Michael van der Galien writes in 2009: Most regular readers of Poligazette will know by now that I’m a Muslim, specially drawn to Sufi Islam (which doesn’t make me very popular among fundamentalists, to put it mildly). Fortunately, any time I’ve mentioned this fact on this site, I’ve received (virtually) no negative feedback. Most consider this a private matter, and therefore of little or no concern politically. As I found out last week, however, not everybody necessarily agrees.
Professor Hans Jansen and I were contributors to a new Dutch blog called Dagelijkse Standaard. He was the resident Arabic, Middle East and Islam specialist, I the American politics expert. I focused, and continue to focus, mainly on America (with the odd excursion into Turkish politics, another field of interest of mine). During one of my conversations with Jansen – I helped him publish his posts, insert links, etc. I even phoned him a couple of times to help him out with technical problems – I mentioned the fact that I am a Muslim. He responded by insulting me (he wondered, among other things how an intelligent young man like myself could “join the side that wants to destroy the West” – a pretty blatant example of prejudice, nay discrimination). As I understand it, he then emailed the owner of the site Joshua Livestro that he had to think about whether or not it was possible for him to continue defending freedom of speech on one website with a Muslim, seemingly no matter how liberal that Muslim may be.
Regular readers will probably strike this as rather odd. After all, I defend freedom in all its forms constantly and my focus is on politics, not on theological issues. In the end, after having communicated with Livestro a couple of times, Jansen said he would indeed stop writing for Dagelijkse Standaard altogether. Jansen himself says the reason for his sudden resignation was nor is my personal faith, but Livestro’s attitude towards Jansen after the first received the latter’s “have to think about” e-mail.
Whatever the case, Jansen is quite a well known character in The Netherlands. He’s an emeritus professor who advises Geert Wilders and other politicians on Islamic affairs and who is a regular guest commentator on TV on all issues related to Islam. This makes it virtually inevitable that his departure will receive some (perhaps but hopefully not a lot of) media attention here in Holland. What will be, will be. I just want to make it absolutely clear to any visitors from The Netherlands who were drawn to this site as a result of this affair that this blog nor my public appearances are about my personal faith. I’m a secularist. I look at politics from a secular, more politically conservative perspective. This post will therefore be my first and only public comment on the subject. I am an expert on American politics, not a theologian. Nor am I a spokesman for this group or another. No, I don’t understand the problem one could possibly have a problem with me being a liberal, anti-fundamentalist, open-minded Muslim who actively defends Western values like freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and equality of men and women, either. Perhaps it has something to do with the view expressed by people like Wilders that Islam is “a fascist ideology”: it’s only a small step from this to “all Muslims are fascists,” as a commenter at DS proves in reaction to Livestro’s announcement of Jansen’s departure. (For American readers, the reader writes: “A logical decision. If you use words to fight against national-socialism you don’t join forces with a national-socialist either. Someone can then claim that this national-socialist is “a good person” and doesn’t accept the most radical aspects of national-socialism, but such a defense isn’t exactly convincing.”) It’s disheartening to read, but I don’t feel the need to respond to such comments.
This is all I have to say about this subject. From now on, I want the focus again to be on (American) politics. I don’t find it – Islam, me being Muslim and / or the exact reason for Jansen’s resignation – a particularly interesting debate. This is purely a ‘yes I know this happened’ post and nothing more.
Now we’ve got that out of the way, lets talk politics again as we’re used to do.
Michael van der Galiën is a 23-year-old American Studies student at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands, and correspondent in the Netherlands for Pajamas Media. In a post entitled “Islamic Law and Violence,” he commented over a week ago on a response written by a student at Brown, Jebediah Koogler, to my Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week talk there. Since van der Galiën articulates so many common responses to and common misunderstandings of the work I am doing, I thought it might be useful to respond.
Jeb Koogler explains the obvious: Islamic law isn’t static. It changes over time. I also get a bit tired of people who say that the Koran preaches much more violence than the Bible and Torah do. I’ve read the Koran and I disagree; it doesn’t teach violence any more than the Bible or Torah.
I discuss this very common argument at length in my book Religion of Peace?; suffice it to say here that van der Galiën’s statement, that the Qur’an doesn’t teach violence any more than the “Bible or Torah” is flatly false. For while the Bible contains descriptions of violent acts committed in the name of God, nowhere does it teach believers to imitate that violence. Where people are commanded to commit acts of violence, these are commands directed to specific individuals or groups in particular situations; they are not universal commands.
