Guns, Profiling, and White Males: Explaining the Left’s Obsession with Gun Control

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The tragic mass shooting of innocent children in Newtown, Connecticut has prompted a renewed zeal for gun and magazine bans by gun control advocates.

The nation’s liberal elites, from pundits to politicians, have seized on this heartbreaking slaughter and depicted it as—first and foremost—a gun control crisis. Members of the NRA and other defenders of gun ownership are portrayed as cold, senseless, uncivilized oddballs who value their guns at the expense of human lives. The unstable nature of the young shooter in Newtown has been largely obscured by the emotional emphasis placed on “assault weapons” and high-capacity “magazines,” which are often mislabeled as “clips.” One columnist for the Huffington Post described the “craziness of millions of gun owners” as “deep crazy.”

In case anyone doubts the Mainstream Media’s (MSM) central focus in the wake of the Newtown shooting consider the tracking results from a recent Nexis search. In a search of the “news” database (all news outlets, including newspapers, wire stories, weekly news accounts, etc. since the date of the shooting), using “Newtown” and “mental health” as search terms in the lead (first paragraph) and headline, retrieves 583 articles. A comparable search using the terms “Newtown” and “gun control” in the same search strategy of the same “news” database retrieves 2,415 articles. (The three searches were conducted on the same day close together to utilize and compare the same level of coverage in Nexis.) The emphasis on guns in the Newtown story is more than four times greater than the emphasis on the mental health of the shooter in the two-week news cycle that followed the mass shooting. Read more

Implicitly White themes in “The Hobbit”

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bag end

The Hobbit is a bit long, and some of the scenes could have been edited down. But I am not really complaining. It held my interest. The only thing is that it has a sort of “one thing after another for no good reason” feel—the result of a lot of padding needed to make a trilogy of movies out of a short novel. But when you look at the garbage put out by Hollywood, The Hobbit is certainly most welcome.

There are a lot of good things here. You have to marvel at the 3-D magic and computer graphics, especially in the fighting and chase scenes. Of course, I am relatively unjaded when it comes to computer graphics in movies because I am rarely inspired to enter the enemy-controlled territory of the local cinema.

There are some really beautiful scenes set in the forests, fields, and mountains of New Zealand. The scene with Gollum and Bilbo Baggins, set in an underground lake, is hauntingly beautiful—with rocky crags and still, dark waters, illuminated as if by the moon. Read more

Last Day: 2012 TOO Fundraising Appeal

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It’s time for our annual year-end fundraising appeal—our only appeal of the year. I’d like to first thank those who have contributed during 2012.  Much appreciated . With your generous support, we have been able to put out close to 300 articles and blogs in the past year.

A very promising trend is that we are attracting some very smart new writers—people like Domitius Corbulo, Andrew Joyce, and Brenton Sanderson and Cooper Sterling. And we continue to post articles from long term stalwarts like Edmund Connelly and Tom Sunic. We now have a critical mass of writers on this site and on other like-minded sites—writers who are on board with our issues and are willing and able to write articles that provide insight into our malaise and provide the sort of cultural confidence that is necessary for long term success.

We are doing pretty well financially—we are definitely not going away, but we could certainly do better. Several of our stalwarts are providing material gratis, and others are underpaid in terms of their situation in life and need for income.

The page with information on donations is here. This page has been updated to provide greater clarity. There are two sections, the top section for tax deductible donations and the bottom section for non-tax deductible donations respectively. Let me know if any of the instructions are unclear.

One of the exciting things about the present state of the Internet is that there are quite a few outlets now for White advocacy as well as sites that are critical of Jewish influence and Israel. In fact, one has the feeling that Jewish organizations are on the defensive, particularly about Israel. Israel is increasingly showing its Jewish character as a hostile, aggressive, ethnonationalist state with all of the characteristics that make organized Jewish Diaspora communities in the West such formidable foes.

Thanks for thinking of TOO. And Merry Christmas!

Kevin MacDonald
Editor

Ron Unz in the New York Times

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In my article on Ron Unz’s  “The Myth of American Meritocracy” I noted that it did not get much buzz in the above ground media. But Unz managed to get a brief comment in the New York Times “Room for Debate” feature (“Fears of an Asian Quota in the Ivy League“).  Unz uses some of the data from his article to make the case that indeed discrimination is involved (“Statistics indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota“).

