Apparently so.
Richard Spencer, an outspoken “alt-right” activist and white nationalist who has cheered on the rise of Donald Trump, was punched in the face Friday, during an ABC interview, by a hooded Inauguration Day protester in Washington, D.C. The attack was caught on video, and promptly went viral on social media. There were many online discussions about whether the violence was justified, with Spencer being widely categorized as a Nazi. The majority view appeared to endorse the sucker punch.
Episodes like this make me simultaneously feel that what I do is important, since the level of ethical literacy in the general U.S. population seems to be at a rudimentary level at best, and make me want to quit and become a paleontologist. Of course it’s wrong to attack someone physically because of his words and opinions. It doesn’t matter what they are. That is so unethical it makes my teeth hurt, and defending it is proof that you need to go live in cave.
I’d love to see a poll on the topic, but I’m afraid the results would send me into serious depression. I’m also afraid the poll would show that Democrats and progressives favor face-punching Nazis with alarming self-righteousness, making ever more tenuous my respect for any Democrat, in the midst of the party’s embarrassing conduct since the election, who doesn’t wear a flour sack over his or her head in public and constantly mutter, “I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry…”
I know that there are people in this country like those who used to appear on The Jerry Springer Show, whose only response to conflict is to start swinging. I assumed, however, that nobody who could name the President during the Civil War, spell “cheese” and knows where babies come from thinks that it is acceptable to walk up to someone on the sidewalk and cold cock him because his opinions are offensive. Silly me. I also assumed that there was no accepted list of punch-worthy positions, but I guess there is.
Who makes that list? Isn’t it obvious that if Richard Spencer’s white supremacy views are on the list, your views or mine could be on it tomorrow? Is this whole freedom of expression thing that hard to understand?
Enough people were prompted by Spencer’s fate to explicate their ethics ignorance that Popehat’s Ken White felt that he had to write a rather long essay explaining what’s wrong with punching neo-Nazis. He has more patience than I do, and apparently more time, but as usual, Ken does a fine job. (At Reason, Robby Souve is considerably more succinct: “Don’t fight fascism by acting like a fascist.”) Do read Ken’s piece if you don’t think you could write one yourself, but if you couldn’t, that makes me feel sad and useless. If you agree with the puncher, however, by all means try to make your case at Ethics Alarms so I can write, “What the hell is the matter with you?”
I promise I won’t punch YOU in the face. But I will be tempted. It is an unethical, dangerous, really stupid opinion to have.
Ethics Alarms 
I think I saw a few commenters trying to justify it over at Popehat too. The reason seems to boil down to “he has badthink.” Which is, of course, incredibly convincing.
Jack, finding your website back in March of 2013, was one of the best things of that year. I having been reading since and impatiently check for updates hourly (which is why I have never subscribed). I had contemplated the difficult task of searching Amazon for a book to start my bettering understanding of ethics. I was looking at starting with The Analects of Confucius (annotated). Your blog was the better choice, bit sized, and are lessons that apply to the current world. You’ve helped one person, I hope that makes you feel a little better.
Also, I have read Ken and Robby’s work. I’m not sure they belong in the same paragraph.
One is plenty.
I think you know it is more than one, Jack. I comment on exactly ONE blog. I respect the discourse here, and the standards being upheld.
I also have learned a LOT. If nothing else, I can better articulate why I support a topic, or not. And the rationalizations list is invaluable.
Thank you
I know it’s more—my point is that one would be enough. Thanks for the encouragement.
A Jack Marshall Book of Ethics or something similar would be a bestseller. I know me and my merry band of men would push it to the far corners of the globe.
Dittoes joed68!
I would love to have a book written by you.
But Indiana Jones punched Nazis in the face.
And HE’S as American as they come!
Good point.
People have legitimately made that comparison, and to Captain America punching Hitler in the old comics.
Thing is, as someone else adroitly pointed out… they punched first.
People may have made that comment, but it sure isn’t legitimate: 1) Cap punched Hitler during World War II, and not based on his speeches, either. 2) Both Cap and Indy are fictional characters. Indy also found the Holy Grail, and Cap worked with the Norse God of Thunder.
+1 for Thor reference. Careful how you speak about residents of Asgard, though. They can be capricious and are prone to get irritated with puny mortals like ourselves who get uppidy. 😀
The WWII comparisons are certainly flawed; we do a lot worse than punching in a war, and that war was necessary to the survival of Western civilization.
Now, I do know that people like Spencer are a threat to our civilization, but I am not yet sure that threat has risen to the level that it needs to be solved by violence. Generally speaking, I think a threat has to rise to a pretty serious level before violence is attempted as a solution, and the idea of leftists resorting to that at this point does make me uncomfortable.
On a less ethical note: Damn, it felt good watching that Nazi motherfucker get punched in the face.
Idiots like that guy have been around as long as I can remember. The American Nazi Party was once far more prominent than alt-right. He poses no threat at all, to anyone or anything, and the suggestion itself is insulting to the country, its history, its laws and its culture. This is just part of the fear-mongering that the Left has adopted as part of ongoing indoctrination…any retreat from the ideology is a step toward fascism. Since I respect you, I assume that you are a victim of this propaganda and not a purveyor of it. But the forces that create the puncher are fat more dangerous than the puncher. No contest.
A few years ago I can imagine people saying birthers posed no threat to our country. Now one is president. Anything can happen now. Anything.
Proportion and reason are life competencies, Chris. His birther crap had no more to do with his Presidency than his hair. It hurt him. It’s like calling Hugo Black a Klansman.
Jack wrote: “Idiots like that guy have been around as long as I can remember. The American Nazi Party was once far more prominent than alt-right. He poses no threat at all, to anyone or anything, and the suggestion itself is insulting to the country, its history, its laws and its culture. This is just part of the fear-mongering that the Left has adopted as part of ongoing indoctrination…any retreat from the ideology is a step toward fascism. Since I respect you, I assume that you are a victim of this propaganda and not a purveyor of it. But the forces that create the puncher are fat more dangerous than the puncher. No contest.”
I like things to be as direct as possible and I don’t have any objection to someone’s expression of their understanding of things. But I do have a right to rebuttal!
I have listened to many of Spencer´s talks, and read his articles, and also read pretty closely those of his associates (Jared Taylor, Guillaume Faye, Alain de Benoit, and many other European figres who best define the Nouvelle Droite) and by no means at all are they idiots. And because they are not idiots of any sort at all their ideas are beginning to gain traction. There are many many sites and blogs and podcasts which are now circulating that deal on identity politics, on the preservation of white culture and white community, are often but not always religious communities, with family-oriented concerns, et cetera, that are coming to be influenced by these ideas. Not ‘hate groups’, not a ‘lunatic fringe’, not inarticulate stupid people or idiots, but people very concerned about their world, the future of thei country and community, and much else. These people do not have faith in the ‘Establishment’ and (if I may say so) only an ‘idiot’ really would.
The Establsihment is a vast and interconnected network of powers which in many ways have little to do with ‘democracy’ so called. Right wing populism (and Left wing too for that matter) arises out of that distrust and suspicion.
Spencer chiefly calls for, advocates for, white identity and in his talks (when asked) explains that he is not a ‘white supremicist’ because it is impossible to ascribe such valuation. But what he advocates for is the ability to say: This is what I am. This is who I am. This is what I have done and made. And these are my people.
That is white identity. It is coming back into a forbidden territory of self-identity and self-appreciation.
More can be said about Spencer’s views and a new and developing and articulate Conservative politics with a more developed ideological underpinning. It is moving in Europe in Britain, France, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Greece, Germany: all of the European countries.
It is NOT Nazism. It is a genuine counter-movement to the excesses of Liberal politics and cultural hyper-liberalism.
I like Richard Spencer. I like those associated with him. I like the developing European Right. I work in the direction of bringing these ideas to the attention of as many people as I can so that we can begin to turn the tide.
I am therefor ‘an idiot’ (in the Greek sense!) and I accept this.
Hell, Great Britain had a Nazi party, even after Dunkirk. The irony being that Nazis would have tolerated “German friends of Churchill”.
“Is it OK to attack a Nazi?”
Spencer is not a ‘Nazi’. The NY Times in an article this AM is asking that false question, and because of the false framing people (here too I’ll bet) *see* him like that. But the Left and Progressive feel they are the moral authority that can and should judge the whole world. Because they know the Truth. They assign to themselves the role of watchdog and Thought Police. They can say what they like, lie, distort, false-frame, ruin reputstions, cause economic loss, shunning and general pain. It’s all OK.
But now I begin to understand the level ‘they’ are going to take this to. And I begin to see a larger picture. In Europe (with genuine intellectual articulation) a movement is arising to challenge and reverse the extremes of postwar Liberalism. That liberalism has aligned with media and money and government and become systematized. Look no further than the Times for the example, the prototype.
They frame right-wing populism as equivalent to Nazism. But right-wing populism is not necesarily that, but to understand it, one has to understand interwar rightwing reaction (which is now referred to as fascism: the hated enemy of systemic liberalism). And it is quite OK to use any tool possible to resist an abstraction like ‘Nazism’.
Spencer represents a rather typical right-reaction but he is not a Nazi. But any deviation from left hyper-progressivism, enen in Conservatives eyes, will get that label. To see why Spencer is not Nazi will mean one will have to read and understand Spencer, Jared Taylor, Kevin McDonald, Pierre Krebs, Alain de Benoit, Jonathan Bowden and numerous others. Whennthat happens America will begin the intellectual and ideological process of defining a more powerful conservatism. Until then: Cockservatism.
There is now beginning a ‘culture war’ unlike anything seen in the postwar. Prepare yourselves. It will involve increasing violence and attacks by the righteous Left wing who now come out in mobs. The only way they can be challenged and turned back is through IDEA (ideology). ‘We’ of this New Right can only suggest sources for education and slowly begin to turn a tide.
Smash Cultural Marxism! (Sorry, I know it’s dramatic…)
Of course he’s not a Nazi. This isn’t 1930’s Germany. It’s shorthand for white supremacy and anti-Semitism, and arguing beyond that is pedantry. It shouldn’t make a difference at all. He holds a set of beliefs and objectives that many people—you don’t even have to say, “many decent people”—find dangerous and repugnant. So what? We can’t go around punching people in the face based on their words and the our certainty that we are CERTAIN, because we know best, that the words are wrong.
To ask the Times” question is itself offensive (but I won’t punch it in the front page), because that assumes there is a valid argument for answering yes. There isn’t. If you can punch sort-of-Nazis for talking like Nazis, you can also punch Muslims, campus censors, socialists, and gay marriage advocates. The false debate is simply the Left advocating justified violence on its way to mandatory compliance with its ideology.
But it is 2017 Weimerica. And this term is used for reasons of parallel.
But you have just defined, in long shorthand, that you also see him as essentially a Nazi. But all of this, all these labels, the ways that race-realism (racism for most of ‘you’) and the most difficult one, a Jewish-critical position (‘antisemitism’ in today’s language) and white identidy are defined and understood: that is what needs to be worked on.
Pedantry? Not at all pedantry here. These defintions, and these meanings, are critical and will be more so as the next years unfold. This is only the beginnings.
I respect — really — that you keep your forus on essentially etiquette. It is just not right to blind-punch anyone.
But is it legitimate to frame a social movement just now arising in Norway, Sweden, Britain, France, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and in te Anglophone world, to be defined as Naziesque because it deals on difficult and forbidden themes and interpretations? It does indeed.
Ask Chris. Ask Beth. Ask Deery. Ask most here how they interpret interwar reaction (‘fascism’ is the universal lens). For most, almost for all, it is non-different from Nazism.
I think I have simply crossed an ideological line that many, and many here, cannot cross. I am not afraid of the new definitions. But I have also read all those I mention. I see and I understand. Unfortunately, Trump is a very bad reflector of solid European right doctrines.
And I am aware that highly indoctrinated sorts will do much more striking. Striking is what’s next in line.
Alizia is a Nazi.
Don’t punch her in the face.
I couldn’t bring myself to hit a woman, unless necessary for self-defense or defense of others. Call that sexist if you must; wouldn’t be the first time my chivalry conflicts with my feminism.
Some deep critical self analysis is in order, comrade. These bourgeois sexist trainings must be purged from our mind with all our most powerful scrunbbing tools! whistle while you cleanse! Or else they come back to bite us in unfortunate ways. Think of it like this: clinging to the products of such false consciousness is a way we keep the Fully Levelled Kingdom from finally appearing on Earth. Ruthlessness, brother, is required. Show no mercy.
________________
One of the thought-tricks of the Hyper-Progressive Left is to possess terminology and control definitions. They have a group of ‘magic words’ they can use which cause their opponent to fall down flat with no defense. These are very important and powerful words and because they have this power they are used all the time.
Curiously, there are right-leaning movements developing in all the countries of Europe. Are they all ‘Nazis’? Well, yes, they are. Because anything which opposes Hyper-Liberalism and the extremist Progressivism is, by definition, Nazism. It is the most marvellous and useful of abstractions.
Nazism threatens to come back at any moment. It is part-and-parcel of the Earth’s substance apparently. Neglect and ceasing of vigilance are deep sins and with one sleepy blink the ‘Nazis’ appear on street corners like hoodlums. Evil/Nazi/Racist/Patriarchal people who want to urinate among their own kind must be kept down by the actions and the will of the Good Ones who know better. These ones have been assigned, like I suppose Orwellian thought-police are assigned, to carefully scan the brain-waves of culture. And when they notice a thought, a gesticulation, a mere breath, which carries a whiff of regressiveness, the powerful Magic Words are pulled out. Always emotive, they function like intrusions into the psychological body, like darts of guilt.
Okay, fine — if someone has to do it, I’ll slap her.
(kidding)
You forgot the quotation marks around “regressiveness”, otherwise, an excellent analysis.
“I couldn’t bring myself to hit a woman, unless necessary for self-defense or defense of others.”
You could bring yourself to punch a man for reasons other than self-defense or defense of others?
Phenomenal.
I’m worried about your violent tendencies.
In extreme cases, I might be willing to punch a man for being a non-stop condescending dick who pounces on my every word.
But in this case I’ll just use my words, and tell you that I really think you’re a non-stop condescending dick who pounces on my every word.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
No, let’s go back to your original point. You took issue with my implication that I could bring myself to hit a male Nazi, even if it was not in self defense or defense of others.
Why did you take issue with this? You can’t see any scenario where you could bring yourself to punch a male Nazi in the face, except for self defense or defense of others?
First of all, you actually made it an issue between men and women not just Nazi men and all other people…
For review, your comment: “I couldn’t bring myself to hit a woman, unless necessary for self-defense or defense of others. Call that sexist if you must; wouldn’t be the first time my chivalry conflicts with my feminism.”
If you’d wanted it about just nazi men and nazi women, I’m sure you would’ve included an “even though she’s what I consider a nazi” clarification in there. In this case, context doesn’t help with all the additions you wrote about feminism etc.
“You can’t see any scenario where you could bring yourself to punch a male Nazi in the face, except for self defense or defense of others?”
That’s correct. If you can’t control your emotions enough to ratchet up a disagreement appropriately then it’s not a fault of mine that I can.
That’s correct. If you can’t control your emotions enough to ratchet up a disagreement appropriately then it’s not a fault of mine that I can.
You are an exhausting pedant. Look up what “bring oneself to do something” means. It does not mean I have no self-control and am a Nazi-punching machine. It means that I can see myself possibly punching a Nazi in certain circumstances. You are not better than me because you can’t even fathom losing your temper, and I’m really sick of you turning every comment thread I engage in into some sort of dominance ritual.
Oh stop it. You made a silly assertion and I called you on it. I don’t cry when adamantly defend your positions, trying to sideways into martyr status is weak. Don’t do it.
What “silly assertion” did I make? That I couldn’t bring myself to hit a woman, but could bring myself to hit a man? How is that a “silly assertion?” It’s how I feel. Do you not believe me? Did I say this aspect of myself was particularly ethical? No, I even conceded it might be sexist. There was nothing to “call me on” except in your petty mind.
“What “silly assertion” did I make? That I couldn’t bring myself to hit a woman, but could bring myself to hit a man? How is that a “silly assertion?” It’s how I feel. Do you not believe me? Did I say this aspect of myself was particularly ethical? No, I even conceded it might be sexist. There was nothing to “call me on” except in your petty mind.”
Shifting the goalposts. I didn’t call you on the silly assertion of “That I couldn’t bring myself to hit a woman, but could bring myself to hit a man”, but rather the reasons you could bring yourself to hit a woman were more limited than the reasons you could hit a man, namely that you’d hit a woman in self-defense or in defense of others. Being the “limited end” of your reasons, logic implies that you are looser in your willingness to hit man, therefore you’d be willing to hit him for reasons other than self-defense or defense of others.
That’s a violent outlook.
It’s also a silly assertion.
If you can’t limit your striking of other men to self-defense or defense of others, then you are a violent person, or you just don’t realize you made a silly assertion.
You still don’t know what the phrase “could bring myself to” means, I see.
If you can’t limit your striking of other men to self-defense or defense of others,
I can, though, and nothing I said implied that I can’t. You are conflating “could bring myself to hit a man for reasons other than defense” with “can’t limit myself from striking men in defense,” which is a completely dishonest conflation, all so you can make the dishonest argument that I’ve revealed myself to be a dishonest person. Why are you doing this?
Being able to imagine possibly hitting another man for reasons other than defense–in this case, being able to imagine hitting a fucking Nazi–does not make one a “violent person.”
Would you strike a real cute little babyNazi? Would you have strangled Rosemary’s Baby? Would you send away your own Nazi child if s/he turned out like that?
I think you’re having a hard time visualizing the Venn or Euler diagram your assertions make…
Stand back, sounds like Chris needs the Southeast Asian geography lesson.
What?
Hey, what’s the capital of Thailand?
Bangkok! (knee to groin)
Ah, c’mon, Chris, that goes back to being in high school.
Wow, that’s juvenile.
Ah, got it.
Of course it’s juvenile, Patrice, I said it dates back to high school. Clocking or cold-cocking anyone, or leading someone gullible into a painful attack (SE Asian geography lesson, how do you scare a bee, where do the Three Stooges keep their money) is generally not considered mature behavior.
Hahaha!
Being a feminist means never having to say you’re sorry for all sorts of logical conflicts.
Reading through the comments rapidly (I’ve been far, far away fpr a few weels), I almost missed this. It’s my new email tagline. With credit, of course.
I’m genuinely honored!
Has no one informed them that their cultural war has been delivered a fell blow? Keep it up, lunatics. We’ll stand by and document it all.
“Spencer is not a ‘Nazi’”
An assertion not helped when Spencer quotes 1930s Nazi propaganda to advance his arguments…
I forgot to comment to this. I hope you were not stressing anxiously too much. OK, here it is!
Because I want to help people — people like you — better understand the Alt/Right, I have to mention that a good part of it, and also a good part of the European right, takes a rather irreverent attitude toward all the *correct* responses to Hitler & Co. There is a large swatch of people writing in blogs, and podcasts, who tend to make fun of the (I think) ridiculous solemnity of the sentiments that one must take toward the Germans.
Hitler takes the role of the secular Satan and you can only speak about Satan in appropriate hushed tone and then you must sprinkle salt around and genuflect down on one knee. I have listened to some podcasts of white identity Christians — quite normal people really — who spoof off of Jewish fear-emotions and use nicknames like ‘Grampa Lampshade’ and other irreverent nicknames. It goes on quite a lot really. It is a way of breaking down the barriers to be able to discuss the *forbidden topics*.
Spencer in a talk he gave used the term Lügenpresse with a hardly suppressed and slightly malicious irony. He has a devilish sense of humor. His Roman salute was done in a similar way: ironic, in no sense serious. And he was criticized quite strongly for ‘damaging the brand’ (Greg Johnson wrote fairly convincingly on that theme).
These people feel that the image of the Evil Nazi, the ur-enemy of man, and ‘ontological malevolence’ that seeps out of the shadows and gives poison chiclets to children beside schoolyards, has become a tool of the Left to discredit, if not to destroy, anyone who does not join with them in declarations of mono-values. Even you understand how that deadly game is played.
So, they choose to take on the accusation, to wear it, to make it their own, to turn it into an inside joke. But at the same time they also understand that interwar conservatism — and fascist thought to various extents — was a natural and a good and a required reaction to Communist and Marxist activism. Kind of like what is going on today. History goes in strange circles. Certainly that was a big deal in Germany (the communist danger). Germany was slated to be the State that next fell to communism after Russia is my understanding.
So, these people study the history but from a different position. Maybe they take a more balanced view? A different angle anyway. They just do not buy the ‘image of pure German evil’ and they also recognize the profound complicity in the opposing powers, especially England, in creating the second devastating European civil war.
So, Spencer *plays* with some of these images and yet when he says Lügenpresse he is indeed referring to a *real thing*. The NYTs is today the Lügenpresse of the NY Intellectual class and is also bizarrely linked to the State (at least the Democrat party and that side of the power-system) as its propaganda organ. Or it sure looks like that.
I personally think that Spencer would do well to avoid those images and that conjuration (and Greg Johnson also severely condemns him for doing harm to the work done to get the Alt-Right where it is) but when I read the comments to Johnson’s essay many people said, ‘Well, no matter what, they will label us Nazis anyway …” They just did not seem to be that bothered.
Naturally, I would say that you must remember that *we* tend to see *you* as C*&%servatives (it is almost a swear word so I disguise it, and protect your heart’s innocence) and essentially slightly right-leaning Leftists in service to Progressivism who really have no solid program, nor values, nor much will, and are more or less on the side of the spectrum bringing about the ruin of the Republic because you cannot take a stand on the most fundamental questions. You serve the same God as the Hyper-Progressives is another way to put it.
We on the other hand take risks and confront PC thinking and are also interested in revisionism according to more realistic views. And we do not seem to be afraid of taking very unpopular stances that go against the grain.
Yeah ok…
When I’m arguing in favor of a national highway system, I’m going to use Eisenhower quotes, not Hitler quotes.
I get the notion that really really wrong people are right some of the time. But when you are wrong on the level of Hitler, you can find other sources of support for your arguments than him…
And alluding to arguments that probably were remarkably unwise to a Nazi worldview… doesn’t help matters when people say “Spencer isn’t a Nazi”…
“remarkably unwise” should say “remarkably unique”.
I don’t understand autocorrect sometimes.
Hitler takes the role of the secular Satan and you can only speak about Satan in appropriate hushed tone and then you must sprinkle salt around and genuflect down on one knee. I have listened to some podcasts of white identity Christians — quite normal people really — who spoof off of Jewish fear-emotions and use nicknames like ‘Grampa Lampshade’ and other irreverent nicknames. It goes on quite a lot really. It is a way of breaking down the barriers to be able to discuss the *forbidden topics*.
Such japery! What a merry band of jokesters you all are!
Seriously, you’re a terrible fucking person.
It always amazes: emotional, false-moralizing blows completely free of intellectual support. The Left is driven by such out of control sentimentalism. The object: to plant an emotional intrusion in the victim. Emotions are powerful, and weak-minded persons especially susceptible. This is pretty much what drives and powers the prigressive-left.
I just don’t feel like a horrible person, Chris. I’m immune to your attacks.
Oh, I’m well aware that you are beyond the capacity to feel shame over your racist views.
But I can still shame others from associating with you. I don’t think joe is beyond realizing that you are nothing but a Nazi-loving, Jew-hating white supremacist, and deciding to reject you on those grounds.
The only person I am talking with here is you. What anyone else thinks or how they respond to what I think is another affair. But what I wish to point out is how you structure your argument, and how you load it up with pure emotionalism. That always tends to place things into simple and often black and white categories, and that is not a way to understand people, culture, history, or the world.
‘Shame’ is a complex feeling. I believe that a person must cultivate the capability of feeling it. It is a powerful motivator and inhibitor.
But what you wish to do is to inflict shame, to use it like a weapon. But unfortunately for you you have not reasoned out your positions enough. And all that I suggest comes as a result of having done so and a great deal of intellectual work.
‘Racism’ and ‘racist’ are *magic words* for you. You attempt to use them like a fighter uses a knock-out blow. I fully understand how you cobble together your concepts and yet I prefer, cooly and calmly, to enunciate my views and understandings without emotionalism (or idealism). And that’s where the difference lies between us. Your *method* results in the destruction of the capacity to think rationally. You can only think emotively and irrationally. And you can surely employ demagogic tactics and, yes, you can move people to rally under those emotional banners.
But in the end all that YOU have left is your guilt-accusations, which amounts to screaming and shrill soundings, but with no articulated argument. Also, when you cannot get your way with your guilt-trip what comes next for YOU is of course violence, and so this conversation comes full circled. The next order of business for *you* will indeed be violence, and it will be instigated by your side. You will first establish your enemy, set up the narrative against him or her, and then lead others to the attack. All in the name of righteousness.
What I call for is education, self-realization, and spiritual transformation, and sound ethical and moral choices based on realism. I can defend myself against *you* at any time, in any place, and on the strength of my ideas.
Just so you know, I have zero expectation of you jumping to my defense. I simply can’t help stating my admiration for someone that’s able to continuously articulate his or her position so precisely and free of excess emotional distortion, something I often fail at.
I am not going to have a “rational discussion” with a Nazi, Alizia. I do not wish to engage with your views. They are undeserving of anything but shaming. They are not new, and history has already judged them. Your values lost. You want me to dignify the values of racial segregation, hierarchy, and white supremacy with a response because you know that would legitimize them and bring them back up for discussion. You think if you can get people to dignify your stupid arguments with a response, to treat them as if they are rational when they are anything but, maybe this time, your values will win.
Here’s my response: Fuck you.
PS: You said a naughtie word!
I love it. First, you deem to control the terms. In fact, you decide what term to apply to define ‘the other’ and this is done autocratically, even with some violence. How do you justify that? (I ask rhetorically). You do so because — I see no other alternative — you are *God’s own righteous child*. You see, you have to see yourself established on really that kind of base. And because you occupy that asiento you participate in the assignation of absolute value to anyone and anything. You mediate meaning and value, truth and goodness. What an awesome responsibility you have!
I do not get to tell you what I am, or what I think, or why I came to this; you as Authority Maximus have the right to tell me, and your judgments are pure and good. I would suggest that up to a certain point that you do all these marvellous things, and have this marvellous powers, because of your Americanism. It’s a sort of manifest destiny and also *American Exceptionalism*. It has a relationship to it in any case. This is why I say that the American and the French Revolutions share some commonality. But I would also suggest that the forward-thrusting momentum is latent, perhaps even unconscious, and that it very much needs to be examined.
A little critical self-examination is in order for you, Comrade!
I certainly did not expect any difference of result, Chris. You relate to most if not all questions and debates in essentially the same way. You are, and by choice if you remain this way, a zealot, not an intellectual.
I would suggest the value is more to the ones who might be reading. To see and to understand how Hyper-Progressive Zealotry operates, how *possessive* it is, and how it really does infect both the Liberal Left and (gasp!) the so-called Conservative Right (Cuckservatives).
Whoa! I been half following this conversation way too long. Alizia, I too am a Jew who has fled from his birthright. I do not believe in a chosen people. My best friend was Catholic. He too, rejected his religion.
Later in life I studied Jesus and concluded he was definitely on to something wonderful. It’s the Jesus kind of Christianity I resonate to.
I confess, I don’t know very much about you, or your beliefs, because I can only read so much and your posts can be exceedingly long. I wish I had the fortitude to real them through because I admire your scholarly input.
Now I’m seeing others here calling you a Nazi. With all the Nazi name calling going round these days, not just here but everywhere, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean anymore. I’m still reading The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich (been reading it for years… it’s a long book and I’ve other books to read at the same time… plus, I’m slow as hell).
From my reading of that book, I intuit there were some very bad people (shall I call them “evil”) involved. You probably know their names.
Look, I just got back from a funeral and I’m tired and I’m drinking whiskey and my wife is sick in bed with a bad cold. So, please, allow me to come to an ending, no matter how unsatisfactory.
In plain words, and in as few words as possibly, do you endorse ethnic cleansing? The reason I ask is because (again) I am not able to read very long posts.
Wow Fatty! I’m attending my dad’s wake tomorrow and my wife is back home in bed with the flu. I wish I was drinking with you now, friend. I usually don’t make too much of coincidence, but odd coincidence..
FattyMoon wrote: “In plain words, and in as few words as possibly, do you endorse ethnic cleansing? The reason I ask is because (again) I am not able to read very long posts.
I certainly do not.
But I think what you are getting at is something like: 1) What do you think of the Nazis and their expulsion of the Jews of the German region? 2) Through what means would you assert one ethnicity over another? You speak of White Identity: what does this mean in a mixed culture?
Unfortunately, in order to be able to speak about the German situation a great deal of preamble is required. To understand a historical tragedy, or any very complex social situation, always requires a long study. The easy and quick answer will not ever work. But that is how the German/Jewish situation is approached.
One thing I will say, and it has become adamantly clear to me: Both the First War and the Second War were mutual creations of all the parties involved. To try to find the one to *blame* is a bad course and it will not work.
There is my answer.
____________________________
I have another, added note, but I am already moving into high word count territory. The idea of a Chosen People,for all that chosenness implies special favor and gifts given, also has to be seen as being chosen for the tragedy that one has had to live. You have implied that you don’t accept or believe in what is generally accepted to be the result of ‘chosenness’ which is to be granted adeptness, cleverness, historical inventiveness, sharpness, and prosperity. I had a childhood friend who when once we were talking about ‘chosenness’ responded, quite innocently, ‘Si pero elegido para QUE? (‘Yes, but chosen for WHAT?’)
You cannot have Jewish identity without embracing the tragedy. It is part of the story. And in that story it all goes in cycles. Take Genesis as the proto-story. The man is in deep troubles. His own family has betrayed him. He washes up on some foreign shore and gets taken in. He is talented and serves in the Court. He becomes one with the Power-System. He becomes wealthy and powerful. The Dynasty changes. New Rulers look at this prospering interloper and ask “Who are these people?!” They begin to militate against (proto-) Jewish presence. God hears the *moanings* of the ‘oppressed’ people and leads them out, and on their way out they make off with all the gold and precious articles (God allows this in fact). And God Himself brings misery and destruction down on those who *have issues* with this unusual people. Oppose the Jews, suffer calamity is how the story is written. Then, God leads them to a wonderful new (inhabited) land where they have to murder each and every living sould down to the mice in the adobe walls to be able to sit around drinking milk and eating honey.
Well, someone mught say that I read Geneis with a misanthopic slant! But I am sorry, these are the stories that are part-and-parcel of Jewish identity.
I do understand that, idealistically, the notion of ‘chosenness’ has a different connotation: “Muchos Judíos, hoy en día se han vuelto temerosos de aplicar el término “el pueblo elegido”, dando todo tipo de disculpas por lo que consideran un “chauvinismo” de sus ancestros. Sin embargo, cuando la Torá se refiere a que Di-s “eligió” a Israel, las implicancias son muy claras. Los Judíos no fueron elegidos para dominar a otros. Ellos no son herederos de ningún privilegio especial. Ser “elegidos” significa que fueron seleccionados para llevar una carga especial de derechos y responsabilidades, mientras que para ello no se comprometió a otros.”
I’m glad you gave this answer. It’s precisely as I would have expected, and I think more than sufficiently vindicates my taking your “side” in this matter.
Sorry, messed my use of bold. But it is still clear so I think you can have no problem reading it.
Blind Pew would be able to read it…but I’ll fix.
And I might yet, given sufficient evidence that she’s actually those things. I’m still not seeing exactly what you’re seeing, though.
Joe, sorry about your dad. Hope your wife recovers quickly. And I’m hoping Stella has a cold and not the flu. Too early to tell.
More coincidence… Lisa died Dec. 13, one day before my 70th birthday. She died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease… https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Fact-Sheets/Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Disease-Fact-Sheet – very rapid onset/decline and death. Interestingly, I’m banned from giving blood or plasma because I’m at risk for the disease due to the fact I was treated for underactive thyroid as a kid… doc prescribed some kind of pituitary extract from sheep.
So, yeah, let’s have a drink. A toast, my friend.
Through the teeth and over the gums, watch out stomach, here it comes!
Thank you, Alizia, for your well thought out answer. (Yes, I did read everything!). I had to go to Google Translate for your final graph. It reads…
Many Jews today have become fearful of applying the term “chosen people,” giving all sorts of apologies for what they consider a “chauvinism” of their ancestors. However, when the Torah refers to Gd “choosing” Israel, the implications are very clear. The Jews were not chosen to dominate others. They are not heirs of any special privilege. Being “chosen” means that they were selected to carry a special burden of rights and responsibilities, while not being committed to others.
As you may know, I’ve been advocating for a citizen’s revolt. My guiding light, at this point, is Chris Hedges. Listen to this speech from 2014…
Then read his call for a nonviolent revolution. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/revolt_is_the_only_barrier_to_a_fascist_america_20170122
Finally, read his column posted yesterday… http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_psychosis_20170129
I welcome your views on what Hedges has to say.
Wow. I watched the video, read the first article, and then did more reading about him on Widipedia. I will say that I have read a good deal of such material. I did so, and was moved by it, because, as is obvious, it presents a message of nearly pure righteousness. That is, it sees itself telling the *absolute truth* about things and it draws people into that vision to the degree that they desire to participate in truth and righteousness. It is able to locate, to see, to describe, to label every evil that eixts, and it sets forth to name them and condemn them. Essentially, it locates ‘evil’ uniquely outside of itself, and it is always (I think I am right to say this) located in the other, be it the corporate other or the governmental other. It seems to describe a situation where the Good Man (the good person), who only want to do good and to be good, is inhibited by faceless others who obstruct the pathway to that good. It seems to me born out of Utopian spirit. I also have the sense (and have had the sense) that people who think and see in these terms are people ‘without ownership interest’. What I mean is that mostly the people who make these sort of speech and write these sort of books are those with a limited ‘ownership interest’ in the structure of society.
But, I think as well that he (and they who think like this) are onto something. I mean, their perception is not wrong necessarily, but it is an ‘angle-of-view’, a specific perspective.
I notice that he started his talk with a description of the reality of Gaza and the oppressive situation. I have tried to grapple with that situation and I have been forced to attempt to ‘justify power’ and to explain it. I think of it in terms of *complicity*. If we are a member of society, let us say United States society, we are ‘complicit’ in it at every single level. Complicity seeps into us, and through us, and we to it. We are tempted to see the wrong-doer as ‘the other’ (or some other) and we do this as a therepuetical strategy to keep ourselves feeling good and free (and non-complicit). I got always the impression that the hippies and flower children were able to see thmselves as non-complicit, kind of like little Angels of God (a favorite term of mine) who, like angles, could flutter down and condemn everyone, their own fathers especially, and yet they themselves were born out of that complicity. The very physical structure of themselves came to be because of complicitness.
When I was researching Vedic religions, and Manu, I came acorss a strange idea which seemed fairly elevated. That Society is founded, always, through acts of violence. There is no way around it. Just the act of tilling the field is an act of violence against Nature, and in this sense against the Cosmos. Since these Vedic people were highly conscious and very sensitive to the tragedy of incarnated existence, and saw clearly how incarnation in a body itself involves on in a mult-level *complicity* (in evil and wrong-doing), if only because one is forced to consume other beings, or carve out a place for onself and thus displace other living things, those who established Culture and Society (the Kings and the Warriors) incurred to themselves a dense ‘karma’ because, like in the Iliad, it is these people who establish Kingdoms and conquer territory.
But the *ring of violence* that forms the outer barrier or the frontier of Culture allows for a whole interior life to occur. The outside is founded in violence and evil and cruelty, etc. But the inside is where culture occurs and life is carried on. In the Vedic way of seeing things, each social level and each situation, be it of a King and his responsibility, with his Warriors and Conquerers and Defenders and Administators, or a householder, or a farmer and trader: each owed what could be said to be a *debt* and were *complicit* in the *evil* that is terrestrial, conditioned existence. And each had to be aware of it at some level. And also in that culture, with its developed metaphysics, each ‘varna’ (caste or social level) had to expiate the debt through sacrifice, that is to say religious observation.
So then, power and the use of power, and carving out an existence within the scheme of things, is simply not avoidable. It will have to be done in one way or another.
My grasp of things is that the people I am speaking of, those who give the speeches and write the books from an idealistic perspective, do not understand ‘how power functions’ and do not understand their own *complicity* to a power-system which gives them everything, including their body.
FattyMoon, thinking about it, there is really a great deal more to say about this man’s views and, essentially, the loss of power and the confusion of average people about their world, their culture, and the very meaning of life and the value of living. I only took the angle I took above as a starting point.
It seems to me unavoidable that people must ask the questions that have to do with ‘vast corporate interests’ and ‘constellations of corporations’ that exert so much control and influence over people these days.
Along that line you might appreciate POCLAD and Richard Grossman:
Japery. Never heard that word. But it doesn’t fit this context.
Something the Japs engaged in? Maybe bayonet practice of allied POW’s?
Thanks, Alizia. I will check them out.
I mean seriously, it’s like the excuse is that they are mocking the Left via a sort of self-mockery using symbolism and terms created by people they sort of agree with.
Huh?
That argument is too specious to even bother with unraveling.
Not at all. The Left, and Progressivism, and certainly Marxian ideas, are criticized because they are often based on fallacious premises and reasoning. The Alt-Right and the European Nouvelle Droite disagrees with the foundation of political, social and economic egalitarianism, and its positions are reasoned ones and supported with strong arguments. As I have come to understand it, the criticism is against a ‘hyper’ version of Progressivism and Liberalism. The argument is based in the notion that this developed after the War and was largely overseen and directed by the United States. The US, as victor, was able to impose its model on Europe, as the US had essentially applied its model to the after-war world. In this sense a philosopher like Benoit could refer to a theorist like Chomsky and speak in terms of the world divided up into administrative regions.
The Nouvelle Droite, generally, takes a critical position of US designs. This is simply a fact. Guillaume Faye says that the US is an ‘adversary’ but he specifies that it cannot and should not be seen as an ‘enemy’. So, to understand the critical European Right one has to understand that it does involve itself in a critical discourse. It stands in this sense in an independent relationship to both political poles, or all political poles, and desires to select from them what is best for it. It resists *impositions*.
When it comes to fascism, to ultra-conservatism, to the positions of the religious conservative-right, it seeks to examine these from a constructive position and recognizes that Marxianism is overtly antagonistic to the *identifications* these former allow. This conservatism therefor sees Marxism and Socialism and certainly Communism as ‘enemies’ and not merely ‘adversaries’.
In my own opinion, I see *you* (if you are a ‘conservative’, and you sort of seem to sort of be) as a handmaiden of the Left. I am not just saying this. I really think this best defines your position. You have very minor disagreements and you will spend your incarnation haggling and bickering over small details. But basically you accept most or all of the tenets of Progressivism, and you turn against ‘real conservatives’ who take principled stances. You have to remember: Americanism is a variant on the French Revolutionary model and was informed by similar (false) idealism and many many different distorted ideas. These can, and must, all be reviewed and reconsidered. You will never ever do this because your mind is jello.
Germany, Germanic cultural forms, the German aspect of central Europe, and also ‘Germanism’ and Germanium are central features of the very core of Europe. True, Nazism was in certain senses, but not all, a distortion and a destructive movement. Yet according to some views, and I have read and entertained them, Germany should have been allowed to undertake its expansion project and should have been aided in utterly destroying Bolshevism which, with the aid of England and the US it could easily have done. England, according to this analysis, had an interest in provoking a war because it feared Germany’s power. It engaged against Germany and, among many different things, destroyed itself as a world power. From some perspectives this is the stupidest, the most dumb, and the worst outcome imaginable! But the worst is that the US and England allied themselves with Russian Communism, and in that process absorbed certain aspects of it into themself. According to this view we live now in the outcome of this unfortunate marriage.
This revisionism, and this adventure in looking at alternative models of history, is useful as a tool to see and think about the present. The Nouvelle Droite does this. And you, Tex, sit there to sputter and drool on your American flag bib. How pathetic! How weak! You pretend that you have some magnificent *argument* to bring forward but it is just bickering and more bickering.
You should just learn to hush up and serve your Masters. It is what you are working toward and it is what you have become.
I regret this obviously tongue-in-cheek comment.
Yeah, but they were actors playing real Nazis or Wehrmacht soldiers just prior to WW2. This was definitely not the situation at the Trump Inauguration with the white supremist guy with repugnant viewspoints.
My comment was tongue in cheek.
proto-japery, in fact.
I hate the violence. I am disturbed at the “vengeance / retaliation” mindset so pervasive in the world. I find it so strange that we pay prizefighters millions of dollars to do something that would be a felony outside the ring. It seems quite hypocritical and a mixed message for our children. TV shows and movies past and present glorify righteous violence. Reality TV is full of people undermining and backstabbing to get ahead.
“Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love…” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Okay, fact of the matter is we all want the punch the Nazi, but to be civilized we can not! Problem is these protests have gotten to the point of embarrassing. Discussion is needed to air all points of view, and fortunately in most circles rasism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and all the other bigotries no longer fly. Unfortunately we still have to hear these bigoted views,but that is good, we know who to watch!
Yes. Those who are anti-Trump who resort to violence show themselves to be no better than any of the hate groups that have been active since the election (whether or not emboldened by the election).
I didn’t want to punch the “Nazi”. Whether I or we agree with people like him, we need more of these brave sorts to keep taking them for the team. Every time this is done, the Left reveals more of their tyrannical bent.
I didn’t want to punch the “Nazi”. Whether I or we agree with people like him, we need more of these brave sorts to keep taking them for the team.Every time this is done, the Left reveals more of their tyrannical bent.
Jesus Christ, joe. Nazis are “brave sorts” for expressing their opinions? You seriously hate “the Left” more than Nazis?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
I don’t know if it was the inauguration or something else, but I feel like I am trapped in a bad Twilight Zone episode. This blog is not helping.
Ah, but which episode? The one where the family is dominated by little Bill Mumy, with magical powers? The one where pig-face doctors pronounce a beautiful patient (Ellie Mae!) deformed and hideous beyond help? Are all the terrified Democrats like Bill Shatner seeing that THING on the wing of the plane, BUT IT WAS REALLY THERE???? Or is Trump the Devil locked up in the room, who some fool believing he’s an innocent lets out to PREY UPON THE WORLD??????
There’s the signpost up ahead, as we’re about to enter the shadowy realm we like to call..
THE TRUMP ZONE!!!!
Yep. That did it — nightmares ahead for the next 4 years. “The Trump Zone” describes my current state of mind perfectly.
Might be time for that safe space.
Bravery is a value-neutral virtue. Is an anti-Semite brave who denounces Jews in a Jewish neighborhood? Brave is not mutually exclusive with stupidity, cruelty and prejudice.
But I’m not sure what “team” Joe is referring to, and I’m not sure I want to….
Is an anti-Semite brave who denounces Jews in a Jewish neighborhood?
No.
But I’m not sure what “team” Joe is referring to, and I’m not sure I want to….
He’s been cheerleading for Alizia for a while now. I’ve been giving him the benefit of the doubt and just assuming that, like most of us, he either doesn’t read them all the way through or doesn’t understand them. But this last comment of his is fairly damning.
Wait—why isn’t it brave? How about a racist bigot who goes into Harlem or NE DC to make a speech, all alone?
I agree that bravery is a value-neutral trait; I made the same argument recently on another thread defending the characterization of Yasser Arafat as “brave.” I suppose I can’t justify why I don’t see your examples as showing bravery, so I’ll have to concede that you’re probably right.
Joe’s comment is still fucking creepy, but I guess I should have taken more issue with the idea that we “need” more Nazis and that joe sees them as being on his “team.”
Whether I or we agree with people like him, we need more of these brave sorts to keep taking them for the team.
Get–a grip. You’re being intentionally moronic. I have no affinity for “Nazis” (have we even established that he IS one, or is the press taking some licence with that like they tend to?), but I’m all FOR people saying what they feel without having to worry about being decked, ESPECIALLY if it bothers leftist thought police. In that regard at least, they’re on my team.
I can laugh at Nazis, but I feel genuine enmity for statist left-wing thought police. “The enemy of my enemy…”
Thank you for proving my point, Joe.
Don’t mention it.
Another tactic and strategy of the Hyper-Progressives is to link people with views that oppose hyper-progressivism’s mono-view in such a way that, just by supporting some element of a different agenda, or someone who is of a differing agenda, they are made ‘guilty by association’. These condemnations are not intellectual and reasoned ones, but ones based in emotionalism whose primary tool is guilt. Guilt as a shaming weapon like in some Maoist ideological retraining camp.
Perhaps it is too *easy* to refer to Orwell but the Left establishes group events (like the Five Minute Hate) where the emotions of anger and righteousness of its exponents are expressed and are made to coincide. If they notice deviation, they attack the deviation. The Left plays quite openly a mental control game and the thing to notice (IMO) is that there is always the emotional aspect that is prominent and then the moralizing aspect: you are literally evil if you do not think the same way they do.
Take any area. If you have issues with politicized feminism (Marxian feminism essentially) you give evidence of traits that are worthy of the worst shaming. Maybe you will be fired from your job? Maybe shunned by friends? Maybe your name will get published in some social media? Whatever it takes to do harm to you is just fine because when an Angel of God goes to battle with a Demon that angel need not justify himself: it is God’s own battle he is fighting!
If you have issues with homosexual politics, same. If you think differently about race or universal immigration, also the same. It goes on, right down in a line.
Factually, the Left destroys real intellectualism, the capacity to really think things through philosophically and rationally. You are not allowed to enage in critical thinking. For this reason, when they infect the institutions of learning, the result is not increase in capacity and in intellectual strength, but in its destruction. They gut out the Institutions and turn them into Maoist Conditioning Centers.
When the Media Organs become propaganda organs tied to State interests, or factions in the political arena (The Democratic Party), and ally themselves with the ‘Black Block’ and with radical Left politics, it gives permission to people to act out on their dislike and hatred.
I accept this. But I am also aware that it is the Left, through their reaction and riotous violence, that are PROVOKING those of other political and social orientations to act in defense. This for me — a political innocent in essence — has seemed the most clear. They PROVOKE a fight and then rail against the fact that there is a fight to increase their reaction to the next level. But all I have seen of the Right that I know and respect is that it has been working to articulate ideas, and very many very good ideas.
Alizia, please do not ramble on about Maoist Conditioning Centers, as it ever occurred to you that you have been conditioned? Do you have any friends who are not alt-right? Have you ever dated someone who is not alt-right? Have you ever dated at all? Have you ever gone to a public school?
(I don’t know the answers to these questions. I am just curious.)
My understanding is that American hyper-liberalism employs Maoist tactics and strategy. To understand this, Little Genius, you will have to study a bit. I will stand by to guide you out of your provincialism if you show minimal inclination. What unusually dark place does your head reside in? Sácala de allí, niña!
I know this is hard for you to imagine as possible but *we* of the Alt-Right or Nouvelle Droite, most of us are historical and philosophy-focussed. Of all those I know, all they do is read, study and discuss. Meta-politics is the discipline. It is perhaps more of a bird-eye perspective, or perhaps universalist. We are not going away and this is not a fad.
In my own case I absorbed Left views, and read a great deal, because I thought this was the route to political and social good. I believe I have insight into how these Marxian-influenced views funtion. Now, I oppose that sort if radicalism and to do that one has to understand the European intrwar period.
Overall, here, I say this with no desire to offend, *you* are American zealots who have not really examined the philosophical bases that informed the French and American revolutions. To define true conservatism that must change.
Yes, I went to High School (Sacramento, California). I also went to a small liberal art college where the focus was philosophy and literature.
Well, you avoided most of my questions and did not fully answer others, but I will overlook that as it was more than a bit rude of me to ask in the first place. I will admit that I am very curious as to which college you attended — even though you don’t have to answer.
Personally, I have a Masters in Wealth Distribution from Trotsky University. It’s a lesser known university in Cuba, but our star is rising!
Sorry, it is too small of a college to post on-line. Here http://insideclassicaled.com/good-colleges-for-classically-educated-students/ is a list. It is quite a bit like these. I have relatives in Panama who helped pay for it.
I did not ‘date’ and no one in my previous world (closed Sefardic Jewish) ‘dates’ in the way I think you mean. I am not sure what you are getting at with your question about dating. In comparison (as I imagine) to you and your girl-friends I would be described as super-strict in those senses. Its hard to explain how it came about but when still a teen I was a ‘metalera’ but of the ‘straight-edge’ variety. That is, Heavy Metal aficionados who also follow the strict ‘Regulative Principles’ (influenced by Vedic philosophy: no meat, illicit sex, gambling or intoxicants). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_edge
I think you have some idea that I am some kind of freak or something. You misunderstand the Traditional right which most influenced me. It is essentially a religious orientation. Take Rene Guenon for example. The concepts that propel his understanding, the way he locates himself in reality, this way of seeing a ‘whole’ and trying to live out of that perspective, is almost unthinkable within the classic American mind-set.
You’re more awesome with every post.
Your college is too small to mention? That doesn’t even make sense.
The dating question wasn’t meant to poke at people who hold more conservative values, it was meant to inquire whether or not you have a breadth of experience — meeting new people and learning how other people think is important and is impossible to learn from a book.
I do not know if you are a “freak” or not, but you obviously have led a sheltered life. I do know that your ideas are awful — whether or not that comes from your upbringing or from your soul is the question.
Because it is so small it would be too easy to link me with it. It is a question of privacy on-line.
Okay, that makes sense. I respect privacy online as well..
Beth/Spartan wrote: “The dating question wasn’t meant to poke at people who hold more conservative values, it was meant to inquire whether or not you have a breadth of experience — meeting new people and learning how other people think is important and is impossible to learn from a book.
“I do not know if you are a “freak” or not, but you obviously have led a sheltered life. I do know that your ideas are awful — whether or not that comes from your upbringing or from your soul is the question.”
I have a couple of thoughts on what you wrote here. But first about ‘shelteredness’. Yes, up to a certain age I can say I was sheltered. I prefer to think of it as ‘trapped’. But when I got out of that by doing the worst thing possible in my culture (denying my own culture’s ‘validity’), then my education began. I have had all sorts of different connections, from the Caracas universities, to my former political (left-leaning) involvements, and many different connections mostly with foreigners before I left Venezuela.
But I think that what you are saying, even if you are not aware of it, is that you imagine that you represent a ‘wide experience’ and that you see yourself as a model? You must, because you say things with a certain authority and you seem to imagine that you know what’s what.
I have broached certain subjects, and talked about certain ideas, and defined different concerns as from you, but I have not said anything that is unethical and immoral. But you can only hear that this is so, because your ears and your ideas have been trained to perceive things in a certain way. In truth, and in many ways, you represent the ‘variation’, the tendency to go off the rail, the extremism, the ‘radical shift’, but you don’t see yourself in that way because it seems completely normal to you. It is also supported by your culture, the movies you watch, the people you talk to, and the cultural content generally. However: to defend things at a philosophical level, this you cannot do. Because you have not really thought things through. You receive ideas but you have not grappled with them yourself. And when I say *you* I mean hundreds and thousands and millions of people who are extruded from the education factories.
You are also profoundly wrong if you are minimizing the value, relevance and importance of the written word. You are incredibly and tragically mistaken. The writings of philosophers, poets, and theologians from former times is a door that opens into realms of thought that, in our incredibly stupid and banal present, are not any longer conceived of. About a week ago I was in a used bookstore in Cali (Colombia) and found an old published by Herder in 1871 (I paid 10,000 pesos: $3.50!) entitled ‘Select Readings in English Prose and Verse for the use of the higher classes in schools’. It has become my favorite book. It is a selection of short writings and poems from Tillotson, Hume, Burke, Chillingsworth, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Macaulay, Byron, Milton etc. which, in its 350 pages deals on more profound themes and ideas than your average citizen will even bother to think about in their whole incarnation. I thought My God, there was a time when people thought high and lofty thoughts and dealt in profound themes, what has happened? This one book, like a primer, could a person spend a whole lifetime thinking about. And there are ideas there that could — that would — change a person at a deep level.
It is because I say that our white culture must rediscover itself, and must learn to protect itself from very real dangers (which you cannot conceive), that we have to come to appreciate ourselves and understand how this sort of power and intelligence was given to us, and how our ideas changed profoundly man’s relationship to the material world, and how our philosophy and politics and especially the profundity of our theologies, jurisprudence, administration, statecraft and so much else represent unique achievements that must be understood and preserved, for this essentially you say that I am ‘evil’ and a ‘Nazi’. Because I stand for White Identity and you are unable to conclude any sort of identity at all, except perhaps ‘Americanism’, you imagine that you have some moral upper-hand. But you don’t. You just don’t really understand what I am talking about, what we are talking about. *You* in this sense are our obstacle.
The other thing you do not understand is why I take a Jewish critical position (which you can only hear to be ‘antisemitism’). But there are quite a few of us, Jews and ex-Jews who write on these themes. But you have not one iota of grasp of why this is and what we mean. The mere expression of any critical idea about Judaism can only be interpreted by you as the speech of the Nazis. You close your ears, you shut down your mind, and yell ‘Nazi!’ (like Chris).
There is nothing else that I have said that is at all ‘awful’. What is ‘awful’ is the rapidity and intensity that you condemn me in. Without taking the time to understand.
There is no such thing as a “white identity.”
And there you have the essential issue. The negation of the concept, the negation of the possibility of identification. To recover the ‘conceptual pathway’ to such solid and ethical identification is possible — I and others have done it – but you make yourself enemy of that project. And for this reason, and that you are a Marxist radical, though you don’t understand how or why, you are my enemy. Así es muchacho. Cuídate. 😉
Alizia is a Jewish Nazi? Or, does she ironically find herself aligned with one of the left’s countless permutations of that word/weapon, because she’s the anti-left?
Read, please. Alizia has been quite clear that she has thoroughly rejected her Jewish heritage. Do you actually read her posts before you start kissing her ass?
Wrongly stated. I cannot do anything about the ‘heritage’ except to define in the strongest and clearest terms possible what I wish to serve. European culture and European civilization.
Judaism, if really understood at its most basic and in a sense authentic or true level, is inimical to European civilization. These are two opposed value-sets. Be a Jew and stay in your shtetl, that will keep you out of trouble. But when Jew becomes a quasi-Jew s/he becomes a problem. I come from a Sefardic background and I have lots of respect for most of my *elders* and their good habits, their uprightness. (Generally speaking).
What you cannot grasp, and will not ever grasp, is that I reject the fundamental base on which Judaism is constructed. It is an idea that no longer serves. You would not understand this because you have no understanding of Judaism and of course next to nothing of Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Christianity_from_Judaism
Not the Nazi team. The anti Trump Derangement Syndrome team.
From a current ‘The Nation’ article on the presence of and the importance of the ‘Black Block’:
“The black bloc is not a group but an anarchist tactic—marching as a confrontational united force, uniformed in black and anonymized for security. Once deployed, the tactic has an alchemic quality, turning into a temporary object—the black bloc. On Friday, the bloc I joined in DC numbered well over 500, the largest of its kind since the antiwar protests over a decade prior. As I wrote in advance of the inauguration, if we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but direct, aggressive confrontation. While perhaps best associated in the United States with the anti-globalization movement’s major summit protests nearly two decades ago, the black bloc is part of the longstanding visual language of international anti-fascism, or antifa. For example, bloc tactics have been used by European anti-fascists marching against neo-Nazis since the 1990s in Germany. The symbolic value of a large black-bloc presence at Trump’s inauguration resided in drawing a connection between anti-Trumpism and anti-fascism.
“The “anti-capitalist, anti-fascist bloc,” Friday’s black-bloc march, was just one among a number of direct actions called by organizers of the Disrupt J20 Inauguration Day protests. Unlike Saturday’s vast Women’s March, Disrupt J20 aimed to directly impede, delay, and confront the inaugural proceedings. This message was delivered with human blockades, smashed corporate windows, trash-can fires, a burning limousine, “Make America Great Again” caps reduced to ashes, and a blow for Richard Spencer. The police responded with fountains of pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and the mass arrest of over 200 people, most of whom now face felony riot charges. Along with the Women’s March’s joyful scenes of togetherness, the disruptions of J20 should be celebrated as an opening salvo of resistance in the era of Trump.”
YYYYYYYYUP, sounds like “The Nation.”
My word for hooded protesters is “chicken.”
Yes, brave for saying what he believes, no matter what it is, in the presence of leftist groupthink mobs. Leftist groupthink mobs worry me even more than Nazis.
Nothing wrong with me, pal.
Punching in the face is one thing, but speaking of explosive violence aimed at the White House… which Madonna did yesterday… Is that ethical when she “sincerely” disagrees with the perceived thoughts or agenda of the president? (Sometimes a punch in the face is just not enough I would guess.)
Of course she was being hyperbolic in her rhetoric, but still, she is an admired “role model” to some and words matter. Somebody… if they are sincerely indignant enough… might think that blowing up the White House was a good idea.
Aside from the ethical considerations… aren’t there laws against such express threats of violence against the president… even when done by a celebrity in front of a mass of angry people? Do celebrities enjoy special privileges that other people might not enjoy… like staying out of jail when threatening the president?
I’m just curious.
Wondering the same thing, myself.
Madonna’s rhetoric was hyperbolic but will that prevent someone from taking it into their head to act on it. “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” may have been hyperbolic musing but that was not likely a comfort to Thomas Becket. A “role model” at some point needs to be accountable for what they incite.
I’ve seen a lot of people bring this up, but no one has pointed out that Madonna specifically said blowing up the White House was not a good idea…
Not saying her words were responsible–they absolutely were not–but I’m trying to be fair.
Since my last comment, I have spoken with my two daughters who were at the women’s march. They told me that in the area they were, pretty much all the response to the blowing up the White House comment was negative. This gives me some hope that there are enough partisan but responsible people on both sides to ensure that we do not descend into anarchy.
Some stripper called for his assassination, immediately lost her job AND got a visit from the Secret Service.
That made my day.
Maybe they’ll become regular clients? Huar huar huar.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
Some ideas are so bad that people who promote them are punch-worthy.
There’s a big, black line between punch-worthy and an actual punch.
The line between depends on the promotion AND the promoter.
Don King?
The guy, whatever his personal views are. didn’t say anything during the interview before he was attacked. I think your characterizing these protesters as acting like lowbrows on Jerry Springer is understating it a bit. They were acting more like brownshirts in Nazi Germany and are a threat to free speech.
1) He was talking about Pepe the Frog.
2) “I know that there are people in this country like those who used to appear on The Jerry Springer Show, whose only response to conflict is to start swinging. I assumed, however, that nobody who could name the President during the Civil War, spell “cheese” and knows where babies come from thinks that it is acceptable to walk up to someone on the sidewalk and cold cock him because his opinions are offensive.”
I think it was clear that I was speaking of those approving the punch rather the guy delivering it. If the only tool you have is a hammer…
Jerry Springer taught you nothing.
There is quite a bit fishy about this website. In the “About” section it states that this site is “not about me” (Jack Marshall). However, that’s really all this site is about: Jack Marshall’s opinion. I certainly do not doubt that you are an ethics expert, but I really have not digested much of anything pertaining to learning ethics, just Jack Marshall’s opinion. This is all simply one guy’s opinions wrapped in a self-righteous blanket of “ethics.” That to me is unethical. You’re also using Donald Trump as a way of proudly displaying the word “pussy” on your site, that does not seem ethical. Maybe you studied ethics for years, but claiming you’re the moral authority on punching nazis is unethical. Punching nazis is illegal. It doesn’t mean that it is unethical, because you have some sort of utopian opinion about punching. I have strong opinions about concentration camps. The individual that punched Richard Spencer probably felt that his ethics were intact and far more appropriate than your website. Who’s to say? Certainly not Jack Marshall. Again, he’s a guy with “pussy” plastered all over his website. You lack the credibility to tell people the difference between right and wrong. More importantly, it’s not for you to decide. Regardless of how many years you tell yourself you’ve been an expert, you’re not an expert in individual’s sense of ethics.
In case anyone is ever wondering, you decide whether punching a neo-nazi is right or wrong, not Jack Marshall. In my opinion, the fact that he leaves that out is unethical. I’m not even entirely correct; it’s not always illegal to punch a nazi.
In other words, there’s nothing more American than hitting a nazi.
Got it! You’re a moron! Thanks for the clarification.
I am a professional ethicist, Frank. People, professionals and businesses pay me to train them in making ethical decisions. Your comment is amusing but silly. Somebody has to write the blog: that doesn’t mean that it is about me. It is about determining right from wrong, learning the tools to do it well, and how to recognize an ethical problem when you see it.
Your argument is like claiming that when a lawyer (I’m a lawyer, too) gives an informed legal opinion, it is really about him or her, not the law. All expert advice and guidance is based on that individual’s informed opinions, which are presumably based on facts, disciplines, and logic. Like mine.
You seem to confuse morality, which does not require thought, just compliance, with ethics. This site is not about morality. Morality is often an impediment to ethics. I don’t claim to be a moral authority on anything.
As for “pussy,” it’s a word, and a word that has caused a great deal of argument, conflict, and controversy lately. Words are not usually censored here. Trying to discuss the impact and import of a word while refusing to print the word is just stupid. I also discuss controversies involving “fuck,” “cunt” and “nigger.” Grow up.
And this…
“In case anyone is ever wondering, you decide whether punching a neo-nazi is right or wrong, not Jack Marshall. In my opinion, the fact that he leaves that out is unethical. I’m not even entirely correct; it’s not always illegal to punch a Nazi.”
…is signature significance for an ethics dunce. Nobody reads here and thinks that I come to the scene of their ethics decisions and tell them what to do. I do, however, know easy ethics calls like this: No, you don’t decide what is ethical in a case like this, because what is ethical is determined by society, culture and what we know about right and wrong, and in the matter of punching people, all systems and experience agree.
You are promoting ethics relativism, and that’s taboo here. Do that someplace else. Punching people in the face breaches all ethical systems—all of them. The Frank Savage “ethical system” is just the raving of a proudly ignorant fool.
No, it’s not illegal to punch a Nazi if you have to defend yourself, and that has nothing to do with being a Nazi.
Silly, embarrassing comment. I doubt that you can undo such a miserable first impression, but feel free to try. An equally anti-ethical comment, however, will not see the light of day.
NOW GO GET YER FUCKIN’ ‘SHINE BOX, YA LITTLE PRICK!
Can you link to any articles where you have discussed more lengthily this dichotomy between morality and ethics?
Can an immoral person make ethical decisions? Would you say that it is the *job* of society (such a poor way to express it) to create a moral individual? Is it an ethical obligation to create moral persons? Or do you avoid the whole contentious topic and stick to ethics that can be reasoned out?
Jack’s and my view on this differ somewhat, but the summary of how I see the differences is two-fold:
1) Morality often includes subjects of an entirely personal and private nature in addition to commenting on inter-personal conduct, whereas ethics typically focuses nearly exclusively on inter-personal and public interactions
2) Morality often comes from an authority (even if the authority worked out the set of morals via ethics) and as such often is set in stone and becomes immovable or unworkable when presented with odd scenarios. Ethics comes from a philosophy of constantly reevaluating itself, even if those reevaluations merely confirm a set of ethics already determined to be “true”.
If I am not mistaken, ‘ethics’ is the older word, obviously Greek (ēthikos). Morality seems to be a later word, Latin, arising in the Middle Ages and likely with Aquinas, the Schoolmen, etc. I would therefor imagine that the ideas behind ‘morality’ (‘moralitas’ in Latin) must have been pretty bound up with Christian concepts. Because that is so morality understood through that lens would necessarily be both ecclesiastical and temporal authority. It seems that we live in the fading shadows of such conceptions. Now, there is no authority recognized and all is arbitrary.
Morality therefor is closely linked with Christianity and religion, and ethics with philosophy and law. I understand why, for example, Jack does not take any position that has any link with religion, and thus ‘morality’ is also excluded because it connotes a religious position.
George Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘Morality without a religion is a tree without roots’.
Another quote reveals the more modern interpretation:
‘Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order’.
I would imagine that this latter view is more similar to Jack’s understanding: ethics and morality as arbitrary choices and decisions that change and shift as the time’s shift.
But ‘the morality of a people’, and the morality of a civilization, at least up till recently, has always flowed out of the religious conceptions of that people, as Shaw truthfully says. Our modernity, which has destroyed the possibility of thinking and acting in holistic terms, and which destroys the possibility of a link between a theological understanding and the administration of the State, and the family, and social relations, leads to a strange outcome: people who can only define themselves in terms of material processes.
The ultimate reduction is to unconscious and arbitrariness. Society becomes a machine not an organism. Men become machine-like. They imitate their machines. The former notion of ‘higher morals’ and ‘spiritual morals’ and certainly the existence of higher ‘transcendental’ realms or even aspects of man, and even imagination, is superseded by and reduced to meaninglessness.
This is likely why I can not ever really figure out “where *you* are coming from” and why the ethics spoken of here seems questionable. If there is no metaphysical pattern, or if the timelessness of the Universe has not already revealed the universal pattern of morality and ethics, one imagines one is free to invent whatever one wants. But in that case what will determine the ethics and morality of a culture will be its most powerful interests, and those who control and determine perception: corporations, constellations of economic power, and those men who actually do desire to imitate their machines, and who are installing machines that control and mediate perception (media essentially does this).
There is absolutely no way to determine ‘truth’ in the present dispensation. Truth becomes on one hand what is determined by powerful entities, visible and invisible, and then by ‘democratic choice’. But average men are in no sense qualified to decide such important matters nor are they really interested in doing so. They are under the influence of ‘the pleasure principle’ and they are trained to respond out of their wants, needs, desires and lusts.
Other than a quantity of flourishes and fluff that may or may not be off the mark but definitely ramble towards some destination-less meander, the periodic substantive comment in this essay doesn’t seem to disagree with my summation above.
Adapted from Cyrano de Bergerac for my self-anointing:
“I have a different idea of written elegance. I don’t write or think like a fop, it’s true, but my moral grooming is impeccable. I never appear in public conversation with a soiled conscience, a bad argument, a tarnished honor, threadbare scruples, or an insult that I haven’t washed away with the blood from the crushed head of my adversary (for this I apologize, Texie!) I’m always immaculately clean, adorned with independence, a wit, a starry sheen, frankness & sincerity. I may not cut a stylish lingusitic figure, but I hold my soul erect. I wear my deeds as ribbons, my wit is sharper then A cracking whip, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs.”
Agree with a number of respondents. To wit: punching a Nazi in the face is exactly what the actual German Nazis did — and of course, much much more and horrific for all humanity — to Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and dissidents from 1936 to 1945 (and to be fair, by others in other settings and times). Amazing that the Hillary- and abortion- and marijuana-left would take on the tactics of Hitler at the same time that they accuse Trump of ‘Hitlerism.” (And I did not vote for Trump.)
One clarification. The German Nazis did not punch other Nazis in the face: They targeted social democrats and communists and murdered quite a few as the communists did the same to Nazis.
There was actually quite a bit of infighting between the countless number of nazi groups, well beyond that initial battle against Rohm and the brownshirts. “I’m more fuehrer-ious than you”.
Agree with a number of respondents. To wit: punching a Nazi in the face is exactly what the actual German Nazis did — and of course, much much more and horrific for all humanity — to Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and dissidents from 1936 to 1945 (and to be fair, by others in other settings and times).
Yes, the Nazis did all that, which is why we should punch Nazis right in the face.
Kidding. Kind of. I’m not going to defend the ethics of punching a modern-day “Nazi,” who doesn’t have much power to oppress anyone (yet). This isn’t World War II; right now, their awful words are just words, and until they actually start putting their “bring back the ovens” rhetoric into action–say, when enough people think David Duke might make a good presidential candidate in 2024 because hey, what a blow to the Left and their stupid political correctness!–I don’t advocate walking up to them on the street and decking them. (I also don’t feel bad when it happens.)
But the idea that punching a Nazi makes someone just like a Nazi is too fucking stupid to take seriously.
Do you think if Jack had written a post here about a man insulting a lady in an incredibly vulgar way, and that same man was punched in the face by a gentleman who was just passing by, that there would be dozens of comments here defending that man’s gallant behavior?
Maybe. Point? That would be assaulting someone based on conduct: bullying, harassment, intimidation. If an alt-right asshole was harassing a Jew or a black man on the street, that’s an entirely different scenario.
Good point.
1) Do you believe that there are some political ideologies that cannot be realized without violence or repression of swathes of the citizenry?
2) If yes, do you believe that there are people who do believe that those particular ideologies can be realized without that violence?
Crickets….
Crickets…..
Oh, I’ll answer: 1) yes and 2) yes. And 2) is shockingly common.
So Chris shouldn’t mind someone wantonly popping a person on the kisser for espousing and preaching Communism or radical socialism then… right?
So Chris shouldn’t mind someone wantonly popping a person on the kisser for espousing and preaching Communism or radical socialism then… right?
Do modern-day Communists preach ethnic cleansing? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
My two questions above that you didn’t answer weren’t rhetorical either.
My answers would be yes and yes.
Good, well, both Communism or hyper-socialism are political systems that cannot be realized without violently repressing, to the level of mass murder, huge swathes of the citizenry. Deny this and you deny history. No doubt you’ll try.
Yet there are still useful idiots out there that really believe you can create systems like that without extreme large scale violence and death. Phenomenal that they exist. I hope you aren’t one of them.
This Spencer twit would likely fall into that category of useful idiot – one who believes you can peacefully realize a type of system that historically has been shown CANNOT exist without extreme and large scale violence. I mean is he on quote actually advocating ethnic cleansing?
“Do modern-day Communists preach ethnic cleansing? “
Old school Communists didn’t even preach ethnic cleansing.
So what?
History shows (though many will either deny it or make specious No-True-Scotsman Arguments) that Communism ends up killing numbers equal to or in excess of Naziism. Motive is immaterial when we’re discussing the murders of MILLIONS upon MILLIONS.
So yeah, so long as you think it’s moderately acceptable to smack people on the mouth for being smug jerks preaching known horrible philosophies without actually verbalizing the horrors necessary to realize those philosophies, then, being a consistent and honest person, you think it’s moderately acceptable to smack modern Communists on the mouth…
Also, since you are consistent and honest, I safely assume no denials of this or any No-True-Scotsman arguments are en route.
A couple of interposed comments if you will kindly permit me:
Tex wrote: “This Spencer twit would likely fall into that category of useful idiot – one who believes you can peacefully realize a type of system that historically has been shown CANNOT exist without extreme and large scale violence. I mean is he on quote actually advocating ethnic cleansing?”
I have come to understand that 95% of your writing is about catching fallacious argument and exposing them. Curious that you don’t ever speak of much of an underlying philosophy nor do you seem to have any specific ideals or even *ideas* that I can discern.
It seems to me that exposing badly constructed arguments is a good thing overall but what I would say to you, in response to the above, is that you have engaged in an even worse ‘fallacy’ than badly-contructed argument or presentation, because you just do not have any idea, and will not take the time to get an idea, what Spencer and other American theorists and activists actually think and say, and then why they say it. So, while you can deconstruct a bad argument, and that is well and good, you cannot offer any opinion about Spencer & Co. that holds validity, and in argument you will simply be *dismissed* as they say.
The thing about you, and this also just as true for Chris, and I suggest this is what links you two basically, is that you do not have the courage or interest to research ideas that are foreign to you. Chris’ simple strategy is to should ‘F%#k you!’ just in the same manner as the protestors that are rioting on the streets and all over the place. It is the absolute certainty of ‘being right’ and being *ordained* by some higher force to storm out to bash what he feels is the *enemy*.
And you Tex are one who is cut from the same cloth.
But why are you not an activist of the sort like Chris? This is what I do not understand. What are the precise differences between his radical-egalitarian position, ensconced in Americanism, and yours?
History shows (though many will either deny it or make specious No-True-Scotsman Arguments) that Communism ends up killing numbers equal to or in excess of Nazism. Motive is immaterial when we’re discussing the murders of MILLIONS upon MILLIONS.
Maoist and Stalinist communist regimes, I think, get the award for the more numbers of the killed, I think that has been established hasn’t it? But my question, and it is one I have not yet figured out (or seen the figures on) is How many people were killed as a direct result of the Third Reich’s will? I mean, Mao directly killed, or starved, many millions. Stalin directly killed hundreds of thousands and then allowed to die many millions through man-made famine, but where are the figures for the Nazis?
Now, you are the Fallacious Argument Fascist, are you not? Scanning the print seeking the worst fallaciousness. But there are some other facts and figures which, curiously, you omit. The Allied bombing of civilian Germany killed many hundreds of thousands. The attack on Dresden in 10 days killed over 100,000. There is a whole long list of *atrocities* that are attributed to the Allies both during and after the war end that can be counted. They add up to millions (if I am not mistaken).
But you, King of the Fallacious Tribunal, and you like so many on the side of their own tendentious historical account, will not bring yourself to tell a complete, honest story. So — fallaciousness of argument aside — you commit a greater sin and even many *millions and millions* of Hail Maries will not atone.
I start from the position that *everyone is lying to me* because, generally speaking, everyone seems to be. Lies lies lies and more lies. Visions of Reality, interpretations of Reality, constructed not on ‘fallacies of argument’ but profound lies of an essential sort.
Are you such a liar, Texie? ARE YOU SUCH A LIAR?
You see, we all have ways that we get invested in lies and the project of lying. It is very much more serious than mere fallacious construct of argument.
I suggest to you that Spencer & Co. seek to bring forward some of the truths that get repressed by people like you. And that is why he arouses your hatred. You don’t like people telling you uncomfortable truths. (And such is the way of the world).
So yeah, so long as you think it’s moderately acceptable to smack people on the mouth for being smug jerks preaching known horrible philosophies without actually verbalizing the horrors necessary to realize those philosophies, then, being a consistent and honest person, you think it’s moderately acceptable to smack modern Communists on the mouth…
Huar huar huar. ‘There he goes again’. You have pretended to be a deconstructer of fallaciousness, but then you secretly build your own private, but clandestine, little fort within a deceptively-presented set of facts. You have no idea what Spencer talks about because you have not read his writing, nor that of his allies in the Alt-Right. You have armed an argument, but all that you wish to do with it is defeat a rather mild-mannered *enemy*, your interlocutor Chris.
Spencer, and others like him, have separatist ideology. In their *best of worlds* they would like to live in a Sweden or a Denmark largely free of immigrants from the Third World, brought into their polities by political-correct do-goods. It is pretty simple really, and not terribly offensive. Where it gets complex is that Vision within the living context of America, a pluralistic society, and one with significant sectors of *people of color*. But even the most radical of these, like David Duke and Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. who I have all read and quite closely, have constructive, logically-organized and even sensible arguments for their particular cases. It is quite possible that after sincere consideration that one might decide that any level of White Identity should be decided against, and no effort make to establish or to reestablish that Identity (as an active movement), but you could only do that after really considering the arguments, and considering the people who make them. And I suggest to you that this amounts not to 1% of America but, in truth, as much as 20-25% of America. What I mean is a great number of people, silent, who cannot vocalize their feelings and thoughts for fear of destruction at the hands of people like Chris (who will stop at nothing in their ‘shame projects’), given the opportunity, and given the education, could very well opt to have and hold and develop a White Identity position.
That is my position. That is what I have come to after a number of years of study and after going through the internal processes of reckoning with the IDEAS. And I can talk about and defend and explain what I think at any time, to anyone, anywhere.
“I have come to understand that 95% of your writing is about catching fallacious argument and exposing them.”
A solemn and important task not left to featherweights. Worry not, I do not tire in this endeavor, even when presented with near endless streams of fallacy.
<i"Curious that you don’t ever speak of much of an underlying philosophy"
I’m not sure I *need* to.
“nor do you seem to have any specific ideals or even *ideas* that I can discern.”
Not my problem.
“The thing about you, and this also just as true for Chris, and I suggest this is what links you two basically, is that you do not have the courage or interest to research ideas that are foreign to you. Chris’ simple strategy is to should ‘F%#k you!’ just in the same manner as the protestors that are rioting on the streets and all over the place. It is the absolute certainty of ‘being right’ and being *ordained* by some higher force to storm out to bash what he feels is the *enemy*.
And you Tex are one who is cut from the same cloth.
But why are you not an activist of the sort like Chris? This is what I do not understand.”
Cut from the same cloth? You may want to bother stepping back a tad and reevaluating your views. I come from a position that believes man is innately fallen and left to his own devices with no checks on his conduct will behave with utmost selfishness and seeking to fulfill immediate pleasures, and a community of such men will create a hell-on-earth. I also happen to believe that men can come to this realization and start placing checks on their conduct. A community of ENOUGH men who do this will establish conditions in which most can thrive. But there’s the rub, there must be a check on their conduct.
We all have to have a dictator in our life. Either we dictate our own lives for the optimization of all, that is to say, we recognize the times and places to check our urges for the greater good and the times and places to indulge our urges without imposing on others. OR we do not dictate our lives and we live as savages until someone else comes and dictates to us.
Here’s why you think Chris and I are cut from the same cloth but fail to recognize that it is you and Chris who come from the same fold: I could care less envisioning societies that require more external dictators to ensure “the greater good” is met. Why, you may ask? Because when a community of men is so base as to need external organizers on the level that socialism requires or your “alt-right” requires, then the community of men is already lost and not worth trying to salvage by force. Nope.
You fail to recognize that both you and Chris envision a world that cannot be realized without external force beyond a minimal necessary to handle outliers.
No, I’ll settle for discussing communities in which man has realized he must be the dictator of his own soul and command his urges into submission *on his own*.
Communities that actually realize this are painfully few and far between in history, but that’s the way it is I suppose.
“What are the precise differences between his radical-egalitarian position, ensconced in Americanism, and yours?”
The fact that you fall for the same language the Left uses to cover for it’s vision implies you can’t break out of the same paradigm you so desperately try to convince yourself you are not part of.
“Now, you are the Fallacious Argument Fascist, are you not? Scanning the print seeking the worst fallaciousness. But there are some other facts and figures which, curiously, you omit. The Allied bombing of civilian Germany killed many hundreds of thousands. The attack on Dresden in 10 days killed over 100,000. There is a whole long list of *atrocities* that are attributed to the Allies both during and after the war end that can be counted. They add up to millions (if I am not mistaken).”
Ooooo, I struck a nerve did I. I somehow feel you must be a little kindred-spirit with the 3rd Reich if that lil ole comment of mine raised your hackles.
I think I’ll settle for a school-yard classic: 100,000? Well yall started it.
Don’t be silly, of course Dresden was an appalling spectacle. But to count deaths attributed to the *western* allies (Russia already being clearly identified in the totalitarian camp), in the course of prosecuting a war aimed at *stopping* the hell-hole world vision of the Axis and compare those deaths (a paltry sum by comparison) to the deaths CAUSED as a mere matter of design is somewhat dishonest.
The rest of your rant is mostly incoherent drivel, so I’ll waste no time dissecting it.
should ‘F%#k you!’
Should read ‘to shout’ (naughtie word)
Cut from the same cloth? You may want to bother stepping back a tad and reevaluating your views. I come from a position that believes man is innately fallen and left to his own devices with no checks on his conduct will behave with utmost selfishness and seeking to fulfill immediate pleasures, and a community of such men will create a hell-on-earth. I also happen to believe that men can come to this realization and start placing checks on their conduct. A community of ENOUGH men who do this will establish conditions in which most can thrive. But there’s the rub, there must be a check on their conduct.
We all have to have a dictator in our life. Either we dictate our own lives for the optimization of all, that is to say, we recognize the times and places to check our urges for the greater good and the times and places to indulge our urges without imposing on others. OR we do not dictate our lives and we live as savages until someone else comes and dictates to us.
Here’s why you think Chris and I are cut from the same cloth but fail to recognize that it is you and Chris who come from the same fold: I could care less envisioning societies that require more external dictators to ensure “the greater good” is met. Why, you may ask? Because when a community of men is so base as to need external organizers on the level that socialism requires or your “alt-right” requires, then the community of men is already lost and not worth trying to salvage by force. Nope.
You fail to recognize that both you and Chris envision a world that cannot be realized without external force beyond a minimal necessary to handle outliers.
No, I’ll settle for discussing communities in which man has realized he must be the dictator of his own soul and command his urges into submission *on his own*.
Communities that actually realize this are painfully few and far between in history, but that’s the way it is I suppose.
Reading what you wrote — describing operative predicates, and driving predicates — I am curious to know how you see this view (a metaphysics indeed!) in the context of Americanism. I assume that you know and agree that America’s colonies began as highly zealous religious communities. What you might want to ‘step back and examine’ your own fine self is that, if Americanism and ‘American civil religion’ is understood as an underlying ethics, then the ‘progressivism’ that both you and Chris share can be understood to be ‘cut from the same cloth’. So, on one side there is the Colonial religiousness and the sense of Divine Mission to establish a New World, and on the other a group of highly zealous men who came under the influence of Enlightenment values and revolutionary spirit, and out of this was born the American soul. Does this sound fair to you?
Now, I have this idea which I got largely from Harold Bloom that America is in a post-Christian phase. The meaning I gather from him is that America is certainly a Christian nation, and highly religious still, but is in a post phase. So there are many many people running around today with no concrete identification with a particular church or Christian branch (I exclude for the moment other religious strains) but who are yet the sons and daughters of people who indeed had these identifications, and which identifications were quite strong, at least up till recently.
So when I come across people like Chris I tend to see them as post-Christian: that means, secular, perhaps even declaring ‘atheism’ with no announced metaphysical understanding, but highly zealous types who channel their religious sentiment, which is in-born, into Social Justice. I see the multitudes of ‘Chrises’ as members of a sort of new religious sect, a synthesis of various strains (a bit postmodern really) but terribly driven by what once was a unique and highly willful Christian focus.
When the religious tendency, and the tenets of American Civil Religiousness, and the intensity of American industriousness and aquisitiveness and frontier-conquering expansiveness are all combined together, and to that one must add intense American military and weapons fascination, and great stress on military power and its use, and then push all that forward into the present, I think one can better understand this bizarre distortion that is evident in people like Chris (sorry to speak of you as if you are a specimen in the Petri dish m’boy but, you know, we have got to get to the bottom of what makes you you!) and the phenomenon of the Social Justice Warrior in our present.
If there is not some historical and social causation that can be traced, what then? would it be proposed that they come swarming up out of the Earth from some underworld cavern? like robotic insects trained to recycle and beat down fascists?
The thing about the ‘Dictator’ is interesting, but you have to understand that I was not born in the US, and thus my perspective is always as an outsider trying to figure out a Cipher. You are aware that Americans tend to be seen as having a ‘dictatorial’ character, don’t you? You may think I mean this in a bad way and I sincerely do not. The American Spirit is a dictatorial spirit. It comes on the scene, it sees, it reacts (to disorder, to chaos, to outmoded social and economic modes, and much else) and it demands that things change, and it changes them. I am not just making this up, Texie.
And what I am trying to communicate is that when you combine the underlying religious mode and impetous with the Tenets of the American Civil Religion with American’s industriousness and revolutionary fervor, and see that manifest in a rather dictatorial personality, well, cannot you see why I would see you-plural as being ‘cut from the same cloth’?
If you do not feel that ‘external authority’ is necessary, how do you relate to the state and then the State (the Nation) and the civil forms of America? Heaven help us all, are you some sort of Libertarian?
Finally, what community can you refer to where these ideals you speak of actually were realized, even smallishly?
Sometimes, ya gotta scramble a few eggs when you’re making that omelette.
Break, not scramble. Of course you have to scramble those omelette-eggs.
Don’t paint all liberals with the same broad brush. Plenty don’t approve of Madonna’s tirade, punching people, violence in protest or misrepresenting facts….I would venture most do not, at least most I am aware of. It is the lunatic fringe in most controversies that gets the most attention though.
There weren’t protests like this when any other Republican took office. There weren’t protests like this when any Democrat took office. Sure there were a few here and there, some election results re-counted, etc. the normal thing. Bush won by the electoral college vote but lost the popular vote and millions of people didn’t march. No one said he was not their president. Even if they didn’t like him, didn’t agree with his politics and policies, there was not the unprecedented up-welling of trepidation, anger and shame. It is not just the whining of sore losers. It is not the anger of the thwarted. There is more to it.
Never before has a president made me feel ashamed to be the representative of America to the rest of the world. It used to be – Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative – you could be sure that while you may not like the direction a president leads, that they would not make us the butt of jokes and derision on a global scale. I am afraid that Trump makes Kim Jong-Un look mature and stable.
I hear people say give him a chance, wait and see what he does, but his policies aside, it is the despicable nature of the man himself that has made the difference for this election. I don’t see a 70 year old suddenly becoming gracious, humble, benevolent, respectful and empathetic when he has been the antipathy of that his whole adult life. Even if you don’t think those are great presidential qualities, you certainly don’t want the polar opposite in the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Most conservatives I know really wished Trump would shut his mouth and move forward with the agenda they wanted. They don’t like him, but they saw him as the only answer to their dreams of a Republican sweep, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and easier politicking than we have had in the recent past – where liberals and conservatives often stymied one another’s objectives and it was difficult to move any legislation through. Others were tired of ineffective government, or a perceived drain on the Nation’s resources by illegal immigration and globalization of jobs. They have their wish, but they are paying a high price for it. I’m not so sure our country will ever be whole again.
“There weren’t protests like this when any other Republican took office. There weren’t protests like this when any Democrat took office.”
There’s a great reason for that. Protesting a President who was duly elected and who hasn’t started yet is unfair to the President and the process, and degrades both the protest and the protesters, with or without Madonna. The tone of Judd, Madonna and others tell us what spurred the protest: hysteria, fanaticism, ignorance, emotion and fear-mongering. The character issue is risible from Democrats. I’ve been saying for more than two decades that character and not position and policies should be the primary qualification for leaders, as Democrats defended Bill Clinton with “It’s the economy, stupid!” and “It’s just personal conduct!” The dreamy eyed willingness to except Hillary Clinton, who was just as corrupt as Trump said she was, shows that character only matters when it’s a Republican. As much as I hate the thought of Trump in the White House, I love the exposure of that hypocrisy almost as much. And it is so, so obvious.
“Most conservatives I know really … saw him as the only answer to their dreams of a Republican sweep, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and easier politicking than we have had in the recent past”
Boy, you must know a lot of stupid or brilliant conservatives, because most prominent Republicans believed the polls, and thought they were doomed. And they definitely thought Hillary was beatable by a mainstream candidate, because she was. Hillary can’t beat anybody. She’s as corrupt and slimy as Bill without the charisma. Check the posts here: I promised that Hillary would never be President long, long before Trump showed up.
“Others were tired of ineffective government”—wait, Democrats aren’t?
“or a perceived drain on the Nation’s resources by illegal immigration”—not the issue with immigration for people like me..you know, those who believe in laws.
“They have their wish, but they are paying a high price for it.”—do you really think that if the nation is richer, more employed, and functioning better with fewer restrictions and the debt under control, anyone will care about that “price”? Obama acted Presidential and was an utter failure, and divided the country. (Trump was the product of that division, not the cause.) If Trump succeeds in half of his objectives, that Democratic Party will just look even more foolish than it does now.
“I’m not so sure our country will ever be whole again.” That’s entirely up to the influence of responsible citizens and good leadership.
Just saw that I originally wrote “Obama” when I meant “Madonna.” Obama, Madonna, Osama, Banana-dana-Fofanna...
“do you really think that if the nation is richer, more employed, and functioning better with fewer restrictions and the debt under control, anyone will care about that “price”? Obama acted Presidential and was an utter failure,…”
Through the power of crap statistics and repeating the Big Lie, many on the left sincerely believe that he nation is richer, more employed, and functioning better since Obama took office. I have a feeling that Trump will have to accomplish 10 times as much to get half the credit.
Through the power of crap statistics and repeating the Big Lie, many on the left sincerely believe that he nation is richer, more employed, and functioning better since Obama took office.
Show us the better statistics then. I’m especially curious about your assertion that unemployment is higher today than it was in January 2009. Show us the evidence.
https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate-3306198
You realize that link proves your original assertion wrong, don’t you? The U-6 is currently lower than it was when Obama took office in January 2009, so yes, by your standard, leftists are correct to point out that the nation is more employed than it was when Obama took office.
But thank you for revealing how sinister the government is. Who are these brave rogues fighting the government by accumulating and sharing the U-6 data? The government sure must be mad at them!
Okay, I stated that imprecisely. The left has been claiming that we’ve been doing better, compared to the Bush era, since well before 2016. Still reeks of Clintonian math.
Okay, I stated that imprecisely. The left has been claiming that we’ve been doing better, compared to the Bush era, since well before 2016. Still reeks of Clintonian math.
The Bush era saw a net job loss while the Obama era saw a net job gain, so yes, the left’s claim is true.
“There’s a great reason for that. Protesting a President who was duly elected and who hasn’t started yet is unfair to the President”
Protest is a part of any healthy democracy. To claim that they are unfair because he hasn’t started yet is a disingenuous comment that ignores his behavior up to the point of him being elected.
Trump’s religious and race baiting, his conspiracy claims about Obama’s birth certificate, his general lack of competency, his massive and unresolved conflicts of interest, his wildly inaccurate claims about, well, everything… he has demonstrably shown himself to be a pathological liar. If you’re surprised by the protests, perhaps you hadn’t been paying enough attention to this sort of thing.
Hillary was certainly atrocious too, with an awful track record (hello Honduras), but her being an awful choice doesn’t make Trump any less reprehensible.
“Protest is a part of any healthy democracy.”
Spare me the cliches. Pointless, grandstanding protests are useless. That’s saying that all political speech is valuable. Most is crap.
“To claim that they are unfair because he hasn’t started yet is a disingenuous comment that ignores his behavior up to the point of him being elected.”
No, because the election decided that. The election draws a hard line: he’s qualified to be President, because the election qualifies him.
No, because the election decided that. The election draws a hard line: he’s qualified to be President, because the election qualifies him.
That’s a tautology.
It really isn’t.
He makes a solid point. It is not a tautology, though it looks like one, because it is not saying the same thing twice. It says really just one thing: a man becomes qualified to the office of president when he is elected to that office.
The question of whether he will be adept in the position, or a successful administrator, or whether he will compare favorably to other presidents, is a separate issue.
That’s a democratic republic.
“he’s qualified to be President, because the election qualifies him.”
This is one of the least intelligent, and most politically ignorant, grossly irresponsible statements I have ever read.
It’s true. Deny it all you like. When the public, balancing all factors, concludes that a candidate’s pluses justify the office, then he or she is, by definition, qualified. The argument that anyone is or isn’t qualified is necessarily subjective, since the only qualifications that are official are in the Constitution.
In short, you don’t know what you are babbling about.
So, if Michele Bachmann were elected, she would be qualified too? “Eligible” and “qualified” are very different concepts.
I can’t get on board with this.
If the election elects someone and the public through the election process decides she should be President, then she has been qualified, and that argument is over. Obama was unqualified to be President by any rational standard. The election showed that the nation had decided to rate some qualities as what the nation needed in a President at that moment in history important enough to qualify him. Decision made. Standard re-set. If Trump succeeeds, his set of assets—business background, non-ideological, blunt speaking, populist, CEO experience, will be regarded as qualifying for future POTUS candidates.
Okay, I understand your point of view, but I completely disagree. To me, an electoral or popular vote is irrelevant as to one’s qualifications — but it speaks volumes about our electorate.
But the two explanations, Jack’s and yours are not mutually exclusive.
Well, I stand by my babblings.
—Djjrldnkfkeoeklqlwpsifj
“Don’t paint all liberals with the same broad brush.”
I will admit it’s becoming harder and harder to find a narrow enough brush that covers only the liberals that haven’t degraded themselves at some level during this nation-wide cry-in…
I got very pissed off this morning so I went on a three-minute rampage.
View at Medium.com
I don’t blame you. Someone’s on Twitter and says nobody asked for your thoughts? Social media participation is a de facto invitation for others to give their thoughts! What, she thinks it’s a one-way platform? That’s one of the most ridiculous responses I ever seen on social media! “Fuck you” might have been too nice.
Haha! Love ya, Fatty!
Awwww!
“Oof ! I did nazi that coming ! Did Jew?
Lots of Jews reject their Jewish heritage. That doesn’t mean they want other Jews to be gassed.
Didn’t you make a comment earlier about someone being a dickbag for pouncing on your every word?
I never said she wants Jews gassed. Like her icon Richard Spencer, Alizia calls for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” racial segregation, and Europe and America as “white homelands.”
A Nazi is a Nazi.
And you’re exposing what you are every time you defend her.
But a 2017 Nazi in the USA is nothing like a 1930’s German Nazi. The latter had a route to power, and the crazy ideology hadn’t been tried yet, so people were naive. A 2017 Nazi in the USA is like a cosplayer…it’s just an ugly and immature fantasy. They might as well be Klingons or Orcs. Their goals are toxic dreams; they aren’t happening. We wouldn’t even be talking about them if the left hadn’t decided that “Nazi” was one more label, along with Hitler and “monster” they could use to delegitimize Donald Trump.
As the guys at the Fifth Column characterized it- nobody paid attention to these guys whove been around for years until the media gave wall to wall coverage for days on a meeting of 200 of these guys, a third of whom were journalists…
Another yup.
And what am I, genius? I’ll bet you’re wrong, though it’s not worth too much of my effort to convince you otherwise. I’m not sure exactly how much I agree with, but what I respect about Alizia particularly, is that she’s seeking some sort of genuine truth and authenticity, and not just a windy dispenser of single-pole emotion-based talking points.
I personally don’t believe in forced cultural associations, or the opposite. I believe the only way for people to not end up murdering or otherwise imposing on one another, and maybe even actually learning how to get along, is just let them clan up however they’re going to naturally clan up.
..Or do you think ethnic and racial minorities don’t have a tendency to clan up, and shouldn’t?
Some of what she says is a little out of Mein Kampf-fort zone.
Ok, that was funny.
Sorry, but no. I think there’s a clear enough distinction between run-of-the-mill nationalism (just some opinions), and being willing to put things in motion like deportations, pogroms, institutionalized racism, and whatnot, which are actually crimes against humanity.
She absolutely believes in deportations and institutionalized racism. She also just said we should have let the Nazis win, so make of that what you will.
It’s different dear boy. I don’t ‘believe’, as you put it, I prefer to say that it is my understanding that the first step that must be taken is the ‘recovery of the possibility of having a solid *white identity*. You can conceive of that as European identity, White European identity, Mediterranean-European identity and one can approach it biologically, culturally, and regionally. Identity is a group of things, not just one.
The first order of business is quite psychological really, and has to do with overcoming exactly what has been installed in your fine person. You exemplify in many senses where the work is and you demonstrate, with every exaggerated, distorted idea that you send forth just what *we* are up against. This has nothing to do with the quality of your person, which I assume is normal, but with an overlay of what is, in fact, Marxian indoctrination. You have so absorbed it though that you have *identified* with it. When you actually sit down to examine it, I suggest to you, you will find that it is vapid and baseless. As I have been saying it is a construction based on an emotionalism and a sentimental foundation.
Important and knowledgable people in the 50s and 60s understood that Mexico and its Meso-American culture, if allowed to penetrate the US, would lower the cultural level of this country. (In addition to being all the nasty things you say I am you will have to add that I am not very in-pro of Latino culture, for logical and sound reasons that can be explained and defended). I firmly believe that America as a nation should resist the cultural and demographic penetration by Meso-America. But it should do it as a conscious and reasoned decision, not in hatred and not with violence. Mexico must be pushed culturally back into Mexico and all those people must work to educate themselves, petition their own government for services, raise up their own children, build their own communities and their institutions.
That more or less addresses what I think about your ‘deportation’ accusation. The entire nation should understand, at the most basic level, that allowing illegal immigrants to pour in without regulation, without control, without limited visas, is ethically and morally wrong, and they should not submit, as you submit, to a cheesy emotionalism. Because you allow your emotions to dominate your reason you allow yourself to become unethical. And then you double it up by asserting, against the truth, that you are more ‘moral’ and a better person than others because you succumb to your stupidity. You actually think that you hold the higher moral ground and this, my little friend, is a big part of the problem. You do not.
I believe in clear-seeing and thinking when it comes to issues of culture and race, and I will defend that idea against anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a moral and an ethical proposition. But you, you live in lies that you call ‘truths’. And again you double-up your error by actually believing that you are *right* and somehow better! You are very free with your moral condemnations. Your arguments are those of a child.
What I actually said about Germans and Germanium was different. But as a Lefty-Progressive you can flip things around to become what you want and you have no ethical and moral compunctions, do you? (This of course nicely illustrates why for example the Times also does it and why a Lying Press is something one has to carefully protect oneself against). Your immorality is rather easy to note and you will stop at nothing.
I described a far larger picture and I said that it might well have been, after all is said and done, a better choice for England and the US to have employed Germany (so to speak) to annihilate Communist Russia. To have worked with them, even in the early days, and not to have done what (as we all know) the US often does: creates and establishes mortal enemies and then propagandizes the population to channel hate at that enemy. The vilification of Germany, and the vilification of all America’s and England’s enemies, is the stuff of war department propaganda.
For England and her empire to have remained intact, and for Bolshevism to have been destroyed, and for Central Europe to have remained relatively intact, I speculate, may have resulted in a better outcome. As I said, these thought-exercises are vain but they are useful as a tool to understand that not all historical outcomes are the best ones, though many suppose that what happened was indeed the *best* (and that God stands behind it).
Again, imprecise language on my part. I Most likely have something more sinister in mind when thinking of deportations and institutionalized racism than you do.
Alizia calls for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” racial segregation, and Europe and America as “white homelands.”
A Nazi is a Nazi.
Well, you are right on a couple of accounts. I am moved by the argument, or the view, or the fact, that America began as a European colony and as an essentially English Anglo-Saxon one. I do understand that many different things went on, and that many different people came to these lands, and that America is a complex entity. And I understand that America, up to a certain point, defined itself as essentially a European country and that it had the will to control immigration and to keep it mostly to Europe. I think the racial blending project which developed, notably after 1965, and much of the *contamination* in the post-Sixties world (mind-set or what ever it was), has done harm to America. Further, that if it continues the harm will grow more severe. These are not unethical sentiments and they are not immoral either.
I actually think the sentiments and the ideas that drive people who think like you, when really broken down and examined carefully, are immoral and unethical. Whatever is your ethical base, God only knows what it is. It is none that I recognize and yet I think I understand how it is constructed.
What I believe in is white identity (though I know that you don’t and cannot). I really could explain this but it would take time. I notice that at one time the white population (which in your view cannot exist! and doesn’t exist) composed about 90% of America. Now it is 68% or something and shrinking. I am supportive of a self-identification, and a self-restoration, that would over s similar period of time (50 years since 1965) begin to reestablish Whites in their own country. I know these are terribly forbidden things to say! But that is the power of definitions.
Only remember this: In England, France, Spain, Austria, Romania, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and other countries people who think like *we* do are getting together and trying to reason things through. Deciding who *we* are and who *we* want to be.
America too has its role to play. And the first order of business is to reclaim the power to define, to decide, to control, to create destiny.
A couple of things. Obviously I have many things to say on these topics and that is because it is these things that interest me a great deal. If I am obsessive or go overboards, well, what can I say? At least I confine it to the thread that most interests me which is now receding into the past. Only those subscribed to it will be notified that another post has been put on it.
