I knew the responses to my previous post would provide fodder for further thoughts. And though not all thoughts are worthy of expressing, there is one underlying idea that should be pointed out here.
Many of us, in the world of H.B.D. (human bio-diversity), consider ourselves different from the rest of the world. We look at the ignorant masses and say, “See how closed-minded they are! They cannot distinguish between what they consider to be self-evident truth (racial equalitarianism) and blind faith.”
Reluctant Apostate was right when he wrote:
Obviously the main motivation for the necrophilia law is the ick factor, but in this case, I think the reflex points in the right direction.
Even if all the risks, and moral complications, involved with necrophilia were to be eliminated, most people would still want it illegal. It’s probably true, as Latte Island says, that “a marker for people who will do bad things to living people without their consent.” When Ed wrote:
With all due respect, I can’t agree with this. You have taken a libertarian principle, and quite logically taken it *way* past what I could support.
Libertarian logic leading to drug legalization?…..OK, I can follow that.
Libertarian logic leading to necrophilia legalization? …..Nope, no way, full stop, I’m getting off this train, and tearing up the rail road tracks.
I’m certain he was speaking for the vast majority of my readers; most were too polite to write their true feelings on the matter. The word for what Ed feels is “revulsion”. There are human proclivities we can explain by way of logic. If we keep asking questions, like the child who persistently asks “why?”, then we reach a point where logic becomes useless. This is because, ultimately, nothing really matters. If our entire planet gets swallowed up by a black hole, it would make no difference for any alien life forms left behind. Our primal instincts are not subject to logic.
Unfortunately, for most of the people around us, a revulsion toward “racism” might as well be a primal instinct. They feel the same way about “racism” as we feel toward necrophilia. This is why it is rarely productive to debate with such people. Even if we show them that what they call “racism” is necessary and good, their primal revulsion remains. Obviously, necrophilia is never “necessary” or “good” – at least when it comes to any sort of benefit to society. But the reptilian brain makes no such distinction. Some things are disgusting at the emotional level, though we may bolster our revulsion with fortifications of logic.
As for my previous post, it’s something I wanted to write. I knew it would upset a lot of people – and that raised the question: Am I writing this blog so that people can smile and agree with what I’m saying, or am I writing it to encourage people (including myself) to think in new directions and ask questions? I knew the answer, and that’s why I went ahead and published the post. I hope that even those who vehemently disagreed with what I wrote got something out of it. It sounds like Ed did. Even if my post caused him to reject libertarianism, at least he feels his opinions are more developed because of it. It’s better to reject libertarianism because of well-thought-out arguments than to accept it based on fuzzy notions and fantasies.
There is some research (by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I think) which shows that conservatives have weaker stomachs than liberals when it comes to disgusting stuff (stuff like necrophilia, or movies like “The human centipede” – which you really shouldn’t read about in general, and especially if you’re about to eat something)
The psychological profile of your readers is undoubtedly conservative.
Maybe we can reach a compromise with the liberals: we accept necrophilia and they accept racism.
Yes, it’s Haidt. He categorizes the revulsion instinct under “Purity”. Purity of mind and body.
The solution to this problem is freedom of association. If every community had an absolute right to make social policy for their own area, there would be no need for consensus on necrophilia, racism, cannibalism, homosexuality, drugs or other social issues.
Here’s how it could work: a new intentional community for gay cannibals is created. Everyone who used to live in the area leaves, unless they want to practice gay cannibalism or tolerate it. Gay cannibals in other communities move there, because the other communities have a policy of exiling anyone who has expressed an interest in that culture.
This illustrates that there is almost no social issue that needs to cause trouble. Everyone can have the lifestyle they want, as long as they are willing to move and tolerate the strange customs of their neighbors in the next town.
So, the argument would be that if group A lives in a neighborhood and maintains ‘Purity’ norms, and group B moves into the neighborhood and violates biologically caused “Purity” norms, that the property values of group A would decline making housing available to group B at a discount, and therefore an organized means of transferring assets from group A to group B.
