Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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March 13, 2015 by henrydampier 6 Comments

Exclusivity

Since the convulsions of the Civil Rights era, it has become almost impossible to argue for freedom of association and exclusion in the United States. Great efforts are undertaken to teach children and train adults into believing that inclusion is good, and exclusivity is bad.

So, for example, it is considered wicked to exclude various types of people which are both real and invented from any organization, whether it happens to be formal or informal. Where soft segregation appears, un-appointed commissars are encouraged to break that up, whether or not there’s anything legally actionable in what’s being done.

It has also happened that people comfortable arguing for the principle of free association tend to become profoundly uncomfortable with any application of that principle. Most of the people who might say that freedom of association is good would not defend the right of a church to exclude sodomites from the congregation or the priesthood.

Proclaiming a belief in a principle but then refusing to defend the consistent application of that principle undermines the prior statement. A political candidate who dares to defend freedom of association in principle must respond to any criticism of his position by condemning exclusion in practice.

To defend the right of the Irish Catholic bar owner to tell a Black patron to “Pike off, nigger” is to also defend the right of the Black barber to tell a White kid to “Get the fuck out of here, cracker.” In today’s crocodile-calculus, the latter statement would be an oppressor getting his comeuppance, but the former would be grounds to seize that bar owner’s business and throw him into penury. Theoretically, the paleface could sue the barber. In practice, any lawyer who took that case would have to be a crackpot.

Trotsky would call them both ‘racists.’ I would say that they are both within their proper rights, and that such exclusion is crucial to the maintenance of any real community of quality.

In both law and practice, the principle of forced-open-entry tends to be inconsistently applied. In most universities, there are Black, Asian, or Latino student unions, but any attempt to create ‘White Student Unions’ attracts scandal. While there might be a few ‘French’ or ‘German’ cultural houses here or there in older universities, those also tend to demand inclusion for all groups. We abound in women’s groups, but any attempt to build such groups for men — even within a leftist identity politics framework — is met with defamatory magazine and newspaper articles along with legal pressure besides.

The press portrays moderate leftists like Paul Elam as if they were proto-Hitlers, merely for attempting to represent the interests of the hated oppressor-class.

This state of affairs permits some groups to be discriminatory and crudely insulting. Others are forbidden from expressing even mild disrespect for the protected groups. To remain in polite society, we must pretend not to notice this. Since society is becoming not-society and the politeness is becoming a worthless pretense, it’s time to toss the lies in the rubbish and discuss things as they are.

To exclude is to say that you prefer one group to other groups. It is to say that a group membership matters to you, that you value the group, that you will defend the interests of the group. Forced inclusion disrupts the number of private spaces available to individuals for most races, classes, and creeds — but it tends to be applied against certain groups more than others. When, here and there, an individual notices the arbitrary nature in which these rules come to be applied, the herd swarms to decry him as an evil person.

In the same way as marrying a woman is to say that you prefer this lady above the others — to grant her that privilege — an expression of preference necessarily ranks some over others.

Whenever disparate impact appears within a group, it takes on the frisson of a criminal gang, because what’s being done is against the spirit of an unenforceable set of tyrannical laws.

The hope behind the inclusive, open society was that it would make human equality real. That goal was never achievable in the abstract, and in the particular, it has resulted in unhappiness, ugliness, conflict, crime, confusion, and aimless solitude.

Without exclusion, there can be little inclusion or intimacy, either. A space for privacy and for secrets makes it possible to protect a given spot of land, an idea, a company, a family, a club, or a temple.

‘Civil rights’ and the concomitant global-multicultural-infinite-immigration policy  has, rather than make cooperation possible, depleted civil society, annihilated private institutions at all levels, weakened the practice of faith, and has instead funneled people into communicating by computer to be surveilled by the state and its favored commercial interests. Where there is no privacy, there can be no ‘private property,’ either.

Because moderates on this topic tend to be punished at incredible levels, people who disagree even mildly will tend to find themselves pushed to extremes, because it is the fastest way for them to find allies to coordinate with. Forcing groups together also forces them into conflict where they might have avoided one another otherwise, through prudent separation.

If the man whose daughter has been turned out and sold by Pakistani slavers can only find an understanding friend in the man with the swastika tattoo, those fellows will become fast friends, and the legitimacy of the state will be undermined, potentially fatally so given enough time and insults to the honor of the little people.

