Off the Deep End with Brett Stephens

Brett Stephens writes on his blog:

Giving up is what many are doing on election 2012. They have convinced themselves that both parties “are the same,” and that the system is rigged. Or that no candidate represents their values. Or even that it’s all hopeless and there’s no point participating.

All of this denies the fundamental truth of politics, which is that there are essentially two directions. They aren’t positions or parties, but paths of thought.

Yeah, but the issue here is that both the Democratic and Republican party presidential nominees represent movement in the same direction.

The first is leftism. It’s new, starting in the 18th century, but seems to appear in every society when it gets too bottom heavy. The idea of leftism is that everyone should be able to do whatever they want to, with minimal hierarchy, because what people feel and perceive is most important.

Leftism is obviously not the idea that everyone should be able to do whatever they want. Leftism is a vision of morality as surely as Conservatism is, with its own taboos and strictures. Leftism stands out for its lack of teachings relating to an afterlife, but though they claim not the power to punish in another world, Leftists continually seek to punish in this one.

The second is rightism. It’s ancient, being invented when every society is created. Its idea is that we should pay attention to how reality works and use proven, workable and eternal ideas to guide ourselves. Perception and feelings are secondary to the outside world in this view.

Actually that's empiricism. The earlier forms of rightism would've been based on the concept of reverencing tradition, not the concept of checking tradition against reality to see if it worked. The traditions that survived would have been the ones that worked for the people who followed, and this explains the general consonance between rightism and reality.

It was actually the philosophy of empiricism which helped to undermine rightism and tradition due to the fact that it discovered some traditional beliefs to be empirically invalid, shaking the masses' faith in tradition and leaving them much more receptive to leftism.

It’s not popular to say this, but America and Europe are basically in the same fix. A massive leftism lobby is slowly taking over and replacing the indigenous people with leftist voters, who are both immigrants and home-grown people who are mentally broken because of the effects of liberal social programs. This mob grows like a snowball, and its only desire is to destroy all culture and heritage, all values and preference, and replace them with good “non-conformist” conformists who have one goal alone, reaching the leftist Utopia through equality. Leftism takes prosperous societies and leaves behind starving third-world ghettos because it removes sanity from human minds.

While there's much truth to this, it's important to understand that leftism is not primarily objectionable because it destroys prosperity, something that can be regained once lost, but rather for how it is in the process of destroying things that cannot be replaced.

We can either go toward more leftism, or toward more rightism.

Going toward more rightism is not actually an option in the US Presidential Election of 2012. America is a two party state due to its lack of proportional representation, and it so happens that the only two viable parties have fielded two candidates who both want to take us toward more leftism. Neither Romeny nor Obama want to take us toward more rightism.

Perhaps Obama wants to take us to more leftism faster than Romney does. If this assertion is credited, perhaps it would give someone with rightist beliefs reason to support Romney.

But why is Bret Stephens talking nonsense about Romney wanting to take the country in a rightist direction? That simply isn't the platform he's run on.

Those are your two options. There are no others; even the most far-out and creative belief system is going to be going more toward one direction than the other.

Yes, and both Romney and Obama have belief systems which would take us more in the direction of leftism.

You might look at Mitt Romney and think, “This guy is really too restrained and moderate for what needs to be done."

There is no reason to project traditionalist beliefs onto Mitt Romney. There's no reason to think he's just someone who isn't assertive enough about his beliefs, or that his beliefs are a moderated version of conservatism. Really what's happening is that he doesn't have traditionalist beliefs, only perhaps seeming that way to some due to his pandering to Republican primary voters and the tendency some have to view all things as relative ("Romney doesn't seem to be as extreme a leftist as Obama is, so that means he must be a conservative!")

While that’s true, you should pay attention to our opponents — the leftists — and how they beat us and took over. They found a popular idea. They steadily advanced it, through baby steps and daily acts of disobedience, until they’d browbeaten or guilt-trapped others into joining them.

But Romney isn't trying to do that. He doesn't stand for anything. Even when he accidently was caught expressing an idea (that 47% of the country are moochers) which wasn't quite an echo of what a Democrat would say, he backtracked and apologized like a coward.

A man can't be a vehicle for advancing ideas if he can't be relied on to stand by the ideas he expresses.

It's like if your football team had a running back who fumbled the ball on every single play.

While people hunger for sudden explosive change, it’s the guys like Mitt Romney who are pushing us to victory.

A President Romney would represent a facade of continuity with the American past, a bland talisman giving the apearance of stability even as he wouldn't do anything to actually stave off the advance of chaos and destruction.

They are supremely able administrators and they push relentlessly and constantly for baby steps in the right direction.

People like Romney have administered a policy whereby the country that made them wealthy has been dismantled and sold for parts. The change they push for is the exact same change the hardcore leftists push for, the only difference being their distaste for high taxes on the wealthy and their need to appoint less liberal judges to the Supreme Court as a sop to the pro-life lobby.

