The end of the troll hunt

I spoke with a representative of the Marshfield police department yesterday, and I can declare, with a reasonable degree of confidence, that the great troll campaign of the last five years appears to be more or less at an end. The police had Yama (whose identity, it turns out, was correctly identified) down to the station with his caretakers, none of whom knew anything at all about what Yama had been doing online for the last 12 years. I have been assured that there will be no further trolling of this blog, or of the many other blogs that have been trolled in the past, and that Yama will not be permitted unrestricted access to the Internet going forward.

While Yama did subsequently take advantage of what I suspect was access outside his home to post a short comment on Brad Torgersen’s blog under the name of Alauda yesterday, I have already reported it to the police and they are addressing the matter. If Yama posts additional comments anywhere else, please bring
them to my attention right away so that I can report them. I expect there will be a few more minor incidents of a similar fashion as Yama attempts to evade his newly imposed restrictions.

I have decided not to press criminal charges at this time due to my opinion that the individual responsible for the cyberstalking is not entirely capable of controlling his behavior. I’m not even certain he’d be considered sufficiently competent to be held liable for them. I do, however, retain the option to press charges if it turns out that the individual’s caretakers prove unable, or unwilling, to control his online activity in the future. I can also assure those who have been concerned about various threats made by Yama to various parties over the last 12 years that he poses absolutely no physical threat to anyone. So, the good news is that it looks like it’s all over.

As an occasional critic of the American police, I would be remiss if I failed to note that the Marshfield police were thorough and professional throughout the course of their investigation. They were also very considerate with regards to some of the more sensitive aspects of the affair, and their temperate actions have permitted us to reach a much better outcome than I had originally imagined possible. I was very impressed by them, as I cannot see how they could have handled the matter any better than they did.

I won’t go into any details about Yama except to say this: he is not someone to be hated or feared. He is someone to be pitied. That doesn’t excuse his execrable behavior, but it does, to a certain extent, explain it. You could do worse than to pray for the poor bastard.

As for the other trolls, who don’t have a similar explanation for their behavior, I hope you will have the sense to see this as a warning. Cyberstalking is a crime in most jurisdictions, and the police do take it seriously when a properly documented complaint is lodged with them.

The tipping point

It appears Netanyahu should have addressed the Jews of Britain, as well as the Jews of France:

More than half of British Jewish people fear Jews have no future in
the UK, according to a new study which also reveals that antisemitic
sentiments are more prevalent than widely believed. British society is at a “tipping point” with Jewish families
increasingly questioning whether to stay in the country, campaigners
claim today.

The warning is bolstered by a new YouGov poll showing
that 45 per cent of Britons agreed with at least one of four
antisemitic statements put to them. Some 25 per cent agreed with the
idea that “Jews chase money more than other British people” while one in
five accepted as true that “Jews’ loyalty to Israel makes them less
loyal to Britain than other British people”. A further 13 per cent
said of those surveyed in the poll commissioned by the Campaign Against
Antisemitism (CAA) agreed that “Jews talk about the Holocaust too much
in order to get sympathy”.

It seems rather obvious that they don’t have any long-term future in the UK. Great Britain is no more the proper home of the Jewish people any more than France, the USA, or China. The diaspora is over and it is absolutely absurd to say that France and Britain and the USA are all part and parcel of a vast globe-spanning home for less than 15 million people.

I tend to think the 45 percent figure cited is far too low. I cannot imagine that four out of five British people genuinely believe that any Jew, particularly one with an Israeli passport, is as loyal to Great Britain as an actual Brit is, unless by “other British people” they were thinking of the mainstream political elite. I daresay most Jews in Britain not named “Milliband” are considerably more loyal to Great Britain than David Cameron or Nick Clegg. But it’s a stupid characterization anyway, as it’s not “anti-semitic” to believe a Jew is primarily loyal to Israel. I should think it’s downright anti-semitic to insist otherwise. Every American living in London I know would be downright offended at the idea that he might be more loyal to the Queen of England than to the Stars and Stripes.

Hell, it’s hard for most of them to go more than a week without reminding an unsuspecting Englishman that “we kicked your ass in 1776 and if it weren’t for us, you’d be speaking German.” On the other hand, some of my English friends do still insist on referring to the US as “the Colonies”.

What I think most people fail to understand is that nationalism is not rooted in hate, but in love. It is love for one’s own people, one’s own kind. The artificial substitution of “country”, as in the sense of “geographical place with a government” for “nation” in the sense of “genetically kindred people”, has confused the issue for a long time.

Nationalism is why “Sweet Home Alabama” strikes a deep chord in everyone who hears it, even if they have never been in the United States and couldn’t find Alabama on a map. It’s a love song by a southern man to his own people, and even if we don’t share that particular love, we understand it, we recognize it. And anyhow, Southern Man need not hate Neil Young to know he doesn’t need Neil Young around.

