Phobiaphobia

I read an article recently which included an excoriation of someone’s viewpoint on non-Europeans in Europe as “xenophobic”. This ended the discussion, because clearly, no decent person would want to be “xenophobic”.

Or homophobic, or my personal favorite du jour, Islamophobic. The list goes on, sometimes with the alterate ending “-ist”, as in racist, sexist, classist, speciesist.

Take xenophobia, "unreasonable fear of foreigners". In Holland, Muslim immigration has created a national crisis. Ask Pim Fortuyn or Theo Van Gogh or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The cultural coherence of an ancient northern European state is under severe stress due to high numbers of immigrants from a cultural family, North African Islam, which stands in direct opposition to the liberal tradition of that country. Yet, to point this out is to be, gasp, xenophobic. Because in actual usage, xenophobia means any negative response to (Third World) foreigners whatever.

Francis Fukuyama, he of “End of History” infamy, wrote the first sensible thing I’ve heard from him in years. Criticizing European and North American societies for ignoring the cultural struggle going on within them, he says, “many celebrate their own pluralism and multiculturalism, arguing in effect that their identity is to have no identity.” (Emphasis mine).

The ideological use of xenophobia and other cognate terms is clear: it shuts down thought and discussion, forbids perception and interpretation. The person who uses it achieves the moral high ground without argument, the person to whom it is applied must immediately drop everything and begin explaining, denying, defending. It is the equivalent to calling a medieval Christian a heretic. It need not have either ground or content, but it creates anxiety and forecloses discussion. That is the purpose of the discourse. I wonder, if Communism had not collapsed, would an anti-Communist position be labelled "Marxophobia" now and pathologized along with all the rest. (While I'm at it, I think that the progressive agenda really is an expansion of Marxism from economics to all of culture...Gramsci is more of a threat to the West than Karl...Trojan horses and all that).

(Postscript paragraph Apr07) With thanks to Elaib Harvey of the Brussels Journal, this quote from Orwell about 1984 Newspeak: "The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them." (Emphasis by my own damn self).

This much is clear: Only whites are racists. Only men are sexists. Only the well-off are classists. Etc. It is just a linguistic tool of the progressive agenda. If poor people start to move into a previously middle-class neighborhood, to dislike this is “classism”. If rich people start to move into a previously poor neighborhood, to dislike this is not “plutophobia” (unreasonable fear of wealth), but resistance to “gentrification”. The protected victim classes may not be criticized. The result of this discourse, if accepted, is that you are not allowed to see what is right in front of your face.

This is true of all these “phobias” and “-isms”. They are nothing but a progressive version of name-calling and the functional equivalent of lies. Russian emigre Alexander Boots, in his book "How the West Was Lost", refers to this as the replacement of democracy with glossocracy, rule by the people with rule by words. I would say instead, rule by slogans.

I am done with all these words, all of them, including "homophobia". If I were not a believer in large freedom of speech, I would ban them. I certainly intend, in my personal life, to avoid using them and to refuse to let others use them without challenge. I want to be able to try to see what's in front of me, to call things by their real names, to think,to talk, to decide.

If you have a problem with that, you're aletheiaphobic!

Allan Bloom

"There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. Those are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—-a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all."

The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.


Of course, while contemptuous of those who hold to antiquated notions of good and evil, right and wrong, a passionate and unquestioning rejection of "wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism" (as we used to call sexism) is required. The political absolutism of moral relativists...

Natura naturans

Nature naturing, nature doing with nature does.

One of my problems with liberalism is that it has a particular kind of hatred for human nature. Now human nature is ambiguous at best, so I am not complaining from the viewpoint of a happy Unitarian or other somesuch. As Neibuhr said, original sin is what allows men to imagine their own perfection and what makes it impossible for them to achieve.

I am thinking of the hectoring schoolmarmish horror with which liberals often greet what I consider to be natural human responses. Take fear of strangers. It's very common. And there's good reason for it. But under the liberal regime it becomes "xenophobia." Because their very highminded morality imagines that strangers --the right kind of course-- should be welcomed, indeed, privileged, the natural response is condemned, pathologized, rendered practically unthinkable, unsayable.

