"Wall Street Under Siege," by Alpha Unit

If you know about the protests staged in New York City by Occupy Wall Street, you might have heard of the numerous arrests and the allegations of police brutality – what you always hear about during large demonstrations. You might know that famous activists have shown up during the protests – Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, and Cornel West, for example. You probably haven’t heard anything about who’s leading these protests. The one thing media outlets are able to agree on about Occupy Wall Street is that there are no leaders. What they do have now is a powerful icon throwing his support behind them. Noam Chomsky released this statement:

Anyone with eyes open knows the gangsterism of Wall Street – financial institutions generally – has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should know also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of

So there are the financial oligarchs (“banksters”) and then there are all the rest of us – the 99 percent. Occupy Wall Street is supposed to represent the rest of us. As for leaders, the group calls itself “a leaderless resistance movement.”

Leaders are the everyday people participating in the occupation. We use a tool called the “General Assembly” to facilitate open, participatory, and horizontal organizing between members of the public.

That means anybody can be a leader of Occupy Wall Street. If you want to learn about organizing protests in your city, you can go to Occupy Together, a hub for “all the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.” But what is all this really about? A website has been set up to inform you. “Allow us to introduce ourselves,” it says.

Who are we? Well, who are you? If you’re reading this, there’s a 99 percent chance that you’re one of us. You’re someone who doesn’t know whether there’s going to be enough money to make this month’s rent. You’re someone who gets sick and toughs it out because you’ll never afford the hospital bills. You’re someone who’s trying to move a mountain of debt that never seems to get any smaller no matter how hard you try.

You do all the things you’re supposed to do – take classes, get a second job, buy store brands. But it’s never enough. Why? Because you’re lazy and undisciplined, according to the banksters.

They say it’s because you make poor choices. They say it’s because you’re spoiled. If you’d only apply yourself a little more, worked a little harder, planned a little better, things would go well for you… They are the 1 percent. They are the banks, the mortgage industry, the insurance industry. They are the important ones. They need help and get bailed out and are praised as job creators. We need help and get nothing and are called entitled. We live in a society made for them, not us.

Sounds pretty familiar. They say they are converging on Wall Street – and on other financial districts throughout the country – to let the 1 percent know just how frustrated they are with living in a world made for someone else. I wonder if anyone on Wall Street is listening. I read that Occupy Wall Street was inspired, in part, by events in Tahrir Square in Cairo earlier this year.

Arabs Are Stupid, Backwards, Low IQ Morons Who Can’t Create Anything

I must admit that I don’t understand US Blacks. I believe that the UAE has an IQ of ~83 or so. That is ~4 points lower than US Blacks. Based on IQ alone, there is no reason why US Blacks should not, theoretically, be able to produce something like this, if they had the income to do so. But does anyone think that they would?

Black oil states in the Caribbean have sky high murder rates. Black oil states in Africa have utterly failed to redistribute the income in a fair and reasonable way; instead, it’s a zero-sum game with everyone for my tribe and my favored group and nothing for anybody else. The nation of Gabon has a PCI of $20,000/yr, yet has some of the worst health and nutrition figures on Earth. Most of the population is sick, starving, unemployed and barefoot.

I don’t get it. Arabs are dumber than US Blacks, and they create Dubai. US Blacks are smarter than Arabs, but they create Detroit. What gives?

Whatever is wrong with US Blacks, it ain’t IQ. Their IQ ought to be sufficient to create scenes like the above.

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Jewamongyou Reviews “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Here.

An excellent book review (warning: long at 44 pages) of a book, The Emperor’s New Clothes, written by Joseph Graves, a black scientist (geneticist) who works with fruit flies. It was published a while back in 2001, but it’s still relevant. Graves claims to totally destroy the arguments of race realists, but JAY shows that he does no such thing.

It’s a good review, honest, forthright, respectful, decent and gentlemanly. JAY concedes points to Graves where he deserves points. Just goes to show once again that the race realists are some of the more honest conservatives out there.

Let’s get real though: a lot of these race realists have an agenda (I will not comment on whether or not JAY has an agenda). It isn’t just, “Let’s get at the truth here.” Most HBD types have deep and abiding hatred or dislike to non-Whites, in particular Blacks. I’m not sure to what extent they dislike Hispanics too. I’ve long noticed that the vast majority of the racism coming from US Whites is towards Blacks. It overrides all of the others by a long shot. The agenda of HBD types, honestly, is “stick it to the niggers.”

This can be shown in the fact that the vast majority of HBD types are Libertarians. NAM’s will crash and burn in the worst way in a Libertarian society. A lot of Whites will too, but HBD Whites think that they will climb to the top of crab barrel.

The worse HBD types, the White nationalists, have another project going on. They are actually trying to revive White racism as a respectable ideology among White society. In this, they are shoveling sand against the tide.

White racism has been declining in intensity probably every year since the 1960’s. It’s going to keep on going that way, Tea Partiers be damned. You can’t stop the forces of history. Time moves forwards, not backwards. Attempts to turn back clocks to the “bad old days” typically fail, because they go against human cultural evolution, which moves in a progressive direction along with human genetic evolution. We aren’t going back to pre-Civil Rights Days.

These are guys are in a race against time.

How To Divide Languages from Dialects – Structure or Intelligibility?

There are many ways of dividing languages from dialects. The three general methods are:

1. Historical

2. Structural

3. Intelligibility

The traditional method has tended to utilize structural and sometimes historical, but intelligibility is also often used. For an example of historical, let us look at some lects in France and Spain.

The various “patois” of French, incorrectly called dialects of French, are more properly called the langues d’oil. It is often said that they are not dialtects of French for historical reasons. Each of the major langues d’oil, instead of breaking off from French Proper (really the Parisien langue d’oil) had a separate genesis.

This is what happened. France was originally Celtic speaking. Around 700-800, the Celtic languages began being replaced by vulgar Latin. People didn’t travel around in those days, so a separate form of vulgar Latin + Celtic evolved in each region of France: Gallo and Angevin in the northwest, Poitevin and Saintongeais in the west, Norman and Picard in the north, Champenois, Franche-Compte and Lorrain in the east, Berrichon, Tourangeau and Orleanais in the center. None of these split off from French (Parisien)!

Each one of them evolved independently straight up from vulgar Latin on top of  a Celtic base in their region from 700-1200 or so. The distance between the langues d’oil and French is almost as deep as between English and Frisian.

After French was made the official language of France in 1539, the langues d’oil came under French influence, but that was just borrowing, not genetics.

In addition, in Spain, there are various languages that are not historically related to Spanish. Aragonese is straight up from vulgar Latin on a Basque base, later influenced by Mozarabic. Catalan started evolving around 700 or so. Murcian evolved from vulgar Latin later influenced by Mozarabic, Catalan and Aragonese. Extremaduran, Leonese and Asturian also broke off very early. None of these are historically Spanish dialects because none of them broke away from Spanish!

Of course it follows that langues d’oil, Catalan and Aragonese, evolving independently of French and Spanish from 700-1200 to present, will have deep structural differences between themselves and French and Spanish.

So you can see that the historical way of splitting languages ties in well with the structural method. Where languages have a deep historical split and a millenia or so of independent development, it follows logically that some deep structural differences would have evolved in a thousand years or so. So these two methods are really wrapping around each other.

Now we get to intelligibility. Intelligibility actually ties in well to structural analyses. Linguists who say we divide on structure and not on intelligibility are being silly. Where you have deep structural differences between Lect A and Lect B, it logically follows that you have intelligibility problems. Profound structural differences between two lects makes it hard for one to understand the other. The differential structure really gets in the way of understanding. So once again, one method is wrapping around the other.

As we can see, historical, structural and intelligibility analyses of splitting languages all tend to be part of the same process, that is, they are all talking about the same thing. And they will tend to reach similar conclusions when it comes to splitting languages.

Iranians Burn the Koran

Here.

This very interesting video shows two young Iranian men burning a Koran, apparently in Iran. If they get caught, they are going to be in deep trouble. I wonder if they are Muslims!?

Although you might think Koran-burning videos are not that shocking, but a lot of Muslims are really outraged by them, with Al Qaeda and jihadi types frequently threatening to kill the people who burned the Koran. There are also a lot of calls to ban these videos.

Deconstructing Leftism Reviews One of My Posts

Here.

Although I want to dislike this guy just for the name of his blog, this piece of his is very fair and honest. I can’t find much in the way of untruths in the piece. He is decent, fair minded and gentlemanly.

There is something strange about race realists. The better of them are among the only honest conservatives out there. One thing is that they have the left the Republican Party, so they are thinking for themselves instead of repeating Republican Party politically motivated lying bullshit.

Another thing is that much race realism, properly formulated anyway, just seems to be the truth. I remember a while back when Hunter Wallace wrote a piece on Liberal Race Realism. His commenters could not figure me out and they did not get why I was so controversial. They found out that it was mostly due to the race realism and after a bit of “What’s that?” they were even more puzzled. The WN’s stated that race realism was not controversial in any way, shape or form, and that “race realism is just the truth,” as one puzzled fellow put it.

