A reply to Ozy

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 04, 2010, 05:35 AM | #

In Great Britain it’s racist for a taxi driver to display a sticker in his cab window saying he can speak English.  Everyone got that?  That’s “racist.” Would it be “racist” if he displayed a sign saying he could speak Mandarin, Polish, Swahili, Arabic, Gujurati, or Hebrew?  No, only if he said he could speak English.

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/02/03/ability-to-speak-english-is-derided-in-england/ .

The people who think this stuff up and enforce it, and the people who help them enforce it like certain branches of the mass media — how long do they suppose good folk are going to continue to put up with totalitarianism of this nature?  Is an explosion that will make the Yugoslav Civil Wars look like a tea party what they’re after?  If so, they’ve come up with exactly the right provocations for it.

Posted by Dasein on February 04, 2010, 10:43 AM | #

First and foremost, you would benefit from reading On Genetic Interest if your goal is to develop any kind of meaningful critique.  One or two have tried, and MR has some killing critiques of those in its archive.  It must be said that none of the gainsayers, who are people with a reasonable technical grasp, have dismissed EGI quite as airily as you. --GW

The reason he dismissed it so airily is that he didn’t understand what he read, or he didn’t read it.

Just one glaring example:

In fact, the genetic distance between races is so infinitesimally small as to be completely negligible.

D Allen was nice enough to respond to this and try to explain it to him, but this was addressed in Salter’s paper (Oxy would also do well to read the Race FAQ, top left of the page).

Oxy, did you really read all of Salter’s paper?  I don’t believe you did.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 04, 2010, 11:41 AM | #

Dasein,

In fairness to him, Oxy has come face to face with radical ideas of which he was previously profoundly unaware.  It is natural that he would first attempt to interpret them through his experience.  It is frustrating to see, but we can’t really blame him.  Only later - perhaps much later - will he come to an understanding that these ideas are calling from beyond his experience, and there is no alternative to putting in the groundwork before passing judgement of any kind on them.

We, on the other hand, are intimately familiar with the liberal world.  There is no further effort required of us in that direction, and thank heaven for that.

Posted by Nemesis on February 04, 2010, 11:44 AM | #

As a BNP activist I should like to thank you, Guessedworker, for an excellent article and for the intellectualism with which you promote our cause - the preservation of the European gene pool. It requires plenty of mental stamina and ruggedness to “debate” with the ultra liberal Guardianistas. Your efforts, and those of others outside the Party, help to create an ambience in which we can effectively oppose them politically.

Posted by Dasein on February 04, 2010, 12:42 PM | #

GW, that was a brilliant post.  And you’re right that we should not be too impatient with Oxy.  My own break with liberalism was not an overnight affair.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 04, 2010, 01:44 PM | #

Nemesis, I’m sure Guessedworker would join me in replying that it is rather we who thank you and all your fellow BNP activists for your hard work, dedication, and sacrifice in standing up for your country and race in their time of need, and in so doing, whether or not you realize it, standing up for white people everywhere on the planet.  I am an American and I thank you profoundly for your vital work.  When the call went out that your country was in danger you did not shirk but answered the call, as did your fathers before you back through the generations.  God bless you.  And God bless the BNP!

Posted by Bill on February 04, 2010, 06:47 PM | #

Fred.  February 04, 2010, 05:35 AM

Postmodern liberal chaos, swiftly disapearing up its own ...

When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn’t ask for ‘reliable’ and ‘hard-working’ applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246201/Employer-told-advertise-reliable-workers--discriminates-unreliable-applicants.html#ixzz0eV2WVkHZ

Posted by Dan Dare on February 04, 2010, 08:21 PM | #

A tour de force, GW. The complete exchange between Ozy and yourself deserves to be pinned on the sidebar.

The passage that begins “surely, the argument runs” through to the charge-sheet for the offence of ‘left racism’ is particularly helpful, and I apologise in advance for plagiarising it whole or in part.

I suspect at this point that you have left little scope for a rejoinder beyond that of labelling you a misanthrope and, perhaps, un-Christian.

Posted by Captainchaos on February 04, 2010, 09:28 PM | #

It is natural that he would first attempt to interpret them through his experience.

Hmm, why does that sound familiar?

It is frustrating to see, but we can’t really blame him.

The sky is blue, damn you for being blue, sky.

Only later - perhaps much later - will he come to an understanding that these ideas are calling from beyond his experience,

Square peg, round hole, stop pounding.  Go with a round peg.  Attempt to elicit acknowledgement of evidence that supports our position that he has himself observed, from his experience.  Results do matter.

and there is no alternative to putting in the groundwork before passing judgement of any kind on them.

But most lemmings won’t put in the groundwork, I guess that means our race is fucked.  Unless...square peg, round hole, stop pounding.  I mean, the philosophy is not an end unto itself and is merely an instrument to facilitate what itself states is the ultimate interest, racial genetic continuity.  Right?  I seem to recall propaganda and demagogy were more the lemmings speed recently, worth considering.

Btw, I appreciate the implicit acknowledgement that the contention that Oxy is not a dishonest debater and/or intellectually lazy, in other words, that he is ‘bad’, and we are ‘good’, is an act of ‘idealization’, which we are told is a cardinal sin.  No, none of that really, Oxy is merely a fucking lemming.

P.S. Hey Dare, why am I always right?

Posted by D Allen on February 05, 2010, 11:14 PM | #

We are not born with the power to choose the influences we absorb.  We walk out in the rain, that is all.  Freedom - the real thing, not the liberal confection - consists in recognising this unconsciousness, this power of the acquired, and turning instead towards that which is true in us.  Many of us here know this.  I think it highly unlikely that you know it.

Funnily enough I stumbled across this short article http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/9/8/1/7/p198179_index.html
earlier today, entitled “From ‘Bio-power’ to ‘Neuropolitics’: Stepping Beyond Foucault”, which elucidates the point that Guessedworker makes here.

Posted by Dasein on February 06, 2010, 06:07 PM | #

Ozy should read that article.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 06, 2010, 07:36 PM | #

From the blog of Andrew Brons MEP:

Q:  How Much More Anti-British Can the Tory Party Be? 
A:  A Lot.

This website yesterday posed the question “how much more anti-British could the Tory party be” in relation to their objection to “English speaker” stickers.  Well, the answer appears to be a lot more, reports our Land and People correspondent.  Take Tory-dominated Surrey Heath Borough Council, located a mere 30 miles or so up the M3 from Southampton where the sticker brouhaha has occurred, our correspondent said.  Last month, the council’s 16-strong planning committee approved an application by the Bengali Welfare Association to tear down a listed Victorian school in a conservation area and to replace it with a traditional domed mosque. 

This was done in spite of hundreds of objections from local people and against the recommendation of the council’s own planning experts.  It appears that the controlling Tory group on the council were merely following orders from the Conservative Party’s head office who have launched a desperate effort to wrest as much of the Islamic block vote from Labour as possible.

[the rest of the article:  http://bnp.org.uk/2010/02/a-how-much-more-anti-british-can-the-tory-party-be-a-a-lot/ ]

Uhhh …. forgive me but I’m not so sure I believe that the reason Conservative Party Headquarters gave this order was “to wrest Islamic votes from Labour,” any more than I believe that was the reason Conservative Party Headquarters instructed Cameron to tell the media there were “too many white faces in Parliament” as if it was some sort of marxoid puppet speaking. 

I believe Conservative Party Headquarters has been taken over by people who want to replace the white race in Britain with non-whites, and that is the reason for both orders being handed down. 

What needs to be done is to find out the names of the specific individuals ultimately responsible for this and identify them publicly along with a clear statement — an unofficial indictment in other words — citing their treason to the nation and their crimes against humanity as defined by United Nations and other international conventions. 

I strongly suspect the ultimate force propelling the adoption by Conservative Party Headquarters of all this high treason and all this crime against humanity, if carefully traced all the way back to its unpublicized origins, will be found to consist mainly of one thing:  Jewish money.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 08:00 PM | #

GW,

Thanks for letting me strike the first blow, however it would have strengthened your position to have addressed my point (and knocked it out) before turning the tables. This would determine whether you in fact have any platform to attack my views from; to re-formulate it, I contend that your positioning of ethnocentricity as a building block for an entire philosophy is based not on reason or deduction, not on sound science, and not on any demonstrable feat of ontological thinking. Instead it is based on an intuition, a gut feeling, one that relies for its justification on terms such as ‘human nature’ and ‘blood’. The problem with this is that these terms in themselves are not satisfactory as an irreducible foundation; there can be as many interpretations of them as there are people interpreting them. You can imagine, therefore, how solid any philosophy that rests on their shoulders can be considered.

No problem, however, to turn to my own beliefs. Perhaps in this way you could better understand where the irreducible point needs to be if your own position is to be understood as reason-based rather than faith-based.

You may have seen that I posted, on the old thread, a reply to a question from danielJ. It sets out the irreducible points of my world view, and I’ll paste it below for ease of reference:

A being’s actions in the world, and interactions with the world, whether taken as an individual or as part of a larger entity, should primarily aim to minimise the suffering of the maximum number of other beings and maximise the happiness of the maximum number of other beings.

You’ll note that what I see as irreducible (happiness and suffering) is what can be directly understood, from personal experience, by every sentient being. Not perfect, but every philosophy needs a starting point on which to be built – this is the most argument-proof one that I have come across. The possible interpretations of these two terms are not infinite in number.

It can’t be denied that you have an impressively authoritative, seasoned writing style. Perhaps slightly hubristic at times. However your ideas about the fundamentals of consciousness are never successfully placed within an ethnocentric context. It seems to me that you can edit out the racialist aspects of any of your writing, and the result would have some merit. I also think you know this – the ethnocentricity, perhaps, helps draw in the sycophantic crowd on Majority Rights, which in turn gets you an audience for what you really want to talk about – ontology. You just need to throw some shallow, baseless ‘racialist’ comment in now and again to appease the gallery, and your whole piece gets applauded.

Your ‘what it means to be human’ essay is a perfect case in point – some interesting arguments, casually (reluctantly, perhaps?) bookended by some vague nonsense about blood and Englishness. (If you have time I’d be interested to hear you respond to my more detailed analysis of the essay, on the other thread).

How else to explain your evident refusal to acknowledge that you know what a logical argument is, and your refusal to contextualise your thoughts in this manner?

It’s no problem, however, to put this aside for the moment (but aside it remains, unanswered) and take a look at what I believe. Your are right to identify my position as liberal, but you don’t budge from your misguided belief that liberalism can only exist if it isn’t questioned or examined. You equate liberalism with Judaism (a truly astounding leap, but I am getting used to that from reading your pieces), and then go on to say that liberalism has been grafted on to a more fundamental, European sensibility, which you imply is more aligned to your brand of radical right thought (again, you omit the reasoning). In essence, you claim to have broken down the false narrative that the mainstream is in thrall to, and instead exist on a more authentic plane - and as this space is free of the restrictive framework imposed on the rest of us by Jews, you are free to pursue your gut feeling that race and enthinicty are fundamental.

TBC below

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 08:03 PM | #

Where you are wrong is in your assumption that liberalism is groundless, especially when contrasted with the faithist character of your belief in enthnocentricity. You say:

In this regard, Nationalism should be understood as a revolutionary corrective.

It this regard nationalism may be posited as a revolutionary corrective, however if it is to be understood as such it will need an underlying argument - that it is free from ‘Jewish paternalistic thought’ is not enough, and I suspect that you know that. I have been accused on MR of being a ‘dishonest debater’ - your constant refusal to adhere to the usual norms of rational enquiry makes me think that you are the dishonest one. It also, step by step, reassures me that my initial thesis - that you are essentially a faithist - was correct. 

Liberalism, in so far as it can be brought to its irreducible elements (as I have attempted to do above), is not without foundation as you allege. In taking as its starting point two notions, happiness and suffering, that can be universally understood it is in fact grounded in the fundamental being-in-the-world that every sentient being shares, and that forms the truly irreducible. Judaism, nationality, ethnicity, Europe, religion - there are all man-made concepts, and come to the individual as part of the acculturation process that you ascbribe as the root of liberalism. By way of example, if you take a new born and give it to chimps to raise, and come back 10 years later, it would have no concept of nationalism, but it would understand what happiness and suffering mean.

In my previous post I listed a series of political positions, in order to describe how my world-view translates to the real business of organising human affairs. You dismiss this as you are primarily interested in ideas - that’s ok, and as you can see I am happy to defend my position both at the practical and fundamental level. Of ideas, you say that ‘They, and not events, are what the world is made of, after all’. But the resulting events are the method by which the underlying ideas are judged. Either that or their self-contained logic - and on both fronts you have failed to demonstrate that your thoughts hold up.

On gene transmission, you say:

That said, I am glad you accept the universal imperative to perpetuate one’s own genes.  I assume you understand that this already “supports” familial genetic interest and thence, since it is an extended family, tribal genetic interests.

Well, no - that’s the problem, that extrapolation is unsupported and in fact appears to be grafted on to better serve your pre-ordained wordview. Like you I am no scientist, but one can’t be an expert in everything - that’s where expert consensus comes in useful. It’s nonsensical to claim that the paternalistic, Jewish liberalism that defines our thought (in your formulation) would extend to the dispassionate world of scientific enquiry.

