- By Dr. Graham Lister

Look, I don’t have the time or inclination to point-out the half-baked thinking of MR’s commentators or interviewed guests (if I think them to be in error). Kevin MacDonald can defend himself can he not? After all, if his ideas are completely robust how can he be subject to a ‘humiliation’? All ideas, political, philosophical and scientific, have to be stress-tested in order to investigate their validity. Why anyone is so much of a ‘special snowflake’ that they get an apriori exemption from this process is beyond me.

Now, no-one that’s sane thinks the individual per se can or should be ‘abolished’, but people have very odd and damaging ideas about what ‘the individual’ is and what it represents - such that over the longer term the ideology of ‘individualism’ has extremely deleterious effects as its model of reality is not in alignment with the true social ontology. Human beings, including Europeans, evolved in small, highly social/group orientated bands. It’s really not rocket science to understand that variation in fitness is partitioned into a group element and an individual element (whilst obviously selecting for or against specific alleles and associated phenotypic traits). In fact, such an observation mathematically and logically flows from basic population genetics, which Hamilton went on to describe as ‘inclusive fitness’ and the importance of relatedness to the evolution of behaviour and life history traits (like female biased sex-ratios in the Hymenoptera etc). Price simplified inclusive fitness theory with his work. And it’s developed since. Steven Frank’s book on social evolution is still the best starting point for anyone seriously interested in the topic.

Returning to the politics and philosophy parts of the discussion, Aristotle is my favourite thinker in these areas. First of all, he would suggest that a proper balance between the ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’ (individuals and the group) is necessary for both to fully flourish. There is a mutual interdependence and reciprocity between the two levels of social reality. Secondly, Aristotle would suggest that there may be many ways to live (like being a Lockean liberal perhaps), but many ways to live are ultimately sub- optimal with the goal of full and genuine human flourishing. And this is true at both the individual level and the group level. And yes the interests of a given individual and a given group can be conflict (again this flows from very basic evolutionary biology and the game-theoretic issue of ‘free-riders’). Thus there must be mechanisms for maintaining the health of both individuals and the collective. It starts by the recognition of the fact that the individual is social and utterly dependent upon the collective in numerous ways that liberal ‘individualistic’ ideology willfully ignores.

Ultimately, I reject liberalism as a set of false ideas about the human world - it has the ontology of humans both as individuals and as communities wrong. Bad ideas eventually result in bad consequences and one hopes vice versa. Thus, I am broadly an Aristotelian communitarian. And I think that must incorporate the realities of human nature (groupishness) and our bio-cultural differential status regarding different groups of human beings. Note, it’s a political axis of differences (bio-cultural) that ultimately ends up in the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction, not some bullshit about equality vs inequalities except that I very naturally value my own well being and life more highly than a random stranger’s and I also value the life of my extended community both today and tomorrow (the idea of an intergenerational ‘moral economy’).

Being a non-liberal, I am against cheap all-encompassing forms of universalism or the moral plateau as philosophers call it. Rather I believe in a nested hierarchy of moral responsibility. I have much more moral duties to my own children than my next door neighbour’s kids, let alone some family in China (that of course does not imply I, by default, hate people in China or wish them harm just that I feel I have minimal moral responsibilities towards them). But I do have some properly warranted moral responsibilities to my neighbourhood and my community. Moral responsibility varies with proximity (properly understood).

Roger Scruton writes about a hierarchy of moral responsibility often. Here he speaks about in the context of the absurd (and liberal) idea of ‘animal rights.’

OK, I have previously attempted on many occasions to write about and explain my thoughts on topics such as societal homogeneity and social capital etc. I will not endlessly repeat myself.

As for the idiotic, paranoid reaction by some to my reappearance, it was simply a function of me taking a quick look at MR in a quite moment and seeing folks speculation about my death! And I posted some chucks from an essay I had been reading. I am starting to get to grips with using a tablet and MR as a site isn’t the easiest to use; so out of laziness I didn’t put the comments in quotation marks. Only when someone posted them to the front page as my own did I feel duty-bound to privately point out that fact. But they’re still good points that I agree with about 90%

No coordination with Danny or GW etc. Seeing a conspiracy at every turn is how Jews think - they project onto others their own deeply ingrained mindset. It’s both pathetic and undignified to follow that way of thinking quite so slavishly.

