What Is the Essence of the Hillary/Alt-Right Conundrum?

My answer on Quora. An idiotic conservative Republican answers me. I do not mind conservative Republicans, but I would like an opposition party that makes some sort of sense. The problem I have with the Republicans and the wingnuts is that their message is so irrational. If we are going to have an opposition, it should at least make sense.

The Democraps hate women! Mention Lincoln again. The Libs are the real racists! LBJ quote! Mention Lincoln again. Hillary quotes! Robert Byrd over and over, did you know he’s KKK? Mention Lincoln again. The Blacks need to get off the Democratic Party plantation! Robert Byrd! Look at our screwed up cities, all run by Democraps! The Dems are the real racists! Benghazi! Whitewater! Robert Byrd! Monica! BLM is a terrorist group! Mention Lincoln again. They’re gonna take away our guns! Robert Byrd! Social programs hurt Blacks, let’s get rid of all of them! Obama is a Kenyan! Obama, radical Muslim terrorist! Mention Lincoln again. Obama has declared war on Whites! Robert Byrd! Obama is dividing out country by race! Eric Holder! Mention Lincoln again. New Black Panthers in Philly! Robert Byrd! Fast and Furious! Voter fraud by the millions! Robert Byrd! Dems registering illegals to vote by the 100,000’s! Monica! Mention Lincoln again. 

It’s so insipid. It’s like the rantings of a retarded, psychotic six year old. I am serious. That’s about the idiot level that it’s on. The Alt Right are evil, but at least a lot of their wicked arguments are based on facts. Republican narratives are simply batshit loony. They’re also stupid as Hell. Really, the Republicans need to give up posing as anti-racists, feminists, gay rights activists and advocates for the poor. Everyone knows the Party is racist as Hell, very much anti-women, strongly anti-gay, and we all know how much they hate the poor. What’s with the charade? It’s so absurd. Do they think that anyone actually believes this BS? These guys are fascists, almost all of them, either Trump-fascists or a far nastier variety. The non-fash are mostly MRA’s who hate feminism. Many of these also hate women. Homophobia is very big on the Alt Right. All of this is directly contrary to Hillary’s embrace of the Cultural Left, in particular feminism, immigrant rights and Blacks (BLM, etc.). Here is the idiot Republican boilerplate comment that follows. I am printing it to show you as obtuse and asinine it is. Like I said, I would love to have a real opposition party that actually made sense. I mean I am sure their positions would suck, but at least they would have a logical narrative. The Republican narrative is simply straight up insane and dumber than a rock.

Where do you get your information Robert? Mrs. Bill Clinton is not a feminist. Women haters exist within every group. Milo, a spokesperson for the Alt-Right is GAY! Mrs. Bill Clinton does embrace the Cultural Left, which only reflects the Saul Alinsky philosophy of destruction, not construction. You have only to look at the morass in contemporary Chicago to see that. Immigration policy needs to be examined and improved. And that false woman looks down on all people, including BLM — with no exceptions.

Isn’t that retarded? Damn that is a stupid comment. Ever seen those trash mountains at the landfill. This is like a huge trash mountain of stupid that poured out of the landfill of some deranged brain, with bulldozers of logic hurrying over it trying in vain to make it make sense somehow amidst all the swirling stupid.

What is the Future of the Alt-Right/ Dark Enlightenment?

My Quora answer. At this point, it can only grow. No one in the movement is going to leave, and obviously quite a few are going to join. All of the people appalled by them were never going to sign up anyway. They have a lot of publicity now and they will only get bigger in the future. A couple of other comments follow.

The question seems to be worded as though those things were synonyms. They are not. The Dark Enlightenment (DE) is a scientific critique on the fundamental premises of The (so-called) Enlightenment: specifically that human liberty and equality are unalloyed goods. Since it is obvious that human (racial, sexual, religious and ethnic) equality is patently false, and that liberty is not an unalloyed good (e.g., offering fertile opportunities for the rapacious to profiteer off the poor impulse control or future time orientation of others), the DE is not going to go away. While politically inconvenient truths about matters may be suppressed for a time (cf. heliocentrism), it is expensive and indeed a sign of collapsing legitimacy. The “Alt-Right” has really come to mean the non-mainstream Dissident Right. It is a loose, often tumultuous, alliance of a wide variety of anti-progressive particularists—including paleoconservatives, paleolibertarians, neoreactionaries, anarcho-capitalists, separatists, southern nationalists, white nationalists, ethnic nationalists, identitarians, and even a few national socialists. It has no essential nature, therefore, to conform to, no central control, and cannot act in a coherent manner. Various arms of the Dissident Right have their own plans to create institutions, and propagate their ideas in various ways. Some seek power within the existing political structure. Others see themselves primarily as Samizdat organizers. If the progressive neoliberal establishment continues to collapse both the psycho-social and economic health of Western nations, dissident movements of all sorts may be expected to continue to attract followers, financial backing, and a modicum of power.

An excellent overview of the Dark Enlightenment, although I suspect he is whitewashing it. From what I know about the Dark Enlightenment as envisioned by Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, British “accelerationist” British philosopher, it is not something I want anything to do with. In fact, it seems like my and hopefully most of your worst nightmare. I would say that if the Alt Left is about anything, it is about Enlightenment values, so this would right away put us at odds for opposing the Dark Enlightenment.

Dim obscurity. While a few events recently have brought them to the front, their ideology is toxic to the majority of people, and that will lead to them back to the fringe. There’s no real future, especially as more and more people learn that “alt-right” is largely a synonym for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The new branding will not change the outcome. I expect they’ll remain a nuisance online. But any sort of intellectual or cultural influence? Extremely unlikely.

This fellow seems to feel that the Alt Right will become a collapsing star and black hole of hatred and nihilism after burning so bright after a brief flash in the spotlight and the camera clicks. I am not so sure about that. How many Alt Righters will say, “Whoa, this movement is neo-Nazi! I never knew that. I’m out of here!” About zero. Everyone involved in this movement knows exactly what it is all about and none of them are taking off. I assume that there are quite a few newbies out there who would love to sign up. They ain’t going away anytime soon I am afraid.

Is Alt-Left an Operative Concept in US Politics in a Similar Sense of Alt-Right?

My Quora answer. There is indeed an Alt Left movement but as John Doe alludes to below, it is quite small. In fact, it is much smaller than the Alt Right. The Alt Left could possibly be seen as “the left wing of the Alt Right.” The original Alt Leftists were Leftists and progressives on the Alt Right who felt very uncomfortable and out of place there for many reasons, mostly because in many ways, these people are Leftwingers, despite their presence on the Alt Right. They finally broke away from the Alt Right and formed an Alt Left. The Alt Left has been described in many ways. “It’s the Alt Right, except they like Mao more than they like Hitler,” is not a bad description. Other descriptions are the place where Pat Buchanan meets Ralph Nader, the place where Mussolini was when he abandoned Marxism and before he adopted fascism. The Alt Left is where the Left and Right meet at the bottom of the circle if you envision politics as circular instead of linear. Most Alt Lefties supported Bernie Sanders, but Sanders would probably not like the Alt Left much. Now most of them will vote for Hillary even though they hate her. A few are voting for Trump. The Alt Left has all sorts of wings but some commonalities seem to be a negative view of the Cultural Left ranging from annoyance to contempt alongside explicitly leftwing economics. So they are Left on economics, but somewhat Right on culture. Really though the Alt Left is to the right of the Cultural Left who they think has gone too far but they are to the left of the Social Conservatives who they think are crazy. A good way to look at them might be to think of the Left as it was from WW2 until the 1960’s Counterculture – the Old Left. They are conservative Leftists, sort of like how a lot of the Communist countries used to be. Here are two posts, one a post and one a site, from some of the earliest Alt Leftists. The first is a manifesto and the second is one of the biggest Alt Left websites. There are also some Alt Left groups on Facebook now. Dealbreakers: What the Alternative Left Is Not AltLeft.com

Is the Alt-Right Fascist?

My Quora answer. Oh Hell yeah a lot of them are fascist! The non-fash wings would be the Manosphere and the HBD folks, but one thing that was loud and clear to me after years on the Alt Right is how fash these guys are. I kept telling myself it wasn’t true because I didn’t want to believe it, but at some point, I could no longer lie to myself about it. The fascism reaches out of the screen and punches you right in the face, that’s how bold and up front it is. Anybody who denies the fascism on this scene is going damage control or out and out lying. Most of the real hardcore wings of the Alt Right are absolutely fascist and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The movement as a whole is fascist as Hell. How do I know this? I have spent years observing the scene, though I am not an Alt Rightist. However, the moderate wings of the Alt Right like American Renaissance and especially Breitbart are not particularly fascist, or maybe they are fascist in sort of a “Donald Trump fascist” sort of way, if you think Trump is a fascist.

Will the Term Alt-Right Catch On?

My answer on Quora. This Alt Right thing is not going away. If anything, it will only get stronger, but it will also form new wings. There will probably also be efforts by some of the (((usual parties))) to splinter the movement and take it in some much more moderate directions. Brietbart is run by a gay named (((Milo))). That’s not very Alt Right. Another site is called Rebel Media and it is out of Canada. It is also run by a fellow named (((Ezra Levant))) and one of its leading stars is a stunning young Danish blond named (((Lauren Southern))) who is not quite completely Aryan. This is the channel where Gavin McGuiness is making his big name. It bills itself as the Alt Right without the racism and anti-Semitism. Problem is you take the racism and anti-Semitism out of the Alt Right and what’s left? (((These people))) will try to grab hold of the Alt Right and change in directions that are at the very least not so dangerous to their own kind. in other words, (((these folks))) are trying to grab the Alt Right to splinter it off and take out a lot of the anti-Semitism. That’s the project. But the Jews always do this sort of thing. There’s nothing new here. It’s catching on big time. Do a web search on it. The cat’s out of the bag now. They have been trying to keep this thing out of the news but the world caught on. Now that people are talking about it, the term will not go away. In fact, more and more people will learn about it and you will hear it discussed more and more. The Alt Right is a very real thing and folks ought to be learn about it as it is a frightening movement.

Has the Alt-Right Taken Over the Republican Party?

My answer on Quora. There were another two nice answers after mine. If you consider the Breitbart wing of the Alt Right to be the Alt Right then yes, the Breitbart Alt Right is the Republican Party, or at least the Trump campaign. Keep in mind though that the Breitbart wing is on the far moderate end of the Alt Right and as you start getting away from that wing, you start getting into some very nasty stuff. The Breitbart wing is the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign is the Breitbart people. But really Breitbart is not a whole lot different from World Net Daily (especially) and Free Republic. Really there is almost no difference between WND and Breitbart. The Republican Party has been going nuts for some time now. But as far as the real ugly stuff to the right of WND and Breitbart, I do not think that this thinking has taken over Trump’s campaign much less the Party.

No. The Republicans this year have been taken over by various people angry at loss of the middle class, job loss to overseas, and people in the Dem party caring only about immigrants and the “disadvantaged.” Which is largely not middle America. They KNOW Trump is nuts. They are too angry to care.

This is a superb answer that explains the Trump phenomenon excellently. I could not have summed it up better. This really is what is going on. Exactly.

The Alt-Right component of the GOP has certainly been given its head during this cycle. It’s what has propelled Trump into his current status as nominee. As the years have gone by and moderates have trickled out of the party, the remaining Alt-Right membership has gotten more prominent by default. The party leadership is obviously of two minds about it. On one hand, they’re grateful at this point for votes, any votes, because the old stalwarts of the evangelical right have been less reliable of late. But the Alt-Righters are an embarrassment and give moderates and swing voters even more reasons to run away. The Alt-Right has also gained more prominence due to the decline of party influence in Congress, which at one time could exert downward pressure on members who were too far outside the mainstream. No longer. Trump isn’t an outlier in the party anymore; he’s just the logical extension of the warfare within the GOP that’s been whittling away moderates for many years. The Alt-Righters have always been there; it’s just that now they’re about all that’s left of the Republican energy. There are plenty of GOP’ers who aren’t in the Alt-Right camp, but they’re being sidelined so as to give The Donald a clear run. It’s anybody guess what they’ll do from here.

