[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Frank Kemp Salter is an Australian academic and researcher. Most of his career was at the Max Planck Research Centre for Human Ethology, in Andechs, Germany. He is best known for writings on ethnicity and ethnic interests. He studies political phenomena using conventional methods and the theories of behavioral biology. He has written about hierarchy (Emotions in Command, 1995), indoctrination (Ethnic Conflict and Indoctrination, 1998, edited with I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt), ethnic altruism and conflict (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism, 2002, Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity, 2004), and genetic interests (On Genetic Interests, 2003). In a review, Jared Taylor called On Genetic Interests “a vitally important contribution to our understanding of the significance of race and ethnicity in human affairs.” Dr. Salter has also been an adviser to Australia’s populist One Nation Party.
Grégoire Canlorbe: You write about the biological underpinnings of the obedience to one’s superiors in a hierarchy, especially in a bureaucracy. Please tell us more about this.
Frank Salter: In writing Emotions in Command, I observed command-giving in many organizations, from the military, to courts and parliaments, to nightclub doormen and theatrical rehearsals. The methods and observational categories were very much in the ethological tradition of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, whom I later joined as a colleague at his Max Planck Research Centre.
I expected to find dominance, and did, but I also found friendly behavior. Effective leaders take care to soften commands and bind subordinates to them through generosity and fairness. In doing this, they are helped by what I called the “dominance infrastructure,” this being the organization’s set of rules backed by inducements and punishments. My observations confirmed part of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy: that it is a rule-governed hierarchy. Being rule governed, with obedience largely ensured by the dominance infrastructure, administrative positions can be filled by a wide range of personalities. Domineering behavior or brilliant leadership have negative and positive effects respectively, but are not required for the organization to function.
It was the discovery of the affiliative component of hierarchy that led me to search for an “affiliative infrastructure.” That search led me to study ethnic ties, which can bind large populations. I wanted to know if there such a thing as an “ethnic infrastructure”?
Grégoire Canlorbe: A popular claim by J. Philippe Rushton is that there are racial differences in ethnocentrism, with the least genetically heterogeneous ethnic groups being the most ethnocentric. Do you agree?
Frank Salter: Philippe Rushton’s theory was not the basis of my research into ethnic kinship. Instead, it was William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness, which is generally accepted in ethology and evolutionary biology. The theory states that kinship bonds promote the reproduction of shared genes. Hamilton extended his theory to ethnic groups. I’m not aware of the finding you describe (that variations in genetic homogeneity and the degree of genetic similarity predict the level of ethnocentrism), though it has a certain plausibility. What I am aware of is that the degree of genetic homogeneity is related to solidarity, a sense of social cohesion; or, to put it differently, conflict increases when society becomes more genetically diverse. That finding, which is compatible with Hamilton’s theory, has been repeated again and again. The work of the late Tatu Vanhanen is an excellent example.
Nonetheless it seems that a more diverse society can actually lead to greater ethnocentrism: not at the level of society taken as whole, but at the level of the different ethnic components of society. As you can see in the case of America especially (and this is a universal trend in the West), white majorities are now increasingly ethnocentric, but it clearly doesn’t compare to the very high ethnocentrism of black or Latino minorities. This is an issue the media and the universities don’t understand, and never talk about.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 19 September 2020 07:13.
Updated for clarity’s sake: Sept 21, 9:13 CET
As I have been preoccupied with the drudgery of having to shovel out the Augean stables of GW’s endless piles of horseshit, I haven’t gotten around to detailing dubious activity coming from Joel Davis and Neo-Asshole acolyte, Keith Woods.
However, in this discussion, there are a few things that should pique the attention of the conscientious in concern of White/European interests…
Firstly, note Davis unabashedly follows the advice of a philosophy professor named Katz.
Second, look for what Davis is doing when he claims that subjectivism is the distinguishing characterisitic of the European world view… while there is some utility to looking at European difficulties through the artifact of that framing, there is also potential for diversion from the important underlying truth in that subjectivism by itself is Cartesian; subjectivism is certainly limited in the case of “I think therefore I am”, and placed in the service of objectivity; furthermore, the kind of self assertion that would correspond with sustained subjectivism, as opposed to self transcendent strives of objectivism, does not ring true as charactaristically and distinctly European as opposed to characteristic of other peoples. Whether or not he turns to our relative, group interests by contrast to Modernity’s Objective/Subjective Cartesianism, that is where we need to be focused in the interests of European peoples.
As Davis has called for Israel to be looked upon as our friend and called upon Paul Gottfried for advice as to where to turn for funding, we may suspect that he is not adverse to putting WN off center; perhaps playing some of its right wing reaction to bolster his own elitism. Note his pandering to Keith Woods’ turd postionism, talking about how appealing that he found Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of The Will’ (whereas, being normal, I find the Hitler rallies repugnant, aesthetically and otherwise, no matter who might film them).
Joel Davis has also explicitly denounced the racial focus and priority of White Nationalism.
A high i.q. and a committed student of philosophy, one can profit from listening to Davis’ as he covers ground (we may have oversighted) for us to convert into the interest of Europeans as opposed to Jewish misdirection - for example, I gleaned from Davis the important but what should have been obvious idea that there is group genetic emergence as well - however, one would be well advised to be on guard and view with suspicion his motives and prescriptions as one with a dubious kosher seal of approval.
There is a big, modernist focus on “creativity” by Joel Davis in this talk, “the sine qua non”....rather, we want creativity to be a feature… otherwise it is just an expressed and impelled obligation of sick modernity, “be different so you can fit in.” ... and something like a kosher diversion of our White Post Modern project to reconstruct the homeostasis of our ethnonational praxis.
“If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Writing anything about COVID-19 at this moment is a daunting task since the situation is evolving so rapidly, and in so many different locations. Information contained in this piece could be thoroughly outpaced by transformative events by the time it reaches publication, or even by the time I finish up and click “save.” There is also a glut of information online right now, some of it reliable and fascinating, and some of it misleading and counterproductive. Everywhere there is a mixture of growing apprehension, clashing opinion, and outright confusion. If the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center’s interactive map is accurate, there are currently 284,566 cases of COVID-19 worldwide, a figure that is growing. The “true” number of infections, that includes asymptomatic carriers, will be much higher. Beginning on February 24th, an accelerating number of new transmissions emerged outside China, primarily in Italy which currently has over 47,021 cases. At time of writing, France and Germany are also experiencing rapid increases in affected persons, together totaling over 33,000 cases, and Spain is on the brink of a national lockdown with over 25,374. Almost every European country has now been affected, and COVID-19 is now spreading in the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. How will it test the West?
Relations with China
Early speculation on COVID-19, especially in dissident circles, orbited conspiracy theories that the virus was engineered, and that it was either deployed by the United States or was an accidental leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology. In recent days, the former theory has been eagerly taken up by the Chinese themselves, with the added detail that COVID-19 may have been unleashed by visiting American soldiers during the Military World Games, which were staged in Wuhan in October 19-27, 2019. According to epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, in the course of a very interesting interview with Joe Rogan, it’s possible to date the origins of human COVID-19 through a process much like carbon dating, and scientists now have data suggesting COVID-19 became active in humans for the first time in mid-November 2019. Ron Unz has asked:
How would Americans react if 300 PRC officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards, a deadly new plague broke out in that city, with a major risk of spreading throughout the country? Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially “unlucky.” It hit China just before Lunar New Year, the absolutely worst possible time, and the epicenter was Wuhan, a key transport hub. It really seems an *astonishing* coincidence that 300 US military servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak, at a peak of international tension.
Other than timing of course, there seems to be little or no evidence that this was a bioweapon attack. Most obviously, one would assume that any attempted bioweapon attack by the United States on China would be much more covert than what has been suggested (a deliberate release by a very public group of soldiers). Also, while we know that SARS-like viruses based on bat coronavirus can be developed in the lab, the genome of COVID-19 has also been examined countless times with the result that there are now over 300 papers on MedRXiv concerning the structure, nature, and origins of the virus. None of these papers have highlighted anything suggesting an artificial origin of any aspect of COVID-19.
Conspiracy theories on the origins of COVID-19 are of course a very convenient and useful tool for the Chinese government, because they deflect attention from the fact the outbreak can easily be attributed to bad government, and to Communism itself. I find the idea that the virus originated in a Wuhan “wild food” market to be utterly compelling (see this documentary by 60 Minutes Australia, and this short piece by Vox), and this has direct consequences for perceptions of Chinese Communism. The consumption of “exotic” foods is itself a legacy of the Great Chinese Famine 1959–1961, after which the government permitted private farming but failed to prevent the monopoly by big companies of the rearing of conventional livestock. The peasantry, priced out of the market, resorted in large numbers to the farming of wild animals, especially, in the initial stages, the farming of turtles. Since this curbed starvation to some extent, the government backed these initiatives, and then in 1988 made the encouragement of domestication and breeding of wildlife an explicit aspect of law. Wildlife farming became an industry overnight. Bears, snakes, rodents, lizards, and bats began to be mass-produced for human consumption, and sold in mass markets in many of the country’s largest cities. In these markets, multiple species, alive and dead, are stacked in cages on top of one another, with the animals soaked in cocktails of urine and excrement—each cage a petri dish for the development new diseases, especially respiratory diseases, with the potential to jump to humans from myriad mammals. Together with its failure to take decisive preventative action in January 2020, and absent conspiracy theory speculation, the origin tale of COVID-19 is ultimately an indictment of Chinese politics and culture.
How that indictment will impact relations between the West and China remains to be seen. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have speculated that while mutual suspicion between the Chinese and the United States will remain high, the coronavirus outbreak will have no meaningful impact on trade between the two countries, and may in fact help de-escalate some prior economic tensions and involve the suspension of tariffs. In the longer term, however, COVID-19 has accelerated discussion about the need to become more independent from China in the production of goods. Several multinational corporations with supply chains based in China, having already considered diversifying their supply chains because of the U.S.-China trade war, are now likely to further their plans. Apple, for example, intends to move some manufacturing of its products (including AirPods and Apple Watches) to Taiwan due to the coronavirus. In Washington, members of Congress have used the outbreak to call for scaling back U.S. reliance on China, especially for prescription drugs, medical supplies, and other critical resources. Since Europe (Germany in particular) is the world’s largest manufacturer of drugs and medicines, we are likely to see a gradual decoupling of the United States from Chinese production, and a greater integration of European-American trade. Brexit Britain, until recently seen by the Chinese as having great potential for a lucrative trade and investment deal, may now present more of a cold house than previously thought. The EU, already resistant to increased Chinese economic influence, is also likely to dig its heels even deeper in the face of Chinese approaches. Some of the lasting challenges of COVID-19 will be how the West can distance itself from economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing, what impact this will have in both the shorter and longer term, and how the Chinese will respond.
Migrant Pressures
The first European outbreaks of COVID-19 fatefully coincided with an aggressive two-week operation by Turkey on its border with Greece, involving the movement of thousands of Syrian and African migrants. Beginning in late February, the Turkish government announced it would no longer stop migrants trying to reach Europe, and then drove thousands to the Greek border, live-streaming the process to encourage more to follow. The move was widely understood as an attempt to force European support for Turkey’s military campaign in northern Syria, and also as an attempt to extort more money from the EU. Although the effort now appears to have concluded with Turkey backtracking in the face of Greek resilience, Europe continues to have this metaphorical human “pistol” pressed to the side of its head.
COVID-19 is going to aggravate the broader migrant problem. Already the clamor is growing that migrant camps on Europe’s borders should be evacuated on health grounds, with the migrants permitted to enter Europe. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have argued that unhygienic and cramped living conditions mean COVID-19 can spread very fast, and that social distancing and hand washing are more difficult. While Europe bans mass gatherings, it’s been said that people in these camps have nowhere to go. Even within European countries, the outbreak has been associated with calls for amnesties and the opening of migrant detention centers. In the UK, lawyers and campaigners have called for hundreds immigration centers detainees to be released “because of fears they will contract coronavirus while locked up.”
The problem with such calls is that they all appear to present COVID-19 as a deadly plague slaughtering all in its path, rather than as something that afflicts the most seriously ill among the old and infirm. As is well known, the average age of Europe’s would-be migrants, particularly those from Syria, is somewhere around the late 20s. Given the known progression of COVID-19 in people in this age category, calls to permit mass influxes of masses of migrants purely because of the outbreak is tantamount to calling for open borders because potential immigrants might otherwise catch the common cold. Such calls are likely to ride the crest of a media-induced wave of panic, however, and the resolve of the West to resist further migrant flows will indeed be tested by twisted forms of moral blackmail in the weeks and months to come.
Life and Death under Liberalism
As stated in my review of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), we live in a decaying society that is in terror of death, and pathologically so. This pathology is rooted in mistaken beliefs that our civilization is dying from, or could imminently die from, disease epidemics, climate catastrophes etc., in the midst of willful and ignorant abdication of a future (via self-hate and industrialized abortion) in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant gratification. Just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay. COVID-19, while not as lethal as media coverage would suggest, is a reminder of our mortality and human fragility and will necessarily have a jarring effect on a Western liberalism that’s become increasingly distant from the confrontation with death.
