Category Archives: Culture

New Age Nonsense

Posted on by

This was in the link list post at Marginal Revolution. It is a wonderful example of authentic new age gibberish. It is all emotive, synthetic language that is popular with the managerial class these days. It’s the sort of therapeutic language that is supposed to both validate the people using it and establish them as insiders in whatever it is they are promoting. This sort of gobbledygook is common now in corporate America, to the point where there are websites fro generating it.

Astra Taylor is the author of “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” a new book on how information technology and market changes are reshaping art and culture.

Here is the bio of Astra Taylor:

Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, and musician, best known for her 2005 film, Zizek!, about the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and for her 2008 film, Examined Life.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia,[1] and was unschooled until age 13.[2] She attended Brown University for a year and holds an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School. She has taught sociology at the University of Georgia and SUNY New Paltz. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and in 2006 Filmmaker Magazine listed her as one of “25 new faces to watch.” She is the sister of painter and disability activist Sunny Taylor,[3] and is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.[4] Taylor performed with Neutral Milk Hotel during the band’s reunion tour of 2013/2014. She is the author of the book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, published by Metropolitan Books.

The “unschooled” bit is amusing, as it could only come Astra Taylor or maybe fellow feminists. they like the pseudo-language stuff.  If you are going to make up a nonsense biography, calling yourself “unschooled” is a good start. The links in her Wiki page go nowhere so a little search reveals this video. Mostly third-wave feminist nonsense, bit we learn that “unschooled” means home schooled. In her circles, “home schooled” is equated with Walmart and gay bashing so they use a neologism.

Right out of the shoot, the interview takes on the vibe of a couple of hens yapping at one another while waiting for their kids at the Montessori school.

HF – At many points in the book you suggest that new technologies, far from leveling the playing field, are creating their own forms of inequality. How can open technologies lead to very unequal outcomes?

AT – It’s true that our new communicative technologies can create space for many voices, but the Internet also reflects and often amplifies real-world inequities. It is open but also unequal.

Contrary to all the hype about the “long tail,” the cultural playing field hasn’t been leveled so much as rearranged. What we are seeing is the emergence of the “missing middle” (a phrase I’ve taken from the political scientist Matthew Hindman). Online the bandwagon effect intensifies: the big can get bigger than ever before, and there are lots of tiny interesting things on the margin, but the in-between is hollowing out. The Internet is a global distribution medium.

Now, the Interwebs has been with us for two decades. The first browser was dropped in the early 1990’s. Not many people were on-line back then compared to now, but it was not a tiny community. When Astra was discovering middle-school, adults were discovering the Internet. Now she is “educating” the rest of us about how the Internet is changing the world. This is a hilarious phenomenon that is popular with feminists for some reason. maybe it is empowering.

I try to highlight a contradiction in the contemporary media ecology. On the one hand, a handful of businesses are rising to become new info-monopolies. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are now among the biggest companies in the world, siphoning revenue away from other local economies to Silicon Valley or Seattle or wherever, concentrating wealth in the process.

On the other, even as this remarkable concentration is playing out, our relationship with media is becoming more personalized. No one can tell you what to click on, Web sites reflect your preferences, and everyone has a glowing screen of their own. Yet these catered services generally rely on centralized vendors and services, like Amazon or Apple, that control the hardware we are using and the content we consume. This creates a kind of vertical integration behind the scenes. Certain barriers to cultural participation have been removed, and we can all post on social media or comment on articles, but massive asymmetries of power persist. Individually we glean benefits that are orders of magnitude smaller than the benefits for the platform owners who can collect and harness the “big data” generated by our communications.

There are certain buzzwords that are popular with these new age hustlers. One of them is “ecology.” The reason is it conjures images in the mind of plants and fuzzy cute animals. People like plants and fuzzy animals. Then there’s the old standby, the false dilemma. The specter of the global mega-corporation versus granny viewing pics of her grandkids on Facebook.

Of course, we see the liberal use of neutralizing words. A “kind of” vertical integration is, logically, no vertical integration, but the point is to have it both ways. It is a way of taking both sides while allowing the listener to assume whatever ever they find pleasing or validating. Obama speeches are full of this sort of language. The text is largely meaningless, so the listener can make it about themselves.

