December 29, 2015 Obama’s Muslim Faith Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Obama’s Muslim Faith

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

The ridiculous Washington Post article about Obama’s alleged “Christian faith” inspired me to view the video above.

I think it’s a pretty weird slip of the tongue. Who would say “my Muslim faith” by accident? I couldn’t imagine accidentally saying that. Even though I am sure Obama is an atheist, I think that maybe he considers himself a cultural Muslim. Remember that he grew up as a little kid in Muslim Indonesia with a Muslim stepfather. He didn’t leave Indonesia until he was nearly 10 years old, which is old enough for him to feel some sort of fond attachment to Islam.

I’ve never previously touched on an important aspect of Obama’s likely atheism. Living in a place where everyone believes in Islam, and then being moved to a place where everyone believes in something extremely different, this makes a smart person realize the arbitrariness of religious belief. It’s also the reason why so few Jews take Judaism seriously, it’s the juxtaposition of being taught one thing in Hebrew school but then being immersed in the Christian world of the United States where no one believes in anything they taught you in Hebrew school. The Hasidic elders understand this very well, which is why they wall the community off from the secular and Christian worlds to ensure their children are not influenced by anything except for Jewish brainwashing.

Obama, of course, realized that if he wanted a career in politics, being an atheist or a Muslim wouldn’t cut it, so he had to demonstrate that he had “Christian faith” (by attending Reverend Wright’s church) and then he no doubt discovered the usefulness of using Christian language to support his left-wing agenda.

COMMENTS:

* Although Black atheists are extremely rare, Obama probably is one himself. His attachment to Islam is based on the view that it is anti-colonial and linked to third-world liberation. Similarly he would regard Christianity solely in terms of liberation theology and social justice. By the way, this ideology is no different than the one espoused by the mainline Protestant churches like the Episcopal, Presbyterian, ELCA, etc.

* I always get a kick out of this one, especially how Snuffulupagus jumps in instantly to save the flub. I’m looking forward to about ten years from now when we finally start to learn something about this empty vessel President of ours.

* Not only was Obama smart enough to become a nominal “christian” for the benefit of his political career, he was also smart enough to know that he’d have to marry a black woman to be electable in those Southside Chicago districts where he got his start. (See the decline of Harold Ford, Jr’s political career to see what happens to a black politician who marries white) Let’s not forget him getting trounced badly in his 2000 Illinois congressional bid by Bobby Rush – a real, authentic mandingo with a more resounding “African big man” sort of countenance and demeanor.

I see ZERO evidence that Obama was ever the least bit involved (or attracted) to black women before Michelle. And there’s ZERO former black ex-girlfriends that have ever come forward.

It had to really pain Obama to give up white women and get with that wooookie. I guess that’s the definition of sacrifice.

* “Muslim faith” wasn’t a slip of the tongue as you can see when he corrects his media assistant for correcting him. The slip, if any, was to say “my Muslim faith” instead of “my alleged Muslim faith.” I still agree that it’s a strange slip. Can you imagine him saying “at least McCain hasn’t talked about my incompetence and failed policies”.

Even more damning is the famous NYT interview where he gives the dog whistle message to Muslims that he is one of them by reciting the Shahada in a “first-rate accent” and saying that the call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Also, his father was a Muslim which makes him Muslim according to Islamic law and indeed his religion in grade school was listed as Islam.

Finally, polls show that people in Muslim majority countries consider him a Muslim.

I’d describe him as a secular Muslim or a cultural Muslim atheist.

* I did Peace Corps in Azerbaijan, and almost everyone there thought that Obama was a Muslim. (Azerbaijan is majority Shi’ite Muslim but they’re not especially fanatical given their history under the Soviet Union.)

Their reasoning was that his father was a Muslim, which means that he himself would be Muslim, and Barack and Hussein are Muslim names. I said that Obama had a Muslim father, but he converted to Christianity and is likely an atheist. I don’t know how many people there understood how that worked.

Posted in Barack Obama, Islam | Comments Off

Education and HBD in the NY Times

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

Lion of the Blogosphere:

1. In a high school in Greenville, South Carolina, the percent of students graduating from high school is rising. But it turns out, their performance on standardized tests is simultaneously falling. “Only one in 10 Berea students were ready for college-level work in reading, and about one in 14 were ready for entry-level college math.” The value of a high school diploma as a mechanism for certifying that the holder has some minimum level of ability becomes worthless if everyone is given a high school diploma.

The high school in the article is 38% white, 30% black and 28% Hispanic. The white students probably have parents who are too poor or too unconcerned about their children’s wellbeing to move to a better school district.

2. The West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in New Jersey has the exact opposite problem. Too many Asian students. The students are 65% Asian.

A white parent told the NY Times, “My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé.’” The district is trying to make the schools less stressful, and the Asian parents are complaining about that, saying that the whites are trying to “hold their children back.”

Asian parents just don’t understand the benefits of self-actualization.

COMMENTS:

* These people are miserable grinds. They are mostly memorizing things, and cheating a great deal. America was a pretty nice place without Asians, why is having them an improvement?

* I’m old and remember The West before 3rd world immigration began. It was a nice place. If Asians are so smart then why don’t they stay in Asia and make it a nice place? Why do they move to white countries?

* Because Jews have a higher verbal ability and appear to be more extroverted, they have dominated in fields such as Law, Academia and show business (which includes politics), not afforded to East Asians, and it appears this will remain in effect for a long time.

