The Hoover Hog

Gems in the dustbin

Virginia Postrel on Naomi Wolf.

Takuan Seiyo on Zinnlandia.

Roissy on Sexual Dystopia.

Troy Patterson on Fireworks.

Mikita Brottman on L.A. tourism.

Audrey on The Wild Ride.

John Dolan on a wayward friend.

Alan Dawrst on the Hard Problem.

~Hat tips to Steve Sailer and Aschwin de Wolf.~

Memento mori.

Something to do with one’s mind

Over at The Tablet, Mark Oppenheimer has posted a thoughtful, in-depth profile of Bradley Smith and Mark Weber. The article is filed in four parts. Here are links to each:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Though Oppenheimer remains dismissive of the substance of revisionist argument and clings to a number of rehearsed assumptions about the nature of the project, his treatment of both men is refreshingly human and full of surprises. A few passages made me chuckle.

Bradley's book, The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, is available from Amazon and Nine-Banded Books.

Memento mori.

06/30/09 UPDATE:  Bradley's first response is here. He asks a question, and reminds us that Oppenheimer's series is actually preceded by a separate article.

Cultural Suicide is Painless

A couple of years ago, I knocked off a mean-spirited commentary on Dennis Cooper's literary MO. In my hamfisted rush to twist the dagger, I neglected to weigh the prospect of an audience, and I certainly never took account of the possibility that the subject of my self-satisfied animadversion might ever take notice. So when Cooper thought to list me in his gallery of "people who hate me," I was surprised, and mildly embarrassed. It seemed too late to point out that I actually admire much of Cooper's writing, that I simply found his better instincts to have been smothered in this one pretentious failed experiment, or that there might be reasons. I just wanted to buy the guy a drink and talk about foreign documentaries and homo stuff. You scratch against the tubes and there is humility. Conscience dictates. I could never use a pseudonym.

So I should state up front that I rather like and respect Kevin MacDonald. I like that he keeps mining this abandoned vein, that he ruts through the footnotes and invites trouble and always seems up to the fight. I appreciate the absence of coating and face-saving apology in his work, and I like the personal subtext that he might not deny. The formal strictures of academic writing muffle the beat, but there is an adventurous spirit detectable in the project to which he is fused, for good or ill. I'm sure many Jewish intellectuals are more interested -- and more amused -- than they'll ever confess. As Superman needs a foil, Jewish history needs a threat. Considered as symbiosis, it's almost quaint.

Of course, I felt the same way about Andrea Dworkin.

Now track back to a recent sputter. Where the mysterious paleocon essayist, Takuan Seiyo, files a shrewdly critical commentary on Kevin MacDonald's troublesome intellectual mission. Where, in a testily pitched response, Prof. MacDonald conveniently accuses Seiyo of "ethnocentric self-deception." Where the beat goes on.

That Seiyo's critique should be only the most recent exhibit in a sideshow of rightwing flare-ups over the MacDonald mystique is not really a surprise. It makes sense that the row should be noisiest at the traditionalist edge, where Occidentalist romance is still limned in crude hoping measures. I suppose this is a good thing. It's at least grist.

I just don't hear the music. I don't think it's real.

Considered as evo-psych, MacDonald's heterodox Jewish studies trilogy -- especially the The Culture of Critique -- may be preposterously overconfident, but once you get past the pretense to science there are some devilishly incisive dissident deconstructions to swish around. I happen to think old MacDonald is on to something, for example, when he decrypts what might be called a "Jewish Savior" trope in a number of pop-cultural artifacts, such as Ordinary People and Independence Day (I would add Welcome Back Kotter and Taxi, though Northern Exposure can almost be read as a parody of the same narrative strategy). If I had the means, I'd pay the bad professor to annotate TV Guide for my perpetual amusement and edification. Subversive pop-crit is a tart snack, even when the main course goes down like persimmon goulash.

If non-cognitivism reduces philosophy to a transvaluative aesthetic game, then  I am liberated to play it loose from Stirner's trench, or from the gut. And so I will. Because I have no use for nationalism or racialism. I don't like babies (of any hue) and I have little respect for pregnant women. I absolutely want to have my cake and eat it too, and why the fuck not? I didn't ask to be born and now I wait to die, all because two gene-propagating robots heeded nature's algorhythimic call. Fuck them for that. I'm left with bells and whistles and taste and sensibility, and the call to some greater awakening will always read as static dash and dot, cuz that's just what it is.

I like the idea of middlebrow WASPish housewives talking Phillip Roth at the Wednesday bookclub. I like that they'll remember the best lines and miss the subversive hostility that grates against another tunneled priority. Fuck Bob Hope, if that's what's left. Milton Friedman ended the draft and that's good enough for me. Murray Rothbard, that eternal Jew, unwittingly convinced me that breeding was indecent. Steven Pinker is a Jew. Ayn Rand could never shake the tethers. Stalin's Willing Executioners may have been disproportionately of a certain mein and stock, but Larry David makes me chuckle and Freud is wonderfully mad, and that's worth a mound of corpses at least. Thank those and fuck the others is my redoubt. It's not a ledger. Life is too short. I don't get lonely. I care more about animals than people. I see no need for apology. I know just where it ends. Call it salience. I am not joking.      

But I want to be fair, because I know you disagree. So listen as MacDonald restates a foundational point in reply to Seiyo:   

Seiyo makes much of the fact that the people and ideas that were discussed among Jewish radicals were in fact discussed by a whole lot of people, including “the entire continental European intelligentsia.” Right. The whole point of The Culture of Critique is that movements that were originated and dominated by Jewish intellectuals eventually became the culture of Western suicide. This implies that they also became the culture of non-Jews. That was the whole point of writing about my memories of Madison.

(OK. I want to interject, because that "Memories of Madison" piece it worth a read. The personalized drift leaves me to wonder whether MacDonald got laid in college. Jewish femininity can be so much sensory overload and I'm tempted to imagine a certain recovering princess talking up young Kevin in the commons, or perhaps in the dorm late at night. Maybe she was having trouble with her boyfriend back in New York. Maybe there was that tantalizing mind-melding moment, or a confession, intoned in embarrassed laughter. To be honest, pot makes me nervous, too! Or: don't tell him, but I've never read a line of Pushkin!  Oh, I know. Probably not. But damnit, when MacDonald talks about feeling "alienated," I don't sense he's playing at Marxian allusion. Do you? It must have meant something. It could have meant enough.)

Anyway, he continues:

In CofC, I present a theory of how these movements spread their influence throughout society: These movements succeeded because they were able to dominate the prestigious academic and media institutions of the West. Once this domination was established, people were socialized within a culture dominated by these ideas. And people who wanted to establish themselves in the intellectual hierarchy perforce engaged in status competition within the universe of acceptable discourse established by these movements. People who dissented from these ideas were ostracized and vilified; they were unable to gain recognition or, quite often, employment. Psychoanalysis is a paradigm of this sort of movement. A major theme of CofC is that these movements did not function like scientific movements — a product of Western individualist culture — but much more like politburos and kangaroo courts. In that regard, there were much more like traditional Jewish culture as described, for example, by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky.

Yeah, OK. It might be a little bit true. I'm not nearly so convinced as MacDonald, but I'm willing to column it on the whiteboard with an asterisk. Trouble is, Jews are just plain smart. And smart explains a lot. Smart people helm movements and influence cultures. Yes, it seems possible -- even likely -- that psychoanalysis and Marcusian social diagnostics may have been enculturated with the spirit of deeper religious and intellectual traditions, as MacDonald would at least nearly insist. And the same subtextual currents might have informed the trajectory and texture of the arduous dialectical logomachies that once got a few bookish Trotskyists closer to laid.

You imagine the proud difficulty that comes of slogging through Talmudic hermeneutics, redirected from the backbrain where the lessons of a rejected father-figure yet simmer. Or you imagine a revolutionist's screed coming to nest at strangely familiar metes and bounds. Communism as a squeaky-clean new god, who might have succeeded. Or who still favors the chosen. You imagine certain prescripted minds flipping through channels, selling goods. 

Or. Conversely. You can imagine Rudolf the red-nosed goy, left with everything to prove. Alienated. And tempted by Jewish pussy.

You can take the boy out of the schettle, but selfish genes are cursed in wile. Is the game thus rigged? I doubt it, but I don't give a fuck if it is.    

Even if MacDonald's suspicions could somehow be tested and proven, the prescription he favors would be dubious by any account, and would be of no interest ever -- ever -- to me.

Let's flay it to the marrow. In the sad slophut of human nature, there probably is an instinct toward ethnic preservation -- a kin-selective peacock effect that may be reinforced by a culture here, subverted by a counterculture there. But assuming this much to be true, so what? By what reason should any normative conclusions follow? MacDonald and his fans seek hope in the recrudescence of ango-white racial consciousness, which inevitably means a fight (or a "cultural insurrection" to use MacDonald's titular phrase). It also means more Bob Hope, and Bob Evans. I have no use for either.

A closer look will reveal a call to action dressed in tried rhetorical phrases that latch to abstractions that reduce to the seductive romance of another dumb naturalistic fallacy. Where everything presupposed is just as confidently rejected. You love your daddy and I hate mine. Pessimism and nihilism are separated, as ever, by a pluckable cunthair. The Hog wields a rusty tweeze engraved with the words, "no one should ever have children."

Google the phrase "suicide of the west" and you'll soon be kneedeep in the mire of  rightist slogan-shouting sludge. But viewed against the certainty of real death and real suffering, the heroically sung preference for dynastic survival will always read as hollow arrogance, as clumsily hoped quasi-spiritual, empty meta-ethical cant. Not for a moment do I doubt that the specter of ethnic "suicide" thrums against atavistic chords in minds far keener than mine. Yet it was only ever a metaphor, children -- a metaphor that  cannot but obscure the welcome reality that fewer people will be born to face the blight of any struggle from without.

If that's the way you imagine it, why, precisely, would you enlist future generations in the praxis? If you think the ship is sinking, if you have nightmares about Norman Lear and Judd Hirsch, here is my suggestion: don't have kids. Demography isn't destiny in any sense that matters. Death is destiny. And genes are not reasons. All life begets death. Racial struggle is a sad distraction for restive souls. Touch the third rail and hope vanishes, as well it should.

If the "suicide of the west" is imminent, my only regret is that it might not be contagious. Is David Benatar a Jew? I fucking hope so.

Memento mori.                                      

HeteroDocs: A Trial Balloon

Just read Greg Johnson's fawning review of a no-budget documentary called A Conversation About Race. Judging from the clips, it might be worth a look. The director, Craig Bodeker, seems to have made something interesting of a very simple concept. With all this highminded talk of a "national dialogue" over an uber-sensitive subject, why not take it to the streets? Why not ask commonfolk some honest questions and see where it goes, just as the New Boss would have it? I like the idea. I like the subversive intent. I don't mind that the result might be selectively filtered, or manipulative. I absolutely assume and expect as much. That's in the nature of this beast. Patricia Aufderheide has written that the documentary genre is "defined by the tension between the claim to truthfulness and the need to select and represent the reality one wants to share." Form follows function, and when form is predefined in the style of careful seduction -- something that may be more intrinsic to visual narrative -- the tension can be especially potent, and entertaining.          

Anyway, as I was debating whether to order the DVD -- or whether to hit up Bodeker for an interview in hope that he might send me a freebie -- it occurred to me that his experiment is apiece with a broader trend. Nowadays, these editorially framed first-personal films-as-argument are everywhere. In recent wide release, we've seen Religulous and Expelled, both of which owe something to Michael Moore's self-promotional innovations. And when it trickles down to the desktop and the tubes, things soon get intriguingly out of hand. A cottage industry of microbudget 9/11 conspiracy docs has gained enough influence to inspire a counter-movement of  rebuttal videos and palmipsest-styled overdocs. Elsewhere, Michael Blowhard has expended more than a few keystrokes in promotion of Tom Naughton's Fat Head, a comically intoned low-carb polemic that reminds us that dissident dietetics can be as politically incorrect as that Supersize Me guy is, well, incorrect. Stray a bit further off the radar, and you'll discover those YouTube-banned Holocaust denial videos, which we've already discussed. Or you can wade full-on into the parallax view until your pupils itch. Ickeites, Teslans, LaRouchies and Moonhoaxists gone wild, vying for your sleepless click and watch. Take it down neat, cum grano salis.

Of course, I'm sure I'm not the first to notice any of this. I'm sure the emergence of dissident DIY filmcraft has everything to do with the democratization of the means of production, and blady yada ho. Blessed be technology, as far as it goes. Whatever the long and short, it's manna for insomniacs. Perhaps the day comes when dueling documentaries will will redefine discourse, when atomized media-facilitated disputation appears as background static, like ads. I don't know that I won't be entertained.           

Just the same, I should be clear that this really isn't my poison. I'm queer for film, but I'm partial to European arthouse shockers and mean-spirited horror flicks, and pretty much anything that makes me laugh. And when it comes to documentaries, I'm more inclined to revisit the Maysles brothers or every frame of Wiseman's work than to linger too long over polemically spirited drive-by curios. I know the smell of ephemera, and I know when to wince. If you want a sense of my sense, know that I consider John Stagliano's Buttman Confidential to be a work of strange genius and I could say the same for Giuseppe Andrews' Jacuzzi Rooms.  Bob Gates' all-but-never-seen short, Communication from Weber, was the first documentary that I considered to be art, and Jacob Young's pioneering bio-docs meant something to me even if fuck Jesco White. I feed on whatever it is Ulrich Seidl is carving. And if you want to wind it all the way back, I'll show you my hard-on for Riefenstahl and Vertov. Or for that matter, In Search Of. After a few drinks, I may go on a tear about the unsung genius of Mary Ellis Bunim and John Langley. I have taste, goddamn it. Time is finite, and I know how to waste it.

But I'm here, for the moment, to coin a clumsy term -- "HeteroDocs" -- and soon to outline a precious list, which I hope to annotate over time. With that task at hand, some ground rules are in order.

First, we need a working definition. Here's my first pitch:

HeteroDocs are documentary films (or videos) that explore or advance unorthodox ideas or taboos.

That seems sufficiently broad, and sufficiently simple. We want to cover these nascent expressions of post-Moore desktop dissidence along with traditionally narrated TV docs and more widely distributed fare on the festival circuit.  It fits neatly with my bloggy hook, with the stifling Hoover Hog mission to which I am more or less happily wedded. Done and done.

Do we need categories? Why not. Let's start off with a relatively wide net.

Say:

• Conspiracy (e.g.: Loose Change; Zeigeist)
• Culture (e.g.: The Sound and the Fury; Ana's Girls)
• Death (e.g.: The Bridge; Freeze Me)
• Ethics (e.g.:  Partly Private; The Silent Scream)
• History (e.g.: Dead in the Water; One Third of the Holocaust)
  
• Media Studies (e.g.:  Manufacturing Consent; Control Room)
• Politics (e.g.: The Israeli Lobby; Waco: The Rules of Engagement; A Conversation About Race)
• Religion (e.g.: The God Who Wasn't There; Hell's Angel; Expelled)
• Sex (e.g.: Chicken Hawk; The Price of Pleasure; Sick)
• Science (e.g.: House of Numbers; Fat Head; The Great Global Warming Swindle)
• Sui Generis (e.g.: Lake of Fire; Mr. Death; Titicut Follies)

Obviously, there will be some overlap. We can sort it out later.

There may be a need to draw finer distinctions. For one thing, it should be made clear that HeteroDocs is not a byword for "politically incorrect" documentaries. Though many efforts thus billed will make the cut, I don't think monomaniacal  Michael Moore haters will have much use for such extrapolitical provocations as The Sound and the Fury or Zoo.

Then there is the matter of shifting consensus, or vindication; back when Frontline produced investigative documentaries on such subjects as satanic ritual abuse, false memory syndrome and facilitated communication, their editorial perspective rattled against reigning sentiment, even if time was on their side. Thus I will include the ones that seemed prickly enough in contemporaneous context.

As for the conspiracy stuff, it's  is a source of abiding frustration. My strong sense is that heterodoxy is intellectually distinct from rank kookery, but I want to be careful not to erect arbitrary boundaries. Perhaps some order of notoriety should override a default instinct toward completism? I am not sure, but I'll follow gut my and park the close calls where they seem to fit. And quality counts.

Finally, there will be the tough cases. Are studies of "outsider" perspectives automatically candidates for inclusion? In the case of Chicken Hawk (a documentary about NAMBLA) the "inside" POV alone favors inclusion. But when we turn to In the Realms of the Unreal, a study of the famed "outsider artist," Henry Darger, I'm much less certain. What about Errol Morris's Mr Death -- about Fred Leuchter? Leuchter is certainly a heterodox thinker by reference to consensus, but Morris's editorial slant is complicated, even if there is an argument for esotericism. I make the call. Leuchter goes in, and Darger stays out. Faced with other hard cases, I may opt to consign them to the catchall "sui generis" category, or I may turn to my loyal readership. Again, we can consult the rule book once and if it's written.   

While my original intention was to append this post with a working filmography, the project is taking forever to compile, so consider this a prelim. If you want to nominate documentaries for inclusion, or if you want to argue against my taxonomy, comments will be most useful.

Next up: "From Ana's Girl's to Zoo: A HeteroDocs Filmography in Progress."

Do I smell popcorn?

Memento mori.

Digging Wells

If you own any of the books pictured below -- I'm looking for these specific editions -- I would like to borrow or purchase them from you. Please contact me through the email under my mugshot to discuss.  

