I’m starting to like this guy:
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”
Looks like we have one of those simplistic Northern European hayseed types on the Court- he apparently doesn’t understand that some races are simply more equal than others.
I generally try to avoid the petty controversies of religious circles, unless I see a huge consequence for our civilization, generally through leaders abusing their positions to push socially liberal agendas. With the low-testosterone tendencies of much of the ministry, it’s something laymen have to look out for or else the sheep will be led away from the true gospel and into the fever swamps of the social gospel.
But lately I have noticed a potentially serious problem in conservative Christian circles. Instead of rejecting the relativism of their liberal brethren, they have embraced a mirror image of the same relativism to justify their countercultural instincts, some of which may be out of sync with reality.
Thus, we see Creationists who talk endlessly of “presuppositions”, as if the truth of the origins of life were not worthy of serious scientific study, and the only use of any given piece of evidence is to either confirm or deny one’s presupposed conclusions. There is a grain of truth to this, but this attitude leads to needless division, as one can presuppose one’s way to any conclusion. Whereas thoughtful Christians were once all united in combating the atheistic worldview, we now have self-appointed mullahs out to purge anyone who deviates from a 6000-year-old young earth view as “unbiblical”.
Similarly, we have folks taking medical advice from non-professionals because of the person’s particular bizarre interpretation of Scripture. Or worse, because “God has given me a peace” about some particular irrational course of action. Mothers refuse vaccines for their children, not based on any sort of rational analysis of the risks, but because they “feel”, presumably based on some sort of private divine revelation, refusing the vaccines is the right thing for their child. I’m not saying every decision has to be rational, but we ought to at least admit when a decision is primarily emotional instead of claiming some sort of superior Godliness for our gut-level choice.
I just bought a new truck. I don’t need it, and God didn’t tell me to buy it; its purchase was a purely irrational emotional decision on my part. I don’t think God really cares what I drive, as long as it doesn’t impact my ability to provide for my family and doesn’t cause me to fall into a general pattern of materialism relative to my income and capital. And I’m proud to support the local energy-based economy here in Texas with a 381-horsepower gas guzzler 
Yet I hear Christians all the time quoting God’s guidance on such inconsequential decisions. With the frequency with which some people get specific extra-Biblical messages from God, you’d think they had his cell phone number.
I suppose some of this is inevitable. Post-modernism (of which Christian relativism is a symptom) is a reaction both to the overwhelming amount of available information and the perfection of the arts of propaganda. There is literally too much information for most people to interpret and the information they do get is often slanted for someone’s agenda. It’s much easier to trust the voice in one’s head and call it God.
While I see this as somewhat inevitable on the macro level, I do worry about some of my friends on the micro level- and specifically, how I am going to find a Christian man for my daughters who is not ate up with this relativistic navel-gazing as justification for irrational choices. Generations of work to build wealth and security for a family, or even their physical health, can be destroyed by one idiot who thinks God is telling him to invest in a pyramid scheme or that there’s a medical conspiracy to hide “natural cures” to his child’s ailments. It’s enough to make one embrace some sort of merit-based primogeniture for descendants.
What is the alternative? In my view, nothing but hard work and hard thinking. There are no shortcuts to research, analysis and foresight- and a recognition of the reality of risk and uncertainty. A Christian friend of mine who studied engineering probability and statistics at the Ph.D. level once informed me that man is most irrational when estimating and dealing with risk; man always underestimates risk and pays the penalty.
To the extent that Christian relativism creates a lower perceived risk for individuals who believe in some sort of private revelation (”God spoke a peace to my heart about this investment”, “God has just given me a peace about taking her out of chemotherapy and using pseudoscientific homeopathic treatments instead”, etc), this can lead to exceptionally destructive choices.
My view, in summary:
1. God’s sovereignty is undeniable, and a comfort in the long term. But in the short-term, it is of little practical benefit for making decisions. God allows horrible things to happen to people. Many of these horrible outcomes are consequences of irrational decision-making.
2. The notion that “God will not give you more than you can handle” is false. God certainly gave Judas and Pharoah way more than they could handle, and I’d certainly like to avoid what happened to Job, even with the net gain at the end. God has given us a brain to use, and our choice to not use it could be the means by which we are revealed to be a vessel of wrath rather than a vessel of grace. After all, we can’t know in advance which saints will persevere, and thus are true saints and partakers of grace.
