Showing posts with label Masculine Axis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Masculine Axis. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Masculine Axis by James LaFond

A Meditation on Manhood and Heroism


James LaFond writes about masculinity with the assurance of a man who knows what he is about. Only by understanding and practicing masculinity, through literature, at work, with their mates and family members, in combat, sports and in fellowship with other men, may the men of our sick society preserve their property, families, cultural patrimony and their own souls.

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

A Temporary Family

The Negation of the Patriarch and Fragility of the Nuclear Family Unit


James, while editing Masculine Axis, I came across a comment from a reader that you might want to address: 'A Young Man Starting Out'.  Your answer connects the nuclear family to America's origin as a plantation of people.  As each member gets scattered to the distance, new temporary families spring up.
-Lynn

Julian writes:

Hi James-

I've been reading your articles on and off for about a year. Could you elaborate on what you meant by these lines, specifically 'temporary family':

"If you just make the money to keep a temporary family and then watch your children dispersed into the atomized world, like I have, you will find yourself standing at the edge of a yawning abyss. I surrendered my sons to the economy, the God of Things, and will likely not get them back.

I will hopefully be able to rescue my grandson."

Are you referring to making just enough vs generation wealth? Or to wealth for wealth sake versus a higher calling? Or something else?

My son is four and I have been blessed since his birth to achieve enough success through entrepreneurism/investing to have left the j.o.b. world behind (seemingly for good, unless something horrible happens). I think often on what his own path might be though, and whether it is possible to stimulate/help him into following that same path as a teenager, so that he can avoid the infinite forms of 'substitute masculinity' and 'substitute sacrality' that permeate our culture today- especially for young people (video games, porn, drugs, degeneracy, self-destruction, victimology, etc). Yet on the other hand the danger of giving too much help rears its head and ending up with him 'r-selected', to use that terminology.

Thank you for the excellent sight and sharing your wisdom.

James responds:

My thoughts on "temporary family" is that that is what a nuclear family has become under the modern system of debt slavery and real estate drift, in which neighborhoods are intentionally blighted to force suburban migration.

The nuclear family, alone, could be maintained as an extended family network under a non-predatory economic system, but tends to be scattered.

For instance my Uncle, a successful man, a millionaire, had five children. He and his wife live in Florida.

His son lives in Pittsburg with his wife and two sons.

His oldest daughter lives in Kansas with her husband, her children having scattered with the shifting career winds.

His next oldest daughter lives in Illinois, with four children, having been abandoned by her husband who moved to Boston.

His next to youngest daughter lives in Baltimore with two sons, her husband having abandoned her for drugs and alcohol.

His youngest lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

How in Hell is Uncle Fred going to protect his family?

What are the chances he will be near in a crisis?

The combination of career drift and real estate blight acting on the nuclear family atomizes all but the strongest nuclear units and these are stretched tenuously.

Also, with the media machine what it is, it is highly unlikely that any given generation of a family will share the same values and outlook as their parents, which stresses individuals immeasurably.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Friday, August 18, 2017

Man versus All

The Hero against the Gods, Men and Monsters: 

A Masculine Manifesto for Literature and Life


I am in the process of writing two heroic novels, Sold and Yusef of the Dusk and am trying to rectify the elements of the heroic in my mind. I have done this more stylistically with the Well of Heroes project, which has already netted two volumes of commentary on the works of Robert E. Howard, all of which had heroic themes. These themes, identified as aspects of his work are:

  • Trails: The natural world, the actions of man and all of those other six threads of the heroic life, act on the hero to shape his form and test his substance. 
  • Race: The racial makeup of the hero, his racial sentiments or rejection of same and racial politics—usually exterior to the hero, who tends to an elemental worldview and is often an interloper—frame and impel the hero through the story arc.
  • Civilization: In a civilized setting, the constructed and affected world of sedentary, hoarding man and scheming woman frames the heroic in stark contrast—for the setting is his elemental opposite, best depicted in film by Tarzan visiting New York and diving off the Brooklyn bridge and King Kong fighting airplanes from the spire of the Empire State Building—to the unjust world, and also, in the hands of genius writers such as Melville, London, Howard and Wolfe, illustrates the corrosive effects of degenerate living on the human character.
  • Barbarism: In a tribal setting the hero is tested in more physically active ways though in a context with no less moral gravity than its civilized counterpart. The best adventure stories in terms of entertainment occur in such settings, tending to a less complex message and less compromised hero. In terms of character development, Howard and Burroughs surpass all by bouncing their barbarian heroes back and forth between the wilting embrace of civilization and the savage allure of the tribal life.
  • Dream: The inner vision of the hero, his education by way of dream, marks a return of the outwardly energized direct actor to his center, coiling him like a spring to leap back into the field that defines him. More than anything, dream in heroic fiction and myth joins the hero with the reader and renews his connection with his revealing agent, the writer, who must not be his creator. Of the many statements about Howard that this author thinks he would object to, the oft quoted blurb “by the Creator of Conan” would probably irritate him the most, as he seemed to be a shamanic type of writer who channeled his heroic visions as much as imposed forms upon them. In terms of the man entombed in modernity, dream is where we come to know ourselves and establish an inner distance from the filthy grotesques of modernity, as well as gravitating closer to our mythic ancestors. 
  • Gulfs: Modernity accepts only physical gulfs, and eschews gulfs of morality, cognition and metaphysics, denying transcendence as a matter of first principal. Such a worldview, that denies the existence of horribly incomprehensible minds, of unfathomable evil or unimaginable gulfs in understanding cultivates the fatally domesticated mind that asks “why” as the city walls collapse, that says “no, this cannot be” as killers sweep down upon them motivated by such nonsensical notions as race, where the hero, fatalistically resigned to facing incomprehensible powers, springs into action. 
  • Cataclysm: When gulfs separating the powers that buffet the tiny human soul converge upon the realms of civilization and rend it, memories of such events are only passed down to us through the ages in the form of heroic actions. The clash of man versus nature and man versus God in the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, of hero versus the gods in the Iliad, of hero versus gods, monsters and hierarchies in the Odyssey, of Saracen versus Christian in the Song of Roland, of hero versus nature, monster and prince in Beowulf, all come at the clashing of nations and religions and lifeways that brought down tribes and civilizations. The hero is at the heart of our collective, moral memory and we discard him at our peril. 
How do these themes align with what I have separately sketched as the elements of the primal man, or of the uncompromising masculine?

I will address these themes in terms of Yusef, hero of The Dusk, adventuring on The Red Sea and Indian Ocean in 1201 A.D., and Jeffy Tun, an enslaved orphan, sold twice in England and once in Virginia in 1678 in the novels attributed to them. But in life, we at the End of Masculine Time, must see the heroic in ourselves in order to guard against the final abomination of our world—not on the political scale, but on the personal. For a discussion of this aspect, or the expression of Twilight Masculinity, continue to At the Feast of Souls and Grace Speaker.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Information Antidote

How the Body Politic Inoculates its Human Atoms Against Enlightenment


In studying escaped slave advertisements it has become clear that a chief reason for successful escapes in the police state of Plantation America was the growing literacy of the slave class. In that period indenture forms and travel passes represented the usual forms of identification and key tools for oppression. Flat on the heels of the era of mass slave escape which was prerevolutionary English America—staffing pirate fleets in the early 1700s and filling the ranks of disease-depleted Indian tribes in the late 1700s—it becomes obvious that literacy was a bane to the slave master. Not only could the “tolerable scholar” forge his own passes and indentures, he could do so for his mates.

In the Early American era, there was the danger of literate half-white slaves and the very common occurrence of a literate Irish slave running away with an illiterate black slave and playing the master-slave act as a cover story, for in Plantation America, before and after the Revolution, every hand was against the undocumented travelling man. This was a chief reason for the switch from predominantly white to virtually all black slavery, which occurred between 1804 and 1850. Ironically, the exclusive enslavement of blacks was only in force for about 10 years before the war that ended it, and throughout that period slave owners frantically busied themselves with preventing black literacy.

After chattel slavery was ended for adults—but not for child slaves until 1929—America found itself in possession of tens of millions of semi-literate to literate wage slaves. In order to control the behavior of these people they were set against each other across racial lines. But this can only succeed in semi-literate or sub-literate contexts.

Channeling literacy into fruitless reading can only be accomplished with a population that believes it has no agency. While this is the natural state of the female population and black men who have been raised believing they had no agency under their savior government, their remained the problem of literate white men who believed they had the ability to chart their own course in life and were more than mere pawns or pets.

The literature that must be avoided is found in the following categories:
  • Ancient texts,
  • History as analysis or narrative,
  • Subversive literature that places the man outside of the artificial State.
One need only emasculate men to direct them to emotive literature such as comic books, fantasy, political tracts and most easily accomplished, sports writing.

Eventually much of literacy was replaced by passive viewing which intensifies the emotive trend, reduces agency and dampens social aggression. However, at the same time that man was in the mid stages of his denaturing, the internet rose and within two decades much of the literature pertinent to cultivating agency among remnant souls was available at the common person’s fingertips.

