Category Archives: Culture

A Little Too Late

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I had an exchange last week with someone about the future of the country. Specifically the future of the country after the Republicans push through another amnesty. His point, one with which I largely agree, is that amnesty pretty much ends the Right as a force in American politics. The Right has very little influence now, but it is an obstacle that causes problems for the Left and their enablers.

Classical Liberalism, the only post-Christian alternative to the the radicalism we typically associate with the Left, will die out in a America with another 30-50 million third world citizens. If these newcomers really wanted western style civil order, they would institute it in their own lands. They don’t, which is why their home countries are something other than orderly. Bringing tens of millions of people who prefer the dynamics of a banana republic means America will become a banana republic.

The argument that these people will l change once they land on the magic soil of America is crazy, given what we know about democracy. Both parties will change in order to appeal to the sensibilities of the new imported peasant class. The political parties will resemble what we see in Europe, one form of socialism versus other forms of socialism, along with some multicultural stuff. Anything resembling the chamber of commerce style conservatism of the GOP will be on the fringe.

No nation is perfect and a “propositional” nation like America is always going to be at odds with itself over the defects. As long as the country is overwhelmingly white, it beats the homogenizing and stifling conformity forced on the citizens of most civilized nations. It certainly beats the barbarism of the uncivilized lands. The key though is for American to remain overwhelmingly white and that’s not going to happen now.

If you are going to love your country, loving one that loves you back is a good choice. That has been the relation for most white people in America, but that will soon be a thing of the past. My “countrymen” will have no more in common with me than a guy living in China. My rulers will see me as just another subject, no different than any of the other entries on the spreadsheet. That’s the reason fertility rates in Europe have collapsed. Why would anyone bring someone into a world of strangers?

The Feelies

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People who fret about the future and those unhappy with the people in charge, tend to rely on Orwell for their ammunition. The truth is, Orwell got most things wrong. The future is not going to be a boot stamping on a human face forever. The future is going to be something closer to what Huxley had in mind.

Automation will do most of the work required to sustain life and people will spend their free time on drugs or their technological equivalents. The “feelies” were a type of movie experience Huxley described where the viewers experienced raw emotions, rather than watching a story with characters and plot.  According to this story, books will soon deliver emotion to the reader.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a “wearable” book which allows the reader to experience the protagonist’s emotions.

Using a combination of sensors, the book senses which page the reader is on and triggers vibration patterns through a special vest.

“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state trigger discrete feedback in the wearable [vest], whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localised temperature fluctuations” the researchers said.

The vest contains a personal heating device to change skin temperature and a compression system to convey tightness or loosening through airbags.

It will not be long before movies move from 3D to 4D, where the fourth dimension is smelling, tasting and so forth. Instead of sitting in a theater, you put on your headset, plug into the grid and join other in some grand adventure that is like being in a video game. It will be lucid dreaming with a social element. Old people will lie around reliving their youth until the state pulls the plug. Maybe it will work out just fine or maybe not.

Old Books

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I’m reading an 80 year old copy of J.B.S. Haldane’s The Inequality of Man, which is one of those books that still has some relevance to this age. Every so often, Haldane gets some mention, as in the case of Richard Dawkins in the 1970’s. Like a lot of smart white guys from the past, his ideas are now heretical, so few dare mention him or his ideas. HBD’ers will reference him from time to time, but otherwise he is slowly being forgotten.

My copy is a worn old copy that is a few years from falling to pieces. I don’t know where I got it, but I figured I should read it before it falls to dust. As I’m reading bits of the page’s edge falls away, creating a natural bookmark. Even though it is 80 years old and written by an upper class Brit, the book reads easier than most modern stuff. The old British academics really knew how to use the language to reach a broad audience.

There’s a great value, I think, to reading old books in science and social commentary. One of the things that jumps off the page right from the start is just how fresh much of his discussion of population differences seems today. I recently re-read The Money Game by Adam Smith. You would think a book about Wall Street written in the 1960’s would seem ridiculous today. Instead, it was as fresh as anything written today.

His treatment of computers and markets (keep in mind that computers were rarities in the 1960’s) was strikingly prescient. The lesson you take away is the money game, the world of finance, has not changed much at all in fifty years. The point of the book, is it had not changed much in the previous fifty years. Reading stories about scams run by big banks on the 1920’s, that are just like those run today, is a bit jarring in a good way.

