Yes, Søren, it is important.  Now is the next time—and you stated it so eloquently that it is a pleasure to listen to it.  Thank you for that oratorical work of true art and philosophy that so clearly expressed your vision.

Here is my written response.

READ MORE...

By David Hamilton

To insinuate that those of us who follow a traditional conservative way, and love a nation that lost thousands fighting Nazi Germany, are ourselves nazis or fascists is malicious, disrespectful and offensive. A racial world view is a traditional world view. It goes back to our Anglo-Saxon tribal days. Hitler ventured far beyond that, of course, and fashioned not simply something that held his people together but excused military aggression and race-hatred. But he was an historical exception and no part of my tribal tradition anyway.

In fact, many aspects of wanting to conserve or recreate our homogeneity can be traced back deep into our history. Britons have a great and noble tradition of conserving our homogeneity, and, at least until the end of the war, had a better and more pleasant life for being homogenous.

Queen Elizabeth was firmly in the Great Tradition. In 1596, she sent an “open letter” to the Lord Mayor of London, stating:-

“there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie,”

She order that they be deported. A week later, she repeated the treatment:-

“good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande.”

And commissioned the merchant Casper van Senden to “take up” certain “blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall.”

In 1601, she again complained about the:-

“great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which [as she is informed] are crept into this realm … infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel,”

And she had them repatriated.

Edmund Burke offered a definition of a nation which involves a shared identity, history, ancestry, and continuity:-

As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Today we are concerned that “those who are to be born” will be dominated by immigrant populations. We read repeated reports that we are becoming a minority in our own towns and cities. The immigrants are human and like us, are subject to the same failings, and are likely to treat us no better than they perceive we treated them.

Then there is the threat of miscegenation.

READ MORE...

About half-way through Obama’s acceptance speech, my wife had to stop watching.  I asked her what was wrong and she said she found it too depressing.  I stopped the streaming video and put my copy of Idiocracy in the DVD drive.  She emerged from her funk presently.  I don’t have a link to the full movie but this scene may be sufficient for most cases of post-acceptance speech depression:

Just time for one last blast before the US election - this one from Martin Hutchinson at Prudent Bear.
GW

The number of economically damaging policy ideas imposed on the United States has greatly increased in the last few months. However from the statements of the Presidential candidates, the next few years may turn this storm of bad ideas into a blizzard. Those with an emotional attachment to the US economy should brace themselves for trauma.

The new salience of bad economic ideas is not particularly surprising. The US economy is heading into an economic downturn that promises to be at least as severe as those of 1974 and 1980-82, whose memory is already fading a generation into the past. Additionally, the 2000-07 period was one in which US voters made very small if any income gains, with such gains arising only through refinancing of ever more gigantic home mortgages. Meanwhile the distant and dislikeable titans of Wall Street apparently scooped up all the money generated by the economy.

Now the housing bubble has burst, the average jaundiced voter naturally sees the free market system and the George W. Bush administration as responsible for the recent not-particularly-pleasant years and the economic horror that has followed. Claims by Republican politicians that the debacle was all the fault of the housing finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while partly true are wholly unconvincing.

With voters miserable and facing a disastrous economic position that they believe was caused by free market excesses, it is not surprising that they are looking favorably on statist nostrums. Both political candidates have propounded bad ideas; Obama more than McCain largely because he has more ideas in general. In addition, there are a few bad ideas that have embedded themselves into the system, accepted by both political candidates and the political class as a whole.

READ MORE...

It appears to be the season for lecture series.  BBC Radio 3 has been hosting its Free Thinking 2008 series, involving approximations to wisdom and originality by a colourful variety of folk.  One of these is the smooth-mover of the MultiCult, Trevor Phillips, who has discerned six questions, no less, which liberal democracy cannot answer.  Sadly, when he last had a proper job is unlikely to be one of them.  The BBC has a 7-day storage system for its radio output.  So I will listen to Trevor tomorrow and, if he is remotely interesting, I will post accordingly.

But now I want to focus on last night’s speech by the only slightly wierd writer, broadcaster and lecturer in psychology, Susan Blackmore.  Her subject was one close to my own heart: The myth of Free Will.

In my last post on it I explained the significance of an absence of free will in humans thus:-

Now, there is no small difference between the self equipped with free will and the self bereft of it.  It is the difference between consciousness and mechanicity, between “I” and “it”.  What emerges from John-Dylan Haynes study is a model of Man in whom Mind, in its ordinary waking state at least, weaves the story of a decisive self over the endless blizzard of electro-chemical impulses in the brain?

And from that, if we are honest, there emerge only questions for which we never have more than an inadequate answer.

For example, if “I” am only a dream of self, a piece of artifice made in the moment and remade in another, is there really any sense in which “I” can be said to exist at all?  In a mechanistic sense only, perhaps.  If one is prepared to dispense with the usual dignifications, the mechanicity of Man is not so great an affront.  It is what it is, and there are a fair number of reflective people who have always known it.  None of them are radical liberals, of course.  The notion of the “fully-human” director of a free and unfettered will absolutely does not fly.  It never could.  Liberal political philosophy is a flightless bird.

Susan Blackmore is a lot closer to the action than I am, and these are the significant passages from her lecture:-

READ MORE...

Global media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and Chief executive of News Corporation, has returned to his native land to deliver the 2008 Boyer Lectures.  The series is titled “A Golden Age of Freedom”.

The Boyer Lectures are a series of six live speeches touching on politics and society, and given each year by a different major public figure in Australia.  The equivalent in the UK is the Reith Lectures.

Murdoch opened today with an offering rather oddly titled “Aussie rules: Bring back the pioneer”.  It served to outline his intentions for the rest of the series:-

My theme for these lectures is the great transformation we have seen in the past few decades: the unleashing of human talent and ability across our world, and the golden age for humankind that I see just around the corner.

... I will talk about how the opening of new markets is leading to the rise of new nations and adding hundreds of millions of people to a new global middle class.  I will address technology, education and the importance of cultivating human capital.

... Most of all I will speak of the challenges which all these developments pose for the land of my birth.  The main reason I agreed to come to Australia to deliver these lectures is that the country I see before me simply is not prepared for the challenges ahead.

One wonders what “the rise of new nations” means.  It does not sound like the rise of old nations like India and China.  Then again, “internationalisation”, as Murdoch later calls it, implies not new nations but the post-nation - essentially the MultiCult.  Is he saying that the condition of Australia is that of a post-nation, and that the advent of the artificial “new nation” awaits - if the appropriate internationalist outlook is internalised by Aussies?

I assume so.  But right away we see what Murdoch’s new nation will amount to.  The only understanding that the man who made his money from Page 3 has of human purpose is material advancement.  He is offering a life of consumerism and wage-slavery in return for the cinematic Arthur Jensen’s:-

“perfect world in which there is no war or famine, oppression or brutality.  One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock.  All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquillized, all boredom amused.”

Here it is again in Murdoch’s only slightly more prosaic version:-

READ MORE...

Today, in its campaign to present the negro Maclaren driver Lewis Hamilton as a national icon, the Telegraph finally came to the point.

... he is a hero to be emulated.

I demurred on the thread.  However, my brief if somewhat uncompromising comment was removed by the Telegraph moderators.

There are three fundamental reasons for admiring sportsmen. One is that they reflect some glory on one’s own people.

Hamilton is not English. I am, and I would prefer any Englishman, and indeed anyone of European lineage, to win anything before a Bantu, half or full.

The next reason for admiring a sportsman is that he or she has such a peerless talent, one is bound to applaud.

Hamilton has been silver-spoon fed by his Dad’s friend, Ron Dennis, since he climbed into a kart.  In F1 anyone can win in the best car - remember David Coulthard’s introduction to F1 in the all-conquering Williams.  Further, uniquely in Hamilton’s case, his team-mate is subtly disadvantaged and, last year, was outrageously regarded by Dennis himself as someone “we are racing against”.

So for now the peerless talent issue remains moot.

The third reason for admiring a sportsman is his or her moral nature.  All sport involves a tremendous struggle against the body, and it also offers a stage for the play of moral characteristics and the making of moral choices.  Men such as Michael Johnson, Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore, Don Bradman and Garfield Sobers brought dignity or modesty or a purity of sporting passion that elevated them to the status of the genuine hero.

Michael Schumaker, in contrast, was a very great driver but morally he failed the test, and he was unloved in consequence.  The signs are that Hamilton will never be ranked among the heroic.

Finally, and unrelated to the admiration issue, I am very tired of the “Poster-Boy” element in the press’s treatment of Hamilton.  There is something political in it which I am bound to reject outright.  I don’t like having my views on race prescribed by the media, which is what most of the Hamilton kerfuffle is about.

Well, it was surely the second paragraph, and that too naked truth, “Bantu”, that did it.  The view that Lewis Hamilton is a negro living in the wrong country, like all negroes living in Europe, is problematic for a Judaised mind.  It cannot process the withholding of legitimacy from African populations in the ancient European homeland without experiencing a fit of the vapours.  The resulting censorship is only the latter-day ammonium carbonate for a correct-thinking MSM moderator.

In fact, over the last twenty months or so I have posted the simple thought that “Lewis Hamilton is not English” on a wide variety of MSM threads and even on the Autosport forums, almost always in response to journalists’ casual description of him as an “Englishman”.  Where my correction posted automatically it was almost always subsequently removed.  On the rest it never made an appearance at all.

There is something here that needs bringing out.  I know perfectly well that a claim that some rap artist in the news, or a black poet, is not actually one of the English people will sail through unremarked.  A white mother won’t make any - or enough - difference.  Nor should it.  Genetically, the English are a northern European people.  African admixture ends this.

But Hamilton is a media-created special case.  We have to believe the media story.  They want us to believe the story.  It is as if the arising of a potential black hero is too rare and, by its rarity, too precious to them to have the stark and uncompromising truth of his inalienable alienness pointed out.  And this, lest you failed to notice, is the racism of the Establishment.  This is the untrammelled desire to meddle in our sense of self, to engineer in us “higher feelings” and an end to racist ones.  The unspoken assumption that we are racist in this way, instead of merely human, and the sheer affrontery that these people have the right to alter us, is the endemic racism of the modern age.

I hope Hamilton fails to finish in tomorrow’s Brazilian GP.  But I fear that his car will be too good, and he will be able to coast around to finish fifth or higher and pick up the point he needs to win the championship.  Perhaps the boy can drive, I don’t know and don’t care.  I do know that we will see more ... much more ... of this media lionisation, all of it pure culture politics.

And that I am, indeed, bound to reject.

The British press has been full of the Affair of Andrew Sachs’ answer-phone.  A full transcript of the offending Radio Two and web broadcast of October 16th is here.

The details of the case and the sticky ends and financial pain of the wrongdoers are very tiresome.  I’m more interested in the sociological significance of a prank call gone disastrously wrong that leads to an amazing 30,000 people registering complaints with the BBC, steals the headlines away from global financial meltdown, and forces top BBC management into a five-hour emergency damage-control meeting.

To find out what’s going on here one has to look back to the Thatcher years, and the change to broadcast comedy that was wrought by a new generation of producers, writers and comics.  This was Alternative Comedy.  What had began as stand-up for a young and educated, right-on audience that, naturally enough, had no respect for the established way of doing things was soon brought into the mainstream of broadcasting.

The sheeple laughed at their little glowing tubes just the same.  All at once it was funny to see broken social taboos, and cool to deride the Thatcher government.  It had to be funny and cool because lots of people said it was.  So there.

Along the way the sheeple got to laugh at lots of things they never knew were worth laughing at before.  Men’s backsides, especially, but also any hitherto unspeakable bodily functions suddenly became riotously funny.  The sheeple seemed to understood that this was a humour, if one can call it that, predicated on racial and sexual equality.  They did not demurr.  It wouldn’t be cool.  The long tradition of the robust comedy characteristic of the British, and so loved by the working man, was being swept aside, and there was nobody around to prevent it.

So, Alternative Comedy’s proponents were, in their odd little world, revolutionaries, even those who were simply swept up in the outrageous audacity of it all.  These were the very first stirrings of political correctness this side of the Atlantic.  Its force and potency was not understood, nor its singular function of the ruthless dismantling of organic society.

READ MORE...