Author Archives: thezman

My Theory of Everything: Part II

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Yesterday I got started on this project by blabbering on about my view of the dominant mode of thought in America. Today, I’m going to get into the chief alternative to it. I’m using the word “alternative” loosely as few people of any consequence subscribe to this view.  Those that do tend to come from the parts of the country and culture that are unrepresented in the American elite.

One of those areas, and one that is a convenient example, is the US military. The great innovation Americans brought to war fighting is the prioritization of training over discipline. Put another way, the prioritization of what gets done over how it gets done. Soldiers and officers are encouraged to be creative in their problem solving and be mission focused.

This was most evident in the Great War at the Battle of Belleau Wood. German commanders ordered an advance through the woods onto the Marine’s position. The French commander ordered a retreat, but American General James Harbord refused the order and told his men to hold their position. Both the French and the Germans marveled afterwards at the ferocity and improvisational tactics of the American Marines.

On the afternoon of 3 June, German infantry attacked the Marine positions through the grain fields with bayonets fixed. The Marines dug shallow individual trenches so they could lie concealed, but still fight while lying on their bellies. The Marines waited until the Germans were within 100 yards and then opened fire. The German infantry was mowed down and the remainder was forced back into the woods.

The legend of the United States Marine Corp was born in the Battle of Belleau Wood not because they had great leadership, or they had superior numbers. It was not technology that gave the Marines their edge. It was their tenacity, improvisational prowess and unrelenting ferocity in pursuit of the mission. “The deadliest weapon in the world is a United States Marine and his rifle,” was said by General Pershing after this battle.

The philosophy at work here is you solve problems by giving competent people the tools and the support to go solve the problem. How they solve the problem is secondary. In small business, this is the dominant mode of thought. The owner can be seen washing the toilets then signing payroll checks. Alternatively, his second in command could take over the toilet washing and then hire a new person for accounting. The point is to get the job done, whatever it takes.

It is in sales that this way of looking at the world is still dominant most everywhere. No matter the industry or scale, salesmen are always on some sort of commission system. They are also given more freedom of action than other employees. You hire a good salesman, train him on the product, give him a quota and let him go, trusting that your best weapon is a salesman and his commission check.

Hold on. My meth dealer is here.

The pithy and patriotic examples aside, this way of thinking is most popularly understood as using “the right tool for the job.” It may not be the perfect tool and the completion of the job may not be ideal, but often, good enough is, in fact, good enough. Underlying this mode of thought is the understanding that the human condition is immutable. Perfection is for the afterlife. In this life, human error is a feature, not a bug.

For most of Western history, this has been the dominant mode of thought. Even in the age of kings, finding the right man for the job was the way things were done. No one had grand, complex schemes for creating the perfect society. In fact, having grand schemes for creating heaven on earth was a good way to get burned at the stake.

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

The last time this utilitarian mode of thought was dominant in America was at the founding. The first shot at a national government was pretty much just leaving most everything to the states to figure out on their own. The Articles of Confederation did not work, because the impotent national government was the wrong tool for the job, so we got the US Constitution.

The men of the Tidewater who crafted it understood that we needed a strong central government for managing trade, national defense and the courts. At the same time, they knew the Puritan lunatics in New England would immediately try to pervert the national government so they could dominate the rest of the country. James Madison had no illusions about the nature of John Adams. The result was a government based on negative liberty.

While this mode of thought is common in the lower classes, the people who run the country reject this completely. Therein lies the rub. The people are asked to validate the decisions of the rulers with their ballots, but no one on the ballot thinks like the people standing in line to vote. To remedy this the parties make noises about American values and talk about the Constitution, but that’s just for show. Thus, the inevitable conflict.

Thus, concludes Part II

My Theory of Everything: Part I

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Somewhere in the Clinton years I began to sour on official conservatism. Part of it was the odious carbuncle Newt Gingrich becoming the leader of the Right. If that loathsome human toothache was the Right, I was going to be something else. Part of it was the general incoherence of the official Right. How can you be in favor of small government, but in favor of an exotic tax code designed to alter behavior?

The other thing that bugged me was the hoard of B-school and J-school strivers taking up positions in the official Right. Naturally, they set about making culture into science! and loading up their language with meaningless jargon. Hearing a guy like Paul Ryan say, “proactively leverage other’s high standards in infrastructures” generates warm thoughts of Gavrilo Princip.

