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The Birth of the ‘New-Man’ under Liberalism by Graham Lister In the Anglophone world, in particular where it has been picked up by cultural studies, the term ‘body’ is a fairly reliable warning of hot air to come: a flashing sign for the sensible and time-poor to stay well away. But there are exceptions. One of which might well be The Coming of the Body by Hervé Juvin, in which premonitions of a new and radical regime of individualism under the aegis of the human body, as life distends and capital mutates to meet it, emerge (somewhat incongruously) from the French insurance industry. Social agendas in the West are in flux, as new kinds of issues gain salience - pension provision, immigration policies, reproductive rights, marital arrangements. Juvin’s contribution belongs to the genre concerned with such issues; illustrated with an abundance of striking data, and delivered with an intellectual mordancy and crisp literary style that remain, even today, peculiarly French. The author might also be regarded as a very particular and local phenomenon. In the Anglophone world business and culture are typically strangers, yielding at best, earnest middle-brow apologetics at the level of Adair Turner’s “Just Capital”; but in France the intellectual executive is a not unfamiliar or strange figure. Operating within the insurance world, Juvin writes without any overt political attachments. “The Coming of the Body” announces a time when the human body has started to pre-empt all other measures of value in the West, separating the experience of contemporary generations from that of all predecessors, and the rest of the world. The basis of this sea change lies in the spectacular transformation of life expectancy. When the Revolution broke out in 1789, the average span of life in France was 22. By 1900 it was just under 45. Today, it is 75 for men, and over 83 for women, and continually increasing. Quoting Juvin; “We have every reason to hope that one girl out of two born in France since 2000 will live to be a hundred years old”. This prolongation of life is “the present that a century of blood and iron has left us - the present of a life that has doubled”. It amounts to “the invention of a new body, against need, against suffering and against time; against the world too - the world of nature, which was destiny”. The gift is restricted to the rich. “An entire generation will soon separate Europe from its neighbours to the south, when the median age of its population passes 50 (towards 2050), while that of the Maghreb remains under 30”. If we were from the developing world we too would be desperately doing everything within our powers to make it to the West. If the new longevity is a result of the advances of traditional medicine, beyond them lies the new ‘industry of life’, already capable of the production of human beings without intercourse, and on the brink of laboratory manufacture proper. Eugenics beckons at the future entrance to life, euthanasia as the routine exit from it. Social isolation can already count for more than physical decay in the decease of the elderly: “the time is near when death will come from distance or disgust with a world that is no longer one’s own - where life will no longer be what the body betrays, but what the spirit abandons, betraying the body”. Such parting with existence still remains passive. Ahead is “active death, willed and chosen, as the last stage in the invention of a new kind of body” - the logical and rational conclusion of “the claim to life as property, as domain par excellence of individual choice and the exercise of free will”. In between entry and exit, meanwhile, the body-shops of maintenance, repair, transformation and perfection are proliferating, as expenditures on dietetics, health care, cosmetic surgery, embellishment soar. The fabricated faces of Hollywood are the new icons of beauty, and the pressure they express is felt at all levels of education and career. Juvin claims:
In public affairs, physical appearance becomes an even more essential condition of success, as the political class illustrates to satiety. The fat, short and bald, or otherwise ugly, protagonists do not generally win national elections. Freed from physical labours, protected from ancient maladies, enhanced by novel additives, extended to longer durations, the reinvented body detaches itself from traditional obligations and constraints, as a machine for individual pleasure that is an end to itself. With this change, marriage as once understood “an institution that had nothing to do with desire, pleasure, the couple, and everything to do with the child, the prolongation of the line and its patrimony” makes little sense. If, as experts point out, sexually speaking:
As for children, the lengthening of the life of one generation reduces its interest in producing another.
The consequences of this thinning of the threads binding one generation to the next are likely to be drastic for those born into the new order. They arrive, separated not only from parents more and more absorbed in themselves, but from any of the forms of culture or relations with nature that once gave continuity of experience between the generations. Instead, they increasingly inhabit a virtual universe of digitalization, erasing the boundaries between the real and the simulacrum. The majority of children between three and twelve, initially in the USA, and henceforward also in France and Europe generally, spend more time in front of a screen - television, computer, video-game, mobile phone - than with their parents, teachers or their friends: on average more than five hours a day, as against four with teachers, less than three with friends - and scarcely more than an hour with parents. In these conditions, the transmission of customs and values that was once assured by the family, the school system, the army, the church or the wider culture shrivels to the passing on of one value only: money, as if in reparation for the abandonment of all the rest. Legacies get steadily larger, and investments in children - typically, privileged forms of education that will pay off in the labour market - continue to climb, even as the imaginative and moral distance between progenitors and their offspring grows. What conclusions does Juvin draw from his portrait of societies dominated by a reinvented body? Economically, parents may ultimately leave larger bequests to their children, but meanwhile they have been taking - and will go on taking - far more from society at large, in a gigantic redistribution of assets at the expense of newer generations through the pension system. In France, he observes, the total purchasing power allocated to those who have retired has exploded in the last thirty years: a couple retiring in 1980 could expect to receive triple the sum in pensions that their parents would have got in 1956. Indeed, since the war the purchasing power of the retired has increased six times over, as against four times for wage-earners. Social benefits - not just pensions, but every kind of tax exemption and subsidized or free services - overwhelmingly go to those who have ceased to work through ‘old-age’. This concentration of resources cannot last for ever; “Sooner or later it will make an accumulation of privileges that gives social spending the role once occupied by inflation - but with inverse redistributive effects, benefiting creditor retirees rather than young wage-earning debtors - insupportable”. This obviously sounds like the ‘bog-standard’ refrain of neo-liberal critiques of the French welfare state, which regularly denounce the same distortions, and count on the entry of Anglo-Saxon pension funds and flexible labour laws to rectify them, in confident reliance on the globalizing logic of today’s world market. Juvin, however, while otherwise at one with such critics, evinces none of their optimism. The market economy, he argues, was the bearer of the project of the West, “born under the sign of reason, mistress of universalism and of individuation”, and long remained its last criterion of the real and rational.
An overly extravagant homage? Alas, simply a tribute to the past. “That is finished. A welfare economy, under the aegis of the primacy of the body, is operating an immense reshuffling of values and prices, of preferences and norms” - one that “places health, well-being and physical integrity above the economy”, and in so doing signifies a return of “collective choices”. In no way does this mean an eclipse of markets, which on the contrary are poised to invade ever more domains of the corporeal, and privatize them. But the financial markets that are today our nearest thing to a regime of truth will have to adapt to this successor system, and derive their legitimacy from serving it, by “introducing calculations of value-added into the production of welfare”. Satisfactory profits lie ahead, as “the capitalism to come focuses unexampled means on the human body”, in health care, procreation and physical enhancement, “investing in what has never been the object of investment, inventing forms of private property over what has never been anyone’s property, determining monetary flows to pay for what has never been the object of exchange or demand”. But the days when financial markets call the shots will soon be over. Another kind of regime is waiting. What will be its politics? For Juvin, born in 1958, the culture of the body descends from the sixties, when the rebels of 1968 raised the demand for sexual freedom. “Naturally, behind it, nothing, or very little was at stake; the only real liberation in this area is one that individuals achieve for themselves - collective political demonstrations are of small consequence for it”. Behind the banners and slogans, in fact, the deadening opposite of desire was on the march, the saturation and banalization of sex, with its generalized appropriation by the market. Alongside this flattening of the libidinal landscape, moreover, has gone the fading of all past forms of the transcendent. Longevity extinguishes belief in eternity. Not that a need for the sacred simply disappears. Religion, like nature, still has its appeal. But in this regime, genuine belief in either of them has all but vanished, and will not return. Instead, we have ersatz versions: techno raves rather than holy communion, not woods or wetlands but municipal parks. The shopping mall as the ‘sacred space’ venerated above all others. Still, whatever the fate of desire or devotion, surely democracy itself is safe? Unfortunately not. The new technologies of permanent connectivity “put the world at the disposal of the body, dispensing it from belonging, being represented, debating or voting”. They thereby undermine and hollow out the traditional institutions of democracy without as yet creating any viable forms to replace them. With the exhaustion of collective adventures, the deep weariness of the mind at the futile quest for the truth of capital H ‘History’, of nature, or of matter, only the narrative of the body, of its satisfactions and pleasures, and the search for new modes of sensibility, experience and emotion, still hold our attention. Me, myself and I in an ever expanding hedonistic calculus. What is the upshot? Juvin’s central message is a sinister paradox: what communism set out to do, and disastrously failed to achieve, free-markets and liberalism is in the process of realizing. The wildest of all the utopian dreams of revolutions gone by is now taking shape, unseen, before our eyes.
For the discredited messianic conception of an anthropological transfiguration of humanity is at length coming to pass.
