“The Black Face of White Supremacy”

Can you people not hear yourselves?

Against Cultural Imperialism

Jamaicans are upset with America's embassy for pushing gay pride on their country.

Trusting the Taliban

As the President of the United States abruptly ended and fled from his press conference on Afghanistan, a reporter yelled out the question: "Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?"

It's an excellent question. One of the problems with the Biden administration's "strategy" of trusting the Taliban is that the Taliban forces are irregulars. Even if a Taliban leader promises something, he has no mechanism to ensure the forces on the ground know about his promise -- let alone abide by it. Even if the leaders that the State Department are talking with are sincere, they aren't able to discipline their forces well enough to ensure compliance. 

The situation is bad enough that even ABC News and NPR are turning on the administration. CNN is allowing their in-country correspondent to point out that the evacuation ground to a halt overnight, Qatar is refusing to take any more refugees, and that there is simply no way that they will be able to evacuate the planned numbers in the allotted time.

Their tribal ties persist, but they are under intense strain because of the horror the administration's actions have provoked. You can tell that CNN Correspondent Clarissa Ward thinks of herself as part of the team: even in her hostile interview with John Kirby, she speaks as 'the one who has to look them [i.e. Afghans] in the eyes,' meaning that she feels she is in a way a spokesperson or a symbol of the American administration. Yet she is doing her best to tell the truth, and being genuinely brave in a situation that very suddenly became unstable. 

Meanwhile, a new report shows that the Biden administration promised allies we would leave a stabilizing force in Afghanistan as recently as June. Even the British were given no warning that we had changed our minds and were pulling the rug out. 

Also, the Pentagon is openly contradicting the President on the facts on the ground. The Pentagon is being honest: al Qaeda is definitely still there, contra what the President told the press, and Americans are definitely not getting to the airport without difficulty. They're admitting that Americans are being beaten by the Taliban's forces and driven back in some cases.

It's not clear if Biden has lost his mind or is simply lying, but even his own appointees and favorites among the press can no longer stand to lie for him. That suggests the end is near for his Presidency.

Luke 22:36 / Havamal 38

Elite Education

My own has not been elite, but public state school, except for two years. In the early 1990s I attended the Paideia School in Atlanta for my last two years of high school, and that is very much a feeder school for elite education (although my family could not afford to send me to such). The youth I encountered there were completely different from anyone I had ever known before; the education included exposure to the progenitors of Critical Race Theory, and Critical Theory in general, to alternative religions including Wicca (then a tiny minority, now bigger than Presbyterianism), and of course to intense forms of feminism. 

So I read this essay from Swarthmore with a kind of interest. He is arguing that elite education is, on its own terms, despicable and impermissible. 

Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

Well, indeed: this is what the Marxists (or Hegelians) would call an internal contradiction, the sort that will ultimately force you to evolve to a new plane of understanding. But all of reality is supposed to be like that, if you read Hegel.

He's read Marx, anyway.

On my first day of teaching at Swarthmore I was asked if I would serve as faculty adviser for the Conservative Society. This came as a surprise. I was just about to publish a book called Plato as Critical Theorist, my job talk had been about the ideal of socialism and I had recently voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Did the students know something I didn’t? The answer was yes. They knew that student societies can only exist if they have a faculty adviser, for one thing, but they also knew there was no one else they could ask. The fact that I had written an article called “Why Conservatives Should Read Marx” was sufficient to demonstrate my interest in engaging with conservative ideas and, given the political climate at Swarthmore, that was all they felt they could ask for. “You could give us a critical eye on our activities,” the society’s president wrote, “and help us come up with hard questions for our guest speakers and for ourselves.” I worried about my reputation on campus but decided I couldn’t let the students down.

Good for you. It's a start. 

It's a hard question, though. There really aren't any schools for ordinary people that are even capable of aspiring to the level of education you'd want in whomever you put in charge. There should be; Catholic schools should teach Aquinas and Aristotle, and even Avicenna and Maimonides. They should be able to train you in the modern and Enlightenment theories without committing to them, showing you where they are strong and where they might be weak. 

Ultimately the goal has to be training those few of the ordinary people's children who have both the interest and the aptitude, that they might be raised to the Guardians (as Plato put it -- and in no way endorsing Plato's totalitarian model). The governing system needs to be voluntary, so that no one makes money off of command of others. You have to make your money off of service to others. That's the only moral way, the only way to avoid the corruption that Weber points out is a necessary feature of constant government (see the archives on Weber). 

