Category: Uncategorized

The final translation

My favorite translator, William Weaver, has died at 90:

Deft in handling a variety of writing styles, from Calvino’s delicacy of language to Mr. Eco’s show-offy erudition, Mr. Weaver was prolific. He translated dozens of books, a dozen by Calvino alone, including “Invisible Cities,” which posits descriptive and philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and a collection of short stories, “Cosmicomics,” for which Mr. Weaver won a National Book Award for translation in 1969….

Even a partial list of the writers Mr. Weaver translated — which includes Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale, Oriana Fallaci, Ugo Moretti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Svevo — is, as Mr. Botstein wrote, “nothing short of astonishing.”

Mr. Weaver talked about his work in a 2000 interview in The Paris Review. “Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, buon giorno for instance,” he said. “How to translate that? We don’t say ‘good day,’ except in Australia. It has to be translated ‘good morning,’ or ‘good evening,’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘hello.’

“You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it’s taking place,” he continued, “because in some places they start saying buona sera — ‘good evening’ — at 1 p.m. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it’s evening for them. So someone could say buona sera, but you can’t translate it as ‘good evening’ because the scene is taking place at 3 p.m. You need to know the language, but, even more, the life of the country.”

What an epic and productive literary career. I think my next fiction read will have to be one of his translations of Eco or Calvino. That being said, having required several days and multiple consultations of dictionaries and native speakers alike to puzzle out a single Italian word coined by Eco, (celodurismo, in this case), I find it very difficult to accept that the simple words are harder.

Then again, I suppose it’s a lot easier when you can actually ask the great man what he was thinking when he coined it.

Mailvox: SF/F’s transideological malaise

It appears it is not only right-wing conservatives, libertarian extremists and Bible-thumping god-botherers who are thoroughly sick of the meatless, mindless, scalzified SF/F that is being pushed on them by the genre publishers:

I am on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you. I am a Marxist and an atheist, but I didn’t come here to debate politics or religion. Anyway, last year I started writing seriously and I thought I should get out there on the web and see what the “scene” is about right now, sci/fi and fantasy writers and markets and new fiction, especially short fiction. I constantly read sci/fi and fanstasy, but mostly from my collection of old paperbacks, Vance, Herbert, Howard, etc… I read just as much non-fiction from my local library. So I put my finger on the pulse. The experience was disheartening. New short fiction seems to place innovation over all other qualities possible in a particular piece, which means my desire to read a good story is likely to go unsatisfied. Also, the “scene” is completely preoccupied with identity.

And of course, I happened upon the Scalzi/Vox feud. I checked out both blogs. The verdict: Scalzi – rather dull and typical upper middle class views, Vox – incendiary but rigorous, consistent, and most importantly, often funny. As a Marxist I can’t resist good polemic, even from the other side.  I lurk about once a month.

Let me backtrack with a little explanation. Some people out there, perhaps not you, may confuse my radical leftism with the stuff going on out there. They would be wrong. As a Marxist, for me it is class, class, class. Class trumps race, gender, everything. Its all about wealth. The fact that “old white men” are holding alot of it is due to historical forces, not from their “whiteness”. In the 60’s and 70’s, the leftist preoccupation with class was replaced with race and gender issues, to the detriment of all concerned.  Old news, just spelling it out here for clarity’s sake.

So we get to now, and race and gender obsessed “liberal progressives” are such a harmful force in society that I, an actual socialist revolutionary, can enjoy you tormenting them on your blog, even though your political perspective is rooted in basic assumptions that are opposite my own. Strange days indeed. For liberal progressives, this would indicate I am a sexist racist, but as a white male I am already on their shitlist so whatever. I am a Marxist. I believe I am fighting the good fight. I am not going to get on my knees and lick boot, hoping for “ally” status. Eff that. The whole thing is a bizarre repackaging of original sin.

So when you put The Last Witchking out there for free, I thought why not and downloaded it. When it came up in the queue I dived in and I was floored. The stories were excellent. They entertained me. What else can I say? Opera Vita was incredible. There was a poignancy there I was not expecting. Suffused throughout is a certain ephemeral beauty, stately and linked with mortality. The subtlety belies tropes about limitations of the “male perspective” that are bandied about when the writing community weighs in on gender.  I haven’t seen religion done so convincingly and movingly in the genre since Herbert. I went ahead and read Magic Broken and enjoyed it thoroughly and then pulled the trigger on Throne for five bucks and now I am enjoying that.

