The entity in question, C. Christine Fair, is a Georgetown University associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies.
From its Tumblr (where else?):
First, I want to note that this man is a supreme coward. When I approached this flaccid, sorry excuse of a man and asked ‘Are you Richard Spencer,“ this pendulous poltroon said “No. I am not.” But of course he was. (Recall that when he booked a restaurant reservation at Maggiano’s Little Italy Chevy Chase under a false name (http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/alt-right-donald-trump-conference-restaurant)?
Second, I exploited the full range of my first amendment entitlements by telling him that this country does not belong to white men. As a white woman, I find his membership at this gym to be unacceptable. I found his membership at this gym to be an unfair burden upon the women and people of color–and white male allies of the same. I also loudly identified him as a neo-Nazi who has said, inter alia, the below detailed things. …I will be writing a piece in the HuffPo. I will be writing to corporate and demanding the firing of this GM and the ousting of this Nazi.
And the General Manger of Old Town Sport&Health is ultimately responsible for ensuring a safe, nonthreatening work environment for his employees. By allowing this savage into our gym, he has undermined his own position. He even asked one of the African American trainers to meet with him! Un-fucking-believable.
Best part of this event this evening: the General Manger accused me of creating the “hostile environment” for hollering in a non-threatening way at this Nazi asshole. He has no idea what hornets nest he has kicked over.
I won’t rest until the GM is out and my friends at this gym are relieved of this hostile environment.
One irony is that the attached photos indicate it could probably use its time in the gym to better ends than harassing people for exercising their First Amendment rights.
A second, bigger irony is that when it is not harassing people exercising their First Amendment rights, it is actively exercising her white privilege to advocate for the bombing of brown people. This makes it objectively far more dangerous to marginalized people of color than Richard Spencer.
Fair has published several articles defending the use of drone strikes in Pakistan and has been critical of analyses by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other humanitarian organizations.[4]
Fair’s work and viewpoints have been the subject of prominent criticism.[5] Her pro-drone stance has been denounced, and called “surprisingly weak” by Brookings Institution senior fellow Shadi Hamid.[5] Journalist Glenn Greenwald dismissed Fair’s arguments as “rank propaganda”, arguing there is “mountains of evidence” showing drones are counterproductive, pointing to mass civilian casualties and independent studies.[6] In 2010, Fair denied the notion that drones caused any civilian deaths, alleging Pakistani media reports were responsible for creating this perception.[7] Jeremy Scahill wrote that Fair’s statement was “simply false” and contradicted by New America’s detailed study on drone casualties.[7] Fair later said that casualties are caused by the UAVs, but maintains they are the most effective tool for fighting terrorism.[8]
Writing for The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf challenged Fair’s co-authored narrative that the U.S. could legitimize support in Pakistan for its drone program using ‘education’ and ‘public diplomacy’; he called it an “example of interventionist hubris and naivete” built upon flawed interpretation of public opinion data.[9] An article in the Middle East Research and Information Project called the work “some of the most propagandistic writing in support of President Barack Obama’s targeted kill lists to date.”[10] It censured the view that Pakistanis needed to be informed by the U.S. what is “good for them” as fraught with imperialist condescension; or the assumption that the Urdu press was less informed than the English press – because the latter was sometimes less critical of the U.S.[10]
Fair’s journalistic sources have been questioned for their credibility[11] and she has been accused of having a conflict of interest due to her past work with U.S. government think tanks, as well the CIA.[5] In 2011 and 2012, she received funding from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad to conduct a survey on public opinion concerning militancy. However, Fair states most of the grants went to a survey firm and that it had no influence on her research.[5] Pakistani media analysts have dismissed Fair’s views as hawkish rhetoric, riddled with factual inaccuracies, lack of objectivity, and being selectively biased.[11][12][13][14]
It is also likely that it has spent more time harassing Muslims for their political beliefs than almost anyone else in the Alt Right.
Fair has been accused of harassment of former colleague Asra Nomani, after Nomani wrote a column in The Washington Post[15] explaining why she voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 United States Presidential Election. The harassment came in the form of Tweets taking aim at Nomani with a series of emotionally charged profanity and insults that lasted 31 consecutive days.
So many microaggressions, I can’t even. Maybe some sensitivity training sessions are warranted?
Spencer should buy a little equipment, and work out at home. (It’ll pay for itself over time, he will no longer have to spend money on membership fees. Of course, stocks were a much better investment 2009-17 than that.) Or search for a supporter who has equipment at home, and train there. If for whatever reasons it’s impossible, he should do callisthenics.
Just another example of the vicious personal hatred that drives most of the political left (including the thinly disguised leftists that are the establishment “right”).
Just the thought that someone might dissent from her political opinions is enough to drive her into a frenzy of hostility and vicious, vindictive bile.
In fact, never mind actually daring to dissent from her political dogmas, even failing to promptly and submissively accede to her demands for punishment and exclusion of her targeted dissenters results in her actively seeking to hound you out of employment, as the unfortunate General Manager found out.
Since we are told we must not tolerate the intolerant, presumably there is no need to tolerate the presence or opinions of this obnoxiously aggressive and vindictive, bullying woman.
Says the woman who targets for her bullying someone she knows full well is safely a member of a small, excluded minority political grouping.
What a contemptible, sanctimonious coward and bully she is!
US liberals are just despicable.
On that note, I was really startled by some extremely bitter remarks Razib Khan made recently on his blog…basically he stated more or less that liberal democracy and free discourse are finished in the US, and that prominent liberals have declared him a non-person because he’s supposedly a white supremacist. Which is just bizarre, not just because of his own personal background, but also because it’s clear to anybody closely reading his output that much of it might have troublesome implications for the more extreme kind of white identitarian (I’m actually mildly disturbed by some of it myself, even though I accept the validity of the science of course).
So it goes well beyond someone like Spencer (whom I don’t have much sympathy for…but still, he doesn’t deserve being hounded like this). There are of course very similar trends in Germany (with AfD members being terrorised by Antifa, with the establishment conniving with this), but then Germany was always an authoritarian society with only a veneer of democracy. The move away from open discourse in the US and UK which did have free speech traditions is all the more disturbing.
It’s nice that he’s noticed.
She knows full well that Spencer was repeatedly violently targeted by antifa scum and was once sucker-punched (with at least one other unsuccessful attempt), and that such a confrontation could easily be just a target verification by an antifa group.
I don’t know…he basically stated that he has to be careful what to say because he has to think of his family…and that prominent liberals (he mentioned Jamelle Bouie) who have a much greater audience would like to silence him.
And it’s not like he’s some “nasty nationalist” like some of us (including myself) commenting here are…more like a classical liberal imo (which informs his criticism of Islam). So I find this pretty disturbing.
EDIT: Oh, may have misread your comment…sorry. But I leave my reply above unaltered.
Apparently modern liberalism has descended into totalitarian thinking. It’s also noticeable in their foreign policy thinking, where starting aggressive wars is now okay as long as their guys are doing it.
In 1943 after the scene of the Katyn massacre was discovered and touted by German propaganda, many (probably most) Germans just shrugged it off, saying that the Germans did the same on a larger scale to not only Poles, but Jews, Russians, etc. An SD report complained that even an otherwise devoted National Socialist had said that if he hadn’t understood that everything could be used in the service of propaganda, he’d cry out seeing such hypocrisy, given what the Germans had done in the East.
That 1943 German National Socialist, a literal Nazi, was less totalitarian in his thinking than modern “liberals”: at least he saw the irony.
“Because we need to DESTROY people up the evil, white male, corporate hierarchy as they are RESPONSIBLE for the LÈSE MAJESTÉ CRIME of me having to become OFFENDED ON OTHER’S BEHALF. ”
“Respect muh HuffPo-article writing ultimate command authority!”
(Female fruits & nuts like these are sadly encountered daily in the schooling environment when little Johnny didn’t exactly make the grades that his incontrovertible future genius so richly deserves.)
I haven’t read any details on this incident. Did Richard Spencer mention his age, the age of the people talking to him, the age of other people in the room and what people of different age groups would make of all this? Seriously, he’s the most age obsessed person I know of. Can he appear on one podcast without talking about it? He just did a podcast with a recovering Satanist to talk about Trump but it all got back to how old Richard is, how old his fans are, how old Fox News fans are, whether anyone needs make-up to appear youthful on camera.
Jeez Richard! Are we going to see the alt-right version of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane in a few years? Is Richard going to get one face lift too many and end up in Caitlyn Jenner territory?
I think that whenever someone is harassed and persecuted for his already underground political views by voluntary Red Guards, it’s the wrong time to call them out on their perceived or real personal failings.
LOL! When I proof-read my comment I noticed that it was open to precisely that misinterpretation, so I don’t think it’s your fault. I was just too lazy to extend it to make it clearer. Mea culpa.
Khan I think is just like the vast majority of people, for whom the state or the bullying majority silencing or harassing nasty others isn’t really a problem until it starts to strike uncomfortably close to home.
Of course. It also attracts a certain personality type now…conformist assholes who want to live out power fantasies against targets that can’t fight back effectively.
The sad thing is that in a hypothetical scenario which would see nationalists coming to power in the west (I know, unlikely…), many of those people would probably change their “values” in an instant, to be in tune with the dominant orthodoxy again.
I’m also a bit like that, though I was already disturbed by and opposed to holocaust denial laws and the likes when I was a leftist or liberal.
Well I guess for a long time it was possible to believe that “Oh, really bad things will only happen to genuinely hateful racists or extremist wackos…doesn’t have anything to do with ME!”. That’s certainly how I feel it is in Germany…I was probably naive, but the open terror meted out to political dissidents today still shocks me somewhat.
The last few years certainly have destroyed many illusions.
I suspect she would approve of such aggressive violence, whether or not she would openly admit to her enthusiasm for beating up dissenters.
And she knows of course that Spencer is a law abiding, basically decent and self-controlled man who isn’t going to respond violently, and that because he is a member of an excluded and demonised political minority she can ultimately get her way by blackmailing the company with mob pressure (as she openly declares her intention of doing).
Utterly contemptible.
I think pretty much all of us are. It’s human nature.
That information on the limited propaganda value of Katyn is quite believable. Germany was still part of classically educated Christendom back then and so adult men cultivated a dispassionate and truth-based view of the world, even when judging massacres. We, on the other hand, live in a feelings based era in which “perception is reality” rather than reality being reality. Is it the difference between modernism and postmodernism or between matriarchal managerialism and technocracy?
I’m saying that here and now because Richard Spencer may read the comments here in this corner of the web. His Twitter stream is clogged with SJW morons and the comments section at Alt Right dot com is full of a bunch of keyboard Alfred Rosenberg types trying to be more hardcore than the last guy who commented.
