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Category: Egalitarianism

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Arthur Schopenhauer Egalitarianism Intelligence quotient (IQ) Manosphere Men Science Sexual "liberation" Women

War of the sexes, 12

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

 

Are men superior to women?

 
turd-flinging-monkey
Those who design computer games depict warrior women as faster than robust men. The same with Hollywood. Remember one of the films of the Matrix trilogy? The black actress who plays Niobe is the best pilot of a Zion hovercraft. In reality women are slower. Men are not only stronger but faster, including reflexes.

The same with intelligence. I used to be a chess player. Generally, the sexes are separated in chess tournaments. Even those female child prodigies in China trained to become chess masters are no match for male grandmasters. (By the way, the 2016 world chess championship is scheduled to start this November 11 in New York City between Magnus Carlsen and challenger Sergey Karjakin: two male whites.)

The same can be said about the careers of physics, mathematics and computing. Men perform far better. The System’s solution? The blogger does not mention race but what is being done with the fair sex is exactly what is done with the niggers: “lower the math standard for women.” That is the official policy in the universities. Once again, Hollywood brainwashes us with poisonous films like Starship Troopers where the main characters, Johnny Rico and his girlfriend Carmen Ibañez, travel in a spaceship to conquer a bug planet. Johnny had obtained low math grades and has to work as a mere infantryman while the smarter Carmen got high math grades, obtaining a job to pilot a starship.

Independently of this shameful inversion of reality in Hollywood and computer games, the blogger says that emotional intelligence is bullshit, that it does not exist. But I agree with Schopenhauer on this point, that “women never see anything but what is closest to them. To consult women when you are in difficulties, as the ancient Teutons did, is by no means a bad idea: for their way of looking at things is quite different from ours, especially in their propensity for keeping in view the shortest road to a desired goal and in general what lies closest to hand, which we usually overlook precisely because it is right in front of our noses”.

The blogger continues to say that the only way that women can win against men is if the system is rigged, exactly what is happening now with the 2016 US election. Sean Hannity is virtually alone in the entire media to openly support Donald Trump!

In his video the blogger has concluded that men are superior to women not only physically but mentally. In a follow-up video, “Men are smarter than women,” he adds that he received critics for his prior video even from the manosphere. He refutes the argument of deceiving IQ studies conducted by dishonest egalitarians showing that pubescent girls score better than boys of the same age. The dirty trick consists that girls reach physical maturity before boys, something that is reflected in IQ studies of the span of puberty where girls score better. But they reach their maximum brain volume at 10.5 years, and boys at 14. (“The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and more slowly does it mature. The man attains the maturity of his reasoning powers and spiritual faculties hardly before his twenty-eight year; the woman with her eighteenth” —Schopenhauer.) Adult men have a brain ten percent larger than women, and five more points of IQ (again, the antiracist blogger simply ignores IQ studies among the races). In the case of those humans who reach the Himalayas of IQ, say from 140 to 160, they are all males. “In conclusion, men are smarter than women, period.”

I would add that we men are not only physically and intellectually superior, but morally (honor, nobility) as well—and thus objectively superior.

But like white nationalists MGTOWers are still plugged in the Matrix of political correctness. Remember the hysterical fuss at The Daily Stormer that Andrew Anglin suffered for stating the obvious about women? Exactly the same happened to this blogger in the manosphere community. In a follow-up video, “False stereotypes,” the blogger says that in the comments sections of his YouTube channel he was accused of incredible claims: that he was probably gay; an ugly fellow incapable of getting laid; an unredeemable misogynist who lived in his mom’s basement, etcetera. All false, ad hoc stereotypes coming from those who cannot stand hard facts.

Still in another follow-up, “Men are smarter than women 2,” the blogger responds to another tactic from utterly dismayed viewers: the denial of the validity of the science of sexual dimorphism.

anas_platyrhynchos

Natural science impossible to refute:
male and female mallards. The male mallard
has an unmistakable green head.

In this follow-up video the blogger responds to a feminist that made a career in so-called gender studies. The woman claimed that men have larger brains because the brains are proportionate to their larger bodies in general. The blogger counters with the fact that even children have more cranial capacity than girls, and the same can be said about adults: the difference between the male and the female brains is of the size of a soup bar. Liberals want us to believe that this has zero relevance for their egalitarian dogma.

The blogger then mentions a crude test for cranial size that we could use at home: measuring tape around the heads of family males and females. But as the staunch antiracist he is, the blogger fails to present the perfect argument. Even tall and robust, muscular niggers have a smaller brain size than skinny Caucasians!

