The Slow Pravdaization of Our Press

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

From the O.C. Register:

In legal news, CNN recently settled what is being described as a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High school student Nick Sandmann over its false and misleading coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that left viewers with the impression that the teenager and his pals were being racist provocateurs.

Turns out that Sandmann’s group had been taunted with racially charged, profane rants by the Black Hebrew Israelites. 

...Thanks to Google and shoddy memories, Sandmann will forever be known as the racist kid who harassed a Native American elder, even though there’s absolutely no truth to it whatsoever.

What could push 'the most trusted name in news' to commit such eye-wateringly expensive folly, all in the name of a narrative?

It's a question worth asking. We invite you to have a look at this piece from a few years back, in the hope that you will find it enlightening.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Islam: Why We Culturally Profile It

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Paris, Nov. 13, 2015: The Indian summer meant many were enjoying a meal out on the patio

Four years ago this week, France experienced its "9-11": The Bataclan terror attacks. Shortly after, we published this body of data on why, exactly, Europeans are becoming so wary of the mass of Muslim immigrants streaming into their countries.

We publish it again on this terrible anniversary, with the footnote that all of the tendencies described therein have only intensified in the intervening four years.

We hope you appreciate this food for thought.

The Europe to come?

[Re-post, original post here.]

At the height of the Trayvon Martin affair, we met a young Afro-Canadian who strongly objected to being racially profiled. Drawing on the pool of data at our disposal, we presented, to the best of our ability, the reasons such profiling exists.

Today, as hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants pour into Europe to claim asylum, profiling again rears its ugly head. Not racial/ethnic this time, but religious:

At least five European countries have signaled that they prefer to grant asylum only to Christian refugees flooding the continent from the Middle East, not to Muslims.

“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” Hungarian Prime Minister Orban said.  ... “Refugees from a completely different cultural background would not be in a good position in the Czech Republic,” said Czech President Milos Zeman.

 Lodz, Poland, September 2015

On what are these fears based? Ignorance, prejudice? We have been told for years that immigration is a gift, an economic boost, an injection of fresh blood, and that our new guests will culturally enrich our lives with their differentness (all while assimilating seamlessly thanks to their sameness). We at TWCS have thus decided to take a deeper look at the data.

But is Islam a religion, a culture, or a civilization? Has it genetically changed its adherents over time like Christianity has (cousin marriage enforced vs. forbidden)? In the absence of any genetic connection, does it culturally push its believers to certain behaviors? Could these beliefs and behaviors really, as the critics charge, prevent their assimilation into the West?

In a word--is this cultural profiling of Muslims based on fact or fantasy?

Why We Profile

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Calling 911 on black people may soon be a crime in parts of Michigan, Oregon and New York (h/t Steve Sailer ).  Why are Afro-Americans profiled so endlessly? We took a look at the data, and here's what we found.

[Re-post, original post here.]

In the outcry following the recent acquittal of Floridian George Zimmerman in the shooting death of an Afro teenager, many in the black community have voiced their displeasure.  Canadian graduate student Matthew Simmermon-Gomes is one:

What I do know is what it’s like to be a Trayvon Martin. To be suspect. I do know what it’s like to be followed by staff in a nice clothing store; to be stopped by police for walking down the street; to endure the thousand micro-aggressions and the hundred fearful looks, the patronising astonishment coupled with quiet indignation at my education or erudition. I know, in other words, what it is to be a person of colour in a world that privileges whiteness.

"Yellow Vests"—New French Revolution?

Liberty Leading the People (revisited)

We will regretfully be taking a short research break this winter, as life's surprises pile up, leaving us little time to publish. Thanks to all our regular readers for your patience and support.

But first: a view from the catbird's seat of the latest protest movement to sweep France. Your humble author has lived among the French for many years, so… What is going on? Why are people so angry? Are these the rumblings of a new French Revolution?

Champs Elysées, Paris

A quick press round-up is in order.

So, Where Does Multiculturalism Work?

Englischer Garten, Munich

Today's progressives have a seemingly unshakeable belief in the doctrine of Multiculturalism. All societies should be a zesty mix of different melanin levels, languages, religions, and cuisines. Anything else would be not only immoral, but boring.

Despite Putnam's evidence that diverse neighborhoods make everyone living in them less happy, this unflappable belief in the tonic effects of diversity seems to have gripped the modern leftist with claws of steel. 

U.N. Migration Representative and diversity evangelist Peter Sutherland

So we ask him: What is an example of a diverse society that actually works? To which we in the West may aspire?

Rue Polonceau, Paris, 2015

As it turns out, Multiculturalism is not such an easy beast to wrangle.

