Crime & Federalism

There are a collection of smart, male writers you'll never hear about.  Vacillating between being ignored and loathed, these young men focus on the art of picking up women.  Yet what they write isn't about merely meeting women: It's writing about culture.  If you want to understand people, look at whom they date.

When I linked to a pick-up artist's blog (In Male Fide, a daily read), Rob commented:

I read through the entire link. The whole thing, including responses from both sides, reveal just how sick and myopic this culture really is. The narcissism and self-centered justifications involved in the writing would certainly cause [a guy to drink].

Rob gets it, and his reaction is why I read these blogs.  Culture is destiny, and dating reveals what truly matters in culture.  If a woman says she wants a "nice guy" but cock-chases an asshole, we know what the true culture is: As the economists say, we have a revealed preference.  What is modern culture?

Unknown to most people over 40, younger men are checking out in record numbers.  For most of American history, a man who worked hard could find a stable mate.  Now-a-days a man can work hard for years, only to be ass-raped in divorce court.  

I know zero men who refuse to marry because gays are getting married.  I know several men who will not marry because of feminism: These men have been scared straight by watching their buddies lose everything in divorce court.  Yet conservatives want to "save" marriage by attacking gays instead of family court.  Futility, thy name is Sarah Palin.

Also, many women are earning their own money.  Because of this, many are unwilling to "settle" for a beta male.  Instead, they cock-chase alpha males.  An out-of-work band member is more valuable than an Internet engineer.  Women have revealed their preferences, and men who want to have sex have been paying attention.

What is the future?  Who is the future?  Roosh is the future.  

Who is Roosh?  He's a guy who sleeps in his dad's basement, doesn't work a real job, saves enough money to travel, and still get laid more than 90% of rat-race-running American males.  Some call him a deadbeat.  I call him a magnificent bastard:

Roosh or what ever his name is, is a natural result of feminism. The more matriarchal a society becomes the more guys will behave like Roosh. Guys like Roosh have always been around but in few numbers. But because in America marriage is such a raw deal for guys and women have no accountability, a lot more guys behave like Roosh.Especially young guys. It is a new phenomena that is really under the radar. In my opinion when guys behave like this in mass you will have a third world country. Women hate the behavior guys like Roosh exhibit but do not want to deal with the root causes. Until American women are willing to face the face that is looking at them in the mirror, most guys will become players like Roosh in the future.

Young men, in every culture, have always been the most productive members of society.  Rome was not built in a day, and it was not built by women.  Roosh had an advanced science degree, and was working in a legitimate, humanity-advancing career (medical research).  He realized he could have more fun and have more sex by not working.  

He also realized that if he got married, he'd risk everything he had ever worked for.  Marriage 2.0 [It seems the blog where this list originally appeared has been taken down - Ed.] provides:

1. No-Fault Divorce (i.e. unilateral divorce, with no recourse for other spouse)
2. No-Fault Alimony (i..e she cheats, he pays; the party breaking/violating the contract gets paid)
3. 66-75% of all divorces are filed by the wife (CDC data; Google it) – cha ching!
4. Presumed mother-custody in most state’s family courts (goodbye Daddy, hello ATM)
5. Presumed guilty until proven innocent DV laws (now widely used as the “opening chess move” of divorce – once the husband is removed from the primary residence he never comes back, and she gets the primary residence in the asset split; you have 27 minutes to leave the house after the initial phone call. Also known as the Federal VAWA Legislation).
6. Decriminalization of Adultery (you can run a brothel and still get primary custody of the kids, plus alimony!)
7. Lobbying by the National Organization for Women against Shared Parenting bills in many states. (NOW is no longer about equality, it’s now about a zero sum game for resources. Children are cash-cows, and NOW will be damned if they allow Shared Parenting to stop the cash-flow. Divorcees of the world unite! 
8. Lifetime Alimony (One NJ Appellate Court recently upheld a lifetime alimony sentenced rendered for barely an 8-year marriage. Their argument was that now in these days of short-term marriages being the norm, 8 years was pretty long, and as such probably deserved to be treated as a long-term marriage. Brilliant!)
9. Fathers Are Optional Parents (States are enforcing payment-obligations by non-custodial parents with an iron fist, however they are completely ignoring the visitation-rights of NCP parents. If you are going to police one parents obligation to pay, why not police the other parents obligation to allow the Dad to see his kids?)
10. One Sided Alimony: Ok so ex-spouse B got used to a certain standard of living, so we will make ex-spouse A pay alimony. Fine. But how about the things ex-spouse A got used to? Shouldn’t we have some sort of reverse payment by ex-spouse B in the form of weekly cleaning, a hot meal 7 nights a week, and “romantic companionship” services? How come one spouse is on the hook to provide something that the other was used to during the marriage, and not vice versa?
11. Paternity Fraud (If you missed the 2 year window to catch that your kids aren’t really your kids, you are SOL in most states. What’s worse if your cheating wife divorces you, and you can bring the DNA tests to court, and you will still be forced to pay 18-23 years of child support for these kids who are some other guy’s spawn). In most fraud crimes, once the crime is proven, the guitly party gets punished. However in the topsy-turvey world of Family Courts, it is the innocent party that gets punished. No one to this date has ever been legally punished of perpetrating Paternity Fraud to this date. If you are going to be a fraudster, this is the best kind of fraud to pull off.

There are civilizations where men "check out."  There are even civilizations within the United States where males do not involve themselves in their communities and families.  We don't call these places "civilizations," instead relying on euphemisms like "urban areas," or the "inner city."

Soon enough, most of the United States will be an inner city.  Enjoy your life today, because it's not going to get any better tomorrow.

You could try to reform it.  That'd require taking on the National Organization of Women.  Are you really going to argue in support of alimony reform laws?

You're too big of a pussy to offend a woman by saying something politically incorrect, and probably live in fear of your wife's wrath - which can be inspired by nothing more than a stray remark at a dinner party.  Reform won't happen.  This Is The Decline.

And so the only rational response to an irrational world is amoral hedonism.  Let the pick-up artists roll. 

I don't watch John Steward or Stephen Colbert, although I unfortunately am aware of their body of work.  In reading about their Rally to Restore Sanity, I couldn't help but be overwhelmed with boredom:

"It's a perfect demographic sampling of the American people," Stewart cracked to a crowd filled with mostly younger whites. 

That explains it.  I am a racist: I generally can't tolerate white people.  Let's talk about wine and political correctness, and the New Yorker. 

And here's the music they listen to:

Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow also performed, singing if "I can't change the world to make it better, the least I can do is care."

Are you fucking serious? They are, which is why the rally is a giant black hole of irony.

Boring whites have re-defined irony.  In the white view, it doesn't mean a shock.  Irony requires nuance, thought, and surprise.  Boring whites lack the psychological robustness to process irony. 

And so irony has become satire.  Insulting the one or two clever among them, the satire is made obvious.  There is no punchline, as a punchline presupposes that the audience has the capacity to get the joke.  The modern ironist explains the joke.

The picture is an example of white irony.  "Isn't it ironic that, at a rally mocking the Tea Party, I am wearing American flag clothing? Because that's what Tea Party people wear!  We are mocking them by embracing them! We are using their tools of oppression to oppress!  OMG aren't we so fucking clever!"

While the rally is based on the white version of irony, their choice of music immediately shows that they are not destroying paradigms by mocking them: They are the paradigm. They don't make jokes: They are jokes.  Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow?  QED.

Allow me to share some good music.  This would be the Crime & Federalism theme song:

Here is the best poetry you will ever hear set to music:

The is a story about the wages of sin, and it contains a legitimate example of irony:

Stop being so fucking boring.

The woman in this video is an idiot.  It wasn't the subprime loans themselves that did most of the damage.  It was the side bets (the CDOs) that crashed the economy.  

I know a lawyer who does his law-and-motion work at the fire station.  When he has to appear in court, he trades shifts with another guy.  Being a firefighter is the greatest scam in the world.  My only regret is that no one told me about it when I could have angled my way into a position:

The creation of new books has done more to destroy knowledge's advancement than burning books.  This becomes obvious when one read's today's political commentary.

Ezra Klein and many others have sought to defend elitism - what they mean by elitism is rule by the elite.  How does one define elite?  Simple - credentials.  If you have the right degrees, then you are elite.  

Yet rule by the elite is not a novel issue.  It's been tried before - in the United States and many times.   It failed.  Does anyone remember the Vietnam War?  How could the Vietnam War have gone so badly?  It went badly for the same reason the Iraq War went badly - namely, the elites ran it:

The Best and the Brightest (1972) is an account by journalist David Halberstam of the origins of the Vietnam War published by Random House. The focus of the book is on the foreign policy crafted by the academics and intellectuals who were in John F. Kennedy's administration, and the consequences of those policies in Vietnam.

You mean there's an old (well, it's older than I am, anyway) book out there that already ended this debate?  Why are we talking instead of reading?  And yet here is Ezra Klein, today:

This isn't a very popular statement, but there is a role for elites in public life. Just like I want knowledgeable CEOs running companies and knowledgeable doctors performing surgeries, I want knowledgeable legislators crafting public policy.

It was "knowledgeable" - that is, credentialed - people who brought the United States into the Vietnam War.  It was "knowledgeable" people who failed to regulate Wall Street.  It was "knowledgeable" who orchestrated an invasion of Iraq, and "knowledgeable" people who crafted the bailouts.  Washington and Wall Street are full of "knowledgeable" people?  As an old wise man might ask a young man who knows it all: "How's that working out for you?"

Rule by the elite plainly fails.  Why?  In a society of narcissism, the answer should be obvious: Elitism has no connection accomplishment, but instead is defined by credentialism.

What does a lawyer who has never tried a case have to say about trials?  In a sane world, not much.  And yet there is not a single trial lawyer on the Supreme Court.  To become a Supreme Court Justice, you need to attend Harvard or Yale law school, work in the Department of Justice (among other Harvard and Yale law graduates), and kiss ass.

No one dares ask: How many trials have you tried?  What were the sizes of your verdicts?  What are some things you learned from decades of experience?

None of that matters.  Accomplishment means credentials.  Indeed, people would "refute" my arguments by saying, "Simply graduating from Harvard or Yale is itself and accomplishment."  Yes, indeed: Even being accepted into an elite institution is evidence that one is very good at being a student.  It says nothing about whether a person is qualified to do anything else.

One reason elitism fails is that elites reward credentials over accomplishments.  The commenters to the insufferable Megan McArdle make the point well:

The elites have credentials, not knowledge. I have multiple graduate degrees. I've earned my distrust of "I have an academic credential, so submit peon".

I could get into Harvard's School of Public Policy.  After playing nice for a few years, I'd have a degree.  Would I then be qualified to rule the world?  Does reading a few (or even few hundred) books prepare you to rule the world?

Another commenter notes:

I work in Washington and it's common to run into "senior fellows" and vice presidents and the like at think tanks who are all of 28 or 29, whose main qualification is that they went to the right school and got in the door by virtue of a key connection or the willingness to spend a stint at said think tank as an intern. Most of them have never had a real job and have no real world experience, so their output, while often clever and well written, has little grounding in reality. I particularly enjoy reading a paper authored by one of these geniuses about how the military could improve this or that when I know the author hasn't spent a day in uniform, couldn't tell an M-16 from an M4, and has fired neither. On the other hand, I work with, on a regular basis, industry leaders who make real things and run real companies and I don't see many who aren't sporting gray hair.

That's true.  Peruse the websites of chicken hawk think tanks.  You'll see many fancy degrees, but not many purple hearts.

The elite have had their -too many - chances.  They've failed.  It's time to give populism a chance.

Ezra Klein, like so many big-government proponents, actually supports individual freedom - at least when it's his freedom at stake.  In this video, he describes his experience as a victim of bullying.  He notes that "It gets better" because when you grow up, you can move away from the bullies.

