Category: Uncategorized

The Flight 93 election, revisited

Publius Decius Mus is taking a considerable amount of flak from conservatives because he is directly over the target, which is the staunchly pusillanimous way in which they have betrayed America and Americans for at least 50 years, and the way some of them are still trying to do so:

Conservatives have shouted since the beginning of Trump’s improbable rise: He’s not one of us! He is not conservative! And, indeed, in many ways, Trump is downright liberal. You might think that would make him more acceptable to the Left. But no. As “compassionate conservatism” did nothing to blunt leftist hatred of George W. Bush, neither do Trump’s quasi-liberal economic positions. In fact, they hate Trump much more. Trump is not conservative enough for the conservatives but way too conservative for the Left, yet somehow they find common cause. Earlier I posited that the reason is Trump’s position on immigration. Let me add two others.

The first is simply that Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did, and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left. The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters, there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious challenge to the administrative state.

Which points to the far more important reason. I urge readers to go back through John Marini’s argument, to which I cannot do anything close to full justice. Suffice to say here, the current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the administrative state is out of the question. The Democrats are united on this point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. To again oversimplify Marini (and Aristotle), the question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. When the people want something that they shouldn’t want or mustn’t have, the administrative state prevents it, no matter what the people vote for. When the people don’t want something that the administrative state sees as salutary or necessary, it is simply imposed by fiat.

Don’t want more immigration? Too bad, we know what’s best. Think bathrooms should be reserved for the two biological sexes? Too bad, we rule. And so on and on.

To all the “conservatives” yammering about my supposed opposition to Constitutional principle (more on that below) and who hate Trump, I say: Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.

If the Constitution has any force or meaning, then “We the People” get to decide not merely who gets to run the administrative state—which, whatever the outcome, will always continue on the same path—more fundamentally, we get to decide what policies we want and which we don’t.

Conservatism as we have known it since Reagan is dead. Whether the Alt Right or NeoTrumpism or something else will ascend in its place is presently unknown, but we can be fairly certain that conservatives will never win another national election, thanks to the demographic transformation they supported, and, in many cases, still support.

Shed no tears and spare no pity for them. Like every ideology that stands in opposition to observable reality, their eventual irrelevance is assured, it is merely a question of time.

The importance of rhetoric

A few facts:

  • 78% of Clinton supporters don’t believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites. 
  • 68% of Clinton supporters don’t believe blacks are less law-abiding than whites.
Wow, they’re all pretty stupid, right? No, because intelligence has NOTHING to do with it. Greater intelligence just means that an individual has an enhanced capability for rationalizing his belief in even more ridiculous falsehoods.

After all:

  • 68% of Trump supporters don’t believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites.
  • 53% of Trump supporters don’t believe blacks are less law-abiding than whites.
Let’s throw in a few more facts.
  • Average white American IQ: 103
  • Average black American IQ: 85
  • Average sub-Saharan African IQ: 70
  • The 12% of the male US population that is black provides 37% of the male prison population.
  • Blacks commit violent crimes at 8.5 times the rate that whites do.

In other words, facts are observably incapable of persuading MOST of the US population. Their minds are not changed by the receipt of new information, regardless of how accurate it may be. As much as 80 percent of the population is totally impervious to observation, statistics, eyewitness testimony, genetic science, and documentary evidence. Considering their ability to resist observable reality, how susceptible do you think they are likely to be to logic and abstract reason?

I conclude that less than five percent of the population is even subject to persuasion by logic and less than two percent are reliably capable of being persuaded by it. And if these facts is insufficient to persuade you that dialectic is an intrinsically limited tool that must always be supplimented by rhetoric to be generally effective, well, welcome to the 98 percent.

T-shirts and whatnot

After nearly 10 years of requests for Ilk-related paraphenalia, we’re finally going to make t-shirts available through a Dread Ilk vendor. These are not going to be the usual Cafe Press junk, but custom designs and select t-shirt styles. There are only going to be 12 designs available at any one time, so once we rotate a design out, it may not be back.

