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Road trip
What better way to welcome summer than with a road trip? The Mrs and I closed out the month with a nine-day tour around Lake Ontario.
Kind friends in upstate New York allowed us to use their house as a base camp. We drove up there from Long Island, stayed overnight with them, then headed west to the Finger Lakes region, which has an astonishing quantity of wineries.
Who knew wine could be grown so far north? It’s something to do with proximity to the great lake, we were told across the counter at one of the several wine-tastings we attended. The lake somehow softens the climate enough to make the hardier varieties of vine commercially viable.
So a night at Belhurst Castle on Seneca Lake, then westwards into southern Ontario to stay with different friends in a small town there.
Canada is a major destination for bogus “refugees” and “asylum seekers” passed on to them by the United Nations. Government policy is to resettle as many as possible of these people in small towns like our friends’ rather than in big cities. Small towns are cheaper, the politicians more easily bought, the inhabitants more trusting and naïve. The U.S. government of course operates on similar principles.
So this pleasant, quiet little provincial town is on the front lines of Canada’s demographic revolution. Everyone has stories. Currently famous in the town is a “refugee” woman who has brought her (or “her”: Canada’s refugee programs don’t do DNA testing) eleven children. The whole family (or “family”) is of course on welfare.
Then east along the north shore of Lake Ontario and the great river for a night in Toronto, followed, after a 7½-hour drive, by two nights in Montreal; thence back down to Base Camp with our friends in upstate New York.
(When I first lived here in the early 1970s I worked in Westchester County, just north of New York City. I had a colleague who lived in Mahopac, twenty miles further north. With the geographical cluelessness of a newcomer, I once referred to my colleague’s house as being “upstate,” sending him into a fit of giggles. When he’d recovered he instructed me that “upstate” is w-a-a-ay further north than Mahopac. His wife’s family, he further explained, came from a town named Peru which is so far north, the family did their shopping in Montreal. “That’s upstate.” When you come from a small country, this one is really big.)
Vague general impressions: Toronto
Toronto’s something of a non-place. I quipped to Mrs D that it is the Taipei of North America: that is, an important and populous city with nothing memorable in it to fix the traveller’s attention: no Eiffel Tower, no Statue of Liberty, no Sydney Opera House or Buckingham Palace or Tiananmen Square.
Yeah, yeah, there’s that big spindly thing; but that just confuses the place in one’s mind with Seattle. (And yeah, yeah, Taipei has the 101; but that’s just an office building for crying out loud. Zzzzzz.)
I of course mean no offense to the good people of Toronto, who treated us very hospitably. An old acquaintance of ours, a native of the place, gave up his time to act as our tour guide. He seemed to know colorful details about the history of every building in the downtown district. To him especially, many thanks.
Dinner with Faith Goldy
I’m sure our Toronto guide won’t mind my saying that the high point of our visit to his city was dinner with Faith Goldy, the fearless young lady who ran for Mayor of Toronto last year on a Dissident Right ticket: demographic stability and equality under the law.
In other words, Faith’s platform stressed opposition to both unrestrained mass immigration and affirmative action. For that she was of course labeled with all the cuss words in the CultMarx playbook: “far right,” “white supremacist,” “extremist,” and so on.
De-platforming naturally followed—literally, for the first public debate among mayoral candidates. In spite of running third in the polls, Faith was not invited to the debate. She mounted the platform anyway, and had to be hustled off by security personnel. As I said: fearless.
In conversation, Faith was pessimistic about the possibility of any sanity penetrating Canada’s immigration policy. Her thoughts seem to be turning towards starting a family. (She recently married.)
Given her courage, intelligence, and beauty, I’d say that the loss to Canadian politics if she withdraws into private life would be more than compensated for by the gain to the larger gene pool. Still, I doubt the public sphere has seen the last of Faith Goldy.
Yellow Flight
Faith reminded me of the issue of Yellow Flight, which I have occasionally encountered in news stories from Toronto.
From the 1960s on, Chinese people settled in and around Toronto in great numbers. Some suburbs, notably Markham, became plurality Chinese.
In recent years lax immigration laws and the “refugee” rackets have brought more and more Sun People into these heavily-Chinese suburbs. Local Chinese have responded with protests and demonstrations. Now they are voting with their feet, to places further out—Yellow Flight.
Vague general impressions: Montreal
The main thing you need to know about Montreal in 2019 is that it is the world capital of infrastructure repair. That 7½-hour drive from Toronto should have been six hours; but as we got close to Montreal there were détours and closed-off lanes everywhere. I have never seen so much construction work.
Our GPS went nuts, returning us again and again to the same spot after ten minutes of détours. At last I switched the fool thing off, fixed my eyes on a cluster of skyscrapers on the horizon, and headed for them with dogged concentration.
This worked and we made it to our downtown hotel at last. Walking out into the city streets, though, the sidewalks of central Montreal were just as addled with détours as the suburban expressways. What a mess! Have the Montreal city fathers come into a ton of money and decided to rebuild the place, or what?
Using the lemons to make lemonade, I shared with the long-suffering Mrs Derbyshire my theory that French is really just English written with a lot of surplus letters and pronounced with some nasal honking.
Me: “See this sign, TROTTOIR BARRÉ? Whaddya think it means?”
She: “Uh … well, I guess the second word is, like, ‘barred’ or ‘barrier.'”
Me: “Right. And a trottoir is a trottery — a path you trot along.”
She: “Why d’you have to trot?”
Me: “You don’t have to. You can just walk in the regular way—amble, saunter, or stride. Well, I mean, you could if it wasn’t barré. It’s just a slightly different usage, like those Japanese characters that don’t quite mean what the original Chinese means.”