That’s one reason why I think it is wise to read old books from time to time. It is a good reminder that the world has not changed very much. By old books, I don’t just mean classics. A well-read man should have read the Western Canon. I mean old books that were popular in their day, but are not included as classics of Western thought. It’s like going back in time and learning about common sense all over again.

Of course, this why the Left locks up history into a trunk and buries it in the backyard. Constant reminders that human relations have not changed very much makes the idea of Marxist Man ridiculous even to the most gullible. If the nature of man is transcendent and rooted in his biology, Marxist Man is an impossibility. Then you have the fact that the ideas current with modern radicals are just recycled from past radicals.

Reading about people 100 years ago making the same claims people are making today is satisfying until you learn they failed disastrously. That is going to take the wind out of the sails of even the most dedicated. “This time things will be different” can only take you so far. Those promised benefits of some form of socialism sound less compelling when you read the same claims made fifty years ago.

That said, there’s a service to the stable minded too. Haldane was one of the first population geneticists. He was also a Marxist. On the one hand, he offers up respectable and rational ideas about population genetics. On the other hand, he claims Soviet communism is a great success and will work in the long run. Incredibly, he claims the Soviets had, at the time of his writing, made no attempt to socialize agriculture.

At the time, the Soviets were brutally collectivizing the peasants, killing millions in the process. It is also during the Holodomer, which a British intellectual of his stature surely heard some rumors. He may not have known the details, but the rumors were everywhere. The point here is that brilliant people are capable of believing outrageously insane things. Reading old books on social commentary is a great reminder of that.

What I’m enjoying about Haldane is something HBD chick touches on in this blog post. Population genetics and eugenics are separate things. The modern critics of HBD immediately throw out the eugenics card. Of course, they quickly jump to Hitler the holocaust, tying population genetics to mass murder. It’s a tactic aimed at shutting down any discussion of the subject by making it immoral on its face.

Haldane goes to great lengths explaining why the eugenicists are wildly mistaken on the science of genetics. What we know now and what he could not know then, is what the Left would do with these ideas. The modern Left’s assault on HBD has little to do with science and everything to do with history. The heroes of the American Left were eugenics promoters. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist, who wanted to sterilize the unfit.

That’s an obvious example, but the Progressive Era is full of them. Sterilization campaigns were a regular feature of the American Left from the beginning. The language changed, but the underlying justification remained. Programs launched by liberals in the 60’s and 70’s aimed at reducing birth rates in black ghettos were just thinly veiled eugenics programs. Of course, it is hard to be the friend of the black man if you have been systematically trying to snuff them out.

In contrast, the HBD folks, for the most part, don’t try to tease morality or public policy from the science of population genetics. There are exceptions and abuse, but the folks dedicated to the science don’t care about the politics. The reason is an example Haldane uses. Atoms do not act in predictable ways. Instead, they act in a number of ways with differing degrees of probability. Rolled up into a bar of steel, however, the mathematics presents an object to us that acts predictably and seemingly consistently.

One last thing on reading old books. There’s a valuable lesson in the wrongness of their certainty. One of my few criticism of John Derbyshire is his blind spot to the error rates of science. The history of science is the history of error. Reading Haldane’s ideas on cancer and what comes next for the treatment of the disease is cringe inducing. His description of blacks in America and their likely future is hilariously anachronistic.

The point is Haldane was brilliant and empirically minded, but he and his contemporaries were wrong about a great many things. Those who came after them made their careers proving them wrong. Those who come after us will do us the same favor. Therefore, it is wise to keep open the possibility that what we think we know now is all wrong. That does not mean there is no truth, just that humans are prone to error.

Libertarian Marriage Nuttery

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Marriage is all about reproduction. Without it, you’re left with the equivalent of an intimate handshake agreement on how to divide up the property when one or both parties gets bored. It is what makes homosexual marriage irrational. Two men cannot create a child together, so by definition they can never be married to one another. Marriage is a biological act, as much as a social construct. To divorce one from the other is to disconnect the institution from reality.

There are crazier modern fads, but it does tell us a lot about the people debating it. Arguments for changing public policy, the good ones least ways, contain knowledge of the current policy, its origins, its trade-offs and then the reasons why the new policy is superior. That allows everyone to agree to the facts in advance. The “good” arguments are basically an appeal to generosity to people afflicted with a terrible condition.