* Several advantages of north east asians come to mind:

a) low birth rate, unlike blacks or especially muslims (the latter breed like rabbits here in Germany)
b) lower aggressiveness than blacks and especially muslims (the MAOA-2R [“warrior gene”] allele has an occurrence of about 15% in the arab population, whereas it only occurs to about .1 to .5% in Europeans).
c) usually smart. They have a higher mean IQ than blacks or muslims, both being pretty dumb. Technical ability of muslims is quite low, unlike that of the average german, for example; north east asians have demonstrated that they, too, are able to invent stuff. I’ve got some Samsung screens and a phone, switches and routers from TP-Link (the latter running OpenWrt), so it’s OK. Muslim engineers or scientists in Germany are very rare (if at all), they won’t make it.

However, at the same time I want to retain my own cultural and genetic heritage. Germany has a very high culture, with great art, philosophy, literature and science having been produced over the last few hundred years. We shouldn’t throw that away because of lesser folks overrunning us (like the muslims in Germany). The Japanese even had readable authors like Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai or Natsume Soseki, and they have Schopenhauer and Heidegger societies. The complete opposite of muslims, who despise books and learning and greatness in general.

All in all it can be said that blacks and muslims are the worst immigrants a first world nation can have.

* Japan has a population of about 120 million out of well over a billion people in Asia. (A huge amount depends on how you define “Asia”, but the point stands.) For the most part, it’s best to take the attitude that when you get, say, a billion Chinese, you get China and not even the Chinese want to live there.

* Asians don’t understand parenting has no impact on life outcomes.

* No impact on adult IQ. I’m sure it impacts other outcomes, such as what college you can get into and how hard you will work to get through it.

* People of all races cheat in academics. But I am talking about tendencies and proportionality. Asians cheat much more on exams than whites, blacks, or latinos, disproportionately more. Google “Asian cheater stereotype” for more information. This is not to say Asians score better only due to cheating. They tend to be smarter, study harder, and cheat harder.

I grew up in NYC surrounded by all sorts of people and Asian abuse of welfare is well known. Asians are known to run cash businesses and don’t show income. They then use low income to qualify for low-income housing, food stamps, EITC, etc. Grandparents who have never given a dime to the US govt are brought over from China and instantly qualify for food stamps, medicare, and social security. Anchor babies are babies born in the US for the sole benefit of collecting citizen benefits w/o having to bear citizen duties.

I don’t think Asians are the worst people ever. They make better immigrants than most. But there is a myth of Asians being model minorities that don’t burden the US . This is not true.

* Will Whites or Asians win the battle of the ice people?

* The Jews will win. Asians will grind their way to doing fine. The whites may self destroy, otherwise they should do better then Asians. The Jews will do the best in this mess. However, if Trump wins and does his thing for 8 years it’s gonna be Jews, whites and Asians. Trump is gonna breath new life into white America, or at least this is what I think and this is why I vote for him.

* I’m not so optimistic that the Jews will win. A Trump victory could be a prelude to a further shift (after him) towards far-right nationalism that is hostile to Jews. Alternatively, a Hilary victory would speed up the third worldization of the United States. A U.S. filled with third worlders, many of them Muslims, could be very hostile to Jews. Of these two scenarios, I prefer the first in that at least some aspects of traditional American life would be preserved, just not for us. Seems like a good idea to keep the passport up to date and a packed bag ready in the closet.

* Jews are happy to know that their tribe dominate NYC and LA, two very important titan cities of specific industries of status: Wall St and Hollywood. No one cares about the south and flyover prole country in the grander scheme of things, where gentile proles call home.

East Asians have no place of their own, not even the Bay of Pigs in Silicon Valley, where Whites dominate the tech industry. Asians generally do not boss Whites in their cubicles.

* American nationalism is not hostile to Jews and never has been. Open borders will not only bring in more people hostile to Jews, but will also dilute Jewish political influence. If you vote on the basis of what’s good for the Jews, better vote Trump.

As T said, most Americans regard Jews as regular white folks, and can’t even tell they’re Jewish unless the Jews in question are of the whiny strident NY / NJ kind.

* I grew up in flyover country, and my family and the few other Jewish families who lived near us weren’t invisible. The “town gentry” were mostly very nice to us, but it was hit or miss among other strata of the population, Just about everyone in town went to church on Sundays (and Wednesdays), and everyone noticed that we didn’t This situation pertained in pre-Hitler Germany and Austria also. There were prominent politically liberal Jews in the large cities who aroused the ire of the rightwing nationalists, but there were also a lot of ordinary Jews living in small towns in places like Bavaria and Hesse. Most were outwardly assimilated and were patriotic, even nationalist. But of course we know that their neighbors turned on them in the end.

Posted in Asians, Diversity | Comments Off

The New Star Wars Movie

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* One good thing about the new Star Wars is the diversity. Most of the heroes are non-white while all of the villains are are white, thus reflecting the reality of the world.

* Heredity gives you a quick way to take a low-level character and make him or her suddenly very powerful or important. She’s born with enormous force sensitivity, or he’s the heir to the throne, or she’s the one who’s been prophesied for centuries, or whatever. Otherwise, your low-level nobody character would need to spend a decade or two getting the skills necessary to play a major role in world events.

To use an example for the original movie, I’m pretty sure that no matter how good you were at handling farm equipment, you’re not a good candidate for being given a top of the line military plane and sent on a critical mission a week after you leave the farm and join the rebelion. Unless the Force is really strong with you….

