Please do comment on the meritocracy discussion. I was really hoping that would continue.

But if you’d prefer something else — since I am in a mood where I’m only coming up with one or two original posts a week – here’s something to discuss.

At Patrick Deneen’s blog, commenter R.C. writes:

The majority of countries in the world simply do not have the traditions of respect for human rights — as we understand them — that exist in the Anglosphere. Put differently: Given the choice between living in a Chinese dictatorship, a Russian dictatorship, an Arab dictatorship, or a British dictatorship, give me the Brits, any day!

The same goes for world leadership. Anyone who thinks the world would be better off with the U.S. being as powerless as Britain, and China or Russia in the dominant economic (and therefore cultural) role, is either a lover of war and repression, or self-deceiving.

As rah-rah American chauvinism goes, this is very mild, of course, but I still want to examine whether it’s correct. First, let’s look at the statement about living in different types of dictatorships. As it’s stated, it’s rather hard to argue with. (A hidden assumption is that the person making the choice is Han Chinese if living in the Chinese dictatorship, ethnic English if living in the British one, etc.) But what Britain is actually headed toward is an anti-British dictatorship. Being an ethnic Englishman in 2030, if things continue on their current courses, could be like being a Tibetan in Tibet under the present Chinese rule. Meanwhile, the Western traditions of human rights are breaking down. The “boot stomping on a human face” is coming to be as common a sight in the EU as in China. So I have ample reason to think this type of statement is just Western hubris. It’s not neoconservative in the sense that the author understands lasting cultural differences among countries, but it is in the sense that it assumes the West is particularly peaceful.

As for the latter statement, certainly other things being equal, Americans are going to be better off with America leading the world. But should we expect the world in general to be a worse and more violent place if led by a non-Western power? I don’t buy it. We’ve had more war in recent times because the U.S. has tended toward “human rights” interventionism. I’m sure China, too, will want to install pro-Chinese leaders in as many countries as possible, but where will this lead to war?

I have no reason to believe that the weakening of the transnational Left, which presumably would follow the decline of the Western powers and the rise of China, would not be a good thing for world stability. Mencius Moldbug’s latest post addresses the potential benefits. He says essentially that the main cause of war in today’s world is a perverse incentive system. We have mostly civil wars of one kind or another, in which “progressives” decide to take the side of the weak, which can pose as an oppressed group and appeal for foreign help. If world powers decided to take the side of the strong and crush rebellions mercilessly, there would be no incentive for the rebellions to start in the first place, since they would know they had no chance of success. Now surely China will have its own motives to foment rebellions in certain parts of the world, but at least it is less likely to have the “humanitarian” motive — which actually tends to produce humanitarian catastrophe.

American foreign policy is a destabilizing force. I disagree with Moldbug that concerns of stability should always override concerns of justice, but in foreign policy the idea is very sensible. The “progressives” who run foreign policy, even under Republican rule, are inclined to champion the weak, which is a recipe for stalemate and ongoing war. It is not too much to say that the rise of a power that will operate according to realist logic, rather than the libertarian delusions that dominate American foreign policy, will be a benefit to the world at large. Maybe it will force America to reexamine its own culture too.

If I may quote the offending comment in its entirety:

I agree with Reverend Wright’s assessment of 1) the historic genocidal treatment of native Americans; 2) the long-lasting effects of slavery in America 3) terrorism during WII [sic] and other wars practiced by the American and other governments; 4) world-wide terrorism as a reaction to injustices perpetrated by Western governments.

I was disappointed in Obama’s across the board denunciation of Wright. Ron Paul would not have done something like that. [emphasis added]

I never cease to be amazed. Is there any better proof of the libertarian movement having gone far to the Left? (And Ron Paul not having made his sympathies very clear, if one of his supporters thinks he would have mostly agreed with Wright’s ideas?)

Do read the original post by Chris Roach, though. It’s excellent.

Update: Roach has a riposte to Justin Raimondo, while Arthur Pendleton criticizes the paleolibertarian left turn at VDare.

While we are talking about meritocracy, I thought I’d recommend an old favorite. The author, Matthew Maly, tries to explain anti-Americanism in much of the world by critiquing the assumption of many Americans that everyone wants a “win-win society” – much the same thing as a meritocracy. However, other nations are accustomed to a win-lose or lose-lose society. (Ironically, if America had remained truly Calvinist, it might have come out win-lose instead; win-win is more Arminian.)