Exactly. But as noted above, this is the ordinary human way of looking at such things. It takes explicit intellectual analysis or close observation of humanity in action to grasp theoretically, without the stimulus of direct experience, the way authoritarians will twist speech and thought taboos to serve their own purposes, and real mental discipline to apply that understanding unprovoked to one’s wider cultural circumstances.
Ironically, it was the European liberal tradition that produced the best summary of the principle that the modern European (and European-derived such as in the US) “liberals” are now flouting, in the declaration dubiously attributed to Voltaire:
“I might hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
Of course, you could argue that this is not censorship, but merely the application of one’s right to freedom of association. This is the cant used by the “speech has consequences” branch of modern censorship apologists. But it was precisely the liberals who first destroyed the notion that freedom of association is an inalienable right, by imposing “anti-discrimination” laws. Now we must perforce accept that freedom of association is a mere privilege allowed when we do not determine it to be against the general good. And for certain allowing holders of majority opinions to exclude minority opinion-holders from the places and businesses in the public square is counter to any civilised political principles
Our very recent forefathers decided to overextend liberalism past its breaking point. They looked at the apparent winning streak of emancipations and liberalizing and assumed it could carry on with women and exotic Others. They assumed everyone would be just more colourful and spirited versions of the “reasonable man”, the bourgeois gentleman. They were wrong.
This journey to the final frontier of 18th century liberalism began circa 1960 and the results are in: it is failing spectacularly. What do we do now gentlemen? I have no ideas myself.
If Richard Spencer were a Black video game player he may well have asked “whose bitch is this”? Whose bitch indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sfs9h3bIDg
A deranged (or grandstanding) liberal acting out is one thing (unfortunately quite common these days), but had the guy really lost his membership? How could it happen? A deranged person should’ve been reported to the police, warned, and eventually served with a restraining order.
Okay.
In case people don’t know, she is not just any SJW, she is a S(((J)))W.
Then again it is always worth to remember that 1945 is only some decades ago, and that things were still far worse under der Nazi Regime. In between there were other cruel episodes, like what happened in Cambodia. If you keep a low profile, you can still live in peace in western countries, won´t you agree? Also emigration is in most cases possible. So I would say the glass is half full.
To where exactly, please be specific. Its not exactly a secret that every white country is being targeted now, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Ukraine all are being attack by the anti whites. What is the point of escaping to some other place that will face exactly the same fate in the end.
The issue isn’t that I fear any negative consequences for myself (I’m a very marginal person and have very little to lose personally), it’s more a feeling “This isn’t what the future was supposed to be like, we’re regressing on every level”. I mean, come on, of course it’s still pretty good in western countries compared with the vast majority of human history (and much of the present in other parts of the globe), but we all suspect that it will only get worse, probably much worse, from now on, don’t we?
As for emigration, personally I’m pretty much stuck here. And where would you go anyway? The political situation in the US seems unstable, to put it mildly, and will probably deteriorate in the coming years. The UK is hyper-authoritarian, with plans for internet censorship on the way that are even more extreme than what we’re seeing in Germany. So I guess this would leave Eastern Europe (which is also quite authoritarian, though at least in a way I can somewhat agree with) or maybe some parts of Latin America (Uruguay is supposed to be quite nice)…but I doubt you can escape the trends affecting the major western countries there.
Maybe we have to accept that the promises of the post-1945 era in western countries – mass affluence and political freedom – were an historical aberration.
Verbal harassment is beyond the scope of the First Amendment? Physical harassment I get, but when someone advocates the kinds of stuff Spencer advocates, verbal harassment ought to be expected in response. He should take it like a big boy. In this specific instance, he can just continue working out and let the taunts continue, and eventually stop (I personally tend to tune everything out when I’m in the gym.)
And the guy is no saint himself. He doesn’t like liberal democracy and wants to get rid of it, like this article demonstrates. One of the few things I agree with the alt-right on is their pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in liberals excusing Islamic intolerance on the grounds that one must be tolerant of diverse cultures. Well, the same standard must be applied to Spencer’s opinions too.
According to the Buzzfeed article the gym terminated his membership, so no, he can’t just continue working out there.
And while Richard Spencer may be an unpleasant individual, it’s not like this kind of action is limited to him or people like him.
@Anatoly_Karlin: Why exactly are you referring to this SJW as “it”? Indeed, isn’t that dehumanizing?
off topic:
now I´ve really had it with Trump. This giant weapon deal with Saudi Arabia is just too much.
It’s usually next to impossible to end your gym membership.
Maybe this woman could set up a service for guys who want to do that.
it will take some generations until every second tier city in Chile or Poland is as bad as London today. Our grandchildren probably won´t see it in their life. And Keynes knew what happens in the long run anyway…
This is the wilful confusion of political protest with harassment characteristic of leftists.
Spencer’s views are political opinions, which must be protected both from government suppression and mob oppression. Her actions are personal harassment of an individual motivated by personal hatred of him for the political opinions he holds. She will claim that there is no real difference because his opinions are “offensive” to her, or “threatening” in some theoretical political manner, but this is just dishonesty on her part.
On the simplest level, the gym should have thrown her out for harassing a fellow member. There’s a time for political protest and a time when it is inappropriate, and this was clearly a time and place when it was inappropriate. They did not do so either because someone in their management structure agrees with her obnoxious illiberal approach, or because they fear the commercial consequences of standing up against the majority mob.
The ultimate conclusion of this developing approach of intolerance of dissent is that political dissenters will be unable to operate honestly and will have to operate outside the law.
This is a rather silly word game. There is nothing inherently sanctified about tolerance, per se. It’s required of political views because to do otherwise negates democracy at the most fundamental level, and will inevitably be misused to suppress dissent generally (as we have seen happening with, for instance, intolerance of “racism” being abused to suppress dissent to mass immigration policies).
Outside of the specific situation of political tolerance, tolerance is a matter of practicality like all ideals, and not some kind of holy commandment to be obeyed at any cost.
Presumably he’s just being polite. After all, it would be inexcusable to presume on its inherent right to determine its own gender. That would surely be at the very least a micro-aggression, and probably (when its ilk get their way) a criminal offence.
Isn’t it just basic good manners to refer to any SJW type as it, rather than he or she?
The ludicrous “Razib” was bursting with eagerness to dissociate himself from all his former associations, when he thought it would be beneficial for his career. I have the world’s smallest violin here, playing sad music just for him.
I guess you can see it that way…doesn’t seem to have done him any good though.
So, she is not only stupid intellectually (bad arguments), but also morally (disregarding mass civilian casualties), politically (shill for Obama out of tribalistic feelings), socially (harassing a law-abiding citizen) and psychologically (general impression).
Mr. Spencer is out of a gym membership but she is out of her mind. She is much more the victim of her handicap than Mr. Spencer is a victim of hers. We should pity her, and hate the society that allows such madness to flourish.
This sort of prideful harassment of political enemies by progressives will only die down when people in the Establishment crack down on them and police their own side. In turn, the Establishment will only tame their little SJW guard dogs when it hurts them too much to do otherwise. White men have to figure out legal ways to make them hurt for sending their yappy little (metaphorical) bitches our way.
Wow, that Katyn-story makes a lot of sense (as another commenter already mentioned). It’s European fair-mindedness in action. But then there is also the German (and also European) sense of duty.
Can you think of any sources for that?
I absolutely agree, concerning political oppressiveness. For the first time in my life, I can clearly distinguish between the present and a substantially different past.
whites dominate Latin America and that is showing no signs of changing.
How is it that you had with Trump? Who is going to provide well paying jobs? The Chinese aren’t going to bring jobs… You are lucky that the House of Saud is blowing its wad on big defense toys instead of either saving the oil loot for a rainy day or spending it on the social needs of its citizens to avoid a horrible ending a la Iraq and Libya. It’s not like we are going to sell them A grade goods…
It’s worth looking at the highest rated readers’ comments under this story. There can be no social peace with these people for at least a generation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/georgetown-professor-confronts-white-nationalist-richard-spencer-at-the-gym–which-terminates-his-membership/2017/05/21/d3ff6512-3e51-11e7-8c25-44d09ff5a4a8_story.html?tid=pm_pop
Fair got in full gym mode and was channeling her inner Melissa Click, that Missouri prof that called out to “get some muscle over here”. Click got bounced out of Missouri. Maybe Fair needs to be encouraged to relocate, too.
The turn to political oppressiveness seems to have happened as the left has started to realize that it looks ridiculous. Their sexual revolution started with the imagery of young attractive hippies rebelling against ugly old conservatives but now they’re in this trap where they need to celebrate middle aged men in dresses as great beauties to maintain progressive credentials.
At this point photogenic right-wingers like Richard Spencer just need to show up to completely blow up the leftist self-conception as the side of the young, the hip and the attractive.
Richard Spencer “photogenic?”
In all fairness, he’s not particularly unattractive, but he’s not nearly as good-looking as his followers seem to want everyone to believe he is.
It’s not that he isn’t good looking, it’s that there is something just “off” about him.
Cagey Beast: It isn’t an issue of “a generation” or any duration of time. It’s us or them. I say this entirely literally: ultimately all Leftists will need to be exterminated. And not just in the US, but globally as well.
I think I read it here. I will try to find it with a page reference, if it’s important. (For example if you’d like to buy the book based on my shady memory.)
As others have mentioned, liberal democracy is dead or close to it, with the commitment to the First Amendment in the US being the major remaining remnant. What we have now (borrowing from Paul Gottfried), is a therapeutic managerial state /totalitarian social democracy with heavy doses of anarcho-tyranny.
Well, he is a lot more photogenic than the usual nationalist. I’m not a Spencer fan, by the way, I think he’s likely an actual fascist and a Russian agent (and for obscure historical reasons from my obscure country I instinctively hate that combination), but at this point anyone who talks about this stuff and doesn’t look like trash is an asset.
The supposed unattractiveness of racists and nationalists has been a pretty big part of leftist propaganda, I remember when the multiculti promotion started here in the 1990s and they filled the TV with documentaries about neo-Nazis, nationalists and skinheads that looked like inbred, pot bellied career alcoholics. The left’s embrace of gender dysfunction and other ugliness movements is a great opportunity to turn this around.
You could also just point out that if your democracy has needs an additional descriptive in front of it isn’t actually democracy. Once upon a time we had democracies who were just democracies and then we had “people’s democracies” that weren’t actually democracies.
Every time some politician tells us that we should be a “liberal democracy” or a “Western democracy” and not just a democracy it seems to mean that we’re transitioning to some system where parties that are not liberal or Western are banned (and “Western” is starting to mean the LBGT, multiculturalist, globalist capitalist package).
Check out page 195, although I am not sure it is exactly what you are looking for. Also footnote #196 on pp. 366-7 (From a Look Inside! search on “Katyn”). These page numbers apparently refer to the paperback edition.
Whatever his faults, Richard Spencer is out there doing what we’re just talking about. And he’s using his own name and taking the hits himself. Hell, those SJW bastards in Montana targeted his mother for retribution! And now he can’t even keep a gym membership–usually these things are more difficult to get out of than a marriage!
