I believe children are the dystopian future

"We need to be allies to children. Children do not have the capacity to articulate their feelings, they do not have power over their own beings to come to the rallies...they are not in control of their own destiny. They need to see you, transgender children need to see you, transgender children, even those who are not out yet, need to see you, they need to know that you are there and that you will fight for them and that they can talk to you. Immigrant children, and children, I work with children, I work with children who are homeless in the city, I work with children who face food insecurity in the city, I work with children who come up to me every day and tell me they're hungry, I work with children who do not have a bed to sleep in at night and it is the last goddamn thing that breaks my heart that the one thing in this world that keeps these children going, their parents, they now fear will go away." 

The above is from a vigil the day after Donald Trump's election at Portland's downtown riverfront park. Children as political allies is somehow not controversial, at least where the epic struggle for bathroom equality is concerned.

The swiftness with which children have become props in the transgender rights movement demonstrates how little resistance there is, still, to cultural Marxism. Concern for children, real, feigned or imagined, naturally finds its way to the forefront of social manias such as the transgender fad we're experiencing now. It recalls the the satanic abuse panic of the late eighties/early nineties that reached its nadir with the McMartin Preschool trial. But in that earlier case concern for children was the catalyst; now it the putative concern for children comes not as a catalyst but as one component, of questionable validity, of a movement dominated and driven by grown men carving out their own grievance identity.

The trans movement's conspicuous concern for children seems of a different order than the earnest if naive parents and police who--perhaps sublimating broader, and I think legitimate, fears about children and modern decadence--were led to believe in a vast network of satanic cults operating out of America's preschools (whatever Pizzagate is, and it does look at the least bizarre, it probably doesn't lead to your neighborhood daycare), but, to the naive who actually think they're protecting trans children against some onslaught, perhaps it's no different.

Now that generation of kids who were the subject of their parents' coddling and concern in the eighties and nineties--coddling that did nothing, by the way, to halt our slide into decadence--are parents. The social milieu of the post sexual revolution has beaten out of them, as much as it can, any residual traditional morality or resistance to the miasma of popular culture that exists today (google searching the literature on moral panics yields an entire literature devoted to ascribing all of it to moral paranoia of the sexually hung-up in outdated Kinsey-ian thought-language) with the time-tested tools of ridicule and pseudo-scholarship. This started long before Reagan, whose election was in some part a reaction to social decay and as we see now did nothing to slow, much less arrest, its progress.

But you can't obliterate human nature; there's probably a genetic, biological component to a parent's concern for the moral behavior of children. Why would biology program us, amidst all this biological yearning to pass on genes, to be indifferent toward whether or not our daughters are sluts and our sons are gay? Where does a parent now, surrounded by propaganda demanding that feeling in his gut at the sight of psychological disorder is just his own psychological disorder? For the most part he smiles and pretends that nothing is wrong, all the while hoping it will not touch him, not touch his family, and that his children will be more or less "normal"--most people still are, after all--and, maybe even bear him healthy grandchildren.

But what do you do when the only place to sublimate your fear of a thing is in the service of that thing?

 Tomoki Martens plays the violin across from the downtown library in Portland Oregon.

Portland

Police will only say robbery suspect Quanice Hayes had a replica gun on him when he was shot three times and killed earlier this month. A grand jury gets another two weeks to decide. This protest was on the 16th.

Reality's Trump-et

Is this Washington Post article trying to imply Donald Trump's recent comments on Sweden's Muslim problem provoked Muslim rioting afterwards?

Just two days after President Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of Sweden's capital, Stockholm.

It's unlikely the Post writer's opening with "[j]ust two days after" is an affirmation of Trump's larger point after all. Would that it were. I wonder if he considered just how much better it works as such. I've given up hope on his ilk recognizing how absurd their defenses have become: we're to believe that Sweden's Muslims being provoked to riot over the gaffe of a US president--despite Sweden's own establishment coming so quickly their defense--isn't in itself cause for alarm. They've been spinning so long they don't know whether they're coming or going.

I don't think Trump is playing "4-D chess" with the opposition, beyond placing himself in position to get lucky by being right on the larger point--here, Muslim immigration degrading Europe--while being imprecise enough to leave himself open to "fact checking" and spin that has to wrestle openly with that broader point and wither under the inevitable dramatic refutation such as Sweden's most recent Muslim rioting.
Because Trump is right about an ongoing catastrophe the opposition press renders itself plausibly accurate and comically irrelevant (here, nothing major or dramatic happened "last night in Sweden", but just wait a couple of days). Trump isn't playing the opposition press, reality is.

