Category: Uncategorized

The importance of stories

Sarah Hoyt explains why it is so important to resist the media mainstream and the stories it is telling:

That wish for normality, that desire to belong to a group is what causes the whole concept of “normal.”  I don’t know anymore who I was reading the other day, when a character says “What if nobody really is normal?  What if everyone is just pretending?”

I’d say it makes no difference, really.  Partly because the concept of normal and people acting externally normal makes it easier for rulers to control you and particularly to hold over you the threat of exclusion form the group; and partly because eventually you internalize what you pretend to be….

In the same way the slow, trickle, trickle, trickle distorts our impression of normal too.  It’s become impolite to say in public you’re a Tea Partier, for instance.  The slur of sexual innuendo, followed by never substantiated rumors of violence, have stained the name, though there is no truth at all in it.  At the same time, unless you are with friends and know them well enough, it is against politeness to refer to Occupiers as “Louse infested would be communists” – though it is true of the vast majority of them.

Because that’s not how the stories present those groups.  And people want to belong to the majority – to the “normal.”

Even outliers, people who step out, can break and fall back into the norm.  A great example is that blog that shall never be mentioned, but which has turned completely around in the last 5 years or so.  I was talking to a friend about that and wondered if it was always a false flag operation, designed to turn before 08 and confuse the issue.  He said maybe but – and he’s a right outlier, by virtue of what he is, the same I am – he thought what it actually was just pressure.  Because the owner of that blog is an artist in a leftist community.  The pressure to “return to normal” just broke him at last.

In my case, of course, the more pressure to return to normal the more I explode in weird directions, but growing up when and where I did with non-pierced ears and wearing pants (for the UK visitors that means trousers) I was sort of like the boy named Sue and learned to fight before I could walk.  The shock is not that I won’t return to “normal”; the shock is that I managed to semi-pretend for ten years.

Of course, the most effective strategy would be to pretend to be of them and change it from the inside, but I’m not sure it’s possible.  Religions take time to subvert and cultures take time to change, and we’re nearing the end of that time.  (No?  Look at our economy.  Or our feral children.)

Christianity, while it was replacing the old culture, at least was aware of how the world works.  The culture the Marxists seek to impose doesn’t fit ANY real world with real people, not even the places where they won.  To be “normal” people are going around pretending to believe things that simply aren’t so, like that anyone wanting to look after himself and his is “greedy” and must have stolen what he has; that women are physically stronger than men, and more independent in spirit; that children are wiser than their parents; that everyone must have sex all the time, or they’ll go mad; that every culture in the world is superior to ours.

No one sane can believe any of these even for a minute, if they examine it.  But people don’t.  They just try to “act normal” – which is bringing down Western civilization.  That part might be a feature not a bug, except that communist regimes in the end are like all the old empires: they must feed off healthy societies near them.  If they destroy the healthy societies, the world will go down to a long darkness, until the culture changes.

When both a European immigrant to America and an American immigrant to Europe, two writers who have never met, who have never read each other’s books, and who have considerably different opinions on a number of policies and issues provide almost identical warnings concerning the cancerous societal effect of what is presently being pushed as “normal”, even the most enthusiastic supporter of the proposed new normal should be inspired to, at the very least, consider rethinking his enthusiasm.

Because moral degradation is the new normal. Is the nihilism of Martin, Bakker, and Abercrombie truly to be preferred to the humble heroism of Tolkien? Has the progressive and privileged white preachiness of Rapey McRaperson genuinely produced better science fiction than the libertarian idealism of Robert Heinlein? Are the pornographic necro-bestial fantasies of Laurell Hamilton better plotted or more psychologically relevant than the modest Christian piety of Ellis Peters and Agatha Christie?  Is the YA work of Stephanie Meyer as thought-provoking or as edifying as the children’s novels of CS Lewis?

And if the stories of this new and progressive normal are so uniformly pallid and cancerous when viewed in comparison with the stories of the old and traditional normal, how can anyone credibly suppose that its reality will not prove equally diseased and devolutionary?

There is power in the old stories. That is why the gatekeepers of progress are so intent on preventing them from being told.  This is why it is important to continue telling them, and why I encourage those who hold to the traditions of the civilized, Christian West to give the works of those authors listed on the sidebar as Standout SF Authors and Friends of Narnia a shot.

So much to learn

Jared Diamond, the great prophet of geographical destiny, tells the West that it has much to learn from the tribal people of Papua New Guinea

“”I believe the few remaining tribes and nomad groups left on the
planet have a great deal to teach us,” he says and it is this belief
that inspired The World Until Yesterday.  Some tribal
customs, such as widow-strangling, will not be missed, of course. “We
should not romanticise traditional societies,” he says. “There are
horrible things that we want to avoid, but there wonderful things that
we should emulate.”

Take the example of child rearing. Far from
being harsh towards children, many tribes and groups adopt highly
permissive attitudes. “I mean permissive in that it is an absolute no-no
to punish a child. If a mother or father among African pygmies hits a
child, that would be grounds for divorce. There is no physical
punishment allowed at all in these societies. If a child plays with a
sharp knife and waves it around, so be it. They will cut themselves on
some occasions, but society figures it is better for the child to learn
the hard way early in life. They are allowed to make their own choices
and follow their own interests.””

I consider his theses to be absolutely absurd, but then again, there may be something to be said for the wise people of Papua New Guinea’s vigorous response to U.S. academics.

“A U.S. academic has been gang raped in Papua New Guinea by nine armed men who hacked off her blonde hair and left her husband tied naked to a tree. The 32-year-old woman, who was conducting research into exotic birds in a remote forest on Karkar Island, was walking along a bush track with her husband and a guide on Friday when they were set upon by the gang armed with knives and rifles. Her husband and the guide were stripped and bound by the men, who then used a bush knife to hack off the woman’s hair before raping her in a terrifying ordeal lasting 20 minutes.”

It would certainly make the average East Coast cocktail party more lively if the sort of overeducated midwits who take Diamond at face value were to follow the example of the noble people of Papua New Guinea in this regard.

Now, I realize that many doubt my thesis that most of the desirable tenets of Christian civilization will not survive in post-Christian society, but note that in Diamond, we already have a well-regarded, much-honored academic overtly advocating a return to many pagan, pre-civilized customs. But it never seems to occur to those who eagerly anticipate Western post-Christianity that those raised in a pagan society without Christian customs and strictures will not necessarily retain the civilized customs that are inculcated in the secularist or pagan raised in a Christian society.

It is easy to say, well, we’ll keep the Western strictures against widow-strangling, witch-burning, and academic-raping, we’ll just toss the ones against homosexual-marrying, public fornication, polygamy, and letting children play with loaded guns… wait a minute! The brutal reality is that a society in which most children are “allowed to make their own choices and follow their own interests” is a society where the values, and the resulting societal strictures, will eventually be decided by those semi-feral children and not their overly permissive parents.

What has long been decried by the civilized Christian West as “the cowardly act of animals” – how very raciss and judgmental – may well become the next “new normal”. No one should be so foolish as to believe that behavioral change on a societal level is either predestined or readily controlled by government bureaucracy. It is easier to destroy than create; it is easier to degrade than strengthen. The progressives who proudly proclaim that the youth of today are much more open to “gay marriage” should keep in mind that in the not-too-distant future, those formerly open-minded youths may well find themselves position of the disregarded, close-minded elderly, listening in horror as the progressives of tomorrow proudly proclaim that the youth are much more open to “sexual services on demand”.

Rabbit logic in action

“Branding terrorists as LOSERS, not villains, not monsters, not fanatics, not foreigners, not religious fanatics —> a win.”
– Ana Marie Cox

This is a revealing and educational statement. It demonstrates both the priorities and the intrinsic solipsism of the average rabbit.  To a rabbit, the thought of being labeled an all-caps LOSER is the ultimate evil and everything from religious faith to national identity will be readily cast aside in order to avoid that dreadful fate.  Being a loser, after all, is only one step away from being cast forth into the outer darkness outside the warren. Living in fear as it does, the rabbit genuinely cannot imagine that the not-rabbit does not feel the same way.

The rabbit believes that if the not-rabbit only understood, truly understood, that all the rabbits are calling the not-rabbit is a LOSER, (or RSHD), he will be so overcome with remorse and shame at his ostracism that he will stop slaughtering people, (or making John Scalzi feel bad about himself), in order to avoid the pain of that terrible, awful, unbearable state.

The fact that this tactic has never, ever worked on a not-rabbit, (for example, the ritual denunciation of people willing to give their lives in suicide attacks as “cowards” doesn’t appear to have any effect in reducing the frequency of such attacks), because, as always, material results are much less important than the rabbit’s ability to feel it is a contributing and valued member of the warren who is Doing Something.

In a world of wolves

There is a need for big dogs with sharp teeth to guard the sheep, especially the little lambs:

Rembrandt’s phone rang at 3:15p.m. on a Saturday. He was on his way home from his grandson’s karate tournament, about 5 miles from his Mesa home.

It was Sassy. A BACA kid was in trouble.

Her road name is Music, and she’s 10. She belonged to a BACA chapter in another state but is now living in Arizona with her grandmother. That makes her Sassy’s and Rembrandt’s kid now.

Her abuser is in jail, but his family members had tracked the girl down in Arizona and were banging on the grandmother’s front door, demanding that she turn the girl over to them, shouting up at the second-floor window where the child was huddled in her bedroom. Her grandmother called BACA and then dialed 911.

The bikers know the drill well. Rembrandt called those who live closest to him – Rock, Uno and Fat Daddy. He stopped to change out of his grandpa clothes – shorts, T-shirt and sandals – and put on his biker garb – jeans, boots, leather vest, holster and handgun.

The bikers carry weapons on stakeouts only when there is a threat against a child and they feel that as citizens they also could be threatened. Otherwise, Rembrandt says, they do not wear weapons around children. He says most of the bikers are licensed to carry concealed weapons.

Rembrandt stuffed water bottles into his saddle bags and jumped on his 2000 purple-and-orange Indian Chief.

By 3:40 p.m., the four men were on their way to Music, the rumble of their bikes announcing their arrival. Music’s grandmother rushed outside when she heard them, hugging Rembrandt and giving him a piece of notebook paper with a description of the people and their license-plate number.

Sheriff’s deputies had been there, she said, and had escorted the people out of the neighborhood. But it is a public street, and law-enforcement officers just don’t have the manpower to stay for long. She feared that once the deputies left, the people would be back.

She was right. But when they did return later that evening, they saw something different: four big bikers, all wearing shades even in the dimming light, their motorcycles backed into the mouth of the driveway.

Rock had something resembling a cannon strapped to his leg; Rembrandt wore his gun on his hip.

To someone trying to mess with a little girl, a group of large, strong bikers sends a certain message, Rembrandt says. “It just has a different feel than a cop,” he says. More unpredictable, maybe.

“Cops are actually handcuffed by specific rules and laws that we are not. A cop has to work within a framework,” Rembrandt says. “You can flip off a cop. You don’t want to flip off Rock.” Just knowing that a biker doesn’t have to follow rules or honor boundaries can intimidate a person trying to make trouble.

That night, Music’s grandmother pitched a small tent in her granddaughter’s bedroom, right under the window, so the little girl could look out the window whenever she wanted to see the bikers at the end of the driveway.

Bikers guarded the house in shifts for the next 2 1/2 days. Some rode two hours from Tucson, kept watch for eight hours and then rode home again.

They talked in low voices, and once Music was asleep, the red embers of their cigarettes glowed in the dark.

Bikers Against Child Abuse is an example of the vast superiority of the libertarian model based on good people freely contributing their time and energy to other individuals in their community to the statist model of permitting a parasite class to forcibly extracting resources from everyone and pay itself to pretend to address the problem through government regulations and bureaucracy.

I thought I’d post this since it strikes me as the sort of activity that some of the Ilk might find to be fulfilling, assuming any of you are capable of passing the required background checks.  BACA seems to go in more for road bikes and handguns than crotch rockets and fully tricked-out .50 caliber rifles with 4th Gen scopes, though.

It’s a good cause. Sometimes, all that courage requires is the certain knowledge that somewhere out there, someone is looking out for you.

Mailvox: rhetoric is not science

Michael Z. Williamson takes a page from the true faithful of global warming and Keynesian economics by attempting to defend what is supposed to pass for science with pure rhetoric:

Watching Creationists criticize evolutionary theory is like watching the Brady Bunch criticize the Heller Decision. It would be cute if they didn’t take themselves so seriously, and pose a serious threat to society.

What I find amusing about this is that I was an evolutionary skeptic long before I was a Christian.  And one of the primary reasons I was a skeptic is because as absurd as some of the arguments presented by the creationists struck me, no evolutionist ever demonstrated an ability to address the questions posed to them.  Instead, they always – always – attempted to discuss the Book of Genesis, the age of the Earth, Christianity, the public school system, or some other topic totally unrelated to the one at hand.

That is why I am still a skeptic concerning the secularism’s epic myth, despite having read every book ever published by Richard Dawkins, despite having read Wilson, and Gould, and Shermer, and Hauser, and a number of other well-regarded evolutionary popularizers.  At this point, it might be more accurate to say I am an evolutionary skeptic because I have read those books and been astounded by the obvious logical flaws, evasions, and handwaving that I have encountered in them.

But since Mike is a Standout Author, and therefore capable of exceeding the customary limitations of discussion point-repeating progressives, I assume he is able to rise above the mere rhetoric and actually defend evolutionary theory.  Let’s find out by asking him six simple questions that should be no problem for any man with a solid grasp of the subject.

  1. How do creationists “pose a serious threat to society”?
  2. There are an estimated 1,263,186 animal species and 326,175 plant species in the world.  Assuming the age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years, what is the average rate of speciation?
  3. How many mutations, on average, are required per speciation?
  4. What scientifically significant predictive model relies primarily upon evolution by natural selection?
  5. Which of the various human sub-species is the most evolved; i.e. modified by mutation and natural selection from the most recent common human ancestor? Which is the least evolved?
  6. Is the theory of evolution by natural selection strengthened or weakened by the claim that most DNA is devoid of purpose?

And Stickwick, who happens to be both a Christian and a physicist, beat me to showing how Mike’s attempt to tar all religious people as simplistic binary thinkers was not only demonstrably false, but amusingly inept:

One of the (many) major problems with religion is that its followers insist there has to be a right and wrong answer, and only one of each.

2 + X = (more than 5). Solve for X. One answer only, please.

“There is only one answer: X > 3. Every other possible answer is wrong: it’s not X = 3 and it’s not X < 3.

It’s
absurd to point to our limited understanding of nature and say that
since one person had it partially right and someone else had it
partially right, therefore there is more than one answer. You don’t know
that. And you’ll be hard pressed to build a convincing case, let alone
prove, that there is ultimately more than one right answer to something.
Science doesn’t proceed that way. Also, since when have religious
people insisted there is only one wrong answer?”

Mr. Williamson, with all due respect, you don’t appear to realize that you are not only dealing with a number of people here who are smarter than you are, but are also better educated in science than you are. It may help to keep in mind that at Vox Popoli, those who live by the rhetoric tend to die quickly and brutally by the dialectic.

Here the rhetoric is only used to dance on the grave afterward.

Second bomber surrounded

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found alive under a boat in a backyard in Watertown by police using thermal imaging. Police are trying to figure out how to get him to surrender.

PZ Myers throws out Darwin

As I have predicted for years that they would, biologists are beginning to turn away from Darwin’s dangerous idea of evolution by natural selection.  Even self-styled champions of evolution such as PZ Myers have reached the point of giving up on their erstwhile secular saint:

We aren’t using Darwin’s model anymore; he had no accurate notion of how inheritance worked, for instance — genes and alleles, the stuff of most modern theory, are not present anywhere in his works. “Darwinian” is also problematic. It does have a specific, technical meaning, but it’s often applied thoughtlessly to every process in evolution.

Today Darwin, tomorrow “natural selection”, and, sooner or later, the entire concept of one species coming into existence from another less evolved species through mutation and environmental pressures will be cast into the incinerator of scientific history.  It is merely a matter of time.

Lars Walker reviews A THRONE OF BONES

As we were discussing George Martin and the aspects of his work which tend to appeal to the Left yesterday, the appearance of this review is a timely one. Lars Walker is the author of the novels that collectively make up The Erling Skjalgsson Saga, and as can be seen from his picture, is a descendant of Vikings himself. (Ladies, I believe he is single.) This no doubt made it rather painful for him to read through the scenes set in the Iles de Loup.   Nevertheless, he manfully slogged through them in order to write his review of A THRONE OF BONES.

Most anyone who starts reading Throne of Bones will realize that it’s very much the same sort of thing as George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice books, and Vox makes no denial of this. But he’s trying to do the same sort of thing in a very different way, which for me makes all the difference….

I enjoyed it immensely. Vox Day isn’t the prose stylist George R. R. Martin is, but he’s not bad. On the plus side we have a complicated, complex story with interesting and sympathetic, fully rounded characters. There are few out-and-out villains – everybody is doing what they think right. And unlike Martin’s stories, the fact that someone is virtuous and noble does not guarantee them a painful and ignominious death. In terms of pure story, Vox Day’s book is much more rewarding. And Christianity is treated not only with respect, but as a true part of the cosmos. Much recommended. 

Walker is entirely correct to say that ATOB is very much the same sort of thing as AGOT. It was intended that way from the start.  However, I did not write Arts of Dark and Light to imitate A Song of Ice and Fire, but rather, to create a fantasy epic of similar scope that not only improves upon Martin’s series in terms of characterization, intellectual depth, and storytelling, but also demonstrates the way in which the utilization of a more traditional and historically coherent perspective can permit a less-talented writer to create works capable of surpassing the well-written, but empty, soulless literary edifices constructed by the betrayers of the fantasy tradition created by George MacDonald and so firmly established by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.

Contra the superficial assumptions of those who look only at the rhyming names and the similar heft of the two books, A THRONE OF BONES is not an imitation of A GAME OF THRONES. To the extent that it is relevant to compare the two books, it would be considerably more accurate to describe it as literary criticism in action.  I find it a little ironic that while people often ask critics if they can do any better, on the rare occasion one actually attempts to do so, one is accused of wishing to imitate the object of criticism.

One Boston bomber caught and killed

Two suspects One suspect caught and killed.  Names are Tamerlan Mike Mulugeta and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Sunil Tripathi. Tamerlan is dead. An MIT police officer was shot and killed on campus.  More details that show the confusion leading up to the endgame from this scanner summary on Reddit.  As well as Part 2.

EDIT 1:39 EST: WCVB reports one suspect is at large!
EDIT 1:41 EST: Reports of first officer down has died of his wounds (death toll: 2)
EDIT 1:42 EST: Reports of explosion at Harvard Quad.
EDIT 1:42 EST: Second suspect not in custody from radio! Be safe all!!
EDIT 1:44 EST: Children’s Hospital clear. No shots fired there.
EDIT 1:46 EST: Explosion heard was from bomb squad.
EDIT 1:47 EST: Backpacks left on Laurel St.
EDIT 1:48 EST: News about Harvard Quad bomb seems to be fake. No bomb confirmed there.
EDIT 1:55 EST: Second suspect middle eastern looking, clean shaven, male with blue jacket with a “christmas style” hat.
EDIT 1:56 EST: My inbox is flooded with “Fuck the Mods”
posts. Please, not now. Come back with hate in a few hours. For now,
only news. Hate them in another thread.
EDIT 1:57 EST: The Christmas hat is a beenie.
EDIT 1:58 EST: MIT update: Suspect from there is no longer on campus. Right now, these are two different incidents and not related.
EDIT 1:58 EST: Suspect who was laying on the ground was released and is walking home. Taken in from confusion.
EDIT 2:00 EST: Reports of a “code black” at Auburn Hospital. Nothing confirmed.

According to Wikipedia, Tripathi is a “Hindu Brahmin surname found mostly in the northern and central parts of India and Nepal.”  Mulugeta is an Ethiopian name.  It looks as if they were both recent immigrants to the USA, within the last year, but if they were Muslims, they would appear to have been converts.  CORRECTION: The Tsarnaev brothers appear to be Muslims of Chechen descent.

UPDATE: NBC says Tripathi is not suspect. Police searching Watertown area for Suspect 2.

UPDATE 2: Watertown Twitter feed.

UPDATE 3: “To recap: One marathon suspect killed. The other at-large and dangerous. If you live in Boston, stay indoors.”

UPDATE 4: The guy in the white hat to the left of the picture appears to be the man for whom the SWAT team is looking. The AP reports his name is Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, thereby dashing once more the hopes of progressives who fearfully fantasize about white Christian terrorists.

