Volk Politics

This article is bullshit. Muh constitution, muh horseshoe, muh “the people asserting their self-interest and historical property in the nation they created are A MIRROR IMAGE OF the ones trying to tear it down and parcel it out so they can be holier-than-thou”, muh classical liberalism, muh “if only we are principled”, and strawman upon strawman, with a parting shot at the banjos.
No Goldstein, you are the real leftist.

It occurs to me that my previous comment may have been a little intemperate.
I’m glad you noticed. Having read his (sadly now defunct) blog for years, the idea of Jeff Goldstein as a “real leftist” (or “pro-BLM”) seems quite silly. His analytical demolitions of leftist conceits were often a highlight of the week. I, for one, miss them.
As I said in a previous thread, there are real concerns about porous borders, demographics, the failure to assimilate, ethnic balkanisation, criminality and lawlessness, generational welfare dependency, the endless accusations of white devilry, etc. Subjects we’ve touched on here more than a few times. There’s also the fact that bad social and political decisions, often inspired by leftist conceits, may ultimately leave one painted into a corner with no good options in terms of correction, only marginally less horrible ones. Which is why one should be wary of the left’s negligent unrealism.
I’m just not sure how addressing any of the above concerns is helped by a hair-trigger tribalism and swarms of morons sending obnoxious racial tweets to people they assume are Jewish – sorry, (((Jewish))) – and therefore, apparently, suspect. So far as I’m aware, despite the surname, Jeff isn’t in fact Jewish and yet the anti-Semitic slurs have piled up on his doorstep quite quickly. And this isn’t a case of ironic trolling or a few aberrant loons; this is something more.

Hullo David,
I liked the article from Jeff Goldstein, but it seems a trifle naive to me.
American exceptionalism, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump understand or can articulate, was born of our founding. This exceptionalism is found not in its genetic makeup (after all, we fought other white Europeans for our independence) but in a collage of Enlightenment ideas our Founders pulled together to create what became our national portrait.
I mean… is he ‘avin a larf? I’m not even sure where to begin with this one. I had a history teacher once, a twitchy, irascible little guy. He used to get a throbbing vein on his forehead and his face would turn a remarkable shade of crimson when we got things badly wrong.
Then he’d scream and throw jotters while shouting “RRRRUBBBIIISSSHHH!”
I don’t mean to be all “how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?” but Anglo Saxon derived limited constitutional government is the pudding.
These Enlightenment values didn’t coalesce at random. The US founders weren’t delving into a pick n mix of Chinese, Swaheli and Eskimo political and legal traditions to build that collage.
Can’t have that sort of confection without the right meat first. If the US was colonised by Syrians, Somalis, or Sontarans it’d be a very different society with very different ideals.
Which is what’s happening now. Apart from the Sontarans. But if an armada of unpleasant and suspiciously Welsh aliens showed up over a Hillary Clinton occupied White House, she’d definitely let them all stay.
To reclaim our birthright, we need only reclaim the Constitution.
Eh. Rilly? Is it a magic constitution? Can you wave it over double digit IQ Guatemalan hillmen or pygmy negritos and – presto changeo! – they’ll turn into Jeffersonian republicans?
This seems like a bad plan, if you can call it a plan. It reads more like extolling the virtues of prayer though. If you say the right words piously enough, disaster might be averted!
I don’t mean to be unkind to prayers, they can’t hurt. But God helps those who help themselves.
Jeff’s idea that constitutional autism will save America has already been tested in the political marketplace, and failed.

Having read his (sadly now defunct) blog for years, the idea of Jeff Goldstein as a “real leftist” (or “pro-BLM”) seems quite silly. His analytical demolitions of leftist conceits were often a highlight of the week. I, for one, miss them.

How about if I phrase it as follows? Goldstein is firing rightwards. I’m not saying he’s cheerleading for BLM any more than Orwell says pacifists are cheerleading for Germany (although they sometimes did); I’m saying that the net result of Goldstein’s actions is to the benefit of the left much as British pacifists were Fascist advantage on net.
The send-off about incest and banjos could have come out of the mouth of any leftist lampooning rednecks; it’s not the sort of thing a conservative would ever say about Marxists.
Leftism is historically characterised by blank slatism, Lysenkoism, the New Soviet Man, and the fantasy that you can regulate people into being good rather than have to deal with inborn human nature; Goldstein asserts a similar fantasy that proclaiming the Constitution loudly enough will americanise non-americans, and you mustn’t listen to the alt-right saying that race and genetics counts for something.
Never mind the inconvenient fact that Goldstein’s beloved federalists, founding fathers, declaration of independence, and early constitution were quite loud on the Rights of Englishmen, of admittance to America only of free whites of good character, and how ‘Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs’.

