionally had entertaining slant for adults, but it was mostly just a Newbomb Turk farting-of-the-song level assault on whatever happened to be popular.

Old magazines in general are hugely informative, and the difficulty of obtaining access to them now short of buying old issues on eBay is a serious beef of mine. Public libraries threw out all their old magazines and, in a singular burst of stupidity, the indices to them (Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, et al) as well. I am quite serious in firmly believing that no one with an IQ of over 86 is awarded the Masters of Library Science degree. (Most libraries hire no one without this certificate of stupidity for any responsible position.) IF you can find the article in question, you might be able to get a reprint via interlibrary loan, but there are no loaning libraries for an astonishing percentage of popular magazines.

And getting back issues in digital format is usually a lost cause. Most magazines had a contract with UMI in Ann Arbor to provide microfilm back issues, but that was abandoned when the company “changed focus”.

“Saying the US could have gotten to the moon without the German scientists who ran our rocket and space program is like saying that the Germans could have developed a nuclear bomb. It’s a meaningless counterfactual that doesn’t take into consideration the fact they the US did not, and Germany did not.”

The only thing meaningless in the above thread was your point. There was a vast industrial infrastructure built up in the 1950s in America to make missiles. Most of it had little to nothing to do with germans who were brought here by paperclip. The F-1 engine for example – the first stage engine of the Saturn V rocket – was not only not designed by Von Braun’s team, it was not even commisioned by NASA. It was developed by ARPA and then by the Air Force for use in ballistic missiles.

Von Braun and his leutenants surrendered to the Americans. Do you maintain that most of his team who were taken to America by paperclip would have preferred to go east?

“Right, just like Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, the Bedford Incident, On the Beach, Planet of the Apes, and many many other things were “revisionist history.””

Every other movie today is a zombie movie. Are people truly “paranoid” about zombies. For that matter, in your example, were people really worried about apes taking over the planet? Movies are movies. They reflect current fears, both real and imagined.

By the same token, the 60s produced movies like “What’s up Pussycat”, “How to Succeed in Business”, “Funny Girl”, the Gidget movies, “The Great Race”, “The Odd Couple”, “A Guide for the Married Man”, etc. Were those films dripping with paranoia and latent fear?

In any event, as someone else pointed out, you don’t seem to know the meaning of the phrase “Golden Age”. It is not synonymous with “The Millenium”.

Given that bad things always happen, there could never be – by your definition – a Golden Age. The 80s certainly wouldn’t qualify.

Trade magazines from the period are also hugely useful because you get an unfiltered view of what was considered okay and (by its absence) not okay for general conversational use at any given time. I’ve seen terms like “pickaninnies” casually used in an editorial in a TV repair magazine circa 1969, for instance.

How is showing the world Hulk’s naked hulk, Bollea’s bollocks, and corresponding regions of his lady love, to the world, without their knowledge and permission, covered by “constitutionally mandated citizen protections”?

It certainly had its moments and the cartoons were pretty good. There was also the back inside cover that you folded over to reveal the secret hidden message.

And it can be used in many instances to substantiate that people in a certain time knew of some fact that retconners may try to obfuscate. For instance, there are cartoons or story lines spoofing JFK having a more than passing interest in Marilyn Monroe, meaning that the rumors were going around before the Madison Square Garden party about them being an item.

But very few people past their early-twenties bought it or read it in more than passing. (And in fact usually once you turned 16 or so, if you read it you did so discreetly, as it was ‘a kiddie magazine’.) It’s like people assserting that the Flintstones or Jetsons were ‘cartoons for adults’. They were primarily for children but included some overarching commentary that parents who watched it with their kids would find interesting or humorous, but without kids there never could have been a market for them.

The bigger problem is proving real damages. The video probably did him more good than harm as a celebrity: he’s buff and bejingled and having everyone know it can’t hurt his career.

A few good movies would help, as would perusing some old magazines (in addition to MAD) and reading a few books popular in that period, and listening to some music popular then.

