Some acts of national-demographic self-mortification stretch the imagination beyond its breaking point:
The Minneapolis–St. Paul area has one of the world’s largest Somali populations outside Mogadishu, with more than 80,000 residents believed to have originated from Somalia.
Seriously: Why?
… isn’t an insulting name for Obama, or even for what he has ‘wrought’. It’s a name for America, and thus for the leading spirit (or Zeitgeist) of the world. A country where support for a Harvard Law presidency ‘bottoms out’ (repeatedly) at something above 40% knows what it wants — and is getting it (good and hard). Blaming Obama for any of this is like blaming pustules for the bubonic plague.
The world deserves Obama almost as much as America does, and in many cases, even more. If the Cathedral is basically to be applauded — and who doesn’t believe that? — there’s every reason to mainline it, by putting the authentic voice of the academy in power. As the chrysalis-husk of a universal project, America is duty bound to abolish itself as a particular nation. If it defers to its own ‘propositional’ ideals, how could it not? There are even chunks of the Tea Party who kinda sorta felt it was the right thing to do. The conservative establishment certainly did, including the Republican campaign machines of the two last presidential elections. The Idea necessitates blood sacrifice, which Obamanation consummates.
“The missile strikes the White House is contemplating would advance Syria’s dissolution,” writes Steven A. Cook in the Washington Post.
What is this ‘Syria’ of which you speak?
Such senseless language should have been dismissed from the practical lexicon by now. It belongs strictly to history books.
Between the Mediterranean coast of the northern Levant and the Iranian border, the internationally-recognized state system exists only as a set of tokens in diplomatic games. It isn’t coming back.
This article (and book) will be seen as astonishingly prescient soon, and deserves to be already.
Sailer’s review of Blomkamp’s Elysium is indeed a “self-recommending” masterpiece, and not just for this:
The notion that art is about equality and niceness is just a cover story put out by artists to keep us poor schlumps from realizing what they are up to. Art, from the Great Pyramid on down, is actually about the most talented and/or self-confident bullying the rest of us into furnishing them with the resources to realize their visions, while the nice liberal dweebs pass on to us the artists’ self-serving justifications.
[There’s even a jolt of Kurtz to keep the horror flowing]
The idea that political seriousness can be evacuated from any situation by invoking (purely procedural) ‘democratic’ norms was always an evasion. It was a way to avoid the reality of ‘who-whom’, and thus dependent upon a haze of Cathedralist insincerity. The implicit selling point — “Don’t worry, the rabble will accept representatives that we can work with” — isn’t bought by anybody anymore. Things have gone wrong badly enough, often enough, for such promises to have been discounted down to zero.
If you don’t want the rabble in power, you have to keep them from power. That’s the simple, and now overt, understanding of the dawning post-demotic age. Michael Hirsh doesn’t like it at all:
As the Egyptian military consolidates control by murdering pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters and declaring a state of emergency, we may be witnessing the most dangerous potential for Arab radicalization since the two Palestinian intifadas. Despite the resignation Wednesday of Mohamed ElBaradei, the vice president, in opposition to the Egyptian junta’s action, the discomfiting fact is that most of Egypt’s liberal “democrats”—along with the United States—have never looked more hypocritical. If the bloody crackdown is allowed to continue while the U.S. and West do nothing, the actions of the Egyptian military could de-legitimize democratic change in the Arab world for a generation or more.
Read without judgement, Hirsh’s article is a fascinating document, punctuated by a raging despair that marks a transition of aeons. “Egypt’s liberal ‘democrats'” can either change course in accordance with their name (as Hirsh would like, but does not expect), or they can teach the world that ‘liberal democrats’ know nothing of global political reality, and need to call themselves something new. A sound name would describe a plausible, though ambitious, aspiration: Modernity in Power (freed of democratic dreams). It will still be a while before we hear anything of this kind, but its intimations are not — any longer — difficult to detect.
ADDED: Crossing the Rubicon: “While we Americans are babbling about a new politics of ‘inclusiveness’, even some of the Twitter-Facebook liberals of Tahrir Square are coming to see Egypt as it is. Us or them.”
ParaPundit captures America’s game of political chicken with exceptional acuity:
The sorts of people who can generate the incomes (and therefore tax revenues) to pay all these [pension] liabilities are becoming rarer. Of course this means the Republicans are road kill. But the demographic ascent of the Democrats into power will give them something like command of the Titanic as it hits an iceberg. In fact, the Democrats decided to head for the iceberg as their sure fire way to get permanent control of the ship.
Glenn Reynolds suspects that this story will confirm some PUA stereotypes settled pattern recognition.
I used hang with a guy who would go to Saskatchewan and sell drugs all the time. He was ballin’. He made tons of money. On our first date, he spent well over a G. He was just throwing it out like it was nothing. He was buying me anything I wanted. We rode around in a limo… It was crazy. We would go out to all these fancy-ass restaurants and all the white people would stare at us like, “Who let these hood rats in?” That was fun. He’s never really in town though, so I only get to see him a few times a year. I think if I ever decide to just settle down and be a housewife, I’ll marry him.
There’s not much in the story for religious traditionalists to latch onto with any sense of consolation. Still, as far as genetic selection for entrepreneurial traits is concerned, it has to be possible to do worse.
ADDED: Another sex psychology story (also via). If you think about the archaic genetics of warfare the answer to the question is obvious. For males losing matters absolutely. For females, not so much.
In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer notes:
It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein’s Law and yell, “Stop.” You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.
Yes, yes, yes … but. Despite its perfect common sense, the monotony of this message is becoming utterly unbearable. The end isn’t arriving tomorrow. This dreary horror show could last for decades. How many roughly-identical, absolutely obvious, sensible Op Ed columns is it possible to endure? (I’m already way into overtime.)
Walter Russell Mead sinks to musty exhortation:
Time and money are running out before economic conditions for ordinary Egyptians lurch even further downward. Egypt’s new, government absolutely must find some way to restore stability and rebuild confidence, or things will get much, much uglier.