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Topics - Religious Dick

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31
3DHS / A Yankee Loses His Shit
« on: June 24, 2015, 09:37:49 PM »
A Yankee Loses His Shit

Hateful Heretic ?   Published June 23, 2015 ?  171 comments
 
The blatant status signaling over the Confederate flag in the last few days has me about ready to cash it in. I get it. You're a really good person. Southern whites who keep that rebel flag around are really bad people, and so is anyone who defends them. Thank God that he sent that young man to kill nine people so that you'd have an opportunity to show everyone else what a good person you are, how much better-bred you are than Southern white trash.

God, it feels so good to collectively blame this crime on people we hate, doesn't it? Can't blame terrorism on Muslims. Can't blame a disastrously high black murder rate on black people. Can't blame single motherhood or child murder on women. Can't blame a degenerate entertainment industry on Jews. But by golly, those toothless hicks down in Dixie with those rebel flags and their racism...now there's a real out-group we can all be united against. Can't have an in-group without an out-group to posture against in order to maintain status. Sorry, Southern whites, you're it, and dead black people are just another way for us to gain advantage against you.

You all disgust me. You're disgusting people. Nine innocent people are dead, and all you can think about is writing some self-important pseudophilosophical blather about how much Southerners suck and how they all need to feel real bad and to some degree personally guilty about this.

I'm not a Southerner at all. I like to imagine heaven as one endless March to the Sea under the blessed visage of William T Sherman. But if we Yankees don't have to feel real bad about the wreckage of Detroit, about the depredations of the financial industry, about the degradation of all that is good and right spewing out of New York TV studios, and about everything else that goes wrong up here, then you can go right straight to hell if you want me to join you in your preening little parade over how much better we are than them.

Four white people tied up, murdered, and burned in DC? No big deal. Talking about black-on-white crime gets you disapproval from the people you want to impress. It's probably racist of me to even know that happened. Five people shot in church in Baton Rouge? Who cares! Killer was black! Eight dead in Tyrone, Missouri? Gross, they were all small-town whites. There's no angle for me to work there, no way to let everyone know just how righteous I really I am.

Don't act like your blog posts and Facebook statuses are about racism, or about blacks, or about the killing. They're about you. I see it right through it, and you disgust me. You are disgusting, loathsome people, and there is no depth to which you will not stoop to morally posture.

http://therightstuff.biz/2015/06/23/a-yankee-loses-his-shit/

32
>PRWEB.COM Newswire(PRWEB) July 28, 2014
For the last few months a new book published by Federalist Publications has been percolating beneath the surface of the conservative political movement. Titled The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, it explains scientifically the biological reasons that humans evolved political ideologies. Recently, well known conservative figures have begun to come out publicly in hopes of promoting the work's premise. National Review Online Contributor and Conservative Icon Bill Whittle, recently said, "That book opened my eyes in a way that nothing I've ever read, ever has... that must have been what Darwin's Theory of Evolution must have been for biologists, or what Newton's insights, or especially Einstein's insights were for physicists... the most eye-opening theory about politics I have ever read... This book is mindbogglingly brilliant..." Reactionary icon Matt Forney called it, "Shocking, Revolutionary." All agree, on finishing the book, that there is no intellectual analysis of the political world, or the biological origins of the political ideologies of conservatism and liberalism, that is even vaguely similar, anywhere in the field. Given the radical nature of its premise, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics could alter the nation's political battles forever, once it hits the mainstream of the political debate.

The premise of the book is that according to the study of reproductive strategies, and specifically what is called r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Biology, there exist only two significant types of environments in nature - either an environment with plentiful resources, or an environment where there are not enough resources for everyone. These two environments each mold the personalities of the animals that inhabit them, by selecting for those whose psychologies and instincts are best suited to each environment. This imbues these animals with two personalities, each designed to see the world, and confront it, in very different ways. Under the premise of this work, political ideologies are just intellectual manifestations of these two deeply imbued instinctual natures, which were burned into human brains through intermittent exposure to each environment during the past. Today, they are designed to emerge in response to changes in resource availability.

As an example, rabbits are more docile, more promiscuous, and less emotionally committed (ie.loyal) to peers and young. They have one of the above described personalities, called an r-selected psychology, or r-selected reproductive strategy, and it is identical to that of the modern liberal's psychology in both perceptions and desires. The r-selected psychology is designed to confront a world with a plethora of resources, such as fields of grass that rabbits can never strip bare. r-strategists such as rabbits are designed simply, to turn that plentiful grass into more rabbits, as fast as they can. Since food is everywhere competition is a dangerous and unnecessary risk, and fitness and adaptability to a harsh world is not a concern - or even on their mental radar. Since competition does not occur, r-strategists don't need to carefully seek out the fittest mate and monopolize that fit mate with monogamy, to produce the genetically fittest offspring possible. Since almost all offspring, no matter how unfit, can get food, all they need to do is produce sheer numbers of offspring with as many mates as possible, regardless of quality, by mating as much and as fast as they can, with whomever they can. r-strategists will also have minimal desire to spend intensive effort rearing their young, or to protect the young unquestioningly (imagine liberals supporting abortion, rabbit-esque single parenting, and other aberrant "family" structures that are hurtful to children). Nor do r-strategists join loyal groups to compete, or become concerned with the idea of in-group vs out-group competition. Just as the liberal is programmed to think that there are unlimited government resources to expend, rabbits are programmed to behave as if resources will always be limitless. From docility and competition aversion, to sexual "openness," to single-parenting, to lack of a desire to form loyal packs, both liberals and rabbits are designed as psychological r-strategists. The evidence cited in The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics clearly indicates that the r-selected reproductive strategy is the biological origin of the entirety of modern liberalism's intellectual foundation.

Conversely, wolves are aggressive/competitive/protective, sexually selective, family/pack oriented, and emotionally devoted and loyal to their pack and their young. They have a different psychological nature, called a K-selected psychology or a K-selected reproductive strategy. This psychology is designed to confront a scarcity of resources which they must compete for, if they are to acquire them. Since their world is dangerous and competitive (and they will starve if they don't fight for a share of the limited food), they form competitive packs of loyal peers, and seek to make their offspring genetically fitter than everyone else's through careful mate selection and mate-monopolization/monogamy. They rear offspring very intensively within a strong family, with lots of protection and care. Having labored to produce a highly fit offspring, they want to protect it, and need it to succeed in competition itself, so they raise it very carefully. Like conservatives, every element of their psychology presupposes that their world is one of danger, competition, and limited resources. It presupposes that those resources are not plentiful enough to provision everyone, so danger is ever-present, competition is inevitable, victory is essential, and adaptability to a harsh world is imperative. The book makes an incredibly strong case that this K-selected reproductive strategy is the biological force underlying the conservative ideology.

According to the book, as a result of this evolutionary phenomenon of r/K selection strategies manifesting in humans, human beings have two political ideologies ? one is r-selected, and one is K-selected. The r-strategists instinctually want a world around them where everyone is provisioned fully and equally and there is no competition - so no one can exert themselves to acquire more than another, and fitness and ability have no bearing on success. The K-strategists expect a world which is competitive - where people seek greatness in competition, and the inherently limited resources are apportioned based upon ability, effort, and determination. One theory of political ideology, which explains everything, from why leftists will tend to support promiscuity, single parenting, birth control, and abortion, to why individuals on the right support gun-ownership, oppose welfare and one-world government, all while insisting on family values and monogamy.

The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics then examines human evolution, showing how different populations of humans were exposed to these two environments in our past. It goes on to examine how as a result, humans evolved both rabbit-like and wolf-like personalities that are designed to emerge in populations to confront changes in resource availability. It demonstrates how it is these underlying personalities which form the emotional foundations of political ideologies, and it is the environment's level of resource availability which elicits the formation of these personalities.

From the crop surpluses of the Medieval Warming Period producing the Dark Ages, to foreign booty and slave labor fueling the Roman Empire's degeneracy and collapse, flood a nation with success, free resources, safety, and ease, and the liberal rabbits will flow from the earth, overwhelm a society, and enlarge its government with an eye to making a world where free stuff is available to everyone, everyone mates freely with each other, and low-investment parenting is the norm. Eventually, the rabbits collapse the whole governmental structure, by fostering a society which actively rewards the quick reproduction of a high quantity of unmotivated and incapable imbeciles. As that society collapses, resource availability will be cut back, (such as during the Carter years, the pre-WWII years ? or what is rapidly approaching today as governments head toward bankruptcy). Suddenly, people will begin to form into packs of more loyal, in-grouping, conservative wolves, and liberal rabbits will be thrust out into the cold, out of necessity. As this occurs, conflict and competition will rise, further punishing and culling the inability to compete. Eventually as things sort themselves out, all of the fit, competitive people who remain will come together to produce a civilization that is optimally efficient and designed for a competitive world. Greatness once again emerges from their aggressive, competitive drive, it produces copious resources, the rabbits re-emerge, and the cycle begins anew. Nowhere has a credible theory for the "cycles of civilizations" ever been proposed, and yet in light of r/K Selection Theory, it suddenly becomes not only easily explainable, but entirely predictable.

The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics fashions an amazing argument based upon peer reviewed scientific sources. From an examination of the genetics of politics and how that mechanism will interact with the neurochemical milieu produced by resource availability, to examinations of the differing brain structures ideologues exhibit and how they relate to harshness or ease, to historical examinations of resource availability's effects on the emergence of ideological movements, to the neurochemical foundations of ideologies, the book makes a fascinating case. It actually takes conservatives into the minds of liberals, examining what data their liberal brains prioritize, what data they lack the cognitive hardware to process, why not having developed that hardware is beneficial to their reproductive strategy, and how all of that produces the liberal ideology on open display today. Suddenly, political ideologies are clearly revealed as merely intellectual outgrowths of deeper underlying Darwinian reproductive strategies, designed to exploit resource blooms, or survive resource shortages. Even the very biochemical and neurological mechanisms which are responsible for triggering all of these behaviors are laid bare in simple, layman's terms.

With hundreds of footnotes citing peer-reviewed scientific studies, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics is not just easily readable by laymen. It also highly substantiated scientifically. The only question that remains is what effect it will have on today's political debates when grassroots conservatives begin discussing it amongst themselves, and liberals are forced to confront it. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the reviews on Amazon.com have given it a perfect five star rating. As author and social commentator Matt Forney said, "This book in one word ? Revolutionary... Evolutionary Psychology is a must-read for the simple fact that there's nothing out there quite like it... The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics" is one of the most important books of our time, and one you absolutely must buy."

Whether it will alter the political debate forever depends only upon whether readers embrace it, and promote it among friends, with the same fervor that the leaders of the Conservative movement have exhibited as they have promoted it.

Editor's note : The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics is now made free in Kindle format roughly once per month, in an effort to advance the intellectual support for the conservative cause. According to the author's website, the only condition of accepting the book free, is that one helps to spread it's ideas through the conservative grassroots, if the opportunity arises. To be notified of a free release date, visit http://www.anonymousconservative.com.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/rK_Selection_Politics/Evolutionary_Psychology/prweb12016589.htm



Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2081273#ixzz3A3cNnETl

33
3DHS / The American Rebellion
« on: February 17, 2013, 01:36:59 AM »
We have swallowed the red pill, which now makes its way to the stomach. The coating dissolves. The rotor spins up and the device begins to operate. Inside, the sodium-metal core remains intact.

And we begin the treatment. Again, our goal is to detach you - by "you," of course, I mean only the endogenous neural tissue - from the annelid parasite which now occupies a significant percentage of your cranium, and of course is fully integrated with your soul.

This worm goes by many a name, but today we'll just call it democracy. Once we've severed its paradendritic hyphae, you can remove your little guest safely in your own bathroom - all you need is a Dremel tool, a Flowbee and a big plastic bag. Pack the cavity with Bondo, wear a wig for a few weeks, and no one will suspect you've become a reactionary imperialist.

Of course, you came to us. So the worm must be a little loose already, or otherwise unwell. Which is great - but doesn't really assist us in the procedure. UR is a scientific operation. Everyone gets the same cuts on the same dots. So for the purposes of our red pill, we'll assume you remain an orthodox, NPR-loving progressive. Continue reading at your own risk.

We'll start by detaching you from the party line, your parasite, democracy, on exactly one point. You'll feel a kind of faint plucking sensation behind your right ear. It might hurt a little. It is not the sodium core. We are certainly not solving the problem here and now. Yet our point is a substantial one, and detaching it should give us plenty of slack to pull on.

