Book Review
2/5 stars
American Marxism
Mass psychosis is not new and "No, history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme. " 


Of the book:

279 pages of prose over 7 chapters.
40 pages per chapter
The reading would be easy, but the content is so distressing/banal (page after page of stupid people involved in frivolity), that I almost don't want to pick it up to resume reading after putting it down.

This book popped up because I needed something short enough to complete after a very long book.

Frankly, I would not have purchased this book again and the reasons are that:

Primo: Even though it's only 280 pages, it reads like it's 560 (and if therefore defeats my purpose of having a short palate cleanser);

Secundo: Even though the events it describes are absolutely appalling, they're really not that unpredictable, nor unknown.


1. All empires have some type of natural lifetime, and even though the Roman Empire was once at the height of its power.....Through the sheer power of entropy: it is with us no longer. 

And the Moguls. And The Ottomans. And the Habsburgs.

Eventually, in the process of a government's making some number of decisions..... statistically some of them will be wrong: en toto, those wrong decisions culminate in a fatal collapse.

How many times has China collapsed? 

How many times has Israel been conquered/collapsed?

The US is not a unique case in this regard.

So, it will not pass defamation laws. Nor eliminate the tenure system. 

And, they will reap the benefits of these stupid decisions / lack of decisions.


2. When human beings get too comfortable, they become fat and sleek (both individually, and as entire generations of people).

Ditto for businesses

Ditto for nations.

So, if a nation that becomes Number 1.... Then that's how you know that its days are numbered. Winners don't stay winners and losers don't stay losers.

The United States is currently Number 1, and that's the perfect position to be in to perish of frivolity (as opposed to if you were Number 2 and striving to be Number 1).

3. When you have a snowflake cause an avalanche, I don't think it is to say that: if you were able to find that one single causative snowflake, you would have been able to avoid the avalanche.

The point is the initial state of the system.

And so, Marx is a red herring. 

It is more like: the initial state is a society that's too comfortable and with more income (to finance idiot academics) than they have brains.


Yes, you might be able to point back to Four Stupid Women in Congress...... But, they are the symptom of a problem and not the problem itself.

And if someone did us the favor of assassinating all four of them tomorrow (tee hee hee!), then there would just be another four to replace them--because the current state of the country is such that those type of people can be produced and have audiences.

4. I don't think it much matters if you have one set of people making the decisions (corrupt and venal Democrats) as opposed to another set (hapless, bumbling Republicans). 

The Vietnam War was a very damaging rallying point for Kooky White People and left-wing radicals--through BOTH liberal and conservative administrations. There might not have been a continuing public reaction that is led to the State of affairs today had there not been a Vietnam War.
 
5. The Western World Is Not The World. The Western trend has been moving away from traditional religion and community to a Secular Humanism (which has morphed into Marxism-plated "social justice" movements). 

Predictably enough, a lot of other destructive mass movements have arisen to take their place. (I don't know how anybody could see the first two World Wars as anything but that.)

The family unit has been undermined, and people are not reproducing at population sustaining levels ALL across Europe, Asia, and North America.

The Middle East/Africa are just as religious as they have been (and in some cases they have gone even further in that direction--Wahhabism in Saudi/Pakistan) and nobody has said that they are not able to sustain their population levels or that they have moved from their own religious movements into Western-style type Secular Humanism.

But then, in spite of not having Western type of stupidity, the Middle East and Africa are constantly having other issues of their own making. (When are they NOT fighting and killing each other?)

Is Western stupidity enough to explain Western descent? Or would it just be something else?

In this case, if the Marxists/Social Democrats / Social Justice Warriors have the allegiance of Men of Words (and they do!), and they are able to take the country into some mass psychosis (and they will!)...... Then it will just be what it is, and there will be some amount of misery/collapsed governments / chaos over some amount of time, and then things will get back to normal.

And posterity will do it ALL OVER again--as if their ancestors had never been. 

Such with the French Revolution. 
And the Reign of Terror. 
And the Great Leap Forward. 
And the Cultural Revolution. 
And Hugo Chavez. 
And Robert Mugabe.

6. Hoffer already wrote "The True Believer," and that is a lot of the intellectual scaffolding of this book-and that makes the specific events in this book just so much stamp collecting.

7. If people want to lose a country to frivolity, is this the first time?

And what can we do about it? 

Do participants in this idiocy get what they deserve? (32 million people starved to death in the Great leap Forward in China because the government thought that they could set rice growing conditions from Beijing. It was a pretty expensive lesson, but eventually they did get disabused of their belief.)

