Category Archives: Reaction

Myth, Truth, and Modernity

Nyan wrote on creating a religion. The basis of his post is this bit of materialist nonsense:

The immediate and obvious solution is that we must believe in a mythology that is not true. Not necessarily false, mind you; our spiritual myths may be nonsense from a truth perspective. For example, we might claim to believe that “It is the destiny of mankind to conquer the stars”. This can’t really be true or false in a positivist sense because constructions involving “destiny” and “mankind” are not really meaningful empirically. How does the statement constrain your expectations? It does not; it is purely mythological.

You may have noticed the relationship of this problem to Hume’s impenetrable Is-Ought barrier. I propose a similarly impenetrable but transparent Truth-Myth barrier to replace it. On one side we have the beliefs one adopts as part of an unsubordinated quest to understand the world, the beliefs that an idealized engineer might have, the Truth. On the other side we have those beliefs that provide meaning and spiritual context, and motivate us, the Myth. I call the barrier transparent because the Myth tends to be constructed in terms of the Truth. For example where on the truth side we notice fleshy ape-things that are related in a certain way to most of what we have to deal with, on the Myth side we call them “people”, give them individual names, and speculate about their destiny. On the Truth side of the barrier, I think Logical Positivism is the correct approach; we construct our beliefs about Truth to constrain our expectations and direct our purposeful actions, and we cut out the non-contributing parts. On the Myth side, I don’t really know how or even whether we ought to constrain our techniques of reasoning. I will be relatively permissive here and take the position that you adopt whatever mythology speaks to your soul, with the only restriction being that don’t let this pollute our understanding of Truth.

Something can be True without being Fact, and you will never have a human system until you come to terms with this. I’ve written on the three types of truth before.

Fact truth – Fact truth is mundane reality. A fact truth is empirical, it explains or describes a natural phenomenon but goes no deeper than that. “The sky is blue” would be a fact truth. Science is the best developed way of establishing this type of truth.

Social truth – A social truth is something socially accepted as being true. A social truth is something true in relating to and within a society. Social truths can be both mundane and transcendental. “It is rude to spit on the sidewalk” would be a mundane social truth; “the American Dream” would be a transcendental social truth.

Primal truth – Primal truth is transcendental truth. It is Truth. Truth speaks to the core of our human essence; to who and what we are. It is never mundane.

Another name for the third is mythic truth. Myths are True, in fact they are often more True than fact.

If you don’t understand, think of Plato’s forms as an analog. The forms don’t technically exist, they are not fact, but the form is more True than any particular factual instantiation of the form. The non-factual concept of tree is more true of trees as a whole than that particular existent oak at the neighbourhood park.

In the same way, the primal truths are more true of humanity than any particular existing human, any organization, or any of the facts of humanity. Myth is the distilled Truth of humanity.

Nyan is trying to replace Truth with fact and wondering how to create a human religion out of this. It’s impossible, you can not even make human out of fact alone. If you try you will only have a broken, soulless wretch animated only until the empty sleeve of flesh can destroy itself. Man does not live on fact alone. Man needs myth; man is myth; myth is truth.

Modernism, in its essence, is the destruction of myth in the human experience and its replacement by fact, often false. Modernism is the entirety of truth being conquered by fact. Buying into the naturalist, materialist world-view is to swallow modernity whole. By holding to his Truth-Myth framework Nyan is only showing that he is still pwned by modernity.

None of this is to say that fact is wrong, untrue, or unimportant. Fact is an essential part of truth, but it is not the entirely truth. Fact has its place, but that place is not myth’s place.

Nyan needs to abandon his false materialism. He sees ‘internal contradictions’ and replaces God with Darwin. Darwin may be fact, he may be true, but he can never be Truth. The internal contradictions he sees which he thinks deny God are Truth. The glory of fox’s hunt and the desperation of the rabbit’s run are not internal contradictions, but are instead mutually necessary; without the glory there is no desperation, without the desperation there is no glory. It is both the glory and the desperation that make the race real, that make the hunt matter, that create Truth. The glory and the desperation are Truth whatever Darwinian facts may be used to explain them. Nyan’s materialism would destroy both leaving only biology and game theory in its place.