What we're going to do is to replace your perspective of a major historical event, one which you have never considered controversial, but one which is vital to your understanding of the world you live in. And how will we accomplish this? By the most orthodox of scholarly methods. The only tools in our little black bag are (a) primary sources, (b) forgotten works by reputable historians of the present, and (c) modern works by respected academics.

When all I knew of surfing was surf videos, I used to wonder how surfers swim through all those big broken waves out to where it's glassy. When I learned to surf (I am a terrible surfer), I learned the answer: there's no trick. At least, not one that works. You just have to paddle out faster than the crazy, roaring mess can push you in. (Okay, if you're a shortboarder, you can duck-dive. But shortboards are for teenagers.)

Similarly, there is no magic key to history. If you want to make up your own mind about the past, you cannot do so by going there. So you have to find sources you trust. The Sith Library makes this about as easy as it's going to get, but it will always be work.

Anyway. Our point is the conflict you call the American Revolution. For a quick self-test, ask yourself how close you are to agreeing with the following statement. (You're not expected to take this on faith - we will demonstrate it quite thoroughly.)
Everything I know about the American Revolution is bullshit.
Orwellian antihistory, at least high-quality antihistory (and remember, kids, democracy is anything but mildly evolved), tends to fit Professor Frankfurt's handy definition: bullshit is neither truth nor fiction. It is bullshit. If it uses any factual misstatements, it uses them very sparsely. If it has any resemblance to reality, the match is a coincidence.

The typical structure of antihistorical bullshit is an aggregate of small, accurate and unimportant facts, set in a filler of nonsense and/or active misinterpretation. This mix hardens quickly, can support tremendous architectural loads, and looks like marble from a distance.

Especially if you've never seen actual marble. When I find out, or at least flatter myself that I have found out, the actual picture behind my 10th-grade matte-painting view of some event, I am always reminded of something that happened to me in 10th grade. I was listening to a shitty '80s Top 40 station - in the actual '80s. Presumably in a desperate attempt to familiarize myself with actual American culture. When, as some kind of game or promotion, they played a Stones song - Paint It Black, I think. And that was basically it for Cyndi Lauper. This is the difference between real history and antihistory: the difference between Mick Jagger and Cyndi Lauper.

Of course, unlike Cyndi Lauper, antihistorical bullshit has an adaptive function. It exists to fill the hole in your head where the actual story should be. Duh. If everything you know about the American Revolution is bullshit, you know nothing about the American Revolution. This is the basic technique of misdirection, popular with magicians everywhere since time immemorial. You can't see the rabbit going into the hat if you're not looking at the hat.

So: let's put it as bluntly as possible. At present you believe that, in the American Revolution, good triumphed over evil. This is the aforementioned aggregate. We're going to just scoop that right out with the #6 brain spoon. As we operate, we'll replace it with the actual story of the American Rebellion - in which evil triumphed over good.

Yup. We're really going to do this. You're on the table. It's the real thing. In the terms of the time, at present you are a Patriot and (pejoratively) a Whig. After this initial subprocedure you will be a Loyalist and (pejoratively) a Tory. Obviously, a challenging surgical outcome. But hey, it's the 21st century. If not now, when?

Some would just try to split the difference, and convince you that it wasn't black and white - that the "King's friends" had a point, too. Your modern academic historian (as opposed to his more numerous colleague, the modern academic antihistorian) is terribly good at this trick of dousing inconvenient truths in a freezing, antiseptic bucket of professional neutrality.

This is pretty much why you can't just walk into your friendly local bookstore and buy a red pill. It was black and white. It was just black and white in the other direction.

How on earth can we possibly convince you of this? We'll read an old book or two, that's all. No actual incision is needed. The metaphor is just a metaphor. Relax and breathe into the mask.

Let's call our first witness. His name is Thomas Hutchinson, and he is the outstanding Loyalist figure of the prerevolutionary era. His Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia is here. It is not long. Please do him the courtesy of reading it in full, then continue below.

Now: what do you notice about Hutchinson's Strictures? Well, the first thing you notice is: before today, you had never read it. Or even heard of it. Or probably even its author. What is the ratio of the number of people who have read the Declaration to the number who have read the Strictures? 10^5? 10^6? Something like that. Isn't that just slightly creepy?

The second thing we notice about the Strictures is its tone - very different from the Declaration. The Declaration shouts at us. The Strictures talk to us. Hutchinson speaks quietly, with just the occasional touch of snark. He adopts the general manner of a sober adult trapped in an elevator with a drunk, knife-wielding teenager.

Of course, as Patriots (we are still Patriots, aren't we? Sorry - just checking), we would expect some cleverness from the Devil. Everyone knows this is the way you win an argument, right or wrong. Pay no attention to Darth Hutchinson's little Sith mind tricks. But still - why would Congress make it so easy? Why are we getting stomped like this? Because ouch, man, that was painful.

The third thing we notice is that Hutchinson actually explains the Declaration. As he begins:
The last time I had the honour of being in your Lordship's company, you observed that you were utterly at a loss as to what facts many parts of the Declaration of Independence published by the Philadelphia Congress referred...
In other words: these Congress people are so whack-a-doodle-doo, half the time your Lordship can't even tell what they're talking about. Presumably "your Lordship" is Lord Germain. Dear reader, how does your own knowledge of the Declaration compare to Lord Germain's? Weren't you amused, for instance, to learn that
I know of no new offices erected in America in the present reign, except those of the Commissioners of the Customs and their dependents. Five Commissioners were appointed, and four Surveyors General dismissed; perhaps fifteen to twenty clerks and under officers were necessary for this board more than the Surveyors had occasion for before: Land and tide waiters, weighers, &c. were known officers before; the Surveyors used to encrease or lessen the number as the King?s service required, and the Commissioners have done no more. Thirty or forty additional officers in the whole Continent, are the Swarms which eat out the substance of the boasted number of three millions of people.
or, most intriguingly, that
The first in order, He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good; is of so general a nature, that it is not possible to conjecture to what laws or to what Colonies it refers. I remember no laws which any Colony has been restrained from passing, so as to cause any complaint of grievance, except those for issuing a fraudulent paper currency, and making it a legal tender; but this is a restraint which for many years past has been laid on Assemblies by an act of Parliament, since which such laws cannot have been offered to the King for his allowance. I therefore believe this to be a general charge, without any particulars to support it; fit enough to be placed at the head of a list of imaginary grievances.
What is this fraudulent paper currency? Hutchinson is referring to this episode. The experienced UR reader may well ask: what is it with America and paper money? We'll definitely have to revisit the question.

But suffice it to say that you, personally, do not have the knowledge to produce any kind of coherent response to Hutchinson's brutal fisking of our sacred founding document. You can't say: "actually, Governor Hutchinson, I was in Boston in 1768, and I can tell you exactly why the Assembly was moved to Cambridge. What really happened is that..." For all you or I know about Boston in 1768, of course, Hutchinson could just as easily be the one yanking our chains. But why, then, are we so sure he's wrong?

Of course, you don't really think of the Declaration as a list of factual particulars. You think of it as a deep moral statement, about humanity, or something. Nonetheless, it does contain a list of particulars. Isn't it odd that it strikes us as odd to see these particulars closely examined? One simply doesn't expect to see the Declaration argued with in this way. And, reading the Strictures, one gets the impression that the authors of the Declaration didn't, either.

Which should not surprise us. What we learn from the Strictures is that, as in the rest of American history, there is absolutely no guarantee that a detailed and rational argument about a substantive factual question will prevail, whether through means military, political, or educational, over a meretricious tissue of lies. So why bother - especially if you're the one peddling the lies? Perhaps Hutchinson is yanking our chain, and King George really did dispatch hordes of ravenous bureaucrats to America, etc, etc. But one would expect to have seen the point at least disputed.

But, okay. Whatever. We are still Patriots. So let's advance to the second primary: Peter Oliver's Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion.

Peter Oliver was Chief Justice of Massachusetts and Hutchinson's brother-in-law. His brother Andrew was Hutchinson's lieutenant governor. Like Hutchinson, the Olivers spent most of the '60s and '70s trying to survive the Boston mob, by whom Andrew Oliver was more or less hounded to death. Hutchinson and Peter Oliver died in exile.

The Origin & Progress was written in 1781, but not published properly until 1961 (with an excellent introduction by the historian Douglass Adair). The copy on archive.org is a bank error in your favor, as Adair's edits should still be under copyright. I recommend downloading the PDF. If Hutchinson has already sold you on Toryism, great. Otherwise, please read the whole book, then Adair's introduction.

If you are feeling especially impatient, and/or confident in your knowledge of 18th-century political theory and the history of early New England, I suppose you can skip Oliver's "procathartick Porch" and go straight to chapter II (page 57), where the story starts to really motor. But I don't recommend it. As Oliver writes:
Methinks Sir! I hear you ask me, why all this Introduction? Why so long a Porch before the Building is reached? Let me answer You by saying, that you desired me to give You the History of the american Rebellion, because You thought that I was intimately acquainted with the Rise & Progress of it; having lived there for so many Years, & been concerned in the publick Transactions of Government before the Rebellion burst its Crater. I was very willing to answer your Request. I, on my Part, must ask you to oblige me, by permitting me, in the epistolary Walks, to indulge my Fancy in the Choice of my Path. Besides, you may perhaps, in the Sequel, find some Analogy between the Porch & the Building, & that they are not two detached Structures; altho' a good Architect might have produced a better Effect, by making either or both of them a little more tasty. However, if you will excuse the Hibernicism, you need not enter the House by its Porch, but open the Door of the main Building which hangs at the End of the Porch, & adjoins to it.

Before I introduce you to the House, let me remind you, that I shall confine myself, chiefly, to the Transactions of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, as it was this Province where I resided, & was most intimate to the Transactions of; & as it was the Volcano from whence issued all the Smoak, Flame & Lava which hath since enveloped the whole British american Continent, for the Length of above 1700 Miles. If I deviate into other Colonies, my Excursions will be few & short. I promise You that I will adhere most sacredly to Truth, & endeavor to steer as clear as possible from Exaggeration; although many Facts may appear to be exaggerated, to a candid Mind, which is always fond of viewing human Nature on the brightest Side of its Orb.
The Origin & Progress is obviously a very different animal from the Strictures.

What's so neat about Peter Oliver's little book is that, besides being a primary source of considerable historical value, it is also an artistic work of considerable literary merit. The tone, as we see, is almost postmodern. Oliver has a voice, and even here in the benighted 21st century (where we think "candid" means "honest," rather than "naive"), we can hear it. This is a man you could have a beer with. Even from the strongest revolutionary characters, TJ and John Adams, it is hard to get such a three-dimensional presence.

The past, as they say, is a foreign country. Imagine you were a hippie backpacker visiting, say, Armenia, having read a few newspaper stories about how the Armenian Democratic Front is struggling nobly against the iron oppression of the Armenian People's Party - this being roughly comparable to the average American's knowledge of prerevolutionary Massachusetts politics. But leaving the airport in Yerevan, you meet Vartan ("call me Varty!"), a die-hard APP man, and wind up drinking with him and his boho friends until four in the morning. Of course, you'll leave Armenia a dedicated supporter of the APP. This is roughly how we intend to convert you into a Loyalist. You can't actually have a beer with Peter Oliver, but you can read his book.

Speaking of John Adams, there's actually another point of contact: you can rent the first disc of the HBO miniseries by that name. I gave up after an episode and a half - I have put a little work into my picture of the 1770s, and I don't want it contaminated with Hollywood's. But I will say this: HBO's Samuel Adams, as a sort of 18th-century Al Sharpton, is dead on. As Oliver puts it:
I shall next give you a Sketch of some of Mr. Samuel Adams' Features; & I do not know how to delineate them stronger, than by the Observation made by a celebrated Painter in America, vizt. "That if he wished to draw the Picture of the Devil, that he would get Sam Adams to sit for him:" & indeed, a very ordinary Physiognomist would, at a transient View of his Countenance, develope the Malignity of his Heart. He was a Person of Understanding, but it was discoverable rather by a Shrewdness than Solidity of Judgment; & he understood human Nature, in low life, so well, that he could turn the Minds of the great Vulgar as well as the small into any Course that he might chuse; perhaps he was a singular Instance in this Kind; & he never failed of employing his Abilities to the vilest Purposes.
His beer sucks, too. And few will forget this portrait of John Hancock, as the dim young Trustafarian, and general Wallet of what Oliver calls "the Faction":
Here I am almost necessarily led into a Digression upon Mr. Hancock's Character, who was as closely attached to the hindermost part of Mr. Adams as the Rattles are affixed to the Tail of the Rattle Snake. Mr. Hancock was the Son of a dissenting Clergyman, whose Circumstances in Life were not above Mediocrity, but he had a rich Uncle. He was educated at Harvard College, was introduced into his uncles Warehouse as a Merchant, & upon his Death was the residuary Legatee of 60,000 pounds Sterling. His understanding was of the Dwarf Size; but his Ambition, upon the Accession to so great an Estate, was upon the Gigantick. He was free from Immoralities, & Objects of Charity often felt the Effects of his Riches. His Mind was a meer Tabula Rasa, & had he met with a good Artist he would have enstamped upon it such Character as would have made him a most usefull Member of Society. But Mr. Adams who was restless in endeavors to disturb ye Peace of Society, & who was ever going about seeking whom he might devour, seized upon him as his Prey, & stamped such Lessons upon his Mind, as have not as yet been erased. Sometimes, indeed, by certain Efforts of Nature, when he was insensible of the Causes of his self, he would almost disengage himself from his Assailant; but Adams, like the Cuddlefish, would discharge his muddy Liquid, & darken the Water to such a Hue, that the other was lost to his Way, & by his Tergiversations in the Cloudy Vortex would again be seized, & at last secured.
Put your John Hancock on that! Of course, dissenting doesn't mean Mr. Hancock's father was an open-minded dissident, like me. It means he was a Dissenter - ie, a Puritan, and thus a member of what Mr. Otis called his black Regiment. (The Olivers and Hutchinsons were Anglicans.) Don't miss Peter Oliver's discussion of the role of the Puritan clergy in the disturbances, which will not be even slightly surprising to the experienced UR reader.

And yes, the Origin & Progress really is pretty much all this good. Read the whole thing. Consider it a small revenge on your 10th-grade history teacher. And chuckle along with Peter Oliver, when he writes:
I have done Sir! for the present, with my Portraits. If you like them, & think them ornamental for your Parlour, pray hang them up in it; for I assure You, that most of them justly demerit a Suspension.
Black humor - cheap black humor - from the 18th century. And there is more to Oliver than his Portraits. If you want action, skip to the Stamp Act (chapter III, p. 76):
In this Year 1765, began the violent Outrages in Boston: and now the Effusions of Rancour from Mr. Otis's Heart were brought into Action. It hath been said, that he had secured the Smugglers & their Connections, as his Clients. An Opportunity now offered for them to convince Government of their Influence: as Seizure had been made by breaking open a Store, agreeable to act of Parliament; it was contested in the supreme Court, where Mr. Hutchinson praesided. The Seizure was adjudged legal by the whole Court.

This raised Resentment against the Judges. Mr. Hutchinson was the only Judge who resided in Boston, & he only, of the Judges, was the Victim; for in a short Time after, the Mob of Otis & his clients plundered Mr. Hutchinsons House of its full Contents, destroyed his Papers, unroofed his House, & sought his & his Children's Lives, which were saved by Flight. One of the Riotors declared, the next morning, that the first Places which they looked into were the Beds, in Order to murder the Children. All this was Joy to Mr. Otis, as also to some of the considerable Merchants who were smugglers, & personally active in the diabolical Scene. But a grave old Gentleman thought it more than diabolical; for upon viewing the Ruins, on the next Day, he made this Remark, vizt. "that if the Devil had been here the last Night, he would have gone back to his own Regions, ashamed of being outdone, & never more have set Foot upon the Earth." If so, what Pity that he did not take an Evening Walk, at that unhappy Crisis; for he hath often since seen himself outdone at his own outdoings.
You see what I mean by "evil." You probably also remember, dimly, your 10th-grade history teacher plying you with propaganda that glorified this kind of spontaneous popular action. If you want to know how decent people can support evil, find a mirror.

Enough of Peter Oliver. Perhaps he is just not your style, and you remain a Patriot. In that case, there is no further escape. You will have to cope with the long S, and read Charles Stedman's History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War (vol. 1, vol.2), our third primary source.

I regret to report that there is no such thing as a neutral primary source. Charles Stedman, though, is Colonel Stedman to you. Call him Chuck, and you're shit out of luck. Not only was he a Colonel in the British Army, he was born in Philadelphia - and commanded a Loyalist corps against the rebel forces. Moreover, he is a trained lawyer and clearly has read his Thucydides, of whom his tone and content are quite reminiscent.

Colonel Stedman's history is accurate, clear, and not at all dry. Like Governor Hutchinson, he lets only a few cold digs slip through. The following is a fair sample:
When the assembly of this province [Massachusetts, of course] met in the month of January [1773], the governor [Hutchinson] probably intending to give them an opportunity, if they were so disposed, of doing away the evil impressions which might have been made by the unqualified resolutions of the town meeting at Boston, took occasion in his speech to insist on the supreme legislative authority of the king and parliament.

But if he hoped to benefit government by bringing on this discussion, he was entirely disappointed. The assembly, instead of endeavouring to moderate and qualify the doctrines contained in the resolutions of the town meeting, seized the opportunity of the address which was to be presented, to fix them more firmly and in their utmost extent. They openly denied the authority of parliament, not only to impose taxes, but to legislate for them in any respect whatsoever; adding, "that if there had been in any late instances a submission to acts of parliament, it was more from want of consideration or a reluctance to contend with the parent state, than a conviction of the supreme legislative authority of parliament."

This address also recapitulated a number of new grievances which had not heretofore been complained of. And such was its improper tendency, even in the opinion of the Assembly, upon cooler reflection, that six months after, in a letter to the earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for American affairs, they thought it necessary to apologize for it, imputing the blame of their intemperate proceedings to their governor, who had unnecessarily brought the subject of parliamentary authority under their consideration.

In this letter they say, "that their answers to the governor's speech were the effect of necessity, and that this necessity occasioned great grief to the two houses;" and then, in a style truly characteristic of puritanical duplicity, they exclaim, "For, my lord, the people of this province are true and faithful subjects of his Majesty, and think themselves happy in their connection with Great Britain."
Trust me: if you have actually read all three of these selections, you will be under no illusion whatsoever as to what style is, or is not, truly characteristic of puritanical duplicity.

If not, please do so. Feel free to stop reading Colonel Stedman as soon as you are sold, or if you get to the point where the war has actually started and you still are not sold. In that case, we move on to the secondary sources: W.E.H. Lecky's American Revolution (Britain, 1898), Sydney Fisher's True History of the American Revolution (1902, US). And if you are still a Patriot after that, we have to get into the tertiary sources. (Anything post 1950 deserves the "tertiary" warning label, I feel.) Read Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967).

If you actually read all this, yet remain a damn'd Whig - congratulations Sir! You are poffeffed of an unusually thick Skull - not unlike yr. ancestor, the Pithecanthropus. Indeed Samuel Johnson put it best: the Devil was the first Whig. And to him with you Sir! For the Remedy hath failed.

Otherwise, congratulations on completing the first step of the procedure. Don't worry - the worst is still to come. Also, we need to quickly install your new Tory history.

The outcome of our little reading list is that, if even a tenth of what Hutchinson, Oliver and Stedman say is true, your desire to remain a Whig is now somewhere between your desire to join the Crips and your desire to volunteer for the Waffen SS. Whereas you formerly thought of the values of the American Revolution as liberty, truth and justice, you now see the hallmarks of the American Rebellion as thuggery, treason, and - above all - hypocrisy.

Therefore, since you can no longer be a Whig, you have no option but to become a Tory. The conflict was, after all, a war. No one was neutral. There is no third side.

But what - since we are now Tories - actually happened? What truth are we to install in the freshly-scraped neural cavity?

What happened is that the executive cohesion of Great Britain had weakened considerably since the golden age of Pitt. For most of the 18th century, there was no such thing as a Tory in British politics. The country was a one-party Whig state. As Colonel Stedman puts it: "... that party distinction of Whig and Tory, which had been dormant since the reign of Queen Anne." It may (or may not) surprise you to know that this was considered a bad thing.

The event that triggered the Rebellion was an attempt by certain elements of the British leadership, a group not at that time distinguished by any great talent, to restore full lawful authority to the American colonies. Especially in New England, smuggling was rife, and it was not at all clear how far the king's writ ran.

Moreover, Massachusetts in particular was swarming with unreconstructed Puritans, who had never been properly disciplined for the failure of the previous republican revolution. In contrast to the home country, which had enjoyed 28 years of restored Stuart rule, the attempted New England restoration of the Andros period had lasted only three years, at which point it was terminated by the treasonous Whig coup of 1688.

British politics in the 1760s was coming out of its one-party phase and had stretched out a good bit, developing Whig radicals on the left and proto-Tory "King's friends" on the right. Naturally, the former tended to be low-church and Dissenter/Nonconformist, the latter tended to be high-church and Anglican. George III never pretended to anything like Stuart authority, but he was making the last ever attempt to render the British monarchy a serious arm of politics.

Therefore, everyone had a reason to do what they did. The King and his friends had a reason to try to reassert authority over the colonies. The colonies had a reason to try for independence. Note, however, that the law was entirely on the side of the former. This gave the rebellion the generally mendacious and criminal quality described above, which is why we are Tories. The rebels could rebel or they could think, speak and write honestly, but not both.

Humans being what they are, it is not terribly surprising that quite a few took the former path. Fortunately, this included many individuals of genuine character and substance, such as George Washington and John Adams, who may have been deluded by ideology but were not seduced by cupidity. The rebellion could easily have ended up where France's did, and its failure to do so is more than anything due to the High Federalists, who once they saw what republicanism meant in practice ended up with very similar attitudes toward mob politics that we see in Hutchinson and Oliver - twenty years before the Thermidorean reaction that created the Constitution. Most of history consists of going around in circles, learning nothing.

As Colonel Stedman says, the rebels could and should have been crushed easily. In a fair fight, their real chances against the British military were slim to none. As the Union later found, suppressing guerrilla warfare, even in the wilds of North America, is not difficult given sufficient energy. Britain failed because it lacked that crucial ingredient in every war: the will to win.

Britain in the Revolution was politically divided. Large numbers of mainstream political figures - most famously, both Pitt and Burke - sympathized with the Americans. Moreover, although the tea outrage finally created a nominal consensus for a military response, and finally made it imprudent for a British politician to openly urge surrender, a new lobby developed which urged conciliation, conciliation, and more conciliation.

What we see, in other words, is the familiar pattern of two conflicting prescriptions for maintaining the integrity of the state. The Whig prescription says: conciliate the truculent, assuage their grievances whether real or feigned, loosen the ropes at every complaint. The Tory prescription says: enforce the law, and do not bend an inch in response to violence or any other extralegal pressure. As Oliver puts it (p. 125):
Timidity, in Suppression of Rebellion, will ever retard the Subdual of it.
With our corrected Tory vision, we see the answer clearly. In every case, concessions made to dispel conspiracy theories, reassure the Americans of Britain's fundamental benevolence, and in general appease a fit of calculated insanity, have the obvious effect of displaying Timidity and encouraging further demands. First internal taxation is a violation of American rights, then all taxation, then all parliamentary legislation. The only actual principle that can be discerned is one of unremitting chutzpah and hypocrisy.

The relationship between Britain and Massachusetts, in particular, was much like that between a parent and a teenager. Independence or loyalty: it could go either way, at least for the moment. Scenario: your teenager starts cutting class. So you take her car keys away. So she throws your widescreen TV out the window. So you give her car keys back. Is this pattern of behavior more likely to result in independence, or loyalty?

But this is basically the American policy that the Whigs prescribed. And with the repeal of the Stamp Act, thanks to Burke (who at least later learned better) and the Rockingham Whigs, it's the policy they enacted. And even when the left Whigs were not, precisely, in the driver's seat, they were in the passenger seat, yelling. While sold as a policy for the reconciliation of Britain and America, Burke's policy could hardly have been a better design for the encouragement of an American rebellion and the prospects of its success - which was, of course, achieved.

For example, General Howe among other British military figures is known to have had strong Whig sympathies. His role in America was also twofold: he was there to either defeat the rebels, or make peace with them. Obviously, the latter would have been greatly to his political advantage. Whether his failures in the war were the result of this conflict of interest, or of simple incompetence, can never be known. But the former is surely a reasonable suspicion.

Colonel Stedman, in his dedication, sums it up both well and not impolitically:
The pain of recording that spirit of faction, indecision, indolence, luxury, and corruption, which disgraced our public conduct during the course of the American war...
What, from the historiographic perspective, is particularly galling, is that the explanation that was generally accepted, even in Britain, for most of the 19th century is the Whig one. The rebellion succeeded not because it was not dealt with quickly and decisively, but because the Americans were not conciliated enough. (Alternatively, it succeeded because the Americans were militarily invincible - another common Whig trope.)

