I’ve got a couple of haters to talk about, with a common theme this time!
First, Torgo(‘s Pizza) accuses me of writing my blog solely to garner attention:
Hard to hate someone who’s writing is meant to intentionally incite hatred. You associate being popular with being right (Argumentum ad populum). Your screeds are based on generalization fallacies. You treat aspects associated with being the least common denominator of humanity (e.g. sex) as being the zenith of human achievement and your raison d’être. Any rutting animal can have sex. I can’t say whether or not you’re a Christian man, for I haven’t read anything to indicate it, but if you have any readers that are, they should really consider what your writing implies about a person such as Jesus. Just because you obsess with the count on your chalkboard doesn’t mean you’re a better man. Just what are you trying to prove by it? Seemingly, by your standards, Genghis Khan was the greatest man to walk the planet simply by virtue of how much sex he had.
You’re own attempts at countering your critics, in which you use ad hominems yourself and criticize their writing ability is itself arguing by the bombastic (proof by verbosity).
What’s ironic for a person such as myself, I came to this website at first agreeing with some of the basic premises of the site (i.e. antimisandry), but further reading revealed that your content is clearly meant to be sensational, and corrosive for the purpose of increased popularity, rather than rational and logical discourse.
Torgo left that comment a while ago, and I had decided to let it go, but he came back and wrote TWO more comments, like this one:
Quote: “And going back to feminism, multiculturalism allows you to spread your seed among multiple races, ethnicities and tribes without the hassle of getting on a plane. Remember kids, it’s not miscegenation if you use contraception!â€
If you’re using contraception, what’s the point of spreading your seed at all? Or do you have so little self control that your hormones (or more likely ego) dictate your life? It astounds me that you have so many cheerleaders for this type of content. It’s obvious to me that you write this solely to provoke people, not for any intellectual merit, yet if one were to go by the responses here, you’d think this was the lost works of Aristotle.
The guy complains that I’m “writ[ing] this solely to provoke people,” yet he keeps coming back for more. Clearly my methods work. In any event, if you expect intellectual content from a blog, pull your head out of your ass and get a life:
Blogging is a hobby for me, like skiing or hiking. I write to inform AND entertain, in no particular order, and I’ve never claimed to do anything else. If I wanted to be all “intellectual” and stuff, I’d have stayed in the ivory tower and pursued a career writing forty page essays on the symbolism of biopower in the writings of Chretien de Troyes for obscure peer-reviewed journals. Go to your local library and log on to JSTOR or any other academic database and you’ll find all the “rational and logical discourse” your brain can handle. Nobody reads any of it, aside from frustrated humanities undergrads looking to pad out their term paper bibliographies, but hey, it’s “intellectual” right? If your writing isn’t provoking people, your writing isn’t worth reading.
Next, I got into it with some tosser named Andrew E at Dennis Mangan’s blog, who took offense at my suggestion that Lawrence Auster should be ostracized from the conservative blogosphere* for being madder than a hatter:
The problem with Ferdinand Bardamu’s post is that there is no reason for anyone on the right to take him seriously. “Ferdinand” is an adolescent who posts about near conquests of secret virgins during his college days and gratuitously links to pictures of scantily clad women. The idea that this clown — far from simply stating his own opinion — has standing to pronounce anathema on an actual thinker of the right (whatever your personal opinion of Auster may be) who has been published for decades is ludicrous.
The West is in the midst of a moral crisis and we’re supposed to take cues from a guy who said recently that God doesn’t exist, the universe is amoral and good goes unrewarded while evil goes unpunished? Do these words “good” and “evil” even have meaning in the universe Ferdinand thinks we live in? No.
Fortunately, there isn’t much of a problem here as it is Ferdinand who is largely irrelevant and will no doubt remain so.
Yes, apparently sharing stories from your personal life and enjoying the beauty of the female body is enough to get you permanently exiled from the Big, Important Thinkers Club. Way to live up to the stereotype of conservatives being stuffy, sex-hating fuddy-duddies. “Just lie back and think of Jesus, dear. It’ll be over in three minutes and you can get back to your knitting.”
I struck back, and he limply replied with this:
I thank Ferdinand for acceding to the nature of his efforts as I described them earlier. His lack of shame for the crude, base and relativistic character of his writings, in addition to the writings themselves, makes clear that Ferdinand in key respects operates from within the decadent liberal order that is tearing apart our civilization. A wilting violet succumbing to the liberal onslaught.
And of course Ferdinand continues to use words like “sin” which have no meaning in his worldview. Such intellectual incoherency does the right no good.
Yup, poor widdle me can’t hack it with towering intellects like Larry Auster or Laura Wood. Woe befall me that I can’t squeeze out droplets of brilliance like obsessing over Michelle Obama’s facial expressions! I can only wish that I possessed the clarity of thought to declare the men’s movement “a form of spiritual homosexuality” and to regard the death of corsets as a “pressing matter“Â that should be considered “for the sake of future generations!” I shall now spend tonight crying in my beer, lamenting that I shall never reach the heights of these incisive thinkers.
Andrew’s incessant white-knighting for a guy who is quickly turning into the Jim Jones of the right reminds me of a passage John Dolan once wrote about Lord Byron:
[Byron] chose to be noisily “immoral†not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don’t mean “moralism†in a normative sense-God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth’s letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It’s one of the curiosities of English literary history that you’ll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral†poets like Wordsworth.
Only the “mad, bad and dangerous†Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin’s gore†and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy’s corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.â€
That’s the formula Byron worked out for beating the Victorians: keep it low and funny, never flinch, and never stop kicking as hard as you can. He knew that the Victorians, like our Bush-leaguers, could not bear the notion of a world populated by grownups who fucked and laughed. So, at every possible opportunity, Byron counterposed his world to theirs: sexy where the Lakers were determinedly pre-pubescent, Continental where they were fiercely insular, facetious where they were hopelessly earnest.