People have asked why I don’t think meritocracy is good, even if we did actually have one. (The assumption seems to be that if we could get rid of racial and other forms of preferences, that we would have a meritocracy, although as is evident from the David Brooks discussion, it is becoming very hard for a person of humble birth to rise substantially.) Here are a few suggestions:

1. I think we could say that win-win societies have a very hard time being conservative, and instead tend to be constantly changing. Win-lose and lose-lose societies seem more capable of preserving their essential nature over long periods of time, although Maly calls Western Europe “win-lose”, and Western Europe has been drastically transformed over the last 250 years. Values are passed down in families, and if different families rule during each generation, the potential for drastic change is greatly increased.
2. As Maly says, in a win-win society there is no place for losers. In win-lose or lose-lose, there is a place for everyone, though not equal in respect. I consider it a key tenet of traditional society that there should be a place for everyone, but a win-win society violates that basic principle of traditionalism. As I said before, win-win is Social Darwinist; a traditional society should not be Social Darwinist.
3. Similarly, there are no conventional checks on the power of the biggest winners in win-win. There is no noblesse oblige, or any other reason that the winners ought to treat everyone else with anything but utter contempt. Elites in perhaps the majority of societies have tended toward libertinism, but in win-lose societies, they don’t do things like starting an ACLU to prevent ordinary folks from enforcing their mores on each other. In that sense, a “meritocratic” elite is proto-totalitarian in a way reminiscent of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, unlike a traditional aristocracy, though the latter may be oppressive.
4. Win-win societies ride on the assumption that everyone can win with sufficient effort. Hence they are especially susceptible to utopian delusions such as educational romanticism, typically ignoring any science that would suggest that not everyone is a potential winner. Major aspects of human nature have to be glossed over or denied. Phantoms like “institutional racism” have to be cooked up to explain basic phenomena such as racial differences in achievement. A whole industry springs up in which professional Don Quixotes make a career of tilting at the windmills thus created. Unfortunately, in doing battle with the nonexistent “institutional racism”, they do real damage to the fabric of society.

That’s just a start, I hope.

Commenter Kindred has recommended a David Brooks article extolling the virtues of meritocracy, which I feel compelled to respond to. It’s mainly Brooks’ points about the conditioning of children toward being something other than self-governing American citizens that I want to focus on, however.

Brooks speaks of his daughter’s childhood as being something vastly different from other styles of childhood:

It’s a busy childhood, filled with opportunities, activities, teams, coaches, and, inevitably, gear. It’s a safety-conscious childhood, with ample adult supervision. And it is, I believe (at least I want to believe), a happy and fulfilling childhood that will prepare my daughter for a happy adult life.

This sort of childhood is different from the childhoods Americans have traditionally had. It’s not an independent childhood, like Huck Finn’s or the Bowery Boys’. Today’s middle-class kids, by and large, don’t live apart from adult society, free to explore and experiment and, through adventure and misadventure, teach themselves the important lessons of life. Nor is it a Horatio Alger childhood. Middle-class kids by definition haven’t come from poverty and deprivation. Nor do they build self-discipline from having to work on a farm. If they hunger for success, it’s not because they started at the bottom.

Too many traditional-minded parents have accepted what we’ll label the ”modern childhood” for their children, not wanting their children to lose opportunity. That wouldn’t have made someone like the devout agrarian Russell Kirk very happy. I’m sure Kirk would have agreed with me that a “Huck Finn childhood” is every American child’s birthright. (Or maybe “Anne of Green Gables” for girls.)

Brooks suggests that the “modern childhood” builds “character” as well or better than the others. But what kind of character? It seems like most of the people I’ve met who have had such a childhood would make ideal subjects of a totalitarian state. They’ve learned to program their activities — on June 1 they probably already know precisely what they are going to be doing all day on July 31, whether they feel like it that day or not. They know what is going to advance their status. The activities that are valued are externally determined — all that remains is for the individual to weigh the activities that are most valued against his own abilities.

