Journalist Elites Are Also Cognitive Elites (Top 1%)

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Steve: Generally speaking, New York Times and Wall Street Journal writers seem quite smart, smarter on average than, say, Washington Post or NPR writers. NYT articles will therefore often get around to the obvious counter-explanation undermining the impression the article is supposed to give toward the end of the article, while lower IQ media sources tend to be oblivious to the obvious.

* The very high-IQ Isaac Newton spent a lot of time obsessed with childish religious claptrap instead of doing science. The more detached from reality you are, the more likely your brains will end up running around in a hamster wheel of nonsense. Liberals waste years of their lives ensnared by their barking mad ideology because they’ve never so much as walked down the streets of a ghetto, or gone to a public school instead of a private school, or lived outside their expensive neighborhoods.

Reality sharpens your wits and helps your brain take in and adjust to new information so you’re not overwhelmed when you run into reality like an elbow in the face.

Liberals only become more maladjusted and denying with age. If you have an elderly liberal in your family, what they say can be downright alarming, and you worry that they’ll be taken advantage of by the first hustler who comes along.

* I recall reading that during the 2003 Iraq war the WSJ editorial page hired outside reporters after concluding that the paper’s staff reporters weren’t telling them what they wanted to hear. I agree, the WSJ is the last national paper doing any actual reporting.

I also agree with commenter Krastos. The methodology here seems more about credentials than intelligence. Elite journalists have high verbal IQ but seem incapable of any critical thinking. More clever than smart. As I put it, journalists don’t report; they Narrate.

Journalism used to be considered a good career choice for bookish men from prole or petit bourgeois backgrounds. It’s not an arcane skillset and doesn’t require four years of credentialing. Walt Whitman left school at age 11. Rudyard Kipling attended a nouveau military college and couldn’t get into Oxford. Pete Dexter got a degree from U. of South Dakota.

No more Whitmans or Kiplings or Dexters.

* In 1965 the NY Times was pitched to people in NY City because that’s where 99% of their readership was. Today it is pitched to the global elite.

* WSJ writers as an elite I accept without dispute. WSJ has an excellent, refreshingly neutral, and pithily factual early morning radio program that is probably the best of its kind.
NYT writers however just illustrates the corruption of our institutions. Do the researchers account for legacy, money, or fluff degrees, or is a Harvard degree in medicine weighted the same as a degree in journalism? How many pure math majors become journalists?
How many more economy-crashing regionally destabilizing bright ideas will we suffer before we reform our rampant credentialism?

* High IQ correlates best to Openness to New Experience, which is why they just love the idea of a multicultural, open borders society. Well, that and the occasional memo from Mr. Salim Haddad at the NYTimes.

* Stuart Richie wrote the book Intelligence: All That Matters in the British “All that Matters” series (sort of a “For Dummies” series), a short, 160-page summary of intelligence science that skirts race but is otherwise dead honest and up to date, and smart people will fill in the blanks. He was on Razib Khan’s podcast recently. He seems to have Stephen Pinker’s instinct for not crossing the line, but getting very, very close, so I think his career is safe.

* The Washington Post went downhill fast when it decided that it was a local paper in an overwhelmingly black city and decided to hire an enormous number of black journalists over a short period of time.

The New York Times is in a minority white community, but it seems to consider itself a national paper. Same for the Wall Street Journal.

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Vice: The Alt-Right Is a Subculture Without a Culture

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Luke Ford

From Vice:

Al Stankard is a racist. He believes that the biggest problem facing humanity is the insistence that everyone is equal, that a “globalist elite” is imposing multiculturalism on Europeans, and that black people in the US who demand reparations are engaging in “seriously violent, vitriolic rhetoric.” He effectively disguises these abhorrent views by dressing like, in his own words, a “shit-lib.” When I met him on the campus of Rutgers University in the fall of 2017, he was sporting a giant hiking backpack, an oversize flannel shirt, and weather-worn boots. His black hair was unkempt, bordering on a mullet. The 30-year-old philosophy student spends his days lazing around the New Brunswick, New Jersey, campus, drinking green tea out of a silver cup he keeps at his hip, gushing about the hyper-literary indie bands he enjoys like the Mountain Goats. This persona works to his advantage when he attempts to spread his views.

Actually, it’s surprising that Stankard hasn’t gotten punched in the face for his beliefs like Richard Spencer. He proudly identifies as the guy who chased down Spencer’s assailant, and as a member of the so-called alt-right. He’s also the champion of those he described to me as “quiet white males who are normal outwardly but are secretly wanting to go back in time and help Hitler win World War II or something.” And as we walked and chatted last November, he stopped, unannounced, to tape up a flyer that declared, “The Only Way to Win the War on Racism Will Be to End It.” He’s done this before, and to his disappointment, it didn’t even make the school paper. That’s probably because you’d have to do a double-take to catch what he meant. What Stankard is calling for is not an end to racism itself, but rather the right for self-described racists to peddle their toxic worldview without facing consequences.

Al Stankard replies. Al on Twitter.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on Vice: The Alt-Right Is a Subculture Without a Culture

NYT: Friendship’s Dark Side: ‘We Need a Common Enemy’

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Luke Ford

MP3

From the New York Times:

Take the new evidence that people choose friends who resemble themselves, right down to the moment-to-moment pattern of blood flow in the brain. The tendency toward homophily, toward flocking together with birds of your inner and outer feather, gives rise to a harmonious sense of belonging and shared purpose, to easy laughter and volumes of subtext mutually, wordlessly, joyfully understood.

But homophily, researchers said, is also the basis of tribalism, xenophobia and racism, the urge to “otherize” those who differ from you and your beloved friends in one or more ways.

“Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?” Nicholas Christakis of Yale University said. “I have struggled with this, and read and studied a tremendous amount, and I have mostly dispiriting news. It’s awful. Xenophobia and in-group bias go hand-in-hand.”

Game theory models predict it, real-life examples confirm it. “In order to band together, we need a common enemy,” Dr. Christakis said.

Fortunately, he added, no model insists that the out-group must be exterminated or otherwise eliminated from the scene. “It’s possible to treat the out-group with mild dislike or even grudging respect,” he said. “Cultivating in-group distinctiveness does not require that the other must be killed.”

Nevertheless, even the ordinary business of making friends is an exclusionary act, a judgment call, and therefore threaded with the potential for pain.

“A friendship is always a little bit of a conspiracy,” said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton. “We two are here, they are over there, and we’re going to do our thing whether they want us to or not.”

