Repost: Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil?

This is a repost of a repost. The first repost was fully 10 years ago. Amazingly the graphics carried over after the shut-down because the images were saved on my Blogger site, which is still up and running. Yay!

This is an awesome post if I do say so myself, though it looks like it needs an edit. Anyone interested in Comparative Religion, Paganism, Polytheism, Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, metaphysics, Middle Eastern History or even philosophy might want to look into this post.

I know it’s long. It runs to 35 pages on the web. But you can read it. I read it myself, more than once too! If I can do it, you can do it. If you are interested in this sort of thing, you might find it quite an enjoyable read. If it’s not your thing, well you can always pass it on by. But even if you are not normally interested in this stuff you might find it interesting because this post goes quite a bit beyond its obvious subject matter into a lot of more universal subjects.

Repost from the old site. This is a very, very long piece, so be warned. But the subject, the Yezidi religious group, is extraordinarily complex, as I found out as I delved deeper and deeper into them.

They are still very mysterious and there is a lot of scholarly controversy around them, mostly because they will not let outsiders read their holy books. However, a copy of their holiest book was stolen about 100 years ago and has been analyzed by scholars.

I feel that the analysis below of the Yezidis (there are various competing analyses of them) best summarizes what they are all about, to the extent that such an eclectic group can even be defined at all. The piece is hard to understand at first, but if you are into this sort of thing, after you study it for a while, you can start to put it together. There are also lots of cool pics of devil and pagan religious art below, for those who are interested in such arcana.

The Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group in Iraq practicing an ancient religion, have been accused of being devil worshipers by local Muslims and also by many non-Muslims.

The Yezidis appeared in Western media in 2007 due to the stoning death of a Yezidi teenage girl who ran off with a Muslim man. The stoning was done by eight men from her village while another 1000 men watched and cheered them on. Afterward, there has been a lot of conflict between Muslim Arabs and Yezidi Kurds.

As Western media turned to the Yezidis, there has been some discussion here about their odd religion. For instance, though the local Muslims condemn them as devil worshipers, the Yezidis strongly deny this. So what’s the truth? The truth, as usual, is much more complicated.

The Yezidis believe that a Creator, or God, created a set of deities that we can call gods, angels, or demons, depending on how you want to look at them. So, if we say that the Yezidis worship the devil, we could as well say that they worship angels. It all depends on how you view these deities.

In the history of religion, the gods of one religion are often the devils of another. This is seen even today in the anti-Islamic discourse common amongst US neoconservatives, where the Muslim God is said to be a demonic god, and their prophet is said to be a devilish man.

Christian anti-Semites refer to the Old Testament God of the Jews as being an evil god. Orthodox Jews say that Jesus Christ is being boiled alive in semen in Hell for eternity.

At any rate, to the Yezidis, the main deity created by God is Malak Taus, who is represented by a peacock. Although Yezidis dissimulate about this, anyone who studies the religion closely will learn that Malak Taus is actually the Devil.

On the other hand, the Yezidis do not worship evil as modern-day Satanists do, so the Satanist fascination with the Yezidis is irrational. The Yezidis are a primitive people; agriculturalists with a strict moral code that they tend to follow in life. How is it that they worship the Devil then?

First of all, we need to understand that before the Abrahamic religions, many polytheistic peoples worshiped gods of both good and evil, worshiping the gods of good so that good things may happen, and worshiping the gods of evil so that bad things may not happen. The Yezidis see God as a source of pure good, who is so good that there is no point in even worshiping him.

In this, they resemble Gnosticism, in which God was pure good, and the material world and man were seen as polluted with such evil that the world was essentially an evil place. Men had only a tiny spark of good in them amidst a sea of evil, and the Gnostics tried to cultivate this spark.

This also resembles the magical Judaism of the Middle Ages (Kabbalism). The Kabbalists said that God was “that which cannot be known” (compare to the Yezidi belief that one cannot even pray to God).

In fact, the concept of God was so ethereal to the Kabbalists that the Kabbalists said that not only was God that which cannot be known, but that God was that which cannot even be conceived of. In other words, mere men cannot not even comprehend the very concept of God. A Kabbalist book says that God is “endless pure white light”.  Compare to the Yezidi view that God “pure goodness”.

This comes close to my own view of what God is.

The Yezidi view of God is quite complex. It is clear that he is at the top of the totem pole, yet their view of him is not the same as that of the gods of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or the Greeks, although it is similar to Plato’s “conception of the absolute.”

Instead, it is similar to the Deists’ view of God. God merely created the world. As far as the day to day running of things, that is actually up to the intermediary angels. However, there is one exception. Once a year, on New Years Day, God calls his angels together and hands the power over to the angel who is to descend to Earth.

In some ways similar to the Christian Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost, the Yezidis believe that God is manifested in three forms.

An inscription of the Christian Trinity, the father, or God, as an old man with a beard; Jesus, a young man; and the Holy Ghost, here depicted as a winged creature similar to Malak Tus, the winged peacock angel. Compare to Yezidi reference for Šeiḫ ‘Adî, Yazid, and Malak Tus (Father, Son and Holy Ghost)

 

The three forms are the peacock angel, Malak Tus (the Holy Ghost); an old man, Šeiḫ ‘Adî (God or the Father) – compare to the usual Christian portrayal in paintings of God as an old man with a long white beard ; and a young man, Yazid (Jesus) – compare to the usual Christian paintings of Jesus as a healthy European-looking man with a beard and a beatific look. A similar look is seen in Shia portraits of Ali.

Since the Yezidis say there is no way to talk to God, one must communicate with him through intermediaries (compare to intermediary saints like Mary in Catholicism and Ali in Shiism). The Devil is sort of a wall between the pure goodness of God and this admittedly imperfect world.

This is similar again to Gnosticism, where the pure good God created intermediaries called Aeons so that a world that includes evil (as our world does) could even exist in the first place. On the other hand, Malak Tus is seen by the Yezidis as neither an evil spirit nor a fallen angel but as a divinity in his own right.

One wonders why Malak Tus is represented by a bird. The answer is that worshiping birds is one of the oldest known forms of idol worship. It is even condemned in Deuteronomy 4: 16, 17: “Lest ye corrupt yourselves and make a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air.”

More likely, the peacock god is leftover from the ancient pagan bird-devil gods of the region. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians both worshiped sacred devil-birds, and carvings of them can be seen on their temples. The Zoroastrians also worshiped a sort of devil-bird called a feroher.

A winged demon from ancient Assyria. Yezidism appears to have incorporated elements of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions, making it ultimately a very ancient religion. Note that devils often have wings like birds. Remember the flying monkey demons in the Wizard of Oz?

 

The pagan Phoenicians, Philistines, and Samaritans worshiped a dove, and the early monotheistic Hebrews condemned the Samaritans for this idol-worship. The pagans of Mecca also worshiped a sacred dove. Pagan Arabian tribes also worshiped an eagle called Nasar.

What is truly odd is that peacocks are not native to the Yezidi region, but instead to the island of Sri Lanka. The Yezidis must have heard about this bird from travelers and incorporated it into their religion somehow.

In the Koran, both the Devil and the peacock were thrown out of Heaven down to Earth, with the Devil and the peacock both suffering similar punishments. So here we can see Islam also associating the peacock with the Devil.

In popular mythology, peacocks tend to represent pride. Note that the Koran says that the Devil was punished for excessive pride (compare with a similar Christian condemnation of excessive pride). Peacocks are problematic domestic fowl, tend to tear up gardens, and so are associated with mischief.

The Yezidis revere Malak Tus to such a great extent that he is almost seen as one with God (compare the Catholic equation of Mary with Jesus, the Christian association of Jesus with God, and the Shia Muslim association of Ali with Mohammad).

Malak Tus was there from the start and will be there at the end, he has total control over the world, he is omniscient and omnipresent, and he never changes. Malak Tus is the King of the Angels, and he is ruling the Earth for a period of 10,000 years. Yezidis do not allow anyone to say his name, as this is degrading to him.

Yezidis also superstitiously avoid saying an word that resembles the word for Satan. When speaking Arabic, they refuse to use the Arabic shatt for river, as it sounds like the word for Satan. They substitute Kurdish ave “river” instead. Compare this to the Kabbalist view of God as “that which can not even be comprehended (i.e., spoken) by man.”

In addition to Malak Taus, there are six other angels: Izrafael, Jibrael, Michael, Nortel, Dardael, Shamnael, and Azazael. They were all present at a meeting in Heaven at which God told them that they would worship no one other than him. This worked for 40,000 years, until God mixed Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to create Man as Adam.

God told the seven angels to bow before Adam, and six agreed. Malak Taus refused, citing God’s order to obey only Him. Hence, Malak Taus was cast out of Heaven and became the Archangel of all the Angels. Compare this to the Christian and Muslim view of the Devil, the head of the angels, being thrown out of Heaven for the disobedience of excessive pride.

In the meantime, Malak Taus is said to have repented his sins and returned to God as an angel.

So, yes, the Yezidis do worship the Devil, but in their religion, he is a good guy, not a bad guy. They are not a Satanic cult at all. In Sufism, the act of refusing to worship Adam (man) over God would be said to be a positive act – one of refusing to worship the created over the creator – since in Sufism, one is not to worship anything but God.

The Yezidis say that God created Adam and Eve, but when they were asked to produce their essences (or offspring), Adam produced a boy, but Eve produced an entity full of insects and other unpleasant things. God decided that he would propagate humanity (the Yezidis) out of Adam alone, leaving Eve out of the picture. Specifically, he married Adam’s offspring to a houri.

We can see the traditional views of the Abrahamic religions of women as being temptresses and sources of evil, conflict, and other bad things. The Yezidis see themselves as different from all other humans. Whereas non-Yezidis are the products of Adam and Eve, Yezidis are the products of Adam alone.

Eve subsequently left the Garden of Eden, which allowed the world to be created. So, what the Abrahamic religions see as man’s greatest fall in the Garden, the Yezidis see as mankind’s greatest triumphs. The Yezidis feel that the rest of humanity of is descended from Ham, who mocked his father, God.

Compare this to the Abrahamic religions’ view of women as a source of corruption. Christians say that Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, causing both of them to be tossed out. In Islam, women are regarded as such a source of temptation and fitna (dissension) that they are covered and often kept out of sight at all times. In Judaism, women’s hair is so tempting to men that they must shave it all off and wear wigs.

The Yezidis say they are descended directly from Adam, hence they are the Chosen People (compare to the Jewish view of themselves as “Chosen People”).

Yezidism being quite possible the present-day remains of the original religion of the Kurds, for the last 2,000 years, the Yezidis have been fighting off other major religions.

First Christianity came to the region.

As would be expected, the Nestorian Christians of Northern Iraq, or “Nasara” Christian apostates, as an older tradition saw them, hold that the Yezidis were originally Christians who left the faith to form a new sect. The Nestorians and other ancient Christian sects deny the human or dual nature of Jesus – instead seeing him as purely divine.

This is in contrast to another group also called “Nasara” in Koran – these being the early Jewish Christian sects such as the Ebionites, Nazarenes, and Gnostics who believed the opposite, since they regarded Jesus as purely human whereas Nestorians regarded Jesus as purely divine. These early sects believed only in the Book of Matthew, and retained many Jewish traditions, including revering the Jewish Torah, refusing to eat pork, keeping the Sabbath, and circumcision.

Mohammad apparently based his interpretation of Christianity on these early Christian sects which resemble Judaism a lot more than they resemble Christianity. Hence, the divinity of Jesus was denied in the Koran under Ebionite influence.

The Koran criticizes Christians for believing in three Gods – God, Jesus, and Mary – perhaps under the influence of what is called the “Marianistic heresy”. At the same time, the Koran confused human and divine qualities in Jesus due to Nestorian influence, so the Koran is of two minds about Jesus.

Finally, the Koran denied the crucifixion due to Gnostic influence, especially the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, hence the Koranic implication that modern Christians are actually Christian apostates having diverged from the true Christianity.

The local Muslim neighbors of the Yezidis, similarly, hold that the Yezidis are Muslim apostates, having originally been Muslims who left Islam to form a new religion.

Šeiḫ ‘Adî (full name Šeiḫ ‘Adî Ibn Masafir Al-Hakkari) was a Muslim originally from Bait Far, in the Baalbeck region of the Bekaa Valley of what is now Eastern Lebanon.

He is one of the tripartite of angels worshiped by the Yezidis  and was a Sufi Muslim mystic from Northern Iraq in the 1100’s. He attracted many followers, including many Christians and some Muslims who left their faith to become Yezidis. Yezidism existed before Šeiḫ ’Adî, but in a different form.

Šeiḫ ’Adî also attracted many Persian Zoroastrians who were withering under the boot of Muslim dhimmitude and occasional massacre in Iran.

He came to Mosul for spiritual reasons. Šeiḫ ’Adî was said to be a very learned man, and many people started to follow him. After he built up quite a following, he retired to the mountains above Mosul where he built a monastery and lived as a hermit, spending much of his time in caves and caverns in the mountains with wild animals as his only guests.

While he was living, his followers worshiped him as a God and believed that in the afterlife, they would be together with him. He died in 1162 in the Hakkari region near Mosul. At the site of his death, the his followers erected a shrine, and it later became one of the holiest sites Yezidism. However, Šeiḫ ’Adî is not the founder of Yezidism as many believe. His life and thought just added to the many strains in this most syncretistic of religions.

The third deity in the pseudo-“Trinity” of the Yezidis is a young man named Yezid. Yezidis say they are all descended from this man, whom they often refer to as God, but they also refer to Šeiḫ ’Adî as God. In Šeiḫ ’Adî’s temple, there are inscriptions to both Šeiḫ ’Adî and Yezid, each on opposing walls of the temple. In a corner of this temple, a fire  – or actually a lamp – is kept burning all night, reminiscent of Zoroastrianism.

There is a lot of controversy about what the word Yezid in Yezidi stands for. The religion itself, in its modern form, probably grew out of followers of Yazid Ibn Muawiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan, the 2nd Caliph in the Umayyad Dynasty of Caliphs. Yazid fought a battle against Mohammad’s grandson, Hussayn, in a battle for the succession of the Caliphate.

Hussayn’s followers were also the followers of Ali, the former caliph who was assassinated. The followers of Hussayn and Ali are today known as the Shia. The Sunni follow in the tradition of the Umayyads. In a battle in Karbala in 680, Hussayn and all his men were killed at Kufa, and the women and children with them taken prisoner.

To the Shia, Yazid is the ultimate villain. Most Sunnis do not view him very favorably either, and regard the whole episode as emblematic of how badly the umma had fallen apart after Mohammad died.

Nevertheless, there had been groups of Sunnis who venerated Yazid Ibn Muawiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan and the Umayyads in general in northern Iraq for some time even before Šeiḫ ’Adî appeared on the scene. Šeiḫ ’Adî himself was descended from the Umayyads.

Reverence for Yazid Ibn Muawiyah mixed with the veneration of Šeiḫ ’Adî in the early Yezidis. It was this, mixed in with the earlier pagan beliefs of the Semites and Iranians discussed elsewhere, along with a dollop of Christianity, that formed the base of modern Yezidism. But its ultimate roots are far more ancient. Yezidism had a base, but it was not formed in its modern version.

Here we turn to the etymology of the word Yezidi. It is possible that the figure of “Yezid”, the young man-God in the Yezidi trinity, represents Yazid Ibn Muawiyah.

By the mid-1200’s, the local Muslims were getting upset about the Yezidis excessive devotion to these two men. In the mid-1400’s the local Muslims fought a large battle against the Yezidis.

To this day, the top Yezidi mirs are all related to the Umayyads. Muslim scholars say that Yezid bin Unaisa was the founder of the modern-day Yezidis. Bin Unaisa was one of the early followers of the Kharijites, an early fanatical fundamentalist sect that resembled our modern-day Al Qaeda and other takfiri Salafi-jihadi terrorists. Bin Unaisa was said to be a follower of the earliest Kharijites.

These were the first Kharijites. Early split-offs from Ali’s army, they took part in the Battle of Nahrawan against Ali’s forces outside Madaen in what was known as the Triangle of Death in the Iraq War. In 661, the Kharijites assassinated Ali, one of the ultimate moments in the Sunni-Shia split.

