Reply to Jansen’s comment on “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?”

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In asking Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic? Kevin MacDonald and I put forward reasons for thinking so:

  • Ample evidence pointing to the Madoff operation being fraudulent was brought to the attention of the SEC: the failure of that entity to take effective action can most plausibly be explained by fear of the lethal rage the Jewish Establishment was likely to show if an important member was attacked.
  • Madoff’s success in raising so much money from so many places was largely a function of the efficiency of networking within the Jewish Community
  • Raising and keeping the money was greatly facilitated by extraordinary — even irrational — reverence Madoff came to be accorded: conforming Rabbi/Guru cult pattern seen amongst Jews from the Rabbis of Eastern Europe to the Boas/Anthropology and Freud/Psychology academic circles amongst others.
  • Economically the fraud was a huge net transfer of resources from non-Jews to Jews and within the group from less wealthy Jews to an elite.
  • That Madoff was not turned in by the numerous Jewish financial sophisticates who had apparently figured out the fraud reflected the shadow cast by the “Mesirah” tradition prohibiting reporting wrong-doing Jews to the Civil Authority: a matter of great significance to non-Jews.

In his thoughtful response Mr. Jansen seems to concede our first point (“I will not argue against…”). From a public policy point of view, this is the most important matter. He ignores the “Guru” and “Mesirah” issues to focus on the distribution of benefits from the fraud. Read more

Stephen Jay Gould: Next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the Devil’s Mouth at the Center of Hell

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In a reissue of The Mismeasure of Man in 1996 Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth” (p. 39). So we definitely know where to find him.

We have known this for some time, but a recent study nicely nails it down (see “Study Debunks Stephen Jay Gould’s Claim of Racism on Morton Skulls,” NYTimes, June 14, 2011).  Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851, had measured skulls from around the world and found race differences in skull size. Gould claimed that he had remeasured Morton’s skulls and found that Morton had “unconsciously” falsified the measurements to fit his “racist” preconceptions that Africans had smaller brains. But now

physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong. Read more

Whites Feel Discriminated Against

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A recent  psychology paper suggests a bit of trouble on the road to our glorious multicultural future. The title says it all: “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” by Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers (Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(3), 215-218, 2011). The paper documents “an emerging belief in anti-White prejudice” — the belief   “that Whites have replaced Blacks as the primary victims of discrimination.” Participants were asked about their perceptions of discrimination against Blacks and against Whites in each decade going back to the 1950s. Here are the results:

The claim by Norton and Somers that Whites view discrimination as a zero sum game is based solely on the fact that the lines in the above chart cross:  perceptions of Black discrimination against Whites have risen as perceptions of White discrimination against Blacks have fallen.  But to say that this implies that Whites see discrimination as a zero sum game is a non-sequitur, since the curves could be going in opposite directions for quite different reasons. (As all first-year psychology students are aware, correlation does not imply causality.) As indicated below, there are very real reasons why Whites feel discriminated against increasingly in recent decades, and this is likely independent of the reality that there is demonstrably less discrimination against Blacks.

A paper like this published in a first rate academic journal has to follow certain ground rules. The authors imply that Whites’ belief in anti-White discrimination is irrational because “by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans.” This comment fits well with the general the general tenor of the comments by several academics (including Norton and Somers) invited by the NYTimes: Yes indeed there is discrimination against Whites via well-publicized affirmative action cases, but Whites are still dramatically better off than Blacks, so get over it. Read more

Forget the Rhino, save the White man

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In the 1980’s in South Africa there was a saying, “F*** the rhino and save the White man.” Given the turn of events in South Africa, it appears that the fate of the rhino and the Whites are probably intertwined.

The history of rhino hunting parallels the changes in attitude of Whites and their power in the world. In the 1800’s Whites were aggressive in their pursuit of power and in hunting animal species. However by the end of that century, people were waking up to the fact there were limits to the earth and that we shouldn’t destroy, but rather build up that which was worth preserving. Frederick Selous, the famous East African hunter, turned to conservation, and Paul Kruger in South Africa promoted the idea of conservation and set aside land for what became the nucleus of the Kruger National Park.

Rhino herds began to be preserved and their numbers grew. This became self-sustaining with the growth of tourism. By 1994, at least in South Africa, there were large numbers (over 30000) of rhino in the parks and their conservation seemed assured in South Africa.

Since then, however, their future is no longer assured. Poachers are now regularly killing Rhinos. A combination of poachers enticed by easy gains and the large oriental mafias that supply the endless Eastern desire for aphrodisiacs have put the Rhinos under threat. As the ability for Whites to set the agenda in South Africa declined, so has the ability to protect the rhino. The future of the Rhino in South Africa is uncertain, but the same can be said of the Whites.

In many ways the future of the Whites in Africa parallel the history of the Bushmen in Africa.