In other words, no matter where you are on the right, from a moderate who leans left on gay marriage to an extreme radical counter-revolutionary, you are serving your interests best by joining mainstream politics and approving its message mass support for a rightist direction.

If Romney wanted to take the country in a rightist direction he would be talking about repealing at least some leftist laws. Instead he only whines about some leftist laws while making clear he'd never do anything to change them.

As his spokesman Ed Gillespie said: "The governor would not repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Act. He was opposed to it at the time. He would not repeal it."

That's what opposition to a leftist law means to Romney, pretending to oppose it to fool people against the law into voting for him, while having absolutely no intention to repeal or otherwise alter the law.

Times change, and with it we must, or we fail to adapt and become obsolete. This is the age of liberalism’s failure, as all of its social programs turn into disasters, which means we must be the antithesis of those ideals but also use its methods.

Except in his personal life, where it might've been better if he had married a man or at least used more birth control, Romney has embodied liberalism's ideals.

He's just embodied them in a somewhat different way than Obama has.

As we push forward with patience and deliberation, our opponents quake in fear because this is the one attack they have no defense against.

No sane leftist would much fear the prospect of a Romney presidency. It's just that a lot of leftists in America have an emotional attachment to Obama because he's the first Black president, and they wouldn't like to see him beat even if it was by Leon Trotsky himself.

Unlike in America, elections in Greece actually mean a whole lot now thanks to a party called Golden Dawn, a group of people who are actually conservatives on account of the simple fact that they want to conserve the things they love, principally the Greek people and their traditions. This stands in contrast to Romney, who feigns love for things he'll then sit back and watch die without even trying to lift a finger.

Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn New York's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/

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Excerpts From 'The Looming Tower'

But cooperation was still very slow in coming. “This investigation has hit a rock,” General Naji admitted. “We Arabs are very stubborn.”

Ali Soufan teased him, saying, “You’re dealing with another Arab, and I’m also stubborn.”

When Soufan translated this exchange, O’Neill contended that the Arabs were not the equal of the Irish in that department. He told a story about the O’Neill clan in Ireland, who he said had the reputation of being the strongest men in their county. Every year there was a boat race to a giant stone in the middle of a lake, and the O’Neill’s always won. But one year, another clan was rowing faster and pulling ahead, and it appeared that they would touch the stone first. “But then my great-grandfather took his sword,” said O’Neill, “and he cut off his hand and threw it at the rock. You got anything that can match that?”

Soufan and the general look at each other. “We’re stubborn,” said Soufan, “but we’re not crazy.”
…

After the incident in the FBI parking garage, O'Neill began reading the Bible every day. In Yemen, he kept a Bible on his bedside table, along with a recent biography of Michael Collins. He returned to Catholicism in spring of 2001, attending Mass every morning.
...

Immediately after that episode, he buried himself in prayer. He had a couple of prayer guides, and he marked his favorites with ribbons or Post-it notes. He was particularly drawn to the Psalms, including number 142.

On the way where I shall walk
they have hidden a snare to entrap me.
Look on my right and see:
there is no one who takes my part.
I have no means of escape,
not one who cares for my soul.
I cry to you, O Lord.
I have said: “You are my refuge
all I have in the land of the living.”
Listen, then, to my cry
for I am in the depths of distress.
...

In the back of one of his red-leather breviaries, he clipped a schedule of Catholic prayer times, and on July 30 he began to obsessively check them off. It is now a rare practice for ordinary Catholics to pray four or five times as day, as Muslims do, but the ancient practice is still available to members of the clergy and extremely fervent believers. Perhaps in his worship O'Neill drew parallels between the early church and certain aspects of modern Islamism, since the church calendar is full of martyrs and stern ideologues who would be seen as religious extremists today. He began this regimen on the feast day of Peter Chrysologus, the bishop of Ravena, who banned dancing and persecuted the heretics. The next day, July 31, celebrates Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the indomitable Spanish solider who founded the Jesuit order. The vision these saints had of a society governed by God is far more like that of Sayyid Qutb than that of most modern Christians.

In his schedule, O'Neill checked off every prayer until Sunday, August 19, the day the article about the briefcase incident finally appeared in the Times. Then the marks abruptly stopped.

"The duties of this religion are magnificent and difficult," bin Laden said in a videotaped speech that was later discovered on the computer of a member of the Hamburg cell. "Some of them are abominable."

Bin Laden spoke about the Prophet, who warned the Arabs that they would become weak because of their love of life and their fear of fighting. "The sense of less, this misery that has befallen us: all these are proof that we have abandoned God and his jihad," bin Laden said. "God has imposed inferiority on you and will not remove it from you until you return to your religion."

Recalling the Prophet's injunction on his deathbed that Islam should be the only religion in Arabia, bin Laden asked, "What answer do we have for God on the day of reckoning?... The ummah in this time have become lost and have gone astray. Now, ten years have passed since the Americans entered the land of the two holy places.... It becomes clear to use that shying away from the fight, combined with the love of earthly existence that fills the hearts of many of us, is the source of this misery, this humiliation, and this contempt."

