Liberty's Torch

Friday, August 5, 2016

Racism Report

I’ve been uncertain at times that despite the evidence and the seeming trends, we would see an increase in racism in these United States that would make it possible for admitted racists to “come out of the shadows” and participate openly and fully in public life. I speak here as an intensely interested party:

I have said it before, and I'll say it whenever anyone asks, whether in public or in private: I am a racist. That is, I am persuaded that as statistical aggregates, the conventionally recognized races differ in ways that can be contextually significant. So any mealy-mouthed leftists in the audience who think they can cow me by calling me a racist already have my reply: Damned right I am!

I haven’t changed that stance nor qualified it in any way since I first wrote the essay in April of 2007.

Racism today, despite what the Left would have us believe, has nothing to do with injustices done to individuals, whether by private action or through the mechanisms of the law. Rather, it’s about watchfulness: knowing against whom you might need to defend yourself. Jesse Jackson once famously said that when walking down a street at night, he was relieved to discover that the footsteps he heard behind him were those of a white man. Jackson thus qualified himself as a sensible, self-protecting racist. That the race he fears is the one to which he belongs is irrelevant.

Phenomena such as the Ferguson and Baltimore riots and the “Black Lives Matter” agitations are turning even dyed-in-the-wool left-liberals into exactly such racists. Put a single Negro before them and they strain to the utmost to treat him as an individual to be judged on his own individual merits, which is laudable. Ask them to walk through a heavily black district when the light is fading and the traffic dwindling, and they become tense, watchful, and quick of step, which is only healthful, self-protective sense.

As the American population has aged, that need for self-protective conduct has risen. We do become more conservative politically as we age, but more to the point we become more concerned with safety and security. It’s imperative that my Gentle Readers realize that that’s not a redundancy: safety is about the present moment; security is about the future. In recognition whereof:

We tend to go armed whenever we leave our homes.
We refrain from making eye contact with strangers.
We avoid crowds and venues heavy with Negroes.
We buy homes in predominantly white districts.
We give our children John Derbyshire’s talk.

The first three items above are about safety, while items 4 and 5 address security.

Why is this on my mind this fair August morning, I hear you cry? Quite simply, because the logic that’s making white Americans ever more racist is beginning to enclose yet another group.

Just yesterday, the mighty Dystopic deposeth and sayeth:

As Europe falls victim to Islamic terror attacks on a daily basis, the latest of which is an apparent mass stabbing (but muh gun control!), SJWs are desperate to stop Trump, and his rhetoric surrounding a ban on Islamic immigration. Americans, you see, might fail to see the benefits of importing millions of Muslims into their country, which include bombings, stabbings, shootings, an attack with a cargo truck, and a greater propensity to live on welfare.

The effect of the expanding plague of Islam-powered violence has been to make individual Europeans far more watchful and self-protective, even as their elites, egged on by their social-justice crowd, strains to increase the Muslim fraction among them. Of all the countries of Europe, only Switzerland has adopted the proper public attitude toward Islamic immigration, though from recent news it appears that France’s political class might have come to its senses, as well.

Americans, despite the canard that we’re ignorant about matters beyond our shores, have been watching. We’re becoming as distrustful of Muslims as we are of Negroes, and for the same reasons. The political rise of Donald Trump is largely due to that distrust. How else would any rational man expect other rational men to react to Islamic violence around the world?

However, to the Left, this is merely one more phenomenon to be labeled “racism.” Quoth Dystopic once more:

     If a Christian country sent migrants to Saudi Arabia, and asked the Arabs to pay for them, and to accept some increase in terrorism, and to build them churches and make citizens of them, the Saudis would laugh… and then probably kill the whole lot of them.
     But, at a minimum, they practice none of the tolerance they demand of us.
     The Left has one set of rules for themselves and their favored special interest groups. And a very different, and far more stringent set of rules for everyone else. This selective rule-making falls just short of law, so as to give them a thin veneer of deniability.

In effect, the Left’s position is that self-protection, when practiced by American Caucasians in awareness of the variable aggressiveness and predilection for violence of identifiable groups, is morally wrong and must not be tolerated. But sensible Americans are aware that this is a political ploy intended to evoke more unearned guilt – this time, over the grievances of Muslims whose political and religious elites are wholly responsible for their condition.

Sensible, rational racism – the sort that makes use of what we know about the proclivities of identifiable groups and of masses of the members thereof – has never looked better. Maybe sensible racists should form a political party. At any rate, it would be something different.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

More Truth Than The Left Can Abide

Ace has been on fire lately:

     At some point, politeness seems to just be a polite euphemism for hectoring, harassing speech control.
     Speech policing is just another form of the leftists' favorite method of politicking -- rent seeking. And the rent they seek is your deference and your acceptance of their higher-caste status.
     And that's huge. It has huge impacts. Crap like that is why Sarah Palin can be called a Temptress Whore but if you make one joke about the "hero" Sandra Fluke, you get boycotted.
     Once you accept the (now nakedly stated) premise that some people simply have greater Social Privileges than others, that's the ball game -- you have now accepted that this is a caste-based society, and the castes have a heirarchy of priority of rights.
     And guess where you fall in that heirarchy?
     Spoiler alert: Not near the top.

Protect this man. His is a voice for our time that we can ill afford to lose.

Intervention Talk

So you thought it would be over with the nomination, eh?

There’s a lot of talk about a movement within the ranks of GOP heavyweights to install a governor on Donald Trump’s mouth. Yes, The Donald does say a lot of “you can’t say that” stuff. Yes, the Old Media are agog over it. Yes, the Democrats have issued marching orders to all their minions to accuse him of everything from treason to mopery-and-dopery. Yes, his temperament is far from that we’ve come to expect from American presidents. Yes, yes, yes.

But Trump is merely doing what won him the nomination: speaking his mind without regard for anyone’s opinions or sensitivities. It’s proved highly appealing to a nation sick to death of elites who make rules for others, including what others can say. So a successful attempt to tame him would likely cost him the presidency.

The Republican Party’s kingmakers might prefer that outcome. Those who’ve thrilled to an uncensored presidential candidate uninterested in the mock-courteous insincerities of contemporary national politics would not.

Mind you, I have my own reservations about Donald Trump. He doesn’t strike me as knowledgeable or thoughtful enough for the powers of the presidency. But that’s what advisors are for: to shore up the weaknesses in a president’s knowledge and to constrain his impulses when he starts muttering about scrambling the bombers and leering at the “football.” Besides, the alternative is the installation in the Oval Office of one of the most blatantly corrupt and dishonest persons ever to gain a national profile. Anyway, we do have a two-man rule about using nukes.

But there’s more going on here, as usual.

Donald Trump wrested the leadership of the GOP from those who’ve steered it for the past thirty years. That older leadership has proved either unwilling or unable to constrain the Democrats, even at those times when the Republicans controlled both Congress and the presidency. To be blunt, after Reagan the elephants renounced conservatism and Constitutionalism. On the majority of domestic policy subjects, they retreated to the party’s posture of the FDR years: “We can do it cheaper.” That was quite all right with their major supporters, as long as the spending continued and the graft continued to flow.

The party’s elders want “their” party back. They’re purple with rage over Trump’s successful insurrection. The embedded lesson is of no importance to them.

Beneath all this lies an important truth about political parties: they exist solely to win elections. Party platforms are merely vehicles for doing so. But a party that alienates so great a percentage of its allegiants is headed for the ash heap. You can’t win elections without votes...and an increasing number of those who’ve been told that the GOP is their appropriate party – i.e., conservatives – are unwilling to support the party and its candidates any longer, even to the extent of showing up at the polls on Election Day.