Therefore the fact that no consensus exists around the ethny as a unit for gene transmission tells me that the idea is more likely political than scientific in nature. By way of example, nothing could be more politically inconvenient to the West than the reality of climate change - and yet, the idea has not been suppressed. Likewise with the ethny - if it was objectively true, or even hypothetically sound, it would have garnered a wider scientific consensus despite the negative political implications.

You say:

Eagles, of course, you would strive to conserve.  Our “conducive environment” likewise.  Tibetans, yes.  Palestinians, yes.  The Yamomani and the other threatened Amazonian tribes, yes, yes, yes.

Well yes, but there is a fundamental difference - for eagles, it’s a species-wide drive to conserve. For Palestinians, it is a learned concept - newborn Palestinians don’t know they are Palestinians, or that they are under threat, until someone tells them. The correct formulation would be that humans as a whole seek to conserve (and that is only true if seen as an aggregate of each individual’s own drive to conserve - that, at any rate is the scientific consensus of those working outside a political context) - that is where the irreducible line is drawn, not at nationalism or ethnicity, which are human constructs.

You say:

In other words, the denial of preservation to Europeans is left-racism: the strange, alien idea that Europeans are this special category of illegitimate human being, the racist, and it’s in the skin and can only be gotten out by forced coexistence with the Third World and a guided “rational” decision to side with tolerance.

You baselessly conflate tolerance with the denial of preservation of Europeans. It’s unduly alarmist, and more importantly, the underlying thought process is obscure (a recurrring theme on MR). Tolerance, multiculturalism - these are political ideas and do not belong on the theoretical plane you affect to operate in. It is indeed a pathological fear of ‘otherness’ that drives your thought, and you, being more articulate than most far-rightists, have chosen to build an ill-defined ontology around this reactionary, nonsensical reflex.

TBC below

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 08:04 PM | #

As for your helpful guidelines to determining whether I am in fact a ‘left-racist’, I’ll say that I probably have exhibited some of that behaviour at one point or another, but I also know a distractionary tactic when I see one. I have abstained from yelling names and accusations while a guest on your site, and would appreciate if you extended the same courtesy - therefore, whether I am a left-racist or not, you should have the intellectual honesty to ackowledge that I am issuing a valid challenge to your philosophy that you are trying your best to sidestep.

You say:

No one is born a left-racist.  The condition occurs when certain weaknesses are present in the psyche.  These may be an abnormally high degree of suggestibility, susceptibility to peer pressure and the desire to conform or to find approval from authority, “second son syndrome”, moral vanity, and, especially, religious feeling denied its proper expression and channelled instead into the political field.

That is in fact the most logic based analysis you have offered so far - you only need to remove the word ‘left’ from before ‘racist’ and you’ll find that you are repeating back to me exactly what I have been saying since we met. The difference between us is that I have set out and defended my views in the generally accepted logical manner, whereas you have only obfuscated at great length.

You quote bombkangaroo:

While a Christian might describe their faith that Jesus/God loves them as irreducible, that does not make it so. Genes however are tangible, they can be observed and tested. That they exist, and that they differentiate the various peoples of the world is an objective fact. There is no room for faith or interpretation, we are our genes.

Again this appears to be an instance of the ‘intelligent design’ approach - the positioning of an irrefutable concept, genes, in proximity to a faithist position, the ethny (to re-iterate, no scientific consensus is what puts paid to it) in the general hope that the result will be exempt from scrutiny.

In a suitably religious tone, you conclude:

In the end, human nature and Nationalism will win, and European Man will find his way back into the light.

To the ‘light’? We know the other route to be brought to ‘the light’ - get on your knees and pray.

I have no problem with a faithist position as long as it recognises itself as such - perhaps you will have the intellectual honesty to do just that.

OZK

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 08:14 PM | #

for ease of reference I thought I’d paste my thoughts on the What it is to be Human Article on this thread:

GW,

I have spent the last hour or so reading the two entries you referred me to, namely What It Is to Be Human Parts I & II.

Part I is essentially laying the context for what comes next – my understanding is that you see in the Social Brain thesis an opportunity to spread the ethnocentric idea via the nudge method, with the ultimate goal (I am guessing) of making it the primary strand of thought in the political discourse. Once we have the fundamentals of the idea worked out clearly, then I will be very interested to hear you describe the mechanics of implementing this strategy.

Before that becomes relevant we will need to see that it is indeed a valid idea, however, and therefore worth disseminating by this, or any of the more traditional methods, such as election campaigns. Indeed considering the fact that no BNP member has ever felt the plush, comfortable embrace of a House of Commons chair, electoral politics may well be a dead end for the radical right, and esoteric solutions like this may eventually become the only option.

Just one thing I want to highlight in Part I specifically. You say:

I can believe in my English blood and English soil because they are real … they are self-evident to me.

This is essentially the only place where the ethnocentric idea appears in Part I, and again we find it couched in unmistakeably religious terms. If something is self-evident to you, but you are at a loss to explain why, then logic suggests that you may well be mistaken.

Part II unfolds an interesting hypothesis about the systems – motor, mentational, emotional – that form our dashboard for interacting with and making sense of our surroundings. While reading I did start to wonder where the ethnocentric idea resides in this formulation – and was slightly disappointed when you didn’t expand on that, so perhaps we could address that in this thread instead.

I would submit that it originates in the emotional and resides in the mentational. I agree with the logic you use which places our elemental emotional responses in an evolutionary context – I would add by way of a supporting example that our fear of heights is an evolutionary trait, as those among our forebears who didn’t have it fell from a height before they could procreate. Into this framework it’s easy to see how Salter’s idea could be slotted in – that prehistoric man found it beneficial for gene survival (on an individual level, as I am yet to be sold on the ‘ethny’ as a unit for gene transmission) to group with many others, who eventually became known as ‘kin’.

However let’s not assume the fallacy, like Salter does, that behaviour coded into us by our primeval past is necessarily of any use in deciphering and operating in the modern world – nature also gave us the appendix and birth defects, so it’s not all good.

So if this was indeed the genesis of the ethnocentric idea, then I would further submit that it currently resides with the mentational system, defined by yourself as:

the realm of true creative thought.  That deals in invention and pure reason, and may perhaps owe its arising to the fitness gain to be got from exploration.

‘Creative thought’ is the only category that the ethnocentric idea would fit into currently, as it serves no evolutionary purpose (since the ethny has not been shown to be a valid genetic unit). Also found in creative thought would be the capacity for myth, for religion, and their natural bedfellow, the ethnocentric Weltanschauung.

You may note that I have done the legwork for you in attempting to connect the ethnocentric idea to your formulation about the three systems. Having finished your train of thought, you seem to have had an afterthought about the fact that you are writing for a radical-right forum, and as a concession tacked on the following at the end:

Nationalism claims the redoubt of being and of Nature.  It claims that the European world as it has been shaped by forces hostile to the European being and European nature is a lie.  It is not our world, does not reflect us, does not grant us legitimacy or land or even life.  Liberalism, Jewish ethno-warfare, cultural Marxism, postmodernity … call it what you like, it is a world of surface meanings, a world of the lightweight, the rootless, the estranged.

Just to look at that first sentence for a moment:

Nationalism claims the redoubt of being and of Nature.

How so? There is no progression from one to the other except by a leap of faith. Above, I have briefly sketched an ontological argument to connect the two, which you surprisingly haven’t attempted, preferring to ‘claim redoubt’ without any back-up. You can put absolutely anything at the beginning of that sentence – Socialism claims the redoubt of being and of Nature. Peruvian sculpture claims the redoubt of being and of Nature. Russian imperialism claims the redoubt of being and of Nature.

I don’t mean to labour the point, however the crux of it, for me, is how your enquiry orientates itself within an ethnocentric framework – on the evidence of your article, it does not.

The last sentence of that paragraph:

Jewish ethno-warfare, cultural Marxism, postmodernity … call it what you like, it is a world of surface meanings, a world of the lightweight, the rootless, the estranged.

That’s presumably there to posit, as a binary, the ethnocentric narrative as a world of deep meanings, a world of the heavyweight, the rooted, the familiar. Again we drill down to the irreducible point and again it reveals itself to be (at best) an intangible gut feeling, (at worst) a malfunctioning religious belief.

In summary I have found your piece interesting and well written, but it doesn’t even begin to explain how the ethnocentric Weltanschauung was philosophically or ontologically constructed.

As I said before, moving past this stumbling block is more than a pedantic insistence on my part – the validity of all your thoughts and articles hinges on it. If the ethnocentric idea is found to be without underlying logic, but rather an intuition, then we may well have a concrete answer as to why it has been, politically, extremely marginal throughout its long and sidelined history in the political realm.

OZK

Posted by Dan Dare on February 07, 2010, 08:35 PM | #

I wonder whether it might click better for Ozy if a response were to be framed in terms of ‘extended phenotype’ rather than simply ethnicity. There is of course considerable overlap between the two, but since the former places a greater weight on ‘environment’ (aka heritage and culture) than does the latter, with its emphasis on shared ancestry, there might be a better chance for a broader understanding of what it is we are about.

Ozy have you read Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy? Scruton is usually said to be ‘right-wing’ but is otherwise consideredt to be salonföhig, even though he shares many (but not all) of the views shared by contributors here. You might find that what he says provides some illumination into the question you ask.

Posted by Captainchaos on February 07, 2010, 08:42 PM | #

I contend that your positioning of ethnocentricity as a building block for an entire philosophy is based not on reason or deduction, not on sound science, and not on any demonstrable feat of ontological thinking.

You could not be more wrong, and this is where the ‘intellectuals’ went wrong from the start in not getting you to acknowledge this most basic premise.

I’ll ask you this question, and I expect an answer:  Do you yourself observe that generally people tend to associate with people of their own ethnic group and/or racial group?

And be well aware, there is much scientifically valid research based upon real data to back up just that claim, even if you choose to acknowledge it or not per your own experience.

Posted by Captainchaos on February 07, 2010, 08:48 PM | #

I wonder whether it might click better for Ozy if a response were to be framed in terms of ‘extended phenotype’ rather than simply ethnicity.

That’s right Dare, he has demonstrated no capacity to assimilate mentally jargonistic abstractions that run counter to his mental models.  So what do you do, offer more.  LOL!

I know how this is done.  “How?” you ask.  Because I do it when interacting with real people, not on the Internet.  Hell, I can even get negroes to acknowledge the basic point of ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 07, 2010, 09:18 PM | #

Cap’n nobody here doubts the existence of the ‘flocking together’ phenomenon that you cite. It’s emprically obvious. The question that Ozy appears to be asking is ‘why do we believe it is so important that we have built an entire worldview around it?’

But let’s take up that point in the other thread and leave this one in the realm of the metaphysical. Neither you nor are cut out to be philosophers.

Posted by Dasein on February 07, 2010, 09:38 PM | #

Well, no - that’s the problem, that extrapolation is unsupported and in fact appears to be grafted on to better serve your pre-ordained wordview. Like you I am no scientist, but one can’t be an expert in everything - that’s where expert consensus comes in useful. It’s nonsensical to claim that the paternalistic, Jewish liberalism that defines our thought (in your formulation) would extend to the dispassionate world of scientific enquiry.

LOL

So, Ozy, if you’re no expert, then on what basis did you make the following statement?

In fact, the genetic distance between races is so infinitesimally small as to be completely negligible.

Again, did you read all of Salter’s paper?

Posted by Dasein on February 07, 2010, 09:44 PM | #

Cap’n nobody here doubts the existence of the ‘flocking together’ phenomenon that you cite. It’s emprically obvious. The question that Ozy appears to be asking is ‘why do we believe it is so important that we have built an entire worldview around it?’

If Ozy discounts a genetic basis for this phenomenon, then I think it is relevant to this thread.

Posted by Dasein on February 07, 2010, 09:48 PM | #

I’m afraid that until Ozy can demonstrate a grasp of the very basics of genetics and evolutionary theory, this debate is not going to go very far.  He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, so we’re kind of stuck at the moment.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 07, 2010, 10:09 PM | #

To be fair to him, Dasein, I don’t believe that it is possible to make a case for ethnocentrism based on genetics alone. That’s why I’m in favour of basing that claim on extended phenotype instead.

Posted by Dasein on February 07, 2010, 10:33 PM | #

Not alone, but if he is an evolutionary illiterate, as Desmond put it, then there’s little hope that he is going to understand what GW is saying, hence his carping about faith.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 10:46 PM | #

Dasein & Mr Dare,

You are right that I cannot fight this battle on the scientific ground, but I don’t see that as a problem, necessarily, as that isn’t GW’s chosen ground either.

My reading on genetics has been restricted to the popular science section, and I am familiar with Dawkins’s formulation of the extended phenotype. From what I recall, though, he did not extend the idea to the ethny but rather stuck to the organism as the ‘highest’ unit to be used when talking about gene transmission. Consequently this is the thinking I stick to in my posts so far.

I read Salter’s article on face value, and briefly looked up some of the concepts I didn’t understand. What I found was that Salter is as marginal in the scientific world as Griffin is in the party political world. However, while Griffin needs to sell his ideas to laymen, Salter needs to sell his to his peers - as I said above, climate change shows that political expediency does not guide the peer-review scientific method.

Therefore, for a layman such as myself, the only reasonable conclusion when looking at the consensus of the experts (who seem to congregate around Dawkins in seeing the organism as the largest unit for gene transmission) is that Salter’s ideas are at best at the hypothesis stage, at worst an effort to bend science around an existing poitical view.