How should this outlook be situated? At first glance, it might seem to belong to the literature of bio-politics set in train by Foucault, and an abundant source of demagogy and posturing ever since. Juvin, however, does not descend from this line of speculation. Standard references and genuflection to ‘Saint Michel’ are missing. Juvin’s background is more that of the sober actuary than that of a self-styled ‘radical academic’. Still, the question remains how far the notion of the body as deployed by him is less a definable object than an all-purpose operator allowing him to sweep up a range of heterogeneous processes into a single diagnostic. His chosen genre lends itself to this. Without citation of sources, the evidence for many of his most arresting claims is not readily testable. In that respect, “The Coming of the Body” might be regarded as an example of Kulturkritik. But here that broad category assumes a more specific guise. The essential register of the book is vatic: possessed of a driving vision of the future, commanding the selection of the data mustered to illustrate it. Extrapolation and exaggeration are inherent to this form. Does it thereby fall under an epistemological ban? Only for the most prudish scientism. Most work of this type goes beyond the immediately available evidence – which is not a crime in and of itself. Provided its nature and limits are understood, the practice of the genre can be a sign of intellectual vitality, without which cultural life would be poorer. Juvin is plainly such a case. That said, the horizon of the book is more local than its intention. Ostensibly, the new regime it describes is coming into force across the advanced capitalist world. In practice, however, the general zone of reference is Europe - the Venusian sector of the West, in Robert Kagan’s trenchant dichotomy, rather than its Martial terrain in the United States. A comparison of Juvin’s work with Fukuyama’s pair of books on related topics brings home the differences. The former splices together problematics that remain distinct in the latter: marriage and the family in “The Great Disruption”, and biotechnology in “Our Posthuman Future”. Missing from Juvin’s European prospectus, on the other hand, are the American preoccupations with crime and psychotropes that feature prominently in Fukuyama’s work. The intellectual setting of “The Coming of the Body”, however, is still more delimited than its European framework. The book comes out of a set of peculiarly national debates in France. Juvin’s emphasis on the deracinated abstraction of the electronic universe, and the de-naturalization of the human body, the atomism of podsters and surfers, is continually set against the historic experience of human beings with the harsh resistances of the land that marked French rural society up to the 1950s, and the bracing disciplines of the State that moulded the institutions - schools, regiments, public services - of the French republic up to a more recent date. The dissolution of these two worlds, with mass urbanism, consumerism and now multiculturalism, has left acute tensions in France’s political and intellectual life, splitting former friends and foes in all directions. In the ensuing disputes over what direction French society is or should be taking, one strand has ranged itself with those who regret the weakening of the classical Republic, and view with scepticism the arrival of more gelatinous, de-sublimated, Americanized norms of existence. Juvin’s affiliations are with this circle. But similar attachments to an older order, and a related hostility - more savagely expressed - to the new, can be found on the non-liberal left, most eloquently in the writing of Régis Debray. At various points in his book, as in his reflections on 1968, Juvin’s judgements are very close to those of Debray. “The Coming of the Body”, indeed, can be read as a dialectical sequel to Debray’s famous verdict on the late sixties: that the ardent revolutionaries of May imagined, like Columbus, that they were setting out for China, only to land in America - more specifically California, launching a cultural revolution in the name of a dreamland communism that in fact ushered in, rather than overthrew, a capitalism of demoralized consumption in France. The punch-line of “The Coming of the Body” takes the cunning of reason one stage further. The arrival of a capitalism reduced to the ministrations and transactions of the body will be the ironic triumph of the most extravagant deliria of radical socialism. What of the antibodies that might prevent this? Daniel Bell, whose “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1976) is the ancestral foreboding of misgivings on the centre-right about the antinomian consequences of unfettered individualism, put his bets on the ‘return of the sacred’ as the eventual bulwark against the complete disintegration of an orderly bourgeois world. Religion would step in to stem the tide of self-indulgence, where morals and politics had failed. From the left, Debray would make a parallel move, if with a much more ambitious historical theory, positing transcendent faith as a virtual anthropological necessity- typically a world religion, though he has more recently scaled this back to any, even lay, communion. Juvin declines such consolation, and his thoughts end on a rather muted note. Financial markets are about to be dethroned as masters of the globe. But they will not cease to thrive in the regime that succeeds theirs, which will require collective political choices to determine the orders and distributions of welfare, yet erodes the democratic foundations for doing so. Neo-liberalism is indispensable, yet insupportable. The book is a contribution to a literature with a future: bitter-sweet reflections - distinctly more bitter than sweet - on the surprises of the complete victory of the Western liberal tradition over all of its historic rivals. The German poet and polymath Goethe saw clearly the potential dark side of the Enlightenment. Freed from constraint, tradition, and communal boundaries, modern man faced instead existential despair and self-destruction. Men use reason, Mephistopheles tells God in the prologue to Goethe’s great drama Faust, to be beastlier than any beast. Unconstrained and unbounded liberal rationality is not enough to ground life, unless we wish only to be Voltaire’s bastards; unlovable and unloved, solipsistic and narcissistic. We require the combined wisdom of all of our non-liberal traditions and modes of thought – the wisdom to know that inevitable human progress is a dangerous myth and that our wants and needs are not the same thing. Our wants require self-control, regulation and in some cases repression for anything approaching civilization to be sustainable. However, the self-destroying auto-immune syndrome may be already be incurable and the outcome inevitable – but we should not yet happily go into that good night gently – hope and courage are perhaps the most precious of all political commodities. Comments:2
Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:10 | # Thank you Dan for those very kind comments. I do think the impact of biotech on our ‘being in the world’ is an important issue. And Dan yes the link to Curtis is apposite. GW has suggested to me that Tom Sunic in his “Homo Americanus” is in the same territory as Juvin (but I have only just started reading that work - thanks GW). Is it not refreshing to be discussing something more serious than the ‘usual’ at MR? Hopefully a sign of things to come. On the beauty in politics idea - perhaps it is best understood as an ‘on average’ trend rather than an ‘iron law’. Is there not something about the general trend in American politics for height and deepness of voice to be positively correlated with winning Presidential elections in the ‘television debate’ era? But one would say that, in absolute terms, political figures are not the ‘beautiful people’ so any assessment is very much a relative one. 3
Posted by J Richards on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:20 | # Dr. Graham Lister, In order to buttress your case that your essay is better than worthless, perhaps you may be interested in explaining a few things. What, succinctly, is liberalism? How many people or what proportion in your estimation are liberals or have endorsed liberalism? If liberals disproportionately wield power, how did they disproportionately acquire power? 4
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:57 | # Liberalism is the politics of self-estrangement. Soren defined it as the struggle against the struggle for existence. It was always so because its roots in the Paulian dispensation make it so. Liberals are the children of liberalism and are the only kind of political animal that can be selected, if I may borrow a Darwinian term, within the liberal totality. That is so whether they are neoliberals or neo-Marxists. Of course, you are waiting to hear of the twice-Judaised nature of the beast, and it is true that Jewish thought has sharpened the cutting edge of liberalism since 1867. But - and this is the lesson of National Socialist Germany - it is only when revolutionary change occurs at the level of the totality that the Jewish factor can be addressed. Nowhere is this more true than in America, a wholly liberal nation. But few American WNs want to contemplate that truth. 5
Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:40 | # @Richards Liberalism is a set of inter-related ideas concerning the primacy of a particular ‘model’ of the human subject with regard to political, social and economic affairs especially emphasising the primacy of individual freedom and autonomy. That is, it’s rather more than Obama, Bill Clinton and diversity talk. A full history of liberal ideas in the West could easily run to a very substantial book. Why not start with Berlin’s “Four Essays on Liberty”? Now as you don’t ‘do’ history and you think ideological world-views are ‘heritable’ in their very precise particulars and I do not, it is hard to answer your question in a way that would make you happy. In the West we are all liberals to a large degree, in that the West has been an evermore liberal ‘project’ since possibly the Reformation and certainly since the Enlightenment. O’Meara writes about this topic unless he is ‘controlled opposition’. Or try “The End of History and the Last Man” by Fukuyama for a general survey of the terrain. Perhaps the terminology of ‘liberal democracy’ leaves you baffled? Contemporary and ahistorical self-descriptions on a narrowly defined and attenuated model of political axiality cannot do the historical or conceptual heavy-lifting. Nor do the banalities of Glenn Beck style ‘talking points’. Why we are at this point in the trajectory of the West is a very complex issue – it’s certainly not monocausal. Now what specifically don’t you like about the OP? Do you think advances in biotechnology are of no social or political importance or consequence? Too subtle an argument? Vocabulary too expansive? And GW is right - the USA is the most liberal nation in the history of the world - in fact it’s a radical socio-political experiment in liberalism. 6
Posted by J Richards on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:05 | # Guessedworker I believe Dr. Lister should answer my questions. Concerning your argument that liberalism is the politics of self-estrangement and that Soren Renner has defined it as the struggle against the struggle for existence, since you bring in “Darwinian term, ” as you very well know, something that struggles against the struggle for existence qualifies for the Darwin award: a thank you note for going extinct. Isn’t it interesting then that liberalism refuses to die and has apparently become a major problem? And if America is a liberal nation, here’s what the the American “liberals” have to say. NORC-GSS Representative survey of white Americans, year 2000, http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 SHOULD IMMIGRATION FROM LATIN AMERICA BE INCREASED? SHOULD IMMIGRATION FROM ASIA BE INCREASED? SHOULD IMMIGRATION FROM EUROPE BE INCREASED? Obviously, these wishes don’t translate into public policy. So some clarity is needed regarding the nature of liberalism, and surely Dr. Lister is qualified to provide it. I see that you concur with GW that America is the most liberal nation, but it’s not at all clear how liberalism, which according to you is a set of inter-related ideas concerning the primacy of a particular ‘model’ of the human subject with regard to political, social and economic affairs especially emphasising the primacy of individual freedom and autonomy, accounts for the NORC-GSS data cited. You’ve also not given me an estimate of the proportion of white Americans or any other white people that endorse liberalism. I also have one other question, which is how come you, someone with a Ph.D. in biology, insists on describing the heritability of the dimension underlying political orientation as the heritability of the ideology itself [which is zero]? 7
Posted by Jimmy Marr on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:41 | #
Wow. Liberal society sounds like a website with no comment moderation. What on earth shall we do? 8
