I can't find the exact Lewis (maybe it was Chesterton) quote, but I remember reading in one of their books sometime back that we often love the idea of something without actually loving the something itself. We love the idea of the neighbor more than our actual neighbor. In so doing we can champion causes and feel good in thinking that championing or holding the moral opinion is the same as actually doing the moral thing. It would appear these single women (and to an extent single men) in lack of having something tangible to love, i.e., a spouse and children, try to fill the void that only arduous love can fill with the self-satisfactory and easily attained championing of what they perceive to be righteous causes. Without the boundaries which necessarily form from experience with arduous and real and selfless love, the causes these single women champion necessarily devolve into abstraction and grotesquery.
I don't think this negates the power of these types of women... one need look no further than all that was wrought by the spinster women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hell hath no fury like a Yankee spinster.
“Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development” -Eric Hoffer in The True Believer
Regarding the Oxfordshire County Council story, you quote Toby Young as writing "Residents will be allowed to leave their zones a maximum of 100 days a year".
This is incorrect. According to the story in the Oxford Mail, residents of Oxford will be allowed to travel outside their zones onto the city's ring road, and back into the city. They just won't be allowed to travel directly from one zone to another within the city. In his article, Toby Young quotes someone (Eric Worrall), who quotes the story from the Oxford Mail, but who leaves out that crucial sentence, falsely giving the impression that people won't be allowed to drive their cars outside their designated zones.
I live in York, another medieval city with a ring-road. City of York Council has pedestrianised many streets in the city-centre, and closed off many residential streets around the city-centre with barriers, and/or turned them into one-way streets and/or covered them with speed bumps. The predictable result is that traffic on the ring road now moves so slowly that it can take up to an hour to get from one part of York (a city of 120,000 people) to another during rush hour. People live, work, shop and attend schools and universities in York just as they do in any other city. Only a small number of people have the option to travel by public transport instead - I can reliably get a bus from my street (a major road on the outskirts of York) to the city centre during normal working hours, but there is no bus route running through the industrial estate where I work, nor can I get a bus from near my house directly to the Lidl supermarket a mile away, or directly to the massive shopping centre on the ring road about 2 miles away, or directly to the huge supermarket, sixth-form college and covid vaccination centre 2 miles away in the other direction. Nor can I get any bus at all early in the morning or late at night. York council won't allow Uber to operate in the city either! I could make similar points about the lack of provision for cyclists, pedestrians and wheelchair users in York.
If there is no practical alternative, people will continue to use cars, no matter what you do to discourage them.
From an Oxonian perspective - Oxford has one of the most unusual urban layouts I have ever seen. The city centre (home to the vast majority of colleges and university institutions), is a sinewy mass of tight-knit medieval streets surrounded, radially, by many other larger, newer urban agglomerations (each with their own small centres), separated by a very old green belt that preserves many of Oxford’s storied meadows and college grounds. Most of these agglomerations only have one road leading into the city, which predictably causes enormous problems. The main artery leading from Headington, Iffley, and Temple Cowley (which by population and area makes up a plurality of Oxford) crosses a two-lane medieval bridge after a roundabout, one of the deadliest in the UK, which, incidentally, I would have to navigate on foot every morning.
Congestion is a terrible issue, particularly because vehicles from some areas regularly end up parking or using space in others. For years small residential streets were swamped with vehicle traffic from drivers attempting to avoid the main arteries. The city is otherwise easily walkable and has infrastructure for cycling, as nearly all of Oxford’s 30,000+ students do. With that said, public transport options are expensive, overwrought, and lack capacity, in no small part because congestion makes it harder for busses to move. The poor traffic management in parts also makes walking and cycling surprisingly risky in certain areas, far worse than in comparably walkable European and Asian cities. It’s a tricky issue, but I think the article is misleading.
Sorry, but the left single ladies and their low-T male slaves servicing the empire are nothing less than enemies of western civilization.