Citizenship is ersatz nationalism. It is false, it is fake. Unless you understand the difference between citizenship and nationalism, you will not be able to make much sense of the events of the coming decades.

RIP John Hill

I never met the man nor knew anything about him, but as a wargamer in general and an ASLer in particular, one can’t help feel a genuine sense of loss upon hearing the news of his death.

John Hill is most known as the designer of the extremely popular Avalon Hill board game Squad Leader in 1977. Hill founded Conflict Games Company in the late 1960s and owned a hobby shop, The Scale, in Lafayette, Indiana, for several years. Among his many titles were Verdun, Kasserine Pass, Overlord, Battle For Stalingrad, Tank Leader, Eastern Front Tank Leader and many others. He also designed Hue, based upon the fighting near the City of Hue in the Vietnam War.

In 1978, Hill was named to the Wargaming Hall of Fame, receiving the Charles S. Roberts Award at the Origins gaming convention in Chester, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 1979.

As the developer of the morale model and the champion of the design-for-effect philosophy, he influenced a wide variety of games, both tabletop and electronic.

The troubling math

Percentages are not the only problem. Quantities matter too. Ian Tuttle points out the troubling math on National Review:

Demographics may not be the whole of destiny, but they are certainly a good part, and across the Atlantic, the United States seems increasingly to be turning toward Western Europe’s most undesirable demographic trends.

In 1992, 41 percent of new permanent residents in the United States — green-card holders — hailed from the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and North Africa, or sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Pew Research Center. A decade later, the percentage was 53 percent. Over that same period, predictably, the number of Muslim immigrants coming to the United States annually has doubled, from 50,000 to approximately 100,000 each year. In 1992, only 5 percent of Muslim immigrants came from sub-Saharan Africa; 20 years later, it was 16 percent. Of the 2.75 million Muslims in the United States in 2011, 1.7 million were legal permanent residents.

There is no official estimate of Muslims in the U.S.; religious affiliation is not tracked by the Census Bureau. However, Pew’s estimate of 2.75 million seems to be on the lower end. The Council on American-Islamic Relations says there are approximately 7 million Muslims in the country.

Now consider the following information about France:

According to the French Government, which does not have the right to ask direct questions about religion and uses a criterion of people’s geographic origin as a basis for calculation, there were between 5 to 6 million Muslims in metropolitan France in 2010. The government counted all those people in France who migrated from countries with a dominant Muslim population, or whose parents did. Only 33% of those 5 to 6 million people (2 million) said they were practicing believers. That figure is the same as that obtained by the INED/INSEE study in October 2010…. A Pew Forum study, published in January 2011, estimated 4.7 million Muslims in France in 2010 (and forecasted 6.9 million in 2030).

Translation: there may already be more Muslims in the USA than in France. (NB: metropolitan does not mean urban France, but continental France.) And in percentage terms, if one uses the maximum reported numbers on both sides, the Muslim population is 2.1 percent of the US population, versus 7.6 percent for Europe. However, the European total includes Albania, Russia, Kosovo, and Bosnia; which are either Islamic nations or contain vast semi-autonomous Islamic enclaves. Once those are removed, as Chechnya is no more properly part of Europe than Turkey or Saudi Arabia, the Islamic percentage of the European population falls to 3.9 percent. Note that about half of all Muslims resident in “Europe” are in Russia.

As one of my friends from Minnesota noted, she sees considerably more Muslims in Minneapolis than she saw in Rome last summer. I was in a moderately sized Italian city last week and I saw precisely zero. The reason for the false impression is twofold. First, Europeans keep Muslims in what are essentially Islamic ghettos in the major cities, the notorious no-go zones. Second, with the exception of the British, the Europeans are much more openly nationalistic and few consider Muslim residents to be of their nation.

But percentages are not magic. There is no precise quantity of individuals required to produce two, or ten, or one hundred, who are willing to engage in direct action. If the nation of Europe enjoy the advantage of their greater sense of nationalism and parliamentary systems that permit the rapid growth of non-mainstream parties, the American advantages are its stronger Christianity and its heavily armed population. But on neither side of the Atlantic should the pro-civilization forces assume that their eventual victory over the invasion is guaranteed. All civilizations fall in time, and the fact that the first two waves of Islamic expansion were turned back does not necessarily mean the third will be.

The strategist’s warning

George Friedman, the head of StratFor, sheds additional light on the long-term European situation:

Europe’s hidden secret: The Europeans do not see Muslims from North Africa or Turkey as Europeans, nor do they intend to allow them to be Europeans. The European solution to their isolation is the concept of multiculturalism — on the surface a most liberal notion, and in practice, a movement for both cultural fragmentation and ghettoization….