Nyan knows, even if he does not actively realize it, that his materialism is false for he can’t even hold to his materialism for the single post in which he purports to do just that. He reifies a non-material, atheist natural law, then anthropomorphizes this immaterial form as Gnon and erects himself a new god. He states he remains agnostic to Gnon’s metaphysical nature while at the same time he posits Gnon as metaphysical Truth itself. He set out to make a materialistic, positivist religion and creates himself a immaterial, metaphysical god. As with all materialists, he denies God only to create his own god.

This is because materialism and positivism are useful for finding fact, but near useless for finding Truth, but Nyan can’t see this because he makes a modern false distinction between Truth and Myth. He needs to reconcile himself to Truth and deny this inhuman materialism.

Nyan, spurn this modernism and embrace the truth of myth.

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From here, I’ll let Chesterton take over (read the entire chapter to see modernity eviscerated):

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment was here: that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales rounded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been DONE. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were WILFUL. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.

But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken. But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet. This modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free. One went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air.

Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance; but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to argue about it a little; and I soon found that the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would say) while it is one thing it is also the only thing there is. Why, then, should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare it with. It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, “I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures.” But if it comes to that why should not a man say, “I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see”? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments. It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness of the world; why should he not choose to have an emotion about its smallness?

It happened that I had that emotion. When one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. The moment you really see an elephant you can call it “Tiny.” If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it. These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

As of my writing this the Google news search of Charlie Hebdo shooting nets “About 21,700,000 results“. Rotherham abuse nets “About 27,800 results“. Rotherham rape “About 9,520 results“. The latter story has had four months for stories to be written, the former a couple days.

Here we can see the West’s priorities: a dozen left-wing journalists get killed by the same people they fought so hard to import and it is an international crisis that everyone must care about. 1400 innocent children get raped by those same imports and nobody gives a shit.

You should have been angry months ago.

Anyway, here’s my opinion on Charlie Hebdo: they got what they deserved  the natural consequences of their pro-immigration beliefs (Ed: Ill-phrased and added a clarification) and I’m not going to shed a tear. May God grant them mercy in the next life.

Charlie Hebdo was a vile left-wing rag that regularly engaged in anti-Christian blasphemy. They are not ‘us‘. The Muslims aren’t us, but neither are Charlie Hebdo. If our enemies want to start killing each other, why should we involve ourselves? Let them take each other out.

I do have some sympathy for free speech and I might be sympathetic if Charlie Hebdo was staunch ideological pro-free speech organization but like most left-wingers Charlie are very selective in their desire for free speech. From Charlie Hebdo’s wiki:

In 2008, controversy broke over a column by veteran cartoonist Siné which led to accusations of antisemitism and Siné’s sacking by Val. Siné sued the newspaper for unfair dismissal and Charlie Hebdo was sentenced to pay him €90,000 in damages. Siné launched a rival paper called Siné Hebdo which later became Siné Mensuel. Charlie Hebdo launched its Internet site, after years of reluctance from Val.

Charlie gutlessly sacked a cartoonist for violating a more-untouchable taboo. I guess they fear Jews more than Muslims. They are not pro-free speech, they are simply anti-religion. Why should I, or any religious person, support them in this?

To add is this:

On 26 April 1996 François Cavanna, Stéphane Charbonnier and Philippe Val filed 173,704 signatures, obtained in 8 months, with the aim of banning the political party Front National, since it would have contravened the articles 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The people at Charlie loved free speech and free assembly so much, they literally tried to ban a political party* and silence 15% of the population. (I wonder if they would/will reconsider their dislike of FN now?)

There is no reason to support Charlie. All this is is a left-wing organization, a supporter of diversity, receiving the natural consequences of diversity. If you invite savages into your country, do not be surprised when savagery results. Mourn not for those who helped engineer the invasion, but for those innocents who suffer due to it.

