Today the disgraced former minister and Cabinet member and founder of violent anti-racism, Peter Hain, graced the Guardian today with another of his graceless scribbles.  It was titled We need to wake up and tackle BNP poison head on.  This is the gist of it:-

Unless the rest of us get our act together, the British National party could easily win three seats - and quite possibly six or more - in June’s European election ... the most successful fascist party in Britain ... far-right and fascist parties in Europe ... the BNP’s racist and fascist politics ... the BNP needs to be confronted wherever its supporters march or appear in public ... They wear suits rather than openly flirt with nazism ... scapegoating of black people, Muslims, Jews, foreigners, gays and lesbians for social and economic problems ... racial violence and racial hatred are barely beneath the surface ... desperate to conceal its fascist and racist instincts ... Its poison should be combatted on the doorstep ...

Etcetera.

I don’t think I have left anything out.

On their respective blogs Simon Darby and Martin Wingfield both celebrated this new free exposure for the BNP.  Darby noted:-

This is the best bit though:

There is also a debate on whether leaders of established political parties should steer clear of leading the fight against the BNP. Campaign groups such as Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, believe that attacks from mainstream Westminster figures will only add to the BNP’s anti-establishment credentials.

In other words here we have an actual admission that figures like Peter Hain and Ian Austin are so publicly despised that criticising the BNP actually swells the BNP vote. How must that feel, to be told that you are so ineffective that it is in the Labour Party’s best interests to keep your mouths firmly shut?

For his part Wingfield noted:-

This is what Hain has to say in The Guardian this morning:

“The lesson of the Anti-Nazi League’s success is that the BNP needs to be confronted wherever its supporters march or appear in public.”

Well, we know that the “success” of the Anti-Nazi League was based on its violent attacks on innocent people. The BNP don’t hold marches, so it seems Hain is advocating attacks on BNP supporters out campaigning for the forthcoming European and County Council elections.

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Here’s an interesting one, again from the Guardian - a recent thread on homosexual marriage.  Some bright spark objected to the appeal to Nature used by a supporter of traditional marriage.  He said:-

“Define Nature for me and I’ll cede your point.”

Define Nature?  Can’t be too difficult, surely.

by Happy Cracker

What follows are adumbrations of the spiritual dimension of nationalism.

Nationalism, by its nature, ultimately demands for itself the right to call it’s sons to die for the collective. That is the secret (and not-so-secret) understanding that lies behind a system of thought that glories in collective existence and continuity. Behind the old symbols is the underlying understanding that one may have to risk one’s life for the group - even give up one’s life for the group.

Our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations were called upon to to answer this demand, in two intra-European fratricidal wars which perhaps lacked a proper Grand Strategy, but were nevertheless fought with courage and self-sacrifice. [note: this post is not about World War I or II.]

Any proper understanding of nationalism will be heroic, that is to say it will acknowledge the central nature of this “ultimate promise to pay” in the nation’s social contract; just to make this clear, I will sometimes refer to this ultimate promise to pay as “the honor-promise”, going forward.

In times of war, nations survive by the sacrifice and willing bloodshed of their young men. Nationalism places the eternal nation in the elevated, august position such that a young man’s life can be sacrificed to it without loss of dignity on his part - regardless of the achievements, background and character of the young man. A family which assiduously stores up human capital through generations of careful breeding and attainment, would no doubt be loth to give up their proudest specimens and representatives of their blood-lines, to die grisly deaths on foreign soil - were it not for the honor-promise which underlies all national belonging.

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Nate Silver, a vectorist, presents his final solution to the racism question to the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference.  I respond:

The time is coming, and it is not that very far off, when guys like Nate Silver and groups such as TED that implicitly share their values, will be seen as a de facto state religion which is justly resisted.

“Separatists”, racial or otherwise, are are more enlightened than “integrationists”:

Scientifically enlightened because they admit the need for separation in experimental tests of causal hypotheses in human ecology—rather than claiming that “predictable” implies “designable” when the data sources are subject to not only the ecological fallacy but to conflation of correlation with causation.

Politically enlightened because they posit human rights founded self-determination rather than a tyranny of the majority limited only by a vague laundry list of selectively enforced “human rights”—such as “human rights” which presume that anyone who prefers members of their own race thereby forfeits his right to refuse any treatment no matter how well-intentioned the “therapist”.

By The Narrator

Today we find ourselves in the path of a raging storm that seems determined to bring the rafters down upon us. We must keep in mind, though, that we are not the first generation to face such perplexities.  Nor, we must hope, will we be the last.

The question before us now is how to best contend with this storm. Rash people climb up on the rooftop, shake a fist at the winds, and challenge the storm to a one-on-one battle to the finish. The finish usually means getting blown away, hit by lightning, or struck by a 150mph piece of airborne debris. Then there’s the panic-stricken, who ignored the gathering storm clouds till it‘s all too late, and are too frozen with fear to work out what to do.

The assured man, on the other hand, knows that storms come and go, and prepares to meet them and weather them as best he may.  He watches and stays alert, and when he sees the clouds gathering he batons down the hatches, secures the lose timbers, herds the small animals into the barn, gathers the family into one place, brings the tools into the house and keeps the candles close at hand.  He may not always avoid all tragedy and loss.  But he has the best chance, and the state of mind and spirit to begin again the next day.

This is the kind of man - someone naturally steady, stable, with good character and good instincts, someone who thinks clearly even in harm’s way - that we need in abundance now.  So this is a post about such men, and about the all too obvious, simple lessons in life - the basic truths - which help to make them, and which we are not getting right anymore.

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UPDATE 4/28: Do-it-yourself mask.

For those trapped in vibrance, the face mask to get is one with an N95 filter. 

CAVEAT:  It will probably not protect you if you are breathing heavily.

Keep a look out for the best current estimate of the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) since that gives the odds of dying if infected.

UPDATE 4/26:  A BBC report has a most intriguing quote:

two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days

Imputing a case fatality rate CFR = 2/(#interns*prevalence) where #interns is the total number of “partners” this guy has, and prevalence is the fraction (0.0 to 1.0) of the population with the flu, puts us in a dilemma:  Any reasonable choice for #interns and prevalence results in a CFR much higher than the 2.5 to 5% 1918 Spanish Flu CFR.

Also, the mind recoils from thinking too much about this:

‘The first case [of swine flu] was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

See Google’s flu trends map for the geographic distribution of people searching on various flu symptoms.  This can map a flu epidemic up to 2 weeks ahead of CDC prevalence reports.  Today it is indicating Hawaii is the top flu search State.

The BNP is currently engaged on posting a series of brief résumés of it policy positions.  Recently we had one on immigration policy.

But a few days ago the party set out a number of attractive proposals on civil liberty.  Unquestionably, a future British National Party government enacting these into law would command wide popular support.  The Human Rights Act would be removed from the statute book, naturally.  We would see an end to those monumentally unloved ID cards, the national DNA database and the spiders web of the surveillance society.  On the new legislation side, the country would gain a parliament for England, binding referenda on major, probably constitutional issues, and a Bill of Rights.

All these would be highly significant undertakings, particularly the parliament which could well create a permanent English consensus against the Labour Party.  But none of them are anti-liberal in any systemic or revolutionary sense.  They would not act like acid on the radical individualist template on which multi-ethnicism is scored, burning both radical individualism and race-replacement out of politics in Britain for all time.

Instead, the party hierarchy (for which read Nick Griffin) seems to be relying in an Inevitablist fashion on the people freeing themselves.  Plenty of “patriotic feeling” and “good common-sense” is expected to be released by two other proposals in that civil liberties post:-

Abolish all restrictions on traditional free speech - common law provisions against incitement to violence are the only proper limits in a free society;

Abolish “anti-discrimination” laws which prevent people from making a free choice.

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In between doing other things, I’ve been debating for a couple of days with a Guardian liberal of a scientific bent here.  He came up with the following definitons of the dreaded r-thing, claiming that I qualify on both counts.

They are:-

1. The belief that certain races are superior/inferior to others.

2. The belief that people’s race is more significant than their individuality.

Now, I answered this person in the least snappy way I could, putting both racial superiority and Man as individual and tribalist into their proper contexts.  But I can’t say that it worked any better than a well-chosen, sharp riposte could have.

So what should I have said?  Is there even such a thing as “evil racism”?  Or is it all just a handy exaggeration, a silencer and an ethnic smear?