But we aim to try, to once and for all get our harpoon into that elusive animal: the Diversitopia on which we, in the West, may model ourselves.



Where to find it?

Widening Circle of Empathy: The Final Frontier

Sic Transit Gloria Homo Albus

The town of Székesfehérvár, Hungary--a thousand-year-old city home to the original royal court--just applied for the coveted 'European Capital of Culture.' The video they submitted was turned down flat by the E.U. jury. The reason?

(Video at link) 

'There are too many happy white people and crosses, and not enough migrants.' … One of the European Union’s experts said with astonishment: 'This is the propaganda film for white Christian Europe; everyone is white, happy and dancing in the streets.'

Just a few months later, the soccer World Cup final pitted France against Croatia. Before the match, France's Anti-Defamation League posted:

'France's team, multi-colored, multi-ethnic, goes head to head with a Croatian team that's distressingly uniform.  Knowing Croatia's history, no surprise. Balkan-centric, nostalgic for an era which worshiped only brute strength, they play a soccer that is bland, colorless, flavorless…

'France will win—she's already won! She unites, welcomes, understands. … Let's keep fighting so that our Republic's values stay on top, even if—against all odds—we lose.'

Hungary 'too white,' Croatia 'colorless'… Whence this race-obsessed rhetoric? 

Steven Pinker has written at length about the 'widening circle of empathy.'  We at TWCS believe that it has four phases, and that certain Western countries have now entered the fourth and terminal phase: the desire for self-replacement.

On what do we base this claim?

And if true, where does it come from? How do we know when it's approaching? Is there anything we can do to stop it?

Weapons of Mass Migration: Are You a Target?

Reaction to Trump's threat to turn off the migrant tap

Donald Trump's proposed immigration policies--though moderate by the standards of any other era in U.S. history--are spurring an unprecedented wave of outrage.

The immense waves of migrants (legal and illegal) pouring into the U.S. and Europe are, say his opponents, a blessing, a gift, even the only way to survive.

Image source

Is it true? 

Today there are a quarter of a billion people living outside their home countries--the most ever recorded in human history. But these mass movements aren't happening by chance-- far larger forces are at play.

Image source

We live in an era where demographic weapons are in fact being lobbed around the globe, disturbing the fragile ecosystems of human societies, in some cases threatening to topple them. 

Who is in the line of fire? Can one make oneself less of a target? 

Africans flood into Europe;  Latin Americans flood into the U.S.

How? 

Governments Are Us

Harper's Weekly, 1869

David Brooks has a history lesson for Donald Trump (via Steve Sailer):

The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens.  …  This is a tribal story.  

Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.

Naturalization ceremony, 2010

This lovely fiction from Mr. Brooks is as quaint as it is ahistorical. But it does go back a fair way. Not as far as our founders, bequeathing a nation 'to ourselves and our posterity.' Not as far as our first naturalization act, in 1790, extended to 'free white persons of good character.' 

Not as far as Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Alexander Hamilton:

Not multiculturalists

'The opinion advanced in [Jefferson's] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. 

'They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? 

'There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.'

The idea that the U.S. was meant to become a League of Nations avant l'heure dates back to the mid 19^th century, when America's first nativist party, the 'Know-Nothings,' agitated against Catholic immigrants (both Irish and German). They were  lambasted by people like George Julian, VP candidate:

'Know Nothingism . . . tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood. It judges men by the accidents of their condition, instead of striving to find a common lot for all, with a common access to the blessings of life.' (1)

By the 1912 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson was currying favor with his new electorate by trumpeting:

'America has, so to say, opened its doors and extended its welcome to men who were Americans everywhere in the world. She has invited all the free forces of the modern civilized peoples to come to America where men can be free, and where all free forces can unite and forget all their differences of origins.' 

Wilson-style multiculturalism: No Asians or Blacks, thanks

But even a 'proposition nation' man like Wilson wasn't a true multiculturalist—he did not extend this welcome to Blacks or Asians:

'The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.'

These days, things have gone so far that we're being told that not letting masses of Mexicans or Africans into our countries is the equivalent of turning away the Jews in 1940, or runaway slaves in 1840.

Forcing Africans to be governed by their own: Worse than slavery

This is an astounding statement. Forcing a Mexican to be governed by other Mexicans, or a Senegalese to be governed by other Senegalese, is akin to committing genocide upon them. What a statement on the governing abilities of Mexicans or Senegalese! Perhaps Jefferson was onto something after all…

The 'magic dirt' theory, of course, says that once these foreigners set foot on our soil, they are suddenly blessed with the qualities that have allowed us to govern ourselves so successfully all these years.