3. We often want to make irrational choices and adopt irrational opinions for short-term comfort (e.g. it’s easier to blame a vaccine for autism than random bad luck; having a child in a hospital is a generally unpleasant experience, but is necessary for the 1/1000 chance of a serious problem at birth that requires immediate medical intervention).
4. There is no private, reliable and practical revelation of God’s will, especially in circumstances where short-term comfort conflicts with low-probability high-risk scenarios (i.e. where man is most irrational). Man, even Christian man (and esp. Christian man when much of the church is teaching this sort of direct-from-God relativistic private divination of God’s will), is utterly vain. We are completely incapable of distinguishing between our own subconscious irrational desires and our perception of God’s Will. Our error rate is so high as to make this sort of attempt at discernment pointless. A friend of mine calls it the “quiver in the liver”, as the means by which most Christians attempt to “feel” God’s will. We’re too vain and fallen to know the difference.
5. In the end, we have the Bible and our brains. Subjects that do not fall into the authoritative, non-negotiable scope of the former must be addressed by the latter. God will not insure against loss because we refuse to use our brains and project our irrational preferences onto Him.
And finally, please understand this is not written as a criticism of any one person or any particular decision, just a general rant against patterns of behavior, prevalent in most people to some degree, that concern me.
In the previous post, I discussed the “non-violent” tactics of the Left to manipulate public sympathies for their pseudo-moral causes.
The Left specifically uses the abstraction of “equality” as the fig leaf for aggressive actions against its enemy, namely traditional Christian, European civilization. When conservatives today scratch their heads at the apparent contradiction between the supposedly race-neutral sentiments expressed in MLKJ’s (plagiarized) “I Have a Dream” speech and the overt racial discrimination later advocated by King himself and now by his ideological heirs, I can only be reminded of what the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto had to say about this notion of “equality”:
“[the so-called sentiment of equality] is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive ‘intellectuals’ still believe; but it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor, this latter being their chief concern.”
Properly understood as a tool of ideological aggression, the Left’s advocacy of equality makes perfect sense: the goal was never equality, but inequality in their favor.
The Left, then, is capable of a key strategic advantage: an ability to discern the difference between stated goals (e.g. “equality”) and actual goals (e.g. in this case, government regulation of private employment and housing, quotas, set-asides, etc). I see some signs of this level of sophistication developing on the right, but at a much more rudimentary level (an example of the Right’s naivety was provided by the example of Dr. James Dobson’s initial advocacy in favor of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, despite her being an unknown low-level crony of Bush with no paper trail of conservative jurisprudence- Dobson trusted Bush, and was later embarrassed when Miers’ pro-abortion views came to light- Dobson revealed his lack of political sophistication when he trusted Bush at his word simply because Bush seemed like an honest guy and claims to be a Christian- in politics at the national level, such Pollyanna-type trusting is fatal).
So the first step to freedom, if we are forced by circumstance to avoid the use of the violent resistance so nobly exercised by our ancestors, is to internalize the mindset of political war. Politics is not the art of convincing others in some autistic-libertarian fantasy of a “marketplace of ideas” (those days, if they ever existed, are long gone in the multicultural Battle Royale of modern America), but rather of using universalist language to deceive others into responding to one’s stated goals instead of one’s true goals. While this goes against our Western European culture (Tacitus, in his work Germania, admiringly describes the early Germans as being almost incapable of lying or deception), this is not a moral issue- indeed it is an imperative for our survival; open honesty is an asset in an isolated Scandinavian fishing village, but a huge liability in a multicultural morass like modern America. Many times in the Bible, we see Christ (Himself living in the multicultural stinkpot of Roman-occupied Jerusalem) giving misleading answers to his enemies, avoiding questions or even refusing to answer questions that did not serve His purpose. The important distinction is that He never crossed the line into outright falsehood- like Him, we should be “wise as serpents…innocent as doves”.
Some of us in this country do have an advantage, though. The Scots-Irish culture of the South is naturally more suspicious and cunning than the relatively simple and bland honesty of ethnic Germans and Scandinavians. Thus, we see a place like Minnesota (largely populated by Scandinavians) being much more a sucker for Leftist causes (their simple culture being unable to comprehend the distinction between the Left’s stated and real goals) than Mississippi, primarily populated by the Scots-Irish. This is why the South produces the best novelists and politicians, the culture being much more complicated and thus requiring much more skill to navigate successfully.
