The Elusive Wapiti

Friday Roundup--First Time in a Long Time Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Australian study: "Combined vaccines are a sudden onslaught to the immune system" (link opens PDF)

HL: We are all Zionists now, and Cognitive Infiltration (i.e., professionalized sock-puppeting with intent to influence public opinion).

PMAFT: Not the same institution (marriage and divorce, that is)

DW at Incendiary Insight posts footage of the 'Ring of Fire' eclipse.

Why go through the middle-man when one can just go direct? China bypassing Wall Street and purchasing US treasuries direct from the USG.

Vox Day: Facebook IPO exposes the nakeness of the US economy and dismantles John Scalzi's condescending assertion of 'white male privilege'.

Alte finds that more men correlates with less rape.

An interesting find: higher female employment correlates with divorce. Begs the questions: do women work as a sort of insurance against a possible future divorce? Or does the very fact of women being in the workplace makes them more likely to divorce? HT: Foseti.

FB: IMF vs the $PLC Round 2.

Ethical, writing at IMF: The MRM as Insurance for Accidental Collisions With Feminism.

Steve Sailer: "Undocumented workers" in U.S. = "Illegal infiltrators" in Israel. One country is concerned with the health and stability of their culture, the other not. Wonder which one?

Whiskey, writing about DC Comics' plan to turn one of their characters homosexual. Keeping with the taste of the times? Or sign of the times. You decide. DC Comics Goes Gay.

Dalrock on how modern Churchianity has reframed Biblical marriage into Marriage 2.0. Click to read his 5th installment.

Mangan: Kucinich is Right.

Paul Elam: Forbes' Misandry for Profit Scheme.

One Third of Child Sexual Abuse Committed by Women

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:45:00 +0000

That's the attention-getting experience of UK's "Child Line", as documented in this 2009 article in the UK's "Independent", titled "Sharp rise reported in child abuse by women":

Last year ChildLine heard from 1,311 children who said they had been sexually assaulted by their own mother, representing 61 per cent of all calls about abuse by females. Research for the helpline found that boys were more likely to say they had been abused by a woman (1,722 cases) than by a man (1,651). In contrast, girls were over 10 times likelier to report being abused by a male (4,972) than by a female (420). A total of 2,972 children complained that they had been sexually assaulted by their father, 45 per cent of all calls about abuse by men. Previous research by the NSPCC suggested that women may be responsible for about one in 20 sex offences committed against children. Esther Rantzen, president of the helpline, said: "This report reveals that ChildLine, by listening to the direct and authentic voices of abused children, has shattered common myths about sexual abuse.

This finding is interesting in light of how sexual abuse of children is treated in our culture, particularly if the victim/accuser is a teenager. If the perp/accused is female, the incident is treated almost sympathetically, with a high likelihood that it will be accompanied by soft human-interest stories about the "true love" that exists between the older woman and the "lucky" young male.

This contrasts greatly with what tends to happen if the perp/accused is male, where the incident is suddenly equated to forcible rape of a child who could not possibly have wanted the encounter, and is only "lucky" that the liaison was caught in time by authorities. I think this difference in how the two crimes are treated in our culture has an effect on reporting rates, in that abused girls are encouraged to report and are treated with sympathy, whereas boys similarly abused are far less so. Thus it is entirely possible that the proportion of female to male offenders be closer to 1 than the present 0.6 as suggested by this data point.

I note also that boys in this sample were more likely to report being sexually abused by their own mother than by any other woman, whereas girls are more likely to be abused by a male known to them but not their father. Again, reporting may be skewed here, as sexual abuse by a woman not a boys' mother may be viewed by the woman, society, and the boy himself as a Mrs Robinson-type of maturing experience and not sexual abuse per se.

Losing It

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:30:00 +0000

MTV is was holding casting calls, seeking young adults who want to lose their 'v card' on a reality show:

Young adulthood is a time for exploration. New relationships, fresh experiences and sexual firsts…

Now MTV is looking to frankly capture that journey in a new series called My First…We’re looking for adults who are ready to go all the way. Let MTV come along on your journey… as you try to lose your virginity!

It's nihilistic trash like this that reconfirm our family's decision to more or less evict the television from the house (we still have movies, but that's it). Long ago, MTV used to have actual music set to videos, featuring Martha Quinn, war-painted Pat Benatar wanna-bes, and lion-maned gender-bending front men. Retrograde as that influence was even then, MTV's programming in the 90s descended into sexually charged reality shows of which this is merely the next iteration.

Apparently, the suits at Viacom thought better of a reality show featuring teens losing their virginity on television after word got out:

Maybe they couldn’t find 40 virgins who are also attention whores.

MTV on Friday abruptly yanked an Internet casting call for men and women who wanted to “give up their V Card” in front of a national audience.

The open casting call posted earlier this month on RealityWanted.com was deleted after an inquiry from The Post.

I would say this was a narrowly averted close call, but that would suggest this sort of rubbish was a one-off. But it's not a bug, it's a feature, and each day that passes, our family's decision to disconnect the television in our living room and to homeschool S3 becomes more apparently correct and increasingly counter-cultural.

HT: CL.

Rise of the Breastaurant

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Seems Hooters has some competition in the tacky and chock-full-o'-pun filled half-naked casual dining segment:

Over the past decade, the “breastaurant” has emerged as the second-fastest growing sector in the casual dining industry behind upscale burgers, says Darren Tristano, an industry consultant with Chicago-based Technomic, Inc., who coined the “breastaurant” neologism in 2007. Puns and plaid go with the territory. Addison, Tex.-based Twin Peaks, founded in 2005, has 20 U.S. locations with plans for another 30 by year-end. It exploits an Alpine lodge theme with “scenic views” provided by “Lumber Jill” servers in skimpy plaid shirts and hiking shorts. Canada is on Twin Peaks’s radar, says marketing director Meggie Miller: “We’ve received lots of interest and we’re open to seriously considering qualified [franchisee] candidates.” Meanwhile, regional players are thriving in the U.S., among them Brick House Tavern & Tap, Honey Shack, and Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke, which boasts “BBQ, beer, and Daddy’s girls” in midriff-baring sweaters.

“Breastaurant” customers are 80 per cent male, range in age from 21 to 35, and are not necessarily single, says Tristano. Tilted Kilt’s clientele skews slightly older at 38, says Hanby, who notes they’ve had success near Florida retirement communities and military bases.

A sadder commentary on the state between the sexes I don't think I could myself make. That men as a whole are so lonely, so sexually dissatisfied, so alienated from redeeming female company that they would line up, consciously or no, to be manipulated in such a blatant manner speaks volumes. This tragic take is surely seconded by those bitter old archeo-feminists whose heads likely explode upon reading this article. Seems Dworkin's and Brownmiller's heiresses have shucked off the old grumpy misandrist feminist theology in favor of a new, more pragmatic, more subtle, much happier in its misandry, one: why have SCUM parties when one can parade their wobbly bits in front of potential rapists for money? Off they go then to cheerily self-degrade in a bid to self-validate, by surrounding themselves with priapic adulatory males.

The hairy armpit feminists surely hate eateries such as these for their exploitation of women. But pray tell, who is more exploited in these sorts of establishments? The women who line up to parade their goods in front of men for money, or the men who frequent these sorts of diners for the food, the scenery, and the saccharine company? Which is more pathetic: the teaser, or the one who signs up to be teased?

What's more, the (male) CEO of one of these companies makes clear who's being goofed here. Men, the yoke's on you as you are cynically separated from your money:

“We’re a place that makes fun of men; women are this, sports are that,” Twin Peaks CEO Randy Dewitt has said. Servers taking a beer order will ask, “Do you want the ‘man size’ or the ‘girl size’?”

Tilted Kilt’s CEO Ron Lynch has spoken of servers employing “touchology”—touching the table often, and making guests feel at home. “Sometimes waitresses are providing the best part of a guest’s day,” he says [emphasis mine].

Hanby, who talks of “keeping it PG13,” insists the line between banter and flirting is not crossed: “It should not be sexual in any way, shape or form.” He doesn’t shy from the “breastaurant” label but says they don’t use it internally: “We never refer to our servers using a part of their anatomy,” he says. “We’d never put the ladies in a position that would objectify them,” a comment at odds with the publication of the annual women of Tilted Kilt calendar.

Hanby doesn’t deny the concept is based on the “sex sells” truism. “There’s sex appeal involved,” he says. “We don’t back away from that. It’s part of life every day, everywhere.”

On this last note, I am in total agreement. Sex appeal is indeed ubiquitous, and it seems increasingly socially acceptable for low women to tweak the lizard hind brain of men in her midst for fun, for ego, and for profit. "Best part of a man's day"? Truly sad. Most pathetic of all is the behavior of my brothers; immersed as they are in lad culture: they don't seem to mind at all.

The ever-useful Spengler's law of gender parity invokes itself yet again.

HT: Will S, in a comment at Traditional Christianity.

Parenting in a Blue Pill Age of Equalitarianism

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:50:00 +0000

Many torrents await men who have drunk the feminist kool-aid, even more so if they wed a woman raised on the feminist blue-pill as much or more than they were:

When K.J. Wiemer got married in the 1990s, he didn't think he was becoming a husband. Rather, he says, he saw himself as "one of two 20-something professionals living together, who were now entering the phase of 'officially' living together." Once in their 30s, however, and with two children, Mr. Wiemer and his wife realized that their roles had to change. "We sat down and decided together that I, as a lawyer, was likely to make more money," he says. "So I stayed working, and my wife stayed at home with the kids." But the new arrangement backfired. Mr. Wiemer says that he felt sheepish about asking his wife to "do something as antifeminist as doing the dishes or the laundry." Even as he grew resentful of her and unsure of his own duties as a husband, his kids, he says, were his "total joy." They remain so, though the couple divorced in 2001 with joint custody of their children, now 13 and 15. Mr. Wiemer has not remarried.

Among a growing number of today's men with children, Mr. Wiemer's story is not unusual: Adrift as they may be in their role as mates, they are proving themselves to be rock-solid fathers. Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. "We're getting a new cultural script for a 'new dad' but not for a 'new husband,' " says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia's National Marriage Project. "That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a 'stay-at-home mom' or 'stay-at-home dad' instead of as 'wife' or 'husband' signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself." [emphasis mine]

Reading this story, one can see the precursors that foreshadowed the divorce train wreck to come. "Two professionals living together", career gal quitting her job to raise chilluns, thinking that feminism relieves a SAHM from the responsibility to contribute to the maintenance of the household, and both parents investing in their children in lieu of the marriage itself.

