From Twitter today:
Your great-grandmother: 12 kids
Your grandmother: 6 kids
Your mother: 2 kids
You: pic.twitter.com/foxFyXJ17P
— Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) April 11, 2018
Cosmologists wonder about a thing called the “Great Filter“. It may be as simple as this.
The scales have fallen from Rod Dreher’s eyes. Commenting on Harvard’s decision to suspend and defund a campus religious organization, he says that his belief in “compatibilism” — the idea that it is possible for orthodox religion to coexist peaceably with the modern liberal state — is over. Regarding the new liberal order, he notes that “it doesn’t matter whether or not we consider ourselves its enemy, but whether it regards us as its enemy.”
Mr. Dreher quotes Alasdair MacIntyre, who likens the predicament of the 21st-century religious traditionalist to what faced the civilized people of Rome during that empire’s decline:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead””often not recognising fully what they were doing””was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.
It is what many of us in the reactionary Right have said: when the Flood is upon us, we must build an ark.
I have one point of disagreement with Mr. Dreher’s essay: he does not seem to understand that liberalism itself is now a religion, and is in fact the established religion of the West. He and his fellow orthodox Christians are not merely political dissenters. They are Cathars. He is clearly despondent, but he is not sufficiently afraid.
Read his article here.
Here’s a disturbing pattern:
1) We lean toward a stand-down in Syria.
2) Spooks and hawks object.
3) A chemical-weapons attack is reported. It is blamed, on scant evidence, or no evidence at all, on Assad and the Russians.
4) Women and other tender-hearted types throughout the West weep over looping news footage of suffering children. (Spooks and hawks cackle, their eyes aglint.)
5) The cry echoes from on high: “Something must be done! This cannot stand!”
6) Presto! We attack!
It is happening again. I am dismayed. I wish more people were.
Here is some commentary from the strategic-security analyst John McCreary’s NightWatch bulletin over the past two days.
Yesterday:
Before rushing to judgment about this alleged Syrian attack, astute Readers will recall that the militant extremists have performed false flag chemical attacks in the past. Just after the US announced its intention to withdraw from Syria, it is in danger of being drawn back in. Nothing suggests the Syrians or Russians want that outcome. At this point, the judgments of Syrian culpability constitute evidence free analysis.
Chemical attack on 7 April. Syrian doctors and rescue workers said on 8 April that at least 40 people died from an apparent chemical attack on the night of 7 April in the city of Douma.
Comment: Pro-extremist press analysis judged that the attack appeared to force the start of a final withdrawal of hardline rebels from one of the last districts under opposition control in Douma. An agreement allowing them to pull out was announced by the Russian military command in Syria. They and their families are heading for Jarabulus in the Turkish zone.
The on-site reporting sources on chemical weapons attacks are biased beyond credibility. In the past, the Islamists posted images that purported to show youthful victims of a chemical attack in a hospital in Syria. However, an astute observer reported that the hospital was Egyptian, and he had been there and recognized the pale green tile. The images were photo-shopped.
Special comment: What is irreducible is that chemical attacks drag the US back into the conflict. One web site posted an analysis that showed a correlation between two past chemical attacks in Syria and US announcements of its intention to end its involvement in the Syrian civil war. A few days after a US withdrawal announcement, a chemical weapons attack occurred, according to this analysis. Of course, correlation is not causation, but it deserves attention when it starts to create a pattern.
A second point that also is irreducible is the Russians have no reason to want the US dragged back into the conflict. Last week, Foreign Minister Lavrov once again encouraged the US to leave, as it keeps promising to do, he said.
The Syrians have no interest in dragging the US back into the conflict and had won the battle for eastern Ghouta.
Russian aircraft technicians are essential to the operational capabilities of Syrian combat aircraft. As in past attacks, it is a simple process to determine whose aircraft, if any, were over Douma at the time of the attack. The Russians know the payloads.
The Russians stand with the Syrians. On 8 April, the Russian Foreign Ministry published a press release on its web site that the reports of a chemical attack by the Syrian forces on the town of Douma in eastern Ghouta were “planted”.
“Information continues to be planted about the use of chlorine or other toxic agents by the Syrian government forces. More of this fabricated information about a chemical attack that has supposedly taken place in Douma appeared yesterday”¦ The White Helmets, a volunteer rescue force that has reported a chemical attack, have been “repeatedly exposed over their links with terrorists”, the ministry added.
“We have warned of this kind of dangerous provocation more than once lately. The purpose of these mendacious conjectures, which are without any basis, is to shield the terrorists and the irreconcilable radical opposition, which rejects a political settlement, while at the same time trying to justify possible external use of force.’
“It is necessary once again to warn that military intervention under far-fetched and fabricated pretexts in Syria, where there are Russian service personnel at the request of the legitimate government, is absolutely unacceptable and can lead to the gravest of consequences,” the ministry said.
Comment: The Russians warned several times in the past two weeks, most recently on 6 April, that ultra-extreme Islamist groups were preparing chemicals to stage an attack in Douma.
Russian defense spokesman Major General Yevtushenko said, “The ringleaders of Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Nusra Front) and the Free Syrian Army, which are acting together, are plotting explosions of makeshift chemical charges containing chlorine in a number of areas under their control, including Al Balad in Daraa,” he said.
As for the so-called White Hats independent journalists have confirmed they act as a mouthpiece for the extremists.
Today (I have emphasized some passages):
The Russians continue to defend Syria. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on 9 April that the Russian military in Syria have repeatedly warned of provocations aimed at blaming Damascus for the use of chemical weapons.
The Russian Centre for Reconciliation in Syria said Russian specialists inspected the site of the alleged chemical attack on the 9th and said there was no trace of chemical agents.
The Syrian Red Crescent also issued a statement on 9 April that its medical personnel in Douma had found no evidence that a chemical attack had taken place. The Red Crescent runs a hospital in Douma. It received no patients that were exposed to chemical agents over the weekend, despite claims by the White Helmets that hundreds were wounded from exposure to chemicals.
Comment: This is the first report that Russian specialists already visited the site. The Russian visit will change no minds. Many will doubt anything the Russians claim. But unlike the western powers, the Russians at least said they tried get evidence.
Western states have not even done that much.
If the site is accessible to the Russian specialists and to the Red Crescent, it ought to be accessible to western specialists. The Syrians intend to declare Douma a terror-free zone.
We repeat our warning that we judge the Russians are serious about the threat of “grave consequences’ if the US attacks Syrian forces. The Israeli attack has deprived the US of the benefit of whatever reluctance the Russians might have had.
In other words: we have no conclusive evidence, beyond the highly questionable authority of the “White Hats”, that a chemical attack even occurred, let alone that it was mounted by Assad and the Russians. (There was good reason to think that the last one wasn’t.) Against that allegation we must weigh the facts that (a) there was no tactical reason whatsoever, in war-fighting terms, to use chemical weapons, and (b) for Assad or Putin to do so would be an utterly incomprehensible strategic blunder.
What have we to gain by escalating against the Russians in Syria? (Keep in mind also that war with the Russians would quickly spill far beyond Syria’s frontiers.) What U.S. interest does it serve? Say we advance with real power, and topple Assad. What then? Have we learned nothing in our futile decades of nation-building in Mideastern snakepits?
Google honors the Egyptian roué and occasional actor Omar Sharif with one of its worshipful “doodles” today (because “diversity” or something, I guess). Here’s a recap of his life.
A habit of mine is to get outside to walk a few miles every day; it lifts the spirit, and clears the mind. Usually I am in one of Cape Cod’s remoter precincts, so I walk a favorite hilly trail in the pine-woods; but sometimes I am in New York, and I take my walk, as I did this afternoon, in Prospect Park.
The two experiences are very different, as you’d imagine. The woodland trail in the Outer Cape is a tiny track through the forest; although I know that others walk it, in the years I’ve been on it I’ve only ever encountered another person a handful of times. The knob-and-kettle terrain is carpeted with pine needles, and if there is no wind it can be eerily silent, save for the distant susurration of waves lapping at the western shore. The view opens from time to time to give a glimpse of the 25-mile expanse of Cape Cod Bay, and of the great arc of the Cape up to Provincetown. The sea-washed air is usually cool and wholesome — though in the winter, when the trail is covered in snow, and the northwest wind roars across the bay, it can be bitter.
