Category: Uncategorized

The dilemma of a dynamic perspective

It would appear I’m hardly the only one to see the similarities between the rhetoric of the Israeli government and the behavior of the Jewish mob and the past rhetoric and behavior of other nations:

Last Thursday morning I woke up feeling more embarrassed for the state of Israel than almost ever before. Considering pogroms, racism (known in Israel almost exclusively as Anti-Semitism) and refugees are such central topics in Jewish history, collective memory and the Israeli education system, one would think that we would be the first to recognize such acts happening in our own backyard.

Apparently not.

Rather, it seems that the recent influx of migrants from Africa and their “taking over” of “our” cities has created a blind spot in our national conscious. Sadly, the riots in south Tel Aviv have demonstrated that nearly a century later, some of us are no better than our former European and Russian hosts who wanted nothing more than for us to leave their country.

Is it a blind spot or is it a newly clarified vision? Ironically, it would appear that I have less problem with Israelis who wish to maintain a Jewish state than some Jews. I do, however, take exception to those who actively oppose the idea of Israel or any other country being permitted to preserve its primary national identity by closing itself off to migrational waves, and American Jews are only a small, if vocal, percentage of a broad range of globalist multiculturalists who oppose that right. I have to give some credit to Feldman and others who would have Israel abide by the same principles that they insist other countries should obey, even though I think they are mistaken and that both the current Israelis are, and the historical non-Jewish nations were, operating fully within their rights to refuse to permit foreign nationals to dwell among them. That doesn’t justify pogroms or violence, of course, merely the peaceful deportation of foreigners to their former country or nation of origin.

On a related note, Chelm Wiseman has begun to respond to my first point, first with what he terms a primer on Jewish immigration views, followed by a post contemplating the four different types of residents and his perspective on a country’s responsibility to them. I don’t fully agree with his perspective, but it is far closer to mine than one might imagine, as he asserts “I believe that a sovereign state has the right to determine who resides within its borders, although that comes with some limitations.”

The devil, of course, being in the details of those limitations, which we shall no doubt discuss in future posts. However, I think the issue of the observed Jewish hypocrisy on the issue of immigration is quite easily explained, and without resorting to any bizarre collectivist theories. The fact of the matter is that until very recently, the Jewish perspective on immigration was entirely shaped by their 2,000-year experience as migrants, with no sense of ownership in a geographically established location or even a viable, self-sustaining society to call their own. Now finally they’ve got one again, so naturally, their perspective has begun changing in precisely the same way that a worker promoted into management has no choice but to begin to understand that the past decisions of management are not necessarily based in pure evil, avarice, and hatred for the working class, but are much more often the necessary consequences of events.

Of course, this process of promotion-based perspective-broadening is often intellectually painful, as it usually involves giving up long cherished myths, some of which have sustained the worker and perhaps even driven him to the success that led to his promotion. One would hope that the Jews of Israel can learn from the mistakes of those who historically sought to defend their nations from the influence of unwanted foreigners even as they begin to understand the reasoning of those who deported their ancestors long ago. There will always be some who hate Jews for one reason or another, but I suspect many Israelis, especially those in positions of responsibility for the continued survival of their country, will soon understand, assuming they do not already, that most of the nations that expelled their ancestors harbored no more intrinsic hate for the Jews than modern Israelis harbor intrinsic hate for the Sudanese now in their midst. A desire to live among one’s own kind and protect one’s own people from dissolution and eventual destruction by foreign influences is not hate, but rather love. It is love for one’s people, and love for their culture, language, and traditions. This is a concept that Jews should understand and respect as well as anyone.

WND column

De Facto Marriage

It is no secret that marriage has been on the decline in the United States even as illegitimacy is on the rise. The problem is obvious: No-fault divorce combined with abusive child support and post-marital support laws has increased the incentive for women to end marriages while simultaneously driving up the cost of ending them to men. As economics would predict, providing incentives for ending marriages to women has increased the percentage of women ending them, while increasing the potential cost of marriage has decreased the number of men willing to take the risk. As is the case with so many government actions, the laws intended to revise marriage, beginning with the California Family Law Act of 1969, were predicated on static human behavior and failed to take into account their own influence on how men and women would subsequently behave

Peasant Game

This Alpha Game post is dedicated to my friends at Fraters Libertas:

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is a much more serious and underlying problem [than the Beer Shield] on display here. By holding a beer, by drinking beer, by even being credibly identified as a beer drinker, a man is signifying that he is an illiterate peasant, of solid, but hearty stock, the sort of man thick-waisted farm girls with red faces and ankles the size and shape of overstuffed German sausages expect to meet out behind the haystacks. Civilized men who attract beautiful women drink wine, preferably red wine, although prosecco and lambrusco are acceptable alternatives in the summer heat or on Friday night with pizza.