That’s why it’s so infuriating to many people. It’s true, so it’s hard to argue with it honestly. And for us liberals and Leftists, not to mention for many NAM’s, the consequences of race realism are potentially devastating.

Nevertheless, HBD types frequently overstate the case against liberals. We don’t necessarily believe that “all people are equal.” We may be liberal, but we are not stupid. Obviously all people do not have equal gifts and detractions. That’s true even within races.

Now if you get into whether or not races are equal or not, the statistics show that on average they are not. So the debate is over. The races are not equal. Period.

All that is left to discuss is whether it is due to environment or genetics or both. At some point, it doesn’t even matter. Black crime is a catastrophe, and getting down to brass tacks, who cares if it’s caused by environment or genetics? The victims don’t care, the cops don’t care, the criminals don’t care. It’s a big problem, that’s all there is to it, it has to be dealt with, and it’s not very important what causes it.

Theories of causation in social science at some point are just intellectual onanism. It’s irrelevant on the ground where it really matters.

Taliban Execute Two Afghan Women

Video here.

This video sucks. The Taliban have captured two women in Afghanistan. The woman are accused of being prostitutes. As if that were not bad enough, they are accused of selling their bodies to US soldiers, so they are more or less spies or traitors. They put the women on the ground where they cry and plead for mercy. Then they shoot them to death with automatic weapons. The women crumple and die on the ground. Their dressed in purple bags so it’s quite so bad because you can’t see the human being under the bag.

Fucked up to the max.

Flash Mob Beatdown in Dallas

Video here.

This is a pretty disturbing video. A young White guy is a clerk in a 7-11 in Dallas, Texas. A flash mob of young Blacks of both sexes raids the store. En masse, they start shoplifting stuff and heading for the door. Stupidly, the clerk tries to stop them. They push him outside and brutally beat him down until he rescued by two brave young Black women, who save him from the attackers and take him to safety in the store. He received serious injuries and had to be hospitalized.

The tape was played on TV, and people were asked to turn in the thieves and attackers. It’s not known if any of them got caught yet, nor is the identity of young women who saved him known.

Black flash mobs are becoming increasingly common in the US. Sometimes they attack passerby at random, possibly focusing on Whites. Other times they definitely attack Whites or at least non-Blacks exclusively, for example at a fair in Wisconsin. Other flash mobs like this one raid stores and malls. In the malls, they just run through the mall knocking stuff over. In the stores, they go in in a large group and steal stuff.

White nationalists have gone absolutely insane over this phenomenon, because in some cases, the flash mobs are preferentially seeking out Whites to attack. But as usual, the vast majority of victims of Black thugs are their racial brethren, their fellow Blacks.

Arab Throws a Dog Off a Building

Video here.

I recommend that my regular readers not watch this video because it’s pretty disturbing.

This is a seriously messed up video. Two Arab guys grab a dog and take it up to the top of a building. Then one of them throws the dog off the 4-5 story building while they both laugh. The dog hits the ground below and you can hear it whimpering. It’s not sure if the dog lived or not.

The video was supposedly shot in Egypt. The date and location of the video are not known, the identity of the animal abusers is not known, nor is it known what happened to them afterwards, if anything.

This video has been making the rounds for a while now, and it’s gotten pretty viral.

Dying Minority Languages and Standardization: Some Problems

I have been studying some of the minority languages of Europe lately. One thing that they have in common is that in a number of cases, there have been proposals made for centralization and standardization of the language. Dying languages very much need standardization. This is because in many cases, these languages are split up in a number of dialects. These dialects are typically quite different, and in many cases, they are flat out separate languages with poor intelligibility with other dialects.

If everyone just goes on speaking their dialects, they won’t be able to talk to other speakers much, and the language will soon die, because most dialect speakers are 35-60+. It’s not a useful solution. Sure, the dialects are very interesting and it might be nice to preserve them, but it seems to be a lost cause. Further, most dialects are not being passed on to children anymore. For the languages to survive, the dialects must all die.

For instance, Occitan has a multitude of dialects, 23 of which are actually separate languages. A unitary Occitan has been created based on Languedocien, one of the largest Occitan macrolanguages. The problem is that this new neo-Occitan is nothing like the Occitan spoken by  Auvergnat, Croissant, Limousin and Gascon speakers.

Further, the unitary spelling and writing style does not represent the way that these languages speak. For instance, a particular word may be written in a unitary way in neo-Occitan, but the graph for that word would look nothing like the way the word is pronounced in the speaker’s language. The word “bricklayer” might be written something like “frondyard.” Ridiculous or what?

Children are being taught neo-Occitan in special language schools. The neo-Occitan is regarded as an abomination by speakers of traditional dialects, and neo-Occitan speakers can’t understand traditional dialect speakers.

A similar thing is going on with the Breton language in Brittany in northwest France. This is actually a Celtic tongue similar to Welsh that is strangely enough spoken in France. Breton is actually made up 4 major dialects that are frankly all separate languages. Intelligibility is poor between the four Breton lects, but the lects are not being passed on to children and most speakers are over 50 anyway.

In schools called Diwans the children are being taught a neo-Breton, an invented “language that no one speaks.” The neo-Breton speakers come out of the schools, and they can’t understand speakers of the traditional Breton lects. And speakers of traditional dialectal Breton can’t understand neo-Breton. Kids and their elders are speaking the same language, but they can’t understand each other. Sad situation.

In the Basque country, a similar situation is going on. The schools are teaching a neo-Basque, a fake language made up of the amalgamation of all of the major Basque dialects plus a lot of made-up neologisms. Speakers of traditional dialects have a hard time with neo-Basque, and neo-Basque speakers have a hard time with traditional speakers.

Nevertheless, there is no way around standardization. Teaching every group of children the separate small dialect of their region is useless. It will create new generations of speakers that can’t even communicate with most of the speakers of the language. If they are taught the unified language, at least they will be able to communicate with all other speakers of the language, at least when the older dialect speakers die off.

Languages must be standardized. It’s essential. Not only so everyone can talk to everyone, but so that everyone can read everyone. Can you imagine what chaos it would be if every writer of English wrote English phonetically in exactly the way that they speak it. You might have millions of different Englishes out there. Yet this is the way that nonstandardized languages are typically written, phonetically.

Further, spelling must be standardized. There must be a correct way and an incorrect way to spell most any given word of English. This makes reading faster and communication transparent. If you don’t like English spelling rules, then don’t write in English!

It’s easy to understand why typical dialect speakers regard the neo-languages are some sort of abomination. Let us use an example from English.

Suppose there was an attempt to unify all of the Englishes on Earth into some sort of World English.

This language would include speech and writing based on the phonetics of various types of British English, Scottish English, African English, Indian English, Singlish, Australian English, Canadian English and New Zealand English.

As if that were not bad enough, the speech and writing would also be based partly on various US Englishes: Southern English, Ebonics, New York English, Boston English and Appalachian English.

If you turned on the TV, the announcers would be speaking in some insane English based on all of the English dialects listed above. Any English writing would also be phonetically based on a mixture of all of the above dialects. The new language would also have a ton of new terms derived from slangs of the various Englishes.

Could you imagine how furious we speakers of US English would be? This is the way traditional dialect speakers feel about the unified neo-languages slated to replace their dialects.

Does Language Learning Carry Over to New Languages?

Not nearly as much as one might think.

For instance, I am relatively well versed in the Romance languages. I can read Spanish quite well, but not fluently. I can read a bit of French. And I have studied reading Italian and Portuguese for a bit.

So one would think that with all that Romance under my belt, I could just jump right into some new Romance languages and read them just like that, right?

Not so fast now.

Lately I have been going through lots and lots of Occitan texts on the Net. Occitan is approximately between Spanish and French. Honestly, I can’t make heads or tails of Occitan. Sometimes I can pick out a bit of information that I am looking very hard for, but mostly I just throw up my hands. My online translator calls Occitan “Catalan” and tries to translate it into English. Some say that Catalan and Occitan are one language. According to my translator, that is not so. Running the Catalan translator through Occitan fixes it up a bit, but it still leaves a gigantic steaming mess on the page. It’s nearly useless.

With Portuguese, Spanish and French, one would think Catalan would be a breeze, right? Think again. My translator is almost always able to grab it, but sometimes it can’t. When it can’t, I am stuck with Catalan and I am well and truly lost. Once again, I just throw up my hands. Obviously, it looks like some kind of Iberian language, but it’s so screwed up and crazy that you just don’t want to bother with it.

It’s said that Aragonese is nearly a Spanish dialect. Intelligibility is on the order of 8

Galician is a sort of Portuguese-Spanish hybrid that is often intelligible to many Spanish speakers. But don’t bother with trying to read Galician texts. They’re a frustrating mess. I dipped into it a bit, but it’s so screwed up and confusing that I quickly gave up.