Persecution is Complicated: An Update on the "Heretical Two"

Several months ago, I tried to draw attention to the little-reported case of two convicted British thought criminals languishing in a Santa Ana hoosegow as their appeal for political asylum proceeded before an INS court. Several months later, Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle are still behind bars, still in U.S. custody. And the news isn't good. A judge denied their appeal, and after nearly a year in lockup the publishers of Heretical.com now wait to be shipped back to the island from which our forbears escaped, where they face multi-year prison sentences for expressing thoughts.

The upside is that the LA Times finally -- yesterday -- took notice of the story. In a more or less evenhanded report filed by Dana Parsons, the saga of the "Heretical Two" is lightly spun as as a legalistic farrago:

Their lengthy detention is largely the product of the asylum-seeking process that Sheppard and Whittle brought on themselves when they entered the country. They and their original attorney acknowledge that motions they filed helped prolong the case.   

Judicature is a paper-tendriled beast, we are reminded, and the matter is complicated. Prolonged jumpsuited detention was of necessity, it must be understood. Clogged in the the sausage factory of a process, a lone appeal must stall and sputter in the slow cogwork of procedures proceeding in the bureaucratic jam of so many tittles and forms and strikethroughs and hearings and caseloads and delays the rest of it. It's a small price for civilized order. And someone is always disappointed. 

Yet the judge's reasoning is never illuminated, never even disclosed. The LAT tells us only this:    

In denying asylum, Peters ruled that the men hadn't shown they had been persecuted in the past or likely to face future persecution.

So we are left to wonder. Is the judge saying that these hapless pro se appellants failed to state the salient facts of their case? That she was not informed of a situation that smells and quacks like any Webster-preferred definition of persecution? Or does her ruling mean something very different?

I am neither a lawyer nor a judge, but it seems clear enough that the operative authority by which the matter should have been adjudicated is contained in a UN Convention, endorsed by the United States by dint of a more expansive protocol. In relevant part, this Convention defines a legitimate political refugee or asylum seeker as:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.   

Assuming a term of art is subject to ambiguous construction, a careful jurist might seek guidance in secondary sources, in related codifications and principles, or in dictionaries. To "persecute" according to Webster, is "to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict ; specifically : to cause to suffer because of belief." Interesting.

In broader context, Amnesty International provides a useful line: 

"Prisoners of conscience" are men, women or children imprisoned solely for the peaceful expression of their beliefs or because of their race, gender or other personal characteristics . . . Amnesty seeks the immediate release of all prisoners of conscience.

And then there is Article 19 of the original UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is also a signatory. Goes like this:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

And  if such guiding proclamations still seem a smidge too vague and slippery, a U.S. judge might yet seek counsel in the emanations and penumbras of a native document. I know one that might even be "on point." Silly goose that I am, I have it memorized:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Perhaps there's yet an argument, supported by the weight of reams of caselaw. Perhaps the fact that these guys were facing serious time for writing words, is in no way clear evidence of persecution. I am aware that countless people have it worse. I can be blind to nuance, slow on the uptake. Could've been a lawyer, but I wound up here.

But there is another possibility, almost too simplistic to consider. It it at least possible with some effort to imagine that a gavel-wielding magistrate, secure in the knowledge that no one was looking, simply didn't like the words used by two men over whose fate she was authorized. It is possible, in other words, that she was being a cunt.

Whatever the case, seeing as Simon Sheppard stands to be locked away for another half-decade, I'll give him the  the last word:

We're not cowed and we're not repentant . . . We have the right even to make mistakes. We could be wrong, it's not inconceivable. We have a right to be wrong. All we're doing is speaking our minds.

Memento mori.

     

Against Politics on "Mad"

Aschwin de Wolf  reads  Jonathan Bowden's Mad and wonders about the practicability of "a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and  distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism." Nerd!

Memento mori.

Socioporn is So Passé

A few years back, Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton published a major paper called "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability." The paper presented a formidable summation of relevant research from psychometrics and related fields and restated the argument, more forcefully than before, that persistent racial differences in general intelligence must have a strong genetic component. Of the scholars who filed commentaries in reply (addressed by Rushton and Jensen here), the most strident critic was the social psychologist, Richard Nisbett, who would go on to write a book outlining his culture-only case for a wider audience.  In rejoinder to Nisbett's hurrah, the dastardly duo recently drafted what might be considered another major paper in which they none-too-gently accuse Gould's latter-day bulldog of dishonesty.

Here is the academic equivalent of a bitchslap:

We found Nisbett's errors of omission and of commission so major, so many, and so misleading, that they forced us to write a particularly long and negative review.

There's a good chance that Nisbett will respond, which should be interesting. So why am I not interested?

Because I'm tired of the charade. For decades now, researchers like Jensen and Rushton and Gottfredson and others have been publishing these careful data-driven studies and analytical monographs where they lay bare volumes of evidence and address popular and esoteric criticisms in scrupulous detail. You step into the cyclone, and certain points become clear enough. The tests are not biased; they predict performance roughly as well for all groups. Evidence for ever-elusive "X factors," such as "stereotype threat" seem to collapse under scrutiny. Most transracial adoption studies break down pretty much in support of the hereditarian model, and the same goes for studies of racial admixture. Regression to the mean effects line up with genetic theory from every angle. Group differences show up in culture-free studies of reaction time, and the same rank differences correlate with neuro-imaging and with more crude measures of brain mass.  Twin studies show that IQ is equally heritable for different racial groups. Human races are at least as real as mountains and dog breeds, and human environments are not analogous to potsoil. The world is not flat and how about that. Were it not for prevailing socio-political preconceptions and the stronghold of taboo, the case would be closed. Or open only at the edges.       

For those who are familiar with the scholarly debate over this explosive topic, there won't be much that's new in Jensen and Rushton's latest volley. There's some killjoy discussion of the widely celebrated (if little understood) secular increase in IQ scores over recent decades (commonly known as the "Flynn Effect"), with the non-news being that ostensible gains do not to correlate with the general factor that counts where it counts. There's the finding that g-loading consistently predicts Black-White IQ differences, with a correlation of .62. There's some interesting  speculation over how selection bias might conceal a significantly lower median black IQ than effusive gap-narrowing reports typically suggest. And there's, you know, more. If you don't feel like wading through 50 pages and want a  snapshot, Inductivist provides a decent breakdown of the dirty parts.

The law of parsimony emerges through the din, at least to my subgenius satisfaction. What was once fascinating and vaguely troubling, now presents as redundant background static.  I'm convinced that reasonable people are not blind to what is most obvious, or at least most likely. They practice ignorance. They pretend. They lie. Social intercourse lights the path. Honesty is for shut-ins and comedians. 

So the story is that a white firefighter in New Haven was denied a promotion. The story is, this firefighter scored well on a qualifying test but the test results were scrapped by the city when it turned out that black subjects didn't perform so well on average and now a lawsuit goes before a high court. That's the story in the cycle just now, or last year, or ten years ago. Doesn't matter, cause it's all so drearily familiar. There must be a problem, either with the test or with the culture, as decorum allows. It's there in the script. Ho hum and boo-hoo. Pick a side and repeat your lines.

Like in this snip from the MSNBC squawkfest, Hardball, where Chris Matthews, Clarence Page and Pat Buchanan make the usual noises:

BUCHANAN:  There are tests—one question on a test long ago, it was about what do you do down at the Yacht Basin, had all these terms.  That's unfair to African-Americans, no doubt about it.  Just like if you use all this lingo from Harlem and you put it in the test, it is going to be unfair to white folks. 

PAGE:  Thank you for proving my point.  It can be unfair.

BUCHANAN:  I don‘t believe for a second the firefighters' test up there in New Haven, Connecticut was unfair.  Nobody thought this one was until the returns came in. 

MATTHEWS:  So why did the white guys do better? 

BUCHANAN:  I think because they studied harder and they know more, is why they did better.  That would be my guess.  What would be yours? 

MATTHEWS:  I think they did better in the test. 

For the last time, tautologies are tautological. Regattas and chitlins are old herrings, reeking on the sill. Disparate impact is not prima facie evidence of racism. The Bell Curve was a New York Times bestseller, and I'm sure every one of these comfortable beltway pundits took a furtive glance at chapter 13 when the dam was cracked. These guys live in the same world as you and I. They've been to the bus station. They drive through the worst of it. They go to book-signings, then they pay the gardener in cash. They knew and they know and it's much easier to parse and shuffle and prevaricate when there are consequences, and consequences there are. You just repeat the words and then dare your schoolyard chums to summon the goblin in the mirror. Or maybe click your heels. 

And enough, please. Please stop muttering about what if it's true and loath it should be known. It's true, and everyone knows. We're worse off for failing to think a problem through -- for concocting these Ptolemic wish machines when there's real work to be done. Liberals latch to Darwin until they're confronted with the obvious. Conservatives lipserve a pipe dream because they're wedded to another dumb script. Horatio Alger meets John Rawls in a dark-lit alley and there is the smell of fear. Libertarians, fuck and bless them, may yet have an argument, but they're too lost in the clouds to grasp it. Who is Eddie Willers?  

Yet all it means is that Goldilocks is dead, and fuck her sexy corpse anyway. The reflex you fear is a crass projection. Individualism remains a seductive muse, and thank your stars for that -- even if tribalism is fated. We are left to lock the pieces together and make the most of something perhaps intractable. Lemons are never sweet. I wish my father were wrong about all of it. But measured against the stubborn grip of reality, a desperate wish is no better than an abominable fancy. A humane meritocracy may be as fair as we can hope.

What is to be done? I don't know. I suppose we might begin by admitting that this fixed obsession with higher education is a rutting elitist conceit, like Charles Murray argues in his latest hated book.  Pipe-fitters and trim carpenters take rightful pride in their work, and someone has to tend the machines, to paint lines on the road. Stop wasting their time with Norton anthologies and trigonometry homework and student loan applications. Stop wringing your hands, and let the people do their job. You may not savor the aesthetics, but this was never about you.  Egalitarian dogmas do real harm to real people. People you will never know.

We might go on to scratch these decades of faddish educational theory and get down to some brass tacks research. Watch Hard Times at Douglas High, and you know that NCLB proficiency standards are codified cruelty, arrogance in the guise of goodly intention. Rather than slaking dim hopes with more Stand and Deliver mytho-malarkey, we could try to figure out what works -- better, then best; how and for whom. Education markets will help. Controlled studies will help. I remember when "Hooked on Phonics" was a political issue and the buried lede was that no one knew shit about what teachy methods obtained results because there was no science, just years of shifting slogans and pop-psych NEA-abetted teacher-conference-spun loft and argot. So start over. Begin by acknowledging that difference may be destiny, at least to some crude extent. Then stop sniffling, stop romanticizing, and leave everything on the table. Rote memorization should be revisited. Conceptual learning may prove less efficient for some kids than for others. Classroom size may or may not matter. Tracking may not be pretty, but it might help. Or it might not. Maybe nothing will. Maybe schooling is, as I hope, a wholesale waste of time. But determined incuriosity will not do.   

As long as were at it, why not repeal the minumum wage and scrap these bogs of codes and regs that make it so difficult for someone to start and run a simple business. Licensure is a many-tentacled beast, and Portland is not America. We need gypsy cab drivers and street vendors and untaxed commerce with an aura of danger. And then let's get serious about genotech and nootropics and nutrition and birth control incentives and anything that might work, anything that might help the ones who nature -- that cunt -- has left in the wings of this post-industrial wonderland.  I don't know what's possible. I only know that recrudescent Mismeasure of Man polemics will help no one. There's no panacea. No Libertopia. Lamarck was wrong. So was Lenin. So was Rand. Untethered by self-deception, the effort that remains may appear humble. But this is the nature of progress. 

But First. -- First, we need to stop with the fib and wink. We need to scotch this one precious status game and give public voice to the festered private suspicion that  keeps us stupid and nervous. Unbank your closeted skepticism. Take that childshit goblin dare. The story will round back soon enough however it does; someone will be in trouble for saying what you have thought so many times. Next time, why not break a lance on their behalf?

Q: Did you hear about what Professor X said at the luncheon?

A: Yeah. I think it's a shame.

Q: I know. I can't believe I had him for psych 101. I had no idea he was such a racist. Did you? 

A: No, I mean it's a shame about the investigation. I don't think he's a racist. I think what he said is probably true, actually. I hope he doesn't apologize, because he shouldn't.

Q: (After a long pause) You mean, you agree with that crap? You think black people are inferior?

A. That's not what X said. And that's certainly not what I'm saying. We can talk about it if you want to.    

I came of age in the surreal slog of PC hysteria, when Anita Hill recounted lame pubic hair jokes before a mock-shocked Congressional committee and everyone had the jitters. A careless classroom remark was enough back then. If you allowed that sex differences might root somewhere deeper than culture, you courted trouble. Because Susan Faludi had the stage and Naomi Wolf may have read something by Foucault. Or because there was that thing at Senecca Falls that you were assigned to read. It hardly mattered how it was propped. You simply had some explaining to do. So maybe you explained. Or maybe you shut up. But then, after a calm, those Newsweek cover stories began to file in and everyone breathed a little easier knowing that lab-coated superscientists had re-discovered hormones. Soon, there would be rumors of feminist apostasy. Ms. Wolf  grunted out a critter and seemed to forget all about Foucault. Ms. Faludi began channeling Warren Farrell. Camille Paglia became a punchline, and Dice Clay went away.

Acculturation works like that. Dissident memes simmer at the waterline until there's a break. People await their cue. When the demon-bait is tested and found to be no more toxic than a swig of backwash, the hair-trigger settings are recalibrated. You swallow the bitters and the firmament holds. So you root for comfort, and you find it. The weirdness abates. You return to the conversation, perhaps wiser. Turns out, evo-psych is interesting.

With the race-IQ bogey, it will be trickier. Cognitive ability is an acutely sensitive topic, made volatile when racial consciousness is moored at the nerve-root. But while race may hold as a heuristic HBD riddlecracker, identity politics is still as silly as any religion, as any fad. This must be repeated. Don't take it personally. It was never personal. I happen to sorta like my President. I like surprises and rolly-polly multi-colored gobs of common humanity. But facts are facts, and I don't even know you.

What is personal is shame, and the silence it indulges. Fuck that shit. Matchpoint Jensen and Rushton. Let's move on. 

Memento mori.                            

A Few Things...

I realize things have been dormant around here, but there's a lot going on behind the curtain.

First off, The Nine-Banded Books site redesign is underway. It'll be a few weeks before soup is up, but the guy I signed with is really good and seems to have some enthusiasm for the  project, which can't hurt. I'll let you know when it's pretty. In the meantime, 9BB titles can be ordered through Amazon.

I have a review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke over at Richard Widmann's new online journal, Inconvenient History.  It's too impressionistic for the forum, but then I warned Richard that I wasn't much of an academic writer. I am a longtime fan of Baker's writing, though, and I think HS is an important book that has gotten a terrible rap.

Also, my little essay for BeJeezuz is now online.

As to the H-Bomb thing,  it's coming along. I'm taking it much too seriously, really. I suppose I'm fortunate in the sense that most of the people who comment here (and who have contacted me privately) are neither deniers nor revisionists but intellectually curious skeptics whose feedback has helped me rethink my approach in some respects. I know how statements like this invite suspicion, but I really don't have much patience with anti-Semitism or with conspiracy theories. By focusing on Samuel Crowell's work, I hope to disentangle some knots of understandable confusion that lead reasonable people to misunderstand what Holocaust revisionism is ultimately about. Crowell is important because he advances a parsimonious counter-narrative based on social psychology and careful literary investigation. He isn't duped by just-so tales of conspiracy. He expresses no animus for Jews. He sees through the 9/11 Truth malarkey. And he understands the role that censorship has played in this story from the start.  I have been in touch with him and the relevant substance of our correspondence will inform what comes.

Memento mori.  

Toys

So Agnostic walks into a toy store and walks out with a question: why is there "no more innovation in toys"? I don't have a good idea here. Can't even say whether the premise is accurate. But yeah, prolly so.  And I figure it has something to do with the way grown-ups nowadays can't let go of the kid stuff, much like Agnostic speculates in his post on the adultification of Halloween.  Growing up, the closest thing to an "adult" cartoon that I recall was Rocky and Bullwinkle, and that one was marketed to kids. Now you have Seth MacFarlandland and Adult Swim and Spongebob with a wink. And there are also UglyDolls and hipster craft festivals and quote-unquote collectible action figures that bit-torrent-addicted SWPLs leave in the packaging. So fuck the littlins.

And fine with me. I don't envy the new breed  for a second anywise. When I was but wee, no one wore seatbelts, and no one much cared if you stayed home alone after school while your divorced mother worked late. You went to your friend's house after school -- his divorced mother was at work, too -- and you sniffed his sister's panties. You had BB gun battles until someone got hurt. You bought dip-tobacco from teenagers with the money you made mowing grass or shoveling snow or that your best friend stole from his depressed divorced mother's pocketbook. I still remember the hierarchy: Hawken was for pussies; then you graduated to Gold River, then Skoal, then,  if you really had balls, Kodiak or Copenhagen. To clean your mouth and gums of  baccy-traces, you'd drink creekwater and eat wild onions. That's the way it was back then is what I remember. Soon enough, we had motorcylces and guns.