Another absolutely fantastic answer. The part about the evangelicals not being as reliable anymore is great. The evangelicals were not really with Trump. That’s a misconception. They were with Cruz and Rubio. Also the rural US was not with Trump either. That is another huge misconception – that it’s rural hicks like TRASH talks about that are the Trump base. The rural areas went for Rubio and Cruz. It is mostly exurbs in the Northeast and Rust Belt that gave Trump his votes. He also won the big cities in the same region. He carried entire states in the Rust Belt. That’s where Trump’s real power is coming from. Trump has pretty much traded in the evangelicals for this new Alt-Right type base. The Republican Party obviously created this whole Trump phenomenon with their decades of dog-whistling. But these people are arrogant and they thought that they could just dog-whistle away and get votes and never really have to pay the piper or cash in the chips at the end. The used the Religious Right in the same way. These elites just wanted their votes. They never intended to actually put in this Christian Dominionist clerical rule that the Christo-fash want. They thought they could just cynically use these people and run on their issues without ever having to implement any of these Christian Right projects because the people who run the party never supported the hard Christian Right projects. They are just rich men who mostly want their daughters, wives or sisters to be able to access abortion. They used the anti-illegal immigrant crowd in the same way. These elites ranted and raved about illegal immigration, but they never intended to do anything about it. At this point, the Trump genie is out of control. They created this monster by their arrogance and cynicism and now they have no idea what to do with it.

Do Bernie Sanders' Supporters Sympathize with Some Alt-Left Ideas?

My answer on Quora. Bottom line is that I do not think Bernie would like us and I doubt if many of his supporters would either. They would probably call us the usual names. However, many Alt Leftists did support Sanders in the campaign. Sanders was probably the favorite candidate of the Alt Leftists. I do know some Alt Leftists who are supporting Trump, but those are the more White Identity oriented ones. Most on the Alt Left dislike Hillary. She is more or less the opposite of what we stand for. Dealbreakers: What the Alternative Left Is Not AltLeft.com That is pretty much what the Alt-Left is. A lot of Alt Left types are for Bernie, but some others are for Trump. I would say that most were for Bernie. Now that Bernie is out, most will vote for Hillary, but most Alt-Left types despise Hillary who they call Hitlery. I would say though that in general your average Sanders supporter would not think too much of the Alt Left as it is currently. The Alt Left is very small but so far, it is gotten only contempt and ridicule from the rest of the Left. Most of the Left calls Alt Lefties racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic fascists. Others simply think that the Alt Left is an example of how toxic Identity politics really is. Leftypol, often said to be an Alt Left group, despises the Alt Left who they call fascists. There is indeed a wing of the Alt Left that could well be described as National Socialist. That would be something like “the left wing of the Alt Right.” But that is not most of the movement. Keep in mind that the Alt Left is a multi-tendency Big Tent movement with all sorts of wings. In fact, I have heard them say things like, “Everyone form your own wing.” One description of the Alt Left was the place where Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan meet. Another description was Mussolini in the time after he abandoned Marxism and before he adopted fascism. Others have said Alt Lefties are conservative Leftists. If one sees politics as a circle rather than a line, the Alt Left is the place where the Left and Right meet and the bottom of the circle. However, one thing is quite clear and that is that the Alt Left is very much a leftwing movement. They are not on the Right at all. That is a complete misconception. I remember one Alt Rightist when shown an Alt Left piece said something like, “Ah, that’s just the Left. Nothing new there. Listen to how often they call names like racist, sexist, etc.” A respondent said, “Well, what do you expect? They ARE Leftists, you know.” This is so true. At the end of the day no matter what you think of them, the Alt Left are Leftists.

Repost: The Moriori and the Dangers of Pacifism

Repost from the old site. This is a popular post for some time on this site. I like this post a lot, as it shows the sheer folly and suicidal insanity of a philosophy of pure pacifism. At some point, you either wait for the enemy to come out and murder you, or you pick up a weapon so you can at least take some of them out in the process. It’s better than being murdered with your hands in the air. At least fighting back offers a dignified death. The saga of Moriori is instructive. The Maori have long been known as ferocious headhunters and cannibals who had one of the cruelest and evillest cultures on Earth. The Moriori seem to be a Maori split dating back to about 1500 or so when they left New Zealand and colonized the Chatham Islands. The Chatham Islands are small, very cold and isolated, and there is not a lot of food other than from the sea. Moriori legend has it that initially, widespread tribal warfare, headhunting and cannibalism was practiced as the normative cruel Moriori culture. On such a small island, this savagery was disastrous, and soon the population plummeted to near-extinction. A leader arose among the Moriori, Nunuku-whenua, who preached a new doctrine of extreme pacifism, Nunuku’s Law. Nunuku’s Law was strictly adhered to 300 years. Fighting was allowed between males, but it had to be conducted with each armed with a stick the width of a finger. At the first sign of blood, the duel was called off, and the dispute was considered settled. Homicide, rape and other crimes were reportedly rare to absent among the Moriori for centuries. In 1835, the Chatham Islands were invaded by Maori warriors, who promptly proceeded to slaughter, cannibalize and enslave the Moriori. When the fighting began, the Moriori gathered for a meeting to decide whether or not to fight the invaders. Many young men argued for fighting back, but the elders decided that Nunuku’s Law could not be violated for any reason. The Moriori ran away and hid and were found and dealt with by the Maori. From 1835-1862, the population declined from 1,600 to 100. Those not murdered and eaten were enslaved. Moriori slaves were forbidden to marry each other, and Moriori women were forced to marry Maori men. It was a true genocide.  Tommy Solomon, the last pure Moriori, died in 1933.

Tommy Solomon on his yearly visit to Christchurch. He was definitely a big fellow! He married a Maori woman, so his descendants are technically not pure Moriori.

  Although popular myth says the Moriori were exterminated by the Maori, several thousand mixed-race Moriori still exist today. The Moriori language is extinct, but efforts are being made to raise it from the dead. Rightwingers have used this episode to exemplify the folly of pacifism. The saga of the Moriori gives the lie to the notion that race is destiny, at least among Polynesians. It is commonly thought that Polynesians selected for extreme aggression on their long sea voyages to colonize distant islands. Food may have run low on these voyages, and the survivors may have killed others and cannibalized them to survive. Perhaps the biggest and strongest were the ones most likely to survive the voyages, and this explains the huge size of Polynesians, probably the largest race on Earth, and possibly their high levels aggression and outrageous cruelty. In modern Westernized societies, Polynesians characteristically become an Underclass with high crime, violence, gang membership and general pathology. In traditional societies, they often do well. Whatever Polynesian genes look like, the saga of the Moriori shows that they are not doomed to high crime rates or Underclass pathology. Genetics is the clay, culture is the sculptor.

Alt Left in the National News!

Well I am copying this from Rabbit’s fantastic blog. Rabbit of course is one of the pioneers of the Alt Left. Rabbit says his traffic has gone through the roof today apparently with folks searching for Alt Left. I do not think that the Alt Left really got mentioned in the news today. Instead what happened was that Hitlery gave a speech denouncing the Alt-Right and tying Trump to it. Now the national news is all abuzz with “What the Hell is the Alt Right?” stories, which of course will probably give these guys a huge shot in the arm. So what is happening is that everyone is writing about the Alt Right today and no one is writing about the Alt Left. But that’s ok! In fact, Trump did mention the Alt-Left briefly when he said, “There is no Alt-Right or Alt-Left…we are just spreading love.” Rabbit sort of has his own little wing or tendency in the movement. I see this as a multi-tendency movement with some general lines to be drawn around the tent that you have to fit into before you can be let in. Rabbit’s wing is much more racially oriented than I am. Rabbit is almost a Left White nationalist, or at least he hobnobs with them a lot. Anyway, he is quite unabashedly pro-White. Whereas I would like to bring non-Whites into my wing of the Alt Left. My wing would be for anyone who is basically progressive or liberal especially on economics who has been driven up to here with the idiot antics of the Cultural Left Freakshow. So we are sort of the Old Left before all the Identity Politics insanity came in in the 1960’s. I would say though that non-Whites in my wing cannot hate White people. They have to like White people. If I am against anything, I am against the constant demonization and bashing of Whites. I like Whites. I like my people. I like White culture. I like my culture. We are not bad people. Actually I think we are good people. I also think that White culture is worth saving. Even if White people go out, I would like to see non-Whites carrying on with the best of White culture. Alternative Left! Alternative Left! Alternative Left! Alternative Left! Alternative Left! Alternative Left! Alternative Left! Alternative Left!

W e w lads! Well, traffic to this site is booming after Hillary’s speech and the subsequent media coverage. I’ve noticed lately that a lot of oblivious idiots have started using the term “altleft” recently without bothering to google it or do any research as to how it emerged. It’s like they just wake up one day and start identifying as something without even checking to see if it already exists. The AltLeft originated with those of us race realists who rejected the anti-white social justice prioritization of the postmodern left and also understand that racial differences are real and acknowledge that multiculturalism transforms society in undesirable ways. People like Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein are not “altleft” because they represent the dominant ethos. They parrot all the same social justice crap about “black lives matter” and promote mass immigration from the third world(which makes social programs, population control and resource conservation that much more unworkable.) Identity politics aren’t going away, and only whites think in terms of “colorblindness.” Other groups(with rare exceptions) simply work in their own ethnic interests unapologetically. Demographics matter for the future. That’s reality, though we don’t all agree on solutions. So before you go on Twitter and change your twitter bio to “AltLeft” or create another misinformed altleft Facebook group, maybe read a few blog posts/manifestos here and on Robert Lindsay’s blog to get an idea if you really want to be associated with this label.

California: How Illegal Aliens Ruin Everything

TRASH writes:

ROBERT I’m lower-middle class myself and no genius (I did graduate from college but not a good one) but how can Inca primitives from the jungles of South America steal the job of any able-bodied American who can read and write in English? This is not a rhetorical question. What is an Inca with 2nd grade education and no ability to speak English able to do better than a person born in the United States that somebody might actually hire them for?

They can’t do anything better except pick crops and yes they are better at that. They’re not better at anything else and in fact, in general, they are inferior workers. Illegal roofers do poor work. Illegal construction workers do notoriously poor work. A lot of the contracting work done here in California in recent decades is shoddy and has to be redone pretty quickly whereas before it lasted a long time. It’s not lasting long and falling apart because it’s done by illegals. Low wage labor – you pay the illegals way less than you would pay the Whites. Illegals do not complain. They put up with any shit and abuse you dole out to them. Illegals are working in a lot of good-paying jobs now like roofing, painting, construction, carpentry, welding, drywalling. Who cares if a Mexican could take it over? These jobs paid working class Whites very good money. The contractors who hire Whites all go out of business because they cannot compete with all the contractors hiring illegals. Most of the people who hire illegals are rich. Landlords hire illegals. My landlord hired illegals to do the roofing on my apartment complex. He was rich. The people who own contracting jobs as painters, construction or landscaping make damn good money. Many live in nice two story houses. The dirty little secret here in California is that if you want to get rich, go into contracting and hire all illegals. That’s the way to get rich. I had friends who businesses like painting and they could not compete with the guys who hired illegals. My friend paid his painters $25/hour. The competition was all hiring illegals at $7/hour. This whole scam is just a way for White men to get rich hiring low wage labor and getting rid of all the high paid Whites. That’s all it is. Most jobs do not require a whole lot of brains or skill and sure they could be replaced by some wetback. I worked in a White town where Whites were janitors, trash collectors, landscapers, construction workers, painters, drywallers, roofers, dishwashers, waiters, maids, on and on. There is no job that was too lousy for a White person. Now when the illegals come in somehow they tend to fill up all of those jobs that were formerly filled by White Americans. Whether this is because they work under the table or are more docile I have no idea. I know they do not work any harder than Whites. It doesn’t really matter if a Mexican took your job. That’s one less job for a White person. A lot of White people work at low-paying, low-skilled jobs but that is just fine. Mexicans come in and wipe out all of those jobs and now all those Whites are out of work. Mexicans do way more than work in the fields. They have taken over a lot of fields, especially construction. Construction used to be all White and all union and you made very good money in a union. The illegals came in and all of the unions were wiped out and all of the Whites were replaced by illegals. I know drywallers who would be making $45/hour in constant dollars today. Now that same job is done by an illegal for $10/hour with no benefits, no union and you can abuse him as much as you like. There is a lot of unemployment around here. Just think if we got rid of all these illegal alien scums in my town. Just think how many jobs that would open up for Americans of all colors – Whites, Hispanic Americans, Asians, Blacks. All of those real Americans could move in and take all of those jobs that the illegals had. Think how many jobs would open up! Wouldn’t it be great?