That’s how you fight humorless, uptight, intellectually incestuous dullards like the Austerites, like-minded conservatives, and tenured leftist college professors – you get down in the dirt and keep hitting ‘em until they scream for mercy. Don’t play by their rules of discourse or conform to their cloistered, warped worldviews (fashioned from a lifetime of keeping their eyes shut to everything around them), but go low and fast and hit them where it hurts.
I also love how Andrew arrogantly claims that my worldview precludes recognizing the concepts of good and evil. Apparently, if I don’t believe in the existence of some magical, all-powerful space man who created the world one day because he was bored, I’m part of some loony lefty world of moral relativism and mindless hedonism. That sort of Manichean, nerdish thinking** is precisely why fewer and fewer people are taking the Aust-rians seriously. Not that it matters in the end. The universe and humanity will go on ignoring the mental masturbations of secluded, deluded intellectuals, as they always have.
…
* – I’m serious about Auster. I’ve removed View from the Right from my blogroll and my RSS reader, and after this post, I will no longer be discussing Auster here or anywhere else. I gave my reasons over at Mangan’s. Tell your friends and spread the word – as far as we on the right are concerned, Lawrence Auster does not exist. Don’t read him, don’t link to him, don’t even think about him. Like a Jehovah’s Witness caught getting a blood transfusion, Auster is to be disfellowshipped and cast out into the wilds until such time as he finds it in his heart to repent.
And on the off-chance that Auster sees this post and decides to go after me to pump up his page views, I will confess that I once considered his dissections of paleocon anti-Semitism to be one of the most important things he did, as I told him in an email I sent him after he approvingly linked my post on Richard Hoste (the only direct correspondence we’ve ever had, and which I’m only telling you about in case he tries to use it against me). But since then, he’s gone completely off the rails.
** – I’m honestly surprised that back when I wrote my post bashing nerds, no one made this obvious connection. Auster is what you get when you combine uber-nerdiness with a heaping helping of mental illness. I hold no ill will against him and sincerely hope the poor guy gets the psychological help he so desperately needs.
{ 58 comments… read them below or add one }
i write my blog solely to garner attention
“if you expect intellectual content from a blog, pull your head out of your ass and get a life”
Actually, when *I* want intellectual content from a blog, I read Elusive Wapiti’s blog. He’s got about fifty more IQ points than you do.
Just because you’re stupid doesn’t mean everyone is.
Now go back to banging herpes patients.
[Not bad for a first-timer. But you'll have to try harder to get the gold. - ed.]
Auster is eloquent and on the subject of race/crime/immigration
[I thought his critiques of liberalism were his most important work. But his dementia and obsession with rooting out anti-Semitism have ruined what good qualities he had. - ed.]
– I’d be glad if you pointed to a better, more solid, hard-right but not nuts blogger on this topic.
[OneSTDV. Dennis Mangan. Mark Richardson. Paul Gottfried. Steve Sailer. John Derbyshire. Guy White. Need I go on? Because I can.]
But I ignore him on topics he’s obtuse on, like male-female relations.
He’s like an inverse Camille Paglia: she’s fantastic on sex/anti-feminism, but I ignore her insipid pro-multi-culti noises, which invariably pop up in every one of her articles.
Losing both Auster and Paglia would be a loss of indispensible commentary on topics that are their respective strength.
I thought his critiques of liberalism were his most important work.
I agree with that. He continues to be an original thinker in this area.
[OneSTDV. Dennis Mangan. Mark Richardson. Paul Gottfried. Steve Sailer. John Derbyshire. Guy White. Need I go on? Because I can.]
Not familiar with some of these. OneSTDV doesn’t strike me as an original thinker of some of the others’ caliber. And nothing wrong with that. His contribution, like many other conservative bloggers,’ lies in simply briging up topics for discussion. By the way, I never got Obsidian’s little obsession with him, as entertaining as it got on occasion.
[Think it had something to do with One calling him out way way back when he first started blogging last year. - ed.]
Derb was my gateway into think-crime back around 2000 as NRO’s Corner contributor. He’s a good, witty writer, but he tempres his presumable true firepower because he makes his living writing for e ‘respectable’ publication.
I am TORGO! I take care of the HOUSE while the MASTER is AWAY!
Somethng else Auster has is passion. When he posts a news item of a baboon knifing an innocent schoolboy in England, he will get righteously pissed off. Many conservative writers, in contrast, will drone on about IQ and future-time orientation, or sigh like tired old men.
I don’t see what’s indispensable about Auster at all. He has a handful of trite catchphrases that he reduces all of those he disagrees with down to. In toto they amount to the same criticism of ‘godlessness’ in some fashion. Auster is an erudite Pat Robertson, or Fred Phelps in essense.
Just squeeling about Darwinists, and reductionists, and the decadence of the liberal order doesn’t fit the definition of intellectual at all. His arguments are usually religious in nature and only vaguely covered with an academic veneer. Even then this seems to be an unintentional side-effect of academic methods rather than the raison d’etre of his work.
Everything at VFR is regurgitation and collation of what is already out there. It’s polished, but it’s not original. Auster never writes anything that is really a shock to the system. It’s never something taken from an angle that isn’t totally predictable. It’s mainstream punditry, offered with a little more zeal.
Occassionally you’ll run across someone who will make some commentary, or crack a joke that they obviously think is original and illuminating. It’s not funny and it’s not original, even if you get chuckles and nods. You and everyone else already thought the same thing, because it was really obvious, and went without saying.
For me, that is Auster. The guy you know who is always asking ‘Get it?’ when you don’t laught as his jokes. I mean I get it, it’s funny even. Just more peculiar funny than ‘Haha’ funny. The delivery of your punchline was good, but you lack the necessary element of surprise in your humour.
“and gratuitously links to pictures of scantily clad women”
Oh dear lord jesus, save my eyes from such carnal knowledge!
Is that an actual COMPLAINT?
I wouldn’t hold up either Lord Byron or John Dolan as examples of sanity. And Dolan should know that Byron’s sympathy for anyone except himself was skin deep. He’d probably have worked Dolan’s poor Irish peasant ancestors to the bone if it meant any extra cash for him, much like he worked those Lancashire coal miners in the coal mines he owned.
