Category Archives: Immigration

The New Normal

Posted on by

A feature of modern life is the public act of grief after a “mass casualty event” like a flood or an Exploding Mohamed Occurrence. Once things settle down, the people in charge gather up for a parade or a ceremony at which they show everyone just how upset they are at what happened. The media makes a big deal of it and the public is encouraged to pretend it is a big deal. Then everyone goes back to what they were doing and we forget all about it.

In the Bronze Age, public acts of piety were common. In fact, they were a necessary part of the life of the polity. The ruler would participate in rituals in order to show the people he was in good with the gods and that he was sufficiently pious. It is argued that Cyrus the Great was able to defeat Babylon because the Babylonian king, Nabonidus, was not participating in these rituals, therefore his people welcomed the conquerors.

Today we don’t have our leaders slaughter a bull to the gods or do something interesting with virgins. Instead, our rulers invite barbarians onto our countries to slaughter us, so the rulers can then come out and show their piety. After the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence in Belgium, the European “leaders” had the typical ceremony.

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur has led a minute’s silence in Paris with his French counterpart Anne Hidalgo.

The memorial for victims of the Brussels and Lahore attacks came exactly a week after explosions at the airport and on the metro killed 35 people in the Belgian capital.

“There is no more normal,” Mayeur warned. “This is a concept that needs to be redefined. We are in a different era and we need to live in this dimension and keep believing that our model of an open, multicultural city such as Paris, Brussels, London or New York, this is what we want to be. This is the future and that is the message I wanted to bring.”

Notice that expelling the Muslims is not an option? Notice that repelling the Muslims is never an option. Instead, we have to just accept this “new normal” where strange men with beards suddenly explode in public places. If Volkswagen made cars that exploded at the same rate as Muslims, the president of the company would be in jail and the company in bankruptcy. But the religion of multiculturalism overrides everything, including civil defense.

We are well past the point where this reckless behavior by the elites can be explained as simply mistaken. That quote makes clear that even the dullest politicians understand that a world of open borders is a future where the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence is going to be like the Windows game Minesweeper. Tick the wrong box and it is game over for you and your family. But you being blown to bits or having your daughter raped is the price you pay so they can have their public vigils.

Increasingly, this is where the evidence points. The Revolt of the Elites has as one manifestation a compulsion by the managerial class to create technocratic solutions to social problems. Given that the big issues of scarcity have been conquered, they are unconsciously creating new life threatening problems so they can solve them. I suppose we should be grateful that it is just Exploding Mohameds and not a new form of the Black Death.

The one thing George Bush said that was correct was that the job of government is to keep the people safe. Ultimately, settled people have tolerated hierarchical government where a minority rules the majority because of safety. For the overwhelming majority of people, a peaceful life of poverty beats a turbulent life, even one of prosperity. Most Americans would choose to be pets to a race of super intelligent chimps if it meant safety and comfort.

The bet being made today by the people in charge is you will accept a world of Exploding Mohameds. They will build out the custodial state, cameras on every block, even in homes, cops reviewing your twitter feed and the elimination of personal privacy, all in the name of safety. Every time a Mohamed goes off in a public space, the rulers will rush around acting like it is something they wish to prevent, while using it as a reason to slowly slam the cage door shut on the natives.

The problem here is that history has no example of this working. In every case where the people in charge have failed in their basic duties, the people in charge ended up dead oir fleeing for their lives. Maybe the technological revolution is allowing a break from historic trends. Maybe the people in charge can play this weird game of human chess and remain immune from the consequences. It is, however, not the way to bet.

Exploding Mohameds

Posted on by

The other day HBD Chick posted this link on twitter. It is an article about how the Exploding Mohameds (henceforth referred to as EM’s) in Brussels had detailed floor plans to the Belgian Prime Minister’s residence and his offices. The implication is that the EM’s were at least considering an attack on the head of government. We will never know as the EM’s are dead and the security state will never tell us anyway.

My thought when reading it is that I am a bit disappointed, but I am mildly hopeful. It is too bad that the EM’s did not go ahead and blow up the official offices of the Belgian government, rather than an airport. The people at the airport are mostly innocent. The people in the Belgian government are the ones responsible for the Muslim invasion so they should be the ones paying the price for it.

It will only take one EM to go off and kill a politician, I suspect, for opinions to change. The EM’s in Paris went off near the place where French President Francois Hollande was watching a soccer match. He suddenly got religion, so to speak, about cracking down on the Muzzies, at least for a little while. Have a few pols actually blown to bits and my hunch is we see official attitudes change. It is easy to preach sacrifice when someone else is picking up the tab.

The window for putting a halt to the invasion and driving the Muslims out of the West is closing. A committed minority population goes from too small to worry about to too large to do anything about in the blink of an eye. Just look at America. About 20% of the population belongs to the Cult of Modern Liberalism, but they run the country and have done so for a few generations now. They have a veto over what can be said in public, which grants them total control of society.

