Tag: declineandfall

An obligation

James Kirchick explains why Jews residing in America have an obligation “to pay it forward by supporting a liberal immigration regime” in an article entitled “Can American Jews Be White Nationalists?”

Nobody’s politics or worldview should be determined by their racial, ethnic, or religious background—certainly not in a country as big, diverse, and welcoming as America. But if there’s an issue that should be at least influenced by one’s American Jewish identity, it’s immigration. And that’s because America, quite simply, has been great for the Jews, whose forebears in the shtetls of Europe spoke about it as the goldene medina, a golden land. Enslaved, ghettoized and murdered throughout our history, Jews have been welcomed by America with open arms.

Of course, that has not always been the case. During the Jewish people’s most desperate hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt slammed the door shut on migrants from Nazi Germany. And it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that institutional discrimination against Jews, in the forms of university quotas and the like, came to an end. But few other nations have been so hospitable to Jews as the United States. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other minority group that has succeeded so much thanks to America’s generosity and openness. The American idea allowed us to flourish to the point where we are the most widely admired religious group in the country. That is not a condition, to say the least, with which Jews have been much familiar at any other point in our long and beleaguered history, anywhere else in the world.

American Jews, then, have something of a communal obligation to pay it forward by supporting a liberal immigration regime. And by and large we have: Jews and Jewish organizations are very pro-immigration. This implied social responsibility doesn’t necessarily entail support for open borders. Nor does it apply to other parts of the world; continued mass Muslim immigration from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe, for example, is a portentous development that will make Jewish life there, already difficult, increasingly so. But an American Jew calling for a drastic reduction in legal immigration to America is unseemly. 

Any group of U.S. residents whose first and foremost question is “is it good for our little group” rather than “is it good for America” is not permitted to use the phrase “fellow Americans”. Because they are nothing of the kind.

A man cannot serve two masters. And while a man can collect as much paperwork as he likes, he can never be member of two nations. Jesus Christ himself told Christians they were to be in, but not of, the world, which is why Christians have been considered a threat by governments everywhere since the days of the Emperor Augustus.

But a nation is neither a state nor a government. Much mischief has been committed, and much confusion has been sown, by those who insist on conflating the nation with the state.

Robbed of their culture

No wonder the West is dying, raising children like young trees with their roots all severed:

At breakfast, in the glass-towered city of Vancouver, five-year-old Abigail looks glumly at her half-eaten bowl of cereal.

“What is it, honey?” I brush the bangs back from her face.

She lets out a big sigh. “I wish I wasn’t white.”

I start. Nothing in the parenting manuals has prepared me for that.

“All we’ve ever done is hurt people,” she continues. “I wish my skin was dark and that I had a culture.”

We live in a part of the city where immigrant families abound. Our neighbours are homesick, first-generation Mexicans, which means that salsas and pinatas and Aztec legends feature prominently at shared social gatherings. Our family regularly eats in Little India where we gush over the flavours of curry and dhal, and every February, we attend the Chinese New Year parade in the slanting rain. Plus, my husband and I are children of missionaries and harbour an acute guilt for the cultural imperialism of our forebears. To compensate, we’ve raised our children with a deep appreciation of non-Western cultures.

So when Abigail laments the colour of her white skin, part of me is programmed to protest. Is it not my moral obligation to tell her that her feelings of poor self-worth are nothing compared with the psychological ruin of real racism? Girl, everything about Canadian culture weighs in your advantage and you have no right to snivel!

Instead, I feel a sadness settle over me. We thought we were raising the enlightened child of the 21st century. We thought we were doing our part in setting the history record straight. Yet, in doing so, it seems we have robbed our oldest child of something primal to psychological health, something elemental to her well-being as a human being: cultural roots.

And it’s not going to end well just because you teach them about tea time. The word “fundamentalist” stems from those who go back to the basics of the religion, back to the fundamentals. It is time for us to become cultural fundamentalists, and our roots are Christianity, the Greco-Roman legacy, and the European nations.

The alternative is this societal suicide in the name of not being called racist. Of all the reasons for a society to die off, this simply must be the most utterly stupid ever witnessed on this planet.

The Boy Scouts, converged

This result was baked in the cake ever since the Boy Scouts started allowing gays. This is what social justice convergence looks like; once social justice enters, it replaces the core purpose of the organization:

The Boy Scouts of America’s board of directors has unanimously agreed to welcome girls into the Cub Scout program and to forge a path for older girls to pursue and earn the highest rank of Eagle Scout, the organization said Wednesday.

