Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Obama Assassination Causes Culturist Terror

The Barack Obama assassination plot terrified me. No I am not afraid for Obama. The culturist dynamic I saw begin today was worse than the death of any one man. And, don't get me wrong, I would not like to see him assassinated. That is third world style idiocy. We have a democracy. And as bad as I may think Obama is, as an American my job is to ride it out Presidents I don't like and wait for the next election. What I saw today concerned me more than the death of any one man would.

The media jumped to report on the white supremacist plot to assassinate Obama. But when you read below the headlines there was no "plot." An 18 year old and a 21 year old had a less than half-baked scheme. To get enough guns for it they were going to start by robbing a gun store - lotta luck with that! Then they were going to kill eighty-eight black Americans. Fourteen were to be by beheading. And, if they still hadn't gotten caught, they were going to assassinate Obama. This is poorly thought out juvenile fantasy, not a white supremacist plot.

I got my news of this from an black man who put the paper down on the bus as he was leaving. As I politely went for what he was leaving behind he saw me and gave me an unlikely combination of a sad, cold, disappointed and angry look. It was intense and meaningful enough that I noticed it. When I picked up the paper and saw the headline I understood. He had been reading about white people beheading black people. The feeling could not have been good. That moment sent race relations back fifty years.

The horrifying thing is that the media loves this sort of sensationalism. It could be that it confirms their leftist view of the world. It could be that hate simply causes such a visceral reaction that it makes people pay attention to the newspaper for once. If it bleeds it leads. Regardless of why they ran it on the front page of two local papers, the trend could be devastating. Imagine reading of white supremacists trying to kill black people every week. And if they print every teenage fantasy as a white supremacist plot, under an Obama presidency we could be in for a lot of such print.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not have to set off days of rioting. No cultural event has significance apart from the interpretation of it. One man being shot led to so much mayhem because black power advocates and the left had spent years telling black Americans how oppressed they were. People such as Jesse Jackson still teach that anger, despair, bitterness, rage and even violence are justified by the brutality and injustice of our racist system. The reason you didn't have such rioting in the 1950s was that black Americans got a different message.

Compared to the rest of the world even our poorest citizens are well off. A huge portion of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day. People come here because there is still some social mobility. The world is not poor because America is rich. Before the West, everyone was extremely poor. Now there are other opportunities with which to compare your station. Feeling rage over being in America is not an obvious choice. But that does not matter.

If the media continues feeding America pictures of white supremacists who hate black people, just like on my bus ride, bad feelings will rise. Just imagine if another ethnic group was targeting yours. And in a multicultural world, where we have made a fetish of differences, we have many ethnic boundaries to cross. Multiculturalism has put us on a powder keg. But if endless images of hate get capped by an assassination, we could have an explosion. Unfortunately, the media seems ready to prepare the fuse. They are taking us into a dark place. If they do not resist the temptation to sensationalize every teenager fantasy as evidence of a hateful racist white America, things could get ugly.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Culturist Banking Lessons

Does the culturist perspective teach us anything about the international financial meltdown? You bet it does. In fact, if we had had the words “culturism” and “culturist” we likely would not have gotten into this financial mess in the first place.

How did we get into this mess? We got in this mess because the United States’ government noticed that different cultural groups get mortgages at different rates. And since they had no word to guide them to a cultural explanation for this discrepancy, they took the disparities as evidence of racism. And since banks make the loans, our government decided banks must be racist. Thus not having the concept of culturism forced them into a tragic misstep.

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act under the American President Jimmy Carter first started checking banking institutions to make sure they were giving credit to low income and minority families. During the Clinton administration, the United States government’s Housing and Urban Development Department sued banks to force them to make risky loans to these buyers. Barack Obama’s ACORN organization intimidated banks, via tactics such as protesting mergers and lawsuits, into making more of these bad loans. Banks complied, but spread the risk throughout the entire system. The stage was set for a collapse.