This is the secret of puritanical duplicity: no shame, none whatsoever. Every quack who hopes to outlast chance must learn the trick. If you bleed the patient and he dies, obviously you didn't draw enough blood. Never concede error. Counter every criticism with a barrage of even more gloriously inflated claims. You can see why the likes of Hutchinson and Oliver had no chance at all against the black Regiment.

Evil is typically more powerful than good. Bad men delight in weapons that good men spurn. Success in past conflicts, political or military, is not Bayesian evidence of moral superiority. It is just the opposite. Which is why it's a problem that the winners write the history books.

So: we've completed the operation, at least as far as the American Rebellion is concerned. We've created a clean separation between the parasite, democracy, and your understanding of the 18th century, and we've replaced the infected Whig mass with a small dose of healthy Tory history. Presumably the counter-democratic nature of the latter is obvious, if not definitive.

In retrospect, your former support for the Whig cause was a classic received opinion, installed without any sort of thought on your part. In other words, it is not something you were reasoned into. It is to your credit as a thinker that you've let yourself be reasoned out of it. If you think of Patriot v. Loyalist as a lawsuit and yourself as a juror, not only had you never heard a single word from the defense, you hadn't even really heard a proper prosecution. There was never any need. The annelid just raised your hand to convict. Megaloponera foetens, thy name is you.

Note, from an almost military perspective, the curious weakness of your convictions in this regard. What made the "Revolution" an easy target is that you had no particular emotional attachment to it - at least, not compared to some other wars we could mention. Your attachment to the Patriot cause seemed rock-solid. But it disintegrated on contact with the enemy. It was all hat and no cattle.

But our red pill is most certainly not an information-warfare device - at least, not a democratic one. It is a tool for your personal enlightenment only. As we can see easily from this first target. If UR were, say, a political party, would the first plank in our platform be repudiation of the American Revolution? This should attract about twelve supporters, all of whom are homeless schizophrenics. It will repel many more, of course.

Of course, this only makes it easier for you to swallow the red pill. The parasite has strong defenses against most attacks of this kind - certainly all which are of democratic relevance. This position is intellectually significant, yet undefended because of its negative political value. Turning you into a Loyalist does not solve the whole problem by any means, but it's a foothold, and we can use it to excavate other annelid coprolites in more delicate areas of your brain.

Reversing this one point is not sufficient to replace your entire picture of American history. In fact, it's entirely possible that, if you stop reading UR immediately, you'll eventually relapse and become a Patriot again. (Some may prefer this outcome.)

What we've done, however, is to establish a second narrative. You now have two realities in your head. You have the reality in which there was an American Revolution, which was a triumph for liberty, truth and justice. You may no longer believe in this reality, but you have no way to forget it. And you have the reality in which there was an American Rebellion, which was a triumph for thuggery, treason, and hypocrisy.

So, for example, we can now then ask the question: in the second narrative, the one in which the American Rebellion was a disaster, what is happening in 2009? Whatever the answer is, the two seem quite unlikely to have converged.

But surely we've done enough for this week. I'm afraid the series will require a third.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_15.html

34
3DHS / Who Were the Geniuses Who Came Up With That One?
« on: February 13, 2013, 09:45:28 PM »
Monday, February 04, 2013
Who Were the Geniuses Who Came Up With That One?

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 23 Comments

There was a time in the 80s when standup comedians were required by law to wear loud blazers and louder ties and to demand answers to life's unanswerable questions about senseless products, airline regulations and the other inconveniences of modern life. "Who were the geniuses who came up with that one?" was their demand.


The Republican Party, which has been a joke for almost as long as it has been a party, is in the hands of those same geniuses. Fresh off two defeats in presidential elections, they have come up with the plan of all plans to get back on top.

First, they will nuke their own grassroots by raising money to attack deviant Tea Party candidates and protect true conservatives who support amnesty, tax shelters and tax hikes. Considering that the Tea Party was responsible for the first Republican victories since 2004, spending money going after it is bound to attract voters and improve prospects for more victories in 2014.

Second, they will add 11 million Democratic voters to the rolls through amnesty for illegal aliens as part of a brilliant plan to stop being a national party and settle down to fighting pitched battles for local council seats. Even the geniuses behind the election polling and ORCA should be able to win a few those. And if they can't, then it'll be time to raise more money to keep down some of those pesky Tea Party types trying to run for school boards while saying politically incorrect things.

Fortunately there is a clear path to victory. All we have to do is convince the Party of Consultants that all is lost and that they should come out as Democrats now. If they do that, then the Democratic Party will be a useless ruin within a decade. If they don't do that, the Republican Party will have the same policies as the Democratic Party, except for the part where it wins elections.

The establishment wanted Romney in '12. And they got him. They assured us that he was the only electable candidate. And when he lost, they told us that he didn't fail, the country failed him. And if a campaign built on Staples couldn't catch fire, it must have been due to the descent of the country into a nation of takers.

And they have a plan for '16. They'll run an immigration friendly candidate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio to win the Latino vote. Sure, Rubio lost the non-Cuban Latino vote in Florida, and unless the entire population of Cuba gets imported to the United States and legalized between now and '16, he'll only win, at best, as much of the Latino vote as Bush did, or as Rick Perry did, which isn't enough to win an election, especially once you've legalized the 10 percent of Mexico that lives north of the Rio Grande. But after they blow that one, the geniuses will step up to the plate and blame the Tea Party for a loss by another of their perfect candidates because during the primaries Rubio or Bush was forced to disavow Amnesty II or Amnesty III.

The Republican Party of '12 looks a lot like the Democratic Party of '88. It's outdated and running on fumes. All its slogans are tired and its leaders seem completely out of touch. Even the most unfair attacks stick to it, because it has no momentum. It isn't going anywhere because it's enclosed in a shell of outdated ideas and tired figures from its past who prevent anyone from coming to the fore. That same state of affairs led to the unlikely candidacy of Bill Clinton among the Democrats, but assuming that an obscure southern governor will battle his way through the Republican primaries to reveal a talent for national politics may be hoping for too much. And if he did, the establishment would spend their cash reserves to crush him in favor of a reliable choice like Paul Tsongas.

It didn't have to be this way. The Tea Party gave the GOP a shot in the arm. Suddenly it was acting and thinking like a revolutionary party. There were ideas in the air, energy on the ground and anger coalescing into action. And then it all got shut down for four months of infomercials about Staples because the establishment had gotten what it wanted and decided to play it safe before the big game.

The Republican Party has no ideas. Its only ideas involve deciding which liberal platform to "evolve" its way up to and how to sell that "evolution" to the base. And a lack of ideas comes from a lack of beliefs.

There comes a time in every struggle when a man wonders why he's doing this. And if the only answer is to win, then he isn't really fighting for anything. He's being competitive. Or he's fighting to make money. Or because it's all he knows. All three attributes describe the Republican Party now. Its leadership does not believe in anything. It believes in winning in that abstract corporate competitive way. It doesn't really know why it's fighting though, except that the other guys will make a mess.


A party without ideas borrows them from its enemies. The big idea that the Republican establishment has is to be more like the Democrats. They just can't decide which area they want to imitate them in the most. But the one thing they do know is that they need to get those annoying conservative ideas off the stage first.

Going after the Tea Party is sound strategy for the establishment, not from the standpoint of winning elections, but of keeping their jobs. If you lose, then you need someone to blame. The establishment is protecting its scalps by claiming the scalps of the reformers who might give them the boot. That's one way of winning a circular firing squad. And of losing all the elections that follow.

Without ideas or beliefs, the Republican Party stands for very little except being the Party of Staples, and while Staples seems like a very nice store, it's not really enough to base a whole country on. If the United States is to be reduced to a superstore full of office supplies, then America is no more exceptional than a stack of writing paper, four rulers and some office furniture shoddily made in a factory in some polluted Chinese megalopolis.

As the Staples Party, the Republicans are interested in importing more cheap labor into the country. It may not be good for the country, but it is good for the people who sign their checks and that's good enough. And if Amnesty destroys the Republican Party, then they'll find someone else to make their checks out to. Influence can always be bought, even in totalitarian countries, ethics and ideas cannot.

The Republican Party is an organization at war with its base. The Republican leadership and its backers think big. Their base thinks small. That inability to think small, to echo the concerns of ordinary people lost two elections. Reagan and Bush won, in no small part, because they appeared to be part of the small world of ordinary people. They shared their culture and concerns. They gave signs of being able to think small, and though the media ridiculed them for it as buffoons and dopes, Bonzo and the Bushisms had the last laugh. But that sensibility never sank into the leadership.

The establishment has failed to come to terms with the fact that the GOP cannot be a party of urban liberals and has been the exact opposite of that for some time. It can't even be the party of wealthy people who live in liberal areas and agree with liberals on many things, except national defense and excessive regulation. The Republican Party can either become one with its base, or it can either try beating it off with a stick some more while waiting around for Meghan McCain to deliver the new hip conservative movement.

The Democratic Party knows who its base is. Its goal in office is to expand that base while shrinking its opposition. That is why it wants Amnesty. If the average illegal alien was likely to turn into a Republican voter, the entire Mexican border would have been irradiated and pop stars would be recording videos urging their fans to turn in any illegal aliens on their block. And that is because the Democrats may be evil, they may even be incompetent outside their conspiracy and campaign zones, but they aren't stupid.

The Republican Party has no interest in doing things like that. The very accusation will lead to a dozen rebuttals in the form of editorials, radio commentaries and skywriting efforts. Instead they will get behind Amnesty to show just how uncommitted it is to any base, except the Democratic base in the world's most elaborate suicide attempt.


A sane party would draw up a strategy by asking who its base is, what they need and how it can maximize their turnout. A party run by people who give lunatics a bad name, asks who the other party's base is and begins planning to win them over by drastically increasing their numbers while disenfranchising and disgusting its own base. The only reasonable explanation for this is that the Republican Party is animated by a fever dream of returning to the scene of its triumphs in the first half of the twentieth century when no one could be paid to vote for it twice.

What the GOP leadership fails to understand that a party without a base is a big empty hall. You can get the checks that will allow you to rent the space, you can order up a band and ask them to play a song, but if no one shows up, then you don't have a concert or a dance. All you have is an empty hall.

The Republican Party has spent so much time trying to win over swing voters that it has lost sight of the fact that it is presiding over an empty hall, a vast echoing space in which nothing is happening. The Tea Party may be the last hope of the GOP, its final chance to connect with a base, gain some fresh energy and ideas, and emerge in fighting shape in '14 and '16. And if it can't do that, then there's always room on the standup comedy circuit of the big empty hall.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/02/who-were-geniuses-who-came-up-with-that.html

35
3DHS / They
« on: January 12, 2013, 06:20:35 PM »
They
by Takuan Seiyo

They bring tens of millions of 7th-century Muslim immigrants to 21st-century Europe and then clamp down on Europe for resisting the unnatural graft.

They bring tens of millions of subliterate irredentist Mexicans to American territory conquered from Mexicans and then call ?racist? those who notice that the Mexicans are subliterate irredentists.

They funnel 200 different peoples onto the same already-crowded patches of Europeans? (or ex-Europeans?) land insisting that we are all the same and then invent multiculturalism and voting in 25 languages.

They import grasping poverty from the Third World and then are perplexed when the poverty grabs what it can purloin from its hosts? public treasury.

They pillory Enoch Powell in 1968, only to wake up to smoldering England and bands of ?youths? beating, stabbing, and robbing Britons in 2011.

They see who the ?youths? are and then write headlines such as, ?Is technology to blame for the London riots??

They force women on the Army and Navy and then panic that there is a ?rape epidemic? in the Army and 19% of the female sailors are pregnant.

They encourage sodomy and are mystified when a Sodom-like medical plague breaks out.

They force the sodomites on the Marines and then court-martial the Marines who don?t approve of forced sodomizing.

They recruit five-foot grandmothers for sheriff?s deputies to escort violent felons twice their size and half their age and then pass bills honoring the grandmas after they were squashed by said felons. To secure the homeland, they ignore the known knowns and harass the unknown unknowns.

They let through swathed Allahu Akbar followers but corral white Christians to shuffle through naked scans shoeless, beltless, and presumed-innocentless.

They plea-bargain and parole millions of violent felons and then blame crime on guns.

They sell guns to violent criminals in Mexico who use them to shoot Americans, then blame crime on guns in American citizens? hands.

They build China?s military from scratch with American dollars and American technology and then notice in bewilderment that China?s military has become a towering menace. If American, they arm, train, and sponsor tribal jihadis all over the Muslim world and then are dumbstruck when the jihadis turn all that on their infidel benefactors. If European, they genuflect before and pay jizya to aggressive Muslims, then blame ?right-wing extremists? when aggressive Muslims slap them in the face.

They fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, support it in Egypt and Libya, and import it to every Western country. If Jewish, they live like WASPs, vote like blacks, and lobby like La Raza?and then complain that many don?t like them. If Christian, they vote socialist and then discover the unknowable secret that socialists hate Christians.

They bind Northern Europe?s productive countries in the same currency with the sunny South?s freeloaders and then are stunned when the euro is in danger of collapsing.

They export America?s industrial base to Asia and then debate why there is unemployment.

They pump trillions of conjured dollars into an economy staggering under a crushing burden of conjured dollars and then assert with a straight face that trillions more conjured dollars are needed because ?recovery? has stalled.

They lend to the banksters at 0% and then borrow from them at 4%. Prattling of a ?strong dollar,? they convert the world?s strongest currency into history?s largest Ponzi scheme and a cautionary tale told to Chinese children.

They put a black commie rabble-rouser in the White House and then are shocked when the economy tanks and their pet minorities along with it.


They hail the black commie rabble-rouser as The One Who Will Bring Us Together and then do the three wise monkeys when the Second Coming leads to Beat-Whitey Fridays all over the land.

They build $100-million schools for 85-IQ blacks in Harlem and $578-million schools for 89-IQ ?Hispanics? in Los Angeles and then moan that the ?achievement gap? continues and trillions more must be spent.

They bring down every public institution to the level of black achievement and then hire Ph.D.s to opine why every public institution is not achieving and America is lagging.

There is no end to the madness, nor to the mad schemes to deny the madness and to hunt down and silence those who notice the madness.

A combination of stupidity, lunacy, and gnostic malfeasance on this scale is unprecedented in history. The scope of the ultimate catastrophe to which this is leading may also be unprecedented?which is saying much, because the precedents include the fall of Rome and the fall of the Weimar Republic.

The perps deserve at least a name. ?Leftist? or ?liberal? are inaccurate, as some of the ruling elite who steer the ship of state and society onto the shoals of breakdown are ?conservative? Republicans, while others profess to be Christians doing what Jesus would do, or are Jews ?repairing the world? in their time-honored tradition. Others yet are opportunists willing to hitch their wagon to anything as long as it brings them more power, glory, or money. It?s hard to find a 5-star CEO, 4-star general, or no-star Congressman who is not in this category.

They keep lecturing their European-origin subjects about the villainy of hating the Other. But it?s not the Kurd and Maya immigrants who are the Other. Those are merely Third World aliens with normal human impulses who just don?t belong as socially dissonant agents in whites? countries. In their own countries of origin, however, they can make for a delightful diversity experience for visiting Western tourists, just as they might if visiting Boston or Belgium as paying tourists on one-month visas.

No, it?s They who are the Other?white people of often privileged backgrounds whose brains have been snatched and twisted by some contagious virus to attack and devour their own while singing Kumbaya and boasting of growing the economy. They are body-snatchers who snatch other bodies, particularly young ones in schools.

They are but a Frankenstein we have created. We elect them, choose to play the games to which they set the rules, buy their cultural products, and pack our brains with their nonsense. But at least we ought to discern their Otherness.

http://takimag.com/article/they/print#ixzz2HnnXTYRe

36
3DHS / The Dark Enlightenment (Part 1)
« on: December 02, 2012, 01:41:54 PM »
Neo-reactionaries head for the exit
Enlightenment is not only a state, but an event, and a process. As the designation for an historical episode, concentrated in northern Europe during the 18th century, it is a leading candidate for the ?true name? of modernity, capturing its origin and essence (?Renaissance? and ?Industrial Revolution? are others). Between ?enlightenment? and ?progressive enlightenment? there is only an elusive difference, because illumination takes time ? and feeds on itself, because enlightenment is self-confirming, its revelations ?self-evident?, and because a retrograde, or reactionary, ?dark enlightenment? amounts almost to intrinsic contradiction. To become enlightened, in this historical sense, is to recognize, and then to pursue, a guiding light.

There were ages of darkness, and then enlightenment came. Clearly, advance has demonstrated itself, offering not only improvement, but also a model. Furthermore, unlike a renaissance, there is no need for an enlightenment to recall what was lost, or to emphasize the attractions of return. The elementary acknowledgement of enlightenment is already Whig history in miniature.

Once certain enlightened truths have been found self-evident, there can be no turning back, and conservatism is pre-emptively condemned ? predestined -- to paradox. F. A. Hayek, who refused to describe himself as a conservative, famously settled instead upon the term ?Old Whig?, which ? like ?classical liberal? (or the still more melancholy ?remnant?) ? accepts that progress isn?t what it used to be. What could an Old Whig be, if not a reactionary progressive? And what on earth is that?

Of course, plenty of people already think they know what reactionary modernism looks like, and amidst the current collapse back into the 1930s their concerns are only likely to grow. Basically, it?s what the ?F? word is for, at least in its progressive usage. A flight from democracy under these circumstances conforms so perfectly to expectations that it eludes specific recognition, appearing merely as an atavism, or confirmation of dire repetition.

Still, something is happening, and it is ? at least in part ? something else. One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: ?I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.?

In August 2011, Michael Lind posted a democratic riposte at Salon, digging up some impressively malodorous dirt, and concluding:

The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals is justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy. Most libertarians have made it clear which of the two they prefer. The only question that remains to be settled is why anyone should pay attention to libertarians.

Lind and the ?neo-reactionaries? seem to be in broad agreement that democracy is not only (or even) a system, but rather a vector, with an unmistakable direction. Democracy and ?progressive democracy? are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Whilst ?extreme right wing? governments have, on rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society?s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have ceased to care whether anyone is ?pay[ing them] attention? ? they have been looking for something else entirely: an exit.

It is a structural inevitability that the libertarian voice is drowned out in democracy, and according to Lind it should be. Ever more libertarians are likely to agree. ?Voice? is democracy itself, in its historically dominant, Rousseauistic strain. It models the state as a representation of popular will, and making oneself heard means more politics. If voting as the mass self-expression of politically empowered peoples is a nightmare engulfing the world, adding to the hubbub doesn?t help. Even more than Equality-vs-Liberty, Voice-vs-Exit is the rising alternative, and libertarians are opting for voiceless flight. Patri Friedman remarks: "we think that free exit is so important that we?ve called it the only Universal Human Right."

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.

Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be prevented ? or at least dissuaded -- from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic ?solutions? to this problem risible, at best.

Hoppe advocates an anarcho-capitalist ?private law society?, but between monarchy and democracy he does not hesitate (and his argument is strictly Hobbesian):

As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this "property." Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard the country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his prot?g?s' advantage. He owns its current use ? usufruct? but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.

Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably irresistible) incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and comprehensiveness. Anything they neglect to steal ? or ?leave on the table? ? is likely to be inherited by political successors who are not only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can therefore be expected to utilize all available resources to the detriment of their foes. Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon in your enemy?s hand. Best, then, to destroy what cannot be stolen. From the perspective of a democratic politician, any type of social good that is neither directly appropriable nor attributable to (their own) partisan policy is sheer waste, and counts for nothing, whilst even the most grievous social misfortune ? so long as it can be assigned to a prior administration or postponed until a subsequent one ? figures in rational calculations as an obvious blessing. The long-range techno-economic improvements and associated accumulation of cultural capital that constituted social progress in its old (Whig) sense are in nobody?s political interest. Once democracy flourishes, they face the immediate threat of extinction.

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ?reality television? political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it?s best to eat it all now.

Winston Churchill, who remarked in neo-reactionary style that ?the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter? is better known for suggesting ?that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.? Whilst never exactly conceding that ?OK, democracy sucks (in fact, it really sucks), but what?s the alternative?? the implication is obvious. The general tenor of this sensibility is attractive to modern conservatives, because it resonates with their wry, disillusioned acceptance of relentless civilizational deterioration, and with the associated intellectual apprehension of capitalism as an unappetizing but ineliminable default social arrangement, which remains after all catastrophic or merely impractical alternatives have been discarded. The market economy, on this understanding, is no more than a spontaneous survival strategy that stitches itself together amidst the ruins of a politically devastated world. Things will probably just get worse forever. So it goes.

So, what is the alternative? (There?s certainly no point trawling through the 1930s for one.) ?Can you imagine a 21st-century post-demotist society? One that saw itself as recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism?? asks supreme Sith Lord of the neo-reactionaries, Mencius Moldbug. ?Well, I suppose that makes one of us.?

Moldbug?s formative influences are Austro-libertarian, but that?s all over. As he explains:

? libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world in which their battle gets won and stays won. They wind up looking for ways to push a world in which the State's natural downhill path is to grow, back up the hill. This prospect is Sisyphean, and it's understandable why it attracts so few supporters.

His awakening into neo-reaction comes with the (Hobbesian) recognition that sovereignty cannot be eliminated, caged, or controlled. Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never condense out of science fiction, divided powers flow back together like a shattered Terminator, and constitutions have exactly as much real authority as a sovereign interpretative power allows them to have. The state isn?t going anywhere because -- to those who run it -- it?s worth far too much to give up, and as the concentrated instantiation of sovereignty in society, nobody can make it do anything. If the state cannot be eliminated, Moldbug argues, at least it can be cured of democracy (or systematic and degenerative bad government), and the way to do that is to formalize it. This is an approach he calls ?neo-cameralism?.

To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.

This business's customers are its residents. A profitably-managed neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its customers efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement.

Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state ?belongs? to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will remain in the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue.

So, secondly, the ruling class must be plausibly identified. It should be noted immediately, in contradistinction to Marxist principles of social analysis, that this is not the ?capitalist bourgeoisie?. Logically, it cannot be. The power of the business class is already clearly formalized, in monetary terms, so the identification of capital with political power is perfectly redundant. It is necessary to ask, rather, who do capitalists pay for political favors, how much these favors are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them is distributed. This requires, with a minimum of moral irritation, that the entire social landscape of political bribery (?lobbying?) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares. Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion of sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision. The conclusion of this exercise is the mapping of a ruling entity that is the truly dominant instance of the democratic polity. Moldbug calls it the Cathedral.

The formalization of political powers, thirdly, allows for the possibility of effective government. Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities. If gov-corp doesn?t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit.

... although the full neocameralist approach has never been tried, its closest historical equivalents to this approach are the 18th-century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by Frederick the Great, and the 21st-century nondemocratic tradition as seen in lost fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. These states appear to provide a very high quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.

In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a familiar phase of cyclical political development, fundamentally decadent in nature, and preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today this classical understanding is thoroughly lost, and replaced by a global democratic ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection, that is asserted not as a credible social-scientific thesis, or even as a spontaneous popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed, of a specific, historically identifiable kind:

? a received tradition I call Universalism, which is a nontheistic Christian sect. Some other current labels for this same tradition, more or less synonymous, are progressivism, multiculturalism, liberalism, humanism, leftism, political correctness, and the like. ? Universalism is the dominant modern branch of Christianity on the Calvinist line, evolving from the English Dissenter or Puritan tradition through the Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and Progressive movements. Its ancestral briar patch also includes a few sideways sprigs that are important enough to name but whose Christian ancestry is slightly better concealed, such as Rousseauvian laicism, Benthamite utilitarianism, Reformed Judaism, Comtean positivism, German Idealism, Marxist scientific socialism, Sartrean existentialism, Heideggerian postmodernism, etc, etc, etc. ? Universalism, in my opinion, is best described as a mystery cult of power. ... It's as hard to imagine Universalism without the State as malaria without the mosquito. ? The point is that this thing, whatever you care to call it, is at least two hundred years old and probably more like five. It's basically the Reformation itself. ... And just walking up to it and denouncing it as evil is about as likely to work as suing Shub-Niggurath in small-claims court.

To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament, characterized by relentless, totalizing, state expansion, the proliferation of spurious positive ?human rights? (claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies), politicized money, reckless evangelical ?wars for democracy?, and comprehensive thought control arrayed in defense of universalistic dogma (accompanied by the degradation of science into a government public relations function), it is necessary to ask how Massachusetts came to conquer the world, as Moldbug does. With every year that passes, the international ideal of sound governance finds itself approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards set by the Grievance Studies departments of New England universities. This is the divine providence of the ranters and levelers, elevated to a planetary teleology, and consolidated as the reign of the Cathedral.