I hide behind a handle myself and write under a pen name. I admire a guy who self identifies as a white nationalist, which is clearly where we’ve got to be headed. Over on Alternative Right, there was a good post about how the United States is dividing up into warring tribes. Richard Spencer is merely a symbol of divisions that different demographics and cultures create. He deserves our support even if we do not agree with every aspect of his political expressions.
Thanks, I’ve found it in that book!
It is ironic that emigration comes up so easily given that maybe too much ‘migration’ is how we got to where we are.
There are still great places all over the West, mostly provincial areas. There are also parts of Latin America, and I think Central-eastern Europe in particular is living through a kind of a golden age. The most amusing thing one hears in Central-eastern Europe is how ‘thank god, communists saved us from the multi-cultural, migration, PC disaster in the West’. Whatever we went through, at least we are not Londonistan.
The amusing part is that this view is shared by a very wide spectrum – almost everybody – from fanatical pro-West liberals to the extreme left. It will take a while to change it. The big fear is the secondary migrants from UK-Germany-Spain-West – the Third Worlders who become ‘English’ or ‘French’ and show up claiming a right to lord it over the ‘backward’ East in the name of progress and something they call ‘Europe’. They are shocked that nobody sees them as particularly European.
But in the longer run, there is little hope. Eastern Europe is the heartland of comprador mentality and that is a fatal weakness. In the meantime we get to enjoy the short golden era.
Minor point. The far left doesn’t actually celebrate transsexuals they celebrate androgynous types that are socially subversive. It’s actually the more moderate, mainstream progs and left-libertarians that celebrate transsexuals. Androgynous leftists are the ones who keep coming up with the subversive sounding terms like “gender queer,” protest a lot, and wear loud, uncoordinated hair and clothing. They certainly don’t support eccentric libertarian transsexuals in designer trouser suites like Caitlyn Jenner or shelt shemales like Janet Mock.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the main effect of the MSM pushing transsexualism will be to encourage fat pre-teen girls to take puberty blockers to make them taller and more model like, a possibly that will horrify the far-left.
Perhaps that’s because an “actual democracy” can’t really exist for a group larger than a few hundred people (if even that many).
Any real society is structured one way or another, as capitalist, or communist, or ethnocentric, or religious/sectarian. The US is a ‘democracy’, and Iran is a ‘democracy’. They are organized in a very similar way, but the power elites are chosen by different criteria: moneybags vs high-priesthood.
Thus, I strongly suspect that ‘the need for an additional descriptive in front of “democracy”‘ is not a bug, it’s a feature.
I think Czechia might have the most optimal combination of liberalism, basedness, and high IQ.
I agree.
On the list of Trump’s sins, continuing the bipartisan American tradition of cosying up to the House of Saud is one of the smallest and most irrelevant ones.
They basically subsidize the American military-industrial complex to the tune of several billions of dollars a year (I am pretty convinced the massive price gouging they tolerate is done on purpose and is a sort of bribe).
Frankly for that sort of money I think just about everyone would agree to say some bad things about Iran, turn a blind eye to Yemen, and worship a glowing orb for a day.
I don’t know, I’m not some sort of do-gooder, but this entire “We’re going to sell weapons to autocratic despots who are currently waging a war with plenty of war crimes and that could lead to mass starvation – because American jobs! MAGA!” attitude is as cynical and immoral as it gets imo. Besides, it seems like a dumb idea to sell the Saudis with all their Islamism such advanced weaponry…the day might come when Western forces find themselves facing those very weapons (ok, the Saudis are probably too stupid to use them effectively…still a bad idea imo).
Yes, and Czechs also aren’t much into religion which I have a lot of sympathy for…unfortunately it’s too close to Germany…
And if I had said we need to put them in labour camps you would have come up with something more hardcore. I get it; you’re tough.
Their world-view will be “exterminated” by events over the next generation or so. We will have fewer but better White people when it’s all over. Shitlibs (ie the degenerate epigones of western liberalism) are going to be squeezed by their Vibrant allies, by economic realities and by us. They hate us the most right now. We just have to make sure to make it through the collapse of the old arrangements.
That’s what I fear as well, I don’t think Eastern Europe can escape the dominant trends of the present-day west while it stays in NATO and the EU. Transatlantic elites clearly now regard the presence of large numbers of non-Europeans as some sign of “modernity” (e.g. I can vividly remember how even around the turn of the century US journalist Joe Klein had an article about Poland in TIME…one of whose themes was how horrible it was you didn’t see any blacks or headscarf-wearing Muslim women in Warsaw; typical attitude for media types from the US/UK and now widespread in Germany as well)…and everybody has to be made to get with the program.
And yes, in hindsight even communism seems to have had certain advantages.
He kill for Putin?
Give me a break.
Labor camps would be absolutely fine, as long as the ultimate goal was destruction through labor.
Liberal democracy and the American First Amendment are products of relatively prosperous liberal gentlemen being able to be good sports. This was becoming clear even in the middle of the last century.
I put the longer excerpt here. It’s about a page long:
https://pastebin.com/maf71fPi
Ironically, the SJWs who want to “smash patriarchy” and tear down the legacy of “dead White males” are only accelerating their own demise. SJWs are hothouse orchids who can only survive in the protective bubble created by White, liberal gentlemen. Their type won’t survive in the future they’re helping to create.
Is that a line of dialogue from a Judge Dredd cartoon or one of your own thoughts?
While I was looking for a good link on José Ortega y Gasset’s “Man The Technician” I found this essay:
PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY OF JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET
Oksana F. Tereshkun
http://ampr.diit.edu.ua/article/view/43689
The abstract is in English but the essay is written in that wonky Russian alphabet. It might be of interest to people who swing that way.
I suspect even some of the Black Hundreds might… blanch at that. 🙂
Anatoly,
I think that’s reasonable. As I said in the other thread, Czechia doesn’t have a significant ‘Brown’ party (minus Okamura’s small marginal party) because even the “Reds” there (i.e. the communists, who might become the second largest party this year) are sort of “Brown” on immigration.
They’re in many ways a success story for the center left too- they have the third lowest level of economic inequality in the world, and seem to have avoided the sharp rise in inequality that befell many other postcommunist states- but they chose to avoid the multiculturalist side of things.
Anyway, in the “longer run”, Western Europe will cease to look like such an attractive model (partly due to eastern Europe becoming richer, partly to increasing ethnic and political tensions within the west, partly to the effects of deindustrialization, and partly to the rise of China as an economic superpower). If Eastern Europe can hold out till then, then by 50-100 years from now I doubt pressure to submit to western dictates will be very important any more.
He’s not THAT photogenic.
He’s capable of taking a good picture, but honestly David Duke is better looking than Richard Spencer.
German Reader,
Actually one of the things that baffles me about the last two years is how singularly ineffective Germany and others have been at bullying eastern European countries into accepting migrants.
They’ve threatened a lot, and they’ve picked up the threats this year, but in the long run the eastern European countries have stood their ground and essentially challenged them to do their worst, and are showing no sign of backing down.
I don’t think Eastern Europe is going to go the cultural liberalism route any time in the foreseeable future. I don’t like Trump at all, but one salutary effect from his campaign was that he demonstrated that in large part, the power that ‘media elites’ have is the power that you give them. If the Polish government doesn’t care what Germany and the western European mass media say about them, then there are limits what the west can do. And in the long run, as China becomes the world’s biggest economy, eastern European nations will have more freedom of action: they can seek trade links with China as an alternative to the EU.
I just remembered the conclusion to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969) gives us the best sense of how things looked in the era just before our own. Watch from around 37 minutes until the end credits. It’ll make you weep to see how low we’ve fallen since then.
https://youtu.be/waoEyjE_dtU?list=PLFYDyLgHrFHC_YIf7cs9-HpCb6WIBHm1R&t=2254
Speaking of Paris, I assume everyone has seen the thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions in the mainstream media the past few days over the following news out of Paris?
Protest over “no-go zone for women” in Paris immigrant district
For some reason it doesn’t seem to have been very big in the French media either, and this morning the (or a) deputy mayor of the 18th arrondissement (Maya Akkari) denounced the original article (in Le Parisien) as a “caricature”.
https://www.sudradio.fr/faits-divers/maya-akkari-larticle-du-parisien-sur-le-quartier-pajol-chapelle-est-une-caricature
Not as members of the EU, they can’t. And the further integration goes the more costly leaving becomes, as Britain knows. It’s touch and go whether Brexit will be allowed to go ahead. I can’t see any chance of any future secession by a lone eastern European country succeeding peacefully. Any effort to unite the population behind a policy of leaving will be met with a massively funded propaganda barrage by the elites whose interests are served by EU membership, that ensures enough of the ordinary people will be scared off from supporting leaving to keep the country impossibly divided.
In the near future, as well, it’s likely that more outspoken opponents of EU membership will be targeted by the presently growing hate speech and similar laws, and subjected to international arrest warrants.
This is true, that much of the appeal of the US sphere model has always been based upon superior wealth, and that the rise of China will change that fundamentally. But it looks unlikely at the moment that any resulting change in attitude will come soon enough to prevent the consolidation of the EU. Any eastern European countries considering, a few decades hence, leaving the EU will find, much as Virginia did in 1861, that membership is no longer voluntary. And furthermore they will find that achieving national unity on the issue will be impossible because a “European” national loyalty will have arisen (and been encouraged with massive financial and political backing) amongst the classes benefitting from globalism, similar to the US nationality that was manufactured and grew to replace loyalty to individual states in the US.
I still think there is a very small window to escape the EU without war, but it is probably not more than a decade or two. It might be that a Front National win in 2022 is the only remaining chance, though who knows what might arise in southern Europe over the next few years.
Well, it might be that you’re right, but I don’t think so. Europhobic sentiment has grown over the last five years in eastern Europen, not decreased. And with Macron and Merkel emboldened to push deeper integration, I think that trend is going to pick up.
The EU doesn’t have an army after all, all they can do to impose their will is to impose economic sanctions. And any economic leverage they have will be less in the future once China (and, hopefully, Russia) are richer and more attractive trade partners.
As for hate speech, I don’t think that’s going to happen either on a Europe-wide level, although it probably will happen in some western countries. The anti-immigrant forces in eastern Europe actually have sovereign governments backing them up.
https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/866529163381026816
I agree. I once had a membership b/c my wife bought it for both of us. I will never understand wanting to belong to a gym except to pick up women or men. Or being part of a sport (I was once into martial arts and needed the heavy bags, etc., which I couldn’t get at my residence). There is no body you can get at a gym or with a trainer that you can’t get at your own residence for a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot less hassle. Even if I were in a cramped city studio apartment I’d just do body weight exercises and boxing cardio (sans rope work). When I’m in the city I see gyms full of young professionals running on treadmills, ellipticals, or weight machines and they all seem to have bodies that leave something to be desired. And while I’m athletic and muscular and know my way around workout equipment, I don’t want to be around other people when working out. I have much less distraction and greater workouts on my own.
Prediction is a complex matter and anyone who claims certainty is a liar or a fool.
Scepticism about European integration is irrelevant unless it advocates leaving, and while you can find pluralities in some European countries for reform in the direction of returning powers to national governments, this will cut no ice with the EU elites, who will ignore it and proceed with integration. As we have seen in the past, even actual referendum votes against further integration will be ignored and bypassed. Meanwhile support for actually leaving is small to minuscule in most European countries.
An army is not needed until civil war breaks out. Until then the courts and banks (under German control) are all that is needed to enforce obedience to EU rules, as Greece discovered, especially those forbidding external trade deals of the kind you imply.
The concept of criminalising speech is universal in EU countries (and wider, it’s enshrined in the ECHR provisions that gut its supposed protection of freedom of expression).
It’s a very small step from punishing harsh words about islam or judaism to punishing harsh words about Europe or about German domination of same. Such stances are easily characterised as hate speech by those who want to suppress the opinions in question, and European arrest warrants will be used to get at people where the laws are not enforced with sufficient pro-European zeal. Elite corruption and media dominance will ensure there is no sustained national resistance to such actions.
The creation of a European nationalism has already begun. You already come across people declaring themselves to be “Europeans” first and foremost, ahead of their traditional national loyalty, flying the EU flag, etc, when it suits them to do so politically (see, for example: Why I’m European First And British Second). This was evident in the recent Brexit referendum campaign. This will proceed further as the globalist EU elites become wealthier and more powerful relative to national elites. And when you have an EU “nation” you have “traitors” to that nation, who can be treated as traitors always have been treated.
The fact that this might be hard to imagine does not mean it will not happen. The straws are visible on the wind already. It happened in the US and it will happen here, though there is no guarantee the outcomes will be the same.
Not really. The refugee crisis has shown how toothless the EU is. Merkel tells Poland and Hungary to take in more refugees and they just ignore her. If Merkel ever put her foot down and told the Eastern Euros that they had to take in more refugees or be kicked out of the EU, the Eastern Euro countries would leave.
Here are much more details about her:
https://altright.com/2017/05/22/crazy-cat-lady-professor-harrases-alt-right-leader-richard-spencer-at-gym/
So she’s one of the “brightest and best” at the centre of the American Empire. Neato.
Go tell it to the Greeks.
The issue of refugees is between nations within the EU, and not a big concern for the Eurocrats per se. They don’t care anyway, because they know that in the long run it makes no difference – “refugees” imported into Germany eventually get German citizenship and then have the right to move to Hungary or Poland any time they want.
The importation of division (sorry, “diversity”) proceeds anyway, on an EU-wide basis. The only point of spreading the “refugee” load was to take the immediate pressure off German politicians at a particular crisis point, and that’s been achieved anyway.
Maybe Richard Spencer is going to get his gym membership back after all? That’s probably what Trump wished for.
https://twitter.com/RedPillDropper/status/866689432455446528
We’re not even half-time in that match. Let’s see what will happen when all the major European governments, the EP, the European Commission, and the Strassbourg court all align nicely against Hungary and Poland. I wouldn’t want to bet too much money either way, but I’d guess Hungary won’t leave the EU. Neither will Poland, though it’d be nice to have a Central European whatever together with them, the Balts, the Czechs, the Slovaks etc. It won’t happen anyway.
“They don’t care anyway, because they know that in the long run it makes no difference – “refugees” imported into Germany eventually get German citizenship and then have the right to move to Hungary or Poland any time they want.”
None of them are doing this though- the few migrants who’ve been resettled in the east have mostly ended up leaving and going to Germany, not the other way round.
In any case I think Greasy William is right and the refugee crisis showed that to a large degree the EU authorities are a paper tiger. Greece was in a different situation because it had a dysfunctional economy and was deeply in debt to the western powers and was therefore at their mercy. This is much less the case for Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia etc. which have healthy economies. (Hungary’s economy seems to be doing really poorly ever since 2008 or so for reasons that are unclear to me, but they were doing fine before they joined the EU so I doubt leaving would hurt them all that much).
That’s exactly what I was saying too. Don’t know why you thought otherwise.
This is rank sophistry. If a democracy starts tolerating too many people and too many opinions that are aimed at destroying democracy itself, it won’t stand very long. This is akin to what Justice Holmes said about the Constitution not being a suicide pact.
“Racism” covers a wide spectrum of attitudes and practices. In various manifestations, it can be highly intolerant itself, making life miserable (even dangerous) for a lot of people. Intolerance of such intolerance is no vice. Though the response should be commensurate to the original action: kicking Richard Spencer out of a gym isn’t, gross though his views may be.
Oh, come on! Like the goal of the alt-right is purely the restoration of full Free Speech throughout America, and that would be the end of it. You guys want to restore a white ethno-state in America (and likewise in Western European states with large immigrant populations), and free speech is a tool you want to use to convince (or scare, or browbeat) your fellow citizens into accepting your vision.
Liberal democracy may or may not be dying (it’s certainly at a rather low ebb), but it’s not just because the left turned PC. Far from it. It’s because many people in liberal Western countries (like you all) have decided that you don’t like liberalism after all, because of its anti-tribalism and openness to different races and cultures.
“This is rank sophistry. If a democracy starts tolerating too many people and too many opinions that are aimed at destroying democracy itself, it won’t stand very long. This is akin to what Justice Holmes said about the Constitution not being a suicide pact.”
It does, however, mean that liberal democracy is intrinsically no better than the various sorts of nondemocratic regimes out there in terms of abstractions like “respecting freedom”. All types of government- communist, fascist, liberal democratic, theocratic etc.- find it necessary to censor or punish dissident speech when they’re under threat.
“Racism” covers a wide spectrum of attitudes and practices. In various manifestations, it can be highly intolerant itself, making life miserable (even dangerous) for a lot of people.
Correct. And other manifestations are failry benign. I don’t think, in principle, that anyone should be able to say whatever they want, and I would even be open to a very narrowly tailored regime that penalized certain sorts of criticism of ethnic minorities, etc.. Vigilante action by aggrieved morons like Ms. Fair is not that. I don’t trust private individuals to decide for themselves what sorts of speech are beyond the pale.
There are a whole bunch of reasons I don’t much like liberal democracy, anti-tribalism is only one of them.
To each their own, I guess, Hector!
The things I like about the world and the things I want from my life and my communities are not well-served by tribalism. To me, tribalism hinders while globalism enables. Hence, I am an unabashed liberal and an unabashed globalist and cosmopolitan.
Though unlike the kinds of “liberals” and SJW-types that people on these forums keep complaining about, I have no desire to ground my opponents (that would include people like you) into dust. In fact, people who are very near and dear to me hold attitudes very similar to those held by people around here, so I don’t see political opinions contrary to mine (conservatism, reaction, even prejudice in many forms including racism) as moral failings that ought to be combated with religious fervor. In practice, I would seek balance (on immigration, trade, religion, whatever), all the while advocating my views though. Live and let live, as generally has been the ethos of our common ancestral country (though perhaps you may disagree with that too.)
In its present form it’s quite open to “minority” (soon to be majority) tribalism.
Except to white races and cultures (with the exceptions of perhaps SWPL and Jewish cultures), which it actively demonizes and suppresses wherever possible.
I actually don’t see that happening, there was a recent survey which indicated relatively few people regard themselves as Europeans first…I think it was that one:
http://www.politico.eu/article/euroskeptic-young-europeans-poll-yougov-youths-eu/
I’m too lazy to do further googling about that right now, but I don’t see any “EU-nationalism” arising soon. The only people who are somewhat more into the “I’m European above all else” nonsense are Germans (and even there it’s only a vocal minority), and frankly, that’s mostly because they want to escape the stigma of belonging to the nation that built Auschwitz.
I am a great lover of different races and cultures, a true multi-culturalist. I have absolutely no problem getting along with people from different races and cultures, in fact I would hazard that I have considerably more experience doing that than you (or most any other “globalist”) do.
It’s just that I somewhat naively want to meet Dutch people in Holland and Ghanaians in Ghana. I don’t think the world would be a better place if everywhere is indistinguishable from everywhere else in terms of its inhabitants. Just as I don’t like it that everywhere one now sees the same international brands and stores. I am old enough to remember when walking on the Champs-Elysées was walking through French culture, when there were Cockneys in East London, and when English was spoken as a native language in Miami.
understanding this is really key.
They have no belief in liberal ideals. Power is the only language they speak.
As reiner tor has already pointed out, globalism and tribalism aren’t necessarily opposites in the way you present them. Many immigrant communities in Europe are quite excessively tribal. Pakistanis in Britain mostly marry among their own kind (actually their relatives in many cases), though of course that doesn’t prevent some of them from reducing dumb white teenage girls to sex slavery (which is a pretty extreme statement of tribalism imo).
I suppose you’re some sort of high-achieving professional…of course globalism has many advantages for people of your class and background…but why should it just be about what’s good for you and your kind of people?
The only way to be more inclusive is to exclude people in the developed world.
The only way to be more peaceful is to get robots to blow up innocent women and children in the developing world.
All she wants is peace and inclusion, how can anyone criticize her?
Did you read my comment in full? I did state clearly that I have many people in my personal circle who are very conservative, and I sure don’t want to make life suck for them.
“High-achievement” is subjective (I make a comfortable living, though I can’t claim to have done great things for humanity or such), though I am well-credentialed and both recent trends and projected future trends are favorable to someone like me (which is what you were getting at, I think?) And I will strongly quibble with your use of the words “class” and “background”. I come from a decidedly lower-middle class background; I’ve had some success because I was a good student, got excellent grades, competed hard and got into the best schools (up to the post-grad level.) That’s basically it; I’ve had zero connections to spur me forward, unless you count parents who placed great emphasis on academics.
Look, where I come from, being a laggard as a child in school was just not an option. You had to strive hard and be among the best to make anything of yourself in life. It was not like the West, where you could pretty much breeze through school and have a moderately cushy industrial job waiting for you. Of course, I understand why people who grew up feeling entitled to such jobs would feel upset at the current state of affairs, but for someone like me, meritocracy (an integral part of global capitalism) has been an unqualified boon.
Well, I used to be one of the idiots who were “open minded” back when I hadn’t really met any Arabs or Africans. You can’t remain “open minded” if you have Somalians behaving like Somalians for actual neighbors and everyone agrees even if they lie publicly – as we’ve been mass importing Arabs and Africans all the bourgeois liberals have moved as far away from them as possible while at the same time claiming to love diversity.
These days I live in a hipster neighborhood where the (supposedly) former communists and greens get 80 % of the vote and “diversity” here means a bunch of ethnic restaurants. Of course everyone around me praises diversity and feels immensely superior to the working class people living in poorer neighborhoods filling up with Somalians while we are “open minded” towards some Chinese guy who owns a restaurant.