Ordinary Madness

Posted on by

Within living memory, a normal person could have a civil conversation about politics with someone identifying as liberal. It was not that everyone got along. It was that everyone seemed to agree on the value of civil debate. Only far out wackos thought you were evil for voting for Reagan or favoring tax cuts. Liberals did not like conservatives, but they did not hate them and they did not treat them like lepers. It was still possible for people to disagree without despising one another.

In the 1990’s that began to change. The vulgarity of the Clinton crowd made civility difficult. The culture gap became a chasm in the 1990’s. If you voted Republican it was not just because you happened to like their positions or the candidate. Party affiliation became tribal identification and the debates, therefore, were not about facts and reason. They were about which side you were on in the culture war. The roots of the great divide between use them started in the 1990’s.

On television, the public affairs shows turned into shouting matches. The liberal would talk over everyone, ignore the questions and just chant the slogans the Left was embracing at the moment. They called it spin, but it infected everything. This filtered into daily life and it became impossible to maintain a friendship with a lefty, because who they were was now defined by their hatred of normal people. The Left became an identity cult based on hatred of normal white people.

These days, the only way to maintain a civil relationship with a lefty is to avoid anything but sports and weather.  Anything that bumps up against the tenets of the faith, even tangentially, has to be avoided. Everywhere you turn a lunatic is preaching at you about gay marriage, the war on women, racism, white privilege and on and on. It often feels like the book I am Legend. Instead of raging vampires, we’re surrounded by lunatic liberals shaking their piety bracelets at us.

This post over at The Spectator does a good job analyzing the ratcheting lunacy we see around us.

It has long been clear that expressing certain views has been a form of social signaling, although social media has made this far more explicit. Holding what might be loosely called politically correct opinions on a range of issues suggests that the holder is more likely to be well-educated, wealthy, young, probably attractive, and possessing social nous (ie in touch with social trends).

But Kristian’s theory also explains one aspect of political correctness: the speed at which the accepted and acceptable view moves, heading in an ever-more extreme direction.

It goes further. Ever notice the speed with which buzzwords and catchphrases get popular among the Left? Obama used the word “shellacked” after the 2010 election and every lefty in America was littering their language with it. Another example was “gravitas” after that idiot Biden was picked to be Obama’s running mate. Language no longer has the same meaning for them as the rest of us. instead, it works like incantations signifying membership in the faith.

He uses the analogy of the music fan who, once the band he’s into has been discovered by everyone else, must find some other obscure outfit as a positional good. Once a wacky idea becomes accepted, the high-status politically correct brigadier must stand out with some new area of concern; this he or she does with one of those articles or blogs in which it is argued that, while progress has been made in one particular battle against prejudice or bigotry, the real war is now against racism in food labeling or the lack of transgender dolls for my children. It doesn’t matter if the issue at hand is inconsequential or, more likely, impossible to overcome; in fact the more so, the better.

Unlike with music, however, the trend is always in one direction and there is no re-centering; it would be as if the mainstream of elite taste in music went from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath to Metallica to Slayer and onto Napalm Death. Politically that’s what much of the commentary in places like Slate sounds like to me – just some guy atonally screaming in my ear about some micro-injustice.

Not a bad example. Thatcher called it the ratchet effect.

Another aspect of this mindset is the desire to punish people who have insufficiently correct views on doctrine, even if the beliefs they hold were orthodoxy ten or five years ago. I’d really like to conduct a Stanford Prison-style experiment in which people were rewarded (perhaps with a dopamine hit) for punishing those with heretical views, and to see where it led. To make it more interesting, only people with unorthodox views on only one side of the political spectrum would be punished, to see how extreme a group would become towards the other direction in a short space of time. Soon they’d be sacking people for disagreeing with an idea that didn’t exist anywhere in the world before 2001 – oh whoops, sorry, that was real life.

There are examples of the public simply going mad. Athens leading up to the Sicilian expedition is an example. The Athenians appear to have lost their minds and threw away their advantage on a crazy idea cooked up by a conman. The Abolitionist Movement is something closer to home. Large numbers of whites in the north wanted to murder the whites in the South and would not be deterred. Prohibition is another example from the American past. Maybe there is something wrong with our grain.

