17 January 2008

Celebrating Identity

One thing I find most curious about the current public milieu is its insistence for certain kinds of identification and not for others. An example: I saw an interview where Lou Dobbs suggested Americans should stop celebrating ethnically European holidays such as Saint Patrick’s Day; reason being that we should identify not with some distant foreign heritage, which he seemed to suggest was divisive, but the contemporary public lifestyle. Asside: I wonder if he would suggest doing away with the likes of Kwanzaa or Cinco De Mio. But anyway…

You see this sort of hypocritical attitude more and more these days. Folks want you to identify not as race, ethnicity, sex or tribe but the broad category of species (human) or, failing that, nation state (not nationality). You hear it all the time: you’re not “white,” “black,” “Oriental,” “Nordic,” etc. because we’re all part of one race—the human race. “But a race of what?” I must then ask, as one who makes such a statement is clearly ignorant of the fact that a race is merely a variant of a larger category.

It’s obvious politically correct pandering and a double standard, as the same logic for such identification could be used for any category: our identities are overlapping and coaxial. If I am to identify not with ethnicity or race, but humanity, supposing that subspecies characterization is somehow unethical, why not take it a step further? Are we not all Hominidae? Let us cease discrimination and unite with our great ape cousins. And why stop there? Subphylum identification is racist! All mammals are Chordata; it’s high time we embraced our yellowfin tuna brethren as equals!

Of course we don’t do that: we have limited loyalties and limited tastes. All animals naturally associate with those that are most like themselves. If you know of a pet store with a large display of finches, go and observe them. Likely they will have a diverse selection. Notice that, even though there is no difference between them otherwise, any polarity of different colored finches will congregate and exclude others. It is so with any kind of animal in large enough numbers to form localities of critical mass. This in-group impulse is a hardwired survival mechanism.

The point of this article is not to denounce the notion of species identification—I see no problem in collecting as a singular humanity in the face of greater outside aggression—but that humanism alone is very limiting. Indeed, I am a human, and that constitutes a large part of my psychological identity; but I’m also a Caucasian, an American, of Welsh and German national descent, a man, a mate, a brother, a son, an autodidact, an illustrator, etc. If I were to stop at species I wouldn’t be remotely as rich a personality as I am, and the world itself would be dimmer because of it.

We are all more than just “human.” Such a stunted public practice as globalist humanism will leave mankind a monocultural, ethnically deluded, socially retarded simulacrum of itself. Instead, our modus vivendi should be nepotistic, winnowing equanimity; and we should always strive to define ourselves by our differences and our similarities, as it is all our influences and heritages that constitute who we really are.

Shayne

06 January 2008

How to have peace

How to Have Peace, Finally

1. End Envy. When everyone in society competes for money alone, envy and resentment run high and so does sleight of hand behavior. Let's stop the rat race. In a healthy culture, every job is important and given its place, and no one is left to rot at the bottom of the competitive heap except blatant incompetents.

2. Reduce pollution and urban blight. We're all scrabbling toward the top of the pile so we don't get left in a ghetto. But running away to the suburbs no longer protects us from deranged urban dwellers. A solution is to fix our cities and o put some people in jail for life if all they do is destroy things.

3. Kick our oil dependency. Oil is our heroin, our crack, our meth. We need a certain amount of it to run our economy. But do we really need individual cars, especially since they don't help us outrun the mess of the city? Do we really need all of these products? We can do just as well with less, and in fact be happier.

4. Support diversity. To have diversity, you need to have distinct ethnic groups. If you try to combine these groups, they'll fight for their own right to exist as a group and cause the ethnic warfare common to multicultural society. Let the ethnic groups separate and stop viewing such separation as a taboo "racism."

5. Don't try to hide different abilities. Billy is a genius, but Mary is a world-class athlete. We get embarrassed for both of these kids because they can't do something the other can. Let's end that charade. We're all different and we each have a place in the world. We don't need to be "equal" to be OK, and trying to force "equality" causes mayhem.

