A new age of spite and entitlement is dawning in the West, as the haves, confronted by a yawning abyss of their own manufacture, struggle to find a way to so demonize their opposite numbers at the bottom that they need no justification to remain at the top.

It is observed, including by my own perennial favorite Adam Cadre, that a powerful motivator for this sort of behavior is simple spite – that after a certain amount of privilege accrues, one of the main ways of enjoying it is finding ways to wave it under the noses of those without it. We observe this on a daily basis with money – the whole category of Veblen goods could not exist otherwise.

A trans-Atlantic culture of fat snobbery has emerged on similar terms, with people – blessed by the mix of economic and physical privilege such that they do not, by their normal day-to-day- routine, gain or retain large amounts of weight – basically heaping abuse on the disgusting, morally incontinent fat-asses who inexplicably now form a majority in the US and a plurality in the UK. While the temptation, as always within the framework of choice-based liberalism, is to view obesity as a simple consequence of personal choice, a more coherent view emerges if you construct it in the same manner at least some liberals are willing to qualifiedly accept class or wealth.

(Certainly much more coherent than Jamie Oliver flogging up-market delicacies as a substitute for prolefeed with similar caloric content, and treating the choice as one not just of diet but of morality – as though money were no object.)

But these are not subjects I am touching on in detail today. With the 2011 autumn of rage still sputtering along and still making the odd headline,  I would only be adding to a vast stream of noise about money to discuss it; and I have already done too much futile speaking for too long on my left approach to obesity, and a man gets discouraged after a while.

What I am interested in now is a new push against the discipline of mental health.

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(As an introduction, see the seminal Brecher/”War Nerd” article, War Of The Babies.)

One of the great hand-wringings of the xenophobic right (often at cross-purposes with itself, as one sees in our Minutemen regarding Islam with indifference and the hyper-Zionists begrudgingly admitting that Latinos pose no threat to the West)  is the idea of birth-rates. The fundamental assumption is that niceties of personality and ideology can be divined from birth as readily and unchangingly as eye color or handedness. This often produces an apparent contradiction in ideology – simultaneous panicking about both the deficiency of a target ‘culture’ and the rate at which its members give birth. This is pretty much the indicator idea for xenophobia as an ideology – with the exception of the crudest, most superficial and unapologetic racists, they must square away the idea that something besides an inferior genome is at work.
The idea of rampaging Moslems is the animating horror in Europe and among fantasy-Zionists; it is passed off as hard-nosed and realistic, but relies more heavily on fantasy and ideology than the most airy-fairy Wilsonian. Whether or not the data bear it out (it generally doesn’t), one of two presumptions arise: the ignorant set and the dishonest set.

Ignorance

The ignorant set is simply blind to any historical or foreign case of immigration or demographic change. It accepts blindly the idea of continuity to first settlement or, in Europe’s case, a more fantastic but academically sanctioned idea of ethnic autochtony. In this view, one is the product of an endless succession of ancestors exactly like one, living in around the same place in roughly the same way and with roughly the same values and appearance. It’s intuitive at first – most of us know our immediate ancestors well enough and are constantly reminded of how much like them we are in various ways – but it breaks down on even casual investigation. This is why “racialism” or “white separatism” or any other form of I-just-love-my-people-ism is doomed to swift failure – it isn’t an internally coherent ideology and has a profound temptation to indulge in contempt for the other. And so the ignorant set comes to parade out the most popular and respectable slurs for the other, producing a kind of coherence and truth from mass repetition and crowd acceptance.

Dishonesty
The dishonest set, on the other hand, is familiar with the contradictions in this ideology, and is more defensive and dishonest about it. They attach themselves less openly to politics and more to “scholarship” and “opinion”. They call themselves “politically incorrect” and revel in the assumption by their friends in the media, government, and economy that those who spurn their views do so because they are too bold for them rather than because they are disgusting. They view the coherence of reality (which their partially-sealed world allows them to see as alternate) as the result of a political and intellectual conspiracy, and they tend to regard disfavored groups outside of the target group as complicit in this. (This has to be the primary reason for the continuing edge of anti-black paranoia in the elite of the American Jewish community.)

Most of all, though, the dishonest set requires an overweening ideology to produce the appearance of impartiality. They’re not afraid of the looming ropy dick of the swarthy interloper, see, they’re afraid of the destruction of their civilization. And as such, they go to great lengths to confuse “culture”, “religion”, “civilization”, “ethnicity”, and “race”. This, coupled with the 19th-century relict idea of demographics as potential for national military strength, produces the Face Fascists Dolan discusses in the eXile article.

As xenophobia becomes politically profitable, the simpler kinds of cultural elitism, provincialism, and chauvinism come to be tinged with bigotry, to be used as stalking-horses for the cause – and because the dishonest outnumber the idiots, paranoia and a conspiracy-driven mindset set in. Other, unrelated causes are dragooned in or grilled for failing to do so. (Thus the attempt by anti-Latino activists to take over the Sierra Club because Mexicans are bad for the environment, the constant, feigned concern by open misogynists about the welfare of innocent little Paki-factories under the swarthy hand of the impostor Mahomet and his Alcoran, et alia.) And there is no satisfaction at, nor real concern for, the achievement of any one objective. When they have banned headscarves it becomes minarets, when they have banned minarets it becomes teaching in Arabic, when they have banned teaching in Arabic the future of civilization depends on brown children wearing green badges.

Part of the reason that this kind of thing receives social acceptance is that most people are fairly easy to manipulate, and operate mainly in terms of superstitions and personalizations. In Europe especially, the outsider is regarded as a fecund savage who requires foreign support to shit indoors – this image is far easier to accept than challenge, and persists even among those who know plenty of outsiders – because all things being equal people seem to prefer having two contradictory data to replacing one datum with the other, and they have a great facility in selectively reinforcing existing knowledge. It is, if anything, easier for someone to form an indelible image of Muslims as a ticking time bomb waiting to flood civilization in children and circumcise their women if one is on good terms with the Husseins and their two-point-four children — after all, it is easier to refute an idea than an observation, and the Hussseins shouting at each other once is worth as much as a thousand honor-killing stories.

My feeling as regards all of this has always been that the correct response is that of Colin Powell (a career military man whose political ignorance is as much to blame for the Iraq war as anything) – not to refute the image of the outsider but to counter and better it. That the reality of the immigrant is and always has been a hard worker and contributor to the economy, that the immigrant family is one convinced at least that a life exists to be made in the new country, that people like them made America a world power and are all Europe can hope for to do the same. You might never convince a soul that Barak Husayn Dhimmitude is a fiction concocted by liars and bigot, but Kareem Rashad Khan’s story is every bit as easy to tell – and has the advantage, in the long run, of being real.

Hello there, *campers*. I’m Thuryl, II*D*’s Australian correspondent, here to bring you news from the other side of the world (or, if you are on this side of the world, this side of the world).

Before that little election or whatever it was that you Americans held a few months ago, some of you contacted me about the possibility of moving over here in the event that McCain won. To you, dear friends, I say: you’re ignorant fuckwits who know nothing about Australia. At the best of times, we manage to be slightly less horrible than you. My purpose here will mostly be to show you just how bad we are.

The media over here are already getting tired of reporting on Obama’s inauguration and looking for news further afield. Today, they’ve managed to latch onto a misogynistic lecture by Abu Hamza, an “Islamic cleric” who runs a small Muslim social club about 10 minutes’ drive away from my home. (Wonderful term, that, isn’t it? Don’t bother researching whether he’s widely respected or has any kind of recognition outside his own congregation; just call him a “cleric” and be done with it. Do people go around referring to street preachers as “Christian clerics”?)

Now, this lecture was delivered back in 2003, and Abu Hamza hasn’t done anything much in the public eye since then, so the only purpose anyone could have for digging it up and kicking up a fuss about it today is race-baiting. It’s not as if it’s even a slow news day, for heaven’s sake. Yes, the lecture is pretty repulsive: among other things, it argues that a married woman has no right to refuse her husband’s sexual advances. On the other hand, this is still the Catholic Church’s official position on marriage. The Vatican is a damn sight more influential than Abu Hamza, and yet somehow people find it easier to believe that a Catholic can disagree with the Vatican than that a Muslim can disagree with whichever “cleric” has been trotted out and demonised this week. Or, if you happen to be a Protestant, look at, say, your own Phyllis Schlafly. Civil authorities don’t do much better than religious ones on the issue, either: spousal rape was completely legal in Australia until 1985, and many police still don’t take it seriously.

I seem to recall something in a book I read once about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your neighbour’s.

(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article – and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)

1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues – and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US – are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews – and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel – a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism – to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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Nuuuuh! Looks like the paranoid lefties’n Realist swine think a coupla troops add up t’martial law! Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

Jesus Christ. While I’m used to how consistently wrong the establishment’s favorite line (back the badge, then backpedal) winds up being, it’s rare to see it revealed wrong so goddamn quickly. The militarization of the convention police departments (especially the RNC’s) was regarded as a necessary precaution against radicals; and even reliable liberals ignored what amounted to the decision of the securitarian establishment to throw the Third Amendment out (evidently out of spite, because Jesus, the third amendment? Was ignoring fishing licensing too much work or something?) – and now we have clear signs that the country plans to have a full division stationed domestically – and live.

Falling empires tend to take one of two trajectories: a grand moment of clarity and the sloughing of the imperial clothes after a bitter external struggle (the Netherlands; France; the UK) or violent, overcompensatory oppression of their home subjects in ways pioneered in the Empire (Russia). I was hoping that we would have the former; turns out that our professional death-squad cheerleaders can’t stand the thought of our dwindling veto power over our subjects’ destiny will be the end of civilians being destroyed with M16s. Sorry, blacks!

Carney had a wry sense of humor. He was fond of joking that he’d graduated from Wasilla High School in the “top 20 percent”–by which he meant he was valedictorian of his five-person class. Sometimes Palin was the only colleague who didn’t get his jokes. “I don’t think he had too much patience for her lack of understanding,” says John Stein, then the town’s mayor. In internal discussions, Carney would be relentlessly logical while Palin was vague and intuitive. “Nick had a way of being direct and to the point, something that Sarah was uncomfortable with,” recalls Chase. Which is to say, when it came to garbage removal, what Palin seemed to have chafed against was less the substance of Carney’s position than what she felt was his elitist, Ivy League bearing. And, over the next few years, she found ways to get him back.

‘nuclear’ is a fairly recent word (its origins are older, but it’s only been a common feature of American English from around the time my parents were born), but it’s one old enough to have an established consensus on how it’s pronounced.

That consensus, generally speaking, is new-cle-ur. Not nu-cu-l[ea]r. New-cle-ur.

This is the way it is used in the neutral American accent, although like many recent or strongly regionally marked words its pronunciation is ultimately likely to be a matter of who is speaking.

The common perception in the popular media is that the b-pronunciation – nucular, as it is usually transcribed – is uneducated. It is often even used as a sort of shortcut for unpolished stupidity in a way that ain’t is no longer suitable for and few other largely Southernisms are politically correct for. I’m not sure if I’ve addressed this here, but if so I’ll happily do so again: ‘nucular’ was and still is in common use among nuclear physicists, nuclear naval engineers, and other experienced reactor and policy personnel. It’s declined sharply – ‘nuke’, common to the nuclear and nucular zones, reinforces nuclear rather strongly – but the distinction is one of region rather than erudition. Carter, Clinton, and Truman each used it.

I’ve long harbored the suspicion that Bush favoring nucular – in spite of having been brought up by a New Englander in a primarily Midwestern political circuit – was just a bit of dumb-hick theatrics, something you do to impress the papers with how very populist you are. Bush, no doubt, has at least once in his lifetime congratulated himself for pronouncing the word ‘nuclear’ in a way foreign to his constituents, believing it makes them more willing to sit down and have a beer with him. O’Doull’s please. Can’t forget that the Lord is with us and drinking’s against the Bible. Like so much else about the man, political theater mingles in more generous proportion than anyone wishes to admit with any other cause.

Governor Palin – who was raised and educated in the Northwest, worked in a Middle-American-obligatory field (broadcasting) before going into politics, and lives in a state whose dialect is an approximate mixture between Iowa, upstate Washington, and western Canada – has no reasonable excuse for pronouncing ‘nuclear’ as ‘nucular’. If she wishes to, that is of course her call, but it’s a particularly obvious and glaringly artificial call – one made evidently under the apprehension that that is how idiots pronounce it and we Americans, the illiterate Heartland hillbillies especially, are slack-jawed morons.

Palin, more than Bush ever wanted to, has settled into a political persona which is more aggressively patronizing than any sane observer ought to tolerate. She’s taken her complete inability to form a coherent sentence about anything that concerns people beneath her and made elitist lemonade, condescendingly changing her diction and register to the disjointed, surreal Ozarkian pastiche every untrained European and left-coaster aiming for the bourgeois American evangelical immediately latches onto. She’s jes’ folks, the McCain campaign assures us, not a fancy lie-ber-ul e-lite what reads books or brushes her teeth.

It’s a pity that the media fell out of love with Palin fairly quickly; otherwise, I wonder if she’d get to the point of affecting a pot belly and a ramrod-straight family tree before anyone actually called her on this shit.

Nuuuh! We’d Americaahs judt laak yeew! No Osama! Nuuuuuh! USA first! Yee-haw! Dale Junior ‘n’ Tyler too!

Not quite the antigastarbites’ Kristallnacht, but goddamned close:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/29/145032/032/755/614524

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/28/203016/697/536/613742

Remember: terrorism is when you kill white people.

I don’t have anything funny to say right now.

John McCain has, as you are no doubt familiar, recently cut an ad framing efforts to educate children on inappropriate touching as ‘sex education’. This is not a popular position – in fact, most Republicans will unreservedly support programs like the one Obama voted for.

Why?
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