I would also find a Sears catalog or two from that era.

Thanks. Back in 1992 or ’93, after Bill Clinton’s election, there was a radio interview with an Arkansas public official who expressed his displeasure at Clinton’s election. The official wasn’t very clear, but he did say near the end of the interview something like: “I just don’t like the man.” I got the immediate feeling the official was flinching from speaking in detail about derogatory information he knew about Clinton, and that maybe the radio interviewer should have pressed him. That, I think, is why I asked you about Thiel.

I don’t know much about the Thiel-“Gawker”-Hogan legal action. Just headlines. But SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) are real. If my memory’s okay, a small Cleveland-area weekly exposed a local businessman’s shady dealings. He sued on various grounds. The paper was forced to defend, ran out of money, and closed up. For the businessman, problem solved.

By the same token, the 60s produced movies like “What’s up Pussycat”, “How to Succeed in Business”, “Funny Girl”, the Gidget movies, “The Great Race”, “The Odd Couple”, “A Guide for the Married Man”, etc. Were those films dripping with paranoia and latent fear?

All good films, from that standpoint.

Those Elvis movies which aren’t completely unwatchable are good for this. Early rom coms like the Day-Hudson and Day/Garner ones, and of course “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, et al. And the musicals of the time.

Only the films the educational establishment specifically wants you to watch should be considered suspect.

But very few people past their early-twenties bought it or read it in more than passing. (And in fact usually once you turned 16 or so, if you read it you did so discreetly, as it was ‘a kiddie magazine’.)

I think the cutoff was a quite a bit higher than age 16. You really needed to be college age to get a lot of the humor and satire. I suspect the bulk of the readership was in its late teens or early 20s. I wouldn’t have been seen reading MAD openly when I was a working man of 28, but certainly did so without self-consciousness in my college years like the rest of my cohort.

Come to think of it, that made MAD the touchstone of the future counterculture generation of the late ’60s—which isn’t something I had thought about until now.

I’ve seen terms like “pickaninnies” casually used in an editorial in a TV repair magazine circa 1969, for instance.

Interesting to note that over in the UK, Boris Johnson used the term in a newspaper column in the Telegraph as recently as 2002. It created a flap a few years later when he ran for Mayor of London.

Old magazines in general are hugely informative, and the difficulty of obtaining access to them now short of buying old issues on eBay is a serious beef of mine.

I agree, and also agree that it is a tragedy that public libraries have failed us in throwing out their stocks of old magazines.

Reading two or three issues of Time magazine and a couple of Saturday Evening Post, Look or Life magazine from those decades allows one to viscerally understand the zeitgeist in a way that is otherwise hard to do by watching documentaries, for instance. I have three very old issues of Time magazine from that time lying around, which I’ve had my kids read—I think they learned a lot.

I will add that the Catholic Church was very powerful in cities with a large Catholic population. Their power derived from their school systems and churches that were well attended.

Pretty much true in Chicago, and from what I’ve heard, Boston and Baltimore too.

Before the death and resurrection of St.JFK, as Steve has related, anti-Catholic prejudice was much more acceptable: after that you had to dig deep into hardcore fundamentalist territory or amongst atheists to find any.

I’d vote for Peter Thiel himself over any president we’ve had in my lifetime, if he were eligible.

The problem is not the merits of Hulk Hogan’s/Terry Bollea case against Gawker.

The problem is that Thiel had no case against Gawker for their expose of how he downplayed his outed status when his companies needed to attract seed money from conservative Gulf investors. Gawker was constitutionally protected from being sued for slander.

But he was able to use the Bollea case as a proxy to get at them. Hulk Hogan didn’t have enough money to fund the kind of sophisticated legal challenge needed to get his difficult case to win. Thiel did, and got his revenge on Gawker. That’s the subversion of a constitutional protection I’m talking about. It’s a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation

Certain jurisdictions have made the tactic illegal as it impedes free speech. But Thiel may got around even that hurdle by quietly funding a third party’s unrelated case against Gawker.

