Kim Kardashian robbed in Paris!

Yeah, right.

To return to matters of actual interest to me, it’s interesting to see how, despite authoring two volumes of a significant new book, Francis Fukuyama’s public relations efforts appears to have been sidelined into an ongoing defense of the indefensible, which are his collective attempts to defend and retroactively redefine his increasingly ludicrous End of History thesis:

In the summer of 1989, the American magazine the National Interest published an essay with the strikingly bold title “The End of History?”. Its author, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, announced that the great ideological battles between east and west were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. With anti-communist protests sweeping across the former Soviet Union, the essay seemed right on the money. Fukuyama became an unlikely star of political science, dubbed the “court philosopher of global capitalism” by John Gray. When his book The End of History and the Last Man appeared three years later, the qualifying question mark was gone.

The “end of history” thesis has been repeated enough to acquire the ring of truth – though it has also, of course, been challenged. Some critics have cited 9/11 as a major counterexample. Others have pointed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab spring as proof that ideological contests remain.

But Fukuyama was careful to stress that he was not saying that nothing significant would happen any more, or that there would be no countries left in the world that did not conform to the liberal democratic model. “At the end of history,” he wrote, “it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”

Fukuyama was talking about ideas rather than events. He believed that western liberal democracy, with its elegant balance of liberty and equality, could not be bettered; that its attainment would lead to a general calming in world affairs; and that in the long run it would be the only credible game in town. “What we are witnessing,” he wrote, “is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama drew on the philosophy of Hegel, who defined history as a linear procession of epochs. Technological progress and the cumulative resolution of conflict allowed humans to advance from tribal to feudal to industrial society. For Marx, the journey ended with communism; Fukuyama was announcing a new destination.

For a long time his argument proved oddly resilient to challenges from the left. Neoliberalism has been pretty hegemonic. Over the last three years, however, in a belated reaction to the 2008 bank bailouts, cracks have started to appear. Global Occupy protests and demonstrations against austerity have led many commentators on the left – including the French philosopher Alain Badiou in The Rebirth of History and Seumas Milne in his collection of essays The Revenge of History – to wonder whether history is on the march once again. “What is going on?” asks Badiou. “The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world?” He tentatively regards the uprisings of 2011 as game-changing, with the potential to usher in a new political order. For Milne, likewise, developments such as the failure of the US to “democratise” Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crash and the flowering of socialism in Latin America demonstrate the “passing of the unipolar moment”.

What remains an open question is whether these developments – dramatic as they are – will actually result in anything.

Frankly, the whole thing is somewhat of a disappointment to me. To discover that Jesus Jones’s conception of “watching the world wake up from History” is both more sophisticated and accurate than Fukuyama’s is devastating to anyone who would fancy himself an intellectual.

Fukuyama’s mistake was to apply History’s end to liberal democracy rather than to Marxism, where it belonged.

Anyhow, both Fukuyama and Marx were wrong. They went full-Hegel. Never go full-Hegel. And you can’t bring back ideology in multicultural societies where identity politics are destined to rule until they are homogenous again.

The mantra of inclusiveness

The fact that this church even feels the need to hold a hearing on this matter is an indication of how hopelessly converged it is. And in answer to the question posed by the headline, no, an atheist cannot lead a Christian church:

The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a dynamic, activist minister with a loyal following at her Protestant congregation in suburban Toronto. She is also an outspoken atheist.

“We don’t talk about God,” Vosper said in an interview, describing services at her West Hill United Church, adding that it’s time the church gave up on “the idolatry of a theistic god.”

Vosper’s decision to reject God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and to turn her church into a haven for nonbelievers “looking for a community that will help them create meaningful lives without God” has become too much even for the liberal-minded United Church of Canada.

The United Church, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, has begun an extraordinary process that could end up stripping Vosper of her rights to continue as a minister. Last week, a special committee of the Toronto Conference of the United Church requested that a formal hearing be convened by the General Council of the United Church to determine her fate as a minister. That followed a review of  Vosper’s actions by a separate committee.

“In our opinion, she is not suitable to continue in ordained ministry because she does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. Ms. Vosper does not recognize the primacy of scripture, she will not conduct the sacraments, and she is no longer in essential agreement with the statement of doctrine of The United Church of Canada,” the committee said in a report released recently….

Like other mainstream denominations, the United Church of Canada, founded in 1925 as a merger of several denominations, has seen its numbers fall sharply in recent years. It reported having 436,292 members at the end of 2014, less than half the 1,063,951 it had at its peak in 1964. But a spokeswoman notes that the Canadian census of 2011, which has a broader definition, counted more than 2 million “adherents” of the United Church.

