rigorousintuition.ca

That’s Dr. Nazi to You

By: Mike Isaacson


Anti-intellectual intellectuals

The speakers at this year’s NPI conference represent a cross-section of the radical right. If you’re an anti-feminist, neo-confederate, antisemite, Islamophobe, or anti-immigrant, this conference has something for you. If you aren’t, you’d likely find yourself feeling very uncomfortable.

Perhaps the most frightening is the blogger and author Jack Donovan. Donovan rails against feminism, the loss of “traditional” gender roles, and the corrupting force of gay culture. When he isn’t pontificating on the finer points of runic symbolism, he’s spreading a brand of hypermasculine ultraviolence that appeals to violent sociopaths like Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger and former MMA fighter War Machine.

Donovan’s ideology is based on a patriarchal apocalyptic survivalism so extreme he has been disavowed by deadbeat Men’s Rights Movement leader Paul Elam. Donovan likewise rejects the Men’s Rights affiliation, most likely because he doesn’t really believe in rights.

In addition to alienating those apparently less extreme than him, Donovan has also caused a bit of controversy to those more extreme than him. League of the South president Michael Hill has recently been replaced as a speaker. According to OverThrowDotCom.com, there have been some arguments on private, neo-Confederate Facebook groups in recent weeks. That source pointed to this post by Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Robb as to the substance of the disagreement.





The NPI’s replacement, Sam Dickson of both the Charles Martel Society and the Council of Conservative Citizens, is an appropriate simulacrum for the neo-Confederate Michael Hill. Dickson began his career as a lawyer for the Ku Klux Klan. After that career path proved to attract more law enforcement agencies than money, Dickson turned to the real estate market — taking advantage of tax lien and title acquisitions in his own racist way.

When he isn’t rhetorically strong-arming Black folks out of their homes, Dickson delivers Orwellian speeches that “you have to be shackled to the truth to be free” because “freedom does not mean you can create your own world.”. Additionally he describes the Declaration of Independence as “manic speech” that constituted “the first act of the unfortunate separation from Britain.” He sees the project of American democracy as fundamentally at odds with the truth (however tortured) of natural inequality. Rather than seeing this natural phenomenon as merely an obstacle for humanity to overcome, Dickson embraces it as a scientific law.

Speaker Kevin MacDonald gives Sam Dickson the intellectual cover to make his naturalist appeals for inequality. MacDonald retired from his 30 year position in the CSU Long Beach psychology department last year. He is the editor of the Charles Martel Society’s “academic” journal Occidental Quarterly which has published such titles as “Sexual Liberation and Racial Suicide” and “Jews and Moneylending: A Contemporary Case File.”

Whereas anti-semitism might seem like a rather outdated form of prejudice, it still remains the core of radical white nationalism. According to nazis and their fellow travelers, the Jewish people — through their concerted influence in media and banks (which are in reality dominated by white non-Jews) — advocate for capitalism and communism (yes, both) to disempower the white race through egalitarian civil rights and borders at least as open to people as factories. Thus, for committed nazis, a government building is as much a target for political violence as a Jewish Community Center.

An is from an ought

Speaker Guillaume Faye came out as an anti-semite at the 2006 American Renaissance conference. American Renaissance is an online magazine put out by the white nationalist New Century Foundation. It is ironically named because its founder, Jared Taylor, hates America and the Renaissance.

Faye left French nationalist “think” tank GRECE for not being farther to the right to the far right National Front than they already were. He had spent his lecture explaining why Europe as an ethno-continent must repel Muslim “invaders.” Former KKK Grand Wizard and Louisiana state congressman David Duke used the Q&A to ask a rather long and drawn out question about “internal subversion” from “another Middle Eastern community.”

After a man who apparently didn’t know what event he had bought tickets for stormed out calling Duke a, “f***ing nazi,” and bizarrely, “a disgrace to this meeting,” Faye admitted that he had hidden his anti-semitism for a while, mostly due to French hate speech laws.

Despite his anti-semitism, he spoke at the Jewish Congress of the French Parliament where he denied his anti-semitic views despite in fact holding them. He asserted that it was not the abolition of the Jewish people, but the abolition of “the Jewish mentality” — a mentality he also tied to the Catholic Church — of calling for immigration and coexistence.

