by Happy Cracker

Why is it that the glimpse of a related physiognomy opens so innocently the floodgates of affection? Why is so much of our ‘liking’ dependent on the face of the person we interact with?

I had a chance to ponder this last month, as I filled a temporary position working for a catering company, and interacting with several thousand party guests - each of whom I had to greet, make small talk with, answer their questions and hand them off to be seated. I myself was determined - regardless of the type of person I was interacting with - to be a non-stop fountain of charm. I did my best to smile as wide, and think as warmly of the other person as possible. This is a technique I’ve learned to convey the most positive image to the other person: think about them as warmly as possible. And although I am committed to the 14 words and the existence of my people, I don’t think giving lukewarm receptions to wogs is going to advance the white cause. So I did everything possible to beam charm at everything that came before my eyes. I looked into thousands of faces, always the same eye contact, and performed the same motions thousands of times.

What I discovered is that physiognomy reigns over us - pre-determining the trajectory of our interactions far more than we would like. There are secret stores of human affection whose access is restricted based on physiognomy - and these secret stores don’t represent gifts which one is conscious of, and thus eager to distribute fairly, but primordial feelings of liking, which spring up innocently from within us and are beyond conscious control. They are thus hard to quantify - it is even hard for people to recognize the subtle influence these feelings have on their dealings with others, in the case of people with limited introspection.

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by Happy Cracker

Frédéric Bastiat was a Frenchmen who lived from 1801 to 1850, in the last decade of his life producing several treatises on free market economics and political economy. He was an enemy of socialism and wrote several books demonstrating the absurdity of socialist economic premises. His writing is notable for its clarity and conciseness; and readers who value their time will no doubt be grateful for his mercifully paired-down writing style, which lets several of his works be read in an afternoon. In addition to these traits, he has value to us for being a non-Jewish voice in the advocacy of economic liberty and against socialism.

I’m going to publish here a smattering - no, make that two smatterings - of various quotes from his work ‘La Loi’ (The Law), a work primarily aimed against socialism and the laws inherited from the government of Robespierre.

Bastiat is credited with the analogy of the Broken Window (sometimes called the Broken Window Fallacy) which basically refutes the idea, common to certain readings of economics, that the breaking of a window as a consequence of a children’s ball game could be seen as causing economic growth, because the glazier has to be paid to put in a new window, thus generating money. He disproves this by showing that the store proprietor has to pay the cost of the broken window; thus while the broken window does lead to increased “economic activity”, it doesn’t in fact result in net wealth creation. Some important statistics frequently used by modern economists have this fallacy built into them, for example, the national GDP - probably the most commonly cited economic indicator in the economic press - would reflect the action of the glazier to repay the window, and could thus be explained by pundits (or any public figure) as signifying economic growth. [Chip in on the comments thread if you know the other reasons why GDP is less useful than commonly supposed.]

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By Happy Cracker

Once in a while a document is published, which puts the human soul so nakedly on display, that one cannot help but stare at it, one’s mouth obscenely gaping, at a lack for words; one is held transfixed for a moment by a mixture of emotions: fascination, repulsion, disbelief tinged with the feeling of having one’s deepest suspicions finally confirmed. That cold rush of adrenaline - a feeling different from the hot rush that comes from racing cars or chatting up girls or getting in fights or soccer - the cold rush grips one, the eery visitor, slithers down one’s back and coils in a knot at the base of the spine.

That’s the feeling I had when famous internet commentator “Spengler” outed himself, and finally, at long last, cast aside the trappings of internet pseudonymity, the oblique angles of attack permitted a detached voice in cyberspace, and finally told the true story of who he is and where he is coming from. He sets the stage thus:

During the too-brief run of the Asia Times print edition in the 1990s, the newspaper asked me to write a humor column, and I chose the name “Spengler” as a joke - a columnist for an Asian daily using the name of the author of The Decline of the West.

Half-way into the story of his pseudonymous origins, he cuts to the chase and presents us with his vision of our death scene:

The old and angry cultures of the world, fighting for room to breath against the onset of globalization, would not go quietly into the homogenizer. Many of them would fight to survive, but fight in vain, for the tide of modernity could not be rolled back.

(That’s us, in case you missed it.)

In the next breath, Goldman aka Spengler points the way to our resurrection - as Jews! :

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By popular demand:

“Dubai’s Lesson to America: How the Middle East’s Shangrai La Became a Hell on Earth”

From the request for this article:

When a group/nation/city/state/territory/etc is not held together by common ethnic/cultural bonds and are instead just a very loose or diverse multiethnic collection of people who merely tolerate and use each other in the greedy pursuit of money and wealth (like the citizens of Dubai did and do) it is only natural that the foundations of such a place or society are rotten and will collapse in short order.

From the article:

I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants, oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. “I love it here!” she says. “The heat, the malls, the beach!” Does it ever bother you that it’s a slave society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. “I try not to see,” she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that, she senses, is a transgression too far.

by Happy Cracker

LindsayWheeler brought up an interesting point yesterday about a return to the Old Order, which he defines as being monarchical rule and Christianity. Permit me to think aloud ...

It seems to me that a fraction of New Right thinkers, who may or may not be represented on this website, desire a return to an even Older Order - i.e. to an order which predates Christianity.

Now we can “return” to an old order, if that order was historically well-documented, simply by imitating the outlines and defining characteristics of that order. In fact, there is no other way we can return except by pretending to uphold the old order and declaring its advent politically. What we are essentially doing is trying to re-enliven a set of past historical circumstances by aping the essential features of those circumstances in our own lives. A fitting analogy would be to say that this is like trying to relive a specific phase of your adolescent past, by gathering together the items you have from those days and doing the activities you did in that phase.

The first thing to understand about this is that this would be a profoundly superficial process. It would necessarily be a matter of recreating the outward symbols and manifestations of the Old Phase, while the context of these actions and the meanings attached to them have been irretrievably altered by intervening experience. One would walk through the forests of one’s youth, dressed in clothes harkening back to those bygone days, all the while listening to music that one listened to at the time: yet the old context cannot be fully retrieved, and what can be retrieved will be viewed through an intervening layer of meta-context which knows this to be a re-enactment of past events. Its strange for human beings to behave in this insincere way.

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This is a bit of a lightweight post that takes me into a world I rarely enter.  But you’d have to live in a faraway galaxy not to have heard this week about Susan Boyle.  Todate, sentimentally-minded YouTubers everywhere have fought back the tears at least 40 million times as overnight this stout and frumpy 47 year old spinster, an unemployed church volunteer, has become Scotland’s least likely superstar.

Since the age of twelve Miss Boyle has hoped to do justice to the gift of a wonderful voice.  The high-point of her efforts was a track she recorded for a charity CD in 1999.  Her chance finally arrived in January at an audition for Simon Cowell’s Britain‘s Got Talent, and this was the show that aired on ITV last Saturday.  Now she has a huge fan base, a fansite, a Sony contract in the offing, and this commendation from Les Miserables producer Cameron Mackintosh, commenting on her rendition of I dreamed a dream:

“Vocally it is one of the best versions of the song I’ve ever heard.  Touching, thrilling and uplifting.  I do hope she gets to sing it for the Queen.”

Singing in front of Her Majesty the Queen, it should be said, is the reward for the winner of BGT every year.  The chances this year of that not being Miss Boyle are negligible to non-existent, and probably less than that.

Well, a lot of clever folks have wiseacred in the world’s press about why this curious little episode has wrought such an enormous emotional impact, particularly in America.  Of course, it’s never enough to say the obvious: that it’s simply a heart-warming and uplifting story, which it plainly is.  No, we’ve been treated to everything from a new anti-capitalist sensibility in these recessionary times to protest against the cult of celebrity to the love of the underdog to the fulfilment of the American Dream.  A particularly viperous Jewish feminist in the Guardian even took the opportunity to berate “us” (in whom it is not at all clear that she included herself) for judging women by appearances.

So I thought I’d also reject the heart-warming and uplifting scenario, and join this motley throng with a few observations of my own.

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by Happy Cracker

Trying to summarize for myself the difference between left and right, here are some ideas I came up with.

The difference between left and right is the question of the right of the struggle for existence to exist. (source: a Soren Renner speech). More precisely, it is a debate of the proper boundaries in which this struggle should be contained.

Both left and right can be broken down into two camps: principled devotees and unprincipled devotees. Either side could be said to have a principle around which it is organized.

The principle of the right is: life is necessarily a struggle to exist.

It follows from that that no intervention is necessary to change that reality. It is the prerogative of the family to ameliorate that struggle - not of the state. The right would merely retain the struggle for existence within it’s ancient boundaries, pre-nation-state. Some exponents of rightist thought would use the state as a means to further pursue the conflicts inherent in this struggle (i.e. the ones the left is seeking to ameliorate).

The principle of the left is: life is either unjustly or unnecessarily a struggle to exist.

It follows from that that intervention is necessary to change that reality. The nearest available mechanism to accomplish that intervention is the modern nation state, and it is the prerogative of the state to ameliorate that struggle - not the prerogative of the family (i.e. citizens and ethny left to themselves). The left seeks to contain the struggle for existence, so that inequality and competition between groups, ethnies and families or classes is contained by the “balancing” (leveling) action of the state.

The Superstate, the Welfare-state, the Command economy, are the result of this principle.

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