And so my task now is to communicate to those interested my humble proposal for redeeming the liberty-loving cause of our fathers and re-establish freedom and constitutional government for our people. Since I’ve been discussing generalities for a while, let me get down to specifics.
1. Our primary loyalty should be to blood and soil. This loyalty was once directed to one’s state and even to our nation, the United States. However, as mass immigration continues to convert our country into the world’s largest multicultural pyramid scheme, these loyalties need to transition away from the abstraction of our government (as the USA is no longer really a nation, the root of the word implying common birth) and back to the fount from which our current blessings flow, namely the founding peoples and their Christian culture.
2. Leaders of our people should acknowledge that the day has come, and indeed has already been past for decades, when the interest of the national government is more often that not separate and distinct from the interests of our nation, i.e. the founding peoples to whom we owe our primary loyalty.
3. As the national government continues to deteriorate, the interests of our people becomes increasingly divorced, even opposite, the interests of the national government. Leaders must acknowledge at some point that a divorce of interests requires formal acknowledgment and eventual independence- guided of course by a course of prudence that avoids unwinnable scenarios.
4. Before our people can be liberated, their loyalties must be divorced from the federal government, and especially from the most abusive part of that government, the judiciary. It is to our great fortune that the most abusive and illegitimate part of federal authority is also the most despised by the country at large. Nobody likes unelected tyrants.
5. State and local officials (in the executive, legislative and judicial spheres) must internalize and believe the fundamental illegitimacy of the federal judiciary. In addition, learning from the Left, conservatives must pick a sore spot, a flash point, as a platform to continually attack the judiciary’s perceived legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Thus, like all great strategists, we must concentrate our efforts not on the government as a whole, but on the weakest point of the weakest branch of the federal government. This is also spiritually satisfying because of its poetic justice, as the judiciary is used to do the dirty work of the feds, to enact the policies most odious to the public, thereby exempting the elected branches from their displeasure at the ballot box. Very little would bring more political joy to a true conservative’s heart than to see these little black-robed tyrants be defied and humiliated on the national stage.
6. The flash point for attacking the judiciary (at least in the regions of our country worth saving) is, plainly and clearly, abortion. Those who oppose abortion make up substantial majorities of many Southern and Midwestern states, and their opposition is deep, ideological, and almost literally religious in its intensity. Those who support abortion, except for the lunatic feminist fringe, are much less politically motivated on the topic.
7. The mistake of pro-life groups thus far has been a lack of vision. Abortion is so uniquely evil that ending its practice is not a mere game of tying up whatever legislative restrictions the federal judges deign to give us, while hoping that A) liberals will die on SCOTUS and B) Dubya won’t appoint a pro-choice crony in yet another effort to annoy his base. Issues like abortion are those that form nations, and mere overturning of Roe v. Wade is much too little. We must kill the tree at its root and end federal tyranny over our people once and for all.
8. Our mode of operation cannot be straightforward civil disobedience. Operation Rescue was one such attempt at this, and it failed. For one, our natural constituencies are not impressed by passive-aggressive techniques and we do not enjoy the luxury of favorable media coverage.
9. The solution, or at least an experiment that begs trying, is an exercise in confrontational federalism. This would involve elected officials at the state and local levels directly challenging the authority of the federal courts. One solution is to simply ignore federal court orders, as this local school board in Louisiana did (in an earlier case, the board called the bluff of the judge and dared him to send federal marshals to arrest local officials for an act of prayer- the judge backed down). Practical examples could include:
These sorts of actions, taken at the proper time, will accelerate the confrontation between the interests of our elites and the interests of the people. It would be most prudent at a time of financial crisis for the federal government, perhaps twenty years from now, when the paychecks are late and the Third World incompetence of our immigration policies will be fully felt. It is already undeniable, given the huge liabilities of government entitlements, not to mention “nation building” in Middle Eastern hellholes, that the federal government has already written trillions in checks it can never cash. We can wait until a convenient crisis of distraction before striking our unconstitutional chains.
