This essay is a wee bit outside of my usual stamping ground, but it is in the nature of lighting the blue touch-paper - just in case anyone wants to address this subject properly!  I’m going to begin with a quote from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, division 2, section 75 (Blackwell translation), published in 1927:

Everyday Dasein has been dispersed into many kinds of things which daily “come to pass”.  The opportunities and circumstances which concern keeps “tactically” awaiting in advance, have “fate” as their out-come.  In terms of that with which inauthentically existing Dasien concerns itself, it first computes its history.  In so doing, it is driven about by its “affairs”.  So if it wants to come to itself, it must first pull itself together from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to pass”, and because of this, it is only that there at last arises from the horizon of the understanding which belongs to inauthentic historicality, the question of how one is to establish a connectedness of Dasein if one does so in the “Experience” of a subject - Experiences which are “also” present-at-hand.

To my mind, this short passage describes, in Heidegger’s difficult and relentlessly particular terminology, the fractured and scattered state of our ordinary inner life, a scattering effected through the tendency of ordinary waking consciousness to elide into and attach itself to externalities, psychologically speaking.  The nett result is a profound absence which many reading this will recognise in their own experience.  We still ascribe qualities of self-hood to it, of course.  We can never cease doing that.  But it is a self-hood with a history rather than a presence in the moment (though that takes us further towards the metaphysical than Heidegger intended - all Dasein is historical in his formulation).

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... Or, “Burkha me, it’s got a beard”

DUBAI (AFP) – An Arab ambassador called off his wedding after discovering his wife-to-be, who had worn a face-covering veil whenever they met, was bearded and cross-eyed, the Gulf News reported Wednesday.

The envoy had only met the woman a few times, during which she had hidden her face behind a niqab, or facecovering veil, the paper said.

After the marriage contract was signed, the ambassador attempted to kiss his bride-to-be, upon which he discovered she had facial hair and was cross-eyed, it said.

The ambassador told an Islamic Sharia court in the United Arab Emirates that he was tricked into the marriage as the woman’s mother had shown his own mother pictures of her sister instead of her, the report said.

He sued for the contract to be annulled and also demanded the woman pay him 500,000 dirhams ($136,000) for clothes, jewelry, and other gifts he had bought for her.

The court annulled the contract but rejected the ambassador’s demand for compensation.

http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/242925/out-of-this-world-arab-envoy-finds-wifetobe-bearded-crosseyed-behind-veil

I recovered the attached illustrative tale from my personal backups after discovering it had been deleted from the internet archives.  Think of it as my musings for a screen play that could use some impressive computer generated graphics to offer an alternative mythology to the normal Arthurian tales.

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by Potential Frolic

I want to explain my struggle with the idea of Palingenesis and what it has taught me about nationalism and myself.  The desire to do this flows from frequent encounters here and elsewhere with “the Palingenetic Necessity”, which I define as the conviction that no other model of political action can support white survival in our times.

Understanding the problem

Seeing the destructive forces working upon our peoples presently, and fearing very much for his own survival and that of his people, the (folkish) nationalist turns his eye to Palingenesis, which presents itself as the opposite to today’s politics of ethnic suicide. The goal of Palingenesis is to renew the values of a supposed heroic and glorious past, these values being assumed to be real and contingent even if the past in question is only a myth, and to venture towards heroism and glory in the present. 

GW has argued that advocates of Palingenesis are not necessarily good psychologists. They do not take account of the fact that the man is of the time in which he is born, decadent or otherwise, and carries only two possibilities within himself:

(i) to belong to that time and have no truck with, or even knowledge of, the truth of his Self, or

(ii) to seek out truth even at the cost of turning away - if someone tells him how - from time and place and artifice.

There is no special third option for the rebirth of the spirit as heroism and glory, according to GW.  Heroism and glory are not characteristics of the true Self but of immersion in violence.  They can only appear in time and place, therefore, and cannot be different to or better than the rest of the artifice.  They are a beautiful deception - in fact, a bastardization for the purpose of reifying political violence.

As psychology, then, Palingenesis as it appears in fascism and revolutionary conservatism is a sham, albeit an alluring one.  It answers the following two wholly utilitarian questions in the positive:

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My reply on the liberal mind thread to our Guardianista OZKT29B - henceforth called Ozy courtesy of Captainchaos - grew rather long.  There is a 5,000 character limit on comments, so I thought I would make a new post of it instead.  Ozy’s last comment, to which I was responding, is here.

OZKT29B,

I was happy to follow Lord Arlen’s example and allow you to strike the very first blow.  The meat of the conversation, though, will now be on the worth of the beliefs you hold.

You write:

You are perpetuating the narrative that any thought that isn’t extremely marginal is, in fact, sheep-like and unconscious.

