Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 03:54 | #

Le Guin is an interesting author.

Her novel “The Lathe of Heaven” is well worth reading.

It’s quite anti-liberal in its our way - example one of the characters wishes for a post racial world only to alter reality so that everyone is the same dull shade of grey.

The title of the novel comes from the writings of Chuang Tzu - quoted as an epigraph to Chapter 3 of the novel:

“To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.”

I see the tiresome sub C.S. Lewis crap is still being smeared like cyber-shit all over the comments.

Apparently some people - not just Jews - ‘know’ what God wants and its some version of the USA in which uber-ruthless, maximally greedy “individualism” is celebrated/required in economic life (the laissez faire to end laissez faire - Haller’s dog eat dog vision makes Hayek look like a proto-communist) along with some ‘correctly formulated’ Voodoo that will engender a maximal ethos of ethno-communitarian feeling (somehow) despite the said Voodoo (the universal Church as it modestly calls itself) being based on one of the most radical statements of universality in the ancient world - or indeed the modern world!

Add to the completely coherent socio-economic mix (as described above) the notion that all men are created equal with unimpeachable individual rights what could go wrong? Oh wait that all men thing doesn’t apply to all men - oh some restrictions are in place? Really who then are these equal men with inalienable rights? Oh white men with property.

Yes I can see how that’s a formulation to last the test of time - all men equally created, God-given rights etc., but only with a small sub-set of humans ‘counting’ as being among the blessed. Yeah what A really stable formulation. Why I can’t even begin to see any flaws or inconsistencies in that ideological trope. Particular universalism - that’s a winning ticket.

“My philosophy is thus - For me neighbor but not for thee.”

“But why Sir?”

“Why because I damn well say so don’t dare question my wisdom I’m Thomas Jefferson a genius don’t ya know?”

“Yes Sir I can see your logic. Now which ‘non-human’ female would you like to fuck tonight Sir?”

Returning to the God point someone once wrote “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” or even better “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself” which speaks to both religious visions and liberal ontology (especially the American Ideology variant).

But it would be nice if MR could do more cultural items (I’ve tried with bits on Ishiguro and Houellebecq for example) but I fear if we asked for say a review of “Global Christianity – A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population” (at http://www.pewforum.org/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/) the request would be declined especially by MR’s Voodoo faction that are seemingly impervious to the empirical reality that Voodoo’s demographic and political center is rapidly moving towards the ‘global South’ - polite talk for the second and third world.

I doubt there will but much appetite for the Haller ‘project’ of a totally quixotic theology of “racial Christianity” among either the lay ‘wogs’ nor the Church leaders that will emerge from the ‘wog’ masses of Brazil, Africa, China and God knows where else (pardon the pun).

Alternatively perhaps the Voodoo faction could review something on ‘negative theology’?

Say “Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality” perhaps?

see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apophatic-Bodies-Incarnation-Relationality-Transdisciplinary/dp/0823230821

Or say “Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology”?

see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flight-Gods-Philosophical-Perspectives-Continental/dp/0823220354/

I don’t have time to read them. But they all do discuss why everyday ‘God talk’ is pretty much meaningless. And they are ‘believers’.

Sadly I fear we non-Voodoo types might instead ‘enjoy’ an essay review concerning the deep thoughts of say Jack van Impe? Alternatively perhaps the meta-political and aesthetic wonders of Jack Chick’s oeuvre could be explored?

Indeed even an article of 500 words on the topic of why ultra-vulgar, uber-tacky mega-churches and their importance to the future well-being of Europe would be most welcome.

Such an event might, in fact, count as a Humean miracle of a sort!

Sorry to the guest blogger for going off topic!

P.S. I to find those odd graphics on Danny’s stuff very ugly and unappealing.

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 06:04 | #

“P.S. I to find those odd graphics on Danny’s stuff very ugly and unappealing.”

Before the last item was scaled down, I might agree. Scaled down, I like it. Again, I like traditional forms as well, but to set things off, this worked in context. Sorry Graham, but you undoubtedly have some tastes that are not for me either.

The first 14 logo is meant to provide or work toward an alternative to the swastika. There is a version on the first of the identity essays which is a bit rigid, and does not appeal to me as much as the one that flows a bit more.

Anyway, abstract and graphics as such are not destined to be on ongoing tag.

