The Mildewed Teaching Chair

On Friday, I left some wet cloths on my wooden stool that I use for teaching Alexander Technique. When I removed the now-dry cloths this evening, I saw they had left horrible mildew splotches.

So I scrubbed away and the mildew was scarcely reduced. Then I Googled the problem, ignored the advice about always using gloves, and poured some bleach on paper towels and scrubbed the top of the stool.

The smell was so strong, I left the stool outside. Then I washed my hands and lay down to watch the last episode of this third season of Better Call Saul.

My hands started to feel funny, and as my anxiety built so that I couldn’t enjoy the show, I Googled “bleach on bare hands” and saw that was a terrible thing. I followed the advice and washed my hands more thoroughly and went back to the show.

As the program reached its crescendo, my horror built. Not only would I need to throw away my stool and spend $40 on another one because of my stupid mistake, I’ve probably done myself some harm with my use of the bleach. So I paused the show right before the end and washed my hands more thoroughly and made sure not to touch my eyes.

When I finally finished Saul, my feeling of dread was so intense that I tried to dilute it by watching the latest episode of Silicon Valley, but found I couldn’t fully get into it because I had this fear that my eyes were stinging, so I took a long shower paying particular attention to dousing my eyes (I normally prefer to wash in the morning as I hate to start the day anything less than fully clean and invigorated by a cold shower).

It’s an hour later now and nothing seems terribly wrong. Yeah, I can’t sleep. I am scared and humbled by how easily I can ignore instructions and careen off course, putting myself and others in danger through my carelessness.

The wet towels were my instincts (fine in their place), the mildew stains were the repercussions from allowing my instincts to go awry, my bare-handed scrubbing with bleach was my best thinking about how to solve my problem, Google was my sponsor, and the cleansing water that took away my sins flowed from the well of Torah.

God, I offer myself to Thee–to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life.

May I do Thy will always!

My mouthguard tastes funny. I think I rinsed it right after I cleaned with bleach.

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Who Are The Good Guys?

Comments:

* The trouble with objective principles for determining winners and losers is that there will be losers, and losing in the status competition game is serious business.

And since we are inevitably a mix of individual and group interests, both equally valid, it will always be in the interests of the losers to gain strength of numbers by embracing whatever group affiliations are not available to the winners, and using them to try to overturn the objective verdict by the only realistic means of victory ever available to losers – a fist in the face.

Of course, being losers, the odds tend to be against them, but every now and then, history has a way of disrupting the stability of the status quo – often exogenously – and the loser-groups may indeed succeed, at least for a while, in ‘decapitating’ the society.

See – the Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge, the Red Guards, the Jacobins, etc.

This is why a fixed, unwavering devotion to objective principles is not only naive, it will, with some predictability, at some point become deadly.

It must stem from the aforementioned fact that, in the eyes of natural selection, we are not merely independent and principled individuals, we are members of groups, and while there may be no group selection, there most certainly is a major group contribution to individual reproductive fitness.

* As if there were no correlation between group cohesion and shared devotion to objective principle. It’s not the only source of such cohesion, but it’s the dominant one in the long run.

* Thomas Macaulay: “The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth; but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error.”

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Jews & Germany

Comments:

* Today, we look at the relationship Jews had with Germany through the prism of the Holocaust, and believe it was nothing but painful and acrimonious. But up until the Third Reich, Jews had a fairly good relationship with Germany, certainly when compared to Russia and even France. (In fact, the Dreyfuss Affair was sparked by the charge Dreyfuss, a Jew, had given military intelligence to the German army.)

Throughout the German Empire, Jews were integrated into German life and most Jews were proud to be part of Germany. They fought in WWI bravely on behalf of the German army.

The British, from around 1917 onward, believed that Jews were loyal to the German Empire, and that Bolshevism was just a Germanic ideological weapon to destabilize and overthrow their opponents, with German support for Lenin being a case in point. They also thought the Young Turks were agents of Jewish influence (another iSteve topic!), hence the wartime alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

Part of the reason why Britain supported Zionism was to try to entice Jews to support Britain.

* We cannot today easily imagine France before WWII, which was one of the most openly anti-Semitic countries in Europe. A Holocaust historian (I know but bear with me) said that if you talked to a Jewish ghost from before WWII and was telling him about the Holocaust, the first time he’d heard about it, and had not yet mentioned who did it, he would instantly assume it had been France.

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More Fresh Meat

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Alt Right Death Match: Richard Spencer Vs Greg Johnson

Richard Spencer has become the face of the Alt Right while Greg Johnson is widely regarded as white nationalism’s leading philosopher. I’m not aware of any photos or videos of Greg online. Richard has money while Greg is poor and that probably accounts for Greg’s greater need for privacy.

Over the past few years, I recall Greg taking a ton of shots at Richard. I found it interesting that Richard didn’t respond. But that’s changed recently.

As a Jew, I’m not going to tell the goyim who they should appoint as their leader. I don’t take any side in this fight.

From AltRight.com:

In 2016, Daniel Friberg and his colleagues at Arktos experienced a brazen attempt at a hostile takeover, when its former Editor-in-Chief, John Morgan, initiated a failed coup against this publisher. Currently, Morgan is an Editor and shareholder at Counter-Currents, whose founder, Greg Johnson, has been leading a smear campaign against Friberg and Arktos for the past number of months.

Greg Johnson writes:

In “Greg Johnson’s Attacks And How To Deal With Them,” Daniel Friberg and Richard Spencer claim that I made a series of accusations against Friberg in a thread on the TRS Forum. Then they demand that I substantiate these accusations or retract them and apologize. After that, they allege that I have a pattern of launching divisive and baseless attacks on important movement people, and they hypothesize that my motive is envy and thwarted ambition.