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* Mike Anissimov indicated on Twitter that it may have been a joke (as did another rude person), but I haven’t been able to find a source for that. Wikipedia and the article wikipedia sources seem to be playing it straight (‘pilon’, translated ‘drumstick’ at the end, also means to pulp a book). Other sources than wiki seem to take it seriously as well. The translations of a random set of these forum members seem to take the attempted ban seriously. Now, I can’t read French very well, so I would miss any subtleties to these stories that would indicate humour and this story is from two decades ago, before the internet went mainstream, so I am having a hard time finding much. It’s possible that this is a joke, but 173k signatures is a long way to go for a joke, and there was an official inquiry into banning FN that followed soon after. I’m accepting it as legitimate until such someone shows otherwise.

Utopia Doesn’t Exist

Victor Mandrake brought up a criticism on Twitter on my recent post on recourse in marriage. It seems like his Twitter is private, so what of

I answered the immediate question on Twitter:

But I want to make a larger point here.

Of course there’s a potential someone will lie and I’m sure there will be people who get hurt in any system or scheme proposed here on the blog, but pointing out that a system could not stop every possible corruption is not a good criticism. Every system will have a failure point and every system will have corruption. Humans are fallen creatures tempted to all varieties of sins and any and every political, economic, and legal system will be prone tovarying degrees and forms of corruption.

Utopia does not exist because people are people and prone to corruption. Attempts at utopia always lead to unimaginable heights of brutality because there is no way to create a perfect system for imperfect beings, and trying to force them into the system will destroy them and the system. I am not attempting to create a perfect system. No reactionary is trying to create a perfect system that is free from corruption.

One of the most basic foundations of reactionary thought is: humans are corrupt and any system with humans in it will be corrupted. Utopia is impossible. Everything is broken.

What I am trying to do is outline workable systems built for humans that will limit the excesses of natural human corruption. Systems that are stable and will provide people with a sense of place and try to lure out their better natures. Our modern system is cold, inhuman, and bureaucratic. We do not need a perfect system, we need a human system.

Traditional Recourse in Marriage

I’m going to return to my previous discussions of the marital cross. In a decent traditional Christian society, there are be no grounds for divorce except for adultery or abandonment, because divorce is degenerate and harmful to society, but this does not mean there would be no recourse for the married but suffering.

For a woman (who is physically weaker) being abused,* the best traditional recourse is family. Having her father/brothers/cousins/etc. ‘pay a visit’ to an abusive husband and ‘demonstrate the error of his ways’ to him should be the most immediate course of action. If a visit or two doesn’t work, then the ‘he needed killing’ defence should be applicable. The widow is then free to remarry.

For the man being physically abused, the traditional recourse is to be a man and not let your weaker wife beat on you. There should be no need for more recourse in cases of physical abuse. Obviously, defending yourself from physical abuse is not abuse itself and should not be punishable by law.

In cases where family is not available/impractical to the woman or the man is being abused emotionally or through sexual withdrawal or restraint is not an option, the church has a traditional process of recourse given in Matthew: Bring it to your spouse, if that fails, bring it before a few brothers, if that fails bring it before the church, if that fails, then the abusive spouse should be expelled from the church. The marriage continues and the believing spouse should continue to love their spouse, but the expelled partner is no longer a believer and no longer a part of the church. If the now-unbelieving spouse, having been through the process of church discipline decides to the leave the beliving spouse, that is marital abandonment and is allowable grounds for divorce.

If the church fails do deal with physical abuse or the abuse is particularly heinous then the law should be employed. There is nothing more evil than a someone who abuses someone under their authority and the law should punish such abuse appropriately. The punishment** for a man who physically abuses his wife and/or children (or a woman who abuses her children and the husband is unable to restrain) should be a private whipping (not public so that he is not shamed before those under him); if a man has been whipped a few times and is still abusive or if his first offence is particularly heinous, then he should be executed as the criminal he is. The grieving widow is then free to remarry.