Viewed thus, Trump’s rise offers the possibility of a Republican revitalization. It might not be in the direction many conservatives would prefer. Indeed, Trump has espoused some policy positions most conservatives would automatically reject. But a shake-up of this sort turns a static situation – the “same old, same old” of Republican failure even when nominally in control of Washington – into a dynamic one in which change becomes possible and new blood can displace the old keep-the-big-donors-happy style of GOP politics.

Elections aren’t decided by the media but by the voters. Today, with so many alternatives to the Old Media available to Americans, voter independence is more likely than voter conformity to a media-preferred “narrative.” The questions remaining to the voters are few and simple:

Can Trump’s strategy for gaining the GOP nomination gain him the presidency?
Would Trump as president be preferable to the alternatives?
Will minor parties play an important role?

The great danger is that Republican elders will contrive a way to deny Trump the presidency. The key phrase is opposition research. The key possibility is a joining of forces between the Democrats’ dirt-miners and those GOP power-brokers who detest and resent Trump so greatly that they’d actually prefer a Clinton presidency to the diminution of their stature within “their” party.

We shall see.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

An Important Perspective

The esteemed Ace of Spades provides it:

     I think the whole [Khizr Khan] thing is more bullshit handwringing by puritans and prudes on both sides of the aisle -- I don't, for example, believe in this bullshit that certain people have Privilege and Status and therefore Absolute Moral Authority.
     I don't believe minorities have that, and I don't believe even Gold Star families have that. Or veterans.
     Never have. Didn't believe it ten years ago when Saint Cindy began giving her Sermons on the Funeral Mound, don't believe it now.
     If you enter the public fray -- and if you insult a presidential candidate -- then you're fair game to be insulted back.
     The guy's son was killed twelve years ago. If Trump loses, and then, in 2020, they trot this guy out to insult the new conservative challenger to Hillary Clinton -- is he absolutely protected from insult then, too?
     Exactly how long does his Force Field Against All Public Criticism last, even while he himself is hurling Trumpian insults at people he thinks aren't giving Islam enough respect?

Please read it all. Pay especial attention to this climactic revelation:

Khan insulted Trump. The fact that his son died twelve years ago does not grant him, in my mind, some kind of personal Grievance Privilege.
If you enter the arena, you're in the arena.

And in the political arena, no holds are barred. Eye-gouging and crotch-kicking aren’t just permitted; they’re expected.

Khizr Khan, whose law firm specializes in selling entry permits to Muslims who want to immigrate to the U.S., deleted the firm’s website yesterday. Don’t you just wonder why?

Roles Part 2: Marital Instabilities

This morning, Dr. Helen Smith has a brief article on the subject. The knockout punch:

I love the way most of the burden in marriage is put on men. Women's roles have changed but they still expect men to earn the money and help with the housework. No wonder so many men are going on strike.

True, all true...but a commenter added this perspective:

     I don't think this is about the burden of earning money being on men. I agree that men's employment status is an important factor in marriage and divorce. But it's deeper than it seems.
     I'm a woman who was happy to be sole breadwinner in my marriage. The problem is my husband started to feel emasculated. He started acting like a teenager...playing video games all night. It was horrible. I suggested he get a job just to change the dynamic of our marriage. He didn't want to.
     We ended up divorced. We had no money problems cuz I made more than enough for our whole family. It was more of a psychological issue for my husband.
     I haven't remarried yet. But I vow to never marry a man who makes less money than me...just cuz I know it means he'll have his psychological health about the whole issue.

I’ve seen the pattern commenter “CaliCrystal” describes at close range. It’s real, it’s what men have been fashioned to be by millennia of evolution, and it’s almost never possible to escape it.

It isn’t always the wife whose expectations create the burden her husband feels. He carries it not merely on his shoulders but in his genes.

From the earliest anthropoids to the present day, men have been the protectors and providers; women have tended the hearth and raised the children. A pattern that’s at least a quarter of a million years old cannot help but be imprinted on our psyches by mechanisms beyond our abilities to modify. The contemporary expression of that pattern, of course, is that the husband has primary responsibility for earning the family’s living. Both he and she believe it and expect it, regardless of any verbalizations to the contrary.

The most constructive response of a man to being exceeded by his wife as a breadwinner is to look for other ways to assert his usefulness to the family. That can take several forms. He can start a business of his own. He can put his energies and skills into improving the family home. He can attempt to raise the family’s status through involvement in the community. No doubt there are other, comparable avenues.

But above all, a man needs to feel useful – productive. He cannot simply consume. In a striking demonstration of this need, retirees often waste away emotionally from the loss of their sense of usefulness, whether or not they’re well provided for financially.

The combination of innate expectations, the feminist movement, and the legal regime that governs the dissolution of marriages have proved highly destructive – perhaps permanently devastating – to the institution of marriage. The tensions are many. They pull at the marital relationship from several directions. When calamity strikes, the most visible victim is the man, but ultimately sorrow descends upon the woman and (if they have any) their minor children as well.

When I wrote in my earlier tirade on sex roles that:

Just as the manly virtues define the essence of respectable manhood, there are feminine virtues that define the essence of respectable womanhood:

Nurturance of a man;
Management of a household;
The skills demanded of a mother.

A woman who lacks those virtues isn’t merely a marginal creature, unlikely to contribute constructively to her society; she’s a disruptive and destructive force.

...it occurred to me that the “disruptive and destructive” aspect could stand to be emphasized...perhaps written across the sky in flaming letters, with ruffles and flourishes. It’s the woman who initiates three-quarters of American divorces. Her expectations of her husband are often at the heart of her decision. Her response is to junk him – used husbands have no trade-in value – and perhaps seek another...after first extracting whatever savings he’s amassed through the courts.

But the crowning irony is this: It’s almost always the woman who’s responsible for her dissatisfactions. Perhaps she wants more than he can provide. Perhaps her feminist “sisters” have persuaded her that she’s entitled to a life of carefree hedonism – a life women imagine to be every single man’s automatic possession. And perhaps she entered the marriage under false pretenses, being unwilling to be a wife: i.e., to care for their home, for their children, and for him.

Every man needs maintenance. Rare is the man who can see to it entirely by himself.

I don’t expect the sentiments above to be popular. They’re starkly countercultural. They inherently dismiss the claims of the feminists and the “women’s liberation” types, root and branch. But they’re long and well considered, heavily supported by experience, and lived out every day by millions of Western men.

The men of “older” cultures have been less affected by the cultural plagues that have afflicted America and Europe. Note that the lowest birthrates are found among the supposedly “advanced” nations where women have migrated away from their traditional roles and into the world of commerce. Note also that marriage itself has been dramatically devalued, reduced to a ceremony and little more, in those “advanced” nations. All it takes to obtain a divorce is for her to say “irreconcilable differences,” LawSpeak for “I’m not happy with him.”

Yet who among us will carry the standard of the traditional, till-death-do-us-part marriage where he labors to bring home the bacon and she fries it and washes the pan afterward? The sort of marriage where he willingly allows her to manage the family finances, because learning to do so is part of a young woman’s training for wifehood? The sort of marriage where his friends come from his workplace, hers from her neighborhood, and neither expects the other to accommodate them? The sort of marriage where either spouse would tell his own mother that she has no business criticizing his spouse or encouraging him to be dissatisfied with her?

I’m feeling rather alone about all of it.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

What Nerve -- Part Two

Note - this was written Sunday, 31 JUL 2016 - The excerpt from Jefferson's letter also appears in Fran's piece on 1 AUG 2016 - this coincidence speaks to the accuracy of the ambassador's assessment of the problem.

The last column addressed three things that struck a nerve. This is about some people who’ve got some nerve. The past week, I dutifully listened to the Democratic National Convention – being water boarded would’ve been better. The parade of military members to bolster the party’s patriotic bona fides was unbearable. Perhaps it is time to create a new Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) entitled “useful idiot.”