From that, it seems to follow that the philosophically inclined, if they are scientific laymen, would be best advised to trust only those ideas that have the largest consensus from the experts in the field, before using those ideas as a jumping-off point for any philosophical reflections.

OZK

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 11:42 PM | #

I was just mulling this thread over, and I have one more thought before I go off to bed, for anyone that would care to engage it:

How convinced are you that a ‘Jewish/Liberal’ conspiracy is the underlying reason why the far-rightist view is politically marginal? Which explanation seems more likely, rationally: that people don’t vote for far-right governments because the idea has been thoroughly examined and found to be hollow, or because an all pervasive, and incorrect, ‘Jewish/Liberal’ way of thinking has clouded most people’s judgement?

Just on the logical plane, what seems more likely if you find yourself in a tiny minority: that you are wrong or that everyone else is wrong?

OZK

Posted by bombkangaroo on February 07, 2010, 11:51 PM | #

May I ask; from an evolutionary perspective, why do you think that people experience happiness and suffering?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 07, 2010, 11:55 PM | #

“that people don’t vote for far-right governments” (—OZK)

The BNP isn’t a far-right party.  It’s middle-of-the-road, slightly left-of-center. 

Do you imagine, OZK, that the process of your side’s demonizing x, y, or z as “far right” actually has any meaning other than, in this instance, you want whites race-replaced?  It doesn’t.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 12:14 AM | #

If by ‘far-rightist idea’ you refer to the BNP’s political platform, when has that ‘thoroughly examined and found hollow’?

We have just had yet another example, as if any were necessary, of how state-sponsored ‘anti-racist’ factions are able to intimidate to event coordinators into cancelling public debate through threats of violence.

There *is* a conspiracy to prevent the dangerous ideas that underlie the BNP’s platform from receiving a full public hearing. The hysteria that attends any coverage in the media, as well as the persecution of BNP activists by state organs of repression (eg the EHRC) attest to its existence.

There is ample polling data which confirms that the BNP’s platform is dramatically better received by the general public than is the party itself.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 12:20 AM | #

Dan,

Every voter has the chance to review the BNP’s manifesto, watch their party political broadcasts and then cast a vote anonymously, without an ‘establishment’ moderator breathing down their neck. Despite this, and despite 28 years of pitching to the electorate, they have yet to return one single MP to Parliament. If that isn’t politically marginal, then I don’t know what is.

Posted by bombkangaroo on February 08, 2010, 12:27 AM | #

Just on the logical plane, what seems more likely if you find yourself in a tiny minority: that you are wrong or that everyone else is wrong?

Me; I like to make an effort to understand the world in a manner consistent with the facts that I observe.
One thing I have observed is that popularity doesn’t make something correct. It must stand on its own merits.

Accepting an argumentem ad populum rather than [at least trying to] developing an understanding of the facts is a cop-out. While the conclusion arrived at is far more expedient, it is not necessarily the correct one.

If I may turn the question around: In a world where one’s life is made difficult for holding certain views, where the path of least resistance is, by far, that of parrotting what appears to be popular opinion, would it not make more sense that those in the minority must have a good reason for holding that their position is correct?

(I’m not actually trying to argue this point, as it’s a fallacious line of reasoning, but it demonstrates that it does work both ways)

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 12:34 AM | #

Bombkangaroo,

You say:

Me; I like to make an effort to understand the world in a manner consistent with the facts that I observe.

As do I, as I would hope my posts above show. My contention is that the radical right idea is in a tiny minority not because of people’s tendency to parrot, or because they have been brainwashed, but because they have overwhelmingly concluded that the far-right idea is not ‘consistent with the facts they observe’.

If you look at the two explanations for its marginality: liberal brainwashing or rational observation, which one does Occam’s razor eliminate? Which one lends itself to common sense and which one to paranoia?

OZK

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 08, 2010, 12:42 AM | #

“My contention is that the radical right idea is in a tiny minority not because of people’s tendency to parrot, or because they have been brainwashed, but because they have overwhelmingly concluded that the far-right idea is not ‘consistent with the facts they observe’.” (—OZK)

The questioning of methodical government-enforced genocide is a “radical right idea” and a “far right idea”?  What’s the support of genocide, a far-left idea?  So you, a far-leftist, are a genocidal maniac?

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 12:43 AM | #

Ozy, I’m not particularly concerned about the BNP, more with the ideas that underlie their message.

To claim, as you do, that the Great British Public would ever be permitted to receive and consider those ideas without a constant background buzz of establishment approbation is facile in the extreme.

The stakes are too high for that ever to happen. In a sense the BNP are both the best and worst of all possible vehicles for the transmission of such ideas. Just imagine the shattering impact if they were to be communicated by someone who the GBP had been pre-conditioned to like and admire!

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 08, 2010, 12:44 AM | #

Forgive me, I’m just trying to learn the terminology.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 12:52 AM | #

Dan,

You rely on the idea of ‘pre-conditioning’, otherwise known as brainwashing, to explain why no constituency elects a BNP MP. The central idea of anonymous voting, since ancient Athens, is to shut the door on the ‘constant background buzz of establishment approbation’. You give the British public very little credit by portraying them as so fickle, that even when no one is watching they cannot break out from a Liberal world-view which has been imposed on them by ‘the establishment’.

So in answer to my original question, you do consider it more likely and more reasonable to assume that brainwashing is the reason for the BNP’s electoral failures, rather than a genuine discord with the logical views of the vast majority? In other words, because they are wrong, or at best misaligned with what most people rationally think?

OZK

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 01:06 AM | #

Dan,

You illustrate yet another irresolvable paradox (as if another was needed) at the heart of the radical right world-view (Fred - ‘radical right’ was GW’s formulation, I suggest you take that up with him).

You are ultra-nationalists, indeed the words ‘master race’ crop up on MR, and yet you see no problem with depicting the overwhelming majority of the British public as unthinking, easily-led imbeciles. You won’t even countenance the idea that they would be able to see through a Leftist conspiracy designed to ‘ethnically cleanse’ them.

What’s up with that?

OZK

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 01:22 AM | #

OZK, I am of an age, as are a few others here, when it was still possible to spend one’s formative years and receive an education during a period before the ‘counter-cultural’ revolution took hold. It’s really not all that long ago, in truth, but the difference between the social conditioning that our young folk receive today and my own experience is dramatic.

Believe it or not, at one time there was not even a National Curriculum, let alone one which includes amongst its principal aims that “… It should promote equal opportunities and enable pupils to challenge discrimination and stereotyping” and “.... contribute to the development of pupils’ sense of identity through knowledge and understanding of the spiritual, moral, social and cultural heritages of Britain’s diverse society.”

After proceeding through a system which for ten or more years seeks to imbue its subjects with the ‘correct’ thinking on matters such as ancestry, culture and heritage, diversity and difference it is little wonder that the output product is pre-conditioned to respond positively to certain political ideas, and negatively to others.

It is in fact something of a miracle that as many people manage to transcend this experience and achieve a modicum of independent thought as do. About a million of them voted for the BNP the last time out.

Something is amiss.

Posted by bombkangaroo on February 08, 2010, 01:22 AM | #

they have overwhelmingly concluded that the far-right idea is not ‘consistent with the facts they observe’

You operate under the assumption that they have made a substantive analysis of the BNP’s manifesto and constitution. I would contest that most of them probably haven’t ever so much as looked into it. Many I’ve debated on youtube’s comments have even gone so far as to say that they never will, and yet profess to know all there is about the BNP.

You rely on the idea of ‘pre-conditioning’, otherwise known as brainwashing, to explain why no constituency elects a BNP MP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_Social_Influence
It’s nothing as fanciful or dramatic as brainwashing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRh5qy09nNw

Group confirmity typically begins with resistance, then progresses to mimickry, and then after sufficient repetition the ideas become internalised, and we hold whatever view the group espouses to be true.

In an experiment it’s possible to have someone completely deny reality in minutes. In an emergency, like the King’s Cross fire people died because they were afraid to use the fire exits, choosing instead to either return the way the entered the train station, or to proceed along the route they originally planned to take. (according to the survivors) The effect of constant media exposure to particular norms over the length of a person’s lifetime will be far more extensive, potentially leading to the internalisation of those norms and ideas.

Posted by Captainchaos on February 08, 2010, 01:32 AM | #

You rely on the idea of ‘pre-conditioning’, otherwise known as brainwashing, to explain why no constituency elects a BNP MP. The central idea of anonymous voting, since ancient Athens, is to shut the door on the ‘constant background buzz of establishment approbation’.

We’ve got a deep, deeeeep thinker right here:  No such thing as the internalization of conditioned guilt.  A medieval peasant, according to this logic, never felt guilty for cursing ‘God’ even if before no witness but himself.

You give the British public very little credit by portraying them as so fickle,

Sure, most of them are even dumber than you are.  The country is undergoing an economic meltdown and what do the lemmings do?  Go with the Conservative party, because, you know, they’re going to do things a lot differently.  The perennial battle between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

You are ultra-nationalists, indeed the words ‘master race’ crop up on MR, and yet you see no problem with depicting the overwhelming majority of the British public as unthinking, easily-led imbeciles.

The difference between an average group IQ of 100 for the English and that of 70 for niggers (yes, I did use the word, and without shame), so the difference between people who ain’t that bright and those who are basically retarded.  How’s that strike you, chief?

You won’t even countenance the idea that they would be able to see through a Leftist conspiracy designed to ‘ethnically cleanse’ them.

Lets just say hypothetically that a bunch of people you really didn’t care to be around, that made life miserable for you, were allowed to move into your neighborhood en masse, and, instead of living in misery, you moved out - though with deep regrets that you had to leave an area you had become emotionally attached to.  But, and here’s the kicker, you couldn’t say a fucking word to the contrary because if you did you would be considered ‘evil’ and a ‘hater’ and if you objected too vociferously, you would be put in jail.  Does any of that ring a bell, you insufferable fuckwit?  Just asking.

Posted by bombkangaroo on February 08, 2010, 01:40 AM | #

CC, I’m new around here, but if I may presume to interject:
If you don’t have any positive energy to put out then perhaps it’s wiser to step back and recharge?
Resistance is much easier when it’s coming from both directions, so let’s try not to push this guy away.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 08, 2010, 01:48 AM | #

Ozy,

It’s late, and I will prosecute the case in the main tomorrow.  Meanwhile, it is important for you to confront the fact - for that is what it is - that genes are not articles of faith, that genes have interests in replication, and that, materially speaking, the ontology of racial preservation is genetic.

It doesn’t help to point a finger at genetic interest and repeat “Faith! Faith! Faith!” over and again.  If you were right, it would leave you with no more natural interest in the birth and survival of your own baby than that of some completely unknowable Pygmie baby born in the darkest heart of Africa.  Likewise, if you were right, it would leave the Pygmie’s sire with no more natural interest in the preservation of his own tribe, or of the other thirty-nine Pygmie tribes, than, say, the Siberian Yupik or one of the three hundred and twelve tribes of Papua New Guinea.

Or let’s stretch the argument further, and point out that the Pygmie’s dad would have no more interest in the survival of Pygmies than that of yeast, say, or cyanobacteria.  In fact, he wouldn’t have any interest in yeast or cyanobacteria either, or in the survival of life on earth, period.  Because genetic interests are arranged concentrically, and do not stop at the genetic information that distinguishes one’s group from other groups.  The rings go outward to encompass all organic forms.

You see, the problem with all leftist anti-genetic and anti-hereditarian arguments is that they have to be so very absolutist.  Everything must be social.  There cannot be a scintilla of influence from genes.  If you conclude that the difference between black and white IQ scores is even 5% heritable, you are already one of those dastardly hereditarians.  If you conclude that Tibetans have any natural interest at all in their own children above and beyond their interest in, say, English children, you are already a Salterian.

Of course, if you want to deny that interest, you will end up having to deny everything else that flows from genes.  You will have to deny the maternal drive as having any genetic basis.  You will have to deny the sex drive as having any genetic basis.  The sexes themselves.  Disease.  The ageing process.  And so on ... you will have to insist that the world and everything in it is wholly and completely social in its arising, and no gene ever coded anything.

So, really how ridiculous do you want to make this argument?  The skies the limit.

But, of course, you don’t really want to make it ridiculous at all.  You just want to find an ideologically convenient place to draw your line.  So ... children in.  Family, erm, in.  Tribe ... out, of course.  Tribe would be “faith”.

But the only faith here is yours.  It is the faith of left-racism.

See you tomorrow.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 01:54 AM | #

You are ultra-nationalists, indeed the words ‘master race’ crop up on MR, and yet you see no problem with depicting the overwhelming majority of the British public as unthinking, easily-led imbeciles. You won’t even countenance the idea that they would be able to see through a Leftist conspiracy designed to ‘ethnically cleanse’ them.

What’s up with that? - OZK

If you’d spend a little more here reading as opposed to posting you might come to realise that there is a range of opinion on such matters, and that we don’t all proceed in metronomic Paradeschritt flinging our right arms up in unison at a given signal.

I for one don’t believe that there is a leftist conspiracy afoot to ethnically cleanse us, nor that the British public are imbeciles.

The reality is far more complex but if we’re searching for a catchy moniker for what afflicts us I’d put it down to a misguided universalist egalitarianism. How that came to be the prevailing idiom is another question (search on ‘Hitler’s Revenge’) if you’re interested in my own perspective.

Actually, I think cock-up would be a better term to describe it than conspiracy.

Posted by Captainchaos on February 08, 2010, 01:56 AM | #

bombkangaroo,

I don’t go to those who suggest it does not matter if my race ceases to exist hat in hand, if it’s going to happen at all, that’s how they come to me.

Here’s something else I have no doubt Oxy will fail to comprehend in the vein of your offerings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion

Hint: This kinda, sorta ties into what GW is talking about when he speaks of the “mechanicity” of the mind.  So, you see, we’re not just pulling this stuff out of our asses.

Posted by Bill on February 08, 2010, 06:00 AM | #

This is a sign of hope that has been a long time in coming.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/07/job-losses-universities-cuts

Is this a real sign that an integral component of the source of our problem is in deep doo doo.

It’s a long time since I said they have to feel a lot more pain before the scale falls.  They are beginning to experience a taste of the good life, same as normal people.

This is happening right in the heart of the nest of vipers.

Posted by Bill on February 08, 2010, 06:07 AM | #

6.00AM above.

?

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 06:13 AM | #

@Dan

there is a range of opinion on such matters, and that we don’t all proceed in metronomic Paradeschritt flinging our right arms up in unison at a given signal.

I stand corrected, I am guilty of tarring you all with the same brush (but perhaps you’ll overlook that one time, given the slating I have received here - bound to put me in a slightly defensive posture). I’m finding your posts interesting and honest.

@GW

Pygmies aside, I have already acknowledged that genes are fundamental, and nowhere have I said that ‘everything is social’. You are starting to sound like you are arguing against a template ‘left-racist’ straw man rather than against anything I actually said.

To re-iterate, on genetics my challenge is to the viability of seeing the ethny as a viable unit for transmission - I outlined the reason I’m sceptical, because it has not garnered a sufficient peer consensus, unlike the rival theory, which is that the organism is the largest viable unit of transmission.

You accuse me of using ideology to pick the facts, however it is you who is championing a marginal scientist, in the face of the expert consensus, because he happens to fit your preordained views.

I’ll look forward to your full reply later, but I think the time’s nearing when you need to either deal a knock-out blow or go down for the count. Prolonging and obfuscating isn’t helping your case. My fundamental challenge still stands, and the resigned tone of your last post makes me think you know it.

Posted by Desmond Jones on February 08, 2010, 07:08 AM | #

I outlined the reason I’m sceptical, because it has not garnered a sufficient peer consensus,

Only in the NW Europe and the diaspora. Japan, China, South Korea, North Korea, Lesotho, Poland, Italy, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Somalia, Tunisia, Greece, and Israel, to name a few, are ethnic nation states. It’s been clear for at least 150 years that white ethnic groups migrating to the Anglosphere do not support Anglo nativism because it serves there own ethnic genetic interests. The fact it does not receive peer consensus in the Anglosphere does not mean it is not viable nor that it is maladaptive.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 07:21 AM | #

Desmond,

But how do white ethnic groups emigrating to the Anglosphere manage to influence the peer review process? It’s ultimately about presenting a case based on the facts, not based on political expediency.

It may well be that ethnic kinship is a viable method for seeing gene transmission, but my point is that it’s not been conclusively proved, not via the standard method of peer review. This method has built consensus around the organism, and its direct descendants, as the only viable way to understand gene transmission.

OZK

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 07:35 AM | #

To re-iterate, on genetics my challenge is to the viability of seeing the ethny as a viable unit for transmission - I outlined the reason I’m sceptical, because it has not garnered a sufficient peer consensus, unlike the rival theory, which is that the organism is the largest viable unit of transmission. – OZK

GW will be along presently to pursue the theme in general I’m sure, but in the meantime I’d like to pick up on the last part of your comment, which I am taking as a reference to Dawkins and The Selfish Gene. That book was written almost 35 years ago and is perhaps overdue for re-appraisal in light of subsequent advances in genomic science as well as population genetics generally.

In fact Dawkins himself has shown signs of wavering, as flagged in this article which appeared in Prospect magazine in 2004, and which appears to be behind the paywall.

While the article is not short on genuflection towards politically correct banality, there are one or two nuggets which might offer a fleeting insight into Dawkins’ innermost thought. This, for example:

… [P]erhaps there are special reasons for a disproportionate amount of variation in those very genes that make it easy for us to notice variation, and to distinguish our own kind from others. These would include the genes responsible for externally visible “labels” like skin colour. I want to suggest that this heightened discriminability has evolved by sexual selection, specifically in humans because we are such a culture-bound species. Because our mating decisions are so heavily influenced by cultural tradition, and because our cultures, and sometimes our religions, encourage us to discriminate against outsiders, especially in choosing mates, those superficial differences that helped our ancestors to prefer insiders over outsiders have been enhanced out of all proportion to the real genetic differences between us.

This passage alone – and there are more in similar vein – indicates that Dawkins is at least open to the possibility that the human propensity to discriminate in favour of in-group members in sexual mating decisions argues for the viability of the clan, the tribe and by extension the ethny as preferred mechanisms for genetic transfer.

It should not need emphasising that these comments refer to higher, sentient organisms,

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 07:50 AM | #

Dan,

As far as I’m aware he also revisited the Selfish Gene ideas in the extended phenotype in the late 90s, and at that time (from what I recall) he still stuck with the organism as the largest genetic unit.

From the passage you quote, he appears to be saying that the reason ethnicities may band together is for cultural rather than genetic reasons - if so, then this would serve to explain why we can observe a certain amount of genetic distance between races, but it would in no way posit the ethny as a unit for genetic transmission, insofar as you could state that a human is driven to perpetuate his own race.

Rather, the conclusion form that passage would be that humans have historically been culturally inclined to mate with those within their own race, which is hardly a revelation since it’s 5 minutes in evolutionary terms that we started moving around the globe in big numbers.

Dawkins may be theoretically open to the idea of the ethny (although that passage doesn’t quite illustrate that), and so am I in theory - the crux is that the idea remains marginal until it builds consensus, at which point it becomes accepted and can be considered a ‘truth’. Until such a time it seems to me totally inadvisable to build a world-view on it, let alone to attempt an ontology based on it.

OZK

Posted by Bill on February 08, 2010, 07:59 AM | #

Dan Dare February 08, 2010, 01:54 AM

I for one don’t believe that there is a leftist conspiracy afoot to ethnically cleanse us, nor that the British public are imbeciles.

The reality is far more complex but if we’re searching for a catchy moniker for what afflicts us I’d put it down to a misguided universalist egalitarianism. How that came to be the prevailing idiom is another question (search on ‘Hitler’s Revenge’) if you’re interested in my own perspective.

Actually, I think cock-up would be a better term to describe it than conspiracy.

What’s the difference?  The result will be the same.

Unintended consequences are a given with liberalism.

As I see things at the moment (and I will change with the prevailing wind) this is our Camp of the Saints moment.

The bright flame of certainty I started out with, is at this moment barely a spark, this is nothing new, l alternate been quiet confidence and utmost despair.

The spark will never be eclipsed.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 08:21 AM | #

Bill,

What’s the difference?

The difference is key. One view holds that multiculturalism was chosen by the majority as the result of reasonable deduction; the other holds that multiculturalism was imposed forcibly by a Leftist/Jewish conspiracy.

Regardless of the outcome, if the former explanation is true, as you and Dan both appear to be tentatively acknowledging, then it completely undermines GW’s ubermensch-like affectations to have broken free and seen the light.

OZK

Posted by Bill on February 08, 2010, 09:27 AM | #

What’s the difference?

If I’m run down by a bus and killed, it is of no difference to me or my family whether if it was by accident or whether the driver intended to mow me down.

It is the driver who survives.

Regardless of the outcome, if the former explanation is true, as you and Dan both appear to be tentatively acknowledging,

I certainly do not subscribe to this notion, to me this a top down forcing of an elite agenda, to which the majority populace do not know how to respond due to brainwashing, bullying, legislation, intimidation and actual violence.

IMO, the overwhelming majority of the British people do not know what the elites have in store for them.  They are demoralised, disoriented, confused and without compass.

Their traditional rulers have abandoned them and there’s the rub.

The BBC (MSM) are doing a fantastic job on behalf of the elites.

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 10:23 AM | #

I read Salter’s article on face value, and briefly looked up some of the concepts I didn’t understand. What I found was that Salter is as marginal in the scientific world as Griffin is in the party political world. However, while Griffin needs to sell his ideas to laymen, Salter needs to sell his to his peers - as I said above, climate change shows that political expediency does not guide the peer-review scientific method. --Ozy

Salter is not a geneticist.  Hamilton and Harpending (whose theories he uses) are not ‘marginal in the scientific world’.  Hamilton is one of the great thinkers in population genetics from the last century.  Harpending’s work that Salter uses is peer reviewed.  The data Salter uses comes from an anti-raycist scientist, Cavalli-Sforza, a pre-eminent population geneticist.  Salter’s credentials as a population geneticist are completely irrelevant.

But how do white ethnic groups emigrating to the Anglosphere manage to influence the peer review process? It’s ultimately about presenting a case based on the facts, not based on political expediency.  --Ozy

Although not White, one need only look at Diamond, Gould, Kamin, Lewontin, and Boas to see how political expediency corrupts science.  When their case was based on facts, they were often wrong or their conclusions were unjustified.  Do you know how Diamond determined IQ equality across races in his magnum opus?  You’re naive if you think science is not influenced considerably by politics.

But let’s get to the crux of the issue.  You said:

Pygmies aside, I have already acknowledged that genes are fundamental, and nowhere have I said that ‘everything is social’. You are starting to sound like you are arguing against a template ‘left-racist’ straw man rather than against anything I actually said.

Yet you’ve said:

In fact, the genetic distance between races is so infinitesimally small as to be completely negligible.

If this is your view of racial differences, then you will never accept race and ethnicity as viable categories for political action and philosophy.

How did you come to this conclusion about racial differences?

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 10:36 AM | #

One view holds that multiculturalism was chosen by the majority as the result of reasonable deduction; --Ozy

Can you show where the majority of people have explicitly chosen multiculturalism?  What’s White flight about?  If you want to say that the people voted for it, then the British also voted for the Iraq war, the Germans voted for the Afghanistan war, and the Americans voted to give trillions to Wall Street bankers.

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 10:51 AM | #

The difference between an average group IQ of 100 for the English and that of 70 for niggers (yes, I did use the word, and without shame), so the difference between people who ain’t that bright and those who are basically retarded.  How’s that strike you, chief? --CC

In case Ozy doesn’t know what an IQ of 70 means, it does not mean that Negroes are, on average, 70% as smart (as measured by IQ tests) as the English.  Taking 15 as the standard deviation, it means that the Negro average is 2 SD smaller than that of the English.  Assuming a Normal distribution (and population IQ scores do generally follow such), this means that the average Negro has the same IQ as someone at the ~2nd percentile of the White British population.  It should be noted that this is for Negroes in Africa.  Lynn estimates the genotypic Negro IQ to be 80, so about 10 IQ points could be gained by improvements to the environment (e.g. nutrition).  That would still put the average Negro at the ~8th percentile of the White British population.

I think you’ll find that this site does not discuss IQ that much.  Our cause is based on more than phenotype.  IQ is good, though, to get recalcitrant environmentalists to face up to reality.

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 11:04 AM | #

As far as I’m aware he also revisited the Selfish Gene ideas in the extended phenotype in the late 90s, and at that time (from what I recall) he still stuck with the organism as the largest genetic unit.  --Ozy

Whether or not this is true is still up for debate.  And it does not really matter for Salter’s argument, as Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is not at odds with Dawkins’ Selfish Gene theory.  In fact, that venerable Wikipedia says ‘Hamilton was regarded as a poor lecturer. This shortcoming would not affect the popularity of his work, however, as it was popularised by Richard Dawkins in Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene’.  The most contentions issue, I believe, with Dawkins’ work is that he does not consider group selection.  And he is a coward and hypocrite on racial matters.

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 11:10 AM | #

More on Hamilton, just so Ozy doesn’t have the impression Salter is using the theories of some scientific bum:

Bill Hamilton’s 1963 and 1964 inclusive fitness articles are easily the most cited articles in the entire field of behavioral evolution, and his work on altruism and kinship spurred endless dissertation projects and hundreds of published articles, both theoretical and empirical. When modern behavioral ecologists and sociobiologists are asked to mark the birth of the field, many respond by citing Hamilton’s 1963 and 1964 articles. Of course, progress on kinship and altruism has continued from 1963 to the present, as Hamilton had hoped it would. And debate on these subjects continues as well—just as one might expect for ideas that fundamentally changed the way in which people thought about the evolution of behavior.

Hamilton’s work led to his election to the Royal Society of London in 1980. He was also awarded the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal (1988), the Scientific Medal of the Linnean Society (1989), the Zoological Society of London’s Frink Medal (1991), the Kyoto Prize (1993), and the Royal Society of Sweden’s Crafoord Award (1993) and received virtually every other accolade that could possibly be bestowed on an evolutionary biologist.

