Under Meat-eating Birds.

I would live for a thousand years, leaping naked from moon-cast shadows into the flame-lights of sacrifice to sway and stomp and howl and laugh in victory-dancing.

Triumphalism? We are such for because of because. No one else but us, and us alone. Going shameless into that good night, we fighting men, carrying on till forever is over. I would live for a thousand years and fight again.

"Lost? And what is there to lose? Is not the wheel of eternity mine?" G.E. Lessing, The Education of Humankind.
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[T]his entry didn't have a negative POV; it's an entry about a negative THING. No one takes prides in her or her own 'triumphalism.' You can't link to any websites with advice about how to encourage more triumphalism in your own group. Those who truly believe in their own superiority call themselves 'superior,' not 'triumphalist.' Those who truly are or will be victorious call themselves 'triumphant,' not 'triumphalist.' When people want to talk about an attitude worthy of praise, they use terms like 'school spirit', 'pride', or 'confidence.' The term 'triumphalism' is used when you want connotations of over-confidence, hubris, or delusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Triumphalism
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I see: So warm. Eyes golden diamonds, skin cherry peaches: floating across the blue an arc of life's rubbies, a bridge uncrossed; to lay down hollow-eyed forever in search of the endless empty skies; to lay at rest under a quilt of meat-eating birds.

Blair Stoned, Bush Burning, Howard Forward; Pak Attacked.

Please excuse the mess I've made here of two stories below somehow cobbled together by sheer accident, I do declare. One is from Australia on the prime minister's reaction to Afghanis wanting to kill a man for insulting pig-allah; and the second is a news brief on Tony Blair's speech about how wonderful is Islam. I just don't know how I got the two pieces mixed up like this. Heckers! I write, being so angry with myself for this mess. I guess that's the end of the virgins for this guy, though Tony's maybe gonna get lucky.

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Christian must die ~ clerics

25mar06

KABUL - Muslim clerics are demanding an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, a move slammed as sickening by Prime Minister John Howard.

The Prime Minister [Tony Blair] during his speech "Not a clash between civilisations, but a clash about civilisation" spoke forcefully about the problems of terrorism.

The talk given to the Foreign Policy Centre and Reuters also included his praise of the Holy Qur'an.

Clerics have warned that if the Afghan Government caves into Western pressure and frees him, they will urge people to "pull him into pieces".

The case against Abdul Rahman, 41, has stirred international protests, including from Australia, and angered President George W. Bush.

Mr Howard said he would personally protest to the Afghan Government.

"This is appalling. When I saw the report about this, I felt sick, literally," Mr Howard said.

"We are putting the lives of Australian soldiers on the line. This is outrageous. The idea that a person could be punished because of their religious belief and the idea they might be executed is just beyond belief."

"The most remarkable thing about reading the Koran – in so far as it can be truly translated from the original Arabic - is to understand how progressive it is. [Says Tony Blair.}

But in Afghanistan even moderate clerics such as Abdul Raoulf have called for Mr Rahman's execution.


"I speak with great diffidence and humility as a member of another faith. I am not qualified to make any judgements. But as an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, rather as reformers attempted with the Christian Church centuries later. It is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and way ahead of its time in attitudes to marriage, women and governance," he said.
[That would be yer Tony Blair again.]

The cleric who was jailed three times for opposing the hard-line Taliban said: "Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die."


He added that under the guidance of the Qur'an, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands was "breathtaking". [Uh huh. it's Tony.]

Diplomats have said the Afghan Government was searching for a way to drop the case, and on Thursday authorities said Mr Rahman was suspected of being mentally ill and would be psychologically examined to see if he was fit to stand trial.

"Over centuries it founded an Empire, leading the world in discovery, art and culture. We look back to the early Middle Ages, the standard bearers of tolerance at that time were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian," he declared.

But three Sunni preachers and a Shiite from four popular Kabul mosques said they didn't believe Mr Rahman was insane.

"I speak with great diffidence and humility as a member of another faith. I am not qualified to make any judgements.

"He is not crazy. He went in front of the media and confessed to being a Christian," said Hamidullah, chief cleric at Haji Yacob Mosque.


Understand how progressive it is. Understand how progressive it is. Understand how progressive it is.

"The Government is scared of the international community. But the people will kill him if he is freed," he said.

Not a clash between civilisations. Not a clash between civilisations. Not a clash between civilisations.

Mr Raoulf, who is a member of the country's main Islamic organisation, the Afghan Ulama Council, agreed: "The Government are playing games. The people will not be fooled."

It is inclusive. It is inclusive. It is inclusive.

"Cut off his head!" he exclaimed, sitting in a courtyard outside Herati Mosque.

And way ahead of its time and way ahead of its time and way ahead of its time.

"We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left."
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AGENCIES
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,18589427%255E663,00.html/
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http://jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/ :

http://www.themuslimweekly.com/fullstoryview.aspx?NewsID=2E55BC69EA7A593A9AEB68F6&MENUID=&DESCRIPTION=Search%20result/
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Cultural Relativism, briefly.

Earlier posts have shown the reaction against social Darwinism that results in cultural relativism among anthropologists of the Boas clique. Unfortunately for us, the inheritors of these reactions don't quite understand why they think they think the things they mouth, and therefore we end our with cultural relativism as multi-culturalist phantasies and gnostic buffoonery. We can look at posts past on Edward O Wilson, Richard Feynman, and Frances Bacon as well as posts on Herder and Fichte for a fuller view of the theme of this post. If that didn't grab your attention, trust me, the rest will be a lot clearer.