* Heredity has always been a part of myth-making/fairy tales/sword-and-sandal fantasy tales: how many old fairy tales are built on the idea of a poor neglected child really being the heir to a throne? The Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson and the Arabian Nights books are filled with the “lost prince” tales. And we are no less immune to the idea these days.

For example, in the 20th Century alone, Tolkien’s LOTR series features not one, but two “blood heirs to the throne” motifs: (1) Aragorn/Strider, the heir to the kingdom; and (2) Frodo, blood heir to Bilbo, who must shoulder his family burden and destroy the ring his relative brought in.

Superman’s mythos is also part of this: I’m not really a dumb farmboy, I’m a super powered alien, the last of my race, only pretending to be a dumb hick!

Cinderella and Snow White are also along this track, except the greatness/inheritance of the girls is no secret: some evil stepmother has just seduced the wealthy and powerful father, and then persecuted and driven the princess away; she only need be restored to the throne everyone knows she has.

It’s also a common childhood fantasy to wonder if your parents aren’t your parents, but that you’re secretly a princess or prince or some other heir to greatness. So the idea appeals to that part of our childish psyche.

And we’ve done it clearly in politics. The Kennedy’s have been perennial political front runners despite the only major accomplishments of the family were getting elected in 1960, looking good on camera, and unfortunately having two very public assassinations.

People like the idea of all-powerful but benevolent families because mass democracy is rather unnatural; most people like kings and emperors and just trusting one group to run things and not make us decide about anything. This is noted in the Bible, where the early Israelites are having a lot of success with adhoc democratically-elected Judges running things, but just hate it, and beg God for a king. That gives them Saul and a whole lot of trouble.

It’s a lot messier in real history than the mythos, however, since good rulers don’t always beget good rulers. Marcus Aurelius begat Commodus, after all. This is what Plato noticed a long time ago, which is why in the Republic he goes into such detail about how to choose and train rulers from childhood and cull the bad ones.

* We’ve lived in an ostensibly enlightened, egalitarian and democratic age for two centuries now. But look at how stories set in traditional societies based on hierarchy dominate many people’s fantasy lives in the 21st Century – Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Outlander, Frozen, Star Wars, and many of the vampire tales. We find something emotionally unsatisfying about the world of levelled, fungible humanity created by the Enlightenment, and we recognize on some level that human nature finds it true fulfillment in the preceding order that the philosophers and revolutionaries in the Enlightenment discredited, destroyed and replaced with their rationalist utopian schemes.

The feeling that we live diminished lives because of the Enlightenment exists now mainly as a splinter in our minds. But thinkers in the emerging Dark Enlightenment have started to figure this out and made it explicit, most notably Steve.

* It’s called escapism. People also like to watch horror movies and The Wire. That doesn’t mean people want to be hacked to death by psychopaths or live in Baltimore. Most people who aren’t prepubescent girls or gay men don’t want to live in some fairytale medieval style kingdom.

* Why not make a pro empire movie? Or a movie where the empire is led by someone who is more of a complex character like Augustus or Trajan. I wonder why nobody bothers to point out that the most likely result of the fall of President Snow in the Hunger Games is civil war and something like crisis of the 3rd century, instead of the sort of idyllic democracy that you see in the movie and books.

* Being good looking, charming/entertaining, and popular are the three most import qualities in modern human society. That’s why the Kennedys are such a glamorous family.

JFK Jr. was outrageously handsome. If he were alive, I guarantee he would’ve been a major contender for the Democratic nomination. On looks alone.

Nixon, despite being a powerful politician, was never glamorized. Why? Because he was ugly, awkward (“you won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more”), and nobody liked him.

* Nixon actually was a pretty handsome guy, though later caricatures exaggerated his hunching nature, his sharp nose, and his receding hairline. This was pointed out, in all places, in Mad Men, when the ad agency is talking about running his campaign, and make the point : “He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero. Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Dick Nixon is a winner.”

Also, most history books and media types exceedingly exaggerate the Nixon/Kennedy TV debates, claiming that Kennedy’s TV appearance was just so much better than Nixon’s ugliness that that won the presidency for him. In reality, if you watch the debate, both men do fine, and Nixon looks pretty dignified, and it barely moved the public needle. What really won for Kennedy was every catholic (especially Irish Catholic) pulling the lever for him and the crooked Chicago pols and Giancana delivering Illinois for Kennedy —which Nixon could have challenged legitimately, but chose not to.

Later media types vilified Nixon because he ran and later won without their approval. Bush, Romney, McCain, etc. all ran with at least some media types approving them, and the others at least grudgingly oking them if they did beat the favorite. The press was outraged when Nixon won in ’68 after he was supposed to be dead and never let up on him after that; when they declared someone dead, he stayed dead, darn it.

* Help me out here but the impression I’m getting is that young boys are no longer a market worth catering to.

Star Wars – girl hero.
Hunger Games – girl hero.
Tomorrowland – girl hero
Twilight – girl hero.
Harry Potter – boy hero.

Are young boys going to be buying Star Wars girl (Rey) action figures and imaging themselves to be her (despite the best efforts of leftists and gender fluidists).

What films am I missing where the protagonist is a young/teenage boy who is on an adventure and triumphs?

Is Disney counting on young girls being as deep into Star Wars fandom as young boys? The majority of women that I dated had never even seen any Stars Wars movies and of the ones who had, all were of the opinion that it wasn’t all that and many watched simply to either become culturally literate or their previous boyfriends made them watch the films.

