Managing the Masses: Lukashenko, Liberalism, and High Technology
The early 20th century is fascinating: it was a period so pivotal in determining the course of the following generations. Looking at that time, we see old monarchies being challenged by republicanism and nationalism; Communism threatening to inflame an already obvious conflict and Zionism and labor unionism managing at times to defuse it; and Christianity still vibrant in the West, though with ideology encroaching on its domain.
A massive transition was taking place in Western society, and in the world. This transition was in some ways inevitable: new technological advancements required societies to think about massive numbers of people in ways they never had before. The railroad, the ocean liner, and now the airplane and the tramway and the automobile, were making distances seem shorter and shorter with regard to both goods and people; the telegraph, the telephone, and now radio, were doing their part to eliminate distance altogether with regard to information.
We needed big ideas to go along with these big developments; we needed a way of dealing with the crowd. So this transition was to be expected, but what would come after that transition was not so certain. To Lothrop Stoddard, writing in 1920, it was clear that certain grand ideas would win out, and be thus sealed into the character of the next stage in history.
Stressful transition is the key-note of our time. Unless all signs be at fault, we stand at one of those momentous crises in history when mankind moves from one well-marked epoch into another of widely different character. Such crucial periods are of supreme importance, because their outcome may determine man’s course for many generations perhaps for many centuries.
Transition spells struggle. And this is pre-eminently true of to-day. Historians of the distant future, appraising our times, may conclude that the Great War was merely a symptom — an episode in a much vaster struggle of ideas and elemental forces which began long before the war, and lasted long after its close. Certainly such a conflict of ideas is to-day raging. Perhaps never in human annals have principles so dissimilar striven so fiercely for mastery of the coming age.
We now know which principles prevailed, which now have mastery of our age.
They are the principles of the Cathedral, the vast complex of media outlets and academic institutions which has replaced the Church as the center of Western political and intellectual life. In any university, in any journal of record, you will encounter the same basic assumptions about the world. All people are basically equal, ethnically diverse societies are a good thing (but mainly for Western countries), casual sex is normal and cigarette smoking is not, and so on. These assumptions were largely absent from the world before World War I, and as Stoddard foresaw, that war was part of a much larger chain of events and ideas.
So from 1914 to 1945, leftism replaced the old order in a two-step process involving the killing of tens of millions of people. Then from 1945 on, different varieties of leftism battled for supremacy. Stalinism fought Trotskyism, both went against Atlantic liberalism, and certain questions, gradually if not immediately, became off-limits.
Sure, there’s been a ‘conservative’ movement since 1945, but it continues to struggle with the question: What’s there to conserve? After the old order was lost, much of what wasn’t Left in the world wasn’t left for long. It remained mostly as a matter of inertia. It took only a generation after WWII for forced integation and mass immigration to begin to fundamentally change the American society the veterans of that war signed up to fight for, and the rest of the West wasn’t far behind. Combine that with the bomb-’em-for-democracy neoconservatism developed by former Trotskyists in the 1970s and 1980s and the loss of anti-Communism as a rallying point with the implosion of the USSR, and it’s easy to see why political ‘conservatives’ constantly lose.
To think that this was all for want of a way of dealing with the crowd!
This Atlantic model, though it works very well for Jews, certain affluent Whites, and the elite of select protected classes, also destroys community solidarity, disregards the White working class, uproots non-Westerners from their own native traditions, and encourages a remarkable hatred of Westerners who oppose it. These ill effects alone would suggest that there are other ways of managing a technologically advanced society, not to mention the alternatives offered in the early 20th century. Of course, many of those suffering the worst of these effects are still invested in a ‘conservative’ movement that serves to divert their attention away from decisive action and toward politically sensationalized inanities that have no productive consequence.
But Atlanticist or not, a society full of telephones and computers and automobiles is a society with distinct needs and concerns from one without them. These advancements give us more ways to create and maintain different thedes, more ways to unite them, more ways to screw things up, and more ways to add beauty to the world.