Below we have excerpts from wikipedia to give a quick overview of cultural relativism, quick because I cut out tons of nonsense. The remainder, those it shows the word anthropology, is little to do with such and much to do with cultural relativism in this rush job.

The point here is to show that there is a difference between cultural relativism and its distant relative aporia, the two not being the same. (See aporia in the archives.) On the far side of cultural relativism is multiculturalism, the mentally retarded version of intellectual honesty and inquiry. We'll look at that next post.With this bit of background we might see how we and our public lives have been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists bent on taking an epistemology of peace and how they have corrupted it to the point we are now afraid to voice opinions against this fascistic mind-trap that is "political correctness.

We will have seen by now that the German reaction against the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution produced the Herderian and Fichtean reactions that lead us to ecology, true racism, identity politics, communitarian eschatology fascism, and philobarist Left dhimmi fascism culminating in today's cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and the quite possible triumph of Islam in Europe.

OK, so this isn't the snappiest post I've put up. Still, we have to know where we came from to have some idea of why we think the way we do. If we know the history of our ideas we can sort out where others went wrong and try to fix our current condition with some hope of doing it right. This will help.
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Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities make sense in terms of his or her own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas [....]

Immanuel Kant, argued that human beings are not capable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world. All of our experiences of the world are mediated through the human soul, which universally structures perceptions according to sensibilities concerning time and space.

Kant considered these mediating structures universal, his student Johann Gottfried Herder argued that human creativity, evidenced by the great variety in national cultures, revealed that human experience was mediated not only by universal structures, but by particular cultural structures as well.

[....]

Although Herder focused on the positive value of cultural variety, the sociologist William Graham Sumner called attention to the fact that one's culture can limit one's perceptions. He called this principle ethnocentrism, the viewpoint that "one's own group is the center of everything," against which all other groups are judged.

Cultural Relativism as a Methodological and Heuristic Device

[....]

Cultural relativism was in part a response to Western ethnocentrism. ...Boas, ...argued that one's culture may mediate and thus limit one's perceptions in less obvious ways. ... He assumed a much broader notion of culture, defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself, and of each individual to himself.

[H]ow to escape the unconscious bonds of one's own culture, which inevitably bias our perceptions of and reactions to the world, and second, how to make sense of an unfamiliar culture....

A Methodological Tool

Between World War I and World War II, "cultural relativism" was the central tool for American anthropologists in this refusal of Western claims to universality, and salvage of non-Western cultures. It functioned to transform Boas' epistemology into methodological lessons.

[....]

Boas and his students realized that if they were to conduct scientific research in other cultures, they would need to employ methods that would help them escape the limits of their own ethnocentrism. One such method is that of ethnography: basically, they advocated living with people of another culture for an extended period of time, so that they could learn the local language and be enculturated, at least partially, into that culture. ...

[....]

Boas argued that although similar causes produce similar effects, different causes may also produce similar effects.

[....]

Anthropologists became aware of the diversity of culture. They began to see the tremendous range of its variations. From that, they commenced to envisage it as a totality, as no historian of one period or of a single people was likely to do, nor any analyst of his own type of civilization alone. They became aware of culture as a "universe," or vast field in which we of today and our own civilization occupy only one place of many. The result was a widening of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity.

[....]

Ruth Benedict, [argued] the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.

Benedict was adamant that she was not romanticizing so-called primitive societies; she was merely pointing out that any understanding of humanity must be based on as wide and varied a sample of cultures as possible. Moreover, it is only by appreciating a culture that is profoundly different than our own, that we can realize the extent to which our own beliefs and activities are culture-bound, rather than natural or universal.

[....]

Relativism does not mean that one's views are false, but it does mean that it is false to claim that one's views are self-evident.

[....]

[P]eople misinterpreted cultural relativism to mean that all cultures are both separate and equal, and that all value systems, however different, are equally valid. Thus, people came to use the phrase "cultural relativism" erroneously to signify "moral relativism."

People generally understand moral relativism to mean that there are no absolute or universal moral standards. The nature of anthropological research lends itself to the search for universal standards (standards found in all societies), but not necessarily absolute standards.... Cultural relativity means, on the contrary, that the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits. [A]nthropology does not as a matter of theory deny the existence of moral absolutes. Rather, the use of the comparative method provides a scientific means of discovering such absolutes. If all surviving societies have found it necessary to impose some of the same restrictions upon the behavior of their members, this makes a strong argument that these aspects of the moral code are indispensable.

[....]

Political scientist Alison Dundes Renteln ... supports a different formulation: "there are or can be no value judgements that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures" (Schmidt 1955).

[....]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism


The history of our ideas has lead us to where we are today, and we usually don't have any idea that such is true. Once we know the German reaction to the French Revolution we can begin to understand why Herder and Fichte reacted as they did and how the ecologists and racists developed as they did to form the gnostic fascism that became Nazi Germany. Knowing that we can understand why the French, cutted and emasculated by the Germans turned to socialism, dhimmitude and neo-feudalist anti-Modernism. We can see why we are stuck in a time of blindingly stupid cliches that threaten our very survival and lead us into the Shadows of the Valley of Death. There's more to cover yet, that being triumphalism, multiculturalism and the concept of social progress. At the risk of overwhelming the reader, he being you, I'll post it tomorrow and move on from there to show how we might change things for the better in our future.

