When Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?
When Adam delved and Eve span, Spur if thou wilt speed,
Where was then the pride of man that now mars his meed?
My Good Citizens: Things will never go well in England - no shall they ever - until all things be held in common, and the lords are no greater masters than ourselves - John Ball, one of the leaders of the 1381 revolt (along with Wat Tyler, above), who was executed in 1381
http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/wat_tyler_1381.html
How does the evolution of revolution effect us today as we find our Progressive revolutionary hertitage on the edge of ruin thanks to the vitiation of post-revolutionary reaction, i.e. Progress taken from the Left and replaced by dhimmitude and philobarbarism, perhaps better known today as 'politically correct discourse?'
Socialism, according to Marx and his some of his socialist contemporaries, was not possible until economic conditions evolved according to the (imagined) inevitable laws of the historical dialectic to the point of bifurcation of the exploited and exploiter class conflict in which the urban proletariat could take over the means of production when the mode of production reached its apex in industrial production. No socialism without capitalism to progress out of and from. Prior to capitalist mode of production, e.g. feudalism, there could not be a socialist revolution because there was no dialectical ground to grow out of. Class conflict in the Middle Ages could not become socialist until the economic conditions created a proletarian revolutionary class; all that could come from feudalism was the further development toward capitalism, and peasant rebellions could only ever result in further reaction because of the necessity to progress toward the right conditions of capitalism. Our modern Left seem not to remember these ideas. They hearken back to the primitive feudal utopian revolutionism of Wat Tyler and others. Our modern Left has devolved socialist theory to the point of opaque "Post-modernist" discourse to write the utter simplicities that Ball wrote so clearly and beautifully in 1381. Left theory is now a rehash of John Ball and Wat Tyler, though dressed up in leather drag.
To know science deeply is to know pre-Socratic philosophy deeply. That does not mean one should espouse the atomic theeory of Lucretius/Democritus. Our problem today with the Left in the West is that, like modern scientists proclaiming a unified theory of the elements on the basis of writings from Anaxagoras, wonderful as those theories might be, our modern Leftists are basing Progressivism on the writings of John Ball.
The result of this utopian reactionism in the Left is that aside from scuttling Progressivism itself, they, our Left dhimmis, are collaborating with the barbarians of the Middle Ages in our time, Moslems, against the Progressive movements of History, of our own Progressivist, Modernist revolution itself in favor of our own destruction. It is a philobarbarism, a longing that is in theory and effect, fascism. Nor do they think of themselves, our typical liberal Leftist citizens, as fascists because they have little sense of the history of Progress as a historical dialectic, however historically contingent it might objectively be. The typical suburban liberal is as rational as the next, but that does not mean he is knowledgable about the agenda of the Leftist professional philobarbarist loser who, as a personal failure within the system of Modernity, works diligently for the reversion to primitivism and fascist reaction in which they might attain their personally desired height of social prominence.
Our roots of Modernity come from the Wat Tyler Rebellion and the Black Death. Below we'll insert two accounts of the Wat Tyler Rebellion; but first we'l discuss very briefly the socio-economic changes brought about by the labour shortage caused by the plague. In coming posts we'll look at the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII and Cromwell's standing army of the peasantry as further developments that lead to our Revolution of Modernity, from which we will see how the dhimmification of our time is a fascist reactionism.
The Black Death destroyed the anchor of feudalism in England by wiping out so many people that there was a labour shortage that created competition for workers, men and women who were enticed from feudal bondage on the land in particular to any land that offered better conditions, regardless of rigid feudal ties that would have otherwise made any mobility, physical and economic, impossible. The Black Death in England is similar in effect to the atomic devastation of Hiroshima or the fire-bombing of Dresden and the attendant destrution of the social fabrics therein. The Black Death remade the ground of social relations in Britain. In short, it was a good thing. We argue that the destruction of Japan and Germany as military fascist tyrannies is also a good thing, as good and as necessary as the Terror of the 1790s. Further, we argue that the need is now for the destruction of Islam as an impediment to the furtherence of our revolution of Modernity. We argue that the plague, the rebellion of the populations, the Terror, the annihilations of societies of Islam, the invasion of 'Others' by the likes of such as William Walker is essential for the furtherence of Moddernitiy for the benefit of Humanity generally. Like the invasion and destruction by Athenians of the Melian, America and the West must invade, conquer, and colonize the world of the primitives for their own good, regardless of any sentimentalist ideologies of philobarbarism and Left reactionism. To acheive this World-Historical synthesis of Progress we must act in a manner that is professional and determined, planned, active, and co-ordinated by committes of revolutionary Modernity.
In these following accounts of the Wat Tyler Rebellion we can see the roots of our own revolutions, and we can see too the roots of fascist dhimmitude in our midst.
***
Wat Tyler's Rebellion - 1381 A. D.
The Court of Common Pleas (the civil court, as opposed to the Court of King's Bench, the criminal court) decided early in the 14th century that it "didn't have time for the affairs of peasants." The peasants immediately recognized that they had no rights enforceable at law.
By 1340 the judges in England had become so enamored of their own procedural technicalities that civil disputes languished for years. The English Parliament enacted a statute that year which allowed the Commissioners to move the judges aside and adjudicate their own cases.
In 1348 the Black Death reached England. As many as half of the people in the country died. The feudal lords, short of tenants, tried to make those remaining work even harder. Most of the people in England were treated no better than animals.
The common people had another barrier in their quest for rights. All English court documents from 1066 to 1500 A. D. were written in what is today called "law French." Most of the men who could teach the language were dead of the Plague.
In 1381 the effort to strictly enforce the collection of taxes created discontent throughout England. Wat Tyler's rebellion was ignited when a tax collector tried to make a determination that Wat Tyler's daughter was of taxable age (15) by stripping her naked and assaulting her. Tyler, who was working close by, heard the screams of his wife and daughter, came running and smashed in the tax collector's skull with a hammer. He was cheered by his neighbors and the commoners of the western division of Kent were brought together by his courage. Wat Tyler was elected their leader.
Wat Tyler's group joined another group led by two itinerant priests named John Ball and Jack Straw, and rose 100,000 strong to invade London. The enraged mob broke open every prison and beheaded every judge and lawyer they could capture. They were not allowed to enrich themselves in their rioting. Valuables found in their midst were destroyed. One man who hid a silver cup on his person was thrown into the river as punishment for his misdeed and as an example to others to refrain from such behavior.
They surrounded Richard II, who asked them what they wanted. Their answer was, "We will be free forever, our heirs and our lands." Richard II agreed.
In a face-to-face meeting with Wat Tyler a short time later, Richard II ordered the Lord Mayor of London to "set hands on him." Tyler was stabbed through the throat with a short sword and, as he lay writhing in agony on the ground after falling off his horse, stabbed through the belly.
Watching from a distance the peasants instantly arranged themselves in order of battle with their longbows. Richard II rode up to them and said, "Wat Tyler was a traitor. I'll be your leader." Confused, the peasants followed the king until his soldiers met him and dispersed the crowd.
Minus their leader, the peasants went home. Richard reneged on his promises and hanged 1500 of the rebels after "jury trials." Those trials were presided over by Judge John Tresilian, who told the jurors in each case that he would hang them if they didn't convict.
Tresilian was hanged himself seven years later.
Richard II was forced to abdicate in 1399.
The English legal system continued to incite wars and rebellions until Englishmen, Scots, and Irish threw off the yoke of English legal tyranny in the American colonies in 1776 and Ireland gained most of her independence in 1921.
http://home.earthlink.net/~dlaw70/wat.htm
***
Wat Tyler's Rebellion (Peasants' Revolt) (1381)
It was on this date, June 12, 1381, that the Peasants' Revolt or Great Rising of 1381, also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion, began. Geoffrey Chaucer was about 41. The 1300s, or what historian Barbara Tuchman calls "The Calamitous 14th Century,"* was theoretically an Age of Chivalry, but in fact a time of superstition, faith, plague, great cathedrals, great poverty, great ignorance, brutal punishment (visited with a vengeance on the peasantry), sexual license and corruption, especially in the Church.
The Black Death (1348-50) and the religiously motivated Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) disproportionately affected the laboring classes, leaving the manors and the fields understaffed. Many lords bribed their serfs with their freedom and pay if they remained to work the land. But many peasant-serfs were compelled to work for free on church lands. This enriched the churches, but made it difficult for workers to support their families.
To prevent demand from driving up the price of labor, in 1351 the undertaxed ruling classes imposed price controls, known as the Statute of Laborers. Thirty years later, in 1380, 14-year-old King Richard II introduced yet another poll tax — poll from the Latin word for head. Walter Tyler (Wat Tighler), now known as Wat Tyler, who lived in Maidstone, Essex, was outraged when an overzealous tax collector sought to determine if Tyler's daughter was of taxable age (15). He stripped the girl naked and sexually assaulted her. With a hammer, Tyler smashed in the tax collector's skull.
His fellow peasants cheered this action. They banded together to seek redress from the king. Tyler's group was joined by two secular priests named John Ball and Jack Straw. Their party eventually numbered 100,000 strong and they converged on London. Artisans and tradesmen provided food and shelter along the way, and the rebels attacked abbeys and monasteries, those bastions of idle wealth and ecclesiastical corruption. The next thing the mob did was kill all the lawyers and judges they could find, and release their brother peasants from prison.
There were outbreaks of violence among the peasantry throughout England. In London, Tyler, Ball and Straw targeted the two people most responsible for the poll tax: Archbishop Sudbury, the chancellor; and Sir Robert Hailes, the treasurer. These two they found hiding in the Tower of London and that is where they were beheaded. But the rebels, still in the grip of the myth of the "divine right" of kings, believed Richard a natural ally of the poor.
Murder of Wat Tyler
The murder of Wat Tyler at Smithfield
All the peasants wanted were the repeal of
oppressive statutes, the abolition of villeinage,
and the division of Church property.