Who is a young boy supposed to identify with in this film?

I do note though that the Disney marketing department has struck a deal with Cover Girl cosmetics for a Star Wars line of cosmetics. Too bad you can’t short individual deals like this because I suspect that there aren’t many broads out there who will make a beeline to the cosmetics counter in order to buy some Star Wars mascara.

* I don’t think the Titanic gambit works here. Young girls become repeat viewers of Titanic because they want to see dreamy Leonardo and fantasize about him being their boyfriend doesn’t quite map onto young boys going to see Star Wars because the fantasize about Rey protecting them from Kylo.

* 1977 Star Wars was based on Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Everything since The Matrix has been based on comic books.

Audiences for the former thought in literary hypertext out of a common fund of myth, epic, and story cycle.

Audiences for the latter need narrative to, like mommy, hover and explain everything, less discomfort ensue from the intolerable condition of not understanding everything at first glance.

I really don’t see, however, that 1977 Star Wars was “creating a new universe.” The space opera Western was at least 40 years old by that time.

* Not to mention that Hamill is a horrible actor and was terribly miscast in the original films. He never came across as heroic, charismatic or even virile. And he sounded like a dweeb. That’s why Han Solo stole the show from him as well as the girl. Lucas rewrote the script so Harrison Ford could become Luke’s brother in law.
Carrie Fisher was also a terrible casting decision. Poor acting skills, no screen presence and frankly not that good-looking. I remember even as a 9 year old I was disappointed by her bikini body, whereas in the movie posters she was supposed to be stunning.

* I thought it was striking how well the movie embodied a few ISteve themes:

a) The KKKrazy clue that keeps the Coalition of the Diverse together is the presence of literal Nazis right around the corner.
b) The Evil WMs are oddly both infinitely powerful in their ability to cause harm and incredibly weak when confronted.
c) The individual journey of a hero who is a member of a disadvantaged group is not, as in Joseph Campbell and the original movies, to conquer their internal or moral weakness, but merely to get together with the inclusively diverse Right and the Good people. You don’t become a hero by growing or improving or questioning yourself (ala Luke with Yoda and Obiwan), but by embracing your identity and joining with those are like you or who, most of all, Finally Understand You.

* Look, it’s only been 150 years since someone assembled the first understanding of the biology of heredity at the population level, without even knowing what its mechanisms were.

It’s only been 50 since those mechanisms started to become clear.

It’s only been 5 that iSteve readers haven’t had to feel like we need to hide in the closet every day (though I still advise it for white men with jobs in civil service…).

A lot of the “hierarchical traditional” storylines/narratives arose from a sense that something was happening at the level of hereditarianism…but just what, nobody could say. The emotional resonance with that is complex and has never been teased out from an HBD perspective. That’s unlikely to happen at the scholarly level so long as America’s universities continue to operate in the fantasy realms of Diversitopia.

But it’s pretty clear that a lot of the “traditional” myths had HBD roots. Humans struggling to understand why they are who they are, and what that portends for their lives–the fates to which their genomes condemn or exalt them.

This is why the Stoic and Buddhist philosophers’ stone of “know thyself” seems so wise and cuts so deeply. That’s sheer, raw HBD right there.

It isn’t nostalgia we’re craving, and there’s nothing wrong emotionally with The Enlightenment per se. It’s that a lot of human endeavor has been expressed in mythic and narrative language precisely because we haven’t been able to understand it simply and materially as biochemistry.

Will understanding all that make for a better life for any, many, most, or all? I can’t say. Then again, I’m content to move through my day trying to be worthy of the sacrifice of Prometheus and taking the occasional burned fingers as the price tag.

* That’s the weird thing about the media’s obsessively anti-white casting, some boys will internalize the imposed negative self image but the rest will shift to identifying with the media’s chief villains: Nazis, Crusaders, Confederate soldiers etc.

* I understand, you girls got a good-looking though inadequate male lead in Mark Hamill. We boys got the plain-looking, boring and vulgar Carrie Fisher, already a coke head at age 19. A casting couch decision, it is rumoured.

Sorry, but those two actors ruined the original Star Wars, almost as badly as the two Annakins and Jar Jar Binks in the prequels. Nathalie Portman was alright but she lacks style. Unbelievable as a princess.

* 1) 3.8 stars (out of 5). Good movie overall. Retains the “look” of the original Star Wars much better than the prequels. Ridley is awesome. However…

2) Too many recycled plot points. Does there have to be a Death Star in every damn Star Wars movie? Lucas got bashed for re-using the Death Star in ROTJ, but somehow it’s ok if Abrams does it.

3) Had no idea what their plan was vis-a-vis destroying the Death Star. Like Abrams’s first Star Trek movie, the plan to destroy it seemed off the cuff rather than well thought out.

4) The villains don’t live up to Star Wars standards. Kylo Ren looks like a poor man’s Darth Vader. The ginger who plays General Hux can’t hold a candle to Peter Cushing (aka Grand Moff Tarkin). Snoke, or Snook, or whatever his name was, looked more like Gollum or something. He’s absurd.

5) Too much Nazi allegory. Enough with that, for pete’s sake! Again, just like in Abrams’s first Star Trek movie, where they destroy Vulcan.

6) Zero explanation of what’s happened since ROTJ. Why is there a “Resistance,” and why is Princess Leia leading it?

Still it was ok. It’s Star Wars, and I needed a fix, and this movie sufficed. They could still do a lot better. Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy had a perfectly awesome villain. Pity they didn’t use him.

Posted in Genetics, Hollywood, Steve Sailer | Comments Off

REVIEW: The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

I’m reading this 2015 book by Dennis Prager.

On page XIII, he writes: “If people lived by these Commandments, little else would be needed to make a world in which armies spent their time playing football; police would rarely be needed; the doors to our homes could be left unlocked; and women would walk anywhere at any time of day or night without fear of being sexually assaulted.”

I can foresee no time when a country won’t need an army, but all the rest of the characteristics of this utopia have been normal in homogeneous white and asian communities. In Tannum Sands, Australia, where I lived for a couple of years, people routinely left their homes unlocked when they went away on vacation.

On the other hand, I can’t think of any society that observed the Ten Commandments coming close to the achievements of Japan in creating safe society and yet few Japanese pay any attention to the Ten Commandments nor do they believe in monotheism.

Prager writes: “We live in a world filled with evil and moral confusion. There is only one way out: affirmation of a God Whose primary demand of us is that we treat our fellow human beings decently. Faith in any god who makes any other primary demand will ultimately fail to solve the problem of evil.”

I’m eager to find that Jewish or Christian country that comes close to Japan’s record of civility and law-abidingness.

How do the Japanese do it without monotheism, Bible, and Jews? If the Japanese excel all monotheist societies in goodness, then what does that say about the moral necessity of monotheism?

On page XVIII, Prager writes:

Imagine for a moment a world in which there was no murder or theft. In such a world, there would be no need for armies, or police, or weapons. Men and women and children could walk anywhere, at any time or day or night, without any fear of being killed or robbed. Imagine further a world in which no one coveted what belonged to their neighbor; a world in which children honored their mother and father and the family unit thrived; a world in which people obeyed the injunction not to lie.

Japan seems closer to this ideal than any other country. Also, as a group and wherever they are in the world, people of East Asian genes come closer to these ideals than do whites who in turn come closer to these ideals than do blacks (aka Rushton’s Rule of Threes). It seems to me that race is much more important here than religious teachings. If I wanted to find a community that by and large followed the ideals of Prager’s paragraph above, I would be better served by looking at racial composition than any other variable.

Eighty three percent of African-Americans are Christians (and 79% of American blacks say religion is very important) and yet they have the highest crime rate of any racial or religious group.

A third of Japanese-Americans don’t affiliate with any religion and another 25% are Buddhist (38% identify as Christian) and yet Japanese-Americans have a tiny crime rate. How do they do it?

Posted in Dennis Prager, Diversity, Race | Comments Off

Is the KKK a “hate group?”

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

From the blog JewAmongYou:

If you ask people to give an example of a “hate group,” the first thing that will pop into many of their minds is “The KKK.” Even white nationalists sometimes like to pick on the KKK. Writing about a recent incident involving some Citadel students who wore costumes reminiscent of KKK outfits, a recent AFT article reports:

Washington (AFP) – A prestigious military college in the United States suspended eight students and launched an investigation after photos emerged of cadets posing in all-white outfits reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, an official said.
Hillary Clinton also weighed in on The Citadel college, where the Confederate battle flag flies, tweeting: “Symbols of hate create more hate. It’s time for the Confederate flag to come down at The Citadel.”
The flag was the focus of renewed impassioned debate in June after a suspected white supremacist shot dead nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — the same city where The Citadel is based.
The cadets were pictured dressed in white and with white pillow cases over their heads with two holes for the eyes, in haunting similarities to the infamous Ku Klux Klan, a white hate group.

Is the KKK a “hate group?”

The answer is clearly “No.” Firstly, the KKK is not even a group, let alone a “hate group.” According to kkk.bz:

The name Ku Klux Klan is in the public domain. This means anyone can use the name Ku Klux Klan. They can use it for good reasons or they can use it for bad reasons. There are around 200 different Klan groups in the nation. They are all locally based or at the most regionally based. Most of these groups remain local because they want to do things their own way. They all use the terminology and ceremony of the twenties and are fraternity styled. They are not politically focused and resemble a club. The average size of the Klan clubs are 6-15. There are a couple of regional Klan groups with an average membership of 50-75. Usually they are led by sincerely motivated individuals, however because they have no national affiliation, their growth, activities, and goals are limited.

Of those 200 KKK groups, there can be little doubt that many have hateful members. This is to be expected. Since the very term “KKK” is now synonymous with “Hate,” many angry and hateful people will naturally be drawn to such groups. They’ll say to themselves, “I was mugged by niggers. I was cheated by kikes. Those Mexicans stole my lawnmower again! I’m sick and tired of this; I’m gonna join THE KLAN!”

When you demonize a name, groups that call themselves by that name will attract a lot of demons. Charitable people are not encouraged to “join the KKK and make a difference.” For this reason alone, it’s prudent to be wary of people who affiliate themselves with the KKK.

What about the crimes of the past, such as the lynchings, committed by the KKK?

If we’re going to blame today’s KKK groups for crimes of the past, then we might as well blame today’s USA for its past crimes. While we’re at it, let’s hold the Democrat Party responsible for slavery and the Catholic Church culpable for the Inquisition.

The vast majority of crimes attributed to KKK organizations date from decades ago, typically from the turbulent “civil rights era.” It seems to me that more recent incidents are “second-generation” phenomena. In other words, the Left establishment has so built up the name “KKK” that crazy and violent individuals are attracted to it. This artificial bogeyman has taken on a life of its own. At the same time, Establishment pro-crime policies (such as subsidizing fatherless households, feeding black anger and entitlement, forced integration and the emasculation of whites) have enraged enough people that some of them seek out groups they consider to be the most extreme: The KKK and neo-Nazi groups.

