Multiculturalism, Feminism, and the Transport Rape Epidemic

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“There have been rises in reported sexual offences on London Underground and London Overground networks.” Transport for London, 2017/2018 Crime Statistics Bulletin.

“The number of rapes and sex assaults of taxi and private hire passengers in London reached a 14-year high in 2016.” BBC News.

One of my all-time favorite thrillers is Richard Harmon’s claustrophobic The Hitcher (1986). Its premise is superficially simple.  A young man, Jim Halsey, is in the process of delivering a car from Chicago to San Diego when he unwittingly stops to pick up a psychopathic hitchhiker, John Ryder, who is in the midst of a murder spree. The film, as it then swiftly unfolds, is essentially a single chase sequence as Halsey attempts to escape Ryder’s obsessive and maniacal attentions and avoid becoming the latest of his victims. The film was released to great critical acclaim in Europe, where it won the Critics Award, Grand Prix, and the TF1 Special Award at the 1986 Cognac Festival du Film Policier. It was less well received in the United States due to the extremity of its rarely depicted, but often suggested, violence. Along with Rutger Hauer’s magnificent performance as the enigmatic Ryder, the overall success of the film probably resided in the way in which it subverted cherished notions about modern transport, and about the car in particular. Much of modern ‘car culture’ and associated marketing orbits an often dubious and self-contradictory rhetoric of freedom, sex, speed, escapism, youth, individualism, ostentation, and safety. Rebuking this rhetoric, The Hitcher portrays the car itself as a kind of lethal trap; a means of imprisonment in one sense, and hostile pursuit in another. Read more

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 3: Was the 1924 Immigration Law Too Little, Too Late?

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Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2

Concluding Thoughts on the Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America

An interesting feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues—their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”[1] There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety”[2]—their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life. Read more

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 2: The Period of Ethnic Defense, 1890-1965

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Go to Part 1.

The early part of the twentieth century was the high-water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races in both intelligence and moral qualities. Not only did races differ, they were in competition with each other for supremacy. For example, William Graham Sumner was a social Darwinist; he thought that social class and racial divisions as well as competition were part of the natural order of things. Writing in 1903, he noted that “the two races live more independently of each other now than they did” during the slave era.[1] Whereas later in the century, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against Darwinism in the social sciences, racialist ideas became part of the furniture of intellectual life—commonplace among intellectuals of all stripes, including a significant number of Jewish racial nationalists concerned about the racial purity and political power of the Jewish people. Many of them were Zionists who believed in the importance of Jewish racial purity (a Jewish homeland in Israel would prevent assimilation and intermarriage) and Jewish racial superiority .[2] Read more

The Puritan Intellectual Tradition in America, Part 1: Nineteenth-Century Optimism and Utopian Idealism

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This is about a pernicious strand of European thinking that is an important component of the crisis we face today—the Puritan strand of American thought which dominated America until the 1960s counter-cultural revolution. The synopsis is that in the nineteenth century, Puritan-descended intellectuals engaged in utopian, idealistic fantasies, often with moralistic overtones. Then after the Civil War, this type of thinking went into disfavor, replaced by Darwinian thinking which reached its apex in the battle over immigration, ending with the passage of the 1924 law. However, this intellectual shift was eradicated by the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique.

The culture of the West is complicated—a blend really between very different cultural influences. A basic idea is that Western societies are individualistic—far more individualistic than any other culture area of the world. But within that general framework of individualism, there are important differences.

One important strand derives from Indo-European culture: From the Pontic Steppes of the Ukraine around 4500 years ago. This culture was completely militarized; it was aristocratic and strongly hierarchical. Read more

The White Racial Movement and Gays

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Back in 2008, I wrote an essay/review—I called it a review at the time, but it was as much an essay as a review—of the book Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy by Michael S. Sherry (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). The book was informative and personally helpful.  It got me clearer about myself and what I’m up to in my life.

I approached the writing from a white racial angle, so I ran it by the editor of a print journal that dealt with racial matters from a white perspective.   He gave it a cool reception.  The gist of his response was the review was too gay-friendly and wouldn’t play well with his readers.  Perhaps if I were to mute my congeniality toward homosexuals so it wouldn’t be such a turn-off . . .

No thanks.  I wasn’t up to changing the piece at all, even if doing that would have gotten it into print.  It was my truth—reality as I perceived it, in the world and inside me—and anyway, I felt done with the writing and had no more energy to give to it and wanted to move on. Read more

Prof. Lee Jussim’s “Social Perception and Social Reality” and the Leftist Bias of Social Psychology

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It’s well known that social psychologists are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics—exactly three people in a crowd of 1000 at a psychology conference raised their hand when Jonathan Haidt asked how many identified as politically conservative. In fact, social psychology is a good example of Haidt’s concept of “tribal moral communities” that infest our political discourse on race, multiculturalism, gender, etc.  People within the (liberal) tribe believe themselves morally (and intellectually) superior to people who don’t think the way they do. And we know that liberal social psychologists are perfectly willing to discriminate on the basis of their political attitudes in hiring decisions, etc.

It is also well known that there is a replication crisis in social psychology. Prof. Lee Jussim’s Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2014) describes several examples of non-replicable findings which have become hugely influential in the field. My favorite is the study claiming to show 100+ point improvements in IQ scores as the result of expectancy effects, placing these individuals in the top 99.9999999987th percentile. How long can it be before everyone has an IQ of 200 just by having someone in authority tell teachers that their students are “late bloomers”?

Here I have compiled some particularly striking passages (please read the whole thing) from a masterful review  by Thomas Jackson at AmRen. It is essential reading for anyone interested how the leftist politics of academic social psychologists have corrupted understanding of group differences. Read more