“It looks so pretty.”

What the Americaness doesn’t notice is that behind the ghostly numbers telling the time, the cathedral is riddled with shrapnel.

I know well enough, since I took the picture myself and poked the gashes and snarls of metal embedded in the doorway. Artillery shells exploded here within recent memory. Here, where German tourists now waddle around in flip-flops and souvenir t-shirts. Here, within fifty paces of the kind of beach described as “must-see” and “breath-taking.” Here, where you can sip a cheap cappuccino in the sun and enjoy the quiet rhythm of lazy tour groups shuffle into sight, into the cathedral, quickly out again, and off to the beach. Swedes; Englishmen; Americans; Germans (Austrians?); Englishmen; Chinese retirees; Japanese retirees; Germans; Slovaks? Not with that economy. Poles perhaps? More Germans. In smoky bars that liven up after dark this menagerie of tourists looks very homogeneous, but during the day the locals turn brown and the foreigners turn red.

This spot is so quiet, so peaceful, so welcoming to the wallets of all kinds of vacationers from all over the wealthy world. And yet this romantic scene of European integration (or shall I say, E.U. integration) belies much darker realities. The obese tourists from Germany sip Fanta Shokata™ by the Coca-Cola Company™ as they wander past twisted metal from 76.2 mm mountain artillery shells embedded into the building. One of these wayfarers’ parents might have done some nasty things to one of the Polish tourists’ grandparents. Possible too some nastiness was exchanged with the forebears of the locals. Likely even some shared nastiness with the locals against the people who launched the shells into this area. Not that it would matter to these Europeans now. They’re modern and progressive. They’ve overcome the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the past. They will all live among one another, in peace and harmony as brothers among nations. The motto of the European Union: “United in diversity.”

What I describe is, of course, not just ordinary in Europe, but in the world. Few places have escaped the judgment of Gnon. Anyone still alive today is descended from a group of people more vicious than the ones who now express themselves only in history books, if even — history is written by the victors, after all. It was not only the cathedral that was injured. In certain notorious parts of Southern Europe, damage from shrapnel can be seen fairly commonly on all sorts of buildings, residential and commercial both. The damage is left unrepaired out of poverty as often as it is left unrepaired out of spite, or defiance. In one Southern capital, NATO bombed a building of the defense ministry in the downtown area of the capital city. For a decade it stayed half-ruined, but no one left their posts or positions. Even in Northern Europe, large undetonated munitions from the last big kerfuffle are found buried among the cities of modern Western civilization.

All these signs are signs of Gnon. They are evidence of natural selection, not necessarily genetic, though often so. More often, and more importantly, they are evidence of the natural selection of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, attitudes, delusions and outlooks. As right-wingers, we are familiar with the idea of Darwinism as it applies to free enterprise and evolution. These are just the two most obvious examples of the principles of natural selection. Nassim Nicholas Taleb does an excellent job of introducing the same principles of Darwinism and selection into many other domains of life, and does a good job of implying everything is always under natural selection, including the mundane things. One’s beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, delusions and outlooks are under constant selection, though the effect is not as glaring and well-studied as in biology or economics.

In practical terms, this means that if (for example) one is a little bitch, witnessing one’s childhood home turn into vapor will instill a good dose of stoicism into one’s psychology. The shocking, immediate, undeniably-real disproving of the childish pretensions that the world is fair, or that one is entitled to good things, or that the future is always bright and sunny — gone like smoke in a wind. All that will be left will be the communion with reality. Then again, it appears not everyone is equally capable of communing with reality. For some the communion is natural, for some it requires practice, and for some it requires monumental effort. And some unfortunate souls can only wish for mercy from Gnon in the form of a quick and painless selection out of the competition of life.

I note too that I purposely use the word “commune:” it seems that to immerse oneself in reality is the secondary state of man, secondary to the primary state of fantasy and easy delusion. To overcome the primary state, no less an effort than one comparable to the effort to commune with the divine is required — full of ritual, constant reminder, deep contemplation and a degree of faith and/or willpower. Just ask a bodybuilding fundie. Not coincidentally, we reactionaries and traditionalists might be inclined to argue that the divine is real and the real is divine. Communing indeed.