At some point, bin Unaisa split from the Kharijites other than some of their early followers who were following a sect Al-Abaḍia, founded by ‘Abd-Allah Ibn Ibad who left with bin Unaisa. bin Unaisa said that a Muslim who committed any great sin was an infidel.

Considering his Islamic fundamentalist past, he also developed some very unorthodox views for a Muslim.

For instance, he said that God would send a new prophet to Persia (one more Iranian connection with the Yezidis). God would also send down a message to be written by this prophet in a book, and this prophet would leave Islam and follow the religion of the Sabeans or Mandeans. Nevertheless, he continued to hold some Kharijite beliefs, including that God alone should be worshiped and that all sins were forms of idolatry.

In line with this analysis, the first Yezidis were a sect of the Kharijites. The fact that bin Unaisa said that the new prophet would follow Sabeanism implies that he himself either followed this religion at one time or had a high opinion of it.

Muslim historians mention three main Sabean sects. All seemed to have derived in part from the ancient pagan religion of Mesopotamia. Sabeans were polytheists who worshiped the stars. After the Islamic conquest, they referred to themselves as Sabeans in order to receive protection as one of the People of the Book (the Quran mentions Jews, Christians, and Sabeans and People of the Book). One of the Sabean sects was called Al-Ḫarbâniyah.

The Sabeans believed that God dwelt within all things that were good and rational. He had one essence but many appearances, in other words. God was pure good and could not make anything evil. Evil was either accidental, necessary for life, or caused by an evil force. They also believed in the transmigration of souls (reincarnation).

It is interesting that the beliefs of this sect of Sabeans resemble the views of modern Yezidis. Therefore we can assume that Yezîd bn Unaisa believed in God and the Resurrection Day, respected angels and the stars, and yet was neither polytheistic nor a true follower of Mohammad.

At the same time, bn Unaisa lined himself up with those People of the Book who said that Mohammad was a prophet yet did not follow him (in this respect, he was similar to Western non-Muslims who acknowledge Mohammad as the prophet of the Arabs).

Although most orthodox histories of the Yezidis leave it out, it seems clear at this point that Yezîd bn Unaisa was the founder of the Yezidi religion in its modern form and that the Yezidis got their name from Yezîd bn Unaisa. This much may have been lost to time, for the Yezidis now say say that the word Yezidi comes from the Kurdish word Yezdan or Êzid meaning God.

After naming their movement after Yezîd bn Unaisa, the Yezidis learned of Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s reputation and become his followers, along with many Muslims, Christians, and Zoroastrians.

Presently, like their founder, the Yezidis believe in God and the Resurrection, expect a prophet from Iran, revere angels and stars, regard every sin as idolatry, respect Mohammad as a prophet yet do not follow him, yet at the same time pay no attention to Ali (recall that the early Kharijites assassinated Ali). Being opposed in a sense to both Mohammad and Ali, bn Unaisa is logically despised by both the Sunni and the Shia.

The fact that the Yezidis renounced the prophet of the Arabs (Mohammad) while expecting a new one from Iran logically appealed to a lot of Persians at the time. Hence, many former Zoroastrians or fire-worshipers from Iran joined the new religion, injecting their strain into this most syncretistic of religions.

There is good evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians.

The Yezidis around Mosul go by the surname of Daseni or Dawasen in the plural. Long ago, there was a Nestorian diocese in Mosul called Daseni or Dasaniyat. It disappeared around the time of Šeiḫ ’Adî. The implication is that so many of the members of this Diocese became Yezidis that the Diocese collapsed.

Furthermore, many names of Yezidi villages are actually words in the local Syriac (Christian) language, more evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians.

Adding even more weight to this theory, the Yezidis retain two Christian customs – the baptism and the Eucharist.

The Yezidis must baptize their children at the earliest possible age. At the baptism, the priest puts his hand on the child’s head as he performs the rite. Both customs mirror the Christian baptism precisely.

When a Yezidi couple marries, they go to a local Nestorian Church to partake of the Eucharist. The cup of wine they drink is called the Cup of Isa (Jesus). The Yezidis have great respect for Christian saints and houses of worship and kiss the doors and walls of churches when they enter them.

When a Yezidi woman goes to the home of her bridegroom on wedding day, she is supposed to visit every every religious temple along the way, even the churches. On the other hand, Yezidis never enter a mosque. Sadly, the Yezidi reverence for Christianity is not returned by the Eastern Christians, who despise the Yezidis as devil-worshipers.

Yezidis revere both Jesus and Mohammad as religious teachers, not as prophets. The group has survived via a hefty dose of taqqiya, or the Muslim tradition of dissimulation to ward off persecution, in this case pretending outwardly to be some type of Shia Muslim.

This is common for minority faiths around the region, including the Alawi and Druze, who have both proclaimed at the top of their lungs that they are Muslims and have hidden to the aspects of their religion which would cause the Muslims to disown them at best or kill them at worst.

Yet the primary Islamic influence on the Yezidis is actually Sufism, not Shiism per se. But even the fundamentalist Shiism practiced in Iran is very friendly to Sufism, while fundamentalist Sunnism is very hostile to this form of Islam.

There are traces of other religions. Hinduism may possibly be seen in the five Yezidi castes, from top to bottom Pir, Shaikh, Kawal, Murabby, and Mureed (followers).

The Yezidi caste called Mureeds are unfortunately about on a par with Dalits or Untouchables in Hinduism. Marriage across castes is strictly forbidden in Yezidism, as it has been disapproved in India.

Pre-Islamic Iran (Zoroastrianism) also had a caste system, and the base of the Yezidi religion seems to be derived from Persian Zoroastrianism. Hindu caste dates from 3,500 YBP.  The suggestion is that going back a few thousand years, caste was common in human societies and caste-based religions were religion. So caste may be the leftovers of an ancient human tradition.

The Yezidi, like the Druze and the Zoroastrians, do not accept converts, and like the Druze, think that they will be reincarnated as their own kind (Druze think they will be reincarnated as Druze; Yezidis think they will be reincarnated as Yezidis).

The Yezidis can be considered fire-worshipers in a sense; they obviously inherited this from the Zoroastrians. The Yezidis say, “Without fire, there would be no life.” This is true even in our modern era, for if we substitute “electrical power” for fire, our lives would surely diminish. Even today, when Kurdish Muslims swear on an oath, they say, “I swear by this fire…”

Many say there is a resemblance between Malak Taus and the Assyrian God Tammuz, though whether the name Malak Taus is actually derived from Tammuz is much more problematic. This connection is not born out by serious inquiry. Tammuz was married to the Assyrian moon goddess, Ishtar.

Ishtar the Goddess of the Moon, here represented as a bird goddess. Worship of birds is one of the oldest forms of pagan idolatry known to man. What is it about birds that made them worthy of worship by the ancients? It can only be the miracle of flight.

 

Where do the Yezidis come from? The Yezidis themselves say that they originally came from the area around Basra and the lower Euphrates, then migrated to Syria, and from there went to Sinjar, Mosul, and Kurdistan.

In addition to worshiping a bird-god, there are other traces of the pre-Islamic pagan religions of the Arabs in Yezidism.

Yezidis hold the number seven sacred, a concept that traces back to the ancient Mesopotamians. The Yezidis have seven sanjaks, and each one has seven burners of the flame. Their God created seven angels. The sculpture carved on the temple of Šeiḫ ’Adî has seven branches.

The Sabeans, another ancient religion of Mesopotamia who are now called star-worshipers by their detractors, also worshiped seven angels who guided the courses of seven planets. Believe it or not, it is from this formulation that our seven days of the week are derived. In the ancient religion of Assyria, Ishtar descended through seven gates to the land of no return. The ancient Hebrews likewise utilized the number seven in their religion.

An ancient seven-armed candelabra, a symbol nowadays used in the Jewish religion, with demonic sea monsters drawn on the base.

 

The Yezidis worship both the sun and moon at both their rising and setting, following the ancient Ḥarranians, a people who lived long ago somewhere in northern Iraq. Sun-worship and moon-worship are some of the oldest religious practices of Man. The ancient pagans of Canaan worshiped the Sun.

At the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the religion practiced there had little in common with Talmudic Judaism of today. For instance, the horses of the Sun were worshiped at that temple (see II Kings 25: 5, 11). The ancient Judeans, who the modern-day Jews claim spiritual connection with, actually worshiped the “host of heaven” – the Sun, the Moon and the Planets. So much for Jews being “the original monotheists”, eh?

In Babylonia, there were two temples to the Sun-God Shamas.

Another pre-Islamic Arab pagan belief is the belief in sacred wells and sanctuaries that contain them. These sacred springs contain water that has curative powers. The holy water found at the Zamzam Well in Mecca is an example; even to this day, Muslims bottle the water and carry it off for this very purpose. Often sacred clothes are used to make the pilgrimages to these waters because ordinary clothes are thought to contaminate the holy site.

In pre-Islamic days, when the pagans circled the rock at the Kaaba, they were completely naked. In Islam, men and women are supposed to remove their clothing and wear a special garb as they circulate around the rock. In Mandeanism, both men and women go to the Mishkana or tabernacle, take off their clothes, and bathe in the circular pool. Emerging, they put on the rasta, a ceremonial white garment.

At the temple of Šeiḫ ‘Adî, there is a sacred pool. The Yezidis throw coins, jewelry, and other things into this pool as offerings. They think that Šeiḫ ‘Adî takes these things from time to time. They also must remove their clothes, bathe, and wear a special garment when they visit the holy valley where this temple resides.

The ancient Arabs also worshiped trees. There were sacred trees at Nejran, Hadaibiya, and Mecca. The pagans hung women’s ornaments, fine clothes, ostrich eggs, weapons, and other items from these sacred trees.

Similarly, the Yezidis also worship trees. They have their favorite trees, and sick people go to these trees and hang pieces of cloth on them, hoping to get well. They believe that whoever takes one of these down will get sick with whatever disease the person who hung the cloth had.

An inscription of a sacred tree from Ancient Babylonian civilization. Trees were worshiped not just in ancient Arabia; they were also worshiped in Mesopotamia.

The Christian Trinity combined with the pagan Tree of Life in an interesting ancient Chaldean inscription that combines pagan and Christian influences. The Tree of Life was also utilized in Kabbalism, Jewish mysticism from the Middle Ages. Nowadays the symbol is used by practitioners of both White and Black Magic. Radical Islam committed genocide once again on the Christians of Iraq, including the Chaldeans earlier in the Iraq War.

 

Yet another Tree of Life, this time from ancient Assyria, an ancient civilization in Mesopotamia. The concept of a tree of life is a pagan concept of ancient pedigree.

The ancient Meccans used to worship stones. At one point the population of Mecca became so large that they had to move out of the valley where the Kaaba resided, so when the former Meccans formed their new settlements, they took rocks from the holy place in Mecca, piled them outside their settlements, and shrine or mini-Meccas out of these things, parading around the rock piles as they moved around the Kaaba.

In Palestine, there were sacred wells at Beersheba and Kadesh, a sacred tree at Shekem, and a sacred rock at Bethel. As in animism, it was believed that divine powers or spirits inhabited these rocks, trees, and springs. This tradition survives to this day in the folk religion of the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese.

The Yezidis also have certain stones that they worship. They kiss these stones in reverence. When the Yezidis reach the goal of their pilgrimage or hajj, they become very excited and start shouting. After fasting all day, they have a big celebration in the evenings, with singing, dancing, and gorging on fine dishes.

This hajj, where they worship a spring under Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s tomb called Zamzam and then climb a mountain and shoot off guns, is obviously taken from the Muslim hajj. Mecca also has a Zamzam Spring, and pilgrims climb Mount ‘Arafat on hajj.

The shouting, feasting, singing, dancing and general excitement is typical of a pagan festival. The non-Yezidi neighbors of the Yezidis claim that Yezidis engage in immoral behavior on this hajj. No one knows if this is true or not, but if they do, it may be similar to the festivals of the Kadesh tribe discussed in the Old Testament, where the Kadesh engaged in licentious behavior in their temples.

Although the Yezidis have a strict moral code, observers say that they allow adultery if both parties are willing. That’s pretty open-minded for that part of the world.

Why Do Haters Even Come Here?

I’ve had haters on this site forever now. For the most part they are gone these days after I put in a lot of new rules that I have been bashed all over the Internet as thin-skinned for having. One of the rules says more or less that you can’t comment here unless you like me. That leaves out 9

Nevertheless, from the very start, I have had many haters on this site. They came here all the time, posted many, many times and obviously absolutely hated my guts. For some idiot reason, I kept letting them post here forever. A lot of them were Jews and SJW’s. Some just hate me for some reason that I never understood.

Whenever I got heavily involved in any subject, be it Sasquatch, the Delphi Killings or whatever, I attracted huge mobs of insane haters. They tried to doxx me.

They set up hater webpages dedicated specifically to me. At one time there were two websites set up for the specific purpose of hating me. One had a forum! Needless to say they all tried to destroy my reputation, if I even have one. They also tried to say that I had no credibility whatsoever and that anything I said about anything had to be completely dismissed due to the source.

But seriously, why in God’s name would you come here and comment all the time if you hate my guts? I really think if you do that, you’re a bad person. Good people don’t troll the blogs of people they hate beating the crap out of them every day.

I mean there are thousands or probably millions of people who I absolutely hate with all my heart writing on the Internet. But why in God’s name would I go over to their pages and pick fights with them all day? Why pick fights with people? I don’t even pick fights with people I hate, and I hate a lot of people. Why should I pick a fight with my enemies? I mean they are bad enough as it is.

Why go over there and launch a war on them? I don’t like having enemies. That they exist is bad enough. I don’t like being in wars with people. That these wars exist is bad enough. I hate to say it, but it’s painful for me to have enemies and be in wars against people.

But why would I go over to a page of someone I don’t even know, who is not my enemy, who never did a thing to me, whose only problem is an awful attitude (like half the population on Earth) or being utterly full of shit (like half the population once again), and deliberately pick or start a fight with them? I’m not a fight picker. I’m not a fight starter. Not with anyone.

Maybe I should be. Maybe some people are so evil that I need to don my suit of armor and lance and charge into battle against them. Maybe I’m a bad person if I don’t launch a war against them.

Incidentally, SJW’s make exactly this argument. They say that if there are some racist people out there, and you are not actively picking fights or starting wars with these people, then you are evil too because that means you are just as racist as they are. It is extremely racist to not stand up and fight racism.

They actually believe that shit. Well I guess I must be an extreme racist against non-Whites because I just don’t feel like picking fights with any of these  racist boneheads.

Just give me my cape and torch already. I already have my cross to burn. I kept it handy for this very moment. I plead guilty and I am ready for my punishment.

I really hate to say this, and maybe it’s not true. I think that adults who go around picking fights and starting fights with people who never did one thing to them are not good people. In fact, most of them are bad people. Lousy people. No good people.

What’s wrong with them?

Many of them are evil minded sadists who get off on picking fights with other humans who never lifted a finger against them. They never graduated from 8th grade. They still think life is a junior high playground. You would be stunned at how many “adults” are actually like this.

I think this is pathetic and if you are an adult who continues to bully other humans in this way, no matter what they did, who never did one thing to you, I think there is something wrong with you. There’s something wrong with your heart. Clearly, it’s full of wickedness and malice. That means you are not a good person, sorry.

Generally speaking, all of these people are moralfags. Many moralfags like this. In particular, these are sanctimonious shits who are, believe it or not, “waging a holy war against evil.” They are the good ones, the knights in shining armor. They have the glory of God on their side.

The people they bully on and pick and start fights with are the bad ones – they are pure evil, Satan on Earth. These moralfags dedicate a good part of their more or less worthless fucktarded lives to going on a good versus evil jihad against the evil people.

Why are these people evil? Because of something they did to the white knight? Of course not, silly.  That would be reasonable. One thing a sanctimonious shit and moralfag is, if nothing else, is that they are never reasonable.

Moralfags hate the people they pick fights with because of what those people said or wrote. Usually not even because of what they did. They said the wrong thing. They wrote the wrong thing. What sort of a person are you that you are such a sanctimonious little turd that you spend your whole life deliberately picking fights with other human beings for things that they said or wrote?