Enter the zombie

All those movies and television shows and cute rewrites of Jane Austin weren’t fairy tales… they were warnings:

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked, and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp Saturday, police said…. Police theorize the attacker might have been suffering from “cocaine psychosis,” a drug-induced craze that bakes the body internally and often leads the affected to strip naked to try and cool off.

That’s just the police trying to keep everyone calm. Don’t believe the non-hype. It’s obvious the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us.

Why the USA can’t win wars

VDH considers the question:

Given that the United States fields the costliest, most sophisticated, and most lethal military in the history of civilization, that should be a silly question. We have enough conventional and nuclear power to crush any of our enemies many times over. Why then did we seem to bog down in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The question is important since recently we do not seem able to translate tactical victories into long-term strategic resolutions. Why is that? What follows are some possible answers….

The most obvious answer is why we argue over the results of our interventions is an inability to articulate our strategic objectives—what exactly do wish to see follow from our use of force and for how long and at what cost? Do we wish to rid the world of Bashar al-Assad? We could do that quite easily and probably without ground troops. But would the region be more or less stable? Would Iran suffer a blow or find ways to fund more terrorists? Would the collateral damage from funding insurgents or bombing be worse or not as bad as the current Assad toll? Would the insurgents prove reasonable, or more like those in Egypt and Libya—or even worse? Many of our problems seem to hinge on explaining to the public what we wish to do, why so, how, at what cost it is to be accomplished, and what we want things to look like when we’re through.

The real answer is that we don’t articulate a strategy because we don’t have one that is palatable to the American people. Most of our actions are not in the American national interest, so naturally the objectives underlying those actions can’t be explicated in a simple and straightforward manner because they would be rejected. There was no national interest at stake in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Serbia, or in Uganda. There is none in Iran. And where there is no coherent and strictly delineated objective in the national interest, there is no strategy, and where there is no strategy there will be no victory regardless of the tactical excellence.

Mailvox: one down

Chelm Wiseman begins what apparently is the Herculean task of responding to me:

I wrote my response to Vox’s charge #1 of Jewish Hypocrisy on immigration policy, but I decided I don’t like it and will have to rewrite it before I post…. I fully concede the point that Vox did not really think that the Amelek comment was a credible and realistic threat of violence. I just found it amusing to assure Vox of my non-violent intent every time I say something that could be vaguely misinterpreted as a threat. It makes me laugh and so I will probably repeat the joke. Following this theme, the title of his post also made me smile. [Insert Top Gun Quote Here]

I will also note that Vox’s continued the strategy of overwhelming me with charges to respond to continued in his post today. He seems to recognize a pattern of that he calls the fighting withdrawal, where a commenter will simply declare him wrong and decide not to respond. Vox should take a moment to think about this. If this is a consistent pattern, then perhaps the problem is his debate style. I must admit that I had a moment of … is this really worth it? …before I posted yesterday. Basically, Vox has given me a todo list of between 4 and 7 posts to adequately respond to him. I think that it is fine (and frankly fair given the nature of what I wrote) and because the topic of each is relevant to the theme of my blog I think it appropriate to continue.

It’s a start, anyhow. And while there is certainly nothing wrong about Chelm’s repeated assurances of non-violent intent, what he skates over here is the fact that necessarily following from his concession is the implicit admission that his interpretation revealed nothing about my thinking. A minor point, but still relevant.

I fail to see any problem with my debate style at all. The general consensus appears to be that it is as successful as it is maddening to opponents. The idea that providing detailed and substantive points is somehow a problem when one is attempting to make a case is ludicrous, and anyone who has read my blog should understand by now what they are in for prior to deciding to engage. It’s not my problem if the occasional drive-by critic wants to fire a pop gun in my direction and then finds himself overwhelmed by the artillery barrage he receives in response. The fact is that I seldom express an opinion without having something to support it, and I seldom enter a substantial discussion without having a significant amount of evidence upon which to draw. That doesn’t mean I’m always right, of course, but it does mean that I’m never going to be an easy out even when I have somehow managed to reach the demonstrably wrong conclusion.

Anyhow, make your case or concede has always been the standard to which I hold both myself and others. However, I have to point out that what Chelm is describing is not a Fighting Withdrawal, as that is a tactic which involves continuing to defend a position by sacrificing the larger part of it. What he is describing is Silence That Gun, which involves falling silent and disappearing rather than defending a point when the arguments supporting it have been contested, or conceding a point when the arguments defending it have been refuted.