Why Do We Need More Immigrants?

Posted on by

In this post about the economics of Brooklyn, there is this bit of data:

Kind of. In 2011, the Census estimated the median household in Brooklyn earned $42,752 a year.  In 1999 the Census estimated the median household income in Brooklyn was…$42,852 (in 2011 dollars; the listed figure in 1999 dollars is $32,135).  That’s compared to a national median household income of $50,502 (in 2011) and $55,999 (in 1999), again using 2011 dollars.  In constant dollars, Brooklyn stagnated while incomes dropped elsewhere.

In that period, we have probably absorbed 20 million legal immigrants. Some claim we have also added another 10-15 million illegal immigrants. The debate over the exact figures is pointless. Everyone agrees we have added a whole bunch new people. This at a time when Americans are getting poorer, outside the over-class and managerial class. They are doing great, naturally, but the middle class is slowly being drained away by globalism and the resulting wage constraints.

The sentimentality of immigration is tough to resist. The myth of immigrant America has been sold to us for generations. People are conditioned to think immigration is one of the great virtues of America. The mathematics of it, however, are beyond dispute. The elites are deliberately impoverishing the country by importing millions of foreigners, who suppress wages and bid up housing.

The Jesus Hoax

Posted on by

It seems like a decennial occurrence. Some scholar somewhere discovers some new proof that Christianity is all bunk. The most recent hoax was proof that Jesus was married. That would prove once in for all that Christianity is a conspiracy by the terrible white males to oppress women, Jews, blacks etc. As is always the case, the proof turns out to be nonsense. The newly discovered papyrus by Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King is a hoax.

In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian) gospel text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’ ” The world took notice. The possibility that Jesus was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and biblical scholarship.

Yet now it appears almost certain that the Jesus-was-married story line was divorced from reality. On April 24, Christian Askeland—a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a forgery.

Almost from the moment Ms. King made her announcement two years ago, critics attacked the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife as a forgery. One line of criticism said that the fragment had been sloppily reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and even repeated a typographical error.

But Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological Review recently published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus’s authenticity. Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly community, the New York Times NYT -1.40% was given access to the studies ahead of publication. The newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying “the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery.” The article prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter, asserting that the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was genuine.

A good rule with all science, hard and soft, is secrecy means dishonesty. If you refuse to release your data and methods, you’re up to something. It is why most people think Michael Mann is a fraud. He refuses to release his data and methods. The reasons for this are all bad. Going to the extraordinary step of forcing the researchers to sign NDA’s was a big red flag. You see the same thing here. There is a lot of effort going into concealing that which should be made public.

Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used—with the “wife” fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.

“Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery,” Mr. Askeland tells me. “First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century.” Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and “concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries.” In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the “Jesus’ wife” fragment was written in a dialect that didn’t exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.

Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: “It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus’ Wife Fragment is a fake too.” Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: “Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus over.”

It was (probably) Mark Twain who said a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. It will take decades before the usual suspects stop insisting Jesus was married. Every Christmas and Easter, the same nitwits claim the Christian holidays were ripped off from pagans. It seems the people who know the least about Christianity choose to be its harshest critics. You don’t have to be a religious person to see that a society run by Christians is better than one run by professors.

Having evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were the victims of an elaborate ruse. Scholars had assumed that radiometric tests would return an early date (at least in antiquity), because the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife fragment had been cut from a genuinely ancient piece of material. Likewise, those familiar with papyri had identified the ink used as soot-based—preferred by forgers because the Raman spectroscopy tests used to test for age would be inconclusive.

It is perhaps understandable that Ms. King would have been taken in when an anonymous owner presented her with some papyrus fragments for research. What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian beliefs have been mistaken for centuries. No evidence for Jesus having been married exists in any of the thousands of orthodox biblical writings dating to antiquity. You would have thought Thomas Aquinas might have mentioned it. But this episode is not totally without merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long after we’re gone and the biblical texts remain.

