Best Films of the Decade

Since everyone seems to be doing this, here is my, ahem, definitive list:

The Lives of Others
Nowhere in Africa
Amelie
A Very Long Engagement
Angels in America
Up!
Coraline
Kung Fu Panda
The Passion of the Christ
Apocalypto
Mystic River
Million Dollar Baby
The Good German
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Gosford Park
A Prairie Home Companion
Memento
Pirates of the Caribbean
Snatch
2046
Master and Commander
Idiocracy
Howl's Moving Castle
The Science of Sleep
Adaptation

1. I have been basically AWOL from movies for the last 2 years so this list is only accurate for 2000-2007.

2. The films on my list are all very good but none of them are truly great. Filmmaking seems in decline, for the moment at least.

3. The best of the bunch is Adaptation.

4. The most underrated is The Good German. It takes some effort to figure out what is going on, but this riff on Casablanca and To Have and Have Not is well worth burning some IQ on. I was right about Deconstructing Harry, The Big Lebowski and Eyes Wide Shut, all widely panned movies that are now getting their due, so I'm sticking to my guns on this one.

5. Most overrated that I've seen are Sideways and The Lord of the Rings. Not that they were terrible, but they ain't the future classics people take them for.

Don't Let The Lies Make You Paranoid

As we all know, the internet is all in a kerfuffle about the revelations of how climate scientists have not been acting exactly in the most objective and fair minded way. To that end, Dennis Mangan has come up with a list of things he thinks those in power are lying to us about.

Now, I should say that on some things we are being lied to by those in power. Two of the biggest shocks in my life came when, first, I discovered the truth about race and intelligence through people like Steve Sailer, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, Vince Sarich and then later discovered the truth about women and sex through Roissy and the seduction community generally. Suddenly, things that you have seen all around you start to make sense. You realize that, "Oh my God, I've been lied to all my life." The temptation is to start disbelieving everything you have been told. Everything is a lie.

But in most things the common consensus is actually right. I'll quote Robin Hansen's sensible take on the controversy:

It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate. But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.

I'll take a amateur stab at some of the rest of Dennis' list. I can't say I've looked deeply into these topics, and I'm open to persuasion, but to the extent I have looked into them, the general consensus seems to have actually come out ahead. OK, let's go:

1. Fiat money

No, the government isn't paying off its debt through inflation at your expense. It's doing it at your expense the old fashioned way, by taxing your pants off.

If you want arguments, compare the lucidity and common sense of this and this versus, say, the dumbfounding economic illiteracy of this.

2. Climate change

Bjorn Lomborg thinks it's real and he's certainly no Gaia worshipper. I have found his take on environmental issues generally quite sensible.

3. AIDS

I haven't read the Duesberg paper that Mangan references through, but from summaries (see here and here) he seems to base his contentions on the following:

a. The population in Africa is still growing in places with high rates of AIDS.

This doesn't seem like much of an argument to me. The population in Ethiopia grew quite a bit despite having a huge famine in the 1980s. What, are we now going to deny that there was a huge famine in 1980s Ethiopia?

b. A lot of the people who have died of immune failure in Africa don't actually have HIV.

Africa is a very disease friendly place. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people who died of "AIDS" there may actually have died of some other disease, especially since some of the people collecting the stats may have wanted to inflate the rate of AIDS in Africa. However, it is a huuuuuuuuuuge jump from saying that other diseases may be causing people to die from immune failure etc. in Africa to saying that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

*****************************************************************

In general, I have noticed how discovering the truth about race and sex has seemed to truly derange the minds of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people. Of course, it is a truly disorienting experience to be so badly mislead in such important areas. It does break down one's trust in society. You do feel betrayed. But this sort of rush to embrace every crackpot contrarian theorist on every other topic seems to me deeply misguided. It is good to question everything, but mere unthinking inversion is not a reliable road to the truth and in reality makes us no better than our opponents.

Liberaltarianism as Paternalism

But (in large part thanks to Kerry) it's come to seem pretty obvious to me that the possibility of a society with libertarian institutions requires a huge degree of government coercion. And to will the end is to will the means, as Kant said. The possibility of actually existing libertarianism depends on a good deal of progressive government policy. Once you start thinking about the kind of policy that could sustain libertarian institutions, I think you start seeing certain government constraints rather differently. At least that's been my experience.

- Will Wilkinson.

(NOTE: I had a little fun with the Wilkinson quote. Click on the link for Wilkinson's exact words.)

Libertarians like Wilkinson and Kerry Howley don't themselves subscribe to government suppression of speech etc., but they tend to get so worked up about sexism and racism and homophobia that the average liberal thinking person has to wonder that if these things are so bad, why isn't the government doing something about them.

And the fact is that the kind of deracinated society these kinds of libertarians like to live in is only possible with massive government interference, so that these kinds of libertarians are de facto left liberals. In this context, Wilkinson's enthusiasm for Scandenavian social democracy doesn't seem all that surprising. A reminder again that these are the same countries that so ruthlessly suppress free speech on such issues as immigration, race, and homosexuality. Given such, I have no confidence that Wilkinson et al. are in fact interested in the liberty of those who disagree with them. (A google search for "will wilkinson sweden free speech" brings up zero condemnations of the outrages being done to freedom of speech in that country. See here for more Swedish goodness.)

As Jim Kalb notes:

[O]n the whole and in the long run people are more interested in how things work than in particular political structures. If so, he'll expect that people who like the idea of removing restrictions, and so become liberal or libertarian, are mostly going to end up more interested in whether they're able to get whatever they're interested in substantively than in the specific structure of what's restricted and what's permitted. They're likely to view the latter more as a means than the basic issue.

Procedure seems a specialized concern that's likely to lose out to substantive issues in political competition as in human action generally.

Getting back to Wilkinson and Howley, it isn't just us traditionalists that see liberaltarians as crypto-authoritarians, Todd Seavey sees it too:

If not, we can be forgiven for wondering why someone who thinks like Howley would embrace the basic political stance of libertarianism in the strict property-defending sense at all. If people telling you “fat chicks should be shunned” is as oppressive as being hauled off to jail, why not pass laws banning anti-fat-chick discrimination? Why not endorse affirmative action laws? Why not tell Catholic-run charities they must hire gays? The traditional libertarian answer is that rights violations are fundamentally different from behavior that merely strikes you as narrow-minded.

Howley’s thinking is potentially authoritarian (in a way that being passively bourgeois is not) because other people’s patterns of behavior will always limit your options one way or another and thus prompt demands for redress. Howley singles out a few hot-button, familiar issues such as race and gender, but the truth is that every time your fellow human beings decide, say, to be sports fans instead of talking about entomology with you, or to leave town en masse for the Bahamas (causing you to feel lonely), their actions have altered your life options. Tough luck. That’s called “other people exercising their freedom,” not “people oppressing you.”

Hey, I'm not a libertarian, so I have no problem in principle with using the government to impose certain values on others, but it seems rather ironic coming from some supposed opponents of paternalism.

FURTHER LINKS:
Jim Kalb's complete thoughts on why libertarianism almost always turns into left liberalism are here and here.

The Wisdom of the Elders and It's Decline

It seems a commonplace that we do not much value old people anymore. This is in stark contrast almost all previous societies, where the experience of the old made them among the most valued members of society. Being a great reader of the classics, I have always appreciated what those who have come before me had to teach and being steeped in the Bible I was well aware of the injunctions there to take heed of my elders. But in my own life, it was always strange to me how little those elders often had to offer me. I know that as I watched my grandfather die I remember wishing that I could talk to him about the things that were going on in my life. I wanted his life to have meaning for us, for him to have something to pass along. But I also knew that for a long time he had ceased to be a participant in modern life and thus knew little of what my experiences were. He had no wisdom to impart.

That is the main reason the “wisdom of the elders” is no longer heeded. Most people aren’t abstract thinkers and therefore whatever wisdom they have to impart is very concrete and specific to the peculiar circumstance of their environment. Social change has been so drastic over the past few decades that older people don’t really understand the specifics of what their children and grandchildren are going through and thus often can’t really be that helpful. Our choices are not their choices and their wisdom is for a time long past.

Literature is somewhat different. The wisdom of the great writers is indeed applicable to how we live now. But, unlike that of most people, it is frequently a somewhat abstract wisdom and thus is only helpful to those who are capable of abstract thought. It is up to the reader to recognize the parallels to his life and properly apply it there. This is not a task for the average man. Religion does somewhat better by the average person, in that it breaks down the wisdom of the sages into digestible chunks for the masses. But for the most part they are left on their own, with only the frequently inane learning of a public school education for a guide to life. In this way too, wisdom has become a luxury good only truly available to the elites of our society, and only if they are self motivated enough to seek it out on their own.

Game and Freedom

As you can all see from a perusal of my archives, I am a man with somewhat unorthodox views on sex, race and other matters. I am not PC. I am also a bit of a worry wart and someone who prefers ease and quiet to continual upheaval. Given that I work in a profession which is rather PC, this has occasionally made me somewhat fearful as to what my colleagues and superiors would do if they knew what I really thought about these and other issues.