These words reached into the hearts of the nineteen young men, many of whom had skills, talent, and education, and were living comfortably in the west; and yet they still resonated with the sense of shame that bin Laden sang to them.

What do we want? What do we want?
Don't we want to please God?
Don't we want Paradise?

He urged them to become martyrs, to give up their promising lives for the greater glory that awaited them. "Look, we have found ourselves in the mouth of the lion for over twenty years now," he said, "thanks to the mercy and favor of God: the Russian Scud missiles hunted us for over ten years, and the American Cruise missiles have hunted us for another ten years. The believer knows that the hour of death can be neither hastened nor postponed." Then he quoted a passage from the fourth sura of the Quran, which he repeated three times in the speech -an obvious signal to the hijackers who were on their way:

Wherever you are, death will find you,
even in the looming tower.

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Frühling in Paris

Laurence Auster:
"Darwinians and materialists … espouse reductive theories that cancel out man’s conscious life, while they want to continue their own conscious life. That's a hypocrisy far worse than any liberal hypocrisy."

No theory cancels out man's conscious life.

A form of materialist theory including a denial of consciousness would do nothing to stop man from having a conscious life.

Was Aristole a hypocrite because he thought he thought with his heart when in fact he thought with his brain?

Obviously he was not.

The above statement by Auster can be seen for the foolishness it is.

Laurence Auster:
"Let's face it--democracy is grounded in stupidity and is stupid."

The Neocon attributes inherent virtue to the gaudy abstraction called democracy.

Auster attributes inherent vice to that gaudy abstraction.

Paul Nachman:
I've long said that Robert J. Samuelson is one of the few adults in our national public life. John Bolton goes on the list, too.

John Bolton.

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Evidence Blacks may be a Different Subspecies

Neanderthals are classified as a different subspecies than Homo Sapians. Therefore if sub-Saharan Africans (i.e. Blacks) are less like Europeans than Neanderthals were, it's clearly also the case that sub-Saharan Africans are a different subspecies than Europeans.

 

This article in New Scientist discusses a study based on the idea that Neanderthals and Europeans broke off from each other after they both broke off from sub-Saharan Africans.

 

If this study is accurate, it inevitably follows that sub-Saharan Africans (Blacks) are actually a different subspecies than Europeans.

 

Don't expect any scientists to admit the obvious implications of their own theory, though, given their pathetic fealty the dominant ideology of our time.

 

Human and Neanderthal interbreeding questioned

• 20:00 13 August 2012 by Michael Marshall 

It was the discovery that challenged what it is to be human. The Neanderthal genome revealed that our extinct cousin's genes live on in many modern humans, implying that the two species interbred. But a controversial new study casts doubt on those claims of interspecies hanky-panky.

 

In 2010, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues sequenced the Neanderthal genome. Their analysis concluded that many modern humans carry a few Neanderthal genes. Only native Africans lack the Neanderthal genes, because Neanderthals did not live in Africa.

 

Right from the start, there was a problem. Neanderthals and modern humans ultimately evolved from the same ancestral population, so any genes shared by the two species might simply have been inherited from this common ancestor.

 

"We were very upfront in our papers that this was a possibility," says Pääbo's colleague David Reich of the Harvard Medical School in Boston.
 

Andrea Manica and Anders Eriksson at the University of Cambridge have now built a model to demonstrate a non-interbreeding explanation for the 2010 result.

 

They began with an ancestral hominin population throughout Africa and Europe. Because of their regional proximity, the hominins in Europe had more genes in common with those of northern Africa than those of southern Africa.

 

Africa and Europe then became genetically isolated from one another, perhaps triggered by changing climates, says Manica. This allowed the Europeans to evolve into Neanderthals and the Africans to evolve into modern humans. Crucially, though, the modern humans in northern Africa retained genetic similarities with Neanderthals that the southern Africans lacked. Northern Africans ultimately moved into Europe – but they didn't need to interbreed with Neanderthals to share some genes in common with them (see diagram).

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USA Presidential "Debate"

 

I didn't watch the debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, but I have a feeling this guy on The American Conservative [sic] website pretty well summed up what happened:



I was very confused by [how] Romney kept insisting that he was not going to make tax cuts that increased the deficit without saying “All that stuff I promised a few months ago is no longer what I stand for.” It seemed like Romney’s message was “Magic will make my tax cuts revenue neutral.” In general he seemed to be insisting that reality would bend to suit his promises.

Also, whenever Romney talks I feel like he’s about to cry, his mouth wavers between a slight forced smile and a slight frown in a way that seems out of control and his eyes squint so they look like he’s about to start bawling. Obama on the other hand looked like he fell asleep a few times while Romney spoke, so I guess that’s bad too.

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