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The original   graph and details can be read in Political Studies

Two days I ago I asserted that an organized campaign had arisen to clog Takimag.com with neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic material. Here is the evidence for that assertion, from the Web site of the lovely and gracious Alex Linder:

I encourage VNN people, as part of our outreach, to visit these two paleoconservative sites.

Old 2 Days Ago   #31
Alex Linder
Administrator
Jews really are nature’s ultimate two-footed ten-faced chameleons. On conservative sites, they ditch their ordinary dirtbag mien for a pious, respectable’r than thou approach. All the better to fool the goyish suckers. It usually works. Help me get after them.

In case you think Herr Linder is only seeking a fair shake for his “unconventional” views, here’s an example of what passes for rational discussion on his site. Again, to quote him:

Like every other jew, you’ll notice, Gottfried is a victim of the Holocaust. His ancestors ‘fled from nazi terror,’ he informs us. In less hysterical terms, they emigrated. Were allowed to emigrate by nazi terrorists. Gottfried is a liar of precisely the same ilk as the jews now running America into the ground.

Notice that this jew also lies that most Christians are offended by the facts about jews. They are not. Like jews always do, jew Gottfried is falsely claiming to speak for an entire community. Just like the ADL does. And just like the ADL, he denounces as a “hater” anyone who posts the plain facts about jews and their anti-White agenda.

I doubt that most of our readers will miss the contributions of Linder’s Nazi trolls.

I’m delighted and relieved that Mr. Spencer has been moved to impose control over the Comments section of Takimag.com. It is clear that we have been targeted by a clique of neo-Nazis and racialists as a site they thought they could hijack, and I’m glad that they won’t succeed. If conservative politics are to be viable, we must show how they are beneficial to every honest, well-meaning citizen, regardless of his ethnic or national origin. The claim of the neocons is that only their ideological construct, a “propositional nation” under arms, can meet this standard. They are wrong. It is our job to show that they are wrong. Race fetishists, anti-Semites, and other haters help FURTHER the neocon case, and discredit legitimate critiques of their policies. As to those who on this site have claimed that I and other paleocons who reject anti-Semitism act only out of fear, I have this to say: We have openly attacked and confronted the Gay lobby, the Democrats, the neocons who control the Republican party, the immigration lobby, the business lobby, the feminists, the Marxists, the academic Left…in other words, most of the groups which in the West dominate the social and financial elites. Oh yes, and we have challenged the Moslems, who might very well blow us up. And you think that we are really running around PRETENDING not to be anti-Semites out of fear of Jews? It is much more likely that you Nazis out there hold your own sick ideas out of fear that you are really homosexual. Which is, in the end, a more charitable explanation.

Over at Dealbreaker, John Carney is doing good work revealing that, in fact, Ben Bernake is the universal historical subject, willing late Capitalism into a higher stage of state socialism (in other words, the last big government bail out was only the beginning):   

Wall Street Socialism: How JP Morgan Gained Control Of The Means Of Financial Production

“In short, this is the mother of all government subsidies — a non-legislative appropriation that doubles the size of all this year’s congressional pork projects combined. Without so much as a vote of Congress, taxpayers are to buy securities of undetermined value for $29 billion — roughly Panama’s GDP, or the Federal Reserve Bank’s entire annual profit. They take this enormous risk so that JPM, a company worth $146 billion, has enough liquidity to make a major and profitable acquisition for next to nothing. JPM is more than happy to take on Bear’s book of client and counterparty accounts — these were probably never in danger of being lost, and it’s great business for JPM. The ones being rescued are Bear’s bond-holders. They keep their shirts. The stockholders at least keep their socks. The profits from the good times are retained, and the losses are socialized.”

And now for your viewing pleasure, the musical version of everything he just said:

Thanks to Paul Gottfried for speaking up about the degenerates who have been hijacking the comments threads on this site. The charge of anti-Semitism is frequently abused, and falsely hurled at conservatives by those who wish simply to smear us and silence dissent. But just because innocent women are sometimes labeled harlots doesn’t mean that brothels don’t exist. I have been profoundly disgusted by the organized campaign conducted by neo-Nazis to take over this site by deluging my own articles—and after I had the comments removed, Paul’s columns—with genuine hate speech.  It has no place here, and no place on any site where intelligent, well-meaning people try to discuss serious issues. It is a form of pornography, and belongs in its own fetid little corners of the Internet, where stagnant, murky liquids collect at their own level. That said, until there is a system for vetting such comments before they appear, this column and all my subsequent columns will appear without the option for any comments at all. I apologize to those of you who have intelligent things to say, but for the moment this quarantine is necessary.

As we remember how great music used to be, I’m reminded of a quote from Adorno’s general theory of why music once was great and now sucks: “Advice on how best to compose a Rondo is useless as soon as there are reasons—of which artisanl instruction is ignorant—why rondos can no longer be written.” It’s a very important question, even if Adorno came up with many, many wrong answers thereto.

Certainly, government subsidy is part of the problem—the many national endowments back either the totally clichéd crucifix in a jaw of piss and Mapplethorp wannabes or else totally dull “respectable” art. But then we shouldn’t forget that Mozart and Haydn were happy to live on the lam of many a central European prince. There’s also no evidence that our age is any more “commercial” than the putatively golden one—Die Zäuberflöte was a beer-hall musical; Verdi was always questing for the latest “blockbuster”; and even Wagner, the ultimate anti-social composer, brought out mechanical floating Rheinmädchen for the premiere of his Ring sage. It’s also very likely that the graduates of Eastman and Julliard are much more professional and better prepared to perform the masterworks than were their 19th-century equivalents. (They are, to paraphrase a quip I once heard, the well-schooled Asians who perform the works of dead Germans for audiences that are mostly Jewish.)

Even if serious music audiences are usually on the “mature” side (it’s often difficult to find someone under 50 in a concert hall!), the fact is they are large—more people enjoy “Classical” music now than at any point in Western history. And yet, the actual new stuff produced is almost universally dreadful—it’s either Stcokhausen’s “Helitcoper Sting Quartet (listen here if you dare) or else the vapid, quaint stylings of Jake Heggie (here’s the most embarrassing sample I could find.)

Obviously, the problem is deep, cultural, and thus it’s almost impossible to articulate why exactly contemporary serious composers are so bad.   

Tom reminds us of Haydyn’s birthday—which leaves me to remind us that tomorrow is the b-day of Sergei Rachmaninoff. And here he is:

Rather than focusing on the grim world of politics and the fact that, regardless of whether McCain, Obama, or Clinton win, we will be replacing one dreadful president with another dreadful president, I thought it would be a good occasion to observe the 276th anniversary of the birth of the marvelous Jospeh Haydn, known to the musicians in the Esterhazy court as “Papa.”  Here is the complete You Tube listing of works by Haydn.  Enjoy.

In case any of you were wondering, I am cutting back my daily column to twice a week, thanks to impending book deadlines that make the old 1,500-2,000 words per day just plain unsustainable. I look forward to sharing my columns with you every Tuesday and Friday. Ciao from Roma!

Although it at once explains the frontal assault on Darwin And All That by Ben Stein and Ralph Reed’s interest in anti-science lobbying, only those who smile to see the Republican Party marching off to the war of ideas on an empty stomach find comfort in this focused political poll of the intellectual ground state of the Red States.

With the elephant’s skull running on empty, no wonder the GOP think tanks are fading.