From the Telegraph:

Separatists win Flanders region in Belgian elections
Belgium’s future as a unified federal state was in doubt last night after a national election landslide for Flemish separatists in the Dutch-speaking north of the country

Early results put the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) on an unprecedented 29 per cent of the vote in Flanders, catapulting separatists to the forefront of Belgian politics.

French speaking Socialists on the opposite end of the political spectrum to the right-wing N-VA, both on the question of Belgium and on economic policy, were the largest party, on 36 per cent, in Wallonia, which has a smaller number of voters than Flanders, as well as Brussels, the country’s only officially bilingual area.

Bart De Wever, the N-VA’s leader, may have won a historic number of votes, however he is unlikely to be asked by Belgium’s King Albert II to form a Federal government.
Instead, Elio Di Rupo, the Walloon Socialist leader, is expected to become the first French-speaking Prime Minister since 1974 at the head of an uneasy alliance of five federalist parties.

Following the election, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and francophone Walloon communities have never been more divided since they were welded together in an unhappy Belgian union in 1830.

The rise of mainstream Flemish nationalism, with the N-VA on course to become the country’s largest party, is unprecedented in Belgium’s 180 year history and will lead to a protracted political deadlock as the divided country tries to form a coalition government.

“It is a true earthquake,” said Mark Eyskens, a former Belgian Prime Minister and a Flemish Christian Democrat.

The N-VA vote will have more than doubled since the 2007 election.  Vlaams Belang, on the other hand, won 11.99% of the Flemish vote in 2007, a performance which dipped to 9.87% in the 2009 European Parliament election.  I cannot find their figure for today’s poll, but it must have been hit by the N-VA’s success.  If so, that would be clear evidence that where an electorate like the Flemish (or the Scots or the Welsh) defines itself through grievances against an ancient neighbour the racial issues which exercise ethno-nationalism cannot come to the fore.  That would beg the perennial question, of course, whether those issues can ever come to the fore.

Perhaps the best that ethno-nationalists in Flanders can hope for is that civicism will deliver separation and facilitate a redefining of the national conversation.  Out of that an opportunity to raise the larger questions may arise.

In any event, tonight the Belgian marriage looks more certain to end in divorce than ever.

by PF

This is a question, open-ended, for your consideration, stemming from debates with liberal friends ...

A recurring picture-argument is that of the possibility of a universal Renaissance, conditioned on the possibility that all people everywhere get a middle-class white upbringing. Essentially this scheme would graft onto the private lives of numberless ghetto-dwellers the kind of nurturing, loving, book-reading childhood enjoyed by upwardly-mobile middle class whites. This is justified because the liberal formulating the argument understands that patterns of behavior are given their first impetus by parents when the child is young. That component of non-genetic variation which is formed by imprinting in childhood is the wiggle-room they need to make everyone theoretically conformable to European standards of behavior.

A person adept at truth search would have to detect in themselves, were they to find themselves arguing in this way, the existence of a cherished hypothesis beating a hasty retreat into a shadowy corner of plausibility where its premises can evade inspection ... for the moment. Realizing that one cherished a hypothesis, which is a sin in the truth search, one would have to take steps to remedy it. But since our liberal friends might not be tainted by that degree of enthusiasm, we have to encounter this argument on its own terms and not point out how suspiciously it resembles certain things you might have learned to recognize from elsewhere ...

Its not clear which entity would ‘reach in’ at the appropriate time to prevent the inappropriate behavior while the non-whites are being upbring-ated. Who would shop for them, and choose healthy groceries? Who would prevent the Dad from drinking? Who would prevent the mother from spending 20+ hours watching television? Who would allocate the spending of money which resulted in enough money being left over for cultural events such as attending art museums? Who would attend to the thousand little details (time allotted? car keys? everyone present? enough gas? directions?) which in the absence of real motivation to go to the art museum, give birth to myriad rationalizations about why it need not happen. In the absence of the DNA-sprung desire to see art, explore and understand the world, who would explain to the children the context of what was being seen, and tie it into a larger narrative emerging from adult experience and knowledge? Who would prompt the natively-uninterested person to bring up the same issues later at the dinner table, sustaining a living interest in what had been experienced? Are government entities going to do this? Individual concerned citizens?

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The MultiCult played itself in the opening Group C game of World Cup 2010 this evening.  The result was a one-all draw, which was suitably egalitarian, I thought.  Both teams were equally unconvincing, too, which is only fair when you think about it.

Apparently twenty-three million people in the MultiCult in England thought it was worthwhile experiencing this equality in real time.  But I don’t know, somehow the build up to the whole event just hasn’t grabbed me.  I can’t think why, because quite a few people have tried very hard to enthuse me.

“Umbro’s stirring anthem for a multicultural England” gushed the headline of Kanishk Tharoor’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian, praising an anti-English ad by a sportswear and equipment manufacturer.  At every level, British bien pensant journalism, and not just British journalism, has been in overdrive for the last month, at least.

Some of the commentary is beyond parody:

It made anyone with tactical knowledge of football wonder why South Africa didn’t make the obvious team change and put Nelson Mandela in goal. I know he was too frail to open the tournament but he’d only have to lie there on the goal line. Who would possibly have the audacity to score past him? Even if the ball accidentally went near him, a Mexican striker would have felt obliged to dive and catch it, preventing his own side from scoring and getting sent off for deliberate handball.

Truly, World Cup 2010 is proving a sink-hole of journalistic integrity.  And as with the magical Mandela, so with the South African Bantu in general - people, we are told, so brim-full with salt-of-the-earth goodness, and so overwhelmingly excited to be “hosting” this event, yes excited, I tell you, in that simple green, gold and black doggy way that liberal journalists naturally expect of Africans, and thoroughly approve of, well, it goes without saying that we are required to “celebrate” with them (the Bantus, that is) … feel good for them … hope with them that their long wait (15,000 years, but who’s counting) for “change” (white man’s stuff) and “justice” (white man’s stuff) is somehow all over now.  It isn’t but we have to believe, you see.

This, apparently, involves smiling along with all the happy Bantu teeth crowding in on the camera lens, as bright in the African sun as light-bulbs in the Blitz.  We should also try without any success whatsoever to emulate that embarrassingly unselfconscious, drop-of-a-hat bump ‘n grind thing that Africans do whenever someone clobbers a piece of stretched animal skin twice.  And, of course, we must admire the clobbering.  Such rhythm.  It’s in the blood , you know.  Not that I meant to imply in any way that they are, you know, less cerebral than anyone else.

No, it’s all trade-mark, feel-good MultiCult stuff.  Those happy, happy Bantus, hey?  How did we ever feel so exquisitely guilty without them?

However, there is one minor downside.  The more the liberal media shove all this journalistic excrement down our throats, the more weary of it some of us become.  Well, not me obviously, because I was sick to death of it years ago.  But in general and on average, as a rule, people who aren’t Bantus and aren’t liberal hypocrites just can’t stick with the picturesque, lovable thing long enough, not when the reality all around them is so, er, different and, for not a few, so tragic.

So any moment I am expecting rainbow overload and thought-direction burn-out.  I am expecting absolutely nothing in the way of “change” and “justice”.  All that has gone to the ANC elite.  I am expecting that the MultiCult will not win the game.  It will lose everywhere on the pitch, because it is built on lies.

Oh yes, and both Argentina and Spain, one of whom will undoubtedly emerge in one month from now as the real winner of World Cup 2010, are white sides.

The Telegraph reports on the outcome of yesterday’s Dutch general election:

With 88 per cent of the votes counted, published partial results showed the Liberals with 31 and Labour on 30.
But the real victory went to Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), which demands an end to immigration from Muslim countries and a ban on new mosques. The PVV took its number of seats from nine in the last parliament to 24, and could hope to enter a coalition government.

The far-right leader with his distinctive shock of fair hair called the result “magnificent”.

“The impossible has happened,” he told a televised party gathering. “We are the biggest winner today. The Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

Wilder’s party has been a beneficiary of the Dutch committment to proportionality (for the delivery of which the list system is employed).  We are about to see whether the resultant coalition-driven politics are kind or unkind to Wilders.  That there is any possibility of kindness at all is testimony to Wilders’ ability to avoid at least some of the wages of dissidence.  But there is a challenge to conventional nationalism contained in that.  Wilder’s Judeophilia, whether it is sincere or simply a stratagem, has worked to his advantage thusfar.  The same can be said for his Islamophobia, which shifts the focus to cultural rather than racial preservation.  It’s about “the Judeo-Christian heritage” and “Western civilisation”.  The focus has shifted from a revolutionary nationalism that sees the challenging of the system in toto, and the deliverance of European Man into his own hands, as the ultimate political good to a civicism that is customised to an electorally proportional representative system and that sees electoral progress as the ultimate good.

Whether anything of actual value can be achieved by this means we may now learn.

by PF

The following are quotes from the 1998 Harvard edition of Rüdiger Safranski’s intellectual biographical work, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, originally published in German in 1994.

We already know one moment when “disguises” break up and authentic Being discloses itself - the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked “that” against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being.

The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of “there is nothing behind it.” Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Heidegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Frieburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to “let nothingness encounter us.” Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are “something” real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the “being possible” that we are ourselves.

Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeing from its contigency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that ‘They’ are only Everyman, [had previously spoken of the fact of self-loss into the ‘World of They’], but ‘They’ are also the philosophers. Because these, as Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical backworlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

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by I. Bismuth

They are out there. They are in here. They are all around us. Is there one near me at this very moment? Do I know what is going on behind that face? Or that one? Am I even now within touching distance of an attitude that has no place in a decent society? These are not comfortable questions, but they have to be asked.

They have to be answered too. Over the years I have brought many offenders to justice, and most of them are unremarkable in appearance and speech. They look like you and me and him and her. Most of the time they seem preoccupied with traffic conditions and discounted prices and their health and your health and warm fronts approaching from the south-west. How better to put you off your guard? But underneath — underneath there stirs the beast.

At the university we are used to relying on our trained antennae to monitor our own and others’ attitudes so as to ensure a perfect uniformity of diversity, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that not everyone enjoys our advantages. Out there, millions of attitude-carriers are still having to go for hours and, in the worst cases, whole days without being professionally monitored, a neglect that can allow the inner beast to grow and strengthen. In my own small way, and as a civic duty, I therefore make it my practice, whenever I venture out into the wild, to hunt it down and point the accusing finger.

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A Majority Rights Radio presentation of a libertarian nationalist political economy and its traitors is now available.  I’ve repeatedly argued that this is the winning political paradigm in the present circumstances.  We can ignore, for the sake of argument, that it is also philosophically and practically superior to other political economy paradigms.