Just before retired USMC General John Allen began ranting about what an awesome and macho warmonger Hillary Clinton would be, we were treated to a sickening display of numerical absurdity. The mathematical misleading made use of two Muslims – tokenism to try to discredit the Republican nominee’s plan to ban temporarily migration from terrorist plagued nations. I’ll get to the abhorrent math in a minute.

In a duel of retired General officers, LTG Michael Flynn commented the next day on Allen’s rant, providing some perspective. “General Allen, as a retired officer, was in charge of our current strategy for well over a year, maybe closer to two years, and during that period of time the rise of radical Islamism and ISIS, you know, it exponentially grew…frankly, I honestly don't know how General Allen can look at himself in the mirror and say that he supports an individual who placed our national security at high risk.”

Allen’s ringing endorsement of Hillary had a “hope and change” theme that displayed the thoughtlessness reminiscent of the mistake that brought us Obamacare. In what can only be described as a, you’ve got to elect her "to find out what’s in it” moment, Allen provided personal testimony to the powers in Hillary:

“With Hillary Clinton as our commander-in-chief, the United States will continue to be that indispensable, transformational power in the world. To our allies, our friends, and our partners, listen closely. We are with you. America will not abandon you…And to our enemies – to our enemies – we will pursue you as only America can. You will fear us. And to ISIS and others: We will defeat you.”

Allow me to summarize General Allen’s foray into the world of political endorsements. “If you like your national military strategy – you can keep your national military strategy.”

Now to the misleading math. American Muslim and former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told us about “Captain Humayan Khan who was one of 14 American Muslim soldiers who have died in combat serving the United States since 9/11.” The point was later made that Khan’s “family immigrated to the United States from the United Arab Emirates, where Captain Khan was born” and that if Donald Trump had his way, Khan (and presumably the others), would not have been allowed to serve at all.

Newsflash for Kareem and the DNC – first, those 14 American Muslim soldiers were all killed by Muslims, and secondly, but more to the point, the number of American servicemen killed by fellow US soldiers who are Muslim is even greater than the 14 cited by Abdul-Jabbar. In 2003, US Army Sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar threw four hand grenades and fired his rifle at fellow soldiers, killing Air Force Major Gregory Stone with a grenade and Army Captain Christopher Seifert who was fatally shot in the back. Then there was US Army Major Nidal Hasan who killed 13 at Fort Hood, Texas. By my math, they’re ahead by one. Not to mention that virtually all of the 6,800 American service members that have been killed since 9/11, have been killed by Muslims.

Finally, Kareem told us that the first place the Khan family visited upon coming to America was the Jefferson Memorial. In the carefully choreographed convention, Kareem was followed by the father of the fallen soldier, lecturing us that Jefferson’s views on religious liberty and the Constitution do not comport with Trump’s position.

Perhaps Kareem and Khan’s father should read Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 letter written after he and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain. They asked the Muslim ambassador why the Muslim Barbary Pirates, “make war upon Nations who had done them no Injury?”

The letter records, “The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Jefferson knew what the problem is.

Processes, Outcomes, And The American Negro

Thomas Sowell’s masterwork The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy contains many gems, but among the brightest of them is this tabular summary of the attitudes of the “anointed” – broadly speaking, the American Left – and the holders of the “tragic vision” – i.e., the rest of us.

Note in particular two rows of this table: the ones concerning Justice and Social possibilities. Here is where the contrast between Left and Right is most sharply depicted. The Left is adamant that a “problem” – which, to the Left, is anything its vanguard strategists decide to call a problem – must have a “solution,” with the implied but clearly understood codicils that:

The solution must have no (or negligible) negative consequences;
A scheme of “justice” that fails to deliver such a solution is therefore unjust.

Yet we know from the laws of physics that:

No action is without unintended consequences;
At least one consequence of any action will be undesirable.

This is as true in social policy as it is in thermodynamics – and it’s nowhere clearer than in matters of policing and criminal justice.

The odious “Black Lives Matter” movement, born from the deaths of junior varsity black criminals Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, has recently released a statement of demands:

     In a policy agenda titled "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice," organizers call for policing and criminal justice reforms.
     Some of the changes include an end to militarized police presence at protests and the retroactive decriminalization and immediate release of people convicted of drug offenses, sex work-related offenses and youth offenses.
     It also includes a request for the passage of a bill that would create a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves.

Such an agenda inherently implies that the demanded outcomes are “just” and could be attained without important negative consequences. It’s nonsense, of course. Blacks are disproportionately the perpetrators of the enumerated crimes, but members of other races perpetrate and are incarcerated for them as well. The laws against them are applied as evenhandedly as any laws on the books. Moreover, a mass release of those convicted for those crimes would destroy the concept of justice – and I say that as one who has long advocated the decriminalization of both “recreational” drugs and sex for hire. As for the notion that contemporary blacks are entitled to “reparations” for slavery, if anyone owes anyone, American blacks owe American society for the opportunities afforded them, even if a deplorable number of blacks decline to exploit them.

So BLM’s demands are trash. They have nothing to do with justice, and if we were to pursue them as mandatory outcomes, the destruction would be widespread and savage. But it is in the nature of a Left-aligned “movement” – and few “movements” of the recent past are more clearly a fabrication by racialist agitators – to clamor ever more loudly for what it wants regardless of any consideration.

The post-World War II period briefly showed steady improvement in American race relations: roughly from the end of the war to about 1965. Some of the credit belongs to the war itself, which had given black soldiers an opportunity to demonstrate impressive amounts of courage and dedication under the worst of circumstances. However, roughly in 1965 those relations began to worsen. They’ve grown worse – more distrustful, acrimonious, and disruptive – every year since then. Those who cherish social harmony are largely baffled by the reversal. Isn’t social peace to the advantage of all races? Then why has seemingly perpetual racial discord afflicted us despite our best efforts?

The correlation between the rejection of processes and the demand for particular outcomes is seldom addressed. Yet therein lies the supposedly elusive mechanism that’s produced so much racial strife.

Convince Smith that his condition, rather than the processes that produced it, is unjust, and he will clamor to have it redressed – redressed now, not by some process that will incrementally improve it over a period of months or years. He will be uninterested in any difficulties involved, for the “injustice” of his plight is an absolute, a matter of right. Black racial hucksters strove to persuade American blacks that their condition, compared to the condition of American whites, is unjust. Moreover, they blamed the processes – freedom of expression and movement, the rule of law, the free market – for the “injustices,” and demanded government intervention to impede them.

In point of fact, under a regime of freedom, free Americans had been doing what they wanted and believed was in their best interests. They were behaving in accordance with their natures: seeking the good and attempting to avert the bad as they defined such things. Inasmuch as no power on earth can nullify or modify natural law, every time the hucksters succeeded in getting a demanded intervention, whether it was a redistributive program, an equal-opportunity law, or the criminalization of some common practice, American society reaped the whirlwind.

Some did profit, of course: the racialist hucksters and the politicians who succeeded in enriching and establishing themselves by pandering to them. As that suited them very well, and the negative consequences could be deflected onto others’ shoulders, they saw no reason to change their ways. And so it is even unto this day.

The legal and social processes of a free society that operates under objective laws, evenhandedly enforced, will over time raise each individual to the altitude he deserves. But time is the ultimately scarce commodity; we cannot mine or manufacture it, and we cannot save it for later. Thus, to tell a man who has been convincingly told that he deserves as a matter of justice more than he’s achieved, that he must await the operation of impersonal processes – abetted by his efforts on his own behalf – for the reward he regards as his by right today will only infuriate him. He’ll be moved to “act out.”

