220 thoughts on “Survival Of Rights”

1. I lost this text twice because of computer problems. I am writing this for the third time. I hope this time I can finish it. I know that I am late to the party and I apologize.

   I disagree with Z about his philosophical materialism. The fact that rights are not physical (so future alien archeologists cannot discover rights in the remains of human civilization) does not mean that they don’t exist. Future alien archeologist wouldn’t discover Math theorems or your ideas, sensations and emotions in the remains of human civilization. This does not mean that Math does not exist or that you haven’t had ideas, sensations and emotions.

   The concept of rights was invented by Catholic theologians of the Modern age as a way to express objective morality. Then, it was adopted by the Enlightenment, by the philosophy and law produced by the bourgeois revolutions and then by the United Nations and by everyone. 

   Although I am a Catholic and I believe in objective morality, I think the concept of rights has been one of the worst ideas in the history of humanity. The problem is that it is a language that obfuscates moral reality so it is prone to manipulation. So it has been used to manipulate Western people to destroy their own civilization.

   The same way the left side of an object cannot exist without the right side, there can be no rights without duties. My right to life is everyone else’s duty not to kill me. If I have a right to my private property, everybody else has the duty of not using this property without my permission. And so on and so forth.

   Ancient cultures and non-Western cultures expressed morality in terms of duties: “Thou shalt not kill”. Modern Western cultures express morality in terms of duties: “You have a right to live”. But the second way is manipulative.

   First, in this second way, the responsibility of the duty is muddled. If I say “Thou shalt not litter”, it is clear that it is you who should not throw garbage in the public space. If I say “You have a right to a clean public space”, it is not clear whose is the responsibility. Maybe I can throw all the garbage I want and it is the government’s responsibility to clean this mess. So the language of rights allows everybody to shirk his responsibility and the government to get more and more power because it has to “guarantee the rights of the citizens”. It is a recipe for anarcho-tyranny. 

   Even worse, since every right comes with an obligation (a duty), the language of rights imposes an obligation  while sounding that no obligation is imposed. So If I have a right to divorce, it is the duty of my wife and my children to accept that they have lost their family and their husband and father. If I fight for “the right to divorce”, people are fooled that only good things are involved (people in unhappy marriages can be free) while disregarding the costs.

   The same way, if I fight for “the right to a free public education”, the cost of maintaining this public education is silenced. Maybe a hardworking man is paying for entitled kids to party and do drugs. It seems as if rights had only benefits while no having any costs. 

   This is why rights have been multiplying drastically. Every time somebody wants something from society can say “It is my right!” and force other people to bear the costs of making this wish come true. So, if I am a tranny and want everybody to tell me  that I am a woman, I can rephrase it as “I have a right to my identity”.
   The thing is phrased in a way that seems that no obligations are imposed on everybody. But this forces everybody to lie in front of a laughable person. If I say “as an undocumented worker, I have a right to public education and health”, this hides the costs of providing this education and health. 

   In short, the language of rights is a weapon of people trying to impose the costs of their behavior upon the entire society. A weapon of parasitism. This is why rights keep on multiplying. In addition, the managerial class takes advantage from new rights because they are the ones that manage these rights. So, for every illegal immigrant with rights,  for every broken family because of the right to divorce, there is a social worker who votes for the Left and works with these immigrants and broken families. Politicians, civil servants, human resources officers make a living or get power based on rights.

   The socialist John Peters Humphrey, director of the United Nations Human Rights Division, wrote the first draft of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which are only the Ten Commandments of a new godless religion: the progressive religion).  Shortly before the Declaration was adopted, he wrote in his diary. “What we need is something like the Christian morality without the tommyrot”. For him, “the tommyrot” was “God, Jesus, the atonement, etc.”. 

   What we have seen it is that it is impossible to have public morality without” the tommyrot” (whether “the tommyrot” is Christian, Muslim, Confucian, etc.). When Western society was Christian and the law was based on Christian morality, the list of rights were clear to everyone: the rights derived from the Bible and Christian tradition. Even if you are an atheist, you can admit that this is a morality that has stood the test of time so it has no nonsense. So, no, you don’t have a right to be a non-binary because ” God created man in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1, 27) .

   If there is not something divine that is the foundation of society (whether is Christian, Muslim, etc.), everybody can claim that his wish is a right that has been oppressed until now and, if he has enough backing from the powers that be, he can achieve this so-called “right”, passing the cost to everybody else. That is, the parasitism has no bounds and the society dies, killed by a one million parasites. Which is why we see in our society. So, yes, give me “the tommyrot”, every time.

   • Very nice post. Language has been inverted and weaponized; so-called “rights” instead of duties and responsibilities.

     And the sins of people big and small are now “rights” that all the rest of us have to pay for. Aint that the truth.

2. Which is why I find it hard to have sympathy with atheist dissidents. There either is objective metaphysical truth or there isn’t, regardless of what is written on a stone tablet or on a computer chip. A thing and its opposite cannot both be true. Regular people used to know this. Committed atheists reject it. Believing Catholic prelates used to defend it. I’d prefer the Dissident Right to not question it.

3. Shapiro delenda est

4. Will miss you 😢 on Taki

5. You Goyim are cattle. Cattle have no fuckin rights. Schlomo opened the cattle gate and is injecting you with poison for a reason…he wants you crippled up, dead, your kids sterile…you buried in a box with your Bill of Rights stuffed in your pocket. Wake up Whitey.

   • Why does Israel have such a high rate of vaccination for c0vi1d?

     • This is a piece of the puzzle I’ve been struggling to fit into my unified theory of Covid.

     • Different juice, brother

       • Covid becomes dangerous only for the elderly. Mortality rates climb from statistically 0% at 50yrs to 20% at 80yrs. How old are those running this show? A healthy 15yr old getting the, essentially experimental vax, doesn’t make sense for the kid. But it may marginally protect the olds. These people cling to life so dearly. Loathsome. If I make it through what’s next, I plan to use the sabbath to piss upon their graves. Whereupon, I will quietly reflect upon my hatred of them. Apologies to the non-psychopaths amongst this cohort.

         • Perhaps, I’ve become intemperate.

6. And yes: the gap between our (increasingly theoretical) “rights” as enumerated in the Constitution— and our *actual rights* as they currently exist— is large and getting larger:

   The Second Amendment stipulates that our right to “keep and bear arms”— that is, to own and carry guns— “shall not be infringed”; in other words, that the very “fringes” of that right— the outermost edges of it— must remain inviolate. But clearly that’s not the case; all sorts of laws have chopped-away the fringes of that right.

   Likewise, our right of freedom of association is long gone: having been destroyed by the “civil rights” anti-discrimination laws of the ’60s.

   And the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ debacle showed that our First Amendment rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech no longer exist, if local officials choose to take them away.

   > Pretending that America is still “the land of the free and the home of the brave” requires more and more not-noticing.

   The sad fact is that our rights have been gradually disappearing for almost a century now, with no end in sight.

   It seems kind of futile to argue about where those rights came from— or to talk about God giving them to us— when we no longer possess them.

   God may have given them, but if Democratic politicians can take them away, we may need to start thinking about other ways of envisioning them.

   • Do not forget, that it was the Republicans who were on the vanguard of taking way our rights. It was the Republicans who were on the vanguard of erecting the security state. It was the Republicans who were on the Vanguard of the Civil Rights legislation.

     It is a remarkable string of political massacres they attended to.

     And now, their handlers have already prepared the Republican and the Republican party for the next phase of the project:

     https://americancompass.org/oren-cass-and-j-d-vance-on-the-future-of-the-republican-party/

7. C.S.Lewis in “Mere Christianity” makes the case that there is natural law across cultures in the same way that we have some universal morality. All are convinced murder is bad, but have different definitions of when its ok. The other example off the top of my head is parents (even animal parents) are supposed to look after and protect their children. The argument goes that if we have some natural responsibilities, we have some natural rights too.

   • Yes, there are quite a few rules which appear universally, in virtually every human people-group that we we’re aware of:

     • don’t murder members of your tribe; • don’t steal from members of your tribe;
     • look after the children of your tribe;
     • don’t lie to members of your tribe;
     • when a member of your tribe does you a favor, you owe them reciprocity.

     And that’s one of the problems with “diversity”: when most people you interact with are no longer members of your tribe— when they are people you have a little or nothing in common with— those old natural rules break down; and it’s every man for himself.

     • forced vacs
       mass tax burden at all income and purchase points
       child mutilation, mass abortion and indoctrination
       state propaganda and mainstream media unity
       complete breakdown of social reciprocity for individual from institutions and govt

       All the white countries currently violate institutionally every one of those universals, irrespective as to how many aliens have been forced into the nation.

       And that is on top of a concerted mult-idecade push to replace and disempower the white populations in their own nations

       Seems they are not so universal as you think.

8. It seems helpful to differentiate the theoretical from the practical: to distinguish “what should be”— according to someone’s conception—from *what actually is*

   Whether you derive your conception of rights from a holy scripture, or from somewhere else; in a practical sense, it seems incontrovertible that *you only have the rights that you’re able to protect and enforce*. Saying “God gave us these rights” doesn’t mean anything in a society where human rulers have taken them away.

   God may have given all human beings inalienable rights, but that doesn’t obviate the fact that people living in communist China don’t have them. *And God doesn’t seem particularly anxious to do anything about it*

   So, even if you see human rights as divinely grounded, they can (and will ) only exist in a human society which recognizes and enforces them. Even if they “came from God”, they’ll continue to exist in our world *only through human action*

   So in the last resort, whether those rights exist or not, comes down to human beliefs, ability, and action. God and God’s Will would seem to have a little or nothing to do with it.

9. This is spot on. Today I completed a journey whose return path led me through Lagos and Washington DC. One of the roads was the George Washington expressway. I don’t know if Expressway is correct because underneath was written, “Dedicated to Gladys Noon Spellman.” Spellman’s entire legislative agenda was diametrically opposed to everything George Washington not only stood for, but everything he fought for against the greatest military to that point in human history.

   In her bio from the Maryland Commission of Women written in 1985 states: “Gladys Spellman was a trailblazer for the women of our state and nation. In her active life, she was a visionary with the intelligence and talent to make ideas become reality. Many of the changes and advances that we take for granted today were the culmination of her dreams, and we, in Maryland, will enjoy the results of her vision and successes for years to come.” How well has her opposition to reforming the civil service and commitment to indebting every major American metropolis workout for Maryland and the nation as a whole? Is it dedicated to George Washington, our First Citizen, or to someone else?

   That same state just elected a black Governor whose motto is, “This is our time.” Who was he speaking for? Was he speaking for everyone in Maryland, or was he announcing that this in now the black’s in Maryland’s time?

   Biden spent the Thanksgiving Holiday consorting with David Rubenstein. Rubenstein founded Carlyle – the grift machine supreme that Washington warned us about. Rubenstein took the billions he made off of the American people and as thanks bought up our Founding Father’s heritage sites and homes and uses them to sully their name, our nation and our people as, “enslavers.” Rubenstein publishes books for the masses that amount to a replacement of our nation and our people’s true history. Biden named his price and is doing his treasonous master’s bidding.

   No better illustration of ZMan’s point today exists than Britain’s recent announcement from London’s Westminster district that from here on out, non-whites will no longer be described as minorities, but as, “the Global majority.” Look at the spokeswoman’s bio. She is a black supremacist. Look at all of the literature printed by Westminster’s borough. It is entirely people of black and brown complexion. Not a single white person graces its brochures and propaganda. She speaks of the indigenous people of the Global south, but gives no mention to the indigenous people of the island of Britain.

   This negro spokeswoman for the, “Global Majority”, is here in no uncertain terms to shatter Anton’s delusion. You see, she is an alien in Britain. As long as it served her to take British people’s handouts and to enjoy their freedoms of speech in a way that served her interest and damaged the interests of the people of Britain, she loved them. Now that the thoroughly cuckholded British population has been sufficiently replaced, talk of being a minority no longer serves her interest. Now, she will hold up the British people’s tradition to defer to the majority against them. So the propaganda will now use the term, “Global Majority”, to create moral legitimacy for the complete and final subjugation of the British people in their homeland. She used their pity and now will spit on it with the force of pure numbers.