(French National Library)
The chronicler Jean Froissart, a partisan of the privileged classes and a loyal Roman Catholic, was 44 when these pre-Reformation events occurred. He records that on June 14 Richard met with Wat Tyler and ordered the Lord Mayor of London to "set hands on him." Tyler was murdered on the spot. Richard seized the moment and declared, "Wat Tyler was a traitor. I'll be your leader." The teenaged monarch immediately agreed to all the rebel demands — chiefly, the abolition of serfdom — and they went home. Thereupon the king reneged on his promises and hunted down and hanged 1500 of the rebels after "jury trials" — trials in which the judge told the jurors that he would hang them if they didn't convict.
Of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt, Froissart writes,
John Ball and Jack Straw were found in an old house hidden, thinking to have stolen away, but they could not, for they were accused by their own men. Of the taking of them the king and his lords were glad, and then strake off their heads and Wat Tyler's also, and they were set on London bridge...**
So the oppression of the peasants persisted. The churches and priests continued to ignore them in preference to their royal patrons. And Richard, king of England by divine right, declared to the peasants seeking an end to their slavery, "Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain."
* Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, 1978.
** The Tyler Rebellion, by Jean Froissart (1337-1410), translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, Edited by: G.C. Macaulay. Harvard Classics: P. F. Collier & Son Company. New York, 1910. The Harvard Classics, prepared by Judy Boss for University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, 1994.
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Sunday, June 26, 2005
Neo-tribalism in the West
What motivates the Western dhimmi intellectual? Below we'll look at some comments from Eward O. Wilson to see if we can continue to expand our understanding of fascist Islam and its followers, below in terms of ideological construction and personality.
Edward O. Wilson describes modern social science as a rigidly ideological failure, and its manifestation of failure is obvious in the dhimmitude we encounter today almost everywhere in almost every strata of society, a cringeing and sentimental dhimmitude of nucleaic tribalists, people who are seperated from soiciety at large, from friends and family, and particularly from themselves, longing for something they think they've lost, i.e. an 'identity' that they might regain vicariously through identification with and association with barbarians, much like old homosexual men trying to suck up lost youth by glomming onto young boys.
Wilson writes in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1998:
The theorists have consistently misjudged Muslim fundamentalism, which is religion inflamed by ethnicity. At home in America, they not only failed to forsee the collapse of the welfare state, but still cannot agree on its causes. In short, social scientists as a whole have paid little attention to the foundations of human nature, and they have had almost no interest in its deep origins. (p.184.)
What is Marx without Freud? Skinner! the Western social scientist's ideological version of the orthopraxy of Islam. And what is psychiatry without psychology? Prozac! Medicated orthopraxy. We have today as our ruling social ethos a banality of mediocrity that can hardly qualify as evil. The banality of the ideologues is one of social science's greatest acheivements, due to its vapid pursuit of mediocrity at all costs. No messy stuff like Human nature, but only the paper-clean ideologies of sociology and anthropology to apply to the unknowable masses, the dirty bastards, those who can be quantified and theorized about from the distant far side of the emotional gulf. Forget who they are but only what they do.
Wilson writes that originally social science kept its distance from natural science to lay its own groundwork from which it meant to become objective in its own right. He continues:"But once the pioneering era ended, the theorists were mistaken not to include biology and psychology. It was no longer a virtue to avoid the roots of human nature." (Ibid: p.184.)
One reason for the constant failure of imposed ideology and its resulting torment of the masses is the perversions imposed on the masses by ideologues who resist any understanding of human nature, or wu, the emptiness of mind one finds explained after a fashion in the Tao Te Ching, an objectivity that surpasses any false impositions of reality upon reality itself, an imposition that resembles Procrustes bed far more closely than anything we could ever call science. The results of imposed and enforced ideological programmes upon the masses fails over and again due to its obvious perversion of the Human condition and the Human state, results deliberately imposed upon the masses by those deliberately ignorant fo and contemptuous of the nature of Humanity. Today's ideology is the imposition of Islam, and the result is a suicidal umma and the masses of emotionally dispossessed and alienated Westerners cut off from their social groups, families, and from themselves as individuals who allow themselves to die in a condition of utter confusion and emotional sickness along with the self-destructing Moslem masses. Naive dhimmitude is the ruling ideology of the West today, imposed from above by the intelligensia of social scientists who have no understanding-- more, even a hatred of Human nature-- that doesn't fit into their social science cargo cult boxes. If people don't fit into the bed of social science, then they must be remade till they do, losing in the process a couple of feet here and there, or perhaps some heads along the way till they look just so. Then, hail: the New World, the New Man, not like those old and inferior men who think in terms of Human nature, as if it were important to life that is determined by culture and the economic mode of production, moderated by the precepts of socially engineered environments developed from the theories of disinterested anthropologists.
Wilson points out that social scientists were averse to the examination of human nature from the beginning, not surprizing if one looks at the mental health of some of its originators, Condorcet, for example. In reaction to what social scientists termed "Social Darwinism" they discounted human nature in favor of ideology. Where human nature offended these scientists they ignored it:
The theorists were inhibited from probing in that direction [human nature,] by another problem endemic to social sciences: political ideology....With caution swept aside by moral zeal, they turned opposition [to Social Darwinism] into the new ideology of cultural relativism.
During the 1960s and 1970s this scientific belief lent strength in the United States and other Western societies to political multiculturalism. Also known as identity politics, it holds that ethnics, women, and homosexuals possess subcultures deserving equal standing with those of the "majority," even if the doctirine demotes the idea of unifying national culture. (Ibid: pp184-85.)
If everything is equally good and if nothing is really bad, since there is no such thing in the Neitzchean world of post-modernity, then where do we go for our beliefs, opinions, and attitudes when confronted by something so totally alien and dangerous that we live in fear for our very lives? We turn on ourselves, adopting the symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome, turning to hatred of ourselves as the likely cause of our own problems with 'others,' and yet too denying that we are actually like our fellows because we are enlightened and dhimmified now, superior in all ways to those who have caused our tormentors to act out their violence against us, mistakenly in our personal cases (if only they truly knew us.) Not having belief in evil, we also have no belief in good; therefore, believing in all things equally we equally believe in nothing until such time when we meet those who do believe, and who are happy to kill us because we believe in nothing, i.e. not what they believe in. Out of fear of social ostrasization, out of fear for our lives, we look for the strongest threads to grasp for our salvation, that thread being appeasement of those who would kill us, because we see our own fellows --even ourselves-- as being worthless and unbelieving allies in our time of need. We move to strength to save us. Not our own strength, which we condemn as socially Darwinistic but that of the oppressed whom we've provoked to rage by our very existence. And those who do beleive, the proverbial "Right-wing Christians," they, not being relativists, are the cause of the provocation of the others who would harm us because the believers among us are believers at all, a thing we consider to be bad in that it provokes the minority to violence against our majoritarian 'Force,' upon which all states are inherently based, and justifiabley opposed only by a Sorelian 'Violence.' Those who have no Moral have instead the moral superiority of self-righteous social-scientific dhimmitude to save their capo lives-- temporarily; and while alive they also have Recognition, in the Hegelian sense. But it's a loser's game.
All great civilizations were spread by conquest, and among their chief benficiaries were the religions validating them.... But every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. (Ibid p. 244.)
For Western relativist dhimmis the solution to this problem is to remove all religion from public discourse, except those that are the domain of the "Other," the victims of the dominant ideology of Capitalism. Thus, Islam is privileged by virtue of its being a traditonal poligion of Captialism's victims, "Moslems of Color,' who must retain their traditonal beliefs and practices from the social Darwinist predation of capitalism in order to maintain a social and Romantic purity of blood and soil. All struggle against capitalism is valid if it leads to the triumph of the New Man, which is impossible under capitalist conditions of competition, of alienation from Mother Nature, and of the inherent and innate evil of White Europeans. To condemn the dominant non-minority and to find ones own place as a fellow minority in solidarity with other, more valid minorities, is to find a place in the tribal Romance of fascism of the Left. And the majority of us go along because we just don't know what the hell is going on and we don't want to upset anyone by complaining about it. If we do, then we must be Right-wing fundamentalists no different from that tiny minority terrorists who've hihjacked Islam, the religion of peace, to justify their deeds against the evils of capitalism and those of us who live well by raping Mother Nature. Christianity, the lapdog of the dominant ideology, obviously with a violent imperialist history, for otherwise it could not have succeeded, now remains as a superstructure on the capitalist base, while Islam, a militant, anti-capitalist, anti-Modernist poligion in struggle against captialism, must be valid and valuable because it retains its naturalism, communitarianism, and 'traditional values' of Romanitic fascism, not Darwinistic but self-defensive in regard to Christian neo-Crusaderism. The struggle against capitalism is the only good in a relativist world, and only non-capitalists can rule non-capitalistically in the capitalist system. Therefore, Christianity must be bad, it must be evil, because of the Darwinian struggle that places it at the top of all religions, and worse because it is a superstructure on the capitalist mode of production. Hence, an alliance of Moslems and Leftists while the rest of us just don't know what to do but keep our silence and sympathize with the downtrodden masses under our big smelly feet. But that's not nearly enough for the dhimmi elite. They need recognition, and from that the power that inhers. They want to be part of the tribe, and rulers therein, to boot.
To be fair, let me put the matter of cause and effect straight, [Wilson writes.] Religious exclusion and bigotry arise from tribalism, the belief in the innate superiority and special status of the in-group. Tribalism cannot be blamed on religion. The same causal sequence gave rise to totalitarian ideologies. The pagan corpus mysticum of Nazism, [and Communism] were put to the service of tribalism, not the reverse. Neither would have been so fervently embraced if their devotees had not thought themselves chosen people, virtuous in ther mission, surrounded by wicked enemies, and conquerers by right of blood and destiny. Ibid: pp. 244-45.)