6. Allow people to live according to chosen values, even if they seem grotesque to us. In the west, our newspapers tell us that Muslims are primitive, women-abusing, tribal societies. But there is no science or philosophy that tells us reliability that such lifestyles are "bad." Tolerate difference.

7. Stop the war on drugs. Some people are gonna take 'em, and some are gonna drink to excess. Just keep them away from the kids and when they're observed screwing up on the job, fire them. We cannot afford the violence and police militarization of the war on drugs.

8. Forget the war between the sexes. If being equal means we gotta fight and have the 50% chance of divorce for every marriage we have, forget it. Let's respect each other for what we are and try to get along with more respect. "Equality" might be an illusory goal, since we've each got different equipment, inside and out, but respect and compassion are eternal.

9. Reverence. We're so busy chasing the holy dollar we've forgotten what it is to love life. Ancient monks in secluded monasteries saw intense concentration on tasks and appreciation of life as a form of prayer. Maybe this kind of soul stillness and inner beauty is missing in our lives, and we need to bring it back.

10. Open-mindedness. "Tolerance" implies not liking something, but putting up with it. Instead, we should try to understand that we each have different paths, and there is no ordained single route to glory. There are some things that are a good idea for everyone, but you have to do it for yourself. Be open-minded in the original meaning -- we know the goal, but there's more than one way to get there.

This message brought to you by AAAWL:
http://www.corrupt.org/

Shayne

04 January 2008

Navarrette Narrative

On CNN’s website, some dingbat looking dude was paid to give his boring, Big Mac opinion about immigration [link]: nothing new, nothing inspired; a sprinkle of NaCl in the Great Salt Lake. In cases such as these an intellectual void is created and reader commentary is allotted the potential of greater insight. One such comment tickled my fancy and showed how “professionals” aren’t necessarily superior to bright hobbyists (bottommost comment):
Geoffrey

"...I can't wait to see what happens when Arizonans realize that the same folks who built all those resorts, restaurants, and houses are no longer around to maintain them."

I remember back in the day, before the time of illegal immigrants, there were no restaurants, resorts, or houses. In fact, I can recall living in a field and wondering to myself, "What am I to do? I have no resort, no restaurant, and no house." Then along came a group of illegal immigrants and they built me a house, a restaurant and a resort - right there in the field. I was so happy. They planted a tree for me too.
People like Ruben Navarrette Jr. deserve to be mocked. Lucky for us they make themselves and their “erudite” opinions public. If you find such people or their nincompoop disciples in your own professional or personal life, feel free—I give you permission—to dig at their shallowly construed identities. It’s tons of fun, I promise.

Shayne

02 January 2008

Cry Because You’re White: The Fallacy of White Guilt



If you’re unfamiliar with the term (which is unlikely given its pervasive media presence), white guilt is the concept of individual or group guilt said to be felt by whites for the historical treatment of non-whites. A ubiquitous phenomenon, white guilt has spread from its traditional home in the Americas, now reaching its tendrils broadly across the sea to Europe and anywhere else with a polarity of “whites.”

Guilt is a strong psychological motivation in humans. It can dictate the type and degree of positive action but also works largely as a preventative measure which curtails perceived negative behavioral outcomes. In the case of white guilt, which is present in the socio-political realms occupied by whites (whether or not they choose to acknowledge it), governmental and social policy is affected through laws, prevailing taboos and social mores.

Left-wing commentators posit a straw man to combat the charge: Our motivation is not guilt, they say, but empathy and compassion. While in some cases this is probably true, inasmuch as the impetus and implementation of polices and procedures, in practice—as far as convincing a white polarity to accept particular anti-white legislation such as affirmative action, mass migration, racial pluralism, etc.—the liberal machine will pound the wicked white devil in the head with the Mallet of Historical and Contemporaneous Injustice. Guilt, guilt, guilt! Feel bad about what you’ve done, White Man, and pay.