She: “Uh-huh. How about this one: VOIE BARRÉE? What’s a voie?”
Me: “Think of a similar English word. Drop the ‘E’ and turn the ‘I’ into a ‘Y’: v-o-y- … What English word begins ‘v-o-y-‘?”
She: “Uhhh … Give up.”
Me: “‘Voyage’! When you take a voyage you go from one place to another. Well, a voie lets you do that. It’s a path, a way.”
She: “What’s the difference with a trottoir? And why the extra ‘e’ on barrée?”
Me: “Look—a squirrel!”
If we stayed here long enough I would eventually get round to telling my spouse that the French-speakers of metropolitan France regard Québécois the way Englishmen regard broad Australian: as an uncouth colonial dialect spoken by bumpkins of doubtful sobriety.
Perhaps the Ulysses Press should work up a handbook of Dirty Québécois.
Montreal: A city of character
Montreal does have a distinguishing feature: like Edinburgh, it’s a city with a mountain in the middle. Well, not exactly in the middle, but a mere longish walk from downtown.
We walked that walk after fortifying ourselves with a terrific brunch at what advertises itself—and you won’t hear any argument from me—as the best dim sum restaurant in Montreal.
The mountain is officially the Mount Royal Park, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the guy who did New York’s Central Park. It’s a lovely spot with sensational views of the city. There are woods and lawns, lakes and pavilions. Although, concerning those woods, checking later on Wikipedia I noted with interest that:
The lush forest has been badly damaged … by Mayor Drapeau’s so-called morality cuts of the 1950s (to remove any opportunity for people to have sex in the bushes) …
Blessed with good weather, we spent most of the day on the mountain and in the pleasant streets around, all of which seem to belong to McGill University.
Faith had told us that the Quebec government has a deliberate policy of importing immigrants into the province from Francophone Africa. That strikes me as weird even by the suicidal standards of Canadian immigration policy.
I mean, the peculiarity of Quebec is that it is run by ethnocentric elites—well-heeled, well-educated types who want to keep the place linguistically distinct. Fair enough; but then, why confuse all that good healthy ethnocentricity with multiculturalism? With Africans?
Do the elites really imagine that linguistic solidarity will trump racial resentment? American blacks speak English, but that hasn’t erased race as an issue in the U.S.A.
Blacks are indeed much in evidence in Montreal, and speaking what sounds to me like decent French. The dominant impression I got, though, is of a city being overrun by swarthy West Asian / Middle Eastern / North African types.
Détours and demographics aside, and the hard-not-to-notice quantity of filthy mumbling homeless street people also aside, we liked Montreal. It’s a city with character: lovely parks, fine old churches, and distinctive quartiers.
If not for the bother of having to learn Québécois, and the prospect of seeing those churches all turned into mosques ten or fifteen years from now, I could happily move to Montreal. Does McGill University need any COBOL programmers?
AmRen conference
The mood at this year’s American Renaissance conference was, as the AmRen website boasts, “optimistic, energetic, and eager.” Thanks once again to the organizers.
I made my annual pitch to Jared Taylor for an AmRen cruise. Ed Capano, the publisher of National Review when I was there, once told me he’d had a devil of a time selling the idea of cruises to his board. Then, when at last they grudgingly allowed Ed to organize a cruise, and saw the receipts come in, they were instant converts.
Me: “Come on, Jared. You’ve got—what?—two hundred people here having a great time among fellow spirits. Think how much more fun a cruise would be!”
Jared: “Fun? John, you forget I’m a Presbyterian. You know what they say about us: We’re haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.”
I shall wear him down at last, though, and we’ll get a cruise. Just give me a couple more years.
Scourby’s Bible (cont.)
On a long road trip you of course need something to listen to. We alternated between some Great Courses lectures, classical-music CDs, and Alexander Scourby’s reading of the entire King James Bible.
Mrs D finds 17th-century English hard to follow and falls asleep after a couple of chapters from Scourby. (I do most of the driving.) Those long genealogies in Chronicles were a particularly effective insomnia cure for her. I’ll admit my own attention wandered some in those stretches, too.
I do like Scourby’s voice, though. It’s exactly right for the job. That style of voice—educated upper-middle-class mid-20th-century masculine northeastern American—isn’t heard any more, other than in recordings like these. (Scourby’s were made around 1950.) It was Peak Euphony for our language, clear, confident, and vigorous.
Scourby doesn’t dial down the original KJV vocabulary, either. I was pleased to hear those references to “him that pisseth against the wall” that used to send the whole class into fits of uncontrollable sniggering back in my schooldays. (It’s just a synonym for “adult male,” I think; but as synonyms go, it’s one of the best.)
Well, I’ve now heard the entire Pentateuch, all the Books of History, Job, and the Psalms. Onward to Proverbs!
Don’t call me “Comrade”!
I belong to that deplorable category of foreign-language learners who, after mastering the utter basics—greeting, goodbye, numerals, forms of address — want to know the bad words.
The Ulysses Press of Berkeley, Ca., has performed a valuable service to language-learners of this regrettable stripe by bringing out a series of books teaching us how to be potty-mouthed in many different languages. Their catalog currently includes Dirty French, Dirty German, Dirty Italian, Dirty Chinese, Dirty Japanese, Dirty Korean, Dirty Russian, and Dirty Spanish, with more titles to come, I hope.
(From dim memories of having worked as kitchen help around New York City in the early 1970s, I look forward with interest to Dirty Yiddish.)