The Cathedral has substituted its gospel for everything we ever knew. Consider just the concerns expressed by America?s founding fathers (compiled by ?Liberty-clinger?, comment #1, here):

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%. -- Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!-- Benjamin Franklin

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. -- John Adams

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. -- James Madison

We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy?it has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny?-- Alexander Hamilton

More on voting with your feet (and the incandescent genius of Moldbug), next ?

Added Note (March 7):

Don't trust the attribution of the 'Benjamin Franklin' quote, above. According to Barry Popik, the saying was probably invented by James Bovard, in 1992. (Bovard remarks elsewhere: "There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to equate democracy with liberty.")

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1880/the-dark-enlightenment-part-1

37
3DHS / Even the New York Times notices...
« on: November 27, 2012, 01:39:46 AM »


November 23, 2012
With Stickers, a Petition and Even a Middle Name, Secession Fever Hits Texas
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
HOUSTON ? In the weeks since President Obama?s re-election, Republicans around the country have been wondering how to proceed. Some conservatives in Texas have been asking a far more pointed question: how to secede.

Secession fever has struck parts of Texas, which Mitt Romney won by nearly 1.3 million votes.

Sales of bumper stickers reading ?Secede? ? one for $2, or three for $5 ? have increased at TexasSecede.com. In East Texas, a Republican official sent out an e-mail newsletter saying it was time for Texas and Vermont to each ?go her own way in peace? and sign a free-trade agreement among the states.

A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response. And Larry Scott Kilgore, a perennial Republican candidate from Arlington, a Dallas suburb, announced that he was running for governor in 2014 and would legally change his name to Larry Secede Kilgore, with Secede in capital letters. As his Web page, secedekilgore.com, puts it: ?Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.?

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership?s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat.

But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas nationalism ? a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the 1830s and 1840s ? it is a far more serious matter.

The official in East Texas, Peter Morrison, the treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party, said in a statement that he had received overwhelming support from conservative Texans and overwhelming opposition from liberals outside the state in response to his comments in his newsletter. He said that it may take time for ?people to appreciate that the fundamental cultural differences between Texas and other parts of the United States may be best addressed by an amicable divorce, a peaceful separation.?

The online petitions ? created on the We the People platform at petitions.whitehouse.gov ? are required to receive 25,000 signatures in 30 days for the White House to respond. The Texas petition, created Nov. 9 by a man identified as Micah H. of Arlington, had received more than 116,000 signatures by Friday. It asks the Obama administration to ?peacefully grant? the withdrawal of Texas, and describes doing so as ?practically feasible,? given the state?s large economy.

Residents in other states, including Alabama, Florida, Colorado, Louisiana and Oklahoma, have submitted similar petitions, though none have received as many signatures as the one from Texas.

A White House official said every petition that crossed the signature threshold would be reviewed and would receive a response, though it was unclear precisely when Micah H. would receive his answer.

Gov. Rick Perry, who twice made public remarks in 2009 suggesting that he was sympathetic to the secessionist cause, will not be signing the petition. ?Governor Perry believes in the greatness of our union, and nothing should be done to change it,? a spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said in a statement. ?But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government.?

The secession movement in Texas is divergent, with differences in goals and tactics. One group, the Republic of Texas, says that secession is unnecessary because, it claims, Texas is an independent nation that was illegally annexed by the United States in 1845. (The group?s leader and other followers waged a weeklong standoff with the Texas Rangers in 1997 that left one of its members dead.) Mr. Kilgore, the candidate who is changing his middle name, said he had not signed the White House petition because he did not believe that Texans needed to ask Washington for permission to leave.

?Our economy is about 30 percent larger than that of Australia,? said Mr. Kilgore, 48, a telecommunications contractor. ?Australia can survive on their own, and I don?t think we?ll have any problem at all surviving on our own in Texas.?

Few of the public calls for secession have addressed the messy details, like what would happen to the state?s many federal courthouses, prisons, military bases and parklands. No one has said what would become of Kevin Patteson, the director of the state?s Office of State-Federal Relations, and no one has asked the Texas residents who received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid after destructive wildfires last year for their thoughts on the subject.

But all the secession talk has intrigued liberals as well. Caleb M. of Austin started his own petition on the White House Web site. He asked the federal government to allow Austin to withdraw from Texas and remain part of the United States, ?in the event that Texas is successful in the current bid to secede.? It had more than 8,000 signatures as of Friday.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/us/politics/with-stickers-a-petition-and-even-a-middle-name-secession-fever-hits-texas.html?emc=eta1

38
3DHS / Brooms and Shovels
« on: November 25, 2012, 03:41:21 PM »
Brooms and Shovels
by John Derbyshire

November 15, 2012

It is traditionally said that after the Lord Mayor?s Parade come the guys with brooms and shovels to clear the pavement of whatever the parade horses may have bestowed upon it. Well, the election?s over, and here I come with broom and shovel to see if there?s anything instructive to be found in the droppings.

In a pre-election piece I opined that I couldn?t see much daylight between the two parties. Three weeks later, in an election-night piece, I confessed to having voted anyway, for Mitt Romney and everyone else on the conservative/Republican line, on account of my kids?one pushing, one pulling.

On the matter of there being little to choose between the parties, I didn?t just have a hold of the zeitgeist by his coattails, I was well-nigh tandem-jump skydiving with the old ghoul.

This won?t improve. It?s been the unanimous opinion of the post-election commentators that what the GOP must now do is make itself more like the Democrats. Women and minorities on the ticket! Shut up about abortion, gay marriage, and Jesus! Comprehensive immigration reform! Keep the millionaires out of sight!

It wasn?t hard to spot this trend. In the nation of my birth, it?s been going on for decades. Fifty years ago the Labour Party, though trending fast toward managerialism, still featured fiery Marxist agitators with an Order of Lenin in the dining-room dresser, longhaired scholarly misfits from magazines printed on low-grade paper, and horny-handed sons of toil from outfits such as the Boilermakers Union.

One scholarly misfit scandalized respectable British opinion as late as 1981 by wearing a duffle coat to the Veterans? Day wreath-laying ceremony. And it was one of those horny-handed sons of toil, I forget from which union, who in respect of some rumored scandal among the brothers declared from the podium of the Trades Union Congress that ?I?ve heard these allegations, and I know who the alligators are.??

The Tories, meanwhile, were still recognizably the toffs? party; not so much the highest of the high toffs?mid-20th-century Tories, though patriotic and monarchist, always thought the Windsors were politically?unsound?as the business classes and the country squirearchy. Farmers were Tory, your local realtor was a Tory, and the board of Imperial Chemical Industries was all Tories.

You had something to get your teeth into there. Either you wanted to stand atop the ruins of Buckingham Palace waving the red flag, or else you were of the same kidney as Tory poet Philip Larkin, who sketched out his political program thusly in a letter to fellow curmudgeon Kingsley Amis:

Prison for strikers,
Bring back the cat,
Kick out the niggers,
How about that?

Nowadays, after the brief Thatcherite interlude (sigh), Labourites and Tories are indistinguishable: sleek young metrosexuals in thousand-dollar suits whose thoughts stray not one millimeter from the dogmas of the New Universal Faith?globalism, feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights, ?human rights,? and all the rest of the snot, dandruff, and earwax we have to pretend to believe if we want to avoid the attentions of the Thought Police.

So it is on this side of the pond. Old voting habits will persist, and sectionalism probably still has a few more decades of life in it; but for an intelligent and reflective person not much interested in Civil War reenactment, reasons to vote for one party rather than the other are approaching zero asymptotically.

Next, the Asian vote, which went 73 percent for Obama. Wassup with that? people keep asking me. I can?t improve on Steve Sailer?s explanation: Asians, like everyone else in the world except white European Gentiles, are ethnocentric, so they preferentially vote for the party of ethnocentrism. Duh.

Isn?t this against their own interests, shafted as they collectively are by the affirmative action and ?disparate impact? rackets? Sure it is. Mass Hispanic immigration is against black interests, yet when the Congressional Black Caucus votes on immigration issues, they might as well be paid shills of the Mexican government. Ethnic solidarity has its price, and the price is willingly paid. Disraeli had an explanation.

And Asian voters are immigrants with long-established urban Democratic ward-heeler networks. One of the first sights I ever saw in the USA, arriving in New York?s Chinatown in August of 1973, was a banner prominently strung across Mott Street urging the locals, in Chinese characters, to vote for Ai-bi Bi-en.


A very high proportion of hopeful Republican commentary is about this or that ethnic group being natural Republicans, if only we can open their eyes to their economic and social interests. It?s all nonsense, sheer wishful thinking, as one of the 20th century?s most successful politicians explained. I keep quoting this, but that?s because you don?t listen:

In multiracial societies, you don?t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

Out on the Disreputable Right where I do my partying, there has been some cautious glee this past week because of the sheer quantity of talk about race and demography in respectable news outlets. Even Fox News, the inner donjon of the neocon media establishment, has been chewing over the election results? ethnic implications. Is America awakening to race realism?

I wouldn?t bet on it. The egalitarian fantasy has tremendous emotional appeal to Americans and is promoted and enforced by mighty social powers. It has its momentary retreats, as in the ?interglacial? era (Peter Brimelow?s term) of the mid-1990s, but it just comes back again stronger than ever.

So it will be again this time around. There will be a few weeks of guarded openness on the major-media outlets, then the enforcers will find their truncheons and we?ll be back to celebrating diversity and building the socialist utopia in which everything is equal to everything else.

The key to understanding the dynamics of multiracial nations in a globalized world is an appreciation of human nature in its tribal and racial aspects. Such appreciation has mighty political, social, and psychological barriers to breach among white people even when the science is indisputable, which it by no means yet is. I?d say we are a full generation away from popular acceptance of realism about race among whites.

In the meantime, the Republican fantasy about recruiting minorities onto their voter rolls will persist, while thirty million more Third World immigrants surge in and the Democrats will win more and more presidential elections.

 http://takimag.com/article/brooms_and_shovels_john_derbyshire/print#ixzz2DGUMB81w

39
3DHS / Fred Throws Sombrero in Ring
« on: October 23, 2012, 11:21:31 PM »
Fred Throws Sombrero in Ring
The Only Thing We Have to be A-Fred of is Fred Hisself
October 25, 2012
I see that I shall have to take over the helm of the country to save it from the impending collapse. It has come to this. I have always said that I would undertake the presidency only under an assumed name?who would want that on his resum???but noblesse oblges. What could be nobler than this column?

You may say, ?But Fred, how can you be so bloody arrogant as to think you can run the country?? To which I reply, ?We know that the incumbents cannot. I may be able to. In any event, I couldn?t be worse: I have not that talent. Which do you prefer, assured disaster or a sporting chance??

Apparently the key to a successful campaign is a bumper sticker of supernal stupidity and irrelevance. I can play that game. How about ?A Fred in Every Pot.? Or Tippecanoe and Frederick Too.? Or ?Better Fred than Dead.? Or "Fred...Ahhhh." Or, most pertinently, ?Well, Have You Got a Better Idea??

It is my understanding that as a candidate, I need a platform. I think this means a pack of rhythmically mendacious platitudes that would put a crank freak to sleep.  I shall try to do better. The following appear to me serviceable:

?Defense? policy: We don?t have one. The last time the military defended the United States was 1945?the United States, remember,  being that place between Canada and Mexico, a region that does not include (recent graduates, check your atlas) Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Iran, Nigeria, or Yemen.

Do not misunderstand me. I am as patriotic as the next guy, and consequently happy to kill remote strangers for no reason, and their wives, children, dogs, and flcoks. Unfortunately, we can no longer afford it. Do you know what bombs cost these days? Thus we must either find a cheaper means of terminating Afghan children, perhaps by poisoning, or else, on purely economic grounds, we must restrain the Pentagon?s appetites.

Therefore, under my administration all military officers will be required to wear pink tutus, toe shoes, and brassieres with expandable boob compartments. This will discourage history majors in arrested development from becoming  lieutenants and strutting around like Genghis Kahn simulacra. An army of ballerinas will be much less troublesome.

With each promotion officers will get larger inserts of high-density silicone, so that they get back trouble and retire. David Petraeus will be instantly issued an udder.

Is this not genius?

Further, all pilots of military helicopters will be required to go into combat with their children strapped to the skids. This will calm martial enthusiasm. (I was going to use the pilots? wives, but on reflection realized that this might lead to an insatiable thirst for war.)

