Friday, December 17, 2010

Thoughts on the military

Recently I've read posts on two of my favorite blogs
http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2010/12/military-and-nationalist-sentiment.html
On onestdv's excellent blog and
http://mangans.blogspot.com/2010/12/patriotism-and-military.html
on Dennis Mangan's most worthwhile blog

I have to say I'm decidedly conflicted about the military in general. Weighing in favor:
1) I like a lot of the people in it, particularly at the enlisted and junior officer level (my direct contacts don't go any higher than LTC). It is heavy with people like myself in a lot of ways. I'm a Southerner for heaven's sake.
2) It's the closest thing America has to a reactionary institution (a sad commentary indeed)
3) Because of factors 1 and 2, their hearts really won't be into squishing me and mine when/if the time comes, although their paychecks may be sufficient
Weighing against
1) Because of factors 1 and 2, I really prefer NOT to see them suffer. Yes, I know a lot of them like to fight, but they only rarely get to fight in the manner they signed on to do (basically just in Desert Storm and the very early phases of the more recent Iraq confrontation where they actually got to fight another army complete with uniforms and vehicles to blow up). But I particularly dislike seeing them come home with brain injuries, in body bags, or suffering what we like to call PTSD now (shell shock, combat fatigue, I think every generation has a different name for it).
2) They're being used in a manner that is contrary to the interests of me and mine. I'm a firm believer in the all or nothing school of warfare. If you're not willing to do what it will almost certainly take to prevail (read, WWII or earlier rules of engagement, see also Mencius Moldbug or more or less any pre-WWII work on successful pacification of a nation), don't even start.
3) We spend an awful lot more on the military than the threats justify (and simulataneously, basically nothing on ACTUALLY defending our borders, the highest and best use of any military). We also spend an awful lot on the wrong threats in chronological terms---e.g. Soviet armored hordes pouring through the Fulda gap. We can probably afford about half the military budget we have right now, and that may well be overly optimistic. Even if you believe that as oil production starts to decline, we will have to engage in resource wars to avoid the strangulation of our economy due to liquid fuel 'demand destruction', you need a vastly different (and generally cheaper) military to do those deeds.

So, I suppose my advice to disgruntled members of the American Legions is this: Perhaps you should consider joining Blackwater or a similar outfit. I hear they pay a lot better. I don't see the nation's elites as presently being worthy of your loyalty, as demonstrated by your accepting a vastly lower rate of compensation than the market would bear for reasons of patriotism.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Weapons of Reaction: Entryism Diversity and the Environment Part II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
Entryism (or entrism or enterism) is a political tactic by which an organisation or state encourages its members or agents to infiltrate another organisation in an attempt to gain recruits, or take over entirely.

Suggested Target: The Sierra Club
http://www.sierraclub.org/

Why: Historically (i.e. before the 90s, the Sierra club has been against immigration in general, both legal and illegal. Among their favorite equations is Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology after all.
So there's no fundamental reason why it couldn't and shouldn't be restored to that track, which is congruent with the retention of demographic hegemony in the US for those of Euro extraction. When last put to a vote, the results were 60-40 percent against with a full-scale and legally questionable mobilization by the directors back around 2004. Control over the directors is a simple matter of votes. Record high turnout for said organization was around 22%, organizational size is around 1.4 million, so subversion is an achievable goal, particularly if executed rapidly before a counter mobilization can be made against it. And, membership is on sale right now, $15 instead of the usual $25. In addition, the organization appears to be pretty heavily demoralized right now, if you read between the lines on their website. Being able to consistently say that 'The Sierra Club' supports a moratorium on immigration and Operation Wetback II, the sequel, would give cover to a lot of people who are afraid of being painted as racists. This is why back in 2004 The Powers that Be were so terrified of the attempted internal coup at the Sierra Club elections. But said coup was just mobilizing people already inside who agreed with Tanton et al. Combine it with a hefty load of entryism and a second effort should succeed pretty easily. Ideally, the entryists would be very 'old school' conservative/reactionary environmentalists who'd maintain the brand.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Diversity and the Environment

One test of the truth of a statement that I often find myself using is to imagine what the world would necessarily look like if that statement was true, and to then determine whether the world in fact is consistent with that state. Similarly, when dealing with people's professed beliefs, I look for what I'd expect to see if I took their statements at face value and conclude provisionally that they actually believe what they say if I see a consistent state. In practice, I exempt people below about two standard deviations from the mean in intelligence from this sort of rigor in my own version of a soft bigotry of low expectations :-)

Recently I talked with a colleague of mine at work. This guy was particularly notable because until about a year ago, he'd never owned an automobile and never had even a driver's license. He biked pretty much everywhere or took public transit. He's also married and has a couple of kids. If ANYONE can claim orthopraxis on environmental issues, it's him--although, amusingly, I've never heard even a peep about such things from him despite my inference that he's SWPL from his visible cultural markers.

Just recently though, he got a driver's license and a car, and, I felt compelled to ask him why, given his known history. He told me that he no longer felt safe taking his little kids on the light rail anymore. He attributed the reason to 'too many apartments', but, we all know that's just code, although I obviously didn't pin him on that. This should seriously concern anyone who fancies themselves an environmentalist or a public transit fan. Here you have someone who's way, way out there---probably +3 sigmas or more from the mean in environmental orthopraxis, and they're abandoning you because of diversity (of the sort less benign than that discussed a couple posts ago). If you want people like him to use public transportation---and he's about the easiest target you're going to get---you have to insulate them when they use it from any sort of intimidation, be it physical, verbal, social, cultural, or olfactory. Calling guys like him crypto-racists or other such won't get you anywhere. Hell, for all I know, he's listening to Radio Reaction in his new car now.

This sort of diversity and the lack of proper management thereof is also a major factor in what people term 'white flight' (i.e., the disintegration of most of the cores of most of our major cities). This has been an economic nightmare and, if you subscribe to environmentalism, an environmental disaster also. Consider this:

People who commute long distances use much more gasoline than those that do not. Commutes also make people unhappy---about the only robust finding honestly of 'happiness research'. This also increases the sprawl of a city and the environmental footprint thereof. Deal with the causes of this white flight and you'll see a lot shorter average commutes---that is, if you care about the environment more than the supposed wonders of diversity. People would also walk a lot more, which would help a lot in dealing with the insane levels of obesity that prevail in today's society relative to when I was growing up.

Most (nearly all) of the population increase in the US in recent years is due to immigration, illegal and otherwise. Pretty much everyone who immigrates to the US has a larger environmental footprint here than where they left. Many also have a larger TFR as well. If you claim to care about the environment, particularly if you are a AGW/CC true believer, you are REQUIRED to care about this. What's your equation? IMPACT = Population*Affluence*Technology---gee, let's boost both P and A and expect less Impact. Maybe the engineers will bail us out with T, or we'll strain at gnats by asking people to sort their garbage while ignoring the elephants in the room.

Nearly all of your support comes from people of Euro extraction, especially those of Anglo or German ancestry. Don't believe me? Check the membership rolls of your organizations---they're often whiter than the Klan.

So here's my suggestion for the environmentalist. Get behind the ejection of illegal immigrants in a big way and the curtailing of the amounts of legal immigration as well. Develop the will to insist on what Mencius Moldbug terms "Order" (the state beyond "Peace" and below "Law") regardless of what diverse group you're discussing in the US. Do this and the environment WILL improve as you typically measure it. You might even find that reactionaries like myself are solidly behind you. There's no reason that environmentalism has to be a left wing issue after all.

Daughters of the American Reaction

Our daughter was born about three weeks ago, which has significantly cut into my memetic output :-) Like her brother, it looks like she's going to be another little redhead with big blue eyes. In keeping with my Southern ancestry, I shall have to obtain a shotgun or two in honor of her birth, well in advance of the coming of any prospective suitors. It will probably be a couple years before we seek our third child. Two small children is very much a handful, even with the much-welcomed assistance of my wife's mother.

By the way, young reactionaries, if you're reading this particular post, and you're in the market for a wife---consider this very carefully:
When you marry a woman, you also marry her family, particularly that subset of her family that you live nearby to and which your wife has become accustomed to regular contact with. This can be a VERY good or bad thing. In the case of my wife's parents, this is a very good thing, and they in truth had a fair degree of influence in my decision to marry their daughter. Why?, might you ask.

A woman will generally recapitulate her relationship with her father with you when you marry her, and will tend to treat you similarly to the way that her mother treats her father. Sure, not always, but frankly, that's the way to bet. What you're looking for in a prospective mother-in-law is Respectful treatment of your prospective father-in-law. Love is a nebulous, fuzzy thing, often difficult to discern between two people that you don't know intimately, but respect is quite concrete and much easier to see. Needless to say, a woman whose parents have divorced bodes very ill for your own marital prospects. Of course, you don't need to take my word for it, there are a lot of studies you can consult that'll even tell you the odds ratios, some of which are even linked in the sphere of reaction.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Why even benign diversity sucks for human beings

Let's start with---what do I mean by 'benign diversity'? By this I mean diversity that does not materially raise the crime rate for those it is inflicted on or significantly change the political scene. The archetypical example of this is people of Chinese and Japanese ethnicity living among people of Euro extraction in the US. They've got similar levels of achievement in the things they care about and neither generally aims to use politics as a weapon against the other to any major degree. Furthermore, their crime rates are similarly low, and their interracial crime proclivities are both pretty much nonexistent. So neighborhoods that are mixed primarily between these groups should be just fine right?

Well, if your idea of a neighborhood is one with desolate streets, very little neighbor interaction, and pretty much no kids playing outside (although they do exist in fair numbers, as evidenced by the school bus stop), they're fine indeed. If on the other hand you like a neighborhood with actual community, shared norms, and kids that don't need play dates and the like to actually be..well, kids, they're assuredly not.

Neighborhoods where no group has effective normative hegemony---i.e. the ability to enforce its norms through social pressure---basically aren't neighborhoods at all. I grew up in a neighborhood. I suspect most of my readers did as well. Most of us do not presently live in neighborhoods.

There is a neighborhood of about 95% Koreans centered around a church where a friend of mine lives a few miles from my own. They actually have a community, and they have shared norms. I see kids bikes in lots of people's yards without any locks or the like on them, that have obviously been used recently. This tells me several things. Lots of kids actually play here. They use bikes as a viable means of locomotion. The crime rate is sufficiently suppressed that they need implement no defensive measures like chains and locks. They have a viable community life and probably actually personally know most of the other folks in the community (my friend is one of the very few non-Koreans that live in this neighborhood, but he's a pretty hardcore martial arts geek so he fits in fairly well aparently). On this I wish them well--their community is much like the ones I grew up living in and which I presently only have via my church. This is the way that human beings are happiest living. They're not happy at all when they constantly have to wonder whether the community will back them with respect to things like how many cars its acceptable to park in the street, volume of music playing, how much noise or how late their parties can run, what's acceptable behavior for kids and teens, and a thousand other things. It's nowhere near as bad as the other kind of 'diversity', which I'm well familiar with since I grew up in the South, but it makes for lifeless 'non-neighborhoods'. It also gives rise to the sort of 'grassroots tyranny' that HOAs often become infamous for---in the absence of agreed on norms, administrative and legal rules tend to creep in.