Untimely Observations

It seems that James Edwards and most others have missed the best part of Glenn Beck’s MLK rally.  Those who watch the Glenn Beck Show will have noticed that one of his favorite regulars is Alveda King, the civil rights leader’s niece.  Here is ABC News on her appearance last Saturday.

On the 47th anniversary of her uncle's historic "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, politician and activist Alveda King has joined conservative commentator Glenn Beck at the same spot to bring people together in paying tribute to America's soldiers and "restoring honor" to America...

While speaking in front of tens of thousands today in DC, King said that she hopes that white privilege will become human privilege and that America will soon repent of the sin of racism and return itself to honor.

King also mentioned “white privilege”, and even claimed to have invented the term, in a 2005 interview with Newsweek.

William Saletan at Slate sees the Beck rally as the final conservative surrender to multi-cultural orthodoxy.

Did these portrayals whitewash the sins against which King campaigned? No. In fact, the rally was full of apologies. "It was you, Lord God, who called us to account when we broke the treaties with the first peoples," the Rev. Paul Jehle confessed in the opening prayer. "You called us to repentance. And you, O God, called us to repentance when we did not live up to our creed, and we did not treat everyone as equal." Palin followed Jehle to the podium, calling slavery "our greatest shame." Beck told the crowd, "Let's be honest: If you look at history, America has been both terribly good and terribly bad." He conceded: "Countries make mistakes. We have made more than our fair share." A video reviewed the ugly era of segregation and concluded that King "awoke our nation's collective consciousness." Awoke our consciousness! That's a line straight out of the 1960s...

The rally organizers didn't pretend that all our sins were behind us. "We as citizens must all carry Martin Luther King's dream in all of our hearts today," said the rally video. "The dream is not completed. It's an ongoing struggle, one that all Americans should always be willing to undertake." Borrowing a favorite progressive buzzword, the video affirmed King's recognition in 1963 that "this was the day to inspire change."..

Christianity helps. Its message of repentance helps people admit their mistakes, inviting them to surrender to God rather than to their political enemies. But pride is still hard to swallow. Conservatives need a way to distinguish their apologies from the apologies of progressives. Hence their contrast between looking forward and "wallowing.”..

Crying "socialism" is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It's a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn't end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That's because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it's a really slow bus. 

Let’s not pretend that the Fox host “had to” do all this in order to remain on TV.  I understand that politics is a game of inches, but you hope for people that move you towards your goal, not away from it.  There are plenty of constitutional, legal and moral arguments against affirmative action, enforced diversity and third world immigration which don’t brush up against white nationalism which Beck could use.  Instead, whether for career reasons, out of personal conviction or both, he's chosen to take white self-flagellation to a completely unheard of level.  One can only pity those regular Americans who thought they may have found a spokesman; I can’t help but believe that all but the dimmest of bulbs are going to start tuning this huckster out.

The one really ironic thing about the whole Thilo Sarrazin comedy, which nobody in the English speaking world seems to have noticed: he has an Arabic last name. I'm assuming his family emigrated to France some time around the Crusades, as they have recognized him as a Hugenot at least, but that's about as German a last name as "Abdullah" is.

Click here if you don't know what I am talking about. Of course, considering his statements controversial is also pretty comical, but this is the EU we're talking about.

Edit add: I suppose he could also be a Basque.

Richard Spencer and Robert Burnham’s Facebook conversation is pretty frightening, but I must say that it pales in comparison to a recent Free Republic thread about Julian Assange.  A commentator recommends the government go after the man’s family and when someone objects he’s shouted down as a liberal commie.

Some other representative suggestions.

His head would look good on a pike.

He truly needs to be carbombed

Surely someone in our DOD can take this pipsqueak out. We have killed better men for less in the past.

I support a CIA covert operation to coat his butt-plug with arsenic. ARSEnic...get it? (too strong? sorry.)

This truly has become deadly serious. He needs to be taken out. No internet bravado here, our government or allies need to act and end this. I don’t know if our various agencies can act on their own, but if they can, I hope they do soon. 

$200 for a bullet between that mother effer's eyes.

