Words mean things

It’s really rather remarkable to see all the self-styled “conservatives” who suddenly develop a new predilection for creative linguistic interpretations worthy of a postmodernist disciple of Foucault and concocting ex post facto legal contortions to put the Warren Court’s “emanations and penumbras” to shame when the clear meaning of “Posterity” is pointed out to them.<

Let reason be silent when the dictionary and a comprehensive set of historical examples conclusively gainsay its conclusions.

The undeniable historical fact is that the U.S. Constitution was no more written to protect the interests of 19th century Irish immigrants and their US-citizen descendants than it was to protect the rights of people living in Iran, Libya, or Mexico today. The reason this fact still matters today is that to cede one claim is to automatically cede the other.


Anti-American conservatives

In which Overgrown Hobbit demonstrates that she is far too short and dishonest for this ride.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Moammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Sarah D’Almeida de Almeida Hoyt to the logical conclusion that the contemporary United States is not a nation, but rather, an idea that belongs to all nations and that immigration to the USA is a basic human right.

If Vox Day does not care for people making up lies about him, he should not make them up about other people. Mrs Hoyt has stated on more than once that immigration into the United States is in fact a privilege; one that the United States may extend or withdraw at will.

A privilege, moreover that if the recipient is not properly grateful for, treating it as an adopted son would his admission into a new family and tribe, he does not deserve and ought not be granted.

Where she, and I, differ from Vox Day is that the founding principles of America are ALSO important, not just the land and the people. Liberty, rule of law rather than men, and a government that serves the people, in which all men are sovereign, are crucial to our identity as Americans. “Posterity” that lack it, are no true Americans, adopted sons and daughters that do are.

The idea the these values make her the same as a damned commie or a Muslim is slander.

It is as false as claiming that because Vox Day is wrong about race trumping culture in IQ, and because he claims that IQ is a necessary requirement for civil society, that he also believes that IQ determines virtue.

He owes Mrs. Hoyt an apology for that calumny.

First, I didn’t make up any lies. Second, the fact that I can draw more accurate conclusions from Hoyt’s statements than Hoyt herself can makes her logically incoherent, it does not make me a calumnist. Third, Hoyt and Hobbit are both factually wrong and historically revisionist. Fourth, Sarah Hoyt is not merely a Fake American, she is openly anti-American. And fifth, you always know that someone is intellectually dishonest when they edit a quote in such a way that leaves the statement grammatically incorrect. This was the full statement that Overgrown Hobbit disingenuously cropped.

It’s going to be very interesting to see which conservatives finally abandon their ahistorical equalitarian-based civic nationalism and which follow Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Moammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Sarah D’Almeida Hoyt to the logical conclusion that the contemporary United States is not a nation, but rather, an idea that belongs to all nations and that immigration to the USA is a basic human right. 

Overgrown Hobbit was trying to disguise the fact that my statement did not address what Hoyt says on the subject, but rather, the conclusions that logically follow from her statements. Which, in this particular context, does happen to render her no different than the particular damned commie and pair of Muslims referenced. So, what has Sarah Hoyt actually said on the subject?

I Was Born American

Yes, I was born in another country of foreign parents who would no more become American than fly unassisted, (and who desire it less than they wish to have have their heads shaved by a warthog) but I figure that was an accident of circumstance.  What really matters is that I was an American in my heart.  I just had to get here and become one in truth. (And that, by itself, is an American attitude.)

This week while talking to a friend about his foreign SO, I found myself explaining that other people, in other countries, have a hierarchy in their heads all the time — who is powerful, who isn’t, what attitude is proper.  You can find it (if you know where to look) even when reading British novels.

We’re not like that.  Whether we were born elsewhere or here, Americans — those of us who are proud of the name —  are rebels, revolutionaries, something new under the sun: a people who believe people should be equal in their right to life, the right to liberty, the right to pursue their happiness undisturbed by either inimical neighbors or oppressive “betters.”… Those beliefs make me American. 

The idea that one “had to get here and become one in truth” is actually an intrinsically not-American thought, by definition. It is, rather, a common attitude among Fake Americans who want to lay false claim to the inheritance that belongs to the Posterity of the original We the People. But the belief that she is an American, however sincere, no more makes a Portuguese woman an American than the belief that she is male would make her a man. It gets even worse in a subsequent piece, where Hoyt actually denies the existence of America as a nation of blood and soil.