I wish you would not remove Auster. You see, it was about a year ago that I discovered you, Roissy, and much of the manosphere as a result of an argument over game, from a link at TakiMag. This has been one of the most intellectually stimulating years of my life. I have little use for the PUA aspects of game, but you and Hawaiian Libertarian have opened my eyes to other applications of it; it makes life better for all, as it helps offset the imbalance of Yin in our society.
You never know which gateway will lead someone to you.
I agree with others in that you’re being too hard on Auster, though I agree that he’s sometimes a little too shrill and cantankerous. But I can ignore this and his sometimes sanctimonious admonishment of others because he provides indispensable material on race, liberalism, and paleocon AS.
[It's precisely this attitude that's enabled his worst personality traits. I used to have it myself. "Oh, he's a valuable thinker, so we can put up with his personality quirks..." Nope. Auster needs to learn that there's a punishment for not being a team player. - ed.]
I don’t understand the hatred for Auster. Yes, he’s too prickly, but that trait is tolerable if one thinks he has good ideas. His recent focus on anti-Semitism has become monotonous and I wish he’d write about something else, but I can’t blame him too much since 1) anti-Semitism is false, and 2) anti-Semites attack him personally because of his Jewish background and would continue to do so no matter what he wrote (unless he “admitted” that they are right, that Jews are always the enemy and cannot help but be such, that all those with Jewish ancestry including himself should be killed or exiled to Israel.)
[One can oppose anti-Semitism while still looking at Jewish behavior with a critical eye. Do you really think the likes of Mangan, Trifkovic, and Gottfried are anti-Semites, as Auster makes them out to be? - ed.]
“1) anti-Semitism is false, and 2) anti-Semites attack him personally”
Hmmm
Not sure that Mangan is not nuts. He recently caught a bad case of “the Jew thing” and can’t seem to shake it off. His sub-moronic amen chorus in the comments section is only encouraging the growth of the disease.
[I read actual, self-labeled anti-Semites like Hunter Wallace and Matt Parrott. Dennis doesn't approach anywhere near their level. If Mangan has a bad case of "the Jew thing", so does everyone in the right-o-sphere save for Auster and Half Sigma. - ed.]
Quote:
In any event, if you expect intellectual content from a blog, pull your head out of your ass and get a life: [video]
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Do I expect intellectual content from your blog? Maybe not, but I at least expect reasonable and rational debate, which your blog clearly lacks, as evidenced by your very reply. Your suggestion that I pull my head out of my ass and get a life is an ad hominem to avoid your informally fallacious arguments: an attempt at ridiculing my persons, rather than debating my premise.
Quote:
Blogging is a hobby for me, like skiing or hiking. I write to inform AND entertain, in no particular order, and I’ve never claimed to do anything else. If I wanted to be all “intellectual†and stuff, I’d have stayed in the ivory tower and pursued a career writing forty page essays on the symbolism of biopower in the writings of Chretien de Troyes for obscure peer-reviewed journals. Go to your local library and log on to JSTOR or any other academic database and you’ll find all the “rational and logical discourse†your brain can handle.
————————-
Whether or not it’s a hobby is irrelevant. What you would have done if you had persued an intellectual life is irrelevant. Whether or not my local library contains what your blog does not is also irrelevant. These red herrings do nothing to address that your blog presents arguments with fallacious premises and conclusions.
Quote:
Nobody reads any of it, aside from frustrated humanities undergrads looking to pad out their term paper bibliographies, but hey, it’s “intellectual†right? If your writing isn’t provoking people, your writing isn’t worth reading.
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One’s writing does not need to provoke people to be worth reading. Victor Hugo was quoted as saying: “Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.†He was referring to the method of argumentation that you so aptly exhibit. Your reasoning that an appeal to emotion via provocation is required to make an argument is a clear absurdity.
You cannot argue the veracity of your premises if your method of discourse involves repeated use of fallacious arguments.
“Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating the truth.â€
[NERRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!! - ed.]
I don’t see what’s indispensable about Auster at all. He has a handful of trite catchphrases that he reduces all of those he disagrees with down to. In toto they amount to the same criticism of ‘godlessness’ in some fashion. Auster is an erudite Pat Robertson, or Fred Phelps in essense.
Got to agree. I don’t think he’s that intellectual (Roissy’s far more intellectual) but he does do a lot of grunt work for the right wing blogosphere. Give the man his due.
I don’t like discussing Jewish matters because as soon as you do everyone becomes rabid and sanity leaves the forum. Any critical comments with regard to Israel gets one labeled as an anti-Semite immediately. The problem is though, that there are an uncomfortable amount of right bloggers who are anti-Semitic and Auster did a good job against them. I think that they are the ones that really need to be purged from the forums. Auster’s problem though is that he has no perspective with regard to Jewish issues, you’re either uncritically for or otherwise you’re totally against. He is totally uncritical when it comes to them and more importantly, denounces any one who is as “un-conservative”. Aftera while it gets boring and is an obvious display of bias or lack of a mature intellect.
You’re quite right Ferdinand, one can pass a critical eye over Jewish issues without being anti-Semitic, but this view is foreign in Auster’s world.
Personally, I wouldn’t ban him or unlink him. But Hey, it’s your blog and do as you wish. One of the good things about In Mala Fide is it’s “catholic” tastes with regard to the right-o-sphere. Auster’s a flawed but earnest example of it.
[I've got to draw the line somewhere. Auster's only reason for existing at this point is to drag everyone down in his pit of despair. Most of what he writes can be gotten from other, saner sources like Oz Conservative or the Thinking Housewife. - ed.]
Then we can purge the misogynists, the homophobes, the Islamophobes, and racists too. Hating Jews for being Jews isn’t tasteful, but it’s not really any different than any other kind of bigotry and there isn’t any reason to single out specifically Jew haters above and beyond all of the other bigots. They aren’t some special kind of extra toxic bigot, or at least they shouldn’t be.
Why isn’t anyone talking about purging Auster for his unabashed hatred of blacks and Muslims? Please, no nonsense about him not having a wicked, irrational hatred of blacks and Muslims. By any standards that makes a guy like Pat Buchanan an antisemite, Auster is a bigot of high order. He’s as toxic as the worst anti-Semites for what he has written.