This is also Aristotle's insight, re: his decision that only the middle class can be trusted with political power because they'll want to politics to the bare minimum so they can get back to earning their living on their private economic activity.

Yet someone ultimately must exercise political power, even if as a volunteer; and they need to be virtuous, and they need to be educated. The elite generally are not virtuous because, for reasons of their class, they live in luxury and ease. Virtue requires practice, and practicing in circumstances of hardship. It cannot be cultivated to a great deal in luxury.

But education requires ease, as Plato and Aristotle note: you cannot sit and study if you must work all the time. The elite thus easily build a surplus of education, but a deficit of virtue as compared to ordinary people.

A strenuous education was Plato's response: put them to hard training, military training, so that they cannot avoid developing the difficult virtues. Yet they will also be subject to education, and provided just enough ease for that. Theodore Roosevelt argues for the strenuous life on similar terms, although he was himself too much an elite to understand how his beloved cowboys were unlikely to have the leisure to grasp Plato at length.

It is a very difficult matter. Some combination of hardship -- war, ideally, if Aristotle is right; training for war at least, if Plato is right -- and leisure has to be made available, and for everyone who shows the potential to understand. Yet the hard work also has to be done; firewood has to be cut, or pipelines run; water must be carried from the river or the well, or plumbing maintained.

We have not reached any kind of ideal. Rule by the educated is enervating because they lack virtue. It is what is killing our society right now. Rule by the virtuous is right and proper, but they also need not to be ignorant of the knowledge that the wise of endless generations have produced. That requires education, of some kind and to some degree.

Pause and reflect on this. 

Goodnight, Sonny Chiba

The martial arts film star has died at 82. Quentin Tarantino was impressed with him; not only was he featured in Kill Bill (Volume One), as noted, his Street Fighter films were introduced in the opening scene of True Romance (an underappreciated movie). Here are some of those scenes.

He might also have been influential in William Gibson's choice to set the opening of his breakthrough novel, Neuromancer, in Chiba City. 

West's Founding XI: Honor and Shame in Politics

This is an underappreciated area of philosophy, though it is where I have spent an awful lot of my time. West points out that political power is insufficient to actually govern, and as such that what the Founders called the "law of fashion" (see prior posts) ends up being the most important law of all. What people happen to honor, or are willing to shame, ends up governing a great deal more of human behavior than the positive law -- and can even alter whether or not the positive law can be enforced, or upon whom, as we saw in the non-prosecution of last year's BLM riots (versus the objectively similar behavior on display on 6 January, which are being aggressively prosecuted because of the comparatively unfashionable nature of the perpetrators).

West points out that politics not only ends up depending on these forms, it can influence them as well. Funeral orations, speeches in general, the granting of and celebration of military awards and decorations, and political symbolism are all ways of using honors to hold up ideals for aspiration. West has an extended discussion of the Great Seal of the United States that intends to show how the Founders held up the Roman model as a kind of ideal, and likened their project especially to Virgil's heroic treatment of the founding of Rome. 

To some degree this underlines a problem with this approach, which is that fashions change and therefore honors of prior generations wash out. The Founders may well have been just as careful in their construction of the symbolism of the Great Seal as he says; and perhaps it had their intended message, down to the untranslated Latin references to Virgil, in their own generation. No one except a few specialists now reads Virgil in Latin; almost no one reads Virgil at all. The symbolism is lost, the honors are not noticed, and the symbol now looks just like a weird pyramid with an all-seeing-eye atop it.

Similarly, the fashion of respect passed that caused the daughters and granddaughters of Civil War Veterans to erect so many monuments to their fathers and grandfathers at the close of those mens' lives -- the great period of Civil War monuments is 1900-1920, when a youth of 20 in 1860 would have been 60 to 80 years old. The Daughters of the Confederacy knew their fathers and grandfathers, as did the parallel Union organizations. They honored them as much for the men they had been later in life, acting as fathers and grandfathers, as for what they did in the great and terrible moments of their youth. But they also honored that, because they had grown up hearing the stories of sacrifice and suffering from their elders. 

