The seventh chapter in Own Your Future is ‘Public Safety’. Here Seymour opens the chapter with one of the non-sequiturs that seems to be characteristic of his style. He talks about visiting a prison, and seeing the downcast faces on the prisoners there. For some reason he lurches directly from this to stating his belief in deterrence being the primary solution to the crime problem.
It’s hard to believe that Seymour is writing this chapter with a straight face. He claims to be tough on the causes of crime – yet his party supports National every step of the way in ripping down the social welfare that people need to get out of the poverty that causes crime.
Indeed, the facade soon slips, and he openly admits that ACT Policy is based around “making the consequences of committing crimes sufficiently bad that people will decide not to do it in the first place.” Within the space of a few sentences he goes from complaining about the cost of prisons to crowing about ACT success in keeping people in prison for longer through their three strikes policy.
From there, Seymour launches into a rant against burglary. Fittingly for a party that values property more highly than people, he wants to add burglary to the list of crimes that involve the three strikes law, the third offence being punished by a minimum three years without parole. Helpfully, he informs us that “The aim [of burglary] is getting more money or goods without working for them or being given them.”
At this point, Seymour serves up a genuinely good idea. Prisoners often find it difficult to return to civilian life after their sentence on account of poor literacy and numeracy, so Seymour proposes that they can get time knocked off their sentences by completing adult reading and maths courses while in prison. Any prisoner who is already educated can get time off for helping to tutor the other prisoners.
This is actually a really good policy, but it’s incredible that Seymour, as a supposedly principled libertarian, doesn’t mention cannabis law reform here. If it costs $105,000 a year to keep a person in jail, we could save tens of millions immediately just by letting cannabis growers and dealers out. He doesn’t suggest this, even though it seems like such an obvious thing for a principled, libertarian party to suggest at this juncture.
This newspaper wondered some time ago if perhaps David Seymour is the biggest coward in the New Zealand Parliament. It’s astonishing that ACT, who barely get more votes than the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, aren’t willing to support cannabis law reform as their libertarian counterparts everywhere else have done, when the entire country is crying out for it. They could take votes off the Greens and the Opportunity Party simply by offering a right-wing alternative to how to legalise cannabis.
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People are afraid of a dark shadow looming on the horizon of our culture: a spate of angry men who can never get laid, and who take their frustration out on others violently. Names like Elliot Rodger are now synonymous with explosive acts of vengeful mass homicide. They are otherwise known as the involuntarily celibate – incels – and this essay looks at how to deal with them.
The incel problem is fundamentally a question of biology. The reason why the problem is so hard to solve is that the problem itself is a byproduct of a greater, more fundamental problem within animal species. This is why we can observe behaviour analogous to the violent human incel in other primates.
The essential challenge for females of sexually reproducing species is to find a breeding partner that is going to give the offspring the highest possible chance of success. Because the female investment in the production of offspring is heavy (compared to the male), the female is very choosy about who she breeds with. Because the male investment in the production of offspring is light (in a state of Nature), the male tends towards promiscuity.
This combination of high female investment and low male investment creates the possibility of multiple partners for high-quality males. This can be observed in extremis in walruses, but it is also evident in gorillas. Adult male silverback gorillas tend to control a small harem of females, most of whom carry his offspring. What’s more, this is evident in humans, only to lesser degree.
For the most part, the female of every species is happy with this arrangement. As long as she is capable of acquiring enough resources to raise the offspring, she might as well go for the best male genes she can get, even if another female already has done so. Because women have evolved to go for males with good genes and reject those without, given enough free female choice, a certain proportion of the male population must be incels.
Observing how this plays out in other primates, we can see why the presence of incels is a problem in human society as well. In other primates we can observe that young males who never get laid, and who have no chance of it because of the monopolisation of sexual resources by violent alpha males, stop contributing to the overall wellbeing of the tribe. They start to attack the other males in their tribe (the ones who are hoarding the females) and may even refuse to defend the tribe against outside invaders.
We can see, therefore, that the incel problem is older than the entire human species. The problem itself can be stated thusly: what can be done with men who are involuntarily celibate, and who have no incentive to fully participate in society? It’s worthwhile looking at how this problem has been dealt with historically.
Nature has developed a panoply of strategies for dealing with this problem. At the most primitive level, the incel problem has traditionally been solved with violence. The reproductive capacity of the female of the species can be considered a resource and fought over in exactly the same way as territory or bananas. So there was no incel problem – any male wishing to get laid simply had to find a fertile female and then beat the shit out of every other male she attracted.
Abrahamic religion is a particular way of solving the incel problem. The idea is that if all men get together and throw women under the bus, collectively, then every man gets one woman and that’s the end of it. Having more than one woman is a crime (bigamy), having sex with anyone outside of marriage is a crime (adultery) and divorce is not permitted.
This means that the number of incels, and their rage, is minimised by way of stripping all rights and dignities from women. The “Women’s Liberation” movement was a reaction away from this logic. Many intelligent women (correctly) came to perceive themselves as having been sacrificed to further someone else’s political objectives, and through their efforts the Abrahamic solution came to be seen as unsuitable.
Another potential solution might be described as the “Bonobo solution”, which is basically that everyone gets laid, regardless of any sexually unappealing quality they might have. This solution replaced the Abrahamic solution in the West, and is usually encouraged by the liberal consumption of drugs, listening to rhythmic music, and use of the contraceptive pill. One can observe the outcome of the application of this solution in any Western city on a weekend night.
The logic of this solution is that enough men get laid and often enough that there are no incels, because any male wanting to get laid simply has to hang around drunk women long enough and one of them will eventually let him have a crack. As a consequence, there is no incel rage to discharge. This strategy has arguably had a deleterious effect on the structure of the average family, but it has nevertheless persisted until very recently.
Today, the incel problem has taken on new forms. Because of the fact that socialising at a pub or bar is falling out of fashion, and because of Internet dating and apps such as Tinder, it’s never been easier for high-quality men to find willing sexual partners wherever they go. Commensurately, it’s never been easier for women to avoid low-quality men.
In other words, not only are there more incels than ever before but ever more of those are hopelessly incel. This has had manifestations already in the form of men like Rodger, but there are festering forms of it that might yet find dark expression. There are several online communities where young incels gather and where their rage turns to hate. Future political movements might exploit this energy.
It’s not clear how the incel problem is going to be solved in the future. Possibly with the (even) wider promulgation of pornography, perhaps state-funded prostitutes, perhaps teledildonics. The alternative to successfully redirecting this sexual energy might be some kind of orgiastic bloodshed that makes the Eastern Theatre of World War II look friendly.
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Another Soccer World Cup, another champion from Europe. Everyone is waxing lyrical at the moment about how wonderful the Soccer World Cup is, and how it bring all nations together in harmony with a common goal. The truth, as this essay will demonstrate, is that cricket is more of a global sport than soccer by at least three major measures.
Geographic representation
As can be seen by the quarterfinalists of the recently concluded Soccer World Cup, soccer is still very much a European sport. Six of the eight quarterfinalists came from this one continent that contains less than 10% of the world’s population.
Over the last three FIFA World Cups, 23 of the 24 quarterfinalists have come from either Europe or Latin America. The single exception was Ghana, back in 2010. So only two continents are ever really represented by the finalists in Soccer World Cups. Asia, Africa, Anglo America, Australia and Oceania don’t feature – a group of countries that includes the world’s five most populous.
For the most part, only Europeans and South Americans really play soccer, but they are capable of getting an extremely high level of performance out of Africans that have been integrated into European structures. Sufficient evidence for this comes from the fact that France won the 2018 World Cup just now.
Since World War Two, only one team from outside Europe and Latin America has ever made a Soccer World Cup semifinal: South Korea in 2002, and they only advanced that far thanks to some extremely questionable refereeing decisions. Every single other semifinalist has been from one of two continents. This is hardly befitting of “the world sport”.
The Cricket World Cup, by contrast, brings the entire world together. The last Cricket World Cup, in 2015, featured teams from four different continents at the semifinal stage: Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania. Teams from North America and Europe have previously contested finals, meaning the overall reach of the sport is greater than that of soccer.
Population
Some people object to the statement made in the first section of this essay. Although most are willing to concede that the geographical representation of soccer is not great, many will nevertheless insist that Europe is a great population centre and therefore can’t merely be counted as one continent. This may have been true a century ago, but no longer is.
The population of Europe is 741,000,000. The population of Latin America is 640,000,000. This means that virtually all of the Soccer World Cup quarterfinalists throughout history come from a bloc of 1,381,000,000 people, roughly 20% of the world’s population.
The remaining 80% of the world’s population – comprising China, India, Africa, Indonesia and Pakistan – essentially never get representation among the final eight teams of Soccer World Cups. India and Pakistan have both won Cricket World Cups, by contrast, and are perennial quarterfinalists along with Bangladesh, South Africa and Sri Lanka.
The population of India, where cricket is the only game in town, is 1,325,000,000, essentially the same as the combined populations of Europe and Latin America. This is a fact that needs repeating for those who think that soccer is the global game: the combined populations of the only places capable of competing at the top level of soccer only just equals the population of India alone.
Measuring population properly requires that we add, to the cricket-fanatic side of the ledger, Pakistan (pop. 208,000,000), Bangladesh (pop. 163,000,000), Sri Lanka and Australia (c. 60,000,000), plus several million others in England, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland and the West Indies, where cricket might not be the national sport but is still one of the major ones.
Against this, soccer has much less overall market share in the countries in which it is popular than cricket does. In Europe and Latin America, soccer has to compete with volleyball, basketball, tennis, handball and golf; in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, cricket is completely dominant. Therefore, it must have more total fans in the world than soccer does.
Appeal within nations
Possibly the most crucial of the three difference between the sports is this one. Soccer mostly appeals to a lower socioeconomic demographic, for who the sport is an escape from the drudgery of everyday life, akin to a circus. Cricket, by contrast, appeals to a higher socioeconomic demographic, for who the sport is the complete test of mental and physical strength and skill and more akin to improvisational theatre.
Soccer players are frequently crude, brutal, thuggish. They cheat so shamelessly that many consider it part of the game. Cricket is a sharp contrast. Men like Rahul Dravid, Ross Taylor and AB de Villiers are complete gentlemen: gracious in victory and defeat, magnanimous, charismatic, serene. Former Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni is literally a prince. He is the upper class of the upper class, an aristocrat by any measure.
If any doubt remains that soccer fans are inherently more base than cricket fans, simply examine the writings of former cricketers like Martin Crowe and Kumar Sangakkara on CricInfo. There is no soccer equivalent.
What soccer is – and this is the cornerstone of its apparent popularity – is the McDonald’s of world sports. It’s a corporatised appeal to the dopamine-deprived brains of society’s lowest common denominator, which is all it can really be on account of its simplistic and luck-based nature. Soccer fans like to tout the ease of understanding the sport as one of its drawcards, but it reality this simply makes it boring to anyone with an IQ over 110 or so.
Over a billion people watched the final of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, according to FIFA themselves. However, more people saw the India vs. Pakistan match during the 2015 Cricket World Cup. The world record for concurrent viewers to a live-streaming platform was set at 10,700,000 earlier this year, not by the final of a European soccer league but by the Indian Premier League of T20 cricket.
What does it mean that more people watch a group match in the Cricket World Cup than the final of the hypefest that is the Soccer World Cup? What does it mean that more people watch the final of an Indian cricket league than the final of any European soccer league? It can only mean that cricket appeals to more human beings than soccer does.
In summary, the delusion that soccer is the “global game”, simply because it’s played in Europe, Latin America and Africa, has to end. Europe is now less than 10% of the world’s population, barely more than half of the population of India alone. If those Indians are to be considered people of equal value to the Europeans, it must be conceded that their passions are of equal value. If so, cricket is a more passionately-followed sport than soccer, measured on a global basis.
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The right to free expression is not a universally held cultural value, and can only be maintained as long as a sufficient proportion of the population support it
Historically speaking, the main reason why people have resisted mass immigration into their territories is because it usually leads to a loss of freedoms, in particular freedom to practice one’s culture. In recent decades, Westerners have been told that mass immigration to the West would not cause them to lose freedoms, but this turned out to be lies. This essay will examine how immigration, especially from undeveloped countries, leads to a loss of freedoms for the host population.
For people to have any freedoms at all they have to value those freedoms highly enough to assert them. If they cannot assert them, the ruling class will take them away. It can be seen in every society that, in order for people to value those freedoms highly enough to assert them in the faces of the ruling class, they have to share them in common, enough so to call it a culture.
Without a shared belief in the value of certain freedoms, they cannot be maintained. If only part of a population believes in a freedom, then the ruling class can ban it and not enough of the population will believe in it to assert it. Therefore, it will be lost. We can see, then, that freedoms are lost as soon as the proportion of the population that supports them falls below a certain level.
For example, naturally speaking, people are free to walk the land. There is no private property in a state of Nature, and originally there were no prohibitions on where one could go. Over the past 5,000 years, as something called civilisation got invented, this freedom was eventually stripped from the people by rulers who commanded men of iron able to use violence to drive undesired people away from certain territories.
The Swedes, possibly on account of the hard-won lessons of solidarity learned by their Viking forebears, were not willing to lose their right to walk the land freely. Thus, they asserted that right in the face of enclosures, and won what they call the allemansrätt (this was known as the Freedom to Roam back when Anglos used to assert this right). This means that Swedish people have the right to walk through property owned by other people as long as they do not come within sight of the main house (and some other restrictions).
Immigration is not likely to threaten allemansrätt anytime soon, but it is threatening (or has already destroyed) other freedoms, all over the West.
New Zealand Federation of Islam Associations president Hazim Arafeh voiced his opposition to a talk by journalist Lauren Southern in Auckland earlier this month, leading to it effectively getting banned by Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s refusal to approve a venue for it. Arafeh, in his attempt to get the talk banned, stated that “I don’t think insulting Muslims comes under free speech, that’s an abuse of freedom of speech.”
As everyone who actually values free speech knows, free speech is precisely what that is. The cultural value of free speech entails that the responsibility is on the listener to not chimp out when they hear something provoking. The reason why this is important is that it makes it possible to talk about things like rational human beings instead of keeping quiet out of fear, because this leads to resentment and then violence.
Satire, windups and pisstaking necessarily come under this umbrella, as do insults and criticisms of governments and religions.
Free speech acts as a safety valve that releases political pressure when the ruling class starts veering off path. An incompetent ruling class will always try to crack down on criticism rather than accept that they have been incompetent, and for this reason free speech must be ardently defended. The alternative is that ruling class corruption and incompetence becomes entrenched.
It is because the Anglosphere values free speech that we have never had a fascist or communist dictatorship come to power in any of our countries. None of Britain, America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand have ever had a totalitarian government, for the reason that our right to free expression enables us to criticise the bastards, and thereby to organise opposition, before they fuck everything up. Thus, no Hitlers, no Stalins, no Pol Pots, no mass starvation of tens of millions.
Arafeh, not being a Kiwi, doesn’t understand any of this. It’s not important to him. He will not defend it.
Islamic culture forces women to cover up because it considers those women responsible for the urges that their appearance might induce in men. The onus of responsibility is not on the Muslims, but on women, who are inferior, to moderate themselves. By the same token, the culture forces people whose speech it disapproves of to keep their mouths shut because it considers those people responsible for the violent urges that their speech might induce in Muslims.
The onus of responsibility is on us Westerners, as inferior, to moderate ourselves. We can see from what happened with Lauren Southern that Muslims are forcing us to shut our mouths in the same way they force their women to cover up – under the implicit threat of violence.
It’s obvious that if we had not allowed any Muslims to immigrate to this country, Arafeh could not have written a letter to Goff “on behalf of 50,000 to 60,000 Muslims in New Zealand”. It’s equally obvious that if we let in another 50,000 to 60,000 Muslims, we will lose even more rights, because we can see this happening in other countries that have made the mistake of opening themselves to mass Muslim immigration.
Multiculturalism necessarily means that the only freedoms that remain are universal values that are supported by all people. What Westerners have failed to understand is that free speech is not a universal value. Most people on this planet are pathetic slave-creatures, not educated citizen-orators that can be expected to assert their rights through reasoned debate.
In short, we’re losing our freedom to speak freely because we’ve let in a lot of people who do not value free speech, and this is just one example. As shown by Europe, if we continue to let these people in, our rights to free expression will be further curtailed, and then the rights of people to walk certain neighbourhoods free of molestation will be curtailed, and then the rights of women to walk in public without covering up will be curtailed.
As long as banks continue to demand mass immigration for the sake of propping up house prices, gutless politicians will continue to placate those making the threats of violence for the sake of appearing to maintain order. We need to take care that our immigration policies don’t end up robbing us of our hard-won rights of free expression.
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