So far for the proportional argument that the feminist used. Finally, remember once more Schopenhauer’s wise words about the fair sex:

Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, “Man”.

In the girl nature has had in view what could in theatrical terms be called a stage-effect: it has provided her with superabundant beauty and charm for a few years at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honorably in some form or another for the rest of his life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy.

In another video, “Women are children,” the blogger implies that today’s westerners are slaves of the egalitarian dogma: a dogma they pursue independently of the data we can gather from nature. Gender equality simply cannot be enforced in the real world, and he concludes his video with the words “Women will always be children.”

Categories
Aryan beauty Egalitarianism Feminism Manosphere Men Women

War of the sexes, 9

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

 

turd-flinging-monkeyIf the overwhelming majority of white guys died tomorrow, that would not threaten the white race. But if the overwhelming majority of white gals died tomorrow, said the blogger, it would be a catastrophe for the race. That’s why women are allowed to abandon sinking ships or burning buildings first. This is not only chivalry: it’s an unconscious drive to protect them, especially the young and fair. Attractive women detonate something in our reptilian brain: we unconsciously want to make love with them even when we experience no overt sexual desire at a specific moment.

Women are also programmed: but programmed to find a man who protects them and provides for her needs. In the animal kingdom female mammals are vulnerable and require food and protection. They will look after an alpha male.

Men and women have different biological impulses: they experience love in different ways. We are attracted by youth and beauty: a sign of good genes and health. When a man loves a woman he loves her directly. This is not the case with women. They are attracted by the resources the male can provide. In one of his early videos the blogger reproduced the pic of a silverback gorilla and commented that if the alpha male disappears, the females don’t care much and would simply go after the next alpha.

In female humans the saying, “I need a man who can take care of me” is an euphemism that they are long-term whores. If the provider gets sick, loses his job or becomes handicapped, love disappears. For the blogger, “women understand marriage as a business relationship.” In his video Women’s suffrage caused the Welfare State he cites academic articles supporting such claim, and in another video about the same subject he reproduces pie charts showing where does the welfare money really goes. The YouTube blogger concludes that the government is taking our money to give it to women, especially single mothers.

But this blogger is an antiracist. He claims to be anti-egalitarian but he is sleeping like any normie regarding race, collectivist fascism, and the Jewish question. He is not alone. MGTOWers in general fancy themselves awakened and ubiquitously use the first Matrix film to advance the red pill metaphor.

They are wrong.

Naked and weak, they have woken up in the liquid-filled pod finding themselves beside countless people connected by cables to an elaborate electrical system. But the giant spider-like robot of the film still has to unplug them from the System. The blogger that I’ll be quoting is one of them: already awoken in a pod he’s incapable to wrap his head about what exactly is the electrical plant he’s now seeing.
 
redpill_handFatherly advice to MGTOWers

You are not red pilled as you believe but merely purple pilled. The feminism you so rightly condemn is a subset of a broader principle of non-discrimination. Today’s religion of whites is that discriminating on race, gender or sexual orientation is the most serious sin of the West and the white man in particular. You have picked a secondary issue—gender—and ignore the other two.

If you claim to be anti-egalitarians start right from the beginning: race realism. Read for example this article by Jared Taylor. If you can digest that piece without throwing up (as Neo popped in the film) read the book that I edited, also available in PDF.

If you start following the white rabbit through the articles and books linked on the sidebar, you’ll find how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Tom Sunic

On Alexis de Tocqueville

Editor’s note: Although “it is disappointing to learn that the ‘aristocrat’ Tocqueville did not object to miscegenation,” as a commenter in The Occidental Observer thread put it, Tom Sunic’s views on the same thread are worth citing:
 

Thanks for the good summary of Tocqueville’s work. A hundred years ahead of Orwell he predicted the rise of “soft totalitarianism” (i.e. despotisme doux). We are now witnessing the finale of this egalitarian hysteria in the USA (transgenderism, miscegenation, self-hate, etc.).

In depicting early Americans Tocqueville was well aware where starry-eyed, Bible-prone, sentimental white Americans will take themselves to: “They have an ardent passion for equality; insatiable, eternal, invincible… They can put up with poverty, subjugation, barbarism, but they cannot stand aristocracy.” (De la Démocratie en Amérique II.I. §1)

For that matter I’d venture to say that the shrewd Southern scholar and lawyer George Fitzhugh (1806-1881) better understood the verbal acrobatics on democratism by Jefferson and his ilk, as well as the seeds of the egalitarian mystique in the Declaration of Independence—which was bound to include non-Whites, affirmative action, etc., 150 years later.