I find all this interesting and valuable. I do hope you'll return and discuss this as you will.
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Sychronicity, by co-incidence.

This is brilliant, this story from the Guardian,

posted by John Sobieski at 3/24/2006 12:37:00 AM

http://pedestrianinfidel.blogspot.com/2006/03/muslim-youths-vandalize-center-of.html

It's even about cars.

Triumph of the Willing

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: Indeed it's the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

We finished our eleventh meeting of the local chapter of the Revolution Bleu here in sunny Vancouver, Canada this evening. As always we went far into over-time, this time being swarmed by a mass of sports fans leaving an arena, pleased that the home team won after some long slump. A dozen or so players enthralled the city's sports fans, put joy in their black little hearts, and made the city a nicer place to live.

We, we happy few, sat at the library in the atrium and discussed Islam and our modern lives as citizens of the West under threat. We discussed numerous topics, all related to Islam and our values in oppostion to it. Our most interesting topic, I believe, is what we stand for as opposed to our opposition to Islam. What do we want from our world even if there were no Islamic threat?

In our group there are no socialists. We are solidly in favor of individual initiative and the benefits of capitalism, whether we share those benefits to the standards we believe we should receive or no. It's not that we are greedy and grasping, it is that we value freedom and independence as individuals within our social groups and nations. Because we value our own freedoms we value the freedoms of others. Yes, we even value the freedom of others to choose slavery if they so wish it.

To make our postive postion sensible in concrete terms we can look at a conversation we had in which we pondered the Oct.-Nov. riots in France last year: Muslim youths rampaged night after night burning cars, burning car show-rooms, smashing cars, and burning and smashing buses. They didn't go looting like normal criminals would do. We had to ask why they didn't steal disposable articles and why instead they simply burned cars.

Is it because of the strong and traditional Islamic prohibition against stealing? Not too likely, given that Muslim gangs steal from passers-by at random on commuter trains between Nice and Lyon, in Malmo, anywhere they happen to be. But grand and organised theft in the Fall riots was the least significant of the Muslim crimes committed. Why did they burn automobiles?

If the youths were poor, they would have stolen money and goods rather than simply burn cars. They did not loot grocery stores or the local Walmart. They weren't hungry. They didn't steal clothing or camping goods because they get sufficient from their state payments to cover such things. And they didn't steal cars because they don't have places to park them, money to insure them if they di, money for gas to keep them moving, money for repairs and so on. It might well be that they don't even have licences to drive them if they had the money to buy cars. But they burned cars by the thousands.

Cars represent two things Muslims will never have: mobility and stability. The car represents all the things the West has that Muslims cannot have by virtue of Islam: cars represent vast intellectual horizons and broad emotional vistas in that a car owner can move from one place to the other with relative ease from one location physical and emotional to another and back again. A car is independence for the driver, a machine under his own control, a thing of his own volition, things Muslims cannot have while being Muslim. To own a car is to move as one will. To own a car is to decide where one will go and when with no one telling the driver anything more about it than nothing at all. To the Muslim it must be a madness to be so free.

Yes, there are milions of wrecked and smoking cars in many Muslim megacities, nearly all of them converted to commercial use in some form or other. They are not instruments of freedom but tools to make money. They are not machines to provide access to new experiences and to give pleasure but means of transporting goods, like pack animals. The average Muslim automobile is akin to a donkey rather than to an Arabian horse.

There's another aspect to the automobile in France that seperates the French from the Muslim: The French produce automobiles. No Mulsim nation does so. at best they produce parts for other nation's manufacturers. Muslims do not have the initiative or the organisational skills or the mental horizons to create their own automobile industries. They can't even take care of the automobiles they buy form other nations. They wreck them badly in short order when they do manage to buy Ladas. Muslims do not have the attitude needed to be stable enough to maintain a car. What they don't understand they destroy.

Our enemy, Islam, is an embarrassment. Muslims are too stupid to do anything to harm us greatly. They can't even park cars on the street without smashing the headlamps. Muslims in the modern world are complete failures as people. In Muslim lands they are even worse because Modernists don't support them in the same style as they do with immigrants in Europe. Muslims, incapable of making cars, incapable of owning cars, incapable of maintaing cars, burn cars. These are the worthless losers we are at war against. And one must wonder if we will win.

We in the modern West do all that the greatest of men can do. Muslims burn cars and blow up their worthless selves. We do almost nothing to constrain them, making allowances for them, praising their evil behaviours, watching in silence as they mutilate and murder females, as they push and bully and demand ever more privilege from host nations, and slowly but effectively colonize our modern world. We make excuses for these embarrassingly inept and destructive parasites. We are slowly dying and feeling morally superiour to those among us who find that a problem.

In our discussion this evening we asked what we might do to revesrse our decline, what postive things we can do to unite our nations in confident progress toward greater good rather than a lessening and a wasting into dhimmitue and decay that is Islam. Suffice it to report that we are dealing with things as well as we are able, and that we will learn from our tasks done. Concretely we are beginning again to create leaflets for public distribution, and to do so with a goal in mind. Ours is a strategic and long-term plan rationally planned, unlike the smashing and burning rampages of our Muslim opponents. We will do socially and politically what automobile manufactures do industrially.


