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Thilo Sarrazin

Germany does away with itself

31.12.2010. Volkmar Weiss, born in 1944, is a German geneticist, social historian, and genealogist. He is the author of several books and many articles and reviews. He holds doctoral degrees in natural science and in history. Here are some excerpts from his review of Thilo Sarrazin's book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany does away with itself):

For about 40 years the topic that Sarrazin tackles in this book has been taboo in Germany. In 1999, when I was looking for a German publisher that would accept a manuscript I had written, no one dared to accept it. “Please understand the reason for the rejection,” the editorial director at a major Munich publishing firm wrote to me. “We fear a storm of outrage that would harm our business.” (Eventually the book was published, albeit in Austria, under the title Die IQ-Falle [“The IQ Trap”]).

Given this, the courage of Tobias Winstel of the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), the major German publisher that accepted Sarrazin’s book, is all the more praiseworthy. For its intuition and its willingness to take a chance, and with shrewd marketing, the publisher has been rewarded with a fabulous commercial success.

In this bold and detailed look at the modern welfare state, Sarrazin deals with the relationship between social and biological factors, and even writes about the inheritability of intelligence (IQ). As experience has shown, anyone in our society who does that risks being treated with contempt and to being marginalized as a right-wing extremist by relentless adversaries.

According to Friedrich von Hayek, the term “social” or “socialist” in modern political life really means “redistribution,” and a “socialist party” should more aptly be called a “redistribution party.” In a liberal-democratic society, the parties that garner the most votes are those that during election campaigns promise to redistribute wealth. This sets in motion a fateful process of decline, which Sarrazin thoroughly reviews in all its consequences, citing solid data and with the rational arguments of an informed and thoughtful minority.

Sarrazin boldly confronts the underlying outlook of those who hold power and decide policies because they are able to secure majorities in election campaigns. Establishment party politicians, whose weal and woe depends on election majorities and the attitude of voters, have predictably reacted to Sarrazin’s book like a flock of chickens that’s startled by a hawk that suddenly appears in its midst. Even before the book was published, they felt compelled to condemn the author on the basis of a few sentences taken out of context that were quoted in the media. If only they had first read the book itself! For this is a remarkably well written and hard-hitting book. Its editor, and the author’s wife, a teacher, have made sure that it’s virtually free of error or misstatement.

Based on what the media had reported before it was published, I feared that this would be a polemical work without supportive sources and evidence, which all too often is the case with non-fiction books that top the bestseller lists. But no. The source references are solid. The numerous tables and graphs are all carefully referenced, as befits a scholar (which Sarrazin had been before taking a post with a Social Democratic Party foundation). There’s an index of persons as well as a subject index.

[...]

In the concluding Chapter 9, “A Dream and a Nightmare,” two satirical alternative prospects for Germany’s future are presented and compared. In the first, Germany adopts Sarrazin’s insights, while in the second, things continue as they have been.

This chapter reveals the book’s two main substantive weaknesses. Sarrazin extrapolates current Muslim immigration trends linearly to project the future portion of Muslims in Germany’s population. In fact, these trends will soon falter. For one thing, birth rates are also falling dramatically in Muslim countries. In Turkey, Iran, and Tunisia, the birth rate has already fallen below the replacement level to 1.8 children per women. If migration to Germany continues at current levels in the years ahead, the migrants are more likely to come from black Africa.

Second, While Sarrazin is being taken apart in the television talk shows, Chancellor Merkel is traveling around the country to gain support for her government’s energy policy. She devotes her time to what is, in fact, a most pressing issue. Sarrazin recognizes the symptoms of the crisis. But he overlooks how this contributes to the rising price of energy. More than half of the world’s available reserves of petroleum have already been consumed, and extracting the remainder will be expensive. The result will be a general world crisis.

I’m not the only one who has warned about this. My novel Das Reich Artam: Die alternative Geschichte (“The Artam Kingdom: The Alternative History”) shows how Berlin might look after the city’s Islamization. A horror is quietly overtaking us—certainly not because of Islam, but as a result of the possible and probable interrelationship of the causes of these crises, which have always been the causes of war and devastation.

An older man near the end of his working life has written an extraordinary book. For decades he had been a Cinderella of the bureaucracy. “In the form of presentations, memos, draft speeches, and essays,” he writes, “I have filled thousands of pages with counter-arguments over the past 35 years. My bosses had to survive politically, and I was there to help them.” Now he’s shown that he can do much more than that. He’s provided an overview of very complex relationships and has familiarized himself in a short time with unfamiliar disciplines.

Sarrazin was sharply criticized for recently mentioning that Jews have a special “gene.” He need take back nothing of what he said. Of course, what he meant is that Jews have similar gene distribution or gene structure patterns. (In Israel, human genetic research centers have published studies of gene distribution among Jewish population groups that confirm their differences compared with other populations.)