This sort of solitude in the woods is, for those with a taste for it, food and drink for the soul; the connection with Nature’s immensities of time and space is direct, but all around you are the little here-and-nows of the living world in the present moment: wildflowers, miniature greenscapes of lichens and mosses, the birds wheeling overhead, and of course the trees themselves, both upright and fallen.
The walk in Prospect Park is a very different business. The Park itself is a beautiful creation: the crowning achievement of the great Frederick Law Olmstead. It is, too, in its statues, monuments, and architectural adornments, a book of history, both aesthetic and biographical. But unlike my trail in the Wellfleet woods, it is an artifact, a work of man. And there is no solitude here: Man, in all his variety, is everywhere.
This is, for someone like me, a healthy thing. Out here in the sequestered cogitorium of neoreaction, we meditate on the Long Now: the great tapestry of the civilizations men have wrought, and the patterns and principles we can wring from it. When we turn our eyes outward, it is to focus our instruments on the passing scene, to make the day’s observations, and to test their fit against our models. Solitude, such as I find in the piney forest, is good for such reflection and meditation. Ultimately, though, the object is human life: what we are, how we flourish, what we can know about ourselves, and what we should be living for. In Prospect Park these things are no longer the abstractions they can be in the stillness of the forest.
On this bright cold day in April, as I was nearing the end of my walk, I heard a rumbling sound behind me, and some youthful voices. I turned to look, and saw a trio of young men in baseball uniforms, rolling a bag of equipment, and heading for the ballfields.
What makes civilizations come into being, grow old, and die? What things can we know, and how can we know that we know them? How ought we to live? How ought people justly to be governed? Who laid the foundations of the world? What does it mean to be conscious? Have we souls? Do we continue?
All good questions. But today I was reminded that it is April in Brooklyn, and that it’s time, once again, to play ball.
This video is everywhere today, and I’ll do my part to make sure everyone sees it. The speaker’s name is Mark Robinson:
Robinson nails the essence of anarcho-tyranny in a brief and powerful sentence: speaking of the law-abiding citizens of America (and I’ll note that his remark applies to all the decent, diligent, and docile citizens of the modern West), he says:
“We are the first ones taxed, the last ones considered, and the first ones punished.”
Amen, sir. Churchill couldn’t have said it better.
Mr. Robinson, you have a rare gift. Run with it.
Continuing the discussion of David Reich’s book on human genetics, here’s Steve Sailer with an essay on the populations of India and China. The gist: compared to India, which has maintained genetically distinct (and stratified) subgroups for millennia, China is highly homogeneous.
Mr. Sailer is a man of broad erudition, penetrating intelligence, and roving curiosity. Were the era less stifling, and more open to diversity of inquiry and opinion, he would be one of our foremost public intellectuals.
I have a question about the Skripal poisonings, allegedly ordered by Vladimir Putin:
Why aren’t the victims dead?
This is quite possibly the best thing I have ever read: the story of how a young man was banned from a hotel for 18 years. It involves a flock of seagulls and a suitcase full of pepperoni.
Here.
Last Saturday’s post was about the scuffle between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over the role of genetics in the varying distribution of cognitive, behavioral, and personality traits in distinct human populations (and over Mr. Harris’s association with Charles Murray, whom people like Klein accuse of peddling racism and “pseudoscience”). I linked to Andrew Sullivan, who had written an excellent article defending Harris and Murray, saying that if liberalism is to survive, it must be able to coexist with truth. (If you haven’t read it, you should.) Mr. Sullivan defends the “classical-liberal” position, which differs from modern, cryptoreligious “Progressivism” in its view of equality and justice.
For the social-justice crusaders of the present day, a pillar of the faith is that human variation in capacity and aptitude, to the extent that it exists at all, is entirely a result of cultural pressures and prejudices. This means that a society that tolerates wide inequities of life-outcomes is by definition unjust. If we’re all innately the same in every important quality, then social inequalities are incontrovertible evidence that the game is unfair — so we have a moral duty to attack the existing order, and to replace it with something better. The job will never be finished until results are equalized for all human groups, no matter how you slice them: sex, race, sexual orientation, and so on.
The “classical liberal” understands that this concept of equality goes too far. Clearly people are not all the same, and wishing that they were does not make it so. This means that when men are free their results will differ, and those with superior talents, aptitudes, and dispositions will come out ahead. The only way to prevent this is to rig the game against such people, with at least two adverse consequences:
First, advancement in science, commerce, art, literature, etc. — all the things that make high civilization pleasant and prosperous — is driven by the efforts of its most gifted and ambitious individuals. To hold such people back is to handicap the society as a whole.
Second, inequalities in outcome arising from the innate inequalites of individuals can only be prevented by restrictions or penalties imposed upon those who rise above the average. Those so hampered will not endure this gladly, so enforcement requires an inequality of power between those striving toward exceptional achievement and those seeking to ensure equalities of outcome. Who will win in the struggle to be at the top of this power-structure? As always, it will be those with superior ambition and ability — superior, that is, in the qualities that fit tyrants for their position.
Thus we see a sort of conservation principle at work: inequality, like energy, can never be eliminated. It merely takes different forms.
The classical-liberal model, then, accepts that there is an ineliminable tension between liberty and equality, and considers inequalities of outcomes preferable to the inequalities of power, and diminutions of liberty, that are necessary to ensure equal results for everyone. What matters, and must be defended, is equality of opportunity, and equality before the law.
Sullivan concludes:
When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.
That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble.
So far, then, we have two models. The first, which we can call Utopianism, assumes the absolute equality of all people in all things, with the implication that differences in life-outcomes are necessarily due to remediable social and cultural defects. Moreover, it asserts that human nature itself is malleable. The task before the Utopian, then, is constantly to re-engineer society, and the people themselves, until perfection is achieved. Because of these premises, inequality of outcome is in itself conclusive evidence of continuing social injustice, and proof that the job is not yet finished.
The second, “classical” Liberalism, limits its assumption of equality to rights and opportunities. If there is work to done toward a just society, it is only to ensure that all people are in fact treated fairly and alike by the law, and that nobody is arbitrarily or maliciously denied his inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. (After that, you’re on your own.)
Enter our reader Jacques, who, in the comment-thread to Saturday’s post, raised an important question. Here are his remarks:
But in reality the problem is worse than Sullivan thinks (or claims to think). Liberalism is supposed to be a “procedural” philosophy based on “civic and moral equality” as he says. But what exactly does that mean? How can there really be some set of fair and reasonable “procedures” or some notion of purely “moral” equality that isn’t ultimately dependent on assumptions about the capacities and dispositions of the people inhabiting a liberal order? For example, if there is some kind of procedural justice that liberalism requires, then at least all (normal or typical) citizens must share certain basic rational and moral capacities. Maybe they have to be capable of assessing evidence or applying moral standards without tribal prejudices or narrow self-interest. But then it’s always an empirical possibility that only some human groups tend to have these traits, or tend to have them to some degree sufficient for competently and justly operating these “procedures’” The same goes for “equality”. What is “moral” equality once we strip away any specific empirical basis involving psychological traits that science might reveal to be very unevenly distributed? It’s necessarily an article of faith at that point; but if liberalism depends on a faith that lots of reasonable people can reject, it’s no longer neutral and procedural; then it’s no longer just and reasonable under its own standards.
In the end liberals face a hopeless dilemma: (i) deny any empirical basis for their theory, in which case the theory has no clear meaning or implications for actual human life, and can only be given meaning if it’s grounded on some controversial transcendental belief system; or (ii) admit the empirical basis needed for the theory to be meaningful and useful, in which case no one knows whether its empirical basis is actually true and science might at any time demolish the whole thing.
Liberalism was never really neutral or purely procedural. It was always incoherent, oscillating between the tautological and the unverifiable. And that served a purpose, for a while — wielding power and imposing a substantive belief system, pretending to have no power and no beliefs. But that trick isn’t working so well anymore.
Jacques’ point, if I understand it correctly, is this: the functioning of a free society of laws and rights — a community in which order and social structure are almost entirely self-organizing — requires that people understand the limits and constraints upon their behavior that the laws, and the rights of others, impose. To understand these limits, and to be able to live within them, is a necessary precondition of individual liberty. Our laws acknowledge this: those who cannot understand such constraints, or who understand them but will not live within them, have their rights and liberties constrained. (Examples of such people are children, criminals, the profoundly retarded, and the insane.) Were society not to limit the rights and liberties of such people, the system would fall apart: the result would either be anarchy, or the imposition of an authoritarian, artificial order. Both of these are far from the “sweet spot”; both are curtailments of liberty.
A free and open society, then, depends on more than an abstract framework of principles, laws, and rights. Such a society necessarily consists of actually existing people, who must have both the capacity and the disposition to instantiate and internalize those abstracta as personal guidelines and constraints. There will always be, as noted above, classes of people who cannot (or will not) do this, and for them we have created elaborate public institutions: schools for the children, asylums for the insane and the feeble-minded, and prisons for the criminals. But these resources are finite, and are already stretched thin; for the whole system not to break down requires that there be at all times a large enough fraction of the population that does have the cognitive and behavioral capacity to be part of a free and largely self-constrained public order.
But what, asks Jacques, if the open, high-trust society we have created in the West is, as I have argued elsewhere, a manifestation of a distinctive population’s unique balance of traits and dispositions? What if the Western liberal system — a framework of individual liberty that relies on a citizen’s ability to assimilate and live by laws and rights and duties and other such abstractions — is part of the “extended phenotype” of, and depends for its existence upon, a distribution of heritable traits that, in general, only characterizes a broadly Western-European genome?
Whether this is true is not a matter of ideology, or of ethics, no matter how ardently we might like it to be. It is a purely empirical question about evolutionary contingency. The adaptability, in statistical terms, of distinct human populations to different sorts of societies may well be as contingent and empirical as the question of the suitedness of Inuits or Pygmies for careers in the NBA. To deny this possibility — to insist, beyond debate, that all populations are precisely equal in their adaptability to Western norms, and to full participation in Western civilization, with everything such participation requires — is simply a declaration of faith.
In addition, then, to the two models of equality we named above — the Utopian belief in the absolute equality of all people, in which Justice requires equal outcomes, and the classical-Liberal belief in a limited sort of equality that nevertheless assumes for all an equal capacity to participate in liberal society — we have a third, more “tragic” model that admits the possibility of innate inequality of adaptability to Western society at all.
This third model is not a new idea; it was the generally accepted view of human reality until the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, if this view is correct, it identifies a danger: if our society admits sufficient numbers of settlers without regard to their fitness for participation in Western-style liberty, or with their ability to internalize and be guided by the abstracta that are peculiar to Western liberal culture, that culture may soon be overwhelmed, and lose the ability to sustain itself.
Is the model correct? Well, we have a method in the West for settling empirical questions: we do an experiment. And as it happens, just such an experiment has been underway in Europe for several decades now.
Are we prepared to draw any conclusions?
Several people have sent me links to an article by Rod Dreher on the narrowing of acceptable public opinion, and the suffocating and isolating effect it has on speech and social interaction. When we have an opinion that might run afoul of Cathedral orthodoxy (and there are fewer and fewer opinions one might have nowadays that don’t), and we aren’t sure that we are in safe company (which is to say, you are speaking to anyone but trusted friends), we are increasingly afraid, for fear of serious consequences, to say anything at all.
This is nothing new in the world; indeed it is all too familiar. It is characteristic of two kinds of societies: totalitarian regimes that must suppress political dissent; and nations, fractured by ethnic, religious, or political tensions, that live under the threat of civil war. (Often it is these very tensions that lead to totalitarianism; again and again we have seen murderous intra-national antipathies tamped down only by ruthless tyranny.)
That is what’s happening now all over the West. Europe and Canada, who are aggressively criminalizing dissent, are farther down this road than we are; in the U.S. the penalties for heresy are still, for now, limited to boycotts, media hate-frenzies, loss of employment, and social expulsion. That it has come to this, however, is a clear and disturbing sign that we are moving either toward ever-deepening totalitarianism, or toward civil war.
Perhaps it isn’t too late, though, at least here in America, to avoid both tines of that fork.
In his article, Mr. Dreher gives us the terrifying example of David Hogg, the child-monster that our media and cultural overlords have inflated to grotesque proportions, and who wields, for the moment, intimidating power. Mr. Dreher likens him to Anthony Fremont, the godlike, telepathic mutant child in Jerome Bixby’s horror classic “It’s A Good Life” who terrorizes a helpless village with capricious and irresistible violence.
The comparison is apt: in both cases we have terrible power in the hands of a morally and intellectually undeveloped mind. But there’s a difference too, and a critically important one: unlike Anthony Fremont, neither David Hogg, nor his handlers, have any intrinsic power. It is still only our fear, for now, that gives it to them.
If we want to live free again, it may still be possible to win this war without bloodshed. We have immensely powerful weapons ready to hand, if we have the wisdom to use them. They are simple, available to all, and they can be utterly irresistible when deployed with courage and resolve.
What are they? One is Faith. Another is Laughter.
But the greatest of them all is Truth.
The secularist writer and podcaster Sam Harris has got into a public scuffle with Ezra Klein, “editor-at-large” of the young-adult news website Vox, over Harris’s recent interview with Charles Murray, and the more general question of the role of genetics in the distribution of traits in distinct human populations.
The absolutist “blank-slate” view of human nature is an essential tenet of the universalist post-modernism currently dismantling Western civilization. It is the load-bearing member that holds up the entire structure: globalism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, subjectivism, postcolonialism, and all the rest of it. (It is the One Ring that keeps the Dark Tower standing, and so it must be defended at any cost: this is why social panopticons such as Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have become something akin to the Eye of Sauron.)
Into the fray rides Andrew Sullivan, a journalist I respect more than most. (I don’t always agree with him, but he thinks for himself, isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, and when he has something to say he says it well. That’s good enough for me.)
Mr. Sullivan has written an outstanding essay on the Harris-Klein fracas. The gist: he stands for truth. I will offer only a small excerpt, because you must go and read it yourself:
I know this is a touchy, fraught, difficult subject. I completely understand the reluctance to discuss it, and the hideous history of similar ideas in the past. But when people seeking the truth are immediately targeted for abuse and stigma, it matters. When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.
That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble. Because we are robbing liberalism of the knowledge and the moderation it will soon desperately need to defend itself.
Go and read the whole thing here.
Making a bit of a splash at the moment is a new book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. (Any book that says anything truthful about heredity and human groups is going to attract attention these days, if only to burn it in the village square.)
Steve Sailer reviews it over at Taki’s. (Greg Cochran will be along with a review presently.)
The topic, of course, is fraught, and anyone writing about it who wishes not to be an all-but-unemployable pariah must make the same sort of obeisances and disclaimers that folks like Galileo once did. Here’s one from Professor Reich:
Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.
Mr. Sailer comments:
So you should just lie back and think of England, like the girls in Rotherham and Telford.
But thinking of what “mixture’ did to the inhabitants of England who were forced to embrace it 4,500 years ago is horrifying.
Before about 2500 BC, ancient Albion was inhabited largely by farmers tracing back to the Fertile Crescent. Suddenly, steppe barbarians, bearing the Bell Beaker culture, arrived, and almost immediately most of the old Britons died off.
Since then, 90 percent of subsequent skeletons in England reflect the DNA of the steppe invaders.
What happened to most of England’s earlier inhabitants? One of the less violent scenarios is that the steppe migrants introduced bubonic plague.
In general, “migration’ and “mixture’ tend in Reich’s book to serve as euphemisms for genocide of the native males and rape of the native females. Reich lists numerous examples from around the world where genetic data show that newcomers enslaved or murdered the local men and turned their women into concubines.
Read the whole thing here.
According to this report, the Obama administration suspended the mechanism whereby employers are notified that the Social Security numbers used by their employees don’t match the employees’ names. This sensible cross-checking had been used to catch both fraud and clerical errors, and had prevented millions of citizens from losing Social Security benefits they were entitled to.
Why did they do this? Because they worried that it might discourage illegal aliens from registering for DACA if they had used fraudulent SSNs. They worried also, with good reason, that Americans might object to suspending this protocol. So they kept it quiet. For four years.
When I read stories like this, my mind wanders toward comforting images.
Torches. Pitchforks. Lamp-posts.
It appears that my blog-posts are now appearing again in Google searches. I don’t know if this was due to a re-indexing after the blog’s title change (perhaps the blog’s title carries more weight in Google’s world than for other search providers), or whether it might even have been thanks to some behind-the-scenes assistance from my friend Bob Wyman (if so, thanks, Bob!).
In other news: I’m going to capitalize titles again. (Stop the presses!) It looks better that way. Adjust your plans accordingly.
With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter “Whitewall”, here’s a depressing item:
German Defense Minister Seeks ”˜Reconciliation’ with Taliban
It is difficult to read this without thinking that such a story simply cannot be true: that it is completely beyond all credibility that anyone not a child or an imbecile could possibly imagine that an organization dedicated to implacable jihad in the name of Islamic theocracy would actually bind themselves to a secular, or even “moderate”, Constitution; that any such concession they might make would be anything other than tactical taqiyya.
Yet here the story is. And here is another female European “leader” — a defense minister! — singing Kumbaya as her nation opens its veins.
In the news today:
Al Sharpton’s half-brother charged in murder after marching against guns
I have to admire Rev. Glasgow for going the “extra mile” to demonstrate how dangerous guns are, but I do think he and his pal might have asked Breunia Jennings for her permission before drafting her to participate in such a lurid dramatization.
Here’s a response, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer [cue ad-hominem attack in comment thread in 3…2…1…], to Hillary Clinton’s insulting remarks the other day about winning the “dynamic” states, and losing the backward ones.
I will confess that I hesitated before mentioning That Woman’s name in print. As Richard Wagner is said to have advised: “Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.”
With a hat-tip to our e-pal Bill K., here’s Richard Fernandez on our psychotic media environment:
With misinformation as with miseducation the public sees, but not in due proportion. Its calculations are put all out of reckoning. The image of world is presented like a reflection in a fun house mirror, with certain aspects greatly enlarged while others are minimized almost to invisibility.
Perhaps never in human history has the average man been bombarded with so many stories. Yet paradoxically never has the public been in greater danger of strategic surprise. If it is caught at unawares the reason for its blindness won’t be lack of bandwidth but in all the things it imagined were important that weren’t.
Read the rest here.
I’ve been unable to turn on the news over the past 24 hours without immediately hearing about yesterday’s protests against “gun violence”. The news agencies have clearly learned a trick or two from their show-biz colleagues who call themselves “illusionists”: if these protests were about “violence”, the marchers would surely have something to say about the people who commit such violence, how to deter them, how they ought to be dealt with, why they have taken to shooting up schools. But even though the protests are ostensibly a response to the Parkland massacre, nary a word have I heard from any of the marchers, or from any of the demagogues who took to the microphone to whip them up en masse, about Nikolas Cruz, Stephen Paddock, Omar Mateen, Nidal Hasan, et al.
Instead, from what I can gather, it was a fellow named “Wayne LaPierre” who barged into Stoneman Douglas High and opened fire, accompanied by a sizable mob of otherwise law-abiding American citizens, such as myself, whose crime is membership in the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, Messrs. Cruz, Paddock, Mateen and the rest of them, lacking any agency whatsoever, are exempt from blame. Indeed, as far as I can make out, the guns themselves have more capacity for volition, and so for the commission of sin, than the people who wield them. (I keep hearing the phrase “high-capacity” from my betters in Congress and the media; perhaps that’s what it refers to.)
Nor have I seen any reflection, on the part of the mob, upon the broader context in which these things seem to be happening. I heard a grandmother explain to a reporter that she was marching because she wanted her grandchildren to be as safe in their schools as she was in hers. Sadly, the man with the microphone didn’t ask her what, exactly, she thought had changed, which of course is the first thing one should ask when trying to troubleshoot (so to speak) a problem of almost any kind. (“This thing used to work fine, and now it doesn’t. What happened? What’s different now?“) He might have pointed out that in her childhood, “military-grade” guns were easily available to all, with almost no restrictions, yet nobody seemed to shoot up any schools or concerts. But he didn’t, of course.
No, the media and our progressive overlords (but I repeat myself!) have palmed the card, and masterfully redirected our attention. This is no march against gun “violence”: it is a march against gun ownership, against the Second Amendment, against the pre-existing right that the Second Amendment does not confer, but guarantees, and, perhaps most ominously of all, against those scores of millions of American citizens for whom this fundamental right — the right that secures all the others — is not negotiable.
The organizers of these demonstrations seek to increase the pressure, and they’re doing a good job. What I think they do not realize is that they are only compressing a spring.
As occasional leavening for the steady diet of politics and reaction I’ve been posting up here for years now, I think I’ll begin revisiting my other life: decades spent recording and mixing music. (Because so many of the recordings I’ve worked on are now on YouTube, it’s easy posting.)
I’d say about three-quarters of the work I did was for albums and singles; the rest was divided between music for films, theater, and advertising. (There’s some overlap there: film and musical-theater work often finds its way onto albums as well.) The TV and “jingle” work is evanescent, but it was good work to have: the level of professionalism is extremely high, nobody’s wasting any time, the money’s great, and you almost always get home in time for supper. (This often made a welcome contrast to 30-hour sessions with drug-addled rockers.)
Of the album work I did, perhaps a majority was for various sorts of jazz artists. At Power Station Studios, where I “made my bones” as a staff engineer in the 70s and 80s, you had to cover whatever they threw at you, from R&B and hip-hop to large orchestral ensembles. Everyone, though, finds a niche, and although I worked on a lot of R&B and rock music, what I enjoyed most was capturing the sound of acoustic instruments — so I ended up doing a lot of jazz records, orchestral overdub sessions, and things like that. Some of these artists don’t have the household-name recognition that the big rock acts have, but in addition to the many rock and R&B records I was a part of, I was fortunate to work with some of the greatest jazz artists of my generation: people like Michael and Randy Brecker, John Scofield, Peter Erskine, Weather Report, Steve Khan, Joe Lovano, Tony Bennett, Anthony Jackson, the Count Basie Orchestra, Ron Carter, Dave Holland, Bib Mintzer, the Yellowjackets, Marcus Miller, David Sanborn, Jack DeJohnette, and many, many others.
So I think that now and then I’m going to put up a couple of recordings. I hope you enjoy them, and in particular I hope it may introduce you to music you might not have heard otherwise. I’ll probably lean toward the jazz stuff, but I’ll try to strike a balance, so you can get a sense of the variety of styles a professional engineer has to be comfortable with.
For tonight, two from 1998:
Up first: Quality Time, from the album of the same name, by the great tenor player, composer, arranger, and big-band leader Bob Mintzer — with Jay Anderson on bass, Phil Markowitz on piano, and Peter Erskine on drums. (“Quality Time” is more than just a catchy title: the “time” on display by this quartet — the rhythmic interplay and “pocket” — is of the highest quality.) Recorded and mixed by MP at Carriage House Studios, Stamford, CT.
Next: Power, a single by by Chaka Khan. Lead guitar by Mike Landau: one take, no punches. Overdubs and mixing by MP at O’Henry Studios, Los Angeles.
“Continental breakfast” is to breakfast what Continental philosophy is to philosophy: something to chew on, but devoid of nourishment.
In a comment to my previous post, reader Asher says that Leftism, rather than rejecting the supernatural, locates it in Man himself.
I think this is almost right. But it is subject to an important objection: if Darwinian Man is nothing more than a part and product of Nature, then locating the “supernatural” in Man is to say that Nature itself is supernatural, which is clearly a contradiction in terms. I prefer to say instead that the Leftist cryptoreligion locates the sacred in Nature, and in Man only as a product and integral part of Nature.
Two years ago I wrote this:
The religious impulse, the need for sacred objects, and the hunger for salvation will always find some form of social expression. (This is because what makes religion adaptive in the first place is its effect on group cohesion.)
Religion wants a “skyhook”: something above us upon which we can depend, and with which we can make a kind of contract. In return for our faith, and for a promise of effort and self-sacrifice in the required virtuous forms, we are given protection, or even salvation.