However, I’m not so sure that their current power is sustainable as, although it is clearly backed by decades of exquisite female frontal lobe planning, it is highly emotional and largely irrational. I was talking to and older married Democrat feminist friend of mine complaining that the non-profit she runs was a mess of staff conflicts over identity politics and woke “rules”… and that because of it, nothing for the business was accomplished. She was in the process of cutting staff and then rebuilding… paying close attention to the profile of new hires.
Then Musk and Twitter… and Facebook, Google, Amazon… etc. they are all laying off many.
The trend seems to be a purge of these dysfunctional woke freaks… because business is not getting done.
I think, I hope, that this is going to be their unraveling… the empire wants power and money but it cannot succeed when it’s armies are staffed with lunatics.
I hope so! But often the ones making these firing/hiring decisions end up being the woke... That's the advantage of capturing institutional/procedural power.
As a long-term corporate executive, is is a common tactic to leverage a downturn to clear the barnacles off the ship. Yes, if the corporate executives are enough of the woke, the will attempt to exploit their power to eliminate more non-woke, but in my experience the woke don't generally make it out of mid-management roles because they demonstrate too much uncontrolled emotional reaction and irrational thought. It takes a very, very disciplined wokeist to both hold the ideology while also demonstrating a calm and controlled behavior and a penchant for objective thought and decision-making. The woke doctrine rejects objectivity. So right out of the gate, it is not a good fit for private business decision-making authority.
I think that the more tech-oriented economic growth we have experienced after the Great Recession made corporate owners focused on hiring based on education credentials. However, I think the unspoken lessons in the corporate world today is a recognition that the education system has been corrupted and it corrupts students who then become corrupt employees... and going forward there needs to be more controls in place to prevent hiring them.
I started this years ago in my businesses. In the interviews we asks certain open-ended questions that are designed to identify the infection.
I do think that Democrats will attempt to counter the changes to private business purging and then not hiring the infected to force quotas.
My perspective on the entire critical theory / woke ideology is that it is a giant affirmative action plan for the lazier, more risk-averse and generally less capable... the social and economic malcontents... and this being relative to individual expectations (i.e. daddy and mommy have a good life, and helped you get a prestigious degree while projecting their expectations that you will be better than them so they can brag to their peers about it)... causes an attraction to the elite academic professional class. And that because females tend to have a stronger emotional processor, and although they tend to be more agreeable on the surface, actually engage in passive-aggressive competitive reputational slaughter, don't as easily demonstrate the qualities needed for promotion to management positions... positions that require a calm and objective approach... the base foundation of stability that the subordinate staff requires as they otherwise would flail about.
So the woke program is really about reforming society to force social status and economic outcomes to be based on identity rather than it being based on merit. That might work in government because government is an inefficient mess already. But for-profit private corporations are going to eventually need to clear the barnacles and get back to the meritocracy that they need to maintain profitability and growth.
Here is a short list. These are common questions to help prevent the hiring of a toxic employee... something that every woke believer will be. Unless they are very disciplined, these open-ended questions will provide clear indications that they are infected with the woke mind virus.
1. What would you change about your previous job/employers?
2. What businesses and organizations do you currently admire?
3. What values of your previous/current employer most align with yours?
4. We are committed to professional diversity, what does that mean to you?
5. How would you describe your dream job?
6. What qualities do you admire and/or prefer in your manager?
7. What qualities do you admire and/or prefer in your coworkers?
Re our* proxy war with Russia: "Noah’s argument here begins by asserting that Russia has severely weakened itself by totally bungling its war in Ukraine (I agree)."
“… it bears repeating what I have argued multiple times in recent weeks: this war has seen the Russian military quickly evolve into a battle-hardened and quick-to-adapt fighting force. The US has not faced such a force since World War II.
“Many believe the US is a 'battle-hardened' force. This is utter nonsense. Of the many thousands of troops currently manning US combat units, only a minute fraction has experienced ANY battle whatsoever, and NONE have experienced high-intensity conflict such as is taking place in Ukraine."
Russia failed to roll Ukraine like it did Crimea, but has nonetheless achieved its strategic objectives in that theater:
(1) Demilitarize Ukraine (read: destroy the NATO proxy army we've* built up there since 2014). Check.
(2) Wreck Ukraine's economy. They've been missile-striking the connecting stations of Ukraine's electric grid since October. They saw us* sabotage their pipelines and raised us* a winter refugee crisis. Check.
(3) Annex and fortify Ukraine's eastern oblasts. This process is still ongoing, but proceeding apace.
And there's nothing NATO can do about it. At least 1,000 NATO 'contractors' (read: Iraq/Afghanistan vets getting paid $200k per year as mercenaries) have met their fates this year via Russian artillery. And dreams of American air power turning the tide are phantasmal. Sober analysts estimate it would take at least 6 air wings, amounting to almost 500 aircraft, to even make a dent against Russia's anti-air capabilities. Not gonna happen.
As for the broader, more long-term economic situation, I have no idea. But clearly, as I put it to a skeptical coworker, "The Russkies ain't fuckin' around on this."
*As a US citizen, tax-payer, and veteran, I still feel obligated to use the 1st-person plural when describing the disastrous consequences of the decisions those humanitarians in Washington make.
Re the intersection of women, religion, and politics: what can I do but quote Orwell?
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
-1984
The silver lining to this dark pink cloud is that the deprogramming process is rather straightforward, and often ecstatic.
And regarding D&D, there are lots of D&D players nowadays - including millennials - who run 70s and 80s editions of D&D, create new material for those old games, and pay no attention to what Hasbro does with the current edition. These people go by the name "The OSR" (= Old School Renaissance).
I don't think the menace of single childless women will be over soon.
I see this week, that most men will be functionally infertile in 30 years, due to sperm counts decreasing
much faster than originally thought?
Coupling up and starting a family, the norm for human history will just not be the mainstream choice.
Surrogacy and biomed for the rich, effective harems for fertile men. More incel type disengagement for men, more sublimation of empathy and caring on Good Causes for women.
I'm curious if you're making a conscious choice to use the abbreviation "CCP" instead of "CPC."
CCP is definitely more common in English media, but from what I can tell it's kind of like referring to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Party." There's nothing inherently offensive, and it communicates the same idea, it's just not how they refer to themselves.
When I was looking into this I found some speculation that "CPC" is some recent innovation intended to soften the image of the Party, but there are documents going back to at least the 60s in which "CPC" is used.
By this time next year, Noah Smith will have difficulty choking down his article, even with a tall glass of vodka. When the USA inevitably cuts ties and walks away from the war, Ukrainians will find they have lost an entire generation of young men for no conceivable rational. Barbara Tuckman, busy at her desk in the Undiscovered Country, will need to write an updated chapter and then rename her book — The March of Folly: From Troy to Ukraine.
I believe Russia is the second largest exporter of oil. The G-7 and Australia are price capping Russia’s oil at $60 per barrel. Is this a smart move? Russia will not sell oil at $60 per barrel when the market for Russian oil is $79 per barrel. What happens if Russia decides to cut oil production? I see less oil in the market which should increase the price of oil.
I'm calling BS on that Oxford traffic restrictions story representing anything like proposing 'lockdown'. If anything, it's encouraging more localism (the antithesis to globalism, as it happens) in a city choked by traffic. It's not even remotely related to 'locking down' anyone. You could still go where you liked, whenever you liked. It's not even like the usual anti-car proposal that always gets conservatives riled, because those often hurt rural dwellers.
I admire a lot of what Toby Young does, but he's still a stupid provocateur at times.
I can't find the exact Lewis (maybe it was Chesterton) quote, but I remember reading in one of their books sometime back that we often love the idea of something without actually loving the something itself. We love the idea of the neighbor more than our actual neighbor. In so doing we can champion causes and feel good in thinking that championing or holding the moral opinion is the same as actually doing the moral thing. It would appear these single women (and to an extent single men) in lack of having something tangible to love, i.e., a spouse and children, try to fill the void that only arduous love can fill with the self-satisfactory and easily attained championing of what they perceive to be righteous causes. Without the boundaries which necessarily form from experience with arduous and real and selfless love, the causes these single women champion necessarily devolve into abstraction and grotesquery.
I don't think this negates the power of these types of women... one need look no further than all that was wrought by the spinster women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hell hath no fury like a Yankee spinster.
It feels like a line from Screwtape Letters. a set of advices from the experienced demon to a young imp
“Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development” -Eric Hoffer in The True Believer
never a bad time for some Hoffer!
Regarding the Oxfordshire County Council story, you quote Toby Young as writing "Residents will be allowed to leave their zones a maximum of 100 days a year".
This is incorrect. According to the story in the Oxford Mail, residents of Oxford will be allowed to travel outside their zones onto the city's ring road, and back into the city. They just won't be allowed to travel directly from one zone to another within the city. In his article, Toby Young quotes someone (Eric Worrall), who quotes the story from the Oxford Mail, but who leaves out that crucial sentence, falsely giving the impression that people won't be allowed to drive their cars outside their designated zones.
I live in York, another medieval city with a ring-road. City of York Council has pedestrianised many streets in the city-centre, and closed off many residential streets around the city-centre with barriers, and/or turned them into one-way streets and/or covered them with speed bumps. The predictable result is that traffic on the ring road now moves so slowly that it can take up to an hour to get from one part of York (a city of 120,000 people) to another during rush hour. People live, work, shop and attend schools and universities in York just as they do in any other city. Only a small number of people have the option to travel by public transport instead - I can reliably get a bus from my street (a major road on the outskirts of York) to the city centre during normal working hours, but there is no bus route running through the industrial estate where I work, nor can I get a bus from near my house directly to the Lidl supermarket a mile away, or directly to the massive shopping centre on the ring road about 2 miles away, or directly to the huge supermarket, sixth-form college and covid vaccination centre 2 miles away in the other direction. Nor can I get any bus at all early in the morning or late at night. York council won't allow Uber to operate in the city either! I could make similar points about the lack of provision for cyclists, pedestrians and wheelchair users in York.
If there is no practical alternative, people will continue to use cars, no matter what you do to discourage them.
Helpful detail, thanks!
From an Oxonian perspective - Oxford has one of the most unusual urban layouts I have ever seen. The city centre (home to the vast majority of colleges and university institutions), is a sinewy mass of tight-knit medieval streets surrounded, radially, by many other larger, newer urban agglomerations (each with their own small centres), separated by a very old green belt that preserves many of Oxford’s storied meadows and college grounds. Most of these agglomerations only have one road leading into the city, which predictably causes enormous problems. The main artery leading from Headington, Iffley, and Temple Cowley (which by population and area makes up a plurality of Oxford) crosses a two-lane medieval bridge after a roundabout, one of the deadliest in the UK, which, incidentally, I would have to navigate on foot every morning.
Congestion is a terrible issue, particularly because vehicles from some areas regularly end up parking or using space in others. For years small residential streets were swamped with vehicle traffic from drivers attempting to avoid the main arteries. The city is otherwise easily walkable and has infrastructure for cycling, as nearly all of Oxford’s 30,000+ students do. With that said, public transport options are expensive, overwrought, and lack capacity, in no small part because congestion makes it harder for busses to move. The poor traffic management in parts also makes walking and cycling surprisingly risky in certain areas, far worse than in comparably walkable European and Asian cities. It’s a tricky issue, but I think the article is misleading.
Nice and more nuanced than my reaction, which I posted before seeing yours.
Sorry, but the left single ladies and their low-T male slaves servicing the empire are nothing less than enemies of western civilization.
However, I’m not so sure that their current power is sustainable as, although it is clearly backed by decades of exquisite female frontal lobe planning, it is highly emotional and largely irrational. I was talking to and older married Democrat feminist friend of mine complaining that the non-profit she runs was a mess of staff conflicts over identity politics and woke “rules”… and that because of it, nothing for the business was accomplished. She was in the process of cutting staff and then rebuilding… paying close attention to the profile of new hires.
Then Musk and Twitter… and Facebook, Google, Amazon… etc. they are all laying off many.
The trend seems to be a purge of these dysfunctional woke freaks… because business is not getting done.
I think, I hope, that this is going to be their unraveling… the empire wants power and money but it cannot succeed when it’s armies are staffed with lunatics.
I hope so! But often the ones making these firing/hiring decisions end up being the woke... That's the advantage of capturing institutional/procedural power.
As a long-term corporate executive, is is a common tactic to leverage a downturn to clear the barnacles off the ship. Yes, if the corporate executives are enough of the woke, the will attempt to exploit their power to eliminate more non-woke, but in my experience the woke don't generally make it out of mid-management roles because they demonstrate too much uncontrolled emotional reaction and irrational thought. It takes a very, very disciplined wokeist to both hold the ideology while also demonstrating a calm and controlled behavior and a penchant for objective thought and decision-making. The woke doctrine rejects objectivity. So right out of the gate, it is not a good fit for private business decision-making authority.
I think that the more tech-oriented economic growth we have experienced after the Great Recession made corporate owners focused on hiring based on education credentials. However, I think the unspoken lessons in the corporate world today is a recognition that the education system has been corrupted and it corrupts students who then become corrupt employees... and going forward there needs to be more controls in place to prevent hiring them.
I started this years ago in my businesses. In the interviews we asks certain open-ended questions that are designed to identify the infection.
I think this type of report will become more common. https://nypost.com/2022/11/26/mount-holyoke-grad-deprogrammed-from-women-only-woke-culture/
I do think that Democrats will attempt to counter the changes to private business purging and then not hiring the infected to force quotas.
My perspective on the entire critical theory / woke ideology is that it is a giant affirmative action plan for the lazier, more risk-averse and generally less capable... the social and economic malcontents... and this being relative to individual expectations (i.e. daddy and mommy have a good life, and helped you get a prestigious degree while projecting their expectations that you will be better than them so they can brag to their peers about it)... causes an attraction to the elite academic professional class. And that because females tend to have a stronger emotional processor, and although they tend to be more agreeable on the surface, actually engage in passive-aggressive competitive reputational slaughter, don't as easily demonstrate the qualities needed for promotion to management positions... positions that require a calm and objective approach... the base foundation of stability that the subordinate staff requires as they otherwise would flail about.
So the woke program is really about reforming society to force social status and economic outcomes to be based on identity rather than it being based on merit. That might work in government because government is an inefficient mess already. But for-profit private corporations are going to eventually need to clear the barnacles and get back to the meritocracy that they need to maintain profitability and growth.
"In the interviews we ask certain open-ended questions that are designed to identify the infection."
Can you share these questions? I think many of us would find them very useful.
Here is a short list. These are common questions to help prevent the hiring of a toxic employee... something that every woke believer will be. Unless they are very disciplined, these open-ended questions will provide clear indications that they are infected with the woke mind virus.
1. What would you change about your previous job/employers?
2. What businesses and organizations do you currently admire?
3. What values of your previous/current employer most align with yours?
4. We are committed to professional diversity, what does that mean to you?
5. How would you describe your dream job?
6. What qualities do you admire and/or prefer in your manager?
7. What qualities do you admire and/or prefer in your coworkers?
Very interesting! You should start a consultancy haha.
Or, formerly commerical decisions / responsibilities will be assumed by the State in a Communist dictatorship or at least Fascist cartel.
Re our* proxy war with Russia: "Noah’s argument here begins by asserting that Russia has severely weakened itself by totally bungling its war in Ukraine (I agree)."
Has it though? Will Schryver would disagree. He seems to know what he's talking about, and unlike Mr. Smith has the tone of a man who's hefted a rifle (https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/08/the-us-is-making-russia-incredibly.html):
“… it bears repeating what I have argued multiple times in recent weeks: this war has seen the Russian military quickly evolve into a battle-hardened and quick-to-adapt fighting force. The US has not faced such a force since World War II.
“Many believe the US is a 'battle-hardened' force. This is utter nonsense. Of the many thousands of troops currently manning US combat units, only a minute fraction has experienced ANY battle whatsoever, and NONE have experienced high-intensity conflict such as is taking place in Ukraine."
Russia failed to roll Ukraine like it did Crimea, but has nonetheless achieved its strategic objectives in that theater:
(1) Demilitarize Ukraine (read: destroy the NATO proxy army we've* built up there since 2014). Check.
(2) Wreck Ukraine's economy. They've been missile-striking the connecting stations of Ukraine's electric grid since October. They saw us* sabotage their pipelines and raised us* a winter refugee crisis. Check.
(3) Annex and fortify Ukraine's eastern oblasts. This process is still ongoing, but proceeding apace.
And there's nothing NATO can do about it. At least 1,000 NATO 'contractors' (read: Iraq/Afghanistan vets getting paid $200k per year as mercenaries) have met their fates this year via Russian artillery. And dreams of American air power turning the tide are phantasmal. Sober analysts estimate it would take at least 6 air wings, amounting to almost 500 aircraft, to even make a dent against Russia's anti-air capabilities. Not gonna happen.
As for the broader, more long-term economic situation, I have no idea. But clearly, as I put it to a skeptical coworker, "The Russkies ain't fuckin' around on this."
*As a US citizen, tax-payer, and veteran, I still feel obligated to use the 1st-person plural when describing the disastrous consequences of the decisions those humanitarians in Washington make.
Re the intersection of women, religion, and politics: what can I do but quote Orwell?
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
-1984
The silver lining to this dark pink cloud is that the deprogramming process is rather straightforward, and often ecstatic.
And regarding D&D, there are lots of D&D players nowadays - including millennials - who run 70s and 80s editions of D&D, create new material for those old games, and pay no attention to what Hasbro does with the current edition. These people go by the name "The OSR" (= Old School Renaissance).
I don't think the menace of single childless women will be over soon.
I see this week, that most men will be functionally infertile in 30 years, due to sperm counts decreasing
much faster than originally thought?
Coupling up and starting a family, the norm for human history will just not be the mainstream choice.
Surrogacy and biomed for the rich, effective harems for fertile men. More incel type disengagement for men, more sublimation of empathy and caring on Good Causes for women.
I'm curious if you're making a conscious choice to use the abbreviation "CCP" instead of "CPC."
CCP is definitely more common in English media, but from what I can tell it's kind of like referring to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Party." There's nothing inherently offensive, and it communicates the same idea, it's just not how they refer to themselves.
When I was looking into this I found some speculation that "CPC" is some recent innovation intended to soften the image of the Party, but there are documents going back to at least the 60s in which "CPC" is used.
By this time next year, Noah Smith will have difficulty choking down his article, even with a tall glass of vodka. When the USA inevitably cuts ties and walks away from the war, Ukrainians will find they have lost an entire generation of young men for no conceivable rational. Barbara Tuckman, busy at her desk in the Undiscovered Country, will need to write an updated chapter and then rename her book — The March of Folly: From Troy to Ukraine.
I believe Russia is the second largest exporter of oil. The G-7 and Australia are price capping Russia’s oil at $60 per barrel. Is this a smart move? Russia will not sell oil at $60 per barrel when the market for Russian oil is $79 per barrel. What happens if Russia decides to cut oil production? I see less oil in the market which should increase the price of oil.
Jimmy Dore does a great job on the oil price cap.
Russia does have leverage with oil.
https://youtu.be/__Osz8YN_80
I'm calling BS on that Oxford traffic restrictions story representing anything like proposing 'lockdown'. If anything, it's encouraging more localism (the antithesis to globalism, as it happens) in a city choked by traffic. It's not even remotely related to 'locking down' anyone. You could still go where you liked, whenever you liked. It's not even like the usual anti-car proposal that always gets conservatives riled, because those often hurt rural dwellers.
I admire a lot of what Toby Young does, but he's still a stupid provocateur at times.
I'm going to take the completely opposite view of Soldo, and of you, as I explain here:
https://theworthyhouse.com/2022/10/31/on-the-fragility-of-the-current-regime/
Great piece!!
I have always read Noahpinion as "No opinion that means much".
On the other hand, I think NS is projecting too much of his own view of blob bogeymen onto what Noah actually wrote.
Maybe. Not all of the article is bad. But I can't help but be triggered whenever the word Progress rears its menacing maw.
I read "progressed beyond" as just meaning something that has happened in the run of history.