Far be it from me to pontificate on the material causes of an inability to commune with reality. I will, however, take the liberty of pontificating on a link between an inability to commune with reality and a lightening of the requirement to do so every once in a while. He who lives in wealth and comfort, by definition, is absolved of the necessity to “clean house” in his soul. Comfort, it appears, could be defined as a respite from confrontation with Gnon. And yet this definition is a denunciation too, for a respite from Gnon could never be permanent, only temporary — only a distraction. Without the constant confrontations with Gnon and his pressures for natural selection from the smallest habits and thoughts to the greatest civilizations, one cannot respond and adjust to Gnon’s new conditions for survival. One consequently only delays the potential for a permanently selective event, one that selects one soul, heart and body whole straight out of the race.

Deprived of the rough guiding hand of Gnon, someone like my Americaness can only see the pretty parts. Trained to be human not on the dictates of Gnon but of Elua, of human wish and folly, there can be no shrapnel in the pretty little church. Who would shell a cathedral? Why would they ever have a reason? Don’t they know we’ve reached a modern paradise of wealth and freedom and fraternity and comfort for all? Didn’t they get the memo? Who forgot to tell them?

Somehow, the West, which drowns in its own wealth, has become atrophied to the pushes and proddings of Gnon on a mass scale. Avoiding Gnon in the form of everything from STDs to staggering societal debt has become a popular past-time. It seems forgotten that denying Gnon sacrifice is unwise, for he can only return later with twice the vengeance. The West operates under the false belief that no selection will ever have to be countenanced again — equality shall rule, and no one shall ever have to judge anyone else for any reason. Not even Gnon may judge! This belief is clearly insane. Not that it would now matter to the Europeans milling around the cathedral. They’re modern and progressive. They’ve overcome the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the past. They will all live among one another, in peace and harmony as brothers among nations.

And yet, that’s what the Yugoslavs said in 1989. And would you just look at those cathedral doors?

The post Comfort Kills appeared first on Social Matter.

Rising #inequality & climate change are defining challenges of our time. You can help: http://t.co/ONSAl4jeRJ #wef15 pic.twitter.com/B4ee6BVYvf

— Oxfam International (@Oxfam) January 16, 2015

Yes, it seems to be true: RT reports that by 2016, the richest 1% of the global human population will control more wealth than the other 99% of the human population combined. Through Oxfam, an “anti-poverty charity,” we learn that:

Last year, Oxfam reported that the world’s 85 richest people have the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent (3.5 billion people). This year, Oxfam said the reality has become more worrisome, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people.

We are alerted to a “dark portrait” of the state of affairs. This news proves we face “challenges [of] severe wealth concentration.”

However, despite constant warnings that the upward curve in wealth concentration will only lead to disaster, the rich continue to gobble up a bigger and bigger share of the global wealth pie.

“Gobble up.” RT’s gratuitous baiting of low-brow egalitarian Western leftists is transparent, but rather amusing. Right-wing opponents of Putin’s Russia would do well to remember that RT is not aimed at Russians, but at English-speaking Western leftists. RT will run pieces on the evils of rising income inequality more fervently than an Occupy Wall Street hippie (along with pieces on racism in America, the surveillance state, etc.) because the Kremlin implicitly recognizes that egging on these kinds of leftists in the West is beneficial for Russia. Better to keep the non-profit mafia whining about Ferguson than Sochi — if you think Putin is crying into his fair-trade coffee about the treatment of African-American brothas by white 1%ers, you are sorely mistaken. Speaking of the non-profit mafia:

Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima, who will co-chair the Davos symposium, said she will draw attention to the grim fact that “one in nine people do not have enough to eat and more than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day,” she told The Guardian.

“Do we really want to live in a world where the 1 percent own more than the rest of us combined? The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

A cursory Google search reveals that Mrs. Byanyima is a Ugandan aeronautical engineer, politician and diplomat. Apparently, she was Uganda’s first female aeronautical engineer. Like all heartfelt tinkerers, Mrs. Byanyima quit her engineering job with the now-defunct Uganda Airlines as soon as she got it to help start the Ugandan Bush War. (Mrs. Byanyima, who was born in 1959, and received both a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. from British universities, would have graduated high school in 1977, just four years before the Bush War began in 1981, and would have required between four and eight years to receive her degrees.) Apparently, Mrs. Byanyima found fomenting political unrest to be more conducive to her skillset than engineering, and she later served in various Ugandan governmental posts (under the watch of now long-time Ugandan President/Instigator of Bush Wars Museveni, who she grew up with), and then later United Nations posts (hmm…). As a one-time “Director of the Gender Team in the Bureau for Development Policy” at the UNDP, I am sure Mrs. Byanyima is extremely qualified for her new executive directorship.