The average Englishman has no opinion about gypsies until you force 50,000 of them to live in his neighborhood at public expense. After that, it should be no surprise if he becomes a world-class gypsy loather. In the mental framework of the Western elite, our gypsy-hating fellow is evil, even though his antipathy would never have been aroused if some bureaucrat hadn’t gotten it into his head that it would be a bright idea to import 50,000 gypsies and dump them into the man’s neighborhood.

Since it becomes forbidden to speak about these topics in any way, anyone who does permit discussion of that topic — usually those unconcerned about elite opinion — will wind up attracting the mass of dissatisfaction. While pseudo-elites of democracies sneer at this ‘rise of extremism,’ this rise only derives from the misgovernment practiced by those same pseudo-elites, the same refusal to address their constituents in a forthright way, to listen to their complaints, and to take appropriate action.

The leaders in the Western democracies think that if they are aggressive enough in hunting down those who dare to discriminate, they will bring about the magic happy world in their television shows, movies, and advertisements. The more aggressive they are in removing unprincipled exceptions, the more bitter the opposition that they will excite,and the more that they will destabilize their own state.

The window of opportunity in which political compromise might have been possible shrinks by another few inches for every reckless & destructive action.

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Filed Under: Social Commentary

March 12, 2015 by henrydampier 16 Comments

Classics: The Iliad

fury of achilles coypel 1737
Fury of Achilles — Coypel, 1737

This was my third or fourth time through the Iliad, this time with a translation by William Cowper from 1791. Although it is in blank verse, I found it to be both more poetic and better put-together as a piece for study than the modern translations which I’ve read before.

For starters, each book in the poem comes with a synopsis, so it becomes a whole lot easier to remember what’s going on without going to an external reference. It took a little adjustment for me to remember all the Roman names for the Greek gods (I couldn’t remember who Vulcan was), but once that was done, I could enjoy it properly.

This is going to be a bit more of a personal post, because I assume most of you have been assigned the Illiad at one point or another by your school.

A good understanding of the Iliad is core to understanding many of the other works in the Western canon. The various references that show up in speeches, novels, plays, and artwork are generally not going to make any sense to you if you are not very familiar with the poem, the characters, and the actions contained within it. Christianity also makes no sense whatsoever unless you understand something of what the Greco-Roman culture was actually like.

At the heart of the poem’s plot is the affirmation of patrimony and property. Paris makes off with Helen and boats full of treasure besides, and the Greeks sail off to Troy to avenge the insult. This is not a story in which sensitivity, understanding, and effeminacy win the day. It was virtù:

Thus they, throughout all of Troy, like hunted fawns
Dispersed, their trickling limbs at leisure cool’d,
And, drinking, slaked their fiery thirst, reclined
Against the battlements. Meantime, the Greeks
Sloping their shields, approach’d the walls of Troy
And Hector, by his adverse fate ensnared,
Still stood exposed before the Scaean gate.

It is also easier to understand the historical importance of culture if you start to understand that the Greeks and the Romans crushed many of their competitors because they were better at transmitting historical lessons relating to military excellence across their own culture and down through the generations. Homer’s poems came down from the preliterate time, but maintaining them through literacy is one of the reasons why Alexander and the Romans were able to both conquer so much territory.

It also helps to explain why, by comparison, the culturally shallow Mongols wound up absorbed by the cultures which they had conquered only a generation or two after that empire reached its territorial peak.

Modern pedagogues tend to break down the Iliad into sections and try to teach each book while ‘testing’ for memorization without really demanding much comprehension at all. It is probably being taught less now because it is such a problematic poem by social justice standards.

Women are, after all, taken and passed around as slaves, and one of the central conflicts of the first portion of the poem is a dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon and demands Briseas as compensation.

When Vulcan forges a set of armor for Achilles, it may seem like it doesn’t matter all that much in a European context, but consider that entire continents full of people, even with rather sophisticated agricultural civilizations (like the Mayans, Aztecs, and various minor African empires) never figured out advanced metal armor or complex metalworking. Considering that — even that a culture would have a god associated with metalworking as well as untamed natural fire — is significant and rather relevant to that culture’s ability to develop powerful technology.

[Ed: Jay Fivekiller notes that iron smelting and metallurgy was known in ancient West Africa among various kingdoms.]

It is sometimes said that the Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad are foreign to how we are today, but I would rather feel more at home with the Greeks and more alienated against the pseudo-people that we have today.  To the extent that more people identify with the classical heritage and feel disdain and revulsion for the contemporary ‘last man’ is the extent to which we will be on our way back to excellence.

The consequence of abandoning the lineage of the Greeks is total annihilation — not metaphorical ‘annihilation,’ but physical destruction; the machete to the neck. People who fear the physical and spiritual West do what they can to suppress this culture because it is so vastly superior to most of its competitors, at an almost incomprehensible relative scale. It is the difference between the rocket ship and the rain dance, the steel cuirass and the cotton jaguar warrior costume.

This is perhaps why relative numbers don’t bother me so much. Being outnumbered was a problem for Cortez when he landed in the new world, but it wasn’t insurmountable.

The compulsive deference and obsequious respect that many Westerners have for inferior cultures might go away once again if we spend some more time and effort emphasizing the cultural heritage of military and artistic excellence.

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March 11, 2015 by henrydampier 21 Comments

Businesses That Separate Working Women From Their Savings

In all the discussions about feminism as an ideology, few of the articles about how to handle it involve economically exploiting the ideology to punish its adherents. There tends to be a little bit of tut-tutting about how liberals mint profits off of the ideology, but not much as it relates to scalping those same profits to discourage the adoption of the new life pattern.

Here are the big ones that I can think of:

  • Student lending and for-profit education
    • Sham courses at stupendous margins — get them hooked and paying interest for most of their working lives. There may be a default risk, but the government guarantees the face value of the loans.
  • Facilitating legal-ish prostitution
    • This has generated at least one high-growth startup success story in recent years
    • Someone has to pay for those student loans
  • Fertility treatments
    • Get them in their late 30s and 40s — they’re at peak earning power, have some savings, and are willing to spend it all on high-risk gambles repeatedly until they run out of money and eventually creditworthiness
  • Therapy
    • High-end therapists and psychiatrists earn $100s an hour
    • Prescriptions can be billed to insurance
    • Even casual users of drugs like Xanax need dealers
  • Romantic literature and film
    • The most lucrative genre of media today
    • Can be produced on a minimal budget, unlike male-targeted action films which need special effects
    • Mix and match genres and characters with the same basic formula
  • Legal services
    • Convince women to get divorced, provoke them into suing and re-suing people until they run out of money or their targets run out of liquid assets
  • Plastic surgery
    • Women naturally decay and become ugly
    • Promise them that they can look younger with surgery and implants
    • Separate them from their money
  • Childcare
    • They can get government assistance for this
    • All working women with kids need it to one degree or another
    • Higher end working women are willing to pay premium prices for care that they see as ‘better’ or more up-class
  • Retirement advice geared to women specifically
    • Women tend to be worse at making financial decisions than men are
    • They tend to be looking for an authority figure to manage their finances for them
    • They will pay a premium for this service and respond well to female-tinged financial marketing messages
  • Charity pitches
    • Childless women tend to respond well to images of surrogate children
  • Profligate pet care
    • Toy dogs are surrogate babies
    • They will spend enormous amounts of cash on their ‘babies’
  • Drugs and alcohol
    • They are always unhappy and feeling empty, so you just sell them the material to temporarily fill that hole
  • Real estate
    • Women will spend a lot more on real estate in ‘better’ neighborhoods
    • They are very socially sensitive to what sorts of neighborhoods they live in (will pay higher rent)
  • Fancy food
    • Working women tend to not know how to cook, so you can reap profits from them by paying people low wages to cook for working women
    • Even if it’s not actually ‘gourmet’ food, plausibly modeling the food after dishes portrayed as ‘gourmet’ on television and in magazines can result in higher profits
  • Hyper-fitness
    • Single women sometimes want to embody the androgynous fantasy of having the strength of a man and the sensual body of a woman
    • They demand ‘personal training,’ diet books, etc. etc. to realize an ideal which is difficult to achieve for most
    • Need becomes more acute as they age and become less intrinsically attractive
      • ‘Wall’ years after ~28 best age to target
  • Hyper-fatness
    • The flip-side of hyper-fitness — sell them muumuus, clothing with lots of elastic, and fat acceptance seminars to make them feel less ashamed over their unhealthy condition
  • Elderly, lonely women can be separated from their money trivially
    • This can be somewhat illegal, but elderly women with money are so helpless that they are practically ATMs

The businesses that load the woman up with cash early in her life primp her to to have that cash be taken from her later in life.

Given that marriage rates are declining at a fast clip, all of these lines of business should grow over time, so long as feminism remains a popular ideology promoted and supported by the state.

To the extent that men are penalized by the state for being men, and ownership becomes less secure, more cash will temporarily go into the hands of women, who tend to have poor impulse control, a low future orientation, and make more emotionally-driven rather than logical decisions.

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