All this hatred, and for what?  Ten years ago a couple fanatics killed three thousand Americans.  Every death is a tragedy, but the US has sinned against the Muslim world much more than it’s been sinned against.  Half a million Iraqis died due to US sanctions and then another half million thanks to the war.  Yet if any Muslim in the world talks like these so-called patriotic citizens do it’s proof of the inherent depravity of the religion.

What’s really scary is speculating on what Republicans would advocate if there actually was a terrorist problem-this is, if the murder rate for Muslims ever reached 50% of what it is for Americans blacks or people of the Islamic faith ever managed to kill 1/10th as many people as the US murders overseas.  They already defend the right of the president to murder anyone whom he deems a “terrorist” and hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely.  Thankfully the “war on terror” is a government fabrication, for if it wasn’t and people actually were dying in any large numbers the US would by now make North Korea look like Hong Kong.

What indicates that conservatives are particularly dull is that they seem to understand that everybody in power is against them, but at the same time desire the state to have the prerogative to decide whether they live or die.  It reminds me of when William F. Buckley said he was fine with totalitarianism in America in order to defeat international communism while he rallied against the Godless and degenerate elite, who naturally ended up running the system he advocated. But at least Buckley was facing an enemy that had taken over half the planet and had the potential to destroy it all, not a few isolated anti-social failed engineering students and low IQ Nigerians with firecrackers in their pants.  

I don't know if I quite agree with Richard and Robert who believe that these sentiments represent something healthy that simply should be channeled into another direction.  The way one terrorist attack carried out with box cutters threw the entire nation into the arms of big brother shows how effeminate and cowardly we've become.  The branding of anybody who tried to link US policy to the terrorist attacks as "blaming America first" represents not only a general stupidity, but hostility to intellectual inquiry.  The wars that resulted out of the attacks managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of White Man's Burden imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.  And of course hostilities in the Middle East have facilitated the complete Zionist take over of the Republican Party.   Sure, there's a decent bit of implicit whiteness and anti-ethnomasochism in there, but it's in a very thick neo-con shell which will be very difficult to crack.  

In an age of checklists, decision trees, and zero tolerance, it's a puzzling notion.

People think it means giving up on reason. Or doing what's been done no matter what. Or accepting an external authority that has nothing to do with the situation we're actually dealing with.

What else could it mean, when each of us has his own thoughts and goals, reason is a matter of studies and statistics, and social authority is either following rules we've agreed to for our own purposes, or getting someone else's demands shoved down our throat?

A column by Jonah Goldberg published in the dead-tree National Review (August 30) “A Muslim Gay Bar by the Mosque?” typifies the utterly infantile quality of our current movement conservative discourse. Goldberg writes in glowing defense of Fox News celebrity Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated (presumably in a serious way) the creation of a Muslim gay bar in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Goldberg happily embraces this idea as a “tough-minded libertarian.” After all, freedom, he insists, “is a cultural institution that needs to be defended, even if that means offending people.” Moreover, “whatever you may think of gay bars, they’re not going away in the freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else in American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such places to one extent or another.”

One might ask Goldberg, the “tough-minded libertarian,” why just one month earlier he had denounced Rand Paul in a column for raising hesitant objections to Provision Two of the Civil Rights Act, a provision that restricts an employer’s right to hire whom he wants for a job. According to Goldberg in one of the most ferocious tirades I’ve seen coming from his pen, unless the subject is the critics of Israel or “Obama fascism,” he let loose against the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky for “lamenting the lost right of bigots.”

Apparently the anti-discrimination mechanism created by Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave this country “economic freedom” for the first time, although it is not at all clear how it did so. But in any case why is my historic right to hire or accommodate whom I want in my business establishment less of a right than the right to run a gay bar, to the consternation of religious and moral traditionalists? Why should I have less of a right not to confer a job on a prospective employee than to scandalize devout Christians by establishing a sodomy recruiting agency in their neighborhood?

The great South Carolina classicist and Confederate soldier Basil L. Gildersleeve once joked that the war was fought over a point of grammar: “ ‘United States are,’ said one, ‘United States is,’ said another.” The war did not settle the question, however, and as late as 1909, Ambrose Bierce was still defending the use of “the United States are.” As he put it, “Grammar has not a speaking acquaintance with politics, and patriotic pride is not schoolmaster to syntax.” I wait in vain for neo-Confederates to revive this charming usage.

