Tag: decline and fall

So much to learn

Jared Diamond, the great prophet of geographical destiny, tells the West that it has much to learn from the tribal people of Papua New Guinea

“”I believe the few remaining tribes and nomad groups left on the
planet have a great deal to teach us,” he says and it is this belief
that inspired The World Until Yesterday.  Some tribal
customs, such as widow-strangling, will not be missed, of course. “We
should not romanticise traditional societies,” he says. “There are
horrible things that we want to avoid, but there wonderful things that
we should emulate.”

Take the example of child rearing. Far from
being harsh towards children, many tribes and groups adopt highly
permissive attitudes. “I mean permissive in that it is an absolute no-no
to punish a child. If a mother or father among African pygmies hits a
child, that would be grounds for divorce. There is no physical
punishment allowed at all in these societies. If a child plays with a
sharp knife and waves it around, so be it. They will cut themselves on
some occasions, but society figures it is better for the child to learn
the hard way early in life. They are allowed to make their own choices
and follow their own interests.””

I consider his theses to be absolutely absurd, but then again, there may be something to be said for the wise people of Papua New Guinea’s vigorous response to U.S. academics.

“A U.S. academic has been gang raped in Papua New Guinea by nine armed men who hacked off her blonde hair and left her husband tied naked to a tree. The 32-year-old woman, who was conducting research into exotic birds in a remote forest on Karkar Island, was walking along a bush track with her husband and a guide on Friday when they were set upon by the gang armed with knives and rifles. Her husband and the guide were stripped and bound by the men, who then used a bush knife to hack off the woman’s hair before raping her in a terrifying ordeal lasting 20 minutes.”

It would certainly make the average East Coast cocktail party more lively if the sort of overeducated midwits who take Diamond at face value were to follow the example of the noble people of Papua New Guinea in this regard.

Now, I realize that many doubt my thesis that most of the desirable tenets of Christian civilization will not survive in post-Christian society, but note that in Diamond, we already have a well-regarded, much-honored academic overtly advocating a return to many pagan, pre-civilized customs. But it never seems to occur to those who eagerly anticipate Western post-Christianity that those raised in a pagan society without Christian customs and strictures will not necessarily retain the civilized customs that are inculcated in the secularist or pagan raised in a Christian society.

It is easy to say, well, we’ll keep the Western strictures against widow-strangling, witch-burning, and academic-raping, we’ll just toss the ones against homosexual-marrying, public fornication, polygamy, and letting children play with loaded guns… wait a minute! The brutal reality is that a society in which most children are “allowed to make their own choices and follow their own interests” is a society where the values, and the resulting societal strictures, will eventually be decided by those semi-feral children and not their overly permissive parents.

What has long been decried by the civilized Christian West as “the cowardly act of animals” – how very raciss and judgmental – may well become the next “new normal”. No one should be so foolish as to believe that behavioral change on a societal level is either predestined or readily controlled by government bureaucracy. It is easier to destroy than create; it is easier to degrade than strengthen. The progressives who proudly proclaim that the youth of today are much more open to “gay marriage” should keep in mind that in the not-too-distant future, those formerly open-minded youths may well find themselves position of the disregarded, close-minded elderly, listening in horror as the progressives of tomorrow proudly proclaim that the youth are much more open to “sexual services on demand”.

I suspect a connection

Ed Trimnell observes that not only are atheists far more inclined to attack Christianity than Islam, but some are even willing to publicly declare that Islam should be off-limits to atheist criticism:

“It seems that a writer at Salon.com is upset because the so-called “New Atheists” have been rather unkind to Islam of late. In a piece entitled “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia” Nathan Lean suggests that these New Atheists should simply shut up about terrorism, sharia courts ordering death sentences for apostates, and honor killings in the Muslim world. Then they can go back to doing what atheists in the post-modern West are supposed to do: talk about the threat that evangelical Christianity poses to humanity. (After all, some of those hillbilly reactionary Christians still haven’t fully embraced same-sex marriage!)”

I suspect that this sort of thing might have something to do with the atheist hypocrisy:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have held protests in Bangladesh to
demand that the government introduce an anti-blasphemy law that would
include the death penalty for bloggers who insult Islam…. Supporters of Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamist group which draws support
from tens of thousands of religious seminaries [and that has the backing
of country’s largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami], converged on Dhaka’s main
commercial hub to protest against what they said were blasphemous
writings by atheist bloggers, shouting “God is great — hang the atheist
bloggers”.”

