Tag: history

What state is that?

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton tells Minnesotans who prefer the real Minnesota to leave the state if they don’t like living next door to squalid third-world Africans:

Governor Mark Dayton was one of the speakers at the NAACP Community Conversation, hosted in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

For several years now, St. Cloud has been one of the locations specifically targeted for “refugee resettlement”. The large influx of East African immigrants has caused racial tension between the White St. Cloud residents, and the East African immigrants.

“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” he said. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago. … This is Minnesota and you [Africans] have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here, and this is Minnesota, should find another state.”

He described alternative views to his own as “unacceptable, un-Minnesotan, illegal and immoral”.

“If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state.” said Dayton. “Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again. It’s not going to be that in St. Cloud, or Rochester or Worthington.”

Where are they going to go? What would be the point? When I grew up in Minnesota, it was one of the whitest states in the country: 96.1 percent in 1980. First, aside from California or possibly Texas, there isn’t a state that can hold 100 million white Americans, which is about how many people would move to a state that was guaranteed to be Asian, Hispanic, and African-free. Second, even if a state is completely white, what is to prevent it from being invaded just like Minnesota and Germany have been invaded? Third, it is outrageous to state that alien invaders have the same right to be there as native citizens. They simply don’t, by any legal or moral standard.

History strongly suggests that Dayton is wrong. I can safely predict that the land presently called “Minnesota” will again feature a strong majority population with a minority population below five percent at some point in the future. After all, it already has twice within the past 165 years. All this imposed “refugee resettlement” means is that a lot of people are going to die and a lot of people are going to be forcibly expelled from the land. Whoever is willing to fight for it will hold it.

Where does Dayton think these homogeneous populations that he hates so much come from in the first place? Except in some extreme circumstances they don’t occur due to geography; mass migrations have taken place for millennia. They arise out of invasions, ethnic cleansings, and wars of the sort that are taking place right now everywhere from Myanmar to the Crimea. Of course, speaking as an American Indian from a tribe that bravely and repeatedly, and in the end, unsuccessfully battled the immigrants invading their land, I can also state with some authority that there is no guarantee the majority population that ends up living in that territory mostly unsullied by minorities will be of European descent.

For decades, Americans have assumed that all the terrible things that happened in Bangladesh and the Congo and China could not happen in the USA. And that assumption was true, mostly due to the halt in immigration in the 1920s. Now, thanks to diversity, labor mobility, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, and the European Union, both the USA and Europe are going to see an insane amount of violence that will probably surpass the Holocaust and the Holodomor over the next three decades.

The lesson of history is very clear. The killing season is coming. And those with the eyes to see are well aware of it.

I am saying that all the ingredients are there for complete breakdown and large-scale deaths given the right initiating incident. I am saying that volatility is baked into the cake – even into the cake of what today looks and feels normal. I am saying that while it may be possible to keep loading box upon box of societal Semtex into the truck, given the right detonator the collapse will be swift, unstoppable and devastating.

And when it comes, as it always does sooner or later, don’t think that the explosives or the truck were responsible. The blame lies with those who loaded it.

Future trends, future history

It would appear that Richard Fernandez sees much the same future unfolding that I do:

Conventional wisdom has had  a pretty bad run these last 15 years.  For that reason there is little purpose to trusting it further. Instead it might be better to predict a future based on observable trends rather than scenarios that politicians offer. If those trends continue one would expect to see in 2025:

  • The self-destruction of the Muslim Middle East;
  • The rise of ethnic and national politics in Europe;
  • The widespread resurgence of religion and cultural identity as a consequence of (2);
  • Mass expulsions or segregation in large parts of the world to deconflict incompatible communities
  • Everyone packing personal weapons like the Wild West
  • The collapse of multi-ethnic countries into simplified pacts based around of national defense, with most social law generated by local communities and affinity groups;
  • One or more large regional wars with casualties in the tens of millions.
  • Several, possibly many WMD attacks on major cities involving radiological weapons, low yield nukes or biological agents.