In looking at the quotation above I find myself disgusted by Margaret Mead. Her elitist and and gnostic view of people angers me. Unlike the local sports team competing with another team, Mead is determined to turn the spectators of the game into slaves rather than participants. Our group here act as men and women on behalf of others as equals, not as their babysitters. Yes, we will be a small group regardless of the numbers we reach in time; but we will be people who are people involved in our communities, not rulers and elites. We will build rather than destroy. We will change the world, not by our own hands but by the will of the people with us. Never doubt that we will triumph. No one else can.

News of France.

For news on France turn to this site:

Tiberge at

http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/

and this:

http://en.france-echos.com/
.

False consciousness and false organising

We have two things below, related, one hopes, to our struggle against Islam and Left dhimmi fascism. First a look at false consciousness; the second a fiasco of anti-jihadi organising.

Some of ours will fall by the wayside in our process. We learn in this process, and some wil learn the hard way, by failing. We will do well to understand what our goals are, and by knowing what we are fighting against. We must be clear in our own minds what we want and what we do not want, and how we will know the difference.

If we follow the Left dhimmi fascist concept of socialism and collectivist phantasies, we will buy into the idea that others are falsely conscious if they do not agree to our special knowledge. we will remain mired in phantasy land with the dhimmis. Such, I argue, has happened in our struggle to organise against jihad and dhimmitude, as we will see in the second piece below. It is a process, not a failure per se, that we are facing a crumbling of our group effort against jihad. We'll see where we have gone wrong in our assumptions of consciousness over reality in the second piece here. Some of ours, thinking themselves knowledgeable in spite of reality, have blown the game for themselves. Gnosticism first and then Voltaire, organiser.

We can see the origins of the classical gnostic dismissal of the material world and the demiurge in Plato's later dialogues, and so clearly that only the most obsessively blind can miss them. We can see the fascist origins of the Marxist concept of false consciousness in Plato. We can see the gnostic visions of our Left dhimmi fascist intelligentsia too clearly by looking at the television or the Internet. But what does this mean?

We stare dumbfounded (or maybe it's just me) at the insanities pouring out of the minds and mouths of our intellectual classes, insanities such as "Islam is the religion of peace." We find equally ignorant and repulsive insanities from the Left who make such noises as "No war for oil." We look at our world, we see our world, we think, and we find we are in strong disagreement with those who say they know the truth about what we see and think. Something is wrong because our vision of reality doesn't match up with what we read in the daily papers, see on television, read on the Internet, hear in our lecture rooms. Ah, it is we who are misinformed by our own minds. We, like the slaves in Plato's cave, are living in states of illusion, seeing shadows and mistaking them for reality. Little do we know just how naive and stupid we are to be fooled by the clever and evil geniuses who run the whole show in the back of the room. It takes those who have a special knowledge of the true reality to explain it to our dull minds, and when we still don't get it, to relieve us of our mental and emotional burdens, to take such burdens upon themselves and to rule us for our own good. We, the dullards and the masses, the iron people who think we are gold, we must leave to the aware and the enlightened the hard tasks of understanding those things too difficult and deep for us to trouble our little heads over. We must leave the thinking and the knowing to the gifted and the special, to the intelligentsia and the highly developed moralists among us.

We here have written numerous times on the topics of infantalisation, of the Left dhimmi fascists who think of themselves as adult while the masses are treated as children by politicians, the welfare statists, the academics, and anyone with a job in government. Infantalisation is the outcome of socialism. Some people love it.

We have written here often of the philobarbarist obsession with the primitives of the world, the socialists having abandoned the working classes of Europe in favor of victims more amenable to their infantalising programmes.

And we have written in great detail bout the ecologists who have abandoned all to the fascism of gnostic anti-Humanism. There is mmore and there will be more to come after that. But first we might look at why we are so stupid as to miss what the gnostics among us know. We are falsely conscious.
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False consciousness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

False consciousness is a Marxist hypothesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society mislead the proletariat — and perhaps the other classes — over the nature of capitalism.

The concept flows from the theory of commodity fetishism — that people experience social relationships as value relations between things, e.g., between the cash in their wage packet and the shirt they want. The cash and the shirt appear to conduct social relations independently of the humans involved, determining who gets what by their in-built values. This leaves the person who earned the cash and the people who made the shirt ignorant of and alienated from their social relationship with each other.

Although Marx frequently denounced ideology in general, there is no evidence that he ever actually used the phrase "false consciousness." It appears to have been used — at least in print — only by Friedrich Engels. (See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 89.)

Engels wrote, in "Letter to Mehring" (1893), that: "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces."

False consciousness is theoretically linked with the concepts of the dominant ideology and cultural hegemony. The doctrine of false consciousness has also been used by Marxist feminists in regard to other women.

[....]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
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Thursday, March 23, 2006

Muslims are Welcome: No Danish cartoons, please.

At the very start of this campaign, we said this is a march in support of freedom of expression, not a march against Muslims. We meant it. But there has been a lot of mistrust about this from Muslims, and some disappointment from those who would like to use it to attack all followers of Islam. The latter is of no consequence to us; the former is a great concern.

Comments here have been illuminating. Particularly striking has been the use of the "First they came for..." motif both by people who feel under attack by Muslims, and by Muslims who feel under attack in Britain and Europe. Let's ignore whether these sentiments have reflected reality. The fact is they do represent the way people feel. People feel under attack from each other, there is vast mistrust and misunderstanding.