“The historic decision comes after years of receiving requests from families and girls,” Boy Scouts of America said in a statement. “[T]he organization evaluated the results of numerous research efforts, gaining input from current members and leaders, as well as parents and girls who’ve never been involved in Scouting — to understand how to offer families an important additional choice in meeting the character development needs of all their children.”

BSA said the move is also aimed at helping busy families consolidate programs for their children. “Families today are busier and more diverse than ever. Most are dual-earners and there are more single-parent households than ever before, making convenient programs that serve the whole family more appealing,” the BSA statement said.

Boy Scouts of America has about 2.3 million youth members between the ages of 7 and 21 and about 960,000 volunteers in the United States and its territories.

What a pity I didn’t write SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down back when I was a Boy Scout in the Order of the Arrow. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before they ban the latter in order to avoid offending American Indians.

You can be absolutely certain that after the initial rush of girls to join the Boy Scouts, the number of youth members and volunteers will begin to drop even more precipitously than it has already; membership is down 63 percent since it peaked in 1972. And in case you’re wondering, the time to start an alternative organization on the guidelines of the original Boy Scouts is about five years ago. You want to have the infrastructure in place and get it up and running before the mass outflow starts.

From SJWs Always Double Down: As Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian has noted, the more women enter any professional field, the more men leave it. And as the men depart, so to do the prestige and the economic rewards provided by the field. This creates a vicious cycle that both expels existing men from the field while repelling new men from entering it.

This is also true of academic institutions, social organizations and entertainment as well. It won’t be too terribly long before, the Boy Scouts of America will be shocked and dismayed to discover that they can’t get boys to join it anymore.

The decision to allow girls to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout is significant for several reasons.

The rank of Eagle Scout is a prestigious and widely recognized achievement, one that can have long-term benefits in academic, professional and even military spheres. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Neil Armstrong and Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are just a few notable men who have attained the rank of Eagle Scout.

While there is a rough equivalent in the Girl Scouts — the Gold Award — the honor is not nearly as well-known as the Eagle Scout distinction.

And we can now anticipate that the prestige and the long-term benefits of achieving the rank of Eagle Scout will rapidly disappear along with the boys. This is what ALWAYS happens when you fail to police your organization in order to keep the SJWs out.

Fat Bastard is toast

Harvey Weinstein is more finished than finished now. They’re going to lock the repulsive pig up for years if this New Yorker article is even remotely accurate. They even have audio of the creep harassing a woman and admitting to having groped her the day before.

Three women––among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans—told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.”

Sixteen former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein’s films and in the workplace. They and others describe a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models. All sixteen said that the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company. Messages sent by Irwin Reiter, a senior company executive, to Emily Nestor, one of the women who alleged that she was harassed at the company, described the “mistreatment of women” as a serial problem that the Weinstein Company was struggling with in recent years. Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a “honeypot”—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman.

What a joke. This loser is not at all powerful, he’s overtly and observably pathetic. Just listen to the pig whine and beg. The sickness of any industry that would allow this sort of disgusting creature to have any influence at all is an indication that it should be burned to the ground.

That isn’t the only reason that I have always turned down requests for film options to my books – and yes, I’ve been approached on five occasions that I can recall – but it is one of them. I have never, ever, wanted anything to do with any of the people in that industry ever since meeting a few of them in my game and music industry days. They aren’t the kind of people with whom I even wanted to have a drink, let alone spend years trying work with them.

UPDATE: Harvey Weinstein’s Wife Georgina Chapman Divorcing Him

What losing the moral level looks like

Spain is losing the moral level of war in Catalonia. Badly. The Spanish can cry “the vote is illegal” all they like, but the Spanish government can no longer pretend to have democratic legitimacy in Catalonia or to be anything but an imperialist state governing an unwilling people by force. The vote is no longer even necessary at this point; world opinion is actively turning against Spain. Had Spain encouraged the vote and offered incentives for a No vote, it might well have won. But by fighting against it and resorting to violence – even well-restrained violence of the sort it has utilized thus far – it has significantly increased the likelihood that Catalans will vote for independence.

AP BREAKING: Catalonia referendum: Spanish police fire rubber projectiles at protesters outside Barcelona voting center.

