Volk Politics
Further to recent rumblings in the comments, here’s Jeff Goldstein on the ‘alt-right’ manifesto:
This counter-trend [to the identity politics of the left], 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 minimises individualism. As with much of the left, the alt-right remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent. […]
It is an identity movement on a par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other tribal products of the kernel assumptions that inform cultural Marxism. That it pretends to throw off some of those trappings — it enforces an anti-PC ethos in a way that creates yet another tenor of the same PC, this time attached to white nationalism instead of multiculturalism — is but camouflage.
Worth reading in full. In the comments at the Federalist and on Twitter, things get lively, and a little strange.
Here is Protein Wisdom in the Wayback Machine:.txt on your workstation. For example, the page I mentioned above would be “20090105144941.txt”
https://web.archive.org/web/*/proteinwisdom.com
If PW is truly become digital ashes (and it would be nice if Pixy just told us outright), then it might be worth the while of its fans to download the Best of PW (or even all of it, given the efficiencies of crowd-sourcing), then reconstruct the site elsewhere, as soon as we find a hosting site that has better security than WordPress.
It would require that someone coordinate the save-outs so that effort is not duplicated. If I weren’t absolutely swamped at work, I’d do it myself. Mabye some of you layabouts (you know who you are) can post a sign-up so people can volunteer to take, for example, April 2009. Or only a week of it.
In the meantime, here’s how you save out a page in Windows (You Apple schmucks can figure out the equivalent moves your own selves, and I don’t recommend using one of those infernal handheld devices to do this, because I don’t use one myself so I don’t know how you’d manage this kind of task on something not suited to Real Work):
1. In the Wayback Machine, click one of the calendar days that has a blue circle on it. All of the posts from that day are displayed.
2. Make a note of the timestamp in the URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20090105144941/http://proteinwisdom.com/. See that huge number in the middle? It’s YYYYMMDDmmiiss, meaning that on January 5, 2009 at 14:49:41, that page was archived by the Wayback Machine. That number will make a good unique filename.
3. Right-click somewhere in the middle of the page and select “View Page Source” (NOT “View Page Info”). Another tab will open to display all of the HTML that makes up the page. ALL OF IT. Most of it won’t make sense.
4. Press Ctrl+A (Select All) to highlight the entire page.
5. Copy it, and then paste it into any simple text editor such as Microsoft Notepad (NOT a word processor such as MS Word, which adds satanic formatting to the text and you’ll never be rid of it).
6. Save the file as
6. At some future date, the files can be parsed and reconstructed elsewhere.
NOTE: The Wayback Machine did not save the comments, which is a pity. We had some really awesome threads back in the day.
Well?
What say?
Make a note of the timestamp in the URL: http://proteinwisdom.com/.”>https://web.archive.org/web/20090105144941/http://proteinwisdom.com/.“>https://web.archive.org/web/20090105144941/http://proteinwisdom.com/.”>http://proteinwisdom.com/.”>https://web.archive.org/web/20090105144941/http://proteinwisdom.com/.
I pasted the URL without tags or anything. I have no idea why TypePad converted it to THAT.
The alt-righters… give our enemies a cudgel with which to beat us.
That.
I’m still processing the idea, aired upthread, that being called a racist (or sexist, or homophobe or whatever), falsely and opportunistically, somehow inspires, and perhaps justifies, “indiscriminate retaliation” and the breakdown of “all restraint,” up to and including the online harassment of Jewish people.
The idea that one “might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb” implies that what one really wants, ideally, is the bigger, fleshier animal, and that if the social penalty is the same you might as well go for it. And by extension, that what one really wants, or at least doesn’t mind indulging in, is an uncompromised racial animus, however crude and stupid. As if there were no remaining reason to avoid the bigger offence, or bigger taboo. As if being repelled by uncompromised racial animus and “indiscriminate retaliation” – say, things like this – were merely a politeness, a false courtesy.
In the nine years plus I’ve been doing this, I’ve been accused, baselessly and opportunistically, of most of the ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’ proscribed by the left. This name-calling, some of it quite colourful and perverse, has not, as yet, impelled me to abandon a preference for accuracy and proportion, or to mimic the (((tactics and neuroses))) of anti-Semites. If I were feeling aggrieved and lacking “all restraint,” I very much doubt that’s where my mind would go. And the kinds of people whose minds would go there, and do go there, and then stay there, are, it seems to me, probably best avoided.
One of the defining features of these alt-right entryists is disingenuousness, and here we might have an example.
Nope. Monarchist here, remember? I’m intently watching the alt-right with great popcorn, but as I said upthread, I think it’ll ultimately come to nought.
I shouldn’t accuse you of that, of course, but I hope you can understand why I might suspect such: you seem like an intelligent person, and yet you apparently don’t think that there exist people who think that whites are better than blacks, even if they didn’t use my exact words.
I do think there are people who think that, but I want to pin down what sort of “better” is involved so one can debate the truth or falsity of the statement. As mentioned, blacks are more violent and less intelligent than whites, on average. Is that betterness? Children of high-income, degree-holding whites similarly regress towards higher means of life outcome and performance than children of high-income, degree-holding blacks. Is that betterness? Transracial adoption studies show white-raised black children winding up worse than white-raised white children, and black-raised white children doing better than black-raised black children. Whites learn faster and make fewer errors in military service than blacks, to the point where a large swathe of the black population is barred from military service on the grounds of “too likely to SNAFU”, et cetera, et cetera, et bloody cetera.
Being a devout Christian, I can still hold that it’s possible to reject any charge of fundamental inferiority by fobbing it off on God, the soul, and the Last Judgment where the judge with infinite time and knowledge will judge everyone on their exact opportunity and so forth, but the moment one steps away from that or a similar religious basis, it starts to look pretty damn hard to maintain the facade that a less criminal 100IQ population isn’t overall preferable to a more criminal 85IQ population. (As you might expect, I disbelieve dicentra’s vehement “ZERO correlation” assertion above. Rather, the Matthew Effect indicates that all nice things are correlated.)
You also want me to define racism. I thought it was pretty clear from what I wrote that I’m not someone who throws the term around where it’s not warranted, and that I’m not trying to pin a label on people to shut them up.
But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I’d define it as an irrational animus based on race. The alt-righters I’m talking about are of the opinion that black criminality is innate and incorrigible, rather than, say, a product of the welfare state and a noxious culture.
[insert “why not both?” image]
The noxious culture is surely a component, but I must also grant the alt-righters that some degree of black criminality, stupidity, and other misbehavior does appear to be innate, cf. aforementioned regression studies, transracial adoption studies, and the matter that blacks even average lower cranial capacity than whites. That one’s damnably hard to blame on a welfare state.
Does this imply genocide? No. But it does imply that many opinions on the race gap are grounded in ignorance and falsehood. Famously, more money has been thrown at the racial achievement gap than at the moonshot, to less effect, in part by people who thought “it’s the poverty, stupid!” and still haven’t learned that it isn’t.