And jesusfuck, with the internet these days the boys must be jaded before they know how to jerkoff -- But Let Me Tell You, there was a time when the quest for porn was a dangerous and exciting adventure. You had to dumpster dive at the apartment complex near the neighborhood where you lived, and when you hit paydirt -- always imagining some pussywhipped sap whose wife found his trove and ordered it gone -- the booty would be hauled to the woods where sundry Hustlers and Cheris and High Societys and B&W swinger rags would be hidden in plastic trash bags under thickets of leaves as camo. Until someone raided the stash. Probably teenagers.  I remember watching Bilitis and Black Emanuelle on Cinemax at my friend's house after the divorced mother was sound asleep on the couch in the same room. I remember finding the absent dad's 8mm reels and a projector and I still have one of the old loops somewhere -- a dog and pony show. Then there was the one that I only remember too vividly where this giant-dicked negro was fucking a heffer and when her pussy was bleeding he just dipped his finger in and used the red clot as lube the better with which to finger her asshole. I was, I think,  maybe twelve when we threaded that one up. The whir of the projector was loud enough that someone had to stand guard in case the mom came home early. 

I remember playing with big globs of mercury in first grade. I remember peanut butter sandwiches before they were allergens and a neighborhood creep called "underpants" who would buy you beer and I remember setting the walls on fire with makeshift hairspray blowtorches. Then, when you were 13 or 14 you'd wait outside 7-11 until someone would buy you the cheapest 24 case and you absconded to the woods and drank as fast as you could until you ruled the night. (No one rules the night!) Then, once you were a bit older you made friends with an impoverished skate punk who worked on cars and whose welfare mother was a lesbian junky and you'd hang out at his place and  listen to Minor Threat records and watch Fantastic Planet on mushrooms and you wanted to fuck his sister but she was aloof and had a mohawk and you were afflicted with acne vulgaris anyway and you kept thinking about suicide so why bother. That was then. You remember, don't you? Kids these days, they don't know what they're missing.

But O how I digress, and in with such untoward ugliness! Did I really have to use the word negro? This was supposed a post about toys, which are for kids -- Hi Kids! -- and in fact I do have a something to say about toys. Or more specifically, about one particular nonexistent toy that I nevertheless coveted as a child -- a toy I always thought would be invented one day. Only it never was. As far as I know, at least.  And yet I still covet it.

I should probably talk to a patent lawyer. But I trust you, so here's the concept:

First you have a helmet like thing only it's a remote viewer, like a Viewmaster or more like those gadgets you see in airports now where you can watch movies in private or maybe like a virtual reality gizmo. So you wear it and you can see what the camera sees, in real time. Where is the camera? That's the cool part: it's in a remote control car! Or -- better still -- a remote control ATV, fastened at the windshield to simulate a driver's-eye-view.  It would have to be a special camera, something with a wide lens and a miniaturized steadi-mount to mitigate the blairwitchy shake factor. It should also be movable and zoomable via the remote. Then there is the optional piece -- a walkie-talkie thing that allows you to communicate with another "driver" operating another  car/ATV, or who's maybe just along for the ride in the manner of a Pro-Rally navigator. Get the idea? It's like this: you put on the helmet and see what's in front of the car just like you were in it, only everything that's small appears huge, like if a cat walked into the frame it would be a giant cat and it would be like, holy shit look out for that giant cat! Drive to the edge of the staircase and it's like, oh man, this is gonna be bad. And if your friend has another car with the same gadgetry, you can communicate through the helmet on a cellular frequency or whatever. So you can have adventures and shit. It'd be like gaming only a lot more fun because of the espionage potential. Also, maybe you could record whatever the viewer sees, to play back later on the TV or online. Something like that.

Wouldn't that be fucking awesome? 

Toys.

Memento mori.

     

Nine-Banded Bleg

5/14/09 UPDATE - I have a guy. All systems are go.

Next week will see the release of the third Nine-Banded book, Mad, by Jonathan Bowden. I am very proud to bring this remarkable text back to life, and I hope and expect that loyal Hog readers will order copies for the grandparents and neighbors. In addition to Bowden's long-forgotten Stirnerite belle lettres, 9BB has a number of interesting books in the offing, including works by Andy Nowicki, Ann Sterzinger, Jim Crawford, and a new anthology of writings by  Bradley Smith, author of  The Man Who Saw His Own Liver. It's all part of a Five Year Plan.

But I need help. More specifically, the 9BB site needs help. It needs a makeover. If you do web design work -- or if you know someone who does -- please consider contacting me privately at chipsmith55 at gmail (there's also a contact link below my mugshot on this page). I have a very clean and simple re-design concept for a storefront and I am amenable to creative suggestions. I'd do it myself were it not for the fact that I am an idiot. I'd ask my go-to tech guy, were it not for the fact he's too busy with life and work and school. So then, I'm counting on you.  I can pay, but not much.

Memento mori.

Intellectual Slumming in Uncanny Valley

A few months back, Overcoming Bias big dog Robin Hanson took a recreational stroll into the looking glass world of 9/11 conspiracy theory and found himself hedging the odds, one way then the other. Now he's back on the bad subject, speculating over how to account for that purportedly anomalous hot stuff in the rubble that the Truthers find so intriguing. His pet theory is that storage facilities housed in the main towers "probably held big chucks of hitech pyrotechnic materials quite uncommon in office buildings," and that once ignited by burning jet fuel, this stuff catalyzed the subsequent structural collapse. He notes that there were CIA offices in the towers, which might somehow explain the presence of said hitech pyrotechnics.

My own sense is that Hanson  is placing too much credence in the first-order claims made by Steven Jones and other critics of the official line, that the explanation he posits against a more implausible counter-scenario is very likely unnecessary. Fact is, we don't know shit about what sort of strange chemistry might be expected when giant office towers full of computers and insulation materials and moldy donuts and god knows what else are are kersploded by giant commercial aircraft. If I had a trillion dollars to blow, I'd buy the Sears Tower (or whatever they're calling it now) and hit it with a remote control jet, just to see what happens. When -- and if -- it toppled, I'd scoop up a sizable mass of  hot rubble and let the Truthers run their electron-scanning gadgetry over it to see what they find. Better still would be to use the results as a control, to see if the intrepid dissidents could make accurate predictions about which pile of pulverized skyscraperstuff was which. Wouldn't prove anything, but it would be more interesting than the spider-sensing speculation being bandied by the current lot of Loose-Change-convinced consensus-contrarians.

To be sure, Hanson has a better face-saving point to make -- one that goes to the mission of the OB forum. To wit, he wonders

...why moderate uncertainty here feels like "uncanny valley."  If I told everyone there was a 10% chance of something they thought pretty crazy, nine times out of ten, it would confirm that I'm crazy.  One time out of ten I'd be vindicated, but even then folks might say I was crazy but lucky.

Epistemological boundary tests are sporting good fun, I admit. Especially so when there's meat on the table. And Overcoming Bias is usually reliable for a savory fix. It's top shelf cerebration is what it is -- often beyond my depth, but I dig it like Pop-tarts and Nabokovian jeu de mots. While I'm more than willing to play my biases against long odds, hedging and shoring as whim and sensibility and sifted information dictate, I hope I am wise to the problem of overconfidence and that special hypnotic brand of seduced certitude that leads a smart kid to bristle  before earnest grown-up opposition. As Robert Anton Wilson reminded us, there's a hunchback behind every soldier.

(! ... ?)

I've read enough. I've seen the movies. And I think the strong claims forwarded by the 9/11 Truth gang are preposterous. Oh, I think it's possible there was foreknowledge -- perhaps some Mossad intelligence ops were on the case, as Justin Raimondo plausibly argues without wading too far off.  I suppose there's even a remote possibility that Flight 93 was shot down. It would surprise me, but not much. But high-tech controlled demolition? Calculated in long-guarded secrecy and carried out with lockstep precision in a world full of snitches and electronic eyes? I don't buy it for a second, and certainly not on the basis of the evidence being showcased by  heeebie-jeebie-afflicted doyens of doubt. The Truthers aren't facing prison time. They are debated in civil forums and their best evidence is routinely and diligently interrogated by counter-skeptics who are then loudly castigated as liars and shills. I think the 9/11 attacks were a real conspiracy executed after considerable trial and error by well-funded Islamist guerrilla warriors. They had their reasons. They deserve the credit.

Of course, I also think that  homicidal Nazi gas chambers are probably the stuff of rumor and myth tracing to culture-bound anxiety and wartime propaganda. So where does this put me? Back in uncanny valley, I suppose. At least by default reference to consensus. And so be it. Spill the hunchbacks and soldiers on the chessboard and line them up. I'm pretty sure that HIV causes AIDS. I believe there is NO GOD and that life is meaningless, though Pascal's wager hurts my forehead. I think Jesus Christ is most likely a fictional character. I think the bombing of the USS Liberty was probably a fog-of-war accident. I have no idea who plotted the JKF assassination, though I feel pretty confident that Oswald squeezed the trigger. I don't believe that Sarah Palin is the biological mother of a Down Syndrome child. I believe that men walked on the moon, that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, that cold fusion is bunk. I think it unlikely that Jack the Ripper was a renowned artist or a Victorian VIP. I believe that average racial differences in intelligence are rooted in biology, and are largely intractable. I don't believe in free will or natural rights. I believe in a whole lotta holocausts. I believe that lobsters and bugs -- and fetuses -- probably experience pain. I have no idea about lab universes.  I believe the thought of Noam Chomsky's "O-face" is funnier than a bubble-farting dog. I believe that no one should ever have children, and that it is better never to have been.  I believe that "parenting" matters less than genes and peers, that rape is about sex, that children are sexual beings, that stepfathers are dangerous, that the Noble Savage is a myth, that Margaret Mead was deceived (even if Derek Freeman played fast and loose). I believe Vincent Gallo is a great artist and that that James Lorinz is a profoundly underrated actor.  I can never shake the suspicion that JonBenet was killed by her big brother. I don't think abortion reduces crime, but I suspect that guns and pitbulls and incarceration do. I believe there was something rotten in Jonestown, though I can't put my finger on it.  I believe that Wayne Bertram Williams was probably innocent and that OJ was not. I think cocaine is more enlightening than weed. I think the Singularity is boring. I believe every individual's death is tantamount to the end of the world. I believe that bottled water is a bizarre fad. I hear voices in my head. As a child I never played hopscotch. I believe that Washington was a greater man than Lincoln. Sometimes I feel I am no good at all.

And I could be wrong about all of it (except the bit about Chomsky). I suppose I could tabulate bookie's odds, the way Hanson does. But I've never been a numbers guy, and fickle rank-assignments always remind me of something you'd find on a pedophile's hard-drive. Don't ask me why. It's not as if I have anything against pedophiles. Or the Truthers. To me, it all collapses to a reeling dreamy loop of pointless synaptic ones and zeros. Remainder bin surf rock and existential threnody and who the fuck knows anyway because I can't grow out of it and I'm doomed to give more of a shit than I could ever hope to justify. It's like that sequence near the end of Donna Tartt's first book, where the slideshow of human accomplishment craters into a kind of fragile nihilistic dirge. Cosmic futility and all that. But I am prone to drift.

No matter, let's not kid ourselves about this much: Robin Hanson is hooked on a devilish mystery. He's testing the waters, and I suspect he's holding back. It doesn't hurt that the rationalist pretext is actually quite interesting and relevant. I'm just saying. It takes one to know one, even when knowledge is a chimeric bitch.

Memento mori.

Sympathy for the "Heretical Two"

Since its inception, more or less, The Hoover Hog has included among its marginal "heterodoxy and crimethink" links an obscure Dada-doused outpost of bizarrely assembled provocations called Heretical.com. It's a peculiar spot, where naked expressions of racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism commingle with genuinely interesting documents in an easter-egg-colored collage of irredeemably irresponsible performance satire. Upon entering, you encounter a kind of odd-knit directory of links where R. Crumb's id-channeling panels cheek up next to National Vanguard polemics, Wotanist pro-polygamy screeds, Spiegeleman-disapproved Holocaust comics, Cargo Cult exotica, anthropological pornography, 70s-era sexual decryptions, inconvenient Darwinism, inconvenient Lovecraftianism, coke-addled Freudiana, anti-television animadversions , suppressed sexology, and good old-fashioned anti-miscegenationist cut-ups. Stick around long enough and you discover the archive of columns by the site's co-curator, "Luke O'Farrell," a self-styled wise-guy who wallows in the worst of it and seems to have a sore spot for da Jews. As hate sites go, Heretical is sui generis. Good for a laugh, an indignant grunt, a befuddled wince, or another guilty click or two or ten. Depending on your mood. You get the idea soon enough and you forget all about it. Until you are reminded.

It turns out the site is administrated by a couple of British meshuganas named Simon Sheppard and Steve Whittle, alias Luke O'Farrell. They look like characters. Go ahead and hate on them, if that's your thing:

I'm sure you'll feel better knowing these mean-spirited weirdos are in jail. And in the United States, no less. California to be specific. By all accounts, they came to our freedom-loving shores seeking political asylum after a British court found them guilty of  "stirring up racial and religious hatred" (or something like that) for writing and publishing the wrong words about the wrong subjects in the wrong way and there you have it. They've been behind bars six months and counting, locked away in a Santa Ana cell, by order of the Department of Homeland Security, where their appeal for asylum is pending before an INS judge with hearings scheduled for select dates throughout March.    

If you're looking for a credible source to verify the grisly details, good luck finding one. I've scoured and scraped and have yet to locate a single fucking mention of this case in a reputable American news source. If the ACLU gives a shit, they're keeping it on the DL. You can read a series of snidely pitched articles in the Yorkshire Post, or you can sift through the editorial fumes provided by any number of dodgy dissident sources, such as Lady Renouf chatting it up with David Duke, or Mark Green writing for Rense.com. Or you can rely with the dense reportage leading the Heretical site. Go with your gut. Take it with a grain.  The plain reality appears to be that two nonviolent men are incarcerated in the land of the free for the content of their thoughts. And somehow it isn't newsworthy. I find this remarkable.

On March 12, the "Heretical Two" stood pro se in their first of several hearings before U.S Immigration Judge Rose Peters. The account posted on the Heretical site is the only one I can find:

Simon Sheppard and Steve Whittle (who were brought into court in handcuffs and leg irons, which, they confirmed, is standard procedure when asylum seekers are held in detention pending the hearing of their case, and not victimisation of themselves) presented their own cases, as their attorney, Bruce Leichty, had withdrawn from the case by leave of the Court, since he was not satisfied with the (substantial) retainer that he had received from friends of Simon and Steve. The U. S. government was represented by its attorney, Miss Myers. The Court heard evidence from Simon and Steve about their experiences at the hands of the British police and Crown Prosecution Service, and also from their English counsel, Adrian Davies, who gave evidence about the relevant provisions of English law (the Public Order Act 1986, as amended) and the English Court’s assertion of jurisdiction over web pages hosted on a server located in Torrance, California. The hearing was conducted in a very fair, courteous and thorough manner, though inevitably Simon and Steve were at some disadvantage, because they are not lawyers, and are moreover being held in prison, where they have had very limited facilities to prepare for the hearing. After a lengthy sitting, the Court adjourned to 1 p.m., West Coast time, on 24th March, when Simon and Steve will address the Court on their own behalf, and Miss Myers will make representations on behalf of the U. S. government. 

My bias is for individual freedom. Has been since I was a pup. I try not to get all sentimental about it, but free speech is one of those core issues that still raises my rankles. I think it's despicable that Max Hardcore is serving time for obscenity and I wish Ira Isaacs all the best. It should absolutely fucking concern civil (and uncivil) libertarians that the U.S. government is complicit in the persecution of these eccentric limey hatemongers. The edges aren't even blurry. No animals were harmed and no teenage innocents were brought to tears. Whittle and Sheppard are charged with publishing offensive words and images and no one should go to jail for that.

Lenny Bruce is dead and those Skokie Nazis are fading into textbook lore. Freedom of expression isn't a fashion signal. You can't wait around for the next typecast martyr. The feds aren't worried about Larry Flynt or Bill Maher, and your precious blog is probably safe for now. But these guys are in serious trouble for no good reason, and the silence is palpable. This is the genuine article and you aren't even paying attention.

If you can set aside your cynicism just long enough, why not write a letter to the ACLU? Just bring the matter to their attention. Contact information for their Southern California division is posted here. You might also consider sending a note to the Orange Couny Register, or the L.A. Times, since they would presumably have an interest in covering a major free speech case that's playing out on the home turf. Perhaps they discarded those other press releases for reasons of provenance, suspecting it was all an elaborate rightwing prank. Perhaps that's all it ever was. There must be some explanation. This is America, after all.

Memento mori.     

______________________

 

3/31/09 UPDATE: My thanks to several readers who referred me to this OC Weekly article, which, to my knowledge, is the first American semi-msm mention of the case to date. Snarky but fair:

Amongst the many wabs, a couple of chinitos, and I'm sure more than a couple of gabachos currently in custody at the Santa Ana Jail are British nationals Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle. They haven't committed any crime in the United States but have nevertheless languished under the watchful eye of SanTana immigration guards for almost two years in a fascinating case involving free speech, international jurisdiction, Holocaust denial, and an American media that just doesn't give a damn about those topics.

Sheppard runs The Heretical Press, an online repository of far-right essays, photos, and just plain bizarre entries (don't they realize R. Crumb is being satirical when he publishes a comic titled "When the Niggers Take Over America"?), to which Whittle contributes. According to British reports, authorities raided Sheppard's flat in 2004 after a copy of his Tales of the Holohoax were found inside a synagogue. After discovering the contents of The Heretical, they arrested Sheppard and Whittle for distributing hate speech online.

If that's not Orwellian enough for you, refry this: Sheppard and Whittle claimed that British courts had no jurisdiction over The Heretical and its materials since its servers hum along in Torrance. But the Brits don't care.

