Sliver of Poz

A friend I hadn’t seen for a while related to me his recent experience with employer-mandated racial equity training. Eight hours of it, in fact. I asked him how they managed to fill the time.
“By repeating themselves over and over.” He said. This was broken up by activities–for one, you sit in a group and answer loaded questions like “explain how you’re enriched by diversity”, etc.

They also showed cartoons:

 

My friend had recently abandoned the second-tier state school he was attending because of the ubiquity of political correctness and its fixation on denouncing white males and promoting transgenderism.
A lapsing SJW, he works for the sort of non-profit that foists this sort of thing on itself out of enthusiasm (and taxpayer subsidy) but says there’s a push to make this training mandatory throughout the private sector.

That might not be such a bad thing. This guy is in the process of being rapidly deluded by a process of excess indoctrination. Cultural conditioning–television, film, music–works by drips of suggestion and disingenuous cues. It never has to present itself in full and it never has to defend itself.

But when it’s brought out of subtext and to center stage for its big number, it’s very hard for the good people who just want to get along to ignore the insanity of it. I think I’m a big proponent of this training, and the more exposed to it the better.

Faster, harder.

Wahabbism is a Social Construct

Jeffrey Golberg interviews Saudi Arabian crown prince and ruler Mohammed bin Salman in the Atlantic

The prince, in my conversation with him, divided the Middle East into two warring camps: what he called the “triangle of evil,” consisting of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sunni terror groups; and an alliance of self-described moderate states that includes Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman. About his bête noir, the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Prince Mohammed said, “I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good. Hitler didn’t do what the supreme leader is trying to do. Hitler tried to conquer Europe. … The supreme leader is trying to conquer the world.”

 The triangle of evil intersects the axis of evil at Iran, which appears to be the juncture of Israeli and Saudi Arabian interests. Where the prince places the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni terrorists George W Bush placed Iraq as their state sponsor, ignoring at the time Saudi Arabia could far more easily be described as just that.

The thirty two year-old MbS, as he’s known, appears to be out to modernize Saudi Arabia as rapidly as he can get away with, in conjunction with a grand plan to move beyond an oil economy called Vision 2030. Combined with an abandonment of the Palestinians and an all-but-open alliance with Israel against the Shia represented by Iran, he comes as if ready-made for the global order. Liberalizing Saudi Arabia is to be open for business.

And that’s Saudi Arabia’s business, of course, but when the West is filling up with young male Sunnis who aren’t bound for glory in their new homes, I worry any terrorist campaign against his government will operate out of and engulf Europe.

The prince cites the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the birth of Islamic extremism. This is a recent theme, tracing the seizure of the Grand Mosque by similarly radicalized Sunnis and the subsequent conservative period in which Saudi Arabia remains, including its appeasement and sponsorship of radical Islam all back to today’s enemy, Iran.

Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia are now allied against Iran, and we’re the only one among our “axis” or “triangle” (of stupid?) that hasn’t a discernible national interest in countering Iran, outside of our alliance with the other two.

Goldberg asks the prince about Saudi Arabia’s support for Wahabbism and the same Sunni extremism he cites in his triangle, and the prince shows a distinctly Western facility for evasion-by-definition:

Goldberg: Isn’t it true, though, that after 1979, but before 1979 as well, the more conservative factions in Saudi Arabia were taking oil money and using it to export a more intolerant, extremist version of Islam, Wahhabist ideology, which could be understood as a kind of companion ideology to Muslim Brotherhood thinking? 

MbS: First of all, this Wahhabism—please define it for us. We’re not familiar with it. We don’t know about it. 

Goldberg: What do you mean you don’t know about it? 

MbS: What is Wahhabism? 

Goldberg: You’re the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. You know what Wahhabism is. 

MbS: No one can define this Wahhabism. 

Goldberg: It’s a movement founded by Ibn abd al-Wahhab in the 1700s, very fundamentalist in nature, an austere Salafist-style interpretation— 

MbS: No one can define Wahhabism. There is no Wahhabism. We don’t believe we have Wahhabism. We believe we have, in Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shiite. We believe we have within Sunni Islam four schools of thought, and we have the ulema [the religious authorities] and the Board of Fatwas [which issues religious rulings]. Yes, in Saudi Arabia it’s clear that our laws are coming from Islam and the Quran, but we have the four schools—Hanbali, Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki—and they argue about interpretation.