Let us look at Germany as an example of the Islamification of Europe. It is a population of eighty million with a fertility rate of 1.47. To understand how this works, let us pretend that in 2010 the whole population was of childbearing age. Their fertility rate means the eighty people produce fifty-six million children. That population will produce thirty-nine million children. One more turn of the wheel and you are down to twenty-seven million children. The point here is that once fertility rates drop below replacement, the population drops quickly.

Now, the population of Germany is not all of childbearing years. The median age is forty-seven and that includes the five million non-Germans Muslims who are in their 20’s with fertility rates over 4.0. The number of actual Germans under the age of twenty-five is twenty million. Throw in those who will possibly have children into their 30’s and you have roughly twenty-five million Germans with a chance to make new Germans. That 1.47 fertility rate looks pretty grim all of a sudden.

On the other hand, those five million Muslims are all young, median age of thirty now. The million or so who have poured in recently are in their 20’s. The history of migration tells us that first the men arrive, then they bring in their wives and children. With a 4.0 fertility rate, those five million Muslims can produce ten million children, which leads to twenty million grandchildren. That fertility rate of 4.0 suddenly looks like a very powerful weapon.

The point here is the math is now working against the German people. They have about a decade or so to figure out how to end the Muslim invasion and de-Islamify their current foreign population. Given that the German political class is emotionally committed to the destruction of the German people, there is no reasoning with them. No reasonable people would invite these problems so it is irrational to think reason will have effect on them.

On the other hand, if Exploding Mohameds start going off in swank ruling class areas like restaurants, offices and government buildings, which could change some minds. Have a few high level pols feel the full force of a nail bomb like those poor folks at the airport in Brussels and suddenly the people in charge will have to re-evaluate their situation. As is the case with all aspects of multiculturalism, it looks great from a distance, but when it explodes in your office or at your kid’s school, it is not so much fun.

This will not end well.

Killing the King

Posted on by

In the olden thymes, a mad king presented the elite with a dilemma. Violating the system for naming a king by, say, voting to remove the king, would introduce dangerous ideas into the system. At the same time, willy-nilly removing the king undermines the whole point of having a king and a line of succession. It was always the critical flaw in hereditary monarchy. What do you do when the king is a liability?

For the benignly mad king, the answer was to work around him until he went to meet his maker. His counselors, maybe his wife or even his mother would make the decisions while the mad king was maintained for ceremonial reasons. Once a suitable replacement was available, like a son or a brother, then the mad king would choke on his dinner or fall of a horse. Everyone could pretend it was a natural transition and there was no need to question anything.

At the other end, the malignant king, the tyrant who was sane enough to to perform his duties, but mad enough to cause great harm, was a serious problem. Often, the tyrant is smart enough and paranoid enough to eliminate obvious replacements, thus buying himself some life insurance. Eventually, the risk of keeping the tyrant in power is greater than the leap into the unknown and the mad king falls of his horse or eats a bad apple and he is dead.

The take away here is two-fold. One is the madness of the ruler or the ruling class is only important if it puts the ruling class interests at risk and it has to be a critical mass of them at risk. Killing one noble is tolerable. Threaten 25% of them and you have a revolt brewing. Caligula did not get himself in trouble merely because he started killing the beautiful people in Rome. His mismanagement threatened the general welfare and risked a general revolt. The financial crisis of 38 AD resulted in a famine, which was a direct threat to the system.

Pandora John William Waterhouse

Pandora John William Waterhouse

The other takeaway is that when left with a choice between near certain death or ruin and some unknown outcome, people will choose the latter, even people with a lot to lose. It’s the only rational choice. If the status quo means a 99% chance of destruction and killing the king opens a range of possible outcomes, some good and some terrible, the numbers favor killing the king. In fact, they make regicide a moral duty.

Killing the king, however, is really not a solution. The leap into the unknown is opening Pandora’s box. It has often led to the demise of the ruling class. The assassination of Caesar was arguably the great mistake of Roman history. Waiting the guy out probably would have turned out better for the Roman elite, but they could not see what was over the horizon.

In theory, representative democracy was supposed to solve this problem. If David Cameron starts doing things that make him a liability, his own party will abandon him, because they know they will face the voters eventually. If one party goes bonkers, like the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, then the party collapses. The ruling class competes with one another and the audience votes on who wins each little skirmish.

For the most part, this has worked out well for the English speaking world. In these countries, the ruling elite has supported the system where the general population gets a say in the management of the country. Europe is another matter. The ruling classes of the Continent have never bought into the concept. The European Union, after all, is mostly a way around the local legislatures and the will of the people.