And if they try to join us, we can say, no, sorry, that seat is taken. We’re saving it for a friend…

Friendships are also surprisingly fragile. Based on a detailed survey of 540 participants, researchers at Oxford University determined that people had a falling out with a member of their social circle about once every 7.2 months, or nearly two times annually, and that a year later 40 percent of those ruptures remained unhealed.

Carl Schmitt vindicated. Identity Theory vindicated.

From Stanford.edu:

In 1927, Schmitt published the first version of his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, defending the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy.

Schmitt famously claims that “the specific political distinction … is that between friend and enemy.” (CP 26) The distinction between friend and enemy, Schmitt elaborates, is essentially public and not private. Individuals may have personal enemies, but personal enmity is not a political phenomenon. Politics involves groups that face off as mutual enemies (CP 28–9). Two groups will find themselves in a situation of mutual enmity if and only if there is a possibility of war and mutual killing between them. The distinction between friend and enemy thus refers to the “utmost degree of intensity … of an association or dissociation.” (CP 26, 38) The utmost degree of association is the willingness to fight and die for and together with other members of one’s group, and the ultimate degree of dissociation is the willingness to kill others for the simple reason that they are members of a hostile group (CP 32–3).

Schmitt believes that political enmity can have many different origins. The political differs from other spheres of value in that it is not based on a substantive distinction of its own. The ethical, for example, is based on a distinction between the morally good and the morally bad, the aesthetic on a distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, and the economical on a distinction between the profitable and the unprofitable. The political distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to these other distinctions or, for that matter, to any particular distinction — be it linguistic, ethnic, cultural, religious, etc. — that may become a marker of collective identity and difference (CP 25–7). It is possible, for instance, to be enemies with members of a hostile group whom one judges to be morally good. And it is equally possible not to be engaged in a relationship of mutual enmity with a group whose individual members one judges to be bad. The same holds, Schmitt thinks, for all other substantive distinctions that may become markers of identity and difference.

This is not to say, however, that one’s conception of moral goodness or badness, for instance, will never play a role in a relationship of political enmity. Any distinction that can serve as a marker of collective identity and difference will acquire political quality if it has the power, in a concrete situation, to sort people into two opposing groups that are willing, if necessary, to fight against each other (CP 37–8). Whether a particular distinction will come to play this role is not determined by its own intrinsic significance but by whether a group of people relies on it to define its own collective identity and comes to think of that identity, as based on that distinction, as something that might have to be defended against other groups by going to war. Since the political is not tied to any particular substantive distinction, Schmitt argues, it is naïve to assume that the political will disappear once conflicts arising from a particular distinction no longer motivate opposing groups to fight. Political identification is likely to latch on to another distinction that will inherit the lethal intensity of political conflict (See ND). But wherever a distinction has political quality, it will be the decisive distinction and the community constituted by it will be the decisive social unit. Since the political community is the social unit that can dispose of people’s lives, it will be able, where it exists, to assert its superiority over all other social groups within its confines and to rule out violent conflict among its members (CP 37–45).

Schmitt claims that one cannot judge, from an external perspective, that a group is morally unjustified in defining its own identity in a certain way and to introduce political enmity, with the attendant possibility of killing, to preserve that identity. Only members of a group are in a position to decide, from the perspective of an existentially affected participant, whether the otherness of another group amounts to a threat to their own form of life and thus potentially requires to be fought (CP 27; See also CT 76–7, 136). Schmitt’s reasoning implicitly relies on a collectivist version of the logic of self-defence. The decision whether someone else’s behaviour constitutes a threat to one’s own life, in some concrete situation, and the decision whether it is necessary to use reactive or even pre-emptive violence to remove or to escape that threat, cannot be delegated to a third person. A group that perceives its own existence to be threatened by some other group, Schmitt argues, finds itself in an analogous position. The possibility of third-party mediation is therefore ruled out in a truly political conflict (CP 45–53).

A political community exists, then, wherever a group of people are willing to engage in political life by distinguishing themselves from outsiders through the drawing of a friend-enemy distinction (CP 38, 43–4). A group’s capability to draw the distinction between friend and enemy does not require, Schmitt holds, that the group already possess a formal organization allowing for rule-governed collective decision-taking. A people, thus, will have an existence prior to all legal form as long as there is a sense of shared identity strong enough to motivate its members to fight and die for the preservation of the group. And as long as a people exists in this way it is capable, through its support, to sustain a sovereign dictatorship exercised in its name (CT 126–35).

Of course, Schmitt’s analogy between the collective and the individual interest in self-preservation papers over an important difference between the two cases. A political community does not enjoy simple biological existence. It might die though all of its individual members continue to live. The drawing of a friend-enemy distinction, therefore, is never a mere reaction to a threat to a form of existence that is already given (but see Mouffe 1999, 49–50). Rather, it actively constitutes the political identity or existence of the people and determines who belongs to the people. To belong one must identify with the substantive characteristic, whatever it may be, that marks the identity of the people, and one must agree that this characteristic defines a form of life for the preservation of which one ought to be willing to sacrifice one’s own life, in the fight against those who don’t belong (CP 46).

Schmitt realizes, of course, that it is possible for people who are not willing to identify in this way to be legally recognized as citizens, and to live law-abidingly, under the norms authorized by some positive constitution. Liberal states, in Schmitt’s view, have a tendency to fail to distinguish properly between friends and enemies, and thus to extend rights of membership to those who do not truly belong to the political nation. In a liberal state, Schmitt fears, the political nation will slowly whither and die as a result of spreading de-politicization, it will succumb to internal strife, or it will be overwhelmed by external enemies who are more politically united (CP 69–79; L 31–77). To avert these dangers, Schmitt suggests, it is necessary to make sure that the boundaries of the political nation and the boundaries of citizenship coincide. This demand explains Schmitt’s claim, in the first sentence of The Concept of the Political, that the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political (CP 19). The point of this remark is that a state can only be legitimate if its legal boundaries embody a clear friend-enemy distinction.

In order to achieve this aim, Schmitt clearly implies, a sovereign dictator, acting in the interstices between two periods of positive constitutional order, must homogenize the community by appeal to a clear friend-enemy distinction, as well as through the suppression, elimination, or expulsion of internal enemies who do not endorse that distinction (CP 46–8). In so doing, the sovereign dictator expresses the community’s understanding of what is normal or exceptional and of who belongs, and he creates the homogeneous medium that Schmitt considers to be a precondition of the legitimate applicability of law. Schmitt observes that his concept of the political is not belligerent. It does not glorify war, but merely claims that a community that is interested in living politically needs to be willing to go to war if it perceives its political existence to be threatened (CP 32–5). But the intended analogy with self-defence seems to make little moral sense, given that Schmitt’s conception of political existence demands the active elimination of those whom a majority perceives as internal enemies, and even celebrates that elimination as the essential activity of the popular sovereign.