Posted by J Richards on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:41 | # Dr. Lister You’ll probably concur that a tenet of “liberalism” is that discrimination is the reason why blacks have worse jobs, worse income, and worse housing compared to whites. Let’s see how the “liberal” white Americans answer the issue. NORC-GSS Representative surveys of white Americans, http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 QUESTION YEAR | YES % | NO % 1977 | 41.2 | 58.8 1985 | 41.8 | 58.2 1986 | 40.0 | 60.0 1988 | 38.9 | 61.1 1989 | 38.6 | 61.4 1990 | 37.7 | 62.3 1991 | 34.8 | 65.2 1993 | 36.3 | 63.7 1994 | 35.3 | 64.7 1996 | 33.5 | 66.5 1998 | 31.6 | 68.4 2000 | 32.7 | 67.3 2002 | 31.1 | 68.9 2004 | 27.3 | 72.7 2006 | 29.4 | 70.6 2008 | 29.8 | 70.2 2010 | 31.1 | 68.9 Any comments Dr. Lister? Perhaps you can explain how is it then that public policies assume that worse metrics for blacks result from discrimination? 9
Posted by J Richards on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:01 | # Dr. Lister I’m sure you’ll concur that “liberalism” demands that the government especially cater to minorities NORC-GSS Representative survey of white Americans, 1980, http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 QUESTION Zero = Haven’t thought much about it 1-7 scale | Percentage 0 | 4.7 1 | 2.6 2 | 3.9 3 | 9.8 4 | 23.1 5 | 18.7 6 | 15.8 7 | 21.3 So how is it Dr. Lister that public policies lean closer toward level 1 (preferential treatment of racial minorities)? 10
Posted by Dan Dare on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:34 | # J Richards appears to have blundered (once again) into the familar pothole plainly signposted “Caution! America ≠ The World”. You’d think he’d have learned to avoid it by now. 11
Posted by J Richards on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:00 | # Dan Dare @10 Is that the best you can do to defend Dr. Lister? My comments @6, 8, 9 specifically address white Americans since America is said to be so “liberal.” The comment @4 asks some questions. @6 I asked Dr. Lister for his estimate of the proportion of whites, Americans and otherwise, who are “liberal.” 12
Posted by zalmoxis on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:07 | # J Richards: Honestly, you should start your own blog. I disagree with you on a number of details, but you’re really the only person here (aside from a few commenters) who writes anything worth reading. The rest is just pseudo-intellectual drivel written by people whose names end in -er, most of which appears to have the intention (and certainly has the effect) of exculpating the Jews. The only thing you’d potentially have to lose would be the established readership of the site, but I think you would take most of the readers with you. Judging from comments, your articles are by far the main draw of the site. You are basically being used to bring in readers to read the rest of this garbage, and being treated like crap for your efforts. Constantly bickering with the likes of Haller and Lister is a waste of your and your readers’ time. There needs to be at least some common ground for any kind of debate to be fruitful and I don’t see a lot of common ground here. Imagine, for instance, what geology would look like if geologists had to spend all their time arguing with flat earthers. That’s a pretty good analogy for what I see here. There’s no opportunity to move beyond the basics. Let this ship sink. 13
Posted by Calderon on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:55 | # Richards is the only one dealing with the facts here. The only facts in the OP are French life spans since the French Revolution. 14
Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:10 | # @Richards Good grief your idiocy is beyond belief. You want to define liberalism as whatever Bill Mahr or Rachel Maddow said yesterday on multiculturalism – the ‘non-hat wearers’ want to use a longer optic to examine it historically (a genealogy of liberalism, if you like). The notion that America is a social order in which ideas of individualistic liberty are or were ‘marginal’ is so spectacularly silly as to demonstrate complete non-thought on your part. Was ‘diversity’ in your sense from the ‘get-go’ part and parcel of liberal thought – no. Was it from the ‘get-go’ about thinking and treating people primarily as radically autonomous ‘individual’ social, political and economic actors – yes – and in a way that’s saying diversity of thoughts, values, etc., is good – it’s called value pluralism. For example, the USA was one of the first nations, in principle, to totally and formally endorse a radical notion of religious ‘value pluralism’. Strangely enough if we commit too seriously to such general ideas we end up living in a kind of ‘solipsism-world’ (which is one of the topics of the essay). Liberalism is an expansive, inflationary set of ideas with its own internal logic – so universal suffrage and extensive legal notions of equality (equal rights etc.) were not part and parcel of the early liberal thought but historically the set of concerns and ‘rights’ etc., it promotes and the circle of concern it encompasses has expanded. Thus we have such legal concepts as ‘universal jurisdiction’ and ‘universal human rights’. As I have suggested before undermining the intellectual and moral legitimacy of ‘international law’ as such would be a good and necessary thing. But it’s probably as an idea too difficult for the ‘basement dwellers’ to ‘get’ let alone to perform. Underachievers please try harder. 15
Posted by Calderon on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:27 | # Lister, Do you have any facts to proffer other than French life spans since the French Revolution? Or is it just word salads with you? 16
Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:38 | # @Richards Perhaps a question for you on ‘heritability’ – you also think religiosity is heritable if I recall correctly. Can you explain, biologically, how is it that in the Denmark of Søren Keirkegaard (1813-1855) he could write about Denmark as a society ‘in which all are Christians none truly are’; i.e. that almost everyone of the time would self-describe as Christian to the point now where Denmark is one of the least religious nations in the world in how people self-describe themselves? 150 years or so is not a very long time for changes in ‘religious phenotypes’ to be the work of allelic frequency changes in a relatively long-lived mammalian species is it? 17
Posted by J Richards on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:15 | # Dr. Graham Lister
Great job doctor! I asked you to define liberalism. You came up with a definition that means nothing and I asked you to clarify it in terms of explaining some data. You don’t do anything of the sort but digress into a discussion on how I may want to define liberalism. I’m not defining liberalism here; I’m showing you real world data that your concept of liberalism needs to explain.
Which I haven’t argued. I’ve given you data from recent decades. How does your concept of liberalism account for it?
You’re answering questions that I haven’t asked. I haven’t asked you whether diversity was part of early liberal thought. The question is are the data I cited explainable in terms of concerns and “rights” that now comprise the circle of liberalism? If so, how do you propose to show that liberalism is a problem and how did the liberals acquire power? If not, then a) why is it that you write as if the historical aspects of liberalism continue to be a problem and b) what do you think accounts for the immigration problems of a number of Western nations and the governments of these nations preferentially favoring racial minorities?
You’ve been repeatedly told, what should be clear from the very beginning (a table copied from a peer-reviewed journal article; the whole article linked, too), that the heritability of religion is zero whereas the heritability of religiosity is non-zero. And, you’re digressing from explaining things central to a concept, liberalism, that you’re claiming is a problem; religion or religiosity isn’t the relevant issue.
Insulting your opponent doesn’t explain any data. Do you have an explanation of the data or not in terms of liberalism? And, again, what proportion of American and other whites in your estimation are “liberal”? 18
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:51 | # JR, Opinions on multiculturalism, immigration, and the life of the African in America do not constitute a metric for philosophical liberalism’s formative power over personality. The key element, to be absolutely precise, is self-authoriality. This is the historical schwerpunckt of the radical liberal paradigm - one Jewish intellectuals are pleased to advance because it ushers European personality towards estrangement from his very being (including his European ethnicity, the losing of which is the key to all Jewish philosophy in the Western diaspore because it is the key to Olam Ha-ba). Another way of viewing this is that liberalism, as a constructive device, labours entirely upon the artificial. It makes European Man artifice. It makes his connections in and to the world about him voluntary, rather than obligations of blood. It makes his patriotism constitutional, and his nation propositional. There really is no argument about this among thinking people. For example, the critique of the New Right - Graham mentioned Sunic’s Homo americanus - is built upon it. You should not be attacking it. WNs in general need to know that liberalism ain’t just leftism. It is their own environmental philosophy, into which all else fits, and the principal source - the meta-source, actually - for what we acquire as Personality. To be temporalised in this historical moment in the West is to be liberal. 19
Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:06 | # I now get what Mr. Richards is doing. I have previously talked about unfalsifability, flexibility of interpretation – well, now we have the flip side – arbitrarily drawn definitions of liberalism as “stuff I don’t like since the 1960s in America”, and of his being embarrassed at his suggestion that voting Democrat (or some such) was an inherited trait he retreats to some ‘generic form of liberalism’ which is inherited instead. We are in the territory of stipulative definitions – ad hoc and near arbitrary redefinitions of ideas to exclude inconvenient facts, alternative analysis and then the stipulative definitions are employed to save Mr. Richards favoured monocasual meta-hypothesis (in a post hoc rationalisation process). Of course, this dance of the stipulative definitions makes those ‘definitions’ analytically semi-coherent at best and near worthless at worse. Mr. Richards seem to be of the following school of linguistic philosophy - Humpty Dumptyism “words mean whatever I want them to mean”– words can endlessly mean whatever Mr. Richard wishes them to mean – or else! It’s a crude intellectual error that is common place – witness the poor sophistry on another thread to maintain Hitler was not a ‘true’ Nazi – or indeed a Nazi at all. That concepts have such arbitrary flexibility/inflexibility of meaning for Mr. Richards (and his rhetorical needs at the time) is of course a quite exquisite and delicious irony – for in such a mindset he channels the ghost of one Jacques Derrida! 20
Posted by anon on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:12 | #
Christianity is just one form to which religiosity can be applied. People can transfer their religiosity from one form to another e.g. to PC or Global Warming or Veganism. It seems to me there’s a perfectly logical explanation for why religiosity could evolve so i’m not sure why it should be an issue. If you have a priesthood promoting adaptive behaviors that the right side of the bell curve follows of their own volition but the left side doesn’t then that chunk of the left side that does what the priest’s say simply out of religiosity will survive and reproduce better. Religiosity is - under the right circumstances - an applied IQ booster.
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Posted by Ex-Pro White Activist on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:35 | # @Dr. Lister, My congratulations to you on a superb ‘metaphysical’ essay. It was a delightful literary book review. I doubt Hervé Juvin’s book really plows new ground. It seems more like an early post mortem on a near-dead civilization.
This theme has been consistently explored for almost a century. The Michael York flick “Logan’s Run” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” are two better known entries in this field.
Perhaps this is not the case. Others are suggesting that some human evolutionary changes might move very swiftly. And it is suggested this particularly applies to changes associated with human behavior as opposed to human appearance. I myself have proposed elsewhere that the central factory industrial era has already proceeded for enough generations in the Anglosphere to apply very stern selection protocols to the subject populations. In particular, it has been highly selective for a positive trait to passively direction from higher social groups. Put another way, modern western “New Homo Economicus” is in large measure now a product of nature and not just nurture. This is not a popular thesis in - ahem- “liberal” non-Movement circles. This might be due to the extremely negative implications of this hypothesis for the outcome of a literary metaphysical struggle. The very concept of a metaphysical philosophical struggle presumes a dominant role for “nurture”, or “environment”. This in itself strikes me as a very “liberal” starting point.
There is no doubt this was preceded by a generation of psychological conditioning delivered by media. But its realization was fueled by “technology”. This was specifically pharmaceutical technology. In the 1960s we first saw a general availability of: birth control pills to prevent pregnancy; penicillin to treat the venereal disease resulting from increased promiscuity; and a range of psychotropic and narcotic ‘recreational’ drugs to overcome natural inhibitions.
