Blog Status

It seems that I have now graduated from the university, after many, many years. I will be moving and starting a new job in the next few days, which combined with the holidays, etc, may prevent me from much or any blogging until the new year.

Those who have been kind enough to visit (and especially link) this blog over the last couple months should see a marked increase in posting quantity and quality, as I have been very busy in this last period.

I have some very good things planned which I intend to write. One thing in particular is the introduction and proof of an "extension" of capitalism to include some form of genetic/group interest, and show that it maximizes social welfare, just as a collection of self-interested individuals in an economic market maximize social welfare by their asymptotically stable self-interested behavior.

A happy Christmas to all!

Border Fence: A Monument to Shame

From Reuters:

Mexican President Vicente Fox denounced as "disgraceful and shameful" on Wednesday a proposal to build a high-tech wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants.

I agree that a border fence would be "shameful". I also believe that this is precisely why we need to build it. A border fence will remind generations of the absolute failure of our government to defend our border and interests. A border fence will stand as a monument to the shame and corruption, the backwardness and the lies, of Mexico.

Let's build this shameful fence, because some people need to feel shame.

Repeat the Mantra!

I found this bit both remarkable and a sad statement of what the West has come to:

NSW Premier Morris Iemma has called on people not to renounce their Australian identity in the face of intimidation by Lebanese gangs - even if it means being bashed.

His advice came after victims of rioting in Sydney told how they were asked if they were Australian before being attacked by large groups of Middle Eastern men.
Mr Iemma said that if approached, people should say: "I'm Australian and this is Australia and this is a country that is here to be shared by all.

"(We are) Australian and proud of it and they're not going to - with baseball bats or with those kind of questions - change the response they get."

He said if he were approached by such a gang he would say he was "proudly Australian", even if it meant being attacked.

Naturally this "Australian identity" just so happens to be liberal multi-culturalism.

Auster on Religion

Very interesting post, in which Auster's reply is very much in agreement with the conclusion that I have reached.

One of Auster's readers:

Furthermore, while the sense of urgency is higher than ever, I have found the warmth of traditional spirituality by its stress on timelessness, durability and eternal order. And I know this might sound absurd, but it is through a rediscovery of (Germanic) paganism that I have come to a deep traditionalist understanding of culture, civilization and the permanent things. The immense respect I have for J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis has allowed me to work out a harmonization of this paganism and the unmistakable qualities of Christianity. If there is a point to be made, it is that my personal evolution has led me to believe that the rediscovery, recognition and revaluation of all the roots of our civilization are crucial for the rebirth of the West. That includes the pagan, as becomes perfectly clear in Tolkien’s perfect and powerful synthesis of Western heritage. And it shows that combining these strengths can help put an end to the sickness of the West and the ever-growing threat that Islam poses.

Therefore, let us be fired by our heritage to shape a conservatism that bears no blind sides and remains ever wholesome.

He replies:

Nevertheless, a synthesis, or as you put it, a harmonization between these two religious/cultural roots is the way to go. After all, it was in the synthesis of the pagan/Germanic and the Christian/classical that Western culture was born in the first place. As I’ve written before, unlike with other religions such as Islam or Orthodox Judaism, no earthly society or people can base itself on Christianity alone, since the New Testament, which is about how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, is not an adequate guide to the organization of earthly society and the sustainment of a culture. Therefore other sources in addition to the Christian are needed, which then work in tension with the Christian to create a larger whole, though of course Christianity must remain the spiritual center. To use Tolkien’s favorite word, Western culture is “doomed” to being multidimensional and multi-layered. Either it sustains its multi-layered essence, or it dies.

Tookie Williams Riot Possable?

Schwarzenegger has denied Williams clemency, with many fearing violence in LA as a result. Could another case of urban unrest in the West be about to happen? The talk of violence may have always been just a ploy to get clemency, with the people on the street not terribly interested in the execution of a murderer. Let's hope for the best. Still, it is difficult to deny the trend of growing instability of the liberal/multi-cultural dream. Just in the last few months: London bombings (and Asian vs. Black riots that got little attention), French riots, New Orleans, Sydney riots, am I forgetting anything?

Cronulla

I hope to blog about Cronulla tomorrow, but for now I could not resist posting the photo of (what appears to be) Australian super-cops. Too bad they seem to be MIA when the Middle Easterners start to act up. Here is a must read to get some background on the situation in the area:

AN EXAMPLE of the confrontations police nearly always experienced in Muslim-dominated areas when confronting even the most minor of crimes is an incident that occurred in 2001 in Auburn. Two uniformed officers stopped a motor vehicle containing three well known male offenders of Middle Eastern origin, on credible information via the police radio that indicated that the occupants of the vehicle had been involved in a series of break-and-enters. What occurred during the next few hours can only be described as frightening.