The Bushmen are now called the Khoisan in PC circles. However I will use Bushmen out of respect, as Khoisan literally means “men-thieves and murderers.” The Bushmen are possibly the original humans. They occupied virtually the whole of Africa. From the Cape to Cairo they were the dominant group. Their presence can be seen in the rock paintings present from the cape all the way to Egypt.

The Bushmen had a universalistic view of the world. There was no individual ownership of land. Land belonged to the tribe and the ancestors. When they hunted the animals some groups would apologise to the animals that they had to kill them for food. Read more

Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism

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I have an article, “Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism” posted at The Occidental Quarterly website.  It is an introductory article for a special issue of TOQ on this topic, and refers to the other 8 articles . To read the entire issue, please purchase a subscription.

The article has the following sections:

IGNORING THE REAL WORLD: LIBERTARIANISM AS UTOPIAN METAPHYSICS

COULD WHITE ADVOCACY BE THE OUTCOME OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS?

LIBERTARIANISM FITS WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF WHITES

IS LIBERTARIANISM A JEWISH INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT?

What Is and Isn’t Creative—and Not Just in Hollywood

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In the comment thread following Kevin MacDonald’s recent blog post “Hollywood and the Left, Again,” one of the commenters, Caleb, wrote “It’s not just Hollywood. Creative people in all fields tend to be tolerant and politically liberal. Show me an artist who’s also a country club Republican.” In effect, several of those who replied seemed to think, as do I, that generalizing about creativity and creative people should be approached with caution. After I tried teasing out the implications of this concise sentiment, however, concision soon got consigned to oblivion. The paragraphs that follow are what replaced it.

The truism that “creative people” tend to manifest the “values”—tolerance and liberalism, for two—of this society’s masters is as uninformative as every other truism (“a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms”). Unsurprisingly, the people who have successfully peddled this bill of goods, even to some TOO commenters, fail to reveal that the definers of creativity are the same people that run the communication, information, and entertainment industries and much else besides. Read more

Crypto-Judaism in the Catholic Church

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An article in Haaretz (“Israeli Jew turned Catholic priest named head of papal court”) describes one David Maria Jaeger who “converted” from Judaism to Catholicism and will now become a member of the highest court in the Vatican. The word ‘converted’ is in quotes because it’s apparent that Jaeger has in no sense ceased being a Jew. Jaeger was born in Tel Aviv and had a Jewish religious education before assuming his high position in the Church.

[A prominent Israeli professor comments:] “He is a special man. … He’s told me about his deep ties to Israel. We didn’t delve deeply into the reasons for his Christianity. He only gave hints.”

When Jaeger was asked yesterday whether he feels Israeli, he replied, “at least as much as you do,” adding, “I’m just like any Israeli citizen who works for an international organization situated outside the country – just like there are Israelis at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the UN in New York or UNESCO in Paris. I am in a supra-national international body, that’s the only the difference.”

“I’m a loyal and patriotic son of our people and our country,” he said. “After all, that was the whole point of the Jewish people’s emancipation in the 19th century, that we would become a nation, not a religious minority among gentiles. A person can live according to his conscience, he can not believe in any religious faith or believe in one rather than another, all according to his own intellectual conscience.”

It is stunning that a very prominent Catholic has a deep Jewish identity and thinks of the Church as just another non-governmental international organization. The ceremony for his ascendancy in Rome will be attended by his sister Leah, an Israeli citizen, bringing a sculpture by Menashe Kadishman, a famous Israeli sculptor. He served as legal adviser to the delegation that negotiated the Vatican’s Fundamental Agreement with Israel–sort of like having Dennis Ross negotiate with the Israelis on behalf of the U.S.

Beginning in the 15th century in Spain, people like Jaeger were called Conversos or Marranos (pigs)—Jews who had the appearance but not the reality of having converted to Catholicism. The Inquisition was designed to ferret such people out and subject them to penalties.  Indeed, a major problem in the eyes of the Inquisition was that the Church itself had been infiltrated by Jews pretending to be Catholics (see here, p. 118; I deal with Jewish apologia on the Inquisition, including denials that crypto-Jews had infiltrated the Catholic Church here, p227ff).

During the centuries of the Inquisition, the Church acted as if it was much more than an international NGO. It was a community of faith where ethnic networking on behalf of non-believers was the ultimate betrayal. In the contemporary world, crypto-Judaism in the Church results in high office and, who knows, perhaps election as the next pope. (Jaeger is so upfront about identifying as a Jew that perhaps calling him a crypto-Jew is inaccurate. Making statements like Jaeger’s could only have been a death wish during the period of the Inquisition.)  Whatever the past successes of the Church in defense of our people, the appointment of a strongly identified Jew to a position in the Church hierarchy is certainly a bad sign indeed of the state of Catholicism in the contemporary world.