On the other hand, homosexual marriage advocates dispense with that and instead throw a tantrum, demanding you justify your opposition to their tantrum. It is a standard practice of the Left to use rhetoric to flip the argument on its head. Instead of the burden being on them to make the affirmative argument in favor of their cause, they force everyone else to defend the status quo to their satisfaction. They start with some form of “why shouldn’t homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else?”

In this regard, libertarians suffer from many of the same defects. They are not as egregious, owing to their fringe status, but they tend to do the same thing with rhetoric. This is most obvious with cultural items. They always retreated into the critic role, demanding conservative justify their position, rather than making the libertarian case for the issue. That way they can avoid having to defend their own position, which almost always compatible with the Progressive position. This Denninger post, for example.

Marriage is none of the government’s damn business.  It’s sad that it took the gay screamers to wake people up to this, but if it results in Oklahoma actually doing the right thing it will be about damn time.

Tell me this — why is it that you want the State in your bedroom? I don’t give a **** if you’re straight or gay, just give me one good reason why you’d invite the ****ing government behind your bedroom door.  Ever.  For any purpose.

But you do, and what’s worse is that if you actually honor a religious, that is, a sacramental marriage irrespective of what faith you follow you have sworn falsely before your God by having the pastor sign a state marriage license.

As with the Left, libertarians tend to violate the Chesterton’s fence principle. They have no idea why the rules and institutions were created. They seem to think they were either forced on us by some supernatural entity or sprung from random nothingness. The assumption is there is no reason for these things to exist, so they see no reason to not tear them down. Denninger just assumes that society, through the state, has no interest in marriage and that marriage licenses are immoral. He does not ask why they exist.

The libertarian argument on this issue is nonsense. This excellent post on matting patterns of medieval Franks illustrates that policing marriage predates Christianity and the nation state. Human populations have been keeping an eye on mating habits for a very long time, perhaps from the earliest times of human settlement. It turns out that humans have always known how babies are made and they noticed problems when babies are made between siblings or first cousins.

Other species have ways of dealing with inbreeding like the Westermarck Effect. The best way Mother Nature has to handle inbreeding is the defective progeny dies off quickly. Humans, having the ability to reason through these results, soon figured out that mothers and sons should not be mating. Whether a natural repulsion developed, followed by the taboo or the other way around, human societies have been policing the mating choices of its members since the beginning. Again, marriage is about reproduction, not sex.

In the Christian world, the church was enlisted in the war on cousin marriage long after authorities took an interest in it. It is not hard to see what human populations would worry about this problem. Every defect is a burden. If you get too many burdens, you end up using more extreme measures to remedy the problem. We know, for example, that human society has practiced infanticide to cull the defective from the population.

If you want to argue that this is no longer necessary in modern times, keep in mind that we are taking in tens of millions of people from places where inbreeding is still common. Then there is the urban and rural underclass where inbreeding is always a concern. If you don’t have someone policing the lower ranks, you will get a large low-IQ population in a few generations. Unfettered liberty works great for smart rich people, but it becomes increasingly problematic as you move left on the IQ curve. People have always known this.

Mating habits are a central concern of all human populations. Try this thought experiment. The world is wiped out by some plague and the remaining 100 people are all of child bearing ages, equally divided between boys and girls. What are the first priorities of the group? Obviously, the group has survival needs. Food, fresh water, fire, shelter and defense against nature are the first concerns. Organizing to solve these primary issues must happen if the population is to survive the first winter.

The next thing they will do is figure out how to handle the inevitable paring off, mating a child birth. Again, if they are to survive, figuring this out is at the top of the list. There is the issue of conflict over sex, but also the need to have a next generation. This is a A-level concern for the tribe, so it will require all of their attention, just the acquisition of food and water is a primary concern.

That’s why libertarians properly belong on the fringe. They are every bit as kooky as people lining their clothes with aluminum foil to keep the aliens from tracking them. What they believe and what they advocate are at odds with obvious reality. We general define insanity as a gap between perception and reality that cannot be remedied. That seems to be the case for libertarians.

