Social Extinction

Grace Liu, archetypal accomplished Chinese “tiger cub,” pays tribute to her Tiger Mom on CNN this morning. The opinion piece, “Why tiger moms are great,” is a sincere memorial to the unflinching, relentless and demanding influence of Asian parenting and the beneficial results it can have on offspring following years of diligent academic carnage and hard work. It’s very heartfelt and I tip my hat to Grace Liu. I grew up with many tiger cubs. In fact, I married one (though now divorced, of course). I am no stranger to the tiger mentality. It is an alien experience to a Mexican boy who was used to sloughing off all the rigors of schoolwork because there was simply no external, thus internal, motivation to do well in school for posterity’s sake.

Grace Liu

Tiger parenting works, obviously. It raises standards, cements focused work habits, the sort that are in pitifully short supply in American society. Some mock it, praise it, dismiss it, but ultimately, tiger parenting is simply another model of parenting that we can’t single out as worse or better because context is all. Surely from the perspective of Western consumerist capitalism, the tiger mentality is the paradigm of success and should be upheld as the parental template we all should use to raise our children.

I owe everything I am and have accomplished to my parents. My family expected a lot from me only because they believed in me and wanted the best for me. They pushed me to excel because they valued me as an individual.
Tiger parents express their love through expectation of greatness, not in acceptance of mediocrity. Some people interpret such expectation as parental rejection of their worth as individuals. I always interpreted such crushing expectation as the ultimate belief in my self-worth. I knew that I was not being set up to fail.
My mother did not push me to excel because she prized my accomplishments more than my feelings. She listened to my feelings, but she also knew that my teenage feelings were volatile and irrational. She knew better than to let my future be derailed by such feelings.
My mother also knows that life has many obstacles, some external, many internal. She loved me too much to let me give up easily when confronted with those obstacles. For that I am eternally grateful.
I gained confidence and resilience from tackling my endless workload and from fighting through sleep deprivation. I knew that I was capable of getting through seemingly impossible situations. I knew that if I failed, then I just had to try harder. Failure is not a permanent state, but merely a temporary challenge that had to be tackled creatively.
The knock against tiger parenting style is that it does not foster emotional and social development.
Well, it partly comes down to expressing love and affection differently. Tiger parents may not often say “I love you,” but actions speak louder than words. My family never would have spent the time, money and effort—not to mention the emotional energy—on me if they did not love me. They never said this, of course. But I knew.
Sure, my mother viewed socializing with others as a waste of time. She wanted me to be valedictorian, not homecoming queen. I didn’t attend my homecoming. I was probably studying or working on my science project.

I have no quarrel with tiger parenting, per se. My only hesitation with it has always been its motivations. Many tiger parents, and much of East Asian mentality in general, is “anti-nihilist.” This mentality believes everything matters too much and obsessive stock is placed on status, reputation and belongings. Peer pressure is the antidote to misery for the tiger mentality. I can’t hang with this. This is the recipe for taking yourself too seriously and worshiping your own meaningless existence at the expense of pragmatism. Tiger parenting has no sense of subdued gloom or negative subtext (other than the occasional tiger cub who commits suicide in a college dorm). The focus and persistent vision of “keeping up with the Wong’s” (or Jones’ I suppose in multi-cultural America) discourages any sense of cynicism or skepticism because there is no time for realistic nihilism when you must stay up until 3 in the morning finishing the homework for that stupid AP class.

The tiger cub lives in a lofty land of ambition and status accomplishment. Any inkling of catharsis, like low test scores, does not make the cut. The tiger cub has much yang, but little yin.

Driving, or rather, trapped, in heavy traffic on Cesar Chavez Boulevard (ah, the beauty) outside downtown this morning, I saw a billboard on the south side of the street. It looked unfamiliar, perhaps it’s been there a while, but I rarely take the street to work, and when I do, traffic is normally moving at a brisker pace through this area and I’m not fond of the idea of rear ending a car simply for the sake of billboard-gazing. So this morning, in standstill traffic, I saw it for the first time.

The billboard caught my eye because it made no sense. None at all.