This is in fact, why people object to bans on racial bias in housing: because the barrier for causing white flight is only somewhere between 5% and 10%. (I am not going to look up the research that number, but it’s available.) And therefore, racially blind housing law is a means of forcible redistribution from one race to another.
The same is true for Child Molesters as is true for our hypothetical Necrophiliacs, and only slightly less so for undesirable races. But it is certainly quantifiable. In other words, we can certainly attribute a ‘cost’ of undesirability in housing.
If some races were not undesirable we would not see these measurable differences. But the principle of ‘Demonstrated Preference’ proves that there are no exceptions to the rule.
We should note that undesirable races are so for specific reasons. Specifically shorter time preference including: impulsivity and lesser respect for property — including maintenance of property, criminality, noise and mess.
And we cannot use the pressure of norms, because undesirable races develop their own norms when suited
It is this delta in norms that people object to as much as it is the cause of the decline in property values. Both are assets. We do not think of our norms as assets. But they are.
One last interesting bit I am working on is the Flynn Effect. And the general observation that at least 15% of any population must have an IQ over 105 in order for sufficient verbal acuity to exist to develop and maintain an advanced society. If that situation occurs, then ‘people get smarter’ due to the ever present stimulation of abstract reasoning which they can then imitate as norms. That appears to be the cause of the Flynn effect. If a lower IQ racial group excises all of its more desirable competitors then imitation of norms fails, and decline in all assets both material and normative ensues.
Since Purity is a function of norms, and norms are a function of available IQ distribution,t hen Purity would appear to be a sliding normative curve dependent upon IQ distributions.
For me, freedom of association is an absolute human right. Even if it could be shown that group B is good for real estate values and has better behavior in general, group A has the right to invite or disinvite anyone for any or no reason.
As for child molesters, they are criminals who have done something to someone without that person’s consent. I’d remove them from society. There can be no community for child molesters, unless they are only people who have that fantasy but don’t act on it. Once people do something to another person without their consent, they have to be arrested. Extradition would apply here. All communities would sign on to this.
I’ve noticed some libertarians think they have to justify their preferences, and if there’s no reason for racial discrimination, for instance, then it’s wrong. But just as you have the right to decorate your house your own way and eat the foods you like, you have the right to keep boring people out of your life. That’s my justification for being a racist, and why I sometimes ignore the more technical arguments for HBD. If I think black people are ugly and boring, and I do, I don’t need a better argument than that.
latte island-
You’ve pretty much just argued in favor of the constitution ie more states rights and limited federal government. I agree, by the way. The federal government is supposed to be limited in it’s ability to do pretty much anything except raise an army for national defense and operate the postal service. Everything else is supposed to be up to the states.
Paragraph 6 should read: … “And we cannot use the pressure of norms to alter their behavior because undesirable races develop their own norms more suited to their ability. Norms consist largely of suppression of impulses.”… Impulsive use of the Enter key. 🙂
@latte island
1) Yes, you’re correct that the libertarian reasoning for personal preferences is a sufficient ethical argument, and a sufficient ethical argument actually for almost all preference arguments. But it is not an argument that is sufficient to offset the argument I’m making: Ignoring externalities is a logical fallacy. An error in reasoning. It is expressly not libertarian. It is expressly anarcho-capitalist. It is certainly Rothbardian / walter block. In their model, the price of freedom is the widespread tolerance of involuntary transfers by individuals and corporations rather than by the state. The ‘libertarian’ and classical liberal ethic would instead argue against all involuntary transfers, whether by the state or by individuals. That is the difference between the middle eastern peasant ‘ethic of the bazaar’ and the european middle class ‘ethic of the market’. (The profundity of this paragraph may not be apparent but if you are a libertarian it’s worth pondering.)