If we extend this to race or ethnicity, the game is clear. But a game it is. Because, of course, if Hispanics or Blacks --or Somalis or Yemenis-- move into a mostly White neighborhood, unhappiness with the upsetting of the status quo is evil racist xenophobia. But if Whites move into a Black or Hispanic neighborhood, that's classist gentrification, etc.  As I say, it's a game.

So perhaps I should clarify. Liberals don't hate human nature, just the human nature of certain humans.
And that is what it's all about.

Just what I've been thinking of late

How UCLA Lies about Affirmative Action:

""A century from now, historians will marvel at how crazy things are in academia today-- how such smart people could so massively disregard the truth.  They will look upon our era the way we look upon Salem witch-trials accusers and slave owners.""

Not just academia, but the whole Western world, passionately believing in the existence of non-existent witchcraft like racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and the whole superstitious pile of ism and phobia BS.



'via Blog this'

A little infallible truth for the day

For almost every form of -ism and -phobia that our liberal betters wish to demonize, there is a reason. And usually more than two.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, classism, transphobia, Islamophobia, antiSemitism, looksism, ageism, ableism, even antiziganism!...there are reasons, and good reasons, for all of them.

They are not --as our liberal betters demand that we makebelieve-- simply groundless, baseless, evil attitudes arising from nothing more than groundless, baseless evil minds, without evidence or foundation, massive denials of the blindingly obvious truth of universal equality, (an equality which, for some strange reason, has escape the noticed of the entire human race until ten minutes ago.)

Universal equality. Talk about groundless, baseless, evil attitudes without evidence or foundation! (Young Mr Kurtagic ramps up the critique made by the elder Dr Kekes that egalitarianism is a huge mistake and leads to terrible evil.) "Our common humanity", in the sentimental sense in which it is usually meant, is the least informative and consequential thing about us. It's as meaningful as saying, "All cats are cats!"

And while I'm at it, stereotypes are only offensive because they cut so close to the bone, not because they are insultingly mistaken but precisely because they carry so much truth in them. Each offended group's comedians relies on the truth of the stereotypes to make them laugh. They all see it.

One of the fundamental and unchanging realities of the human species is that we live in groups, groups of all kinds, and that many of these groups --including the most important ones like families and tribes-- are in constant competition and conflict with one another. Competition and conflict are structured into the very nature of the species because of the very nature of the planet on which we have come into being, where death is universal and ever at-hand, and life is marked by scarcity, contingency and flaw. Competition and conflict are not moral flaws in our species character, they are the conditions of our survival, about which we are not given a choice. You may as well condemn humans because we eat organic matter.

Survival is both an individual and a group concern, but a group concern above all, since it is your group(s) that allow you to survive as an individual. So in an important way, it does not matter whether an ism, a phobia or a stereotype is "true". That is a determination that will always be clouded by self-interest and will never convince the Other who is in competition and conflict with you. What matters is to find your group(s) and fight for your survival. Because that's what all the Others are doing.

Everyone who is not a Foolish White Person knows this and lives by it.

---

Good point!

Dennis Prager makes the excellent point that our liberal elites in government and the press seem utterly puzzled about why Muslim men engage in jihadi terrorism (PTSD from non-combat? Mortgage pressures?) but quite sure that the fascist Tea Party folks and conservatives in general are moved by racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, hatred and greed.

____________________

Women

Tintoretto's Temptation of Adam

An appreciative reader took the time to write, and to correct a factual mistake I made in posting Fins des siecles, for both of which I thank him. And he also had some issue with what he called my "stealth misogyny".

A couple of thoughts in response.

One is, I don't think it's so "stealth". Since a lot of this blog functions as a place for discharging my negative reactions --so I don't bore or alienate my friends with them-- I think I am pretty consistent in directly attacking certain kinds of females and female behaviors:

Phallic females who take advantage of the current feminist and reflexively anti-male Zeitgeist to compete with males by disrespectfully trashing them but expecting no pushback because they are, after all, girls.

Women who invade male space with their anger and then want to play the victim when they do get pushback.

Labile females who want to play the Big Boys' games and then collapse into helpless little girls when it suits them, expecting that they will get respect for the former and soothing for the latter.

And characters like Olivia in The Shooting Party or Monroe in The Misfits, or Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye, who use male vulnerability to their sexual attraction in order to act like narcissistic irresponsible children and again, expect no consequences for whatever harm they do.

Or feminists and animus-possessed women in general. 

In regard to these types of characters and behaviors, I am with Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, who writes his female characters as men, and then "removes all reason and accountability."

And I respond to the term misogyny rather as I do to racism, homophobia, or xenophobia. Regardless of the user's conscious intention, they carry a pre-packaged PC software program which is supposed to elicit a defense against the charge. I refuse to enter a plea because I don't accept the validity of the category in the first place.

All these words assume that the only acceptable moral attitude toward women, non-Whites, gays, or foreigners --all Sacred Victim Groups in liberal parlance--must be positive and that the burden of proof lies on those who are unimpressed or unfriendly in any way. I disagree. I dish out praise and blame as I see fit.

About Elizabeth Taylor's acting all I can say is that I am not alone in my estimation of her talent. Just google "Elizabeth Taylor" and "mediocre". But that is a question of taste. De gustibus. I'd rather watch a Jacqueline Bisset, Lauren Bacall, Olympia Dukakis, Juliane Moore or Julia Roberts.

And whether or not my reader can respect a man who appears to be insensible to the charms of a beautiful woman, well, what can a Kinsey Six say to that? I remember a wise old fella who defined charm as manipulation that you like. Where I sense manipulation, it is true, female beauty leaves me not only unmoved but hostile. Women, beautiful or not, who have a natural sense of self-worth and an un-game-playing warmth and frankness about them, I quite like, both when they are exuberant and when they are vulnerable. My women friends are all like this.

And again, thanks for writing.

PS. I am a pro-patriarchy type ("It's Mother Nature's way!"), which means that I think that men and male values should predominate in a society. I think that societal sexual equality is as illusory as the classless society, and I certainly don't like the dominance of women and feminist values. I actually think that this is better for most women overall, as well as for men, but many people nowadays would consider my attitude misogynist.

An anthropological difference? Edit

On reflection, I think that real progressives come to hate human nature precisely because they believe it to be perfectible. And it disappoints. Over and over and over. Frustration.

A kind of utopia would really be possible, achievable, doable, --according to this view--  a multicultural world of male and female equality, parity of wealth, peace, freedom from religious bigotry, global cooperation and environmental balance...

were it not for the bad people who refuse to live up to the progressive standard. What results is chronic anger. But rather than direct it at the Official Victim Groups for failing to perform, --or their own ideology for its unreality--it is less anxiety-provoking and more in line with the conscious narrative to direct it at the Official Oppressor Groups, with their mean-spirited, selfish, greedy, violent, superstitious, jingoist bigotry. As Obama put it, clinging to their xenophobia, their guns and their religion.

I remember a scene from My Beautiful Launderette, where, in resignation rather than wrath, a depleted Indian socialist journalist, father of one of the leading characters, confesses that "the working class is such a great disappointment to me."

Superstition spinoffs

Since I hold that the supposed evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Eurocentrism, ableism, etc are all as real as witchcraft, let me add some newer favorites, "haters" who use "hate speech."

Like all the other Blue State Pill memes in this list, this is a blinder and a program. It determines who you are not allowed to dislike, based on...what? Well, the Liberal project of replacing the traditional winners with the traditional losers by getting the traditional winners to surrender and kill themselves. So if you speak uncharitably, critically or blunt-and-truthfully about Special Protected Victim Groups, you are a hateful hater who hates and you speak hate speech.

Oooooh.

The whole point of this is to remove another power from you so that you cannot defend against the Barbarian Invasions and indeed, via their various Trojan Horses, welcome them with open arms.

"Hate" means: You May Not Disagree With Us and, OBTW, Shut Up.

That's all.

This meme, like its fellow witchcraft equivalents, is BS.

--

Liberalism as HIV

HIV is a retrovirus that hijacks the cells in the human immune system in order to create more copies of itself and render its human host defenseless against alien pathogens. Untreated, it is fatal.