Because of his seemingly endless fundamental contributions to the discipline, evolutionary behaviorists looked to Bill Hamilton as a leader and a man who was expected to spend the last part of his life as an elder statesman in the field. But that was never to be. On March 7, 2000, after 5 weeks in a semicomatose state, 63-year-old William D. Hamilton died as a result of a massive hemorrhage following a very serious bout of malaria. Hamilton had been in the Congo testing the now-discredited hypothesis that HIV had initially spread from other primates to humans through a botched polio vaccination program undertaken in Africa during the 1950s (HOOPER 1999). He failed to find the evidence he sought, and some time near the end of his work in the Congo, he contracted malaria.

The Guardian’s obituary called Hamilton “the primary theoretical innovator in modern Darwinian biology, responsible for the shape of the subject today” and The New York Times dubbed him “one of the towering figures of modern biology,” while The (London) Independent reported that Hamilton was “a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.” Hamilton would have been embarrassed by all the attention and saw his life in a very different light. “I grimace,” he wrote, “rub two unrequestedly bushy eyebrows together ... snort through nostrils that each day more resemble the horse-hair bursts of an Edwardian sofa, and, with my knuckles not yet touching the ground, though nearly, galumph onwards to my next paper” (HAMILTON 1996, p. 93).

Those MSM quotes are bolded, just to make it clear that this isn’t a fringe right-wing opinion.

Posted by 0 on February 08, 2010, 11:16 AM | #

By way of example, nothing could be more politically inconvenient to the West than the reality of climate change - and yet, the idea has not been suppressed. Likewise with the ethny - if it was objectively true, or even hypothetically sound, it would have garnered a wider scientific consensus despite the negative political implications.

However, while Griffin needs to sell his ideas to laymen, Salter needs to sell his to his peers - as I said above, climate change shows that political expediency does not guide the peer-review scientific method.

Given the recent revelations of fraud concerning global warming, climate change does not at all support your claims about the supremacy of peer review as a means for establishing truth.  Peer review is far from incorruptible.

Also, surely you do not think global warming propaganda is contrary to the interests of the ruling elite?

You are incredibly naive if you do not believe politics influences the opinions of the scientific elite.

Posted by 0 on February 08, 2010, 11:18 AM | #

The difference is key. One view holds that multiculturalism was chosen by the majority as the result of reasonable deduction

Please tell us when the plebiscites on immigration were held.

Or, if there were no such plebiscites, why do you believe that the vote would have been in favor of mass immigration and multiracialism in every country if plebiscites had been held in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia?

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 11:43 AM | #

I certainly do not subscribe to this notion, to me this a top down forcing of an elite agenda, to which the majority populace do not know how to respond due to brainwashing, bullying, legislation, intimidation and actual violence. --Bill

Democracy in action:

http://bnp.org.uk/2009/11/one-law-for-british-people-another-law-for-the-colonisers/

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 01:03 PM | #

Actually, I think cock-up would be a better term to describe it than conspiracy. --DD

Almost 60% of the Dutch (presumably an even higher percentage of the native Dutch) described mass immigration as ’the]http://www.nisnews.nl/public/270308_1.htm]the biggest mistake in Dutch history[/url].’ And yet, no one will fix this cock-up.  As Fred quotes Palese, ‘something is blocking the democratic process.’ Conspiracy?  Well, we have Neather’s revelation.  I think it’s an open secret, and to call it a cock-up suggests that those who rammed it down the throats of Europeans and Americans were well-intentioned.  They weren’t.  Jews and capitalists who seek to suppress wages don’t give a shit about anyone except themselves.  Same with their scientific toadies like Cavalli-Sforza and Dawkins.

Posted by Dasein on February 08, 2010, 01:05 PM | #

Dutch poll story

Posted by A Company for Importing WOGGES into Her Majesty's on February 08, 2010, 05:27 PM | #

Of course Dasein is exactly right.
The politicians (you know those people who scream and shout ‘democracy’ at every opportunity), know that their policy of race replacement is massively unpopular amongst the indigenous population.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 06:08 PM | #

What’s the difference?  The result will be the same. - Bill

I don’t dispute the latter. However if we delude ourselves with conspiracy theories and are constantly searching for the mythical men behind the curtain we will be forever tilting at windmills.

Do you seriously believe that Tony Blair had an agenda when he launched on his political career? The notion is risible, his intellectual armoury consisted of exactly the same mushy, gooey blancmange of modish nonsense that has been standard issue for university graduates since the 1970s.

Like all modern politicians Blair was afflicted with chronic short-termism and trimmed his sails to what he viewed as the prevailing winds of fashion. His agenda, if it can be termed as such, was to ingratiate himself with anyone who could smooth the path to his realising his true ambition, that of becoming a peripatetic after-dinner speaker getting rich in the process.

Is it possible to conceive of any prominent British politician of the last quarter century making any serious contribution to intellectual life? The last one I can think was Roy Jenkins. Now there was someone with an agenda.

Political expediency does not equate to conspiracy.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 06:25 PM | #

And he is a coward and hypocrite on racial matters.

With the responsibility that comes with the position of Britain’s leading ‘public intellectual’ Dawkins probably feels obliged to be circumspect on such an incendiary topic. If only Hamilton has been as telegenic as he.

The article in Prospect is as far as I have seen him tread towards the light. I will read a substantial part into the record next.

Posted by D Allen on February 08, 2010, 06:34 PM | #

Posted by OZKT29B on February 07, 2010, 10:46 PM | #

My reading on genetics has been restricted to the popular science section, and I am familiar with Dawkins’s formulation of the extended phenotype. From what I recall, though, he did not extend the idea to the ethny but rather stuck to the organism as the ‘highest’ unit to be used when talking about gene transmission. Consequently this is the thinking I stick to in my posts so far.

What has Dawkins got to do with this discussion? Nothing. Why do want to bring him into the discussion? Because he’s a paternal and impeccably right-on liberal authority figure whom you would like to feel is ‘on your side’ against the nasty racists. Dawkins knows best. Unfortunately for you, in his scientific output Dawkins has got nothing in particular to say about ethnic kinship, or the existence of race, etc., and it is eminently possible to endorse both his and Salter/Harpending’s work.

Besides, just what do you mean by the organism being the ‘highest unit of gene transmission’? Are you trying to ignorantly say that someone’s close family are reproductively irrelevant? The words that you wrote seem to express this. Or are you trying to talk about levels of selection - which is beside the point of ethnic genetic identity and kinship?

climate change shows that political expediency does not guide the peer-review scientific method.

Great example, bro.

http://mangans.blogspot.com/2009/11/peer-review-and-gramscian-march-through.html

http://mangans.blogspot.com/2009/11/global-warming-exposed-as-greatest.html

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 06:44 PM | #

Here, then a lengthy extract from the Dawkins article. I have excised a large section in which Dawkins rails against the ‘artificiality’ of racial classification. The first part of the article is useful in its debunking of the ‘Lewontin Fallacy’ (albeit with the obligatory PC disclaimers), while the real meat begins at around the three-quarter mark.

Race and creation Prospect magazine, October 2004
In his new book, “The Ancestor’s Tale,” Richard Dawkins deals with the vexed topic of race. Humans, it seems, were predisposed to make sharp distinctions between in-group and out-group before there were any races at all-indeed, races may have evolved partly as a response to that predisposition

Richard Dawkins

“Race” is not a clearly defined word. “Species” is different. There really is an agreed way to decide whether two animals belong in the same species: can they interbreed? The interbreeding criterion gives the species a unique status in the hierarchy of taxonomic levels. Above the species level, a genus is just a group of species whose members are pretty similar to each other. No objective criterion exists to determine how similar they have to be, and the same is true of all the higher levels: family, order, class, phylum and the various “sub-” or “super-” names that intervene between them. Below the species level, “race” and “sub-species” are used interchangeably and, again, no objective criterion exists that would enable us to decide whether two people should be considered part of the same race or not, nor to decide how many races there are. And of course there is the added complication, absent above the species level, that races interbreed, so there are lots of people of mixed race.

The interbreeding criterion works pretty well, and it delivers an unequivocal verdict on humans and their supposed races. All living human races interbreed with one another. We are all members of the same species, and no reputable biologist would say any different. But let me call your attention to an interesting, perhaps even slightly disturbing, fact. While we happily interbreed with each other, producing a continuous spectrum of inter-races, we are reluctant to give up our divisive racial language. Wouldn’t you expect that if all intermediates are on constant display, the urge to classify people as one or the other of two extremes would wither away, smothered by the absurdity of the attempt, which is continually manifested everywhere we look? But this is not what happens, and perhaps that very fact is revealing.

…

It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. That is all correct. What is not correct is the inference that race is therefore a meaningless concept. This point has been clearly made by the distinguished Cambridge geneticist AWF Edwards in a recent paper called “Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy.” RC Lewontin is an equally distinguished Cambridge (Mass) geneticist, known for the strength of his political convictions and his weakness for dragging them into science at every opportunity. Lewontin’s view of race has become near-universal orthodoxy in scientific circles. He wrote, in a famous paper of 1972: “It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.”

This is exactly the point I accepted above, not surprisingly, since what I wrote was largely based on Lewontin. But see how Lewontin goes on: “Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.”

We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. That is one reason why I object to ticking boxes in forms and why I object to positive discrimination in job selection. But that doesn’t mean that race is of “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is Edwards’s point, and he reasons as follows. However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance.

...

In short, I think Edwards is right and Lewontin wrong. Nevertheless, I strongly support Lewontin’s statement that racial classification can be actively destructive of social and human relations - especially when people use racial classification as a way of treating people differently, whether through negative or positive discrimination.

...

Interobserver agreement suggests that racial classification is not totally uninformative, but what does it inform about? About things like eye shape and hair curliness. For some reason it seems to be the superficial, external, trivial characteristics that are correlated with race - perhaps especially facial characteristics. But why are human races so different in just these superficially conspicuous characteristics? Or is it just that we, as observers, are predisposed to notice them? Why do other species look comparatively uniform whereas humans show differences that, were we to encounter them elsewhere in the animal kingdom, might make us suspect we were dealing with a number of separate species?

The most politically acceptable explanation is that the members of any species have a heightened sensitivity to differences among their own kind. On this view, it is just that we notice human differences more readily than differences within other species. Chimpanzees whom we find almost identical look just as different, in chimpanzee eyes, as a Kikuyu looks different to a Dutchman in our eyes.

...

Our recent worldwide diaspora out of Africa has taken us to an extraordinarily wide variety of habitats, climates and ways of life. It is plausible that the different conditions have exerted strong selection pressures, particularly on externally visible parts, such as the skin, which bear the brunt of the sun and the cold. It is hard to think of any other species that thrives so well from the tropics to the Arctic, from sea level to the high Andes, from parched deserts to dripping jungles. Such different conditions would be bound to exert different natural selection pressures, and it would be surprising if local populations did not diverge as a result. Hunters in the deep forests of Africa, South America and southeast Asia have all become small, almost certainly because height is a handicap in dense vegetation. Peoples of high latitude, who, it has been surmised, need all the sun they can get to make vitamin D, tend to have lighter skins than those who face the opposite problem - the carcinogenic rays of the tropical sun. It is plausible that such regional selection would especially affect superficial characteristics like skin colour, while leaving most of the genome intact and uniform.

[this is where Dawkins starts to stray off the reservation – DD]

In theory, that could be the full explanation for our superficial and visible variety, covering deep similarity. But it doesn’t seem enough to me. At the very least, I think it might be helped along by an additional suggestion, which I offer tentatively. We are indeed a very uniform species if you count the totality of genes, or if you take a truly random sample of genes, but perhaps there are special reasons for a disproportionate amount of variation in those very genes that make it easy for us to notice variation, and to distinguish our own kind from others. These would include the genes responsible for externally visible “labels” like skin colour. I want to suggest that this heightened discriminability has evolved by sexual selection, specifically in humans because we are such a culture-bound species. Because our mating decisions are so heavily influenced by cultural tradition, and because our cultures, and sometimes our religions, encourage us to discriminate against outsiders, especially in choosing mates, those superficial differences that helped our ancestors to prefer insiders over outsiders have been enhanced out of all proportion to the real genetic differences between us. No less a thinker than Jared Diamond has supported a similar idea in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. And Darwin himself more generally invoked sexual selection in explanation of racial differences.

I want to consider two versions of this theory: a strong and a weak one. The truth could be any combination of the two. The strong theory suggests that skin colour, and other conspicuous genetic badges, evolved actively as discriminators in choosing mates. The weak theory, which can be thought of as leading into the strong version, places cultural differences, such as language and religion, in the same role as geographical separation in the incipient stages of speciation. Once cultural differences have achieved an initial separation the groups would subsequently evolve apart genetically, as if geographically separated. An ancestral population can split into two genetically distinct populations only if given a head start by an initial accidental separation, usually assumed to be geographical. A barrier such as a mountain range reduces gene flow between two populated valleys. So the gene pools in the two valleys are free to drift apart. The separation will normally be abetted by different selection pressures; one valley may be wetter than its neighbour, for instance. But the initial accidental separation, which I have assumed to be geographical, is necessary.

There is controversy here. Some people think the initial separation has to be geographical, while others, especially entomologists, emphasise so-called sympatric speciation, meaning that the initial separation, whatever it is, is not geographical. Many herbivorous insects eat only one species of plant. They meet their mates and lay their eggs on the preferred plants. Their larvae then apparently “imprint” on the plant that they grow up eating, and they choose, when adult, the same species of plant to lay their own eggs. So if an adult female made a mistake and laid her eggs on the wrong plant, her daughter would imprint on that wrong plant and would, when the time came, lay her eggs on plants of the same wrong species. Her larvae then would imprint on the same wrong plant, hang around the wrong plant when adult, mate with others hanging around the wrong plant and eventually lay their eggs on the wrong plant.