At the outset, we said that displays of the Danish cartoons would be welcome on Saturday. No, let me rephrase that: At the outset, I, Peter Risdon, said the cartoons would be welcome. I am going to take full responsibility for this. I now think that was a mistake.

In practice, Muslims who wholeheartedly endorse our statement of principle, as quoted below by Peter Tatchell in his superb essay, who abhor the threats made against Danish cartoonists and believe people should have the right to publish things they themselves find offensive or abhorrent would be UNABLE to come to our rally on Saturday, because to be surrounded by these cartoons, now, in the present context when the BNP are using them as a rallying point, would be intolerable.

So I now appeal to people not to bring the cartoons on T-shirts or placards.

Instead, because the principle of free expression must be upheld in this context as well, we will arrange a forum in which they can be seen and debated without this being, in context, intimidating to anyone.

The principle of freedom of expression is used, by some, as a Trojan horse, as a proxy for racism and islamophobia. Not by me. Not by us. Not by this campaign.

posted by Voltaire @ 11:20 AM

216 Comments:

http://marchforfreeexpression.blogspot.com/2006/03/muslims-are-welcome-no-danish-cartoons.html
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And the reaction to those who do not understand that they do not have a special understanding of reality that the rest of us miss is to their shame. The gnostic babysitters blew it. We are not so stupid as they would think us. I urge all to forego the grand schemes of marches and rallies for this or that until such time as we have made our own local cadres unified and coherent. To sort out our agendas on a man to man basis is our strength at this time. To meet in the open in our own locations with others of like-mind is to orgainise properly for the struggles against fascist Islam and Left dhimmi fascism. To rely on others to campaign for us, to set our agendas for us, to decide for us what we can and cannot do is to exchange one group of gnostics for another. Let them live in their state of bliss and let us carry on in our own confident manners, throwing off those who accuse us of false consciousness, and that we meet each other on Thursday evenings to know who and what we are as individuals unbeholden to the idiot schemes of grand organisers who know better than individuals together.
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Nativism and Power.

Life's not fair. So what? We don't always get what we deserve, not our rewards, not our punishments. That's life. And so too we see that some people gain at the expense of others when the obvious right and wrong is simply shrugged off as meaningless. What is to be done? Some work to make things better in the face of wrong, others simply continue on hoping nothing worse will happen, and some get on the gravy-train and rip and tear with the worst. It's all living, and we live with it. Victims of genocide, lottery winners, cancer victims, it's all the same. We live and we die and we make the best of our details as we can. That also includes such fundamental outrages as the most obvious evils pushed in our faces. We live with it. We might try to stop the evil but if we don't we must live with it till it kills us, and there's no good reason to complain either way, nature being mindless.

The point to make here is that some people are evil, and that is objective reality, something we live with. How we deal with that is up to us. It is objective that some will do nothing to stop and some will do nothing to aid evil. Life is as it is. And some of us will make it as we wish it to be regardless of others and their passivity. With our competitors we compete and we leave aside the apathy of the middle. That is the nature of nature, that the apathetic and the weak do nothing while the aggressive and the motivated do as they can. The weak and the stupid are material to use, either side using them as they can. That is nature, coherently non-judgeable.

Yale University has a Taliban cretin in its undergrad programme. It's official. Is it morally right to admit a fascist monster to one of our elite universities? No. And so what? The question is one of power, and that is all we can look at at this time. Yale has the power to admit our enemies to its programmes and the power to exclude natives. That is raw power, and that is what we deal with if we are in opposition. We ignore the morality of Yale's position until such time as we have the power to act over them. Yale has done what it has done, and that is the end of that. It is now up to those in opposition to move on and fight for power to undo and to wreck the power Yale has to do such things, regardless of the middle of apathetic people who know or care not. We cannot sit back and await goodness to pour down from the skies. Those who do are doomed. They are drowned, and they have no names. Yale admitted a Taliban terrorist. That is power.
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The day after the New York Times profile appeared, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that he indeed had "non-traditional roots [and] very little formal education but personal accomplishments that had significant impact." Mr. Benaroya was stupefied; did Mr. Shaw mean accomplishments that had a "positive impact, not terroristic and totalitarian impact"? Mr. Shaw responded: "Correct, and potential to make a positive difference in seeking ways towards peace and democracy. An education is a way toward understanding the complex nuances of world politics."

[....]

Amy Aaland, executive director of Yale's Slifka Center for Jewish Life, where Mr. Hashemi takes his meals (Kosher complies with Islamic dietary laws). When I asked her if any of the revelations about his past disturb her, she noted that he was "very, very young" when he had been a Taliban official, and that "it's not like the Taliban attacked this country." I asked about the Taliban's decree in May 2001 that all non-Muslims--chiefly Hindus--had to wear yellow badges. The order, reminiscent of the Nazis, was met with global censure. A reporter then in Kabul recalls Mr. Hashemi had no trouble defending the decree as a protection for minorities against punishment by the religious police "until I pointed out it also required non-Muslims to move out of housing they shared with Muslims within three days; he didn't have a coherent response to that." Ms. Aaland absorbed all that I told her, and replied: "I don't expect learning to happen overnight." She still thought that "just living here, [Mr. Hashemi] can learn values and ideals from our society."