Looking over kkk.bz, I didn’t find anything hateful. So it would appear that the official positions of that particular KKK group are not hateful.

Posted in KKK | Comments Off

HOUSE DEMOCRATS MOVE TO CRIMINALIZE CRITICISM OF ISLAM

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

Robert Spencer writes:

December 17, 2015 ought henceforth to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment. Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The Resolution has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

That’s right: “violence, bigotry and hateful rhetoric.” The implications of those five words will fly by most people who read them, and the mainstream media, of course, will do nothing to elucidate them. But what H. Res. 569 does is conflate violence — attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances – with “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric,” which are identified on the basis of subjective judgments. The inclusion of condemnations of “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric” in this Resolution, while appearing to be high-minded, take on an ominous character when one recalls the fact that for years, Ellison, Carson, and his allies (including groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR) have been smearing any and all honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence as “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” This Resolution is using the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.

That’s not what this H. Res. 569 would do, you say? It’s just about condemning “hate speech,” not free speech? That kind of sloppy reasoning may pass for thought on most campuses today, but there is really no excuse for it. Take, for example, the wife of Paris jihad murderer Samy Amimour – please. It was recently revealed that she happily boasted about his role in the murder of 130 Paris infidels: “I encouraged my husband to leave in order to terrorize the people of France who have so much blood on their hands […] I’m so proud of my husband and to boast about his virtue, ah la la, I am so happy.” Proud wifey added: “As long as you continue to offend Islam and Muslims, you will be potential targets, and not just cops and Jews but everyone.”

Now Samy Amimour’s wife sounds as if she would be very happy with H. Res. 569, and its sponsors would no doubt gladly avow that we should stop offending Islam and Muslims – that is, cut out the “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” If we are going to be “potential targets” even if we’re not “cops” or “Jews,” as long as we “continue to offend Islam and Muslims,” then the obvious solution, according to the Western intelligentsia, is to stop doing anything that might offend Islam and Muslims – oh, and stop being cops and Jews. Barack “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” says it. Hillary “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested” Clinton says it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, certain that anyone who speaks honestly about Islam and jihad is a continuing danger to the Church, says it.

Posted in Censorship, Islam | Comments Off

Baltimore, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the new racial politics

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

Fred Siegel writes: In the summer of 1966, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that there would be riots by angry, poor minority residents in “30 or 40” American cities if Congress didn’t pass President Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities antipoverty legislation. In the late 1960s, New York mayor John Lindsay used the fear of such rioting to expand welfare rolls dramatically at a time when the black male unemployment rate was about 4 percent. And in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry articulated an explicitly racial version of collective bargaining—a threat that, without ample federal funds, urban activists would unleash wave after wave of racial violence. “I know for a fact,” Barry explained, “that white people get scared of the [Black] Panthers, and they might give money to somebody a little more moderate.”

This brand of thinking, which I have called the riot ideology, influenced urban politics for a generation, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Perhaps its model city was Baltimore, which, in 1968, was consumed by race riots so intense that the Baltimore police, 500 Maryland state troopers, and 6,000 National Guardsmen were unable to quell them. The “insurrection” was halted only when nearly 5,000 federal troops requested by Maryland governor Spiro Agnew arrived.

In the years since 1968, Baltimore has proved remarkably adept at procuring state and federal funds and constructed revitalization projects such as the justly famed Camden Yards and a convention center. But Baltimore never really recovered from the riots, and the lawlessness never fully subsided. What began as a grand bargain to avert further racial violence after 1968 descended over the decades into a series of squalid shakedowns. Antipoverty programs that had once promised to repair social and family breakdown became by the 1990s self-justifying and self-perpetuating.

In the wake of the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 West Baltimore riots, a new riot ideology has taken hold, one similarly intoxicated with violence and willing to excuse it but with a different goal. The first version of the riot ideology assumed that not only cities but also whites could be reformed; the new version assumes that America is inherently racist beyond redemption and that the black inner city needs to segregate itself from the larger society (with the exception of federal welfare funds, which should continue to flow in). This new racial politics is not only coalescing around activists claiming to speak for urban blacks—represented publically by groups like Black Lives Matter—but is also expressed in the writings of best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Baltimore is once again center stage.

The West Baltimore rioters of 2015 didn’t call for more LBJ-style antipoverty projects but for less policing. In a “keep off our turf” version of belligerent multiculturalism, the rioters see police as both to blame for black criminality and as an embodiment of bourgeois white values. The old riot ideology referred to mostly white urban police forces as occupying armies; the new version sees even Baltimore’s integrated police force, under the leadership of the city’s black mayor and (until recently) a black police chief, as an occupying army. Withdrawing the police from black neighborhoods is the only acceptable solution.

