Learning difficulties

On a day when Prince Charles spoke for us all and Charles Clarke spoke for the rest, I was pleased to find that John Ray had got there ahead of them.

He reported this article by English lecturer Joanna Williams.  She has come to the realisation that this government’s great drive for social inclusion is counter-educational.

Inclusion is, of course, code for equality.  But it’s code that we, as nice, decent, high-minded people are not meant to quibble with.  After all, who would protest at something so soft-focus, so clearly well-intentioned and humane as inclusion, whereas an awful lot of us will bitterly contest the harder, politically divisive issue of “equality” – be it of opportunity or outcome.  No, inclusion is a useful word, a real asset for the left.  We need to unpick the meaning of it ruthlessly because the meaning of it is that classic dictatorship of the proletariat: the lowest common denominator.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 08:27 PM in Education
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What’s Happening to the Dollar?

Few blogs I’ve read mention the dramatic events surrounding the US Dollar’s decline, which impacts our lives greatly.

European governments are pleading with the US to stop the fall. Also they’ve warned the US about its debt to which Bush responded: “Freedom is priceless. We will pay whatever price is required”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1352886,00.html

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts warns the Chinese exchange rate policy threatens the US’ position as the holder of world reserve currency.

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/041116_declining.htm

I feel the US is a financial house of cards, yet I know little about economics. Though I started buying gold bullion one year ago, when it was at $340 per ounce, now it sits at $442.

http://www.gold-eagle.com/intra-day/XAU3m.html

Posted by leslie on Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 01:40 PM in Economics & Finance
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They want to see your anger

Censorious, over-regulatory, ban-happy, criminalising – that is the nature of Blairism and of our culturally-liberating government as it impacts upon the quiet lives of Middle England.  If you hunt or if your hobby is shooting, if you own a house which you may wish to sell, if you own a horse or both a car and a mobile phone you will be regulated or you will be banned.  If then you fail to comply you will be criminalised and have to pay a swingeing fine … or face jail.

The social customs and interests of all those respectable, responsible folk who abide by the law and intend no man harm are being steadily legislated away.  It might not be programmatic.  A case can be made for each of these new legal instruments and, yes, they arise through different causations, not simply political malignity.  But the unavoidable overall picture is one of a government with extreme and well-targeted regulatory instincts ... a government with absolutely no inclination to maintain for its own sake our long-standing tradition of liberty.

At some point that has to and does connect to a set of profoundly malign political values.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 07:24 PM in British Politics
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How One Thing Leads to Another

A recurring theme amongst activists everywhere is “how do we meet our objectives?” Especially in eugenics, there is a great deal of angst about not being able to plan a movement and implement it. Therefore, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how humans adopt their current ideologies and how to bring about change in the face of other activists pushing against our objectives. My conclusion is there is no simple plan of action, the best one can do is keep fighting for what one believes in, and hope for a break your way.

A new book addresses the issue of how change comes about: Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another by Philip Ball, 2004 (available from Amazon.com for $17). Ball builds upon the field of emergence, complexity theory and self-organization. This field of research uses computer models, physics, and pattern matching to see if mathematical models can be used to tease out how cultural and political change comes about and how humans as well as gas molecules and snowflakes come upon taking on the patterns and shapes that they do. In essence, there are often times a hidden order, pattern, or mathematical model that underlies nature and human society. In understanding these patterns, as activists, we can better understand how change comes about.

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Posted by Matt Nuenke on Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 08:12 AM in Social Sciences
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“The Nation Needs Her”, says Bush

Transcript: Rice’s Testimony on 9/11

Thursday, April 8, 2004; 1:45 PM

LEHMAN: Were you aware that INS had been lobbying for years to get the airlines to drop the transit without visa loophole that enabled terrorists and illegals to simply buy a ticket through the transit-without- visa-waiver and pay the airlines extra money and come in?

RICE: I learned about that after September 11th.

