Buying a gun bleg

I’d like to buy a gun for home defense. I was thinking of getting a pump-action shotgun, but I’d be open to suggestions.

I’ve never owned a gun before. What do I need to get one and get it registered, etc.? I live in DC.

The Obsidian challenge

Obsidian put up a very whiny post saying that white guys whine a lot. His post is whiny because it says stuff like "you are indeed, LOSERS. L. O. S. E. R. S. Read it slowly." This is apparently how "grownassed Men" talk. (Note to self: I do not want to be a "grownassed Man.")

In typical Obsidian fashion it asks you to respond to an argument that consists of something like 20,000 words which touch on 50 subjects in no coherent order. So, if you respond well to one point, he’ll point to another part of his original writings and ask why you ignored that point. Then, two weeks later when you’ve stopped paying attention, he’ll put up a post claiming that he stepped "right in your chest," which is apparently good for him and bad for you, or so I infer.

As best I can tell, using his own words, Obisidian’s argument is:

Now, the argument I am advancing in this discussion is that I am calling the whole notion of White Guy as Victim BULLSHIT. . . .

Why are White guys, who are highly college educated, have considerable disposable income, enjoy significant advantages simply being White, so very bitter and nihilistic about life? And, for those of you who maintain that the Roissy analysis highlights the reasons for this and more importantly, justifies it, then what real solutions have been broached to solve these problems? . . .

So, it gets really tired to hear White guys, who by dint of birth have so many advantages over so many others, whine and moan about not being able to get the last two marbles, when they already got a wheelbarrow full of em. . . .
The entire arc of the (White) Manosphere is one of victimology, woe is me, everybody’s picking on me, the much maligned White Guy-from Sailer, to Half Sigma, to OneSTDV, to Roissy to the Spearhead, and it’s downright sickening, one because that’s no way for grownassed Men to conduct themselves, and two because if yure [sic – I think] really all that like you say you are, you would have done somethng [sic] by now, and you haven’t.

Well, perhaps we should act like "grownassed Men," put down our keyboards, and spend our days reading Marcus Aurelius so that we’re in the proper frame of mind to watch the downfall of Western Civilization.

But seriously, . . .

White guy victimology

I think victimology is the wrong word to use to describe the position of the HBD or MRA groups.

If you are on a train and you see that there is an enormous boulder in the track ahead of you and you yell that the train should be stopped, you’re not really acting like a victim. If everyone else ignores the boulder, they might think of you a victim, but a victim you are not.

"White guys" are expected to roll over for everyone and Obsidian is saying that we can’t even complain about it. Your wife cheated on you? Well, you better smile while she takes the kids and half of your income! A black guy with lower test scores applied to the same college or job that you applied to? Well, you better smile while he gets the job you otherwise would have gotten! You can’t send your kids to the neighborhood school because it’s unfit for actual learning? Smile! You can’t leave your house after 10:00pm because of crime? That sucks, but you can’t put a price on diversity!

Of course, if you openly complain about these things, you’ll be called a "racist." At which point, you’ll be more unemployable than an uneducated black ex-con.

All hyperbole aside, the truth is that the white guy in the US is basically supposed to solve other peoples’ problems.

Enter the HBDers and guys like Roissy. The HBDers point out the problems are not solvable. Roissy points out that there is only so much you can expect from "white guys." If you take too much from them, you’ll destroy civilization.

These positions aren’t whiny. Roger Boisjoly wasn’t "whining" when he suggested that the o-rings on the Challenger wouldn’t work at low temperatures.

In truth, I think that everyone should man-up and take care of himself, but I don’t think a level playing field is too much to ask for.

The Black non-underclass

Obsidian (with some validity, in my opinion) criticizes HBDers for focusing too much on the black underclass. Of course, in the next sentence he says something like "White guys" have "considerable disposable income." If he wants HBDers to take a more nuanced view of blacks, he’d be better served by leading by example and taking a more nuanced view of whites.

Under this more nuanced view, the HBD view still wins. For example: "Financial assets, excluding home equity, among white families grew from a median value of $22,000 to $100,000 during that [23-year] period while African Americans saw very little increase in assets in real dollars and had a median wealth of $5,000 in 2007."

