Elites feel for 3rd world children, who seem more authentically human than their own robotic striver spawn

The absolute hysteria that the elites have shown over the past week about the Central American immigrant "kids in cages" is not the response they would show if those kids were from the first world. The profound disconnect between their response toward the children of their own nation and those of less developed nations is a sign of a broken moral compass, and none of the usual explanations for the outta-whack state of affairs seem to be correct.

A healthy moral sense devotes more attention to domains where the person or some group they belong to can make a difference. That's how we recognize the shameful deflection when the liberal elites ask why Trump is meeting with a human rights abuser like Kim Jong-un, when they do not ask why Trump met with an even worse offender like Mohammad bin Salman. Kim is not our ally, and won't change his behavior just because we pressure him to. Bin Salman is our #1 ally, and would respond to our pressure, lest he lose the material and intangible goodies we provide him with. Worrying about Trump legitimizing Kim is morally pointless, worrying about Trump legitimizing bin Salman is morally worthwhile.

Maybe you could worry about both of Trump's meetings with those leaders, but you could not worry more about the Kim meeting than about the bin Salman meeting.

Now, if the elites are so concerned over children who are in a pitiful state, why not start right here at home? It's not as though everyone's kids in this country are doing A-OK. The elites might respond that they worry more about the immigrant children because they're poor, whereas their own kids are rich, and even those of the middle-class are wealthier than the immigrant kids. But then they ignore the large swaths of American children who are not wealthier than the immigrant kids. There are plenty of places right here where rural whites and urban blacks are not exactly living in what you would call first-world comfort.

Oh sure, there's the once-a-year feature story on the lead-polluted water of Flint, Michigan, or the heat system getting shut off during winter in Baltimore public schools. Then it's right back to obsessing over immigrants for the rest of the year, which is a far more recurring topic of theirs, and one they report on with much greater emotional investment. The chronic plight of urban blacks has been totally sidelined in favor of attention to immigrants.

When they do mention Flint or Baltimore, it's more of an empty ritual -- something they know they're supposed to do, and they go through the motions, but their heart is not in it, and it's not part of a larger and longer-term vision of theirs for a better society. Their moral vision for improving the lot of the non-white people of the world is to open our borders to 10 billion foreigners, and hope that there's still enough wealth to go around for all of them. They can't have an impact at that level, so why bother? Whereas focusing on blacks in America is something they can have a huge impact on -- and yet, just half-hearted ritualistic expressions of concern.

Of course, the elites care even less about white American children who are in a pitiful state, but it is not about race. They scarcely care more about African-American children than about Euro-American children, since almost all of their effort goes to immigrant and foreign children. And some major cases are not even very non-white -- look at how apoplectic the elites go after seeing dead children in Syria, during each chemical hoax du jour. Syrians are pretty white, especially compared to African-Americans -- and yet, we don't see the elites foaming at the mouth to start another war on behalf of dead black children in America, like they do about children in Syria.

So what's going on with the outta-whack moral sense of today's elites, whether liberal or conservative?

A cynical response is that the elites are just crying crocodile tears in order to advance their globalist agenda -- whether the goal is to import hordes of cheap labor to boost corporate profits, to culturally replace what they feel is an embarrassing American culture, or whatever else.

We can reject that, as with most lazy cynical answers, since it only captures a tiny slice of the elites. A big chunk truly feel morally invested in the fate of poor Guatemalan children, while feeling almost nothing similar for poor African-American children, or poor white-American children.

And the phenomenon is broader than just trying to incorporate the Guatemalans into the American nation -- the elites feel more deeply for Guatemalan children even when they're understood to be living in Guatemala itself for the rest of their lives. And again, that's true for elites on both the left and the right, albeit with different rationalizations for their similar behavior of ignoring poor Americans in favor of poor foreigners -- alleviating global poverty for the left, saving all of God's children for the right.

Another cynical response is "virtue signaling," meaning the elites don't bother sympathizing with American children because that's easy or cheap to do, whereas sympathizing with third-world children is somehow harder or more costly to do, so that their moral posing is really a kind of status contest amongst themselves. Who can out-do the others in obsessing over the children of unfamiliar and alien cultures?

But if that were true, we would see the "most obscure band / film / author" phenomenon -- the elites would resort to ever more exotic cultures to sympathize with the plight of pitiful children, just as they do in fact for the cuisine of other cultures. It's amateur to signal your knowledge and appreciation of Mexican food -- but make it Salvadorean food, and you've upped the ante.

In this framework, only a beginning poser would try to score points by sympathizing with Central American immigrants -- too geographically close to us, too familiar from their immense numbers in our country, and therefore too over-exposed in our public mind as stereotypical immigrants. But make it those Rohingya people who the media have been trying to turn into a storyline, and you'd rack up a higher score. ("Oh... you've never heard of the Rohingya...?")

And yet the elites continue to pay little attention to the Rohingya, the Tibetans, and other truly more exotic cultures than the Guatemalans or the Syrians. The "costly signaling" model does not work here.

These and other lazy cynical answers all presume that this elite behavior is part of a well-functioning machine -- that their moral obsession over third-world immigrants is somehow serving a more fundamental goal of theirs, whatever we may think about that goal. This is the fallacy of thinking that all traits are optimal for the individuals possessing them, presumably because they would otherwise be weeded out by some form of competition. On such a brief time scale as we are observing our elites, how do we know that these traits are not in fact mal-adaptive to their own goals?

Consider their slowly and hazily dawning awareness that by pushing so forcefully for open borders, they have triggered a backlash that will end up not only closing the borders, but deporting a large chunk of illegals who thought they were already in the clear. Too much immigration leads to zero immigration.

And before too long, they'll start to understand how 10 billion people living in America would wreck our welfare state worse than any Tea Party scheme. Liberals go to pains to preserve the welfare state in political contexts that do not touch on immigration.

As I said at the outset, this elite behavior is clearly a sign of their being broken, outta-whack, misaligned. It is not 3-D chess for globalists. But what precisely is the nature of this broken moral compass?

Quite simply, I think our elites don't view American children as authentic human beings, as a result of our children being micro-programmed, as though they were cutting-edge robots, in our hyper-competitive and status-striving climate. Program them to eat the right kind of organic breakfast foods, program them to play the right sports in pre-school, program them to ace the pre-pre-pre-school admissions exam, program them to play the right instruments when they get home from pre-pre-pre-school, and on and on and on.

Striver parents are terrified that their kids won't grow up to be strivers like them, so they leave nothing to chance or free will. Just program the hell out of the kids, and that's their best shot at making it in adulthood. The children's eventual social status depends entirely on the parents properly nano-tuning their programming during childhood.

If that's your conception of the parent-child relationship, then of course you won't conceive of the child as a real human being. They're not even sentient, like a pet. Sidenote: people train their children as though they were pets, and resort to owning pets to fill the void left by raising robo-kids. Their pets are treated as though they were the real children -- left alone from programming, and behaving all natural.

When these elites think of third-world cultures, they sense that there are no elites there like there are here -- sure, there are elites, but attaining that status does not come from a war of all against all, a Darwinian survival of the fittest, AKA meritocracy. They sense the elites inherit large tracts of productive land, or political office, or whatever it is. In our elites' mind, the third-world parents don't turn childrearing into micro-programming, since there is no hyper-competitive admissions process for pre-schools, colleges, internships, and professional firms.

The children from such a culture will appear to be more authentic as human beings, making them suitable targets for sympathy -- unlike the robo-kids of our society, who don't even register as sentient.

Our elites view all children from the third world this way -- naturally the children of poor foreigners, who don't go to college, but even those from relatively better-off families, who don't have to go through the dehumanizing process of striver programming. That shows that our elite's sympathy is not just about being materially poor -- you can be relatively well-off, as long as your parents didn't turn you into a robot in order to attain that comfortable status.

And our elites project their own kids' robo-traits onto those of American children writ large. After all, such a large share of kids in America go to college, and an even larger share are put through regimens to prepare them for college, even if they decide not to. The elites may assume that our education system treats every child as college material, so they must all get cranked through the striver grinder, just like the elite kids.

Whether that's true or not, doesn't matter. It's the elite's perception that matters. And they talk in such broadbrush terms about "our society" and "our children" that they wouldn't see exceptions even if they were there among urban blacks or rural whites, who may not robotize their children like the strivers in the elite zip codes do. Out of sight, out of mind for the elites.

American children as synthetic, third-world children as natural -- that's what's behind this whole warped morality phenomenon. And it's a sign of something wrong, namely the degree to which today's parents treat childrearing as though it were engineering a machine to optimally compete in Battle Bots, as all of society tunes in to watch their performance -- the machine's performance, and by extension the engineer's.

This likely applies more broadly than just children, too. Even adults in America are perceived by our elites to not really be human, given the dehumanizing system they are all a part of in our hyper-competitive climate. But adults from poor third-world cultures? Our elites doubt that their way of life is as dehumanizing as ours, so they must be more wholly human than American adults, and hence more suitable as targets for sympathy.

It's not really a Noble Savage worldview, since the poor immigrants are not hunter-gatherers. They come from cultures with a government, sedentary residence, agricultural economies perhaps with some of our off-shored manufacturing plants, permanent elites, religious hierarchies, and other elements of complex societies.

It's more about our hyper-competitive, credentialist, groping for a post-industrial utopia whose outcome feels increasingly uncertain. The third-world cultures certainly don't have that going on.

What is the solution? It is to channel our awareness of the broken moral compass into changing the underlying problem. First, by drawing the elite's attention to their outta-whack priorities -- they should be more concerned with struggling Americans than struggling Guatemalans, since we control America but do not control Guatemala. Then, by pointing out the root cause of the elite's misaligned priorities -- seeing their fellow Americans as not really human, due to being cogs in a dehumanizing machine, which they assume does not apply in Guatemala.

Finally, to make that the central task -- to dial down the psychotic levels of competitiveness in our society. If it keeps going any further, it will blow up the society in a civil war. And even if that were to be avoided, it is still producing more dehumanized people on the other side of the striver grinder, and that in turn makes it easier for our elites to treat them callously rather than charitably.

We have to unseat the reigning ethos of anti-social ambition, and replace it with pro-social restraint. And we must replace the warped focus on fixing the whole world with fixing America -- where we can actually succeed.

Ban everything harmful and polluting: The new nonpartisan Temperance movement to undo the bipartisan libertinism of our neo-Gilded Age

A major shift in the zeitgeist is turning away from the laissez-faire individualism of the past 40 years, and toward regulation in the social interest. It's popping up in various disparate issues -- assault weapons, pitbulls, sugary drinks, drugs, pornography, etc.

So far it is an inchoate shift in attitudes, rather than a consolidated united front movement, but it's going to get there at some point in the near future. The near-term goal should be to highlight the commonalities across the new attitudes, and to band together politically to achieve all of them as part of a single new movement to regulate chaos in order to prevent societal destruction.

That would reverse the reigning orthodoxy, akin to Social Darwinism, of letting anyone do anything and hoping that the optimal outcome (for individuals or for society) will result from unfettered behavior.

In this post we'll be focusing on social-cultural issues, even though there is a similar shift on more economic issues (banks, social media companies, immigration, inequality, etc.). This is like a new Temperance movement, which is running in parallel with a new Progressive economic movement -- just like they paired with each other during the last struggle to overturn a laissez-faire Gilded Age.

* * *

As revealed by a new poll from Fox News, the rearguard Conservative Movement (TM) has failed to win the argument on gun regulation.

Put aside particular items like banning assault weapons or requiring background checks, and look at which general goal is more important -- protecting the right of citizens to own guns, or protecting citizens from gun violence? A bit over 50% say protection from gun violence, a bit over 40% say protecting gun rights, and under 10% are undecided.

Those figures do not depend on class or age / generation. Men, whites, and Independents are split evenly, when they should have been decisively in favor of gun rights, to balance the expected anti-gun views of women, non-whites, and Democrats.

Gun nuts have only focused on preserving their hardcore libertarian base -- gun owners, Republicans, white Evangelicals -- and alienated the middle enough to make them 50-50 allies at best. Like all extremist interest groups, the gun nuts will either not accept those numbers as true, or they will dismiss their relevance and refuse to try to win back the middle.

They will shrink even further into their echo chamber, ramp up their already high level of anti-social paranoia regarding gun-grabbers advancing toward them in a great big confiscation apocalypse event -- which would now seem to be confirmed by how ambivalent the average American, not just the typical liberal Democrat, has come to feel about their cause.

* * *

As the extremists retreat further from attempts to reach out and make deals, the opportunity arises for those who are not rabidly pro-gun or anti-gun to strike grand compromises. As detailed in an earlier post, I don't see these being compromises on a particular issue, with endless haggling over the precise kind and degree of regulation on firearms. Rather, the side screaming for more gun regulation will more or less get their way -- in exchange for giving up to the other side on some separate issue, where there will be much greater regulation, for example on immigration (regulated downward).

Trading more gun control for more immigration control may seem a bit too random of a pairing, though. So perhaps the trade should be one form of harm-based regulation for another. Liberals are rabidly anti-assault rifle, but also rabidly (as it were) pro-pitbull. Conservatives (distinct from libertarians) are pro-gun and anti-pitbull. In a stylized trade, both sides would agree to remove assault rifles from the population of firearms, and to remove pitbulls from the population of dogs.

If the conservatives felt like pitbulls were not enough to make the trade worth it, make it violent criminals instead. If the goal is to reduce the threat of violence, remove both assault rifles and violent felons -- not by killing them off, just keeping them locked up instead of turning them loose back onto the general public to commit further violence.

Or conservatives could push for a trade related to preventing harm -- preventing pollution, degradation, and other forms of degeneracy. In exchange for banning assault weapons, both sides agree to ban red light district activities like strip clubs or legal marijuana shops.

Liberals have their own puritanical views on food and drink, so maybe there could be another trade within the framework of preventing pollution -- the Right gets a (figurative) war on drugs, while the Left gets a war on sugar. Both sides would be spared the sight of people who viscerally disgust them -- junkies for the Right, fatties for the Left.

* * *

These have mostly been material things that could be subject to bans, but there are also informational media that could be subject to regulation in the social interest. During the golden age of the 1950s, government censors prevented all sorts of "bad influences" from showing up in comic books, movies, and music -- today that would have to extend to internet media and video games.

Pin-up posters were fine, but hardcore pornography was illegal. Alcohol was OK, but not marijuana. Violence in movies was fine in moderation, but not gore. Sexual innuendo was allowed in pop music lyrics, but not graphic descriptions. Certain profane words could not be said on TV, radio, etc.

Those were all aspects of mass media that conservatives wouldn't mind seeing a return of.

On the other hand, right-wingers were not allowed to use their own taboo words, and had to make arguments with terms that were not socially offensive per se. Whatever they said privately, in the mass media for public consumption, they said "negro" rather than "nigger," "fairy" rather than "faggot," "tramp / hussy" rather than "slut / whore," and so on and so forth.

Again, in private situations they could say taboo words, or make taboo gestures like the middle finger or jerking off. But in a social and public space like the mass media, these were not allowed.

Would conservatives be willing to bring back "words you can't say" in the media, including those that free speech / libertarian right-wingers might prefer to use themselves, in exchange for bringing back "images you can't show" in the media?

Liberals are more abstract and verbal, and are more sensitive to offensive words, while conservatives are more corporeal and visual, and are more sensitive to offensive sights.

The danger of censorship, on the verbal side, is going beyond regulating isolated words to entire ideas regardless of which specific words are used to express them. On the visual side, the danger is going beyond regulating discrete images to entire scenes or events regardless of which images are used to convey the gist of who did what to whom (e.g., banning all scenes that convey sexual behavior having taken place, rather than just hardcore pornography).

So the compromise in regulating the media would likely be restricted to the discrete items, rather than broad bans on ideas or scenes.

* * *

The main laissez-faire objection to these bans is that they won't be effective -- you can't make bad things go away just by passing laws against them.

First, they certainly do reduce the level of bad things, and that's what we're looking for.

But more importantly, the effectiveness of these public campaigns to "ban X" does not only come from the direct results of the ban. It comes also from the change in norms that is signaled by the broadly popular, publicly supported, and lobbied-for ban.

When drugs and porn are banned, people get the idea that substance-based and sexual degeneracy are socially "out," so they start dialing down their inclination toward degeneracy, lest they be perceived as deviants and treated as pariahs by others.

The ban is like a social pressure -- threatening ostracism if others do not adhere to the new norms that are signaled by the ban. Without a highly visible norm that everyone knows is there, how can violations of it be policed (somewhat by law enforcement, but really by your fellow citizens)?

Perhaps a tacit norm is fine for policing an enduring problem, but then when a new problem emerges, there may need to be an overt concerted effort to signal a norm against it. That will be more likely when technology is the driver -- promiscuity is an old enduring problem that everyone understands needs to be policed, whereas hardcore porn videos streamed into an internet-capable device are new, and require a more overt regulation. Ditto for assault rifles or hand grenades, as compared to earlier weapons.

That's how it worked to drive tobacco consumption, and cigarettes especially, out of the public sphere. The government could raise taxes and limit access to cigarettes all they want, and it would make a decent dent alone -- but reinforced by the greater social pressure that the restrictions had signaled, they all but wiped out cigarette smoking within a single generation.

Banning high-carb food and drink, banning porn, banning assault rifles, banning pitbulls -- all would unfold the same way as in the war on cigarettes. Some direct effect, backed up by an even more powerful social pressure.

* * *

These problems are not going away, and the dam has already begun to break on the laissez-faire morality of the last 40 years. Hardcore libertarians on any issue -- allow all guns, allow all porn, allow unlimited pot, allow unlimited sugar, etc. -- are losing the argument, and have begun to grate on the average person's nerves, especially when they attempt to give an overarching framework to justify their views. It boils down to embracing chaotic destruction-creation, and Social Darwinism will improve society by separating the strong from the weak.

We see where unregulated chaos and Social Darwinism has gotten us, and we don't like what we see, unless we're Boomers who have been shielded from the consequences of their decisions since they were babies.

"I don't know how to define dystopia -- but I know it when I see it."

Now is the time for striking grand bargains on regulating these social-cultural issues, not doubling down on all-or-nothing partisanship.

Donald Trump, cat person

For a man who has so meticulously crafted his persona over many decades, whose career is in fact defined by playing up his persona, there's one detail that is curiously missing from Donald Trump's public image -- his pets.

His wives and girlfriends, his children, his grandchildren, his parents and siblings, his many residences and how they are furnished -- he has carefully cultivated all of these to reflect on him in just the right way.

But something's absent from this detailed portrait of the household side of his persona -- where are the pets? An obsessive image-maker like Trump would never leave that detail out of his home life.

And now he's the first president in a very long while to not bring any pets with him into the White House. He has obsessed over the color and pattern and material of the curtains in the Oval Office, which presidential portraits to hang, what kind of furniture there should be. There's no way he simply overlooked the obligatory "pets" aspect of the White House's image.

What is Trump trying so painfully to hide? If he were to own some dogs, how would that subtract in any way from his persona as a no-nonsense, ruthless alpha male who calls the shots at the top of an empire? It would seem to only enhance the overall image.

His children and his first wife are all dog owners, and they don't hide it. They're proud to be photographed with their dogs.

It must be that -- unlikely as it sounds at first -- Donald Trump is actually a cat person.

That would explain why he is so scrupulous to not have pets. If he gave into his natural inclination, he'd have one or likely several cats. But that would totally kill the image he has sought so hard to project -- an alpha gorilla... who has a soft spot for kittens? His image would be done for, never to recover.

And maybe Trump's media persona, which points to being a dog owner, is not quite who he really is when the cameras are off. The portrait that comes from journalists who he calls every day, like Maggie Haberman from the NYT, or from sources close to him, as recounted in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, is of a man who is spontaneous and discursive rather than no-nonsense and to-the-point, magnanimous rather than ruthless, averse rather than drawn to confrontation, and being an impressionable marshmallow rather than a rigid ideologue.

Other telltale personality traits of cat people that Trump possesses in spades -- mercurial rather than predictable, a cad rather than a dad, prickly rather than tough-skinned, neurotic rather than level-headed, uncomfortable with intimacy, socially isolated (having few close friends), and generally being suspicious and mistrustful of others.

His career field is likewise full of cat people and devoid of dog owners. His career is performing a role -- being Donald Trump -- and he's made most of his fame and fortune in the media and entertainment sector. He's in show business, not real estate development, and creative types are far more in favor of cats than dogs.

So, too, are those from the pastoralist culture of honor that his mother's side of the family comes from (Isle of Lewis, Scotland). Anywhere that people make a living by herding livestock instead of planting and harvesting crops, they may keep some work dogs, but are always inclined to cats for household pets. Islam, the religion of honor-driven pastoralists, considers dogs to be unclean and taboo. But the feeling is only somewhat lesser in the rest of the Mediterranean, or in Britain, a nation of shepherds and cat fanciers.

Trump is also a notorious germophobe -- no way he'd take a liking to dogs, with their smells and their slobber. Nope: he'd insist on an animal that actually cleaned and groomed itself.

As high-strung as he is, he would benefit greatly from having a pet that would jump onto his lap, begin purring, and let him pet its fur. Prickly cat people know that there's nothing as soothing as that little ritual bonding experience.

However, Trump craves everyone's undivided attention and obedience -- so perhaps there's another reason, aside from the death blow to his image, that he has not taken a cat into the household. He would respond well to it, and it would totally suit his personality -- but the cat being on its own social schedule might set off Trump's temper about being ignored or rejected, even if only temporarily.

"And after all I've done for you. No, that's OK, you just go ahead, take your nap under the chair over there. I didn't want you taking a stupid nap on my lap anyway."

It must be burning him up to have to restrain his cat fancying side. If he got a really large, rambunctious Maine Coon that looked and behaved more like a tiger, it wouldn't hurt his image. Maybe in retirement.

Related: earlier posts on the topic of pets and their owners

Animal cruelty ads show liberal morality of dog people

With the arrival of the Christmas season, you may be seeing charity commercials for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They play maudlin music, the voiceover is in the most near-crying register, and the words of the appeal are so childishly manipulative (help prevent harm to cute puppies, or I'll never talk to you again).

It's typical liberal morality which emphasizes prevention of harm / provision of care, almost to the exclusion of any other moral concerns, for example about purity, sanctity, and taboo, or about responsibility. They could have just as easily framed the matter as one of man abandoning or neglecting his stewardship over the animals, of desecrating what is sacred (animal life, or at least companion animal life), of violating a taboo against treatment of pets, and so on. Those push conservative moral buttons, though, so we can conclude that the audience for these appeals are liberal.

What's striking is that they only show dogs throughout the whole long commercials. Search Google Images for "ASPCA" or for "animal cruelty" in general, and again it's almost all dogs.

This is yet another demonstration that dog people have a more liberal moral mind, while cat people are more conservative.

It's not as though there are no cats wasting away, missing eyes, caught in traps, shivering in the rain, or otherwise looking pathetic. And it's not as though cat people don't care about the welfare of their pets, or even of stray cats. Rather, they don't respond to the attempted emotional manipulation that treats the audience like they're small children, who are expected to go, "Awww, poor hurt puppy! Mommy, give money to that group or you're hurting that puppy in your own way!"

They're not so different from the "sponsor a Third World child" commercials that appeal to liberal do-gooders.

Cat people respond to needy animals in more pragmatic and sober ways, like leaving food, taking an injured cat to the vet, or adopting the animal as a pet ("rescue" rather than "sponsor"). They aren't naive enough to think that donating enough money to an idealistic cause will magically make all the bad kitty feelings get better. They take a more direct and personal role, like a capable adult rather than a wish-and-hope child.

The commercials prove another point I've made: dog people are closer to the thing-oriented end of the spectrum, and cat people closer to the mind/empathy end. It's nice that the audience for animal cruelty prevention ads are empathetic enough to respond to them, but it would be even nicer if the dog people who let their pets fall into such a shameful state had been more empathetic in the first place.

You just don't see cat people setting two un-neutered tomcats against each other in a cage match, while a degenerate audience cheers on a forced bloodsport. Nor do they neglect their pets to the point where they're only skin and bone. Or leashed to a post outside with no shelter for days or weeks at a time. Cat people are too empathetically in tune with their pets to let it get anywhere near that bad.

The worst that it gets is the cat hoarder, although there are dog hoarders who do the same. As far as animal welfare goes, even this is not as bad as what the ASPCA shows. In a cat hoarder's home, at least they get fed, have shelter, and are shown some attention. The level of neglect "only" descends to them living in filth and being overcrowded. Bad stuff, but not as bad as canine neglect, nor as common.

What I find really bizarre is that the owners' personalities seem mismatched for the animals. Dog people on average are more neglectful, yet their pets are far more dependent on human care. Cat people are sticklers for taking care of their pets (forcing them into perfumed doggie yoga pants doesn't count as caretaking), even though cats would actually do OK for themselves if turned loose.

Perhaps the main factor here is how mature the owner is in their social psychology. With dog people, it can more often get into "the blind leading the blind" since both the pet and the owner are a little more naive, innocent, and childlike mentally.

If it's mostly a matter of developmental maturity, that would explain the link we've already seen between dog people and liberal morality -- children rebel against authority, pride themselves on violating disgusting taboos, and have no loyalty to a larger group. It's all about "kiss my boo-boo!" and "that's not fair!" It would also explain the link between dog people and thing-orientation, since children aren't very empathetic (not until adolescence, when they form peer groups). And it would explain the link to blacks and Hispanics being dog people -- lower developmental maturity. Ditto for gays being distinctly dog-lovers, as gayness is one symptom of a stunted Peter Pan syndrome.

We're going to get some dog-people rationalizers in the comments who are going to try to wave this whole web of associations away. Just remember that a good idea explains a lot with little. The opposite approach is to rationalize every separate observation, multiplying the causes out to infinity, and explaining nothing.

Dog people more likely to treat grooming like a human makeover

Continuing some themes from my earlier look into dog people vs. cat people (click the "pets" tag at the end of this post to see the others), I've noticed that pet supplies stores carry way more grooming products for dogs than cats, in a much wider variety, and especially ones where the owner is like a 7 year-old girl giving a makeover to a poor younger sibling or a dress-up doll.

Here are the grooming products for dogs and cats at the website of PetSmart, the main pet store in America. There are 368 products for dogs vs. only 60 for cats, and the dog products are less likely to be utilitarian and more likely to be striver salon-quality makeover products (loads of "premium" shampoos and conditioners, various salon scissors and clippers, etc.).

You can also tell by the brands who sell to dogs vs. cats. SWPL favorite Burt's Bees offers 11 products for dogs and 0 for cats (their own website shows some for cats, compared to a much larger selection for dogs, but PetSmart's selection must reflect how in-demand they are -- not very much for cat owners). And CHI, one of those "affordable luxury" salon hair products for human beings, offers 36 items for dogs vs. just 1 for cats.

See as well the difference between the in-house grooming services that they offer for dogs vs. cats. For cats there are 10 services offered, but 27 for dogs. The cat services are mostly utilitarian -- bath, brush, trim coat, trim nails, clean ears, etc. The only airheaded service is aromatherapy -- who knows, maybe it's just letting your pet get high on catnip while you browse the store. The dog services also include utilitarian things, but they have far more airheaded services than for cats -- aromatherapy, scented cologne, "premium" salon treatment, skin moisturizers, pedicure, sculpting facial hair, adding fur extensions, colored nail polish, and decorating your poor poochie's fur with wacky color patches and jewels.

Now, people who live with dogs come in two types -- dog owners and dog people. Certainly these weird services and products are only reflective of the dog people, who fixate on their pets, rather than those who just live with dogs around. But the dog people are becoming more of a majority of all those living with dogs.

And their weirdness cannot be blamed on their obsession with their pet, as opposed to merely having animals around. Cat people are almost all doting pet owners, aside from a tiny minority of rural folks who may have barn cats around who they don't show much attention to. And yet being so focused on their pets doesn't make cat people feel like dyeing part their pet's coat purple, or sculpting its facial hair as though it were a garden hedge, or cleaning its fur with an oatmeal shampoo and milk bath conditioner.

I attribute this different attitude toward a more liberal moral sense among dog people than cat people, which includes having a lower disgust response and a lower sense of preserving what is sacred. Warping a living creature into such an artificial abomination against nature -- a perfumed poodle with painted paws -- cuts so strongly against the conservative sense of sanctity, purity, and the organic.

The picture only gets worse when you look into the clothing & accessories offered for dogs vs. cats. Only 16 cat items, but 465 dog items. Most of the cat items are really occasional costumes -- giving it a Santa hat or an ugly Christmas sweater (hipsters and actual creative types are more likely to be cat people; see earlier pet posts). Dog people, on the other hand, dress up their pets in human-type clothing -- parkas, tank tops, dresses, swimsuits, and shoes.

Dog people, like liberal-brained people in general, seem to be more arrested in their development. That would account for their more liberal morality (conservatism grows with age), and their peculiar childlike way of making their pets the victims of a cartoonish dress-up / makeover game.

Even their pets...

Bibi's dog yelps out as he bites you.

Persona striving and the end of family

All forms of status striving lead an individual to withdraw investment in others and re-allocate it to the self, the better to climb up whatever pyramid they're trying to conquer. This is easiest to see in family ties since everyone has them. Strivers will tend to lose touch with their siblings, let their elderly parents fend for themselves, and maybe not even bother with having children of their own to take care of.

And yet not all forms of status competition have the same strength of impact. Here I outlined the three basic forms, based on career, lifestyle (external, regular behaviors), and persona (internal, character traits). It looks like the career side will stay closer to family formation, while the persona side will be the furthest removed. Lifestyle strivers may be an exception, preferring more family involvement.

Part of this is because what drives people to seek out status in the persona arena is that the career arena is already saturated, so persona strivers won't have as much income or wealth. Career strivers may be making enough money to pay someone to take care of their parents, whereas a persona striver has nothing to show for their efforts but reputational coolness points. Not exactly what the owner of the assisted living facility will accept as payment. So while career strivers will be remotely involved with their elderly parents, the persona strivers will be removed altogether.

Ditto for paying for all the things and services that go into raising children -- just at the very basic level, let alone all the extra junk that goes along with making them pawns in the parents' status contests.

But there's a separate pathway from persona striving to the divorce from family, aside from having less money. It's that persona construction and maintenance is such an inward-focused set of activities that there's really no way that other people can contribute toward it.

Maintaining ties with siblings or parents could be a way for career strivers to network, get their foot in the door, get a loan, etc. Having children means they have yet another way to show off their wealth -- sending them to exclusive schools, dressing them in expensive clothing, hiring armies of tutors and coaches, and so on and so forth. Every investment in others is an investment away from the self, but at least the other family members can help the career striver recoup some of their lost striving effort.

Lifestyle strivers seem to be more involved in family life. These are the Gen X overly involved parents who want to do everything as a family -- all those activities that make up a lifestyle. They make their parenting style part of their lifestyle identity (parenting being an ongoing set of external behaviors, not a persona). Whether it's the hyper-concerned food-allergy parent or the free range kids parent. They get to express their foodie lifestyle by bringing their kids to the organic yoghurt bar, fixing them striver cupcakes (and posting pictures to social media), etc. They are concerned with their kids learning how to become lifestyle strivers at college, not how to score high-paying jobs.

However, lifestyle strivers appear to not be very connected to their parents, aunts and uncles, or grandparents. Not very much to their siblings either. After all, it's hard to make your mother or your brother enhance your lifestyle points. Your own children don't really have much of a choice about eating your foodie meals, acquiescing to your parenting "philosophy," and tagging along on regular trips to your leisure haunts. There's no room for Aunt Edna in the striver version of family vacation.

Persona strivers have even less use for family in boosting their status points. The whole goal is meticulously crafting and maintaining an image of one's internal characteristics -- how are other people supposed to reveal one's own inner psychology? Not by their actions, which reveal their own inner traits. If they're family, though, perhaps their persona is correlated with your persona based on genetics.

This is terrifying news to the control-freak persona-shaper. Just think -- the audience's perception of your character could get flushed down the drain if your clashing-persona of a father waltzes into the frame. The audience of a story likes to know who the family of a character is, and forms an image of the character in part on that knowledge. Therefore, all family members will be kept very far out of the frame -- outside of the entire artist's studio, and ideally in another region of the country.

The same goes for not wanting to have children. Their actions do not reveal your persona, and their inner traits will be similar to yours by inheritance, but you're not projecting your true self to others in the status contests -- you're portraying your crafted persona. The child doesn't yet have the ability to shape their persona to harmonize with yours and make you look good as the genetic donor. You could try to make it seem that the way you treat and raise your children reveals your persona -- your beliefs, opinions, attitudes, philosophies, etc. But that's really putting you in the lifestyle striver arena, which was already so full that you opted to seek status in the persona arena instead.

It's not impossible to make children play into your persona crafting this way, it's just a lot harder than conscripting them into a lifestyle contest. Dragging your kids to a foodie ice cream parlor, sending them to get their hair cut at a trendy kiddie salon, or hiring a private tutor, doesn't need to imply much about the parents' core personal beliefs, preferences, and attitudes. Merely participating in the activity makes them part of a lifestyle contest, whatever it may or may not suggest about the parents' inner character traits. For persona strivers, parenting decisions would all have to reveal something meaningful about the parents' special snowflake personas -- and how special and unique is it to want your kids to have a decent haircut and a helpful tutor?

So do persona strivers remain totally childless? Not quite -- they may adopt pets, whose own characteristics will either be seen to not reflect the personas of the owners (no genetic relationship), or can be carefully chosen to harmonize with those of the owners. They're more of a decorative item in the LARP-y stage design of their home. But, it is a living creature that needs their care, so it's about the best they can do without risking a major hit to their own personas, or a major distraction from them.

Pets play a different role as substitute children for lifestyle strivers. They are taken out on walks to the dog park (a leisure hangout akin to the cafe that the owner visits), they are taken to the doggie spa, and so on and so forth.

Career-oriented strivers are more likely to want their pets to win at something, the way their owner does -- a dog show, a hunting competition, or some other kind of doggie career.

It's going to be interesting to see if Millenial strivers actually have any kids. Those who are not caught up so much in status contests will, of course, but I mean in a place where competitiveness is high -- the middle-class and above in California, Texas, New York, etc.

And as before, I want to emphasize that it's not just one narrow sub-culture of persona strivers that is cut off from family maintenance and family formation. The wannabe models on Instagram, the YouTube characters, the SJWs on Twitter and Tumblr, or the neo-pagan cosplayers on the right. All of them feel a visceral rejection of their own existing families, and do not seem very interested in making many babies to start a new branch of their family tree.

Were the original domestic cats not so defiant?

I came across a series of these "cat shaming" pictures that show a cat with a note explaining what trouble it got into, and why it's not sorry.

One thing stood out about these cat mugshots -- hardly any natural looking cats (tabbies). The few that were shown, had not crossed much of a boundary with their owner -- licking some butter, for instance, rather than tearing up a roll of toilet paper. At one site that had a sample of 30, 10 of them were either black or black-and-white. Orange ones were there, too, including calicos. The ones with tabby coloring almost always have large swaths of white as well, not fully natural looking tabbies.

Today's tabby cats look like the wildcats that were domesticated thousands of years ago, so I'm guessing that those first however-many generations did not steal and hide sharp objects around the yard, did not sneak their way into the granary and treat it like a great big litter box, and did not climb up on the roof and start shredding the thatching.

If they were wary of human beings, they must have still had a more helpful and submissive attitude, at least compared to the terrorists in the cat-shaming pictures. It's hard to imagine hardscrabble farmers continuing to domesticate an animal that only wanted to flop down on their work space so they couldn't get anything done.

The mischievous ones look more like what you'd see, not in nature, but in an artificial urban environment where feral colonies form. There are plenty of black, black-and-white, orange, and heavily white-spotted cats there, much more so than tabbies. These are the cats that have evolved to thrive in a setting where human feeders and caretakers can be taken for granted, hence where good manners aren't very necessary.

In fact, it must have paid off in Darwinian terms to be a little more pushy toward their adopters, who had begun to take care of them out of a sense of duty or stewardship (and so, more likely to thrive among a pastoralist group). They would therefore care for the creatures on a more unconditional basis, compared to the early domesticaters who tolerated cats on a quid pro quo basis, such as keeping the mice away from the grains. If your relationship with the semi-wild animal is conditional, you won't find it difficult to shoo it away if it starts acting too big for its britches and assuming an air of authority and entitlement.

Appearance and temperament are linked in all animals, so that selecting for certain personality traits will alter their looks as well (see Belyaev's foxes for the classic case study). As cat adopters shifted from farmers who allowed barn cats to hunt the mice on their land, to the urban crazy cat lady who takes care of the feral colony no matter how bad they misbehave, the tabby coloring has been slowly weeded out.

Black coloring is generally associated with aggressiveness in animals (including homo sapiens), so it may not come as a surprise to see the change move in a darker rather than lighter direction. I'm not sure why it's also selected for heavy patches of white as well -- perhaps to increase visual contrast and be more attention-getting in a dense, competitive urban setting.

Whatever the reasons, it's worth bearing in mind if you decide to adopt in the future. Tabby color looks like a good predictor of not acting like a dictator around the home.

How can "mercy" killings of pets be justified, when they never attempt suicide?

One of the more galling rationalizations for killing a pet whose near future looks dark is that, in some way, the animal is ready for death and perhaps even sending a signal to the owner that it's time to go and please do the job for me.

Their movement gets stiff, they don't walk or jump around as much or at all, they aren't as playful, they stop eating and drinking — they're just laying around, waiting for you to put them out of their listless misery. It's only humane of you to honor their request and have a doctor come pump barbiturates into their veins to shut off their nervous system.

Wait just a second — if they're so miserable and beyond all hope, why aren't they trying to do the job themselves? Not like it would be hard for most pets. Over a lifetime, they have cultivated a good sense of what things and places are dangerous, so instead of avoiding them, they could go toward them. Y'know, walk out into busy traffic, climb someplace high and go splat on the ground below, pick a fight with a nasty predator or rival... anything, really.

In fact, animals never commit suicide (which is not to say that they don't sometimes behave in a way that results in their own death). Their survival instinct is too strong. I suspect the same is true for human beings, and that suicide is a maladaptive disease of civilization (the exact mechanism being irrelevant for now). I don't recall ever hearing of hunter-gatherers taking their own lives. In any case, we sure don't see it in animals, particularly not pets who are winding down their last days.

Laying still, breathing slow, refusing food and water is their way of conserving rather than wasting energy so that they'll live as long as possible in the final stage of life. Yes, even trying to eat, digest, and excrete food would be a waste if the bodily systems required are performing poorly or winding down.

If they seem sad, it is because they sense the end is near — not sad because you're taking too long to bump them off already. Like any other living creature, they want to go out on their own terms, and not have their lives taken from them by some paternalistic authority. They want to be respected and leave with their dignity intact, not to get snuffed out in a final disrespectful humiliation.

Are veterinarians biased against cats?

We cloak professional healers in an aura of sanctity, as though they were guardian angels and miracle workers. But they are fallible human beings with their own set of motivations, in addition to wanting to help patients.

The most disturbing example must be the veterinarians, who turn out to be biased against an entire class of their patients — the cats.

Here are the results of a survey of vets and vet technicians. The majority express no preference for either, but that's just giving them the easy fence-sitting answer. Psychological studies show that people who own both dogs and cats are more like dog people than cat people. Push them in a real-life setting, and they'd more likely come down in favor of dog patients. Of those who do express a preference, the vets are 2 to 1 in favor of their dog patients, and the vet techs are even more biased at 3 to 1.

Here are even more extensive statistics, painting the same basic picture of preferences, but also revealing how these manifest themselves in the hospitals and clinics themselves.

The two main reasons seem to be that dogs give cues that are easier for humans to read, and they aren't as fiesty. Dogs are more closely adapted to interacting with people, but I still wonder how much the greater difficulty of "reading" cats is due to the vet not being a cat lover in the first place. To each their own in their private life, but this is like a pediatrician who doesn't care for kids.

Aside from the bias against cats in itself, dog people also tend to be more liberal, in the sense of having less respect for purity and sanctity (click on the "pets" tag below to review earlier posts on this topic). I expect they're more likely to callously favor euthanasia, whereas cat people would set a higher threshold for putting a pet down.

And given the greater influence that the vet has in this decision — not being as easily persuadable as a panic-stricken pet owner — this likely results in more pets (canine and feline) having their lives taken than there should be.

Part of the belief in "healers as angels" is that we shouldn't research and choose which hospital and which doctor we should bring our loved one to. Aren't all angels equally angelic? In the case of taking care of cats, though, you ought to check into these things beforehand, to at least make sure you'll be seeing a cat person with the proper respect for life, and not a dog-loving mercy killer.

Do cats have generational differences?

Cats these days seem more bratty and dependent than I remember growing up. And more housebound and supervised by their caretakers — perhaps the cause of the greater brattiness and dependency, a la the children of helicopter parents? Just as there has been a huge change in parenting styles over the past 25 years, so has there been with pet-caring styles, and in the same direction.

I'm inclined to rule out genetic change, not on principle, only because the change has been so sudden.

Fortunately, cats are less obedient than children toward over-protective owners, so they still get out a good bit. But it still feels like they have a weaker public presence than they did in the '80s. One of our cats used to flop down into a deep sleep right on the sidewalk out front. Once he even got accidentally picked up by animal control because they thought he'd been hit by a car and was laying dead on the curb. Another cat used to climb trees and walk over our first-story roof.

Come to think of it, it's been awhile since I recall seeing the "cat stuck up in a tree" in real life or pop culture. Last I remember was having to climb up a tree and dislodge our cat who liked to run up there, at least until the birds began dive-bombing him. That was the mid-to-late 1990s.

I'm not sure how to investigate this idea quantitatively, but it would be worth looking into by animal psychologists. There may be surveys of pet-owners over time about whether their cat is an indoor or outdoor cat.

Parental discipline discussion led by Mr. Rogers (1982)

So many pieces of folk wisdom in this informal discussion among parents, led by Fred Rogers, that would trigger the Child Protective Services alarm these days. Try it and see. The helicopter parents have your place bugged, waiting for you to slip up at indulging your kids' egos.