Wow! Is human speech ever that bad? Why should I wage war against some moron for shooting off his mouth, no matter how stupid or unpleasant the things he said were? Why should I go pick a fight with him?

Look, I am sorry. If you are a moralfag, sanctimonious shit, or simple an evil-minded sadist who spends all your time on here hating on me and picking fights with me, you’ve got a very serious problem. Why don’t you go hang out on the page of someone you like? Why do you prefer to spend your time on here picking fights with me, someone you obviously hate.

I also think that no matter how much you dress up your moral jihad in sanctimonious colors, I think you are a bad person. Good people simply don’t go around picking fights with others. They don’t spend all their time hanging out with their enemies trying to start fights with them. If you do that, on what basis do you call yourself a good person. You’re a vicious-minded little shit if you ask me.

Life is for the lovers. Hell is for the haters.

 

Narcissism and Psychopathy Are on Continua Too

Very good book.

I just finished reading this book.  It it titled The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain

Author is a well known neuroscientist who discovered while looking at his brain scan that he is a psychopath himself! His scan looks exactly like that of a criminal psychopath. He is what is called a prosocial psychopath. These types or even a lot of the antisocial noncriminal psychopaths types are everywhere in politics, business, law enforcement, the military, law, and medicine. Psychopaths are attracted to all of those fields and all of these areas of work are swarming with those jerks. Most antisocial noncriminal psychopaths never spend one day of their lives in a jail or prison. They are what I like to call legal criminals, always skating  just on the edge of the law. Our government (see Mr. Trump) and many corporations are full of these “legal criminals.” I don’t think too much of them honestly.

I’ve met a few apparent antisocial criminal psychopaths in my life. The last one was a 23 year old woman! You really need to stay away from them.

Every psychopath who entered my life ended up harming me. For the most part, they all stole from me. You won’t be able to befriend these people without getting used and harmed because that is exactly what they do to most if not all other humans. Nobody emerges unscathed from befriending a psychopath. You’re not going to get away with it!

Psychopathy is also a continuum, just like…everything! The PCL scale ranges from 0-40. 0’s and 40’s are not common. For instance, I assure you that I am absolutely not a 0! But I am not a psychopath either, although my score is  for sure somewhat elevated above that of  goody-goods, cop-lovers, authoritarians, and choir boys.

On the other hand, I don’t really victimize innocent people, unless you count women, but that’s debatable as all’s fair in love and war! Sexual relationships are generally outside of morality. They can be immoral but they have to be pretty bad to get to that point. Players, pump and dumpers, easy women, etc. are generally not behaving immorally.

30+ is a psychopath and 20+ has serious psychopathic traits. Even in 0-20, if you score a 6 on the scale, and someone else scores a 12, they will appear more psychopathic to you. If we look at the scale that way and pick out everyone who clearly has elevated psychopathy, we are talking about 10-2

Most everything else in the world that is a subjective quality  is a continuum too. Philosophically, qualities and objects are different things. Objects are objective and generally are not on a continuum. An object either exists or it doesn’t, 100 or zero. There’s no such thing as part of an object or an object that is only there a little bit but not completely there.

For instance, all humans are narcissistic and you can score that on a scale too. Narcissism and self-esteem mean the same thing! So low narcissism means low self-esteem. And high narcissism means high self-esteem, which is considered to be normal and is actually thought of as good mental health, although some folks might find people with big egos like this a bit much.

Here we are into people who are vain, conceited, self-centered, etc. but nevertheless normal. None of those three things are indicative of narcissism.

Sure narcissists have all of those in spades, but narcissism goes far beyond that. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is pathological narcissism (Trump), and if you have been around anyone like that, trust me, they are real bastards and get on your nerves real fast if you are reasonably sane.

They are very annoying people and actually they are rather mean, ugly, and hostile in many ways. NPD’s are not very nice people!They are also profoundly selfish. They really don’t care about you! It’s all about them. What’s all about them? Everything. Face it, you’re either a taker or a giver in life. Narcissists are takers, not givers. They don’t necessarily take from everyone, but they definitely don’t give to much of anyone either. All of their stuff, material and otherwise, is for them.

A Look at the Mind of the Anti-Black Racist: The "Magic Negro" Theory

A lot of them do admit that some Black people seem good. They call these the magic niggers or magic Negroes. It’s 1 But you see even these racists can figure out that some Blacks (they underestimate 1 The Magic Nigger Theory allows them to accommodate the fact that even they, since they are basically sane, can see that millions of Blacks seem to be just fine, while still allowing them to hate the whole race. If millions were just fine, then it would be a moral quandary to hate the whole race. What about the magic ones? Do you hate them too? Well, why? How can you? They can’t, and they are decent enough to recognize this. So to assuage their guilty consciences, they come up with the Magic Nigger Theory that says that even the ones that act good are really just lousy niggers deep down inside, and sooner or later their lousy inner nigger nature will come out. The theory’s completely false, but it shows the lengths these people will go to try to mollify their obviously guilty consciences. As long as we see racists are pure evil sociopaths and not simply regular moral people like you and me that have gone astray on some immoral belief system, we will never understand these people. Racists feel guilty about strolling down this immoral path as as they properly should, so they devise all sorts of fancy cognitive strategies to deal with their guilt. And it’s important to note that if anti-Black racists were truly evil, they wouldn’t have any guilt in the first place. The fact that they feel guilty at all shows us that we are dealing with good folks who went astray rather than pure evil sociopaths. If you want to fight racism, at first you need to understand your enemy. Anti-racists fail on this front by not even bothering to understand why racists feel the way they do and what sort of people racists are in the first place. The first dictum is always To know thine own self is the rule, but the second dictum ought to be about how important it is to know your enemies.

A Look at the Mind of the Anti-Black Racist

They have bad experiences with quite a few people of the race and then they just decide to hate the whole race. Anti-Black racists make a deliberate cognitive error. They say that all Blacks suck. They have to say this because when you are that racist, saying that 4 These people still have consciences. It would bother their consciences to hate the whole group if only 4 Seeing racists as evil is an error. Most are not evil. If they were evil, they would not have guilty consciences. They are moral people with consciences like you and me, but they have taken on an immoral view, so they have to justify this to their own guilty consciences, and they jump through some moral hoops to do so.

Moral Philosophy: How Low Does a Culture Set the Bar as Far as Acceptable Behavior Goes?

Alpha Unit: Human beings are good at figuring out who they should defer to (or at least pretend to defer to) and who they can take advantage of. “Low class” people are probably very skilled at detecting weakness in other people, and once they know they can get away with treating you like crap, any respect they might have had for you takes a nosedive.

No problem. But then if I am such an obvious sucker or mark,  why don’t White people take advantage of me then? And I would argue that any culture that  habitually sizes up others to figure out if they are marks or not is frankly sociopathic. Because that’s exactly what sociopaths do? So I’m going to argue that this low class or ghetto Black culture is  somewhat sociopathic, certainly more sociopathic than White culture, even poor or working class White culture. Sure, White people, no matter how low class, yes, treated me like that, but in general, they never stooped to those lows. This “take advantage of this person” idea seems to be rampant among this group of low class or ghetto Blacks as Tulio calls them. I haven’t seen it a lot among Whites. Whites don’t usually take advantage of me like that, and in White culture, even poor and working class White culture, there are extreme rules about politeness that disallow a lot of the manipulative behavior that those who take advantage of others engage in. I mean I am not even talking crime here. I am talking very low level offenses more properly seen as politeness or manners violations. But even there, the differences between low class or ghetto Black culture and even low class White culture are stark and dramatic. Low class or ghetto Black act pretty bad from a White person’s perspective. I am not going to say it’s genetic. Let’s try culture. White culture, even poor White culture, has deep and profound politeness, manners, and proper behavior rules that result in the White culture we White folks like. I am looking at this low class or ghetto Black culture, and I am thinking that these people were raised in a permissive culture that set the bar way too low on behavior. They simply did not demand that these people behave in a proper manner. Proper manners and politeness rules were simply not instilled in them. Now by saying this, I am hopeful. I suggesting that this behavior is not genetic but is instead caused by a crap culture that lacks proper rules for decent behavior. Obviously a culture that sets the bar far too low could theoretically be taught and teach their children and fellows to behave better. If you are going to argue that this culture has the same politeness and manners rules of proper behavior as White culture does, I am going to call bullshit. If they instill these same values in their kids as we do, why do the people in this culture act so awful? And what’s wrong with saying that this is a crap culture that needs to instill better rules about behavior? Is there something wrong with saying that? I mean it’s a modest proposal, right? We can’t even say that this is a culture that needs to shape up?

Alt Left: Black People and Anti-Racists in General Will Never Understand Anti-Black Racism

I said in an old post that Blacks and antiracists in general should go to racist sites like Stormfront or racist humor sites like Chimpout or Niggermania to see why people really hate Black people. Actually, Stormfront would be a bad choice because they’re not very rational. The people at the other two sites make a lot more sense. Look through the Introductions section on those sites where new members introduce themselves and tell, well, tell why they hate Black people so much.

Blacks and anti-racists in general think the dislike, wariness, or out and out hatred of Black people is the height or irrationality. It’s crazy and it’s evil.

Now I would argue that if you are a Black person who acts just fine and you are still a victim of racism, this is serious moral error. I have some great Black folks on my site. I don’t personally know Alpha, Tulio, Greg, Phil or the other Blacks on my site, but what I’ve learned about them is that they all seem like great people. In particular, they behave quite well.

When I think that these people, my Black friends, will suffer racism, prejudice, unfairness and hate because of things that other people did, it almost makes my blood boil. It’s so wrong.

Specifically, you are being held responsible for the behavior of the other members of your race when you have done absolutely nothing wrong at all. It’s basically collective punishment. Why should that Black person over there, who acts as decently as any other citizen, be subjected to racist hatred because a lot of his racial brethren act terrible? That’s immoral on a deep and powerful level, but it’s also understandable.

The problem with Moral Philosophy is that a lot of immoral behavior is understandable. Humans are not wild, slavering, drooling, crazed beasts of the field. Even people who act bad often have some pretty sensible reasons for doing so. The problem is that behavior that is sensible (not irrational) and understandable is often nevertheless morally wrong.

Black people and antiracists just don’t get it. Racists don’t hate Black people for no reason. Few people hate Black people “because of the color of their skin.” Actually, if they did, it would make it a lot easier for people to hate anti-Black racists because hating someone due to the color of their skin is pretty awful.

Few people hate Black people because of how they look. Asians look pretty funny too to us Whites, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. If Blacks acted like Norwegians or Japanese, I think anti-Black racism would be at a  pretty low level.

Which brings us to the cause of almost all anti-Black racism: It’s the behavior of Black people. Period. If you go to the sites I listed above, you will notice that almost immediately. On the Introductions section, over and over, you will see almost everyone there say that they hate Black people because of the way they act. Then they will list a lot of very negative experiences they had with Black people.

And in a way, you can’t blame them. It’s wrong to go so racist due to these types of experiences, but I see why people do it. I’ve had many of the same negative experiences with Black people, and it is only with conscious effort that I have kept myself from falling into the racism hole.

Not because it’s wrong, although it is. Mostly because it’s a hole that I don’t want to fall down into. And it is wrong to hate well-behaved Blacks because so many of their tribe act terrible. To me, that’s a moral error on a very serious scale. It would be hard to live with myself if I felt that way.

Blacks and antiracists simply refuse to believe that this is the reason why Blacks are disliked. They get very agitated and angry if you so much as mention it. According to them, Black people don’t act bad at all. They act just fine. Except anyone who has spent a lot of time around Blacks knows that’s just not true. Yet Blacks keep insisting that Black people act just fine. People say Blacks act bad, and Blacks say well, White people act bad too.

Yes…but…the difference is the numbers. Compared to Blacks, the number of White people who act bad is quite low, and the degree to which they act bad is on a much lower level. Looking out at a population level, there’s much less bad behavior, and what bad behavior there is is typically at a lower level.

Now you go over to a Black area and the bad behavior is everywhere. There are far more folks acting bad, and they are acting bad in a far worse way than Whites do.

Actually there are behaviors that low class Blacks engage in routinely that you will almost never see a White person engage in, simply because in White culture, that behavior is regarded as unspeakably low.

Even poor and working class Whites often have strong moral and behavioral codes and stringent rules of behavior. I don’t think these Whites act better because of their genes. It’s probably culture. But there is something in even pretty low White culture that is above even average level behavior of low class Blacks.

So when Whites see Blacks routinely doing things that are absolutely outrageously rude and disgusting beyond all comprehension, we are outraged. We are outraged on a moral level. We are morally offended at what to us is outrageously bad behavior.

Black people won’t have any of this. They jump up and down and yell, “Why do you care? Why do you think about us anyway?” It’s simple.

These Blacks have never studied Moral Philosophy. Behavior that is so outrageously bad that it is almost never seen in one’s culture because it’s universally regarded as the lowest of the low outrages people on a moral level.

People who get outraged on a moral level are often not bad people. At worst they might be too good – i.e., prigs like my late father. But Black people get furious at good people who are morally outraged by people acting awful and say that these outraged folks are bad people. No they’re not. If they were bad people, they wouldn’t be so outraged by terrible behavior. Only good people get outraged by people who act awful.

Good people have relatively high morals, and when they see lowly behavior, it sets off a sense of moral outrage in them. Black people say that these people are evil for having high morals and a sense of moral outrage for despicable and low behavior. This is so wrong. No one is evil for having high morals and a sense of outrage over anti-civilizational behavior. It’s never evil to come from a place of elevated morals.

The problem is that Black people will simply never admit that Black people tend to act worse, a Hell of a lot worse, than other races, such as White people. They’ll go to their graves insisting that this is not true. Yes, there are people in every race that act bad, of course there are.

But humans are smarter than that. Humans are intelligent enough to play the odds game.

In my youth, I had many encounters with my fellow Whites whom I lived with. Of course these were a mixed bag, but I had many good encounters, and I was able to make many good friendships. Sure, I ran into some bad White people who harmed me, but their numbers were not large. In general, you could make friends with a White person and be pretty well assured that they would treat you right.

My very first encounter with Black people – on the street outside my father’s school in Watts at age 12 – was terrible. My father was inside working in  his classroom and he had foolishly left us outside.

Two very young and very feral Black boys asked us to play some game with them – I forget which – and very quickly they were trying to steal from us, and there was a wild fistfight in the streets. My little six year old brother took on both of those little ratfucks. This sort of thing would almost never happen with the White boys our age, and we had dealt with some pretty bad White bullies. But even the worst White bullies weren’t that bad.

My next encounter was with JD, one of the few Black guys at my school. He was friends with my group of friends so I became a sort of friend of his, although he was always a bit of an ass. One night he left me in a park for 45 minutes for absolutely no reason at all, just for a joke.

Somehow he came back around later, and my friends in the car with him saw me and picked me up. My other friends were all laughing, but none of them would have done that to me. In fact, very few Whites I knew at that time would do that to me. JD simply thought that was a hilarious joke.

JD had a brother named MD. He was a former football player, and I rather liked him. He had parties at his house, and the 14-16 year old high school kids in my crowd would hang out there, drinking cheap wine and smoking weed. He was a good jolly fellow, but he was later arrested for having sex with teenage White girls.

There was a Black man named Mr. Matthews at my school. He was the only Black teacher. He was also a jolly good-natured Black man. While I was there, he was arrested for having sex with a 15 year old White girl student. People said it was racism, but I doubt it. I think he did it.

Ok, now I am in high school, and I’ve met a whole five Black people.

  • Two tried to steal from me and then picked a fight with me.
  • One left me in a park for 45 minutes as a joke.
  • Two were grown men who got arrested for having sex with teenage White girls.

5-5.

At least two of them were in jail or juvey, and another two should have been.

All five acted pretty damn bad. Their rate of bad behavior was far higher and an order of magnitude greater than the Whites I knew.

The statistics prove that Black people as a race act pretty damned horribly no matter how you slice the cake. Line up any number of statistics on any number of behavioral variables, and there are the Blacks, leading the charge in the bad behavior brigade.