With potential disaster facing the slave state intellectual tyranny, the terms of political correctness have since been brilliantly implemented. The phases are three:
  1. Three-part newspaper article construction, with the form designed to cultivate bias confirmation of the headline—which is the takeaway message—serves as the basis for the system and goes back to the beginning of the wage slave era. American who do read have been trained to read like zombies, the actual reading nothing but a confirmation of some initial assertion. 
  2. Acute attention-span deficit afflicts most Americans, with few having an attention span regarding emotive subjects—with all topics important to the ruling elite effectively emotionalized by the media through trigger words that actually shut down information intake and bypass the reasoning process. 
  3. The taboo, the ancient art of enslaving minds by demonizing strands of thought, has been resurrected to implement self-censorship on behalf of the control organisms.
The upside of these means of eliminating inquiry and discourse among humanity is that, due to rampant emasculation of men and the toxic denaturing of women, that 95% of the population is so easily controlled through self-censorship, and that 10% of the population is militantly orthodox and able to quash the emergent ides of the alienated 5% in the general herd, that there is no real pressing need for old style censorship and erasure of information, as most will refuse to read or believe the truth. This speaks to the chance of truth emerging as a viable commodity in a post-collapse society.

The danger is that the emasculation of men is so deep that the feminine urge to control the environment rather than interact with it, will win out among the minority and that their push for control will do for alternative ideas what the rise of National Socialist Germany did for nationalism, to render the prospect so abhorrent to the vast majority that its enemies will always garner broad support.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

The Hero King

What Kind of Societal Figurehead Fits a Tribal, Masculine and Transcendent Worldview?


Written with the thoughts on a just society, as expressed by Joseph Bellofatto over the course of our friendship.

The modern president or prime minister is a subdued shadow of the classical king, just as the dictator is a feminized caricature of the king, expressive or collectively distorted to the point of celebrity.

The classical king, himself, is nothing more than a pale imitation of the hero king, seduced by material concerns, managed by moneyed puppets as far back as the Magna Carta of 1215. Hence, even the king of the High Middle Ages is a debased commodity, and a manipulated manipulator, an evolved inheritor of Agamemnon, not of Achilles.

A hero king, like the hero he was before assuming kingship—David comes to mind—must, by definition be a hero first, a man who went against the established order. In an infinitely corrupt and degraded way, a modern businessman who went against the political order would satisfy this requirement. In most cases, the hero turned king is ruined by his transformation, but the ruin is his, as a sacrificial figure, rather than the ruin of the nation that befalls the followers of a dictator or a managerial head of state.

For a view of the heroic conflict of interest with the duties of kingship, one should read The Rage of Achilles from the Iliad and the Prologue of Beowulf. As both the conflict between hero and king take their toll on the nation and army respectively, as the King is essentially illegitimate in masculine, meaning primal, terms, with his stature based upon the accumulated wealth passed down by hero kings and passed upward by slave beings, resting upon the actual heroism—actionist sacrifice—of politically disenfranchised henchmen. This latter element reflects the essential instability of any hereditary kingship and the illegitimate proxy nature of any politically selected head-of-state.

Recently, while discussing politics and my apolitical lack of alignment with a war-fighter, he asked me why I could neglect an attempt to influence the selection of the regime leadership that my sons must live under.

I responded that my position was so far to the right that alignment with the New American Political Right made no more sense to me than the alignment of the “Alt-Right” with third wave feminist political candidates would make to writers at such sites as Counter-Currents and VDare, and that the very idea of a president serving as the hood ornament of an ostensible oligarchy, which is in fact the backroom-bought mask of an actual plutocratic state, was a political form so intrinsically corrupt and false-faced that no good could come of it.

He then asked what kind of government I would support.

I put forth the idea of the Hero King:
  • The man must have fought;
  • The man must have killed;
  • The man must give away all his worldly possessions;
  • The man must then engage in some physical contest to be named king;
  • The man must serve uncompensated, advised by older, not younger, men, who have likewise sworn an oath of poverty;
  • The man must participate in any military action he initiates;
  • The man must retire into poverty and exile when physical or mental decline render him ineffective.
That is it, rather than a hero becoming degraded by kingship and devolving into the pawn that pushes lesser pawns around the board of death merchant exchange, he should remain the bane of such manipulators, rather than surrender to their embrace as any modern head-of-state must.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Biblical Babes: Regarding Rivka (aka Rebekah) by Baruch Kogan

Arranged marriage was common among European aristocrats until pretty recently.

Inbreeding is not deleterious in and of itself, except when it concentrates deleterious recessive traits. However, over time, these traits wash out. Advantageous recessive traits do not. Examples of successful sustained inbreeding in humans include the Egyptian Pharaohs. In other mammals, you have the Naked Mole Rats, which are eusocial and where the queen breeds with her offspring, with no ill effect.

In any case, this is not totally relevant to us, because in our society, cousin marriage is combined with a steady inflow of converts.

For instance, the tribe of Judah is descended from Tamar, a Canaanite woman. Joseph married Asenath, a Egyptian noble girl, and the tribes of Ephraim and Menashe come from her. Moses married Tzipporah, who was either a Midianite or a Kushite. The Davidic dynasty comes from Ruth, a Moabite convert. Etc., etc.

Your Pakistanis are not Semitic but Aryan, by the way. Cousin marriage is also practiced in Iran, and has been from the time of the Ancient Persians, and is common among Hindus. So you might as well refer to it as a "despicable Aryan practice"

The mentality of Abraham, who sends Eliezer to find a wife for his son, is not "find him a hot wife." This is the normal thinking in a society of sexual anarchy, where people mate like wild dogs coming together, i.e., the modern West. You should not project it onto our patriarchs, who were completely different people living in a different time with a different mentality. In a normal, functional society, this is not how things are done. You look for a good family, if possible (Abraham didn't have this option,) and good character traits. When you put people together who are generally compatible, and their marriage is a fait accompli, they learn how to love each other with the years. Notice that when they were married, Isaac was 40. When a man marries late, he does not look for the same things that he does when he marries early, and in any case, Isaac was subject to his father's authority in all aspects (notice how his life was an almost complete parallel of Abraham's).

Sincerely,
Baruch

Baruch, 

Thanks for your response, I was hoping you would chime in.  I appreciate your comments on marriage in a more holistic patriarchal context.

I should have credited Moldbug for the inbreeding comment, but I was trying to draw you out and it worked.  I am over 13% Ashkenazi myself, and grateful for the admixture, granted to me by my great-grandmother who was trafficked by fellow Jews to the remote tip of South America as a burlesque dancer and prostitute.  Her village in Eastern Europe was later targeted for a pogrom, so I guess it worked out after all.  August beginnings!

Pakistani Muslims tend to be either conquered Hindus of any caste, or else converted members of the lowest castes, seeking social equality as Muslims.  I don't know what kind my neighbors might be, but the level of inbreeding is staggering.  It takes a long time and a large population to wash out deleterious genes, the Paki's aren't there yet, obviously.  Hindus are highly endogamous within their castes but not so much into cousin marriage, the rampant inbreeding among Paki's has to be the Muslim/Arab (hence Semitic) influence I think.  

Thanks again, Baruch, hope to hear from you more.
Lynn

(c) 2017 Lynn Lockhart & Baruch Kogan

Monday, July 3, 2017

Biblical Babes: Rebekah

James, I don't know whether to call it ironic, but you often put me in the mood to pick up my trusty King James Version, the one my uncle gave me when I was seven years old, with a gilt edge and my name engraved in gold letters in the corner of the red leather cover, adorned with both a Cross and a Star of David. Sorry Jeremy, you can keep your NIV, the KJV is the only Bible for me.

Your readership seems to overlap with those of the seduction community (AKA pick-up artists) as well as those who advocate a return to patriarchy. In light of that, I thought it would be fun to seek your thoughts on some of the Bible's great love stories. Let's start with Abraham's son Isaac, and his niece Rebekah:

Genesis 24:15 - 25
And it came to pass, before he had done speaking, that, behold, Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother, with her pitcher upon her shoulder. And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the well, and filled her pitcher, and came up. And the servant ran to meet her, and said, Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water of thy pitcher. And she said, Drink, my lord: and she hasted, and let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink. And when she had done giving him drink, she said, I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking. And she hasted, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran again unto the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels. And the man wondering at her held his peace, to wit whether the LORD had made his journey prosperous or not. And it came to pass, as the camels had done drinking, that the man took a golden earring of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her hands of ten shekels weight of gold; And said, Whose daughter art thou? tell me, I pray thee: is there room in thy father's house for us to lodge in? And she said unto him, I am the daughter of Bethuel the son of Milcah, which she bare unto Nahor. She said moreover unto him, We have both straw and provender enough, and room to lodge in.
My thoughts -- men like to see a woman willing to do work, particularly if it is to benefit his own comfort, a cool drink on a hot day, a tidy home, a well cooked meal. The idea of an arranged marriage is not totally abhorrent to me, especially now that I am a parent, but I truly believe there is a genetic predisposition to rebelliousness in Europeans that would prevent it from taking hold among our people. There may be cultural components among Asian and Subcontinental people that assists, but the DNA has a strong effect.