I don’t know about anybody else, but game has made me fell much more free to speak my mind anywhere. With the decent level of game I now have, I know that no matter if my job is taken away, no matter if I’m reduced to poverty, no matter if I’m denounced by respectable society, I can still get and keep a woman. And let’s face it, a big reason men work so hard to get ahead in their careers and don’t want to have them taken away is because they are afraid of what not having a job will do to them on the mating market. But, unless they actually throw you in prison, game can’t be taken away from you. There may be some women who won’t date you for your unfashionable opinions or your lack of respectable employment, but they are a lot fewer than you might think.

As we all know, the economy has taken a downturn and jobs can be scarce. A friend of mine has had a really hard time finding work over the past few months. He’s been really hard up lately. Anyway, using game he has managed to find himself a sugar mama. She buys him food, takes him out to dinner . . . It’s nuts. Granted she’s only a (solid) 6.5 and in her mid 30s, but still, she’s basically footing the bill for everything. Dudes, with game, even if worst comes to worst, this is the lowest you can fall.

Now, liberation from all restraints is not necessarily a good thing for human beings. Some nod to the good opinion of your neighbour is a healthy requirement for a good citizen. Hubris is always ready to take overtake those who are free to live without consequence. I don't think this will be my problem. I still do care somewhat about my career and my place in society. I care about my standing before God and before his church. I don't want to needlessly offend good people. But the knawing fear of aloneness and reproductive oblivion is gone. The terror of having it swept all away is no more. It feels nice.

Thanks

Thanks to Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias for directing an insane amount of traffic my way. Thanks also to Tyler Cowen for picking up on Robin's post.

UPDATE: Belated thanks to Robert Wiblin for directing Robin to the site.

Best Books for High School Teachers

1. Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?

The best introduction to the psychology of learning and eminently applicable to planning your lessons. It mostly confirms what traditionalists have had to say about teaching methods all along. Eg. It's pretty useless to teach critical thinking without teaching students enough facts to think critically about. The book is a little bit squishy on IQ, but no one should let that deter them from reading such an otherwise superb book.

2. Daniel Seligman, A Question of Intelligence and Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve

It's technically cheating, but while The Bell Curve is probably the more important for understanding of how different levels of intelligence affect your school, it may not make a lot of sense unless you know a little something about intelligence. Seligman's book is the best introduction to that topic, so I included it as well.

3. Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching

The best general introduction to the topic.

4. Madeline Hunter, Enhancing Teaching

The best book on how to plan your lessons.

5. Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

It wonderfully captures what it is like to be a teacher, from your early insecurities on to finding your place in the system. It's also a superbly written piece of literature. One for the canon.

6. Julia G. Thompson, The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide and Discipline Survival Kit for the Secondary Teacher

Good practical advice.


Some other good books relevant to education I have read:
Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption
Charles Murray, Real Education
Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes

Relevant books I haven't read, but am planning to soon:
Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education
Robert Cialdini, Influence
Leonard Sax, Why Gender Matters and Boys Adrift
Christina Hoff Summers, The War Against Boys
William G. Pollack, Real Boys
Michael Kimmel, Guyland
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy

NOTE: I have to express my disappointment in Peter Brimelow's The Worm in the Apple. This is particularly acute as I am a big fan of both The Patriot Game and Alien Nation. Brimelow's book sets out to prove that teachers' unions are a major obstacle to improvements in American education. They definitely don't help, but the fact is that reforming or abolishing such unions probably wouldn't make all that much difference. School choice has been touted as a grand solution for what ails North American education, but results have been disappointing. As Steve Sailer has noted, the most important factor in creating good schools is good students.

Why Church Going Guys Don't Have It That Bad With Women

For all the complaints I have made about the bad dating advice, grotesque naivete about female sexuality and indifference to the plight of single men you will find in the contemporary church, I have to admit that guys in my situation are in fact in a lot of way a lot better off than their secular counterparts. These are the reasons:

1. The effects of female hypergamy are much muted.

Since women are by nature hypergamous and they are no longer constrained by the need for a provider, they will often choose to engage in one of the following:

a) Soft polygamy. Many women are willing to share the most attractive men, either by allowing these men to have concurrent relationships with more than one woman, or else by waiting their turn for a chance to have an exclusive relationship with them.

b) Voluntary spinsterhood. Some women just aren't willing to be sexually used by the most attractive men in such a way, but because they are not sufficiently attracted to other men, they would rather stay single than marry a "beta provider."

However, while church going guys have to deal with voluntary spinsterhood, for the most part they don't have to deal with soft polygamy. Even the most alpha single guy in church is, in general, not going to be able to sleep with more than one women in the church either concurrently or serially and most church women, at least where I am, are not out looking to meet guys in bars and such. Hence, there really is a girl for every boy. Furthermore, most of the church women who are choosing spinsterhood do in fact want to get married. Their inertia is a significant problem, but it is eminently overcomable.

2. There are more girls in church than guys.

The sex ratio isn't as grotesquely skewed in favour of men among younger people like it is among older age groups, but there are still more younger girls who go regularly go to church than guys.

3. Church girls are more likely to be virgins (or at least have low numbers of partners).

Church girls who have premarital sex lose significant value on the marriage market among church guys. Thus she is much more likely to bond deeply with you regardless of how ordinary your skills as a lover are.

4. Church girls have been prescreened for good character.

If you've had any extensive experience dating non-Christian women you will immediately notice the massive difference in average marriage worthiness between church girls and non-church girls. Guys whose only regular social interaction is with church girls will doubtless be able to pick out the flaws of the women beside him in the pews, but believe me it is much, much worse out there in the world.

In general, church women are much more likely to stick by their husbands out of a sense of duty and are much more likely to agree that they have responsibilities for the health of the marriage too.

However, you have to be careful. Being a conservative Christian is much less useful as a screening device when "everyone" is a conservative Christian. I wouldn't set much store by it in certain areas of the United States, such as the American South. At least in areas like that, the divorce rate is just as high among evangelical Christians as among everyone else.

5. Conservative churches will still shame women for infidelity and divorce (usually).

A woman who gets a frivolous divorce or who cheats on her husband in a conservative church will usually lose a lot of status. Combined with prescreening this means that you are much less likely to suffer from the divorce regime.

Again, you have to be careful though, especially in areas, like the American South, where "everyone" is a conservative Christian. Those churches are often little more than social clubs for the Republican party and the membership do not necessarily take their moral obligations as seriously as they should.

I have been attending a church where the 20s group recently joined together with the 30s. Being with the 20s are a good illustration of what the churches are doing right by their young men. Most of the 20s guys are plenty alpha enough. They often don't have a clue how to use their alphaness to get a girl, but they will do just fine without having to learn any game. The women they will marry have been preselected to marriage worthiness. The community will (usually) shame their wives for any infidelity they may engage in or any divorce that they frivolously engage in. Men with only one lifetime sex partner (i.e. mostly religious guys) are by far the most fertile in the U.S. These young guys will do well. They have all they need to live a happy and fulfilled life.

However, the guys in the 30s group are a prime illustration of the failings of the church in this area. The group is filled with some of the most pathetic specimens of manhood you will ever meet. Its beta central. Most of these men are decent, clean living, devout guys with good jobs, but they have zero game and hence there is almost zero dating between them and any of the 30s females. And the church does nothing to help the find and woo the women they do want to marry. (Needless to say the dating advice given in conservative Christian communities is less than worthless.)


SOME CAVEATS

1. Marrying a woman you met in church is not a substitute for screening that woman. While a large portion of truly devout Christian women are good marriage material, many women in church are just as bad as women out in the world.

2. Going to a theologically conservative church is not a substitute for screening that church. Some churches have drunk more of the feminist cool aid than others and some have more propensities for unthinkingly blaming the man than others. Reader S.L. Werner has some horror stories of men being blamed for their wives adultery and of divorced women receiving much sympathy from their church while divorced men were treated like lepers.


FINAL REFLECTIONS

In general, for all the above, I tend to have a lot less sympathy for involuntarily single Christian guys who know a little about game and refuse to implement it. You have so many advantages over non-Christian guys. Most of the women now choosing spinsterhood do in fact want to get married. You will have to overcome a little bit of inertia among these women, but, since the natural alphas will be snapped up pretty quickly too, it won't take that much to move them from indifferent to interested. I can appreciate that one might feel the need to be cautious about taking dating advice from rakes and pick up artists and there is also the question of finding an appropriate practice venue. (I definitely do not recommend nightclubs and have to emphasize the need for extreme caution even in friendly neighbourhood pubs.)

In short, church going guys have better dating chances than secular guys, and when they do find someone they want to marry, they are more likely to have a successful marriage.

LINKS:
Tom Rees on religion and infidelity here.
Mark Regenerus on early marriage here. (NOTE: I don't much agree with Regenerus' take on why men are supposedly avoiding marriage.)

