White Conservatives Need Some New Arguments Now

“The Southern Strategy is a liberal myth! Liberals are the REAL racists! Liberals keep blacks on the Democratic Plantation! Liberals are afraid of blacks that can think for themselves! You’re just playing the race card! Blablabla! Garble Yarble Snarg!” – Standard right wing response to being called a racist,...

Louis Armstrong's Culture (Some Things Never Change)

“That he was not interested in cultural assimilation is an indication of psychological security and confidence. It may also be taken as a political stance. To insist on the value of vernacular culture and to reject assimilation was not an idle position to take. There were considerable ideological pressures working in the other direction.”

They Like You After You've Survived & Don't Need Them

I can't stop it - I know that - all I can do is tell you about living with it:

“In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue. Online job boards burst with ads recruiting 'idea people' and 'out of the box' thinkers. We are taught that our own creativity will be celebrated as well, and that if we have good ideas, we will succeed.

It’s all a lie. This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

'We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,' says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. 'As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,' he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.”

Add in the cost of being black and it's damned near hopeless,...

 

I'm Stuck On A High-Speed Rail Train To Nowhere Fast

While reading this, I had no idea if I should laugh or cry because, Buddy, TMR's already there:

A healthy culture transmits values. When it stops doing that, it dies. When the values no longer seem to be applicable, than the culture hunts around for new values, it undergoes a period of confusion while its forward motion slows down. That is where Japan is now. It's where America has arrived. 

The values of the left, that are present in both Japan and America, are a cultural suicide pact. The left pretends to add a spiritual dimension to modernism. It has been peddling that lie for two centuries and it has yet to deliver. In countries where it wielded full control, there was neither modernism nor values. Russia destroyed the economic, technological and spiritual potential of generations of its people. China is trying to use Communist values to avoid turning into another Japan, not realizing that those are little better than the collective obligations with which Japan rushed into the future. 

As America gazes at the ruins of Detroit and the insanity spewed forth by a digital frontier that increasingly looks every bit as eccentric and toxic as anything coming out of Japan, it is all too clear that we are Japan. There is no unique insanity in East, only a common disintegration of values in the East and the West. 

Asia and Europe have both witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations. It isn't technology that destroys technology that destroys civilizations, but a lack of values. 

To understand where Japan and Europe are, imagine an America decaying with no new ideas, losing its religion and values, losing its economy and finally its sanity, becoming coldly conformist and inhuman, while its families fall apart and its youth retreats into their own makeshift worlds. That reality is closer to home than we might like to think. 

America is destroying its values on an industrial scale. In a post-industrial nation, the destruction of values has become one of its chief industries. And while there is value in challenging values, in the conflict and clash of ideas, that requires that values go on existing, or there is no longer anything to challenge. And then there is nothing left but emptiness and madness. 

Another stupid product from an infomercial. Another ridiculous politician. Another protest. Another indicator of economic decline. Another day, week, month, year of empty nothingness.

I just used my "American Values" tag, on the last post, remembering all the flak I caught for it in the past. It does seem pretty worthless now, next to everyone scheduling "Eastern" medicines in with their meditation ("not just for new-agey folks") and no clue why they're doing either.

That's the only reason why I don't know whether to laugh or cry,...

Pole Dancing For Jesus: "There's Nothing Wrong With What I Do" (But, Of Course, There Never Is)

And "Thank You" for the permission to judge - now that's new!

Hat Tip: iOwnTheWorld

Only A Matter Of Time (Which You Gave Them)

The Houston Press' TV reviewer caught it (like a virus) even if no one else did:

I thought I imagined it at first, or was suffering the onset of hallucinations brought upon by sleep deprivation, strong drink, and three consecutive nights of watching Steven Tyler undress the audience with his eyes. But for maybe the first time since Season 10 of Idol began, I actually rewound my DVR to rewatch something.

It starts out ambiguously enough that you know something hinky is afoot, then moves into uncomfortably quasi-spiritual territory before flashing the "S"-word. And why am I talking about it so much? Because it was one of the few mildly surprising moments of an otherwise utterly predictable evening.

I included the clip,...because I imagine a few of last night's failed contestants - and not a few of you "suppressive persons" - might need some auditing in the near future.

"One of the few mildly surprising moments of an otherwise utterly predictable evening." Ha! - See what happens, Mr. & Mrs. Conformity-As-Entertainment, when they don't think they can get Charlie Sheen?

They start coming after YOU!

Because you've proven - with your lack of independence, Gawd-awful taste in entertainment, overall low standards, and tumble weed-infested lack of imagination - you're prime-cut cult material! You'll go for ANYTHING! (As long as it blinks and promises to be uplifting at the end, you're recruitable.)