James, what are your thoughts?
Lynn  

How do you rate the camel-watering seduction technique?
Getting to know, or forming an opinion of another person’s qualities in a work setting has resulted in some very stable relationships in the retail food business. Whether you are a man or a woman, seeing a potential mate engaged in their trade provides an authentic measure of their character, quite the opposite of “dating,” which tends to be a waltz to the bottom of our beings in search of the lesser angels of our nature.

Would you trust your brother to find a wife for your son?
I would trust him to find a prospect, but never to make the actual purchase.

I am not even going to ask if you would trust your uncle to find a wife for you.
I would definitely trust my uncle to find a wife for me, even sealing the deal and making the buy. Out tastes in women are that much in alignment. I have brought a couple girlfriends to family functions were my Uncle Fred and Aunt Patsy were in attendance. When he hugged the more well-curved of the two he grinned and would not let her go and my aunt slapped is shoulder and said, “Fred, let the poor thing go!”

He then patted me on the back and asked, “Friend or sleepover friend.”

“Sleepover,” I answered and he patted me between the shoulder blades so hard it hurt and said, “You’ve turned into a good judge of women.”

Have you given any thought to the despicable Semitic practice of cousin marriage? My Pakistani Sunni neighbors have confirmed to me that cousin marriage, or uncle-niece marriage is the norm there.

I have spent little wattage ruminating upon the breeding practices of that strain of humanity. I am more interested in how local varieties of humans have reproduced for good and ill. I do find it fascinating that the advent of Christendom, facilitated in some instances of conversion via the wives of kings, princes and chiefs to whom sissy holy men of the Christian orders were permitted access as they were not seen as a sexual threat, brought to European royalty the practice of cousin marriage. Many people do not realize, that by the eve of the Great War in 1914, that virtually the entire ruling class of the nations of Europe were related by blood. This curious impulse to keep power within family blood lines by inbreeding has contributed to the degeneration of numerous nation states throughout history and finally brought about the ruination of all of Europe in the Two Acts of the War of European Suicide. It is also noteworthy that one develops inferior dogs from wolf stock by inbreeding. This fact leads me to believe that such cultural patterns serve the purpose of human domestication, though have no evidence for this at hand.


Buy James's books because they are full of sage advice on love:
On Bitches

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Sunday, June 25, 2017

The Artifice of Fatherhood

James, recently you recounted your experiences of being targeted for aggression based on your female company in Amping up the Race Hate. You state there, as you have before, that were it not for "the artifice of being a father," you would be making headlines as an example of the need for knife and stick control, to stop heterosexual white men from murdering innocent youths (I am paraphrasing).

James, I think you are not being quite fair to yourself here, in light of your role as a father, and the importance of the father in the family and in society. This recalls our discussion on matriarchy and patriarchy, because what most alt-right people mean by patriarchy is a society where paternal investment in their offspring is high. By and large, you don't get high investment from men without ensuring paternal certainty, and this is where oppression of women comes into the picture (don't shoot me, I am just the messenger).

Fatherhood is not an artifice, in fact, it might be the essence of humanity. First, in the basic Darwinian sense, if you don't have descendants, you may as well have never existed. Second, and more importantly, paternal investment in young is rather rare in the natural world and varies greatly among human societies. Long story short, more paternal investment is better.

James, our families are the first line of defense against alienation. Your sons stand between you and the world burnt to a cinder, but they also stand between you and a totally unmoored and atomized existence, short though it may be. Thank them for me.

-Lynn

Lynn, in the strictest sense I believe father hood is artifice, social artifice. In this materialistic world where art and artifice have been turned into baubles, masks, lies, moral straightjackets, etc., we may think of artifice as bad, as it so often is, but fatherhood, and the entire suite of psychological disciplines that make up successful human societies are social adaptations to a very primal fact.

When we become adults we have two opposite experiences: A woman is transformed into a life giver.

What does a boy transform into?

The boy becomes a lethal version of his former self, a person typically possessing the ability to take life in a way previously barred to him. A typical man, or vigorous youth, has the ability to kill, children, women and the elderly with his bare hands.

This is an event of potentially catastrophic outcome for the tribe. If these youth are not taken away from the vulnerable portion of the population and indoctrinated into a moral order then humanity gets what civilization has given it, a social substrata of savage, feral youth who have emerged in the absence of the fathering process and the process of masculine tribal societies, which have been replaced by naked proxy force, replaced by the police state, which teaches its own brutal lesson.

Fatherhood, manhood, warriorhood, these are all socially generated artifice. Manhood is much less instinctual than womanhood and more sensitive to materialistic artifice. Such mechanisms as states supersede fatherhood--often with mothering constructs [alternative artifice]--and cast male youth into a savage incubator of feral minds, incapable of surviving in a traditional natural band, in a traditional tribal context or in highly evolved masculine societies who were once the core of social stability for both tribes and nation states. However, once the nation uncoupled from the state, masculine societies had to be jettisoned, for they would produce an organic--superior--social artifice in the form of manhood, rather than an employee, a debtor or a voter.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Monday, June 12, 2017

A Captive Woman's Gall

James,

A little while back, you linked to Kevin Michael Grace's interview of a fellow with the handle "Jay Fivekiller." From listening to the interview, one can gather that J-5 is something of a neighbor of mine, in the San Francisco metro area. You included the following comment, which has caused me to stew since then, since I am also guilty of using a pseudonym:

"Like it or not, Jay Fivekiller and other anonymous Alt-Righters do not value their opinion as highly as whatever money they are making. "

This is particularly galling for me, because I don't even make any money, and I hardly express any opinions here, I mostly just ask you questions!

Then recently, ten once-and-future privileged oppressors had their admissions to Harvard rescinded for posting inappropriate memes in what they thought was a private facebook page. This quote had me rolling around laughing:

"Harvard does not comment on individual applicants’ admission statuses, but incoming students are explicitly told upon receiving an offer that behavior that brings into question their moral character can jeopardize their admission."

There are many other examples, notably Brendan Eich, who created a major software language, was fired from his post as CEO of Mozilla when it was leaked that he donated to support traditional marriage.

James, the persecution is real, and many of us in the bourgeoisie are barely hanging on, even with six figure salaries. It takes a lot of courage to write under your own name, as you do, and it is no small thing to structure your life in such a way that neither your livelihood nor your loved ones can be taken hostage.

-Lynn

Lynn, my statement as to the men who write under pen names stands, they care more about remaining in the bosom of their beloved and wrathful God of Things than they do about their convictions, ideals--their souls.

However, you are not a man, but a woman, so you get a pass.

The use of the pen name to protect women in the male-dominated realm of the published word is at least as old as Mary Shelly and her Modern Prometheus. I suspect, though that females assuming a protective identity [for instance Einstein not having done his own work, but depending on his wife] goes as far back as The Odyssey, which is attributed to Homer, but which I and other readers suspect might have been composed by a woman, perhaps his daughter.

Marriage, for instance, has often cloaked a woman's identity in the protection of her husband's identity. When I moved to Baltimore and interviewed for a supermarket job, the person who hired me, Miss Betty, broke a long-standing agreement with her husband, that they hired their own gender only. He was quite offended that she hired me and gave me a hard way to go. She, however, reminded him that, "this is my business Leonard--you're the picture on the box, I'm the cereal." Mister Len was strictly relegated to handling the money and being the male face of the business while his wife ran the show.

This is just one example.

Another exemption from my scathing critique is the family man, like Ishmael, Shayne, Mescaline, and so many others who have vulnerable family who are in business, or raising small children, who need to be sheltered from the social war by people who take the pre-doxed stance that I, Jack Donovan, Greg Johnson, and other people who write and publish under their own name, do.

This is how men behave tribally. Certain men will paint the bulls-eye on themselves and carry on the discourse, suffer the alienation, etc., while their supporters secretly agree, slip them resources, and bide their time while they try to raise children who will not become sucked into the vortex of evil. This is--tribally speaking--a shamanic role, placing ones self outside the social construct and off the hierarchical path, in order to be able to express a dissenting view. Unknown to many, people in power, even those who pursue evil, value this function as a progress marker and don't seek to wipe out a dissenter who is not on the hierarchical-economic track.

I have been told by many readers that they support me because I speak for them where they would be destroyed or put out of work for expressing an honest opinion.

My slave girl won't even let her children know my last name for fear she would be ostracized for associating with such a fiend as I.

My older son is a mechanic, in a trade, and immune to his association with me.

My younger son has long wanted to be a CEO or CFO of a large company. We decided that he should begin writing grant letters for college claiming poverty by insanity, as his father had quit a management job to become a science-fiction novelist. He started his public separation from my opinion at age 18. He even discusses me with his coworkers, who seem to regard me as some sort of Neanderthal ho-macking, demi-god. Basically, even in a corporate environment he has been honest with his associates and the men above him in stating that, "my dad is essentially crazy, still fights young jocks, takes the bus in Baltimore city, grosses less annually than I pay in taxes in the first quarter, but is a lot of fun and can kick just about all my friends' asses... I have absolutely no desire to be like him, but he's a great guy to have around and gives me great advice on soft skills that he learned managing a workplace full of ex-convicts."