Categories
Axiology Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Individualism Kevin MacDonald Prehistory Science

Understanding Cuckasoids

Why are Europeans so prone to individualism? Why are they less concerned about kinship? Professor MacDonald explained last month the complex issues of population genetics. “This is the toughest intellectual problem there is; psychology, studying Jews is easy by comparison.”

Fortunately, there’s now a huge amount of research to crack the annoying cipher:

https://youtu.be/7ZLD31C3cdE

Postscript of November 19:

Population genetics is an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle but it doesn’t explain everything. Always keep in mind Frost’s response to MacDonald about the “Christian axiology” piece in the puzzle.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Christendom Communism Egalitarianism Emperor Julian Final solution Jesus Miscegenation Philosophy of history St Paul Table talks (commercial translation)

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 37

the-real-hitler

 

21st October 1941, midday
 
Prophetic sense of Julian the Apostate—The Aryan origin of Jesus—Distortion of Christ’s ideas—The Road to Damascus—Roman tolerance—Materialism and the Jewish religion—Christian problem—The mobilisation of the slaves—St. Paul and Karl Marx—Final solution.
 
 

When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn’t know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians. You should read what he says on the subject.

Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bohshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry. Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionaries, and it’s certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded him as the son of a whore—of a whore and a Roman soldier.

The decisive falsification of Jesus’s doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean’s object was to liberate his country from Jewish oppression. He set himself against Jewish capitalism, and that’s why the Jews liquidated him.

Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely. When he learnt that Jesus’s supporters let their throats be cut for His ideas, he realised that, by making intelligent use of the Galilean’s teaching, it would be possible to overthrow this Roman State which the Jews hated. It’s in this context that we must understand the famous “illumination”. Think of it, the Romans were daring to confiscate the most sacred thing the Jews possessed, the gold piled up in their temples! At that time, as now, money was their god.

On the road to Damascus, St. Paul discovered that he could succeed in ruining the Roman State by causing the principle to triumph of the equality of all men before a single God—and by putting beyond the reach of the laws his private notions, which he alleged to be divinely inspired. If, into the bargain, one succeeded in imposing one man as the representative on earth of the only God, that man would possess boundless power.

The ancient world had its gods and served them. But the priests interposed between the gods and men were servants of the State, for the gods protected the City. In short, they were the emanation of a power that the people had created. For that society, the idea of an only god was unthinkable. In this sphere, the Romans were tolerance itself. The idea of a universal god could seem to them only a mild form of madness—for, if three peoples fight one another, each invoking the same god, this means that, at any rate, two of them are praying in vain.

Nobody was more tolerant than the Romans. Every man could pray to the god of his choice, and a place was even reserved in the temples for the unknown god. Moreover, every man prayed as he chose, and had the right to proclaim his preferences.

St. Paul knew how to exploit this state of affairs in order to conduct his struggle against the Roman State. Nothing has changed; the method has remained sound. Under cover of a pretended religious instruction, the priests continue to incite the faithful against the State.

The religious ideas of the Romans are common to all Aryan peoples. The Jew, on the other hand, worshipped and continues to worship, then and now, nothing but the golden calf. The Jewish religion is devoid of all metaphysics and has no foundation but the most repulsive materialism. That’s proved even in the concrete representation they have of the Beyond—which for them is identified with Abraham’s bosom.

It’s since St. Paul’s time that the Jews have manifested themselves as a religious community, for until then they were only a racial community. St. Paul was the first man to take account of the possible advantages of using a religion as a means of propaganda. If the Jew has succeeded in destroying the Roman Empire, that’s because St. Paul transformed a local movement of Aryan opposition to Jewry into a supra-temporal religion, which postulates the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the death of the Roman Empire.
 
Raphaels_study_St Paul Athens

Raphael’s studio on Saul predicating in Athens

 
It’s striking to observe that Christian ideas, despite all St. Paul’s efforts, had no success in Athens. The philosophy of the Greeks was so much superior to this poverty-stricken rubbish that the Athenians burst out laughing when they listened to the apostle’s teaching. But in Rome St. Paul found the ground prepared for him. His egalitarian theories had what was needed to win over a mass composed of innumerable uprooted people.

Nevertheless, the Roman slave was not at all what the expression encourages us to imagine to-day. In actual fact, the people concerned were prisoners of war (as we understand the term nowadays), of whom many had been freed and had the possibility of becoming citizens—and it was St. Paul who introduced this degrading overtone into the modern idea of Roman slaves.