How about if I phrase it as follows? Goldstein is firing rightwards.
Presumably, then, that isn’t allowed, irrespective of what lies to one’s right? Would Jeff be more principled if he mocked tactics and conceits on the left but excused and even championed much the same tactics and conceits if mouthed by people ostensibly on the right? Is that how it works?
I forget where I saw the quip “you call us Hitler, we hurl a swastika”, but I think it sums up much of the situation… all restraint is breaking down… It’s part indiscriminate retaliation…
And hence the unpleasant taste it leaves in the mouth. As underlined by Jimmy’s “ Jews like Goldstein,” immediately above.

I don’t understand the principled conservatives of America anymore. The lost the culture war. They lost badly. They keep losing.
There’s an old joke about the Scotland football team manager being asked if he’s planning any changes.
He replies “Naw, I’ll stick with the tactics and players who’ve let me down before.”
Conservatives lost the Culture War as surely as drugs won the Drug War. The – plan, if you can call it that – is to keep retreating while insisting whatever the Left captured 10 years ago is the new Line That Must Not Be Crossed.
I saw a lot of Ted Cruz in his quixotic run for the presidential nomination, and his strategy seemed to be “This time with feeling!”
We’re only a few years away from these chaps declaring polyamorous transgender marriage for babies to be a Conservative Value.
The root of this comprehensive failure is probably their desperate need to be respectable. As if the Left will stop calling them racists if only they fellate the memory of Marxist race hustler Martin Luther King earnestly enough.
But Mel and Kim were right.

If the US was colonised by Syrians, Somalis, or Sontarans it’d be a very different society with very different ideals.
Errrr . . . If the US was colonized by Which individual members of [ insert assorted cultural references ] doing said colonization???
For merely one of many handy examples of why the rather required precision, with the recent final reports on the the New Year’s attacks in Germany, what is thus rather established instead of casually noticed is that the criminals totaled about two thousand altogether, and that two thousand or so having to be assembled from several cities worth of attackers.
In turn, the fantasy of the right wing—and therefore extreme—is basically OMG The Non Europeans Got Into Germany And All Is Wrong!!!!! where such hysterical screaming very much requires that the rest of us can’t do the simplest form of math: Actual arrivals in Germany were apparently somewhere around one million, so that the two thousand criminals come out to about point two percent . . . not even as much as two percent, but point two percent.
A very easy—and perfectly correct—observation is that the newcomers are not those they have arrived among, and therefore are not interchangeably identical, and also among the immediate reports of the attacks in Germany were the equally immediate reports of refugees being quite opposed to the criminals who were clearly quite separate from them and separate from the natives.
Therefore, the issue is never where some general lot comes from, the issue remains what the individuals then do.
Equally the same, of that equally extreme and limited left wing instead of right wing, a quoted bit is indeed that . . .

This counter-trend, make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimizes individualism. As with much the Left does, it remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent.

Sooo, instead of Said, or whomever may get quoted by the right wing, yes, for we conservatives who are thus annoyingly bookended by the merely right wing or merely left wing, there is indeed David Cannadine. Or, very particularly, Cannadine’s observation that Said is full of it and therefore that one may note and then relatively ignore Orientalism, because the reality is Cannadine’s Ornamentalism

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire is a book by David Cannadine about British perceptions of the British Empire.[1] Cannadine argues that class, rank and status[2] were more important to the British Empire than race.[3] The title of the work Ornamentalism is a direct reference to Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which argues the existence of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. It has also been argued to borrow tones from the title of Joseph Scumpeter’s “Imperialism and Social Classes[4] which some historians see as the origins of the ‘Ornamentalist’ perspective in academic history’

—That last pulled from Wiki . . .
David—Thompson, that is—has that very nice link in the upper right that he would like you to make use of. Granting in turn that I’m about to quote from the Amazon.com site, rather than UK, commentary for the book is also entertaining:

His argument apparently has taken his PC readers so much by surprise that they cannot comprehend it, but to someone, like myself, who lives in Hawaii, it is a commonplace. Hawaii was colonized by Americans, not Britons, but they behaved exactly the same — despising, or at least keeping their distance from, the commoners; but happily intermarrying with the ‘natural’ aristocracy. Once Hawaii became a republic and the aristocracy was extinguished, they stopped intermarrying with them, as all natives were then ‘common.’
This little story from the islands was written large in the British Empire. Cannadine does not pretend there was not a color line, but he notes — and any Australian would say, ‘Right, mate!’ — that the elite in the metropole despised the white colonists more than the black elites they chose to cosset and use in the policy of indirect rule.

How about if I phrase it as follows? Goldstein is firing rightwards.