Such a world would be rough, dangerous and in many places, miserable.   Perhaps it will not even be as good as that; for the list above omits the occurrence of an event equivalent to World War 3, in which case we can describe the future with a single word: ruin.  But it is the world we are building, absent any change of course.  The oddest circumstance is that politicians still pretend without the slightest basis, that if we stay their perverse course we’ll go right through the ruin and out the other side and find the dream we glimpsed as we crossed into the 21st century. 

I’m not concerned about nukes or radiological weapons. What concerns me are genetic weapons. I expect genetic research to be shut down and highly regulated in the relatively near future. In addition to the way advancement in genetic science keeps disrupting the Narrative, it also poses a genuine large-scale threat to Mankind that is very nearly unprecedented in human history.

The events of the post-WWII period desperately need to be chronicled in detail, because future generations need to learn from the utter idiocy of the international policy makers of the last 70 years. In the unlikely event we happen to have enough historians here, I have in mind a project like the Cambridge Medieval History series, where the different writers each focus on a different set of actors. If this is of any interest to you and you think you might have the ability to contribute a section, email me with POSTWAR in the title.

Also, in not entirely unrelated news, we still need 3-5 more non-fiction articles for THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. X. If you’re a published military writer, we’re looking for high-quality reprints, so if you’ve got any, let me know.

Mailvox: get your syllogisms straight

TB goes awry in the second step:

This post (which was about IQ, part of a larger issue of Civilization) seemed to me to be about the very foundation of the Civilization discussion.

1. Genetics and culture are inseparable,
2. Only British genetics can grasp and enact Western Civilization,
3. The U.S. cannot allow a drop below a certain level of British derived population.

I understand that civilization requires trade-offs in education, economics, religion, and other systems. It just seems that the Civilization you describe was doomed the very moment it started. I believe the Constitution allows the nation to be hardier than this hot house flower being described.

2. is false. The U.S. Constitution is not synonymous with Western civilization. Western civilization is hardier than the U.S. Constitution, which was not only written by and for Englishmen, but is only understood correctly by them and those who have sufficiently adopted their culture.

More than that, it was only written for them and their descendants and was never intended to apply to anyone else except some of the German colonists who successfully grasped, accepted, and supported their unusual limited government philosophy.

The descendants of the countries who came later, the Irish, the Italians, the later Germans, the Scandinavians, the Jews, and the Hispanics are not the posterity of the Founding Fathers. It should be no surprise that they have not successfully defended a philosophy they have never accepted or understood nor respectfully abided by a document that was never written for them.

And my rebuttal to those who would argue is very simple and straightforward. Look around you. Do you see anything that is even remotely respectful of the concepts put forth in the U.S. Constitution?

Rise of the ultras

The result of the recent Greek parliamentary election is in line with my prediction of the European ultra-nationalists coming to power in two election cycles.

Golden Dawn, one of Europe’s most violent far-right parties, has emerged as one of the biggest winners of Sunday’s general election in Greece, consolidating its presence in parliament and power on the streets. The neo-fascist group came in third with 7% of the vote, behind the triumphant leftwing Syriza and conservative New Democracy….

“Golden Dawn is a movement of power, it is not a protest movement any
more,” the party’s Swastika- tattooed spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, told
Star TV as it became clear that the extremists had retained their
position as the country’s third biggest political force. “Golden Dawn is
the only party seeing an increase in its percentage. In October when
Greeks begin to experience the consequences of the memorandum and
illegal immigration you will see our support increase radically,” said
the former marine, berating the country’s mainstream media for
boycotting the party.

With 18 MPs in the 300-seat house, around 500,000 Greeks cast ballots
in favour of Golden Dawn. The organisation performed especially well in
Attica, the greater Athens region and the Aegean islands of Lesbos and
Kos where voter support doubled. Both islands have been overwhelmed in
recent months by thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing conflict and
poverty.

