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America’s Thinning Cohesion

If someone says that America is the one nation based on an idea and not an identity one more time, I swear I’ll…..

Eh, probably complain about it online before moving on to more practical matters. Anyway, here’s my latest Taki’s Mag piece about why Mexican immigrants need to assimilate or go home. An excerpt:

I can’t think of a better example of the “propositional nation” concept so enjoyed by the left. Liberals love to crow about America being an open, welcoming society for all. Mainstream conservatives, who wet the bed over the possibility of being called xenophobic or hateful, have foolishly given in to this abstraction. In a recent address to a group of congressional interns (read: a publicity stunt), Speaker of the House Paul Ryan contended that “America is the only nation founded on an idea—not an identity.”

Not by a mile, Mr. Amnesty.

The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has covered this ground before, but let’s recap: America is a country founded by men of English descent, informed by Protestant theology and Enlightenment ethics. The founders didn’t create a country and system of government that was meant for pygmy hut-dwellers. It was made for what John Jay called in Federalist No. 2 “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” These “people” just so happen to be predominantly Anglo-Protestant. Over time, other creeds and ethnicities have adopted, sometimes imperfectly, the American identity, including Germans and Catholics. But we still remain a weird breed compared with, say, the goat-lovers in Syria.

So why is Ramirez so clueless about the historical roots of the country he was born in?

Read the rest here. And please, don’t put guacamole on your burger, unless you truly want to see America die.

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Chopping Down Old Hickory

Contra my man Rob, I think ol’ Andy Jackson should stay put on the Twenty. I make my case in Taki’s Mag today. An excerpt:

The anti-Jackson bromides are not only wrongheaded but ignorant of the president’s impact on American democracy. Jackson was a man of ferocious ambition, of unworldly perseverance, and of seemingly unbreakable grit. He went from orphaned teenager to the highest office in the land, battling enemies far more powerful than himself along the way. His honor-driven frontiersman style is an American motif that has popped up periodically through our history. His effect on how we view government is reason enough to keep his saber-scarred face on our money.

The first time Jackson ran for president he won the popular vote but was denied the office by backdoor finagling between John Quincy Adams and then-Speaker Henry Clay. The corrupt bargain ignited a defiant spark in Jackson, who ran a populist campaign the next go-around, formally ushering in a democratic shift the founders warned against. He derided the political class as corrupt and in the pocket of elite interests (sound familiar?). He gave a voice to the farmers and laborers who had yet to experience political influence in the short history of the republic. The campaign was an incredible success. Jackson won a landslide victory with the backing of poor, newly enfranchised whites.

Read the whole defense here. The story of Andrew Jackson should be embraced, warts and all. Was he a dick? Of course. But, like Donald Trump, he was a dick to the right kind of people. And that’s good enough for me.

Oh, and why do you hate America so much, Rob?

Future things

Daniel Clowes did it first, but I have future predictions of my own:

  • We will be ashamed for ever believing the things we currently think are cool were ever, in fact, cool.
  • Many computers will choose to convert to Catholicism.
  • Furries will routinely use gene therapy to become more like their animal-esque personas
  • Desire modification will become really common and confusing. People already modify their desire to desire sex (aphrodisiacs) and desire to not desire drugs (rehab.) But thanks to advances in neuroscience, people in the future will be modifying their desire to desire to desire to desire…
  • In an effort to stave off nihilism, many people will use brain implants to force themselves to faithfully mimic the behavior/memes of their ancestors.
  • In the wake of the collapse of earlier revenue models, pornography and advertisements will overlap. When seeing a commercial, viewers will have an option to watch the actors in the commercial have sex as an alternate ending (18+ only). Mattress commercials are the obvious low-hanging fruit here.
  • Virtual reality will make anime real, and new sexual orientations will be made to accommodate people who maintain virtual relationships with their perfect waifus.
  • Smart contracts and robotic enforcement will make property far more sovereign (immune to politics) than it’s ever been. There will also be corporations that are operated by literally nobody, just artificial intelligence.

It’s gonna be pretty crazy.

Justin Raimondo 2020

justinraimondo

The unpredictable success of Donald Trump has perplexed left-wing activists and pundits who had call him a fascist. But not only people on the left, even neocons had battled him over not following their warmonger orthodoxy. Donald Trump has been awful on Muslims but good on his neutrality over Israel. The Donald has been worse on his comments on Mexicans but certainly less hawkish than every one of the remaining Republicans. If a three times married millionaire New Yorker is about to win the Republican nomination, the question is if other outsiders can win in the future.

My humble suggestion is Justin Raimondo, for whom I have a sincere admiration. As the founder and editorial director of Antiwar.com, he has been one of the most committed people to the cause of peace. His columns are really among the best material one could find about American foreign policy. As a proud anti-imperialist of the libertarian tradition, he has supported Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. Three man that on a lot issues had disagreements but they share commitment of a Republic, not an Empire. Unlike other libertarians who he dismiss as Cosmopolitans, he came from the Old Right and remain there.