Our racial thoughts and instincts are the racial thoughts and instincts of the people.  They are no more marginal than is human nature itself.  But there is a powerful conflict between human nature and liberalism in the West.  Liberalism, in the broadest sense, is the controlling idea of our age.  Every person of European descent is enculturated in it, and enculturated thereby in conflict with their own racial thoughts and instincts.

Nationalist philosophy is not at all a formative factor on the psychological landscape.  To come to nationalism, then, you must, at some level, realise that your entire understanding of not just politics or even ideas, but life in general, including the acquired part of the Self, has been unconsciously absorbed, and all life long you have defended the result quite unconsciously too - just as you are defending it today.

We are not born with the power to choose the influences we absorb.  We walk out in the rain, that is all.  Freedom - the real thing, not the liberal confection - consists in recognising this unconsciousness, this power of the acquired, and turning instead towards that which is true in us.  Many of us here know this.  I think it highly unlikely that you know it.

So ... I am not “perpetuating” any narratives.  I am trying to bring you, as quickly as possible, to the beginnings of the understanding that, so far in your life, you have not owned the formative processes of your own mind.  Not only, then, are you not free but you cannot be free, regardless of the “liberty” in the liberalism you espouse.

We can discuss in detail what passes for freedom in the liberal canon later.

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Peak oil curves are largely based on a model called Hubbert Linearization.  Some critics claim that this model is incorrect.  The fix may be as simple as assuming a slight positive skew on the production curve.

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By Martin Hutchinson

Paul Volcker’s proposal that proprietary trading should be spun off from deposit taking banks is a worthwhile step in the direction of stabilizing the financial services business. However when you consider that business in detail, it becomes clear that further breakups are necessary in order to remove the excessive risks from the US economic system.

Volcker became something of a hero to the left for his sponsorship of President Obama’s bank-bashing announcement.  Indeed I was very much hoping that he could ride this new-found enthusiasm through a defeat of Ben Bernanke in his Senate confirmation vote, followed by a more or less unanimous Senate approval of a Volcker nomination to replace him as Fed Chairman. Assuming Volcker hadn’t suffered a Damsacene conversion to sloppy monetary policy while I wasn’t looking, Obama and the left would be suffering buyer’s remorse within about an hour of Volcker’s arrival at the Fed, but by that stage the deed would be done. I was practicing my Dr. Evil laugh for this eventuality, but alas it was not to be.

There are three problems with the current set-up on Wall Street: systemic risk, rent seeking and conflicts of interest. The Volcker proposal addresses the systemic risk problem to a great extent, but does not do much about the other two. For a complete solution we thus need to go further.

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I received a circular mail from the Australian National Anarchism activist Welf Herfurth a couple of days ago.  Essentially, he was making an appeal for funds for Andrew Yeoman’s outfit in the Bay Area.  The basis of the appeal was that Andrew’s prodigious energy has been richly rewarded.  But welcome as it is, success and political advancement needs to be funded:

Since he started to get active, Andy’s Bay Area National Anarchists group grew from a few people to the biggest alternative metapolitical group in San Francisco. Here are some of their major achievements in the past few years:

* 44,000+ website hits (http://www.bayareanationalanarchists.com/blog/)
* 22,000+ YouTube video views (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bay+area+national+anarchists&search_type=&aq=0&oq=Bay+area+national+)
* Regularly hosted meetings and recurring events (Monthly Meetings, White Cross Patrols, Folsom Street Fair Protest)
* Speaking events including Emeryville, Orange County, and Sydney Australia
* A large increase in support from groups across the nation and abroad
* Hosting foreign visitors for events and speeches
* The first unofficial BANA housing collective
* Media coverage by a local newspaper and the SPLC
* Flyering runs in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Petaluma
* A continuous presence at street protests
* The formation of sister networks in Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Inland Empire, and Orange County
* Our first online radio interview
* 22 videos produced and 3 more in production
* At least 4 blog posts a month
* A business plan
* An active Facebook presence
* PayPal subscribers (currently numbering at 5)
* A custom graphic banner on the website made by allies in the UK
* A private mail box

I think you agree with me that this is a very impressive list of achievements.

Our ‘friends’ from the SPLC wrote a very interesting article about the BANA that you can find here:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1058

And Spencer Sunshine wrote this for the Public Eye website:
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v23n4/rebranding_fascism.html

Last, but not least, here is an interview with Andy with the well respected and valued ‘The Occidental Quarterly’:
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/interview-with-andrew-yeoman-part-i/

So you can see that he is not only promising political activism, but also he is delivering it too. The BANA are a group of dedicated and committed people. I know for sure that Andy not only spends every spare minute in organising events, making videos, networking with likeminded people, etc, but he also puts thousands of dollars of his own money into the cause ...

And what followed was the appeal for funds.  I shan’t copy that out.  But if you know Andrew’s work and want to offer him some support, here’s the link:

http://bayareanationalanarchists.com/blog/2009/09/bana-monthly-donations.html