What I hope to become successful at communicating is a sort of ‘essence’ which I consider to be vital to define and uncover and which is the ‘essence’ of a conservative position. Even if that word (conservatism) is not the right one. But what I find is that to even begin to define an intellectual position where such a platform for a sensible conservatism could be described, it requires what amounts to a dismantling of the reigning ideologically-driven position. You cannot communicate your ideas to people who are, as LaRouche proposes, ‘brainwashed’. That’s a tough word, and one too often used, but what it means is that we — anyone — may well be filled up with distorted ideas. I find that alone a fascinating topic: because we see things ‘as through a glass darkly’ (I mean this without any of the spiritual connotation of St Paul and just a way to indicate how we cannot really *see* reality, or we struggle all the while to do that).
The Nouvelle Droite (the European New Right and then the ‘Alt-Right’) actually represents and is a solid and valid, and philosophically-based, movement of ideas, and the people involved in it are serious, thoughtful, concerned people, not evil ‘Nazis’ nor even (as the American press always says) ‘Far Right extremists’. They are historians, social critics, philosophers and religiously-oriented people who are confronting, intellectually, the advances in our Brave New World. Ideas are usually if not always a way to get a handle on things, to control through definition, and these people are attempting to do just that. My goal is to first understand what they are on about, and then to be able to explain it. And then also to add my own view and vision. I certainly see my efforts as touching Ethics and Morals, but I am more interested in the philosophical, spiritual and metaphysical bedrock out of which Ethics arise (or are conceived).
If you have read this far you have further to go! Because what I wish to communicate is that to understand where I am coming from (as the ‘terrible person’ Chris says I am; and with the ‘awful ideas’ coming from my ‘dark soul’ as Beth states), and where the Alternative Right is coming from, one has to come to understand a whole set of ideas, and these ideas are essentially philosophical. They are also *alternatives* in the sense that they bend the mind to some degree, they make demands on a person, and they require effort.
To this, I propose this article by P. T. O’Talryn which isolates what he understands as the ‘alchemical agent’ that functions against European Identity. The alkahest which is a word that corresponds to my sense of and use of the word ‘acid’ that runs through my writing. Alkahest and acid are complex ideas, or complex assertions, all in themselves.
My argument is that there is an alkahest that is eating away at the European soul and that to recover strength and power it needs to be understood and confronted. This is spiritual, ideational work. It is not a joke or a game. It is in the most essential and important sense the most demanding philosophical and existential (i.e. religious) work. It is Platonic and Aristotelian in the best possible senses, and it is the same work that has gone on, and should go on, in our societies. It is what we have to recover.
________________________________
Lyndon LaRouche wrote:
“But most of the people of the United States have been brainwashed. And I do mean, literally, brainwashed. And that’s the thing you’ve got to correct. You’ve got to bring people who are actually ignorant, not just ignorant of particular things, but ignorant in their behavior towards society in general. And if we want to win this, win a recovery of the U.S. economy, you’ve got to do that.”
Our Choice is the Holocaust or Outer Space
P. T. O’Talryn
At this point in the history of the media and education, everyone in the West has a relationship with that painful, profound, and defining event in Western history known as the Holocaust. Understanding our individual and collective relationship with it in its enormity, singularity, and aftermath is of capital importance if we wish to save the West from dissolution, precisely because, at root, it is the Holocaust which has murdered the West’s spirit, cost it its nerve, and shattered its identity.
It did this by initially shocking us with stories and images of industrialized, grotesque human depravity; by breaking our logical imagination by creating a new sacred narrative which must never be questioned in any detail save in hushed and reverential tones by faceless, anointed scholars; by instilling in us a pernicious, hereditary guilt-by-association that extends by implication to every element of traditional centers of Western power; and by sweetly eliciting in us the proud love of hating the nasty villain in said sacred horror movie. These dangerous ingredients emerged cooked together as if in a witch’s cauldron, a black-magical vessel capable of containing the universal and most potent of all solvents: the alchemical alkahest.
Alchemy was not, as vulgar corruption has it, concerned primarily with transmuting lead into gold. That imagined process was only a metaphor for the transmutation of the substance of the soul from the base to the noble, of transcending the material plane. The universal solvent was sought as a means to effect this, to melt away the spiritual dross. But the problem of what manner of container could hold such a substance was not solved until the period of 1933-45, when the black, molten pain of the Holocaust victims was cast into the shape of the cauldron.
Born of pagan human sacrifice, the Holocaustic alkahest itself is not a physical thing but a mental spectacle, an information pattern, a hungry ghost, a meaning in the brains of survivors, and the physical reality of architecture, books, pictures, and film, intended to impress upon the instincts of the peoples of the West the shock, the unquestionability, the guilt, and the siren intrigue that are all part of an iron will to “never again” allow such an atrocity to occur. Therefore, since the Second World War, this alkahest has been serving its purpose in an alchemical fashion, spurring Westerners to recognize and resist any whisper of recapitulation to the imagined drive towards a future Holocaust. It intends to turn base bigotry into noble anti-bigotry.
And that, as far as it goes, is an important lesson from history. The Jews and others who suffered in the Holocaust are right to be concerned. As Pope John Paul II once said, the Holocaust was an attempt to “kill God.” The bruised apple should be eaten out of deference to the starving. The cold steel rails leading into Auschwitz reflect the “steel-like romanticism” of Goebbels. We must be careful how we tread. But, how careful?
And that’s where it becomes a liability instead of an asset to society. The alkahest attacks the power centers: men, European lineage, heterosexuality, Christianity, everything that gave shape and vigor to the West. It gives a taste of blood to every group with a grievance, legitimate or not, particularly the Marxists and Cultural Marxists. The non-European ethnoi, the Third Worlders, the poor, the disabled, the women, the homosexuals, the transsexuals, the neo-pagans and other non-Christians, the champions of animals, and those of the ecological movement itself are all viewed, implicitly and often explicitly, as potential victims of a future, feared, looming neo-Holocaust, the perpetrators of which will be, naturally, the ethnic European, Christian heterosexual men and their allies, their dominating mentalities, and the oppressive, prejudicial, homicidal, bullying, rapine, colonialist civilization they have made. In order to avoid this horrible eventuality – this population transfer, this genocide, this slavery, this nuclear war – the only solution (the final solution) must be to marginalize and in some fashion enslave, imprison, or otherwise eliminate ethnic European, Christian heterosexual men from the Western world. They must be put in a box.
This cannot sound like an impossible flight of wild fancy to any serious observer of history. How many people foresaw the Holocaust of 1933-45? Or the Holodomor of 1932-33? Or the Cambodian genocide of 1975-79? Or the Rwandan genocide of 1995? Or any of a dozen others in the twentieth century alone? News report by incomplete news report, film by multicultural film, piece by piece of hideous art, class by Left-progressive class, election by bought election, the entertainment, official news and media narratives, and policies of modern Western nation-states move us towards eliminating European ethnoi as distinct groups. They also push us towards marginalizing, debasing, and mocking Christianity, whilst ignoring, if not celebrating, its widespread persecution around the world, and towards colonizing straight, all-male spaces with both omnipresent femininity and all manner of invented genders and sexualities.
The proximate goal is to lock men, straights, European ethnoi, and Christians into cold, ugly, isolated, propagandized cells subjected to constant oversight by women, “rainbow people,” non-European ethnoi, non-Christians (secularists, pagans, Muslims, etc.), and others deemed ideologically pure by the new commissar vanguard. At that point, one might imagine that the alkahest has done its job, but, think again: once a group is so hated, so feared, its subjugation so prized, its humiliation so delectable, the morals of its captors so degenerate, and the popular inhibitions so low, there will be a force of social inertia pressing for that group’s permanent neutralization, whether through outright slavery, microchipping, or actual extermination.
The alkahest’s ingredients are shock, guilt, illogicality, and sweetener. They form an elixir that has affected the West in a number of ways.
The West has suffered a number of profound shocks over the past century, starting with the sinking of the Titanic, the Influenza Epidemic, the Great War, the Great Depression, the Second World War (particularly the razing of Europe’s cities, the atomic holocaust in Japan, and the Nazi ethnic Holocaust), the Cold War, the detonation of the hydrogen bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis, desegregation, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, the Communist holocaust, the ecological holocaust (perceived or real), the Sexual Revolution, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and massive Third World immigration. These shocks have never been fully recovered from, leaving us in a state of disorientation and paralysis, making us insecure and vulnerable to injections of guilt and illogicality.
The West has become addicted to guilt and its accompanying self-mortification, and is terrified that if it doesn’t feed this guilt by dismantling its own culture, it will be subjected to a personal holocaust of shame or social death. Western man must realize that he is innocent of the charges, lest his children condemn him both for his sins and for the burden of the sins he has bequeathed to them.
“Discrimination” is now taboo for the West. Our own natural good will has spurred us all to agree that “discrimination” was a bad thing. So why is this a problem? It’s a problem because to “discriminate” is to “tell the difference” – which is the fundamental law of logic: A=A, the law of identity. Without being able to recognize differences racially, religiously, or culturally, we create confusion in our minds that – because we naturally seek to avoid cognitive dissonance, and because the path back toward “discriminating” has been barred by the guilt club of the alkahest – slowly drives out logic entirely and replaces it with the metaphysical equivalent of an LSD landscape: interesting, but counterproductive for our survival, both individually and socially.
How many people do you know who live by principle? How many even know of principles, or could say what a principle is? Whatever principles are, they’re certainly not central in Western society anymore. And that’s because the alkahest has largely driven logic out of the public and private spheres, into an underground state of “intuition,” which is more malleable. Without logic, principles begin to blur into frustrating patterns. Trying to pin them down without logic is like trying to shoot a bull’s-eye target whilst high on psychedelic drugs. Eventually, the “shooter” gives up and just settles down by himself (on a couch) staring into space (TV screen).
And lastly, the West has become the sweetest civilization in history. The first three components of the alkahest taste bitter, and so in order for it to be successfully administered from the loving spoon of the oligarchy, it needs to be sweetened. And how sweet it is: we live in a galaxy of distraction and hedonistic delight. We’ve got opiates, psychedelics, empathetics, stimulants, depressants, painkillers, you name it. We’ve got funny sex: twenty-three new types are developed every day. We’ve got social media to let you access all the funny sex. We’ve got advertisements salaciously selling hyperreal products as deftly as any glib-tongued Baghdad merchant. We’ve got music in such quantities, so conveniently accessible, with such fidelity, and with such quality of skilled craftsmanship (cleverly placed hooks?). We’ve got NASCAR, and perfume and haute coutoure, gewgaws and billboards and fancy automobiles. We’ve got art galleries and museums and colorful maps and unlimited options for interior decorating.
But that’s not enough. We’ve got bubblegum and comic books and the glorious silver screen and infinite varieties of multicultural cuisine. We’ve got cheap education, we’ve got roll the dice, we’ve got the death of God and the joy of jumping on his corpse, and we’ve got the luxury of summer ice. We’ve got lights in our massive cities, we’ve got cameras in our hands, we’ve got endless novelty and color and action on our small screens. We’ve got sugar and salt and fat, and we’ve got the luxury of keeping comfortably clean. We’ve got it so good, the poor people among us are the fat ones, our rich the skinny ones. Imagine what the royalty of old would have paid for a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken? Why, I once learned that a single pineapple could be had in Europe in the seventeenth century for approximately $10,000 in today’s currency. Now, imagine how much meat Westerners eat, and how many delicacies from around the world. It’s amazing, and what’s more amazing is how used to it all we’ve become. We just accept that pouring sugar – or cocaine, perhaps – on our pre-sugared cereal while popping an insulin pill to keep our blood sugar level down is normal. And we wonder why we aren’t getting more out of life. We’re too busy wondering how deep this fabulous goodie box is.
But sugar rots the teeth, and pleasure rots the soul. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” says Jeremiah. Cheap, low-grade pleasure numbs the pain of missing the higher pleasures in life, the genuinely happiness-creating pleasures like Family, Nation, and Creativity. So, in a sense, we are a civilization addicted not to a healthy sweetness, but to a kind of artificial, oligarchal sweetener.
Dripped into the ear of Western civilization, the alkahest has steadily eaten into the social capital that is the Christian spiritual, Roman legal, and Greek intellectual heritage, supported by the European ethnoi, its faith, its families, and the masculine spirit. Thus, its final goal is to take apart the West ideologically, legally, sociologically, and territorially, like a man being quartered by horses, and to replace it with some manner of gruesome, neo-feudal empire.
What avails? Faced with a society that cannot reproduce itself any longer, biologically or culturally, we would become atomized – both isolated and morally small – and intimate with poverty of the spirit and the addictive behaviors that come with it. In the spirit of the times, even our resistance to this atomization can itself become addictive, though, like an addiction to physical fitness or appreciation for classical music, not all addictions are deleterious. Morality addicts and philosophy addicts should prove highly useful in reorganizing our culture back into a healthy molecular matrix.
The mental scum known as Political Correctness (PC, or Pawn Control) can be scattered momentarily by trashy action, but even such action on a national scale only treats symptoms rather than the disease. Sometimes the eldritch horror of what has come from the Holocaust feels like it has seeped into our bones. Hope is in short supply and many of us prefer our addictions to wrestling with taboo and principle. We can hardly be blamed for this; the innocent, trodden worm curls and writhes.
But, suppose society has a kind of patriotic dysphagia that has stopped us from fully swallowing the poison we’ve been given, even as we have been disorientated and blindfolded by our ordeal. And, suppose – just suppose – we’re not where we think we are, a thousand miles from power, but that we have in fact been wandering in our sleep and are, interestingly enough, standing in the penetralia itself, and we don’t know it. We can, however, smell it and feel it if we pay attention to principle. If we orient ourselves in the dark, feeling the sinister, bejewelled carvings and the curved, cold metallic surface of our surroundings, we might just find that, with strenuous moral and mental effort, the black cauldron can be tipped over and the noxious brew dumped out, defiling the temple of terror.
The Holocaust is the guardian of sleep. Our job as dreamers is to rally ourselves and those around us to a cause that is meaningful, principled, and proud, which offers the higher pleasures of honor, virtue, and love, and which orients us not towards the crimes of our ancestors, nor towards our supposed eternal guilt, but towards the stars, where our children’s destinies lie. For, without a Frontier, the Western spirit will wane. Organize the political economy to preserve us instead of erasing us, and we will awaken, and the alkahest will be flung away and dissipated in the infinite reaches of Outer Space, never to bother us again.