Liberalism is an intellectual and spiritual HIV.

By its cartoon narrative of oppressors-and-victims and its privileging of certain Sacred Victim Classes, enforced by its language system, it renders successful Westerners --its target-- without any immunity to the attacks of alien groups. Indeed, the language and memes of Liberalism hijack the soul and mind of Westerners and recreate more Liberals.

And all the while, the Western host is dying, unable even to allow itself to fight back. It installs Crimethink.*

Orwell's Crimethink - To even consider any thought not in line with the principles of Ingsoc. PC. Doubting any of the principles of Ingsoc. PC. All crimes begin with a thought. So, if you control thought, you can control crime. "Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death, Thoughtcrime is death.... The essential crime that contains all others in itself."

Liberal control of speech and language is nigh absolute. The paradigm case is "racism." This is the worst thing in the whole world, the most damning accusation (except perhaps, for the time being, paedophile, though that could change.)

It contains two parts:  One, some beliefs/attitudes about the non-White group in question are wrong, factually mistaken, incorrect, if not outright lies, aka, stereotypes. So if you hold to these, you are clearly stupid. Two, these beliefs/attitudes, being lies, are unjustly damaging to the groups in question. So if you hold to these, you are clearly evil.

When someone calls you a racist, they always automatically assert that you are wrong and hurtful, therefore, stupid and evil.

The deeper meme inside this word is that group is question must therefore be, harmless at worst, and beneficial or specially blessed at most.  The flip side of "racism" is that non-Whites must be accepted, praised and celebrated. It mandates applause. No matter what your stupid and evil self might suggest, they are nothing but positive. They can't be ambiguous, competitors, or hostile. And if you bring up instances where they are not unalloyed boons, it must clearly be the case that it is precisely beliefs/attitudes like yours that is visiting these apparent phenomena on them.

Racism is the father of all these linguistic viruses, but they are numerous: sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, looksism, transphobia, etc. etc.

The clear dogma inside each one of these is that there can only be acceptance, welcome, praise and celebration for women, Jews, gays, foreigners, Muslims, uglies, transgenders, etc. And by contrast, you, a member of the "dominant group", are guilty and responsible. Forever.

The victim minorites are canonized groups, new Chosen People, criticism of which is heresy and blasphemy.

And the whole thing is a lie and a fraud from beginning to end.

If you use this language at all--even, or especially, to exculpate yourself from its accusation-- then you are embedding yourself again in its deadly grasp by recognizing its legitimacy and further damaging the immunity that tries to protect you from your enemies. And in this case, from allowing yourself to recognize that you have enemies, and who they are.

--

Separate and unequal

I am in favor of white privilege. And male privilege. And heterosexual privilege.

Those who care about these things are almost always against them. The very language is a negative judgment, like xenophobia or Islamophobia or homophobia.  Privilege, in this context, is by definition unjust: it is a social benefit earned not by an individual's merits, but by mere belonging to a group. This is supposed to be bad. And it is usually cartooned into seeing them as but one step away from black slavery, female debasement and gay-bashing. But it is inevitable and necessary.

It is especially ironic that the folks who banter about privilege are almost always the same ones who see people primarily as groups. Another irony is that the theory, groundwork and the actualization of the anti-privilege movement, whose primary target is white heterosexual males, comes entirely from cultures created by white heterosexual males.

The assumption is that privilege is bad and that it should be dismantled so that everyone can be equal.

Which never happens, has happened or will happen.  What the dismantling of these privileges means is their replacement by another group's privilege. People of color privilege. Female privilege. LGBT privilege.

Has there ever been a society past the stage of the small hunter-gatherer groups where it was not composed of a complex of group identities in more or less hierarchical relation to one another? Has there ever been a society without a center, or centers, and a margin, or margins? Without definition and assumption you cannot have a viable culture.



If you want to expand this notion of unearned and oppressive privilege past the standard one of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, you can travel quite far afield: there is privilege connected with being an adult, speaking the national language, being able to walk, see and hear, being naturally either male or female*, knowing how to read and write, being healthy and goodlooking, being tall, etc. And horrifyingly, being a natural born citizen of a country gives you an unearned privilege over immigrants...And if you talk to an animal rights activist, there is the speciesist privilege of being human. It goes on and on. A revolt against reality.

