Altruism’s Bloody Roots: Cultural and Genetic Selection for Altruism in Humans

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Altruism and the question of group selection continue to generate heated debate among biologists. Because there are so many misunderstandings of these issues, it’s worthwhile discussing how they relate to my writing on group evolutionary strategies. A recent paper, by Sam Bowles, “Altruism’s Bloody Roots“, argues that group selection could have evolved among humans as a result of between-group competition. Bowle’s paper is based on data showing high rates of violence and genetic variation in Stone Age groups. A computer simulation showed that selfless groups eventually predominated over groups composed of selfish individuals. (Another recent paper, co-authored by E. O. Wilson, rejects the now traditional idea that kin selection is the root of eusociality—social forms in which animals like bees and humans have division of labor and altruism [see here]. This is compatible with Bowles’ results, but goes quite a bit further in its rejection of kin selection and is not necessary for the following discussion.)

Bowles’ model is explicitly compatible with cultural group selection. The theory of group competition presented in the first chapter of A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy is phrased in terms of cultural group selection. That is, the theory does not depend on genetic tendencies toward altruism, but rather on the ability of humans to monitor and punish free-riders and defectors. This is not merely theoretical. For example, traditional Jewish groups had strong internal controls that enforced group-oriented economic behavior (e.g., not competing with monopolies controlled by other Jews; Ch. 6 of PTSDA) and punished “informers”—the practice of Mesirah which  prohibited informing on other Jews to the non-Jewish authorities. Mesirah continues to operate in the contemporary world, particularly among Orthodox and Haredi groups—a recurrent theme on TOO. Read more

An Encouraging Report on Populist Attitudes in Europe

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UK-based think tank Demos has put out a report on supporters of European populist groups  (“The rise of Populism in Europe can be traced to online behaviour”).  The report is based on over 10,000 survey responses filled out by followers of Facebook pages maintained by 14 such groups in 11 countries (e.g., France’s Front National, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, the Dutch Party for Freedom, Sweden Democrats, and the BNP).  Supporters of these groups are predominantly young (63% under 30) compared with 51 per cent of Facebook users overall; 75% are male

This is good news because young people are the future. It is they who will suffer the most from the ongoing disaster to our civilization resulting from the massive invasion of non-Whites. These results also show that substantial numbers of young people are able to develop these attitudes despite growing up in a media and educational culture that has been saturated by the opposite attitudes since before they were born.

I suspect that the great majority of these young people have personally experienced the costs of multiculturalism in their  schools and neighborhoods—e.g., the de facto ethnic segregation apparent throughout our glorious multicultural landscape, the resulting “us vs. them” attitudes, and perhaps being victimized or knowing White victims of crime by non-Whites. At some point, one’s personal experience trumps the constant drumbeat of multicultural propaganda emanating from the elite media and the educational establishment. Read more

It’s the Demographics, Stupid!

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Michael Moran, Expert

The paranoid worldview holds that secretive global elites who know the score are plotting world domination at their shady little international conferences. Personally, I believe this is only partially true. There’s definitely a cabal of global elites and they’re definitely plotting world domination, but I’m not convinced they know the score. I suspect they not only write the clueless drivel shoveled out by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorial pages–they believe it, too!

Michael Moran, a leading luminary in the internationalist Council of Foreign Relations, fancies himself to be an “analyst of international affairs”. His most recent analysis is It’s the Politics, Stupid! The basic thesis is that America’s biggest problem isn’t its economic crisis but rather its political crisis.

Much has been made of the depth of the economic crisis facing the United States, and it should not be underestimated. But only about 30 percent of the trouble facing the U.S. today is economic — the U.S. economy, compared with all the other developed economies, is in the best structural and demographic shape to weather this storm and ultimately regain its health. But a cancer does exist: The real problem America faces is political, and once again today, it is on stark display.