Life under liberal finance capitalism is largely one of illusion, in which the prospect of real death is pushed far into the distance, both psychologically and culturally. Postmodern Western liberal culture is largely one of perpetual adolescence, in which the primary virtues are acting according to one’s individual will, identifying oneself in a hyper-individualistic manner, and expressing these identities via conspicuous consumption and behavior. We do not “live towards” Death, with a sense of purpose and a feeling that we are part of a much grander civilizational trajectory. We do not understand that Death has shaped our historical path, and that it hangs over us in ways that should direct our actions in the present.
COVID-19, regardless of current confusion over its true mortality rate, is a corrective to illusions that “progressive” Man has overcome Nature and can shape the world according to the human image, and without consequences. Certainly throughout my own lifetime, I’ve grown accustomed to assertions that life expectancy will continue to increase, and that there will be an endless supply of innovations and social projects that will make the mechanics of life easier and more productive. One increasingly expects that one will live a long life, mostly in very good health. Such a sense of security can breed all kinds of arrogance and fantasies, including the recent perverse luxury of the delusion that one can simply decide to be this or that gender. This new virus, however, presents the possibility, both in itself and its inevitable heirs, that Death is much closer than we ever thought, and that for all our technological advancement and self-congratulation, Nature need only tweak one molecule, so small our naked eyes could never perceive it, and the grave opens before us. The Age of Fantasy is confronted with the ultimate reality.
How the West responds to this realization will be a further cultural challenge. We have grown equally accustomed to the idea that we have “advanced” morally as a society, and that we have overcome some of the more “brutish” aspects of human existence that we perceive in the past. But in a world of apparently increasing plenty, such notions can be hard to test. It’s always easy for a man with a full stomach to condemn the actions of the starving. The conceit of the full-bellied West that it has overcome and surpassed itself and its past will now be tested. I, of course, arise from a political and philosophical tradition that insists there is no shame in the past. I see little or no place for morality in the struggle for survival. And I also see the cracks already forming in the Western conceit. This society that is against “hate” and prides itself on “coming together” is already struggling to stop people rioting over toilet paper and bottled water. If civil order breaks down, will the proud feminists be seeking their own resources, or hoping for a strong man to protect them? If the death toll does rise dramatically, and if curfews and lockdowns are imposed and intensified, I ask: How well will your beloved multicultural societies respond? If resources become scarce and tensions rise, who will you trust? These tests are coming.
Scott Morrison: “I said I was going to burn for you, and I am”
He told supporters he had “always believed in miracles” as partial results showed the Liberal-National Coalition close to a majority.
Opposition Labor Party leader Bill Shorten has announced he is resigning after accepting defeat.
Exit polls had suggested a narrow Labor win for the first time in six years.
The final result of the election may not be known for some hours, but with more than 70% of votes counted the Coalition has won, or is ahead in, 74 seats in its quest for a 76-seat majority, with Labor on just 66 seats.
Australia has mandatory voting and a record 16.4 million voters enrolled for the election, which returns a new House of Representatives and just over half of the seats in the Senate.
The result nobody predicted
By Hywel Griffith, BBC Sydney correspondent
Try finding someone who says they saw this result coming.
For well over two years, the coalition has trailed behind Labor in the opinion polls, and the assumption had been it would be Labor’s turn to govern.
But somehow Scott Morrison managed to turn things around at the 11th hour - and he did it largely on his own.
With some of his cabinet colleagues considered too toxic to appear in public on the campaign trail, ScoMo made this election about him, and his ability to be the trustworthy, daggy-dad Australia needed.
In the end, it was very, very close, but the voters decided, on balance, he deserved the fair go he craved.
In another development, controversial right-winger Fraser Anning failed to regain his Senate seat. Fraser Anning cleared over ‘egg boy’ clash.Attack victims honoured in Christchurch. While in the Senate, he had called for preference to be given to white immigrants, used the Nazi-related phrase “final solution” while discussing immigration, and blamed the Christchurch shootings on Muslim immigration.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thanked voters for re-electing his conservative coalition in a shock result at the federal polls.
In another development, controversial right-winger Fraser Anning failed to regain his Senate seat. Fraser Anning cleared over ‘egg boy’ clash. Attack victims honoured in Christchurch. While in the Senate, he had called for preference to be given to white immigrants, used the Nazi-related phrase “final solution” while discussing immigration, and blamed the Christchurch shootings on Muslim immigration.