I personally don’t care that Auster is a bigot though. I just take that into consideration when I’m reading his stuff. Just like anyone can do for an antisemite or a suspected antisemite. Just because I suspect someone might hate Jews, and is writing about Jews because of that hatred doesn’t make me write that person off, much less engage in a campaign of ostracization against them.
Auster’s anti-anti-semitism is of the exact character that any liberal opponent would use against him based on what he writes about blacks and Muslims. He’s a racist, so therefore nothing he says or ever could say is worthwhile, and he should not only be ignored, but shouted down. It’s not true of Auster that he’s unsalvagable because of his bigotry, and it’s not true of anti-Semites (even more so of people that Auster labels such, but are not).
There are legitimate criticisms of anti-Semitism (which I believe I’ve made in Ferd’s comment section before), and many of them extend to any ‘intellectual’ that has blinders on while riding his hobby horse of a subject in circles (and this definitely describes a lot of what Auster has written).
[I read actual, self-labeled anti-Semites like Hunter Wallace and Matt Parrott. Dennis doesn't approach anywhere near their level. If Mangan has a bad case of "the Jew thing", so does everyone in the right-o-sphere save for Auster and Half Sigma. - ed.]
I wouldn’t call it hatred. But it is an irrational obsession and an increasing tendency to view them as the central problem and source of our socio-cultural and national woes.
[I have yet to see Mangan write anything like that. The closest he's come is his sudden white-knighting for Kevin MacDonald. - ed.]
James Kalb comments, indirectly, on Auster:
A final problem, that’s become very practical when I’ve actually tried to organize something, is personal conflicts. People who buck the general direction of opinion are sometimes not very clubbable. And those who believe in authority, but don’t accept a definite way to determine what’s authoritative, eventually become a collection of popes fulminating mutual excommunications.
As for me, while I wouldn’t exactly excommunicate Auster, I don’t generally read him much anymore either.
Auster is very smart, and capable of some very incisive analysis, but he’s also extremely volatile emotionally.
“In any event, if you expect intellectual content from a blog, pull your head out of your ass and get a life.”
Agreed. I usually don’t read blogs that sniff of intellectual seriousness and pretension. I read blogs to be entertained. There are far too many blogs out there, too many with serious, intellectual content to be read, and each writer of these blogs take themselves far too seriously, especially given the medium where anyone can blog on anything for free. How can you take it seriously? Every one can now be an Aristotle, or Burke, or Mill online. In the end it becomes too much.
Also agreed on the stiff and repressed attitudes so many “conservatives” have about sex. They can’t even joke about it, or appreciate a beautiful woman without complaining how uncomfortable it makes them. I think a lot of these male writers who are so uncomfortable about sex and women may be closest fags. Usually the men who complain the most about images of beautiful women turn out to be homos.
Hating Jews for being Jews isn’t tasteful, but it’s not really any different than any other kind of bigotry and there isn’t any reason to single out specifically Jew haters above and beyond all of the other bigots.
You’re quite right. No one is obliged to like the Jews or Blacks or whatever. There is a fine line between not liking them and wishing them harm. The problem is that many of the virulent anti-Semites are paranoid nut jobs and not really Conservatives at al. I’m a right wing bastard and appreciate anyone who helps, but I’m gonna pass on all the crypto-Nazi’s
What qualifies ‘harm’? Didn’t Auster suggest a de facto Jim Crow for Jews to keep them in line? Is that harmful?
As for bodily harm, I think you can find plenty of bloggers that openly declare themselves antisemites who have never advocated bodily harm to Jews.
The level of bigotry that actual makes someone genocidal in rhetoric is extreme and rare. To make one so in practice, even more so. I don’t really think I need to look out for crypto-Nazis, in the event that they might be the next Hitler. The US right-wing is much more philosemitic than antisemitic. It’s far more anti-Arab or anti-Muslim than it is anti-Israel or Zionism. The Jewish pogroms are not coming.
Hating Jews for being Jews isn’t tasteful, but it’s not really any different than any other kind of bigotry
But in practice, it is different. The attitude of the current generation of Internet racialists towards Jews is qualitatively different than their attitude towards blacks and other “darkies”. The former are The Enemy, the latter are a mere nuisance.
On anti-Semitism: it’s a mentality that’s a counterpart to many Jews’ traditional contempt for Gentiles, manifested in innocuous things like “goyische kopf” and malign things like leftism. One feeds off the other in a vicious circle. The onus of effecting good relations, in other words, lies with both Jews and rightie Gentiles, not just with one side.
Auster is pretty good on confronting Jews’ disproportionate attraction to Leftism, without being deterministic about it like Kevin MacDonald. The latter is too depressing to contemplate; I don’t want civilization and Western peoplehood to have an enemy that can’t be stopped, appeased, or reasoned with.
“I thought his critiques of liberalism were his most important work.”
“I agree with that. He continues to be an original thinker in this area.”
Really? It always seemed to me that his best ideas in this area were the ones he’d learned from Jim Kalb.
I posted a version of this at OneSTDV’s and it’s fair to say this here as well:
In fairness, there are bloggers and writers Auster respects, even defers to. Rick Darby, Laura Wood, Fjordman, Jim Kalb. Even if on occasion he will disagree with them on something, he will be circumspect about his criticism.
While he’s a politician rather than a writer, Geert Wilders has LA’s respect. Most notably, a mainstream and relatively high-positioned writer Andrew McCarthy does too.
The things that set Auster off is anti-Semitism (real or perceived), bio-determinism, and frivolity.
It’d be interesting to know if Kalb has influenced Auster more, or Auster Kalb. I’m not going to undertake a scholarly analysis to see which is the case. Anyway, it is clear that Kalb is the vastly superior thinker. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the new Burke.
@K(yle)
“What qualifies ‘harm’?”
Anything with negates the proposition, “Do unto others as you would have done to you”
@Thursday
Anyway, it is clear that Kalb is the vastly superior thinker.
Agreed. Though Kalb is wrong about conservatism.