Another NPI speaker Keith Preston, also ends up largely in the same place as Faye and the others, but in his own fake anarchist way. For Preston, the end result of nationalism is increasingly specific overlapping forms of identitarian chauvinism. Preston, who holds an MA in history from VCU, advocates for the seemingly contradictory ideology pioneered by Troy Southgate called National-Anarchism.

In the National-Anarchist tradition, building popularity for such an absurd ideology requires entryism — attempts to co-opt the power of existing social movements for the purpose of ethnic strife and clannish tribalism. Preston manages the online zine AttackTheSystem and directs the pan-secessionist something-or-other American Revolutionary Vanguard.

He has written several articles on LewRockwell.com defending Ron Paul and arguing against immigration. He has also held important positions within the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World union and International Workers Association, things he still proudly puts on his resume.

What Preston and perhaps Jack Donovan represent is the traditional appeal of the radical left — an embrace of the existential frustrations of a failing socioeconomic system — redirected towards reinforcing the very social constructs which undergird it. And given the rising tide of white violence, it appears to be taking hold.

American Dream » Thu Nov 26, 2015 2:25 pm wrote:Jack Donovan, and the Wolves of Vinland




http://foolsofvinland.blogspot.com/2015 ... nland.html

American Dream » Sun Dec 13, 2015 1:01 am wrote:Or maybe he just thinks the Wolves are an extremely fucked up group, and is surprised that there might be any ambiguity about that..

How a Thor-Worshipping Religion Turned Racist

To understand Odinism—and the way that it became a religion entangled with racism, exclusion, and American prison culture—you need to start with the original Scandinavian pagans. These groups worshipped Norse gods through songs and ceremonies, celebrating the mythology of gods like Thor and Odin, who went by many names. Between the 8th and 12th centuries AD, Christians "explained" to the heathens about the One True God, and so-long went paganism, until the mid-1800s, when a nationalistic climate led Scandinavian countries to rediscover their own history. They found something to call their own—Norse Gods—and rebirthed the religion into Germanic neopaganism.

In 1936, Australian author Alexander Rud Mills established the First Anglecyn Church of Odin, which claimed Odinism as "the indigenous religion of the northern European people." In his opening liturgical text, he mentioned "the fall from grace of the White Race by being untrue to the spirit of their forefathers." Else Christensen, a Danish woman, was struck by the work. After WWII, Christensen and her husband Alex emigrated to Canada and founded the Odinist Study Group after WWII with the claim that "religion is in our genes." After Alex's death in 1971, she moved to the United States and published The Odinist newsletter.

The return to Norse gods was regaining steam. In 1972, Icelandic farmer Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson founded the Asatru Fellowship (or Ásatrúarfélagið)—a spinoff of Odinism—which was granted recognition as an official religion in Iceland. While many components are the same as Odinism—including the celebration of blot, the worshipping of Norse gods, the same Moot Horn blasts and Mead Horn gulps—the religion wasn't based on an indigenous claim. "The Asatru has a holistic, environmental touch—and they feel very closely connected to Mother Earth," said Michael Nielsen, a professor of Viking History at Copenhagen University, in an email. All are welcome, no matter your heritage or color.

But a few years later, in 1976, American Stephen McNallen also adopted the term "Asatru" for the creation of his own organization, the Asatru Folk Assembly, a non-profit organization based in Nevada City, California. (McNallen created a precursor to this organization in 1972, under the name The Viking Brotherhood.)

"I found the Norse system of courage, honor, and daring much more compelling than the submission and submergence of the individual I saw in Christianity," McNallen told me through email.

But rather than following the tree-hugging vibe of the Beinteinsson-created Asatru Fellowship, McNallen's American version adopted the Mills/Christensen "folk" style regarding the worship of Norse gods, the more "classic" version of Odinism. Generally speaking, in this in this context, "folk" actually means "racist" and has caused many opponents to suggest that he has co-opted the term and ideas of the Icelandic "Asatru" for his own hateful devices.



Odin, flanked by his two wolves and two ravens.


"[Odinists] claim they are opposed to racism, but they define racism very differently from the average person," says Rood. "They say, 'We're not racist. We just believe in keeping ethnicity separate.' Which... it's racist."


...The idea has caught on in American prisons. The Holy Nation of Odin, Inc., a non-profit church that worships the Old Norse gods, is run by Casper Crowell from his prison cell in California's maximum-security Corcoran State Prison. Crowell is serving a 54-years-to-life sentence as a California Three Strikes offender, the final strike coming when he shot a man in Palm Springs in 1995.

