The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The bourgeoisie


I'm thinking that the true enemies of the Marxist - the "bourgeoisie" - aren't Conservatives. The "bourgeois" enemies of the Marxist are the liberals. They're the "nice guys", the White Guelphs. They're the people who like the Stuff White People Like. They're the people Marxists can intimidate.

Marxists can't attack Conservatives until Marxists take power absolutely. (Then it's off to the camps.) Until then Marxists don't care. They do use the "Conservative" (or, "fascist") as a label, but it's only to pin upon liberals. Liberals are too busy playing the election game with Conservatives to spot the danger. They're like Roman generals bickering while the Goths pour in.

If I were in SEIU or ACORN I would spend less time beating up right-wingers directly, and more time putting pressure on urban white liberals.

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posted by Zimri on 21:58 | link |

Monday, November 16, 2009

Card check, 2


The New Scientist is printing an idea by one David Rand of Harvard: mandate that your house and car display your wasteful ways.

Even better than voluntary displays would be laws enforcing disclosure. For example, governments could require energy companies to publish the amount of electricity used by each home and business in a searchable database. Likewise, gasoline use could be calculated if, at yearly inspections, mechanics were required to report the number of kilometres driven. Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance travelled, with inefficient cars labelled similarly to cigarettes: "Environmentalist's warning: this car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Judging from our laboratory research, such policies would motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint.

Unlike my post on public signatures, Rand isn't running a thought experiment. Rand thinks that everything you do should be public. He disdains "possible privacy issues" where the "potential gains" are "great" enough.

The only reason to out someone else's personal data is to open them up for personal attack. David Rand is a supporter of terrorism; so, apparently, is New Scientist.

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posted by Zimri on 20:39 | link |

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Revenge of the Guelph


What we have now in Progressivism is a natural impulse of urban elites, which has manifested itself in history many times over in different forms.

The doctrine of the transnational elite only has to be consciously accepted, to be internally consistent, and to be common across state boundaries. The doctrine's content and even accuracy do not matter. There is little in - for instance - Progressive doctrine (as opposed to observed science) that will survive the coming century.

Some Conservatives might be tempted to send our Progressives off to reeducation camp - maybe making them all good Baptists - so that everything can go back to the Good Old Days. I doubt that this would help. Even if it "works" I think that it's more likely that these new Baptists will impose a new transnational ideology, which will be just as based on an anti-Conservative faith.

Transnational elites, like the poor, will always be with us. They are not evil; they are just inhumane. It's not a good idea to guillotine them anymore than it's a good idea for Progressives to guillotine Conservatives. We should encourage those of an abstract mindset to concentrate on non-political forms of expression, like science and research.

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posted by Zimri on 17:30 | link |

The black flag of progress


The Guelphs were the ideological party of their day, loyal to a transnational ideal. They map pretty well to our Liberals, and to Muslims.

The Guelphs more or less easily took over the major cities in Italy but by 1300 had split into pro-Pope (Black) and anti-Pope (White) factions. Dante was a White Guelph. His side lost.

Transnational idealism, when it wins, takes on a logic of its own. It seems insane to us that a "liberal" party should riot and take over cities in the name of Papal autocracy. But that was the inescapable logic of Guelphism; as Communism is the endstate of liberalism, and as the Taliban is the endstate of Islam.

Transnational idealism is abstract, and little interested in local concerns. Their extremists love the abstract beauty of their system more than they love humans. These extremists gain a propaganda advantage when their ideal - even a moderate, White-Guelph form of it - takes over a nation. When they force the moderates to "live by their own book of rules" (as Alinsky said), they win.

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posted by Zimri on 17:12 | link |

Monday, November 09, 2009

Insidious bad apples


I just read this parable of economic inequality:

There are three men on a desert island. Adam has 2000 apples. Bob has 12 apples. Carl has only 3 apples. There is reason to think that all three men could survive to be rescued, if each has at least 10 apples to feed himself until the rescue arrives. If things remain the same, Adam will obviously survive; Bob would also most likely survive. But Carl would definitely die. Bob could give up 2 of his apples to Carl, but then he'd be at more risk and Carl would still most likely die--or he could give up 7 of his apples and Carl would live but Bob would die.

Here's the author's answer - social democracy:

So, Bob and Carl make a contract: They will take 7 of Adam's apples so that Carl will have 10. Adam resists, saying, "This is coercion! This is socialism! You have no right!" They do it anyway; everyone lives---but Adam is angry.