No drink of alcohol, no taste of bacon could Westernize him more than this mode of argument. The society of global bugmen have a Prince.

The Foldin’ State

Is it a cliche yet to contrast California’s (old) Utopian aspirations with its dystopian present? It should be. The latest police shooting to be turned into a financial and political shakedown even raided the local NBA franchise with success. Protesters shut down two games and the team responded by partnering with BLM and something called the Build. Black. Coalition. Somehow that name perfectly sums up the movement, shutting things down over and over again. We stutter along.

A city council meeting was shut down by a grandstanding surviving brother. Apparently he also practically climbed into his brother’s coffin at his brother’s funeral-media event, reminding me of the old joke about the usher at the funeral who says “keep an eye on the widow, she looks like a climber”.  The Washington Post’s account tries to soften what you see in photos and video, but it’s pretty remarkable the license being granted the enthusiastically bereft brother, who should probably be in jail.

  A broadening coalition of the fringes addresses the problem::

Sheikh Omar Suleiman, an adjunct professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was the keynote speaker at a town hall meeting at the Salam Islamic Center. The event was co-sponsored by CAIR-SV, Sacramento NAACP, Sacramento Area Congregations Together and a coalition of 10 mosques from throughout the Sacramento region.
Suleiman is scheduled to participate in Thursday’s memorial service for Clark, who had converted to Islam. During the meeting, he and a panel of local faith and community leaders urged an audience of more than 200 people not to let their fervor for justice die, but to fight against what they described as systemic injustice.
Too often, Suleiman said, people don’t mobilize because they don’t recognize that when one minority group is targeted, all are affected.

Clark’s conversion is probably not being looked at too closely by the Imam, who seems to have carved out a sweet niche marketing himself as a moderate Muslim promoter of interfaith dialogue (with a death threat from ISIS to boast of) and Muslim advocate, which included leading a campaign to censor google searches to combat “Islamophobia”. There’s your interfaith dialogue.

It’s notable not all immigrant groups produce religious leaders purporting to lecture us on “systemic injustice”; some take to it more easily than others. It–political activism–doesn’t seem to be correlated with IQ. Higher IQ groups are naturally going to be more able politically, but I don’t see Asian American groups yet allying with the left’s fringe, focusing more on straightforward advocacy.  US Muslim groups look far more eager to ally with what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes. Somalis look from here like a low-IQ, high–let’s call it Political Quotient, or PQ, measuring a tendency to purely political endeavor–group. Somalis are low IQ/high PQ. Compare to, say, Japanese Americans, who I would expect to be high IQ/low PQ. Yer IQ/PQ ratio is key, I tell ya.

Sheikh Omar joins Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump on the scene. These things play out like a loosely scripted television show, where the actors improvise within a given scenario. Except here there’s no desire for spontaneity, and the thing plays out with rigid predictability. They don’t need no dialogue to stick to the script.

The State of the State

From a post-Iraq invasion paper, The New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: the Decline of the State and US Strategy (PDF):

National security policymakers are continuously challenged to ensure that the judgments and assumptions underlying policy, force posture, and provision are congruent with the international environment and the role the United States is playing within it. This has become problematic in the 21st century security environment characterized by complexity, connectivity, and rapid change.
This analysis offers key insights into what is a shifting security environment and considers how the United States can best respond to it. Dr. Phil Williams argues that we have passed the zenith of the Westphalian state, which is now in long-term decline, and are already in what several observers have termed the New Middle Ages, characterized by disorder but not chaos.
Dr. Williams suggests that both the relative and absolute decline in state power will not only continue but will accelerate, taking us into a New Dark Age where the forces of chaos could prove overwhelming. He argues that failed states are not an aberration but an indication of intensifying disorder, and suggests that the intersection of problems such as transnational organized crime, terrorism, and pandemics could intersect and easily create a tipping point from disorder into chaos.

The post-Apocalyptic scenario retains a powerful mythic charm that takes hold of men in their childhood and never completely lets go. We almost yearn for it. The political chaos, cultural degeneration and material comfort of the present mean it won’t go away any time soon–or until the apocalyptic becomes reality.

But how possible is that? Dr Williams’ paper quoted above is about the decline of the state. But we all know now that doesn’t mean a decline in the concentration of power or, forgive my disappointment, complete civilizational collapse returning us to a benighted state of nature.

Underlying the change from traditional geopolitics to security as a governance issue is the long-term decline of the state. Despite state resilience, this trend could prove unstoppable. If so, it will be essential to replace dominant state-centric perceptions and assessments (what the author terms “stateocentrism”) with alternative judgments acknowledging the reduced role and diminished effectiveness of states. 

This alternative assessment has been articulated most effectively in the notion of the New Middle Ages in which the state is only one of many actors, and the forces of disorder loom large. The concept of the New Middle Ages is discussed in Section II, which suggests that global politics are now characterized by fragmented political authority, overlapping jurisdictions, no-go zones, identity politics, and contested property rights.

There’s hope yet I’ll live out my fantasy of driving a Mustang around an abandoned LA a la Charlton Heston in The Omega Man.
But I suspect any dystopian future will be too crowded for that, for one, and technology has advanced too far.

Failure to manage the forces of global disorder, however, could lead to something even more forbidding—a New Dark Age. Accordingly, Section III identifies and elucidates key developments that are not only feeding into the long-term decline of the state but seem likely to create a major crisis of governance that could tip into the chaos of a New Dark Age. 

Particular attention is given to the inability of states to meet the x needs of their citizens, the persistence of alternative loyalties, the rise of transnational actors, urbanization and the emergence of alternatively governed spaces, and porous borders. These factors are likely to interact in ways that could lead to an abrupt, nonlinear shift from the New Middle Ages to the New Dark Age. 

This will be characterized by the spread of disorder from the zone of weak states and feral cities in the developing world to the countries of the developed world. When one adds the strains coming from global warming and environmental degradation, the diminution of cheaply available natural resources, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the challenges will be formidable and perhaps overwhelming. 

Order doesn’t break down so much as it devolves.

States, having reached the zenith of their power in the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, are in a period of absolute decline. The challenges from contemporary globalization and other pressures are neither novel nor unique, but are more formidable than in the past— while the ability of states to respond effectively to these challenges is not what it was. 

In a sense, states are being overwhelmed by complexity, fragmentation, and demands that they are simply unable to meet. They are experiencing an unsettling diminution in their capacity to manage political, social, and economic problems that are increasingly interconnected, intractable, and volatile. States are also undergoing a relative decline, challenged in both overt and subtle ways by the emergence of alternative centers of power and authority.

The forces that are dissolving state authority are the forces that will replace it. Order, of one kind or another, is established eventually.
If you find yourself trapped in some Muslim-held canton of Europe in the future, you will submit to your dhimmitude, official or otherwise, if you can’t get out. Police in Europe have already lost effective control over some neighborhoods. That doesn’t mean there’s no authority there. As this grows I expect eventually Muslims to gain control of official police duties in no-go zones, the white police having lost control of them, with subsequent problems issuing from them having a legally armed force.
Detroit and the black ‘hood have provided America with some training for dystopia-they are in fact just that. If the US succumbs beneath the hordes, history will set our end as beginning with the black riots of the sixties.

Stateocentrism tends to blind its adherents to the democratization and diffusion of coercive power to these nonstate actors. This has more recently been evident, for example, in a growing tendency to dismiss 9/11 as simply a blip rather than an indicator of a major change in world politics.6 Skepticism of this kind about the terrorist threat is unlikely to be dispelled by anything less than another major attack on the U.S. homeland. Yet, even without such an attack, these stateocentric perspectives are increasingly tenuous. Transnational networks and forces of disorder are seriously redrawing the maps of the world—and the lines that demarcate nation-states are becoming increasingly notional, if not wholly fictional. At the same time power and authority are moving away from states to other actors. These trends must now be examined. 

You know what else is redrawing the maps of the world making borders “notional”? The European Union and powerful non-state allies such as George Soros, whose obsession with browning the West contributes as a necessary condition to most of the factors the author cites as “…mutually interlocking and reinforcing conditions which give [global politics] a neo-medieval quality”:
“[m]ultiple or fragmented loyalties and identities”;
“inequality or marginalization of groups”;
“[t]he spread of geographical and social ‘no go areas’ where the rule of law no longer extends”;
“[a] growing disarticulation between the dynamic and technologically innovative north and the south”;
even “contested property rights, legal statutes, and conventions”, of course, which is commensurate at least with the rise of autonomous slums and no go zones.

And only an incidental mention of immigration late in the paper.