What happened today? The “super-committee” delegated by Congress to resolve the latest budget impasse admitted failure. Nobody doubts that the American political scene is becoming increasingly polarized, paralyzed, and radicalized. For this priest from the Church of the Status Quo, supporting radical political change is heretical. For Mr. Moran, what the world needs is more “moderates”, this seemingly interminable problem of America declining and failing on every front could be solved if we only had more “respectable” people lining up to vote. Read more

Pakistani family networks prey on White girls in the UK

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Editor’s note: This was submitted as a comment on a previous blog by someone identifying himself as Mickey Meadows (comment #54910; comment is effectively anonymous, since commenters supply whatever information they want). I thought it deserved wider attention. A key point is that sexual exploitation of White girls by Pakistanis is not the result of loner psychopaths but done by people well integrated into their family networks–that indeed the exploitation is a family affair. Not surprisingly, these crimes are under-reported and the authorities are reluctant to prosecute because of the ethnic implications. So we have the pathetic spectacle of White governments so paralyzed by fear of offending non-Whites that they won’t protect their own people.

In the UK there’s a terrible problem of South Asian’s of Pakistani origin targeting underage female white children for sex. Particularly children in the care system where they are most vulnerable.

The problem has been reported a few times but it gets silenced. But from the reports that have emerged, and the cases that have come to court, the most shocking aspect of this is not just about the racial dimension, but the fact that these children get passed around from man to man—not in the way a pedophile network might do this, where the pedophiles are all social outsiders who find eachother to share in their perversion. No….these Pakistani gangs pass these children through their *family* networks. Cousins, uncles, fathers, brothers, friends of the family.

From the perspective of inter-group attitudes, this makes it incalculably worse than ordinary pedophillia. Passing white children around for sex within a family and friends structure means that the concept of treating our children like meat is culturally normal and mainstream for them. They are pedophiles to our children but not their own children. They are pedophiles that treat our children like meat, and they don’t even see it as pedophilla because our children aren’t even qualified as children in their eyes.

The news media and politicians and courts won’t call it pedophillia and won’t talk about the awful implications that follow from a people who will do this to us and not even be ashamed of it within their own families and friends. They don’t call it pedophilia because it is so widespread and so roped into their mainstream, that they don’t want to ostracise the people responsible.

Our news media and our politicians are putting concerns for those pedophile criminals that treat our children like meat, actually ahead of children. It chokes me.

The passing around to relatives dimension is available in mainstream articles (see, e.g., here).
Quote from the article:

“‘No one wants to stand up and say that Pakistani guys in some parts of the country are recruiting young white girls and passing them around their relatives for sex, but we need to stop being worried about the racial complication.’”

Then in the next paragraph a confirmation of the fact our own media and police and politicians are avoiding calling these people pedophiles. Despite the fact the girls are underage, deliberately targeted, and the subject to the worst form of pedophilia which is to be passed around like meat.

“The offenders were not viewed as paedophiles but had picked the girls ‘because of their malleability’.”

I’m sorry, but if some guy views child pornography he’ll go to prison and be stigmatized for the rest of his life. But if a gang of Asian men go to a children’s home and rope children into drink and drugs before subjecfting them to abuse that will probably destroy their lives, this is not pedophilia according to the media. These men should be spared that stigma.

Here’s a BBC documentary (apparently available only in the U.K.) that came out a few days ago on the matter.

Here are some other sources, courtesy of another reader:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ7jnIU4SeA
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8433887/60-girls-groomed-for-sex-at-takeaway-shops-in-Blackpool.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8248347/Are-white-girls-really-easy-meat.html

Tristan Tzara and the Jewish roots of Dada, Part 4

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The destructive legacy of Dada

Dada’s destructive intellectual and cultural influence has proved to be seminal and long-lasting in at least three ways. First, as Dempsey points out, Dada’s notion that “The presentation of art as idea, its assertion that art could be made from anything and its questioning of societal and artistic mores, irrevocably changed the course of art.”[i] As Dickerman notes, looking at the output of Dada from its various centers of production emphasizes the degree to which it coheres

around a set of strategies — abstraction, collage, montage, the readymade, the incorporation of chance and forms of automatization — so foundational for the rest of the century that today we have to struggle to recognize their historical novelty. [Together these media] signal an assertive debunking of the ideas of technical skill, virtuoso technique, and the expression of individual subjectivity. … Dada’s cohesion around these procedures points to one of its primary revolutions — the reconceptualization of artistic practice as a form of tactics.”[ii] [These tactics consisting variously of] intervention into governability, that is, subversions of cultural forms of social authority — breaking down language, working against various modern economies, willfully transgressing boundaries, mixing idioms, celebrating the grotesque body as that which resists discipline and control.[iii]

Dada’s iconoclastic force had enormous influence on later twentieth century Conceptual art. Godfrey notes that “Dada can be seen as the first wave of Conceptual art” which exercised an enormous influence on subsequent art movements. [iv] In the late 1950s and 1960s, in opposition to the then dominant Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns resurrected the Dadaist tradition, describing the works they produced as “Neo-Dada” — a movement that, together with the “pre-emptive kitsch” of Pop Art, effectively relaunched the Conceptual art of the original Dadaists, and which has plagued Western art ever since. Read more

Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada, Part 3

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Dada in New York

According to Marcel Duchamp’s own account, in late 1916 or early 1917 he and Francis Picabia received a book sent by an unknown author, one Tristan Tzara. The book was called The First Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine and had just been published in Zurich. In this work Tzara declared Dada to be “irrevocably opposed to all accepted ideas promoted by the ‘zoo’ of art and literature, whose hallowed walls of tradition he wanted to adorn with multicolored shit.”[i] Duchamp later said: “We were intrigued but I didn’t know who Dada was, or even that the word existed.”[ii] Tzara’s scatological message was the catalyst for the establishment of the antipatriotic and anti-rationalist Dada message in New York, and it may well have informed Duchamp’s decision to submit his infamous Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists in New York.

In February 1917 Duchamp famously sent the Independent an upside-down urinal entitled Fountain, signing it R. Mutt (famously photographed by Alfred Stieglitz). By doing so Duchamp directed attention away from the work of art as a material object, and instead presented it as something which was an idea. In doing so he shifted the emphasis from making to thinking.

Duchamp later did the same with a bottle rack and other items. Through subversive gestures like these he parodied the Futurist machine aesthetic by exhibiting untreated objets trouvés or readymade objects. To his great surprise these became accepted by the mainstream art world. Read more

Outpourings of Jewish ethical superiority: The Graham Spanier case

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Mondoweiss has posted a summary of articles by rabidly pro-Israel rabbis who have waxed indignant about the Penn St. situation, basing their arguments on a rather tendentious reading of Jewish religious ethics. The article by Rabbi Moshe Leib Gray, the head of Chabad at Dartmouth (described by Mondoweiss as promoting Israel “to a faretheewell”) makes it clear that not informing when others are suffering is forbidden by Jewish ethics:

When it comes to saving a life, physically or spiritually, we must to do everything in our power to push aside our natural inclinations, to depart from our comfort zone and to speak harsh words; to do what is right, even when it challenges the will of God Almighty. (Emphasis in text)

This is a strong ethic indeed. Mondoweiss makes that point that these same rabbis manage to look the other way in the face of Palestinian suffering and Israeli ethnic cleansing. Good point.

Beyond that, these high-flown statements of Jewish ethics don’t seem to apply to mesirah–the prohibition against informing on other Jews. Some of the  most egregious examples of mesirah come from Orthodox Jewish communities like Rabbi Gray’s Chabad—e.g., this blog by John Graham which describes mesirah advocated by Agudath Israel in the case of reporting child abuse allegations within the Jewish community. Read more