If the United States’ government had had a culturist perspective, rather than using the disparity in loan rates to show society is racist, they might have used it to show reality is culturist. They could have used it as a teaching tool by says, “Cultural group A, you’re lagging behind cultural group B. You need to do some collective reflection and get your cultural act together.” Culturists would see this as a more constructive reaction than suing banks so that they could not discriminate on a rational cultural basis between good and bad loan risks. Recognizing the important variable of cultural values helps people make realistic decisions.

Multiculturalists will tell you that all discrimination is bad. They do this because, ironically, they do not really believe cultural diversity is important. They think cultural diversity is just a matter of food, fashion and festivals. Deep down, they do not really think diversity exists; they think all cultures are the same. Culturists, on the other hand, acknowledge cultural diversity. If people in your culture drink too much, if they do not postpone pregnancy, if they don’t study, if they do not keep their families together, culturists know it will impact your economic and educational outcome. Cultural practices can even affect the rates at which your cultural group gets mortgages approved.

The next time you hear someone start into that tired rhetoric about how racist our Western societies are, the next time you hear them start to use different levels of achievement to prove it, I want you to get angry. Tell them that that is the same lame sort of thinking that got us into our financial mess! Tell them that rather than dismissing the possibility that cultural values can impact society, as multiculturalists do, they need to start considering the very real impact cultural values can have, as culturists do. The multiculturalist perspective makes us indiscriminately ignore the impact of culture and denigrates our society as racist. It undermines our rationality and pride. Shout that you are sick of people constantly undermining our teaching of values and pride by calling America racist. Then, after regaining your composure, remind them that the financial collapse proves multiculturalism is dangerous.

To get our financial institutions and society back to discriminating and judging rationally, to safeguard both, we need to recognize the very real impact of cultural diversity. We need to stop being multiculturalists and start being culturists. We have to switch from multiculturalism to culturism. We must to learn from our mistakes. Otherwise, reality will soon hit us in the face again.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Muslims and Culturist Nuance

The culturist policy towards Islam dictates that we stop Muslim immigration and do not recognize Muslim holidays. Culturist thinking also argues that we should not needlessly antagonize Muslim Americans or violate their Constitutional rights. These culturist policy suggestions provide the best methods by which to foster the unity culturism seeks and safeguard America.

In some European cities Muslims have become such a large block of the population they can make demands, disrupt affairs and get a taste of victory when propagandized towards this end. That sends the testosterone level up in males. They feel they could supplant the current top dogs and become a ruling class. We should not allow such large pockets of foreign, un-assimilated populations of any stripe to develop.

No nation is required to admit any persons to whom it objects. Not allowing more Muslims to enter the US would not violate our Constitution. US Constitutional rights only apply to Americans. We have no global or mystical 'human rights' obligation to continue on an immigration pattern. We need to be especially harsh on this account because Islam is, at its core, hostile to Western values. A growing Islamic community is more likely to produce threats to our safety and society. We need not take that risk.

That said, Culturism is dedicated to uniting America and, ultimately, the Western world. And it is also pragmatic. Over a million Muslims live among us legally. We cannot make them leave without savaging our Constitution. Mass deportation would undermine, not protect, the Constitution and our Western heritage. We should profile those who have gone to radical mosques. But unity can best be fostered, in all who are not haters of America, by making love for America our goal. Fairness and kindness are our best weapons in this endeavor.

For unity's sake, we must not needlessly antagonize otherwise possibly good citizens. But being friendly does not mean giving legal sanction to other culture's holidays in our schools or society. Drawing this legal line will define our core culture by pointing to our traditions. When we legally affirm that we are just as Islamic or Buddhist or Malay a nation as we are Christian, Jewish or Enlightenment-based, it undermines the Western identity upon which we must guide ourselves. Honor killings, child brides and polygamy won't be far behind.

An Islamic presence will always present a danger. After a few generations of moderation a radical son may be born. The whole ideology of Islam makes this a real and fearful possibility. To reduce this risk we must not increase the Islamic population. We must stop the funding of Mosques by foreign governments. If people preaching radical Islam, our government must watch them. Loyal Muslims will understand. We must also be aware, however, that violating the rights or liberties of legal Muslims will only create antagonism and push people towards Jihad. And that would undermine our culturist goal of unity.