The more closely a person’s upbringing resembles Brooks’ modern model, the more he is ideally suited to the nanny state, and completely unsuited to situations where he might have to make a decision about what is good. What is good is simply externally imposed — whatever Harvard, or later on the job market, will reward a prospective student or employee for. Power is not right or wrong, but just is — and resistance is not wrong, but simply useless. Christopher Lasch makes the point in Haven in a Heartless World that the modern power structure relies heavily on getting people to obey not by persuading people it is right, but just because it offers the path of greatest reward. The modern society is already far down the path of 1984, in which O’Brien tells Winston Smith that there is no truth independent of what the Party says it is. Liberals’ denial that there is even such a thing as truth, becomes an essential adaptation to reality. If there were truth, the misdeeds of those in power could be measured against truth and found wanting.

I have to think that somewhere my parents recognized subconsciously what kind of person a Huck Finn childhood produces, compared to the kind of person the modern childhood produces. Brooks, for that matter, doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t go to the trouble to define character, but we might guess he thinks it’s whatever is necessary to succeed. The ability to fill some niche that is useful to the Leviathan is good enough for him. “Conservatism” is just sustaining the existing power structure by producing people obedient to whatever authority there is, while convincing them that achieving things rewarded by the powerful is “self-fulfillment”. In fact, in many ways they have annihilated the “self”, so that it is not even possible to honestly speak of “self-fulfillment”. The individual has never learned to value himself for anything other than being appreciated by those who are in a position to dole out rewards. Being a “minority of one” would strike him as identical to insanity.

Similarly, Brooks doesn’t define “morality” either, but he seems to be in just the position I would expect, given that he is taking such a relativistic approach. Again, morality for Brooks seems to be, “resisting the impulse to do what will get you in trouble”. There’s nothing wrong with fornication, which is not punishable; but criticism of Islam leads to conflict and is therefore impermissible (socially or morally). Even in the blogosphere, we might notice the liberal’s M.O. — often a thinly disguised appeal to force. “Everyone is on my side, so although you might think yourself right, power makes truth and power is on my side,” the liberal says. Liberals don’t use the word “morality” much because the very concept implies that standing up against power could be right. But they will say something is “wrong” — meaning it’s not rewarded — and sound more dogmatic than the most hardened moral absolutist.

I feel tempted to say that there’s a great deal of relativism inherent in the idea of “conservatism”, in that “conservatism” tends to mean preserving whatever authority and order exists. In one sense of “conservative”, Brooks is hardly being unconservative in implying that authority is not right or wrong, it just is. The modern childhood appears conservative because traditional-minded people everywhere have conventionally thought that accepting authority leads to a better society — other things being equal. But other things are not equal these days. Almost every source of authority is permeated with liberal ideas. Conservatives have seen quite clearly that the federal government is, for that reason, not much of a legitimate authority. However, all liberals had to do to get control was capture a lot of other sources of authority, especially big business. Only the “Huck Finn childhood” develops any kind of independence in the child, which from the point of view of opposing liberalism is the most important thing.

I admit that favoring the Huck Finn childhood is a bit problematic for many parents, who would rather make of their child a successful liberal than a misfit right-winger. However, if we are serious about preserving our culture, we have no choice. Russell Kirk understood that much of American culture was being sacrificed on the altar of success, and he stood against that trend. We should too.

If you haven’t yet read Charles Murray’s piece on “educational romanticism”, do read it now. You might also be interested in Rod Dreher’s commentary on it here and here.

Dreher points out — citing Christopher Lasch – that Murray’s ideas really mean that a “meritocracy” is a social-Darwinist nightmare for many. The leaders in a meritocracy, Lasch has written, “retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.” I might be able to make it fine in a meritocracy, but the way I’ve been raised, I just think it would be deeply wrong to leave the less intelligent members of my family behind.

Earlier this week, a hit-and-run commenter left an obscene and snarky comment on my thread on “Jewish Power and Fairness”, which I deleted. Such an uncivil comment didn’t deserve to see the light of day, even if it had not violated my policy on profanity. But basically the question was, “Why don’t you just get educated and stop complaining about people who out-compete you?”