Anyway, I slowly concluded that the whole Right-Left dynamic was just a myth. One of things about working in Washington, even briefly, is you learn quickly that politics is nothing like you see on TV. Two people on a show ripping one another apart will be at the bar after the show laughing it up like old pals. That’s because they are old pals. The Right-Left narrative has simply become a convenient framework for the reality show called politics. This has been true since the 80’s.

Once you free your mind, if you will, of that framework through which you are expected to see your world, you have to make sense of what you see. If the Right-Left construct is just a version of good cop/bad cop where the people in the media hustle the rest of us so they can live above their utility, then what’s really going on in the world? How do things really work?

One way to understand the world is to think about the primary modes of thought that dominate the age. If you want to understand the Mongol Empire, for example, you have to learn something about the Mongol worldview, how they organized themselves and why they believed that was the correct way to do things. Just knowing what they did is not going to tell you why they did them.

In America, there are two dominant modes of thought that are not exactly in conflict, but they are incompatible. The primary mode of thought is best illustrated by an example from business. Every company in America of any size has some sort of quality initiative or business process improvement program. Big companies have whole departments to improve performance throughout the organization.

The basis for this is the belief that the human errors can be mitigated by arranging things in just the right way. For instance, you can stop Jose from putting the wrong stuff in a box by implementing software systems that physically prevent Jose from making that error. Jose’s machine supervisor stops him before he can sin against the firm by making a shipping error. Ideally, Jose gets eliminated completely and a robot does the job.

Everything and everyone in the company gets this treatment. If you read through the literature of the Six Sigma Cult that was popular at General Electric, it sounds like a pagan purification ritual. The financial incentives for reducing errors quickly give way to spiritual incentives. Being right 99% of the time is less fulfilling than being right 99.9% of the time. The last time I checked, salvation in Six Sigma comes at 99.999999% accuracy.

This scales up to social advocacy. Progressives, for example, are obsessed with the people they see as failures or victims, the human error rate. The former are people that, through poor choices, fail to have self-actualizing careers, achieving their full humanity. The latter are people who are prevented from fulfilling their potential due to structural impediments like racism, sexism, interstellar conspiracy, etc.

This is the crux of the dominant mode of thought and it even has a name, Positive Liberty. In politics, you see this with Obama’s health care plan. They fully believe that abundance can be had if they arrange the parts of the public health system a certain way. It’s also on display with the myriad of Conservative tax schemes. Arrange the incentives the right way and people will make the “correct” choices. The tax code becomes the enterprise software of the economy.

As an aside, what fuels the semi-sexual fantasies of the robot future types is the belief that the robots will remove human error and therefore human sin. Once the robots are in charge, there can be no more human error. The Christian conception of God and Heaven is perfection. You see how that works? Perfect the human condition, and you have created Eden. Alternatively, the robots slaughter everyone and the human stain is removed from creation.

There are few people in public life that reject this mode of thinking. Almost all of the so-called conservatives accept this as a premise. Progressives not only believe it, but they also view anyone who does not accept this world view as a mortal threat to civilization. The debate, therefore, in modern American politics is over how the central planners arrange things and whether or not to punish the refuseniks.

The revealing character trait of people who subscribe to this mode of thought is the refusal to ask why things are as they find them. If they talk about the “why” of anything, it is as a jumping off point to debate their preferred “solution” that they believe will solve some aspect of the human condition. “Why are the prisons full of blacks? Racism! Now, let’s talk about how we fix that.”

Thus, concludes Part I.

Fear of the Dark

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Jonah Goldberg still churns out a newsletter, of sorts, that National Review distributes for some reason. I’m not a subscriber, but they post it on their site. I don’t read Jonah Goldberg very much, but I don’t have anything against him. It just feels like he has said everything he has to say as a writer. Whenever I read one of his columns these days it just feels like I read it a few times already.

That’s not unusual. A lot of opinion writers exhaust their supply of insights, gags and gimmicks within a few years. The exceptions are those who have very fertile minds and a high degree of curiosity. Christopher Hitchens was an example of someone who never stopped fine tuning his worldview so he kept his work interesting, even though I rarely agreed with him.

Anyway, his column starts with the stock gags he has been doing for a long time, but the point of it is to solve the puzzle as to why the Left keeps denying the obvious about Islam. After meandering around a bit, he gets to this:

And that is why, as I argue in my column today, Barack Obama is so eager to respond to the Paris attacks with a rhetorical fusillade against Republican bigotry. It is a ploy as brilliant as it is disgustingly cynical. Obama is a co-author of this refugee crisis. As Walter Russell Mead writes, “No one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama.” Somewhere deep inside Obama’s supposedly Niebuhrian conscience even he must suspect there is some truth to this. And even if his denial is total, he must understand that a great many historians will side with Mead in this appraisal.

One of my themes here is that the Professional Right is not all that interested in understanding the motivations of the Left. They much prefer to be the foil as the pay is better and the work is easier. Instead of digging deeper, the preferred response is to just assume the Left is playing politics, dodging responsibility or scoring points for the party. In this case, Jonah just assumes Barry both agrees that the refugee situation is a disaster and that he knows he is largely responsible for it.

There’s no evidence of this and there’s plenty of evidence that Obama thinks the refugee situation is a pretty good result. Further, he does not seem all that concerned about the politics of it. You can tell when a politician is worried about how something looks by watching him change his position, often denying he was ever on the other side of the issue. None of that is happening with Obama.

The general consensus from people who have read his two autobiographies and studied his life is that Obama was a Muslim growing up. His church in Chicago was nominally Christian, but was modeled on a mosque. Within Islam there’s a tradition of street corner Imams building a following, which is what Reverend Wright did in Chicago, but waving the Christian Bible around instead of the Koran. Reverend Al is another obvious example. Holy man without portfolio is common in Islam, too.

That’s not to say he is a Muslim. I don’t think Obama is very religious. It’s just that when he thinks of religion, he thinks of what he knows and that’s the street corner Islam of his youth. Therefore he is sympathetic to Muslims in the same way normal Americans would be sympathetic to Christians fleeing the ISIS lunatics. The truth is, most Americans would welcome Syrian Christians. Obama’s instincts are 180 degree out of phase with normal Americans.

None of this is groundbreaking. As I said, this is the consensus of people who have read his books and studied his life. People who are his supporters often point to his exotic foreignness as the primary attraction. Obama’s critique of America is from the outside and his desire to fundamentally transform the country is from the perspective of an outsider, particularly an outsider who is emotionally outside the traditions of the West.

You never hear anyone in the professional Right point this out. It’s as if they fear it. If you go on Fox and talk about Obama’s own words in his autobiographies, you get branded an extremist loon. The only people referencing Obama’s writing in their columns are hate-thinkers like John Derbyshire, who may be one of the few people to read Obama’s books.

The reason for this studied avoidance of the obvious by the Professional Right is fear. When Obama was elected, the great fear of Republicans and their cheerleaders in the conservative media was that Obama would be accommodating to them. They would have no choice but to go along and, in effect, sign off on his proposals. The game would be up and it would no longer be possible to carry on like there is substantive fight over public policy.

Obama turned out to be a petty and venal guy once in office so everyone could relax and pretend there’s a real fight going in Washington. Obama seems to fine with it and may even enjoy it. He wins all the fights so I suppose he should embrace this dynamic. The GOP huffs and puffs. The “right-wing attack machine” goes into high gear. Then, Obama wins and he feels like a hero. Everybody is happy.

Alert: The Backlash™ Was Spotted

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This is a public notice to all of my readers. Reports are coming in that The Backlash™ was spotted near the internet safe zones of the University Illinois. Reports are still coming in, but it appears someone associated with the university may have said some mean things on Facebook about rampaging black students on that campus.

A Facebook page ostensibly created for an audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Illini White Students Union” has drawn fire after it characterized the national Black Lives Matter movement as “terrorism.”

Created Wednesday after a protest sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, the page declared itself “for white students of University of Illinois to be able to form a community and discuss our own issues as well as be able to organize against the terrorism we have been facing from Black Lives Matter activists on campus,” as the Daily Illini reported.

The page did not last long in its original incarnation, but was taken down after three hours. It has since been revived here.

“We recognize the right to free speech, and we encourage you to exercise that right when you see examples of racism, discrimination or intimidation on our campus,” Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson, who called the page “extremely disturbing,” wrote in a message Thursday to the student body.

Got that? When blacks go bananas on campus it is the most beautiful thing in the world. When a honky posts mean things on Facebook, well, they need to be stopped because they are extremely disturbing.

In an anonymous message to the News-Gazette, the page’s administrator discussed Black Lives Matter.

“We feel they disrupt student daily life and activity far too much,” the message read, saying that movement “marginalizes” white students. “… We are in the United States and not Africa and we don’t desire to have an African flag on campus.”

Given that there’s probably a 10-to-1 hoax to non-hoax ratio on campus, it is a good idea to assume the anonymous administrator here is a black guy, probably a professor at the university. Check that. Probably a black female professor. For some reason they are the most common perpetrator of hoaxes on campus. Even so, it is pretty tepid stuff.