So, Lynn, for people like Jayfivekiller, Paul Kersey, Zman and the various authors I used to follow at Return of Kings and Eradic, who write under pen names, I suspect, that when the rubber hits the road, they will fold and denounce themselves and their fellows, because this society has effectively emasculated them in the crucible of comfort that is Modernity. This is the normal state for a woman, who must denounce her man to save her children.

An example comes from a Tennessee settlement in the 1700s, which was under siege by a superior Indian force. The wives of the few remaining men told their husbands to leave. If the men stayed and fought the outcome would be the same, they would become Indian wives and their children would be raised as Indians. they wanted to be spared seeing their husbands killed and did hold out hope that their husbands might eventually mount a raid to get them back or even raise a ransom. They were confident that the largely white Indians would treat them and their children well and knew that there would be a horrible end for their men. Women have had to function like this through all of our formative ages and it is ingrained. Continue to protect yourself, Lynn, it is what a woman living under enemy occupation or in captivity does.

Thanks for expressing your gall, Lynn.

James.

P.S. People in my position who have stepped beyond the pale, do not wish to see our supporters targeted. I would rather be attacked by antifa faggots than have one of my readers doxed.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Monday, May 29, 2017

The Guerilla Patriarchy

Matriarchy in Harm City?


James,

Recently, the zman, a fellow Baltimore denizen of yours, gave an interview with Kevin Michael Grace which you shared on your site and can be found here.

The following exchange takes place beginning 17:50 (I transcribed this myself, please excuse any errors):

KMG: What do you hear about the matriarchy?

zman: There’s no question, and I think that would never change. I think there is something there that goes back a lot farther than modern history, you talk to people who grew up in Africa, there is a guy on my blog who is originally from Rhodesia, and he will tell you that in SubSaharan Africa, it’s a female dominated society. There is a narrow role for males, but the domestic life, community life is largely dominated by females and I think there is a biological component there, that transcends anything that we are going to do as a society.

Steve Sailer gives an amusing excerpt on behalf of the African matriarchy theory, from the book The Marriage Problem, by James Q Wilson.

Vox Day has expressed similar thoughts, and even your unpaid intern seems to think so.

James, what can you tell us about the life-ways and habits of Baltimore's African diaspora with regard to matriarchy, patriarchy, or some unholy sociological innovation?

-Lynn

White Daddy and His Bitch

Lynn, in Baltimore what you have is not a matriarchy, but a decapitated patriarchy cast aside to permit the mutated matriarchy to interface with the meta-patriarchy: The State, known by blacks as The Man and White Daddy.

Hoodrat mothers cast aside would-be men in order to marry the State and then behave as experimental female-beastmen, brutalizing their boys from the cradle to the jailhouse and allowing both boys and girls under their roof to be raped by male relatives and the sex drones that serve her. It is a nightmare, with neither a functional patriarchy or matriarchy, a broken society. An anthropologist has called this bureaugamy, husbandless women married to the bureaucracy.

But what about the female dominated political machine in black urban centers?

This is simple, black man may not vote, because they are almost all felons, because their mothers raise them in an argumentative and brutal fashion which weirdly requires them to fight the cops as a rite of passage. Even if they were just jaywalking, fighting the cops turns it into a felony. There is hardly any black male vote.

Yesterday, I walked by a welfare queen in a nice neighborhood, standing in the doorway with her black paramour, scolding her two children by different men, one a mulatto and the other an octoroon like her. She beat this five year old boy brutally before me and the assembled neighbors, the child screeching in horror as the powerless black youth she is dating—a third her weight—cringed in the doorway as the boy of another, lighter-skinned man writhed on the porch.

Lynn, this is a mutilated matriarchy running amok as the decapitated patriarchy sits in the gutter. That black stud was cringing—I am guessing—at the memory off his own mother beating him like his giant mistress beat the spawn of a previous drone.

Before going into examples of African patriarchy, let me state why the z man and Vox Day, both brilliant men, cannot understand matriarchy or patriarchy:

They, as is our entire society, are critically emasculated.

Matriarchy and Patriarchy

They and even our anthropologists, generally look at a society as either matriarchal or patriarchal. That is a grave error that disables any understanding of human gender dynamics. This comes from the fount of Western Civilization, the pastoral takeover of agrarian civilization by conquering nomads.

Before describing that, let me back up further.

Patriarchy is a paternal hierarchy, a masculine order.

Matriarchy is a maternal hierarchy, a feminine order.

Any healthy society has within it a functional matriarchy and a functional patriarchy, two humans spheres that interact, ideally in an overlapping fashion, not a clashing fashion and not in a submerging manner.

Traditionally, for hundreds of thousands of years, the matriarchy dominated the camp, the cave, the home and the patriarchy dominated interaction with the natural world and other societies. This is exemplified in Amerindian traditions such as the Iroquois, whose men owned nothing but their weapons and whose women shared political power and owned all household goods.

Back to this later, as this is the crux of the book A Dread Grace, the thesis of which is that shared gender power is the basis for hyper-aggressive war-making men, such as the Spartans, the Zulus, the Iroquois, etc.

Matriarchal Submersion

When one gender sphere is squashed or submerged by the other we have an unhealthy society. In traditional, Middle Sea Based [Roman, Semitic, Hellenic] Societies, where nomad conquerors had completely crushed lesser tribes, the status of free manhood was denied conquered men and they were driven into the household as its close master, now squashing the matriarchy under them as they became hairy women. Upon meeting Western Settlers, Amerindians rarely identified European men as men, but as mutilated women, for they farmed and stayed housebound, not hunting and journeying and raiding, but behaving like native women. In this situation, the civilized woman becomes a slave in the same house that a barbarian woman would have ruled, forcing her man to range far and wide and deal with the world rather than huddle womanlike in his false castle.

Patriarchal Decapitation

Ron West, adopted member of the Blackfeet people, calls his people matriarchal, as that is their anthropological designation and we westerners who labeled them so see and shared power between the matriarchal and patriarchal spheres as matriarchal—or female dominated. In reality, according to Ron’s own history of the tribe, the Blackfeet men were not the slaves and servants of the women, but shared equally the powers of the tribe. Then the whites came and split the chiefs between loyalists and drunken puppets and their Jesuit priests went directly for the women and converted them to Christianity, which was how the Catholics originally converted the Germanic kings, by getting to the queen first, which was allowed, because civilized and monkish men were regarded by both red and white barbarians as “effectively female” and allowed access to the women, who, since they occupied an honored place next to the men, had equal influence, which was enhanced by the fact that the men had been split by drug addiction and venomous diplomacy. Thus the natural men find that half of their number have been seduced by the Whiteman’s drugs, that their women have been seduced by his religion and are separated from the community. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the men now face irrelevance in their manly sphere, for a handful of stone age warriors—even super warriors—cannot fight the machine arm of a million man state and no longer have game to hunt, or the freedom to range widely and are thus left with nothing.

There is essentially no difference in how the Indian or the black man have been emasculated by white civilization. Each Indian tribe had its own story and own masculine death and many have managed a revival, have managed to grab back some ground only to have feminism hit them between the eyes.

Black men were originally set aside as the white slave master bred his woman to produce half-breed slaves. After emancipation it took almost a hundred years before black families really began to form. According to Patrick Buchanan in the 1950s, black families were “more churched” than white. According to Thomas Sowell, black men had significantly closed the income gap between 1954-55.

Then, in 1964, LBJ unleashed a plan to destroy the formed-from-scratch black family by initiating State-to-Mother macro-marriage and casting the black man out of the house he had taken a hundred years to build. The process accelerated demonically due to these factors:

1. Not coming from a western, submerged matriarchy, but from Africa, where the gender spheres tend to coexist at a level of separation most reminiscent of the classical Hellenic household, in which men hardly socialized with their wives, who kept separate quarters, people of predominantly African decent are already predisposed to gender separation. The numerous African men I speak to, speak of brothers, fathers and other men of their tribe or nation, not of their mothers, wives and lovers as emasculated Americans of all colors will speak.

2. Not having fully assimilated to the greater American society, cultural disintegration was more likely under such stress.

3. The civil rights movement largely promoted feminist values in a communistic context and came to favor female leadership. One recent example is of the two black female mayors of Baltimore, who have looked to their presidents as father figures and have been petulantly overruled by their white male governor on crime matters. This fatherless-daughter-as-municipal-executive-worshipful of the federal “White Daddy” [I know black women who even called Obama “White Daddy’] was never better illustrated than when Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was told by Eric Holder of the Justice department to stand the police down and she did, as her male underlings seethed with rage. She was eventually trumped by the Whiteman governor who sent in the national guard. In the end, a female mayor is nothing but a slaughter at big daddy’s knee.

4. The low intelligence and high defiance of black criminal youth ensured that most urban black men would never become voters, causing an unbalance between the patriarchy and the matriarchy in the black population, which, to be clear, does not represent a separated community from the white population, but merely an underclass. The only sense of community in the back population is found I the Guerilla Patriarchy.