The "They All Need to Get a Degree or Learn a Trade" Lie

Jason writes:

However, then again, you have the whole, “Well they should get an education or more job training” thing…Actually it isn’t hard to learn a trade.

Jason, you can’t say everyone has to go to college and get a degree or learn a trade. How many jobs are good-paying jobs. Would you not say that maybe 5 So look. Let’s follow your crazy ideas to their resolution. Let’s say 4 Now in JasonWorld, everyone miraculously goes to college and gets a degree or learns a trade somehow. Guess what? 4 JasonWorld operates on the crazy notion that there can be a nation where all jobs are good-paying jobs. JasonWorld is sort of like Lake Woebegon where everyone is above average. Life is like a footrace. There’s 1,000 guys running in that footrace. Say a good finish is to finish in the top 5 Bottom line is that JasonWorld is a place where if everyone just tries hard enough and gets the degree or skill, somehow everyone can become a winner. How can you have a society where everyone is a winner? How can you have a society where everyone has a good-paying job? You can’t. That’s not possible. There will always be many low-paying jobs in the country no matter how educated or trained anyone gets.

The Saga of a Cuck

I got this in the comments on the White Women and BBC post. This comment is pornographic, so if pornographic prose bothers you, don’t read. And if you are under 18, please don’t read. Now that we are done with the warnings, we may proceed.

In college all the guys I knew surfed online for hot pussy. I was totally into small breasted skinny girls like my high school cheer leader gf. After a while i started looking for spread legs.  I have also had fetishes for short skirts and used panties. As a young 11 year old, our divorced neighbor wore miniskirts, heels, & tight white blouses. I spent years fantasizing about her while jerking off. I saw her hanging laundry, stole her panties and while sniffing/sucking them, had a blast. I met my gf when I was 18 and still a virgin who masturbated 4-5/day. She as a cheerleader was experienced, and I was embarrassed to let her know I had never seen tits or pussy. The first time we went to the movies and made out, she unbuttoned her top buttons, and as I played with her tits and she kissed me, I shot my load so hard, I blacked out for a second. As I was coming around, she was buttoning her shirt, grabbed my hand, said let’s go, and led me to her car quickly. She took my keys and drove to a secluded park. She said why didn’t you tell me, now let’s do this right. She took my pants down smiling at my huge stain in the front while she cleaned me off with my cum-filled jockeys. Off came her top and her bra, and my flaccid penis got hard again looking at her 33C tits. I reached by habit to jerk, but she grabbed my hand and said my boyfriend only needs me, or else I am gone. I got my first handjob she did it slowly, with stops, starts and punching low on my penis to stop my instant orgasm. I lasted 5 minutes this way, and fell head over heels in love. I was pussy whipped without ever seeing her pussy. I worked as a handyman. This was early April. By Christmas I had saved and purchased a diamond. I had also been taught to eat her out by doing as she told me. She said I was very good by Halloween, and I got my first bj on Christmas after she said yes to my proposal. I didn’t know then, but I do now that I was entering a female-led relationship and have never regretted it. I make my lover happy with pussy worship, waiting on her every need, and being house husband/co-breadwinner. We separated during college years for a 1 1/2 year. I spent that time with cyber-porn jerking off. When Paula showed up that winter break in a red miniskirt and heels, came to my room and said it was now or never, I begged her to marry me. She sat on my lap dressed like that while squirming and reached down under her skirt then stuck her finger in my mouth I passed out on orgasm from the taste of her hot pussy. As the glow was passing, I realized she was shaving my privates. She then sent me into the shower told me to shave all my body hair to please her and rub a lotion on that would finish it. When I was done and I had pleased her, she told me if she married me, I would need to sign an agreement that would spell out our relationship, my duties, her rights, and penalties including divorce with nothing if I failed. I was ready to sign, but she made me read it. She explained it. Some shocked me but she said this was mainly because she was disgusted by my jerking  off, and we can revisit this every 6 months. We spent the night together, got it notarized the next day, had a quick private wedding then went back where she took my virginity, and I was a one pump chump. I was told I needed to please her, and I went down on her. I ate my creampie which she made sure I consumed. As we were laying down later, she put on my chastity device so I would behave until she returned. I was then given movies she wanted me to watch and think about. I found them all to be interracial cuckold porn where the husband eats creampies. I have to admit, this made me curious, and from then on, I have noticed black men in a different way. Next time I saw Paula, she brought a black yoga instructor with her. She has had me eat his creampie many times. He can fuck her and last, and I cannot. Then she made me blow him and swallow. I have talked with many of her friends. Most of their husbands first saw BBC on interracial porn and got hooked. All of us now do it, and Tony lives with us.

I hope this guy is not reading this because I don’t want to embarrass him or make him look bad, but I think this cuckold lifestyle stuff is bull. For the life of me, I cannot understand why any real White man would want to get into this and be humiliated, degraded and cuckolded, by Black men no less, in this manner. I told you that the media is promoting perverted stuff. Well, the Cultural Left media has been promoting this cuckold stuff in a huge way. And it’s all about White men having their wives have sex with Black “bulls” who humiliate the White man and insult his masculinity and his sexual prowess, while he cowers in the corner, delighting in having his race and manhood abused by a studly Black man. And the White man often has to eat the Black men’s semen oozing out of the wife’s vagina at the end. Worse, the Black man humiliates the White man by forcing the White man to suck the Black man’s penis, all while laughing at him and calling him a faggot and a queer. So these straight men also get sort of “homosexualized” in this kink. It doesn’t change their sexual orientation of course, but it goes to show you, as I keep saying on here, that straight men have a huge capacity for recreational homosexuality even if men’s bodies don’t turn them on Bottom line is that polymorphous perversity is simply the human condition. It makes us uncomfortable that we are such a bunch of morally debases monkeys, so we create religions and laws and whatnot to attempt to put a civilizing veneer over all of the tendency towards debauchery. This doesn’t cure humans of course. The only cure for human debauchery is a bullet. But these things do a pretty good job of repressing the basic degeneracy in our souls, which is all these palliatives are supposed to do anyway. A repressed society is a civilized society. An uninhibited society tends towards anarchy, chaos, violence, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, STD epidemics and general mass dysfunction. I assume this cuck stuff would be an Alt Righter or White nationalist’s worst nightmare and a sure sign that our society has fallen completely apart. Blacks are now in charge and Whites are an abused minority, at least in this scenario. White men are not even men. They are wimpy cuckolded pussies who even consent to having their penises locked in cages so they cannot even masturbate. Their wives cruelly deny them even self-pleasure, and these guys like it this way! This whole thing is ridiculous, and I am being kind when I say that.

Avoidant Vs. Schizoid Personality Disorder

A commenter who I will call MWD wrote this. He actually wrote his whole name in the comments, but I am not going to use it here as I am not sure he wants me to use his name in a post so I will just refer to him with his initials. He wrote this on the Schizoid Personality Disorder post and he wants to know whether he has it or not. His is an interesting case. MWD writes:

Could you judge me? I’m told that I was quiet, too quiet when I was a baby. At childhood my guardians, which include immediate and extended family, gave me enough attention (I can see myself smiling from old photos, strange I remember close to nothing about any of those stiff moments except one where I was comically having a dump, that was embarrassing), but I can’t remember much of the time due to being hospitalized a lot for lung problems. I remember when my grandfather died and myself not feeling anything, despite having been close to him and done lots of fun activities like exploring farms earlier in my childhood. I remember in the last year of primary school some girl with her friend told me she liked me, I just froze, couldn’t say anything back because I wasn’t used to things like crushes. They probably were just joking around, but my complete non-response must must’ve made me a jerk in their eyes. I made no attempt to explain myself, and to be fair, they never asked. Come puberty I didn’t develop much, resulting in me being socially ostracized and made fun of. I didn’t take it very well, and it made me oversensitive to insults, and now the slightest hints of hostility against me are thoroughly scrutinized in my head. Hidden in privacy, my eyes would tear out of frustration, anger, fear and anxiety and lash out against the wall or anything I could break, including my knuckle. That time I learned that people can beyond cruel. My childhood friends too dropped me for visibly no reason, so that adds to my misery at the time. I did poorly in school, and in college I couldn’t manage to study properly, as my anxiety, fear and feelings of desperation and wanting to escape and hide were stronger than my need for accomplishment. Around 10 yrs ago, I noticed myself mentally slow. I have a feeling where I was floating, which isn’t new, as even in childhood I used to feel like I was just floating around, but this time I was more non-present. My head was almost entirely wrapped in paranoia and made me lose some sense of reality. One time I decided to run away from home and seek death in a dangerous place I could find. I don’t remember much how it happened. Suddenly I found myself at the back of my aunt’s car. I was living with her and my cousins at the time. I dropped out thrice from college and hid away at the confines of my parent’s house. That was the only time I considered suicide, since then, my thoughts shifted from suicidal to homicidal without actually acting upon those urges. But I would fantasize about and sometimes verbally discuss it. 8yrs later, and still no life, but some things have changed. Insults no longer made me as sad like before, I expect, and it no longer surprise me. I shift from being amused about my pessimistic prophecies and the tiredness and annoyance of being subjected to the same shit all over again. Sometimes I hide because I’m sick of it, no longer due to fear. I lost the ability to make friends, as I no longer tolerate other people’s quirks (like they don’t mine, so receive and give is the rule here). I switched the word friend to acquaintance, as it makes more sense. I have developed a snarky attitude as if a right, and people don’t like it. Wow, this is long enough, reading it I think I display more avoidant traits from what is written above. Thing is as a student all I wanted was to be left alone and progress and study in peace, not subjected to social torture and snide insults like I experienced. Living in an oversexed and densely populated location, this is almost impossible for a non-attractive guy. I could’ve done better, but help was not available for me at the time. Not even my parents understand my condition. I could’ve done better, instead I just wasted school funds thrice.

I am not an expert on personality disorders and I am not allowed to give legal DSM diagnoses anyway. Further, one is not supposed to diagnose over the Internet. Nevertheless, looking at everything he has written here, this looks more like Avoidant Personality Disorder than Schizoid Personality Disorder. I have read a lot of case histories of both, and they can be hard to tell apart at times. Avoidant Personality in particular is hard to diagnose because it is sometimes hard to tell if the person wants to be around others or not. This is important, as the main differential diagnosis between SPD and APD is that SPD’s have no desire at all to be around others and APD’s do. However, the APD desire to be around others is often masked and hard to figure out. Also, APD looks more like extreme shyness. They avoid others because they get very nervous around other people, worry about saying the wrong thing and especially worry about getting criticized or made fun of. SPD’s on the other hand avoid humans because they are pretty much indifferent to them and also because they find them draining. They are also rather indifferent to criticism or even praise for that matter. They simply have no use for other humans, and are often perfectly happy to live this way. I would also urge this man to get some help. He lives in the Philippines, so I am not sure what help is available or how good it is, but the way he is living his life is making him very happy, and it isn’t very adaptive either.

IQ's of Commenters on Beyond Highbrow

TRASH writes:

Minorities cannot even construct a cerebral blog like Robert Lindsay’s and while most of his contributors probably have an IQ lower than his I would say most of us contributors are in the 120 range.