I was born in Portugal, of Portuguese parents, and so far as I know (it’s hard to stand on the marital faithfulness of people you never met even if they were your ancestresses) have no American ancestor, ever.  I probably have British blood, somewhere.  Being from the north of Portugal it is virtually impossible I don’t, when you consider trade going back to the 4th century B.C. and a tendency for well-to-do British families to send their remittance men to the area before there was an Empire.

What does this have to do with being American? Despite the genetic ignorance of people who claim that America is a nation like old Europe of “blood and soil”? Clear nothing.

I’ve been known to say I was born American, it just took me a few years to make it official. Is this strictly true?  Kind of.  If you squint and shake the magic 8-Ball.

Of course, I didn’t know the name for what I was or what I wanted.  I had not read that “immortal poetry” of the Declaration of Independence.  All I knew is that I wasn’t precisely right where I was, and while I loved my family and the village in which I grew up, all my impulses — indeed, my way of being — were at odds with the local culture and the local beliefs….

As almost everyone here should be aware, being an American – not just fitting in the culture, and because that’s regional it means I’ll need to learn to talk and walk again if I move across the country again – is an ongoing process, an ongoing fight between liberty and totalitarian impulses which exist in every society and possibly in every human.  And it is a struggle to free yourself from the inherited nonsense that has plagued other societies too: ideas of class and inherited rank or ability.

Lest you think I am reading too much into Hoyt’s denial of the very purpose of the U.S. Constitution, rest assured, she is consistent in denying and rejecting it.

We are a radical experiment, a nation not of blood and genes, but a nation of heart, of mind, of belief. 

Now try to square that statement with the preamble that defines the purpose of the Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to… secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Posterity, as I have conclusively proven, means “direct genetic descendants”, not “future history” or “succeeding generations” or anything else. Paper Americans, Fake Americans, absolutely love the idea that America is not a material nation like every other nation in the history of Man. That allows them to claim that they are not just Real Americans, they are Better Americans than the real thing, even as they preserve their national identities, endlessly lecture their “fellow Americans” about the way things are done back in the “old country”, and attempt to change American society to be more to their liking. And notice that like so many Fake Americans before her, indeed, like Overgrown Hobbit, Hoyt is openly deriding both the genuine American nation as well as the very purpose of the Constitution to which she claims to have sworn herself. Now, here is the statement by Overgrown Hobbit that proves my original point about the Proposition Nation propagandists and shows that Overgrown Hobbit is intrinsically anti-American herself.

Liberty, rule of law rather than men, and a government that serves the people, in which all men are sovereign, are crucial to our identity as Americans. “Posterity” that lack it, are no true Americans, adopted sons and daughters that do are.

I must have missed the bit about Proposition Policing in the Constitution. If this is adoptive gratitude, I can’t imagine what a lack of it would look like! And idea that one should apologize to a Fake American like Hoyt, an immigrant who exhibits open contempt for both the historical We the People as well as their direct genetic descendants, for accurately characterizing her anti-American views and the conclusions that are logically drawn from those views, is absurd. She is no more American than I am Italian, Argentine, or Zulu. Of course, we can’t expect Sarah Hoyt to understand what Posterity means, or grasp the core purpose of the U.S. Constitution, or to accept the fact that America is an actual blood-and-soil nation and not a mere idea to which anyone, anywhere in the world, can profess allegience, any more than we can expect any other Portuguese, any other immigrant, or any other descendant of immigrants to do so against their own self-perceived interests.

John Locke warned us of people like Hoyt and Hobbit. Even though nothing gives them the right to dispossess the American posterity and turn those Americans out of the inheritance which ought to be the possession of them and their descendants to all generations, they are indeed apt to think themselves the masters.


Rejecting history, transforming America

Lest you are under the illusion there will be anything substantive left of America once the replacement population is sufficiently in control, consider this rejection of an important American children’s writer by a literary award:

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name is set to be removed from a major children’s book award after concerns were raised about the “Little House on the Prairie” author’s depiction of certain races in the early-to-mid 20th century.

The Association of Library Service to Children’s (ALSC) board voted unanimously on Saturday to rename the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” as the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award.”

The association, which took the vote at its board meeting in New Orleans, said the vote “was greeted by a standing ovation by the audience in attendance.”

Wilder is best known for her “Little House on the Prairie” novels, which the ALSC has stated “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values” based on Wilder’s portrayal of black people and Native Americans.

This sort of gesture is an intentional public insult to American history and heritage. As a Native American, I am not offended by Wilder’s portrayal of the Indian tribes that lived where she and her family settled, but I am greatly offended by this gratuitous insult to a woman whose literary contribution to American history will likely survive the country itself.