Prosecutors didn't agree with their excuse, and convicted the two in January for publishing racist material online--the first conviction of its kind in the history of the United Kingdom. "People in this country are entitled to be racist and they are entitled to hold unpleasant points of view, but what they are not entitled to do is publish or distribute written material which is insulting, threatening or abusive and is intended to stir up racial hatred or is likely to do so," a prosecutor told the Yorkshire Post. "If this sort of material is made generally available on the internet or by pushing it through people's doors indiscriminately, it is likely that racial hatred will be stirred up in some people who are exposed to it - the young, the impressionable, the gullible, and so on."

British courts had to convict Sheppard and Whittle in absentia, however. In July 2007, the two skipped bail and made their way to LAX, where they promptly turned themselves over to authorities and asked for political asylum, claiming the British government was harrassing them for their "satire." Immigration officials hauled them to the Santa Ana Jail, which has a contract to help out the government with immigrant detainees. Read their case for asylum here.

"This is a test case for the US on whether the American court will protect anti-semites and those that incite the hate that leads to anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim violence, or whether it respects a British court decision and sends these people back for sentence," a Parliament member told the Post.

The fates of the Heretical Two is in the hands of Immigration Judge Rose Collantes Peters, who has a past of thumbing her nose at British courts. In 2004, she went against the wishes of the American government and ruled that la migra couldn't deport Sean O'Cealleagh, a bartender at O'Malley's in Seal Beach, for having been convicted in England for his role in the murder of two British soldiers during a 1988 Irish Republican Army funeral. This past Tuesday, Peters heard final arguments in the case of the Heretical Two, with Sheppard and Whittle acting as their own attorneys because the attorney originally recommended to them by Mark Weber of the Holocaust-denying Newport Beach-based Institute for Historical Review  dropped out after not getting paid enough cash (according to The Heretical Press home page). Peters is expected to deliver her verdict within 30 days.

The saga of Sheppard and Whittle has drawn nary a press report in the United States, even though it involves all sorts of free-speech questions. But the Heretical Two have become far-right causé célebres, earning support from the aforementioned IHR, David Duke, and other types of trash.

Then again, supporters of the Heretical Two make this interesting point:

The question is not whether you like Sheppard and Whittle, or agree with their writings, or the other material posted on the Heretical site.  It is, quite simply, whether you are prepared to help ensure the effective representation of two men seeking to set a vital precedent for genuine asylum seekers from oppressive, liberticidal regimes, seeking refuge in the world's last true free speech zone.

The byline goes to Gustavo Arellano, who may or may not be a Hog habitué.

Meanwhile, the Yorkshire Post provides an update on the asylum proceedings, with additional coverage and linkage heading the Heretical site. Looks as though things may drag on for a while.

Memento mori.            

Born Screaming

Insanity dislocates the nervous system from its axis. Mind and body lose the symmetry which both require. Hence, in the most extreme states, a multiplicity of persona, compete with one another, for mastery of the mind. The discursive intellectual sees deeper still. He sees a society where mounds of corpses left redundant in the Nazi’s wake were thought by many to have deserved their fate. Who then, in circumstances such as these, is wholly sane? The truth is that we are all in some sense mad. We are liable, in that moment of madness, to go over to the other side. We are sick because we have never diagnosed the possibility of curing our sickness. We are immoral because we lack the propensity to behave morally. In that moment of madness we are too nervous to attempt anything with anyone unless they’re a corpse first. Necrophilia is the privilege of the naturally human. The lividly swinish, the essentially bestial, the thing from which we emerged, and he stands there, behind every lawyer, every judge, every mendacious cesspit of a politician. You will find him there. The man with the gun, the individual of the first cause, the articulator of the original violation: Cain; the man who killed Abel.

-- Jonathan Bowden, Mad

Jonathan Bowden's Mad will be released by Nine-Banded Books in May, 2009.

Pet Project

Ages ago, in a throwaway post called "More Pit Bulls, Less Crime?" I drew upon the sociometric debate over the deterrent effect of right-to-carry gun policies to speculate that notorious dog breeds such as Rottweilers and "Pit Bulls" were probably getting a bad rap. My reasoning started with the easily observed disconnect between sensational media accounts of pooch-wrought carnage and the statistically infinitesimal real-world risk of death by dog. When snarling canines maul youngsters and and urbanite lesbians, the public response is characterized by deep-rooted fear and morbid fascination -- pretty much what we should expect, considering that for most of our evolutionary history people had good reason to fear being eaten alive by animal predators. You get grisly headlines and red-font Drudge links and tragic newsmagazine close-ups of bawling moms and dads and soon the public is stirred to Do Something about another Very Serious Problem. Municipalities hastily impose breed-specific bans, and no one considers that there might be another side that can't be dismissed as  mere PETA-hearted sentimentalism. 

So you drill through the panic-mongering litigation-bait in your first round of Googling until eventually you discover the stats and it turns out that in the United States maybe just over a dozen people on average are killed by dogs (of all breeds) in a given year. Maybe an even twenty, depending on your source. Of course, most of the victims are wee tots, but before before you hit back with your "one child's death is too many" applause line, keep in mind that children face greater mortal risk from cribs, swimming pools, buckets of water, bicycles and their own parents. Relative to any other calculable mortal risk, the dogstats are just tiny. In the scheme of public-spirited epidemiology, they barely register. And to the extent that the yet tinier subsets of  breed-specific fatal attacks  may be considered (here is a recent report from Dogbite Law, and her is an  older one from the CDC), the question is far more complicated than it seems on first pass, in part because those tinier numbers keep breaking down into even tinier subgroups; unneutered male Pits and Rotts account for proportionately more canine mayhem than their female and neuter littermates. And then there is the problem of negligent breeding subcultures, which leads to the sort of inconvenient sociology that really shouldn't be overlooked.  

But there's no need to get bogged down in an interesting subject. Because even if we grant the lawyers their scariest stats and assume the worst about stigmatized breeds, the relevant hook is clear. People are afraid of dogs. The curiously unexplored empirical question then becomes: does this  fear translate into a crime deterrent, to the benefit of dog owners? -- with the ancillary question of special concern following: if such a deterrent can be demonstrated, does the effect differ by breed? That is, do Rottweilers and Staffordshires and other feared pedigrees confer a greater crime-reducing benefit to their owners than less notorious breeds? And finally, if there is a deterrent that tracks by breed, is the effect great enough to offset the supposed threat posed by liberal dog-owning policies? Do Pit-Bulls save lives?

When I first floated this question, I assumed it would be a short matter of time before some Levitt-styled quant-nerd would begin crunching the stats. I figured that the faddish move toward breed-specific bans in major cities (most notably in Denver) would prompt at least a few econometricians to wonder what I wondered, and to investigate what I have neither the time nor smarts to investigate. I'm told that such naivety is common among nonacademic admirers of academia; if you stumble upon a notion,  you assume that someone has already worked it out, or soon will. But that's just dumb cause there ain't no research been done. Not of the kind I have in mind.

It is interesting about the gun thing. It's similar. And it's different.

With the empirical research on guns and crime, you started out with a lot of overconfident sociology cultivated in the cultural fear of crime and motivated by frank anti-gun prejudice. Eventually, matters were complicated by a number of population surveys (perhaps most notably those conducted by criminologist Gary Kleck and later written up in his book, Point Blank), where reports by convicted criminals and civilian gun-owners converged to provide evidence that guns were being used in self-defense far more frequently than the old-school sociologists had allowed, and usually without a shot fired. A one-dimensional and largely political debate thus gave way to complex matrix of possibilities.

When the concealed-carry controversy was heating up anew, there was John Lott with his data-laden county-comparative charts and graphs that seemed to show that liberalized permit laws, contrary to dire predictions, had the effect of reducing crime rates to some significant degree. Lott's critics were left with plenty of nits to pick, but mostly they just kept shuffling the variables until they could seize upon some strange set of controls to massage the regressions into something nearer to a wash. People like to make fun of Lott, and he set himself up for a lot of it, but his work really did change the terms of the debate. I don't think there are many serious field scholars who still hold to the simplistic "more guns cause more crime" thesis, even if that was the original default. The center-stage debate now focuses not on the question of  how much crime is attributable to firearms, but on the extent to which gun-crime is mitigated by the countermanding deterrent benefit of gun ownership. The null hypothesis isn't dead, but the one-tailed conceptualization of the matter has been traded in favor of a more nuanced cost-benefit analysis.

As with the presently stalled move to ban notorious dog breeds, the old gun control movement was based on a superficial reading of reality. In the early rounds, gun policy research suffered from a value-bound failure of imagination and I think this is what we're seeing now with the dog issue. When you look in only one direction, the view is limited, and perhaps skewed by intrusive images from the id. Demon-guns and demon-dogs.  Oh my.

I think the dog question differs from the gun question in a couple of important respects. First, there is the simple matter of numbers, already mentioned. If you exclude gun suicides (as I must insist), the  CDC's mortality calculator sets the latest gun homicide rate in the United States (for 2005) to be somewhere around 4.5 per 100,000, representing  roughly 12,400 criminally motivated kills. With at least a couple of hundred million firearms in private possession, any deterrent effect must be considered against this relatively high measure of lethal harm. But when it comes to dogs, the mortality stats are so small as to nearly defy stable expression in standard per capita terms that can be adjusted over time. Some years there are fewer than 10 deaths attributed to dog attacks. Other years there are just around 30, and if you believe the National Canine Research Council, the numbers may be on the decline. It's hard to know, really, since subtle shifts in the relevant populations combine with stat-noise to keep things slippery. But with lethal dog attacks occurring so infrequently, it would seem that even the slightest crime-reducing counter-effect could be enough to overturn the prevailing assumption.

On the other hand, the theorized mechanism of gun-facilitated crime reduction needs to be taken into account. Especially with the concealed-carry angle, where the effect is usually conceptualized as a kind of positive externality that benefits members of the general population whether they own guns or not. Here and again, the idea owes to rational criminal behavior. A stick-up fiend is thwarted when one or two would-be victims  brandish heat and he revises his worldview to account for the newly increased risk. Since he doesn't know who's packing and who's not, the standard MO becomes too dangerous, or too costly. Until everyone is a little safer. With dogs, the situation is different. Any deterrent effect owing to dog ownership would seem to confer more narrowly to the dog owning population, without necessarily spilling over into anything  more generalized. On a leash, behind a fence, or barking behind the front door, dogs remain conspicuous. You don't tuck them under your belt, except on very special occasions.

If you want some graspable grounds for breed-specific crime deterrence, here's a decently referenced snip from a police home security manual:

Dogs have proven to be an effective deterrent to burglars. Researchers Paul  Cromwell, James Olson and D'Aunn Avary write in their book, Breaking and Entering: An Ethnographic Analysis of Burglary (Sage, 1991) "When asked what were considered absolute "no go" factors, most burglars responded that dogs were second only to occupancy. However, approximately 30% of the informants initially discounted the presence of dogs as a deterrent. Yet, during "ridealongs" the sight or sound of a dog at a potential target site almost invariably esulted in a "no go" decision. 

And:

Professional dog handlers suggest some breeds are better at "watchdog" duties than other breeds. Dr. Stanley Coren in his book, The Intelligence of Dogs: A Guide to the Thoughts, Emotions and Inner Lives of Our Canine Companions (Bantam, 1995) consulted experts and found the following breeds to be good "guard dogs": Bull Mastiff, Rottweiler, Doberman Pinscher, Komondor, Puli, Giant Schnauzer, German Shepard, Rhodesian Ridgeback, and Kuvasz. Good "watchdogs" are the Rottweiler, German Shepard, West Highlander White Terrier, Yorkshire Terrier, Cairn Terrier, Airedale Terrier, Poodle, and Miniature  Schnauzer. Breeds such as the Rhodesian Ridgeback and Rottweiler are good guard and watch dogs, but do require close supervision and obedience The worst watch dogs identified by Dr. Coren are: Bloodhound, Newfoundland, English Bulldog, Pug or Scottish Deerhound.

The manual focuses on burglary and home invasion, but it seems reasonable to assume that publicly exposed dog-walkers would also make less than optimal targets for robbery or rape. I figure a leashed Mastiff  signals a louder "no-go" to a would-be aggressor than would a cute bugeyed pug. After all, we know that criminals are rational actors. And the same breed-phobic bias that reads as edging moral panic when expressed in opinion polls makes perfect rational sense when expressed by a crook sizing up his mark.

If you want another starting point, there is the U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook, published by the AVMA.  I haven't read it, but according to the TOC, it contains statistics on dog ownership by breed and region. Could be useful. So could the regional data gathered at the Breed Specific Legislation repository.     

I understand that real-world-factored regression analysis is a byzantine bitch, but it sure seems like you could get things rolling simply by taking before and after criminological snapshots of  municipalities where breed bans have been imposed. If there's a difference that deviates from general trendlines, then let me know. Of course, the question of ordinance enforcement may turn out to be crucial, but it shouldn't be too hard to scour the magistrate records to determine where dog-snatching cops are playing by the letter and where they aren't. So maybe you need to control for enforcement, too. OK then. Do that, too. Then get back with me. Matters may become more complicated later, but just start with before and after, and let's not be distracted by those boring lawyer-pimped dog-bite stats. Just see if there's a possible effect in overall crime trends, in whichever direction. I'll be curious to see what you come up with. And keep in mind the exceptional microtude of the  mortality stats to be trumped, if my precious pits are to be vindicated.  Even a blip could be significant.

You have your work cut out for you. Expect false starts. Now get to work.

I'll be waiting in front of the TV. Surrounded by cats.

Memento mori.

Me and the H-Bomb, Part One: Kyle Broflovski and the Gas Chambers

Editor's note: this is the first in a planned three-part series on Holocaust denial and the culture of skepticism. In Part Two, I  will take a close look at Samuel Crowell's thesis presented in his monograph, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. In part three, I will revisit the question of Michel Epstein's fate at Auschwitz and address related foundational questions concerning the nature of proof, knowledge, and doubt.

____________________________________

Worse than a Refuge

Not long ago, a trusted reader referred me to IHR director  Mark Weber's editorial, "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?,"  which seems to have since garnered a lot of attention. The thrust of Weber's argument is neatly distilled in the closing paragraph:

Setting straight the historical record about the wartime fate of Europe's Jews is a worthy endeavor. But there should be no illusions about its social-political relevance. In the real world struggle against Jewish-Zionist power, Holocaust revisionism has proved to be as much a hindrance as a help.

Of course, this tells us far more about Weber's priorities than it does about the relevance of Holocaust revisionism in a more disinterested, or less politically preoccupied, context. The rhetorical shift is really no less predictable than Deborah Lipstadt's obtusely qualified gloating, which soon followed. Judeophiles and anti-Semites dance in practiced formation.  The choreography is lockstep, always uninspired.

Opinions are boring. If you must know, I don't think the state of Israel should have been established where and how it was, if at all. But there it is, and there is nothing I can do about it. It bothers me precisely as much as Watergate. The "struggle" to which Mark Weber refers, is not my struggle. I am more interested in mass psychology and the stronghold of taboo; I am more interested in the ideal of intellectual freedom, and the fascinating possibility that some of the most sacred truths of our time may be largely grounded in rumor and propaganda and myth and outright falsehood. I am more interested in the mind of Michael Shermer than in the machinations of a socio-political power structure, which I believe is largely and insipidly rooted in aggregate biopsychology anyway. With the usual caveats, Jews are simply smarter, more creative, funnier, and more consanguine than other critters. They also have better PR. Kevin MacDonald makes curious noises, but honestly, you might as well argue with a barometer. Or try getting used to it.

As Weber gears up for battle, the slow rout of cultural deracination cuts subversively at the power dynamic he suspects and opposes. His stance is neither valiant nor especially unseemly; it is more tellingly blinkered, or stunted. And untimely. My wife is mongrelized with sweet Ashkenazi blood and she doesn't give a damn about Holocaust-upmanship or US-Israeli hegemony. She thinks my interest in the other side of genocide is a nerdish hobby, which is sort of true. But the grandmother believes in lampshades and soap, and the old man is an armchair Zionist who thinks Palestine is a nagging myth. These are good people, people with whom I disagree about certain things that really aren't worth the trouble. But they won't be around much longer.

Weber mentions the presence of Holocaust memorials in virtually every major American city. Yet isn't there something terribly conspicuous and almost desperate about this strange reality? Some Jewish kids will be wise to it. Some already are. These days, the most vocal and prominent critics of Israeli policies are Jewish. And some of the most adamant Zionist cheerleaders are devout Christians.  Chomsky is a superstar in every college town. And Finkelstein runs laps around a Harvard-bred plagiarist. If I were chatting it up over drinks with Mark Weber, I'd tell him to check back in a couple of generations.

Spend a few hours with Kevin MacDonald's accidental foil -- I'm referring to Yuri Slezkine -- and you quickly see that Jewish nationalism is as silly as it is counter-historical. You can stump for a one-state solution, if it makes you feel special. Or you can gerrymander that shitty desert real estate until the demographic tide laps at your design. It's hemlock or cyanide, really. Either way, the specter of an ethno-theocratic clash rears back, and pyrotechnics are assured. The Jewish homeland is a crass bible myth, just like Armageddon. Ancient tall tales embolden the tribes, until there's little left to do but watch the ticker. Count up the corpses and wring your hands over disproportionate response. Or cheer for the home team. With Pat Robertson, if that's your thing.

FDR should have opened the gates, to the disappointment of Herzle's latter day crusaders. Even Madagascar would have been better. Those Haganah rebels would have made short work of the demon lizards, though Leon Uris might not have taken notes. 