Coming to take part in the Great Democratic Experiment

But we at TWCS suspect that, on the contrary, Jefferson was right—Governments Are Us. 'That temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism' has not been equally distributed on Planet Earth. 

We mostly rule ourselves now--the age of empire is over.  If we rule ourselves badly, that's because we are somehow ill-equipped to handle the running of a large, modern representative state.

(Formerly 'Failed States Index')

So if we few in well-run countries usher in the many fleeing ill-run countries,  what will be the result? Is it possible such people will recreate the conditions they've created in their own countries, right here on our soil? If so, we should be very, very careful which groups we let in the door.

What is the evidence?

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Cold Hard Facts

Have we arrived?

Why, one may ask, have so many leftists gone ballistic over a short stoppage on immigration from 7 terror-prone states?  

Via Steve Sailer

Crowds are mobbing airports. Pundits, movie stars, sports players, foreign heads of state, all lifting their voices in horror….

As though such a banal, oft-practiced, and sensible measure were some kind of crime against humanity.

Headlines courtesy of Breitbart News

It is a question worth asking. An alien arriving from another planet might think Trump had just announced he was planning to rain down bombs on these countries for years. (Thus confusing Trump with his predecessor.) Such country-specific migration blocks are nothing new, and have been a favorite of Democrat presidents from Obama to Carter to old FDR himself. Yet our current hysteria continues unabated.

Agitated Hollywoodians won't take this lying down

One can't be blamed for feeling as though one has arrived at Saint Anthony's 1700-year-old prophecy. Truly, has the whole world gone mad?

Though we're hard at work on our next piece, we're taking a quick break to provide a few links to those seeking some facts and data in the midst of this planetary pants-soiling. 

Some may wonder:

Why We Culturally Profile

The Europe to come?

At the height of the Trayvon Martin affair, we met a young Afro-Canadian who strongly objected to being racially profiled. Drawing on the pool of data at our disposal, we presented, to the best of our ability, the reasons such profiling exists.

Today, as hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants pour into Europe to claim asylum, profiling again rears its ugly head. Not racial/ethnic this time, but religious:

At least five European countries have signaled that they prefer to grant asylum only to Christian refugees flooding the continent from the Middle East, not to Muslims.

“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” Hungarian Prime Minister Orban said.  ... “Refugees from a completely different cultural background would not be in a good position in the Czech Republic,” said Czech President Milos Zeman.

 Lodz, Poland, September 2015

On what are these fears based? Ignorance, prejudice? We have been told for years that immigration is a gift, an economic boost, an injection of fresh blood, and that our new guests will culturally enrich our lives with their differentness (all while assimilating seamlessly thanks to their sameness). We at TWCS have thus decided to take a deeper look at the data.

But is Islam a religion, a culture, or a civilization? Has it genetically changed its adherents over time like Christianity has (cousin marriage enforced vs. forbidden)? In the absence of any genetic connection, does it culturally push its believers to certain behaviors? Could these beliefs and behaviors really, as the critics charge, prevent their assimilation into the West?

In a word--is this cultural profiling of Muslims based on fact or fantasy?

Best news sources, Paris attacks

Diners at La Belle Equipe restaurant, Paris--The Indian summer meant many were enjoying a meal out on the patio Friday evening 

Best news sources for unfolding carnage in Paris:

In English:

Gates of Vienna

Gallia Watch

Daily Mail

In French:

François de souche

François de souche Facebook
(their regular site is overloaded from record traffic)

"Le Figaro" live feed

Sending positive thoughts to any Parisian readers. You are at war.

Crashing the Gates: A Crash Course

Storming the Hungarian border at Hogros, Serbia, September 16th, 2015

(Or, The European Migrant Crisis: A Reader.)

From the Pope to the E.U. to the U.N., the narrative has taken shape: 'Millions of refugees fleeing war-torn regions are flooding into Europe, and we must take them all in.'  If one doesn't embrace it whole-heartedly--and many Europeans do not--one is 'vile,' 'shameful,' and 'spreading hate' (to quote German chancellor Angela Merkel).  Such closed-minded bigots need to open their hearts and homes.

We here at TWCS argue that there is much more to the story. From our privileged perch here in continental Europe, we enjoy access to scores of local news stories which haven't seeped into the international media. So as with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we're taking a slight detour from our normal blogging in order to give a press round-up we hope some may find useful. From our seat in the very front row, we humbly invite you to join us on a tour of the less-reported sides of this epochal event. But kindly buckle up first.

