I can only shake my head at this kind of stuff. Jason Soon (who else?) likes the fact that capitalism has “tamed our desire” for honour by “corrupting us with a taste for comfort and luxury”. Mr Soon thinks it’s much safer to live next to “greedy but rationally self-interested Homo Oeconomicus” rather than dangerous men of honour like “jihadis, samurais, fanatics and Crusaders.”

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I’ve been quietly waiting for Mark Richardson to introduce MR readers to this high-class take-down on John Bradford’s article, The role of ‘loser males’ in elections in the Australian liberal-left magazine, Dissent.

Of course, I could have just pleaded with him to put the damned thing up on this site.  But then I’d have to have restricted my own, perhaps not very startling observations to the comment thread.  Didn’t fancy that.

First, then, here’s Mark’s article in full:-

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MR regulars will have noticed from the jpegs that daily decorate our banner that war has a prominent place in my understanding of Western intellectual, social and political development.  War shapes our society for decades after the last shot has been fired.  It is the father of social instability as well as some truly rotten ideas about a “better world”.  Some time I might try to prove that the advanced phase of liberalism with which Western Man is now struggling is wholly the product of The Great War and its continuation a generation later.  What, one wonders, might our world be like today had peace prevailed in 1914?  Liberal no doubt, but not marxian.

But whatever one’s reasons for paying heed to those two great European upheavals of the Twentieth Century, it is something worthy of our personal time.  So I was interested to read this report of the regal progress to England this summer of Ricky Ponting’s Australian Test side.

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Yes, yes, I know.  The Gene War is still raging elsewhere.  But thus far in this extended discussion with GNXPers, the combined forces of MR contributors and commenters have mostly bearded them with the pursuit of the very EGI’s they deny to us.  I want to tilt the discussion towards the purely political motives of the GNXP boys and since I happen to own this political hoosegow I can do it, too!

Now, the formidable David B has very courageously showed-up on our threads.  For that he has my thanks.  But not political asylum.  I’m throwing in a few observations here about the smoothly fashioned but overt and singular political intent in his Opus Salterium at GNXP.

Just taking as an example the piece to which I have linked, David writes: In its primary, everyday sense, we use the word (interest) to designate the wants and needs of individual sentient beings (usually humans, but sometimes other animals). These may be either subjective wants (such as a desire for food or sex) or objective needs, such as survival, but in general we value the latter only as preconditions for the former. Survival is usually in our interest, but not if we are in constant pain, or being kept alive as a senseless vegetable.

Senseless vegetables?  What price EGIs for senseless vegetables?  Or strawmen.  Let’s, instead, put it this way:  In its primary, everyday sense we use the word (interest) to designate the pleasures and advantages people seek.  Obviously, some of these pleasures and advantages hold no implication for our role in Nature.  But others do, or we would not exist at all (a world of liberals, for example, could not exist at all).

So the question, really, is whether these latter pleasures and advantages are of the individual, as David desires to prove, or not.  They’re not.  Post “Out of Africa”, we didn’t evolve as individuals but as the members of an ethnic group.  So the question we should ask David is: why must you number those pleasures and advantages (such as ideals of attractiveness in the opposite sex and all the striving that goes into attaining that) among the sanctities of individualism, rather than among the commonalities of ethny?

The honest answer would be: It’s my politics.  But we don’t hear it.

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From today’s Telegraph:-

A sixteen-year-old girl was murdered after she and a friend were assaulted over three hours by a gang of up to six men, police said yesterday.

Mary-Ann Leneghan was stabbed in the neck and her body was found in a park.

Her friend, who has not been named, was recovering in hospital yesterday after being shot and stabbed.

She managed to escape her attackers and staggered from Prospect Park, Reading, Berks, to raise the alarm by flagging down a passing motorist.

Detectives leading the murder hunt said the two teenagers were lured into a car parked in the centre of the town on Friday night.

The girls, in what police believe may have been a “state of great distress”, were taken to a nearby bed and breakfast hotel where they were assaulted over three hours ...

Mr Warwick added: “They suffered from a series of assaults throughout the evening, culminating in the death of the 16-year-old.

“It would appear that they had been in the company of this group of males and they had been assaulted during this time.”

Police would not confirm suggestions by close friends and family that Mary-Ann’s hair had been shaved off and that she had suffered burn wounds to her head from cigarettes ...

Mr Warwick said that the men police are looking for may be of mixed race, white or Afro-Caribbean.

So not much doubt about that, then.  But, of course, we must never be told so, never be led to believe that white men tend not to prosecute sexual assaults in groups of six.  The propensity to rape and murder must, must, must be equally distributed among ourselves and our, of course, always vibrant communities.  A bit hard on the orderly, under-endowed Chinese, but equality is the thing, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, we must celebrate our diversity and agree not to look too closely into the racial identity of our daughters’ rapists and murderers.  That would be racist and totally, inexcusably wrong.  That would be inegalitarian.  That would threaten the Multi-Cult.  And, Marx-knows, the Multi-Cult is worth any number of dead white sixteen-year old girls.  Which is why the future must, must, must continue to be multicultural.  You lucky people.  And you lucky girls.

There is no law which says that families must weaken, crime must increase, and societies must decay.

David Willetts, timely as ever, having his four-penneth in the Sunday Times about the future of Conservatism.

But is he right?  Of course not.  The “law”, in this case, is advanced liberalism.  And that absolutely decrees that families must weaken, crime must increase and societies must indeed decay.

Willetts cranks out a quote about old Dizzy and lovingly romanticises Compassionate Conservatism.  But he doesn’t use either of his fabled brains to really look through the surface ripples and down into the silent depths of our political history.  I suppose he has no need of such rigour.  His purpose does not justify the effort, and we do not get it:-

A country with too many broken lives and fragmented families is going to depend on public services more. As well as a strong economy, we need a strong society. How do we disentangle the catastrophic mixture of poor social housing, rigid school catchment areas and long term welfare dependency which disfigure Britain?

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Great Sword technique, from Fechtmeister Joachim Meyer’s Kunst des Fechten

I’d like to introduce MR readers to The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (The ARMA):-

ARMA - the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts, is an educational non-profit organization dedicated to the study and practice of historical fencing and the exploration and promotion of our Western martial heritage.

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Late last year I chose for the inaugural Biased History Award a school textbook which described the crusaders as follows:

“They were all fanatics. Crusaders were fundamental extremists - mad warriors who were intent on causing havoc for whatever they believed. They were virtually religious terrorists.”

This year’s leading contender for the award has chosen the same theme. Film director Ridley Scott has made a $150 million feature about the crusades called Kingdom of Heaven. The New York Times pithily described the plot of the film this way:

“Muslims are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything.”

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