 

Dark Enlightenment

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The pseudo-intellectual poser is almost always a creature of the Left, but they do turn up on the Right as well. They cultivate a certain look and a superficial knowledge of many subjects, but never enough to really know much about them. It’s not just their pretentiousness, but also their precociousness that defines them. They are too good for the rest of us. One such example is Jamie Bartlett, a blogger at the Telegraph, who is worked up over those of us on the Dissident Right.

Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called “The Dark Enlightenment”. Its modus operandi is well suited to a digital society. Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism.

It started, suitably enough, with two blogs. Mencius Moldbug, a prolific blogger and computer whizz from San Francisco, and Nick Land, an eccentric British philosopher (previously co-founder of Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) who in 2012 wrote the eponymous “The Dark Enlightenment”, as a series of posts on his site. You can find them all here. 

HBDChick does an excellent job taking the guy apart. It explains the liberal use of the word “fascist” in his rants. Marxism, like all groups on the Left needs bogeymen. The Marxists call their bogeymen fascists, which is a catch-all phrase for the undifferentiated other they fear is on the other side of the door, ready to burst in and snatch them away. It says something about the world when it is OK to be a Marxist, despite the fact that cult has murdered about 100 million people worldwide.

From his blog, it appears he is writing a book about the dark forces he and his fellows are fighting against on-line. In another age, they would be writing hotly worded letters, that were never sent or read. Today, they end up on blogs at the Telegraph or the Times. Of course, they never take on anyone with real power. The so-called Dark Enlightenment types are just people with other opinions. They don’t have spots in mass media or positions of authority. Jamie Bartlett can attack them without fear of retribution.

Suicide Watch

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In the 17th century, European settlers in North America saw the native populations as an obstacle to progress. That was not an unreasonable proposition since the natives had not made it far past the Stone Age. They were using stone arrows and spears, wore animal skins and lived in nomadic tribes. From the perspective of Europeans, these people were barbarians.

The locals may not have been very advanced and they were certainly not very bright, but they soon figured out that it was a bad idea to let the white man settle in their lands. A long war of attrition won by the technologically superior (and eventually numerically superior) whites turned North America into a European outpost and then a European country. The point being that even primitive nomads could quickly figure out that the tribe that controls the land wins and the tribe that loses, dies out.

Everywhere else on planet earth, human populations have been killing one another over land since the dawn of time. So much so we have developed elaborate methods to keep tribes apart from one another. People knew that mixing a bunch of Tribe X into Tribe Y’s turf was going to lead to violence. One tribe would try to dominate the other, assuming the other tribe was going to do the same thing. It’s just a fact of human existence that people used to understand.

Now, against that backdrop consider what the GOP is considering for the end of this summer. It will consist of at least four bills, to be voted on by the end of the summer. One bill is an amnesty for illegal aliens that doesn’t lead to citizenship.The second bill is a Dream Act–like amnesty granting green cards (and eventual citizenship) to illegals who came as juveniles. The third bill will require tracking of foreign nationals. Finally, the fourth bill increase importation of low-skilled workers to compete with unemployed Americans.

And though none of the bills is likely to offer a path to full citizenship, the fact Republicans are preparing to take on immigration at all is a sign the party is coming to grips with a political reality: if they want to win elections in the long run, they’ll have to face the issue.

After the last amnesty in the 1980’s, the GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote declined from 37% to 30%. In fact, it has never again risen above 31% and that was with George Bush, who spoke Spanish and was super friendly to Mexicans. Bush arguably did more for Mexican peasants than any Mexican leader in the history of the country. Bush expanded resettlement and dropped the English requirement.

The author of the piece just assumes it is the GOP’s problem to fix what the Left has destroyed. Liberal democrats were the champions of the last two amnesty deals and are behind the current amnesty deal. In fairness, the global elites are buying off people like Boehner and Ryan so both parties have their snouts in the trough this time. Still, the assumption that the GOP has to win the votes of invaders, rather than citizens says a lot about the state of the American political elite.

Immigration is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. The degree and timing is what determines the right course. In boom times, it may make sense to bring in guest workers and ramp up the naturalization of immigrants. The numbers should reflect the needs of the native population. In lean times, like the last five years, foreign workers should be thrown out with some rare exceptions, like those who possess some unique skill. We don’t want to deport all of our hockey players.

Nothing like economic necessity is involved here. The ruling elites of America have concluded that America is too white. They want to remedy that by importing fifty million Hispanics, who they consider non-white. If it were practical, they would bring in fifty million Congolese, but the running of slave ships over the Atlantic is bad form, for now. The question that comes to mind is “If our government hates us, what would they be doing different?” Replacing the population sounds like hatred to most people.