Anti-Semitism is worse than a refuge; it's a rut. Peer through the fog, however, and the core project of  Holocaust revisionism is revealed as a thing apart. Essentially, it remains a positivist endeavor. Beyond the bad faith and the entrenched emotional investment that so noisily attaches, there is the lure of a pure intellectual adventure, culturally shrouded here, legally proscribed across an ocean, or a border. It's a simple matter of inquiry, nursed in the skeptic's instinct and consequences be damned. Partisans to a larger cause fail to see the thing for what it is.

Whatever animates the ones who persist, their task should remain focused on facts and science and scholarly skunkwork, perhaps with a good deal more appreciation for social psychology, which Crowell alone seems to grasp. But the Jewish Question? Please. That's a fool's distraction. Slezkine's book slaked my curiosity, such as it was, leaving Cochran and Harpending to gild the lily the tip. This is old business. Old money. Old politics. Best left to old souls. Weber and Lipstadt...sitting in a tree.

Ideology is a prickly refuge, but truth for truth's sake -- well, that's another matter. There are no illusions here. States come and go, but knowledge is a river.

Stuff White People Like #1245: Condemning Holocaust Denial

A Holocaust museum is built in Washington. Sixty-five million people watch Schindler's List. The German president apologizes to Israel. Then what can you say about these guys who say the Holocaust never happened? They're a fringe movement of charlatans.

         -- Michael Berenbaum, distinguished professor of Holocaust studies

This has been a difficult project because at times I have felt compelled to prove something I knew to be true. I had constantly to avoid being inadvertently sucked into a debate that is no debate and an argument that is no argument.

             -- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust

The basis of human dignity is the right to doubt what our senses apparently tell us, and to accept that there is a second possibility.

-- Germar Rudolf, convicted thought criminal

Holocaust deniers are intellectual niggers. Prominent columnists and top-flight idea guys routinely flout other cultural taboos, but the same experts and dilettantes instinctively draw the line when the subject turns to genocidal mens rea and inconvenient gas chamberology. Steven Pinker champions the unfettered exploration of "dangerous ideas," but makes the obligatory exception. National Review puts up with  John Derbyshire's cantankerously godless blank-slate-scotching racial heresies, but if the blustery Brit ever deigned to take a recreational dip into Germar Rudolf's prolific corpus of writings, he'd be out of a job; consigned to the margins, and he knows it. Even our pocket anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald toes the rhetorical line, perhaps because the idea of genocide fits so sexily within the framework of his teetering group-adaptive thesis. Meanwhile, career skeptics like Michael Shermer and Robert Jan van Pelt play fast and loose with revisionist arguments, leaving an expectant and selectively credulous audience with the assurance that the whole unfortunate business is less coherent -- and more nefarious -- than the lamest wingnut conspiracy yarns.

Biohistory is chic at the borderlands, at the moment. Cochran and Harpending present a thesis that would have got them thrown off the bus a couple of decades ago, and the critics respond in a qualified thrall. Judith Rich Harris is taken seriously. Charles Murray is taken seriously. Gregory Clark gets a prominent hearing. Phil Rushton isn't facing jail time. And Howard Zinn even blurbs a 9-11 conspiracy book. But no respectable performance iconoclast admits to reading Germar Rudolf, or Arthur Butz, or Robert Faurisson, or Samuel Crowell. Serious right-thinking people may drink from the denialist-debunkers cup from time to time, but they studiously avoid the criminal source material. There are lines. There are laws. There are consequences.

And just as surely, there are reasons.

What ever could be the difference? Why is it fashionably controversial to question long received wisdom  in certain touchy domains of human experience but not with reference to the orthodox account of the fate of European Jews during the Second World War?

I don't think there is a simple answer. I certainly don't think the special treatment of Holocaust heresy signals a crude symptom of Jewish cultural influence, although that's part of it.  I don't think the funk of anti-Semitism explains enough, either. It's a serious put-off, but degrees of separation are more apt to beg the same first order questions. I don't think it's because revisionist arguments are too preposterous to merit a response, as Deborah Lipstadt asserts. To the contrary, it seems clear, if not immediately obvious, that orthodox historians have long and quietly struggled with the problems their marginalized critics have identified and amplified. Walter Laqueur struggled with the problem of secrecy. Ernst Nolte threw up his arms. Finkelstein dances a mite too close. And David Irving wasn't always a sieg hieling pariah.

Nor do I think it's because revisionist arguments are but an insidious ruse for those whose real intention is to "whitewash" National Socialism, or to recussitate the awful sleeping beast.  This one comes up everywhere, but I know first-hand that Holocaust skeptics are a motley crew. The lesser lights may have a soft spot for Brownshirt regalia and Third Reich apologetics. It's no surprise that such unseemly nostalgia would lead the bristling misfits to a dissident line that's already cast. But the outlaw historians with whom I've corresponded are mostly libertarians and lefties. Not that it should even matter, but the blanket imputation of motive is best understood as a wishful smear.

Perhaps you'll tell me it comes down to grounded suspicion, or trust -- an economic bow to the consensus scorecard. A kind of default appeal to bookie's odds. Fair enough. I actually like this idea very much. I think it's surely part of the story as well. Despite my lack of relevant expertise, I don't expect that Peter Duesberg stands to be vindicated. And while I don't know for climatology, I think the earth is probably getting warmer due to human conduct, just as the experts have it. The  difference is, HIV skeptics and global warming naysayers are published in real journals; they write books  bearing the imprint of respected publishing houses. They enjoy equal access to the evidence. Serious people wrestle with their arguments and data and respond in kind, in the manner of open, albeit acrimonious, debate. Most importantly, their words are not criminal. Their speech is not proscribed or profoundly stigmatized. Only revisionists (and  a handful of pornographers, I suppose) fall afoul of laws in the post-Enlightenment Western word. In the world of academia, gas-chamber skeptics remain personae-non-grata. When a public person so much as repeats a suspiciously flavored morsel, he faces the gauntlet. Just ask Bishop Williamson, or Fred Leuchter. Stephen Colbert is ready with a line. Because there are lines.

I said it's complicated. I'm sure it is. In many ways, at many nuanced layers. But there is one reduction that intrudes with seductive parsimony.

I think the taboo is at base a kind of fad.

Fads encroach at the periphery, almost hypnotically. You wake up with the knowledge that you're supposed to wear your hair a certain way, or drive a certain style of automobile, or ride a bike. You scour the baby name books and end up calling the kid Molly or Finneas. Or -- you sense, somehow, that you're supposed to believe something, to the exclusion of something else, perhaps in a certain subtle way. The clever ginks call it signaling, or performance.

Used to be, hardwood floors were considered drab and austere -- and not in a good way. Now, for some fucking reason they'll try to explain, Christian Lander's outed White People rip up the carpet and celebrate over timeworn planks. Ever get a tune stuck in your head? Adopt and nurse a useless opinion? When did you start using the term "gob-smacking"?  When did you decide to buckle up? Where you persuaded by evidence? Remember SARS? Trudi Chase? Cruise ship illness? Killer bees? Smoking in restaurants? Routine tonsillectomies? Nervous breakdowns? Smash-up derbies? Flagpole sitting?

Times change. People forget.

Sensibility and Doubt             

To me, it collapses to the Satanic abuse panic, so easily washed from our consciousness.  In the cultural mire, the collective bloodlust didn't present as hysteria. It never does. What happened was, mother Oprah dutifully educated a mass audience as to the lurid details of a vast Sadeian conspiracy that played out right under our noses. There were astronomical statistics parroted by confident experts, and there was the testimony of the children -- the CHILDREN! -- and of the cops who saw it all with their own jaded eyes. Anatomical raggedy dolls filtered through an insidious memetic storyboard. Backbrain fantasies were subtly sublimated, given license in the form of blot-reading "naked movie star" verisimilitude.

Because the beast needed feeding.  Soon you looked at those grainy milk carton kidfaces and imposed the only backstory that a culture allowed. According to the script you'd been handed, piece by piece. Germinal lies, or mistakes, were necessary but not sufficient. Overzealous prosecutors and opportunistic post-Freudian charlatans stirred the vat, but they were really just pawns in a larger scheme that would never trace to a clean design. What was required was a culture of belief, pitched in the language of righteous urgency, and justified, crucially, by the resurgent and enduringly stupid notion of pure metaphysical Evil. The Frontline expose's came much later, after the spell had lifted. Fads fade. Sometimes it takes a while. But they really did go digging for tunnels, didn't they? Innocent people were put in jail.

The mechanisms are complex. What I'm saying is simple enough. Kelly Michaels could have been Ilsa Koch.

N-rays never were, but scientists saw them clearly. Facilitated communication was a sham, propped up by the earnest, believing wish of the most well-intentioned people. Gulf War Syndrome was culture-bound psychosomosis, and Rorschach blots turn out to mean nothing. Charles Mackay wouldn't be surprised.

But Nigerian yellowcake was a lie, wasn't it? Like those bullshit stories about Kuwaiti babies being plucked from incubators by Evil Iraqis. And weapons of mass destruction? Well, the ones in Iraq didn't exist. But the ones at Auschwitz, we are assured, were the genuine article. You believe it. Because you believe it. For the same reason you cultivated a preference for charming hardwood patina. Some fads become resonant social signals, tethered to  a short memetic fuse. But the best ones burn into myths, weighted with the aura of the sacred. Like the one about a rebel Jew, dying for your sins. Like the one about a homeland. I still wonder if Dalyrymple was stifling a Straussian wink when he observed that Intellecuals Like Genocide. Esoterica should never be so obvious.

You call it like you see it. But what you see, and what you don't see -- that's another matter.

WWKBD?

Really?
   
       -- Kyle Broflovski, fictional character

Could the cryptocracy have orchestrated the 9-11 spectacle, right before our lying eyes? Could such a vast conspiracy have been hatched and executed with labyrinthine  precision by the same boobs who couldn't be bothered to fabricate WMDs in a vanquished state when the chips were down? By George Bush's sinister puppeteers? Go ahead and snow me with your webumentaries, Truthers. I'll look and listen like a good student. Hit me with your most seismic cui bono epiphany. Connect the dots for me. We'll have a nice chat and I'll disspaoint you with my best Kyle Broflovski.

It just doesn't happen that way. Someone would talk. There would be a budget. There would be hard evidence, not suggestive traces. Neocons are assholes, not warlocks.

Say you get to the part where John Mack signs off on Strieberland stories about weird creatures shoving weird devices up those poor closeted goblin-abducted asses, and you are amused. But when Raul Hilberg cites Jankiel Wiernik's lurid tale of shit-grinning Nazis drinking and dancing like wicked Dionysians amid piles of stinking burning Jewish kindling corpses (the ladies burned faster, you'll recall). Well, not so funny.

I'm not quick to call a man a liar. I try to respect those who believe what I doubt and those who doubt what I believe. But I know a shit story when I hear one. Abduction narratives are at least delusional. 9-11 Truth is a mad gestalt. And the early Nazi genocide memoirs read like midrashim. Or Sadeian pastiches. Or bullshit. One genre is risible. Another other is hallowed. Both reduce to the same baloney. There was a cottage industry of this crap in the seventies.  Nowadays, publishers are more careful, even if Elie Wiesel cites a grandfather clause.

During the First  World War, there were meticulously detailed atrocity stories about how the deviously industrious Germans used the corpses of their own felled soldiers to make soap in factories.  The stories were dutifully reported in major newspapers. They were lies. They were propaganda, most likely cooked up by British intelligence operatives and fermented in a culture of belief -- a culture that needed, as always, to justify the horrors of war. Business as usual. But when a newly tweaked version of the soap opera was cooked up by the Soviets and "proven" at Nuremberg, people believed it all over again. It wasn't until the 1980s that serious Holocaust historians, the ones you trust, began to disavow the stories about human soap (and human lampshades), though no one seems to be able to point to a careful debunking. When you try to find out what, precisely, led the Yad Vashem barkers to declare the stories "thoroughly investigated" and discredited (or "mistaken," as Micheal Shermer insists), you hit a dead end. It's appears simply to be something that serious people once believed but no longer do. Of course, most people still believe the all of  it. They've seen the films. They've heard the stories. So have I.

You hear a lot about how Holocaust denial is just like 9-11 hoax lore. The ostensible link is largely enabled by web-skulking sideliners who have their own bad reasons. But the common analogy is a bad one. It's ass-backwards, as I see it. This isn't to say there isn't a more salient, if less convenient, epistemological nexus to be delineated. That one is easy enough to articulate:

It just doesn't happen that way. Someone would talk. There would be a budget. There would be hard evidence, not suggestive traces. The Nazis were assholes, not warlocks.      

Here is Paul Grubach's concise explanation of why he is a Holocaust revisionist.

I am a revisionist because I maintain (1) There was no Nazi extermination policy in regard to the Jews; (2)  The "Nazi gas chambers" and "Nazi gas vans" never existed; and (3)  the claim of six million Jewish dead is an irresponsible exaggeration. I do believe, however, that there was a National Socialist deportation/ethnic cleansing policy in which a large number of Jews lost their lives due to starvation, disease, ad hoc atrocities, exhaustion, and executions on the eastern front during the German army anti-guerilla warfare campaign.  As Professor Butz pointed out in his Hoax, the Jews may have lost up to one million dead.  Of course, it is possible that the number of Jews killed may have been, say, 400,000. 

I think this is a pretty good bookmark summary of the strong revisionist/denialist view. In barest strokes, it outlines content of an idea that gets people thrown in jail. Think about that the next time you link to another bravely rendered Muhammad cartoon.

I don't know what Kyle Broflovski would say, but I don't think Grubach's position is crazy or hateful or wrong. My betting hunch is that it's probably more or less accurate. If you allow that the demographic problem is confoundingly slippery, it's not far from a prima facie reading of available evidence. The problem is that the standard Holocaust narrative is itself a story of a vast conspiracy carried out in total secrecy and orchestrated by mendacious Nazi g-men who took fastidious care to cover their tracks at every possible turn. That's the story. That's the problem.

Revisionists are fond of citing a passage from "functionalist" Holocaust historian Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken. I've discussed it previously.  Time being finite, I'll crib from the archive. Goes like this:

Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.  Even though Hitler and the Nazis made no secret of their war of the Jews, the SS operatives dutifully eliminated all traces of their murderous activities and instruments.  No written orders for gassing have turned up thus far.

Having duly noted that there is in fact little to no reliable trace evidence to confirm the existence of the Nazis' primary murder weapon (which may seem a bit odd to the most people who assume the whole sordid business to be so well documented  as to render revisionist skepticism absurd), Mayer goes on:

Most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders.  This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity.

And then, a few sentences later:

...there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources. These cannot be ignored, although it must be emphasized strongly that such defects are altogether insufficient to put in question the use of gas chambers in the murder of Jews at Auschwitz.  Much  the same is true for the conflicting estimates and extrapolations of the number of victims since there are no reliable statistics to work with.

This is what it comes down to.  A question of whether the wholesale absence of clear-cut documentary and physical evidence for a monstrous crime can be construed as sufficient grounds for questioning  whether and how the alleged crime took place.  Answer in the negative and everything will be fine.  Answer in the positive and if you have the wrong postal code you may get your ass thrown in jail. I may be oversimplifying, but not by much.

There is a psychic intersection where sensibility confronts an epistemological endgame. You have a range of choices, not all of them honest. Textbook dissonance isn't quite the crux of it. Culture and emotion entail special gravity.   The mind recoils. The moral weight is too grave, too intrusive, too urgent; larger than you. It's there in the literature you read in high school, an extra-rational dimension that doesn't yield to practiced scrutiny. Merely to relinquish certainty, to simply declare "I don't know," feels like a trap, or a transgression. Someone makes a joke, and you laugh. No point in defining what's sufficient.

In his little-read essay, "Wilkomirski and What it Means," America's foremost Holocaust revisionist, Arthur Butz, takes a novel pass at illuminating the predicament. He asks:

Does our dispute with the defenders of the entrenched legend arise not over what happened, but over what it means for something to "happen"? Is the dispute metaphysical rather than historical? Or is it neither?    

It's not a rhetorical question. "For one thing," Butz writes (and I agree), "it is not simple." With specific reference to the "Wilkomirski affair," which centered on the hand-wrung aftermath following one of many known frauds in the annals of Holocaust literature, Butz corners a paradox:

...both sides were right, and the revisionists are right as well. To see how this can be possible, consider in analogy the revisionist assessment of a not very hypothetical debate on whether or not Hitler knew of an extermination program, a controversy that David Irving started in 1977 with his Hitler's War. One side says the evidence shows that Hitler did not know. The other side argues that events on the scale of the "Holocaust" would have to have become known by Hitler. The two sides can't possibly agree because they are both right and know it. Only the revisionist can explain why there is no contradiction in saying both are right, but only provided it is understood that the revisionist is right.

If I may return to Laqueur, a similar seeming contradiction arose as a paradox, because the same man held what appeared to him to be two contradictory opinions: mass exterminations at Auschwitz were a "terrible secret," and mass exterminations at Auschwitz could not have been kept secret. Only the revisionist sees that there is no contradiction. Laqueur is right on both counts, but of course given his preconceptions he was unable to resolve the contradiction and left the subject. Again, the revisionist resolves the seeming contradiction.

Consider the dispute over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII. One side says he did nothing against the "Holocaust." The other side says he gave as much help as reasonably possible to the Jews. The dispute is illusory. Both sides are right, as is the revisionist, but only the revisionist has the key. There was no Holocaust for the Pope to act against.

