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”?


ABC reports “Hillary Clinton’s death”

Presumably they’re going to have a tough time explaining her reappearance yesterday. Second coming or body double? But the image below was briefly up on the ABC News website. Hoax, hacking, contingency preparation or Joe Biden’s wishful thinking? Who knows.

In any event, Democrats are already openly discussing her replacement, so I think it is reasonably safe to conclude that regardless of her personal state, her campaign for President is now pining for the fjords.

Troubling thought for the day: what if the reason she reappeared and was so mysteriously reinvigorated is that Satan didn’t want her in Hell either AND SENT HER BACK!

“Marital rape” does not, and cannot, exist

Judgy Bitch considers my debate with Louise Mensch on the matter, thinks everything through and concludes that my position is the correct one:

I think we have to clearly distinguish between having a right and exercising that right. Under the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, every American has the right to keep and bear arms. Lots of Americans choose not to exercise that right. They still have the right, whether they use it or not. The question under consideration in this particular debate is whether marriage confers consent to sex that cannot be withdrawn except by the dissolution of the marriage.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have sided with Mensch. If I say no to my husband, I expect him to respect that, although if I’m being honest, I would be very insulted and sulky if he rejected my advances. In the 18 years we’ve been together, I do not recall him ever rejecting me, and I can count the number of times I’ve absolutely refused to have sex with him on one hand.  Pondering the idea more carefully, I have now come to the conclusion that Day is correct – rape cannot exist within a marriage. If marital rape is a thing, then 100% of the sex I have ever had with my husband has been rape.

I have never obtained his consent and he has never obtained mine.

Consent is assumed as a basic function of marriage. Consent to sex is part of what marriage is. Mensch acknowledges the general obligation spouses have to one another to have sex, but refuses blanket consent. I think the most interesting part of the discussion surrounds the use of force and violence. Marriage confers the right to have sex with your spouse, but it does not confer any right to assault your spouse. By what means could a spouse force sex that was not wanted without the use of force?

It’s not an accident that the same ideology that has expressly stated “all sex is rape” is the same one behind the push to create the oxymoronic legal concept of “marital rape”.

If they could, feminists would outlaw both marriage and normal sex. Marital rape is an effective way for them to attack both.