The first five are going to be:

  • [Redacted] for original Big Fork supporters only. Sold at cost + shipping. Limited time.
  • [Redacted] for anyone.
  • Trumpsl!de
  • Whip It Out (Harambe)
I’m interested in knowing which designs are of most interest to the Ilk. So, here are a few random ideas; let me know which would be of the most interest to you, assuming that the designs are well-executed. Or if you have any other ideas, feel free to throw them out.
  • Evil Legion of Evil (member’s edition)
  • Evil Legion of Evil (Red Meat cartoon)
  • Vile Faceless Minion
  • Dread Ilk
  • Rabid Puppies 2015
  • Rabid Puppies 2016
  • Vox Day Che
  • Just Say N20 (Psykosonik lyrics on back)
  • Spacebunny (cartoon logo)
  • Supreme Dark Lord (Altar of Hate mask logo)
  • SJWAL cover
  • Cuckservative cover with 1790 law quote
  • That Red Dot On Your Chest Means My Daddy Is Watching
  • Castalia House logo “Restoring Science Fiction Since 2014”
  • There Will Be War
  • The Missionaries
I’m hoping that we’ll do some caps at some point too, but I am very, very picky about my caps, so that may take a while. We can also discuss this a bit at the Brainstorm tonight; don’t forget, if you’re an O[BF] you are also invited.

Of faith and fairy tales

John C. Wright considers the charge that Christianity is nothing more than a fairy tale:

There are those who call Christian faith a fairy tale. I assume such scoffers are not old and wise enough to believe in fairies.

To them, I give the answer of that most excellent marshwiggle and insightful theologian, Puddleglum: Suppose my account is a fairy tale. Your account is not even that.

Let us contrast and compare the Christian fairy tale with the tale told by witches both white and green, both modern and ancient.

One modern account of the world consists of little more than saying “Life is a bitch, and then you die, and in the end nobody lives happily ever after. Entropy triumphs over all, a nightfall of endless darkness and infinite cold.”

Well, says I, if you actually believed your account, the wise thing to do is to swallow cold poison and jump into the sea: so the fact that you are still here hints that at some level you know your account is unsatisfactory: a poorly constructed story, pointless, plotless, and with a weak ending. It is not a tale at all, but a complaint.

Another account, this one with considerably more pedigree, says, “We are all just naked apes or meat machines: our souls are made of atoms blown together by the twelve winds with no more purpose and meaning than the shape of the sand dune: we are helpless and without free will, victims of blind evolutionary forces and blind historical forces. Atop the Holy Mountain no gods dance, and no burning bushes speak. Death is dreamless sleep and soft oblivion. Therefore let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Entropy triumphs over all, a nightfall of endless darkness and infinite cold.”

This is a poor story: a tale of despair, a myth to justify hedonism.

A nobler version of this same account says, “Man is a rational animal, capable of moral reasoning, creativity, productiveness, love. Man is heroic. Therefore let us live rationally working with mind and heart and soul to produce such works of art and science as befits so dignified a creature: let each man to live for himself alone, a paragon of self-reliance  each man in the solitary but invulnerable tower of his self-made soul, never demanding nor making any selfess sacrifice. Nor hopes nor fears of after-lives or nether-worlds need detain us: Therefore let us think, and work, and triumph, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Entropy triumphs over all, a nightfall of endless darkness and infinite cold.”

This is a poor story: vanity, vainglory, and blindness to the pain and misery of life. The pretense that bad things never happen for no reason to good people is a very thin pretense: since the days of Job, we have all known better. This is a tale of vainglory.

He is correct, though, to conclude that there is no better answer than the marshwiggle’s. We choose the fairy tale regardless. And there is nothing in your moralities, nothing in your philosophies, nothing in your sciences that can provide one single legitimate reason to criticize that choice.

That dark magic

Needless to say, the meme magic has the Hillary campaign, or what is left of it, running scared.