What about when the bullies are government officials who make it impossible to run your business?  What about the bullies who control how much you can charge for your services?  What about the bullies in the Federal Reserve who steal taxpayer money to enrich Goldman Sachs?

Getting away from these bullies isn't quite so easy.  And yet Klein remains an advocate of Big Government.

Only someone with a pathological case of cognitive dissonance would not see the parallels between bullying and living in the United States:

Fascinating:

on the macro level, every injury inflicted on one sex by the other will eventually, in some form, be repaid in full. When men become simpering, cowardly weaklings, women become ball-busting sluts. When women become ball-busting sluts, men become exploitative cads. When men become exploitative cads, women become tyrannical shamers. It goes on and on, transcending individuals and generations in a neverending feedback loop until equilibrium is reached. 

The double standards that exist between banks and ordinary Americans are many.  People like Todd Zywicki and Megan McArdle continue fighting for the banks right to live under a separate "code" of (dis)honor.  Here is the banks' latest attempt:

A group of the largest commercial banks asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let the government continue to withhold details of emergency loans the Federal Reserve made to financial firms in 2008.

You, me, and everyone else has a credit report.  Banks keep detailed records about our borrowing and spending.  They will not loan anyone money who does not have a credit report.  How else can they assess the risk of making a loan?

The bank group is appealing a federal judge’s August 2009 ruling requiring the Fed to disclose records of its emergency lending. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, sued for the release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The central bank has never disclosed the identities of borrowers since the creation in 1914 of its Discount Window lending program, which provides short-term funding to financial institutions, the Clearing House said in its petition.

“Disclosure of this information threatens to harm the borrowing banks by allowing the public to observe their borrowing patterns during the recent financial crisis and draw inferences -- whether justified or not -- about their current financial conditions,” the group said in its appeal. Calls to Paul Saltzman, general counsel for the Clearing House, were not immediately returned.

Banks borrowed our money.  Yet when we ask to see their credit report, they file appeals in the United States Supreme Court preventing us from seeing it.

How can anyone seriously continue defending the banks?  How much money does Todd Zywicki, an employee at a taxpayer-funded institution, make "consulting" to banks?  How can anyone take people like Todd Zywicki and Megan McArdle seriously?

What do you do when no one is watching? Elwood John Walzer steals.  And the New Jersey State Bar doesn't care:

Stealing from clients will get a lawyer disbarred, but the sanction for stealing from a blind refreshment stand operator in an office lobby is only a censure.

That was the outcome Wednesday in the ethics case against Elwood John Walzer, an attorney and regulatory officer for the Department of Human Services, who was caught on camera swiping food and beverages at least 14 times between Sept. 19 and Oct. 26, 2007. The vendor operated the stand under a program of the DHS Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

That's it.  (Even though Elwood John Walzer stole $1,200 worth of food, he didn't face any criminal charges.)

In an age when anyone can have a widely-read (or even merely Googleable) blog, why would anyone cheat people out of money?  I just sent the below e-mail to a guy:

I have not received a check.  

He has no idea what is about to happen to his online reputation.  It's a long story, and it's one I'm going to tell if this guy can't prove to me he sent a check.  (If/when the post comes up, you'll see that it's not about $63.)

In general I treat people well because that's my circuitry.  I don't cheat people because that's just not in my nature.  Yet I am constantly getting e-mails and Facebook messages from people describing an interaction with a mutual friend.

It's a small world.  If you cheat someone, humans - in real life - are going to find out.

It's also a wired world.  If you cheat someone, he might have a blog.

Even if being ethical isn't "your thing," in a small-and-wired world, you shouldn't go around ripping people off.  Sure, most of the time you'll get away with it.  What happens when you don't?

I'm reminded of tax advice learned during Business Planning.  My law professor, a former tax planner, always told clients who wanted to cheat on their taxes, "There's a low chance you will get audited.  There is a 100% chance that, if audited, you'll be fucked."

It only takes one time for you to cheat the wrong guy.  And then for the rest of your life, whenever someone Google's your name, they're going to find the cheated guy's blog.  

Leave the morality of honesty for another day.  Today, being honest is in your selfish interest.