Martin Willett 2.0

Never Forget Rule One

2012-03-06T18:21:00.000Z

The forum is a place for me to express my views. I have no intention of letting it become a vehicle for censoring me and patronizing me.

Perhaps the time has come to finish off the forum, close down my website and confine my activities to the blog. I will give it some thought. The experience of running the forum isn't anything like as satisfying as it was a few years ago.

My views have changed, I have moved on and yet many people on the forum don't seem to be able to cope with this, they want me to be something that I am not any more. They want me to be like them rather than like me. They want me to care about what they care about.

I don't know how long the forum will be off. Possibly a few weeks. I might switch it back on in a few minutes. It might never return.

Mormon Ghouls

2012-02-19T16:11:00.002Z

Doyou know what beastly things Mormons do to the dead? They baptizethem. The ghouls! They prey on the dead and pray over them.

Ifyou ever have any dealings with family history you are likely to comeacross the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, more commonlyknown as the Mormons. Do you know why they have a fascination withancestry? It's rather sick. Not content with harvesting the souls ofthe living the Mormons want to harvest the souls of the dead. This issneaky in the extreme because dead people have even lower criticalfaculties than the usual target of predatory religions – children.

Untilrecently I thought this was something of a joke, nothing of any greatconcern of mine. But now I have found that the Mormons have beenafter some of my ancestors, and I take that personally. Ourancestors, just like our children, don't belong to us. We have thingsin common, we have associations, there are some basic obligations wehave towards their memory, to protect them from lies and smears. Butwe don't own them. We can't use them for our purposes. I have anancestor, Elizabeth Scattergood, who was born in the village ofBranston, near Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, one hundred yearsbefore it gave its name to a popular pickle. She had several sons,the youngest was my ancestor and another took himself off to Bannockin Idaho to join the Mormons, dying in the same year as the secondcharismatic psychotic Mormon leader Brigham Young. Because of that nodoubt some Mormons would have felt justified in baptizing Elizabeth,my ancestor, and all her ancestors, as Mormons.

Onthe subject of protecting ancestors from lies and smears I have hadto block a few more idiots again. Where do people get the idea thatevery Englishman is inherently guilty of all possible historicalcrimes and needs to be reminded of it on a daily basis? I think weknow the answer to that don't we? Leftist teachers and lecturersconstantly spouting anti-west, anti-capitalist, anti-British andanti-white propaganda. I am English, and I have nothing to apologizefor. Can't you get that? My ancestors did nothing to grind downanybody and I owe nobody any apologies on their behalf. I have nonobility, gentry, aristocracy or even much in the way of bourgeoisiein my background. If there is a chip on your shoulder don't take itup with me because I have had a belly full of such nonsense. Istrenuously object to the notion that to be English is to be born ina moral debt.

Myancestors were blacksmiths, wheelwrights, tramway timekeepers,bricklayers, weavers, dressmakers and lots and lots of tenant farmersand agricultural labourers. Not plantation owners or absenteelandlords. The closest I get to that is a wheelwright, son of awheelwright, who became the landlord - of a pub. None of my ancestorsever carried a whip or went to the Indies. Not guilty. You can shoveyour white guilt and your English guilt where the sun doesn't shinebecause I'm not buying it.

Idon't suppose I will ever be able to shake them off, the indignantleftists, so confident in the rightness of their cause and thevalidity of their sense of grievance. I am not going to stand for it.My ancestors have nothing to be ashamed of and I am not going to actas if I am ashamed on their behalf. Being proud of your ancestry isnot just for people whose ancestors had the good taste to always beon the losing side in wars. I operate a zero tolerance approach on mychannel, I don't do YouTube to get involved in a debate with peoplewho like to trade insults, a single insult against me, my ancestorsor my people in general and it's your last on my channel. If peoplecan't tell the difference between an honest Englishman with nothingto apologize for and a xenophobic racist white supremacist then theirabsence from the debate is no loss at all.

Backto the Mormons. They only went and baptized Mitt Romney's deadatheist father-in-law. The utter nerve! How dare they! It was not asif the man didn't have any opportunity to hear the words of men ofGod. Any American of even approaching average intelligence has plentyof opportunity to encounter religious people and to assess theirmessage. Nobody in America wears the badge of atheist or non-believercasually, I find it very hard to believe that the father of a womanwho a potential presidential candidate would choose for a wife couldbe a stupid and ignorant man. He must have known his own mind. Tohave the opinions he held and expressed in his lifetime dismissed inthis way is a scandal. It shows just how crazy Mormonism is.

Ifyou don't know much about Mormonism I suggest that you learn.Mormonism gives a perfect example of how religions are born. Unlikethe foundations of Islam and Christianity we have historical recordsand contemporary accounts from reliable sources who knew the supposedprophet and knew him for the charlatan he clearly was. We canclearly see that this religion was created by a charlatan and acrook, a man who like Muhammad was not fully capable of reading andwriting with any fluency. He has revelations which to the scepticalmind seem almost comically inept attempts to bamboozle people but hesucceeds, which can only be explained by postulating a great naturalcharisma. Both Joseph Smith and Muhammad used their charisma andtheir claimed prophetic gifts to give themselves special rights.Smith was not a conventionally well educated man but it seems obviousto me that he made a study of Islam, not in order to discover thetruth, but to know how far the minds of men could be bent by a manwho had the talent to be an outstandingly profitable prophet. Theparallels between Islam and Mormonism are very instructive. BothSmith and Muhammad claimed to be prophets of God bringing furtherrevelations to be built upon existing religious teachings, bothadapted things from the religious life around them which they founduseful and enabled them to gain the trust of followers. Both tookHebrew myths and transplanted them to their own country to make themseem more relevant to their followers. Both called for theirfollowers to go on a journey to found a religious colony where theycould practise their religion unmolested by others, where they couldbe in charge and make the rules, they were political and military aswell as religious leaders. Both required their followers to abstainfrom alcohol and make other lifestyle sacrifices. Both had a streamof new revelations which allowed them to get fresh instructions fromGod about how to rule the lives of their followers. Both had theirGod give them special dispensation to bend the rules about marriagein order to satisfy their personal lusts, special dispensations whichhave caused problems later. To this day Mormons have problems withpolygamy and the marriage of young girls and Muhammad's decision todemonstrate his power by porking his right hand man’s nine year olddaughter and making a crazy ruling about the status of adoption hasblighted the lives of tens of millions of Muslims who now sincerelybelieve that God wants them to take young girls as wives at the firstsigns of puberty and doesn't approve of adopting children.

Charismais a difficult thing to analyse, you recognize it by the effects ithas. It isn't something which is easily captured by artists orcameras and it certainly doesn't translate well into other languagesand eras. We are told that Gandhi, Hitler and even George W Bush hadit, but exactly what it is is hard to define. I have no doubt thatwhatever it is Joseph Smith must have had plenty of it. There issimply no other way to explain why so many people swallowed such acock and bull story, he certainly didn't have any evidence or performany miracles, he simply got people to believe in him and his accountsby sheer power of his personality. Some people have the gift to charmother people and they end up in prison, selling home improvements orgoing into politics. Occasionally they start cults, sometimes theyend up killed, and every few centuries one of those cults survivesits infancy and develops into a religion and people find themselvesobliged, through gritted teeth, to respect it. That is they feelobliged to respect it if they have their own flavour of idiocy toprotect and subscribe to the golden rule of you don't bad-mouth myirrational superstitious bollocks and I'll not bad-mouth yours. Deal?

Asan atheist I need not respect anybody's silly myths. I don't have anyirrational beliefs of my own to mock. When the religious try to mockmy beliefs they end up looking even more stupid. Everything I believeI believe for a reason that I can defend and I don't claim to knowthings that cannot be known. For me there is no need to pretend thatJoseph Smith or Muhammad was a false prophet, to me the term falseprophet is tautology, anybody who claims to be in touch with gods isdeluded, on the make or both. I don't have to divide the world'ssuperstitious myths into two categories in the way that any believerhas to. Real prophets and false prophets. There is no such thing as areal prophet. I find it faintly amusing that Christians and Muslimshave to believe the superstitious tribal myths of a tribe they aretaught to despise and at the same time regard the tribal myths oftheir own tribes as something primitive, the result of ignorancewhich was passed down the ages through bloody-minded refusal tochallenge it, whereas the tribal superstitions they stole from theJews (God-forsaken Christ-killers or sons of apes and pigs) areprotected from doubt by the marvellous gift of faith.

Ifthere was one life skill I would like to see taught in school itwould be the ability to stand back and look at something, everything,from the other side. Looking at the religious faith of somebody whoprofoundly disagrees with your take on reality has to make you thinkabout why you regard faith as a virtue. In somebody whose faith isplaced in something you know to be wrong faith clearly is nothinglike a virtue at all. It is bloody-mindedness. Pig headedness. Arefusal to think. A crippling mental blind spot which prevents themfrom seeing reality. And yet your faith is a gift from God,wholesome, a great virtue, the only thing which makes your lifeworthwhile. Really? That's not how it looks from the outside of yourbubble of delusion.

Whatwould you call a man who believed against all the available evidencethat Beyoncé was his girlfriend, that when she sings it is only forhim and the words in her songs hide coded messages to him? Notsomething complimentary, I'd guess. But such a man shows enormousfaith, surely just like the great faith that apparently can movemountains. Although I keep asking Christians to tell me wheremountains have been moved by faith none of them have ever come backwith any map references. In no other aspect of human life is a doggedrefusal to take the evidence on face value considered to be some kindof a virtue. We call people who refuse to accept rational conclusionsdeluded and in denial, we don't regard any other kind of irrationalbelief to be a virtue.

Religiouspeople are often obliged to accept the notion of religious tolerance,but of course only when they are not in an overwhelming majority.When the religious are in an overwhelming majority tolerance goes outof the window. Muslims who live as a minority demand tolerance,allegedly occasionally even for non-Muslims, when they are in themajority they demand compliance with their rules. This was true evenin the time of Muhammad. There are plenty of references to religioustolerance in the Qur'an, but all date from the early times ofMuhammad's rule, later suras take on a very much less tolerant tone.Islam must be tolerated but need not be tolerant.

AmericanChristian mythology has it that Christians fled to America to escapereligious persecution but in many ways Puritans went to America toallow persecution, so they would be doing the religious persecutionwithin their own communities. That was certainly the motivationbehind the migrations instigated by Muhammad and his temporallydistant apprentice Joseph Smith: a new desert land in which theirrighteously intolerant religion would have the whip hand. A gloriousprospect indeed.

InAmerica no single Protestant church has power to throw around, sothey have to tolerate each other, but together as Christians they canforce other people to the margins. Fifty years ago Catholics attainedenough influence not to be kicked around by the Protestants anylonger, then Jews too came to be respected and now Mormons havejoined the charmed circle of those the irrational consensus regardsas worthy of reciprocal respect. In America that tolerance does notextend to atheists of course, although in Europe it does, nopolitical party can afford to alienate a group that they perceive tobe large and powerful. In Europe any politician who directly insultedatheists in the way that George Bush did would be slapped down anddisowned by the party leadership, even in a Christian Democrat party.Maybe in another fifty years atheists will have enough of a publicprofile to become mainstream and credible in the way that currentlythe nutters of Salt Lake City are becoming respectable, or at leasttolerated.

Garbage in, Garbage Out

2012-02-09T12:44:00.004Z

Garbagein, garbage out. It is a well known concept in computing, you can'timprove on poor data and bad assumptions no matter how clever you areor how fast you can think, if you start out with incorrect data orbad assumptions the final result will be just as poor. Exactly thesame goes for moral philosophy. If you start out with a fundamentalerror you can't possibly come to a sound conclusion.

SorryChristians, you are just wasting your and everybody else's timearguing morality. Garbage in garbage out. When you make theassumption that a soul enters an egg at the moment of conception youare wrong, and therefore everything you base upon that wrongassumption is also wrong.

Peopledeserve to be treated as if they have human rights because they arecapable of suffering in a human way. That is where I start my moralreasoning from. I don't need to believe that humans alone couldattain this level of suffering or that they only attain it because ofsome magic spell by a magical invisible being. I know from experiencethat other people react in a way which is consistent with the theorythat they are people too and like me they can suffer. I might bewrong but it's a risk I'm willing to take. I'm even doing it now,assuming that there will be people listening to my words who havebrains which allow them to think in similar ways to myself, some notso well, and maybe a few who can do it better. If I'm wrong aboutthis then I'm wrong about just about everything, sometimes you justhave to make a choice and stick to it. I have decided to assume thatI am not unique, that other people are just what they appear to be,other people, who deserve similar treatment and respect.

For methat's a sound footing for moral philosophy. It's not perfect but itworks.

Incontrast when you mix in ideas about magical beings and souls you runright up against the problems of garbage in garbage out. It doesn'tmatter whether people have IQs in the 180s and have been debatingthese issues for hundreds or thousands of years that cannot rescuethem from the problem of garbage in, garbage out. The concept of thesoul is wrong and therefore everything which rests upon the notion ofthe soul is wrong. And that goes for the idea that abortion ismurder.

To meit is blindingly obvious that a five year old child deserves humanrights and a newly fertilized egg does not. The five year old childis clearly human and capable of empathy, suffering, terror, pain anddread. A microscopic egg is capable of nothing of the sort.

Whathappens in between the egg and the child? Development. An incrementalprocess. For the first couple of weeks the newly fertilized egg lacksany mechanism to think or feel. To me it seems perfectly reasonableto look upon the developing foetus as equivalent to various kinds ofanimal depending upon how advanced the development process is. Thenew born baby is not, as a matter of simple fact, superior in itsability to suffer than many higher animals, including those we farmfor meat. By the time the child is five they have clearly surpassedthe level of empathy and suffering of any animals we are aware ofother than our own species.

Ithink there is some room for speciesism here, it is not a completelyuntenable position to give our own species a bit more benefit of thedoubt and to push back the granting of human rights a bit before thepoint at which we could all agree that they are completely justifiedby the capacities of the child on the grounds that they exceed thecapacities of those of any other species. I don't see why birthshould necessarily be a significant milestone for the child. The ideathat before birth the child isn't a person at all and becomes onemerely by passing down a tunnel of flesh and taking a breath isn'ttenable. I have been present at the birth of both my children and itwas clear that the baby was capable of suffering and stress beforethe birth was complete and it was also clear that a newborn baby israther like a rabbit, something is clearly there behind the eyes butit isn't really anything that is operating on a uniquely human level.And premature babies are like stupider and less energetic rabbits.