There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale "went nearly unchallenged." He concluded that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi. http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110008127
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Yes, some people at Yale are mind-bogglingly stupid, and some are disgustingly evil. We live with that as a fact of life. What is important is power. We have it or we take it or we lose and the others win their agendas. Like it or not.

To a great extent people have power. They might not use it. When they do not, then cliques rule. The cliques now in charge of our daily public lives, the elites of the intelligentsia, are fascists. They have power, we need power to defeat them. Our power wil only come from the people. Without that we wil not rule our own lives.

There are four concepts to come that we need to examine clearly in our look at power. Things are changing, however slowly. We face a paradigm shift in our approaches to epistemology. It seems arcane and even irrelevant at this time, but when the killing fields pile up the bodie we will know ourselves by our epistemologies and little else. We will know who we are by how we approach power, how we force reality to conform to our needs and demands.

Below is the first of four short entries on how we know reality as it pertains to people and culture. If we favor one over the other we find ourselves in one camp or another in this bifurcation of Humanity. We are Modernist Progressives or we are fascist reactionaries. Yes, there is a middle ground, but it's not ground at all, it is the place wherein sink those Primo Levi refers to as "The Drowned."

In the middle of our on-going emotional and intellectual dialectic we are caught with old assumptions about our values and then are vividly confronted with the unreasonableness of same. Our attitudes toward life and people and cultures make no sense in light of reality as we live it. Old attitudes die hard. We do not like to make new ones. We live in a state of comfort, even when that comfort is fatal. Too bad for those who cannot adjust to reality as it is. Social reality has changed, and we will deal with it regardless of whether we do so actively or not.

In the first piece below we look at the concept of and some history of Nativism. Look today to Europe for the sense of it. Compare that to the Cultural Relativism that follows next. We will follow that with a brief look at Triumphalism. Then Multiculturalism, and finally the idea of Social Progress.

This four posts covers a lot of space, and not all of it will be of interest to all readers. We suggest looking over the whole, however cursorily, and that one keep these concepts in mind when viewing unfolding developments in the coming months through till Fall in Europe for the proof that this provides a valid and important base for understanding our new world situation.

The Left dhimmi fascsist phantasies of fools at Yale are today the norm of those who have power. Their ideas were not the norm forever, and they need not last much longer. We can see alternatives. We will act against the norm as it is today or we will face a worse future by allowing the competitors to the mulit-cultural phantasists to continue in power.

First, a look at what is not multi-culturalism. Keep in mind, if you will, the Left fascist leanings of the author of the following piece and see that we need not buy into it.
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In politics "nativist" refers to the socio-political positions taken up by those who identify themselves as "native-born".

Nativism is a hostile and defensive reaction to the flux of immigration. Though it surfaced first, gained a name and affected politics in mid-19th century United States, recognizably nativist movements have since arisen among the Boers of South Africa, and in the 20th century in Australia and Britain. In American history, nativism was always associated with fears that certain new immigrants might inject political and cultural values at odds with the American way of life.

The term "nativism" is normally applied only to nativists of European stock, and accused by some of being a nationalist element of racism. Similar ideologies espoused by non-Europeans are given other labels and are rarely connected to nativism in public discourse. For instance, while Mexican President Vicente Fox faults the US for not opening its borders, Mexico simultaneously cracks down harshly on "undocumented migrants" who breach her southern borders from other Central American countries. Yet no public discussion accuses Mexico of being nativist in immigration policies. Modern contention over ancient ethnic occupation of areas in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus, sometimes based on tenuous linguistic and place-name hints, is given added urgency by assumptions that an urrecht of the earliest local population can justify nativist stances towards more recent arrivals. These issues are rarely assessed in terms of "nativism".

One such example that has succeeded in asserting their nativist rights, is Zionism. They have based their claim on the territory of Palestine on the Bible and created the state of Israel.

U.S. nativism appeared in the late 1790s in reaction to the political refugees from France and Ireland. After passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 it receded. Nativist outbursts occurred in the Northeast from the 1830s to the 1850s, primarily in response to a surge of Irish Catholic immigration. In 1836, Samuel F. B. Morse ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York on a Nativist ticket, receiving 1,496 votes. In New York City, an Order of United Americans (OUA) was founded as a nativist fraternity, following the Philadelphia Nativist Riots of the preceding spring and summer, in December, 1844.

In 1849–50 Charles B. Allen founded a secret nativist society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner in New York as a result of the fear of immigrants. In order to join the Order a man had to be twenty-one, a Protestant, a believer in God, and willing to obey without question the dictates of the order. Members of the Order became known as the Know-Nothings (a label applied to them by newspaper editor Horace Greeley, because no one would admit to knowing anything about the secret society). The Nativists went public in 1854 when they formed the 'American Party', which was anti-Irish Catholic and campaigned for laws to require longer wait time between immigration and naturalization. It is at this time that the term "nativist" first appears, opponents of Americanists denounced them as "biggoted nativists." Former President Millard Fillmore would run on the American Party ticket for the Presidency in 1856. The American Party included many ex-Whigs who rejected nativism, and included (in the South) some Catholics. Conversely, much of the opposition to Catholic and Chinese immigrants came from other immigrants, who can hardly be called "nativists."