Well, first of all, I don’t know why anyone would take me as totally uneducated, but one reason is that I would like to enjoy life more than I ever would if I just made life into a ruthless competition. But more than that, I just identify with the people who don’t like the rat race, and who just want to make a decent living without being brutally competitive. My mother’s side of the family tends to be conservative, but uncompetitive and politically quietist. In a sense it continues to be agrarian in outlook, even though most of it is no longer on the farm. Many still do things like sewing their own clothes. My father’s side (with the notable partial exception of my father himself) tends to be liberal, aggressive, and competitive. My mother’s family preserves my basic values; my father’s family doesn’t. If only people like my father’s family prosper, then my values tend to die out. If society is a social-Darwinist competition, a type of person with whom I have nothing in common is going to win out.

The rat race is morally degrading, too. It legitimizes all kinds of social aggression, whereas I prefer to deal with people who aren’t constantly trying to take advantage of each other. Every social relationship is brutalized. Instead of that, I’d like to see a world where people like I can continue to live in dignity even if I lived as simply as my grandfather. Dreher’s Crunchy Cons inspired me because I saw my own family in it, as somewhat the perfect family from that kind of perspective before it became uprooted from its home. From the perspective of “simple living”, there were tens of millions of conservative Middle Americans living that way all the time, whereas few liberals made of “simple living” anything other than a romantic fantasy. One of the biggest liberal lies was that conservatives were consumerist and liberals weren’t. It was in part my realization of that lie, from reading Lasch among others, that drove me to be a traditionalist.

Hopefully that will explain why I’m not a big fan of total meritocracy, though if “meritocracy” can be used as a weapon against racial preferences, I suppose I understand why many conservatives find it appealing.

Update: More at What’s Wrong with the World.

Vanishing American has rebutted Richard Spencer’s weak “Obamacon” argument that relies on antiwar conservatives being thought of as a kind of “swing vote”. I thought it would be obvious that Spencer is not arguing from a truly “nationalist” or pro-white point of view, but more of an antiwar one.

If that’s not clear, one may refer to Spencer’s prior article with its categorization of “Obamacon” arguments, not all of which are as weak as Spencer’s own. In support of the argument from “White Pride Delirium”, he links to a thread at Vanguard News Network. Now TakiMag obviously doesn’t link to white nationalist sites — especially something as hardcore as VNN – for any other purpose than to say, “This is what the real kooks think.” Spencer could have linked to a somewhat more “civilized” source, like AmRen, where similar but better-presented arguments had been put forth, but he linked to VNN, where none of the commenters on the linked thread could write a correct paragraph.

Moving on, VA asks why “Hillarycons” have not been visible. Well, Hillary locks us into the same Clinton vs. Bush polarization that has gone on, where conservatives can blame all problems on the Clintons personally, while avoiding the more fundamental issues, particularly race. Obama puts a black face in front of us, day in and day out, as the representative of liberalism. True, there are “Hillarycons” who wanted Hillary to win while she still had a chance — Auster has expressed such a preference. But that isn’t really a “worse is better” argument. It’s an argument that Republicans will oppose Hillary like they wouldn’t oppose McCain.

It doesn’t take much courage to oppose Hillary, who wouldn’t help to sort out the difference between people who will be intimidated by race-baiting arguments, and those who won’t. We need the “false friends” — MSM voices who are simple Republican partisans and back down from accusations of racism – to be marginalized. That’s why it’s not true that “a better contrarian case could be made for Hillary than for Obama.”

VA continues:

I’ve said before that [Hillary] would definitely call forth a vigorous opposition from the right, and that would be healthier for the right (the real right) than an Obama presidency, since he is treated like not merely a rock star, but as some kind of avatar (in the original sense) or a Messiah.

The “vigorous opposition” that VA correctly predicts is not healthy for the real right, though. It puts our false friends back in a position where they can oppose the liberal president without actually taking a stand against PC. It gives back legitimacy to mainstream Republicans, who ought to be thoroughly discredited. It increases the chance that Hillary would be thrown out in 2012 in favor of a Republican neocon like McCain or Giuliani or Jeb Bush, who would have an impeccable record on the one “important” question (to Republican regulars) – consistent opposition to Hillary as an individual. Whereas if Obama is thrown out in 2012, it might be in favor of a more conservative candidate.