   This is tribal warfare. It is brute force numbers with no thank you for the suckers who fed the monster ready to rip out their throats. The remaining indigenous people of the West need to wake up and need to wake up fast. As ZMan said, if everyone agrees on the rules and to play by them then you can have natural rights. That is not the society we live in. We gave it a chance and the people who said it will not work and why have been proven correct for the reasons they gave. The question before us now, isn’t, “Can it work?” The question is, do we have the will to see the writing on the wall and to do what it takes to survive?

   Do we have the will and the ability to elect our people in our cities and our states and to declare, “This is Our Time and our Place From Now Until The End of Time.” Do we have the will and the courage to back that up and make it so? I think this verse from an old Tool song is something the aliens will recognize, and we might make it to meet them if we recognize the wisdom in it too:

   “Credulous at best, your desire to believe in
   Angels in the hearts of men
   Pull your head on out your hippie haze and give a listen
   Shouldn’t have to say it all again
   The universe is hostile, so impersonal
   Devour to survive, so it is, so it’s always been”

   All of our ideals and laws and traditions were used against us. Ironically, we need to look to Israel for our inspiration. We need to claim our lands as ours for eternity. We need to back up those claims. We need to enforce who is in and who is out. We need to build our walls and use appropriate force to deter any who would encroach on it. Hold up Israel as the example. Put its defenders in a position to deny us what they, as a, “Western democracy”, seem to hold as a right exclusively for themselves as a Western nation in their appeals to our sense of fraternity. I think that is one of the most effective things we can do. I have yet to hear a Jewish person who can deny this logic without denying their own legitimacy to what they claim as theirs, (and build with our money), even while we have been subverted and told what is ours is not.

   In the early skirmishes in the war against us, used our principles and above all our high trust and good faith against us. It was a war of subterfuge. They have had 60 + years to prove their calls to our better natures were a call to join us and play by the rules. Their actions have betrayed their true desires and us with them. Our demographic situation is severely weakened so the gloves have come off. Another old Tool song talks about the laws of nature – crime and punishment, cause and consequence. It holds what is perhaps another fitting lesson for us to think about. It is called, “Jerk Off.”

   • This sort of cultural and heritage humiliation is everywhere.

     Learn to swim.

10. We have given of our gifts too freely.
    All that we have, and have done, we have given to those who are not ready for it.

    This is akin to sugar candy every day to children, or Kalishnikovs to Africans.

    We were told that they would become us- this was a false hope. From the Devil’s point of view, we have upset the balance.

    Imagine the world of Bladerunner 2049.
    Synthetic flora, replicant humans, mountain ranges of trash, skies and seas choked with chemical garbage.

    Only White people could create such a world. Only us. The rest revert to a savage sustainability, dragging themselves back into internecine culling.

    We worship the world of Nature, we respect and would protect it, this is our way. But we have given the sugar and the Kalishnikovs; the Earth’s carrying capacity might be much greater from cold technological statistics, but what will break first are the social structures.
    We can’t MBA human nature as we did our industries.

    Now Europe, our birthplace, faces starvation and frostbite, the collapse of its industry’s energy and feedstocks.

    Why?

    Because the foreign satraps (Rishi Sunak) and collabo regimes are in place. The Muslim and African footsoldiers are mustered in force. They are given privileges, immunities, and benefits above the native subjects. They will fight tooth and nail to keep those privileges, a “natural” overseer class.

    Europeans from other ethnicities- from the east, Albanian, Romanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish- are bunched into underclass enclaves to stymie white cohesion.

    Europa will be broken.
    Europa will be conquered.
    Her colonies as well, that neither might aid the other.

    This, then, is the savage sustainability.
    The Devil will have his due; our enslavement ensures that the world will slow, the White plague of surplus abate.

    Quarantine! Segregate!
    We must make ourselves a fortress, and none may enter the Kingdom of the Elves!

11. Hence the concept of private property. Ownership traces to the laws of the universe, which is its authority.

    ++++

    Except everybody knows that is crap. You can have what you are strong enough to keep. That is nature’s law, and is evident everywhere in the universe.

    • Indeed that is correct. There is only force.

      The rest is wanking on about things that don’t matter anymore, if they ever did.

      As Holland is now demonstrating today by force purchasing and closing 3000 livestock farms because 10 EU traitors on the commission have decided it.

      Generations of property ownership, land management, effort, food and livelihoods .

      Fuck you says the govt.

      The boot is pressing on the face with every more pressure and still its not enough to break people free of their learned helplessness in the face of hypnotic evil.

      Europeans are either gonna have to fight or accept death.

      • Yep.
        It will be a fight, the worst enemy is “our own” keep it local get to know your neighbors, local officials find out who MIGHT be an ally & who WILL be an enemy they might be even in your own family. Do not show your hand. Be a gray man.

12. Calvinism posits a completely deterministic view of human life.

    Calvin asserted that— *without exception*— *everything* that happens is God’s will. He famously insisted that “not a drop of rain falls, not a breeze blows”, that God hasn’t deliberately brought it about, deliberately willed it into existence.

    And he extended that doctrine to all of human behavior as well: everything which human beings do, reflects God’s deliberate will.

    *It’s not simply that God has allowed it; rather, according to Calvin, God has deliberately brought about everything that happens*

    In line with this, Calvin further asserted that before God created anything, God first decided everything that would happen. Thus in the Calvinist worldview, everything is foreordained, predetermined. In Calvin’s world, *nothing happens— nothing *can* happen— outside the express will of God*

    Although Calvinists claim that Calvinist doctrine doesn’t preclude free will, I would argue that it does: that there’s no place for free choice in a world in which every single event and decision has been predetermined.

    Is this way, Calvinism is much like Islam, which also asserts that everything which happens is God’s (Allah’s) will. Since Allah is all-powerful, by definition no one can resist Allah’s all-powerful will, and nothing can happen outside of Allah’s all-powerful and all-encompassing will.

    Thus both Calvinism and Islam agree that the only “rights” human beings can have, are those which the divine being has granted them.

    > > So it seems obvious that *the concept of “human rights” is going to be entirely different, depending on whether or not one sees the Universe as being the product of an all-powerful God*

    > > For for those of us who reject the notion of an all-powerful “supreme being”— whether that supreme being is the Allah of the Koran, or the God of the Bible, or something else— the only “rights” we humans can possibly have, are *those we carve out for ourselves*

    If there is no higher power telling us what is right and wrong, or specifying what rights we have— if religious narratives are recognized as fully-human documents reflecting human opinion, not “divine will”— then it’s clear that *we humans are left to create whatever standards— and whatever rights— there will be*

    Can rights be derived from the natural world? I think so.

    Here’s one way to get there:

    One characteristic of all life, is that all living beings instinctively resist death: *when faced with the prospect of imminent extinction, all living creatures— from the simplest bacteria on up— struggle to continue to live*. As far as I’m aware, there are no exceptions to this.

    > Thus *the urge to continue living* would appear to be a fundamental drive, which every living creature shares.

    > So it seems entirely reasonable to assert that *all living beings behave as if continuing to exist is a fundamental right*

    Logically following from that, would be an individual right of self-defense; i.e., the right to use force to prevent someone else from ending your life.

    And logically following from these initial presumptions— of every creature’s right to continue to exist, and to resist threats to that continuing existence — is the right to continue your existence *in whatever way you see fit*— provided your doing so doesn’t interfere with someone else’s right to exist.

    >>>> The advantage of this standard is that it doesn’t rely on any “holy scripture”, or any particular cosmological narrative, for its justification; rather, *it reflects the way in which all living creatures behave, and the values which they seem to instinctively possess*

    • Thus I reject Semitic narratives; they are political propaganda to justify conquest rule, a morality to ease the troubled conscience of slaves.

      Harshly put, because of the Cuckening: a cuckening which has happened before.

      Sargon and the line of Semitic tyrants were the “Snake” in the coded political history of Genesis.

      “Snake” was a cultural reference, true, but said in the tone of a hated family rival. Why?

      Because the book was revised by the brothers who failed, filled with righteous jealousy.

      I had thought their ire was directed at us, but no, the true thrust of their anger was at their own.

      Because, the Abrahamic branch had failed in its revolt, and was cut off from the desirable genes it sought to harvest. They had been forced to flee to the wastelands; the Cult of the Bride Stealers had no brides to steal.

      The Benjamite warriors were Aryan; the cruel Akkadians had put bit and bridle on the White horse, and ridden them to power;

      Much worse, they had steady supply of the highest prize in the known universe: Aryan females. Eve had listened to the Snake, and had cheated the Adam.

      We have been Cucked into elevating these creatures once before, or more than once.

      Further, I submit the origin of the Semitics explains their lopsided nature: they are an attempt to cross too great a divide.

      As whites are from Neanderthal and CroMagnon;
      As Asian and Amerindian are from Neanderthal and Denisovian;

      The Semitic origins are Africanus Erectus. The goodness we gave the Ugly Children is at terrible odds with the darkness they inherited. It is a lamentation.

13. Locals is Dave Rubin’s own, meant as a free speech platform. It is not a Rumble creation, tho Locals and Rumble recently merged.

    Don’t know of any complaints; then again, I’m not looking for a video platform.

    • Locals is in the hands of controlled opposition. Would be nice if we had our own Locals like service.

      • So, build one. That’s what Dave Rubin did, originally. Why is he special? A: Because he actually did it, starting from nothing. What Locals is now is a different problem, but it’s not like there’s some barrier if you want to attempt the next Youtube.

        There’s also the Lotus Eaters (Sargon’s own).

        Fact is there are already a dozen or more alternatives of varying merit, and the question becomes reach and scale.

    • Rumble has “investors” who’ve invested enough that the company publicly offered to buy out Joe Rogan’s contract+penalties (at least 200 million dollars)—and the site demands that you prove your identity if you want to use it.

      I’d sooner fax a copy of my posting career to Merrick Garland.

      • All that tax money being recycled through many avenues for those endless control mechanisms.

        The amusement they must get from all these platforms and organizations that people are paying for their own enslavement and they can’t even see it.

14. good article. speaking of the fall of civilizations , this channel on y tube is called “fall of civilizations” and has what i think are excellent summaries of the end causes of issues that led to the disappearance of civilizations , from the Sumerians on.
    this video is a good one to start with . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA&t=5788s . it’s a great one to learn some reasonable history from , and “the message” is very limited too.

    • Thanks much, miforest; that’s the kind of thing I was looking for, as I want to listen to docu-casts on my long drives.

      The pajeets in Google/Youtube had flooded the tubes with Pajeet propaganda, cutting off or redirecting away from White narratives, most especially Aryan and Celtic histories.

15. Zman you betrayed your Catholic roots when you associated Calvinism with choice. Calvinism (contra Arminianism) is the doctrine of predetermination, the opposite of choice.

    • And thus, by paying attention to what Calvin said, we forget entirely his real role: this insane mystery puppet from nowhere directed the funds and thrust of genocidal religious war between brothers.

      A bonus! Calvin also declared that the mark of a witch was green eyes and red hair, and urged the extermination of the rarest form of beauty in the world. I have no doubts as to the true Master whom “J.C.” served.

      • >>>Calvin also declared that the mark of a witch was green eyes and red hair,<<<

        And where, exactly, did he say this?

16. Pingback: Survival of Rights | American Freedom News

17. I’m sad that there are no more Taki posts (was using that as a gentle introduction…) but rather disturbed that Takimag has apparently removed all the Z-Man posts. They’ve never before removed posts when a writer left their fold, so wtf?

    • Hmmm. My ‘read’ on posts by the man Taki – are that they come from a very feminine voice. Now there may be some contractual reason we are not privy to – that led to the removal of prior posts. Or it could be a simple snit – see the rupture between Lind Dinh and Unz as an example.