I live in a neighborhood with lots of middle to upper-middle class blacks and whites. In general, whites spend their money on education and improvements to their houses. Blacks – even the wealthy, well educated ones – tend to spend their money on cars and clothes. My neighbor – who is in her sixties and black and lives in a house that’s probably worth $650,000 to $700,000 – has a son who gets unemployment checks from the DC government (a couple have been delivered to my house by accident). The son drives a one-year old Mercedes. No one in the family is married or appears to ever have been married.

Yes, there is a black middle class and upper-middle class. No, it still doesn’t act the same as its white counterpart. Further, it acts in a way that ensures the next generation will not benefit from the current generations progress. One step forward then two steps back . . .

Gentrification in action

The neighborhood just north of where I live is undergoing a very rapid gentrification. The process is fascinating to watch to those of the HBD persuasion.

The H Street Corridor was once a bustling commercial neighborhood in DC. Then, after MLK was assassinated, the blacks in the area destroyed it. Wikipedia says that builds were "severely damaged" during the riots. That is an understatement. At that point, any remaining whites (and capable blacks) fled. The neighborhood stayed a shit-hole until a few years ago. The few businesses that remained were barber shops or fried chicken places.

The neighborhood has undergone a renaissance because it is just north of Capitol Hill, which is now highly gentrified (for example, a two-bedroom house a couple blocks south of H Street will still cost well over $500,000). The city is also putting in a street car line that will connect H Street to Union Station. Finally, the burned out remnants of civilization were still less than two miles from the Capitol and they’re zoned commercial in a city in which commercial space is increasingly scarce and expensive.

The first businesses that moved back to H Street are discussed here. The HBD-aware will note that one would have trouble coming up with a list of places more perfectly designed to repel black people. Of course, one is not supposed to mention this fact.

Walking around the area is odd. Homeless people fill the streets, yet the restaurants are full of SWPLs.

The strangest part to me, is that blacks in the area are generally opposed to gentrification. At first, this positions seems reasonable: after all, their neighborhood is being taken over, and they are being driven out. However, they treated their neighborhood like shit. They literally burned it to the ground and then didn’t re-build it. Many of the blacks in the area own property, so gentrification should make them wealthy. I just can’t muster up any sympathy for people who destroyed their neighborhood.

Dalrymple on evil

At City Journal:

And in a certain sense, the promise of the Enlightenment has been triumphantly fulfilled in our modern societies—surely as regards natural evil. Thanks to rational inquiry, to take but one instance, the infant-mortality rate since Jenyns wrote has fallen 98 percent. We live lives cleaner, more comfortable, and freer from pain than those of any people who have ever existed. Nobody today has to endure one-hundredth of the physical tortures, brought by illness and the efforts to treat it, that Philip II of Spain and Charles II of England had to endure.

Nor can one say that no moral advance occurred because of the Enlightenment. Just as we are freer from disease, so, too, our mental lives are freer. Of course, dictatorships over thought still exist in the world, but they are on the defensive and have come to seem somehow unnatural. Freedom is now the default setting of human thought. No one can tell us what to think, say, or write, at least not without our consent.

But an uninvited guest has arrived at this banquet of human advancement: evil. Whether men behave better or worse, individually or in the aggregate, than they did before the Enlightenment, is probably a question that we cannot answer approximately, let alone definitively. But what is certain is that moral evil has not only failed to disappear but has taken on a more deliberate, calculated character. Whereas the torturers of Damiens did their evil unself-consciously because it was the natural or preordained thing to do, modern evil is done after intellectual reflection, divorced from any tradition that might guide conduct.

The two greatest moral catastrophes of the twentieth century, wrought by Lenin and Hitler, were perverse effects of the Enlightenment. Lenin and Hitler were creatures of the Enlightenment not in the sense that they were enlightened, of course, but in the sense that they believed they had the right and the duty to act in accordance with their own unaided deductions from their own first principles. Everything else they regarded as sentimentality. Lenin preached no mercy to the non-proletarian, Hitler none to the Jew. The truth of their theories, supposedly rational and indubitable, was more evident to them, more real in their minds, than the millions killed as a consequence of those theories. If a syllogism ended in a command to commit unspeakable evil, you did not doubt the premises or the argument but obeyed the command.