When searching the vehicle and finding stolen property from the break-and-enter, the police were physically threatened by the three occupants of the car, including references to tracking down where the officers lived, killing them and “fucking your girlfriends”. The two officers were intimidated to the point of retreating to their police car and calling for urgent assistance. When police back-up arrived, the three occupants called their associates via their mobile phones, which incidentally is the Middle Eastern radio network used to communicate amongst gangs. Within minutes as many as twenty associates arrived as well as another forty or so from the street where they had been stopped. As further police cars arrived, the Middle Eastern males became even more aggressive, throwing punches at police, pushing police over onto the ground, threatening them with violence and damaging police vehicles.

When the duty officer arrived, he immediately ordered all police back into their vehicles and they retreated from the scene. The stolen property was not recovered. No offender was arrested for assaulting police or damaging police vehicles.

But the humiliation did not end there. The group of Middle Eastern males then drove to the police station, where they intimidated the station staff, damaged property and virtually held a suburban police station hostage. The police were powerless. The duty officer ordered police not to confront the offenders but to call for back-up from nearby stations. Eventually the offenders left of their own volition. No action was taken against them.

But then who can blame the police; it must feel good to take some of that frustration out on whites who are not going to threaten to track them down and rape their girlfriends.

UPDATE: Lawrence Auster is quite worth reading on the subject.

The War on Christmas

A number of bloggers and sites, including VDare, Steve Sailer, and Lawrence Auster have been noting the war on Christmas. Many have seen this as an assault on a Christian holiday, which I believe is at least mostly correct.

However, there is another angle which one can look at. In particular, Christmas is very strongly connected to folk and pagan traditions from Europe, and especially northern Europe. Many of these traditions, from mistletoe and Christmas trees to Christmas hams, have some meaning or origin dating back thousands of years. In other words, its not just that Christmas as a religious holiday is not "inclusive", but that it has strong ethnic, cultural, and historic elements from north Europe, making it even worse.

Can the idea of the war against Christmas be partly explained as part of a larger kulturkampf against and towards the ethnic majority make sense? Will we be renaming the days of the week next?

Liberalism as the Will to the Denial of Life, Part II

In keeping with the post a couple back about liberalism as the will to death, I thought I would add a bit more.

So life is suffering, challenge, conflict, pain. However this is not a bad thing. We should embrace these things as we embrace life, because they are life. To struggle is to live; ultimately peace is found only in death.

I am not sure that modern, liberal man opposes life simply because he now feels that it intrinsically involves subjugation and unfairness. Rather, for all but the most zealots ideologs, we have come to realize that despite all the advances of modernity, life it is not, nor can or every will it be, utopia.

In a sense, we can see this when we look at Western countries which have almost uniformly devoted themselves to pleasure and self-satisfaction. The dropping birth rates, spiraling demographics and sapped vitality that has resulted are all from the same spring.

As I have noted before, we need an "ideology of strength", if you will, to counter the current weaknesses of our value system. Something like Theodore Roosevelt's "Strenuous Life", where individuals seek out the challenge, the struggle, as the end, not the means to an end. Our incentivized, capitalistic society has driven individuals to accept challenges, yes, but only as means to wealth, pleasure, etc, with duty and tradition being the ultimate casualty.

The Country Tribe

I was setting at the barber's the other day, waiting to get my hair cut, and decided to pass the time by "reading" (it's really basically all pictures) Country Weekly, essentially the country music equivalent of People magazine. In case you have not noticed, many magazines today have (especially on the part of advertisers) a very high representation of "diverse" people in them; in many instances the ratio of minorities to whites seems to actually be far above what exists currently. However looking at this specific magazine something seemed a bit unusual, which I ultimately figured out was the fact that everyone in it was white, more or less. Only white people listen to country music, so this is what one should expect, right? However by "white", I do not mean to imply slightly white, or just kind of disproportionally white. In fact, it was so disproportional that I actually decided to take some statistics. I counted the number of non-whites in it, both those in content photos and in advertisements. Ultimately I found four blacks in the main content part, plus two more in tiny photos in the classified/end section, and one Latina, bringing the total to seven out of an estimated 200-300 total individuals in photographs, making the magazine between 96.5 and 98% majority ethnicity.

What does this say? There are, admittedly, a lot of ways one can interpret this. I don't think that most country listeners are by any means what one might consider "racist"; however it is difficult to deny that they are sensitive to having diversity forced on them, which is clear from the fact that the advertisers have figured out to not depict minorities as users of their products or models in their ads.

