Fake Cowboys and Real Indians

By Timothy Egan, Dec. 2 2016 (LINK to article)

"a living diorama of so much awful history between the First Americans and those who took everything from them."

It's interesting how we think in terms of "them and us"; only in this piece the author, a white man, is siding with "them" rather than with his own side/tribe or race.

Why? Because in overreaction to the evils committed by white men (especially slavery, Jim Crow and the Holocaust, despite the latter being white on white) it is now deemed a moral virtue for them to deny and despise their own white race. And with moral virtue comes personal advantage, privilege and power.

I'm not defending the evils committed by my own white race, put pointing out how an ideology of white racial self-denial and self-contempt now serves the state and its liberal elites as an instrument of socio-political intimidation and control, just as medieval church ideology once did.

It's the age-old strategy of “divide and rule”, with America's white elites demonstrating their moral superiority, and thus right to rule, over both white majority and all the ethnic minorities, by themselves embracing this self-destructive ideology, and not just of white America, but of American society at large.

It is exactly the kind of overreaction the NYT itself warns about in an editorial response to the Paris terror attacks in November 2015:

“In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism [evil] comes the risk that society will lose its way.”

The West's elites have indeed lost their way (see The West's Overreaction to Nazism).

West's Fatal Addiction to Compulsive Work Ethic

Addicted to Distraction

By Tony Schwartz, Nov. 28 2015 (LINK to article)

This is an excellent and important piece, many of the negative aspects of which I recognise in myself and others.

Why are we driven to distraction? And isn't reading also often just a distraction?

Distinguishing between what is compulsive and what isn't can be difficult, and compulsive isn't always bad. Charles Darwin was a compulsive collector of things, without which he would not have become the renowned scientist he did.

I'm reminded of the hilarious film, The Gods Must Be Mad, in which the compulsive activity of white South Africans is contrasted with the much healthier activity of indigenous Bushmen.

On the other hand, is it not this very compulsiveness which drove Europeans to create western civilisation?

The Germans are particularly compulsive when it comes to work (I know, because I lived in Germany for many years), but it has played no small role in making them so wealthy and "successful". Sometimes I felt like tapping them on the shoulder and pointing out that they had succeeded in rebuilding their country after the war and could now relax a little, but it would have had no effect. Their work ethic is compulsive, distracting them from, what exactly? Themselves? Reality?

Trouble is, we have made a virtue of a compulsive work ethic, seeing the material wealth  it results in as some absolute good.

We tend to admire East Asians, because they can be even more compulsive and driven than "successful" white people are, but perhaps we should question