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Posted by Ex-Pro White Activist on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:49 | #
Yup. That’s why the USA even had a political party that was officially named the “Liberal Party”, which party joyously committed its national young manhood to unlimited war on August 4, 1914. 23
Posted by MOB on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:57 | #
My February 11 post to TOO thread: Anxiety about a Northwest White Homeland: I’ve never been enticed by Covington’s Northwest plan, nor can I imagine that it would ever interest my children or grandchildren. Today I took a fresh look at McCullough’s Racial Partition Map. My first reaction was to laugh; it so clearly moves THEM away from US, whereas other plans seek to move US away from THEM. I thought, why not continue the line Eastward across the northern border of Louisiana to the southernmost tip of South Carolina, and color everything below that Blue. I had forgotten about this and The Atlantic Seaboard, which McCullough wants to keep in the hands of European Whites, is littered with the heaviest concentrations of American Jews, from Greater Boston (235,000) down through CT, NYC (well over 2,000,000), Long Island, northern NJ and the Baltimore-DC area (250,000)—I’m sure the actual numbers are higher, and the wealth and power is immense. I agreed with fender’s earlier suggestion, that Iceland, Greenland, or Alaska present a more desirable degree of separation than one or more U.S. states. And yet . . maybe we could—like the carefully planned and organized Libertarian migration to New Hampshire with the stated goal of influencing policy in their favor—organize a similar migration to the entire one or two northernmost tiers of American states including VT, NH, and Maine, with the eventual goal of joining ourselves to Canada? Relocating Chicago’s and Canada’s Jews (250,000 and 335,000 respectively) seems much less formidable than stealing power that’s entrenched in America’s East and West coast Jews. As I see it, even if a secession or partition plan should miraculously succeed, it would only be a partial solution. European-Whites would still be struggling with the problem of Jewish control.
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Posted by uh on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:25 | #
Oh dear — more projection onto the blank canvass that is Renner. You are ever so obliging. In fact it was LUDWIG BÜCHNER who spun that phrase, in German of course, in his book Kraft und Stoff, which Darwin knew in English translation as Force and Matter (cited, I believe, in The Descent of Man). The phrase has existed in English at least since T.H. Huxley’s heyday. It is not Soren Renner’s invention. Soren did not “define” anything because he is not a thinker, but a stuttering parrot; he saw it in a book or an article and passed it off as his own.
You haven’t spent enough time around serious real-life “American WNs”. Those of my acquaintance roll their eyes at you for imagining we don’t understand this. I know there is a certain set that likes to believe America is still “80% Anglo-German” or whatever, but obviously it isn’t, and that hyphenation is itself proof against the assertion. There are no pockets of old Europeans in Texas or Illinois speaking their native languages. “Melting pot” was symbolic of a given state of affairs, not prescriptive of a desired one. But the medicine you prescribe for American WNs is evidently too strong for you, as you have never really grappled with my own assertion that your long national identity isn’t enough to make up for so many millions of resident and native-born aliens, hundreds of thousands of native half-castes, a social degeneracy that set in long before the arrival of the Windrush, and a Jewish element in the City that’s been present for centuries. Few English WNs want to contemplate those truths, instead preferring to deflect by criticizing American WNs. Moreover, the desperation we feel at being rootless European hybrids will prove more useful in local struggles than your bourgeois philosophy of ‘rootedness’. There’s no way to verify this, but just going on my intuition and observations, there are more American post-WNs having children (often two or more) and supporting their families than English, which may be reflected in the national birthrates. In other words we are (probably) out-breeding you. How is your ‘rootedness’ better than our fecundity? We still have room to expand. You haven’t. When Englishmen need room to expand, they leave England because property prices are too high. I thought the point of all this is to be fruitful and multiply so we don’t pass from the earth. In short, your grip upon the Kingdom is no firmer than ours upon the Kwa. In neither case are we a jot more than ciphers yammering in cyberspace. There is as much popular resentment at elitist misdirection in America as in England, so popular discontent as reflected in the online newspapers is no proof, I am sorry to say, that the English are poised to overturn the establishment. 25
Posted by Helvena on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:29 | # “Wow. Liberal society sounds like a website with no comment moderation. What on earth shall we do?” - PERFECT Jimmy! But because of the hypocrisy of noblesse they will only sniff and quote the fine ideals as they serves their purpose. The good dr. and his posse would throw the baby out with the wash water. They are preparing the ground for our acceptance of the next step of our enslavement…Blood. We must ....(you fill in the blank)... because of our blood. Masters come in many forms. 26
Posted by Ex-Pro White Activist on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:54 | # GW,
How does your own well-known rejection of England’s state religion differ from other forms of “liberal self-authoriality”? How can a real “English nationalist” reject this symbol of the authority of the Elizabethan state? (historical diversion: Elizabeth Tudor and her father Henry VIII set up the Church of England as their own exercise in self-authoriality and rejection of the authority of the Bishop of Rome over them.) You are equally on record as rejecting the “fascist period”. The roots of ‘fascism’ itself are simple enough. The word derives from ‘fasces’, which were a bundle of rods used by the Roman state to symbolize “authority”. A useful discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces Note the apple of Liberalism’s eye, the US Federal government, also widely uses the imagery of fasces. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces#Fasces_in_the_United_States I have never met one liberal who desires that all their fellow men exercise “self-authoriality”. Like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, they want to exercise it for themselves and simultaneously deny it to as many others as possible. This is why Fidel Castro is such a god to them, despite his having reduced Cuba to 19th Century conditions. 27
Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:37 | # Ex Pro You do know that a phenotype is the generally result of the genes and the environment interacting? And we only have the genes we do because of the environmental history (which selects for and against alleles via natural selection) of our species? It’s a crude error to say we are blank slates ready to be only and totally shaped by our environment but genes do not emerge out from some Platonic ‘non-environmental’ realm either. So no-one thinks the looming potential prospect of our ‘post-human’ future is of concern or interest? 28
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:41 | # Ex-Pro White Activist,
I don’t reject the Anglican Church. I admire many aspects of our religious heritage, and love the misty patina of the faith in wood and stone. The ancient country church is the soul of something, to be sure. But I don’t happen, myself, to possess the possibility of belief, that’s all. It’s not a chosen or rationalised posture. I just cannot believe in or worship a deity, but I can approach the greater question of being.
I reject grand teleologies as end-points for personality. It’s the Jewish error.
Regardless, this is the inner aspect of the unfettered will. It goes like this: When all restraint upon the will is removed, then all bounds are broken and all possibility lies open for human being. Then, and only then, Man may freely will his self as anything. Now, if you don’t know liberals who understand that this is it ... this is absolute liberty within their own terms ... then it only goes to show that you haven’t met any intelligent liberals. Of course, such liberty isn’t Truth. It is self-estrangement. Human personality is acquired in darkness and lives in it, and the darkness can never be transcended by the power of the will alone. It can only be made darker (ie, more artificial). To the contrary, the very essence of the nationalist case is that transcendence is a return to the given, to Nature, to the Cosmos, to what is. It’s just that nationalists don’t understand the ontology here any more than liberals understand the teleology of their politics. 29
Posted by GenoType on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:02 | #
I understand. You’re where I am. This position - the middle ground - is most difficult to defend. So why did we choose it? Perhaps, in your case, it was due to the problems involved in the blanket acceptance of either side’s errors. Although part of me recognizes this I have to say that, overall, the position chose me. I am built to accept challenges and solve problems. Sometimes I wish it was otherwise.
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Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:28 | # But it can never be otherwise, GT. And one must still strive to understand something, however meagre it may be. 31
Posted by anon on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:04 | #
White people have no future in the current trajectory. In particular the longevity of white people in France today has no relevance to the future - on the current trajectory. If (non-elite) White people survive the coming storm at all it will be in giant globalized slums where life will be old-style nasty, brutish and short. For the elites yes, i see your point vis a vis their potential post-human future living for centuries off harvested organs and body-transplants from their slaves - although i already consider the people responsible for globalization as non-human so i can only hope that if they get their way it causes them all to go mad.
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Posted by J Richards on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:00 | # Guessedworker @18
If this is the case, you better not tie multiculturalism and immigration to liberalism. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
It would be useful to see what proportion of white people don’t see their connections in terms of blood. Since America is supposedly so liberal, let’s look at two NORC-GSS representative surveys of white Americans, http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 QUESTION Year | Response (%) Is this what you expected to see? If liberalism is a useful concept and the key to some major Western troubles, it must be able to explain the four instances of data I’ve cited here. If it doesn’t explain the data, I see two possibilities. Either liberalism isn’t relevant to major Western troubles associated with multiculturalism, immigration and governments catering to minorities, or you and Dr. Lister don’t have an understanding of it to show how the concept explains the data.
I don’t care for labels such as “New Right.” I care for concepts that explain data. Are you aware of concepts, regardless of what they’re called, that explain the four instances of data I’ve cited here? 33
Posted by J Richards on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:03 | # Dr. Graham Lister @19
I haven’t defined liberalism. I asked you to define it and explain some data. Your explanation is meaningless, you have yet to explain any of the data or answer what proportion of whites in your estimation are “liberal.” And I’ve never suggested that voting democrat is an inherited trait. This is your second major recent attempt informed by the apparent belief that liberalism is a problem. You owe it to your readers to explain what liberalism means and to show what it explains. The burden is on you to show why we should care about liberalism. I’ve given you some data to explain with your concept. It’s clear that you have no explanation and are trying to deflect attention to my supposed deficiencies, which are false claims and vile straw men.
What a fine response to a request to explain some data! You reveal your roots here, namely of being a fake, pathetic pseudo-scholar. 34
Posted by J Richards on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:00 | # Guessedworker @18
I forgot the personality part: Verhulst, B., P. K. Hatemi, and N. G. Martin. 2010. ‘‘The Nature Political attitudes had nothing to do with any of the personality variables except for attitude toward out-groups (immigration, multiculturalism, etc.) being weakly correlated with neuroticism (r = 0.2; more neurotic means more liberal attitudes toward out-groups; the relationship being accounted for by genetics). Neuroticism is the tendency to experience some negative states; individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely to experience anxiety, anger, guilt, depression, inferiority, unhappiness, hypochondria, guilt, emotional instability and obsessiveness. Neuroticism is normally distributed. TAKE HOME MESSAGE: We need concepts that explain real world data. If you think Dr. Lister is able to provide relevant concepts, good luck to you! 35
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:07 | # JR,
But these are tied conceptually to the bloodless artifice of chosen association, and also to the interests of elites that form through that agency. All bases are covered, JR. You can never succeed in promoting a detail - Jewish supremacism - above the whole.
Yes, insomuch as the elite’s application on the pressure point of European existence must antagonise the European nature, which has not gone away because of liberalism (can’t go away, of course). We dissidents are proof of that.
I would expect movement in that direction, obviously. It would be informative to have data broken down by age and socio-economic group.
You are a liberal, JR. I am a liberal. The liberalism of the West lives in Mind and in personality, not in library books or institution buildings. The liberalism that is in the latter two is the same as the feudalism and Catholicism that also exists in books and, to the most vestigial degree, in institutions. It is a liberalism in cold storage. We are dealing here not with that but with a total ideational or memetic system which is in the living mind in the West, and so shapes the life that is lived because it shapes European Man himself. It is worrying that you can even question if the analysis of liberalism, and its distention to absolutes, has utility. This is understanding of our own lives and our own selves. To reject understanding for obliviousness is most regressive and unEuropean.
Try the struggle against the struggle for existence.
I doubt if messers Verhulst, Hatemi and Martin know what personality is, or what they are measuring.
No, we need to replace liberalism as the formative ideational system of the European mind with something that comes from the European nature, and tends to European genetic interest. I know what I am talking about, JR. I know how to build such a system. 36
Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:15 | # Excellent essay, Graham! I’m too beat right now to comment, though there is a lot here. I’m not huge a fan of Cultural Studies, finding it generally leftist with mostly impenetrable prose, but you’ve done a good job explicating this man’s ideas, which incidentally make sense. Of course, it is natural that bodies should be a central human focus. We experience pleasure and especially pain through them -and I think political theory begins on a foundation of pain avoidance or minimization. What has increased the emphasis on body over spirit (and everything attached to spirit - duty, honor, piety), is not only longevity increases, but also religious decline (which is only partly a function of those increases). One quibble. I was rather surprised you made this assertion without comment:
You know this is untrue for your purposes, right? The “average” lifespan in France in 1789 was only what it was due to very high infant and childhood mortality (all of my now long-dead grandparents - none of whom could be described as “working class”, or were raised in urban tenements - had siblings who did not reach adulthood). Most persons who made it to adulthood lived to their 50s-60s. Just think back to history. Was it Solon who lived to 99? I forget, but it is known that Plato lived well into his 80s. Cicero made it to his 60s, and was then killed. Look at the ages of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson - none died young. Even the peasantry usually made it into their 40s. ————————————————————————————- On another note, and not wanting to totally derail the thread, but I think one’s attitude towards interracialism is a good proxy for liberalism, and this is certainly disturbing (I’ve listed some highlights):
Interracial marriage in US hits new high: 1 in 12
I still am of the opinion that miscegenation is the real long term threat to white survival. 37
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:51 | # GW – absolutely brilliant comment on liberalism (#35). The worry with the upcoming bio-techonology stuff is not simply the disappearance of European man per se, but the disappearance of the authentically human as such. That Daesin destroys itself via hyper-rational medicalization. Heidegger on technology (in general) does hint at such a possibility of the therapeutic vision ultimately being radically self-destructive. As in my OP hinted at perhaps our Mephistophelean bargain with instrumental rationality eventually will require us to pay the true terrifying costs thereof. Leon – it was Juvin’s figure not mine. Obviously there are different averages – mean, median and modal – I think the point that everyone now expects a very long-lived existence as of ‘right’ is of great sociological and cultural importance. Hope you can find the time and energy to comment at greater length especially given your theological commitments. And Juvin was (still is I think) an insurance executive – not a ‘cultural studies’ persona. 38
Posted by anon on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:08 | # http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc Lecture on the underlying differences between self-described liberals and conservatives as regards moral questions: the relative weighting given to each of five principles 39
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:57 | #
Oh for fuck’s sake. These names.
True. Which means Ivan, Captainchaos and I are the only real anti-liberals here. : / 40
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:05 | # #38 One of my favorites. Been meaning to read his work. Check out the studies by R.R. McCrae on which he based his material. http://www.subjectpool.com/ed_teach/y4person/O/McCrae_Sutin2009Openness.pdf anon, is anyone studying the personality profiles of those of mixed race? I mean as people who might express both sets of traits, e.g. 41
Posted by Noboyushi Araki on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:30 | # From McCrae & Sutin (2009) – the paper cited by uh “Open and closed individuals differ in their political orientations, beliefs about religion, and intellectual interests. The characteristics may influence friendship…open people are bored by the predictable and intellectually undemanding amusement of closed people; closed people are bored by what they perceive to be the difficult and pretentious culture of the open…Open individuals are curious and attentive to the world around them…” 42
Posted by Dan Dare on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:45 | # @38 The criterion that the audience were invited to use when self-defining as liberal, moderate or conservative was whether they are left or right of the centre on social issues. The assumption then being that such a definition holds across space and time. That this is false is easily demonstrated by reference to Wilhelmine Germany, one of the more authoritarian states in Europe then or since, but one which was also the first to introduce a social welfare along the lines that we would recognise. In similar vein, the social policies of the Third Reich were also very advanced (i.e. ‘liberal’) for its time. The difference between these societies and present-day liberal democracies is that they were clearly based upon a notion of in-group membership and that the benefits of their ‘internal liberalism’ were only available to members. The Scandinavian countries were also ‘liberal’ in that sense until really quite recently. What we often term liberalism today is actually not classical liberalism, per se, but rather universalism.
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Posted by rodin on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:55 | #
This is the culmination of decades of top-down imposition and conditioning. Richards is right and the data support him. It has been top-down, a “revolution from above”. 44
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:05 | # Dan I agree but the worm of radical universalism (hyper-liberalism) was always lurking in the apple waiting for an opportunity to eat its way out - funny you should mention that period of German history as I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit. Yes I agree that intra-societal solidarity with the appropriate in-group is part of any civilised society - the dog-eat-dog world of rampant individualism in all things is not part of my politics. Think of the Aristotelian concept of philia (φιλία philía) which means friendship or affectionate love in modern Greek. It philosophical meaning is as a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity. In ancient texts, philos denoted a general type of love, used for love between family, between friends, a desire or enjoyment of an activity, as well as between lovers. It is very the opposite of the ‘unencumbered self’ of liberal theory. 45
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:14 | #
Neurochem tells us that: high impulse-control = Conscientiousness (in the “Big Five Personality Traits”) = higher serotonin low impulse-control = Agreeableness = higher dopamine By ze weg, Agreeableness is identical with the “Openness” discussed in the Haidt lecture, which is associated with the ascending dopaminergic system. More JEWISH SCIENCE, no doubt, for which the rigidly conscientious freak-bot will have a looooong response “controlling for confounding factors” (to his highly idiosyncratic, anxious worldview). PS - SSRIs were developed to inhibit over-activity of the serotonin system to combat chronic high anxiety. I recommend one to the Richards Bot, stat!
http://www.brainexplorer.org/anxiety/Anxiety_Aetiology.shtml
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Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:18 | # Ohhh yea, almost forgot ... AUTISM & ASPERGERS are also associated with Conscientiousness / high anxiety. Withdrawal from the world, mah’fuxxx. Note that Richards Bot, despite the coterie of adorers he inspired, never once said “thank you” or acknowledged their existence in any way. lzooz ok i’m done 47
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:27 | # Top down processes and conditioning…funny you should mention that. Uh - I think you might just be onto something there - thank you for being part of the interesting ‘noise’ around here. 48
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:29 | #
You are right, of course, but I don’t see how it is relevant to the significance of the lecture. I doubt a majority of that audience could properly define classical liberalism vs. the modern acceptation, and owing to their political allegiance, this arising from their psychology (= genetic constitution & life factors), certainly would not want to be bothered with exploring how they are really “universalists” because classical liberalism was about liberality for homogeneous European peoples. On the other hand, we can be certain university libraries are sagging under the weight of theses about just that “implicit racism” of classical liberalism, which is one source of the hatred aimed at Ron Paul, for example. Or let me say: political Jews (all Jews are political, but I mean copywriters and journos), being opportunistic universalists, lash out at Paul for two reasons — it makes their spidey sense tingle (instinct), and they are familiar with the intra-European nature of classical liberalism, which they might call its “failure to redress historical injustices” or some shit. The terms of the lecture may be weak but the theory isn’t, nor the self-concept of the audience who, you may be sure, associate ‘liberalism’ with ‘universality’ or acceptance of tout le monde. 49
Posted by Dan Dare on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:34 | # Yes Graham, and the all-too common propensity of our American cousins to mis-apply the terms ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism’ in overlaying them onto their own domestic political framework (viz. ‘red pills and blue pills’ per the video) is what bedevils not just their own national conversation but also derails much of the discourse here. There is such a chasm of misunderstanding that it is little wonder that so many initially-promising discussions soon degenerate into playground squabbles. I fear the present one is also heading along the familiar trajectory.
