Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Taqiyya & Kitman Against Progressives

Most of you aren’t Muslims, and I don’t court a Muslim audience. I’m not Muslim and have no love for the religion.

However, there are a couple ethical methods which Muslims use especially heavily when they are a minority in a non-Muslim country. They are especially alien to the people of Northern Europe, who have tended to be more forthright and honest than most other ethnic groups all over the planet.

The concepts are called taqiyya and kitman — they are just ethical justifications for lying to non-Muslims in a systematic way in order to advance the general interests of Muslims against that of the foreigners.

It’s very difficult for a lot of people from Northern Europe to empathize with that sort of mentality, which is partially why dopey democratic elites tend to try to universalize from their own limited experiences within their own ethno-religious group.

Progressives in part enjoy so much success because they can count on the honesty of the conservative opposition. For the left, the operating principle is the Satanic one — “nothing is true and everything is permitted.” The strength of our traditional culture has become a sort of weakness for us. We expect to speak the truth and expect the other people around us to speak truly, but our opponents are willing to drop all ethical restrictions on their behavior to achieve their goals.

This is really only a tentative suggestion, so I expect some push-back from it. There is an element of taqiyya in using a pen name and concealing one’s political opinions to the general public, especially in a time when we are supposed to expose ourselves to casual surveillance from everyone around us.

What I’d like to say is that it’s permissible to lie to progressives about what you believe. There should be little shame in it. You’re not obligated to go throw yourself into the fray, especially if you have to live around progressives owing to your profession or your family situation. You don’t have to tell everyone on Facebook that you think democracy is bad and that the protesters in Ferguson should be machine-gunned. It’s probably preferable that you keep a low profile.

You don’t necessarily have to go so far as to write a Facebook bot to post the most popular post on Upworthy every day to your wall, but it probably couldn’t hurt, either.

The advantage to this is that it helps to feed paranoia and cannibalization within the progressive sphere. You want them to be frightened and erratic. They should know that their are wreckers in their midst, but not know who they are. Success is when they harry or consume someone on their own side who is basically a moderate leftist. Sowing terror, leaking information, and generating confusion while minimizing personal risk is useful.

This is where conventional Republicans and other radicals with a democratic mentality tend to go badly wrong. They think that if they speak often and loud enough, they will get what they want. Depleting the controlled opposition (or eliminating it) dissipates an illusion and frees up a lot of energy for more productive projects.

If dissent is just going to be used to exact penalties on dissenters, then it’s really best to be more roundabout about it. This also damages the information quality available to progressive bureaucrats. Giving false information to pollsters is also possibly useful for certain efforts, as is the orchestration of mass misreporting of statistics.

When you stop thinking about it in terms of how many people you can get to repeat your slogans, an awfully large number of options start to open up for you.

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Social Matter Column: The Left Killed the Working Class

I keep forgetting to link to my column when it comes out. I pledge to forget less frequently.

The typical story that the left tells about the relative decline of the American working class is that it was the outcome of inevitable technological and historical processes. You can see many of the shells of old factories all around the “rust belt” yourself. Formerly great industrial cities like Detroit have become ruins with governance more typical of war-torn African countries than those you would expect in the West in the matter of few short decades.

The claims about the ‘obsolescence’ of industrial work are entirely false. There’s still an enormous amount of mass industrial labor going on. It just happens in Asia, with Asians doing the work for the pay that is appropriate for their jobs. This has happened repeatedly, especially since the 1970s, as the United States has made it harsher and harsher for businesses that have anything to do with the physical world to create businesses here that employ people.

Head on over to read the whole thing.

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Words and Images Control Your Mind

Many people, especially smart people, will tell you that they’re not affected by advertisements or what’s in the media. Whether or not they really believe this or are just putting on a strong front must remain a mystery. But the reality is that humans communicate by language, gesture, and picture, and that those messages wind up impacting how those people behave. It’s not so much that  a single article, movie, or radio spot will change someone’s behavior so much as the cumulative effect of all of it together impacts behavior in the aggregate.

So, for example, while a man who sees an ad for Revlon lipstick is not likely to ever go to the pharmacy and buy some Super Lustrous for himself, he may become ever-so-subtly more attracted to women who know how to apply it properly. The women who see it and buy it will then be marginally more likely to net the man they’re looking for, which helps to generate new social norms around wearing makeup.

People in the media are often accused by dissidents of being in the mind control business. This charge is absolutely true. Unfortunately, no method of perfect mind control has yet been developed, despite numerous crash programs and ongoing experiments to that end. The most that can be done, really, is mind-nudging, mind-jostling, which can eventually result in something like fragmentary control over some big part of the average person’s mind.

Knowing this — knowing that what we see changes how we think, and what we think changes how we behave — it behooves us to be much more careful about what we allow ourselves to see, to hear, and to read. Thoughts must precede actions, and misguided or evil thoughts precede evil actions.

So, for example, while it may be useful to read the New York Times to get a sense of what other people believe, reading the Times without a strong mental framework of skepticism will necessarily bring you closer to the viewpoints espoused by the editors at the Times, which is to say, towards champagne communism. Similarly, if you read Zero Hedge every day, you will be pulled in closer to the world of paranoid hedge fund traders who are also probably working for Vladimir Putin. If you read Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, you will be brought in closer to the way of thinking at the State Department and the CIA.

While much of what you read on may not be directly actionable, it does affect how you act, and you should think carefully about what you choose to read & believe if you want to also shape your actions towards your ends.

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