As for "widespread consternation", in the US it's no wider than the Acela corridor. In Sweden, if the Post's somewhat cravenly implication is to be taken seriously, "consternation", for Sweden's Muslims, is expressed by burning cars, attacking police and general rioting. The source of their consternation leading to "bouts of anger" (phrasing designed to prevent further consternation, perhaps) can be attributed to that universal constant, the inadequacy of the host population to integrate newcomers.

At the very least these efforts to refute by pointing out an irrelevant lack of precision force the opposition press to expose that which it would rather leave completely in the dark. Optimal for them would be complete ignorance; the mere act of "fact checking" Trump's latest constitutes a severe degradation of their position. Emphasis added below:

The neighborhood, Rinkeby, was the scene of riots in 2010 and 2013, too. And in most ways, what happened late Monday night was reminiscent of those earlier bouts of anger. Swedish police apparently made an arrest around 8 p.m. near the Rinkeby station. For reasons not yet disclosed by the police, word of the arrest prompted a crowd of youths to gather.
In 2015, when the influx of refugees and migrants to Europe from Africa, the Middle East and Asia was highest, Sweden took in the greatest number per capita. By and large, integration has been a success story there, save for incidents such as Monday night's, which have taken place in highly segregated neighborhoods.

Integration has been successful except where it isn't (here, and there, and over there...) and where there is segregation which is all over (notice how assimilation isn't even mentioned any more--that failure is no longer even recognized as such--you're a racist for even thinking it's a failure). It's gotten so they can't even get out a coherent sentence. "Protests were peaceful until some started rioting" is the template.
Trump is Br'er Rabbit, reality is the briar patch.

Portland anti-Police Protests

There has been at least one protest in the city of Portland every day since the election of Donald Trump. Today's demonstrators are protesting the fatal police shooting of robbery suspect Quanice Hayes, who police say pointed a realistic-looking replica handgun at them. Here protesters taunt police as they pull out of a standoff on the campus of Portland State University.

Demonstrators at these things tend to be at their autistic screechiest when berating the police. There's a curious outpouring of aggression for them that I cannot fathom. As for the police I've seen nothing but restraint from them so far. But it will likely take only one losing his cool for the entire story of this protest season to turn against them.

Periscope Chat, Feb. 16, 2017

Pirating Social Justice

When I first saw this quoted on Twitter I assumed it was satire--someone had simply substituted "Chinese" for "White".

One reason for that is I've found myself making this argument to SJW friends and family: "this white privilege business is silly. Go to China and you won't see people arguing about 'Han Chinese privilege'." Well, almost there.

It turns out Ms. Thanapal is in fact an activist in Singapore (Muslim Malay, I think).  Here she is teasing out of a Singaporean official's sympathetic remarks the stuff of narrative outrage in language we'll all find familiar:

 When Mr Shanmugam first posted about Ms Thanapal's remarks, he said the point he actually made at the event was that the Malaysian education system was not good for integration. 

"The Chinese leadership in various local areas in Malaysia want to maintain control over the Chinese population. It suits them to have Chinese students go to Chinese schools instead of mainstream Malaysian schools. And the schools are more Chinese (because they are effectively single race)," he wrote. 

 "At the same time, many mainstream schools in Malaysia are becoming more Malay (because the students are largely Malay) and Islamic (e.g. through the way some principals and teachers handle matters) which discourages the Chinese from going into those schools. So you end up with having more Malays going to mainstream schools, and more Chinese going to Chinese schools. As a result, the different races are kept apart from a young age." 

Ms Thanapal's Facebook post appeared to take issue with Mr Shanmugam saying that mainstream schools in Malaysia were "becoming more Malay and Islamic".

 She wrote: "The only reason you would consider this important enough to make statements about, is if you are an Islamaphobic bigot who thinks Malay-Muslims are a threat."

And here she is hitting all the right notes in Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore. 

Chinese privilege in Singapore is unique because it occurs outside of mainland China and territories which it has historically controlled. In this manner, our interview is intended as the beginning of an examination of a larger Chinese privilege, with its own histories of colonialism and migratory communities. We note that in order to zero in on the current racial and political structures in Singapore, as well as specifically on the complex role of gender, our interview does not focus on the historical development of this privilege per se, or on the obviously important, historically motivated distinctions between different groups of Chinese in Singapore. In the nineteenth century, under British colonialism, southern Chinese immigrated from China to Singapore and Malaysia to escape famine and the effects of the Opium Wars back home, and arrived to a colony in which they were brutally subjugated: the majority of male Chinese immigrants experienced great abuse under a system of indentured labor (the “coolie” system), and many of the (comparatively few) female immigrants were forced into prostitution. While this interview is intended to open up a conversation about monolithic Singaporean Chinese privilege today, we plan a more comprehensive critical historical genealogy of comparative Chinese privilege in our future work in order to elaborate upon these distinctions and developments.

Somehow I don't think the Chinese will endure much of this sort of thing in the Mainland, but one can hope.

The Soulless Statistician

Business Insider derides Americans' fear of terrorism:

"I once asked a guy at [the National Institutes of Health] how much we should spend on preventing a disease that kills 6 per year, and he looked at me like I was crazy," John Mueller, a foreign policy expert at the Ohio State University and co-author of the book "Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism", told Business Insider in an email.

It has become a commonplace to argue against any critique of immigration or the refugee racket by ranking the risk of dying in a terror attack against other causes of death, from traffic accidents to street crime to shark attacks. Of course the threat to the individual is slight in a nation of  over 300 million without Muslim communities of the proportional size, poverty and radicalism of such as Europe's Muslim communities. Though, come to think of it, you could probably show similar disparities between terror and other causes of death in Europe--does that mean Europe doesn't have a terrorism problem? The point of terror is to terrorize, not to win by attrition.

All deaths are not equal. The death due to terrorism exists in a sort of causal chain of effort; each is a brick in a wall the enemy is trying to build. Each death advances a cause. The ocean isn't conspiring against us, and if we're flooded it's either Nature's indifference or God's wrath--and the statisticians will probably snark at us for fearing these as well. Every death encourages our enemy and sustains his effort at the same time it demoralizes and terrorizes us.

A total of three people were killed in the Boston Marathon Bombing. Does that mean it should rank lower among our concerns than a plane crash killing dozens? Does that make the moral culpability of the terrorists less than that of a madman run amok? Are these murders of no different quality than that committed by a 70-IQ street criminal acting on a whim? Was the expense and disruption of the city-wide lock-down to find the surviving Tsarnaev brother a massive waste of resources that could have been better spent on improved crosswalks or AIDS education? Aside from his likelihood to kill again (which statistics might show to be low) what was the purpose of bringing him to justice? What is justice, if a death by falling drunk into a well is no more tragic than a boy mangled by a terrorist's bomb?

We all know we're taking our chances driving. We all know we'll eventually get sick and die. We know there's a certain risk to swimming in the ocean. But these are not outrages. They are not perpetuated upon us by people advancing a cause (something we seem to have forgotten how to do ourselves); they do not exist in a web of purpose. If we eliminate both morality and our communal point of view--our identity, as Americans--then the statisticians are right, and the State's only role here is to limit total deaths by proper allocation of resources. Is it?

It is our right to defend ourselves. Americans murdered by an enemy, however small and ineffectual he may be--and I find it entirely plausible that this is true--are our responsibility beyond the mere optimization of life outcomes.

Our own ethnic masochism and the ethnic hostility of some among us, operating under the veil of moral universalism (which would be unsustainable even if it didn't translate in practice into a bias for the Other against our own) has robbed us of the right to speak of (and even the ability to think) of ourselves as a coherent us. The victim of terrorism is one of us murdered by one of them. 

But the real thing is we don't have a terrorism problem; we have a Muslim problem. Most of us who are most enthusiastic about rolling back the refugee program don't want growing Muslim communities in our country because we know it will contribute to our destruction in other ways, by dividing us further into a nightmare of competing ethnic groups, by introducing values anathema to our own, by making us dumber overall, by making us boring and incapable of acting as a nation, even in our own defense. But we don't get to talk about that, so we have to focus on what is merely the worst aspect of a growing Muslim population in the West. That worst aspect speaks volumes for how bad the rest of it is--for all the horror of Bataclan and tragedy of the Eiffel Tower's walling-France's bigger problem, that to which it may succumb, is its festering Muslim-dominated banlieues. 
We're bigger and there's a great deal more ruin in our nation. We endure the tiny minority that would behead us at the first chance for the benefit of the mass of unenlightened, boring, bigoted Muslims we have now.