That’s part of what is driving the mass suicide we see going on throughout the West. When the majority of British school children are not British, it is not hard to see what the future holds for the Brits. At every turn, the citizens of the West are being told that they are worthless or that they are evil. It’s done in pop culture, the media and public policy. When the political leaders care more for the welfare of foreigners, the message is clear. There are other factors for sure, but the West is dead, so the people are dying.

Our Meaningless Constitution

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Most people still think the courts are the defenders of the Constitution. After the ACA ruling, it is impossible to hold that view. Maybe Roberts was pressured into changing his opinion, but the fact that such a thing is a possibility argues against the court being the great defender of the law. On the other hand, if he simply changed his mind, it says that these judges are not bound by an internal logic. They are just as prone to follow the fads as follow the law. Either way, the law is no longer a fixed thing that can be defended.

He could also just be a nut. We like to think it is impossible for crazy people to make it to the top, but history says otherwise. Caligula is the best example. He was obviously a homicidal madman from the start. Ivan the Terrible is another good example. You can be a crazy and ambitious and ambition can overcome just about any defect. Therefore, Roberts could very well be a kook or suffer from some nervous condition. Regardless, it just shows that the Constitution is what the court says, not what is written on the paper.

With that in mind, this gun case looks ominous.

Abramski bought the gun because he could get a discount, and checked a box on the relevant form saying the gun was for him. But he sold it to his uncle.

Abramski was later indicted under federal law for making a false statement material to the lawfulness of a firearm sale — and for making a false statement with respect to information required to be kept in the records of a license firearm dealer.

But Abramski’s lawyers told the high court that since both he and his uncle were legally allowed to own guns, the law shouldn’t have applied to him.

His team argued that Congress never intended for a lawful buyer who transfers a gun to another lawful owner to be prosecuted under this law — and that the intent was all about making sure straw buyers don’t purchase guns for people not allowed to have them, like certain convicted criminals.

But the government argued that he violated the plain language of the law, when he said on the form that the gun was for him. They argued he never gave the seller any idea that he planned to essentially resell the gun to someone else the dealer would have no opportunity to vet.

Much of Wednesday’s arguments centered on the question on the form — prepared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — and whether the agency’s decision to include the question gives it the force of law, enough to make it a crime to answer untruthfully.

In a sane society, a natural right of the citizen enshrined in the founding documents would require the state to meet a very high bar before it could infringe on that right. The acquisition of and possession of arms is a fundamental right of a free citizen. The Founders regularly said this. They put it in the Bill of Rights. They were explicit that this is an inalienable right of the citizen. That’s not a contestable point. Therefore, the state must meet a very high burden before it can regulate the acquisition and possession of arms.

It gets worse. The Federal law against straw purchases was clearly meant to end the practice of people buying guns in bulk and then selling them to blacks in the ghetto. We can pretend otherwise, but that’s what the law is designed to inhibit. It was never intended to stop private sales, which is what the Feds are trying to do here. If owning a gun, in order to defend against tyranny, is an inalienable right, then the state has no role in the private sale and purchase of guns. That should be obvious, but here we are anyway.

John Derbyshire Makes a Mistake

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John Derbyshire has a piece in the Spectator on Intelligent Design. It is part of “face-off” segment with someone named Stephen Meyer. He argues for Intelligent Design, while Derbyshire takes the science side. The first page has the intelligent design argument and then mid-way through the second page Derbyshire begins his dismantling of it. Meyer has been peddling intelligent design for a long time and his arguments are well known, so Derbyshire has the advantage of knowing the other side’s best moves.

John has been driven near mad by ID’ers over the years. He finds their circularly reasoning terribly frustrating. The thing with believers is you have to understand how they play the game. They make their assertions against reality and then demand you prove reality exists. Gay marriage is a great example. Confronted by skeptics they will demand you explain why your oppose it. In other words, they use rhetorical trickery to make their position the default and the status quo the radical alternative.

Derbyshire makes an error when he claims that Jews and Christians embrace occasionalism. This is the claim that God is unknowable and unpredictable. He can rearrange his creations anyway he likes, including the laws of science. That is not the Christian view of God. Some pseudo-Christian cults in America like Mormons and Evangelicals may have may have gone down this road, but that’s not standard Christian dogma. Jews embraced the Greek view of God’s creation, so they reject occasionalism

Islam, on the other hand, is a different thing entirely. For them, God is unknowable. You can follow God’s commands, but you can never know God and you can never know if you will be rewarded if you do follow his commands. The God of Islam is not a God making covenants with man and he may not be rational. He could suspend gravity tomorrow or change the speed of light. Nothing we do will impact the will of God nor is it possible understand the will of God.

It is one reason science came to a grinding halt where Islam took root. What’s the point of learning the laws of nature, if God can change them tomorrow? It’s not the only reason why Islam has stagnated. Invasion killed off a big slice of the Muslim intellectual elite, thus closing the golden age of Islam. Internal fights within Islam also cut off Islam from the world, especially Europe, just when the West was beginning to flourish. Still, the role of occasionalism is a big reason Islam remains doggedly anti-science.

Now, these intelligent design people may be embracing occasionalism in order to justify their theories about evolution. Again though, they are going against Christian tradition by doing it. Granted, the “real Christianity” is in bad shape and these new bespoke Christians may be the future, but they are still outside the Christian tradition. Given the inherent dishonestly of the intelligent design people, it is not a great leap to think they are perverting Christianity in order to con people into believing their nutty theories.

Stalemates

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Conservatives have been programmed to reject anything that smacks of pessimism regarding America’s future. They continue to hold out hope that some combination of miracles will put the right people in charge of the state and they will set about reforming the nation. Then there are those who blithely say something along the lines of “we always muddle along somehow. We can make it through this.” It’s a weird combination of fatalism and optimism. They accept they will fail, but things will work out anyway.

The fact is, things can and will get much worse, perhaps catastrophically worse, if the current ruling elite is not reformed or replaced. This post min the NYTimes is a good example of just how rotten the ruling elite is now. Notice the use of the word stalemate when describing the current situation. While technically true, the fact is most Americans would be fin with ending all immigration. The only reason this is a topic is the Left wants to flood the nation with non-white immigrants. The stalemate is really an assault.

It is considered an inevitability that 30 million Mexican peasants will be granted citizenship, despite not going through the regular process. It is just a matter of getting passed this pesky “stalemate” business. It is also assumed that the number of legal immigrants will be increased to some number just below whatever the Left wants. In other words, to the people in charge, a stalemate is really just an interregnum or a pause in the steady march toward whatever the Left wants. They know they will eventually win. They are right.

One Reader Writes

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I got the following from a reader and I thought it would make a good post. There’s a lot here, so it should probably be two post topics.

This comment would probably be better suited for an email, but alas, I can not find any good way to contact you. I find your views intriguing, brilliant, and sometimes insane.

What is curious to me is that you seem to have all the foundations of a free and empirically minded thinker but also possess some egregiously incorrect views. Further, in much of your writing you tout a freedom from group-think and the cultish mentality which most of humanity takes up over some particular dogma or another. For this reason, I rather enjoy and respect much of your work here.

I fancy myself a similar sort of thinker, and often blast people of all different sorts of ideologies in a manner not unlike your work in this blog. I find it strange that you and I can disagree on so much when we appear to be coming from the same sort of epistemological framework. I’d wager that you have a good deal more raw knowledge than me, both of the historic and political types, so I’m willing to be charitable to your views and try to learn from them.

With that concession, it’s hard to imagine how you have come to some of your beliefs. You appear to have a great faith in evolutionary psychology, especially as it pertains to gender roles. But I am highly skeptical of this very new field of science; very little of what I’ve read has been grounded in good empirical work.

Further, you are against Gay-marriage. Being charitable, I suspect you mean to say something like: marriage is state-recognized for the sole purpose of promoting fertility, which gay people necessarily cannot participate in, therefore, it does not make sense for gay marriage to be state recognized. Would I be correct in saying this? Or do you think gay couples should be deprived other rights which heterosexual couples enjoy, such as hospital visitation rights and adoption?

In general, I’d like you to expound on your view on evolutionary psychology, gender roles, and homosexuality. You are of course free to tell me to fuck off. But I’ve read 25 pages of this blog and feel unsatisfied with your exposition on these topics, so it’d be great if you could indulge me a bit.