The metaphysical impasse that Butz outlines is, of course, religious in character. Evidence is subordinated to truth a-priori, to belief, to faith. A museum is built. A monument is built. A memorial. A shrine. Another Holocaust film is released and the same critics make the same approving clucks as they will again. We are reminded of grave moral lessons, and  the factory line shits out more stage plays and book club memoirs and careful punchlines until somewhere in the saturated cultural din our sound instincts are traduced. The empirical search for historical truth is rendered suspect. The mere act of questioning becomes a vulgarity. Critical inquiry assumes the stained aura of sacrilege. There is a failure to communicate. It isn't worth the trouble.

 

The Great Question of Belief

Do I believe the Nazis implemented a plan to systematically exterminate the Jewish people using gas chambers and gas vans and the rest of it?

I'll spare you the long version this time. No, I don't believe it.

More on point, I don't think it has been demonstrated. I think the consensus history amounts to what skeptics like to refer to as an extraordinary claim. The truism is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A passing glance at any Holocaust studies course syllabus will underscore the problem. The matter is nothing if not extraordinary. The moral questions dwell on the singular problem of understanding that which defies comprehension, of grasping for embers of meaning and hope in the darkest contours of an episode that remains almost preternatural in its scale and enormity. Evil with a secular gloss. There is the seduction of ineffable verities, garbed as history.

But taboo is just a guarded moat, and it's shallow. When proof is lacking and evidence is scant, doubt is reasonable. Belief is not. I think that's the case with the gas chamber/genocide/six-million business.  I think it's an extraordinary claim without much meat.

It hardly matters at this stage, but not believing is not the same as denying. It's a semantic or relativist issue that no longer interests me. Parse it however. What is known to have happened is bad enough. People suffered immeasurably. There are real lessons. But the story we've been handed, in weft and weave and detail, is  in large measure preposterous. A grisly folk tale branded as an immovable truth.

It may turn out that rogue gassings occurred somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't doubt that the SS police units went medieval now and again, as all testosterone-addled soldier boys will in times of war and shame on them. The Nazi "euthanasia" program was real enough. But it defies credulity to believe that hundreds of thousands -- or millions, depending on your source -- of people could be marched to certain death in a steady queue day after day after day while others were being treated in camp hospitals on the same fucking grounds. At a most superficial level, the priority makes little sense in the context of a desparate war.

I think it's far more credible to imagine that unjustly declared enemies were deported to labor camps where the harsh reality of illness and the overwhelming stench and presence of death combined with the indignity of circumstance to germinate a culture of fateful suspicion. People were removed from their families and forced to work, for fuck sake. That's bad. In the confused atmosphere of total war, food blockades led to starvation. Infrastructural collapse made things worse. Lice-borne diseases made things yet far worse.

I think the Holocaust story was born in the fog of war and war-enabled pestilence. Confusion and fear and horrorshow beget tales, rumors, and lies. Belief is bred and nursed in the direst human predicament and later reinforced through black propaganda, through intertextually facilitated confabulation, through torture-derived confessions, and Sykewar disinformation. In the wake of Soviet-spun sham trials, and war-fevered newsreel images, and  Life magazine atrocity spreads, and pulp-fiction, only one story was made to sell. Much like with the abduction narratives. Much like with those preschool witch-trials, or Salem back when. It's a buyer's market.

I'm not a historian. I don't have an agenda. I have no animus toward Jews. It simply makes more sense to me that there wasn't a genocide in the sense the story demands. It fits with the world I've come to know, which is bad enough without embellishment. I could be wrong about any of it. But I am not wrong to doubt what I do not believe.

Treblinka is Crazy

There's no need to get stuck on poor Abe Bomba the barber dutifully snip-snip-snipping the locks of bedoomed and dunuded dames in impossibly cramped gas chambers rooms, all between the swift, filthy business of killing. Or Elie Wiesel's science-defying "geysers of blood." If you believe such fables, you'll believe anything. Curl up with a stack of dogeared stalags and sleep tight. 

You can stick to to the big stuff. Like Treblinka, writ large.

In its broader substance, the received account of what went down at Treblinka remains surreal in its absurdity. We're told that some 750,000 to 925,000 bodies were gassed using inefficient if not impossible machinery in moronically designed facilities over a short span of months. The story goes that the bodies were buried in massive pits then later dug up to be burned in makeshift pyres when word came that the Russkies were advancing. 

There are gaping problems with every sordid postwar-testimony-based element of this tale. To begin with, there are problems with the means and method of introducing poison gas with diesel engines from Soviet tanks, a method terribly suited to the task of killing anyone, much less for  mass murder on a nearly inconceivable scale.  There are problems with the timeline and with the pace and force of labor necessitated for such ghastly work, weather permitting. And even when you plug in the most liberal assumptions (as Denierbud does here), there simply wouldn't have been enough space for all those burial pits. The math isn't difficult. And it's not even close.

But if you prefer to begin with the assumption that it must be true, you're left with a second problem that doesn't rest. There would still be evidence. Big time. There would be gross signs of  sedimentary disturbance, for one thing. There would also be massive amounts of ash and bone and teeth and even incriminating chemical residues to be unearthed. You can't bury and burn the population of a major American city without leaving some serious forensic clues behind. So why is no one looking? Honestly, I can't think of anything that would shut the deniers up more soundly. If you need an incentive, word is there's even a James Randi style reward on the table. It should be simple enough to do the excavation. Just grab a shovel and go. And while you're at it, why not check out the other Reinhard death camps where the same MO is alleged?

Of course you'll need to apply for a grant and fill out the paperwork. And you'll surely have to explain your reasons -- reasons which may be deemed illegal. If that's too much hassle, why not send a note to Penn & Teller? Maybe they're hard up for fresh Bullshit material. Or perhaps the professional geeks at Mythbusters would be up for the challenge?  Adam and Jamie could lay waste to the deniers and their desperate negationist obfuscation once and for all. They'd be heroes, wouldn't they?

The Incredible Shrinking Auschwitz Genocide

Way back in the 80s, there was this socially inept, uncredentialed, patent-collecting execution equipment technician named Fred Leuchter who was asked at the behest of a man facing a prison sentence to investigate the forensic evidence for homicidal gassings at Auschwitz. Leuchter naively agreed to have a look-see.  What he did was, he took samples from walls of the "reconstructed" Krema I killing room, the one tourists are shown as the coup de grace, and which, at least until recently, was passed off as the genuine article. He also took samples from the remnants of the ostensible killing chambers at Birkenau, where the dirty work is implausibly said to have later been relocated to avoid prying eyes. Leuchter sent the samples to a reputable lab to be analyzed for hydro-cyanic residue using a control brick sample from the camp's still-standing complex of delousing facilities where the stuff was in regular use as a pesticide, as evidenced by the blue staining you've heard about.

He came up with snot. The control sample was literally off the chart, but the homicidal gas chamber samples bore only minute traces of cyanide, traces which would seem to be plausibly explained by the undisputed fact that Zykon-B was also used for routine disinfection purposes in most structures at the Auschwitz-Birkenau main camp.  Leuchter concluded that the buildings designated as homicidal gas chambers could not have been homicidal gas chambers. When he went public with his now infamous Report, his career was ruined, and Errol Morris was intrigued. Perhaps you've seen the movie. I still don't think Fred saw what was coming.

In 1991 it came to light that researchers at the Jan Sehn Institute in Krakow had conducted a similar forensic study under the auspices of the Auschwitz Museum. When an early draft of the JSI team's initial findings was leaked (purportedly by an Auschwitz Museum employee sympathetic to revisionism) the results seemed to corroborate Leuchter's findings inasmuch as they found almost no appreciable traces of cyanide residue in the alleged homicidal structures. This information was reported in the revisionist Journal of Historical Review.  

Several years later the same team, led by Prof. Jan Markiewicz, produced a revised report, which curiously omitted reference to their previous inconveniently leaked results. This later report is now most often cited as a definitive refutation of Luechter's conclusions. However, for reasons that I think are fishy, if not fraudulent, the second report adopted a very different methodology than the straightforward one employed by Leuchter. Most significantly, the researchers chose to exclude from their analysis Prussian blue iron cyanide samples from the delousing chambers that Leuchter had used as his control. They also used a non-standard method of measuring cyanide traces. In responding to the 1994 JSI report, forensically-driven revisionists have expended no shortage of ink and energy arguing that the  methodology had no scientific basis and was adopted to stack the deck in favor of their desired results. The revisionists have other criticisms. You can read about them here. And you can read the JSI results here. And you can read the original "Leuchter Report" here.

That's not the end of it. Around the same time that the Polish scientists were retooling Leuchter's chemical metrics, a chemist named Germar Rudolf was conducting his own post-Leuchter research, which resulted in a book-length report that probably stands as the most extensive forensic analysis of the alleged Auschwitz gas chamber chemistry to date. Rudolf's meticulous-even-if-erroneous research essentially confirmed Leuchter's arguably crude results, although his conclusions were less preclusive than Leuchter's (Rudolf did not rule out the possibility that the imputed structures could conceivably have been used for homicidal purposes; he merely concluded that any such usage would have occurred at a rate radically less frequent than anything imagined in the conventional accounts provided by eyewitnesses, postwar deponents, and traditional Holocaust historians).

For his curiosity, Rudolf was prohibited from competing his doctoral dissertation at the world-renowned Max Planck Institute. Later, he was deported from the United States where he had sought political asylum and he was thrown in a German cell for writing about chemistry.

In the wake and midst of all this weird chemistry, defenders of the Auschwitz genocide story have come forth with explanations for what might seem to unsophisticated eyes like a big problem. Jean Claude Pressac was the first in line. The French pharmacist authored an imposing coffee table tome entitled Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, which was published by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. In it, he tried to resolve the seeming inconsistencies by asserting, inter alia, that the amount of  Zyklon-B pellets used for killing humans turned out to be much smaller than anyone might have suspected -- certainly  much smaller than the amount used for killing pests. Somehow the Nazis figured it all out. He also asserted that the killings were far, far less frequent than had been previously asserted, claiming said that only small doses of the stuff were needed to kill however many people (and he revised the latter number down dramatically) on a none-too regimented schedule. While Pressac noted "an absence of any 'direct,' i.e. palpable, indisputable, and evident proof of homicidal gas chambers," he claimed that a trained reading of relevant documents revealed a trail of telltale "criminal traces," which , if you squinted, would coalesce into an adumbration of a shadow of a genocide.  

Later, in the middling 90s, the professional debunker Michael Shermer took a derivative shot at diffusing revisionist arguments in  the pages of the excellent Skeptic magazine. Banking off Pressac's lead, he presented his thesis that, despite some valid revisionist nitpicking, a "convergence of evidence" strongly supported the established master thesis. Robert Jan van Pelt says something similar now, sometimes in court.

So. As best I can determine, the currently accepted line holds that upwards of  95% of  Zyklon-B shipped to Auschwitz was used for the label-intended  purpose of killing lice to prevent the spread of disease. That was  Pressac's conclusion, and it was good enough for Deborah Lipstadt. Revisionists argue that shipments of the pesticidal pellets to Auschwitz were not proportionately higher than shipments to other camps where no homicidal gas chambers are claimed to have been in operation, a point which is disputed by van Pelt, their most credible foil. Revisionists further contend that the Auschwitz crematoria were physically incapable of toasting human flesh at anywhere near the rate imagined by all orthodox accounts, and this point is disputed, too -- most notably by John C. Zimmerman in his essay "Body Disposal at Auschwitz: The End of Holocaust Denial," which is in turn counter-disputed, most notably by an Italian revisionist cremation-tech point man who uses too many exclamation points.

However the details are sliced, there is no longer any real doubt that the vast bulk of the  infamous bug  spray was  not used to kill human beings. The debate is over a fraction, and of the forensic studies conducted to date, only one claims to support the extermination thesis. When you wade into the vicissitudes of argot-laden disceptation, is easy to become exasperated. It's easy to lose sight of what is plainly significant; if you didn't know what you know, the dual role of the Zyklon-B would be cause for pause.    

I'm sure those ominous mounds of expended Zyklon-B canisters are still displayed behind a glass on the official Auschwitz visitor's tour. I wonder whether the guides bother to tell onlookers that at least damn near all of the reputed WMD was used on mattresses and clothing for pesticidal, not homicidal, purposes? I wonder if they even know. The cynic's money says no. Complicated stories are less interesting. They don't sell.

Another Bad Analogy

As a convinced atheist who once took a passing interest in the Creationist debate, I think I have an idea of what post-hoc reasoning looks like. Let's be clear about this much. The revisionists were there first. They used reputable labs to analyze the samples using traditional methods. They used what strike me as reasonable and controls and they drew what strike me as reasonable conclusions. They found what they had hypothesized. Science is never finished, but the explainers had explaining to do. And after a suspicious false start, they got around to it. Defense portrayed as offense.

When the fossil record doesn't seem to jibe with biblical inerrancy, what's a believer to do? Depends on how committed he is to his precious scriptural narrative. It depends on how clever he is, and perhaps whether there is a book deal in the offing. It might depend on who his employer happens to be. But mostly, it depends on what he believes and why. Duesberg is wedded to a bad idea. Michael Behe keeps shifting his deck just enough to please the choir. And the 9-11 Truthers are programmed to see the shadows of dark conspiracy in every pore of Dick Cheney's crooked sneering mug. What makes you so sure that Michael Shermer and those thought-patrolling Nizkor scholars couldn't be so deceived?

I realize it's a swamp. The literature has grown to immensity, and much of it is simply beyond my ken. Yours too, I suspect. I don't know enough to know, but I know enough not to believe. I have a hunch, just like you. Some people still obsess over the tunnels at the McMartin preschool. They insist they were real. They keep looking for evidence, for "criminal traces." These people have their own slideshows and websites and forensic reports meant to reveal a massive cover-up. They are invested in a corrupt story. When you absolutely know what happened, the natural human tendency is to force the pieces to fit. Me, I don't know what happened. I only know when the pieces don't easily fit. A surface reading tells me it's more likely that the Auschwitz-genocide story does not fit the forensics, does not fit with a straightforward reading of facts, does not fit with human nature. Look at Raymond Buckey. Look at Heinrich Himmler. What do you see?

A crime so vast shouldn't produce such confounding puzzles. No one argues that slavery is a myth, though the trope is a familiar straw-man. I think I know the simplest explanation. The one Occam -- or maybe Kyle -- would prefer. I may be wrong.

A while back there was some buzz about recently uncovered documentary evidence of  Auschwitz gas chambers. Blueprints found in an apartment in Berlin, or something. It didn't pan out. You follow the debate, such as it is, with half an eye and you get used to this shit. Honestly, those Russian archives should have nailed it by now. Instead, they've produced death books, once said to have been destroyed. Nazi logs documenting the deaths of thousands including oldsters -- surely unfit for labor -- in camp infirmaries, due to illnesses for which they were being treated. It doesn't fit the narrative, but don't worry. The pieces will always bend.

Zoom back a bit.

There are still no blueprints of homicidal gas chambers from any Nazi camp. But there are volumes of architectural documents for the crematoria as well as for innocuous structures, which we are told must be read  like esoteric grimoires. Faurisson's problem, remains a problem.

The Soviets told  whoppers at Nuremberg. They blamed the Nazis for the Katyn massacre. They produced sham evidence of shrunken heads and human soap and human lampshades and they claimed that Nazis killed people with all sorts of sadistic contraptions that aren't much mentioned anymore. They also claimed that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz alone. That figure was repeated for decades. Then it was revised down to around a million plus, and may have since been dropped by a few hundred K, depending on your source. That's at least three million bodies -- the population of Chicago -- returned to life.

Then you have the Dachau "gas chamber," which was probably a phony, just like in that Beck song. Or maybe it was another delouser. Whatever  it was, it was never used for anything, despite what the early newsreels claimed. Doesn't stop the same Auschwitz-flavored survivor stories from attaching.

Anne Frank died of Typhus at Bergen-Belsen, after a stint at Auschwitz, where the Nazis by all conventional expectations should have snuffed her, being that she was a verminous Jewish child, frail and ill-suited for saving labor.

Rudolf Höss was almost certainly tortured, or at least someone thought to brag about it. There's good reason to believe other Nazi war criminals were tortured in captivity as well. We know something about confessions obtained under "refined interrogation techniques," don't we? Postwar life wasn't so sweet for Eichmann, either -- after he was nabbed.

A straightforward reading of  "Final Solution" is consonant with deportation. A clear-cut order remains elusive. Instead you get cryptics and codes, topped off with a few disparate strands of inflamed rhetoric, anti-Semitic vitriol tucked in a memoir here and meeting there, any example of which is easily met by Winston Churchill's bloodlusting gin-fueled vituperation. The Wansee minutes are ambiguous.

Delousing rooms are as real as the Auschwitz swimming pool.

Night and Fog images pack a visceral punch. They document a catastrophe, not a genocide.

Gas-tight doors where commonplace in air raid shelters and morgues. Peepholes too.

And the eyewitness stories, well, they have a curious history. As we shall see.

Faced with Mayer's dilemma, the orthodox are left to seek traces, which they invariably find. The traces are then displayed to those who crave assurance, who won't bother checking against a vilified opposition, as irrefutable proof of something uniquely awful in it's shrouded monstrous enormity. It's a matter of convergence, like with the cross-cultural deluge narratives I remember from the fundie pamphets.

Please do this much. Watch David Cole's documentary at the bottom left of this page, if only to admire the kid's balls while you scoff. Then read Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman's treatment of the same documentary in  Denying History. Tell me who's not being honest.