The Qur’an, on the other hand, quite clearly does teach believers to commit acts of violence against unbelievers — see 2:190-193, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, etc. There are no equivalents to such open-ended and universal commands, addressed to all believers to fight unbelievers, in the Bible.
Of course, van der Galiën would respond that such passages have not been understood as such by all Muslims throughout history, and that is no doubt true. We’ll discuss that in more detail in a moment. But it is not the point here, for when he says that the Qur’an “doesn’t teach violence any more than the Bible or Torah,” he is not talking about interpretative traditions, but the content of the text.
In fact, I’d say, the only way for people to defend terrorism or violence by the Koran is by quoting passages in it completely out of context and to ignore the spirit of the Koran, which is peaceful.
Unfortunately for van der Galiën, there is not a single traditional school of Islamic jurisprudence that would agree with his assessment here, for all of the schools that are considered orthodox teach, as part of the obligation of the Muslim community, warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers.
Posted inConversion, Islam|Comments Off on A Conservative Converts To Sufi Islam
From PJ Media: These commenters all share some specific views — views that are diametrically opposed to traditional conservatism. Firs, they look at people as part of “a tribe,” a word they actually use rather frequently. There is the “white tribe,” the “black tribe,” and the “Hispanic tribe.” They identify with the former: the “white tribe.” This makes them collectivists.
Secondly, they all seem to believe that there is a grand conspiracy aimed at destroying the “white race.” Neo-Nazis have used the phrase “white genocide” for decades, but until recently, normal conservatives didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Clearly, the alt-right has embraced the concept.
Third, the alt-right believes that American culture is related to “whiteness.” To them, American culture is white culture. This means that the struggle to “preserve” American culture is actually a struggle to preserve the “white race.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this not only leads them to oppose immigration (of non-whites), but mixed marriages as well. After all, mixed marriages result in non-white (or half-white) children. If they don’t, they’re contradicting their own philosophy.
Finally, while the alt-right may call themselves “conservatives,” what they wish to “conserve” aren’t the principles that made America great such as unalienable rights for all people, but “white culture” and therefore the “white race.” This is a racial battle to them, just like it is in the eyes of Black Lives Matter, only the skin color they pretend to “defend” is different.
And that’s precisely why it’s so important for real conservatives to vocally oppose them and their agenda. These people have nothing to do with conservatism. More precisely, they represent the complete opposite: conservatism is focused on individuals; they are focused on groups or, as they call them, tribes. They’re collectivists, and racist collectivists at that.
Decades ago, the conservative movement purged itself of the John Birch Society. It’s up to modern conservatives and libertarians to get rid of the alt-right.
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on The Mask Comes Off: The Alt-Right Is Racist to Its Core
Take a look at Brock Turner’s happy, privileged face. This is what campus predators look like, America.
Bring it on — the brilliant smile of a Stanford swimmer with Olympic dreams, the happy privileged face of a white college kid named Brock Turner. Another picture of him smiling, please.
Because this is what a campus sexual predator looks like. And that’s the truth too many people refuse to acknowledge. It’s the most difficult part of the campus rape culture destroying the lives of so many young women: acknowledging whom their rapists are.
Turner, 20, was convicted of sexually attacking an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at Stanford University after a fraternity party. It was a violent, brutal attack, and he was caught by two passersby, who tackled him when he tried to run away.
The rape charges were dropped because it was Turner’s fingers, along with dirt and pine needles, that went inside his victim, not his sexual organ. Was that calculated on his part? Was he trying to avoid leaving his DNA in her body?
The jury convicted Turner of sexual assault, which doesn’t sound quite as horrible as rape.
* The swimmer was a bad guy, the Dad is inexplicable, and the sentence too light. (Although difficult to find exact comparison given that there is only claim of digit rape).
But that is not the problem being discussed. At issue is the attempt to generalize the “face of campus rape” based on this one case that is clearly an outlier. He is the only example she cites, as the other cases do not involve conduct at a college campus or students (that I can see).
Thus, while we can admit the severity of this particular case, we should not allow her to get away with this false generalization.
* God help me but, not meaning any disrespect, I read as much of her diatribe as I could, scanned most of it and so help me God it looks as though she was so drunk she pretty much was complicit in what happened. Did anyone read the whole thing? Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m serious. I don’t condone rape. But she seemed to have gone along with most or all of what happened. I just couldn’t get through the whole long, self-absorbed blabber.