In the case of these insects, you can see that, in a single generation, gene flow with the parental type could be abruptly cut off. A new species is theoretically free to come into being without the need for geographical isolation. Or, another way of putting it, the difference between two kinds of food plant is, for these insects, equivalent to a mountain range or a river for other animals. I am suggesting that human culture - with its tendency to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups - also provides a special way in which gene flow can find itself blocked, which is somewhat analogous to the insect scenario I have just outlined above.

In the insect case, plant preferences are handed down from parent to offspring by the twin circumstances of larvae fixating on their food plant, and adults mating and laying eggs on the same food plants. In effect, lineages establish “traditions” that travel longitudinally down generations. Human traditions are similar, if more elaborate. Examples are languages, religions and social manners or conventions. Children usually adopt the language and the religion of their parents although, just as with the insects and the food plants, there are enough “mistakes” to make life interesting. Again, as with the insects mating in the vicinity of their preferred food plants, people tend to mate with others speaking the same language and praying to the same gods. So different languages and religions can play the role of food plants, or of mountain ranges in traditional geographical speciation. Different languages, religions and social customs can serve as barriers to gene flow. From here, according to the weak form of our theory, random genetic differences simply accumulate on opposite sides of a language or religion barrier, just as they might on opposite sides of a mountain range. Subsequently, according to the strong version of the theory, the genetic differences that build up are reinforced as people use conspicuous differences in appearance as additional labels of discrimination in mate choice, supplementing the cultural barriers that provided the original separation.

Learned differences in language, religion and social customs notoriously provide labels for prejudice and discrimination. So, even more obviously, do genetic differences in colour. Could the first category have been implicated in the evolution of the second?

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 07:00 PM | #

The difference is key. One view holds that multiculturalism was chosen by the majority as the result of reasonable deduction; the other holds that multiculturalism was imposed forcibly by a Leftist/Jewish conspiracy. – OZK

This is a grotesque mis-representation of the historical record. Multiculturalism was chosen by nobody; it has never been presented to the electorate for approval. Multicultralism as an instrument of state policy was administratively elided onto the statute book as a by-product of the 1976 Race Relations Act.

Regardless of the outcome, if the former explanation is true, as you and Dan both appear to be tentatively acknowledging, then it completely undermines GW’s ubermensch-like affectations to have broken free and seen the light.

I am acknowledging nothing of the sort. Multiculturalism is simply a bureaucratic wheeze intended to make the best of a bad job, cobbled together in the 1970s as a sort of Polyfilla intended to patch up the cracks in the societal fabric resulting from the ramshackle immigration and citizenship ‘policies’ of successive post-war governments. As I said, it’s all a giant cock-up, an instance of the Law of Unintended Consequences writ large.

Posted by Bill on February 08, 2010, 07:20 PM | #

Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 06:08 PM

quote]Do you seriously believe that Tony Blair had an agenda when he launched on his political career?

Yes I do, but not when he first set out as a politician.  Blair’s new Labour was recruited, like Obama by the PTB when he went to America to learn his trade with slick Willie Clinton in the ‘90’s.

It was not Blair’s agenda it was Americas and the new progressives.  The culmination of the culture war and the so called implosion of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of the new left.

I read somewhere that Prime Minister Blair and Rupert Murdoch were so close some thought Murdoch was a member of the new Labour cabinet.  What do think they were discussing?

Lord Levi, anyone for tennis?

I am in no doubt that new Labour were assigned the task of destroying Britain and its people, how else can you account for their behaviour in the past eleven years?

Britain, over these years. has been the mirror image of America, it made no difference the right were in power in the US and the left in power in Britain.  Neocons, liberals, progressives, republicans, democrats, no matter, America and Britain have been in constant lockstep - the direction always constant.

Britain and America share the same fate, massive immigration, a house of cards economy, a destroyed middle class, a shared war on terror, loss of civil liberties, post industrialism, post work, elite war on their own whites.

Why all of this?

To take down Western civilisation. (Every white nation is subject to the same assault)

It is heartening to see the American people are outstripping the British in the wake up stakes.

A cock-up?  More like a New World Order. 

Here’s a piece I’ve just been reading - Brussels Journal.  OK, OK, I know, don’t shoot the messenger.

Liberalism and the Search for the Ground: Another Visit with Eric Voegelin

A successful attempt to “change” this society, such as the one currently being organized by Barack Hussein Obama and his political minions, will be indistinguishable from a successful attempt to destroy the society. We must not think that the recent electoral development in Massachusetts alters the long-range plan of the Obama regime. The consequence of “transforming America” (or any other Western nation) will not be the Utopian dream world of the regnant radical usurpation, which remains unrealizable; it will simply be destruction in and for itself: 

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4308

Posted by Dan Dare on February 08, 2010, 07:36 PM | #

I am in no doubt that new Labour were assigned the task of destroying Britain and its people, how else can you account for their behaviour in the past eleven years? - Bill

This sort of hysterical hyperbole takes us nowhere.

As for New Labour, their destructive behaviour is simply the logical outcome of the egalitarian universalist dogma which has been institutionalised since the 1960s.

We have to learn to accept that the enemy is us, not shadowy figures manipulating levers behind the curtain. To the extent that such figures exist and are permitted to carry on with their machinations a la Lord Levy is a consequence of our own malaise, but not its cause. Insistence on conspiracy is simply a panacea when what is really required to effect a cure is radical surgery.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 08, 2010, 08:51 PM | #

@O,

You say

Given the recent revelations of fraud concerning global warming, climate change does not at all support your claims about the supremacy of peer review as a means for establishing truth.  Peer review is far from incorruptible.

Those leaked emails in no way invalidate the peer-review process, or climate science; it was just a stupid thing to do for those scientists involved.

Also, surely you do not think global warming propaganda is contrary to the interests of the ruling elite?

Absolutely - I take it you don’t? How so? I’ll anticipate - because ‘leftists’ want to use it as a pretence for wealth redistribution? Climate change is bad for business, therefore automatically bad for all 3 main political parties, plus the USA and any of the emerging economies. That’s why they got nowhere at Copenhagen - no one wants to acknowledge it because it’ll dramatically eat into the bottom line. It’s about the least politically convenient thing that’s happened in living memory.

Please tell us when the plebiscites on immigration were held.

When the British public overwhelmingly voted in Labour in 97, 01 and 05, the last election after two unpopular wars. Multiculturalism was always a basic part of their platform. Unfortunately we are about to elect the Conservatives, but they certainly aren’t getting on the immigration platform after Michael Howard crashed and burned on that issue in 05.

Anyone know how the BNP polled in any of those elections? No, me neither.

@Dan

However if we delude ourselves with conspiracy theories and are constantly searching for the mythical men behind the curtain we will be forever tilting at windmills.

I completely agree, and that is one of the fundamental problems of the radical right world-view when it enters the practical sphere. Conspiracy theories certainly don’t wash with any electorate.

As for tilting at windmills, GW is the personification of Don Quixote - tilting at the imaginary ‘left racist.’

Posted by Desmond Jones on February 08, 2010, 09:36 PM | #

But how do white ethnic groups emigrating to the Anglosphere manage to influence the peer review process?

As with any large immigrant group, by their desire to serve their ethnic interests.

Posted by BGD's tuppence on February 08, 2010, 11:42 PM | #

The British political system is for all intents and purposes a two horse race. It is a package deal not an individual Woolworth’s pick-and-mix policy deal. We don’t have a referendum system like the Swiss. It’s choosing which set of policies are less offensive than the other and of late it’s choose Tweedledum after having an extended bellyfull of Tweedledee because the grass is greener “and let’s give them a go"… The choices for the British public are now even more limited as Labour and Conservatives have moved extremely closely together.  The newspapers traditionally side with one party or the other and the level of their support increases in intensity as the election season emerges. There is also an orchestrated campaign against alternatives especially the BNP. That’s where the average man gets their idea of the political parties’ principles. Do you think people go onto the BNP website download their constitution and then do that same for Lib/Lab/Con and contrast them point by point?

The average British person is not interested in bird’s eye view politics unlike you and some of the people on this forum. It’s tedious and they are overly cynical about the process. They don’t have some “unexamined life not worth living” attitude to life. You must realise this. They are just interested in their bottom line, the fundamentals:

who will give me a reasonable standard of living, who will take the least money from me whilst giving me a suitable environment to earn some and will I have a chance of survival if I go into hospital.

That doesn’t mean that the general views the Everyman evidenced in countless opinion polls are accurately mirrored in what is offered by the political parties. You seem to suggest that in the marketplace of ideas those closest to the majority opinion wins? It aint so is it. I feel you have a very 19C / JS Mill / utilitarian way of looking things.

The Conservative and Labour ascendancy is the result of a long historical process that started when Labour managed to supplant the Liberals after joining various factions in one front. Thereafter for the better part of the last century it was (is) an article of faith that “I’m Labour like my dad before me.” Or effectively : we vote Conservative unlike those oiks.

There is also a gradualism in the political landscape that allows things to change inexorably for the while not scaring the electorate enough that they are shocked out of their comfort zone and forced to make hard choices as they would do if there was a big bang change:

Examples: The Common Market > Lisbon Treaty. The (civil law) Race Relations Act of 1965 > Equalities (almost) Act of 2010 (that we think attempts to make our politics for all intents and purposes illegal.) And a few hundred immigrants aboard Windrush in 1948 > millions over the current Labour governments duration.

The above is quite obvious I’d say and really axe grinding from a political faction perspective. I get the feeling you’re like that kid in debating class in school unwilling to allow for fundamentals.

I haven’t had the time to read back over much of the previous thread right now but you also seem to be arguing against the clear genetic interrelatedness of the European peoples and thereby implying that taking a Pakistani as a wife is no different genetically / culturally than taking a Irish woman? If I have gotten that right then words fail.... you can wait for these guys to furnish the population genetics equation that you’ll accept but coming from your strife-riven background its curious that you can’t see what has always been known (at least before the second half of the 20C) that the world’s people greatly value their genetic background and will fight over centuries to defend and expand its physical territory. Perhaps one day science will demonstrate to your satisfaction why on the virtual blackboard until then life will go on.

Posted by BGD's tuppence on February 08, 2010, 11:50 PM | #

Apol. Computer is crashing at present so just noticed a typo. I meant: “That doesn’t mean that the general views of the Everyman / average man as evidenced in countless opinion polls “

Posted by Guessedworker on February 08, 2010, 11:55 PM | #

Ozy,

[It] would have strengthened your position to have addressed my point (and knocked it out)

One more try, then:

1. You accept that genes have an interest in transmission.  You accept that living organisms have genetic interests.

2. You accept that we humans have a genetic interest in humankind both as the reservoir of distinctively human genes that complete our own procreative “package” and as the bearer into the future of our own human-distinctive genes.

3. You accept that distinctive genes have interests.  You accept that there are distinctive genes particular to the ethny.  You refuse to accept that we have a genetic interest in the ethny both as the reservoir of ethnically-distinctive genes that complete our own procreative “package” and as the bearer into the future of our own ethnically-distinctive genes.

Why?  It doesn’t make any sense.  Unless it’s simply that you don’t want to give best to the enemy.  You prefer to cling to … what, exactly?  The belief that you have as much genetic interest in a Bushman as in a fellow Croat?  You don’t.  You are a man of your people, like us all.  Stand up, then.

You write:

I contend that your positioning of ethnocentricity as a building block for an entire philosophy is based not on reason or deduction, not on sound science, and not on any demonstrable feat of ontological thinking.

The great preponderance of serious nationalist thought takes the form of anti-liberal or anti-modern analysis, and you could certainly be forgiven for concluding that nationalism itself has no foundation in philosophy, metaphysics and science.  Further, the great majority of those who term themselves nationalists are not expositors of a political philosophy at all, but of instinct as you infer.  Such is the typical BNP member, for example, and accordingly his politics are nativist, not nationalist.

To that extent we can agree.  But as it happens, you have alighted upon one of the places on the nationalist web where ideas are central to debate, including principles such as EGI, evolutionary biology, being, mind, Volkishness, Palingenesis, Idealism, natural justice, etc.  Any fair-minded observer would regard your assertion that our “product” is floating on a sea of mere gut feelings as plain wrong.

A being’s actions in the world, and interactions with the world, whether taken as an individual or as part of a larger entity, should primarily aim to minimise the suffering of the maximum number of other beings and maximise the happiness of the maximum number of other beings.

Happiness is not the primary purpose of our lives or of Nature.  Nature cannot really be said to be purposive at all.  Continuing to fill a space is what she does, and our bodies and evolved natures are fitted to that.  This is primary purpose.  One might add, if one is so disposed, that self-perfectionment and/or union with the All are the primary aims of the personal life.  But then, as an evolutionist, one would need to be able to answer the question: why did these teleologies evolve in our minds when they offer no discernible fitness gain.  And the answer to that might be that Homo sapiens lost himself long ago but staggers on in a sort of half-life.  And until the planting of the notions of a this-world liberty of the individual, equality, universal brotherhood and endless progress in the heads of Europeans, and the blurring of the distinctions between adaptive and maladaptive life choices, he managed to fulfil his part of Nature’s bargain tolerably well.  But no more.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 09, 2010, 01:38 AM | #

Ozy,

However your ideas about the fundamentals of consciousness are never successfully placed within an ethnocentric context.