Hillary Clinton has officially declared war on Pepe the Frog, a popular Internet meme.
The embattled candidate has dedicated an entire page on her campaign site about the cartoon frog she believes is “racist.”
“That cartoon frog is more sinister than you might realize,” declared HillaryClinton.com. “Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike. But in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the ‘alt-right.’”
Additionally, the Hillary campaign linked Alex Jones and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to Pepe the Frog, implying they are also “white supremacists. Yiannopoulos in particular is a predominant commentator on the alt-right who’s often mislabeled as its leader.

If I was Horde, I would say “kek”.

Everyone not us is the same

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the clueless myopia of the left-center mainstream than this piece from the American Interest:

The alt-right is more diffuse, and diverse in its tactics and objectives, than the PC left. It encompasses sophisticated neo-reactionary Silicon Valley engineers like Curtis Yarvin, 1990s-style white nationalists like Jared Taylor, and legions of race-baiting online trolls with Pepe the frog as their Twitter avatars. But they are united by their contempt for pluralistic liberal democracy, their view that Western Civilization is in a profound and perhaps irreversible state of decline due to the empowerment of women and minorities, and their open embrace of white identity politics, and even white separatism, as the only solution.

This is a precarious cultural moment. How can it be that it is impossible to really understand the 2016 U.S. presidential election without reference to anti-liberal ideologies developed in the dark corners of 4chan and the inner sanctums of once-marginal campus bureaucracies?

Many commentators have observed that the radicalisms of the right and left feed on one another, teaming up to suck the liberal center dry. On the one hand, excessive left-wing speech policing and cultural brinksmanship on issues of race and gender was bound to make Milo-style ideological transgression more appealing. On the other hand, the alt-right’s newfound cultural power seems to vindicate some of the assumptions of the PC left: that racism and misogyny are deeply embedded in America’s cultural fabric, just below the surface, ready to erupt unless controls on thought and language are continuously tightened.

But what if instead of thinking of the campus left and the alt-right as mortal enemies, each bringing out perpetually heavier firepower in a long-running war of attrition, we thought of them as allies in a battle for the fate of liberalism? Because despite what they might say about each other, the radicalisms of 2016 actually align with one another more than they align with the Anglo-American Enlightenment tradition that has always occupied the American political center.

The Alt-Right is no ally of the campus left and never will be. What’s really happening is that the campus left, long coddled by the left-liberal center, is starting to scare the mainstream thumbsuckers. And starting to scare them nearly as much as the Alt-Right does.

There is no space left for the Weimar Republicans and Social Democrats. Their age of playing touch football with each other are over. They’re going to need to learn how to put on pads if they’re going to play according to the new rules.

Pinterest is converged, anti-American

Pinterest deletes my Nationalism board devoted to being proud of being American & white. Calls it “hate speech”
– Wife with a Purpose

This is coming everywhere. This is why we need to develop alternatives now. If we don’t use the converged companies’ tools, they can’t use those tools to control what we are allowed to think, say, and write.

Whites are the new Indians

Lawrence Murray chronicles the invasion and conquest of white America:

It is clear that the coastal and border regions of the United States, home to our largest cities and power centers, seem destined to become solidly non-white, leaving a large but relatively sparse—and therefore colonially vulnerable—interior region as the only place with a large White majority. The United States is reverting to a colonial society, one of foreign cities and a disconnected indigenous countryside. We’ve become the Indians.

This is a problem. Cities are the focal points of social and financial mobility in the United States, centers of political power, and where high status is conferred upon people, something normies crave. That we are becoming physically and culturally excluded from this world I think is a net negative, despite much of the alt-right’s hostility to urban life. Indeed, how much of that hostility is an indictment of the demographics of cities and their derived politics rather than of the physical spaces of the cities themselves? Our situation is a perverse one, one in which our cities are foreign to us even though urbanization is an integral part of modernity.

The idea that we can abandon our own cities for farther and farther away suburbs, a phenomenon which has been going on for decades, is one whose time is going to be cut short sooner or later by the simple reality that ordinary people cannot afford to move away from jobs. Not to mention that we will run out of land eventually. At this point it is a game of chicken with (((international financial capitalism))) to see whose rotten undergirding falls out first—do the cities collapse under their own dead weight as a result of our flight and replacement with net tax-consuming vibrants, or do we become impoverished in the long-run as a result of unplugging ourselves from “where the money is”?