“It’s become a question of the church’s public integrity,” the Rev. Don Schweitzer, a professor of theology at St. Andrew’s College in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and editor of a history of the United Church, said of the dispute with Vosper. “It’s tough on the United Church because we’ve created this mantra of inclusiveness and now it’s been tested. It goes against the grain to tell somebody that you have to leave.”

Inclusivity and tolerance are NOT Christian principles. They are quite literally the opposite of Christian principles. They are social justice principles, which is to say, they are among the many principles acceptable to Hell.

The Devil is most inclusive and extraordinarily tolerant. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want. And all it will cost you is your soul.

Obamacare in action

Minnesota may not have any insurance companies soon:

Minnesota’s top health insurance regulator says the state’s individual market is in “an emergency situation” amid big rate increases for next year.

Department of Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said Friday that the five companies offering plans through the state’s exchange or directly to consumers were prepared to leave the market for 2017. He said big rate increases were the tradeoff to convince all but one company to remain for now.

Rate increases finalized this week range from a 50 percent average hike for HealthPartners plans to a 67 percent jump on average on UCare.

But Rothman called it a temporary fix and called on lawmakers to make reforms before the market collapses.

It’s rather fascinating to see how one institution after another is collapsing like dominoes while everyone wanders aimlessly around wringing their hands and wondering how this could have happened.

It tends to remind me a little of when a girl in my class and a boy the class below me died in separate, but similarly stupid, easily avoidable accidents. I kept my mouth shut out of respect for everyone else’s feelings, of course, but it was occasionally difficult when a plaintive “why?” would be uttered in conversation.

Now, there are certainly times when one genuinely wonders why something bad came to pass, believe me, it’s a question I have found myself asking from time to time. But there are also times when the answer is completely obvious and totally undeniable. I mean, if you absolutely must point an apparently gun at yourself and pull the trigger to impress your friends, maybe, just maybe, you might want to check the chamber as well as eject the magazine.

The USA is collapsing because it is not the United States of America anymore. Its human and military capital have been considerably drawn down. The people who are the posterity of the Founders have been invaded and overrun, the various propositions and creeds that made their culture exceptional have been rejected by nationals, citizens, and invaders alike, and the remnants of their religion is a watered-down, treasonous, pharisaical Judeo-Churchianity that is a pale shadow of the unadulterated Christianity that once fearlessly proclaimed “No King but Jesus” to the English Crown.

Now they are afraid to call abomination and adultery sin. Instead, they preach against masculinity and nationalism.

So, what else would you expect? I mean, seriously, what other outcome could there possibly be?

Do you not see that the pace of the financial rapine has increased as well? That’s the elite, desperately attempting to make hay while the setting sun still shines.

The best of Gab

What you’re missing by not being on Gab:

Hephaestus@Jaciii
Overheard…… 


Wife to Daughter, “What’s Gab?” 


“It’s Twitter for the bad kids.” 


#dreadilk #VFM #gabfam

Speaking of Gab, I’m pleased to be able to say that @a will be a panelist at tomorrow night’s Brainstorm to discuss Alt-Tech and The Disconvergence, including Project Big Fork. If you’d like to join us online at 7 PM Eastern tomorrow, you can register for it here.

Safe as houses

The cartoon above is a reasonable summary of the current state of the West. After finishing The Clash of Civilizations, it is eminently clear to me that most people, from proposition-nation white conservatives to rainbow-haired, diversity-drunk, quad-gendered, genetically-vibrant multiculturalists, are as completely and absolutely clueless about what the future holds with regards to the ongoing remaking of the world order as the average rotisserie chicken. That’s not surprising. To me, the remarkable thing is how early, and how clearly, Huntington saw the civilizational trends developing. This just goes to show how useful a sound conceptual model is, and how pointless it is to stubbornly insist on retaining models that events or logic have proven to be observably false.

Which leads me to address a concern that was expressed by several people concerning the way in which certain specific individuals happen to disagree with me, such as John C. Wright, whose recent post entitled Hooey and Phooey takes serious exception to what could be described in general terms as my Alt-West thesis. From the comments:

John C. Wright
“As for Vox, I admire his fight against the enemies of civilization, he’s actually doing something about it. He can be wrong about an issue and right about the need to fight for something. An unintegrated horde of millions of people with a hostile ideology from one of the most violent places on earth should be opposed on the basis of common sense (no race-science needed).”

I agree.

This is a holy war, not a race war. The religion of secular leftism (and it is a religion in all but name) has made an alliance with the horrid and enduring heresy of the False Prophet, Mohammedanism, against the religion of the West, Christianity: those two are teamed up, and the Left are trying to use demographics to destroy us. He is right that it is an invasion: he is right that men who hate us cannot assimilate and certainly must be expelled from the nation.