Apparently the old chestnut about there being no atheists in foxholes isn’t all that far from the truth. Christians are holding to their faith even as they are murdered for it by Muslims in Nigeria and Egypt and by atheists in China and North Korea. Atheists, meanwhile, are showing that they don’t have the courage of their lack of conviction, thus proving my point that post-Christianity in the West is unlikely to look any different than post-Christianity in the Middle East.

A post-Christian West will be pagan, not secular. It will be in the form of dark gods like Santa Muerte and Damballah Wedo, and it will be rooted in death and cruelty. It should be recalled that whereas there never was any medieval “Dark Ages”, there is a very good reason why Jesus Christ was considered “the Light of the World” by civilized and scholarly men who were familiar with the darkness of pagan cultures that preceded Christian society. Merely having to compete with that Christian society considerably improved paganism, as even Julian the Apostate implicitly admitted in his futile attempt to build a paganism capable of rivaling it.

“Julian’s heart was set on a civil and religious reformation. He longed for amendment in law and administration, above all for a remodelling of the old cult and the winning of converts to the cause of the gods. He himself was to be the head of the new state church of Paganism; the hierarchy of the Christians was to be adopted — the country priests subordinated to the high priest of the province, the high priest to be responsible to the Emperor, the pontifex maximus. A new spirit was to inspire the Pagan clergy; the priest himself was to be no longer a mere performer of public rites, let him take up the work of preacher, expound the deeper sense which underlay the old mythology and be at once shepherd of souls and an ensample to his flock in holy living. What Maximin Daza had attempted to achieve in ruder fashion by forged acts of Pilate, Julian’s writings against the Galilaeans should effect: as Maximin had bidden cities ask what they would of his royal bounty, did they but petition that the Christians might be removed from their midst, so Julian was ready to assist and favour towns which were loyal to the old faith. Maximin had created a new priesthood recruited from men who had won distinction in public careers. his dream had been to fashion an organisation which might successfully withstand the Christian clergy; here too Julian was his disciple. 

“When pest and famine had desolated the Roman East in Maximia’s days, the helpfulness and liberality of Christians towards the starving and the plague-stricken had forced men to confess that true piety and religion had made their home with the persecuted heretics: it was Julian’s will that Paganism should boast its public charity and that an all-embracing service of humanity should be reasserted as a vital part of the ancient creed. If only the worshippers of the gods of Hellas were once quickened with a spiritual enthusiasm, the lost ground would be recovered. It was indeed to this call that Paganism could not respond. There were men who clung to the old belief, but theirs was no longer a victorious faith, for the fire had died upon the altar. Resignation to Christian intolerance was bitter, but the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found. Julian made converts — the Christian writers mournfully testify to their numbers —but he made them by imperial gold, by promises of advancement or fear of dismissal. They were not the stuff of which missionaries could be fashonied. The citizens were disappointed of their pageants, while the royal enthusiast found his hopes to be illusions. Mutual embitterment was the natural result.”
– The Cambridge Medieval History Vol. I, pp 362-363

That was 1,650 years ago. There is truly nothing new under the sun. Even today, we see “the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found.” The reason Richard Dawkins’s attempt to set up an atheist charity will ultimately be no more successful than the Emperor Julian’s efforts is because the Christian customs they seek to imitate are not inspired and encouraged for their own sake, but by the particular religious impulse. Both history and observation clearly indicate that it is no more possible to maintain the tenets and various aspects of Christian civilization considered desirable by non-Christians without the Christian faith to support them than it is to maintain intellectual function without a beating heart.

Such efforts can be maintained, for a short time, by extraordinary artificial measures. But they will fail soon enough. And then the true nature of pagan darkness will reveal itself again.

Feminists are sub-civilizational

I’ve said it before.  I’ll say it again.  And each time, more people recognize the truth in the statement.  Calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the National Socialist German Workers Party:

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion. Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor….

“If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,
what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is
struggling for life?”

“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the
woman, her family, and the physician,” said Planned Parenthood lobbyist
Snow.

