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.
Friday, December 10, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
One suggestion to improve employment in the US
Of course, I know that TPTB will never take this suggestion, but here it is:
1. A very large fraction of the employment in the US is by small and very small businesses
2. Administrative, legal, and tax codes are absolutely full of constants of the form---this applies to all businesses with more than N employees
3. A lot of businesses deliberately stay lower than various values of N because of the immense compliance burden involved with the addition of employee number N+1
Therefore, take all such constants, and double them. Thereafter, index them to the population of the US.
You'll probably see a large wave of pent-up hiring where economically hiring the N+1, N+2 makes economic sense but for the added compliance costs for those employees AND the 1st-Nth employee. In addition, you'll have to enforce these rules on less companies, which means it'd cost a negative amount of money. By allowing 'small' businesses to scale to a larger size, this will also increase the competition they represent to the 'big boys', who love rules that protect their incumbency and increase barriers to entry.
1. A very large fraction of the employment in the US is by small and very small businesses
2. Administrative, legal, and tax codes are absolutely full of constants of the form---this applies to all businesses with more than N employees
3. A lot of businesses deliberately stay lower than various values of N because of the immense compliance burden involved with the addition of employee number N+1
Therefore, take all such constants, and double them. Thereafter, index them to the population of the US.
You'll probably see a large wave of pent-up hiring where economically hiring the N+1, N+2 makes economic sense but for the added compliance costs for those employees AND the 1st-Nth employee. In addition, you'll have to enforce these rules on less companies, which means it'd cost a negative amount of money. By allowing 'small' businesses to scale to a larger size, this will also increase the competition they represent to the 'big boys', who love rules that protect their incumbency and increase barriers to entry.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Tim the (un)Wise
I've been mulling over Tim Wise's recent screed for some time now. I suppose I should start with my most important observation:
Thank you Tim Wise, for being, well, unwise. Your work and the resounding lack of total excoriation forthcoming from the organs of mainstream culture have provided me with ample material for recruiting and awakening allies among my coethnics. Frankly I doubt I could have done a better job of black propaganda if I tried. You see, most of my coethnics and especially my coethnic coreligionists are far, far too nice, and far too trusting at that. It's very hard to awaken them to the defense of their own interests. Far too many of them are basically just cultural Christians without any real attachment to Christ or Christian tradition, and that is a recipe for being led around by any guilt-tripper like an ox with a ring through his nose. It causes me a great deal of frustration to see denominations fall like dominoes because their orthodox and conservative elements are afraid of not being nice or of confrontation. Often I want to scream to them 'Purge them before they purge you'. But that's a matter for another post or three.
Let's talk existential interests. The most pressing interest any people has is the maintenance of its demographic hegemony over the real estate in which it resides. Tim is serving me well here by calling my root argument into strong focus in a venue I normally have little access to, excepting when I'm acting in what I call a 'counter-intelligence' capacity. You see, it really doesn't matter whether you're collectively guilty or not when existential interests are concerned. You defend them if for no other reason than your basic requirement to defend the interests of your children. You can get to this requirement either from pretty much any Abrahamic faith's traditions and writings (failing to do so is to deny the Faith and be worse than the unbeliever) or from the brute facts of nature if that's your bent. Honestly, you SHOULD feel it in your gut. Even I do, and I don't feel a lot of things in my gut that I should, being pretty seriously non-neurotypical. I'd suggest a secular version of my religious test in my earlier post Solo Scriptura or Sola Scriptura tradition as a guide here.
Let's talk privilege. I for one want to confer as many advantages as I can on my children. I make no bones about it either. I even chose their parents (particularly their mother and maternal grandfather and grandmother) carefully :-) Sure there are lots of people that hem and haw on this point, but in general they act precisely as I have and continue to do. From this I infer that they must believe, at root, as I do. This is not a bad thing, and people shouldn't feel guilty about it. Genuine love for their children is all to often the only real love many folks have (with so much self-loathing, many even lack self-love). God doesn't want you to loathe yourself. He wouldn't have sent His Son to suffer, die, and be raised from the dead if He wanted that. There's a reason that Gospel means essentially 'good news'. For those of you who aren't interested in that particular offer, I've another one for you. I don't want you to loathe yourself either, even if you're my enemy. Self loathing almost certainly causes inflammation, like low status does, which literally hurts you. So stop feeling guilty about your 'invisible knapsack' of white privilege or whatever metaphor for such you've been sold. Insofar as privilege exists, it's really much more 'elite' privilege than 'white privilege' anyway.