Most of Pakistan’s nuclear program was imported from Western countries.

As your linked article notes, it would be more accurate to say that most of Pakistan’s nuclear program was surreptitiously and sneakily imported from Western countries, in bits and pieces, to evade detection. Some it of it was plain stolen.

I appreciate your bringing up one of Trump’s weaknesses: his lack of familiarity with legal, as opposed to operational, matters.

Having the head of the executive branch view things from an operational, rather than legal viewpoint is perfect. That’s what the AG is for. We also have nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. It’s plenty. I don’t know why it is people feel that we also need the president, the VP, and every member of Congress to be lawyers as well. The number of lawyers in any organization should be kept to the barest minimum necessary to function to prevent bureaucratic metastasis.

Amen.

We’re really crossing a line as a society if we decide somebody’s status as a public figure makes it ok to make them an unwitting amateur porn actor.

I agree we don’t want plutocrats to be able to subvert the freedom of the press. I also believe we don’t want the “press” (it’s a stretch to call Gawker a news organization) to be able to run roughshod over people that don’t have pockets deep enough to fight back. I’d say the real problem is how often victory or defeat in our legal system is a matter of who can keep paying legal fees the longest.

Bear in mind the legitimate press (defined here as news outlets that balk at running photographs of people having sex without their consent) typically has plutocrats of its own in its corner. As Steve often mentions, the NYT is ~17% owned by World’s Richest Man Carlos Slim.

The problem is that Thiel had no case against Gawker for their expose of how he downplayed his outed status when his companies needed to attract seed money from conservative Gulf investors. Gawker was constitutionally protected from being sued for slander.

But he was able to use the Bollea case as a proxy to get at them. Hulk Hogan didn’t have enough money to fund the kind of sophisticated legal challenge needed to get his difficult case to win. Thiel did, and got his revenge on Gawker. That’s the subversion of a constitutional protection I’m talking about. It’s a problem.

This is called “champerty”-the root word being the same as that of “champion”, in the original sense of a champion being a ‘hired proxy’ for someone in an affair of honor not capable of physically defending same-and, like barratry, was once grounds for disbarment from the legal profession.

Technically, the court ruled on the merits of the Bollea case, and found Gawker liable. The amount seems outrageous to me: my personal opinion is that Bollea was in no way financially harmed, in fact his reputation was enhanced-now all and sundry know that he’s got a big one and knows how to use it, and that will make his wrestling image even more upscale: but that was how the court ruled. If Gawker is properly incorporated, of course, it will file Chapter 7 and its principals will start a new company and be back up in weeks, which is why lacking said champertous influence no lawyer would have taken the case to begin with.

Were we a sane and functional nation, we would have a legislature composed mostly or entirely of non-attorneys and champerty, barratry and the like would never be tolerated. And losers of such suits would pay the winners, meaning contingent fee tort litigation would be scarce. If contingent fees were allowed at all.

There is a good case for barring attorneys from Congress and state legislatures entirely. Certainly they have a conflict of interest in that they have an incentive to make laws requiring as many people as possible to hire attorneys as often as possible.

If you F someone else’s wife in his own house as far as I am concerned pretty much you have no cause to complain if it gets out. It’s like couples getting busy in an elevator and complaining when the security camera footage gets out.

The fear of Khrushchev, other than that one instance cited, never really occurred to me that much. The nuns never had us ducking and covering. It wasn’t something that came up at the dinner table. At least with the old fears we got something that was much closer to paradise in return.

The biggest difference between the old fear of nuclear war and new one of terrorism is that the perpetrators of terrorism actually revel in MAD.

Local boy makes good. I’ve actually played here. It’s a dump, but it’s also a national historic site. The 9th fairway contains the launch site.

http://pakachoaggolfcourse.com/

Steve gets a shout out from Michael Barone: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/george-orwell-call-your-office/article/2597330.

What’s next? Grudging approval from the NYT?