In his underground movie, Cole states the core problem simply:

...the key to understanding the Holocaust story is understanding the true nature of the things passed off as proofs. Everything that is used as evidence of the Holocaust can also be said to have a perfectly normal explanation.

Is this true? Tell me where it's not. And tell me what it is, precisely, that I am supposed to believe? And why?

End of Part One.

Memento mori.

Paging Jared Diamond...

I'm busy doing stuff, but I would be remiss not to direct readers to Michael Blowhard's just wrapped week-long interview series with the formidable Gregory Cochran, co-author (with Henry Harpending) of The 10,000 Year Explosion.

 Here is part one.

 Here is part two.

 Here is part three.

 Here is part four.

 Here is part five (in which Cochran responds to  a selection of readers' comments and questions).

And here is the official 10KYE site, which includes a number of juicy outtakes.

I'm halfway through the book. It's at once a model of good pop-science exposition and a seismically provocative synthesis of the nascent field of what John Derbyshire calls bio-history. If you want to catch up on the genre, other required stops include Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms, Jeffrey Hart's Understanding Human History (free PDF here), Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, and Jon Entine's Abraham's Children. And if you're inclined to survey the bordering pornographic underbelly, Kevin MacDonald's maddening books are probably worth a look as well. As TGGP points out, The Culture of Critique is now freely available online.

Memento mori.

Hoover Hog Interviews: The First Five

The Hoover Hog's interview series seems to have generated some interest. In case you want to catch up, here are links to the first five:

Interview with a Holocaust Denier

Forced Life and its Discontents: An Interview with Sister Y

Instinct, Drive, and Reality: An Interview with Peter Sotos

Worlds of Suffering: An interview with Alan Dawrst

The First Rule of Androphilia: An Interview with Jack Malebranche

More in the offing.

Memento mori.

The First Rule of Androphilia: An Interview with Jack Malebranche

Editor's note: this is the fifth in a series of Hoover Hog interviews.

_________________________________



_________________________________

INTRODUCTION

Eventually, it comes back to the scene where the cornered pacifist has that thug garroted to a jagged sill. "My neck's on the glass," pleads the invader, his voice quaking with atavistic fear. Then comes David's adrenaline-strained declarative:

Good. I hope you cut your throat.

The one whose conscience writhed over a felled dove. Is still a man. "I will not allow violence against this house." You remember.

Of course, David Sumner wasn't a fag. Wasn't even real.

Mark Bingham was both. A last-second passenger on board United Airlines Flight 93, bound for the Bay Area, on September 11, 2001, Bingham is thought to have been among that small group of men who stormed the cockpit when the stakes were clear. He may have led the charge. We needn't tempt mythology to understand. When there is no recourse to civilized order, men act. You imagine a spontaneous kinship. A plan, derived in focused urgency, by a group of men. A brotherhood. You imagine the treble of women crying, and the pulse quickens, as when David turns to his wife and commands, "Do as you're told." Peckinpah wasn't masturbating.

The story is that Bingham had faced  off against thugs before, once at gunpoint. The story is, he was proud of his scars. He was a jock. According a former boyfriend, Bingham "hated to lose -- at anything." Mishima's "purity of sentiment" comes to mind.

Of course, Mishima was a fag.  Jocks made fun of him.

Across the desk is a man of  mien. Could be an executive, a cop, a sergeant, a professor, a tradesman, or a union boss. But let's suppose he is a lawyer. This man is not your father. You profess to hate this man, this boss, this authority. Perhaps just as you hate your father, for the usual specific reasons. But there is work to be done, and you are confronted, or seduced, by his command presence. A spell. The man looks you in the eye, outlines the task at hand, and your role. And it is understood, somehow, even as you are bewildered by your deference. You will rise to this occasion  . . .  because.

"There's something to this 'being a man' business," writes Jack Malebranche in his unapologetic, un-pc, pro-homo polemic, Androphilia. Something that fights and acts and creates and cries on Bob Paulson's tits. It's just that the rainbow barfags have forgotten, as culture-bound affectations transmute into a tired script that reduces to a parade. The ones who only pretend to read Genet, who cling to an insouciant female romance, are living a different lie. It isn't just a matter of aesthetics, or crudely conceived biology. Nature is a fascist bitch, but a lisp isn't a badge.

Do I have an opinion? Same-sex marriage is for lesbians. I like Steve McQueen and Powers Boothe and Sergio Leone and Project Runway. Gentility was never the rub. Take a swing at Tim Gunn and I bet he hits back, with a clenched fist.

Jack Malebranche, aka Jack Donovan, is an artist, a writer, a Satanist, an androphile.  Jack Malebranche is not gay. Let's talk about it.

_________________________________

HOOVER HOG: You are a man with a sexual preference for men, yet you reject the label "gay." What's in a word?

JACK MALEBRANCHE: What’s in a word? What is the difference between a paleoconservative and a neocon, a socialist and a communist, music and noise, between black and nigger? We use language to conceptualize our world and make important distinctions that change the way we perceive ourselves and the way others perceive us. Some people claim that they reject all social labels, but this is a cowardly posture. Identify yourself. Stand for something. Say what you are. Make distinctions. Discriminate.

Any good high school English teacher will tell you to mean what you say and say what you mean. Why then when we discuss homosexuality do we have to speak of it in cutesy euphemisms? Why can’t we say exactly what we mean without frosting it with a brightly colored sugary coating?

The word gay doesn’t precisely describe male homosexuality. It prances around the issue. The word gay describes an entire cultural and political movement. It describes a way of being and behaving and believing that expands far beyond a mere sexual preference. So for a man who prefers to have sex with men, but who finds himself at odds with the ideas, beliefs, aesthetics and culture that the word gay also communicates, identifying himself as “gay” is technically and meaningfully inaccurate. 

With “androphilia,” I take this one step further. Homosexuality is accurate and fine for casual conversation because it is widely understood, but homosexuality is not particularly specific. Androphilia adds an additional level of distinction. I do not simply prefer to have sex with male bodies. I am attracted socially, sexually and conceptually to adult men and adult masculinity. “Andro” means MAN. The word “man,” like the word “gay,” and the word “woman,” is loaded with meaning. I am not merely attracted to adult males, I am attracted to the expression of the MAN archetype in men. And in so many ways, the values and qualities associated with archetypal masculinity have an opposing polarity to the values and the central culture of the gay community. It is this opposing polarity, this sense of having values that are irreconcilable with the values expressed in the word “gay” that makes the distinction between “androphile” and “gay” both valid and necessary.  

In Androphilia: A Manifesto  you advance a broad critique of contemporary gay culture, and you challenge a number of commonly held views within the gay community. You argue that homosexuality isn't necessarily innate. You question the presumed solidarity of homosexual and feminist interests. You contend that a "Gay Advocacy Industry" promotes an "illusion of oppression and victimization" to advance a narrow leftist political agenda. And perhaps most unforgivably, you express opposition to same-sex marriage.   Setting aside the substance of your dissenting views, I'm curious as to how your book has been received in the gay community? Have gay-identified critics taken notice? Or are you "off the reservation," as they say?  

If I am “off the reservation” it's a matter of my own doing more than anyone else’s. In Androphilia I wrote unapologetically that gays are not my “family” or my “people,” and that aside from a handful of shared experiences I have little and often less in common with them than I do with other groups of “people.” I don’t spend time in gay parts of town or gay restaurants and I really don’t seek out homosexuals as friends—though I do have some friends who happen to be homosexual. It would by hypocritical of me to expect the gay community to embrace me or my work.

That said, there are a lot of intelligent guys who identify themselves as “gay” but who consider themselves to be free thinkers. Some of them identify with outcasts and underdogs and enjoy seeing someone shake things up a bit. Plenty of them are able to read a book critically and step back and say “I agree with this and disagree with that,” as any smart reader should. Some of these gays have publicly reviewed Androphilia, and while many of them ultimately defended the gay community, they were not entirely unsympathetic. Even one gay reviewer who wrote “let’s just agree to hate it,” was able to work a few kind words into his review. Some guys really liked the book, recommended it to friends and started calling themselves androphiles. A few went off and joined the army!

The only people who really go off the deep end about the book are extreme feminists and queer theory zealots, but despite their academic posturing these people operate within a closed intellectual system based on highly questionable assumptions.

Can you be more specific -- about these "highly questionable assumptions?" 

The pursuit of knowledge isn’t the primary goal of any “study” program grounded in feminism. There is an obvious political agenda there. That’s the only reason why these programs even exist. While superficial debate occurs over doctrine and details, if you don’t buy into the primary goal and service the central idea, you are not “with the program.” It’s like arguing with someone who studies theology. God is the ultimate justification for every path of study, for every argument. The theologian’s claim to authority comes from God. If you pull God out of the equation, the whole thing falls apart.  

If you don’t agree that creating a gender-neutral society is possible or desirable, then “feminist scholars” and “gender studies scholars” wield no real intellectual authority. If you aren’t prepared to accept on faith alone that sex is just a skin-deep costume, or that human societies have some sort of moral imperative to collectively wish-away or blind themselves to any meaningful differences between the sexes and do away with all gender roles, these people’s criticisms can be evaluated more realistically. They are priestesses and priests, propagandists, political operatives, interested parties. I’d no sooner expect objectivity from Karl Rove or a Jehovah’s witness knocking on my door. I’m familiar with their racket and I don’t find their arguments to be especially convincing based on my own first hand observation of human behavior.  

Advocates of a gender-neutral society, including queer theorists, feminists and most gay rights advocates, often pose as freedom fighters, but like most freedom fighters, they are really just advocates of a different system of control. They are outcasts who want to be accommodated, people who believe they were on the bottom, and who believe that they should be at the top. They are people who have been scorned or underestimated, who believe they should be celebrated. They are not objective, and they want what’s best for them, not necessarily what is best for you or for society as a whole.  

As you can see, I’m not objective, either. But I’m honest about it.
 
A recurring theme in Androphilia concerns how gay culture has come to embrace a radical feminist position that sees masculinity in wholly negative terms, thus encouraging a kind of ideological jam where male homosexuality is easily equated with effeminacy. By contrast, you describe yourself as an "unrepentant masculinist" and defend the value of male-centered ritual and tradition. If gay activists have erred in rejecting masculinity, is there a danger of replacing one gender-cult with another?

A danger to whom?

While I’ve framed the discussion in my own terms and articulated things that are not necessarily always articulated, the ‘gender-cult’ of masculinity is hardly my invention. If anything my presentation of it is often a remedial one for guys--like myself--who missed the boat the first time around. Negotiating the gender-cult of masculinity is something that every man has to do, even if he never speaks about it in those terms, even if he never speaks about it at all. The cult of masculinity may have taken a few hits, but sit down with an average group of men for a while when women are not present and I think you’ll find that it is alive and well, though in practice I find that men’s’ reverence for masculinity is generally more nuanced and thoughtful than the goofy caveman television sitcom version would lead one to believe.

You praise masculinity in nakedly religious terms, as an ideal to be preserved and defended if civilization is to flourish. But we live in a time and culture where the conscious affirmation of male identity is often met with ridicule. If same-sex-oriented men are emasculated by cultural expectations, do you perceive a greater threat in the broader cultural devaluation of traditionally masculine virtues?      

Absolutely. Our culture’s strategy for integrating women into the workforce has unfortunately been to strip men of any distinct virtues, qualities, social roles or responsibilities. This is one of the great tragedies of our time, and time will tell if this gender neutral society thing is really sustainable, practical or even truly desirable.

Women don’t often understand this, because they are women, and womanhood is something gained automatically through reproductive maturity, but MAN is an earned status. “Person” is a substantial demotion. My opinion is that if you don’t expect men to act like MEN, mere “persons” is exactly what you will get. “Persons” make adequate drones for the busywork of modern life, I suppose.  
 
Your focus on the "feminist critique of masculinity" and your rejection of culturally perpetuated effeminate affectations could lead some readers to wonder whether "androphilia" is in some sense a byword for misogyny. Have you encountered this line of criticism? And how do you respond? 
  
Most people who throw around the word “misogyny” a lot are completely hysterical.

Did you know that the root of hysterical comes from the greek “hysterikos,” meaning “suffering of the womb?” What’s in a word, indeed…

I do not advocate any REAL violence against women and I would take the traditional line that it is the responsibility of men to protect women from harm. However, it is not and has never been the responsibility of men to indulge every female…hysteria.

There are countless women of intelligence and accomplishment in the world. Most of them would prefer not to identify themselves with most “feminist” hysterics, and those women should be judged according to their own merits and achievements.

 
An interesting digression in Androphilia centers on the work of Adolf Brand, an early advocate of homosexual rights and a critic of sexual essentialism (as expressed in the antiquated theory of uranism). By any modern standard, Brand would be considered a dodgy character (he defended pederasty), but you offer a qualified defense, arguing that his work sought to remove homosexual attraction from its pathological status. Do you think that Brand's largely forgotten views are relevant to contemporary debates over the nature of sexual orientation?

I think Brand is important in the sense that his work shows that in the earliest stages of the development of what has become the modern gay rights movement, there was a homo at the forefront calling “bullshit.” Brand’s contemporaries were essentialists who believed that homosexuality was the result of an internally feminine disposition. Many gays today still believe this, and much of the half assed social “research” done on behalf of gay liberationists seeks to prove this stereotype to score political points. The side effect of this position is that every man who has ever had sex with another man is forever labeled “masculinity challenged” even if his behavior in every other aspect of his life suggests the contrary. Brand believed that homosexuality could fit into traditional society, and that practiced within certain boundaries (his would be different from my own) it could be a healthy expression of masculine sexuality—even for some men who would later marry and father children. Brand believed that the “female soul” argument was baloney. I brought up Adolf Brand in Androphilia because as a history lesson he proves that my antipathy towards the gay essentialist line and my rejection of sub-masculine status is hardly a post-liberation phenomenon.

 
Your views on the nature (and nurture) of sexual orientation are confoundingly nuanced. While you don't dismiss the notion that sexual preference -- and effeminate traits in some men -- may be partly rooted in biology, you are skeptical of the more deterministic view that people are necessarily "born that way." Why do you see the question as being more complicated than Melissa Etheridge would have us believe? And does it matter?

Human sexuality is confoundingly nuanced. Human psychology is confoundingly nuanced.  We absorb and process an inconceivable amount of data, and it seems incredibly facile to advance the idea that a certain behavior—which is expressed in a wide variety of ways by a wide variety of very different people—is always attributable to the same simple biological on/off switch. To say that homosexual childhood abuse never results in an awakening of homosexual tendencies which may not otherwise have ever been expressed is just as absurd as saying that it homosexuality is always the result of childhood sexual trauma. To say that peer affirmation of homosexuality will have absolutely no influence on the willingness of an individual to indulge in homosexual experimentation is just as absurd as saying that people will stop having heterosexual sex if homosexuality is accepted. To say that being in the right place at the right time with the right pal doesn’t have any influence on whether or not two otherwise heterosexual men will cross their normal boundaries and engage in homosexual sex seems highly unlikely—most gay males don’t even believe that! Many of the same gays who will toe the “born that way” line in public will brag privately that they can “get” a straight guy, or even that they prefer them! And the idea that predominately homosexual men are somehow incapable of being sexually attracted to women or developing strong feelings for them is an outright lie. Gays who advance the “born that way” argument aren’t interested in truth, they are interested in easy answers and political expediency. 
 
I don't get the sense that you're quite in step with Foucault, but there might be a vaguely structuralist current in your thinking. For example, you argue that the common understanding of sexuality is skewed by a cultural fixation on polarities, most conspicuously between male and female. The idea seems to be that binary thinking locks us into these reductive categories, where same-sex attraction between males is easily construed  in simplistic terms that promote and reify a culture of effeminacy. Is it your view that contemporary gay studies have blinded us to the more complex and diverse reality of sexuality? It seems relevant that bisexuality is often blithely dismissed by gay commentators and comedians.                     

I don’t know if I’d always say that about “gay studies” but I would agree that contemporary gay culture does both oversimplify the complexity of human sexuality and reify a culture of effeminacy. Gay comedians and commentators invite self-proclaimed bisexuals under their rainbow umbrellas, possibly for a variety of suspect reasons. But the reality of bisexuality seems to be incompatible with the absolutist “born that way” platform of hardcore gay advocates. They don’t have a good answer to this question, and it is something they like to sweep under the rug, because it rightly makes them uncomfortable. Bisexuals are the black sheep of that particular “family.”

 
I find it fascinating the way debates over human nature play out in political terms. Where racial differences are in question, biological theories are held to be gauche (or more politely, "discredited") while purely environmental explanations are credulously endorsed by people who've never bothered to look at the evidence. But when the subject turns to sexual preference, the default orthodoxy does an about-face and we are confidently assured that biology rules the day. When public discourse is so overwhelmingly molded by wishful ideology, is there a place for disinterested curiosity? 

One can only hope. 

You've had relationships with women, and in your book you state that you might have led a productive and satisfying life under antiquated norms which stigmatized homosexuality. Yet your perspective -- and your experience -- clearly owes something to sexual liberation, if only in the more narrow libertarian sense. Given your position, I'm curious as to your thoughts on the old days of closeted homosexuality, when men led double-lives or whatever. Assuming that decriminalization of sexual behavior was a positive development, do you think there might have been social value in the marginal status of homosexuality that has largely been replaced with broader social tolerance? Was there a baby in the bathwater? 

When gays came out of the closet, what I think they collectively lost as men was a connection with their fellow men—a sense of purpose and belonging among them. When homosexuality was practiced covertly, a man who preferred men was still forced to function as a man in mainstream society and was still saddled with the same expectations and pressures that other men have to negotiate. There were no special rules for homosexual males, because homosexuality was not part of a man’s public identity.  