Why do we care? Because morals are important to us. Because we have deeply held moral beliefs, and people who violate our morals in an outrageous way offend us to an incredible degree. Moral outrage is a thing. It’s a normal thing. A rational thing. A morally outraged person is not usually a bad person.

Black people can huff and puff all they want to about how evil Whites are for feeling morally outraged. “Well, don’t think about us then!” That’s not helpful. It’s Blacks who are acting awful. The solution to people acting awful isn’t to call the people who are offended by them evil and order the offended to look the other way and mind their own business.

The problem that keeps circling back around itself is that Blacks refuse to believe that Black people act bad. You can throw anecdotes at them, and they will cry, “Anecdotes!” You can throw impressions and intuition at them, and they will cry “Impressionistic!,” “Unscientific!” and demand scientific studies. Then you throw scientific studies at them, and they order you to shut up and take down the damned studies, and then they yell that the studies are wrong.

The Emperor’s walking naked down the street and everyone is looking at him and laughing, and Black people are jumping up and down and screaming that he has clothes on and screaming that the people who see that he’s naked are evil. That never works very long.

You can scream at people all you want that their eyes aren’t seeing what they see, that their ears aren’t hearing what they hear, that their very senses aren’t sensing what they sense. People will get confused for a bit and believe you and think maybe they are hallucinating after all, but then they will revert right back to sense and reason.

And when you yell at people like that and accuse them of hallucinating, Blacks and antiracists are gaslighting people on huge scale, 10’s of millions of people at a time. Are they proud of that?

And this is the saddest part of all. As long as Black people keep acting so terrible, anti-Black racism will never go away. The antiracist project will be forever doomed. This is heartrendingly sad to me because at its root base, at its core, the antiracist project is a noble one. Wouldn’t a society with a diminished degree of racism be a wonderful thing? It would for me. It would be like a dream.

But the antiracist project will keep crashing back on itself because anti-Black racism is driven overwhelmingly, especially at this late date, by bad Black behavior and little else. This is very depressing, and I don’t know what to say about it, but hollering that Black people act just fine isn’t going to cut it. People will believe a lie for only so long until reality keeps coming back and smashing them in the face and wakening them from their socially drugged slumber.

How SJW's Are a Threat To Human Intelligence Itself

Thinking Mouse: “What about the exceptions?!?” is good for research, though. You want to know as much as possible.

Even in research, we don’t care much about that. I write for academic journals. In a lot of fields, we don’t care about exceptions. We just look for a statistical effect. Of course we have to discuss the exceptions statistically in our findings, but in a lot of fields, no one really cares about them. The purpose of life is looking for patterns that help you to explain reality. The SJW What about the exceptions? nonsense is intended to completely stop humans for seeking or discussing any patterns in humans because all patterns in humans are necessarily generalizations, stereotypes, and various forms of bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and all the rest of the folly . On Quora, they often ask people with genius+ IQ’s (140+) how they think. Over and over you hear that they are always looking for patterns everywhere they go in life. If all patterns in human life are generalizations, stereotypes, and various forms of bigotry, and if What about the exceptions? nullifies all generalizations, we are talking about wiping out the very pillars of human thought. All this dangerous silliness is coming out of postmodernism, a theory which denies even the possibility of truth or the ability of humans to discover it. That’s why in all Identity Politics like feminism, gay rights, trans rights, anti-racism, all the rest of the foolishness, you always get hand-waving away of the scientific facts they don’t like because the facts conflict with their precious theory. All Identity Politics is based on the primacy of theory over fact, and as such, all IP is intellectually fraudulent. The fact that it is mandatory for all humans in the West to go along with a manifestly intellectually fraudulent and provably false set of theories on pain of job firing, career destruction, etc. is one of the most anti-scientific and anti-intellectual outrages of our modern era. I lay this whole travesty at the foot of the intellectual joke called the Cultural Left, a miasma of propaganda and lies masquerading as truth and science.  The SJW’s are an actual menace to human intelligence itself.

High Illegitimacy Rates and Dysfunction among Lower Class Blacks

Greg Rambo: “The current plight of Black America has more to do with the government’s subsidizing of pregnancy and desertion than anything else.”* When you have a nearly 7 * T. Sowell

We don’t really support them anymore. Welfare is $300/month. Black women have out of wedlock rates like that all over the Black world and they don’t get a nickel. Further this is based on a delusion. First that Black women have kids to get the check when the check doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of raising a kid. Socialist states all over the world subsidize children with fathers or not and we don’t see epidemics of illegitimacy. So if those women are having kids to get checks, they’re retarded. You get a check for $300, but it costs so much more than that to raise the kid? How are you coming out ahead? You sink yourself further into the hole with every new kid you have. It also suggests that Black women will start acting more responsible if we cut off the checks. Well they won’t. This is happening for societal reasons not monetary reasons. Another suggestion is that if we cut off the checks, these Black men will suddenly start sticking around and supporting their kids. Yeah, right! Come on. Illegitimacy itself is not a serious problem if you look at it statistically. There are effects but they are moderate rather than major. The problem is the rate of it. A community can handle a 2 There is another reason. A moral reason. It is the argument that children need to be supported. Single motherhood is not optimal, but as a socialist, I refuse to cut off funds for single mothers and their children. Give them the check in the form or rent vouchers, IBT cards, cards to pay their bills, whatever. Not just cash in their hands. In the 1990’s, Richard Nixon himself bemoaned the Clinton welfare “reforms.” in an interview. He shook his head at the interviewer and said in a note of dismay and disgust: “I can’t believe what we are doing nowadays…I mean…beating up on the single Moms…of all things…come on…” Although I agree that the high illegitimacy birth rate is catastrophic for Black people. It’s not doing them any favors and I think Blacks would act a lot better if that rate would go down. Before 1960, the Black illegitimacy rate was 2 Illegitimacy and being raised by a single mother predict a lot of bad things. Basically: The girls develop Daddy issues and often turn into sluts trying to fuck their way to an ethereal Daddy who is always fading out of the picture. The boys turn into criminals. I don’t want to beat up on single Moms. They get beat up enough. But it’s not the ultimate family arrangement, and it does cause some problems in the offspring.

Alt Left: "Sleazy Gay Men Who Just Want Boys"

Great article from a gay man who has now gone religious and is opposed to homosexuality. The problem with these guys is that they say homosexuality is a sin against God according to Christians. Regardless of whether that is true or not, it’s not a scientific argument and most us, even Christians like me, are most interested in the science than the doctrine when it comes to that. Anyway, I don’t think homosexual behavior is sinful.

There are other problems with these guys. They all adopt an anti-essentialist point of view on homosexuality. Of course, we on the Alt Left are essentialists or we are nothing. The best available evidence that is the homosexuals somehow get wired up that way by the time they hit puberty.

The best theory is that homosexuality is a developmental disorder akin to left-handedness. These people seem to argue that gays choose to be that way, when that does not seem to be the truth.

They all argue that homosexuals can be cured, while there is no evidence that they can be. They are also against gay marriage of course, which I support.

Other than that, a lot of these men offer an immaculate critique of modern gay culture that cannot be found anywhere else because PC/SJW Culture means that gay men are a protected class above all critique. Apparently it’s illegal to even look at them wrong.

It’s long been known that homosexuals have high levels of mental pathology along with a long list of medical problems. The way homosexuals live shaves a full 20 years off their lifespans. A lot of gay men are are flaky and sleazy. Crime is high in the gay community as is a general debasement of morality and culture itself, as everything of value is subsumed to the supreme value of sex above all else.

That gay male culture has very high rates of pederasty and that pederasty has been elevated as the ultimate gay male relationship above all others has been true since Antiquity. Older gay men have very high rates of sex with young teenage boys, much higher than older straight men do with young teenage girls. Yet no one says a word about this because gay male culture is silent on the older gay man-teenage boy question.

These relationships, many of them illegal, are ubiquitous across the gay community. They are regarded with an accepting or amnesic shrug, and these older men are almost never turned in. Gay organizations deal with these relationships constantly, and they never turn the man in even one time. Yet we hear no end of screeching from the Puritan-feminists about how all of us straight men are pedophiles for turning our heads when a hot 17-year-old girl walks by.

The following is a reproduction of the article linked at the beginning of the text. It contains “graphic true language of the sinfulness of homosexual sin,” according to the author.

I have to thank Michelangelo Signorile and other gay writers who have come forward in the Huffington Post and elsewhere in response to the discussion of Dustin Lance Black’s relationship with a nineteen-year-old boy. After decades of false pretenses, they have at last come clean with the American public and admitted that the gay movement cannot succeed unless taboos against man-boy sex are at last knocked down.

I had tiptoed around the issue until this week. I had been attacked as “anti-equality” and “anti-gay” for over a year, even without bringing up what I knew about the rampant pederasty (sex between men and teenage boys as opposed to pedophilia which is sex between men and boys.) Even as my defense of children’s rights made me vulnerable to charges of conspiring with evil homophobic rubes, I was holding back an even more difficult dimension of my opposition to same-sex parenting.

I had known that beneath the appeals to gay “normalcy,” there was an underbelly in the gay male world of men sleeping with boys.

I avoided mentioning this when I testified in St. Paul, Paris, and Brussels. Nonetheless I had engaged in the debate about same-sex parenting with the unspoken suspicion that many gay male couples, if given the chance to be foster parents or adoptive fathers, would end up having sex with boys in their care or exposing their charges (both boys and girls) to a gay male culture that trampled on the generally understood prohibition against older adults sleeping with vulnerable young people.

The result, I feared, would mirror many of the negative impacts on gay boys that have occurred as a result of “It Gets Better,” the Gay-Straight Alliances in high schools, sexualized curricula, online gay sites like Chatroulette and TrevorSpace (not to mention the creeps on Craigslist), and gay mentorship programs.

These public policy projects have blossomed over the last twenty-five years in the United States with the best of intentions – to keep gay boys from killing themselves out of despair.

As it turns out, gay boys don’t usually kill themselves simply because people reject them for being gay. The vast majority of people really don’t care what anybody does in their private sex life, which is why Dayna Morales, the tragic lesbian waitress in New Jersey, had to fabricate the tale of homophobic patrons stiffing her on a tip.

Homophobia is far less powerful than the reigning callousness and indifference of society to what’s going on with other people. So gay boys are far more likely to kill themselves not because people care about their gayness and hate them for it but rather because most people don’t care about their gayness at all other than horny gay men who are much older than they and fuck them up the ass when they aren’t ready to deal with the emotional minefield of homosexuality.

All these naive programs placed boys in contact with adult gay men based on the assumption that the gay adults wouldn’t end up using such arrangements to corner boys and sodomize them. That assumption was criminally negligent.

I speak crudely because as the statistics from the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control reveal, the end result of many such gay mentor programs has been many adults inserting their penises into boys’ anuses. Hence there has been a spike in the HIV infection rate of boys aged 13-19, of which 9

Studies into HIV infection rates among black gay men reveal that blacks are infected with HIV at an exorbitant rate because they of all the races are most likely to be engaged in relationships with males much older or much younger than they are. Black gays do not engage in higher rates of unprotected sex, nor do they have unusually high or risky numbers of sex partners. Rather, their Achilles’ heel is their greater penchant for what Mr. Signorile lovingly calls “intergenerational” sex.

One of the top indicators of HIV infection risk is a tendency to date much older or much younger than oneself, and this makes sense for a basic reason: the kind of men who disregard the taboo against men fucking boys will usually also disregard other ethical limitations to their gratification, seeing limits as unfair or prejudiced.

Condoms disappear somewhere in the confusion – and no, making people feel less guilty about doing something doesn’t make what they do safer, as the recent statistics shockingly tell us.

Let’s forget HIV for an instant however and the overall issues of sexually transmitted diseases. What if there were no STD’s at all to be spread from older men to boys through anal and oral sex?

There is still tremendous emotional vulnerability in a boy who is considering gay sex which isn’t there with girls or boys who are 10 A boy who starts getting fucked by men finds his whole future rewritten – it is not only a single event dealing with one particular partner but rather a foundational shift in his imagined future.

He will be in the gay community, living by its rules. Once an old man’s penis finds its way into the boy’s anus, the boy has to redefine his life goals, envision a future without women, children, or access to the cultural mainstays enjoyed by the 9

He must picture spending his time in the constricted, tiny circle of gay bars, gay associations, and gay cliques, looking for love in a tiny, somewhat incestuous pool of familiar local characters; gay men who will flit in and out of his life, vanishing without a morning call-back after a year and then popping up two years later on the arm of his best friend.

There is also the sheer physical change that happens when you are a boy and you first start letting men fuck you. It’s painful. You are being taught how to mix pain and pleasure, which increases the likelihood that you’re going to develop masochistic behaviors. You feel like a different person. As someone who got fucked by a lot of men in their forties and fifties when I was a teenage boy, I speak from real, extensive experience.

So when you as a grown man fuck a boy, you are inflicting a host of potential anxieties on him. You are throwing his masculinity and sexual identity in doubt. You are forcing him to picture himself growing old and dying without having a wife and children, without giving his parents a daughter-in-law and grandchildren – being stuck in a claustrophobic world full of flaky and sleazy men.

The recent statistics from many sources all seem to confirm that man-boy sex is a rampant problem in the gay community, and it’s destroying people’s lives.

The Department of Justice found that gay teens are much more likely to be in physically abusive relationships not to mention emotionally abusive relationships, with one of the key factors the fact that they are involved so often in unstable sexual liaisons with men much older than they are. While the report included a statement about the lack of “role models” for gay teens, we must extrapolate a deeper problem that straight researchers might not be able to piece together. Gay teens have role models, but the role models are fucking them. That messes up their heads.

