Posted by jimmy marr on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:23 | #

Write on, brother.

Posted by Sam Davidson on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:07 | #

Blacks don’t have struggles - they have failures.

Posted by Wanderer on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:10 | #

White Nerd [to Black Security Guard]: “You know, I really like rap music [....]”

I wonder if such a scene ever has, or ever will, happen, anywhere.

(In real life, not as some kind of internal dialogue within the white-clown’s head).

Posted by 8 Miler on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:57 | #

White Nerd [to Black Security Guard]: ”You know, I really like rap music [....]”

I wonder if such a scene ever has, or ever will, happen, anywhere.

(In real life, not as some kind of internal dialogue within the white-clown’s head).

I witness this sort of thing going on all the time. In fact it’s a common happening wherever blacks live in close proximity to whites. At least it does here in the USA.

Posted by sirrealpolitik on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:23 | #

Great topic, PF!

So now not only do blacks from da hood take your tax dollahs thru welfare, grafitti your house, blare their subwoofers, and steal your shit, they also rob from you something infinitely more precious: your ability to have a valid perspective on things. For lack of “struggle cred” ultimately translates into an invalidation of opinion and a disprivileging of perspective.

This is why the American media fixates on “what the blacks think” about any given topic. Obama’s “beer summit” of last year, for instance, was discussed on CNN by no less than 5 black commentators who “gave their perspective” on “the issue,” whereas no advocate for the white perspective was consulted, mentioned, or seen. Nary the slightest peep from whitey. Why? Because whites don’t have a valid perspective on any given topic, ya know, because they have no struggle cred. Struggle cred is the means through which the media privileges the “insights” of lower-IQ Morgan Freeman “magic negros” and Sotomayor “wise Latinas” everywhere.

You can’t underestimate the power of this cred; it is even used as a child-rearing tool. Your kid is crying about not having this or that? Whip out the blacks are starving in Africa card and he’ll shut right up. You might be saving yourself, as a parent, from having to hear a whiny kid, but you are establishing in your child an economy of desire wherein his wants and needs have decimated purchase. He’ll be carrying around this devalued currency all his life (sniff).

It is nteresting that groups that constantly yammer for “equality” or “parity” simultanously get to get a boost up into perspectival valorization by means of—ironically—this perpetual one-downsmanship.

And if you dare to indulge them in this game of struggle cred, as you have described, you will ultimately have to resort to the animal kingdom to relativize and downgrade their cred. Your mamma beat you with a broom handle, eh? Well, dogs eat their own vomit and praying mantises devour each other alive, birds nest in their own saliva and armadillos get squished on the roadside by white hit-and-runners.

Nah, that still will never be “struggle” enough.

Posted by sirrealpolitik on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:39 | #

However…

One way to upset this hierarchy of “struggle,” (which, by the way, the mainstream media will never buy because it runs counter to their narrative) is to simply point out that struggle is not merely some unilateral thing. It has a dynamic. The more sentient the being, the greater the struggle. Put a snail in a jar for a month, and it will hardly know it is in there. It will know no struggle. People who are sensitive and intelligent, however, will be more susceptible to feeling sympathetic pain and existential despair. Their struggles can be more real or more keenly felt than those of the dense dolt rotting in a Supermax.

Posted by Tanstaafl on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:53 | #

Real example.

Chris Kelly: Why You Don’t Care About JournoList:

The problem with the JournoList scandal is the problem with a lot of right wing news: It’s not happening on Earth I, where you and I live. Like the Black Panthers taking over the Justice Department, or Shirley Sherrod’s night raids on Andrew Breitbart’s small family farm or Glenn Beck’s lonely one-man struggle against the Tides Foundation, it exists in a parallel universe that only superficially resembles our own.

A universe where straight, rich white men are the only victims of anything, ever, and shrieking like an infant is their only defense; where Christianity and capitalism are in constant peril, where black lesbians and the very, very poor run everything and Iran has the Bomb and we don’t. And where Andrew Breitbart is Biko, and revolutionary political power doesn’t come from a gun, it comes, under TV lights, out of the puckered, anus-like mouth of a whining pink face.

You can imagine why the people in that universe are so unhappy. You wouldn’t want to live there for five seconds.

Since it’s not real, trying to figure out what they’re complaining about is a chore, if you’re not ready to commit some real time.

Posted by Bill on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:31 | #

It seems to me the liberal league system of struggle is indistinguishable from the liberal league system of victim-hood.