A glorious cultural heritage

That’s what I tell SJWs before they make their architectural contributions to my abode. I like to think that it helps them feel a part of something bigger than themselves:

Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.

Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City’s cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral’s back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world. Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed. The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor.

“This is a world of information,” says archaeologist Raùl Barrera Rodríguez, director of INAH’s Urban Archaeology Program and leader of the team that found the tzompantli. “It’s an amazing thing, and just the kind of discovery many of us had hoped for,” agrees John Verano, a bioarchaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who studies human sacrifice. He and other researchers hope the skulls will clarify the role of large-scale human sacrifice in Mexica religion and culture—and whether, as scholars suspect, it played a key part in building their empire.

It’s always good to know that one is maintaining a long-standing historical tradition. It also tends to put a new spin on the Mexican reverence for La Señora de la Santa Muerte.


Science is not scientific

And as a result, it’s mostly fake. That’s the only conclusion that can be honestly reached in light of the fact that the single most famous experiment in social science turns out to have been a fraud:

One of the most famous and influential psychology studies of all time was based on lies and fakery, a new exposé reveals.

The Stanford prison experiment purported to show we are all naturally inclined to abuse positions of power – after volunteers randomly assigned to act as prison guards began abusing volunteer inmates in a mock prison.

But now a report from author and scientist Dr Ben Blum claims the research was all a sham. It points to recordings found in archives at Stanford University which show the study’s author Professor Philip Zimbardo encouraged guards to treat inmates poorly.

Also, one volunteer prisoner has now admitted to faking a fit of madness that the study reported was driven by the prison’s brutal conditions.

The revelations have sent scientists into uproar, with some calling for the experiment and its findings to be wiped from psychology textbooks worldwide.

We certainly live in interesting times. I knew that most “scientific” economics was a fraud, and I’d concluded that all “scientific” evolution was a fraud, but it is clear that the rot begins in physics and goes all the way down through the softest social sciences.

The central problem is simple enough, as it is the result of the gap between the theory of scientody and the reality of scientistry. Scientistry doesn’t incentivize or require replication, so no one even bothers trying to replicate the vast majority of studies and experiments.


Fraud AND racist

Not only did Albert Einstein rip off and take credit for the work of Newton, Poincare, Lorentz, and De Pretto, but he was a Chinese-hating racist as well:

The publication of Albert Einstein’s private diaries detailing his tour of Asia in the 1920s reveals the theoretical physicist and humanitarian icon’s racist attitudes to the people he met on his travels, particularly the Chinese.

Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries see the scientist musing on his travels, science, philosophy and art. In China, the man who famously once described racism as “a disease of white people” describes the “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” he observes. He notes how the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.”

After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary. A peculiar herd-like nation, often more like automatons than people. I noticed how little difference there is between men and women; I don’t understand what kind of fatal attraction Chinese women possess which enthrals the corresponding men to such an extent that they are incapable of defending themselves against the formidable blessing of offspring”.

At least we know the drill. Tear down the statues, remove his name from everything, and retroactively strip his Nobel prize. And, of course, bring up the fact that he was a horrible racist every single time anyone mentions his name.



Calling Mary Beard

Mary Beard, to the front desk. Your services are required.

Historians believe the Queen is a descendant to the founder of Islam – after tracing her family tree back 43 generations.

The claim makes the British monarch a distant ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad.

The findings were first published in 1986 by Burke’s Peerage, a British authority on royal pedigrees.

But the claim has recently resurfaced after a Moroccan newspaper said it had traced the queen’s lineage back to the Prophet.

Forget Londonistan. Ukistan is go!


Mailvox: Stupid cons and Smoot-Hawley

Sean asks about an old conservative trade chestnut:

The Conservatives on talk radio keep screaming about Smoot-Hawley. Those tarriffs if I remember right, the prevailing wisdom made the depression worse. What is the counter argument to that and how does it apply to what is going on now? Just curious. I have a hard time grasping arguments, and I know Vox is right but I would just like to better understand why the Levin’s are wrong.

I really do not understand why conservatives insist on continuing to pay attention to ignorant and deceitful posers like (((Ben Shapiro))) and (((Mark Levin))). These guys simply do not know what they are talking about and it is absolutely and eminently clear to everyone who does that they neither know the basic facts involved nor understand the core conceptual issues that make those facts important.

Every single talking head who makes any reference whatsoever to Smoot-Hawley is a poser and a fraud who knows nothing about economics or economic history. This is basically a variant of the “Um, Ricardo?” pseudo-rebuttal to an argument for tariffs or other forms of protectionism. It is proof that the speaker has heard about the subject, but doesn’t actually know the subject at all.