Borrowing a page from my review of Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, it seems that the equalitarian erasing of distinctions between men and women, extended to the roles they perform inside the family, inside the four walls of the home, and in the labor market, is cause of much of the troubles discussed above. While I agree that the father-as-provider-only and mother-as-SAHM-only paradigms leave a lot to be desired--both overly specialize the maternal and paternal roles, when there should be substantial overlap--casting men and women as interchangeable parental units and fungible economic agents is as much or more of a mistake. Mr. Wilcox's quote above highlights the problem well, in that there is so little distinction between the modern husband and the modern wife that our society no longer attempts to make one, except to sell $10,000 wedding dresses, market tuxedos, and grease the gears of the divorce mill when the seven-year itch needs to be scratched. Still instinctively seeking that distinction when the culture refuses to permit discriminating between the male and female, however, fathers and mothers today seem to focus on their work and their children. This, rather than as it should be, with 'life partners' prioritized first and foremost and remunerated employment and children far lower on the totem pole.

To illustrate this phenomenon, refer to the the photo I placed at the top of this post...a woman with her three yo toddler son is suckling at her breast, while standing up. The father is not depicted, and the sense of the domestic order one gains from the photo is that of a home organized around the child(ren) rather than to succor the marriage bond first. The 'attachment parenting' fad referenced by the Time magazine cover--tweaking OCD and neurotic American mothers everywhere with the question "are you mom enough?"--is an outgrowth of excessive and misdirected American maternal culture...mothers who focus on their children so much that they forget that their first duty is to ensure that the answer to the questions "is monsieur happy?" and "do children know their place in the hierarchy?" is a resounding yes, Of course, men covered this ground first, way back in the bad old days of the nuclear family with their laser-like focus on financial provision, to the exclusion of all else, that effectively crowded out their duties to husband their wives and father their children. Thankfully, the workaholic dad archetype was long ago discredited as unhealthy for all involved. Time now to rubbish the supermom archetype as well.

Teacher at Christian School Sacked for Fornication

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:33:00 +0000

While government at all levels in America began widespread steamrolling over the rights of free association and private property back in the 60s--violating the foundational tenets of Western Civilization and the rights of the whole populace to advance the narrow and temporary interests of a minority--the right to free exercise of religion has surprisingly held up over time. On this issue the RCC of course has had its own high-profile dust-up with the Feds; now comes an Evangelical Prot, no doubt emboldened by the RCC's sudden testicular fortitude, to draw his own line in the sand about the values of the Church and the limits beyond which the libertine state to may not encroach:

For almost three years, she coached volleyball at the private school. Samford was named "Coach of the Year" and recently began teaching science. But when she got pregnant last fall, the school fired her because she was not married. "We all have different views and interpretations," [fired teacher] Samford said. "It's not necessarily the Christian thing to do to throw somebody aside because of those."

"I understand some people that would say 'It's a heartless thing to do,'" said the school's headmaster, Dr. Ron Taylor. "It wasn't easy to do." Taylor acknowledged that Samford could not get fired for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy in a public school. But HCA is a private, religious campus, and Taylor said the school considers teachers to be ministers, since they're allowed to share their beliefs in the classroom. Taylor said Samford violated the morals clause in her contract and was not a "Christian role model" to her students. "How's it going to look to a little fourth grade girl that sees she's pregnant and she's not married?" Taylor asked.

Thank God for the morality clause in her contract, for without that, I think Mr. Taylor would find drawing the line he has drawn much more difficult. But he has it exactly correct...Samford is a teacher at his school, a religious school at that, and she is a role model for her students by virtue of her status of in loco parentis. Added to this is the fact that her behavior as an employee of a Christian school reflects upon that school and the Christian faith, and both her students and the pagans are watching.

Speaking of behavior, since when did "Christian" become synonymous with 'pushover', 'enabler', or 'doormat'? There is a standard, she is being held accountable for her immoral behavior, and she should be apologetic for setting such a poor example and go about her business, lesson learned. Instead, she is using the free association- and property rights-violating laws (and low sexual standards) of Caesar to crowbar her way back into a job she lost for her lack of taking the requirements of the job seriously.

'Not Christian'? I seem to recall the Bible having something to say about fornication. So who in this case is less Christian...the headmaster who has the Word on his side, or the evidently low woman busted for speeding between the sheets? "Different views and interpretations" indeed, and woe to her if her example causes some of His sheep to stray.

Creeping Sharia in Oz

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:27:00 +0000

Having all but murdered the Christianity that birthed Western Civilization, and structurally unable to assert its own goodness and thus defend itself, equalitarianism-infected Western culture is yielding to the vanguard of an Islamic one:

In the usual endearing family way, Belghar telephoned his sister-in-law to convey that he was a tad rankled: “You slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach!” Afterwards, happening upon Ms. Kokden at a shopping mall in New South Wales, he angrily confronted her, slapped her face, and dragged her to the railing of an over-ground parking lot. As he seemed ready to hurl her to the traffic below, her brother (Kokden’s chaperone at the mall) finally stirred himself to intervene, tackling the assailant. Belghar was charged with attempted murder, among other crimes.

As night follows day, Belghar’s defense counsel argued that his client could not get a fair trial because Australians are too Islamophobic: Once informed about the nature of the allegations and the fact that he is a Muslim, jurors would surely leap to the crazy, bigoted conclusion that Belghar was probably guilty of this “honor beating” — which, in fact, he was. Just as he was, precisely, motivated by his Islamic beliefs.

Enter the jurist assigned to the case, the pitch-perfectly named Ronald Solomon. He ruled that, yes, Belghar would be compelled to stand trial, but also that the case would have to be decided by a factfinder Judge Solomon could trust. No doubt you’ll be stunned to learn that this reasonable, objective, and culturally sensitive factfinder turned out to be . . . Judge Solomon himself. After all, ordinary citizens with nothing but their common sense to fall back on lack the juridical acumen needed to weigh what Solomon gently called Belghar’s “attitude,” “based on a religious or cultural bias,” that he had absolute authority over his wife.

Innately, Islam is not moderate — just ask Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, who rejects as “ugly and offensive” the very term “moderate Islam.” Instead, Islam can be moderated, but only by a culture that is self-confident and self-assertive. Alas, that is no longer Western culture. So, the more Muslims immigrate, the less the West is moderating Islam. It is Islam that leaves its mark.

Ironically, the recent resurgence of religious liberty in America may very well end up assisting Islamists in their campaign to fold Europe, America, and the rest of the Anglophone diaspora into the dar-al-Islam. I suspect it won't be too long before Islamists will find a receptive audience for their claims of religious liberty in the defense of values that oftimes run counter to the dominant secular culture, just as Catholics and Christians are presently doing. As it is, Islamist mouthpieces are already playing the intolerant card quite well, aided by government officials frightened by the mere spectre of bigotry, racism, or "Islamophobia" accusations*--self-censoring before such charges are made or even threatened--or those who consider a few broken eggs an acceptable price for the anything-but-a-Christian-white-guy diversity omelet.

* To be sure, other government officials are not quite so timid, resisting as much as they can [pdf] the secular culture's voluntary slide into dhimmitude. But these mid-level functionaries will pay the price, as West Point grad Lieutenant Colonel Dooley is likely to do when the dust settles (he still has a job thus far) from the fracas surrounding his "Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism" course at Joint Forces Staff College, for assuming the West any longer places any substantial value on the tradition of rational inquiry and the diversity of ideas in academic environments. Silly rabbit, don't you know that reason or even civilizational self-preservation takes a backseat in order to maintain the equalitarian ideal?

Book Review: The Closing of the American Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:30:00 +0000

The Book: The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom.

Summary: In this 25 year old book, Mr. Bloom, a former college professor at the University of Chicago, argued that the minds of Americans have become 'closed' by being indiscriminately open to all comers. He explains this initially contradictory claim by comparing the textbook definition of openness...the search for the good, the correct, and the banishing of ignorance by applying reason...with what has become the conventional definition of openness in modern discourse: the openness of an mind that accepts everything equally and refusing to employ (or even suppresses) reason's power to judge 'good' and 'bad'. In Bloom's characterization, the Western mind has regressed to a pre-Western Civ state...a mind characterized by openness is 'beyond good and evil' (a concept found in Classical and older civilizations), and because the good life neither valued nor actively sought, ideas are given more or less equal weight when encountered. The American mind first spurned, then forgot its heritage and consequently floats along, adrift in a stream of values about which it no longer cares (or is permitted) to discriminate. Thus, virtue in the mind of the modern American is no longer found in being right or correct, or in correcting past mistakes, but in being open, tolerant, non-judgemental. The open-cum-closed mind does not look back to analyze the past, only forward to the next judgement-free encounter.

In openness-land, the only real vice is intolerance toward the new. Mr. Bloom worried about this new openness and what it means for American and Western culture when the received wisdom of tradition and the acquired wisdom of over a millennia of Scholasticism is rejected in favor of all kinds of men, credos, and lifestyles. As America from its inception was a radical experiment in natural rights and natural equality, it did not possess an aristocracy per se, an elite class where culture and wisdom were maintained and transmitted to the next generation for the entire people. Instead, the American anti-aristocratic model depended on the university to educate its citizens directly, regardless of social class, to inculcate a desire to seek virtue, and to motivate them toward seeking and living the "good life". Instead, today, "men are [no longer] permitted to seek the natural human good and admire it when found", for that is discriminatory and intolerant. Thus tradition and Western natural law are neutralized and the Western tradition of critical self-reflection, a tool unique to Western Civilization (other cultures and civilizations see no reason to test their cultures or their habits, their cultures are just fine, thank you very much) and a feature that enabled its greatness, is reduced to merely critique. Our past is shameful because it was so 'closed', our culture is flawed (because its past is flawed), and our beliefs are merely accidents of our place in the stream of time and as a result, our preferences are only that...accidents.

Similarly, not only is the American university adrift, but when young Americans arrive at university, they are vessels largely devoid of a sense of virtue or moral clarity. Their minds are tabulae rasa and, mirroring the decline in the universities--nobody believes the old books written by dead white men could contain any truth useful for us know-it-all moderns--the family has also retreated from its traditional role as the transmitter of knowledge and tradition. In its place enters media and the schools, as parents seem to

lack self-confidence as educators of their children, generously believing they will be better than their parents, not only in well-being, but in moral, bodily, and intellectual virtue. There is always a more or less open belief in progress, which means the past appears poor and contemptible. The future, which is open-ended, cannot be prescribed to by parents, and it eclipses the past which they know to be inferior [emphasis mine]

A moral education, which to be effective, according to Mr. Bloom, must present to the pupil "a vision of the moral universe, reward for good, punishment for evil, the drama of moral choices", and a sense of the stakes involved in such choices. Mere 'values education' in the school system does not suffice, it is but the wind, with no anchor to hold it in place. Furthermore, Mr. Bloom argues that the lack of exposure to great literature from the past stunts the educated citizen's ability to identify evil, as those who have not read the great books doubt evil's existence, despite the fact that they witness horrible crimes and see many many more on the news. The citizen-student, open and adrift as he is, lacks an awareness of both the depths and the heights.