We see here immediately that social democracy (which Moldbug and I abbreviate, more cynically, to "democracy") creates envy in Carl and anger in Adam. It also demands that no-one recalls how the apples came into Adam's possession in the first place. Lastly, like Dispensational Millenniarianism, it assumes a finite span of time before some future Rapture. As a result no-one on this island asks how this colony might acquire more foodstuffs and other supplies.

Adam could offer some of his apples to Carl (who's clearly the worst at apple husbandry), on condition Carl row out and catch fish. If so, Adam and Carl both could have apples and fish between them.

To save his zero-sum-game model: the author has to fill his ocean with maneating sharks, and to strip his island of everything but those three guys and thousands of apples, and to intervene at the End. His model is entirely detached from reality. He may as well be talking about Robots! - from Spaaaaace!

Because in real life there is ALWAYS someone who has something and someone else who has something else - if only the people have the wit and the drive to produce it. Optimising total wealth and happiness involves free exchange, and restriction of interference to when one side is doing something clearly harmful (pollution, for instance).

The author should take an interest in what Adam really thinks beyond "I got mine". Adam has the hoard to prove that he is the most rational actor in the parable. Adam is wishing that he had refused to pick more than Bob's 12 apples, and pretended not to know how to pick them. Adam could have let Bob bear the wrath of the community while Adam spent his extra time lounging in the sun and playing dominoes with Carl.

Under socialism, those 2000 apples won't be picked and nobody gets protein, either. Everyone works just enough to stay under the radar. (Except maybe for Carl the least productive. Whether it's Carl's own fault or not, Adam and Bob will see him as the weak link. When supplies go low enough those two are likely to ambush Carl in the middle of the night and eat him.)

Socialists aren't that stupid, and if I can figure out the flaw in the above parable then so can they. Something else is at work.

I say that socialism was Bob's insidious plan all along. Bob undercut his own efforts so as to achieve parity with Carl, so that he could get Carl on his side. It wouldn't matter if Carl was poor or not; Bob would have told Carl it was okay not to work all that hard. It's not about justice for socialists; it's about being the one to dispense justice.

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posted by Zimri on 16:27 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

The Department of Homeland Security works for YOU


We get attacked by a Muslim terrorist, and who does the DHS make it a priority to protect - Muslims.

In mainland America, we are empirically more in danger from Muslims than Muslims are from us. There is clearly a "priorities" problem here.

In addition the DHS is spreading the message to Muslims that if they want something - preferential security arrangements, say - their best bet is to shoot up some Americans.

UPDATE 11/9/2009: And now the Attorney General is off to negotiate with CAIR.

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posted by Zimri on 22:44 | link |

Avatar is going to be worse than the Matrix sequels


I'm aware of Avatar's insectile "buzz".

I'm hearing it's going to be Dances With Blue Space Wolves. Difference is, Kevin Costner was and remains a genuine blood-and-soil patriot, with a deep understanding of America, who didn't shrink at showing the dark side of Indian life. James Cameron is a man I do not trust to tell a similar story; we're going to get Rousseau's noble savage from him.

It'll do okay among film geeks and Leftists. The critics will rate it highly, like they rated Wall-E.

Whether it will be any good, I do not know. I haven't seen a Cameron film I can endorse since the mid 1980s. The shine from "Aliens" has rather worn off by now.

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posted by Zimri on 20:01 | link |

Trolls trolls trolls


I don't know if it's even worth my time to blog about this...

I'm dealing with a couple of the inmates at Moran's nuthouse. Moran as far as I can tell is saying "meh, we're getting socialised healthcare" and shopping for KY Jelly and condoms. His commenters are more extreme.

Here's one:

“Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because the CEO of your health insurer needs a private jet? Well too damned bad, pal, the GOP does not give a damn.”

Or, we could say “Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because ‘budgets are tight for everyone’, and Sheila Jackson-Lee needs a private jet?”

What we have here is an appeal to emotion and a not-very-roundabout way of calling libertarians evil. Because the people have the right to the contents of your purse; you, on the other hand, have the duty to sit in line for months. For the chilllldrennnn!

And then there's this:

This bill however flawed, is the only serious one on the table; the GOP had control for decades, and not once made any serious attempt to fix the problem.

What's "the problem"? If we're talking comprehensivity of existent care, George W Bush "fixed" a "problem" of medication not being covered well under Medicare. That effort was pretty "serious", as I recall; Bush had to twist arms all over the place. If the problem is cost and complexity, then Pelosi's monstrosity makes things much much worse.