They who see potential profit in a “movement” will contrive to weld such persons into a mass that can be directed at their goals – the organizers’ goals, which need not have any connection to the desires of the individuals in the mass. Politicians who hope to gain in stature by collaborating with the movement will align with it and help it to obtain the interventions it seeks. In the absence of a counterforce of equal or greater power explicitly directed at quelling the movement and maintaining the social order, disorder will result.

That’s what We the Formerly Free have suffered for half a century, with no end in sight. That race relations have worsened was, if not a conscious aim of the participants, no more than a minor consideration.

Squandering the gift.

America: A gift in the process of being squandered and sacrificed by the ingratitude of her soft, effeminate, decadent, virtue signaling inheritors. What would Lovecraft have thought of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act and the resulting third world bazaar America has since inevitably become?

"The Great Men On Americanism." By Chateau Hartiste, 8/1/16.

Shifting gears.

As it's clear that the Treason Class has no intention of enforcing America's borders and that the evisceration of the Constitution is no big deal to Republicans, it's useful to pay attention to what thoughtful people have to say by way of describing the reality of our political life, as opposed to the illusion that we're living in a functioning constitutional republic. I highlight some such views here, though they grow like weeds everywhere.

Having been as slow on the uptake as anyone, I can't claim too many independent penetrating insights early on. The Cold War years seemed straightforward enough with the main irritant being the left's (1) failure to recognize the hideous nature of communist regimes, (2) failure to recognize the superiority of economic freedom, (3) failure to recognize the innate decency of American law and traditional society, (4) pathetic belief in their ability to craft solutions to life's problems superior to those developed over the centuries, and (5) their dishonesty about their revolutionary objective.

The borders remained open and the Democrats made hay with the power that came from pandering to the black underclass and its parasitic, libertine, anti-white, criminal ways. A halfhearted gesture was made during Clinton to turn off the spigot of subsidies for producing black babies on an industrial scale and Newt seemed to be able to hold Clinton's feet to the fire on spending. Return to sanity seemed a real enough possibility.

With the mere election of GW it seemed like the pendulum swung slight back in the direction of Republican "sense" but with Bush's mad dash to the Islamic Center of Washington on the day after 9/11 to slobber over the resident Muslims, his "religion of peace" foolishness, and his hand holding and kissy face with Saudi royalty, whose hackles did not rise? What?!

Since then it's been perpetual war, Republican fiscal idiocy, Keynesian/monetary lunacy, and servile Republicans stretching to the horizon. It's a period that might in future histories be known as The Long American Demolition Derby, Mud Wrestling, and Foreigner-Worshiping Extravaganza. Immigration spiraled up into the clouds; Islam became as hard to understand as quantum mechanics; Muslims and ultra-leftists were inserted into federal agencies with abandon; rule by decree became the new normal; inexplicable, unconstitutional, and fatuous foreign military adventures multiplied; and Republicans cowered under their desks, immobilized by a Harry Reid raised eyebrow.

Anyone who still thought we might still be living in something remotely like a Jimmy Steward/Bob Hope kind of normality finally had to hang it up. It just wasn't Kansas any longer and a grotesque transformation of the United States was visibly in progress, aided and abetted by the sellout media and dumb ass academics.

This is Chuck Baldwin's take on what we face:

Over most of the last century, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, and Christians and secularists have collectively jettisoned constitutional government in favor of a Welfare State, a Warfare State, a Nanny State, and a Police State.^[1]

The acquiescence of the worthless Paul Ryan in the last spending bill granting everything that Obama wanted in his relentless drive to destroy even the remnants of the old America is Exhibit B for Republican complicity in the Obama revolutionary agenda. Exhibit A is the Republican failure to impeach Obama for his extra-constitutional end run around our immigration laws and his undeclared, unconstitutional war against Syria and Libya. Republicans love both.

Here's Clyde Wilson's take on Republican duplicity:

Another fact: With the exception of Reagan’s contribution to winning the Cold War, the entire history of the Republican Party in the 20th century has been grotesque betrayal—a lack of effective opposition to any leftist and Democratic initiative. The Republican Party has won office claiming opposition and immediately abetted and institutionalized whatever revolution has been imposed. Whenever the party leadership has been challenged, money, electoral expertise, and cunning deceit have been employed to defeat the usurper.^[2]

On the issue of dynastic government, so help me God, Baldwin has this to say:

For twenty out of the last twenty-eight years, America has had either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. And to the chagrin of Democrats who thought they were getting “change” with Barack Obama, for the past eight years, he has simply treaded water for the Bush/Clinton regime. And with Hillary winning the Democrat nomination, they are back.^[3]

Yet another Bush stepped in to offer himself this year as a presidential candidate, an example of unmitigated gall if ever there was one. I thought I had an ego but that guy takes the cake.

Is that what the Constitution was all about? Dynastic government? Rule by two families of nonentities, lightweights, and a horn dog, followed by an interim joke, to be followed, God forbid, by a lying, foul-mouthed, power-hungry Alinsky groupie who gives political corruption a bad name?

Notes
^[1] "'A Threat To All Humanity' ." By Chuck Baldwin, Chuck Baldwin LIVE, 7/28/16. H/t: Russia Insider.
^[2] "The Missing Opposition." By Clyde Wilson, Chronicles, 10/1/14.
^[3] Baldwin, supra.

Monday, August 1, 2016

This Needs To Be Preserved For Posterity

Just in case Hillary Clinton becomes president:

...so I've downloaded a copy of it, that it might remain in my safekeeping.

I can’t imagine Comey not cringing with embarrassment as he announced his decision not to recommend the indictment of Hillary Clinton for multiple violations of the National Security Act and the Espionage Act.

Of Heroes And Whores

Once again, the old media have elevated a minor contretemps over a Republican’s comments to the status of a world-shaking cataclysm, the sort of horror that would have the entire human race locking, loading, and manning the barricades. The occasion, of course, is Donald Trump’s arguably ill-advised statement about the Democrats’ use of Khizr Khan family’s loss of its son in Iraq, twelve years ago.

Here’s the story according to ABC News:

     On the last night of the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Gold Star father Khizr Khan, his wife Ghazala by his side, recounted to the crowd how his son was killed in 2004 by a car bomb in Iraq.
     Khan also chastised Trump for seeking to ban Muslims from entering the country, saying that his son, U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, would not have been able to serve under a Trump presidency.
     “Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America,” Khan said, addressing Trump. “You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”
     Trump appeared to try to brush the speech aside, saying that Khan “was, you know, very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me.”
     Trump also said, "If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me."

Frankly, I would have advised Trump not to say what he said...but I would have advised the Democrats’ program directors not to make the Khans part of their gala, either.

American Muslims are an increasingly restive bunch. They’ve slowly elevated their demands on their communities and this country, such that today serious public figures are actually questioning whether the criticism of Islam and Muslims should be protected under freedom of expression. The DNC’s program directors might not have been under pressure to include the Khans in the convention lineup, but no doubt it occurred to them that their story might be politically useful against Trump.

The collectivist fallacy rears its ugly head once again. As usual, it’s the Left that hopes to get away with palming that card. Have a few words from our beloved Emperor:

     The Khans had a son who died in The Long War 12 years ago. The Khans are muslim. Therefore Trump is a horribly racist bigot because he’s concerned about muslim terrorists since obviously, their son gave his life for this country and, therefore, all muslims are American Patriots who can do absolutely no wrong.
     Did we get that just about right?
     Sounds an awful lot like Saint Cindy of the Ditch. You know, the hag who lost a son in Iraq and, as a result (according to the DNC, the MSM (but we repeat ourself) and the Cucks), she could say or do no wrong, and if she declared that water ran uphill, that trouts live in trees or that if she buys kippers, it will not rain anymore, then that was received, immutable, incontrovertible truth....
     Let’s take malaria. We know that it’s spread by mosquitoes, right? Please tell us that everybody knows that or we’ll just have to give up entirely on the human species.
     We also know that it’s a very small proportion of mosquitoes that actually carry malaria. The vast majority of them are quite harmless and, at worst, a minor annoyance. Those bites damn well itch.
     So, Cucks and Prozis, we want you to reflect very carefully on the last time you used Raid or slapped one of those most likely completely innocent little bugs. You horrible, murderous, generalizing, speciesist HITLER you!!!!

Let’s add to the above that some speakers at major political conventions are paid for their appearances. Some; not all. Were the Khans paid to emit their slurs against Trump? If so, how much? And if not, why not? Open the books, Democrats. Show us the figures in black and white. Or explain why this “gold star family” wasn’t paid for whoring for the most deceitful, corrupt individual ever to get a major party’s presidential nomination.

I’m not a major Trump fan. In my estimation he’s the lesser of two evils. I’m still waffling over whether I can vote for him in good conscience. But on the subject of immigration control, especially Muslim immigration control, not only do I endorse his position, I’d like to see him stiffen it.

David Solway has the prescription I favor:

Islamic immigration must be drastically curtailed if not completely stopped....
Since large Muslim populations are already settled within our borders, surveillance must be intensive, methodical and ongoing. No-Go Zones must be pacified by whatever means, and must be made Go Zones. Self-regulated ghettoes have to be opened up and rigorously policed. Islamic law must be ruled in contravention of common law and legally prohibited....
All mosques, which are effectively command centers, must be stringently investigated and many must be closed down.
Every imam in the country should be thoroughly vetted and many should be de-licensed and restricted from preaching.
Jihadi suspects clearly and unequivocally known to law enforcement agencies should not be so readily allowed, as is far too often the case, to mix freely among the people....
Muslims and non-Muslims who leave the country to fight alongside terrorist entities must not be repatriated, even if they are passport-holding citizens. They are accessories to those who would destroy us and are therefore enemy combatants.
Muslim organizations with ties to terror-sponsoring organizations or that lobby for Sharia or for cultural and political influence must be disbanded and outlawed, no matter how powerful and widespread.
No less important, indeed, perhaps the most crucial of the measures I am proposing, has to do with terminology and the concepts it signifies. We keep hearing that the enemy we are facing is “Islamic extremism” or “radical Islam.” Nothing can be further from the truth. This is the most serious in its consequences of the evasions we practice and one that ensures our eventual destruction. The enemy is not radical Islam but Islam pure and simple. The terrorists, their enablers and the “entry” cohort take their warrant from their holy scriptures—the Koran, the Hadith, the Sira, the schools of jurisprudence, and centuries of political and religious commentary.

Trump would be well advised to study the above. Islam declared itself the enemy of the United States shortly after this country was born:

In March 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with Tripoli's envoy, ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (or Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). When they enquired "concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury", the ambassador replied:
"It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once." [source]

Nor has any armistice been signed since then.

These days, it seems that no politician can be found who won’t bend the knee to an identifiable interest group with a substantial membership. Muslims in America number between three and four million. That would be a substantial voting bloc by the usual standards...if there were any prospect of getting Muslims to vote for a candidate who favors limiting immigration and strengthening our borders. That a Republican, who rose to prominence specifically on this subject, should be expected to do so is the rankest lunacy. Whether Trump might have been wiser to say something else, or perhaps nothing at all, when approached about Khizr Khan’s act of political cunnilingus, is a separate subject.

I’m not concerned about my Gentle Readers’ attitudes; no one who regularly reads Liberty’s Torch would be unclear on what a threat to America Islam and its allegiants represent. But it would surely be pleasant to see a few “moderates” and “unaligned voters” ask whether the Khans’ loss of their son amounts to an argument over immigration policy or just the cheapest, crudest sort of political theater.

The essence of Merkel's rule.

Since the bland, circumspect, inscrutable, placid, blancmange (but devious and vicious Coudenhove-Kalergi Prize-winning) Merkel intends to ignore the consequences of her recent and earlier intentional Muslim madness, she and her CDU lawn jockeys, factotums, sycophants, lickspittles, and legally-dead Frankenführerin intend to augment the hellish life they have inflicted on the German people (Leuteschlag, people smash) with the Hasssuchekampf (Hate Search Struggle) or Traumverstärkungkrieg (Dream Reinforcement War).
If reality is vexing in any aspect then promote fantasy ("European values"), conceal actual crime, and crucify malcontents, patriots, and those simply aghast at the jungleization of Germany with the aid of a former Stasi informer, the BND, and our own Mark ("The Lion of Free Speech") Zuckerberg.
Merkel, the former communist youth organization functionary, has created the dystopia so beloved of leftists, but you can thank her for two things: (1) Germany is not being torn apart by vile nationalism and (2) its leaders know the difference between the form of National Socialist government excess and its substance.

Comment by Col. Bunny on "The Good Fairy." By Hans Heckel, Die Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung , 7/23/16, republished in "It’s Nobody’s Business but the Turks.’" By Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna, 7/28/16.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Three Glories: A Sunday Rumination

     “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”
     “No—”
     “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question....”
     “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion....Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future and mine?”
     “That we shall die.”
     “Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer....The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
     [Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness]

There’s a strange, yet simple idea haunting, or perhaps taunting, me today: the idea that the three “theological virtues” – faith, hope, and charity – are independent of adherence to any religious creed. The theological virtues are closely identified with the Christian tradition. Yet when I put them under close examination, it became necessary for me to ask whether that binding is real, or merely assumed.

Let’s look at faith first.

To have faith is to believe a proposition without requiring conclusive evidence of its veracity: i.e., without requiring proof. Yet which of the many propositions upon which we stake life and wealth every day is provable? The only truly provable propositions belong to mathematics and formal logic. Science rejects the possibility of proof; all it will allow us is confidence based on experimental repeatability. You cannot prove that any of the things you rely on will persist for even a moment longer. You cannot even prove that the floor beneath you won’t suddenly collapse under your weight. Your confidence in these things demonstrates your capacity to believe without requiring proof: i.e., faith.

Faith, so long regarded as a word pertinent only to religious propositions, is in reality ever present and ever operating. Without it, we would be paralyzed.

The total absence of faith leads to solipsism: the inability to accept that anything outside your head is real and definite. Yet in solipsism we find the germ of an important idea. I once allowed a character to put it thus:

     “A very smart man once said that imagination is more important than knowledge.” Redmond guided the truck out of the parking lot and onto NY 231. “It was an overstatement, and context-free to boot. Still, he had an important point in mind. He wasn’t the first to make it, either. What is an outline, Todd?”
     The conversational swerve jarred Todd into a curious state. His thoughts seemed to drift free of mundane reality. He struggled to discipline them.
     “The boundary around an object?”
     “Have you seen any outlines lately?”
     “Huh? I don’t...hm.”
     “In the world outside our heads.” Redmond piloted the truck smoothly down Kettle Knoll. “Did you see anything you could point to and say ‘there’s an outline,’ at any time recently?”
     “I don’t think so.”
     “And why is that? Every object has a boundary, so it must have an outline, right?”
     Todd was overwhelmed by the sense that he was being introduced to a higher realm of thought, a sphere of concepts and relations whose existence he hadn’t suspected.
     He’s way beyond me.
     He fought down his distaste at the admission.
     If I’m going to learn anything more from him, I have to accept it.
     “Outlines are imaginary, then?”
     Redmond pulled into the Iversons’ driveway, stopped, and set the parking brake. “Not quite. It depends on whether you’d say an image—a picture of the world you have in your brain—is imaginary. When we look at the world, we see...things. Objects we take to be bounded and separate from one another. Most of us view the world that way, most of the time. We have to. It makes organized thought possible. And it’s what moved a great writer to write that ‘wise men see outlines, and therefore draw them.’”
     “Who was that?”
     “William Blake. A poet of the late Enlightenment.” Redmond’s eyes twinkled. “He wrote something a bit different a few years later, though.”
     Todd waited.
     “‘Mad men see outlines, and therefore draw them.’”
     “Huh?”
     Redmond held up a hand for patience. “It was an important insight, centuries ahead of its time. Modern physics tells us that there are no absolute boundaries between things, that boundaries and outlines are only tools of thought.” The engineer’s smooth, solemn face seemed to acquire the weight of centuries. “They exist, whatever that means, only as long as we insist on them. And there are subjects where we can’t make any progress at all unless we refuse to see them.”
     [From Polymath]

The most important aspects of existence, from the perspective of human consciousness, are the categories and concepts we apply to the reality around us. We do that to make orderly thought possible – to provide for the operations of deduction and induction from which all our knowledge of reality flows. And all those products of our minds, and the uber-concept upon which they’re founded – i.e., that they’re truly applicable to reality – require acts of faith.

Hope requires faith. Without faith that, broadly speaking, we know what we’re talking about, that it’s constructive to theorize about it, and that our theories can be tested against external reality, we cannot proceed. All of classical physics was founded on two assumptions:

That the universe is lawful;
That behind all the more detailed laws stands a law of cause and effect.

Perhaps the most important contribution of modern physics to human understanding is this: cause and effect, as classically understood and employed, does not rule all of reality. To cope with the very smallest and very largest of natural phenomena, our notions about cause and effect, so useful at the “macro” level at which ordinary human life takes place, must give way to other premises. But the real significance of that shift in understanding lies in this: despite the failure of “macro” cause and effect – what’s sometimes been called the “clockwork universe” of classical physics – our faith in the lawfulness of the universe, even at those extreme phenomena, remain unviolated. In other words, even where classical cause and effect cease to apply, there are governing laws; we can determine those laws by study and experimentation; and having determined them, we can hope to put them to use technologically.

Of course, there will always be realms beyond human experimentation. Though we can conjecture about things like the ultimate creation of the universe, we cannot test our conjectures by creating a fresh one. Yet the discovery that human thought is applicable to so much allows us to hope that natural law is pervasive – i.e., that all phenomena are orderly in an ultimate sense. We can entertain phenomena that exhibit randomicity while remaining confident that even seemingly random events are governed by laws we might someday grasp. Consider radioactive decay, the foundation of nuclear physics, as an example.

All our hope of progress – “the improvement of the human condition, morally, with declining input” – depends upon maintaining our faith in our perceptions and the operations of our minds.

Charity, despite its seeming distance from faith and hope, isn’t about generous actions performed in a conceptual vacuum. It depends upon hope: specifically, the hope that:

We can see the troubles of others clearly enough to grasp their genesis;
We can distinguish those that should be helped – the “deserving” – from those that shouldn’t;
We can then contrive to help the “deserving” without causing them material, emotional, or spiritual harm.

Now, this is not how most people think of charity today. That’s because of the largely successful campaigns by the apostles of envy to persuade us that anyone who lacks something that he wants but is unable or unwilling to pay for is an appropriate object of charity. That this is not so should be obvious to any thinking person. As I wrote some time ago:

True charity requires proximity, for at least two reasons. First, the necessary personal connection, the sense that one is helping one's own, fails at any great remove. Second, human fallibility and weakness guarantee that just as some will fail to prosper on their own, others will fail to employ charity properly; indeed, to receive money from others sometimes makes one's troubles worse. When this occurs, the giver must give no further, for other measures -- criticism, instruction, discipline -- are clearly indicated. With any separation between the benefactor and his beneficiary, it becomes impossible to know whether help helps in fact, or only in theory and intention.

The ultimate aim of true charity is to return its beneficiary to a condition in which he doesn’t need it. Is it not clear that proper charity, that helps those who deserve help without doing them harm, requires knowledge and conviction of uncertain kinds – i.e., knowledge both of how a particular person came to be in need, and the conviction that his need can be remedied nondestructively? Is it not clear that one can never be absolutely confident in such knowledge and such conviction – that one must have faith in one’s ability to know another’s state adequately well, and maintain a firm hope that he can be helped without being harmed?

The above seems to detach the “theological virtues” from all theology. Indeed, having mulled the matter over for several hours now, I can’t see a necessary connection between any theology and any one of the three. That they should be so firmly associated with the Christian faith must have another lesson for us.

But the theological virtues are not all the virtues by a long shot. There are four cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude – vital to a stable, peaceful, and prosperous social order, and these too are usually regarded as Christian teachings. So there’s more juice in this orange than I’ve yet managed to squeeze out. Though it’s rather unusual to conclude a “Sunday Rumination” this way, I’ll take my chances and say:

More anon.

(And may God bless and keep you all. Can’t leave that out!)

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Roles

Sometimes, when I’m feeling creatively dry, I return to my past writings and spend some time studying them. I try to do so as if they weren’t emissions of mine. It’s difficult but not impossible to do so, and it can sometimes refresh the sense that matters most to a writer: the sense of why I’m doing this.

I’ve made some interesting discoveries by doing that. In particular, I’ve been reminded – forcibly at times – about what it was that got me started writing for a general audience.

I shan’t tell you what that was (and is) straight off. Permit me to meander around it for a few hundred words. With luck you’ll get a better feel for the wherefores that way.

In a piece that appeared at Eternity Road in 2010, I had some fun with the idea of a “silly syllogism:”

It occurred to your Curmudgeon this morning that many of one's decisions, however great or small, are likely to be founded on theorems that, let us say, could stand closer examination. For those Gentle Readers who cut all their tenth-grade geometry classes: a theorem is a statement of implication, which states that a specific premise implies a specific conclusion. For example: "If Smith is a man, then Smith is mortal." (Alternately, "All men are mortal.") Thus, we have the famous demonstrator:
Theorem: All men are mortal.
Premise: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

A three-part inference such as the above is called a syllogism. Whether any particular syllogism ends with a trustworthy conclusion depends on the soundness of its theorem. So if the theorem is wrong, the conclusion is likely to be wrong as well:
Theorem: All mortals are men.
Premise: Rufus the Newfus is mortal.
Conclusion: Therefore, Rufus the Newfus is a man.

But there is a special class of "theorems," distinct from all others, in which truth is inherent. These are so obviously correct that they require no proof. They're called tautologies.
A tautology takes the form: If X is true, then X is true.
Well, uh, yes. Indisputable! But how useful is it?
Your Curmudgeon had a demonstration of two such just this morning, in conversation with the C.S.O. She was speaking of her need to go to the gym after work, to which your Curmudgeon replied, "If ya gotta go, ya gotta go."
Theorem: If ya gotta go, ya gotta go.
Premise: The C.S.O. gotta go.
Conclusion: Therefore, the C.S.O. gotta go.

"But," your Curmudgeon continued, "why not come home first and sit for a bit?" The C.S.O. replied, "Once you're home, you're home."
Theorem: Once you're home, you're home.
Premise: The C.S.O. has come home.
Conclusion: Therefore, the C.S.O. is home.

Your Curmudgeon admits to having been temporarily blinded by the brilliance of these insights. But on later reflection, he recalled an even more striking syllogism from a few years back. On that occasion, he asked the C.S.O. whether she wanted to go on some errand immediately, or wait until after lunch. The C.S.O. replied, "Let's go, so we can come back."
Theorem: If we go, we can come back.
Premise: Let's go.
Conclusion: Therefore, we can come back.

The variation in form from that of a "classical" tautology is purely incidental.
Such silly syllogisms are at the base of a great part of human decision-making. Watch for them in your life. And always remember:
A tautology is a tautology.

Now, I’m not advocating the displacement of conventional reasoning by a scheme built entirely on tautologies. We wouldn’t get much done that way. But occasionally a tautology (or a close relative) will “wander by” that expresses a truth one needs to emphasize to oneself. Here’s one:

You are what you are.

This isn’t a perfect, “classical” tautology. It’s true, but it doesn’t cover the whole of the matter. Yes, you are what you are – i.e., your organic nature – but you are also who you are: those traits and capabilities you’ve added to your God-given organic nature via individuation.

However – and this is the crux of the thing – there are limits to individuation:

What you are constrains who you can become.

Note: Constrains is not synonymous with determines. I had a fictional character put it thus:

Father Ray rose from his armchair and ran his hands down his trim, muscular frame. “I am a combination of two things: what God has given me, and what I’ve done to develop it. The first of these is immutable. God decreed it. His will in the matter cannot be countervailed. The second is merely the consequence of my decision to make the most of that gift—to develop my body in a direction natural to it with proper exercise and dietary discipline. As that does not in any way cross-cut God’s gift, or whatever element of his plan resides in me, my use of his gift is entirely acceptable.”
[From “One Small Detail”]

To try to individuate in a way that contradicts one’s nature is a bad, bad idea. There’s nothing but suffering at the end of such a journey. In other words: Don’t jump off a cliff hoping that you’ll learn how to fly before you hit the ground.

Quite a long time ago, I wrote an essay that’s become something of an Internet staple. It proceeded from my perception of what a man is, and the role he must fill to be true to his manhood. I sincerely believed it when I first wrote it, and I stand by it today.

Many years later, I wrote the following:

Just as the manly virtues define the essence of respectable manhood, there are feminine virtues that define the essence of respectable womanhood:

Nurturance of a man;
Management of a household;
The skills demanded of a mother.

A woman who lacks those virtues isn’t merely a marginal creature, unlikely to contribute constructively to her society; she’s a disruptive and destructive force. A fair number of such women infest our society today. Worse, they’ve wangled special legal privileges that no one deserves nor should be allowed. In consequence, young men are being taught to fear: especially, to fear women. Young women are being taught to resent: especially, to resent men.

Again, I stand by what I wrote.

This is not to say that a woman must not become a wage-earner, a monetary contributor to her household; that would be foolish in this day and age. Rather, a woman’s pursuit of an income should not cause her to disparage the feminine virtues or stint their development and employment, for those virtues are prior and superior to her wage-earning possibilities. Indeed, I’d advise a woman blessed with a husband who provides amply for her and her children to consider eschewing wage labor in favor of “traditional” womanly pursuits.

This heartening piece at The Federalist elaborates on the reasons for my contentions.

It’s a matter worthy of considerable attention that masculinism – a return to the manly virtues and what a man needs to practice them – is rising sharply, while feminism, especially militant, misandrist feminism of the sort Stacy McCain often lambastes, is fighting a rearguard action to hold onto its place in Americans’ minds. Metrosexuality is retreating, as are the gender-war attitudes purveyed by the Anita Sarkeesians. In effect, what we humans are is reasserting itself against perverse notions about who we are or could be.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a unanimous movement among human beings. Men aren’t that biddable; even the soggiest, most easily led milksop will assert an individual preference or two, especially if he doesn’t think he can measure up. Similarly, there will always be women who are utterly averse to traditional femininity, and will fight to their last breath against “being assigned to a role.” Yet those who adopt the traditional masculine and feminine paradigms appear to be prevailing – winning. On the whole they’re happier with themselves, their fellows, and their lots in life. That seems to be the case even among individuals who fought the traditional roles for decades, only to “surrender” to them later on in life.

Perhaps time will paint a shaded picture. Perhaps among men there are some who must depart from traditional masculinity as the price of survival. Perhaps among women there are some who must forgo traditional femininity for similar reasons. It wouldn’t surprise me. But neither would it surprise me to learn that traditional masculinity and femininity have tremendous value, both to those that accept them and to their societies. Traditions and conventions arise not from the arbitrary decisions of individuals, but for reasons of utility. That utility is well expressed in the history of the United States of America.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Scattered Thoughts

It’s that sort of morning, I fear.

Our long national nightmare – i.e., the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama – is almost over...but not quite. Obama’s entire agenda was to “fundamentally transform” the Land of the Free. He has a little less than six months more to do so. With six months, the powers of the presidency, no need to run for a third term, and only a gaggle of Republican milksops to “oppose” him, the prospects for further “transformation” are troubling.

Among other things, Obama’s vanity will not permit him to allow the Clintons, whom he despises, to exceed his “achievements.” With Bill behind him and the possibility of Hillary to follow him, what sort of deviltry will he concoct to ensure that his name stands above theirs in the annals of political villainy?

The C.S.O. usually does the grocery shopping. Now and then I fill in, as I’m home during the day and have no objections to a shopping trip if she realizes there’s some item she’s forgotten and will need to prepare the evening’s repast. However, she usually reserves the “bulk” shopping for herself.

Tuesday was an exception: she asked me to go to CostCo for a few items we prefer to buy in quantity. It was a “learning experience,” to say the least. Here’s the complete shopping list:

2 bales of paper towels;
1 bale of facial tissues;
Large paper plates;
Small paper plates;
Mouthwash;
Dishwasher detergent.

The bill was $110. Granted the quantities involved were considerable, but $110??

Buy gold and silver, Gentle Readers. Add a few copper rounds to your hoard, as well. Now, before the run commences.

We had an interesting chat about slavery and its preconditions yester eve. I advanced the proposition that a slave might be more amenable toward his condition if he were allowed to choose his own master – from a constrained set of choices, of course. The C.S.O. was uncertain, but allowed the possibility. (It was a motif I was exploring for use in a novel-in-progress.)

Just this morning, in thinking about the heavily rigged and preconditioned electoral system we endure, the parallels struck me with special force. The last time a president came from a third party was 1860. Today the likelihood of that is effectively zero, yet national discontent with the major parties is rising swiftly. Might the major parties’ kingmakers be thinking about increasing the seeming probability of a third-party president, that we might be more amenable to our special form of enslavement?

“A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” – Lysander Spooner.

According to a source I trust, there is no significant difference between the rate at which police shoot black criminals and suspects and the rate at which they shoot white criminals and suspects, in proportion to their percentages of the American population. However, there is a very significant statistical difference between the rates of black-perpetrated crimes and white-perpetrated crimes, especially crimes of violence: in the U.S., the perpetrator of a violent crime is eight times as likely to be black than white. Doesn’t that imply that the police are far more reluctant to shoot a black suspect than a white one?

It’s a question the rabble-rousers of Black Lives Matter would prefer not to face.

I spent a pleasant hour yesterday enjoying this Youtube video channel. Blaire White has a unique approach to the presentation of her views, something like a cross between Michael Loftus and a generic Valley Girl. I found it curiously refreshing. Recommended!

A friend has strongly recommended the Kel-Tec Sub 2000 foldable rifle to me. It’s a remarkable design, capable of being folded -- legally -- to a length suitable for storage in a typical backpack (un-fireable in that condition, of course). However, dealers who carry the gun are rare; does anyone know of one in New York who carries it chambered in 9 mm?

The July sale at Smashwords will soon be over. If you haven’t indulged yourself in any of my tripe, you still have today and the weekend. After that, everything returns to its normal price, so dally not. And remember to write reviews!

I think that’s all for today, Gentle Readers. I plan to spend the rest of the day on fiction. For me, that’s a bit like weightlifting for the brain: I desperately want what it promises to bring me, but the effort involved has become ever more daunting. However, though it’s the severest of my trials, it’s also the surest way of deflecting my attention from politics and current events...and that’s something I could surely use.

Wish me well.

The reason for Trump's popularity.