Katrina: 5 years later

Thoughts from Mr Roach:

It is perhaps not surprising that on the five year anniversary of Katrina, a major revisionist history effort is underway. Just as the LA Riots became a story of “12 Years of Neglect” and, last week, a single unrepresentative white crime against a cabdriver makes the national news, there have been hints of this revisionism regarding Katrina before. The real story, we’re told in the Nation and elsewhere, is of racist whites going on a rampage and not the “conventional wisdom” of mass black local government incompetence, collective poor planning by government and individuals, and an aftermath of largely black criminality.

Read it all

The Tea Party is not Marxist, Marxism is dead

Half Sigma says the Tea Party is Marxist. He should re-read his Marx.

Marx saw the great divide as the divide between the owners of the means of production and the workers. The Tea Party is therefore (obviously) not Marxist, since the Tea Partiers are classic owners of the means of the production – in the Marxist sense. They virtually all own their homes, many own businesses and nearly all pay taxes (something that only 50% of the population does).

The Tea Party springs from the divide that is created by all democracies – the divide between the workers/producers and the great unwashed and their political enablers.

I like some of Half Sigma’s writing, but he often makes sweeping statements like this one that are, at best, only half true. If you want a thoughtful analysis of this conflict – instead of some random, half-formed thoughts – try this. To help you get started, the OV’s are the Tea Partiers. As you’ll see quickly, they share nothing in common with Marx’s proletariat.

HBD and DC public schools

Here is a very interesting article on race and DC public schools. You should read it all. I basically argues that the Chancellor, Michelle Rhee, is actively recruiting white kids to the DC public school system. Such recruitment will raise test scores, but increase the education gap – unusually, this is openly admitted in the article.

Anyway, read the whole thing. I may put up some comments later if no one else does.

Review of “When Gravity Fails” by George Effinger

This book is another detective sci-fi novel.

It’s one of the better ones that I have read, in that it manages to be both legitimate science fiction and legitimate detective story. The sci-fi is probably the more interesting part, but the two intersect nicely.

It’s set in a world in which the Soviet Union and US collapse at roughly the same time. The result is that the first- and second-world revert to small principalities or kingdoms. The book is set in the Muslim portion of the world – and the Muslims are getting set to take over the world. I found this setting interesting and absolutely believable.

The other interesting bit is that people have Matrix-style inputs directly into their brains that allow them to take on different personalities or to instantly knowing everything about any subject. Needless to say, this creates some interesting possibilities for a detective novel.

Enjoy.

The meaning of a priori

Will Wilkinson says the following:

First, I don’t believe in a priori anything. My view is very similar to my one-time grad advisor Michael Devitt in his aptly titled paper, “ There Is No A Priori.” There is only one way of knowing: the empirical way! . . .

Where I definitely part ways with the conservative is that I think it is both possible and desirable to critically evaluate our “full-bodied tradition” — to identity inherited habits of feeling, such as patriotism, that have generally pernicious consequences, and to argue against them on those grounds. (Perhaps Foster should consider that I’m hard on patriotism not because I don’t appreciate the overriding power of moral emotion, but because I do.) This evaluation isn’t done “on a chalkboard,” but through a delicate, messy, and indeterminate process of seeking wide reflective equilibrium — the process of detecting and eliminating internal inconsistencies within our traditional moral judgments, and then detecting and eliminating inconsistencies between our refined judgments and the well-established findings of the psychological, social, and other relevant sciences.

The problem with this is that it’s wrong.

Wilkinson believes that "the only way of knowing" is empirical. By this, he seems to me that he can "critically evaluate our ‘full-bodied tradition’" and render judgment unto it (from on high).

The conservative belief is that this action is impossible for one human being – or any group of human beings – to do. No one can: 1) completely conceive of the entirety of our tradition; 2) understand all possible alternative states; and 3) determine which state would be best.

Wilkinson, however, believes that he can. This belief of his is an a priori belief. There is absolutely no empirical reason to believe that 1-3 are possible. He takes it as a priori true that it is possible. Finally, this belief is obviously the most conceited possible belief that a person could hold. I think it’s difficult to believe in an omnipotent God, but it’s fucking crazy to believe in an omnipotent Wilkinson.

He then goes on to discuss patriotism, which he blithely tells us has "generally pernicious consequences."

This example illustrates my point. Does patriotism have "generally pernicious consequences?" Some types of patriotism do, some don’t. When patriotic societies are compared to unpatriotic or apatriotic (if I can invent a word) what do we see? It’s hard to say, since the latter types don’t last long.

Modern art?

Nope, just a normal scene from a diverse neighborhood