Then there are the guys who claim that it's all the fault of Beck, Limbaugh, and the extreme right-wing GOP who wouldn't play ball. Another commenter (mannning, 3 n's) refuted that; the GOP did show up to the plate with several amendments which Pelosi struck out. (Trying to keep all the metaphors on point, here.)

You can say the GOP sucks as much as you want. But that doesn't make the Democrats any better - and if you compare the two, the choice is clearly on the (R) side.

I know, it's the internets. But these blustering bullshitters still annoy me.

UPDATE 6 PM ... and they should annoy Progressives. There was another objector in the Nuthouse, by name "busboy33", who had substantive points and a better attitude. He would be tough to debate. But it's easier for me to play whack-a-troll so I just, well, whack those trolls. It fills up the comment thread with an apparently one-sided smackdown of people out of their depth. It makes the argument seem more settled than it is. On a personal level it's not fair to someone who is there for a real argument, like busboy33, who then has to share space with the circus.

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posted by Zimri on 17:24 | link |

Saturday, November 07, 2009

What to do about sleeper agents?


University graduates today may have taken courses like the courses Monfort took. These people are a danger to us in every sense of that word.

In a previous life I would have called on the State to put an end to the rot where it starts - the universities - but the State is deeply entwined via its civil service, so that wouldn't be practical.

Non-government personnel can help here, though.

Employers nationwide should demand the full transcripts of all university graduates. If you see a course that looks "off", don't count it toward the total credit hours which that university requires; and if the new total runs below the minimum, don't treat the graduate as a full graduate.

Your duty as a good employee, as a patriot, and as a free human being is to make it impossible for men like Monfort to move in decent circles.

Redemption is possible; this can be done through vocational training. If he's still a joker, you can probably tell (we're not dealing with the cream of the university system here or he would have got his Engineering degree in the first place). But you are not malicious; you do want to offer the genuinely-misguided a way out of their hole.

In all cases resist, resist, resist the urge to hire a still-damaged person; or to allow a university-aligned division any place in Human Resources. Downsize the company if you have to; set up offshore if you have to. The more you reward the worst element of this system, the worse the system gets.

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posted by Zimri on 18:07 | link |

Anarchist madrassas


Muslims aren't the only Will To Power automatons engaged in war against America. Left-wing anarchists get into the act too. But where Nidal Hassan aimed to thwart the West's existential war against Islam overseas, Monfort aimed to destroy the rule of law in one of our more liberal cities.

For Monfort himself, I have described the secret agent profile three years ago. Ace's commenters are covering the same ground. We have nothing more to learn from what Monfort thinks.

We have more to learn from Monfort's social network. Every terrorist dwells in an ideological community. Monfort belongs to the Alinskyites. Their progeny, ACORN and the various "coalitions against hunger", never target Conservative towns. Alinskyites target towns which have already set up a welfare net. They know that liberal towns are run by weak and/or like-minded hacks. Their aim is to max out the liberals' credit card: where the liberals aren't as liberal as they like, they support more liberal laws; where the laws are already liberal, they advocate among the city's poor to exploit those laws beyond the point of legality. Alinsky's ultimate aim is to force Menshevik cities into chaos, whereupon these Bolsheviks can step in as the group with the best record for getting things done.

Monfort learnt his lessons from the University of Washington. The nature of university coursework is such that it establishes a current of student flow, from the most g-loaded subjects (Math, Physics) to the least. In the old days, at the downstream end of this current, were the vocational fields, and management.

Not so much now. The genius of the 1968 student-radical takeover is that the activists created fields even further down this current. There it is the Alinskyites in the university set up their nets.

The university Alinskyites' aim is to create an army of community-organisers. These are their agents abroad, who agitate for State support of Alinskyites generally but especially in the university ("Diversity Office" "Community Outreach", "Center for Peace and Tolerance", etc).

Not every graduate with an Activism degree proves good even at community-organising. Deep down the graduates know that this was the best degree they could get. Time goes on and they are still stuck in loserdom, while their peers go on to live productive lives. All they have is their Marcuse and, nowadays, Zizek. Some will go barmy.

But Alinskyites have a use for the violence too. The more violence the radicals inflict, the worse for the community, and the more need for those Community Leaders who can Appeal For Calm.