Presumably, then, that isn’t allowed, irrespective of what lies to one’s right?
Of course it’s allowed. And then one should expect to get lumped with leftists by one’s right, and receive corresponding hostility.
Would Jeff be more principled if he mocked tactics and conceits on the left but excused and even championed much the same tactics and conceits if mouthed by people ostensibly on the right? Is that how it works?
Jeff would probably be more principled on that score if he first stopped *using* tactics and conceits of the left like snarking about incest and banjos. But I fear a fuller argument here would be getting deep into the weeds of mixed metaphor and overstretched analogy.
—
But Mel and Kim were right.
Who?

Who?
Brace yourself.

I should point out that in the article I link to upthread, the comparison between the Conservative establishment and the Washington Generals, (who turn up every week to get thrashed – indeed humiliated – by the Harlem Globetrotters), is probably racist.
Apt, but probably racist.

This is merely an article about group-think. He seems to always be alluding to the idea that sharing a sense of identity or common understanding is somehow faintly reprehensible. That doesn’t seem so Conservative to me. There is a time for belonging and a time for questioning. The great questions of politics are based upon this idea. His only response to the question of identity crisis to those who feel that their identity is threatened, is for those people to clump together with people outside of that identity in order to err.. regain a sense of identity. That seems to me to be the central tenet of leftist thought. He isn’t saying anything new about radicalism either is he. All that really happens is that if radicals gain more ascendency in a political narrative or movement, then there are the inevitable ruptures, sunderings and subsequent re-groupings. I don’t feel he’s answered anything really, but has only alluded to some abstract solutions. He talks about the impossibility of cultural nativity, but then mentions the birth of the American idea as the inspiration for a sense of collective identity.He talks in another faintly sniffy way about national identities being ‘local’, but doesn’t appear to have any problem with America being a nation separate from the rest, even to the extent of ‘exceptionalism’. Going by his own precepts, that also suggests a certain desire for a kind of superiority, wouldn’t you say? By the way, I’m an Englishman, and I don’t care much for jazz, sushi or basketball. I like cricket, tea, Constable and G K Chesterton. Does that make me a gauliter of the worst stamp?

Jeff, you ignorant slut!
The trouble here is that JEFF! would rather curse the darkness than light a candle. He’s had a lot of practice cursing the darkness, and it’s what he’s familiar with, as the left have cut the electricity and then been putting out the gas lanterns and flashlights one by one. Objectively, candles provide pretty poor light – just as simple reaction and clinging to one’s “tribe” are poor vessels for enlightenment – but fellow feeling and understanding one’s neighbor and nation a la Kipling’s description of how he understands his fellow from his own land are the basis of the trust of community.
Other people have lit a candle. JEFF! in this metaphor has been looking at the worst things lit *by* it and is complaining that the sudden light and smoke both irritate his eyes – he wishes to extinguish both. Rather than see a use for light (in this metaphor, revived patriotism and self-interest), he creates calumnies against it because he hates the smoke so very much. It’s the wrong sort of light, you can tell by the smoke, he explains. Must put the candle out before our eyes are ruined or someone catches the drapes on fire.
JEFF! has been in the funhouse mirror world of Twitter too long. The world where all feelings of national pride are held by enthusiastic racists and all enthusiastic racists are Nazis – or purport to be. On poking his head above water he offers himself a wholly false choice between “Nazi” and “respectable”, picks the “obvious”, then tries to content himself on how this could have happened by playing a perverse version of Dorothy Parker’s Who Goes Nazi by trying to figure out who has been a secret Nazi all along. Why, of course it’s been those hick Southerners. None other!
Wrapped in the warm blanket of his own ironic bigotry, he goes back to sleep.
The alt-right has been a nascent movement for some time, and to believe it (like the Tea Party) can be smothered by the Alinsky tactics of tearing down its respectability – from the right! – is foolish in the extreme. It has arisen because the interests of the Tea Party were not met, and other interests long buried have become more painful and risen once again. It is a force of last resort which has no respectability to lose, so any attempt to defuse it without understanding it is not only foolish, but an insult.
William F. Buckley was largely the mold for conservative commentary and left his imprimatur on the movement of respectability, education, wit, and calm reserve, but he did not lack in passion – nor was he a blind man. The political will of conservatism depended on recognizing the pains and travails of those without a voice (just as the left pretended to do) and offering practical intersect between first principles and needs. Needs best served most often by standing in the way yelling “stop”, but also clever enough to recognize means to ends.
The modern writer’s class has held onto that repectability, education, wit, and reserve label as it’s the comfort held when they’re with their lefty friends – “I’m actually better than you at those things you pretend at” – but somewhere has lost all meaning of what they should actually be doing with themselves. By failing to control what is and is not respectable through real guidance in the cause, they’ve fled the battlefield. “I’M RESPECTABLE!” screams JEFF! as he turns and realizes the footsoldiers in the ranks behind look… peevish. Could JEFF! have spent time on how nationalist-leaning motives best serve the country? Or rather than decrying BLM, explored ways of recovery for the crushed manufacturing base? Musing about profiling – whether it’s worth the cost in some cases? No, because the next thing is that you’re a Derbyshire and un-personed. Better to ignore where Taki is succeeding and dismiss any attempt to route that sort of thing through better angels. I’ve held JEFF! up here as an example, but he’s been better than most – which may be one reason he hasn’t realized how exceptionally toxic the Kristols and other have become.
To conclude: JEFF!, “you’re just saying that because you’re a bigot” has never once won an argument. It has ended many, and what comes after is not continued good feeling between parties involved. You had an opportunity to use tools given to you for the restoration of conservatism, freely given, but got in a snit because of mean things that teenage trolls were saying. You dolt.

They (Jews) are the most successful group in America, wielding enormous power in proportion to their real number, and yet they seem to foster a deep resentment toward the founding stock that created the country in which they prosper.
I’m reminded of the masthead of Heeb Magazine in its heyday, which pleaded with anyone who had contacts with the Jews who control the media to please get in touch with them. Personally I look forward to having enormous power in proportion to my real number.
Speaking as the author of yesterday’s essay about cultural Marxism in The Federalist, the aggressively secular and bonkers-leftist Jews associated with it were a marked exception to the gently secular and moderately liberal Jews who came here in the 20th century. The latter were assimilationist and worked their asses off, precisely out of respect to the people who founded the country. My people went to Dallas, of all places, where they encountered no anti-Semitism to speak of because Texans understand what hard work and respect look like.

@Franklin: Noted, but he arguably had the political capital to do so. Anyone proposing to lose to Hillary in order to (in theory) hand the rebellious elements a defeat and excise them from politics has not gamed things out very well. A conservative movement can only function so long as it is seen as other than useless. I grew up since near infancy watching Firing Line, reading Buckley, Novak, Cal Thomas, and even George Will, but there is a gap between what Buckley’s movement was meant to be and the the self-sabotaging sinecures of a moribund faux-intelligentsia.
For the record, throwing anti-Semites out of the party was absolutely required, but the Bircher affair… we’ve had some long-term repercussions. It is imperative to be lucid when one is an anti-Communist, which the Birchers were not, but in the conservative movement’s enthusiasm for finding a common-ground national face, all anti-Communism for decades was funneled into foreign policy and what might be termed anti-Russian public posture. Anti-Communism within the domestic sphere was strangled in the crib and this enabled the Gramscian March like little else. Worse still, such conflicts for direction of conservatism and efforts to displace what came to be known as paleo-conservatism helped the spin of Goldwater as some type of radical and put in place Johnson’s Great Society.
So, while I hold Buckley high as what the movement was, I cannot hold him completely faultless – nor can I claim that throwing out all nationalistic tendency at this time in history is a reasonable act. Nor still are his supposed successors of his stature as an original thinker or leader – they couldn’t lead an infant to a diaper-changing station.

It’s a question, then, of how to correct those problems, to whatever extent is practical, without indulging in knuckleheaded racial tribalism and “indiscriminate retaliation,” or generally being an arse.
David, I suspect that we share a broadly similar – in many ways a very ‘English’ – temperament. However, with every insult and outrage that is visited upon us I find myself growing less squeamish about the possibility of losing the odd baby with the increasingly foetid bathwater that is accumulating. I do fear the time may come when we are forced to take sides: I know where I should be standing, and even if some of my fellows turn out to be not as appetising as I’d like I’m pretty confident their company will be preferable to abject surrender.

David, I suspect that we share a broadly similar – in many ways a very ‘English’ – temperament
Yes, I think that may be part of it. I’m not temperamentally inclined to the kinds of crude tribalism on show. But for me it’s not an issue of manners, status or fretting about how one seems in supposedly respectable company, and certainly not for the benefit of people who will scold and name-call anyway because that’s what they do. It’s the narrow and emphatic ‘with us or against us’ mindset that jars, the quest for purity, especially when it repels so many people with whom one has common ground. When partial dissent and even measured qualification is met with instant denunciation and (((crap like this))), it’s not a happy state of affairs. Nor does it bode well for a glorious future, of any hue.

The first and most important difference between us and them is we’re us and they’re them.
True Conservatives are just about the only people in history, aside from libertarians, who can’t figure that out.

I’m not onboard with Vox, certainly. That being said, if it’s taking a crazy person to raise buried issues, just how sane is the common discourse in the first place?
On the other hand, Franklin, Milo certainly doesn’t believe you ought to be gassed – ‘twould be rather odd if he did. I’d tend to regard him as more influential in the real world than Ted Beale without question. I would like to take people on board for white identitarianism only out back and shoot them (metaphorically), but if it’s impossible to figure out where the line is other than letting the left come up with one, we’re going nowhere fast. Which is why I think a fight for the leadership and influence over the (very broad) alt-right *base* (perhaps not the alt-right itself) is more productive than to put everybody possibly carrying an imagined alt-right contagion in a box and nuke them.
A lot of people out there are really worried. The alt-right has picked up on some of their worries in a semi-credible way. The answer is not to channel hatred of some elements of the very loose alt-right into a with-us-or-against-us request to either sit down and shut up or be called mean names. Anyone wondering where the with-us-or-against-us drawing of lines on alt-right twitter came from needs look no further than the ongoing Crusade of Our Betters to control. It’s reactive – a mirror of many purges of old. A whole spectrum from the Buchanans to the Derbyshires have been ejected, silenced, and – most importantly – left to grow, outside.
It’s no use pointing out to people acting like a peasant’s revolt that they’re dragging things toward feudalism when there are actual landed gentry being rebelled against. So to speak.

Hal – Actual arrivals in Germany were apparently somewhere around one million, so that the two thousand criminals come out to about point two percent . . . not even as much as two percent, but point two percent.
Good point. You’re more likely to win £25 on the Lottery than be raped or murdered by a Muslim.

@Sporkatus: Milo and I followed each other on Twitter, before he was ejected for wrongthink. I’m also led to understand that as soon as he started speaking for the Alt-Right, large segments of the Alt-Right disowned him. That is what it is. Your point –
A whole spectrum from the Buchanans to the Derbyshires have been ejected, silenced, and – most importantly – left to grow, outside.
– is well taken, and I very much subscribe to the notion of considering people one at a time. That said, we’re talking about a movement in which (according to Beale, who would know) the Overton window includes the Final Solution. Is blanket disgust a wholly inapt response to that?

@David: Fistbump transferred to TCP/IP. Should arrive shortly.
@Franklin: Blanket disgust is certainly apt, and it’s hard not to let disgust color things. I for one am deeply disgusted by George Will’s fetishization of baseball. Jokes aside, I do not have any associations other than being white (ish) and American southern causing people to generate malformed malediction toward me, so I can’t begin to imagine.
It is deeply unfortunate that lines are drawn as they typically are, given that the Jewish friends I have are (per axiom) quite conservative in their matters of expertise. Politically, doctrinaire to middling leftists all, despite no personal advantage (several are poor) – they’re not Part Of The Conspiracy, certainly, but the long-term poisoning of the Marxist movement in the upper middle class has left its mark. On the other hand, they are absolutely not the New York Set or the Hollywood set.
These people are not The Jewish Issue, they’re my friends, and not more leftist than anyone else in their social set and upper middle class backgrounds – but they’re visible, leftist, and Jewish, which is enough to seem to make them seemingly an identified type. Which for someone unhinged looking for a villain behind the curtain…
On the other hand, the anti-semitism of the far left has been so rampant for decades that it isn’t even contained or confined to areas – though some show concentration. Zombie’s photo-essays of events in Berkeley are enough to curdle the blood.
It’s certainly true, isn’t it – that axiom that all forms of crazy eventually come back around to conspiracies of THE JEWS. I comfort myself that a movement of outcasts containing a few crazies must have some inevitability in that until the next (true) Buckley comes along.

I was hoping this discussion would come around to Star Trek.

I was hoping this discussion would come around to Star Trek.
The night is young.

I said once, regarding Joy Karega, that eventually all anti-rationalist movements conclude that The Real Problem Around Here Is The Jews.

Hey Lisboeta, your vegetables are less than perfectly washed of sand and soil, so by the same token I’m sure you have no grounds for complaint if served gravel for dinner. Right?

@Steve 2: A better wit than me once said on that matter “Ah yes, Britain, a nation of immigrants, like William the Immigrant, who arrived at the head of the Norman Immigration.”

Well, certainly that Worf chap was vetted, right? Brought in through existing measures (adopted) and completely acculturated. These “refugees” coming in from planets pledged to the clone of Kahless might be worth a bit more scrutiny, yeah?

“Ah yes, Britain, a nation of immigrants, like William the Immigrant, who arrived at the head of the Norman Immigration.”
It’s always startling to be told that despite one’s British ancestry stretching back to the Domesday Book and likely much earlier, we’re actually a “mongrel race”.
How come nobody lectures the Japanese or the Chinese or the Indians that they’re “mongrels”? Probably too afraid of being arrested.
These “refugees” coming in from planets pledged to the clone of Kahless might be worth a bit more scrutiny, yeah?
But think of all the vibrant new restaurants serving gagh and blood pie.