Education policy: I will institute schools. This will be a novel concept in a nation accustomed to day-care centers intended to keep the young off the labor market, introduce them to drugs the purchase of which sustains the Mexican economy, and, so as to prepare them for jobs in odious bureaucracies, inure them to levels of boredom that would cause a stone post to crumble.

To this end I will put a bounty on education theorists, offer taxidermy at public expense, and convert teachers colleges into repositories for radioactive waste (Wait: They might mutate. The consequences could be incalculable. I?ll have to think this over carefully). The schools will teach reading (phonetically) writing (grammatically) and arithmetic (without calculators). Otherwise  their entire staffs will be fed to colonies of army ants. Brazil has lots.

I am replete with ideas for scholarly progress and social improvement. For example, any student who curses or assaults a teacher will be expelled, instantly and forever. (?But Fred,? you say, ?The poor things, they will end up in prison.? Exactly. They would anyway. Let?s get them started. Think of it as advanced placement. We could call it Head Start.)

Next, I will end affirmative action, specifically to include the admission to Ivy schools of dull-witted white legacies. This admirable policy would have protected us from Bush II, who on his merits couldn?t have gotten into Yale with burglar tools. It will make the federal bureaucracy functional again. Everything will be done without regard for race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, except cheese-cake photography. The underlying principle is the recognition that if you hire people because they can?t do a job, they won?t.

TSA: I am told that in Africa there are enormous silver-backed gorillas that can crush a coconut one-handed. I will station one of these at every airport gate in the country after suitable training. After an employee of TSA gropes a passenger, the gorilla will grope the TSA employee. This will doubtless result in a degree of attrition and, one hopes, frequent emasculation. Those who stay on the job will work naked to promote a sense of oneness with the public.

Moreover, I intend to institute the National Sausage Act, requiring that all other officials of Homeland Security be passed through a large industrial grinder. They will then be packed into sausage skins before being fed to undiscriminating sharks. This promise alone should result in my election by a grateful nation.

The first into the hopper will be that awful woman who records the airport warnings in that condescending almost gurgling elocution-major voice that sounds as if she wants to suck the microphone. There are limits to what we can bear. Well, there ought to be.

Next, I will have members of Congress officially designated as ducks by the National Park Service. States vary as to when duck season opens, but this is a matter of States rights. For a small license fee in the capital itself, citizens will be permitted to erect duck blinds along Pennsylvania Avenue. I imagine the use of duck calls which will squawk, ?Quaaack Pork, graft, corruption, little boys awwwk!?

God I?m good.

Next, marriage. We now have a situation in which heterosexuals believe that marriage exists to produce children, while homosexuals pursue their own ends. (Actually they pursue each other?s ends, but never mind.) As president of all Americans, I cannot discriminate. It seems to me that I must either outlaw all marriage entirely by executive order, or allow to all citizens the creativity that has made this country great.

I will thus allow same-sex marriage, as well as polygamy, on the principle that the state has no place in the bedroom. Combining same-sex marriage with polygamy, I imagine whole matrimonial platoons, with a sense of community and perhaps ID cards. In fact, I see no constitutional barrier to marriage between species. Why should a man not marry Fido? It is a question of individual conscience. We could introduce children to non-judgemental attitudes with books called ?Mommy Says Moooo.?

Ha. I cannot lose. See you in November.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/President_Fred.shtml

40
3DHS / Goodbye Beveridge: welfare's end nears
« on: September 30, 2012, 02:42:43 AM »
Goodbye Beveridge: welfare's end nears
By David Goodhart

Steven Van Riel, Labour's director of policy at the last election, recommends that if party activists travelling to their annual conference in Manchester on Sunday want to read something truly frightening, they should bring the annual survey of what their fellow citizens think.

He is right, especially when it comes to attitudes about welfare. The latest British Social Attitudes survey  spells out in agonising detail the collapse in support over the past decade or so for social security spending and what might be called poor peoples' welfare.

There is still strong support for the National Health Service and even a slight upward blip in the number of people calling for an increase in tax and spend. But whereas in previous recessions sympathy for the poor and jobless rose, this time it has continued its inexorable march downwards.

In 1991 58 per cent of Britons agreed that government should spend more on benefits even if it led to higher taxes. That figure is now down to 28 per cent. More than half believe people would "stand on their own two feet" if benefits were less generous, with only 20 per cent disagreeing. In 1993 the responses were almost exactly the reverse.

According to a YouGov poll this year for Prospect magazine  74 per cent of voters agreed that welfare payment levels should be cut. The less well-off were almost as hostile as the rich. Labour voters supported reduction by a large majority.

This narrowing of sympathy ought to benefit the Conservatives. But they too are grappling with their own welfare problem - the huge Welfare Reform Act introduced by Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary.

But what is at the root of this apparent decline in social solidarity since the early 1990s' The "scroungers" who abuse the system have always been unpopular and their number has always been exaggerated - fraud has been in sharp decline in recent years.

More significant, changes in society and in welfare have created a greater social distance between middle Britain and the typical social security recipient. As people have grown richer the Beveridge ideal of a social security system that all citizens feel part of has given way to a residual system for the poor.

Instead of unemployment being a temporary misfortune that could befall anyone, it is increasingly associated with people in the old industrial regions who have lost the work ethic or inner city youths who never acquired it. As in America many recipients of welfare have become more like a separate caste.

Such social distance does not matter so much when a welfare system is heavily insurance-based, as it is in much of Europe and used to be in Britain. You don?t need a moral consensus when there is a clear link between what you pay in and what you get out.

But social security in Britain has become increasingly "non-contributory": paid for out of general taxation. This has happened at a time of declining trust among citizens. When life experiences and values become more diverse, it becomes harder to assume that other people will have the same attitudes to work and welfare that you do.

Meanwhile the system has grown much bigger. Last year we spent almost ?200bn on benefits and pensions, 40 per cent more in real terms than in 1999. Housing benefit and disability benefit - benefits that barely existed 30 years ago - pay out about ?20bn each a year.

As welfare has expanded it has grown away from peoples' moral intuitions. The average taxpayer thinks that too many people are getting something for nothing. But then if they need the system, they find that they get nothing for something. You may have paid national insurance for 25 years but if you lose your job you qualify for jobseekers? allowance for just six months at  ?67.50 a week, after that if you have ?16,000 or more of savings you get nothing.

In a recent focus group on welfare reform organised by Demos, my think-tank, a librarian called Philip reported that when he was made redundant he spent his savings on a car so that he would qualify to get his mortgage paid and other benefits.

We are asking our battered and unloved social security system to do too many conflicting things: to provide a decent standard of living for the genuinely needy and unlucky without damaging incentives to work or save or costing too much, or offending peoples? sense of fairness.

The Tory reform has failed to square these various circles. It has introduced some caps on benefit that are popular. And from next year it is also planning to simplify the system by rolling up six different means-tested benefits into one universal credit, though this requires an ambitious computer system to function properly.

However, the Tory reform is no more contributory than the current system and at various points penalises savers - Philip will still have an incentive to buy a car.

Making a system more contributory is much easier said than done. It did not grow less contributory by accident but rather because of the end of full employment, the fact that many women work only intermittently and less caring was done within extended families. To penalise those groups that find it hard to contribute would require a degree of ruthlessness foreign to modern politics.

The alternative of paying extra to those who have contributed more is a more realistic option. Labour, which also grappled unsuccessfully with welfare problems when in office, talks about rewarding good behaviour - or those who work, care and save - and increasing the employment rate for women and young people to expand the tax base and therefore to make welfare more affordable.

But the reality is that as societies get richer and more diverse the public welfare system will inevitably become more fragmented and more residual. The clever people in all parties who care about preserving some aspects of social solidarity and redistribution in the system should be thinking about how best to combine state and private insurance - in salary protection schemes, for example - that provide the security middle-income voters want at tax levels they can bear.

The writer is director of the think-tank Demos and editor at large of Prospect

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/034b4d28-089b-11e2-b57f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz27sxQz6f8

41
3DHS / Reasons to vote for Mitt
« on: September 25, 2012, 03:00:21 PM »
Madonna strips for Obama, offers profanity-laced endorsement
By Emily Goodin    - 09/25/12 09:21 AM ET

Madonna offered a profanity-laced endorsement of President Obama at her concert Monday night, which involved the singer stripping down to her underwear to reveal the president's name written on her body.

?You all better vote for f---ing Obama okay,? she told the crowd at Washington's Verizon center.

Later in the show, Madonna took off her shirt and pulled down her pants to show she had ?OBAMA? written in all capital letters across her lower back.
?When Obama is in the White House for a second term I'll take it all off,? she said to cheers and whistles from the audience.

She then began singing a slow, seductive version of ?Like a Virgin? while rolling around on a piano top.

Madonna first revealed her body art in early September, during her performance at Yankee stadium in New York.


The outspoken, controversial singer was on the second night of her Washington, D.C. stop in her ?MDNA? tour.

Between performing fan favorites such as ?Express Yourself? and ?Vogue,? she paused twice to discuss politics.

In her endorsement, Madonna touted Obama's support of gay rights in a profanity-filled monologue about the president.

She also spoke of the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., noting ?and now it's amazing to think we have an African-American in the White House.?

She added: ?So they didn't die for nothing.?

She ended her speech by shouting of Obama: ?So vote for him, OK godd---it!?

Later in the show she admitted: ?I get a little worked up about some subjects.?

http://thehill.com/capital-living/in-the-know/258491-madonna-strips-for-obama-offers-profanity-laced-endorsement

42
3DHS / Murderous Equality
« on: September 11, 2012, 10:01:52 AM »
Murderous Equality
By Andy Nowicki

?Equality? is one of the hoariest cliches and most pernicious slogans of modern times. Said to derive from a supposedly common-sense notion of fairness, the mad clamor underway to equalize the human race in fact has no basis whatsoever in justice or reality, human or otherwise. Ironically, the idea of equality is almost inevitably deeply debasing to a culture; pushing for greater ?equality? does nothing to make the dumb smart, the ugly beautiful, or the poor rich; instead, it only makes nearly everything? be it fashion, the arts, language, commerce, or general human interaction-- duller, less pleasant, less orderly, less desirable, and infinitely more tacky, tawdry, and loathsome. More crucially, the ramming of equality down our collective gullet requires the construction of a hateful bureaucracy to monitor, control, and altogether enslave the very people it supposedly wishes to uplift and empower. The imposition of equality, that is, requires the self-appointment of a vanguard elite who arrogate to themselves the task of being the equalizers. Thus the attempt to construct a society of ?equals? invariably leads to perpetual exercise of tyranny.

But how did we get to the point where this obviously insane concept came to be enshrined as an ideal? And why, after the untold carnage, horror, and heartbreak it has caused, do we still view equality as a thing worth pursuing, worth sacrificing for, a patriotic duty even?

The term ?equality,? of course, isn?t exactly new; it first sprung up as a vogue among the Western intellectual elite over two centuries ago. It in large part inspired two major political upheavals, one in America and the other in France. Upon deciding to be unencumbered states, representatives of the thirteen former English colonies in the New World signed the Declaration of Independence, which holds it to be ?self-evident? that ?all men are created equal?; meanwhile, those guillotine-happy men of Gaul made ?egalite? one of their watchwords of revolution.

Far be it from me to mock and deride America?s founding fathers?they were in many ways an impressive lot. Still, their collective signing on to the concept of mankind?s equality was an astoundingly stupid gesture, which has ushered in all kinds of ideological mischief. Whatever Thomas Jefferson?s reason for including the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, this ill-defined assertion of men?s equality is vexingly vague. ?All men are equal,? how exactly? Equal under the law? Equal in the eyes of God? Equal, as in ?deserving the same level of income as everyone else?? TJ doesn?t say. And the matter is complicated, since?as has often been pointed out in our selectively iconoclastic age?this supposed believer in the self-evidence of human equality was also an owner of slaves.

The French revolutionaries, for their part, weren?t content merely to cozy up to abstractions. Their tireless quest was to make society much more equal by bringing the mighty low: specifically, to cut the ?one percent? of their time down to size by rendering them a whole head shorter. Thousands perished in this orchestrated reign of terror, whose main aim was to promote and promulgate equality.

Once the Bolsheviks seized power in 20th century Russia, joined later by the Maoist regime in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the stakes were magnified. Now millions, and tens of millions, would be put to death for the singular crime of not being properly ?equal? with their fellow men. Across the world, the quest for equality has led to carnage unequalled by any previous era in history. One would have thought, by now, that demagogic demands to ?level the playing field,? as the sinister euphemism goes, would be utterly rejected as gauche and tasteless, given the moldering mound of corpses whose pitiful and poignant stink reminds us that equalitarian rhetoric seems inextricably tied with state-sanctioned mass murder. We live in a time, after all, when any criticism of Jews is treated, in respectable circles, with extreme reflexive suspicion, if not outright hostility. Because of the bloody Shoah of recent history, one who calls Jews to task for anything in any manner or context is punished with banishment from polite society and the imputation of being complicit in genocide; such a one might as well wear a scarlet swastika sewn across his chest, like a post-modern day Hester Prynne.

But of course, not all of history?s victims are held to be equal in stature; as George Orwell famously observed, some are indeed much ?more equal? than others. Thus it seems to make no difference how many tens of millions have been beheaded by the guillotine, executed in the killing fields, or sent to Siberia to starve, all for the offense of seeming to be more prosperous or of a higher social strata than the average citizen, and thus rousing the ire of a murderous revolutionary regime demanding that the high be brought low (or, as the Hutus in Rwanda broadcast their genocidal designs prior to indulging in a luridly nightmarish three weeks of unfathomably promiscuous slaughter, that the ?tall trees? be cut down)? No, it seems clear that no matter how many have been ground into dust under the tyranny of enforced ?equalization,? demands to make things more ?equal? will continue to be not only tolerated, but approved. Those who agitate for equality are still viewed as righteous crusaders for justice, rather than properly judged as shrieking nuisances spitefully waging a campaign of terror against tradition, logic, and reality.

It was, I suppose, only a matter of time before the relentless clamoring for ?gay marriage??that is, the demand that a millennia-old institution to be suddenly redefined based on a decade-old whim of the ruling class?got reframed as a matter of ?equality.? The fact that a man and a woman can get married but not two men or two women, means that things aren?t ?equal? on the marriage front (so it is asserted); therefore the law must be changed to accommodate those who feel left out (or at least those among the ?left out? whose cause is favored by the hive-mind of the Zeitgeist-upholders; polygamists, having as they do the flavor and complexion of ultra-conservative patriarchy, are TSOL in the new dispensation, while incestuous couples are just seen as icky and are reflexively dismissed, though in truth no legitimate reason exists to reject either innovation under the new rules, given that everyone involved is a consenting adult).

Again, one would have thought, given the equality-brigade?s altogether crummy human-rights track record throughout recent history, that those stridently demanding what is now called ?marriage equality? would be looked at askance for employing such rhetoric. Indeed, if the merest whiff of sanity prevailed among the fetid fumes of our brain-dead Zeitgeist and its uncritical adherents who man our opinion-shaping institutions, then the invocation of ?equality? would set off the same warning bells that ?hate? now does among the highly-placed and powerful and their eager lapdogs and water-carriers. In such a world, an outfit called ?equality-watch? would be keeping a wary eye on equality-agitators. As it stands, the SPLC?s ?hate watch? has conniptions whenever any skinhead with an iron cross tattoo on his neck appears to sneer threateningly at an illegal immigrant, and it completely flips its lid anytime a small group of clean-cut, suit-and-tied white activists want to hold a weekend seminar in a medium-sized hotel ballroom somewhere in the United States. But far-greater malefactions are excused, or even defended, if left-leaning equalitarians commit them. (A semi-famous Hollywood actress can even wish catastrophic death upon a group of convention-goers who don?t meet her definition of ?enlightened,? and nobody important seems to care, since even if her words were imprudent at least she?s on the side of the angels.

Again, as we see, the legacy of genocide, terror, and tyranny that the push for equality has engendered makes absolutely no difference; equality will remain perversely sacrosanct among our cultural betters; it will continue to be trumpeted as a good in itself, an end unquestionably worthy of fulfillment, and its conspicuous historical dark side will be downplayed, if not completely ignored. In Europe and North America, the wish to impose ?equality? now carries a more and more pronounced anti-white subtext; its advocates tend to be deracinated white liberals (or SWPLs, as they are now called) who have imbibed poisonous cultural Marxism like mother?s milk, and who flatter themselves as being the vanguard of the ongoing societal revolution, ridiculously romanticizing the cultures of urban blacks, barrio Latinos, and other ethnic minorities, while viewing their conservative Middle American racial brethren with an unhinged, embittered hostility worthy of an Ellen Barkin Twitter hissy-fit.

But the truth is a mighty ally, and those of us who know better than to believe what we?re told should never hesitate to point out that our would-be vanguard are naught but a bunch of smug, self-serving, and generally ignorant brainwashed clowns. And it is a grim irony not untinged with Shadenfreude that, should a real, brutal, balls-to-the-wall, no-bullshit revolution ever actually gain momentum, these useful idiots will no doubt be the first to face the firing squad.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/zeitgeist/murderous-equality/

43
3DHS / AP Exclusive: Memos show US hushed up Soviet crime
« on: September 11, 2012, 01:03:05 AM »
AP Exclusive: Memos show US hushed up Soviet crime
By RANDY HERSCHAFT and VANESSA GERA | Associated Press ? 6 hrs ago

WARSAW, Poland (AP) ? The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.
The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.
Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives released and is putting online. Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who helped lead a recent push for the release of the documents, called the effort's success Monday a "momentous occasion" in an attempt to "make history whole."
Historians who saw the material days before the official release describe it as important and shared some highlights with the AP. The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of the secret codes sent by the two American POWs ? something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on.
The declassified documents also show the United States maintaining that it couldn't conclusively determine guilt until a Russian admission in 1990 ? a statement that looks improbable given the huge body of evidence of Soviet guilt that had already emerged decades earlier. Historians say the new material helps to flesh out the story of what the U.S. knew and when.
The Soviet secret police killed the 22,000 Poles with shots to the back of the head. Their aim was to eliminate a military and intellectual elite that would have put up stiff resistance to Soviet control. The men were among Poland's most accomplished ? officers and reserve officers who in their civilian lives worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or as other professionals. Their loss has proven an enduring wound to the Polish nation.
In the early years after the war, outrage by some American officials over the concealment inspired the creation of a special U.S. Congressional committee to investigate Katyn.
In a final report released in 1952, the committee declared there was no doubt of Soviet guilt, and called the massacre "one of the most barbarous international crimes in world history." It found that Roosevelt's administration suppressed public knowledge of the crime, but said it was out of military necessity. It also recommended the government bring charges against the Soviets at an international tribunal ? something never acted upon.
Despite the committee's strong conclusions, the White House maintained its silence on Katyn for decades, showing an unwillingness to focus on an issue that would have added to political tensions with the Soviets during the Cold War.
___
It was May 1943 in the Katyn forest, a part of Russia the Germans had seized from the Soviets in 1941. A group of American and British POWs were taken against their will by their German captors to witness a horrifying scene at a clearing surrounded by pine trees: mass graves tightly packed with thousands of partly mummified corpses in well-tailored Polish officers uniforms.
The Americans ? Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. ? hated the Nazis and didn't want to believe the Germans. They had seen German cruelty up close, and the Soviets, after all, were their ally. The Germans were hoping to use the POWs for propaganda, and to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western Allies.
But returning to their POW camps, the Americans carried a conviction that they had just witnessed overwhelming proof of Soviet guilt. The corpses' advanced state of decay told them the killings took place much earlier in the war, when the Soviets still controlled the area. They also saw Polish letters, diaries, identification tags, news clippings and other objects ? none dated later than spring of 1940 ? pulled from the graves. The evidence that did the most to convince them was the good state of the men's boots and clothing: That told them the men had not lived long after being captured.
Stewart testified before the 1951 Congressional committee about what he saw, and Van Vliet wrote reports on Katyn in 1945 and 1950, the first of which mysteriously disappeared. But the newly declassified documents show that both sent secret encoded messages while still in captivity to army intelligence with their opinion of Soviet culpability. It's an important revelation because it shows the Roosevelt administration was getting information early on from credible U.S. sources of Soviet guilt ? yet still ignored it for the sake of the alliance with Stalin.
One shows head of Army intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell, confirming that some months after the 1943 visit to Katyn by the U.S. officers, a coded request by MIS-X, a unit of military intelligence, was sent to Van Vliet requesting him "to state his opinion of Katyn." Bissell's note said that "it is also understood Col. Van Vliet & Capt. Stewart replied."
MIS-X was devoted to helping POWs held behind German lines escape; it also used the prisoners to gather intelligence.
A statement from Stewart dated 1950 confirms he received and sent coded messages to Washington during the war, including one on Katyn: "Content of my report was aprx (approximately): German claims regarding Katyn substantially correct in opinion of Van Vliet and myself."
The newly uncovered documents also show Stewart was ordered in 1950 ? soon before the Congressional committee began its work ? never to speak about a secret message on Katyn.
Krystyna Piorkowska, author of the recently published book "English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn: Recent Research," discovered the documents related to the coded messages more than a week ago. She was one of several researchers who saw the material ahead of the public release.
She had already determined in her research that Van Vliet and Stewart were "code users" who had gotten messages out about other matters. But this is the first discovery of them communicating about Katyn, she said.
Another Katyn expert aware of the documents, Allen Paul, author of "Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth," told the AP the find is "potentially explosive." He said the material does not appear in the record of the Congressional hearings in 1951-52, and appears to have also been suppressed.
He argues that the U.S. cover-up delayed a full understanding in the United States of the true nature of Stalinism ? an understanding that came only later, after the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in 1949 and after Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe were already behind the Iron Curtain.
"The Poles had known long before the war ended what Stalin's true intentions were," Paul said. "The West's refusal to hear them out on the Katyn issue was a crushing blow that made their fate worse."
The historical record carries other evidence Roosevelt knew in 1943 of Soviet guilt. One of the most important messages that landed on FDR's desk was an extensive and detailed report British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent him. Written by the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile in London, Owen O'Malley, it pointed to Soviet guilt at Katyn.
"There is now available a good deal of negative evidence," O'Malley wrote, "the cumulative effect of which is to throw serious doubt on Russian disclaimers of responsibility for the massacre."
___
It wasn't until the waning days of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe that reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev publicly admitted to Soviet guilt at Katyn, a key step in Polish-Russian reconciliation.
The silence by the U.S. government has been a source of deep frustration for many Polish-Americans. One is Franciszek Herzog, 81, a Connecticut man whose father and uncle died in the massacre. After Gorbachev's 1990 admission, he was hoping for more openness from the U.S. as well and made three attempts to obtain an apology from President George H.W. Bush.
"It will not resurrect the men," he wrote to Bush. "But will give moral satisfaction to the widows and orphans of the victims."
A reply he got in 1992, from the State Department, did not satisfy him. His correspondence with the government is also among the newly released documents and was obtained early by the AP from the George Bush Presidential Library.
The letter, dated Aug. 12, 1992, and signed by Thomas Gerth, then deputy director of the Office of Eastern European Affairs, shows the government stating that it lacked irrefutable evidence until Gorbachev's admission:
"The U.S. government never accepted the Soviet Government's claim that it was not responsible for the massacre. However, at the time of the Congressional hearings in 1951-1952, the U.S. did not possess the facts that could clearly refute the Soviets' allegations that these crimes were committed by the Third Reich. These facts, as you know, were not revealed until 1990, when the Russians officially apologized to Poland."
Herzog expressed frustration at that reply.
"There's a big difference between not knowing and not wanting to know," Herzog said. "I believe the U.S. government didn't want to know because it was inconvenient to them."
___
National Archives page on Katyn: http://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massacre/
___
Randy Herschaft reported from New York. AP reporter Monika Scislowska contributed from Warsaw.
___
Vanessa Gera can be reached at http//www.twitter.com/VanessaGera and Randy Herschaft at http://www.twitter.com/HerschaftAP

http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-memos-show-us-hushed-soviet-crime-132109652.html

44
3DHS / Democrats: Let's Ban Profits!
« on: September 08, 2012, 12:42:23 PM »

45
3DHS / First man on moon Neil Armstrong dead at 82: NBC
« on: August 25, 2012, 04:39:31 PM »
(Reuters) - Former U.S. astronaut, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, has died at the age of 82, U.S. media reported on Saturday.

Armstrong underwent a heart-bypass surgery earlier this month, just two days after his birthday on August 5, to relieve blocked coronary arteries.

As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. As he stepped on the moon's dusty surface, Armstrong said: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

The Apollo 11 moon mission turned out to be Armstrong's last space flight. The following year he was appointed to a desk job, being named NASA's deputy associate administrator for aeronautics in the office of advanced research and technology.

He left NASA a year later to become a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

The former astronaut lived in the Cincinnati area with his wife, Carol.

(Reporting by Sandra Maler; Editing by Philip Barbara)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/25/us-usa-neilarmstrong-idUSBRE87O0B020120825

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