Guerilla Patriarchy

The black population has been shattered out of community and into social atomization. If one wonders why blacks, as a rule, are fawned over by globalists and the media, it is because the former black community, rendered now into the black underclass, ordered from raped toddlers and shivering addicts in cardboard boxes at the bottom to rappers and athletes and false-maternal icons like Oprah at the top, was the test project for the mono-cropping of humanity, a racially homogeneous, purely class-based mass of unaligned individuals. You whites should look at black America now for a glimpse into the future that has been planned for you. This is meant to be the fate of all peoples, all races, atomization, the division and conquest of society on a subatomic level.

Blacks in American cities call the federal government and the state and municipal tiers and armies of cops, lawyers, social workers and medical persons who are an ever-present hand of unseen but always-felt power in their daily lives, “The Man,” and “White Daddy,” expressions that hark back to the antebellum plantation and before that the English servant plantation, which was ruled by one man, as one Virginia slave master of 1711 put it, “like a biblical patriarch of old.”

This leaves a deep yearning for a flesh and blood daddy figure in the lives of lonely black women and their children. I have had numerous blacks adopt me as their White Daddy, over a hundred at last count and this is often the social role of the boxing coach in urban environments, a breathing bandage for the fatherless soul.

There is another patriarchy, one that is under our noses, bloodying it all the time but remaining unrecognized due to our abysmal, emasculated ignorance.

This is the Guerilla Patriarchy found in various forms. Always extremely, almost cartoonishly, male-dominated and oriented, the postmodern black-identity street gang is an extreme patriarchy, an ephemeral cipher of a society dedicated to the creation and financing of black men—even at the cost of dying before age 35 as most do. This gang activity, exemplified by The Black Guerilla Family (BGF), the name of the most prominent Baltimore area gang, is an extreme reactionary social symptom one may expect from the body sub-politic that remains after the patriarchal structure of a culture has been decapitated. This dynamic actually informed my writing of Reverent Chandler and Malediction Song. This dynamic, the Guerilla Patriarchy is what The Wolves of Vinland and other such neo-barbarian hyper-masculine groups are practicing, albeit in a more sophisticated if less successful way than the BGF and other black identity gangs.

Note that gangster life is distantly modeled on white, Irish criminality in similar urban centers and that, like the Irish before them, the blacks are penetrating law enforcement as well.

Hallmarks of black identity gangster life include the rejection of ‘Government names” in favor of street-names, including the mother's pathetic attempts to invent an atomized identity for her son by giving him a lisping name of pseudo-Arabic inspiration.

Conclusion

Yes there is a black matriarchy, a malformed social order put in place and utterly beholden to Uncle Sam himself for the purpose of extinguishing and suppressing African-American patriarchy.

As emasculated-in-the-cradle civilized Americans, the z man (who declines to express his counter cultural opinion under his real name) and Vox Day, brilliant men though they may be, look at a society such as the many in Africa, where men and women live gender-based lifeways instead of being two-gender Siamese twins like American married couples, and see in this natural, ages old, universally human separation of gender roles and function as matriarchy, largely because the mutilated remains of America Indian tribes whose patriarchal structure had been negated and superseded by the paternal federal government, labeled such societies matriarchal.

We see also, in nations like Sweden and Germany, where the State has turned to a mothering role, an upwelling of the matriarchal urge to be dominated by a very different person—with the majority of women in such places obviously preferring, based on voting outcomes and behaviors, to be gang raped by foreign men than to be served by domestic men.

Achilles and Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Roland and Beowulf, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, would look today at the postmodern American man, who cares more for the company of his wife than for his fellows as some kind of freak of nature, somehow unable to understand that men and women work best together when they remain different and then come together and join as mates, achieving the overlapping of the divergent spheres of femininity and masculinity.

Both the traditional Western perversion of placing the man in the house as the slave of God [See Leviticus] and lord of the woman and the current practice of making of the man a monster and all things masculine monstrous—unless clothed in the flesh of denatured womanhood, are equally distorting and perverse of the natural order of man and woman, protector and nurturer of what is human.

The black rejection of democracy in favor of strong men in Africa and Haiti and of gang life in America, represents a visceral distrust of democratic politics, as democracy is womanish in all of its squawking aspects, encouraging men to squabble like women and amounting to a popularity contest to determine who gets to aim the Great Gun of State, rather than a trial by danger.

Notes on African Patriarchy

1. African men I speak to almost never speak of the mother or wife without apologizing for rudely inserting a woman into the discussion. Boomy, my cabbie friend, is in charge of checking homework and report cards for his daughter, the wife having no authority here. He and other Nigerian men are very patriarchal in outlook. Mobi regarded his mother and her tribe as unimportant to his formation as a man and resents her Americanized meddling with his daughter.

2. In fractured American and Americanized black populations like Baltimore and Liberia, rape by black men is experienced by over 80% of black females, representing a seething animosity toward the forced false matriarchy of the husbandless mother backed by the meta-patriarchy of the State.

3. African queens were less numerous than European queens, had fewer powers and were less warlike than kings, where European queens were more warlike than their kings. The Queen of Uganda was a gigantic fertility goddess that drank milk all day long and had to be rolled around and bathed by attendants. The explorer John Hanning Speke measured her rear end and thighs like a farm animal with no complaint made by her king or people.

4. The Masai are and were dominated by lion-hunting warriors and their women adore them like kings.


(photo credit: Old East Africa Postcards)

5. The Zulu kings forbade their young men to have intercourse with their wives-to-be until they had fought in a battle.

6. The Haitian slaves that rose up in the wake of the French revolution rejected the Rights of Man and wished to fight under a king. One, Mimeca, dictated a letter to the effect that he was a warrior and had fought under three kings, one of the Congo, one of France and one of Spain, and would not accept a collective notion of rule.

7. The famous Amazons of the West African KINGDOM of Dahomey were 5,000 wives of the king, subject to his patriarchy and bearing his children and otherwise permitted to live as men, shouldering arms in the field on his behalf and taking a wife to care for their household and child. This is, in all aspects, a patriarchal arrangement.

8. The current King of Swaziland has numerous wives at his disgusting disposal—hardly a matriarchal arrangement.

9. Hip Hop, or gangster rap, is a vicious attack on matriarchal notions, a feral, woman-hating reveling in unilateral male dominance, and is the single most influential cultural contribution to American public life made by Americans of African descent.



10. Kangs and Queens is a strong motif in Hip Hop culture. Any man who has bedded black women, as I have, knows that they are slaves to the male penis even more so than the famously slutty white women of the hipster and millennial generations. Once you dick a black woman she is your slave until you cast her off, and then she is your most murderous enemy. Most black women abandon their children for hours on end to be inseminated by random men, but preferably Gangster Kangs and White Daddies: clear patriarchal figures. Most food stamp money spent in Baltimore is dedicated to the feeding of luxury meats to the temporary king in her dubious bed, while her children eat cheap hot dogs and ramen noodles. This is not patriarchy or matriarchy, but a symptom of the grasping grossness of a psychologically mutilated people, attempting to purchase some parody of kingship and queenship—some balanced joining in the shadow of the system that has denatured them so coldly—with the bribe that bought their humanity.

Civilization is Evil.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Monday, May 15, 2017

On Blood Sacrifice

This post is the fourth part in a series of discussions between James and Lynn on the work of Nassim Taleb, see part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Lynn:  Taleb wrote a piece on lent, Easter, and blood sacrifice that I wanted to discuss with you. My thoughts were that the lack of blood sacrifice in Western religious practices is akin to the relinquishment of the individual's responsibility for violence to the State. No bloodshed means no spiritual life. When I read the King James Bible at age 19, one of the few things I was able to gather from it is that worshiping God in the Old Testament meant sacrificing to God. It does not mean singing songs while swaying in the church pew. I grew up going to various super-fun-rock-band churches (that is from Ann Barnhardt, Queen of Crackpots), and the songs just make my skin crawl. I don't mind singing the older hymns though.

So far from requiring blood, or any effort whatsoever, most modern "non-denomenational" Christian churches insist that there is nothing for Christians to do but say a few magic words and accept salvation. It never felt right to me.

James:  Lynn, there are so many varieties of new Christian churches that I cannot even address that subject, other than to say that these churches only remain vibrant for the first two generations. There is a constant branching by young Christians, making their own churches, even building them with their hands, in a never ending attempt to correct for the materialism that tends to creep so easily into church life.

My sister left the Catholic Church to join a first-generation church. In the Catholic Church, as a boy, I was exposed to the gay, light-rock, feel-good, hippie version of New Age Catholicism and even at eight, saw it is a phony attempt to make religion cool for kids. There is, in Catholicism, a focus on sacrifice and the symbolism of blood, but the only sacrifice asked by the priest is the donation. I recall my parents being humiliated when their two dollar donations were posted in the church weekly, next to those made by business owners and CEOs. This is where religion always ends up and that is why American Christians have reformed as young churches constantly, for the four centuries of our continually fracturing history.

In the Appalachian and rural piedmont churches I have attended, the notion of sacrifice seems to focus on not taking the many pleasures that the gross world offers—a post monastic form of abstinence that fits well in such a pleasure-saturated society and I think makes a good surrogate for bleeding. The better postmodern churches are, in a sense, fertile monasteries.