Someone who wants to prove that the weather is the same all year round will have little trouble finding in each month at least one day when the temperature corresponds to that of an average day in mid-May. It’s on that intellectual level that beautiful young women of Muslim background are presented on television talk shows as living witnesses to refute Sarrazin’s alleged “contempt for humanity.” The producers of these shows overlook, however, that the intelligence level of those who are interested in Sarrazin and what he says is higher than that of the general voting population, for whom nonsense is broadcast day in and day out. Sitting among those who malign and interrupt him, he sits alone but all the same triumphant.

“This book was written out of deep concern. If it contributes to taking timely and proactive measures that blunt even a few of the consequences that are warned of here, this book will not have been written in vain.” That’s how I concluded my book The IQ-Trap. Sarrazin’s motivation is the same.

The egalitarian utopia has always foundered on the biological inequality of human beings, especially differences in intelligence levels (IQ), with their social consequences, and how those differences are inherited. To save this vision of utopia and, even more, to maintain hope that one day it will finally be realized, it is important to marginalize and suppress any awareness of biological inequality. And that goes for the scientists who encourage that awareness.

For leftist politicians and the other watchdogs of this “politically correct” society, Thilo Sarrazin, social Darwinism, reactionary Mendelism, racism, right-wing extremism, and evil demons are virtual synonyms. The liberal-democratic exorcism continues.

Read the entire review at AmRen.

Tim Wise

Anti-white racism

30.12.2010. Not yet convinced that whites becoming a minority in their own countries is a desirable development in the eyes of the multiculti elites? Perhaps you should have a look at infamous 'anti-racist' Tim Wise's Open Letter to the White Right:

You need to drink up. . . . Because your time is limited . . . . I know, you think you’ve taken ‘your country back’ with this election—and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise—but you are wrong . . . . It is coming, and soon. . . . In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that . . . cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart. . . .

[...]

We just have to be patient. And wait for your hearts to stop beating. And stop they will. And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told. Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don’t need guns.

We just have to be patient.

And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well…

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

So know this.

If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…

Payback, thy name is…

Temporary.

Read this open letter in its entirety at Tim Wise's website.

Takuan Seiyo

The Art of Strategic Citizenship

30.12.2010. Excerpts from Takuan Seiyo's latest essay at Gates of Vienna:

Let’s look at the travesty of the howls of “racism” whenever the subject of group IQ differences is broached. This is not the “controversial” issue that it’s routinely proclaimed to be. The thinking work on it has been going on for 300 years. It has engaged from the outset all-time greatest brains such as Montesquieu, Linnaeus, David Hume, Francis Galton. The proposition has been proven in hundreds of peer-reviewed empirical studies going back 100 years. Dozens of brilliant books are in print on the subject and a half dozen brilliant websites exist. The layperson need not even read specialist literature or decipher calculus equations, for such writers as Steve Sailer and Razib Khan have pre-digested and posted this knowledge on the Internet.

Gnostic Progressives are able to attack the concept of the IQ Bell Curve (e.g. see “Barack Obama on The Bell Curve”) and hijack Reality with terrible consequences for the rest of society because their every assault is met with the victims’ capitulation and flight from the arena of combat. Yet this particular redoubt is so easy to defend. For instance, assertion of mean IQ group differences does not equal a denial of high intelligence that individual “people of color” may possess. The trivial fact that two of the world’s five tallest men and the tallest NBA player are Chinese does not disprove the “racist” fact that the average Chinese male stands 5’6”.

This is not an issue to be brushed off as superfluous “divisiveness.” It’s an issue on which America’s destiny was staked — and forfeited. Trillions of dollars have been looted from compliant taxpayers to “improve test scores” and “close the achievement gap” for students whose gap is immanent and unclosable. The Washington DC school district spends over $16,000 per pupil annually, by official statistics, and $24,600 per more honest calculations by Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson. That is the highest per-pupil expenditure in the Milky Way Galaxy, yet District of Columbia Public Schools has the worst performing schoolsof all 50+1 ranked states.

Every year it’s debated again how to close the achievement gap, without touching on anything remotely connected to the actual reasons for the gap. New expenditures are proposed, more school bonds are loaded onto the local population, further federal grants dent the taxpayer’s pocket. It’s all wasted, mostly on loot for school administrators and union members. The looters assert that more loot for more looters means less “gap” for the pupils.

Alas, Reality’s law is that it takes an IQ of 100 to master the unfaked K-12 curriculum, such as still exists in self-respecting countries like Switzerland or Singapore. Even for Whites, only half are equipped to graduate from a real high school. In a place like Washington DC, only one in five pupils is so equipped, for over 90% of them are Black, Hispanic or Polynesian, hence sub-90 in mean IQ. A law entitled “No Child Left Behind” would be an act of egregious blasphemy even in an atheist universe.

Continue reading at Gates of Vienna.

Neocons in Norway

Further interesting observations and comments from Sellanraa

29.12.2010 (updated the same day at 17:20). Excerpts from Sellanraa's article at The Brussels Journal:

Norway's chattering classes often claim that the American political spectrum skews to the Right. Most Norwegians, I find, imagine that the U.S.'s Democratic Party is right-wing by their country's political standards, and that the Republicans are a cabal of borderline Nazis that wants to shoot abortion doctors and hang the unemployed. Over the last few years, Norwegian pundits and foreign correspondents have informed me that John Kerry, Al Franken, and Barack Obama are all actually ultraconservatives, and that National Review in its current MOR incarnation is actually a magazine of the far Right. One could easily dismiss all this as simple anti-American ignorance, and that may well be part of the answer – but there is something else at work here as well. Scandinavian political blinkeredness is not limited to the U.S. For instance, whenever an election is won by the Sweden Democrats, whose opinions are almost absurdly moderate by any objective standard, cultural elites across the continent react with hysteria and indignation, as if extermination camps in Stockholm and pogroms in Gothenburg were just around the corner. The same sort of reaction occurs whenever Norway's Progress Party experiences a bump in the polls; they, we are told, are right-wing extremists, “right-wing extremists” here and everywhere else in Scandinavia meaning “moderate socialists.”

I suppose one shouldn't be too harsh on the people who believe these things, just as one can't hold the average North Korean responsible for the actions of his country's regime. A look at Norway's own political spectrum, particularly the Right, makes it very clear how and why we have managed to convince ourselves that everyone to the Right of Leon Trotsky is a fascist.

In his critiques of the mainstream American Right, Paul Gottfried often points out that the neoconservatives who now run the conservative movement are not rightists so much as they are rear-guard leftists. Hence his claim that the Cold War was not a conflict between Left and Right which the Right eventually won, but a conflict between two Lefts – one archaic and Sovietic, the other Trotskyist, politically correct, and culturally radical – which the Trotskyists eventually won, after which they seized total cultural hegemony. Based on the information I receive from across the pond, that analysis seems to me entirely accurate; and from what I know of Norwegian politics, it can be transplanted in many of its aspects to Norway. I would argue, though, that we are even worse off than the Americans. To indulge in a bit of justified hyperbole, Norwegian “conservatives” are the most craven, frivolous people in the world. They make David Frum and Jonah Goldberg look like paragons of erudition and principle.

Continue reading at The Brussels Journal.

HonestThinking comments: I am surprised to find in this otherwise excellent article the following statements (emphasis added):

Norway has nearly no serious and organized paleoconservatives, traditionalists, or national conservatives; it has no Paul Gottfrieds or Pat Buchanans; it has no parties whose electoral success and ideological stature parallels the Lega Nord, the Vlaams Belang, the Danish People's Party, Germany's National Democrats, or France's National Front. With the exception of a handful of half-mad recluses and obscure blogs, the Norwegian non-aligned Right does not exist – not yet.

Why does Sellanraa use the expressions "half-mad recluses and obscure blogs" when describing conservatives (presumably including himself) in Norway? While I fully agree with him that it would be an understatement to claim that there is room for improvement in this area, I think it can be argued that this particular way of describing the current state of affairs is at best inaccurate or biased.

PS: Sellanraa has today sent me the following comment via e-mail:

In short, I stand by what I wrote about conservatism in Norway -- with some reservations that were left out for practical reasons. I firmly include myself in the category of half-mad recluses, and I firmly include my blog in the "obscure" bracket. I can think of no Norwegian newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV station with whose editorial position I agree even 50 % of the time. I can think of no parliamentarian or political party (including the small ones) that I'd trust with running a lemonade stand, never mind the country. I can name only a handful of Norwegian-language nonfiction books published in this millennium with anything interesting or valuable to say. (These include Nina Witoszek's "Verdens beste land" and, incidentally, Dr. Anfindsen's "Selvmordsparadigmet", which is lying on my bedside table as I write this.)

That said, the situation is not unremittingly bleak and hopeless- just very nearly so. This fall, Progress Party politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde wrote an editorial criticizing multiculturalism, upon which he was of course denounced as a racist and a philistine, and his arguments "refuted" with the usual barrage of relativistic strawmen. HonestThinking.org and, to a lesser extent, Document.no and Morbus Norvegicus, are among the closest things we currently have to a light at the end of the tunnel. Still, the treatment these have received in the mainstream simply confirm my statements about the current climate of opinion. (When one Googles Ole Jørgen Anfindsen's name, one of the first hits is a forum post describing him as a notorious "closet racist.") Through no fault of their own, they are therefore relatively obscure to many people. I hope that this will not remain the case.

Totalitarianism and education

Svein Sellanraa reports from Norway

27.12.2010. Excerpts from Sellanraa's article at The Brussels Journal:

Between the ages of 16 and 19, virtually all Norwegians attend upper secondary school – an optional, three-year add-on to 13 years of compulsory elementary education. Most opt for public schools over private ones, and a goodly chunk of that group chooses a course plan whose emphasis is on history, social science, and the humanities. As our educators admit, though, Norwegian students would be remiss to expect to actually learn anything about those subjects. This is not an accident caused by the quality of the school system, which the international body PISA has repeatedly found to be among the worst in the developed world – it is a consequence of design. The bureaucrats and intellectuals who create the curriculum for Norway's State schools, most of whom attended university during the 1960s and 1970s and partook of that era's student radicalism, agree that the goal of education is not the transmission of knowledge, but the propagation of soixante-huitardisme, relativism, and a bellyfeel hatred of white Europeans.

For influential Norwegian pedagogue Harald F. Skram, for instance, the belief that history constitutes “an objective account of what happened in the past” and the rejection of cultural relativism are both earmarks of low academic historical competence, while “an awareness of how history can be used politically” is a sign of high competence. Harald Syse, writing in the renowned quarterly Prosa, assures us that “it's been a long time since historical education has had as its only goal to communicate the truth about the past.” (Syse's piece examines whether a set of newly released history textbooks sufficiently emphasize the oppression of minority groups by ethnic Norwegians, as a State edict has recently required.) Facts, to Syse, are of secondary or tertiary value, subservient to the need for “a broad education in democracy.” In other words: Schools are not to transmit knowledge, which can be inconvenient and unpleasant and is at any rate a mere social construction of late-capitalist phallogocentrism. No, they should instead turn their students into docile paragons of “tolerance” and “open-mindedness,” “tolerance” and “open-mindedness” being acquired mostly through the memorization of a few thought-terminating cliches and the unquestioning acceptance of Cultural Marxism and the therapeutic welfare state. Like all totalitarian institutions, the Norwegian establishment starts its indoctrination as early as possible – even kindergarteners are made to sing songs about the horrors of racism and the need for world government.

Continue reading at The Brussels Journal.

YouTube

What's the matter with these people?!?

21.12.2010. From a forwarded mail message:

YouTube has closed down the main video account of Palestinian Media Watch - PALWATCH - for "violating YouTube terms of use", by supposedly propagating hate speech. Of course PMW does not promote hate speech, but exposes the hate speech of the PA and the Hamas, in order to bring about its elimination.

YouTube stated that the account was henceforth terminated "due to repeated or severe violations of our Terms of Use" and they specified the following PMW videos from Palestinian sources, promoting the killing of Jews:

1. "Hamas TV teaches kids to kill Jews" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwN2M6ZIIRU
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 10/02/2009.

2. "Jews are a virus like Aids" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYaGl3KjPUw
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 01/18/2010.

3. "Farewell video before suicide attack of Hamas suicide bomber Adham Ahmad Hujyla Abu Jandal" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYdTudQhWM4
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 06/10/2010.

4. "Hamas suicide farewell video: Jews monkeys and pigs; Maidens reward for killing Jews" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryc7RqXlVdE
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 08/14/2010.

5. "PA cleric: Kill Jews, Allah will make Muslims masters over Jews" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjuDTO8fgqM
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 12/12/2010.

6. "Hamas suicide terrorist farewell video: Palestinians drink the blood of Jews" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSftYIGH6-w
Removed for violating our Terms of Use on 12/15/2010.

PMW urgently seeks to have this account reopened, since some of these videos have accumulated hundreds of thousands of viewings and the exposure is critical to our ongoing work.

HonestThinking comments: From what I consider to be trustworthy sources here in Norway I am being told that YouTube has now reversed their scandalous decision. But the questions still remain:

• What's the matter with these people?
• How can a company like YouTube act like this?
• Who is YouTube trying to please?
• What about freedom of expression?
• When will be the next time YouTube makes a questionable decision of this kind?
• What will be the long-term developments in this area when companies such as e.g. YouTube employ decision makers with few or no principles worth having?

European Commission

A disgrace

21.12.2010. The European Commission has come under fire for producing more than three million copies of an EU diary for secondary schools which contains no reference to Christmas but includes Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim festivities. Continue reading in The Telegraph.

The Netherlands

'No future for Dutch Orthodox Jews’

12.12.2010. Prominent VVD politician Frits Bolkestein believes there is no future for 'active' Jews in the Netherlands. The former EU Commissioner says there is no future for this group in the Netherlands because of "the anti-Semitism among Dutchmen of Moroccan descent, whose numbers keep growing''. Thus reports Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

Goodbye Sweden

Another excellent video by Pat Condell

05.12.2010. Do not miss Pat Condell's take on the latest developments in Sweden.

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HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.