And there’s a nasty edge to their comments on the subject. We’re talking about people who are disingenuous about what they truly believe, so to a certain degree we’re left to draw inferences from their tone. But to me at least the irrational animus is often clear. They may hide it behind reasonable concerns like those mentioned above, or behind legitimate science like that on intelligence, but I’ve often been left with the impression that there are no improvements that blacks could make that would satisfy them. It’s not rational, they just hate niggers.
I must say I sympathize with their position. They’ve been browbeaten with the false idol of equality, and when blacks don’t live up to it, it’s whites who get blamed and taxed. When that fails to resolve the situation, the beatings continue until morale improves. Meanwhile blacks rape more whites every year than whites lynched blacks in the entire history of the USA. (What about whites raping blacks, you might ask? The Justice Department’s yearly stats on that score have estimated 0 for five years running, every year with the footnote that the figure is unreliable because the sample size is small, i.e. they couldn’t find any.) And still the textbooks cry over Emmett Till, rather than, say, Christian and Newsom.
Given such a situation and identity politics, animus seems a perfectly rational outcome. Which means one has to step back and ask why the identity politics, rather than why the animus. Given the left’s pushing of “identity politics for everyone but whites, who shall sit there and foot the bill”, is it such a surprise to see “identity politics for whites”, or, the alt-right? No. Does it stink nonetheless? Yes.
You really don’t think there’s anything behind those triple brackets? Who else would feel the need to clearly identify every Jew when their Jewishness was totally irrelevant, except somebody who had an irrational animus towards Jews?
Oh, I think there’s something behind those brackets, all right. For example, not thinking their Jewishness is totally irrelevant.
There are obvious reasons that politicians from lots of countries pay more attention to Israel than to India. I would also wager that not all congressional references to Israel are positive.
I did say it was a crude proxy. But what reasons has Israel got that India hasn’t, exactly? Unstable neighbors? Nuclear weapons? Religious conflict? Bordergore? Pilgrimage sites? Troubled democracy? Terrorism? Being an important trade partner? A multi-million minority of immigrants in America? I’m really not seeing the supposed obviousness here – the discourse of “israel israel israel” seems to have an element of unhealthy obsession to it that one can notice without blaming ZOG. India has literally over a hundred times the population of Israel; it seems bizarre for it to get less attention.
And I hardly think all congressional references to India are positive, either.
Here’s the problem with people who worry about Jews:
When Mitt Romney ran for President, I didn’t see many complaints that his religion meant he’d put Mormon interests ahead of everything else. But if a Jew rises high, people question his loyalty. Why? Is there something different about being a Jew than being a Mormon? I suppose it’s an ethnicity as well as a religion; and, sure enough, there are lots of alt-righters who’d make the objection based on ethnicity: I recall people who insisted on referring to Nikki Haley as Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, ignoring that she was married. But still, these people never seem to think Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz’s loyalties are quite as divided as a Jew’s would be. Why? Is there something different about being a Jew than being Indian?
Once you hack away at it, you’re usually left with nothing but that definition of racism I used earlier: an irrational animus.
Yes, there is something different about being a Jew than being a Mormon. For example, there exists a Jewish state that one might wonder if some Jews have dual loyalty to, and there doesn’t exist a Mormon state. The US government gives several billion dollars every year to said Jewish state, which might spur even more worries that the Jews are exerting improper influence on US finances, especially when one considers the disproportionately large amount of Jews in a position to exert such influence. AIPAC is huge; ADPAC (the D is for Deseret) is nowhere to be seen. And there’s hardly a shortage of questionable remarks by American Jews suggesting that not merely they are devoted to Israel, but that all America should be:
“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.
While I’d be willing to bet that that’s technically not true, I’d basically agree, and that wasn’t what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say was:
1. Black people have a lower average IQ than whites, and proportionally commit more crimes. As far as I know, those are facts.*
2. It does not follow from those facts that black people are innately criminal, i.e. lacking in virtue, nor does it follow that those facts will never change.
3. If someone disagrees with point 1, they either know something I don’t, or they’re a wilfully ignorant SJW-type.
4. If someone disagrees with point 2, they probably just don’t like black people, regardless of the facts.
5. The alt-right in general seems to be people who are willing to face the facts in point 1, but:
6. There’s a significant element in the alt-right that disagrees with point 2.
*If I’m wrong, I welcome correction, as long as I don’t have to read anything too long
Given such a situation and identity politics, animus seems a perfectly rational outcome… Given the left’s pushing of “identity politics for everyone but whites, who shall sit there and foot the bill”, is it such a surprise to see “identity politics for whites”, or, the alt-right? No. Does it stink nonetheless? Yes.
I’d agree with the latter part, but I’d say that the people we’re talking about here give the impression, to me at least, that their animus is not dependent on “such a situation”.
I’m really not seeing the supposed obviousness here… India has literally over a hundred times the population of Israel; it seems bizarre for it to get less attention.
India’s position is considerably less secure than Israel. They have billions of people and only one totally hostile neighbour. Not only is Israel’s position weaker, but policy on a number of different countries in the oil-rich, strategically-important Middle East impacts policy on Israel, so it’s always a consideration. There’s tremendous media and public attention paid to Israel’s relationship to its poor neighbour, a unique problem that India doesn’t have to deal with. Moreover, there’s still constant arguing over Israel’s very legitimacy, which the US, if it is to support Israel, must confront. An alliance with India doesn’t involve defending the very idea of India in the United Nations all the time.
And then there was the holocaust, a repeat of which is entirely possible and would be applauded by half the world. Nobody’s ever displayed that much animus towards India. (Well, except maybe Pakistan.) I know it’s common in alt-right circles to no longer care about that, but most people still do.
Most western countries give away large amounts of aid to all sorts of other countries without people worrying that said countries are exerting some nefarious undue influence. And the people worried about divided loyalty from Jews never worried about the same from Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz. I bet there’s a lot of “questionable remarks” from Indians and Cubans in America on the importance of both countries to America. But somehow it’s always the Jews that inspire the most paranoia. Irrational animus sums it up pretty well for me.
And I hardly think all congressional references to India are positive, either.
Fair point, although I’d bet there’s more negative references to Israel than India.
@David:
You’ve cut short a phrase I used with quite a bit of deliberation there: indiscriminate retaliation in kind. As in, widely targeted, but of the same caliber as they’d received in “your race is neo-Nazi gutter scum, cancer of the earth, plague upon history, whiteness equals oppression” etc. As I said upthread, I don’t think it’s supposed to address actual concerns, so I won’t stand up for justification – but on the count of inspiration, escalation inspires counter-escalation.
“You want unabashed racism? Go to east Asia or India.” Dicentra September 7 20:49
Reminds me of a live studio discussion I saw on the Beeb many years ago: group of teenagers of Indian/Pakistani descent talking about life. One girl says, “I can’t stand those Gujarati girls, they’re all such tarts,” and – and – nobody turns a hair.