Thank you Tim Wise, for being, well, unwise. Your work and the resounding lack of total excoriation forthcoming from the organs of mainstream culture have provided me with ample material for recruiting and awakening allies among my coethnics. Frankly I doubt I could have done a better job of black propaganda if I tried. You see, most of my coethnics and especially my coethnic coreligionists are far, far too nice, and far too trusting at that. It's very hard to awaken them to the defense of their own interests. Far too many of them are basically just cultural Christians without any real attachment to Christ or Christian tradition, and that is a recipe for being led around by any guilt-tripper like an ox with a ring through his nose. It causes me a great deal of frustration to see denominations fall like dominoes because their orthodox and conservative elements are afraid of not being nice or of confrontation. Often I want to scream to them 'Purge them before they purge you'. But that's a matter for another post or three.
Let's talk existential interests. The most pressing interest any people has is the maintenance of its demographic hegemony over the real estate in which it resides. Tim is serving me well here by calling my root argument into strong focus in a venue I normally have little access to, excepting when I'm acting in what I call a 'counter-intelligence' capacity. You see, it really doesn't matter whether you're collectively guilty or not when existential interests are concerned. You defend them if for no other reason than your basic requirement to defend the interests of your children. You can get to this requirement either from pretty much any Abrahamic faith's traditions and writings (failing to do so is to deny the Faith and be worse than the unbeliever) or from the brute facts of nature if that's your bent. Honestly, you SHOULD feel it in your gut. Even I do, and I don't feel a lot of things in my gut that I should, being pretty seriously non-neurotypical. I'd suggest a secular version of my religious test in my earlier post Solo Scriptura or Sola Scriptura tradition as a guide here.
Let's talk privilege. I for one want to confer as many advantages as I can on my children. I make no bones about it either. I even chose their parents (particularly their mother and maternal grandfather and grandmother) carefully :-) Sure there are lots of people that hem and haw on this point, but in general they act precisely as I have and continue to do. From this I infer that they must believe, at root, as I do. This is not a bad thing, and people shouldn't feel guilty about it. Genuine love for their children is all to often the only real love many folks have (with so much self-loathing, many even lack self-love). God doesn't want you to loathe yourself. He wouldn't have sent His Son to suffer, die, and be raised from the dead if He wanted that. There's a reason that Gospel means essentially 'good news'. For those of you who aren't interested in that particular offer, I've another one for you. I don't want you to loathe yourself either, even if you're my enemy. Self loathing almost certainly causes inflammation, like low status does, which literally hurts you. So stop feeling guilty about your 'invisible knapsack' of white privilege or whatever metaphor for such you've been sold. Insofar as privilege exists, it's really much more 'elite' privilege than 'white privilege' anyway.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Making being neurotypical work FOR you, Christian edition
Pretty much by definition, the overwhelming majority of the population is neurotypical. I suspect that many of my readers are as well. Because I'm religiously obligated to love you, I'm here today to offer you some encouragement if you're working out your salvation with fear and trembling.
You've got one huge advantage over me---you're neurotypical, which means you're at the center of mass of all the theological advice that's been heaped up over the centuries by the communion of the saints. You're the bullseye of the target, as it were. Let's turn to a genuinely difficult problem, the central one, in fact, for a Christian:
How do I love God?
For some of you, loving God is as natural as breathing. Lord I envy thee. Others of you have such profound self-deception that you can convince yourself that you love God even when your actions indicate to an outside observer that you must not. Many of the rest of us have to struggle in the darkness in the fear and trembling that Paul spoke of in his letters. Its this group that I'm speaking to.
Fortunately for you, I've got something to offer you today. It comes to us by way of our good friend C. S. Lewis. Lewis understood the neurotypical very well:
"Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him."