To join Crowell'sHoly Nation of Odin, Inc., you have to pay $40 membership fees, unless you're incarcerated, in which case it's free. In order to be considered, you must give up drugs (prescriptions are OK), leave your political ideology at home, follow the sacred runes, keep holy the blot, and, oh yeah, be white:

This religion and way of life was indigenous to the peoples of Northern and Western Europe and so it remains so of their descendants today, "us"!

Crowell is a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He left because it wasn't as pure as he'd liked. Instead, he turned to the teachings of David Lane, the white nationalist founder of The Order who was serving a 190-year sentence for the 1984 murder of liberal radio host Alan Berg. Lane also infamously coined the term that particulary resonated with Crowell, the so-called Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children."

It's not shocking, then, that followers of Odinism aren't known as being the most sterling of citizens. Glenn Cross, the 73-year-old who killed three people at Jewish institutions in Kansas last year, wears a Thor's Hammer medallion. Ryan Giroux, who killed one and wounded five in a shooting spree at an Arizona motel earlier this year, has Thor's Hammer tattooed on his chin. According to some reports, 15 percent of American Odinists are "overtly racist.

The Ancestral Logic of Politics
Upper-Body Strength Regulates Men’s Assertion of Self-Interest Over Economic Redistribution

Abstract

Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in Argentina, Denmark, and the United States, men with greater upper-body strength more strongly endorsed the self-beneficial position: Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution. Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.

Dr Petersen and Dr Sznycer were investigating the idea that a person’s political opinions might be aligned with his physical characteristics. The opinion in question was whether resources should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. The physical characteristic was strength.

Poor people might be expected to favour redistribution, and the rich to be against it, regardless of how strong they were. And for women, Dr Petersen and Dr Sznycer found that this was indeed the case. For men, though, opinion did depend on strength.

The two researchers came to this conclusion after looking at 486 Americans, 223 Argentinians and 793 Danes. They collected data on their volunteers’ strength by measuring the circumference of the flexed biceps of an individual’s dominant arm. (Previous work has shown that this is an accurate proxy for strength.) They then measured people’s status with questionnaires about their economic situation. And they determined a person’s support for redistribution by asking the degree to which he or she agreed with statements like: “The wealthy should give more money to those who are worse off”; and “It is not fair that people have to pay taxes to fund welfare programmes.” They also asked about participants’ political ideologies.

Dr Petersen and Dr Sznycer found that, regardless of country of origin or apparent ideology, strong men argued for their self interest: the poor for redistribution, the rich against it. No surprises there. Weaklings, however, were far less inclined to make the case that self-interest suggested they would. Among women, by contrast, strength had no correlation with opinion. Rich women wanted to stay rich; poor women to become so.

The researchers’ conclusion, then, is that if, like a subordinate Harris sparrow, you are not in a position to fight your corner, it makes sense not to provoke trouble. In the distant past, when such instincts would have evolved, doing so would have been dangerous, and possibly fatal.

Joao » 12 Dec 2015 18:52 wrote:I've never been into guys but damn, some of this imagery is kinda fuckin hot. I wonder if its appeal is tuned more to the male psyche, or if it crosses gender boundaries significantly.

Masculinities of the far left could learn a few tricks from these rough-and-tumble vagabonds.

American Dream » Sun Dec 13, 2015 4:50 pm wrote:Most all of the critiques posted are anti-fascist perspectives from people affiliated with the anti-fascist movement.

Joao » 15 Dec 2015 16:05 wrote: Kinda getting worried I should lay off the bicep curls lest they lead to starting an Ayn Rand book club.

slomo » 15 Dec 2015 23:32 wrote:

Joao » 12 Dec 2015 18:52 wrote:Masculinities of the far left could learn a few tricks from these rough-and-tumble vagabonds.

semper occultus » Wed Dec 16, 2015 9:54 am wrote:

slomo » 15 Dec 2015 23:32 wrote:

Joao » 12 Dec 2015 18:52 wrote:Masculinities of the far left could learn a few tricks from these rough-and-tumble vagabonds.

.....back in the good old days Stalinist poster-art seemed to involve alot of bare-chested muscle-bound workers swinging sledgehammers or farmers doing heroic things with a scythe......a trope Mr Putin's image-consultants seems very alive to....