Surely there are some minorities who could write a blog like this or could at least write a brainy blog. Socially Extinct is a Mexican-American, a pretty full mestizo, and he is incredibly smart. I actually worry that he is a better writer than I am. And I also worry that he’s smarter than I am. Jayman is Black and has a very brainy blog. I dislike Abagond the antiracist Black, but that man is smart as Hell. There are some damn smart NAM’s out there, make no mistake about it. I believe there are 500,000 US Blacks with IQ’s above 125. With Hispanics, the number must be even higher. I am thinking 1.2 million? There may be 6 million Whites with IQ’s that high, but there are more White people. Keep that in mind. There are a lot of smart fuckers on here all right. I don’t know what their IQ’s are, but I know they are smart as Hell. The few IQ scores we have of frequent recent commenters: 124 118 123 115 112 So the median IQ is 118, or let’s call it 120. That is the top 1 Some of you slackers have not turned in your scores yet, so you need to get to it. Alpha hates the idea of IQ, and I believe, like Tulio, she doesn’t think hers is all that high, but Alpha is wicked smart. I know this because I have access to her locked personal blog. Every time I go over there, I almost get knocked on my ass by her brains or genius or whatever it is. Some others are insecure about their scores. Matt with IQ of apparently 115 seems to worry that it is too low, but the funny thing is that Matt seems like one of the most wickedly smart commenters on here. Tulio has confessed that he feels stupid and thinks he has a low IQ at 124, but he’s in the 93nd percentile for Chrissake, and right now, Tulio has probably the highest IQ of any of the regular commenters. The performance of Matt shows us that we should not place too much faith in a simple number or score. Matt’s performance shows us that if you have an IQ in the 80th percentile, you can probably do all sorts of things, and further you can seem wickedly smart. I am wondering if guys like Matt and Tulio are high verbal and lower in mathematics, which might explain their “performance above IQ.” Jim Flynn wrote a whole book on “Performance Above IQ” where he showed that Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans were performing at jobs and showed a job performance that was 10-20 points above their actual IQ’s. So maybe it is not just IQ, but it is also what you do with it and what else (extra-IQ factors) that you can bring to the table that will “raise” your IQ effectively or de facto if not in realis. Realis is your number. De facto is your actual performance in the real world. At the end of the day, only de facto is what matters, let’s face it. Performance is everything, potential is nice, but it’s talking the talk whereas performance is walking the walk. So it looks like the average commenter is in the 118, which means they are in the top 1 We do have some higher IQ commenters on here, but they don’t comment all that much. I used to have some lower IQ commenters on here, and some of them were damn good. One has a 94 IQ, but he understood well and made some damn good comments, however lately he says that he can’t understand what I am talking about. I am actually trying to write this stuff so that the majority of the population can understand it. Yes, there is all sorts of higher level stuff running all through my posts, but it’s not necessary to know all of that stuff. Those are references to movies, TV shows, famous remarks, nicknames, music lyrics, books, lines from books, famous people of all sorts, on and on. I litter my stuff with all sorts of winking references. I don’t expect you to get all of them because that’s not my intent, but I expect if you find some of that stuff, you may enjoy a bit of a slow, nodding, knowing and loving smile. Sort of like a secret language. Those references are scattered through there more as a big game than anything else. I am just playing games with words and screwing around, and if anyone gets it, great, but if they don’t, so what? Sort of like those Easter eggs that some software used to have in them. I am not trying to show that I am smarter than anyone or especially my commenters, more like how I said, it is all sort of a big game where I am playing around with words and ideas, sort of like a big subtle brainy joke.

LBJ on Blacks

I’ll have these niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years. – Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Yeah, he actually said that. That’s actually pretty funny. I laughed when I read that. Oh, LBJ. He certainly had a way with words, didn’t he? He did pass the Civil Rights Act though, right? Oh well, God bless him. Nobody’s perfect.

Privilege Theory and Trigger Warnings

Privilege theory. I am well aware that my race (White, you’re welcome), gender (male, you’re welcome again, and please call me sir next time, thanks), sexual orientation (you’re very welcome, ladies, thank you very much), and gender identity (Homo Superior cis, sorry trannies) offer me certain privileges, thank you. And I am quite all right with that, knowwhatImsayin? Trigger warnings. I don’t do trigger warnings on here. I would, but I can’t keep track of everyone’s triggers. You all are just going to have to tough it out, sorry folks! Actually it is worse than that.r warnings, I am actually trying to trigger you guys. Sucks or what? Nigger warnings. I don’t do those either. Yep, I refuse to use the n-word here, but then I never use the word nigger in a racist sense anyway. All you tough-minded, hardened cynics who almost have a heart attack every time you read the word nigger, remember help is just an ambulance away. Safe spaces. I don’t do safe spaces. This is most definitely not a safe space. Actually it is sort of the opposite, an anti-safe space. But that is the general idea. This space isn’t safe for anyone. Hell it’s not even safe for me. It’s probably not safe for work, and it might not even be safe for life. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!  

US Seeks “Safe Havens” in Eastern Syria

From Global Research. The Americans are getting more and more insane by the day over there in Syria, and it looks like the neocon dream is starting to come true. What is going on here is that the US’s pals, ISIS, Al Qaeda and all of the other groups who more more less share their same philosophy, are starting to get badly beaten on the battlefield. In particular, the situation in Aleppo looks very bad. That is why John Kerry, Turkey,Saudi Arabia and Qatar just poured weapons into Al Qaeda’s hands and assembled 10-15,000 fighters to flood into Eastern Aleppo. Every day, more and more Al Qaeda type jihadis come in from Turkey. Not long ago, the Saudis flooded Syria with 3,500 Al Qaeda type jihadis from Turkey. A similar large force of Al Qaeda types is in the Jordanian border where they have been moved from their training camps in Jordan. It is at these camps that US military advisors train Al Qaeda type jihadis for war on Syria. The weapons come from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the US. The weapons from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are given to them by the US, whereupon they are then flooded into the Syrian battlefield. So ISIS and the Al Qaeda type groups are all using US weaponry. In addition, the CIA runs large quantities of weapons in via Turkey to its favorite jihadists. It doesn’t really matter who the CIA gives the weapons to. The weapons all end up in something that amounts to an arms bazaar inside Syria where they are distributed to any group that has the money to buy them. It is in this way that the CIA supplies Al Qaeda and ISIS with much of their weapons. So our Al Qaeda pals are getting beaten on the battlefield by Syria, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia. The US is panicking because its Al Qaeda buddies are losing the war. If Aleppo falls to the Syrian regime, the war may be nearly over for the rebels. Nevertheless, it will probably continue on for as long as the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar continue to pour men and weaponry into the conflict. They can feed this thing for many years.

US Seeks “Safe Havens” in Eastern Syria

By The New Atlas Global Research, August 22, 2016 The New Atlas 22 August 2016

Region: Theme: In-depth Report: US-Syria Tensions amid Syria’s conflict has escalated with warnings by the United States that it would use force against Syrian aircraft operating over their own territory. The US claims to have aircraft operating over Syrian territory and ground forces below, mainly in and around northeastern Syria near the city of Al-Hasakah.  CNN in its article, “Top US commander warns Russia, Syria,” would report that:

In the most direct public warning to Moscow and Damascus to date, the new US commander of American troops in Iraq and Syria is vowing to defend US special operations forces in northern Syria if regime warplanes and artillery again attack in areas where troops are located.

Unlike Russian and Iranian forces operating in Syria, US forces have not been authorized by Damascus to enter Syrian territory. US operations in Syria violate Syria’s territorial integrity and constitutes as violation of international law. And while US military and political leaders attempt to portray this most recent confrontation as a matter of US self defense, in reality it is the fulfillment of longstanding US policy papers that have called for the establishment of so-called safe havens and no-fly-zones (NFZ’s) over parts of Syria as an intermediary step toward regime change, the stated objective of the US government in Syria. In 2012, the following year of the Syrian conflict’s beginning, a Brookings Institution paper titled, “Assessing Options for Regime Change,” would state:

An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under [Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s] leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.

Here, US policymakers are admitting that the use of “humanitarian” concerns is a cynical steppingstone toward more direct military intervention. The unfortunately reality of this strategy, as seen in Libya, is that US “humanitarian wars” end up costing a vastly larger toll in innocent human life than the alleged abuses cited to initiate the war in the first place. This plan of using humanitarian concerns to incrementally establish a foothold in Syrian territory through safe-havens and NFZ’s would constantly evolve, be updated and revisited throughout the entire duration of the Syrian conflict. America’s True Intentions in Syria  More recently, The Brookings Institution’s “Order From Chaos” blog published a post titled, “What to do when containing the Syrian crisis has failed.” Brookings policymakers discuss in it once again the prospects of establishing what would effectively be NFZ’s:

We must also be clever about employing various options for no-fly zones: We cannot shoot down an airplane without knowing if it’s Russian or Syrian, but we can identify those aircraft after the fact and destroy Syrian planes on the ground if they were found to have barrel-bombed a neighborhood, for example. These kinds of operations are complicated, no doubt, and especially with Russian aircraft in the area—but I think we have made a mistake in tying ourselves in knots over the issue, since there are options we can pursue.

Brookings  policymakers also revisit the notion of establishing “safe-havens” claiming:

…we should push the debate about what creating safe havens really means. I don’t think we should start declaring safe havens, but rather try to help them emerge. The Kurds are making gains in Syria’s northeast, for instance, as are some forces on the southern front—so, if the United States, in cooperation with its allies, accelerates and intensifies its involvement on the ground in those areas, safe havens can essentially emerge. An important advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require putting American credibility on the line, but does help local allies build up and reinforces successes on the ground.

Here, Brookings specifically mentions Syria’s northeast. It should be noted that none of this is being discussed by US policymakers in the context of fighting terrorist organizations like the self-titled Islamic State or listed terrorist organization Jubhat Al-Nusra. Instead, it is clearly within the context of seizing Syrian territory toward the end goal of regime change, with the Islamic State and Al-Nusra merely pretexts for US forces entering and operating within Syrian territory. Similar attempts to create such safe-havens are in motion in Syria’s south, with British special forces now allegedly operating on the ground to incrementally “accelerate and intensify” Western involvement on the ground. It is the literal fulfillment of the plans recently laid out by Brookings policymakers. Displacing US Forces from the Game Board  With US-supported militants being pushed back in and around Syria’s northern city of Aleppo and prospects of Western-backed militants succeeding elsewhere throughout the country increasingly unlikely, the creation of safe-havens and NFZ’s over parts of Syria directly by Western forces remains a last but desperate option. Displacing US and British forces on the battlefield with an expansion of forces from among Syria’s allies could finally see these last game pieces in play by the West pushed off the board entirely. Diplomatic efforts appear to be underway with Syria’s Kurds in particular to encourage them away from what will be a self-destructive geopolitical move made only to Washington’s benefit. Providing alternatives to Western training and support for Kurds and other local forces in the northeast in a genuine fight against the Islamic State and other foreign-backed militant groups operating in Syria could also help eliminate clashes the US may use to cynically escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with either Syria or Russia (or both). US strategy in Syria is based on 5 year old plans that even 5 years ago were difficult if not impossible to implement, fraught with risk and even should they succeed, left a long and difficult road ahead of US ambitions in Syria and throughout the region. 5 years later, however, these difficulties and risks have only increased. That the US is still exploring this last and poorest option indicates a bankrupt foreign policy wielded by an increasingly unbalanced world power. Careful diplomacy and expert strategic maneuvering by Syria and its allies will be required to avert Syria’s conflict from plunging deeper into tragedy, and ironically, may also help the US from tilting over further out of balance. The New Atlas is a media platform providing geopolitical analysis and op-eds. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. The original source of this article is The New Atlas Copyright © The New Atlas, The New Atlas, 2016