Europe operating as a market-state without external threats and a pacified population gave the ruling class of Europe the sense that this arrangement would work long term. Then the king went crazy and flung open the doors to Muslim invaders. Initially, this was not a problem as the ruling class lives in bunkered enclaves, removed from the consequences of their polices. They have no reason to care if the train stations are carnivals and rape and assault by the dusky sons of Mohamed.

**Note: There was a pic I grabbed on-line but the person who took the pic and some other members of the OCD community took issue with my use of it. These are folks who can’t see the forest through the trees and want to spend all day haggling over meaningless details. I have no time for this so I removed the pic. My apologies to the OCD community. I will forever avoid noticing them so this sort of mistake does not happen again**

But, the people have noticed that their liberties are slowly and methodically being curtailed in the name of public safety. When you can only enjoy a traditional parade from behind barricades and armed soldiers, you’re going to start having dark thoughts about the people who caused it

When you have to start putting your wife and daughter on a segregated train car, for fear the Muslims may rape them or simply go crazy seeing an uncovered female head, the mad king is no longer a man for whom you will pledge allegiance. When the king cancels the “March Against Fear” out of fear of offending the invaders, it’s hard to love the king. Instead, you start thinking it is time to kill the king. It’s either him, or you, no matter what comes next.

Language Wars

Posted on by

I’m fond of pointing out that language is the currency of a culture. Charlemagne figured out that if you can control the currency, you can turn your economy into a weapon against rivals. Seigniorage had the benefit of making the crown wealthy, but control of the mint allowed the King to stabilize the economic life of his kingdom, thus attracting foreign investment. King Offa of Mercia figured this out around the same time.

Similarly, radicals figured out that if you control the language, you can control the politics of a society. This can be as simple as picking an appealing name for a cause or as complicated as reframing an issue so that their preferred option appears to be the default, thus putting traditionalists on their heels. The use of rhetorical sleight of hand allows the radicals to set the terms of public debate, thus giving themselves an enormous edge.

The Vox story from the other day I used as a jumping off point for some good old fashioned Merkel bashing is a good example. By focusing on the fact that the exploding jihadist are technically citizens of their host countries, the radical can both muddy the waters and shift the focus. Instead of talking about the guys named Mohamed suddenly exploding in public places, the debate can be shifted to other topics like racism and xenophobia.

Open borders, which is a central part of the new radical ideology that is replacing old fashioned Progressive ideology, is relying on the same old tricks to warp the language. Illegal invaders are called “refugees” and helot labor is re-branded as “guest workers” to make it sound better. The point is to give them a pleasing name. After all, only Hitler would be hostile to refugees and guests.

Of course, there are two big problems with selling the New Religion of a borderless world to the citizens of the western countries. One is that many of the people on the other side of the border are savages. There’s no hiding the daily atrocities that are just a normal part of Muslim life.The other problem is that Muslims have a habit of exploding in public places, like airports and train stations.

People tend to notice these things. When you are walking to the train station, you may not notice the Hungarians or Ukrainians. The Greek or Italian will stand out in Sweden, but are otherwise of no interest. The guy screaming “Allahu Akbar!” before he explodes is going to leave impression, assuming you live through it. People have figured out the the Mohamed-to-Suicide Bomber Index.

What to do?

The solution is to re-brand the exploding Mohamed as a citizen. This NY Magazine article is a pretty good example of how the radical utopians are trying the muddy the waters to obscure reality. Instead of asking why Mohamed keeps exploding, the story  is “why are so many citizens of Western countries going on jihad?” We’re supposed to believe that ISIS is now loaded with gingers from Ireland, I guess.

The associated chart is here:

CeRb9VBWsAArv0n

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The article does not bother to look into these numbers. The Russians on the list, for example, are Chechen warriors, who have a long history of being a sort of Varangian Guard for Arab potentates. The French are almost certainly Algerians. The Germans are Turks and Moroccans. The Canadians are the little mushroom people of Nova Scotia, known for their tunneling skills.

The point here is that instead of looking at the data with clarity, the effort is to obscure. Let’s not notice that second and third generations Muslims are prone to Sudden Jihad Syndrome. That’s an argument against the importation of Muslims. Instead, the effort is to pretend that these are nice boys who become disaffected and go off in search of belonging and purpose.

This is why guys like Trump and Geert Wilders are so horrifying to the globalist fanatics. They make observations and statements that are clarifying. When they point out that Muslims do poorly in the West and are a massive burden on their host countries, it makes the arguments for open borders sound ridiculous. How can anyone justify importing people who peak at being welfare spongers? Why risk the two or three percent that suddenly explode?

The flip side of this is that it is crucial to never surrender the language to the radicals. They are extremely good at this game so it is hard to win these battles, but they must be won. As soon as we stop talking about the ethnic and religious aspects to terrorism, we have accepted it as a part of our daily life. This is an unnecessary elective cost no society should incur just so managerial elites can get some grace.

The End of Doyle

Posted on by

This is what national suicide looks like.

A man who tweeted about stopping a Muslim woman in the street yesterday, challenging her to “explain Brussels”, and lambasted on Twitter for his comments, has responded to the criticism today, insisting he is not some ‘far right merchant’.

Matthew Doyle, partner at a south London-based talent & PR agency, posted a tweet on Wednesday morning saying: “I confronted a Muslim woman in Croydon yesterday. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said ‘nothing to do with me’. A mealy mouthed reply.”

He was later arrested.

At some point, people figure out that posting a complaint on twitter is the same as punching someone in the face so they will start doing the latter. In fact, this man should have just punched the woman and walked away. The chances of him being arrested would have been lower. That’s how things are under an anarcho-tyranny. The cops only reach for the low hanging fruit.

His tweet referred to yesterday’s bomb attacks on the Belgian capital’s main airport and Metro system that left at least 34 people dead and 198 injured. His comment went viral, being retweeted hundreds of times before he eventually deleted it.

Mr Doyle told the Telegraph he had no idea his tweet would be the “hand grenade” it has proven to be – and that Twitter’s 140 character limit made the encounter sound vastly different to how he thought it went.

“What everyone’s got wrong about this is I didn’t confront the woman,” he said. “I just said: ‘Excuse me, can I ask what you thought about the incident in Brussels?'”

“She was white, and British, wearing a hijab – and she told me it was nothing to do with her.

“I said ‘thank you for explaining that’ – and her little boy said goodbye to me as we went out separate ways.”

On Wednesday afternoon, he says, someone who’s been outraged by his comments “turned up at my door, gave me a load of abuse and tried to throw a punch at me.”

This is predictable. When you start groveling, people naturally assume you will not fight back. Every guy who wants to signal his membership in the cult comes calling so they can take a poke at you, showing their coreligionists they are a true believer. It’s a low-cost act of public piety.

As for his more inflammatory tweets, Mr Doyle claims they’re intended as a joke, which people who know him would understand as “that’s absolutely not who I am.”

“I’m not some far-right merchant, I’m not a mouthpiece for any kind of racism or radicalism,” he says. “If I was xenophobic I wouldn’t live in London.

“I have a Muslim neighbour who got burgled, and I was one of the first people to go around to help.”

What this man is failing to grasp is he can never be forgiven for his crimes. No amount of groveling will get him off the hook. You see, all mass movements need bogeymen. They cannot exist without them. The suicide cult of multiculturalism can never forgive guys like this because he is their oxygen. He is the face of the thing against which they struggle. When the multi-cult starts forgiving the sinners, their movement is finished.

This is also why multiculturalism cannot exist in a free society. Inevitably, the people of Rotterdam notice that the swarthy fellows are raping a lot of white girls. The folks in Minneapolis notice that the Somali girls are disappearing. The people in Westphalia start to notice the migrant crime wave and the unwillingness of the police to go into those neighborhoods. Once people start noticing, they inevitable start saying it in public.

This forces the state to choose sides. The people who invited the problem into your neighborhood are certainly not going to take your side over the migrants, so men like Mr. Doyle get picked up by the police and humiliated in order to send a message. The next guy tempted to speak up will think to himself, “I have a family. I can’t end up like Doyle. Maybe I’ll just think of something else.”

Of course, this just emboldens the Muslims. They see it as weakness so they become even more provocative. In short order, another Doyle is on twitter complaining about some “Asian” men who harassed his wife and daughter at the train station. The police then pick up this new Doyle and we never see him again. The train station is now part of the Caliphate and the Doyles of the world steer clear of it.

As I keep pointing out, there’s always a reaction and we are seeing that all over as fringe candidates and parties begin to fill the void left by the legitimate candidates and parties. The fellas at Pegida or Soldiers of Odin will soon figure out that petitioning their rulers for redress is a waste of time. Instead, they will take up the tactics of the Mohammedan. After all, success breeds imitators. Burning down migrant centers will soon move to blowing up mosques.

It will not end well

True Believers

Posted on by

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know a theme here is that people are more often driven by irrational belief than cold hard reason. Evolutionary biology tells us the belief is one of the oldest cognitive traits, probably co-evolving with language. The quest for salvation, grace and glory are at the heart of human history, because they are the things that drive men to dominate other men.

In the current age, formal religion based on the supernatural has mostly fallen away. Look at the empty churches across what we used to call Christendom and it is hard not to see the West as post-Christian. With some exceptions, the leaders of the free world, as we used to call the West, are secular men and women, lacking any identifiable attachment to a Christian sect. The exceptions are usually attached to modern sects that have found a way to wrap Christianity around the core of Rousseau-ist theology.