Freedom of association is a purely verbal construct. If you associate with someone that’s outside norms, that’s irrelevant to everyone else. They can avoid you by not spending time with you. Property (land) ownership is not neutral. If you sell your property to someone in a neighborhood and doing so decreases the home value of everyone else in the neighborhood, that’s just theft, plain and simple. For the government to make it illegal to defend your property value is just a forcible transfer from one racial group to another. That’s the data. Plain and simple. It’s “theft.” (involuntary transfer). By the same argument if you do not maintain your house, or you keep cars and refrigerators in your yard you cause ‘externalities’. That is, you export the cost of your bad judgement onto others. That’s an involuntary transfer. Just as if you let your dog bark, or play music loudly into the middle of the night, or something else that goes beyond the border of your property and affects others.
2) There is no reason one cannot create a ‘community’ of child molesters. Humans have made ghettos and prisons for centuries. They work. Isolate them in the desert. It gets out of the moral dilemma of the death penalty. If it weren’t for the problem of false accusation, or creeping judicial activism I’d support the death penalty for child molesters. But getting them to a ghetto (prison) in the desert is probably a compromise solution.
Curt-
In the bible, there is the concept of the “sanctuary city” where murderers are exiled. They’re supposed to be safe as long as they stay there.
The origin of the word “outlaw” is also an interesting concept. Criminals are outlaws but outlaw doesn’t technically mean criminal. Originally, people were given protection under the law. If someone crossed the line then the protection of the law was removed from them. They were considered to be out(side the) law. Anyone outside the law was considered fair game. So if someone else robbed or killed them there wouldn’t be any consequences.
I still support capital punishment. Even if an innocent person gets whacked occasionally it still scares most people out of breaking the law.
Curt, I like your reasoning when it comes to externalities. It seems to me, however, that we are all exposed to externalities simply by virtue of living in this world. Every time somebody lights up a cigarette, drives a car, burps or even plows his field, he creates externalities for others.
I don’t think there is a clear border line between an “acceptable externality” and an “unacceptable externality”. At the extremes we have burping outdoors (acceptable) and smoking in an elevator (unacceptable), but there is much in between. Your examples of neglecting one’s house, or selling it to undesirable people, force the libertarian mind to accept that no man is an island (though most of us know that already). here we see the importance of setting up like-minded communities in order to truly enjoy our liberties.
Freedom of association has different levels. Each individual white, for example, has freedom of association insofar as he can choose his own friends, spouse, and education for his children (if he can afford it). But government infringes upon his liberty to choose his neighbors, employees, or renters. These are areas where individuality morphs into community – and whites, as a community, are NOT allowed freedom of association as other groups are.
If we had community freedom of association, then government would not be allowed to dictate who our neighbors, employees, or renters must be. Instead, it would be the community (which we joined by choice) that dictates this. Our community would prohibit us from selling our homes to undesirables. Our community would prohibit us from neglecting our lawns or leaving garbage outside our homes. The right to dictate these things used to belong to homeowner associations and the like. Now the “Federal government” has declared that it alone can dictate such things. Therefore, it has abolished local communities.
Sorry about the long ramble.
Paragraph 6 should read: … “And we cannot use the pressure of norms to alter their behavior because undesirable races develop their own norms more suited to their ability. Norms consist largely of suppression of impulses.”… Impulsive use of the Enter key. 🙂
I agree that undesirable races develop their own norms. That would undoubtedly happen when they are entirely left to their own devices. In the case where they live within the larger umbrella of white created society, as ours, some of the norms they create are dysfunctional because they so resent whites and resent being dependent on us that that they reject white norms because they are white norms. I suspect some of their more dysfunctional norms would not have arisen organically, without the resentment of whites factor. They loathe almost nothing so much as a black who they perceive as acting white, or adopting white norms of speech or behavior.
Then again, I am almost wholly unfamiliar with black behavioral norms in Africa, absent white influence, so I don’t know how African norms differ from black American norms.