One would think that with a bit of French under the belt, one could pick up on the various French patois of the langues d’oil. Forget it. It looks like a chaotic disaster on the page. The translator calls the various patois French. Running them through a French translator in general doesn’t really improve matters all that much. It’s still a messy disaster.

The moral to the story is don’t think that semi-getting a few languages under your belt is going to help you even with reading closely related languages. Things are not so simple.

Socialism and Welfare

Comrade Patrick asks:

Robert I am a socialist but one thing I struggle with is the phenomena of intergenerational welfare families. There are people in America who are on welfare and whose ancestors have been on welfare for generations.

Hypothetically I support the idea of a welfare safety net for people. Because sometimes things just don’t work out and people need to be on welfare and some may need to be on welfare for the rest of their lives. ANd I don’t have a problem with that.

But when families have been on welfare for multiple generations that seems problematic. So what I wonder is this. Is welfare a necessary part of socialism and if so what can be done to prevent multi-generational welfare families from arrising?

I am a real socialist, like a Commie type socialist. Under socialism, real Commie socialism, you have to work. If that means holding up a wall in an office for eight hours a day, so be it. If it means sweeping the streets or picking up trash, so be it. If you want a check, you have to work for it. We, the state, will give you a basic job for your welfare check. If you don’t want to work for your check, then you don’t get one. Under real Commie type socialism, we put you in jail if you refuse to work. It’s called “parasitism.” I’m not sure if I have a problem with doing that.

The welfare state includes many things.

Low cost housing, food stamps, unemployment benefits, disability, social security, phone, electricity and heating assistance, free medical care. Most of the welfare state does not involve just handing out checks to people. A lot of it is in services.

Great Site: Introvert Zone

Here.

It takes a while before you figure out exactly what it is that you are. Well, I have figured out that I am an introvert. I wasn’t always this bad of one, but this is what I have become anyway. I think I always had some tendencies, but they just got worse with time, and maybe with psychiatric stuff like OCD. Why hang around people if all they are going to do is treat you like you’re weird or crazy? Fuck that. I’m not weird, I’m not crazy, and if you think I am, well, hey, fuck you.

People are always telling me to have a good day or have a good night. Nothing wrong with that, but they always say it like they don’t think I am going to have a good day or a good night. Which is very insulting, because I generally am going to have a good day or night. One more thing, if they really think I am going to have a lousy day or night, why are they telling me to have a good one instead? Why not tell me to have a bad day or have a bad night? Sometimes I get mad. They say, “Have a good day,” in that insulting way, and I say, “No.” They look shocked. “No?” “Yes, no, I’m not going to have a good day. It’s already been a bad day so far, and I don’t think it’s going to pick up later on.” This makes people very upset and flustered, and they think it is really weird.

I must say I resent extroverts, because they have been persecuting me and generally making my life miserable and Hellish for decades now. I suspect they have been firing me from jobs too. I do tend to get fired, but it’s usually not for bad work, fucking off, calling in sick, showing up late, stealing or anything bad like that. It’s always personal – the boss starts hating me after a while. I suspect it might be because I’m an introvert.

At the last job I had, I heard that the boss (and maybe some of the co-workers) were getting really upset about me. They gave me these pitiful breaks every few hours. That year it was raining all the time. So, like a typical introvert, I would grab my umbrella, go outside in the rain and walk up and down the road basically watching the rainwater running down the sides of road like rivers. Mostly I was thinking. Just walking around in the rain, looking at the weather and the runoff, and thinking about stuff. You know, we introverts do that.

Well, the boss and I guess the rest of the staff couldn’t get it. They thought I was mentally ill or something. Apparently this was some kind of extremely profound and disturbing and possibly dangerous aberrant behavior I was engaging in. You know, walking around in the rain thinking about shit. Like humans have been doing since, when? The dawn of man? Well, I figured out that they were getting all weirded about what I was doing, so I had to quit doing it. But I resented that.

I just got read the riot act the other night for being an introvert. After all, it’s a great big pathology, now isn’t it? Another person who was there at the time kindly told me to try to be less shy or introverted or some such shit.

These people don’t get it. We’re always trying. I’ve been trying to “get over it” for a very long time now. Like, say, 24 years? Something like that. It’s a constant effort, or battle or whatever. It never ends. I’ll be fighting this until the day I die.

Funny thing was that I was quite extroverted when I was younger. I wonder how much of this is just illness?

There comes a point where you really ought to just embrace what you are, defend it and enjoy it. I already enjoy it. I’m happy. All the time. All by my lonesome too, a good part of the time. And happy as a clam. Instead of kicking yourself in the butt over it, why not cook up some great tomato penne pasta and eat it alone, like I just did?

This is the way we are. We’re trying to get over it, always trying. But we can’t. Um. Get over it. So…

Extroverts fuck off!

American English Teacher in Korea Goes Nuts on Bus, Attacks Korean Couple

Video on the video site here.

Interesting video. This Black English teacher in Korea got into it with an older couple on a bus. The Korean man said something in Korean that sounds like “nigga” but really it just means something totally different. The older man had no idea that “nigga” in Korean means something bad in English because he doesn’t speak English. The English teacher goes totally nuts, starting screaming and yelling at the Koreans, and then starts manhandling both the man and the woman. The Korean man wants to fight back but is afraid to.

This American guy totally blew it on the bus. He totally lost it. What a moron. I hope the Koreans send him home for this. That’s all I can say.

This video is getting a lot of play on the Net and making the rounds.

Being Black in Japan

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiB9Lqz5moE]

The race realists and White nationalists frequently say that the Japanese absolutely detest Black people.* Based on this video, I would say that that is somewhat of an exaggeration. However, also based on this video, I would say that the Japanese aren’t the biggest Negrophiles on Earth.

All in all, the Black experience in Japan is more nuanced than either the Negrophobic or Negrophilic extreme. It’s somewhere in between. This guy has had some difficulties, but he doesn’t say he’s been living in Hell. On the other hand, he’s a quite civilized young Black man, and he also seems pretty smart, so even here in the US most Whites are going to be pretty nice to him. How will the more common ghetto Black type to one degree or another go over in Japan? Probably a lot worse, I would imagine.

He does say one interesting thing. In Japan, a foreigner is a foreigner. So a Black man is likely to be treated about the same as a White man in Japan. They’re all the same – foreigners.

There are few Blacks in Japan period, and most of the ones over there are Oreos like this guy. Nevertheless, I have heard that of all ethnic groups in Japan, the small group of Blacks have the highest crime rate. Which should surprise no one.

Good video – check it out.

*What I have seen is more the case is that many Japanese-Americans have a strong and abiding racism towards Blacks. I know this from some of these types that I have known, generally 2nd or 3rd generation. As an example, see the all too common ghetto Black behavior of a man running around and making babies with  a number of different women,and then not supporting any of them (also relatively common in Africa by the way).

To a Japanese man, that is perfectly normal behavior – for a dog! Because that’s what a dog does – he runs around and knocks up various bitches down the years, then takes off and refuses to support any of the whelps. So to a Japanese man, a Black man who does that is not even human – he’s simply a dog. Japanese men are supposed to be husbands and fathers, and a man who refuses to support his kids is treated as the lowest sort of garbage.

Japanese in Japan are probably a bit differnt because they simply don’t have much experience with Blacks. Japanese-Americans have dealt with Blacks in their families and extended circles for two or three generations, and I think they don’t like what they saw.

Jared Taylor, “White Identity: What It Is and Why It Is Necessary”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oVv3aF5Q84&feature=player_embedded#!]

I helped edit the book that he holds up at the beginning of the video.

One of the reasons that Taylor is so hard to argue with is that he is so honest. Most of what he says is straight up true in one way or another. For a liberal, the facts of race are cold, hard and brutal, a devastating slap to the face. There’s no need to exaggerate them by lying. The facts are bad enough as it is.

If and when Taylor starts lying like most pundits, politicians and public figures, his argument will deteriorate. The more he lies about race, the more his enemies will be able to tear him apart. By being largely comparatively truthful for a pundit and political figure, he remains a gentleman and actually dramatically increases the power of his arguments. Why? Because it’s hard to argue with facts.

Your comments are welcome.

Socialism, Multiculturalism and the Latin American Future of America

What do we on the Left want? We want an increasingly socialist America. Social democracy of any sort would be just fine and dandy. What’s the best way to work towards that? A declining Whit

One argument is that socialism is not possible in a multicultural society. Yet there are multicultural societies around the globe (depending on how you define it) that are quite socialist. Even Mexico has free health care and university education for all. Trinidad and Tobago, virtually the definition of an unstable multicultural society, has free universal health care. Libya had free health care, free education including higher education anywhere in the world, cheap subsidized food and very cheap rent.

The real argument is that socialism is not possible in a multicultural society with a significant number of European Whites. That’s because European Whites don’t like to share with non-Whites.

At any rate, we have no choice. With the current White percentage at 6

The argument is that we must secure some sort of Euro-American state in the US, or else fight to keep America a White country because a minority-White America will be an anarchic multicultural state.

But we really don’t have any choice about the matter.

Non-White immigration is not going to stop. Whites will continue to decline. There is nothing that can be done about it. So fighting for a White America is hopeless, bailing out a leaking rowboat. And a White state in the US will never happen. So the only solution is to make lemons of lemonade. As Whites decline, look for the silver lining. The silver lining is an increasingly socialist America. There’s no way to stop it short of dictatorship.

And I really doubt if multiculturalism will lead to long term anarchy in the US. It hasn’t necessarily elsewhere.

More likely what we seem to be moving towards in the US is a Latin American model. Insane inequality and maldistribution of wealth, a venal, corrupt, violent and extremely reactionary White elite and an increasingly radicalized non-White group (often led and including many radical Whites) moving hard to the Left, and a multiracial, mixed race middle class caught in the middle, but often siding with the elites.

Politics will become unstable as both the Right and the Left become increasingly radical. With extreme levels of inequality, you get an increasingly reactionary and vicious Right along with an increasingly radical and violent Left. It’s virtually a law of political science as stable as an equation on a blackboard. At some point, either the Right or the Left may become armed. There may be regular violent protests, riots, police riots, mass arrests, politicized military and police forces, etc. This is what Latin America has.

This is really the future. It will be about class, not about race. It’s really all about class in Latin America also to be honest. White Argentina and heavily White Chile have been extremely unstable and led by both the radical Left and radical Right in recent years. There won’t be any more race riots in the future US than there are in Latin America, which is next to none. Class riots? Yes. Race riots. Not really.

Everything Republicans Say Is a Lie

That’s really all you need to know about the Republican Party. It’s generally true around the world too. Everything that rightwing and conservative politicians say is a lie, except when they are stating the obvious that everyone agrees with. I would also say that it’s true of most major conservative and Republican pundits. Almost everything they say is a lie. A politically motivated lie too.

The interesting thing about rightwing race realists is that although most of them are conservatives or Republicans, it’s not true that everything they say is a lie. In fact, a lot of what conservative race realists say is the truth. They’re ugly, cruel, vicious and racist, yes, but are they liars? Not necessarily. Is Jared Taylor a liar? Not really, not like your typical rightwing Republican pol anyway. I wonder if the fact that they are often telling the truth is why they are shut out of public discourse.

We could do a regular series about Republican lies here, but it would get old real quick.

One of the worst ways the conservatives lie all over the world is about economics. The conservative philosophy is that of the moneyed elite or the rich. That’s rightwing economics in a nutshell. Great for moneyed folks, bad for everyone else.

Yet they have to somehow sell an economic project that helps the top 2

Conservatism is a minority philosophy. It’s the philosophy of an elite. It says that economics should benefit them and only them and that democracy must be limited to allow the moneyed elite to rule without the dirty unwashed getting in the way too much. There’s no way you can be honest about an elitist political project and somehow sell it to the bottom 8

This is one reason why conservatism sucks. It’s dishonest, always was and always will be. Under capitalism, it grabs the media and culture, and saturates society with conservative lies. After a while, the population is so brainwashed and confused that they don’t know what is what.

I honestly don’t think that liberals and the Left lie all that much. Communists lie, but they don’t lie too much inside Communist circles. I am on some Communist mailing lists and visit Communist websites regularly. There’s not much lying going on. Very little or none actually. They are quite up front about the problems of Communism and the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism.

We on the Left are trying to benefit the vast majority of people with our project. There’s no need to lie to do that. Just figure out what’s going to be the greatest good for the greatest number, and lay it out and push it. We don’t have to brainwash the moneyed elites or the Right, and they don’t listen to us anyway.

As we are not an elite project, we don’t need to lie to the masses to sell our product. One of the worst anti-Communist lies about, one that is still endlessly peddled, is that Communism was an elitist project. It was anything but. The fact that it had so many problems was not because the elite were ripping off the masses but instead due to problems inherent in the nature of the very project itself.

Another aspect of this lie that anything progressive cannot possibly benefit anyone. For instance, the capitalist media in the US says that Hugo Chavez’ project has not benefited the poor at all. In fact, it has harmed them. But if it won’t benefit the poor, why push it? Why not just be a rightwinger like everyone else and push an elite project?

Of course Chavez’ project has benefited poor Venezuelans to a dramatic degree. That was what it was supposed to do. That’s what the Left does everywhere on Earth; benefit the poor, low income and middle classes against the moneyed elite. True, the moneyed elite tend to lose out under the Left – but that’s the nature of our project.

The poor and low income have benefited so much from Chavez’ project and the projects in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil that all of these people keep getting re-elected and their projects stamped with the seal of endorsement.

If the Right admitted that Left projects have been great for poor, low income and even the middle classes at the expense of the moneyed classes, a lot of people would say, “Good for the Left! Screw the rich!” The Right can’t admit that, so it has to lie.

A corollary of this is that the best way to help poor, low income and middle class people is via the project of the rich, the economics of the rich, which has been proven to only benefit the top 2

But this was just another lie. Neoliberal economics is the same economics of the moneyed classes that it has always been. It doesn’t benefit the less well-off now anymore than it did yesterday. Nothing changed in Berlin in 1989, at the University of Chicago economics study circles in the late 1970’s or the election of Reagan in 1980. The only thing that changed was the words used to make the arguments, not the lies themselves.

If a Republican’s mouth is open, he’s lying. He has a lot of reasons to lie. He’s pushing a project that only benefits business and the moneyed classes and hurts everyone else. He can’t tell the truth about it because it’s so ugly. So he has to lie. And he does, floridly and continuously.

Strange Photo

Crazy photo.

Anyone have any ideas about what is happening in this video? No one quite knows what is going on. It appeared on the Net via some guy saying, “Look at the photo of my friend who barely escaped death,” but he may not have shot the pic, because it’s been on the Net for a while.

Obviously, it looks like he is about to do a face plant. The famous deadly face plant story in Lebanon is here, and the video itself is here. Be forewarned!

Game Lesson: What If She Gives You a Hate Look?

We have guys on this blog who say they have a hard time meeting women, so I will periodically write articles about Game. In addition, we have had some Incel types and male virgins come to the site. I’d like to welcome Incel types and male virgins to the site, because I am sympathetic to them.

It’s not so much about Game as it is some basics in terms of how to deal with women. I’m no expert, but I’ve had a lot of experience with women, so I think I know them pretty well.

I was going into a store today when I noticed two women standing outside. They were about 25-30 years old. I thought they were Hispanic for some reason, but I believe they were both White. One thing I really noticed is that they both had huge tits! I glanced over at them, and the shorter one gave me a cold, hard, hateful glare. I ignored it, but then looked back a couple of times to see what was going on. Each time she was staring at me with that sheer hate look on her face.

I went into the store and stood in line. The women came up in back of me in line. I then looked them over a bit. I was mostly focusing on their huge tits! They had really big tits, but they weren’t exactly fat. Nice to look at. Anyway, the hate looks went away. For a bit I tried to figure out why the hate looks, but I couldn’t come up with anything.

We got to the front of the line and suddenly the women engaged me in extremely friendly conversation about the CD I was looking at. The one with the hate stare started the conversation. They were laughing and giggling and making jokes and moving closer to me when they talked. I would turn away and they would start up the conversation again. We laughed and joked and maybe sort of flirted around.

It came my turn, I ordered, turned around and left. As I was leaving, two other women in line, both about 25-30, caught my eye, and one of them gave me a great big, “Hi!” The reason she did that is because she saw those other women making nice to me.

I didn’t think anything of the friendly joking around I had with the women. I didn’t make any sexual comments or remarks at all. I have no idea what was on their minds.

It’s best not to read women’s minds, and it’s impossible any, so don’t even try. Don’t think, “She digs me!” “She wants me!” “They have the hots for me!” You don’t know any of those things for sure. Most guys come on too strong when women are just being friendly.

I just let them be as friendly as they want to be and don’t interpret it sexually unless and until they start making obvious remarks or doing obviously sexual things.

I just sit back and put the woman in the driver’s seat as far as sexual stuff goes. Just lay back, be warm and friendly, joke around and whatnot, but leave the sexual initiative to her.

You would be surprised how many women start venturing into the sexual arena if you just sit back and let them take charge. Further, I think women like to feel empowered sexually by a nonjudgemental guy who is not coming on strong yet at the same time, she knows what his feelings are. When a woman takes the initiative, she feels powerful and in control. You allow her to do this by giving her permission to take the initiative, by making her relaxed and being nonjudgemental and approachable.

Once she starts doing sexual things and making sexual remarks, it’s a whole new ballgame. You really need to respond to that in some way or another.

The moral to the story is that women are nuts. You can’t really make sense of them, and anyone who says he does is insane.

