My next MR Radio interview subject is Lee John Barnes of the BNP.  His contributions to recent threads here have been interesting, to say the least, and this is your opportunity to help frame the questioning he will receive sometime in the next week.

My interview of Dr Dan Roodt, which took place on Tuesday evening, is now on the Radio page.  It is in three parts of about 20 minutes each.

Dan Roodt is a leading campaigner for the white South African and, most especially, Afrikaner cause.  He is also an author, journalist and blogger, and links to his on-line publications are here:

Dan Roodt’s blog.
Dan Roodt’s pro-Afrikaner campaign organisation.
Dan Roodt’s English-language news site.

It is five weeks since Hunter Wallace asked a question on our 5th birthday thread that deserves a proper response.  It was this:

Any thoughts on the next five years? What direction would you like to take?

For one reason or another I let HW’s question slip down the list of things to do at MR.  But I’m going to answer it now.  It will take only a little time.

Let’s start with the admission that it takes someone very special - a lot more gifted than me - to plan and to be entirely consequent.  Generally speaking, Man just proposes, you know.  And that’s what I did back in the summer of 2004 when, with Phil Peterson as sounding board, I cooked up a blog that would not simply be another guy sounding off about this wicked old world but would model the broad right - radical, hard and traditional - and contain all its ideological tensions.

Phil and I did not - could not - know how it would be received, let alone whether any synthesis might emerge.  Neither, since it was, anyway, designed for a larger purpose than anything one might achieve through blogging, could we know what direction it would take or how long it would hold together.  It had to be free to run its course.

As most of us no doubt recall, it did not hold together.  The principle reason was that Phil and I had decided to airbrush out the JQ to allow a better chance of success, but the “harder” right would not have that!  To be precise my most respected friends wintermute and ben tillman almost immediately drove a big, fast coach and horses straight through it.  We were left with the choice, which was no choice at all, of pretending to be Larry’s pals or challenging the “soft wing” to recognise that all those awful and impolitic things WNists say about the JQ have the benefit of being fundamentally true.  Some could not deal with that.

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by The Narrator

There continues to be debate about the pros and cons of religion, specifically Christianity, around pro-Western and semi pro-Western blogs and sites. Does religion help? Does it hurt? Is it a bulwark against multiculturalism and diversity or is it their foundation? The following will address some of the points which often come up in this ongoing discussion.

A recent article at Takimag.com put forth the (somewhat common) theory that part of The West’s problems in regards to the promotion of multiculturalism and immigration is one of fertility as it relates to theist vs. atheist influence. The theory goes that as Whites drift away from theism (usually specifically Christianity) they cease having children in sufficient numbers.

Now the problem with this theory is obvious. Namely, there are actually very few atheists in the world or the West in particular.  (And for the clarification of the uncertain here, a theist is not a Christian. A theist is someone who believes in a deity or deities or the supernatural in general. In other words Julian the Apostate and Martin Luther were both theists.)

This article at Wikipedia sources a Eurobarometer Poll from four years ago informing us that France has the highest percentage of those who “do not believe there is a spirit, God, nor life force” at 33% (within the European Union 18% fell into this category).  In America the percentage of atheists is even fuzzier with various polls suggesting somewhere around 4% to 9%.  Further problems are created when agnostics are lumped in with atheists.

At any rate, when it comes to numbers, theists seem to hold a firm majority.  So much so that to contrast theist vs. atheist fertility rates may be impossible as the later could easily fall into the ‘margin of error’ on most polls in many Western nations.

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DanielJ has made a very sensible observation about the tendency for outbreaks of strife on this and, as far as I can see, every other free board in our political micro-world.  In consequence, we are changing mod rules initially for a trial period of one month to see if we can eliminate the more abusive commentary which sometimes deforms MR threads.

Criticism, constructive or otherwise, remains fine - and personal criticism too.  But serious and inflammatory abuse is out.

This has always been the case here, of course.  But now the MR team, which comprises four old hands as well as myself, will remove not only the abusive comment but every entry by the miscreant on that thread.

If the word sinks in and the standard of commentary improves as expected we will relax the policy in some form - I like good and interesting but free speech.

This is the first time comment policy has been modified in MR’s history.  It does not represent a trend.  We will never go to full moderation or no comments, as some folks have suggested in the past.  Latitude and inclusiveness remain core values of this blog.