“Perhaps the lesson from history is don’t end up like the Saxons”
Hastings 1066: Not Enough Saxon Violence
(seen on a t-shirt)

Hastings 1066: Not Enough Saxon Violence
(seen on a t-shirt)
That’s an awesome tshirt.
I’ve always pictured the Saxons as cool, chilled out guys with long hair and big moustaches like a 70’s prog rock band.
William the Bastard’s guys were like punk rockers.
I hate punk rockers.

@Steve 2: Well, you know how it is. It’ll take American audience marketing to really come up with a form of gagh that everyone will enjoy. I suspect it’s all in the seasoning, though there’d probably be something to do with flatbread. I expect Klingon purists would call it gaghqoq or “so-called” gagh, but sometimes cultural cuisine needs to adapt for its audience. I’d expect a Chicago gagh to have more cheese than most, for one.

If only the monarchist economic track record were better. Dierdre McCloskey has been arguing convincingly for many years (in the WSJ for instance) that we owe our relatively enormous wealth compared to the rest of history to the burgeoning of liberal ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Paywalled; but I see it opens with “The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment” and I’m curious now as to how the argument goes.
Because my impression is that the Great Enrichment was a combination of manymanymany things: automated production, mass production, production lines, ease of transportation, the idea of science, small contracts, eugenic downward social mobility, the joint-stock corporation, various efficiency increases in various processes, and other innovations and inventions, — some of which were no doubt facilitated by the liberation of ordinary people, others of which were facilitated by the royalty that had e.g. the concentrated capital to afford large amounts of experimental basic research, and the clout to override entrenched guilds and unions.

Whoops – somebody’s grasp on html isn’t as firm as he thought

This comments section seems even more “rumbly.” 🙂
Hmmm . . . some random witterings:
1. Just ‘cos something upsets the SocJus types, it doesn’t mean it’s automatically a “good thing.”
2. If you go far enough in one political direction you’ll eventually bump into opposite direction.
3. I like Western Civillisation, and yes I beleive it is under attack both from without and within, but . . . but being open to knew ideas is a very important part of Civillisation. (NB This is not the same as embracing anything new just ‘cos its new.) The alt-right’s assumption of automatic superiority and emphasis on genetic purity is against this. Example: what have non-Western civilisations done for the world? Zero. No, zero. It’s a vital mathematical concept, and it didn’t originate in the Western Europe.
Well that’s my two pennyworth of random witterings/JIMHO

2. If you go far enough in one political direction you’ll eventually bump into opposite direction.
I hear this a lot, but it does not appear to be borne out by the evidence. The Khmer Rouge went about as far as it was possible to go into the depths of communism, but I could swear they stopped because they were bumping up against “everyone is ruddy well dead” rather than because they realized they were on the verge of turning capitalist.

The only watchable episode of Star Trek: Enterprise surprised me by finally explaining the great Klingon mystery – to wit, how a bunch of overly macho space biker Vikings managed to form an empire and the sophisticated technology necessary to keep it together.
Turns out Klingon culture used to be much more diverse, with great achievements in art and science, before a retrograde cultural element espousing the values of a mythical Klingon Golden Age based on warrior culture and a form of racial and ideological purity took hold and swept the Empire.
I have to admit, I did Nazi that coming.

Where’s that clip of wannabe leaders standing in a circle and vehemently arguing who gets priority based on the made up precedence of the moment?
Did you mean this? The one with the bare-breasted lesbian and the cacophonous shrieking?

You morons.
JEFF.
IS.
ITALIAN.
He was adopted by a family with a Jewish surname. They didn’t even PRACTICE.
How come nobody lectures the Japanese or the Chinese or the Indians that they’re “mongrels”? Probably too afraid of being arrested.
Kim Jong Il and his spawn do all the time. Only North Koreans are racially pure, you see. South Koreans are mongrels (especially from a certain southern region). You want unabashed racism? Go to east Asia or India.
The first and most important difference between us and them is we’re us and they’re them.
That statement is no damn good unless you can define US and THEM in a way that leaves no ambiguities.

I have to admit, I did Nazi that coming.
Hmmm…

South Koreans are mongrels
Well, you are what you eat, I s’pose.
Might it equate to “my hovercraft is full of eels”?
That’s insane. Who would say a thing like that???

Did you mean this? The one with the bare-breasted lesbian and the cacophonous shrieking?
Yes!!!, that’s the one . . . and then the right wingers try to claim that Oh, no, no, there’s no resemblance whatsoever, we don’t look the least like that . . . .

