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Page added on November 24, 2015

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Kunstler: Boundary Problems

It’s no accident that Donald Trump’s vaunted wall along the US-Mexico border became such a potent metaphor for a floundering American polity. The US has boundary problems — and not just with illegal immigrants (whoops, undocumented visitors). A mighty flux of standards and principles is symptomatic of an economy in freefall. Nothing is settled. All values are put up for re-negotiation. Steamrolling and bullying are the new fair play. Foundational ideas, such as the first amendment, erode under a flood of special pleadings. There is no center left to hold.

The latest identity politics fracas at Princeton University is instructive. Princeton students’ Black Justice League demanded both the vilification of former university president Woodrow Wilson as an arch-segregationist at the same time they demanded a segregated “cultural safe space for black students.” The pusillanimous current Princeton president, one Christopher Eisgruber, entertained their “demands” perhaps knowing that the threatened “indefinite” occupation of administration offices would be cut short by the Thanksgiving week vacation. (So far, the occupying force of the Black Justice League has not demanded delivery of free turkey and cranberry sauce — turkeys problematically have distinct regions of white and dark meat.)

The past ten days have also seen protests against free speech at snooty eastern elite Amherst College and a “white privilege retreat” at the University of Vermont for students “self-identifying as white” — why not “students of whiteness?” — with required reading on “The Invention of the White Race,” “White Privilege, Male Privilege in Race, Class, Gender,” “The Feminist Classroom,” and “The Abolition of Whiteness.”

You might whiff a general drift in all this of antagonism against people of whiteness and men in particular. Hence it’s extra-specially unfortunate that the oafish and sadistic Donald Trump is so conspicuously out there representing that identity group. I suppose what that shows is that the process of boundary dissolution can really call out the demonic. The sad part is that white men of principle and reason are so beaten down that none dare oppose the forces of identity vengeance on the loose.

The fugitive truths surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests are too unpleasant for the public interest to digest. For instance, the behavior of the new Holy Trinity of Black Martyrs, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, in the incidents where they lost their lives. All were doing something likely to get them into serious trouble: 1) beating up on an armed sentinel, 2) groping inside a patrol car for a policeman’s gun, 3) brandishing a pellet gun designed to look like a .45 automatic in a public place. I’d go so far to suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement has become so virulent because it’s increasingly obvious that black behavior is so embarrassingly bad and nobody knows what to do about it, especially black people. (Check the national murder rates.)

The colleges and universities have become the theater for these histrionics because they are institutionally so vested in the wish for better outcomes that evolved from the civil rights struggles of the last century. A general failure of those expectations has driven the colleges collectively crazy — or, more precisely, made them places for the enactment of craziness. The careers of reasonable people are hostage to the new campus Red Guards, who operate much like Mao Zedong’s lunatic minions of the 1960s, who were set loose to distract public attention from the enormous failure of Mao’s five-year plan economy.

A reasonable argument can be made that the temperament of the USA is worse than that of Germany in 1932. We’re more foolish, feckless, and savage, our politics more ridiculous, and the wave we’re riding is much more dangerous.

Kunstler



11 Comments on "Kunstler: Boundary Problems"

  1. Hello on Tue, 24th Nov 2015 6:40 am 

    I wouldn’t mind having a few negros presented in a zoo. But letting them roam in the city freely? That’s just crazy. Who does let millions of apes roam freely in cities? Nobody in their right mind, that’s for sure.

  2. Read on Tue, 24th Nov 2015 8:52 am 

    Hello, That was irony wasn’t it?

  3. HARM on Tue, 24th Nov 2015 2:07 pm 

    Kunstler is completely missing the fact that blacks are far more likely to get pulled over for no reason, shot in situations where whites might get Tazed/roughed up, handed long sentences where white (and “white collar”) criminals plea bargain or walk, etc.

    He’s also ignoring the fact that blacks, unlike the rest of us, actually have endured centuries of actual slavery, Jim Crow, and blatant racism, that has only recently gotten better. There are still black people today who can recall public lynchings in the Deep South and Midwest.

    That sort of thing tends to have a veeeery long tail, and leave a mark on people’s attitudes about authority and “Law and Order”, dontcha’ think? There’s a good reason why black people still distrust the police and political authority in general, and it’s not because they are all violent hooligans.

    In short, Jim Kunstler is being… dare I say it?… color blind.

  4. salinsky on Tue, 24th Nov 2015 2:50 pm 

    Harm Talk about color blind. Negroes are not black,they are brown.

  5. Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Tue, 24th Nov 2015 7:16 pm 

    Kuntler is just cranky cuz Israel’s getting its ass beat at every turn and there’s nothing the Jews can do about it. Might as well pick on somebody. Makes him feel big.

  6. makati1 on Tue, 24th Nov 2015 8:49 pm 

    Harm, right on!

  7. SugarSeam on Wed, 25th Nov 2015 3:25 am 

    “Hello,” could you be more of a disgusting racist pig? … Just curious.

  8. theedrich on Wed, 25th Nov 2015 4:34 am 

    On this one Kunstler is right.  Due to evolutionary factors (even though Christian mythology denies evolution), the Africans simply are not as cerebral as the rest of mankind, compared even to the now partially mulattoized Arabs.  (For centuries the Mohammedans have enslaved as many others as possible, but especially Negroes.)  Naturally, anyone who accepts evolution as fact is attacked as “racist,” “evil,” etc.  In an age when the general IQ is declining by 1.29 points per 25-year generation (per Richard Lynn of the Ulster Institute for Social Research), the myth of “equality” (as in “self-evident that all men are” blah, blah, blah …) is universally taken as a given by the rabble of every color.  Such delusionality notwithstanding, the average Negroid brain does not have the neocortical power to restrain the animal impulses surging from the lower primate levels beneath the cortex.  The popularity of media-driven White genosuicidism has become so great, however, that Presidents of taxpayer-supported universities and colleges, always looking for new opportunities in hypocrisy, are nowadays getting into the fun game of maniacally attacking Whites for being White, because it looks so good on their résumés.  And it all diverts attention from the Grand Theft Wall Street that is hastening our demise.

  9. Davy on Wed, 25th Nov 2015 7:42 am 

    Thee, IQ is a very narrow and easily manipulated indicator of intelligence. In fact it is best used by people with insecurities with their own IQ’s and existential survival. How should these indicators be structured? Well of course by white asswipers stuck in their own deceptive superiority.

    There is so much more to life than narrow intelligence indicated in IQ “bs” test. There is all those higher human traits found in Spirt. These are reflections of the sacred and undefinable. These connections are nebulous and abstract. These much more powerful human attributes are above quantifying. These are the powers that lead peoples and armies to victory. In the end it is these powers that will conquer isolated intelligence found in humans decoupled from themselves and their environment.

    It is absolutely clear to me and many others that it is intelligence itself that is our species fatal flaw. The cultural feelings and narratives of exceptionalism found throughout modern man’s history but especially today is leading us directly into a bottleneck and great earth extinction. This can only be attributed to one thing and that is uncontrollable intelligence.

    It is only where the spiritual tempers, directs, and limits intelligence that we see real humanity . In other words where we see a people at the spiritual level able to say no to the drive for more intelligence that we see true civilization. The only people I see currently today at this level is the Kogi of Columbia. It comes down ultimately to humility before nature. Nature enjoys nature and only nature can overcome.

  10. theedrich on Thu, 26th Nov 2015 3:15 am 

    Davy, if you reread my text, you will see that I said, “the average Negroid brain does not have the neocortical power to restrain the animal impulses surging from the lower primate levels beneath the cortex.”  Nothing there about IQ, only about restraint, i.e., what is generally called self-control.  IQ is an additional element in the complex that makes up the hominid brain/mind, but not the whole of it.  Recall the sporadic, endemic violence associated with Blacks everywhere.  The reports about your Kogi are probably written by the usual sociologists eager to make flower children out of primitives so as to make a name for themselves in academe.  Sort of like that consummate liar, Margaret Mead, with her mendacious “Coming of Age in Samoa:  A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation.”  It contained titillating vignettes of free love under the palm trees, and was naturally acclaimed by horny male sociologists in America as a grand new advance in their “science” and a prescription for benighted White civilization.  Later, honest anthropologists discovered that the truth was quite different:  the Samoans killed any teenage girl who got pregnant before marriage.

    I mention Mead only because modern sociology, frantic to be seen as a “science,” comes up with all sorts of nonsense “proving” that Whitey is evil and the illiterate jungle dwellers are innocent children of Eden.  Try reading “Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage” by Robert Whelan or other books which debunk Rousseau’s idiocy.  Invariably, the socio-mythologists use their drivel to incriminate the White man, how he “stole” the primitives’ profound knowledge, how he lacked their deep spirituality, and so forth.  The academic book catalogs are full of this nonsense, which the authors pretend to have discovered and for which they expect accolades (and promotions) from their institutions.

    This rubbish is not even restricted to the human species.  When Jane Goodall first began studying chimpanzees in the wild, she reported that they were all so nicey-nice and peaceful.  It was only after an extended period of years in Africa that she noticed they were carrying on what in human terms would be called warfare against other tribes.  This was depressing for her, but she and her colleagues at least had the honesty to publish the facts.  Unfortunately, not all academics are as honest as she.

    And in any case, even if the Kogi were as wonderful as you think they are, it would be impossible for the 7 billion+ rest of mankind to imitate them, even if there were a general wish to do so.  We are a warring species, and sooner or later war and privation are going to whittle down our numbers.  The Judeo-Christian fantasy about how “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb” (Isaiah 11:6) and similar unnatural idiocies are useful only as escapist delusions for the masses (and separating them from their money).

  11. Davy on Thu, 26th Nov 2015 7:07 am 

    Thee, my point is primarily focused on the existential failure of human intelligence and civilization. This appears to be overall a failure of place and purpose within the earth ecosystem. In other words we are destroying the earth ecosystem and trying to replace it with a modified human version either by direct purposeful effort or by negligence of human actions from uncontrolled growth. This is very important point that modern man continues to ignore.

    Our social and intellectual narrative is exceptionalism of position in nature. We feel different from other animals and act like we are separate from nature. This is rapidly changing on some levels but for the most part popular culture is bound up in consumerism and the global market support of this destructive activities. We are locked into these destructive behaviors and they are irreversible per the status quo. This is a profoundly important point because modern man currently continues to have a fundamental feeling of being able to overcome all obstacles ahead of him even with his ongoing dangerous destruction of nature.

    These feeling of superiority and separateness must change if we are going to acknowledge both population and consumption overshoot. I am not saying this will herald changes that will save us from ourselves. My point is similar to when we as individuals have mental illness or substance abuse. The first and most important step is the act of acknowledging and accepting that we have a problem. There is nothing more important than this if we are going to change, adapt, and mitigate the coming bottleneck.

    Our cultural attitudes found in our various narratives that all revolve around a dangerous system of consumption and development must change at that highest fundamental level. This must be globally and all together. We must come to the realization that this is the problem above all other. This highest problem is us. We humans are the problem and our whole existence is based upon a flawed basis of existence.

    We have not bottomed out enough in crisis for this transformation of social attitudes at the highest of levels. In crisis there will be change. The question is will there be enough change in a crisis to dethrone modern man’s basis of meaning that drives us on. Will a crisis big enough to shake us to the core but gentle enough to still allow survival occur? Is this even possible is another important question. We may be fated to self-destruct with no options. Crisis is what is needed but survival of a global crisis is a big if. The rebalance of population will mean many will not survive and many more will have shortened reduced existences.

    Can we change at the highest levels from disruptions to the fundamentals of our existence found in consumerism, global market based cooperation, and academic knowledge? If we can change we still have a limited window of positive action before us. That window is closing tighter monthly. The best we can do is emergency crisis type activity.

    Once we go into emergency mode the whole global system will begin to contract and end. So many activities require economies of scale and duel use support. How many critical parts to our technical world require associated production to create an overall economies of scale that allow the production of the vitals? We can end poor attitudes and lifestyles but in many cases they indirectly support the vitals of our complex civilization. In other words once we enter crisis mode the wheels of globalism will come off.

    The most vital of these supports are food and fuel. Until we can localize fuel is vital. The nature of food will have to change. We will have to move gradually or suddenly to localized food. My conclusion is acceptance of failure at the highest level that leads to an existential crisis of forced change is our only hope. We can change some things. We can make many things less horrible. Much of what is ahead is in natures hands. It will be a storm of rebalance of our place in the greater earth ecosystem.

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