Why Re-Colonization? Commonweal Orientation

Driving in Varanasi, India

(Part II of two)

Europe and the U.S. are both being overrun with illegal immigrants from the South. We recently asked the question, 'Why?' One answer, we've found, could be the former's higher levels of Future Orientation. This ability to fully conceive of and plan for the future creates societies that are the envy of the world.

 Africa's illegal aliens flood into Europe;  Latin America's flood into the U.S.

But we also argue that a second quality is drawing the masses to Euros' doors. We call this trait Commonweal Orientation. Where it is found in abundance, safe and prosperous societies seem to flourish. So what is it, and why has it been so unevenly distributed on Planet Earth?

Why Re-Colonization? Future Orientation

Mongongo tree and fruit

Each day, the Kung San walked long distances to the mongongo groves to collect their fruits.  

Once he asked a tribesman why nobody had ever made an attempt to grow mongongo trees near some of the permanent water holes where the tribe resided.  "You could do that if you wanted to," he replied, "but by the time the trees bore fruit, you would be long dead." --Anthropologist Richard Lee

(part I of two)

At independence, 50 years ago, optimism for the tropics was high. No one could have dreamed that half a century later, a massive movement for re-colonization would be afoot--led not by Africa's leaders but by her masses.

1960: Demanding Europeans leave Africa; 2014: Africans demanding to be let into Europe

We have looked at some of the reasons that the global South wants into Teutonic countries.  But the real appeal is broader.  Globally, tropical peoples are trying to migrate to lands run by temperate peoples.

Image source 

Like a baby trying to crawl back into the womb, the formerly colonized are coming back to their old foreign masters and begging (or demanding) to be ruled by them again.

One year of African boat people = a city the size of Venice. Can Europe absorb them all?

Why?

We propose two major reasons: Future orientation and Commonweal orientation.  These two qualities, we argue, are plentiful in the North but in short supply in the South, where their opposites (Short-Sightedness and Clannishness) can be found in abundance.

Today we shall focus on the former: Future orientation. We argue that the shortage of this trait in warmer climes has prevented these societies from developing the way they wish to. This is why, two generations after independence, millions are voting with their feet to place themselves back under Euro rule.

We also argue these traits follow tropical peoples long-term, which is why North America's centuries-old African population has never assimilated. This too, we shall show, should be a cautionary tale for European deciders on immigration.

So what is the evidence to back up our assertions?

I Don't Belong Here

Paris, France; Ferguson, United States

France is still reeling from the Islamist attacks against satirical rag Charlie Hebdo which killed 17.

As commenter Kolia points out, many of the murder victims weren't white indigenous French--an Arab and an Afro cop, four civilian Jews. Does this mean religion trumps race?

The truth is that Arab (and Afro) immigrants to France pose two different kinds of threat to the natives.  The distinction should be made clear.

For Americans, one of these two will look very familiar, and one will not:

• (1) The daily incivility / insults / beatings / rapes perpetrated by Arabs / Blacks against indigenous white French.  No religious aspect to it at all; pure ethnic minority alienation.

• (2) The ever-growing calls to bend French values to mirror those of their guests: Single-sex swimming pools, halal meals, legalized polygamy, criminalized blasphemy... The most extreme is the young man radicalized by an imam who tries to launch a caliphate by holy war.

All the world's a-tizzy about (2).  While we admit Islam is a genuine threat to parts of Europe, we're going to swim against the tide and take a look at the more 'banal evil' of (1). Why? This is the everyday brutality the French must live with day in, day out, and it bears a striking resemblance to that aimed at Euro-Americans by their Afro countrymen.  What can the data tell us about hopes of assimilating these two alien minorites on either side of the Atlantic?

Is Nothing Sacred

'A towelhead kisses a kike's ass'--Charlie Hebdo on the 1977 Egyptian visit to Israel

 ('So, should we make peace?' 'Keep going, I'll let you know')

Despite appearances, we are hard at work here at Those Who Can See, sticking to our adage of 'if it ain't ready, don't publish it.'  An unusally busy winter work schedule is slowing down but not stopping us.

But a quick interlude is in order.  The recent attacks in France have taken over the news cycle here, spawning much journalistic heat but little light on both sides of the Atlantic. We'd like to give a brief snapshot of some of the  less-seen bits of the story.

Alors, pour les curieux...


I. The Magazine

Charlie Hebdo, for those unfamiliar, is a French satiric weekly born in 1970 from the ashes of Hara Kiri, itself inspired by Mad Magazine.

It is the baby of counter-culture leftists.  Their number one targets have always been conservatives and Christians. A sampling (some courtesy of MPC):

When the famous 'Piss Christ' angered Catholics in Avignon, Charlie said:

All Religions in the Shitter!