Katie’s Dad 2.0

The traditional Thanksgiving holiday still finds me in the midst of a very busy spell that makes blog posting a secondary priority. I have been absent here, but I have been keeping up with what is going on regarding the key issues that inform the concerns I have for Katie’s future. These concerns are what compel me to keep this blog going.

While I have had scant time to write lately, I have found some time in quiet moments to contemplate in a broader sense what is really happening to my nation…and to reach some tentative conclusions. My broader deductions can be summed up thusly:

America is being set asunder by (mostly) internal forces that seek to alter its character permanently for various reasons and in support of specific special interests that have no concern for conservative prescription, national sovereignty or the continuity of heritage.

Our increasingly internecine problems can be broken into political essentials and reduced to two polar positions that share a common similarity of sin: Lust.

The ongoing revision of America into a mediocre brand with no meaning is spurred on the left by lust for political hegemony and on the right by lust for obligation-free profit. Both sides find common ground in that their lust, if satiated, will endow them with overbearing political power over others.

I sometimes suspect that the forces that reject the prescriptions of heritage most vehemently object to the truth that the majority of artifacts that define our nation is a lineal descendant of the dreams of Protestant Puritans. For as long as the Protestant ethic remains embraced by a significant percentage of The People in this republic, the power-hungry will be inconvenienced by it.

So they must invent and memorialize something else to replace it.

H.L. Mencken once described the Puritanism practiced by those who were actually there for our first Thanksgiving as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” Today, the disciples of this “New Puritanism” that is political correctness live in haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be finding happiness by living in accordance with moral absolutes prescribed by tradition.

We need not look far to see that this political disease afflicts nearly all of Western Civilization and what was once known as Christendom. If a European objects to the Islamification of his nation, he is a heretic. If an American proposes that his nation is a product of heritage rather than some mere “idea,” he is immediately sacrificed on the altar of political correctness for being a purveyor of bigotry, racism and xenophobia. Anyone daring to challenge the New Puritan dogma is summarily dismissed in precisely the same manner in which blasphemers were cast out of some early American colonies.

The major political parties refuse to represent traditionalists because paying heed to the time-tested wisdom would force them to admit they are leading us down paths that have either failed in the past or are so innovative that they disconnect from history entirely.

The mainstream media is too ignorant to ever be our ally; with few exceptions, it lacks the capacity to understand the complexities of prescription and history and heritage. The contemporary journalist considers us to be alien curiosities at best.

As a result, today’s traditionalist finds himself stuck playing some bizarre game of news-cycle whack-a-mole, having to go on defense every time someone with credibility points out a politically incorrect truth. Despite having the wisdom of the ages on our side, we get little traction.

And we would be getting absolutely nowhere in gaining audience for salient, traditional points of view were it not for the growing power of the new media. Only here can someone correctly posit that heritage supplies the compass that does indeed differentiate civilizations and cultures. Only here can someone insist that the prescriptive meanings offered by history should not be discounted or ignored. Rather, they must be re-embraced if our nation and the West are going to survive.

A most intolerant lot, these “New Puritans” don’t like us one bit because we keep talking about wisdom and truth and fact.

When Facts are Damned by Political Correctness

One of the most obvious recent examples of the New Puritan dogma rearing its ugly head is in the case of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA Double Helix, who has recently been vilified for daring to state this:

The elementary DNA of Dr Watson - Times Online

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

There is nothing inherent in what Watson is trying to say here that should offend anyone interested in following the facts. While I wish he had been more judicious in the way he posited his position for his own sake, I cannot reasonably argue against it. And I do not know what parts of the statement the journalist left out of this disjointed mish-mash of quotation and paraphrasing. What Watson actually said in the interview may well have been entirely uncontroversial.

But the New Puritans have effectively excommunicated him.

I first learned of Watson’s statement from the good folks over at GNXP and have spent probably too much time reading the back and forth between the New Puritans and Traditionalists over this issue.

Gene Expression: Is James Watson a racist?

These are old lessons, centuries old, but it maybe that we have to learn these simple lessons again in the interests of a liberal order. What we hold to be good, true and right is not good, true and right because the world is as it is, but because it is what we wish it to be. And for us to most efficiently attain what we wish we must wrestle what what is. Live not for the fashions of the day, honor the timeless truths of nature.

The debate rages there still, and it’s really informative for those interested in the dichotomy between the New Puritanism and Traditionalism.

While this disagreement continues in several places like here and here and here, there’s more trouble of a similar sort brewing for tradition in the Netherlands.

A princess and a refugee stir national identity crisis in the Netherlands - International Herald Tribune

Princess Maxima, the Argentine-born wife of Crown Prince Willem Alexander triggered a round of national soul searching about what exactly it means to be Dutch in an age of globalization and mass migration with a speech last month. “The Netherlands is too complex to sum up in one cliché,” she said. “A typical Dutch person doesn’t exist.”

For me, this immediately raised the question: Why does it almost always seem to be a Central or South American Hispanic telling someone from the West that he has no heritage or cogent identity? At least the Islamist will give us that point, but he’ll immediately say our past is kafir and we must die for it. Give one point to the Islamist over the Hispanic in the column of being honest about one’s intentions.

In the article, a traditionalist voice does have his say.

“What is really at stake, due to a frivolous immigration policies and decades of multicultural indifference, is the identity of the Dutch nation, Dutch history and culture as a part of the history of Western civilization,” said Spruyt, founder of The Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative think tank, and contributor to Opinio, a conservative weekly.

What I find most interesting in Princess Maxima’s words is how closely they correlate with those of our esteemed South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in addressing the National Council for La Raza.

Sen. Lindsey Graham: America just an idea, “we’re going to tell the bigots to shut up”

An American is an idea… no group owns being an American… nobody owns this…

Both Graham and Maxima are so full of excrement there are flies feeding from their eyes.

The Ultimate New Puritan Solution?

For a while I’ve been wondering when someone from the left would come completely unhinged in the face of heritage and tradition being almost blessed as worthwhile for preservation by science. Well, I believe it has finally raised it’s ugly head. Finally.

Whew! I thought that nobody on the insipid left would ever come out and advocate a real cleansing, but it has happened. Thanks to Lawrence Auster for catching this one.

Race, genes, and intelligence. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

Intermarriage is closing the gap. To the extent that IQ differences are genetic, the surest way to eliminate them is to reunite the human genome. This is already happening, including in my own family. In 1970, 1 percent of U.S. marriages were between blacks and nonblacks. By 1990, it was 4.5 percent. It may be the best punch line of the IQ debate: The more genetic the racial gap is, the faster we can obliterate it.

I risk venturing over the Godwin’s Law cliff in asking, but in Saletan’s brave new world will there be sterilization for those who refuse to interbreed?

It really isn’t a great leap from imagining that racism can be cured by eliminating races via interbreeding and coming up with policy that makes it happen. As noted in Auster’s points, I’ll paraphrase, the left started all this by insisting that race is social construct in which all differences between people who look different from one another are due to bigotry and oppression.

Pouring billions of dollars into social programs has had no effect, or only bad effects depending on your perspective, so now we see the first crack in the dam that has a leftist saying “gee, maybe there really are real differences between peoples…and we need to find ways to eliminate them!”

Our New Puritans sure do have strange ways of being tolerant.

Happy Thanksgiving!

American History, American Kernel, american tradition, ancestors, Conservatism, Culture, Demographics, Diversity, GNXP, James Watson, lawrence auster, Multiculturalism, overlords, Political Correctness, politically correct, Politics, Racism, Traditionalism