But as to terrorism and President Trump's so-called "Muslim Ban", there is another misconception here in the crude cost-effect analysis above. As a means of preventing terrorist attacks, it doesn't represent a sledgehammer of a solution applied to a fly of a problem. It's part of a broader effort that is largely the reason the numbers of terrorist kills in the US are so low in the first place:

It's worth pointing out that the US government's multi-billion-dollar-per-year homeland security efforts to thwart terrorism, certainly since 9/11, have ostensibly reduced American deaths and kept the odds low.

However, it's hard to say — the DHS does not publicly release data about the number of terror attack attempts per day and lives saved as a result of its efforts. The same is also true of counter-terrorist military operations. 

 But assume for a moment that one 9/11-like event killed 3,000 Americans per year, and indefinitely. While this would drastically raise the lifetime odds of death by a foreign terrorist, the typical American is still far more likely to die walking out the door, getting into a car, jumping into a pool, or simply standing up. 

 Mueller and his colleague Mark G. Stewart explored the costs and benefits of fighting terrorism for the Cato Institute in a September 2014 study. That report states:

 "[T]he United States spends about $100 billion per year seeking to deter, disrupt, or protect against domestic terrorism. If each saved life is valued at $14 million, it would be necessary for the counterterrorism measures to prevent or protect against between 6,000 and 7,000 terrorism deaths in the country each year, or twice that if the lower figure of $7 million for a saved life is applied."

Assuming the 2010 terrorist attack plot on Times Square was successful (the car bomb didn't go off), Mueller told Business Insider, hitting that measure would require four such attacks per day on US soil. 

As has been suggested," Mueller and Stewart wrote in their study, "terrorists scarcely seem to be numerous, competent, and dedicated enough to carry out such a task."

That last part may very well be true.

What's missing from all this is the concept of evil. I don't want to live in a world where a woman tortured to death in a nightclub in Paris is no more worth our notice than a man dying of a heart attack because after "standing up" (unfortunate choice of phrase for an argument that demands you lay down).

 Universalism first destroys the concept of "us", then it destroys us.

Diary, February 9, 2017; Bittersweet Decay

The girls from work are all young and pretty, and in various stages of wreckage. Taylor is delicately featured, pale, a classic red head except for the not quite red hair. She's done up too much, with the excessive eye liner and dark red lipstick that is a current, unfortunate fashion; it cannot overcome her natural beauty, which bleeds through with all the bloom of youth. I suggest a trace of her Indian ancestry in her high cheekbones, complimenting her, taking advantage in the presumed harmlessness of my age what I wouldn't have dared as easily as a young man, always perceived as being on the make. The worst part is I am harmless. She had been talking about a Native American great grandmother down the line, maybe I'm indulging the flattery too much there, but it's okay, she's genuinely beautiful, tragically, hopelessly beautiful, all for naught.

She's one of these girls you think don't know they're beautiful, you hope she doesn't, but she probably just isn't at peace with it; she's admirably not in control of it--despite the make-up. And all the young girls look better without the war paint; but I won't tell them. It's no use. She has no chance either way, she's too frail, too delicate; none of us do. I can see the brief grace of flowering youth just burning out of her, I can see it evaporating with the alcohol fumes in the haze of smoke and the godawful vape mist, but not dissipating, not yet, like some short-lived nuclear reactor inside is still outpacing the awful, relentless wasting away of time, burning itself out with indifferent, mystical precision.

 I can only think it is good to be young and to go any farther in trying to describe it, why it is good, or how it is good. is not just pointless but wrong somehow. At any rate I cannot bear that it will not last, and despite that something sadder still, I think, that if it did last it would no longer be good--there is nothing for it but to avoid these too melancholy reflections on it. To not look upon beauty without despair gets harder as we age and soften; it just comes through more piercingly as you near your end. Everything else fades away with you.

Youthful ardor obscures somehow, even in intimacy, just what you're up against. That too may be a necessity. But I can't help wishing we were in simpler times, and they weren't awash in options, and the boys too--that they might make honest men and women of each other. That these kids represent a generation; it's too much to bear. I don't know how we will reclaim them, but we have to, somehow, for tradition, for the future.