Mr. Bloom argued that this openness of indifference extends to human relationships as well. The American mind has become sharply egocentric, self-focused, defensive, and inwardly directed. Openness as the ultimate virtue drives a radical egalitarianism, with the result that the culture no longer recognizes no practical differentiation between any persons. When observable differences do surface, as they do most often with race, ethnicity and sex, they are denied, engineered away, or made taboo. Truth and reason are abused to maintain the openness-egalitarian narrative when the facts say otherwise--"the recalcitrant matter of the is gave way before the practical and philosophical ought to be"--resulting in racial and ethnic bribery for NAMs and sex-based set-asides for women. All in the name of forcing the unequal to be equal, an attempt to restore the equilibrium of sameness the closed mind seeks.

In addition, this openness-egalitarianism has wedged the sexes apart. Bloom wrote, channelling Socrates, that "equal treatment of women necessitates the removal of all the old kind of sexual relations...and a consequent loss of the human connections that resulted from them which [Socrates] replaces with the common good of a city". Men and women are thus undifferentiated in custom and in law, sex loses much of its significance for men and women, except as a purely recreational activity, and a feminism takes root hat denies nature, denies the truth of sexual differentiation, homogenizes and suppresses relationships between the sexes.

In Bloom's account, this closing of the American mind has a long and distinguished pedigree. He locates it in three events, the Enlightenment, the absolute defeat of Rousseauean philosophy in favor of the Lockean variety, and a misinterpretation and misapplication of Nietzschean philosophy. The Enlightenment dethroned God and promoted man and his ability to reason in its place. Religion, by definition virtue-prescriptive, was marginalized to the realm of opinion and myth and, because it is but one opinion or creed among others, it has little definitive knowledge to offer about the human condition and the soul. Locke advanced this ball further downfield, realigning virtue from the difficult task of loving one's brother to 'enlightened self interest'. No longer was agape a virtue, no longer was the man who cared for others virtuous, but instead the most virtuous man became he who cared for himself the most:

The old commandment that we love our brothers made impossible demands on us, demands against nature, while doing nothing to provide for real needs. What is required is not brotherly love or faith, hope, and charity, but self-interested rational labor. The man who contributes most to relieving human misery is the one who produces most, and the surest way of getting him to do so is not by exhorting him, but by rewarding him most handsomely to sacrifice present pleasure for the sake of future benefit, or so assure avoidance of pain.

Locke encouraged his fellow man to love life, liberty, and the pursuit of property above all other things. The protestations of his antithesis, Rousseau, that such a proto-utilitarian philosophy left man's spiritual side unattended and bereft were largely ignored, leaving the modern man spiritually adrift, or as Mr. Bloom wrote, 'flat-souled'. Into this nexus then came Nietzsche and other great German thinkers. Nietzsche recognized how Lockean philosophy stifled and hobbled man's soul and encouraged him to become something bigger than a selfish economic agent. In writing about the new world that awaits the man that looses his spirit, Nietzsche wrote " Gott ist tot " in reference to the power that man has to shape his future were he to only will it so. Here, Mr. Bloom claims that Nietzsche's prouncement was not so much a triumph, as is commonly thought, but was instead a lament...was this all there is? Bloom then asserts that the Enlightenment forces hostile to religion from the get-go seized upon this confirmation of God's death and used that as the jumping off point for an aggressive religious and dogmatic atheism...thus transforming Nietzsche into a hero of the Left, where he would more properly be a Rightist. What started as an attempt to realize natural law, reason, ever the devil's whore, slowly becomes an auto-immune disorder.

Enter now the Frankfurt School, a nihilistic leftist philosophic school that fled Germany in the 20s and 30s, ironically escaping an aggressive instantiation of their nihilistic and leftist philosophy. First coming to Columbia University, this cancer rapidly spread to the rest of the American academy, and the revolution that comes with the upending of one weltanschauung and installation of another came to a head in the 60s. In the 60s, American universities were experiencing the same turmoil and dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the 30s. The result was the same however...a levelling of the populace, and the distinction between the educated and the uneducated, the diversity of many differing opinions, had given way to homogenization. No vision--or even competing visions--of what constituted an educated human was on offer, merely a keen focus on equality, which "...for us seems to culminate in the unwillingness and incapacity to make claims of superiority, particularly in the domains in which such claims have always been made--art, religion, philosophy. [Furthermore,] no one can say what "civilized" means, when there are said to be many civilizations that are all equal". Thus did the American mind close, the effect of a nihilistic abandonment of the Western rational tradition, a tradition that made room for both the mind and the spirit. Victorious, reason-based radical egalitarianism found that it had to suppress reason to maintain the hegemony of radical egalitarianist philosophy.

Commentary

One thing that is obvious to readers of this book is the inherent structural bankruptcy of the philosophy of openness. For if we are not to think our way better than others, then what tools do we have to tell right from wrong? Some of us have religion, the remainder of the polity has merely the direction of the herd to shape their values and ethics. In other words, there is nothing but the mob. Perhaps this is the very point...how easy it is to shape the behavior and tastes of a mob, what with compulsory public schooling, an agenda-driving media selecting what issues are worth discussing and which are not, and advertising that teaches what goods are to be desired and which are not. Freethinking? I think not.

Something else, too: What chance does Western civilization have if it is peopled by those who either think Western civilization should be destroyed or those who think it gauche to think it preferable to other civilizations. I think this has profound implications for the West as we adapt to challenges from Islamic and Sinic civilizations, two civilizations who do not suffer from the profound self-loathing that the West seems to have at the moment. Will the West summon the will to carry on?

Additionally, being an MRA of sorts, I found what Mr. Bloom had to say wrt relations between the sexes of particular interest. Of the state of the male sex in an egalitarian society, he had this to say way back in 1987:

de Tocqueville describes the tip of the iceberg of advanced egalitarianism when he discusses the difficulty that a man without family lands, or a family tradition for whose continuation he is responsible, will have in avoiding individualism and seeing himself to be an integral part of a past and a future, rather than as an autonomous atom in a merely changing continuum

On this point, Mr. Bloom was very prescient. 1987 was just a few years after 'peak divorce', the revolution that divested men from their families and initiated a self-reinforcing cycle of family breakup, made both men and women both think that the male is not a necessary component to the family, a nice-to-have luxury, certainly not essential. We see now, 25 years later, the effects of advanced egalitarianism, most notably in rising rates of commitment avoidance and rational slackerhood. I do not think most men really see themselves as part of a living society, with a past and certainly a future that he can be a part of. Instead, he lives only for himself, and is wary of the sort of social entanglements that his forefathers took for granted as part of the role of a patriarch.

I found myself also wondering if the increasing lack of substantive differentiation among men and women, legally and socially, is fuelling the rise in availability and acceptability of pornography both for men (visual) and for women (romance novellas). It seems that, since sex differences are denied except for when advantage can be accrued to the female, genuine sex itself loses its power among otherwise undifferentiated men and women. What remains of the sex act then is a hollow shell, the industrialized rubbing of genitalia, somewhat satisfying but yet still leaving the practitioner wondering if there was more, wondering why their forebears fussed so about sex and relationships, not missing what they don't know. Furthermore, perhaps men and women are increasingly turning to porn in an unconscious effort to re-establish that differentiation, to regain what they don't know in their head they've lost but their flesh still cries for nonetheless.

An another thought that came to mind while reading Mr. Bloom's manuscript was how adopting the virtue of openness replaced the old, former sex-differentiated virtues for men and particularly for women, responsibility and modesty, respectively. Instead of modesty, female sexuality is instead ubiquitous...it is nigh upon impossible for a man to walk down the street without individual women or advertisements featuring women attempting to manipulate him through displays of sexual imagery. What's more, the culture is absolutely unable to resist this trend; slut-shaming is not very tolerant, ergo verboten, and 'blaming the victim' is an offense of a very high order. Similarly, although somewhat less so, virtue for men does not appreciably contain elements of responsibility; indeed, responsibility is something to be avoided when possible, viz., the rise in cohabitative unions, low and falling levels of male community engagement, working only enough to satisfy one's individual needs, etc. While the old patriarchal society is no more, it was replaced by a functionally matriarchal one, and male responsibility, unlike female modesty, is still enforced vigorously by the State through chalimony, property division, and state transfer payments.

In conclusion, I found this a very worthwhile book, although the writing was at times very difficult to penetrate and could be much more compact. That said, the author did an outstanding job of imparting to the reader a sense of history, of a thread leading straight from the Enlightenment through the social contract theorists to German philosophers and forward to the Frankfurt School to the state of modern American academia.

Legal Electoral Fraud

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:30:00 +0000

...practiced by both sides of the bi-factional ruling party, but mostly by Dems, with your tax dollars, is as commonplace as it is widely condoned. I'm stumped at why we tolerate such naked fraudstering in our so-called enlightened state, yet we don't even yawn anymore. Thus truthiness such this, where one is tempted to exclaim: "well, ya don't say?", fazes no one. It's just the way it's done, folks:

"We're headed in the right direction. Unemployment continues to drop and those people who are unemployed, they're not going to be voting for the party who wants to cut their benefits, cut access to food stamps, cut job training," Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) said on MSNBC's Al Sharpton program.

While the fact that this quote appeared on notable racialist race-baiter Rev Al's MSNBC show is duly noted, it's nice to see the truth spoken every once in a while. Transfer payments and social programs and entitlement spending are indistinguishable from straight-up vote-buying, which is what social programs (e.g., "benefits") such as food stamps, 'job training', individual welfare, corporate welfare, bank and auto company bailouts, and now student loan bailouts in exchange for the youth vote, really are at the end of the day.

"A democracy...can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury". Whether de Tocqueville or Tytler spoke these words, or even Ronald Reagan himself, we were warned.

The Multi-Gravidic Survival Advantage

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 02 May 2012 10:51:00 +0000

It makes sense that "mother nature" is pro-natalist...otherwise, the struggle to survive would be that much more difficult. Now we have research to back it up:

The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday reported the results of a study by researchers at the University of New South Wales, which analyzed 1,200 women over the age of 60 since 1988. Women with six or more children were found to be 40 percent less likely to die during the 16-year follow-up period than women with no children, an expectancy that increased predictably with each child they bore. Researchers said that, although it was not known exactly why children increased life expectancy, the results corresponded to the findings of studies in other countries as well.

The study also found that men with more children were less likely to die earlier, although the link was not as clear as with women.

This is bad news for feminists, who consider marriage and children to be obstacles to their self-actualization, and for Malthusian greenies, who consider humans to be a infestation on the planet best eradicated. The good news, if it can be thought of this way, for the pro-natalist crowd is that the antis will eventually select themselves out of the gene pool.

What I also found interesting about this article is the finding that both fathers and mothers benefit from birthing/siring children. While the article mentions recent research that suggests fetal stem cells cross the placenta and rejuvenate mothers, no such mechanism can exist for fathers. Thus one wonders what the link for dads is. My guess it is behavioral...more socialized behaviors and less risk-taking producing the survival advantage. I wonder if the researchers cross-tabbed for marital status...I speculate that the link is positive for men who remain married to their wives and raise their biological children, but negative for single men or divorced/separated men.

Counter-Productive Male Verbal Tics

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:29:00 +0000

Just as if one tells a lie often enough, people will come to believe it, so do men sow the seeds of contempt toward themselves, their brothers, and their sons when they proffer falsehoods as a matter of social lubrication.

For instance, we have the "fairer sex" meme, normalizing the notion that women as a group are more beautiful than men are handsome. We also have "better half", a self-deprecating expression that quite literally pedestalizes one's wife or female significant other. Ditto for claims that man's wife is better/smarter/wiser/more forgiving/etc than is the man himself...while such a claim may be true in a great many cases, the fact that women rarely utter symmetrical compliments toward men suggests that such publicly expressed ~~bootlicking~~ appeasement is as much a wholly male habit as it is patently untrue. And then we come to my personal favorite, the oft-repeated claim that a man cannot do this-or-that for fear of his wife's verbal or physical retribution. This meme is a two-fer insult: one, it implies that a man is not the leader of his home, his wife is, and thus he truly is a gelding with his cojones in a jar in the refrigerator. Two, it implies that his wife lacks emotional or physical self-restraint and abuses or batters her husband. Even if true, what person would want to be publicly known as an abuser? Yet these are treated as jokes, as ways to break the ice. Awful if you ask me.

Perhaps such pretty lies made sense in a day where men ruled the roost and his wife obeyed. Such self-deprecating, pedestalizing habits would then be indicators of humility, a useful and important personality trait in persons who wielded so much power by virtue of their position as patriarchs of their families. But we are a long ways away from those days, so much so that men habituated in this manner truly appear effete and weak and as they bow in public supplication to their more powerful (by virtue of his submissive genuflection) wives. Even our own president gets caught up in this ridiculous habit:

The Obama family warmly welcomed 30,000 adults and children and encouraged them all to enjoy the bunny and egg festivities. Glancing over at his wife, Obama said "My job is very simple, it is to introduce the powerhouse of the White House," First Lady Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama responded demurely, saying, "Thank you, honey." Then, the demure 'powerhouse' warned Barack that if he had any competitive inclinations about "beat[ing] a three-year-old" in the egg roll, he had better suppress the urge.

The optics of this event look terrible times two...both the obvious subservience and the image of the leader of the so-called free world publicly admonished by his stern wife to 'let the three year olds win'. Naysayers may point out that this was all in jest, and it all may very well have been. But how many times does one have to witness scenes such as this before thinking that what was once considered fancifully humorous is really behavior to be modeled, its message internalized?

Thus, the trouble I have with all this ~~sucking up~~ pedestalizing going on is that, eventually, both men and women will come to believe these things, and, because they are repeated so often, they must be true. Moreover, said behavior normalizes this pedestalization, fosters feelings of contempt toward men, excuses female chauvinism (after all, even their men tell them they are better than they. Perhaps it is true) and, worse, such habits may promote and provide social cover for violence against men. After all, slapping a man or making him sleep on the couch in his own house is in turns both funnytude and just punishment for the man-child who displeased his wife-turned-mommy.

Count those fellows--who anachronistically utter such pap--as those men who help make the world worse.

Book Review: The Clash of Civilizations

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:53:00 +0000

Book Review: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel Huntington, 1996, 321 pages.

Summary: In this 16 year old book, Mr. Huntington divvies up the world into 9 distinct small-c civilizations, each with its own culture, which Huntington defines as blood, language, way of life, and religion:

(1) Western - Christian and post-Christian lands populated by Europeans. The border of Western civilization is marked not by Urals but where Catholicism/Protestantism ends and Eastern Orthodox/Islam begins

(2) Orthodox - Hellenes, Slavs, and other Eurasians influenced by/professing Orthodox Christianity

(3) Islamic

(4) African - Sub-Saharan Africa

(5) Latin American - Mesoamericans professing Catholicism

(6) Sinic - Modern-day China, Korea, Vietnam

(7) Hindu (Indian)

(8) Bhuddist - Modern-day Tibet, Mongolia, Burma, Laos, Thailand

(9) Japanese

Mr. Huntington argues that these civilizational fault lines better explain patterns of conflict and bandwagoning / balancing behaviors in interstate violence, particularly in a post-Westphalian world, than other paradigms. His taxonomy of civilizations tends to pivot around religion, in that he sees religious factors as the primary factor that defines culture, and therefore 'civilizations', with race/ethnicity coming in a distant second as key distinguishing factors. Mr. Huntington argues these characteristics to influence how each country within civilizations behave, not only inter-civilizationally with their "kin" countries, but those countries around them which may be members of a different civilization. In addition, civilizations with a "core state"...a state synonymous with that culture as a whole, behave differently (i.e., more stable, less prone to spasms of violent conflict) than those civilizations that lack a core state, such as Islam which lacks an identifiable core state. He also identifies several countries which he characterizes as "cleft" nations, those countries that contain more than one major culture: Ukraine, Sudan, and (possibly in the future if Mexican and Latin American migration continues apace) the United States. For Mr. Huntington asserts that cleft countries are particularly conflict-prone, particularly if they lay astride a civilizational fault line.

Huntingdon's Civilizations (image via Wikipedia)

One major theme of Huntington's book is the realignment of the world order from a binary East-vs-West or Cold War model to that where historical and religious roots return to the fore. He documents several ways in which secular Western power is declining, and what this decline means to the prevailing economic and political structure of the world. This is particularly with respect to the Chinese and Islamic civilizations--both "Eastern" civilizations with traditions oftimes in direct opposition to Western habits--these two civilizations are poised to reshape the world political dynamic in their favor.

Most at risk in this realignment and decline of the West is the notion of cultural universalism centered around Western values. Neither the increasingly assertive Sinic or militantly metastasizing Islamic cultures place anywhere near the same value on the principles of human rights, natural law, and Western-style individual liberty as the West at its apogee once did. Ironically, "democracy", that form of government inherited by the West through Classical Civilization, improved, and spread around the world by Western Civilization appears to be midwifing what Huntington calls the process of "indigenization". This term refers to the resurgence of once-marginalized native cultures gaining strength, power, and cultural relevance through the process of democratization to challenge Western hegemony--often by overthrowing Western-backed autocratic regimes.

Another significant theme of Huntington's book is what he calls the revanche de dieu, or the "revenge of God". Post-Enlightenment secularism, seemingly the dominant cultural force in the world 100 years ago, has largely reversed. God/gods/Confucianist beliefs, it seems, are making a comeback, and not just among hard core fundies but amongst entire peoples as a whole

"A new religious approach took shape, aimed no longer at adapting to secular values but at recovering a sacred foundation for the organization of society...moving on from a modernism that had failed, attributing its setbacks and dead ends to separation from God. People do not live by reason alone. They cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define their self, [and] interest politics presupposes identity...for people facing the need to determine 'who am I?' [and]'where do I belong?', religion provides compelling answers, and religious groups provide small social communities to replace those lost through urbanization"

Far from being archaic, religion in Mr. Huntington's book has re-emerged as a--or maybe even the--dominant force in a society, and Mr. Huntington claims this renewed interest in belief has profound implications for the behaviors of civilizations and their constituent populations.

Other than these two major themes, Mr. Huntington spends the bulk of his book analyzing the implications of a world defined by his taxonomy, and in which the West recedes in the face of a trifecta of re-emerging Asian civilizations: Sinic, Islamic, and Orthodox. He discusses political reconfiguration as a result of this retreating-advancing dynamic, possible consequential "fault line" wars, and the effect that demography, economics, and non-Western civilizational self-valuation on the political order. He closes his book by discussing ways in which the West may arrest, maybe even reverse its decline...but sixteen years on it appears his prescription has yet to be heeded.

Analysis and Critique

Christianity and Western Civilization. One of the maddening things about Mr.Huntington's description of the West is his over-identification of the West as Christian. For certain, Christianity, and the Roman Catholic Scholastics in particular, ensured the lessons of Classical Civilization did not fade into the dark mist of history past. Mr. Huntington argues, and I agree, that Christianity has played the decisive role in the shape, tenor, the "look and feel" of Western Civ. But, unlike Mr. Huntingdon, I contend that Western Civ is no longer Christian in any culturally significant sense. It may still retain some Christian cultural residue, to be sure, and large minorities of its peoples claim the Christian mantle, but the culture itself is thoroughly steeped in a secular quasi-religion that, like any other religion, marginalizes its competitors. Thus Christianity is increasingly cast aside as irrelevant, and the the values that Christianity impressed upon Western Civilization: the inherent dignity of men, the equivalent value of both sexes, individual rights, and individual responsibility, have started to retreat in the West (and worldwide) as a result.

The paradox of democracy, the interaction of power and democratization, and 'Universalism'. I found Mr. Huntington's discussion of democracy, particularly how it is being used usher in new eras of indigenization, to be quite interesting. Acolytes of democracy were fond of fantasizing that democratic governments were, by definition, Western-friendly. But as we can plainly see by events such as the "Islamist Spring", democratization does not necessarily imply a particular country will align with the West in a climate in which the West has little power and influence. Showing his realist side, Mr. Huntington writes:

"...culture almost always follows power. Throughout history, the expansion of the power of a civilization has usually occurred simultaneously with the flowering of its culture and has almost always involved its using that power to extend its values, practices, and institutions to other societies. American hegemony is receding...the erosion of Western culture follows, as indigenous, historically rooted mores, languages, beliefs, and institutions reassert themselves. As Western power declines, the ability of the West to impose Western concepts of human rights, liberalism, and democracy on other civilizations also declines and so does the attractiveness of those values to other civilizations."

Now that Western power is on the wane, other cultures find much less utility in being Western-oriented, and nowadays we find numerous examples of democratically elected governments being less disposed toward the West, Western policies, and indeed the entire Western-constructed economic edifice. "Electoral competition instead stimulates them to fashion what they believe will be the most popular appeals, and those are usually ethnic, nationalist, and religious in character", not necessarily secular or Western-friendly.

This leads me to a discussion about 'Universalism', a concept that Mr. Huntingdon defines thusly:

[T]he Western universalist belief posits that people throughout the world should embrace Western values, institutions and culture because [Western culture embodies] the highest,most enlightened, most liberal, most rational, most modern, and most civilized thinking of mankind

Mr. Huntington discussed the very human tendency--seems that it is now the West's turn to fall victim to this folly--to assume that its culture is superior, that its way of life and way of doing things represent the apex of human development, and is therefore their culture is rightfully pre-eminent. As such, Western culture more or less takes it as a given, without much thought to the contrary, that everyone worldwide should naturally agree with the Western conventional wisdom regarding human rights, individual freedom, economic principles, Western-style democratic government, nuclear non-proliferation, and arms control. Naturally, Eastern civilizations, with their differing cultural traditions and experiences, and with their increasing power, chafe at Western Universalism. This is particularly true with Islam and China, two civilizations who regularly flout Western cultural conventions (as in, for example, questions of human rights, of individual liberty, and of nuclear non-proliferation). And why shouldn't they? They themselves have millennia of cultural tradition upon which to draw from, traditions frankly different from the West. In addition, in their eyes, their culture is infinitely superior, if for no other reason than the decline of the West fuels and reinforces their chauvinism. Particularly if one believes, as Huntington hints he may, that Western culture didn't become dominant because it was intrinsically so much better, but because it made war that much more effectively than competitor civilizations:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Apart from undermining Western claims to universalism, this is an interesting statement, especially when viewed in light of 2GW and 3GW warfare (which the West used to significant effect) and the back-to-the-future rise of 4GW and 5GW warfare. These 'new' ways of making war tend to neutralize, even sidestep, Western strengths while simultaneously exploiting Western weaknesses (e.g., media, diversity, democratic governance, etc). Moreover, 4/5GW seems to favor Eastern-style warfare...the sort that Westerners would find barbaric...and enables Asian cultures more naturally inclined to 4/5 GW to rise to the fore once more. But what disturbs Mr.Huntingdon the most about 'false, immoral, and...dangerous' Universalism is what he sees as the inherently destabilizing influence of the notion of a messianic 'Universalist Prerogative' with inter-state and inter-civilizational violence. The logic train for Huntingon goes like this: Universalism, spread by power, foments empire. Empires are maintained by violence, if not legal and economic, than of the political/physical sort. Eventually, dissimilar civilizations will rise to challenge the dominance of a foreign culture and alien people, and the reigning imperial power will attempt to stop the shift in power toward their adversaries. These challenges will eventually involve the use of arms...and there resides the danger of Universalism to the international community. Thus does universalism necessarily imply empire and imperialism, on the way to open warfare. Mr. Huntington, unsurprisingly, attempts to disabuse the reader of any favorable impressions of such a fashionable conceit.

Islam's "bloody borders". After having first introduced this term in a 1993 article [link opens PDF] for the publication Foreign Affairs, Mr. Huntington writes:

Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. Muslims make up one-fifth of the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.

Mr. Huntington lists a few factors that contribute to this pattern of aggressive behavior: (1) the degree to which Muslim societies are militarized--it is hard to conceive of a single major Moslem country which is not heavily militarized, (2) proximity to non-Moslem peoples and states, (3) absence of core state(s) which could otherwise retrain and/or dominate wayward countries, and (4) the "pig in a python" effect of a high percentage of unmarried, unattached males with low/no prospects of marriage. A fifth factor, which Mr. Huntington calls "indigestibility", is explained as follows:

Muslim countries have problems with non-Muslim minorities comparable to those which non-Muslim countries have with Muslim minorities. Even more than Christianity, Islam is an absolutist faith. It merges religion and politics and draws a sharp line between the dar-al-Islam and the dar-al-harb. As a result, Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Western Christians, and Orthodox Christians have less difficulty adapting to and living with each other than any one of them has adapting to and living with Muslims.

Mr. Huntington suspects that as Moslem societies age, the pig-in-the-python effect will recede. But indigestibility remains, as does Islam's inferiority complex and, increasingly, the West's desperate grasping at the levers of global power that erstwhile empire once manipulated so easily:

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining power, imposes upon then the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West

Note that the assertion "...imposes upon them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world..." eerily prefigures the late 20th-century "Neocon Wars of Coerced Democratization" (my term), first in the Balkans, then in Iraq and in Afghanistan after 9/11.

The Future of the USA, and the West. In the final chapters of his book, Mr. Huntington narrows his scope and addresses the cultural war underway in the United States, the heart of Western Civilization. Specifically, he details the efforts of elites to deny the uniqueness of Western culture, if not destroy Western culture outright, in an effort to replace Western Civilization with no civilization at all. To wit:

Historically, American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization, and politically by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism,equality before the law, Constitutionalism, private property. In the late twentieth century, both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western Civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted radical, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced...'the systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives' in education and 'the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective'. The multiculturists are,as Arthur M. Schlesinger said, 'very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes'. Their "mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusion from non-Western cultures". The American multiculturists similarly reject their country's cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, they wish to create a country of many civilizations...a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. The mutliculturalists also challenged a central element of the American Creed by substituting for the rights of individuals the rights of groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual preference.

If this were not bad enough, Mr. Huntington invokes the experience of another country that was also organized around ideological precepts rather than a common, shared culture...the Soviet Union. He thinks that counting on loyalty to an ideology, as do those who assert that to be American means only that one have an affinity for a set of principles, is, in the absence of a unifying common culture, foolhardy:

"[T]he total failure of Marxism...and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union", the Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara has suggested, "are on the precursors to the collapse of Western liberalism, the main current of modernity. Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be the next domino to fall.' In an era in which peoples everywhere define themselves in cultural terms, what place is there for a society without a cultural core and defined only by a political creed? In a multi-civilizational world where culture counts, the United States could be simply the last anomalous holdover from a fading Western world where ideology counted. Rejection of the Creed and of Western Civilization means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western Civilization. The clash between the multi-culturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurth's phrase, 'the real clash'.

Mr. Huntington paints a bleak picture indeed for America, foreseeing the United States becoming a cleft country as a result of this deadly embrace of multiculturalism. America, in Huntington's view, may very well split linguistically and culturally along Western and Latin civilizational lines; separate, alientated, and suspicious of the other. In other words, the United States will reconfigure to be Anglophone America vs. the Mexifornicated rump state of what was formerly the American southwest. But while we're a lot further down this dystopian road that we were 16 years ago, Huntington hadn't yet written off America's chances at self-recovery. For America--and therefore Western Civilization--to survive, Huntington claims that both must reject the fashionable cancer of multiculturalism and embrace their common European (and, unsaid by Huntingdon, Christian) heritage. To live, America must ask herself the following question, and answer it in the affirmative: Is America a Western country? To answer "yes" means to embrace its roots, to look east to Europe, and not west to Asia. To answer "no" means to die a self-inflicted death.

Equal-Opportunity Reproduction

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 01:06:00 +0000

One way in which feminism has undermined family formation is by blurring the old divisions between male and female. By bequeathing to women what was once the exclusive domain of men...wealth, status, power, security...goods that women used to have to marry to acquire, women suddenly found that the old Grand Bargain no longer held. They no longer had reason to bargain: Why put up with a man when you can get nearly everything you want or need--including children, money, a nice nest--without having to tolerate one of those clumsy smelly beasts around?

Thus did feminism divorce the old biological urge to merge from the equally old social imperative to cleave. The urge remains, but outside religion, there is increasingly less reason to cleave in lifelong monogamy. Feminism enabled women's hopping to and fro from one genital moment to the other, safe in their security, in search of Mr. Big. Or at least Mr. Bigger Better Deal. You have indeed come a long way, baby.

Now along comes technology to finish the job that feminism started (why do I feel like I'm channelling fellow manosphere blogger PMAFT right about now?). Only this time, where feminism made the Grand Bargain irrelevant to women and, to a lesser extent, less relevant to men, technology is increasingly, economically, granting to men what was once the exclusive purview of the female: Reproduction. The Grand Bargain just became completely anachronistic in these modern, libertine times. To wit:

The first human egg cells that have been grown entirely in the laboratory from stem cells could be fertilized later this year in a development that will revolutionise fertility treatment...[s]cientists are about to request a license from the UK fertility watchdog to fertilize the eggs as part of a series of tests to generate an unlimited supply of human eggs.

Researchers at Edinburgh University are working with a team from Harvard Medical School in Boston to be the first in the world to produce mature human eggs from stem cells isolated from human ovarian tissue. Until now, it has only been possible to isolate a relatively small number of mature human egg cells directly from the ovaries of women who have been stimulated with hormones. This technical limitation has led to an acute shortage of human eggs, or "oocycts", for IVF treatment as well as scientific research. The scientists want to fertilize the laboratory-grown egg cells with human sperm to prove that they are viable. Any resulting embryos will be studied for up to 14 days - the legal limit - to see if they are normal. These early embryos will not be transplanted into a woman's womb because they will be deemed experimental material, but will either be frozen or allowed to perish.

Generating an unlimited supply of human eggs and the prospect of reversing the menopause was made possible by a series of breakthroughs led by Professor Jonathan Tilly of Harvard.

Sex is cheap because low women are plentiful in the post-feminist social ecology. Ditto for sperm...plentiful supply makes for low cost. And increasingly it appears that human ova, once the most expensive part of the IVF process (I once read that a healthy college-age blonde-haired blue-eyed white woman's egg would run upwards of 50 grand; it seems center of mass is around $10K for those who are not quite so picky), will soon go the same way. Leaving only uteri as the only real expense for those men inclined to want children, but who are wary of the risks that Marriage 2.0 entails. Thus, a man's striking the Grand Bargain becomes either an exercise in piety or foolhardy risk-taking. In view of the alternatives, for the irreligious, why should men assume that risk, when that same guy can procure an egg for cheap, fertilize it with his own seed--cheap by definition--and procure nine months of gestation for half the cost of the average wedding?

With this in mind, the following calculus suggests itself:

wedding: $$
divorce: $$..."how much ya got?"
20 years fractional servitude: $$$$$

vs

uterus: $

= Yikes.

Once again, in the present climate, we see amoral science serving to wedge men and women apart rather than bring them together. I bemoan our arrival at this juncture, while recognizing that it is merely the scales between the sexes rebalancing once again. Likewise, while I am not pronouncing marriage dead...it will live on, particularly in the upper classes...I do see some chalimony-shy men who wish to be a father (yet skittish of being taken to the cleaners) opting for woman-not-included reproduction. For less than the cost of the average wedding--or for that matter, divorce--and for far less than two decades of your hard-earned private property confiscated by the State to benefit a woman who hates you with the utmost intensity, a fellow can truly MGTOW. And humanity as a whole will be the worse for it, so long as the culture and technology combine to be disintegrative rather than unitive.

"French" Moslems Counterattack

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:56:00 +0000

Once again, we see the barrenness of secular cultural identity:

PARIS - France's Muslim community is mobilizing voters to reject President Nicolas Sarkozy in Sunday's election to punish the conservative leader for his anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric.

"[French] Muslims can't stand it anymore. They are fed up with these debates about national identity, halal meat, the veil or fundamentalism all over the place," said Francoise Lorcerie, a sociologist with the Institute of Studies on the Arab and Muslim World near Marseille.