That is because I am not seeking to lead debate, but to fit my ideas in to other people’s thinking.  I will finish the third part of that series on what it means to be human in due course, and try to extend it into a more philosophical form when the opportunity to do so arises.  The problem with it, however, is that it is tending to sashay from the neurological - or, at least, phenomenological - towards the metaphysical, and I don’t necessarily want that.  Heidegger analysed being not as “ground” but as “relation”.  As things stand, I could work from “ground”, but I want to explore and assess the other possibility, and it is difficult.

You just need to throw some shallow, baseless ‘racialist’ comment in now and again to appease the gallery, and your whole piece gets applauded.

Rhetoric is not baseless if it is founded in truth.  I mentioned the long tradition, dating back into the 19th century, of fascist and revolutionary conservative critique of liberalism and modernism.  This tradition runs through post-war nationalist intellectualism also.  It informed the work of GRECE, during its hey-day period, and it informs the New Right in Britain and on the continent today.  We have a critique which is detailed and valid, and we use it.

Your countryman Tom Sunic has written extensively from this critique, and has a new book coming out shortly.  If you want to sample what this critique is about, check out his last book, Homo americanus: child of the postmodern age.  Sunic does a fine job, incidentally, of “equating liberalism” with Puritanism, not Judaism.  Likewise, we do not equate liberalism with Judaism as you contend.  We note the Jewish paternity of Western intellectualism post-Marx and especially post-WW2 (look, for example, at the changing character of John Rawls’ thought from his socially democratic, New Deal-ist stance in the Johnson era to his late gesture in the direction of culturalism - a direct example of Jewish gravitational pull.)

It also, step by step, reassures me that my initial thesis - that you are essentially a faithist - was correct.

I hoped I had laid that to rest by giving you the links to the two “human” essays.  It is very difficult to disprove such assertion, especially from somebody who appears not to notice the teleological nature of his own philosophy.

In taking as its starting point two notions, happiness and suffering, that can be universally understood it is in fact grounded in the fundamental being-in-the-world that every sentient being shares, and that forms the truly irreducible.

Now, let’s do some ontology.

Emotion - and this goes for happiness and suffering - is an evolutionary product whose fitness gain lies in its value ascription to adaptive or maladaptive choices, causes and effects.  The states created in the emotional faculty have a relation to being but it is not an immediate one.  There is a chain through existence and the existent, experience, judgement, value ascription and, finally, emotion.

Value equates to thought representation - to modelling - in its proximity to being.  You would not say of thought-models that they are “fundamental”.  They are not.  They are methods of perceiving the fundamental, perhaps.  But one cannot say more about them than that.

So, happiness and suffering must be replaced by other concepts if we are to travel closer to the true foundation.  Adaptive and maladative are obvious candidates, no?

Of ideas, you say that ‘They, and not events, are what the world is made of, after all’. But the resulting events are the method by which the underlying ideas are judged.

If you interpose human imperfection and the law of accident between “ideas” and “events”, then I accept your point.  However, the real point here is probably that I did not spend enough time explaining myself.  The worth of liberalism is a done deal for us - I said earlier that we have nothing more to learn of the milieu in which we have all been born and raised.  We are revolutionary nationalists - a portentious claim, I know, but the nature of the beast leaves little alternative.  So “ideas” are necessarily our realm of interaction.  “Events” do not yet matter.

newborn Palestinians don’t know they are Palestinians, or that they are under threat, until someone tells them.

Well, I will pass over, so to speak, that research into Jewish babies and the incidence of Stranger Anxiety.  But your point is surely that ethnicity is cultural.  It is genes + culture, of course.  Can we at least avoid the Guardianesque basement-level debate about the “white racism” of our people who know very well that they are not black, and discriminate accordingly?  Really, we don’t have to pretend we agree with the fraud and liar Franz Boas, and Matt Seaton ain’t gonna ban us here.

The correct formulation would be that humans as a whole seek to conserve (and that is only true if seen as an aggregate of each individual’s own drive to conserve - that, at any rate is the scientific consensus of those working outside a political context) - that is where the irreducible line is drawn, not at nationalism or ethnicity, which are human constructs.

Who are these scientists who have discovered that individual products of culture seek to conserve/preserve a genetically distinct ethny?  What interest would these products have in doing so?  None, since culture is fully transferable between human beings, isn’t it?

But you know that this line of reasoning is false.  We conserve/preserve for love, and we love kin above all others.

You baselessly conflate tolerance with the denial of preservation of Europeans. It’s unduly alarmist, and more importantly, the underlying thought process is obscure (a recurrring theme on MR).

I doubt that any of my English forefathers would be “relaxed” about having eight to ten million negroes, Asians and other foreigners (so far) dispossessing, deracinating and replacing them.  It is a cause for revolution, not relaxation.

Tolerance is not a true philosophical value, as you say.  It is political.  The call for tolerance is strictly an insistence on self-pacification while the replacement process grates daily at our hearts.  It is duplicity, since we have never consented to or been permitted to debate our own replacement.  You know this to be true, and you know it to be a crime against the people.  To characterise the natural and righteous desire of a people suffering such a criminal calamity as “a pathological fear of otherness” is a fine example of the racism of the left.

If you want to avoid this label, you must accept that the English have the same right to live sovereign and free and in peace in their own ancestral land as any other people anywhere.  There is no universal right to race-replace a native people, not Tibetans, not Palestinians, not the English ... and not even Croats.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 09, 2010, 03:19 AM | #

The flippant manner in which OZK treats our legitimate concerns about ethnic displacement in our own country leads me to wonder whether he is actually aware of the dramatic scale of the transformation that has already occurred.

I’m going to be charitable and assume that he does not know and, and that if he were aware, he would not be issuing such strident calls for tolerance and accusing us of being unduly alarmist.

Posted by A Company for the Importation of WOGGES into Her M on February 09, 2010, 09:46 AM | #

GW mentioned ‘preffering one’s own kin’ in one of his posts.
A natural enough statement and one I would have thought would be uncontestable (except in this mad age).
But anyway, we have the evidence of etymology to back us up.
‘Kin’ is related to the Indo-European root ‘Gan’ which means to beget, the whole idea being wrapped up in the sexual root of life and thus to the early Indo-European the essence of genetic frequencies and shared gene pools though he was ignorant of modern science he grasped the real gist of the subject (apparently unlike some pompous word and concept bending sophists here).
Hence we are ‘kind’ to our children (’kind’ is of course the German for child).
Also ‘King’ originally meant ‘of the kin’ ie the original ‘kings’ claim to eminence was based on their blood relatedness to the gens or tribe.
Even the word ‘genius’ itself is related to ‘kin’ - ‘genius’ orginally meant a protective racial spirit assigned to oversee the gens.
- And ‘kith and kin’, ‘kith’ is merely an old name for womb.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 09, 2010, 10:41 AM | #

Ozy,

The charge of left-racism is not a tactic, not a “pay-back”, and is not flippant.  Sometime during the 1960s, I would say, the political left in this country began its migration away from apprehending the British generally, but the working-class specifically, as “subject”, with all the warmth and tenderness of feeling and kinship which that implies, to an “object” fitted to criticism and hitherto unheard of programmes of “moral improvement” and deconstruction of identity in the name of combatting prejudice and discrimination.

This application of distance and critique - essentially a treachery - can only be understood in the context of an intellectually bankrupt left transforming itself, in conformism with the only available new philosophical analysis at the time, into an extended phenotype of Jewish ethnic aggression.

The result, in very broad terms, is that the political left actually, fervently believes three fantastical primary tenets of that analysis, and has faithfully acted on them for the last four decades (but most faithfully since the late-1980s). These tenets are:

1. Race does not exist.

2. The Self is socially constructed and is devoid of any naturally-arising or permanent content.

3. The European mind is irrational and uniquely flawed by hatred of the Other.

All that is said and done as a result of this unnatural and fatal treachery is left-racism.  It is a very grave problem and somehow the political left must be brought to an understanding of what has happened to it, how and why.  It cannot simply be allowed to go on acting as the engine of the European peoples’ destruction (for the left all over the West has been infected in the same manner).

So, whilst I apologise for the rhetorical tone, the substance of the charge is there, and on this blog at least - where people are allowed to think freely - it is not in dispute.

Posted by ethnic nation states: stop lying on February 09, 2010, 10:44 AM | #

http://www.xpatathens.com/news/20544

“Greece says it detained more than 146,000 illegal immigrants in 2008, a 30 per cent increase from the previous year and 54 per cent up on 2006.

But it now has the highest number of illegal entries each year in the EU, followed by Italy and Spain.

In an attempt to stop clandestine boats from landing on Greek soil, coast guard patrols use radar, satellite navigation, and sophisticated night-vision equipment, backed up by army observation posts on mountain tops.

But even when boat people are detected, they are typically held for several months and then released with a formal order to leave the country in three weeks.

Many end up staying, slipping beneath the authorities’ radar and taking casual jobs in a desperate attempt to raise enough money to get to other parts of the EU, often Italy.”

http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/article/16111/illegal-immigration-has-italy-in-its-sights.html

http://www.euronews.net/2010/01/08/immigrants-riot-in-italy-amid-racial-unrest/
..and just wait until the current “right-wing” government in Italy, which makes a show against illegal immigration and does nothing about legal immigration, is replaced by the socialists.  Can anyone say “amnesty?”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy
“Traditionally a country of emigrants, in the last 20 years Italy has become a country of mass immigration, with about 7.5% of the population fitting that description. 156,179 foreigners were counted in the 1971 census, (Source: Italian Caritas); according to the last figure (Caritas est. 2009[25]), 5 million immigrants live legally in Italy, while estimates for undocumented immigrants vary from 0.8 million to 2 million”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3622953.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/06/opinion/06iht-edmatt.t.html?pagewanted=1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7603243.stm
http://www.topnews.in/africans-poland-gradually-sinking-roots-2226490]http://www.topnews.in/africans-poland-gradually-sinking-roots-2226490]http://www.topnews.in/africans-poland-gradually-sinking-roots-2226490[/url]

Posted by Captainchaos on February 09, 2010, 11:20 AM | #

1.) The Jewish people are socially constructed and therefore there is no inherent, abiding value in their continued existence.

2.) The Jewish mind is irrational and uniquely flawed by hatred of the Other.

3.) As such, the Jewish people are wholly unentitled to a homeland of their own, and, justice be done, the Zionist entity will be dissolved.

4.) Accordingly, “the Holocaust” [really the Hollowhoax - it never happened] of the Jews was not more horrible than the engineered starvation of ten million Ukrainians overseen by Jew Lazar Kaganovitch as they were seen as “Kulaks” or “class enemies,” social constructs all. 

Or alternatively:

1.) The White race is the Master Race.

2.) Jews are a people evolved for parasitism who experience a genetic compulsion to subvert to dominate host societies.

Posted by Dasein on February 09, 2010, 11:35 AM | #

The flippant manner in which OZK treats our legitimate concerns about ethnic displacement in our own country leads me to wonder whether he is actually aware of the dramatic scale of the transformation that has already occurred. --DD

Dan, he thinks people want it because they voted for Labour.  Whatever elected officials do, the people want.  Ozy understands how democracy works.

I’m going to be charitable and assume that he does not know and, and that if he were aware, he would not be issuing such strident calls for tolerance and accusing us of being unduly alarmist.  --DD

You and GW have been assuming too much here.  Ozy should have been vetted before the conversation began.  What’s going on here is analogous to a kid in school uniform coming to an open house, and the real estate agents thinking he’s interested and able to buy.  You said the following earlier:

Cap’n nobody here doubts the existence of the ‘flocking together’ phenomenon that you cite. It’s emprically obvious.

Are you sure Ozy doesn’t doubt it?  I think he’s detached from reality, and that’s why CC’s line of questioning was important.

The fundamental problem is that Ozy is a race-denier.  I’ll re-post my earlier comment and see if he replies this time.

Ozy, you said:

Pygmies aside, I have already acknowledged that genes are fundamental, and nowhere have I said that ‘everything is social’. You are starting to sound like you are arguing against a template ‘left-racist’ straw man rather than against anything I actually said.

Yet you’ve said:

In fact, the genetic distance between races is so infinitesimally small as to be completely negligible.

If this is your view of racial differences, then you will never accept race and ethnicity as viable categories for political action and philosophy.

How did you come to this conclusion about racial differences?

Posted by A Company for the importation of Wogges on February 09, 2010, 02:44 PM | #

“The genetic differences between races is infinitessimally small”.

This comment (oft repeated by others other than Ozy) always makes me laugh.
- the genetic difference between male and female humans is to coin a phrase ‘infinitessimally small’, being the purlieu of a single chromosome.
And yet posession of that chromosome leads to such major anatomical, physiological and emotional differences between both sexes.
But Ozy would probably even deny those differences exist.

Posted by Dasein on February 09, 2010, 03:43 PM | #

If what Ozy says is true, then the following must be the result of raycist magic (no wonder GW chose faith):

source

Posted by Captainchaos on February 09, 2010, 08:57 PM | #

Buy it now!  The Captain’s Palingenetic Elixir!  Verily I say unto you, White man, it is the Elixir of Life, of Being.  Does your shaved head not gleam as it once did?  Buy The Captain’s PE!  Has the goose gone out of your step?  Buy The Captain’s PE!  Does your mind cloud over when confronted with esoteric gobbledygook?  Guzzle The Captain’s PE!  Only $19.95 per liter, buy five get one free, $4.99 shipping and handling, $9.99 shipped across the Atlantic.  Buy today!

Posted by Gudmund on February 09, 2010, 09:23 PM | #

This Ozzy character is ‘Niccolo and Donkey’ from The Phora.  Same ideology, same arguments, even the same ethnicity (Hrvat) for Christ’s sakes!  I’m surprised Dan Dare didn’t pick up on it.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 09, 2010, 09:28 PM | #

Niggolo lives in the PRC not the UK.

Posted by Dasein on February 09, 2010, 09:36 PM | #

Are we sure he’s Croatian?  The biographical details he gave led me to think he’s Macedonian.

Posted by Dasein on February 09, 2010, 10:50 PM | #

Looking back at my earlier comment, I think my analogy was inappropriate, and could be interpreted as insulting to GW and DD, which was not my intention.  Let’s say some bloke off the street, instead of a kid.  The point is, though, that before we get too immersed in conversation with Ozy, we should make sure his head’s screwed on right.

Posted by Dasein on February 12, 2010, 09:57 PM | #

I thought I would check in at CiF and see if Ozy is still in cyberspace, and I was not disappointed.

Dan defended Ozy against my charge that he’s hopeless.  Was that trust misplaced?  I don’t know what Ozy was like before he ran into MR, but in his comments he is at least challenging some left-racist articles of faith.

Here is the CiF entry to which he’s commenting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/12/england-daft-pleasant-land

And here are his comments:

12 Feb 2010, 2:42PM

Here’s how this thread will pan out:

200 posts saying that there’s no such thing as the English, only Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Picts and all that;

200 posts saying that NuLabour have deliberately sacrificed Englishness on the altar of Multiculturalism;

200 posts saying that people like to celebrate Diwali as well as Christmas, and that they like a curry now and then.

Now you can do something else and not bother reading the thread!

No need to thank me, that’s just how I roll.

12 Feb 2010, 4:02PM

@petrifiedprozac

Englishness, like Scottishness and Welshness and Irishness are just a cultural phenomena, not a racial phenomena, if there is such a thing as racial phenomena. The English, like the Celts, are just a cultural invention.

Do you think that being cultural makes it any less valid?

Your points are interesting, however they are a variant on the ‘no such thing as the English’ theme. It’s this that feeds the BNP - I’m always asking why this tendency among the English (I’m East European but have been in England since childhood) to deny that there is, in fact, an English ethnicity.

Someone above said that the fish in water doesn’t notice the water, and that to me seems to be a pretty valid explanation, at least in part. You have previously talked about the ice cold homicidal charm of the upper classes - colonial guilt, basically.

Whatever the problem is, it seems to me that the English need to start accepting that they are a distinct ethnicity, otherwise that sentiment will continue to be harnessed by the BNP and their ilk.

12 Feb 2010, 4:36PM

@Gloria

It simply says that it is cultural rather than racial. You appear to be disagreeing with a post when you actually entirely agree with it.

I’m not saying that Prozac’s an English-denier[!] - I just wanted to steer things in that direction, really, and his post shows a regular current on CiF, which is the tendency to dissolve the idea of Englishness (as a distinct enthincity) in discussion of the mixed historical demographics of the Islands.

ought to have comprehension skills a scratch above the norm

Get you!

@Prozac

As above, I’m not contradicting your point - more using it to jump off sideways. I would contend that there is such a thing as Englishness, but I’m not really sure where to draw the boundaries. I agree that racial boundaries won’t do, as I found when I first arrived in the UK and found black and Asian kids who were orders of magnitude more ‘English’ than me, a white European.

It is cultural [ok, still a ways to go], and I think perhaps shared experience has a lot to do with it. Perhaps it’s not immutable, but each generation (maybe) experiences a different idea of Englishness - a constantly mutating thing....[he’s getting close here.  Ozy, if you want to get closer, you’ll have to come back]

The problem, though, is that there seems to be an appetite for an immutable ‘Englishness’ which can be set and defined against other ethnicities - I think perhaps the BNP (in part) exist to cater to that appetite.

12 Feb 2010, 5:02PM

@pairibu

That’s an interesting question. Mainly, I suspect because those doing the denying aren’t really English anyway

Not sure about that - from these threads it actually seems to be the ‘indigenous’ English that are most uneasy with the idea.

but there is a definite strand of self-loathing that you find in the leftish leaning type of English person

That there is, Pairibu. Not only on CiF, but it’s reflected in government, to the point that Jack Straw feels he can say on Question Time (the Griffin edition) that there’s no such thing as the ‘indigenous’ English (allowing Griffin to land a punch by asking if he’d say that to the Maoris).

It’s this tendency, in my view, that in part fuels the BNP. Since I am sane and therefore want to see the back of the BNP, it interests me firstly why there is a tendency to deny ‘Englishness’, and secondly what will appease those who want to see that enthnicity enshrined.

Notice that Ozy is still confused as to what role genetics play in a definition of English.  But I see reasons for hope.  He’s beginning to recognize who’s dealing with reality, and who’s in denial.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 12, 2010, 10:16 PM | #

I noticed that too Dasein and left a little tickler for him under another nom-de-guerre. I wonder if he will twig.

He’s starting to ask questions which is a positive development.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 12, 2010, 10:24 PM | #

Ozy is a fair-minded person who is yet to realise that his thoughts and feelings are not produced ab initio out of his own mind and heart but out of that “water” in which we fishes swim.  But he can come to that realisation, as any of us can.

It doesn’t help in that respect to be living outside his own country, but there is no law that says that he is bound to strive for the destruction of the natives - notwithstanding what the Irish and Italians did in America and what the Irish and Ukrainians did in Canada.  We have to have some hope, we Europeans, that we can recognise one another’s circumstance in this time of danger, and offer kinship and solidarity as a matter of principle.

Posted by Bill on February 13, 2010, 07:58 AM | #

I wanted to get a handle on this Greece thing, I tapped a Google search, ‘Greece, What’s the problem?

Here’s an interesting piece on the subject.

Greece is NWO Test Ground, Says Greek Reader

by Christos
(for http://www.henrymakow.com)

“I am 26 years old and live in Greece. I am writing this letter in order to let you know about a new law in Greece announced yesterday.

The financial minister of Greece announced yesterday that from 1/1/2011 all financial transactions of sums above 1500 euros in cash, will be banned. For any transaction above 1500 euros, only credit cards and checks will be legal. The formal explanation for this law is it will combat those who do not pay taxes. But we all know this is not the case…

It seems the new world order wants to make Greece a testing ground for their new laws. For the past months, Greece have been attacked without mercy. We have been called liars, frauds, cheaters, thieves. They are threatening us constantly with banning from the euro zone and default. [These charges are] not true. ... The problem is, based on their accusations and (the virtual) bad situation of Greek finances, they will pass their experimental laws of their new world order.

The fairly new Government of the socialist party, elected 4 months ago, forgot all its promises, and is determined to pass laws giving citizenship to illegal immigrants after 5 years, without any trade-off. We are 10 million Greeks here, and almost 3 million mostly illegal immigrants, who will obtain Greek nationality and will gain the right to bring their families here too… In Pakistan there are even ads saying “for 5000 euros we get you to Greece, to study free, work, make families, and obtain EU passports"…

And now this… The previous government created a new ID card, to collect data from people since childbirth. This government will ban transactions in cash over 1500 euros, in order to make all of us have credit cards. The obvious first step is to ban all cash transactions, then merge this new ID card with the credit system, then, well.... insert this merged ID card into our bodies…

Our peoples’ morale is low, society is disorganized because of immigration and propaganda, and we will not fight those laws. You people living in the Western World, be prepared because they are planning the same for you!

BACKGROUND

I will try to give you my personal view of the conditions in Greece.

First of all, there is no trust in politicians. Most people distrust them and know they are scum, but continue to vote for the same people in every election. This happens because they promise privileges in order to get votes. Most politicians are members of secret societies, and have close ties to USA and European elites. Our current prime minister is even an American citizen…

A young man living in Greece and having no connections, is hopeless. Without connections, he will have major difficulties if he wants to join a good University(or complete his studies without bribes), if he wants to find a job, or create his own. He will be forced to join the army while privileged young men with connections will illegally avoid it.

And there is no point discussing finding love… Of course pretty women will pick wealthier men, but in Greece even women of moderate appearance prefer men with deep pockets. They prefer sharing the top men than having a man only for themselves.

And the top men in Greece are all frauds. Greece, apart from some natural resources and its tourism industry, produces nothing of value. Corruption is so big, that all productive forces are drowned. So all men of power here, get their power from plundering the Greek people, or having connections with those that do it. Women (and their families) of course are not concerned about that. As long as someone is wealthy, he is desirable, and value as a person is irrelevant.

Despite poor economic condition (but not so desperate as to warrant dire measures), people in power take pleasure in attacking traditional customs, Orthodox Christianity, and traditional Greek patriots. They protect illegal immigrants, and silence their crimes. They attack Christianity, in the media, at schools etc. They are removing all Christian symbols from public places.

MEDIA

Greek media are a pile of garbage. For the biggest part of the day, most major TV networks will show shows discussing greek “vips” lifestyle, sexual relations etc. There are few “political” shows and news shows, all trying to cover the truth and turn the attention of the people at matters of trivial importance. Propaganda is blatant. The previous government was literally destroyed by TV networks. They promoted heavily the current government, so strongly that previous prime minister was forced to make new elections despite being only for 2 years in government.

Current prime minister made promises, NONE of which kept after being elected. Only a few days after election, he went on with the plans of New World Order. He created an artificially dire financial situation, in order to be able to pass whatever laws he wanted, plus giving his friends some money… He “cooked” our budget, by moving payments of 2010 in 2009 and incomes from 2009 to 2010, in order to both make our deficit bigger and be able to claim in 2010 that he “improved” our economy… This doesn’t mean that our previous prime minister wasn’t a puppet, just that he wasn’t able to fulfill New World Order directions like the new government.

Huge economic scandals are discovered every day, and buried by Greek propaganda media. And most honest people are so concerned with working 2 and 3 jobs in order to feed their families, that cannot fight this corruption. Greek people work on average many more hours weekly than other EU countries, get much less pay, and pay more for the same products. And because of the traitors in government, EU newspapers and media call our people lazy. They say we need to work even more and receive even less… Of course this is not true. The plunder of Greek people has been made with their assistance. But this is a long subject and i wont go on with it.

CONCLUSION

In a few words… Life in Greece sucks. Since I am a computer programmer, i have many times thought about leaving for a better country and make my living there. But i do not want to abandon my home… yet. I would be willing to fight this system, but i see no point since the system is so well entrenched it cannot be tackled by a few men alone.

The reason i wrote you my previous letter is because this new law of banning cash transactions above 1500 euros is just another step towards cashless society, and is being implemented in Greece as a testing phase. I strongly believe it is a matter of time before most western nations see similar laws.”

End.

It looks as though Greece is Europe’s sub-prime.

Posted by Dan Dare on February 13, 2010, 08:18 AM | #

Greece should never have been admitted into the EU as a full voting member, let alone permitted to adopt the Euro.

The big mistake was admitting more Mediterranean countries (Greece, Spain and Portugal) as full members in the 1980s. It was bound to end in tears.

Posted by Dasein on February 13, 2010, 10:46 AM | #

Ozy is a fair-minded person who is yet to realise that his thoughts and feelings are not produced ab initio out of his own mind and heart but out of that “water” in which we fishes swim. --GW

A good point, and that’s perhaps why he’s asking these questions of his fellow Guardianistas.  There were a number of questions that he left unanswered, or avoided, here, but perhaps he’ll return in due course.

Posted by OZKT29B on February 13, 2010, 08:30 PM | #

All,

I’m not sure why you are all so surprised at my comments on the Guardian yesterday - it seems to be another instance of you assuming you know all my views in advance because they all stem from a monolithic ‘leftist’ narrative. In fact I am more of a centrist, or a libertarian, or just a pragmatist. I have never denied that the English are an ethnic group, although I know that many do. If you read my posts on the Guardian you’ll know that I see that tendency as deeply counter-productive.

I think it stems from the same grim view of the public as you have - where you see a mass of people blindly marching to the tune of some sort of leftist pied piper, the shrill elements on the left tend to agree; and furthermore they think that if the masses are allowed to get one glimpse of Griffin’s jowly face, then they’ll start frog-marching the country into the 4th Reich.

Both positions seem to me to be equally ridiculous - the British people have shown time and again that they are simply not interested in far-right views. Allowing those views to be openly aired will choke off the risible argument that the BNP are marginal not because 99% of people don’t agree with them, but because people aren’t allowed to listen to them.

OZK

Posted by Dan Dare on February 13, 2010, 08:45 PM | #

Both positions seem to me to be equally ridiculous - the British people have shown time and again that they are simply not interested in far-right views.

You continue to chant this mantra OZK, on CiF as well as here.

You seem to want to put forward the 2005 general election as proof positive for the assertion, the claim apparently being that Howard and the Tories were (narrowly) defeated in large part due to the tough stance they were alleged to have taken on immigration.

So here’s another question for you to ponder:

Which of the two major parties made the introduction of an ‘Australian style’ points-based system the central plank of their election platform on immigration?