It seems that any civilized country, even a country coming out of multigenerational Communism, will tend over time to develop sensible ways of dealing with this if not under the influence of the Atlantic media-political complex, i.e. the Cathedral. The Philosophers’ Mail, the news organ of Alain de Botton’s School of Life, notices one example: that of Belarus. There, President Alexander Lukashenko has had the State introduce national awards programs, offering celebrity status to exemplary mothers, fathers, welders, milkmaids, and farmers. Though his overall approach to governance leaves much to be desired, Lukashenko clearly understands the importance of mass role models in a society with mass technology. He’s also smart enough to know he doesn’t want a country where millions of people idolize political activists, Black rappers, and slatternly socialites (there’s a reason he exiles certain people).
The core point is that a lot of things we should care about, and need to take seriously, are not well treated by the marketplace and the celebrity culture it produces. Most adults are desperate for their children to eventually establish good, fairly stable, fairly contented relationships. And we all acknowledge that is a hard task. Despite these hopes and anxieties, we have turned over the public sphere to the marketplace that is deeply unhelpful to our hopes.
People who worry about the evils of competition and Capitalism, when it comes to making clothes or supplying coffee beans, tend to get very cagey and alarmed when there is any suggestion of the state encouraging certain cultural attitudes. And so we are collectively delivered to the opinions of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.
The authors of this piece come quite close to grasping the nature of democracy:
It’s not sinister in a genuinely democratic society to think the government should take in hand the project of instilling citizens with an attractive view of how to live. The alternative is not neutrality. It just means that corporations, who ultimately care only about their profits, will step in and fill the vacuum; and encourage us to admire only the deeply inappropriate targets they’ve found for their own financial ends.
But then they lose it.
Governments already have a massive impact on how society works – we accept that, on the basis of having been democratically elected, the government can take half your earnings. And yet we somehow deny that it might be allowed any say in what makes for a stable relationship; suddenly that seems like ‘too much power’. The government is allowed to sign a treatise which will bind a nation to momentous changes over decades, but it is not allowed to have a significant view about what makes cities beautiful or office life more pleasant.
We don’t like very much at all about the state of Belarus. But we do think its dictator is on to something in this area. We’d like to see a prize for ‘The Best Mother of a Large Family of the Kentucky, Melbourne, Zurich or La Paz region…’
Once again, they sound like they get it…
And a prize for ‘The Best Husband who Learned to Control his Temper and Say Sorry.’
…and then they really don’t.
But the point still stands, and it is an important one—and one that the conservatives have forgotten: there are other ways to do things. The Atlantic model is not inevitable, not the only possible way to organize a society at our technological level; and furthermore, it is flawed. There are problems with it, and these problems can be addressed—but only by a change in models, which conservatives and progressives alike refuse to contemplate, or even admit as a possibility.
from
Managing the Masses: Lukashenko, Liberalism, and High Technology
March 6, 2014
The Righteous Uighurs: How the Media Promote Terrorism
How quickly the American people forget! Ukraine is on the news-circuit of today; Syria is relegated to yesterday. Before Syria, Libya; before Libya, Iraq; and rarely, if ever, the -stans, which America invaded in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, now remembered only in comical low-quality Photoshops sitting quietly in webringed sites last updated in 2004. Osama bin Laden, this relic of yesterday—why even bring him up today? How could he be relevant?
Well, for one, he once endorsed Noam Chomsky, and echoed the concerns of any good leftist.
“Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,” Mr. bin Laden was quoted as saying in a report on Al Jazeera’s English-language Web site. “All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.”
“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying. “They are the true terrorists, and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”
And Chomsky returned the favor.
It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. …
[T]he name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
But again—why bring him up? Chomsky and Osama are relics of the past, irrelevant to today, and even to last month. What can be learned from history so ancient to the American mind?
Well, for one, Osama was a terrorist. To understand terrorism, one must understand the terrorism of twelve years ago as well as the terrorism of today. And there is still terrorism today.
All acts of terror are shocking, but those involving knives – the most intimate of murder weapons – carry a particular horror. Saturday’s murders in Kunming station of 29 people, and the wounding of 129 more, by 10 masked, black-clad men and women, add a dimension of scale to an already gruesome act. The victims were mostly ordinary travellers in one of China’s most peaceful and multi-ethnic provincial capitals. The perpetrators, according to official Chinese statements, were from Xinjiang, the mineral-rich and predominantly Muslim north-west region. If this is the case, this incident will have profound repercussions in China.