There, it seems, is the clue to the dhimmi intelligensia's lack of insight that propels them to ally with fascist Islam: They, the moral nihilists, cling to moralism, not to religion but to empty religiousity, to socio-political orthopraxy, all of it in reaction to a loss of their own moral beliefs, loss of their own abilities to gain a place of status to their own liking in the present mode of production. They who have nothing in Modernity that they feel is worthy of them, turn to those who have nothing for their validation as recognizable Humans: Big toads in tiny sloughs. Those self-exiled from their own tribe flee to an inferior tribe to act as dhimmis and toadies in the false hope of recognition of their desired status, and the mysticum, the fascist longing for strength and glory through irrationality comes from Islamic fascism itself, which most dhimmis cannot believe in, creating a further striving for acceptance by further acts of extremities of posturing orthopraxically. Because the dhimmis don't believe, they must believe even harder in that which they cannot believe, acting-out even further to prove adherence to their false beliefs.
The lonely, unhappy, socially failed dhimmi longs for recognition, and he tries to find it in Islamic fascism. Finding it, he then finds it empty, needing an endless filling-up with more and evermore vacuuity, endlessly, and hoping, like a prositiute on the sidewalk, to have another to share her miseries and perhaps to show her where the glory is that she really can't see in spite of all her self-assurance that somewhere it really does exist, because this is the lot of the life, paid for at the cost of all else. O,the tribe one almost sort of belongs to. O, the romance; the glamour of it all; the path of glory that leads...to dhimmitude.
Edward O. Wilson describes modern social science as a rigidly ideological failure, and its manifestation of failure is obvious in the dhimmitude we encounter today almost everywhere in almost every strata of society, a cringeing and sentimental dhimmitude of nucleaic tribalists, people who are seperated from soiciety at large, from friends and family, and particularly from themselves, longing for something they think they've lost, i.e. an 'identity' that they might regain vicariously through identification with and association with barbarians, much like old homosexual men trying to suck up lost youth by glomming onto young boys.
Wilson writes in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1998:
The theorists have consistently misjudged Muslim fundamentalism, which is religion inflamed by ethnicity. At home in America, they not only failed to forsee the collapse of the welfare state, but still cannot agree on its causes. In short, social scientists as a whole have paid little attention to the foundations of human nature, and they have had almost no interest in its deep origins. (p.184.)
What is Marx without Freud? Skinner! the Western social scientist's ideological version of the orthopraxy of Islam. And what is psychiatry without psychology? Prozac! Medicated orthopraxy. We have today as our ruling social ethos a banality of mediocrity that can hardly qualify as evil. The banality of the ideologues is one of social science's greatest acheivements, due to its vapid pursuit of mediocrity at all costs. No messy stuff like Human nature, but only the paper-clean ideologies of sociology and anthropology to apply to the unknowable masses, the dirty bastards, those who can be quantified and theorized about from the distant far side of the emotional gulf. Forget who they are but only what they do.
Wilson writes that originally social science kept its distance from natural science to lay its own groundwork from which it meant to become objective in its own right. He continues:"But once the pioneering era ended, the theorists were mistaken not to include biology and psychology. It was no longer a virtue to avoid the roots of human nature." (Ibid: p.184.)
One reason for the constant failure of imposed ideology and its resulting torment of the masses is the perversions imposed on the masses by ideologues who resist any understanding of human nature, or wu, the emptiness of mind one finds explained after a fashion in the Tao Te Ching, an objectivity that surpasses any false impositions of reality upon reality itself, an imposition that resembles Procrustes bed far more closely than anything we could ever call science. The results of imposed and enforced ideological programmes upon the masses fails over and again due to its obvious perversion of the Human condition and the Human state, results deliberately imposed upon the masses by those deliberately ignorant fo and contemptuous of the nature of Humanity. Today's ideology is the imposition of Islam, and the result is a suicidal umma and the masses of emotionally dispossessed and alienated Westerners cut off from their social groups, families, and from themselves as individuals who allow themselves to die in a condition of utter confusion and emotional sickness along with the self-destructing Moslem masses. Naive dhimmitude is the ruling ideology of the West today, imposed from above by the intelligensia of social scientists who have no understanding-- more, even a hatred of Human nature-- that doesn't fit into their social science cargo cult boxes. If people don't fit into the bed of social science, then they must be remade till they do, losing in the process a couple of feet here and there, or perhaps some heads along the way till they look just so. Then, hail: the New World, the New Man, not like those old and inferior men who think in terms of Human nature, as if it were important to life that is determined by culture and the economic mode of production, moderated by the precepts of socially engineered environments developed from the theories of disinterested anthropologists.
Wilson points out that social scientists were averse to the examination of human nature from the beginning, not surprizing if one looks at the mental health of some of its originators, Condorcet, for example. In reaction to what social scientists termed "Social Darwinism" they discounted human nature in favor of ideology. Where human nature offended these scientists they ignored it:
The theorists were inhibited from probing in that direction [human nature,] by another problem endemic to social sciences: political ideology....With caution swept aside by moral zeal, they turned opposition [to Social Darwinism] into the new ideology of cultural relativism.
During the 1960s and 1970s this scientific belief lent strength in the United States and other Western societies to political multiculturalism. Also known as identity politics, it holds that ethnics, women, and homosexuals possess subcultures deserving equal standing with those of the "majority," even if the doctirine demotes the idea of unifying national culture. (Ibid: pp184-85.)
If everything is equally good and if nothing is really bad, since there is no such thing in the Neitzchean world of post-modernity, then where do we go for our beliefs, opinions, and attitudes when confronted by something so totally alien and dangerous that we live in fear for our very lives? We turn on ourselves, adopting the symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome, turning to hatred of ourselves as the likely cause of our own problems with 'others,' and yet too denying that we are actually like our fellows because we are enlightened and dhimmified now, superior in all ways to those who have caused our tormentors to act out their violence against us, mistakenly in our personal cases (if only they truly knew us.) Not having belief in evil, we also have no belief in good; therefore, believing in all things equally we equally believe in nothing until such time when we meet those who do believe, and who are happy to kill us because we believe in nothing, i.e. not what they believe in. Out of fear of social ostrasization, out of fear for our lives, we look for the strongest threads to grasp for our salvation, that thread being appeasement of those who would kill us, because we see our own fellows --even ourselves-- as being worthless and unbelieving allies in our time of need. We move to strength to save us. Not our own strength, which we condemn as socially Darwinistic but that of the oppressed whom we've provoked to rage by our very existence. And those who do beleive, the proverbial "Right-wing Christians," they, not being relativists, are the cause of the provocation of the others who would harm us because the believers among us are believers at all, a thing we consider to be bad in that it provokes the minority to violence against our majoritarian 'Force,' upon which all states are inherently based, and justifiabley opposed only by a Sorelian 'Violence.' Those who have no Moral have instead the moral superiority of self-righteous social-scientific dhimmitude to save their capo lives-- temporarily; and while alive they also have Recognition, in the Hegelian sense. But it's a loser's game.
All great civilizations were spread by conquest, and among their chief benficiaries were the religions validating them.... But every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. (Ibid p. 244.)
For Western relativist dhimmis the solution to this problem is to remove all religion from public discourse, except those that are the domain of the "Other," the victims of the dominant ideology of Capitalism. Thus, Islam is privileged by virtue of its being a traditonal poligion of Captialism's victims, "Moslems of Color,' who must retain their traditonal beliefs and practices from the social Darwinist predation of capitalism in order to maintain a social and Romantic purity of blood and soil. All struggle against capitalism is valid if it leads to the triumph of the New Man, which is impossible under capitalist conditions of competition, of alienation from Mother Nature, and of the inherent and innate evil of White Europeans. To condemn the dominant non-minority and to find ones own place as a fellow minority in solidarity with other, more valid minorities, is to find a place in the tribal Romance of fascism of the Left. And the majority of us go along because we just don't know what the hell is going on and we don't want to upset anyone by complaining about it. If we do, then we must be Right-wing fundamentalists no different from that tiny minority terrorists who've hihjacked Islam, the religion of peace, to justify their deeds against the evils of capitalism and those of us who live well by raping Mother Nature. Christianity, the lapdog of the dominant ideology, obviously with a violent imperialist history, for otherwise it could not have succeeded, now remains as a superstructure on the capitalist base, while Islam, a militant, anti-capitalist, anti-Modernist poligion in struggle against captialism, must be valid and valuable because it retains its naturalism, communitarianism, and 'traditional values' of Romanitic fascism, not Darwinistic but self-defensive in regard to Christian neo-Crusaderism. The struggle against capitalism is the only good in a relativist world, and only non-capitalists can rule non-capitalistically in the capitalist system. Therefore, Christianity must be bad, it must be evil, because of the Darwinian struggle that places it at the top of all religions, and worse because it is a superstructure on the capitalist mode of production. Hence, an alliance of Moslems and Leftists while the rest of us just don't know what to do but keep our silence and sympathize with the downtrodden masses under our big smelly feet. But that's not nearly enough for the dhimmi elite. They need recognition, and from that the power that inhers. They want to be part of the tribe, and rulers therein, to boot.
To be fair, let me put the matter of cause and effect straight, [Wilson writes.] Religious exclusion and bigotry arise from tribalism, the belief in the innate superiority and special status of the in-group. Tribalism cannot be blamed on religion. The same causal sequence gave rise to totalitarian ideologies. The pagan corpus mysticum of Nazism, [and Communism] were put to the service of tribalism, not the reverse. Neither would have been so fervently embraced if their devotees had not thought themselves chosen people, virtuous in ther mission, surrounded by wicked enemies, and conquerers by right of blood and destiny. Ibid: pp. 244-45.)
There, it seems, is the clue to the dhimmi intelligensia's lack of insight that propels them to ally with fascist Islam: They, the moral nihilists, cling to moralism, not to religion but to empty religiousity, to socio-political orthopraxy, all of it in reaction to a loss of their own moral beliefs, loss of their own abilities to gain a place of status to their own liking in the present mode of production. They who have nothing in Modernity that they feel is worthy of them, turn to those who have nothing for their validation as recognizable Humans: Big toads in tiny sloughs. Those self-exiled from their own tribe flee to an inferior tribe to act as dhimmis and toadies in the false hope of recognition of their desired status, and the mysticum, the fascist longing for strength and glory through irrationality comes from Islamic fascism itself, which most dhimmis cannot believe in, creating a further striving for acceptance by further acts of extremities of posturing orthopraxically. Because the dhimmis don't believe, they must believe even harder in that which they cannot believe, acting-out even further to prove adherence to their false beliefs.