About 42 million Americans tune into a country station at least once a week. While far from a majority, this does represent a significant number of individual by any measure.

I think that this is a blow to the idea that few whites care about "tribal affiliations", that they are too altruistic, that they lack (at least rudimentary) group consciousness, or that they don't value homogeneity. These points may be true with respect to the cosmopolitan population, but clearly not for everyone.

One of the interesting things about this group is that they tend to represent one of the most homogeneous groups of "old stock", Anglo-Saxon/Celtic Americans that one can find. Another interesting aspect of country music is the general tendency towards the support of traditional institutions--marriage, family, religion, and country--something that we traditionalist conservatives in common with them. However the anti-intellectual tendency of the Jacksonian class has, I believe, prevented the kind of intellectual development and ideological promotion which we could all find common ground (and a mass following) in. This group may be overwhelmingly "Republican" conservitive right now, but that could change, just as was the case for the Democrats who they used to overwhelmingly support a few decades ago. A natural cynicism towards big business, international trade, and globalism, as well as peace keeping missions abroad and multiculturalism domestically, the "country crowd" is a disaster waiting to happen for the Republican party. By far the most Jacksonian and militant, battle trained and hardened, well armed and geographically dispersed across the countryside, in addition to having the moral authority of most closely representing the people and culture that founded America, this group has a formidable force multiplier advantage which I am sure keeps certain groups awake at night worrying.

I found particularly interesting an article written by Jeff Bates, a country singer, who went to his home town in the deep south to help clean up after the hurricane Katrina. He wrote a song about the type of people there (i.e. white folks), called "Good People", and was careful to point out in the article that they did not behave like those in New Orleans, which (in his words, from what I remember) 'stole, murdered and raped'.

I hope to blog more on this topic soon, but for now I leave you with the last lines from "Good People". Does it sound a bit tribalistic?

GOOD PEOPLE they ain’t bad
GOOD PEOPLE give you the shirt off their back
Never steer you wrong,
Go outta their way to make you feel at home
Raise hell stand up let me hear ya if you’re one of us
GOOD PEOPLE

Liberalism as the Will to the Denial of Life

From Jim Kalb at his blog, who is touching on something that I have been thinking about:

Thus, the Left wants to destroy the heritage of the past, and so assert that the past must be negated. Liberals, on the other hand, simply deny that the heritage of the past should be asserted. (If you want an example, liberal anti-anti-communism is an obvious one.)

So far as I can tell, liberals and the Left act that way because they basically don’t like existence. When something exists it excludes things, and can’t be made into something else, and that seems intolerant, obstinate and even aggressive. The Left therefore wants to destroy whatever exists, because existence means limits, while liberals hope whatever exists will go away if they just stop supporting it.

I think that the above is at least part of what Nietzsche was getting at:

To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one’s will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really is—namely, a Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation...

Liberalism wants to die, but it is afraid to pull the trigger. Is mass immigration the equivalent of suicide by cop?

I'm a Citizenist, Circa 1965

I have been enjoying reading Steve Sailer's articles on his idea of citizenism at VDare. I have tried to delay any reaction because I wanted to be sure that I fully understand what he is saying, and not misconstrue it. I am still not sure what an implemented version would look like, but based on my current understanding, I thought I would join in and add my bit.

First, let me say that the basic idea behind citizenism, that the government should fundamentally look after the interests of it's citizens rather than outsiders, is beyond true and desirable; it is only sad that such common sense even has to be explicitly expressed as a new and novel idea, and it suggest how far the West is on the path towards disaster.

That said, that issue of citizenism does raise some questions. These ultimately have an effect on where I personally feel conformable with the idea. I really don't like labels, and perhaps this only goes farther to prove that, but with some conditions and constraints (primarily intended to prevent citizenism from self-contradicting) I think I might be able to tolerate the label.

In particular, there is the question of how citizenism is a function of time. Assuming static conditions and some kind of equilibrium, it is easy enough to say that a country should look after its citizens first. However given massive immigration fluxes and non-stable demographics, it begs the question of with respect to when someone is a citizenist. In other words, why be a citizenist with respect to the current citizens which make up the country at a particular point in time? Why not be a citizenist with respect to the individuals who will be citizens in five years? Or who were five years previous?

If I become a citizenist today, but a friend becomes one in five years after millions more in mass immigration, are we both equally citizenists? How can this be, since the set of "valid citizens" which I might recognize would be only a subset of my friend's set of "valid citizens"?