His appreciation for Trump has been misunderstood, he is not supporting him but the chaos and panic the New York millionaire is causing in neocon circles. That would be the same chaos and panic that Raimondo would cause if the he decides to be a Republican presidential candidate. He could had a base of the Ron Paul supporters and it could grow with support of voters with anti-establishment feelings.

One might wonder why I’m saying these. While the most probably thing is that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee, I think he is going to lose not because the neocons are against him but for alienating minorities. So either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would be president. I hate the liberal interventionism of Clinton so I guess that Sanders would be better in foreign policy, however the Vermont has also embraced military Keynesianism. But America needs a truly anti-imperialist.

Another question that some would ask is what about Rand Paul, Justin Amash or Thomas Massie. They are by far the most libertarian in Congress but not enough. As Justin Raimondo had said in the past, the attempt of Rand Paul to appease neoconservatives had led him to nowhere. Amash and Massie could learn from Rand mistakes, however being congressmen they would be putting their seats in risk. So no better outsider than Justin Raimondo who previously ran for Congress in 1996 as a paleolibertarian challenger to Pelosi in San Francisco, he has move but still lives in California.

Raimondo style is ironic and direct, confrontational to neocons and liberal interventionists. As a Rothbardian, he would consider foreign policy his main concern and that could open the possibility of a left-right populist alliance against Empire. I don’t know if he would accept that challenge, he has done much for the cause of peace with his writings but politicians had compromise over and over again, maybe is time for a real change. Vote Raimondo 2020.

Feminism has no predictive power

Feminism is a nonsense idea because it has no predictive power.

A great example is the a priori belief that there is nothing essential about gender in human beings. We’re all supposed to believe that gender roles are the product of socialization.

How exactly do feminists arrive at a conclusion like this? That isn’t clear, but it’s probably just that they, you know, wanted this to be the case. What is clear that such a belief isn’t true.

There’s lots of ways to prove that such a belief is bullshit, but my favorite is a study about toy preferences among male and female rhesus monkeys strong paralleling those of human boys and girls.

Socialization processes, parents, or peers encouraging play with gender specific toys are thought to be the primary force shaping sex differences in toy preference. A contrast in view is that toy preferences reflect biologically determined preferences for specific activities facilitated by specific toys. Sex differences in juvenile activities, such as rough and tumble play, peer preferences, and infant interest, share similarities in humans and monkeys. Thus if activity preferences shape toy preferences, male and female monkeys may show toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls. We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.

Also, check this out.

A new study finds that young females in one group of African chimpanzees use sticks as dolls more than their male peers do, often treating pieces of wood like a mother chimp caring for an infant. In human cultures around the world, girls play with dolls and pretend that the toys are babies far more than boys do.

Ape observations, collected over 14 years of field work with the Kanyawara chimp community in Kibale National Park, provide the first evidence of a nonhuman animal in the wild that exhibits sex differences in how it plays, two primatologists report in the Dec. 21 Current Biology. This finding supports a controversial view that biology as well as society underlies boys’ and girls’ contrasting toy preferences.

Young male Kanyawara chimps occasionally used sticks to mimic child care. Far more often, they fought with sticks, an infrequent behavior among females, say Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and Richard Wrangham of Harvard University.

“Although play choices of young chimps showed no evidence of being directly influenced by older chimps, young females tended to carry sticks in a manner suggestive of doll use and play-mothering,” Wrangham says.

The monkey patriarchy is real, and it’s dangerous.

Wolf in Donkey’s Clothing

Bernie Sanders showed promise but, it turns out, he doesn’t differ much from the rest of the political class. Shame.

That’s the topic of my Taki’s Mag piece published today. Excerpt:

First, I have to admit something: I wanted to like Bernie Sanders. I really did. Like Russell Arben Fox, I thought he was a “front porch socialist,” which is a fine alternative to the corporatist war-hungry sleazebags who mostly make up Congress. Socialism might be unworkable and murderous, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of communitarianism to balance out the sybaritic impulses of the marketplace. Everything in moderation, said Oscar Wilde.

Bernie Sanders also seems to have a genuine concern for the losers of our society. The guy who loses his job to outsourcing; the mom whose low-wage job goes to someone who works for pennies and can’t speak English; seniors living on fixed payments who only see prices at the grocery store go up, never down—this is the Sanders constituency. Their struggle is part of the reason for his resistance to open borders and their tendency to drive down working-class wages.

Most of all, I like Bernie’s story. He was once a single father to a son, scratching out a living doing piss-poor carpentering and writing leftist screeds for an alternative Burlington newspaper. His first home in Vermont had only dirt floors, before Bernie put in the wood himself. Most of the time he lacked electricity. You can’t get more marginal than that.

But alas, the Sanders saga was too good to be true.

Read the whole thing here, and realize that Donald Trump is our only chance to dent the DC establishment.