UPDATE 5: Glenn Reynolds notes: “Several readers comment that there are probably quite a few people in
the Watertown area who wish they had a gun right about now.”

UPDATE 6: Zerohedge posts an interview with an MMA guy who trained with Tamerlan: “About four or five years ago, I was working full-time as a project
manager and in my off time, I was training at a mixed martial arts gym
in Boston. Tamerlan wasn’t part of our gym, but he was training for the
golden gloves boxing championship. I remember that he would come in to
work with some of our boxers and worked with us. That is where I
remember him from. When I woke up this morning and saw his name and his
picture on the news, I immediately recognized him.  He seemed
like a really nice guy, to himself and a little bit arrogant and cocky,
but he helped people at the gym all the time with their boxing and was
friendly with everyone. It’s a complete shock.”

His girlfriend was attractive and supposedly converted to Islam, presumably on his behalf. It looks like he might have met her at one gym or another.

UPDATE 7: The Telegraph has a detailed summary, including lots of pictures related to the incidents.

The black vs brown wars

It’s not too hard to understand why the Hispanic gangs have methodically gone about ethnically cleansing former black neighborhoods such as Compton for the last 20 years. They have no more desire to live in the vicinity of Africans than white progressives like John Scalzi do, but since most Hispanics can’t afford to buy property in lily-white counties, they have to go to the work of forcibly undoing years of government-sponsored desegregation. And this sort of racial violence no doubt provides them with their ruthless determination to not live among blacks.

Two eighth grade students are now recovering from a terrifying attack in Queens…. The honor student said she was badly beaten while trying to defend her friend Christina Campos, who was getting punched and kicked by more than a dozen high school students.

“About seven to 10 girls just started grabbing me and held my hands and just started kicking me in the face,” Gonzalez told CBS 2′s Hazel Sanchez. “They threw cones at me. They hit us with belt buckles, with Timberlands, umbrellas, guys kicking us — like guys, really?”

The attackers could be seen stomping on Christina Campos’ body and head. Campos said the same group of high school-aged girls jumped her the day before and warned her they’d be back for more. This time boys were throwing punches, too. Campos’ face was bloodied and bruised.

“They came out of nowhere with so many people,” Campos said.

“I was scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Was I going to live after this or was I going to be beat to death?” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez was left with two black eyes and a broken nose. She said no bystanders stepped in to help her or her friends. Most, she said, just watched or recorded the brawl.

Educated African-Americans who have never laid a finger on anyone in anger and would never dream of resorting to violence understandably get distressed and offended when this sort of black group violence is contemptuously described as “chimping-out“.  But the issue is not the label, however offensive some might find it to be.  It makes no difference if such behavior is called “chimping-out”, “wilding”, or “youthful exuberance”, because the problem is that whatever one calls it, it is not behavior indicative of a people capable of maintaining, or even successfully co-existing in, a civilized society.  At the end of the day, most people are inclined to believe that whatever may you call it, if it quacks like a duck, it is, for all intents and purposes, a duck.

The problem facing the African community in the USA is three-fold, even if we agree to delicately avert our eyes from all the frightening and very politically incorrect implications of genetic science and human bio-diversity.  First, as the domestic economy worsens, it will be harder on those of African descent than everyone else since they are less likely to have financial and family reserves than other Americans.  Second, with their sky-high illegitimacy rates, low marriage rates, and 3/4 adult male/female ratio, they have very little family infrastructure to guide the intellectual and emotional development of their children. Third, the growing Hispanic population feels absolutely no shame over historical black slavery and is almost completely immune to the race card and the White Guilt upon which the African community has become so dependent.

Where whites stay their hands and suffer black barbarism out of a misguided sense of shame, browns simply react without hesitation or remorse. I note the percentage of the Queens population that is Hispanic is presently 6.4 points higher, at 27.5 percent, than it was in Compton in 1980.  Given the fact that there is already an amount of black vs brown racial conflict in Queens, we can probably expect the the African percentage of the population there to decline to less than 10 percent in the next ten years.

Both Compton and Queens are trivial in themselves, of course, but they are a microcosm of the larger conflict that is already playing out inside the United States, a sizable conflict concerning which white Americans are largely oblivious.