8. Free speech is not free. The experiment is being tried in the United States, and it's not working out too well.

So, you have some state that was an experiment and it failed.

So now what? This is far from the first example of a failed state.

9. Karl Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" is not new.

Chapter Synopses:

1. Description of the scope of the problem and the author's intentions to raise people's consciousness in order to create a reaction.

2. The destructive tenure system that no one has reined is slowly creating an army of grievance warriors. Brief synopsis of Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Hoffer. Cloward-Piven Strategy.

3. Education is in indoctrination tool, and it filters from universities to teachers that are licensed by them, who in turn infect K-12. Repurposed Marxism has eschatological elements. 

4. US Academia is the number one culprit in this destructive tide. The New York Times and "The 1619 Project"- which, coincidentally, has NO footnotes (kinda like the Christian Bible!). Equity≠Equality because the first is equality of results and the second is equality of opportunities. Mexican/south American infestation of the United States is really internal migration, and white people are the real occupiers because the former have a greater claim to the land than the latter. (By the way, universitys that teach this are all financed, built, and controlled by white people.)

5. Capitalism=Freedom of Choice;
Freedom of Choice=Bad;
THEREFORE, Capitalism=Bad.

Environmentalism/Degrowth is warmed-over Marxism. Intro to Serge Latouche. "Intersectionality is the combination of disparate causes and alleged victimizations under yet another radical / anti-capitalist umbrella United in their hatred for American society." (p.160)

6. Fake news (like we didn't know this?). "The modern press is actually a highly negative force in our society" (p.196- Again... we didn't know this?)

7. Recapitulation. What can we do to save this sinking ship? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Use the same Alinskyite tactics that the Marxists use. Legal form shopping. BDS. Pick the topic, personalize it, freeze it, polarize it. If you can avoid purchasing from big corrupt corporations (I'm looking at you, Amazon), then you should avoid it.


Second order thoughts:

1. Maybe the best way to save the United States is for China/Iran to drop several nuclear bombs on California/ New York/ Seattle. In addition to killing off a pretty high fraction of useless people, it might give the country some focus.

The second best way would be to just get some estimate of how many Destructive Intellectuals (Kimberly Crenshaw / Noam Chomsky, et. al.) there are in the country, and just sue/detain/execute a good enough fraction to make an example to the rest.

Lawsuits are the way that the fabulously wealthy Singapore manages to keep its destructive intellectuals in check; The First Chinese Emperor just executed all of his intellectuals at once and the Chinese Empire is still here, still trudging along, and bigger than it ever has been.

2. I wonder what does this mean to Black people? All of this talk about some mythical "people of color" aside: it doesn't help you snag any of these other non-white ladies. And decreasing order of difficulty: Arab>>Asian>Spanish. If you are interested in non-black women (and most black guys are, no matter how grudgingly they admit it), white ladies are probably still your best choice. (And if you are good enough, you might even be able to get better than a Remnant Baby Elephant.).

3. When you have a government that is totalitarian, people slowly find ways to work around it. (The Chinese are, again, an excellent example of people who are prodigiously talented at circumventing the government. For several thousand years.)


4. Some things are factually wrong here. No, Chinese workers are not bound to a job and they don't have to worship Xi Jinping. (p.68).

5. Again, some society somewhere does not learn something or they forget what they have learned. So what? 

In Iran, theocracy was the Big Thing,  and it appears to have run its course. 

Communism / Bolshevism were the Big Thing in the Soviet Union, and eventually they ran their course. (Everywhere, really, except US academia.)

6. I wonder how much these (Marxist, academic) fools really want to get their wish? If the state withers away, then there is no mechanism to finance academia.
 
Do I really need to tell you that without these glorified government jobs, professors of environmental justice would be working at Little Caesar's or mowing lawns for a living.

7. Why don't these miserable degrowth types just move to  certain parts of Africa? 

They've got ALL the good stuff there: Low growth. Unstable governments (it's pretty helpful when you want the state to wither away, à la Karl Marx). Primitive healthcare. Pit latrines.  Subsistence agriculture /plenty of contact with "nature." Non-white/black people everywhere! And if you don't want to live around black people, you could just move to much of Latin America. Say, Venezuela. And if that's too much, then you could just move to Cambodia.

8. Might be infection be self-limiting? Universities are closing down all over the place in the United States because people are slowly becoming aware that they have been sold a fake bill of goods.



Verdict: Very weak recommendation.


New Vocabulary:

Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Recommended instead:

1. Hoffer, "The True Believer"
2. Tainter, "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations"
3. Sowell, "The Quest For Cosmic Justice"