Kundalini Binaural Beats

Here. This stuff is pretty trippy. Scientists poo poo it, but I believe there is something to it. The binaural bets are set to mimic various brain waves: Alpha waves, Beta waves, Delta waves, Gamma waves and Theta waves. Of course you have all of these waves in your brain. So you put in Theta binaural beats and you get more theta waves supposedly. The same with Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, etc. It sounds like a reasonable hypothesis anyway. This stuff is called brain entrainment because supposedly it actually changes how your brain works (via manipulation of existing brain waves). They also work with your chakras. Chakras are an Indian medical theory. Supposedly you have chakras in your body that do various things and you can mess around with these chakras to achieve desired ends. A lot of yogi types swear that they are true and a lot of folks who listen to these beats have had experiences suggesting of chakras. For instance, people who listen to the Kundalini beats report that they feel a warmth at the bottom of their spine that goes all the way up to the top of their spine. These people who report this have no idea that this is one of the things that Kundalini is supposed to do. It is called Kundalini rising because it supposedly turns on the energy levels in your body. The Kundalini is said to be like a snake that moves up and down your spine. It’s all pretty wacky and insane, but who knows, maybe there is something to it. I have no idea if chakras exist or not either but I would not take the word of modern scientistic medicine about whether there is anything to this stuff. There are supposedly dangers that can occur when you awaken Kundalini, but I am not sure about that either. If it’s all nonsense, how could it have ill effects? I put this Kundalini stuff on very low and then I go to sleep in the other room. I put it on so low that you can hear it but only barely. I also have a fan in my room and often have windows open so there are other noises. I try to make sure that the other noises are louder than the binaural beats. Nevertheless you can sense them if you listen hard because it feels like the whole room or apartment is vibrating in this strange way like the hum you hear of highway workers at night or an electric plant that is nearby. One thing I noted is that I crash hard as Hell with that stuff on. I sleep maybe five hours and I wake up and think I slept for 18 hours. I get up and feel like a slab or wood or concrete, but that feels very good. It reminds you of the feeling of whenever you had some very good hard sleeps. It’s like as hard as the hardest crash you have ever had. I also noticed that some of the pains I have in my neck and back diminished after that very hard crash. In addition, the first few nights I had this stuff on, my dreams changed. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I had sex in my dreams! I know you are thinking so what, but the thing is, I do not know if it is a hangup or what, but I never or almost never have sex in my dreams. Even when I have a girlfriends and we are going at it for hours a day, I still never have sex in my dreams. And with this Kundalini stuff, I had sex in my dreams for maybe four days straight. That’s pretty weird right there. This stuff might effect you more than you think it does.

When You Bet on the Body, You Bet on a Losing Horse

Most younger women seem to think that I am not attractive at all. That’s the message I seem to get from them all day long every single day. Compared to younger men, I suppose I do not come across well. I was supposedly very goodlooking as a young man. I assume so because I heard this constantly.  I even had 2-3 offers to be a male model, all around age 24 which is when I assume I looked my best. I was also quite thin at that age, all the way down to 150-165. Do they want male models thin like they want female models? I applied at one agency. They told me I was goodlooking enough but they were not sure if I could handle the rest of the job because modeling is more than just being goodlooking.  I turned down the modeling jobs because I was afraid of all the gay men. I was having way too much hassle with gay men at that point in my life anyway. Actually they were turning my life into something resembling a nightmare that would never end. Every day I got up and it was here we go again. People think most male models are gay, but it’s not true. Actually most of them are straight. I know a man who was a male model and he told me that 1/3 of male modes are gay, another 1/3 are regular guys with a wife or girlfriend and another 1/3 are trying to screw every woman on Earth. He also told me that all straight male models have to fight off gay men all the time, “like mosquitoes in Siberia” is how he described it to me. This suggests that gay men do no go after men that they think are gay like everyone thinks. Instead I assume that they simply have no idea at all who is gay and who isn’t and instead they simply go after any goodlooking man. Their gaydar is a pitiful joke. As a young man I had girls and women after me all the time. Unfortunately I also had men after me all the time too! Now why this is, I have no idea, but I have been gaybait since my teens. Maybe someone can tell me why this is. It felt pretty good to be the hot guy that everyone wanted or at least liked to look at. But looks don’t last. Now matter how handsome or beautiful you are, there will come a day when your looks are shot all to Hell. I suppose I am approaching that point. My looks are pretty much history I suppose. It is a natural process but it is hard to take. It’s like going from the handsomest man on Earth to the ugliest man on Earth. It’s a pretty serious blow especially if you have some egotism going on, which of course I do. The Buddhists say, “When you bet on the body, you bet on a losing horse.” Yep.

The Pitiful Joke Called Gaydar

Actually, I think most gay men do not have the faintest idea who is gay and who is not. Their gaydar is one of the most pitiful cognitive devices devised by man. Bottom line is it’s a fraud. Idiotic gay men and their even  more stupid straight worshippers insist that gay men have perfect gaydar, but that is a comically idiotic statement. If it works so great, why were they always hitting on me and so many of my friends? Couldn’t they tell we were straight. I think we should resign gaydar to the realm of urban myth.

When Your Girlfriend is 30 Years Younger Than You Are: Problems of Attraction

dat writes:

I think it’s fine if 2 consenting adults want to be in a relationship regardless of age, but there is a certain point where it’s just awkward…when it’s a man above 60 trying to date women 18-25, that’s kind of odd. I feel like only a woman with very little future prospects would fall into that type of situation. When I was 18 or 22, I felt like I had a bright future ahead, why would I want to be with an old fogie who already lived most of his life? If I were uneducated and had no path in life, perhaps I would have tried to go that route in hopes of gaining a future of financial stability out of him…hopefully I would inherit the bank. If he didn’t own a home or have money, no way in hell I would have been seen with him. My point is, the only woman who does that is one who is not confident in her ability to build her own financial stability and wealth. All this stuff goes out the window after 30 or 40. At that point date whatever age person you want, you’ve lived, you’ve worked, you probably know where you are in life. For men, it makes them feel good about themselves when they are with a younger woman. It makes them feel younger and more desirable. It also gives them a hard-on, which apparently is the main goal of men. Plus, it’s easier to control younger women. Less experience, less hard headed, less confidence, less financial stability, less income. It’s easy to get them trapped, get them in a comfortable place away from their families and become their source of income…

I am 58 years old. In the last few years, I have had relationships with a few young women aged 26-29. All of them had serious older man fetishes. Two of them were hot, and the other was not. One was a model! However, there were some pretty serious problems with these relationships, in particular due to attraction. A couple of them started off the relationship by saying how hot and sexy I was and what a great body I had. A 55 year old man with a great body wtf? Then after a while they started telling me that they were not attracted to me, often because I reminded them of their fathers. This has never happened to me in my entire life. No woman has ever told me she was attracted to me and then changed her mind I decided I was undesirable. Once a woman thinks you’re sexy, it’s for life. Women don’t decide you are goodlooking and then change their minds about it. But maybe with middle aged men it is different, as for a female to get attracted to us in the first place is not that easy. The truth is that it is almost impossible for a man my age to get a younger woman, especially one in her 20’s. It’s even hard to get a woman in her 30’s. It’s even not that easy to get a woman in her 40’s! I have dated a few women in recent years who were in their 40’s, but they were in their late 40’s. If you are my age and you are somehow able to get a much younger woman even in her 30’s but especially in her 20’s, you are kicking ass. Everybody thinks this is an easy thing to do, but it is not easy at all. 9

In Praise of Older Women

Women around age 45-50 are damn good in bed. I know you might think they are ugly, but I have been training myself to get used to them, and from my perspective, I thought some of them were even beautiful and a few looked fantastic even with their clothes off. Honestly, if a woman is hot, keeps herself thin, doesn’t have kids and takes care of herself, even by age 50, a lot of them look damn good with their clothes off. But then I am acclimated to such things. As I said, they are great in bed though. The reason is simple By the time a woman reaches 45-50, assuming she has had a lot of sex, she has probably accumulated a lot of kinks in her time. Yes, as women age, they tend to get kinkier and kinkier and more and more perverted. I assume that they are simply accumulating kinks and perversions as they age. A lot of women this age have tried just about everything sexual, and I do mean everything. There are not a whole lot of things they haven’t done, either experimentally or otherwise. Furthermore, for some reason, women that age take pride in the sexual skills, often bragging about how good they are at this or that perverted, kinky sex act. I am not sure what is going on here. Some of them told me that they had been practicing these techniques for many years, so maybe once again it is down to the skill of the experienced. Perhaps they are aware that their looks are fading and they are ramping up the kinks and perversions to try to keep men interested. With a lot of them, I get the feeling that they are trying to outwhore each other with kinks and perversions. Of course, I fully support this trend.

Was Joseph Conrad a Neoliberal? Are We? A Contemporary Reading of Victory

I participated in a session with this fellow on Academia.edu. I believe the author is a professor at a university somewhere in the UK. I really liked this paper a lot. It’s a bit hard to understand, but if you concentrate, you should be able to understand. If I can understand it, at least some of you guys can too. It is an excellent overview of what exactly neoliberalism is and the effects it has on all of us all the way down to the anthropological, sociological and psychological.

Was Joseph Conrad a Neoliberal? Are We? A Contemporary Reading of Victory

by Simon During

Over the past decade or so “neoliberalism” has become a word to conjure with. It is easy to have reservations about its popularity since it seems to name both a general object — roughly, capitalist governmentality as we know it today — and a particular set of ideas that now have a well-researched intellectual history.

It also implies a judgment: few use the term except pejoratively. I myself do not share these worries however, since I think that using the word performs sterling analytic work on its own account even as it probably accentuates its concept’s rather blob-like qualities. Nonetheless in this talk I want somewhat to accede to those who resist neoliberalism’s analytic appeal by thinking about it quite narrowly — that is to say, in literary and intellectual historical terms. I begin from the position, first, that neoliberalism is an offshoot of liberalism thought more generally; and second, that we in the academic humanities are ourselves inhabited by an occluded or displaced neoliberalism to which we need critically to adjust.1 Thus, writing as a literary critic in particular, I want to follow one of my own discipline’s original protocols, namely to be sensitive to the ways in which the literary “tradition” changes as the present changes, in this case, as it is reshaped under that neoliberalism which abuts and inhabits us.2 To this end I want to present a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Victory (1916). To do this is not just to help preserve the received literary canon, and as such is, I like to think, a tiny act of resistance to neoliberalism on the grounds that neoliberalism is diminishing our capacity to affirm a canon at all. By maintaining a canon in the act of locating neoliberalism where it is not usually found, I’m trying to operate both inside and outside capitalism’s latest form.