Schmitt’s understanding of the political provides the basis for his critique of liberalism (Holmes 1993, 37–60; McCormick 1997; Dyzenhaus 1997, 58–70; Kahn 2011). On a descriptive level, Schmitt claims that liberalism has a tendency to deny the need for genuine political decision, to suggest that it is neither necessary nor desirable for individuals to form groups that are constituted by the drawing of friend-enemy distinctions. Liberals believe that there are no conflicts among human beings that cannot be solved to everyone’s advantage through an improvement of civilization, technology, and social organization or be settled, after peaceful deliberation, by way of amicable compromise. As a result, liberalism is unable to provide substantive markers of identity that can ground a true political decision. Liberal politics, consequently, boils down to the attempt to domesticate the polity, in the name of the protection of individual freedom, but it is unable to constitute political community in the first place (CP 69–79; CPD 33–50).

If this is a correct account of the character of liberal ideology and of the aims of liberal politics, Schmitt is right to conclude that liberalism has a tendency to undermine a community’s political existence, as he understands it. But in order for this observation to amount to a critique of liberalism, Schmitt needs to explain why a liberal subversion of the political would be undesirable. Schmitt’s political works contain a number of rather different answers to this question. A first line of thought emphasizes, with appeal to Hobbes, that a state can only be legitimate as long as it retains the capacity to offer protection to its members (for Schmitt’s engagement with Hobbes see McCormick 1994; Tralau 2011; and Schmitt’s L; SM; VR). And a state that has suffered a subversion of the political, induced by liberal ideology, Schmitt argues, will be unable to offer protection to its members, because it will fail to protect them from the indirect rule of pluralist interest-groups that have successfully colonized the state (LL 17–36, L 65–77) and, more importantly, because it will lack the power to protect them from external enemies (CP 51–3). If a people is no longer willing to decide between friend and enemy the most likely result will not be eternal peace but anarchy or subjection to another group that is still willing to assume the burdens of the political. This first answer, however, is not Schmitt’s last word on why liberal de-politicization is undesirable. Schmitt seems to admit that a global hegemon might one day be able to enforce a global de-politicization, by depriving all other communities of the capacity to draw their own friend-enemy distinctions, or that liberalism might one day attain global cultural hegemony, such that people will no longer be interested in drawing friend-enemy distinctions (CP 35, 57-8). Schmitt, then, cannot rest his case against liberal de-politicization on the claim that it is an unrealistic goal. He needs to argue that it is undesirable even if it could be achieved (Strauss 2007).

Schmitt replies to this challenge that a life that does not involve the friend-enemy distinction would be shallow, insignificant, and meaningless. A completely de-politicized world would offer human beings no higher purpose than to increase their consumption and to enjoy the frolics of modern entertainment. It would reduce politics to a value-neutral technique for the provision of material amenities. As a result, there would no longer be any project or value that individuals are called upon to serve, whether they want to or not, and that can give their life a meaning that transcends the satisfaction of private desires (CP 35, 57–8; RK 21–7; PR 109–62). But that a world in which one does not have the opportunity to transcend one’s interest in individual contentment in the service of a higher value would be shallow and meaningless does not suffice to establish that a willingness to kill or to die for a political community will confer meaning on a life, much less that it is the only thing that can do so. When Schmitt claims that the defence of the political is the only goal that could possibly justify the killing of others and the sacrifice of one’s own life (CP 35; 48–9) he assumes without argument that the life of political community, as he understands it, is uniquely and supremely valuable.

Some interpreters have explained Schmitt’s hostility towards liberal de-politicization as being grounded in the view that a willingness to distinguish between friend and enemy is a theological duty (Mehring 1989; Meier 1998; Groh, 1991). Schmitt argues in Political Theology that all key concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts, which suggests that a political theory that continues to use these concepts needs a theological foundation (PT 36–52). In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt claims that all true political theorists base their views on a negative anthropology which holds that man is by nature evil and licentious, and thus needs to be kept in check by a strong state capable of drawing a friend-enemy distinction if there is to be social order (CP 58–68). This latter thesis, Schmitt admits, can take a secular form, as in Hobbes or Machiavelli, as the purely descriptive claim that man is inherently dangerous to man. But Schmitt suggests that this secular version of a negative political anthropology is open to be transformed into the view that man, though by nature dangerous, is perfectible or into the view that man’s dangerous behavior is a mere contingent consequence of a mistaken form of social organization (PT 53–66; L 31–9). In order to establish a permanent need for political authority, negative political anthropology must be given a theological reading that portrays the dangerous nature of man as an irrevocable result of original sin. Liberal de-politicization, from this perspective, is to be rejected as a sign of human pride that rebels against God, who alone, but only at the end of history, can deliver humanity from political enmity.

Schmitt himself admits that the theological grounding of politics is based on an anthropological confession of faith (CP 58). And one is tempted to say that Schmitt’s theory turns out to be philosophically irrelevant if this is really the last word. Schmitt would likely have replied that the liberal assumption that man is perfectible, that humanity can overcome political enmity, and that to do so is desirable, is also an article of faith. The theological partisan of the political, in Schmitt’s view, is as justified in practicing his creed as the liberal cosmopolitan and to engage in a deliberate cultivation of political enmity (CPD 65–76). As long as the political theologian can make sure that the friend-enemy distinction survives, liberals will be forced to enter the arena of the political and to go to war against the partisans of the political. And this fight, Schmitt hopes, is going to secure the continuing existence of political enmity and prevent the victory of liberal de-politicization (CP 36-7).

From Simple Psychology:

Henri Tajfel’s greatest contribution to psychology was social identity theory.

Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s).

Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.

In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. For example, England is the best country in the world! We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against the out group (the group we don’t belong to). For example, the Americans, French etc. are a bunch of losers!

Therefore, we divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).

This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). Social identity theory states that the in-group will discriminate against the out-group to enhance their self-image.

The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.

Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its extreme forms, racism may result in genocide, such as occurred in Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians and Serbs.

Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:

1. the differences between groups

2. the similarities of things in the same group.

We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we belong (the in-group) as being different from the others (the out-group), and members of the same group as being more similar than they are. Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e. “them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.