Golden Dawn’s anti-immigrant stance at a time of mounting fears over
Greece’s frontline role in Europe’s biggest humanitarian crisis in
recent history, almost certainly helped. The party, portraying itself as
the “only nationalist choice” played heavily on fears that Greeks could
soon become a minority in their own country. But, so too, did its
shrill opposition to the internationally sponsored bailout accords, or
memoranda, that the extremists have said amount to “ethnocide” or death
of the nation. Polls showed that some 16.6% of those who voted for
Golden Dawn were victims of record levels of unemployment – the most
grievous side-effect of massive budget cuts and lay-offs enforced as the
price of being bailed out to the tune of €326bn creditors in the EU and
International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“In terms of absolute numbers Golden Dawn was the only party to hold
its ground,” said Aristides Hatzis, political commentator and Athens
University professor.

The Fascists and the National Socialists came to power in the 1930s because they were the most credible options available to the Italian and German publics at the time. Don’t confuse the beginnings with the ends; 1933 was not 1941 or even 1939. Fascists were not elected with the idea that they would throw in with German imperialism (it is usually forgotten that Mussolini was an ally of France and Great Britain and only threw in with Germany after Great Britain betrayed Italian interests), and the National Socialists were not elected because they promised they would invade the Soviet Union, slaughter the Jews in Eastern Europe, and get Germany into a war with the USA.

One can’t learn anything useful about the future prospects of revolutionary parties by what other revolutionary parties did AFTER they came to power, one can only learn about their prospects by looking at what the other parties were doing BEFORE they came to power.

The worst thing about the established anti-nationalist European parties is that they have failed so spectacularly that even the violently murderous anti-immigrant parties will be preferred to them by even the most sane and civilized elements of the electorate. In a time of invasion, it doesn’t matter how dangerous the only party willing to defend you might be, what matters is that they are the only ones willing to defend you, your family, and your children.

As for those who are historically ignorant enough to point out that Golden Dawn only won 18 seats in the Greek parliament with 7 percent of the vote and therefore will never come to power, I will type very, very slowly and point out that in 1928, five years before they took power, the National Socialist Workers Party won 12 seats in the German parliament with 2.6 percent of the vote.

Two election cycles. And then you will see an absolute sea change in Europe. And if the EU attempts to entirely abandon even the pretense of democracy in defense of the invasion, the change will come even faster. And harder.

Rationalist naivete

One of my great disappointments this year has been reading JB Bury’s History of Freedom of Thought. Bury was the editor of my much-beloved Cambridge Medieval History series, which is excellent, and so I was looking forward to reading his thoughts on a matter that is of more than a little interest to me.

But while the book is as erudite and well-sourced as one would expect, it is little more than a one-sided anti-Christian rationalist polemic, with little insight and absolutely no foresight whatsoever. It’s High Church Atheist in a manner that is about as proto-“I Fucking Love Science” as it is possible for a book published in 1913 to be.

One wishes one could bring Bury forward in time to see what passes for reason hath wrought; a thought police more authoritarian, more delusional, and more in conflict with reality than any of the religious opponents of the freedom of thought ever were. Bury’s unjustified faith in the power of reason is a fascinating precursor to the complete inability of the modern irreligious to grasp the connection between Christianity and many of the aspects of Western civilization that they value, as well as their willingness to blithely saw off the branches of the tree on which they are sitting.

The struggle of reason against authority has ended in what appears now to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty. In the most civilized and progressive countries, freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle. In fact, we may say it is accepted as a test of enlightenment, and the man in the street is forward in acknowledging that countries like Russia and Spain, where opinion is more or less fettered, must on that account be considered less civilized than their neighbours. All intellectual people who count take it for granted that there is no subject in heaven or earth which ought not to be investigated without any deference or reference to theological assumptions. No man of science has any fear of publishing his researches, whatever consequences they may involve for current beliefs. Criticism of religious doctrines and of political and social institutions is free. Hopeful people may feel confident that the victory is permanent; that intellectual freedom is now assured to mankind as a possession for ever; that the future will see the collapse of those forces which still work against it and its gradual diffusion in the more backward parts of the earth. Yet history may suggest that this prospect is not assured. Can we be certain that there may not come a great set-back? For freedom of discussion and speculation was, as we saw, fully realized in the Greek and Roman world, and then an unforeseen force, in the shape of Christianity, came in and laid chains upon the human mind and suppressed freedom and imposed upon man a weary struggle to recover the freedom which he had lost. Is it not conceivable that something of the same kind may occur again? that some new force, emerging from the unknown, may surprise the world and cause a similar set-back?