To channel Mr. Moldbug, Byanyima’s real education was not in engineering, but in progressive-leftist demotism, and her first big break was not at Uganda Airlines but in an African bush war, and her real career wasn’t in “helping women get a leg up,” but “fomenting political unrest” — only later at the United Nations — all for a good cause, of course! It should go without saying Oxfam believes that “rising inequality and climate change are defining challenges of our time.” Wait, climate change? I thought this was an anti-poverty organization? Silly me, I forgot about the Cathedral again.

The image attached to the Oxfam tweet at the top of this article is emblematic of Western liberal delusions about reality concerning wealth and income. A rough-around-the-edges South Asian man (let’s call him Pakistani Abdul), pushing watermelons hanging off his old bike, presumably to market, with a huge poster of a clean-cut Westerner (read: dirty white devil) sitting in an airplane reading from some new gizmo — the massive hashtag reads “#INEQUALITY.” We are exhorted: “Join the debate!” What do liberals see in this image that we normal people do not? Like all good leftists, they psychologically project. Where we see Pakistani Abdul pushing his wares to the market, presumably pondering this year’s harvest, the leftist liberal sees a potential college student, a potential high-achiever, academician, bureaucrat, hoop-jumper, future lawyer/doctor/consultant (and future progressive) denied a chance for the good and holy life by privileged, rich white racists — if only Abdul could have applied to cawww-lidge! That Abdul couldn’t care less for these bourgeois Western pretensions does not even occur to them. That Abdul is mentally incapable of achieving them is beyond unthinkable.

But no matter — we will continue the “debate” about “income inequality” across “the global community” under the assumption that everyone on the planet has the ability, willpower, desire, necessity and urgency to seek out an upper-middle class Western existence of paper-pushing and platitude-mouthing. It’s a “severe challenge,” after all. Right next to climate change. Hopefully Abdul will get educated and donate some money to those climate change groups. Just check out Oxfam’s seven-point plan to alleviate income inequality:

Oxfam said it was calling on governments to adopt a seven-point plan to alleviate global inequality:

• Clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and rich individuals.

Rebuild that Berlin Wall, boys, these rich nancies aren’t going anywhere until we’ve got their monies!

• Invest in universal, free public services such as health and education.

Spread the wealth around, boys, free stuff for everyone! Paid for with our “clamping down” on “tax dodgers.” Wink wink, elbow elbow.

• Share the tax burden fairly, shifting taxation from labour and consumption towards capital and wealth.

Taxes are only a burden when the State is upwards of 40% of the economy, such as in modern times. This was not the case in the past.

• Introduce minimum wages and move toward a living wage for all workers.

When “minimum wage,” lost its luster, the leftists moved onto “living wage.” Next it’ll be a “happy wage.” Because if gays deserve “gay marriage” because they “love,” each other, why shouldn’t the poor deserve “happy wages” if they want? Don’t they deserve to be happy? Why do you hate poor people maaan?

• Introduce equal pay legislation and promote economic policies to give women a fair deal.

Destroy patriarchy and abolish the family so that the State can step in and expand its power over people’s lives. Because for the leftist, if the solution isn’t the State — is it really a solution? (No! Off with their heads!)

• Ensure adequate safety nets for the poorest, including a minimum income guarantee.

Repetition, because propaganda doesn’t work if it’s only repeated once.

• Agree a global goal to tackle inequality.

Identify the ones who disagree i.e. the ones who won’t let you rent-seek, and immediately begin slandering them as poor-haters, rich gobblers, and what-not. Maybe instigate a class revolution. Bring out the guillotines. You know how it goes with the Left. “Executive” director indeed.

Income inequality is a farce directed by the same leftists responsible for the globe’s social ills, masquerading as righteous crusaders while doing nothing but ruining the value built up by highly non-leftist people. They are rabble-rousers and demagogues of the worst kind. Remember Mrs. Byanyima: the upstart revolutionary guerilla becomes a politically correct United Nations functionary. This is not a coincidence, and it is not an isolated incident. Bernardine Dohrn bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and just a couple police stations. She is now a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her terrorist husband has a dormitory named after him at the same university, and is himself still a “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

If this article was rambling, it’s because the gravity of the situation confuses the author’s attempts to make sense of a course of action. When did avowed terrorists become mentors of youth? When did jungle guerillas become internationally-approved moral guides? Then again, the most recognizable faces of the previous century all belonged to murderous maniacs and their differently-sizes mustaches. I suppose we’re still defined by murderous maniacs in the 21st century — the mustaches just seem to be missing, replaced with pasty clean-shaven faces or (increasingly) Islamic beards. Such a shame. The mustaches were the only good thing left.

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