Mr. Sarkozy, of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, called for tightening immigration because there are "too many foreigners" in France. Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate of the far-right National Front party, talked about "green fascism" (a reference to the color of Islam) and wondered "how many Mohammed Merahs are arriving on boats and planes each day, filling France with immigrants."

The speeches infuriated French Muslims and reignited the debate over origins and identity. As Europe's largest Islamic community, French Muslims account for as much as 10 percent of the country's 65 million people. "Merah was born in France. He did not come by boat or plane, but everyone talks about his origins, despite his being French," said Mohamed Mechmache, president of AC Le Feu, a community association working to improve conditions in the banlieues. "The French Republic has not been fair: She has forgotten some of her children."

For now, French Muslims, like a slim majority of their compatriots, seem to prefer Socialist Francois Hollande: He is the clear front-runner in the runoff on May 6, according to polls. "Hollande said he will lower rents and bills. That's what everybody cares about because our salaries aren't enough to make ends meet," said Chaker Alain, 28, a Parisian born to French parents of North African descent.

The problem, as I see it, is two-fold. First, France must answer the question: 'what does it mean to be French?' Second, is it reasonably possible for one to be French and also possess an Islamic identity?

Observing from afar, it seems that Merah is an exponent of the Moslem problem for France. Being born in France to Algerian immigrants did not make him identify as French, nor does it appear that he assimilated very well into French society. And therin lays the rub...does merely being born on French soil make one French? Or is there a unique French culture, a set of values, liberty, equality, brotherhood, all that jazz, that only adopting and living those values permits one to claim French-ness. Moreover, and this is where things get tricky in our post-Enlightenment society that does its level best to ignore or paper over morphological differences, is Frankish blood also required to be French? Merah apparently thought so. He deliberately targeted his French Army victims, two Moslem, one Catholic, because they were swarthy-complected and looked Moslem. Furthermore, unable to kill other "Uncle Tom" Moslems, he instead improvised and killed three Jewish children and one rabbi allegedly in revenge for the suffering of Palestinian children and the French participation in Afghan reconstruction. Hard for me to say for sure, but it sure sounds like Mr. Merah identified as non-French due to his different skin tone and different religion, indentifying instead as a member of the wider Islamic diaspora. Furthermore, given these 'banlieues', these Islamic ghettos, which house millions of un/under-assimilated Moslems in French cities (and who likely will resist calls to assimilate), is it then so beyond the pale that the culturally, linguistically, and ethnically French resent the petulant "indigestible" aliens in their midst?

Note also how the Left prosecutes kulturkampf: it buys the support of cultural aliens with the cultural majority's money...in essence, authentic French are being dragooned to underwrite their own cultural demise, by multi-kulti cheerleaders bent on eradicating French culture and Western Civilization in general.

The Pay Gap Myth Rears its Ugly Head at Fox News

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:28:00 +0000

Sigh. Seems that even presumably conservative women are stuck on stupid when it comes to the pay gap:

Regarding economic inequality, the president proposed new legislation to close the gap on women earning 77 cents on every dollar a man earns. This issue can't simply be changed by a law or more regulation; it has to be changed by the culture, a culture that values a woman's opinions, decisions and leadership as much as a man's. We don't want a regulated job, we want respect. I don't want a job or a CEO position because it was regulated for a female, and nor should any other woman. Jobs and positions should be earned and rewarded, and it's unfortunate if the culture doesn't allow for this. This culture shift, which has been slow to shift, must start with us women, and with the president. We must demand respect, and he and others must show it.

Given the raft of material that demonstrates the pay gap to be a hoary myth, including my own scribblings, I can only conclude that those who continue to propagate this blatant and easily disprovable falsehood are ignorant or deliberately attempting to mislead their readers. But what really got my attention in this article were statements such as

...a culture that values a woman's opinions, decisions and leadership as much as a man's

[Womens'] jobs and positions should be earned and rewarded, and it's unfortunate if the culture doesn't allow for this

or this:

We must demand respect, and [President Obama] and others must show it

Frankly, I don't know what Ms. Hamel is complaining about. All one has to do is look at family law, reproductive rights and laws, sexual harassment law, civil rights law, etc, to see clearly that women's opinions and claims are instantly believed and given more weight than a man's. Women's decisions are inviolate, unoverridable, and given primacy over the decisions of men or of children, even when men have significant equity in the question at hand, such as the right/duty to protect their children. Or even in questions of civil rights thought settled long ago--the right to not be trafficked for money. We even have a Constitutional amendment for that. Moreover, women's decisions in favor of serial polyandry are as feted as they are subsidized. With all these instances in mind, if one looks at how our society is structured, our culture doesn't just value a woman's opinions and decisions as much as a man's. It values them more.

Regarding leadership, even with taking the apex-fallacy into account, her implicit claim that successful and powerful white men "make the rules", and she and the Sisterhood are merely along for the ride, I suppose Ms. Hamel has a point. Both men and women seem to trust male leaders more, while they tend to groan under the high heel of a female overseer. But since both men and women express a preference for men over women, even in this feminist day and age, I'm not sure what more Ms. Hamel thinks we can or should do. Equalitarianism seems to have significant difficulty making inherently unequal beings equal.

As far as "women's jobs must be earned and rewarded", I suppose Ms. Hamel is correct here. One can certainly make the case that women's jobs aren't truly, fully earned and rewarded, what with affirmative action, set-asides, and dare I say it--quotas, that tilt the playing field steeply in favor of women. Being given something, or driving from the white (women's) tees, is not "earning" it, not on your own merits anyways. Does one really win the race if your competitors have 35 extra pounds in their rucksack?

Last, wrt to respect, I've found in my short time on this planet that those who demand respect are those who usually deserve it the least. Demanding respect is more likely to result in the opposite...being held in contempt. Respect is one of those things that must be earned. No amount of AA or preferences or set-asides will help, and in fact such advantages probably hinder.

Action Movie Stars Vote Conservative

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:24:00 +0000

This article is crap, and the study probably is too, but the study cited intuitively makes a certain amount of sense. Nancy-boys are more likely to vote for security in lieu of freedom and liberty:

The researchers looked at the political attitudes of actors in Hollywood and found those who played action stars were more likely to support military action by the US overseas. The study said: "Those actors known for their physical strength and formidability, among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone, were more likely to support military action.

"Generally speaking, Hollywood actors are left wing, but the action stars among them were more likely than not to support the Republican position on foreign policy. Upper body strength in adult males is a crucial variable that appears to have impacts on a wide range of mental mechanisms. These mechanisms were designed by natural selection at a time when personal physical aggression was far more common and individual differences in fighting ability were far more relevant for the resolution of conflicts."

Translation: if a man can take care of oneself and protect his family, he is less likely to look to the state or community for that security. Moreover, such a fellow would probably harbor a more realistic view of the nature of man--base, craven, prone to vice, and greedy and covetous--and realize that violence, physical or legal, settles more conflicts over time than any other method.

Martin-Zimmerman: The Last Gasp of the Race Baiters?

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:04:00 +0000

Commenter Sean thinks so:

...the recent Martin incident far from being the epic "we hate whitey" event you think it is, is really a sign of the death of the race-baiters. You don't know this because you only see what the media shows you about the Black community. Surprise, it's a lie. There is no race war in Sanford. Why do you think the media keeps focusing on getting statements from Black people outside of Sanford? More particularly inner-city Blacks or clearly lower educated Blacks? Jesse Jackson et al tried to stir up trouble in Sanford and it didn't work. We refused to boycott businesses b/c most people in Sanford understand it is not a Black/White thing. Why do you think Rev Al had to tone down his rhetoric?

April 17, 2012 4:15 PM

Interesting point. I am forced to admit that my impression of the state of black thought is informed through media, not only via the admittedly biased and agenda-pursuing MSM but also those blacks in academia whose writings and words I come across. It so happens that these sources of information are mutually reinforcing...that Black thought as represented in the Academy is, by varying degrees, more or less represented by what the race hustlers known as Sharpton and Jackson spout off on the telly.

But Sean's point is a fair one...that the bleatings of street theater hucksters just happen to coincide with the scribblings of Black Nationalists/Supremacists/Separatists, and their anti-racist (code for anti-White) colleagues safely ensconced in their protected fiefdoms of racial identity politics, and aided and abetted by senior public officials and LEAs whose silence on interracial crime is deafening, does not necessarily imply that "Joe Eight Ball"* shares their antipathy.

* "Joe Six Pack" didn't seem to fit here

Comforting, for sure. But I'm unsure whether knowledge that the great core of black folks aren't buying what they're so-called leaders are shoveling will change much how a White should calculate he should behave when encountering, alternately, packs of drunken white or black guys. It may do so over time, especially if we get real about race and cease the pretty racial lies America tells itself in a poor substitute for genuine inter-racial dialog, doubly so if the crime data changes along with it. Additionally, Sean's claimed gulf between grass-roots black opinion and that of what is shown to the world via the MSM and AfAm Studies Courses
suggest that those blacks who do resent non-blacks (mis)attributing the deeds of their 'leaders' to their own personally held opinions, have some yeoman work to do in pushing these spewers of hate and disorder to the margins. Perhaps this revolution of sorts is already underway, that those who hijacked the Civil Rights movement will soon be defenestrated. I hope Sean is right...and in some ways the cracks are already showing. When the race baiters' favorite attack--dat's raciss!--is now a punchline, the end of the Sharpton/Jackson era cannot be far away.

Until that day, I doubt that disinterested observers can really fault your average White taking the Black Elite racialist provocations at face value...or at least hedging in the interest of personal safety as Derbyshire did with his "Talk".

NBPP, Racist Bastages

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:24:00 +0000

As a white guy, it's hard not to take extreme offense at this woman's words:

In an online interview this week, Michelle spoke openly of her frustration with what she calls the massive racial problem in this country, especially over the Trayvon Martin case. She admits that her sadness over the case was overwhelming and that she spoke harshly during the online segment.

"Let me tell you, the things that's about to happen, to these honkeys, these crackers, these pigs, these pink people, these ---- people. It has been long overdue. My prize right now this evening ... is gonna be the bounty, the arrest, dead or alive, for George Zimmerman. You feel me?"

While a part of me wants to grant this woman some grace for her reckless words, knowing that I've said a few myself in my life, wow, I wonder how many hearts have been hardened amongst whites during this whole Zimmerman - Martin affair for the things flying out of her and other black folk's mouths. Any halfway observant white knows--or at least suspects strongly--that their his/her black countrymen have been bathing in a victimhood ideology that scapegoats whitey and blames so-called white racism for all the ills that befall them. Thus outbursts like this are as tragic as they are predictable. Tragic that such a misguided weltanschauung can exist without being roundly condemned (can you imagine a white activist shouting "nigger", "spook", or "spade" without the whole world coming down on him/her?) Tragic also that it shows whites what elements of the black community think about them...and demonstrates that Derb was onto something in his controversial and slightly overwrought Takimag column last week...thus driving a wedge between black and white Americans. Predictable because such radicalizing ideology is bound to bear, well, radical and hateful fruit. Fruit that ionizes those it comes into contact...would whites feel more secure about their black countrymen in the wake of the $10,000 dead-or-alive bounty on Zimmerman's head, or less? It is interesting to consider that, with her words, the 'massive racial problem' she sees because she wants to see it is the very one that attitudes like hers helps create.

Also, when did Zimmerman become a white guy? Isn't he Hispanic by the racial draft/one-drop standards of non-white communities (in cahoots with the left-wing media)? Wait, I know when that happened: It happened when the narrative required Zimmerman to be white...otherwise it was just another of the gazillions of brown-on-black, black-on-brown, or black v black incidents that happen each year. "Dog bites man" is ho-hum, 'nothing to see here', not even worthwhile to report in the paper because it's so common it's--if you'll pardon the expression--white noise. "Man bites dog"...especially in a critical race theory/black liberation theology context...now that's news. And agitprop you can't buy if you are a race hustler.

I've bucked the HBD trend here at EW, and stated uncategorically that I think culture largely trumps biology when it comes to behavior such as this. I still believe this to be the case. It is a shame that the black community's wholesale rejection of fatherhood teams up with searingly racist and racialist anti-white ideology. But perhaps it's just like a whitey/cracker/pink person/pig to tell black Americans that their problem is with their culture and the stories they allow themselves to believe about the differently hued people around them. I suppose I could tell them to man- and woman-up, get off the welfare plantation and stand on one's own two feet, and things will suddenly improve for the better. But I'd be wasting my time, they won't listen to me anyway. I'm the wrong color. I just don't "get it" and I can't because, well, my skin color prevents me from understanding.

Looks like I'll be required to dispense a variant of "the talk" to my children too. I have to warn them about the 10% of ~~black~~ African Americans who are a cauldron of anti-white hate inside, and the other 90% who enable them, if not with their secret sympathy, then by doing nothing at all.

Reaping the Whirlwind of Racial Resentment

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:40:00 +0000

This Vietnam veteran-turned-peacenik gleaned the harvest of decades of Marxist racial-resentment-planting. Fragged by the racially charged explosion that is the Trayvon Martin situation, he now is quite literally the definition of a conservative--a liberal who has been mugged by the completely foreseeable consequences of Progressivist/Marxist policies:

Mr. Watts was on his way home from the nearby Gas Express Mart at Starr Avenue and White Street about 4:45 p.m. Saturday when the boys approached him.

One pointed at Mr. Watts and said, "take him down," the victim recounted in an interview Monday. Mr. Watts, carrying home two small bags of pork rinds to dole out as treats to his three dachshunds, looked at the youth and said, "Why you picking on me?" Mr. Watts recalled. "Remember Trayvon. Why you picking on me?"

The boy, again, allegedly told his friends to "take him down." While Mr. Watts was down the boys kicked him, over and over, shouting, "[Get] that white [man]. This is for Trayvon ... Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man]," according to a police report. Toledo police charged two children -- the 11-year-old and a 17-year-old -- with robbery, Sgt. Roy Kennedy said.

At his home Monday, Mr. Watts said he has never allowed weapons inside and that when his four children were growing up, they were not allowed to play "cops and robbers, to kill the Indians." During the Vietnam War, Mr. Watts, who served in the military from 1950 to 1961, refused to let his boys play GI Joes. There would be no more killing, he said. But now, Mr. Watts says he plans to buy a gun and obtain a permit to carry it. "What happened to me ... down here on the corner, that changed my perspective on humanity," Mr. Watts said.

The assault occurred only a few hours after a peaceful rally, near the Thurgood Marshall Building, 420 E. Manhattan Blvd., to show support for the Martin family.

While I note the article takes pains to avoid mentioning the race of the yoots that attacked Mr. Watts--consistent with the habit of the media to avoid mentioning race or ethnicity in reporting, unless the media wants the alleged offender to be white--the racial nature of the epithets allegedly uttered while the attack was underway offers a clue. I can't imagine white thugs uttering "kill that white" while kicking an septuagenarian white man on the ground, although it is certainly possible. With white assailants thus excluded, and the racial component and racial animus thus established, and why is this crime not being prosecuted as a hate crime?

I think we know the answer to this rhetorical question. Once again, the soft bigotry of low expectations proffers a bored yawn in response to yet another roving band of vibrant yoots beating a white guy for the crime of low skin pigmentation.

Exit question: would whites do well to be on their guard for unprovoked racial attacks in any neighborhood that sports a "Thurgood Marshall" center as they should be in any neighborhood bisected by a "Martin Luther King" boulevard? Although in this case I note that said Thurgood Marshall center is a good ways away from the incident. It may simply be just a coincidence. Or not.

Who Determines Constitutionality?

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:37:00 +0000

Naturally, the political class thinks that it, and only it, should:

President Obama has earned much criticism for preemptively challenging the Supreme Court's
authority to strike down Obamacare's individual mandate. And deservedly so; his glib ignorance of constitutional history deserves a firm response. It is one thing to argue that Obamacare's individual mandate is unconstitutional and that the Court can rightly strike it down. It is quite another thing to argue that the Supreme Court alone is the ultimate arbiter of constitutional law. Conservatives can oppose Obamacare, and support the Court striking it down, without endorsing of further advancing the theory of "judicial supremacy."

Unfortunately, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell made that error today, in remarks to a Kentucky audience

Well, fortunately, in matters of constitutional interpretation, we've got a final arbiter in this country, and that's the Supreme Court. [A]t the end of the day, it's the judiciary that ensures we're a nation ruled by laws, not the whim of a President or a particular Congress."
McConnell's remarks are not much different from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes remarks in 1907 (before he was appointed to the Court): "We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution." The Supreme Court embraced these sentiments years later, in Cooper v. Aaron: "the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the
Constitution."

Our rulers presume too much, in arrogating to themselves the power to decide what's "in" and "out" of bounds. The Constitution is not a large document, nor do I think it that difficult to understand, and in the spirit of the principle of 'negative liberty', I offer another class of persons as suitably equipped to judge the Constitutionality of laws passed by the Legislative branch: the People themselves. Perhaps I have too much FIJA on the brain, but it seems to me that our laws and our government and our liberties are too important
to be left to the protection of those who make a living eating at the public trough. Their perspectives may be too tainted, too alienated, too remote from the realities of the plebes' daily life to truly represent the polis' perspective. Thus, while Congress and the executive theoretically--via "checks and balances"--won't pass unconstitutional laws, and the SCOTUS long ago annexed the power to declare legistlation Constitutional or not via Marbury v. Madison, the final arbiter of a law's Constitutionality can and should be the People themselves, via that very German-English invention, the ultimate check on governmental power, the jury box.

School Neuters Song "God Bless The USA"

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:28:00 +0000

A jealous god continues to succeed in displacing
Another:

Parents at a Massachusetts elementary school are furious after educators first removed the word 'God' from the popular Lee Greenwood song, "God Bless the U.S.A." and then pulled the song all together from an upcoming concert.

Fox 25 in Boston is reporting that children at Stall Brook Elementary School in Bellingham were told to sing, "We love the U.S.A." instead of "God Bless the U.S.A."

Greenwood released a statement to Fox News condemning the school's actions.

An online poll taken by the television station indicated more than 80 percent of viewers were outraged by removing God from the song.

"I don't have a problem with the song if somebody else does I guess it's their business," resident Patrick Grudier said. "I mean It's on our currency (God)."

But not everyone agreed - including parent Matthew Cote.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with changing the song," he told the television. "It's a public school. If you want to have the word God in the song, go to a private school."

It is fitting that mere mention of Yahweh is being proscribed by a public school, a facility that is itself a functional Sunday school of sorts for the Church of Leftist Sec-Humanism (I'll call this institution CLaSH for short). The difference in these types of "Sunday schools"--sectarian and so-called secular--is that, instead of churning out new little Christian and Catholic and Mormon and Orthodox acolytes, these taxpayer-funded CLaSH churches mint new congregants for the State's faith in, well, the State's houses of worship. To the tune of 3M annually. And as one cannot simultaneously serve God and Mammon, a church cannot support two competing gods. One or the other must go, and in this case, with CLaSH ascendant and Christianity on the wane, another symbol of the Christian faith takes a hike.

While I do mourn the continuing cleansing of Yahweh from the fabric of public life by an increasingly godless people, for I think it bodes significant ill for our country, I do not oppose it. In fact, I am at the point where that not only do not oppose it, I now welcome it. And I pray that it accelerates. For the Christian God long ago stopped being America's god, and the sooner that American Christians and Christians around the world are disabused of the surprisingly resilient notion that America is "Christian", the sooner that the name "Christian" is not linked to the manifest evils that the CLaSH congregation wreaks at home and around the world. Put another way, continuing insistence on the part of American Christians that America is a Christian nation ends up slandering Christianity in the eyes of non-Christian foreigners. Better to clear up the misconception by conceding the obvious--that America is at best post-Christian and we Christians are a minority in the country we founded, and let the CLaSH take responsibility for the fruits of its moral system.

I for one am tired of having my faith, which I take seriously, confused for that of the nominal Christians, atheists, and pagans that presently occupy the seats of power and influence in the United States. It is as if my car, which had a Jesus fish sticker on the trunk lid (it doesn't IRL, but bear with me here), was carjacked at gunpoint and I kidnapped by a gang of heathen hooligans, who went on to careen around on the interstate, cut people off in traffic, flip other drivers the bird, and commit more than a couple hit-and-runs. Some spectators, noting the fish sticker, would likely conclude that such a vehicle were piloted by a Christian. Moreover, these observers may extrapolate from such individual incident(s) to be characteristic of Christians in general, when in truth the vehicular misconduct was committed by an unbeliever and I, jammed in the backseat between two armed heathens enjoying their moment of reckless bravado, was relatively powerless to intervene.

Such is the situation today in our post-Christian society, and the sooner American Christians stop claiming that America is a Christian country when it obviously is not, the better it will be for the Christian brand.

Exhibit A of Why Liberal Sec-Humanism Won't Last

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:28:00 +0000

Under the mantra of "tolerance" for all cultures, no matter how anathema, the Faith of Liberal Sec-Humanism refuses to defend itself against encroachment by an aggressive rival religion:

This has been a week of attempted advances for the Islamization of America (and Britain as well). Those who think it isn't happening should ponder the case of Wegmans, a supermarket in Rochester, N.Y. Wegmans has put up a sign asking customers buying pork or alcohol not to use a particular checkout line when a Muslim teenager is on duty as the cashier. Only after public pressure from readers of my site AtlasShrugs.com and Robert Spencer's JihadWatch.org did the sign come down.

This was more Islamization of the marketplace. This is a pattern. If you don't want to handle meat that's not halal, work for a Muslim butcher. Don't take a job at Wegmans, Wal-Mart or Target. But this Muslim cashier's special line was not about that. It was about imposing Islam on non-Muslims. Muslims are seeking special accommodations for a "special class." (Islamic law places Muslims in a special class, giving them rights that non-Muslims do not have.)

It's not just the principle of tolerance that will do liberal sec-humanism in, but the seeds of its own destruction that so-called tolerance will permit to be sown. How so, you ask? It's like this: we know that "tolerance" in Liberal-speak means the meek acceptance of the disruptive and disintegrative presence of anything non-Western--particularly if it's non-white--by the culture. Celebrate Diversity, and every other breezy catchphrase for cultural incoherency and eventual seppuku. In addition, we know that a highly intolerant Islamic culture, permitted a beachhead in Western Civilization's post-Christian lands by the very principles of Liberal Sec-Humanism itself, seeks to ~~subvert~~ evangelize the foreign cultures it comes into contact with, in this case, post-Christian Liberal Sec-Humanism. Ironically, sometimes this subversion is effected using the very tools of lawfare that Liberal Sec-Humanism itself used to destroy the hegemony of Christianity in Western culture.

In effect, Islamists hoist Liberal Sec-Humanism on its own petard, slowly bringing the dar-al-harb into the umma using Liberal Sec-Humanist ideals and tools, turning these erstwhile strengths into critical strategic vulnerabilities.

Does anyone think for a minute that liberal sec-humanism's libertine State will survive in an climate rife with Islamism? Especially with defectors such as this (HT: VD) who run, not walk, into the arms of the very intolerant Islamic culture that seeks to blot pagan Liberal sec-Humanism from the Earth?

3-Yr Nightmare (Mostly) Comes To An End

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:10:00 +0000

We need "rape shield" laws for the accused, symmetrical to that which protect the identity of the accuser, badly:

A Spanish court has dropped a probe into allegations a Saudi billionaire prince raped a model on a yacht in Ibiza three years ago, according to a ruling seen by AFP Wednesday. The case concerns Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of King Abdullah and one of world's richest men, who is being asked to respond to a complaint of sexual assault against him in August 2008 by a model who was 20 at the time. A provincial court on Palma de Majorca, the capital of the Balearic Islands, on Monday ordered a stay of proceedings in the case due to the "contradictions and vagueness" of the alleged victim's testimony, the court ruling said.

A judge in Ibiza in May 2010 ordered the case to be closed for lack of evidence. But courts later reopened the case and asked the Saudi authorities to take a statement from the accused. The woman, who has not been named by the court, believes her drink was spiked with a drug in a nightclub on Ibiza after she met the prince. "I didn't drink much, but I think there was something in my glass," she said in a text message at 5:12 am August 13, after waking up in a bedroom of a luxury yacht...

We will never know what truly happened on the yacht "Turama" three and a half years ago. The model could have been slipped a mickey. Perhaps she blacked out but assented to sex and doesn't remember it. Maybe she made the whole thing up, in a desperate move to "save her reputation" after having been rogured by a man (not necessarily the wealthy prince) only to experience post-coital regret later. But one thing is for certain: the lack of accountability for rape accusers makes a rape allegation both ridiculously easy to make and a frightful weapon of terrorist lawfare, and if this man is innocent of rape, these last 42 months must have been sheer hell.

Anyone else notice how alcohol is quite often at the epicenter of rape allegations? There's a teachable lesson in there, both for men who wish to avoid a spurious FRA and for women who value their reputations.

Mr. Romney Wedges The Youth Vote

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:09:00 +0000

Generational warfare is a variant of ye olde Marxist class warfare, and therefore automatically suspect as a tactic, but I think this time the class warfare card is being appropriately played:

"...I don't see how a young American can vote for a Democrat." The Democratic Party "is focused on providing more and more benefits to my generation, mounting trillion-dollar annual deficits my generation will never pay for," Romney said. While Democrats are perpetrating "the greatest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of humankind," The government's record-breaking debts "are not frightening to people my age, because we'll be gone," Romney argued, but "they ought to be frightening to death to people your age!"

Washington's staggering spending binge is entailing a burden of fearsome proportions on the millennial generation - voters in their late teens and 20s. With the government more than $15.5 trillion in debt and continuing to borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends , Generation Y is in for a prolonged economic beating. The national debt now exceeds the entire annual output of the US economy. Millennials will be paying for it through higher taxes, slower growth, reduced public services, fewer jobs, lower incomes, and a more uncertain future than their parents or grandparents confronted.

By "to my generation", I presume Mr. Romney is speaking about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and not talking about "crony capitalism" where the middle class is squeezed for the benefit of the politically connected rich. Intergenerational wealth transfer has been a bipartisan staple of political vote-buying for the last 80 years, and it is good to see a mainstream politician finally go after the morally dubious nature of this class of entitlement spending. I think the President is quite vulnerable on this issue, partly due to unfortunate timing (he is in charge when the bills are coming due), but also partly due to the words from his own mouth. Why should young people who have been clobbered by the mancession in these trying economic times and many of whom have had to move back in with their parents have whatever wealth they're able to scrape up be "spread around" at the point of a gun to their parents and grandparents,* who are likely to be many times more wealthy than they?

* Granted, Boomers paid for their parents and grandparents too, but for far shorter of a period. Their bill was far smaller than the one that awaits Xers and especially Millennials.

Thus I think Mr. Romney's overt playing of the generational warfare card, and subtle invoking of the rich-envy card, will serve him well in his attempt to pry the youth vote away from Mr. Obama in the upcoming national election.

But Mr. Romney's campaign isn't just playing standard Marxist class warfare politics here. It really *should* make Xers and Millenials fighting mad that their tax monies (and that of their children and grandchildren) are going to subsidize Boomer retirements, just as it should have made Silents fighting mad that they and their Boomer children and Xer grandchildren were going to be taxed to support dear old born-in-1890 Granny in her sunset years--after she had paid nothing or little-to-nothing into the system. Of course, one difference back then was that life expectancies when Social Security was created in the 1930s were much lower, thus "retirement" was nothing like the 20-30 year partial- or total vacation--less if male, more if female--from productive labor that we have today. Another difference is that, frankly, the entitlement state has swollen to such an extent, first by FDR's New Deal, then by LBJ's Great Society, that it would probably make Bismarck blush in shame. And John Galt shrug the burden from his shoulders.

So: Mr. Romney is inviting Xers and especially Millenials to ask "why?". What I would really like to see him do is parley this wealth-transfer issue into an attack on the whole entitlement spending edifice--and couch it in terms of liberty and freedom. However, I suspect that he's far too moderate (and astute) of a politician to do this; it is to his advantage to play class politics to gain young people's votes, but it would not be to his advantage to overly antagonize all those Boomers like him who would see their payout get cut. After all, politicians who pay Paul with Peter's money can always count on Paul's support, even if it means that Paul, the politician, and poor, trapped, tapped-out Peter go off the fiscal cliff together.

When Is Tolerance A Fatal Flaw?

noreply@blogger.com (Elusive Wapiti) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:14:00 +0000

...when your tolerance and pluralism propel you to admit elements into your culture that undermine the tolerance and pluralism and permits their very existence in the first place:

Every time a Muslim commits murder in the name of Islam, the denial begins again: Western leaders and the mainstream media tie themselves into knots trying to explain what happened without making any reference to its guiding motivation.

Last week was no different: Muhammad Merah was a self-styled "Islamic warrior" who killed a rabbi and several children at a Jewish day school in Toulouse, France, in an attack that the international media widely reported initially as having been perpetrated by a neo-Nazi. When it became clear that Merah was actually a jihadist, the predictable denial began: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that the attack had nothing to do with Islam, and the call echoed worldwide not to allow the murders to harm French "pluralism."

In fact, however, Muhammad Merah's murders had everything to do with Islam: he claimed affiliation with al-Qaeda and may have trained with the Taliban, both of which are explicitly and ostentatiously Muslim groups that justify all their actions by reference to the Qur'an and Sunnah. He claimed to be a mujahid, which is a warrior of jihad, which is an Islamic theological and legal concept. He killed Muslim soldiers who fought in the infidel military -- something that only someone who considered one's loyalty to the umma to trump all other loyalties would have done.

Indeed, so grounded is Merah's massacre in Islam that it is virtually inconceivable that he would have carried it out had he not been a Muslim. And so Sarkozy is, like every other leader in the Western world today, whistling in the dark, trying to pretend that there is no problem when there is a huge problem, and basing the future of his nation on the fantasy that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in France do not believe the same things Muhammad Merah believed.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy announced that he is going to make habitually visiting jihadi websites a crime. But as long as Sarkozy and the French establishment continues in denial about the nature, source and magnitude of the threat, monitoring websites may stop a few jihad attacks, but it will do nothing to stop the Islamization of French society by gradual capitulation to Sharia demands. The hijab ban was one step to prevent that, but Sarkozy is going to have to be prepared to be much more "implacable in defending our values," as he declared he would be in the wake of Merah's massacre, than he has been up to now, if he is really serious about doing so.

Secularism, tolerance, pluralism, and relativism are in a pickle here. On one hand, secularism, tolerance, pluralism, and relativism theoretically have no truck with any creed or faith tradition. I say theoretically, because we know that there are some creeds (viz, neo-Nazism) that are rejected in a European pluralist society. But in general, all are fungible and interchangeable.

On the other hand, secularism, tolerance, pluralism, and relativism, since these philosophies do not believe in the objective superiority of any one creed or faith (or in the objective incompatibility and/or inferiority of any one creed or faith), these principles render a tolerant and pluralist culture unable to defend itself against a competing rival culture. Particularly a steeply chauvinistic one that insinuates itself into the host culture (in this case, French, European, and Western) under the rubric of pluralism, and then works feverishly to subvert that tolerant and pluralist culture and transform it into a Sharia-compliant Islamic one.

In other words, post-Christian Western Civilization's values of tolerance and pluralism impede it from acting on the threats posed by invading viral agents from another civilization. For what does it mean to be French? Can--or more saliently, will--an observant Moslem living in France act the same or hold the same values as would a white native-born nominally Catholic Frenchman? Is it realistic to expect a Moslem Algerian-born "Frenchman" to have any commonalities with a secular or nominally Catholic white Frenchman for the essential elements of a culture...shared faith, blood, language, traditions? If one's "identity" is one defined so broadly that all are accepted and few are rejected, on what basis is one French as opposed to German or Algerian? Speaking the French language, and obeying French laws? Or is it something more substantive than that, such as a common faith and shared genetic heritage?