For the foreseeable future, we will continue to have a  racially-driven reverse movement of people out of cities into the hinterland. Traditionally, cities were grown from the countryside as people migrated to them in search of opportunity and employment. Our ongoing revolt against the flow of history does not stop urbanization, however. Instead of our own countryside fueling the growth of our cities, it is migration from the global south, which exacerbates White flight further. Is there really any good reason why unemployed or underemployed native English speakers from say, the Rust Belt, couldn’t be encouraged to move to our cities for work? Why instead import what are largely foreign functional illiterates?

The so-called global city is really just a third world colony in the White world. Colonization is not just a metaphor for the current state of affairs, it is the reality of them. How did European colonists live outside of Europe during our high tide? They lived in and built fortified cities and ports in foreign lands where they were a minority. Today it has been reversed; we are the ones living beyond the Pale, watching ivory towers filled with ebony rise in our conquered capitals.

The loss of our own cities is unique problem of the White world, the sort of thing Stoddard warned us would happen if we yielded the outer dikes without shoring up the inner dikes. A Japanese city is Japanese. A Mexican city is Mexican. An Indian city is Indian. A Chinese city is Chinese. It is only in Europe and the Anglo satellites where you have this phenomenon of cities being not just slightly divergent from the general population but foreign to it. New York, for example, is not an Anglo-American city, but an Israeli-Puerto Rican-Chinese-Pakistani-Ecuadorian-Mexican-Filipino-Dominican-African-Korean city. Paris is not a French city, but an Algerian-Moroccan-Portuguese-Senegalese-Vietnamese-Malian city. London is not a British city, but an Indian-Pakistani-Jamaican-Polish-Bengali-Arab-Chinese-Nigerian city. It will pose a geopolitical problem in the future, that metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties in the same country are different races from one another. Indeed, there can be no harmony in a country where the centers of power and economic life are radically different from the wider society—the ancient tension between urban and rural will only be exacerbated further.

Of course, the situation can, and most likely will, be reversed in time. The tragic thing is that it will not be reversed easily, or most likely, peacefully. This is why the great military historian Martin van Creveld, when asked if migration caused war or war caused migration, answered: “there is no difference, migration is war.”

And the United States of America has been losing that war since 1965.

Even unto the fifth generation

In which it is observed that immigrants, the children of immigrants, and even the great-great-grandchildren of immigrants cannot be trusted to vote in the interests of their new country. A reader comments at John Wright’s site:

As a Republican who has tentatively decided not to vote for Trump (tentatively because it is foolish to bind yourself with oaths before the vote; who knows where my conscience might lead me come November?), I read the article as per your advice. I sympathize with the author, but I do not agree for the most part. I suppose I am either a fool or a conservative intellectual, because I do not believe Trump is worth trying.

The author admits that Trump is to the left of Hillary on most every issue except immigration, and immigration is quite frankly the issue I care least about. I understand the concerns of my fellow conservatives, but I am not afraid of immigrants. We are a country of immigrants: my great-great grandfather was an immigrant who came from a people and culture that many (perhaps most) Americans at the time thought was too stupid ever become proper citizens. Later they were considered dangerous, and it was said that they had come from a culture that was too radical and subversive to ever assimilate. Yet assimilate they did, and I stand here because of it. I am hesitant to close the door that my ancestors came through, and I have faith enough in assimilation and the melting pot, even if the Left does not.

Even after five generations, this particular US citizen cares less about “his” country than he does about his native identity. Because, by his own admission, he still identifies more with those who are not Americans than those who are, and is still more concerned with the well-being of those who are not Americans than those who are.

I found the statement “I am not afraid of immigrants” to be particularly fatuous. Because, of course, one high-performance immigrant from Germany is the same as 600 million immigrants from Mexico, China, or Nigeria. There is neither quantity nor quality, neither newcomer nor native, because all men are created equal.

Remember this solipsistic virtue-signaling if you’re ever tempted to regret the decline and fall of the United States, or find yourself asking “why”?