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1 Daniel Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014, p. 17. 2 This argument is made of course in T.S. Eliot’s seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921). Let me begin with a brief and sweeping overview of liberalism’s longue durée.3 For our purposes we can fix on liberalism by noting that it has two central struts, one theoretical, the other historical. As generations of theorists have noted, the first strut is methodological individualism: liberal analysis begins with, and is addressed to, the autonomous individual rather than communities or histories.4 Methodological individualism of this kind is, for instance, what allowed Leo Strauss and J.P Macpherson to call even Thomas Hobbes a founder of liberalism.5 Liberalism’s second strut is the emphasis on freedom as the right to express and enact private beliefs with a minimum of state intervention. This view of freedom emerged in the seventeenth century among those who recommended that the sovereign state “tolerate” religious differences. It marked a conceptual break in freedom’s history since freedom was now conceived of as an individual possession and right rather than as a condition proper to “civil associations” and bound to obligations.6 We need to remember, however, that methodological individualism does not imply liberal freedom, or vice versa. Indeed neoliberalism exposes the weakness of that association. Early in the nineteenth century, liberalism became a progressivist political movement linked to enlightened values. But after about 1850, non-progressive or conservative liberalisms also appeared. Thus, as Jeffrey Church has argued, Arthur Schopenhauer, the post-Kantian philosopher who arguably broke most spectacularly with enlightened humanist progressivism, 3 Among the library of works on liberalism’s history I have found two to be particularly useful for my purposes here: Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: a Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso 2014, and Amanda Anderson’s forthcoming Bleak Liberalism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2016. 4 Milan Zafirovski, Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries: Freedom, Liberalism and Anti-Liberalism in the 21st Century, Amsterdam: Brill 2007, p. 116. 5 Van Mobley, “Two Liberalisms: the Contrasting Visions of Hobbes and Locke,” Humanitas, IX 1997: 6-34. 6 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 23. can be associated with liberalism.7 Likewise Schopenhauer’s sometime disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche, no progressivist, was, as Hugo Drochon has recently argued, also an antistatist who prophesied that in the future “private companies” will take over state business so as to protect private persons from one another.8 Liberalism’s conservative turn was, however, largely a result of socialism’s emergence as a political force after 1848, which enabled some left liberal fractions to dilute their individualism by accepting that “a thoroughly consistent individualism can work in harmony with socialism,” as Leonard Hobhouse put it.9 Conrad himself belonged to this moment. As a young man, for instance, he was appalled by the results of the 1885 election, the first in which both the British working class and the socialists participated.10 That election was contested not just by the Marxist Socialist Democratic Federation, but by radical Liberals who had allied themselves to the emergent socialist movement (not least Joseph Chamberlain who, as mayor of Birmingham, was developing so-called “municipal socialism” and who haunts Conrad’s work).11 The election went well for the Liberals who prevented the Tories from securing a clear Parliamentary majority. After learning this, Conrad, himself the son of a famous Polish liberal revolutionary, wrote to a friend, “the International Socialist Association are triumphant, and every disreputable ragamuffin in Europe, feels that the day of universal brotherhood, despoliation and disorder is coming apace…Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism.”12 That prophecy will resonate politically for the next century, splitting liberalism in two. As I say: on the one side, a 7 Jeffrey Church, Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, p. 226. 8 Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016, p. 9. 9 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, London: Williams and Norgate, 1911, p. 99. 10 It was at this point that one of neoliberalism’s almost forgotten ur-texts was written,Herbert Spencer’s Man against the State (1884). 11 For instance, he plays an important role in Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors. 12 Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol 1., ed. Frederick Karl and Laurence Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983, p. 16.   progressivist, collectivist liberalism. On the other, an individualist liberalism of which neoliberalism is a continuation. By around 1900, liberalism’s fusion with socialism was often (although not quite accurately) associated with Bismark’s Germany, which gave anti-socialist liberalism a geographical inflection. Against this, individualistic liberalism was associated with Britain. But this received British liberalism looked back less to Locke’s religiously tolerant Britain than to Richard Cobden’s Britain of maritime/imperial dominance and free trade. Which is to say that liberalism’s fusion with socialism pushed socialism’s liberal enemies increasingly to think of freedom economically rather than politically — as in Ludwig von Mises influential 1922 book on socialism, which can be understood as a neoliberal urtext.13 By that point, too, individuals were already being positioned to become what Foucault calls “consumers of freedom.” 14 They were now less understood less as possessing a fundamental claim to freedom than as creating and participating in those institutions which enabled freedom in practice. Crucially after the first world war, in the work of von Mises and the so-called “Austrian school”, freedom was increasingly assigned to individual relations with an efficient market as equilibrium theory viewed markets. This turn to the market as freedom’s basis marked another significant historical departure: it is the condition of contemporary neoliberalism’s emergence. Neoliberalism organized itself internationally as a movement only after world war two, and did so against both Keynesian economics and the welfare state. 15 It was still mainly ideologically motivated by a refusal to discriminate between welfarism and totalitarianism — a line of thought already apparent in Conrad’s equation of socialism with Caesarism of course. As 13 See Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane. New Haven: Yale University Press 1951. 14 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 63. One key sign of this spread of this new freedom is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous appeal to the “free trade in ideas” in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. the US, a judgment which joins together the market, intellectual expression and the juridical. 15 See Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009.   Friedrich Hayek urged: once states begin to intervene on free markets totalitarianism looms because the people’s psychological character changes: they become dependent.16 For thirty years (in part as confined by this argument), neoliberalism remained a minority movement, but in the 1970s it began its quick ascent to ideological and economic dominance. Cutting across a complex and unsettled debate, let me suggest that neoliberalism became powerful then because it provided implementable policy settings for Keynesianism’s (perceived) impasse in view the stagnation and instability of post-war, first-world welfarist, full-employment economies after 1) the Vietnam War, 2) the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement; 3) OPEC’s cartelization, and 4) the postcolonial or “globalizing” opening up of world markets on the back of new transportation and computing technologies.17 In the global north neoliberalism was first implemented governmentally by parties on the left, led by James Callaghan in the UK, Jimmy Carter in the US, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in Australia, and leading the way, David Lange and Roger Douglas in New Zealand.18 At this time, at the level of policy, it was urged more by economists than by ideologues insofar as these can be separated (and Hayek and Mises were both of course). As we know, neoliberals then introduced policies to implement competition, deregulation, monetarism, privatization, tax reduction, a relative high level of unemployment, the winding back of the state’s participation in the economy and so on. This agenda quickly became captured by private   16 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 48. 17 This history is open to lively differences of opinion. The major books in the literature are: Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, London: Picador 2010; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso 2014; Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe; Joseph Vogl, The Spectre of Capital, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2014; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. My own understanding of this moment is informed by Stedman-Jones’s account in particular. 18 It is worth noting in this context that the left had itself long been a hatchery of neoliberal economic ideas just because liberalism’s absorption of socialism was matched by socialism’s absorption of liberalism. See Johanna Brockman, Markets in the name of Socialism: the Left-wing Origins of Neoliberalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011 on the intellectual-historical side of this connection. 6 interests, and from the eighties on, it was woven into new, highly surveilled and privatized, computing and media ecologies, indeed into what some optimists today call “cognitive capitalism”.19 In this situation, more or less unintended consequences proliferated, most obviously a rapid increase in economic inequality and the enforced insertion of internal markets and corporate structures in non-commercial institutions from hospitals to universities. Indeed, in winding back the welfare state, renouncing Keynesian and redistributionist economic policies, it lost its classical liberal flavor and was firmly absorbed into conservatism — a transformation which had been prepared for by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.20 But two more concrete conceptual shifts also helped animate this particular fusion of conservatism and liberalism. First, postwar neoliberalism was aimed more at the enterprise than at the individual.21 Largely on the basis of van Mises’s Human Action (1940) as popularized by Gary Becker, the free, independent individual was refigured as “human capital” and thereby exposed instead to management and “leadership.” At the same time, via Peter Drucker’s concept of “knowledge worker,” which emphasized the importance of conceptual and communication skills to economic production, postsecular management theories for which corporations were hierarchical but organic communities also gained entry into many neoliberal mindsets.22 At that   19 Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery. Cambridge: Polity Press 2012. 20 Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s influence is no doubt part of why neoliberalism emerged in Austria. Indeed the Austrian context in which contemporary neoliberalism emerged is worth understanding in more detail. In their early work, Hayek and Mises in particular were responding to “red Vienna” not just in relation to Otto Bauer’s Austromarxism but also in relation to its version of guild socialism associated with Hungarians like Karl Polanyi, with whom both Hayek and Mises entered into debate. See Lee Congdon, “The Sovereignty of Society: Karl Polanyi in Vienna,” in The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi, ed. Kari Polanyi-Levitt. Montreal: Black Rose Books 1990, 78-85. 21 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 225. 22 Drucker was another Austrian refugee who turned to capitalism against totalitarianism in the late thirties and his profoundly influential work on corporate management shadows neoliberal theory up until the 1970s.   7 point, neoliberalism also became a quest to reshape as many institutions as possible as corporations. At this point too Foucault’s consumers of freedom were becoming consumers full stop. To state this more carefully: at the level of ideology, to be free was now first and foremost deemed to be capable of enacting one’s preferences in consumer and labour markets. It would seem that preferences of this kind increasingly determined social status too, and, more invasively, they now increasingly shaped personalities just because practices of self were bound less and less to filiations and affiliations than to acts of choice. This helped the market to subsume older gradated social and cultural structures of identity-formation, class difference and cultural capital. At this juncture, we encounter another significant unexpected consequence within liberalism’s longue durée: i.e. the sixties cultural revolution’s reinforcement of neoliberalism. This is a complex and controversial topic so let me just say here that, from the late seventies, neoliberal subjects who were individualized via their entrepreneurial disposition and economic and labour choices, encounters the subject of post-68 identity politics who had been emancipated from received social hierarchies and prejudices, and was now attached to a particular ethnicity, gender or sexuality as chosen or embraced by themselves as individuals. These two subject formations animated each other to the degree that both had, in their different ways, sloughed off older communal forms, hierarchies and values. Governing this ménage of hedonism, productivity, insecurity and corporatization, neoliberalism today seems to have become insurmountable, and is, as I say, blob-like, merging out into institutions and practices generally, including those of our discipline. And it has done this as a turn within liberal modernity’s longer political, intellectual and social genealogies and structures rather than as a break from them. Nonetheless, three core, somewhat technical, propositions distinguish neoliberalism from liberalism more generally:

  1. First the claim, which belongs to the sociology of knowledge, that no individual or group can know the true value of anything at all.23 For neoliberals, that value — true or not — can only be assessed, where it can be assessed at all, under particular conditions: namely when it is available in a competitive and free market open to all individuals in a society based on private property. This is an argument against all elite and expert claims to superior knowledge and judgment: without prices, all assessments of value are mere opinion. In that way, market justice (i.e. the effects of competing in the market) can trump social justice. And in that way, for instance, neoliberalism finds an echo not just in negations of cultural authority and canonicity but in the idea that literary and aesthetic judgments are matters of private choice and opinion. In short, neoliberalism inhabits cultural democracy and vice versa. By the same stroke, it posits an absence — a mere structure of exchange—at society’s normative center.
  2. There is a direct relationship between the competitive market and freedom. Any attempt to limit free markets reduces freedom because it imposes upon all individuals a partial opinion about what is valuable. This particular understanding of freedom rests on the notion of the market as a spontaneous order — its being resistant to control and planning, its being embedded in a society which “no individual can completely survey” as Hayek put it.24 Not that this notion is itself original to neoliberalism: Foucault’s historiography of liberalism shows that, in the mid eighteenth century, this property of markets was thought of as “natural” and therefore needed to be protected from sovereign authority’s interference.25 But as Foucault and others have argued, neoliberalism emerges after World War 2 when the spontaneous market conditions of freedom are no longer viewed as natural (even if they remain immanently lawbound) but as governmentally produced.26
  3. Neoliberalism has specific ethical dimensions too. While it generally insists that individuals should be free to “follow their own values and preferences” (as Hayek put it) at least within the limits set by those rules and institutions which secure market stability, in fact individuals’ independence as well as their relation to market risk, provides the necessary condition for specific virtues and capacities. Most notably, in Hayek’s formulation, a neoliberal regime secures individuals’ self-sufficiency, honor and dignity and does so by the willingness of some to accept “material sacrifice,” or to “live dangerously” as Foucault put it, in a phrase he declared to be liberalism’s “motto”.27 This mix of risk-seeking existentialism and civic republicanism not only rebukes and prevents the kind of de-individualization supposedly associated with socialisms of the left and right, it is where neoliberalism and an older “Nietzschean” liberalism meet—with Michael Oakeshott’s work bearing special weight in this context.28 But as soon as neoliberalism itself becomes hegemonic in part by fusing with the spirit of 1968, this original ascetic, masculinist neoliberal ethic of freedom and risk comes to be supplemented and displaced by one based more on creativity, consumerist hedonism and entrepreneurialism aimed at augmenting choice.29

