Just another day in the NYT

Some time ago I picked up from Foseti the bad habit of reading Business Insider. I have to say that I'm pretty much over it now, and only take a look in circumstances of extreme boredom, which aren't common for me (unless I'm too hangover to read books or play Civ).

Recently though I have picked up a perhaps even worse habit, this time from Half Sigma. HS can be an insufferable snob, which is made all the more hilarious because the persona that reflects out of his writing is that of the less glamorous guy on the internet (I always imagine him as Dilbert with a Jewish nose). But as dumb as his writing is sometimes, his heart is in the right place, and he has interesting intellectual habits. One of which is reading the New York Times. He does very well reading the NYT, not only because it gives him and his readers a window into the soul of the elite they so yearn to join. But because it gives him an infinite supply of stuff to blog about.

I don't usually check up on the MSM, haven't done so since I was 15. I never wanted to 'know my enemy', I have enough interaction with liberals in daily life to need to listen to their crap even when I'm in the comfort of my home. Or so it was for me, but my lifestyle choices have helped me to increasingly isolate from the larger society, and I guess I've been losing track with liberal fads. I must be seriously out of sync, because the stuff I've been reading on the NYT make me stop every 5 seconds to double-check. Does it really say what I think it does?

I used to just check up on the links at HS or Sailer's or whoever has the guts to actually read that shit every day. But I don't know why I started to jump link after link, and read quite a bunch of NYT articles today. And wow. Let me give you some examples.

I started reading the frontpage article on the military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Hundreds of dead. Big deal. The local military goes out of their way killing hundreds of Islamists, and USG is sad? I guess they'd rather kill them themselves, one drone strike at a time. Make-work for the military-industrial complex. Whatever. Nothing of interest.

And so I clicked on a link saying: Design Advice on Reconfiguring an Emptying Nest. Hey, that might be interesting for my parents, as my little brother just moved out. Turns out it's a Q&A where readers ask the expert about their situation and get some tailored advice. I start skimming and then bump upon this question:

Q. I was never able to afford a house while my daughter was small; to put her through college, I lived in a studio co-op that I now own. Now she cannot get a job. How can I make a 420-square-foot studio accommodate two women with a lot of clothes? I cannot afford to rent a bigger apartment; I need to save money for retirement or to help her with graduate school. — Landless, Brooklyn

Wait a fucking second. OK, singular tense, so it's a single parent, I guess it's a woman. And she lived for decades in this tiny studio to put her daughter to college. Wow. Sacrificing her lifestyle for her daughter. Very nice. And what's the result of that sacrifice? An unemployed daughter! Bravo. 20 years of savings... for nothing! And see how she hasn't had enough. Now she's saving more for her useless daughter's grad school! See that's it's either that or retirement. Guess what she'll choose? Fund her own old-age, or pour more money in the higher-education racket? At least her daughter will be hooking-up like the NYT wrote about a while ago.

I was getting all riled up when I go to another link, this one about Germany Fights Population Drop. That sounds interesting. Everybody's talking about how the financial crisis has sent droves of Spanish, Italian, Greek and EE engineers all over to Germany which is booming and whatnot. I always thought it strange that Southern Europeans, even engineers, could readily adapt to work in Germany, let alone learn to speak Deutsch. As usual my gut was right:

A recent study found that more than half the Greeks and Spaniards who came to Germany left within a year.

Heh. Ich...bin...ein... slacker for the most part. Oh well. The article isn't about that anyway, it's mostly about some ideas to increase the local fertility rates. The neoreactionary gut on this issue is that women should stay out of the workforce after marriage and have kids. But Germany is notorious for having been doing exactly that, and they have one of the lowest birthrates in Europe. Anecdotally Japanese women also overwhelmingly leave the workforce after marriage, and still don't have babies. That leads liberals to argue that what we need is, of course, more feminism.

Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs. They say recent data show that growth in fertility is more likely to come from them.“If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” said Reiner Klingholz of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.

Oh yeah? Really? Wait a minute, what does it say around here?

Screen Shot 2013-08-15 at 9.03.18 PM

Champions of equality

Of course the only datapoint on their favor is that Sweden, famous for forcing toddlers to forget they have dicks, has a TFR of 1.67 against Germany's 1.42. Big fucking deal. Yemen is in 4.27. Why don't we try that instead?

Of course the real reason behind low fertility isn't that hard to understand, and in this very article, probably without noticing it, they make it quite clear:

Melanie Vogel, 39, of Bonn, found that trying to blend work and motherhood was so lonely, dispiriting and expensive that she decided to have one child. None of her friends worked full time, her mother-in-law made clear she disapproved, and so did clients in the job fair company she runs with her husband.“Before my son was born, I was Melanie, a working businesswoman,” Mrs. Vogel said. “But after my son was born, to a lot of people, I was just a mother.”

Well as long as women like Mrs. Vogel think hat being a working businesswoman is higher status than being a mother, well Germany is fucked. It's obvious that nobody wants to be "just a mother". Or "just" anything. The problem is the "just". The day when German women say that they want to be mothers, and not "just a working businesswoman", they'll start pumping out babies like rabbits. The same day the NYT will command Obama III (or Dwayne Elizondo Camacho) to carpet bomb the Nazi scum with agent orange.

I thought the article was about promoting feminism in enemy countries, but of course that's not enough. The NYT is the trend-setter, and it couldn't end an article about workers without mentioning the current fad.

Immigration in general has become more temporary, and moving across borders in Europe is especially easy.“I think the answer is that we need to look outside Europe,” Dr. Klingholz said.

That's the final sentence, and it comes out of the blue. No real context in the rest of the article. Which reminds me of Cato the Elder, the Roman senator who would make a speech on agricultural policy, or the treasury, or the next festival for Venus, but would always finish saying Cartago delenda est. We should have open borders. White majority countries delendi sunt.

Blaming myself for reading anything political from the NYT, I then jumped unconsciously to the next link, which said: Sex in a teenager room. Hey it's about sex, how bad can it be. Well let me put some random quotes:

One of the lovely things about not having children (besides never having to counteract a toddler’s propensity for covering all surfaces with what experts call “sticky”) is that I will probably never need to stare down the barrel of teenage sexuality.

or

But surely there is some happy medium? “I’m a great believer in the Edwardian house-party approach,” said Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners. “Back then, people would have large parties and invite the lovers of their guests. They’d put these guests in separate bedrooms. And then stay out of the hallway. Parents should put the boyfriend or girlfriend into the guest room. And then go into their own room.”

or

We tell our child: ‘Here are the rules. This is our house, and while you are welcome to have a friend stay the night, we expect you to consider sex to be a private, two-person activity. That means you go to bed when we do, you get up when we do, and if you are really well behaved, we’ll make you pancakes for breakfast. We do not want to be involved in any way in your sex life. We don’t want to hear it. We don’t want to see it. We expect you to wash your sheets and towels. In other words, we expect you to behave like good guests.’ ”This setup strikes me as fairly ideal: a well-mixed cocktail of caution and tolerance with a possible pancake chaser. As the benevolent manager of your family campgrounds, though, you would have to be prepared for the occasional camper who takes an especial liking for the site.

or

As Nina Lorez Collins, who worked in publishing for 18 years before recently becoming a life coach, knows. Two years ago, Ms. Collins — having decided that her 17-year-old daughter Violet was in a loving and committed relationship with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Nile — allowed the couple, with the permission of Nile’s parents, to sleep together in her home in Brooklyn.

Wait a damn second. The writer starts the article by disclaiming how she hates children and then she starts pontificating about how to deal with horny teenagers? What the fuck is wrong with her. You don't have a family then shut the fuck up and stop telling people how to deal with one. Damn these feminists. What's her name?

Henry Alford is the author of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.

A guy? No way. No fucking way. My gaydar didn't even have to start running. I just went directly to Google, and right enough:

Alford lives in New York City in a part of town he calls "the Adorable Restaurants district".[52] He is openly gay.[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Alford_(writer)#cite_note-53)

I would easily start swearing about how fags should shut up about people's children, but of course they can't help thinking on sex with teenagers. Not anymore that they can help wanting to shove dicks on their rectums. It's their nature.

After just these few articles I just couldn't take it anymore. Damn I don't know how Half Sigma or Sailer have the energy and mindset to read this stuff every day. After 30 minutes I needed a break. A week at least.

So be very careful around there. I recommend that you don't read the NYT directly, but read stuff written about it, like this interesting article on the Telegraph which covers a massive takedown by the NYT on the Clinton Foundation. The NYT criticizing the Clintons in a long article is the rough equivalent of a court assassination in Tang China. The factions in the ruling class are moving against each other. If Hillary Clinton is out of the scene, who's coming next? Mrs. Obama?

EDIT: B's comment just reminded me of another NYT article I read a few days ago.

Sex Ed in 1964. Yeah I know, I'm a sucker for anything that contains the word sex. You can imagine where I end up clicking every time I read the Daily Mail.

The article is about how sex education in schools is so important, and how she wishes she would have had it in her days, when she was a teenager in the 1960s. In those days, teens had no idea about sex, nobody would talk about it.

The only time my mother gave me any information about sex was when I was 13 and traveling alone for the first time to visit an uncle in California.“We haven’t talked much about this,” Ma said. “But if a strange man ever puts his hands on you, you open your mouth and scream.”

Oh poor thing, condemned by her mother to a life of ignorance and obscurantism of the pleasures of life. Fortunately at age 16 she discovered Playboy, which had some hilarious advice.

So we got the Saran Wrap and wrapped. And wrapped. And wrapped. You new readers may not know this, but in matters of safety and personal health I am scrupulous. So we kept wrapping. I cannot, even in educationally correct greengrocer terms (root vegetable? zucchini? summer squash?) do justice to the final result. Let’s just say the only sexual thing possible, when we were done, was to look, and having looked, it was not something you would ever forget. Wait, I’ve got it: Picture a noble palace guard, swathed in 13 layers of dry cleaner’s plastic wrap, but, you know, proportional.Anyway, summer ends, the teenage boy, who had been a waiter at one of the hotels, goes back home to New York City and this being one of the things in my life I want to block out forever, I do.

See? Back in those dark, dark days, kids didn't know about condoms or pills or depo-provera, so they (at least she, being scrupulous) did things like wrap the dick on Saran Wrap.

Wait a second. So we have a teenage girl, raised in the 1950s by a conservative family, who never talks about sex, in an age without porn or sexual content in TV...

And she still fucks the hotel waiter during a family summer vacation? Holy shit. One more point for the null hypothesis of parenting.

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