LEHMAN: Were you aware that the INS had quietly, internally, halved its internal security enforcement budget?

RICE: I was not made aware of that. I don’t remember being made aware of that, no.

LEHMAN: Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or oppose the sanctuary policies of New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Diego for political reasons, which policy in those cities prohibited the local police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities?

RICE: I do not believe I was aware of that.

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Posted by leslie on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 10:45 PM in U.S. Politics
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Now ... let’s all sing along

No doubt the left looks with gloomy ingratitude upon the memory of A.C.Benson, who gave us the words for Land of Hope & Glory.  Likewise, Dr Henry Carey of National Anthem fame will not be admired among those who would prefer Prince William to marry an exotic flower of our, of course, always vibrant minorities.

As for James Thomson, his stirring Rule Britannia probably can’t be sung at all by anyone who has read as far as page 2 of Das Kapital.  Which isn’t all that many, actually.  I know.  I tried.

And, well, Russ Parker and Hughie Charles (There’ll always be an England) should be on Trevor Phillips little list.  Can’t say blacklist, of course, but you know what I mean.  A million marching feet … the Empire too, we can depend on you!  One must have been a fascist, the other a racist.  It’s perfectly obvious.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 07:49 PM in Humour
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Albion blocked

These are momentous times in Flanders.  My friend, Johan Van Vlaams, blogs below on the new beginning for pro-Flemish politics.

Meanwhile, I want to look backwards at the Vlaams Blok model.  Does it have a wider applicability?  What if any lessons does it hold for the benighted natives of my own country.  For the avoidance of doubt and in deference to my Scots friends I will restrict my observations in this respect to my own band of raiders south of the border.

The Blok took its character and drew its determination not from anything so nebulous as political ideals - or, God help us, values - but from the Flemish people themselves.  They are children of the North Sea coastal lands of Europe, cut from much the same cloth as the Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans who, with the Celts of the fringe, constitute the indigenous peoples of Great Britain.

But unlike us, the Flemish have, even under the multicultural onslaught and in the maw of the Belgian Establishment, retained sufficient self-knowledge and self-respect to found a liberation movement on national identity.

National identity in a European people, no less than any other, ought always to be contiguous with the nation state.  A discreetly related people is the heart and soul of nationhood.  But that nationhood is not merely diminished by the artificial conjunction of differing peoples with differing interests, it is permanently disfigured by the inevitable contest and still more inevitable one-sided outcome.

But there is an upside to this, too.  Ancient rivalries do speak to public feeling.  A people who suffer injustice are likely to be as mindful of their identity as any single-malt nation.  All too clearly, being gripped in the Belgian maw has served just such a purpose for the Flemish.  The Blok was all about that.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, November 15, 2004 at 02:00 PM in Political Philosophy
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Not just of Flemish interest

It was written in the skies that the Flemish political adventure which was Vlaams Blok would not end with the decision by the Court of Cassation last week. The Party Council, comprising delegates from one thousand local Blok chapters, voted at an extraordinary general meeting yesterday morning in Antwerp to disband their Party.  The next vote brought into being a new party: Vlaams Belang – in English, Flemish Interest.

The cost of this historical action is high, put at two million dollars by the old leadership.  But that is a small price for freedom of speech and thought in Flanders.

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Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on Monday, November 15, 2004 at 10:59 AM in European Nationalism
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Folly in Fallujah

“For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization”

—Ezra Pound

“Freedom is God’s gift to humanity,” says President Bush.  If so, might God distinguish between a freedom for the Arab and that freedom for which the American army is fighting?  And might He, after Abu Ghraib, use some proxy other than the US military to effect Arab freedom?

The idea of God dispensing politics on the battle field is more redolent of Islam than Christianity.  Professing to be a religious man, President Bush ought to know that Christianity is concerned more with resisting temptation than crusading for “Democracy”, and the message about temptation is clear: resist it.  That goes for the sweet taste of dollar denominated crude - a mighty temptation, perhaps irresistible.  Like an apple.

Still, theology won’t deliver an American victory in Iraq. 

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Posted by leslie on Saturday, November 13, 2004 at 01:32 PM in U.S. Politics
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The raw nerve of the liberal democrat

Steve Sailer has an article

at The American Conservative about how deeply Kerry was troubled by the information, statistically deduced by Charles Murray and Steve himself, that Bush has the higher IQ.

When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn’t care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed.

A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus’s radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, “I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.” 

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Saturday, November 13, 2004 at 10:11 AM in Liberalism & the Left
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Alberto Gonzalez and the new American Spoils System

The nomination of Alberto Gonzalez for Attorney General tells us much about the racial spoils system and the character of President George W. Bush.

In the old Republic federal jobs were filled by patronage, commonly known as the spoils system. Preference was shown to those owed favors or those with connections to elected officials. This system functioned openly, if not inefficiently, and with few complaints. British subjects may recall Prime Minister Palmerston effectively ran his government without a secretary. The spoils system ended when President Chester Arthur signed, in the year 1883, the Pendleton Act requiring merit as criteria for acquiring federal jobs.

Is today’s racial spoils system superior to yesterday’s patronage system?

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Posted by leslie on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 07:01 PM in U.S. Politics
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Confessions of a cultural elitist

I have put up the above-title article by Ted Rall in full because Yahoo articles tend not to stay up for long.

The article is of course an unashamed claim of superiority for Democrats and “Blue State” inhabitants. Insofar as it is an argument rather than mere assertion, however, it is easily demolished.  Before I do that, though, read it for yourself.

Confessions of a cultural elitist
Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters
by TED RALL

NEW YORK—Democratic hand wringing is surrealy out of hand. No one is criticizing the morally incongruous Kerry for running against a war he voted for while insisting that he would have voted for it again. Party leaders have yet to consider that NAFTA, signed into law under Clinton, may have cost them high-unemployment Ohio. No, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, darling of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council, blames something else: the perception “in the heartland” that Democrats are a “bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives.”

Firstly, living in the sticks doesn’t make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban—they’re irrelevant. San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there’s a reason. We do, and all the more so after this election.

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Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 06:22 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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Back to that election ... and its aftermath

Both Melinda Henneberger and Carol Gould have recent articles out which portray how frantic and extreme Democrat supporters now are in their hatred of Bush and of conservatives generally. Such fury is not the reaction of people who are quietly confident in the truth of their own beliefs. It is the derangement of people who know that they are wrong and who are steadily having their props kicked out from under them.

How otherwise to explain the fact that such great preachers of “tolerance” cannot abide over half of their fellow citizens?

(Cross-posted from Dissecting Leftism.  E-mail John .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 01:44 PM in U.S. Politics
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Regret on hearing of the death of Arafat

It was a long time ago.  If I had to rely purely on memory I couldn’t even be sure of the year now.  But, you know, I was young and didn’t worry for the world as I do today.  I didn’t understand the need to hold fast to the remembrance of such dispiriting realities.  I didn’t understand why it would matter if, so many years later, they should slip out of the public mind, and mine.

So it was rather easy to forget.  Perhaps, too, forgetting went with the grain of the wood.  Seventies Britain was a different place with quite different expectations.  Life seemed more providential, and perhaps was.  We raced between the lights.  We were freer and more risk-taking or, perhaps, just more subject to the cheapening, egalitarian law of accident.  Now we are all wrapped up in cotton wool.  Death seems an intolerable affront.  But I don’t know that it was then in quite the same way. 

I should also say that we were also immeasurably more naïve then than now.  For one thing, the foul-minded, shit-hearted non-soldiers of the Provisional IRA had not begun leaving their murderous gifts in mainland pubs.  We saw terrorism on the nightly news.  But it was mostly on the island of Ireland, as the shit-hearts liked to put it.  Or it was even further away and involved Middle Easterners and Israelis.  This type of terrorism came to us through the most basic moral filter.  It was a filter through which only one side of the story ever got told.  We didn’t question it then.  We hadn’t learned to question everything.  But anyway it was a true filter.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 06:28 AM in Obituaries
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Red and Blue Lamentations

Countrymen, I cannot stomach a Rome full of Greeks. For years Syrians have poured their sewage into our sacred Tiber; their cackle, manners, flutes and ridiculous harps; with their guitars and their outlandish tambourines and their whores found at our stadiums.

—Juvenal, Roman Satirist

Examining the map of red and blue America you can easily locate where the whores, Greeks, and Syrians live. The red states have high Church attendance, large concentrations of European Americans, and lower rates of crime, the blue state don’t. The corporate media rarely states this fact preferring the use of code words like “ethnic diversity” and “worldview”, instead of “white majorities” and “Christian faith”.

As a red state resident, expelling Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, and Houston is an oft desired wish. (In my state only one county voted for Kerry. Can you guess which one?).  I don’t wish to live with Mexicans, Arabs, and white liberals anymore than Juvenal wished to live with homosexuals, whores or Greeks. I’ll stop here before charges are filed.

Now I read that the Democrat party is publicly lamenting its status as an anti-white volkspartei and the leadership is looking for ways to attract white voters, like me. Good luck!

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Posted by leslie on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 02:54 AM in U.S. Politics
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Proposition 200 Revisited

Something amazing happened last week when the citizens of Arizona cast their vote for Proposition 200.  That’s the law that denies illegal aliens state services and ensures only citizens can vote.  Despite wall-to-wall bullying by the government-media complex the citizens of Arizona voted 56% to 44% for the Proposition.

They are lucky to have been able to do so.  Only a few states feature the proposition process, their legislators having amended their constitutions or written it into them prior to the European apocalypse of 1914.  As a result government organs can be bypassed and law crafted directly.  Once crafted, if a threshold number of petition signatures are collected the entire state can vote that law into the civil or criminal code.

This faith in majority rights was fulfilled on November 2nd.

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Posted by leslie on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 at 10:26 AM in U.S. Politics
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The Blok is dead.  Long live the Vlaams Belang?

The people of Flanders are, this evening, contemplating the decision of The Court of Cassation, the final court of appeal in Belgium.  In a case of historic proportions Flanders’ largest political party has been criminalised on charges of racism and, to all intents and purposes, politically assassinated.  It is the most legalistic of convictions obtained on the most specious of grounds.  But the means will be seen by the victors as justifying the end, and the end was to preserve the political status quo and, therefore, the existence of Belgium itself.

The stakes could not have been higher.

The case was brought by the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism – the thought police of the Belgian state, essentially.  This body, a privately-owned public prosecutors office, was armed with anti-racism legislation that makes even the mention of human differentiation a crime.  Their tax-paid lawyers have persecuted Vlaams Blok for years.  Any impartial observer would conclude that the crime here has been perpetrated in the other direction, upon the conservative Flemish.

In any case, the Blok will be reborn.  It draws its strength from the Flemish working man.  It will not capitulate under this or any other stress.  How it will operate, how it will be true to itself and to the Flemish people we must wait to see.  But Flanders will not be held back indefinitely from its independence.  The Establishment cannot be other than it is, and offers Flanders only the gift of oppression.  That, however, is the gift most likely to harden the Flemish resolve for freedom.

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Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on Tuesday, November 9, 2004 at 02:45 PM in European Nationalism
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IQ and the skills of nations

Digby Jones, Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, will tell his members at their annual conference today, “there will not be any work in Britain for unskilled people … within one scholastic generation.”  Outsourcing is the culprit, with the jobs going to India, China and, increasingly, the countries of eastern Europe.