Think of the numerous Germanic people whom Rome welcomed. Arminius himself, the first architect of our liberty, wasn’t he a Roman knight, and his brother a dignitary of the State? By reason of these contacts, renewed throughout the centuries, the population of Rome had ended by acquiring a great esteem for the Germanic peoples. It’s clear that there was a preference in Rome for fair-haired women, to such a point that many Roman women dyed their hair. Thus Germanic blood constantly regenerated Roman society.

The Jew, on the other hand, was despised in Rome. Whilst Roman society proved hostile to the new doctrine, Christianity in its pure state stirred the population to revolt. Rome was Bolshevised, and Bolshevism produced exactly the same results in Rome as later in Russia.

It was only later, under the influence of the Germanic spirit, that Christianity gradually lost its openly Bolshevistic character. It became, to a certain degree, tolerable. To-day, when Christianity is tottering, the Jew restores to pride of place Christianity in its Bolshevistic form.

The Jew believed he could renew the experiment. To-day as once before, the object is to destroy nations by vitiating their racial integrity. It’s not by chance that the Jews, in Russia, have systematically deported hundreds of thousands of men, delivering the women, whom the men were compelled to leave behind, to males imported from other regions. They practised on a vast scale the mixture of races.

In the old days, as now—destruction of art and civilisation. The Bolsheviks of their day, what didn’t they destroy in Rome, in Greece and elsewhere? They’ve behaved in the same way amongst us and in Russia.

One must compare the art and civilisation of the Romans—their temples, their houses—with the art and civilisation represented at the same period by the abject rabble of the catacombs.

In the old days, the destruction of the libraries. Isn’t that what happened in Russia? The result: a frightful levelling-down.

Didn’t the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. To-day, it’s in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday, the instigator was Saul: the instigator to-day, Mardochai. Saul has changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx.

By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.

Categories
Autobiography Conservatism Egalitarianism Liberalism Racial studies Roger Devlin

Why I Write

by Roger Devlin


 
I came late to the issues characteristically discussed in The Occidental Quarterly.

I had no interest in politics during my early adult years, a circumstance for which I am now grateful. Like most Americans, I assumed that “politics” meant electoral contests between hardly-distinguishable parties.

In early adulthood I encountered The Gulag Archipelago and gained a proper appreciation of just how high the stakes of politics could be. Initially, I gravitated toward that combination of anti-Communism and status quo Social Democracy known as neo-conservatism. In the academic bubble I then inhabited, such a stance was viewed as radical.

As a college instructor, I was baffled to receive student essays vehemently maintaining the “equality” of black and white, or singing the heroism of Rosa Parks. My classes were in philosophy, and I never mentioned race at all. Clearly, this was the stuff students had been taught to write for their professors before they got to me.

The stridency of their language suggested they were defending an idea under heavy attack. But where was the attack? All I had ever heard anyone say about races is that they were “equal.” If this is all the students wanted to say, what were they getting so worked up about? They wrote as if they were trying to scratch an itch.

I wished to devote my life to learning and scholarship, with no thought of practical application beyond eventually sharing my knowledge with the generation that came after me. Of course, I quickly learned that few of my colleagues shared this elevated, quasi-monastic notion of the scholar’s calling. Some turned out to hold beliefs weirdly similar to the jailors described by Solzhenitsyn; many more did not, but were untroubled by—or afraid of—those who did.

Accordingly, my first practical cause belonged to the realm of academic politics: defending the life of the mind from ideological corruption. I was also fascinated by the sheer power which ideology exercised over many men’s minds, and by how a band of resentful mediocrities armed with little else had infiltrated and virtually subjugated an institution made up of highly intelligent people.

The ideologues talked a great deal about race, of course; but this did not lead me to take any interest in the subject myself. I vaguely hoped that once the imposters had been purged from the academy we could forget about race and get back to learning and teaching.

I devoted several years to investigating the first principles of modern “progressive” thought, publishing a little philosophical primer on the subject (Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought). But this still did not lead me to the issue of racial differences, which are an empirical rather than philosophical matter. The entire drama of ideological politics can be played out within a homogeneous society, as students of the French Revolution know.

Nevertheless, I have come to the point where I prefer to publish even purely sociological analysis (e.g., “From Salon to Guillotine,” Summer 2008) in an explicitly racial-realist venue such as The Occidental Quarterly.

Here is why. Those traditional conservatives who continue to admonish us against the dangers of “biological determinism” are increasingly condemning themselves to irrelevance. The plea that “race isn’t everything” is valid per se, but not especially germane to the situation in which we find ourselves. For we are not the aggressors in the battle now being fought. And in any battle, it is the aggressors’ prerogative to choose the point of attack: if they come at you by land, you do not have the option of fighting them at sea.

Race is everything to our enemies, and it is the angle from which they have chosen to attack our entire civilization. It is also where they have achieved their greatest victories: you can see this from the way “conservative” groups feel they must parrot the language of the egalitarians just to get a hearing (see: here). Such well-meaning but naive friends of our civilization are in effect consenting to occupy the status of a “kept” opposition.

The more we try to avoid confronting race directly, the more our enemies will press their advantage at precisely this point. Tactically, they are correct to do so. And they will continue until we abandon our defensive posture and turn to attack them on their own chosen ground.

The Occidental Quarterly is blessed with contributors who have made racial differences and ethnic conflict their lives’ study, and I cannot match them in their own fields. But I prefer to throw in my lot with them because they are unambiguously not part of any “kept” opposition. Being a pariah at least keeps one honest.

A turning point for me was reading Glayde Whitney’s “The Biological Reality of Race” in American Renaissance (October 1999). Like everyone else in America, I had been subjected to years of race-talk, but the aim had always been to lead me to “feel” in a predetermined way. Even my students’ papers had been apprentice work in this genre. Whitney, by contrast, was simply setting forth information. Reading him was like being addressed as an adult after years of being talked down to. This by itself was enough to get me to sit up and take notice of what he was saying.

Moreover, he contradicted everything I had ever been told. And he did so while showing that race could be as interesting as any other scientific topic. I had never seen anyone actually diagram the human family tree, showing which groups were most closely related and which most distantly separated. I was particularly struck by the revelation that the deepest evolutionary cleft within the human race was that between black Africans and everyone else.

But even a complete racial science based upon exhaustive knowledge of the human genome would never make a dent in anti-white ideology. This is because ideologies are not scientific theories: they are systems of ideas mobilized by groups of men in their struggle to acquire or maintain power over other men. They are a misuse—a prostitution—of the faculty of human reason, whose proper end is the discovery of the true. Ideological doctrines are true, in the best of cases, only per accidens; more often they are falsehoods publicly maintained through violence and intimidation.

Not being based upon knowledge, the content of ideologies change with the elites and counter-elites which champion them. Past ideological regimes have been governed by Marxists who spoke of class rather than race. Still earlier regimes (and revolutionaries) invoked religious concepts. And, yes, racial science itself has been prostituted in the service of what was essentially a political ideology.

The masters of the West long ago ceased performing even the minimum function required of any governing elite: seeing to the physical survival of the people it rules. Instead, it maintains its power by setting its clients (“designated victims”) against the rest of us. “Antiracism” is the ideology, but what is really going on underneath is the mobilization of envy, covetousness, and the libido dominandi.

Much of the elite itself is white, of course. But this is really no more paradoxical than a company getting rich by staging a “going out of business sale” that never ends. Except, of course, that the “white anti-racism” game will have to end soon.

The regime’s greatest crime, however, lies not in setting its clients against us; it is what it has done to our own young people. Those indoctrinated students whose essays so perplexed me had been formed into instruments of an alien will: pawns in a struggle inimical to their own interests, and whose real nature they could not grasp. They were no less victims for being willing.

Writing for The Occidental Quarterly is essentially a continuation of the work I had always intended to do, adapted to a hostile political situation I have come to understand better. In the most general terms, this work remains: the pursuit of knowledge, teaching, and the fight against the same ideological enemies I encountered in the academy. For a professor-manqué, writing for an independent journal is the equivalent of what home-schooling is for a parent: a quiet revolt against institutions which have lost all claim to allegiance.

TOQ Online, October 1, 2009

Categories
Egalitarianism Feminism Liberalism Wikipedia

Liberalism, 21

Other regions

In Australia, liberalism is primarily championed by the centre-right Liberal Party. The Liberals are a fusion of classical liberal and conservative forces and are affiliated with the conservative International Democrat Union.

 

Impact and influence

The fundamental elements of contemporary society have liberal roots. The early waves of liberalism popularized economic individualism while expanding constitutional government and parliamentary authority. One of the liberal triumphs involved replacing the capricious nature of royalist and absolutist rule with a decision-making process encoded in written law. Liberals sought and established a constitutional order that prized important individual freedoms, such as the freedom of speech and of association, an independent judiciary and public trial by jury, and the abolition of aristocratic privileges.