There are several endgames to this- most preferable would be a regional government system with a common defense perimeter. Texas can be Texas, and Vermont can be Vermont. In the long-run, the increasingly meaningless bonds that hold the government together will dissolve.
As our ancestors needed then in 1861, so we need now of leadership. Who will answer the call, of prudence and patience with no compromise of the long-term goal of liberty, and claim the crown of greatness that goes to founders of nations?
Ann Coulter is somewhat of a mystery to me, someone who’s hard to take seriously at times. She’s an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, and from that perspective some of her more outrageous statements make sense- and it’s not so much what she says (which is usually true), but the provocative way she says them. And of course, she can get away with it for obvious reasons- so I think she’s having a lot of fun.
What’s ironic about Coulter is that the liberal elites she attacks are by-and-large media elites, whose very wealth and power are partially sustained by the mass commercialization of Nordic female beauty- i.e. the mythos of the Hollywood blond bombshell and New York supermodel. These liberal elites comb the countryside of the interior of the country searching for those few cases of near perfect genetic beauty (as they are an ugly sort of people themselves dependent upon a constant supply of imported Celtic and Anglo-Saxon beauty for their industries), and then lure them into lives of media prostitution in New York and Hollywood. It’s poetic justice that their own media-created idol creates a Teflon coating for someone like Coulter, who can get away with saying a lot more than a Limbaugh or Hannity.
Her latest column in particular about immigration took a lot of guts to write, even for Coulter, as she treads on subjects that are forbidden to discuss, specifically the interests of the white sheep getting sheared in our multicultural wealth transfer racket:
With his 1965 immigration act, Kennedy embarked on entirely transforming American culture for no good reason. (You know how people always say the same arguments against illegal immigrants today were once made about the Irish to show how silly those arguments are? If only the U.S. Senate had had an “Irish Need Not Apply” sign!)
Until that point, immigration law basically took a laissez-faire approach, with country quotas attempting to replicate the traditional immigration patterns. Most immigrants to America had historically come from Great Britain, Germany and Scandinavian countries. Consequently, immigration quotas roughly reflected that balance, with smaller numbers of immigrants admitted from other countries.
But in an angry, long-awaited payback to WASPs, Kennedy decided he was going to radically transform the racial composition of the country. Instead of taking 15 immigrants from England and three from China, America would henceforth take three from England and 15 from China. Payback’s a bitch, Daughters of the American Revolution!
Some of those hardworking immigrants who just want a chance to succeed were arrested in a plot to blow up JFK Airport last week.
…
In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner.
One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population.
We needed to have “more discussion” about Iraq for nearly two years before finally invading. When will we be allowed to begin discussion of a government policy enacted by stealth 40 years ago specifically intended to decimate one particular ethnic group in our own country?
If liberals think Iraqis are genetically incapable of pulling off even the most rudimentary form of democracy, why do they believe 50 million Mexicans will magically become good Americans, imbued in the nation’s history and culture, upon crossing the Rio Grande? Maybe we should dunk Iraqis in the Rio and see what happens.
And as long as we’re adopting an open borders policy for immigration, how about opening the borders for emigration? As it stands, anyone can come in and start plotting terrorist attacks or collecting government services right away. But the rest of us can never escape having to pay for it.
You can leave the country, you can renounce your citizenship — but you still owe taxes for 10 years. The government does not allow us to stop supporting welfare recipients in America, millions more of whom it plans to import under Bush’s bill. That’s not a free market — it’s a roach motel.
If these free-marketeers at The Wall Street Journal want the free movement of people, how about letting us freely leave after they’ve wrecked the country?
What a legacy- all phone solicitors fired at the RNC because no one at the grassroots level is giving anymore because of Bush’s idiotic amnesty. That means these people can’t even bring in enough revenue per hour from proven Republican donors to pay their marginal costs- that’s some serious news.
All the political capital so many people helped to accumulate over the last 30 years is being spent so The Shrub can have a “legacy”. If this passes, many people will never forgive the Republicans. And here in the South, where we have previous experience with Connecticut-born Yankee Republican tyrants like Bush, it may never recover.
Two Interesting Articles to Pass Along:
Media Male-Bashing:
A Doozy of a Post at the Chalcedon Blog:
The Death of the Middle Class, Part One: