No kids please, we're selfish

Childless at 48, I'm now old enough for the question of motherhood to have become merely philosophical. Still, I've had all the time in the world to have babies. I am married. I've been in perfect reproductive health. I could have afforded children, financially. I just didn't want them. They are untidy; they would have messed up my flat. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

From the Guardian on September 17 via American Renaissance.

This essay, surprisingly frank and self-aware, lays it all on the table, covering falling European birth rates and what it means for sustained European culture. The author continues:

Yet maybe the multiculturalism debate is sufficiently matured for us to concede that white folk are people, too. We encourage minorities of every stripe to be proud of their heritage - Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews - as well they should be. We don't assume that if an immigrant from China cherishes his roots and still makes a mean moo shoo pork he is therefore bigoted toward every other ethnicity on the planet. So can Italians not champion Italianness? Or the British their Yorkshire pudding? Indeed, the tacit consensus - that every minority from Australian aboriginals to Romany should be treasuring, preserving and promulgating their culture, while white Europeans should not - is producing a virulent, sometimes poisonous rightwing backlash across the continent, and a gathering opposition to the immigration that Europe sorely needs if it is to maintain itself economically. In the interest of civil, rational thinking on this matter, we should at least allow ourselves to talk about it. The long-dominant populations in most of Europe are contracting, and maybe by the time they're minorities in their own countries they will have rights, too - among them at least the right to feel a little sad.

We are living in the eye of a great big storm, one that will only fully be appreciated by our children as they try to write the history of their nation. The paradigm has irrevocably shifted, and even baby-boomers who have never before questioned any of their petty assumptions and motivations can smell the rain a'comin'.

"What they didn't steal they trashed..."

"They took everything — all the electronics, the food, the bikes," said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. "People left their old clothes on the floor when they took new ones. The only thing left are the country-and-western CDs. You can still get a Shania Twain album."

Read More...

Joy!

Google is now offering a blog search service at http://blogsearch.google.com/.

From the FAQ:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you're looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

If you read this, you will go insane...

The New Century Foundation has updated The Color of Crime for 2005. Those of you who are inclined to commit mayhem when confronted with facts should avert your eyes. The rest of us can safely read and analyze mountains of U.S. Department of Justice data in adult fashion. Really. I have faith in you.

Read Jared Taylor's press release at VDare.com, as well, and make up your own mind. As to the anonymous poster who chastised me below for linking to Jared Taylor and American Renaissance, I think Taylor's words speak well to the situation:

It is a sorry day in America when you are either brave or racist if you dig up and publicize crime data the Department of Justice has been collecting for decades.

Disgrace

Purely by happenstance (not due to the events which unfolded 24 hours later in New Orleans), I purchased J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace from Amazon on the 28th of last month, and it arrived Friday. I finished it at 6 a.m. yesterday morning. At 224 pages, it is a fast read, but the book lingers long after it is put down.

Just as Nabokov wasn’t much interested in the political implications of child molestation when he wrote Lolita and was instead using Humbert Humbert’s tawdry obsession as a vehicle to explore the English language, Coetzee, too, seems to use the strife of post-apartheid South Africa as a literary device. Any sentiment Coetzee the author may have towards the country he has since fled is well-hidden. I won’t even attempt to engage in any lit crit here, since others have done it much better than I could ever achieve.

Whatever the author’s feelings towards black-ruled South Africa, he is too good an observer to refrain from describing the brutalities of that land. His novel ends with the utter debasement of his protagonist, David Lurie, an erstwhile college professor who finds at the end his only redemption is by making sure that the dog corpses he is in charge of incinerating are not debased:

It would be simpler to cart the bags to the incinerator immediately after the session and leave them there for the incinerator crew to dispose of. But that would mean leaving them on the dump with the rest of the weekend's scourings: with waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside, maleodorous refuse from the tannery - a mixture both casual and terrible. He is not prepared to inflict such dishonor upon them.

So on Sunday evenings he brings the bags to the farm in the back of Lucy's kombi, parks them overnight, and on Monday mornings drives them to the hospital grounds. There he himself loads them, one at a time, on to the feeder trolley, cranks the mechanism that hauls the trolley through the steel gate into the flames, pulls the lever to empty it of its contents, and cranks it back, while the workmen whose job this normally is stand by and watch.

On his first Monday he left it to them to do the incinerating. Rigor mortis had stiffened the corpses overnight. The dead legs caught in the bars of the trolley, and when the trolley came back from its trip to the furnace, the dog would as often as not come riding back too, blackened and grinning, smelling of singed fur, its plastic covering burnt away. After a while the workmen began to beat the bags with the backs of their shovels before loading them, to break the rigid limbs. It was then that he intervened and took over the job himself.

Such is the place Lurie has found himself in. His lesbian daughter is now pregnant with the offspring of black thugs who raped her after they locked her father in a bathroom. His daughter refuses to leave her smallholding, even though she has family in Holland. She has agreed, with little or no resistance, to become the concubine of the local “big man” who arranged her rape.

‘How humiliating,’ he says finally. ‘Such high hopes, and to end like this.’

‘Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’

‘Like a dog.’

‘Yes, like a dog.’

I doubt that the Nobel committee would have awarded their prize to a novel which described a black family learning to accept their existence as being that of dogs. I don’t, however, think that Coetzee is being political in this book, either in endorsing or excoriating the situation. He merely describes the inevitable, and it is up to the reader to draw his own conclusion about its greater ramifications.

A Watershed Moment in U.S. History

The events of the past week have opened many eyes, and I hope it has changed some hearts. Steve Sailer is doing brisk business in the bloggosphere as he explains what happened in New Orleans, and how it is being spun. Jared Taylor has written a great, no-nonsense article that shouldn’t be missed. And I just recently re-discovered my new most favoritest blog, relapsed catholic.