These sweeping changes in political authority marked the modern transition from absolutism to constitutional rule. The expansion and promotion of free markets was another major liberal achievement. Before they could establish markets, however, liberals had to destroy the old economic structures of the world. In that vein, liberals ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and various other restraints on economic activities. They also sought to abolish internal barriers to trade—eliminating guilds, local tariffs, the Commons and prohibitions on the sale of land along the way.

Later waves of modern liberal thought and struggle were strongly influenced by the need to expand civil rights. In the 1960s and 1970s, the cause of Second Wave feminism in the United States was advanced in large part by liberal feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women. In addition to supporting gender equality, liberals also have advocated for racial equality in their drive to promote civil rights, and a global civil rights movement in the 20th century achieved several objectives towards both goals.

Among the various regional and national movements, the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s strongly highlighted the liberal efforts for equal rights. Describing the political efforts of the period, some historians have asserted that “the voting rights campaign marked…the convergence of two political forces at their zenith: the black campaign for equality and the movement for liberal reform,” further remarking about how “the struggle to assure blacks the ballot coincided with the liberal call for expanded federal action to protect the rights of all citizens”.

Lyndon-B-Johnson

The Great Society project launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the establishment of Head Start and the Job Corps as part of the War on Poverty, and the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964—an altogether rapid series of events that some historians have dubbed the Liberal Hour.

Another major liberal accomplishment includes the rise of liberal internationalism, which has been credited with the establishment of global organizations such as the League of Nations and, after World War II, the United Nations. The idea of exporting liberalism worldwide and constructing a harmonious and liberal internationalist order has dominated the thinking of liberals since the 18th century. “Wherever liberalism has flourished domestically, it has been accompanied by visions of liberal internationalism,” one historian wrote.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Enlightenment John Stuart Mill Liberalism Thomas Hobbes Voltaire Wikipedia

Liberalism, 16

Classical and modern

Enlightenment philosophers are given credit for shaping liberal ideas. Thomas Hobbes attempted to determine the purpose and the justification of governing authority in a post-civil war England. Employing the idea of a state of nature—a hypothetical war-like scenario prior to the State—he constructed the idea of a social contract which individuals enter into to guarantee their security and in so doing form the State, concluding that only an absolute sovereign would be fully able to sustain such a peace.

John Locke, while adopting Hobbes’s idea of a state of nature and social contract, nevertheless argued that when the monarch becomes a tyrant, that constituted a violation of the social contract, which bestows life, liberty, and property as a natural right. He concluded that the people have a right to overthrow a tyrant. By placing life, liberty and property as the supreme value of law and authority, Locke formulated the basis of liberalism based on social contract theory.

To these early enlightenment thinkers securing the most essential amenities of life—liberty and private property among them—required the formation of a “sovereign” authority with universal jurisdiction. In a natural state of affairs, liberals argued, humans were driven by the instincts of survival and self-preservation, and the only way to escape from such a dangerous existence was to form a common and supreme power capable of arbitrating between competing human desires. This power could be formed in the framework of a civil society that allows individuals to make a voluntary social contract with the sovereign authority, transferring their natural rights to that authority in return for the protection of life, liberty, and property.

These early liberals often disagreed about the most appropriate form of government, but they all shared the belief that liberty was natural and that its restriction needed strong justification. Liberals generally believed in limited government, although several liberal philosophers decried government outright, with Thomas Paine writing that “government even in its best state is a necessary evil”.

As part of the project to limit the powers of government, various liberal theorists such as James Madison and the Baron de Montesquieu conceived the notion of separation of powers, a system designed to equally distribute governmental authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Governments had to realize, liberals maintained, that poor and improper governance gave the people authority to overthrow the ruling order through any and all possible means, even through outright violence and revolution, if needed.

Contemporary liberals, heavily influenced by social liberalism, have continued to support limited constitutional government while also advocating for state services and provisions to ensure equal rights. Modern liberals claim that formal or official guarantees of individual rights are irrelevant when individuals lack the material means to benefit from those rights and call for a greater role for government in the administration of economic affairs.

Early liberals also laid the groundwork for the separation of church and state. As heirs of the Enlightenment, liberals believed that any given social and political order emanated from human interactions, not from divine will. Many liberals were openly hostile to religious belief itself, but most concentrated their opposition to the union of religious and political authority, arguing that faith could prosper on its own, without official sponsorship or administration by the state.

Beyond identifying a clear role for government in modern society, liberals also have obsessed over the meaning and nature of the most important principle in liberal philosophy: liberty. From the 17th century until the 19th century, liberals—from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill—conceptualized liberty as the absence of interference from government and from other individuals, claiming that all people should have the freedom to develop their own unique abilities and capacities without being sabotaged by others. Mill’s On Liberty (1859), one of the classic texts in liberal philosophy, proclaimed that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way”. Support for laissez-faire capitalism is often associated with this principle, with Friedrich Hayek arguing in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that reliance on free markets would preclude totalitarian control by the state.

tom green

Beginning in the late 19th century, however, a new conception of liberty entered the liberal intellectual arena. This new kind of liberty became known as positive liberty to distinguish it from the prior negative version, and it was first developed by British philosopher Thomas Hill Green. Green rejected the idea that humans were driven solely by self-interest, emphasizing instead the complex circumstances that are involved in the evolution of our moral character. In a very profound step for the future of modern liberalism, he also tasked society and political institutions with the enhancement of individual freedom and identity and the development of moral character, will and reason and the state to create the conditions that allow for the above, giving the opportunity for genuine choice. Foreshadowing the new liberty as the freedom to act rather than to avoid suffering from the acts of others, Green wrote the following:

If it were ever reasonable to wish that the usage of words had been other than it has been… one might be inclined to wish that the term “freedom” had been confined to the… power to do what one wills.

Rather than previous liberal conceptions viewing society as populated by selfish individuals, Green viewed society as an organic whole in which all individuals have a duty to promote the common good. His ideas spread rapidly and were developed by other thinkers such as L.T. Hobhouse and John Hobson.

In a few years, this New Liberalism had become the essential social and political program of the Liberal Party in Britain, and it would encircle much of the world in the 20th century. In addition to examining negative and positive liberty, liberals have tried to understand the proper relationship between liberty and democracy. As they struggled to expand suffrage rights, liberals increasingly understood that people left out of the democratic decision-making process were liable to the tyranny of the majority, a concept explained in Mill’s On Liberty and in Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville. As a response, liberals began demanding proper safeguards to thwart majorities in their attempts at suppressing the rights of minorities.

Besides liberty, liberals have developed several other principles important to the construction of their philosophical structure, such as equality, pluralism, and toleration. Highlighting the confusion over the first principle, Voltaire commented that “equality is at once the most natural and at times the most chimeral of things”. All forms of liberalism assume, in some basic sense, that individuals are equal.

In maintaining that people are naturally equal, liberals assume that they all possess the same right to liberty. In other words, no one is inherently entitled to enjoy the benefits of liberal society more than anyone else, and all people are equal subjects before the law.

Beyond this basic conception, liberal theorists diverge on their understanding of equality. American philosopher John Rawls emphasized the need to ensure not only equality under the law, but also the equal distribution of material resources that individuals required to develop their aspirations in life. Libertarian thinker Robert Nozick disagreed with Rawls, championing the former version of Lockean equality instead.

To contribute to the development of liberty, liberals also have promoted concepts like pluralism and toleration. By pluralism, liberals refer to the proliferation of opinions and beliefs that characterize a stable social order. Unlike many of their competitors and predecessors, liberals do not seek conformity and homogeneity in the way that people think; in fact, their efforts have been geared towards establishing a governing framework that harmonizes and minimizes conflicting views, but still allows those views to exist and flourish.

For liberal philosophy, pluralism leads easily to toleration. Since individuals will hold diverging viewpoints, liberals argue, they ought to uphold and respect the right of one another to disagree. From the liberal perspective, toleration was initially connected to religious toleration, with Spinoza condemning “the stupidity of religious persecution and ideological wars”. Toleration also played a central role in the ideas of Kant and John Stuart Mill. Both thinkers believed that society will contain different conceptions of a good ethical life and that people should be allowed to make their own choices without interference from the state or other individuals.

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Liberalism, 15

Major themes

The objectives of liberal theorists and philosophers have differed across various times, cultures, and continents. The diversity of liberalism can be gleaned from the numerous adjectives that liberal thinkers and movements have attached to the very term liberalism, including classical, egalitarian, economic, social, welfare-state, ethical, humanist, deontological, perfectionist, democratic, and institutional, to name a few.

Despite these variations, liberal thought does exhibit a few definite and fundamental conceptions. At its very root, liberalism is a philosophy about the meaning of humanity and society. Political philosopher John Gray identified the common strands in liberal thought as being individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The individualist element avers the ethical primacy of the human being against the pressures of social collectivism; the egalitarian element assigns the same moral worth and status to all individuals; the meliorist element asserts that successive generations can improve their sociopolitical arrangements, and the universalist element affirms the moral unity of the human species and marginalizes local cultural differences.

The meliorist element has been the subject of much controversy, defended by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, who believed in human progress, while suffering from attacks by thinkers such as Rousseau, who believed that human attempts to improve themselves through social cooperation would fail. Describing the liberal temperament, Gray claimed that it “has been inspired by skepticism and by a fideistic certainty of divine revelation… it has exalted the power of reason even as, in other contexts, it has sought to humble reason’s claims.”

The liberal philosophical tradition has searched for validation and justification through several intellectual projects. The moral and political suppositions of liberalism have been based on traditions such as natural rights and utilitarian theory, although sometimes liberals even requested support from scientific and religious circles. Through all these strands and traditions, scholars have identified the following major common facets of liberal thought: believing in equality and individual liberty, supporting private property and individual rights, supporting the idea of limited constitutional government, and recognizing the importance of related values such as pluralism, toleration, autonomy, bodily integrity, and consent.

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American civil war Blacks Egalitarianism Universalism

On the US Constitution

by Jack Frost

 
“The Naturalization Act of 1790 says that the country is open to Free White Persons.”

There’s quite a bit of interesting history involved with this discussed at considerable length in the Dred Scott case from 1856, especially in the dissenting opinions given by Justice Maclean and Justice Curtis. For example, Maclean wrote:

In the argument, it was said that a colored citizen would not be an agreeable member of society. This is more a matter of taste than of law. Several of the States have admitted persons of color to the right of suffrage, and in this view have recognised them as citizens; and this has been done in the slave as well as the free States. On the question of citizenship, it must be admitted that we have not been very fastidious. Under the late treaty with Mexico, we have made citizens of all grades, combinations, and colors. The same was done in the admission of Louisiana and Florida. No one ever doubted, and no court ever held, that the people of these Territories did not become citizens under the treaty. They have exercised all the rights of citizens, without being naturalized under the acts of Congress.

Also, Curtis:

On the 25th of June, 1778, the Articles of Confederation being under consideration by the Congress, the delegates from South Carolina moved to amend this fourth article, by inserting after the word “free,” and before the word “inhabitants,” the word “white,” so that the privileges and immunities of general citizenship would be secured only to white persons. Two States voted for the amendment, eight States against it, and the vote of one State was divided. The language of the article stood unchanged, and both by its terms of inclusion, “free inhabitants,” and the strong implication from its terms of exclusion, “paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice,” who alone were excepted, it is clear, that under the Confederation, and at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, free colored persons of African descent might be, and, by reason of their citizenship in certain States, were entitled to the privileges and immunities of general citizenship of the United States.

Constitution_of_the_United_States,_page_1

Did the Constitution of the United States deprive them or their descendants of citizenship?

That Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States, through the action, in each State, or those persons who were qualified by its laws to act thereon, in behalf of themselves and all other citizens of that State. In some of the States, as we have seen, colored persons were among those qualified by law to act on this subject. These colored persons were not only included in the body of “the people of the United States,” by whom the Constitution was ordained and established, but in at least five of the States they had the power to act, and doubtless did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of its adoption. It would be strange, if we were to find in that instrument anything which deprived of their citizenship any part of the people of the United States who were among those by whom it was established.

I can find nothing in the Constitution which, proprio vigore, deprives of their citizenship any class of persons who were citizens of the United States at the time of its adoption, or who should be native-born citizens of any State after its adoption; nor any power enabling Congress to disfranchise persons born on the soil of any State, and entitled to citizenship of such State by its Constitution and laws. And my opinion is, that, under the Constitution of the United States, every free person born on the soil of a State, who is a citizen of that State by force of its Constitution or laws, is also a citizen of the United States…

It has been often asserted that the Constitution was made exclusively by and for the white race. It has already been shown that in five of the thirteen original States, colored persons then possessed the elective franchise, and were among those by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. If so, it is not true, in point of fact, that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race. And that it was made exclusively for the white race is, in my opinion, not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration, that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for themselves and their posterity. And as free colored persons were then citizens of at least five States, and so in every sense part of the people of the United States, they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.

So it turns out that, despite being a nation in which white supremacy was enshrined in law, there were numerous places and times in America when this was honored more in the breach than in the observance. Without any Jewish “control” whatsoever, unless Christianity is admitted to be such a controlling influence, there had always been a strong undercurrent of anti-racism and of America being a “proposition nation,” which eventually and disastrously grew to the whirlpool of destruction that sucked the whole nation down into the carnage of the Civil War. After that, through ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, it was made explicitly so.

Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, a proud Christian nation of racial cuckolds? American patriotism = cuck pride!