In his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Coates described how his father, a former Black Panther and full-time conspiracy theorist, drove his son around West Baltimore “telling me again the story of the black folk’s slide to ruin. He would drive down North Avenue and survey the carry-outs, the wig shops, the liquor stores and note that not one was owned by anyone black.” Whites had “plundered” what belonged to blacks, his father explained, as they had done with once-great African kingdoms. Coates, who lived in fear of black street toughs as a teen, sees the police as a greater threat to black well-being than the drug “crews” and gangs roaming the streets of West Baltimore today. His vision, in part, is to free gang-ridden areas from the malign grip of white standards and aggressive policing. Coates has adopted his father’s view that “our condition, the worst of this country’s condition—poor, diseased, illiterate, crippled dumb—was not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that the whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of a great rot but the rot itself.” Not even a hurricane of violence, says the new riot ideology, justifies a vigorous police presence in black localities…

Baltimore is a city of many Freddie Grays. The 25-year-old Sandtown resident, a petty drug dealer who had been arrested 18 times, might have seemed like a flawed martyr. His death appeared to be the result of police negligence—he wasn’t fastened into a seat belt for the 45-minute ride to the police station and suffered a severe spinal-cord injury—rather than intentional malice. But in a city where one in ten residents is a drug addict, and in a state where ex-felons can vote, Gray represented a significant constituency. Showing, she said, that “no one is above the law,” state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby brought murder charges against the police less than two weeks after Gray’s death. “To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace,’ ” she said. “Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.”

Mosby’s husband, a city councilman representing West Baltimore who has mayoral ambitions, gently described his rioting constituents as engaged in “a cry for help.” The rioting and looting had “nothing to do with West Baltimore or this particular corner in Baltimore,” Nick Mosby told a reporter. But Leland Vittert of Fox News stood with Mosby outside a West Baltimore liquor store as it was being looted, and the councilman refused to criticize the thieves. Looting, Mosby said, is “young folks of the community showing decades-old anger, frustration, for a system that’s failed them. I mean, it’s bigger than Freddie Gray. This is about the social economics of poor urban America.” It’s also about drugs and the unprecedented mass theft of opiates by many of the city’s gangs. According to the Associated Press, federal drug-enforcement agents said that Baltimore gangs targeted 32 of the city’s pharmacies during the riot, stealing roughly 300,000 doses of opiates such as oxycodone. “The ones doing the violence,” said a 55-year-old West Baltimore woman, were “eating Percocet like candy and they’re not thinking about consequences.”

“Justice for Freddie Gray” produced a withdrawal of law and order. The “army of occupation” retreated, murders surged, and thugs roamed the streets largely unhindered. The protest culture of the sixties ruled the day but without the hope once engendered, albeit mistakenly, by the incidents of that era. Great Society–inspired social programs failed to reduce poverty but succeeded in creating self-serving political machines that blame white conspiracies for the degradation of West Baltimore and other urban areas.

Posted in Baltimore, Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

New Jersey School District Eases Pressure on Students, Baring an Ethnic Divide Between Whites & Asians

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

Kyle Spencer, New York Times, December 25, 2015:

This fall, David Aderhold, the superintendent of a high-achieving school district near Princeton, N.J., sent parents an alarming 16-page letter.

The school district, he said, was facing a crisis. Its students were overburdened and stressed out, juggling too much work and too many demands.

{snip}

With his letter, Dr. Aderhold inserted West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District into a national discussion about the intense focus on achievement at elite schools, and whether it has gone too far.

At follow-up meetings, he urged parents to join him in advocating a holistic, “whole child” approach to schooling that respects “social-emotional development” and “deep and meaningful learning” over academics alone. The alternative, he suggested, was to face the prospect of becoming another Palo Alto, Calif., where outsize stress on teenage students is believed to have contributed to two clusters of suicides in the last six years.

But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold’s letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter’s middle school, who has come to see the district’s increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.

“My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,’ ” Ms. Foley said.

On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.

“What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.

{snip}

The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.

They have had a growing influence on the district. Asian-American parents are enthusiastic supporters of the competitive instrumental music program. They have been huge supporters of the district’s advanced mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold’s reforms.

Asian-American students have been avid participants in a state program that permits them to take summer classes off campus for high school credit, allowing them to maximize the number of honors and Advanced Placement classes they can take, another practice that Dr. Aderhold is limiting this school year.

With many Asian-American children attending supplemental instructional programs, there is a perception among some white families that the elementary school curriculum is being sped up to accommodate them.

{snip}

At a packed meeting of the school district’s Board of Education held shortly before the winter break, a middle school cafeteria was filled with parents, with Asian-Americans sitting on one side and white families on the other. Some parents and students described rampant cheating, grade fixation and days so stressful that some students could not wait for them to end. But other parents, primarily Asian-American ones, described a different picture, one in which their values were being ignored.

Helen Yin, the mother of an eighth grader and a kindergartner, told the crowd that Dr. Aderhold was attempting to hold her and her children back. At one point, a visibly upset Ms. Yin, who moved from Chengdu, China, to pursue a master’s degree in chemistry, shouted to the room filled with parents, “Who can I trust?”

Posted in Asians, Whites | Comments Off

Men, Marriage & Migration

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I’ve noticed that married white men with children are unconcerned with immigration and demographic change.

Unmarried white men with no children are the most concerned with immigration.

What’s up with that?

* More time on their hands.

* It could be that these men are so busy with their jobs and their families that they have minimal to no time to even consider the demographic changes taking place in our country.

* The first group is comprised of winners. The second group is compromised of losers. No great mystery.

* The Idaho ranchers should try to connect the dots a bit on immigration. The problem isn’t that these Latin American indentured servants are fleeing. The problem is that there is such a large Latin American community in this nation, due to our broken enforcement system, that these indentured servants can easily walk away from the shepherding gig and blend into the greater Latino culture that unfortunately exists in the USA.

This is why there was that story a few years back where that Israeli manpower firm was bringing in Thai workers to work on American farms. The Thais would be easier to keep on the farm because, unlike Mexicans, there is not a large community of Thais or Thai speakers. So the Thais would have a much harder time stepping out than Mexicans and other Spanish speakers.

Ironically the Syrian shepherd would be what the Idaho ranchers really desire. They have to forget about Latin Americans. It is just too easy for Latinos to blend into the larger Latino community. The Syrian might be more controllable unless and until the Feds bring in a million or so Syrians.

* There are all sorts of externalities associated with bringing in new workers, particularly low skill workers.

So the problem comes down to the usual issue with privatizing profits and socializing losses. Their fellow citizens end up dealing with all the externalities and don’t get any benefit.

* Before Caesar Chavez and his UFW got it abolished, American farmers had the Bracero Program. Farmers could tell a Mexican labor contractor they needed workers to harvest their crop. The Mexican contractor would be given temporary work visas and bring the workers to the farm. The Mexican labor contractor managed the workers and, since the work was temporary and moved from farm to farm, the workers did not bring their families. At the end of the season the workers were bused back to Mexico with their earnings and everyone benefited.

Chavez grasped that seasonal agricultural work would never pay enough to raise a family on unless his union could control the supply of farm labor. Keeping Mexican farm labor from doing this work was critical to his unionization efforts. In the event he did end the Bracero Program but got an even worse situation. The permanent relocation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers to California that undermined his unionization efforts and left farm workers impoverished.

* What always kind of troubled me about Brokeback Mountain was how lame and PC the response of the stand-up comedians were.

It seems that stand-ups missed a great opportunity to point out the entire premise of movie was simply ridiculous and in that in all likelihood in reality the rancher played by Randy Quad would have been just thrilled at the chance to hire two obviously gay cowboys to look after his flock. At least they would be screwing each other and not the sheep for a change.

One could imagine the sheep rancher stroking his chin as he looked up from the latest Village People album thinking out load, “If only I could find a couple of cowboys like this here fella”.

You see come round up time as the sheep are being loaded on to trucks to be taken to the slaughter house, the Randy Quad character could be proud that having employed the gay cowboys, he at least would be spared the spectacle of lambs bleating passionately as they are being betrayed and torn away from their former lovers.

Instead in the movie, we have the rancher, Joe Aguirre played by Quad, being ambivalent about hiring what he suspected in the first place were two gays.

Joe Aguirre: You pair of deuces lookin’ for work, I suggest you get your scrawny asses in here pronto.

Joe Aguirre: You boys sure found a way to make the time pass up there. Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin’ paid to leave the dogs babysittin’ the sheep while you stem the rose.

The comedic parody could have had Joe Aguirre handing the “gay caballeros” a couple of tubes of lube with the suggestion that as long as the both of them keep their eyes on the sheep at all times everything would be alright with him.

The “suggestion” might have include pointing to a wall diagram of exactly what he had in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_position#Penetrating_from_behind

I think only Artie Lange actually came remotely close to pointing out how laughable the plot of BBM was.

* According to the garbage historian Stephen Ambrose, Lewis and Clark were the only members of their expedition that never needed to be treated for VD. There are advantages to shrinking one’s circle of compassion.

* Mall riots: In South Africa this sort of thing is given the pithier euphemism – ‘affirmative shopping’.

* With the internet, why do shopping malls still exist? Given your measurements, a computer program can…

Because women.

We can see the obvious engineering solution because as the ones who actually work for a living, efficiency matters to us. But a computer model showing the fit doesn’t “feel” the same. Women want to try things on in person, browse by touching, etc. I know it sounds insane, but it’s how they are.

* If Obama had a son, he’d be “shopping” in Louisville.

* And do you know why it’s called ‘boxing day’?

It’s got nothing to do with pugilism or the sport of ‘boxing’ – as I naively thought when I was a 7 year old. I held a fantasy then about ‘charity boxing matches’ being held as a weird festive celebration on the 26th in times past.

No. Apparently it dates right back to medieval England, and the tradition of a ‘Christmas box. Now, a Christmas box referred originally to a gift of a small sum of money – in coins of course – given to a trusted tradesman, roundsman, servant etc who diligently served a good middle class household all year long, by way of ‘thank you’.
The tradition persisted right well into the 20th century. As a boy, in the 1970s, I well remember the ‘dustmen’ – or garbage collectors as you would call them in the States, knocking on every door in the street and more or less demanding their ‘Christmas box’ ie a small gratuity. Rumor always had it that non-payers would have garbage ‘accidently’ strewn across their front yard for the entirety of the following year.
Because of this, local councils, the ultimate employers of dustmen banned the practice, threatening dustmen who participated in the practice with dire punishment.

* “Swept up.” I like that one. Teens/youths/juveniles are forever being swept up and caught in situations where bullets begin to fly, gunfire erupts and looting/violence breaks out. Is this the fault of “bad malls”?

Then again, much agency does a 70ish IQ black kid really have? I’ve avoided individuals among large groups of whites, but I always avoid entire group of blacks.

And how the hell would Percocet be conducive to rioting?

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Recovering From Under-Earning

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Luke Ford

In talk 176, Andrew says: “My mother was a schizophrenic and in and out of mental hospitals. My dad went back to Romania. I went to a Jewish school known as the yeshiva. I was walking around in a state of PTSD. The rabbis kept on hitting me and telling me that I was lazy. Other than that, it was a great childhood.”

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