There is a contemporary battle over language that again pits a political interest against the rules of grammar. In this case, the political interest is feminism which, in these emasculated times, has something like the force of Union sentiment in 1863, so the rules of grammar have crumpled like the Confederates at the Battle of Lookout Mountain.

Until perhaps the 1970s, civilized English-speakers said things like “everyone should try his best.” No one doubted that “his” included both men and women -- no one except feminists, that is, who insisted they felt left out. They beefed in their shrill, humorless way, and for a while, there was a clumsy concession to both grammar and politics, in which people said “everyone should do his or her best.” A few people still try to please both camps this way, but the vast majority has abandoned principle, and hardly anyone now winces at such barbarisms as: “A leader must inspire their followers.” “If you have a friend, tell them to come.” “No one did their homework.” And why not something like, “My good friend can help themself to my clothes if they like.”

One of the dispiriting things about our enfeebled era is the inability of people to state obvious things that everyone knows are true. Many on the Alternative Right seem content to voice the unpopular truths about genetic links to intelligence, or statistical racial differences. A far more radical and obvious unpopular truth is that men and women are different.

I maintain that the deliberate denial of sexual dimorphism has had a larger impact on Western civilization than any other modern cultural delusion. Men and women have different psychological makeups, different athletic abilities, different aspirations, different physiology, different emotional reactions, much different reproductive functions, different consumer habits, and different capacities for rational thought and intellectual productivity. No civilization in all of human history has thought otherwise; ours is the first one to come up with something as obviously wrong as the Blank Slate theory. Human societies have survived all of the other kinds of dribbling lunacy the West presently self-immolates in. Many cultures have managed to survive for hundreds of years with multiculturalism, debasement of currencies, religious upheaval, widespread debt, usurious taxation and massive immigration and population transfer -- in some cases, even worse than we have today. None has ever thought to question sexual dimorphism, because the ancients were never that stupid.

Taking a very pedestrian example from current events, consider the dearth of women in physics and engineering. Academia, being what it is, considers this evidence of a vast world-wide conspiracy of  invisible men who are diabolically conspiring to keep women from succeeding in the hard sciences. If you're a working academic in one of these fields, you will engage in ritual Maoist witch hunts, looking for sexist oppressors. There is approximately zero evidence for this conspiracy theory, yet it is unquestioned by hard nosed savants who allegedly fear no ghosts. Some of these true believers doubtless understand the concepts of "mean" and "standard deviation," and may even be aware of the fact that men have both a higher mean intelligence, and a much higher standard deviation in intelligence distribution; in particular in the areas of intelligence which pertain to these professions. With these two facts, the conspiracy theory evaporates: there are more male scientists and engineers because there are more males who are capable of doing the work. Virtually nobody is willing to say this, despite it being completely obvious to anyone not equipped with an academic sinecure.

For those of us who prefer not to think out details of Gaussian distributions, we have the late, great, Australian philosopher of science, David Stove. His essay on the subject should be read in its entirety by all fans of truth and common sense.

I believe that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men. By "on the whole," I do not mean just "on the average"; though I do mean that much. My belief is, if you take any degree of intellectual capacity which is above average for the human race, as a whole, then a possessor of that degree of intellectual capacity is a good deal more likely to be man than a woman.

This proposition is consistent, of course, with there being women, and indeed with there being any number of women, at any level of intellectual capacity however high. But it does mean, for example, that if there is a large number of women at a given above average level of intellectual capacity, then there is an even larger number of men at that level.

In the past almost everyone, whether man or woman, learned or unlearned, believed the intellectual capacity of women to be inferior to that of men. Even now this is, I think, the belief of most people in most parts of the world. In this article my main object is simply to remind the reader of what the evidence is, and always was, for this old belief, and of how strong that evidence is. An opposite belief has become widely current in the last few years, in societies like our own: the belief that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole equal to that of men. If I could, I would discuss here the reasons for the sudden adoption by many people of this opinion. But I cannot, because I have not been able to find any reasons for it, as distinct from causes of it. The equality-theory (as I will call it) is not embraced on the grounds of any startling facts which have only lately come to light. It is not embraced on the grounds of some old familiar facts which have been misunderstood until lately. It is not embraced, as far as I can see, on any grounds at all, but from mere prejudice and passion. If you ask people, "What evidence is there for the equality-theory?", you do not get an answer (though you are likely to get other things).

Rather, the question is felt to be somehow improper, morally or intellectually, and is thought not to deserve any answer.

.....

The evidence for the inferior intellectual capacity of women is so obvious and overwhelming, that anyone who can lightly set it aside must be defective in their attitude to evidence; and our contemporary equality-theorists are in fact (as I have hinted several times), religious rather than rational in their attitude to evidence. As providing some further indication of this, the following thought-experiment may be of use. Suppose that the historical evidence had been the exact reverse of what it has usually been: that is, suppose that the intellectual performance of men had been uniformly inferior, under the widest variety of circumstances, to that of women. Rational people would in that case be as confident of the superior intellectual capacity of women as they now are of the reverse. But would those people who are at present equality-theorists be as confident then as they are now of the equal intellectual capacity of the two sexes? To ask this question is to answer it. The fact is, our egalitarians treat evidence on a basis of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose; indeed, to say so is "putting it mild," at that.

I occasionally wonder at how we've reached this level of cultural madness that educated people are now required to believe that there is some vast international male conspiracy designed to keep women away from ... what amounts to a really lousy job. "The international male conspiracy" is also not a very good theory for the lack of noteworthy female entrepreneurs. I can think of only one female entrepreneur who succeeded in making a meaningful contribution, and most of you never heard of her, because there are hundreds of male entrepreneurs who created more important companies than she did. I don't think the "international male conspiracy" is the reason why the female world record for the deadlift in these days of widespread steroid abuse is only 500lbs; an accomplishment any healthy young male can do with a few years worth of training and beefsteaks.

In 1000 years, a more enlightened civilization may wonder at our vast social experiment with attempting to abolish sexual dimorphism. Will this be seen as the glorious liberation that we tell ourselves it is today? Or will it be seen as something akin to attempting to teach all dogs to walk on their hind legs, just because some of them are physiologically capable of it? This is a question which needs answering, and I'd prefer it be answered by something other than total civilizational collapse. The only Westerners who seem to notice the importance of sexual dimorphism aloud are libertines, one or two white nationalist thought criminals, and the occasional HBD enthusiast. I think it is well beyond time for people to have a rational conversation about this without fear of being hectored by grouchy man-jawed harridans, or whatever it is which has made people this silly.

The YouTube filmmaker NXSchell has created a powerful video on the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual degeneration of Western man. "The Last Man's" appears quite happy living in a democracy.   

The comic version can be found here. 

Here they are, the real villains of American society according to the mass media and commentariat: the middle class. The lower classes hate them because they are better than lower class people. The upper classes sneer at them as being unenlightened boobs with no taste, or pious frauds who go to Church on Sundays and appear in Norman Rockwell paintings. Really, everyone hates them because they're the happiest people in the country. I didn't care for them while growing up (as a member of the lower orders), and I didn't for a while as a young adult (as an aspiring member of the upper middles), but looking at them now, they really have life squared away better than most other classes of Americans do. I wouldn't want to be one of them, but I can see where others might like it. In my opinion, most of the independent voters, libertarians and tea party types are, in fact, middle class people. They're the ones who need to be won over in elections: the other social classes are mostly bloc voters.

Since I was always pretty contemptuous of them when I was below them on the class structure, it is hard for me to say how to suck up to them. Probably the best way to gain their favor is to avoid frightening them. Another might be to make them think you're comfortably above them in social class. These are the people who have most obviously avoided the social decay that has set in since the 1970s; there are middle class towns which are exactly as they were in the 1950s. This is why the middle class are so hard to win over in elections; they don't notice a lot of the changes which have ruined society for everyone else. They also don't want to rock the boat. The fact that they are out in the streets protesting indicates that we live in remarkable times.

Anyhow, here's how I break it down:

1. Don't work too hard. You're in the middle! it's safe in the middle. You might go to school, but it is not important if you finish, or study anything hard. That's for those gosh durned upper middles; wow are they ever smart! Middle class people have jobs -they go to work for money. They do not have careers. They are not interested in saving the world.

2. Play sports when you are in school. It doesn't matter what; soccer, baseball, football. Sports are fun.

3. Marry a nice middle class girl from your home town.

4. Buy a house, make a family. That's what it is all about, ain't it?

5. Go to Church on Sundays. That's what middle-class people do! Or don't, if you're the type who doesn't; that's OK, too.

6. Dress appropriately; as in, like everyone around you. Tie if they have ties, t-shirt if they have t-shirts. It is most important for middle-class people to fit in.

7. Hobbies: church, family, watching TV, watching sports, watching sports TV, sellin' a little real estate, Back Yard BBQ, thinkin' the little woman is still pretty cute after all these years, and gosh-diddley-durn it, you are a lucky guy!

8. Politics: well, middle of the road of course! Maybe a "Reagan democrat" here, or a "pro choice republican" there, but nuthin too extremey-weemey.

9. Military service: sure! Probably an Army officer, or NCO.

10. Habitat: suburbs, exurbs, places where you can buy a house.

Example middle class people: anyone who has a house in a suburb. I am hard pressed to think of  examples of middle class people who anyone has heard of. I do know they like their butter refrigerated hard for some reason. Upper middles don't eat butter, because they think it will give them a heart attack. Working class people are too tired at the end of a day's work to fight with their butter, so we like it room temperature. The upper middle class media people don't portray them well, even when they try to disguise their contempt. An example from Cinema is "American Beauty" -an upper middle class portrayal of middle class life. The middle class rarely get rich enough for people to notice them, so there are no plutocratic examples, except perhaps for Warren Buffet, who is really unusual in many ways (but one with mostly middle class folkways). They are the teeming, faceless masses who make America a decent country. When they become extinct, America will become Brazil. Even Peggy Noonan is saying so in the Wall Street Journal: it is that obvious at this point.

Young people today have been programmed to “Rage Against the Machine.” The Left has successfully marketed youthful rebellion against “The Man” for decades. One has to wonder, though, how long it will take until today’s budding hipsters -- gussied up in a postmodern hodgepodge of recycled rebellions past -- finally realize that they are the new squares.

“The Man” is now a smooth-talking, b-ball playin’ brother who come up from bein’ a community organizer in the ghetto.  He wants to save the planet, offer healthcare to everyone, punish the greedy, redistribute wealth, and offer a welcoming hand to his working-class Brown brothers from the south. He’s surrounded himself with a rainbow coalition of the choicest minorities.

It’s got to be tough to make it as a real radical lefty these days. You really have to do your research and get out your microscope to find your microaggressions.  You have to go so far left that it feels almost tongue in cheek and goofy, like that awkwardly ironic t-shirt you bought at Urban Outfitters. You have to hold an anti-plastic bag drum circle. It’s not like back in the ‘60s when you could just grow your hair out, get naked and sit around singing and smoking pot in the mud.  And it’s not some wizened old beatnik feeding you communist propaganda; it’s your schoolteacher, your principal, your college professor and your Supreme Court Justices. The future is now, cats, and you can’t fight “The Man” when he’s on your side. You can take to the streets and march, if that’s what you’re into, but your signs might as well say “Yes, sir, more of the same, please!” All you can do is become part of the machine, another cog. Your “rage” is all staged.

Any real resistance, any real rebellion at this point will have to come from the right.

There is growing reason for it. This has not been the people’s revolution. If polls are to be believed and votes are to be counted, the federal government is now behaving more and more like an oligarchy, where a cadre of elites, academics and “experts” decide what’s good for the people. Healthcare reform was passed with waning support, when few even knew what was in the bill. The American people were assured by their irritated masters that they would learn to like it. The State of Arizona, a border state facing a massive influx of illegal immigrants, decided to crack down and enforce the law. A majority of Americans have always supported sensible immigration control and rule of law over free-for-all, but “The Man” stepped in, sued the state and got a judicial decision that hobbled Arizona’s attempt at immigration control before it went into effect.

Most recently, an openly gay federal judge negated the will of a majority of Californians -- 7 million of them -- and decided that the state would recognize same-sex marriages whether the people agreed or not.

As the state progressively abandons the song and dance required to maintain the illusion that America is governed for and by the people, as it stops asking and listening and starts telling, it becomes increasingly illegitimate as a people’s government. At a certain point, it stops being us and starts being them, they, IT.

Andy Nowicki called it when he wrote:

They are the rulers; we are the ruled. They are in control; we aren't.

In fact, they have shown themselves to be openly contemptuous of, even mocking towards, anyone with the audacity to try to stop them from achieving their goals. "Pass all the resolutions you want, suckers!" they sneer, "We'll just send our boys in black to knock 'em down and call 'em 'unconstitutional,' and it'll be back to square one for you bozos!"

Yes, they have the power, and they'll eventually get exactly what they want.

The far Left has been portraying the state as an illegitimate oppressor for years. Until recently, the Right has probably seen itself reflected in the halls of power enough to think of the government as “us,” albeit ever more besieged by usurpers. But the worm has turned and the usurpers have usurped. Again, after Nowicki, “let them have the state” -- withdraw, disengage, ridicule and defy the Other.

What the state does is simply what the state does.

It has long been clear that the list of “rights, benefits and responsibilities” associated with marriage and denied to same-sex couples are beside the point for the majority of same-sex marriage supporters. For many, even a perfect civil union law that replicated those rights, benefits and responsibilities exactly would not be an acceptable compromise, so long as the word marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples. The push for same-sex marriage is emotionally charged and highly symbolic. It’s about a word that equalizes, validates and -- same-sex marriage supporters hope -- confers a sense of collective acceptance that same-sex unions are essentially the same as heterosexual marriages.

But what the state does is simply what the state does.

Those on the Right can withhold social approval and deny that acceptance.  The Right can rebel against the state by resisting socially, by refusing to pretend that this consensus exists, by refusing to give the actions of the state any moral authority.

The general public does this already. Take for example the manufactured consensus on transsexuals.

According to the law of the land in many states, a man who takes female hormones and chooses to live as a woman -- usually but not always with the goal of getting breast implants and having his penis removed -- can legally become a woman.  Likewise, any woman who prefers comfortable shoes can take male hormones, live as a man, and according to the law, become a man. The media will deferentially perpetuate this illusion by referring to her with all of the pronouns normally reserved for men who were born male. Reporters will even report, straight-faced, that a man has given birth.

The state considers Thomas Beatie a man, and the United States Tennis Association allowed Renée Richards to play as a woman, but few people actually accept that a female can truly become a male or vice versa. If you doubt this, imagine an average guy telling his friends and family that he is dating a male-to-female transsexual. “But the state considers her a woman” will not change the fact that in most people’s eyes, that dude is having sex with another dude. A dude with particularly buoyant breasts who is missing a penis -- a dude who looks like a lady -- but a dude all the same.  To the general public, Thomas Beatie is a freakshow, a bearded lady who had a baby. Chaz Bono is just another fat lesbian with a short haircut. The government and the media say one thing, and the rest of us chuckle and believe another.

What the state says is simply what the state says.

Same-sex marriage offers another opportunity to separate what is right from what the state says. Among the various factions and thinkers on the Right, there will be dispute about the place of homosexuals in society and there will competing visions of what is ideal. But I think just about everyone can agree, though sometimes for different reasons, that same-sex marriage is a ridiculous sham and should be treated as such.

And here’s where it comes down to you.

You have the choice either to concede and play along, or you can keep same-sex “marriages” encased in sarcastic quotation marks. I have male associates who refer to male partners as their “husbands” and who consider themselves “married.” I’m not going to indulge that fantasy. As a writer, I don’t refer to MTFs as women, and I won’t refer to some lesbian’s live-in lover as her “wife” -- no matter what the state says.

To restate the old H.L. Mencken zinger, we must respect the other fellow's “marriage,” but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his “husband” is handsome and his adopted children are smart.

“Oh, is that what they’re calling it now?”