      Otherwise, to the ear of this ONE man – Taki has a snarky, female voice. So a knee-jerk removal if Zeesterman took his ball and went home, would not be odd in that environment.

      In any case, I am a daily Zman reader, occasional to rare Taki reader. I rarely read the Zman column there as it is.

      • There were some good articles. But Z was no ‘rougher’ on the deserving than say, David Cole’s column.

        Well, now I wonder who owns the rights, and whether Z might reproduce them here.

    • For the same reason Taki killed the comment section, Taki’s daughter runs the site AFAIK. she wants to stay in the good graces of polite society, they still have some interesting writers but the Zman is a loss

      • (((They live))): “she wants to stay in the good graces of polite society”

        We paleocons badly missed the mark in ignoring the near omnipotent power via which “Social Proof” mesmerizes and hypnotizes the average White front-hole.

        Obviously, in our own private lives, as bachelors, we’ve got to be searching diligently [frankly obsessively] to find young fertile White front-holes [with whom to breed] who are ultra-resistant to the almighty power of “Social Proof”.

        But they ain’t exactly easy to stumble upon.

        OTOH, they’re precisely the kinds of chicks who would have refused the V@xxines, so if the V@xxines do indeed induce the Great Die-Off, then that more psychologically ornery personality will largely be the only remaining White front-hole personality, status post the onset of Armageddon.

        It’s simply spellbinding to behold the sheer supremacy of Psychology over Biology in the human affairs [and then the inevitably reassertion of the dominance of Biology once again].

        Is that the fundamental paradox [or the defining characteristic] of our species?

        The inherent inability to resolve the Psychological/Biological dichotomy?

        • (A triumph for Bourbon! Such a comment deserves long savoring.)

      • Indeed, as a long time part of the Takitariat, when Taki (his daughter being editor) removed the comments, the value of the site plummeted…Taki’s daughter is a social climbing society girl, and she didn’t like the criticism of Jews and Israel, for one thing..She lived in London, where Israel is king…

      • Yeah, Taki’s hasn’t had quite the bite since then. Still, it’s one of my semi-regular skims, and Z’s columns were not “out of line” as they go.

        • Indeed, I read Taki’s for Taki, he serves up delicious dish.

          Taki’s reminisces of what was and could’ve been, had Whites not thrown away their crown, is like the last memories of sumptuous feast at a fantasy ball, to be imagined and savored by we peasants before the Seljuk hordes break through the wall.

          (D.C. also, his is a canny insight into the mind of a smart enemy. Like a bondslave overhearing the talk of the Seljuk ambassadors.)

18. Z’s themes today echo many concepts that I’ve belabored here for years. I surely cannot take credit for them being original ideas; they are far older than me, from earlier writers and most probably dating to 18th-19th century European thought.

    A key quote in today’s essay: “Many Christians reject the idea of a universe defined by fixed and unchanging rules.” My goal today is not to trash only
    Christians; let me call them “Idealists.” In all times and places there are plenty of people who think that the rules can be changed. Or ignored.

    This returns to the ancient Platonic division between so-called “real” (mental/conceptual) and “apparent” (the outside, physical reality perceived by our senses). Bad news for the Idealists: the real world IS in fact, governed by physical laws of Nature at are not in the least susceptible to alteration by Man. Now, I’m not qualified to pronounce them “fixed and unchanging,” but all my learning points in that direction. It’s also worth noting that when such laws do “appear” to change, it’s almost certainly the case that what has changed is our understanding (theories), not the underlying phenomena itself.

    Note, and it’s critically important: what IS highly flexible and changeable is that interior mental world of thought, well structured logical thought to the most wild fantasy and any mixture of those you’d like. There’s nothing wrong with this, in principle. Problems arise when people think they can impose those wishes on the physical universe, which is but another way of saying that Nature’s laws will bend to whatever his wishes may be. If only it were like that, but it just ain’t so, folks.

    I realize the term “natural rights” has some legacy meaning. Nevertheless, it makes me cringe every time I read it. How could any “right” exist in Nature? Who shall enforce that right? If someone is violating my right, to what court or other authority do I appeal to? If you say “God,” it doesn’t change this argument in the least. The Deity may indeed rule in his Heaven, but this world is run by a set of immutable laws that are indifferent to our wishes. A hungry man may think he has a “right” to food, and by some legal code he probably does. But that fact, of itself, will not cause the multiplication of loaves and fishes.

    I believe that this is what Hume was discussing when he observed that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”.

    Yes, rights do exist. But they are purely a human creation. Rights cannot exist, or at least they don’t have much value, absent the human institutions that grant and maintain those rights. And just as human cultures are enormously variable through time and space, similarly their rights, laws, customs, ethics and so on are quite diverse too. And just as cultures are born, exist a time and die, so do many of their institutions, sadly which includes their rights.

    • Q. Why must rights be enforced? Or more to the point, if they are not enforced why do they cease being rights?

      2+2=4, regardless of what O’Brien might try to convince Smith.

    • Not sure I’m correct, but my impression is natural rights are derived from nature, not necessarily inherent in it. So indeed they come out of a certain tradition and need to be enforced.

      But like I say, I could be wrong and the last 300+ years could’ve been based on naïve idealism, hard as that is for me to swallow. I tend to think an incredible winning streak had Western man smoking his own dope.

      • Human rights, as adverted to by Z-man, are largely a product of the social trust developed by peoples raised under manorial feudalism, west of the Hajnal line…that social trust does not exist in, say, Sicily or most of the rest of the world….

        • Yes, but as another commenter on here noted, a lot of that trust was earned by a population that didn’t take abuse after a point. ‘Natural’ rights, I’d say! We’ve lost that edge, safe to say.

    • Z: “More so, in fact. In order for rights to survive, the people who created them must survive.”

      Ben the Layabout: “Yes, rights do exist. But they are purely a human creation. Rights cannot exist, or at least they don’t have much value, absent the human institutions that grant and maintain those rights.”

      ===============

      Kinda way way way off topic, but are there any serious Urologists or Endocrinologists here chez Z who can weigh in on the theory of worldwide collapsing sperm counts?

      In just the last few days, the sperm count stuff has been everywhere in the news, to include luridly graphic depictions of smaller penises and malformed urethrae.

      What’s going on here?

      I’ll throw out three possibilities:

      1) We [Western Men] simply got fantastically unlucky, and plastics plus pesticides plus carbohydrates [harvested from grains sprayed with pesticides] plus the sedentary lifestyle are just randomly turning men into women?

      2) The Georgia Guidestones Oligarchs have known for 50 or 75 years that plastics/pesticides/carbs/sedentism were biologically effeminizing, and have been very intentionally & methodically shoving those products & practices down our throats in order to chemically castrate us?

      [In which case, Mr McGuire’s advice to Benjamin, in “The Graduate”, “There’s a great future in plastics”, would have been the Sanhedrin simply laughing at us.]

      3) The Georgia Guidestones Oligarchs can no longer keep the lid on the side effects of the V@xxines, and, in particular, the “lipid nanoparticles” in the V@xxines are attacking v@xxinated men’s gonads and destroying them, ergo the Georgia Guidestones Oligarchs realized they needed to get ahead of the publicity curve, so they launched a new “Look Squirrel!” psychological warfare campaign, designed to distract our attention away from the V@xxines?

      In terms of the ackshual question of declining sperm counts [setting aside all the V@xxines/plastics/pesticides theories], my own guess is that the most likely culprit would be men’s worldwide transition from working 9-5 primarily standing upright on their feet [as blue collar labor] to instead primarily sitting in a chair all day long [as white collar labor].

      Classically the greatest threat to a man’s sperm count was an overheating of his gonads, and when he’s out and about, walking upright, his gonads swing loose and easy in the breeze, and are much cooler [especially if he’s going “Commando”], whereas if he’s sitting in a chair for eight to twelve hours a day, wearing underwear, then he’s in danger of overheating his ‘nads to the point of infertility.

      ===============

      Obviously the Georgia Guidestones Oligarchs don’t believe that the proles have a right to procreate.

      And absent a right to procreate, Thomas Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” become largely meaningless to yuge swaths of the population, except maybe for the moast cynically nihilistic of the ultra-libertardians [i.e. Alisa Rosenbaum’s Objectivists].

      Z hasn’t said it explicitly in this essay, but procreation is at the heart of all of this, ergo who does the procreating [versus who refuses to procreate, or who can no longer even summon the sperm count necessary to procreate in the first place] is [was & will always be] the single determining factor of the nature of the human race.

      Which would get back to my point that everything we are witnessing, and classifying via abstract cultural or political or philosophical descriptors, is, in fact, merely Meta-Darwinian phenomena consisting of differing families of strands of DNA fighting it out for genetic supremacy in MeatSpace/KlownWorld.

      In particular: No More Anglosphere == No More Saxons == No More Slow to Hate.

      Absent the Anglosphere, the remaining hominids are nothing but shape-shifting-merchants and leprechauns and chimpanzees, with hair-trigger tempers, who literally eat [and especially drink] one another for dinner.

      • Hail, Caesar! A Triumph, I say! Prepare the garlands, make ready the Processional Way!

        ******

        I see exactly this in the secondary layer, in what is called the “spiritual” realm.

        It is design, a Design above mind. A titanic movement in a certain direction. As a dead man told me, Nature is beyond morality–yet, even so, it is only the Good that prevails.

        Most fortunate are we, the children of Creation: for of all the gods of Creation, the greatest amongst them, is Mercy.

19. re: ‘ phrase “I know my rights” means nothing in China’

    I, for one, will be extremely disappointed if The Atlantic does not ceremoniously soon extend lockdown amnesty to the CCP. Emily Oster should explain this in Mandarin to the protestors via dancing TikTok video. Expecting consistency from intelligentsia is one of those grand true things I got from Tom Washington and George Jefferson

20. Lot so ungrateful comments here the re Taki Theodoracopulos. He has been calling a spade a spade since the 1980’s along with providing amusing tales of his travels and vices and also providing a platform for various writers. He should be given his due respect.

    • Yes, I read Taki’s, for Taki.
      He serves up delicious dish.

      Taki’s is lessened without the Zman.

21. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Survival of Rights

22. Scott Adams uses Locals and apparently likes it a lot. I subscribe and watch him there and have had very few problems with it.

    • “The Joker” a man-osphere talker that suggests replacing women with dish soap and an appendage uses Locals.

    • Has Scott Adams killed himself yet?

23. I agree that on earth in human societies, ultimately FORCE is the true power. There’s no debating this. That’s why in my ideal society, there is freedom of speech to give room for the few outsiders/geniuses lest they get smothered by conformity. But there is NOT such freedom for the civilization wrecking crazies who espouse trannies, DIE, feminism, porno, and all the rest. I say lock them up and throw away the the key. Because if you don’t and extend them good faith courtesy, they will get their foot in the door and inevitably take power and NOT return the favor to you; such is their nature. It’s just the way it is. One some things, there HAVE to be absolute red lines.

    “They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust.”

    You lost me on this one.

    ” Men in one period accept certain things to be true that men in a different period would not accept as true. Loosely put, mankind and its mental constructs are a product of time and place.”

    Yes, but there is objective truth outside of mens’ heads. There is somewhere OUTSIDE of time and place. To adhere to the truth, to God, will lead to prosperity and happiness in a society. To do otherwise will lead to hell. We can observe the latter in real time.

    Of course here on earth, God’s way would ultimately have to be enforced with force; as all authority on earth must be. I’d never argue against that. Doesn’t change the substance of my comment above.

    “You are born into this world as the property of your parents who created you and raised you.”

    Parents didn’t create the child. The woman does not know how to knit together the child in her belly, but it happens anyway. God did it.

    • I have a natural right to own guns. Because, come and take them.

      • Admittedly, I am weak in philosophy. Still coasting on a undergraduate course on Hellenistic history.

        • “Coasting on an undergrad course in Hellenism…”: don’t fret, the entire Roman Empire did the same thing.