How Social Conservatives and Traditionalists Got It Wrong About Femal Sexuality

The older generation of men grew up, so to speak, inside The Matrix. They hold to chivalry because they believe women by nature are pure, innocent, and good, because in the world these men grew up in, that's how they were bred. Our civilization's campaign to make women that way was so successful that after millenia it seemed they really were that way, so that these guys never had a chance to see women's untamed nature.
- Jacob M. (Hermes)

Over at In Mala Fide, I have been participating in a comment thread on game and traditionalist conservatives. Commenter Rum wrote:

Traditionalists of every stripe have been very comfortable talking about the animal, brutish, hind-brain side of men, especially in regard to sexual instincts. The idea that men's sexual nature is something that must be channeled and controlled--and thus partly frustrated--for the sake of civilization is accepted without question.

It obviously makes traditionalists uneasy to think of their equally human female counterparts as having deep instincts that are equally unruly and problematic for civilization. Why this is true makes for interesting speculation but it cannot be denied that it does make them more uneasy than contemplating men's bestial component.

Traditionalists have done a fairly good job of recognizing female imperfectness in areas other than sexuality, and their critiques of feminism often had traction because of this. But traditionalists haven’t really come to terms with the dark side of female sexuality. Traditionalists never really addressed why women were attracted to rakes and bad boys in the first place, nor why they would leave good men for the same. It was all chalked up to some sort of “trickery” on the part of the rake or some moral inadequacy on the part of the nice guy husband.

As Jacob M. has mentioned, Western Civilization had done such a good job of suppressing female sexuality for the past few hundred years that it became the conventional wisdom that women didn’t really have any sexual desires. According to this line of thought, what most women really wanted was committment and family and while they were willing to give men sex in exchange for these they weren’t really interested in sex in and of itself. Oh how wrong we were.

The above is unquestionably true despite the protestations of some older traditionalists like Lawrence Auster. Here Auster replied to me:

What world is Thursday living in? Victorian England? Has he never heard of the 20th century? Has he never heard of the Roaring Twenties (the first Sexual Revolution--meaning unmarried middle-class women were getting it on)? Has he never heard of the Fifties (a.k.a. the "Sixties before the Sixties")? Has he never heard of the Sixties? Has he never heard of the Seventies? Shall I continue?

Sadly it has taken traditionalists almost 100 years to even begin to realize that the series of sexual revolutions in the 20th century were primarily driven by female sexual desire, not male sexual desire. Until recently, traditionalists have tended to assume that the behaviour of women in the Victorian era was a close reflection of their unconstrained sexual nature. The signals indicating otherwise were indeed there to read much earlier, but that doesn't mean they were in fact read. Other aspects of female sinfulness were acknowledged, but the primarily female driven nature of 20th century changes in sexual mores was not put forward by any traditionalist or social conservative before F. Roger Devlin. One might reply, as Auster does, that it is axiomatic that the sexual revolutions of the 20th Century were changes in who young women slept with. But that ignores the differing explanations as to why they started doing so. The usual social conservative/traditionalist explanation was that bad males had gotten these young girls to sleep with them because these poor females wanted love and affection (but not sex) and those bad males refused to give them love and affection unless they slept with them. Those innocent females didn't really want the sex, you see, they just wanted to be loved and cherished, but they had to give these men sex outside of marriage or else these bad men would move on to some girl who would have sex with them. It was sexual extortion, aided by the fact that the young man could now say, "But you won't get pregnant. We have birth control now."

The true explanation, of course, is that these supposedly innocent young women just liked having sex with the most attractive males. And that is definitely not what social conservatives and traditionalists before Devlin have ever said, despite the protestations of Mr. Auster.

NOTE: I had to write this blog post because Mr. Auster wouldn't post the last couple paragraphs here in his post criticizing me (see above link). I am not going to speculate as to why he hasn't done so, but the fact is that they radically undermine his position that traditionalists had it right about female sexuality all along. Furthermore, Ferdinand Bardamu has caught Mr. Auster only a year ago putting out one of the most clueless explanations ever for female misbehaviour:

So what is Auster’s explanation as to why women prefer violent men? IGNORANCE. I’m dead serious:

This isn’t about some wild attraction to dangerous and exciting men. It’s about pure insensibility, pure dullness, the quality of being tuned out from reality.

Funny that’s its only women who are drawn to physically abusive lovers. Are men not capable of stupidity? Any animal is smart enough to avoid actions that cause it pain, and yet the Western members of the female sex of the only sentient species on the planet can’t do the same.

Have you considered, Mr. Auster, that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive? Namely, that in the absence of social conditioning, women will blindly follow their genitals straight into the arms of violent dirtbags? Those men are socially dominant by dint of their nature, which is why women are drawn to them and why, when they get slapped both silly and senseless, they almost always go back to them.

No, Mr. Auster, you and other, older traditionalists didn't have it right all along. It was the followers of Devlin and Roissy who pointed you in the right direction. To state otherwise is dishonest.