* I’m not offended. I really don’t know what happened, but it’s a given that the woman in question was so drunk she has no memory of going to the party with her sister or anything that happened after that until she woke up in the hospital. (She was about 4 years older than the guy.)
There’s no question that some kind of sexual assault took place inasmuch as she blacked out, lost consciousness, and with a BAC three times the limit for intoxication was clearly in no position to give consent. However, in fact, no one claims PIV; it is claimed that he touched her down there and was dry humping her. Outside of that, I don’t know what to say, except that, clearly, if someone drinks that much they bear some responsibility for their actions.
As for her statement, I thought it was incredibly self-indulgent. I expect she will go public in short order to draw even more attention to herself, and her literary skills.
* …the happy privileged face of a white man named Bill Clinton. Another picture of him smiling, please. Because this is what a presidential sexual predator looks like. And that’s the truth too many people refuse to acknowledge.
* They should have run Petula’s photo along with that of the rapist:
I’m not sure that Petula really needs to be worried about being raped.
To me, the circumstances of the “rape” are not all that clear cut – two very drunk college students left a party together. The female has no memory of consenting or not consenting to sex. Apparently he didn’t get very far – his conviction was for fingering her, and “intent” to commit rape. It sounds like if anyone was having fun, it was her, at least up until the point where they were interrupted. She was supposedly unconscious but presumably walked to the area where the “assault” occurred. If two very drunk people fumble around in the dark, who raped whom? It’s my understanding that a lot of college women get drunk specifically in order to lower their sexual inhibitions although they often misjudge and end up black out drunk or unconscious (or sometimes even dead).
Other than the fact that this fellow has Haven Monahan good looks, the circumstances don’t make him the Great White Defendant, at least not to me. If she was a stranger walking down the street and Turner jumped out and dragged her into the bushes (the way actual black/Hispanic rapists often do), THEN he would be the Great White Defendant, but this case was far from that.
* You know how it’s always the most repulsive specimens can’t stop talking about how all men want to rape them?
It’s called bragging.
* I tried to explain to a friend tonight that people bring their preconceptions to these internet stories and they are often false, but the preconception determines their first (and sometimes final) tack on the subject.
I explained that when Harambe the gorilla was shot apparently most people assumed the kid was white, which is why there are youtube videos of black talk DJ’s excoriating the mother and the zoo for killing the gorilla. Also SJW types, and also me. But, when it turned out that the kid was black, all of a sudden the gorilla was “just an animal” and also that “it could have happened to anyone.” (Except for me, I still am unhappy with the the shooting and the mother.)
In this case, people see (a) white kid, (b) sexual assault (which automatically becomes “rape”), and (c) assumes penetration. So everyone assumes that this was an imagined entitled white kid Haven Monahaning some freshman who only wanted directions to the library.
In fact, there is no evidence of penetration, which is why the rape charges were dropped, both of them were drunk, the woman exceedingly so, there is no clear evidence when or for how long she lost consciousness, she claims no memory of the campus party until the following morning when she sobered up in the hospital, but nevertheless wrote a 12,000 word victim impact statement about how her life had been ruined, and even how her attacker’s life was ruined, culminating in a quite inappropriate comparison of herself and the perp with the Twin Towers on 9/11. (Color me suspicious about her memory loss; I know people who have drunk to blackout status, they don’t forget an entire evening.)
On the other hand, the young man insists that they met at the party, where the 23 y.o. plaintiff attended with her “baby sister” and who danced, flirted, made out and engaged in other consensual behavior with him, before leaving with him and falling down behind the dumpster where they engaged in further sexual behavior.
I will be quite honest and say I don’t know what actually happened, I know the young guy tried to run when two Swedes came by on their bicycles at 1 AM. But OTOH there clearly was a sexual assault because her level of intoxication (at least 3x BAC) would have made it impossible for her to consent. Therefore I have no problem with the final resolution in this case.
But the problem is that most people freaking out about this case simply assume that it was penetrative rape in the usual way; they simply don’t know the facts, and they make up their minds on the initial idea, and try as you might they will not budge; counter-intuitively indeed many of the people condemning him now want him to go to prison so he can be raped there; which of course is quite bizarre but there’s a heart of darkness in a lot of SJW types.
* I (almost) can’t believe this is the Washington Post and not The Huffington Post.