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Posted by rodin on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:37 | #
Surprising as it may seem, it isn’t the case that commoners out in the boonies have been heading down to their local libraries to pick up works by Adorno on a whim and assimilate them. 51
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:58 | # @Rodin I’m writing something (quite short) about that now - I think you’ll find it interesting if GW wants to put it up. Just a couple of quotes on the topic to kick off a debate hopefully. @Dan Yes I have made the point time and time again about just how deeply different sensibilities operate on Mars and Venus. Really a nation that can take that fine political philosopher Sarah Palin’s talking points about Norway et al., being ‘socialist hell-holes’ seriously (try North Korea for the real thing) has very different atmospherics. Its just a quirk of personal biography that I have explored both planets. No serious discussion can follow without the appropriate optic being used. 52
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:06 | # Dan, Pardon my alleged bedevilment — I didn’t realize that you know better than experimental psychologists, or that political definitions nullify the purpose of a quick diagnostic method that relied on broad ideological associations to “get a feel” for the self-concept of audience members. One more thing you ought to consider. Because ‘liberal’ in their minds means approximately ‘universalist’, ‘accepting’, ‘progressive’, which all in turn refer to those not themselves, we may view their position as completely appropriate to them — not being members of a single ethny, and reflecting the very ‘diversity’ or ‘universality’ that they exhibit as people. But again, I don’t see that your point invalidates the purpose of the lecture — nor that the new acceptation of ‘liberal’ “derails discourse” at all beyond MajorityKikes. After all, the English are not part of the American political “conversation”. However, it seems probable to me that the ‘progressive’ policies of the Third Reich (I think that’s more fitting than ‘liberal’) did emanate from the diverse backgrounds of those in the Party; at least compared to the northern Germans and especially the Prussian military caste who looked down on them. An Austrian and a Bavarian would not want to exist in rump duchies but would prefer to exist in a greater realm in full recognition of their ‘germanness’; this is an ‘inclusive’ ideology which would allow adherents to explore social policies of which Germans proper and especially entrenched castes would be mistrustful. Also consider that Hitler’s father was something of a social climber in the Waldviertel: this is already to expose a young man to the virtues of a forward-thinking mindset. Everything in Adolf’s pre-Fuehrer days, in fact, can be seen as training in ‘progressive’ policy — defiant behavior, obsession with the Napoleonic Wars, Alois moving the family around, Alois eventually withdrawing and passing on, much free time alone given to fantasy, atheism at school, painting of course, Vienna, bohemianism, exposure to lower orders, and so on. So I guess when Knoedeln-Looneytunes, or whatever the fuck his name was, writes that National Socialism was ‘leftist’, insurgent, revolutionary, i.e. a threat to the family fortune and traditional order, he was right as far as the psychogenesis of the National Socialist worldview, which was entirely the perspective of a gang of outsiders. 53
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:12 | # Wot would we retarded rootless Americans do without you “subtly mocking” Englishmen to endlessly remind us that we are “confused” and “shallow”. Later broskis, going to sniff some blow off the “misty patina” of this here Ikea table made in Thailand. White powder! 54
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:20 | # uh - please I’m not English thank you. I’m a Celt. I am genetically incapable of playing cricket. And on the regional origins of a certain regime I think you have a point. Blow and Ikea tables? - Why you’re an outrageous hedonist and all-round libertine! What’s wrong with a nice cup of tea? 55
Posted by Dan Dare on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:25 | # Oh dear, Comrade uh appears to have taken umbrage, and that at comments which were not directed towards his person. The next time anyone comments about British dentistry I’m also going to scweam and scweam until I make myself thick. So there! 56
Posted by Dan Dare on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:36 | # As for the ‘purpose of the lecture’, it seemed to me to be a riff on the ‘Can’t We All Just Get Along’ refrain, or perhaps a nostalgic glance backwards to those magical early post 9/11 days when, with teary eye and puffed-out chest, we could all proudly claim that ... 57
Posted by Republicrat on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:41 | # What are the psychological traits that describe ‘uh’? Would anyone describe him as a neurotypical individual, or perhaps he himself is in need of some of behavioral modification himself? Biting sarcasm, high level of disagreeability, emotional/moody. What else? Just what would the doctor prescribe? 58
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:42 | #
1. Don’t pick a fight with me. I have nothing against you. 2. You are being disingenuous — you Englishmen have a nasty habit of talking over we Americans. I don’t mean Graham, of course. In fact I prefer his punchy comments about Americans to this cool disdain of the English. Now I really must go, my ice-cream truck is idling outside and the gude peopoo of Glazgoo need their fix. 59
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:43 | # Republicrat wrote:
Jesus Christ, do you really want to open that can of worms?? 60
Posted by uh on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:45 | # By the way — those traits, at least the first two, describe nearly everyone here!! llzozozozozzzz 61
Posted by Republicrat on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:57 | # I think we’re on the same page then. Carry on 62
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:15 | # Some of use do tire of America from time to time – but one must always make some distinction between a régime and the people that must endure under it. uh are you Rab. C. Nesbitt in disguise? 63
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:43 | # Speaking of comedy - enjoy the Scottish version of Ricky Gervais 64
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:37 | # Some Yanks are pretty funny too on religious matters. Yes, yes I know but it is funny. 65
Posted by anon on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:41 | # DD
Sure, the bit that jumped out at me was two of the five principles that separated the groups: fairness and reciprocity (liberals) vs in-group loyalty (conservatives) because it ties into my thinking that there’s a biological component and that the stronger the sense of blood-ties the more dominant in-group loyalty is to any decision and it’s the loosening of blood-ties that creates the momentum for an alternative and more universalist basis for making decisions simply because if you’re not going to use “is it good for the [whoever]” as the basis for morality then what are the alternatives?
Yes, but i see classical liberalism as possibly being the earliest stages of intellectual (as opposed to religious) universalism when it was still mainly the province of a minority of the educated urban upper middle class in a few countries (as the most outbred segment in the most outbred places) i.e. early stage universalism combined with atheism. Whereas now i think maybe most of the (NW Euro and associated) population is at part-liberal by this biological definition. .
I haven’t seen anything like that. From experience people who are born to a mixture of a very exogamous and a very endogamous parent seem to identify much more often with their more endogamous half which makes sense but it might be more complicated in less extreme circumstances. For the sake of argument imagine an endogamous population were 20% identical by descent and an exogamous one 5% then a kid produced by a mixture would on average be 10% connected to one side of the family and only 2.5% to the other so they’d be less connected to both sides of their family but still be twice as endogamensch as the the more exogamous population. On the other hand it might not just be the relative feelings of genetic identity but instead of or as well the balance of traits created as a result of endogamy vs exogamy i.e. sib altruism vs reciprocal altruism traits. I remember two half-black brothers one of whom was naturally and unselfconsciously white in behaviour and the other very black so who knows.
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Posted by anon on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:56 | # DD
It kinda is. The focus is morality and iirc his main point is basically punishment is neccessary but liberals oppose punishment because conservatives support it and that “we” need to all get along and incorporate both liberal and conservative ideas into public morality. However the reason i linked it was because of his five-point list which i feel is a pretty good list of component traits which in varying proportions could be used to distinguish liberal and conservative at a behavioural level.
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Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:21 | # How did I know the mocker of Christ - the ironically named David Cross - was a Jew? Why did I immediately suspect it? A few more of that filth and I may start inching closer to the Richards faction ... (though for the Judeo-hostile element to classify the great and noble Ludwig von Mises with creeps like Cross, Madoff, Geffin, Bernanke, etc ...) Of course, Ricky Gervais is a snotty, self-important POS. He mocks the Lord, but I bet he wouldn’t mock “St.” Martin Lucifer Coon, would he? God how I despise that type!!
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn? A great Catholic rightist, monarchist and staunch defender of liberty and property. One of my heroes. By all means, read Leftism Revisited. Everyone. It would be a good and necessary education. Improve the tone and tenor of MR considerably. BTW, it is highly debatable to suggest that classical liberalism was Eurocentric. Many classical liberals were racially realistic, if not racist (eg, Jefferson, Acton). But in being so, it is certainly arguable that they were betraying their own philosophical commitments. Indeed, is it possible to be a classical liberal and a racialist? I use the term “racialist” to denote someone who not only accepts race as a valid biological category, as well as that races do statistically differ in mean/modal behavior and ability - this, without more, would constitute a “race realist” - but who also believes such differences ought to be reflected in legislation. A “racist” is simply someone harboring ill-will towards persons of different races. Obviously, one can be a classical liberal/libertarian and a race realist; one can even be a libertarian and a racist (eg, a libertarian who hates nonwhites, but refrains from violating or advocating the violation of their natural rights). But are CL/libertarianism and racialism incompatible? I’ve actually thought about this a lot. I’d like to hear if others are interested in the topic before presenting my own thoughts (sorry if this is a derail from the original post, but things seem to have gone off in this direction). 68
Posted by Ex-Pro White Activist on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:45 | # http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/graham-lister/48/5a/bb8 http://www.adultswim.co.uk/blog/icons-comedy-graham-lister “Dr” Lister, I presume? “Lister was a complex man – a perm-haired, bespectacled ball of resentment and bravado. Self-importance was his key characteristic, as he aligned himself with the ‘doctors, dentists and architects’ with whom he was acquainted.”
I know you have exactly reversed Dawkins’ concept. But this isn’t the first time I’ve observed Lysenkoist sympathies in you. A phenotype is the combined expression of genes acting to control their surrounding environment in the interests of reproduction. A commonly used example is a beaver making ponds. “Phenotype” underlies the entire concept of “micro-communities”.
So do you accept or deny that the “Industrial Revolution” exerted profound selective effects on the subject populations?
This is easily the most mis-addressed statement that has ever been run on M-R. You need to resend this one to the “metapolitical” book club discussants.
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Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:08 | # Now we are informed that genotype x environment interactions do not occur… Really? genotype x environment interactions What next phenotypic plasticity as ‘leftist’ J-babble? Or are norms of reaction also J-babble? Damn that’s a hell of a lot of ‘leftist’ biology that must be rubbish because someone that’s read Richard Dawkins says so…but that is also one massive amount of ecological and evolutionary theory you have to overturn and also account for all the data recorded in the relevant observations and experiments. It’s amazing how jumpy and defensive people get when their easy answers are challenged eh? Thank you Leon for you kind comments much appreciated. P.S. most people use a pseudonym of some type on the internet ex-pro - hardly a crime? 70
Posted by J Richards on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00 | # Guessedworker @35
But these are tied conceptually to the bloodless artifice of chosen association, and also to the interests of elites that form through that agency.</blockquote> The bloodlessness claim is refuted by some of the data cited (how close are you to your racial/ethnic group?). The data show that this “liberalism” thing pertaining to the specific, highly relevant questions addressed isn’t endorsed by the masses and couldn’t be an emergent process of general public interests. You’re trying to have your cake and eat it, too.
I’m not promoting Jewish supremacism above the whole. The data show that much of the whole isn’t relevant. If Jewish supremacism is relevant, it can’t be rationally discussed at MR, so let’s not go there. I didn’t author the piece, and the burden of proof remains on Lister and now you to explain the concept of liberalism and account for the data I’ve cited within the framework of this concept. Dr. Lister has flat-out refused to do so. So it’s up to you.
If the nature thing (racial closeness and other specific data points) hasn’t gone away in spite of “liberalism,” then this liberalism thing is either imposed by the elite, in which case you need to explain who are these elite and how did they acquire power, or it’s something apart from the nature thing, and then you need to explain what this mysterious thing is then.
Not much of a difference regarding socioeconomic status or age. There’s no evidence of deficiency in racial consciousness and no movement need be directed toward this purpose. Major practical issues such as a society not having control over its own money didn’t result from a loss of racial consciousness and can’t be solved by attempting to enhance racial consciousness.