I’ve banged on about this before, how do liberals decide at any one moment in time who is a victim?

The only given is the oppressor is always white, this is unalterable and set in stone.

In the liberal world of shifting sands of victim-hood, how do they decide who is promoted and who is relegated?  Are there different leagues under constant review where victim groups are constantly re-evaluated?

In a one world government where victim group rule rules, it would be imperative to have an up to the minute reference of whose who and which group was in what league and what league position they occupied and which group had been elevated or had regressed.

The victim industry is the basis of our legal system of who gets the goodies.

The biggest victim in all of this is the white male, and in the upside down world of the liberal, the oppressor becomes the supreme victim.  What league are whites in then?

I wish I hadn’t started this, it’s hurting my head.

Posted by Leon Haller on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:46 | #

Only a fool or coward would care what minorities think about anything. “Struggle cred”? Only in the minds of deluded whites. Blacks don’t suffer. They bring suffering upon themselves, and certainly prefer existing in harsh environments than submitting to the rigors of doing something to mitigate them.

Never, never, forget: we whites owe non-whites nothing. They owe us everything! And it’s time we started demanding compensation and reparations from them.

Posted by Wanderer on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:04 | #

I witness this sort of thing going on all the time. In fact it’s a common happening wherever blacks live in close proximity to whites.I witness this sort of thing going on all the time. In fact it’s a common happening wherever blacks live in close proximity to whites.

You often see “white nerds” wander up to thuggish blacks and start chatting about why rap music is so great?

The thought-process in the white’s head is common, no doubt. But if I ever actually witness this event taking place between two humans, I’d have to pinch myself as I’d need help waking up from a surrealist dream.

Remember the movie “Office Space” and its opening scene?

Posted by Wanderer on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:16 | #

sirrealpolitik wrote:
People who are sensitive and intelligent, however, will be more susceptible to feeling sympathetic pain and existential despair.

A good point.

If blacks are in such a dire, desperate situation and life is so hard on them (thanks to the evil quasi-plot of Institutional Whiteness, that needs to be abolished), why are black suicide rates so much lower than white suicide rates?

2005 Suicide Rate
Black rate: 5.1 per 100,000 pop./yr
White rate: 12.3 per 100,000 pop./yr

Posted by PF on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:26 | #

Commenting in clarity from Sirrealpolitik, I like it.

For lack of “struggle cred” ultimately translates into an invalidation of opinion and a disprivileging of perspective.

As you describe, its a tool of psychological warfare against us.

The ‘black reframe’ is always looming as a perceptual tool to make our own perceived suffering invalid.

Its like What Would Jesus Do?, except its, How Much More Seriously Are Nonwhites Suffering Right Now?

HMMSANSRN, foolish child.

High IQ whites are even known to suffer at extremely young ages from ‘existential angst’. One girl of IQ 170 was recorded as laying awake all night, at age 4, with tears in her eyes, realizing that God’s existence would justify the suffering of the world - meaning that if God existed, then all of human suffering was justified, since everything he made would be perfect.

http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10172.aspx

Or, consider four-year-old Jennie. Jennie’s grandfather died several months ago; Jennie is asking questions about death and showing evidence of emotional upset. Her mother tries to reassure her by telling her that she need not worry - she and Mommy and Daddy will live a long time. She will grow up and have children and Mommy will be a grandmother. Jennie responds in trembling voice, “But you don’t know, Mommy. Even children die sometimes. Nobody knows for sure…

Most four year olds would simply accept the mother’s reassurance. Jennie, however, like Greg, is highly gifted.

Consequently, her logical and abstract reasoning abilities far exceed those of most four year olds. They create for her a reality more complex and threatening than that facing her age mates. Like average four year olds, she needs to believe her mother in order to feel emotionally secure. However, her advanced cognitive capacities allow her to see too clearly the faulty logic. She is left vulnerable and bereft of comfort.

Giftedness as Asynchronous Development
Greg and Jennie exhibit a lack of synchronicity in the rates of their cognitive, emotional and physical development. Jennie’s physical development is similar to that of an average four year old, while her cognitive development more nearly approximates that of a child at least twice her age (Morelock, 1991). The emotional needs that must be fulfilled for Jennie’s healthy emotional development to take place are similar to those of other four year olds. In order to feel secure, to trust in the world and to begin to develop her own identity, Jennie requires a certain comfortable predictability in her daily existence. She also needs to have a simple, solid trust in the strength and reliability of her parents. However, the fulfilment of those four-year-old emotional needs is complicated by Jennie’s extraordinary capacity for abstract thought. Her internally imposed demand for logical consistency leaves her emotionally unable to accept anything contradicting it. Children do die. Mommies and Daddies aren’t omnipotent and omniscient. For Jennie - and for other gifted children like her - the world can threaten to dissolve into unpredictable and frightening chaos.

So high IQ people are sometimes subject at early ages to “life threatening epiphanies”, which are basically realizations that they - at ages 8-12 - don’t have the strength to actually tolerate understanding. Thus certain ideas can themselves be traumatic.

Posted by PF on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:23 | #

8 miler wrote:

I witness this sort of thing going on all the time. In fact it’s a common happening wherever blacks live in close proximity to whites. At least it does here in the USA.

I actually said the first line of this conversation - that I like rap music because it describes the singer’s struggle - to a black person while working in a restaurant not far from 8 mile in Detroit. This was some years ago. The response was different though, he didnt chew me out. The post is based on a lady friend’s struggle for struggle-cred, but I used my own words as the springboard for the fictive discussion.

Posted by sirrelpolitik on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:02 | #

Yes PF, not to belabor the point but I think it is a crucial one: Suffering often has as much to do with the sensitivity of one’s perceptions and their ability to mentally extrapolate from their circumstances as it has to do with those circumstances per se.

The discovery of the function of nerves in the 18th century led to a cult of sensibility where both women and men of a refined or “nervous” temperament could weep and sob at the drop of a hat. Of course this kind of thing could/can be taken too far, and was, by poets and pretenders of all sorts who thought they could advertise to the world how intelligent and sensitive they were by always assuming a melancholy demeanor.

But I think there is certainly some truth to this, that intelligent people are more finely attuned to just about everything and therefore to pain as well. Some of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century (think P. Shelley) wrote in this vein, with nerves set all a-tremble by the majesty and mystery of the universe.

But try suggesting that there might be a hierarchy of sensitivity these days. It aint too pc, that’s for sure. First of all, it establishes a hierarchy of physiology. And, more importantly perhaps, it takes away struggle cred from certain currently entitled groups. 

One more thing: If this talk of sensibility seems to praise the crybaby, that’s not my intention. There is a whole doctrine of “sense and sensibility” from - you guessed it - Jane Austen’s era, where it is the shallow (whether intelligent or unintelligent) person who cannot control their emotions. Sensible yet mature individuals keep a stiff upper lip about things. Thus their emotions, denied access to the surface of expression, push down into an even greater depth of feeling.

Posted by sirrealpolitik on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:07 | #

oops, well dol garnet. i dun misspelled my own name (in the post above). i’m so embarrassed.

Posted by PF on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:20 | #

sirreal wrote:

The discovery of the function of nerves in the 18th century led to a cult of sensibility where both women and men of a refined or “nervous” temperament could weep and sob at the drop of a hat. Of course this kind of thing could/can be taken too far, and was, by poets and pretenders of all sorts who thought they could advertise to the world how intelligent and sensitive they were by always assuming a melancholy demeanor.

Yes, funny you mention that.

I think it lives on in Morrissey, who I also quite like. Enough of the British public love him to make him take a high number in certain voting contests about who is the best Brit (or something, cant remember).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_q3xcJVgQM&feature=fvsr

This is really about sensibility, i.e. what delicacy in your feelings are you able to perceive.

There are also movements about being emotionally stuck in certain states and/or imitating them. (Arguably Morrissey could be “about” being stuck in lovelorn whistful despair and Oscar Wilde-style narcissism…)

Emo, for example, is about being pissy and pretend-wounded. Rap is about being tough (emotionally numb and aggressive/fearful). Punk is about being angry & alienated. Grunge is about apathy, confusion, and “unghh”. Heavy Metal is something I dont know about.

People think these states are cool, or somehow that they offer safety. Being tough - at least theoretically, makes you invulnerable to violence. Being ironic, pissy and pretend-wounded makes you invulnerable to seriousness and sincerity, and the obligations of responsibility. Being angry makes you invulnerable to certain emotive appeals, which one is afraid of experiencing. Being apathetic saves you from ever having to show an interest or take initiative in anything.

So cliques of kids get into feeling these states. All this is pretty inauthentic most of the time, but the best expressions will usually be somewhat authentic.

I think that our real emotions when we are not “stuck”, encompass all these things and a lot more, moving in rapid succession. But we are stuck so we tend to emote cyclically.

But I think there is certainly some truth to this, that intelligent people are more finely attuned to just about everything and therefore to pain as well. Some of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century (think P. Shelley) wrote in this vein, with nerves set all a-tremble by the majesty and mystery of the universe.

Gifted people “suffer from” the so-called ‘overexcitabilities’.

http://www.squidoo.com/overexcitabilities

There are five different OEs: Psychomotor, Sensual, Intellectual, Imaginational, and Emotional. A person could have any number of them, but gifted individuals tend to possess all OEs to varying degrees of magnitude. “One who manifests several forms of overexcitability, sees reality in a different, stronger and more multisided manner” (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 7). However, these abilities can cause difficulties in the lives of the gifted. Piechowski, who created the Overexcitabilities Questionnaire used to identify OEs, writes that “the stronger these overexcitabilities are, the less welcome they are among peers and teachers (unless they, too, are gifted)” (Piechowski 287). Because gifted individuals with overexcitabilities view the world through a different lens, communication issues and feelings of dissonance can arise for both those with overexcitabilities, and those who do not have them but interact with people who do. Often times those with overexcitabilities feel that “they are speaking in different languages, or operating from different perspectives, or dealing with different cultures relative to their colleagues, friends or family members” (Lind par. 11).

This might manifest as not being able to tolerate loud sounds, or not being able to tolerate most types of clothing, or bright lights. Also being overwhelmed by the strength of feelings and crying more, being overwhelmed more, etc. This stuff correlates with giftedness, legend has it.

Posted by John on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:01 | #

Yes, funny you mention that.

I think it lives on in Morrissey, who I also quite like. Enough of the British public love him to make him take a high number in certain voting contests about who is the best Brit (or something, cant remember).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_q3xcJVgQM&feature=fvsr

This is really about sensibility, i.e. what delicacy in your feelings are you able to perceive.

There are also movements about being emotionally stuck in certain states and/or imitating them. (Arguably Morrissey could be “about” being stuck in lovelorn whistful despair and Oscar Wilde-style narcissism…)

I liked Morrissey when I was younger because of the mismatch between his balefully depressing lyrics and his cheerful upbeat melodies. It’s like the lyrics matched how I was feeling (at my worst) but the melody lifted me out of it. I think he was parodying himself to an extent. Here’s an fun take on one of his songs from American’s nuttiest psychobilly artist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js_3GuxAgm0 (just listen—he did the video in a record shop in El Cajon California without permission of the management).

Posted by sirrealpolitik on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:09 | #

Being ironic, pissy and pretend-wounded makes you invulnerable to seriousness and sincerity, and the obligations of responsibility.

Indeed, I wish there was a device that could harness all the fake angst of the implicitly eurocentric emo, screamo, grindcore, and viking metal outfits and their minions and turn it into real, “responsible” political action of the kind we might desire here at MR. I have long felt that many of these movements - while often containing shreds of authentic feeling and genuine desire - usually just divert people’s anger and energies from otherwise more politically expedient activities.

Go to a Sonic Youth or Modest Mouse concert (i.e. college indie rock) and you’ll be hard pressed to find a non-white person in an audience of thousands. The same might be said of a euro-folk, country, or classical music concert. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the taxonomies of musical/artistic asthetics in that they are still one of the most effective and natural ethnic segregators.

Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:10 | #

Thank you thank you for the suicide data!!!!!

I hypothesized this before some horrified liberals back in 1994. I said that whites were more sensitive than blacks, which I intuited explained what I believed (though I merely asserted the matter as though it were proved) were higher white suicide rates.

We need to be careful about linking suicide with higher intelligence, except in the most general way. Suicide I would imagine usually grows out of depression. About 4 out of 5 depressives are female (according to an OUP text on depression I read a couple of years ago - title escapes me ... I think it was Understanding Depression, which I read on a friend’s behalf). Females are on average somewhat less intelligent than men (though I think all the difference is in quantitative IQ, while the type of intelligence associated with higher sensitivity is probably more the verbal kind). Of greater importance, as many here will know, men are far more likely than women to be found at the highest reaches of intelligence. Anyone know about male/female differences in suicide attempts (that last word is important: men being more aggressive, I would imagine they are more adept at actually offing themselves than women)?

Bottom line though re other races, especially blacks: they are certainly less sensitive than whites, which I suspect, however, is less due to superior white intellect, or even empathic sensitivity, than to our superior morality (I suppose these traits are all interrelated, however). Whites care deeply about even abstractions, like justice; minorities less so; Negroids (and Arabs) almost never.

But is this a source of racial strength - or weakness? It is like the aesthetic superiority of our genome: wonderful, but fragile. What a world of implications there are, for morality and politics, in that realization!

Posted by Wanderer on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:52 | #

Leon Haller:
...Is this [high morality and introspection] a source of racial strength - or weakness?

Amid rampant and aggressive Multiracialism, it’s a terrible weakness.
In healthy times, it’s the greatest possible strength.

The same is the White-Liberals “Question”. There’s nothing really wrong with having such people in society. People like the New-England Transcendentalists of old, that certain neo-Lost-Causers love to bash. Having such people is actually a great thing. It keeps society healthy and ‘honest’ and innovative and prevents stagnation. People who are real thinkers about life and its mysteries. Having such people ranges from harmless to quite a good thing—As long as there is no existential threat to ethnocultural-continuity. (When there is, all bets are off.)

Posted by Wanderer on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:56 | #

Leon Haller:
Male/female differences in suicide attempts ... I would imagine [men] are more adept at actually offing themselves than women

Here is some corroboration (I don’t know how they estimate attempts, but I’m sure there’s some rhyme to the reason):

2001 Suicides in the USA
185,000 males attempted suicide
555,000 females attempted suicide

25,000 males successfully killed selves
6,000 females successfully killed selves

‘Success’ Rate
Females : 11 deaths out of every 1,000 attempts
Males : 135 deaths out of every 1,000 attempts

Posted by Leon Haller on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:54 | #

Wanderer: Thanks much for that additional data. It is a rather delicious feeling when one’s intuitions are proved empirically.

I agree with your other comments. There is nothing at all wrong with those sensitive souls questing for meaning or otherwise concerned with moral improvement or aesthetic perfectionism. Such persons enrich our lives by their activities.

The problem, of course, comes when this type of excessive introspection occurs in the context of war, whether military or demographic. We need active fighters and ‘reproducers’, not navel-gazers. (Those excessively concerned with any type of philosophy, especially wholly unpragmatic ontology, might take note.)

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:12 | #

The characteristic in SSA’s that damps suicide is a high native self-confidence.  The fitness of self-confidence in a high-r environment in which both males and females are sexually assertive and sexually active by the standards of other races should be obvious to all.  The noisiness and laughter that one observes among SSA’s in their own company are the positives of self-assertion.  Sullenness and aggressivity are the negatives.

Posted by Wexler on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:15 | #

The idea of suffering covers a lot of ground. The sensitive person’s psychic pain, or the gifted child’s existential despair on the one hand. The starving kids in Africa (to use the cliche) on the other.

These are two different things, entirely, but we use one word to refer to them, generally.

I was going to say that the simpler person does not understand psychic pain, and i suppose that’s true, but i really wouldn’t know. Some people are more empathic than others, there’s probably some correlation with other cognitive function.

American Blacks certainly have a soul. At least they used to. The lyrics to blues songs have pretty strong metaphor. So spiritual awareness is evident there. But since that is the nature of folk art, which has been generated collectively over time, the question becomes, To what extent does psychic awareness exist in the individual, vs. the group?

It’s often contended that Whites are more individualistic. If that is true, then this is a good measure of it: They are not only going through the collective rituals, but experiencing them.

Whatever, Jung, collective soul, the cross.

Posted by danielj on Sat, 07 Aug 2010 07:16 | #

I think the person who penned this was a spoiled little brat who’s sufferings certainly don’t compare to mine.

Riddle me this: if Jennie and Craig are so smart that they have the conceptual resources to encounter painful emotional terrain precociously, why can’t the develop the requisite inner strength to overcome the obstacles?

The person who defends these children or the “suffering” of the pampered is lost. Not only is the person exaggerating and inflating their circumstances (like a “second generation Holocaust survivor”) and making excuses for their failings, they are also continuing to engage in the struggle for struggle-cred. Is this bit of irony lost on everybody here?

Posted by MOB on Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:08 | #

Chris Kelly:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446264/

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/01/14/huffington-horror-maher-writer-mocks-death-ann-coulters-dad

http://www.slate.com/id/3774/entry/24954