I suppose I should address some of the rank imbecility I’ve just read here and do it in a way that won’t, I hope, strike anyone as if I’m being either naive or leftist — both of which traits I can assure you I lack.
First, no one believes in magic dirt, nor does anyone believe had Somalis, say, formed this nation, things would be as instantly “meaty.” The civil society is a prerequisite for the kind of procedural country our Founders envisioned, and they were well read men in western philosophy. Liberia, for instance, lacked this base — and as we’ve seen in ill-fated democracy projects, you can’t simply slap a Constitution onto a people and expect them to understand it.
The civil society formed in colonies began a century and a half plus before the Revolutionary War. It was a collection of various religions, from Quakers and Anglicans to deists and so forth, all of whom shared certain Judeo-Christian values that underlay the morality side of the western Enlightenment and the civil society built in what would soon become the United States. So. There’s the historical backdrop. It is my contention that anyone who abides the compact forged by our Founders and Framers is capable of useful citizenship, regardless of their DNA markers.
It is clear to me that we are living in post-constitutional era, and I’ve advocated for ways to re-group, be it a Convention of the States or simply state nullification of fed judiciary rulings that are on their face unconstitutional or beyond the purview of the courts as laid out in the Constitution.
There have been innumerable poor court rulings, but the leftist activism is getting even worse, and state Governors need to find the balls to tell the feds to keep their money and stuff their bathroom demands, eg. This is hardly “pacifist,” and we may well soon see a kind of soft civil war I’ve been writing about as inevitable since at least 2005. I reject stare decisis as necessary and believe only originalists / intentionalists have a right to interpret law, because it is only they who are actually interpreting in the first place.
What I don’t want to see as a battle strategy is “my side” becoming what the left wants it to become: just another competing identity group vying for special dispensation. That is the wrong way to go, in my opinion, no matter how good it makes you feel or how cathartic it might be. White nationalism is left-progressivism in its bones. It devalues the individual and requires tribal loyalty.
Fuck that and fuck anyone who needs it.
Secondly, I’m no pacifist, and I’m familiar with the “muh Constitution, muh principles” bullshit certain people who fancy themselves fed up FIGHTERS! throw around. Seems an odd thing to mock — after all, we’re talking about the central document to our country and its governance, and the desire to adhere to it, in such a way as to make it seem somewhat silly — but then, these are strange times, where people like I’ve who’ve spent decades fighting the scourge of PC leftism, faux-diversity, and pernicious multiculturalism, are suddenly lumped in with BLM.
The fact of the matter is, I’ve spelled out the reasons why white identity politics is no different than any other identity politics in terms of how it is organized and where it must necessarily leave. You may wish to bleat about how you’re FINALLY FIGHTING BACK, but that’s just self-serving garbage. I defended Stacy McCain when he was called racist; I defended Trent Lott (whom I detest); I’ve defended Bill Maher; I’ve defended David Letterman. I’m an aggressive proponent of free speech, and I don’t much care what political letter it wears behind its name. I’m also a tenacious enemy to PC in any of its forms. I was never known not to fight, and in fact, when I wasn’t fighting the left I spent most of my time bashing the quisling Rs. I’d link but my site was hacked and my archives removed by Trumpers. For freedom! This will have to do as an example: http://hotair.com/archives/2009/03/09/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-f-bomb/
Calling something what I believe it to be — and the AltRight is rife with racialism, racism, antisemitism, and batshit crazy pseudo-scientific white nationalist “sociology”– then drawing out the argument to make the case, doesn’t make me PC, or a “pacifist,” or someone who advises against raising our weapons against a foe. I just believe we need better weapons, not the shared shit weapons imported from socialists. In fact, the very idea I play by Queensbury rules is completely ludicrous, given how I’ve spent years teaching people just how to combat the left, and how to disentangle ourselves from the linguistic traps institutionalized in how we believe language works that were always going to bring us to this point of competing identity blocs. Whether it’s more nuanced racialists or outright racists within the AltRight, the fact remains it’s there, it’s ugly, and it is inherently anti-individualistic. As such, it is anti-American.
The undercurrent here, be it pointing to early Naturalization Acts or “our posterity” — two of the go-to bits whipped out ever so proudly by racialist morons — is that the US was formed as a discriminatory country. To believe this, one must believe that both the Constitution and the Declaration were somehow mis-written, and that the Founders and Framers simply forget to build in firewalls to prevent citizenship to anyone not, eg., born in one of the original colonies. You must believe that Jefferson’s “all men” line was an oopsie, and that what he REALLY meant was “all free white Christians only” and was just self-conscious at being overly verbose. You must believe the Framers forgot, during the drafting and ratification processes, to include discriminatory language in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It forgot to set up a state church, for instance, when it was crafting 1A.
All of which would be in keeping with how progressives view the Founders: racist slave holders who cared only for themselves and built a country on the backs of disenfranchised chattel slaves and on the bones of Natives. The difference being, you’d be celebrating what the progressive left uses as a cudgel. And yet both of you are basing your positions on lies and slanders.
Now, some of you can pretend that what was of necessity (given the venue) a brief essay doesn’t answer certain key questions about what to do, and you can trot out the now ubiquitous line from the AltRight that conservatism and classical liberalism hasn’t conserved anything, but the truth is, Coolidge, Reagan, and Gingrich’s Contract all lead to prosperity, while for most of the last 100 years, dating back before Nixonian free trade and 1965’s Hart-Celler Act, a 90% European “meat” white country elected repeatedly progressives informed directly by Fabianism imported here from white Europe.
It was conservatives who opposed Hart-Celler, incidentally, and as anyone who’s read me knows, I’m a proponent of a border fence (just not a fantasy King Kong enclosure promised by an old orange Mondale Democrat); I believe we need to enforce our own immigration laws, including sponsorship, means testing, and required assimilation; that we need periodic moratoriums, particularly on low-skilled workers; and that I’d refuse any refugees from countries that are tied to terrorism unless and until we have a means to accurately vet petitioners.