Also, there is still a crusading notion among rural Christians who make up the bulk of U.S combatants in its money-grubbing wars, a notion I see as being exploited by the globalists, but is authentic none-the-less in the minds of many, who see themselves as holding back The Caliphate.

The musical orientation of some of the money-focused, feel-good churches you mention reminds me of the black ghetto churches in Baltimore, which manage to concentrate money and sexual access in the person of a store front minister. The only sacrifice being made in these churches is the woman’s giving of her oft-sampled sexual goods to the neighborhood patriarch, who stands as the alternative to the other two patriarchs in the black community: the drug king pin and White Daddy [government].

Traditionally, in American Protestantism, the notion of sacrifice has been Abrahamic, in that sons were sacrificed to the wars of expansion that spread the Gospels among the Heathen and that the lives of the early plantation Congregationalists in New England were literally sunk into the alien soil in their effort to eradicate the native forest ecology and replace it with a grassland. In 1868, Messach Browning recalled that he had done his Christian duty by siring a family of 64 sons, grandsons and great grandsons, who stood ready to fight for his nation—an overtly Christian nation.

Aside from the sacrifice of sons in war and the more heroic sacrifice of one’s self [which has never been the preferred American sacrifice, sons being favored over self], the protestant ethic of toil, or doing what a man can to live a virtuous life on an evil earth is almost Roman in character. The best example of this would be the ploughing scene in Sergeant York, where the hero, played by Gary Cooper is shown working the land, literally attacking the rugged natural environment.

In respect to sacrifice, in American culture, the notion among Catholics has been completely farmed out to the past, of Jesus taking the full burden. The aspects of sacrifice are revered, but they are not for men. This has really caused the guilt-rot to emerge strongly in American Catholicism, with third world immigrants and even Islam—the religion—being embraced as suffering foci for the post-suffering American Catholic. Currently joint Islamic-Catholic services are being held in Baltimore, and old Catholics, like my mother and aunt are being guilted into sitting through Spanish mass next to Mexicans carrying baby dolls in coffins. In this fashion the elder women in my family act out the simpering sacrifice of identity before the altar of their all-erasing God.

I suspect that the above notion of guilt-based sacrificed, of living prosperously as the benefactors of an ancient God’s suffering, lingers even in the secular, ethical construct of American Atheism, wherein a nominally Christian person, secularized beyond redemption, is led to believe that his abstinence from actual sacrifice can be atoned for by sacrificing his unborn children via omission, and stepping aside in sterile old age as the suffering slave class from Latin America and beyond takes the places at the American Table of the Last Supper that might have been occupied by his children.

The turning point for me, is the year of my birth, 1963, and the Yul Brynner movie Kings of the Sun, with Shirley Anne Field and George Chakiris. Brynner plays a proto-Comanche Indian chief who at first opposes, then allies with a fleeing Mayan King and his exiled people. The King, played by Chakiris, at one point overrules the high priest in the matter of sacrifice, noting that this new land was so fertile that no sacrifice need be made. [This is a heavily propagandistic story line aimed at indigenous white America.] In the end, the sacrifice is made on the temple stairs, when the native Chief, played by Brynner, dies defending the refugees from their pursuing enemies on the very stairs of the un-bloodied sacrificial pyramid. In the year of my birth a movie maker was already preaching what the new Christian sacrifice would be in America, the extinguishing of identity and patrimony, in favor of refugees from across the sea.

To get back to your objection to “singing songs and swaying in the church pew” as a form of religious expression that has replaced sacrifice, I might add that available evidence hints at conversion to Christianity of black slaves by their white masters as facilitated more easily by indulging the African penchant [which does, indeed, seem to be genetic] for song and dance. Again, the sacrificial aspect of toil is present, as it was through the entire Middle Ages, when the suffering serf carried the fighting and praying classes on his back in return for the promise that his way to eternal paradise had been assured by the sacrifice of Christ.

In summation, it is my opinion that in the Western World, with all of its indigenous traditions submerged by Christianity and with Christianity itself fighting off cycle after cycle of corruption introduced by the rampant materialism of modernity, that the notion of sacrifice remains three-tiered as it always has: work from the poor, money from the merchant, blood from the powerful and their pawns and offered with words from the ruling class.

The latter has three postmodern manifestations:

1. The powerful, and those of a liberal mind who align themselves with the elite, by and large, sacrifice their bloodline to their post-Christian ideology, by forgoing reproduction and adopting suffering groups and individuals as their children, in this way retaining much of the psychology of sacrifice.

2. The massive, secular edifice of modernity—in its America form—has retained a Christian patina, with mottos such as, “In God We Trust,” and “One Nation Under God,” not yet stricken from the American creed, encouraging predominantly Christian combatants to sacrifice their lives in the “The War on Terror.”

3. Every day, in every mid-sized to large city in America, the thugs of the Black Urban Mob that have risen since 2014, are shedding the blood of those who must bleed and die for the crime of being born white. Among the victims one will see a strong tendency not to blame their attackers, a common aspect of sacrificial victim behavior.

Thank you, Lynn.

(c) 2017 James LaFond and Lynn Lockhart

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Defeating the Perspective Trap

James, let's continue our discussion on Taleb's antifragility, see part 1, and part 2.

LL: I think you have applied this idea of antifragility in your own life quite extensively, especially the way that any aggression displayed against you is material for your writing. I often wonder what the learning process must have been like for you, much earlier in your life, as you developed your approach to managing the constant aggression in your environment. Can you comment on that?

JL:  At 11, after five years of being beaten and tormented by older children and teenagers, I talked my father into a punching bag and weight set and stayed inside until I could hit hard enough to make the floor above shake. The first ingredient a person needs to deal with aggression is the ability to apply aggression. You have to make at least one example before you can begin the nuanced threat negotiation that has typified most of my life. The sports comparison would be that you have to attain a certain baseline conditioning to engage in the sport in a learning way. By age 15 I had an aura of menace that kept almost everyone away. After nearly killing a man at 18 and narrowly avoiding prison time, I unlearned this, and had to learn it again on the job and on the way to work. By age 31, when I walked into a strip club—all 143 pounds of me—bouncers wanted to be my friend, businessmen would ask me to take their seat and the strippers would compete for my attention. This had only to do with the fact that I had become used to dealing with mobs of black youth and crews of gangbangers six nights a week and carried myself on a constant combat footing—was flat-out suicidal for most of my 30s. I had a D& D Charisma rating of 6 out of 18—just a bad actor who never initiated. The negroes could smell this, that I was like a coiled snake. I was really a creepy person who was utterly callous with everyone but my sons. My wife suffered greatly from this studied neglect of the softer parts of the world.

LL: Taleb has noted that he avoids anything or anyone that is "middle brow." He associates with only the most elite in any academic field, or taxi drivers, doormen, (and maybe grocers?). Back in 2008 he was getting death threats for his comments on the banks and markets and took up deadlifting to deter attacks. Now his deadlift is over 300 lbs (he is in his late 50s with no previous athletic history). He loves hanging in the gym with the meatheads. He doesn't care for extensive proofreading of his writing, which is something he has in common with you. You specialize in mining the dregs of Baltimore for both your fiction and non-fiction. You have also been memorializing the lives of so many who served in unacknowledged slavery during the "colonial" era. Is it a coincidence that our elites wish to erase these classes of people who possess a type of understanding that has been effectively brainwashed out of the more compliant, educated classes?

JL: Okay, Lynn, you know how you continually take umbrage over my assertion that I’m a dumbass? Well, I am. I won’t get into the years of crying as a child as I tried and failed to learn basic math, even with a tutor and remained unable to read two years after my younger brother was reading toy assembly instruction. Yet, the people in the middle of our society—you and most of my readers, who are college educated or brilliant laymen—are continually dumbfounded at how I can make deductions and observations that astound men such as Ulric Kerensky—who is a flat-out genius, I mean a dude who could have been a Tesla in another age, before the regimentation that drives minds like his underground. He calls it wisdom, what I have, and he is right. How did I get all of this insight that the big brains and beautiful minds gawk at and misunderstand?

I aspired to learn, to read, and finally did. Made certain to read what others generally did not, history, anthropology, religion as well as the wars all boys read about. I did this so I could feel smart, not having the confidence to compete with others mentally in any way. Then, knowing myself unsuited for middle management, I stayed at the bottom of the bottom of the working class economy, a simple clerk in grocery stores for decades, refusing 13 offers of promotion as I slowly learned, and then finally learned that I was seeing that business from a perspective that no management person sees it from, as managers start on their track early and never gain deep experience at the low level. I had lower class perspective. When I finally agreed to a management job I held out for the top spot and got it, doing things that smarter, more experienced mangers—who could actually count money, for instance—could not do. I understood the engine that drove 60% of supermarket volume like no one else. I built a 7-man crew that carried a 110 person store out of failure and into profit.

Lynn, the people in the middle always suffer from lack of perspective—they are the meat, the grist of the social mill, the dupes and the fools. In early modern Britain, as the poor were being driven to the cities by the rural rich, where they were preyed upon my the Dickensian middle class, they formed an alliance with the urban old money, the heirs of fading fortunes and formed what was called “The Fancy” and came to be known as “the sporting set,” in America. The men at the social apogee and at the social knee saw the world in like and ancient ways, where the herd, the flock, the fold of the merchant class and those aspiring to a place on its lower rung, clung to the merchant values that amounted to the worship of property and shunned all things spiritual, such as honor. The Fancy birthed prizefighting as the sport it is today, gangs of poor thugs and sets of dandy’s working as pug and sponsor, attendant and spectator to the fighters, their living mythic heroes, a thumb in the eye to the depraved middle class who campaigned for an end to prizefighting for over a century and failed. The middle class even fell like ducklings into the cult of celebrity born by boxing—with John L. Sullivan being the very first modern celebrity.

Men low and high saw that materialism was ultimately the death of humanity and gloried in risking health and fortune in a brutal imitation of the ancient heroes that had returned to the human imagination with the translation of Greek and Latin literature from the ancient world. Boxing literature from 200 years ago is chock full of ancient comparisons. The poor men played the hero to their fellows and betters as the smartest of the rich men read to them or wrote for them of the ancient heroes.

In short, Taleb figured out what I only learned through gross repetition and long years in the social depths he somehow framed in his imagination.

LL: Taleb has also introduced another concept -- skin in the game. This is probably the most important. He says you cannot trust anyone who does not take risks in their field. I can think of quite a few ways you exhibit this quality, and have therefore earned high credibility. For one thing, you write under your own name, in topics that are highly taboo, both to the ruling class and to some of the dissident groups. You are a pedestrian in possibly the most dangerous city in the US. You gave up your lucrative day job to write. I don't think there is a better example of skin in the game than your work on ancient weapons through Modern Agonistics. How can anyone believe a Ph.D. sitting in his office, when James LaFond has sacrificed blood and bone to learn the use of these weapons, in addition to your extensive reading?

JL:  He re-introduced the oldest masculine aspect of tribal life into our sick world of liches, wraiths and zombies. Lynn, now you know why I resist pleas to scamper to safety out of Baltimore, because skin in the game is all I really have that most literate humans lack, the source of my only real value as a non-fiction writer.

Now, the Ph.D. in his office cult that we have has real roots. Amongst the large brained creatures that make up my leadership [a Freudian typo I’m keeping since you people have pretty much led me around by the literary nose—I don’t even decide what I read anymore. I’m like a crib-note generator for busy minds.], I probably fall on the short end of the scale in terms of brain power, but am swimming in a wealth of experience. Think of a more primitive society—like Big Ron’s Baltimore—where the average knucklehead is nearly retarded and a fellow of mine and Ron’s good but not great intelligence, becomes a sage or the guy with the right read on a situation while others get run over by a chain of events they may have initiated. When everybody has the same experience, then being the Ph.D. is a big deal. This is the position of the coach in athletics. The intelligence of coaches over athletes is usually a larger spread than you’d see between management and labor. This, again, encourages high levels of adaptability in sports, with pro athletics outpacing most sciences in terms of adaptation of application, because you have brilliant coaches with a gut knowledge of the activity, communicating with the meatheads getting hit. Very few high-level athletes show any aptitude for coaching. So, where does the Ph.D. cult fit?

It fits in barrooms, in locker rooms, in a kick-ass Colonel’s command center, that’s why sports and war and beating the shit out of people, evolve and a democracy—a thing all about the collective center, about meat herders making the herd feel like they are serving it—has not changed since Athens.

Thanks for making me think this morning.

James

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

Monday, April 24, 2017

On Becoming Antifragile

James,

We have discussed offline Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility, detailed in his book "Antifragile." Briefly the concept is that things may be fragile, that is, easily damaged; or they may be robust, that is, not easily damaged; but it is also possible to take the spectrum further, and look for things that are antifragile, that benefit from stress, attacks, or the passage of time. Taleb gives the example from Greek myth of the Hydra, which grows two new heads each time one is cut off. What are your thoughts on this characteristic?

Lynn

Lynn, thanks for stretching my brain space again.

What would my boxing coaches say about Taleb’s antifragile concept? In other words, if I had summarized the anti-fragile concept to them in a training session, what might they have said:

Reds Foley: “If you don’t learn to move that head they’ll soon be no room in there for those big ideas.”

Big Rich: “No shit, Sherlock—give me another round!”

Raphael: “Steel sharpens steel. We don’t sharpen our knives with silk pillows.”

Mister Jimmy: “Some genius got paid for saying that? I wonder if he’ll by my car. The transmission is shot.”

Mister Frank: “That’s the foundation of what we do here. I’d like to speak to this man. I’m sure I could learn something from someone smart enough to figure that out without stepping in the ring.”

In other words Lynn, this is clearly known to anyone who has fought and who trains to fight or trains others to fight. There is all the equipment and technique to learn, the hundreds of rounds spent shadow boxing and meditating on method. However, one is not made fight ready until he is set to sparring with a partner.

That partner, if inept, and posing no danger to the fighter, will make this fighter weaker, will leach from him the essence he is trying to increase.

There are also numerous pitfalls to sparring, as many unproductive things that can crop up as productive. If sparring is mistaken for fighting, for instance, retardation and fixing of an incomplete skill set may occur. If conducted sensibly, sparring, with the right sparring partner, which means a partner who poses some level of threat, is the only way one progresses in the training environment in such a way as to translate to the fight venue. But even this, since there are various takes on the behavior that fall short of the actual fight, only achieves a portion of a fighter’s evolution.

Where the fighter gains mastery—the only place this occurs—is in that most dangerous setting where he can be stopped, injured, maimed or killed. Being stopped may cause a type of spiritual damage that is essential an injuring, maiming or killing of the fighting spirit.

The fighter is brought along in evolutionary steps to prepare him first for an “antifragile” immersion in sparring and then finally in competition where the nature of the more lethal environment will greatly increase his adaptive quality.

This antifragile notion is, perhaps tied to Nietzsche’s dictum, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Admittedly, in the case of boxing, the coach is pre-selecting an antifragile—let’s call him hyper-adaptive, though “robust” is really perfect, to be cultivated as an evolving combatant in progressively more stressful training session and then fights, in such a way that the fighter literally ascends a transformative field of experience, a field of experience ritually and perilously far beyond the domesticated norms of the civilized experience.

LL:  James, you quote Nietzche, whom Taleb discusses at length in the book, and in your last paragraph you note the importance of pre-selection on the part of the coach, another topic he covers extensively.  It fascinates me to see intersections between seemingly disparate intellects, your insights particularly so, since you seamlessly combine both modes of inquiry, that of the intellect and that of the physical.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Considering a Primal Human Perspective

A Prequel to the Author’s Interview with Lynn Lockhart


Lynn, you’ve asked me some pretty big questions and also to match wits with a man that has put forth some daunting ideas. Before answering I should make plain my divergence from modern society so that an understanding can occur.

Modernity places man in his masses under ideologies, according to numbers.

I disagree.

Most blatantly I disagree with this approach to violence studies. For instance, the FBI did a comparative analysis of Cocaine-Boom Miami circa 1980 and Dodge City, a hundred years earlier, and declared parity between the two, as they use numbers of people under threat, not area of habitat under threat to determine risk of violence, with their stupid how many deaths in 100,000 equation.

What this showed was that Dodge City and Scarface Miami were both equally violent to an unacceptable degree. Ever since people have used the euphemism that if guns are not taken away from Americans, than our cities will become like “The Wild West”

Well if Baltimore was like the Wild West, we would have had only one homicide last year. That’s right, in the year Dodge City was compared to Miami during the drug cartel high tide, one man was killed and that in a voluntary duel over a woman?

Not one murder, just a man slaughter. And, according to the FBI, that is equivalent to Cuban thugs and Columbian Narcos hosing down strip malls with machine guns while women and children are shopping?

Why would these geniuses—and they are geniuses, unlike I who could not pass the FBI entrance exam—come up with such a false model?

It is simple, the FBI is a branch of the U.S. government, and that government like all other modern state systems is engaged in people farming. Just as shepherds and ranchers count their livestock so do our handlers.

This, I see as a departure from most of human history and prehistory and has its roots in the two great submissive faiths, Christianity and Islam. Islam means submission, with Muslim men taking names that proudly declare themselves the slaves and servants of God. In Leviticus—in the very book of the Old Testament that justifies enslavement, God’s Chosen People are declared to be his slaves, and should therefore strive to keep one another free of lesser bonds of servitude to outsiders. Being raised Catholic, the idea that I was supposed to submit as a first response to an invocation of authority over my person and my soul was explicit in the ritual kneeling, the constant reference to God, His Son and Prophets “shepherding” their “flock,” coupled with the “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s admonition that our parish priests quoted often, indicating that I should be a submissive subject of a government, that I should be livestock.

This doctrine of submission to God and his representatives insured that Christianity and Islam would be the dominant faiths over most of the planet. And breadth means something here. For these faiths are the blueprints for interacting with the human habitat. There may have been more Hindus at one point, but the adherents to that religion were geographically limited, meaning that fewer aspects of creation fell under their religion’s influence. And to people before the materialistic ethos and atheism supplanted so much of the metaphysical construct humanity lives within, Creation meant something, something more than a pile of rock to be rendered into ore and smelted into precious commodities.

Many current critics of the “Abrahamic” faiths take issue with their ethnic or environmental origin. But the fact is that most tribal conquest resulting in civilizations feature violent, herding people displacing the ruling class of a submissive toiling people, who are naturally viewed as cattle, and hence chattel. This was obvious to all pre-modern societies. But modern society operates under a fiction, far less plausible than the idea of God, that is the idea of “civil service” or “democracy,” the insane notion that the cattle rule the ranch through their bellowing.

Before we continue with the dialogue on Taleb’s work, I’d like to make it plain that I see the human being in terms of his relationship to God, which includes the environment, and excludes the herd, the human shepherds. It is obvious that the sacred creeds of submission informed those who structured modern state systems and political ideologies, and that these notions of Dar al-Islam and Christendom contained a more ancient notion of habitable space, not simply the numbers of their flocks.

Before the Industrial Age, Europeans thought in terms of faith far more than race and would speak of “Christian lands,” placing people in their living context and beyond it, rather than in our atomized way. Muslims had a similar view and retain far more of it than we secularized Christians.

“…he regarded himself as a citizen, not of a country called Morocco, but of the Dar al-Islam, to whose universalist spiritual, moral and social values he was loyal above any other allegiance.”

-Ross E. Dunn on Ibn Battuta

Early Christianity retained much of the ancient, holistic, human worldview, before it was gradually reduced to an ethos to support Modernity. Many Christians [I’m not one] have a sense for this and are continually reinventing the Church on a smaller scale, whether localized or inward-reaching, even bordering on the shamanic, like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, in which he discusses “the silence of fathers” in our denatured society. In a larger sense the ethical systems derived from these religions are, too, silent, which is why I wanted to discuss Taleb’s antifragile concept and his related opinion concerning the absence of sacrifice, after this attempt to place it in a truer context.

I’ll address Antifragile, and then sacrifice, over the next two weeks.

Thanks for the demanding line of inquiry.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Friday, April 7, 2017

The GQ Mugging Inquest by James LaFond

From early 2013 through late 2014, the author, an urban violence researcher and novelist, visited one Northeast Baltimore bar where a handful of middle-aged men gathered to speak of sports, their work day, the current news, and of their youth. The GQ Mugging Inquest is his impression of their interesting, entertaining, and ultimately manly, art of conversation.

The GQ Mugging Inquest is a study in masculine culture, specifically the art of bonding conversation between African-American men of the generation that came of age in the 1960’s and 70s.

Kindle & paperback

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

The Scale of Warfare; Q&A with James LaFond

Masculine Revival in the Face of the Machine State: From the Peace of Westphalia to the Marseilles Soccer Hooligan Clash and the Baltimore Riots


Note to reader: If you haven't read James LaFond's post "No Small Beer," or seen the related video, you should go there first.

The video is an hour long and well worth watching, but the gist of it is that there is a growing movement of Soccer Hooliganism in Russia. Young men are training and fighting one another in groups, and in 2016, around 200 of these Hooligans went to Marseilles during the World Cup and attacked their English counterparts. English Hooliganism has seen better days and they were unaware and unprepared for the battle. The video was put out by the BBC and has the predictable biases.

LL: James, you have observed that the Peace of Westphalia marked the beginning of "national machine warfare." Relatedly, Nassim Taleb has proposed, also citing the Peace of Westphalia, in "Antifragile," that the existence of nation-states, as opposed to city-states, feudal and tribal groups, led to the pattern of war of the twentieth century, with large scale conflict, and has left the world with far greater danger of catastrophic war than ever in history. This contrary to the popular view (from Steven Pinker) that violence, including warfare, is on the decline world wide. Taleb's point is that having numerous local skirmishes is much safer than having large powers in constant tension, and we won't know how bad it could get until it does.

JL:  Lynn, first, violence within society continues to increase, counter to law enforcement data. Society is now more violent per foot space than it ever was. However, since our intellectuals deal in violence per 100,000 , an intrinsically dehumanized scale, we, like the wildebeest, are seen as rarely preyed upon. Medieval studies of violence show a high per-capita rate of violence. However, per-capita notions are artificial. What is important is violence per foot. How dangerous is the place where you live if you removed everybody but yourself and the predators? That is the psychologically impactive view, what produces alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, ennui, decadence…

Furthermore, if we go along with the misleading and fundamentally flawed FBI notion of macro-data qualified violence we see the following when compared with my first hand survey:

In 1996, only 25% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

In 2016, only 5% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

During this 20 year period law enforcement has made a multi-layered commitment to reclassifying violence down, with home invasions becoming destruction of property, muggings becoming theft, etc.

Beyond this is the fact that most aggression does not result in legally definable aggression. Me following you to your car and then walking on by because your husband happens to be sitting in the car, when if he hadn’t I would have attacked you, is not definable by law enforcement.

Also, where murders may remain stagnant, with handgun killings staying steady nationwide and stabbing perhaps doubling, blunt force attacks, as the admittance of clubbing and beating victims do not trigger law enforcement responses as do gunshot, stabbing and rape admittances, have greatly increased, with cagey criminals averse to prison time switching to blunt force away from firearms and edged weapons.

Taking the above factors, from Baltimore City, into account, how can anyone look at a marginal decrease in overall killing stats across the nation, or a reduction of robbery stats [which are heavily massaged by reporting methods] and see a less violent world, where it is at least three times as violent.

A better way to rate aggression would be to track the sale and installation of plexi-glass counter shields at retail outlets and aggregate them, meaning the bulletproof counter installed on North and Maryland 40 years ago is still in use, and all of those built since, at an accelerating rate, actually amount to a manifold doubling of hostile points of aggression and predation across the real physical landscape rather than in the contrived theoretic landscape of the FBI macro stats.

As for the Peace of Westphalia, which traditionally dates the rise of the nation state, projecting force with conscription-based armies over kingdoms and republics employing feudal obligations and mercenary employment for force projection, here are my immediate thoughts.

The defeat of the Spanish tericos [combined arms regiments loyal to the king of Spain] that led to the Peace of Westphalia, killed whatever connection to warfare that heroism had, that is whatever the brutal 30 years war had not already erased. In a very real sense, that war, from 1618 to 1648 was when God was killed on the battlefield along with the divine right of kingship. Kings would now increasingly become a class of managerial despot compromised by their advisors. That war also saw the first WMD, the Hell-Burner of Antwerp. The Spanish were as evil as the rest of the players. But their soldiery still held to notions of heroism that would soon only find expression in dueling and prize fighting, which emerged at this very time as a plague on the officer class. We see honorable violence being pushed downward into society as the first modern slave armies [they emptied the prisons and whore houses to fill the ranks] sterilized war of meaning as it became a collective expedient.

LL:  James, do you think the Russian Soccer Hooligans represent a return to tribal warfare? You point out in the comments to that article that these firms fight one another for practice. By fighting firm vs. firm, they signal the safety of their towns, and by joining up to fight the English, they can also signal national strength.

JL:  The fact is that these hooligans are engaging in warrior pursuits with meaning as only a few hundred men of any nation can engage in meaningful warrior activity in the machine-minded armed services. Once you get below the special operations types you just have a welfare state-prison-school-system in uniform.

LL:  I have mixed feelings about what they did in Marseilles, but I wonder if there aren't a few English and French who would think twice now about going to war with Russia?

JL:  Such notions as national will for war are really obsolete. War is now a machined wraith of its former self, a form of macro-policing by globalists and doomed resistance by nationalists, and has been such since 1948. This Marseilles clash was about the Russians using the occasion to assert their masculine humanity over the decadent Brits, in essence saying, “We will remain Russians and men, as you are thrown on the scrap heap of humanity by the soulless system that your grandfathers fought to erect, which has now begun eating its own, reducing you to neither men or Englishmen, but a shadow without a ghost—you revolted against Modernity and sank into sloth and we carry on.”

The Russians are letting the British and the dying West know that they have all become like Tolkien’s ring wraiths—terminally, amorally domesticated ciphers.

LL:  Looking back over this I have left out what I really wanted to talk about which is your idea about outsourcing violence.

We have seen that an individual man has the right to risk his own body in the violent endeavors of his choosing. You have made your life's work out of sharing your violent experiences, and we learned about some of the physical consequences last week.

By joining firms, these young Russian men compromise themselves to a group, albeit a small and highly accountable one. The leaders of the group are fighting alongside the recruits and we saw that the fighting and the leading are inextricably linked when Vasily indicated that he had retired from fighting and firm leadership, without distinguishing between the two. Moving up the scale any further removes the warrior role from the leaders who are responsible for disposing of their lives.

JL:  Lynn, you have just described a real—if circumscribed within the confines of modernity—a real, actualized return to the hero bands of primal antiquity. Vasily and his men are Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and his Crew, Jason and his Argonauts, Achilles and his Myrmidons and Beowulf and his dozen heroes. As strange as it seems Russian soccer Holliganism is a protest against outsourced aggression-based society and an expressed yearning for a return to a primal lifestyle.

LL:  Thank you James.

‘No Small Beer’ - jameslafond.com

‘The European Age’ - jameslafond.com

jameslafond.com

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart