Lord Salisbury, three times a Conservative Prime Minister and a political giant in a more enlightened age, once remarked, “English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.”  English, no less!  But I digress.

To illustrate the Anglo-centric point a little further, here’s what the New York Times reported on 4th March 1900:-

Regarding Lord Salisbury’s point of view, for some time past he has taken little interest in American politics, and he is averse to any form of an Anglo-American alliance, believing that the Constitution of the United States is unsuited to such a bond.  To use the words of one who is in the closest confidence of the Premier, “the politics of America have such an influence on foreign policy, and render the duration of supreme power so uncertain, that any alliance would kill itself quicker than any one could kill it.”

Lord Salisbury feels under no obligations to foster pro-British sentiment in the United States.  In fact, for the most part he remains in profound ignorance as to the trend of American public opinion.  His idea, as represented by the speaker just quoted, is to trade fairly and squarely without embroiling himself with any extraneous matters ...

Today, though, English politicians - if that is what they really are - have an altogether different view of their and our priorities.  Here’s Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and currently the most powerful Conservative politician in the country, talking to a reporter from Square Mile magazine about Barack Obama:-

“I was looking at him on the news and just thinking what an amazing moment this is, watching his speech in Berlin and thinking what a critical moment this is for America and for attitudes towards what they can achieve amongst the black community.

“If Barack Obama can do it, it will be the most fantastic boost, I think, for black people everywhere around the world.

... I think a Barack Obama victory would do fantastic things for the confidence and the feelings of black people around the world - that they can win.”

Unfair comparison? The last of the great Conservatives ... and Boris. With a friend.

Asked if his words consituted an endorsement of the Democrat hopeful, Mr Mayor said pithily, “Yes”.

Well, I’m just wondering what a time-travelling Salisbury might have thought about Obama and the American body politic, and the “feelings of black people around the world”.  Presumably, he would have held on harder than ever to his boathook, and to English national interest.  He was flatly against what he called “black men” in the English Parliament, and opposed the Liberal candicacy of Dadabhai Naoroji at the 1892 General Election (Naoroji was elected nonetheless and became the first Indian sitting at Westminster).

Salisbury happens also to have been the man who set up the first city-wide authority in the capital, London County Council - something he later came to regret as “the place where collectivist and socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms.”  And, these day, puts them around the nearest example of “black people”, apparently.

In any case, the time-travelling Salisbury would be able to judge from the incumbent at City Hall how completely successful those revolutionaries have been.  We are all MultiCultists now.

By JW Holliday

Leading on from this MR essay, where I asked some questions that needed to be addressed in future updates of Salter’s work, I now repeat and, in some cases, expand upon these here:-

1. Genetic patterns/combinations as genetic interests

This refers to genetic structure, and this has been discussed in detail already – e.g, here.  This is a crucially important point that needs to be expanded. It can certainly be done theoretically and qualitatively based upon the known facts. A quantitative examination would require the services of an objective/sympathetic population geneticist (if such exists - doubtful today) and/or further studies about genetic structure and population differences in said structure. In any case, this topic needs to be addressed in future editions of On Genetic Interests.

2. Compare and contrast kinship genetic interests and adaptive genetic interests

Adaptive genetic interests can be renamed functional genetic interests, since the pursuit of kinship genetic interests IS , of course, adaptive and there is no clear distinction here.

Functional genetic interests are a subset of total genetic interests. A simplistic view would be:-

Total Genetic Interests = Kinship Genetic Interests + Functional Genetic Interests.

That is simplistic because of overlap – some portion of functional genetic interests are also kinship genetic interests, since important functional genes can vary in ways correlated to kinship.

Better:-

Total Genetic Interests = Kinship Genetic Interests + (Functional Genetic Interests – The Kinship Component of Functional Genetic Interests).

Simply put, kinship genetic interests are those genetic interests based upon relative kinship, independent upon the functional consequences of the gene sequences in question, while functional genetic interests focuses on how the gene sequences influence phenotype to make the individual and/or group more competitive, and more likely to pass on distinctive genetic information to the next generation.

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Remember Lester Jones, the interesting social constructionist who troubled to engage with “Recititive” at the Guardian’s “Comment Is Free”?  Alas, shortly after that conversation Recititive was despatched to the gulag by the Guardian mods.  They do like to preserve the intellectual purity of their thought-world, and poor Recititive was judged altogether too polluting.

However, some very similar right-wing swine named “unsanctimonius” is playing with the fire of the mods instead, and today he had an encounter with the aforementioned Lester Jones.  As there are one or two half-useful pointers to debating technique in it I will reproduce the goalmouth moments here:-

The thread followed on a very fine and interesting piece of writing about the illusion of leadership by the (I think) Marxist intellectual Jeremy Seabrook.  It finished with this splendid observation:-

Power and privilege will always find ways round efforts to create economic and social justice. And so it has been in our time. The principal participants in the global theatre are increasingly masks of some gigantic harlequinade or Noh play. The script is pasted in the wings. It is their business to offer prospectuses of freedom and constant improvement to the people, to receive acclaim, to fail, and be scorned and repudiated for their venality and dishonesty. They know this. This is why they tend to expend so much effort providing against the time of their downfall; sometimes corruptly, usually within the loose limits placed upon their right to accumulate and prepare for the day when they will be hounded from power in defeat.

It is the ignoble shabbiness of their role that has created a highfalutin language of “governance”, “high office”, “senior politicians”, “veteran leaders”, “statesmen and women”; as well as the global babble about “transparency”, “accountability” and of course, the “empowerment” and “participation” of the people. The grandiose words are merely decorative. No one should be under any illusion about the emancipatory potential of Barack Obama, and nor should we be quite so vengeful over the shambling figure of Gordon Brown who strings together cliches much as our grandmothers knitted kettle-holders. Their destiny is to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, to exit and not mess with the decor.

“Unsanctimonious” duly praised Mr Seabrook thus (trolling ever so slightly, you understand):-

An informed and eloquent article in a desert of wrong-headedness. Thank you, Mr Seabrook.

However, you omit to mention that the power elite are not merely corporatists but are also coldly determined anti-nationalists whose primary assault on our lives is not economic but racial. The power elite is bound to attempt to kill the most stubborn and salient point of resistance to its absolutist ambition, which is the ancient European state tied to and defended by its people.

Nation-killing and race-replacement immigration - all wildly applauded by the dumb and self-loathing, universalist left - is a power elite crime against humanity. When are you, Mr Seabrook, going to break with your universalist principles and defend your people and their homeland against this attack?

And off we went. Lester Jones, defending his ideological turf next in the thread:-

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“Big Brother” - the king of reality shows - is, they say, coming to the end of the road.  But then along comes Obama to prove that our life as passive consumers of shallowness and narcissism is not over yet.

The 44th President of the United States, apparently, graced Britain with his presence on Friday - a busy schedule of private meetings and no more engagement with the public than the inevitable sight-seeing photo-calls and a quick appearance outside No.10 (the impudent demand to address both houses of Parliament having been rejected on grounds of protocol).  That left little opportunity for we Brits to guage the exact degree of “greatness” Obama is supposed to have about him, falling from his lips and his fingertips like so much fairy gold.  Just as well, really.  We are in a politically carnivorous mood, and probably not well dispositioned towards snake-oil salesmen.

But not so the 200,000 “people of Berlin“ who renounced critical thinking to stand for 45 minutes and listen to what, I suppose, the American media will sell as Obama’s JFK moment.

Because every Democrat candidate has to lay claim to something of Kennedy.  Jimmy Carter had his hairstyle.

Now, everyone should read Obama’s testimony to his own coming greatness and all-round magicality.  So I reproduce the speech in its entirety here:-

“A new generation ... common humanity ... the greatest danger of all ... my father ... give our children back their future ... the moment to stand as one ... listen to each other ... keep the promise of equality and opportunity ... banish the scourge of AIDS in our time ... the road ahead will be long ... the walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrant cannot stand ... learn from each other ... Christian and Muslim and Jew ... aspirations are bigger ...  America cannot turn inward ... will we welcome immigrants from different lands…  trust each other ... this is the moment ... shun discrimination ... our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom ... you too know that yearning ... live free from fear and free from want ... Berlin ... people of”

There.  I think I got it all.

Well, it flirts with a truckload of vacuity.  Can’t deny that.  Alright, there was some foreign policy substance: Obama wants to withdraw American forces from Iraq over a sixteen month period, though only to commit them to Afghanistan.  Or possibly the Horn of Africa because, you know, what‘s happening down Darfur way shames the world, and America cannot turn inward.  Etc.  But getting out of Iraq is certainly a positive.  And, though it wasn’t part of his speech, so is the left-Dem line on NAFTA that he has taken thusfar.  But beyond these and a few other scarcely detailed policy hints, everything but everything is 100-octane aspiration.  John Gast should be raised from the dead to paint it.

Now, obviously, it’s mighty tempting to swing a wrecking ball at anything that has 200,000 naïve Germans swooning over a junior American politician on a dais in Berlin.  But let’s set temptation aside, and also cease accusing this poor man of shallowness, narcissism and having unfortunate ears.  Instead, let’s consider what Obama-speak might portend for white America.

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Several times over the days since his capture I’ve toyed with putting up a post about Radovan Karadži?.  The angle would have been to speculate on his trial strategy ... on whether there really is forensic evidence for the Srebrenica massacre ... on whether the wider claims of a Bosnian genocide actually stand up ... on whether the issues will remain as clear as the prosecution would want, or whether the realities of Western geopolitics will be forced into the open, to overtake the moral standard.  In a word, will Karadži? do what Miloševi? did prior to his death, and lead the Court by the evidential nose.

But the deeper I got into the researching the issues to a depth sufficient to float the intellectual boat, the more I learned how little I understood, or really have any likelihood of understanding, this extraordinarily dark and challenging event.

I did not understand the region and its peoples and their tremendously complex histories.  I did not adequately understand the Bosnian War itself.  I did not at all understand the legalities and precedent involved in bringing a case before The International Court of the Hague.  I did, I felt, understand the geopolitics of Nato in Bosnia and of the importance to the West’s interests in Serbia of bringing Karadži? and Mladi? to “justice”.  But it wasn’t enough.  Discretion won and I deleted my notes.

Karadži?, however, remains a charismatic and slippery figure, comic in his disguise but also admirable in the roguish but resourceful way he lived.  But he still has that word “Nationalism” attached to him and his, we are told, pitiless, genocidal deeds.  For us it is an unjust attachment because Nationalism is not that, but is something born of love.  Still, those who strive to darken Europe at dawn don’t baulk at such distinctions nor hesitate to use the spectre of Karadži? the War Criminal for their purposes.

We are bound to respond in some way, and this post - a not-post, really - must suffice.  Feel free to broach the issue however you please.

Apparently, you and I are criminals.  Or possible animals.  I never got to find out which.

Yesterday at midnight in multicultural Greenwich - the Observational one, not the beatified Mr Ginsberg’s - erstwhile MR luminary JWH alerted me to a rather Sub-Condescending thread at GNXP.  Ever the sharp-eye, he had already posted on it at Western Biopolitics (which, if it isn’t already a staple read for you guys, darn well should be).  He thought I should get up to speed.

So here’s the gist.

Godless Capitalist, co-founder of GNXP and the attack-dog of South Asian cognitive elitism in the Kwa, took it upon himself to contribute to a GNXP thread on Steve Sailer’s self-promoting VDare review of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s book, Grand New Party.  THE political book of 2008, apparently.  Anyway, I will return to it shortly.  First, let’s deal with gc.

Now, both Douthat and Salam - a “Bangladeshi-American” like Razib Khan - are editors at TheAtlantic.com.  Douthat had put up a couple of posts on Sailer’s review, the threads to both of which degenerated into the usual, pointless argument with difference-deniers and the kind of mental dross which manages to make every third word “racist”.

On July 10th Razib - he, we must presume, of the vindictive inter-racial porn link - posted a short entry headed Sailer on Grand New Party.  The thread to this post also got a bit stuck on sticking it to the racially-aware white American - but in that special GNXP way, since the Sub-Con cognitive elitist’s promulgation of human difference is what makes him cognitively elite.  In this spirit Razib unburdened himself of the under-capitalised observation that:-

i don’t think ethnic nationalism is malevolent as such. but it has been pathologized among white americans to such an extent that a disproportionate number attracted to white (as opposed to irish or scottish or whatever) identity tend to have bizarre and unattractive personalities.

Now, a dispassionate, socially scientific mind encountering this unpleasant point of view for the first time might, having established that black racial consciousness and Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism are flourishing all over, ask itself whether “ethnic nationalism” has really been pathologized, or just white racial consciousness.  And if it is the latter, why?  And by whom?

Well, by Razib and gc, for one.  Er, two.  Here’s the latter’s response to his pal:-

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I will begin with a confession.  I haven’t kept up sufficiently with the growth of bioethics in American colleges.  I seem to remember a few years ago reading about the setting up of special “bioethics” departments.  MR touched upon the issue here.

Hardly surprisingly, our take on it then was that the liberal-left and Jewish ethno-centric reactionaries were instituting a strategy to control any damage that genetic science could do to the lovingly-constructed lie of “Race Does Not Exist (and if it does, It Does Not Matter)”.

Ten days ago Stanford University came forward with a portentous set of “Ten Commandments” on race and genetics.  The Stanford Group of, yes, ten not overly Jewish hard and soft science folk issued it in the form of a letter.  There have been many responses to it, but not much that I’ve seen from the radical end of the market.  So I thought I would pitch in.

The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

Statement 1: We believe that there is no scientific basis for any claim that the pattern of human genetic variation supports hierarchically organized categories of race and ethnicity
The equality of rights of all human beings is an unquestionable, moral claim that cannot be challenged by descriptive, scientific findings. As a normative commitment, equality is fundamental to our conception of human rights, and is not open to debate. Classification by racial and ethnic categories has, at particular moments in history, been used to further racist ideology. In view of concerns that linking of emerging genetic data and race/ethnicity categories may promote racist ideologies, we emphasize that there is no scientific basis for any claim that the pattern of human genetic variation supports hierarchically ranked categories of race or ethnicity. Furthermore, we abhor any use of genetic data to reinforce the idea of between-group difference in order to benefit one group to the detriment of another.

Let’s rewrite that.  All seats are created equal.  Discrimination against a comfy settee because it doesn’t perform well on shooting expeditions is seatist and against the all-conquering morality of Seat Rights.  Intolerance of any design of seat is intolerable.  And will not be tolerated.  Obviously.

Well, I’m sorry to be flippant.  But, really, how is one to react when ten learned men and women adumbrate for months over their supposedly seminal and morally Olympian task and come up with … that trash.  Frankly, I am embarrassed even to have to take it seriously for the purposes of this response.  There is no ethics here, just tenured Nazoid fantasy.

The simple response to give, of course, would be to state that equal treatment under the law is all any person or group requires or deserves.  Oh yes, and maybe make it clear that equality is not a moral value at all, never mind an unquestionable one.  It is, in this present context, a rank refusal to measure Man, made for the purposes of maintaining a political deception.

First impressions have turned out to be right, and bioethics is revealed precisely as the deceitful, faux-moral left inveigling itself into the scientific process to still-birth inconvenient findings.  But no matter.  Knowledge is far superior to, say, wealth redistribution or culture war, and this garbage is nothing better than anti-science.

In 1927 Carl Schmitt wrote in The Concept of the Political “Ethical or moral pathos and materialist economic reality combine in every typical liberal manifestation and give every political concept a double face.”  For “economic“ substitute “racial”, and observe the two-faces of liberalism - the claimant to high principle and the wilful wrecker of our European life.

Statement 2: We recognize that individuals of two different geographically defined human populations are more likely to differ at any given site in the genome than are two individuals of the same geographically defined population
Research in human genetics has highlighted that there is more genetic variation within than between human groups, where those groups are defined in terms of linguistic, geographic, and cultural boundaries. Patterns of variation, however, are far from random. We recognize that human population history, including major migrations from one continent to another as well as more short-range movements, has led to correlation between genetic variation and geographic distribution. This finding is particularly true of indigenous peoples; populations characterized by a high degree of interaction with neighboring groups adhere less to these patterns.

Well, thank you very much.  I think!  But let’s get it out in the open, shall we?  Do two Icelanders have more DNA in common with yeast than with each other?  Perhaps.  But it doesn’t matter, because Icelanders are Icelanders and yeast is yeast.  What matters genetically is what makes one an Icelander and the other only yeast.  Or Han.  Or Bantu.  Difference is what matters.  Difference is what we value and understand, and live to advance.  Difference is the product of adaptivity, without which there would be no science, nor would there be Man, nor life.

Evolution and reproduction, and the combination of the two in natural selection, are the great tricks by which life arose and clung on in the margins.  Who can say how many hundreds of thousands of times it was generated, only to disappear again before these tricks were incorporated within?  Denying their value, and the value of the distinctiveness which they engender, is more than anti-science.  It is anti-human, anti-life.  Until recently, the scientific Marxoid left did exactly that.  But now it has to admit that it can’t get away with it any more.

But, golly, you can see that it’s not happy.

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Incompatibility is an issue somewhat at the heart of the analysis on these pages.  But incompatibility came back to haunt us on Thursday when an argument developed between an automatically updated software component and the basic system we run.  The updated component won and took us off-line.

My apologies for that, and the inordinate amount of time wasted while I looked for a solution in all the wrong places - not, I hope, a characteristic of anything else that goes on here.  Anyhow JR resolved the problem within three hours of getting involved, and here we are again.

Thanks for keeping faith with the blog.