My meager musings on Palestine. What hasn't been written about?
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I have the best of reasons for not posting lately. I was working on the Bad Therapy review that went up today, and the girls have been demanding a lot of my attention.
I love Matt Taibbi but dropped my subscription because I'm simply not that deeply invested in what's happening in the US. This week he gave his opinion on the Israel-Hamas set-to, which pretty much sums up my position. I haven't followed it, don't understand it, and I don't really care. I have been convinced for fifty years that no peace is possible in the Middle East and just don't want to be involved.
David Cole summed it up pretty well five years ago. The Jewish establishment had a natural ally in us Gentiles, but instead have been allowing George Soros, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL and sundry other parties closely associated with Judaism to sock it to the white man for decades. It would be convenient to have our help now in this Hamas fracas. Israel's enemies are certainly not sympathetic characters. But I can easily wish a pox on both their houses. It doesn't concern me.
I coined a couple of aphorisms on this topic over the past couple of decades, to which I am pleased to point now in Israel's hour of need. When the Jews who control the Democrat party help the US defend its southern border, maybe I'll find sympathy for Israel defending its borders.
In my view the final outcome will be determined more by demography than moral considerations. The Arabs are far more fertile than the Jews. They have a better sense of who they are. Julian Langness summed up their sense of themselves pretty well in Fistfights with Muslims. Edward Dutton expressed the same sense of inevitability in Why Islam Makes you Stupid – And Means you will Conquer the World. As the very Jewish Cole says in the piece cited above, it is amazing how the smartest people in the world can be so dumb. How they manage to make enemies out of everybody.
One of the pleasures of reviewing books is seeing others so eloquently express ideas that have been on my mind. That was certainly the case with Bad Therapy. Yet, every book I read calls to mind many other books making points that the author did not consider. As an example, Shrier mentioned vaccines only in passing, and in rather positive terms. She does not show any awareness of human evolution and dysgenics.
In the past few years I have made several false starts on longer written pieces. The equation is pretty simple. How much work would it be, and who would be interested? I have another tickle in my brain at the moment – my reflections on raising girls to be real women in this difficult age. Most of the writers who address the subject are women. I like Brittany Pettibone, Peachy Keenan, Abigail Shrier, Amy Loftus and the ladies who were behind the "Rules" franchise a few years ago. They write from women's points of view, a US perspective, and without taking into account worldwide demographic trends.
Birth rates were plunging even before Covid. They are now in free-fall. We have only a hint of what the vaccines have done to the fertility of young women who have not yet tried to become pregnant. We cannot tell if Edward Dowd, Geert vanden Bossche and Michael Yeadon's apocalyptic premonitions about excess mortality will prove to be accurate. The people who write about men, such as Baumeister and Donovan, don’t give much ink to questions related to fatherhood and child rearing.
Predictions, as Casey Stengel said, are very difficult. Especially about the future. It is conceivable that my daughters will come of age in a far more sparsely populated world, in which there is a significant shortage of women whose fertility has not been compromised by vaccines or other environmental poisons. They may emerge on the other side of a severe population bottleneck, the kind of thing that, like the Black Plague, allows society a painful but much needed reboot. Is that worth writing about? Has anybody done it? Am I the guy? Would anybody read it? I'm thinking.
Those are the thoughts from Lake WeBeGone, where the lawn is green, the vegetable garden is in, the fruits are set in the trees, the weather is in the 70s, and we bicycle every day in the sunshine.
Against Thomas Pierce:
A more self-contradictory string of comments I have never seen.
What does Pierce say about ‘expectations’ on children?
On the one hand, expectations are destructive, make children crazy, and Pierce has *no* expectations for his child:
“Let them live without expectations. It's parental expectations that make kids crazy.”
“My contention is that expectations are destructive.”
“I have zero expectations about her future.”
On the other hand, expectations are necessary for most people, and Pierce himself expects honesty, integrity, truthfulness, and good decision-making, from his child:
“Yes, we all have hopes and expectations.”
“Yes, you're right. I do convey messages to my daughter about honesty, integrity, and truthfulness.”
“Of course, I am trying to teach her personal integrity, honesty, and how to make good choices.”
“No question that we infuse our children by our own values”
“I think traditional values are probably necessary for most people because they are generally not smart enough to make their way in the world without them.”
Such blatant contradiction and embarrassing confusion ought to be dismissed by all serious minds.
Pierce continues his absurdity by thinking that when Seibert, Kit, and I, call on people of good quality to have children, that we reduce people to breeders, and that we must think that making babies exhausts the value and meaning of life. For a man to make such a claim, on the substack of Graham Seibert, a man who reviewed countless books of intellectual substance on Amazon, is an outrage.
Without question, Seibert, Kit, and myself, think that there is more to life than procreation. But none of those fine things, not your “honesty, integrity, and truthfulness,” nor anything good or beautiful or wise, is possible, unless you first EXIST. And existence requires procreation.
You write: "Is that worth writing about? Has anybody done it? Am I the guy? Would anybody read it?"
My answers: 1. Yes. 2. I don't know. 3. Yes. 4. Yes, I would.