Since Bush I was elected in 1988 (28 years and seven, four-year presidential terms ago), high-paying mfg. jobs have been sent abroad while at the same time, these same American presidents have let tens of millions of illegals stay here without regard for the long-term consequences to the American way of life. The rampant bitterness we see now is the culmination of prior presidents policies topped-off with the devastating effects of Obama, who vandalizes "traditional" America everywhere he can. These last four presidents have collectively, inflicted a colossal burden upon the American people for which there is no penalty to them; but only to the quarter-billion people who are the American middle-class.^[1]

All those presidents did that. They let millions of illegals stay as though it were the most normal thing in the world to allow foreigners to flood the United States of America because they felt like grabbing a piece of our pie.

Note, too, that the mantra is "11 million illegals." It's been "11 million" since Al Gore first had to crank up his air conditioner at Chateau Gore. Ann Coulter played with some simple numbers and said at a minimum it's 30 MILLION. At a minimum, my friends.

All perfectly normal and unremarkable by the political class. The perfect expression of globalism and leftist lunacy: inundation of white people in their own countries.

Notes
^[1] Comment by Felix da Kat on "Will Any Future POTUS Matter (Other Than Launching More Wars)?" By By Charles Hugh Smith, Zero Hedge, 7/28/16.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Celebrity Politicking: A Brief But Pointed Reflection

For Christians especially, but ultimately for all of us:

As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every dictator or even demagogue — almost every film star or crooner — can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bellwether, and his whole flock comes after him.
[C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast. Hyperlink added by FWP.]

Teach your children to learn, to distinguish between facts and opinions, and always to do their own thinking. Please.

A Most Effective Advertisement

I am overwhelmed by admiration:

It really doesn’t matter whether you think “lesbians are hot.” I mean, imagine the figures in that image replaced by Rosie O’Donnell and Andrea Dworkin! No man in his right mind would consider that “hot.” What really matters here is the use of truth married to humor to make an important point in one’s own favor:

All the Islamic states punish homosexual conduct with death.
Homosexual conduct is not a crime in the nations of the West.
Discrimination against homosexuals is punishable by law in Canada.
Thus, in Canada homosexuals are free to be “open,” regardless of anyone’s opinion of their behavior.
And Canada has lots of oil to sell! Cheap, too! Get it while it’s, uh, hot!

Effective advertising often marries truth to humor: truth, because without it you have only empty boasts; humor, because nothing is better at cementing a message into one’s memory.

Learn it. Live it. Love it. (No, not sodomy. Get your mind out of the gutter!)

Two Parties

Now that the Democrats have concluded their quadrennial ~~horror show~~ convention, a few words about the two parties within the Democrat Party might be of some value – at least, to those hoping to understand how the Dems can veer drunkenly back and forth as they have since 1980.

For starters, let’s recall historian Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Laws #2 and #3 refer to a process, not an instantaneous transition. The Democrats of the late Nineteenth Century were a conservative bunch: rather bluenosed about social matters, generally hands-off toward industry and commerce, and careful with the national treasury. Indeed, both parties would be described today as conservative in orientation; one of the ironies of political history is that their spokesmen both laid claim to being the proper party for the American liberal. It was the emergence of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 that started the Democrats’ leftward turn. The Wilson and FDR Administrations turned the wheel farther leftward.

After World War II, politics was at first dominated by foreign policy considerations, owing to the rise of the Soviet Union and the division of Europe. The ascendancy of domestic social engineering, most notably under Lyndon Johnson, came as a surprise to many analysts at that time. There are several theories about the reasons for it, but there can be no doubt that, apart from the Vietnam War, nothing loomed larger in Sixties political discourse than “compassionate” government action nominally aimed at “helping the poor and disadvantaged.”

The Nixon Administration saw national attention diverted from social engineering for a time, in part due to renewed international turmoil, particularly in the Middle East, and in part due to the heavily publicized efforts of glamor diplomat Henry Kissinger. Sadly, the Vietnam War, which Nixon promised to end (and did end, as he’d promised and with the best outcome that could be achieved at that time) and the Watergate scandal deflected attention from Nixon’s singular achievements at restoring a balanced federal budget and curtailing the growth of the federal bureaucracy. In consequence, the Democrats were able to make “peace” – something the century’s Democrat administrations were hardly known for – the prime public issue of the Carter years.

Carter’s disastrous four years in power saw a huge increase in federal spending and an explosion of inflation. Those two things have always gone together. Taxation sufficient to fund massive social programs has never been politically feasible in the U.S. But what government cannot tax it can always print, and print the Carterites surely did. Currency expansion continued to the point that the prime rate rose to an unprecedented 13% at its peak, guaranteeing that the Democrats would lose the White House.

The loss of the presidency to Ronald Reagan threw the Democrat Party into an internal frenzy. The contradictions were stunning: there were more than four registered Democrats for every three registered Republicans, and no pre-election poll had shown the candidates more than 3% apart, yet Reagan had buried Carter in a landslide, taking the Senate majority in the process. In the ensuing confusion, two major camps emerged. Though the labels are somewhat anachronistic, we may call them the Kennedy and Clinton camps.

The Kennedy camp, ideologically social-fascist, pressed for a domestically oriented agenda. Its spokesmen, among whom Senator Edward Kennedy was most prominent, favored downplaying matters of foreign policy and military preparedness in preference for large expansions of virtually every domestic initiative of the Johnson and Carter years. Though the creation of special interests bound to the Democrat Party wasn’t an overt aspect of the Kennedyites’ strategy, it was a logical consequence.

The Clinton camp, which would be identified with Bill Clinton from 1991 onward, was coldly pragmatic. The Clintonites were interested in power for power’s sake, with all the perquisites and opportunities for graft that accompany it. They spurned specifics of ideology in preference for flexibility of orientation. They emphasized gaining and keeping control of the federal government, from which largesse could be distributed to favored persons and groups. Though less socially divisive than the Kennedyites, the Clintonites were inherently more deceitful, and far more corrupt.

Walter Mondale was the last of the original Kennedyites to get the Democrats’ presidential nod. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry were all from the Clintonite school. The seeming successes of the Clinton Administration first two years at cementing its grip on power had swayed the bulk of the Democrats into his camp. Clinton’s aura of success was so convincing that the party remained there even after the 1994 “Republican Revolution” and the disastrous candidacy of Gore. It took the 2004 election, the defeat of Kerry, and the meteoric rise of Barack Hussein Obama to get the Kennedyites back into the game.

The Kennedyites succeeded in elevating Obama to the Oval Office, but found that having “used him up,” the bench is bare. There are no Kennedyites of suitable age and national profile who could plausibly succeed him. Add to that the “devil’s bargain” the Kennedyites had to make with the Clintonites to unify the party behind Obama, and the answer pops out of a slot: a Clintonite Interregnum while promising young leftists in Congress are groomed for higher things. Despite her age, her unattractiveness, and the many seamy incidents in her past, Hillary Clinton has been given the Democrat nod.

Ironically, the Clintonites face the same problem as the Kennedyites: after Hillary, the bench is bare. Promising figures from years past have vanished into the political mists; if it were otherwise, the Clinton machine and Hillary’s vast appetite for power would not have been sufficient to sway the party to her side. This heralds a protracted period of internal disorder – made even more unruly by the unexpected size of the Sanders for President movement – that Democrat strategists will have a hard time controlling.

This should not be taken to imply that there’s no disorder among Republicans. Indeed, the processes taking place within the GOP present a strong parallel to those within its adversary. However, it does suggest that should Hillary Clinton lose to Donald Trump in November as has seemed increasingly likely, the Democrats’ ranks will offer politics-watchers a lot of milling-around to study until a new standard-bearer with “all the right boxes checked” should emerge from the teeming Leftist horde.