That’s the art of the con. The confidence man first seeks to win the trust of the mark and he does that by appealing to their biases. Sometimes it is vanity. Sometimes it is hatred of something or someone. Maybe it is the mark’s desire to be famous. In this case, the confidence men sensed a strong  desire by female academics to feminize antiquity, so  they created an artifact to meet that need. Look for similar hoaxes to write blacks and Jews into the history of white people in the coming decades.

Reparations

Posted on by

The other day on Marginal Revolution, Steve Sailer was holding forth on an IQ topic in the comments section. As is often the case, the comments drifted into the areas of race and all of the taboos that surround the topic. These days, it is hard to have a serious on-line discussion about race, because everyone is afraid and the discussion gets loaded up with moral posturing. Anyway, Sailer responded to someone with this:

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/do-social-problems-cause-economic-problems-or-vice-versa.html#comments

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

Charles Murray is probably right and we will be clawing each others eyes out in the not too distant future as a result of the racial spoils system. It is one thing for the dominant group to buy off the minority group to keep the peace. Once you get into competition between groups for a share of the spoils, the result is predictable. As Steve notes, immigrants are jumping on this system, which will accelerate the problem. The suicidal whites in charge now will be pushed aside one way or another.

A way out of this trap is reparations for slavery. Reparations pops up from time to time, but no one takes it seriously. The reason is the people making the case are ridiculous or simply illiterate. The problem is compounded by the difficulty of calculating a fair number for reparations. In civil suits, the actual damages have to be proved. Punitive damages are usually done by a formula of some sort.

If we were actually settling up with real former slaves, that would be a good starting point. The last slave died in 1971, but most were long gone 100 years ago. One of the unreported facts of Reconstruction is black life expectancy fell dramatically after slavery, so most of the former slaves were gone a few decades. Even their direct decedents were gone by the early 20th century.

Then there’s another problem. If you were living in sub-Saharan Africa in the 17th or 18th century, life was going to be short and brutal. Slavery sounds awful, but it turns out to have been better than living in Africa. Slaves had value to their owners so they took care of them. There is no better place to be black than America. The decedents of slaves are reaping a huge reward for being the decedents of slaves. If we are going to build a case for reparations, you have to factor in that huge benefit, as well.

All that said, what’s the price of a clean conscience? Whites in charge of America pretend to be racked with guilt and demand all whites feel shame for slavery. Settling up with black people may very well be the best solution to finally close the books on this issue for good. It may also be the only way to dismantle the racial spoils system before it tears the nation apart. Given the push for open borders, we may have but a few more years before things get very tough.

A simple proposal. Everyone descended from slaves, over the age of 25 gets $10,000 per year, distributed on their birthday. To get on the gravy train of reparations, they must do a few things. One is you must provide a genealogical history showing you are directly descended from former slaves on both sides of the family. That means if you’re Barak Obama, you’re not getting reparations, but his wife would be eligible. The kids would not be as their father is not a descendant of slaves.

Another requirement would be DNA testing. We know enough at this point to confirm the basics. Weeding out the hustlers and con-men would be a little easier with DNA evidence. Someone who is 50% Chinese, indicating a Chinese parent, could look like Tiger Woods and thus try to get on the payroll. This would also be a service to people who cannot piece together their genealogical records completely. If you are the relative of someone who has established their line, you can use that information.

Finally, the criminals would lose their entitlement. Sending checks to prisoners or their families is asking for trouble. Once the person has paid their debt to society and been crime free for a number of years, then the benefit can resume. Using this program as a nudge to obey the law is a low cost choice with some obvious benefits. Most black criminals would not be motivated by this provision, but some would. Given the enormous crime rate among blacks, a little goes a long way.

The data on recipients would need to be public. That way the public can help supervise the program by spotting and reporting cheaters. It could also have value to scientists researching DNA, evolution and so forth. The Civil Rights Act  and the Voting Rights Act would be repealed as part of the program. The savings on mischief from those programs would off-set the cost of reparations. The books would then be closed on slavery and segregation. Normalcy would be restored.

That’s why this can never happen.