The European inability to come to terms with the reality it has created for itself in this and other matters does not preclude the realization that wars involving troops are occurring in many Muslim countries. The situation is complex, and morality is merely another weapon for proving the other guilty and oneself guiltless. The geopolitical dimensions of Islam’s relationship with Europe, or India, or Thailand, or the United States, do not yield to moralizing.

Something must be done. I don’t know what needs to be done, but I suspect I know what is coming. First, if it is true that Islam is merely responding to crimes against it, those crimes are not new and certainly didn’t originate in the creation of Israel, the invasion of Iraq or recent events. This has been going on far longer than that. For instance, the Assassins were a secret Islamic order to make war on individuals they saw as Muslim heretics. There is nothing new in what is going on, and it will not end if peace comes to Iraq, Muslims occupy Kashmir or Israel is destroyed. Nor is secularism about to sweep the Islamic world. The Arab Spring was a Western fantasy that the collapse of communism in 1989 was repeating itself in the Islamic world with the same results. There are certainly Muslim liberals and secularists. However, they do not control events — no single group does — and it is the events, not the theory, that shape our lives.

Europe’s sense of nation is rooted in shared history, language, ethnicity and yes, in Christianity or its heir, secularism. Europe has no concept of the nation except for these things, and Muslims share in none of them. It is difficult to imagine another outcome save for another round of ghettoization and deportation. This is repulsive to the European sensibility now, but certainly not alien to European history. Unable to distinguish radical Muslims from other Muslims, Europe will increasingly and unintentionally move in this direction.

The fact that the Europeans view nationality in a fundamentally different matter than Americans is hardly hidden. They have never bought into the myth that paperwork determines nationality. I’ve lived in Europe for more of my adult life than I’ve lived in the USA and I’ve been pointing this out to my American readers for years.

Forget nationality. One of my neighbors had lived in our town for 30 years and she still considered herself, and was considered by the other townspeople, as a resident of the next town over. As for us, we have been “gli americani” for more than 15 years; for the last decade “nostri americani”. And this is despite our being fully integrated into the community, speaking the language, attending the church, and so on.

Now, imagine how those townspeople regard even second- or third-generation Muslims, who look, act, think, believe, and behave differently. To believe that they will be able to distinguish radical Muslims from non-radical Muslims, much less bother to do so, defies all credibility.

ESR on gun control

Eric S. Raymond reviews and recommends Gun Control in the Third Reich:

It is commonly argued today that civilian firearms can do nothing to prevent tyranny because the armed citizen is helpless against the military and law-enforcement machinery of the modern state. But the Nazis never believed this; Adolf Hitler said in 1942 “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered […] peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.

Halbrook shows how the Nazis treated the Germans themselves as “conquered people”; they took the prospect of armed resistance very seriously and acted with brutal efficiency to thwart it it by disarming any civilian they identified as a political enemy or potential rebel. In this they were successful; while armed anti-Nazi resistance movements sprung up all over the rest of Europe, there were none in Germany where weapon controls had been tightest.

The Nazis built their edifice of repression on a law of the preceding Weimar Republic requiring universal weapons registration. The law’s architects realized that these records could be dangerous in the hands of “extremist groups” and required them to be securely stored at police stations. This proved extremely convenient for the Nazis, who used the registration records as a targeting list.

The lesson for today is clear: the individual right to bear arms has to be defended with zeal even when a nation’s political circumstances look relatively benign. By the time the will to repression takes visible form, opposing gun control has already been deferred too long.

And it is only argued by those who know nothing of 4GW. There are sufficient guns even in most “gun-controlled” European countries to wipe out the soldiery and the police forces overnight.

Although it must be noted that the very concept of “gun control” is bordering on being completely outdated, thanks to 3D printing technology. Perhaps that is why the globalist elite is not only increasingly anti-democratic, but anti-technology as well.

Hail to the victors

Contra SEC loyalist Nate’s assertion, they’re chanting it now. B1G! B1G!

I’m not what you’d call a fan per se of THE Ohio State University, in fact, I think Michigan has better colors as well as the best uniforms and fight song in college football. But back in the day, when there were only two teams playing for the Big 10 title, I tended to favor Woody Hayes, Art Schlichter, and Archie Griffin over Bo Schembechler and the Maize-and-Blue. I have no idea why, but it still astonishes me that Griffin was not a star in the NFL. It didn’t surprise me that Rashan Salaam failed in the pros; all he ever did at Colorado was take a pitchout, beat an undersized cornerback around the corner, and run 80 yards for a touchdown. But Griffin was the real deal in college. Was he simply too slow? I have no idea.

Anyhow, with Harbaugh back at Michigan, Meyer leading a resurgent Ohio State, and both Penn State and Nebraska rebuilding their programs, it should be interesting to see if a rivalry between the SEC and the Big 10 develops. It’s enough to get this NFL fan paying a modicum of attention, anyhow.

