Peter Singer and that Question again

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, 28 April 2021 06:26.

This morning ConservativeHome, the only really salient website for politically-minded British conservatives, ran an interesting piece by Rebecca Lowe. She is described as “the former director of FREER, and a former assistant editor of ConservativeHome. She is co-founder of Radical.” The latter tells us that she is part of the feminist rearguard action against the trespasses of trannyism on womanhood, her judgement being that the broad offices of state have fallen to it, and it is now a radical act to speak of woman in her nature and whole being.

The article is titled What consequentialism and Peter Singer have taught me about the gender debate. In it she is much exercised by the Jewish radical Singer, and spends a fair part of the article sniping at his approval of parents murdering their disabled babies. But her principal concern is “the gender debate”. It’s a good and properly conservative article but, of course, it does not situate Singer in the wider historical paradigm, the failure to recognise which ensures that conservatives continue operating on the enemy’s ground and on the enemy’s terms.

One ConHome commenter (whose similarity to other such, long-banned commenters of a nationalist persuasion, offering an identical nationalist critique, we need not dwell upon) offered the following, minor observation in an attempt to open a few tight-shut conservative eyes:

FickleFate
Good to see a properly thoughtful article at ConHome raising issues of an importance greater by orders of magnitude than the customary political fayre.

Consequentialists are active nihilists: deniers of all that is content-ful in the human being. What resides in and belongs to us, what we receive from the past, what connects us, what is particular and of the essence of us, what is emergent from our nature, what we discriminate for and, most of all for nihilists, moralise about ... this can have no place in the utopian end time, where all otherness is the same as self, all boundaries and borders are gone, and all human cause, all struggle, all desire, all need, all conflict is forgotten.

That self-estranged and denatured , artificial human estate, sans nation, sans kin and kind, is the final equality. It is not at all at odds with our Abrahamic religious and post-Enlightenment secular philosophical paradigms; which is why conservatives, who stand, in theory at least, against it, can never slough it off. They stand and fight on ground which inclines towards it, and are for the most part captured by gravity, defending only the last slip downwards from the next, but always relenting anyway, always sliding again in the end.

We need a clear philosophical exposition of why it is only truly conservative to level the ground. Scruton strove throughout his life to speak of such. There are some less exalted nationalists and anti-modernists, routinely and mechanically traduced by the crazed left, who speak of much the same. But will you listen, or are you too complacent, too self-absorbed, too materialistic, too disinterested in the struggle for the human tomorrow?

Tags: Conservatism, That Question Again

Comments:

Posted by Thorn on Wed, 28 Apr 2021 16:54 | #

It surprises me not in the least bit consequentialism, moral relativism and the like have become so mainstream. It’s a logical consequence of post-Christian West. Once the moral absolutes taught by Catholicism fell out of favor, the moral vacuum was filled by secular value systems such as consequentialism.

From the article: “trans women are women” TWAW is straight-up societal orthodoxy — particularly in intellectual circles.”

On a personal note, everyone I know who possesses an IQ above that magical 124 mark are supporters of “anti-racism” and the radical gay/radical feminist agendas. Can’t think of one exception. All of them are secular liberals. My theory is it’s mainly social pressure that drives this. Pressure to conform, pressure to identify with what they perceive as socially acceptable to the upper-classes. Furthermore the adherents reinforce each other thus the mindset grows stronger. What’s even more tragic is that mindset has quickly filtered down to masses. Now the hoi polloi are propagating the rot. Can the West/white race recover from this? At this point it looks doubtful.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:31 | #

More on the consequences of Paul Singer’s consequentialism:

Tucker Investigates: What is destroying rural America?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdwH066g5lQ

—
Tucker Carlson’s Critique Of Paul Singer Is Part Of The Reckoning Underway In America
The Fox News host’s exposé on “vulture capitalism” goes to the heart of a debate on the Right about the role of government.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/05/tucker-carlsons-critique-of-paul-singer-is-part-of-the-reckoning-underway-in-america/

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:34 | #

OOPs mixed up Peter with Paul.

Oh well, both of them are gigantic A-holes.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 29 Apr 2021 23:17 | #

BTW, GW, another excellent comment on your/FickleFate’s part.

I had to read it twice (very slowly the second time) to fully comprehend/appreciate your message.

My only hope is more whites could connect with a message such as that.

Most whites, I’m afraid, are indifferent to the value of their inherited qualities. They seem to care less that the real probability of losing those inherited qualities stares them right in the face.

Most whites deliberately avoid contemplating the consequences of their own race becoming a minority in their own homeland.

They don’t even seem to care if the race they were born into goes extinct.

Disturbingly, there is a fast growing segment of the white pop who’re working towards hastening the process of white extinction. (And I’m not talking about Jews doing it to us - although they, no doubt, play a main part in the process.)

Moreover, the segment of the white pop who’re working for white extinction seems to be growing faster than the segment of whites who’re trying to defend and preserve the white race.

Can I be proven wrong?