VA asks, “Do we want a President who is the object of a cult?” But this is far from a cult that encompasses everyone. Obama has received the votes of under 30 percent of white Democrats in most states with a substantial black presence. It’s hard to believe he won’t make a few more gaffes like his statement about rural Pennsylvanians “clinging” to guns and religion. I would guess that Obama’s “unfavorables” figure to be very high by the time of the general election. The myth that Obama is a “uniter” has been embraced so fervently by liberal MSM voices in a desperate attempt to make it unquestioned conventional wisdom, even though it is so obviously not true to anyone who sees the data. Obama is a polarizing figure, which is what’s led to the McGovern comparisons. Opposition to McGovernism still wins Republicans lots of debating points. The simple fact is that “cults” tend to generate intense dislike among their opponents. That’s especially true among young voters. Once Obama becomes the candidate of the Ivy League, he automatically becomes a lightning-rod for the anger of those who resent everything the Ivy League stands for.

Vanishing American has cast some doubt on how worse could become better in the case of an Obama election. I have a hard time seeing how the argument is not just one that things can never improve, regardless of future events. VA also makes an argument that because people haven’t come to demand major measures like a complete end to Muslim immigration, that past events haven’t made any impact on people.

First, a word about “change”. Obviously the change being sought is a change in the direction of our nation. We might visualize what’s happening in terms of Newton’s laws of motion — an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. We might define “fundamental change” as a force that changes the momentum of a rolling ball, as opposed to simple change, which is the movement of the ball itself (the continuation of current demographic trends and current levels of immigration). Stopping the ball (though with a view to soon reversing its direction) would be a fundamental change. The fundamental change we ultimately want is for whites to have a land free of recent immigrants and their descendants, and with black crime under control. Any success for particular political parties, pundits, or right-wing organizations is completely subordinate to the main goal.

It seems that VA’s argument has often boiled down to:

1. The people have shown a willingness to follow our political class down whatever harmful path it might decide to go — to vote against fundamental change. This is just the way the people always are.

2. The people who make up the political class are never going to change. For example, Chris Roach has cited statements that would seem to indicate some change on the part of Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin. But given the various financial and social pressures on people like Goldberg and Malkin, they can never openly recognize that nonwhite immigration has been a bad idea.

Now given these premises, how do we avoid the following conclusion?

3. Fundamental change is impossible.

I’m not going to say I have proof that fundamental change is possible. But if we think it’s not, why are we even blogging? Or shouldn’t we be blogging about how to adapt to the inevitable Mexicanization of Anglo-America, instead of what we’re doing?

So presuming for the moment that fundamental change is possible, let’s list some possible solutions:

A. New leadership will rise from among the people, changing the balance of forces in the political class. Premises (1) and (2) are thus correct, but the composition of the political class can change. (For these purposes, the “political class” can basically be treated as identical with the media, including bloggers and alternative media sources.)

B. The pressures on the existing political class will change, making it acceptable for mainstream pundits to realize they have been wrong, and say so openly, leading the nation on a different course. That is, premise (2) is flawed.

C. Events will transpire that will cause people to not follow the political class anymore, to distrust what they hear in the media, etc. That is, premise (1) is flawed. It has conventionally appeared true, but will not be true under every set of circumstances.

Basically, the people promoting an Obama presidency on a “worse-is-better” rationale (to be carefully distinguished from people who actually think Obama will make things better) see a mechanism for (B) and/or (C). VA seems to see a mechanism for (A), although I’m not sure what it consists of. That’s not to say one doesn’t exist — just that I have not seen it adequately explained.

If (A) is the solution, then the main thing we need is to avoid a crackdown on alternative media sources, which will allow a pro-white segment of the political class to develop more easily. However, I don’t see a path in this direction, and it’s up to those who support this solution to spell out a path. I would ask them to spell out the best-case realistic scenario, if indeed there is a scenario that makes things better without getting much worse first.

If (B) and/or (C) is the solution, then it will be helpful to try to manipulate the pressures on existing media in such a way that they lead the nation in a different direction; or make the events transpire that will get significant numbers of people to reject all the mainstream media, and start preferring non-liberal explanations for events.

I tend not to have much faith in (B), since the main mechanism for that would be for mainstream pundits to believe they could use nonwhites’ crime and misbehavior as a partisan issue. Folks like Goldberg and Malkin would probably rather the GOP lose, than have it adopt “hateful” or “bigoted” positions in order to win. They have a financial incentive to promote the interests of their primary sources of income — media organizations eager to appease open-borders advertisers. They also have somewhat of a personal incentive, since they don’t want to be seen by their families and communities as traitors to particular ethnic interests (Jewish for Goldberg, Asian for Malkin).