Some notes:

Disciplining your child included spanking back then. (NB: this was for the liberal PBS station, not even a culturally conservative one.) It's one of the clearest signals the kid can receive that he and the parent come from two separate social layers, or are playing different roles, where the parent can strike the child but not vice versa (unless you're really cruisin' for a bruisin'...). In an age where parents want to make their kids feel like they already belong to the same social group as the parents -- "the family," "mankind," or whatever -- they refrain from displays of the asymmetry in power.

Several of the parents were convinced that their kids wanted somebody to be an authority figure, to set boundaries, and to administer punishment when the lines were crossed -- and in a way that only a grown-up could punish. The parents' hunch was that this gave the kids a feeling of security, like there's someone competent and powerful enough who's in charge of what would otherwise be a rudderless and chaotic world, where the children would be utterly at the mercy of fate.

A recurring reason that the parents gave their children for why they were being harsh with them: someday you're going to be a grown-up, and I want to make sure you're prepared to assume the duties of that role. Discipline was part of the broader preparation of a child to transform into an adult. E.g., "Someday I won't be there to hover over your shoulder and tell you what good manners are." One little girl who's interviewed recounts a time when her mother told her that she was being harsh because that way the girl will learn what mothering consists of, so that she will make a good mother when it's she who has matured into that role.

That one really blew me away -- can you imagine today someone explaining to their kid that they need to learn what mothering or fathering is, so they'll make a good parent when it's their turn? "God no, I'd never say that. I wouldn't want to frighten them! They're not going to be a parent for another 25 or 30 years anyway -- they can learn later."

One father said that after a heavy-handed approach had failed with his son, he took his wife's advice to act disappointed in his son, as though his poor behavior had let down his dad, someone who had high hopes for him. It worked. In this strategy, too, the father is telling the son that he expects him to be a man someday soon, and that there are certain expectations to be met if he's going to do well in that grown-up role.

That's a good way to sum up the entire style of parenting in the '80s, and how different it was from the Dr. Spock message of the Mid-century, or the Dr. Phil message of today. There were clearly drawn lines between the roles of child and parent, but the child was expected to transition into an adult, hence much of parenting was preparation for the rites of passage they would face.

The smothering mothers of the Mid-century and the helicopter parents of the Millennial era thought otherwise. There were no clear-cut lines of authority between the roles of child and parent -- they were all part of a great big happy family, Team Johnson, mankind, or whatever. Children are made to feel bad for not being a cooperative team member -- which assumes that they are already a member of the same team as the parents. That is, kids are not going to transition from one group into another (children into adults), so parents don't need to give them all that preparation for navigating so-called "rites of passage."

This infantilizes children (see the Millennials), but it assuages the OCD and anxiety that helicopter parents have about awkward topics like puberty, rites of passage, one-way authority, and so on. Rather than prepare for these awkward transition stages, confront them, and then be done with it, they want to keep postponing puberty etc. so that the parents will never have to feel all grossed out. Show your children some respect and love, and help them get through those stages, whether it makes you feel awkward or not.

What are parents treating their kids like, then? They don't totally treat them as co-members of Team Johnson, that's just the illusion. They still feed, clothe, and house them. Still answer their calls for help. Still give them toys to divert their boredom from not being able to play outside. Still give them the occasional pat on the head, and rub on the belly. And still make them wear ID tags in case they ever get lost (the kids being incapable of finding their way back home).

In short, it isn't child and parent, it's pet and owner. Pets are not expected to grow and transform into the same role as the owner (that'll be the day). They're too defenseless or helpless to ever take care of themselves, so they'll always need the owner to keep close watch over them and provide for them. Naturally the owners will have their pets spayed or neutered, so the owner won't have to confront all that awkward business about the cat going into heat, the tomcat prowling the neighborhood, and so on. To do otherwise would be the height of irresponsibility. Today's parents would therefore not see their kids' kids as "my grandchildren" but as "the litter of my pet, who I guess wasn't as spayed as the vet assured me she was."

How do these changes reflect the changes toward cocooning and falling crime rates? Well, if the parent expects the kid's world to be socially isolated, then why bother teaching them how to interact with others (i.e. genetic strangers)? The kid's social circle will focus on his nuclear family for most of his life, and parents are more tolerant of bratty behavior than strangers are (Hamilton's Rule), so he doesn't need to learn good social behavior that much.

OCD also rises in cocooning times (see this list of related trends). There is something awkward, anxious, and OCD underneath the way parents view their kids today -- particularly regarding the maturation process. Just the word "process" makes it sound like it has a schedule and drive all of its own, and control freaks won't accept that. The maturation process must be subject to parental manipulation, or else all hell would break loose.

And if the parent expects the kid's world to keep getting safer and safer, then why bother giving them the training that would prepare them for a dangerous world out there, where the parents aren't always going to be around to step in and protect them? Back in 1982, parents sensed that a child who was socially naive and incapable of action would make the easiest target for kidnappers, child molesters, serial killers, and cult recruiters. But now that those evils are imperceptible, the parents feel they can afford to let their kid grow up naive and dependent.

One final thing to note, and that's how dissociative everyone appears, albeit some more than others. I mention this anytime there's real-life footage of everyday interactions from the '80s or early '90s. It looks like for them everyday life is an out-of-body experience. As the crime rate is plateau-ing or at its peak, the world seems so topsy-turvy that it's hard to believe it's all happening for real. Even those small children interviewed have thousand-yard stares, as though they'd just gotten back from Vietnam.

Contrast that with how precise and deliberate folks are today, or how crisp and focused their attention was in TV shows from the '50s. I don't know how else to describe it, they just seem like they're in much more conscious awareness and control of their mind and behavior, way back then or right now. In between, people look almost like they're running on auto-pilot, guided by instinct. Still going through the impressive social behaviors that human beings are known for, but not showing as much introspection or deliberation as our capacity for reason and abstraction would lead us to expect. They're more focused on other people around them, and just letting their thoughts come out.

Cat class, cat style

A not unrepresentative piece of clothing for cat people. Think of trying to make something similar for dog people, or note the absence of "sexy doggie" or "sexy puppy" costumes on Halloween, and it drives home how uncool dogs are. They've been over-bred for neoteny (or infantilization), while cats have been allowed greater freedom to mature.

Great touch on the back. "I strut right by with my tail in the air."

Cats and dogs in pop music over time

Here is a list of cat songs by year, and a list of dog songs too. I only counted references to domestic animals (dog, puppy, cat, etc.) rather than wild species. And I only counted original rather than cover songs, to show what mood was like at the time of naming the song. Grouping them by decade gives the table below.

Decade - Cat ___  Dog songs

50s - 1 ___ 4
60s - 12 ___ 12
70s - 8 ___ 7
80s - 3 ___ 1
90s - 2 ___ 1
21c - 1 ___ 2

Dog songs outnumber cat songs in the '50s, then suddenly during the '60s cats rise to equal prominence. They just barely overtake dogs in the '70s, though cat people really come alive in -- when else? -- the '80s. They appear to outnumber dogs in the '90s, though cats only appear in the first half of that decade, and the dog song in the second half. Dogs are clearly back in the lead during the 21st century.

To help clear up the picture after the '60s, when each decade doesn't have a whole lot of animal-named songs from which to judge definitively, we can also look at names of the recording artists themselves. There was Cat Stevens who had a string of hits in the '70s (and "Cat" is not a short form of his given name, or middle name). Then there were the Stray Cats who had several hits in the early '80s. MC Skat Kat sang a duet with Paula Abdul in the late '80s. Heavy metal bands from the '80s chose wild cat names -- Def Leppard, Pantera, White Lion, White Tiger -- but not wild dog names. (They chose other animals, just not dogs -- Ratt, Whitesnake, Jackyl, etc.)

Dog names show up more during the '90s and 21st century, primarily with rappers. Snoop (Doggy) Dogg, Nate Dogg, Pitbull, Lil' Bow Wow, and so on. The only exception is the Pussycat Dolls from the mid-2000s (part of the '80s revival at the time?).

Side note: black people are not cat people.

The rise of cats in pop music tracks the violent crime rate and the outgoing phase of the cocooning cycle. Why? Beats me. Cats are more aggressive and assertive than dogs, and respond more to tenderness than to fear, so folks from the '60s through the early '90s would've identified with them more as a totem animal. People were also in a more conservative mindset, as far as wanting to preserve what was good in the past, and having a heightened sense of disgust, which would tilt them toward cat people.

Why do cocooning times bring out the popularity of dogs? Pop culture gets kiddie when the crime rate falls, and dogs are more cutesy than cats. ("How Much Is That Doggie In the Window?") Dogs are good for wannabe thugs who front like they're badass, a more common thing in falling-crime times when they won't be put to a real test. Dogs also allow socially awkward people to interact in a mediated and thus more comfortable way -- through their dogs, e.g. at a dog park.

You know, it's not necessarily that they're socially awkward. It's more like people need some kind of cover story, rationalization, and plausible deniability in a climate of suspicion and cocooning. Being openly outgoing is creepy and suspect, but if you're just taking your dog out for a walk, and happen to meet up in a place where there are other people taking their dogs out for a walk, well, it's not like you were trying to go out and socialize, so you're probably not a creepy crypto date rapist.

Does this mean that folks who came of age during the '70s, '80s, and early '90s are more likely to be cat people? I could see Generation X being more cat-loving than the Millennials, who strike me more as dog people, as do the Silents and early Boomers, while late Boomers could go either way (they seem slightly more cat people-y to me, though).

I'll be running through the history of the popularity of cats vs. dogs in other areas of pop culture later on. I wouldn't have thought that their relative popularity could cycle, but why not, if just about everything else does?

Skaters are cat people

While out gift-shopping tonight I stopped by Zumiez, a clothing store for skateboarders and snowboarders. The sales girl was showing me t-shirts that she thought my snowboarding brother might like, when she paused and asked, "Do you have a cat? Or does your brother?" Either she had very good intuition, or she already knew that her customers are most likely cat people. She said she had a cat herself (and that she's a skater), and then showed me three or four "wacky cat" t-shirts. Funny, I didn't see any with dogs.

At the online store for Zumiez, they have 34 cat-themed clothing items for girls, vs. only 1 that's dog-themed. For guys, there are 19 that are cat-themed, and fewer than 10 that are dog-themed. They sell skate decks with animal designs, too: 1 with a dog, 4 with a cat. They may not be as one-sided as the Urban Outfitters crowd in preferring cats, but skaters clearly go against the mainstream when it comes to pets.

How does this group tie in to the broader traits that cat people tend to have, compared to dog people? Well, the anti-authoritarian leanings of cat people show up again with skaters. I'm not sure if they have a heightened sense of disgust / purity / taboo, but I have a hunch they do. Shaming someone for "selling out" appeals to moral norms about group loyalty and purity -- not only has the sell-out defected from their group, they're corrupting themselves in the process. And skaters are one of the few groups, along with blacks, who don't mind dissing faggots, using "gay" as an insult, and so on.

Shaming sell-outs also shows their revulsion toward status-striving, in stark contrast to dog people. There's supposed to be an atmosphere of camaraderie, and if someone starts acting too big for their breeches, the other skaters will ridicule their pretensions.

I don't think skaters have a strong sense of empathy, but they're more toward that direction than being fixated on things and systems. And probably more empathetic than the male average. They do concern themselves with how their skateboard is made, when and how to fix or replace parts, what type is best suited for what purpose, etc. But they're not like gear-heads who get really into cars. Skating is mostly a social hang-out activity.

Skaters also show the cat person's characteristic disdain for mindlessly marching forward toward whatever is new. A lot of their graphic design looks like it's straight out of the late '80s and early '90s -- off-beat color combinations, exotic references (Ancient Egypt), irreverence (sacred cats in wacky situations), neon laser futurism, etc. When I dropped by Zumiez over the summer, the guys were non-ironically blasting "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." They aren't as deeply and self-consciously into vintage as the UO crowd, but they do value "fun and old" over "boring and new." Who wouldn't?

I've suggested before that skaters seem to be the only large, visible youth culture these days. Certainly the only one where there's initiation and acceptance, a code of behavior, distinctive group markers, regular participation in shared experiences and rituals in real life, and hence an overall sense of cohesion.

Studies that show dog owners to be more conscientious are misinterpreting those results when they then describe dog people as more "team-oriented." It's more like hive-minded -- the qualities that make you a good fit in a large, anonymous, hierarchical corporation. Their status-striving instinct adapts them to that kind of environment too -- always toiling toward that next micro-promotion. "Team" is too unspecific. Cat people are more band-minded or tribe-minded -- traditional, something smaller in scale, more typical of hunter-gatherer societies. Cat people are also more like hunter-gatherers in being self-effacing, and ridiculing those who act too big for their breeches. Dog people could only have emerged after civilization.

Queers are dog lovers -- What does it tell us about dog people?

Continuing the approach from yesterday's post about how to distill the essential differences between dog and cat people, we want to find a group that is so uniformly pro-dog or pro-cat, and that differs in only one crucial way from the comparison group.

If you live in a city, you probably have a hunch that homosexuals prefer dogs to cats. You see them out walking them all the time -- and not just Pomeranians that look and act gay themselves, but larger and less flamingly obvious ones too. A quick check of a question at Yahoo Answers provides several confirming answers from gays that they indeed far prefer dogs over cats.

Googling around turned up an excerpt from a queer lit novel Men Who Love Men (2008), which contains this pop sociology discussion, both establishing that gay men are feline-phobic and throwing out explanations as to why:

"I love cats," Luke repeats. "You know, it's hard in gay culture to come out as a cat-lover." ...

"It's like it's just not cool for a gay man to be into cats -- the way lesbians are, anyway, or the way most gay guys are into their dogs."

Jeff is starting to smile. "Well you know the faggot-canine connection is a long and honorable one. You see it on every street in every gay ghetto." ...

"Well," Jeff says, "it's easier to chat up a hunky blonde walking down Commercial Street if he's got a golden retriever with him." ...

"I know!" Luke says. "But when you ask gay men if they like cats, they invariably look at you a little funny, as if you'd just asked them if they liked drinks with little parasols in them or the music of Holly Near." ...

"Cats are considered girly," Luke continues. "Dogs are manly -- except poodles, but they don't count." ...

"You know," Luke says, ignoring me, "maybe that's why so many gay men claim to be allergic to cats."

"Have you noticed that, too?" Jeff asks. "There's got to be a correlation. None of my straight friends -- or my lesbian friends -- are allergic to cats. But gay men start sniveling as soon as you tell them there's a cat in the house." ...

"To me," Jeff says, "cats should be the gay men's pet of choice... Cats are what we as gay men aspire to be. Cool. Slightly mysterious, completely autonomous, perfectly groomed."

"So why hasn't it happened?" I ask. ...

"You see, buddy, cats are tops, and most gay men are loath to advertise their bottomness walking down the street. With a dog, they can pretend to be master. But just let some faggot try to saddle up a cat and take him out for a trot. He'll quickly learn you can't use a cat to get the double takes or the chance to score."

NB: among each other, gays admit they are not cool, mysterious, and autonomous, but lame, obvious, and dependent.

Their kneejerk equation of cats with girliness, when cat ownership is about equal among men and women, is one of a broader set of perceptions of anything that shows a sex difference as girly and therefore disgusting (because in the gay Peter Pan mind, girls = cooties). Others include cologne, jewelry, and medium-length or long hair. Although they rationalize their revulsion as "ewww, girly," these things are part of the rite of passage of both males and females out of childhood and into puberty and adolescence. So, what they are truly repulsed by are things that signal the end of childhood and the beginning of courtship and mating -- with the opposite sex, naturally.

Does playing with cats fit in with that pattern? It sure does. Cats generally don't like small children. Yeah, occasionally they'll cuddle up with a baby, but usually they either tolerate the kid or try to avoid it. At such an immature age, the child doesn't know how to interact with a cat, which is not a babyish animal like the typical doggie. If he pets the cat too hard, the cat will get angry. If he pulls at his tail, the cat will get angry. He has to grow up and learn how to interact more subtly with other people and creatures before the cat will accept him.

My family and a number of my friends had cats growing up, but I don't remember them taking a liking to me until I was in middle school. Cats were like another set of grown-ups in the house -- cute ones, but cranky and strict about how to treat them. It was the same with my friends' cats, when not until 6th grade did I manage to earn the trust of one of them. Now I can befriend them on the street, where as a kid I certainly would have frightened them away.

Cats must be able to sense how infantilized faggots are -- it's not that hard -- and steer clear of them. "Oh god it's like a toddler, only bigger -- RUN!" Stinging from what they see as unfair rejection, gays then grow to distrust or hate cats. On the other hand, most all dog breeds show such indiscriminate affection toward people that gays don't have to worry about being rejected. The juvenile mind cannot tolerate conditional affection, such as those that characterize adolescent and adult relationships. It has to be unconditional, like a parent shows their baby.

Dogs are perfect at providing that, while cats treat you more like an equal friend, where one of you might not be in the mood to socialize when the other wants to, and that it's not the end of the world -- you'll simply try again later, and not blame them or hold a grudge in the meantime.

Gays also have their own special brand of autism, which follows directly from their psychological stunting. They just don't get what makes other people tick, especially people not exactly like them. They don't get straight guys, and they don't get straight women either. They project so clumsily from their own warped ways onto normal people, and are always oblivious to how wacko they sound in doing so.*

Googling and browsing around some autism support sites confirmed my hunch that cats do not make good pets for children with autism, not only because the cat is less tolerant of not-yet-mature creatures, but also because the autistic child often does not know how hard he's petting the cat, might throw it in frustration, and so on. Dogs were always said to make better pets for autistic children.

Both of these results tie back in to what I laid out in the first post, that one of the strongest differences between cat and dog people is that cat people are more empathetic and dog people more interested in things. Empathy and back-and-forth relationships among equals takes awhile to grow, so that suggests a related difference -- that cat people tend to be more emotionally savvy and developed. Dog people seem to have more difficulty reading another being's emotional state and interacting accordingly, although normal grown-up dog lovers don't behave bitterly and vindictively like the queer cat-haters do when they and the pet come to an impasse.

Projecting your own mindset onto the animal, rather than respecting its differences at a species and individual level, is part of what leads to the use of pets as status symbols, as outlined in the first post. (You also need a fashion-striving mindset, but of course homosexuals do.) A dog doesn't care about doing yoga, and doesn't understand what the writing on his doggie sweater says. But don't let that stop the owner from parading them around in this stuff. They need a servile animal to pull this off, and dogs are the ideal. Queers could definitely not dress up cats in rainbow-colored gay pride shirts like this:

Shameful, oblivious, patronizing, cruel... but in the dog owner's mind, if the pets themselves don't protest, they must be fine with it. That's the consequentialist view typical of liberals and rationalizers. The deontological view shared by cat people is that humiliation and exploitation is wrong no matter if the pet realizes or pipes up about how demeaning it is or not. You should respect the pet's dignity and honor, and not go there.

One time for yuks? Maybe you can bend the rules once in awhile, but not as the default. It'd be like sending your kid off to school with a gag scrawled in marker on his face, that he can't read himself. It's demeaning. As a rare practical joke, it's fine, but not every week or every day.

The consequentialist vs. deontological morality points to the final difference I noted before -- that cat people feel very strongly about respecting taboos, keeping pure what ought to be kept pure, and preserving the sacred. Gay dog lovers provide some of the most vivid evidence of what little regard they have for the most basic human taboos, such as against inter-species mating. I'll only subject you to one of a creepily huge number of gays in leather dog mask costumes, with or without a leash, with or without an owner/master, and with or without a fuller dog suit (including hooves that cover the hands).

And don't forget this classic nightmare scene of decadence from the end of The Shining.

Why did they pick a dog/bear suit? Their intuition must have told them that truly depraved people don't dress up in cat suits, which is more for the garden variety sorority chick who wants maximum attention on Halloween without actually having to put out. That's one "Sexy ____" costume you don't see on Halloween -- Sexy Puppy. It would give off too much of a master-and-servant vibe, and everyone would be thinking, "That girl just ain't right."

I know there are those cat furry people out there, but I didn't find them searching Google Images for pictures of gays in weirdo animal outfits at the parades. It was almost entirely dogs (horseheaded men was another).

While gays are not the typical dog lover, they appear to be an extreme caricature of some central dog lovers' traits, and their case makes it easier to see what would otherwise require subtler examination. Dog lovers are less empathetic, more status or fashion-striving, and more permissive about violating taboos.

* For example, one time a group of girl dancers sat down at a table next to mine in Starbucks, and they had a gay bff with them. The girls began sharing stories about how their housemates had awkwardly walked in on them when they were making out or getting it on with their boyfriend. The queer immediately chimes in, as though his story is exactly like theirs, only his experience with it. Instead he goes through a lengthy description of some dude lying naked on the bed while he hunts around for some lube in the bathroom but can't find any, so he improvises with something I have blocked out of memory. Turns out this stuff burns the bottom's bottom like crazy, and the pair begin freaking out like the Two Stooges about how to put out the fire. Then.... complete silence from the girls, while he laughs along at the conclusion of his own story, totally unaware of how sick and from-another-world that kind of "awkward sex experience" is, how totally unlike what all of them had just shared.

Cat vs. dog people -- clues from pet items at two hip young retailers

I've been looking into the differences between cat people and dog people, trying to boil them down to the most basic causes. Some groups are more cat-loving than their counterparts, although there's typically enough overlap to require a more fine-grained look, a discussion of exceptions, and so on.

Well, not with the two groups we're going to look at first. I couldn't believe how totally separate they were.

Two personality traits appear to underlie their many behavioral differences: cat people are more empathetic and curious about people, and dog people more oriented toward things; and cat people are more content with a simple life, and dog people are more status-striving. There's a third one that might be reduced somehow to one or both of the other two: cat people are more sensitive to holding things sacred, taboo, and pure, while dog people are more permissive and profaning.

Again, that'll take an extended series of comparisons to provide all the rich convincing detail, but for now we'll run a fairly controlled experiment. We want to make sure that the two groups we're comparing are very similar in most of the unimportant ways -- age, race, class, sex, etc. -- and we'd like for there to be a fairly honest signal of how cat-loving or dog-loving they are, not just asking them if they like one or the other.

The clothing retailers Urban Outfitters and American Apparel target the same demographic group -- young, white, educated, urban, liberal, more female than male. And they both have pet sections on their websites: here is UO's "pet shop," and here is AA's pets section. Presumably the selection reflects what the audience is into, or else they'd be losing money stocking the wrong stuff.

Every one of the 66 items at American Apparel are not only dog-related -- they are for the dogs themselves to wear. At Urban Outfitters, there's 1 item that is both cat and dog-themed, 2 that are neither, and of the remaining 60, 45 of them (or 75%) are cat-themed and 15 dog-themed. Only a few of the cat items are meant to be used by the cat (pet houses), while a good chunk of the dog items are meant for the dog itself (cape, bowtie, etc.).

Doggie sweatsuit from AA

Ceramic cat knob from UO

So, cat people do not treat their pets as pawns in a status contest played by the owner, while one of the primary motivations of dog people is to use their pet as a fashion accessory to broadcast the owner's lifestyle to their rivals in the status competition. It doesn't matter which arena they're battling it out in; that will only affect which choice of dog they bring along to duel it out with the other dog owners. E.g., pitbull for ghetto thugs, Pomeranian for childless yuppie women, and so on.

Cat-related merchandise is not foisted on the pet, but worn by the owner to signal the tribe they belong to (cat lovers). It is not part of a status contest because the t-shirt, sweater, etc., does not show the owner's specific cat -- like "Drop what you're doing, world, and look at my awesomely unique pet." It's either a generic cat or a well known cat, neither of which belong to the owner, and hence not one that the wearer is trying to show off or brag about in public.

Even though the two retailers cater to folks in the same demographic groups, there are other sets of striking differences between the typical shopper at each store. This tells us what types of people are likely to be single-mindedly dog-loving vs. mostly cat-loving.

Comparing the target audience at Urban Outfitters (first) and American Apparel (second), on the following dimensions, we find...

Heterosexuals (mostly) vs. queers, boy-phobic straight girls, and outright fag hags

Relatively muted gays vs. flamingly annoying gays

Vintage vs. trendy

Traditional vs. progressive

Retains classics vs. dumps iPod every couple years

Late '60s, '70s, '80s, early '90s vs. "That is so five minutes ago"

Lived-in vs. shining and new

Rustic, Mediterranean vs. Scandinavian modern

Geometric patterns vs. solid planes

Rock vs. techno

Arts and crafts / DIY vs. mass production

Nonchalant, mysterious vs. attention-whoring, obvious

Basic sense of shame vs. rationalizes shamefulness

Holds things sacred vs. whatever, get rid of it, it doesn't matter

Amateur photographer vs. selfie-snapper

Record player vs. iPhone as dream gift

Transparent irony (affectionate) vs. campy / blackface

No gym, no yoga, no jogging vs. owns array of specialized work-out gear

Girls: lets eyebrows and bush grow semi-naturally vs. plucked and napalmed (despite ad campaigns)

Guys: no manscaping, may have beard vs. trims pubes, shaves chest

And so on...

Some of these themes will keep coming up, but they won't be so black-and-white. It's good to start with a rather extreme group comparison since that lays out the rough outlines, with finer details to be left filled in by more realistic comparisons.