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posted by Zimri on 16:16 | link |

Thursday, November 05, 2009

"I won :)"


(Title stolen from Pamela Gellar.)

To offer some background here, Honduras legally ousted its would-be tyrant Zelaya. LGF denounced that as a "coup". I considered this stance to be unprincipled Leftism. LGF banned me for pointing that out.

Even Obama now understands the legality of the process, although the Associated Press is still calling it a coup (h/t HotAir). There is no principled case to make for Zelaya. There's a "Whig" case, that Zelaya is so super-awesome that he should be El Supremo whatever the law says. But it's not a principled case.

Charles: You didn't ban me; I banned you. Enjoy your new friends at the Associated (With Tyrants) Press.

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posted by Zimri on 07:46 | link |

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Why Earth?


I am trying to divine the motives of a V-type race. We are here dealing with aggressive conquerors. At the same time, the conquerors do not act by bombing the planet back to the Triassic.

That means they're not primarily concerned with our natural resources. They want live and friendly humans.

In other science-fiction epics, like Star Control 2, other races come to uplift us because they are looking for help in a trans-stellar war. An allied and independent race can be relied on, to settle planets and to defend them; allowing the other races to concentrate on other flanks.

If there is no such war (and the Vs claim there isn't), then the Vs need the warm bodies for something else. Food is possible, or incubators for their young a la Alien; but those strike me as clunky. Surely the Vs have technology to deal with that.

The option that I think most likely: the Vs have an ethical problem with doing the "hard work" themselves. They want serfs. Humans of high IQ would be great at helping to terraform other planets, or to do dangerous tech work in asteroid mines.

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posted by Zimri on 21:14 | link |

V


This evening's plan is to watch V. I saw the first eight minutes online already. It looks pretty clever so far. I am crossing my fingers that it will be good. And that the regular season doesn't kill it.

[9:10 PM] Okay - seen it. 'Twas good. I hope the upcoming episodes are good too. I'm a little worried. The logic of this show is anti-Utopian and, therefore, anti-Progressive and anti-Obama.

The show exposits that the Vs have always been with us, creating the crisis that they're now here to save us from. That's an interesting idea... for anti-Progressives. In the real world, for the most part minus the lizard people, this is the argument anti-Progressives made against (for instance) the Community Reinvestment Act, and against ACORN and other exploiters of liberal government programmes.

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posted by Zimri on 17:44 | link |

Saturday, October 31, 2009

On flu shots


I don't distrust the idea of the State saying that influenza vaccines are a good idea. If the State wanted to control us with injections, they could sneak stuff in to the other vaccinations: polio, measles, etc.

As for the hucksters claiming that vaccines cause autism, I see them as enemies. Behind that claim is the assumption that people on the autistic spectrum are diseased. I am on that spectrum myself and I take that talk personally. Beyond that, the claim is bumcombe; autism is genetic. Extreme forms of autism are a problem, but they won't be solved by lies.

(Some disclosure here: I was a regular at LGF's Parachat lounge, whose regulars migrated to Table 9. When LGF went with a pro-vaccine stance - which, I must add, opposed conspiracy-theorists on the Left as well as Right, here - the people in both lounges mounted an insurgency against it. For that, Charles Johnson shut down the former lounge. I am, like Moldbug, a believer in sovereignty. I applauded Johnson's decision and I still support it. I have more mixed feelings about the attendant mass banning since dubbed "The Night Of The Vaccine Needles". But all that is over and done with now.)

I'm more concerned about the State mandating who can get the vaccines. And, yes, there is a concern that the State might force a shortage by its own policies; and to fight the emergency, demand control over the healthcare system. In the Left's history of the past decade, Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to curtail civil liberties. The Left has been casting about for its own emergencies to do the same. The economic crisis has already led to mass takeovers of our industries and banks. Global warming is another supposed crisis, but the people have been losing faith in that.

H1N1 could serve as the next "manbearpig" that we all have to Unite Against. But, so far and touch wood, it's not acted as our generation's 1918 pandemic or even as SARS. H1N1 has just acted like... the flu.

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posted by Zimri on 17:54 | link |

Friday, October 30, 2009

Ismism


"Ism" is today a marker for a school of thought. This is a classic exploration of the theme, which I first viewed in the Alamo Drafthouse out on highway 6, west Houston.