Speaking of slaves, can anyone seriously doubt the USA is a vassal state of Israel? The best superpower money can buy? And yet Americans still persist in their hurbris that they are the model Europeans ‘must’ follow? Look, if KM or indeed anyone else is pushing that as some sort of ‘idea’ they can go fuck themselves. Savvy?

If Mr. Bowery wishes to contribute to MR go for it. Who the fuck cares either way?

by Niel Vodavzny

Poesy is not much in the offing in the present climes as a tool of opinion, wit or idle fancy. Instead, we are plagued with words, ie language with no formal embellishments. If you take Byron, he wrote in various idioms, and often inserted a mocking characterization or political sideswipe. What is it, in short, about cadence and meter that render them so full of content to our eyes and ears?

Why is it, also, that Nietzsche’s poetic fancies are so inspiring as philosophy? This harks back to pre-Enlightenment days when scribes labored over illuminated manuscripts. Craft was a thing of beauty to behold: Ruskin even wrote a book on The Stones of Venice. Why are ornate folios so much more appropriate than kindles?

Is it something to do with how we perceive reality? Aurally, visually, through the senses, then through the phenomena of the mind. What is it the King James Bible has that modern transcripts don’t? Here’s a page from French comics magazine Pilote from 1979, text by Klotz and pictures by Regis Franc:

READ MORE...

In fact, a smooth and amazingly blended rainbow trout mask replica..

  for Carolyn..
                 
Particularly recommended for your listening pleasure are the cuts: Ella Guru
                              ...“here she comes walkin’, lookin’ like a zoo, high YElla Guru”
                          Hair Pie Bake2        Dachau Blues      She can’t go to the beach because her hands are too small.

Neon Meat Dream of a Octafish .. “mucous mules fox trot, tra la, tra la, tra la, tra la”...                                         

...but they are all quite good  

       

                              ...drives a cartoon..

             
Graham doesn’t want us exporting our American culture :(

     
A conspiracy theory of a conspiracy theory about hippies

    ..fast and bulbous           ..fast and bulbous                       ..and a tin tear drop.

READ MORE...

I think this is rather pithy - A Word in the Ear of the Future-Seekers — Modernity is not the bridge; it is the abyss.

Fine Persecution — Every society has before it an ideal of the kind of society it ought to be, and every society, in order to uphold that ideal, needs to persecute those within it who are at odds with that ideal. Once again, however, the deep mendacity of liberalistic society manifests itself in that it denies the persecution which it carries out against its hated enemies, namely, those at odds with its ideal. This denial of the persecuted status of its enemies — along with the ridicule of them when they claim it — are additional elements for the intensifying of their persecution.

Specify, or Be Damned — Individualism does not specify itself to be in keeping with any particular society, or even with the existence of society at all, but rather it addresses itself only to an unspecified individuality. Such unspecification about what an individual should be is precisely at the heart of individualism’s boast about its being the friend and not the foe of the individual’s freely seeking to be and to do whatever he chooses. “Do what thou wilt”, it says, whereto it may add the black-box phrase, “so long as it harms none”. Now, given a teaching which says that everyone may do as he pleases, irrespective of all truth, reason, goodness, morality, tradition, authority, obedience, bonds, and so forth, “so long as it harms none”, and which, by its boasted lights, does not specify the kind of society which should be upheld, or even that any should be upheld, how is it that anyone could then come to the belief that it might after all stand as a pillar of any society, let alone a particular one, rather than being, as in truth it is, the rot upon all? One might say that here we are at the brink of sheer madness, inbequeathed through many years of listening to silly tales. But leaving aside an understanding of the teaching itself, which might conceivably have taken any name, the very name which it does carry gives us a clue to its drift, namely, that it seeks to uphold the unspecified individual, not any society, specified or unspecified.
 
There are no ends specific to man as man, rather than to what he shares with mere beasts, which can be reached outside of his fellowship with his kind. No speech nor reasoning, let alone higher arts and sciences, would arise if all men stood from the first outside of fellowship. Every man began as a helpless baby and would have died were it not for the society of his kith and kin. Every man was without speech, and would have remained speechless were it not for the same. Every man was without schooling, and would have stayed unschooled. And so on. No man was ever born into a so-called state of nature, as first imagined by Thomas Hobbes, even if this be helpful as a conceptual threshold for the understanding that the closer a society comes in breaking down towards that threshold, the more brutish it becomes. It is nevertheless a figment which has led to misunderstanding and mischief, and it is from it that individualism has grown. Man’s state of nature is the state of society. Man has never been in the so- called state of nature; for he is by nature a social animal and always in fellowship. Individualists, having thoughtlessly taken all social things for granted, and having for the most part imbibed unawares some old spirit of seventeenth-century philosophy, often speak as though they rose out of the ground and shaped themselves in isolation, wherein we glimpse also the drunken idea of self-creation born of Romanticism.