This woman is disturbed; a real nutcase hater of white men. Period.
I’m also suspicious of anyone who claims to have “totally lost their memory” while drinking. If you just pass out drunk, you still remember things up to the point that you fall asleep/unconscious. There is no way that someone would have absolutely no recollection of the HOURS spent at a party before they passed out.
I think many “blackouts” are probably psychological. It’s telling that some people claim to regularly black out while other people can get drunk to the point of minor alcohol poisoning and still remember everything.
* Part of the issue here is that liberal journalists project their experiences to the rest of the country. Liberal journalists are generally SWPL types who either don’t go to colleges with strong athletic programs and lots of black athletes, or don’t travel in the same social circles as black students. If they are friends with blacks or associate with them, they’re generally nerdy or SWPL type blacks, not ordinary blacks or black athletes. They generally don’t hang out with black athletes or go to the same parties. So when they say that “this is what campus predators look like”, part of what they mean is that they generally aren’t in a position to be affected by black predators on campus, who commit most of the rapes overall, because they generally avoid blacks in the first place.
* The gist of that article is that Brock Turner deserved hatred because he has blond hair and blue eyes – I can’t see any other reason for all that bile and hostility.
Pure racial hatred in other words.
The white race – the Judas race.
* The victims letter makes it sound like the violations she suffered were mainly in the hospital, her vagina being photographed and poked for hours by nurses gathering evidence before letting her shower. If no one told her she had been raped, she might not have had to suffer.
* They know exactly what they’re doing.
They lie to maintain the anti-white narrative.
It’s not just this – the pattern repeats over and over – the filthy media lie to maintain their anti-white narrative and they’ve been doing it for 50+ years.
* He was a freshman. My guess is that they were really drunk. Started grinding on the dance floor anonymously. Started making out. Went somewhere private (he’s a freshman so he doesn’t have a room at the frat house). This was probably all with very little to zero talking.
If I were trying to argue on his defense, I would make a big deal about this next point. He fingers her. Is this something a rapist does to an unconscious girl? I’m guessing she was givong some kind of indication that he took for her enjoying it.
At some point she probably passed out or was at least very close to it. Then the swedes arrive and he runs away. He clearly feels as though he has been caught, so there is an indication of a guilty drunken mind.
im not sure this kid is a predator. Drunken hookup culture is just going to lead to things like this. Perhaps if it was made clear that normal women don’t want to get drunk and have one night stands rather than it being a common sitcom plot. Perhaps men should be encouraged to be chivalrous or of the reputation for being a cad was actually considered a bad thing. What if, gasp, we returned to an era of chaperoned interactions between teenage single mean and women. This disgusting situation is pretty close to what passes for courtship among college kids. Feminism ia part of the cause and is the only socially acceptable “solution” to this.
* Here’s an angle which is worth consideration: Was Turner juicing? To be on the swim team at Stanford is quite an achievement. Also, the attack he engaged in is out of character for the kind of students they have at Stanford. Last, the police report, which seems pretty believable, says that Turner still had an erection after he’d been chased, tackled, and held down by some other students.
Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.
To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)
In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.
The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.
The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:
Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”
No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.
Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.
Posted inRape|Comments Off on WP: Why the Stanford attacker’s smiling photo is far more telling than any mugshot
* It’s absolutely nutty. No disrespect intended, Steve – you have been fighting a lonely and important fight for a very, very long time. You were the only “raycisss” I ever read when I was a leftist, a decade or more ago, and you surely qualify as one of the intellectual godfathers of the AltRight. (I don’t even know, were you writing for Spencer/TakiMag back when he was originally trying to make the term “Alternative Right” happen?)
But you have little to do directly with “neo-reaction”. No one he mentioned has anything to do with neo-reaction. Not only was the Douthat essay he cited not about neo-reaction, I wouldn’t be surprised if Douthat has never heard of neo-reaction. It seems like Tyler Cowen has vaguely heard the term a few times, got a mistaken understanding of what it went, and ran with it.
* The fact of the matter is, neo-reaction consists of frustrated libertarians who have realized that people will never democratically institute their absurd ideology. So rather than re-think radical liberalism, they rethink representative government. Naturally, they also have a lot of dislike for blacks, who are very antagonistic to them politically as having very tribal, unliberal worldivews. They are also antagonistic to them socially, being urban-dwelling criminals.