The lonely, unhappy, socially failed dhimmi longs for recognition, and he tries to find it in Islamic fascism. Finding it, he then finds it empty, needing an endless filling-up with more and evermore vacuuity, endlessly, and hoping, like a prositiute on the sidewalk, to have another to share her miseries and perhaps to show her where the glory is that she really can't see in spite of all her self-assurance that somewhere it really does exist, because this is the lot of the life, paid for at the cost of all else. O,the tribe one almost sort of belongs to. O, the romance; the glamour of it all; the path of glory that leads...to dhimmitude.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Let's Invade Sweden
Is Europe doomed to become a province of Islam, as so many of our public intellectuals fear? Maybe yes--if Europeans sit back smoking pot, letting the world slide into decay, taking Europeans down along with it.
We live in a world that sends men to the moon, a world that splits atoms, a world that feeds millions of starving and superfluous peasants who want nothing better than to destroy the modern world that supports them in their mad dash to commit their own vast populations of dysfunctional primitives to death by want. Let's get weepy over war, say our dhimmi brothers and sisters, let's bang the drum for diversity, and let's all sit around communing with Mother Nature as the savages destroy the very modernity that keeps them alive while they destroy us and themselves along with us.
Or let's not. No maybe--if we decide to strike back at the lotus-landers letting the world slide into decay, Europeans with it. Maybe yes we can take the savage world by the throat and kill them to the point the remaining live life like helots, slaves cringing in terror of our might, men and women so fearful of our displeasure they beg to be like us, and more: that they beg to be more than simply men and women like us but that they become us as much as we are us. Let them suffer to death as they are if they will, and those who come after will be ours and us.
If we can go to the moon and split atoms, then we can rip the world's peasants from their dogmatic slumbers and kick them till they join the world of the living, if they choose not to die by our benevolent hands. Maybe maybe--let's start the slaughter by attacking our very own anti-war dhimmis before we go on to destroy the primitives holus bolus.
***
Below we will look at excerpts from Orianna Fallaci on dhimmitude and the decline of the West in terms of cultural suicide in the face of Islamic invasion; and also at memetics in terms of how we receive and transmit ideas cross-culturally, ideas good or bad regardless, and how the idea of the spread of Islam and dhimmitude and cultural suicide is little more than yet one more transitory pseudo-intellectual fad that will and definitely can and necessarily should pass into something better.
We've written many times before that most people believe what most people believe, logic and reason having little or nothing to do with public opinion and personal beliefs. Where do ideas come from? Why do many in the West feel strongly that Islam is a religion of peace hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists who have no valid reason for committing acts of terrorism in the name of Islam while anyone with the patience to read the Koran, the ahadith and sira can find out within a day that Islam is a fascist poligion that does indeed require its true believers to do exactly that which we in the West have opined that they do not do by virtue of their religious belief. Why do we cling to our ignorance of Islam in the face of the obvious falsity of our wrong and obviously wrong opinions? Regardless of our opinions about the right or wrong of Islam, the clear and provable truth from Islam itself and from Moslems themselves is that we are self-deluded and aggressively so and determinedly so. No one can read the texts of Islam and come away with any other conclusion than that which is clearly and repeatedly stated in the Sunna, that Islam is a violent and triumphalist poligion. We have our opinions because they are the norm in popular circles, spreading from the epicentre of the dominant ideology, in this case from the politicians of Europe and, yes, from Washington, D.C., even from the slack mouth of George W. Bush himself.
We face at this time a culture that is on the path to self-destruction by means of self-willed dhimmitude. One group of people are moving in on another, which over-all is fair in biological terms. Our problem is that it is the other group that is doing the moving by virtue of its suicidal longing for destruction of the host, a cancerous spread of primitive Islam into the world of Modernity, and we are allowing it to happen.
Here we can look at Richard Dawkins to see his ideas on memes, how cultural ideas live and die. We might gain some insight into the spread of the idea and ideology of Islam as a political ans social force in the West. The following excerpts come from Wikipedia on Dawkins.
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Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way that populations of organisms evolve. Various ideas pass from one generation to the next; such ideas may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas. This process affects which of those ideas will survive for passing on to future generations. For example, a certain culture may have unique designs and methods of tool-building that another culture may not have; therefore, the culture with the more effective methods may prosper more than the other culture, ceteris paribus. This leads to a higher proportion of the overall population adopting the more effective methods as time passes. Each tool design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations.
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One controversial application of this "selfish meme" parallel results in the idea that certain collections of memes can act as "memetic viruses": collections of ideas that behave as independent life forms which continue to get passed on even at the expense of their hosts simply because of their success at getting passed on. Some observers have suggested that evangelical religions and cults behave this way; so by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along even if they do not provide particular benefits to the believer.
Others maintain that the wide prevalence of human adoption of religious ideas provides evidence to suggest that such ideas offer some ecological, sexual, ethical or moral value; otherwise memetic evolution would long ago have selected against such ideas. For example, most religions urge peace and cooperation among their followers ("Thou shalt not kill") which may possibly tend to promote the biological survival of the social groups that carry these memes.
A tendency exists in memetics to disparage religious memes. However, some speculate that traditional religions act as mental immune systems to suppress new and potentially harmful memes. Interestingly, we can compare this scenario with the action of a virus (here a religion a "bundle" of religious memes) proving ineffective and maladaptive if it kills its host(s). For example, popular Christianity forbids both murder and suicide (an idea from Augustine of Hippo's The City of God), and its precise definitions of heresy ensure that "properly" educated Christians cannot accept new religions which advocate such actions.
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The West is an "open society' that doesn't filter or restrict ideas or memes as strictly as do most other cultures and nations. Our plurality allows for the religious Right as much as for the radical Left, allows for the pornographers as well as for multi-national corporatists of the world-at-large. Our ruling ethos is multi-culturalism, diversity, and simple openness to the right to privacy of pursuits of individual happiness. Fascists are as welcome to practice their beliefs as are extremist Libertarians and all those in between, within the bounds of relatively lax laws. And because there is no state ideology, no state religion, no overweening government control of the minutea of privacy there is room for the growth of memes that are cancerous, such as Islam.
Some complain, freely, that the religious Right is a danger to the democratic ethos of America, and they are to be feared more than any single group otherwise. Fair enough. We do complain. And the religious Right is powerful, as is CAIR and the ACLU and numerous other groups of varying degrees of extremity. We live in a culture of plural memes, but it is the meme of Islam that threatens the weak cultures of Europe with death. Islam, a proven violent poligion bent on domination and conquest of the entire world, if one will take the time to learn about it from its own texts and adherents, not simply some tiny minority of extremists but the entire umma of Islam, being every believing Moslem on Earth without exception, like it or not, believe it or not, and ignoring it or not. Islam is a cancerous meme that is made to conquer the world in the name of and in the practice of Islam. Any one who becomes familiar with Islam will see and know it clearly and directly, and it is beyond debate for rational people. But most people are not interested and are not logical at all, relying on the beliefs of others to find and validate their own beliefs.
Orianna Fallaci begs to differ with the majority of Europeans who get along by going along. Her writings on the nature of Islam have her involved in a court case in Italy, a case brought against her by Moslems. Below are some excerpts from an interview with a man who doesn't seem to know his subject well. Fallaci does.
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In a Wall Street Journal interview, Orianna Fallaci, currently facing criminal charges in Italy of "vilifiying Islam," speaks to a man who doesn't seem to understand that Huntington is a world-class dhimmi, and who likely doesn't even now understand Fallaci's points as below:
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Prophet of Decline
An interview with Oriana Fallaci.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."
In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.
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Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).
***
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: "The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" She then says "Phwah, phwah," and gestures at slashing her wrists. "He committed suicide!" Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. "What could Seneca do?" she asks, with a discernible shudder. "He knew it would end that way--with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing."
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West
Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent."
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"The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
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Can we condemn the dhimmi class of the West? Indeed, some are conscious fascists and collaborators with fascist Islam who have a clear goal in mind: the destruction of Modernity and the imposition in its place of Romantic fascist barbarism. But for the majority of dhimmis the real problem is one of irrational and near hysterical frenzied hatred of the Myth of America. It is a learned behaviour, a metastasized meme that is destroying the Western host. It is mostly a pose, an attitude that can change overnight, and one that will change when Islam becomes a greater military threat than it is now, a threat that will in time lead to the extermination of the Islamic world and its people, a goal the unconscious Islamic civilization's primitives long for in their intuitive grasp of their own failure as a functional meme in the age of Modernity.
And what accounts for the hysteria in the West?
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States' image is so tattered overseas two years after the Iraq invasion that communist China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. in many long-time Western European allies, an international poll has found.
"It's amazing when you see the European public rating the United States so poorly, especially in comparison with China," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which surveyed public opinion in 16 countries, including the United States.
In Britain, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.
In France, 58 percent had an upbeat view of China, compared with 43 percent who felt that way about the U.S. The results were nearly the same in Spain and the Netherlands.
The United States' favorability rating was lowest among three Muslim nations which are also U.S. allies -- Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan -- where only about one-fifth of those polled viewed the U.S. in a positive light.
Only India and Poland were more upbeat about the United States, while Canadians were just as likely to see China favorably as they were the U.S.
The poll found suspicion and wariness of the United States in many countries where people question the war in Iraq and are growing wary of the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism.
"The Iraq war has left an enduring impression on the minds of people around the world in ways that make them very suspicious of U.S. intentions and makes the effort to win hearts and minds far more difficult," said Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The overseas image of the United States slipped sharply after the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Pew polling found, and it has not rebounded in Western European countries like Britain, France, Germany and Spain.