None living today knew the men, nor heard their stories from them. And so, to us, the monuments -- which are honors -- are important only for our own purposes. Few of us care for them even for their historical interest; almost none care for honor itself so much as to revere the impulse to honor one's elders for its own sake. Therefore our present generation destroys such monuments for their own internal reasons, honoring themselves instead (and not apparently even caring whose monuments they are, or what they did, as witnessed by the destruction of monuments to Lincoln and Grant as well as Lee and Stonewall Jackson). 

These are titanic matters of the first importance to human society; few understand how powerful or how deep they are. West's chapter is a little dry, but at least its presence shows that he is cognizant that it is a topic that deserves discussion. 

Assabiya

Lee Smith and Rod Dreher are making an explosive charge about the CIA's operations in Afghanistan.

The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service. Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it. When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort’s cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.

This is part of an overarching analysis of why the American elite has comprehensively failed, and why the barbarians in Afghanistan found them easy to beat. 

Dreher warns that he thinks the likely outcome is a totalitarian system, such as the one that replaced the Russian Empire after the fall of the Tsars. I think that's wrong; the totalitarians are the ones in the elite now. What's likely here -- as R. E. Howard wrote -- is likewise the return of barbarism. Our barbarians are healthier, though: strong, honest, and with a love of liberty enforced with arms. 

The French, Too

Under the commander in chief, our military is less daring and capable than French police. C’est dommage. 

That Was Four Days Ago, Five

People are pointing out that it was only two days ago — Monday — when Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban were falling to their deaths from American planes. Fair; apparently the President has lost track of time. 

In two or three days, though, it will have been four or five days ago. Had he given the answer then, when it was accurate, it would have been a horrible thing to say. How can you trivialize this, least of all by suggesting that the passage of a few days should put us beyond it? On 9/11, twenty years ago, we saw people choosing such a death over the horror of their situation; and it remains deeply tragic after all this time. 

PRC Funded China Trips for Anti-Audit Dems

Surprise. 

Hey, why would Chinese Communists be aligned with those trying to suppress audits of the election? Coincidence?

State Dept. Bureau In Charge of Afghan Evacuation Defunded

Trump's State Department -- which chafed under his authority the whole four years -- never really wanted to establish the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau, but Trump wanted it to prevent Benghazi-style embarrassments. Biden's team defunded it in June, so it wasn't there to help evacuate Americans in Afghanistan.

Communists Outed by Communist Purge

Current Affairs is a lefty magazine that extends even to outright Communism at times. For example, from their current edition here is an argument that you should be breaking things at work (to keep your capitalist bosses from replacing workers with machines); and here is an argument that gay marriage was secretly just a plot by the wealthy to obtain benefits for themselves (one that, along the way, celebrates the descent of American sexual culture into complete chaos). 

The magazine just fired almost all of its staff because they were trying to organize a worker's co-op.

Not a surprise for those who read the history of actual Communist states.

UK Forces Still Running Patrols into Kabul

Apparently hotly opposed by the US commander, the UK's 2Para are running patrols to pick up and transport citizens -- theirs, Irishmen, but also others who want to be moved safely -- to the airport. Read this exclusive thread on the topic.

Czech Republic Enshrines Right to Arms in Constitution

The language is peculiar to my ear, but it's an honorable action all the same.

The amendment states that “the right to defend one’s life or the life of others, even with the use of weapons, is guaranteed.”

Read about how this came to be at the link. 

The idea, according to one person quoted in the article, is to form a civilian militia. 

Maybe you ask why this additional constitution law helps us to secure our civil gun ownership against EU restrictions, because EU restrictions are more powerful than basic laws of EU countries – this constitutional right is just first step. The second step, which will follow and already is in our parliament and senate for discussion is, that the our government – especially our Ministry of Interior affairs in, collaboration with Ministry of Defense, make a project which is called “defined state backups” and that means that all gun owners can sign to a special training with guns covered by state armed forces. This course should deepen the civil gun owners skills to defend lives before special police forces arrives. It is our reaction on terrorism and the cases with active shooter in schools, public areas, etc. We know that the police cannot be everywhere. That means that all the gun owners which undertake this training and make a promise, will become let’s say part of interior security. The interior security is one of a fields where EU has no rights and then we can say – OK, you cannot tell us which kind of guns or size of magazines we can have, because this is strictly in our competition for our internal safety.

That's precisely correct both conceptually and as a means of execution. 

A Happier Topic

Here is a collection of online, searchable 18th and 19th century cookbooks. One of them is a treatise on brewing beer from 1795, which points out that even in those days government was screwing up basic things: brewhouses were required by law not to move their coolers without notifying the excise official, but brewers in private homes could move them about the house as conditions warranted. 