The point is so trivial that I dealt with it in a single paragraph in The Return of the Great Depression ten years ago and haven’t seen the need to mention it again since.

For many years, it was supposed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 played a major role in the economic contraction of the Great Depression. As more economists are gradually coming to realize, this was unlikely to have been the case for several reasons. First, the 15.5 percent annual decline in exports from 1929 to 1933 was less precipitous than the pre-tariff 18.3 percent decline from 1920 to 1922. Second, because the amount of imports also fell, the net effect of the $328 million reduction in the balance of trade on the economy amounted to only 0.3 percent of 1929 GDP. Third, the balance of trade turned negative and by 1940 had increased to nearly ten times the size of the 1929 positive balance while the economy was growing.

Unless Levin is concocting some new and highly improbable mathematical scenario based on chaos theory and the Smoot-Hawley butterfly, he’s flat-out wrong. To put it in more simple terms, there was nowhere nearly enough international trade taking place at the time to cause or account for the Great Depression. Whoever originally came up with that idea didn’t know what they were talking about and didn’t understand economics. And neither does anyone who still takes the ridiculous idea seriously.

The reason the Great Depression happened was the same reason that the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Everyone was overleveraged and the total amount of money being borrowed collapsed. That is why an average of 1,287 banks failed every year from 1930 to 1933. The historical credit collapse had vastly more impact on the economy than a smaller annual decline in exports than had been experienced seven years before as a result of the Fordney–McCumber tariff act.


The younger religion

There has been a similar debate at Steve Sailer’s over the propagandistic term “Judeo-Christian”. There were four things in particular that I noted from the comments:

1) The great American intellectual Harold Bloom reached a similar conclusion about the myth of the “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

There is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian tradition. That is absolutely ridiculous. And fascinatingly enough there are two things that I’ve said throughout my life when I’ve addressed Jewish audiences, say at the Jewish Theological Seminary or such places, and they always get furious at me. But they’re both true. One is that nowhere in the whole of the Tanakh does it say that a whole people can make themselves holy through study of texts. That’s a purely Platonic idea, and comes out of Plato’s Laws. That simply shows how thoroughly Platonized the rabbis of the second century were. The other one, which I say in this book and it has already given some offense, is that in fact not only is Judaism, which is a product of the second century of the common era—and it’s worked out by people like you know Akiba and his friends and opponents like Ishmael and Tarphon and the others, is a younger religion than Christianity is. Christianity in some form exists in the first century of the common era. What we now call Judaism comes along in the second century of the common era. Christianity is actually the older religion, though it infuriates Jews when you say that to them.

2) Christianity has considerably more in common with Islam than with Judaism. The Muslims regard Jesus Christ as a divinely inspired prophet. The Jews regard him as at best a fraud, and at worst, an evil sorcerer who is in Hell boiling in excrement. The Jews are also awaiting the Antichrist and will worship him. The Muslims are not.

Unlike Islam, Judaism does not accept Jesus as a prophet or as having performed any miracles. The rabbi’s best guess was that Jesus was the illegitimate offspring of a Roman soldier and that Mary made up the “virgin” thing as an excuse. Nowadays they would go on Maury Povich and get a paternity test. They most certainly do not believe that Jesus came back to life after his crucifixion and then flew up to heaven. 

3) Oliver Cromwell never allowed the Jews to legally return to England. The celebration of the “informal resettlement” is pure historical revisionism meant to hide the fact that they were illegal infiltrators there for hundreds of years, until 1858. And it was the same sort of evangelical ecumenites as today’s churchian cuckservatives who were responsible for the legal emancipation of the Catholics and the Jews. Less than a century later, England found itself enmeshed in global wars, lost its empire, then its sovereignty, and was invaded by third world savages. Sound familiar?

4) This exchange was both informative and hilarious. The amusing thing is the way in which that David Goldberg’s semi-autistic fan actually thinks he’s being conciliatory rather than infuriating.

As a Jew, I have nothing against Jesus. At best, “Jesus” is a fairy tale creation, akin to Santa or the Easter Bunny. At worst, Jesus was a dangerous cult leader/sorcerer/terrorist, but who cares cause he’s dead. The real issue is political reality. And the fact is, Israel needs evangelical support.
– SpenglerFan

Really? Why is that? Why not use your awe-inspiring 115 IQs to take care of yourselves for once? I’d also like to let you know how much I enjoyed hearing the rationalist, “fairy tale” explanation of Jesus, juxtaposed with the suggestion that he might really have been an evil sorcerer. You don’t get that combination very often.
– Anon