Jews & Christmas

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Luke Ford

Stan Adams writes: At my first office job (in college), I continued my childhood habit (instilled in me by my mother and grandmother) of giving small Christmas gifts to all of my co-workers.

One of my female co-workers looked at the gift and said, “Um … you do know I’m Jewish, right? I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

I said, “Well, think of it as a Hanukkah gift.”

“Hanukkah is over.”

“Well, it’s just a seasonal gift.”

“There’s no such thing as a seasonal gift.”

“Just think of it as a nice gesture.”

“It’s not a nice gesture. It’s a Christmas gift, and don’t try to pretend that it’s something else.”

“Well, then maybe I should just take it back.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m not overly offended. I’ll keep it.”

(She never did say “Thank you.”)

The next year, I didn’t bother with the gifts. I was tempted to give that particular woman a card saying “Happy Kwanzaa, you f**king c**t,” but I didn’t.

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USA & Russia

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Speaking as a traditionalist, not an alt-righter, we don’t have an ethnic animus towards Russians. When they were part of the evil empire USSR, we opposed them due to ideology. Now that they dropped that ideology and have begun to re-Christianize, we feel no need to regard them as our enemy.

Historically we seem to have gotten along with them up until the time the Bolsheviks took over. They gave us a sweet deal on Alaska, prevented Europeans from intervening in our Civil War and they even provided a job for John Paul Jones.

There seems to be some similarities between Americans and Russians. We both occupy vast land masses that we took from other peoples. We both have a historical characteristic of being hard and tough. Though we do have differences, there is much common ground we probably have. And now that communism has been swept away, we should be exploring it. But the geniuses that run our nation like it is the board game Risk, have other ideas. They are still stuck in the past and have not correctly identified the real threat, the global South.

* “The alt.right love for Russia (and the left’s new hatred for it) are complete mysteries to me.”

The continued Boomer obsession with Russia is a complete mystery to me as well (too many Ian Flemming books?). As I have pointed out before, Russia is just a country – like any other country that has interests and objectives (except our own because we don’t seem to have to coherent policy in anything). Their actions are neither mysterious nor unpredictable.

* Russia’s anti NATO strategy is to promote territorial disputes which effectively preclude membership. Besides Georgia, Russia has taken that approach in Moldova and Ukraine.

The mindless expansion of NATO is inexcusable. As far as Russia’s resistance – I’m fine with it. Anything to create a buffer.

I’m with George Kennan on this.

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The Story Of Civilization

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Luke Ford

Anon writes: Having developed a new interest in learning history I picked up Will Durant’s majestic 11-volume Story of Civilization from the first half of the 20th century. I gave up on it in the first pages of volume 1, chapter 1:

“There are no racial conditions to civilization. It may appear on any continent and in any color: at Peking or Delhi, at Memphis or Babylon, at Ravenna or London, in Peru or Yucatan. It is not the great race that makes the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical and economic create a culture, and the culture creates a type. The Englishman does not make British civilization, it makes him; if he carries it with him wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. Given like material conditions, and another race would beget like results; Japan reproduces in the twentieth century the history of England in the nineteenth. Civilization is related to race only in the sense that it is often preceded by the slow intermarriage of different stocks, and their gradual assimilation into a relatively homogeneous people.”

Seriously?

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The Importance Of Place

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Luke Ford

John Michael Greer writes:

The brilliant Native American philosopher and activist Vine Deloria Jr. offered an important hint in his most influential work, God is Red. He pointed out that in the wake of the Reformation, Western spirituality lost track of a crucial variable—the spiritual importance of place. To most spiritual traditions, and to Native American traditions even more than most, specific places on the land have their own unique spiritual properties and powers, which are not dependent on the people who happen to live there. He went on to argue that much of the reason why modern American society stumbles so blindly from one preventable disaster to another is that we have not yet learned to relate in a sacred manner to the powers of place, the spirits of the land on which we live—and that those powers remain the ones that native peoples reverenced.

… The changes that matter very often focus around one person who becomes the focus of change, and who proceeds up the river of our national life, encountering one crisis after another and somehow overcoming each one of them, until death or retirement ends the tale—and by the time that happens, the world has changed decisively and nothing will ever be the same again.