However the U.S. image has bounced back in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country which benefited from U.S. aid to tsunami victims, as well as in India and Russia.
The survey found that a majority of people in most countries say the United States does not take the interests of other countries into account when making international policy decisions.
It also found most would like to see another country get as much military power as the United States, though few want China to play that role.
People in most countries were more inclined to say the war in Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place. Non-U.S. residents who had unfavorable views of the United States were most likely to cite Bush as the reason rather than a general problem with America.
The polls were taken in various countries from late April to the end of May with samples of about 1,000 in most countries, with more interviewees in India and China and slightly less than 1,000 in the European countries. The margin of sampling error ranged from 2 percentage points to 4 percentage points, depending on the sample size.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. [So sue me.]
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We'll look in a future post at the ideas of Neil Postman and the ideas of Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma to see what conclusions they have in this regard. In the mean time, skipping ahead, we offer our own untying of this Gordian Knot of anti-Modernist fascism and dhimmitude. We have argued at long length that the solution is a
Walkerian conquest of the primitive world, the enslavement of its populations, and of the permanent colonization of the primitives who survive our conquest to the point whereat they are us and we are them, universally and naturally Modern, regardless of sentimental nonsense today about the relative virtues and values of "others." In politics we have no friends. Morally we have no equals.
Our ostensible allies, our supposed friends, so-called sovereign nations: what more could be stupider? Our Western, Modernist Revolutionary meme is potentially triumphal. Islam and other forms of fascism are memes no different than Relativism and other forms of Post-modernist ideology. This is our thesis, our meme: Let's invade nations and conquer their people, take over their land by force of arms and threats of death and destruction, and let us win by main violence: Let's invade Sweden!
You smile, dear reader? Is it a foolish idea, one that cannot possibly come to pass in this our modern world of civilized people in the land of legality and simple common sense? Well, stop smiling because this is a serious proposition, and one we must consider seriously if we are to turn back the invasion of Islam and the tide of self-destructive savagery of the primitive world threatening to overwhelm us and our progress toward universal good.
We are revolutionaries in the history of Mankind, a group unlike any others who've existed in the world, and our ideas are not merely better, they are universally better and more functional and beneficial to all than anything in our human past. Our revolutions came by way of violence against those who opposed the progress we take as given, and the violence was massive and brutal. It is a price we paid for our revolutions, and others must pay the same price, especially those who would destroy our progress here and now.
Haul out the guillotine, hone the blade, oil the gears, restring the works. Loose the blood-dimmed tide, and let's move ahead our revolution to the farthest reaches of Humanity. Let's start with Sweden. Let's go, Berzerk!
***
Europe generally, Sweden in particular, has been invaded by the cancerous meme of Islam, and Malmo is a Moslem city today. Will Sweden object to a million American colonists showing up at the airports, armed and aggressive militant triumphalist Americans, who will descend on Malmo to rule and colonize the city in preparation for a general invasion and conquest of all of Europe and eventually of the entire world? Who cares? Ideas, so-called, are generally semiconscious attitudes gathered from the surroundings and from ones mates. Culture is learned, and if one is imbued with ones culture, one must either give it up in favor of a better meme or one must die in resistence to it. Will we face masses of crazed Swedes throwing meatballs? Unlikely. More likely is that Sweden will adjust perfectly well and easily to restored democracy and European tradition, something much harder to create in the primitive world of Islam, to be done regardless.
Sweden, isolated fromAmerica as is in the concept of the West-As-Evil-America is not yet totally irrational. But consider the following excerpts on memeology:
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In traditional population genetics the normal genetic variation, selection, and drift do not lead to formation of a new species without some form of "reproductive isolation"; i.e., in order to split a single species into two species, the two subpopulations of the original species must ultimately lose their ability to interbreed, which would normally maintain their heterogeneity. However, once separated, natural selection and/or just genetic drift acting on the normal genetic variation in the two subspecies will eventually change enough characteristics of the two subgroups that they can no longer interbreed, which by definition means that they will comprise two different species. Examples of reproductive isolation include geographical isolation, where a 'suddenly' appearing mountain range or river separates the two subgroups; temporal isolation, where one subgroup becomes entirely diurnal in its habits while the other becomes entirely nocturnal; or even just 'behavioral' isolation, as seen in wolves and domestic dogs: they could interbreed, biologically speaking, but normally they do not.
A similar phenomenon can occur with memes. Normally, the population of individuals having a meme in their consciousness is heterogeneous and mixes enough to keep the meme intact although it covers a wide range of variations. Should that population become split, however, without sufficient contact for the two different subgroups of variations of the meme to equilibrate, eventually each group will evolve its own version of that meme, differing sufficiently from that of the other group to appear as a distinct entity.
One example of this occurring on the Internet is the Kellerman meme. A search of the web and/or Usenet for the word 'Kellerman' will turn up a large number of citations, describing at great length the behavior of a 'Dr. Arthur Kellerman', who, with the willing assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and the public health lobby purportedly fabricated studies in order to implicate firearms (and by extension their owners) as a menace to public safety, for the purposes of statist control of the population which the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution the right to keep and bear arms would otherwise thwart. The authors of these pages and postings describe purported machinations, "junk science," a subsequent recantation by Dr. 'Kellerman', and the use of his work by gun control proponents.
In reality, no "Dr. Arthur Kellerman" exists, at least not in any connection with the above description. There is, however, a Dr. Arthur Kellermann (with double n), who has indeed published several papers estimating the overall impact on the public health of firearm availability and various aspects of firearm storage, as part of a career in public health and emergency and trauma medicine. As in any such series of studies, Kellermann's work has strengths and weaknesses, which pundits rigorously debate both in the literature and online. However, even after eliminating matters of opinion and statements which are not fully supported, the remaining verifiable facts of Kellermann's studies and career remain virtually unrecognizable in the negative descriptions of 'Kellerman.'
The original meme of Kellermann and his work on gun-related violent injury has generated a new meme, "Dr. Kellerman is a evil lying gun-grabbing enemy of freedom," by the classic genetic phenomenon of a deletion mutation. The sub-population involved had strongly negative attitudes towards Kellermann's work as well as a lack of first-hand familiarity with his studies and career. Because of the "reproductive isolation" caused by the total non-intersection of the results of searches for "Kellerman" and "Kellermann," the 'Kellerman' meme drifted even further in the direction of negativity, unchecked by facts related to the real Kellermann. As this group encounters new individuals of similar general outlook, they introduce new recruits to the 'Kellerman' lore only, and go on to produce their own websites and postings furthering the rapid progress of this meme.
This phenomenon also demonstrates two other features of memes the "meme-complex," a set of mutually-assisting "co-memes" which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship, and the "Villain vs. Victim" infection strategy.
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Is the learned-insanity of the Anti-American meme spreading? Of course, and it will only worsen. As the rise of Islam grows, so too will its counter meme, non-Islam, meaning fundamentalism of other religious expressions, yes dear reader, the mightily feqred "Religious Right." Politics will lose its current (dubious) validity and make way for dissent in the form of equal and opposite reactionary ideology: those who wish to combat Islam will devolve into religious fundamentalisms of their own themselves. The political Left will abandon its pseudo-intellectual pretentions and go fling itself into the sheer irrationality of fascist Islam in opposition to the remants of Modernity. We can look forward to the end of science as a religion in the West from that point on. We can look forward to our very own scarey faces in the mirror.
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Some (such as Dawkins himself, see [2] (http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/quotes.shtml) ) consider religion itself a meme or, more exactly, a memeplex or group of memes. To observers infected by a different set of memes, it appears that some fundamentalist evangelical movements act only to add to their own numbers. The movements in question devote what appears to their opponents as an inordinate amount of time to evangelical activity, and therefore may seem to unsympathetic observers to serve no other function. This makes it possible to characterize them as self-serving, and in some cases as a particularly virulent virus. On the other hand, for the meme to continue to propagate, it must provide some spiritual or emotional good: catharsis, a release from worry and guilt, a sense of salvation, happiness, moral energy, etc.
The American Religious Right has a unified message built around religious dogma. By attaching conservative political views to Christian religious evangelism (meme piggybacking), they have associated a set of political ideas/memeplexes with a set of religious ideas/memeplexes that throughout history have "replicated" very effectively. That is, Christianity has won converts for centuries; now in many cases a religious conversion also becomes a political conversion.
Similarly, the scientific method offers a body of social and experimental techniques which, given certain preconditions a free press for the circulation of information, a large number of people predisposed to see the world as a mechanism subject to general rules which can be discovered through repeatable experiments acts highly virulently, spreading quickly through an educated population. By demonstrating its success at making predictions, science as a practice can make itself more attractive to converts. Ideas and attitudes which are not necessarily verifiable by experimentation, but which tend to be held by scientists or feel aesthetically pleasing in combination with scientific discoveries, can propagate themselves in societies where science has a high status by the same process of "meme piggybacking."
[edit]
Meme resistance
Karl Popper advocated this in the strongest possible terms: "The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us."
Resistance to science and technology has formed a common meme that can guide human cultural and cognitive evolution away from disastrous paths for instance the US and USSR stockpiled but did not use nuclear weapons in the Cold War period. Ignorance has been in some cultures considered a virtue in particular, ignorance of certain temptations that the culture believes would be disastrous if pursued by many individuals.
The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme vector, seems to be hosting both sides of this debate. Although it would seem to a na�ve observer that no adult user of the Internet could oppose its use by other adults, that does in fact happen, based on any number of criteria from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography.
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For the full entry, please go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Basic_introduction .
***
Science as religion is an obvious failure, and Islam as a poligion is also an obvious failure; Rationalism and irrationalism cannot co-exist, and yet neither can they exist in themselves. Suicidal Sweden is overwhelmed by suicidal Islam. Two bad ideas overlapping are destroying Europe from within. If we do not invade and conquer then nothing will be left but to invade and conquer later. In this war of memes, the West is losing because of its inherent puralism, its openess to a multiplicity of memes, a meme that itself is destined to die out if we do not preserve it consciously and by force. If Europe is to become a province of Islam, as many of our public intellectuals claim, and as our pot-smoking citizens watch passively while it occurs, then by all means, by any means, let us invade Sweden.