The classless society was a catastrophic illusion which produced the deaths and the soul murder of many many millions in a mere seventy years...and never produced a classless society. The Marxist engineers of the movement became the new privileged and ruling class. I am much disinclined to believe that a society can become truly egalitarian about sex or race, either. The effort will produce a lot of dislocation and damage (Harrison Bergeron) and in the end, social hierarchies will reproduce themselves.

Our recent societal obsession with and fetishization of equality as the primary and perhaps only value, the heart of contemporary Western liberalism, is a symptom of something wrong. 

The anti-privilege industry is a prime example of liberalism: the use of social control and state power to raise the status, wealth and power of traditionally less successful groups (victims) at the expense of the status, wealth and power of traditionally more successful groups (oppressors). Anyone who thinks that equality is the goal, that the effort will cease when balance is struck, is deluding himself.

So if you are going to have a society with a set of centers, of groups who will be dominant or assumed to be the norm, I would much prefer one where white heterosexual males were that group.



*Transexual activists have created a Newspeak: if they are trans-gendered, then people whose gendered bodies and psyches match are called cis-gendered, from the Latin, on this side. And so there is cisgender privilege...a result of the oppressive binary gender regime.

Dust of ages

Getting my guestroom ready for an end of month arrival, I spent a couple of hours...yes, hours...cleaning it. I am an orderly man but apparently blind to dust. Which was copious. Shocking.

Speaking of dust, which we are and to which we shall return,

Her Grace of Stockholm*

the lesbian bishopette of Stockholm...you already know this is not going to end well..has ordered one of her priests to de-Christianize a chapel so that Muslims can pray it. It's a matter of "hospitality."

Part of the complex process of dissolution that we are going through is that our elites no longer believe. This is a process which has been going on since the Renaissance and accelerated with the rise of science and the self-destruction of philosophy. As The Closing of the American Mind showed three decades ago, they are all both absolute relativists and absolute egalitarians.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

One of the elements of Western greatness was Christendom. For as long as it lasted, the Empire of Christ asserted without doubt the truth of its creed and its ways. And the possession of this truth is part of what made Europeans the self-confident world-changers that they were.

But that is all gone now. With the death of God, science has become scientism and reason has become  skepticism. The classical unified trinity of the Beautiful, the True and the Good has been reduced to rank polytheism, where they are no longer One but competing forces, squabbling like the Olympians and the Aesir/Vanir.

When a Western elite who no longer believe in access to truth is met by a mass of dark-skinned believers who doubt not for a moment that they are in full possession of it, they have no choice whatever except to surrender and commit suicide. They'll call it "hospitality" or "openness" but it will be suicidal surrender. They have no grounds on which to say no.

With the exception of a few fundamentalists, all the Protestant churches of the West have surrendered the notion of theological truth, dumping "narrow-minded, exclusivist and dogmatic orthodoxy" for "the bracing challenges of fearless and prophetic orthopraxy." That is, they have lost their faiths and become liberal activists and social workers.

But if you've ever met a liberal activist or social worker, the phrase "narrow-minded, exclusivist and dogmatic orthodoxy" will not have lost its utility. Human beings are a species of believers. They only appear to dump a religion; they always find another to replace it. The crypto-religion of Western progressivism, with its babbling about "human rights" and, well, you know, is in every way the successor of the previous faith, except that it makes believe it is simply seeing things as they really are...which is an odd thing for a relativist to say, doncha think?

Did it never occur to anyone that an immune system is just Nature's own xenophobia?

Even the Church of Rome, a place where you would think that "narrow-minded, exclusivist and dogmatic orthodoxy" would find its natural home and safe haven, we have the corrosive effect of its slapdash "social teaching" finally doing its termite thing in the Vatican itself, with the current papal
colazione canino currying favor with the aforementioned elites and the Third World masses of the South who are Rome's future.

From my little perch in San Francisco, I ask myself, what could be the possible ground for religion in the West to survive and also serve the West's survival rather than its suicide?