Congratulations Ferdinand for the Auster-award Going where no Auster-hater has gone before! You are a top contender now.
I used to be the unchallenged bête noire of Auster with his You are like Hamas!-award. But finally I got some competition from you.
You seem to get him well. Likewise, I’m amazed how many people that don’t see him for what he is. But then these people are blind to the true nature of most aspects of reality.
Auster believes in things like astrology and demonic possession. The only reason people pay attention to him at all is that under the massive PC tyranny they are so starved of anyone sounding confident. Sooner or later he will have made an enemy out of everyone, but before that, for some mysterious reason (or not mysterious at all, the same reason that makes our whole civilization fall) up until then they defend him. Even Mangan deleted my comment about Auster’s belief in astrology, before he got under the fire himself. And I have to admit, once upon a time I defended Auster too… But he’s very effective in making an enemy of everyone.
Auster has a certain way with hyperbole, but nevertheless you look like you could be at the top of his list right now. Many congratulations!
I had to double check that this post was actually written by a man. It was so whiney.
[You rightie girls are so cute when you use shaming language. - ed.]
Swede Misnamed Conservative, every morning Auster takes a dump that is more intelligent, interesting, articulate, and conservative than you. Go back to your laughable neo-pagan playpen — I think your Odin action figure fell over.
The concern with fighting “anti-semitism” is fundamentally at odds with the recognition of the media and government’s anti-White animus, and it’s inspiration, which is to give priority to “minority” interests, with jews being the archetypical “minority”.
For jews concern about “anti-semitism” makes perfect sense. For Whites, not so much.
@ Tarl
[T]he author of Genesis is more scientific than the supposed scientists (Darwinists) who despise him. In the second chapter of Genesis, God creates man, Adam, out of the dust of the ground, and then, seeing that the man is incomplete and lonely by himself, God proceeds to create woman out of a part of the man’s body. (…) In this way and in other ways, Genesis expresses the truth of human existence, which Darwinism with its lame fairy tales (sic) does not express at all. – Lawrence Auster
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014110.html
Wow, yes as ConSwede says, very impressive indeed to go “…where no Auster-hater has gone before”. Your hatred is even a “clinical” disorder now!
Auster is the only blogger I know who explicitly puts up links to sites he doesn’t want you to read. But we know why he does that though don’t we – because that way he need not respond to the well directed criticsims himself. Instead he calls out his conga line of suckholes to come join the line and provide the shield for him to hide behind.
And sure enough in they come as OneSTDV leads the dance, a Tarl here, a Gintas there, “where’s Lugo” goes the cry and dog whistling but…what’s this?! Is that all there is?
Looks like Auster is fast dissapearing down his own black hole with no one but the dregs to defend him.
There’s even a poignant touch of hypocrisy from Prince Valiant OneSTDV who won’t read The Spearhead because “…others dismissed actual rape (not the rueful, “date rape” kind) as trivial…”. Funny that. Apparently defending child rape is just hunky dory for OneSTDV though. Maybe OSTDV has a dog in the Polanski fight as well. This sort of thing, the Polanski Test, is the new Litmus Test to know who is on our side and just who is being disingenuous.
Ah, but it’s all just Auster Derangement, but one of the many foibles of the “Anti-Auster Right”. Imagine the sheer vanity, the puffed up, full of yourself, swaggering, head toppling hubris it must take to imagine yourself so mighty, so critical to the mission of humanity that you create a whole new metric dedicated to yourself in the political spectrum.
I hope Auster never develops a slow leak in his ego otherwise Kristor , OneSTDV & co will have to permanantly man the bicycle pumps to inflate Auster’s bloated arse in shifts.
Auster never retracted or recanted his defense of Polanski. All those who stand by him are compromised by Auster unless they call upon him to admit that he defended Polanski because…Polanski is a Jew.
No apology is required. Just the admission of what is obvious for all to see. That Auster has an allegiance above his sworn allegiance to protect the White west. He shall not care for them, or acknowledge their pain. There lies the madness. (to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes in “Murder by Decree”).
But to make this admission is to admit also that just about everything he has ever written in our so called defence is hopelessly compromised by his higher allegiance to the Jews over and above all us “gentiles”, as Auster calls us.
So how about it Mr. Impartially sanctimonious lackey OneSTDV. How about you call out Auster on Polanski hey? I bet you don’t though. You’re too busy desperately grovelling at the crumb like links Auster casts from his table. That stuff’s only fit for the dogs. Get up off your knees son, you’re emabarrasing yourself.
Hey Ferdinand… I was wondering if you saw this bit at VFR, or was it posted after you cast Auster into the wilderness…
“The act of defining terms and articulating standards is central to what I’m about. I have no ambition to be the “sole judge of what constitutes acceptable opinion on the traditional right.†However, it is my calling to attempt to define such terms as traditionalism, liberalism, and so on. The act of defining terms and articulating standards is an act of intellectual leadership which is indispensable for society and particularly for conservatism, and almost no one does it today. I have no desire to control or direct other people. At the same time, the act of intellectual articulation in which I instinctively engage, as my calling, is by its nature an act of intellectual leadership. Many people in our society, including many conservatives, are strongly offended by such an act of leadership. They want everyone to be free to think what he wants and to define terms as he wants. Therefore they will see someone engaging in the act of intellectual leadership as a bossy egotist imposing himself on others.”
I don’t post that as some sort of “Ha!” retort, far from it. I thought it was interesting though, and wondered what you thought.
[In isolation, I agree with this statement. My beef is with HOW he goes about doing this. Auster's definitions are so rigid and inflexible that they exclude almost everyone save for him and his lapdogs. Game is incompatible with conservatism, HBD is incompatible with conservatism, atheism is incompatible with conservatism, almost EVERYTHING is incompatible with conservatism except for...Austerism. How self-serving. He and his ilk don't realize that the world has moved on and conservatism has to change in order to meet the challenges of a new era.
In any event, his arrogance on this issue doesn't so much offend me as his predilection for yelling "ANTI-SEMITE" in the crowded theater of conservative discourse. See my comment at Mangan's. - ed.]
Also, it’s not a “Space Man.” That particular comeback is getting a little worn around the edges. Not a bored “Space Man” at all, but rather the organizing principle of the entire universe, the unity of Being that makes existence possible at all, and that makes happiness within that unity — however fleeting — a subtle miracle. Your shaming language (heh) attacks your theist opponents’ weakest point (primitive superstition) and fails to engage the meat of the issue. Surely you must be aware there are some quite serious defenses of religion. If you haven’t read it, I recommend G.K. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy.”
[I was being hyperbolic. I have no problem with religion (in fact, most of my ire is reserved for the Darwin-worshipping aspie atheist crowd), but when people start proselytizing I get annoyed.]
PS: Alpha Status is indeed long dead, but I’m storing up posts to burst onto the blogging scene again. I’ll send you a link when the site is up, if you like.
[Good to hear.]
@ Thiry,
Wonderful!
I have read a lot of junk from Auster about anti-Darwinism and Christian fundamentalism, but this takes the prize! Astrology, demonic possession, Asperger’s syndrome, and now this! What’s next? How much nuttier can it get? Is it possible?
@ Pat Hannagan,
Yes, Ferdinand must be doing something right :-)
Regarding Auster’s position on demonic possession, he wrote here:
A commenter at Mencius Moldbug’s blog, Unqualified Reservations, said he would not read me any more because I had said that demonic possession was a possible explanation for Diane Schuler’s behavior leading to the terrible automobile disaster on the Taconic State Parkway.
I guess his theory about demonic possession is more scientific than Darwinism too, in Auster’s mind. Couldn’t e.g. OneSTDV ask Auster where the demons come from, and how they manifest themselves within a person such as Diane Schuler. It would be very interesting to hear a more detailed description of this “special science” of Mr. Auster.
I agree with Ferdinand: entertainment should be the top priority in the blogosphere. So please please could anyone, whose still one on speaking terms with Auster, please ask him where the demons come from. We would love to hear the answer. I do not think there could be any better entertainment imaginable than his answer to that. We all need a good roar of laughter. Pretty please!
Just for the record, I have apologised to OneSTDV for my tone and personal attack here at his blog
OneSTDV is obviously not appraised of the facts with regard Auster’s dissembling so my attack was unwarranted. I apologise.
Pat Hannagan wrote:
“Auster never retracted or recanted his defense of Polanski.”
I search the VFR site for “Roman Polanski” and found the original thread in which Larry Auster questioned why Polanksi was arrested after 32 years:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014370.html
Not too hard to find; it was first on the search results.
In that thread, Auster says, after being given links to the details of the Polanksi rape case:
“I didn’t know about these specifics until now.”
In a later comment in the same thread:
“Again, I was not aware until today of the extent of what he did to the girl. And, yes, I have argued that violent, aggravated rape should be a capital offense. And if it were a capital offense, then there should be no statute of limitations, just as there is none for murder. And though the statute of limitations is irrelevant here because he’s a fugitive from justice, the seriousness of the crime nevertheless has an effect on one’s view of the lengths to which society should go to apprehend the wanted criminal. So I take back what I said earlier.”
In a later comment in the thread:
“After I learned what he had actually done, I retracted my original objection.”
How long will liars like Hannagan continue to post that he never retracted his original comments? I predict that Hannagan will be the one who is not big enough to retract his comments, while Auster already has.
Dear Clark,
Here’s a few clues:
1) Read my post on the subject here. You’ll find this so called retraction by Auster has been covered in detail and it is in fact NOT a retraction.
2) You’ll find that in Auster’s original post he knew it was rape as opposed to statutory rape.
3) Auster knew the girl was drugged and deliberately gotten drunk.
4) Auster knew that Polanski fled the Californian judicial system.
5) Auster knew Polanski was a Jew at the time of posting.
6) What Auster din’t know was that a) the rape was anal and oral and b) Polanski had already been convicted and was awaiting sentencing.
Conclusion: no retraction, no recantation by Auster. Auster lied about not knowing Polanski was a Jew.
Further facts: Clark Coleman defends and runs lines for Auster who defended a child rapist because the rapist was a Jew.
I await your retraction for calling me a liar as well as you demanding that Auster admit his loyalty to Jews overode his principles in this matter.
I predict you won’t because you have form for this sort of thing, that is being a two faced hypocrite and major fucknuckle.
Further clues for you Clark,
Auster’s statements “I was not aware until today of the extent of what he did to the girl.” and “After I learned what he had actually done, I retracted my original objection.” are not retractions but obfuscations.
I’m sure you understand the difference.
Why are they obfuscations you ask? Because Auster already established what he did know, at the time of posting, that the girl was 13 and was raped, not statutory, but raped in the full meaning of the word.
The only things that came to light were the facts that the rape included anal and oral penetration as well as the fact Polanski had been tried and convicted. Therefore he is obfuscating. By doing so Auster null and voids the retraction. I’m sure your big lawerly brain can grasp these details so I’m not giving you any benefit of the doubt.
Here are Auster’s exact words:
And based on this knowledge he condemned America as a “Javert” nation, equated Polanski to Jean Valjean as being nothing more than the perpetrator of petty crimes who had more than made up for it by becoming a great hero in the intervening years. It’s not my metaphor Clark. It’s Austers.
So don’t call me a liar you pommy wanker.
I’ll retract calling you a fucknuckle and wanker when you demand, and I see it posted at Austers, that Auster admit he defended Polanski because of the one and only possible reason for him violating a lifetime of supposedly principled action: Auster defended Polanski because Polanski is a Jew.
And you can report back to your boss that this isn’t a case of Auster derangement. It is quite simply that if you can’t trust a man to look after your own daughter then what can you trust them on?
@ Pat Hannagan
How would he (Chuck Ross) deal with my argument that Darwinian evolution on one side and the existence of objective morality and moral conscience (sic) on the other are mutually exclusive?
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014469.html
Wait a minute, Coleman’s insistence has caused me to recheck the original Auster post and…it gets worse for Auster!