The honest expression of one’s thoughts: where did it go?
David says here everything I was trying to say here, more clearly, and with half the words. That’s why they pay him the big bucks, I guess. Good work.
You’ve cut short a phrase I used with quite a bit of deliberation there: indiscriminate retaliation in kind.
Okay, but it still seems tactically unsound and rather corrupting. Morally blunting, as it were. A (hopefully) nuanced position is exchanged for a crude, often absurd one. And if someone were to jump about and call me an unthinking racist or whatever, I wouldn’t feel an urge to start jumping about and acting like one.
I don’t think it’s supposed to address actual concerns, so I won’t stand up for justification – but on the count of inspiration, escalation inspires counter-escalation.
And so one becomes, and perhaps remains, one’s opponents’ preferred caricature. Which is presumably either a position of bad faith, a warped cartoon of one’s actual views – and a validation of one’s opponents’ accusations – or is somehow liberating, even gratifying. And a validation of one’s opponents’ accusations.
That’s why they pay him the big bucks,
Excuse me while I slip into something encrusted with diamonds.
No, but perhaps you might feel an urge to start making some vivid generalisations with mocking phrases. In fact I believe you already might have; “Our Betters” comes rapidly to mind.
Agreed. But when I eat my popcorn and watch the antics of the alt-right as a spectator sport, I’m not looking for moral nuance. To riff off Magical Finger’s comment about a zombie movie —
— well, I’d compare it more to a comic horror movie, which can have zombies. Variety fantasy with an evil warlock, or variety scifi with a mad scientist.
Picture the evil Dr. Progressivism, cackling in his lab/castle about how he’ll show them, oh he’ll show them all, and everything will be a better world just as soon as he’s swept aside those pesky menaces who keep getting in his way and doing not-nice things and obstructing the course of Enlightened Technocratic Government.
Flashback: Cut to Dr. Progressivism choking on a biscuit, so he decrees biscuits must be banned, and tries to get them banned by importing a ton of plague biscuits. The people exile the Doctor to the site we saw in the opening scene, where he begins constructing his fortress of doom.
Present day: Dr. P creating/summoning some eldritch abomination to send at the townsfolk. Scene: The town militia, fighting off a horde of zombies. Scene: The timid seatwarming mayor, talking about how we mustn’t lower ourselves to the Doctor’s level by forming an angry mob and marching on his castle.
Cut to: Dr. P’s latest experiment with a giant zombie (stitched together out of the corpses of several former townspeople), which he is quite unwisely poking with a cattle prod. It goes the way of all mad scientists and evil warlocks in monster movies: the protagonist shouts something like “I command you! I am your master! I am your creator! You must obey me! Stop this at once, Experiment #78!” and the zombie roars “I am not a number! I have a name, and it is Old’Rite!” then proceeds to chase the Doctor around the place, trampling lab equipment and propriety in the process, occasionally stopping to tangle dramatically with the Doctor’s miscellaneous monsters and minions. Yakety Sax optional.
It’s in this context that I am – briefly, and aware that this is fraught with caveats – rooting for the metaphorical movie monster. I’m not rooting for it because I think it will rebuild civilization, hold enlightened discourse or follow the rules of war; I’m rooting for it because I want to see it give Dr. P a karmic beating.
Jeff – 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
Sorry Jeff, this is where I think you’re being naive.
Liberia is the way it is because it’s a black African country, which is the same reason Zimbabwe is the way it is and the same reason Detroit is the way it is and the same reason white British people who value not being mugged avoid conspicuously black areas in London and Nottingham.
No amount of Joseph Jenkins Roberts reading Aristotle and Descartes would’ve turned Liberia into a mini-America on the equator.
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.
Which is a nice thing to believe, but after 240 years of the American experiment and trillions of dollars spent on racial equality it should be pretty obvious that the real world doesn’t work that way. If even your black president despises the US Constitution, the chances of converting guys with names like Trayvon into Jeffersonian republicans are slim to none.
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.
Again, very noble but, I fear, a bit like being a Russian in 1919 who likes the cut of that Kerensky chap’s jib.
Politics doesn’t care about your feelings or mine. The game has changed, and not for the better, but this is to be expected when Western nations have embarked on a disastrous policy of population replacement through mass Third World immigration.
You must believe that Jefferson’s “all men” line was an oopsie, and that what he REALLY meant was “all free white Christians only”
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” – Thomas Jefferson
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.
I’m certainly not a socialist, but a 90% white country voting for quasi-socialist policies is likely to be infinitely preferable to a country that looks like the Star Wars cantina… and still votes for socialist policies because every ethnic group is jostling for gibmedats.
Personally, as an old fashioned Tory I see a lot in the Alt Right to dislike, if it can even be called a coherent political philosophy (which I don’t think it can). But I can also see where the winds are blowing, and your doctrines are sadly in vain.
Oh the irony.
Indeed, particularly coming from the author of “In a world where WASP society had NOT suffered continuous, withering criticism from Jewish intellectuals I would be more sympathetic, but that world does not exist.”
“Right-click somewhere in the middle of the page and select “View Page Source” (NOT “View Page Info”).”
Sheesh, do people even use text editors (try Atom it’s free!) for HTML, etc, any more?
“The Wayback Machine did not save the comments”
No one backs up content any more?
For Dicentra, some pointers on how to scrape a site out of the Wayback Machine. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
No, but perhaps you might feel an urge to start making some vivid generalisations with mocking phrases. In fact I believe you already might have; “Our Betters” comes rapidly to mind.
Touché.
Agreed. But when I eat my popcorn and watch the antics of the alt-right as a spectator sport, I’m not looking for moral nuance.
Okay. I can certainly see the fun in watching our betters clutching their pearls and spluttering indignantly. Milo, for instance, has entertained us quite a bit, while airing some statistics one isn’t supposed to know about. Though, so far as I’m aware, Milo doesn’t describe himself as ‘alt-right’, merely as a commentator on it, a translator of sorts. I don’t think he’s driven by quite the same motives as the charmers who do (((this))) to people based solely on their being Jewish. (Or Italian, as the case may be.) And they are much more numerous.
I think my objection is that this isn’t just a question of appearance and rhetorical propriety, and of to whom one’s arguments might appeal. Based on the hundreds of tweets and comments I’ve seen by self-declared ‘alt-righters’, the position itself is broadly antithetical to nuance, a blunting of the moral senses. It’s a mix of crass racial bravado, endless rumblings about “the enemy,” and more than a dash of apocalyptic bluster. Stuff like this, as retweeted approvingly by Mr Vox Day himself.
It’s a bit like trying to have a conversation about, say, the prevalence of cousin marriage in the Islamic world and its medical and social consequences, and then someone walks by and shouts “fucking pakis.”
It doesn’t really help.
[ Edited. ]
Regarding this notion of taking an extreme position at the exhortation of other people taking the extreme opposite: It’s enjoyable to mock the outsize sensitivities of certain exemplars of the contemporary left, but it’s not like they came out of nowhere. The world has a long history of iniquities that good people are eager not to repeat. A subset of them feel justified by some prior expression of racism or sexism or some other ism to mouth intemperate attitudes to the contrary, and thus we end up with the kind of buffoonery that keeps our host in material for his posts. Emulating these clowns in a rightward direction seems like an extraordinarily bad idea.
and thus we end up with the kind of buffoonery that keeps our host in material for his posts.
Bugger. Hadn’t thought of that. Quick, everyone get hyperbolical and shouty.
“buffoonery”
But it makes for such great, compelling news stories where conflict and controversy can be conjured up out of thin air by elevating nonsense to a level where it is treated seriously!
I’ve often thought that many TV “news” broadcasts (especially the ones that feature some kind of “expert commentary” or Useless Studies people) should come with an screen-inset Sanity Explainer or Bullshit Detector, sort of like that used for the deaf.
It’s a mistake to judge Jeff G. solely on a single post in The Federalist without considering the entire body of his work going back more than a decade. It’s also worth remembering that he became persona non grata among the “proper” “conservatives” the moment he defended Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he [Obama] fails” remark, whereupon he was promptly cast into the wilderness.
Further, I note the disparaging remarks about those of us who appreciate the Constitution as it was written and intended and believe that the problems which currently exist are problems of implementation and people and not the document itself. Indeed, Jeff was and I assume still is, a proponent of an appropriate convention to try to right the ship by eliminating the more odious amendents, repealing constitutional jurisprudence which adversely impacts principles of federalism and which accumulate power in the state at the expense of individual autonomy. In short, Jeff espouses classical liberalism.
The Alt-right seems–and I use “seems” as it appears to be a mish-mash of grievances wrapped in a single banner–to wish to scrap those founding ideals in favor of . . .something . . .which remains curiously vague. And it cannot be seriously argued that components of the Alt-right movement embrace the same identity politics used by its nominal opponents on the Progressive Left and deploy the same violent rhetoric.
Rhetoric always leads somewhere, and it appears the desired destination is the same for both the Alt-Right and BLM & associates. Those of us who notice these things are not dupes and in fact, may be resigned to the inevitablity of violent civil discord. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean we cannot be saddened by the loss of what might have been.
R.Sherman.
Rhetoric always leads somewhere, and it appears the desired destination is the same for both the Alt-Right and BLM & associates.
The difference being that BLM supporters have already murdered several police officers, and leftists regularly assault Trump rally-goers – seemingly with impunity. As far as I’m aware, Alt-Righters have neither physically attacked nor killed anyone – their only crime is to have said some mean things on the internet.
As for all the White Nationalism stuff, that seems to be a very small minority at best and to be honest, as someone whose family had to flee to Europe from the Middle-East over a hundred years ago to avoid being killed for the crime of being Christian, and having lived and worked in Africa, I’d rather live in a majority white country than not.
No, the language is what creates the reality. It’s no coincidence that I’ve been able to physically trace the institutionalization of the New Critics’ idea of who has ownership of a text to the textualism purportedly deployed by judges to create new texts out of legislatively intended one. It is also no coincidence that I’ve been able to point to how this kind of group usurpation of individual agency must necessarily end with the loudest mob taking over the official identity group narrative while discarding individuals ostensibly in that group as race traitors, victims of false consciousness, inauthentic, etc.
The problem isn’t that I’ve played some semantic game. The problem is that most of you don’t see how a semantic game is being used to manipulate you.
You aren’t realists. You’re useful idiots. Gramsci would happily let you jack him off.
Just because they’re pussies who have their li’l red hats bitchslapped off their domes doesn’t mean that once their mob gets big enough they won’t go a-lynchin’.
Strictly as a hypothetical question, of course, how bad would things have to get before you endorsed lynching (which might be more precisely specified as death penalty imposed by vigilante justice)?
You’ve cut short a phrase I used with quite a bit of deliberation there: indiscriminate retaliation in kind…. As I said upthread, I don’t think it’s supposed to address actual concerns, so I won’t stand up for justification – but on the count of inspiration, escalation inspires counter-escalation.
It’s true that when mud is tossed by one side, the other side is bound to lob back mud.
It’s also true that although a photo and its negative* are exactly opposite one another–oriented at 180° from each other–they are not UNRELATED, nor can the one claim to be morally superior to the other, nor can one claim to have nothing in common with the other.
When one group uses racial essentialism to proclaim All Whites Guilty of a the sins of history (and glories in the “browning” of a population), then the group that uses racial essentialism to do a perfect 180° pivot (the American Experiment is a glorious White Thang and nobody should brown or whiten someone else’s population) is a mere photo negative, not a remedy nor a repudiation and definitely not an improvement.
The only way to Not Be Them is to be a different photo altogether, or maybe an oil painting or a 3D-printed ham sammich.
Or a member of Homo sapiens sapiens who’s not suffering from severe cranial/anal inversion.
——
*Sherpa note for millennials: Pix used to be taken by single-purpose cameras that recorded images on 35mm-wide strips of “film,” a transparent and flexible plastic, and the image was rendered with dark spots light and light spots dark, red spots green and blue spots orange, producing what they called a “negative,” from which the positive image or “photo” was produced.
he became persona non grata among the “proper” “conservatives” the moment he defended Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he [Obama] fails” remark, whereupon he was promptly cast into the wilderness.
And many who hadn’t yet distanced themselves from him were later persuaded to do so by the whisper campaign launched by a certain ADA whom Jeff called out for using the same corrupt linguistic model that the left wields as a weapon against Western Civ.
And then bested him in a days-long debate on three blogs and a late-night IM session (which yours truly witnessed and participated in).
…how bad would things have to get before you endorsed lynching (which might be more precisely specified as death penalty imposed by vigilante justice)?
Probably only in a Mad Max / Road Warrior post-apocalyptic world. Maybe not even then. Defending one’s family, friends and neighbors from a rampaging mob is one thing, going out and becoming part of a rampaging mob, or even endorsing one, is quite another.
Now there’s a coincidence. I used a quote from that essay.
✅
What is astonishing … umm, no, disturbing is a better word … is how anti-American identity (aka collectivist) politics is.
How it cannot have sunk in that the US in particular, and the West in general, is based upon the individual as the source of government.
Given the repeated horror shows of collectivist thinking, how can anyone think more is needed?
If your spectrum is right v. left, then yes.
Collectivist v. Individualist, not so much.
✅✅✅✅
Here’s my go. Racism is an instance of groupism. That is, attributing to an individual the putative characteristics of the group to which that person belongs. In essence, it is a false syllogism.
Regarding that ‘certain ADA’ Dicentra mentions…
Even after all the calumnies that ADA heaped upon Jeff and all the backroom attempts to destroy Jeff’s Reputation said ADA instigated, Jeff still came out and defended that ADA when said ADA was the subject of a nasty campaign by Neil Rauhauser and Brett Kimberlain [including a SWATting].
Jeff’s actions during that time speak to his Honorable Character and Deep Commitment to Principle.
…and more than a dash of apocalyptic bluster.
In AD 403, the poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius wrote in celebration of the peace and diversity of his time:
He would probably have made unkind remarks about apocalyptic bluster if you suggested that these peoples might soon come un-joined and act very un-brotherly.
In AD 410, migrants sacked Rome, and it was downhill from there.
I used a quote from that essay.
That pleases me to no end. Glad I could help.
In AD 410, migrants sacked Rome, and it was downhill from there.
Good clean Aryans, ironically.
*Sherpa note for millennials:
Heh!!!
In AD 410, migrants sacked Rome, and it was downhill from there.
It was downhill long, long before there. The people defending Rome at that time were migrants too. Actually many thought of themselves as good Romans, despite their foreign origins.
But previously Rome managed a multi-ethnic empire for over 400 years. They had leaders who were not Italian for much of that time. Culturally they were almost as Greek as they were echt Roman. They had absorbed several waves of migrants previously to 410, and had fought off previous enemies worse than the Goths.
As an example of multi-ethnic empires not working, Rome lacks quite a lot.
Gibbon argued that it was the religious changes that brought them down. Others that climate change and disease did the main damage. Others that it was sclerosis from an economy that concentrated wealth in too few hands and destroyed the middle class. Likely it was a combination, but it wasn’t the external attacks, because they were no worse than ones that had been repelled when Rome was strong.
Migration was not the cause of the fall of Rome, but the other way round. Internal weakness allowed the forcible migration.
Now you may say, “so what”. The West is too weak to overcome migration the same way. But the important difference is that the Romans fought the Goths and Vandals bitterly, and did not want them to come. They failed because their internal state was weak, not because they allowed them to come. Our situation is not that at all.
And it is the same with the West today. Immigration is not causing the weakness, but is at most a symptom of it. Seeking the “cure” the West by tackling immigration is doomed to failure.
Massive immigration in the 19th and early 20th century was swallowed with ease by the US. So it cannot be immigration per se which is the problem. (And at the time those people were Russians, Poles, Irish etc, who were stated by the naysayers are being impossible to integrate, and now apparently at are the bedrock of US culture without which it is nothing!)
1. Black people have a lower average IQ than whites, and proportionally commit more crimes. As far as I know, those are facts.*
My definition of crime is broader than yours AND MORE ACCURATE.
You can’t rebut what I didn’t assert.
For Dicentra, some pointers on how to scrape a site out of the Wayback Machine. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Thanks for the pointer. I pulled those instructions out of my nethers (as I do with all my documentation) on a moment’s notice (also my MO).
Liberia is the way it is because it’s a black African country, which is the same reason Zimbabwe is the way it is and the same reason Detroit is the way it is and the same reason white British people who value not being mugged avoid conspicuously black areas in London and Nottingham.
You’re being a-historical, Steve-a-reeno. Liberia and Zimbabwe and Chile (no blacks) and Laos (no blacks) and North Korea (no blacks) and Mongolia (no blacks) are miserable shit-holes because miserable shit-hole-ness is the default state of human society.
All of whitey-white Europe was a miserable shit-hole for millennia, too, until an insignificant Jewish carpenter was executed by Rome, rose again, and some puke named Constantine made that Jew’s putative religion the official religion of the Roman Empire.
When the ancient Greek texts were reintroduced to Europe by those miserable A-rabs, it paved the way for Modern Scientific Inquiry as a means to know the Mind of a Personal God, who rescued the House of Jacob from captivity in Egypt, after which he imposed the first recorded RULE OF LAW (rule of kings is the default), which is why the English and the Scots founded their Common Law on the RULE OF LAW that they learned about from a bunch of FUCKING FOREIGNERS.
Our Enlightenment and Constitutional Order are FUCKING OUTLIERS IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, a cause for Exceptional Gratitude for our Exceptional Good Fortune, not FUCKING CHAUVINISM.
Steve, I used to think you were all right, because you are so damned funny sometimes.
But if you cannot see that your reaction to FUCKING LEFTIST ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT RACE AND CULTURE is to assume those very FUCKING LIES YOURSELF, then I don’t know what to do with you.
Go ahead and accuse me of condescending to you, because I FUCKING AM.
Cripes, you people are a mystery to me. THIS IS BRAIN-USAGE 101: THE LEFT IS FUCKING WRONG (in every sense of that reading). DO NOT PARTAKE OF THE LEAVEN OF THE PHARISEES. If the Left preaches racial essentialism WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THAT IT’S APPROPRIATE TO DO THE SAME FUCKING THING?
Seriously. Not even rage at the Current Situation can possibly justify that. Look at how unhinged I am, and I CAN STILL CLEARLY SEE THAT THE ALT-RIGHT IS EVERY BIT AS WRONG AS THE LEFT AND FOR ALL THE SAME FUCKING REASONS.
What the everlasting hell is your excuse?
My apologies to David for spilling cranberry juice on the sofa.
It won’t come out, not with… no, don’t bother with the soda water or the boiling water or that stain-eraser.
I’ll replace it entire. Just send me the bill.
dicentra @ September 08, 2016 at 04:58:
The alt-right is an eerie photo-negative of the identitarian left…
There’s a lot of that going around. When a shtick is successful, it draws imitation. I’ve read that Palestinian nationalism is in some respects a bad imitation of Zionism.
One sees conservatives, Christians, whites, Catholics, police officers, men, imitating the toxic methods of the Left.
It is not treason to call out such behavior.
As to the Jews: as a group they exercise no power whatever. They never act as a group; there is no mechanism for that. Millions of individuals Jews do exercise power, and on average substantially more than non-Jews. (More precisely, a disproportionate number of those with substantial power are Jews.) And Jews collectively exercise enormous influence, in part due to the sensibilities most of them hold in common.
Sheesh, do people even use text editors for HTML, etc, any more?
TXT files don’t add extra baggage. And it’s not about editing the HTML, it’s about preserving the raw code with the least fuss. I use Notepad++ for easy edits and Dreamweaver for hard ones.
Also?
Real coders can handle plaintext HTML. The best can edit their HTML with a magnetized needle and a steady hand.*
——
* h/t Randall Munroe
And Jews collectively exercise enormous influence
I’ma let you in on a secret: SO DO MORMONS, and for many of the same reasons. We value the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of excellence as an end unto itself, we have high ethical expectations of ourselves, we promote family cohesion and mutual support among congregationalists.
Difference is we’re a much younger group, so we’re not as numerous nor as “infiltrated,” and we’re not an ethnicity, so racialism cannot be used to explain how we’ve managed to wrest control the media and the banks from the Joooos.
We don’t even have readily identifiable surnames (except Young, Romney, and Osmond), so most of us hide in plain sight.
Our detractors are reduced to calling us Not Christian (we’re just not neo-Platonic) or Satanic or Mormons, Inc. or The New Jews or whatever insult they consider the Worst Thing EVAR.
If the Left preaches racial essentialism WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THAT IT’S APPROPRIATE TO DO THE SAME FUCKING THING?
It’s done knowingly, at least by some. As Mr Vox Day says, “We use every tactic they use.”
The question is whether that will improve the situation.
Cripes, you people are a mystery to me. THIS IS BRAIN-USAGE 101: THE LEFT IS FUCKING WRONG (in every sense of that reading). DO NOT PARTAKE OF THE LEAVEN OF THE PHARISEES. If the Left preaches racial essentialism WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THAT IT’S APPROPRIATE TO DO THE SAME FUCKING THING?
Look at how unhinged I am
Cripes, here I thought I was being intemperate at start of thread.
But yes, I’m looking, and you definitely are unhinged. Brain-usage 102: The Left cannot possibly be wrong in every sense, certainly not simultaneously. If the Left says they want control of Congress, for instance, then the inference rule of “THE LEFT IS FUCKING WRONG (in every sense)” could lead to multiple interpretations:
a) the Left doesn’t want control of Congress
b) It is wrong to want control of Congress
c) I want someone other than the Left to have control of Congress
Or, if the Left begins arming for violent revolution, should one disarm because arming oneself is now leftist?
Chester Draws:
I’ve seen Vox Day and other alt-righters answer this point by pointing to the English character of the first Americans and claiming that there was something special about English culture that best incubated liberty. Clearly Vox has never spent much time in England.
dicentra:
Very well, black people commit more violent crimes. But I don’t know that crime really balances out among the races. I can see how white people could commit more white-collar crime than black people, but I’ve never seen any evidence that they commit as much. I remember reading that black men aged 15 to… 30? or something… accounted for 2% of the US population but ~50% of US homicides. That’s the sort of thing I was referring to.
And let me just make clear, lest I’m hit with some CAPITAL LETTERS, that I’m still a squishy enough liberal that those statistics make me uncomfortable. But, like I said, as far as I know, it’s true.
David:
That’s one of my biggest problems with Vox Day: if turnabout is fair play, and if SJWs always lie, then how can I trust anything he says?
I remember reading that black men aged 15 to… 30? or something… accounted for 2% of the US population but ~50% of US homicides.
There are relevant links in the last paragraph here. Seen for the first time, the figures are quite startling, but they match victim and witness descriptions and have changed very little from one year to another, over decades.
The patterns persist across the range of crimes that most alarm people and make neighbourhoods feel unsafe – gun crime, burglary, robbery, assault, murder and rape. Hispanic and, especially, black men are also, it seems, more likely to resist arrest, leading to violent, even deadly confrontations. That police officers, including black and Hispanic ones, should be especially wary of those particular demographics is hardly surprising.
[ Edited. ]
Chester: Actually many thought of themselves as good Romans, despite their foreign origins.
Bingo! There were indeed many reasons why the Roman Empire collapsed. I would argue that every empire eventually collapses under the weight of its internal contradictions. Religious changes, maybe. Concentration of wealth in too few hands, definitely. Climate change and disease? I’m not aware of any evidence of that, and given the modishness of this concern it seems to me it is more likely to be a trumped up charge meant to provide yet another justification for “combating” it nowadays, coincidentally by concentrating more wealth in the hands of a few. There’s even a theory that the Roman population became stoopid because all the public water works, aqueducts, etc., used lead-lined conduits to pipe water into the cities and over time the ingestion of lead that had leached into the water caused the average Roman citizen to regress intellectually. But it’s certainly true, and bizarre, that a civilization that was able to fight off much more dangerous foes than the Goths (see Hannibal, Carthage, the disasters at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae , etc.) and that emerged stronger every time was unable to fight off a relatively insignificant enemy in the 5th century AD.
I think that the common thread that links these things is the belief by Romans in the superiority of Romanness, for lack of a better word. This wasn’t a belief grounded in ethnic exceptionalism, but a belief grounded in cultural exceptionalism. The belief that a Roman way of life was right, and that Romans were favored by the gods because of it.
So let’s look at the parallels between us and them, shall we? Religious changes, check. Concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, check. Climate change? With the caveat expressed above, check. Stoopidification of the average citizen? Considering this is one of the main topics addressed in these pages, I’d say check and double-check. But most importantly: does the Western world still believe in the superiority of its civilization? I’d say that’s an emphatic NO, and that is the real problem that we face. Multi-culturalism, tribalism, distrust between people based on their superficial differences, the unceasing denigration of the civilization in which we live and in particular of the people most closely associated with the development of this civilization: this is where we stand today.
The US was able to assimilate successive waves of immigrants from such relatively backward places as Ireland, Scandinavia, Italy, Russia, Poland, Germany etc. because they were forced to integrate into the dominant culture – and most of them were happy to do so, like the Barbarians of yore who wanted to be Romans, because they believed that the way of life in the US was superior to what they left behind in their ancestral homeland.
Well, we are no longer doing that. Not only are we no longer demanding that newcomers assimilate into our culture, we discourage them from doing so. Because of multi-culturalism, because of cultural relativism, because we have to expiate our colonial and imperialist past, whatever. You’re correct that our inability to handle the current waves of immigration is but a symptom of our decline, but the result and the eventual outcome are unequivocal. The normal situation of mankind is crappy (nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it), and this is where we are going. As I’ve said in these pages a little while ago, a polity cannot long survive if it does not have a unifying credo that everybody accepts. We have squandered that, and the results will be as dire as what befell the Roman Empire.
The question is whether that will improve the situation.
It is not a question.
Some self-identified alt-righters are just getting off on saying awful things that everyone refrained from saying because of Teh Ostracizing. They think they’re smashing political correctness.
And then there are the ones who are dead serious, and they’ll try to break away and form two coastal “ancestral white homelands” (Northern Europe? Don’t be absurd!): One on the east coast (which will later be renamed “Bangladesh”) and one on the west, which will acquire nukes.
History provides a nice, peaceful, pain-free precedent for this kind of separatism.
Brain-usage 102: The Left cannot possibly be wrong in every sense, certainly not simultaneously.
One possibly awesome joke, shot to hell…
But I don’t know that crime really balances out among the races.
Please do some heavy-duty research and find out for sure before letting that opinion gel. I admit I don’t know the numbers, either. I don’t dispute the numbers you’ve presented thus far, but those crime stats don’t include all de jure crimes and certainly not the de facto ones.
Remember that numbers aren’t the problem; how you interpret them is, and never forget the “damned lies” clause.
I DO know that socio-economics don’t determine whether you commit crime so much as which crime you’ll commit (because of which crimes are available to you or which ones you’re capable of committing and getting away with).
In your efforts to form a reasonable conclusion about this, please do NOT factor out LBJ’s Great Society in the destruction of the black family and of laying waste to the inner city, of decades of corrupt Democrat governance in those areas, and of the continual doses of venom that the Left injects as they attempt to ride black discontent to power.
Also make sure you go back as far as you can in American history with the stats. IIRC, black criminality began to skyrocket with the Great Society; prior to that, all blacks lived apart (functional and dysfunctional) until they were liberated in the 1960s, at which point the functional blacks got out of the black urban neighborhoods as fast as possible, leaving behind the dysfunctional ones.
Similar evacuations have taken place among whites in Appalachia. I recommend this article and this article by Kevin Williamson, which lays it all out.
Also consider that between the Civil War and the Progressive Era, blacks made significant strides in terms of holding political office and entrepreneurship, and then with the advent of Eugenics and Progressivism, their gains were mercilessly squelched.
The unstated narrative that we’ve absorbed is that between the Civil War and 1964, blacks made zero progress at all. Only the Civil Rights Act started the ball rolling, you see, because history began with the JFK assassination.
And let me just make clear, lest I’m hit with some CAPITAL LETTERS
You weren’t acting like a perfect ass. Steve was.
Hedgehog,
Climate change and disease? I’m not aware of any evidence of that, and given the modishness of this concern it seems to me it is more likely to be a trumped up charge meant to provide yet another justification for “combating” it nowadays…
Curiously (ironically?), what evidence there is (Greenland ice cores) suggests a cooling climate at the end of the Roman era.
Curiously (ironically?), what evidence there is (Greenland ice cores) suggests a cooling climate at the end of the Roman era.
Thank you. A bit of googlemancy points indeed to a number of recent studies that indicate that the climate may have been cooling around that time, which would comport with the increased incidence of Völkerwanderungen because of famines due to crop failures, and also explaining the Hunnic pressure on Gothic populations that led the latter to breach the frontier of the Roman Empire. I stand corrected.
dicentra, you win the thread hands down.
dicentra – “Please do some heavy-duty research and find out for sure before letting that opinion gel.”
Ugh, that sounds like far too much work. And besides, I’ve never let ignorance stand between me and an opinion before. Why start now?
I prefer to simply keep an open mind, and be willing to change it if necessary. But as a matter of fact, I’m familiar with every one of the points you made, and accept all of them. I think we’re basically on the same page.
I’d only throw in two caveats, one, when I looked into it I recall that pre-WW2 statistics for blacks in America were hard to come by, which makes it difficult to be certain about things. And two, I disagree that “socio-economics don’t determine whether you commit crime so much as which crime you’ll commit”. I’m sure you’re onto something with that, but I think the effect will be relatively small.
It’s my own personal theory that poor people (of whatever race) really do commit more crimes than middle-class or rich people. But it’s not so much because the poor are more criminally-inclined (and it’s certainly not that being poor makes one more criminal); it’s because crime doesn’t pay. I won’t bore you with the details.
the unceasing denigration of the civilization in which we live and in particular of the people most closely associated with the development of this civilization: this is where we stand today.
That. The left rots our confidence as a civilization. (‘Dead white men’, etc.)
The left rots our confidence as a civilization. (‘Dead white men’, etc.)
For an illustration of which, see here.
Tribalism may be the default of humanity. America was an attempt to rise above the worst aspects of human nature, but the Left has been doing its best for at least the last 50 years to reincarnate the demons that we did manage to put to rest. Perhaps it’s no surprise, and maybe it’s long overdue, that elements of the Right are reverting to form and hitting back with everything the Left has thrown at them. It may even be understandable that some on the Right could view their choices as either succumb to the Left or throw out what it means to be a country based on an idea. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I view our present situation with more sadness than anything else.
dicentra, you win the thread hands down.
Don’t encourage me.
The left rots our confidence as a civilization.
As I understand it, France suffered the same loss of confidence between the world wars; the Nazi invasion revealed them to have become cheese-eating surrender monkeys (to coin a phrase) rather than Lafayette’s children.
it’s because crime doesn’t pay. I won’t bore you with the details.
Smart, rich people commit crimes all the time but either they’re not caught or their lawyers get them out of it or they’ve paid some fool congressman to make their unethical behavior legal.
The Clinton Foundation is not unique: most of the creatures inside the beltway have “charitable foundations” that anyone who wants their ear can donate to. Some of the money might even make it to a charity. Congress has made it LEGAL for they themselves to engage in insider trading but for nobody else.
Those bastards regularly call their Rolodex full of Industry Insiders to inform them that a bill that affects them might or might not coming up for a vote, but a donation to the GOP or Dem election fund might signal their intent.
They unironically call it “fundraising,” and the creatures that raise the most money have literally bought themselves a coveted committee chairmanship.
I shit you not.
when you’re already wealthy, crime pays very well. And this is quite without listing the Horribles visited on us by the Kennedy clan, who made their fortune during Prohibition selling Bibles.
Or something.
Wells Fargo just got busted because 3500 of their employees created 2 million fake accounts that their customers never asked for.
That’s 2 million shady acts over a period of ~4 years, committed by 3500 (now former) employees, averaging ~571 fraudulent acts per person at the rate of ~143 per year. I dare you to find some poor black schlub in lockup who’s racked up those kinds of numbers.
Quoth Zero Hedge:
The victims of the WF employees’ behavior were pelted with late fees and overdraft charges when the accounts they knew about kept coming up short, because the funds had been transferred into the accounts they didn’t know about by the kids with computer access.
And yes, they’re mostly in their 20s. I know because I had a 2-year gig at a Wells Fargo call center that could have housed some of those 3500, because half of the 3rd floor employees were in that line of work. Around their cubes the walls were plastered with Encouragement to Hit These Goals, and there’d be charts and graphs Showing Progress and Mylar balloons bobbing above the cube of the Employee of the Day or whatever. I was ever-so-glad to be updating the procedures for lines-o-business that only took incoming calls, and were pressured only to make sure the caller wait time wasn’t too long. (Technical Writing tends to be a gypsy job: taking a contract here, a temp job there…)
The customers got their money back, because it’s all electronic anyway and WF just had to Xfer the money from their own accounts that they maintain for Just Such An Occasion. When a thug mugs you on the street, busts your lip, and takes your wallet, you’ll never see it again and you’re stuck with the medical bill, to boot.
You may be right about the black crime statistics. I tend to get more outraged by white-collar crimes because the perps are every bit as dishonest and criminally minded as their scarier (and less likely to afford their own justice) brethren on the streets, and yet we tend to think that their crimes aren’t worth lumping in with the robberies and assaults, because, well, what’s a little fraud between countrymen, amirite?
I hope we can agree that black criminality isn’t genetic but rather the soul-corrupting result of decade after decade of fatherless children who are raised by gangs and barely-literate mothers and whose plight will never be addressed by the Left, who prefer to keep their pets lower than they were during slavery, where they are in a junkie-pusher relationship with the blessèd Welfare Check.