As for the label “Alt-Right”, I didn’t object because a) I don’t know what it means, and, b) I don’t care how others choose to categorize me. I might wonder about the sanity of someone who describes me as part of the “conservative media”, but I doubt I’d even bother to comment on that. I’ve simply run across too many people who call me a conservative, or even a Republican, to concern myself any longer with whatever label others choose to apply. Raciss, sexiss, misogyniss, anti-semiss, whatever. But to the best of my recollection, the only time I ever registered to vote, I registered Libertarian, and the only time I voted, I voted Libertarian as well. However, I don’t belong to the Libertarian party and I depart from it on a number of policies because I don’t believe they are in line with the combination of libertarian principles with valid logic.

I do agree that Americans are largely unprepared for European openness about matters of race in general and Jews in particular. I would simply assert that I am using primarily American language on the blog, though I suppose it’s entirely possible that I’m not always as conscious of the distinctions anymore given how long it has been since I left.

Mailvox: tools of the trade

LB wonders what I use to write:

Thank you for the near constant intellectual stimulation you provide. I’m a long time fan of yours and have often wondered something. You often write about your adventures in writing and I can recall several instances when you have answered readers questions about your particular methods. What I don’t remember ever reading though is what you use as the tools of your trade. I’ve noticed that I seem to get the very least accomplished when using my Windows 7 laptop, and that I seem to get the most accomplished when using a composition book and a pen or the ColorNote app on my Android phone. What do you currently use and in what proportions?

It’s a pretty simple answer. I use my Dell XPS laptop running XP and LibreOffice 3. Nothing else. I’ve used the laptop long enough that the paint is worn off three of the keys, but it works fine for my purposes. I’ve written 52 columns, three short stories, hundreds of blog posts, and 626 words per day on the current novel with it in the last year, so it would appear to suffice. The only change I’ve made in recent years was to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice following Oracle’s decision to interfere with the OpenOffice board. I find that the key to getting work done on your laptop is to ignore the Internet and refuse to get sucked into doing “research”. Sure, you can use it to look up a name or a piece of vital information, but then, get back into the word processor right away. I’ve found that for me, the key for staying focused is maintaining a spreadsheet that contains both my word count progress and keeps track of the various organizations. So, no matter if I want to know how many more words I need to write today, who was consul five years ago, or how old a character’s uncle is, I have the information readily to hand.

And since we’re on the subject, I’m expecting to see the cover of the book next month. It’s being done by the same artist who did the SE cover, so I have great expectations of it.

The anti-abortion trend

One of the informative things about those who draw conclusions from purely linear poll-based trends is that they do so on a very selective basis. For some inexplicable reason, we’re supposed to believe that legal gay “marriage” is inevitable because more people – though still less than half based on most polls – support it than before, and yet an abortion ban is impossible even though the anti-abortion trend is not only every bit as clear, but is also supported by demographic logic.

About four in 10 Americans said they support abortion rights in a new Gallup poll — the lowest figure recorded by the organization since it began asking the question in 1995. Fully half of Americans, meanwhile, told Gallup they were against abortion rights.

Of course, the more stories like this one of murdered little girls being literally thrown to the dogs leak out into the press, and the more third-worlders enter the country and begin to exercise their feminist “right to choose” by aborting baby girls, the stronger the anti-abortion movement will grow.

[Insert Top Gun quote here]

I have the feeling that even if Chelm hadn’t already accused me of anti-semitism, someone else is bound to by virtue of the extreme ease with which I will show the erroneous aspects of his arguments. After I disputed what he described as “the danger of the alternative right”, Chelm doubled-down and attempted to bolster his position as follows:

The other day I wrote a post about an exchange I had with Vox Day on his website Vox Popoli. I made a rhetorical mistake by referring to some of his more hotheaded anti-semitic commenters as “Amalekites.” Vox took this to be a credible and realistic threat of violence against his readers… which I believe reveals more about Vox’s thinking than mine. You can read his post here and my response here. If you didn’t read the post, additionally, I had the nerve to described him as dangerous, because his blog is a great example (in terms of quality) of a group of web sites of the “alternative right” (or alt-right) which, among other things, seeks to create an intellectual basis for a more socially acceptable anti-semitism….

So, this is what Vox did in today’s post. There are so many errors and accusations in it that to try to refute them all in one shot would require a long rambling… boring… post. In advance, he is slamming me for doing exactly what he is inviting me to do. So here is how I will approach this… I will list the accusations below (paraphrased) and over the course of the next few days, I will refute them one by one.

So many errors that he can’t possibly respond to them all right now… that sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But it’s not actually a Fighting Withdrawal, as Chelm proves himself to be more than the usual handwaver in actually troubling to list seven of my purported charges and declaring that he will respond substantively to them. Unfortunately, he’s already provided some indication that he’s not going to be able to respond effectively to them, given the prelude provided above.

First, I absolutely did not take his reference to “Amalekites” to be “a credible and realistic threat of violence” against anyone, least of all my readers. I understood it to be simple rhetorical exaggeration, which Chelm himself subsequently admitted, as he was using the term to refer to what he described as an “irrational Jew hater” in the modern sense. In fact, my very first response to him was “I think you exaggerate quite a bit. How do you define “Amalekite”? Most people here neither curse nor care about Jews.” I subsequently added: “Given the historical metaphor, calling someone an Amalekite strikes me as giving the less metaphorically astute a perfectly understandable justification to not only hate Jews, but commit violence against them. So, you may wish to rethink the use of the slur.” At no point did I ever take it as any sort of threat, much less a credible and realistic one, nor would any reader of this blog ever believe that I am so intellectually humble as to number myself among “the less metaphorically astute”. I not only understand, but have frequently pointed out on this very blog, that metaphors are not reality.

Because Chelm is incorrect about how I interpreted his rhetoric, he is necessarily incorrect about what that interpretation reveals about my thinking as well. It should be readily apparent that if there is any projection taking place here, it is Chelm projecting his own fearful tendencies upon me, since I don’t believe there is any threat posed by him whereas he has already openly referred to me as “dangerous”.

Now to the question whether my blog “seeks to create an intellectual basis for a more socially acceptable anti-semitism”. There are 10,667 posts on this blog, dating back to 2003, precisely 118 of which have any reference to Jews. And many of those 118 posts aren’t concerned with the Jews as such, but rather, are related to Biblical references as part of discussions of atheism or Christian theology. So, given that less than one percent of the posts are even potentially related to what Chelm describes as an objective of this blog is an exaggeration so vast that it borders on outright falsehood. I assert, to the contrary, that it is the actions of Jews such as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Chuck Schumer, and Eric Cantor that are actively providing the basis for that socially acceptable anti-semitism in America that he fears. Perhaps Chelm has forgotten that I live in Europe, where there is simply no need to create a more socially acceptable anti-semitism because far more virulent forms of anti-semitism are already quite socially acceptable here. For example, I find it hard to imagine that Americans would refer to any political leader as a “sale juif”, as Sarkozy was often called.

Moreover, being a libertarian, even a nationalist libertarian, (which I would argue is logically one and the same), I simply do not adhere to the concept of collective identity that genuine Judenhassen requires. I have previously blogged on the topic of anti-semitism here.

Concerning the seven charges listed, I shall wait for his promised refutations before adding anything further. I will, however, note that his characterization of numbers 2, 4, 5, and 6 are inaccurate and he should probably look at them more closely or they will be as easily and conclusively dismissed as his “threat of violence” claim was. And as for 7, he can rest assured there are plenty of non-Jews for whom a mere 60,000 African criminals would also be a bargain.

And finally, I suspect Chelm will want to comment upon some recent and related events in Israel, in which Sudanese migrant workers were attacked by a large and angry mob which also broke store windows and searched passing vehicles for suspected migrant workers to beat up. One wonders whether he will be able to draw any obvious historical parallels between yesterday’s events and European history.

The drachma is not catastrophe

As for the Euro, on the other hand…. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard contemplates the upcoming Greek exit from the Euro:

The danger for Euroland is slow contagion later once the sanctity of monetary union is violated, compounding the underlying crisis as Portugal, Spain, and Italy sink deeper into (policy-driven) debt-deflation.

Fitch boss David Riley told a banking form in the City that the Greek saga is “knocking down the central pillars underpinning monetary union”.

EU leaders said successively:

1) There would be no bail-outs.

2) Sovereign defaults inside EMU were inconceivable.

3) EMU exit was out of the question, lunatic, and so forth.

Every one of these claims has been shown to be untrue….

Mr Papademos said withdrawal from the euro would be “catastrophic”
for Greece. This is a religious incantation, or possibly just a threat.
It would be catastrophic if EU leaders and the IMF chose to make it
catastrophic. That is a political decision. Such shroud-waving borders
on political blackmail.

We hear this sort of language before every devaluation crisis.
Argentina in 2001-2002, Mexico’s Tequila crisis in 1994-1995, the East
Asian crisis in 1997-1998, not to mention countless others through
history, including the UK’s two liberations from dysfunctional
fixed-exchange systems in 1931 and 1992.

The reality is that the Euro is intrinsically catastrophic and has been from the start. It’s never been about the economics, but rather, providing a first step towards a single unified European state of the sort previously constructed by Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler. And, like its three predecessors, it is rapidly collapsing, albeit under the weight of its structural inconsistencies rather than any external pressures. Pritchard has made some serious blunders along the way, mostly because he made the mistake of paying too much attention to the mainstream economic experts, but he is entirely correct to remark that “Remaining in the euro is demonstrably catastrophic already.”