Many of the recent cases involving gay foster dads or gay mentors who sexually abused boys do not reflect a sinister, evil psychology in the adult gay male, but rather a frighteningly innocent belief on the part of the adult that the youth wanted to get fucked and somehow fucking him was part of helping him. Walter L. Williams, the founder of USC’s Gay and Lesbian Archives, got caught in sex traffic with underage boys in the Philippines and elsewhere, after decades of writing in favor of more open attitudes toward sexuality. He most likely thought that he was doing something benevolent by fucking boys. He had been after all a veritable father figure to gay college students for years. Mark Newton, who manufactured a baby with an illegal Russian surrogate and then used the child he bought as an international sex slave, said it was an “honor” to have been a gay father as he was sentenced and sent off to prison. He was profiled by Australia’s ABC in 2010 as the idyllic example of same-sex parenting, beneath a headline, Two Dads Are Better than One. He and his husband, Peter Truong, probably felt that the toddler was experiencing pleasure with penises in his mouth, since the experience was pleasant for the adult getting a blow job. There is a failure of ego differentiation in many of these cases (of which these are only a sliver.) The gay male adult, fed a steady diet of LGBT narratives about people being born gay and deserving sexual gratification as a civil right, cannot comprehend that what they believe and feel isn’t exactly the same as what the child is believing and feeling. Since so much argumentation about gay parenting has hinged on the notion of “gay couples providing a loving home,” many gay adults charged with youths get lost in the nebulous meaning of “loving.” They have been prompted to believe that if what they do to young people comes from affectionate motives, it’s good. Which is a very convenient way to talk oneself into fucking a boy, unfortunately. I am sure that Dan Savage felt that he was helping young boys with “It Gets Better,” though it seems that the tens of thousands of testimonials from adult gays merely encouraged boys to go out and get fucked up the ass by older men, with the result that now a lot of them are going to die from AIDS. And then think of Caleb Laieski, the teen activist honored by President Obama, who helped a fortysomething gay policeman score with a fourteen-year-old boy who was questioning his sexuality. As Caleb and his adult conspirator prepare to go off to prison as well, I cannot say that they were ill intended. He and the gay policemen were leaders in the gay community and thought they were helping the fourteen-year-old by breaking him in. Unfortunately for them, the boy got suicidal and exposed the entire activist game as a terrible exploitative ruse. While neither Michael Jackson nor Jerry Sandusky identified as gay, it is worth noting that they both also viewed their suspicious congress with boys as part of nurturing and affection. These abhorrent data result from the gay movement’s uncritical celebration of the penis and its supposed liberating power. Your penis is not an instrument of charity, gentlemen. Your penis is a loaded weapon. You must understand that. Mr. Signorile speaks of intergenerational sex as “nurturing” and educational. His views on this reveal that the modern gay male has little to no concept of nurturing and educational relationships except when such connections involve inserting their penises into people and ejaculating into them. It’s bad enough that relationships between gay male adults have to be hypersexualized. When your beginning mindset is, “I can help and coddle this young boy, and fuck him too,” and you see nothing wrong with this, in fact believing that any resistance to it is based on homophobia (as Mr. Signorile has written in stark terms), you may be qualified to lead the gay community in developing its imagination, its fantasies, and its sense of self-actualization. But you should not have custody of children, teenagers, or young adults. You should not be asking the American people to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and then place millions of future 18-year-olds in basic combat training under gay NCO’s who think this way. You should not be asking the American people to allow gay leaders in the Boy Scouts. You definitely should not be listed as a potential foster care home, let alone candidates for adoption. The response from Mr. Signorile that the 19-year-old in the Dustin Lance Black case was a “consenting adult” makes it all the more urgent that the American people reject the ligbitist push to change laws about adoption, employment non-discrimination, and the like. Mr. Signorile, like most in the movement, believes that anything legal is okay. It shouldn’t be surprising that they are therefore so interested in changing laws to make more of the sleazy things they do legal. I didn’t arrive at these harsh declarations because I hated gay people or because I am part of the gay community and have a deep abiding love for my gay brothers; I got here because I love young people and understand that it’s better that gay men don’t try to fuck them, which they will, if given the chance. That scares me. As a professor, I live and operate with the understanding that people in a seasoned, mature, mentor-like role must express love toward those who are in the learning, young, and undeveloped role, without unzipping our pants and getting our penises involved. As a father, I live and operate with the understanding that my daughter should go forth in the world and be mentored by adults who can differentiate between teaching her about professional life, etc., and involving her in the fraught act of sexual intercourse. As a veteran of the US Army Reserves (as undistinguished as my service admittedly was), I live and operate with the understanding that training and discipline do not mix well with orgasms and erections and ejaculation. These are all understandings — norms, if you will — that an adult entrusted with children has to walk around with. It has to be second nature. It must be something beyond question, beyond editorial review, beyond negotiation. While women face this issue, it is even more acutely an issue for men, who have a long history and perhaps biological predisposition, to inject their penis into situations and confuse their own quest for pleasure with their obligation to teach, mentor, and guide young people. Heterosexual men who defy these rules with girls are subject to swift recrimination, even if they get away with it because it’s supposedly “legal.” Colleagues of mine who have violated the sacred sexual barrier between teacher and student and made love to their pupils have lost tremendous respect from me and especially from females in the profession. Non-commissioned officers or officers who sleep with female subordinates are subject to severe penalties in the military. Think of what happened to Bill Clinton and David Petraeus as a result of their inability to manage their penises properly in the presence of younger forbidden fruit. Dustin Lance Black is thirty-nine years old and almost the same age as his boyfriend’s father when the latter passed away recently. Judging from what the boy said in the video and what others have reported as information gleaned from people close to him, he looked up to Dustin Lance Black and wanted to learn from him, be mentored, be held and fathered by him. It’s entirely possible that the boy broached the topic of sex and wanted the older man to teach him about homosexual intercourse–as a professor, trust me, I am familiar with how 19-year-olds can be sexually aggressive, even demanding that a relationship that should be based on mentorship turn into sex. When I say that our penises are loaded weapons, I do not mean to say that the “victims” of gay penises aren’t sometimes eager to have access to them. But the adult in the room has to be able to say “no,” tell the college freshman to calm down, and keep his zipper up and his penis under lock and key. That’s part of being a grown-up. If you can’t say “no” to a young person who wants to take a look at your penis, you have no business trying to pass the Every Child Deserves a Family Act.

Related articles

Why I Cannot Blame Russia and India for Taking on the Gays (americanthinker.com) Michelangelo Signorile: Tom Daley Is 20 Years Younger than Dustin Lance Black… So What? (huffingtonpost.com) Michelangelo Signorile: No, Pope Francis Is Not the LGBT Person of the Year (huffingtonpost.com) Poor Black and Hispanic Men Are the Face of H.I.V. (thelib2013.wordpress.com) Man-Boy Sex and Its Long Tradition among Gay Men (robertlindsay.wordpress.com) Michelangelo Signorile at Odds With HRC over Positive ‘Duck Dynasty’ Message (towleroad.com) Gay Teens Are At Higher Risk for HPV, Study Shows (thegayclassifieds.wordpress.com) Study Finds HPV Common in Young Sexually Active Gay Men (counselheal.com)

Alt Left: Lousy Arguments the Left Uses to Counter “Racist Facts”

Below is a list of the “racist facts” that I listed in a previous post. But first of all, a look at some great progress. Some good news for once.

Blacks Have Made Much Progress in Ameliorating Black Problems and Discrepancies

Yes, Blacks have closed the achievement gap by 1/3, which shows it was not purely genetic. However, 2/3 of the gap remains. Blacks in the UK have closed the achievement gap completely according to scores on the latest high school achievement tests.

Yes, the Black crime rate can go down and has gone down dramatically in the last 25 years. But that occurred at the same time as the crime rate for everyone dropping dramatically. It’s definitely true that you can have large swings in the Black crime rate. Black violent crime is down 4

Nevertheless, crime reduction becomes an arms race as the White rate declines concurrently with the Black rate so the Black 6X discrepancy remains.

Yes, there are Black societies in Africa with over 1 million members who have homicide rates as low as the Japanese. This shows that a high Black crime and violent crime is not a genetic inevitability. And it shows that genes are not destiny.

An excellent environment which does not occur naturally very often (I call it a superenvironment) can wipe out the entire Black tendency towards crime and violence (which I believe is genetic). The problem is that replicating these “superenvironments” Blacks need to get these problems down to low levels seems to be quite difficult to achieve.

The Black IQ gap has closed significantly among Black children, among whom it has closed by 4

The Black single parent rate was quite low in the 1950’s when 8

There are wealthy Black areas like Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights that reportedly have low crime rates. They are the opposite of rundown, slummy, blighted, dangerous Hellholes. Apparently if you get a lot of wealthy Blacks in one place, they can create a well-functioning metropolis.

However, in general, it seems that not a whole lot can be done to ameliorate the Black problems and discrepancies below. This is why most of the people talking about such things resort to extreme solutions such as bringing back Jim Crow and legal discrimination or forming a separate White state.

They advocate such extreme solutions because those are the only real ways to deal with the problems below. The problem here is that the solution is immoral. Immoral solutions are not acceptable no matter the problem.

Now we will look at why there is little point harping on and on about these discrepancies unless you can do something about it. If you don’t have even a partial solution to a problem, why talk about it?

Why Bother Writing about “Racist Facts?”

If there’s no solution, and if writing about this just gets me called racist, makes Blacks and liberals hate me, and stimulates a lot of White racism, why bother to write about this stuff unless I want to use these facts as a stick to beat Black people with? See what I mean? That’s why I don’t bother often to write about these things. I write about them once in a while, but I don’t like to harp on and on about them.

What’s the point? There’s no way to fix them, and all writing about them does is cause a lot of bad vibes, exacerbate hostility and racism in society, and make even more people hate me. Why do it?

Now we will look at the absolutely awful rejoinders that the liberal/Left uses as rejoinders against “racist facts.”

Bad Arguments Used by the Left to Counter “Racist Facts”

Nevertheless, the Left still has no arguments or very poor arguments for all of the facts below. I would like to point out first of all that the Left gets away with calling all of the above facts racist because they say they are lies. So we need to determine if these are lies or not. If they’re not lies, then the facts below are not racist. How can you have racist facts? It’s weird.

Even things like “Black schools tend to perform more poorly,” they will say is a lie because it’s a generalization. They will say, “Lots of Black students do very well in school, so that’s a racist lie!” This argument is a logical fallacy, but never mind. The rest of the allegations, they will just say they are not true.

I will list the previously stated facts below along with the bad arguments that the liberal/Left uses to try to refute them. I would like to point out that all of these liberal/Left rejoinders are very bad arguments. All are illogical or do not even attempt to counter the original statement. And in general, they rely in a huge way on all sorts of logical fallacies.

  •    Black people are less intelligent than Whites as measured accurately by IQ tests. They will say that’s a lie. However, it is simply a 10
  •     Black people impose considerable costs on society. They will say that’s a lie or White people impose costs on society too, so therefore the statement is a lie. This is factually true. Black people per capita impose much greater costs on society than other races.
  •     Your average Hispanic has an IQ of 90. They will say that’s a lie. But this is a straight up pure scientific fact. There’s no debate about that figure either. It’s accepted across the board.
  •     Blacks commit 6X more crime than Whites. They will either say that’s a lie, or it’s due to poverty (which means it’s still true) or that Whites commit just as much crime except they commit corporate crime. Those are all very bad arguments. First of all it is true. Second of all it’s not due to poverty. West Virginia is the poorest state in the country and it has the second lowest crime rate. The kicker? It’s almost all White. As far as corporate crime, so what? Does it effect you personally? Anyway it goes on constantly no matter who’s in power and there’s no way to reduce it. Since it’s always at the same level, isn’t it a good idea to lower street crime then? Are individuals truly and obviously harmed by corporate crime the same way they are by street crime? I say no. When I am walking in a shady neighborhood at midnight, and there is a guy in a suit and tie walking behind me, I will not start running away because I’m afraid he’s about to violate a health and safety code. Get it?
  •     Blacks are 1
  •     Large cities with high percentages of Black people tend to be slummy, dangerous, rundown, blighted hellholes. They will ask you to define those terms, say there are nice areas in all of those cities, say it is due to discrimination (which means it’s still a fact), or say White cities are slummy too. The terms are obvious. So what if there are nice parts of those towns? Does that obviate the places like look like they just got leveled in a WW2 bombing run? Discrimination doesn’t cause heavily Black cities to turn into slummy, dangerous, rundown, blighted hellholes. You know what causes those cities to be like that? Black people. Black people created those cities in precisely that way of their own free chosen will for whatever reason. There are almost no slummy White cities in the US. Haven’t seen one yet and I’ve been all over.
  •     Blacks tend to be more impulsive than Whites. They will say that’s a lie and demand evidence. Never mind the candy bar test originally done in the Caribbean and redone in the US and elsewhere in the Caribbean now replicated ~15 times. These tests showed conclusively that at least Black children are vastly more impulsive than White children at off the charts rates. And it has to be genetic. Those kids were only six years old.
  •     8
  •     Many Black men do not stick around and take care of their children. Same thing. Racism makes them do it, or Whites stole all the jobs. Neither of those things are true. Black men do this, it’s a fact, they do it far more than other races, and they do it of their own free will for whatever reason.
  •     Most prison rape is Black on White. Almost none is the other way around. They will say it’s a lie and demand proof. Or they will bring up some weird case of a White raping a Black and say it’s a lie because Whites rape Blacks too. Those are terrible rejoinders. Black men rape White men in prisons all the time. White men almost never rape Black men in prisons. Those are facts. Those Black men in prisons rape those White men of their own free will at insanely disproportionate rates for whatever reasons they have to do that.
  •     Blacks have quite high rates of STD’s. They will say Whites get STD’s too or it’s due to poverty or racism (which means it’s still true). Whites get STD’s at much lower rates than Blacks. Black STD rates have nothing to do with poverty or racism. Who knows what causes it but Blacks are far more promiscuous than Whites on average, so there’s a clue.
  •     Heavily Black schools tend to perform poorly. First they will say it’s not true, then they will say it’s due to poverty and racism. It’s not due to poverty or racism. There is a considerable intelligence gap between Blacks and Whites on average. This average lower intelligence would be expected produce poorly performing schools.
  •     Blacks tend to be poorer than Whites at postponing instant gratification. See the candy bar studies. Liberals reject all of those candy bar studies as flawed even though they have been replicated 15 times. And they were done with little six year old children, so there’s little cultural influence. And many were done in the Caribbean, where there is zero racism against Blacks.
  •     One of the main reasons so many Blacks get shot by police is because they commit so much crime. They will say that Whites commit crime too. Sure, but they don’t commit nearly as much! Unarmed Whites are more likely to get killed by police than unarmed Blacks, so Black Lives Matter is based on a fraud, and obviously the high rates of Black killings by police are simply due to Blacks committing six times as much crime.
  •     Black people tend to be louder than White people. They will say that Whites are loud too and bring up some example of loud White people. Ever taught in a Black school? Ever taught in a White school? Hispanic school? Asian school? Pacific Islander (Filipinos and Samoans) school? I have taught all of those races of students countless times over many years. Blacks are much louder than any of those groups. It’s most horrifically noticeable in primary and junior high, but it can still be heard in 9th grade and even up to 10th grade. 11th and 12th grade Black schools even in the heart of the ghetto are rather subdued because all the bad ones are either dropped out and on the streets, in juvenile hall, or dead.

Defend Your People

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMX3yZIf0qk An African immigrant attacks a Chinese beggar. It goes on for 10 seconds before a patriotic young Chinese man jumps in to defend his people. Everyone, please, always defend your people. It’s the honorable thing to do. A people who will not defend themselves are doomed to destruction.

The Likable Homophobe: Are You One, and What Do You Tell People When You Choose Not to Spend Time with a Someone Because of Their Homosexuality?

Answered on Quora: I believe that almost all straight men are homophobic on a certain level – and that level is that they hate homosexuality and especially the idea of doing it themselves. Dirty little secret – most straight men are completely straight in part because they think that engaging in homosexual acts is the worst thing on Earth, and this is why they don’t engage in them. There is a problem when you say that engaging in homosexual acts is just fine. Now the question comes up, “Well, why don’t you do it, then?” And the ugly truth is that most straight men find that idea so horrific that they would rather die than do that. A number of straight men have told me that they would rather take a bullet than engage in a homosexual act. That’s how severe the revulsion is. Now the question becomes if we think this type of sex is the worst thing on Earth, how can we accept it in other people? This is a bind, but many straight men solve the bind by saying that gay men cannot help being gay, so it’s therefore immoral to hate them. Others somehow say that it’s the worst thing on Earth for them to do it, but it’s ok if those gay guys want to do it. As you can see, it is difficult for straight men to reconcile their extreme revulsion for gay sex with somehow managing to accept biological gay men for what they are. The source of a lot of homophobia is simply this rooted in this very revulsion. This seems more common than religious objections from guys I have known. And it is a problem once you say gay sex is fine. I assure that once a lot of straight men say there’s nothing wrong with gay sex (as we are supposed to think nowadays) that you are going to see a lot more opportunistic and recreational bisexuality among basically straight men. And my anecdotal evidence is that we are seeing just that right now. It’s a bind. On the one hand, the revulsion causes a lot of homophobia, but on the other hand, once you say there’s nothing wrong with it, I assure you that a lot more guys will start doing it. There’s bad outcomes either way in my opinion. The likable homophobe would be someone whose homophobia is simply limited to a desire not to associate or deal with gay men. If that’s the total extent of your homophobia, I don’t see the problem. Nobody has to associate or deal with anyone. Our associations are our personal choice and in a free society, everyone has a moral right to associate with whoever they wish. In fact, I do not associate or even deal much with gay men myself. I don’t hate what they do if they can’t help it. On the other hand, I have had a lifetime of bad experiences with gay men, and I simply do not wish to deal with them anymore. Can someone tell me why this is wrong? However, I have supported gay rights for decades and even endured accusations of being gay for supporting gay rights. To this day, I support a lot of gay political causes, and I am on the mailing list for gay political organizations. And I do participate in a lot of their campaigns. In summary, if the total extent of your homophobia is not wishing to associate with gay men, I would say your homophobia is basically nothing and that level of mild homophobia indeed qualifies as a “likable homophobe.”