Not only that, but you're too dumb to be insulted by their backhanded flattery (oh yeah, they want you, because you're fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked UP!) and, of course, you won't cause a fuss or a scene. You're not going to stop watching American Idol over some little ol' commercial, are you? Of course not, not you. Us, maybe (well, we never watch American Idol to begin with) but not YOU. Your brain's already turned to fucking mush. There's tons of commercials on T.V., right? What's one more?

Now turn over all of your money and let them fix you:

And then get in line to scream at Charlie Sheen,...

"I'm Not Interested In What People Believe"

Unlike probably everyone else watching Charlie Sheen these days, we think this "train wreck" (as some are calling it) is probably the best we've seen him, and (having mutual friends) we applaud him mightily for it. He looks and sounds more like his father than ever. His nothing-can-take-me-down attitude, in the face of this wimpy, middle class, wet rag nanny state finger-wagging opinion is winning. This is a man, owning his actions and insisting everyone else come clean and take responsibility for theirs as well. (Our favorite line? Interviewer: "One of the women said she was afraid she might O.D.". Sheen [incredulous]: "What's that got to do with me?") Seriously, considering the most this loser culture can come up with now is awful Lady GaGa (and Britney Spears) records, vs. watching Beibermania or Kim Kardashian's ass from afar, do you really think everyone is, or wants to be, stuck in this same lame no fun existence the rest of you seem, if not enthused by, at least comfortable with? Really? Are you kidding us? This completely stagnant creative period has shown us nothing but the cultural and artistic equivalent of adults playing with bubble gum - and you think every living breathing person wants to be limited to that? Again, are you kidding?

Everyone can say what they want, but we've said, all too often, we see too many powerful beta males in this country, and where we've been going, both financially and culturally, is reflective of that. We've become a cautious, conformist, inoffensive, non-risk taking, arrogant, lying bunch of NewAge pussies who think if any woman, like this interviewer, says she or others don't approve, then some form of public contrition and apology is called for. Well, screw that. Neither she, or the public, are Charlie Sheen's mother and even if his parents disapprove, he's a grown-assed man who refuses to be a part of whatever milquetoast existence the rest of you think is good for gaining social approval from a worthless feminized culture-killing clique. He didn't ask for it, doesn't need it, and isn't angling for it. He's a man. He's rich. And he's free.

The question is, what the hell have the rest of you become?

*Welcome readers of Althouse, Instapundit (by way of Althouse) and Big Hollywood! This is TMR - check out the whole thing!

Learn How To Think (And We'll Never Argue)

Catching A Weak Buzz

"Youth culture doesn’t need to be saved from commercialism, it is commercialism."

-- Tom Slater, reviewing a "rebellious" concert film and discovering conformity - kids today are too stupid to lead rebellions - so it's safe to say, I guess, that '60s punch wasn't really all that well Spiked.

I Got Cha, Insta-Baby!!!

"'Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.'

So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science.

Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong."

-- Nicholas Wade, by way of Glenn Reynolds, who has finally run across one point made repeatedly on this blog (Glenn didn't think of it himself - though I've charged him with it - because, with all his power, when did he ever rock the boat?) I think this should be a major topic of discussion in American society - because it's a major aspect of it's post-60s cultism - maybe even taken up by me (and because they're so smart) Panda Bear, Ann Althouse, and the Instapundit?

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! (They're Gomers)

"It amazed me when I looked around and saw the reaction of all these people who considered themselves open-minded… They all thought the exact same way and I wanted to tell them 'you’re not open-minded, you’re progressive and there’s a difference'. The same people would assume that every single conservative point of view was wrong and evil. I’m not a conservative by any means, but I see value in discourse and actually listening to the other side, whether they’re wrong or right. But they wouldn’t listen at all. They were as intolerant as the people they hated.

That contradiction just really irritated me, and it really stuck with me and I guess inspired some of the anger that comes out in my blog and book."

-- Christian Lander, on "people who are doing things that appear to be beneficial to the world but are essentially just being used as status symbols" and why he created "Stuff White People Like" (he noticed the Left's hypocrisy after Ann Coulter visited his college) on Spiked!



And - hey! - does this sound familiar?:

"...Behind their often conceited struggle for uniqueness there is, paradoxically, a desire to conform. These two desires are not easily united, and the impossible pursuit of being an individual while at the same time fitting in leads to a particularly angsty, narcissistic, snobby, duplicitous and guilt-ridden personality type."

Oh yea: that's my cultish NewAgers!!!