I hate this sort of drama. But with heavy heart, I drafted this reply shortly after Friberg and Spencer’s attack was published on June 1. I would have preferred to post it in the comments thread at Altright.com, but Friberg and Spencer preemptively blocked my Disqus account. I eventually decided not to publish it at all, because the more I thought about their statement, the more ridiculous it seemed. So I thought it best to just let the controversy die and focus instead on The White Nationalist Manifesto.

But that was a mistake. Ignoring even transparently idiotic charges allows your attackers to frame your silence as guilt or weakness. Beyond that, ignoring bullies just encourages more attacks, which is exactly what Friberg launched in recent days, both on Facebook and again on the front page of Altright.com, in an article originally signed by Friberg, Jason Jorjani, and Tor Westman. Friberg has also used Matt Forney as a proxy in this battle. (Forney, by the way, is Friberg’s most vocal character witness in the present drama.) Finally, a handful of monthly donors quit supporting Counter-Currents because I have allowed these charges to go unrebutted. (Help us make up the loss by donating here.)

…Like the London Forum, the Scandza Forum is an invitation-only event. Daniel Friberg was not invited because he had mistreated some of the backers over the years, and they did not want him around. I was not privy to any of this, though, until Wednesday, May 10th, when I was informed that Friberg tried to register for the conference. I advised the organizers not to change their policy, for I too had good reason not to want Friberg around. Since they were reluctant to engage with Friberg (they did not want to veto his registration, because knowing Friberg, they knew they would never hear the end of it), I also told them they could tell Friberg that I insisted he not be invited. “Nail me up,” I said, “I’ll be the fall guy.”

…On Sunday, May 14th, Friberg was told that he could not attend. On Tuesday, May 16th, Friberg issued an ultimatum. He wanted to be invited to the Forum by 22:00 or he would sabotage it. Of course, this removed any lingering doubts about whether Friberg should be excluded.

Now, at this point, you have a pretty good sense of how Daniel Friberg operates. Just to sum up: A new metapolitical organization was being launched in Scandinavia, on a proven model for success. People put time and money into organizing it. Kevin MacDonald and I agreed to fly half way around the world to help the new venture get off to a good start. Aside from two nights at a hotel, the trip was entirely at my own expense. Guillaume Durocher also agreed to fly in from elsewhere in Europe. More than 100 people had set aside time, laid out money, and made plans to attend. Some of them had even purchased non-refundable airline tickets and pre-paid for hotel rooms. And Daniel Friberg was threatening to sabotage the whole thing because he was not invited. That is a pretty clear-cut case of putting personal ego before the good of the movement and the race.

…Swedish antifa founder Mathias Wåg published an article at Stockholms Fria on the Scandza Forum outing the organizers. Friberg and Wåg have been “frenemies” for more than 20 years. The article mentions that Friberg was excluded from the upcoming Scandza Forum event. How did Wåg know this? The inclusion of this little detail is, of course, Friberg’s thumbprint on this despicable betrayal. The precise nature of Friberg’s relationship to Wåg has been a source of much anxiety and speculation in the Swedish movement. It is a joke in Sweden that when someone wants information about the movement, they are told to “Ask Mathias Wåg.”

…When I visited Stockholm, several veterans of the movement told me they had no doubt Friberg was the source of the antifa article. He has done similar things in the past: In 2009, Mattias Karlsson, a high-ranking Sweden Democrat, agreed to give a candid interview under the pen-name Anders Lundgren to Motpol, a website co-founded by Friberg. In 2014, Karlsson temporarily took over as leader of the Sweden Democrats when Jimmie Åkesson was ill. In 2015, Friberg and Karlsson quarreled, so Friberg revealed that Anders Lundgren was in fact Mattias Karlsson to the Left-wing Arbetarbladet (Workers’ Newspaper), in an obvious attempt to harm Karlsson.

The pattern is clear: In 2015, Friberg revealed the real name of a movement author to the Left-wing press, simply out of a desire to harm him. In 2017, Friberg revealed the names of the Scandza Forum organizers to a founder of the Swedish antifa, simply out of a desire to harm them. But I am sure that people who write for Altright.com and Arktos under pen names are perfectly safe. Friberg only doxes people who make him angry. And surely they won’t make that mistake.

…Friberg and Spencer criticize me for taking Matt Parrott and Matt Heimbach to task for launching a completely dishonest and calculatedly destructive attack . . . on Richard Spencer and NPI, namely their assertion that Heimbach was disinvited from NPI because it is controlled by a “gay mafia.” I also called out Parrott for launching equally dishonorable attacks on Nathan Damigo and Mike Enoch. But now, apparently, all is forgotten, and Heimbach is palling around with Spencer at protests.

…I don’t wish to be a political leader or a guru, because first and foremost, I aspire to be a philosopher. My main activity is the pursuit of wisdom through appreciating the great achievements of civilization. I want to surround myself with independent minds and free spirits, not flunkies, flatterers, minions, shills, and cultists. The North American New Right is not a political party. It is an intellectual movement, devoted to metapolitics: both the creation and propagation of ideas and the formation of new models of white communities.

I recognize that our movement needs activists and agitators. But I am not one of those people, nor have I ever aspired to be one. If Richard Spencer wants to organize protests against the removal of Confederate monuments and shout “We are a people!” through a bullhorn, more power to him. But that’s just not me. For someone to think that I aspire to be a public figure, much less “lead” anything, reflects not only complete ignorance of me as a person, but also a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of Counter-Currents.

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