The new Biblical Archaeology Review (35.6) has Steve Mason's article on Ism. X-ismos comes from the Greeks, up to 2 Maccabees and Ignatius. When I was in school, I learnt this in the context of "Medism". It was the act of X-ising; becoming X. It was never the marker for the ideology of X. For that, the Greeks had the construct X-ia; "sophia" for the domain of the wise, for instance.

This article, being a BAR piece, riffs on "Judaism". It claims that the term applied to one who was not at first a Jew; but was Judaising into one. This didn't happen much in antiquity, the Jews then being a marginal bunch who didn't take to converts; but Hanukkah changed everything. That is why the word crops up in 2 Maccabees.

Mason blames the Ism-ism of Ism on Tertullian; which he used to define Christianity ("Christianism").

In that light I'm tempted to take back the Ism. The construct X-isation for the act of X-ising has never sat well with me; it's a mix of Greek -iz and Latin -atio. Now that I know, or have been reminded, that it's just -ism; I can put down that misbegotten seven-digit horror.

I might not even have to change a lot of what I've written about Islamism or Progressivism. Ism is inherently progressive. It never gets to Dr Utopia's promised land; it is always a Whig journey. Given that Marx never quite managed to define what the end state of his Ism should look like, even that old Communist might have got it right.

That still leaves the non-Whig ideologies - and we do need new words for them. Jew-hating, for instance, is not inherently progressive. The conservative mindset (as opposed to the sundry reactionary ideologies) is anti-progressive by all definitions; it cannot contain the "Ism". "AntiSemity" and "Conservaty" would be better, at least befitting the Latin, but these terms look like a joke even to me.

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posted by Zimri on 18:00 | link |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Renewable energy


I mentioned it in passing below, but Understanding E = mc2 bears posting again. What it boils down to, is that "renewable energy" doesn't scale for a population of our size.

Solar energy is good only for dealing with peak daylight usage; and it doesn't solve the problem of the baseline energy we must use when the air-conditioning isn't running and the offices are powered off (at night).

Geothermic, wind, and hydro power together won't make up that difference.

There's another equation to keep in mind here: total energy = number of people x energy use per person.

Environmentalists have a principled case to levy against coal and oil (less so, natural gas). If we find a principled environmentalist, who is fine with our population the way it is, and wouldn't mind lower energy bills: he would then support nuclear power. However we don't see this amongst the Al Gore set. Something Else Must Be At Work.

That Something is that these "environmentalists" are not, in fact, environmentalists. They are simply a coalition of those who would set a ceiling upon the nation. Here, the ceiling is allowable power usage. With total energy capped, the number of people becomes too high, and energy use must be rationed.

The Left wants either fewer people, or a return to the Dark Ages - except for the Left elite.

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posted by Zimri on 00:59 | link |

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Former market-dominants


GNXP, and now Van der Byl in UR, have commented that the Mesticos in Angola - a mixed-race bunch - are now the overclass in an ostensibly Marxist nation.

This is notable because before that the Mesticos started out as the most pro-Portuguese bunch in the colony. They remind me of the mixed-race people in Haiti. In Haiti, famously, the Whites wanted what we might call a unilateral declaration of independence and a slave state; the Blacks wanted blood. Mixed-race people are a natural middle group - they know they don't stand a chance without help. In Haiti this group supported France.

What pushed the Angolan Mesticos to Marxism was Salazar the dictator, in the mid twentieth-century. Salazar had exported a lot of Portuguese trash to this colony. There they predictably set to discriminating against the locals. The former elite resented that.

Mestico Marxism followed the Russian "socialist worker" model and not the Chinese peasants'-party model. They knew that a peasant-party would be indigenous and, if the worst happened, Haitian. In effect the Mesticos found new colonial masters, in Moscow.

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posted by Zimri on 22:05 | link |

Monday, October 26, 2009

Moderation is no virtue


So off I go to Obsidian Wings, where the slogan is "This is the Voice of Moderation".

Moderate ideas for them: equalising homosexual marriage to heterosexual marriage (it's bigotry to think elsewise), National Health By Stealth (to the Left of Obama, note), and punitive taxation.

Take it away, Vitruvius!

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posted by Zimri on 16:33 | link |

Hypocrisy


I have to say that it is a little bit rich of Liberals to complain about the far-right associations of Conservatives now.

For decades Liberals fêted outright Communists as their vanguard and as their literary élite. If anyone like Horowitz pointed out these networks, all the nice moderate people snickered and sneered and called it conspiracy-theorising. ACORN-bashing became a little more respectable last year but the Left still got its sneer on.

But now it's a taint when someone is buds with an extremist.

Sure. Go on, pull the other one.

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posted by Zimri on 16:27 | link |

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Internet "Bad Craziness" as social pathology


Here's a pretty good article, from Research News: EXTREMISTS MORE WILLING TO SHARE THEIR OPINIONS, STUDY FINDS.

There's a slight irony in the hat-tip. It comes from the anonymous "Vitruvius", who shares the site "Small Dead Animals" with one "Kate". Their associations with extremists bear scrutiny.

The base group of extremists I have chosen are the essayist "Fjordman" and the blog "Gates of Vienna". These two share a consistent, principled, and courageous stand for indigenous Europe against foreigners. This happens to be about the definition of "racism" although, to their credit, they don't much mind that tag either. That much is out of the pale for American Republicanism, which has been what we now call "neo-con" at least since Frémont in 1856. As a result, when Little Green Footballs called out Fjordman & Co., they were frozen out of the mainstream American Republican-leaning blogs.

Where Kate links 76 times to "Gates of Vienna", Vitruvius links 26; and for "Fjordman" the stats are similar. Vitruvius is a third the extremist Kate is. He probably sees himself as a moderate by comparison with his friends; and, being a moderate in his own mind, sees "Small Dead Animals" as a blog which accepts moderates and, therefore, a moderate blog.

I don't have much of a "blog in this fight". I know my views are extreme, if only because most Americans like democracy and I don't.

My self-awareness as an extremist may well derive from my choice to be as antisocial as possible. People in a community, like cobloggers (here, Vitruvius) always establish a Somebody Else's Problem Field when they come across a friend who disseminates what the LGFers call "Bad Craziness". Vitruvius doesn't agree with all of the positions of the sites his blog has linked so many times. But he's chosen his side and he knows who his friends are. Which is a comfort.

I don't mean to pick on this one poor guy. On the Left side, propagandist scum like Jones, Zinn, and Lerner ought to be poison; ditto, ACORN. Some, like David Corn, get it. Most Left bloggers don't.

It's just a microcosm of what happens in the wider blogosphere. It's easy enough to diagnose. When you see a blogger attack the extremists in a given community, it might be a principled stand. But if the blogger is only attacking the former community, at the same time making excuses for extremists in another community, it is not. "Something else must be at work." That something is that he is a member of that latter community. He's a hack, maybe even a shill; and his pretensions to higher principle are to be laughed at.

The blogosphere enables this pathology, this willful hyperopia. Even among Sagacious Iconoclasts.

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posted by Zimri on 15:43 | link |

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Ends and means


Looking through the recent "tags", I see that a strong plurality of posts I've done here have been about "conservatives" and mostly hostile at that. This is an artifact of the time I've spent hanging around (and occasionally trolling in) Conservative and generally right-wing blogs. If I spent more time at the blogs of Progressives (or Liberals), people being the primates they are, I might find similar, or at least analogous, problems with them.

I have not been disappointed.

For instance, take the blog "Holocaust Controversies", which I linked at the end of "LGF Considered Harmful". A first draught of that post below was a comment to the HC blog. HC delivered a few retorts, which mostly boiled down to "lighten up", but some were substantive and bear reproducing:

So Charles pointed out that mere appearance of V[an]J[ones]'s name on a document on a truther site (which is known for putting other names there of people who did not give their consent) doesn't necessarily prove that he is a truther. He is right. Such a crime! He also noted that Van Jones is too far left to be in the admin. Somehow you omitted this.

Since when is ACORN a "criminal enterprise"? And please, don't bring up videos of a few individual ACORN employees being naughty. It doesn't prove that ACORN is a criminal enterprise. (Not that I give a damn about ACORN. But let's not be ridiculous.)

[Killgore Trout trolling Hot Air] was a clumsy act of anti-racist sabotage.


The first of these has two parts: whether Van Jones was in the Truther movement, and whether Charles Johnson supported Van Jones.

The first is an historical question which may be demonstrated via the documents of the relevant period, which would be late 2001 to Election Day 2008. By the principles of historical research, Van Jones's trutherism should have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Buttressing the point, Jones was at a truther rally in San Francisco in 9/11/2002 (from topsecretk9). Against the counterargument, two of the guys covering for the man, Lerner and Zinn, are hard Left themselves, and long known by responsible academics as ideologues; and these two were also signatories to Truther events (from Ace).

Time was when LGF itself would be a clearinghouse for commenters to run that level of fact-checking. Now, LGF bans people who find this stuff. So when Charles Johnson covered for Jones, while still saying he was "too far Left": what Johnson was doing was dismissing a genuine evil (trutherism) and forbidding talk about it; while allowing for a relatively harmless political disagreement ("far Left"). Jones shouldn't be allowed to get away from his Truther past; and here was Johnson letting him do it. HC may think the view of the Right is hypocritical; my view, histrionic and aspergerish. But Van Jones's trutherism ought to be an objective conclusion from the facts at hand.

Let's talk ACORN next. ACORN was always against the rule of law in a capitalist society; which laws it views as a tool of the ruling class. I mentioned in the link (which HC didn't follow) that ACORN wasn't technically an inherent criminal enterprise but that it should be. Reading more about ACORN, though, I find that it got into the Motor Voter campaign, which was designed to create voter registrations without allowing checks into actual voters. ACORN became an explicit mafia at that point, where before it was just a parasite.

Lastly, Killgore Trout. An "anti-racist" action might be to publish a paper, or even a comment at LGF, refuting Putnam or otherwise detailing how races might mix and diversity be celebrated thereby. KT instead elected to go to a Conservative forum in the middle of the night, knowing that the moderator was asleep, and to post racist comments. KT didn't prove anything about any HotAir moderators and he didn't inspire any HotAir commenters to cuddle up and sing kumbaya. What he did do was to reinforce the prejudice Black visitors to any Conservative site might have, which is that White Conservatives are racist. This played to a racial stereotype others have of White Conservatives and, therefore, was racist.

"Holocaust Controversies" concludes, "I will survive". He doesn't care about the harm LGF does to history (in the case of Jones), to the nation (ACORN), or to race relations (Killgore). HC is just glad the harm is done "to certain people" which means, all Conservatives; and not just to the people with holocaust on their minds, the pretended concern of his site.

"Holocaust Controversies" is not a principled blog. It is not willing to expose Leftist websites, organisations, or celebrities to the same level of scrutiny it exposes Rightists. What HC has to say about RS McCain, or other Conservatives, will have to be balanced against that knowledge.

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posted by Zimri on 20:40 | link |

Friday, October 23, 2009

Criminal enterprises


The post I linked earlier from Barrett Brown rang mostly true for me. "Mostly." (As Newt would say.) It did have one section which made me sit up (labeled "The Thomas Paine Affair", although 'tis not really about Paine):

Protein Wisdom contributor Darleen Click, who has been running the site for a while now, at some point got into the habit of characterizing ACORN as a “criminal enterprise,” presumably because some of its employees were found to have committed crimes while engaged in the enterprise in question. I suggested that, if this was how a “criminal enterprise” is to be defined, then the Catholic Church must also be a criminal enterprise insomuch as that many of its employees were also found to have committed crimes while engaged in the enterprise in question, and that these crimes were not only of a more serious nature, but also seemingly more widespread even when taking into account the relative size of the church. ...

If ACORN is a criminal enterprise, then so are plenty of other things that the gang at PW would probably not want to see referred to as a criminal organization. Incidentally, ACORN is indeed kind of a criminal enterprise insomuch as that it is an enterprise with several employees that have broken the law in the course of their duties – just like ... and also the Catholic Church. So perhap we should save the term “criminal enterprise” for those enterprises that are involved first and foremost in crime, such as the Crips

Brown and Click, and I, are all agreed on the inherent criminality of the Crips; if what they did became legal, they would move to something else illegal. I reject Brown's terms of debate. The crimes which ACORN and the Church in his argument were committing were non-inherent. Even bringing in the Crips as a control group, he's talking about the gangbanger's nephew engaging in a coked-up shootout with the division head of ACORN and the local priest. The Crips then would be forced into doing the same damage control as ACORN and the Church: it would be a distraction from the work (or crimes, if you like) that they wanted to do, and they would all be saying in unison "I don' need this shit, yo". It's entirely pointless, for the purpose of this debate, to talk about individuals engaged in crimes which the parent organisation does not approve.

That's not even what Click was talking about or, at least, it shouldn't have been. I think it's worth discussing the criminality of the Catholic Church and ACORN as designed.

The Catholic Church spawned from a "proto-Orthodox" hierarchical group extant in the third century CE. This group formed its hierarchy mostly as a means to enforce stability upon a religion, Christianity, which prior to that was chaotic. Before the proto-Orthodox became the Church, we have the hostile witness of the pagan Celsus around 178 AD, "On The True Doctrine", preserved by the Christian (but not Catholic) scholar Origen and whose extracts I am reading from the translation of R. Joseph Hoffman (1987) pp. 90-1. As an organisation founded to define and preserve Christianity, the infant Church arrogated to itself the right to disobey laws against Christianity, then on the books in the Roman Empire. In that respect the Church was by definition potentially criminal; analogous to the 1950s civil-rights groups involved in disobedience.

ACORN, the "association of community organisations for reform now", spawned from the Rathke / Wiley National Welfare Rights Organization in 1970. It formed in order to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy via the tactic of Alinsky, which was to weasel into Liberal programmes which had been addressing poverty and to wreck the US Government thereby. Here too I am citing a hostile witness, Discover The Networks. Unlike the Catholics (and the civil-rights groups) ACORN was founded explicitly to work within the written law (to exploit it). Civil-rights and then the Great Society were the law of the land already in 1970.

The difference between the Church and ACORN, and the reason the Church is not inherently criminal and the reason we can call ACORN "anti-law", lies in the two organisations' core missions and in their relationship to the State. Remember here that "the State", by the Hobbesian and more recently Heinleinian definition, can be nothing less than law enforcement.

The Church's core mission, as mentioned, is to protect Christianity. Whatever lawbreaking is done on behalf of Christianity, or against Christianity, is incidental; and the Church has no interest in ending the State. If the Church is allowed to operate, and its people obey the law: then no laws will be broken. Even if everybody becomes good practicing Christians, the Church will still hang around if only for the charity works it does.

ACORN's core mission is the collapse of the State, and therefore ACORN is an organisation designed to end law itself. If ACORN is allowed to operate, the State will collapse and there will be an anarchy; after which, a new State will arise, which doesn't have the liberties ACORN now assumes, and which will not tolerate an ACORN of its own.

So Click is wrong in practice. ACORN is not a "criminal" organisation. It is following our legal standards. Even its aim, to destroy our standards of "law" and "crime" in this country, is legal under the First Amendment.

But for me, and I suspect for Click, it distorts the very meaning of "criminality" to exclude a group so structurally anti-law. What ACORN has done for four decades should be illegal. This is an example of the Liberal Loophole, analogous to that which Obama followed in becoming President. Our system allows for community organisations, and community organisers, to exploit said system so as to destroy it.

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posted by Zimri on 19:55 | link |

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Funny pages


I'm reading up on Obama's talking-points which he sent to his media lackeys (h/t Ghost of a Flea (itself found via Table 9)). Obama is pushing for these stooges to run stories "about service and volunteerism".

In the Houston Chronicle comics this week: the daughter in Baby Blues has signed up her mother for "all" of the volunteer-work her school offers; Mutts refers to volunteerism; and (less surprisingly) so does Luann.

If you read a mainstream newspaper, there is no escape.

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posted by Zimri on 20:49 | link |

Sunday, October 11, 2009

The Nobel Prize


The Nobel committee’s decision is an afterclap of the reconstruction of Norway after 1945.


Norway surrendered to the Nazis in 1940 and, under Vidkun Quisling, their collaboration went beyond that of allied Finland and even occupied Denmark. Not everybody went under, but the resistors needed help. They got it. According to this Norse site, British agents were in deep with the resistance. When the Germans surrendered in Norway, British forces under General Sir Andrew Thorne occupied the place. Under Thorne, and then under the indigenous Labour-Party under Einar Gerhardsen, for 20 years Britain and Britain’s Norwegian allies drove the Nazi-aligned elite of old Norway into extinction. They remade Norway into a Progressive nation.


Norway has a new elite now, which exploits national guilt for its collaboration. This elite has relentlessly (if peacefully) continued its purge of anything remotely right-wing.


Moldbug has the goods on what that meant last week. This elite sees populists in America (I call them, "Conservatives") as the prime enemy now that their own populists are marginal. It has rewarded Obama for being a bulwark against America itself.


By accepting this award, Obama has announced that he is our Quisling: ruling America on behalf of continental European interests.



P.S. I believe that reconstructing Norway was a necessary act, and I’m glad my countrymen helped do it. Unfortunately handing over Scandinavian nations to progressives cost us in the Cold War: Gerhardsen wouldn’t let NATO keep military bases in Norway, for instance.

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posted by Zimri on 19:37 | link |

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