Vox is dead wrong on the ultimate reasons and the ultimate cure for it. The ultimate reasons are spiritual, not genetic. The ultimate cure is revival of Christianity, a re-dedication to the founding principles of this nation, not the creation of a White Lives Matter movement coupled with an abolition of those principles.

Tom Simon
Vox is dead wrong on the ultimate reasons and the ultimate cure for it.

Sir, I am very glad that you acknowledge this. I have sometimes been fearful lest your business dealings with Mr. Beale (conducted to mutual profit) might incline you to overlook his faults in politics and dialectic.

Camilla Cameo
At the same time, I for one hope that this disagreement does not cause any rift between! (Though I suggested debate earlier, it was with the acknowledgement that the possibility of ill feeling would be a good reason not to.)

Let me be perfectly clear. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on anything, let alone everything. I suspect – let me correct that, I KNOW – that every single Castalia House author disagrees with me with at least some aspect of my Alt-West thesis even if they tend to generally support its objectives. Not even the co-author of Cuckservative wholly agrees with me; he is not a Christian, for one thing. I think William S. Lind would probably come the closest of them all and he does not even use computers.

So, I have to assume that my idea of direct techno-democracy is right out with him.

Now, I do happen to think the estimable Mr. Wright is so vastly and utterly and risibly wrong on this particular subject that one day he will find it it hard to imagine that he ever genuinely believed what he now believes quite sincerely.

But so what? I have been every bit as wrong about other concepts myself in the past, such as free trade, just to give one example.

There is neither a rift nor any reason for one. I don’t edit and publish Mr. Wright’s books because I care what he thinks about the Alt-Right or Western civilization, but because he is one of the three best SF/F writers writing today. His novels are entertaining, important, and uplifting. I wouldn’t hesitate to publish China Mieville either even though Mr. Mieville’s ideas concerning political economy are considerably more frothing-at-the-mouth mad than Mr. Wright’s could ever be even if Mr. Wright were bitten by a rabid, syphilitic mongoose.

Nor do I admire Mr. Wright because I agree with him about one particular concept or another, but because he is a great writer and a good man. He is, without question, better than me on both counts. Although I think he is wrong with regards to American posterity, Aristotelian rhetoric, human intelligence, genetic science, and the art of war, just to name a few things concerning which we disagree, I enjoy reading his thoughts on those and other topics, and I do not mind his criticism in the least, as it is considerably more honest and substantive than most I receive. I consider it to be both an honor and a privilege to work with him.

The truth is immutable. But none of us have the capacity to see it clearly and fully. Perhaps time will help clarify who is correct and who is not, or perhaps not. In the meantime, all we can do is observe and reflect as honestly as we can.

Besides, if current events are any guide, I expect Mr. Wright and nearly everyone else to begin to come around to my way of thinking soon enough once the ongoing clash of civilizations strikes close enough to home to make an impression on them. Back in 2002, people were a lot more dubious about my opinion concerning a coming financial crisis than they are about anything I say these days. Frankly, I see “dead wrong” as a big step up from “seriously, what color is the sky in your world?”

A missing mandate

When elected politicians ignore the people, the people will ensure their voices are heard and their will is ultimately obeyed.

Over the past several months, the German people have become increasingly frustrated with Merkel’s “open-border” policy that has allowed over 1mm migrants to flow into the country from the Middle East and North Africa.  The flood of migrants has brought with it a wave of violent crime including sexual assaults resulting in a rising nationalist tension as people have turned their backs on Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union party in recent elections.

The most recent example of backlash over the migrant crisis comes from the small German town of Oersdorf in Northern Germany.  The Mayor of Oersdorf, Joachim Kebschull (61), was recently beaten unconscious outside of the city’s Town Hall where the construction committee was meeting to discuss a new housing development for migrants.  The mayor was apparently struck with a club from behind as he stepped out the Town Hall building to get a laptop from his car.

According to DW, Kebschull had been receiving threats for months.  In fact, the committee meeting had already been postponed twice over bomb threats.

The controversy surrounded a local subsidized housing revitalization where the mayor wanted to offer apartments to asylum-seekers.  “If we could also offer a family of refugees a new home in our village, we would like to take this opportunity and make a small contribution to people who had to flee their homes,” the association said in a statement on its website.

It will be interesting to see if the mayor learns anything from the experience or if he’s going to follow Angela Merkel’s lead and keep doubling down. Germany will not tolerate this invasion much longer and it won’t surprise me in the slightest if these one-off attacks – this is not the first attack on a pro-migrant politician – are replaced by a more organized campaign over the next year.

Keep in mind that this sort of violent response to an authority figure is very much a “last resort” behavior on the part of Germans. They are far more inclined to violence in obedience to authority than in resistance to it. It is a telling indicator that the German political establishment has lost the proverbial “Mandate of Heaven” and is on the verge of entering a pre-revolutionary state.

Right now, there is still the hope that the AfD will come to power and set things straight. But if they are, like the Front National, kept out of power through collusion by the major parties, or if they fail to repatriate the invaders, Germany is going to see violent civil strife that goes well beyond the Red Brigades scare of the 1970s.

British TV finally discovers a problem with diversity

Because the luvvies are now being affected by it:

The BBC was at the centre of a damaging diversity row last night after one of its top radio stars was sacked for being ‘white and male’. Bafta award-winning comedian Jon Holmes was axed from The Now Show – the hit Radio 4 programme he has appeared on for 18 years – when bosses told him ‘we’re recasting it with more women and diversity’.

Last night, leading figures from the world of entertainment and across the political spectrum reacted with fury to the BBC instigating a policy in which it was now choosing performers based on their gender or skin colour, instead of their talent.

Mr Holmes revealed that since his sacking he has heard from other stars who have been rejected by broadcasting bosses because of ‘positive discrimination’. He told how one woman presenter was given a job only later to be told ‘we can’t have you, because you are too white and middle class’. Another performer was considered ‘perfect’ for a role but could not be employed because bosses had been told to cast someone Asian, he said.

Holmes’s axing follows the BBC’s April announcement of new diversity targets to ensure that women will make up half of its staff by 2020, including on screen, on air and in leadership roles. The Corporation is also aiming to increase the proportion of its workforce from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds to 15 per cent by the same date, while lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people should by then make up eight per cent of the staff.

That’s clearly not enough. I think the BBC should mandate that everyone who appears on air must be gay black women. I can’t think of a better way to defang their incessant propaganda.

I don’t read books or watch movies with diversity anymore. It is a reliable indicator of propaganda, ideological preaching, and moral posturing in the place of entertainment. Diversity is remaking The Wizard of Oz as The Wiz with angry blacks who can’t sing or dance, with political lectures in the place of songs.

There is a reason why historical dramas are increasingly popular in England. It’s the only form of television available anymore without any bloody diversity.

VFM and Gab

All VFM who emailed me prior to noon today have received their registration emails from Gab.  In the event you don’t think you have, you are advised as follows:

Many in the lists had already been sent, mostly gmails, those folks should check both their “social” and spam folders. Usually best to do an inbox search. Google is pushing our emails to both of those folders.

Remember, once you’re on, be sure to do a post with #DreadIlk and #VFM so that others can find and follow you.

By the way, @a will be appearing at the Monday Brainstorm on the Disconvergence. I’m hoping that we’ll actually have three of the major #AltTech players there. Invites will go out this evening.

UPDATE: And this is what #AltTech in action looks like. In tangentially related news, the Brainstorm invites have gone out to the Brainstormers and OGs. They’ll go out next to the VFM. Tomorrow I’ll open it up to everyone else. We can seat up to 1,000.

Empty-handed at the OK Corral

Not bringing a religion to a clash of civilizations is like not bringing a gun to a gunfight. Every major civilization has had its basis in a core religion.

Consider these three quotes from Sam Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations:

  1. The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.
  2. Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the Subcontinent.
  3. Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations, and, as Christopher Dawson said, “the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest.” Of Weber’s five “world religions,” four—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism—are associated with major civilizations. The fifth, Buddhism, is not.
Now, one can blithely try to wave away Huntington’s civilizational perspective and his thesis, but considering how The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was published in 1996 and has proven to be not merely far more insightful and predictive than Fukuyama’s End of History thesis or any other conceptual model, one would have to be grossly ignorant to do so.
So, if we accept the idea that Western civilization and Islamic civilization are in conflict, what must we logically conclude from the three quotes provided?
  1. The decline of the West is the direct result of the decline of Christianity in the West, both religious and institutional.
  2. The growing power of Islam in the West cannot be halted by secularism, white nationalism, or any sub-civilization-level force.
  3. The preservation of the West requires a revival of Christianity.
  4. The preservation of the West requires the abandonment of some, though not all, secular values, beginning with the freedom of religion, that conflict with the restoration of Christianity
There is considerably more that can be concluded from this particular perspective, but I expect most people, even of an Alt-West persuasion, will struggle to accept just those four inescapable conclusions.