Newsflash: Many Surgeons are Controlled Sociopaths

A new trick among surgeons is to take one operation and chopping it up into four smaller operations and double their money. There are actually popular seminars for surgeons showing them exactly how to do this. What a sleazy ripoff! However, many other physicians frown on this scummy behavior. A physician who does this can lose their hospital privileges and get sued. When I worked as a paralegal, most of my time there was spent working on the defense of a sociopathic lowlife physician who did exactly that, and that was exactly what was happening to him. Local hospitals had revoked his privilege, and a number of his former patients were justifiably suing his crooked ass. And I was getting paid to legally defend this guy. It was morally trying to make a living defending slugs like this, but the money was good, and I sloughed off the guilt. Doubt if I would do it again though. Some jobs actually cause moral injury, in my opinion. This arrogant dirtbag was suing the hospitals who had revoked his privileges! And we were helping him do that, and getting paid from his unlimited money supply in the process. The arrogance. I see narcissism, and it looks like some sociopathy too. It’s not well known, but many physicians are controlled psychopaths. The field of surgery is full of them. And you wondered why so many surgeons have the reputation of being the worst arrogant physicians of them all. These professionals have learned to channel their sociopathy into quasi-legal avenues in order to become “legal criminals.” But these folks do a lot of damage. Look at our politicians corporate executives? Just how many are not controlled psychopaths?

Do Psychologists Make Their Patients Aware of the Diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy?

I recently answered this question on Quora.

Do Psychologists Make their Patients Aware of the Diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Sociopathy?

These personality disorders seem to carry a lot of social stigma, therefore are patients made aware of their diagnosis or does the therapist just continue behavioral therapy to treat the symptoms rather than informing them of the diagnosis?

I am not a psychologist. I am a counselor. I only work with one disorder, OCD, and I can quite accurately diagnose that condition, I assure you. Nevertheless, I am not allowed to give out legal DSM diagnoses. However, I can obviously give out my opinion on a diagnosis. I can also tell the person my opinion on what they do not have. For instance, I have gotten many clients with OCD who have been misdiagnosed with some sort of psychosis. I am an expert at telling the two apart. I simply tell them that in my opinion, they are not psychotic. Then I tell them to fire your clinician and go get a new one that will recognize the difference between OCD and psychosis (many clinicians are very poor at telling these apart). Other than OCD/psychosis, I also have to make differential dx on OCD/sociopathy, violent thoughts, etc., OCD/pedophilia, pedophilic thoughts, etc. and OCD/homosexuality. In a limited number of cases, I told clients that in my opinion, they did not have OCD but instead had some psychotic disorder, or sociopathic traits, or pedophilia, or that they were homosexuals. Most of this differential dx is pretty straightforward. I have never had any narcissistic clients, God forbid clients with NPD. One thing nice about working with OCD clients is that they are usually very nice people. Not all of them, mind you. But if they are not nice, there is often some other reason, for instance, Borderline Personality Disorder in an OCD client could possibly make them impossibly vicious, cruel, unstable, not to mention extremely crazy, far crazier than any OCD sufferer ever gets. OCD by its very nature strikes nice people. The fact that they are so nice, meek and kind is actually one of the main reasons that they have the disorder in the first place! For the most part, only nice people get it, and the nicer you are, the more likely you are to get it. I will leave it at that for the moment and give you a chance to think of why that might be. I know why but it goes beyond the scope of this post at the moment. But in general, I never even give my opinion on other anxiety disorders or on any mood disorders or personality disorders. I only rarely see clients who have psychotic disorders, and the two that I have seen were already diagnosed. I also very rarely see people with personality disorders, and the few that I have seen were all females with Borderline PD diagnoses. I did see one woman for two sessions with obvious Borderline Personality Disorder, but I had not figured it out yet in the first session, and by the second session, I declined to diagnose her. She has already been diagnosed by a psychiatrist from afar anyway. So apparently I am guilty of failing to dx a Borderline PD client. The session was about her OCD, not her BPD and she was very nice through the whole session. It would have ruined the whole thing if I told her she had BPD, and I doubt if she would have accepted it anyway. At any rate, I am not allowed to give legal dx’s anyway, so it’s apparently proper for me not to diagnose someone! That only comes up if there is differential diagnosis. I simply say that I not only can I not legally give these out but that I am not qualified to work with any condition other than OCD, which I can actually work very well with. If they want me to work on their depression or whatever, I tell them that I have no expertise or training in that area so I can guarantee nothing and it would be similar to talking to a friend or family member. If I were able to give out diagnoses, I think I would simply give them out in most every case. Possibly if it might make a suicidal patient go over the edge, I might decline to give one out. But I will disagree with the clinicians below. In my opinion, physicians and other medical professionals in addition to all licensed clinicians should give out whatever diagnosis is appropriate. I feel it is a moral matter. The patient or client is simply owed a diagnosis on the part of the clinician or MD and I feel it would be remiss of the clinician or MD not to tell the patient what is wrong with them, and I mean everything that is wrong with them. This is just my personal opinion and I believe there no ethical rules on the subject. Also I respect the clinicians below for not giving out diagnoses in cases where it would not be helpful. I simply feel that this is a case were morals or even the categorical imperative trumps pragmatics or even common sense.

Honesty Is Overrated

Let me tell you a story. For the first five years I lived here, my landlord always acted like she hated me, and I just smiled and pretended to like her back. I cannot afford to make this woman mad. I cannot afford to be sincere with her. In my case, sincerity would have gotten me thrown out of this place long ago. Sincerity, like honestly, is overrated. For instance, in the US we have this idiot attitude that we are supposed to be honest all the time and never lie. Not only is that unrealistic, but in a lot of cases, it’s downright stupid. In many cases, the only smart thing to do is lie. Forced with lying and telling the truth, lying is clearly the smarter case in many situations. Being honest in those situations is sort of suicidal. You are deliberately causing problems in your life just to carry the torch for Sincerity. What’s the point? Is your name Jesus? Why do you have to be honest all the time? The Japanese are very smart about this, and much of their culture is based on strategic lying. They often lie in order to be polite. You tell a Japanese man that you never lie and he will laugh right in your face and call you a fool. Because of course that is exactly what you are. Many Americans, for some idiot reason, like to tell people that they never lie. That in itself is of course a lie. Sometimes this lie is necessary. For instance, in dating. In heterosexual dating, women typically demand honest men. Go on dating sites. “No liars! No players! Honest men only!” If you talk to women in this context (call it pre-dating), and I have talked to countless women in that context, you are often quizzed about whether or not you are honest. If I am honest, I will have to say, “Of course not. I’m a big fat liar and proud of it. In fact, I am an excellent liar. You will rarely meet a liar as skilled as I am. I deserve a PhD in lying.” But if I say that, I blow the potential date. So I lie and say that I am honest even to a fault. I say that I am so honest that my honesty gets me in trouble. I am an innocent babe in the woods, ignorant of worldly ways. If she thinks I am a fool for doing that, then I just adjust the lie and admit to white lies, lies of omission and  strategic lying. A number of Americans are uncomfortable accepting of those sorts of good lies, but it’s clear that for an American, the very idea that there are good lies and bad lies opens up a huge can of worms that needs to stay sealed. Seduction is all about lying anyway.

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.

***

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

What Is Antinatalism?

Anti-Natalism is a very odd movement which is made up of folks who, like many of us, wish they were never born. But the anti-natalists wish to make this a trend or a movement. Their philosophical view is that life is horrible torture. We come into the world, shine bright for what seems like forever but is really just a the blink of an eye. And the whole time we are wishing we lived forever (As if 70 year of torture was not enough!) and living in daily terror of our looming annihilation, which is colloquially known as our death. We know we are going to die, this is the ultimate terror, and these facts make most of us at least a bit nuts, which is why things like dope, porn and therapists exist at all. A human comes into the world, is shown a glimpse of heavenly forever in a fleeting flame of existence, and then cruelly snuffed him out with utmost cruelly just when he thinks it’s barely even gotten started. It’s awful. Life is torture. They give you a glimpse of eternity and then snatch it away just as you are beginning to adjust your eyes. How cruel can you get? We salve ourselves with religion and lies and dope and sex to try to make this truth go away, but none of it really works, and deep inside we all know we are just fooling ourselves. This thing called life is cruel and evil precisely because we die and we know it, and this tortures us into some degree of insanity with every day we march forward in footfalls of doom towards the ultimate in sheer, raving horror. Death is the ultimate fear, the granddaddy of all of the rest, and the others all have death as first base. No compassionate human being would ever bring a child into this torture chamber called life to saddle it with the charnel house as coda always barely visible at the end of that long, seemingly eternal tunnel always in the foreground at least a bit no matter how we try not to see it. Death is the shadow that stalks us through life. We keep saying we won’t turn around and see it, but it’s no matter because it falls in front us as much as behind us. We can run but we can’t hide. Every time we turn this way or that, there’s another reaper. There’s literally no escape. Bringing a poor innocent child into this horror called life is such a cruel and evil act that anti-natalists say we should all just stop doing it. Quit having kids. Stop bringing new humans into this Hell. It’s the only moral choice. Making babies can be nothing other than immoral or even evil. In order to be good, we must not breed. Why is life such a horrorshow? Not so much because we die but because we know we are going to. As far as we know, most other animals are not even sure that they exist, and they don’t seem to know that they are going to die. So life is a pleasant illusion in a sense for a lower mammal. If we humans somehow had no idea we were going to die, then our deaths would hardly be painful at all. We would be stumbling right along, assuming we were going to live forever, and then one day, death would take us away, but since we don’t know what it is or if it will even happen, it’s not a problem. We could go through our lives barely worrying about death for a second. On the other hand, we might take all sorts of crazy risks all through life because we knew that no matter what, we could probably get away with it. The threat of injury can be sobering, but it ain’t got nothing on death. Hurt and sick can’t begin to compare to buying it. It would be nice if they did, but they just don’t. That’s mostly because we humans persist in the delusion of sure recovery from injury and illness. The only reason we are much cautious at all is because we are afraid that if we let down our guard or slip up, we will die. So most folks tend to watch their step through their lives, which is actually good for our species. Obviously anti-natalists acknowledge that the movement would drive humans extinct, but anti-natalists either don’t care or think this would be a good thing. I have no idea what to say about that except that there sure would be lots of cockroaches running around our planet. I do not support anti-natalism, and I think it is a bit of an absurd movement, but it is one of the cleverest movements I have heard of. I will give them that. For some reason, I doubt it will catch on. Ann is also quite a misanthrope and pessimist, but I guess most of these anti-natalists are, and the former two would seem to flow naturally form the latter. So she spends a lot of time making misanthropic posts on Facebook which are pretty funny. Schopenhauer (and even Nietzsche) are probably right after all. And so was Twain at the end. I realize that pessimism (and even nihilism) are rational. And so is misanthropy. I just think they are a drag. These notions are not wrong because they are false. They are wrong because they are no fun. I suppose my argument would be, “Well, of course the world blows and life sucks, but so what?” And, “Well, sure most other humans are moronic and contemptible, but so what?” The purpose of life is not to wallow in these damnable truths. The purpose of life is the Endless Party we all need to engage in so we don’t have to think about those things. We are here to pretend, escape and forget. That’s the meaning of life. That’s it. There’s nothing else.

Nice Guys, Friendzoning and the Redpill View of the Basic Nature of Women

I found this on Quora, and the author is a former commenter on this site who left. This person did write a very good post coming from a rather Redpill manner on Quora. This is still a brilliant fellow with a lot of great insights into human nature. It’s really sad, but almost everything this guy says is straight up true.

Also I do not know if he is an MRA per se, but I believe he is a masculinist, and I think we should form a masculinist movement as counterpart to the feminist movement. We can try to mirror them if we wish. If it’s progressive, hip, groovy, and right-on and hipster for women to advocate for their rights, then we think it ought to neato, right-on, boss, cool, and progressive to advocate for men’s rights. Because we men need our rights just as much as the women need their rights. Women want to advocate for their rights? No problem! Let them. But why should we men not do the same thing?

The Masculinist Movement will make alliances with any sane feminists out there, and I believe there might be a few. In general, women think that “Men’s Rights” means all out war on them. This is zero-sum thinking, and furthermore, it is just wrong. You want and need rights for women, and we want and need rights for men. Neither gender likes being screwed over. If it’s right for them, it’s right for us too.

I recently checked out the resurrected Men’s Liberation Movement on Reddit, and it is a disaster. You are not allowed to attack feminism!

I would instead identify with some of the more radical wings of the Masculinist Movement who broke away early on. Interestingly, some of the most prominent among them were gay men. Gay men have always been an integral part of the Men’s Movement, and we need to welcome them with open arms.

After reading several of these threads about the “Friendzone” and “nice guys”, I’ve come to realize that the discussion universally ignores two very important things:

1) lying

and

2) age

Within my comments below is the direct answer to the question “Why do girls reject guys who are good to them…”.

1. LYING

Women lie.  Compulsively. They say they want to be treated kindly, with respect, by a nice smart guy who knows how to be a gentleman blah blah blah. But, more often than not, they’re lying. They usually do not respond positively (i.e. with attraction) to kind, respectful treatment from nice smart guys.

They respond positively to bad boys, punks, criminals, sleazy pickup artists, motorcycle gang members, drag-racers, rock band members, trash-talking rappers, jocks, and other guys who they find exciting. They respond to guys who put them on an emotional rollercoaster, up and down.

They often respond positively to guys who abuse them or treat them like shit. Not because they like being treated like shit, *per se*, but because being treated like shit, and then being sexually ravaged, (i.e. ultra-cold, then super-hot), is exciting, thrilling, highly attractive, and emotionally addictive.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. There’s nothing wrong with liking what you like, and being attracted to what you’re attracted to. What’s wrong is lying about it, which women do all the time. And the lying, understandably, confuses men something awful.

They think that the women are telling them the truth about how they want a nice guy who will treat them with respect, open doors for them, buy nice things for them, and all that. Then, when the guy gives them those things, the woman responds with indifference and “lets just be friends”. WTF?! – says the guy, understandably.

This is where all the crap about “entitlement” comes from. Very few guys actually feel entitled to sexual attraction or engagement, but they are terribly confused about why it is not happening after he takes her at her word and gives her what she says she wants.

And who can blame them? Well, actually, some morons do blame them. There’s a whole lot of man-hating and -shaming going on in this discussion, I’ve noticed, rooted in the failure to see that men’s sometimes-inappropriate reactions are occasioned by women’s chronic lying.

2. Age

What I wrote above about what women positively respond to in a man,  applies largely to women in their prime years, approximately age 18 through 30. Those are the woman’s years of sexual experimentation, of going for all of the most sexually exciting men: mysterious wild bad boys, Alphas and  high-status men (sports stars, rock stars, etc.) at whom all the other women are throwing themselves, and a variety of “interesting” high-testosterone types including slick PUA’s, guys who are perpetually getting in fights or scrapes with the law, guys who are heavy into drugs, etc.

Having sex with a bunch of guys of these genres is very exciting and emotionally riveting. And the “nice guys” are a bore, except as an occasional shoulder to cry on about how terribly the asshole/bad-boy boyfriend is using and abusing them.

However, as the years go by, things change. Our wild ‘n free young woman hits “the wall” – a moment typically in late 20’s or early 30’s when her looks start to fade rapidly. She is no longer as attractive to the Alphas and bad boys or to men in general. They stop calling her.

As this is happening, she realizes that her fertility clock is ticking, and that the Alphas and bad boys are not going to give her what she wants for the long term like stable marriage, material support, and so on. She begins to look at other men – the men she had rejected and friendzoned before, the “nice guys” – in a different light. These are the guys, she then realizes, that could give her what the men she chased earlier will not.

The only problem is that many of these “nice guys” are now successful, comfortable and confident, and are actually becoming more attractive with age, rather than less. They’ve grown up and become a little less “nice” and a little more manly. They’ve taken care of their health and acquired some style, and some of them morph from nerdy to quite handsome and sexy.

They may not want the older female, often a single mother, overweight and/or with generally deteriorating looks. Instead, they go for that (substantial) fraction of younger women – younger and a whole lot hotter and sexier – who like older successful guys. The “nice guy” who got friendzoned and sexually shut-out in his 20’s, now has the power in his 30’s and 40’s.

Meanwhile, our formerly-young free-spirit female is facing grim options, like say two offers for dates last month – both from unattractive, much older men. “What happened to all the good men?”, she cries. The answer is that they were there all along, and she ignored them, and now they have no interest in her. She may wind up living a barren life, hanging out on personals sites and hoping that some slightly attractive guy will see how awesome she truly is, regardless of her looks. Rots of ruck.