The possibility cannot be denied, but there are some considerations which render it improbable (apart from a catastrophe sweeping away European culture). There are certain radical differences between the intellectual situation now and in antiquity. The facts known to the Greeks about the nature of the physical universe were few. Much that was taught was not proved. Compare what they knew and what we know about astronomy and geography—to take the two branches in which (besides mathematics) they made most progress. When there were so few demonstrated facts to work upon, there was the widest room for speculation. Now to suppress a number of rival theories in favour of one is a very different thing from suppressing whole systems of established facts. If one school of astronomers holds that the earth goes round the sun, another that the sun goes round the earth, but neither is able to demonstrate its proposition, it is easy for an authority, which has coercive power, to suppress one of them successfully. But once it is agreed by all astronomers that the earth goes round the sun, it is a hopeless task for any authority to compel men to accept a false view. In short, because she is in possession of a vast mass of ascertained facts about the nature of the universe, reason holds a much stronger position now than at the time when Christian theology led her captive.

All these facts are her fortifications. Again, it is difficult to see what can arrest the continuous progress of knowledge in the future. In ancient times this progress depended on a few; nowadays, many nations take part in the work. A general conviction of the importance of science prevails to-day, which did not prevail in Greece. And the circumstance that the advance of material civilization depends on science is perhaps a practical guarantee that scientific research will not come to an abrupt halt. In fact science is now a social institution, as much as religion.

I wonder if Bury would revise his conclusions in light of the “social construct” school of denial, which has produced everything from the “science” of anthropogenic global warming to multiplying sexes. Considering how ready the SJWs are to deny that a man is, in fact, a man, it is not at all hard to imagine that they would be every bit as willing to compel men to accept a false view of the sun rotating around the earth.

SJWism is the revival of the blasphemy concept, but it is far more dangerous than the religious laws ever were because it lacks a textual anchor. At least with religion, you always knew what blasphemy was and could readily avoid committing it. With the current thought police, they will inform you of your offenses after you have committed them, and neither ignorance of the law nor its previous nonexistence will provide you with any defense.

The dangerous faith

I doubt it has escaped anyone’s attention that with a few exceptions, the atheists, agnostics, and pagans around the world are content to make common cause with very nearly any religion except for one particular faith. As J.B. Bury observed nearly 100 years ago in his epic Cambridge Medieval History, which I cannot recommend more highly, this is not a new development:

Jesus Himself, had His followers allowed, might have had a place between Dionysos and Isis; but Christianity, which according to Porphyry had departed widely from the simple teaching of the mystic of Galilee, was sternly excluded from the Neoplatonist brotherhood of religions. Its idea of a creation in time seemed irreligious to Porphyry; its doctrine of the Incarnation introduced a false conception of the union between God and the world; its teaching about the end of all things he thought both irreverent and irreligious; above all things its claim to be the one religion, its exclusiveness, was hateful to him. He was too noble a man (philosopkus nobilis, says Augustine) not to sympathise with much in Christianity, and seems to have appreciated it more and more in his later writings Still his opinion remained unchanged: “The gods have declared Christ to have been most pious; he has become immortal, and by them his memory is cherished. Whereas the Christians are a polluted set, contaminated and enmeshed in error.” Christianity was the one religion to be fought against and if possible conquered.

What Neoplatonism did theoretically the force of circumstances accomplished on. the practical side. The Oriental creeds had not merely gained multitudes of private worshippers; they had forced their way among the public deities of Rome. Isis, Mithra, Sol Invictus, Dea Syra, the Great Mother, took their places alongside of Jupiter, Venus, Mars, etc., and the Sacra peregrina appeared on the calendar of public festivals. As most of these Oriental cults contained within them the monotheist idea it is possible that they might have fought for preeminence and each aspired to become the official religion of the Empire. But they all recognised Christianity to be a common danger, and M. Cumont has shewn that this feeling united them and made them think and act as one.