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 03:25 | #

Thanks, Thorn. ConHome is fiercely moderated, and without a heavy emphasis on conservatism it isn’t possible to make Establishment-critical comment. FickleFate may not entirely believe that Scruton, although undoubtedly the greatest conservative intellectual of his generation, is really the light and the way. On which note, yes, there is much to be pessimistic about. As aware people, we seem to be caught between the two extremes of mechanical pessimism and the complacent assumption that the human spirit will somehow revolt.

Morgoth has a new podcast on his site about the WEF’s Internet of Bodies, which is the development from the Internet of Things. The reductive effect of these technologies upon human being itself is screamingly obvious, and many people who are by no means nationalists will revolt at them. But many, many more shallow, materialistic others will embrace them and become entangled in the monstrous, flattening sea of data, their human beauty and import hammered in to 0s and 1s; all for a digital watch or pair of glasses, and because the novelty of being chipped, basically, seemed a good idea at the time; and, hey, what harm can it do if some super-computer somewhere knows everything about one’s health or one’s day or one’s thoughts. Better than being locked out of international travel or losing your bank account, right?

How are we, who will never submit ourselves to such humiliations, to respond, both personally and collectively, to this creeping anti-human dispensation? After all, technology as such belongs to our cold-climate, northern hemisphere sociobiology. We can’t switch that off! The only chance of an effective response is to find a widely communicable basis for discriminating between good and bad, freeing and enslaving, vivifying and death-dealing. That will have to be thought through soon, it seems. Perhaps a sixties-style youth rebellion is needed to kick the thing off.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 01 May 2021 21:06 | #

More shocking and unacceptable things said at ConHome by this shocking and unacceptable FickleFate person:

https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2021/04/tim-clark-the-sewell-report-is-right-to-highlight-education-as-the-passport-to-a-fairer-country.html

Surely, the moderators must move in soon to stop the shock and unacceptability.

Posted by Dr_Eigenvector on Thu, 20 May 2021 12:12 | #

Surely, the moderators must move in soon to stop the shock and unacceptability.

They certainly make it easy to find your comments in any given thread.

Your avatar name, Comment removed by moderator, is a bit on the bland side if you don’t mind me saying so, GDubya.

You should spice it up a bit, xXxComMentreMovedbymoDerator360noscopeZfortheLuLZxXx, or some such.

Posted by Dr_Eigenvector on Thu, 20 May 2021 12:31 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 02 Jun 2021 16:06 | #

Back again.

https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2021/06/emily-carver-to-really-fight-the-woke-agenda-we-need-a-march-back-through-the-institutions.html

Posted by Al Ross on Thu, 03 Jun 2021 07:35 | #

I appreciated and understood your comments on CH , GW, but I wonder how many readers there grasped the problem which you carefully elucidated.

As we all know , the generation factor often obviates efforts to enlighten, especially when Education consists of Marxist rubbish about anthropoid rubbish :

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-56447682

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 03 Jun 2021 14:30 | #

The first objective at CH is to present conservatism as something other than the usual neoliberalism and neo-Marxism, ie, as a sociobiologically-rooted stance on all matters political that, crucially, does not quite tip over into our worldview. The second is to kick the CH drones into wakefulness. As a whole, the site stands as a bulwark for political shallowness and conventionalism, and is quite viciously policed. So both objectives are, let us say, challenging. But we are in this to fight.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 03 Jun 2021 15:17 | #

I know you are already well aware that white “conservatives” are indoctrinated to think overcoming/defeating racism* is the highest virtue. Changing their minds is an almost insurmountable task. WN has yet to find a formula to do so. In fact WN as currently formulated, actually chases them away.

I’m reminded of Jamie Kelso’s valiant attempt to convince a small group of brainwashed white “conservatives” that it’s in their best interest to defend and preserve their own race. But to no avail.

https://youtu.be/iCdBrAalghY

* Of course they’ve have it pounded into their thought patterns that “only whites can be racist”. They believe it’s incumbent upon whites to defeat racism; moreover, they are prepared to sacrifice their own race to achieve success in their war against racism.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 03 Jun 2021 22:05 | #

Depressing video. Of course, their affliction is nihilism. “Why would it matter if the European race dies out?” is a question so completely devoid of human understanding, so insensate towards human nature, one is left marvelling in silence at the decadence and cupidity of those who ask it. What can one say in reply? Then it cannot matter either if material things are made absent from the world, or pleasure, or egoism, or love? It cannot matter either if the liberal individual ceases to care about its future, and gives itself up to extinction. Nothing can, with any certitude, matter at all. At what point in the declension does it become apparent that a world without human worth and meaning is no longer human because it no longer knows the place of emotion in human Being?

I do not think that any man knows the answer to these questions, and certainly not those whose answer mechanically involves the “spirit”, secular or profane.

Posted by Thorn on Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:27 | #

Nihilists? Only when it comes to the preservation of the white race.

Shelby Steele voiced a simple, but accurate, explanation of why whites react to racial issues the way they do. He says (paraphrasing) “Whites are under great pressure NOT to be seen as racists. Because of that they will go to bizarre extremes to prove they aren’t racists.”

And what is more extreme than sacrificing your own kids - and country - at the alter-of-diversity only to prove you’re not a racist?