This is what the feminist’s vaunted concept of equality means.  This is what it has always meant: the legal protection of a woman from all and any consequences of her actions.  This includes a woman’s ability to break any contract at will, to steal from anyone as she pleases, and murder even the most innocent without having to even hear a whisper of protest to make her uncomfortable.  Feminists are objectively worse than Nazis.  They are demonstrably worse than Fascists. They are provably worse than Communists.  Their insane ideology has a higher body count than any of those three evil ideologies and comes with more costly, less sustainable societal consequences.

Civilization has always depended upon the collaborative effort of men and women to restrain the darker and more chaotic aspects of women’s nature. Women are more important to the sustainability of a society, which is why a society that can survive the bad behavior of its young males cannot survive similarly bad behavior on the part of its young females.

Islamic society is one example of the result of the civilizational burden falling upon men alone.  It isn’t ideal, but it is observably preferable, and observably more sustainable, than the catastrophic state in which Western society presently finds itself.  Victorian expat society appears to be about as close to leaving the civilizational burden in women’s hands as I’ve been able to determine.  Even that is a vastly more functional system.  But now, both men and women alike have washed their hands of the burden and we are seeing the results of hypergamy and solipsism run amok.

There are no limits.  That is the key.  Or rather, there are no INTERNAL limits to them, and so in the absence of external ones being imposed, there are no limits.  “Women’s rights” requires nothing less than sacrificing every other right that Western civilization has achieved, including the right to life itself.  Only the sub-civilizational, the nihilistic, and the stupidly short-sighted can support them.

This isn’t a theoretical observation.  This isn’t mindless mysogyny.  This is simply called “paying attention” to the ongoing societal collapse and its sources.  The Doctor Panglosses of the various statistics departments are already openly willing to admit to a “triple-dip recession.” Deposit heists of up to 80 percent are being openly discussed. College enrollments, even those funded entirely by debt, have peaked.  The nation is on the verge of becoming a genetically Third World one.  We are rapidly approaching a fifth year of debt deflation/disinflation.  The government is arming and asserting its right to assassinate anyone.

And you think everything is fine?  You think this is going to last?  You think this even has the possibility of continuing in the intermediate term?

Persecution in America

It’s fascinating, is it not, how those who deny Jesus Christ, from Roman emperors to petty academic professors, are observably obsessed with forcing others to symbolically reject the name of Man’s Lord and Savior:

A professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Davie campus named
Deandre Poole teaches an “Intercultural Communication” class from a
textbook by the same name.  The textbook calls for an exercise where
students write the name of Jesus in large letters on a piece of paper
and then stomp on it.

Enter Ryan Rotela, a student in the class who happens to be a devout
Mormon. Rotela refused to stomp and complained to Professor Poole,
telling him, “Never do the assignment again because it’s offensive.” 
Rotela also told the professor that he was going to complain to the
university.  Then, according to Rotela, FAU responded by suspending him
from Poole’s class.

It gets worse; the university is now going after the student, not the professor.  That’s obviously questionable.  But as the PJ Tatler rightly puts it, the more important question is this: “Why was there only one student in the class who found stomping on Jesus objectionable?”

Never forget, this is the sort of “tolerance” that the atheists and pagans grant to the Christians after successfully demanding respect and tolerance from Western Christian culture.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the genuine tolerance that was given to them may have been a serious mistake of cataclysmic proportions for everyone, including the atheists and pagans who have been granted free reign and are foolishly using their freedom to bring down a civilization more than a millennium in the making.

Descent into barbarism

It may not be only the economic statistics that are fictional:

Flying in the face of the traditional image of a country seen as the land of good living, ‘France, A Clockwork Orange’ claims that mainstream politicians and the media have long masked a far more disturbing reality: it is rapidly descending into mindless violence and incivility. “Nobody should ignore the reality,” the book claims, namely that “every 24 hours 13,000 thefts, 2,000 attacks and 200 rapes” take place in France – figures far higher than official national statistics.

Now, I don’t spend much time in France, so I have no way of verifying who is telling the truth and who is hiding or exaggerating it here.  But the fact that the book has become a national bestseller tends to indicate that there is something amiss with regards to the reported French criminal statistics, especially since we know that the FBI’s criminal statistics are less than entirely consistent where racial matters are concerned.

But it is worth noting that just as cultural integration tends to split the difference between the criminal tendencies of different cultures, economic integration tends to split the difference between living standards.  The intellectuals on the Left are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they have made an epic mistake of historical proportions, in devaluing and ruining their own cultures under the mistaken impression that this would somehow be of benefit to the rest of the world.

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

It’s not a question of fault.  It’s a question of actions and consequences. The best thing the West can do for the rest of the world is to preserve itself and serve as a positive example towards which it can aspire, not ruin itself in a futile attempt to transform other cultures through the magic of mass geographic relocation.

“enormous possibilities for the Administration”

Granted, he is often a little excitable with regards to the imminence of the sky falling, but in this case, Karl provides mathematical support for his prediction concerning when something similar to the Cypriot action will take place in the USA:

In two years federal medical spending along with Social Security and interest will, on current paths, reach the total of all tax receipts. At the outside the market will realize that Congress will never address the underlying issue with medical care because they have steadfastly refused to do so.  At that point we will have become Greece and Cyprus.

For those who say that our banking system is “strong” and “not corrupt unlike Cyprus” may I ask what the record is on money laundering and intentional obfuscation of the truth with regard to firms such as HSBC and Wachovia (both of which were caught laundering enormous amounts of money) and JP Morgan (which was just grilled, along with the regulators, regarding the “London Whale”) and not one person or institution has been indicted and prosecuted?

There is about $20 trillion in US Retirement “assets.”  A “small” 10% “one time” tax levy on those assets would fund the US Deficit a couple of years from now, and I will go out on a limb now and predict that exactly that will be done.

It first crossed my mind that this could eventually happen back in 1998, although I can’t remember why, but we were discussing it for one reason or another.  I never thought it was necessary, not even in 2008, because I simply didn’t imagine that the financial rulers of the US were crazy enough to continue with their credit expansion even after that clear and present wake-up call.

Two years seems rather on the abrupt side to me, but as I have often observed, these things always take longer to develop than one imagines, and then, when they finally arrive, unfold faster than one can believe.

From Huxley to Orwell

The world isn’t binary. Sometimes it isn’t an either/or proposition, but rather, a first A, then B situation.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through:

•    Sensual gratification,
•    Cheap mass-produced goods,
•    Boundless credit,
•    Political theater and
•    Amusement.

While we were entertained,

•    The regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled,
•    The laws that once protected us were rewritten and
•    We were impoverished.

Now that:

•    Credit is drying up,
•    Good jobs for the working class are gone forever and
•    Mass-produced goods are unaffordable,

  …. we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.”

We can take some comfort in the knowledge that all of this was foreseen and explained nearly two thousand years ago.  Of course, that doesn’t mean it is going to be a good time for everyone.

Can’t say we weren’t warned

Some find significance in symbols:

Oh, dear. This is probably not the symbolism the White House wanted.

Hours after CIA Director John Brennan took the oath of office—behind closed doors, far away from the press, perhaps befitting his status as America’s top spy—the White House took pains to emphasize the symbolism of the ceremony.

“There’s one piece of this that I wanted to note for you,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at their daily briefing. “Director Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution that had George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it, dating from 1787.”

Earnest said Brennan had asked for a document from the National Archives that would demonstrate the U.S. is a nation of laws.

“Director Brennan told the president that he made the request to the archives because he wanted to reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law as he took the oath of office as director of the CIA,” Earnest said.

The Constitution itself went into effect in 1789. But troublemaking blogger Marcy Wheeler points out that what was missing from the Constitution in 1787 is also quite symbolic: The Bill of Rights, which did not officially go into effect until December 1791 after ratification by states. (Caution: Marcy’s post has some strong language.)

That means: No freedom of speech and of the press, no right to bear arms, no Fourth Amendment ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and no right to a jury trial.

How … symbolic?

It could be.  I find it more intriguing that Obama took both his oaths of office in private ceremonies after the first, public one was fluffed.

Too big to jail

Karl Denninger considers the Attorney General’s recent admission that the big banks are above the law:

The Rule of Law works and guides a just society only because it applies to everyone.  Nobody gets to rape, rob, pillage or murder.  If you do, no matter who you are, you face the same punishment, the same process, the same sentence.

We all know there are disparities in the process and always have been.  But there’s a difference between the foibles of mankind — everyone has their bias, and there is no such thing as a human process that is flawless — and intentional, designed-in or willful refusal to prosecute certain people for acts that land others in prison.

The latter is the defining action of a dictatorship.

A dictatorship can only exist by declaring war upon the people.  When a certain subset of the population is given license to pillage or worse that is the very definition of “diktat” from which the term “dictatorship” comes.

Fast and Furious, incidentally, falls into this category as well.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs and must not be permitted to continue.  The government and its actors have lost all moral and ethical appeal to fair play and the rule of law — by exempting certain people they have declared both themselves and those they exempted beyond the protections that exist in a civilized society.

I’ve previously pointed out that there is no longer “law” as such, in the United States any more.  Everything about the “nation”, which is no longer, properly speaking, even a nation anymore, is fraudulent, from its “money” to its system of “justice”.  Even something as simple and basic as openly fighting a “war” is now beyond its bloated, cancerous make-believe structure.

I wouldn’t call the present system a dictatorship myself.  Dictatorships are more open and direct.  It is better described as a simulatorship, which is to say, rule by pretense.  It is remniscent of the latter days of the Soviet empire, when the Russian people pretended to work and the Soviet government pretended to pay them.  In the latter days of the US empire, the federal government pretends its actions are within the limits set by the U.S. Constitution and the American people pretend to believe them.

If a corporate entity is too big to fail or too big to jail, then logic dictates it must be cut down to a size that permits both.  Remember, corporations are not capitalism, they are creations of government and if they can’t reasonably be imprisoned, they can certainly be “executed”.  And if real American people can be “legally” executed at the order of the president, then can there really be any doubt that artificial American people are also liable to termination on command as well?

This section of the American Banker article particularly struck home:

Many are still angry about the 2008 bank bailouts, and they now have an
on-the-record confirmation from Justice’s top official that the
department is treating big banks softly just because they are large.
Compare it to how law enforcement typically treats American citizens
when they break the law — often times by throwing the book at them — and
it’s easy to understand how that anger could grow into more popular
support for a big bank breakup.

For example, my father was imprisoned for 12 years after being accused of evading $1.6 million in taxes, penalties, and imaginary “interest” despite having paid something like $75 million in state and federal taxes over the previous 20 years and forcing the State of Minnesota to admit that its agents knowingly lied when they falsely claimed he was a resident and seized his house for not paying taxes he didn’t owe. Meanwhile, Congressional investigators estimate that the big US banks launder about $250 billion in drug money every year in addition to their $12 billion in estimated annual mortgage fraud.  When caught, they occasionally pay a monetary penalty calculated at a rate which, in my father’s case, would have amounted to about a $20,000 fine.

So, I can understand why many Americans support a big bank breakup and seeing corporate criminals treated with the same severity as actual human beings.  But it’s not going to happen, because the entire financial system is already on the verge of collapse and all of the insiders know it.  That is why the banks will continue doing whatever they want and the regulators and politicians will continue to look the other way, until the moment when a critical node fails and the entire system breaks down in a manner that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.

Rushmore isn’t enough

Al Sharpton on the pressing debate of the day:

Last month, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton conducted a spirited debate about whether Obama belongs on Mount Rushmore or instead deserves a separate monument to his greatness (just weeks before replacing frequent Obama critic Cenk Uygur as MSNBC host, Sharpton publicly vowed never to criticize Barack Obama under any circumstances: a vow he has faithfully maintained). Earlier that day on the same network, a solemn discussion was held, in response to complaints from MSNBC viewers, about whether it is permissible to ever allow Barack Obama’s name to pass through one’s lips without prefacing it with an honorific such as “President” or “the Honorable” or perhaps “His Excellency” (that really did happen).

I would absolutely love to see Obama added to Mount Rushmore.  The ears alone would be hysterical.  Given that the great destroyer of American liberty is already up there, it seems only fitting that the penultimate consequence of his actions should be memorialized in stone there as well.

However,  I don’t think Mount Rushmore is sufficient memorial for Barack Soetoro-Soebarkah-Obama.  I think he merits a “Chairman Mao” style statue of the sort that the Chinese carved for Martin Luther King.  The bigger, the better.  I want future generations to be able to see precisely how far the nation descended before its final collapse.  Ideally, it would be atop a square platform decorated by a carved frieze featuring 1) the Folsom Street Fair, 2) a squad of female Marines going into action, 3) an image of 9/11, and 4) Mexicans crossing the border.