*Notice how all these types are always smiling? Even during their consecration ceremonies. The solemnity of the whole thing has evaporated into the ethos of a pep-rally. Reminds me of how I used to tease my Protestant pastoral colleagues about them always smiling and being nice, while the Roman priests, as group, were rather less pleasant: "Well, we don't have to be nice. We have the True Faith and Real Sacraments. There's no need."
----

Second class citizens

 

This is one of those show-stoppers that people drag out in discussions, a phrase that wins the day merely by being spoken. Like "separate but equal".  Or in a pinch, "Jim Crow."

As a matter of fact, I am in favor of different classes of citizens. The mania for levelling everyone is, well, a mania. One of the great weaknesses of the Enlightenment was that its devotion to reason turned out to be vulnerable to huge levels of abstraction. I more and more regret Jefferson's "all men are created equal." He might have said more defensibly, if far less elegantly, "all men are created with equal right to life, liberty and property, and the pursuit of happiness." But, brilliant Founding Father though he was, he was a Francophile and given to moods of rhetorical excess.

Our Constitution still enshrines second-class citizenship, actually mandates it. When some people wanted Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for President, calls were made, of course, to erase the discriminatory clause which, barely concealing its xenophobia,  limits this office to natural-born citizens. In our age of global blah-blah, how can this antique requirement, blah blah, which insults our immigrant fellow-citizens and new arrivals, blah-blah, depriving us, blah-blah.

Our nation's capital has long been deprived of a full voice in Congress. And is it an accident that Washington "Chocolate City" DC is more than half Black...I mean African-American? To say nothing of all the mostly People of Color felons deprived of the vote for life.


And then there is a group of folks, not negligible especially here in the People's Republik of Laputa By The Bay, who find the restriction of voting rights to citizens to be "discriminatory". (You can smell the racism.) Do you remember the calls for a "global voice" in the selection of the US Prez during ourlast elections, on the grounds that since we have so much influence, it's only fair to let the "world community" which holds us in so much contempt take part...and possibly correct our bad choices.

There's also the rank ageism. According to the Constitution, you have to be 35 to be President, 30 to be a Senator (and a citizen for at least 9 years) and 25 to be a Congressman. Sheer unconcealed arbitrary hatred for youth: ephebophobia, even pediaphobia. And people under 18 are cruelly restricted from voting across the board...an insult to our young people and our children, who, after all, are our future. And in many cases, innocence and hope still intact, they can see more clearly than so-called adults.

And I really wonder why folks get all bent out of shape about the Electoral College but hardly raise a whisper about the grotesque inequality of the bi-cameral Legislature. The House of Representatives is pretty representative, with seats apportioned by population. But then all that fake people-power gets erased by the ridiculous notion that each State gets 2 Senators, regardless of size. The practically empty state of Wyoming's 570,000 (86% White) citizens get an equal voice with (oh so diverse) California's 30 million --50+ times larger!--, or Texas' 27 million or New York's almost 20 million, etc. That system really renders massive numbers of Americans --racial and ethnic minorities especially--second-class, their voices diluted beyond recognition just to please some misguided 18th century obsession with "States".

So many second-class citizens.



I wish there were a lot more.

French balls

It's unusual when the French show balls, but they just have. They are throwing gypsies, whom we must now call Roma in PC, out of their country and sending them back to Romania. Where they belong.

One of the stupidest and most cynically destructive dogmas of modern liberalism is that any group of people --as long as they have approved victim status-- have the right to live wherever they want and the people in the host country --especially if they are white--have to be happy and grateful about it and accommodate them, even if it means offending or erasing their own native values and institutions.

One of the most obvious truths about humans is that we are tribal and that when you start mixing tribes together in the same space you almost always have trouble. Human groups are territorial. Struggle for land and the control of it is a constant of life on this planet.

The predictable cries of "racism" are based on that liberal dogma. And that dogma is not only groundless but cruel. It asks people to be angelic about your particular moral agenda despite its deleterious effects on their real ordinary lives and it disingenuously sets up other people, the official victims, for a bad experience. If people go where they are not wanted and where they have no right to be and then suffer the consequences, whose fault is that?