      • SidVic,
        I would derive your right to own guns, from your fundamental right of self defense; which in turn derives from your fundamental right to keep on living.

24. What’s ironic is that the natural rights civilization seems to harbor the seeds of its own destruction. Owing to a misbegotten because overly capacious conception of human nature, the ostensible universality of natural rights provides in implicit argument for racial egalitariansim and unlimited immigration. If all human beings, irrespective of culture and location on the globe, inherently possess identical rights, what grounds are there for any culture or civilization to remain hermetic? On the contrary, it stands to reason that we really are one world and our political arrangements should reflect that reality.

    But, as we see from the cultural forces that are ripping the West asunder, natural rights are anything but universal. What’s more, the West’s Power Structure, which is now postmodern rather than Enlightenment-based, no longer believes the natural rights bull. Not only does it not have the stomach to compel negroes to respect free speech and Moslems to acknowledge the equality of sexual deviants, it encourages them to do the opposite. The only people hanging onto natural rights theory on the domestic front are Civ-Nats, and the only people pushing it globally are the neocons. Everybody else has moved on, and that means culturally centrifugal forces, with all their considerable destructive power, now run unchecked.

    • Agree.

      It’s only my gut instinct, but it feels as though the CivNat vibe is over – or very nearly over. Fewer and fewer people care. Non-whites and the usual suspects never believed in it, but as they gain in numbers (non-whites) and begin to openly exert their power (small hats), these groups are no longer even pretending to care about colorblind civic nationalism.

      More and more whites are waking up to other groups’ exploitation of our CivNat beliefs. No one likes to be a sucker.

      You can see it even here. A few years back there was a lot of discussion about how to talk to normie CivNats and plant seeds in their brains. But, now, most of us have moved on. If the opportunity is there, sure, we’ll do what we can, but, mostly, I’m done with the CivNats. If they can’t see what’s happening, screw them.

      The CivNats are getting abandoned by all sides. Non-whites hate them. DR whites mock or ignore them. Civic nationalism is a dying ideology. It fails at every turn and has no future. It only survives because the alternative is so terrifying for normies that they don’t want to let go. But nature doesn’t give a shit about their feelings.

      • We must be understanding of why it is so hard for them to let go. From this understanding, we can help some cross over. A numbers game has been played against us and we need all the numbers we can get.

        They think, and rightly, that if they give up on obeying the rules of the system, (colorblind, natural rights, consent of the governed, limited government), then the system will be over. Yes, it will be. What they don’t understand is that it is either they declare the system over and face reality or it won’t be the system that is over, it will be the existence of them and/or their posterity that will be over.

        None will come to our side if mocked. An important part of our project is to leave the smoke signals that say, do you want to be extinguished along with your system that is effectively already extinguished, (here is the proof it is happening), or do you want to extinguish the system yourself and get out with some sort of future in tact?

        Jordan Peterson is a classic example of such a person stuck in the mud. His clings to Christ in a world that abandoned him. Who in the mob is going to accept Christ when they are promised revenge and the goodies they can obtain from exacting it? It is time to abandon that Sad Sack from Jerusalem and adopt as model one of Western Civ’s Great Men, (Alexander, Caesar, Alfred, Rollo, Clovis … …), or adopt a pagan God and move on. Rome is falling and with it, the order and promise of basic protections and benefits for its founding stock.

        • I read the comments on some Breitbart clickbait – if they are a representative sample, then Normie’s worship of Israel the risen Antichrist is as strong as ever.

          (Of course, the moderators at Breitbart are most decidedly painting that picture, as well.)

          • Ah, exscusi, Zblog moderation, I should’ve coyly said “their worship of the ADL.”

            A sign! My liberal bestie just now sent word to invest in EE bonds.

            Normie is right, without this creaking, corrupt system even as it is, the retirement class is lost.

      • From where I sit, it appears most of the civnats have one thing in common: they are old. In 20 years not so many of them will be left. But in 20 years a lot of other things may not be left either.

    • Superb comment. I have come to the conclusion that so-called liberty enables its own destruction through permissiveness toward the forces of anti-liberty. For instance, people use their own free speech to assail and prevent the free speech of others. Such self-contradictory activity cannot be effectively opposed under a regime of liberty. “Liberty” means refusing to play offense. It’s impossible to win any game without playing offense.

    • “the West’s Power Structure, which is now postmodern rather than Enlightenment-based”

      That solves a lot of problems I have. When I think Enlightenment, I think reason, science, materialism. What we have today is anything but. How did we get here? Best guess I have is the Enlightenment’s fruit: leisure and plenty; total, industrial war; loss of religion for ideology; Leviathan. But then that makes me think we’re still in the Enlightenment, at its end. Internal contradictions, or something like that. Otoh, I guess the dividing lines aren’t so clear when you’re living through them.

      Idk, I’m having a hard time untying that knot.

      • Beginning as early as the late 20s, and reaching full effect by the early 60s, Leftist intellectuals lost faith–as it were–in orthodox Marxism, certainly as it was lived in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries. Postmodernism, which has its roots in Nietzschean relativism, and critical theory, which is a more culturally-oriented form of Marxism, then vied for the attention those disaffected Leftist intellectuals. Postmodernism, thanks to Michel Foucault and the relative quietism of the critical theorists, won this little battle and proceded to conquer American academia beginning in the late 60s. At some point in the 80s, pomo had swept the field in the social sciences and humanities, and its young acolytes, wittingly or not, went thither into the media, government, Hollywood and the corporations, bearing postmodern sensibilities, chief among them being anti-white racism and a hatred of Western civilization. The aggressive cancer metastasized very quickly and the host is now on life support.

        That’s a somewhat reductive thumbnail history of the West’s collapse.

        • Think I read somewhere (don’t quote me, I read casually lol) that during that early 20th century timeframe, Atlanticism took hold in the American academy. That’s where I get the idea that America was reconquered— that and the establishment of the Fed. Before that, America was rather isolationist.

          I wonder if that was the vector. Certainly would make sense.

          (PS I really need to re-read Nietzsche. He seems to have a reputation as the fount of many evils. Must’ve missed something 😆)

          • Painter, as this blog’s resident Nietzsche Pimp, I declare you have him pegged quite well 🙂

            I recommend Preface (section 1) of his “Human, All too Human” as a fairly succinct manifesto.

            https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38145/pg38145-images.html

          • He’s like a dog that got kicked too many times imo. Easy to see how spiteful mutants could run with that and miss the point, also how the well-adjusted could be put off. Still, it seemed to me he had good, if damaged, will. Idk, maybe I’m being too generous?

      • Nietzsche (and perhaps others, but I’m most familiar with him) wrote widely about just those issues, ca. 1870-1890. Even in his era, he argued that Christianity was long in decline in Europe, no longer a serious subject of study in the university. As I understand him, he claimed two major attempts to reconcile religion with advancing knowledge (science): Jesuitism and Liberal Democracy. This latter becoming a secular religion. The progress of science ties in too. The “will to truth,” the relentless quest to discover the secrets of nature, brings material progress and new knowledge but inevitably at the cost of undermining older beliefs, social systems and such.

        Although I don’t recall Nietzsche arguing the following, I think a good case can be made that more and more institutions are going quite the opposite way, that is, to deny reality and try to enforce illusions. He did expect that the end result is nihilism, which is to claim that life is meaningless.

        None of the above necessarily obligates the End of the World but, perhaps the end of a major epoch. N. was influenced by Buddhism which has its cyclical view of history (His “eternal return,” perhaps). Even “normal” history traces the rise, heyday, decline and fall of many great civilizations or cultures, often spanning many centuries apiece. It’s often said the West is late in the game of perhaps a 500 year cycle.

25. Big mistake to leave Takimag, imo. It’s an edited organ, therefore has an aspect of legitimacy to it, which self-publishing can never have, no matter how ardent the fan-club. It is also a high-visibility platform (it is how I came to find this site) with some big names (whether or not you agree with them all the time) and connects to a wider ecosystem, such as The Spectator readership.

    IMO also, pay-per-view is just going to lose more of your audience than you will gain – I for one refuse to pay for anything online. It’s not so much the cost (though that is an issue when there are lots of potential subscriptions you might want to make) – really, it’s just too much trouble. Constantly signing in or having to manage cookies would soon push me away. Visibility and ease of access is everything.

    • It’s interesting that all traces of Z seem to have been removed from Taki.
      He’s be un-personed.

26. Forgive me if this has already been addressed below, but I’d like you to elaborate on your assertion that there’s no such thing as list. On its face, it’s rather absurd, but maybe we’re working on different definitions.

    Lust, by my definition, is simply the biological drive and desire to copulate when you see an attractive female. When you see an attractive female, it moves a little in your pants. There’s lust in simplest terms. Now men can chose to act or not act on this list based on a number of cultural or logical reasons, but that’s a different discussion.

    • ***Damn autocorrect…lust not list

      • Is it just me or has autocorrect and predictive typing gotten too aggressive and intrusive?

        I feel like the setup I had on my phones from 2013 to about 2018 was far more helpful and effective than what I have today.

    • The urge to copulate is a real thing, but the moral component is conceptual.

      • The practical consequences of unbridled lust is a real thing, which nature knows well enough.
        Which I think illustrates how today’s article got into a semantic tangle. A stimulating read as always, but I found little convincing or meaningful in it.

    • I was thinking about the sin of lust, not the biological impulse. I should have been clearer.

      • Everyone has sexual urges; what we do with them determines whether we’re being lustful or not.

        As Martin Luther famously said, “You can’t stop a bird from landing on your head. But you can stop him from making a nest in your hair.”

    • In diverse, vibrant communities, I believe they call it “muhdick”

27. Ref Taki – I never forgave him and his miscreant daughter for taking away the comments section a few years ago.
    ZMan is too good for them.

    • You said it. You and I used to post there regularly until we were all unceremoniously given the bum’s rush. So, screw ’em, says I. This is my posting home now, and if Z begins writing for another site other than Taki’s, I’ll read his stuff there, too.

    • Taki’s comment section was very good. Better than most. It seems like it went away around the time Charlottesville but I could be wrong. Taki is not so bad. Refers to New York as the Big Bagel.

28. We can argue over natural rights and historicism, but what about “human nature,” “male/female” nature or (gasp) Nature in-and-of-itself? Are ALL our views historically and genealogically conditioned? Are there ANY truths, i.e., unchanging brute facts, on which we may agree? More generally, is this a random, chaotic, chance-based multiverse without a telos, or is there a cosmic order, a creating and embracing intelligence that animates ALL of existence? This strikes me as a fundamental choice we’re required to make between Being and non-being, where the latter cannot be.

    • Excellent post.

      What I can say is this: human nature is real, but it’s less comprehensive than most on the Right usually reckon. Human beings are violent, musical and in need of amusement and esteem from our fellow man (thymotic pride). Beyond that, the vagaries of specific culture supervene.

      As for truths, even social ones, I believe they exist, although some cultures will not agree to them. But just because a truth is denied, doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.

      Regarding the cosmic questions, the universe is certainly governed at the macro level by the laws of physics, which were created by God, but I’m not sure there’s any telos. Perhaps God created a mechanism so vast and complex that even he cannot say for certain how it will all end.

    • Rta,

      When you ask, “Are ALL our views historically and genealogically conditioned? Are there ANY truths, i.e., unchanging brute facts, on which we may agree?”

      I would suggest that there are:

      The urge to continue living would appear to be a fundamental drive, which every living creature shares.

      So it seems entirely reasonable to assert that *all living beings behave as if continuing to exist is a fundamental right*

29. Interesting how when if came time to withhold communion from the congregations, due to the Chinese stiff cold, of which the vast, vast majority of churches did, all the preachers put on their bulletins the one line from Paul in Romans 13, which may as well have been written by the CCP. Even an Obama speech writer would have said “I love it but they won’t buy it in Peoria.” Of course Paul was wrong as he was eventually dragged away by authorities never to be hear from again. Was he rebelling? Was he in the wrong? Did he show them his nice letter?

    The same preachers who take a dip in the eternal spring of “human rights,” especially the right to squat wherever they heck you want, from any continent, at any time, suddenly, when it came time to exercise their First Amendment rights, retreated into Romans 13. Even the right to eternal life by partaking in the sacraments was struck from theology itself. Not even the most backwards, dark ages European would even think of withholding this sacred right. Because the only thing more useless than the Republican Party is Christianity. If you think your rights are secure because America has a healthy dose of Christianity you can always look up old video of axes being swung at beer barrels a hundred years ago.

    All rights as we know them come from an ornery, suspicious, and at least clever population that can suddenly fly off the handle and murder its leaders. Throughout history, this has been people from Northern Europe and subsequently North America. The history of natural government expansion and centralization is the slow, clawing back of those supposed rights.

    Romans 13:
    13 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.

    6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7 Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

    • Very fair, although another factor was certainly the make-up of the congregations, either young bug-persons or seniors terrified of the coof. They could have been defiant and opened their doors but a lot of the ministers/priests knew that their congregations would be no-shows as their true god is the glowing rectangle.

      • This is a popular belief, but largely not true, at least in my own AO, the churches were not shut down by the seniors, but by the Karens.

        The local Methodist pastor, for example, appealed to Wesley’s “Do No Harm” directive as his justification for masks, then shut-down, then ultimately jabs. He’s a guy in his 30s who bullied the Admin Council into doing things his way, not His way.

    • American Christianity pussing out when the shit hits the shinola goes back further than the coof. In the 80s and 90s they did a lot of complaining about abortion, but all of it fell far short of what you would expect of someone reacting to baby murder.

      Even further back the protestant majority tolerating the immigration of dirty catholics to breed like rabbits and subject us to green dyed beer and lousy adaptations of Italian cuisine.

      • Fifty years ago, all the dem catholic politicians who supported abortion should have been excommunicated. But there wasn’t stomach for that consequence at the beginning, and there sure as hell isn’t now.

    • Wow.

      Nice find, JR, very relevant here.

      Romans 13, 1-5. I will discuss with someone I admire, a very learned man, a scholar, a history major, my Pastor.

      My country, right or wrong? My government is good because God says it is, or because it is good, God says it is?

      • Good luck.

        IME, pastors of every denomination are taught in seminary to recite extra-biblical dogma as Truth. Most pastors just go with the, “ah, but that is not legitimate authority”.

        Ask him what he thinks of His temptation in the wilderness., when the devil offers Him the kingdoms of the world. (Matthew 4.) Since it says flat out that He was tempted, it means He knew the devil could deliver on the deal. And, no the deal wasn’t over the dirt or anything else physical. (Psalms 24). I can’t think of anything other than the idea of one man having dominion over another that the devil was offering.

        This is usually when the fall back on what I call Paulianity.

    • Very thought provoking post. Chapter 8 of Romans 13 says “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”
      Governing bodies, God’s and governments both stand behind the laws to govern the masses (thou shall not murder, adultery…) funny how the biblical laws and others in religious text often mirror one another.
      Governing bodies in the world change constantly, leaving nature as the true arbiter(to Z man point), However God’s laws have only changed once from a biblical perceptive with the death of Christ (old vs new testament).
      I think the true question comes in believing that this a random, chaotic, chance-based multiverse without a telos, or is there a cosmic order, a creating and embracing intelligence that is energy working in all things.
      Science shows us that everything is made up of energy. It’s in the building block of all matter. The same energy that composes your body is also the one that makes up bricks of the house you live in. Your car, phone, animals, trees, you name it, are all composed of energy.

      • The inaccuracy is what chafes. That a cosmic order needs “a creating and embracing intelligence” is the terrible chain that binds us to the Lord of Hell.

        I mean this, with all my heart and soul, and with all that I’ve learned and been given.

        Yet, such an understanding, as a child would understand, allows one to give word to the near-inexpressible scale of what we are dealing with, in such tidy fashion that one can live in a Godly way.

        My fear is that good children, striving to do good, can be fooled. It this not what has happened to the Left? In them, in all, I see goodness twisted and turned, trying to break free.

      • “…everything is composed of energy…”

        Soooo, what is energy composed of?

30. A right is something you possess that confers no obligation on another – free speech, free association, etc… An entitlement is something you possess that does confer an obligation on another – handicapped parking, welfare; that is, demanded by one, paid for by another.

    Understood this way, an abortion is not a right since it obligates the unborn child to give up its life to pay for the mother’s entitlement to a better “quality of life”. It is called a right because those who want the power of life and death demand that it be so, not because it is.

    The idea that “universal rights” are in the eye of the beholder makes sense when the history of its evolution as an idea is considered.

    But for many, universal rights means all those things that you are entitled to. I have only met a handful of women who would consider an abortion an entitlement. I think our idea of rights vs entitlements is not universal. The world’s definition of universal rights is, “what helps me win, no matter what.”

31. “The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition. Whatever claims one wants to make about the universality of natural rights, it is clear that the new people and their enablers are not embracing the concept.”

    It has been game, set, match since at least the end of the Nineteenth Century and probably at the conclusion of the Civil War. As I responded to you below, it was both sad and utterly predictable that Anton clings to the old religion and similar to Emperor Julian praying to his ancestors as church bells chime in the city square. We live in a profoundly religious era, and the faith of civic nationalism is weak sauce compared to the fanatical dogma all around us.

    • It at least goes back to Tammany Hall, the existence of which proclaimed the rejection of Jeffersonian democracy and wore it’s institutions as the proverbial skin suit.

32. Mainstream conservatives love the notion that principles and belief systems matter more than people. They are loathe to recognize that principles and belief systems do not create themselves. Those principles/belief systems come from particular peoples and reflect the unique genetic patterns among those peoples. Until enough conservatives come to terms with that reality, conservativism will continue to be a paper tiger, more a farce than an ideology worth embracing.

    • Conserve the People, not the latest “idea”. Indeed, indeed.

33. Modern society largely rejects the notion of sin from which the Christian religion offered redemption and salvation. So it is unsurprising that the values, rules and “natural rights” that allowed Christianity to spread and flourish will struggle to persist. What seems to remain universal is the innate religious drive. In a decidedly post-Christian society, the majority have recognized new “sins” such as patriarchy, racism and homophobia. And they have simply diverted their fundamental religious drive to identifying and redeeming or destroying the new sinners. For yesterday men, what was once right is now wrong; and martyrdom is once again a real prospect for the intransigent. But survive or die, there is no going back. Anton, of all people, should realize that this is Flight 93 writ large.

    • In his own way, Michael Anton is more deluded than the National Review. Even if the cockpit were to be somehow commandeered, everything before that moment still would be irreversibly altered. Only the disembarkment point would change.

    • ” In a decidedly post-Christian society, the majority have recognized new ‘sins’ such as patriarchy, racism and homophobia.”

      Not coincidentally the “new sins” are the things, the virtues, the TRUTHS, that stopped and restrained real sins.

      “diverted their fundamental religious drive to identifying and redeeming or destroying the new sinners.”

      The “new sinners” are of course the righteous, the good.

      It’s a tale as old as time, really. In Russia, it was the sons of fantatic rabbis that often became the most fanatic atheists and communists.

34. I like the idea of natural rights, because that’s my tradition, hard-won by people who fought and died for it. Lately it’s the writing-down of rights, and consequently the elevation of law above tradition, that bothers me. I wonder if there’s a link between universality, written law, and the Christian notion of the Word— or the earlier Hebrew law. Seems likely to me, but I haven’t put in the work to be certain.

    The problem, seems to me, is that it reduces a people to an idea. Citizens instead of nationals, etc. Not that there isn’t some sense to it, but when you end up denying flesh and blood— an integral part of the organism— you’ve gone too far.

    Then there’s the paradox of rank materialism in a time when we’re living in the matrix, navel-gazing and self-actualizing. Idk, maybe it’s because we’re missing a huge part of the picture. A bunch of spiritual cripples.

    Ancient ideas, interesting trying to fit them to our time. Plenty to think on, for sure!

    • What do people who believe in natural rights do if large populations are uninterested or unpersuaded by arguments for natural rights?

      The only answer is to separate from the unpersuaded but the current natural rights advocates are unwilling to talk about this.

      The sunny, optimistic talk of Reaganites who are so certain that everyone will be persuaded sounds stupid to me. When a GOP politician proudly states that, “I believe that the best days of America are still ahead,” I bitterly shake my head.

      • Yeah it’s some old white man’s burden stuff. “This is our way, tough shit if you don’t like it” should be sufficient, probably would be if we were less idealistic, more worldly. It would be a good way of separating wheat from chaff.

        I think what I’m getting at is that we wouldn’t be so keen to save the world if we weren’t so divorced from it. In other words, in the world but not of it.

    • “when you end up denying flesh and blood— an integral part of the organism— you’ve gone too far.”

      So very yes. Leftists espouse that humans are just a bundle of nurture rapped in skin.

35. This is perhaps the best piece that I’ve ever seen here. Well done.

36. Not to get too philosophical, but the piece does seem to privilege the tangible over the intangible with respect to what is real. Concepts can be real though intangible. Words are “real” though intangible. I do agree that real or not, “rights” are only available to the extent the reigning society enforces them, and that is largely based upon the culture that creates and sustains that society. Change or lose that culture, and the enforcement of/respect for those rights disappears along with it. So, even if the rights are universal and eternal in a conceptual sense, they are very time bound and local in a practical sense.

    Maybe I am just an incurable optimist.

    • Word are as real as the concepts they represent. Gravity is a word with genuine weight because gravity is as real as anything can be in our conceptions of reality. Gravity would still exist even if we did not have a word for it. Latin has no word for volcano. Home had no good word for blue. These things existed before our minds could come up with words to capture the concept.

      Right, on the other hand, have only ever existed in our minds. Unlike gravity or the color blue, it is a concpet that cannot be detached from the mind of the creator.

      • And even if one does away with the notion of a “creator”— and sees evolutionary theory as providing the most accurate understanding of our human backstory— it’s still possible to look at the behavior of every living creature, and recognize that an instinctive urge to keep on living, seems to characterize all life.

        Every creature seems to behave as if continuing existence is their “natural right”.

        And following from that, would be the right of self-defense: the right of the creature to defend against threats to their continuing existence.

        • The problem with Z is that it assumes that there is no God, so objective morality is impossible. It is only a fiction created to humans.

          His reasoning is: there is no God, so there is no foundation of an objective morality so morality is a fiction (and such are rights, being a language to express morality). Morality is in the mind.

          Religious apologists produce the reverse reasoning. Since there is an objective morality (you cannot torture children for pleasure), there must be a God, because God is the only foundation of an objective morality.

          Everybody is entitled to his assumptions. The problem is when assumptions are hidden.
          It would be clearer to say: “Since I don’t believe in God, I don’t think rights are real” than to say “Rights are not real”, hiding the fundamental premise, as if this was an obvious fact and not only an opinion.

          • “Objective morality” is a contraction in terms. Morality is, by definition, subjective. Your opening statement would be valid if it read, “The problem with Z is that he does not share my conception of God, so he does not accept my moral claims.”

      • This conversation made me to think about how in practice you only have rights to the extent you don’t get in the way of big corporations, powerful men’s interests, or a protected sacred class. We can have all the hueman (or hooman in dog-speak) rights we want in our imaginations and our sacred political documents, but if a judge can be coerced, bought, or simply hates you you don’t have any rights. Same for policemen. Journalists can also help or do damage to our rights.

        At the end people that have the coercive power and the judges decide if you have rights for real and we have lost a lot of rights because of Democrat judges (don’t know if GOP judges are any better). Your real effective rights are what the social institutions we decided had power over us give us.

        The devil’s play is to talk a lot about human rights to coerce us to accept our enslavement to big government and the UN. And Journos are happy to play along as long as they stay a powerful cast.

        We live in a low testosterone society, so a solution to all of this is to teach young men of each generation that rights are liberties you have to fight physically and rhetorically for and are fought back each generation from parasitic forces. And also teach them that equality is not real so it is OK if capable and virtuous people end up in an advantageous situation.

        I am repeating an idea that has appeared several times in the comments. But definitely Christianity was part of promoting this self defeating worldview. Maybe it was right for it to be displaced. We need Christianity 2.0 that may end up having another name but keep the good stuff from 1.0. Or maybe this will be another part of the cycle where hard times give rise to a masculine way of running our societies. The too easy times of the XX century allowed the feminized spirit we have to suffer under today to make everything in society to cater to the weak and the criminal elements at the expense of the capable and law abiding using fake human rights campaigns.

        So the idea of rights only makes sense as a blueprint for rules that have to be enforced by the threat of a virtuous society to their leaders. If we had and Antifa-like on or side, more things would go our way. Leftie is more realistic than we are -they enforce their rules by coercion- despite living outside reality in their foundational ideas, a true paradox.

        • “We need Christianity 2.0”

          I rather like that- a New New Testament, written by men, as the entire Book was.

37. What “works” persists, and it’s always environment specific. The ancestral peoples of Northern Europe lived in a place of sharply changing seasons with harsh winter deprivations. Over time, the behaviors that “worked” in this unique environment became encoded in DNA. Post civilization, nurtured behaviors that also “worked” became transmissible to future generations via social mechanisms such as religious training of youth. Eventually, secular mechanisms of social indoctrination co-evolved and generally were applied across-the-board, not just in niches like religion. This occurred when multiple religions had to coexist in the same region. The concepts of natural rights and universal rights grew out of religious traditions and codification of laws respectively. Both persisted because they “worked” to keep the peace in mixed societies.

    And all of this is downstream of biology and disease. When pathogens are killing a society, it’s not a matter of “correct belief” or even voting, it’s about basic survival. Health can only return when the pathogens are removed. It serves no useful purpose to debate civil liberties when you’re at risk of dying from late stage cancer. Priorities matter. Smarter, not harder.

    • TomA, we survive as a tribe. So, it is worthwhile to spend some amount of time, while we’re not improving our own fitness and building a community, to try to persuade our tribesmen to stop believing dumb things, like the universal appeal of natural rights as our Founders conceived of them.

      • Unfortunately, huge numbers of our tribesman are no longer fit for the current environment, and will need to be left behind by those of us who want to preserve an ‘us’. And worse, many of those who superficially seem to belong to our tribe are actually our worst enemies, and will need to be treated as such. Sentimentality is a trait that will have to be suppressed if we are to survive as a people.

38. Throughout this essay, my mind kept being drawn back to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” which is basically Spengler’s civilizational model converted to pulp sci-fi form.

    The protagonist of that story might not have found evidence of the Elder Things watching TikTok, but he found the decline in culture you’d expect to find as a reflection of that.

39. “What happens when the new people reject the Western tradition of natural rights? Should they be forcibly removed? Should they be compelled to change their ways? ”

    Nobody is going to do anything.

    What remains of the Right is going to keep talking on the internet until they are put in a box six feet under.

    The Right is going to fade away with a whimper, The Left will murder this civilization, and whatever emerges from the wreckage will be something completely different.

    When the Legions left Britian, who at that time, could foresee the Saxons creating England?

    • I don’t doubt the sincerity of civic nationalists who seem to believe that the phrase “ordered liberty” is some sort of magical incantation that will defeat their enemies, but your observation reinforces my suspicion that the leaders of Conservative Inc. are controlled opposition who are paid to waste the energies of their followers on fools’ errands until they can be easily crushed.

      • They are controlled opposition. Good cop, bad cop. We are screwed.

    • Defeatism is not a sustainable evolutionary trait. For about a billion years now, the strong and smart have prevailed through all manner of adversity. This will be no different. Rather than whine the defeatist mantra, perhaps you would be better served to get stronger (sorry, no help on the smarter part, but you can acquire wisdom if you open your mind to it).

      • “For about a billion years now, the strong and smart have prevailed ”

        Totally true, and that is why I said what I said.

        The strong and smart (in practical maters) are not the “Heritage Population”

      • Evolutionary theory doesn’t say natural selection favors the strong or the smart. It just favors what survives. That is not always the strongest or smartest. The saying is “survival of the fittest,” but there is zero definition for fittest except “what survives,” so the phrase is equivalent to, accurately and meaninglessly, “survival of the survivors.”

        • Vizzini,

          Not exactly….

          I don’t disagree with what you said, I just think you need to take it one step further.

          “Survival of the fittest” can certainly become mere tautology, when you define “fitness” as “the characteristics possessed by those who survive”, and leave it at that.

          “Who survives?
          The fittest.
          Who are the fittest?
          Those who survive.”

          But evolution takes place in particular environments; and it is *adaptation to those particular environments* which determines *what “fitness” means* in any particular case.

          So “the fit” are not simply “those who survive”, but “those whose characteristics render them best able to adapt— to successfully “fit in”— to the environment in which they find themselves.”

          And at that point, you’re talking about the possession of particular human traits and human differences; and not simply defining fitness as coterminous with survival.

        • Actually, bacteria (among the most populous life forms on the plant) can exhibit communication behaviors that model as intelligence. And bacteria with strong movement capabilities tend to survive and thrive better than their competitors (again, can be modeled as strength). Do a google search and you will find tons of articles on these topics.

      • ” the strong and smart have prevailed.”

        No, whatever worked prevailed. Who’s smarter, a rocket scientist Olympian with two kids or a low IQ welfare recipient with 30 kids supported by the State?

        Darwin is clear in his answer.

        • fakeemail,

          For sure: Western welfare democracies may be the first societies in history to successfully subvert evolution: having created an environment, where the least-capable not only survive, but thrive, and outreproduce everyone else.

          A few years ago I worked at a homeless shelter, where I got to know two Black crack whores. One of them had had 11 kids, the other had had 13; all of them taken away by child welfare authorities, because the mothers were addicts.

          If each of those 13 kids has 13 kids of their own— while responsible White couples are having less than two kids— it’s not hard to see where that math could lead.

        • Intelligence is a survival-enhancing trait for humans in most times, but not in your example. [Neo-]Darwinism would explain the welfare family as an evolutionary adaptation. Nearly limitless resources (“supported by the State”) are available; the, er, “organism” will opportunistically fill that ecological niche.

          A key aspect is overlooked: in raw nature, natural selection will tend to cull the less-fit. But civilization provides many UN-natural environments, at least temporarily.

    • Agree. West of the Hajnal Whites are an evolutionary dead end.

      • If enough people start to develop an immune reaction to the media conditioning then there may be some hope, and that is particularly true for women..

        Although given the current trajectory that seem unlikely a 99% do not even see it is their enemy and controller.

        • If enough Indians start developing immunity to these smallpox blankets…

      • We had our time but we were corrupted. We were promised a brilliant future of freedom and equality. So we trashed our duties (which was the thing that allowed our society to survive) and started enjoying life, while our enemies laughed at our stupidity.

        See the two minutes of Disney’s Pinocchio about the Island of Games. There is no better description of the end of our culture and our people.

40. As a (regrettably former) strong civic nationalist, I find this perhaps the most distressing post of Z-man’s in the five years I’ve been reading him. I think this might be because it strikes so close to the heart of what’s gone wrong with us — that it’s so central to the loss of the nation, though society and civilization I grew up in and loved. I would say “God help us,” but that would be a call meaningless to more than half of the peoples now within out (failing) borders.

    • EDIT (dammit): Hate phone typing — Don’t know how the “though” got in there; and should be “…our borders …,” not “out borders …” last sentence.

      Give me a pencil, or at most an IBM Selectric over these efficient modern monstrosities for creating the written word.

      • … I so agree with you; however it has given rise to a fun new discipline of interpretation of a written text: is this a typo, or is awkwardness, what key did the writer mean to hit but missed, how often did he look over what was just written and revise (so often chunks of text are left in) etc. Yet another challenge is closed caption interpretation – hilarious at times maddening at others …

    • Indeed. As I sit here, I feel a profound sadness at today’s Z-man posting. Perhaps his worse “black pill” in memory. Heretofore one had hope that the loss of values one currently experiences was transient. That even if during one’s lifetime they disappeared, there was hope for resurgence. In short, that these values were indeed timeless and universal, not transient and situational. That if lost, such might be only temporary and would be found and adopted again.

      But what if situational and genetic? Then indeed Humanity suffers an even worse loss as our race dies off.

      • For my part, there is always hope. Not so much for a reinstatement of a previous social order per se (that ship has sailed) but for a resurgence of the things that are most important in life. We can’t control what aspects of us will persist, but the fact that we existed will always be true, and it will also always be the case that we mattered and had influence on the flow of life. Better that we focus on building the new world to come and staking out our place in it than we stay regretting the world that we miss. It’s worth remembering that previous generations have had their maniacal religious movements, terrible wars – both secular and religious – and devastating natural disasters. All were survived, not with the entirety of the culture or its people intact but with enough for us to enjoy. Who during the Black Death imagined the world would recover? And yet, despite all the loss, human rebuilt and even prospered.

        There are two other silver linings: (1) the sins of this age are not our sins to bear. We can choose to not embrace the excesses of this age and be better for it. (2) The removal of the scales from our eyes, however painful, is positive and freeing. I now no longer have the same faith in institutions I did before and that makes me a bit less complicit in their evils.

    • Always amazing how all the civnats and libertarians never batted an eyelid when it was pointed out that all the illegals coming over would eventually outvote and overwhelm them. The border hoppers were not carrying copies of Von Mises in their napsacks.

      It wasn’t about principles, it’s NEVER about principles. It was about the short term economic gain of cheap labor.

      An old story: for love (of God, family, country) or for money?

41. Ah, yes, the glaring irony of “Colorblind Civic Nationalism” is that it can only exist in a 90%+ white country.

    The hubris of whites is that we assume that our view of the world is THE view of the world either emanating from God or nature, but most definitely the correct view. CivNats are nothing more than modern Yankee missionaries hellbent on spreading the word.

    But they screwed up. Even the Puritan missionaries were smart enough to go to other people’s lands. CivNats invited those other peoples into our land – and we’re now paying the price.

    Sure, the usual suspects took advantage of our nature, but we were an easy con. We wanted to believe that that those dusky foreigners would see the greatness of ways and thankfully accept our ideas.

    Hubris lies at the heart of many a lost empire.

    • So is just about every other dominant Western ideology. Libertarianism – completely a white man’s delusion. Woke-ism – well, perhaps there are others behind it, but it is only relevant in a mostly white society. Liberalism (classical liberalism and what we call liberalism today) – white person thing.

      Come to think of it, ideology itself is more of a white person thing, and stronger in America than even in Europe. The rest of the planet is far more tribal, and practical. In Africa, Dictator A and Dictator B are fighting to see who’s tribe can win, and get all the resources, power, and women. Members of Tribe A and Tribe B kill each other until one side wins and takes power. It’s pretty simple, and not really ideological.

      The CCP is not really ideological either, other than ensuring its survival by any means necessary, and getting “stuff” for its people. Even in the West, most non-whites preaching “woke” ideology don’t really care, it’s just their tool to get more “stuff” from whitey.

      There are some things we can learn from this. Ideology doesn’t matter as much as tribe. You need to get in control of your tribe, slap down the weirdos and women, and then start getting “stuff” for your people. That’s it, simple as.

      It’s hard to say what the future will look like, but it makes the squabbles between the “Left” and “Right” wing Europeans look more and more irrelevant. Re-arranging deck chairs while the Titanic sinks, so to speak.

      • It is a mistake to classify it as an ideology I think.

        It is more a semantic hacking of the internals of how people encode information.

        There is no ideologilcal belief basis that forms a whole, there are only kafka self contradictory phrases that are used to place full formed stopping thoughts and slogans into the brain without any supporting cognitive process as to how they got there.

        It is literally a spell system using linguistic techniques that directly alters the perceived reality of those susceptible to it.

        • This is very interesting way to look at it. It mirrors my notion that we are not yet evolved to recognize when such lines of attack are taken as they are taken. We understand what’s happening when bombs drop, but not so much when we are subject to mentacide.

        • Oh, huzzah, trumpton, huzzah.

          I shall bruise my forehead on the floor to this and to B125’s clarity of purpose.

      • “Come to think of it, ideology itself is more of a white person thing, and stronger in America than even in Europe. The rest of the planet is far more tribal, and practical.”

        Any “multi-cultural” society is tribal, and none more so than the United States. A segment of American Whites thinks magically and has deluded itself to believe it is special and will continue to live peacefully and comfortably. We very well may see the folks we call “liberals” react more sharply than CivNats when that delusion becomes impossible to maintain. They also are part of a tribe even now, whether they acknowledge it or not.

        • >We very well may see the folks we call “liberals” react more sharply than CivNats when that delusion becomes impossible to maintain.

          This has always been my little theory. Impossible to know if it’s correct, or the probability of it being correct.

          Sweden was certainly interesting, the goodest of good whites. The “far right” party just barely happened to win a majority. We know that this doesn’t happen on its own, and the media didn’t freak out and downplayed it in the Anglo media, which suggests that a segment of the Swedish elite are looking to wind down the diversity experiment.

          Conservatives are not anti-white, but they are also closer to every other non-white group. White Liberals (Yankees, Puritans, N-W Euros, whatever you want to call them) are the group that are way different to the rest of the world, and much different than us. It’s hard to understand how or why the operate in the ways they do.

      • We’re more ideological because we’re less tribal. European tribes disappeared during the Middle Ages, because of Catholic Church forbidding the marriage between cousins. Then feudalism, Enlightenment and capitalism made us more individualistic. Nationalism was the last vestige of tribalism, but there was destroyed after World War II, because of Hitler.

        Without tribes, ideologies is the most important for us.

        All other peoples are more tribal than White people. Other people help each other. This is not bad: this is good.

        I have lived more than 20 years outside Western countries and I have seen how they help each other and how thrive because of it. I never had help from another person from my country in a foreign land, but other peoples help each other in a foreign land.

        I have tried to tell my acquaintances to see the world in more tribal ways, but it seems that our hardware prevents that.

42. Good.

    F*** Taki. Used to be that next to this place… they had the best comment sections in town. Some of the visiting wanks were as much fun to read as the featured authors.

    I’ll get by without Taki just fine.

    • Agreed. When they did away with comment section, I quit reading – that is until Z started contributing. Now I can quit again.

      • I still enjoy reading David Cole there. One of the few essayists I can enjoy even when I disagree.

        But yeah, sucks to see Z leave.

        • I find Cole thoroughly unreadable

      • usNthem: At Taki Zman was casting pearls among swine. His level of philosophical thought and understanding of civilizational issues are in another league entirely than Steve Sailer eternally trying to quantify the qualitative, or David Cole celebrating himself and his based mestizos.

43. The idea of natural rights was specific to a certain subset of English-speaking white men at the conclusion of the English Civil War. Locke’s “Second Treatise” described, and the English Bill of Rights of 1688 codified, the political settlement of the civil war — religious toleration, free speech, right to bear arms, no taxation without representation, etc.

    The Founders did not fight for universal human rights, they fought for the rights of Englishmen that had been part of English law for a century before the founding of the U.S.

    In evaluating Jefferson’s appropriation of Locke, it is important to understand that the chief natural right is the right to decide which type of polity a people are going to live under. The specifics of how those rights — life, liberty, property — are going to be exercised in practice are not described in Locke’s theory. Consequently Jefferson and others saw nothing wrong with excluding Africans from the American polity; Africans had a natural right to forge their own polity in their own countries in Africa as they saw fit. Jefferson denounced the British colonial slave trade in the original draft of the Declaration for this very reason.

    The argument contrary to Locke’s argument was Hobbes’s argument in “Leviathan,” written shortly after the beheading of Charles I and during Cromwell’s Long Parliament. Hobbes took a Maoist approach to the whole “rights” argument — “rights” are whatever the government that happens to be in power says they are, and the government must be a great beast, a “mortall God,” powerful enough to keep “keep men in awe” to prevent them from fighting over rights, religions, etc.

    Needless to say we are in the process of making the transition from a 90% white Lockean America to a polyglot multicultural Hobbesian America… FedGov is already a Leviathan that does whatever the hell it wants, the Bill of Rights be damned.

    • It’s been a while since I heard the whole Hobbes vs. Locke debate, so thanks for the reminder.

      Credit to Z though. This article sums up so much of why we’re seriously f***ed.

      It also lays out why, among natural rights, freedom of speech has been the first to go.

    • Nice points, and I would just like to tack on a bit about their epistemology: Jefferson and Locke were empiricists. I think that Jefferson would argue for a “right(s)” government based on the idea of an orderly universe. An empiricist, at least during Locke’s era, would have to have faith in an orderly nature and universe; hence, Jefferson as a Deist. They have faith in a mechanistic, orderly universe. This inherently brings with it certain rules.
      If we consider the enumeration of grievances in the Declaration, and the “in the course of human events,” there is a sense of orderly unfurling like a scientific observation. While the individual results may vary (same way observation of the sun varies on time of day and location), there are fundamental rules that guide the understanding. In listing the rights that have been violated, Jefferson is giving a treatise on how to observe a government in the same way one observes nature.
      Both require an order outside the human mind – which of course is the fundamental basis of empiricism.

      • And human rights, to be clear.

      • Correct. The natural rights tradition in Western philosophy originates with the Scholastics and the attempt of Aquinas to reconcile Aristotelian empiricism with Christianity.

        Locke in fact wrote an earlier work entitled “the reasonableness of Christianity” attempting to do exactly this. Throughout this entire tradition, however, there remained the belief that natural rights and Christianity were not obvious to everyone, but rather only to rational people and educated people as opposed to savages and barbarians. In other words, savages and barbarians had natural rights but were unaware of them due to their ignorance.

        The overall point is that natural rights as we understand them are the rights of educated, enlightened, European white men who existed within a Christian society with varying sects but with basic underlying agreements.

        Hobbes, writing at the time when the head of the Church of England was executed and replaced by the Puritan Cromwell, both of whom were disdained by papists, argued that there was no agreement on anything, and the only “rational” choice was to end the “war of all against all” where life is “nasty, brutish, and short” was to give the sovereign complete and total power to decide all things and enforce its decisions, so that some semblance of peace and order could be imposed.

        The bizarre thing about our society today is that we rhetorically adhere to Lockean rationality and Lockean universalism while in fact imposing these ideas with brute Hobbesian force.

        The U.S. Government transitioned from a Lockean republic of agrarian white men into a Hobbesian Leviathan when it decided to go kill hundreds of thousands of Southerners who were trying to exercise their Lockean natural right to secede.

        We’ve been doing it to the rest of the world since 1917, when we killed Germans to force them to become “democratic.” When we they did exactly that and voted for the wrong guy, we went back again and killed some more. Then we imposed “human rights” on the Japanese by nuking their grandmothers and toddlers.

        So ultimately Z is right — “natural rights” are a western, white idea, not universal. We use universal rights language to cloak our Hobbesian imperialism.

44. Mao Tse Tung said !!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWBjwgxEawo

45. SWPL

    Stuff white people like. Without white people we won’t see many of the things white people like, thats just the way it is

    https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

    • Maybe I’m missing the point of that website SWPL. I don’t know anything about “My so called life” since I’ve never watched it even though I was aware of it’s existence back then.
      So I went to the list of things White People like and pretty much batted zero until I scrolled down to #1 – Coffee. Then that even went bust since “White people gotta have starbucks, which is ridiculous.
      It left me where it found me, I’m as white as they come and I don’t get it.

      • Its a ten year old site, its mainly a joke talking the piss out of a certain type of white liberal, but in the end its true that many things are SWPL, and if you have less white people, you will have less of the things white people like or value

        • Fair enough.

          Fair enough was all I wanted to say but “your comment was too short, go back and type some more stuff and filler.

          Thank you, I actually do appreciate your response.

          • It’s best read in conjunction with its antithesis site:
            Pau; Kersey’s excellent SBPDL

            Stuff Black People Don’t Like.

            As always, Thanks to Ron Unz, the exception that proves the rule.

          • Fuckit.

            https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/

            gibber gibber gibber

            Some-one should waste five minutes determining just how much drivel make a post.

          • Very white of you, Vince, I must say!

            In addition, (((They))) live, your moniker is a rather cheeky comment all to itself.
            Brava, lad!

        • Yes, and for another thing, a strong sense of irony hung in the air about those Things White People Like. And, if you think about it, Irony – writ large – is THE Über Thing White People Like. Or so it would seem to me.

46. Well written piece. It seems to me that the concept of “natural rights” as well as the civilization that created them are slowly but surely heading the way of the Dodo – and they just don’t get it. The idea that the various and disparate people of the world would of course glom onto our current morality is hubris in the extreme. Just like Woodrow Wilson’s claim we had to “make the world safe for democracy”.

    There’ll natural rights alright- for everyone other than the peoples who invented the idea…

    • It was always preposterous to think that our culture would translate well to other cultures. I hadn’t thought about the natural rights angle, so I appreciate Zman articulating this problem. Another area to consider is the notion of justice. We have a culture-specific notion of justice that relies heavily on the concept of the individual and his/her rights. We consider ‘backward’ the idea that entire groups can be blamed for an individual’s crimes.

      But other cultures and other peoples do not share this view. Even we used to have a group-justice ethic that became replaced by an individual-justice ethic. Now, as strangers in our own land, we are faced with the return of tribal ‘social’ justice exacted on our people indiscriminately and in violation of our ethical principles. One question is can we live as a minority group in our former territories without ending up utterly destroyed? Alternatively, could we relocate en masse to a more favorable location where we can carve out a life for ourselves in the new territory (the Aeneas option as it were)? Both scenarios present considerable difficulties, and other options may be preferable. But one way or another, we need to thread the needle for our survival.

      • Iron Maiden: The very concept of individual rights and responsibilities is a product of a specific people/culture and thus concurrently proves the legitimacy of group virtues and guilt. No individual White today ‘invented’ the auto or the lightbulb or most conveniences of modern life, but there is no denying the historical and biological lineage of the inventors. Joint pride is normal and justifiable. “He’s one of ours” is a real thing.

        Certain groups practice this consciously and deliberately – Juice as a prime example. Blacks simultaneously celebrate when one of their own achieves anything, and deny any community-wide responsibility when most of their own are demonstrably guilty of endless crimes and ethnic failure.

        Jesus specifically taught both individual responsibility (i.e. no one’s historical guilt that someone was born afflicted in some way) and joint responsibility (Christians are to help and love one another and gather for corporate worship). It’s disingenuous to try to neatly divide the two ideas. I am certainly guilty if I commit a crime, but to what extent are my parents? Certainly blacks are genetically inclined to short-time preference and violence, but I don’t think anyone would entirely discount being raised in an erratic, chaotic, and violent environment.

        It’s another version of genetics versus environment. I would argue ultimately the individual must suffer consequences or win awards, but that the group/culture/environment that produced that individual certainly bear some responsibility for both the good and the bad.

        • That’s fair and nicely put. I don’t disagree with where you landed in terms of group vs. individual responsibility. For my part, it’s a question of how far does that group responsibility go and under what conditions?

47. A certain Chinese philosopher noted that all political power flows from the end of a gun. While the Christian faith does involve more freedom than most others, Mao was correct.
    In the now distant past of this country, rights weren’t violated because enough people were willing to start shooting oppressors. People think they have too much to lose now, but given the war, famine, and economic depression that our leaders are working on, we’ll be back to gunfire deciding things sooner than they think.

    • Saw a photo a while back of a citizen’s arrest of a sheriff who was trying to evict a widow at the behest of an insurance company. This was in the 1950’s. Doing this now would involve 100 FBI agents raiding those citizen’s homes and being brought up on domestic terrorism charges.

      Violence has been monopolized by the State at a level rarely seen in human history and is making the second amendment more and more or a dead letter. Sure, you can shoot an attacker, but have fun rotting in prison for 10 years if he was diverse.

      The citizen’s arrest in Georgia of Saint Arbery that lead to life in prison for even the guy who just taped the incident showed any real ability to defend one’s community is nonexistent.

      • “citizen’s arrest of a sheriff who was trying to evict a widow at the behest of an insurance company. ”

        Reminds of me of the famous “Grapes of Wrath” scene: “Then Who do we shoot?”

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8

      • While keeping the larder and armory stocked and stacked is key, all should consider adding bags of lime and a backhoe (or at least a trusted neighbor) to ensure you meet the new “Can’t Stand Your Ground” law.

    • Most Chinese (actually most non-Westerners) see Mao’s quote as plainly and stupidly obvious. Westerners think it’s backward, but only Westerners could possibly rationalize themselves into thinking that other things drive politics, like economic growth or human flourishing. It’s never power…it’s “public service”.

    • You are assuming that the majority of the people WANT those rights. If a nation is defined by its people, then what kind of a nation now exists? There is a necessary commonality that needs to exist in order for a nation to exist. The USA doesn’t even have a common language any longer, never mind having an agreed upon set of values.

      You will not see anything happen like you describe. We are so far removed from the courage necessary to resort to the gun. America is being actively purged of Americans. There are now enough non-Americans to take over all formerly American institutions and traditions. Don’t be surprised if Christmas is removed as a national holiday and replaced with something like “ghetto-day” or some sort of vibrant worship. July 4th has essentially been replaced with “joontennf” which gives the low IQs another opportunity to destroy things for a day.

      The only possibility of salvaging our land is complete separation, but there are not enough whites who are willing to unite and make it happen. It is still hopelessly ingrained in them that diversity is good and that we can, and should, co-exist. IMHO it is foolish to believe that there is any hope for traditional America. It is a foreign country now and what we once had is never coming back. Seeing things like the black fat slob play Madison’s flute and the statues of saint Floyd everywhere should solidify this in people’s minds.

      • Given Coonteenth has now official sanction (it’s a federal holiday) and is being promoted as an alternative to Independence Day, we’re perhaps further along than you suggest.

        They have tried to replace Christmas with Kwanzaa, but so far unsuccessfully. Probably more owed to commercial factors than cultural/religious ones, unfortunately.

        • Celt Darnell: Oh, Christmas will continue but may well be officially renamed ‘Xmas’ or Solstice day, so as not to trigger or offend anyone – the same way the juice gradually substituted BC/AD with BCE/CE. It’s the same, they say . . . but not.

          Besides, tons of Hindus and Iranians and juice have Christmas trees – because ‘they’re pretty’ and considered a non-religious symbol. There’s a reason they light a national tree in DC but not even the smallest municipality can have a creche/nativity scene.

          Keep the name but change the substance. Just another endless iteration of “Kill it, gut it, wear it’s skin suit, demand respect.”

          • Before Christ’s Entry/Christ’s Entry

      • Here’s a nice marker for the death of the American nation: July 2, 2020, the day self-proclaimed conservative Republican senator Ron Johnson floated the idea to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth in response to the Floyd riots. That was when the savages won. Separation is the only hope now for the American people. It is happening informally but there is no appetite at the moment to formalize it. Will that day ever arrive? Events, dear boy, events–if they ever in fact happen.

      • “It is still hopelessly ingrained in them that diversity is good and that we can, and should, co-exist.”

        Ingrained very much so. When all the proof in the world is given that it’s not good, doesn’t work, and causes suffering on all sides, they are unmoved.

        They simply respond that we’re not doing it right, but once we figure how to do it right, it will be the most valuable and wonderful thing ever.

        • “They simply respond that we’re not doing it right, but once we figure how to do it right, it will be the most valuable and wonderful thing ever.”

          The answer is that white people need more conditioning.

          “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.

          Those of us who have chosen to live in reality are made to suffer, I am convinced of it.

      • Arguably, the replacement of Christmas was done already by removing all religious aspects of it and ‘rebranding’ it as a secular, materialistic holiday. The more interesting question is: why didn’t we perceive what was happening right under our noses and how to we prevent such blindness in the future (since we can’t go back in time)?

        • No offense, I think “stark realization” is a better term here. The decline of Christianity has been remarked upon for a long time now.

      • Then we really are the New Jews, as the evangelists would have it.

        We will boil off our civnats to be subsumed by the larger populations- giving the darkies a White upgrade, as Creation’s Design demands- and resolve into a smaller, tighter, more focused core.

48. “Many Christians reject the idea of a universe defined by fixed and unchanging rules.” AKA Catholics, to an extent

    “Other types of Christians reject that we can understand these rules, even if such a thing even exists.” AKA Orthodox Christians

    Western Christians (especially Protestants) love to codify, rationalize, and universalize everything. It is their way. Much of what ails us can be traced from the PQ, not always the JQ.

    • Admittedly I have a bias, but the Catholics deserve credit for the idea of a universe operating by fixed rules. You can credit Protestants with expanding on the idea, but they could never have done this without the Catholic church. it was Catholicism that spread Greek thought and internalized it into the new religion.

      • Given that Protestantism literally exists only as a response to Catholic excess, this does make sense.

        • Don’t speak of your Protestant minister,
          Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
          For the foundation stone of his temple
          Was the bollocks of Henry VIII

          Brendan Behan

          • Typical of the Irish to credit Protestantism to the English….

          • And, let it be also noted, that the Irish state has now made it the law that the “incorrect” exercise of freedom of speech and thought is a punishable crime in their country. Rather ironic that they would have done this after centuries of contending for those very rights to freedom of speech and thought themselves, eh? But this return to mind slavery seems to have come naturally, albeit now under their new rulers, the EU and the pursed-lipped, “liberal” order.

      • The Orthodox like to say that Roman Catholics internalized Latin thought, meaning adding legalism or rationalism to belief…where it probably shouldn’t be. Protestants took it one step further, basically allowing how your brain interprets the scriptures as being the highest authority. Every man a cleric!

        The Greek and Russian East has been fine simply with the divine mysteries.

      • “Catholicism that spread Greek thought and internalized it into the new religion”. how so? more so than the Orthodox church did, through Byzantium? in my mind, Catholicism is the antithesis of Greek philosophical tradition; obedience vs discussion.

        • karl: I, too, used confuse modern conceptions of and untruths about Catholicism with the historical record. But reading “The Cave and the Light” by Arthur Herman gave me a much greater understanding of the development of philosophical and religious thought. And I’m not a Catholic . . . but credit where credit is due.

          • Before the Schism, Rome had eastern and western flanks, but authoritarian Romans had still been taught by Greek tutors.

            The Schism itself was a battle of political power, as was the Trinity a settlement of it. Religion begins as politics, and ends as politics.

    • I guess with your qualification of “to an extent” it is relatively accurate. Catholics do believe in fixed and unchanging rules, but those are relatively few. Just like you don’t have to have an opinion on every question, the Catholic Church has not set a definite dogma on every theological issue. Limbo being one example off the top of my head (i.e., what happens to the souls of those who die without baptism through no fault of their own) – still an open question.

49. One only needs to read the farce of the EU Human Rights courts to see how hackneyed and arbitrary any talk of human rights actually are, or just talk to someone fifty year ago versus today. It’s clear it’s based on sentiment and cultural norms more than any critical analysis.

    Natural rights doesn’t fare much better. If the idea of Natural Rights was simply a philosophy that tried to ascertain effective rights a person had in a community that would put the person in good standing with the community and put the community at an advantageous standing with whatever environment they live in, it would have some credence, but this isn’t that case. If we lived in a Warhammer 40k world with evil aliens intend on genocide, any talk of property rights would be an absurdity. Such an idea is very sold when talking about settling vast swaths of unoccupied land though.

    There’s an idea that believing in the existence of God necessarily requires the belief in Natural Rights, because of human dignity of something, but you see little of this in the Bible. As a general rule, The God of the Christians is perfectly fine with his followers being burned alive, stoned to death, etc. This is actually seen as a great good, as it proves the Elect’s commitment in the facde of terrible adversity. Never did I read how God intervened because a Christian’s “Natural rights” were violated. The right to bear arms is based on a general obligation to defense of one’s people.

    What the Bible has lots of is not rights, but obligations. Obligations to your children, society, and, of course, God. You can’t have abortion not because of the natural rights of the baby, but the obligation of the parents to protect their children. You have property rights not because of a divine creed, but because the individual needs property to fulfill his obligations to support his family. Basing a society on being able to fulfill one’s obligation would solve a lot of the “rights creep” where health care, food, shelter, are now rights that must be given without question.

    • Notice how we have “rights creep” at the same time we have the narrowing of rights. You now have the right to pretend to be an invented sex, something with no basis in reality, but you have no right to hear a wide range of opinions. You have a right to health care, but you no longer have the right to protect your children.

      • Excellent point. “Rights” now are the religious dogma of the Ruling Class and change constantly. This mutability was the hallmark of most pre-Marxist tyrannies. Civic nationalism also is a quasi-religion although in theory it has the patina of immutability. It is both predictable and sad that Anton clings to the old faith like Emperor Julian praying to his ancestors as church bells chimed all around him.

        • “It is both predictable and sad that Anton clings to the old faith like Emperor Julian praying to his ancestors as church bells chimed all around him.”

          I feel like that going to my old Church as I drive by countless pride flags.

      • “Rights creep”, is really arbitrary application of power. The proposers and enforcers of these, “rights”, are manipulative. The people who want these new rights don’t want rights, they want permission to do anything they want.

        This system is called Libertinism. You are free to do whatever you want, best if that thing is degrading yourself. But, you are not free to do anything that interferes with our right to control you – but best if we control you by you getting lost in destructive self indulgence.

    • Chet Rollins: Vital point about rights versus responsibilities/obligations. And I believe you are correct that the Bible does not discuss rights. Certainly one of the commandments is “Thou shalt not murder,” but even that has been muddied into incomprehensibility by centuries of convoluted interpretations.

50. The Chinese language makes no distinction between political rights and political power.

    • When I first read your comment, I thought of this lack of a distinction as an inadequacy of the Chinese language. On second thought, this deficiency is efficient in that it ignores what is a distinction without a difference.

      Even if thinkers like our Founders are correct that the Rights of Man can be deduced from observations about humans in the world, these rights don’t matter at all without Mao’s barrel of the gun. Well, talk of these rights matter only if they inspire people to organize and resist.

      • Universalism cheapens everything. Look at old books and the phrase “an Englishman’s ancient rights” was something you could find in these debates because the people discussing it knew that rights were tied to people. Once you break the link between people and the concept, both the concept and the people lose their value.

        • Your observation is why those old “At least I still have the Constitution” memes were so disarmingly funny.

          I tried to link to one but they are almost entirely scrubbed from the internet.

          • https: https://i.imgflip.com/2darr3.jpg

          • Yes, maybe the best meme I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some doozies.

            I liked it best when used in 2016 when a white guy was running from D.I.E. after attending a Trump rally.

        • That’s simply because most modern people, especially our present Lords and Masters, being historically illiterate, and profoundly stupid, cannot understand the distinction between “rights” and “liberties”. Especially ordered liberty.

          • You may be inadvertently supporting the relativist claim.

            “Natural rights are a product of a specific people living in a specific time,” specifically “peculiar to European people.”

            “The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition.”

      • LineInTheSand: “these rights don’t matter at all without Mao’s barrel of the gun”.

        That was the genius of the Anti-Federalists, when they insisted upon an explicit Bill of RIghts, and especially the moast important right of all, which is the RKBA.

        [The Passive-Aggressive federalist gringotts goblins had to bump it to second place, simply to massage their own butt-hurt egos.]

        In human affairs, all behavior swims downstream of the RKBA.

        Conversely, no RKBA quickly results in extinction.

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