The Grauniad goes on for many paragraphs, not to condemn this act of terrorism, not to advocate for measures against it, but to explain its motivations, to list in great detail the grievances that the Muslims of Xinjiang hold against the Chinese government. These sentences are particularly informative, though not in the manner they would like:
Given its oppressive treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, it is perhaps more surprising that China has not figured as a prime target of jihadi propaganda, let alone action, a pass it obtains largely through its strategic alliance with Pakistan.
In return for Chinese support against India, Pakistan’s intelligence services have been careful to ensure that their own sponsored militants turn a blind eye to China’s repression of their fellow Muslims.
“Muslims! Why haven’t you been hitting them more? You’re being repressed!” Needless to say, this was not their reaction to Anders Breivik—but it is remarkably similar to Chomsky’s reaction to Osama.
Carl Schmitt would call Chomsky and the Guardian interested third parties. What separates the hateful madman Breivik from the understandably disaffected Uighurs? The interested third party confers “the sort of political recognition of which the irregularly fighting partisan is in need, in order to avoid falling like the thief and the pirate into the unpolitical, which means here the criminal sphere”. Schmitt writes that “Napoleon often recalled bitterly that England was the real instigator and the real beneficiary of Spanish partisan warfare.” There is much that people like Chomsky and institutions like the Guardian—that is, the Cathedral—instigate, and much to be gained by instigating it. Noam Chomsky’s calls for an end to the American empire, progressives’ calls for an end to global warming, the West’s calls for a weaker China—and, once, for an end to apartheid in South Africa, a demand no doubt amplified by the actions of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the terrorist arm of the African National Congress, founded by the now-sainted Nelson Mandela—and the hippies’ many calls, aided by many different acts of violence… yes, there is much to be gained. A demand becomes much stronger when backed with violence, and stronger still when it is made to appear legitimate, when it is made to appear that the right way to end the violence is to accede to the demand, to admit its righteousness, not to crush those who commit it.
Waxing poetic about the righteous grievances of terrorists is one response to terrorism, but there is another; it is not for nothing that the Guardian raises the possibility of “profound repercussions in China”. It even explains these repercussions:
The most recent outbreak of serious violence in Xinjiang goes back to 2009, when an ugly inter-ethnic episode in China’s industrialised south-east triggered a violent and sustained reaction in Xinjiang, provoking more repression, in turn, on the part of the state.
Repression on the part of the state. Breivik goes on a shooting spree at a Labour Party youth camp; Norway cracks down on rightists. Uighur terrorists go on a stabbing spree at a train station; China cracks down on Uighurs—but the Cathedral calls for precisely the opposite.
Mencius Moldbug would not be surprised.
Thus, we note that there are two responses to terrorism: the natural response and the unnatural response. The natural response is to take revenge on the terrorist and everyone even remotely resembling him. If he is a Muslim, the natural response is to chastise the Muslims. When Grynzspan, a Jew, kills the German vom Rath, the German people must chastise the Jews. And, of course, when a right-wing piece of filth slaughters the cream of the Norwegian Komsomol, all racists and reactionaries are automatically suspect.
The unnatural response—which will not happen by itself, but can be made to happen by a sufficiently powerful psychological-warfare machine—is to look instead at the grievances of the attacker. After all, no one commits terrorism unless he has some complaint. No complaint—no terrorism. Thus while the Nazi response to the terrorism of Grynzspan is to collectively punish the Jews, the Atlantic response to the terrorism of Grynzspan … is to attribute it to the injustices suffered by the Jews. This of course is also our response to the terrorism of Mandela. …
Here is our Mutt-and-Jeff act: the unnatural response. We can always tell a Mutt-and-Jeff strategy because Mutt and Jeff have the same demands. Mutt tells you to satisfy these demands, or die. Jeff tells you to satisfy these demands, to “take the wind out of Mutt’s sails.”
The Guardian goes further, and admits it outright.
The Kunming attacks represent a major escalation of violence against Han Chinese outside Xinjiang, and, no doubt, a bid for global as well as national attention.
This bid has been answered, this attention has been provided, by the Guardian and many papers like it. And it can outright admit that Nick Land is right: the primary motive of terrorism is to draw media attention to the perpetrators’ grievances, and coverage of the kind the Cathedral has provided is not merely about terrorism, but a key part of it.
from
The Righteous Uighurs: How the Media Promote Terrorism
March 4, 2014
Whither American Nationalism?