Sadly, we do not live in a decent traditional Christian society, so instead of a civilized response to abuse, we encourage more abuse through the dissolution of the family. Obviously, this is not all practical advice given our current degenerate laws, but  this is how a traditional society should handle domestic abuse: family, masculine leadership, church discipline, and, if necessary, corporal/capital punishment.

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* When I am speaking of abuse throughout this piece, I am not speaking of such things as the bitter, even mutually violent, arguments of a dysfunctional marriage or isolated incidences (unless the incident is unusually heinous). I am talking of a sustained pattern of cruel abuse. Isolated incidences and mutual dysfunction should be dealt with privately through forgiveness and love.

** Obviously, when I say punishment, I mean after a fair trial.

On Bisexuality

The Legionnaire says neoreactionaries need a theory of bisexuality, so here it is:

It doesn’t exist.

Done.

****

Alright, so you actually want an explanation.

The evidence tends to lean towards true bisexuality (a natural sexual attraction to both sexes) not existing.

Men’s sexuality is rigid: they are aroused by women or aroused by men. Several studies have shown that ‘bisexuals’ show genital arousal similar to either homosexuals or heterosexuals, although a more recent (smaller) study funded by the Institute of Bisexuality with more carefully picked subjects has shown there might be otherwise (this study does not sound particularly persuasive to me).

OkCupid is one of the largest natural experiments in history on the dating market, and in the past they were kind enough to make posts on a bunch of their data. They looked at bisexuality, of supposed bisexuals less than a quarter sent any messages at all to more than one other sex. Most “bisexuals” are closeted gays or straights trying to look cool. Sadly, they did not include an analysis of how many messages were sent to each among those few who did message all, but I would guess they were very unbalanced..

So the evidence suggests bisexuality doesn’t exist in males. This is not to say that gays or straights may not swing towards the other side on occasion. Some experimentation may be natural, especially in younger men, and straight men may occasionally be aroused by a male presenting enough femininity (or for homosexuals, a women presenting masculine enough) . As well, “romance” (which some argue is all that is needed for bisexuality) is somewhat separate from arousal.

As well, there are non-natural situations where attraction may be aroused by environmental factors. First is the is the hedonic treadmill. Those engaging in hedonic pleasures will often have to go farther and farther extremes just to get the same rush as they did initially and so, due to unnatural hedonic plenty, will engage in behaviours not natural to them. One step down the treadmill may be bisexual behaviour. As well, male sexuality tends to be overwhelmingly powerful. When desperate or consumed by lust men will often use whomever or whatever is available to relieve themselves. Hence, ‘gay for the stay’ and ‘sodomy, rum, and the lash’. If no woman is available in a man’s environment, or if a man is significantly more convenient, straight men will often engage in homosexual behaviours, just as non-pedophiles will have sex with children and lonely Chinese men will have sex with benches.

But desperation, experimentation, and confusion do not a true bisexual make. There is little evidence to support the supposition that there are men who are naturally aroused by both men and women.

On the other hand, women’s sexuality is fluid,the categories of male sexuality don’t really apply.

Women are less aroused by visual cues, such as a someone’s body, and are more aroused by environmental, attitudinal, and interpersonal cues. To say they’re attracted to men or attracted to women would not be fully correct, most women are attracted to the cues given off mostly by men or the cues given off mostly by women, but if those cues were given by someone of the opposite sex (or even of a different species) they would also be attracted.

The neoreactionary theory of bisexuality is that it doesn’t exist but behaviours that appear like it on the surface do.

Of course, as with the pathogenic hypothesis of homosexuality, this theory is not set in stone. If new and better data becomes available then the NRx position will change.

The Law is a Death Threat

VD linked to a post by law professor Stephen Carter that makes a point that can not be made enough, so I’m going to reiterate it here:

That’s too bad. Every new law requires enforcement; every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence. There are many painful lessons to be drawn from the Garner tragedy, but one of them, sadly, is the same as the advice I give my students on the first day of classes: Don’t ever fight to make something illegal unless you’re willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way.

The government exists solely to force people to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise. No matter what the government is doing: public health care, economic redistribution, taxation, fighting obesity, etc., it is doing so by force. At the very least, they have forcibly taken taxes from the citizenry to pay for whatever activity they are doing.

Every law is a threat of violence: Do (or don’t do) this or we will sic the police on you.

The police’s sole purpose is violence, they exist solely to enforce the law through the use of the threat of violence and, failing that, violence.

But even further than that every law is at heart a death threat: Do (or don’t do) this or we kill you.

Don’t believe me, consider the one thing every government needs simply to exist taxation.

Pay your taxes or the IRS will fine (or jail) you. If you refuse to pay the fines, they send police to take you to jail. If you refuse to go to jail, the police will threaten you or forcibly move you to jail. If you do not bow to their threats or rseist them forcibly moving you, they will shoot you. If you resist being shot, they will shoot you until you are dead.

If we remove all the intermediary bureaucracy, the law is: pay your taxes or we will shoot you until you are dead.

Smaller laws and regulations hide this behind layers of bureaucracy. You might have to deal with the Department of Administrative Affairs, then the DAA’s enforcement arm, then the courts, then the Department of Justice, all before finally meeting the police, but if you refuse the law long enough, eventually the police will be there (if they’re don’t eventually arrive, then you simply don’t have to obey, but anarcho-tyranny is another topic for another time).

The police are the eventual enforcement mechanism of any law or regulation, however many layers government may use to muddy the waters, and the police’s job is, at base, to kill you if you don’t obey. Again, the police’s job is muddied as are society is soft and unable to deal with reality, but everything the police do, the Miranda Rights, the “please come with us”, the “do you mind answering a few questions”, the handcuffs, the tasers, the “stop or I’ll shoot”, all of it, is predicated on: if you don’t obey, we will kill you.

Most people in the West abide by the law and so they never go farther than a layer or two into the bureaucratic swamp; even most criminals generally obey the police before it becomes necessary for the police to kill them, so this reality is obscured by common social delusion. This delusion is how leftists can always cry for more laws but whine when the police enforce the laws on the likes of Michael Brown or Erik Garner.

Now, just because every law is a death threat and the police’s job is to kill you if you don’t obey, doesn’t make the law necessarily evil. Sometimes death threats and killing are justified. If someone was trying to rape your daughter, “stop or I’ll kill you” is justified, as is following through on the threat if necessary. Arguably, it’s the only just course of action. So, by calling the law a death threat and saying the police’s job is to kill is no indictment against the law or the police, it is simply a recognition of reality.

This reality is important to remember whenever we theorize on politics or call for more laws: more laws means more death threats and more reasons for the police to kill. It is also important to remember when someone gets themselves shot by the police: the police exist to kill, that is their job.

So remember for all political philosophy or law-making:

The government’s sole purpose is violence and every law is a death threat. Unless you are willing to kill for something no law should be made over it.

The Jewish Question

I wrote on Jewish privilege last week and the post was made more as a satirical bite at critical theorists than really related to Jews at all. As should be obvious to anyone reading my blog, I am not a critical theorist and am opposed to them. (My thoughts on white male privilege can be seen here and here). So any post where I seem to be supporting it should be read as containing a certain level of satire or irony.

I was accused of being anti-semitism because of the Jewish privilege post. Given that my post was mostly just a collection of statistics, it would seem some people think that reality itself is anti-semitic. So, note to Jews, you’ll probably make more enemies than friends if you go around yelling anti-semitism whenever someone mentions Jews in anything less than worshipful tones.

I’ve written little on Jews before for the simple reason that I don’t really care all that much about Jews either way. I don’t write pro-Jewish things because I’m not a Jew, Jew’s aren’t my people. I’ll leave it to Jews to promote and defend to themselves. I don’t write anti-Jewish things because I’m not particularly anti-Jewish either. But, given that the topic’s come up, I’ll give my thoughts on the Jewish Question and alienate all my readers in the process.