From Communists to Muslims to SJWs, various philosophies and religions have been more than happy to attempt to coopt Jesus Christ, because they believe he is dead. What they cannot countenance are the servants of the Living God, the followers of the Risen Christ, who despite our manifold failings, our observable flaws, our complete falling short of the glory of the God we worship, insist on attempting to tread upon the hard and narrow path rather than obediently follow the gentle, easy, thoughtless ways they advocate.

Christianity is the dangerous faith because it is the one faith that is rooted in truth rather than lies. It is the one real connection Man can make to the Divine. Yes, our understandings are imperfect, yes, we see as though through a glass, darkly, yes, our interpretations are various and contradictory, and yet, only in doing so, only through relentlessly pursuing the truth to the best of our ability can we begin to approach Truth.

Those who consider Christians to be self-righteous entirely miss the point, including those who consider themselves to be righteous Christians. To be forgiven is not the same as being sinless. To be repentant is not the same as to be blameless. It is not necessary to put on sackcloth and with Augustine melodramatically label ourselves the worst of all sinners to recognize that we are no better, and in some cases are considerably worse, than the virtuous pagan.

For better or for worse, we are who we are. We have done what we have done and we can never change the past. But what we don’t have to do is remain broken, frightened, sin-enslaved beings. That, through the grace of God, is the one thing we can change.

And that is what the enemies of God, in all their various guises, cannot abide. Because that is the one freedom they can never offer.

Immigration and idiocracy

This development in human devolution will be very difficult for the true believers in human progress or racial equality to explain away:

Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.

What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.

But this isn’t the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.

As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants’ so-called visual reaction times — how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.

In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.

It should hardly come as a surprise that the average level of intelligence has declined as less intelligent populations have become a larger percentage of the whole. It would be interesting to learn if that is a factor, or if the various intelligence studies are all of a homogenous Anglo-European population and the decline is even worse than it appears.

Remember, intelligence scores are always normalized to 100, so what is 100 in 2004 is not the same thing as 100 in 1884.

I don’t find this difficult to believe at all. There is virtually no one writing today that I regard as being on the same level as many past writers; it was astonishing to read how F.A. Hayek, in addition to refining Mises’s Impossibility of Socialist Calculation, refuting Keynes, and winning a Nobel Prize, also traced the intellectual roots of social justice before obliterating it 14 years before it became an observably significant cultural force.

Who do we have to compare to that? Paul Krugman? Steve Keen is the one and only economist doing anything that can even be remotely compared to the giants of even the relatively recent past.

Now, what could possibly account for an even more dramatic decline in average British intelligence?

Tests carried out in 1980 and in 2008 showed that the average 14-year-old was two IQ points cleverer in 1980, according to a study published in 2009. Scientists found that performance dropped the most dramatically in teenagers in the upper half of the intelligence scale, The Telegraph reported. Brighter teens who took part in the study in 2008 were on average six IQ points less intelligent than their counterparts tested 28 years earlier.

The 1980 UK census didn’t even take ethnicity into account. The 2011 census showed that the white population had dropped to 87.2 percent, down from 92 percent in 2001. It shouldn’t take an IQ much above the average to determine the reason for the decline in British intelligence over the last 28 years.

Diversity doesn’t only destroy a society, it makes it literally dumber. After all, you have to be pretty damn stupid and scientifically ignorant to believe in human equality anymore.

You can’t accommodate the Left

Sultan Knish explains the futility of trying to talk to, reason with, or accomodate the SJWs:

You can’t accommodate the left on social issues. You can’t accommodate it on fiscal issues. You can’t do it. Period.

The left exists to destroy you. It does not seek to co-exist with you. Its existence would lose all meaning. Any common ground will be used to temporarily achieve a goal before the useful idiots are kicked to the curb and denounced as bigots who are holding back progress.

