Race Neutrality and Pyrrhic Victories  01/06/10

So-called racial neutrality is the Thomas Sowell argument. It rests upon a supposedly more universal application of the intent of the abominable 14th amendment, which Dixiecrat segregationists have the eternal shame of having supported with an amendment to the bill requiring the language be extended to gender, which they mistakenly thought would kill it. Joined by plutocracy advocates in the Republican party who wanted a cheap labor force for big business donors and equity feminists who wanted to undermine traditional gender roles, it carried the day.

In my opinion, and I’m going to sound hopelessly retardaire in this, race neutrality is not the direction we want to go because the arguments that underlie it run utterly counter to those that would support some form of racial privileging of whites. This is especially so when we are not…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

Classically, and in all traditional societies that deserve the name, the term we translate as ‘love’ (where a cognate is even extant in the language) has denoted something akin to an oath of service and the expression of an inviolable relation, and not, as in modern times, the expression of an emotive state of being. This is important when considering what is meant when scripture relates to us that God ‘loves’ man, or when we receive from secular texts that a man ‘loves’ his wife, child, or spiritual or carnal brother. The positive, operative definition of this word has been ‘feminized,’ and currently pertains chiefly to the evanescent nature of romantic love, fittingly described by the Gypsy Carmen in the libretto of same name by Bizet, when she is made to claim, ”L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.” In the…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

In Philippe Beneton (e.g. his excellent book titled Equality by Default) we see a contemporary figure straightforwardly affirming that the Enlightenment did not present the world with a final social standard, to stand as a paragon for all future generations. I still fail to understand why US right wing (is there such a thing any longer?) intellectuals make so little use of the abundant materials to be found in both the European reactionaries like Beneton and the older Counter-Enlightenment figures, such as Bonald and Chateaubriand. Strike that, I think I know. Apart from Kinism itself (which this weblog seeks to establish on a firm intellectual footing), the right wing in the US that is still vital and has a future is devoted to a brand of materialist genetic determinism that is actually quite liberal in its cast of thought, especially…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

A friend recently brought to my attention an article entitled The Plot Against Art, written for the Occidental Observer by a person purportedly named “Dr Lasha Darkmoon” (whom I also found quoted here). I do not want the comments that follow to be taken as a general indictment of the good work that goes on at the Observer, and its sponsor, the Occidental Quarterly. As my readers (all 3 of them) are aware, I have been critical of TOQ on account of its Darwinian materialism, and its support for “eugenics” -to be understood as a sort of god-making exercise (the term is notoriously slippery). Prefatory remarks concluded, I must protest the nauseating repetitiveness and outright slipshod scholarship in laying the current malaise (predictably) at the feet of the Frankfurt School, those nefarious (to be…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

Our lack of access to higher-dimensional thinking forces us to focus narrowly on the material world, which he admits we are very good at (since it is undeniable and you tend to look like a fool when denying it). And he wonders why I can’t take seriously his offer to teach me “quantum communications,” a term he picked up from a kook…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

Perhaps the greatest want of the Protestant faith in the 500 odd years since its birth at Wittenberg is the want of historical imagination. Its Puritan industriousness notwithstanding, the scions of faith have met frequently with the not undeserved criticism of many of the West’s surly muses and doom-saying prophets on this account. This want of rootedness in history took the form of the eschatological expectations of the Church, in its varied forms, with the last act of the drama telescoped forward, rendering to a nullity the interregnum of the Church age. Yet, though we may be citizens of heaven, as the Apostle wrote, we are also subjects of Time, and it is in time that we know our essential selves, both individually and corporately. Many in the church have been appalled by the flesh of history, yet…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

Continuing with our recent theme of imagery and psychological imprinting as a propaganda tool, here is an interesting PJTV video on the Power and Danger of Iconography. Aside from the silly praise for Republican “ideas,” the video is a valuable (if superficial) look at the effects of imagery on the mind, and the subtle ways that visual language can communicate very powerful meanings. Of course, the moneyed sophistication of the Obama P.R. apparatus is on full display here. Was there ever a presidency as “corporate” as the Obama presidency? The only problem with the video being that our hoary host seems to think that the Republicrats need to compete on the same playing field as the Demoblicans. If they represent immemorial traditional values rather than corporate and international interests, then they need to be playing a different game…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

Central governments rarely relinquish a power they have obtained, even though the need for such powers is of a fleeting nature, to avert imminent crisis, or meet a transitory need in the population. Crisis and its corollary of chronic fear are the chief means of seizure and consolidation of power. Just as with the envy and hatred of diversity that fuels so-called progressivism, so easily wielded by central governments through dominance of the media, crisis-fear is carefully cultivated by the totalitarian mentality. Now this totalitarian mentality despises human difference, and is bent entirely on various narcissistic regimes of uniformity. Examples are replete: ethnic uniformity through forced integration, economic uniformity through nationalization or progressive taxation or outright confiscation, religious uniformity through forced secularization. Independence is a threat to this mentality, to its self-apotheosis…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

In this column some months ago I wrote that there was a skeleton in the closet of race integrationists both left and right, and that was the social fact of racial self-segregation -that is, that members of races and ethnic groups tend by the exercise of freedom of association to select the company of members of their own group, all things being equal, and not that of individuals highly distinct from themselves. I further commented that this state of affairs must be deemed ultimately intolerable by those who view racial integrity as a flaw of nature, or some sort of social disease that has its cure in a sort of assimilation therapy conducted by the state and by extension industry. I am reminded of these comments by the recent speech by newly appointed Attorney General Eric…  [Read More]  |  (2)  

It is the mark of manhood that the immemorial truths of human existence be recognized. Perhaps the foremost of these is the parsimony of nature, that it does not easily yield its fruit, and that scarcity, danger, and hunger is a shadow always across man’s path. The pathetic state of the negro in Africa is testimony to the hardness of life, and the pitiless requirements of the body. But Providence at times appears in the unlikeliest forms. For though it is not ventured in polite conversation, the sober mind acknowledges that the state of the negro in America is and ever was so far superior both materially and spiritually to those conditions which follow ineluctably (history shows) from his African progeniture*, that whether slave or free, his thanks should ever go to that God who brought whom he willed out of…  [Read More]  |  (2)  

Since the passing away of flesh is the central fact of existence which no man can long avoid, the generative capacities of life must take on a pseudo-sacred character for the pagan. Both the pagan and the Christian, however, assert the primacy of spirit or principle of life-giving. Not so the materialist. Pagan man was never a materialist. A skeptic, even a cynic perhaps, but never the cognate of the modern positivist, with his self-assembling universe of chance. Without the generative capacities that are inexplicable to the materialist, it is clear to even a child that the universe would shortly exhaust its life, and to the normal intellect lose all fascination. But the materialist is enraptured by the thought of an empty universe -its beauty is its pointlessness, its arbitrariness, and its lack of ultimacy. It appeals to…  [Read More]  |  (0)  

Think we so little of nature and of those writs inscribed in men that we seek in our puritanical fervor for “fairness” to destroy every vestige of privilege, convinced it is ineluctably the product of naked power, and that relative virtue will never arise, excellence never appear absent our political midwifery? And what if power were itself a virtue, not connected by necessity to other virtues, but no less a thing of value for it arising out of human diversity? It is in the unconscious association of power with goodness or excellence of character that we err, not in ascribing benefit to power itself, power to lead, power to convey, power to attract, power to assert, power to defend, power to uphold, and every species of its good and wise application is more so for…  [Read More]  |  (2)