The Catalan regional government may well be a collection of economically ignorant fools. Democracy and rule by the will of the people may well be an illusion. But people have the right to be fools and billions of people believe in the idea that the reason their governments are legitimate is due to their foundation of democracy. A government punctures that illusion at its own risk. Remember, “the law” does not actually exist in any material sense. It is merely a collective agreement, which ceases to exist when a sufficient number of people unilaterally withdraw from it.

Too clever for love

This, in a nutshell, illustrates why pushing women into higher education is a waste of human talent, a net producer of human misery, and unnatural selection for a less intelligent population:

We’re just too clever to find a boyfriend! It may sound insufferably smug, but these women say their high intellect means they struggle to meet someone. Natasha Hooper, 22, says men do not know how to deal with educated women. She is worried about not finding love because of a shortage of educated men. Becca Porter, 23, says a man factory worker turned her down for being too clever. She says the sense of achievement derived from learning is alien to most men. Andrea Gould, 41, believes her intellect has prevented her from finding love. ‘I get the impression they’d rather date a girl without a degree, said Andrea.

The issue, she explains, is the calibre of men she attracts. ‘I’m not claiming to be Albert Einstein, but I can’t seem to meet a man I find intellectually stimulating,’ she says. Nor is she the only well-educated young woman who says she is too clever to find love. Indeed, she is one of a growing breed of women who fear — perhaps with good reason — they will be left on the proverbial shelf because of a shortage of educated men.

Recent figures from the university admissions service UCAS showed that 30,000 more women than men are starting degree courses in the UK. On A-level results day last month, 133,280 British women aged 18 secured a university place compared with 103,800 men of the same age. The effects of this carry over into the workplace, where women aged from 22 to 29 typically now earn £1,111 more a year than their male peers.

This is what happens when Man attempts to outwit Mother Nature. Speaking as a man who is, statistically speaking, more intelligent than 99.9 percent of the species, I can attest that I don’t particularly value female intelligence. The cognitive differences between a normal smart girl and an average girl is virtually undetectable to me, and the most noticeable difference is that the former tends to behave in a much more challenging manner, which is the real reason that men “would rather date a girl without a degree”.

It’s not about about the intelligence, the cleverness, or the credentials, but rather, the attitude that tends to come with it. Men know perfectly well how to deal with educated women: they avoid them. They do so because they want an attractive and pleasant companion, not an argumentative opponent trained by her professors to regard every conversational interaction as a formal debate.

The essential problem is that the combination of female solipsism with female hypergamy means that too many women now desire the logically impossible and the statistically improbable. Women are attracted to men who possess qualities of size, earning potential, education, and, yes, intelligence, that are superior to their own. That’s fine, but the problem is when they believe that men are attracted to the same thing.

And it’s a damn good thing we’re not, because if we were, no couple would ever pair off and get together, because if X > Y for Z, then Y !> X for Z. Mutual attraction would be logically impossible. These women, both young and not-so-young, have subscribed to a false and incoherent philosophy of romance that quite literally cannot exist and has rendered both their intelligences and their educations moot. Furthermore, as believe I was the first to point out more than a decade ago, the rising F/M ratio of women at institutions of higher learning mean that at least one-third of all college graduates cannot ever marry a man with equivalent or better academic credentials.

So, it should come as no surprise that these intelligent, educated women have found neither romance nor love, have not married, and most likely, have inadvertently removed themselves from the gene pool.

Crackdown and resistance in Catalonia

Spain is cracking down on the Catalonian secessionists, causing more neutrals to support secession:

I just got of the phone with Josep Maria Sole Sabaté, my friend and a leading Catalan historian and public intellectual. He was nothing short of breathless as he described the helicopters  flying overhead stated flatly that he was in the the midst of a coup being carried out by the Spanish State.

He wanted to get in touch with me and others “out there”  because he was not sure how much longer free communication would be available to him and other out in the street protesting against he Spanish central government’s arrest of members of the Catalan Autonomous government.

As of this writing at least six agencies of the Catalan Government have been the object of forced police searches and thirteen, mostly mid-level members of the Catalan government have been arrested.

The homes of two the leading architects of the incipient Catalan state,  Carles Viver Pi i Sunyer and ex Spanish judge Santi Vidal, have been searched by police.  The headquarters of the far-left CUP, part of the pro-vote coalition in the Catalan Parliament, has been surrounded by police.