We live in a world that sends men to the moon, a world that splits atoms, a world that feeds millions of starving and superfluous peasants who want nothing better than to destroy the modern world that supports them in their mad dash to commit their own vast populations of dysfunctional primitives to death by want. Let's get weepy over war, say our dhimmi brothers and sisters, let's bang the drum for diversity, and let's all sit around communing with Mother Nature as the savages destroy the very modernity that keeps them alive while they destroy us and themselves along with us.
Or let's not. No maybe--if we decide to strike back at the lotus-landers letting the world slide into decay, Europeans with it. Maybe yes we can take the savage world by the throat and kill them to the point the remaining live life like helots, slaves cringing in terror of our might, men and women so fearful of our displeasure they beg to be like us, and more: that they beg to be more than simply men and women like us but that they become us as much as we are us. Let them suffer to death as they are if they will, and those who come after will be ours and us.
If we can go to the moon and split atoms, then we can rip the world's peasants from their dogmatic slumbers and kick them till they join the world of the living, if they choose not to die by our benevolent hands. Maybe maybe--let's start the slaughter by attacking our very own anti-war dhimmis before we go on to destroy the primitives holus bolus.
***
Below we will look at excerpts from Orianna Fallaci on dhimmitude and the decline of the West in terms of cultural suicide in the face of Islamic invasion; and also at memetics in terms of how we receive and transmit ideas cross-culturally, ideas good or bad regardless, and how the idea of the spread of Islam and dhimmitude and cultural suicide is little more than yet one more transitory pseudo-intellectual fad that will and definitely can and necessarily should pass into something better.
We've written many times before that most people believe what most people believe, logic and reason having little or nothing to do with public opinion and personal beliefs. Where do ideas come from? Why do many in the West feel strongly that Islam is a religion of peace hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists who have no valid reason for committing acts of terrorism in the name of Islam while anyone with the patience to read the Koran, the ahadith and sira can find out within a day that Islam is a fascist poligion that does indeed require its true believers to do exactly that which we in the West have opined that they do not do by virtue of their religious belief. Why do we cling to our ignorance of Islam in the face of the obvious falsity of our wrong and obviously wrong opinions? Regardless of our opinions about the right or wrong of Islam, the clear and provable truth from Islam itself and from Moslems themselves is that we are self-deluded and aggressively so and determinedly so. No one can read the texts of Islam and come away with any other conclusion than that which is clearly and repeatedly stated in the Sunna, that Islam is a violent and triumphalist poligion. We have our opinions because they are the norm in popular circles, spreading from the epicentre of the dominant ideology, in this case from the politicians of Europe and, yes, from Washington, D.C., even from the slack mouth of George W. Bush himself.
We face at this time a culture that is on the path to self-destruction by means of self-willed dhimmitude. One group of people are moving in on another, which over-all is fair in biological terms. Our problem is that it is the other group that is doing the moving by virtue of its suicidal longing for destruction of the host, a cancerous spread of primitive Islam into the world of Modernity, and we are allowing it to happen.
Here we can look at Richard Dawkins to see his ideas on memes, how cultural ideas live and die. We might gain some insight into the spread of the idea and ideology of Islam as a political ans social force in the West. The following excerpts come from Wikipedia on Dawkins.
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Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way that populations of organisms evolve. Various ideas pass from one generation to the next; such ideas may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas. This process affects which of those ideas will survive for passing on to future generations. For example, a certain culture may have unique designs and methods of tool-building that another culture may not have; therefore, the culture with the more effective methods may prosper more than the other culture, ceteris paribus. This leads to a higher proportion of the overall population adopting the more effective methods as time passes. Each tool design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations.
***
One controversial application of this "selfish meme" parallel results in the idea that certain collections of memes can act as "memetic viruses": collections of ideas that behave as independent life forms which continue to get passed on even at the expense of their hosts simply because of their success at getting passed on. Some observers have suggested that evangelical religions and cults behave this way; so by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along even if they do not provide particular benefits to the believer.
Others maintain that the wide prevalence of human adoption of religious ideas provides evidence to suggest that such ideas offer some ecological, sexual, ethical or moral value; otherwise memetic evolution would long ago have selected against such ideas. For example, most religions urge peace and cooperation among their followers ("Thou shalt not kill") which may possibly tend to promote the biological survival of the social groups that carry these memes.
A tendency exists in memetics to disparage religious memes. However, some speculate that traditional religions act as mental immune systems to suppress new and potentially harmful memes. Interestingly, we can compare this scenario with the action of a virus (here a religion a "bundle" of religious memes) proving ineffective and maladaptive if it kills its host(s). For example, popular Christianity forbids both murder and suicide (an idea from Augustine of Hippo's The City of God), and its precise definitions of heresy ensure that "properly" educated Christians cannot accept new religions which advocate such actions.
***
The West is an "open society' that doesn't filter or restrict ideas or memes as strictly as do most other cultures and nations. Our plurality allows for the religious Right as much as for the radical Left, allows for the pornographers as well as for multi-national corporatists of the world-at-large. Our ruling ethos is multi-culturalism, diversity, and simple openness to the right to privacy of pursuits of individual happiness. Fascists are as welcome to practice their beliefs as are extremist Libertarians and all those in between, within the bounds of relatively lax laws. And because there is no state ideology, no state religion, no overweening government control of the minutea of privacy there is room for the growth of memes that are cancerous, such as Islam.
Some complain, freely, that the religious Right is a danger to the democratic ethos of America, and they are to be feared more than any single group otherwise. Fair enough. We do complain. And the religious Right is powerful, as is CAIR and the ACLU and numerous other groups of varying degrees of extremity. We live in a culture of plural memes, but it is the meme of Islam that threatens the weak cultures of Europe with death. Islam, a proven violent poligion bent on domination and conquest of the entire world, if one will take the time to learn about it from its own texts and adherents, not simply some tiny minority of extremists but the entire umma of Islam, being every believing Moslem on Earth without exception, like it or not, believe it or not, and ignoring it or not. Islam is a cancerous meme that is made to conquer the world in the name of and in the practice of Islam. Any one who becomes familiar with Islam will see and know it clearly and directly, and it is beyond debate for rational people. But most people are not interested and are not logical at all, relying on the beliefs of others to find and validate their own beliefs.
Orianna Fallaci begs to differ with the majority of Europeans who get along by going along. Her writings on the nature of Islam have her involved in a court case in Italy, a case brought against her by Moslems. Below are some excerpts from an interview with a man who doesn't seem to know his subject well. Fallaci does.
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In a Wall Street Journal interview, Orianna Fallaci, currently facing criminal charges in Italy of "vilifiying Islam," speaks to a man who doesn't seem to understand that Huntington is a world-class dhimmi, and who likely doesn't even now understand Fallaci's points as below:
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Prophet of Decline
An interview with Oriana Fallaci.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."
In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.
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Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).
***
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: "The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" She then says "Phwah, phwah," and gestures at slashing her wrists. "He committed suicide!" Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. "What could Seneca do?" she asks, with a discernible shudder. "He knew it would end that way--with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing."
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West
Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent."
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"The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
***
Can we condemn the dhimmi class of the West? Indeed, some are conscious fascists and collaborators with fascist Islam who have a clear goal in mind: the destruction of Modernity and the imposition in its place of Romantic fascist barbarism. But for the majority of dhimmis the real problem is one of irrational and near hysterical frenzied hatred of the Myth of America. It is a learned behaviour, a metastasized meme that is destroying the Western host. It is mostly a pose, an attitude that can change overnight, and one that will change when Islam becomes a greater military threat than it is now, a threat that will in time lead to the extermination of the Islamic world and its people, a goal the unconscious Islamic civilization's primitives long for in their intuitive grasp of their own failure as a functional meme in the age of Modernity.
And what accounts for the hysteria in the West?
***
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States' image is so tattered overseas two years after the Iraq invasion that communist China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. in many long-time Western European allies, an international poll has found.
"It's amazing when you see the European public rating the United States so poorly, especially in comparison with China," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which surveyed public opinion in 16 countries, including the United States.
In Britain, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.
In France, 58 percent had an upbeat view of China, compared with 43 percent who felt that way about the U.S. The results were nearly the same in Spain and the Netherlands.
The United States' favorability rating was lowest among three Muslim nations which are also U.S. allies -- Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan -- where only about one-fifth of those polled viewed the U.S. in a positive light.
Only India and Poland were more upbeat about the United States, while Canadians were just as likely to see China favorably as they were the U.S.
The poll found suspicion and wariness of the United States in many countries where people question the war in Iraq and are growing wary of the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism.
"The Iraq war has left an enduring impression on the minds of people around the world in ways that make them very suspicious of U.S. intentions and makes the effort to win hearts and minds far more difficult," said Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The overseas image of the United States slipped sharply after the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Pew polling found, and it has not rebounded in Western European countries like Britain, France, Germany and Spain.
However the U.S. image has bounced back in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country which benefited from U.S. aid to tsunami victims, as well as in India and Russia.
The survey found that a majority of people in most countries say the United States does not take the interests of other countries into account when making international policy decisions.
It also found most would like to see another country get as much military power as the United States, though few want China to play that role.
People in most countries were more inclined to say the war in Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place. Non-U.S. residents who had unfavorable views of the United States were most likely to cite Bush as the reason rather than a general problem with America.
The polls were taken in various countries from late April to the end of May with samples of about 1,000 in most countries, with more interviewees in India and China and slightly less than 1,000 in the European countries. The margin of sampling error ranged from 2 percentage points to 4 percentage points, depending on the sample size.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. [So sue me.]
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We'll look in a future post at the ideas of Neil Postman and the ideas of Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma to see what conclusions they have in this regard. In the mean time, skipping ahead, we offer our own untying of this Gordian Knot of anti-Modernist fascism and dhimmitude. We have argued at long length that the solution is a
Walkerian conquest of the primitive world, the enslavement of its populations, and of the permanent colonization of the primitives who survive our conquest to the point whereat they are us and we are them, universally and naturally Modern, regardless of sentimental nonsense today about the relative virtues and values of "others." In politics we have no friends. Morally we have no equals.
Our ostensible allies, our supposed friends, so-called sovereign nations: what more could be stupider? Our Western, Modernist Revolutionary meme is potentially triumphal. Islam and other forms of fascism are memes no different than Relativism and other forms of Post-modernist ideology. This is our thesis, our meme: Let's invade nations and conquer their people, take over their land by force of arms and threats of death and destruction, and let us win by main violence: Let's invade Sweden!
You smile, dear reader? Is it a foolish idea, one that cannot possibly come to pass in this our modern world of civilized people in the land of legality and simple common sense? Well, stop smiling because this is a serious proposition, and one we must consider seriously if we are to turn back the invasion of Islam and the tide of self-destructive savagery of the primitive world threatening to overwhelm us and our progress toward universal good.
We are revolutionaries in the history of Mankind, a group unlike any others who've existed in the world, and our ideas are not merely better, they are universally better and more functional and beneficial to all than anything in our human past. Our revolutions came by way of violence against those who opposed the progress we take as given, and the violence was massive and brutal. It is a price we paid for our revolutions, and others must pay the same price, especially those who would destroy our progress here and now.
Haul out the guillotine, hone the blade, oil the gears, restring the works. Loose the blood-dimmed tide, and let's move ahead our revolution to the farthest reaches of Humanity. Let's start with Sweden. Let's go, Berzerk!
***
Europe generally, Sweden in particular, has been invaded by the cancerous meme of Islam, and Malmo is a Moslem city today. Will Sweden object to a million American colonists showing up at the airports, armed and aggressive militant triumphalist Americans, who will descend on Malmo to rule and colonize the city in preparation for a general invasion and conquest of all of Europe and eventually of the entire world? Who cares? Ideas, so-called, are generally semiconscious attitudes gathered from the surroundings and from ones mates. Culture is learned, and if one is imbued with ones culture, one must either give it up in favor of a better meme or one must die in resistence to it. Will we face masses of crazed Swedes throwing meatballs? Unlikely. More likely is that Sweden will adjust perfectly well and easily to restored democracy and European tradition, something much harder to create in the primitive world of Islam, to be done regardless.
Sweden, isolated fromAmerica as is in the concept of the West-As-Evil-America is not yet totally irrational. But consider the following excerpts on memeology:
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In traditional population genetics the normal genetic variation, selection, and drift do not lead to formation of a new species without some form of "reproductive isolation"; i.e., in order to split a single species into two species, the two subpopulations of the original species must ultimately lose their ability to interbreed, which would normally maintain their heterogeneity. However, once separated, natural selection and/or just genetic drift acting on the normal genetic variation in the two subspecies will eventually change enough characteristics of the two subgroups that they can no longer interbreed, which by definition means that they will comprise two different species. Examples of reproductive isolation include geographical isolation, where a 'suddenly' appearing mountain range or river separates the two subgroups; temporal isolation, where one subgroup becomes entirely diurnal in its habits while the other becomes entirely nocturnal; or even just 'behavioral' isolation, as seen in wolves and domestic dogs: they could interbreed, biologically speaking, but normally they do not.
A similar phenomenon can occur with memes. Normally, the population of individuals having a meme in their consciousness is heterogeneous and mixes enough to keep the meme intact although it covers a wide range of variations. Should that population become split, however, without sufficient contact for the two different subgroups of variations of the meme to equilibrate, eventually each group will evolve its own version of that meme, differing sufficiently from that of the other group to appear as a distinct entity.
One example of this occurring on the Internet is the Kellerman meme. A search of the web and/or Usenet for the word 'Kellerman' will turn up a large number of citations, describing at great length the behavior of a 'Dr. Arthur Kellerman', who, with the willing assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and the public health lobby purportedly fabricated studies in order to implicate firearms (and by extension their owners) as a menace to public safety, for the purposes of statist control of the population which the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution the right to keep and bear arms would otherwise thwart. The authors of these pages and postings describe purported machinations, "junk science," a subsequent recantation by Dr. 'Kellerman', and the use of his work by gun control proponents.
In reality, no "Dr. Arthur Kellerman" exists, at least not in any connection with the above description. There is, however, a Dr. Arthur Kellermann (with double n), who has indeed published several papers estimating the overall impact on the public health of firearm availability and various aspects of firearm storage, as part of a career in public health and emergency and trauma medicine. As in any such series of studies, Kellermann's work has strengths and weaknesses, which pundits rigorously debate both in the literature and online. However, even after eliminating matters of opinion and statements which are not fully supported, the remaining verifiable facts of Kellermann's studies and career remain virtually unrecognizable in the negative descriptions of 'Kellerman.'
The original meme of Kellermann and his work on gun-related violent injury has generated a new meme, "Dr. Kellerman is a evil lying gun-grabbing enemy of freedom," by the classic genetic phenomenon of a deletion mutation. The sub-population involved had strongly negative attitudes towards Kellermann's work as well as a lack of first-hand familiarity with his studies and career. Because of the "reproductive isolation" caused by the total non-intersection of the results of searches for "Kellerman" and "Kellermann," the 'Kellerman' meme drifted even further in the direction of negativity, unchecked by facts related to the real Kellermann. As this group encounters new individuals of similar general outlook, they introduce new recruits to the 'Kellerman' lore only, and go on to produce their own websites and postings furthering the rapid progress of this meme.
This phenomenon also demonstrates two other features of memes the "meme-complex," a set of mutually-assisting "co-memes" which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship, and the "Villain vs. Victim" infection strategy.
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Is the learned-insanity of the Anti-American meme spreading? Of course, and it will only worsen. As the rise of Islam grows, so too will its counter meme, non-Islam, meaning fundamentalism of other religious expressions, yes dear reader, the mightily feqred "Religious Right." Politics will lose its current (dubious) validity and make way for dissent in the form of equal and opposite reactionary ideology: those who wish to combat Islam will devolve into religious fundamentalisms of their own themselves. The political Left will abandon its pseudo-intellectual pretentions and go fling itself into the sheer irrationality of fascist Islam in opposition to the remants of Modernity. We can look forward to the end of science as a religion in the West from that point on. We can look forward to our very own scarey faces in the mirror.
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Some (such as Dawkins himself, see [2] (http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk
The American Religious Right has a unified message built around religious dogma. By attaching conservative political views to Christian religious evangelism (meme piggybacking), they have associated a set of political ideas/memeplexes with a set of religious ideas/memeplexes that throughout history have "replicated" very effectively. That is, Christianity has won converts for centuries; now in many cases a religious conversion also becomes a political conversion.
Similarly, the scientific method offers a body of social and experimental techniques which, given certain preconditions a free press for the circulation of information, a large number of people predisposed to see the world as a mechanism subject to general rules which can be discovered through repeatable experiments acts highly virulently, spreading quickly through an educated population. By demonstrating its success at making predictions, science as a practice can make itself more attractive to converts. Ideas and attitudes which are not necessarily verifiable by experimentation, but which tend to be held by scientists or feel aesthetically pleasing in combination with scientific discoveries, can propagate themselves in societies where science has a high status by the same process of "meme piggybacking."
[edit]
Meme resistance
Karl Popper advocated this in the strongest possible terms: "The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us."
Resistance to science and technology has formed a common meme that can guide human cultural and cognitive evolution away from disastrous paths for instance the US and USSR stockpiled but did not use nuclear weapons in the Cold War period. Ignorance has been in some cultures considered a virtue in particular, ignorance of certain temptations that the culture believes would be disastrous if pursued by many individuals.
The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme vector, seems to be hosting both sides of this debate. Although it would seem to a na�ve observer that no adult user of the Internet could oppose its use by other adults, that does in fact happen, based on any number of criteria from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography.
***
For the full entry, please go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
***
Science as religion is an obvious failure, and Islam as a poligion is also an obvious failure; Rationalism and irrationalism cannot co-exist, and yet neither can they exist in themselves. Suicidal Sweden is overwhelmed by suicidal Islam. Two bad ideas overlapping are destroying Europe from within. If we do not invade and conquer then nothing will be left but to invade and conquer later. In this war of memes, the West is losing because of its inherent puralism, its openess to a multiplicity of memes, a meme that itself is destined to die out if we do not preserve it consciously and by force. If Europe is to become a province of Islam, as many of our public intellectuals claim, and as our pot-smoking citizens watch passively while it occurs, then by all means, by any means, let us invade Sweden.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Cargo Cult Science
Why is the West in a state of self-imposed dhimmitude? Why have we struck the attitude, not the deep belief nor the idea of knowledge but simply the uncritical attitude, that we are somehow bad in comparison to the 'Other?' Few outside the clique of highly motivated and entrenched professional Leftists actually go home at night thinking that the West is evil and committed to genocide in its insatiable greed for oil and the trees of the tropical rainforests. Most people simply hold the attitude of a cocktail party guest, a pose for the occasion, that we are so deeply concerned about this or that particular issue--while in sight of company we wish to impress. It's a pose that we will do well to exercise less often, even not at all, in favor of real exercise of our grey matters. Let's skip the dhimmi stuff and try to get real.
Most Westerners, all but a tiny minority of lunatics on the Right who've hijacked religion as a platform from which to shoot at doctors and geologists, feel comfortable with liberal social values; and if we are incautious we will lose those values in place of rabid reactionary values in a violent backlash against our strained smiling in the face of our dhimmitude.We're letting ourselves be taken for a ride by extremist hijackers, and the ride isn't amusing any longer. Someone else is piloting our fates, and it's not looking like we're in for a safe landing. In fact, the situation is so extreme that it's time for us to call 911.