The fallacy here isn’t so much that injustices didn’t happen, but that they aren’t as pro-white specific as the liberals would have you believe. They see white guilt as “a tool for extortion, reparations and income redistribution based on race rather than merit.” [1] However the history sings a different tune: proportionally, if we are to consider the sorts of things used to validate white guilt (slavery, exclusive immigration practices, ethnically specific discrimination), whites were more “unjust” to themselves than to others—and it is the same with nearly every other ethnic in-group.

White slavery in Briton and America is often underappreciated and overlooked. The phrase “indentured servitude” lessens the relation of European slavery to African slavery, but the treatment of white and black slaves was remarkably similar. Sometimes, things were worse:
Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, "Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the 'middle passage,' and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves." Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America. [2]
Most of today’s American working stock is descendant of these servants. If blacks are entitled to slave reparations, so are the “white trash”, “crackers” and “rednecks” that are so unabashedly ridiculed in today’s media. Additionally, as far as reparations go, who is paying whom?
Tens of millions of nonblack Americans are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who arrived after the Civil War. The vast majority of the rest are the offspring of whites who never owned slaves. (Even at slavery's peak, three-fourths of Southern whites held no slaves.) [3]
Regards to slavery, there isn’t even much for whites to feel guilty about that any other ethnicity involved shouldn’t also share: competing African tribes captured and sold each other to Arab traders during the American slave era, and black-on-black slavery is still largely happening in Africa today. An added note: the etymology of “slave” is “Slavic”; from the frequent enslavement of Slavs in central Europe during the early Middle Ages. [4]

The position of holding white guilt as legitimate is pathological and historically incorrect, and those that tout it are either self-hating, valetudinarian, white cosmopolitan liberals, misinformed common folk or nepotistic minorities.

Guilt is a weak and embarrassing place to be motivated from. Those who try to foist it on others for their own psychological capitulation are cowards and are unworthy of your association. Others—outsiders—who flex guilt at your group for their own advantage…well, recognize that they’re only doing what is instinctual: humans developed in-groups from the pressures of nature and the necessity of survival, and the struggle for one’s own group advantage is, evolutionarily speaking, correct; it is the responsibility of ones own group to fight for itself. So quit loathing about your heritage, crying about being white, and stand up for yourself.

Shayne

01 January 2008

Men-Art-War

On Earth, the competition of life is never ending. Individuals by themselves are vulnerable; thus nature shapes life, and from this force groups necessarily emerge. Each group develops distinct ways of survival which are constantly tested, growing stronger with endurance or weakening with decay and eventually going extinct. Among the hominids, the Cro-Magnon man has developed many traits for survival but the quintessential ability—the distinctly unique limb of their survival—is imagination, which, when structuralized with symbolism and enacted through idealism, is responsible for the whole of human domination and supremacy.

In Men-Art-War, Kolya, with ten succinct and easily digestible short stores, deals with the faculty of imagination extensively, demonstrating its expression throughout history as well as its corruption in the modern West. We are shown how the acceptance of force—the striving for the feeling of power—as an extension of our inherent nature leads to a more fulfilling, meaningful life not just in a socio-historical sense but to the individual psychology as well; and how the cogs of modernity strive to conquer, subvert and burry this impulse.

Contextually, the themes of this book present modernity, with its assurance of progress through technology, reverence for the illusion of safety and passivity and pity as the impetus of moral action, as a direct affront to the very nature of mankind, instead positing that life should be about transcending difficulties and overcoming adversities, no matter how daunting the task or how easy the alternative, through glorious art and glorious war: “Facilis descensus Averni.” Nietzsche’s Will to Power and Kaczynski’s Power Process are strongly implicated.

Rarely dose a work of contemporary fiction conflate with my personal beliefs as Men-Art-War has, which made reading it a rich, refreshing and fulfilling experience. For those of a dissimilar weltanschauung, much of this book might be difficult, challenging or even offensive, but such reactions to a different point of view are the impetus of intellectual growth and should be sought out rather than avoided if one is honest about such a pursuit. Kolya’s characters also provide many artistic, literary and historical references for one to explore if the wish.

Highly recommended.

Shayne