One of the difficult realizations of the early 21st century is that America in the cultural sense does not equate to the United States. This wasn’t always the case, of course. The United States no longer have a coherent culture (now it’s got at least two or three), but they used to. There’s a reason we made postcards like this one:
A Confederate and a Yankee, reconciled to the Union, together take arms to liberate Cuba from the abuses of Spanish rule. That was the image in Americans’ heads during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Civil War, the War of Secession, was over, and a new national project united the men of every section of the country. You will note that it is being generally ignored by the media in the US that we are currently in the 150th anniversary period of that war. If we had a media-political class that actually cared about America as a people or as a nation, we’d probably be hearing more about it. Like the postcard above, there are numerous ways to illustrate, and encourage, the reconciliation of different American cultures. Here’s a great McKinley reëlection campaign poster from 1900, when America still had direct control over Cuba:
Much better art than you’ll find on today’s campaign posters, despite—or perhaps because of—the lower level of mass media technology. It’s also boastful, not only of American achievement but of American selflessness. The quote from McKinley at the bottom is sweet and all, but let’s not kid ourselves. Many Americans did want to acquire more territory, and keeping Cuba would have been perfectly humane. The place was going to end up being dominated by American business and geopolitical interests anyway, so why not hold onto it? It certainly wasn’t better off falling to Communism.
The picture at the top of this page is of a statue first erected in 1904, The Hiker. When Allen George Newman built it, the Spanish-American War was still fresh in the American mind. It was made to honor the men who fought in that war, and in the Philippines and in the Boxer Rebellion. There are numerous copies of the statue, and of a similar one done a couple years later by Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson, around the country. The one in the picture is in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and was put up in 1940. It was presented to the City of Ypsilanti by members of the 31st Regiment of the Michigan Volunteer Infantry, of which my own great-great-grandfather, Edwin P. McMullen, was a member. The Honorable Harry F. Kelly, then Michigan Secretary of State, described The Hiker as an archetypal American, representing our longstanding tradition of civic nationalism:
We are paying today a tribute to plain American citizenship. I do not know whether our Hiker came from the South or East, the North or West; I do not care. Whether he came from a large city, or a village; I do not care; whether from the [world] of labor or from a college; I don’t care. We do not know what religion he learned at his mother’s knee. We do not care. It is enough for us that he illustrates the basic quality of American government.
But how much we do care! When the Honorable Mr. Kelly said that we do not know “what religion” our Hiker grew up with, the assumption was that it was some form of Christianity. The Hiker is clearly not a Muslim, a Hindu, a Jew, or a practitioner of voodoo. He certainly speaks English, and if he speaks any Spanish it’s probably because he wanted to tell some Spaniard in Cuba to go fuck himself. And if he went to college, he definitely didn’t take women’s studies.
Oh yeah—and he’s White. That’s problematic for the people who presently call the shots in the US. There were Black soldiers who fought for the United States in Cuba as well, but that isn’t enough for the Brahmins who largely shape US foreign and domestic policy today. America having a meaning that even implies something Western is anathema to them. Of course, we’re talking about people who are often so obsessed with deconstructing Whiteness that even making everyone beige won’t be enough. This is the horrible result of us calling our own bluff on our civic nationalism. We’ve found out the hard way that civic nationalism, as opposed to ethnic, religious, or thedish nationalism, only works when more or less every citizen belongs to certain thedes, certain assumed ingroups. In other words, it works when it isn’t really civic nationalism. When we used to speak of ‘the American way of life’, we meant a Western way of life. Somewhere along the line, we started pretending that it had nothing to do with race or religion, and that abstract ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ were enough to make America great. The fact that Detroit, where my great-great-grandfather was born, can no longer even pass for a civilized society, is enough to tell us that this was a very bad idea.
My home State of Texas, whose Independence Day was on Sunday, is another example of this pattern. Texas was founded on much the same civic ideals as the Union:
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the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty, and only safe guarantee for the life, liberty, and property of the citizen.
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our arms … are essential to our defence, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.
Texans, like Americans in 1776, didn’t want independence out of mere thedish interest. In typical Western fashion, we wanted to justify the act of war with some higher principle. This is noble, but it can become unwise. Civil liberty and the right to bear arms are fine and good things when taken in their proper thedish context, but without context, you end up with a State where Whites are simply the largest minority and a woman like Wendy Davis is running for Governor. Perhaps if Texas had not been annexed by the Union, things would have gone differently. But under the present system, it’s clear that White Americans do not belong to enough common thedes to constitute a single nation, let alone a single ethnic group. Brahmins have seen most Southerners, Midwesterners, and even other Yankees as foreigners for at least a century, and have lately shown a tendency to dehumanize us. This means that the American heritage of civic nationalism will need to be reëxamined.
So what comes next? Recent cultural and demographic trends are already beginning to tell us, and we need to be prepared. With more people, more room, and more foreign influence than any other Western country, we’ve got a lot to figure out.
from
Whither American Nationalism?
March 3, 2014
About one of the new “governors” in the Ukraine
RT reported that the new government in the Ukraine has appointed two new oligarchs to “govern” the east.
Considering that Aleksandr Muzychko, one of Right Sector’s leaders, has had some very strong words about jews, it’s worth noting that one of these new oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky, is a jew who, as RT mentioned, is co-owner of the Ukraine’s largest bank.
According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Kolomoisky and two other Jewish billionaires in the Ukraine are jewish activists and donors in Dnepropetrovsk. Kolomoisky is also the president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine who won the election to this post by a rather wide margin - a very popular jewish activist it would seem.
The United Jewish Community of Ukraine is the group that’s been making a blacklist of “anti-semites” in Ukraine under Kolomoisky’s leadership. Kolomoisky said, “We achieved certain success in making the so-called blacklist of anti-Semites. I think soon we will allow ourselves to publish some names from it.”
In 2010, Kolomoisky was made president of the European Council of Jewish Communities, during their Berlin meeting, in a move that Council members referred to as “nondemocratic”, “illegal”, and “hostile”. This was “less than a month after he was reportedly detained by Turkish authorities on a cruise ship where a number of underage prostitutes had been hired as entertainment.”
(Kolomoisky seen here chugging vodka shots in Berlin with Israel’s chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, a month after he was detained for suspicion of lewd behavior with underaged prostitutes.)
Kolomoisky is a dual citizen who carries Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship. Dual citizenship is already illegal under Ukrainian law, but the new lawmakers there have just proposed a bill that would impose a 10 year prison sentence for using “illegal Ukrainian citizenship to vote in elections or to hold a public office”.
Kolomoisky is also good friends with Vadim Rabinowitz, a man the United States government still won’t allow into America due to his involvement in criminal black market dealings for which he spent 7 years in prison. Vadim created the United Jewish Community of Ukraine and helped Kolomoisky with his coup of the European Council of Jewish Communities.
(Kolomoisky with Rabinovich)
These new appointments in the Ukraine prompted one commenter to say, “So it can feel completely Russian ^_^ like home.” Apparently, Jewish oligarchy is “like home” if you’re Russian.
Kolomoisky is definitely someone to keep an eye on.
March 2, 2014
Is Putin Bullying Obama? Yes—You Would Too
Our media reaches a new low in their defense of the effeminate beige chosen one, Obama, and reinforces the wussiness of the system once more, with a television headline on CNN that asks, “Putin Bullying Obama?” Traditional masculinity is attacked or portrayed negatively by the tastemakers and gatekeepers of society, and this is a prime example. Reality has a hard way of hitting a society based on pretty lies. This is it. This is the end result of a Cathedral system that denies reality, selects for pansy men and will not allow for masculinity to be fostered, encouraged and glorified.
The media has to frame the Putin-Obama symbolic confrontation (who has the real foreign power in the USG system?) with Putin as a negative attacker (“bullying”) and Obama the victim. We live in a victim culture. This is what modern America is. Someone is designated a victim and then their status skyrockets, causing whatever they say to have more gravitas, and whatever they do wrong is excusable due to being a victim. The media has to lie about the USG involvement in the Ukrainian mess despite being caught on tape discussing it. Instead of it being a man-versus-man showdown, the media has to portray the US side as passive victims of Russian aggression. This is geopolitics. You want to play Empire, you are going to need to be tough.
This is also the sick outcome of having a media-bureaucratic machine that makes real decisions and pulls the strings instead of a President with more authority. Because the man himself does not matter as much, which is how the media could help Obama along in 2004-2008, you can select for a symbol for elections. Say what you will about Romney, but do you think he isn’t full of masculine energy? He is a perfect Ivy stereotype of the guy who does it all. Think back to the first Romney-Obama debate. It was Don Draper versus puss-boy. Nixon is laughing about this in purgatory. The last man who thought he had individual power as President, and understood that dirty work needed to happen to get things done around the globe, would relish a match up against the Russians. The man saved Israel to beat the Soviets in a proxy battle.
It is hard to blame Obama. He is a product of the Left’s selection process. Turn the clock back twenty years, and Clinton is no better. Clinton is a fat nerd who grew up and got power doused on him and became a sex addict. The joke theme on Clinton was that he was the kind of guy who would fake helping three other guys lift a sofa. It was also said that his wife wore the pants in the marriage—this was twenty years ago, before every sitcom had that type of marriage as the standard. “Nancy Reagan was the first female president; Hillary just does it better” was a joke on the sitcom Grace Under Fire. This is the Left. Jackie O once said that Adlai Stevenson was the perfect pansy man that the “violently liberal” women in the Democratic Party, who “were scared of sex”, loved. Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama… not the kind of guys you want on your side in a fight. Obama gets mocked or spiritually slapped down by his wife in public monthly. Cory Booker, the former football player, gets pedicures and never seems to get around to finding the right girl to marry? Shucks. Kerry, the war vet, who saw limited action then came home to trash the military (he had to for prog credits) was still a softie compared to his rich harpy wife. Not to mention nearly every journalist in America.
That is the point though. Gelded men to pull the levers of power as the credentialed progressive apparatchiks of the system take care of it all. The Left does have some tough guys left—union guys, and minority-majority congressmen who like to shout, do still exist. They won’t get selected for higher office, though, due to the Left’s selection for credentialed “geniuses”. Minority-majority congressmen act like sub-Saharan politicians in office though as they skew extremely Left, often get embroiled in corruption scandals, and try to out-Black or out-Hispanic each other as Bobby Rush did to Obama. That’s the Left for you. W may have been dopey at times, but you know he was a guy’s guy with his alcohol problem and nicknaming attitude. McCain is senile and crazy now, but he was once a fighter pilot. Bob Dole was a war veteran who lost use of his arm but did not let them cut it off so he faked people out for years so as not to be less of a man. Chris Christie is a loudmouth, macho fat guy. You know he’s hiding some secret about some Jersey strip club from 1988. It’s still somewhat okay on the Right to be a man in traditional ways.
The media portrays veterans as ticking time bombs. Businessmen are said to be rapists of the environment, the working man (not that the Left really cares about the working class anymore), and perhaps random women. Fraternities are dens of rapists when not full of closet-case homos. Two guys work out together at the gym? Closet cases. Two guys cut their dicks off and get married? Heroes. Priest who gives advice to all who seek is portrayed as a homosexual pedophile in every movie. Rick Lazio was neck and neck with Hillary Clinton in the 2000 Senate race and he—oh no!—walked across the stage to tell her to sign something? He crossed a line, the evil aggressive man, and the NYT was still whining about it eight years later. Sorry, boys. That is the system. It works when the times are good and lies need to be maintained. Forget all those men working coal mines and oil rigs and sanitation, farming, operating CNC machines, and providing every other basic need that Mike Rowe showed on Dirty Jobs. Just a bunch of ‘bullies’ and rapists in waiting, according to the Left. Counterargument might be that they do allow Black men in the US to be portrayed positively in the media, but that’s worth another discussion and has a perfectly good explanation (it’s okay to spotlight a group when you don’t have to worry about them threatening the system). Anyway, if the media always portrays manly men negatively, who would I vote for in November 2012? Hmmm, traditional male or effeminate beige boy?
Does the man behind the podium matter? Not often as an actual wielder of power these days, but he does matter as a symbol. The vigilante gangs now fighting back against the cartels in Mexico? Men. As a Sailer reader pointed out with the missing libertarians in the Ukraine, men made decisions to storm barricades. Men fought cops. Men ran through fire. Some incredibly brave Orthodox priests tried to act as peacemakers. All the years of training and regular masses for that one moment. That’s the calling. Those are men. This is on the periphery of the Washington empire but it will find its way to America. When the time comes and the money is all gone, people will have to act. There will be a role for women, but the people storming the drones and slapping EMPs on armored Humvee police ‘cars’ will be men. Will your nation’s men be ready?
from
Is Putin Bullying Obama? Yes—You Would Too
February 28, 2014
Michael Ramirez Cartoon - Sun, Mar 02, 2014, http://j.mp/1cgXW04
February 28, 2014
Several nooses hang ready “for traitors of Ukraine”.
(Source: rt.com)
February 28, 2014
The Jewish progressives over at Think Progress are worried about white men engaging in currency platforms that sidestep traditional banking. One wonders if their defense of the global banking structure makes Jacob Schiff smile from his seat down in hell. Five instances of “white/white men/white males” in 3 paragraphs. That’s impressive.
However, non-whites are getting in on the Bitcoin action, too. Ben Horowitz funded Coinbase with Marc Andreessen. It’s probably better to blame the “white men” for their “privilege” in sidestepping the unprivileged (?) banking legacy of people like Suasso, Itzig, Ephraim, Rothschild, Warburg, Schiff, etc., than to admit what even Marx observed.
"The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general." - Karl Marx
Don’t worry, Think Progress, you should see plenty of your co-ethnics in any sort of move outside of the “enshrined banking system”. After all, e-shekels are still shekels. You can bank on that.
February 28, 2014
Metaculturation: How White America is Becoming More Southern
The past generation and a half have seen the development of a new dominant political coalition in the United States under the banner of the Democratic Party.
Where the Republican and Democratic parties both had sizable support across class lines throughout the 20th century, since the 1980s the two parties have comes to represent not mere opposing factions, but distinct cultural elements. The upper-middle-class demographic who now lead the Democratic coalition has homogenized—you will find effete Brahmins in California who have the same political views, the same taste in nearly everything from music to fashion, and even much the same bland accent, as on the East Coast. Middle-and working-class Whites, who often vote Republican despite increasingly finding themselves unrepresented by either party, maintain some of their regional distinctions—if you meet a New Yorker who actually sounds like he’s from New York, or a Southerner who actually sounds like he’s from the South, you’re probably talking to a Vaisya, someone who has a sense of pride in his origins and values them over the ‘authenticity‘ of deliberately sounding like you’re from nowhere and refusing to eat genetically modified foods.
But just as the Brahmin caste has consolidated not only politically but culturally since the Reagan administration, a parallel trend has arisen: the Southernization of middle- and working-class Whites. As noted above, this is not so much discernible from dialect as from the fact that you can find Confederate battle flags being flown in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maine. You’ll also find that Southern country music is massively popular in States as far apart as Montana and Ohio. As the United States are increasingly divided along caste lines, regional differences are subsumed into broader clusters of general values, beliefs, and practices.
This subsumption, thanks to the treatment of cultural matters by the media and by the political system—but we repeat ourselves—includes the watering down of distinct thedish elements that do not have some political relevance. Regional, or even national, trends wash away subtle differences in local custom and speech, unique forms of trade and organization give way to more widely applicable and politically actionable models, the finer points of Protestant theology become crowded out by a conspicuous attachment to Zionism by many Christian conservatives, whose love for Israel is not reciprocated in the slightest, and even Jews themselves drift away from their religious traditions in favor of an idea of Jewish identity centered around political activism and remembering the Holocaust (and otherwise, who would do the job of reminding Germans of their “everlasting” guilt?). Elements of culture that are not directly politically useful are lost, and replaced by weaker ones, designed and promoted by political interest groups, allowing less room for communal identity, but carrying more political content.
This process, this political weaponization of culture, can be called metaculturation. Just as normal enculturation occurs when one is either born into a particular culture or is adopted into it at some later point, metaculturation involves the adoption of these weakened and exaggerated forms of one’s ancestral culture. In this case, Vaisyas are metaculturating due both directly to the general watering-down of old thedish distinctions and as a reaction to the antagonism of the Brahmin caste. Vaisyas are simultaneously losing what remains of their great-grandparents’ culture and distorting it, because even as progressive ideas maintain the upper hand, even as culture becomes progressively homogenized (in both senses of the word: many activists of the Progressive Era argued in support of this process), Vaisyas don’t want to be Brahmins.
A look at Wikipedia’s brief article on Southernization reveals the casual contempt for the South held by the typical US progressive. The sentence about the South having “infiltrated the national stage” tells you almost all you need to know. Infiltrated! The South especially, but the entire middle and southern section of the US in general, is viewed increasingly not only as a foreign entity by the namaste-and-a-latte set, but as an enemy. It is entirely lost on Brahmins that the divisions of the Civil War were reconciled as the 19th century ended, with tens of thousands of Southerners signing up to fight with their fellow Americans in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and putting the carnage of the 1860s and the contemptuous treatment of Reconstruction behind them. For these smugly irresponsible pseudo-sophisticates, it’s always 1861.
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Metaculturation: How White America is Becoming More Southern
February 28, 2014
The rise and fall of different languages in America over time
February 27, 2014
Michael Ramirez Cartoon - Fri, Feb 28, 2014, http://j.mp/1hmX3lX
February 26, 2014
How Americans Already Pay For Maternity Leave
The list of gimmedats from the 21st-century feminist agitator continues to grow. It never is enough. Most feminists in 1965 would be amazed at free birth control, a society that protects abortion rights, no-fault divorce, child support for illegitimate kids—but there would be just one who would be pissed and want more. That is where we are today. The steady drum beat but in the background is the problematic situation of no paid maternity leave for American women. This is part of the distressing wage gap between men and women, for which, when viewed in foreign nations that do have it, maternity leave proves not to be a fix. The media frames this gap as a failure in American policy, but the secret is that you already pay for maternity leave.
If you live in California (oldest, richest program), New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island or Hawaii, you pay for State-paid maternity leave. You have done so for decades. Note that the Huffpo article linked above is careful to say the US has no program but some States have cash benefits. Because getting cash benefits is somehow different from getting payments from the government. There are roughly 70 million people in those States listed above, which is over 20% of the US. These programs treat the birth of a child like an illness, and routinely pay for 6 weeks of disability if natural and 8 weeks if a caesarian procedure was performed. The benefits are not the incredibly generous benefits of Europe, but in California it is 55% of weekly earnings, in New Jersey 66 2/3%, and 58% in Hawaii. These plans are administered by bloated State agencies, but some States allow third-party insurance providers to perform duties. Usually companies keep plans with the State agencies because they are more generous with benefit payments and do not charge more for premiums from companies despite horrible cost overruns that may happen.
Those laws were written decades ago when private-sector unions had power. Some secondary effects that then cost everyone, not just those States’ residents, are still with us today. Those benefits had to be carried even if the employer was based in another State. Because of State-mandated benefits in one State, union representatives had a shiny new object to use at the negotiating table. Pennsylvania manufacturers with New York and New Jersey exposure were stuck in a hard place. They provided private insurance to non-State-mandated employees and passed the cost on to consumers. This contributed to the higher costs of American labor, giving the consultants more ammunition to outsource work to platform firms in Asia. If the annual cost just for insurance mandated by States equates to $200/year, you are taking about a large chunk of annual wages in Third World nations. In Vietnam, with the cheapest labor out there, one worker costs $0.39 per hour, or $811 on a 40 hour workweek 52 weeks a year. That is a no-brainer to a consultant with no loyalty to Americans nor any concept of quality.
Paid maternity leave is another gimmedat for women that will have negative effects on the nation as a whole. How many moms work anyway? How many would want to take 26 weeks off paid? I’m serious, because we will be told this will help with closing the wage gap (not to help families bond), and we know the type of women who are going to put career advancement over their kids will not stay out for 26 weeks. They might miss a promotion, after all. The entire private sector of employer-paid disability insurance is going away as it is too cost-prohibitive, with things like AFLAC replacing it. AFLAC is employee-paid. The talk may be faint now, but it will grow. If you want to fight it, point out the programs already in place. We have soft forms of maternity leave now. Let us formalize them and break the system faster. After all, they have subsidized abortion, subsidized birth control, and tax breaks for day care. We might as well pay them solely to sit at home and magically close the gap.
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How Americans Already Pay For Maternity Leave