It is really remarkable that your apparent congenital disorder, the inability to shut up or even tone it down, has disbarred you from the typical path to success as a writer.  I guess there is hope. I found your work via your soapbox. Despite my predilections toward the radical, I never let politics get in the way of personal relationships and now I have to add that it can’t dissuade me from enjoying fiction I like. Thanks for the books. I am hooked on Selenoth now, the antidote for my genre malaise. Please make it your goal to churn out volumes of the stuff for readers like me trying to survive this long winter.

That an avowed Marxist would enjoy my fiction is less surprising than it might sound. I am, after all, a radical, merely one with very different assumptions and objectives. And I’ve always gotten along much better with the hard left than with the soft, squishy, bourgeois progressive left; one of my independent studies was done under a hardcore Canadian socialist who regarded McDonalds as the capitalist devil incarnate.

Of course, this may be because the hard left is about the only group that hates the progressive left more than I do. One of the great satisfactions about being on the right-wing is the knowledge that even if we lose and the revolution finally arrives in its fullness, the useful idiots are going to be the first ones lined up against the wall and shot. And who can look at the way Wall Street has been raping the country and not feel the urge to raise a revolutionary flag; if that is capitalism, then I don’t want any part of it and I’m a libertarian!

But besides our obvious ideological and religious differences, I have to take some issue with the writer’s idea that it is my unwillingness to cower before the PC gods of publishing that have prevented me from following the conventional path. While my notoriety would presumably have made it easier for them to decline to publish me – which is theoretical anyhow because I do not have an agent and I have never submitted my work for publication to any of the various genre publishing houses – this actually has the situation backwards.

One reason that I have been so uncompromising and so unwilling to play along with the progressives is because I have known from the start that the substance of my fiction would prevent the mainstream publishers from publishing it. And I also knew I had no interest in writing the sort of tedious political crap they wanted to publish. So, there was no reason to muzzle myself because I knew there was no chance that they would publish books like The Chronicles of King David or Summa Elvetica no matter what I did or did not say. I can’t pose as either a hero or a victim because I never had anything to lose in that regard.

In fact, I consider myself incredibly lucky to not only have such strong support from intelligent readers across religious and ideological lines, but to be writing at a time when the gatekeepers are so impotent. All of us who write should be deeply grateful, whether it is to God or to History and the class struggle, to be alive at such a fascinating time! To be able to write exactly what one wants and be able to make it readily available to those who are potentially interested in it is all that any writer can really ask for. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.

Who are the savers being harmed?

Karl Denninger explains QE and its consequences for the economy:

Let’s simplify “QE” and “low interest rates” generally into the most-basic view — a lending transaction for $100,000.  We’ll say, for the sake of argument, that this is to buy a house, although the purpose of the loan is not really material.  We’ll further start with an interest rate of 7% — not particularly high in the historical context, nor particularly low….

We’ll take this $100,000 and borrow it for 30 years @ 7%.  This produces a payment of $661.44 per month for 360 months (30 years of 12 months each.)  The total paid is $238,119.87 over that time, so just over $138,000 is paid in interest, or just over $4,100 a year on average (this is misleading, however, as at the start of the loan most of the payment is interest and that falls off over time.)  We will further assume that this 7% rate reflects a reasonable return for the risk that you will not pay and that inflation will occur — that is, the rate is negotiated between the lender and borrower using all known facts and no lies or distortions.

Now let’s assume we “lower rates” (by any mechanism) but the risk does not materially change.  We lower them to 4% by employing “QE”.

The payment is now $475.83, or a total of $171,298.51 over 30 years.  Note that approximately $65,000 in interest was saved by the borrower… The borrower saves that $66,821.36 and can thus spend it on something else but every one of those dollars is not collected by the lender and thus he cannot spend them.

Net benefit?   Uh uh. 

Every dollar benefiting one person comes out of someone else’s back side.

Remember that Bernanke and Yellen have admitted that “savers might be harmed somewhat” by these policies.  They want you to think of “savers” as the little old lady who is stupid and has all of her money in CDs at the local bank — indeed, Yellen, Bernanke and Congress have even used that precise example.

But in fact that is intentionally misleading too.

Who do you think actually owns all that paper?  For example, the FHA, Fannie and Freddie paper?

Let me give you a hint: If you have an interest in some sort of “stable” means of income or support against catastrophe, ordinary or otherwise, you can find one of the persons who own that paper by getting up and going into the bathroom, staring into the mirror!

Are you a teacher?  Firefighter?  Cop?  Have any sort of pension at all?  Have a life insurance policy?  An annuity?  Have any sort of insurance at all?

That is where all those loans are.  They’re in bond mutual funds, they’re in insurance companies, they’re in pension plans and they’re in various entities that have long-dated obligations — because these are long-dated instruments.

This is why the pension plans and cities are all going bankrupt now. Their fate was obvious several years ago, and mathematically sealed long before that, but those preordained consequences are now coming to pass because QE is continually devouring the value of their remaining assets.

Keynesian manipulation of the economy has always been a short-sighted strategy dependent upon putting off today’s pain until tomorrow and counting on dying before tomorrow dawned. The magical thinkers don’t understand this; they simply cannot fathom why something that worked yesterday isn’t working today, hence their prescriptions for more of the same even when the same is causing the very problem they are intent on solving.

It’s interesting, because I’ve yet to hear anyone even attempt to describe a scenario where QE will be successful. All I’ve ever heard is that “we’ll stop when the economy magically recovers”.  Okay, fine, but that raises the obvious question: as a result of what?  People can’t spend money they don’t have. People can’t use credit they can’t repay. People can’t retire on bankupt pensions.

It appears Mr. Keynes’s long run has finally arrived.

Women Destroy SF

I must confess that I am rather enjoying the way in which my original assertion from 2005 has now become an established meme in the science fiction community.  Sure, they intend it in an ironic way, but the publication will almost certainly provide additional supporting evidence for my hypothesis that women have destroyed the SF/F literary subgenre by feminizing it.

Women Destroy SF — Special Issue

September 5, 2013 — It could be said that women invented science fiction; after all, Mary Shelley wrote what is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel (Frankenstein). Yet some readers seem to have this funny idea that women don’t–or can’t–write science fiction. Some have even gone so far as to accuse women of destroying science fiction with their girl cooties.

So to help prove how silly that notion is, Lightspeed is proud to announce that in 2014 we’ll be publishing a “Women Destroy SF” special issue, with a guest editor at the helm. More details to come soon, so watch this space!

I tend to suspect it is going to confirm the notion rather than prove how silly it is, but we shall await the evidence before judging it. I would also point out that the problem isn’t the girl cooties per se, but rather, the strong female preference for writing thinly disguised romance that is then sold as science fiction to men who are perfectly aware of the bait-and-switch. It’s not that women can’t write excellent fiction. They can, they have, and they do. But most women who are sufficiently solitary-minded to write are too didactic, too self-obsessed, too bitter about their low SMV value, and too little interested in science or any other intellectual concepts to successfully write in a literary format that is first and foremost driven by ideas.

As it happens, the publishing situation is actually much more dire and the destruction caused by women is considerably more widespread than many people imagine.

Consider this: as of 10 November, I have sold or given away 26,092 Selenoth books on
Amazon alone in the last 11 months. Those are books that women at not
one, but two, mainstream publishers were instrumental in declining to
publish, and as a result, those books have not appeared in a single
bookstore anywhere in the world.

Now, think about the
multiplier effect of a major publisher’s distribution channel compared
to that of a small independent, electronic-only publisher?  Even if it
is only 5x, that likely would have been enough to put A Throne of Bones in the top 5 percent of best-selling fantasy.  (This may be why the bestselling author who wrote to me said:
“I very much found myself wondering what would have happened had it
been
published by a large house with a marketing campaign behind it.”) And
all the time spent reading those 26 thousand books, which was not
inconsiderable, is time that was obviously not spent reading the various offerings of the mainstream publishers.

More
importantly, the money that would have been spent on the nonexistent
“multiplier books” was mostly not spent on other science fiction and
fantasy novels, but was instead spent on the wide variety of other
non-literary options available to the sort of men who make up the books’
primary market. And I am far from the only male-oriented writer who was shut out by the SF/F gatekeepers in favor of the scalzified material. This means that there a very good case to be made that
women have not only destroyed science fiction, but have also contributed significantly to the lower profits of the publishing industry as well as the ongoing collapse of the chain and local bookstores.

Troll Ban: Ann Morgan

Tex wrote: **Notice how he dodges and spins and spews venom like a snake?**

Which is rather much like Vox, spewing obscenity regarding my body parts and making death threats.


As for you, TS, I don’t think that Vox is a very good example of a Christian, neither is Roger a very good example of an atheist. There is no evidence of God, but there are very good reasons to think there is a God (possibly more than one). Among which are that if you believe in evolution, it is absurd, arrogant, and anthropomorphic to think that human beings are the smartest and most powerful things in existence. The existence of something with abilities and intelligence so powerful that it might rightly be called ‘God’ is a very distinct possibility. I find it a bit silly that those who believe in evolution think it somehow stops with our species, planet, or universe. Limited thinking, lol.


However, by the same token, it is also arrogant and anthropomorphic to think that ‘God’ somehow hates exactly the same sorts of behavior that people do. Which would be rather like you hating the same sorts of things a brine shrimp does. If someone’s proposed “God” hates the same people they do, they don’t have a religion, they have a justification. They get to hate people and feel proud of it, rather than ashamed.


Religion, ultimately, is a magnifier. Possibly because of something in human psychology, possibly because a person will attract the sort of spirits that are in accordance with their real nature, regardless of what name they call them by. If a person is good, religion will make them better. If a person is evil and unrepentent, religion will make them worse.


Josh wrote: **You’re a freaking drama queen**


That might very well be, but my being a ‘drama queen’ does not alter the fact that Vox has used obscenity and death threats against me, without my previously using them against him. Nor does it explain why his version of venom spewing is qualitatively any different than Roger’s. Other than your wanting it to be.

Ann Morgan: I don’t think that Vox is a very good example of a Christian …

Stickwick: By what measure do you judge this?

Well, that’s an interesting question. I suppose your standard of measure does make a difference. If a Christian is supposed to try to act like Christ, then Vox is not a very good example of one. On the other hand, if a Christian is supposed to be full of hate, use obscenity, make death threats, and think it perfectly fine to kill 2 year olds if what they call ‘God’ commands it, then Vox would be a very good Christian.

Sigyn wrote: ** Ann demands that Christians behave according the parts
of the Bible she likes, and ignore the parts she doesn’t. She can’t make
up her mind.**

Yet Christians themselves behave according to the
parts of the bible that they like, and ignore the parts they don’t. And
can’t give any good reason why the parts they like and the parts they
ignore are more valid than the different parts that other people like or
ignore.


And, btw, your insult against me does not change the
validity of my statement that if being a ‘Christian’ means behaving like
Christ, then Vox is not a very good Christian, but if being a Christian
means being full of hate, using obscenity, make death threats, and
think it perfectly fine to kill 2 year olds if what they call ‘God’
commands it, then Vox would be a very good Christian.


I’ve also
noticed that when I say something that people here don’t like, but can’t
disprove, they generally resort to obscenity and various insults
regarding me.

George wrote: **What, if anything, would you accept as proof?**

Something
which, at the least, precludes the possibility of having been created
by present or past human beings, or by nature (however great the odds).
Or simply being written accounts by those who could have been lying or
deluded. As I’ve mentioned before a 3000 year old tablet engraved with
the 10 commandments and made entirely of a pure, stable, transuranic
element would definitely get my attention, as it would eliminate the
possibility of liars, delusion, and present or past human beings.
Although it would include the possibility of time travellers or aliens,
as well as God. Though admittedly, sufficiently powerful time
travellers, aliens, spirits, and other things that can demonstrate that
they can accomplish certain tasks, whatever the means they might use to
do it, would probably be deserving of the name ‘God’, at least in the
terms of the power they wield.


It would also be more impressive
if it were not the case that those who talk loudest about being
‘Christians’ are also those who most often advocate killing, rape,
infanticide, genocide, and spew out obscenities about my speaking out my
vagina. If that is the end result that the practice of their religion
has on them, it doesn’t seem to be very worthwhile.

Beau wrote: **You’re wrong. You can’t differentiate a quote of another
party from an original authored thought. You need to get a refund on
your education. You completely missed I was leveling criticism at that
crass remark. So you morphed it into yet another LOOK At ME…” blah,
blah, blah. No, Ann, you shouldn’t.**

Beau, I’m well aware of
what you wrote and what Pox wrote. And your attempt to evade having to
deal with why VD’s ‘crass retorts’ are any better than Pox’s ‘crass
retorts’ by instead criticizing my grammar has been noted.

MPC wrote: **Ann, I’ve set foot in a church twice in my entire life, and not by
choice, so I’m not what you’d call pious. However, I can say from a
perfectly secular perspective you are observably a stupid, insufferable,
and above all, DULL, annoying cunt.**

 That’s probably preferable to what a lot of people are.

So why did the twat think Vox threatened her life? I must admit I never read her twattle too closely either.

“Me neither, but I always read Vox’s comments and had to follow the dialogue, in which the following transpired:

“Concerning
an apocalyptic scenario, Morgan stated she’d find the smartest gang,
and of course, they’d all be super honored to have her join them because
of her special survival skills (as if nobody else in this world knows)
in finding edible things, to which Vox promptly responded that his gang
would shoot her upon uttering her first sentence.

“His reply was
short, brutal and hilarious, but the threat, like everything in her
reality, was a figment of her delusional, twisted imagination.
Regardless, that didn’t stop her from repeatedly referring to this
imaginary death threat.”

Otherly Insane America

“The transnational progressive expects to maintain and expand modern, enlightened, prosperous, liberal society while opening up the borders that shelter that society to unlimited numbers of the least assimilable and most reactionary, most traditional and hidebound, least economically productive cultures on the face of the Earth. This wouldn’t be so bad, or so insane, did they not at the same time insist that nothing be done to even try to assimilate the immigrants from those cultures to modern, enlightened, liberal values.

“The Tranzi also insists on enlightening the rest of the world, but rejects any and every means that might actually work.

“This, friend, is the other kind of insanity.”

– from A Desert Called Peace, by Tom Kratman

As the novelist observes, the America in which we live is presently insane. It is not the insanity of Einstein, in which different results are expected from doing the same thing over and over again, but rather the insanity of Kratman’s Corollary: “Insanity also consists of doing everything differently and expecting the same result.”

Read the rest at Absolute Rights.

It’s no mystery why Kratman is hated by the Left even more than I am. Kratman’s work is categorized as military science fiction, but the reality is that he writes the same sort of ideological fantasy that most modern science fiction writers commit, but from a pro-civilization perspective.

The ideological barbarism of the Stephen Goulds and John Scalzis of the world is utterly and intrinsically opposed to Kratman’s advocacy of civilization. Unlike the short-sighted, cognitively self-contradictory magical thinkers of the Left, Kratman possesses the ideological Key of Solomon: actions always have consequences.

And unlike most on the side of civilization, Kratman understands that civilized men will ultimately have to adopt sub-civilized measures if sanity is to be restored and Western civilization is to be saved. This, of course, is absolutely terrifying to the barbarians, who know perfectly well that they cannot survive any battle that is fought on anything close to even terms, which is precisely why they devote themselves entirely to convincing civilized men to lay down their intellectual arms.

Mailvox: don’t struggle

TS writes of his difficulties in attempting to find belief in the existence of God:

Vox, I’ve read your blog for quite some time now and have enjoyed it immensely. Right now I am a struggling theist. More and more I am doubting the existence of God and it’s plaguing my thoughts and causing some serious depression.

My biggest hurdle in my mind right now is the fact that you can’t see God. You come across as very intelligent so I ask you personally: what helped you get past the fact that you can’t see God or hear from him. My mind continues to tell me I am being irrational for believing in a life form I can’t see. Am I missing something?  Is this truly a matter of “blind faith” as an atheist would mockingly say? Your thoughts are much appreciated. I genuinely want rational reasons that can help me get past this mental hurdle

It has become apparent to me that there are three primary causes for atheism. One is a simple neural anomaly where the atheist lacks something in the brain that is necessary for some forms of belief. This doesn’t merely relate to belief in God, but also in the ability to connect with other beings, hence the strong correlation between atheism and higher levels on the autism spectrum.

The second cause produces the most common and irritating variety, the intellectual perma-adolescent. This is the Religion Minus variety, which is nothing more than a parasitic Do What Thou Wilt Society. Combine it with the first cause and one has the typical New Atheist: smug, juvenile, and socially autistic.

The third cause is what I would describe as a failure of understanding. It is, I submit, a category error at its core. To me, it seems quite literally crazy to refuse to believe in ANYTHING simply because one has not seen it or heard it. We live in an age of virtual reality, where what we see and hear are entirely false. We live in an age of quantum physics, where what happens on one side of a galaxy has chaotic and unknown, but theoretically observable effects on the other side of it.

So, to think that because one has never personally seen nor heard something is any sort of indication that it doesn’t exist strikes me as solipsism of the first order. As for me, I have absolutely no problem whatsoever in believing in God’s existence. There is nothing to get past. Perhaps this paragraph explaining why I am a Christian, taken from my exchange of letters with Luke of Common Sense Atheism, will help you understand my perspective on the readily observable fact of God’s existence.

Why am I a Christian? Because I believe in evil. I believe in
objective, material, tangible evil that insensibly envelops every single
one of us sooner or later. I believe in the fallen nature of Man, and I
am aware that there is no shortage of evidence, scientific,
testimonial, documentary, and archeological, to demonstrate that no
individual is perfect or even perfectible by the moral standards
described in the Bible. I am a Christian because I believe that Jesus
Christ is the only means of freeing Man from the grip of that evil. God
may not be falsifiable, but Christianity definitely is, and it has
never been falsified. The only philosophical problem of evil that could
ever trouble the rational Christian is its absence; to the extent that
evil can be said to exist, it proves not only the validity of
Christianity but its necessity as well. The fact that we live
in a world of pain, suffering, injustice, and cruelty is not evidence of
God’s nonexistence or maleficence, it is exactly the worldview that is
described in the Bible. In my own experience and observations, I find
that worldview to be far more accurate than any other, including the
shiny science fiction utopianism of the secular humanists.

My advice to TS is to stop struggling to understand how God functions or why God hasn’t submitted to a personal belief audit and start simply experiencing the effects of God in this fallen world.

Stand outside in the cold autum breeze, close your eyes, spread your arms, and feel the unseen wind on your face. Read the Book of Proverbs, read the latest professional manual on child-rearing, written with the benefit of more than two thousand years of collective human experience, then go to a park and observe the children interacting with their parents. Go drop one rock on top of another 500 times and do your best to convince yourself that all the life you see around you began as a result of a singular accidental collision. Go to a funeral of a stranger, observe the grief of the friends and family, and tell yourself that the rearrangement of atoms involved in the transition of the deceased from life to death was of no more material import or significance than the shattering of a rock into dust.

Speak to a murderer and ask him to tell you why he committed his horrific crimes. Look at the pictures of the aftermath. Then look deep into his eyes and try to tell yourself that neither good nor evil exist.

Immerse yourself in the atheist arguments with your eyes and your mind open. Not until you fully understand them, not until you reconstruct them from their foundational assumptions, can you grasp how superficial and foolish they are from a purely rational perspective.

Empirical mysticism isn’t a path I would recommend for everyone, but the excessively logical often struggle with the reality of the mystery. They simply cannot accept that Man is not capable of formulating the questions, let alone finding the answers. That is why allowing themselves to experience and accept the manifold mysteries of life, the universe, and everything can be necessary for them to permit themselves to be convicted of things not seen.

In the end, one is advised to make The Castrate’s Choice: It is so or it is not so. Because the life lived seated on a fence makes for a poorly lived one. Choose, and then live accordingly.

Mailvox: A European perspective

A Spanish reader weighs in concerning my comments on the different challenges faced by Western civilization in Europe and North America:

I have been following your posts for several years and, although I never had an interest in fantasy, I just started reading The Wardog’s Coin. (I figured that since I enjoy so much your thoughts on economics, politics, and gender issues, I should also check the fiction.)

After reading you post titled “Why there is hope for Europe” I would like to share some thoughts with you about the differences between the situations on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps I should begin this by mentioning that I am European, Spanish to be precise.

In your article, you enumerate these three differences:

1.    Parliamentary systems
2.    Trans-ideological nationalism
3.    No popular pro-immigrant mythology

I agree with the first, not so much with the other two. But, most importantly, I would add two that I consider crucial.

1.    America’s immigration problem is with Spanish-speaking (mostly) Christians, whereas Europe’s is with (mostly) Muslims. I am really surprised that you did not include this one among your three differences.

The Americans’ memory of the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War is nothing compared to the Europeans’ memory of centuries fighting against Islam (almost 800 years in the case of Spain). Not to sound patronizing, but can an American wrap his head around the idea of a national identity forged in a conflict that triples the age of the United States of America (711 A.D. to 1492 vs. 1776 to 2013)? Some things are so big that they are routinely overlooked.

An American notices a South American moving into his neighborhood and he may have some very valid concerns, if nothing else, as a taxpayer. But he never really fears that Juan Garcia is going to show up one day in a subway station and blow himself up killing dozens of innocents. Our American John Doe has never witnessed Juan Garcia peeing in broad daylight on the façade of an American church. John might fear that his baby girl will marry Juan and then he’d have to attend a Catholic wedding, he does not fear that his baby girl will spend the rest of her life in a burka. He may fear that his grandchildren will play soccer rather than American football, he does not fear that they will learn how to behead infidels (like John himself).

In Europe, you find croissants, which were created in the image of a crescent to be eaten in defiance of the Muslim invaders centuries ago. You find Spanish families named Matamoros, literally ‘Moor-slayer’. And so on. In Europe, a nationalist party has plenty of symbolism to use against immigrants. There is absolutely nothing in the American culture against South Americans even remotely resembling that deeply rooted pathos. The closest thing being what? The ballad of El Álamo?

Plus, a South American is not going to tell our John Doe to stop eating burgers, but a Muslim cannot tolerate jamón, and to a Spaniard jamón is several orders of magnitude more important than the national flag, the national anthem, and the King, combined.

Worse still, after two devastating world wars and a traumatic cold war dividing the continent, Europeans happily (hippily?) embraced this kumbayah idea that if you don’t annoy others then they will leave you in peace. This was not meant only between France and Germany or between the metropolis and the former colonies, but in a vaguely general universal sense. So it is now particularly vexing to receive so much animosity from some immigrants (while the official politically correct tune goes on unaltered). America has not at all gone through such an emotional roller-coaster; you see, it happened over there.

So John Doe is not that concerned; certainly not as concerned as his European counterparts.

2.    If I am not very mistaken, immigration in the US is very concentrated in the Sunbelt. Whereas In Europe, immigration in Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany is as much an issue as it is in Spain and Italy. This would be equivalent to Alaska, the Dakotas, and Vermont having as much an issue with immigrants as Texas and California. Clearly, they don’t. (Again, this is not to overlook the federal fiscal implications.)

Plus, European towns are typically much more densely populated and geographically contiguous, so much so that you can actually walk from one neighborhood to another, so when a neighborhood suffers it is much more evident to all and so it is easier to genuinely worry, to empathize (even if the media tries to ignore it). But urban sprawl in the US, I suspect, has had a detrimental effect on what Ibn Khaldun called Asabiyyah, the nation’s social cohesion, by creating some sort of watertight compartments. An American neighborhood goes to hell and the people over the county border do not even notice because, to begin with, they’d need to drive there to notice but they never go (and the media dutifully ignores it). By the way, I think this phenomenon also helps explain why American Conservatives in the last presidential election where so mistaken about their real chances, they have lost sight of the nation by living inside a monochromatic bubble (Dems too, but their aggregated Blue State bubbles are demographically larger, it seems).

I think these two points are much more powerful than the pro-immigrant mythology. Indeed, it was, in part, because of the strength of this mythology all across Europe that so many nations made it so easy for immigrants to move in.

Finally, all this relates to perceptions, not necessarily actual threats, and to how easily and how much political parties can gain from that fear and what they do with that. Almost every Muslim I have personally met in Europe is too busy making a living to spoil it by going radical. And since they often live in several European countries before they settle down it is quite normal for many of them to speak several European languages. And let’s not forget that it was not them who drafted or even voted for all the idiotic legislation that’s gotten us into this mess (ditto for South Americans in the US). Obviously if it was all bad news then all the continent would be soaked in blood once again. But the really amusing twist (and isn’t History rich in amusing twists?) is that these growing nationalist parties have much more in common with what most adult Muslims have seen in their own homelands than with the political parties that have dominated Europe since 1945. Perhaps they will feel more at home? It’s not a cruel cheap joke. After all, General Franco, won the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) with the help of the African volunteers, his beloved Moorish Guards. Perhaps the key to real multicultural understanding was not to be found in kumbayah Social-democracy but in something better time-tested.

He’s entirely correct to call me to account on my failure to mention the demographic differences concerning the two invasions, especially since I’ve written about them in the past. Most Americans are astonished to learn that Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the European population, whereas Hispanics make up around 20 percent of the U.S. population.

As one American friend was surprised to observe, she saw more Muslims on her last visit to Minneapolis than she did in Rome.  Londonistan and Amstarabia no more indicate the Muslim occupation of Europe than New York City proves that most Americans are Jews.

That being said, our Spanish friend is incorrect about the invasion of the U.S. being primarily concentrated in the Sunbelt. It is certainly most severe in the four Sand States, but when Somalis are being elected in St. Paul and entire neighborhoods are being renamed to reflect who is now controlling them, the idea that the problem is localized is clearly incorrect. To put it in the proper perspective, there are only about 4x more Muslims in Europe per capita than there are Somalis in Minnesota. 

The rule of law

It’s fascinating to see how the sacred and inviolate law proves to be so mutable in practice:

Bowing to pressure, President Barack Obama intends to permit continued
sale of individual insurance plans that have been canceled because they
failed to meet coverage standards under the health care law, officials
said Thursday.


The decision was designed to ease the impact on millions of consumers
who have received cancellation notices in recent weeks, and also to try
to redeem a presidential promise that anyone who wanted to keep his
coverage under the law would be allowed to do so.


An announcement was expected in late morning.


Officials said the president would announce that insurers could continue
to sell existing individual policies to current customers for 2014,
even in cases of plans that had been ruled inadequate.

In other words, he’s buying the techs a year to fix the system. Then everyone will lose their coverage again. Truly, this is conclusive evidence of Obama’s political mastery. No one, NO ONE, saw this fiendishly clever move coming.

Police your institutions

This is more evidence that it is absolutely necessary to strictly police your organizations for hostile ideologies. It’s very hard for normal people to comprehend this, but leftist parasites will readily devote years, even decades, to quietly worming their way in before showing their true colors.

The editor of Guns & Ammo magazine apologized to readers and resigned shortly after the writer of a column advocating gun control was fired this week.

Dick Metcalf, a well-known television host and gun writer, was canned after penning a column in favour of gun control in the magazine’s December issue. The outrage then prompted editor Jim Bequette to issue an apology and resign.

In the apology, Mr Bequette said he hoped the column ‘would generate a healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights,’ but then said he was wrong and asked for forgiveness.

Mr Metcalfe, widely visible in the gun community, has written about guns and hosted gun-oriented television shows for decades, but that did not save him from reader backlash.

Whether it is a smug-faced atheist schoolboy infiltrating a nominally Christian school or a gun-grabber seeking to become the voice of the gun media, the techniques and the tactics are always the same. And they are active in your church, in your synagogue, in your school, and in your place of work.

If you don’t actively look for them and root them out, sooner or later, they will take over. Always pay particular attention to those who are unusually eager to help and happy to lend a hand. Being driven by ideology, they often have the motivation to take on all the dirty little jobs that no one else wants to do and secure their positions by making themselves indispensable. They usually present as being non-ideological, but put some pressure on to determine their real views and they’ll usually reveal themselves.

Notice how Bequette tries to present a non-ideological justification: a healthy exchange of ideas. They always hide behind a facade of being reasonable.