Also, hate and love are very close. If a woman really hates you, she will just ignore you. Often if a woman really likes you, it comes across as hate. It’s true that a hate look might mean she really hates you, but many times, it is something else.

What it means is that she feels passionately about you in some way or another. Hate and lust are often confused in women. If a woman gives you hate looks, don’t write her off. Maybe she’s your worst enemy, or maybe it means something else altogether.

Everyone Can’t Be “Successful”

Surely one of the lousiest things about capitalist society is the extreme competition that it engenders among humans. This would not be so bad except that US capitalist society is all about the “winners” and the “losers.” Supposedly the winners are the people who are making lots of money while they losers are the folks who are not making much money. Supposedly in this system, everyone gets exactly what they deserve. It’s America: life is what you make it.

I’ve been told these things over and over. This attitudes are ingrained so deeply in our culture that they are virtually intractable. If you don’t believe that these notions are the bedrock of American culture, then think about it a bit.

Of course I believed this crap myself for a long time, until I really sat down and thought about it.

In US society, the successful are probably those in the top 2

There’s an immediate problem with this, and this is the contempt for working class people. In what way is an honest, hardworking, conscientious working class person, no matter how low their income, a loser? Think about it. A good working class person can never be a loser. If you work, you’re ok. If you work hard, even better. If you work hard and you’re honest, better still.

The fact that tens of millions of Americans regard working class people with contempt and hatred simply because they are not paid very well is sickening. If you think like this, fuck you. Rightwingers insist that they never think this way. They insist that they love the working classes. But they don’t. They hate them, not only in policy but in everyday life.

To be completely honest, most liberals and moderates are not much better. I spent a lot of time hanging around with moneyed liberals, mostly “Hollywood Left” types who were working in the movie industry. These were good liberal people politically, but I didn’t like them one bit. They were all about money. They judged people according to how much money they made. The more money you made, the better human being you were. The less you made, the more of a slithering slug you were.

To me, this mentality obviated almost all of their liberal values. If you judge human beings by how much money they have, and you are all about money above every other human value, then how can you possibly be on the Left? I don’t see how you can.

Let’s assume that the top 2

No matter where you draw that cutoff line, and you have to draw it somewhere, 10

It’s typical in capitalist society, even among so-called liberals and Democrats, to say that those who were not “successful” didn’t try hard, or made poor decisions in life, or just frankly fucked up of their own accord in one way or another.

But consider this thought experiment. Suppose you could engineer humans so that everyone tried just as hard as everyone else and everyone made an equal number of poor and good decisions, and everyone fucked up as much as everyone else.

Guess what? You still end up with a small number of “winners” and a large number of “losers.” See? There will always be winners and losers, no matter how hard everyone tries, no matter how well people make decisions, no matter how many everyone fucks up.

Life under capitalism can be compared to a race. I would like to compare it to an Olympic race, say with 100 runners. Are any of these 100 crappy runners? Are any of them going to try any harder or less hard than anyone else? Are any of them going to fuck up more than the others? Probably not.

Anyway, no matter how hard those 100 try, no matter to what extent they fuck up their race or not, guess what. One person comes first, another second, another third, another tenth, another 37th, and 69th and another 100th. That’s the way it has to be.

And that’s the way it is in US capitalist society. Someone has to come in first, another 6th, another 27th, another 65th and there always has to be someone to come in 100th. People will come in first and 100th no matter how hard anyone tries, no matter how well people make their choices, no matter how much anyone fucks up.

Life’s a race.

I have thought about this analogy long and hard for many years now. I plug it into reality all the time. It makes perfect sense.

Winners and losers is crap. Everyone gets what they deserve is crap. Anyone can write their own ticket and go as far as they want is crap.

It’s all crap. All of these essential myths of the American Dream are bullshit.

And you know it.

And you if you don’t know it yet, you just haven’t thought about it enough.

How the Public Airwaves Would Be Treated Under a True Democracy

True democracy meaning what you usually don’t have under capitalism, where rightwing capitalists typically own 90-9

Some Republican Congressman named John Grant successfully got the funding of public radio station WNNF-FM cut off for playing Iris Dement’s Wasteland of the Free. You could say that it could have been played on the radio of the private sector, but that’s all corporate radio, and they won’t touch this song with a 10 foot pole and an 11 foot extension. The only place such a song could ever be played is on pubic radio.

This shows you that freedom of speech is more or less bullshit under American capitalism. There’s freedom of speech for everyone who owns a TV or radio station, all of them extremely rich rightwing corporate types, and there’s none for anyone else. Internet radio and Internet TV is threatening to change that a bit, which is one reason why the rightwing is trying to crack down on the Internet to censor it via getting rid of Net Neutrality so they can get rid of the voices of the Left on the Net.

Freedom of the press under American capitalism, and under capitalism in general, is simply a joke.

The truth is that I own those damned airwaves. Their mine, dammit. They’re yours too. They don’t belong to those corporate fucks. Corrupt political swine of both parties auctioned off your and my airwaves worth $30 billion for pennies on the dollar to rightwing corporations.

Here is how the media ought to work under a true democracy. The media ought to represent the views of the public. If the public is mostly rightwing, the media should be rightwing. If the public is mostly Left, the media should be Left.

Here’s how you do it. Do surveys every five years or so about political views. The most recent surveys showed 4

4

3

2

I would like to open up the cable networks. I would love to turn on cable and see Joe Blow and Jane Shmoe doing local and community shows of all political flavors. That would be very nice. Let 1000 flowers bloom.

Iris Dement, “The Wasteland of the Free”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhgb9hYjX3g&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL5875AA879192AC3E]

The Bluegrass Left!

Let’s face it, the best folk music has always been leftwing. So has bluegrass. They’re both the music of the poor, the music of the people, both of which can never be anything but the music of the Left. Country music ought to be the music of the Left too, but for some odd reason, it’s the music of the Right.

Lyrics here.

The Republican Party: The Ghoulish Party of Death

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocKFSLsZnUo&feature=related]

First the Tea Party roared its approval when Ron Paul said that letting the uninsured die was “what freedom is all about.” “Should we let them die?” Wolf Blitzer asked. “Yes!” the Tea Party crowd shouted.

Here, at another weird Republican Party debate, the anchor says, “Governor Perry, you have executed 234 people in your time as governor…” The Republican crowd then roars with approval.

Recall that the crowd cheered when Jesus was executed too. One wonders if those Jews were proto-Republicans?

This party is getting really sick, and this country is getting really sick. This is turning into some kind of culture of death. Or maybe it always was?

French Architecture and the Hazards of Globalization

A commenter says that French intellectualism is worthless because it’s applied to abstract bullshit like literature and philosophy, whereas they should be talking about engineering. I guess the commenter is some STEM guy. I’m not sure what to say about this except that French science and engineering looks pretty damn good for a long time now. Marie Curie? The Salk vaccine?

On another point, he says that French culture is disappearing.

I don’t agree that French culture is disappearing. It’s nothing at all like America. I have seen Internet travelogues of people driving through France all the way to Paris.

That’s a real country. Real architecture. An architecture steeped in history and culture. No tract homes or strip malls. Even when they got to Paris, I was stunned. They were in Versailles, and it could have been 1790 looking at the buildings.

When France starts looking like America with strip malls and tract homes, when French buildings look exactly like American buildings, France will be dead. It will just another America.

Travelogue: The Ardennes, between France and Belgium. Check out the countryside, towns and cites. A real country looks like this!

What Languages Are You Studying?

Please feel free to update us on your current language learning endeavors, if they exist.

As for me:

English: Native speaker, no need to study anything. In fact, it’s unusual that I run across a word that I don’t know. The most recent one was analphabetism. I bet you don’t know what that means.

Spanish: I have been studying Spanish on and off since I was 6 years old. Studying Spanish is more or less of an ongoing thing with me. We have a lot of bilingual signs and prinouts in our area. I often read them with the English translations to bone up on my Spanish.

I could do better. There is a bilingual newspaper that is issued around here for free, but I never bother to pick it up.

Part of the problem is that when you are as good at Spanish as I am, learning more Spanish (such as reading Spanish papers) is really a serious drag. Spanish as written down especially in papers does not translate literally. Not only are there a ton of not commonly used words, but there are also a lot of figures of speech. In addition, there are lots of phrases, that, when looking at the Spanish and then at the English, one wonders how they managed to go from one to the other. The Spanish-English translation is not transparent at all.

As you learn Portuguese, French and Italian, it only helps you with your Spanish, though the assistance is not obvious. After a while, all Romance just starts running together. You might as well just study Latin and get it over with.

I speak Spanish to Spanish speakers around here on a regular basis. It’s a lot of fun, and they really appreciate if you can speak three words of their language, unlike the French.

