Amerika

Where normally I write free-form based on the values of philosophy and culture, since I prefer such organic understanding to the linearization that occurs with science and politics, sometimes it’s best to remember my roots: I’m a news junkie.

And even though most of the media is moose drool that leans toward the left only because (a) they lean toward polite egalitarianism as a social means of making people like them and (b) most of them are “underpaid” liberal arts students who are leftists through the cognitive dissonance process of finding someone to blame for their failure and that of their civilization, sometimes the media hits the nail right on the head.

These moments lead to rare insights but often require elaboration. Writers rarely state the topic on which they’re writing if it’s a new area. They may not know, or they may be hiding it so they can get published at all. So if you can imagine a fireside, perhaps Brahms wafting up from the Victorola, cups of tea at the ready, maybe a pipe smouldering on the chairside table, and a discussion of the news…

• Why are right-wingers so angry? (Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany). The original author confines this to the secular right blogosphere, but I think it applies to the entire right. We are defending a single thing, civilization, against many complaints about its details by the left. They have no unified plan; we are defending a unified plan. Their ideas are unproven; ours are, but are interdependent. And then the kicker: their ideas always “sound better,” like the words of Satan in the garden of Eden and/or the words of the car salesman who sold you that minivan, because they flatter the social ego. They say that everyone is important and ergo, you’re important. They make you feel like an opulent king for helping the downtrodden, which makes you forget for a moment that you owe a house on a credit card and your job still bores you into a stupor. In short, they get all the breaks and we’re left defending a complex, inter-connected, and long-range plan that requires insight and experience to defend. It’s a hopeless task! That is, if we expect them to get it. As a result, most rightists are paranoid and defensive and lash out with anger. If we’re going to succeed, it begins by translating that anger into an attack on the real enemy, which is liberalism. Not its “issues” (which are all transient and the liberals don’t even believe in them) or its proxies, but liberalism itself. Liberalism is a mental health condition that is the only thing that can destroy a civilization because like a cancer it rots them from within. Stop getting frustrated, and start getting angry at the real culprit.
• So they crucified Jason Richwine (VDARE). As others have pointed out, there are two types of people who defy unanimous social convention: idiots who are oblivious, and intelligent honest people who realize what liberals fear, which is that denial is always self-destruction, and that while you can get away with it for awhile, it will always come home to roost and destroy what you need most. Richwine said something un-PC, but the bigger question is why conservatives don’t simply defend his right to say it. You don’t need to endorse free speech, but you can’t buy into the leftist binary of “correct”/”incorrect” that is the basis of PC. You can say, “I don’t agree” or “I have no idea what I think about that,” but your next move should be to go right to free speech and freedom of association. It’s not our job to police our ranks. Even more, we’re going to have to own up to the reality principle at some point. It’s mathematical and biological nonsense to insist that all ethnic groups are equal; we developed differently, and have different abilities. It’s political nonsense to insist that diversity is anything more than a struggle and probably a fatal internal fracture leading to doom, whether that diversity be of any type, including religious, ethnic, cultural, social and values-based. We’ll have to own up to — at some point — the realization that it’s conservative to defend monarchy, and to defend the right of populations to be united by culture, calendar, language, cuisine, heritage and values. In fact, we should just admit that we don’t like the modern state at all, and that we prefer cultures unified by some organic means. That doesn’t mean we’re insisting that everyone share that view. In fact, we should acknowledge that we want “sloughing off” of people who don’t get it. We’ll always have kind words for those who need to be raised up with a bit of knowledge, but for those who can’t figure it out because in a state of hubris they refuse to, we should hope they go elsewhere. That includes those who want to orchestrate witch-hunts based on people not agreeing with the dominant paradigm.
• The actual way to win the war on drugs (The New Republic). The liberal hive-mind is buzzing crazily about the idea of marijuana legalization, which many states are starting to flirt with. Never mind that the overwhelming evidence throughout history shows that when societies have more escape valves, they’re more likely to deny their internal problems. Wine in Biblical times was bad enough! But people do enjoy their little brain-warps and some can handle it without problems. This article on the Georgian approach to opiate addiction shows one method of accomplishing a war on drugs, which is zero tolerance on a new level. It might wipe out a long-lasting social blight, but it seems extreme. Liberals want us to rush the other way and endorse everything by legalizing it. Many among us have proposed an intermediate, which is (a) have certain areas where drug use, making and selling are legal and make sure they have the ability to do it cleanly and (b) make sure none of the rest of us have to support these people with our dollars, hire them, rent to them, etc. In other words, as long as they can make a druggie society that works well on its own, we support them being able to do it but we equally support our right to say they can’t do it around us and can’t live near us. They have to go it alone. I don’t see much support for this from the left because it crushes the dream by forcing it to be responsible, and we all know that people guided solely by their own pleasures tend to fail at collective activities. The right is afraid of it, because they think we’d be endorsing drugs. But then I’d ask how “Go form your own isolated society to try that experiment” is in any way endorsement?
• Total carbon panic (New York Times). Those on the left seem to assume the right is blind to this issue. We’re not; however, we see it as part of a larger issue, and we have a different solution. What causes excess carbon? Excessive numbers of people. What is the solution? Change the ratio of people to trees. How do we do that? Traditionally, we had a concentration of wealth among the intelligent in the aristocracy who would then prevent that land from being developed. We could easily incentivize private citizens to do the same. We could also stop the flood of people into our country, because this flood creates a new person here, and in the former host country, a new person is born to replace the person who left; that means each immigrant creates two new citizens from a population standpoint. We could also stop subsidizing so many people who contribute little, which would stop encouraging them from making more little people. Finally, we could incentivize American manufacturing. Our factories do abide by environmental rules, and we have facilities for disposal of the waste produced without it re-entering the environment. We could also create a cause of action for private citizens to sue and win big from polluters, which would create a financial incentive for them to profit from the bad acts of others, a sort of environmental “bounty hunter” if you will.
• Is safety the enemy of enjoying life? (The Huffington Post). According to this article, American parents spend their time trying to save their kids from unsafe situations. The point the article makes is that kids need to encounter danger so they know how to handle themselves, and they need to fail in order to find self-reliance; they need less time in school and more time at play, and they need to be treated like adults at the dinner table so they learn how to be adults. All of these are immensely agreeable, but the immediate question is, Why not for adults as well? We’ve wrapped our people in safety nets, removed all the threats to existence, drafted rules for every possible occurrence, and as a result we’ve made life unutterably tedious and adventureless. People need more time to play. Even more, our goal should be to enjoy life and experience it to the fullest. We can’t do that while we’re all at work, living in gated communities, reading articles about whether this or that will kill us dead if we eat it, and so on. As this article hints but is afraid to say, our safety-mania may be the opposite of life itself.
• Demystifying paganism (Hindu Human Rights). We have all experienced pagans who carry around crystals and bundles of sage and other props. All religious however are philosophies, albeit metaphysical ones, so the question is, what is paganism? This article answers that question by saying paganism is polytheism and then argues for caution with the monotheism of the West. While it’s hard to not have sympathies along these lines, it’s also an unfortunate reading of spirituality. The fact is that all spirituality has a single root, which is a belief in an “alive-ness” to life itself, and through this animism it picks its gods to represent reality. It’s unclear whether Christianity is even really monotheistic, since its oldest doctrines involve armies of seraphs who shape the earth according to the commands of an invisible deity. Perhaps a more pragmatic reading is to see that all religions describe the same thing, and thus on some level, they’re the same. Then it becomes merely a question of reality and how to use a realist principle to shape a religion that is both inspiring and true.