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 06:30 | #

Speaking of that, if you take a look at Counter Currents, they are trying to condition people for several days in a row running hideous swastika art to try to normalize it - according to the title, people are “hysterical” if they see it and its proponents for what they are. Taking that into account you begin to see the reason for provisionally* running some female forms and proposed popular logos as part of a shock, tropism and anecdote.

What the idiot Thorn* is calling “my art” is not mutually exclusive to appreciation of Botticelli, Holbein, Bernini, etc.

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 08:59 | #

This Week in ‘Nation’ History: The European Right—From (Jean-Marie) Le Pen to (Marine) Le Pen—and the Rise of the French Far Right

Katrina vanden Heuvel on March 1, 2014

Next week’s issue of The Nation will feature a report by Stanford Professor Cécile Alduy about the alarming rise of Marine Le Pen and the French far right. In recent years, Le Pen has skillfully, if disingenuously, attempted to scrub her National Front party of the most odious manifestations of the anti-Semitism, racism and outright xenophobia in which her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, specialized during his forty-year leadership of the party. At the same time, Alduy writes, the French mainstream—mistakenly scapegoating immigrants for the country’s economic malaise—has moved further to the right. Whatever the results of local elections slated for later this month and European Parliament elections in May, there is a serious risk that the toxic ideology of the National Front will become further enshrined and legitimized as a driving force in the public conversation—not only in France, but across Europe as a whole.{ed. we can dream!}

Although Le Pen “has managed to put a modern gloss on an old political brand,” Alduy writes, the underlying philosophy of the National Front remains almost exactly the same as it was under Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is perhaps useful, then, to re-examine the behavior of the wolf before it donned sheep’s clothing—and for such a mission there is no better guide than Daniel Singer, The Nation’s longtime European correspondent before his death in 2000. His numerous dispatches on Le Pen père—“the man whose name is synonymous with the recent revival of overt racism in French politics and society,” Singer wrote in 1985—show how mutable and dangerous remains the threat emanating from what Singer, in a recurring assortment of related metaphors, called France’s plague, poison and disease.

In “The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen” (September 7, 1985), Singer wrote of Le Pen:

Smiling, smartly dressed, he now seems—particularly on television, where he is on his best behavior—a frank and reasonable fellow saying aloud “what everybody really believes,” telling people “what they already know,” a man who merely echoes the basic precept of that great American Ronald Reagan: namely, that communism is the root of all evil. A red-faced, rather fat man who warns the “silent majority” against muggers, drug addicts, gays and crypto-pinkos, Le Pen might be described as a sort of French Spiro Agnew preaching law and order, except that he is not of Greek or any other foreign extraction. That is an important difference, because the man and the movement he leads, the National Front, trumpet the slogan “Frenchmen First” and spread the fairy tale that everything would be fine in the streets and hospitals, in the schools and even the factories were it not for the foreign hordes invading France, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean. France would be just marvelous without Marxists, Arabs and other aliens.…

The entry of avowed racists into the French Parliament is not in itself the worst prospect. As the old saying goes, you don’t bring the temperature down by breaking the thermometer…. More worrisome is the underlying ideological shift to the right, the radical metamorphosis of the substance and form of political debate, of which this plague is only a symptom.

Three years later, after the National Front had secured a new level of legitimacy when Le Pen won more than 14 percent of the vote in the 1986 presidential election, Singer wrote “In the Heart of Le Pen Country,” about a visit to Marseille:

Serious trouble does not begin when the men with jackboots or with cloven hoofs opt for fascism. It begins when the tinker and tailor, your neighbor and your cousin, are driven sufficiently mad by circumstances to vote for an admirer of Pinochet, a preacher of apartheid, a man for whom the gas chambers are a mere “detail.” As I looked down from the steps of the station, on departing this outwardly still-warm and attractive town, I could not help feeling that moral pollution is not so easily perceived. All the more reason to probe below the surface, to sound the alarm and, above all, to seek a cure—unless we want to wake up one day, too late, in a fully contaminated city or country.

Singer continued to track Le Pen’s rise throughout the 1990s. His dispatches from the time show an increasing concern about Le Pen’s staying power, and even foreshadows the more recent attempts by his youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, to conceal the party’s underlying fascism by projecting a more smiling, human face:

“The Ghosts of Nationalism” (March 23, 1992):

Although unemployment in Western Europe is now roughly three times higher than it was twenty years ago, it has not reached the proportions of the prewar Depression, nor is the fate of its victims comparable. Although discontent is high, workers are not flocking en masse to Le Pen and his equivalents. The danger for Western Europe is not an immediate takeover by various National Fronts. The threat lies in the gradual extension of the disease: the spread of racism and the weakening of class solidarity, sapping society’s capacity for resistance should a really catastrophic slump bring back another bout of the deadly epidemic.