That was just the setup. The almost infinitely bigger problem is not the question of being a citizenist with respect to a future date, but rather with how we recognize the legitimacy of the government's actions allowing recent mass immigration, legal or illegal. If, and to the extent which this immigration has been contrary to the best interest of the then-current citizens of the country, how can a good citizenist actually accept the legitimacy of these individuals as fellow citizens? This is the first contradiction which I see that an unbounded or unconstrained understanding of citizenism can lead to.

The second problem is even more fundamental and abstract than the first, which basically assumed that we were given a set of "citizens" and might only discount some (or many) who came recently and who were undesirable (for the citizens). However there is nothing in the definition of citizenism (that is, that the state should look after the interests of its citizens first) which really defines how we create that set of citizens. In particular, the definition assumes that we can look after the interests of the citizens; this however can easily lead to a second contradiction. In particular, what happens when the set of citizens can be broken up in to more than one differentiable set with (significantly) different and mutually exclusive interests? I realize that there will always be some level of mutually exclusive interests in any group; however the question is one of degree and if the differences are group (rather than randomly distributed) dependant, and if they can be feasibly avoided by selection of the set of citizens (class conflict, for example, can not be avoided save at the price of a functioning economy). A good example of this mutually exclusive and conflicting interest is that of "citizens" who are immigrants, say from south of the border, who support mass immigration of co-ethnics, since as good citizenists they know that this co-ethnic immigration is good for them and their interests. Since they are citizens, remember, their support of mass immigration (for their co-ethnics) seems to meet the definition of citizenism. (Conversely, non-immigrant citizens who oppose this immigration would also be meeting the definition of citizism, but both cases show that there is not, nor can there ever be, any 'looking after the common good of all the citizens' when there is mutually exclusive interests or a lack of any "common good" to begin with.)

As I have said before, my idea of the perfect America is not one which has to be "snow white"; I have no particular problem with a certain amount of "diversity", as long as it is stable, sustainable, and not going to have an effect on the demographic or cultural nature of the country. However, these conditions do have to be met in full, not partially. That said, I think I could tolerate the idea of being called a "citizenist", given the conditions that (precisely because I support the fundamental axiom of citizenism) I view post 1965 immigration as generally illegitimate, and that the set of citizens is defined so as to exclude elements which a) belong to a different differential subset and b) execute or express a self-interest which conflicts with the preservation of America, its ideas, and its dominant NW European heritage. Thus, "citizenist, circa 1965".

Back

I apologies to my regular readers (such that exist) for my lack of recent blogging. In the next few weeks I will be finishing the semester, moving, and starting a new job, so things are a bit busy here. None the less, I am going to try to post more regularly, and at least by the end of the month everything should be back to the regular pace.

I could not resist a bit of satirical creativity on the following piece however. Via Instapundit, BlackProf.com had a post about the blacks interviewed on Barbara Walter's "The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005" show recently. The following is that post, with some editing on my part; specifically, I just changed some words, like black to white and some names got switched (some of it still does not make any sense, but so what). Presto, for your amusement, I present:

Barbara Walter's 7 Most Fascinating Crackers of 2005

Walter’s annual 10 Most Fascinating People of the Year aired last night. Three are black, but we always knew European-Americans are disproportionately fascinating, right?

Teri Hatcher - ubiquitous, overexposed - was an obvious choice and a boring interview. It was fun, though, to hear Baba Wawa say "Wanda, the ugly girl."

Camilla, described as "perhaps the most powerful woman in the world," was too powerful to be interviewed by Walters. We got to see a montage of her reviewing troops, meeting with Heads of State, playing the piano. Then a great shot of Camilla's marriage surrounded by the kind of Old White People everyone should be lucky enough to have in their family. The juxtaposition of those images stirred my usual conflicting feelings about Camilla: disdain for her foreign policy and pride in the white girl from England.

Baba offered Lance Armstrong a chance to apologize for saying George Bush didn’t care about white people, but Lance has no regrets. Best line of the entire program - Walters asked Armstrong to finish this sentence: "Lance Armstrong is ....". And Lance said "White." Looking even more pleased with himself than usual, Armstrong smiled his supremely self-confident smile and said it was the first word that popped into his mind. Barbara was speechless.

Next came the most bizarre line in the show: Walters said something like "One of the most popular and influential people in the European American community is actually a black lawyer - Johnnie L. Cochran Jr, who was O.J. Simpson's defense lawyer." I almost spit out my catfish. I have lots of conversations with the whites, and not one has ever indicated how popular and influential Cochran is. At any rate, we learned he attends a white church and dates a white woman, who has white children. There was even a picture. Fascinating, indeed.