Do Women Belong Everywhere?

Bring back men-only spaces

There are a number of places where women do not belong, or collectively lower the standards.  Of competence, efficiency, and/or safety.  The best example I can think of is an oil rig.  Women do not belong there.  Is it not just so convenient that they do not really want to work there?

But there are plenty of men's spaces where women do want to be.  They are never as dangerous or as dirty as an oil rig.  But women view them as somehow beneficial for themselves.  We will come back to this, but first, current events demand that we talk about the game.

The Game Women Play

I really do not care how women dress.  But to pretend that they do not dress provocatively, intentionally, in certain spaces is ridiculous.  It is a game for them; a sly power game.  It works like this:  If a man approaches a woman, and she finds him attractive, well, then she is pleased that her provocative outfit did the trick.  If another man approaches her, and she finds him unattractive, then regardless of what she is wearing, he is creepy and he makes her uncomfortable.  And she will noisily call out his misadventure and mal-intent.

I first noticed the weaponization of the term uncomfortable ten or fifteen years back.  The problem with the label uncomfortable is that it can be applied to almost anything or any action however benign.  And because it is personally subjective, one cannot argue against it.  This has only gotten worse.

Anyway, this is why women are so mad at Shane Gillis for joking that they dress like whores in the gym.  He called out the game.  Men, it seems, are supposed to just keep quiet about it.  To call it out is sexist, or worse.  To joke about it is tantamount to sexual assault.  Are we really supposed to take these women seriously?  They have belittled and beclowned themselves.

But it goes well beyond outfits.  This game is the general attitude that women possess towards men today.  Men can be forgiven for tiring of it.  Some blame feminism; I personally have no idea where this came from.  But I do not believe it predates the Second World War.  There was a time when the sexes treated each other better.  There was a respect and etiquette to the relationship dance.  This seems to have eroded since mid-century.  Today, like etiquette more generally, it seems completely lost.

Respect and etiquette have been replaced with hookup culture and the game.  The whole dance is more transactional, less serious, and yes, ripe for gaming.  Women take relationship advice from Alex Cooper.

But the game is terribly unfair for men.  And so many of them no longer want to play.  Women can do as they please and act as they please.  But surely men should be able to escape; at least occasionally.  In order to stop the nonsense, let's bring back some men-only spaces.

Someone should open a men-only gym or even a chain of men-only gyms.  Not all gyms need be men-only, but men should have the option of not participating in the female games.

Of course, women would immediately pressure the gym to open membership to women.  Somehow men-only spaces seem to threaten women and women's rights.  And too many men accept this precept.  I urge resistance.  When you are talking about a men-only gym, the only reason women want to be there is to play the game.

Let's consider a few other scenarios where women have installed themselves.

Women reporters on NFL game sidelines and in men's lockers rooms.  They have nothing to add and no one wants them there; they just want to be there.  And that alone is not a good enough reason for them to be there.  No, it is not.

Women in the boardrooms and C-Suites.  I realize this is debatable, but consider their collective record.  It is underwhelming.

Women do not need to be members of all men's athletic clubs.  Why cannot Augusta National remain a men-only club?

Should women really be police officers?  Regardless of the answer, the question should probably be discussed.  Here I mean, cops on the street.  I see no problem if a woman wants to join the FBI.

Taxi drivers, long haul truckers, airline pilots, fine, women can do all of that.  But do women belong on trading floors?  I tend to doubt it.

Why do the boy scouts need girls?  Do the girl scouts need boys?  The idea is ridiculous.

So are we conflating women's relationship games with women's equality?  First, I would say it is less about women's equality, and more about women's ability to perform at a level equal to men.  Can women be as effective as men as a beat cop?  The idea is absurd.  Is it merit or is it mere inclusion?  What ties all this together is women's need to be everywhere men are.  To answer the question posed in the title:  No, women do not belong everywhere.  Other cultures understand this.

Let's return to the game.  One might ask, what about the predatory Andrew Tate and his ilk in the so-called manosphere?  I have previously discussed these charlatans.  They play their own games.  And I think that these respective game players are most likely to meet each other.  Or more accurately, collide with each other.  Likely as not, in the gym.  Where they all get exactly what they deserve.

Of course, Alex Cooper and Andrew Tate deserve each other.  But the fallout is the Cornell Seven.  Or what Megyn Kelly rightfully calls the Cornell Eight.  Because Jane Doe was just playing her game, as the men were playing their own.  They too deserve each other.  The societal collision was inevitable.  There will be more.

Finally, if you view this piece as sexist, that is not my intention.  But if you find it so, I am okay with that as well.  Like racist, antisemitic, homophobic, etc., I could not care less what you call me.  Why not just go find something, anything, you are good at?  And leave the rest of us, both men and women, in peace.

𓐵

Culture Is What We Tolerate

Do not tolerate ghetto and ratchet behavior in your business

How should businesses respond?

So long as we continue to tolerate this behavior, it will continue.  In fact, this is getting noticeably worse.  I advise requiring prepayment for all services including restaurant meals.  Of course, you must ask everyone to prepay, but most people will understand.  Prepayment does not absolutely guarantee against bad behavior, but it does lessen the possibility and gives advantage to the business.  No exceptions; if people do not like it, have the confidence to send them elsewhere.

Regarding other behavior, institute a one-strike trespass rule.  I think a dress code and a no-unaccompanied-minors policy also make a lot of sense.  In most businesses, all devices should be muted.  Patrons should take calls and other noise outside.  Or do not come back.  This must be enforced rigorously.  Loud voices, really any kind of noise, are symptomatic of people who cause problems.  Do not tolerate it.

One other note on minors.  There are some business and restaurants where children are just out of place.  And the people who tend to bring children into these places are very often problematic.  One might consider an across the board, no children policy.

For the businesses that can afford it, I would put guards on the doors.  Cameras are helpful, but only after the damage is done.  The goal should be to head off the damage in advance.  Maybe you decide the guards need to hold bags and give out baggage claim tickets.  These policies are common in low-trust societies.

Yes guards, just like a nightclub.  Because that is the way so many people behave today.  They will gladly treat your business like a rowdy roadhouse.  At this point, these behaviors and attitudes are an existential threat to your business.  You need to respond aggressively.  In too many places, the US has already become a low-trust society.  If you do not adjust to this new reality, you will go out of business.

And I would severely limit and/or curtail discussion.  These people are not rational.  For the most part, there is just no utility in discussion.  It only escalates and exacerbates the problems.  Just get them out as fast and efficiently as possible.  Here again, guards can be helpful.

Along these same lines, do not be concerned by what they call you.  Because you care about your business, you are obviously a racist or some other sort of bigot.  And they are going to video record the situation; you know this in advance.  But people are tired of their behavior.  It is called fatigue for a reason.  These videos most often make these so-called customers look bad.  Most of the clips above prove this point.  It is vital for you to keep your cool.  Because they often do not, and this will work to your advantage.

At this point, I actually believe the videos will help you gain the type of customers that you want (of all demographics).  Let's go to ABC business because they do not tolerate the nonsense.  Same for any news reports; regardless of how negative the journalist covers your business, today it will help you.  Lefty journalists may be too stupid to know what is going on.  Or too cowardly to report on it.  But everyone else knows the deal.  We have all seen it far too often.

Besides, any reputational harm will be among the people you do not want as customers anyway.  Everyone else will quietly notice, and return.  Just look at the situations with Carnival Cruise Lines and Spirit Airlines.  Who wants to go on a Carnival Cruise today?  This is because they have allowed the ratchet behavior to fester.  And people avoid them; opting instead for the competition.  As for Spirit, they, very noisily, went out of business earlier this year.

The customer dynamics of your business are no different.

I do have one other suggestion.  Well, not a suggestion, an anecdote.  When I was a kid, my parents owned a rental beach house.  It was oceanfront, but it was an older unit.  Think:  In demand because on the water, but older and therefore prone to age-related problems.  And of course, they got a lot of complaints.

Now my parents are pretty shrewd real estate operators.  And I believe it was my mother who came up with a solution to this ongoing problem.  What did she do?  She doubled the rent.

No more problems.

You see, when you double the rent, you get a completely new class of tenants.  People who maybe understand what they are paying for and what is important.  They do not tend to complain about every little thing in an old house.  The type of people who would never send their food back to the kitchen in a restaurant.  Nor use their smartphone without ear pods.

I understand that most businesses cannot double their prices.  But there is a lesson here for all businesses:  The type of customer you attract matters greatly.

Also this:  Eighty percent of your problems will come from twenty percent of your customers.  It might even be ninety/ten.  So serve the eighty or ninety percent of your customers that you want and value.