Well, I don’t care if it’s blacks, catholics, armenians, or syrians. Norms are an economy. Norms establish the definitions of property within an economy. Success with norms determines the social and economic hierarchy. I don’t so much are about norms being ‘white’ or anything else. I care that a portfolio of norms produces a set behaviors in a population that lead to either evolving prosperity, or decaying poverty. It so happens that ‘white people’ have developed the best suite of norms. And in their ignorance of them, they abandon the norms that have made their world possible.
To more directly answer your statement: the problem is the density of normative behavior required in order to perpetuate norms appears to be far higher than we anticipated. It looks like it’s on the > 80% range. We know that at 10%, if an idea is held by the elites, that it will eventually be incorporated in to the norm structure. The question is, how do we kill off bad norms as quickly as we add good ones. And that question in the past has had a malthusian answer. Today it doesn’t. And that’s the problem.
I’m not sure I disagree with the assertion that we’re speciating into new ‘humans’. I’m pretty sure that every 30pts of IQ means we can’t communicate well, and at 60pts communication is all but impossible. It certainly looks like we’re sorting by breeding. (Again.)
“They loathe almost nothing so much as a black who they perceive as acting white, or adopting white norms of speech or behavior.”
I don’t know. They seem to love Barack Obama. And while the policies he pursues are anti-white, and he has adopted the black victimization attitude, there is no doubt that his speech, mannerisms, and personal lifestyle are much closer to those of white Americans than those of black Americans. It would be more accurate to say that (the majority of) black Americans hate nothing so much as a black who has anything other than an adversarial stance towards white Americans. So Barack Obama is okay with them, while an “Uncle Tom” with the speech and mannerisms of most black people, but who is at least okay with white people is anathema to them.
Georgia-
I agree. To a lot of blacks, being pro-black isn’t enough. Being a sell-out means one doesn’t hate whites enough. I’ve seen that sort of attitude with the extreme fringe of skinheads, etc. But its disturbing how mainstream that attitude is among blacks.
JAY wrote: “Unfortunately, for most of the people around us, a revulsion toward “racism” might as well be a primal instinct.”
But how did it come to that? Some 50-60 years ago there was no such |primal instinct”.
True – but we do (at least most of us) have a primal instinct for fairness. I believe this instinct was diverted, and perverted, toward the anti-white leftist agenda.
Hmm. Why do I feel a little responsible for all this?
Yeah, it’s all your fault countenance! 🙂
Glad I’m having a better weekend here than I am at AR. Two of AR’s British regulars are really letting me have it — One says that economics is a “pseudo-science,” and the other basically told me to fuck off. Now I’ve got you in a row about necrophilia. How much better can this weekend get?
Morality is the reason it is and always should be illegal to have intercourse with a corpse. God forbids it. That is reason enough. Only intercourse between husband and wife is morally licit. A corpse, being dead, is no longer married. Neither can a corpse grant consent.
“But what if I don’t believe in God?” Tough shit. God is real and His law is real, whether a given person believes in them or not.
“But it doesn’t hurt anybody?” First, the issue of whether or not a given act hurts anybody is irrelevant. In fact, there is no objective way to determine whether or not a given act hurts anybody, since any such method would require the absolute foreknowledge of all future repercussions of the act.
Second: The human body is made in the image of God. To injure it for the sake of sexual pleasure is an insult to God. Whether the body is living or dead is irrelevant. To believe otherwise is to believe the human body is just dead meat. And if it is dead meat, why not cook and eat the corspse you’ve just fucked?
Second: “Do As Thou Wilt” is not a Christian idea. In fact, it is a credo alien to all religion except one. That religion is the religion of Satan.It is a creed that adores the individual will as the supreme being instead of God. And it ends in hell: the current hell of a life lived in slavery to desire, and the hell to come after the final judgment.
Third: The “liberation” of man from traditional sexual morality has destroyed our social order’s central pillar: the natural human family. Feminism destroyed the natural relation between male and female. Result: the destruction of the idea of unity between husband and wife. Contraception distorted the natural relation between sexual intercourse and procreation. The “normalization” of homosexuality distorted the natural function of the human body itself, and will soon destroy the institution of legal marriage. And now we should take it one step further and distort the natural relationship between life and death. Sorry, but no.
Any society where people are free to do whatever they like as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else is not going to last long. It is a society where each man is his own jealous god, with nothing standing between him and his most perverse desires but the thin tissue of his own personal idea of what “hurting anybody else” means. It is a recipe for chaos and unspeakable evil.
Monogamous, man-woman marriage. Conception and reproduction. the family unit. The sanctity of the human body. Anything that weakens or damages these vital institutions is not just a crime — it is an act of war against society, and against God Himself.And those who make war o God will ALWAYS lose.
I’m happy for you that you’ve got your morals all figured out. Though I wouldn’t want to live in a society ruled by people like you, it’s probably better than being ruled by people with no morals at all.
“a society ruled by people like you” = the High Middle Ages. SOLD
@Robert Oculus III
God forbids it. That is reason enough.
Does that mean if God commanded you would do it?
God doesn’t need to issue Abraham-style commands any more. Since He came to Earth in Person, that sort of communication is no longer necessary. God is physically with us in the Sacrament of the Altar every day. We have His direct words in printed form. Those are all the commands with which we need be concerned.
In fact, God has commanded us all to do certain things. These commands are contained within the deposit of faith handed down by Christ Himself to Saint Peter, and thence to us.
Since He is omnipotent, the Almighty could use a hypocrite like me as an instrument of his will — but I find the idea ridiculous. Imagine the world’s greatest concert pianist choosing to perform a concert using an out-of-tune toy piano with 50 missing keys instead of a Steinway Grand. It would be like that.
Re: Countenance,
Take heart my friend. It’s all in good fun. Fortunately, your detractors can’t reach into their computers and hurt you over the internet. Sticks and stones.
Let’s leave religion aside just for a moment. A major problem in modern society is our ability to reason ourselves into accepting things that should frighten and disgust us. If you press the “override” button too many times, your natural instincts, such as fear and disgust, will cease to work. That’s not a good thing. Fear and disgust are inherent in humans and are there to protect us. Stripping away our natural protections is suicidal.
Yes, I agree. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees on what is “disgusting” and what is not. Many Americans consider it disgusting to eat snails, and yet it’s acceptable to the French. It is acceptable to eat dogs in some parts of Asia. Likewise, there are differences among individuals, from one extreme to the other.
Where do we draw the line when it comes to making laws? Especially if they’re based entirely upon a sense of disgust. I could make a strong argument against nose-picking in restaurants; if somebody sits across from me and does that, it takes away from the value of my meal – as Curt pointed out earlier. It’s an externality and, as such, it could be considered “theft”.
There are many things that are wrong, that should not be done, that affect other people in various ways – but not all of those things should be made illegal. Sometimes it’s a tough call, especially when resources are thin. There are unintended consequences, and unintended expenses.
There’s an answer to that, Jay. Go by your own culture. Just as it is of little value to consult international law when deciding a case in the U.S. Supreme Court, there is little value in dispassionately noting that other cultures find clitoridectomies peachy keen, so there’s no need to get upset if your neighbor slices up his little girl in Sacramento. Western Culture is our basis and it is WORTH PRESERVING. No matter the intellectual justification, i do NOT wish to live in a country where Fluffy is an entree.
Yes. It would be a lot easier to protect our culture if it were contained in a smaller area, and did not try to incorporate the world in its bosom. I do believe that there is such a thing as a country being too big for just one culture; regional cultures will naturally develop over time (unless mass media prevents this). Still, when people come here, they should understand that they must abandon their old barbaric customs.
The problem isn’t the number of square miles of area, it never was. It is the unnatural suppression of perfectly normal negative feelings which is essential to the multicultural project. Absent that ideology, we would be free to express the normal “yecch” reaction to backward practices and beliefs. Of course the West is different from the Northeast and the South, city dwellers differ from rural people, but that is normal in any polity.
Prohibiting the “yecch” is also the basis of the radical gay/transgender political project.