That’s the archetypal pattern I see unfolding in American life right now…

I think it’s safe to predict that no future attempt to stop Trump in his tracks will get any further than the ones we’ve already seen. The efforts to hit Trump over the head with an investigation or stab him with media tirades will doubtless continue—in fact, with an eye toward the legends, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mueller investigation is still lumbering ineffectually onward for a long time to come, and I’d be amazed if there’s the slightest decrease in the sniping from the media and the official intelligentsia—but none of it will affect the outcome. At the beginning of 2025, when Donald Trump hands over the presidency to his successor, he’ll look back on a long string of crises that never quite managed to derail him. By that time, furthermore, the nation and the world will have changed irrevocably.

With an eye to the first two parts of this series of posts, it’s not too hard to see the new realities taking shape on the far side of the Trump era. The drastic pruning of federal regulations, the end of one-sided free trade agreements that encourage the offshoring of working class jobs, and the end of the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration and the resulting downward pressure on wages and benefits—all core policies of the Trump administration—represent a dramatic rebalancing of economic power in American society away from the managerial aristocracy. The realities of politics being what they are, that will bring about an equally dramatic rebalancing of political influence. We’re already seeing a lively socialist insurgency threatening the Democratic Party establishment, and a less dramatic but equally far-reaching influx of populist candidates into the GOP is also well under way. Despite all the shrill denunciations of the mainstream media and the official intelligentsia, There Is An Alternative—in fact, more than one—and that in itself shows that the enforced consensus of the last forty years is shattering around us.

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Alternative To MSM Distribution

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

Bittorrent has been delivering decentralized, ad-free, censorship-free media for nearly two decades. It’s rock solid, well-proven, has extensive tooling, requires virtually no investment or overhead, and doesn’t require touching anything made by Hollywood or Silicon Valley.

Want to deliver podcasts and video without having to grovel at the feet of Zuckerberg or Tim Cook? Throw up a torrent. For $100 a month in hosting fees you can independently distribute hours of video to tens of millions of people.

What’s the problem? All but a tiny sliver of high-IQ, technically savvy, anti-estabilishment nerds are too dumb or too unmotivated to care. Even if Alex Jones’ fanbase could figure out how to download a torrent, probably nobody on Alex Jones’ production team is smart enough to set it up correctly.

The Internet of the 90s was incredible because it was all libertarian maniacs, antisocial geeks, and misfit geniuses. It was as if the Wild West was settled by smartest people on the planet. Now everyone and their mother is online. The same dullards, yes-men, soccer moms, and neanderthals that ruined meatspace have made cyberspace just as intolerable.

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Trump Tightens Rules On Economic Migrants

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Lot writes:

Been thinking about this more, this could be the single most significant news on immigration in Trump’s entire first term with the exception of killing the DACA amnesty.

1. Congress doesn’t have to approve, so it can actually happen.

2. Virtually no economic migrants could become citizens since nearly all will have used at least 1 government benefit such as Medicaid or an Obamacare subsidy.

3. Fewer third-world origin citizens means fewer Dem voters and fewer chain migration legal immigrants.

4. A fair number of third world origin citizens are born to US citizens abroad. To take one common example, Ahmed the American who became a citizen from a W-Era refugee or visa lottery meets Betty Burkha online in Pakistan, marries her there, and knocks her up. Under Miller’s proposal, Baby Burkha is not a US citizen because refugees like Ahmed almost all use welfare and would be barred from naturalization.

5. This rule actually favors non-welfare using immigrants by knocking the welfare immigrants out of the naturalization line and subsequent chain migration waiting list. So high income immigrants who also don’t lie about their income for the bennies win too entirely at the expense of the welfare migrants.

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When To Lie Is To Die

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

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The Joys Of Being Wrong

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Nick Short writes:

When I first got clean, the catalyst beyond threat of discontinued financial support was certainty that I would finally be recognized for the meteoric talent that I was – that all of the reasons for which I thought I used substances would be reinterpreted and rightly understood as unappreciated genius and, once so affirmed, I would no longer indulge that self-destructive tendency born of being “misunderstood” – no wait sorry – not just misunderstood like you are – distinctively misunderstood. Quitting drugs for me, however, has actually shown its primary benefit to be that I now get to participate in life just as other people do – like a person looking to what actually is instead of constant consumption with what is not, with how they’ve been wronged, with how they are somehow simultaneously better and worse than ____, all at the same time.

Even now, despite years of practiced right-sizing and spiritual dependence, there is a part of me that continues to sustain the myth that I am somehow so special as to be immune to the conditions that dog other people, despite a consistent undercurrent of fraudulence: that I can put in a little less effort, that I am somehow shrouded in a halo sufficient to enchant those so blessed to gaze upon my angel face.