Hi Microbillionaire,
“2. If you go far enough in one political direction you’ll eventually bump into opposite direction.”
Try thinking of it as if you go far enough in one direction, you’ll become indistinguishable from those who have gone too far in the opposite direction i.e. there isn’t really any difference between the extreme right and the extreme left; both are evil. (Although the extreme right probably has shinier jackboots.)

Hi, David. I keep trying to get in touch with Pixy Misa to get the site back online, but he’s not returning my emails. Maybe he, like Ace, is blocking me because of “muh principles.”

The alt-righters are extremely dangerous to those of us on the conservatarian spectrum in large part because they give our enemies a cudgel with which to beat us.

Perhaps I’m a bit touchy on the anti-Semitism at the moment (does the “s” get capitalised?), but I remember Vox Day making that exact point about Israeli influence in the American government, and I thought, by gum, that’s perfectly reasonable. And then he started doing (((this))), and now I have to wonder: wait, was he being reasonable? Or did I just get tricked into accepting the thin end of the wedge?

Hi Jeff
What David said at 22:31 …. turned up to 12 because that’s two more than ten.

It seems like even recognising Jews as a group, in any capacity that isn’t purely positive, immediately relegates one to the status of a jackbooted thug.
When you recognize us as a group for the purpose of making invidious claims about us, the problem of course is with the claims, not the aggregation. We then ponder where we’ve heard these sorts of things before.
When I complemented Texans en masse above I did so knowing that there are numerous exceptions, and neither I nor anyone else felt the need to issue reservations. That’s because praise and blame set off entirely different dynamics. That something so obvious needs explaining is the real curiosity here.

When you recognize us as a group for the purpose of making invidious claims about us, the problem of course is with the claims, not the aggregation. We then ponder where we’ve heard these sorts of things before.
Here’s another invidious claim for you: Jews have a neurotic obsession with victimhood and imagine Nazis around every corner. No wonder you’re such ripe targets for trolling on the Twitter.

Jeff has spend his life debating language deconstruction. “Alt-right” is a language construct just like “social justice”. The language game is to argue the constructs and not the reality. Don’t play. America offered color blind and it was refused. If color matters than color matters.
Trigger warning!
Trump will win a landslide if he ever uses words “white children”.

They may hide it behind reasonable concerns like those mentioned above, or behind legitimate science like that on intelligence…
Permit me to interject that there is ZERO correlation between IQ and virtue.
Stupid criminals commit stupid crimes: robbery, assault, murder. Those crimes scare us because they’re scary things to experience.
Smart criminals commit crimes that are actually WORSE in their scope and impact but not as scary because there’s no precipitous instant of violence against its victims: identity fraud, insurance fraud, hacking into the NSA, securities fraud, accounting fraud, embezzlement, indoctrinating college students with clever lies, holding Senate seats forever, writing seminal lies (aka “damned lies”) about your struggles or capital, occupying the Oval Office, crashing national currencies, staging coups against Batista or the Shah, maintaining death camps and gulags, pillaging vast swathes of Eurasia with your Mongol Horde…*
If you expand your definition of “crime” to include all of the horrible things that people do, across history, you’re not going to see a racial signal in all that noise.
Humanity sucks. Always has; always will.
That’s all there is to it. Sticking with people you are comfy with won’t change that.
*Crushing your enemies. Seeing them driven before you. Hearing the lamentations of their women.