The Spanish-speakers who are actually born in Mexico appreciate it a lot more than the ones who are born in the US. I am not sure why that is, but in so many ways, Hispanics who were born in Latin America are much better people than Hispanics who were born on the US. It’s popular to dog on Latin America, but Latin American Hispanic culture is much superior to US Hispanic culture.

There are deep elements of respect, pride, kindness, brotherhood, politeness and dignity present in Latin American Hispanic culture that are almost neutered in US Hispanic culture. US Hispanics are pretty much just typical asshole Americans, except that they happen to be Hispanics. And in many ways, such as the lumpenization of their culture, US Hispanics are actually worse than the rest of Americans.

I’m not sure what it is with US Hispanics, but something has gone terribly wrong. They’ve lost most of what’s grand about Latin American culture, and they’ve replaced it with what’s worst about US culture, in addition to concocting up various cultural poisons of their own. It’s cultural mongrelization of the worst sort, all of the bad, none of the good and a bunch of new innovations, almost all bad.

Portuguese: Past. I studied it a bit in the past when I was hanging around with this Brazilian woman. Now I’ve given it up. I am already studying Spanish and French, and after a while, you are just studying too many Romance languages. The words are so similar that you start getting them all tangled up in your head. You go to say a Spanish word and you say the Portuguese, Italian or French word instead. If you have some Spanish (especially), French and Italian, you get lots of help with Portuguese.

Italian: I study this language a little bit, but not too much. I am not very good at it, but it’s interesting. If you know some French, Spanish and Portuguese, you can go a long way with Italian.

French: My latest fetish is French. I am not very good at it, so I am at the point where learning the language is fun because you’re always learning new stuff. I have blown off verbs and just concentrate on vocabulary. Verbal conjugations in Romance languages suck anyway. Even in Spanish, they can be quite complex.

German: Past. Mostly I just picked up some basic vocabulary. Attempts to run beyond that, I am afraid, run into Hell. I understand that they still have case, and that the nouns are pretty crazy. There are supposedly other difficult aspects of this language, but I am not sure what they are. Learning basic vocabulary is pretty fun though.

That’s about it. For the most part, as a language learner, I concentrate on the Romance languages. They are difficult enough, believe me! Going beyond Romance seems like a gigantic PITA to me. You’re pretty much traveling to whole new planets. Why bother when Romance is hard enough as it is?

Frenchmen and Berets

As I noted in earlier post, I have been reading a lot about France lately.

One thing that really struck me was the berets! So many Frenchmen still wear these things. In the rural areas and especially among older Frenchmen, berets are almost ubiquitous. Even younger Frenchmen often wear berets. These are often guys from the more rural areas of France who are often deeply steeped in French history, culture and literature. Call them traditional intellectuals if you will.

In the larger cities, especially in Paris, I am not sure how prominent berets are. Among the corporate types and the more modern crowd, they may well be going out in big cities.

I also saw many pictures of France from a while back. It seems that for a long time from about 50 years ago and before, every single Frenchman wore a beret! You will not see a picture of ordinary Frenchmen pre-1960 where they are not wearing berets. I believe in Picasso and Jacques Cousteau wore berets, n’est-ce pas?

It seems that for a long time in the 19th and 20th centuries, the beret was simply a part of the Frenchman’s daily uniform.

Why French Culture is Better Than American Culture

I have been reading a lot about France lately for an article on the French language that I am cooking up. It’s still in the notes stage at the moment. I have been to many French websites, almost all of them written in French, so I have had to read a lot of French, which I am not very good at.

Many interesting things struck me about France which could be the subject of many provocative posts.

First of all, I feel that France is a real country, unlike this bullshit nonentity we call the United States. I don’t know why I felt that way, but reading endlessly about France, I felt that somehow this was a real country, with a real culture, a real language, a real history, a real politics, and a people deeply rooted in, yes, blood and soil, yet somehow without being fascists.

It’s a region where the past, present and possibly the future all run together. The year 1200 could have been yesterday. The 30 Years War could happen tomorrow.

The people, even regular, ordinary working class people, are extremely cultured and educated. This goes far beyond IQ. I had a French girlfriend when I was young. I was 21 and she was 37. She told me she was educated – she had a “baccaularet.”

That is an extremely hard test that the French make you take if you graduate from high school just to qualify to get into the unversity. Just to qualify, mind you. She had passed the college entrance exam, so she was an educated person. In France, that statement is actually true. Can you imagine somehow saying that in the US.

This woman was one of the most educated people I have ever met. I have no idea what her IQ was, not that it matters. We went to see art movies, plays and lectures by arty directors. She read voraciously, especially avant-garde novels like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Peter Handke that no one reads here.

One time I called her up and she said she was reading a book. I asked what it was about. She said, “Ontology.” I asked what that was, and she acted like I was stupid for asking. It’s a branch of philosophy that deals with “the study of existence,” whatever that means.

French women are one of the few women on Earth who will actually fuck you just for being an intellectual or an artist. They really respect stuff like that.

The weird thing was that I never thought that Suzanne was an unusual French person. I met a lot of her French friends and they were all just like her.

I met another Frenchwoman on the Net recently. She read a book a day. She also wrote poetry, which she published on the Net. I have no idea how good it was, but how many Americans put their poetry on the Net? I told her I was reading Sartre, and she almost screamed for joy. This woman had spent her whole life working for the post office. How many intellectuals do you know who work at the post office?

The French IQ of 94 is lower than our US White IQ at 100, yet the French seem to so much smarter.

Your IQ is a nice base, but it also matters what you stuff into your head. The White American stuffs nothing of any meaning or intelligence in his somewhat larger head. The French head is a bit smaller, yet he fills it to the brim with intellectual hors d’oevres large and small from far and near.

“Riotous Nonsense”, by Harry Powell

Warning: Long, runs to 36 pages.

Harry Powell is a British Maoist who has written an excellent piece about the riots in the UK that goes against the typical arguments of the Left about the riots. He argues that the riots were not motivated by class or racism, but were instead spearheaded by primarily criminal lumpen elements that had been preying on low income and working class people in their neighborhoods for a long time.

The riots had little political consciousness. Many of the lumpen elements among the rioters buy into the capitalist project and revere the rich. The riots were a chance for them to get rich too.

It is very nice to see such a heterodox view coming from a hardline Marxist.

Riotous Nonsense

A great deal has been written about the recent urban disturbances in Britain and a lot of it is nonsense. For example, Robert Borba of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA wrote:

What is taking place on Britain’s streets is a revolt against an oppressive state apparatus that is enforcing an unjust society, an apparatus that has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of millions. It is a revolt against state-backed racism. It is refusal by hundreds of thousands of youth to accept a world where they are destitute, with no jobs and no future.

The general idea being put forward here, and by some others, is that the disturbances were a widespread, conscious revolt against the capitalist system. I do not think that the evidence supports this assertion.

The incident that sparked off the rioting was the police shooting Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London on 4th. August. After an unsatisfactory response from the police to their inquiries the family and friends of Duggan held a protest outside a police station. This attracted other people and developed into more general disorder involving fighting with the police, damage to buildings and looting from shops.

This sort of disorder spread to other areas of London and outside in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham. Just as suddenly as these outbursts had begun, they came to an abrupt end on 10th. August when the weather turned wet. As someone commented, “I don’t recollect that the Russian Revolution came to a sudden halt when the weather turned bad.”

Chairman Mao said, ”No investigation, no right to speak.” The present writer does not claim to be some sort of expert on urban disturbances but for forty years in Nottingham I have lived in and near the localities where such outbursts have occurred, both past and present. I have carried out political work in these areas, particularly anti-racist, anti-poll tax, anti-war and anti-voting campaigning. Thus I have some first hand experiences I can draw upon in assessing the reports and analyses of other people.

For the most part the riots occurred in urban areas where there is much unemployment and underemployment, large numbers of ethnic minorities, poor housing and limited social facilities. It is the young people in these areas, particularly black ones, who have high rates of unemployment and very limited opportunities.

The class composition is largely working class (proletarian) with some middle strata elements such as small shopkeepers and business proprietors (petit bourgeois) and gentrified enclaves of more affluent business and professional people (manageriat).

Racism?

One interpretation is that the disturbances were at least partly a reaction by black youth against the discriminatory racist treatment of them by the police. In particular the prevalence of “stop and search” operations by the Metropolitan Police in London is seen as generating resentment on the part of black youth. Mark Duggan was black and the police shooting him certainly sparked off the disturbances.

However, from the incomplete picture we have of the circumstances of the killing it does seem that Duggan was carrying a gun. In Britain, unlike America, very few people habitually carry handguns and most of those who do so are criminals. The fact of the matter is that knife and gun crime carried out by young people is a serious problem in many British cities, especially London.

The police have been criticized, not least by people living in the affected areas, for not doing enough to contain and reduce such crime. (In the Meadows area of Nottingham some years ago the residents were fearful of armed gangs of drugs dealers and demanded that the police institute regular patrols of armed officers.) This is a major reason for police stop and search operations.