The gay community embraces everyone and doesn’t expect its men to be anything but gay and “proud” of it. There is no pressure to be a “good man” because gays aren’t held to the same standards as other men. The gay community offers a place to hide from those sometimes oppressive expectations, and from the unforgiving judgment of other men. Gay males can surround themselves with women and gays who will flatter their egos and make them feel special no matter how they behave or what they do. They only have to “be themselves,” and that’s a luxury most men don’t have. 

I believe there is a place for homosexuals in a tolerant, sane society. The phenomenon of homosexuality is a historical constant. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some magic gene that turns it on, but it does mean that if you have a society with a hundred people, it seems like a few are usually going to end up having homosexual tendencies. Probably more if that society has a huge surplus or if homosexuality is incorporated in some way that doesn’t slow the birth rate or encourage a cultural submissiveness that makes that society vulnerable to a more aggressive one. The causes are really irrelevant here if you’re willing to accept the simple fact that “homosexuality happens.” So if a society is not suicidal or self destructive or self-hating, if it has a set of values and interests and a collective culture it wants to protect and ideally promote—which includes placing a high value on a culture of reproduction and rearing children in a way that ensures the society’s future—it has two basic choices when it comes to dealing with homosexuality. It can either foster a culture that is inclusive of homosexuality in a way that supports that goal, or it can marginalize homosexuals leave them to hatch subversion on the fringe. If you’re smart, and this rarely happens, you pick choice A. If you’re not, you do what Christians have usually done and pick B. Modern gay culture is a by-product of marginalizing homosexuals, who “came out” in cahoots with the various forces who want to dismantle western culture—the culture that marginalized them.  

The thing I have in common with many more socially conservative homosexual Christians is that we believe society needs to acknowledge that “homosexuality happens” and envision a noble role for the homosexual which encourages homosexuals to support the collective culture and mainstream family life. When homosexual men and women remained closeted and got married, or, as in some parts of Chinese history or often in the case of royal blood, they fulfilled their duty to society by having children and teaching them respect for their culture, even as they dallied on the side with men. That’s an ethically sketchy position to be in, but in some ways it worked and maintained social order. Some people, like writer Andrew Sullivan, for instance, believe that allowing same-sex marriages will allow homosexuals to assimilate sufficiently into a healthy, normal, reproductive society. But that’s an oversimplification. Homosexuals can’t have children naturally. They will never be on truly “equal” footing in that area, and if adoption is advocated as the “one true path,” that puts wealthier homosexual couples in a better situation morally—which is somewhat perverse.  

When you look back to WWII you see a lot of men who served who were men first, Americans second, and they had this homosexual thing on the side. I am always happy to hear it when young androphiles ignore “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and consider joining the armed forces. I interviewed one of them and posted that interview to my web site at androphilia.com under the heading “Andro in the Army.” Androphiles serving in the armed forces are in some sense closeted but they have a profound respect for order and a desire to serve society in some way.  

We have all of these young men who are probably never going to have kids or wives—why not encourage them to make some use of themselves and go into professions designed for men, or where men have a natural advantage of some kind? Some of those same professions also put a strain on heterosexual marriages and make active parenting more challenging. Law enforcement. Firefighting. Soldiers. Park rangers. Merchant marines. Pilots. Long range transportation. Even healthcare and education. Why create this socially subversive, pleasure seeking culture of self congratulatory nothingness when you can encourage these men to do something that will give them a sense of real purpose and worth? Put them to work supporting society’s infrastructure, instead of chipping away at its foundations.  

I’m an advocate of holding homosexual men to the same set of expectations as other men, in the traditional sense. They should be expected to be strong and self reliant, they should be judged by their achievements and their actions, and they should be expected to have some sense of honor. They should be expected to do the right thing and take responsibility for their actions without resorting to the shirker’s response of blaming society for their personal failings. But taking it a step further, I think these men have to be inspired to serve society, to do more than just attempt to mimic the nuclear family and appear ‘normal.’ As a society it makes sense for us to promote a noble, productive ideal for homosexual men that doesn’t set them up with the natural handicap of not being able to reproduce without resorting to bizarre and often expensive arrangements which will never quite be the same as “raising your own kids.” 

Gay culture shows homosexual males how to behave like clowns, how to get laughs at their own expense, or to get laughs by gossiping or insulting others. The gay community celebrates “fabulousness” and shows homosexual males how to be the center of attention, no matter what kind of attention. It shows them how to be beautiful and popular and desired in the way that high school girls want to be beautiful and popular and desired. Perhaps the only really complimentary—if fairly pathetic—role gays have traditionally played in society is helping women get dolled up so they can find a mate. “Honey, put on some lipstick and fix your hair—you’re unfuckable.” I guess one could make the argument that all of the hairdressers and makeup artists and fashion fags perform a service to society as some sort of sexual lubricant for straight people.  

I think androphiles, for the most part, have far more potential.  But as a society, we have to expect more of them if we hope to get it. We have to expect them to be men, ask them to be good men, and show them how they can become extraordinary men.

 
Even among readers who largely agree with your ideas, I suspect there will be some who pause over your affiliation with The Church of Satan Can you explain your attraction to Satanism? I know this is an area where there is considerable misunderstanding.

Well, Satanism is a topic almost intentionally prone to misunderstanding. There has always been something rebellious in me that reacts to sacred cows, pointless taboos and privileged lies with a resounding “NO!” And then, more soberly, with a thoughtful “Why? Cui Bono?” This aspect of my nature is really what initially attracted me to Satanism and later to The Church of Satan. Satanists, and I mean the REALLY interesting ones, not just the dorky ooky spooky cheese-ball Internet Goths, are extreme individualists who tend to revel in what the Hoover Hog calls “thought crime.” Satanism is a no-bullshit worldview that portrays men as animals, which is exactly what they are. I can’t argue the truth of that.

I am also attracted to the idea of choosing (or becoming) one’s own God in a world where God is, metaphorically speaking, dead, and almost everything certainly seems to be permitted. As an artist, I like the idea of employing religious psychodrama, because I don’t think hard science and reason are always the appropriate tools to use with the human animal to achieve a particular result. Anton LaVey said that he saw Satanism as something bridging the gap between psychology and religion, and I think that’s a neat idea.

However, the real misunderstanding that troubles me and seems to contradict with my work as it has evolved is what Satanism implies to many people in terms of personal morality and ethical codes. Satanism makes personal ethics a personal matter, and that leads a lot of people to assume that Satanists have no ethical code beyond “me first.” Sometimes that seems to be the case, but Satanism also acknowledges that just about everyone is really going to take care of themselves first. Satanists are just more honest with themselves about it.

Personally speaking, I have enormous respect for “good men.” When I deal with firefighters and policemen and military men and others, men who put themselves in danger to protect the infrastructure of civilization or to help people, I am humbled and inspired. It is a joke amongst my friends that I am almost physically incapable of lying, and I try to do “the right thing” when facing some sort of ethical conundrum, often at my own expense. Integrity and sincerity are extremely important to me. Compared to most average guys, whatever their religious affiliation or sexuality, in many ways I’m practically a Boy Scout.

This runs contrary to most people’s ideas about what it means to be a Satanist, but it doesn’t conflict with my own understanding of its philosophy. Satanism is very much a do-it-yourself religion when it comes to personal ethics. It’s an individualistic religion that provides very few ethical codes so that individual adherents can make up their own minds about what is right and wrong. My personal code of honor was developed freely and consciously.
 
Upon first pass it's easy to get the impression that your take on the gay community is something of a caricature, but the biographical sketch you provide in Androphilia makes it clear that you're au fait with the trappings and rites of the subculture that you criticize. You've participated in GBLT meetings and pride parades, and you even had a stint as a go-go dancer. When you look back over your youthful travels in the demimonde you've come to reject, are there any regrets? And also, what the fuck, man? -- A go-go dancer?

Well, most men probably do things in their late teens and early twenties that they find embarrassing later. It is only because I switched gears so dramatically later on that I am maybe a little more embarrassed than others.

I can’t say that working in New York City nightclubs in the early 1990s wasn’t educational, because it was. It taught me a lot, up close and personal, about aspects of human nature most of people find exotic and somewhat alien.

But as a man who has hung out with and even dated drag queens, who spent years of his life going from nightclub to after hours surrounded by a veritable Village People of gay stereotypes, who has worn makeup and corsets, who has been in the most fashionable gay bars and the nasty ones with fisting videos and cum on the floor, and who was also young and good looking enough to put on a pair of jeans and a baseball cap and walk into any of those places and look like fresh meat, I believe I am uniquely positioned to call gays out on their bullshit. They can issue all of the sanitized press releases they want, but I know what they do and how they behave and what they say when they aren’t trying to score sympathy points with straight people.

There's a memorable line in Androphilia where you write: "I signed on for William Burroughs and Jean Genet and Tinto Brass' Caligula and rumors about Lord Byron and ancient Greece," but of course, by the time you made your way to Christopher Street, the "dodgy undercurrent" which lured you had already been supplanted with RuPaul-branded fashion gestures, and ubiquitous politics. John Rechy is dead and Dennis Cooper won't shut up. Is there anything left of the "sexual outlaw" subculture that ignited your curiosity? Is it relegated to pornography?  

The “outlaw” aspect of homosexuality is going to be especially attractive if you’re working through a stage of adolescent rebellion. If you read Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw there’s this sense of rage against the machine teenage rebellion there that is still running just beneath the surface in many segments of the gay community. There’s this underlying belief that somehow “freedom” means having sex in public parks and “scaring the straights.” It’s oppositional in a careless, selfish, irresponsible way.  

To really be “outlaws,” you have to be doing something that is truly…outlawed. Homosexuality is so mundane now, at least in the majority of the modern western world. I think that’s as much a result of the information age as it is a result of gay activism. You really have to work at it if you want to maintain the sort of mystery and unspeakable horror that an old fashioned bogeyman requires. It’s too easy to fact check someone or just look up anything that you’re curious about. I’ve written elsewhere that the widespread availability of every imaginable form of pornography has desensitized a lot of people to homosexuality and while they may agree or disagree with various gay agenda action items, the “shock value” just isn’t there in the same way that it used to be. Today, homosexual sex is not particularly dangerous or extremely taboo, and it doesn’t have this intersection with the criminal world that Genet wrote about—which also brought a raw, malevolent masculinity into the mix.  

I was sitting at a bar with two of my straight co-workers the other day and one of the guys showed me a funny video clip someone forwarded to his phone which showed some dude getting drunk and accidentally having sex with a transsexual. This father of four is sitting there laughing at a graphic image of a man having anal sex with another male who has a hardon. With this kind of thing floating around, any modern homo “outlaw sex” subculture is going to seem a little forced, artificial and…retro. The “nasty sex pigs” and “BDSM bears” and so forth are really just guys who like to have kinky sex, and the idea of it being forbidden is just another turn-on, some Sadean headspace that depends on endlessly escalating transgression and ever more novel forms of fetishism and perversity.  

I wonder if making every masturbatory fantasy a reality is really the best use of a man’s time. But I really don’t have any problem with people getting their rocks off in funky ways as long as they’re not being pretentious about it and posing as if inventive fucking is some sort of meaningful rebellion.  

To answer your question, though, since an element of danger always adds interest and excitement to sex—homo or hetero—I think it will always figure into pornography in some way. And moving forward, that’s probably where it belongs.

 
In your essay, "Agreements Between Men" (which appends the main text of Androphilia), you articulate your reasons for opposing of same-sex marriage. Now that the defeat of Proposition 8 has blown into a full-scale media spectacle, I wonder if you have been inclined to revise your position? I know this is an area where you explicitly allow that there may be good faith disagreement among androphiles.

Am I inclined to revise my position? Hardly. The tantrums, hissy fits and hysterics that followed the passing of Prop 8 in California have very publicly validated Androphilia’s criticisms of the gay community and of gay activists.  

My opposition to same-sex marriage issue has two main layers: the political/legal and the aesthetic/cultural. While I suspect that many androphiles may disagree with me when it comes to the political and legal issues surrounding the same-sex marriage debate, I hope that they’ll put those differences aside when they think about marriage in cultural and aesthetic terms, because I think I have some interesting ideas to offer that could inform or inspire the way they conceptualize and sanctify their own relationships—even if they ultimately choose “marriage” as a legal solution for financial or other reasons.  

I do think society as a whole has an interest in encouraging cohesive reproductive nuclear families founded by one man and one woman, and I think it is absolutely fine to reserve a specific institution specifically for that purpose. I don’t see it as an “equality” issue, because I believe that men and women are different, and that comparing a male/male relationship to a male/female relationship is like comparing apples with oranges. 

That said, I suspect that same-sex marriage will eventually become a reality in all of the United States. Gay advocates have legal momentum on their side and public opinion is inching in that direction. Any national prohibition on same-sex marriage will be dead in the water for the next few years given the current political climate. When same-sex marriage happens on a broad scale, all intermediary solutions will be voided, and anyone who receives Domestic Partner or Civil Union benefits will ultimately be forced to marry or see their unions dissolved or rendered inconsequential. So, I believe I will lose this argument, but I’m not going to change my position to be fashionable. That would be kind of gay. 

What really interests me is the idea of a union between two men as intellectual and aesthetic territory that remains under-explored and virtually undeveloped. I’m an androphile. I appreciate the different character of MEN and the different experience of manhood. I think there’s something different about the way two men relate to one another privately and publicly. The nature of manhood demands a different sort of balance, a different approach to problem solving and negotiating issues of personal autonomy, and a different conceptual aesthetic. Whether the legal solution of marriage seems practical or not, the social and cultural institution of marriage—an institution with literally thousands of years world of baggage—is an awkward fit, to say the least. We have thousands of years of poetry and history and art and theater that conceptualize marriage as a romantic mating dance between a man and a woman. Aesthetically speaking, even the most modern marriages tend to be elaborate presentations of the “virginal” bride. For two men it just isn’t the right thing.  

This is actually the subject of the follow up to Androphilia, which is almost finished. For the past two years I’ve been working with a co-writer, Nathan F. Miller, who has done some really in-depth research on the concept of blood-brotherhood. It’s a rite familiar to most people even today, but it has a rich history and has been practiced by cultures on virtually every continent in some way or other for thousands of years. It’s also a practice that is, with very few exceptions, specific to males. The idea of the book is to take this masculine style of solemnizing a bond between friends and apply it to bonds between androphiles. We’re designing Blood-Brotherhood as a “toolbox for the imagination” that androphiles can pull ideas from as they conceptualize their own relationships and ritualize their bonds. My compadre and I actually performed our own adaptation of a blood-brotherhood ritual to celebrate our 10th year together. The documentation of that rite is the subject of the book’s final chapter—it moves the idea out of the realm of theory and demonstrates one way that blood-brotherhood can be put into practice within the context of a homosexual relationship between men. 

 
You open Androphilia by stating that you never wanted to become a "professional homosexual." In that spirit, it's worth noting that prior to your foray into cultural criticism, you were an accomplished artist. Do you still paint?  

Well, a few of my velvet paintings were actually recently featured on the “Fangtasia” set of HBO’s True Blood series, but I’ve moved on as an artist. I’m currently refining my technique by painting realistic portraits of men in oils, with the aim of eventually producing some large, surrealistic paintings based on Yukio Mishima’s suicide. As far as painting is concerned, I’ll be dropping the “Malebranche” pseudonym, which I’ve outgrown for the most part, and I’ll be using Jack Donovan, which is my “real life” name.  
 
I have to ask: what did you think of Brokeback Mountain?      

This may be difficult to believe, but I really haven’t seen it. A lot of people who were inspired by Androphilia also found it very inspiring. I own a copy, because I’ve been told by so many people I ought to see it, but I can’t bring myself to watch it. The film came out while I was writing Androphilia and the way that the gay community latched onto it and fagged it up—I believe that was a year full of gay men parading down the street in pink sequined cowboy outfits—was so typical. It became a punchline before anyone even saw it. I was also kind of put off by this mainstream “gay cowboy movie” based on a heterosexual woman’s fantasy about what it must be like to be a closeted homosexual cowboy in love, directed by a foreigner and starring two heterosexual men. Some of my readers have also pointed out to me that it is really just another tragic, tortured “love that dare not speak its name” parable. But again, I really don’t know. At this point it has become sort of a curmudgeon’s badge of honor for me to be able to honestly say that I haven’t seen it, so I suspect it will continue to collect dust in my DVD collection.

_________________________________

Memento mori.

 

Poesy ennobles; silence defames

From Mad, by Jonathan Bowden:

A civilization rests on force and comes into existence when every scream is part of the design. Inhumanity is always sacrosanct: we’re not dealing with morality here: that is a matter for the individual. Collectives deal not in morals but expediency; not in conscience but judicious expenditures of force. A ruler really has power in his hands, when he can decide what’s wrong and what’s right. From moment to moment, enforcing this, prescribing that, the one an offence, the other a beneficence, whilst the blood cries out to high heaven for a reckoning it won’t receive. Here, each scream has its place, every anthropomorphic prodding of the system, resolves itself, in a patchwork quilt of condemnation and reward. Rulers enforce criminal jurisdiction when they decide what’s crime and who’s committed it. Law was created from its opposite. Law was created to forestall its opposite. Law is legalized crime: sanctimonious mendacity for those who mulct the system. Murder’s still the name of the game. Yesterday it was criminal; today it is the law.

Originally published by Egotist  Press in 1989, a new edition of Mad will be released by Nine-Banded Books in 2009. Check back for details.

Memento mori.