If (C) is more of the solution, then we need the events to happen that will undermine people’s trust in the media’s inadequate explanations. I have to disagree with VA that people have never been mobilized by disaster. I’m not sure how she can dismiss the backlash against the Sixties as not really significant, when it is in large part what got us the renewed toughness on crime that has locked away large numbers of black violent criminals. Surely backlash against the Sixties could not reasonably be expected to sustain conservatism forever. Even those who have vivid memories of forced integration are told that now race relations have improved greatly – an idea they might well believe if they have not seen firsthand, recently, that in fact, black behavior is as bad as ever. If they have not lived among Mexicans, they also may believe that Mexicans are not comparable to blacks. Roach is correct that “people… grew forgetful of why they or their parents left cities for orderly and gated suburban communities.” That doesn’t mean they never demanded that anything be done, or that they never learned a lesson, and are incapable of ever learning any lesson. They just didn’t learn the lesson that there is something innate in blacks (and Mexicans, who were hardly even around in most places back then) that requires separation of the races.

As far as the other examples VA provided, I think a lot of people did wake up as a result of various events, even if they did not draw the conclusions we would have liked them to. Take 9/11, for example. Support for a response to 9/11 was practically universal. But what, short of in-depth study of Islam, was supposed to persuade an average American, who either knew no Muslims or knew a few ”moderate” Muslims (either nominal Muslims, or sharia-supporters who put on a ”pro-American” public face), that the appropriate response to 9/11 was to essentially suspect all Muslims of supporting jihad – and shut down Muslim immigration? (For the record, I don’t agree with the people VA mentions, who say that another 9/11 would lead to the deportation of Muslims. That doesn’t mean another 9/11 wouldn’t affect people’s opinions at all.)

Race realism is probably even harder to get people to grasp than realism on Islam. It’s especially hard to sort out confounding variables that are used as alternative explanations, such as poverty, culture, and the activities of black agitators. If I had to say why I believe in biological differences among races in behavioral traits, I would have to say it’s just because it seems so implausible that there would be the obvious biological differences that we are all willing to notice, and no others. Given that there are obvious adaptations to various environmental conditions — like dark skin and the sickle-cell gene for people in the tropics, and light skin for people in polar regions — it only stands to reason that there would be differences in intelligence and self-control too. Again, people who have not studied the science may not take away the lessons from events that race realists would like them to. With Katrina, for instance, what were we supposed to learn? That New Orleans is a poor city, dependent on government, and with a lot of black thugs? We already knew that, and in fact, many whites think they would have “looted” too if they had been in the same situation. Blogger Cambria Will Not Yield has written that media voices argued after Katrina that “Anybody would have done the same thing under those conditions” — and most whites agreed. It’s unlikely that whites are going to respond dispassionately to a scientific argument, based on IQ and propensity toward crime, for living apart from nonwhites. The argument that resonates better is simply, “Races don’t get along, and tend to commit seemingly random acts of violence against each other. For whites to live near nonwhites is never safe, and under liberalism, no area is safe from nonwhites deciding to move in.”

It reminds me a bit of what Kevin MacDonald wrote in The Culture of Critique about the Frankfurt School. Jews never attempted to explain anti-Semitism in a rational fashion as the result of specific things Jews were or did. The Authoritarian Personality was an excuse to reorder society in a way that would be more beneficial to Jews, not a serious scientific investigation of anti-Semitism. For the Jews, there has tended to be a “noble lie” that anti-Semitism is just totally irrational and unexplainable. Meanwhile, the Holocaust provided an excuse to write a pseudoscientific explanation of anti-Semitism for Gentile consumption. If whites had a similar lack of interest in why nonwhites hate us, and just treated that hatred as a totally irrational phenomenon, we could turn our interest to how to protect ourselves (keeping nonwhites away) instead of trying to address the “causes” of the hatred.