A recent post was a clip from the 1998 film “American History X,” in which Edward Norton plays a white supremacist. In the clip, billed as “revelant to all Ferguson news,” Norton’s character denounces the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

“It’s a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go and loot a store, nothing more,” Norton says. “… Lincoln freed the slaves what, like, 130 years ago. How long does it take you to get your act together?”

The amusing part here is the quote is not actually on the page. Instead the WaPo reporter fished it out of the interwebs. If I were Steve Sailer, I’d assume that was not an accident.

While this was certainly eyebrow-raising, the original page was even more provocative.

“Feel free to send in pictures you take of any black protestors on the quad so we know who anti-whites are,” one message read, as FOX 55 reported.

According to a student reporter, protesters were particularly concerned that they were being targeted.

“One of the parts on the page particularly concerning to students is that they were taking pictures from the rally of the main quad and identifying students in attendance to identify the ‘anti-whites,’” Marijo Enderle, a 20-year-old senior at the university, said in a telephone interview. Enderle also pointed out that “there hasn’t been any indication that it has been a university student” who created the page.

My recommendation to the black lives matter types is they start wearing masks at their riots. Maybe dress up as the old Black Panthers and carry fake guns. That will scare those honky oppressors!

I like this closing bit from the WaPo story.

And in 1991, the New York Times discussed a similar group at the University of Minnesota.

“I have no desire to harm the non-white races,” senior Thomas A. David, who founded the group, said at the time. “I simply think it would help everyone to separate.” He added: “I don’t want to be a mud race in this country, and I will fight to the death against that.”

Again, If I’m Steve Sailer I wonder if this is code to let people know the reporter is not as batshit crazy as it would first appear. It’s the magic signal to let the outside world know he is being held against his will. If that last time The Backlash™ showed up was 1991 – 25 years ago – one has to wonder if maybe it really even exists. But, that’s crazy talk. We all know the greatest threat to humanity is The Backlash™. We have always been at war with The Backlash™.

Voting Nations

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The news brings word that Bobby Jindal has dropped out of the presidential race. I can’t say I had strong opinions about him one way or the other. He always struck me as one of the earnest strivers that infiltrated the GOP in the 90’s when the Boomers took over politics in America. These are men and women who planned their elections from the womb, tailoring their education and early employment with the sole focus on running for office.

The dominant feature of these modern politicians is the obsession with apple polishing. In school, they studied hard not so they could become educated. They studied hard so they could repeat to the instructor the answers that most pleased the instructor. Out of school, they became a toady for a local politician or maybe a judge. Having proven their skills at toadying, they moved up the party ranks getting prime appointments and then running for office on their own.

As politicians, they have carefully crafted positions that are designed to bore the voters into a trance. The idea is to curry favor with the locals, but not sound like a yahoo from the sticks. All of them dream of being president so that last part is critical. No thick accents. No local color. No nothing other than generic poll tested positions approved by the party and its donors.

That was the problem for Jindal in the primary field. He said all the same things the others said but did it sounding like the guy from accounting telling us how he saved money on envelopes. The worse part for Jindal is that Indians are a successful migrant group in America, so they don’t get any piety points. If Jindal were black or Hispanic, he probably would be in the thick of it trying to be the donor party candidate.

His other problem is regional. The GOP, like the Democrat Party, is run by people living in the Acela Corridor and financed by people in the great financial, cultural, and technological centers. Money men from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston own the two parties and exert a tremendous amount of influence over the management of the parties. The result is the leadership is Yankee and Midlands, with a few members from the other regions of the country.

Louisiana is one of those outlier regions that Woodard called New France, but most people think is Deep South. I’m not sure any state, outside of West Virginia, carries a worse reputation outside the South than Louisiana. The typical person in the Northeast, for example, thinks Louisiana is a place full or spindly legged rednecks speaking gibberish while wrestling alligators.

But, the Deep South, Tidewater, Appalachia, and the Far West have little say in the management of either party and that’s clear in these primaries. On the Democrat side, Clinton is a Midlander with Yankee predilections. Sanders is a Yankee Jew. Bill Clinton was probably the last national Democrat we will see those hails from outside Yankeedom or the Midlands.

The GOP field is similar. Trump is from New York and representative of what Woodard labeled New Holland. Carson is a Midlander. The Party Men may hail from areas outside the two dominant regions, but they reflect Yankee culture. Ted Cruz is perhaps the one exception. There’s an Appalachian dodginess to him that I can’t quite put my finger on with him. Regardless, the only member of the Deep South is Caitlyn Graham, and he is a joke.