Examples of In-groups – Out-groups
o Northern Ireland: Catholics – Protestants

o Rwanda: Hutus and Tutsis

o Yugoslavia: the Bosnians and Serbs

o Germany: Jews and the Nazis

o Politics: Labor and the Conservatives

o Football: Liverpool and Man Utd

o Gender: Males and Females

o Social Class: Middle and Working Classes

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Nationalism, Psychology | Comments Off on NYT: Friendship’s Dark Side: ‘We Need a Common Enemy’

White Privilege Vs Jewish Privilege

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* 2015 Household Income
Asian: $81k
White: $61k
Hispanic: $47k
Black: $39k

* Amy Schumer started out as a very funny standup comic. That’s a brutally competitive field, and no one succeeds in it based on any kind of privilege (once you become successful, there is a bit of privilege — as I think Norm MacDonald said, you never bomb after you’re famous). She’s gotten less funny and more politically correct as she’s become more successful in Hollywood.

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Parshat Acharei-Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1–20:27)

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Luke Ford

From Chabad.org:

Following the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, G‑d warns against unauthorized entry “into the holy.” Only one person, the kohen gadol (“high priest”), may—but once a year, on Yom Kippur—enter the innermost chamber in the Sanctuary to offer the sacred ketoret to G‑d.

Another feature of the Day of Atonement service is the casting of lots over two goats, to determine which should be offered to G‑d and which should be dispatched to carry off the sins of Israel to the wilderness.

The Parshah of Acharei also warns against bringing korbanot (animal or meal offerings) anywhere but in the Holy Temple, forbids the consumption of blood, and details the laws prohibiting incest and other deviant sexual relations.

The Parshah of Kedoshim begins with the statement: “You shall be holy, for I, the L‑rd your G‑d, am holy.” This is followed by dozens of mitzvot (divine commandments) through which the Jew sanctifies him- or herself and relates to the holiness of G‑d.

These include: the prohibition against idolatry, the mitzvah of charity, the principle of equality before the law, Shabbat, sexual morality, honesty in business, honor and awe of one’s parents, and the sacredness of life.

Also in Kedoshim is the dictum which the great sage Rabbi Akiva called a cardinal principle of Torah, and of which Hillel said, “This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary”—“Love your fellow as yourself.”

Lev. 16:1: “The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they approached the Lord.”

Aaron’s two sons didn’t stay in their lane. They offered strange fire while drunk in the Sanctuary. The closer you come to holiness, the more likely you are to be exposed. Great people can see right through you. In traditional Judaism, you don’t just walk up to great rabbis and say hi. The more traditional the form of Judaism, the more hierarchical it is and the more veneration Torah scholars receive and the more care they take with how they dress.

High achievers are more sensitive to the stench of under-earning, to people who don’t have an accurate view of themselves and of reality.

The Torah’s prescriptions are minute. They’re all process. Success and failure depend on process. You put the right ingredients in the right order and bake them in the oven at the right temperature, the cake comes out delicious.

There’s not a lot of room to just wing it with Jewish religious rituals.

Lev. 16:4-5: “He is to put on the sacred linen tunic, with linen undergarments next to his body; he is to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban. These are sacred garments; so he must bathe himself with water before he puts them on.”

From the Torah perspective, how you dress is important. Whether or not you bathe is important. Cleanliness is important, but it is part of a constellation of values, so for example, Orthodox Jews don’t bathe on the Sabbath and religious holidays. There are at times higher values than cleanliness.

The opposite of Torah is pointless self-destructive poverty. Underearning behavior — your phone dies, your car dies, your computer dies, you didn’t back up your work… Stability boredom so you create drama and isolate yourself.

Leviticus 16:

Aaron is to offer the bull for his own sin offering to make atonement for himself and his household. 7 Then he is to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 8 He is to cast lots for the two goats—one lot for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat.[b] 9 Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin offering. 10 But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat.

11 “Aaron shall bring the bull for his own sin offering to make atonement for himself and his household, and he is to slaughter the bull for his own sin offering. 12 He is to take a censer full of burning coals from the altar before the Lord and two handfuls of finely ground fragrant incense and take them behind the curtain. 13 He is to put the incense on the fire before the Lord, and the smoke of the incense will conceal the atonement cover above the tablets of the covenant law, so that he will not die. 14 He is to take some of the bull’s blood and with his finger sprinkle it on the front of the atonement cover; then he shall sprinkle some of it with his finger seven times before the atonement cover.

Judaism puts great stress on providing for your family. “Parnassah” is important. The Jewish way of life is expensive. All these bulls and goats and incense and sanctuaries don’t just pay for themselves.

The philosophical underpinning for all these cleansing rituals is that the world is full of poz and if you allow it to gather on and around you and accumulate, you will die.

Jacob Milgrom writes in his book on Leviticus:

All year long, Israel’s sins have been polluting the sanctuary. True, the pious have been bringing purification offerings, which prove effective because their impurity was caused inadvertently. However, what of the advertent, brazen sinner? Their sins have penetrated into the adytum, the inner sanctum, polluting the very seat of the Godhead, threatening the destruction of the community. Since the brazen sinners are barred from offering sacrifice, how then is the sanctuary purified? The answer is Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Purgation, when the high priest risks his life by entering the adytum-to which entry is forbidden to mortal humans-and purifies the adytum through a smoke screen. The high priest emerges, transfers the removed pollution plus all the sins of the people, which he confesses, onto the head of a live goat, and dispatches the goat to the wilderness…

The similarities between the Babylonian New Year Festival and Israel’s Yom Kippur are immediately apparent. On both occasions, (1) the temple is purged by rites that demand that the high priest rise before dawn, bathe and dress in linen, employ a censer, and perform a sprinkling rite on the sanctuary; (2) the impurity is eliminated by means of slaughtered animals; (3) the participants are rendered impure; and (4) the king/high priest submits to a ritual of confession and penitence.

In each of these categories there are also significant differences. (1) Whereas in Babylon the demon-intruder is exorcised, in Israel it is the sin and iniquity generated by humanity that must be expunged. Israel uniquely elevated the people and their behavior to being worthy of divine scrutiny. The fate of the nation rests on the shoulders ders not of its leadership but of its laity. Moreover, whereas the purgation of the temple is the predominant aim of all of the rituals during the Day of Purgation, the Babylonian purgation rite is relatively minor, preparing one of the many cellas in Marduk’s temple, Esagila, for the brief stay of a visiting god, Nabu. (2) In Babylon the detergent itself (the carcass of the ram) is eliminated; in Israel elimination is achieved by dispatching a goat onto which Israel’s sins have been loaded. To be sure, Israel’s detergent, the carcass of the purification offering, is burned, thereby paralleling ing the Babylonian elimination procedure (see chap. 4, THEME A). Hence one can infer that the Azazel goat was originally a discrete elimination technique that was artificially attached to the sanctuary purgation in order to focus on Israel’s moral failings ings rather than on the sins and impurities that polluted the sanctuary. (3) In Babylon the impurity of the slaughterer and officiating priest lasts seven days-the remainder of the festival-whereas in Israel the impurity of the dispatcher of the goat and the burner of the purification offering carcasses lasts one day. Furthermore, the exact Israelite counterparts, the officiating priest and the slaughterer, are not rendered impure. And in Babylon, because the high priest becomes impure merely by watching ing the purgation, lower temple officials conduct the ritual. In Israel, by contrast, the entire ritual is conducted by the high priest. (4) In Babylon the king undergoes a ritual ual of humiliation: the high priest strikes his cheek, drags him by the ears, and makes him bow to the ground; tears indicate the king’s penitence and the god’s favor. His confession is within a political context; he has been a faithful custodian of the god’s temple and city and has not violated the political rights of the kidinnu (a protected group). The major difference lies in the self-reflection of the Babylonian king and the fact that he focuses on his own conduct, whereas in Israel the high priest confesses the failings of his people. In other words, in Babylon the viability of the society depends solely on the worthiness of the king; in Israel the national destiny is equated with the moral condition of the people, as articulated through the priest.

* Lev. 16:29: “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: On the tenth day of the seventh month you must deny yourselves and not do any work—whether native-born or a foreigner residing among you— 30 because on this day atonement will be made for you, to cleanse you. Then, before the Lord, you will be clean from all your sins. 31 It is a day of sabbath rest, and you must deny yourselves; it is a lasting ordinance.”

Normally, ease and comfort are good things in Judaism, but there are occasions when you deny yourself. In general, work is highly encouraged in Judaism, but there are days such as the Sabbath and Yom Kippur when you must abstain from work. Judaism is a constellation of values.

Lev. 17:10: “I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. 11 For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.[c] 12 Therefore I say to the Israelites, “None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood.”

13 “‘Any Israelite or any foreigner residing among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth, 14 because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, “You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.”

God gives life. Blood represents life and death. You return the blood to God. You don’t eat it.

* Leviticus 18:

6 “‘No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord.

7 “‘Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have relations with her.

8 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor your father.

9 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere.

10 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter; that would dishonor you.

11 “‘Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your father’s wife, born to your father; she is your sister.

12 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s sister; she is your father’s close relative.

13 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your mother’s sister, because she is your mother’s close relative.

14 “‘Do not dishonor your father’s brother by approaching his wife to have sexual relations; she is your aunt.

15 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your daughter-in-law. She is your son’s wife; do not have relations with her.

16 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your brother’s wife; that would dishonor your brother.

17 “‘Do not have sexual relations with both a woman and her daughter. Do not have sexual relations with either her son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter; they are her close relatives. That is wickedness.

18 “‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.

19 “‘Do not approach a woman to have sexual relations during the uncleanness of her monthly period.

20 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your neighbor’s wife and defile yourself with her.

21 “‘Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.

22 “‘Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.

23 “‘Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion.

24 “‘Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the foreigners residing among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

The life of Torah is one of sexual discipline. I only ever met one Orthodox Jewish nudist and he knew he was a freak and he was a baal teshuva, and he wasn’t married and he got into trouble when his predilections were discovered. Public nudity is not Jewish.

Leviticus 19:

9 “‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.

11 “‘Do not steal.

“‘Do not lie.

“‘Do not deceive one another.

12 “‘Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.

13 “‘Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.

“‘Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight.

14 “‘Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord.

15 “‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.

16 “‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people.

“‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.

17 “‘Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.

18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

19 “‘Keep my decrees.

“‘Do not mate different kinds of animals.

“‘Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed.

“‘Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

* In retrospect, the Syrian strikes seem pointless and almost harmless. Trump never spoke about regime change.

Posted in Torah | Comments Off on Parshat Acharei-Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1–20:27)

WP: ‘Imploding’: Financial troubles. Lawsuits. Trailer park brawls. Has the alt-right peaked?

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

I discuss a favorite book of mine: Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving

From the Washington Post:

Eight months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in the death of a counterprotester, the loose collection of disaffected young white men known as the alt-right is in disarray.

The problems have been mounting: lawsuits and arrests, fundraising difficulties, tepid recruitment, widespread infighting, fierce counterprotests and banishment on social media platforms. Taken together, they’ve exhausted even some of the staunchest members.

One of the movement’s biggest groups, the Traditionalist Worker Party, dissolved in March. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, the largest alt-right website, has gone into hiding, chased by a harassment lawsuit. And Richard Spencer, the alt-right’s most public figure, cancelled a college speaking tour and was abandoned by his attorney last month.

“Things have become a lot harder, and we paid a price for what happened in Charlottesville. . . . The question is whether there is going to be a third act,” said Spencer, who coined the name of the movement, which rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign, advocates a whites-only ethno-state, and has posted racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic memes across the Internet.

I GET COMMENTS:

You are aware that the Alt-Right is actually called the ‘Identitarian movement’ in Europe, right? From my understanding it has much greater traction in parts of Europe.

This is an interview Theodore Shoebat did with an identitarian leader from Germany, Martin Sellner.

Theodore isn’t the most professional person in media. I often disagree with his positions. For example, he is pro-open borders because he is so disturbed by the rise of neo-Nazism. This is a reactionary stance. I’m PRO-borders and PRO sensible immigration laws. Theodore does use ambush journalism a little here catching Sellner completely off guard. Nevertheless he does get his point across and has Sellner spinning in circles.

The greater issue here isn’t so called ‘white genocide’ (which gives the impression our extinction is forcibly being inflicted upon us). The real issue is we have fallen away from Christendom (God/Truth) and become an immoral people and culture. Why are birth rates drastically low in the West? Do we have a totalitarian communist regime, like the Chinese government, forcing abortions upon us if we give birth to more than 1 (now 2) children? No. We are using artificial birth control on mass of our own freewill as well as getting abortions on demand as we please. In short, we are doing this to ourselves!

This is the harsh truth most Westerners still refuse to face, even most in the so called ‘alt-right movement’ crying out about ‘white genocide.’