You’ve failed to define liberalism in a satisfactory manner as you have a lot of highly relevant data to account for notwithstanding your attempts. So why should I consider myself a liberal when it’s not clear what you mean by the term? What specific liberal beliefs live in my mind that you’re sure exist there for you to call me a liberal? And if you’re not specific in terms of questions that can be asked to assess how liberal one is, then your argument is quasi-religious, one that may not be subjected to testing or validation.
It’s perfectly normal to be unconvinced of the seriousness or relevance of a concept when one isn’t told what it means, or shown what it explains, or shown how highly releavant data can be explained in terms of it. If liberalism is our own lives and our own selves, then you should be able to specify specific questions that reveal the extent to which one is a liberal and account for the five instances of data cited above.
Try the struggle against the struggle for existence.</blockquote> As I said, this qualifies for the Darwin award. How has it persisted and defies attempts to combat it when it’s suicidal?
They used the revised Hans Eysenck personality questionnaire. Eysenck did pioneering work on personality, which eventually lead to the well-documented big-5 personality-traits model widely used in science. The Hans Eysenck personality questionnaire was revised accordingly. Eysenck remains one of the most influential psychologists of all time. His pioneering work on personality was done during the mid-twentieth century, and his ideas have been expanded upon and strengthened since then. So your argument on philosophical liberalism’s formative power over personality fails to validate.
No, we need to replace liberalism as the formative ideational system of the European mind with something that comes from the European nature, and tends to European genetic interest.</blockquote> You need to show what this liberalism thing is in the European mind. How else would you convince people of the need to replace it?
You undoubtedly know what you’re talking about, but it’s apparently a quasi-religious belief as it seemingly can’t be clarified or subjected to empirical validation.
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Posted by J Richards on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:16 | # <h2>Uh, the charlatan “psychologist”</h2> @45, uh takes a strange turn. But the historical context first. The year is 2012. Uh doesn’t primarily draw upon psychological literature from the twenty first century or even the late twentieth century. He goes back to Freud, and puts it to the use that the Freudians and the critical theorists put it to. The argument is basically to assign all sorts of mental illnesses to the opponent and tie it to their assumed sexual problems/deficiencies to explain the opponent’s arguments. To the extent that Uh specifically uses this approach, not refuting the data, he adopts the ad hominem of the critical theorists (Frankfurt School) and, the later appearing, deconstructionists. As a commenter, Tootberg, said on a different page, one curiosity is that uh ignores a fundamental concept from Freudianism/psychoanalysis, “projection.” One has to wonder if Uh is “projecting” his own paranoia upon me given the pattern he has shown. Uh was shamed into abruptly exiting MR when he revealed himself to be a great fool on the topic of white women allegedly wanting to teach physics to inner city blacks, a disgusting misogynist, a person preying upon vulnerable females (which include mentally disturbed runaway underage girls), a connoisseur of bestiality (interracial pornography), a man interested in watching women being ejaculated and urinated upon by multiple men, a man disturbed by portrayal of Jews in a stronger negative light, etc. So what would make a man shamed in this manner to come back? The heat being turned on Talmudism, the heat being turned on Soren Renner when he’s exposed as working for Jewish interests, and the hope of getting me to stop working here. Paranoia over harm to Jewish interests is an appropriate explanation of someone in Uh’s situation coming back (not an instance of “projection”). And now the comment @45. Surprise, surprise, Uh cites modern psychological literature! And in this manner he reveals himself:
</blockquote> Uh shows that he can’t understand modern psycholgical literature even when it’s available in plain English and clear black letters. SSRIs = Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which effectively increase the amount of serotonin available between nerve cells (effective because the reuptake of serotonin by nerve cells is diminished). So SSRIs don’t inhibit effective serotonin levels in between nerve cells, they effectively enhance it. In addition, SSRIs such as Zoloft (Sertraline), Lexapro (Escitalopram) and especially Paxil (Paroxetine) are used to treat both depression and anxiety, and these SSRIs have the same general mechanism of action as other SSRIs that are used for depression but not anxiety. Then in the next comment, Uh goes into my alleged Autism or Asperger’s… charlatan. Nice job Guessedworker for having Uh defecate all over MR. 72
Posted by uh on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:17 | #
Not the “psychology bullshit” to which you referred recently, then? Our Bot is really an unconscionable opportunist. Psychology’s ‘bullshit’, ‘Jewish’ when coming from someone who disagrees with him, but it’s ‘well-documented’ and ‘empirically valid’ when coming from him — even if the other person has used the very concept endorsed by the Bot against him (Big Five Traits model) !
I rest my case. 73
Posted by uh on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:24 | # Man — you are a cunt.
Anything to let yourself off that hook, I guess. “The data show that much of the whole isn’t relevant.” If no one sees clinical significance in that, well, you need to visit an old folks’ home sometime — they are full of J Richardses. Alas! the day is nearly gone; and I shall not waste the remainder on the freak Bot and his verkochte moralistic obsessions. Besides, I know where the Mexican high school girls go to smoke cigarettes .... 74
Posted by J Richards on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:46 | # Uh @72 “psychology bullshit” You put the term in quotes as if I used the term. But since you bring up the term, the fact is that your “psychology” is appropriately compared to organic manure, not psychology that I’m aware of, which comes from current peer-reviewed journals and tries to validate models, explain data and do other things you couldn’t be bothered with, like the Freudians, the critical theorists, the deconstructionists and the rest of your ilk. On “...much of the whole…,” “whole” is a reference to Guessedworker’s term, which if you follow the discussion is either a quasi-religious concept, not whole as in a different sense, or a reference to everything. Quasi-religious concepts aren’t suitable for discussion among people who don’t share the belief, and this is why much of the “whole” isn’t relevant. Obviously, much of everything can’t be relevant either (can you see the relevance of bird droppings, asexual reproduction, the mass of an electron, etc. to the discussion?). And if “everything” is everything relevant to the discussion, then none of this everything is irrelevant, and GW should make an attempt to list the constituents of everything relevant. 75
Posted by J Richards on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:24 | # <h2>attitude towards “interracialism” as a proxy for liberalism</h2> Haller @36 claims that one’s attitude towards interracialism is a good proxy for liberalism, citing data that
Details: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/ For once, this isn’t pure trolling. Let’s look at the big picture. NORC-GSS Representative surveys of white Americans, http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 QUESTION YEAR | YES (%) | NO (%) 1972 | 36.8 | 63.2 1973 | 37.5 | 62.5 1974 | 33.4 | 66.6 1975 | 38.3 | 61.7 1976 | 32.6 | 67.4 1977 | 27.2 | 72.8 1980 | 31.3 | 68.7 1982 | 32.2 | 67.8 1984 | 26.1 | 73.9 1985 | 28.6 | 71.4 1987 | 26.0 | 74.0 1988 | 25.6 | 74.4 1989 | 22.1 | 77.9 1990 | 19.6 | 80.4 1991 | 19.1 | 80.9 1993 | 17.8 | 82.2 1994 | 15.1 | 84.9 1996 | 11.9 | 88.1 1998 | 12.5 | 87.5 2000 | 10.9 | 89.1 2002 | 10.8 | 89.2 SPECIAL QUESTION FOR 1977 RESPONSE | % Very uneasy | 46.5 Somewhat uneasy | 33.4 Not uneasy | 20.2 Note: Only 27.2% favored the outlawing of black-white marriages. ANOTHER SPECIAL QUESTION FOR 1977 RESPONSE | % Agree | 92.8 Disagree | 7.2 Note: Only 27.2% favored the outlawing of black-white marriages and 20.2% said they would not be uneasy if a relative married a black. SPECIAL QUESTION FOR 1982 YES (%) | NO (%) 40 | 60 We have three possibilities. Either people’s attitudes have genuinely changed, or they’re giving more politically correct answers, or a combination of both. The response to the special question in 1982 suggests that attitudes may have changed. It can be safely assumed that attitudes have changed to some extent given other observations not discussed. The answers to the three questions for 1977 suggest that whereas whites can reason at an abstract level about black-white marriages, they become less open to such unions when it comes closer to home (relatives) and personally hold such marriages in even lower esteem, most thus being unlikely to indulge in such unions themselves. In recent years, analysis of data from online dating sites has clearly shown the large gap between what whites say (many open to interracial dating) and what they do in real life (typically seek whites for dating and prefer whites to non-whites). So there’s the possibility of people giving more politically correct answers with time. To the extent that attitudes have changed, we have the possibilities of greater desirability of interracial unions, increased prevalence of abstractions where erroneous or more complex reasoning is used to not find anything wrong with interracial unions even though one doesn’t find such unions palatable or personally desirable, or a combination of the two. Whereas it would take too much work to show here, and not worth any serious person’s time given the kind of responses the opposition comes with, in my estimation, the great majority of whites prefer to date and have serious relationships with whites rather than non-whites. In practice, the prevalence of interracial unions is greater than this internal preference because of opportunistic factors (crossing paths with other races in the face of uncertainty over being able to meet and settle with a more desirable partner later on) or practical issues, where an ordinary white man is more likely to have dating success with the creme of the crop among Asian women than the creme of the crop among white women, or a less desirable white woman may have to chose between a more successful non-white man or less successful white man, etc. Recently, Dr. Lister brought up the issue of ‘top-down versus bottom-up’ processes in the world of ideas and ideology: http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/Marxian_Illustrations_or_Marxian_Illusions [data free, as usual] No serious person would suggest that changes in whites’ attitudes toward interracial dating and the likelihood of giving more politically correct answers to the acceptability of interracial dating have been a bottom-up process. It’s been a top-down process comprising of changes in the mainstream media, forced integration and undesirable levels of immigration being forced upon people. If this top-down process represents liberalism, then this phenomenon is imposed by a small, powerful elite minority that didn’t acquire its power via democratic vote, and the temporal change in “attitude towards interracialism” held by the public reflects the “liberalism” imposed by a powerful minority. It’s not difficult to identify this minority, trace its rise to power and figure out ways to undermine it, but there’s no way to discuss these issues sensibly at MR. 76
Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:06 | # I hate to focus on “personal” stuff yet again, but this is pretty incendiary:
Do you have evidence to back up these claims, esp re the stuff on extreme porn (note: I don’t read everything that appears on MR, and only comment on what interests me, or if I’m attacked)? If I recall correctly, uh was making perfectly sensible claims about the liberalism (whether innate or conditioned, we can argue over) of white females, and that the “whiter” the female, the more exogamous and out-group oriented (in a word, “PC”). I claim no special expertise in this area, just a decent bit of personal and vicarious dating experience in a couple of unrepresentative (I dearly hope) metropoli: mainly, LA and NYC, though I’m also quite familiar with Vegas and San Francisco. All that anecdotal experience suggests to me that uh is correct. A WN-oriented friend and I even once discussed trying to confine ourselves to “white-ethnic” (non-J, of course) women, as they seemed to be the least liberal and the most normal, as we would define it. In the places I’ve lived in or spent a lot of time in, it seems like blondness is actually a pretty good proxy for liberalism - for women, not necessarily for men. The white girls who are least likely to be PC (again, in “Blue State” cities; it would be much different in rural white America, I hope: I have little experience of rural America) are usually Italian, or East European, in heritage; sometimes Irish. I can barely remember one blonde girl under 50 I have known over the past few decades who was not a race-liberal (and usually very liberal otherwise, too). Does anyone still remember that odious liberal Amy Biehl, who went down to SA to struggle against that horrible apartheid stuff, and ended up getting murdered by her own saintly savages - and for no other reason than that she was white? Herewith a the end of an utter dipshit (on so many levels) - and typical Aryan female post-1960s:
Can anyone imagine any nonwhite putting him- or herself in any similar type of situation? Of course not. Say what you will, but there is something weird and dysfunctional about whites. I’m not at all convinced that we have not reached our evolutionary end, a situation to which a majority of our race is not adaptable -and the minority which is capable of survival may be too few to ensure our racial continuance. This was always my point wrt White Zion. 77
Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:30 | # @Leon
here you admit not being committed and to us, not ‘appearing’ honest about your relationship and place in nationalism, and that you see flight and surrender as the wiser option. In a sense you are more honest than many on this forum in this. But people misunderstand this in your diatribes on monetary policy et. al. = surrender and flight - and you ‘appear’ dishonest because it seems unthinkable that someone who espoused such a view on a nationalist forum would not be up front with this, and not hide it in a muddle of verbiage and hobbledehoy. It’s a troubling thought one is impressed with again and again, that some of the leading personalities agenda here at MR is about negotiated surrender or acceptance of evolutionary irrelevancy… and propose a flight into the illusions of verbiage, or the nostrums of post-modernism, which amount to the same thing…majority surrender / not majority rights. In short if you are not convinced the present troubles are just an evolutionary test that requires us to rise to it, whatever the hurdles, then you are not a nationalist, racialist or anything we would understand as being a comrade in the struggle. For we plan to win, and we will win, whatever the cost. Instead you seem a potential turncoat, traitor and fifth columnist… a vector in the matrix of defeat - propaganda fashioned by our enemies, intentional on your part or not. Look at Lister, sure he throws out a few cherry pits now and again. but at bottom his message is about hiding in the illusion of some type of middle class ‘status’. The judas deal, for a few miserable totems of egoic status he agrees to be the conduit for the type of mind rape fashioned by the frankfurt school for just his type to promulgate… in return he is allowed to pretend to be an ‘intellect’ and arbiter of taste, again directed by the various ideas which led to the dilemma we are here to discuss and derail. And few have missed how any vigorous idea is overwhelmed by platitudes from the usual quarters. Even GW, whom everyone naturally likes, seems prisoner to maintaining a miasma of unspoken ideas. ‘Just keep talking about nothing’ - a Nationalist site about ‘nothing’, dressed up as ontological renewal soaked in the cotton batten of half-understood heideggeran ontology. Never mind Heidegger openly espoused the nasty Nazi’s as least of evils facing western man….just overlook that as they say and ‘after me’ mouth these nostrums ‘Be still!’ or
Control of the dialogue is the exact purpose of ‘controlled opposition’. 78
Posted by Desmond Jones on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 08:12 | #
Where did the liberalism meme arise from if not from European nature? What form of European nature, if it is natural, will it arise from? Fear, hate, love or racial struggle? It appears that the liberal meme is a mutating entity, existing on a continuum that extends from the Anglo Saxon sacral king to universal human rights. It appears then not to be self-estrangement because what then does incremental estrangement look like. Either there is presence or absence…is there incremental absence? Surely, the same values cannot be applied to one liberal epoch as to another. The American liberal experiment is certainly not the same as the Jewish liberal experiment or even the English liberal experiment, although they are liberalism and in some sense founded in the same meme however experiencing mutation in the process of horizontal and then vertical transmission in response to the human ecology in which it resides.
Yes but will it fly?
Who knew that liberalism would prove so adaptive despite its apparent modern day maladaptiveness? 79
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:10 | # Nothing I have written could reasonably be described as ‘post-modernism’ – anyone describing as such only reveals their own ignorance. After decades of marginality and little real intellectual or political impact you might have thought fresh thinking and analysis might be welcomed, but it seems not. Since when did an unwillingness to languish in easy non-answers and various forms of bullshit make one the fabled creature of ‘controlled opposition’? What Grim-very-Dim and like-minded friends have to assess is why have they enjoyed such irrelevancy in the wider world of politics and ideas? Is it all the fault of other people – or do they shoulder some portion of the responsibility? Maybe the typical WN type enjoys being marginal and a dangerous ‘outsider’ (at least in their own mind). One can see how and why such a psycho-political dynamic could work. But tell you what, take your ‘esoteric’ green-ray dildo and stick it up your arse – but I’m sure your doing that anyway. There is no reasonable ‘moral good’ served by non-existence. And as one bearer of a people’s continuity, culture etc., (very much an ‘encumbered’ self) there is no moral good served by our collective non-existence. Suicide is not an obligation. I refuse to be classified as ‘the cancer of history’. Now what follows from that premise is very much up for discussion – they should be no ‘sacred cows’ that are unquestioned or unchallengeable. I am very much for a non-bullshit type of robust and deep ethno-nationalist politics and theory. Call it analytical ethno-communitarianism. And I think it can be constructed from with mainstream Western philosophical thought, social science and science. I do not need the ‘esoteric’ or other delusions or half-baked half-truths to formulate my world-view. We are all guests of GW. Should he decide one of us is beyond the pale then that’s not a problem. If asked I will be out of here, it’s really not an issue. But should I get such an invite for pushing people out of their very limited comfort zones (in a lot of cases here) because I try to use a bit of logic, or bring some clarity to conceptual analysis, or indeed bring facts to in (such as the reality of phenotypic plasticity – a subject one can find 1000s of peer-reviewed scientific papers and books on)? Don’t believe me Google the term… Just how intellectually and emotionally insecure are the ‘tin-foil tendency’ as I think we should call them? 80
Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:28 | # @Gay-ham 81
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 11:01 | # @Grimmo-chops I seriously don’t think you have the first clue as to what post-modernism looks alike or is about - it’s more than complex words that you don’t understand. As for Positivism - I’m not a naive follower of that doctrine but I’m not going throw the scientific baby out with the naive positivist bath water. I’m a methodological physicalist/naturalist because really one has to be to do any form of science. No-one can genuinely investigate the world in a robust and systematic way without starting from this point, but you may disagree. You’re some sort of ‘idealist’ which explains quite a bit - the physical apple conforms to the ‘idea’ of an apple if I recall correctly? Complete tosh but there we go. The physical apple is just the apple in its mere, brute material reality. It’s not in anyway ‘conforming’ to some quasi-Platonic realm were the ‘idea’ of applyness ‘exists’. However, when I have the time and energy I will ‘explain’ myself in more detail. Finally I have no wish to ‘go into’ politics, government etc., I just like kicking ideas about with GW mainly, is that a problem? 82
Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:14 | #
@Gay-idiot It’s also consonant with hissy little defense, ‘I just like dressing up like a scientist and role playing with GW, what’s your problem?’ You’re not a methodological physicalist/naturalist Gayham - you’re a deluded freak who needs to inflict himself onto others as balm for your failed pretensions. Otherwise you’d be off doing science, instead of here pretending to catwalk your diseased brain. 83
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:51 | # Grimmy I can find the apple thread if you really want me too. Not all of us have quite as big ‘memory hole’ as you seem to. I don’t care what you believe or not about me. I don’t need to ruin my career prospects to satisfy some idiot on the web of my background or employment history/status. Perhaps you don’t understand just how generally PC the UK is, or the hyper-PC world of the education sector? People can have their lives ruined by being smeared as a ‘racist’. But again I’m not saying believe me because of what I am or am not - look at the fucking arguments in and of themselves - all this secret J-lizard, ‘controlled opposition’ paranoia is so fucking tiresome as a position that it is exhausting and deflationary in the worst possible way to any intelligent discourse. So apart from that Dimmy I see a lot of ‘hot-air’ from you but little action - try playing, primarily the ball and not the man…if you can that is. Now I’m off to enjoy the weekend with the family - Toodle pip! Have fun. 84
Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:33 | #
Gayham 85
Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:41 | #
According to GW liberalism’s power to shape personality does not translate to those now liberalized personalities being more likely to hold liberal opinions. LOL This begs the quesiton, If inculcation to liberalism cannot even imbue individuals with liberal beliefs that they then act out, just how the fuck do liberal policies become realized?
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Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:53 | #
Yawn. Precisely what thoughts does a liberalized mind think? Can we ascertain what these liberal thoughts are by asking a liberalized mind to disclose those liberal thoughts to us? Does the liberalized mind actually perform actions that are consonant with its presumably liberal thoughts? If so, then how come so few White people actually fuck muds, hmmm? According to “self-authoriality”, one orafice is as good as another, right? Post a comment:
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Posted by Dan Dare on Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:41 | #
An interesting and provocative piece, Graham, and extremely well presented. We need more this calibre of contribution at MR.
I’m not sure that I find Juvin’s hypothesis entirely persuasive, although I can understand how as an insurance wallah he may be pre-disposed to viewing extended longevity as uniquely threatening! He seems to be over-egging the pudding somewhat in correlating success, especially political success, with physical beauty. Merkozy ain’t exactly an oil painting, is it?
The depiction of a totally atomised society, linked together only by the “... The new technologies of permanent connectivity” is eerily reminiscent of Adam Curtis’s discussion of the nexus of ‘Randian heroes’ and ‘computer utopianism’. Unfortunately, as Curtis demonstrates, any ecosystem reliant on such self-stabilising networks for its collective health is prone to catastrophic and unpredictable failures when the all-important feedback machanisms themselves fail or are interfered with by outside agency.