Lars Walker on the State of the World

Our old friend Lars Walker, translator and author of numerous books (some of which we've delved into deeply here), has thoughts about the future. 

I don’t want to write about the state of the world. I’m not very happy about the state of the world, or the nation, or the state, or the community.... At bedtime, I’ve been reading Jeremiah. Appropriate, in a tragic way. There’s Jeremiah, this young man who loves God, and what job does God give him? “Tell the people to repent or they’ll be punished. They won’t listen to you, but tell them anyway.”

“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The problem is, His idea of wonderful is different from ours. From mine, anyway.

If I didn’t have a strong impression (very likely wrong) that I have a Calling to finish my Erling saga before I die, I’d be strongly considering taking up an even more unhealthy lifestyle, just to avoid the disaster that seems inevitable now.

One might reasonably take up riding motorcycles, which brings joy even in times of crisis. Alternatively, one might stick around in the hopes of dying honorably in battle -- it seems more and more likely that we might get a chance. 

The important thing is to live and die with honor. If you want advice I would say to finish your saga, but practice with your sword as well.  

Austin Bay: Afghanistan Debacle Inexcusable

 It didn't have to be this way. A well-executed withdrawal would have saved their lives and perhaps saved the anti-Taliban government. The acronym is NEO -- Noncombatant Evacuation Operation -- "the departure of civilian noncombatants and nonessential military personnel from danger in an overseas country to a designated safe haven ... "

The U.S. military is highly skilled at NEO. Even a NEO involving an area as large as Afghanistan could have been planned and prepared in 30 to 45 days if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had coordinating power and the State Department arranged for temporary refugee housing in third-country safe havens. The decision to withdraw from the huge air base at Bagram was utterly stupid, at least until threatened Afghans were extracted.

President Joe Biden gave his withdrawal speech on April 14. There was time. Incompetent, arrogant and oblivious White House leadership compounded by obscenely bad interagency planning created the horror we witness and the slaughter to be.

UPDATE: Hey, how about Ryan Crocker? 

 “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” Crocker, who led the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from 2002 to 2003, then again from 2011 to 2012, told The Spokesman-Review.

“To have read this so wrong – or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care,” he added.

Crocker, who also represented the U.S. in Afghanistan under the Bush administration from 2002 to 2003, said the collapse of Afghan forces amid the U.S. troop withdrawal was the result of “a total lack of coordinated, post-withdrawal planning on our part.”

“That’s why this is all so sad,” he added. “It is a self-inflicted wound.”

A Modest Proposal on Afghanistan

People are treating the Taliban like they're ten feet tall, but they haven't actually won a gunfight with us in twenty years. Why not take Bagram back by force, and stage a proper retreat action once we've secured Kabul? 

We wouldn't have to stay any longer than necessary to pull out the eleven thousand Americans there, plus our soldiers and Marines. We also don't have to accept letting the Taliban roll over us or dictate terms to us.

Sweden and Its Example

Sweden's seven-day moving average of deaths has been zero for a little while now. Two weeks ago, people were critical of the government's 'laxity' given the new variant; but it's still zero two weeks on. 

Our county locked down way back a year and a half ago, but has been back to normal for quite a while. Almost no one wears masks, restaurants are open for in-room dining, businesses are back open. I gather that's typical for rural America. I keep mentioning that we haven't had a death since February, but I got to thinking maybe that's just good luck. Maybe deaths are higher in other rural counties; surely they are in the cities. 

Now if you go to the CDC website to look at county-level data, here's what they'll show you first: 'community spread.'

Looks terrifying, right? But you have the option to select for 'deaths,' and in rural America deaths are at zero in much of America; in some places there are still single digit or low-double digit deaths.

So rural America is less prone to death; that makes sense because of less crowding and so on. It's almost the same for the metro counties, though, with a handful of exceptions.

It seems as if there's plenty of room here for a Sweden-style solution to most of America, at least. 

Of course, you could take the position that 'even one death is too many,' and lock down like New Zealand at the first confirmed case. But they're a remote island nation where keeping cases to zero is an imaginable goal, even if it's probably impossible in the long run. That's not true of the United States, where international commerce is centered. Even if we had control of our southern border, we'd still have a lot of people coming and going at ports and airports across the country.