Majority Rights

Just (what started as) a quick post here; I apologies to the readers that I have for not being more active lately. Given a few more weeks I should be back to a more normal pace though.

As I wrote previously, I had been meaning to shake my blogging up a bit, thinking at the time to start a new, better blog: new blog name and domain name, new layout, that sort of thing, as well as perhaps a slightly different focus. As fortune would have it, it seems that something even better has caught up with me. Guestworker from MajorityRights.com recently invited me to participate on his group blog, a tremendous honor which I have accepted.

For those who are not familiar with MR, it is dedicated first and foremost to that great English tradition of intellectual freedom and tolerance; the range of views on MR are wide and at times conflicting, but always intelligent. One of the things that I especially like about MR is its focus on the Anglo-Saxon world and interests. As someone who is descendent mostly from plain, good old-fashion English settlers and frontiersmen, MR has come to represent a real intellectual and cultural "home" since when I started reading it nearly a year ago.

I don't recall the exact instant I realized it, but there was a point when I realized that I felt more "connected", more patriotically united, a stronger sense of duty, to fellow "Anglo-Saxon" people in, say, Australia, than I did to many of my fellow Americans (legal and otherwise), like the flood of Hispanics I encounter on my drive to work every day. Indeed, it is not an intellectually realizable feeling--but it is a very real one, like the one that one has for one's family.

My reason for writing this is merely to point out to my fellow Americans that it is possible to step beyond "Americanism" (in the modern, degressive sense) and to become a real person, that is, to shed the embryonic bond to the modern, deeply unfree, American collective; to go beyond the mind numbing and thought suppressing mantras of "equality", "democracy", "universalism", "proposition nation-ism", and such dogmas, and become a proper person (not to be confused with an "individual"), with a people, a history, and ultimately, a future. We are not, in fact, doomed to exist merely as self-destructing cogs in the mechanisms of a proposition masquerading as a nation. If freedom means anything, it must include the right to throw a wrench into the spinning gears of this madness.

As I watch America slipping farther and farther from both its ethnic, national origin and founding people, and away from anything that I recognize, my hope is that we can rekindle a certain sense of who we are and where we come from. I have no desire to see an Anglo-Saxon EU equivalent made up of English speaking nations; however now is the time to put our heads together and either hang together or hang apart, regardless of where we live, be it in the UK, Australia, Canada, the US, or elsewhere.

Now let's get busy.

Blind Men and the Beltway

Katies Dad at American Kernal has a remarkable account of a discussion with a friend in the Beltway:

My friend consults to some prominent members of Congressman Tancredo's Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. She says that she constantly has to badger these members because special interests, particularly Big Agriculture, are refusing to pony up to those who supported Sensenbrenner's good bill.

I suggested to her that instead of recommending that congressmen ignore the desires of their constituencies, she should instead be imploring the reticent special interests to "think outside the box" and start promoting govermental incentives for alternatives to imported cheap labor.

"What?," she asked.

Well, if BigAg would start putting ideas on the table instead of simply being obstructionist, perhaps a win-win situation can be had. For instance, I suggested, why Isn't BigAg asking for tax incentives so that they can invest in the research and development into technical innovations that would do away with the need for hordes of stoop-laborers and replace them with more highly skilled (and paid) workers who would operate the new advanced machines that such incentives would surely lead to.

"Wow! I hadn't thought of that," she exclaimed. "I don't have an answer for that."

Well, of course you don't.

The interesting thing about this picture is that it illustrates the dangers and problems of a decentralized system, in this case one made up of atomized individuals pursuing what they believe to be their self interest, however with only very limited, local (in the mathematical sense) information.

Decentralized systems have certain benefits such as robustness and the lack of the information bandwidth constraints normally found in centralization. Decentralized systems also have disadvantages however; one of the biggest being the situation found by the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant by feel instead of sight. A good example of this is also that of a group of robots trying to navigate a maze; in a strictly decentralized sense, they would only have access to the information that they can detect locally, and thus have to take an essentially trial and error approach to the problem. With centralization or at least some form of hierarchy and information sharing, it becomes possible for each robot to benefit from the information of all the robots, so that the entire maze may be able to be constructed and solved analytically, thus giving the robots the correct path to follow the first time.

As the maze example illustrates, despite the robustness of decentralized systems, it is paradoxically quite easy to trick or confuse them.

On the other hand, strategy tends to belong to centralized, or hierarchal systems. The access to "big picture" or global information greatly facilitates forethought and the ability to anticipate those k + 1 changes.

One of the problems with atomized Western populations, where particularly for whites any form of group consciousness or collective self-interest is essentially prohibited, is that very quickly we arrive at the situation described above.

I might also note though that Islam seems to be fairly decentralized, as is the behavior of the Hispanic influx into the US. Both groups do however have the benefit of a strong sense of group consciousness which facilitates their ability to maximize not only their short term, personal self interest, but also their long term, collective interests.

Ultimate Choice

Chris Brand at IQ & PC links to a remarkably interesting and thoughtful essay in the London Review of Books which I recommend reading:

...Genocide may be more difficult than it looks, but that does not mean that it is wrong. There are good arguments for it, the strongest of which come from just-war theory. If you accept that wars fought as a last resort by legitimate authority with the sole intention of responding to unprovoked aggression with proportionate force are justifiable, then there are circumstances in which you may find yourself supporting genocide. If your adversary is unshakeably committed to a total war involving every member of the population in a struggle that brooks no surrender (and in the modern period most states have been committed, at least rhetorically, to just such an undertaking), then it follows that the war must continue until all the enemy are either dead or incapacitated. If they insist on fighting, you have to keep on killing them, and if they all keep on fighting, you will end up having to kill the lot.

...

If feeling genocidal is a symptom of what Boehm terms ‘human egalitarian syndrome’, is our abhorrence of genocide then the effect of a growing revulsion towards egalitarianism? Most modern victims have been perceived to be in possession of some form of capital to which they had no right. Many have indeed been socially or economically more advantaged than their persecutors – the educated and people in middlemen occupations being particularly at risk. But indigenous peoples, as the illegitimate occupiers of immense tracts of land, also fall within this category. And citizenship itself, as a form of legal and social capital, can provoke the same genocidal impulse if held by those who appear not to merit it. In almost every case, genocide is the attempt to eliminate free-riders, the pests and parasites of society.

In contrast, having duties without rights appears to be the best defence against genocide. One sentence rarely found in the annals of human history is: ‘And then they killed all their servants.’ The Spartans used to carry out an annual raid against the Helots, just to remind them who was in charge. But despite having the right to do so, slave owners rarely slaughtered their slaves. Even the most bloodthirsty reactionaries do not call for the annihilation of the working class. And illegal immigrants are not rounded up and deported en masse, because they are usually hard at work doing something beneath the dignity of a citizen.