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23 See Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, p. 55. 24 Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents. The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 212. 25 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 19. 26 This is argued in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s The New Way of the World: on Neoliberal Society, London: Verso 2014. For the immanent lawboundedness in Hayek, see Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, New York: Fordham University Press 2014: pps. 195-220. Vatter’s chapter “Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault” is excellent on how law is treated in neoliberal thought. 27 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 130. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 66. 28 See Andrew Norris’s forthcoming essay in Political Theory, “Michael Oakeshott’s Postulates of Individuality” for this. We might recall, too, that Foucault argues for similarities between the Frankfurt school and the early neoliberals on the grounds of their resistance to standardization, spectacle and so on. See The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 105.   I have indicated that Conrad belongs to the moment when socialist parties first contested democratic elections and which thus split liberalism, allowing one, then beleaguered, liberal fraction to begin to attach to conservatism. In this way then, he belongs to neoliberalism’s deep past (which is not to say, of course, that he should be understand as a proto-neoliberal himself). Let us now think about his novel Victory in this light. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century Indonesia mainly among European settlers and entrepreneurs. Indonesia was then a Dutch colony itself undergoing a formal economic deregulation program, which would increase not just Dutch imperial profits but, among indigenous peoples, also trigger what was arguably human history’s most explosive population growth to date.30 Victory belongs to this world where imperialism encountered vibrant commercial activity driven by entrepreneurial interests, competition and risk. Thus, for instance, its central character, the nomadic, cosmopolitan, aristocratic Swedish intellectual, Axel Heyst, establishes a business— a coal mine — along with a ship-owning partner, while other characters manage hotels, orchestras and trading vessels. Victory is a novel about enterprises as well as about individuals. But Conrad’s Indonesia is other to Europe as a realm of freedom. Importantly, however, its freedom is not quite liberal or neoliberal: it is also the freedom of a particular space. More precisely, it is the freedom of the sea: here, in effect Indonesia is oceanic. This formulation draws on Carl Schmitt’s post-war work on international law, which was implicitly   29 The history of that displacement is explored in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso 2005. 30 Bram Peper, “Population Growth in Java in the 19th Century”, Population Studies, 24/1 (1970): 71-84.   11 positioned against liberal and neoliberal theory. In his monograph The Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt drew attention to the sea as a space of freedom just because national sovereignties and laws did not hold there. But Schmitt’s implicit point was that liberal freedom needs to be thought about not just in terms of tolerance, recognition, rights or markets, but geographically and historically inside the long history of violent sovereign appropriation of the globe’s land masses so that elemental freedom was enacted on the oceans where law and sovereignty had no reach. From this perspective, piracy, for instance, plays an important role in freedom’s history. And from this perspective the claim to reconcile radical freedom to the lawbound state is false: such freedom exists only where laws do not. The sea, thought Schmitt’s way, is key to Conrad’s work. But, for him, the sea is also the home of economic liberalism, free-trade and the merchant marines by whom he had, of course, once been employed, and whose values he admired.31 Victory is a maritime tale set on waters which harbor such free trade at the same time as they form a Schmittean realm of freedom — and violence and risk — which effectively remains beyond the reach of sovereign law. Let me step back at this point to sketch the novel’s plot. Victory’s central character Heyst is the son of an intellectual who late in life was converted from progressivism to a mode of weak Schopenhauerianism or what was then call pessimism.32 Heyst lives his father’s pessimism out: he is a disabused conservative liberal: “he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.”33 Believing this, Heyst leaves Europe to “drift”— circulating through Burma, New Guinea, Timor and the Indonesian archipelagoes, simply gathering facts and observing. But, on an   31 For Conrad and trade in this region, see Andrew Francis, Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015. For Conrad’s affiliations to free trade proper see my unpublished paper, “Democracy, Empire and the Politics of the Future in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”. This is available on this url. 32 Joseph Conrad, Victory, London: Methuen 1916, p. 197. 33 Conrad, Victory, pps. 92-93   12 impulse, while drifting through Timor he rescues a shipowner, Morrison, whose ship has been impounded by unscrupulous Portuguese authorities, and through that act of spontaneous generosity, becomes obligated to Morrison. The two men end up establishing a coalmine in the remote Indonesian island of Samburan, backed by local Chinese as well as by European capital. The company soon collapses. Morison dies. And, living out his Schopenhauerian renunciation of the world, Heyst, the detached man, decides to stay on at the island alone except for one Chinese servant. He does, however, sometimes visit the nearest Indonesian town, Surabaya, and it is while staying there in a hotel owned by Schomberg, a malicious, gossipy German, that he makes another spontaneous rescue. This time he saves a young woman, Lena, a member of a traveling “ladies orchestra,” who is being bullied by her bosses and in danger of abduction by Schomberg himself. Heyst and Lena secretly escape back to his island, causing Schomberg to harbor a venomous resentment against Heyst. At this point Schomberg’s hotel is visited by a trio of sinister criminals: Jones, Ricardo and their servant Pedro. Taking advantage of Schomberg’s rage, they establish an illegal casino in his hotel. To rid himself of this risky enterprise, Schomberg advises them to go after Heyst in his island, falsely telling them that Heyst has hidden a fortune there. Jones and his gang take Schomberg’s advice but disaster awaits them. The novel ends with Jones, Ricardo, Heyst, Lena all dead on Heyst’s island. The novel, which hovers between commercial adventure romance and experimental modernism, is bound to neoliberalism’s trajectory in two main ways. First, it adheres to neoliberalism’s sociology of knowledge: here too there is no knowing center, no hierarchy of expertise, no possibility of detached holistic survey and calculation through which truth might command action. Heyst’s drifting, inconsequential fact-gathering, itself appears to illustrate that absence. As do the gossip and rumors which circulate in the place of informed knowledge, and which lead to disaster. Individuals and enterprises are, as it were, on their 13 own, beyond any centralized and delimited social body that might secure stability and grounded understandings. They are bound, rather, to self-interest and spontaneity. This matters formally not simply because, in an approximately Jamesian mode, the narrative involves a series of points of view in which various characters’ perceptions, moods and interests intersect, but because the narration itself is told in a first person voice without being enunciated by a diegetical character. That first person, then, functions as the shadow representative of a decentered community, largely focused on money, that is barely able to confer identity at all, a community, too, without known geographical or ideological limits just because the narrator, its implicit representative, has no location or substance. This narratorial indeterminacy can be understood as an index of liberalism at this globalizing historical juncture: a liberalism divesting itself of its own progressive histories, emancipatory hopes and institutions. A bare liberalism about to become neoliberalism, as we can proleptically say. More importantly, the novel speaks to contemporary neoliberalism because it is about freedom. As we have begun to see, Heyst is committed to a freedom which is both the freedom of the sea, and a metaphysical condition which has detached itself, as far as is possible, from connections, obligations, determinations. This structures the remarkable formal relationship around which the novel turns — i.e. Heyst’s being positioned as Jones’s double. The generous Schopenhauerian is not just the demonic criminal’s opposite: he is also his twin. Both men are wandering, residual “gentlemen” detached from the European order, and thrown into, or committed to, a radical freedom which, on the one side, is a function of free trade, on the other, a condition of life lived beyond the legal and political institutions that order European societies, but also, importantly, are philosophical and ethical — a renunciation of the established ideological order for independence, courage and nomadism. To put this rather differently: Heyst and Jones’s efforts to live in freedom — to comport themselves as free individuals — combines economic freedom — a freedom of exchange, competition and   14 entrepreneurial possibilities— with a state of nature as a line of flight (or emancipation) from received continental laws, values and social structures. Freedom, that is, which combines that which Carl Schmitt and the early neoliberals imagined, each in their own way. The novel’s main point is that there is, in fact, nothing in this freedom to sustain true ethical substance. It is as if Schmittean freedom has smashed both liberal freedom and pessimistic asceticism, along with their ethical groundings. Or to come at the novel’s basic point from another direction: it is as if the absence at the heart of a free society has transmigrated into these characters’ selves. It is at that level that individual freedom cannot be separated from violence and risk and good from evil. Without an instituted social structure, Heyst cannot stay true to himself: his commitment to freedom and renunciation is compromised because of his spontaneous acts of generosity and sympathy which lead to his and Lena’s death. On the other side, Jones, a homosexual shunned by respectable society, is afflicted by those key nineteenth-century affects, resentment and boredom as well as a quasi-Nietzschean contempt for “tameness”, which drive him towards living outside of society, at contigency’s mercy, and towards reckless, malevolent violence. Heyst and Jones die together almost by accident, in deaths that reveal them not just as entangled with one another at existence’s threshold, but as both attuned to death, even in life. It now look as if while they lived they wanted to die. In that way, the novel makes it clear that the risk, disorder and emptiness which inhabit their striving for a radically liberal practice of life corrode distinctions not just between violence and renunciation, not just between good and evil, but also between life and death. We can put it like this: the freedom that these characters claim and the risks that it entails and which bind them together are inclined more towards death than towards life, just on account of freedom’s own conditions of possibility, namely radical autonomy, absence of sovereign power, and maximum choice.

***

15 As I say, this is a reading of the novel which, at least in principle, helps to canonize Victory just because it claims that its form, plot and characters address versions of our current neoliberal social condition, and does so in metaphysically ambitious terms. Victory is a critique of freedom, I think. Conrad is insisting that even in a liberal society devoted to free trade, enterprises and markets, the law — and the sovereign state — comes first. It is, if one likes, beginning the work of detaching liberalism from freedom. To say this, however, is to ignore the most pressing question that this reading raises: to what degree should we today actually accede to Conrad’s ambivalent, pessimistic and conservative imagination of radical freedom? How to judge that freedom’s renunciation of established hierarchies, collectivities and values whether for adventure, risk and spontaneity or for violence and death? It is a condition of the discipline’s neoliberal state that the only answer we can give to that question is that we can, each of us, answer that question any way that we choose.

Gedalia Braun's Piece on Africans

Sam: A possible explanation for Black behavior. “…common understanding among blacks of what morality is: not something internalized but something others enforce from the outside…” https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/ Tulio: Interesting article. But I’d like to examine multiple perspectives on this topic before I draw any conclusions. I’ve never been to Africa to observe her findings first hand, and given that the author writes for Amren, this individual has an obvious predisposition. For example she speaks of cruelty and torture in Africa, but that has existed among whites as well. I’ve seen some of the torture devices used during Europe’s middle period. Even looking at them was unbearable. Even in this country witches were burned at the stake. Blacks were hung from trees on false accusations while whites stood around and cheered. I don’t like her conclusion that blacks have some inherent flaw that makes them incapable of being moral or having any abstract thoughts. Google a list of African proverbs and they contradict everything she just said.