Auster did know that Polanski had gone to trial because his linked article by Anne Applebaum, in the original post, states that he did.
Source.
So the only knew facts that came to Auster’s attention were those of the alleged anal and oral penetration.
Christ Almighty! And you are defending Auster?
Thiry, I’m sure Professor Arnhart (not Chuck Ross) would be quaking in his boots at the prospect. Auster’s ego is so out of control it must be a ginormous effort for all the Austerians to keep him permanently inflated.
So, when someone says they retract their original objection, someone else can still claim it is not a retraction?
Even if we established that every allegation that Pat Hannagan makes against Auster is true (e.g. that Auster knew that Polanksi was Jewish and claimed otherwise, or that Auster knew that Polanksi’s trial had started), these allegations are a separate subject from the question of whether he retracted his original objection to pursuing Polanksi.
This is an elementary point of logic that escapes Pat Hannagan, apparently. Exactly what Auster knew, and when he knew it, and whether he claimed to not know something until today when in fact he knew it yesterday, is an interesting discussion about the integrity of his posts on this subject. Even so, if someone says they “retract” their original objection to pursuing Polanski, then they retracted it.
From the linked post at lying Hannagan’s web site, it is obvious that the post in which Auster used the word “retract” was not part of Hannagan’s diatribe. Auster’s thread was posted in installments from September 29 through October 1 of 2009. Hannagan’s diatribe is dated July 25, 2010, and repeatedly states that Auster did not retract his statement. The only post by Auster that Hannagan refers to as a possible retraction is the brief “I did not know,..” post that I quoted earlier. He did not address the “I retract” post.
So, did Hannagan not read Auster’s thread carefully enough (in which case he is trying to cover his failure with his current vitriol), or did he deliberately not address the retraction? As Hannagan assumes that Auster read and absorbed every word of Anne Applebaum’s column, and feels free to accuse Auster of lying whenever a fact was given in her column and he said he was not aware of it, should we apply the same standard to Hannagan and assume he read and absorbed every word of Auster’s thread and then lied about it?
I will be glad to cut Hannagan some slack on that count, and retract my claim that he deliberately lied, as soon as he publicly grants the same slack to Auster.
This is a typical Austerian style comment designed to make the absurd appear as rational. Your verbose convolutions won’t work their magic here though Clark because this is an open forum. I’ll explain it again for you:
Auster’s “retraction” is contigent upon new evidence being brought to his attention. Auster says “I was not aware until today…” and “After I learned what he had actually done…” and “Prior to today,…”. Thricely he has referred to ‘new evidence’ coming to light and, based upon this ‘new evidence’, Auster “…retracted my original objection.” But, like St. Peter after the cock crew thrice, his guilt is exposed for all to see because there was no new evidence other than the alleged anal and oral penetration. That is all! Everything else he knew, at the time of posting.
A true retraction would be something like “I’m sorry for defending a child rapist. I did it because Polanski is a Jew and no matter how much I try to be a Christian it’s hard for me to shake off my allegiance to my co-ethinics.” See, that’s a retraction.
Any reference, in Auster’s so called retractions, to have come to his senses due to new information diminishes the retraction and is, as I’ve shown, an obfuscation. Because, for the umpteemth time, he knew it all already, at the time of posting!
Auster characterises his post as a fiasco. It is that at least to be sure but, more accurately, the entire series of postings constitute not just a fiasco but a farrago of lies.
Here’s a question for you Clark. If Auster said to Clark Coleman, “Look mate, sorry for going into bat for the rapist of your child. I didn’t know he gave it to her up the arse and in the mouth as well. So, I retract my original defence.” What will be your response?
In that response we’ll find the difference between you and me.
I put it to you Clark, that it’s quite tragic that you have more passion and integrity for defending soccer than you do a 13 year old girl from rape. But I guess you’re right. These are elementary points of Austerian logic that do escape me and I’m so happy to have made my escape.
So, once again I have demonstrated that Auster retracted nothing and I ask you, as a man who may desire to have integrity, to demand that Auster admit his allegiance to Polanski as a Jew caused Auster to throw a 13 year old girl to the wolves.
While you’re at it, tell Auster I said: La vengeance se mange très-bien froide. I’m sure he’ll get the reference, being the master of literary metaphor and all, that he is.
Lying about why you are retracting a statement, and not retracting that statement at all, are still two different things. Nothing you wrote indicates that you have the intelligence or integrity to understand and admit this difference.
To simplify for you Clark, as I understand that your brain has been warped by years of dealings in Austerian logic, the essence of my argument is as follows:
Clark, mate, no matter how much you call me a liar it doesn’t make me so. I have demonstrated, with evidence, Auster’s own words, his lies. You, however, have produced no evidence of me lying.
Get back to defending soccer and leave the big stuff to us men.
Another way to put the case:
@Pat Hannagan
(…) “no matter how much I try to be a Christian it’s hard for me to shake off my allegiance to my co-ethinics” (…)
—
Indeed:
A subject can from time to time fall prey to a very harmful ambiguity just through its name. The natural and justified content of the Jewish question is involuntarily or even deliberately obscured if the incorrect double meaning of the term ‘Jew’ is falsely used to characterize the Jewish question as indicating one of the Jewish religion (…) In this way the term ‘Jew’ (became) falsely, and almost exclusively, an indication of religion, and the designation of a racial tribe (…) became an incidental matter. (…) Even the Jews themselves have upto the present day striven for ways of putting down every criticism and every conduct against them as if it were a matter of religious differences and prejudices and as if they were different from other peoples only through their religion. (…) The baptized Jew, thus the Evangelical or Catholic Jew was and is always to be considered as essentially a Jew.”
Alexander Jacob, Eugen Dühring on the Jews (page 55)
If you want to have your own private definition of words such as retract, then of course you can insist on whatever you want to say about them. When communicating with others, on your blog or here, it is best to use words in a standard way.