On a personal level, I’ve met few Jews, they’re sparse on the ground in the Canadian prairies, but those few I have met seemed to be decent-enough folks. As with any group of ‘others’, I’ll interact and judge Jews on an individual base but I have a natural preference for my own and tend to naturally congregate to my own, so I tend to spend the majority of my time with working/middle-class Christian whites.

On a group level, I view Jews as I do any other out-group not engaged in war with my in-groups, with benevolent neutrality. They are not my group but neither do I wish them ill.

Continuing on, as I demonstrated in my Jewish privilege post, in North America Jews are vastly overrepresented in any non-physical, high-status area of achievement, be it government, the financial sector, the media, the education system, or the justice system. Jews wield a disproportionate level of influence. This is a statistical fact. Anybody who denies this is a liar or ignorant and anybody who thinks stating this is anti-semitic thinks reality itself is anti-semitic and is no more worth listening to on the subject than any other race-baiter.

The reason for Jew’s over-representation is likely a combination of intelligence and tribalism. Jews have a high average IQ, which is correlated heavily with success. As well, Jews, like most people groups excepting some pathologically altruistic whites, tend to favour their own group over out-groups. This in-group favouring gives Jews, along with Asians and blacks, a competitive advantage as a group over whites in white dominated countries where the white in-group is larger, more diffuse, and riddled with the pathologically altruistic, making whites less likely to act in their group interests. Whites simply don’t identify as whites as an in-group and don’t act on this in-group loyalty.

For these two reasons, Jews are more successful on average than the white majority and I don’t really begrudge them that. Tribalism is natural and healthy, it is a good thing. I don’t hold it against other groups who act in the interests of their group except when it is to attack my group. That Europeans deny their natural tribalistic impulses is on Europeans not on Jews.

(I’ll note here, that whites as a group are not my group; white in North America is far too large and diffuse a group to make it an in-group. My in-group would be the red tribe, particularly Prairie Canadians. Many whites, particularly blue tribe whites, are also the other).

Some would point to the Jewish over-representation in progressive causes as an attack on my people, but I do not think Jewish over-representation in progressive causes indicates any purposeful, malign attack on the part of Jews.  Jews have always voted strongly Democrat and are a liberal group who prefer liberal policies, and given the earlier two reasons they tend to represent themselves well wherever they happen to be; this combination of achievement and liberalism is why Jews tend to be heavily represented in progressivist movement.

Those minority of Jews who have not been liberal have acquitted themselves proportionately well in anti-progressivism. Jews were the largest minority who fought for the confederacy. Jews were important aides to McCarthy in his anti-communist fights. Barry Goldwater himself was half-Jewish. More revealingly, 1% of the John Birch society were Jews, despite the fact that at the time, only 10% of Jews voted for Goldwater. So, .2% of the population that were Jewish conservatives were over-represented by a factor of 5 in the JBS.

So, Jews represent themselves well wherever they seem to go, but they tend to go liberal as a group. It seems less a purposeful attack on us by Jews, and more Jews, as a different group, have different priorities and pursue them. They happen to be good at it and are thus overrepresented among progressives. The effect is the same, progressivism, but ideological convergence rather than malign conspiracy seems more explanatory.

Continuing on, Jews are only 2% of the population. They are, as a group, smart and wealthy, but they are not super-human monsters. They may be progressive and disproportionately powerful, but even then they still hold only a small fraction of power and wealth in North America. If the majority were opposed to progressivism it wouldn’t matter what Jews thought. Our willful self-destruction is our own fault.

Because of this I can’t bear any particular ill-will towards Jews as a group; I do not fault groups for pursuing their interests and the only reason their interests are hurting us is because too many of us are pursuing self-immolation. But, we do have different interests, so something should be done so neither of our groups are hurting each other while pursuing our own interests.

So, what is to be done?

The same as is to be done with any other group: separation. As with blacks, Jews are not us, they are a different group with different priorities and different values, and they should be allowed to pursue them, just as we should be allowed to pursue our own priorities.

