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.
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.