It isa philosophically sound position to be totally against abortion ifyou are a pacifist vegetarian, but by the same token it is aphilosophically sound position to assume that you are the only realperson and everybody else is a figment of your imagination. Beingphilosophically sound isn't any guarantee you're not going to be atiresome obnoxious friendless git. We live in the real world and oneof the things you'll notice about this real world is that peopledisagree with each other, on almost everything. Those people whobelieve in souls are wrong. That's a given. Here is my evidence. Mymemories. The oldest memory I have is utterly sensational, inconsists of nothing but sensations, no words at all. I can't pin itdown to a particular place and time because it doesn't contain anyclues which refer to specific events that can be placed in ahistorical context but the very fact that there are no words orlabels associated with it tells me it probably dates from the timebefore I could speak. It is two smells and a few sounds andmovements. It is the smell of setting lotion and a paraffin heater,the sensation of being in what what mind believed to be a kitchenwhich was strangely large and there were moving coloured strips. Thestrangely large kitchen was a downstairs room without carpets, it wasstrangely large and somehow excessively rectangular in some wayprobably because of large mirrors reflecting an image of more spaceand more vertical edges. I couldn't see myself in the mirrors becauseI would have been strapped into a seat or a pram. It would be ahairdresser's salon, heated by a paraffin heater, with a door made ofvertical strips of highly coloured plastic. My memory is just beingcomfortable, knowing my mother was near by with another woman who wasnot scary, hearing her voice, and trying to make sense of the newsmells and sights. At the time I didn't know what was happening, butit wasn't a threat. I have been probing that memory all my life, nowI think I finally understand it.

Whatwas the point of that rather boring (for you) detour into my memory?It shows me at my earliest stage, pre-verbal. When my mind had nowords neither did my soul. I was a baby with a baby's mind, not thesoul of a man. At no time have I ever had a mind inconsistent with mybody. My baby self had a baby mind, my child self had a child mind,my teenage self had a teenage mind, my drunken self had a drunkenmind. There is no room for a soul in my experiences. When I have hadanaesthetics I have never experienced waiting around for my brain andbody to wake up and play with me. When my body was anaesthetized themind was anaesthetized along with the brain, almost as if my mind wascontained in and run by my brain and I didn't have a soul at all.There has never been a single moment in my life in which theexperience of being me was inconsistent with the theory that I am thesensations generated within my brain. The soul theory just doesn'twork anything like as well as the brain theory.

Ifsouls are implanted in fertilized eggs what accounts for twins whichform several days later as a fertilized egg divides into twoindividuals? Similarly there are also people who contain the geneticmaterial of two fertilized eggs, these are known as chimera. The soultheory is full of holes and it simply doesn't match our observationsof the real world. When a theory doesn't match the observations thetheory is wrong – and everything which was based upon that theoryis also wrong. Garbage in, garbage out.

Theidea that human rights depend upon souls is therefore wrong.

Theidea that abortion is murder because the tiniest human embryo has asmuch of a soul as an archbishop is wrong.

Theidea that heaven and hell exist as a destination for souls must fallif souls do not exist.

If youbuild your morality on sand it will fall. The soul theory is wrong.Personalities are created by brains and die with them. All soul-basedreasoning is wrong and nothing valuable can be rescued from it. It isas absurd to have clergymen and theologians pontificating aboutabortion due to their understanding of soul theory and being given ahearing as it is to be listening to the ideas of proponents of thestork theory of baby arrivals.

Afoetus does not have a soul. The foetus is an unborn baby, but ithasn't developed into a baby and it doesn't exhibit awareness whichexceeds that of farm animals, therefore it does not merit treatmentas if it was a full human being because it isn't a full human beingjust as a recently sprouted acorn is not a fifty year old oak tree. Afoetus deserves to be treated as an animal with respect for its lifeand its ability to suffer pain. How much respect is due? To me itseems obvious, the same sort of respect with which you would treat avaluable animal. The ownership and welfare must both be respected.You should not operate upon a human foetus without anaesthetic anymore than you would operate on a horse or a dog without pain relief.Similarly if you do destroy them you should treat their corpse withrespect.

Somepeople would like to see no dog ever killed simply because they werenot wanted by their owners. These people are free to collect forcharities which keep unwanted dogs at the expense of those who insistthat they are not killed. I say the same should be true for abortion.If people want there to be no abortions they should be free tocollect charity funds, given freely, to offer good homes for unwantedunborn children. But if anybody wants to say that abortion or killinga dog or a horse or a cat are murder then they have no sound groundsto make such a case and no good reason to expect the rest of us toagree with them.

Justbecause you are alive and were once a foetus it does not follow youowe a duty to every human foetus as if you would magic yourself outof existence in a cloud of magical hypocrisy were you not to defendevery last foetus from every threat. There are very few people whoare actually pro-abortion, just a few hardened statists who seeabortion as politically preferable to contraception because itweakens the family which is the enemy of the state. Abortion is a badthing. So is war or shooting dead a hostage taker. But sometimes abad thing is better than the alternative. Ruining the lives of youngpeople and their wider family because of an unwanted pregnancy is avery bad thing and I personally would like to have another optionavailable and I cannot see how anybody's moral qualms on this issueshould be so important that they trump other people's decisions. Evenif the people with the qualms are celibate octogenarians in frocks.

If youdon't like meat or beer or hip hop then don't buy it. If you don'twant an abortion don't have one. How hard is that? But what about therights of fathers? Simple, if you don't want your unborn baby killedby its mother then you cannot have casual sex with casual fertilepartners. And if you don't want unborn grandchildren killed you hadbetter be careful how you educate your children.

Who Do I Think I Am?

2012-01-29T17:50:00.001Z

Ithas always been quite common for people to ask where I come from.Often with the opening charge “You're not from round here, areyou?” I object. Most strenuously. I am from around here, and now Ican prove it.

WhenI was 12 I lived just across the road from the farm on which mymother was born. She always says, for effect, that she was bornbarefoot and hungry in the Workhouse, which is sort of true. Itwasn't functioning as a workhouse at that time, it was the farmhouseof the workhouse farm. Her father was the youngest child of a familyof ten. His father's plan had been to establish a farm then move onand leave a son behind to run the old one, then move on again. Afairly good plan. But as the youngest George was shit out of luck.The plan unravelled almost at once. George's whole life was a bitagainst the odds. When he was born his mother had already given birthto nine children, beating the record of the then queen Victoria. Shewas forty seven. If she'd been a dairy cow no doubt she would havebeen sold off for pies before then. But Harriet was built of sternstuff. When George was three years old she pulled little George outof the duckpond, fished him out by his red petticoat with the clothesprop. It was a good job she did or I wouldn't be here, or any of hisother descendants, which come to about seventeen. Or so. Maybe more. I'm more of an expert on the dead than the living these days. I'm notsure why it is but I have developed the bug for researching my roots.

Itis a fascinating hobby for me because there are not too manymysteries and dead ends. I have always known my parents andgrandparents, which is where you need to start. In 1911, the mostrecent census which is has been made public, I knew the whereaboutsof my four grandparents. That information gave me the names of theirparents and their ages, or at least the age they put on the form. Inone case the information was distinctly dodgy. That story is veryresistant to a final conclusion, the most likely explanation is thatmy great grandfather William was not the father of his second wife'sfirst child, one of his sons was, but for some reason such a marriagewasn't a possibility so the widower took responsibility and marriedthe eighteen year old Mary Emma. Anyway the child that caused theproblems didn't survive, but another three did, including uncleCharlie who fought in the first world war and died much later with apiece of shrapnel still inside him. His father was a picture of Manchester Victorian respectability, but it was largely a front, hewas born south of Birmingham in a little cottage, the son of afish-hook maker and a needle maker. He never quite lost the ways ofthe cottager, keeping goats and cocks in the back garden of hisbay-fronted end terrace house. Yes, cocks, not hens. Game cocks. Justlike Alex Halley I have found a cock-fighter in my past. Yes ofcourse it was illegal, as no doubt many of other side lines were.

Ihave formally studied the economic and social history of GreatBritain in the nineteenth century at three different levels,including as part of my degree, so I have an idea of what Victorianlife was like. I could recognize themes in my own family thatpreviously were academic concepts. The most obvious point is thelarge family sizes. Little George the youngest of ten was far fromalone. Another of my ancestors had the reputation of having twentychildren. Twice. I haven't quite dotted all the I's and crossed allthe T's but it doesn't seem that much of an exaggeration. He had alarge family, well into the teens, then his first wife died inchildbirth. He was a farmer, no doubt a tenant farmer, and he had ayoung housemaid. Who can tell at this distance exactly what the storywas, whether the housemaid looked after her mistress's baby and fellfor the grieving widower as the sickly child struggled for life andfinally died. Or whether she was just out of choices and she had toeither marry her employer or be out on the streets, except there wereno streets. Out on the empty lanes. Whatever the story was, whetherromantic or tragic, without it I wouldn't be here, and several dozenother people alive today also owe their existence to that young lady.

Ihave found the women in my past at least as interesting as the men. Iowe my existence to so many dedicated mothers. I am haunted by thephotograph of my great grandmother. She died a week after givingbirth to her only child. She was 27. I have little doubt that if shehad been in difficulty in 1999 rather than 1899 she would havesurvived. There are also at least two women who gave birth tochildren after the age of 45.

Thesweetest story of them all is the story of a lifetime of love. Sarahand Samuel were first cousins, actually a little closer than simplefirst cousins. They lived their entire life in the same village,going to the same church, living on neighbouring farms. The fact thattheir first child was born in the same year that they marriedsuggests to me that while their parents might have insisted upontheir wedding they had not planned their love affair. They never lefteach other alone until death separated them, for mere weeks. They lieburied together. Forever. In the soil of their home village, where,quite coincidentally as it turns out, my son was baptised.

Ihave found one of my ancestors was a hand loom weaver. I have foundthe plot of his meagre rented property outlined on a tithe map –isn't the internet wonderful? Today the town is full of the nouveauriche and footballer's wives. Back then it was a working town,producing textiles in a mixture of mills and rude cottages. Myancestor, John, was one of the last of the hand loom weavers. Hislandlord was an Earl. Today where he lived is the edge of the gardenof remembrance. Looking using Google's street view I can reconstructthe view from his window, which as a hand loom weaver would almostcertainly have been a big south facing one to catch as much freelight as possible his view would have been dominated by the church. Is it any wonder he called his sons Samuel, Cain, Abel and Levi?

Wedon't own our ancestors and we have no right to rewrite theirhistories to make our own points. Margaret Thatcher's father did notlive his life to be an example and a model for her time ingovernment, he lived his own life and had his own plans for hisdaughter. I feel a bit dirty trying to make points from the lives ofmy ancestors – that is not what they are for. But here goesnothing. I have no ancestors who enslaved or colonized. None of myancestors oppressed the Irish, in fact I am one sixty fourth (or isit one one hundred and thirty second) Irish, a Thomas McCauley madehis way to England of his own free will a generation before thepotato famine. His grandson had dropped the Mac, had a thoroughlyEnglish first name and was so integrated into Englishness that heactually formed a village cricket team. I think that is quite anormal story. The idea that Britain is a nation of mongrels orimmigrants who wish to keep their own foreign identity and arethoroughly welcome to do so is just not true. There are some who aremongrels but many, like me, are almost completely pure English, orpure Welsh or pure Scottish and we British have never, not in thetime of the Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Norman or Huguenots, Jewishrefugees from the Nazis or in the time of the Empire Windrush or IdiAmin's expulsion of Asians – never - has Britain ever asked forforeigners to come to live here in order to live the way they livedback home to teach us culturally impoverished people the values ofdiversity. What kind of idiot would ever believe such a transparentcock and bull story? Mostly foreigners came because we couldn't stopthem, not because we needed them and begged them to come. That is weas in the people, the ordinary people. The elites and thoseshort-sighted people looking for a quick fix of skilled workers orprofessionals on the cheap maybe did invite them, but they did notrepresent the views of the people, who they studiously avoid askingto offer an opinion lest it not be the one the elites want to hear.

Theboundary of my grandfather's farm is a brook, it formed the boundarybetween two parishes and it marked the furthest extent of the landsof a family who came over with William the conqueror and were givenlands as spoils of conquest. When that first Norman petty noblemancame my ancestors were here waiting for him. Not to fight him youunderstand, no, to farm the lands he claimed. Somebody had to do the work, plough the fields, milk the cows, weave the cloth and smelt theiron, we can't all play bloody soldiers.

Afive minute walk across my grandfather's land would take me to a peatbog which had been common land since the medieval period. My motherknew people who had been born in huts on the bog, people who didn'tunderstand the meaning of the word rent, or landowner. I used to playon that bog land when I was a boy, and mother had done before me. Itwas here that they found Lindow Man, a body preserved in the peatsince the time of the Roman invasion. There is absolutely no way toprove anything but as a result of my researches into my family I feelconfident in saying that it is highly likely that if there are anysurviving descendants from the tribe who sacrificed that man and casthim into a watery grave around two thousand years ago I am one ofthem.

Iknow where I'm from, I know where my towel is and I know my roots godeep.

Promoting the Theory of Evolution

2012-01-04T08:37:00.000Z

Creationists are very fond of saying that evolution is just a theory. This clearly demonstrates just how lacking in understanding of science creationists are.

They say it is just a theory. JUST? Why, what is better than a theory?

Facts are commonplace in science. Experimental findings are facts. Facts are the lowest grade of idea in science, not the highest.

So what about the laws of nature? Isn't a scientific law better than a theory? No. It isn't. A law describes the way something is, often without any explanation for why this is the way things are. The laws of thermodynamics explain the what's and how's of heat and energy. They don't explain why.

A scientific law can state that a certain type of thing will happen under certain circumstances. If this is shown to be the case always, or at least in every practical test that can be done to test it we can come up with a law. It isn't necessary to have the faintest idea about why it is the case.

A law is a low grade idea. It is very rugged at prediction although it need not have any explanation at all underneath it to explain why it works as a law.

A theory is something else. A well proven theory explains hows and whys. A well proven theory makes predictions and passes the tests. For example the germ theory of disease states that many, but not necessarily all, diseases are caused by infectious agents which are very small and possess the power of multiplication. We have come along way from the work of men like Louis Pasteur but we still have a germ THEORY of disease, not a germ fact or a germ law. Why? Pay attention creationists, this is the point - because there is nothing which a scientific theory can ever get promoted into.

No matter how many bacteria, viruses and protists are discovered to be the cause of diseases we will never have anything other than a theory of disease caused by germs. Because theory is as good as it can ever get. A theory explains what how and why. Theories become more complex and complete as time goes on, their power of prediction improves. But they are never promoted to become facts or laws because facts and laws offer lesser degrees of explanatory power than theories.

If anybody says that evolution is just a theory they might as well say that gravity is just a theory. They are announcing to the world their complete ignorance of the nature of science.

Theory is as good as it ever gets. The theory of evolution of species by natural selection is one of the most thoroughly tested ideas that mankind has ever had. The theory explains findings in geology, embryology, anatomy, geography and genetics. The theory makes predictions which have been tested and found to be consistent. The theory of evolution could easily be falsified by any number of pieces of evidence which doggedly keep refusing to come to light. We will not find fossilized rabbits in the Precambrian. We will not find birds in rock strata which are older than those which contain the oldest reptile fossils. We will not find fossilized sheep in New Zealand which didn't arrive there via ships from Europe. That final prediction is not inherent in the work of Darwin but we can now say that it is part of the theory of evolution because theories also evolve and they get better. But no matter how good they become they never get promoted to a higher status because a well proven theory is the pinnacle of science.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T13:14:00.003Z

For all the idiots out there who think it is a good idea to conduct some half-arsed war on Christmas in the name of atheism I have only one thing to say: NOT IN MY NAME.

I don't have any problem with Christmas, a festival that has always been bigger and more powerful than Christianity. They can't control it. It is a monster. But it is a big friendly monster. It doesn't hurt anybody and it doesn't have the power to intimidate anybody.

It can easily be subverted by playing up all the elements which have nothing to do with old dead Jews. Snow, turkey, mistletoe, trees, cakes, puddings, robins, comedy DVDs and alcoholic drinks you would not drink at any other time of the year.

Leftists should GET A LIFE. OK, so maybe not everybody is Christian, or ex-Christian, but nobody who came to live in Britain ever did so without being aware that this is a Christian country, most should know it has been Christian for over a thousand years. Nobody is damaged by Christmas and nobody has any right to be offended by it in a Christian country. Pandering to the non-Christian minority, and let's be clear about this, the Muslim minority, does not require pretending that nothing special is happening in December.

People can make their Christmas whichever way they want. They can try to avoid it. They can fly off somewhere warm and ignore it. They can make it achingly pious or completely devoid of mythical and supernatural significance altogether. In my my house we have advent calendars, because they come with chocolate pieces in them. We unwrap our presents in the morning with breakfast and have a big meal about 2pm featuring turkey (not a whole one, just a big breast roast) and ham and roast potatoes (done in goose fat) and mashed potatoes and Yorkshire puddings, gravy (my job), a mix of vegetables, roast parsnips and onion sauce. Christmas is a pick and mix thing, we don't bother with The Queen's Speech, Brussels sprouts, the baby Jesus or egg nog. Your Christmas may not be complete without them.

I can smell the meat cooking. Damn, I'm getting hungry. I'll do it some justice this year. Again.

I haven't had time to make a video recently so here's one I made earlier:-

What would Christmas be without repeats on the telly?

Arguing with Idiots

2011-12-08T21:36:00.001Z

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.

These words, by Mark Twain, reveal a truth we should all consider from time to time. While democracy is a good thing, or at least the least worse system that we have so far tried out as Churchill said being in a majority is not the same thing as being right or in the right.

One thing you can say for certain when you are on the side of the overwhelming majority - there must be plenty of ignorant idiots agreeing with you for reasons which just don't follow. On the other hand if you are in a minority, especially in a very small minority, there is a strong possibility that there are no unthinking idiots on your side at all.

People on YouTube, and let's be fair here I'm mostly talking about men, are far too quick to call people that they disagree with idiots. Just because somebody has reached a different conclusion to you it does not follow that they are an idiot. Everybody is wrong about something and people who speak their mind a lot have more opportunity to be shown to be wrong than those who just go along with popular opinion. I like people who are prepared to say what they believe and stand by it, even if they get proven wrong on a few things later. One of the great opinionated arseholes of the nineteenth century was also one of its greatest scientists, Lord Kelvin. He confidently stated that heavier than air flight was impossible, in the year before the Wright Brothers first took off, and the earth could not possibly be as old as the geologists said it was because it was still warm inside, if the earth was older it would have cooled down to a uniform temperature. He was wrong of course. He was wrong on the idea of heavier than air flight because he lacked the imagination to conceive of lightweight lift-generating wings and efficient lightweight engines and he was wrong about the age of the earth because he didn't know there was fresh heat being generated within the earth via atomic decay. He was wrong - there were factors he did not consider, but he was no idiot.

When you disagree with somebody do not automatically assume that is because they are ignorant or stupid. They may know something that you don't. The Victorian geologists didn't know about the ultimate source of geothermal heat but they knew that the huge weight of evidence that they had gathered provided a very strong case for an earth that was dozens, hundreds or thousands of millions of years old. Neither the geologists nor William Thompson, who was made a Baron for his work in physics were stupid. They had a disagreement. I doubt that you are as smart as William Thompson and I know I am not. Can we all just try to debate with people without calling them idiots just because they have reached different conclusions? There may be some new evidence which comes in which throws your beliefs onto the scrapheap as surely as the idea that the maximum possible age of the Earth was forty million years. There was nothing wrong with his calculations as far as they went, they just didn't include a vital factor that he was unaware of, and at the time he was without a doubt one of the best scientists the world had ever known.

Everybody can get it wrong, and people can have disagreements without either party ignoring evidence in a shamefully wilful manner. Many of the geologists listened to Thompson's lectures and followed his argument but at the end they still had to say "No sir, your theory must be wrong, I can't explain how it is wrong but my evidence says it must be wrong."

Can we please show some respect for people who espouse different views, believe in different hypotheses and come to differing conclusions. The fact that you state a different opinion is not proof that you are ignoring my evidence, you may be fully aware of it but also be aware of other evidence which suggests a different conclusion to you.

Double Standards

2011-11-17T16:21:00.001Z

She wrote

"It is very ethnocentric to feel that somehow your culture is so much better than anyone elses. Even to the point that you will export it and maintain it in a foreign land."

She was thinking about Australians moving to Bali or various Pacific islands. She has an excellent point. It is very arrogant and thoroughly deplorable.

My reply was rather brutal, and if she hadn't known me for the last nine or ten years she might have taken deep offence:

"Walk up to a woman in a burka in Sydney and tell her that. Then duck.

Do you like prison food?"

This exposes the double standards involved here. If you challenge the actions and motivations of rich white migrants, and most Australians are white, at least their white bits are white, you are applauded for your hard-hitting honesty and political savvy. But if you question the actions and motivations of non-white migrants you're a racist bastard who should shut up and be thankful you're not in jail.

It's a funny old world, isn't it?

Busy

2011-11-16T12:43:00.001Z

I have been busy on other matters. For some reason I have suddenly taken an interest in family history. I suppose this might be because I have finally come to terms with the fact that my parents will not be around for ever and so I had better get to know who they are are.

I am considering publishing the accounts of my journey to find my roots. This could be seen as the ultimate act of doc dropping, listing all my ancestors. It would be quite spectacular, because I have found other people researching my family too and by piggy-backing upon their researches I stand a good chance of digging up dozens of relatives. While I can't compete with the family history of great families (those with money and power need to know who they are related to) I have done quite well, getting several names back beyond the start of the nineteenth century and finding one root which goes back to the English Civil War era.

I have names and dates and some photographs and graves and old family houses. Should I post them? I suppose anybody who really wanted to stalk me could find me already, and I already reveal my broad location by marking my YouTube videos as being posted from Manchester Airport as an approximate location (the pin is usually sited on the centre line of one of the runways) revealing that my ancestors come from thereabouts isn't really adding anything new.

Sorry

2011-11-08T12:21:00.000Z

Itwas always done with the best possible motives, at no time did Ithink I was doing the wrong thing or backing the wrong side but Ihave come to that point in my life that I dreaded. I have shifted tothe right, I have become my parents.

Iused to think it would be the worst kind of betrayal, to change mymind in the light of mere, urggh, experience of real life. But whatwas I thinking? I never was the little leftist that my lecturerswanted me to be. There were always little islands of individualitythat never did quite mesh in with other people. No, I am not turninginto my parents, as if that was a bad thing, I'm am becoming who Ihave always been and what I always should have been, my true self.

Atthe age of fifteen I had my own political party, I was the leader andthe membership was my mate Tim, who has just retired as a policesergeant, lucky lucky bastard. We were the Enoch Powell AppreciationSociety. A lot of people got entirely the wrong idea, no we were notracists and not Nazis. OK, so we liked guns and knives and boots andleather but that didn't mean we were racists, skinheads, antisemites(whatever they were) or homosexuals. There was no hatred in us and noracism either. Straight up.

I remember in school writing an essay which involved a right wing coup, after storming the houses of parliament the radical leader makes a speech about how this was just the first step and next they would be going after the communists and Jews and the blacks, at which point the hero, a thinly disguised portrait of a slightly older version of myself, swings the machine gun round on the top of the tank and guns him down. I can't remember if it was for an exam. Any way my point is that there was always a core inside me which is still there now. I haven't betrayed my deepest sympathies. I have stripped away the shallow shell of protective colouration I took on in my later teenage years and young adulthood.

You don't have to hate foreigners to wantthem kept where they belong – in foreign lands. That is simplenationalism: this is my country, that is your country, you stay outof my country and I'll stay out of your country. There is no hatredin that, no smug sense of being superior, just valuing what you havein your country and the community and political system you have. I don't even want to stop people coming here. People are welcome to come here if they want to belong and fit in with what is already here and they are more suited to our lifestyle than the lifestyle in the land they came from. People who enter a country for what they can get out of it, with no intention of integrating or accommodating themselves to what was there before they arrived are invaders, regardless of their legal status, regardless of their colour, race or creed. Invaders should never be welcomed and they should be expelled, regardless of where they happen to have been born.

Theworld is full of nationalists, apparently to the leftists when theyare not white, or at least not Anglo, nationalists are heroes like Nelson Mandela, Jomo Kenyatta, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi, Hugo Chavez andHo Chi Minh, but when they are white they are just scum full ofugliness hate and an warranted sense of superiority. The racistdouble standards of the left never fail to bemuse me. They hate theirown people for being who they are and for being governed by people and a system they hate. The people they hate the most are working classconservatives, little Englanders, Daily Mail readers, small farmers and the most petty of the petit bourgeois: my people. They hate the people who don't want socialism, collectivism and multiculturalism and who actually like their country and its traditions. It took me a long time to realize it but finally I have. I don't have enemies, I don't want any enemies, but when people regard me and my people as their enemy, as a problem, as somebody who has to be dis-empowered, mocked, belittled and kept away from power I would be an idiot not to acknowledge the reality.

WhileI was studying politics for A level and later for my degree MargaretThatcher was on the throne, and I was a student, being taught, andpartly indoctrinated, by public employees. I was clearly abeneficiary of a system which was being taken apart, which was anuncomfortable position to be in. The tide had turned. At fifteen Iwas witnessing the death of the socialist dream and I welcomed thecoming of a move to the right and a restoration of sanity. But then Isaw I was the beneficiary of the system she was dismantling. I wastorn. My father told me he had paid enough in taxes down the yearswith very little to show for it so that he didn't feel any qualmsabout me taking all the state help I could get to get myselfeducated. It clearly didn't feel quite right to me and I began to betaken in by the socialist and statist agenda. And then the worstthing happened, the rise of a new political party. The SocialDemocratic Party was new, very new, and clearly it was the comingthing. I was too young to know who these people were and where theystood, all I could see was here was a voice that was in favour ofeducation and the NHS but still wanted to have a strong defence anddidn't want to toss aside Britain's nuclear weapons regardless ofwhat the Soviet Union was going to do. I was smart enough torecognize that it was the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons I wantedscrapped as those were the ones which might destroy my country andthat the Soviet Union was not about to be shamed into pacifism byBritain doing exactly what they wanted her to do any more than it wasshamed into vegetarianism and pacifism by the stance of the DalaiLama or shamed into having no army like Costa Rica. The SDP seemedlike a reasonable compromise. I'm sorry. I was young.

Ibecame involved with student politics through the SDP, I set up theSDP students group at Leicester University, quite a presumptuousthing for a first year to do, but as I said, precociously running myown political party wasn't a new experience. I also got involved inthe Young Social Democrats. But my main activity was with the SDPStudents and the Student Campaign for Electoral Reform. I got to seea number of people who went on, after ditching the SDP baggage ofcourse, to be involved in grown-up politics . I also got to see howpoliticians can manage stitch-ups. For some reason a number of theyounger members of the national committee of SDP students, of which Iwas a member as the convenor for the East Midlands region, had markedme out as somebody to the right of the wishy-washy Guardianistaleadership. Because of this I was encouraged to stand as arepresentative on the party's governing body, the Council for SocialDemocracy. Surprisingly I scraped a place, narrowly defeating one ofthe Guardianistas, a rather posh girl who made out she wasrepresenting the oppressed masses because she came from ExeterUniversity, which is like, a long way from London. Ya. And she waslike, a woman. Ya. So she would be a better representative than mewho just like, well, won the vote. So all who won their place went tothe conference and they made their speeches. It was funny, nobodyasked me what my speech would be about, and nobody told me what towrite a speech about. Ah well, maybe there wasn't enough time foreverybody to make a speech. But much to my surprise I saw the girlwho I defeated got to make a speech, on behalf of my organization of which Iwas voted on to represent, despite not having any credentials to evenbe in the room. Of course it probably wouldn't have made a differenceto anything but I can't help feeling shafted. That might be why I amso touchy about people trying to silence me. Again.

The World's Biggest Problem

2011-11-04T11:24:00.000Z

Itwasn't even the main story on the news that night. It should be themain story on the news every night.

Everyhour, on the hour, the message should go out despite all thetragedies I am about to describe to you the world's population hasgone up again today, and it has gone up by a number that is more thanyou can imagine.

Thereisn't anybody alive who knows 200,000 people. If everybody you knew,all your relatives, all your neighbours, everybody whose name hasever meant anything to you personally or by repute died today but nocollateral damage at all, the world's population would still go up.For a good proportion of the people listening to my words now therewas only a single day in your lifetime when the world's populationdidn't go up, December 26^th 2004. That day because of theGreat Indian Ocean Tsunami there were fewer people alive at the endof the day than at the start. But don't worry, the human race hadmade up the shortfall within thirty hours.