The answer to the Jewish question is subsidiarity or patchwork. Different groups, whether ethnic, religious, or ideological should have their own regions to live as they see fit without interference from other groups. In the particular case of Jews, this should be easy, as they tend to be geographically concentrated in the Northeast, Florida, and California. When we divide the country, we can allow these areas to either be cosmopolitan or give them to the Jews to run as they see fit. Then Jews and blue tribe whites can have their progressive utopia, blacks can have their welfare state, and red tribe whites can have agrarian conservatism. We can all live separate but in peace.

McCarthy & Fisher

I was just reading on McCarthy on Wiki and came across this:

In what played out to be the most dramatic exchange of the hearings, McCarthy responded to aggressive questioning from Army counsel Joseph Welch. On June 9, 1954, day 30 of the hearings, Welch challenged Cohn to give McCarthy’s list of 130 subversives in defense plants to the office of the FBI and the Department of Defense “before the sun goes down”.[24] In response to Welch’s challenge, McCarthy suggested that Welch should check on Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch’s own Boston law firm whom Welch planned to have on his staff for the hearings. McCarthy then mentioned that Fisher had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a group which Attorney General Brownell had called “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party”.

Welch revealed he had confirmed Fisher’s former membership in the National Lawyers’ Guild approximately six weeks before the hearings started.[27] After Fisher admitted his membership in the National Lawyers’ Guild, Welch decided to send Fisher back to Boston. His replacement by another colleague on Welch’s staff was also covered by The New York Times. Welch then reprimanded McCarthy for his needless attack on Fisher, saying that “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy, accusing Welch of filibustering the hearing and baiting Cohn, dismissed Welch’s dissertation and casually resumed his attack on Fisher, at which point Welch angrily cut him short:

“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Welch excluded himself from the remainder of the hearings with a parting shot to McCarthy: “You have brought it out [the Fisher/NLG affair]. If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good!” After Welch deferred to Chairman Mundt to call the next witness, the gallery burst into applause.

Fisher was relatively unscathed by the incident and went on to become a partner in Boston’s prestigious Hale & Dorr law firm and organized its commercial law department. He also served as president of the Massachusetts Bar Association and as chairman of many committees of the American and Boston bar associations. He was a former trustee of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy and chairman of the Franklin N. Flaschner Foundation in Waban, Mass., while Welch’s maneuvering helped to ruin McCarthy’s life and career. McCarthy died at the relatively young age of 48.
…
After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence on behalf of David Schine, but that Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, had engaged in some “unduly persistent or aggressive efforts” on behalf of Schine. The conclusion of the committee also reported questionable behavior on the part of the Army: That Secretary Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams “made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth”, and that Adams “made vigorous and diligent efforts” to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board “by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee”. Before the official reports were released Cohn had resigned as McCarthy’s chief counsel, and Senator Ralph Flanders (R, Vermont) had introduced a resolution of censure against McCarthy in the Senate.

Despite McCarthy’s acquittal of wrongdoing in the Schine matter, the Army–McCarthy hearings ultimately became the main catalyst in McCarthy’s downfall from political power.

Remember, this all happened a year after the Korean War, the year after Stalin died, and only a few years before the Great Leap Forward.

McCarthy is hunting possible traitorous supporters of mass-murdering communist regimes in the Army. An investigation is found in which the army is found to have committed questionable behaviour in stymieing these investigations, while McCarthy is found to be free of any wrong-doing.

During the trial, McCarthy calls out a lawyer who was a part of a known communist organization and McCarthy is painted as the bad guy. McCarthy ends up losing his career over this trial; the communist later ends up as President of the Massachusetts Bar Association and has major roles in the organizations for training new lawyers.

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Also interesting: Fisher was a part of the Signal Corps in WW2 and the whole hearing was about McCarthy investigating the Signal Corps.

Euler and Tradition

Scott writes on what he calls getting Eulered: when someone tries to convince you of something or rebut something you believe using arguments (particularly mathematical ones) you are either not intelligent or not trained enough to understand.

I’ve never heard the term before, but I’ve thought of this. I am intelligent, but not exceedingly so, there are a number of things I won’t be able to understand, at least not fully or without much more effort and time than I am willing to put in.

So, I follow a simple heuristic: what does someone smarter than me who agrees with me on things I understand and is willing to put in time/effort think on the issue?

If you know he agrees with you on the things you understand for similar reasons as you, you know he reasons in similar fashion to you from similar presupoositions. If he reasons in a similar fashion as you, you then know that his thoughts on another issue you don’t understand will be the most reasonable approximation of what you would think if you were either smart or knowledgeable enough to be able to form an informed opinion on the matter.

No matter how smart you are you can’t know or understand all things. In the case where you can’t, the wise course of action is to fall back on those who think the same as you, but are either more intelligent or more knowledgeable on the subject matter.

All rational organizations outsource when it’s more efficient, so why not outsource your thinking when it is more likely to be correct if someone else does it for you?

Agreeing with someone because he generally agrees with you when you don’t understand the argument in question is usually the most rational form of action.

Of course, this is not an original heuristic, and is no different than asking, ‘what does my father, my priest, my teacher, etc. say?‘

But what if you move your intellectual outsourcing beyond a known individual to something greater. This is where tradition comes in: why outsource your thinking to a single individual when you can outsource your thinking to the collective reasoning of every single previously-existing mind of your society?

Is it not much more efficient and wise to follow the collective wisdom of thousands of minds much more intelligent and knowledgeable than yourself than to go through the intellectual labour of thinking something through for yourself and likely arriving at a rationally inferior position?

From this, is not the person saying, “I believe what my ancestors, the magisterium, my intellectual forebears believe” being more rational than the one who tries to reason everything out for himself?

Maybe, argument from authority, if the authority stands firmly upon a mount of tradition, is the most rational argument of all.

Preventing the Killing Fields

There was a discussion on Twitter of which I was not a part concerning Anders Breivik. Alice Teller made the following point:

I agree, it is better to lose to chaos than to become chaos ourselves. While killing children under the direct command of God may be acceptable, we do not have and likely will never have that divine command and hoping we can receive it is abhorrent. A divine command that horrific is something that should be feared, not desired.

I bring this up because just last week while reading of Rotherham I wrote a rash Tweet in anger to the effect of: ‘Where is England’s Breivik to cleanse Rotherham? No jury in the world would convict you.’ I deleted it a little while later because while I still support crucifying everybody who was involved with supporting foreigners in sexually enslaving English children, holding up a child murderer as a positive example is simply wrong.

Which brings me to my point: the goal of neoreaction is to prevent Breivik-style mass murders.

Eventually, there will be a reaction against the current order as white men lose their trust in government officials as they watch them support foreigners as they rape their daughters, murder their sons, steal their jobs, destroy their freedoms, and ransack the national treasury. They will feel rage, as it is only natural to feel rage, and they respond to this rage with right-wing folk activism. Breivik was not a madman, he was the first reaction of the powerless white working-class against their masters and their masters’ imported voting-class.

Right now, violence is the only response available to the white working class. If the situation stays as is, eventually the white working class will respond the only way they can. When one’s own are threatened, a violent response is the natural response; it is currently not white men’s response because white men are unnaturally generous and their ethnic identity has been repressed. But this could rapidly change if their good nature is abused.

The goal of the neoreactionary project is to ensure that it never comes to the point where working-class white males need to slaughter imported foreigners en masse to be able to be able to celebrate their own culture and ethnicity and be treated justly in their own lands.

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Sidenote: When I’ve written on this before, some of whined that I’m making threats. I am not. This is not a threat, this is reality. Most men need a few things to be content: a wife, a family, meaningful work, and a cultural space into which he can fit. The modern progressive order is robbing men of all of this. When the white man realizes he has no place, he will become discontent. Enough discontent among the working-class will lead to violence, it always has and always will.

This is the way it is. It is not a threat, it is simply the way reality works.