See, you, as a neurotypical are wired to like people better that you've done favors or nice things for, not those who've done such things for you. It's perverse but it is true. In an awful lot of instances, this REALLY sucks for you, because most of the science & art of manipulation that has been developed over the centuries since Adam has been aimed squarely at YOU. You run what amounts to the Windows OS that 99% of virus authors write for, the non-neurotypical is like the OS/2 or Linux OS. This unfortunately doesn't work worth a damn for me, because I'm not wired that way, I'm wired to like people better the more they do for me. So, I'm selfish and you're ungrateful, or more likely, both of us are selfish and ungrateful, we just have different degrees of predilection towards each vice. Pray for me as I also pray for you.
Praying for others is, for the neurotypical, a way of 'hacking' yourself to love them more, and in so doing, to love God more under the whole 'least of these my brethren' rubric laid out by Jesus. It's a spiritual aid in your walk that's available and efficacious for you and I encourage you to use it. Actually helping your fellows is another such aid, and in that I'll borrow from Lewis again (from the Screwtape Letters if I recall correctly) and advise you to keep your charity as close to home as is feasible. Help the people in need in your own church or social circle---your love for them will be concrete as opposed to abstract. Abstract love is generally no love at all, as when one practices 'Telescopic Charity'. They are very much your neighbor in the sense that you are told to love by Jesus in the Gospels. This love is also how the lost are supposed to be able to recognize Christians.
Now I'll give you the biggest one of them all, harvested straight from Matthew 6:21. That guy Jesus really understood the neurotypical heart...I mean, you'd think that he had a hand in designing them or something :-)
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also
Translation, give your treasure to advance God's kingdom. For most of us, in a modern nation, that means tithing. For a neurotypical, I'd suggest giving enough so that it hurts a little---i.e., it cuts somewhat into the money that you'd otherwise spend on the various luxuries that you desire. I say 'a little' because God is VERY clear in Paul's letters that you're supposed to take care of your family, and that if you do not when you're able to do so, you've denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever. But this is really the nuclear option in conditioning yourself to love God if you're neurotypical. It mashes the 'I've made sacrifices/done favors for you so I MUST love you button' and triggers your sunk-cost misprocessing cognitive bias to boot. God must really love the neurotypical. If this helps you, you're welcome to it, and if you like, you're even welcome to pass these insights off as you own.
You've got one huge advantage over me---you're neurotypical, which means you're at the center of mass of all the theological advice that's been heaped up over the centuries by the communion of the saints. You're the bullseye of the target, as it were. Let's turn to a genuinely difficult problem, the central one, in fact, for a Christian:
How do I love God?
For some of you, loving God is as natural as breathing. Lord I envy thee. Others of you have such profound self-deception that you can convince yourself that you love God even when your actions indicate to an outside observer that you must not. Many of the rest of us have to struggle in the darkness in the fear and trembling that Paul spoke of in his letters. Its this group that I'm speaking to.
Fortunately for you, I've got something to offer you today. It comes to us by way of our good friend C. S. Lewis. Lewis understood the neurotypical very well:
"Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him."
See, you, as a neurotypical are wired to like people better that you've done favors or nice things for, not those who've done such things for you. It's perverse but it is true. In an awful lot of instances, this REALLY sucks for you, because most of the science & art of manipulation that has been developed over the centuries since Adam has been aimed squarely at YOU. You run what amounts to the Windows OS that 99% of virus authors write for, the non-neurotypical is like the OS/2 or Linux OS. This unfortunately doesn't work worth a damn for me, because I'm not wired that way, I'm wired to like people better the more they do for me. So, I'm selfish and you're ungrateful, or more likely, both of us are selfish and ungrateful, we just have different degrees of predilection towards each vice. Pray for me as I also pray for you.