Jones is scathing of the protectionist trends in American and French political life.  One would, of course, expect him to be.  The CBI has been a cheer-leader for goin’ global for years.  Its D-G has “formed the view that if ever there was a country made for globalisation it is Britain. It is in our DNA.”

Well, he might be over-heating somewhat there and probably meant to say that it is in our island culture.  Still, from that one can fairly construe that he is referring to the culture of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples of this island.  So, if globalisation will indeed pin our future prosperity to our native capacities, which seems to be the logical extension of Jones’ premise, why are we allowing in 150,000+ legal and illegal immigrants each year with not a moment’s consideration of theirs.

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Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, November 8, 2004 at 01:10 PM in British Politics
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French panic at the threat of extinction

So despite all rumours au contraire there is hope for France again.  Magnifique.

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, November 8, 2004 at 11:25 AM in Humour
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So social conservativism trounced a non-existent liberal majority.  Surprised?

The entire liberal media establishment has gone into a blue funk.  To lose the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Presidency in a time of war, economic uncertainty and a soaring budget deficit must have required a special effort.  What the hell did they get wrong?

Well, themselves, frankly.

It is obvious now that the too, too solid reality of a righteous and determined Middle America has slapped them in the face.  You have to expect that sort of thing in elections sometimes.  But there’s more to it this time.  From media mogul to third rate hack the Establishment is struggling to find an answer to that awful, unexpected question: does this mean that they’ve had enough of us?

I can’t tell you how much I hope the answer to that question is YES!

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Saturday, November 6, 2004 at 04:15 PM in U.S. Politics
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Migration versus Democracy

An article that may interest Majority Rights readers.  The Failure of the American Experiment published at Kuro5hin

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, November 6, 2004 at 01:23 PM in Political Philosophy
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Managerialism

I remember a Romanian telling me, just before the downfall of the Ceausescus, that it would take three generations at least to remove the taint of the communist system from the souls of Romanians; it will take at least as long to remove managerialism from the souls of the British, though it has been with us for so comparatively short a period.

— Theodore Dalrymple

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, November 6, 2004 at 12:04 PM in Health
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Thou Shalt Not

The story is told well enough here.  My thanks to Fred and Paul for the link.

To add to that, readers who are interested in knowing a little more of van Gogh and why he died, please read the comment by Braveheart in the thread of my initial post on the killing.  You will find there a translation of van Gogh’s last press article.  My thanks to Braveheart for that.

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, November 5, 2004 at 11:55 AM in European Nationalism
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Jacksonians at War

As chance would have it I stumbled across AMERICA’S SECRET WAR: INSIDE THE HIDDEN WORLDWIDE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS ENEMIES by George Friedman today. Highly recommended.

The “Norman Goldman” review on the Amazon site provides an accurate summary of the book.

Friedman runs STRATFOR, billed as the largest private intelligence company, not surprisingly, Friedman analyses the war from the point of view of a hard headed strategist. At one point in his concluding chapter, he discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the arrayed Jihadist and American forces that may shock some readers in it’s candour.

He points out that American forces are well armed and equipped and capable of enduring hardship. He points to the long history of foreign powers underestimating the fighting prowess of American troops (Valley Forge, Corregidor, Khe Sanh..) and the war fighting ‘stomach’ of the American people.

“The weakness of the U.S. is not our soldiers, or their numbers, but the vast distance that separates American leaders from those who fight. From government officials to media moguls… few members of the leadership class have children who are at war. To them, the soldiers are alien, people they have never met and don’t understand… A ruling class that sends the children of others to fight, but not their own, cannot sustain it’s power for very long.”

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, November 4, 2004 at 11:56 AM in U.S. Politics
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Um ... and the British people?

Mr Blair’s thinking operates on three levels: what is best for the British government, what is best for the Labour party and what is best for him personally.

Ewan MacAskill, Diplomatic Editor, The Guardian

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, November 3, 2004 at 05:02 AM in British Politics
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