Get rid of the rest.

𓐵

It Is Not Racism, It Is Fear

Chi Brown on the African American mindset

I really cannot add to Brown's commentary.  I did make a comment on one of his Youtube videos:  Chi Brown deserves a million subscribers.  Today he has 42.5 thousand.  I am one.  Watch a few of his videos and you will join me.

Brown has been posting videos on Youtube since 2015, but he only appeared in my feed in the last month or so.  He was not someone I sought out; I had never heard of him.  Occasionally, the Youtube algorithm does seem to work, however belatedly.

Highly recommended.
𓐵

The New Nazis

We are watching the end of democracy in real time

This conversation is mostly about life in Germany during the Covid period.  And the German government's response to a writer who did not accept their unsound narrative.  Clearly it is people on the left, in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, who are the new Nazis.  I have referred to it as neo-feudalism.  Call it whatever you like; but power is rapidly accumulating into the hands of a few.  And they no longer care what you think.  They do not even care how you vote.

I remember, long before Covid, I shared with a left-of-center friend, when I still had some left-of-center friends, that I thought that people on the right were much more tolerant and open-minded than people on the left.  She laughed at me.  It did not really bother me because I knew that the left had long viewed the right as close-minded.  I had not yet realized that this view was complete projection, and a defense mechanism for their own faith system.

This gal is an intellectual and a writer.  I could wonder what she thinks today.  But we already know, right?  I think of it as the religion of the left.  Or the religion of leftism.  With government as their god.

And no one wants to be a heretic.  They know perfectly well that they will lose their friends, and maybe their family and job.  They will lose their respectability and standing among the bien-pensants.  No more dinner parties.  So they just follow and repeat doctrine and dogma, without too much thought.  And they do not allow any challenge to the orthodoxy to brush up against their own closed minds.

So if government instructs them to give poison injections to their own children, they eagerly fall in line.  Only a religion could command that level of obedience.

I do not really mind no longer having any left-of-center friends.  You cannot talk to them.  I mean, it is impossible to have a give and take discussion with them.  Try it; see how long it takes for them to call you a racist, sexist, antisemite, or nazi.  Why bother?

Yet the irony is that there are old-school left-of-center types, a very few, like Bret Weinstein and C.J. Hopkins who are willing to break with the more orthodox leftist disciples.  But Hopkins admits that he lost all of his friends and colleagues over his Covid stance.

Hopkins believes the goal of the new Nazis is a one-world capitalistic market.  If only; personally, I think that is far too generous.  I think the goal is more feudalistic.  That is to say, they want an elite class, the Davos class, overseeing the one world.  In fact, I am not convinced they care all that much about capitalism.  Just so long as they are in charge and the Gulfstream is fueled-up, on the runway.

This is the contemporary goal of the left.  Not worker rights, or unions, or teachers, or childhood education.  Not healthcare; we see how they fixed that.  Canadian government healthcare has given us MAID.  Not even climate change, which is really just a cudgel for their not-so-hidden agenda.  Are we really to believe that the leftists running our governments cared about Covid fatalities?  You think Andrew Cuomo cared about the elderly?  Absolutely not.  What they cared about was the power that the Covid crisis provided them.

It can only be described as lust.  What Saint Augustine called libido dominandi.

And once experienced, they need more of that drug.

Today, all the left wants is to be in charge.  They only promote nonsensical, empathic-sounding policies in order to achieve and maintain power.  This is why they do not want to talk with people on the right.  How would you argue for being in charge undemocratically?  That was the magic of Covid.  But if left to a free and fair election, people might vote for Brexit, Donald Trump, Javier Milei, Flávio Bolsonaro, the AfD, Rassemblement National (formerly, the National Front), and Reform and Restore.

So the left bans, censors, cheats, and jails.

Anything to be in charge.
𓐵

The Moral Squalor of a Low-Trust Society

Integrity is an individual choice

We read a lot about high-trust and low-trust societies, but what makes a high-trust society?  I would argue that it is not complicated; high-trust societies are made up of high integrity people.

But what came first?  The high integrity people or the high-trust society?  And how do high-trust societies develop?  Well these are questions academics can study.  But for the rest of us, does it matter?  What is important for most of us, is the absolute fact that a society is simply an aggregation of its individual members.

I do not want to get into the various definitions of high-trust and low-trust societies.  You can find plenty of that for yourself.

Rather, what I want to focus on is this:  The reason you have a low-trust society is because you have a large population of low integrity people.

I am only somewhat interested in how this happens.  Like I said, we will leave that question to the academics.  Here, we are more interested in describing and navigating this reality.

Are there exceptions?  Of course.  But there are enough low integrity people that one cannot expect routine, everyday honesty in one's dealings with others.  You must assume that everyone you meet, and every interaction you have, will lack integrity.  You must assume that the people around you are untrustworthy and unscrupulous.  Certainly not all, but the fact is, many of them are.  Too many to know which is which; too many to assume otherwise.

I will take it a step further.  Each individual member of any given population has a choice.  They each individually choose to either act with integrity or without integrity.  That is to say that even in a low-trust society, individuals still possess agency.  There is no physical or metaphysical compulsion that forces individuals to be dishonest.  No, this they each choose for themselves.

This is not a societal choice.  Individuals lack integrity.  Individuals choose to be dishonest.  Make any excuse you like, but this is an individual choice.  And if you have enough of them, your society will be low trust.  And rightfully so.

Also notice that most low-trust societies happen to be found in the third world.  Is it the case that countries are low-trust because they are poor?  Or are countries poor because they are low trust?  It is certainly a huge cultural factor.  The cost of business, and cooperation more generally, is just too high to even compare with high-trust societies.

In a low-trust society, you are forced to spend more and operate less efficiently in order to overcome trust issues.  Transactional costs and friction are extremely high.  You will tend to make poor hiring decisions, likely preferring family hires over the possibly best hires.  Contracts lack the presumption of good faith that you find in high-trust societies.  People often conduct business in-person for the same reasons.  High and low value scams are epidemic.  And of course, these societies are corrupt.

As I have pointed out before, most people do not understand corruption.  It is not something that you find exclusively at elite levels; the top of government or business.  Yes, corruption goes all the way to the top.  But it also goes all the way to the bottom.  Corruption is a cultural failing across and throughout the economic spectrum.  A high government official is not philosophically more corrupt than a crooked taxi driver or a bent copper or a shady street vendor.  He just has more opportunities for major graft.

It all comes down to individual choices.  And a pervasive lack of individual integrity.

Three traits.  I have noticed that high integrity does not operate in a vacuum.  It is directly, if not perfectly, correlated with hard work and intelligence.  If you doubt this assertion, let us consider the inverse.  A lack of integrity almost perfectly correlates with laziness and a lack of intelligence.

Let's start with laziness.  If you are lazy, you are always looking for shortcuts, and more generally, to avoid effort or extra effort.  One obvious way to achieve this goal is dishonesty.  And while I know that there are some smart but lazy people, most lazy and dishonest people are also not very smart.  For most of us, intelligence requires effort.

So you have hardworking, high integrity, intelligent people and you have lazy, low integrity, less intelligent people.  And I think this is true everywhere.  It is just a question of percentages.

But what about all the good people in these low-trust societies?  The hardworking, high integrity, intelligent types, however many or few there may be.  Well in my observation, they are forced to adapt to the low integrity world around them.  They learn that the easiest path is cautious interaction, without accusation.  Most learn that silence is preferable.  It does little good to hold low integrity people accountable when there are so many of them across every aspect of society.  So they pay the high cost of business and often do without justice.  Note, this leaves no path for societal improvement.

Notice here, that at least in the short term, the low integrity type does not pay the higher cost, but in fact pays an artificially low cost.  This perverse incentive keeps the number of low integrity individuals high; and incentivizes others to set aside their own integrity.

And we must consider how the low integrity types view the high integrity types.  First of course as marks and suckers to be taken advantage of.  The low integrity types would never consider the high integrity types to be of superior intellect.  That idea never crosses their third-rate minds.  Low integrity types usually believe that they are smarter than everyone else.  And always believe that they are smarter than they actually are.  I have written about this before.

So the first reaction that the low integrity type has about a high integrity person is one of superiority.  I know something that they don't; I know the shortcuts; let me take advantage of this naive fool.  Or the always popular:  Let me take advantage of this person unable to do anything about it.  But when the intelligence of the high integrity type ultimately prevails, the reaction of the low integrity type is one of resentment.

Yes, in time low integrity people come to resent high integrity people.  This is inevitable.  But there is a reason beyond intellectual envy.  The lazy, low integrity, limited intelligence person does not want to believe that hardworking, high integrity, intelligent people hold some type of advantage over their own dodgy ways.  They do not want to believe that hard work and honest dealings are somehow advantageous.

That would mean that they are not the superior creatures that they believe themselves to be.  They might actually be inferior.  And who wants to think that?  That is to say, very few people will come to that conclusion.

Spurious superiority and genuine resentment describe their entire existence.

And there are so many of them.  They are parasites who take advantage of the honest and hardworking, and importantly, of each other.  Ultimately, productivity falls to basement levels because it is easier to scam others than contribute to a productive society.  These societies can produce nothing requiring anything more than a face-to-face cash transaction.

So the low integrity types work to undermine the high integrity types.  They even have a name for it:  Crab mentality.  Some places call it crabs in a barrel or bucket.  They want the high integrity types to get down in the muck with them and live as they do.  In physical, intellectual, and/or moral squalor.  This attitude is pervasive in low-trust societies.

Now of course in the end, high integrity people, just like high-trust societies, prevail.  But their numbers remain small.  The low integrity types are rarely smart enough to actually learn from their mistaken attitude.  So it continues, and they wonder why they never seem to get ahead.  No, what I need is more shortcuts and I will get what I deserve.  Low-trust societies find it almost impossible to break this cycle.  It is a reproducing culture of low integrity parasites.

In addition to the grimy triad of indolence, dishonesty, and limited intelligence, is it any wonder that the low integrity types are so often rude, obstreperous, inconsiderate, unappreciative, unethical, and abusive of the environment.  They are agents of chaos and incivility.  Now imagine a population teeming with such characters; that is a low-trust society.

Now finally, culture is what you tolerate.  The reason you have a low-trust society is that you tolerate these unworthy activities and attitudes.  And if you were to stop tolerating them, then your society would immediately trend in the direction of more trust.

It is a choice.  If you find yourself in a low-trust society, it is because the people around you have made the choice to tolerate bad behavior.  So be it.

It is the widespread moral squalor which keep these societies poor.

𓐵

On Ed Sheeran and Macklemore

Ed Sheeran comes out in support of Macklemore

Here's Sheeran:

Screenshot:  New York Post website, 19 September 2026

Maybe Israel has behaved badly.  I do not know for sure one way or the other.  Certainly Netanyahu is completely untrustworthy.  But of course, here is Macklemore.  He is an open and proud anti-semite.  Is this degenerate any better than Netanyahu?

Screenshot:  The Independent website, 21 May 2014

Sheeran's first instinct was correct.  He should have stayed out of it; which was his long-standing general policy on politics.  My question for Sheeran is:  How could you let some clown like Macklemore draw you into this mess?  For future reference, maybe include a no politics clause in the contracts for your opening acts.  Stick to music Ed; you're quite good at it.

I have said it before and I will say it again.  The people who claim that Israel is committing a genocide receive their information from Hamas.  Regardless of how bad Israel may or may not be, we must recognize that Hamas is worse.  And yes, I have come to accept, however late, that Israel may be very bad indeed.

Today in Gaza, I will go so far as to admit we have two discreditable actors.  Another question worth asking:  Are the bad actors limited to the respective governments, or are the people blameworthy as well?  I mean there is no doubt that Palestinian civilians held Israeli hostages.  Plus the whole idea of civilian hostages is relevant to this question.  But again, I do not know the answer.

I will admit something else.  The way Israel has behaved since 7 October 2023 has not helped its cause.  They have lost a great deal of goodwill in the United States and Europe.  They never had Macklemore's support, but they probably had Sheeran's quiet support.  Now, not so much.

Whose fault is that?

𓐵

The Dustification of the World Trade Center

Where was all the debris?

The famous or infamous dust was not created when the structures hit the ground.  That is, it was not the impact that created all the dust.  And we all watched; the dust was not ash.  It was not the fires that created 110 floors of dust.  Rather, the dust materialized as the buildings fell.  Re-watch the videos, as I have just done.  How is this possible?



I cannot speak to Judy Wood's comments on breakthrough energy.  Or really anything else in this video.  Nor can I comment on her credibility as a scientist or speaker.

But her point about the dust is fascinating.  Should we not have seen a mountain of mangled steel girders?  Yes we saw some, but not what we should have expected.  We are talking about multiple steel-framed buildings, two of which were 110 floors and another was 47 floors.  The official narrative is that the steel floors pancaked together as the buildings fell.  But a 110-layer pancake of mangled steel, times two, would have been a mountain.  In the hindsight of twenty-five years, we can imagine what that would have looked like.  That is not what we saw.

We saw the dust and the lack of debris with our own eyes.  Regardless of any other point Wood makes, regardless of her credibility or lack of credibility, we saw this ourselves.  Here is a slide show she put together showing the dust and the lack of debris.

I always assumed that the dust we saw on that day was pulverized concrete, sheetrock, and hundreds of acres of drop ceiling tiles.  That is, it seems likely that buildings of that size would explain that amount of dust.  But where is the mountain of mangled steel?  And why was there no earth-shaking impact when the structures hit the ground?  Wood's contention is that they turned to dust before and as they fell.  As unlikely as that sounds, her video above is worth a watch.

Further, I find it interesting that Wood is not making an argument for a controlled demolition.  This is the path of most conspiracy theorists.  But I cannot imagine how someone could set that number of charges, in multiple buildings, without anyone noticing.  Wood's argument is even more unlikely.  So I cannot agree with anything other than what we can all see for ourselves.

I did go watch some Youtube videos of controlled demolitions.  What I noticed is that the expected dust comes up from ground level as the impact occurs.  And as we see in Wood's video, this is not what happened on 9/11.  The dust starts high and falls.  I cannot understand what I am seeing.  And that, of course, is Wood's whole point.  To her credit, she draws no conclusions.  She merely points out the anomaly.

Finally, it seems plausible to me that the planes' high impact, and the subsequent explosions and fires, would explain some portion of the falling dust.  Of course.  But as Wood points out, it was dust all the way down.  And the same was true for the 47-story building seven, even though it was not hit by a plane.

So, what should we make of all this?  I have no idea.

This presentation is around fourteen years old.  How did I first learn about it this week?  What are they hiding and why are they lying?  I post this as a follow-up to a speech Bret Weinstein gave last week.  He questioned a number of odd, anomalous, and/or disharmonious situations, going back to the Kennedy assassination, where the government is clearly lying.  Remember, there is no such thing as a magic bullet and these goons supposedly work for us.  It is shameful and we need to shine a light on all of it.

𓐵

Franck Zanu on Race and Colonialism

The ultimate victim mentality of Africans and African-Americans

Franck Zanu is a Benin-born naturalized American citizen; he now lives in Connecticut.  He speaks common sense about the problems of Africans and African-Americans.

For instance, here are some formerly colonized countries:  Brazil, Canada, United States, Singapore, Malaysia, and Korea.  What is the difference between these countries and the formerly colonized countries of Africa?  Well there may be many reasons for the disparities, but obviously colonialism is not one of them.

Rather than something that happened a hundred or two hundred years ago, Zanu blames elements of African culture.  A lack of curiosity, a lack of national cohesion, polychronic timekeeping, etc.  Zanu points out that Africa has no original written languages.  That means no books, no history, no philosophy, etc.  Africa has only oral history, in more than two thousand distinct languages.  In one of Zanu's videos he talks about the lack of maintenance in Africa.  It is a culturally nonexistent concept.  Things fall apart.

It is interesting that he puts so much importance on a lack of curiosity.  I have mentioned the lack of curiosity in the third world before.  It would be fascinating to track curiosity or a lack of curiosity across the developed and undeveloped world.  My guess is that genuine curiosity is a prerequisite for development.  Also, someone should study the origins of curiosity.  But we will leave that for another post.

The geographic nations of Africa are artificial entities leftover from the colonial period.  The colonists imposed geographic boundaries on tribal peoples.  These have always been at odds with African culture.  Zanu asks:  When these peoples demanded and received their freedom from the colonists, why did they keep these artificial geographic nation states, which were and continue to be, antithetical to African culture?

Polychronic timekeeping is just a polite way of saying that Africans do not value punctuality or lines.  You can explain the value to them, but you cannot accept the value for them.  If Africans cannot accept the value of punctuality, they can never appreciate the possibilities or opportunities that a schedule provides.  These opportunities will just never materialize.

I have heard Zanu use South Africa as an example of the problem with African culture.  Without excusing the evils of the apartheid system, the country has fallen apart since black people with African culture took over in 1994.  A mere 32 years ago.  This is simply undeniable.  The formerly first world nation of South Africa today looks like every other broken African country.  Well, they got what they wanted.

Zanu's critics blame everything except culture, and their always measured language has long dominated the argument among scholars and diplomats.  But to what end?  What is the result we see today?  Africa is a mess.  At some point we have to ask if this is intentional?  Who benefits from the mess that is Africa?

Likewise, who benefits from the mess that is the urban black family in the United States today?  In contrast to the problems of Africa, what I see in black America is a people who have lost their culture.  Just look at black families back in the forties and fifties.  Even with poverty and pervasive racism, you found intact families making their way.  What happened to that?  But that is my perspective as a middle-aged white man.

Zanu argues that in the forties and fifties, black Americans were not free, they lived under duress, and therefore their goal was to operate within the system.  He argues that they did not lose their culture.  Rather the freedom that came about after, say 1965, allowed them to, finally, live their culture.  He argues that you can only find your true culture once you have freedom.  And since black people never before lived in freedom, not in the US and certainly not in Africa, they do not know how to behave and self-regulate within it.

Zanu says:  Freedom is responsibility.  A man's true essence, his true capabilities, are observed only when he is free.  It is an interesting observation, because I have always thought that a man's true essence is observed only when he is under duress.  But Zanu seems to be saying that a man can only be his true self when he is free to be his true self.

It is a provocative argument.  Is it correct?  I do not know.  Is he saying that two-parent black families, with no out of wedlock children, are not part of black culture?  That the two-parent families of the forties and fifties were only the result of the systemic oppression of the time?

I want to think that is a stretch.  But of course, I do not know any intact black families today.  It is interesting; I did know some growing up in the seventies and eighties.  But not today.  Does that prove his point?  Or does it prove that Zanu simply does not understand incentives?

I have always believed that the disintegration of the black family was the result of LBJ's Great Society programs, which clearly devalued black family cohesion.  Arguably, these programs incentivized the breakdown of the families.  This is the argument that conservative commentators often make.

But about those incentives:  Are young, unemployed, black women truly incentivized to have multiple, out of wedlock children, that they cannot afford, with multiple men, none of whom remain in the home?  Why would anyone do that?  Can government incentives adequately explain this behavior?  I find it at least questionable.

Zanu offers a dire explanation.  If he is correct, the family disintegration, and all that flows from it, is a natural state of black culture.  Black people are now free to be their true selves.

Can that be correct?

Naturally Zanu gets a lot of pushback from more orthodox African-American commentators.  Here he is with four of them:

Watch this video and decide which of the two perspectives sounds more reasonable.  One side offers blame and excuse.  And more, there is a habit among modern African-Americans to exaggerate the contributions of black people in history.  No, Pushkin was not black and he did not invent the Russian language.  People are free to think whatever they like, but a lot of this just makes you sound stupid.  The more common refrain we hear today is:  Black people built America.  Well they helped, sure, but again this just makes you sound stupid.

On the other side is Franck Zanu.  He says, I chose to leave Africa.  I have lived all over the world.  I chose to come here.  I choose to die in America.  What's the problem?  One other thing I notice about Zanu is how often he says:  I do not know.  The other guys know so very much.  Trust people who admit what they do not know.

I will say this about Zanu, even if we disagree with one of his points, he is so direct and plain-spoken, we should take him seriously.  He challenges the bien pensant narrative and that alone is a benefit.  He is refreshing to listen to.

Keep fighting Franck.

𓐵

They Are Lying!

What happened on 11 September 2001?

Bret Weinstein on the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the Covid pandemic and so-called vaccine, 7 October 2023 in Israel, the Epstein files, and the Charlie Kirk assassination.  They are lying about it all.  I discussed four of these questions back in July.  Weinstein goes on:  We do not have an FBI to investigate, we do not have an academy to study, and we do not have a press to report.  What we have instead are sham entities and professionals which pretend to serve these functions.  But dissemble at every level.

This speech is so on target that it makes me somewhat embarrassed to ever have quibbled with Weinstein about politics.  You do not have to agree with his politics, but you cannot question his insight or his honesty.
𓐵

Are We Witnessing the Start of Britain's Civil War?

Winston Marshall asks the question



Perhaps it would be in poor taste to advocate for a civil war in someone else's country, but Marshall is all British.  And surely he has a right to ask the question.  I am going to follow his answer closely.
𓐵