First of all, Gedalia Braun is a man, not a woman. No idea what that first name is all about. I actually think he is onto something, especially as he lived in various African countries for many years. That was always one of my favorite articles on Amren. The odd thing about that article is that while is not real flattering towards Africans, the author doesn’t seem to hate Africans at all. In fact, it seems that he is rather fond of them despite it all. I don’t think just writing for Amren should disqualify you as biased. One of the truly disturbing things about Amren that I learned from hanging out there a very long time is that so much of what those articles say is flat out true. That is hard to swallow. However, the site is dishonest and biased as it only reports the downside to Blacks and never says anything good about them, while I know some of you will be amazed, but there are actually quite a few good things you can say about US Blacks if you are looking to write good things about them. The Black love of cruelty and sadism does seem to be a part of the race. Yes any culture can become extremely cruel and sadistic, even the “highest” races of all which can become downright genocidal under the right conditions of Organized Violence.  Not long ago, two of the “highest” races of all, the Germans and Japanese, engaged in some spectacular cruelty, sadism, out and out evil and even horrific genocide. And yes, European White did use to be quite sadistic and cruel as the torture devices indicate. However, under normal peacetime conditions, most European Whites in Europe and the West demonstrate remarkably little sadism and cruelty, while with Blacks, even US Blacks, it just seems to go on unabated. I should note that cruelty and sadism are not Black traits. They are human traits! Humans are naturally cruel, sadistic and downright evil, at least at times. Most human societies and most humans have it in them to be sadistic and cruel. I was a pretty vicious little boy, but all my friends were too, so I just figure that boys are just naturally rather evil. But you grow out of it. I still have cruelty and sadism in me of course, but I try to keep it locked up in a cage inside of me and hope it never comes out. My argument is going to be that Blacks are more susceptible to the normal human tendencies than say Whites or Northeast Asians are, not that Blacks are evil and sadistic and White people are real nice. Screw that. Some of those things may not be race-dependent. For instance, even if Blacks are bad at abstract thinking as a race, if you push their IQ up, their capacity for abstract thinking ought to grow quite a bit. African Americans appear to be dramatically more intelligent that Africans for whatever reason. One standard deviation is nothing to shake your finger at. Hence, even if US Blacks are have some inherent issue with abstract thinking, pushing that IQ up to one SD is going to make US Blacks a Hell of a lot more abstract than Africans. I should also note that a number of the other downsides to Africans that he writes about – childlikeness, love of cruelty and sadism, needing morality imposed from the outside rather than from within A lot of that has been said before. Albert Schweitzer wrote much the same things after working for years as a do-gooder in Africa. The fact that he was such a do-gooder makes his remarks particularly potent, as I do not see how a man with that much of a kind heart would deliberately make up a bunch of evil things about Blacks. In fact, if you study so called racist literature down through the years, you will find many of these things that Braun talks about repeated many times. Much early anthropological writings on Blacks are now called racist because they were pretty blunt about the race, whereas now the field is very PC. For instance, the thing about Blacks being “childlike.” Childlike is not the same thing as childish. Childlike is not a bad thing really. I would love to be childlike in some ways and I hope I am, actually. Early American writings including I think Thomas Jefferson noted the same thing: they also said that Blacks were childlike. The morality thing sort of makes sense. In situations where brute force enforces morality, Blacks do pretty well. I heard they do pretty well under Communism. Supposedly you could walk from one end to the other of Maputo in the middle of the night and no one would bother you. Maputo is the capital of Mozambique. That was under the Communist like government of Samora Machel, who is actually one of my heroes. Havana is the safest large city in the Americas and it is very Black. Blacks also do well under Islam. Reporters have gone to the parts of West Africa that are under Islam and they say that things are a lot smoother, less chaotic and far less crime ridden than in the non-Muslim countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. I hear there are also many Blacks in Yemen, maybe up to 4 Under both Islam and Communism, morality is for sure imposed from the outside in a pretty heavy handed way. It was similar in the typical African village or villages that was ruled by a king. I have heard that pre-1960, Nigeria was mostly a country of small rural villages. There was almost no crime in these villages. Not only was law enforcement pretty brutal, there was also a heavy shame factor involved similar to what we see with the Northeast Asians, who do not want to commit crimes or even do bad things in general because it will bring shame unto their families. Amazingly rural Africa was able to operate under the same shame-based morality as the Northeast Asians, yet the NE Asians are usually thought to be a “higher” race than Africans. So it looks like some of those things that make these “higher” races higher can actually be imported and be used by the “lower” races, which seems counterintuitive but is also hopeful. The notion that Black genes make societies inherently unstable is belied by the fact that North Africa (1 Also Ancient Egypt was 1

Why Indians Hate the Aryan Invasion Theory So Much

Found on the Net:

In Indian context, the theory has a few problems:

  • The Aryan invasion theory was postulated by non-Indian thinkers at a time when India was a colony of Britain. That has led to the criticism that Europeans can never accept that Indian culture could not be home-grown, it must have been imported from elsewhere. This line of thinking is not completely baseless, just look at the decades it took for Westerners to accept that all the statues in Easter Island were built by the natives and not a creation of some alien species.
  • There is an Indocentric fervor in India – Indian culture is superior, Indian food is superior, Indian linguistic traditions are superior and Indian intellect is superior; not just against one or two countries but against everyone. So, the idea that India could have benefited from immigrants is immediately rejected. This line of thinking is quite evident when you see how many people want to cleanse India of Muslims.
  • The title of the theory has not helped – it implies that all the extant culture was destroyed and replaced with the culture of the invaders. If it had been called “Aryan Immigration Theory”, there would have been less resistance.
  • A few people have told me that the “Aryan Invasion Theory” was developed to cement the idea that Europeans and Indians were distinct populations – even though the theory actually calls for Europeans and Indians to have common ancestors!

All in all, this theory drives a lot of people (especially of Indian origin) batty.

This sums up very well the problems Indians have with the AIT and why it provokes such passionate emotional responses in them.

Blacks in Restaurants

In response to this post, Tulio writes:

Tulio: If anything, I thought blacks have a reputation for being spendthrifts. But seriously, who in 2016 would even use the word niggardly. Forget the phonetic similarity to the n-word, it sounds like such an antiquated word that it has no business coming out of someone’s mouth in the 21st century. It would be like a teenager referring to someone as a curmudgeon. You’d probably have to do a double-take.

Blacks don’t tip. You did not know that? Black people are notorious for not tipping. They have a very bad reputation that way. Most servers hate waiting on blacks. They don’t tip or they tip ridiculously low, like $1 for a $150 bill, they complain all the time – usually about stupid stuff, they make a huge mess at the table, they are way too loud and sometimes even start fights, and they are awful when they order – often going into micro-detail, “little bit extra catsup, not too much, extra onions, easy on the tomatoes, horseradish instead of mustard, relish on the side,” stuff like that – just impossibly difficult and petty orders. There is a whole set of behaviors that most Whites have internalized for going out to eat. Even poor and working class Whites act this way; they can be even worse than middle class Whites at enforcing manners in restaurants. I know because I have gone out to eat with such folks many times in my life. It’s like Black people never got the memo. A lot of nonracist non-Blacks start working in restaurants as servers, and after a while, they start hating Blacks. It is quite common. I would say that if you are Black and capable of being civilized like millions of Black people, you might want to act extra civilized when you go out to eat if for no other reason than to improve the reputation of your race.

Moral Panics: Police Shootings, Race Riots, and Muslim Terrorism

Tulio sums it all up so perfectly. These are just vicious circles that endlessly feed back and loop into each other like a dog chasing its tail. One wonders what the solution is. Provocation, revenge attacks, revenge attacks for the revenge attacks, jumpy cops, belligerent suspects, and worst of all, increasingly frightened and angry people looking for more revenge, paybacks and pre-emptive reactions, it just goes on and on. Hatfields and McCoys.

Tulio: The Black man shot in Milwaukee was shot by a Black cop. Which makes this race rioting all the more bizarre. This has all been stirred up by the media. When the media focuses on something and starts a narrative, it can lead to a moral panic. Many Black folks, even ones that have never had any violent encounter with the cops, think they are currently under siege. Even if the statistics show that an innocent Black man being killed by cops is more rare than being struck by lightning. Or that 9 And then people overreact, and there are race riots and retaliatory cop killings. And then race relations began a downward spiral. Whites turn on the news and see Blacks tearing stuff up, setting buildings on fire and shooting cops, which makes them more racist. Then Blacks see Whites becoming more racist and say, “See that, they hate us! Just like we said all along!” Cops who now have to deal the possibility of being shot on the job may be even more inclined to have hair-trigger responses with Blacks, which then feeds into the notion that cops are out to get Blacks, and then you just have one big clusterfuck spiraling out of control. While I’m not a racist or a racial separatist, the separatists do make good points. If we didn’t share the same nation, we wouldn’t have to worry about intractable race problems. Or the differences in behaviors and perceptions that cause race problems. Dividing up the country into racial territories is never going to happen, but I see why some people would be in favor of it as a solution to race problems, and it makes completely sense in a lot of ways. Peace in a multiracial society can be fragile. Everything can be humming along fine, and all it takes is for someone to get shot by a cop, and all Hell lets loose, and you see that this pent-up resentment was there all along under the shallow skin of a “post-racial” nation (yeah right). Also, Whites are capable of this moral panic as well. In their case, swap cops for Muslim terrorists. Even though the statistical likelihood of being killed by a Muslim terrorist on any given day is probably even less likely than being innocently murdered by a cop, Americans think they are constantly under siege from terrorists and that terrorism is more prevalent than it actually is in reality. We have a presidential candidate that doesn’t even want Muslims stepping foot on US soil, and a large of America that agrees with him. Even though we’re orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by a homegrown mass shooter. So to whites, there’s a terrorist hiding behind every tree ready to kill you. To Blacks, the nation is full of racist cops that want to shoot you dead over a broken taillight. And it’s not that there aren’t terrorists, or that there aren’t cops with an itchy trigger finger and racial biases. It’s that these scenarios are wildly exaggerated by the media, and 99.

Laquan McDonald Shooting

Famous case from late 2014 in Chicago. It didn’t happen the way the media said it did. He wasn’t walking away from police. He was approaching them and he was armed with a knife. Cops had guns drawn and warned him repeatedly to drop the knife but he continued to approach police armed with a knife. When he got to within 10 feet of police, one officer opened fire. However, 16 shots were fired, many of which when he was already down on the ground after being shot, and that doesn’t seem to make sense at all. The officer Jason Van Dyke is on trial for murder. The trial has not yet started. Mr. McDonald was not portrayed properly in the media. Photos showed him as a boy and another showed him with a graduation cap on, but that must have been from junior high as he never graduated from high school to my knowledge. McDonald was 18 years old going on a very early grave, full speed ahead. I figure this shooting postponed the inevitable for probably less than 10 years. He had already been shot multiple times by rival pharmacy organizations while he was employed as a Street Pharmacist for the New Breeds Pharmacy Group, a profession he took up at the tender age of 12.

The ward was born to a 15-year-old mother who herself was a ward. The teen mother entered DCFS care at the age of 12 because of her mother’s extensive drug history, including giving birth to a substance-exposed (PCP) infant, her lack of participation in services, and her extensive criminal history for drug charges. By the age of 18 the teen ward lost custody of her then 3-year-old son and his younger sister after she left the children home alone and the younger sister suffered extensive burns which required hospitalization. The mother was indicted for inadequate supervision. The two children were placed with several relatives and were returned to the mother in 18 months under an order of protection. A year after they were returned to their mother, the then 5-year-old boy and his sister reentered DCFS custody because of physical abuse by the mother and her boyfriend. The boy reported that he often witnessed domestic violence between his mother and her boyfriend. His father was incarcerated. The mother, then 21 years old, did not participate in services, struggled with continued drug use and did not visit her children. After several failed placements, including one where the boy was sexually abused, the maternal great-grandmother took the children into her home. In first grade the boy was described as sometimes explosive. In 2006, when the boy was nine, the great-grandmother obtained subsidized guardianship of the children and DCFS closed its case. The boy became involved with gangs and selling drugs on the street at age 12. He was a member of the New Breeds gang and had sold drugs for the gang and had been shot at by rival gang members but did not engage in gang violence. At the age of 13 he was arrested and referred to juvenile court for possession of a controlled substance. At the age of 16 he was incarcerated at the juvenile detention center for violation of probation. He was released and placed on electronic monitoring so he could visit his 79-year-old great-grandmother before she died and attend her funeral. Afterward DCFS became his guardian and learned that he had been living with his mother prior to his detention. While in detention he exhibited aggressive behaviors, but his behavior was uneven. At times he was respectful and insightful; however his poor judgment put him at risk of harm. At one court hearing he was high on PCP and had an aggressive outburst in the courtroom resulting in his being taken into custody and placed in detention. He violated probation several times and cut off his ankle home monitor. His mother became involved in treatment and began family therapy with her son. The community service provider recommended intensive outpatient treatment while probation recommended commitment to the Department of Corrections or a residential treatment center. The court-appointed advocate recommended residential treatment. A DCFS staffing resulted in a referral to an intensive specialized foster care program for dually involved (delinquent and child welfare) youth. He and his mother agreed to attend therapy. His uncle agreed to have the youth placed with him. Intensive probation stayed involved and the ward was enrolled in an alternative school. He was suspended once but was enrolled when he died.

Judging from the biography of this famous young American Black man, this is looking more and more like what I call a “PSK” or Public Service Killing. Nevertheless, I do not agree that Black scumbags should get the death penalty by extrajudicial execution without trial. Black scumbags suck all right, but they should be dealt with properly by the criminal justice system via the courts, and penitentiary system. We don’t want to turn into a banana republic with death squads running around. Despite the Hispanicization of America, we are yet too good for that at this early date. Death squads are not just White, at least not US White. American White people don’t do it like that, not yet anyway. However, I will disagree with the narrative and I do think this punk bitch was a threat to the officers. But he was no threat lying on the ground shot armed with a knife.

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