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. [1]

The liberal concept of man as selfstanding being, free to set his own moral ends, is one of the biggest untruths ever told — and yet folk swallow it whole, whereat we might take it that they are greedy for something.
 
Individualism is an emptiness which blights the field of personhood, turning men, if they can still be called such, into mere units of the mass to be gathered up in the total state. Man is a social animal; society is required to actualise a man’s potential as a person. There are no pre-social individual persons. In the light of this, we may see individualism as some deeply primitive recrudescence, the tendency of which is to destroy the very conditions by which one can become a human person. A man cannot be a person without the fellowship, community, or society that made him. Un- socialised, man’s potencies are not activated, and he stays at a level close to a beast, bereft of speech and reason, let alone partaking of the higher arts and sciences.
 
Individualistic societies are decomposing social bodies in which kinship-ties are loosened and even cut, and which can be held together only by an all-pervasive and socially-alien bureau-technocratic power — the “coldest of all cold monsters”. In defence of these societies, and, by extension, willing or not, of this bureau-technocratic power, liberals, who sometimes call themselves libertarians, claim the greater freedom of these societies, where the largely unexamined and fuzzily-held concept “freedom” is a multivariate reference, unspecified of what, for what, and to what. In individualistic societies there is more freedom in the direction of baser and thrilling appetites, non-specific to mankind, hence the appeal of this freedom to the mass of baser men; and it is these appetites which dissolve kinship and personhood, bringing even greater demands for individualism, which brings greater freedom in the direction of baser and thrilling appetites, and so on, in downward spiral. In individual- istic societies freedom in personhood is much lowered, whilst freedom in beasthood is heightened; and the bonds of kinship are cut whereby men would be men.
 
Liberals and libertarians, being the fiercest enemies of the freedom of personhood, and the strongest friends of the freedom of beasthood, that is to say, of the liberal haze-ideal of the “individual” whatever that individual may be, must be defeated if the freedom of the person as person is to be upheld. Liberalism, or rather its essential individualism, has a gut-feeling and a canny nose for the breaking-up of everything, even of the person, and it knows nothing of creation. The ideal of individualism can only belittle persons and bring to the fore a bulk of fittingly-blank individuals of the mass — fittingly blank for bearing the stamp of the bureau-technocratic regime.
 
                     

The conformity that is forged today through the atomized individualism that strips men of their personhood has little to do with the collective identity for which men have always yearned. The conformity today is stopgap and takeover of this natural yearning. The atomised individual is stripped bare of his humanity —which has hitherto been actualised in society —and left adrift with his “freely-formed” and “chosen” opinions, which are in truth nothing of the kind. He cannot think for himself, only of himself, as he is suffering a loss. He rebels against conformity in conformity with everyone else.                         

As the subversive mind is essentially individualistic and isolationistic, so is it essentially collectivistic and identitarian: on the view inherent in it, the curse of division and of being ‘set against one another’ cannot be surmounted except by a ‘fusion into one’; an actual identification of consciousness, of qualities and of interest. In fact, individualism (tending towards egalitarianism) prefigures collectivism from the outset, and again, collectivism is only individualism raised to the high power of an absolute monism centered in ‘all and every one’. [2]

Individualism foreshadows mass-collectivism and the herd of ersatz ‘individuals’. With authorities and societies broken down, nothing stands between pressing individual units of alienated humanity, hitherto existing as persons, into mass, each homogenised unit shaped to fit and imprinted with a set of political ideas and economic desires.
 
The pluralism which accompanies individualism is a social dysfunction built on subject- ivistic-irrationalistic ethics. It denies that mankind has a nature and thereby a natural end to be fulfilled. Only by that denial does it make sense to say that everyone has a right to pursue any goals and practice any values which he pleases so long as he does not seek to foist them upon others. And how is that disorder to be managed? Why, by the totalitarian bureau-technocratic state of liberaldom! But of course it isn’t true that under liberaldom one can believe whatever one likes, nor especially what’s ratio- nal to believe. In liberaldom one can believe anything so long as it makes no odds against liberaldom; one’s unliberal beliefs, if they can still bear the name, are to be mild quirks of self, slight hues in otherwise grey smears of bureaucratic massification.
                     