The leader of the Catalan National Congress Jordi Sanchez and the head of Omnium, a major Catalan cultural organization, Jordi Cuixart, has called Catalans to come into the streets and they have responded with a massive presence.

The mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau, who has been  highly ambivalent regarding the referendum that is scheduled too take place on October 1st, has now come out firmly for the referendum and against the crackdown taking place.

This response would appear to increase the chances of what looked to be another failed vote for secession into violent separatism. It all feels a bit unreal, however, considering that the real struggle appears to be over which government has the right to collect subsidies from the European Union, the Spanish central government or the Catalonian regional government.

The replacement chronicles

This is an interesting paper chronicling the ethnic cleansing of Miami, as seen from the perspective of the black-run Miami Times from 1960 to 1985, as a million immigrants poured into Miami-Dade County, which in 1960 had a population of 935,047. As the author notes:

Four themes developed through the Times’s editorials. The first was governmental favoritism towards Hispanics. The second was alarm because of the sudden and seemingly endless growth in population, with its attendant problems. The third was acknowledgment of the Cubans’ growing economic and political power and the need to reckon with it. The fourth referred to underlying common interests tempered by local political rivalry.

Hispanics now make up 65 percent of the population of the county, with more than half of them being Cuban. 52{9764fb840510ebfbcceeb8e5e656358a091cd25464f3be0f86629b28d17bfdb9} of the county residents were born outside the United States, while 72{9764fb840510ebfbcceeb8e5e656358a091cd25464f3be0f86629b28d17bfdb9} of the population speaks a language other than English as their primary language.

The loss of moral confidence

This is what it looks like in action:

A high school in California has warned students against chanting ‘USA’ at sporting events in case it offends students of ‘different ethnicities’.  Lori Emmington, the principal of Vista del Lago in Folsom, California, sent an email to parents and made the announcement over the PA system on Thursday.

She suggested that it was appropriate for students to chant ‘USA’ after singing the National Anthem or Pledge of Allegiance but that if used at athletic events in any other way, it could risk sending an ‘unintended message’. ‘During an athletic event, when Vista fans are in a competitive environment and cheering their school pride, chanting USA might be confusing. What is the intent, and is it open to misinterpretation? What would be the purpose at a sporting event?’ the email read.

When women like this are removed from their positions for acts of such pernicious defeatism, we’ll know that confidence has been restored. If that ever happens.

Catalonia’s case for independence

A summary of the conclusion of European legal experts on Catalonia’s case for independence:

As   a   result   of   their   research   and reflections,   the   authors   come   to   the  following conclusions and recommendations on the Right to Decide and the Catalan Government’s call for an independence referendum in October the 1st:

1. The   evolution   of   the   negotiating   process   between   the   Catalan   and   Spanish governments since the re-establishment of democracy in 1977 through time has allowed us to   identify   key   moments   of   a   deteriorating   political   relationship   where   the Spanish government has  gradually  renounced  the  accommodation  of  Catalan  territorial  demands. The evolution of this relationship sheds a new light on the tortuous path towards the legally binding referendum on political independence to be held on the 1st October 2017.

2. The upsurge  in territorial  demands  towards  political independencewas  put on the political  agenda  by  organized  Catalan  civil  society  immediately after  the  passing  of  the Constitutional  Tribunal  ruling  in  2010. Additionally,  there  has  been  a  clear  shift  in  popularterritorial  preferences, moving  from  preferences  asking  for  the  maintenance  of  the  current “status quo” to demands of “political independence,” irrespective of people’s age.

3. Catalan popular demand for a referendum on political independence has been largely justified by the democratic “Right  to  Decide”, which has evolved from the more traditional and  long-standing legal framework to the “national right to self-determination”. In other words, demands   for   political   independence   have   been   legitimized   by   a   democratic principle invested in the Catalan people, reinforced by the repeated denial to accommodate Catalonia’s demands by the Spanish government.

4. From   an   international   law   perspective,   it   appears   clearly that   there   is   no international legal prohibition barring a sub-state entity from deciding its political destiny by assessing the will of its people. Both case law and state practice support this conclusion. State  practice  demonstrates  that  numerous  geographically  diverse  sub-state  entities  have expressed  the  will  of  their  people  regarding  independence.  The  practice  occurs  both  with and  without  the  consent  of  the  national  state.  Many  sub-state  entities  have  achieved independence  after  assessing  the  political  will  of  their  people. EU  member  states  have recognized  many  former  sub-state entities that assessed their people’s political will and decided to pursue independence.

