Posted by D.E. Johnson on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:11 | #

Oh for crying out loud.  Look at the painting.  It’s the eyes, dammit.

Posted by D.E. Johnson on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:24 | #

In all fairness, we should include for purposes of examination an image of Mona
Gorilla:

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:37 | #

By Darwin, no doubt.  Which rather proves my point.

Don’t you like art, DEJ?

Posted by D.E. Johnson on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:00 | #

By Darwin, no doubt.  Which rather proves my point.

Don’t you like art, DEJ?
Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 12:37 AM | #

Not Darwin, but some Jews, back in the 1970’s.  Which rather proves my point.

I don’t have a problem with art, but it’s a really subjective thing.  I even like the Mona Lisa, but I don’t care for all the speculation about that skewed smile, which detracts from the overall experience.  I have never believed that the artist was focusing on the smile in the first place, but I have no more proof of that than anyone else has proof against it. 

You seem to want certainty, where mystique - rightfully, in my opinion - prevails.  So be it, I don’t mind.

There is certainty, however, in the Mona Gorilla.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:19 | #

Go here for a debunking of the century-old-and-counting “modern abstract art” scam:  great art site!

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:02 | #

DEJ,

The post is not about art, of course.  I mean, you do know that the end line doesn’t really say, “And on that the Madonna Lisa is as alluringly enigmatic and unhelpful as ever.”  It says that myth, ancient or modern, in the service of teleology offers no clue as to its eventual utility.  OK?  That’s the problem for a materialist (or empiricist) like me ... that and the problem that materialist philosophy is a tethered and, ultimately, uninspiring thing.

The nationalist Philosopher’s Stone, therefore, is the elusive thought which unites European-America’s materialism and Europe’s reification of its mythic spirit ... its tendency to teleological dreaming.  Without this synthesis we cannot develop a world of ideas that can stand in opposition to liberalism, and call to our peoples to look up from their preoccupation with self, and to move away from danger.

Posted by rustymason on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:06 | #

“The nationalist Philosopher’s Stone, therefore, is the elusive thought which unites European-America’s materialism and Europe’s reification of its mythic spirit ... its tendency to teleological dreaming.  Without this synthesis we cannot develop a world of ideas that can stand in opposition to liberalism, and call to our peoples to look up from their preoccupation with self, and to move away from danger.”

Kannst du das in Englisch sprechen, bitte?  I’d really like to hear more of these kinds of ideas today.  Larry is on a related subject today:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009677.html

Donkey’s Ear,
Rusty

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:58 | #

Political correctness?  Oh Larry!

I wrote that sort of stuff once upon a lifetime, albeit it from the standpoint of actual Conservatism (ie, “the natural good”, meaning adaptive behaviours, expressed as social conservatism and thence broadened and politicised into historical English Conservatism).  The parting of the thought-ways between me and Larry lay not at the end of the reasoning process, but its beginning.  Adaptive behaviours are race-specific - they are particular to the people of the land, and we are not Larry’s people.  It doesn’t matter how often Larry attempts to culturise the argument on religious terms, or how often he decorates and demonises the racial alternative with those little Godwin moments, we are not Larry’s people.

That said, Larry’s definition of liberalism is plain wrong.  It’s the Frankfurt Heresy: the belief in equality and non-discrimination as the ruling principles of society.  While designed primarily as a vehicle of ethno-aggression, the FH does a passable imitation of a means to the unfettered will - the real end of liberalism (which is, therefore, properly defined as the pursuit of the unfettered will).

Why would Larry, universally acknowledged to be a sharp-minded guy with oodles of philosophical nous, get this so wrong?  Why would he incorporate a recent Jewish political revision of non-discrimination into his definition of a - whatever we think of it - great and long-lived Western philosophical tradition?

Oh, of course ... he has to make the ethno-aggression difficult to see.  And for our part, we must all work constantly to eschew that dratted “Nazi-like tribalism”, and contemplate only “society” and such fuzzy benevolences as “the traditional moral order of a society under God”, and “transcendent and traditional goods”.

Meaning we have to include Larry.

Well, no.  And it’s not that we are unreasonable to the point of goose-stepping.  If Larry spoke our truth, Larry would be assimilable.  He doesn’t.  He dissembles.  He is obstructive.

Larry, goodbye.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:14 | #

Kannst du das in Englisch sprechen, bitte?  Well, maybe the post was a little bit about art.

Posted by rustymason on Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:57 | #

GW,

I understand that LA’s solutions fall short of what Whites really need (i.e., will not allow Whites true self-determination), but could you please explain a little more about the FH and its relation to what LA is saying?  Aside from his obviously silly comment about “nazi-like tribalism,” what else do you think he is getting wrong?  Thanks.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:24 | #

This is my opinion, Rusty, and mine only, not drawn from any authoritative source.  To make sense of it you need to remember that in my political universe liberalism is ALL - not just a name for leftism.  Conservatism does not actually exist at all.  Conservatives are liberals.  White nationalism exists, but on a different existential plane entirely.