The task of liberalism from its beginning, namely, the search for neutral ground whereon the life of all mankind can rest, and whereupon everyone can seek his own ends, can find its end only in a true neutrality and indifference, and that is nowhere to be found in man except in his unpersonhood. Wherefore it is that liberalism’s struggle to settle the life of mankind can find its end only in the death of personhood; and it is for this reason that the struggle against liberalism is the final and most profound one. Liberalism is the greatest evil that mankind has yet faced, and there is almost no-one to withstand it. That lack of withstanding, owed to liberalism’s having swayed almost everyone to its side, is partly why it is the greatest evil.

1] Aristotle, Politica, Bk.I: 1253a:28-9, tr. B. Jowett, in The Works of Aristotle, Vol.X (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).
[2] A. Kolnai, “Privilege and Liberty” (1949), in Privilege & Liberty & Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed.D.J.Mahoney(Lanham, Maryland:Lexington Books,‘99),p.21-2.

READ MORE...

The other day I received an email from a reader who expressed the same vexing disbelief felt by all of us, I would say, about the role of “the Establishment” in this vast and viscerally offensive phenomenon that has become known euphemistically as Moslem Grooming.

Steve S, I shall call him, asked how, “given the length of time, the quantity of the victims, and narrow demographics of the perpetrators and the horrific nature of the crime” there could have been literally no Establishment response, beyond an implacable will to look away.

Well, Steve, the time period over which the crime has been around is well over 25 years.  Back in 1988 there had been an uproar among Sikhs in Birmingham when girls from their community were targeted by Moslem men.  Then, when news of the first Rochdale trial finally broke into the press (that is, when the press was forced to report it), a retired police officer came forward to report that as long ago as the early 90s he personally was ordered not to investigate victims’ complaints.  Because of the “grooming” nature of the offence, involving supposed boyfriends, drugs, alcohol, and other forms of bribing the girls, it is likely to have been initiated by Mirpuris of the second or later generations. It could have been going on thirty or even forty years ago.  However, it is not limited to Mirpuri or even Pakistani Moslems today.  The BNP has reported that in Wrexham, for example, the offenders are Iraqi.

Given the uncertainty of the time-scale, the quantity of victims is, of course, impossible to assess with any degree of certainty.  The latest assessment for Rotherham is that there have been around 2,000 victims there alone.  But Rotherham, it has been said, is dwarfed by events in Manchester and Sheffield.  There has been talk of “the tip of the iceberg”.  There have been over fifty cases brought to court so far – few of them reported nationally.  The other day I saw someone use an estimate of 130,000 victims from day one – whenever that might have been - and that could be the right sort of scale.  We just don’t know.

READ MORE...

by Neil Vodavzny

Earth Mother I heard on a Jefferson Starship live album on a mud-splattered field (Roswell), and the sentiment could be taken to represent a desire for something approaching the primitive.

This monophonic composition is by the little-known 13th century pet and composer Jehan de Lescurel:

Triste Plaisir is a 15th C rondeau by Gilles de Binchois:

There is something exquisitely formal in the rondeau which doesn’t immediately bring to mind mud-splattered fields. The formality engenders a mental state, languid and dreamy, a state of being in a certain milieu. In Binchois’ case it’s principally that of chivalric etiquette and honour.

In both cases, the formality is a type of art-craftwork, primal feelings honed by a diligent apprenticeship to the craft. To that extent, the style is unchanging to modern ears, hallmark of a tradition. So, by that fact, you sort of detect very subtle qualities of phrasing, allusive lyricism. Subtlety is the chief beneficiary of formality.

READ MORE...

Dr Christian Lindtner, renowned Sanskrit scholar and author of standard reference works on Buddhism and comparative religion, talks to Daniel and GW about his acceptance of the Holocaust as an historical event, and about his latest book, Revelation of Bodhicittam, which uncovers the Pythagorean roots of the New Testament Gospels, and finds the story of Jesus Christ to have been transmitted from earlier Buddhist writings.

READ MORE...

Dr Christian Lindtner, renowned Sanskrit scholar and author of standard reference works on Buddhism and comparative religion, talks to Daniel and GW about his acceptance of the Holocaust as an historical event, and about his latest book, Revelation of Bodhicittam, which develops a thesis striking at the very foundations of the Christian faith. 1hr 32min; 89 MB.