As for all your claims to have proven some lie or established that Auster committed some other lie, all of your claims rest on the assumption that Auster fully read and absorbed all of the information in the Anne Applebaum column that he linked. Given that his whole thread shows that he posted hastily and then had to be corrected on numerous points by his readers, and given that he did not type in quotes from Applebaum in his original post but merely said, at the end, “Anne Applebaum writes about it in the Washington Post,” (the word “writes” has a link to her column), it seems very likely that he had a gut reaction after reading a little of her column and (unwisely) posted that reaction.
At the top of the entry, Auster posted a note that he “takes back” what he originally posted, with a link to his retraction (the retraction that you did not discuss in your blog diatribe).
But, based on your assumptions about how much he read in Applebaum’s column, and based on your own private definition of “retract,” someone can use the phrases “I take back,” “changed my position,” and “I retracted” and still be accused of not retracting hsi original statement.
When will you have the moral integrity to address my point that you quoted Auster’s statement “I did not know …” and made it seem as if it were his only retraction? He used much more definitive language of detraction THREE separate places in the entry. Shall we assume that you read and understood every word of the entry, or not?
C’mon Clark, I’ve been reading your stuff for years at Austers and I know you’re not as dumb as this.
I’ll explain it again for you with reference to an Auster argument that is correct imo. You know how Auster criticises the modern apology as a non-apology because the modern apology comes with the caveat “if I have offended anyone….” then “I’m sorry”? Well, Auster is right. It’s not an apology because the apologiser is qualifying the apology with an “if” which is predicated on the other person “taking offense” to something the apologiser isn’t in fact apologising for.
The words make it sound like an apology but, any one with half a brain cell can see that it’s not an apology.
The same holds here. Just because Auster says the word “retraction” doesn’t make it a retraction, no matter even if he says it thrice, because he’s qualified it with reference to not knowing certain facts. Facts which, as I’ve demonstrated, he did in fact know.
For Auster to retract his post he needs to acknowledge that he did know all these things. The problem is he’d already inadvertently stated that he knew them,as I quoted above and in my post by referencing his multiple choice Polanski test.
You can argue this till the cows come home but I don’t believe you’ll fool anyone other than yourself and Auster acolytes. Any reasonable person can see that Auster made no retraction and that what is required is not a retraction, not an apology but an admission. An admission of his motivating factors. Of course once he admits his motivations then his jig is up. Auster would have exposed himself as an unprincipled advocate for Jews over and above “gentiles” as he calls us (and this word itself doesn’t give the game away?).
Auster is principled up until a Jew is threatened by a gentile at which point a whole new set of principles kick into gear.
Addressing your other two points:
1) The repetition of the “retraction” wasn’t referenced (even though it would have added further weight to my case) because the crux of my case is the facts as Auster knew them, at the time of posting. The post was already long enough as it was. Thank you for pointing out though Austers insistence in “retracting” on numerous occasions as it compounds his duplicity.
2) If Auster references a post (in this instance Applebaums) to source his own commentary one can only take that reference at face value. It’s his reference not mine. I didn’t make him reference it nor did you. He chose it. It’s his evidence. But if you want me to start discounting anything Auster says or references then I’m with you. That’s my point. The man can’t be trusted. He’s duplicitous.
Conclusion: Auster need only admit (not retract, nor apologise) that he defended Polanski because Polanski is a Jew. Of course this is problematic for him and calls into question everything he’s ever written re “gentiles” and Jews. But it’s the first step required if he wishes to have integrity.
Forgot to address your point, “…all of your [my]claims rest on the assumption that Auster fully read and absorbed all of the information in the Anne Applebaum column that he linked.”
No, that is not so. My point that Auster knew Polanski was a Jew, at the time of posting, is sourced to Applebaum’s column. Also that Auster knew Polanski had come to trial is evidenced in Applebaum’s column. This point wasn’t in my post and I had accepted Auster’s claim that he knew Polanski “… then fled the country” after committing the rape.
Most of my argument rests on Auster’s own words, cited again above, which I’ll put here again for you:
If we accept that this is all Auster knew it is more than enough to warrant not a retraction but an admission.
As I said to you above, if someone were to say to me “Look mate, sorry for going into bat for the rapist of your child. I didn’t know he gave it to her up the arse and in the mouth as well. So, I retract my original defence.†I wouldn’t accept that as a retraction but an invitation to smash that fella’s head into oblivion.
I don’t think any rational person would make such a retraction face to face because they would know it’s not a retraction but a provocation. Unless of course it were you they were speaking to in which case they’d know they could say anything, so long as “they” were Auster, and you’d accept it. Even if the child were your own.
I believe that you, like many others, want to give Auster the benefit of any doubt no matter how miniscule because, if accepting what is obvious and true from his own words, then it is a horror to accept that this is the true face of the man you admire so much. Auster’s “retraction” can be seen as a response to the general horror of his readers at what Auster has said. He retracted to assuage your fears and suppress the truth of his complicity in defense.
And you want to believe in the retraction. You need to believe that it is a retraction. The “retraction” lets you go on believing that Auster isn’t compromised and you aren’t compromised.
But no matter what you believe, what you desperately re-assert over and over, the truth is there for all to see. Auster defended Polanski because Polanski is a Jew.
Hannagan:
All of your arguments continue to rest on your perception of Auster’s motives, what he was thinking at a certain point in time, etc. You cannot possibly “know” that he criticized the arrest of Polanski because Polanski was Jewish. Therefore, you cannot “demonstrate” or “establish” that Polanski’s Jewishness was Auster’s motive. You can make the allegation, if you wish, and some might believe you and others might not. But it is infantile to continue to claim that you have proven what someone’s motives were. Even a second-rate intellect such as you should be able to understand such a simple point.
Au Contraire, mon amie Clark, I’ve evidenced my conclusions.
You submit nothing but snark.
Get behind me Satan!
That’s a joke son. But really, I’ve torn Auster a new arsehole and only Clark Coleman is here to defend him. We’ll leave it to the jury, which are hopefully my ethnic peers and not yours.
Gotta add, you had a good go Clark and I wish you were on my team. Serving an honest cause would make your life a shitload easier and respectable.
There’s always time to think things through though mate. You can redeem yourself yet. All the best buddy (I believe, contrary to my first impression that you’re a Yank?)
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