For Democrats, it makes perfect sense for their party leaders to be from their strongholds. New England, the upper Midwest and the West Coast are where the Cult is strong, so it makes sense that they get their political talent from these areas. Modern Progressivism is the religion of Yankeedom now and to a lesser degree The Midlands. It makes sense that their leaders are the truest of true believers.

In the GOP things are different. They rely on votes from the Tidewater, South, Appalachia and the far west, yet they pick their leaders from Yankeedom and The Midlands. Boehner was from Ohio, but he represented a district with a strong Yankee culture. Look at the place names in his district. Hamilton, Fairfield, Middletown, Springfield, Eaton, Greenville, and Piqua are place names brought by the Yankee settlers from New England.

His replacement is a man from a state that votes just like Massachusetts. Paul Ryan would have been a moderate Democrat thirty years ago. If you look through the GOP leadership in both houses, you find very few people outside the two dominant regions. Mitch McConnell is the glaring exception, mostly because he is a glaring exception. Otherwise, the GOP is a Southern Party with Northern leaders.

Some of this is an accident of history. You rise up in a party by sticking around a long time. The American South just went fully to Republicans in the last generation. There’s a lot of young guys from these areas, while old farts from the dominant regions fill up the leadership jobs based on their seniority. Father Time will remedy this. But the time is rapidly approaching when the voters will not tolerate the foot dragging and deal cutting of the GOP leaders. Donald Trump says “Hello.”

Minnesota is a good place to use as an example. They have a deranged lunatic as governor. Mark Dayton has repeatedly said that people not in his cult should leave the state. Looking at the neighboring states in Yankeedom, one has to assume he is wildly out of step with the people. There’s also the fact that Trump is drawing huge crowds in these states, solely on the issue of immigration.

I’m trying to make a few points at the same time with this post so forgive the length. On the one hand, we see a sharp divide between Yankeedom and the rest of the country culturally. The Midlands is currently aligned with Yankeedom. The leaders of both parties are from these dominant regions. Demographics and the calendar say the GOP is about to break loose from the ruling coalition.

Parallel to that process is the one issue that seems to unify the nation and that’s immigration. The loopy logic of the Left does not do well outside the faculty lounge. The average person in Yankeedom is paranoid of outsiders and hostile to strangers. In the South, familiarity with diversity makes people wary of adding more of it. The one thing everyone agrees on is we don’t want any more immigrants.

Putting the two together you have one party that maybe can continue to dominate Yankeedom but is struggling with core issues that contradict the cultural instincts of the people. Open borders and multiculturalism sell very well in New England as long as they are not applied locally. Otherwise, the locals will look elsewhere for their political leaders. Again, Trump is running the table in New England, for example.

On the other side of the street, the GOP is soon to become a very southern and southwestern party. Mark Steyn famously said that the future belongs to those who show up and right now it is the people from these nations showing up to vote GOP. They will get leaders that reflect their values and desires. Cultural Marxism is not going to be on the table, but maybe a divorce will be in order.

What Comes Next

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Steve Sailer has an excellent column on how Europe can manage its Muslim lunatic problem. The other day, I made the point that the will of the people cannot be ignored forever. If the politicians can’t be made to do the people’s bidding, they will get new politicians. If the parties are too corrupt to produce the right politicians, then we get new parties. Ultimately, if the political system proves useless in dealing with threats, then the people get a new political system.

The French Revolution is the most common example of the people getting a new system. Through trial and error, they eventually got to the Second Republic. In America, the Constitution may still be the theoretical framework of the nation’s political system, but our government is nothing like it was 100 years ago or at the founding. As times change the political system changes, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently.

The changes Sailer discusses are changes in the political system. Implementing a system of collective guilt where the clan of a criminal pays for the crimes as opposed to the current method of punishing just the criminal, requires a radical change in the political system. Sailer is no doubt being facetious with this, but it is not far-fetched. There has to be a way to keep the peace and if the current arrangements cannot keep the peace, we will get new arrangements.

John Derbyshire the other day mocked up his chart of probable outcomes with regards to the immigration issue. It sounds reasonable if one assumes the political systems remain static and you reject other possible outcomes, like revolts, anarchy, pestilence, war, etc. The countries of Europe, for example, have not faced an invasion like this since Batu Khan stood at the Mohi River.

The political systems and cultural structures in place did not evolve to face invasion, at least not invasion from over the horizon. Europe is what it is today due to the internal forces of Europe. For instance, the authorities no longer wear uniforms and solute one another in public. Instead, they wear pants suits and grin like chimps, so no one thinks they are Hitler.

What John gets right is the math, which stands to reason. The math makes clear that the ruling elite’s desire to replace their native populations with foreign imports is doomed to failure. A critical mass of Muslims will simply force changes on the political system that either trigger revolts or sends the West spiraling into anarchy.

Take a look at the responses from Western governments to the latest Muslim attacks. Civic life is being sharply curtailed, and restrictions are being placed on citizens. All over Europe, large public events are being cancelled because they fear a Muslim may detonate and kill a bunch of spectators. The Germans government is telling people to avoid walking in large groups so as not be a target.

Today, the French president is out there welcoming 30,000 new suicide bombers into France. There’s simply no way they can keep importing Muslims and remain France. They know this, at some level, which is why they put in jail anyone who points it out. Holland says, “France will remain a country of freedom” unless you’re opposed to the Muslim invasion. Then it is not a free country.

Because the people in charge have defined themselves in such a way that open borders is the only option, they must implement these sorts of polices in order to prevent mayhem. The Muslims will adapt and find new ways to blow themselves up in public. That means new restrictions. This cycle can only go on for so long before even the most docile honky throws down his pacifier and picks up a rock.

It’s tempting to assume that whites are too timid and lost to fight back. Some are, for sure, but action in the streets has a funny way of bringing out the revolutionary in even old men. A big part of what plagues the West is there’s no place for men in modern societies. Rioting Muslim hoards in the streets suddenly will spike the demand for white males willing to crack skulls. The supply will soon follow.

History says this sort of large scale, transformative event washes away the old solutions for long ago problems. What comes next is something different. Again, Europe is politically and culturally alien to its past of just a century ago. Two great wars did that. An invasion by millions of Muslims will surely mean a different Europe, even if they beat back the tide.

That’s where John’s five scenarios falls down. Whatever comes next means the West stops being the West, politically and culturally. If it lets in the Muslim invaders, it becomes Muslim and follows the path of every other Muslim society into a dark age. Alternatively, it becomes a police state to keep the Muslims from killing everyone else. Or the West changes to beat back the tide and do what is now unthinkable.

Regardless, what comes next will something entirely different than what we are today.

Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth

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On the list of things you will never hear someone say is “Be careful with those gold bars. They are valuable.” The reason for that, one reason at least, is that everyone knows gold is valuable. It does not have to be explained to people that gold is valuable. It’s obvious.

That’s true of most things. If a thing has universal value, everyone knows it. That’s why they are valuable. Enough people want the thing, so its value rises compared to things that are less desirable. The exceptions are those oddities or specialty items that few know much about, but there are exceptions to everything.

The same is true of people. Anyone who has sat through a “down-sizing” session knows how it works. You look at the employee list and come up with a rule for cutting jobs that keeps the valuable people. Maybe you shuffle the deck so that those valuable people are moved to some new position in order to keep them. If it takes a long explanation as to why someone should be spared, they are not going to be missed.

That always comes to mind when stories like this one get my attention. If black lives really mattered, no one would need to say it. It would just be another item on the list of things everyone knows. Instead, we have this organization financed by a foreign criminal (why is he still alive?) desperately trying to prove to the rest of us that black lives matter.

To make matters worse, these protests are so futile that the activists feel it necessary to assault people in at their school, place of work or on public streets. Back in the summer these idiots were showing up at breakfast joints in SWPLville desperately trying to get people, who should be sympathetic, to pay attention. Instead, they just called the cops and added security.

If your argument needs this nonsense to have a chance of convincing anyone, it’s pretty safe to assume your argument is without merit. In this case that means black lives really don’t matter very much. In my neighborhood that’s obviously true as blacks shoot one another over sneakers all the time. They abandon their children, beat their women, and spend all of their time bringing shame to the black race. In the ghetto, black lives are worthless.

That’s fundamentally the problem with the black lives matters stuff. Instead of helping black people in some way, it just reminds everyone else how screwed up things are with black people. Here we have a library where students give a damn about their lives and, presumably, have enough self-respect to take their schooling seriously. They are stopped from being productive by a bunch of black people trying hard to be a burden on the rest of the campus.

This turns out to be the one time where campus life resembles the real world.

I’m no fan of inter-generational guilt or collective responsibility. You are responsible for you. You cannot pass onto your children the guilt of your deeds so that means your ancestors could not have done that to you. Holding white people in America responsible for the deeds of white people located here 200 years ago is madness. White people owe black people nothing more than they owe themselves as citizens.