A final note: I’m rather appalled that VA would suggest that those who have helped elect Obama are responsible for violence that might follow — which is what’s implied when she writes, “Are random people to be offered up as a sacrifice… ?” This seems suspiciously similar to the times when leftists blame Muslim violence in Europe on people like Geert Wilders, Pim Fortuyn, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The responsibility for violence lies with the person who commits the violence. At any rate, since anti-white hate crimes, violence, and rioting are already occurring at a significant rate, the status quo is already intolerable. Part of the reason things are getting worse is that we have not been ready to say that what has already occurred is too much. The authors of the Declaration of Independence made it clear that King George had already made war on them; they were just fighting back against unjust authority. We must say the same.

While I’m bemoaning the sellout to modern vulgarity at paleocon publications: Does this post serve any other purpose than to promote the idea that social conservatives are, as they say, “fixated” on homosexuality? Or that “people who hate homosexuals are probably homosexual themselves”, and the pro-war conservatives at Conservapedia are spending a lot of time “hating” homosexuals, ergo neocons are homosexual?

I understand that Conservapedia is probably viewed by many paleos as a neocon project, which may be the case, but this post uses leftist premises to argue the point.

(By the way, even the liberal Wikipedia admits, “What is believed to be an automated click bot attack struck Conservapedia, driving many of their homosexuality-related articles into the top ten most viewed pages on the site.” TAC’s post is thus no more than gossip, regardless of one’s opinion of Freud’s theories.)

Don’t miss Ehud Would’s latest post at Hearthstone. What white people would be choosing to remain in California these days? Those who absolutely would never want to have one of those awful white babies! This is the impulse toward race suicide or “self-extinction”, which is against God’s plan for us. The one most vital step to win this nation back, therefore, is a return to segregation (plus deportation of immigrants), which among other things would save us from the stupidity of having the unnecessarily high violent crime rate that we do. Another terrific post from Hearthstone!

Guy White has a great post on the way that liberals argue. Essentially they try to bully conservatives with an appeal to experts — that all the academics are on the liberal side — as well as making a big deal about whatever degree they have. Unlike traditionalists, they are afraid to let their intelligence (or lack thereof) speak for itself. (One of the most off-putting aspects of Chronicles is the pretentiousness of Thomas Fleming and some other writers, who also use their degrees to insist on deference.)

The aftermath of the recent Italian landslide for the Right is being discussed by Paul Belien and John Laughland at the Brussels Journal, which also features a second installment in Takuan Seiyo’s Europe vs. Japan series.

Gates of Vienna has a couple of great posts on why to “wargame” possible future scenarios, and the hypocrisy of those who denounce “genocide” while not recognizing Muslim genocide as such. Good comments too.

Conservative Heritage Times has lots of links on Chuck Baldwin’s campaign, including a link to this forum.

Though I’ve been inveighing against profanity in the blogosphere, I suppose I’ve never defined what, to me, constitutes foul language. Since there seems not to be such wide agreement, I have a responsibility to do so. Let me just lay out the antiquated, prudish ways standards that I was taught, and that we’ll try to abide by. From now forward, comments that violate the rules may be edited or deleted.

1. Profanity is profanity. The common online practice of replacing certain letters with asterisks does not make it acceptable.
2. For body parts and bodily functions, use the words that a doctor would use when speaking to a patient, like “urinate”, “defecate”, and so on. In an ideal world, we would probably use euphemisms for “have sex”, but I won’t go that far for the purposes of the blog. Just don’t go any more vulgar than “have sex”.
3. If you have a reason to talk about Hell and damnation, feel free to use the words “Hell” and “damn” in their literal sense only. For any other purpose, however, they are inappropriate.
4. “Whore” and “slut” are acceptable words for a loose woman. You don’t need to use any worse words than these.
5. There are lots of ways to say something is a silly idea; it’s not necessary to say it is something that comes out of a male bovine — with or without using the name of the animal.
6. “Suck” in anything other than its literal meaning is inappropriate.
7. Though there is a place for racial and anti-homosexual epithets in a traditional society, this blog is a polite environment where we will criticize homosexuality and misbehavior of certain races and ethnic groups without using vulgar words for them.
8. When quoting from a source that contains profanity, use [expletive deleted] or something similar.
9. Thou shalt not use the Lord’s name in vain. Since most of us here are Christians, please abide by this rule on this blog, even if you are not Christian.

Linked blogs may not follow the same rules, of course. Back to normal blogging soon. Thank you for your patience.