And there we have it: no one wants to be the first to panic.
Is the theatre crowded?
FIRE!
Let's stop pretending that Islam is a religion at all. It isn't; Islam is a poligion, a political ideology of fascism, and it's dangerous to limb and life. All of our pretty noises aren't going to soothe it. Islam is fascism, and those who practice it are not moderate, cannot be moderate, and will never be moderate. Islam is fascism, a new form of Nazi ideology in the old form of Islam. I'm not smiling anymore. Are you?
We might like to recall that we've worked hard over the past 500 years to make progress in the general Human condition, and that progress is under attack not only by barbarians but by our own reactionaries on the Left.
Below we see some of the greatness of our recent past, ideas that came as a result of thousands of years of intellectual struggle against the herd instinct of Islam and its evil relatives. We'll start by including some writing by Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, writing that is in itself not only brilliant but beautiful:
Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man
* * *
XXXVIII
The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance is obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify themselves as far as may be against their assaults.
XXXIX
There are four classes of idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names,--calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.
XL
The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use, for the doctrine of idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic.
XLII
The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions, as well of the sense as of the mind, are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
XLII
The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.
XLIII
There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market-place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies.
XLIV
Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak: for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received.
But of these several kinds of idols I must speak more largely and exactly, that the understanding may be duly cautioned.
***
To continue with the Idols of the Mind, please search Francis Bacon: http://www.whitworth.edu/
Bacon's "New Learning" set the forms for a new paradigm in critical thinking. Rather than continuing to muck about in an Aristotlean swamp as before, Bacon devised a new way of looking at the world and testing the results for verity. For all the pretentions of the modern Left they are pseudo-scientists every bit as backward and committed to that backwardness as any witch doctor from Haiti, those who are, as a rule, our leftwing social scientist Ph. D holders. Feynman makes some nice observations below:
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
***
To continue this article, please go to: http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html
***
Although the excerpt below is an ordinary observation it does articulate clearly a common attitudinal problem in the Left's attachment to barbarism. After putting in too many years learning the stupidest damned stuff, finding a position that pays for doling it back out, and gaining ones sense of personal and societal worth, well, who's going to give that up just because it's stupid stuff?
The Enchantment of Reason
Pierre Schlag
(Byron White Professor Constitutional Law, UC Boulder)
Published by Duke University Press/NC in 1998
Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2005
[page 11] The discipline [of law] can begin to seem somewhat solipsistic. The thought arises that it may be the sort of discipline destined to find the answers it seeks because it has already constructed the answers. This is not a pleasant thought. It is particularly unpleasant and yet particularly applicable to those disciplines that look the most like the "methods" of the police.
Understandably, few disciplinary thinkers can be counted upon to consider the emptiness of their own disciplines with great enthusiasm. The disciplinary thinkers will resist this possibility for three reasons.
First, those who, like thinkers in law, have invested hard, painful labor into the mastery of dry, obscure, and maddeningly intricate grids are unlikely to consider such a thought for very long. On the contrary, what one would expect from such thinkers is a certain ressentiment against those who have not experienced the dreary toiling in the disciplinary trenches. As a general matter, the more painful the mastery of a discipline was to acquire, the less its practitioners will be willing to give it up.
There is a second reason that disciplinary thinkers will fail to own up to the possibility. For disciplinary thinkers to pursue the possibility that their discipline is organized in solipsistic lines would be to relinquish the advantages that their discipline has bestowed upon them. The cost is highest among those who have been most successful. These leaders are the least likely to turn against their discipline. In American law, loyalty to the discipline is particularly alluring because the discipline is understood (however erroneously) to feed into the channels of worldly power: high government office.
There is a third, perhaps even stronger, reason that disciplinary thinkers will not consider the emptiness of their discipline. It turns out that the solipsism of the search that always finds the object it constructs is not a problem specific to any particular discipline, but rather one that is more or less common to all. If the problem is well nigh unavoidable, why then not stay with the grid that one knows rather than switch to the ones that one doesn't? Why turn against the grid?
Why not simply run the academic mazes like the police and continue the "exaggerated application of a principle or a set of principles"? Why not continue to polish the grid, monitor its relays, supervise its connections?
***
Philosophy, the philo of Sophia, love of wisdom, is in short supply among our dhimmi philobarbarist comrades, and they aren't about to give up a good scam even if it brings the house down in ruins around them. We as a society have to find our own courage as individuals to create a revolution of attitude to bring things round to a new paradigm of attitude, one that will in all liklihood eventually be just as ridiculous as is the one now but one that we can leave for our children to combat. For us, for now, the struggle is against this version of fascism, this dhimmitude and philobarbarism, this collaboration with fascist Islam. It akes some clear thinking, some honesty, and a willingness to suffer the scorn of ones fellows for not conforming to the current cocktail party dress code.
Most Westerners, all but a tiny minority of lunatics on the Right who've hijacked religion as a platform from which to shoot at doctors and geologists, feel comfortable with liberal social values; and if we are incautious we will lose those values in place of rabid reactionary values in a violent backlash against our strained smiling in the face of our dhimmitude.We're letting ourselves be taken for a ride by extremist hijackers, and the ride isn't amusing any longer. Someone else is piloting our fates, and it's not looking like we're in for a safe landing. In fact, the situation is so extreme that it's time for us to call 911.
And there we have it: no one wants to be the first to panic.
Is the theatre crowded?
FIRE!
Let's stop pretending that Islam is a religion at all. It isn't; Islam is a poligion, a political ideology of fascism, and it's dangerous to limb and life. All of our pretty noises aren't going to soothe it. Islam is fascism, and those who practice it are not moderate, cannot be moderate, and will never be moderate. Islam is fascism, a new form of Nazi ideology in the old form of Islam. I'm not smiling anymore. Are you?
We might like to recall that we've worked hard over the past 500 years to make progress in the general Human condition, and that progress is under attack not only by barbarians but by our own reactionaries on the Left.
Below we see some of the greatness of our recent past, ideas that came as a result of thousands of years of intellectual struggle against the herd instinct of Islam and its evil relatives. We'll start by including some writing by Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, writing that is in itself not only brilliant but beautiful:
Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man
* * *
XXXVIII
The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance is obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify themselves as far as may be against their assaults.
XXXIX
There are four classes of idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names,--calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.
XL
The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use, for the doctrine of idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic.
XLII
The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions, as well of the sense as of the mind, are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
XLII
The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.
XLIII
There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market-place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies.
XLIV
Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak: for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received.
But of these several kinds of idols I must speak more largely and exactly, that the understanding may be duly cautioned.
***
To continue with the Idols of the Mind, please search Francis Bacon: http://www.whitworth.edu/
Bacon's "New Learning" set the forms for a new paradigm in critical thinking. Rather than continuing to muck about in an Aristotlean swamp as before, Bacon devised a new way of looking at the world and testing the results for verity. For all the pretentions of the modern Left they are pseudo-scientists every bit as backward and committed to that backwardness as any witch doctor from Haiti, those who are, as a rule, our leftwing social scientist Ph. D holders. Feynman makes some nice observations below:
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
***
To continue this article, please go to: http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html
***
Although the excerpt below is an ordinary observation it does articulate clearly a common attitudinal problem in the Left's attachment to barbarism. After putting in too many years learning the stupidest damned stuff, finding a position that pays for doling it back out, and gaining ones sense of personal and societal worth, well, who's going to give that up just because it's stupid stuff?
The Enchantment of Reason
Pierre Schlag
(Byron White Professor Constitutional Law, UC Boulder)
Published by Duke University Press/NC in 1998
Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2005
[page 11] The discipline [of law] can begin to seem somewhat solipsistic. The thought arises that it may be the sort of discipline destined to find the answers it seeks because it has already constructed the answers. This is not a pleasant thought. It is particularly unpleasant and yet particularly applicable to those disciplines that look the most like the "methods" of the police.
Understandably, few disciplinary thinkers can be counted upon to consider the emptiness of their own disciplines with great enthusiasm. The disciplinary thinkers will resist this possibility for three reasons.
First, those who, like thinkers in law, have invested hard, painful labor into the mastery of dry, obscure, and maddeningly intricate grids are unlikely to consider such a thought for very long. On the contrary, what one would expect from such thinkers is a certain ressentiment against those who have not experienced the dreary toiling in the disciplinary trenches. As a general matter, the more painful the mastery of a discipline was to acquire, the less its practitioners will be willing to give it up.
There is a second reason that disciplinary thinkers will fail to own up to the possibility. For disciplinary thinkers to pursue the possibility that their discipline is organized in solipsistic lines would be to relinquish the advantages that their discipline has bestowed upon them. The cost is highest among those who have been most successful. These leaders are the least likely to turn against their discipline. In American law, loyalty to the discipline is particularly alluring because the discipline is understood (however erroneously) to feed into the channels of worldly power: high government office.
There is a third, perhaps even stronger, reason that disciplinary thinkers will not consider the emptiness of their discipline. It turns out that the solipsism of the search that always finds the object it constructs is not a problem specific to any particular discipline, but rather one that is more or less common to all. If the problem is well nigh unavoidable, why then not stay with the grid that one knows rather than switch to the ones that one doesn't? Why turn against the grid?
Why not simply run the academic mazes like the police and continue the "exaggerated application of a principle or a set of principles"? Why not continue to polish the grid, monitor its relays, supervise its connections?
***
Philosophy, the philo of Sophia, love of wisdom, is in short supply among our dhimmi philobarbarist comrades, and they aren't about to give up a good scam even if it brings the house down in ruins around them. We as a society have to find our own courage as individuals to create a revolution of attitude to bring things round to a new paradigm of attitude, one that will in all liklihood eventually be just as ridiculous as is the one now but one that we can leave for our children to combat. For us, for now, the struggle is against this version of fascism, this dhimmitude and philobarbarism, this collaboration with fascist Islam. It akes some clear thinking, some honesty, and a willingness to suffer the scorn of ones fellows for not conforming to the current cocktail party dress code.
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