Now ...

The leverage of classical economic Marxism into what, in the 19th Century, had been working-class European self-help movements was achieved in the main through busy little Jewish bees in the left-field body politic, aided and abetted, of course, by the usual useful-idiot self-haters from the host ethnies.  More than by weight of numbers, it was achieved through position in the movements and an intellectual critical mass.  Oh, and let us not forget that special talent for finance.

For all that, economic Marxism never stormed the barricades as it was intended.  The battles it won were for the soul of the left, and it lost that struggle eventually, too.

But the astonishing transformation of the cultural equivalent into, as Larry nearly says, the core value of the postmodern liberal zeitgeist is another story entirely.

It could not have been achieved through the same renegade elements, the same array of forces that served the economic variant.  The capture of the commanding heights of government, academia, the media et al all over the Western world - truly the capture of the Western polity with staggering speed and uniformity - can only, in my opinion, be explained by the making ready of the way by governments themselves, and by the seedcorn of elite-funded institutions, research programmes, university chairs and what-have-you.  It happened by invitation and by commission.

Otherwise, we have to believe that the work of the (I think) sixteen Jewish intellectuals and one very junior Spanish-German student in Frankfurt was of such moral and philosophical significance, it was equal to this enormous revolutionary task.  It was manifestly NOT of moral or philosophical significance.  Its carefully calculated product is the destruction of the European male and the European family, a profoundly negative value for any “government of the people ...”.  Obviously, outside of academia this value was never argued in plain sight.  It was wrapped up in the Marxist lexicography of equality and the extention of freedom, and coerced on an unwilling population through repressive law.

So, I’m saying here that liberalism was recast by the same people, and for substantially the same reason (war against the European male and the European family) that breakneck immigration is officially boosted all over the West.

The philosophical goal of the new liberalism is, of course, the Frankfurt Heresy.  Larry describes it with inadvertent aptness as “the belief in equality and non-discrimination as the ruling principles of society”.  These are not liberalism’s core values.  They are Jewish political values - or, more accurately, labels for an ethno-centric strategy.  Non-discrimination, of course, was never any sort of liberal value until the 1960s and the advent of race politics.  That’s why, in classical liberal terms, it is a heresy.

But Larry is pleased to retail it.  He is a pretty conventional American “right-winger”, so he divides the polity into liberalism and conservatism, and establishes them in relationship thus:-

To achieve this universal freedom and equality, the ability of actual peoples to define and govern themselves must be eliminated.

In other words, classical liberalism’s great goal of the unfettered will, which he presents here as self-autonomy, is a Conservative value!  Liberalism, or “the left”, is moved all the way to Frankfurt-am-Gentile.  And in this false political universe white advocacy is “Nazi-like tribalism”.

It’s all very nice and pat, very convenient.  But it is not true.  Larry the crypto does not tell the truth, because the truth stands with WN.

There’s nothing one can do about it - there’s no dissent at VFR - but read Larry Auster with special care, and tell those who admire him to do likewise.

Posted by bbgun on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:47 | #

Have you read Adorno GW?

If Adorno was Jewish, why isn’t Fred Scrooby - where do you draw the line and why should we respect your call?

Posted by D.E. Johnson on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:26 | #

GW,

You are an odd sort of materialist, never mind empiricist.  In fact, you may be the sole specimen of such - at least in my experience.  It seems quite difficult to me, to absorb the meaning of a synthesis of mythos and materialism.  I don’t quite get it.  Exactly where is the line between “European-America’s materialism and Europe’s reification of its mythic spirit”, and who draws it?  Does such a dichotomy actually exist in the first place?  Is it desireable? 

Is that what you’re trying to get at?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:36 | #

“If Adorno was Jewish, why isn’t Fred Scrooby”  (—bbgun)

I feel I have to respond to this again (I never should’ve mentioned my grandparentage in the first place — it gets tiresome responding to this.)  My formal religious upbringing was a little complicated.  What there was of it was Catholic.  (There wasn’t much of it — I did get sent (at the insistence of the German side of my family and after a late start) to what was called “Catechism” and I got to make my First Communion but was pulled out of Catholicism about half-way between that and Confirmation, so was never confirmed.  From that point on I was taught atheism and to make fun of organized Christianity — which came as a huge shock to me, little child that I was.  All the big atheists here, Al Ross, Scimitar, Friedrich Braun — I can out-atheist all of them, the whole lot:  I can make all their arguments for them, often better than any of them.  I smile benignly and pay them no attention because they have no idea what they’re talking about, none, zero.  I rediscovered Christianity in a long slow process that started right after I left college and ended around my early or mid-thirties.  My religion is Catholicism because that’s the religion I remembered from my childhood when, as an adult, I rediscovered Christianity and sought to get back to it.  Catholicism is the only formal religion I ever had.  My mother absolutely abhorred Christianity, my father was, to all appearances, indifferent to it, never practiced it, and the ones insisting on it were the Catholic Germans of my father’s family, some in New York City, most in Germany.  So for me it’s also a German thing, part of my German heritage.)