One author, an older “nice guy”, puts it poignantly: “Dear Girls Who Are (Finally) Ready To Date Nice Guys: We Don’t Want You Anymore.”

With the passage of years, things are likely to get better and better for the “nice guy” types and worse and worse for the women who friendzoned and sexually rejected them. Not to mention much worse for many of the bad boy types that they once prized: alcoholism, addiction, disastrous accidents, prison, disease, burnout, etc.

The exception to this is the “nice guy” who can’t get over having been rejected and marginalized – becoming, over the years, embittered and withdrawn. Many in the MGTOW movement are this type. But it is his choice. He could grow up, mature, work on himself, and become much more attractive to women – even young, hot women – than he ever was before.

Some women say that women are “stupid” for going for the bad boys, etc. But that’s not true. They are not stupid; they are emotional, and they love the emotional roller-coaster ride.

For a woman to give sound relationship advice, she needs to be honest with herself and others about the following:

1.Women are hypergamous, they are not naturally monogamous.

2.Women fitness test. Sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously.  With rare exception, they all do it.

3. Women often don’t say what they really mean.

4. Women often speak in partial truths and half truths. A perfect example:  when a woman says she just wants a nice guy who will treat her right, what she really means is “I just want a hot, good looking, confident guy who will be nice to me, commit to me, have sex only with me, and treat me right.” Half the battle would be fought and won if  women would just be clear and honest about this.)

5. All women have a rationalization hamster. I’ve seen girls as young as 10 rationalizing.

6. Women often say one thing and then do the exact opposite  Examples: “I  just want a nice guy who will treat me right” then run off with Harley Biker Badboy; or “I don’t want to get in a serious relationship right now” then a month later, she’s hot and heavy with Dr. Medical Student.)

Part of what is done here is to have honest conversations about these  issues. Feminism and the mainstream media ignores things like female  duplicity, hypergamy, female cheating, women initiating at least 7

A few women like Susan Walsh get it. Most still don’t, including my mother and every woman I knew until I was 30 years old. I was told to “be nice” and “be yourself”. My father’s sole relationship advice? “Keep your d**k in your pants. If you don’t you’re playing  with fire.”

This is the most useless advice any parents could ever give their son. It condemns a young man to neverending frustration, anger, bitterness and withdrawal. It makes you spin your head in disbelief that the jerks, the thugs and the a$$holes get all the girls. “How can that be? They’re not “nice”. Why do they get all the girls? I was told that I was supposed to be “nice” and I would be swimming in girls. Why is this not happening?”

So then I was told that evidently I must not be “nice” enough and I should be “nicer”. Heh. The frustration is only amplified when he finds out that what everyone told him was absolutely 180 degrees from the truth.

Ever Fantasize about Killing Someone?

Jason Y writes:

So who is more disturbed, De Niro on Taxi Driver or Robert?

I am not that disturbed. I actually don’t really mind most people on an individual basis. Or at least I don’t hate them, let’s put it that way. I do not hate on an individual basis,the vast majority of people I meet. I have quite a few people I actually like, especially people I see on a regular basis. For instance, there is local corner store here, and everyone who works there totally loves me and acts like I’m they’re my best friend.

When I say I am homicidal, I don’t mean that seriously. I usually don’t want to kill any individual person. It’s more of a vague feeling directed at humanity in general. It’s hard to explain, and I know I would never do anything about it. I would have to hate people vastly more than I do now to go shoot up a mall, and even if I had that level of hatred, I still doubt if I would shoot up a mall because my massive inhibitions or guilt would stop me. I honestly do not think I will ever go postal. It’s just not going to happen, ever.

I have no guns, and I hate guns. I’ve never even tried kill someone except maybe someone who was trying to kill me. So really as long as you are not trying to kill me, I’m not going to try to kill you, so everyone needs to relax. That’s been my history for decades now, and I doubt if it will change. I guess I could use weapons other than guns, but I don’t even think about that, and I do not think I have ever used a handheld weapon against another person. I have used weapons, including very large knives, to threaten people before, and they deserved it, but never to attack someone. I’ve pulled knives on people before, but I’ve never stabbed anyone.

There are some old girlfriends about whom I say “I want to kill them to this very day,” and they richly deserve that feeling. It’s very vaguely true, but it’s something I almost never think about. And when I actually think of those women, I don’t like them very much, but I almost never think about killing them even in fantasy.

It’s just that some of the things that they said and did to me were absolutely unforgivable and completely warrant homicidal feelings towards them. But even then, it’s only when I think about that specific comment or action, my next thought is, “Goddamn I want to kill that bitch. She should be killed just for saying that/doing that to me.”

So most of the time I think about even those old girlfriends are fairly pleasant because I prefer to think about good things we did, and 9

I think it is that I really do not like thinking about killing specific individual people because it bothers me on some level. And also something that happened long ago, I really should not still be all wrapped up in it.

Also there were a few guys who did stuff to me that pretty much warrants me killing them, and they would deserve it too for what they did to me. But even with them, when I imagine meeting them, the fantasy is more like I punch them in the face as hard as I can one time, which they would deserve, and walk away.

So I don’t really want to kill them either. I suppose I want to kill them in some vague sense, but it’s usually not even a fantasy because explicit homicidal fantasies about specific people bother me on some level.

I say vague because even if I met this guy who I really want to punch, I doubt if I would punch him. I have been in quite a few fistfights and physical altercations, but they always hit me or acted very physically aggressive towards me first.

Sure there’s a few guys I totally wanted to kill before, and they all deserved it. I did have homicidal fantasies about them even including plotting how I would do it. But the fantasies usually involve guns, and I don’t even have one, never have, and they terrify me. Also on some level, I know the fantasy will never happen.

That is because fantasy is different from thinking you really want to do something. A lot of evil fantasies involves things you know will never happen. So sure, I feel like killing them, and I even think about at times maybe, but I pretty much know it will never happen.

And there is one more thing. There were times when I was plotting how I would kill one of these guys, and I stopped myself because the thought process felt disturbing.

So I actually sat down and thought, “Hey wait a minute. Does this guy really deserve to die over what he did to me?” Almost always it comes back that even though what they did to me was horrific, monstrous and probably unforgivable, it doesn’t really warrant taking their lives. Actually killing them just seems wrong on some level.

When you think about what you are actually doing I mean what you are really, really, really, really doing, when you kill someone, you realize that true homicide is some very heavy shit. It’s about the heaviest shit you will ever deal with in your life. So if you kill or try to kill someone, you better have a damn good reason. The only time I ever actually tried to kill people was when they were trying to kill me.

I also start really worrying that I might get caught, and then that even if I did it and got away with it, I would have to walk around with that in my head for the rest of my life, and it might eat me up. Because killing someone who isn’t trying to kill you is so heavy that I’m not sure I could do it without being destroyed by guilt for the rest of my life.

Also when I get into these feelings about a specific person (which doesn’t happen too often), I usually only feel homicidal for 2-3 weeks. Then it just completely goes away for some reason (it sort of “burns out”), and I don’t miss it at all. It doesn’t seem healthy to stay in a homicidal frame about someone for a significant period of time. A few weeks, sure, but after that, it starts to feel disturbing, and I just want it gone.

Capitalism 101: Want a Loan? No Problem!

Loans are very easy to obtain in a free market system. The relationship between the lender and the borrower is a contract entered into voluntarily by two equals. LOL yeah right.
Loans are very easy to obtain in a free market system. The relationship between the lender and the borrower is a contract entered into voluntarily by two equals. LOL yeah right. Can you believe capitalists actually believe that crap?

Great system.

But really, have you seen the laws on usury in your state? I mean what laws? Payday loans anyone? Seen all those payday loan stores popping up everywhere? Isn’t capitalism grand? You would not believe the perfectly legal rates those scumbags are allowed to charge.

Many major religions forbade usury for a damn good reason. They weren’t just a bunch of uptight primitives. They had a good handle on universal moral philosophy.

What Is the Basis for Our Political Opinions?

The truth of course is that almost no politics is empirically proven to be right, wrong or even indifferent. Different proposals are simply different ideas about how society should be run and as such are outside of the realm of science.

And honestly, almost everyone’s politics is “I take Position A over Position B because Position A makes me feel good, and Position B makes me feel bad.” That’s how 9

Now a lot also take positions on a moral basis. For a lot of my positions I simply feel that Positions B that I reject are out and out immoral, while Positions A that I take are much more moral choices.

A lot of politics is also taken for selfish reasons. I am not here to knock that, as I do this myself. Many Positions B that I reject are rejected simply because I feel these positions would be very bad for me personally in some way. This stuff hits close to home. So I choose Position A which will not harm me over Position B which will harm me. Most other people and even entities like corporations base most of their politics on similar egotistical and yes, of course, selfish politics.

The Big Lie is that everyone says, “I take Positions A because those are the ones that really work, and I reject Positions B because those policies simply do not work.”

Now I might take that position in a few cases. Say if someone proposed to tear down all the prisons (there are far Left types who advocate this), I would reject it on grounds that it just would not work and further would probably harm a lot of innocent people. Prisons are horrific, but they work better than setting what amounts to wild animals loose on our streets. Animals belong in cages!

But most people do indeed take positions based on what makes them feel good, what they think is morally correct and what is better for them on a very selfish level. Almost no one will admit this because to do so makes them seem petty, vain, shallow and narcissistic and although this describes most humans, hardly any of us want to face up to our petty, shallow and callous inner cores.

Why Feminists and the MRA’s Are Both Wrong

Something finally dawned on me. I was talking to a feminist the other day (you really don’t need to know who that was), and I mentioned MRA’s, or Men’s Rights Activists. She saw red and became absolutely furious at the very mention of the phrase. Apparently MRA’s are simply evil, or wrong, or assholes, or something. Anyway, she made it clear that MRA’s suck. This is the attitude of almost all feminists: that MRA’s are evil, it is a misogynistic, wicked movement, etc.

However, the more time I have spent around MRA’s, the more I noticed that they are just like feminists. MRA’s are the other side of the feminist mirror. Turn a feminist around, make her into the exact same thing as a feminist except her direct opposite, and wa-lah! You have an MRA. Now, I happen to think feminists suck. As a man, I have good reason to think that, as feminists are pretty much the enemies of the men. Now this feminist may well believe that MRA’s are the enemies of the women. And sad to say, that is exactly how some of them come off.

So,

Feminists are the enemies of the men,

yet

MRA’s are the enemies of the women.

See what I mean? You are just turning the mirror around. It’s the same person. Turn an MRA around, and you have a feminut. Turn a feminist around, and you have an MRA kook. Get it? They’re the same damn people! One type is just the mirror and completely opposite image of the other side’s kookery.

Personally, I think if women ought to fight for their equal rights, then feminism is justified (at least the equal rights type).

But why must only females fight for their rights? Don’t males have a right to fight for their equal rights too? Well of course they do. Then MRA’s are justified at least as a movement that fights for equal rights for men.

Now feminists will counter this with an interesting argument that bears listening to (not all feminist arguments are crazy): Feminists simply argue that women have to fight for their rights because they are oppressed or slaves, while males are on top and already have all the rights they need, so they don’t need to fight for their rights, and indeed, Men’s Rights just means giving oppressors or slaveowners more rights. Obviously only slaves need liberation. Surely slave owners do not need liberation too! We took that argument out in 1865.

However, this argument is problematic because with the coming of Female Rule (an Oppressive Matriarchy that openly assaults men), it is becoming increasingly obvious that men are definitely in need of equal rights as women take away more and more of our rights and oppress us more and more, which has honestly been the result of feminism political power in the West.

So probably in the West women and men are both systematically oppressed either by society or law, and both are in need of equal rights, so both feminism and MRM are justified on an equity basis.

But then I observed something else. This feminist absolutely hates misogynists and misogyny. There is literally nothing worse than a man who hates women. That is just pure, sheer evil. Now misogynists are pretty nasty creatures, let’s face it. It’s an ugly philosophy, and women have a right to dislike their haters. But this feminist also completely rejects the argument that men who have lots of bad experiences with women have a right to be misogynists. Fair enough.

And yet…and yet…

I have brought up women who hate men to this feminist before, and she has always tried to justify them. “Well, she had a lot of bad experiences with men,” or “Yes, Simone Beauvoir was a man-hater, but Sartre was her husband and he didn’t treat her very well.”

In other words, feminists justify women who hate men on the basis that men treated them badly but then refuse to justify men who hate women on the basis that women treated them badly.

Rational? Of course not.

Now MRA’s are the same way. MRA’s are always railing against misandry and women who are man-haters, and for good reason. These are some pretty damn nasty creatures. On the other hand, one major theme of the MRM is that misogyny in men is completely justified.

Ok, now how can these views possibly make sense? How can this feminist possibly believe that women being man-haters due to bad treatment by men is understandable and even laudable, while men being woman-haters due to bad treatment by women is the ultimate in evil? This cannot be reasonable. Or can it?

In a proper moral philosophy, either:

1. Women who hate men due to bad treatment by men and men who hate women due to bad treatment by women are both acceptable,

or

2. Women who hate men due to bad treatment by women and men who hate women due to bad treatment by women are both unacceptable.

Either they’re both ok, as we figure damaged people are understandably haters, or they are both no good, as we figure that no matter what you go through, you don’t turn into a bigot.

Right?

But what you can’t have is a universe where one is ok and the other is not (the worlds of the feminists and the MRA’s).

However!

Such a universe,

where misandrists are understandable and even laudable and misogynists are Satanic,

or

misogynists are understandable and even rational while misandrists are wicked,

can only be true under one condition:

And that condition is that the other side is Evil.

Now let us examine what feminists and MRA’s are really saying.

When a feminist says female misandry is understandable and even a good thing, while male misogyny is wrong and despicable, what she is saying is this:

Female misandry is acceptable because Men are Evil. Male misogyny is wrong because Women are Good. Surely it is correct to laud those who hate Evil and despise those who hate Good, correct?

And of course, on the other hand, when an MRA says male misogyny is understandable and even logical while female misandry is deplorable and disgusting, what he is saying this is:

Male misogyny is acceptable because Women are Evil. Female misandry is wrong because Men are Good. Once again, we are back at Square One of Moral Philosophy, that those who hate evil are proper and even heroic while those who hate Good are wrong and even malevolent.

Once again, we see the same person switching genders and reversing the mirror, no?

Do you follow me here?

A Geneology of Amorality

From here. I will quote from a few snippets below:

Research on hypocrisy shows that people are mostly motivated to appear moral rather than to actually abide by their moral judgments.

Once you understand this hard truth about humans, so many other deliciously cynical hard as nails truths shine through the light, and you can finally find your somewhat disgusted way in life.

Research on ‘motivated reasoning’ shows that people deviously craft moral justifications to push their own agendas.

Yep. Sad but true once again. Plug this truth into your brain and watch the whole world light up before your very eyes. In other words, when people are good, they are good. When people are bad, they are also good. People are always good, no matter how good or bad their behavior is. No one wants to be bad. Except me. The bad boy.

In fact, humans are more eager to judge other people than to follow their own moral advice.

You know, you really can’t understand life at all until you plug into ugly little truths like this. Plug this in and watch everything converge together, an endless epiphany. We proclaim our moral values, and then we don’t even follow our own rules. But that’s ok, because we all just lie and say we do anyway. Evidence to the contrary? Not an issue. Deny it. Things hitting a little too close to home? Not a problem. Project away the blame onto someone else so you go scot free. Defenses are a handy little bag of tricks.

From Civil Rights to Modern Antiracism, a Moral Inversion

Found on the web:

After the chicken’s chicks were all killed at eaten by the fox, a liberal chicken then said to the surviving chicken “Ya know, not all foxes are like that.”