As far as my views, I would never claim to have an organized and well thought out philosophy on anything. Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The world, at least from the perspective of any one man, is a tiny clearing in the wood. Human intellectual history is the expansion and contraction of that bit of clearing. It is impossible for any one man to know all that is known. The sum of human knowledge is a tiny subset of what can be known. Therefore, any one man can only know a tiny bit of what can be known and, worse yet, is wholly ignorant about what he does not know.

Now, presented with the facts as described above, spending time building a grand unifying theory to explain what I know seems like a waste of time. If someone were to come forward and offer me a big fat sack of money to come up with a grand unifying theory of everything, then I’ll be glad to do it. That’s not happening so I don’t waste my time on inventing a new philosophy. I take in as much new knowledge as my genetic code permits and wedge it in with the other stuff. I’m like a hoarder or junk collector.

Now, to the evolutionary sciences. John Derbyshire said it best. Evolution is the best explanation for the fossil record. It is flexible enough to absorb new data. It can be adapted to include the new data without invalidating other data we know to be true. It allows science to further explore and catalog the fossil record and now the genetic record, as well as hunt for new information. Understanding our nature is the first step toward creating a new way of looking at human organization and Western politics.

Unlike John, I’d leave open the possibility that some new, better theory could come along and make evolution sound like witchcraft. The history of science, is the history of mistakes, but natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection and gene mutation are unlikely to be replaced with a new idea. Still, you always have to leave open the possibility that what we think is certain is not more certain than the superstitions popular with our ancestors. We may be closer to the caveman than we like to think.

As to “gay marriage,” I’m neither for nor against it in the same way I’m neither for nor against Santa Claus or flying carpets. One cannot be opposed to something that does not exist and by definition, homosexual marriage is impossible. This is not just biological pedantry, but a fact of our cultural and moral history. To pretend that two men sharing rent and a bed is the same as your mother and father having and raising children is the nullification of human civilization. It is the claim that there is no truth, just argument.

Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it. Biology and physics are two good examples. These nuts can believe they are sexless starseeds but biology does not bend to wishful thinking. Humans come in two sexes. This is a matter of genetics. New humans come from a human of each sex mating thus creating a new human that is the result of their marriage. Long before the legal and religious meanings, the biological meaning was plainly obvious to humans. It’s why gay marriage never existed.

This is something humans knew since the dawn of time. Marriage without reproduction is impossible. Two guys or three gals can certainly have sex. They can contract with one another over property ownership. They can play house. They cannot reproduce with one another to create new humans.  It is as irrational as insisting dogs and horses are the same species. They may have many things in common, but they cannot mate and produce off-spring, which by definition makes them of different species.  Yet, we have lunatics in our midst who rail against speciesism.

Now, every society has useful lies it tells itself to lubricate daily life. Americans tell themselves that all men are created equal. This is most certainly not true, but it helps grease the wheels. Pretending Bob and Bill are married is not going to unravel civilization, but, that’s not what this is about and the numbers make it clear. Homosexuals are not that interested in marriage. As the New York Times admits, “monogamy is not a central feature of gay couples.” No, the real goal here is the progressive assault on normalcy.

As far as homosexuals, biology and the role of the sexes, I don’t think you need stray too far from biology. Men and women are different in our primary, secondary and tertiary characteristics. Men have different reproductive strategies than women for obvious biological reasons. This naturally leads to a a whole list of secondary and tertiary traits that would evolve differently in support of reproductive and survival strategies. As the old paleocon saying goes, men will trade safety for sex and women will trade sex for safety.

How do homosexuals fit into this? That’s a mystery. No one really knows what causes homosexuality, but it does appear to be natural. Genetics has failed to find the “gay gene” and logic says such a gene would not exist. Homosexuals would reproduce at far lower rates and the trait would soon die out. There are some theories about conditions in the womb or perhaps a combination of genes that when exposed to certain conditions in the womb result in a gay child. No one knows, but gay exist and there is a cause.

The bottom line with homosexuals is that they have been a feature of human society since the dawn of time. In the West, homosexuality was politely ignored with fits of persecution from time to time. In America, homosexuals were expected to keep their sex lives private and the rest of us were expected to leave them alone. Despite claims to the contrary, there’s no evidence of wholesale, systematic persecution of homosexuals. The natural order her is benign neglect and agreeing to not talk about it.