It makes no sense for several reasons, but the primary one is because there is a logical fallacy present. For a parent to be “perfect,” it follows naturally that the person must be “perfect” as well. One cannot be a perfect compartmentalized extension of an imperfect person.

We’re all imperfect. Vilely so, if you ask me. People are vile and disgusting and their collective imperfection makes me sick to my stomach. The delineation between tolerable imperfection and intolerable imperfection is the degree to which a person’s self-acceptance of imperfection is obstructed by their ego.

People are flawed, and thus, they make flawed role models and flawed mentors. And disastrous parents. There are people who don’t try to be parents and churn out apathetic criminal losers. And there are people who try too hard to be parents and they churn out high-strung mental cases. People are imperfect. The illusion of being a perfect parent makes for resounding disappointments that further gnaw at the soul of our cultural psychic peace of mind. No one is what they want to be, least of all “perfect parents.”

People who believe parental perfection is attainable also believe their children should be perfect, which leads to further sick parental obsession. Sometimes, the most concerned parents are those who are most imperfect and who allow their short-sighted actions to mar a generation behind the guise of good intentions which are nothing but unacknowledged pressures of “offspring ownership” duties they believe exist.

Imperfection runs rampant and it procreates exponentially and forcefully. The millions of generations of human evolution since the dawn of time have cemented a deep, unshakable legacy of human imperfection. Being human is being imperfect. Monkeys and dogs and hamsters are perfect. So are lizards and platypuses. Imperfection is so deeply embedded in our character that perfection, as a concept, can only live imperfectly in our human souls.

Richard Swanson sorta had a dream. Who’s to say it was not as noble as Martin Luther King’s?

Swanson had a dream of soccer…or more specifically, soccer balls. He wanted to bring soccer balls to the world’s poor, and he landed in a Berkeley, California, charity whose specific goal was exactly this. Called the One World Futbol Project, the company’s primary aim is to donate durable soccer balls to developing countries. That’s noble. I can certainly think of worse things, OK?

Well, in a bid to promote the worldwide soccer ball fund, Swanson set out on a 10,000-mile trek which was set to begin in his hometown of Seattle, and conclude thousands, maybe millions, of dribbles later in São Paulo, Brazil, in time for the 2014 World Cup there.

Richard Swanson was a kind man with a generous heart, but his journey was cut tragically short near Lincoln City, Oregon, as he dribbled his soccer ball along the 101 highway, when he was struck by a pick-up truck. When I saw the headline, I assumed he had been hit by some wild, out-of-control driver in a little Latin American shithole. Little did I expect this would have happened just a few hundred miles into his journey in the vast terrain of Oregon’s Pacific region.

Richard Swanson

Police in Lincoln City, Oregon, said 42-year-old Richard Swanson was hit at about 10am on Tuesday while walking south along US highway 101 near the city limits. He was declared dead at a local hospital. The driver has not been charged.

Lieutenant Jerry Palmer said investigators found materials among Swanson’s things listing his website, breakawaybrazil.com. Swanson set out on the trek to promote the One World Futbol Project, based in Berkeley, California, which donates durable soccer balls to people in developing countries. The company did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

Police said Palmer’s soccer ball was recovered.

In a fitting darkly-noted conclusion to this oddity, we are comforted that Swanson’s soccer ball was recovered. Goddamned soccer balls, his downfall. Soccer balls everywhere, his siren. Soccer balls for the world’s poor, soccer balls dribbling for 10,000 miles, Goddamned durable soccer balls!

Swanson was a good man but that is a deadly thing sometimes. I am a cynical, bitter man. I am a firm believer that no good deed goes unpunished, and furthermore, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (or soccer balls, in this case). I believe this is such a cynical, caustic world that any attempt to achieve grace, albeit moral purity, is invariably greeted with a harsh round of whoopass and fatalistic denunciations.

Virtuosity is dead. RIP, Mr. Swanson!

People need to stop announcing they have taken videos of the police like this dumb woman.

If you have a recording device of any sort, you are an enemy combatant of the police and they will not let you leave unless you give up the goods. Cops don’t care about your “rights,” a concept which they punctuate with totalitarian LOLZ.

If you take a video, keep it on the DL and get out quickly. And for Heaven’s sake, don’t tell them. Life is not a stupid episode of Dragnet.

I wonder what the minimum required IQ is for a person to understand, or better, predict, that the latest HBD-laced anti-immigration dust-up involving Jason Richwine’s 2009 Harvard doctoral thesis would cause hordes of HBD/paleoconservatives to cream their pants as the scent of evolutionary nectar filled their nostrils? The spectacle of Richwine’s 4-year-old thesis resurfacing parallel to the issues of immigration and amnesty as they dot the collective American talking-point dartboard and their certain applicability to an issue near and dear to every HBDer’s heart distracts me from other matters at hand by its sheer train-wrecked luminosity. As in the afterbirth of a collapsed star.

Many intelligent and cogent opinions have pervaded the landscape of commentaries and blogospheric ruminations in the days following Richwine’s resignation from the Heritage Foundation. Mexican and Hispanic groups have predictably bashed Richwine’s findings and lamented his anti-immigrant/Hispanic intellectualizing but it’s all knee-jerk stuff. Even those who oppose Richwine’s interpretations don’t seem to have bothered understanding the elemental academic foundations of his opinions before reacting by painting him with all the vilified denunciations of the racially wronged. While I do take limited umbrage with much of HBD’s dependence on that quirky facet of intelligence as the sole precursor to cultural success (this is their focus…economic success, which is a loose corollary to intelligence), anything I might argue in that regard has nothing to do with the current circumstances surrounding Richwine’s academic thesis and the policy inferences he draws from it.

And this is the intersection where HBDers cream their pants. Richwine’s thesis, which 4 years ago was an intriguing thought experiement, now. in 2013, can also be manipulated into a twice-removed argument against illegal immigration and amnesty. I say “twice-removed” because this is how I feel most HBD people argue against illegal/Hispanic immigration: rather than owning their distaste for Hispanics, they predictably intellectualize the argument in order to lend it a disconnect, an academic credence, as if the general public really gives a rat’s ass about that. If Steve Sailer or Jared Taylor would simply say “I do not like Mexicans and I don’t want any more here,” their flowery BS might be more palatable. Alas, the intellectual mind is utterly defensive and prone to bouts of self-consciousness. The intellectual needs to announce to the world, as a preface to his oblique opinions, the factual basis for these opinions, less he be construed as an imbecile. So he works tirelessly to conjure up every data point possible in order to paint the bulls-eye of statistical concurrence around his opinion. Thus, Jason Richwine’s thesis fits their anti-Hispanic/immigration fervor, and the “crucifixion” of Richwine by immigration fetishists further feeds their grueling sense of victimization. HBD victimhood is something I’ve noted previously. It’s not pretty. Richwine’s plight feeds this self-devouring hunger mightily! A man who speaks the truth (at least 4 years ago) and the intersection of this truth with the circumstances of today’s nativist crusaders has created the perfect storm of insanity.

Personally, I, as a person of Mexican descent, must admit Richwine presents some fiercely biting statistics. I believe that in the realm of IQ, as with most other purportedly genetic phenotype expression, variances are clouded by a host of sociocultural legacies, which in this case, disqualify any dependable gradient of relevance of intelligence as a common marker for differentiation between groups. Richwine’s ostensible theory enfolds upon itself like a clam, and disqualifies reasonable argument: collective ethnic intelligence is a precursor to culture. But once again, “intelligence,” meaning what? And the context? Are we to argue that 2013′s global form is the truest and purest sense of “intelligence?” Does his measure of success, as power, as intelligence, prove to be nothing more than a self-absorbed ethnic masturbation fantasy?

Most socially deprived academics don’t know Mexicans at all. Which is not a surprise. Even the California-based HBD folks still congregate within the safe confines of their little ethnic sandboxes and rarely venture out into the “real world.” In other words, they are sorely lacking in familiarity with the subjects of their derision. In his thesis, Richwine “brilliantly” opined, “When given the choice between a paycheck from a low-paying job and a welfare check, most intelligent people would realize that the welfare check offers them no potential for advancement. Low-IQ people do not internalize that fact nearly as well.”

Actually, if academics and wanna-be HBD academics, along with assorted other social retards, believe that inability to recognize the asynchronous relation between a payroll check and a government assistance check can be reduced to “IQ” rather than common sense, liberal Aztlan types really have nothing to worry about from White people.

In about 10 years, guns will seem like child’s play. As of now, they are a timely, gimmicky exercise, but the extensive offerings of 3D (additive) printing and its inevitable evolution will be astounding and culturally revolutionizing. 3D printing represents the next wild hairpin turn in the high-speed road of sociotechnological development, a long-lasting deflection in the trajectory of present societal evolution that will propel the world to exotic locales unknown, but the earnestness of the matter tells us that it will assuredly take us somewhere confounding and life-altering. This we can be sure of.

This is how confident I am in the promises/threats/offerings/forebodings of 3D printing.

Computing’s lengthy and shadowy ostensible aim is the complete recreation of life. Through the well-crafted, genius manipulation of silicon chips and refinement of code and computing languages, the primary impetus is to increase speed and processor power which directly translates into a mirror of real life’s stream. Computing’s goal is to mimic our existence undeniably, and thus, hasten liberation of human time. Robotics is a less than oblique manifestation of this aim.

What is technology’s nature other than to provide a substitute for human input? Technology evolves exponentially as it compounds upon previous technology. Advanced technology is the platform against which tomorrow’s technology can feed off. This is the mathematical equation for exponential!

3D printing is the next “step” in computing’s mission to mimic life. It is that step in which computational power is translated directly to tangible reality forms we can perceive through our grounded senses. All previous computational-based life-imitating forms have been confined to the screen or paper, or at the most, ethereal three-dimensional displays of projected images lacking true substance. The description “3D printing” is a bit askew in that it can even be called “real life printing.” The primitive state of 3D printing today is that it is not generated, from the schematic/design/digital realm, to anything remotely close to a molecular level. 3D printing, circa 2013, is rudimentary digital prefabrication, at most. 3D printing can design parts, constituent pieces that need to be re-assembled once they are “printed.” The essential building blocks of 3D printers now are plastics, metals and a morass of other malleable materials.

It’s not too outrageous to presume that as processor power grows steadily, digital 3D design will one day be capable of handling the enormous, mind-boggling mass of computations required to assemble masses of molecular assemblages. This is very likely and inevitable. The primary limiting factors of 3D printing appear to be computational power and printer capabilities but there is little doubt that future sophistication levels of these factors will increase incrementally leading to a state of technological evolution in which we can digitally design a human body, down to the level of DNA and reassemble the design through an incomprehensibly complex printer. I would presume that by the time this state of advancement is attained, “printers” will no longer be known by that archaic name. Any device capable of printing molecular-level designs and product will be aptly named something we can’t even fathom.

The revolution spawned by 3D printing will reshape life and alter existence in that our moribund reality will no longer be measured by the immutable foundations of building blocks that once eluded our meddling; the alter-reality of imagination and mind will meld with the terrestrial environment we know today as “reality.”

When this happens, will reality become less real than digital reality, or will digital reality become more real than reality? Will there be a convergence and “bland-ization” of society, a featureless landscape of monotony in this world of prefabricated existence, and will the momentum of humanity’s soul follow suit, ala The Giver?

This is what I loathe and expect, given the course of human social evolution which has been most discernible since the Industrial Revolution.

Does no one realize Mexicans are not Western-minded humanity?

We are truly aliens. We flood the civilized Western world and lug with us the attendant foreign value system that clashes with that of our hosts. Mexicans do not have a European or materialist attitude. We don’t concern ourselves with conformity or assimilation. We are assuredly not Asian. We don’t act White and don’t even pretend to be anything close. We don’t worship or idolize WASP culture.

We don’t care about college or living in smart neighborhoods or eating at peer-approved SWPL eateries. We just do what we do, which is Mexican shit.

So a lot of anti-immigrant voices harp incessantly about the ill-fitting Mexican intruders and appear completely flabbergasted that they simply will not mimic angelic American culture, which of course is the only way and the right way. Conservatives lack such imagination. Mexicans fail to play the American game and some folks ascribe it to inability when it fact, it’s mostly indifference. But the typical American xenophobic consumerist cannot fathom that anyone would not prefer their aspirations, so it’s easier and more pleasing to claim their value system is a hierarchical scale of desire when in fact, Mexicans don’t give a crap about the scale of desire. Mexicans are self-encased. and living just hundreds of miles from their mothership homeland, it’s easy to maintain this esoteric value system.

Mexicans will never assimilate in the United States.

They will never value education, they will never eat at Panera, or buy Mini Coopers. Mexicans don’t do this, they are not White. That’s what Asians are for. Asians serve to help White people assume a sense of superiority.

When the WASP sense of entitlement and superiority is rejected, it’s surely the fault of the “rejecters.”

In the link above, Steve Sailer did nail one facet of the Mexican personality well: those who marry outside the ethnicity are usually more apt to eschew the Mexican mentality and embrace American culture, and thus, are more likely to adopt WASP value systems. Nevertheless, there are many Mexicans who have not jumped bail and remain tethered to their history. These are the ones who will remain forever “illegal” in mind and such a pain in the ass of social pain-by-numbers Whites.

Every once in a while an incident/crime/spectacle lands on the American or global landscape that is of such an abhorrent nature that it immediately begs opinion, though in reality, it is flagrantly objective in nature. The strange, very strange, case of Ariel Castro and his imprisonment of the 3 girls-to-women for 10 years (it is now acknowledged by law enforcement that he was the sole perpetrator after it was concluded his 2 brothers were not involved in the abductions). The events are unquestionably horrible. For anyone to attempt a permutation or interpretation of the incidents reeks of desperation, barring major mind-boggling developments, which of course, is always possible. For instance, I believe there was some level of Stockholm Syndrome at play in Castro’s house. This obviously only reinforces the case against him, it does not disqualify his culpability in the name of politics as some are attempting.

There is a tendency on the part of many idealists to embroider repugnant events of human misbehavior with their own ideology even though the neutral mind can tell there is nothing remotely connected between said ideology and the events in question.

Let’s just consider the obvious observation that Ariel Castro was a sick, but clever, fuck. He managed to procure and sustain a harem of 3 sex slaves in plain sight for 10 years. His vile nature is a very simple supposition and I don’t think it speaks to a large 2013 sociocultural phenomena. If anyone delights in searching for the proverbial social needle in the haystack of collective society, it is me, but really, there is little to be accomplished in turning this sad story into a thesis on why my beliefs are right and your’s are bad.

The girls are home, families are reunited, and a depraved man awaits judgment. I firmly believe this case is not as cut and dried as the media would have us believe, but I don’t believe this gives desperate opinionistas the right to resort to demagoguery about it.

We are not attached to people. We don’t fall in love with people. We fall in love with the smoky plume of memory they implant in our mind.
Even our dearest, most loved family members, are not people.
They are memories.

We are attached to memories. We are indebted to pasts.

People are not people, they hold no credence. People drift in and out of our life. Some stay for a wile, others don’t. But they all offer one thing: a memory. The longer the memory lives, the more ingrained and essential it is to us. We grow acclimated and accustomed to the memory and when it is gone, we miss it. Not the person.

A person is a mass of cells, tissue, cartilage and sinew, but the person as it interacts with others in our communal human environmental hive only represents a memory. And the memory is what we know and crave.

We don’t want love. We don’t want companionship. We merely desire memories. We desire the ability to hark back on a past, a shared past, and this we carry forward in our bosom and pray sustains our frail human sustenance.

This crushes my soul. To realize you don’t love a person you always assumed you did. Our culture is so hung up on the notion of love, but no one can define it because it really…isn’t. You love what the blip of existence they drew upon to map out an existential radar. You loved what they were, never what they are.

This is a gruesome realization and the key foundation of grief.

We romanticize the past, and even when we presume to romanticize the future, it solely draws upon the past as reference.

We are unimaginative creatures intent on reliving past glories and calling them our own.

We love memories.