As children, we trust in the protection of our fathers and mothers, and we submit to their authority in return. But even as adults, the world around us is still chaotic and merciless, and to have so many things beyond our control is frightening and stressful. We know that as adults we must make our way somehow in the material world ”” but we are finite, and we know in our bones that the mysterium tremendum is not. Dwarfed by this infinitude, we seek to attach ourselves to something transcendent; salvation in God is our warrant against that great chaos.
When the supernatural basis for all of this is removed — when God dies — we’ve lost our skyhook; the warranty is void. But we are no less overborne by the chaos and mystery we face. We continue to seek the transcendent, but the sky is now empty, and the heavens have lowered. Having sliced off the apex of the sacred pyramid — the unifying presence of God — we are left with a truncated, frustrated hierarchy. God had been the Absolute from which both the natural world, and all human agency, emanated, but now the roots of both Nature and the soul of Man are exposed and disconnected.
We have not, however, lost our sense of awe, and of transcendent beauty and mystery, when we contemplate the natural world — and so in our new, sawed-off religion, we preserve Nature as a sacred object. (Indeed, with God now departed, many of us now promote Nature to fill his place.) And having lost God as the agent and guarantor of our protection and salvation, we must set our sights, and pin our hopes, upon the only thing we can still discern above us: the State.
Once we have put Nature in the place of God, then Darwinian Man, being at the same time a creation of Nature and a coequal part of Nature, becomes sacred as well — a devalued version of the notion of Man being the “image of God” (we should note as well that this can be seen as a stunted analogue of the Trinity). In this way, evolution becomes a spiritual involution: the towering ladder of Being, that once reached all the way to Heaven, is reduced to a single rung.
See also, for example, this. I have so many posts touching on all of this from various angles that I really should gather them all and distill them into a single essay. The gist, though, is this: When God is removed from the cosmic hierarchy, the sacred necessarily becomes earthly. (Where else can it go?)
Another point to keep in mind is that, because the lowering of Heaven to Earth is a flattening of a gradient that, historically, has always served as a mighty source of energy, the change can also be understood in terms of entropy:
It’s a mechanical, entropic process, like water finding every crack and fissure as it seeks the lowest level.
It is entropic precisely in the sense that it levels and flattens everything, as order yields to disorder. In particular, it levels the gradients that are necessary, in any thermodynamic system, for the possibility of useful work. Ultimately, everything will be undifferentiated from everything else. (Is that not the obvious endpoint of our secular religion’s pathological mission?) It is this flattening, correctly understood as a thermodynamic exhaustion, that is why Leftism always reduces societies to economic and cultural rubble.
Astrophysicists speak of the “heat death of the Universe’” This is perfectly analogous: it is the heat death of our civilization.
From the same post:
The action of the Left is always to reduce potential; it leaves everything it touches in a lower-energy state. It breaks mountains into scree; it dismantles cathedrals to build hovels.
Our friend Bill Vallicella has posted an interesting essay on the Left’s attempt to maintain a doctrine of transcendent egalitarianism while scraping away the transcendent. He describes the problem as follows (after noting that our academic institutions have become “Leftist seminaries”):
What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left’s equality dogma is upheld? Could we explain it as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal? Long before I read Carl Schmitt, I had this thought. But then I found this provocative assertion by Schmitt:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.
(Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36.)The idea that all humans are equal in virtue of having been created by God in the image and likeness of God is a purely theological notion consistent with deep and wide empirical differences among humans. Its secularization, I suggest, involves several steps. (These are my ideas, not Schmitt’s.)
The first step is to transform the metaphysical concept of equality of persons into an empirical concept of equality of measurable attributes.
The second step is to explain away the manifest empirical inequality of human groups and individuals in terms of sexism or racism or ageism or some other ‘ism.’ This involves a turn toward social constructivism and a reality-denying turn away from the mind-independent reality of biological differences between the sexes and the races. Sex becomes ‘gender’ and the latter a social construct. Similarly with race. The absurdities that result are foolishly embraced rather than taken as so many reductiones ad absurdum of the original mistake of making sex and race social constructs. Thus one foolishly embraces the notion that one can change one’s race. For a calm and thorough critique of this notion as represented by a contemporary academic, see my Can One Change One’s Race?
The third step is to jettison the theological underpinning of the original equality conception.
In this way a true, non-empirical claim of Christian metaphysics about persons as rights-bearers is transformed into a false empirical claim about human animals. At the same time the ground of the non-empirical claim is denied.
It is easy to see how unstable this all is. Reject God, and you no longer have a basis for belief in equality of persons. Man reverts to being an animal among animals with all the empirical inequality that that brings with it.
So the Left has a problem. It is virulently anti-theistic and anti-religious and yet it wants to uphold a notion of equality that makes sense only within a theistic framework. The Left, blind to this inconsistency, is running on the fumes of an evaporating Christian worldview. Equality of persons and rights secularizes itself right out of existence once the theological support is kicked away.
Nietzsche understood this long ago. The death of God has consequences. One is that the brotherhood of man becomes a joke. If my tribe can enslave yours, then it has all the justification it needs and can have for doing so. Why should I treat you as my brother if I have the power to make you my servant and I have freed my mind of Christian fictions?
For those of us who oppose both the Left and the Alt-Right faction that is anti-Christian and Nietzschean, the only option seems to be a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.
A year ago, I posted an item of my own in response to Bill’s disagreement with my opinion that modern “progressivism” — whose most sacred tenet is its radical egalitarianism — is a mutated form of Protestant Christianity that, having slyly stripped away its commitment to the supernatural, had become a “cryptoreligion” that was now the established church of the present-day liberal West. I laid out historical, taxonomic, and empirical reasons to believe that this hegemonic faith could fairly be called a “religion”. (Bill, in this latest post, seems to be moving asymptotically closer to acknowledging this, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for him to grasp the nettle.)
Bill is quite right to point out that, deprived of any metaphysical basis for such radical egalitarianism and for the denial of the plainly obvious differences between individuals, and between long-separated human populations, this new official faith has a serious problem, one that can only get worse over time.
It’s easy to see why this must be. A simple analogy will be clarifying:
In the field of structural engineering, if you were to ignore the varying qualities and properties of different materials, and to insist instead on their universal interchangeability, your buildings and bridges would fall down. To preserve the doctrine of interchangeability, you would have two options: you would have to blame these collapses, increasingly implausibly, on pernicious environmental factors, or you would have to lower your ambitions so as to build only those structures that any of the available materials, randomly chosen, could support.
The same considerations apply to social structures as well — and this is why, as Bill correctly observes, the secular Left finds itself under increasing pressure. It is easy to see that it is already, and has been for some time, applying both of the “solutions” listed above to protect and preserve the underlying doctrine.
What Bill doesn’t say (though I imagine he’d agree) is that the problem doesn’t go away simply by putting the supernatural metaphysics back in place. As I described in this post about the evolution of religion in America, the reduction of Christianity to a worldly cryptoreligion necessarily involved the flattening and immanentization of transcendent principles and hierarchies:
What happened in the Progressive era, however, was that the social mission completely overturned and usurped the traditional concept of salvation itself. Working toward God no longer meant work on oneself for the saving of one’s individual soul, which now was scorned as sinful self-interest; the only soteriological pathway now ran through the collective, right here on Earth… Here, we see Heaven itself shot down from the sky.
In this way, equality of all before God became, at first, equality only before the law — and finally, in the present day, equality on every Earthly measure, real or imagined, simply by proclamation (save of course, for those instances where sacralized “victims” are to be lifted above their oppressors). Perhaps a nationwide resurgence of traditional religion might also entail a reconsideration of what Bill calls “a false empirical claim about human animals” — but I’m inclined to doubt it. Water doesn’t flow uphill.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data-mining story, in which personal information about Facebook users was scooped up by a firm working for the Trump campaign. The media have been all over it. It’s been terrible PR for Facebook, and the company’s stock has dropped sharply.
The media response was not, however, so negative when the Obama campaign did the same thing, with Facebook’s acquiescence, back in 2012. Back then, the New York Times called Mr. Obama’s social-media manipulators “digital masterminds“.
This has a lot of people over on the Republican side of the aisle blasting the mainstream media for hypocrisy. But if that’s the way you’re looking at this, you couldn’t be more wrong. What the MSM are showing here is, in fact, disciplined adherence to a timeless and consistent political principle:
Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.
How I wish more people understood this!
An addendum to yesterday’s “reactionary roundup“:
In the Radio Derb podcast linked to in the post, Mr. Derbyshire reported on the detention and deportation of several identitarian dissidents who had come to England to express their views at Hyde Park’s famous Speakers Corner. One was a young Austrian by the name of Martin Sellner.
Mr. Sellner having been booted out of the country (which, to be fair, any nation has the right to do, for any reason it likes), the English dissenter Tommy Robinson read Mr. Sellner’s speech in absentia. You can read it yourself, here. (The topic, aptly, is freedom of speech.)
For context, here are the latest “hate-crime” guidelines published by London’s Metropolitan Police. They include the following language (my emphasis):
A Hate Incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.
Not all hate incidents will amount to criminal offences, but it is equally important that these are reported and recorded by the police.
Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.
Are you getting this, readers? Here we are in London, the birthplace and nursery of the magnificent Western legal tradition, and now in 2018 the very heart of that tradition — objective truth, as supported by evidence — is, like an Aztec sacrifice, to be ripped from the still-living body of the English nation and offered to the gods. (The gods in this latter obeisance are no longer Xipe-Totec and Quetzalcoatl, but their modern replacements: Diversity, Equality, and Multiculturalism.)
It does seem, though there is scant comfort in it, that the authorities, wary of backlash, are proceeding with some caution. Apparently the original guidelines contained this language as well, since removed:
If someone does something that isn’t a criminal offence but the victim, or anyone else, believes it was motivated by prejudice or hate, we would class this as a ”˜hate incident’. Though what the perpetrator has done may not be against the law, their reasons for doing it are. This means it may be possible to charge them with an offence.
George Orwell had a name for this: thoughtcrime. He saw the future of what he called “Airstrip One” with terrifying accuracy, getting the dates wrong by a mere three decades.
Finally: all of this is in perfect conformance to another, higher Law: Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations.
For tonight, something to listen to and some things to read.
To listen to, we have John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb. This week’s 43-minute installment is dedicated to the cultural and demographic death of his ancestral homeland, the British Isles. It is a melancholy survey of the ruin of a great nation, but some things need to be heard. Please listen, if you have the time.
To read, we have two essays: a Catholic critique of the “alt-right” (now a catch-all term that is used more by critics of anyone to the right of Lindsay Graham than by the variegated dissidents, traditionalists, neoreactionaries, anti-universalists, anarcho-capitalists, Moldbuggians, technofuturists, ethnoidentitarians, critics of democracy, etc. to which it is so carelessly and indiscriminately fastened in the popular media), written by Matthew Rose at First Things, and a response by Costin Alamariu at Social Matter.
Rose considers a defining characteristic of this nebula of right-wing thought to be an antipathy to Christianity, which he ascribes to a belief that Christianity’s universalism has brought the West to a condition of “pathological altruism”. He is right that this is a recognized problem in neoreactionary circles, but in my own experience it does not result in a rejection of Christianity itself — which most Dark Enlightenment types see as an essential part of the traditional Western organism — but of the mutated, radically egalitarian Protestant cryptoreligion that has effectively become the established faith of the liberal, “secular” West. Are there atheists in this mix? Absolutely. Pagans? Yes, those as well. The dissident Right is large; it contains multitudes. But to characterize it as monolithically, or even largely, anti-Christian gets it wrong. (To imagine it as in any significant way anti-religious would be an even greater error.)
Alamariu responds to this:
Regarding Christianity, most people on the “alt-right’ are distinguished from the general population and from the mainstream of American conservatism precisely because they are religious, or rather, traditionalist. Matthew Rose might be acquainted with Twitter accounts like @NoTrueScotist (Tradical). These are not an exception, and are far more representative of the right-wing movement arising now in Western nations than anyone Rose mentions in the article.
Take France as an example. The “alt-right’ uprising in France precedes that in the United States, and began in 2013 with protests against the recently passed gay marriage law, and against mass immigration. Roughly 2% of France still believes in the monarchy”“not a symbolic or constitutional monarchy, but the King in Versailles with the Church ruling France together with the army. A much larger percentage wouldn’t go so far but comes close. They reject the French Revolution, and they reject a Catholic Church that betrayed the monarchy and itself””not to speak of what they think about Vatican II. But these are devout Catholics, many of who belong to the Society of Saint Pius X. Many come from France’s oldest families, including those who founded the French presence in the Antilles and other colonies. Many of these youth form the backbone of organizations like Generation Identitaire in France, a group Matthew Rose would no doubt label “alt-right.’ Their families have long-standing connections with Action Francaise, and more recently with Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement Pour la France. It is an act of arrogance or of ignorance to claim that such people are less devout because they don’t embrace Catholicism in the same way Rose does.
To be fair, Rose in fact argues that to see Christianity as being, in nationalistic terms, pathologically altruistic is a mistake. He writes:
The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, “God has made all the nations [ethnos].’ The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible.
Here Rose relies upon a distinction between “race” and “nation”. This is a particularly modern sleight-of hand, inasmuch as the distinction was essentially meaningless in Biblical times, and is only comprehensible in the context of the modern “proposition nation” — which is, of course, precisely what much of modern reactionary thought calls into question as a sufficient basis for durable and harmonious nationhood, depending as it does upon an axiom of universality and interchangeability of widely divergent human populations.
Alamariu offers this in reply:
Although it’s only mentioned as an aside in his article, central to Rose’s argument is the tired cliché, so beloved of polite conservatives and tamed traditionalists, that “racism is modern.’ This would be news to the devout Catholic Spaniards who spread Rose’s faith across the world and who came up with the concepts of limpieza de sangre, or with the casta system in the colonies and its myriad classifications like mestizo, castizo, zambo, and even more exotic, stratified in a formal racial hierarchy. It would be news to those very unmodern men who made the Law of Manu in India. The truth is what common sense would expect it to be: race is one of the oldest and most robust ways that mankind has had to distinguish different groups, and has always been central to the definition of peoplehood.
Rose gives the example of ancient Greece as the foundation not of racism but of a healthy nationalism, and points to the word ethnos; but as the other word genos implies, ideas of race existed even then. Plato’s republic was an idealized eugenic state modeled on the real-life eugenic state of Sparta, which continued a Dorian tradition of racial eugenics and concern with heredity explicitly promoted in the writings of poets like Pindar and Theognis. The fact that ancient peoples didn’t divide races in the same way we do is not surprising: they didn’t have much contact with either blacks or Asians, let alone Australian aborigines. But the claim that race is a recent invention and therefore can be looked down on by a Gentleman of Tradition is false. It’s a cop-out by weak conservatives who seek merely a kind of status in distinguishing themselves from “vulgar’ racists. It’s a pose and affectation largely for display in front of the Left. In his Politics, Aristotle very clearly says that difference of race is a cause of faction in states, and one of the surest causes of their destruction; the fact that he believed even the different Greek lineages were bound to hate and fight each other does not support the claim, as Rose and other “traditionalists’ imply, that they would have gotten along just fine with a Saxon, a Yoruba, or a Mapuche.
Later on, Alamariu adds:
The assault on health, on beauty, on manliness, on Christianity, on intelligence, accountability and competence as such, has gone a great way to forcing this most vital part of the youth into a virtuous reaction: this recently-spread meme is, in fact, the truth, or not far from it.
There’s much more. Read it all. The Rose article is here, and Alamariu’s response is here.
Nobody has brought more clarity to reporting on the tempest of scandals and investigations flooding the political landscape than National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy. As the federal prosecutor who handled the case against the “Blind Sheik” Omar Adbel Rahman for the 1993 Word Trade center bombing, he brings expertise and authority to a topic that would bewilder even the best-informed layman, and he writes with limpid exactitude. It is no small thing to do this so well, and we are lucky to have him.
Today he looks at the increasingly Byzantine convolutions and divagations of the Mueller probe, and in particular its highly irregular prosecution of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates. His article begins:
These columns have many times observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to set limits on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. To trigger the appointment of a special counsel, federal regulations require the Justice Department to identify the crimes that warrant investigation and prosecution ”” crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate in the normal course; crimes that become the parameters of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.
Rosenstein, instead, put the cart before the horse: Mueller was invited to conduct a fishing expedition, a boundless quest to hunt for undiscovered crimes, rather than an investigation and prosecution of known crimes.