Nice. Increasingly, modern antiracism is simply becoming absurd, stupid, dangerous, belligerently abusive and pro-suicidal. Thinking back to our salad days in the Civil Rights Movement, I remember how things were so much different back then. We Whites were fighting for good people! Good, fine, upstanding Black people, of which there were plenty at the time and even now. Was James Meredith a dirtball? Of course not? Was Rosa Parks a slimebag? You kidding? Were the Little Rock a bunch of scumbuckets? Huh? If you think of yourself as a good person, it feels good to be fighting for the rights of other good people. And it is painful to see good people being so mistreated merely because of who their parents were. It’s so wrong it hurts. This was the essence of the moral impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement. We won most of our battles, and here it is, 50 years on, and anti-racism is so far away from the Civil Rights Movement that it seems like it’s on another planet altogether. Now the antiracist movement does nothing but support criminals. All of the modern antiracist heroes have been criminals, often pretty bad ones. Most of them are dead and in the ground now, which is really where they belong if you ask me. It’s hard to feel good about supporting a bunch of scumbuckets. It’s hard to feel sorry for them, even if they are getting their rights violated. And typically, the people who aggressed on the Black criminals were the victims in one way or another of the crooks, or they were law enforcement or school officials trying to arrest or discipline the crooks. The ultimate hero of the antiracist movement is none other than OJ Simpson, a narcissistic sociopath who decapitated his girlfriend with a meat cleaver before he sliced her boyfriend to blood-spattered bits. Many of the antiracist cause celebres have involved Black criminals who get shot by cops, sometimes under dubious circumstances. One thing you will notice that everywhere Black folks move in the world, this racist phenomenon called police brutality rears up its head. There is  this mysterious phenomenon whereby cops all over the world want to fuck over and kill Black people for racist reasons and only racist reasons. Here is what happens:

  • Lots of Blacks moved to a country, often a Western country.
  • Over a period of time, they start to commit lots of crime, particularly violent crime, including homicide. They also start joining gangs and dealing a lot of dope.
  • This goes on for a while, and the police start arresting a lot of the Black criminals, for good reason.
  • The Black community starts to hate cops for “taking so many of our good men away.” Police are seen as a hostile because they are doing their job, which is to arrest Black criminals.
  • Sooner or later, a Black criminal is shot dead or badly beaten under possibly dubious circumstances. There is nothing necessarily racist about this. Most Western police departments have wildly stringent anti-discrimination policies and are far more PC than your average workplace. Police commissioners are tired of getting sued for this stuff so they are taking pre-emptive action.
  • What happens is once Black people start committing tons of crime and getting arrested all the time, sooner or later there is going to be a questionable shooting. It’s the law of averages. If Whites committed crime at Black rates, there would be a lot of dubious police shootings of White people. Dubious shootings are part and parcel of a group that commits lots of crime.
  • Blacks start rioting because one of their criminals got shot dead or beat up badly by police, which is a pretty bad reason to tear down a city if you ask me.
  • Antiracist movements begin to take up the “antiracist” cause of police brutality, an issue that usually has little to do with race.

These antiracist movements spend almost all of their time defending the absolute worst of Black society, the scum of the Earth. These are their heroes. If you are on the Left, you are supposed to support the lionization of these sociopaths. If you point out what scumbags they are, you are accused or racism yourself. You see how far we have come? Pointing out that the Black criminal cause celebre du jour who may have been victimized is actually a piece of dirt is racism! It’s racism for good people to call criminals what they are! That’s pretty breathtaking. It goes far beyond that. All criticism of mass dysfunction in Black America, typically in the more ghetto areas, is slammed as racism. Good people are called racists for complaining about bad people acting bad! Wow! That takes my breath away. If you try to counter an anti-White myth such as that Whites are more likely to be child molesters or serial killers by pointing out that actually Blacks have higher rates of both serial killing and child molesting, you are a racist! Whoa! It’s racist to pore through crime statistics to try to catch people telling racist lies about crime rates of various races! It’s racist to point out that Group X commits way more of Crime Z than Group Y. Pointing out the obvious is racist. Telling the truth is racist. Hard and fast statistical truths are racist. Apparently, The Truth itself is racist. The only way not to be a racist in this modern era is to be a liar! This idiotic movement extends to the rest of the world. Much of the 3rd World is very screwed up. A lot of it is non-White. Pointing out how lame, dysfunctional, and pathological these failed states and cultures are is racist. Damn! Good people criticizing bad people overseas for acting bad is racist. People from decent cultures criticizing sick cultures for being stupid and evil is racist. Pointing out that Country X is swarming with crooks, liars, cheaters, frauds and thieves, not to mention violent crooks, is racist. Telling people to avoid these shitholes is racist. In fact, we are ordered to travel to these shitholes just to prove how antiracist we area. In this sense, modern anti-racism is pro-suicidal. They want good people to go to places were lots of terrible people who act awful and stay there a while (presumably until they get victimized, which won’t be long) just to prove their antiracist mettle. If you say, “I don’t see why I should risk my life and limb to associate with this group just because a few of them are good people,” you are racist. Modern antiracism does nothing but defend bad people. All of its heroes are criminals, often very bad criminals. These are the leading lights of the movement. It is racist for good people to criticize the bad behavior of these criminal heroes. The only cultures it defends are non-White 3rd World cultures where a large percentage of the people act terrible, where states are failed, where cultures are toxic when they are not flat out wicked. Yes, to modern antiracism, the worst, most dysfunctional, corrupt, amoral and idiotic cultures of all are actually the best ones of them. These are the “heroic cultures” of modern antiracism. Modern antiracism fetes barbaric cultures above all else. Cultures are crappy because they are full of crappy people – who behave in lousy ways and think in even worse ways. There is no such thing as a crappy culture full of good people. Good people make good cultures. Lousy people make lousy cultures. The bottom line is that antiracism criticizes good people for attacking the behavior of bad people. It’s racist for good people to defend themselves against bad people – I assume we are supposed to let them kill us to prove earn our antiracist stripes in the afterlife. Anti-racism attacks people from good, competent, successful cultures for attacking lousy, incompetent and failed cultures. Once again, it punishes the good for attacking the bad. I could go on here, but I think I will stop. You get the idea. All I have to say is that this is a complete inversion of the moral principles I signed up for in the Civil Rights Movement. We were the good guys fighting for the good people against the bad people. Now it’s the other way around. Let me off this bus please, Rosa.

"The Suppression of Will in Islam and Hinduism," by Dota

Dota just sent me this piece and asked me if I wanted to run it. It is very nice! Enjoy, this one will really make you put on your thinking cap.

The Suppression of Will in Islam and Hinduism

by Dota

I’ve often wondered why Islam was able to make spectacular gains in India whereas Christian missionaries have often struggled to attract converts. One possible explanation might be that Islam has maintained a longer presence in India, spanning over a thousand years which saw the rise and fall of various Muslim dynasties. European Christian presence in contrast has been sporadic and short lived. Yet I feel that another explanation must suffice, one that accounts for the contouring of the Islamic faith along the Hindu psyche. This necessarily leads us to the conclusion that both of these religions possess certain attributes in common, as we shall see. I’ve written about Hindu ethics in detail over the last three years and I maintain that the most salient characteristic of Hinduism is it’s suppression of the human will. Hindu ethics preclude intention and hence ignore the rational agency of an intelligent being. For further reading, please read the article here. As Arthur Danto pointed out in the 70s, the ancient Hindu philosophers never saw the difference between knowledge and its application; a fundamental flaw in Indian epistemology. Plato believed that morality was predicated on the knowledge of the good. In other words, people behaved morally when they possessed an understanding of moral behavior. Likewise they behaved badly when they were ignorant of morality. Yet the crucial question which the ancient Hindus failed to ask is this: Why do people behave unethically when they possess sufficient knowledge of moral injunctions? In response to this question Western philosophy developed what we refer to today as “the will.” To paraphrase Danto, the will is the applicative mechanism that bridges the discrepancy between knowledge of the good and action. What does this mean? Perhaps an illustration is in order. Suppose you are driving through a residential zone with a speed limit of 40 kph. You see the speed limit sign yet roll through the neighborhood at 80 kph. You have seen the sign and are aware of the speed limit (knowledge of the good) yet you willfully choose to ignore it. You have exercised your rational autonomy to act in a fashion contrary to what you know is good. Liberation in Hindu philosophy is described by the Upanishads as a union with Brahman (the ultimate reality) where the only sensation one experiences is no sensation; a passive bliss. The Upanishads use the analogy of a drop returning to the ocean symbolizing the ultimate surrender of the will and one’s own identity. Islam’s relationship with free will is rather complicated. Despite Muslim apologists claims to the contrary, the Islamic religion is mired with contradictions (which is normal for any religion) chief among which is the simultaneous endorsement of both free will and predestination. The Catholic Church in contrast has always adopted the free will position despite agonizing over the philosophical dilemma of Judas’s betrayal: that if Judas was merely doing God’s will by fulfilling the prophecy where Christ would be crucified and mankind redeemed, how then is he blameworthy? Nevertheless the Church’s position was clear: Mankind possessed freewill. Unlike Hinduism, Islamic theology addresses individuals who possess knowledge of the good yet choose not to act on it. Unlike Hinduism, Islamic ethics account for an individual’s intent that binds the agent to his course of action, regardless of the outcome. This is illustrated in the following Hadith: Two men are engaged in a duel where one slays the other. Which one goes to hell? Muhammad’s companions stated that the victorious man would burn in hell since he had committed murder. Muhammad then corrected them by stating that BOTH men would burn in hell, for the slain man INTENDED to commit murder, he was just unsuccessful in his aim. During the Abbasid dynasty of the 8th century, a school of Muslim Arab philosophers called the Mutazilites gained the Caliph’s favor. These philosophers were smitten by Greek philosophy and held steadfastly in favor of free will. The school declined after the death of Abdul Jabbar, one of its major proponents, according to Wikipedia. The Asherite movement eventually replaced the Mutazilites and advocated the philosophy of occasionalism; that man would be judged solely on the basis of intention as his actions had no power to alter the world since only God possessed that power. But the ultimate case for predestination is made by the classical sources of Islam, the Quran and hadith (Muhammad’s sayings) and hence mainstream Islam gravitates towards that position in most cases. Islam has a suppressing effect on the will in other more direct ways. The word Islam literally means “surrender.” But to whom? To the will of God. What is God’s will? That man live life a certain way, and Islamic tradition dictates how a man should and shouldn’t eat, how he must have sex, what he may and may not wear, how he must bathe, how he must walk etc… Of the three Abrahamic religions Islam is possibly the most intrusive, perhaps even more so than Judaism, but I digress. While Islam may not be as ritualistic as Hinduism, it’s long list of orthopraxic practices that govern even the most mundane motions of daily life serve as an effective substitute for the Hindu convert. The Indian’s life precludes will. Traditionally, his caste determines his occupation and his choice of spouse. When he hits puberty he receives his twice born status if he belongs to the top three Aryan castes. His parents find him a spouse and he dutifully reproduces. The Indian’s life is planned out for him before he is an embryo. The weight of the community crushes the individual’s agency. I recall my mother would often remark that we were lucky to practice a religion like Islam which kept us away from alcohol and hedonism. What she failed to realize is that one doesn’t need Islam to keep away from vice, but merely sheer human will.

Ariel Castro Is Dead

The famous man who kidnapped three teenage girls and imprisoned, raped and tortured them in his home for 10 years killed himself in jail yesterday by hanging himself in his cell, apparently with his jail-issued bedsheet, comes with every cell. He was on suicide watch, but they only come by once every 30 minutes. He had also been getting many threats from other inmates. Inmates have a curious system of morals. One thing is “pick on someone your own size” as long as you are going to be picking on people at all, which is after all what criminals do. If you are going to rob or kill someone, rob or kill a grown man, one who can fight back against you. Inmates who victimize women and especially children are held in very low esteem, especially those who rape and kill women and children. It is considered pussy and chickenshit to prey on women and children, who are considered by inmates to be relatively helpless. Even sex offenders have a hierarchy, believe it or not. Voyeurs and exhibitions are on top, and child molesters, rapists and guys like Castro are lower than whale shit, and that’s at the bottom of the ocean! I heard Castro got himself into some deep sheet in jail, but he hung in there as long as he could. As much of a scumbag this guy was, I do have a tiny mite of respect for him. I mean come on. How many of you guys have ever had a 4-way with three chicks? This guy did every single day! Impressive. I don’t think I ever had a 4-way with three females. This one time I was doing with this woman and her two dogs kept barking and jumping up on the bed, but that doesn’t count, does it? Well, that’ll be enough Castro jokes for now…

Alt Left: India As a Poisonous Culture; Indians As Poisoned People

A good, decent, Indian Hindu woman named Sittingonthefence writes:

An advance warning.. this is going to be a long comment: I am a Hindu Indian, and I felt a sting every time people are chided on this blog for being Hindus. However, I landed on this blog because I am frustrated and wanted to see what people out there think about India.

I was brought up to be an honest, hardworking girl. My parents taught me all the right things, lying and cheating is bad, work hard for what you want, everybody should be treated with respect, etc. Needless to say I grew up feeling like a misfit. Actually, my family was a misfit even among our relatives.

I was brought up to believe that a Hindu is a person who lives by his Dharma and lives a morally pure life, and this is what I try to live by.

I think the main problem with Hinduism is that it confuses ritualism and superstition with religion and God. Everywhere around me I see people having different values for themselves and others. Nobody respects other peoples time and space (be it on road…where people keep driving deeper into gridlocks, or in personal relations…where elders decide whom their children marry or what they study etc.)

My sister is married to an American (whom she met in Singapore while working there), is settled abroad and barely has any Indian friends. She is not in touch with any relatives except us (her immediate family). Me and my husband were also in the US, where I did a Masters in Social Work, and this urge to work for the betterment of my country took me over. Hence, we came back last year.

However, I am already frustrated…how do you help people who do not want to be helped or even understand and accept the deep-rooted issues in this country.

I have also met some amazing people here…Many of them are born Hindus, and all of them are either spiritual (not ritualistic) or agnostic.

However, I have to add that maybe religion is not the only culprit because I have seen corrupt, selfish and unreasonable people of all religions, castes and genders.

I want to delve deeper to figure out why? Is it because of insecurity (due to centuries of foreign rule), is it because of a corrupt upper class with absolute power (I am guilty of being born one)? Could it be a distorted interpretation of Hinduism? Could it be the genes (but i know many amazing people born out of the same gene pool)? I do not know the answer…however I do know that I don’t want my daughter to feel like a misfit growing up.

Welcome to the blog. You are a good Indian Hindu. Apparently there are a few.

India and Indians are sick and messed up because their culture is sick. It is like a poison that poisons everything coming out of it. Most Indians get culture-poisoned, so they are damaged people, poisoned and damaged by their culture. They could get rid of it, but that would mean renouncing just about everything they were brought up with. Few people are prepared to do that.

Indians are not really bad people. Most of them are good people who have simply been poisoned by a sick and perverse culture. So they are damaged people. They can be cured, but most of them don’t want to get better. I work as a therapist, and if people don’t want to get better, they won’t. Indians don’t want to get better because they don’t think anything is wrong.

Plus being an amoral, parasitic, opportunistic, somewhat sociopathic human is very profitable in a way. Sociopaths often clean up in life. Morals get in the way of getting all the money and stuff you need in life. The person mostly likely to clean up in life is the most selfish, opportunistic, parasitic and rather sociopathic person, as they are not encumbered by morals in getting what they want.

Maternity as a Basic Human Right

Hizzle writes:

Republicans like to say “If you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em.”

I do not agree with “If you can’t feed em, don’t breed ’em.” I believe that every woman has a right to have a kid or two, except maybe if they are retarded, have a psychotic illness or are in prison. There are Black women in the ghettos in their 20’s who have no man in sight but are starting to get the urge to have a kid. Some of them just go out and have a kid with Tyrone or Demont or whoever, knowing that he won’t support her. Basically none of the men in this environment are going to marry or support their kids, so it’s have a kid with a deadbeat or have no kids. These women are going to try to raise kids on their own, and that’s ok. My Mom doesn’t think these women have a right to have kids, but I disagree here. She said, “Well, you know, having kids is not as great as it’s cracked up to be.” People have the right to one or two kids, no more than that. You’re poor, so you can’t have kids! You’re not married, so you can’t have kids! Well, screw that. You can have a kid or two even if you are not married or even if you are poor. It is a basic human right.

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