Rememberall the hysteria marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11? Chicken feed.The human population was higher after the towers had fallen thanbefore the first plane struck. You can't knock the trend withsomething so trivial. Even the death toll from both Japanese atomicbomb raids was smaller than the human population grew yesterday, andwill grow today and again tomorrow. And let's be very clear aboutthis, I'm not talking about births here, I am talking about thedifference between births and deaths. Not crude births but thesurplus of births over deaths. Every single day of your life thereare not only more new babies than you could kiss there are more extrapeople alive than your brain could cope with.

Ifyou could arrange it that the whole of humanity walked past yourhouse twenty four hours a day do you know how long it would take forthem to walk past? They would never manage it. Even three abreast thequeue waiting to pass your window would never get shorter.

Areyou beginning to grasp the scale of the issue yet?

Weknow what happens when a jumbo jet crashes, it is big news for weeks,we remember some crashes decades later. The world's population isgrowing by the equivalent of a jumbo jet load every three minutes,twenty four hours per day. Again, this is not extra births, this isthe nett increase.

Forgetthe image of the world's seven billionth person being a newborn baby.That is very unhelpful. The seven billionth person is not any babyborn on the 31^st of October, we all are part of thatstatistic. It's you. It's me. It's a fifty eight year old garbagesorter in a shanty town. The increase in the world's population hasnot been driven by mad breeding at all but by an entirelyunprecedented drop in the death rate. It is not that we are havingmore children than we used to have but that we are not losing them ininfancy and we are not losing them in childhood, or early adulthood.In fact the poorest slum dwellers alive today have got a lifeexpectancy that only the gentry had a mere 150 years ago. The problemwe have today with our huge population is a problem of success andexcess. The momentum which is driving the population forward is alegacy of decades of steady growth and prosperity. We have foughtfamine and disease and we have won, and the prize has been a toxicincrease in population. We have defeated plagues and become a plague.

Aspopulations have risen new problems emerge, farm sizes get smallerand smaller as more children survive to inherit a share the sharesget smaller and smaller until they are too small to support thepeople and they leave the land and go to the city. Paradoxically whenpoor people arrive in a city the first thing that happens, longbefore they get a well paid job, is that their fertility increases.The interval between children drops. And if the children don't diethey grow up, and they too have children. Even if we could geteverybody on the planet to stop at two children the world'spopulation will continue to grow because we are living longer.

Twochildren per person should be the goal. If it was universal, if everyperson had two children, no more, no fewer, the population crisiswould be over. And the population crisis makes all the rest of theworld's problems worse. Two is not quite replacement level, becausesome people won't or can't breed and some children will die beforethey reach breeding age. But those numbers are small, a modestdecline in numbers will result, which is exactly what we should hopefor. A future in which the birth rate is fractionally below the deathrate would be ideal. A population fall is bad news, it would stagnatethe economy, but a slow decline of half of one per cent a year wouldbe a graceful decline which we could cope with easily. At present inmany Western countries the birth rate is well below two per person,or two per woman, which is effectively the same thing, butpopulations are not crashing because death rates are even lower andimmigration is filling up the gap. Of course on a world scaleimmigration isn't an issue. There is none. But migration to richercountries isn't an option to cope with the world population explosionin the poor world which is hardly developing, much of it is goingbackwards. The reason why migration isn't a solution is obvious. Thenumbers. A country such as Britain could absorb less than one day'sincrease in a year. Where are the others going to go? Could the USAdouble its population in five years through immigration? That stillwouldn't be fast enough to ease the strain and you hardly needtelling that such a possibility would be totally unacceptable to anydemocratic country, if the leadership forced it on the people therewould be a bloody revolution and under what circumstances would anyfree people freely consent to such a move?

Migrationcannot be offered as a solution. The only practical solution is birthcontrol. If you give money to charities which feed the poor or curediseases you are making the world's biggest problem worse. Everyeffort we make to reduce deaths must be balanced by at least as bigan effort to reduce births, especially births in areas where peopleare likely to live impoverished lives. But please, for goodness sake,do not take away the message that you should not breed. If there isone thing sure to make the world's future worse that is for theintelligent and caring to leave the populating of the world to thereligious lunatics and those too stupid to use a condom.

Race Surrealism 2

2011-11-01T12:23:00.000Z

To answer you question - no. I absolutely would not tell any child that racial differences were significant and for exactly the same reasons you put forward. The differences are superficial and the similarities are far more important. There is vastly more difference in human potential measurable within each race than can be shown between races as aggregate groups. Why does anybody need this to be continually restated? I am not a racist, or a so-called race realist either, I have said this innumerable times.

I cannot understand where you got the idea from that I might want to make such a statement. Are you really incapable of seeing the difference between racists and people who don't want any argument no matter how obnoxious attacked with libel, lies and distortions? I am not a racist but I will not be a party to lying in the effort to block the racist agenda. The way to destroy an argument is not to pick at its minor features and twist and squirm and insinuate but to allow the theory to be built up into its strongest possible form and attack it in a full frontal assault at its strongest point. With its strongest point destroyed there is nowhere for the rabble to regroup around.

I have been found to be a racist and race realist because I made a video with the title Race Surrealism. Like Richard Dawkins I have been found guilty of something I am innocent of simply because people have constructed a straw man out of a mere title. Dawkins is not a social Darwinist who believes in a gene for selfishness or that selfishness is good. He wrote a book with the title The Selfish Gene, for those too idle to read the book that was enough to convince them he thought selfishness was natural and therefore good. That is a total comprehension failure. His book is nothing like this absurd caricature, and my position is nothing like the caricature that people have constructed from the title of my video.

Racism is irrational and unsupported by evidence. However, I do not believe that racial differences have been proven not to exist. The reason for this is that the amount of difference in politically sensitive measures such as intelligence is clearly relatively small and should be expected to be relatively small. Expecting zero difference, in any measure of any variable factor among diverse human populations is an absurd faith stance. It of course could be true if there was a god running the world. But with freely breeding populations exposed to various genetic drift and natural selection pressures expecting an identical outcome is absurdly optimistic or naive. It is several orders of magnitude more likely that there is some modest difference in intelligence between human populations than there is either an identical statistical spread or a large discrepancy. If there was a large discrepancy in intelligence those populations would have dominated the planet from the earliest times and no other population would ever get a look-in. That isn't the pattern we see in history. What we do see in human history is entirely consistent with human populations being broadly equal, or varying within very small bands, with massive overlap.

That is what I am arguing for. The possibility of accepting that not every human population will have exactly the same mean, mode, median and standard deviation on any measure, at all. I think we are all smart enough to cope with such a reality and it isn't necessary to lie to anybody to try to make out that science has proven the case for human equality, or that science has proven that races have no biological basis at all or that intelligence has been proven to be equal in all groups. People can tell when they are being lied to. When you toss away your credibility with transparent lies it is irrational to expect people to listen to you. Pretending that there is a god to send to to eternal torment if you sin is a lie that has been found to be extremely convenient in the past, especially in the days before the invention of police. Perfect racial equality backed by science is the modern day equivalent of this - the people are assumed to be too stupid to be able to handle the truth so a useful myth is created instead, and those who will not endorse the socially useful myth get called heretics because their honesty is seen to threaten the social fabric. The religious always seem to hate the outspoken heretic far more than the venal sinner.

Race is a social construct, but it is based on real biological variation, if poorly understood. Human equality is another social construct, not a scientifically proven fact. Humanity is not equal, nature simply doesn't do equal. Nature does strong and fast and smart but not equally strong, equally fast or equally smart. Accepting the possibility of inequality at the group level as well as the individual level is simply being adult. It's not that I accept the possibility, it is more the case that perfect equality is so much more unlikely than similarity that I find the notion of people standing up and beating their breasts declaring that equality has been discovered to be just absurd. The idea that the first case of equality ever discovered in the world of biology would be found in human intelligence is as likely as President Putin being found to be the best golfer in Russia - you'd have to be a bit flaky to accept such a stunningly bizarre and politically useful coincidence. Faking evidence and destroying categories so that inequality can never be demonstrated is childish, smashing the theory of races and scattering its ashes, dismissing the concept of intelligence, making out that IQ measurements are no more scientific than horoscopes are all aspects of what I call race surrealism, the misguided attempt to destroy racism by attempting to make it impossible to prove that there are differences between human groups beyond those which even pre-verbal children can see are self-evidently real. Why would people do that if they believed that there were no differences which could be found? Genuine scientists rarely go out of their way to disprove stuff which is transparently untrue and unscientific, such as astrology or the so called science of Noah's flood. Attempting to crush racism with a combination of science, myths, ostracism and character assassination is not an edifying sight and it is poor tactics. It will backfire and cause damage to science as well as to politics, as it always has when science has been used to push a political agenda.

Seven Billion

2011-10-31T09:14:00.002Z

It is officially the day when Earth's population exceeds seven billion. It seems like only last year when I was marking the total passing six billion. It seems that we were wrong about that, it actually passed six billion about a year beforehand. So if you see anybody holding aloft the seventh billion person they are wrong on two counts, firstly we can't know to within about plus or minus eighteen months at what day we actually passed seven billion and secondly the seven billionth person isn't really a baby. The growth of the world's population has been mainly down to increasing life expectancy not exceptional birth rates. The seven billionth person lives in a shack on the edge of a city in Chile. Mrs Álvarez is 52, and she has nine grandchildren. So far.

Colour Perception

2011-10-27T11:26:00.000+01:00

Normally I don't do anything to encourage video responses. But this time it's different. I want an explanation.

Colours. How do they work? Why is there a finite number of colours in the rainbow? Is this a phenomenon of light or is the limit imposed by our eyes or by our brains? I could go and look it up but why bother? I've always found people quick to jump on my mistakes so why not roll with it? If you have the answer, and please only if you are confident that you do have it, please respond.

I know that we have three light receptors which allow us to see red, green and blue, although the peak receptivity isn't in red, green or blue. That's confusing enough already. From these three colours we can perceive, well, how many? Newton said seven, that's probably because he was a superstitious alchemist into numerology. Is Indigo really a colour rather than just a shade in between blue and purple?

What is a colour and what is a shade? It's complicated, I'm sure.

When we mix red and yellow paint we get a shade, or is it a colour, of intermediate frequency - orange. Again when we mix yellow paint and blue paint we get a colour directly in between in the spectrum, green. BUT- If we mix red paint and blue paint we get purple. That's the lowest frequency of visible light, red, and one of the higher frequencies, blue, mixed together produces a dark shade of the highest visible frequency of all. How does that work? Is this something which happens in the eye or the brain? Where is colour actually produced?

I have heard that there's a crustacean called a mantis shrimp I think it is which has twelve different colour receptors, or some species sixteen or more. Needless to say they are colourful things which when seen makes many marine biologists think they're suffering acid flashbacks. Sixteen colours. Or must it be shades? Will the mantis shrimp see and perceive and imagine colours which we cannot imagine? They can SEE colours that we can't see, they can see in both infra red AND ultraviolet. Many animals can see in one or the other, these outperform us at both ends of what we laughingly call the visible light spectrum. Surely because they can see the colours that means they can also, to some extent at least, think in more colours than we can. And just to freak you out even more they can detect polarized light too, different polarities including circular polarity, in trinocular vision, with the same eye.

So to a mantis shrimp at least there are more colours than we can imagine. I could show you a mantis shrimp now, but what's the point? You wouldn't see it in anything like the full colours it really possesses because your screen is built to show off images which impress animals with a mere three colour receptors, and if those colours could somehow be fed into your brain they wouldn't find anything to connect up with. But even with our feeble colour perception they are pretty. Well, pretty gaudy.

My brain hurts.

It's Just a Social Construct

2011-10-22T16:51:00.002+01:00

It is quite common to hear the race surrealists say that race is just a social construct. Indeed it is. The term preexists science, as does the term species, but while it has been career promoting to develop complex theories to define exactly what a species is anybody wanting to define what a race is meets a quite different reception. It doesn't create academic opportunities, it limits academic careers and empties address-books. So science has now officially declared that races are not a scientific concept, or at least not a biological concept. At least for our species.

If we are in the business of accepting reality how about accepting another political concept has no basis in biology too? Equality. Nothing in nature is equal. No individual, cline, haplogroup or whatever you want to call them is equal to another. Biology is about degrees of similarity. There is no such thing as equality in the biological world. Equality is a social construct.

You can shout all you want about race not being a scientific concept you have achieved absolutely nothing. You have not convinced any racists. You haven't convinced any race realists. And you haven't convinced me either. it's just annoying.

Nature doesn't do equality. It is a social construct, a political and philosophical construct. If you measure people you find that there is variation in everything. The more you look the more variation you find. It is not huge variation. When you look at large groups for any trait which varies widely you find that the variation patterns in different groups are similar but not identical. You find bell curves. Overlapping bell curves. Another name for a bell curve is a normal distribution. Variable traits vary and if you look at different groups you will find broad overlaps in these patterns of variation. That is what any person who understands statistics would expect to find, always. The only way to get the bell curves to overlap precisely is to select the two groups on something entirely unrelated to the trait you are measuring. For example if you graphed height of people with an even number of letters in their name and people with an odd number of letters, assuming you used a big enough sample you would find that the two distribution curves would overlap almost exactly. But if you took white Belgians and black Congolese and measured anything biological at all, finger length, chest size, number of siblings, body weight at birth or number of repeats of some non-coding section of DNA you will get bell curves that overlap, but not perfectly. Because the groups are not the same population, not the same people. Does that make sense?

Now why would you expect that pattern of imperfect overlap to stop when we move onto politically controversial measures? There is no logical reason at all to expect that while skin colour, lip shape, chest sizes and finger lengths of people who haven't shared a common ancestor for sixty thousand years or so may vary skulls, brains, penises, sex drives, aggression levels, tendency to accept deferred gratification, doggedness, inventiveness, religiosity or intelligence could not possibly vary. Similarly there is no reason to expect that any of these differences would be so large as to rule out one group from competing fairly with members of another group. This is my position. I don't call it racist or race realist, it is just straight forward common sense. Equality is a social construct, a modern myth. We also don't need it. I don't need to believe that the 95th centile of the Jewish population will line up with 95th centile of the black population, on any measure at all, nobody needs to pretend it is the same, or fake the evidence or ostracise anybody who would do a study to see if was true. Our educational structures should be race-blind. We should try to give everybody the best education that is available and take those showing the most promise on to the next level and not hold back some who have demonstrated their ability to give their places to those who have demonstrated a lower ability but a membership badge of a socially constructed group who represent society's victims.

Wizards and Priests

2011-10-21T12:03:00.000+01:00

Observe the great magician. The mighty wizard. See his pointy hat. Behold his mighty staff, his magic wand, his long flowing robes - far too impractical to do farming work in, this is a man of the gods - a man full of the knowledge of the ancients - can you not see his long white beard? This is a wise old man, wise in the words of the ancients. He can read! He has words, magic words, written in his spell book. The spell book he keeps in his private book-lined study with his candlesticks and incense. These are the magic words of the ancients who lived in the age of magic in the land of magic far to the East - the land of the Magi - the land of Zarathustra who also did thus spake. The wisdom of the ancients can't you hear him chant magical incantations in dead languages? This is no ordinary man. He has status. He has finery and wealth but he does not waste his time with luxuries he keeps himself to himself and his fellow wizards - away from the world of women and the activities of agriculture and commerce.

Behold his pointy hat his long robes his staff his magical amulet on a long chain this man is clearly a great wizard. He knows the wisdom of the ancients. Bow down and kiss his magic ring. Lo! He is offering you a drink from his magical goblet! Draw near to his table festooned with candlesticks and the scent of fine perfumes from the East, the magical holy lands, which block from his nostrils the stench of the sweat of honest toil of the flock he fleeces regularly each week and especially at each harvest which he blesses with his magic words and hand gestures. Look he has the symbol of his role as a pastor, a keeper of sheep. The crook, with which he can reach out beyond his natural reach to grasp the wayward member of his flock, with his golden crook, like any poor hard working shepherd would carry, a golden crook bedecked with jewels.

A golden crook bedecked with jewels.

A golden crook bedecked with jewels

A golden crook bedecked with jewels

See his magnificent white beard. This is a man who wears his great age well. He has not been broken and fatigued by hard work. His has been a life of piety, study and contemplation. Not graft and sweat like a farm horse. He is a great man. He has great learning, which he keeps to himself like the precious gift from the gods it is. He can read. He can write. He has been to university. He has been taught how to think and how to stop others from doing the same and usurping his special place as the holy man. The great and mighty wizard.

Allowing Diversity

2011-10-20T12:47:00.000+01:00

I'm just processing a new video. Well, I've done my bit, I'm just letting the computer finish its job. This stuff takes some rendering at 720p, all fans whirring away as Frankenstein is manipulating and pummelling pixels.

Allowing Diversity: Geeks, Meatheads and Slobs.

354.9 MB. It's going to take about the same time again to upload and process at their end.

Action This Day

2011-10-19T13:46:00.000+01:00

I am in the midst of updating the site and adding several pages. The first thing I did was search for orphaned pages and I have three which I had written but hadn't added links to. That was an obvious place to start. I gave them a final polish and added inbound links.

Ground Zero Mosque (orphaned for the best part of a year, finally seeing the light of day)

I'm Not Racist I'm Mad as Hell

I am sitting down and getting stuck in.

I have found a few YouTube scripts I am making into pages for the site. I may reverse the process too and make a video some time in the next day or so.

Original Sin: Being English

I am scouring my hard drives for unpublished material and seeing to it that it gets published. I've got notes all over the place, quite a lot of them are worthy of their own page. There is a chance that I will end up publishing something which is unfinished, not spell-checked or duplicated. If you spot any please send me a subtle message, a private message via the forum or YouTube would be good, or use the email link on the website.

The Tyranny of Scripture

The Norwegian Tragedy: Never be Silenced

Hijacked!

Chains

Time for Action

2011-10-16T10:55:00.002+01:00

Expect to see some more activity over the next few days as I have a week off which I have decided to spend in my favourite holiday resort - cyberspace.

Lifting the Limit

2011-10-14T11:04:00.000+01:00

YouTube have taken off the fifteen minute limit. In the next couple of days I will do a new full version of Enoch Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech to replace the two-part versions which I uploaded earlier.

I was absolutly gutted to find out that just as I made my first video which exceeded fifteen minutes in length they had re-imposed the limit on me.

OK, scrub that. When I said days I meant hours. Or possibly minutes.

Paying Their Debt

2011-10-14T09:47:00.003+01:00

One thing that really annoys me is the phrase paying your debt to society when it is applied to some criminal scrote who has been a drain on public and private resources his entire life who has finally come out of prison. A prison where he didn't work for his keep, where his food, heating, lighting and gym membership were paid for by the taxpayer. A prison which costs significantly more to run per room occupied than a Premier Inn.

Paid their debts? They haven't even come close.

What about the victims of robberies and burglaries terrified and traumatized? What about the insurance premiums required to cover the costs of theft and vandalism? Yes, and insurance fraud. And last but far from least what about all the crap the rest of society has to put up with because we share a space with unthinking vandals and thieves?

How much of your life do you spend checking locks?

What about the absurdity of the modern public toilet? Those automatic taps are not there for hygiene reasons, they are there because unattended toilets are regarded as a challenge for vandals, an opportunity to break things, smash things up and cause huge floods. We have to put up with automatic hand dryers because arseholes will otherwise shove fistfuls of paper towels down the bowls and flush them flooding shitty water out onto the floor.

We have to put up with cameras looking at us while we park our cars, reach for a bottle of whisky off a shelf or get on a bus.

We have to put up with railway stations with no litter bins, cyclists walking into shops carrying their front wheel to deter thefts. We have to put up with the bloody locking wheel nut that takes two hours to remove if you lose the key that is designed to stop scrotes stealing your alloy wheels.

We have to put up with movement sensitive lights coming on when the neighbours cat walks past.

We have to put up with burglar alarms on cars and houses going off all the time, thankfully mostly false alarms - and we have to put up with security guards in our supermarkets.

We have to put up with not only the ugly face of graffiti blighting our urban landscape but the even more hideous sight of arty-farty leftists trying to tell us it is art and using similarly crap criminal-chic imagery in advertising. Graffiti is not art, it is vandalism, an abuse of private and public property. Banksy get a fucking job and buy your own canvases. If people want to see art they can go to a museum or a gallery.

We have to put up with the constant fear of robbery, assault and rape that could loom out of a shadow at any time and ruin our lives. Paid your debt to society? You haven't scratched the surface.

The Ins and Outs of Breeding

2011-10-07T09:49:00.001+01:00

Everybody knows the Royal family isin-bred. As is so often the case what everybody thinks they know isbullshit. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are second cousins onceremoved via King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins via QueenVictoria. Their children suffer no hereditary illnesses and theirdaughter at least is clearly intelligent, fit and had enough abouther to go to the Olympic Games in her own right, although the horsesprobably helped quite a bit. OK, Charles is a jug-earred buffoon buthe's no worse a human specimen than say Jimmy Carter's brother, orBarbara Bush's sons. It's just that we're not used to seeing idiotson television except in reality shows, we just have to face the factthat royalty is a reality television show, and like many such showsit's got high ratings despite poor reviews.

There were clear problems within-breeding among several European Royal families in the past. TheHabsburgs were a classic example. So many cousins married cousinsthat the family tree resembled a dense thicket. Several geneticconditions arose together in the body of Charles II of Spain suchthat he could not swallow his food. Fortunately they also renderedhim sterile so the experiments in in-breeding did not continue.

Marriages between various kinds ofcousins were common among European royalty since Roman times. By andlarge they were not especially problematic. The odd first cousinmarriage is unlikely to cause major genetic problems, even instancesof brother sister or father daughter incest do not guarantee thebegetting of malformed imbecilic monsters. Selective breeding amongother species regularly has much more intense inbreeding thananything we would feel comfortable with in our own species, but neverblind to the effect on the quality of the offspring, which is whatsuch breeding is for.

The most famous of all royal geneticdramas has nothing whatsoever to do with inbreeding. Queen Victoria,or her elderly father, or possibly her father's footman, had aspontaneous genetic mutation which was passed down through the royalfamilies of Europe. It wasn't the fact that her husband was her firstcousin that caused the tragedy, it was the fact that she had ninechildren who passed on the faulty gene which caused haemophilia rightacross Europe as the children of the Empress of India made excellentpolitical matches. In-breeding never creates mutations, it merelyensures that more recessive genes meet copies of themselves, harmfulgenes that are often otherwise invisible to evolution.

The problems with incest and inbreedingarises when other factors get in the way of nature. Left to their owndevices children don't start sexual relationships with those theyhave grown up with. If you raise a family together from the age ofthree or so there will be no sexual relationships between them. Thisis good news for people with step-families, and ordinary families,but rather bad news for people living in kibbutzim. If you let allyour children spend too long together as small children they willdevelop incest avoiding aversion to having sexual relationships. Sokibbutzim and communes should mix up their populations a bit everyfew years or try to isolate some children from the rest or else whenthe time comes to be sexually active they will all be looking toleave and take up with strangers and your community will die.

Have you heard of cases of brothers andsisters falling in love? This is almost always the result ofseparation during the formative years. If you have not grown up withyour sister when you meet her as an adult you will not see her assomebody you can't and shouldn't want to have sex with, you will seeher as somebody uncannily desirable. That's because she's like afemale version of you, or a younger version of your mother. What weseek as a sexual partner is somebody who is like ourselves but of theopposite sex or somebody who reminds us of our parent or sibling ofthe opposite sex and to a lesser extend somebody who reminds us ofother children we played with as children. The key part there isreminds us of. I am not sexually attracted to my sister. However fora couple of years I regularly used to pass a young woman in thestreet who looked just like my grandmother as a young girl and verylike my sister. But she clearly wasn't my sister. She wascaptivating. She embodied the perfect search model, she was goodlooking but not to a fault. Objectively she was probably less goodlooking than my sister, but she had other traits which reminded me ofother family members too. Yeah, she was stacked. If somebody hadintroduced her as a long lost cousin I would not have been in theleast bit surprised.

There were two snags of course. She wasalways going in the opposite direction and I was happily married. OKthree, she clearly didn't like the funny looks I couldn't help givingas I passed.

Before you say I am some kind of afreak try playing the Spouse or Sibling game. The rules are easy.Look at couples out in the street together and ask yourself whetherthey could pass for brother and sister. You'd be amazed at how manydo look remarkably similar and could certainly pass for brother andsister, often much better than the coupling that casting directorsmanage for films and soap operas.

Several times I have seen couples whoare clearly from different races, for lack of a less inflammatorydescription, who also have managed to find themselves a partner wholooks remarkably like what you'd imagine their siblings would looklike. Sometimes I have even spotted the similarity, the racialambiguity, before seeing their partner – that man looks almostoriental, but he's not – oh, and there is his Chinese wife. Haveyou seen the arse on that girl? Wow, you don't often see an arse asshapely as that on a white girl – and there's her black boyfriend.

If you let people make their ownchoices they will. That is why it is total nonsense to say thatblondes will be extinct in a hundred years. Of course they won'tbecause so many blonde women will be attracted to blond men whoremind them of their brothers and fathers and cousins. Blondeshaven't become extinct in Argentina, or Brazil, or Italy or Mexico oreven in Iran or Afghanistan, so why imagine they will ever becomeextinct in Denmark? Humanity is programmed with urges that ensure wedon't get too much in-breeding or too much out-breeding. If we don'tmess about with it we will do just fine. Some people will want tostart a family with somebody of a different race, but many won't, andthat is cool too. No population is ever going to suffer from majorinbreeding issues these days unless they choose to be stupid andforce their children to marry close relatives for political,religious, immigration status or family wealth issues. We havebicycles, cars and the internet. We are not confined to the samesmall village like most of our ancestors were.

It is not necessary to promotediversity as if it was a virtue. It isn't a virtue. Or a vice. Racialdiversity is not the only weapon against genetic disease. You canhave perfectly healthy children just by visiting the next villageevery third generation or so. The idea that marrying somebody ofanother race is doing humanity's future a great service, or a greatdisservice, is wrong. Trust your instincts. And trust your children'sinstincts too. Don't let somebody else's head or stupid rules rulethe feelings you have inside. Don't be bullied into marrying eitherin or out of your ethnic group, it's always your choice, do whatfeels right for you.

The List

2011-10-03T17:03:00.002+01:00

Marvin Gaye
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Lord Byron
Elvis Presley
Jesus Christ
Andy Kaufman
Bob Marley
Keith Moon
John Lennon
Jimi Hendrix
John Belushi
Martin Luther King Jnr
John Candy
Heinrich Himmler
Alexander the Great
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Ernesto Che Guevara
Freddie Mercury
Malcolm X
Captain Lawrence Oates
Maximilien Robespierre
Vincent van Gogh

What do they all have in common? None of them managed to live as long as me. Soon I will be able to add Charles I, then Michael Jackson.

What is the significance of this? I don't know, but sometimes when a day has passed and there isn't much to show for it I begin to wonder.

World Quiz League

2011-10-03T11:42:00.000+01:00

I have restored the World Quiz League, in archive form, to my website. This involved dredging up an old cached version and updating it to remove links to defunct files and the old navigation system.

The reason for doing this is quite simple: the quiz was a valuable part of the website which helped bring in curious people, often some very curious people. The quiz was a unique and rich source of material to attract people searching for stuff that nobody else offered. It was great Googlewhack material which means it must be reasonably good for Adsense, people just passing through, not sure if they have found what they are looking for are ideal people to show adverts to.

So it is back, and I can hope that it continues to increase my internet presence and feeds curious people into my website, blog, YouTube channel and forum.

The Quiz has never died, it has now been put into hypersleep, awaiting the opportunity to rise again when the universe is ready for its services, as in Arthurian legend

Update

I am now in the process of adding back in long deleted photographs thanks to Alan's help. So he keeps copies of everything. I wonder what his house looks like?

I will update however many pages I manage to do later today. This may take some time.

It has to be said

2011-09-29T16:36:00.000+01:00

The video above is by rahotep101 but I endorse its sentiments 100%.

White Genocide Losers

2011-09-28T07:36:00.000+01:00

These clowns even admit that all they do is post a mantra. They really are the most pathetic of internet lifeforms. Still, they are easy to spot and easy to block. There was never any debate with them, just a repetition of a mantra, a phrase devoid of meaning and incapable of being argued about.

In one way they are very similar to the leftists, they have a simple strategy - make a baseless charge against you and keep repeating it until you either shut up and go away or you join in and spout the line at other people. At least that is how it is meant to work.

I don't do hivemind.

Hell

2011-09-28T06:54:00.001+01:00

I'm soft and spoilt. I have never hadto work hard or starve. I have never been beaten senseless by anybodyor tortured or treated unfairly for years. I come from a lovingfamily who have done their best to ensure that I don't experience anygreat hardships or injustice. My basic needs for food, shelter,education and love were met. And I don't believe in hell.

Is there a connection between thisupbringing and my inability to take the threat of hell seriously?It's possible. For most people in earlier times there would bememories of very unpleasant experiences: squalor, filth, disease, hunger, beatings, suffocating heat or profound cold and a life inwhich some people were systematically excluded from everything whichwas good. The trend of life would be to grow up, have a brief happyflowering if you were lucky and then suffering and misery heap uponyou until you succumb and die. It would be easy to imagine thatsuffering and misery was the default state of existence. Growing upin a happy family in a welfare state has shielded me from so muchmisery and pain that I don't consider that life is meant to behorrible. I see life as potentially enjoyable. Of course death isinevitable and it may be painful and there may be other painfulexperiences in my life before its final day but there is no feelingthat life is a vale of tears and that the future is something to lookupon with dread.

I cannot recall ever having aconversation about hell with anybody who actually believes itdefinitely exists. There may be people in my life who do believe suchthings but they don't have enough in common with me to get into deepconversation. A hundred years ago the idea that people didn't believein heaven and hell would be absurd, dangerous and scary. Such beliefswere very much the norm. But those people had much more bleak, scaryand dangerous lives, the idea that you had to try very hard not to begrotesquely punished would be much more normal to them than it couldever be to me and most of my contemporaries.

I know it sounds fatuous but thenearest I ever got to Hell was Scout camp. Orders you could notquestion, food options of take it or leave it, the whole operationrun by a bunch of sadists who thought it was their job to make yourstay unpleasant.

The idea that existence should behellish is something that hasn't occurred to me. Hell seems to be theclear invention of primitive minds. My own understanding of what mymind is also makes the idea of hell absurd. I am quite clearly theexperience of my body. When I did not have words my experiences wereall sensational, nothing but smells and sights and sounds I didn'tunderstand. When I have fallen asleep my consciousness falls asleeptoo, the experiences of dreams are never convincing, the best theycan ever manage is a cheap and dirty patch that allows my mind to besatisfied with the miserable thin stream of pseudo-experience that myimagination can generate. When I wake up all that remains is afeeling of wow it was so real, but when I probe the memory of itthere is nothing there beyond my waking capacity to imagine unseenevents.

Never once have I had a drunken bodyand a sober mind or an adults mind in a child's body or my mindanywhere other than the space between my ears and behind my eyes. Mymind is a trick of my body, a survival trick. When my body doesn'twork any longer there will be nowhere for my mind to be and nothingfor it to do. My mind will fade and die.

Oh but if that is true then why don't Igo out and rape and murder? Because I like being a good person.

But if the great unwashed get to hearabout atheism and the fact that hell isn't real won't they beungovernable? Maybe. But probably not. But is it ever really moral tocontrol people by lying to them?

For the first time this week I haveseen a bus with a sign warning about video cameras and actualcameras. Previously it was always one or the other. Real cameras andno need of a warning, or a warning where there were no cameras. Italways disgusts me when people get other people to behave by lying tothem, and hell is the biggest nastiest lie humanity has ever told.

Keeping it Going

2011-09-23T22:32:00.000+01:00

I haven't got much to write at the moment, but that's not an excuse when there is a blog to fill.

I am tired from longer hours and harder work than normal and from walking to the train station again as my wife has borrowed my car today. I will have two days off next week so I should be able to catch up with some more activity.

I have made a video of my last blog post, partly just to keep the momentum going and partly to test the audio quality. I think I have finally got it sorted out. Frankenstein (my computer) is running particularly quietly now so the background noise should be much less than it was, the less noise that is filtered out the cleaner the audio should sound.

He's Got My Number

2011-09-20T10:58:00.001+01:00

Iused Eminem as an example of a rapper. He's got my number.

Itmust be really easy to live on planet stereotype. Everybody who is astranger to you belongs in a simple box. People you know well can becomplicated. Nobody you know well is normal, they are all complicatedand nuanced. But strangers? Strangers are all simple. Every one ofthem. If they aren't simple what the hell business have they gotbeing strangers?

Ashe doesn't know me well I can't be complicated, sophisticated andnuanced. I have to fit in one of his simple discrete categories.These boxes have huge hidden gravitational power, they can draw aperson in from a very long way off.

Oneof the most powerful gravitational forces lurks inside the boxlabelled racist. This box can swallow millions of people easily. Theentire population of a town can be sucked in in a matter of seconds.Resistance is futile, the great big box opens its massive maw andpeople are swallowed up whole.

Whydo we do this? Why as a species do we assume that the people we knowwell are unusual in that they have breadth and depth and subtletywhile people we don't know can all be easily summed up in five or sixwords?

Frommy own experience I can say that I doubt that normal people exist atall. Everybody I know well has got some unusual feature which makesthem stand out. On the basis that nothing good has ever come fromseeing myself as unique I have a very good reason to expect thateverybody in the whole world has got breadth and depth to them if youwere take the time to get to know them.

Weclearly don't have the time to work out everybody's breadth anddepth. Stereotypes are essential to our mental survival. We need tomake some assumptions. The difference between using wisdom andexperience and being tied up by prejudices is a matter of degree,especially the degree to which we hang onto our stereotypes in thelight of evidence which casts doubt on them.

Theevil in prejudice comes when the prejudice is given greater weightthan direct personal evidence.

Frankenstein and Igor

2011-09-16T09:16:00.000+01:00

Frankensteinis dead. My monstrous laptop has succumbed to the effects of itswounds and died. As a result Igor the faithful family retainer hasbeen restored to life on top of the desk once more.

Igorstarted out as Black Tower, my once shiny new desktop PC. Now renamedIgor he continues to do great service and has now won a reprieve. Iwill not be wiping his memory nor making him suffer the indignity ofloading up Linux. Igor, when he was Black Tower, had 512 MB of RAM.Now he has 2 GB. Never at any time has his 200 GB hard drive everbeen close to being half filled. Now that he has demonstrated hisrugged reliability I will keep him in a usable condition for as longas possible, being the custodian of archives and back-ups andconstantly ready to resume life as the main PC. Igor runs Windows XP,an excellent system combing speed, flexibility and security, although not quite as pretty as Vista it does the business.

Thatis what a spare PC should be, a spare PC, not crippled and blindedand made to perform like a drudge.

Frankensteinwill be sent to see if a repair is possible. As a 4GB machine with a250 GB hard drive everything he has is better, on paper, than Igor.He also has ten months worth of videos, photographs, sound files,emails and documents. That has to be worth saving.

I am very impressed by how smoothly I have managed to carry on despite the PC I have been relying on for the past ten months being completely unusable. Within minutes I had my netbook running and connecting to YouTube, my forum and my Blogger account. When I got Igor going the hardest thing was plugging in the cables, requiring me to put my glasses on and turn on a brighter light. In less than fifteen minutes Igor was plugged in to everything I need, I had moved old email and started to collect my email again on Thunderbird on Igor as if nothing had happened. Naturally there were a few programs which needed updating, they all just got on with it. The new external hard drive worked plug and play with Igor and with my Ubuntu netbook. Modern technology is wonderful, hardware and software working in harmony with humanity. I had been prepared to be much more traumatized by the whole affair but so far so good, I have not been devastated. I have now used Dreamweaver's Get functions to pull the latest version of my website back onto Igor, so I am again synchronized and ready to update my website as required. My online presence does not seem to be particularly hardware dependent even without me "living in the cloud".

Despite all this optimism I will, once stability is restored, start to take the idea of backups seriously, for the first time. Maybe. Otherwise it looks like I just wasted money on that big hard drive.

Later

Itook Frankenstein to be repaired but the shop was closed, so I triedsomewhere else. The moment I demonstrate the fault he springs intolife again. He must have been on some sort of stand-by mode. I reallycan't understand how I can have unplugged his battery several times,held down the on-off switch and plugged him back in again severaltimes and yet still he does nothing for me yet leaps back into lifewhen plugged in at the shop. I decided to leave him to have his heatissues sorted, a check around his heat sinks and a blow through hisfans and hopefully if there is any underlying power supply problemthat can be identified.

Thebig downside of having my hardware in doubt is not being able to seepast the doubt. I am confident that the netbook and desktop PC I havecan do all I need them to do to keep me online and making pages, blogposts and videos. But Frankenstein the powerful laptop (sans screen)can do just that little bit more. Until that doubt is cleared up mymind is preoccupied.

Playingaround with Igor this morning I have tested the Audacity set up andI'm confident that I can still make videos with better sound qualityusing Igor if required and at up to 720p (or even higher), although the Vista versionof Movie Maker does have more effects.

The trick with Audacity seemsto be to record with as much quality as possible, then run theexcellent noise reduction module (unaltered default settings on thelatest 1.3 beta unicode version). I have found that just keeping quietfor three seconds before speaking will ensure there is a good sampleof background noise for this module, you need to select a section ofnoise then in step two you select the whole piece (control A) and apply thefilter to it. The results are remarkably good. After noise reductionis complete edit out unwanted sections, boost any particularlyquiet sections (such as giving the odd trailing consonant a 6dBboost), mute any especially loud bits slightly, remove all tuts, sniffs,lip-smacks, desk bumps and annoyingly audible breaths and anysentences which don't sound as good as they read. When that is alldone normalize the track (which usually will boost up the averagevolume slightly) then I then give it a 5dB bass boost to give myvoice more gravitas and then export to MP3, which requires a drop inthe bit rate. That sounds complicated but it soon becomes a habit.Knowing that I will be finely editing the sound means if I think Ihave fluffed a line I just repeat it knowing I can fix it later, thesooner the line is re-recorded the better the chance that the editwill be unnoticeable. Once the recording has been made it is verydifficult to match the sound, the timbre, again.

Hoverflies

2011-09-13T14:53:00.002+01:00

Asignificant pollinator in Britain is the hoverfly. As the namesuggests this is a fly which hovers. It visits flowers in a similarway to bees. It is not related to bees or to wasps. It is harmlessand useful. It keeps itself out of trouble by looking mean and nasty.It has an abdomen which is striped black and yellow. Many children,and presumably also many birds and other predators of insects,mistake them for wasps or bees. There is no sting in that tail, andthe abdomen itself is mostly hollow, its sole purpose is to look likethe abdomen of a wasp or bee, to look like something which can fightback. In reality it is defenceless.

Ithas been suggested that many children who adults are afraid of arejust like hoverflies. No threat to anybody, merely taking on theappearance of something more frightening in a bid to stay out oftrouble and avoid being picked on.

Ifyou look like something threatening then it is reasonable that thosewho might be threatened may act as if you are a genuine threat. Manyinnocuous hoverflies are swatted as if they were bad temperedsting-happy wasps. Often it is only after swatting one that peopleget to see that there is no sting and the abdomen is as hollow, asimmobile and as non-threatening as an inflatable tank.

Ifchildren dress in the uniform of a shoplifter or mugger is it anysurprise that adults treat them as if that is what they actually are?Is it really reasonable to say to somebody how dare you treat me asif I am the kind of person I dress to look like?

Ifa woman walks through a red light district late at night dressed in ared PVC mini skirt and a car slows down and asks if she is doingbusiness who, if anybody, has made a faux pas?

Ifa person dresses in the uniform of a Muslim fanatic why shouldanybody treat them like a lapsed Methodist?

Fountain of Truth

2011-09-11T22:05:00.002+01:00

One criticism which thereligious make of atheists may have some merit to it. We're not verybig on self discipline. A lot of YouTube atheists smoke, drink or arefat, and some perhaps all three. Is there a reason for this? Perhaps.One of the really powerful negative effect of the religious people'swar on atheism has been the idea that atheists should be moraldegenerates. Atheists should take drugs, indulge in the pleasures ofthe flesh, drink and eat like there is no tomorrow and copulate likebeasts. They want us to be bad examples to their children. They likeit when we set a bad example and too many young atheists enjoyfulfilling the role that is expected of them, they enjoy beingoffensive and outrageous.
What makes the religiousreally uncomfortable is moral behaviour from atheists. It reallychallenges their world view. Ask a devout Muslim or Christian what hethinks about the charitable activities of unbelievers such as BillGates or Warren Buffett, the biggest charitable givers in the historyof humanity, and he'll suddenly find the pattern on the carpetparticularly fascinating. Others will say that they really arebelievers, but of course they can offer no proof.
There is little mileagein a popular public figure who is popular for some other reason tomake a big thing about their atheism. This of course is the oppositeof the case for people who wish to appeal to mainstream America, theyhave a lot to gain by being seen to be Christians. A wholesome imagehelps a lot. Especially for politicians. And for some strange reasonAmericans have come to associate belief in a book filled withscientific ignorance, unprovoked genocidal aggression and bigotrywith good behaviour and a sound moral grounding.
I find the faking ofbelief for convenience to be the height of hypocrisy. Whenintelligent people pretend to believe in heaven and hell so that theyget to be seen as moral people by the stupid the world is moveddeeper into ignorance: it's another turd in the fountain of truth.
Of course it is a verywell known sentiment that the powerful find belief convenient, thatis, when the poor believe in gods the powerful feel more comfortable.Gods give a narrative to society and justify obedience. Those beliefsystems which don't support the status quo used to be rigorouslyrepressed, as Christianity was repressed by Rome when it wassubversive, but once state and church embraced in a death gripChristianity ceased to be subversive and became instead distinctlyuseful.

At any time in the lastthree thousand years if you had landed an alien spaceship next to apeasant out working in a field (this works for ALL peasants, but notall hunters) and asked him to take you to his leader he would be ableto do so. There would be a leader. The leader would be able toexplain what the meaning of life was, or click his fingers andproduce somebody significantly more educated who could explain it onhis behalf, I guarantee it. I can also guarantee that the explanationwould involve a code of social obligations set down by deities orwise elders whose judgement cannot be questioned. This is not to saythat religions are invented by Machiavellian forces behind the thronefor the purpose of keeping rules in place any more than the internetwas invented as a masturbation aid for teenage boys, but that is whatit is used for. Successful religions give something back to theirbelievers. Usually that something is cost-free, baseless hope, pie inthe sky and keep cheerful it might never happen bollocks. God willprovide, if they have faith. When things go well God gets the thanks,when things go wrong they wonder about the wisdom and mysterious waysof their god and whether they have done enough to honour him. If youhave any quibbles with this analysis just read the book of Jeremiah,here God's chosen people get conquered and enslaved and somehowJeremiah still manages to make out that God was in the right and thepeople in the wrong. Just ask yourself what would have to happen tomake a man like Jeremiah give up on his god, it is clear that thesemi-mythical Jeremiah would be as unlikely to repudiate his god asthe completely mythical Job. Indeed there were many Jews who followedthe ways of Jeremiah when Hitler took it upon himself to exterminatethe Jews. They saw Hitler as a tool of their own god, punishing thepeople of Israel for various real and imaginary sins. It seems forthe Jews it's always about them. I suppose the gypsies, homosexuals, Poles and communists were just collateral damage, like all thedrowned pandas and kittens when God flooded the world.
One extra negativeconsequence of the tendency of the religious to use a ratchet on theworks of their god, discounting bad things and counting every goodthing as direct evidence of their god's special favours, is that itmakes everything that happens, everything, good bad or indifferent,into proof of their God. Now for many Jews the holocaust, if it didnot destroy their faith, is a major pillar of it. To question theirgod now is to spit in the faces of the millions of victims. Heads Godwins, tail man loses. To the religious everything they see isevidence for the existence of their god, and his wisdom. If they likesomething and understand it then this demonstrates the wisdom andbeneficence of God. And if they don't like something and can'tunderstand it this too is evidence that their God is wise andmerciful but his ways of being wise are beyond human understanding.That hardship is a test, or it is a deserved punishment or it is lessof a hardship than some unknown alternative which God in his wisdomsaved them from. Either way God must be thanked for snow or rain orsunshine or for a dull day with an unfulfilled threat of drizzle.Praise the Lord, Allahu akba. Everything that happens is meant to beand the believer was made to believe it.

Just because we don'taccept their absurd supernatural explanations it does not follow thatwe should reject all their values and the culture we have inheritedfrom them. Belief in an absolute ruler in the sky does not make forsound morals, it makes for blind uncomprehending obedience. Thebeliever does good because it is the will of his god not because heknows it to be good. Making your own moral choices is bordering onhubris. You should follow orders. If he intended you to think andmake moral judgements the almighty god wouldn't have given youprophets and laws, would he? The believer should simply obey and dowhat is expected of him. Of course those who invented the codes andlaws used a good deal of common sense and came up with systems thatworked reasonably well.

Other prophets havespoken and their words have not been preserved because they didn'tfit in with what had gone before or they made ridiculous impositions.But when faith is used it can be quite effective at getting people toswallow a few absurdities. With the help of faith Muslims can believethat proof of guilt can be worked out by a mathematical formula bycounting up the number of witnesses, a system of absurdity whichallows millions of rapists to get off with their crime and yet seetheir victim convicted for adultery. If you took away faith in thewisdom of the prophet that absurd situation would be changed at onceacross the Muslim world and there could be the beginning of justice.The absurd ruling came about because Muhammad didn't want to believean accusation of adultery brought against his child wife Aisha andMuslim “scholars” have argued from this one bad case to make acriminally bad law.

Similarly religioustaboos have grown up which don't make sense, because either theynever made any sense or people have forgotten the rationalexplanations, the scaffolding on which the taboo was built and nowthey follow the caricature of a rule. The classic religious taboo ofthis kind is the tenth commandment not to seethe a kid in itsmother's milk. Don't cook a kid in milk from its mother. Why?Probably because this was the traditional feast meal of the Hebrewsneighbours, if you can't eat their feast meal you can't spend muchtime with them, and so be corrupted by the more sensible rules oftheir religion. How does this relate to a Quarter Pounder withcheese? Clearly it shouldn't. But the idea has grown up that to avoideating kid seethed in its mother's milk the only sure way is to avoideating any type of meat at the same time as any sort of dairyproduce. Does the creator of the universe really suffer fromobsessive compulsive disorder?

We really should not betaking modern laws from Bronze Age fables. We need better reasons forthings to be illegal than “God said it was an abomination”. Therereally is no good reason to make homosexual acts illegal unless youbelieve the insanity of the Westboro Baptist Church and decide topersecute fags out of national self preservation. Clearly there isnothing inherently evil in cross dressing consensual oral or anal sexor having sex outside of a publicly affirmed lifelong commitment. Ofcourse people can have their own personal opinions on theadvisability of such actions, and I mean that, it is not wrong to saythat something that isn't illegal is wrong, but there is no soundreason to invent victimless crimes. If you don't want to engage insodomy don't do it. You can even preach about it. Just don't try tostop anybody doing it if they want to. You are entitled to yourbeliefs, and to express them. You are not entitled to impose themupon other people. That goes for Muslims too. You are free to say“Good Muslims don't smoke during Ramadan!” But you are not rightto dash a cigarette from a man's lips in the street, and you arecertainly not right to beat him up if he disagrees.

Sad in My Pants (video)

2011-09-09T21:26:00.000+01:00

The wording may be a little familiar, it's basically just my blog post read out. I hope you enjoy it.

Putting it About a Bit

2011-09-09T09:42:00.001+01:00

Ancient Humans Were Just Having Sex With Everyone

It seems that Africans between 60,000 and 20,000 years ago were interbreeding with other much more archaic species of Homo. But of course the fact that these hybrids didn't leave Africa until the slave trade (as the branch leading to Europeans and Asians had already left Africa by this time) is not relevant to the matter of races, because of course scientifically races don't exist because politically that is impossible. I'm glad we're all clear about that. If we weren't we might have to contemplate some ideas that the left wanted firmly buried and concreted over.

It seems that geneticists keep on finding material which suggests that there are differences in human populations and their genetic heritage. Asians are descended from people who left Africa and cross-bred with Denisovans who in turn may be throwbacks or cross breeds with links to a much older hominid species. Europeans are descended from people who left Africa and cross-bred with Neanderthals who had several hundred thousand years of separate genetic existence (and the largest brains of any hominid) and Africans are descended from people who cross-bred with, well, people who were barely people at all, and quite recently too.

It seems that whenever our species finds its cousins it tries it on with them. Perhaps the old badge I wore in university had an element of truth about it afterall: sexual deviation is the mainspring of evolution.

The idea that we are all Africans is just flat out wrong. Of course all our ancestors were African if you trace them back far enough and we probably do have a surprisingly recent universal common ancestor who was African but that does not mean that we are all equally African, we all are descended from the same people (or even species) or that we are all equal. The full story is far more complicated, subtle and interesting than the racists or the race deniers would have you believe, and I for one am fascinated by the tale.

We are all related to a common male-only line ancestor who was African and recent (Y Chromosome Adam), and we are all related to a common female only line ancestor who was African and a bit more ancient (MtDNA Eve). However we all contain genes from older populations which are not universal, these have survived by the more normal route of ancestry - down both sexes, not requiring a lack of any breaks in continuity of sex. A single male in the all female line breaks the line, a single female in the all male line breaks the line, but the vast majority of genes are not in only one sex and so can be passed down from much older populations to specific groups despite the fact that all human groups have managed to achieve the trick of having a universal common ancestor of both sexes. A trick which is of no significance, just a statistical quirk. It is not at all problematic that 4-6% of the genes of one race come from a different species and there still be a universal common human ancestor, who was African. Science cannot prove that race can't exist or is meaningless. Sorry race surrealists, you are just wrong.

As an example of how genes are handed down take a strawberry birthmark that my son has (although it has faded to near invisibility now). I have no such birthmark, neither has my daughter. Neither has my mother. Or her father. But her father's brother did have quite a big one. And so does his son's daughter (my first cousin) and her daughter. Clearly that is a gene which has survived down the generations, presumably it must have come down via my maternal grandfather but without being manifest for (at least) three generations but not on a male-to-male nor a female-to-female line of descent. Surely these mixed lines are the most common way of genes being passed down. These mixed lines allow us all to be related to recent Africans and yet still be in races which are related to different older species of hominid. It is not a case of either Out of Africa or Multiregional Origin you don't have to choose one model or the other any more than you have to plump for nature or nurture, the truth requires both realities to be understood.

Bits and bobs

2011-09-07T19:09:00.000+01:00

Thismorning I went looking for more old embarrassing pages to kill, pageswhich represented an old leftist vision. Before I found any Idiscovered an old page which had been orphaned. Andras Konya's page disparaging Obama. I had loaded it up then decided that I didn't wantto be associated with it. Like so many others I had been swept alongby the Obama hype. Looking at the reality seemed to be wrong, themyth shouldn't be tarnished with reality. I am embarrassed by thatdecision, so as I was in the mood for revising and putting rightprevious errors I reinstated the page.

Theremust be some pages on the site that shouldn't be there, pages whichare orphaned or worse, pages which still have some long-forgottenlink to them. I will have to get to grips with these soon, make surethe image of the site I keep on my hard drive is the same as the sitethat is available on the internet. The site has suffered a lotrecently, partly because it is YouTube which provides the mostpositive feedback. Not every idea I have is suitable for YouTube,some are just too big, people just don't have the stamina for longvideos. One of the reasons I do a few short videos every now andagain is to retain the interest of subscribers with short attentionspans. I can picture them looking at a video which is twelve minuteslong and thinking that it's probably going to be a bit tedious. Someof my web pages would take far longer than fifteen minutes to readout so they are never likely to see the light of day on YouTube, ifyou want to access that material you must read the site.

TheScore

WhenI first started out with my website, back twelve years ago, the scorewas kept by a counter on my home page. I remember clearly the timewhen I saw there were sixteen people who had visited my site in asingle day. I was really impressed. Of course things have changed alot since then. A few years later I measured my success by trackingmy website against that of the company I worked for, beating themfelt really good. For the past couple of years my site has beenbobbling along with between three and five thousand visits per day. But what does that figure really represent? I am not sure. Whatmatters is reaching and influencing people. Ten thousand hits per daywith no influence is worthless. Now my online presence is splitacross multiple platforms, my website, my forum (on the website atmwillett.org) YouTube (my videos and just as important my comments onother videos), Twitter, Facebook and now my blog. It is a common bitof advice to bloggers that to be taken seriously you need to haveyour own domain, I am not sure whether that really matters. If a blogis interesting why would you look to see what the URL said? If itisn't why would you be impressed by a distinctive URL?

Nowthere are so many different numbers flying around I have decided tostop paying too much attention to any of them. The number of newsubscribers I get on YouTube is influenced to a large degree by theactivity of Pat Condell, if people click on subscribe to him they cansubscribe to me as well by default. This means that the number ofYouTube subscribers I have isn't really a measure of anything inparticular, being a mixture of my popularity and Pat's. Often Inotice that when I make a video my subscriber count dips. I assumethat this is because when people who subscribed to Pat notice myvideos are not identical to Pat's they decide to unsubscribe. It wasa bit disconcerting when I first noticed it, it seemed that the morevideos I made the fewer people wanted to view them. But that'swrong-headed. When I make a new video I get about two hundred viewsin the first day, and views usually continue to grow slowly afterthat, or sometimes grow substantially if the subject sparks debateand it gets embedded in blogs and such forth elsewhere. So losing asubscriber isn't likely to be losing influence on the world as muchas recognizing that I wasn't influencing somebody who didn't knowwhat they were subscribed to.

Feedback

Feedbackis what I'm doing this for, to some extent at least. Please don'tlurk in silence for ever, let me know if you appreciate what I'mdoing. You can comment on posts (hit the link that says commentsbeneath each post) you can send me private messages via my forum ifyou are a member, or indeed via YouTube or Twitter. If none of thosemethods appeal head on over to my website to see how to send meemail.

Iam whatever you say I am

Iam whatever you say I am, if I wasn't why would I say I am? I am nowfinally beginning to understand that most of the rest of the worlddoesn't really care that much about me and isn't likely to beprepared to invest enough time in trying to understand me. I amresigned to being misunderstood, it is the normal condition ofhumanity.

Peoplewill misjudge me, they will think I am something that I am not.Nothing I do can change this.

Anti Racist is a Codeword for Anti White.

2011-09-07T19:06:00.000+01:00

A couple of months back my YouTube account got targeted by a bunch of people who constantly used the phrase anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white. It was very annoying constantly facing the same “argument”. You can't argue or debate with a slogan. Debating anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white is rather like debating Jesus Christ is Risen, you can't hug your children with nuclear arms, Islam is the religion of Peace, meat is murder, yes we can or Beanz Meanz Heinz. When all intellectual content is removed from words to the point that they are mere slogans no kind of a debate is possible, and these jokers didn't seem to be interested in debate, just spreading their meme. They got so annoying and repetitive I just had to block them, which was a great pity.

There is a lot of merit in the concept of drawing people's attention to the hypocrisy inherent in much of the so called anti-racist movement.

The terminology, phrasing and imagery used by the anti-racist movement is distinctly revolutionary communist in style. Fight. Kick out. Smash. Is that really a reasonable style of debate? Just for a moment see what would happen to other political ideas if they started to use the language that the anti-racists use:-

Kick out the socialists.
Fight the climate change deniers.
Smash the Labour Party.
No platform for environmentalists.
Keep our schools free of Scottish Nationalism.

They don't seem right, do they? And yet it seems it is completely open season on racists, as long as they are indeed not anti-white, being anti-white is acceptable, even required.

The idea that there is a giant global conspiracy to do down the white race is absurd. However the political climate is very conducive to anti white forms of anti racism. If you ask why anybody needs a black history month you are called racist, if you ask why there is not a white history month you are told that every month is white history month – you racist bigot. It is seen as perfectly normal that countries such as India require people going to live there have Indian relatives but any hint that immigration should be controlled in a white majority country is called racist. Africa should be for Africans, India for Indians, and Europe and North America and Australia and anywhere where white people live in any number should be, have to be, for everybody, otherwise it's racist. Everybody wants what the whites have got and trying to hang on to it is evil and racist. So too is mourning the loss of it.

Nobody on the left ever says that Brixton or Wolverhampton is hideously black and yet many on the left feel no slight twinge when they say that a country village, the rambler's association, the in-take of a school or the crowds of tourists in the Lake District are hideously white. Diversity means having enough non-white people, even if you don't have any whites. Being largely white is seen as if it was actually a problem, by definition. And yet where is the outcry at schools which have no white faces? In what way do they not lack diversity? In what way is a lack of diversity not a problem if it involves a disproportionate lack of whites? Diversity in 21st century Britain means having whites firmly put in the place they should be getting used to.