If the heritage and geography were reversed—if our Founders had come from an alt-history West Africa that birthed the Enlightenment, and had also enslaved blue-eyed, stone-age Scandis (and all the rest had happened in reverse)—then the Scary Crime Statistics would land on the fatherless, drug-addled, gang-dominated whites.
PLEASE say you agree.
Please.
That’s one of my biggest problems with Vox Day: if turnabout is fair play, and if SJWs always lie, then how can I trust anything he says?
Mr Day’s leftist opponents are indeed frequently dishonest, seemingly shameless and apparently impervious to mere factual correction. Many of them also favour thuggery and mob harassment, a rejection of due process, along with property destruction and acts of opportunist spite. It’s one thing to favour an unflinching demolition of one’s opponents’ arguments, to reveal them, and their proponents, and their tactics, as every bit as malign and absurd as they actually are – and I sympathise with those who feel that their supposed representatives have failed on this front far too many times. I just wonder, given the tenor of the rhetoric we’ve seen, and Mr Day’s insistence that “we use every tactic they use,” how many of these sly, malign behaviours will be mirrored and embraced. And once you embrace them, normalise them, what happens then?
dicentra:
143 crimes in a single year? A single crime every two and a half days? I can’t be bothered doing the actual research, but I’ll bet there are muggers and burglars and car thieves and so on who hit those numbers easily. Bear in mind that someone who’d steal a car would also rob a house, or shoplift, or commit some fraud or other; they might also be the type to get in fights, or beat their wife; perhaps they’re also a date rapist, and a tax cheat, and they park in the disabled spot, etc, etc.
I’m aware that rich people can hire better lawyers, and that politics and big business are corrupt. (Who isn’t aware of that?) But that misses my point. I’m not saying rich people are any better than the poor, morally.
My feeling is that a man who spends his life committing crimes will end up poor because the reputation he develops will destroy his chances. I read somewhere that most of the job opportunities we get in life come from acquaintances: people who aren’t strangers, but who aren’t really friends either. (My personal experience backs that up.) If you were acquainted with someone who you know to be a thief, or a wife-beater, or a cheat, or whatever, would you recommend them for a job opportunity?
I think this is a really huge factor in a criminal’s life, and between it and time spent in prison, it must destroy the earning potential of any criminal in rough proportion to how much of a criminal he’s been. I’ve read one’s earnings peak in one’s 40’s; how much worse must fare a criminal, who’s lost out on a few years of experience due to prison, and who’s considerably less likely to be given the opportunities to rise up to a higher-paying job. If I were an economist, or a criminologist, I might even be able to quantify that decrease in lifetime earning potential.
Anyway, that’s why criminals end up poor. Those 3500 Wells Fargo employees – and sure, some of them will already be rich and connected, and it won’t make much difference, but for most of them – do you think they’ll have better career opportunities now that they’ve been caught committing fraud? Do you think they’ll end up earning the same amount of money over the course of their life that they otherwise could have?
Thus crime, in general and on balance, impoverishes. And that’s why poor people commit more crimes: not because the poor are more likely to be criminals, but because criminals are more likely to be poor.
I guess I did bore you with the details after all.
Yes, we can agree on that. Although I did see a Stefan Molyneux video that said black people were more likely to have some gene that makes them more aggressive. I don’t know enough about genetics to dispute it, but I’m generally not impressed by genetics anyway. If someone is born more aggressive than normal, it’s possible to control that tendency and channel it to more productive ends – but not if they grow up without guidance in a toxic culture. And yes, I agree that it’s not in the interests of the left to reform that culture.
Off-topic, but how does one become a technical writer?
David –
I suspect that for more than a few on the alt-right, the chance to embrace such malign behaviours is what most attracts them.
I suspect that for more than a few on the alt-right, the chance to embrace such malign behaviours is what most attracts them.
That does seem to be the case. And hence my comment about being hanged for a sheep, upthread. I realise Milo likes to stress the value of being “dissident and mischievous,” and it was funny to see the chanting SJWs at his talks being drowned out, decisively, by counter-chants of “Trump!” or whatever. But I’m far from convinced that this characterisation – of mischief and knowing irony – can credibly accommodate much of the sentiment we’ve seen.
Incidentally, after a couple of days of browsing ‘alt-right’ tweets and blog commentary, Google is now auto-suggesting Stormfront and Daily Stormer articles. In case I might be interested.
Google is now auto-suggesting Stormfront and Daily Stormer articles. In case I might be interested.
Hail Spode!
There you go, winning the thread AGAIN.
Which leaves entirely unasked, and therefore unanswered, why it is that blacks are more likely to be poor. Watch out for circular logic.
Incidentally, after a couple of days of browsing ‘alt-right’ tweets and blog commentary, Google is now auto-suggesting Stormfront and Daily Stormer articles. In case I might be interested.
That’s just a trick: those sneaky lying Jews at Google want people to think we’re anti-Semitic
Which leaves entirely unasked, and therefore unanswered, why it is that blacks are more likely to be poor.
My General Theory of Crime and Poverty isn’t intended to account for discrepancies among the races. It sounds like you might be interested in my Special Theory on Race and Poverty, which is that it’s mostly the left’s fault. I’m still tinkering around the edges, though.
My feeling is that a man who spends his life committing crimes will end up poor because the reputation he develops will destroy his chances.
That statement applies exceptionally well to people who are raised in “respectable,” middle-class circumstances, where one might have had an after-school job delivering the news paper or flipping burgers. If you embezzle funds from those jobs, it can hurt your chances for getting another job. If not this time you steal, then the next.
If you were born to a crack-whore mother in Chicago’s south side, you grew up learning the rules of the chaotic environment of the gang-infested streets. Your soul was deeply damaged by your mothers’ neglect and by the beatings and molestation of the men who traipsed endlessly through your squalid apartment. Your brain was likely screwed up in utero from your mother’s drug use. You weren’t properly nourished as a child.
The only reputation that matters on the streets is whether you can be messed with: you dress gansgsta and affect bad-assery so you won’t be beaten or killed by the psychopaths you live among. There isn’t anyone around with a job for you to impress, let alone someone who’s hiring. Unless you count recruiting by narcotraficantes.
THIS DESERVES BOLD CAPS ==> When you compare apples to apples—children raised in two-parent homes where at least one parent worked every day and there was regular-ish church attendance—the racial difference in delinquency and criminality vanish utterly. Seriously: there’s no difference between whites and blacks raised in those circs.
heritage.org and city-journal.org have more on this. (No, you google it; I’m bitter.)
It sounds like you might be interested in my Special Theory on Race and Poverty, which is that it’s mostly the left’s fault. I’m still tinkering around the edges, though.
No need. The cited sites have done all the heavy lifting for you. Go thou and read.