Praying for others is, for the neurotypical, a way of 'hacking' yourself to love them more, and in so doing, to love God more under the whole 'least of these my brethren' rubric laid out by Jesus. It's a spiritual aid in your walk that's available and efficacious for you and I encourage you to use it. Actually helping your fellows is another such aid, and in that I'll borrow from Lewis again (from the Screwtape Letters if I recall correctly) and advise you to keep your charity as close to home as is feasible. Help the people in need in your own church or social circle---your love for them will be concrete as opposed to abstract. Abstract love is generally no love at all, as when one practices 'Telescopic Charity'. They are very much your neighbor in the sense that you are told to love by Jesus in the Gospels. This love is also how the lost are supposed to be able to recognize Christians.
Now I'll give you the biggest one of them all, harvested straight from Matthew 6:21. That guy Jesus really understood the neurotypical heart...I mean, you'd think that he had a hand in designing them or something :-)
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also
Translation, give your treasure to advance God's kingdom. For most of us, in a modern nation, that means tithing. For a neurotypical, I'd suggest giving enough so that it hurts a little---i.e., it cuts somewhat into the money that you'd otherwise spend on the various luxuries that you desire. I say 'a little' because God is VERY clear in Paul's letters that you're supposed to take care of your family, and that if you do not when you're able to do so, you've denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever. But this is really the nuclear option in conditioning yourself to love God if you're neurotypical. It mashes the 'I've made sacrifices/done favors for you so I MUST love you button' and triggers your sunk-cost misprocessing cognitive bias to boot. God must really love the neurotypical. If this helps you, you're welcome to it, and if you like, you're even welcome to pass these insights off as you own.
Articles to come, or, dealing with the writing deficit
I'm somewhat backlogged on my writing. Here are the articles I'm thinking on presently.
Political/Social:
Tim the (un)Wise --- my thoughts on how everyone's favorite anti-white...I mean...anti-racist figure has illuminated the cultural battlespace and how we as reactionaries might best exploit him.
Taqiyya, a gift from Mohammed for the neurotypical white person in the present cultural battlespace
Religious/Theological:
Metaphors for the Divine, God as Absolute Monarch
Metaphors for the Divine, God as Author
Metaphors for the Divine, God as Game Master
Making the Neurotypical work for you, some spiritual advice for my neurotypical Christian friends
Normally my writing style is to think about what it is that I'm writing until I feel the words clawing at the inside of my skull, eager to escape. So I don't really know what the timeframe for these is going to be.
Political/Social:
Tim the (un)Wise --- my thoughts on how everyone's favorite anti-white...I mean...anti-racist figure has illuminated the cultural battlespace and how we as reactionaries might best exploit him.
Taqiyya, a gift from Mohammed for the neurotypical white person in the present cultural battlespace
Religious/Theological:
Metaphors for the Divine, God as Absolute Monarch
Metaphors for the Divine, God as Author
Metaphors for the Divine, God as Game Master
Making the Neurotypical work for you, some spiritual advice for my neurotypical Christian friends
Normally my writing style is to think about what it is that I'm writing until I feel the words clawing at the inside of my skull, eager to escape. So I don't really know what the timeframe for these is going to be.
Adding a few more blogs to my blog list, also congratulations to those reactionaries with new children or children on the way
Not much to update here, but I've added Coldequations and Foseti to my blog list. Also, I'd like to extend my congratulations to Foseti on his new little one, and B Lode on his child to be named later that is still in development. My own little reactionary family will be adding one as well in the next couple of weeks.
Amusingly, my little boy, with his big blue eyes and red hair and extremely symmetric features, is probably already a mightier soldier of reaction than I. Given the surge of procreation that has occurred in my church and social circle after his birth, I swear he must be contagious. I've even seen an SWPL woman in her early 40s play peek-a-boo with him and say 'oh I want one' at the Whole Foods. Nobody with 2 X chromosomes seems to be able to resist him, and even at places like a gun show, complete strangers dote on him.
Amusingly, my little boy, with his big blue eyes and red hair and extremely symmetric features, is probably already a mightier soldier of reaction than I. Given the surge of procreation that has occurred in my church and social circle after his birth, I swear he must be contagious. I've even seen an SWPL woman in her early 40s play peek-a-boo with him and say 'oh I want one' at the Whole Foods. Nobody with 2 X chromosomes seems to be able to resist him, and even at places like a gun show, complete strangers dote on him.
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