 I have been drinking. I rarely drink, especially now, but I can put it away like my torso is just a hollow cask; I don't know where it goes. Some of the young guys are crashed out here and there, and I just keep going. I should leave, I think, I don't belong here, but I don't want to go. I take my harmonica over by the decks--they're dj's here--and I'm playing along. It sounds amazing; I'm finding the right key by accident, somehow, maybe it's the alcohol. I don't really know how to play but I can fake it, and I'm lost in the music, and the dj approves, he likes it; it's pure joy for a while, but I won't play too long. People are watching, I'm putting on a show, it's like a fantasy I have of playing an instrument on stage--always a great music lover, never able to play a musical instrument--and it's good but I don't want to overdo it, so I don't go on too long.

And somehow I can just keep drinking. Until I wear out from exhaustion I only get more sharply gregarious, too much really. I hope I'm not boring anyone; my conversation is way over their heads, my best stuff wasted. I'm wasted. Occasionally one of the guys falls apart, trying to sound smart, or cool; they don't know how to take me. They're in worse shape than the girls, even: they have to put on a front. It's so important to be interesting; I try to make small talk and find them uneasy; they can't talk about themselves. They just fall apart trying to sound interesting. I don't care; I'm not so interested in them--I don't know how to take them. They're incapable of jesting self-deprecation. They're hopeless; there's nothing I can do for them. But the girls, they break my heart.

I'm thinking about what it means, about countless kids like this living like this--I'm a hypocrite, for I might be right there alongside them if I was young, and I mourn for my own lost decadence along with their lost innocence. But none of us know what's good for us, until it's too late.

And then it's over.

Deluded by the Dunning-Kristol Effect

We've all seen it. Forget for the moment the nastiness of it. Consider just how insanely stupid it is, to think you're "replacing" a population--forget even the stupidity of taking no account of the quality of human capital you're using as replacements in taking Somalis and Mexicans to be mere fungible human units equal to Europeans. Forget his obliviousness to technology and automation's relentless reduction of labor and the crisis it would represent without the importation of ever more uneducated, low-IQ foreigners.

Consider that Bill Kristol seems to think the white working class simply evaporates away by the same process with which their replacements are brought in, disappearing from the scene without causing the profound social and economic shocks that go with a displaced population as it becomes more impoverished, more dependent on government, more drug-afflicted and disaffected. How long does Bill think that will take? What form does he think that will take?
It takes the form of death, despair and hopelessness, and it takes generations.

Imagine a Jew, of all people, oblivious to the connection between heredity and history, thinking that these grandchildren of the Europeans he now pretends to lionize deserve nothing of the legacy they labored and died to produce. Imagine if those European immigrants of the past--who in another context Kristol would be sure to deride in no less disdainful terms--could hear this addled, pot-bellied embodiment of mediocrity dismissing the progeny they cherished in such flippant terms.

Okay, don't forget the nastiness of it. It's hard to tell where the stupid begins and the evil ends.

But his obliviousness to the irony of his talking of regression to the mean and mediocrity while presenting the living embodiment and history of it stands out like that well-fed gut.

 

Despair and Decline

War with the NEETs

The assault on Richard Spencer turns out to be a watershed moment for the Trump opposition. The response from the mainstream has gone all the way from tepid, qualified disapproval to enthusiastic cheering. Then cultural figures joined in, most notably when an Emmy Awards audience applauded an award-winner's visceral call for more.



It isn't as if the violence had only just begun with the election of Trump. Organized intimidation of Trump supporters became big with its successful shutting down of a rally in Chicago and escalated to outright violence when a Trump rally in San Jose was attacked:



Isolated assaults on Trump supporters were already becoming normal, but going mostly unreported because it was mostly isolated incidents of minority assaults on whites, something the Press doesn't report as standard practice already (they should just put it explicitly in the social justice style book at this point). It also couldn't be spun through the Narrate-o-Matic as "violence breaking out at Trump rally" which, remarkably (or not so remarkably) some did with the obviously organized and one-sided attack on Trump supporters in San Jose.

But also it's still that black and brown people don't really register to a media elite dominated by Jews and Wasps still insistent on seeing the world as a battle between goodwhites and badwhites, with minorities as bit players unhindered by moral agency or responsibility.