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/do-social-problems-cause-economic-problems-or-vice-versa.html#comments

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/do-social-problems-cause-economic-problems-or-vice-versa.html#comments

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/do-social-problems-cause-economic-problems-or-vice-versa.html#comments

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/do-social-problems-cause-economic-problems-or-vice-versa.html#comments

One way or another, white America is going to be paying the Slave Trade Tax for, roughly, ever. Therefore, I don’t mind giving racial preferences to the 12% or whatever of the population who are the direct descendants of slaves in America, and I don’t mind the 1% who are American Indians having casinos or whatever.

On the other hand, I’m not at all happy about ethnic preferences for immigrant groups, such as the 17% (and rapidly growing) of the country who are Hispanics. They chose to come here. And I’m not at all happy about the business breaks that Asians get, which are so valuable that in 1982 Indians got the government to move them out of the Caucasian category and in with the Orientals so they could get minority business development breaks on government contracts and low interest SBA loans.

– See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/do-social-problems-cause-economic-problems-or-vice-versa.html#comments

Inside the Left

Posted on by

It’s always good to search around the websites of the fringe Left. It is like watching a homeless man soil himself. You’re disgusted, but you can’t help but feel sorry for the wretch. The hard thumping wackos that write for these sites are nutty as fruitcakes, but you can’t help but wish there was a cure for their mental disease. There isn’t and it is important to remember that guys like Markos Moulitsas would gladly hustle you off to the death camps if possible. Here’s an example.

I had already been planning on cartooning the National Rifle Association’s ridiculous annual meeting when my nephew’s unarmed friend got killed in what is shaping up to be another “Stand Your Ground” case.  The circumstances surrounding this shooting may make things a little more difficult for the shooter, who was basically laying in wait to murder someone.  The shooter’s defense attorney has already said his client is going to use a Castle Doctrine/Stand Your Ground defense.

The Left has a long list of abracadabra phrases. A popular one these days is “stand your ground.” They have disconnected it from any real meaning as we see here. In no state does someone in their home have a duty to retreat. Therefore, “stand your ground” laws would never apply. Further, castle doctrine laws have been common since Blackstone. Self-defense is the most sacred human right.

Regardless of what the circumstances are in this particular case that happened to strike close to my family, it is perfectly clear that the NRA is stoking the fires of paranoia and fear in order to pass legislation, sell more guns and make more money.  All you have to do is listen to the apocalyptic, conspiratorial speech made by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre to get so scared you probably will rush right out and buy a couple AR-15s.  (Which were conveniently available at the time of the speech in an adjoining gun showroom that covered nine (9) acres.)

The NRA does not sell guns. They certainly have seen a  boom in membership. That’s exclusively due to lunatics like Mark Fiore out banging their pots and pans on the street in favor of gun confiscation. People tend to notice things and they noticed that these crazies keep saying they want to gut the 2nd Amendment. They do the sensible thing and organize a defense.

It is baffling to me that members of Congress speak at the NRA’s annual gun fest, an orgy of military hardware marketed to civilians, while the head of the gun lobby group essentially trumpets the need for armed revolt.  (Join now, buy now!)  As a bonus, the NRA held a “Youth Day” last Sunday, which coincidentally was the day my nephew’s unarmed 17-year-old friend was killed.  Ugh.  While you’re watching the cartoon, see if you can pick out which lines are direct quotes from Wayne LaPierre, and which are my interpretation.

A common trick with these people is insisting ignorance furthers their argument. His bafflement is presented as proof that his opinion is valid. This is absurd. His bafflement actually tells us we should discount his opinion because he obviously fails to grasp some basic elements. It is a byproduct of the totalitarian mind. Ideas, opinions and facts outside of those acknowledged by the Left don’t exist. Therefore, placing anything in the set of items that is unknown means they are irrational. It’s a passive-aggressive way of declaring something off-limits.

The puzzling thing is how is it Western society has produced so many crazy people like Mark Fiore? These people are generally smart and usually educated. What is it that has gone wrong with Mark Fiore and his coreligionists on the Left? Why would they join a movement hell bent on collective suicide? It’s as if some outside group has found a way to turn up the volume on crazy people in the west, while turning down the volume on the normal people. it looks like a plot by people who hate us.

Kill The Witch!

Posted on by

The various witch hunts going on America at any one time are pathetic and degenerate, but at least we’re not burning the witches or throwing them in jail. That’s going to change as the Left becomes more deranged, so it is coming soon. Here in America we are a little behind the other English speaking nations. Unencumbered with a First Amendment, they will throw people in jail for saying unapproved things.

A candidate in the European elections was arrested on suspicion of racial harrassment after quoting a passage about Islam, written by Winston Churchill, during a campaign speech.

Paul Weston, chairman of the party Liberty GB, made the address on the steps of Winchester Guildhall, in Hampshire on Saturday.

A member of the public took offence at the quote, taken from Churchill’s The River War and called police.

The passage from the book, written by the wartime Prime Minister and first published in 1899, focuses on Churchill’s observations about Islam while serving during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan.

Mr Weston told his audience: ‘Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

‘Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

‘No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.’

Police officers arrested Mr Weston, mid-speech, for failing to comply with their request to move on under the powers of a dispersal order made against him.

He was further arrested on suspicion of religious or racial harassment.

Behaviorally, humans have not changed a whole lot since we moved from hunter-gatherer to settled life. Religion is what holds people together, fostering cooperation and providing ways to punish the freeloaders and trouble makers. Two thousand years ago Mr. Weston would have been stoned for saying bad things about Woden. One thousand years ago he would have been broken on the wheel for saying bad things about Jesus. Today, he is arrested for saying bad things about Mohamed.

I wonder sometimes if we are even that sophisticated. There’s strong evidence that the smart fraction running pagan society knew it was mostly nonsense. They enforced the rules because it was the only way they knew how to keep everyone in line. The Catholic Church went after Utopian heretics because they knew they disrupted society (as we see today). They let a lot of harmless heretics go unmolested. Today’s ruling clergy seems to really believe in Cultural Marxism.

 

A Glimpse of the Future

Posted on by

One of the things that is never discussed, as it is not permitted, is how non=white tribes here in America feud with one another. It is just assumed that since whites are evil, all non-whites get along in order to defend against the evil white man. That’s not true in the least, as non-whites are much more tribal than whites. As a result, they tend to dislike everyone outside their tribe, not just white people.

For example, here in Lagos on the Chesapeake, Indians and Koreans own the cash businesses in the ghetto. There are some Nepalese in there, but most people assume they are Indians. The Koreans have their own off-the-books financing system to help new comers get a start. They still do the old school sponsorship thing with immigrants that used to be common in the US. The newcomer is sponsored by someone who helps they get started, in exchange for a little interest on the investment.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 28 percent of Korean-American men and 20 percent of Korean-American women own their own business—the highest rate of entrepreneurship in the country. Indians have something similar, but it is more kin-based. It’s why you see clusters of Indians in an area and they have similar last names. There names mean something. If you know a little bit about the surnames, you can get a sense of where they came from in India.

Regardless, the result is Koreans and Indians own a lot of small retail business in and around the ghetto. These are businesses that are not high margin, like liquor, convenience stores and smoke shops. They are high risk. It takes balls of stone to own a liquor store in the ghetto. Running a gas station in or even near the ghetto is almost a death wish. That’s why they can be had for cheap and that’s why immigrants take these businesses. They have more guts than cash.

There used to be a Palestinian guy, who owned a C-store near the ghetto. He was missing an arm, having had it blown off back in the territories. Compared to dodging terrorists and Jews in a refuge camp, selling smokes and skittles in the ghetto was a good deal. He did all of his business from behind bullet proof glass. Cameras watched the perimeter for locals plotting an assault on the business.

This, in part, why blacks hate foreigners so much. From their perspective, the people exploiting them in their community are all the same. They seem them as proxies or maybe tools of the white majority. Blacks don’t like Jews very much, because blacks are not that dumb. They know the Jews are the most powerful tribe in the country, so they are not fooled by the effort to make Jews intersectional. The Koreans and Indians serving this “community” are just another face of the man.

As a result, the blacks hate Koreans and Indians. The Koreans and Indians are not all that fond of the blacks. East Asians treat blacks with utter contempt, as if they are just talking moneys. South Asians, on the other hand, play the skins game, claiming they too are victims of whitey, despite being well off. Look around and you see a lot of social just types coming from the south Asian community. In time, we’ll learn that dumb browns are better than smart browns.