I have some Jewish ancestry at the grandparent level, ancestry which in no way makes me Jewish or “part Jewish.”  There isn’t a Jewish one-drop rule — or, there certainly isn’t one in my case.  I am in no way Jewish.

Posted by rustymason on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:43 | #

I see.  Did you argue the FH or something like it to Wintermute?  It was you or someone else here on this board a year or so ago, IIRC.  WM regularly curses that stinkin Frankfurt school.  Do you think WM gives the FS too much credit?  Interesting, I’d never thought about it.  I didn’t understand the argument then; it seems to make more sense now. 

I suppose I have always considered the FS as the Lizards’ kitchen.  I didn’t really consider exactly how it would have affected the West in any detail.  Perhaps I too have been giving the FS and Liberalism too much credit.  It’s hard for me to tell.  Id est, How do I know that classical liberalism wouldn’t have morphed into it’s current form by itself, through Spengler’s natural civilization-degeneration process?

Posted by rustymason on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:47 | #

Oops, Fred posted before me.  My last comment was to GW.

Posted by bbgun on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:29 | #

Fred, my question was for GW, and religion was immaterial.

The questions you raise are for GW, Salter, and the ultimate-interested variously defined and pseudonymed.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:14 | #

Fred: “I smile benignly and pay them no attention because they have no idea what they’re talking about, none, zero.”

This is literally, inevitably true.  Those of us devoid of faith can witness the absence of it.  We should be cautious in attempting more, “witness” the telling difference between my gauche offering at the head of this thread and F. John’s at the end.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:46 | #

bbgun,

I purchased an English translation of Theodor Adorno’s declaration of profundity, The Authoritarian Personality, maybe thirty-five years ago, amidst an eight-year splurge of autodidactic reading of assorted philosophy and psychology.  I remember I gave up on it after a long and hard battle with its unreadableness.  It wasn’t my idea to read it anyway. 

Anyway, I certainly don’t remember smelling out the heady scent of individual freedom.

Incidentally, Adorno’s parachuting into the Rockefeller Institute’s Radio Project is a fine example of the seedcorn approach to Critical Theory adopted by the American authorities and elites of the period.  Here was a life-long revolutionary Marxist with a critique of European Man rooted in Jewish ethno-aggression, and yet he was welcomed into the Land of the Free, and then to the academic fold, and provided with every means to pursue his, one would have thought, highly un-American “interests”.  Why, exactly?

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:36 | #

Rusty,

The somewhat historicism-laden question about whether classical liberalism contained everything necessary to develop into, say, a vehicle for transsexual rights and gay marriage is a pretty good one, and worthy of proper investigation some time.  Some attention to it was given by Jim Kalb at Turnabout all of four years ago, and he found no Jewish intervention requisite in the process.

I question that finding.  Certainly, when autonomy is the highest human value, and when Locke’s Tabula Rasa is understood as the page on which a picture of self is drawn by other, perhaps unkind hands, and no autonomy can attach to it, the pursuit of ever more extreme and unlikely forms of self-authorship may be predicted.

Still, the form of that pursuit is open to challenge, it seems to me.  Christianity contains quite sufficient universalism to extend to “the different” without declaring an overt war on Nature and normalcy.  Further, the spiritual tradition pursues perfection of the self through detachment from the acquired, not from the inate.  How come it was the inate, then, that copped it with advanced liberalism?

The excuse as given by left-liberals is that the oppressor is also freed when the oppressed is rendered equal in worth.  Well, do the math.  Male and female homosexuals comprise, say, 1% of the population.  Ninety-nine times as many very perplexed people must be “freed” from their natures as there are poor oppressed dikes and whatnot.

Democratic precedence and the laws of economics surely dictate that it would be more efficient to free homosexuals from their natures.  After all, they are socially constructed.

So, does any of this sound like a serious focus for philosophical contemplation?  The great themes in philosophy are Man, Woman, God and Nature.  How did we get stuck with this rubbish about a couple of saddos fiddling about in the public toilet after dark?

The literal answer is Critical Theory, of course.  But for me that is a synonym for another word, plural, four-letters and beginning with J.