My goal is to take only a very few of the very most important ideas of existentialism, and connect those to the fight for the survival of our people, with however all this done in regard to language.

Freedom and responsibility are two of the biggest items of existentialism.

“At issue is the role of the free, responsible individual – the hallmark of existentialist thought.” (7 lines from the bottom of page 135).

In the opening chapter of the book, page 11, are the “Five Themes of Existentialism.” Theme 4 is

“4. Freedom/responsibility. Existentialism is a philosophy of freedom. Its basis is the fact that we can stand back from our lives and reflect on what we have been doing. In this sense, we are always ‘more’ than ourselves. But we are as responsible as we are free.”

For the sake of completeness, let me mention that the five themes listed for existentialism are: 1. Existence precedes essence. 2. Time is of the essence. 3. Humanism. 4. Freedom/responsibility. 5. Ethical considerations are paramount.

Let me also mention that on the same page 11 are statements to the effect that while many philosophers downplay “the philosophical significance of our feelings and emotions,” existentialism places great significance on such emotions as [and here the book mentions examples]. This sets existentialism in “likely dialogue with creative artists,” because these people are involved in our “emotional and imaginative lives.” I will point out that this statement in the book is itself an example of the issue of freedom, the freedom of the artist to go ahead and choose which and have emotions and feelings, a freedom downplayed by many philosophers and, I will also point out, by science. The statements in the book invoke the idea of the freedom for all of us to have emotions and feelings.

Parts of the book are leftist, but I will use the rest of the post to discuss our own situation, motivated by the above ideas.

It is true that the other side uses these ideas – freedom and responsibility – to ultimately assist in the replacement and destruction of our people. But that doesn’t mean we have to passively use them in the same way. Indeed, we can invoke freedom to use them in not their way but ours, and we can point out the responsibility of our people to fight the replacement of our people and the give-a-way of our lands, and we can point out to our people that they have freedom with responsibility.

We might even stress ideas of freedom and responsibility as a way to bring back some name for ourselves. “Our people” can’t be the only name for ourselves, and “white” has been taken away from us.

There is another place where we have got unnecessarily caught in issues of language.

Many of us have been cleverly driven to think that we have no choice but to more and more invoke scientific type explanations, in our struggle, and that we have to try to impose ever more stridently these scientific explanations on those not listening, and we get into this mental state because going round and round in our mind is: more science, more science, more science, that is the answer. And that thought is the only thought going round and round in our minds. Yet many people in our countries would become friendlier to our side if they didn’t feel beat up with science. They would especially respond to heartfelt statements from us about our freedom with responsibility.

Use ideas like “freedom” and “responsibility” in a manner that is genuine, heart-felt, and honest according to your own lights (and that too is freedom, your freedom to do so), and we will do much good. More people will feel we are talking to them and not lecturing them on science, and they will see us as human beings, which we are.

I hope the above illustrates how we need not be captive to how the other side seeks to imprison us in a house of language of their making.

We need people to break out of the prison house of language that the other side has socially constructed for us. We also need the scientific approach. Our civilization fighting for its survival needs these and lots of other efforts too.

Yes. How does that work? Admin has my permission to send the email I give when I post to this thread – to send it to you. I live in southern Idaho.

And I have to look more carefully at John Drake’s comments involving Searle.

As my coming post on the existentialism book shows, it is possible to go in a different direction. One of the things about this material is that it can be taken in many directions, that’s its strength for the other side, and strength for our side.

“Alluding to the point that because the term ‘Race’ is merely a word and thus allegedly a social construct as far as the Marxist Liberal mindset is concerned, one could equally suggest that a daffodil is not a flower but a social construct, that a Spaniel is not a canine but a social construct, that a dog is not a canine but a social construct, that an ant is not an insect but a social construct AND so on.”

Well, the original wild wolf is not a social construct, but your Spaniel is, at least in the sense that it was human beings “breeding” wild dogs that brought about all those different varieties we have today. It is true that there’s only a few landraces who came about without any major human intervention, but the breeds coming out of those landraces are indeed “constructs” in this sense.

Same with the common garden flowers. You can still get seeds for some of the precursor flowers (“species”) but it was endless human interference that produced the big ‘n’ colourful, Fisher-Price flowers we are all familiar with. Same with the grains eaten all over the world. You would not recognize the original wild corn (maize) discovered by the Mexicans 9,000 years ago, nor any of the others that today constitute a major part of the diet in various parts of the world. Those big and juicy cobs didn’t just present themselves. WE made them that way.

So my point is that even the purest Russian or Frenchman isn’t so pure. Go back far enough and you will see that we are all stabilized hybrids – some complex, some simple, but hybrids nonetheless. All of which doesn’t mean we have to sit still and be wiped out, but let’s not fool ourselves that we didn’t come about through heavy manipulation.

do you live in central, southern, or north idaho. i’m in central, and if you want, we can maybe swap email addresses (through admin?).

james

Now going to the subject of John Howard’s article “On the Social Construction of Race.”
“Their tradition of inquiry, while certainly intertwined with that of the humanities, was not accustomed to exploring the relationship between words, signification, and producers of discourse.”