Honestly, the fact that neo-reaction is a species of liberalism makes it mostly incoherent- it tries to criticize the regent ideology on utilitarian grounds. Moldbug’s beef with modernity was city-crime, thought-blindspots wrt to race, etc. He criticized it on the guns and butter issues which modernity excels at.
Because neo-reaction is essentially benthamite in values (and in intellectual pedigree), it also makes it the most appealing branch of the alt-right for liberal journalists and academics to interact with. No one thinks moldbug and Justine tunney are closet brownshirts, or their radical libertarianism could lead to anything like Hezbollah. Its just bay area weirdos playing dress up.
* Steve, did that description of Neoreaction seem to describe your own views accurately? In the dissident-right sphere, the term neoreaction comes out of the works of Moldbug and Land, which in turn is based on Carlyle, Froude, Maine, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Jouvenel. So by that definition of Neoreaction, Cowen’s piece is way off.
But it seems like what Cowen did is define Sailerism, and then apply the label “neo-reaction” to describe your own general world view. In that sense the piece seems to be more on the mark. He still missed pretty badly in his first point — it’s not just culture that matters, it’s genes and culture.
* I’ve never really thought of you as explicitly NRx.
But I suppose I might have to classify you as operationally in agreement with NRx, and highly influential compared to anyone else in the NRx sphere.
In other words: yes. You’re NRx to about the same extent that Nietzsche is NRx.
To be utilitarian, I will say this: if people googling NRx found Steve Sailer as their first gateway drug to NRx, that would be better in 95% of cases than if they got referred to, for example, Nick Land or Steve Hsu.
* I think you’re Sui generis.
I certainly don’t think of you as neoreactionary, but you are probably the only figure on the alt-right generally that each sub-group (NRx included) admires and identifies with.
* Swift, Hobbes, Aristotle…. this fella has lumped you in with some big fish. High praise indeed.
I suppose history could give you the same name recognition.
But only if we win.
* As a commenter there suggested, the neo-reaction is more of a subset of the alt-right, while his list of people is much broader. For me, what puts the alt in alt-right are three principles taken together:
1) Intelligence and many behaviors have a genetic component
2) Culture and institutions matter and some are better than others
3) Humans have a tendency to see the world in terms of in-group and out-group and that’s very hard to change.
Lee Kuan Yew fits this when he says that multi-ethnic nations don’t work well because of (3) and so it’s better to have single-ethnic nations
Robert Putnam does not. Even though he believes that trust matters for the quality of life in nations (2) and diversity reduces trust (3), he argues that this can be easily overcome by education (contra 3)
This still allows for quite a bit of variation. In the blogging world, I see Sailer and Moldbug as having very different views on the world although they would likely both subscribe to 1-3 (but that’s enough to get you excommunicated from civil society)
Neo-reaction defined narrowly (say, as described by Scott Alexander) seems kind of goofy and hard to tie to an intellectual tradition.
* I think Steve is too down-to-earth to be NRx, and too nice to be #AltRight. His stubborn insistence on noticing things has made him a hero to us all, though.
* Neoreaction is a rejection of the Enlightenment narrative that both liberals and conservative have bought, which is used by the elites to oppress the people.
The Enlightenment narrative was never coherent and never made sense. Even in times of the Enlightenment, it was only a political tool for the bourgeoisie to fight the Ancient Regime elites. Once the new bourgeois elite won the fight, the Enlightenment narrative became the official ideology of the land and people was brainwashed with it from the crib to the grave, by schools, books and any other cultural artifact. This way, an incoherent and contradictory ideology was imposed on the population, not using arguments but by using repetition and hinting that thinking otherwise made you a bad person.
Several centuries of brainwashing made the thought of rejecting the Enlightenment narrative unthinkable. But without seeing the world as it is (instead of seeing it like our fantasies want it to be), it is impossible to stop the decline of Western society.
This may appear very abstract, but I can type an example real quick. According to the Enlightenment narrative, all men are equal and all cultures are equal. As a result, importing massive amounts of Muslim people in Europe is no big problem, because these people are equal to the European people.
If you think otherwise, you are a racist, a religious fanatic, a contemptible human being that wants some races to oppress others. So your opinion doesn’t count and if you dare to tell it in public you will be ostracized, as a guilty of heresy, so your heretical opinions don’t corrupt the general public. Who are you going to believe, the official ideology or your lying eyes?