What is preferable, to refuse to allow an unwanted group to enter your land or to let them in and then mistreat, abuse or slaughter them? Common sense, even common decency, suggests the former.

I, as an individual, have to ask permission to enter a foreign country. I have to show a passport and tell them why I want to enter and I have to abide by the laws which tell me how long I can stay, etc. I am a guest in someone else's house. But when thousands or millions of people cross into another country without asking and then behave badly and are sent home, that's racism? Again, approved victim status is the key.

IMHO, not every group of people should be living next door to each other. It's beyond brainless to believe that they should. Ever read a history book? Or watch the news? Even groups that are similar almost always develop some kind of conflict. And whatever group of people own a land (as in a nation) have the right to decide who else gets to live there. It's what's called sovereignty, sort of an enlargement to a group of the right of private property and self-defense and self-determination, etc. The issue is NOT "What right do you have to keep us out?"* but "Why should we let you in?" The analogy between your own home (aka house) and your homeland can be overdone, but it's a damn good marker of how crazy someone is on issues of ethnicity, immigration and that completely bogus concept, xenophobia.

*This was the lie behind the disastrous US immigration policy changes of the 60's that will one day not too far off turn the USA into a white minority country. I doubt very much that that will be pretty.

The Key to PeeCee

I have discovered the philosophical foundation of PC NewSpeak, that set of periphrastic phrases we are now supposed to use to replace words and phrases that we used prior to The Great Liberal Enlightenment, back in the awful years of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, jingoism, looksism, xenophobia, Eurocentrism and Islamophobia, aka, human history prior to the last ten minutes.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-- that’s all.”

“The question is, which is to be master-- that’s all.”

Boxing Day Miscellany

Due to my 17-year sojourn in The Great (formerly) White North, today is not only the feast of St Stephen the First Martyr, on whose feast Good King Wenceslaus Looked Down, but also Boxing Day, a kind of Brit extension of the holiday, for reasons no one really understands. But it's a nice idea.

Giotto's version, I believe

St Stephen was one of the first seven deacons, an order of the priesthood created by the Apostles in response to the failure of multiculturalism in the early Church. Think I'm kidding? Read for yourself in the Acts of the Apostles, 6:1, and following.

6 But with the believers multiplying rapidly, there were rumblings of discontent. Those who spoke only Greek complained that their widows were being discriminated against, that they were not being given as much food in the daily distribution as the widows who spoke Hebrew. 2 So the Twelve called a meeting of all the believers.“We should spend our time preaching, not administering a feeding program,” they said. 3 “Now look around among yourselves, dear brothers, and select seven men, wise and full of the Holy Spirit, who are well thought of by everyone; and we will put them in charge of this business. 4 Then we can spend our time in prayer, preaching, and teaching.”5 This sounded reasonable to the whole assembly, and they elected the following: Stephen (a man unusually full of faith and the Holy Spirit), Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus of Antioch (a Gentile convert to the Jewish faith, who had become a Christian).6 These seven were presented to the apostles, who prayed for them and laid their hands on them in blessing.

Ah, the origins of the bureaucratic race-based welfare state and the Christian diaconate! Of course, the absolutely crucial difference is that this is not a state-run distribution, as it was in the Rome of panem et circenses. Or now with us.

Stephen's energetic preachig enraged his fellow Jews so much that he was condemned to death by stoning (Sharia did not come from nowhere!) and one Saul, who acted as coat-check boy for the men who did the deed, later became the famous 13th Apostle Paul. (On the far left in the pic above)  Acts 7: 54-60, if you're interested.  The Wikipedia article on him, no surprise, mentions that some find his attitude, gasp, "anti-Jewish." Sigh. Christianity, as the neo-heathens never cease to remind us, arose within the not entirely uniform Judaism of the Second Temple as a fight among Jews.

And for your Schadenfreudenal enjoyment, speaking of martyrs, a White liberal in South Africa who decided to open his farm for Black refugees fleeing "xenophobia"  is now, the wake of the Africans' split into two hostile groups, in fear of his life and that of his wife and ten children. A prisoner of the savage people he wanted to help. Well deserved, I say, and a perfect example of The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c). 

Happy St. Stephen Boxing Day!

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