5. As  regards European  Law,  in  the  absence of  specific  Treaty provision  on the right  of Self-determination for a European people without a Statein the territory of the EU, EU law does  not  forbid  the  exercise  of  its  Right  to  Decide  for  a  European  people  within  the  EU. There  are  even  numerous  Treaty  provisions  that  indicate  that  if  such  Right  were  to  be exercised,  EU  and  its  member  States  would  react  positively  to  a  new  European  State candidacy  to  join  the  EU.  Recent  and  consistent  practice  clearly  points  that  way.  Further, both  as  a  collectively  exercised  human  right  and  as  a  fundamental  norm  of  international Law, EU recognizes the Right to Decide.

6. As  regard  the  constitutionality  of  the  claim  for  the  Right  to  Decide, it  is  necessaryfrom  an  empirical  viewpoint,  and  fruitful  from  a  normative  one, togive  up  the  quest  for  a supreme  constitutional  interpreter. What  is  crucialin  a  constitutional  state that  is  faithful to the ambitions of constitutionalism isthe ongoing dialogue about, and engagement with, constitutional values and principles. Only this will make the constitution a living document, infused by the competing interpretations of values and principles that, by their very nature, admit various readings and conceptions. The quest for the final word is useless, illusory and possibly lethal from the political viewpoint of a healthy deliberative community.

7. In  that  respect,  the  debate  is  much  more open  than  what  one  might  think  at  first sight   by   examining   too   rapidly   the   basic   features   of   contemporary   constitutionalism, especially as it is illustrated by the Spanish constitutional system. Far from being disruptive of  the  constitutional  project  that was  adopted  in  1978,  the  Catalan  claim  to  the  Right  to Decide  on  its  political  future  precisely  testifies  to  a  genuine  commitment  to  the  ongoing constitutional dialogue that is legitimate in an open society.That is why simply dismissing this claim as “unconstitutional” cannot be an attitude that lives up to the high standard of political morality that is imposed by the ideal of constitutionalism.

8. Democratic  legitimacy  at  Catalan  and  Spanish  levels  may  both  be  legitimate,  even though  the  principle  of  external  preference  limits  the  capacity  of  Spain  to  permanently oppose the democratic choice of Catalonia. However, when conflicting political legitimacies compete,  there  is  a  duty  for  democratic  authorities  to  negotiate.  This  is  confirmed  by  the observation  ofinternational  practice  that  in  almost  all  instances,  the  sub-state  entity  and national state negotiate the contours of the assessment of political will.

9. Further,  in  a  genuine  liberal  democracy,  rule  of  law  may  not  trump  democratic legitimacy, nor the other way around; therefore, in a modern democratic State, rule of law and  democratic  legitimacy  need  to  be  reconciled and  cannot  in  the  long  term  remain opposed.  In  the  context  of  a  vote  of  self-determination,  as  is  the  case,  the  national framework  will  inevitably  be  inappropriate  because  the  existing  democratic  processes  to address the issue did not allow for a solution or a process to emerge. A change of scale thus appears necessary by justifying either locally or internationally(or both)the organization of a  referendum. If  Spanish  national  Authorities  deny  the  right  to  Catalonia  to  negotiate  its Right  to  Decide  within  the  Spanish  political  framework,  then  the  only  path  left  for Catalonia’s Authorities is the call for a self-determination referendum.

10.Thus, whatever the conflicting claims of legitimacy put forward by the political actors, international   practice   and   transconstitutional   jurisprudence   show   that   successful   self-determination  processes  always  rely  at  some  point  on  a  negotiation  procedure.  In  that perspective, the experts recommend the exploration of an earned sovereignty negotiating process  within  the  framework  of  the  EU.  This  would  imply  involvement  by  EU  institutions; we consider it possible in the perspective of a negotiation within the EU, fully implying Spain in seeking for Catalonia a constrained sovereignty solution, as a full member of the EU.

It’s a strong point to say that a democratic State cannot simultaneously declare its legitimacy is based on democracy while attempting to deny democratic self-determination to a secession-minded part of its populace. Post-Brexit, the EU is much more likely to support this political fragmentation on the part of its member-states, since smaller microstates are far less likely to believe they can survive without being subject to the EU.