True, black youth are disproportionately targeted, not always sensitively handled and many perfectly innocent young people caught up in such operations come to feel victimized and resentful towards the police.

Borba and others highlight the racist attitudes and behaviour of the police. Certainly the police are far from being free of racism as they are drawn from the wider society in which racist attitudes are still widespread. Thus some of the police are racists but not all of them. There were similar urban disturbances in Britain in 1981 and in subsequent years.

Then almost certainly the main factor was resentment by black and Asian people against racist treatment by the police. As a result much action has occurred within the police forces to try to combat their racism and in my view with some success.

Even so there are still many instances of police racism. It is also the case that the Metropolitan Police have seriously bungled operations leading to the deaths of innocent people as in the cases of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson. It is hardly surprising that many young people, especially in London, treat the police with suspicion.

But it does not necessarily follow that all the black and Asian people participating in the riots were protesting about racist police. Back in 1981 in Hyson Green Nottingham I witnessed a group of mainly black people laying siege to the local police station. At the same time around the corner other people, many of them black, were busy looting the local shops.

The former group were probably motivated by resentment of police racism while the latter group were clearly simply out for personal material gain. Back in August in Nottingham several police stations were attacked.

An acquaintance lives near one of the targets. She saw a gang of black youth come up her street, on their way to attack the police station, and as they proceeded they trashed every car parked in the street. These belonged to the residents, predominantly council tenants, mostly on lower incomes. (My acquaintance’ s car was so badly damaged that it was written off by the insurance company.) It is not plausible to try to explain this incident as a protest against police racism.

It is easy to see why the family and friends of Mark Duggan were upset by the police’s insensitive handling of that case and why some other people interpreted this as a case of police racism. But this is hardly an adequate explanation of the widespread disturbances that occurred in many parts of Britain.

Lack of Opportunities?

Of course, by no means all of those active in the recent disturbances were black and Asian. Many ”white” people were actively involved and arrested, especially young ones. Some people, such as Robert Borba, claim that it is the lack of opportunities for young people, of all ethnic groups, in these deprived areas which explains the riots: ”It is refusal by hundreds of thousands of youth to accept a world where they are destitute, with no jobs and no future.”

It is objectively true that in these areas there are limited educational and employment opportunities for young people. Many of them are demoralized and bored and some of them drift into gangs and criminal activities. Many do hold a vague resentment against the system which degrades them. However this hardly constitutes a definite class political consciousness in the Marxist sense.

Having tried to politically engage with such young people, my impression is that most of them have no real conception of who are their rulers and why they are in a disadvantaged position in this society. Indeed many of them at least partly embrace the media’s definition of them as inadequate and undeserving in various ways. Many admire rich people such as footballers.

The Coalition Government elected in May 2010 has been introducing a draconian programme of cuts in public spending so as to pay off the massive government deficit brought about by the need to bail out the banks three years ago. These include cuts in welfare benefits, support for disadvantaged people, spending on education and training etc.

These will particularly impact on the deprived area where the riots occurred. Some people suggest that this is a cause of the August disturbances but this is not very plausible because the cuts have not yet really begun to have a serious impact.

It is hardly surprising that some of these people should seize upon an opportunity to relieve the monotony and boredom of their lives by going on the rampage. Also we live in a capitalist society where there is constant pressure to acquire material possessions beyond the means of unemployed youth. Here was an opportunity to grab some goodies such as flat screen televisions, laptops, ipods, etc. for free.

Even so, it is unlikely that those doing the looting saw themselves as taking their revenge upon the bourgeoisie, as ”expropriating the expropriators” . Given the temporary breakdown of civil order an unexpected opportunity arose. It was just sheer opportunism.

Having fun?

As people arrested appeared before the courts it became clear that they were not all poor and oppressed. Many of the rioters were in education and employment, some in well-paid jobs. They are not in serious poverty nor are they lacking opportunities. So why did they get caught up in the disturbances?

There is nothing new about sudden, spontaneous outbreaks of civil disorder in modern Western societies, especially involving young people. Back in the nineteen fifties and sixties there were many cases of ”youth disturbances” in countries such as Britain and Germany.

A well-known example was the Mods and Rockers disturbances in Britain in 1964. (See the film ‘Quadrophenia‘ ) Rival groups of teenagers congregated in seaside resorts on holiday weekends engaging in rowdy behaviour and a certain amount of violence and vandalism, probably somewhat amplified by the attention it received from the media. This was a period of full employment and rising living standards, especially for young people.

These rioters could afford motorbikes, scooters and expensive trendy clothes. Some commentators tried to interpret their behaviour as a youth protest against the system but it was not plausible. The disturbances stopped just as suddenly as they had begun. Another example is the soccer hooliganism present in Britain during the nineteen seventies and eighties. Again, attempts to explain it in terms of class conflict are not very convincing.

The fact of the matter is that spontaneous civil disorder, on a small or large scale, has been a recurrent feature of modern capitalism. Quite often the initial ”spark” which gets it going remains unclear. In certain circumstances people who are normally law-abiding can get caught up in the excitement and do things which they would not normally do.

A case known to me in Nottingham was a young man, an apprentice electrician, who during the 1981 riots found himself in the thick of it, picked up a stone, threw it at a shop window, got arrested, convicted and fined in court. He had never been in trouble with the law before and has not been so since that time. In the recent disturbances it seems that many of those rioting were engaging in this sort of impulsive, spontaneous behaviour.

A lot of the riotous behaviour was not to obtain desirable consumer goods but simply to destroy property. The proprietor of a shop in Manchester selling expensive Bang und Olufsen hi-fi equipment was somewhat put out because the rioters did not steal his goods but simply destroyed them. It might be claimed that the culprits were somewhat inarticulately expressing their resentment at the rich who could afford such luxuries.

However a lot of the damage in the riots was inflicted on small local businesses and cars parked in the streets. The victims were not multinational corporations but local residents. Some of these business will not reopen and this will further economically depress these already deprived areas. In Dalston, East London where many Turkish and Kurdish comrades live, people mobilized to defend the local shops against the rioters. I hope that the Turkish and Kurdish Maoists who live there participated in this defensive action.

The truth is that in the right circumstances most of us are capable of getting caught up in riotous, anti-social behaviour. The ruling class are no exception. Consider the hooligan behaviour of people such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson during their student days in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. This sort of spontaneous release of normal constraints on personal behaviour is not a revolt against the system.

Criminality?

It is undoubtedly true that capitalism spits out people at the bottom of society. Its economic contradictions operate such that a section of the proletariat are relatively lowly paid, regularly unemployed and underemployed, have poor standard housing and live in areas with limited social facilities.

These people are the lower sections of the working class and it was only during the thirty year economic boom following World War ll that their numbers proportionately diminished. Both before and after this period they have constituted a significant minority of the population in Britain who are now disproportionately drawn from non-white ethnic minority groups.

Given the lack of legitimate opportunities for personal improvement, it is hardly surprising that some of these people become involved in crime, both against property and persons This is the lumpenproletariat, criminal and anti-social elements which prey off other people living in the same area. These are the burglars, muggers, pimps, drug dealers and street gangs who often make their neighbours’ lives a misery.

Yes, I know that these are people whose behaviour largely results from their class position at the bottom of capitalist society just as surely as the behaviour of swindling financiers is determined by their position at the top of capitalist society. None the less, the great majority of people living in these areas for very good reasons regard the lumpen elements as an enemy.

The victims of these crimes are mostly people living in the same areas and not middle strata and bourgeois elements who live elsewhere. There is rivalry among the criminal gangs involved in these activities and they usually arm themselves with knives and guns. The macho gang culture so generated in these areas spreads among local young people who are not necessarily directly involved in criminal activity.

It is difficult for children growing up in such areas not to be influenced, They engage in much anti-social activity to the distress of other local residents. Injuries and deaths caused by the use of weapons by rival gangs are quite common. Some years ago at the school at the top of my street two criminals involved in a car chase pulled into the school forecourt and proceeded to shoot guns at each other. A bullet lodged in the windscreen of a coach waiting to transport some of the pupils.

For twelve years I lived in the St. Ann’s area of Nottingham, an inner city area largely consisting of council housing with high levels of unemployment and many black and Asian residents.

My house was burgled on three occasions and I had to install window bars, toughened glass panes, a burglar alarm and security lights. Anything left outside in the garden, however trivial, would be stolen. My experience was typical throughout the area. Cars parked in the streets were broken into in broad daylight and people passing who dared to remonstrate with the thieves were threatened, often with knives.

An acquaintance of mine was confronted by muggers who then beat him up because he had no money. The victim spent many weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries. The criminals committing these acts lived locally. Prostitutes were soliciting on the street outside my house. Many of these women were being run by pimps and many of them needed the money to feed their hard drugs addiction.

The pimps and drug dealers lived in the area and when they fell out with each other would use knives and guns to settle scores. Also youth gangs made peoples’ lives unpleasant by harassment on the streets and damaging property.