The list of thinkers that Steve wrote are very different between them but all of them reject the Enlightenment narrative, which it is considered today “the truth and the good” but it is only a very specific ideology of a specific period in the period of decadence of a specific civilization.
* Neo-reaction seems a reasonable term, for a growing political movement that is close to but perhaps not identical to Alt Right. The progressive agenda of the post-war liberal consensus has spiraled out of control and lost contact with the empirical evidence on a range of important policy problems. For example, affirmative action policy is now entirely out of step with empirical evidence — and in fact empirical evidence is explicitly forbidden in affirmative action policy unless it confirms the (false) orthodoxy. Open borders policies are completely undemocratic and ignore the wishes of the people in several countries, including the USA. Neo-reaction refers to the new, quite different reactive movement against this out-of-control “liberal” elite agenda. Neo-reaction is entirely separate from the the William-Buckley-style free-markets conservative movement.
* Steve Sailer is alt-right but not NRx. NRx being a constituent part of the alt-right, but by no means are all alt-rightists NRx. Basically the acid test for NRx is hereditary monarchy good or bad.
While we’re on this topic, here is my proposed definition of Alt-Right:
One is Alt-Right if one’s rightist politics are chiefly motivated by some form of anti-egalitarianism, AND one is at least less than comfortable with identifying one’s self with the incumbent categories of rightist politics.
When I floated this definition at OD, someone responded to me stating that he was disappointed that I didn’t include some race based entry barrier.
I have to clear something up before everyone gets confoozled. Don’t be all Rossington-Collins Band-like up in here and misunderstand me.
My proposed def of alt-right isn’t me wishing with my heart, it’s me observing and thinking and concluding with my brain. IOW, I didn’t include any racialist-exclusive implications in my def NOT because I want it that way, but because that is the way the alt-right is currently constituted and presenting itself. If a movement can comfortably fit Anglin, Moldbug, Roosh and Jared Taylor into it, as the alt-right does, then you have to conclude that explicit white racialism or explicit anti-Semitism isn’t a distinguishing characteristic and neither one is a sine qua non entry barrier. At that point, you have to find another through-line, and I think I have.
The fact that there’s no race-based entry barrier into the alt-right is the source of a lot of contention, and is why a lot of people who are alt-right, to the extent that they fit the definition of it, don’t like the term at all. And that’s not even counting those of us who are strongly if not extremely opposed to, and paranoid about the J tribe. That crowd doesn’t like the term alt-right all precisely because the net is cast too wide, or if they like it, they think that it should only apply exclusively to them.
As for me, I do think the lack of a race based blocking bug is a problem.
* The probability that someone sympathizes w/ folks who call themselves neo-reactionary is at least 50% if that person accepts HBD.
Otherwise it is roughly zero.
HBD is central because if true then conventional wisdom is wrong about most everything of consequence.
And it is true.
No other insight claimed by someone like Moldbug is as certain to be true or as consequential.
So nowadays neo-reaction is HBD.
But that just shows how stupid it is to try to ideologically classify people spaced by centuries. Steve talks HBD not because he’s got some fetish for the past and hates gadgetry and is scared of new ideas but because it’s the lowest hanging fruit in [The current year!].
If Steve were born in the 1880′s we know what he’d be – a progressive like his boy Galton.
* To quote Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
* Neoreaction seems to attract people who have trouble keeping their abstractions separate from reality. Viz, the overlap between libertarians and neoreaction. It’s the late-night-dorm-discussion of rightishness. Granted, some like Moldbug are smart and put a lot of thought into their ideas, but re-booting all of society or starting new religions is not serious.
Cowen’s summation is wrong but useful to him and his ilk because they want to define and dismiss dissent from the ruling narrative. People like Unz and Razib Khan don’t even fit the broader term alt right, let alone neoreaction. However, if the TCs of the world spent their time dealing with all the individual issues rather than pigeon-holing people, they wouldn’t have time to think up more “because economics” reasons to support immigration.
* Steve Sailer is barely ever quoted as a neoreactionary thinker and so far as I know he has never described himself as such. The two most prominent modern NRxers are Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) and Nick Land.
* “They both seem to be intent on destroying the world. But maybe Camacho more accidentally? The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room. Also, not a racist.”
This expresses their anxiety in a nutshell. Camacho can be managed. He knows he is not the smartest guy. He can take advice. As Prince, Camacho will listen to the vizier/advisor whispering in his ear. And this, sadly, is an eternal problem for Jews in the Diaspora: relying on a personal, private, off-the-record relationships with the Prince to resolve community problems.
* I wouldn’t say that Moldbug is a bad writer, just a voluminous one. Try reading his inspiration – Carlyle – if you want to test your patience with an idiosyncratic style. Moldbug is comparatively less fatiguing.
His division of society into five classes – the Brahmins (educational/technocratic elite) who ally with the Dalit (negro) and Helot (illegal immigrant) lower classes against the Optimates (the old-money elite) and the Vaisyas (the gainfully-employed) is perceptive. It bears some resemblance to Pareto’s theory of elites, and to James Burnham on the “managerial revolution.” Joel Kotkin has developed a similar analysis in his book The New Class Conflict (2014), seemingly without his being aware of Moldbug or Moldbug being aware of him.
Moldbug traces the intellectual ancestry of the ascendant Brahmin class to New England Puritanism. In this he reminds me of Santayana, who remarked that the Boston liberals of his day were just exponents of a Puritanism bereft of its Christianity, so that its fanaticism and moral vanity were all that remained of it.
He is not a monarchist, but believes that democratic politics are inherently unstable (so did Aristotle) and always end in one faction trying to manipulate the franchise to give itself the advantage. The latest example of this is of course the importation of millions of “ringers” to become future Democrats. So, elective governments cannot be reformed and made to conduct themselves responsibly simply by restricting the franchise to taxpayers or property owners, as it was in the nineteenth century. Sooner or later the temptation would again arise among politicians to “dissolve the people and elect another,” and we’d be back in the same old fix.
Moldbug’s idea of a stable political order is to break the world up into thousands of city-states like Liechtenstein or Singapore, owned by their rulers (who could be individuals but more likely would be joint-stock companies). If you didn’t like the one where you were you could move to another, voting with your feet. The term he uses for this is neocameralism. The original cameralism was an Austrian version of mercantilism, expounded by the Graf von Hornigk, J.J. Becher, and the Baron von Schröder; it was adapted to the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, which they wanted to be run like country estates, for the profit of their owners, but on a grander scale.
This seems to me to be the weakest part of his œuvre. He has good aperçus about human nature, inherent inequality and the hierarchy of society, the failings of today’s managerial/academic elite, and the methods they use to exert control. Among the best parts of his blog were the extensive quotations from and links to the works of 19th and early 20th century writers who have fallen from favor or even from our general awareness, not because they were wrong but because they don’t fit modern politically-correct expectations.
* The AltRight is everyone on the Right excluded from the current power structure and its worldview. Lots of odd little groups that exist mainly online in their own little spheres (though they have recently begun cross pollinating intellectually.) It’s like the endless subgenres of electronic dance music or Heavy Metal in a way. Exponents could happily blather on about the essential differences between Hair Metal/Death Metal/Stoner Metal, but to someone outside looking in it’s all just the same noise.
NeoReaction is the goony poli-sci/philosophical subset of the AltRight. The founder and principle exponent is definitely Moldbug. It seems like every other current within the AltRight bastardized and adopted a lot of his terminology and analysis without pining for a return to monarchy or his fetish for ending Democracy.
I lump people like you, Kevin Macdonald and Derbyshire in with the EvoCon section of the AltRight. Not overly philosophical per say, more about looking at scientific data/news/history and offering policy prescriptions within the Democratic framework or a widening of the current worldview.
* The only thing all these guys have in common is they deviate from liberal/humanist thinking. Aristotle, Franklin and probably Montesquieu can arguably be lumped together as emprirical realists or noticers, while Heidegger and Nietzsche are non-egalitarian critics of right-wing liberalism and Christianity. Steve would be most prolific blogger in the tradition of Aristotle and Franklin, while Radix would probably be the go to site for those who like Hiedegger and Nietzsche.
* Crimethink is a lot easier when you see thousands of posts on a news thread saying the same thing. It was a lot harder a decade ago when it was just Steve, Vdare, Majority Rights, maybe a few others specific sites such as Jihadwatch and of course the anti-Semitic WN sites such as Stormfront. If one tried posting crimethink on news comment sections or elsewhere it would usually get deleted.
There is lots to notice in addition to HBD. Reality of Islam, origins of PC, communism, I’m sure there are others.
* MOLDBUG: This stuck elevator reminds me of the status of nineteenth-century German society, as Schopenhauer once said. Can it be that we do not move? Of course! However, this poorly constructed elevator could only exist under a democratic society. Under a proper monarchy, everyone would be on the appropriate floor already, and rare movements between floors would be easily accommodated by occasional use of the stairs. Further, in predemocratic societies, the use of stairs kept everyone in sufficient good health, preventing the oblate geometries that most American men find vexatious.
ROOSH: Have you *ever* been laid?
FRED: (pushes emergency button and pulls out a bottle of Padre Kino) Yeah, we’re stuck, second floor. I’ll wait.
*
1. America is not becoming a better nation. The American nation has been invaded and swallowed up by a liberal multicultural empire that is distinctly inferior in almost every way to the nation it has conquered and suppressed.
2. This is blatant stupidity. Slavery was never a white invention and most rape in the USA is committed by blacks. White gun violence rates are equal to Holland; blacks are entirely responsible for the high US gun violence rates.
3. The USA has no tendency towards drunkenness; at 9.2 liters per capita per year, it consumes less alcohol on average than nearly every European nation and ranks 46th globally.
4. This isn’t even an argument, let alone a convincing one. It’s an appeal to personal incredulity combined with political correctness. Whether it seems highly unlikely or not, the fact is that an absence of white men has reliably correlated with a failure to imitate the successes of white culture.
America doesn’t have to be a global policeman and there is no way to “make immigration work”. Innovation is not about numbers; see Scotland and the Industrial Revolution for just one obvious example.
This is not a serious critique, let alone a convincing one. If these are the “problems” with neo-reaction, then obviously we should all be neo-reactionaries. Tyler Cowen is more intelligent than the average cuckservative, but he is still too cucky to abandon his emotional commitment to equalitarianism.
Every philosophy must sooner or later choose to accommodate or reject reality. Progressivism, liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism all require the rejection of readily observable reality. That is why they are doomed to eventual failure and irrelevance.
* Sailer comes across as a moderate who covers the wacky cultural marxist influence on our society and points out the inconsistencies of their agenda. Most moderates probably would feel the same if they noticed all the garbage spewing from the left. Steve has an extraordinary memory of what America was like 30+ years ago and thus can analyze the trends better than others. Since he remembers what the leftists were advocating 30 years ago, he is better able to show how they have been proven wrong. Few moderates would have the courage to write like Steve, even if they did take notice of the incoherent leftists agenda.
Steve is on the side of Americans who have been harmed by the Leftists abandonment of economic issues. This includes most Americans, Black, hispanic and white. He seems to have genuine concern for the oppressed, which in the past was a leftist concern. He pints out the damage the leftists agenda has caused to working Americans and seems to oppose the billionaire class which promotes the culture wars, and divides Americans.
* Whatever neoreaction is, Steve Sailer does not belong there. Please consider the following :
1) The Alt-right is a Generation X, Millenial thing. Steve Sailer is a late boomer.
2) They come from either a liberal/apolitical or libertarian background. Steve Sailer remains basically a Reagan Democrat.
3) They were recruited either through the Manosphere ( Roosh, Roissy, Vox Day) or through Mencius Moldbug. I doubt Steve Sailer is even remotely interested in either of those movements. ( Moldbug is unreadable).
4) Most read Steve Sailer and are interested or proficient in HBD lore.
4) some are monarchists, some are “minarchists”. Steve Sailer is a unionist Republican .
5) Many want to split up the USA, and relocate minorities. Steve Sailer is a citizenist.
6) Some are Christian, some are atheists. Steve is a lukewarm or merely cultural Catholic.
To sum up, the only thing in common between Steve Sailer and neorectionaries is an interest in HBD and being to the left of the NY Times. Despite the obvious differences, all neorectionaries are devoted Steve Sailer readers.
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on Tyler Cowen: ‘The most significant neo-reaction thinker today probably is Steve Sailer’
Daily Mail: Saved by their mobile phones: Dozens of Jewish teenagers from London are rescued after using their handsets as distress beacons when trapped by the rising tide below the White Cliffs of Dover
Extraordinary footage taken from helicopter shows the lost students waving their phones at RNLI rescue teams
Group of 34 teenagers and two adults from London got stuck on Kent beach in area known for falling rocks
Jewish students got lost in dark after following coastal path close to Dover and would have drowned within 2 hours
Several lifeboats and a helicopter were guided to area below White Cliffs by students waving their mobile phones
Posted inJews|Comments Off on When you remove Jews from their natural habitat, this is what happens. Sad!
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