What are some of the things being done to us with language? I can think of at least two.
- any name to use to name ourselves has been ripped away from us. Quite a diabolical accomplishment. It certainly handicaps us in our fight for survival.
- a broad front of words and concepts that falsely re-cast the giving away of our lands in the US and Europe.

Coming to the problem of this kind of use of words, coming at it from one particular direction, and a successful direction, is the recent “Racism, Schmacism,” by James Edwards”, reviewed in TOQ http://www.toqonline.com/2010/06/racism-schmacism/

Clearly the term “social construct” is being used in a certain way, and I think there is no term I would use in such a way – I would call such a usage vague and muddled. But as the author John Howard could be suggesting, maybe we should explore this new piece of language and not be passive in accepting only what the other side says.

I have a short book which I am starting to look at, “Existentialism: A Brief Insight,” by Thomas Flynn http://www.amazon.com/Existentialism-Brief-Insight-Thomas-Flynn/dp/1402768745 . One part of the book contains material on language and constructs, and contains brief descriptions by many philosophers and philosophies. Does the book give further primary ideas or issues involved with how they are looking at this thing they generally include under the phrase “social constructs”? I will try and report back within a week.

The Marxist Liberal invention of multiculturalism and diversity is a clear-cut example of social construct, its particular interpretations of which are unnatural and thus entirely false whereas racial variation is a naturally occurring reality.

Alluding to the point that because the term ‘Race’ is merely a word and thus allegedly a social construct as far as the Marxist Liberal mindset is concerned, one could equally suggest that a daffodil is not a flower but a social construct, that a Spaniel is not a canine but a social construct, that a dog is not a canine but a social construct, that an ant is not an insect but a social construct AND so on.

By the time Marxist Liberal doctrine had realized its objectives and reached its intended goal, if we were to foolishly let it proceed unfettered, we’d find ourselves back in our prehistoric past communicating via grunts and growls all over again.

What politically-correct people mean when they say “social construct” about race is that it is a chimera with no basis in empirical fact. Further, they mean to imply that race was constructed as a concept by evil whites to maintain our power — like different color jerseys and names for sports teams… (now THERE is a 100% social construct!) an artificial division for nefarious purpose. The periodic table of the elements is a construct of data that is nearly entirely empirical, even though chemistry started out as more an alchemical social construct in the sense you mention in the article. The difference is that our symbols come to reflect reality rather than social, wishful, political, or otherwise erroneous thinking. That is the point of science. Political-correctness is exactly the kind of thing that science was invented by Europeans to counteract. Science is the dragonslayer of non-accurate social-constructs.

The ideas of race 100 years ago were maybe more like alchemy and socially-constructed in this regard (and is the reason why Jews like Boaz had an easier time of it attacking these ideas in their infancy, and why other Jews Stephen J Gould cited 100-year-old studies in his books much later), but now we have essentially a periodic table of races — a vast network of modern empirical information in which denial of racial reality is similar to the denial that the Earth moves around the sun. ALL of the evidence supports the existence of and vital importance of races.

One area where we constantly fall down in our assessments of the importance of race is in the area of DESTINY. Each race is on a different path — comes from a different environmental and social background which has selected traits around a common theme. ONLY the white race appears poised for something truly different, is actually on a path of change — toward becoming a wholly different species with higher empirical truth as its heart and soul. Other races have individual traits which add up to something else — they fall off the path, and create their own eddies and dead-end trajectories. We see this clearly in Africa, and less obviously among highly intelligent asians until we see their natural deference and stifling conformity unto death — as the Falun Gong movement has felt over there in China where they are being tortured to death, executed, and imprisoned simply for being different and not adhering to the program. The social program. To them, the constructs are the thing–the litmus of worth. Not to us.

Individual behaviors add up, and when one of our race sees someone of another race acting and perceiving differently, we see the IMPLICATIONS of these genetic propensities for us and our pattern — because they are diametrically opposed — and then we want to separate from them NATURALLY. There is no construct about that — it is the direct experience of reality. That is a big part of my own experience, and why James Watson said what he did about employers knowing what he was talking about too.

Like I said — a well-written and researched and very though-provoking article. Thank you.

If that is the case, it might be advisable to distinguish two classes within the class that Searle would call “brute facts.”

A) There is a class of facts that can be perceived by ordinary sense-perception, e.g. “the sky is blue and the sunshine is warm”;
B) There is a class of facts that can be inferred from trained analysis of experimental measurements, e.g. “If we regard voltage as a block, there are no statistically significant effects, but if we regard voltage as a second factor, then the only significant effect is that of voltage.”

This kind of distinction may turn out to be very important for issues in biophysics, genetics, molecular biology, etc.

“the use of the word “race” has different connotations in the bleachers at the Daytona 500 than it does in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), though most TOQ readers will likely find both uses to be of equal intellectual consequence. ”

To the contrary, I find the Daytona 500 to be vastly less repugnant than the writings of S.J.Gould.