That deviation, it turns out, is not the half of it. With Rosenstein’s passive approval, Mueller is shredding Justice Department charging policy by alleging earth-shattering crimes, then cutting a sweetheart deal that shields the defendant from liability for those crimes and from the penalties prescribed by Congress. The special counsel, moreover, has become a legislature unto himself, promulgating the new, grandiose crime of “conspiracy against the United States’ by distorting the concept of “fraud.’
Why does the special counsel need to invent an offense to get a guilty plea? Why doesn’t he demand a plea to one of the several truly egregious statutory crimes he claims have been committed?
Good questions.
Mr. McCarthy then explains, in fascinating detail, the charges leveled against Messrs. Manafort and Gates, and the strange deviations from normal procedure, and from the meaning of the law, that the prosecutorial team has made in pursuing these cases.
The article concludes with this:
Think about how bizarre this is. For public consumption, the special counsel alleges breathtaking felony offenses ”” bank fraud, tax fraud, and money laundering, crimes involving over $100 million when aggregated. Yet, to obtain a guilty plea from one of the allegedly serious felons, Mueller finds it necessary to abandon the hair-raising felonies he purports to have found. If these felonies are readily provable, as Mueller has claimed in his indictments, they are supposed to form the basis of any plea under Justice Department policy. If Gates is the mega-criminal nine-digit fraudster the special counsel has portrayed, he is not supposed to get a slap on the wrist. Yet Mueller accepts a plea to minor charges, including a Section 371 conspiracy that is a prosecutorial invention ”” designed to shield the allegedly serious felon from penalties Congress has decreed for the misconduct involved.
These charges against Gates and Manafort have nothing to do with “collusion with Russia,’ the investigation for which Rosenstein appointed Mueller. There is no reason this case could not have been prosecuted by regular Justice Department lawyers. There was no need for a special counsel for this. And regular Justice Department prosecutors, overseen by engaged Justice Department superiors ensuring adherence to well-established Justice Department policies, would not prosecute a case this way.
For the details — and if you care about being an informed observer of this historic it is worth your time to understand them — read the whole thing, here.
Writing at the Federalist, Molly Hemingway gives us the latest on the DOJ’s skulduggery in the Trump investigation: a personal relationship between FBI agent Peter Strzok and the FISA-court judge Rudy Contreras, who mysteriously recused himself was recused after taking Mike Flynn’s guilty plea.
Ms. Hemingway’s story, which is based on newly obtained text messages between Strzok and his mistress, fellow agent Lisa Page, is here.
In the comment-thread to our previous post, we see in microcosm the tremendous fissure in American culture and politics. It goes far deeper than mere disagreements about policy; it has reached the point in which the two sides have entirely different conceptions of moral, political, cultural, social, historical, and even human reality — views that are not only incommensurable, but mutually and bitterly antagonistic.
This would be bad enough if the parties were engaged in a merely social dispute, but they are not: they are implacable rivals in a great contest for sovereignty over the entire American nation.
The problem is exacerbated by the ever-increasing centralization of American sovereignty in the Federal government, control of which meant far less in the early days of the Republic, but which has now become a struggle with truly existential stakes for the nation’s future. (Imagine a fully loaded tractor-trailer careening down a mountain road, with two mortal enemies in the cab fighting for the wheel, and you will have a sense of American political society in the early decades of the new millennium.)
This centralization, which has raised the stakes of political struggle to such dangerous heights, is itself a central battleground in our cold civil war. Were we able to return to the vision of government that the Framers intended — a federation of States, operating on the subsidiarian premise that government should be as local as possible, with the Federal apparatus limited to powers and responsibilities that are few and carefully enumerated — control of Washington would matter so little that there would be almost nothing there to fight over.
The singular exception to this, in America’s history, was of course the great question of slavery, now resolved at the cost of 600,000 lives and the subjugation of the South. That great civil war was a chastening lesson in the limits of comity and the willingness of Americans — and all people everywhere — to shed each other’s blood over incommensurable political and cultural axioms. (It left a terrible wound that was very slow to heal — to the extent that it healed at all — and that is now, in an ominous symptom of accumulated tectonic stress, being torn open again.)
Another crisis of comity now threatens us all: one that is, perhaps, even more ominous than that of the 1800s, in that there can be no geographical solution. I am not alone in thinking that we are already far closer to the breaking point than most of us realize.
We’ve been treated in recent days to the spectacle of schoolchildren marching in the streets to demand legislative restrictions on gun acquisition and ownership. This sort of thing is nothing new; I remember my own adolescence, in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and the student protests of that era.
When you’re that age, it’s fun and exciting to do what we saw the kids doing this week: to play a little hooky, block some traffic, make some noise, taste the thrill of shared, unbridled emotion — and, most of all, to get a lot of attention while lecturing your elders about how the world could be easily and profitably improved, if only they could see past their fossilized habits of mind (or, failing that, be pushed out of the way).
Looking back on my own ardent youth — which by happenstance took place in a curious epoch, as whenever we are young, in which old folks were fools and children were wise — my nostalgic impulse is to say “more power to them”. In doing so, I’d be echoing the sentiments of a great many in the media and chattering classes who insist that these children should not only be listened to — which I’m happy to indulge for a minute or two if I must — but given the vote.
The nostalgic impulse, however, quickly passes. Reason and wisdom regain the helm. “More power to them”?? God help us all. These are teenagers, folks. Have you ever been, or had any intimate association with, a teenager? If so, you will agree that the amount of power they should have over public policy is, quite precisely, zero.
Every adult knows this, of course, which means that those calling for this ludicrous expansion of an already far-too-inclusive franchise do so for cynical and tactical reasons. Can you imagine that if these cherubs were marching for Israeli-style school security, or for sensible immigration restrictions, or for an end to the poisonous cult-Marx grievance-mongering that has ruined all of our institutions, that they’d be the media darlings they are today? Of course not. If high-school seniors were marching for the right to carry pistols in class to defend themselves, would the Governor of New York beclown himself, and soil an expensive suit, to egg them on? No. (Duh.)
Ah, but then I have to ask myself: how would I feel if they were demanding such things? Wouldn’t I see them as the great hope for the future? Wouldn’t I be thrilled that a new generation of American youth had finally wised up to the catastrophe that my own generation of lotus-eating Utopian Universalist cryptoreligious hippies had wrought upon their magnificent heritage and birthright?
Well, yes. You bet I would! I’d be climbing a lamp-post to cheer them on.
But give them the vote? Are you kidding? They’re children. Have we lost our minds?
Well, I’m back up, it seems. The technical problems on the backend appear to have been due to some gummed-up WordPress plugins and an old version of PHP.
I’ll confess that I had begun to suspect that something darker was happening. My recent exclusion from Google search results (while Bing and DuckDuckGo results were unaffected) has got me looking over my shoulder a bit, I guess. (I’d like to think there’s an innocent explanation for that, too, but I don’t have one.)
Anyway, I’ll ask you all to let me know if you notice any problems henceforth — in particular, slow loading, or any reappearance of the caching issue that caused the comment-box to be pre-populated with the previous commenter’s information.
Thank you all for your patience, and I hope to get back to normal output shortly. It’s bracing to have the site working properly again.
With a hat-tip to our friend Bill K., here’s a good, short video (just over four minutes) on the realities of evil, guns, progressive hoplophobia, and protecting our schools.
A busy couple of days. Back shortly.
I’ve noticed also that there have been a lot of backend errors recently that have been affecting connectivity here. I’m investigating and hope to have a resolution shortly. Thanks for your patience.
Update, 3/12: The backend problem persists. (Just posting this update took me half an hour.) Support ticket submitted with my hosting/security vendors.
“Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy intoxication extravagance Vice and folly?”
– John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 21st 1819
Big news tonight about a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un. Most commentators, including many I respect, are suggesting that Mr. Trump is being played, just as previous presidents were. I’m not so sure. Here’s why.
What’s different this time around is that Trump is using a different lever, and he isn’t using it directly against North Korea.
Who does North Korea depend on for its survival?
China.
What does China depend on for its economic survival?
Trade with the United States.
I’ll leave it there.
Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals allowed a children’s climate-advocacy group to proceed with a lawsuit against the Trump administration for not preventing global warming. The suit argues, with a straight face, that inaction by the Federal government to produce what the plaintiffs believe to be necessary carbon-reduction policy violates the children’s Constitutional rights — and the Court finds this plausible enough to let the suit go forward.
Madness.
“We must own up to the fact that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society.”
If you didn’t listen to the John Batchelor show last night, you missed an informative (and worrisome) conversation between the host and Professor Stephen F. Cohen about the new U.S. – Russian arms race.
The issue is this: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has abandoned the commitment to parity that prevented mutual destruction during the Cold War. The expansion of NATO beginning in the 1990’s, and the abrogation of the ABM treaty by George Bush, pushed Russia, apparently deprived of effective retaliation to a U.S. first strike, and confronted by NATO forces now deployed right up to its borders, into an increasingly tight corner. On March 1st, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia now has a new generation of nuclear weapons that render our missile defenses obsolete — and if his claims are true, the new weapons not only restore parity, but have given Russia tactical (and therefore strategic) superiority.
You can hear the discussion in two parts, here and here. See also the relevant section of Putin’s March 1st speech, here.
Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology.
It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.
If you’re familiar with Patrick Buchanan, you won’t be surprised to know that his latest column is a ringing defense of tariffs.
An excerpt:
“Trade wars are not won, only lost,’ warns Sen. Jeff Flake.
But this is ahistorical nonsense.
The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900.
Bismarck’s Germany, born in 1871, followed the U.S. example, and swept past free trade Britain before World War I.
Does Senator Flake think Japan rose to post-war preeminence through free trade, as Tokyo kept U.S. products out, while dumping cars, radios, TVs and motorcycles here to kill the industries of the nation that was defending them. Both Nixon and Reagan had to devalue the dollar to counter the predatory trade policies of Japan.
Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits, and, in the first decade in this century, we lost 55,000 factories and 6,000,000 manufacturing jobs.
Does Flake see no correlation between America’s decline, China’s rise, and the $4 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up at the expense of his own country?
The hysteria that greeted Trump’s idea of a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum suggest that restoring this nation’s economic independence is going to be a rocky road.
In 2017, the U.S. ran a trade deficit in goods of almost $800 billion, $375 billion of that with China, a trade surplus that easily covered Xi Jinping’s entire defense budget.
Read the rest here.
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s Rod Dreher commenting on this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water. (If you aren’t familiar with the story — due, perhaps, to your having been in a coma for several months — it is about a woman who enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with an anthropoid fish-creature.)
Mr. Dreher offers an acute comment from a reader:
[T]he turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.
This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.
Revenge it is. Another of Mr. Dreher’s commenters quotes Jimmy Kimmel, hosting the Academy Awards on Sunday, on another popular movie:
“We don’t make films like [pederasty celebration] ‘Call Me By Your Name’ for money, We make them to upset Mike Pence.”
Whither hence, readers?
Around the Outer Cape in the off-season I’m reminded of how many people here are capable of subduing, commanding, and profitably plying the proximate physical world, and how stark the contrast is with the cosmopolitan, soft-handed symbol-manipulators who spend their time and money here in the summer. A great many of the people who live year-round in my little town — with the general exception of retirees from elsewhere — have these skills, and knock together a living building and repairing things, and/or pulling food from sea and marsh and forest. (The sexes seem sharply distinguished as well, which I think is not a coincidence.)
In Gurdjieff‘s system of inner work, the practice of “self-remembering” stressed awareness of the body. This is effective because the grounding of our experience in the physicality of the body is what brings us back to our actually existing selves in the present moment: to what is real, now. Practical engagement with the physical world works in the same way to keep a life of symbols, ideas, and abstractions from becoming wholly unmoored from reality and drifting off into cloud-castles and hallucinations. The physical world, and its truths, are stubborn, and persistent, and in the end will make their claim on our attention, whether we like it or not.
This division, between those who must in some way engage and control the physical world in their work and those who do not, is a chief feature of the great cultural fissure in present-day America.
It all makes me aware, when I’m in New York, of how brittle and technology-dependent the whole shebang is nowadays. if something goes badly and suddenly wrong — a Carrington Event or something like that — it won’t be pretty, and it would be good not to be in the cities.
In a recent post I declined to comment on the proposed imposition of new tariffs, pleading ignorance of the subject. The uncommonly astute blogger calling himself “ZMan”, however, has a definite opinion. An excerpt:
The fact is, the current trade regime ushered in after the Cold War, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like Pat Buchanan warned about 30 years ago. Open trade with Canada, an English-speaking first world country, is mostly beneficial. Trade with Mexico, a third world narco-state that now operates as a pirate’s cove for Chinese and American business, has been a disaster. NAFTA has made Mexico a massive loophole in American labor, tax, environmental and trade policy. A loophole ruthlessly exploited by China.
The current trade regime is also at the heart of the cosmopolitan globalism that seeks to reduce nations to a fiction and people to economic inputs. This neoliberal orthodoxy has eroded social capital to the point where the white middle class is nearing collapse. It’s not just America. The collapsing fertility rates in the Occident are part of the overall cultural collapse going in the West. Slapping tariffs on Chinese steel are not going to arrest this trend, but it does open the door for cultural critiques of the prevailing orthodoxy.
That’s the reality our betters would just as soon not allow back into the conversation. The fact is, a nation is its people. What defines France is the shared character and shared heritage of the people we call French. What defines a people is not the cost of goods or the price of labor. What defines a people is what they love together and what they hate together. It is the collection of tastes and inclinations, no different than family traditions, that have been cultivated and passed down from one generation to the next.
Even putting the cultural arguments aside, global capitalism erodes the civic institutions that hold society together. Instead of companies respecting the laws of host nations and working to support the welfare of the people of that nation, business is encouraged to cruise the world looking for convenient ports. There’s a word for this form of capitalism. It’s called piracy. Global firms flit from port to port, with no interest other than the short term gain to be made at that stop. Globalism is rule by pirates.
This resonates well with my view of globalist capitalism generally, and of its innate antipathy to national particularity. The usual arguments for and against free trade are economic, but at this point in my life, and in my study of history and culture, I have come to believe that there are far more important things than money.
Read the rest here.
Planned Parenthood tweeted this the other day:
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.— Planned Parenthood (@PPIndKentucky) March 2, 2018
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Don’t let them do this to us. Don’t give in.
While responding to a comment to a recent post just now, I wanted to add a link to an earlier item of mine: Can Progressivism Really Be A Kind Of Religion?
I thought the quickest way to find it might be to look it up in Google. I typed in the title, and … nothing. (This is odd, because Google used to give my website fairly high priority in search-result rankings.)
I went to DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t filter results, and my post was at the top of the list. I went back to Google and put the title in quotes, but my post still didn’t appear.
Have I now run afoul of Google’s heresy-detectors? Have I been added to some Index Librorum Prohibitorum? It seems odd, as I am a relatively obscure site, and pretty tame as far as heresies go. Indeed, one result that did appear was an article at Social Matter linking to my post, and I’d have thought that SM would be a far more visible feature of the reactionary skyline than this humble dwelling, and one that throws a much larger shadow upon the Cathedral’s towering facade.
Maybe this is due, somehow, to my having changed the title of the blog recently (though the URL didn’t change). I wonder.
A foreground item in the news in these last days has been President Trump’s announcement of tariffs on various goods. As with everything else he says or does, (or, for that matter, anything that any prominent person says or does these days), there has been pugnacious disagreement.
I’m not going to comment on this one. Why? Because I don’t know enough to have an opinion. The question of trade protections — subsidies, tariffs, and negotiated preferences — has existed since trade between nations began, and has been an important part of American history since the continent was settled. It has always been the subject of contention and disagreement. Right now I’ve been reading the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and it was a difficult topic for them too, often raised in their letters.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” That’s my position on tariffs. Sorry to disappoint.
If you know more about this than I do, readers, your comments are welcome.
It’s a dreary day here, and I find myself at a loss for anything interesting to say. Instead, then, I give you Russian politician Valentina Petrenko. And her hair.
I was back at my old alma mater, Power Station Studios, earlier today. It’s on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. Nearby, some expensive apartment buildings have gone up. If you’re lucky enough to afford one of these tony residences, here’s your front door:
Is it me, or did we miss a turn somewhere?