Those anti-semitic Israelis

Is it not remarkable how, when the Israeli Prime Minister said Jews living in Europe should move to Israel, he was not attacked as being anti-semitic in the way everyone else who wishes the Jews well and advises precisely the same thing is?

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has invited Jews from France and the rest of Europe to immigrate to the state of Israel, referring to what he sees as a “rising tide of anti-Semitism” there. The statement comes in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a televised statement on Saturday, referencing the Jewish tradition of facing Jerusalem when praying.

Netanyahu called on lawmakers to alter the existing immigration laws to make it easier for Jews to permanently move to Israel.

So, what do we conclude from this, that Benjamin Netanyahu hates the Jews? I note that absolutely none of my previous critics have remarked upon the fact that I was absolutely correct to have warned the Jews of the changing mood in Europe, and to have urged them leave Europe and emigrate to their homeland. Had the Jews in Paris done so sooner, they would not have been murdered by Muslims as they were in Granada and eventually in every Muslim-controlled city in Spain and the Maghreb.

Reports from the period describe that, after an initial 7-month grace period, the Almohads killed or forcefully converted Jewish communities in each new city they conquered until “there was no Jew left from Silves to Mahdia”

A man cannot have two masters, and the French Prime Minister Valls (who is a Spaniard) was absolutely incorrect to claim that France requires Jews any more than it requires Spaniards, Germans, Russians, or Turks. France without Jews is France. It is the Israeli Prime Minister who is correct. Israel is their home. The various nations of Europe are not, and it is time for everyone to stop pretending that they are. The diversity concept is dead. It has failed, and failed spectacularly.

It is not necessary to love or hate anyone to recognize that a group of people whose foremost concern is “is it good for the Jews” is never going to be entirely acceptable to those whose primary concern is “is it good for the French”. That is straightforward logic, it is simple set theory, and in a time of rising nationalism around the world, from the Islamic State to Germany, non-nationals everywhere would do well to either a) fully convert or b) return to their home nations.

Especially when one of the historical lessons of al-Andalus is that when Muslim and Western cultures clash, the Jews tend to end up as collateral damage. For the European Jews, emigrating to America instead of Israel looks rather like the Medieval Jews fleeing from the Almohads to what eventually became the Spanish Inquisition. And given the economic trend of the last 60 years, I very much doubt it will take another 345 years for Americans to begin doubting the loyalties of the USA’s Jewish residents, as the Spanish Christians eventually came to do.

NB: When considering these large-scale movement of people, try to recall that the significant changes tend to take decades, even centuries, to play out, even though the obvious turning points can often be identified at specific moments in time. As Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel shows, we often tend to look at certain sections of history while ignoring the relevant sections that immediately preceded or followed it, and thereby reach erroneous conclusions.

Coaching craziness

Rex in with the Bills, Fox out with the Broncos, most open positions still unfilled… I wonder if Peyton Manning will retire as quarterback and take the OC position under Adam Gase as the Denver head coach?

Pegida rises

As expected, the Paris attacks have caused German nationalism to continue growing, from 500 marchers to 25,000 in only three months:

A record 25,000 people joined an anti-Islamic march in Germany on Monday, claiming their stance was vindicated by last week’s Paris jihadist attacks. However, the impressive turnout was dwarfed by 100,000 counter-demonstrators calling for tolerance nationwide.

Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier stressed that “Islam belongs to Germany” and announced she would on Tuesday join a Muslim community rally in Berlin against extremism, along with most of her cabinet ministers.

Undeterred, supporters of the self-styled Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, or PEGIDA, gathered for their 12th rally since October in their birthplace of Dresden in former communist east Germany.

The marchers waved the German national flag and held up placards that read “Fight Islamisation, stop the flood of foreigners now” and “Stop multiculturalism. My homeland will stay German”.

The “counter-demonstrators” are irrelevant. They’re just the usual suspects who will turn out for any leftist cause. They won’t fight when the time comes; once the nationalists outnumber them they will disappear. What matters is the way Pegida is forcing the treasonous German elite to show its true anti-German colors.

Come election time, I imagine Merkel is going to be seeing a lot of pictures of herself in a burqah, talking about how “Islam belongs to Germany”. Germans can be so tone-deaf it is hysterical; imagine how that assertion is going to go down in Iraq, Pakistan, and Egypt. I don’t know enough about German politics to know if this will be enough to sink her yet, but it is clear that she’s determined to go down with the transnational ship. Furthermore, given the media’s obvious sympathies, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if there were already more Pegida marchers than tolerance losers.

Tolerance, multiculturalism, and diversity are all dead. They’ll twitch for a while, but no one with more than half a brain can still seriously claim to buy into the concepts. I note that Pegida is already spreading into Austria and Switzerland as well.