It is hardly surprising that the great majority of residents in St. Ann’s and in another similar area of Nottingham, the Meadows were demanding action by the City Council and police to deal with these scum, the criminal and anti-social elements. One response by the Council has been to introduce all sorts of security measures to these areas. These include installing burglar alarms in dwellings, building walls and steel fences to make entry by burglars more difficult.

Residents wanted more police patrols, especially on foot, for their protection. In the Meadows residents felt so intimidated by armed gangs that they requested the police to start regular patrols by officers openly carrying firearms, something which had never been done before in Britain.

It is an unpalatable fact for most leftists that the main problem with the police that most people in deprived areas in Britain have is that the police are not doing enough to protect residents. The police are not generally regarded as oppressors. Many surveys carried out in such areas in Britain during the last forty years bear this out.

Some anarchists see professional criminals as engaging in some sort of rebellion against capitalism. This is nonsense. These criminals are informed by a crude, caricatured version of the dominant bourgeois ideology. They aspire to a lifestyle based around expensive cars, jewelry and clothes. In order to achieve their aspirations they are prepared to oppress and exploit the people in their own localities in the most vicious and crude manner making the worst capitalist employer seem like a saint in comparison. They are the scum of the earth.

The police try to clamp down on criminal and anti-social behaviour, not least at the insistence of local residents who are the main victims of such conduct. However well local people organize themselves in community groups they are not equipped to take on vicious, armed criminals.

Only armed police can do this and clashes between the police and criminal/anti-social elements can take on a racial character given that the police are predominantly white and those they are dealing with are disproportionately, although by no means exclusively, from black and Asian groups. This is not to deny that some police officers hold racist attitudes and thus have negative views of black and Asian people.

Even so, the police, who are drawn from the wider society are not uniformly racist and the proportion of them with such an outlook is less than in the past. Now there are a significant number of black and Asian police officers.

On the street where I live we had a problem with a hooligan youth gang harassing residents. We had to form a residents’ association to try to deal with the problem and we went to the police and insisted that they take action. The gang was multiethnic in composition and some of their parents accused the residents and police of being racists.

Some of the police officers involved were of Asian background and they were not impressed by these allegations, the charge of police racism being a common defence put forward by delinquents. I was somewhat amused one day when I saw the gang leader, from an Asian family, who had broken his bail conditions being taken away by two Asian police officers.

Yes, the police are an important part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. Their main function is to control the working class so as to maintain capitalism. This was very clear during the Miners’ Strike during 1984-5 when they used all sorts of illegal methods to contain the miners.

But it is also true that a secondary function of the police is to uphold general public order so that civil society can effectively function. Unless the criminal and antisocial elements who prey off the working class and middle strata are combated and contained then everyday life would become very difficult. Ordinary people have neither the organization or skills to deal with criminals and street gangs.

Now it is becoming clear that many of the people arrested in the riots had previous criminal convictions. So at least some of the rioters were delinquents who seized the opportunity to engage in thieving, not just from commercial premises but from anybody who happened to be around as well. In no way were these people protesting against the rule of capital. As for attacks on police stations in Nottingham, the word on the street is that these were carried out by criminals, especially drug dealers, who seized the opportunity to get back at the police who pursue them.

Approaching the Working Class

In Britain the objective conditions upon which a growth of revolutionary consciousness could be based are becoming more favourable. The financial crisis three years ago and the subsequent unemployment, falling living standards and cuts in public services are impacting on millions of people, especially the lower sections of the working class.

For some years inequalities of income and wealth have been widening to greater differences than they were a century ago. The legitimacy of the state has been undermined by the scandal two years ago of Members of Parliament enriching themselves by blatantly fiddling their expenses claims.

There is widespread disaffection with the war in Afghanistan. A new financial crisis brought about by problems with the Eurozone could occur. And yet the subjective conditions for taking advantage of this situation in Britain do not exist. There is no Marxist-Leninist- Maoist political organization in Britain.

The lower sections of the working class – the sort of people who live in the areas where the riots occurred – are, given their objective conditions of life, potentially open to influence by revolutionary ideas. However most leftists avoid these people like the plague. As for the few people of Maoist sympathies in Britain, they are not organized so cannot really do anything.

I was active in the anti-poll tax struggle in the St. Ann’s area of Nottingham in 1989 to 1991. (The poll tax was a change in local taxation brought in by a Conservative Government which massively shifted the burden of paying for local services from better off people onto those with low incomes.)

In over fifty years of radical political activity in Britain the anti-poll tax campaign is the only occasion on which I have seen large numbers of working class people – many millions – become actively involved in a political campaign. Throughout Britain anti-poll tax groups were formed and these campaigned for people to refuse to pay the tax.

This did not happen spontaneously. It was necessary to campaign door-to-door to persuade people to withhold their poll tax payments. In St. Ann’s we held public meetings which attracted quite large audiences of working class people. This was most unusual.

In March 1990 a large national demonstration against the poll tax was held in London. This was attacked by the police but the demonstrators fought back. They held the police at bay and damaged expensive cars, upmarket shops and offices of large companies. The media dubbed this occurrence the “Poll Tax Riot” but the outcome of it and the mass non-payment was the Conservative Government backing down and scrapping the tax.

Also it was an important factor in bringing about the downfall of the apparently impregnable Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Unlike the recent riots, this was a real political rebellion informed by the conscious aim of stopping this iniquitous tax.

Although the Labour Party said it was against the poll tax, it urged people “not to break the law” and to pay it. Indeed, in Nottingham the Labour-controlled City Council boasted about the zeal with which it set about prosecuting those refusing to pay. Meanwhile with the poll tax abandoned the Trotskyites and revisionists urged people to vote Labour in local elections.

In Nottingham some of the other activists stood in the local elections as protest candidates against the Labourites’ persecution of poll tax defaulters. By then the campaign had largely dissipated but we did attract a respectable number of votes.

The poll tax was a serious blunder by the Conservative Government because they enacted an obviously unjust measure clearly aimed at the working class and which directly impacted on all of them. Thus it was relatively easy to mobilize people to not pay the tax. Even so this only happened because of deliberate efforts by activists to raise people’s political consciousness. From a Maoist perspective it was not possible to secure any lasting political influence because we had no revolutionary organization.

Another type of campaigning in deprived areas of Nottingham I have been engaged in is urging people not to vote in national and local elections. This receives a largely positive response because the majority of people in these areas do not usually vote and so do not need much encouragement to abstain. It is noticeable that since the first term of New Labour government, which ended in 2001, many working class people have finally abandoned their support for Labour. Working class voters are now no more likely to support Labour than other parties.

However people’s alienation from the capitalist political system, bourgeois democracy, does not mean that they think it is possible to get rid of capitalism and replace it with something better. While they have no confidence in the existing order, they feel powerless to do anything about it.

Half a century ago in Britain there were millions of people, both working class and middle strata, who thought of themselves as “socialists”. This did not mean that they had a sophisticated grasp of Marxism but it did mean that they held a basic conception of the class division under capitalism, the iniquity of it and the need to change the system to one more equitable, to some sort of socialism.

This political consciousness has considerably diminished, and now only a small minority of people call themselves socialists. Very few working class people identify as socialists and there are probably more middle strata people who do so. The level of class political consciousness of the working class in Britain has greatly diminished during the last fifty years.

When campaigning for abstention in elections, some people do ask what is the alternative to the present system. If one says that it is socialism, then usually this does not meet with a positive reception. Most people see it as something that was tried and failed in Russia.

Also as a result of intense anti-communist propaganda in the media, especially during the last twenty years, many people – probably a large majority – see socialism and communism as highly undesirable, oppressive systems. It is very difficult to combat this negative perception in the context of street campaigning. Better propaganda materials are needed to educate people about socialism and communism.

However the most effective way in which people would become interested in revolutionary ideas is by revolutionaries taking the lead in generating popular struggles against the oppression and exploitation of capitalism. This can only be done really effectively if revolutionary communists are organized and in Britain they are not.

Conclusions

1. The disturbances in Britain during August 2010 were not a revolt against capitalism and neither were they primarily a protest against police racism. For leftists to try to make out that they were is a case of what Lenin called the ‘worship of spontaneity’.

2. Lumpenproletarian criminal elements were prominent in the disturbances much to the disgust of other residents in the affected areas. These criminals are thoroughly reactionary and enemies of the working class.

3. The low level of political class consciousness among the working class in Britain could be raised by sustained agitation, propaganda and practical political campaigning among such people. In the right circumstances they are capable of taking conscious political action against the system as was demonstrated by the anti-poll tax struggle of twenty years ago.

4. The experience of Britain during the last few decades demonstrates the essential correctness of Lenin’s thesis that a political class consciousness cannot spontaneously arise among the working class. It has to be developed by a revolutionary political party persistently and consistently agitating, propagandizing, organizing and leading working class people in struggles against capitalist oppression and exploitation.

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