The only noteworthy comment was by Jeff Neal, director of university communications for the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard. Neal attempts to combat the weight of statistics by assurances that admission is based on reviews that are “individualized and holistic.” In other words, they are completely opaque, so they can do what they want. And the result is a very large underrepresentation of Asians and the much larger underrepresentation of non-Jewish Whites controlled for academic achievement. Read more

Christmas Symbols And The Confederate Battle Flag: Display To Be Equally Forbidden?

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Merry Christmas

Being marched into history – or Siberia

 

Over at VDARE.com Peter Brimelow has published WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS 2012: The Eight Stages Of Christophobia. On the VDARE.com Facebook posting of it he summarizes

This is my definitive assessment of the state of War Against Christmas in 2012. It’s basically an index of the displacement of the historic American nation, which is why I think any resistance to it is about to be banned

VDARE.com has War Against Christmas archives going back to 1999 with dozens of examples; decisive refutation of the default MSM line that there is no Christmas eradication effort. Brimelow’s own interest goes back further:

Wikipedia currently dates my involvement…to the “early 2000s.” But in fact I got John O’Sullivan, then Editor of National Review, to start a War Against Christmas Competition in 1995…The last NR competition ran in 1997, at which time William F. Buckley for his own discreditable reasons had already fired O’Sullivan… The War Against Christmas Competition was promptly dropped, along with the cause of immigration reform—not coincidentally.

In 2000, NR itself actually published a “Holiday Edition.” Read more

Syria and the uniqueness of the West

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One of the themes at TOO is the uniqueness of the West, which basically comes down to individualism. The great achievement of the West has been the construction of civil societies where allegiance to family, kin, and religious sect are minimized. In Western societies, the personal qualities of the individual (character, intelligence, talent) rather than these parochial allegiances are the standard of personal evaluation and in making alliances.

To be sure, the individualism at the heart of Western societies has never been perfect. There is a constant battle against nepotism, and such societies are threatened by groups such as Jews, where ethnic networking (i.e., ethnic nepotism by any other name) continues to be a major theme.

I thought about this in reading a Washington Post article on the Syrian civil war (“Syrian conflict’s sectarian, ethnic dimensions growing, U.N. warns“). Syria, like Iraq, is a typical Middle-Eastern society divided along ethnic and religious lines.

The 21-month-old civil war in Syria is rapidly devolving into an “overtly sectarian” and ethnic conflict, a U.N. investigatory panel has concluded, raising the specter of reprisal killings and prolonged violence that could last for years after the government falls. … “In recent months, there has been a clear shift” in the nature of the conflict, with more fighters and civilians on both sides describing the civil war in ethnic or religious terms. …

Many of the rebel fighters interviewed by the panel — including defectors and foreign volunteers — described themselves as loyal to Islamist militias or ­ethnic-based movements, and not to the opposition Free Syria Army, the report’s authors found. Civilians, likewise, are increasingly being drawn into the opposing camps, they said.

“Feeling threatened and under attack, ethnic and religious minority groups have increasingly aligned themselves with parties to the conflict, deepening sectarian divides,” the report stated.

A report from the Foreign Policy daily email summary notes the involvement of al Qaeda:

The most severe division is between Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority and President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect, a Shiite Muslim minority. However other sects are increasing getting pulled into the conflict. Many opposition fighters interviewed in the inquiry were aligned with Islamist militias rather than the Free Syrian Army. Additionally, al Qaeda is capitalizing on deteriorating conditions in Syria and is building its presence.

In other words, there are not two sides in the fighting, but many sides reflecting the fractionated nature of a typical Middle Eastern society. These divisions have always been there; and ultimately, with the exception of the Sunnis and Shiites who are entering the country for religious reasons, the divisions are based on ethnicity. As predicted by the evolutionary psychology of group conflict, these differences become exacerbated in times of threat.  People retreat into their ethnic enclaves and are forced to choose sides. Read more

Obama versus the Israel Lobby, Act 2

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Jim Lobe reports that senior White House officials have leaked information that Chuck Hagel “was likely” to be the Obama Administration’s nominee for Secretary of Defense when Leon Panetta leaves. What’s not surprising is that the neocons have gone into full-on attack mode, including charges of anti-Semitism. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens complains because Hagel once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people [in Congress].” Read more