This form of nationalism often identified with xenophobia, anti-Catholic sentiment (anti-papism). In the 1840s, small scale riots between Catholics and nativists took place in several American cities. In California, Irish immigrants vented their resentment against the Chinese. Nativist sentiment experienced a revival in the 1880s, led by Protestant Irish immigrants hostile to Catholic immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first of many nativist acts of congress to limit the flow of immigrants into the U.S. The Orange Order was the center of nativism in Canada from the 1860s to 1950s. The second Ku Klux Klan, which flourished in the U.S. and Canada in the 1920s, used strong nativist rhetoric. In 1928, nativist bias was an important feature of the defeat of Presidential candidate, Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic. During World War II, 'nativist' undercurrents fueled the Japanese American Internment.

American nativist sentiment experienced a resurgence in the late 20th century, this time directed at 'illegal aliens,' largely Mexican resulting in the passage of new penalties against illegal immigration in 1996. After terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. in 2001, nativist feeling and islamophobia were amplified and directed increasingly toward individuals perceived to be either Arab and/or Muslim; these found themselves the target of rhetoric and a request by nativists to tighten border controls. The early 21st-century American movement that is self-characterized as "Immigration reduction" attempts to distance itself from any suggestion of Nativist motivations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism/
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It likely strikes many as obvious that there is a conflation of nativism and racism. I beg to spit on such a thought. Such reductionism is typical of the stupidity of many on our so-called intellectuals. The KKK is not America; the BNP is not Britain; the FN is not France. The IRA is not Muslim. Should the Irish, as one example, make consessions to Muslims in Ireland by way of sharia in Ireland? Are the Irish, if they do not concede sharia privilege to the Muslim community in Ireland, nativist and racist? And if one argues such, does it really make any difference?

The only argument for or against sharia privilege in Ireland is who has power. Any other argument is naive and sentimental. There is one rule: "All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

The Islamic umma is at war against the world at large. It is between the natives and the Muslims. No, Islam is not monolithic, and no, not every Muslim is violent; but yes, it only takes a small number of dedicated people to rule. We are for ourselves in opposition to Islam or we are on our way to Islam and dhimitude. It's not fair. We should all just get along and live in peace and harmony. In the real world there are real people who are our enemies. They might win. It is a matter of power.

Islamophobiac Meeting

We meet again Thursday evening from 7-9:00 pm at the Vancouver Public Library atrium, Vancouver,Canada.

Spoiled French kids can pull out thousands of protestors and force the government to do as they demand. We have to take our approach to social change a little more slowly, but we must do something or have no say in our world. We will speak out.

Give Me Stalin and St Paul

The concept of Left and Right as opposing is long since finished, the two now being indistinguishable. Proof, if any further were needed, comes from the results of the F-Scale test below, which rates me, a Rightwing religious bigot, according to my numerous critics, as a "Liberal Airhead" in terms of post-1945 values. If today I am a Rightwing religious bigot, and if I'm also a Left flakey, then something is wrong in terms of either the test or the times we live in today. It's our postion here that it's not the average person who has become a Rightwing religious bigot but that it is our societies that have become so skewed that only the most outrageous Left dhimmi fascist can be seen in societal terms as normal. That ain't me or those around me. By being reasonable and doing nothing we have seen the centre move so far to the Left that it now meets the Right. Ask Robespierre.

You can score for yourself at the first link below. The test is today almost funny, but it gives an indication of just how screwed up is our world. In the following pieces we'll take a closer look at the F-Scale:
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Fifty years ago, the Authoritarian Personality studies attempted to "construct an instrument that would yield an estimate of fascist receptivity at the personality level."

This online, interactive F Scale presents that instrument in its final form. Additional information, including an explanation of the personality variables the F Scale tries to measure, is given below after the questionnaire. So take the F Scale now --- or else!

http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm
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The F-scale is a personality test (psychometric assessment) that attempts to quantify authoritarian tendencies. The F-scale was designed on the basis of Theodor Adorno's theory of authoritarian personality. The "F" stands for fascism.

The test is designed to measure several variables, including conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness," destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and sex.

Among the criticisms of the F-scale is its sensitivity to respondents with acquiescent response styles. A number of related scales such as the P-scale and the balanced F-scale have been created in an attempt to fix the shortcomings of the F-scale.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-scale
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The concept of authoritarian personality denotes a number of qualities, which according to the theories of Theodor Adorno predict one's potential for fascist and antidemocratic leanings and behaviors. These qualities are assessed by a coherent system--the "structure of personality"--which arises out of characteristic experiences in early childhood and the pattern of internal, psychic processing.

Those persons who cling to fascist ideologies, according to the theory, distinguish themselves through their inappropriate, prejudice-laden view of social and political relationships. From this background in their personal history arose the assumption that the emergence of certain phenomena such as anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism stands in close connection with this particular personality structure. Because fascistic groupings get support essentially from the right-conservative camp (although that does not suggest that the right-conservative camp invariably lends these groupings such support) parts of the conservative outlook are likewise judged as an expression of this personality structure. As an instrument to measure this outlook, the AS-scale (for "anti-Semitism") the E-scale (for "Ethnocentrism") and the PEC-Scale (for "political-economic conservatism") are used.

The instrument for assessing the underlying authoritarian personality structure was the so-called F-Scale ("implicit antidemocratic tendencies and fascist potential"). This scale is comprised of the following subscales:

Conventionalism -- the tendency to accept and obey social conventions and the rules of authority figures; adherence to the traditional and accepted
Authoritarian Submission -- submission to authorities and authority figures
Authoritarian Aggression -- an aggressive attitude towards individuals or groups disliked by authorities; particularly those who threaten traditional values
Anti-Intraception -- rejection of the subjective, imaginative and aesthetic
Substitution and Stereotypy -- superstition, cliché, categorization and fatalistic determinism
Power and Toughness -- identification with those in power, excessive emphasis on socially advocated ego qualities
Destructiveness and Cynicism -- general hostility, putting others down
Projectivity -- the tendency to believe in the existence of evil in the world and to project unconscious emotional impulses outward
Sex -- exaggerated concerns with respect to sexual activity

The authors of the study expected a positive correlation between results on the F-scale and being marked by conservatism, ethnocentrism and anti-Semitism.

Robert Altemeyer found that three facets of this authoritarian personality were important: conventionalism, authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission. He has refined the concept of the authoritarian personality into the Right-wing Authoritarian scale, though his conceptualization is in some ways more primitive than that of the Adorno group. The Adorno group did, for instance, try to keep the concepts of authoritarianism and conservatism separate (using different measuring instruments for the two) whereas Altemeyer confounds them inextricably.

Psychoanalytic aspect

Adorno and his colleagues regarded the fundamental basis of this presumed system of personality qualities and its linkage to certain attitudes according to a psychoanalytic viewpoint: experiences in early childhood and their internalization.

[....]


Extent of Validity

[....]

Despite some methodological deficiencies, the theory of the authoritarian personality has had a major influence on subsequent research. One criticism is that the theory of the Berkeley group insinuates that "Authoritarianism" is present only on the right of the political spectrum. As as result, some have claimed that the theory is corrupted by political bias.

[....]

Most academic journal articles that mention the theory, however, assume that it is at least largely true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_Personality
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It's our postion that the Left is indeed fascistic inside and out. Keeping this test in mind we'll return next day with more on the authoritarian personality and the Left dhimmi fascism that prevails in our time.

The title comes from Leonard Cohen, "The Future."

Media Bias and Elitist Contempt

Three commentators below express opinions on media bias and the Left dhimmi fascism in our time. These comments come from Tech Central Station without permission from the writers. I'm expecting the marshals at the door any time now.

This is an introduction to a theme I hope to follow up on over the coming days on the elitist view of the "masses." If time allows I'll follow John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia. 1800-1939. Faber and Faber: London, 1992; and Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. Time Pub. : New York, 1963.

This theme follows along the lines of gnostic and Platonist fascism as discussed numerous times in previous posts: that there are those who consider themselves superior to the masses, entitled to rule others by virtue of their special knowledge; and that the masses are incapable of living rightly or in accord with cosmic harmony without such guidance and leadership, rulership by the elite.
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In my experience, reporters, editors and publishers don't have "an agenda." They don't meet in smoke-filled rooms and hatch plots to slant stories in order to "liberalize" America.

Rather, what's at work here is much less organized and much more subtle. First, there's a process of self-selection that goes on when a young person chooses a career. Those who opt to go into the news business are what I call "Crusader Rabbits", i.e., they want to change the world, make it better. They want to make a difference. Such people tend to be liberal. Then they attend J-School where the professors are cut from the same cloth. Upon graduation, they find a job with a news organization filled with, you guessed it, other Crusader Rabbits. They socialize where they discuss the day, the world, their lives -- all from a liberal perspective. Eventually, they come to believe that their perspective is the norm, that "most Americans" believe the way they do.

In the dozen years I was in the business, I rarely heard anyone voice a non-liberal opinion. Abortion? Well, everyone is for that, aren't they? It's not even an issue. Fundamentalist Christianity? Well, only the fringe is into that, you know, those "rednecks" who dance with snakes! Vote Republican? What, are you a Neanderthal? A muscular foreign policy? Are you a war-lover? The U.N.? Best hope for mankind! One-World government? Inevitable.

On and on it goes. So no one meets behind closed doors to map out a policy to present only one side of the news. They don't need to. One side is presented because that's all there is, one side. The side we ALL believe in.

And because newspeople (like all people) are fundamentally lazy, they rarely go out into the real world and see that their's is the minority view. That average Americans have a much more rounded view of the world. And should a newsie finally make this connection, he/she will likely then blame the folks out there for not being as enlightened as they should be. It then becomes the reporter's self-imposed task to "enlighten" the masses, whether they want it or not.

Thus you get a leftist news media.

Dmith
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Polls of news medial people show that, at the big MSMs, over 80% are registered democrats; a media research group found that just under 50% of all MSM stories were liberally biased, compared with less than 20% conservative; another research group found that liberal positions were mentioned at a 5-1 rate compared to conservative positions.

From the UCLA Study - "While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

Pauled
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From the people I have talked to, there seem to be two reason's for the creeping bias:

1) The newspaper industry is becoming more and more insular. Like the magazine editor of days gone by, who reportedly told acquaintances that she couldn't imagine how Nixon could have won, since nobody she knew voted for him. When 90% of DC reporters admit to voting Democratic, you rapidly reach the point where you actually you can't imagine why anyone would disagree with your positions. You start to actually believe that you are being centrist, when in fact you are just centering yourself inside a left wing clique.

2) Many reporters view their job not as informing, but rather educating. Their goal is to teach their readers how to think and believe the way they, and all their friends do.
MarkTheGreat
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http://www.tcsdaily.com/discussionForum.aspx?fldIdTopic=7522&fldIdMsg=13380
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