I know about this because a neighbor gifted me a copy of Dirty Chinese. It is not widely understood among round-eyes that in the matter of lewd and scatological diction, Mandarin Chinese has few rivals for richness of vocabulary and force of expression. (Although as filthy as Mandarin can be, and with due allowance for the fact that my experience may have been atypical, I think Cantonese can be even filthier.)
After fifty years of hanging out with Chinese people, and 33 years of being married to one, I expected few surprises from Dirty Chinese. Well, my expectations were confounded. There were a lot of surprises, some of them wonderfully eloquent.
Here for example is a little quatrain—it rhymes abab in Mandarin—that, while a bit too long for a simple out-the-window road-rage volley, would be just the thing to chant at some adversary who’d stand still long enough to receive it, and was not packing heat.
你妈大屄
肥又宽
上泡飞机
下泡船。
Nĭ mā dà bī
Féi yòu kuān
Shàng păo fēijī
Xià păo chuán.
Translation (not precisely literal, but striving in a properly literary spirit to preserve the rhyme scheme):
Yo momma’s ****
Is fat and wide
With planes up front
And ships inside.
Now that’s eloquence!
Even my good lady got some surprises from Dirty Chinese. She hasn’t lived in China since the 1980s and is not au courant with today’s street slang. She did not know (and of course I didn’t either) that 同志 (tóngzhì, pronunciation here), the very common Mao-era way to say “Comrade,” has been appropriated by mainland homosexuals to refer to one of their kind. This usage, the authors tell us, is now so widely known you can give major offense by addressing a Chinese guy as “同志.”
Good to know. I was already noticing back in 2001 how rare it was to be addressed as “Comrade.” The word must have been transitioning (so to speak) at that point, as I never heard this modern usage. Funny thing, language.
My days are numbered (cont.)
In last month’s diary I mentioned the Astronomer’s Julian day-numbering system. Not for the first time: Twelve years ago I confessed to the world my odd habit of counting off my own days on earth:
I have a wee text file I keep for checking historical data, with all the dates Anno Domini up into the middle of this century tallied by Gregorian date, Astronomer’s Julian, day of the week, and a couple of others. I generated the thing myself with VBASIC code.
One of those others is my own day number—I mean, counting my date of birth as day one …
“Astronomer’s Julian” is a very simple system. It starts with 0.000 at noon Greenwich Mean Time on a certain day back in the fifth millennium BC, then just counts off the days. The day number is called the Julian Day, “JD” for short. And you wonder why I like this system?
The system is unfortunately named, though. It has nothing to do with the Julian Calendar, which is a totally different thing. (All right, all right, not totally different. It’s complicated. Calendars are always complicated. That’s the fun of them.)
There are of course apps that will look up the Julian Day for you. I was born around 6:45 a.m. GMT on June 3rd 1945: that—the beginning of Day 1 in my time on earth—was 2,431,609.78125 JD. Heh.
I am writing this diary entry close to ten o’clock in the morning New York time, around two p.m. GMT, on May 5th 2019. That’s 2,458,609.083333 JD. Since my Day 1 began at 2,431,609.78125 JD, adding 26,999 to both numbers there, my Day 27,000 began at 2,458,608.78125 JD, i.e. at 2:45 a.m. this morning New York time.
So this is my 27,000th day on earth! Party time!
Auberon Waugh
My nonfiction reading this month has included A Scribbler in Soho, Naim Attallah’s just-published anthology of writings by his friend Auberon Waugh, who died in 2001.
Waugh, the eldest son of novelist Evelyn Waugh, was a great grandmaster of the paradox—a peculiarly English paradox, I think—that one can hold strong opinions while never taking oneself too seriously. He defined opinion journalism as “the vituperative arts” and boasted that he had a gift “for making the comment, at any given time, which people least wish to hear.”
He died too young, aged only 61. This was in part a result of lifelong cigarette smoking, but mainly a delayed consequence of having accidentally fired six rounds into his own chest from a machine-gun while in military service at age 18.
Waugh’s death was a loss to opinion journalism, but probably timely from a career-development standpoint. In the savagely puritanical cultural dictatorship of today’s Britain he would be in jail for offenses against political correctness, or at best shunned by polite society.
Some years ago I mentioned having written to Auberon Waugh about one of his newspaper columns, and having received a courteous, funny letter in return. I wish I had kept that letter. The only thing I can remember about it now, forty years later, is his thanking me for having typed the word “restaurateur” without an “n.”
Creationism
In my May 17th podcast I passed some comments on creationism. I hadn’t heard anything about the topic for several years, and vaguely supposed the creationists had given up after the Kitzmiller decision in 2005.
That was naïve of me. Persons of that contrarian tendency never give up. Heck, geocentrists are still with us, or at any rate were in January 2011 when I reviewed two books about Galileo.
So I got a modest email bag on that May 17th podcast from creationists. Most of those emails were, I am glad to say, couched in a polite, non-obnoxious, more-in-sorrow-than-anger diction. Thanks to all who took the trouble to write.
I don’t have anything to say on the subject that I haven’t already said, so I have just put links to related articles and reviews from my archives at the end of this segment.
For anyone totally new to the topic I recommend, with some slight qualifications, Frederick Gregory’s lectures at The Great Courses as a primer. Along with his Harvard Ph.D. in History of Science (Scientific Materialism in 19th Century Germany, 1973), Prof. Gregory has a Divinity degree, so he’s well-equipped to tackle Darwin’s theory and the controversies it generated from both sides, the scientific and the metaphysical. As I noted at one of those links below, the Prof. cuts “Intelligent Design” a tad too much slack for my taste, but your mileage may vary.
The very useful TalkOrigins anti-creationist website quiesced soon after Kitzmiller, but it’s still on the internet, though no longer actively maintained. It has a good index, an FAQ page, and a great mass of links to articles and reviews, including for example complete court transcripts of the Kitzmiller trial. Any creationist argument you will ever hear—there are only a dozen or so — is thoroughly tossed and gored at TalkOrigins.
Here, as mentioned, are contributions I have made down through the years, in chronological order.
- Philosopher’s Stove; National Review Online, 12/23/00. A review of David Stove’s Against the Idols of the Age, which has some passing references to Darwin … but first read Steve on Stove.
- Valiant for Truth; The New Criterion, January 2001. A review of Martin Gardner’s Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy and Other Dubious Subjects. Gardner thought Darwin’s religious position was fideism, close to his own.
- How Do You Feel About That? The New York Sun, 6/9/04. A review of Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul, mostly about Freud but with some nods to Darwin.
- But Is It Science? National Review, 2/14/05. Eighty years on from the Scopes trial. This was the article that launched, well, not a thousand ships, but several plane tickets for Discovery Institute principals to fly over from Seattle to New York, as described in my May 17th podcast.
- The I.D. trial; National Review Online, October 2005. Kitzmiller under way.
- Stuff Happens; The New Criterion, January 2006. A review of Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.
- George Gilder, Metaphysician; National Review Online, 7/13/06. A response to Gilder’s creationist essay “Evolution and Me.”
- Religion and Politics; National Review Online, 2/20/07. Thoughts on Bill Buckley‘s creationism.
- A Blood Libel on Our Civilization; National Review Online, 4/28/07. Ben Stein‘s creationist movie Expelled.
- The I’s Have It; New English Review, July 2007. Will my dog go to Heaven?
- Attack and Counterattack; National Review Online, 12/19/07. Do I mock Evangelicals?
- What’s So Scary About Evolution? — For Both Right and Left, a Lot; Taki’s Magazine, 5/19/08. Anticipating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin.
- Make Way for Bio-Aesthetics; The New Criterion, January 2009. A review of Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.
- Pat’s no monkey; National Review Online, June 2009. Pat Buchanan gives hogwash a bad name.
- Survival of the Most Pious? National Review Online, 11/11/09. A review of Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.
- Two Cheers for Folk Metaphysics; Taki’s Magazine, 6/8/10. Beyond medium-sized dry goods.
- Men versus the Man, 100 Years On; Address to the H.L. Mencken Club, 10/22/10. Mencken’s Social Darwinism.
- Nature, Nurture, Nature, Nurture; Taki’s Magazine, 6/23/11. Biology and criminality.
- Occasionalism Isn’t Science; The American Spectator, January/February 2014. The metaphysics of creationism. (NB: The Spectator had actually sent me a copy of Stephen Meyer’s creationist book Darwin’s Doubt for review. I found the book unreadable, so I knocked out an essay instead, and the editors printed it. The TalkOrigins website has links to several withering reviews of Darwin’s Doubt by people who know what they are talking about.)
- Middlebrow fiction of the month; VDARE, October 2015. Alfred Russel Wallace (the co-discoveror of Natural Selection) fictionalized by Elizabeth Gilbert.
- What happened to Intelligent Design? VDARE, August 2016.
Math Corner
Just a couple of notes. First, one more Chinese-language oddity.
The idiom “all at sixes and sevens,” meaning a state of confusion, is not as current in English as it used to be, although I think most English-speakers recognize it. The Chinese equivalent, according to Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, is 三三五五, sān sān wŭ wŭ, “threes and fives.”
Do other languages use numbers like this to express the idea of confusion? Is it “eights and nines” or “ones and fours” in Finnish, or Nahuatl, or Malayalam? I’d be interested to hear from native speakers.
Second, national-level finals of the 2019 Mathcounts competition for middle-schoolers (grades 6 to 8) were held in Florida, May 11-14th. The full state team lists, 224 competitors, are here, by state. The top 56 of those 224 competitors are listed here.
The friend who passed the results on to me observed that: “Judging by the names, it looks like about 4 of the top 56 competitors are not children of recent immigrants.”
Indeed. I tally those 56 finalists as:
- 42 Chinese & Korean (the one Vietnamese name is ethically Chinese)
- 7 Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi
- 4 Russian (Jewish?)
- 3 Other
Not that White Privilege is totally absent. My friend:
You might find it interesting to look at the state team list. The first name for each state is the coach. Quite a few teams have a coach with a Euro name and 4 Asians as the team.
E.g., there are 4 Chinese on the Minnesota team, with Coach Grivna Schlukebier.
(Schlukebier means “gulp beer” in German, but Grivna doesn’t look like a German name. Might be an interesting background there.)
The Asian kids (and their moms!) are on average more fanatical about training for Mathcounts, so I’m not surprised that they’re more dominant among the top 56 than among all 224. Still, the degree of dominance is amazing.
It certainly is; the more so when you remind yourself — as you constantly must! — that There Is No Such Thing As Race.
[Footnote: For my next life I want to be born with the surname Schlukebier.]
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John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT(also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
They say “upstate” is north of wherever you are.
What it is not is South Carolina. I’m told real Palmettos call their higher regions “upcountry”. Leave “upstate” to the appleknockers.
London, New York, and Paris are diverse cities, too, but everyone knows what a Londoner, New Yorker, or Parisian is. What the heck is a Torontonian? What does Toronto have, other than diversity?
Seattle has the Rainier Tower, which you have to see. It was designed by the city’s native son, Minoru Yamasaki.
Yamasaki, by the way, spent WWII not in an internment camp, but designing bunkers for the US Army. As if I wasn’t cynical enough about FDR…
Alan Watts told of his Anglican uncle who drifted from one conservative sect to another, until he came upon the passage about “eating their dung and drinking their piss”, and was so offended he left Christianity altogether. The late Lawrence Auster said that was one of his favorite verses.
One of the leaders at the Rockford Institute a decade or so ago said that their donors were always complaining about the frequent tours and seminars in Europe. Why can’t they spend that money to spread ideas instead.
He had to explain to them, patiently, that they weren’t spending anything. Those trips were the Institute’s biggest moneymakers.
For your next life you will probably be born Mbungo Mbute. Sorry.
I recently drove across Germany, and nearly every Autobahn in the country has large sections under construction. You don’t see much actual work, just a lot of half-finished construction sites. Germany is indeed the Infrastructure capital of Europe, if not the world.
I visited my old High School French teacher after my first visit to France, and recounted my experiences of being laughed at and corrected in a number of pronunciations. It was then that she admitted to being Québécois and, more interestingly, admitted that Québécois is considered to be the Hillbilly of French. To your point about French being English, every Stop-sign I see in France reads “STOP.” The Québécois are SO obstinate that the signs in French-speaking Canada read “ARRÊTEZ.”
The America paddlewheeler accomodates 185 people. Might I suggest you pitch The Grand Heartland cruise on it to Mr. Taylor?
https://www.americancruiselines.com/cruises/mississippi-river-cruises/grand-heartland-cruise
Speaking of calendars as Derb does above, one might mention here the very elegant calendar reform proposal by Steve Hanke and Dick Henry of Johns Hopkins, the ‘Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar’ or HHPC, under which, e.g., your birthday would be on the same day of the week for every year of your life:
Haha, Alarmist, I was going to write a quick anecdote per that section of this diary involving just that. It’s not just the stubbornness but the driving. 3 of us were in a taxi in Ottawa and we passed by many of these ARRET octagonal signs (it should be obvious).
“What does “Arret” mean?
“Apparently, slow down a tad.”
To Mr. Derbyshire, put me down for that cruise thing too. Alarmist’s version (and there’s an even bigger riverboat, for which I just met someone who worked on, called the something Queen) is OK, but I think there’d be just as much hassle with the ctrl-left as with the Amren locales before that Tennessee state park. It’d be nice to get out in the ocean away from the bastards.
I really like that “Comrade” thing. That means that when I write to the Commie bloggers and commenters right here on unz, the Godfree Robertses, the FBs, the DenKs, the Biffs, etc., I can feel justified in calling them Comrades, as I feel they are in EVERY pejorative sense. (Actually, let me except Mr. Roberts, as he seems a very polite guy.)
On your discussion of Creationism, I really wish you would understand that Intelligent Design is NOT some re-named creationism. One can believe the latter possible and not the former with no contradiction.
Lastly, whatever calendar you like or use, please don’t start with the BCE and CE business. I’m glad you didn’t here, because whenever I see that, I completely tune out the rest.
I had the same reaction to Toronto when I visited: a generic city with no individuality. Maybe that’s inevitable in a country that wants new “citizens” from everywhere in the world to erase whatever British character remains.
Surprised the woke Canuck authorities let you in. I guess they don’t yet have the U.S. policy of demanding access to all social media and email accounts for foreign visitors.
‘every Stop-sign I see in France reads “STOP”‘: when I was young such signs in Britain always said “Halt”. Perhaps they did in Germany too. I don’t know which pack of furriners made us change to “Stop”.
Germans to this day have far fewer Stop-signs and still rely on people complying with the “right before left” rule, but I’m sure the recent arrivals are messing things up, because roundabouts are springing up everywhere, as if that is better than a stop sign.
No logical reason to have a seven day week. But as if that isn’t bad enough…
…it has a leap week, rather than leap day.
I like my calendar much better…
https://www.quora.com/Should-we-have-a-calendar-reform-If-so-how-would-this-new-calendar-work-and-how-is-it-superior/answer/Jamie-Bechtel-%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BF-%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%8D
If we’ve lost Derb, we’ve lost World War T.
Bit harsh on Taipei, methinks. All the Chiang-Kai Shek stuff is cool. Liberty Square is good-looking. The national museum is amazing!
Plus, fantastic (and cheap) food everywhere. Pity the beer in Taiwan is not so good.
Trumpstein Administration Cracks Down Hard On Employers Hiring Illegals. The Justice Department prosecuted a total of 11 employers for hiring illegals in all of 2018 according to federal records i.e. not even one a month. Any MAGAstinians care to explain?
Toronto is Canada’s armpit, freezing in Winter, boiling in Summer, the Police are Nazis, the people ,Pius, stupid and proud of it. The rest of the Country is far far better.
Derbs in Canuckistan. Echoes of Dickens and his American Notes.
I am told they speak Ebonics which is as distinct as Scots. Though dated (1986), I recommend episode 5 of the series The Story of English by Canuck Robert MacNeil.
Regardless, they are Africans living in the Americas. LOL.
What about Kosher Privilege e.g. the U.S. Supreme Court and Tory tribe members Dominic Raab and Boris Kemal Bey in the old country? Then you have goyim proxies Michael Gove (wants to move the UK embassy to Jerusalem), Matt Hancock (has likened Jeremy Corbyn to Hitler), Pakistani bankster Sajid Javid, Esther McVey (grew up with Stuart Polak of the Conservative Friends of Israel) and Rory Stewart (married to Jewess Shoshana Clark).
Why not May, as in Treason May? It is an actual German surname.
Wait are you joking? We DO have something notable– the CN tower…….
Dont expect Derbs to call that out…
Hey Derb, I know you’re an old man, and you’re keeping a stiff upper lip and all that, but you NEED to fire back at Frijole Fred if you want to stay relevant, Bro. The world has changed, it’s de rigueur amongst white boys nowadays…
+1. Everything White Guy in Japan said. Plus if you enjoy wandering, say, Greenwich Village, you’ll enjoy wandering around 民生社區 just as much. http://cultureexpress.taipei/EN/topics_content.aspx?id=185
“My days are numbered…” This is the best sentence Derbyshire has ever written. I will return to this after criticizing other parts of his article.
As usual, just when I think Derbyshire has completely degenerated, he manages to come up with something even more degenerate – his idea for an AmRen cruise. At least when he was giving his stupid Artic Alliance speech on land, a white male with testicular fortitude could get up and walk out. At sea, there is no escape. More idiotic ideas from useless Western males cucks.
His scribblings about Toronto and the large number of Asians sounded like he was glad this is happening. Hopefully, if his Chinese offspring don’t move to China, they will leave for Canada. Faith Goldy is a another cuck. I’ve seen stories about her “retirement.” She has returned to the RCC and believes it will save the West. Goldy is insane.
His Math Corner observations about the Asians once again shows his contempt for the West. None of these “winners” will do anything to benefit the West. They must go back to their shithole countries and try to help their own kind.
And finally, back to my favorite sentence about his impending doom. Derbyshire scribbles about listening to the KJ Bible on some CD. He grew up in an all-white England which was very Christian. I’m sure he read the Bible growing up. He has written that he is an atheist. The Bible is a literary work so it can be read without a religious intent. However, he wrote an article where he stated he didn’t understand Christians. In another article, he wrote how he helped his pagan Chinese woman with her heathen ancestor worship rituals. He wrote another article about his Chinese son asking about Jesus and some other Christian history and Derbyshire stated he could not give him a proper answer as he had abandoned Christianity. The past 2000 years of Western history cannot be understood without knowing about the Bible and Christianity. His Chinese son has no clue about the West. And, being, Chinese, he is not a Western male.
He may be reflecting on his past as he draws nearer to the end, but why? He has done nothing but denigrate the West for over 30 years. He could have easily solved his problems by moving himself and his Chinese family to China. Maybe he now feels guilt and shame for marrying the Chinese woman and having Chinese offspring. The best atonement for his “sinning” is for him to help his Chinese family start moving back to China before he dies.
After you, Slav
Bengali – Asian – average Bengali IQ 82, not Western. The West is not black/Asian/Jewish/Muslim. You go back. You are not Western. Bangladesh is a shithole who needs Bengalis like you to help it.
And it’s not Slav either! And it never will be by the way, I find these aggrandizing self-important delusional diatribes quite unbelievably funny. Please, do tell me that you are pretending, and that you are not actually being serious
Pot calling the kettle black..Croatia, Serbia, and all those countries are not Western either. Again, deal with that fundamental reality, the truth.
See above comment. When you do, inform me. I’ll join you. But till then, I won’t have new immigrants like yourself tell me what do LOL. You and I…we’re both ” untermensch ”
Anyways, you have never been nor will ever be “WESTERN” just because you are WHITE. You are an immigrant and don’t you ever forget that. You are not even “old stock”. This applies to the Italian immigrants, as well as many of the Irish, and the Germans, the Ukes, the Ruskis, and the mulitudes of other groups. Screw it. If you ain’t Anglo, Scots, French(to an extent), Irish(to an extent), Scandi, Polish, don’t wanna hear a damn peep outta your immigrant mouths
The bane of calendars is that they’re resistant to sane, prudent changes. John Herschel’s proposal to bring the Gregorian calendar closer to our reality, for example, never came to be.
Surprised to read people typed letters to each other 40 years ago, in the ”pre-email days”. Perhaps you meant to say you wrote ”restaurateur” without an n? (You also wrot- I mean typed ”ethically Chinese”. Perhaps you meant ”ethnically Chinese”? What’s with this rationing of ns? Is that a WWII brit thing? Isn’t there an n in ”restaurant” anyway?)
This pedant wishes you had a happy birthday, Mr. Derbyshire.
Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar says “a little more or less” translates literally in Turkish as “three down five up” and “not to haggle about the price” as “not to look at three or five”. What “a little more or less” means in English, or what a Turk calls positive haggling, I do not know. But I am not a native speaker, or even much of a speaker. Of Turkish.
I see I’m dealing with a delusional dalit/gunga din Asian who has no idea of what the West is.
The West includes Eastern Europeans. They are Caucasian, European, white. The European nationalists in Europe include Russia and other Eastern European countries in their movements.
You are a dark-skinned, low IQ, Asian. You are not and never will be a Westerner, European. A Western man/woman will always be your superior. Where there is a Westerner – in the USA, Latin America, Asia, Africa – they will always have a home in Europe.
Your home is in Bangladesh. Start dealing with this reality.
However, you also seem suspicious. Maybe you’re not a BengaliCanadianDude. Maybe you’re from another tribe who is stirring up trouble among Westerners. Wars like those of WWI and WWII will never happen again in Europe. Westerners are woke.
I could only make it thru 27 seconds of the first video, and only 12 seconds of the second, and I’d rather stick needles in my eye than listen to more of either.
Hah! I wrote my comments because I know enough to pass judgement on what the West “is”. I think the real delusional one here is the Slav who feels native to a land she is foreign to, because of her melanin content. That is archetypically a symptom of delusion.
Refer back to the delusional comment. You really need to stop embarassing yourself. No way in hell Croatia is “Western”. No way Serbia is Western. Same goes for Albania. Or Kosovo. Or Poland for that matter. And so on.
That’s not what defines Western. It’s a race to the bottom with you. Come back to me when you
actually get your facts right.
No relevance at all to this.
Sweetheart, I am one. Seething through the screen won’t change a thing.
You aren’t a Westerner, you’re a Slav in an identity crisis. Your mummy and daddy left the Soviet Union because your neigbour Vacheslav reported you to the commisar, and now the salt and anger has flown through the bloodline and it has manifested into you, and your ramblings. You being white won’t make you a Westerner, and I’ve seen more and more comments on different sites, including Unz, with commenters disassociating themselves from white immigrants like yourself. Rightfully so, because you have to be consistent, and plus, why would anyone voluntarily want to be associated with you?
Paradoxical logic, as I am a “Westerner”. You’re gonna have to try harder than that.Unlike Eastern Europeans, “we” actually share a common history(colonialism), “we” share a common language(English) as well as “our” political systems, and “our” law and certain aspects of “our” arbitratration is based on English common law. Nigel Farage himself has made this clear to, as he and other Brexiteers dont consider their white “brethren” to be well…close like you imply. Poles are regularly the victims of anti-immigrant sentiments. Facts facts facts
We were talking about Canada. Which Slavic country are you from again? Also, nigel farage as well as other nationalists tend to disagree with you.
Jury’s still out on the dark skinned one, I’ve been confused for a Punjabi and a Persian once(twice). Pretty light for my phenotype. How do you even entertain such claims lol? How do you make that assertion in the first place?
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHA
wooh couldnt help myself. If that isnt projection, I dont know what is
My ancestral homeland, where my progenitors originate from is Bengal and Gujarat. Again, off the mark. You’re really not good at this are you?
Also, your home is in Eastern Europe. Please go there.
Uncool and unoriginal. Stop stealing my words like you steal the identity of others!
Since when do ((danes)) LARP as rare ethnics on alternative news sites? They don’t by the way.
Yeah, they’re really starting to clamp down hard on insipid immigration originating from useless Slavic countries.
Wait…you’re actually right on this one! Bah- gawd! Golly gee! There’s a first time for everything.
So are we HAHAHAHAHHAHAH
Riiiiiight
You’re a better man than I am
Talha, are you the “Bengali Canadian Dude?”
If yes, you’re a Paki, Asian. You’re also a Muslim. You’re not Western.
The same latitude as the arctic hells of Tuscany, or Umbria. They squeeze out the odd drop of half-decent gargle there, I believe. Or even (the nation of) Georgia, where wine was most likely invented.
The big-lake buffering hypothesis is interesting, could the Med have the same Gulf-Streamy effect?
And Georgia is also sandwiched between two large landlocked seas.
No, we’ll gladly keep our Slavic Americans, thanks.
Same latitude hardly means same climate. Europe is warmer than it ‘should’ be due to ocean currents. Eg. average January temperature in New York City is 32 degrees, while the average in Porto, Portugal, is 48 degrees, even tho both cities are at the same latitude.
Well then you certainly wouldn’t be into the response to the response.
No way in hell Croatia is “Western”. No way Serbia is Western. Same goes for Albania. Or Kosovo. Or Poland for that matter.
Brings up the very interesting question of what constitutes “Western.” Which nobody ever bothers to define so they can go off into interminable irresolvable arguments.
Here’s a definition: Those nations which evolved out of the western European (Roman Catholic) tradition, with its fundamental separation of Church and State.
So in the above list, Croatia and Poland (and Czechia) would be Western, the rest would not.
To show how important this divide is, the Croats and Serbs speak the same language. They both insist they don’t, but they’re wrong. But the religious/cultural divide has had them at each other’s throats for a long time.
Or you can kick in with your own definition of “Western” if you like. Without an agree definition, how can you even have a discussion about whether country A or country B fits it?
London is at the same latitude as Goose Bay, Labrador. It’s quite a bit colder there. January averages about 0F.
Having lived and worked in Ireland, Western Scotland and the Northern Isles for more years than I care to recall (only as far as Hillswick, 62N, mind) I do have a passing acquaintance with this phenomenon.
I doubt the Gulf Stream is all that pertinent in the Adriatic, never mind the Black Sea or the Caspian, seeing as the latter two are indisputably stuck right in the middle of the largest continent on the planet.
It’s the “large bodies of water adjacent to the vineyards” effect I’m interested in.
You can barely grow kale, carrots and barley in Shetland.
Come on Truth tell the truth : White Boys make better ni**ers than ni**ers do .
My definition of the West is the best: not black/Asian/Jewish/Muslim. It covers race, ethnicity and religion.
We’ll separate the above and see what’s left.
Who is “we”? One of the ancestors of the Ellis Island depraved Sicilian stock? Or what? Everything about my statement is a 100% valid. Who am I dealing with? Too bad this “we” you talk about is hardly representative of anything and it is nullified by the fact that there isn’t a united front that can be referred to as “We”. Many people have and will disagree with your statement. Also, I wonder when Attilas parents came….? the 70s? the 80s? or when the scientists and profs were running after the Soviet Union imploded? beats me. Regardless of that, they get absolutely no say in this. They are immigrants who dont belong here(like me, you would say). Their ancestors werent the original “settlers”, and they share nothing
That would mean Serbia is Western…and Russia…..HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA.
You absolute joke
No he’s not.
That’s like me asking if you’re Anatoly Karlin.
Irrelevant, plenty of “white” converts to Islam. Too many to post seperate pictures of. They are Western in your own off-the-mark definition.
Projection.
You’re a Slav. Go to Russia or Serbia or something. You’re not Western. Like these countries.
Someone’s getting worried.
Is that good or bad?
I’ll take “Things not good for the jews” for $100, Alex.
Toronto is less a city than a Beachhead. Current politics in Canada is marked by a group of neurotic, virtue-signaling parties that long ago betrayed everyone who didn’t live in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. As the vast majority of immigrants now are from countries of a warmer disposition, they may try to live ‘up north’, but they soon hightail it back to the city, or even the US if possible. It seems tolerating minus 40 C is largely a First Nations and Euro-Caucasian thing. Canada, meanwhile, languishes under an extremely mediocre (and derivative) political class that bows low and long to some of the world’s most corrupt and violent despots. Most of Canada’s vaunted social programmes are more like a mish-mash of half-assed political bromides designed to secure key urban demographics, often along ethnic lines. In short, Canada’s a politically correct mess, and more than ever a marionette of others. Hard to believe we stood our ground at Paaschendale and stormed Juno, and once relished every opportunity to punch above our weight.
Radical Center: you have an Asian wife and offspring. You and I have commented before. You stated that you and your Asian family spend vacations in Asia. I think you know your future.
Well, I read 4 or 5 of the anti-creationist articles you linked to, John, and it’s evident that you are a very bright man and a darn good writer. There exists a discrepancy between what you wrote then and what you write here such that I’m led to believe that what you present here you write with your left hand. Anyway, and nevertheless, I’m sorry to tell you that I believe that you’re a bit confused.
The “creationist” argument is really a restatement of Anselm’s argument from Design for the proof of the existence of God. We all know it: the universe is so intricately designed that it must have been the work of a master intelligence and only God has that much intelligence, therefore, God exists.
What you have done is this (paraphrased): Evolution is a proven fact, God doesn’t exist, therefore the universe was not in any way the consequence or result of “Intelligence”, whatever form that may take.
Even if one grants your two premises–and I do–the third proposition doesn’t logically follow.
And that’s that.
A bit over the top, perhaps, but the main point is bang on: Asians back to Asia.
Well, yes but the causality is backward – English is French. All those words came into English from Norman French, otherwise our stop (estoppez) signs would read Halt.
We’ll gladly keep our Slavic Americans, thanks again.
We’ll gladly keep our Slavic Americans, thanks to you too.
Thank you for the concise and informative explanation of the ethnic politics of the great formerly-white North, SH, but:
In that case, why be part of it, with your “First Nations” PC crap? They are Indians, and even “Inuits” is a decent term, as it wasn’t made to be PC. Peak Stupidity has the lowdown on the PC/PIC on the terminology in First Nations and the Spirits Communities.
Whoops. Losing my memory. Wasn’t Anselm who put forth the Design argument, but Aquinas. Anselm’s was the Ontological argument. Obviously, doesn’t change my point.
Maybe Canada needs something like the US Electoral College: a brilliant device to help balance the population disparities between the claustrophobic confines of the polluted cities with the expressive openness of the rural prairie. It makes for social peace. Given the Electoral College, it is easy to calculate that a vote (for president) in Wyoming has 3.63 X the voting power of a shmuck from New York.
Otherwise, in the extreme, you end up like Britain, France, and the so-called South American republics: one megacity controlling all of the wealth and power in the country … which divvies out bread crumbs to the peasants in the “provinces” based on their willingness to genuflect to their “betters” in the capital city.
It is no wonder that immigrants tend to congregate in large cities as opposed to rural villages. The cities are where wealth and demographic power reside. Voting power aside, if you want a piece of the action based on your willingness to stand in the way of progress unless you get your “cut” of the wealth, megacities are the place to be.
Without devices like the Electoral College to share and equalize power between highly populated urban areas and low-density rural areas, the result is inevitably nascent or overt civil war, i.e. the ongoing war between rural and urban Britain found in BRITEX, between rural and urban France found in the mouvement des gilets jaunes, and between rural and urban America found in the distinction between RED and BLUE states.
Upstate in Maine is “Downeast”.
No, the Electoral College favors the large states. And Canada’s already way more urban than the US.
What they need is a House of Lords. With teeth.
Derb either has good powers of observation or Faith Goldy filled him in on Current-year Canada
Montreal is/was very distinct but that is rapidly changing. The French working-class are vacating the city and scores of Africans and Muslims are moving in. There has been a lot of debate about the hijab in courts, driving licenses , etc. Quebec City had a mosque shooting a few years ago.
Toronto used to be fun, exciting city up until the nineties. Interesting neighbourhoods and buildings, a very good round-the-clock transit system . Affordable. Lots of fun stuff to do. It was a safe New York City. Now it is unaffordable and full of sun people. Working class whites are long gone and the middle class are following. Meanwhile sun people get subsidized housing downtown.
Derb is wrong on the yellow people. Most of them have come relatively recently and come from quasi criminal backgrounds. They contribute to the problem- the de-Canadianization of Canada.
It has been bad since the 90s and is exponentially worse now. We have a prime minister with a double-digit IQ with little work experience before politics and living off a trust fund. Our immigration minister is Somalian
Who’s Faith Goldy??
That Asian ancestor worship thing isn’t really religious. It’s cultural. Asian practicing Christians and Muslims do the ancestor rituals all the time. Even Asian Christian and Muslim clergy do the rituals.
attilathehen is just her commenter name. What makes you think she’s Slav? She used to hate the Catholic Church. Now she hates Whites who marry non Whites and their non White spouses. She denies Armenians and Persians are White. She’s dubious about Italians Greeks and Spanish. Lately she’s an admirer of Russia maybe because they’re tall and light skinned. She’s fun to harass.
The correct term is European civilization, not western civilization. After all, Morocco and some African nations are far west of most of Europe.