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Will Maxine Waters Chair The Committee On Financial Affairs?

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* …when I was younger and worked for a House Democrat, Maxine Waters was considered a total joke by most of her own caucus – at Financial Services hearings, she repeatedly demonstrated that she didn’t have even the most rudimentary understanding of most of the issues under the committee’s jurisdiction.

Should she become chairwoman, not only should the opposition highlight her lack of knowledge repeatedly, it should also flog the fact that she lives a life (and district) completely different from her constituents and how little her influence in Congress has meant for them.

* Is there some reason why the average ISteve reader should give a damn about the Republican Party?

* The average iStever reader is probably a white American who is deeply concerned about the future of this nation. Yes, most definitely yes, they should give a damn about the Republican party. And before anyone writes “they’re just both sides of the same party”, or “the Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats”, consider the following:

1) It should be abundantly clear to anyone reading this blog that the Republican party has been for some time the white party and will become even more the white party in the future. If you are a white American you really have no other choice. It’s like a homesteader who doesn’t get the choicest piece of land. You make do with what you have and try to make it as good as possible. So whatever you think of the Republicans, it’s your party now and you should get involved and try to make it better.

2) The Democrats and the media have finally shown what many have suspected. They are anti-white. Steve’s tweeting and selection of blog posts over the weekend is testament to how out in the open they are about their anti-white animus. So iSteve readers know their choice has been made for them. There is no option to iStevers for the Democrat party.

3) We have guys like Speaker Paul “Cuck” Ryan and Senators Corker and Flake quitting. These are some of the people who justify the saying that Republicans are “just as bad as the Democrats”. They are quitting because the Republican party is finally changing. It is changing into something more of us on this blog can accept. And it’s only the beginning.

4) Many neocons and nevertrumpers have left the Republican party. The cleaning continues.

5) Even big donors like the Cuck Brothers have been publicly attacked by Trump and the Republicans. So the party is changing.

The list goes on and I won’t bore you. I am sure others can add items similar to the above. The point to take is that if you are an iSteve reader you have no choice. And despite your past opinions of the GOP, there are signs that the Republican party is changing to our view. Is it there yet? No. But we have seen more movement in the past 18 months than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Now is not the time to stop or pause and complain. Now is the time to keep your foot on the pedal and continue with this transformation.

But here is the kicker. All of this progress we’ve seen over the past 18 months can and will be stopped if the Republicans lose the House in November. Not only must iSteve readers accept that the GOP is their party, they must actively support it this election cycle or risk having our momentum stalled or completely stopped by a Democrat House.

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‘I remember thinking his waning vitality could be used to my advantage’

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

From The Guardian: “As a 17-year-old student about to go to college, Ottessa Moshfegh approached a famous male writer for advice. He was willing to give it – in exchange for veneration… and sex.”

I first became aware during the physical act of love… Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I — I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, but I do deny them my essence.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Sounds like the creepy old male writer was Philip Roth. The dates and ages match up, not to mention character. The real Roth’s wife had divorced him rather than died, as in Moshfegh’s description, but she may have changed that detail to something functionally similar to disguise Roth a little more. Roth’s ex’s memoir about leaving Roth was titled Leaving the Doll House, and Moshdegh described how beautifully decorated Roth’s wife had left his apartment.

“Rupert Dicks” scans the same as Philip Roth.

* Moshfegh is brilliant at self-marketing, she knows intuitively the female victim space is full and the supply demand mismatch is on the side of fem-fatal. I am positive she has been victimized in one way or another in her action packed 37 years, but why waste valuable time writing about stuff that at best might get you a middling pay job on the Times editorial board when you can spend your time writing serious books or for Conde Nast.

Moshfegh has an Iranian Jewish father and Croatian mother. This raised a question in my mind about NY Times editorial board diversity. There isn’t any Jewish diversity at the Times. Friedman, David Brooks, Bari Weiss, why no Middle Eastern Jews? Or Persian Jews like Moshfegh? Moshfegh might have something to say about the most important topic this minute, Iran, but either no one is asking, or she’s not telling.

Pro tip for aspiring writers: If am searching the net correctly, Moshfegh does not seem to use or need social media. I don’t see any Tweets and her Face Book page is not viewable by people without a facebook profile like me. She apparently does not get woman of letters career advice from tech journals or the NY Times.

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