The culture war rages on

Watch this video and then take your best stab at what religious tradition these guys hail from:



Yep, that's their idea of shaking things up. Still unsure? A few hints: They are less likely to see the US as "structurally unjust" than other Americans are, they express high levels of contentment with the communities they live in; their younger members are actually more politically conservative than their older members are; they are more likely than members of any other (ir)religious tradition in the US to express support for a smaller government providing fewer services and opposition to a larger government providing more services; they find abortion, drinking, and sex outside of marriage all more off-putting than members of any other (ir)religious tradition do; their reproductive tendencies are uniquely eugenic; and when their tradition is singled out for mockery, rather than issuing death threats in response, they playfully use the derision as an impetus for others to gain a deeper understanding of their worldview.

These hidebound archaics, of course, contrast starkly with today's chic groups, like the shrieking, violent feminist harpies (via Mangan's):



And their somewhat overlapping allies, the puerile, immodest LGBTXQRBUGGERYJIMOAIDSRYWers:

Since members of the West's greatest last hope won't unsheathe their swords and go for the jugulars of modernity's degenerates, allow this willing assassin from the ranks of the darkly enlightened to do so in their stead. First, borrowing from the inestimable Phyllis Schlafly:

 And then with an AE original:

Pat on the butt too much for Pats' fans

As a complement to Jayman's recent post on state laws regarding corporal punishment, I'll note that blacks express the greatest support for the practice as a means of disciplining children. Additional positive correlates include being male, politically conservative, and of modest intelligence. The GSS item doesn't specify who the spanker is, though it's reasonable to assume that much of the time the respondent has a parent in mind--if the question specifically inquired about opinions on schools using corporal punishment, the approval rates would surely be lower across the board.

One of Jayman's recurring themes is to employ an American Nations paradigm when evaluating social phenomena. The GSS doesn't allow quite that level of granularity, but it does break survey participants up by census region. The percentages of respondents who either "agree" or "strongly agree" with the statement "It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking". For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward. Here is a map of said regions for those who are unfamiliar with them:

Region	%Spank
1) East South Central	85.9
2) South Atlantic	80.0
3) West South Central	78.5
4) East North Central	72.9
5) Mountain	71.8
6) West North Central	71.4
7) Mid Atlantic	68.2
8) Pacific	64.1
9) New England	46.9

Most acceptable in the South, least so in the Northeast. Embers of the Civil War burn on.

And the same, by reported ethnicity. Minimum sample size of 50, though N is much exceeds that for most groups:

Ethnicity	%Spank
1) African	84.5
2) "American"	81.5
3) Native American	79.0
4) Scottish	78.5
5) Puerto Rican	78.3
6) Dutch	74.9
7) English/Welsh	73.3
8) German	73.1
9) French	71.3
10) Spanish	71.1
11) Mexican	69.0
12) Irish	68.4
13) Filipino	64.5
14) Swedish	63.3
15) Italian	63.0
16) Chinese	61.6
17) Norwegian	61.3
18) Indian (dot)	59.7
19) Russian	59.4
20) Czechoslovakian	58.1

White liberals, black rednecks. Those who refer to themselves as "American" are largely Scottish, and unsurprisingly express attitudes similar to those who consider the highlands to be an ancestral homeland. Most people in the US of Russian national descent are Jewish, not little Putins. No idea about the Slavs!

Parenthetically, regarding the question of ethnicity, people much smarter and far more perspicacious than myself have said that in the contemporary US it is basically meaningless. Perhaps as a biological marker, okay, though it does track geographically and it seems to provide some insight into cultural characteristics. My working assumption is to treat it as good--or at least useful--information, and not an enemy of the perfect even if it falls well short of being as much.

Finally, in the comments section of Jayman's post, there is some incredulity about the use of corporal punishment among readers who are from states where it is legal. I suspect that in these states it occurs almost exclusively in private schools, though few if any of the state laws distinguish between public and private in questions of the legal permissibility of the practice.

GSS variables used: SPANKING(1-2)(3-4), YEAR(2000-2012), REGION, ETHNIC(1)(5)(6)(7)(10)(11)(14)(15)(17)(18)(19)(20)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(30)(31)(97)

Trayvon Martin Day

The administration of Carrick high school in Pittsburgh planned and subsequently scrapped "Trayvon Martin Day" in which students would be encouraged to wear hoodies in celebration and remembrance of the dead teenager. The school stepped back after opposition from several parents who publicly expressed concerns over the day, specifically with the consequences it would bring to students who chose not to participate.

If this were a school on Martin Luther King boulevard or in a plush area of Belmont, there would likely still be media 'controversy' surrounding the proposed honorific day, but visceral fears for the safety of the students from parents at said schools probably wouldn't be a part of it.

Why so much worry about violent fallout among the student body at Carrick? Diversity. In addition to strength, it's also social combustibility! A pie chart of the racial composition of Carrick's student body:

Residuals are 5% two or more races, 1% Hispanic, 1% Asian. Despite Zimmerman's Hispanic heritage, his persecution and the coverage surrounding it operated upon the old binary racial template of oppressed black America under the thumb of oppressive white America. Too fitting.

And the school's unsurprising scholastic profile (Carrick students' proficiency rates, Pennsylvania's statewide proficiency rates):

Math -- 38%, 60%
Reading -- 57%, 68%

Science -- 16%, 42%

Writing -- 80%, 83%

I don't get no

++Addition++South Park's treatment (thanks to Dan).

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... Posthumous respect? Nope, he's still not getting any. A mostly forgotten movie from two decades ago in which he starred presaged the next big 'civil rights' movement in the contemporary West, the crusade for sheilas to be treated as though there isn't a package between their legs. Or maybe to be as though a package has always been there, I forget. In any case, I'm of course referring to Rodney Dangerfield and Ladybugs. The relevant synopsis:

Chester is desperate for a promotion at work. To impress his boss, he claims to have been a good soccer player in his youth and is badgered into coaching a girls' team called the Ladybugs. Dragging his assistant along as assistant coach, Chester figures the gig to be easy as the Ladybugs, sponsored by his company, are a dynasty. Unfortunately, only one player has returned. The team, which includes the boss's daughter, Kimberly, are clueless, make a dreadful start to the season, and the boss is less than impressed. 

In his personal life, Chester is engaged to Bess, who has a son, Matthew, from a previous marriage. Matthew just happens to be a great athlete, but poor grades get him kicked off the soccer team. Chester invites Matthew to watch the Ladybugs practice and to get some tips. Matthew has a crush on Kimberly from school and it is partly due to this that Chester persuades him to dress like a girl and play for the team under the name Martha. 

With only Chester, Matthew and Julie knowing the secret of Martha's identity, the team wins the rest of its games to get to the championship game. Kimberly makes friends with Martha, not knowing "she" is in fact Matthew.

The closing scene in this corny movie from the early nineties demonstrates far more perspicacity in identifying where this strange road leads to than the entire NYT editorial board or our most preeminent legal mind does. As Chester prepares for the first game of the season in girls softball, we see a bus full of cross-dressed male recruits eager to alternately ogle and smash their hapless female opponents.

This is a PG-13 parody of gender bending. It potentially gets a lot more gratuitous. As a commenter at Steve's astutely pointed out:

This problem will be self-correcting. Jocks will start loudly proclaiming their female identity and demand to shower with the cheerleaders. Progressives will quietly throw the fight then.

He's probably being overly optimistic in that assessment, but if you thought traditional, middle American cultural sensibilities were burned and pillaged in same-sex marriage's march to the sea, just wait for what the tranzis sympathizers have in store.

That said, athletics are where we find the most auspicious ground upon which to join combat with the Cathedral's Amazonian termagant forces and their eunuch auxiliaries. HBD realists are always up for a tough fight in the court of public opinion, and the Cathedral doesn't deal lightly with heretics. But the post-Christian West has another religion whose powers of captivation are even stronger--sports. If there is an ideal field for us to join battle on, this is it. Mainstream writers--even ethnically Jewish ones!--like Jon Entine and David Epstein are able to discuss athleticism and HBD in almost unveiled terms because sports competitions are designed to pit athletes against one another on a level playing field, and, because, well, Americans love sports. It's about the only shared cultural experience left in the polyglot country we used to think of as united.

Consequently, they're own lying eyes tell them a lot--it's harder to blame structural/institutional/socio-economic/cultural isms for west African black dominance in speed positions that are especially reliant on fast twitch muscle fibers like cornerback than it is to explain away why the children of wealthy blacks perform worse on standardized tests than the children of poor whites do and how putative white racism is squared with apparent yellow favoritism.

Momma's in the kitchen, daddy's in the field

Upon further inspection it has come to my attention that the GSS is even more oblivious to PC etiquette than I gave the survey credit for. In 2012, it queried respondents on what they conceived of as the most ideal situation for a family with a young child to organize their family and work lives (and even more controversially, the question is written with the assumption that a "family" consists of one man and one woman married to each other). Despite all the putatively egalitarian feminist-inspired blathering about how parenting roles are fungible across sexes (and orientations), contemporary Americans trust biological realities more than they rely on the harping of the harpies. The distribution of responses among the broader population (n = 1,004):

Arrangement, all responses	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	39.7
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.6
Both full-time	11.3
Both part-time	6.8
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.5

Perhaps it's skewed heavily by the patriarchal enforcers of patriarchy, the patriarchs themselves. The response results, this time considering women only (n = 527):

Arrangement, women only	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	33.6
Mother part-time, father full-time	45.7
Both full-time	11.7
Both part-time	8.5
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.3

The vast majority--we're talking 4 out of 5--of Americans conceive of the ideal family environment being one in which a man works full-time and a woman works either part-time or not at all. It's as though they recognize some sort of special bond between a mother and the child her body spent nine devoted months bringing into the world.

Maybe the patriarchs have brainwashed their own barefoot wives slaving away in the kitchen into falling for the breadwinner-homemaker ideal, but what about women who think for themselves? Liberal women only (n = 130):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	23.1
Mother part-time, father full-time	48.4
Both full-time	12.9
Both part-time	15.0
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.6

Okay, but many of these women went through their formative years before third-wave feminism really got going. Let's see what the Sandra Fluke generation thinks. ... Oh, she's in her thirties? I got the impression that she was a college student or something. Ah, she recently graduated and will be starting her career soon. After a decade establishing herself professionally, she might even procreate one unaborted, down-free kid of her own, provided she outraces menopause or has her eggs frozen--soon. Anyway, the preferences of women under the age of thirty (n = 118):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	26.3
Mother part-time, father full-time	47.7
Both full-time	7.7
Both part-time	18.2
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.0

Not a single woman surveyed thought it desirable for a mother to spend more time working than her husband does. Suck the marrow from the men, let work drain their souls, not ours! Good for them.

Given their illegitimacy rates, welfare utilization rates, and their positions on marijuana legalization, one may be forgiven for scoffing at the neocon assertion that Hispanics are "natural conservatives", but he should also be willing to give credit where credit is due. They are even more traditional than their white, black, or yellow brothers and sisters are (n = 73):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	45.4
Mother part-time, father full-time	36.3
Both full-time	2.3
Both part-time	14.9
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	1.1

I'm throwing in with the plurality on this one, since our conceptual approach is one in which I'll assume the role of primary breadwinner/secondary caregiver and she the role of secondary breadwinner/primary caregiver. This is as good a time as any to pass along the happy news that my fiance and I are expecting a child just a few days before Christmas. No, I'm not so audacious as to herald the coming of a savior, but I am thrilled by the thought of combining birthday and Christmas into a super day in which (s)he gets 150% of what (s)he'd separately get on either day if the two gift glut days were further apart from one another, ha!

GSS variables used: FAMWKBST(1-6), SEX(2), RACECEN1(15-16), AGE(18-29), POLVIEWS(1-3)

Opposition to premarital sex over time

A few years ago, I looked at trends in US public opinion on seven major social issues and came to the conclusion that, with the exception of same-sex marriage, traditionalists are doing a decent job of holding the line (see Dan's comments for a more finely grained, contemporary discussion of as much). Levels of support for abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action, wealth redistribution, and permitting prayer in public schools are at the same levels today that they were forty years ago (the seventh issue, support for marijuana legalization, has crept up slightly but remains a minority position).

Here's another pervious point in the traditionalist's perimeter, however. The following graph shows the percentages of respondents over time who said that sexual relations between two people prior to marriage are either "always wrong" or "almost always wrong" (the other two options were "sometimes wrong" and "not wrong at all"):

The mean liberal position of a generation ago has become the mean mainstream position of today. The mean mainstream position of a generation ago has become the mean conservative position of today. When the ratchet turns, it turns to the left.

The treatment in popular culture of the idea that a couple should refrain from having sex until they've tied the knot as something quaint, prude, anachronistic, and, most importantly, unserious, demonstrates how the Establishment is comprised primarily of progressive standard-bearers. Not that I can legitimately distance myself from said treatment--while I'm sympathetic and theoretically supportive of the idea that premarital sex is civilizationally destructive, my behavior doesn't adhere abide by it, nor do the behaviors of just about everyone I know.

According to one of Jayman's hypotheses (and the guy seems to be generating an intriguing new one every week), it's plausible to think that not only will traditionalists hold the line, but that in the future, aided by a conservative advantage in fecundity, they will stage a counter offensive and push progressive positions on these issues back from whence they came.

Maybe. While the seven issues mentioned above are reasonably representative, they are of course not exhaustive, as the persistent shift towards moral acceptance of premarital sex illustrates. It gets at the question of how substantive the Jayman hypothesis will be if it plays out as predicted. If self-identified conservatives increase as a proportion of the total population but the positions they hold morph into those their parents' generation opposed, are traditionalists on the receiving end of little more than empty semantic success, of a Pyrrhic victory?

GSS variables used: PREMARSX(1-2)(3-4), YEAR, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

Pride as a deadly sin? Hah!

++Addition++OneSTDV responds, pointing out that "pride" is not a semantically ideal descriptor for what might be better characterized as gay self-assertion. Gay pride parades are not billed as a celebration of the artistic commitments of gays (thanks for reducing putative supermodels to emaciates objectively less attractive than many of the next door girls I know!), but instead an unsolicited broadcasting of the bohemian bacchanalia one should expect when both parties involved in the sexual union have Y chromosomes.

He also asks the following:

But is this concept even rational? Can an individual completely removed or essentially inconsequential in bringing forth these accomplishments rationally feel pride?

A separate issue is whether or not that question is necessarily relevant. When French military commander Henri Gouraud said something to the effect of "Behold Saladin, we have returned," after putting down an uprising in Syria, was it rational for the French troops to beam with pride at the 'accomplishments' of their forefathers in having established the Kingdom of Jerusalem 800 years earlier? Probably not, but that pride presumably carried with it inspirational, beneficial (from the colonial perspective) consequences.

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Apparently, there was a "Pride Parade" on the main drag just off the University of Kansas' campus last week. On my facebook news feed, I noticed a friend had a status update that read "Yay pride week!" She's bisexual with a healthy libido--the kind of girl who screams to be bedded, not an ugly, serious LGBT-activist type. So I commented:

White pride, huh? I'm glad you don't hate everything about yourself ;)

I was making an inside remark from our time together, and as I knew would be the case she didn't take any umbrage from it at all, but several other comments expressed very predictable disgust at the idea, justifying my comment in a general sense. Those responding with hostility (all white I think, though I know none of the people who generated them), clearly were appalled by the idea of embracing a white racial identity.

Their collective opinion is shared by most people in contemporary American society, at least in public. Pointing out that vociferous, in-your-face adulation of sexual deviancy is more acceptable than a public proclamation that being of European descent is nothing to be ashamed of is hardly insightful on my part, I know. But the fact that "pride" is short-hand for gay pride, the most acceptable variety of self-celebration whites allow themselves to engage in, reveals the pathological nature of today's Western popular culture, which embraces and gladly cultivates a bohemian image (as the nearby typical photo from another gay pride parade illustrates) our forefathers prudently found themselves perpetually at war with, while disdaining a celebration of the dead white males that societies everywhere (most especially our own!) should be venerating.