The San Jose violence and Chicago intimidation was organized by the usual shadowy suspects, but that organization seems to have not been intended to go beyond busing the mostly black and brown thugs to the targeted venues and encouraging them to provoke Trump supporters in the hopes of producing plausible optics attesting to their inherent violence. Trump supporters actually proved stubbornly resistant to it; thus ever greater provocations, backfiring in San Jose. The Elite doesn't understand their lynch mob: California's Mexicans are among the least political and most racially territorial people alive; as a group are probably one of the few more alien to and misread by our oblivious Elite than the Trump supporters they fear in increasingly lurid fantasies.

It may be that the Chicago campaign, limited to intimidation and the threat of violence and creating the impression Trump was weak and losing was viewed as a success, while San Jose, where Trump supporters were assaulted for the world to see, was the mob getting beyond organizers' control. Still, with no real repercussions (if you don't count losing the election, but there's no evidence they're even capable of making the connection) for it, they continue even now to press on and escalate. If there's any centrality to the organized political intimidation, anyone at the helm, it was probably decided it would be better to avoid another San Jose by not busing about large groups of angry Mexicans before election day.

But the political violence that followed in Berkeley after the crowd at the Emmys applauded Richard Spencer's assault is of a different order and type. With black bloc types showing up things haven't just escalated; they've assume a new character.

Now the rioters themselves, while probably still directed, ultimately, and certainly funded by the same shadowy forces, are self-organized and disciplined. And these groups are overwhelmingly young white men, ironically evoking a trope of the alt-right: when whites are provoked to "chimp out" it can go as far as the Holocaust. And our desperate elites still haven't "provoked the Saxon" until he comes to see his elimination is their ultimate goal.

These disaffected young men are the very products of the globalization they've been pressed into obliviously defending. Their continuing allegiance in the chaos they are being manipulated into creating is by no means a given. Unlike the minority mobs and the atomized social justice head cases, they pride themselves on their independence and agency. The aspire to more. Our Elite is wielding a flame thrower they think is a fire extinguisher.

Level 5 Peaceful Protest

I've seen it too often now, in person and online, for it not to be the result of training. I've even read someone else online (I don't recall where) attesting to the phenomenon: as soon as demonstrators engage physically with police, counter-protesters or innocent bystanders, those not in the scrum start chanting "peaceful protest." Once when they were trying to invade a downtown hotel, blocked by a cordon of police in riot gear (I later learned from hotel employees that they were trying to get at someone with a Trump hat or sign inside--presumably to trump his hate, good and hard) they started in with it--the effect was a bit sinister, as if they were deliberately taunting the cops with irony.

I'm not sure if the idea is to settle down their overexcited fellows or an attempt to frame the event as it's happening (and being recorded from multiple angles) in their favor. It appears to be the latter. There's more and more organization behind the protests, and the protesters are picking up experience and habits.
The "special snowflake" theme has to go away. There are many among them now committed to violence--there have been no consequences and the precedent has been set, with the attack on Richard Spencer, then a counter-protester knocked unconscious here in Portland, and tonight's escalation. They are in a self-control spiral, as the more zealous compete to distinguish themselves against these increasingly violent examples. The safety of the mob and delusional zealotry gives courage to many.

The "special snowflakes" thing always only went so far. These demonstrations are expressions of power, and they are intoxicating. The dimmest among the mob, and these must be many, if not the majority, may in fact think they've been powerless and oppressed all this time (ironically as a result of all the coddling they've received), and their lashing out has the energy of released frustration.
That frustration may in fact be real, just displaced. They don't know what they've been denied--family, faith, community--by modernity, technology, atomization, indoctrination--so their frustration is displaced onto these same things, which they've been trained to think of as the problem.

Movement Aesthetic and Action

Standards are necessarily discriminatory. The higher the standard, the more discriminatory. The more standards society maintains the more discriminatory that society is. The idea of discrimination is now discredited, due to the elevation of individual and minority rights. There is no morality above individual self-esteem or the group esteem of favored minorities. Standards of beauty and standards of behavior are linked. A society that will not maintain standards of beauty cannot long maintain standards of behavior.
Ugliness advances in direct proportion to behavior's decline. A society that can no longer discriminate in favor of, or aspire to, beauty can no longer discriminate in favor of the better or even the good. The lowest common denominator, already set loose by democracy and technology, rules unopposed. Ironically, standards of beauty are more crafted now, more "socially constructed" and derive less from human nature--what would have been called the soul before--than they were in less democratic, less "free" times.