That phenomenon is displayed across the spectrum - from left to right. The leftists’ prove their anti-racism by expressing themselves in a blatantly, overtly, anti-white fashion. The right, i.e. “conservatives” refuse to admit whites are under a vicious racial attack. For the most part they pretend anti-white bigotry doesn’t exist ... or it’s not really a threat to their existence. But like the leftists, they, too, believe white ppl are the main perpetrators of racial oppression. They, whether they know it or not, are already indoctrinated by the tenets of CRT. That explains why white “conservatives repeat the misguided mantra: “The Democrats are the REAL racists.” Of course they are singling only the white Democrats as being white racists. In the end, it speaks to a brainwashed mindset.

That vid I posted @ 12 is a good example young brainwashed white “conservatives.” And to think they represent our future leaders?

God help us!!!!

Posted by Thorn on Fri, 04 Jun 2021 23:56 | #

“Of course they are singling only the white Democrats as being white racists.”

LOL! did I ever butcher that!

Correction: Of course they are only singling out the white Democrats as being racists.

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 05 Jun 2021 06:44 | #

I wonder what the CH crowd would think of this demonstration of racial logic :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX_5J76h7N8

Posted by Thorn on Sun, 06 Jun 2021 13:14 | #

I’m not sure what Pedro’s racial makeup is but I sure agree with his thinking!!

The Failure of Facts and Logic
Argument and debate have done nothing but comfort us with our losing principles as the water has risen to our necks.

By Pedro Gonzalez

Truth, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1777, “is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.”

But free argument and debate, though there was plenty of it, didn’t win American independence. By strength of arms and spines, not merely through words, colonists freed themselves from the yoke of King George III.

One of the most pernicious ideas in our time is that facts and logic can prevail on their own against illogic and lies. Conservatives, in particular, have never stopped to wonder why, though armed with reason, the lies their enemies tell end up weaving the very fabric of reality. What they laugh at as insane and irrational today, their children come home repeating as gospel tomorrow.

Consider a recent article in The Conversation by Jennifer Ho, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Writing about the recent rise in attacks on Asian Americans, Ho begins the debate with a claim that is misleading and irrelevant to the point about violence: “White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism.” Ho cites acts of “verbal abuse and harassment,” not violent crimes—and the latter reveals a very different picture upon closer examination.

New York offers the most comprehensive figures on hate crimes in the country. Reviewing that data brought the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald to a very different conclusion than Ho’s.

“A black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker, according to New York Police Department data,” she found. Moreover, in 2020, “blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in New York City, even though blacks are 24 percent of the city’s population.”

“If we include black Hispanics in the black category, blacks account for 60 percent of all anti-Asian attacks in 2020,” she concludes. Contrary to Ho, whites are not the main culprits. But feelings don’t care about facts.

Ho believes that “anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy.” It follows, then, that “when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy.” Put simply, nonwhites have no agency; they are overpowered and in thrall to white racial magic. “White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it,” Ho concludes.

It’s hard to see how any amount of free argument and debate could persuade Ho and her fellow travelers to abandon this position. In the time they have produced reams of columns, pamphlets, documentaries, and books to win hearts and minds, conservatives have lost ground to the ideologues—because that is what they are.

“An ideologue—one who thinks ideologically—can’t lose,” James Burnham observed. “He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation.”

Though they don’t like to think it, conservatives have their own ideologies disguised to themselves as infallible economic theorems and self-evident truths. The answers in any case, as Burnham put it, are derived from the ideology, and therefore not subject to the facts. “There is no possible argument, observation or experiment that could disprove a firm ideological belief for the very simple reason that an ideologue will not accept any argument, observation or experiment as constituting disproof,” he concluded.

There are certainly cynics who sound like ideologues. White guilt is at once masochism and onanism; it is a sign that you repent for your sins and are better than others for doing so. People like Ho, however, are dyed-in-the-wool, totalizing every disparate social problem—real and imagined—under a unified theory of white supremacy. Indeed, the French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff likens anti-white racism to a kind of totalitarianism.

According to Taguieff, the spell of “antiwhite anti-racism” is sweeping through the West. It is now, he says, “politically and culturally acceptable political and cultural racism.” By redefining and resituating racism as a phenomenon that begins with and is exclusive to white people, it becomes impossible for whites to experience racism.

“This militant definition of racism, known as ‘structural’ or ‘systemic,’ further implies a dogmatic definition of anti-racism as the fight against white racism, and nothing else,” Taguieff says. “And if said racism is ‘systemic,’ then anti-racist action must aim at destroying the ‘system’ that produces racism by its very functioning.”

On an intuitive level, many Americans understand that reasoning with this threat is impossible. That awareness has manifested most prominently in calls and efforts to exorcise critical race theory from society, which is a good start.

Going further will require rejecting any rhetorical concessions to the narratives of white guilt or unique American evil and lawfare to protect the victims of discrimination. And wherever possible, people like Ho should be denied tenure and professorships and universities espousing anti-white racism should be defunded. Because, in truth, argument and debate have done nothing but comfort us with our losing principles as the water has risen to our necks.