But that’s the thing. Like it or not, black, white, red, brown, and yellow are here and we all have to get along as best as possible. As citizens, we have a duty to one another to work in concert so that all of us have a chance to make the most of what nature has given us. If that means special accommodations like affirmative action, well maybe that’s what’s best. I can live with it as it is a small price to pay for peace, assuming that’s what results.

There’s the problem and it is clear in that Black Lives Matter protest. Here we have unqualified blacks on the campus of Dartmouth, displacing better qualified Jews and Asians who would relish a chance at an Ivy League education. Instead of being grateful for the opportunity, these blacks are bitching and moaning, making a nuisance of themselves. Worse yet, they are interfering with the work of others.

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless er, Black Lives Matter activist!

In the end, this Black Lives Matter movement is going to be a disaster. More than a few white people I know have had enough of this stuff. People who would never say anything racist are suddenly sounding like John Derbyshire after one too many chardonnays. My bet is most of America is damned sick and tired of Black America sounding like ungrateful children. If black people want to find out their value, keep pissing off the rest of the people with this nonsense.

 

Not Welcome

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The pearl clutchers are no doubt scandalized by Trumps suggestion we shut down the terrorist training centers mosques in the US in light of the obvious fact that Muslims make terrible citizens of a civilized country. No one wants them here, outside of the suicidal lunatics in the elite, who may be the only people who hate the West more than ISIS.

There are over 50 majority Muslim countries practicing every conceivable brand of Islam. There’s no need to have them in America so let’s take all necessary steps to keep them out. That’s about as reasonable as one can expect, given the circumstances. If you have rats in your house you want the rats removed and the access points they are using to be closed.

The counter argument is that only small number of Muslims will go bonkers and commit mass murder. Diversity is so important that we have to just accept a few 9/11-scale terror attacks a year in order to welcome Muslims into America. The absurdity of that is evident right here in this news story from Florida.

A Muslim family said Sunday that they might be victims of a hate crime after shots were fired into their Orlando house.Amir and Nehal Elmasri said when they returned home to their gated community from feeding the homeless Sunday morning, they noticed a bullet hole in their garage door. The family said that the bullet went through their garage and into their master bedroom.

It’s obvious these people are lying from this alone. Feeding the homeless? Really? Can you come up with a more ham-fisted lie? But, the low-IQ nitwits running CAIR just assume you will believe this nonsense because they see it work on TV. It’s why Muslims overseas will decorate a bomb site with children’s corpses from the local morgue. They know the gullible dopes in the western media will fall for it.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Florida said that it is investigating the case with their attorneys to determine whether the family was targeted.

“The American Muslim community has faced severe backlash™ since the Paris terror attacks,” said Rasha Mubarak with CAIR Florida. “There have been two death threats to local mosques in Central Florida alone.”

Nehal Elmasri said that she and her daughter wear traditional hijabs in public, adding that it’s obvious for anyone to be aware of their Muslim faith.

A century ago, Irish immigrants were ashamed of their co-ethnics bad behavior so they worked hard to self-police and prove they belonged. Jews made a deliberate effort to get out of crime, sports and other low-class activities in order to prove their value to America. Muslims can’t bring themselves to condemn their coreligionists and instead blame Americans. Why would we invite this?

I would prefer it if we didn’t have angry mobs chasing Muslims out of our communities. I don’t want to see people shooting up mosques or attacking Muslims on our streets. I just don’t want to see Muslims on our streets. I don’t want a mosque in my city. I don’t see any reason to be inviting these troubles onto our shores. Therefore, I want my government to take the necessary steps to let every Muslim know they are not welcome here.

Baltimore City has topped 300 murders this year. It is a smallish city so that’s a big number. The cops are standing aside, letting the crooks run wild because the politicians refuse to back the cops against the crooks. What in the hell do they think will happen when they import 10,000 Syrian Muslims? Why in the world would anyone call down more madness on their head?

CAIR looks at Western leaders and sees nothing but weakness and stupidity. That’s why they roll out these canned tales of backlash™ after every terrorist attack. They think we are stupid because our rulers appear to be stupid. If you are a Muslim and you see that America twice elected an effeminate man with an Arabic name as president, why would you fear America?

A truth of life is the will of the people wins out eventually, unless you are prepared to slaughter the people. If the people cannot get satisfaction from their political leaders, they will elect new ones. That’s why Trump and to a lesser degree Carson are doing so well in the GOP primary. It’s not so much what they say or who they are; it is what they are not.

If the people cannot find satisfaction within the current system, they will look outside the system. First it is party outsiders and then it is outsider parties. There’s no reconciling Islam with western society. If the politicians cannot accept it, then we will get new politicians. If the political system cannot accommodate this, then we get a new system, one that allows for the shuttering of mosques and the deportation of Muslims.

Islam is a fine religion that brings peace to millions of people around the world. It’s simply incompatible with western civilization. The people who practice Islam want things that are antithetical to western liberalism. Therefore, there can be no mixing of the two. The Mohammedan has to stay in one of the 50 countries that practice Islam and the western liberals must stay in the West. It is why we have separate countries.

How Much Longer?

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One of my moonbat friends, let’s call him Goldfinger, is right now wringing his hands over what he is sure will be worse than any terrorist attack. That thing he fears is the response to the latest Muslim barbarism in the streets of a Western city. The bodies are not even cold, and our domestically produced lunatics are ranting about the bogeymen they imagine are lurking in the bushes waiting for them.

Goldfinger got his nickname because the day after 9/11 he posted a gassy essay about how an irrational fear of Muslim terrorism would lead Americans to suddenly become Islamophobic. The text, which is no longer available so you will have to take my word for it, read like a manifesto from a super villain in a 60’s spy thriller. The only thing missing was a demand for one million dollars. Hence the Goldfinger moniker.

It’s tempting to think that these people are a) sociopaths incapable of empathy, b) so obsessed with their cause everything is warped into supporting it, c) crazy or d) some combination of all three. Read this demented nonsense from Salon and it is hard not to pick the last two options.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, Nedd Ludd points out that the NYTimes is flooded with comments from readers trying to shift the focus from the events in Paris to whatever hobbyhorse they think is more important. At this point, it is hard to think it is anything other than a biological response. An integral part of the Progressive response to the world is to shift the focus away from them and onto something else.

It’s baffling to normal people, for example, when they see liberals stutter and spit at the ideal of calling these things terrorism or Islamic terrorism. How is it possible they cannot see what is manifestly obvious? The answer is they do see it and a lot more, which is why they impulsively try to change the subject, even if they look foolish doing it.

You see, the Progressive religion that has evolved over the last half dozen generations shares much with Islam, including the thirst for blood. Look at the heroes of the American Left. The Weathermen were planting bombs blowing up innocent people. The Black Panthers were a racist murder squad. The SDA existed to start riots on campus so they could burn down buildings and assault their enemies.

Barak Obama was sponsored in politics by two former Weathermen, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Obama has repeatedly said he is the man he is today because of these two people. The only material difference between the Weathermen and the guys who executed yesterday’s attack is that the later was better at it than the sniveling punks from the 70’s.

When Muslim nutters go bonkers and murder a bunch of people, guys like Obama wish they had been able to do it. They grew up hearing the stories from their elders and always wished they had been given the chance to blow up a recruiting center or shoot a security guard in a bank robbery.

What they know that you don’t know is they envy these Muslim terrorists, and they don’t want that revealed so they quickly shift the focus from this topic to something else, like the mythological backlash. That way no one will notice that they are both giddy at the sight of it and envious that they are not part of it.

Of course, the natural response of Progressives under all circumstances is the say, “Let’s talk about what’s wrong with you.” No matter the topic, that’s what they are thinking. If you ask about the weather, they will shift the conversation from that to why you insist on driving an SUV and voting Republican.

In these cases, however, the events strike too close to home so that’s why we see the panicked attempts to shift the focus to hate speech and white privilege.  Even when it is dismissed, the conversation moves from the dangerous – the similarities between Progressivism and Islam – to the general craziness of back bench lunatics writing for Salon.

That Salon piece is what you see on Islamic websites. Right now, there are stories in Arabic claiming this Paris attack is an attempt by the Mossad to get Europe more involved in the Near East in support of Israel against the faithful. It’s completely insane, but it beats talking about reality. You don’t join a cult because you enjoy reality.

If you are a Frenchman, even one wedded to the three pillars of the New Religion, and you are standing on a street corner watching the aftermath of a suicide bomber, you have two choices. You either volunteer to wear the next vest or you volunteer to shoot the guy in the vest.

If you are that same Frenchman sitting in your flat watching this on TV maybe you don’t think those are your choices. Maybe you think there’s some third choice. The reality is that there is no third choice. There’s just the distance between now and when you are forced to choose.

The questions in front of us today, in the general sense, are how much longer we can tolerate being ruled by a deranged religious cult and how much longer we will tolerate it. The mass exodus from Muslim lands is due to the collapse of Islam as a coherent organizing force. The same thing is happening in the West, except that the West has a vast store of wealth on which to live, even though the raison d’être is no longer obvious to anyone.