The purpose of power is power. The left is not seeking to achieve a set of policy goals before kicking back and having a beer. The policy goals are means of destroying societies, nations and peoples before taking over. If you allow it a policy goal, it will ram that goal down your throat. It will implement it as abusively as it can possibly can before it moves on to the next battle.

It’s not about gay marriage. It’s not about cakes. It’s about power.

More fundamentally it’s about the difference in human nature between the people who want to be left alone and those who want power over others.

He’s absolutely right. There is ample historical precedent for their behavior and the eventual consequences of it. The moderate position is a complete nonstarter, as Brad Torgersen, among others, has learned. Read the whole thing.

Delusion and deterrence

Mr. Smith has a rather unusual theory about the Charleston church shootings:

Adam F. Smith ‏@Adampdx Jun 18
Haters like @castaliahouse  Theodore “Vox Day” Beale are the cause of massacre at SC AME church #SadPuppies #hugoawards

I look forward to the SJWs at File 770 being as horrified and outraged by this ludicrous accusation as they pretended to be by Mike Z. Williamson’s “too soon” joke. It’s particularly bizarre since I am not Castalia House and @castaliahouse has never taken any position on any American racial or religious affairs.

It’s rather amusing to see the many attacks by their own side the SJWs resolutely ignore as they go about their daily posturing and strike their latest outrage poses. Tor employees attack Tor’s authors and customers alike, Castalia House has undergone six straight months of cracking attempts, Vox Popoli is now into its third straight day of a DDOS attack, hundreds of people emailing Tor Books have been accused of being bots by Tor employees even as as Tor supporters create fake tweets to feign public support for Tor, and yet science fiction’s SJWs still preen and posture as if they’re the good guys because a few hundred science fiction readers followed the rules and violated an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to which we were not privy and to which we never agreed.

And yet, some of those on our side still want to pretend this decades-long cultural conflict is some sort of white-glove affair. There is a fundamental disagreement between the noble defeatists and those who are less willing to continue to submit to the SJWs attempt to claim cultural dominance at Sarah Hoyt’s post on The Marquess of Queensbury’s rules:

thewriterinblack  
Another observation I have made in the past is that our enemies often not only know that we don’t play by the same “rulebook” as they do, they count on it. Those among the Jihadis who have even a ghost of a clue know that if we were really as bad as they make out, well, it would be easier to pray toward Mecca–just face the blue glow.

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of a scene in an old Fantastic Four comment. Sue Storm as the Invisible Girl (I think this was before she started calling herself the Invisible Woman) facing Dr. Doom. “Doom, do you have any idea how dangerous my force fields would be if I decided to play by your rules?”

That’s us all over.

Dorothy Grant
And this would be why they hate and fear Vox Day above all others: because he does play by their rules.

RES
If we played by their rules the earth would be scorched. But playing by the Devil’s rules would be to concede defeat — what we fight for is ordered liberty, constrained government, rational argument over insanity.

Batman does not become the Joker, Superman does not accept the values of Luthor, Spiderman does not become Doc Octopus.

RES is completely wrong for the obvious reason that SJWs are not the Devil, they are merely his unhappy, not-very-bright children. And the vital point that RES completely misses is that you do not defend ordered liberty, constrained government, and rational argument over insanity with unconstrained liberty, government inaction, and talk. You defend it with force, and you defend it successfully with force that exceeds that of your opponent at the point of conflict.

The Romans did not become the Britons by defeating them with superior force. The USA did not become Nazi Germany by invading Normandy (although it may as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act). The Soviets did not become the Afghans and the Coalition of the Willing has not become the global jihad. Batman would not become the Joker even if he snapped the Joker’s neck, but he would certainly save the lives of all of those who would have been killed by the Joker in the future.

What frustrates me about the noble defeatists is that they are like a football team who refuses to accept the newfangled rules that permit the forward pass. They insist on playing the game in the outmoded way they believe to be the correct way, run the ball every down against a defense with 11 men stacked in the box, and inevitably lose when the other team passes for ten touchdowns and wins 70-0.

The problem is a conceptual one at heart. Even those whose devotion to free expression is unquestioned, such as Ken and Clarke of PopeHat, fail to understand that their efforts are doomed to failure so long as they confuse the objective with the methods used to defend it. This is not a “by any means” argument, it is a straightforward argument for Chicago Rules deterrence.

The best defense for free expression is not to permit the other side to freely libel and slander and calumniate and defame and lie while responding with few feeble protests that what they’re saying just ain’t so. The reason poison gas has made very few appearances on the battlefield since WWI is not because the French, English, and Americans set the Germans a good example, but because they promptly responded by manufacturing and using even more gas than the Germans did. The only reason the USA has not dropped an atomic bomb since 1945 is because the Soviet Union obtained their own in 1949.

Has the assault on free speech waxed or waned since Belgium introduced hate speech laws in 1981? The high-minded non-deterrent approach has failed, continuously failed, for the last three decades. The SJWs find speech-policing to be a useful weapon for marginalizing, disqualifying, and destroying their enemies and they are not going to give it up until they find themselves suffering from it to a greater extent than the free speech advocates do.

If you seek to defend free expression, you can do no better than to follow the lead of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, who said of poison gas, which he deplored as a “cowardly” and un-English form of warfare:

“We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.”

This does not mean we must blindly imitate the other side, particularly not in their instinctual resort to stupid and petty lies, transparent psychological projection, and a foolish insistence on defending the indefensible. Nor should we seek to be as blindly ignorant of them as they are of us. What it means is that we should adopt their more effective tactics, and, as the Allies did with gas in WWI, make even more effective and extensive use of those tactics until they agree to abandon them.

A historic privilege

In his landmark economics textbook, Paul Samuelson pointed out that domestic debt did not matter in the aggregate, with one notable exception.  He wrote: “The
interest on an internal debt is paid by Americans to Americans; there
is no direct loss of goods and services. When interest on the debt is
paid out of taxation, there is no direct loss of disposable income; Paul
receives what Peter loses, and sometimes – but only sometimes – Paul
and Peter are one and the same person…. In the future, some of our
grandchildren will be giving up goods and services to other
grandchildren. That is the nub of the matter. The only way we can impose
a direct burden on the future nation as a whole is by incurring an
external debt or by passing along less capital equipment to posterity.”

Setting aside whether it matters or not who owes what to whom, the recent report on external debt owed would therefore appear to be not entirely irrelevant in this regard.

The Treasury Department says overseas ownership of U.S. debt rose 2.1 percent in March to $6.18 trillion. That is below January’s record of $6.22 trillion. China added $37.3 billion of Treasury debt, bringing its stockpile to $1.26 trillion. That’s ahead of Japan, which added just $2.5 billion, lifting its total to $1.23 trillion.

In February, Japan became the leading owner of U.S. debt for the first time since August 2008. China overtook Japan that year as the Great Recession, higher government spending and a steep drop in tax revenue pushed up U.S. government borrowing.

As of the end of 2014, US government debt outstanding stood at $13 trillion. That means that with $6.18 trillion of it owed externally, 47.5 percent of the US public debt is of the sort that, even in Keynesian/Samuelsonian terms, imposes a direct burden on the future nation as a whole. And when you consider that the future USA – one can hardly call it a “nation” at this point – will be less white, less intelligent, and less productive on average, it should be readily apparent that the economy has absolutely no chance of growing itself out of the external debt owed regardless of which economic school of thought you belong.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the gradual demise of the biggest, wealthiest economy in world history. It is truly a privilege and an education to behold. It is rather like being able to witness the death of the last Tyrannosaurus Rex. Regardless of how the fallout from the event may affect us personally, we have seen and experienced something that very few men have ever known.

I still remember living in Japan at the height of the Heisei Boom; I flew out of Narita less than five months before the consumption tax and the first round of monetary tightening marked the peak of that Golden Age and brought it to an end. In nearly three decades since, Japan has never again approached those heights of ease and luxury. Now we are looking at much the same thing, albeit on a considerably larger scale. But rather than mourn the recent past, we should appreciate it for the rare moment in history it was.

The Hobbesian Law was never abolished, it was merely held in abeyance for a time.