This is one reason why I think Eastern Europe is doomed as well, they’ll just face the same dynamic where “openness, tolerance, diversity” become code words for “I can afford to live in an expensive neighborhood away from the blacks and Muslims”. Nationalism becomes declassé because voicing your frustration about immigration becomes associated with the poor people who can’t afford to move away from blacks and Muslims.
I see Poles, Czechs etc making fun of Western lies about “tolerance” because they’re obvious lies but we all know “tolerance” is a lie, the difference is the Poles, Czechs etc haven’t yet become immersed in this dynamic where the lie has become a status signal. They think Westerners have become altruistic to the point of stupidity instead of becoming selfish to the point where they’re willing to condemn their society to death just so that they can signal their individual status. If they don’t understand how wealth put Western society on a death spiral they won’t avoid it either when wealth comes to them.
You must have good genes then and be cognitively privileged. Personally I find the concept of “meritocracy” very dubious, it’s often used by elite people to justify their privileges and the order that benefits them (whereas those that don’t see it like that are just too dumb, lazy etc. to take up the opportunities freely available, and consequently are morally worthless and should preferably just die off). But I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.
There’s no such thing as ‘meritocracy’. Western workers fought long and hard for their rights, and then, starting from around 1980s, global capitalism started rolling it all back, piece by piece, using various methods, but mostly by introducing competition from the poorest of the poor around the world, to suppress wages and benefits, and to diminish working conditions and job security. All for the benefit of a few on top. And that’s what they call ‘meritocracy’.
Back a century ago when we had a hot debate over what kind of a political system we should adopt after the revolution, most of the right-wing was monarchist and opposed to democracy. Parliamentary democracy was viewed as an inherently left-wing system that would lead to a socialist state which is exactly what happened.
This obligation to worship democracy is just another example of the total leftist takeover of society. We never wanted it and agreed to it as a compromise with the left. A key part of this compromise were some pseudo-monarchist elements like a really strong President and the left has spent the last few decades erasing that so we are basically left with the political system that the Reds wanted in 1918.
Getting rid of parliamentary democracy should be a key part of any right-wing political program.
I agree. My point was not to agree with Greasy’s assertion but rather to point out that it’s not an urgent priority for the Eurocrats anyway, although clearly they would always prefer submissive obedience. You reinforce my point that the power in reality lies with the Eurocrats, not with the nation states.
I don’t know, what would you replace it with? Monarchy might be attractive in theory, but how would you get rid of a king not ruling in the common interest (e.g. a king who hires Somali mercenaries as a palace guard and lets them rape every woman they want)? How would you limit the risk of abuse of power? Would there be some mechanism for deposing an unjust king or would one just have to hope for a successful assassination?
I’m very dissatisfied with the political systems in western countries as they are today…but what could conceivably replace them?
They go wherever the free money and jobs are. In the long run they will inevitably diffuse back into other countries as they become partially assimilated, creating the kind of acceptance of divisive diversity we already see in the countries further west.
No, for the reasons I pointed out (it’s not been important for the Eurocrats to resolve it urgently, since the crisis has passed for the moment) and reiner Tor reinforced – the Eurocrats have not yet begun to exert any real pressure on the countries in question. Most likely the Eurocrats will just wait for a cyclical downturn political support for the resistant parties in the countries in question.
The countries standing up against taking in “refugees” will, if and when the Eurocrats decide it’s time to bring them to heel, simply be taken to court and fined/sanctioned until they comply, with massive “antiracist” propaganda campaigns against their political class to divide their domestic popular support. They will get no sympathy from the populations of Germany and France, who will be endlessly reminded that they’ve “shouldered more than their share of the burden” as a result of the resisters’ stance.
The fact is that the two most powerful national leaders in the EU, Merkel and Macron, are profoundly unsympathetic to the anti-“refugee” stance and either strongly in favour of increased EU centralisation (Macron) or, at best, ambivalent about it and likely to embrace it as the response to Brexit (Merkel).
No individual country, nor the Visegrad Group collectively, will stand up to the kind of pressure that will be brought to bear, if and when the decision is taken to enforce the EU’s will. Switzerland certainly caved pretty quickly.
I’m talking about a timescale of decades, and a lot can change in terms of attitudes in that time. But I think this kind of change, backed by powerful, well-funded interest groups, can happen a lot more quickly than other more organic changes. In the US, opinion on same sex “marriage” almost reversed itself in just 15 years, backed by that kind of elite propaganda drive, from 57% opposed/35% in favour in 2001 to 55% in favour/37% opposed in 2016, and though I don’t have poll figures for my own country my recollection is that the same kind of reversal happened on a similar if not even shorter timescale.
Talk of “European values” and such is the cultural groundwork for European patriotism.
Germans might be more vulnerable to it for a number of reasons, not least their recent familiarity with Verfassungspatriotismus as well as the centrality of Germany to the EU project, but I certainly have repeatedly encountered the “European before British” trope, and the insistence on displaying the EU flag, in the course of the Brexit debate (perhaps triggered by it to some extent), although admittedly only occasionally so far.
I don’t say it’s imminent that even a slim majority would take that view in any country (not even Belgium) in the near future, but I do say it is inevitable that such sentiment will grow dramatically over the next years and decades (unless, obviously, something in the trajectory towards the United States of Europe changes). It will grow because it reflects reality, and because very wealthy and powerful people want it to grow. And it will be vastly disproportionately powerful because it aligns with the wishes of the powerful, amongst whom it will be concentrated initially.
I think to dismiss the idea because it isn’t particularly visible yet is to underestimate the dangers we (those who stay in the EU, at any rate) face.
I’m not convinced that will happen…though you’re of course right that it’s the end goal of the European project (which I reject as well even though in principle I’d be in favour of some loose form of European co-operation). Not sure either if the comparison holds with homosexual marriage…that wasn’t really an issue that cut to the core of people’s identities imo like manufacturing some EU identity would. But I guess we’ll just have to see.
not even in theory. being at the mercy of an unaccountable elite’s noblesse oblige suxx big time. at least democracies are unaccountable only to the extent that they can manufacture consent via the captured media and institutions, not in principle.
given the disparate power (the people who stormed the Bastille had guns, same as the kings had, but look what they have now), electronic communications, spying etc, the next monarchy will be forever.
I imagine a system which is basically like democracy, but one where they don’t court the right half of the bell curve for votes, and special interests for money. As a result, more realpolitik, less theatrics and less mendacity overall.
I meant the left half (and just lost the right to vote in that new system, lol)
I dunno. Poland has stayed in the EU/NATO and it has if anything become more anti-migrant then before. Sense of victimhood combined with disdain for Germany/France/UK (Germans murdered us while France and Britain looked the other way – how dare they lecture us about morality and human rights), lack of post-colonial guilt, and at this point the obviousness of the drawbacks of massive non-European immigration strongly suggest that eastern Europe won’t be getting on that train.
I tend to agree, being somewhat of a nationalist I wouldn’t want to do away with the concept of popular sovereignty. In fact I somewhat admire the system of ancient Athens because the people there found being ruled over intolerable and designed a system that would minimise the opportunity for oligarchic groups establishing predominance (e.g. they had collective courts, designated frequently rotated officies mostly through lots, and the few officials that were elected – mostly leaders in war – were executed if they failed)…unfortunately though such a system wouldn’t be workable in a modern territorial state.
I’d still be interested though to read how proponents of a reintroduction of monarchy imagine such a system could work today.
Democracy but with high standards for voting eligibility?
The USA originally had such as mixed system also, although it too has eroded and become more democratic.
Well yes, but a) nationalism in Poland is intimately connected with Catholicism, I don’t think that will be viable long-term, given the Church’s future is in the global south and the Catholic Church up to its highest levels (Pope Francis) is strongly pro-mass immigration (and I’m not trying to start an argument here about religion, I know you’re a believer…I just want to point out possible inherent tensions in Poland’s self-conception), b) the whole “martyr of nations” idea will at some point fade – I’m sorry, but do young people in Poland really still care that much about WW2? I’d suppose it might be seen as connected to the older generations, and eventually become pretty uncool among the younger ones influenced by western popular culture, c) as long as Poland regards Russia as a threat, it will stay in NATO, and NATO is dominated by the US which is one of the main promoters of multiculturalism and mass immigration (because admitting that those often have detrimental consequences would mean putting the American project into doubt) and pushes those ideas on its satellites as well.
So I don’t think it’s clear Poland can continue with its anti-immigration stance.
My response was to your inappropriate suggestion that Spencer’s political opinions must be not tolerated because they are supposedly intolerant. In fact, as I pointed out, all political opinions (barring those that amount to a conspiracy to commit violence) must be tolerated if we are to live in a meaningful democracy, and further that otherwise there is nothing especially sanctified about tolerance (which you implied with your instance that Spencer’s political opinions must be treated differently because they are intolerant).
No, this is to make a fetish of democracy and place it above the popular will. Democracy is merely a mechanism of governance, to be employed to the degree necessary and appropriate to achieve good governance. But the US and UK democratic systems are founded upon popular sovereignty, not democracy (parliamentary sovereignty, which is the origin of the UK system, was not even a plausible pretence of democracy in modern terms, and the US is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy, in which the inherent right of the people to change their system of government if it doesn’t suit them was inbuilt from its birth). If the will of the people is to do away with democracy, then that is what should be done.
That phrase usually refers to the primacy of necessity in any governmental arrangement, and has no relevance to the discussion of political tolerance in general, though it might be relevant in cases where there is a related foreign threat – a real one not the silly fantasy one the US mdia and political elites are hysterically bleating about at the moment.
Again, this is wilful confusion of opinions with actions. There is no justification whatsoever for not tolerating non-violent political opinions of any kind, and as I pointed out, failing to tolerate all political opinions fundamentally negates democracy.
If the popular will is genuinely to do that, then that is what shall be done, but the society is no longer genuinely democratic, because the nation has ended the option for future voters to have free access to that opinion. And worse, as I noted with the experience of “racism” and opposition to mass immigration, any such suppression of political opinion will in practice certainly be abused by the powerful to suppress other perfectly legitimate opinions to serve their own interests.
Regardless, being intolerant so long as you do not violate others’ rights (I mean genuine rights, not made up nonsense about having a right not to be offended or to feel threatened in some collective or theoretical sense) is basic liberty. If you are not free to discriminate then you are not free, to that extent. The problem is the antiracists want to have it both ways – to curb the liberty of those whose opinions they disapprove of, whilst themselves being free to discriminate all they like against the same people.
Absolutely, only time will tell which of us is more right on this.
Manufacturing a new national identity might be difficult, but it’s certainly been done before by elites with an interest in doing so – the US and Britain being two obvious examples, and perhaps more relevant because more artificial than, and without the deep historical and cultural roots of, the other obvious one – Germany.