Here is a quote from the Catholic Ukrainian-Greek Catechism (an official rite of the Catholic Church), that perfectly encapsulates the Catholic doctrine on this:

4. The Sin of Artificial Contraception

Contraception is a deliberate action by which a person ruins the fecundity of the reproductive sphere and makes the conception of new human life impossible. Contraceptive actions impact the entire human person by limiting his or her ability to accept the gift of new life. The consequences of such actions can be not only the physiological but also the spiritual, moral, and psychological inability of a married couple to give birth to children. The formation of a contraceptive mentality can also become a consequence.

Source: http://catechism.royaldoors.net/catechism/

Here is an excerpt from the Catholic classic, ‘Liberalism is a Sin’, first published in 1886 in Spain:

Liberalism is the root of heresy, the tree of evil in whose branches all the harpies of infidelity find ample shelter; it is today the evil of all evils. (Ch. 4).
“The theater, literature, public and private morals are all saturated with obscenity and impurity. The result is inevitable; a corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation. Liberalism is the program of naturalism. Free-thought begets free morals, or immorality. Restraint is thrown off and a free rein given to the passions. Whoever thinks what he pleases will do what he pleases. Liberalism in the intellectual order is license in the moral order. Disorder in the intellect begets disorder in the heart, and vice-versa. Thus does Liberalism propagate immorality, and immorality Liberalism.” (Ch. 26).

Liberalism “is, therefore, the radical and universal denial of all divine truth and Christian dogma, the primal type of all heresy, and the supreme rebellion against the authority of God and His Church. As with Lucifer, its maxim is, ‘I will not serve.'” (Ch. 3).

“Liberalism, whether in the doctrinal or practical order, is a sin. In the doctrinal order, it is heresy, and consequently a mortal sin against faith. In the practical order, it is a sin against the commandments of God and of the Church, for it virtually transgresses all commandments. To be more precise: in the doctrinal order, Liberalism strikes at the very foundations of faith; it is heresy radical and universal, because within it are comprehended all heresies. In the practical order it is a radical and universal infraction of the divine law, since it sanctions and authorizes all infractions of that law.” (Ch. 3).

http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/LIBSIN.HTM (free online version)

The hard truth is that our governments aren’t the source of our ills. WE ARE.

I state this broadly speaking, I’m NOT pointing my finger at you or anyone else individually. Our culture is the problem, and a culture is an expression of we the people. Our present culture is an indictment on us.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on WP: ‘Imploding’: Financial troubles. Lawsuits. Trailer park brawls. Has the alt-right peaked?

White Privilege Vs Jewish Privilege

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on White Privilege Vs Jewish Privilege

Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this new book by the BBC’s Mike Wendling:

* Spencer was correct in drawing (as he was attempting to do just before he got smacked in the face) a line between himself and neo-Nazis. Technically, Nazis want to kill and enslave what they see as inferior races. Ethno-nationalists like Spencer—those who believe that political entities should be properly divided along racial and ethnic lines—don’t go that far. Instead, they preach separation, with dedicated homelands based on tribal groupings, including large swathes of the planet reserved for white people.

* In November 2008, a professor named Paul Gottfried stood up in front of a few dozen people at the first gathering of his newly formed H.L. Mencken Club. It was an event that, at the time, made almost no impression on the general public. It attracted no press coverage or scholarly attention. In fact, before a reporter phoned him up in 2016, Gottfried himself says it had slipped his mind that, through his speech, he had inspired the name of a nascent political movement…

Gottfried—bald, jowly and bespectacled—looked like a central casting version of what he was: a philosophy professor at a small college in Pennsylvania. He described himself as a “paleoconservative”—a term which, according to some sources, he also invented.4

Paleoconservativism—a Stone Age-y play on “neoconservativism”—is a branch of thought that’s had a rump of a following on the right in America for many years. Paleos dislike immigration and multiculturalism. In contrast to neoconservatives, they are skeptical of free trade and foreign military adventures. They look to the past and are strict traditionalists when it comes to gender, gender, ethnicity, race and social order.5 It was a movement which held the seeds of the alt-right, and one that had been confined to the political fringes for decades. Before Trump, the most high-profile politician with paleoconservative leanings was Pat Buchanan, who in a presidential run in 2000 scored 0.4% of the popular vote.6

Despite the small, subdued crowd, the Mencken Society’s first meeting in a Baltimore hotel included some key characters in what would become the brain trust of the alt-right. Peter Brimelow, a British journalist and critic of multiculturalism and immigration, attended and spoke at the conference, as did Jared Taylor, editor of the far-right magazine American Renaissance.7

…Gottfried, standing in front of the audience, announced: “We are part of an attempt to put together an independent intellectual right, one that exists without movement establishment funding and one that our opponents would be delighted not to have to deal with. Our group is also full of young thinkers and activists, and if there is to be an independent right, our group will have to become its leaders.”

He then launched into a ramble taking in Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula, the last few decades of American conservative thought, Elizabeth I’s defeat of the Spanish Armada and Flannery O’Connor.8 While it was not headline-producing stuff, Gottfried did manage to identify the broad outlines and deep concerns of what would eventually become the alt-right movement.

He gave a nod to the far-right websites Takimag and Brimelow’s VDARE.com, from where most of the intellectual energy of the movement would come in the years before the alt-right gained anything like mainstream attention. He put his finger on the outsider nature of the small group and identified the Republican and conservative establishment as enemy number one. “A question that has been asked of me and of others in this room is why we don’t try to join the official conservative movement,” he said. “This movement controls hundreds of millions of dollars, TV networks, strings of newspapers and magazines, multitudinous foundations and institutes, and a bevy of real and bleached blondes on Fox News.” He concluded that the establishment—or, as Gottfried put it, the “dark side”—wouldn’t have them. He continued, sarcastically: “It has treated us, in contrast to such worthies as black nationalists, radical feminists, and open-borders advocates, as being unfit for admittance into the political conversation. We are not viewed as honorable dissenters but depicted as subhuman infidels or ignored in the same way as one would a senile uncle who occasionally wanders into one’s living room.”9

Although he didn’t go into much detail or name names, he hinted at the alt-right’s obsession with race-based science and questionable theories about the relative intelligence levels of different ethnic groups, decrying what he described as censorship against anyone outside of what he saw as a neoconservative and center-left consensus. “This imperial ban has been extended even to brilliant social scientists and statisticians who are viewed as excessively intimate with the wrong people,” he said. And in just a few words he encapsulated the stubborn self-righteousness which would come to characterize the alt-right: “We are convinced that we are right in our historical and cultural observations while those who have quarantined us are wrong.”

Gottfried never actually put a name on his imagined movement. A decade later, even as he continued to sympathize with some of the alt-right’s leading figures, he rued being associated with it.10 But the title of his address was dramatic and catchy, and it contained the name that, in a shorter form, would stick: “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.”

* AlternativeRight. com. It became the first thrust at defining the alt-right and developing a raw online communications strategy. Spencer and Gottfried would later slightly disagree on who came up with the name “alternative right,” with Spencer claiming authorship and Gottfried insisting it was a joint effort.12 However, Gottfried was made an editor of the new site, and Spencer plucked his inspiration from the professor’s words, declaring that the effort marked “an attempt to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the ‘conservative’ establishment.”

AlternativeRight.com was the first of Spencer’s alt-right outlets, and, like the Mencken Club, it didn’t find a huge audience at first. It was eventually shuttered in 2013. But those early missives give an insight into the formulation of the alt-right argument style. They give the overall impression of a small group of academic-minded people holed up together, lobbing words into the ether and seeing what, if anything, might stick. Spencer aimed for a freewheeling bloggy style, using short posts to comment on news reports and, in what would later become a hallmark of the alt-right, ranging outside of the world of politics. At the same time, the worldview of AlternativeRight. com was framed in ethnic and racial terms, with posts, for instance, about how white, blonde women are naturally more attractive than black women, or pointing out violent crime against gays in majority-black neighborhoods.14 But Spencer’s goal was always to appeal to a broader audience—including those who wouldn’t even think of showing up at a Mencken Club meeting. Posts dealt with the stock market, state fairs, MC Hammer.

* A long post from 2011 about the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people, starts reasonably enough: “What kind of “ultra-nationalist” murders the children of his own people? The answer is one who is truly deranged.”22 Spencer then mixes in his own brand of racial politics, an endorsement of Breivik’s Muslim hate, and a dash of conspiracy theory, to argue that the killer is worth listening to.

“Anders Behring Breivik’s work (if this actually is Anders Breivik’s work) is rational and argued; he is clearly influenced by many neoconservative authors, but also many from the non-aligned Right,” he writes. “We still aren’t sure whether Breivik is the man who perpetrated Friday’s bloddy [sic] actions … But we should most definitely study Breivik’s ‘European Declaration of Independence.’”

Spencer goes on to quote favorably and at great length from another blog post, this one by Kevin MacDonald, an academic whose writings describe Jewish people as characterized by “ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, aggressiveness,”23 and who has been called “a primary voice for anti-Semitism from far-right intellectuals.”24

For his part, MacDonald seemed absolutely puzzled that Breivik’s manifesto didn’t talk more about Jews. “It could well be that his silence on Jewish hostility toward Europe and the West and his rejection of ethnocentrism are motivated by his strategic sense,” he wrote. Still, he went on (remember, this about a mass murderer): “It must be said that he is a serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”25 Spencer was enthusiastic: When it came to the study of Breivik’s manifesto, “Kevin MacDonald had made an excellent start.”

* After AlternativeRight.com, he planned another online venture, Radix Journal, which he hoped would appeal to a broader cross-section of society. “Sometimes the movement fails when you have websites called whiterights.com or demographicreality.org, when we’re focused so intently and brutally on race,” he told me, while adding: “I don’t want this to sound sinister. I’m very upfront about what I believe.” “What I wanted for Radix,” he continued, “is a journal that includes writing that someone who’s apolitical or a leftist or someone who’s more literary literary minded could read and not just be put off immediately by the right-wing race stuff. “It’s not that I’m just trying to make this palatable, it’s that white nationalism doesn’t really have anywhere to go. All of its arguments have been made. And I don’t know what new IQ data someone needs to see, or someone needs to say again ‘It’s healthy to love your race.’ I don’t know how many more times we need to hear that.”

* On the other hand, he [Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug] was more entertaining than academic types like Gottfried or MacDonald, and, as the movement developed, he became the alt-right’s favorite philosophy instructor.

* On VNN, the very alt-rightish idea of “white genocide” is a near constant topic of conversation.9 Those who use the phrase mean it seriously and literally; they believe there is a master plan dedicated to the total destruction of the white race. Usually (but not always) the supposed genocide isn’t portrayed as an active one, carried out via gas chambers, nuclear bombs and Kalashnikovs, but a rather slower but no less radical demographic process of cultural integration and intermarriage, hurried along by low birth rates and legal abortion. The white genocide crowd has resurrected the “one drop” idea born in antebellum America, that any non-white ancestor fundamentally alters all lineal descendants forevermore. They argue that generational change is not a passive or desirable process, but is driven by forces engaged in an active conspiracy specifically targeting the white race. The alleged culprits vary—fingers are pointed at Jews, a shadowy cabal of elite globalists, other races, and liberals or “Cultural Marxists” who want not only white people destroyed but all vestiges of Western Western civilization eliminated forever. The “white genocide” idea was at the root of the chant “Jews will not replace us,” heard at far-right demonstrations, perhaps most notably the August 2017 far-right rally and attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the death of a counterprotester and galvanized the country. Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is titled “White genocide conspiracy theory” and traces the idea to a Nazi pamphlet titled: “Are the White Nations Dying? The Future of the White and the Coloured Nations in the Light of Biological Statistics.”

* The science-fiction writer Theodore Beale, who writes under the pen name Vox Day, is a big voice in the alt-right firmament. I asked him whether there was a clear contradiction in a movement including staunch opponents of identity politics—even in their most basic form, which for instance leads to the formation of an African-American interest group such as the NAACP—and people who embrace identity politics for white people. He shot back: “The alt-right has never railed against identity politics. You are confusing us with conservatives, who abhor them. To a certain extent, the alt-right is what happens when the Right accepts the post-ideological reality of identity politics in multiracial and multicultural societies. “History suggests there is no reason to believe that the European homelands would not be considerably better off in most aspects of society if left to their own devices,” he continued, going on to make a strange claim: “Been to Paris lately? All that diversity is turning it into a dangerous, filthy place that no one even wants to visit.”

* The more media-savvy alt-righters began making the most of the newfound attention on the movement, but others were tuning out. With ethno-nationalists like Spencer and conspiracy theorists like Jones and Cernovich increasingly competing to becoming the faces of the alt-right, some were jumping ship. Paul Gottfried, for example, rued ever having been linked with the movement. “My presumed association with the alt-right has contributed to my professional isolation,” he told me via email. “In the last six months literary agents and publishers have begun to treat my communications as SPAM and have made it abundantly clear that they want nothing to do with me. As a septuagenarian scholar who has published thirteen books, most of which are read in translation, I am appalled by this reaction.”21

Gottfried was also distancing himself from Spencer, who he said was involved in organizing the Mencken Club but “only stayed on for a few years before dropping out”:

“One of the incidents that may have suggested to him that the group would not suit his purpose was the ready acceptance for membership of a black applicant who had been faithfully coming to our meetings. Although as a member of the board he objected, his objection went nowhere with the other board members. Critical points on which I disagree with Richard, as his views have become more crystallized, are his leftist social views … and his saddling of non-whites with responsibility for what white Westerners have done. For me it seems ridiculous to go after black or brown people for the multicultural, PC plague that is afflicting the West. It’s whites who have done this to themselves.”

* Compared to doxxing Hollywood stars, spasmodic private “investigations,” or giddily memeing a presidential candidate who may actually retweet your stuff, day-to-day politics is boring. And most of the rank-and-file channer-level alt-righters are energized not by the long plod that wins ground wars, but by big online battles. Post-Trump, they promptly went on a losing streak in big elections in other Western democracies, such as Holland, France, and Britain, showing up their weakness and relative geographic isolation. At the most basic level, the mostly American and British meme warriors failed to grasp the politics of the foreign countries they targeted, and woefully lacked the language and cultural skills needed to come up with messages that hit home. After their chosen candidates disappointed in those votes, the movement’s mass mind quickly moved on, looking for the next scrap. The dream of “taking over the Republican Party” with flash mobs and 24/7 streaming video of candidates’ lives—ideas that were once seriously discussed in the wake of Trump’s victory—were, only a few short months into the new administration, already beginning to evaporate like a fever dream from a much stranger time.

* In 2017 we witnessed the snuffing out of a brief and frightening glimmer of possibility, that the alt-right could grow into something resembling a conventional political force. But in its tactics, ideas, and personalities, it has opened up and shown to the world a box of assorted deplorables and long-dormant ideas which will have deep and unpredictable effects for years. The movement’s first phase is over. In fact, by the time you read these words, it will no doubt have morphed into something completely different—a rump of serious white nationalists perhaps, or the last remnants of a toxic paranoid fringe endlessly circulating YouTube videos among themselves. The campus warriors might succeed in changing their ecosystem and ushering in a new conservative cultural wave—although before that happens they probably need to get some decent tunes.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House

Baked Alaska Goes Hollywood (4-16-18)

Posted on April 20, 2018 by Luke Ford

I would like to think that Baked Alaska is simply heading in a new direction and that all the bad things imputed to him didn’t occur as we imagined. Maybe he’s had a spiritual epiphany and wants to leave behind activism that no longer serves him? Here are some excerpts from Baked’s Gab.ai account:

* anyone calling for the death of me and asking antifa to slit my throat and murder me unironically will be reported. i don’t take that lightly. that includes warski, tonka, ralph, jim etc.

* then stop watching. stop talking about it. and move on.

that’s why i continue to win. because you guys are obsessed.

* lol yea im not trippin at all, they are all making shekels by whining and crying about me for content, while im hanging out in the real world having fun.

really makes you think….

* I hide all my secrets in plain sight, but only the smart well-mannered see what’s actually going on.

* It’s funny I’ve told people over and over that @Microchip‍ is my alt account, and they always seem to forget what I’m capable of.

Baked is my dumb persona to fool people. Microchip is where I make the action happen.

* Everyone sayin Baked doxxed X, Baked mass flagged X, Baked fucked my mom, etc.

I didn’t dox anyone. Show proof or shut up. Because the proof does not exist. People know the truth and the truth is coming out, and it’s not looking good for all the backstabbers & liars.

* yes absolutely, we need to bring loyalty & integrity back or we have nothing.

so many backstabbers and rats. they all must go.

Posted in Alt Right, Internet | Comments Off on Baked Alaska Goes Hollywood (4-16-18)

Using A Key Card On Shabbat

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro writes:

* Fixler is a student of R. Nachum Eliezer Rabinovitch, and I used some of the time we were together to clarify the details of R. Rabinovitch’s position that there is no halakhic prohibition in using an electronic key card on Shabbat,[1] or in walking through a door that opens electronically, or even using an electronic faucet where the water comes out when you put your hand under it. Without getting into the halakhic details, I think one thing is sure, namely, that the future will bring more such lenient decisions in this area. The changing circumstances of modern life will create enormous pressure for lenient decisions, as modern technology which helps us in so many ways also creates many problems regarding Shabbat. For example, how long until it will be impossible to access an apartment building in New York and other big cities without using a key card? The day is probably coming when private apartment doors will also use key cards, not to mention numerous other such Shabbat-problematic technological advances that will be unavoidable aspects of life in the future. Therefore, I believe that some future poskim will return to R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach’s position that if there is no creation of heat or light, then technically there is no violation of Shabbat.

* R. Moses Isserles…states with reference to a different case that Jews who threaten to kill another Jew are only trying to scare him, “as Jews are not murderers.”

* Here is another story about Harbin told by R. David Abraham Mandelbaum. In 1943 his father and his friend, both yeshiva students in Shanghai, came to Harbin where they visited the university. While there, and presumably in the library, they found on one of the tables a Sefat Emet on Kodashim. The two students were very surprised, since how did this book end up in such a far-away place? They grabbed the book and quickly exited.

The story as told is quite shocking to me and I am surprised that it was reported, for how was this not thievery? Presumably, the university acquired the book from one of the local Jews who donated it. Or perhaps at the time the yeshiva students were visiting the man who was studying the book had gone out to the restroom or he had left the book there from a previous visit. If such was the case, when the man returned he would have been very upset to find that his book was taken. It appears that the two yeshiva students simply felt that they had a right to take the book, as it did not belong in a Chinese institution.
This reminds me of how many years ago I walked into the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary and saw that they had installed an anti-theft system to prevent anyone from removing a book without it being checked out. Upon inquiring I was told that this was necessary as some people thought it was OK to take books from the library, as they felt that they were “liberating” the books from the clutches of those who had no right to them, that is, the Conservatives. I never took that claim seriously and always assumed that a thief is a thief, and the people stealing the books – no matter how big their kippot or how long their beards – did not have any religious justification worked out. Subsequent experiences have shown me that these sorts of thieves will steal from anyone if given the chance, even if it means pretending to be kollel students. (I won’t elaborate further, but some European readers will know what I am referring to). But in the case from Harbin, it seems obvious that the reason for taking the book was precisely because the yeshiva students felt that there was no reason for the Sefat Emet to be in a Chinese institution. As mentioned already, I do not see how this can be justified halakhically, as we are not talking about a Jewish book that was, for example, confiscated by the government for anti-Semitic reasons.

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