Tribal conflict will only get worse as the nation becomes majority-minority. When one ethnic group can dominate the rest, the minorities tend to band together. For most of American history, WASP culture dominated American culture and everyone else fell in line with it. The “everyone else” was mostly Catholics and blacks. When no one group dominates, then it becomes a free-for-all. Everyone has a reason to distrust everyone else. Balkanization soon follows.

Suspicion and distrust of those outside the group is a behavioral trait that most likely pre-dates all others. Our own history of race tells us that this is not a behavior that is easily modified. President Obama, who is multi-racial, wears his racial suspicion like a medallion. His attorney general, from Barbados, is proudly hostile to whites. If reaching the peak of society is not tempering these traits, it’s not happening at the other end of society either. Throw in a bunch of of new groups with their own grievances and the result will be a lot of public shouting.

This is the future. America will be a country where everyone gets frustrated with everyone outside their group. The public space, where groups intersect, will be a 24×7 shouting match about who owes what to whom. History provides no examples of a country dominated by a grievance culture. Up until now, people have been smart enough to keep their distance from one another whenever possible. Maybe everything will work out just fine. Or, maybe not. Time will tell.

The High Cost of Diversity

Posted on by

In Pennsylvania, the police can now search your vehicle whenever the spirit move them. This is all about stopping drug mules on the interstate. Those drug mules are almost exclusively black and Hispanic. The cops don’t advertise it, but they are trained to look for young NAM males driving rented cars. The drug gangs want to eliminate one reason to stop the vehicle. Using a rental means all the lights work and license is in order. They also figured out that local cops tend not to pull over out of state drivers.

The problem with that is they need a reason to pull over T’Q’uan. These people are idiots so the mule is often smoking weed while driving or otherwise doing something the cops can use as an excuse. But, it will be a lot easier to run a wide-scale version of stop and frisk on the nations highway system if they no longer need a warrant. They would also like to search mobile phones without a warrant as well. That way they can get a jump on the rest of the crew once they pull T’Q’uan or Julio over in I-95.

That sounds great until you think about the abuses that will surely follow. Cops are mostly decent people, but it is a close call. A lot of cops are sociopaths, attracted to the position because they can push people around with impunity. Many are just crooks with enough on the ball to know it is better to be a crook with a badge than a crook without a badge. The crime rate among cops is not encouraging, if you are looking to trust your liberty to these people.

There are a couple of things to consider in that graphic. One is cops are much whiter than the general population. Adjusted for race, the crime rate of cops will be much higher than the general population. Second, the number of robberies is most certainly an outlier. Bad data is my guess. Cops steal like mad. Everyone knows it, but it is rarely reported or prosecuted. Violent crimes are too difficult to hide so they get investigated.

Crime in America is mostly a NAM issue. The drug game, outside of crystal meth, is a black and Hispanic activity. Plenty of whites take drugs, but the drug game is run by blacks and Hispanics. Legalization of weed will further this trend. Murder is not entirely drug related, but a big part of the yearly homicides committed by young NAM males in the drug game, mostly at the street level. Controlling this population has been the focus of policing, prisons and social policy for 50+ years.

The fact is, you can have diversity or liberty, but not both. Otherwise, you get a violent free-for-all of tribal warfare. The reason Continental Europe is naturally authoritarian is it is how you survive when surrounded by a bunch of people not like you. For the Dutch to have remained Dutch for 2,000 years meant defending their turf against all comers. This required a high degree of discipline. The same is true of every other group in Europe.

The same will be true of America.

Long Memories

Posted on by

When I was a kid, a former Nazi was caught with some regularity. Most were small timers like camp officers or regional functionaries. Back in the 1970’s, promoting the Holocaust mythology was still in the early stages, so capturing a former Nazi was a chance to sell the story. Even today, when the few remaining Nazis are octogenarians, they still hunt for them and cheer when they find one somewhere. Nazis remain good business for the Jews running the Holocaust industry.

Vengeance is a part of human nature and no group hold a grudge like the Jews, so Nazi hunting will be with us forever. Even after all the Nazis are dead, Jews will go after their decedents and the companies they claim benefited from the Nazis. Then they will go after the governments and on and on. The Jews never forget an enemy and they run the world now, so as long as that is true, the holocaust will be with us. The past will be a nightmare from which we never awake.

Anyway, the same thing is playing out with the Irish. The Troubles are long over, but there are still scores to settle. The one people who come close to the Jews in terms of holding grudges are the Irish. That means as long as there are Irish in Ireland, they will be holding grudges over the troubles. Police in Northern Ireland have arrested Gerry Adams for the murder of a Belfast widow 40+ years ago.

Police in Northern Ireland arrested Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams on Wednesday on suspicion of involvement in the Irish Republican Army’s 1972 abduction, killing and secret burial of a Belfast widow.

Adams, 65, confirmed his own arrest in a prepared statement and described it as a voluntary, prearranged interview.

Police long had been expected to question Adams about the 1972 killing of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10 whom the IRA executed as an alleged spy. According to all authoritative histories of the Sinn Fein-IRA movement, Adams served as an IRA commander for decades, but he has always denied holding any position in the outlawed group.
‘‘I believe that the killing of Jean McConville and the secret burial of her body was wrong and a grievous injustice to her and her family,’’ Adams said. ‘‘Well publicized, malicious allegations have been made against me. I reject these. While I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will, I am innocent of any part in the abduction, killing or burial of Mrs. McConville.’’
Reflecting the embarrassment associated with killing a single mother, the IRA did not admit the killing until 1999, and her unmarked grave was discovered only by accident near a Republic of Ireland beach in 2003.
Adams was implicated in the killing by two IRA veterans who gave taped interviews to researchers for a Boston College history archive on the four-decade Northern Ireland conflict. Belfast police took legal steps to acquire the interviews, parts of which already were published after the 2008 death of one IRA interviewee, Brendan Hughes. The researchers fought unsuccessfully to avoid handover of the tapes of the second IRA interviewee, Dolours Price, who died last year.
In his interview, Hughes, a reputed longtime deputy to Adams within the Belfast IRA, said McConville was killed on Adams’ orders. Hughes said Adams oversaw a special IRA unit committed to identifying, killing and secretly burying Belfast Catholic civilians suspected of spying on behalf of the police or British army. An independent investigation by Northern Ireland’s police complaints watchdog in 2006 found no evidence that McConville had been a spy.

Adams was always a loathsome character. Every revolt has characters like Adams, who see the unrest as a chance to profit. He was never much of a fighter, but he was good at talking for those who did the fighting. He was never much of a politician, but he was happy to stand in front of cameras and take credit for the work of others. That said, he should get credit for bringing about the Good Friday Agreements.

What Adams was good at was seeing the American Empire plainly. If he could get Americans on his side, he could put pressure on the British government. Politicians like Peter King of New York became aggressive advocates for the killing of women and children, even helping the IRA raise money. Having a US congressmen on the payroll was worth a thousand masked paddies holding clubs.

Anyway, the argument for going after him now, after all these years, is that justice must be served. That sounds fine when you are a great distance from the events, but it is a reminder to present and future adversaries that you can never sleep as long as the other side lives. Adams thought he put all of this behind him. Now he probably wonders if he should have ever done business with the Protestants. Every future rebel will draw the right lesson here.

The bigger issue is the fact the past, this part of the past anyway, is heading down the memory hole. I recall when the battles in Ireland were front page news. Today, hardly anyone remembers it. The modern Irish on both sides have no interest in the struggles. They don’t go to church and they don’t care about the past. Young Irish are not interested in planting bombs. They want to get drunk and fornicate while listening to hip-hop.

The Nazi hunters succeeded in keeping the past alive, but that’s a different thing than this. The American Empire is largely run by Members of the Tribe so keeping the Holocaust alive has real value to people wholly unrelated to the events of 70 years ago. No offense to the Irish, but even the Irish have lost interest in Irish history. I just don’t see the point in trying to keep The Troubles alive. But, people have long memories and an innate desire to kill their enemies.