“Hate in a Warm Climate” (April 20, 1992):

Le Pen has been told that to win votes he must keep his tongue in check, so he’s on his best behavior. He makes no openly racist or anti-Semitic remarks. Yet, listening carefully, you can still judge the man. His reference to Jean-Claude Gaudin as “the bearded woman”—a not so gentle hint about the incumbent’s alleged homosexuality—gives an idea of his moral tone. The contempt he puts into the words “of every race and religion,” describing demonstrators he saw in London, is also revealing. So is his scorn for those who stir up unpleasant memories of World War II: “They only want to talk about Pétain and Touvier” (a wartime torturer, hidden for years by the clergy and only recently arrested). “Whatever the subject, it reminds them of Hitler and Vichy.”

“Liberté, Egalité, Racisme” (October 21, 1996):

In its new posture the National Front is increasingly reminiscent of the prewar fascist movements. Equally worrying is the fact that the phenomenon is not simply French. From Antwerp to Vienna, passing through northern and southern Italy, in the absence of rational prospects, all sorts of forces of unreason are gaining ground. Naturally, the situation should not be overdramatized. The economic crisis is not yet deep enough for a Le Pen to be voted into power in any Western European country. But the poison is spreading. It will not be halted by pandering to prejudices, making compromises, sticking to an increasingly conservative consensus. It won’t be stopped by decree, either. The counteroffensive will require relentless daily battles on the political, social and cultural fronts. If the respectable right is more to blame as the carrier of the disease, the main responsibility, nevertheless, belongs to the left: The rise of Le Pen will not be really resisted until the people, offered the prospect of a radically different society, start struggling for genuine solutions instead of seeking scapegoats. This French lesson, now read throughout Europe, does not lose its validity on crossing the ocean.

“Supping with the French Devil” (April 20, 1998):

Much having been written here about the resistible rise of Le Pen, we can sum up the spread of the disease in shorthand. When François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981 the front was insignificant. Deprived of office, the right invented the myth that growing unemployment was due to immigrant labor, forgetting that however low it would stoop, Le Pen could get lower still. Thus he acquired his stock in trade, imposing a phony debate on the nation. But he was able to consolidate his position only because the left failed to offer a radical alternative. With France experiencing a vague consensus on economic policy combined with rising social misery, Le Pen could appear to be the only outsider, gaining support notably among workers and the unemployed. His queer mixture of Reaganomics at home and opposition to globalization is incoherent, so whenever the social movement is active (as in the 1995 winter of discontent) the front is cast aside. But it recovers, feeding on the economic failure of the other protagonists.

Thus the fate of the National Front is really in the hands of the left. If it listens to the international financial establishment, opting for a deflationary policy and the dismantling of the welfare state, it will encourage the spread of the disease, which no changing of the electoral thermometer will cure. Only if it tackles unemployment head-on, radically reshaping French society, will the left be able to contain a cancerous growth that is already serious, although not yet fatal. The responsibility is historical because…the corpses of the past are still unburied. Pace Hegel and Marx, history may repeat itself not as farce but as tragicomedy.

Of course, the Le Pens have never actually won anything or even slightly arrested France’s rush to racial dissolution, but thank God they’ve tried!

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 09:13 | #

“particular universalism”? No.

“Universal particularism”? EXACTLY!

Human nature fits men best for life in communities of the genetically similar. Isn’t that how man evolved? Isn’t that the heart of “ontological nationalism”?

Let all peoples enjoy territorial self-determination. Do some here imagine that such an arrangement cannot be justified in terms of Christian ethical universalism?

How precisely is it thought that multiculturalism derives from ethical universalism? I’ve never understood that supposed linkage. Multiculturalism at best is an ideology which denies statistically significant group differences, which refuses to acknowledge regular patterns in outlook and behavior among visibly distinctive human groups; at worst, it is merely a rhetorical mask covering a viciously antiwhite, nonwhite nationalist agenda. What has this to do with Christianity (other than the sad fact that many of the modern churches have been partly or wholly taken over by Europhobes, a sociological fact and problem, however, not a philosophical one)?

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 10:46 | #

Leon,

Human nature fits men best for life in communities of the genetically similar. Isn’t that how man evolved? Isn’t that the heart of “ontological nationalism”?

Nothing prescribed us.  Everything emergent from us, both in terms of the life that is lived and the power that treats politically of that life.

Let all peoples enjoy territorial self-determination. Do some here imagine that such an arrangement cannot be justified in terms of Christian ethical universalism?

We do not seek simply to justify a new life for European peoples but to release its expression.

 

Posted by Silver on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 11:44 | #

Lister, put a sock in it, you tiresome little poonce.

some ‘correctly formulated’ Voodoo that will engender a maximal ethos of ethno-communitarian feeling (somehow)

Because a shared religious outlook has never been known to strengthen community infeeling.  Got it.

And because Christians have historically never perceived themselves as belonging to separate nations/ethnic groups and have never attempted to defend those groups against the incursions of other Christians.  Got it.

<blockuote>Yes I can see how that’s a formulation to last the test of time - all men equally created, God-given rights etc., but only with a small sub-set of humans ‘counting’ as being among the blessed. Yeah what A really stable formulation.</blockquote>

Isn’t that the same position you are in?  You’re a hard left shitbag who signs off on all the delusion views of reality that hard left shitbags commonly articulate but you care about racial-cultural belonging (allegedly) so you’re stuck having to make desperate exceptions to those views that 99.9999% of hard left shitbags wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

 

Posted by Thorn on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 13:55 | #

The vivid depiction and description of arrogance—personified:

              Jules Michelet

“We must examine and penetrate the full meaning of the faith, for which we are combating … There is no such thing as original sin. Every child is born innocent and is not marked beforehand by the sin of Adam. That impious, barbarous myth is disappearing. In its place, justice and humanity stand forth. Accordingly, two principles are now face to face; the Christian principle and the principle of 1789. There is no possibility of reconciliation between them. Odd and even members will never agree, neither will justice and injustice, so in the same way 1789 and the heritage of original sin will be ever opposed to each other … Education then will be completely different according as it takes as its starting point the old or the new principle.”

                      —- Nos Fils, Jules Michelet (1798-1874)

—-

What a putz.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 14:04 | #

The Disintegration Loops

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Disintegration-Loops-William-Basinski/dp/B00EBDXZKE/

For a collection of music built around the poignant inevitability of decay, there has been a great many hopeful and inspired words devoted to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops: stunning, ethereal, majestic, transfixing, life-affirming… and for good reason. From its 20-year gestation period to its infamously fateful completion, The Disintegration Loops is one of the most powerful manifestations of the inevitable cycle of life ever committed to tape, even as it documents the inevitable decay of all that is committed to tape. The very passage of time is its most effective instrument.

No ‘act of will’ can save the original tapes.

Listen carefully to this work at a very low volume level, perhaps read some of Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, and afterward if anyone really does still think the piffle that’s contained within the US Constitution etc., and all the other crap produced by the holy ‘Founding Fathers’ contains “timeless truths” about the human condition then I’m afraid gentlemen we will have discovered some authentic philosophical zombies

For most of us the only ‘project’ which can defy the cruelty of time’s work is that of family (on a personal level) and community (on a political/social level).

Off topic - sorry about that.

On topic - “The Dispossessed” is another interesting novel by Le Guin.

Posted by DanielS on Mon, 03 Mar 2014 14:22 | #

Posted by Thorn on March 03, 2014, 08:55 AM | #

There is no such thing as original sin. Every child is born innocent and is not marked beforehand by the sin of Adam. That impious, barbarous myth is disappearing

What a putz.

a “putz”

What a Jew Thorn is.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 04 Mar 2014 01:15 | #

Genetically similar communities, per Salter, may be adaptive, but this is a prescription for humanity not a description. A tendency toward individualism by Europeans can find its origin in both nature, the ecological individualism of Ice Age Euros and in nurture, the philosophical pondering of classical Greece. And while ethnically based communities may be adaptive, it is difficult to maintain them. As a wise man once said, ethnies both cleave and conflict and that too is natural.

Posted by neil vodavzy on Tue, 04 Mar 2014 16:51 | #

Genetically similar communities, per Salter, may be adaptive, but this is a prescription for humanity not a description.

..In part 2 I’m attempting to get at the difference between “outsider” groups and cliques with the mainstream. The Junto is a fairly typical one that Texan Robert Howard belonged to 1928-30
http://rehtwogunraconteur.com/?p=25128

They’re kindred spirits, which is not quite the same as kin. Their “prejudices” and instincts are similar. The liberal mainstream has less of both, or none ideally. Man the mythmaker as I suppose exists in groups of such types, say the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 05 Mar 2014 11:21 | #

Ahhhh, what have I been saying re American Christians:

POLL FINDS EVANGELICALS OVERWHELMINGLY OPPOSE KEY COMPONENTS OF OBAMA’S AND BOEHNER’S IMMIGRATION PROPOSALS

Click here to view the analysis and comments on the poll, and to get the link to view the full poll results:

https://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/beckr/february-24-2014/religious-poll.html

The poll found that most evangelicals oppose Obama’s and Boehner’s plans (1) to give out lifetime work permits to nearly all illegal aliens, (2) to give out any work permits before all new enforcement is fully implemented, and (3) to greatly increase the flow of legal foreign workers.

The moral priorities for evangelical lobbyists are to help illegal immigrants and business organizations..

On the other hand, most evangelicals put top moral priority on helping unemployed and low-wage Americans, the polling found.

The evangelical lobbyists are operating with money from an organization that gets major funding from leftist George Soros and the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been guiding the lobbying strategy for several years now.

BIBLICAL VIEWS

When it comes to illegal immigration, the poll found that three of every four evangelical voters believe that biblical teaching about treatment of foreigners is more of a command to apply the law humanely to illegal immigrants than to give them work permits as is being advocated by both Pres. Obama and House Speaker Boehner.

The Pulse Opinion Research survey of 1,000 evangelical likely voters found that, when considering the country’s unemployed, the overwhelming majority of evangelicals favored fully enforcing immigration laws and reducing legal immigration by at least half. (The 19-question survey’s margin of error was 3%.)

Only 12% of evangelical voters agreed with the view that the Old Testament verses in which “God commands the ancient Israelites to love the stranger as themselves” mean that “the U.S. government should offer work permits and legal status to illegal immigrants.”
Instead, 78% chose the interpretation that God’s command “means the U.S. government should offer humane treatment while fairly applying the law.”
The survey asked evangelicals if restrictive immigration laws violate or follow biblical teachings?

By a 5-1 margin, evangelicals said the laws “follow biblical teaching by protecting the most vulnerable within the national community,” as opposed to the view that the laws “violate biblical teaching by keeping out poor foreigners seeking a better life.”

By a 4-1 margin, evangelicals were more likely to say the government has “a lot” of moral responsibility to protect struggling Americans from having to “compete with foreign workers for jobs” than to say the responsibility is to protect the ability of “settled illegal immigrants to hold a job and support their families without fear of deportation.”

Only 18% of evangelical voters were persuaded by arguments that the presence of so many illegal immigrants as active members of their churches improves the case for granting work permits and legal status. It should make no difference, said 71%.

29% WANT ZERO IMMIGRATION . . .
HALF WANT NO MORE THAN 100,000

The poll found even less support for increasing legal immigration:

only 8% of evangelicals supported doubling legal immigration and 14% favored keeping it at the current 1 million a year,
64% said immigration should be cut at least to 500,000 a year, with half of all evangelicals supporting a limit of no more than 100,000 a year,
29% said legal immigration should be reduced to zero.
Evangelicals showed particular concerns for Black and Hispanic Americans, younger less-educated Americans of all ethnicities and the disabled, all of whom have very high jobless rates and whom many employers say they find it difficult to recruit. Most evangelicals (73%) said that, instead of bringing in more immigrant workers, employers should be “required to try harder to recruit and train” Americans from those high-unemployment groups.

And most evangelicals (68%) said they are willing to pay higher prices if it is necessary for employers to raise wages to fill jobs with Americans instead of adding more foreign workers. Asked to choose between two overall views of immigration:

15% chose that “most people should be able to migrate from country to country since all people are equal children of God.”
75% chose that “nations have a moral and sovereign right to decide which and how many immigrants can enter.”
Half the respondents of the poll were Republicans, 25% were Democrats and 25% were Independents. The margin of sampling error was 3% with a 95% level of confidence.