This “secularization” does not mean that men are less fanatical or lack belief. It just means it is untethered from the traditional constraints of organized religion. Christianity was particularly good at modulating belief, as well as directing it into useful habits. Of course, the Catholic Church was very good at rooting out the dangerous fanatics. The suppression of the flagellants is a good example and one relevant to our current age.

My favorite example, as an aside, is Konrad Schmidt, who claimed to be Frederick II and baptized himself in the blood of his followers. His band of fanatics abandoned their normal lives and spent their days praying in preparation for Judgment Day. The Inquisition had them burned at the stake before they caused too much trouble. For most of human history, people understood that the unhinged fanatic was more dangerous than the barbarian at the gate.

It is one of the many things we seem to have forgotten in the modern age. The bombings in Belgium once again remind us that the fanatic is the most serious threat to human civilization. I don’t mean the fanatics who self-detonated in the airport. I mean the fanatics who invited them into the West and now demand that we invite ever more of them into our lands. The bodies are still warm and the open borders fanatics are demanding even more immigration.

Read that Vox article and the only conclusion is that the writer is so committed to open borders she can no longer accept reality. Instead, she is forcing reality into the world she believes is just over the next hill, the fulfillment of prophesy. Amanda Taub may be harmlessly crazy, but the people running Western countries are just as unhinged as she is over the topic of immigration. Open borders is now a religion for these people. They will die for it, or at least let you die for it.

What other conclusion can be drawn from current events?

There’s no economic argument for importing foreigners. Wages in Western countries have been flat for decades. There are no unfilled jobs that can only be filled by foreigners. The demand for unskilled labor is falling, as automation take over in the West. Importing millions of illiterate young men who have no usable skills and the IQ of a grapefruit adds nothing but a burden to the economies of the West.

The other side of this is who has ever heard someone demand that their town or village invite foreign settlement? Were the residents of Amsterdam demanding their government fill up their city with Moroccans? Were Germans in Frankfurt organizing rallies in the 80’s demanding the importation of Turks? Did the people of Lewiston Maine ever get a chance to vote on the importation of Somalis?

Of course not. There never has been a practical reason to import foreigners into the West, much less hostile, low-IQ savages from the Middle East. Whatever contributions have been made to the Belgian economy by Muslims were just blown to bits by a pair of suicide bombers. There are now rivers of blood because the leadership of Europe has been overrun by what looks increasingly like a suicide cult.

Angela Merkel, who will be remembered as one of history’s greatest monsters, is a good example to study. This piece on her from a few months ago walks you through her “evolution” from mundane Christian lady to a prominent deacon is what amounts to liberation theology, centered on the annihilation of the West as penance for generations of oppression.

Merkel is not alone, of course. The religion of the West, at least for the people in charge, is the toxic blend of egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. The more the bodies stack up, the more they are convinced they must somehow atone for the sins of the West. Each new blast renews their faith. There’s no reasoning with them and there is no bargaining with them. They are true believers.

No Country for the New Men

Posted on by

Going by my own experiences, my sense is Europeans fall into three groups with regards to the Muslim invasion of Europe. There are those who are moderately xenophobic about the whole thing and are not afraid to say it, even if they are called Hitler for their trouble. These are people who have long ago grown tired of explaining the basics of human behavior to their betters so they no longer bother. They just oppose immigration. These are the Old Europeans.

The second group are those who are emotionally moved by immigration to the point where they seek out positive immigration stories in their news so they can feel good about it. They see a story of a European being kind to a migrant and they are filled by a warm glow, like the feeling you get when you drink liquor on a cold day. Like the first group, these people no longer bother explaining their position. If you do not get it, you are probably a racist so who cares what you think?

These are folks who call themselves New Europeans, but like everything else about them, that is a lie. Their imagined future does not include Europeans. Instead, it is a mythical world where dusky fellows speaking gibberish operate the machinery of Western civilization, without any of the hard work and intellect that is required to maintaining it. The European is just an avatar, forever basking in the grace of the world he created for the benighted.

There is a third group that never gets into the news, because they do not participate in the great debates over the Muslim invasion. At least they do not show up on the street waving banners or on the television screaming at members of the other group. This is the silent majority, so to speak. Most Europeans are in this group and most would just as soon never discuss this issue. These are the New Men of the New Europe.

On the one hand, generations of hectoring by the beautiful people have made these folks instinctively fearful of being lumped in with the xenophobes and racists. They do not think about it. Like trained animals, they simply react to commands. Their logical parts can hear the arguments against immigration, comprehend them and agree with them, until they hear the cry “racism” and they hit the panic button, erasing everything they have in their mind on the topic.

On the other hand, these folks look at the trial of Geert Wilders and they know this cannot end well. Whatever one wants to say about his positions or how he goes about stating them, you cannot have a civilized country while throwing people in jail for holding an opinion. The only difference between what the fascist did and what is happening now is the fascists were honest about it. The Dutch authorities are slathering on a frosting of lies to go along with their thuggery.

The New European has grown accustomed to working out these contradictions. It is what defines him. There is always a good reason for not joining on one side or the other. Generations of abuse by their betters have left them unable to look their betters in the eye. At the same time, generations of groveling have made them too weak in the fight against the xenophobes. They are dispensable Europeans.

And they are being dispensed with at an accelerating pace. When European leaders are not coming up with news reasons to snuff out their own people, the Muslims are taking a more basic approach to clearing out towns and villages they would like to occupy. Set off enough bombs and those still alive get the message. That message is, “You’re not welcome. This is our country now.”

There are dozens of families who will never see their loved ones again, thanks to the leaders of Europe. They created this. They invited this and they refuse to address it. They want that warm feeling so bad they are willing to sacrifice as many of their people as is necessary to get it. Like heroin addicts, they cannot get enough of the opiate of multiculturalism. It is always more and more, while life gets worse and worse.

The New European Man will read these words and wave them off. “Our leaders will figure it out eventually. They are just trying to do the right thing, the humanitarian thing.” That is what is called wishful thinking, the thing you cling to when you got nothing else or you are unwilling to consider anything else. It is why the New European Man will not be a part of what comes next for Europe. They may not even be in the stands for the big game.

The Muslims have figured out that European leaders are paper tigers. They will not fight. Eventually, the xenophobes will figure this out as well. The guys joining Pegida, Sons of Odin and similar groups will learn the same lessons the Muslims have learned. Then they will adopt the same tactics. This is a civilizational disaster unless the New European Men figure out that the future belongs to those who show up.

Alternative für Deutschland

Posted on by

Americans always struggle understanding the politics of continental Europe. For starters, the European Right has usually sounded like the American Left, while the Euro Left has sounded like the faculty lounge at Oberlin College. For my European readers, Oberlin is an insane asylum in Ohio. Buckley Conservatives may not have been sincere in their goals, but they put a lot of effort into sounding like small government, Classical Liberals.

Of course, there has also been this weird phrasing that Americans are just now adopting. That is the phrase “extreme far right” that is always center stage, ironically, in European political discussions. The “far left” never gets mentioned. Stalin is never described as “far left” but Hitler is “far right” even though he was a socialist. This has always been confusing to Americans, but we are catching up. Donald Trump is now far-right.

Then there are the political figures. In America, we hold veterans in very high regard, maybe too high, so military service is a good thing for politicians. In Europe, military men command little respect compared to other vocations. In America, we like it when someone goes from rags to riches. Therefore, we like politicians with humble origins. Europeans prefer men and women from the aristocratic and academic backgrounds.

As a result, unsophisticated Americans, like myself, have found European politics a bit murky. Well, that used to true. Americans can now relate to what our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic are experiencing in their politics. The evil Donald Trump is smashing up the political class with his extreme right-wing populism. Across the pond, extreme right-wing parties across Europe are smashing up their respective political classes. It is springtime for Hitlers and they are blossoming across the West.

The most stunning development, the one that has good thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic in a panic, is the sudden rise of Alternative für Deutschland, an extreme right-wing extremist party of the most extreme right-wing kind. Led by the elfin Frauke Petry, this new party rang up surprisingly large vote totals, exclusively on the issue of immigration, particularly opposition to the Merkel policy of Islamification of Germany.

In addition to the ruling class Hitler fantasies, Americans and Germans now appear to have two things in common. One is that the political classes in both countries have displayed a staggering disregard for public welfare in their pursuit of personal salvation. Merkel out posing for selfies with refugees is as tone deaf as Republicans demanding open borders and amnesty for tens of millions of illegals. Cui bono?

The responsibility of the people put in charge, their chief responsibility, is to maintain public order. You cannot have a civilized and prosperous society with civil unrest. Deliberately inviting in these problems, as we see with Merkel in German and the open borders lobbies in America, is a betrayal of the public trust. In another age, the elites would not have to fear these populist parties as the people would have hung the elites before it got to this point.

The other overlap and the most important to consider is the source of support for these extreme right-wing far right extremist movements. Alternative für Deutschland is decidedly middle-class. It has the nickname “the professors party” because its founders were mostly academics. It is vote is coming from middle-class Germans who work in professions. It is support is also overwhelmingly male at this time, with some estimates at 85% male. This is a point that will become central to our future political debates.

Smart people have figured out who is voting for Donald Trump and the thing that jumps out is that Trump has broad-based support across the American middle-class. In fact, he is the candidate of middle America right now. Despite all the hooting and hollering about his angry voters, his rallies look like the crowd at Little League baseball games in a typical American suburb. His issues are also directly aimed at the middle.

Like AfD, Trump is drawing in male voters who have dropped out of the process, but also males who have thrown in the towel on the main parties. Current estimates suggest a 2-to-1 ratio male-to-female for Trump. This is not an accident. German culture has seen the same war on men we have seen in America. German men were literally told they had to urinate sitting down. When you have to get permission from a judge to take a whiz, you’re going to begin to think the people in charge are against you.

One last thing, related to the middle-class nature of these movements, is how the elites are responding. Instead of co-opting the issues, they are trying to link these movements to bogeymen like Pegida and the KKK. That is a telling response and suggests the ruling classes have become decidedly anti-middle class. It is also legitimizing the taboos against xenophobia, racism and ethnocentrism. You can only call decent people Nazis so many times before it loses its power to shame.

What is happening across the West is the people are awakening to the fact that their rulers have a very different vision for their societies than they disclose in public. In many cases, it feels like the rulers have plans for the future that do not include their voters. Those plans may be great ideas, but in stable societies, they must be debated in public. Otherwise, society becomes unstable. That is what is happening in Germany and America. The system is becoming unstable.

Reverse Engineering A Belief

Posted on by

I was watching a documentary on the remains of the ice man from the Æneolithic period, found in the Alps 25 years ago. Ötzi is a big deal for anthropologists, historians, geneticists, biologists etc. The ability to get genetic material for analysis offers up enormous research opportunities. For hobbyists with an interest in these subjects, it is always fun to listen to experts discuss their interests in such a rare discovery.

One of the things they have been puzzling over are the weird tattoos on the man’s body. Initially, they assumed they were for decoration, but further research suggested that was unlikely. The markings were not very decorative, but they did correspond to areas that either had prior injuries or signs of disease. In other words, the tattoos were medical treatments of some sort.

This sounds rather loopy to modern people, but it is not hard to see how people could come to believe such things. Grog gets the evil spirits and is close to death. The local Shaman gives him a tattoo so he is properly marked up for the afterlife and Grog suddenly rallies and recovers from the evil spirits. Everyone assumes it was the tattoo. Before long, tattooing the sick is what everyone does.

Belief is a funny thing in that it is self-reinforcing. The people of Ötzi’s time probably understood that tattoos did not always work, but when they got a good result, they just assumed it was the tattoo. What else could it be? Not doing the tattoo treatment, quite logically, became a high risk choice.

Understanding this dynamic is useful when looking at modern times. For example, we believe smoking tobacco causes lung cancer. At some point in the future, when the alien anthropologists are digging through the remains of our age, they will puzzle over “No Smoking” signs in the same way, wondering why they never found “No Child Molesting” signs in the rubble.

The point here is that you can tease out some things about what people believe based on what they do, even in the modern age where we pretend to be irreligious logic machines. That came to mind reading this rather entertaining comment thread on a Marginal Review post. As is often the case, Steve Sailer was making heads explode by noticing things that are on the prohibited list.

The question Steve kept asking in various ways is why economists have never bothered to study, much less calculate, the value of citizenship. If a citizenship card for Somalia and one for Canada were put up for bid, which would fetch more? How much would each get at auction? Who would do the bidding?

These are very interesting and reasonable questions that should be natural areas of interest for modern economists. After all, immigration is the dominant topic of our age and economists are the shaman class, asked to weigh in on every topic. It follows that the “markets in everything” crowd would have come up with a model for the market for citizenship.

As Steve correctly observes, the better question may be why they refuse to even consider it. Read the comments in that post and you see a lot of undefined panic. They don’t know why they should not be talking about this, but they sense it is a taboo subject so they keep trying to change the subject. In a sense, Steve was asking, “why are we tattooing Grog?”

I’m not much for reductionism so I don’t think there’s a conspiracy. What I see is that these people believe all of the things people in the managerial class believe. One of those beliefs is that citizenship is an artifact of a prior age. They dream of being citizens of the world, hopping from Washington to New York to London to Davos. Being an “American” is, if anything, a little embarrassing for them.

It’s why they are puzzled by the resistance to open borders. They live in these wonderful, bunkered communities that are surrounded by ethnic restaurants and shops. When they meet friends at the Ethiopian place in Fairfax to reminisce about their trip there in grad school, they wonder how anyone would not want this life. For them, open borders are the paradise of their daily life.

The answer to Steve’s query, it turns out, is a question. Why study something that has no value? From the point of view of economics, citizenship is as valuable as unicorn insurance or stock in the flying carpet company. The market for their skills is in climate magic and monetary policy so that’s why we have a million papers on those topics.

There’s another thing to tease out here, returning to the image of the Cloud People gnoshing on fit-fit at the Ethiopian place. To these people, the horny-handed sons of toil are failures. They have failed to reach the managerial class. Therefore, their habits are the habits of failure. Their shouting about patriotism, the dignity of work and joys of family are just confirmation to the Cloud People that they are the elect.

In a world where one is measured by how many of the correct boxes he ticks, there’s no value in even thinking about the wrong boxes. The neo-mandarin system of the modern managerial class rewards recitation, not inspiration. Why puzzle over the plight of the Dirt People when the people grading the exams don’t care about it? It’s simply easier to believe it does not matter than to wonder why.

After years of examining Ötzi, researchers have determined that he did not freeze to death in the snow. That was the working assumption for years. Everyone assumed he got trapped in bad weather on a hunt or a trip. It turns out that he died from an arrow wound. Ötzi was murdered. While those tattoos may have worked against evil spirits, they were not much use against an arrow in the back.

Dirt People Blues

Posted on by

After the New Hampshire primary results came in, I flipped on the news sites to see what they were saying. Fox News had a panel discussing the results in the same design you see ex-jocks discussing ball games. They were talking about the exit polling and all were shocked at the numbers. I got the feeling they really believed that some miracle was going to bring down Trump. Instead, it was a blowout in favor of him.

It reminded me of the ’94 election when the Republicans swept the House for the first time in fifty years. I was sitting with some friends and we were flipping from channel to channel, laughing at the shock and horror of the news readers. I forget who it was, I think he is dead now, but one of them appeared to be close to tears. Everything they believed in was suddenly proven false.

The concept of a “media bubble” is nothing new and many in the media fully admit to living in such a bubble. For the men and women of the prestige press, America is a foreign country in the same way India was foreign to British colonial officers. Watching the Fox show, I would not have been surprised if one of them blurted out, “What’s wrong with these morons?” It was what they were thinking.

The great transformation of the American mass media into a sealed off class is a relatively new thing. Originally, the news business was for the lower classes. If you were a working class guy possessing a decent IQ, being a newsman was a great way to avoid the factory life. You got to work inside, keep odd hours and have a lot of fun covering the events of the day. It was the sort of gig for the literate man, who liked adventure.

That changed in the 70’s as news reporter became a profession. Today, a paper like the Washington Post hires only from elite colleges. Northwestern and Columbia specialize in journalism, even having grad schools for it. Syracuse, another very good college, has long dominated the minting of TV and radio graduates. The prestige press is littered with Ivy League grads these days.

Of course, you don’t end up at the Columbia School of Journalism if your dad is a plumber and mom is the payroll manager at the local Chevy dealership. The elite colleges draw from the elite high schools, mostly private high schools. Many of the boys and girls milling around the Yale campus made it to adulthood never having met a plumber or ever collecting a paycheck, so they enter the bubble unfamiliar with the world they intend to cover as journalists.

While it is not a conspiracy or even a coordinated effort, the media tends to move as one organism. That’s why both sides are horrified by what they see from the Dirt People recently. They fashion themselves as savvy cultural observers and they never saw this coming. Even when it is explained to them in detail, they look blankly out at the mobs, not understanding what’s happening

On my trip around the dial, I did not hear the “I” word until finally one of the Fox color commentators mentioned it briefly. The reason for this is they experience immigration differently from the Dirt People. For them, it’s just another charm on the piety bracelet. They are for open borders because only racists and xenophobes are against it.

The rest of America interfaces with the subject in a much different way. The Dirt People go to the ER to get some stitches and see it looks like a Tijuana bus station. Their kid’s school now has Bantus for some reason. Their insurance goes up because the illegal that rear ended them had no license or insurance. They lost their job because their employer brought in a bunch of H1B indentured servants.

When 75% of the tech jobs in Silicon Valley are held by foreigners, the Dirt People are, unsurprisingly, a little cynical about the elite’s immigration romanticism. More important, they are horrified when their healthy skepticism is called bigoted or un-American by the people who rule over them. It is this contempt for the Dirt People that is so noxious. As I’m fond of saying, it makes you want to spit on your hands, hoist the black flag and slit some throats.

That’s what the Cloud People don’t understand. Most of the Dirt People are fine with sensible immigration. They just expect it to be debated in the context of what is best for Americans. Instead, it’s treated like child pornography. There’s only one acceptable opinion and any deviations means you’re a vulgar bigot. As is so often the case, the response from the Cloud People is “suck to be you!”

I remember when Reagan was accused of going around the media to talk directly to the people. Then it was talk radio becoming the alternative to the liberal press. Then cable news, then the Internet and then Fox and now here we are, right back where we started. If you want anything resembling reality based commentary you end up reading hate thinkers like me. The point being that the brewing revolt will have to be more than just a batch of new pols and some sore feelings in the press. It has to leave a mark.

This cannot end well.