So in what way are they wrong to say that anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white? In the simple literal way, there is no code, there is no conspiracy, this is not a movement controlled by any organization or cabal. The anti-white movement is no more organized than the international capitalist movement, there is no membership, no secret handshake, no group of evil cackling conspirators meeting in a Swiss hotel. There is no more a single mastermind behind anti-white racism than there is a Lord of the Goths, King of Punk or Chief Emo. We live in a culture which rewards people who are anti-white, they can spread the memes of anti-white anti-racism easily and they obtain social status by doing so. Being an anti-white anti-racist is seen to be socially acceptable, the smart thing to do and be. Anti-white anti-racism is seen as progressive and modern, forward thinking, caring and compassionate. Being an anti-white anti-racist is like going to a charity rock concert with your civil partner in your Prius, while complaining about it is seen as the same as sitting on the porch of your double-wide trailer in your dungarees spitting chewing tobacco out between your only two teeth before going in to see your wife and double first cousin, Cyndi-Lou.

Hating whites and especially proud whites is the only socially acceptable form of hatred these days. Everybody needs somebody to hate and these days it is increasingly politically impossible to show any negative emotions towards strangers, foreigners or those showing any kind of difference. You can't be seen to hate homosexuals, or foreigners and hating by class can sometimes trip you up when you find yourself deeply insulting somebody's parents, so pretty much the only socially acceptable hate-group is white racists, and if there aren't enough real ones around you can, just like witches and communists under the bed invent as many as you need by the age old practice of accusing and then using the denial as proof of guilt.

Sad in my pants

2011-09-06T10:37:00.001+01:00

Several people have told me how crap ZOMGitsCriss's video was but I just thought they were being kind. It really is a perfect example of exactly what my video was all about in the first place. What is the reason for people on the trendy dope smoking lip-pouting homosexual-hugging left to feel the need to prove that they adhere to the classic modern politically correct conception that races don't and can't exist but racists do and they are everywhere and if anybody says anything other than races don't exist at all they must be racists? That is classic race surrealism!

17,300 years of evolution is enough to turn a single species of fish into a whole ecosystem of over 200 different species in the newly refilled Lake Victoria but 60,000 years of separate human evolution cannot be allowed to have any effect at all except those which are so obvious that they are impossible to deny. That is totally surreal!

I am not a racist or a race realist, which is simply a code word for a racist in a tie. I just am open minded about the possibility that different populations might have different characteristics on the average and aggregate. Why is this unthinkable? Or rather, why is speculating about it in public completely unacceptable? If anybody refused to accept the possibility of difference in any other group of clearly different things we would consider their behaviour to be bizarre and probably evidence of mental instability. And yet when people make statements such as this they get applauded, even when those statements are made from a position of zero knowledge and zero research. In contrast forty years of direct studying of the subject are batted away as if they were nothing but blind prejudice and hatred.

Saying that The Bell Curve is not peer reviewed science is as absurd as saying there is no scientific evidence to back up Darwinism. What can we expect to come next - tales that race theorists have recanted on their deathbeds?

This really is akin to creationism, with the leftist race deniers being the equivalent of the believers of answers in Genesis. Their methods involve straw man attacks, quote mining and implying guilt by association and in ZOMGitsCriss's case implying guilt by implied association. Since when was I part of any they? Since Criss put together her video. I was completely unaware of either of the two people she featured until that after that video. I have since "friended" Ruka on YouTube because she strikes me as a reasonable person subjected to an unreasonable witch-hunt, not because I agree with all her stances and beliefs. She has produced an excellent reply, much better than the original attack which is definitely below par. The other bloke? What an utter nutter! I really am offended to be seen in the same video with him.

The video appeared hysterical, the tone of delivery certainly suggested fizzing anger. It reminded me a lot of how Christians react to atheists - how dare you knock my faith and challenge other people's deeply held and precious faith! That is what I do. I am a natural iconoclast, I challenge received wisdom and conventional thinking instinctively. If somebody gets angry when I challenge their thinking it makes me suspect that they are not confident of the rationality of their own position. In the case of blind race surrealists a lack of confidence is to be expected, there is absolutely no rational reason to expect that every population of humanity is equal in anything. All genetically controlled traits may show difference. To believe that they don't and can't if that factor is politically sensitive is a faith position.

Let me make the following points abundantly clear:-

I do not believe that humanity is divided up into five clear races. That is clearly not true.
I do not believe that human races are the same thing as breeds of dogs or cattle, clearly they are not as breeds are the result of artificial selection. However breeds are of the same level, between species and direct close relatives, they can function as a model or analogy, but as with any model care needs to be taken to distinguish between the analogy and the thing itself. Time is not money, but the analogy has proven useful to humanity for centuries. Breeds are not the same as natural races, but there are similarities and looking at the similarities can be useful as long as we never forget the fact that it is only an analogy. People know that breeds of dog are the same species yet have different characters and temperaments because the selection pressure that selected them selected on that basis. If nature selected races to be different in temperament and intelligence (a big if) then the races would be different.
There are populations with a long history of largely separate existence, long enough to show evolutionary change and to give rise to phenotypic differences which are obvious to pre-verbal children and animals. These differences are helpful in identifying people and their remains. These differences need a label, the traditional word we use is race.
I do not believe that different human environments are likely to produce hugely different levels of intelligence because the main factor in boosting human intelligence is social cooperation and competition.
To believe that populations separated from other populations for 60,000 years, and with some on one side of the divide interbreeding with members of another species or two could not possibly show any different levels of aggression or intellect is simply absurd. The possibility is only deniable to those who seek to use science to prove what they want to prove rather than to discover truth as it is.
I do not consider myself to be a racist because I do not believe that the differences that do exist between groups to be significant enough to be an important criteria for choosing between individuals.
The differences between individuals are much larger than those between groups, therefore individuals should always be treated as individuals and never as mere representatives of a group.
The ethic of equality of opportunity and the ethic of fairness for the individual does not depend upon or require any belief in underlying equality in groups or individuals - so faking such a belief is not required to be a liberal or a decent member of human society.

When people say I am not X but what they mean is I am about to say something which is subtle and not simplistic, a stupid person might interpret the statement to imply that I hold a belief, taste or prejudice that I do not hold, I do hope that you are not such a stupid person and I do not live to regret making the following statement.

For example, if I was to say I am not gay but I have to admit that George Clooney is rather handsome this means

I am not gay
I have to admit that I find George Clooney to be rather handsome

NOT

I am so gay, I am the gayest man who ever drew breath
I will bend over for anything in trousers
I'd scratch out anybody's eyes to have George Clooney up my back passage

Second example,

I don't like rap but I have to admit that Eminem is talented this means

I don't like rap
I think that I do grudgingly have to admit that despite point 1 I think Eminem is talented

NOT

rap is my favourite musical genre
I don't like any other music except rap, and maybe hip hop
I'd just die if I didn't get my quota of rap
I love all rappers and I would like to have Eminem's babies

The I am not but formation is used not when the speaker is prejudiced, but when the speaker fears that the listener might be too simple-minded to understand the full meaning of their statement, especially those paragraphs which haven't been said because they haven't been thought.

Refreshing Change

2011-09-05T17:00:00.002+01:00

I have blitzed the site quite a bit stripping away several pages which express views which now stand a long way from where I find myself to be. Things change in twelve years. Several pages were an embarrassment to me so I have deleted them. Naturally I have plenty of backups so if I decide to reinstate them I can put them back.
The process is a bit too big to do all at once, I expect there will be a few more pages vanishing or changing their tone substantially.

One major advantage of the website over YouTube is the ease with which changes can be made. If there is one dodgy line in a video I have to decide whether to delete the whole video, paste a caption (which not everybody can see depending on how they are viewing the video) or remake it. A page of html can be changed in seconds.

I have taken down the page "Pride" because I have changed my mind on the utility of national pride, I now see it as really important, a great source of social cohesion.

I have taken down the Jesusland page because it was sneering at Americans in a way which I now find quite disgusting. I apologize to any Americans I may have offended in the past. I like Americans and I have come to respect them all, well, most of them. The sneering attitude to Americans, especially what you might call rednecks from the red states, is a widespread disease in Europe, I wish to disassociate myself from it completely.

I have taken down my page on Obama because it was just embarrassing. I am sorry I swallowed the hype so uncritically, I hope it will not happen again.

Log jam broken

2011-09-05T13:11:00.000+01:00

Thanks to the nudge from this blog I have broken the log jam with my main website. I hadn't updated anything for months, but I have updated the home page and changed the navigation options using Dreamweaver's find and replace tools. But unfortunately I've made a small mistake, so I will need to update the entire website again later today. This gives me the incentive to get stuck into some proper updating and get some new pages made and old embarrassing stuff removed.

I got rid of the What's New page, it doesn't have a role now I have a blog.

Then I need to do a short YouTube video (audio with background really) to let my subscribers know I'm blogging and give another plug to the site and forum too.

I have tweaked the backgrounds to the blog, YouTube channel and Forum to match. I had a bit of a play around with images but I've decided that I like it stark and quick. The blog is now enabled to run on mobiles so you can check out the latest thoughts wherever you are.

Thanks to my new "mini-me" icon sat on your tab bar I can now watch you while you masturbate. Well, maybe not yet, but who knows where this great big web adventure is taking us. I feel quite giddy today at all the new possibilities.

Rants and Raves

2011-09-05T09:28:00.000+01:00

Rants and Raves. Some ranting with a few more positive suggestions. Recently I have been finding myself watching a lot more commentators from the right, more right wing than I feel comfortable with myself, I find it more refreshing and interesting using my natural "hold on a moment, have you gone to far?" type scepticism on suggestions from the right. I find leftists just too bloody annoying to pay any attention to.

This represents a move back to how I really am, the real me. At university I was also attracted to the right wingers, I found them interesting but I didn't always agree with them. They were just better company. The left (old Labour through Communist to left-anarchists) didn't appeal to me at all, they were just a bunch of pretentious self-absorbed pricks.

I am not a conservative, neo or otherwise. I feel that I am a liberal, but of a more 1860s kind, certainly nothing like what goes under that banner these days in America. US liberals are just socialists, but sometimes in denial. I have never felt entirely comfortable under any political banner and I don't see that changing any time soon.

I'm sleeping on it

2011-09-04T23:36:00.000+01:00

In the morning I will be deciding whether to stick with this blogger account or move to Wordpress. I can't be sure which way I will jump but I clearly can't continue with two, I have to focus on one, and put links to it from my main website (which has been particularly static recently). As I'm not sure what the most significant criteria will turn out to be I might even end up deciding by tossing a coin.

Any advice would be welcome.

Moving On

2011-09-02T22:02:00.000+01:00

What's the point of a blog when I already have a website? Simple, the blog is easier, it lays things out automatically and it is much more interactive.

The website allows me to keep articles online and keep editing them. The flexibility of my own website is great, I love it, but now it has grown to over six hundred pages maintaining links across it is a chore, as is keeping the content fresh and relevant.

I have not decided whether Blogger is the answer or whether some other form of blog or content management system is the way to go but I have decided that the website I have been running is getting too large for the way I have been running it. The time it takes to keep it up to date is daunting. Something a bit more automated has got to be the way to go.

With the spell checking embedded in modern browsers it is very simple to just type directly into the blog, writing the blog is little more effort than posting on my forum. The level of automatic integration is impressive, it looks like it has been designed by people with their finger on the pulse of the modern internet rather than idealistic and semi-competent hippies.

Because I already have a presence on YouTube and my own website and forum I don't need a blog to be especially busy in order to be successful, because it isn't the be all and end all of my online presence. I am not about to measure my success by the number of page views on my site, the number of Facebook friends, YouTube subscribers, Debate Unlimited members or followers on Twitter. It is the overall picture that counts. What matters is how many people are touched by my ideas, how many minds are changed. I don't have a single message to put across, I have several, and I don't expect anybody to agree with me on everything. In fact that would be a bit dismaying. I know from past experience that I am likely to change my mind on some matters in the future, if anybody agrees with everything I write they too will be wrong about those matters of which I am at present unaware that I am wrong. There will be some, that I have learned from experience, the more I have learned the more I have learned that I don't know.

My opinions do change over the years. When I first started out on the internet twelve years ago I called myself a socialist at times, I even joined a socialist webring at one time. Do you remember webrings? Do they still exist? It is vitally important that I get stuck into my website and hack away those bits which are now nothing but an embarrassment. My views have changed quite substantially. I have become aware of who I really am, I have developed a class consciousness you might say, I have recognized that the leftist I had tried to be for so long had nothing in common with the real me.

I am not a state employee. I am not a teacher. My bread is not buttered on that side, and it never has been. So why have I been spouting political crap as if I was a teacher? It never has been in my interests or the wider interest of the country to support a bigger and bigger interventionist state. Under the guise of teaching me to think and giving me analytical tools with which to think I have actually been brainwashed for years and taught what to think to support the interests of other people. I had been taught to cheer when leftists insult people like my own parents and grandparents. It is not going to happen again. They didn't recruit me into the sneering classes, the sneering professions or the party of the sneering classes.

If they think I am going to sneer with them at peasants and rednecks and Daily Mail readers they had better think again. I come from peasant stock. I come from generations of conservative voting Church of England attending patriotic Daily Mail readers. Both my grandfathers shot game for the pot. I will not let some lefty Marxist scumbags piss on my family's heritage and aspirations and pretend I'm enjoying their in-joke. I will never sneer again at people with aspirations to do better for themselves or their family, even if they are white and read the Daily Mail or like to shoot at animals and birds not raised by gamekeepers. I am also not going to take the label Little Englander as some kind of an insult. I am proud of my country and I see no good reason at all why the things it stands for should be pissed away in pursuit of some internationalist Marxist experiment as fast as humanly possible.

Has the time come to say that I have become a conservative? I don't think I am quite ready for that label yet. But I do find it quite flabbergasting that the idea that somebody might support the largest and most popular political party in the country for the last 150 years and be regarded as somehow abnormal, shocking or their actions be in need of some explanation. The culture I have been swimming in for years is half blind, it barely acknowledges the existence of any political views on the right side of centre, people identified as supporters of the leader of the Conservative Party are seen to be shamed. Our culture is sick, we need to redress the balance of left wing musicians, actors, journalists and comedians who have succeeded in making the views of the majority of the British public seem to be extreme right wing and unforgivable. I intend to do my bit.

Welcome to the blog

2011-09-02T10:44:00.000+01:00

OK, after twelve years of running a standard website I have decided it is worth having a go adding blog features to my online world. I haven't updated my site in quite a while and the prospect of doing so is getting ever more daunting. It's hard work to track links across hundreds of pages.

Naturally I haven't committed myself to Blogger yet but it seems to make sense to give it a quick go to see how it suits. I already have the Google account so it doesn't require much effort to do it.
Let me know if you think this is a good idea.