I’m not so sure of that. To a certain extent being “European” can be seen (or at least sold) as being complementary to “British” (or whatever), but for many people issues such as homosexual marriage, a continuum of genders, etc. are in some sense so counter-intuitive to fundamental reality that their (forced) acceptance over such a short period of time is truly astounding, and obviously alarming.
Facts on the ground also suggest that national identities (at least the “original” ones) are going to have difficulty surviving, even if they are not necessarily replaced by a “European” one. Do most people in London still consider themselves English?
Probably not…but the majority of the population in London actually isn‘t English today (iirc “white British” is about 45% or so now there?).
Obviously my comments were somewhat speculative…but the way I see it many people regard homosexual marriage along the lines of “Let the homos marry if they want…doesn’t affect me personally after all”. Whereas identifying as primarily European (and not just in a cultural sense, but in connection to an intrusive political project) would be a huge change in self-identity.
For whatever reason, Poles seem to to have compartmentalized love and respect for Pope Francis with the desire to keep away refugees. Polls have shown, if anything, and increased desire to keep them out.
I suspect the Church is often doing what it is doing to keep Catholic numbers up. Since Poland is already Catholic, it doesn’t “need” a flood of poor Catholics. I haven’t noticed a lot of pro-immigration rhetoric by the Church aimed at Poland specifically, though I could be wrong.
Also, the Church within Poland is so closely tied to Polish nationalism that there won’t be local bishops and priests pushing this stuff to their parishioners (and there is indeed a history of the Church locking horns with the Vatican when it comes to issues Polish nationalists like).
It may, but it will not be replaced by guilt. And if guilt and victimhood are a virtue, as in the West, one can guess how this will only feed into and keep alive the martyr idea.
Millions of Poles living abroad relate back stories to their homeland about the negative effects of non-Euro immigration. These personal testimonials are more powerful than propaganda. Poles probably know more about the bad things happening in Chicago than do leftists in insulated parts of the same country as Chicago, such as Vermont.
::::::::::::::
Nevermind these speculations, however – polls are showing consistent rejection of the idea of flooding by Poles.
There was a lot more material for nation-building there though – Protestantism, the English language, common experiences in war, in Britain’s case the empire, and probably much more I can’t think of now. And arguably at least in Britain’s case the project wasn’t entirely “successful” since it didn’t totally submerge the earlier national identities which have reemerged as Britishness has declined in importance (e.g. my father would never call himself British, just English, and while he may be a bit extreme in some ways, I don’t think that’s uncommon in today’s UK either).
By contrast, what exactly would be the positive basis for some EU identity? There’s not much there except some sterile cosmopolitan values and the fading memories of the world wars as a negative foil (“You don’t want to go back to that, do you?”). I have my doubts this can inspire strong passions. I think a common European identity with mass appeal could only emerge through some sort of struggle against an external enemy (the Islamic world maybe?)…and that would be antithetical to the spirit of the EU project. But we’ll just have to wait and see.
Interesting points…I’m still skeptical, but obviously I’m not able to refute them, thanks for your observations.
That was my point actually! How can existing national identities survive under such circumstances?
Millions of Poles living abroad relate back stories to their homeland about the negative effects of non-Euro immigration. These personal testimonials are more powerful than propaganda.
Interesting. The Irish also had some bad experiences abroad with other ethnic groups, though lots of positive ones too, and this immigration history has been used against them. The argument goes like this: the Americans, Australians, and many others took our people in and all of us know someone who works abroad therefore we owe it to these immigrants to our country to offer them refuge just like foreigners did for us*. It’s preposterous, of course, because there’s a difference between reciprocity between nations and some almost randomly applied universal altruism.
A lot of Irish, like Poles today, only work abroad for a couple of years before returning home and many of them become more sympathetic to immigrants. Maybe Poles are more inoculated from this type of thinking.
Sorry, I missed the point of your original post, my mistake. Yes, that’s actually what some critics of the EU like former Czech president Vaclav Klaus claim…mass immigration as a way to break down national identities so they can be replaced by an EU identity. It’s certainly not implausible.
yes, and disentanglement from big business, especially certain kinds of business that literally profits from war, debt, disease, social dysfunction etc.
it’s not just the voting. there’s also media and humanities working in tandem to further globalism, the all-pervading mendacity (Ctrl-F “immigr”), positively Orwellian public rituals like those “anti-racist” candlelight vigils every time another victim is claimed by “diversity”, etc, etc
you assume someone will be asking them. the globocapitalists played nice (and only in 1st world countries) for as long the USSR existed and offered a credible alternative. following its demise however, the gloves are now finally off. We’re all colonials now.
…, this woman, …
What you say is true of Poland, but it’s much less true of the other three Visegrad countries. (Neither Hungary, nor the Czech Republic, nor Slovakia is particularly religious or particularly anti-Russian). And unlike in western Europe, in eastern Europe the youth lean ethnonationalist. (I know Reiner Tor is going to argue with me about youth support for Jobbik, but even he agrees they probably do, if not as strongly as that outlier poll suggested). In Slovakia, 25% of the youth last year voted for Marian Kotleba (who is best case a fascist and worst case an actual neo-Nazi).
I think Poland can continue with its anti-immigration stance since it’s right on the merits, and eventually it will be proven right. All it has to do is hold out for another couple decades until the consequences of mass migration into England, Germany, and France have become too serious to ignore.
I have to sort of admire the unabashed self-interest here: because global capitalism works for you, it must therefore be a good thing?
Of course, your self-congratulatory paragraph about working hard in school, being a laggard, etc., is mostly false, as self-congratulatory stuff usually is. You achieved in school because you were genetically gifted with high IQ, just like other people are genetically gifted with strong muscles, height, good looks, etc.. That’s great, but it doesn’t give you a moral claim on a better standard of living than people who work ‘cushy industrial jobs’.
Like you, I did extremely well in school, have an Ivy League degree, and currently work as a research biologist. I don’t think that entitles me, as a matter of moral desert, to a better salary than a farmer or a steelworker. And I especially don’t think that my political worldview- or for that matter, societal priorities- should focus on what’s good for me, or you, as opposed to what’s good for ordinary people.
I absolutely want a world where people who breeze through school and get industrial jobs have just as good an opportunity at a decent standard of living as biologists like myself or skilled professionals like you. If you don’t, then all that means is that you’ve substituted self interest for principle.
+1000 to this.
People who claim to love ‘diversity’ often fail to realize that in culture as well as in biology, diversity requires geographical separation.
Common ancestral country here being India?
I actually kind of do disagree with the existence of the Union of India. I don’t regard India as a cohesive nation-state any more than Europe is, and I would much rather have seen a world in which Bengal, the Punjab, “Dravida Nadu”, etc., had all become independent countries.
No one’s pension is at stake in gay marriage legislation. Nearly all aspects of our lives are affected by this EU project and you can see how much friction there is when you force a bit of institutional unification of Greece with Germany.
Identity is something that gets tested by every crisis that affects the parts unequally, economic, political, security, and European history is a constant series of elites spending generations gathering empires that instantly disappear off the map when they face a shock like a war and it turns out that the different subcultures have radically different ideas about what to do when asked to sacrifice for the supposedly common good. This union is built solely on apathy and the bet that history has ended and no direct serious sacrifices for the sake of the “common identity” will be needed.
I believe support that tolerance of homosexuals is also a superficial position and would not survive a serious test where people would actually asked to sacrifice for it. Something like a super-AIDS capable of infecting the heterosexual population through non-sexual contact but still spreading mainly through the promiscuity of gay males would do it.
Hey Hector,
Totally agree here. India is far closer to Europe than a single nation (people speaking completely different languages, worshiping different deities [even within Hindu localities], etc.). Though, you gotta admit, lots of people have attempted its unification going all the way back to Ashoka. So the dream of unification is hardly new. Question is; is it attainable and sustainable?
Peace.
In USA they had a philosophy behind it, though, while our system was made up on the spot. The autocratic presidency was a demand by the most powerful people at the time, a bunch of disgruntled aristocrats kicked out of the imperial army as real or imaginary Kornilov supporters who wanted to give White leader Mannerheim powers to gather another army and march on Petrograd.
I don’t think a powerful president is a good way of stop leftism anyway, in hindsight it was dumb to assume that a man elected to have the powers of a king for a few years would act like a king. France is another example of a place where a powerful presidency did nothing good in the long run.
As for turning back and limiting the disaster of universal democracy, the most obvious and simplest way to dramatically increase voter quality in one stroke would be to cancel women’s suffrage.
Don’t move to America if you are White. We have this strictly enforced government program “affirmative action.” By law, companies must hire unqualified non Whites. Same goes for business contracts and business loans.
In Hungary the leftist opposition is heavily using the European flag, they tried to plant one on a public building (I think on the presidential palace), but the police prevented them from doing so.
Some kind of pan-European national feeling is certainly an existing thing, but I think for it to stick you’d need a common language. Otherwise it will descend into domination by one tribe and then civil war or peaceful breakup. People are too tribal for that, and the most important tribal marker is language.
Actually, after the UK left, it might be easier to make English the official language of Europe.
Of course it’s not the same as a common language.
That’s not necessarily connected to the EU though. I do feel European (not least in the sense that I don’t want Europe to be taken over by non-European immigrants), but that doesn’t mean I’m in favour of that fake EU identity with its imperial pretensions…a European empire would be an un-European concept anyway, all such attempts in the past have deservedly failed. And at this point the EU is arguably inimical to the actual interests of European peoples. That needs to be pointed out to people who think it’s all just about avoiding a repeat of the horrible experience of the world wars.
German Reader, thank you for noticing the authoritarian side of German culture. Yes, as Americans have traditionally understood the term, respect for democratic freedoms (when they have existed in Germany) have historically been a thin veneer overlaying a totalitarian culture at its core.
As I observe the German government acting against dissidents who oppose open borders, massive Muslim immigration, German’s control over the EU, and other issues, my gut feel is that Frau Merkel ingested the core authoritarian and atheistic beliefs of classical Communism during her early life in the East. She also would have made a good Nazi. No contradiction. Both Communism and National Socialism are totalitarian ideologies.
I lived in Germany for four years in the 1970s and have visited frequently since. In the 1970s, I worked and socialized closely with the West German military, which included being the only American at social gatherings of ex-SS officers. In ceremonials and behaviors, I was amazed at how much the Bundeswehr and Luftwaffe continued to respect their historic Prussian and Nazi military traditions.
Now America is at risk. Just as National Socialism laid low in post-WWII Germany waiting for an opportunity to resurface, Marxism laid low in post-WWII America waiting for its own rebirth. Now, both have been reborn, hiding behind different labels.
“As good an opportunity”? Absolutely. But opportunity does not equal outcome. If some peoples’ skills, capabilities, and productivity exceed those of others, the former should get better results. You can advocate for socialism all you want, and I’ll keep opposing it.
Yes. Alt-righters believe that closing borders in their countries works for them. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but that’s them speaking out of perceived self-interest. They don’t give a crap for someone like me. They don’t give a crap for principle. And neither do you, for all your smug talk about principle. You have your comfort zone and want to keep it, which is why you advocate for the things you do.
I believe in meritocracy not because it lets everyone live equally good lives (that doesn’t figure in my priorities) but because, to me, it is right on principle. Why do I argue for this principle and not any other? Because I indeed have benefited from it, as have many others I know of. So? If your standard is that one must only support a principle one is harmed by, then I will laugh at you and ignore you.
Self-congratulatory? It was no more than a self-description, in response to what I perceived was an inaccurate description by the OP. And you are seriously nuts if you think a person is being arrogant if they claim to have worked hard in school. What could be more anodyne? As I added earlier, I don’t consider myself any kind of great person or genius. I just have skills that pays the bills and puts food on the table. No more, no less.
Whether you think you are entitled to something or not is your problem. In the real world, people get more or less in life depending on the skills they possess and the output they produce. To paraphrase other (greater) people, you are entitled to your own feelings but not to your own logic.
Perhaps your preference for “cohesive nation states” isn’t shared by everyone? Most people in India are reasonably happy to identify as Indian at this point, though you can dream up all the counterfactual history you want. And it’s their preferences that count, not that of someone who doesn’t live there and has general disdain for the people and their cultures.
You ‘benefited’ at someone’s expense. And next year, when they kick you out and ship your job overseas for some new starving poor bastard to ‘benefit’ (at a fraction of what you’re paid), your ‘principles’ might undergo some serious reexamination.
“Me and my friends have benefited” is pretty lame as a “principle”, don’t see how you can claim the moral high ground over alt-righters or the people commenting here with that attitude. Nice illustration what motivates many cosmopolitan types.
You are clearly clueless about India, if you had even a bit of an inkling of a clue then you would be aware of their endless “communal violence” problem. Just a random glance at any online forum that includes Indians of Muslim and Hindu background should give one an idea what their level of cohesion is.
Islam is certainly a major problem in India, as it is elsewhere.
what about Pakistan?
Actually, if whites cooperated and strategically migrated, a lot could be done. The SA whites, for example, could easily bolster weaknesses in red states in the United States. I think another commentator here mentioned that if enough whites moved to Malta, taking advantage of EU’s policy of free movement, they could easily just overwhelm the local voting population.
Sure, Soros,etc. will continue to try to destroy them, but it’ll be a lot more effective as a way of fighting back than simply losing slowly as they are right now.
Saudi military is an embarrassing joke. The greatest threat would be if lack of security on their weaponry lefts to theft by actually effective actors.
Hey Greasy,
I consider Pakistan as part of the idea of India actually – like I consider Bengladesh on the other side. It really represent the isthmus between the Persian and Dharmic/Vedic civilizations. Pakistan itself is made up of ethnic subgroups also and could potentially be split up, but at least they have a common religion (and partially Persianate culture) to bind them.
Peace.
Liberal democracy was a mistake.
Are SJWs human now?
Hey Daniel,
It’s the Pakistani mercenaries you’ve got to worry about using Saudi equipment like fully equipped and functional F-15s. I’m not sure if Pakistan keeps their pilots as intensely ready as they used to, but this is what Chuck Yeager had to say about them back in the 70’s:
“Experience. I’ll tell you this: I flew with the Pakistan Air Force for three years, during the war with India, and I’d say the Pakistani pilots are the best I’ve ever flown with in my life. And it’s because they’ve got a lot of experience. That’s what makes a good pilot. The pilot with the most experience is the best. And if he’s gotten that experience in wars, he obviously has to be damn good, or else he’d be dead.”
http://www.huntingtonquarterly.com/articles/issue77/chuck_yeager.php
I’m very happy Pakistan declined to cooperate with Saudi in its murderous and foolish campaign in Yemen.
Peace.
He’s gone downhill a bit. He was quite handsome, though, and I’m not an exceptional fan of him.
That’s silly. Alt-Right individuals have principles, you may not agree with their principles but they fully exist and are worth considering even if they do not benefit you. The desire to live in a society surrounded by people who think and look a bit like them, and perhaps even more importantly, be able to leave something to his or her children in terms of ideology, spirit and lessons that is only possible in a stable society isn’t something to simply mock or dismiss.
In doing so, they may wish to expunge people like yourself or myself but it doesn’t mean that their logic is necessarily flawed or lacks consistency.
So, have you transgendered your children yet? Sacrifice to Moloch early and often!
Isn’t this potentially a terrible sliding slope to be on, though? This was an anti-Sailer argument at one point, and potentially becomes an excellent argument for socialism. If existence itself is sacred, and society should not incentive anything, then one can maximize oneself through being a slacker. Its very similar to arguments, potentially, of white privilege permitting one to greater levels of success through presumed advantages gained through “whiteness.”
Pakistani pilots flying garbage aircraft splattered the Israeli Air Force all over the Sinai in the 1973 war. Was a total route. I don’t believe they even lost a plane.
Don’t fuck with Pakistan.
What can the EU do to them, really? Attack them?
Hey Greasy,
Doubt you’ve heard this interview before, but here is one of the Pakistani pilots describing what happened and how they had to be super careful about being shot down because none of this involvement was officially acknowledged by Pakistan (probably because the US would have had a fit). Pay attention to the beginning too; Pakistan will not help Saudi in invading Yemen, but they have signed onto helping protect Saudi territorial integrity itself (click on the ‘CC’ to get the captions in English):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oVquFoD3sY
Which makes sense in a way – they could easily help Pakistan double its military expenditure. Furthermore, if Pakistan ever gets into another major tiff with India, it may be a strategic move to have its pilots well trained on (and even using) Saudi equipment. Basically Saudi could function as a massive, distant safe hangar. Pakistani pilots could fly F-15s out of Saudi’s eastern airfields, stop to refuel in Pakistan and continue on to attack India.
I wish Pakistan would have more influence on Saudi rather than the other way around (as it’s been working), but they’s po’ folks and money talks.
Peace.
I’m a communist of sorts, so yes, of course it’s an argument for socialism (of sorts). I want collectivist economics so I’m willing to follow this argument most of the way to its end. The point where I agree with you guys is that I want collectivist economics within, for the most part, relatively homogeneous nation-states. Czechia for Czechs, Hungary for Hungarians, Russia for Russians and so forth.
N.B. I do not want everyone to be paid the same amount of money. I think there need to be pay differentials of some sort to reward hard work, longer hours, extra effort etc., as well as to some degree to reward exceptional skill at one’s job (which, yes, reflects inborn genetic gifts). Most societies, even the eastern bloc ones, had pay differentials. I’d like pay differentials to be fairly small however (much smaller than in western societies today), and I’d like more equality of pay between intellectual and manual labour, as well as much lower pay for the sorts of parasitic professions (much of finance, law, etc.) that don’t do much good for society. As a first step to cutting out those sector’s dominance of our economy.
That is to say, when I say I prefer tribal societies to imperial ones, I mean that in all senses of the world: the collectivist, relatively egalitarian economics of the tribe as well as the homogeneous composition and relative suspicion of outsiders.
“It really represent the isthmus between the Persian and Dharmic/Vedic civilizations.”
I mean, so does India, really. Muslims have played a role in Indian art, culture, music, law, etc.. disproportionate to their population. There’s a reason even rich Hindus often hire muslim devotional singers at their weddings: Urdu really is supposedly a much more poetic language than any of the Hindu-majority languages.
Unlike most people of Hindu Indian ethnicity I think Jinnah was right and that South Asian Muslims were entitled to a country of their own. I just wish that logic had been taken a bit further and that we could have gotten a Dravida Nadu for Tamils, a (multireligious though slightly Muslim dominated) Bengal for Bengalis, and so forth.
Where do you think this has been most successfully implemented? I was thinking of something akin to Japanese lifetime employment, but in the end, they suffered heavily from nepotism and even low productivity from the odd slacker who took advantage of seniority.
I’ll roll the dice with Singaporean semi-monarchy, to be totally honest and work the dynamic of the aristocracy against the monarchy, the monarchy typically employing the masses against the aristocracy. Some form of balance usually emerges.
Hmm, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with that…there must be some mechanism for getting rid of leaders not acting in the common interest. Even in Fascist Italy there was the Grand council of Fascism which deposed Mussolini…and that was one of the reasons why Italy got relatively well out of WW2 (though not unscathed, due to the German occupation), whereas in Germany there was no way of getting rid of Hitler short of assassination which meant a fight to the bitter end.
I guess I just differ somewhat in my analysis of the problem…mass democracy of course is quite flawed because many voters are quite stupid and easily manipulated by powerful interest groups. But I don’t see how monarchy (which is dependent on the character of the monarch for good outcomes) can be the solution.
Urdu when spoken is almost exactly the same as Hindi.
Hey GR,
Raise the voting age to 40 – people usually wise up by then and have enough life experience even if they aren’t necessarily well read.
Another model I was running around in my head is one where all the local person has to know well enough to vote for is their local politician – say a mayor. All they have to do is make sure that person is capable and honest. Then the local mayors select the county governor among themselves. The county governors select the state governors among themselves and on until you get to the head of the nation.
It would minimize the role of parties and money in elections, etc. I’m just thinking the average man can be very invested in the choice he makes at the local level and can size them up pretty well. I know I met with our current mayor a couple of times while he was running and even sat down with him over coffee. Something you can’t do when you get too high up.
Just an idea – at the high-level, I have spent much time thinking about details.
Peace.
I don’t know about that, frankly in Europe (and probably in the US as well) in many cases older people are a problem in the political system…they’re often unable to recognize changing realities, are mentally stuck in the past and also often quite selfish in an Après nous le Déluge way (this is of course especially pronounced among the so-called baby boomers who seem to be a universally dreadful generation throughout the west). Rasing the voting age to 40 would make those problems even worse (25 or so might be ok though).
I’d agree though that the power of parties needs to be broken. There must also be laws for minimum qualifications for politicians to keep away dishonest persons without qualifications from making a career in politics…no one should ever be elected to an office who hasn’t worked in a job outside of politics for at least ten years, and there should be term limits, to prevent the continuation of a parasitical political class. And certainly, from time to time politicians who have been responsible for extraordinarily disastrous policies (e.g. Bush II, Blair, Merkel) should be executed, as a warning.
German_Reader:
I wholeheartedly commend/agree with your last recommendation (although I would add to the list!).
Doh! Should be “I haven’t spent too much time thinking out details.”
Given that in much of Europe the youth lean nationalist, I’d much rather lower the voting age to 16.
(I’d favour a low voting age on general principle, certainly no higher than 18, as I’m extremely distrustful of any so-called wisdom of age. But if that were enacted in eastrn Europe it might also change outcomes in some interesting ways).
Depends on the register. At the higher more literary registers- which I’d imagine is what poets and musicians use- Urdu draws more from Persian vocabulary and Hindi from Sanskrit.
Hmm, I’m not so sure about that. These creatures nest in foundations, think-tanks, NGOs, academia and the corporate world so I can’t see how that would do any good. Macron is a prime example. A career in politics isn’t very lucrative, the sinecures afterwards are though.
Either you are being an idiot or you are trolling.
How did “people I know of” translate into “my friends”?
And if you do want to throw that at me, what are YOU advocating other than “I want what benefits me and my tribe”?
Hypocrite!
And I never claimed a moral high ground over you or anyone else here. In fact, I explicitly stated that I had people close to me who would agree more with your views than with mine, and that I wished there to be a balance in practice.
But then, you all are so thin-skinned (not too different from SJW snowflakes) that anyone advocating a viewpoint radically different from yours (libertarian in my case) has to be combated with contempt and ad hominem.
I am an Indian, you clueless person! I was born and raised in this country, and I live here now. I know what things are like in my country, and what people feel.
If one were to go just by news stories emanating from a country, the endless streams of coverage about police officers murdering blacks, and people going about on shooting sprees make the US look like Somalia to outsiders who didn’t know better.
I don’t understand what you were trying to convey. Transgendering has as much of a correlation with your ideology as it has with mine.
How come you aren’t friendly and good natured like most people from the Indian subcontinent?
How come you’re not a liberal like most Jews I know? 😉
Peace.
I know you are trolling but I’ll still respond and say that I always start hoping for a constructive debate. (Though I won’t apologize for the fact that I make my arguments forcefully.) Only when someone makes it personal, or willfully misreads what I write, or expresses contempt or condescension, or when people gang up on me, do I respond in kind.
What a bad cosmopolitan you are. Don’t you want your children to be able to experience a truly equal, cosmopolitan gender-free life? Moloch demands it! Quick, quick, to the knife and the drugs, and make more pod people to proclaim the oppressiveness of tribalism!
If your definition of cosmopolitanism includes transgenderism, then I’m guilty as charged. My cosmopolitanism has limits. I’m liberal on issues like speech, association, and commerce, but rather conservative in my personal habits and preferences.
You’re not liberal in matters of speech; you seem to think its find that Spencer should be intimidated and excluded from his gym. As far as I can see, you simply favor things that benefit yourself – quite the opposite of the idea of principles, by which you should have to sacrifice for.
Hey Daniel,
I don’t particularly care either way, but doesn’t the gym (as a private entity) also have a say in the matter. What if they decided that, yeah, they simply don’t like his views. I mean, should a private gym be able to exclude, say, homosexual activists or Black Panthers or Shariah4UK Muslims on grounds that they don’t like them?
It gets tricky.
Peace.
I’ll agree to that when a gym can exclude blacks or yellows because they don’t like their skin color. Freedom of association should be total.
This is an example of misreading comments that I alluded to earlier, and it irritates me to no end.
I did say that it was perfectly fine for someone to criticize Spencer for his views in public. I NEVER said I advocated his being kicked out the gym. I did not read the entire article linked to, and thought he had chosen to leave the gym of his own volition. My mistake was pointed out, and I stand corrected.
Whether or not I advocated for Spencer to be kicked out of his gym (I did not), how does that benefit me either way?
I am an advocate for meritocracy regardless of whether it benefits me. At certain points in life it has helped me, and at other points it has hurt me. I earn a modest income (though comfortable enough for me) and am rather low on the totem pole in my organization. So I don’t need any lectures on sacrifice from you, Mr. Investment Banker.
I’m probably the definition of hereditary blessings – noble origins, reasonably consistent success, and the ability to rebuild into semi-elite status despite massive changes in environment throughout family history. The difference is that I’m self-conscious of this, and realize that there’s nothing wrong for a native population to wish to preserve their status, culture or livelihood.
The difference is that, I’m still able to be concerned with the lives of others who may not be as blessed and acknowledge that my own presence can be a disruption.
Meritocracy is generally positive. However, it has its downsides. Like most things, it should not be considered as an unalloyed good and this is particularly worth consideration given the consequences that it can entail, such as atomizing the individual from his or her family. Tribalism has a lot of beauty to it.
The alt-right wants to privilege people based on race.
You want to privilege people if they’ve won the genetic lottery and have inherited high-IQ genes (because basically that’s what your talk of “meritocracy” is about…no amount of hard work will compensate for genetic stupidity).
Now the alt-right position (which I don’t share in its most extreme forms) may be morally dubious. But your position seems pretty dubious to me as well…you don’t even pretend that the system you favour is to everyone’s benefit, instead you have explicitly stated that your priorities don’t include equally good outcomes for everybody (which I interpret basically as “Those lazy losers can go to hell”). The many negatives of “openness” to established communities don’t seem to factor into your analysis at all…instead it’s all about how YOU and people like you benefit from it. But why should I care about that?
And sorry, but if anybody comes across as thin-skinned in this thread it’s you imo.
In Germany it is, e.g. they get generous pension rights for even a few years in the Bundestag. And I’m talking about manifestly stupid people here who have no career outside of politics, in some cases have no qualifications apart from the school diploma they earned in their late teens, and owe everything to their parties.
Though the type you describe is also common of course and may ultimately be more dangerous.
I am sorry you interpret it that way, because that is not what I wish for at all. And neither do you wish for its opposite, if are honest with yourself, Let me elaborate below.
This is mostly accurate, but I would say “genes + hard work”. The effect of good genes can be undone if one grows up in un-salubrious environments or if one does not work hard.
But when you say you want to privilege people based on race, unless you are a full-blown socialist/communist, you are probably OK with some inequality among people of a particular race? What you seek is some sort of floor below which no one will slip, right? And not that everyone must be able to own a yacht?
Well, that is what I wish for. Let the genetic lottery plus one’s achievements provide benefit to individuals. It is then society’s responsibility to ensure that the “losers” don’t suffer too much, and ALWAYS have the opportunity to rise again through hard work of their own (which in practice would mean a progressive tax code, welfare services, even basic healthcare, etc.)
When people misinterpret me, or read ulterior motives into what I say, or if I feel they are ganging up on me, then yes, I do get defensive.
Daniel, seriously, JUST GO BACK ALREADY.
Yes, pretty much. I’m not in favour of planned economies or a fully socialist system, but I do regard at least a basic level of a welfare state as an achievement worthy of preservation. In a way that’s also one of the reasons why I’m for restrictive immigration policies…such a system is obviously undermined when you have large groups (especially those defined by ethnicity or religion) taking out much of the system, but contributing very little to it. This is the case for many Muslim immigrants in Europe, who on top of that also often show quite a marked hostility to the native population and to outsiders in general. Such a state of affairs cannot but lead to massive resentment against the groups abusing the system, and will of course also in the end lead to the welfare system no longer being financially tenable.
Anyway, this discussion got a bit ugly, I’m sorry you felt people (including me) were ganging up on you. I should have taken your statement into account that in practice you’re in favour of “balanced” policies. To some extent I can even understand your visceral dislike of Richard Spencer, who certainly says quite a few things indicating that he probably shouldn’t be trusted with power (but then in all likelihood he never will be). It’s just that imo in the last few decades in Western societies there has been rather too much “openness”, with quite disastrous consequences, and some correction of that is needed.
Thanks! Peace.
I was in Chicago for 9/11, the only open, intense Islamophobes I ran into were Hindu immigrants from India.
An “extreme” SJW, or ESJW?
Martin Schulz?
He’s not the worst actually, at least he learned a trade (bookseller). That’s more than can be said for quite a few others…it’s especially notable among the Greens (e.g. one of their prominent politicians Katrin Göring-Eckardt seems to have quite literally never worked outside of politics…her only “qualification” higher than a school diploma is a few years of studying theology without acquiring a degree…in 2015 she stated how happy she was that Germany was going to change dramatically…as it would become “younger, more colorful and more religious”; and there are other prominent Greens with similar careers). Though in reality the Christian Democrats probably aren’t better, they just have a somewhat more respectable veneer. These mediocrities would be nothing without their parties, they are quite literally parasites imo.
“Mark Leonard describes threats of how (…) the political development of the European Union happened isolated and differently than in any other political system in the world. (…) It may be that Europe’s postmodern order has become so advanced and particular to its environment that it is impossible for others to follow. It evolved in a protective ecosystem, shielded from the more muscular, “modern” world where most people live.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome
there seems to be a universal understanding among them that Europe is just too nice (not Hong-Kong-y and Bangladesh-y enough.) Which is something that needs to be fixed stat.
Shut up, Corvinus.
Make me.
Make yourself. Therein will lie your true triumph.
Ladies first.
But of course.
After you, Danielle.
No, refugees do not have the right to move to Poland or Hungary, which have full control of their borders. You babble on like a moron.
Once they’re granted Schengen visas, they indeed do have the right to move to Poland or Hungary.
In general I don’t cardinally disagree with this vision (in theory).
In practice, the big problem with this is that we live in a globalized world with very free capital flows and relatively free labor flows (between upper income countries), so any attempt to drastically lower inequality through very high marginal income and capital gains taxes will just see the smart fractions who like money leave abroad for greener pastures. For instance, you can meet many high quality European immigrants in the US and the rest of the Anglosphere who emigrated for the lower taxes and greater economic freedoms.
COMECON of course handled this problem through heavy restrictions on capital and labor mobility from outside. Who could assume that role now?
No; he should sign up to work out at ‘The Judgement Free Zone”. There are at least three locations in Alexandria.
The Judgement Free Zone®
“Planet Fitness is known for a lot of things – our low prices (and all the stuff you get for those low prices), our Lunk™ Alarm, and of course, our Judgement Free Zone®. We’re fiercely protective of our Planet and the rights of our members to feel like they belong. So we create an environment where you can relax, go at your own pace and just do your own thing without ever having to worry about being judged. This is your Planet. You belong.”
Planet Fitness Mission Statement
“We at Planet Fitness are here to provide a unique environment in which anyone – and we mean anyone – can be comfortable. A diverse, Judgement Free Zone® where a lasting, active lifestyle can be built. Our product is a tool, a means to an end; not a brand name or a mold-maker, but a tool that can be used by anyone. In the end, it’s all about you. As we evolve and educate ourselves, we will seek to perfect this safe, energetic environment, where everyone feels accepted and respected. We are not here to kiss your butt, only to kick it if that’s what you need.”
Might as well get multiple lawsuits going. Sue and win bigly until you’re sick of winning.
I think that actually means, in corporate English, that we will keep drawing a $10 ACS on your bank account even after you send us three separate certified letters indicating your cancellation–because your diversity is so important to the Planet Fitness community.
On the other hand, if Spencer joins, and they kick him out, presumably they might have to stop charging him, which I don’t know if they are capable of doing.
Not the first time pilots, Pakistani or otherwise, have exaggerated their aerial victories: