The following posts are those I made in another forum, The Internet Book Database of Fiction.

http://www.ibdof.com/index.php

I went in there to share some technical information about how to calculate the orbits of other planets and transfer orbits to fly from one planet to another.

http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=1838
http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=1837

After posting those treatises, I became involved in a discussion of fossil fuel depletion and its probable effect on human colonization of other planets.

At one point, I put the blame on the unwise use of fossil fuels on the ideals of humanitarian egalitarianism. I said that all you get when you feed the hungry is more hungry people to feed later: it's like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. I also said that if more energy had been used to gain a permanent footing in space, while leaving the masses of mankind at the feudal level (i.e., no cars, no air conditioners, no TV), the fossil fuel might have lasted thousands of years instead of a hundred years, that when the end finally came it would be gentle, and that the humans who had established themselves away from Earth could continue to keep the technology spark alive with extraterrestrial sources of energy, such as solar energy or Titan's methane sea.

I was warned by a moderator not to be so Nietzschean because WW2 had been fought to prevent someone from asserting the superiority of his own race. I responded to that in a particular way, and the moderator took a "masked dislike" to me. Is he a Jew? I don't know. He acts like one.

Jerry Abbott

Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 8:58 am

A big reason to colonize would be that all hell is about to break loose on Earth: stuff like worldwide famine, global resource wars, food riots, race wars, cannibalism, and in general a pretty bad time. On another planet, you wouldn't have to worry about any of that.

The problem is that it's too late. Humanity has spent too many ergs in air conditioners, too many barrels of oil growing food to feed the hungry (and they're still there and still hungry), and not nearly enough investment of terrestrial fossil fuels in gaining access to extraterrestrial energy supplies in anticipation of the depletion of same here on Earth.

Whether there is a nuclear war or not, humans are nearly finished as a technical species. It is, I repeat, too late to correct the failure to develop resources off-planet. That should have been done starting in 1940 or so, instead of doing anything else.

Out there near Saturn, about a billion miles away, is a moon called Titan. It's surface is covered with an ocean of primordial methane. Think we're ever going to get our hands on any of it? Nope!

How many asteroids do you suppose Mankind will ever mine for metal? Answer: none.

How many cities will ever exist on the moon? Answer: none.

We did have a chance at a "Star Trek" kind of future; we don't have that chance any longer. We wasted it.

Why did we waste it? Stupidity? Not exactly.

We succumbed to an error of moral values and ideology, often called "egalitarianism." If one man bakes himself a cake, we figured, then it isn't fair that there are other men who do not have cakes. Cakes must be given them! To be FAIR! The minions of fairness, frothing at the mouth, took over our public institutions for making collective decisions - governments, that is - and started making public policy conform to their distorted and exaggerated sentiments, and burdening more normal folks with the costs of subsidizing their programs.

The masses of humans should have remained at the feudal level of culture. The use of fossil fuels should have been reserved to those who used them to help along the powers of mankind to acquire all of the resources of the solar system, with the idea that then it would be possible to consider interstellar voyages to seed the rest of the galaxy with the life that originated on Earth. To our species fell the responsibility for ensuring that this mission did not fail...but fail we did. Nature's organizing principles did three billion years of labor here in vain. On some other planet, at some other time, nature will repeat her work, perhaps with a better result. But it won't be us.

So don't worry about whether you would colonize or not. You can't. Nobody can. Humans will never live on other planets.

Jerry Abbott

PostPosted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:15 am

[quote="Brad_H"]
I disagree with your 2nd, 3rd, and penultimate paragraphs ... but somewhat agree with the rest.

You make a lot of good points, but I think it's too soon to write us off just yet ... at the very least, draconian conservation combined with population controls and heavy efforts made to switch to renewal resources are imperative - and are not beyond our grasp.

Viable interplanetary and interstellar travel is not beyond our grasp either. I have some interesting links to share ... but only if your mind isn't already made up and resigned to humanity's ultimate doom. Mine isn't, and I hope yours isn't. Smile[/quote]

Oh, sure. If the right people were in charge of things now, we might yet pull out of a permanent downward decline toward the stone age. But the right people are NOT in charge. The right people don't have the muscle to put themselves in authority. Mankind made a choice, and it went the wrong way. It will continue going the wrong way, until the power grids fail for the last time, until there's no more fuel for tractors, no more fertilizer for farm crops, and we're left with no electric power and only enough food to feed five percent of us. I don't see why your decision about whether to post your links depends on my attitude.

Jerry Abbott

Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:33 am

[quote="Brad_H"]
Well, I'm sorta getting the impression (hopefully false) that you're already absolutely convinced, beyond all possibility of doubt or need for discussion, of mankind's ultimate doom.

If that's the case, you've already ruled out any possibility for discussion before it can even get under way.

Am I wasting my time ? I hope not. I enjoy discussing such things - but not if the person I'm discussing it with has already made up their mind beyond all possible hope of change. Not much fun or enticement in that, from my end. Smile[/quote]

I am not beyond being persuaded. I never am. But in order to persuade me, your evidence will have to be good enough to show me why what I think I see is wrong. It might turn out that I will not be convinced that you are right, after I've seen your evidence, but in that case I'll tell you why your evidence failed to convince me.

Jerry Abbott

Brad provided me with this link.

http://www.charlespellegrino.com/project_valkyrie.htm

Then another poster, Pirate Queen ChoChiyo, jumped in to argue with me...

Jerry Abbott

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 10:14 am

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]No offense, Jenab, but my comment to this is "piffle." From my earliest youth, I was conditioned to believe that I would be a small chunk of radioactive carbon before I was old enough to vote. Or else that the four horsemen of the Apocolypse would ride me down and stomp me before sending me and my disobedient arse to hell. It scared the bejesus out of me until I final learned to say "whatever" to the doomsayers.[/quote]
And once there was a boy who cried wolf. The first two times were hoaxes. The third time, the wolf (Peak Oil) really did show up. But the people of his village had been conditioned by false alarms (Y2K) to regard the boy as a hoaxer.

[quote="Jenab"]A big reason to colonize would be that all hell is about to break loose on Earth: stuff like worldwide famine, global resource wars, food riots, race wars, cannibalism, and in general a pretty bad time. On another planet, you wouldn't have to worry about any of that.[/quote]

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Hell has been loose on earth since earth came into existence. Any student of literature and/or history knows that mankind has been attempting to eradicate itself since the dawn of time, yet, here we still are. I suspect we shall continue to be here until the earth drops into the sun. And, on another planet, if there were no native beings to engage in war, cannibalism, racial violence, or other stupid behavior, we shall certainly bring the darker side of our human nature with us and inflict some if not all of it upon ourselves anyway.[/quote]
Even if humans muddle through after the fossil fuels are gone, they will continue to evolve...not necessarily upward...and will not be recognizable as humans by the time the sun moves off the main sequence in five billion years.

By the way, Earth will cease to be habitable in two billion years...three billion years before the sun runs out of hydrogen to burn. The reason for that is that the sun's total luminosity is increasing at about the rate of 10 percent per billion years. Two billion years from now, the oceans will start to evaporate, which will lead to a runaway greenhouse effect - assuming that one hasn't started from a different cause before then. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, just not as efficient for that purpose as carbon dioxide is. So, about two billion years from now, the Earth will become like Venus and all life which remains stuck here will die.

[quote="Jenab"]The problem is that it's too late. Humanity has spent too many ergs in air conditioners, too many barrels of oil growing food to feed the hungry (and they're still there and still hungry), and not nearly enough investment of terrestrial fossil fuels in gaining access to extraterrestrial energy supplies in anticipation of the depletion of same here on Earth.[/quote]

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]The restless, relentless inventiveness of the human mind will tinker and tinker until new forms of energy are created.[/quote]
That's a basic fallacy of thinking. The human mind has never "created" energy. It has only devised new ways of tapping into natural energy resources... wood, coal, oil, uranium. The problem is that soon there won't be any new and higher resources to tap into. Inventiveness creates ideas, not matter nor energy: for something to be done, both the ideas and the material prerequisites are necessary, and neither can substitute for the other.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Who could have imagined that words could be sent through wires to people on the other side of the world? Who would have imagined that people could chug along the bottom of the sea and not drown? Walk in space? Preserve vegetables in ziplock bags in a freezing environment during the sweltering heat of summer? Mankind is a clever bunch of monkeys. We will kill and hurt each other, but we will also quit doing it occasionally and get on to something more productive, like creating solar generators or finding the cure to AIDS.[/quote]
All of those things depend on a naturally occurring energy resource, and the more people who participate in the benefits of technology, the faster these energy resources are consumed. Until our times, there was always a higher and more copious energy resource to be exploited. Soon, there won't be.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]My point is: It is only too late if we are all dead. And some of us are still alive and kicking.[/quote]
Too late - for what? Fossil fuel depletion will kill about nine billion people in one way or another. Of course, you don't have to be one of them. The situation will be a bit like two people running from a hungry bear. You don't have to outrun the bear, only the other person. If you outlive those who are to die, if you are alive when the world's population is again in balance with the food supply, then you will have escaped from the bear.

[quote="Jenab"]Whether there is a nuclear war or not, humans are nearly finished as a technical species. It is, I repeat, too late to correct the failure to develop resources off-planet. That should have been done starting in 1940 or so, instead of doing anything else.[/quote]
[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Sorry, I just don't believe it. See above. My gifts do not lie in the technological areas; I'm more into philosophy and literature and humanitarianism. But I know enough people whose gifts do lie in the tenchnological arena that I am convinced that not only is off-planet development of resources possible, it is damn near unavoidable.[/quote]
I'd agree that it's damn-near necessary to keeping the technological spark alive. Unfortunately, it will also be impossible. A starving man finds eating necessary, but he won't be eating if he never finds food. He can "invent" with his mind however he likes, but it won't cause food to appear unless it exists in the natural world outside his mind. And likewise for industrial civilization: it will die. Our mental gymnastics won't prevent it from dying.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]"If it can be conceived, it can be achieved." And there is a lot of conception going on in the minds of a lot of truly brilliant people in this world. Will it be in my lifetime? God, I hope so. I'd love to see it, even though I'm too dang old to participate much more than as a spectator--but it will happen. I believe that with as much intensity as I believe that the earth is round, the tide is unstoppable, and my brother is a doofus.[/quote]
I'd like to see such a thing happen, too. But about 2010, you, too, will see why it won't happen, ever. We "fed the hungry" knowing that we could never cure hunger, and by doing so we sacrificed our chance to bring the seed of Earth's life to other worlds. The hopes of all of our world's life - of every species past, modern and future - rode on our species, and we failed them all, we betrayed them all, with our humanistic egalitarianism.

[quote="Jenab"]We did have a chance at a "Star Trek" kind of future; we don't have that chance any longer. We wasted it. Why did we waste it? Stupidity? Not exactly. We succumbed to an error of moral values and ideology, often called "egalitarianism." If one man bakes himself a cake, we figured, then it isn't fair that there are other men who do not have cakes. Cakes must be given them! To be FAIR! The minions of fairness, frothing at the mouth, took over our public institutions for making collective decisions - governments, that is - and started making public policy conform to their distorted and exaggerated sentiments, and burdening more normal folks with the costs of subsidizing their programs.[/quote]
[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]So, is your position here that the poor should be left to starve so resources can be better directed to the technological development of the priviledged classes? I'm not sure what you're saying. [/quote]
That is almost correct. The least of mankind should have been left to nature's usual means of handling the least of any species: an early death by starvation or by predator. If we undertook to carry them along for reasons of charitable sentiment, we should at least have ensured that they bred no more of their weak stock.

For someone to gain a skill, two things are needed: the opportunity to learn, and the physical/mental potential to do the learning. There is such a thing as opportunities badly targeted, or offered to those who have not a required minimum level of potential. Such poorly targeted opportunities cost as much, if not more, than those offered to people with more aptitude, and the resources spent on trying to teach, say, a monkey to read are utterly wasted. Those resources might as well have been destroyed by fire for all the good they did anybody. Not only that, you may have given the monkey cause for resentment or anxiety or feelings of inadequacy that could have been spared him had we simply left the monkey chattering happily in the jungle.

[continued...]

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]I don't see any connection between making sure all people are fed and clothed and the development of a society which can support a "Federation of Planets" way of life. In fact, I think the ensuring of all people's basic needs being met is unavoidably essential to produce the philosophical mindset that would promote the "Star Trek Federation of Planets" ideals. Otherwise, we would instead have the Dark Empire of Star Wars with a very minimal number of powerful overlords hording the power for themselves and using everyone else as slaves or cannon fodder.[/quote]
Okay, here's the explanation. We have never had infinite resources. We did have large resources, but we have largely used them up, and we are approaching the end of terrestrial deposits of energy resources. With luck, we can continue on as we are for 20 more years...but that's it, and I doubt that we will carry on for even that much longer.

Since our good times have lasted for about four generations, people in general have come to believe that this is a normal situation. But it isn't. Fossil fuels are a one-time resource. When they're gone, the good times will go with them. The human population has numbers that strain even our high-tech mechanized agriculture to provide food for them all. When there is no more fuel for tractors and harvesters, when there are no more nitrate fertilizers, food production on Earth will drop to 10% of what it is now, as hand-tool farming tries and fails to cope with demand.

When you feed the incapable hungry, you only get larger numbers of incapable hungry people to feed a generation later. Trying to end hunger by feeding the hungry is like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. It doesn't work: the fire just gets bigger.

Wisdom should have shown us this, but sentiment prevailed, instead. The energy needed for gaining a permanent toe-hold in space, with sustained technology and access to extraterrestrial energy resources, was wasted on feeding the hungry and on providing unnecessary luxuries to spoiled rich people. The balance of political power shifted in favor of this status quo, and never in all the 80 years of heavy fossil fuel exploitation has it strayed from these species-lethal sentiments.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"](NOTE: I'm not trying to provoke any fights. I'm just saying that there are different philosophical ways of looking at this issue.)[/quote]
I'm not trying to start a fight, either. But although there may be different philosophies, the mathematics of the situation we are in has only one answer. Mankind is nearly finished as a technical species.

[quote="Jenab"]The masses of humans should have remained at the feudal level of culture. The use of fossil fuels should have been reserved to those who used them to help along the powers of mankind to acquire all of the resources of the solar system, with the idea that then it would be possible to consider interstellar voyages to seed the rest of the galaxy with the life that originated on Earth. To our species fell the responsibility for ensuring that this mission did not fail...but fail we did. Nature's organizing principles did three billion years of labor here in vain. On some other planet, at some other time, nature will repeat her work, perhaps with a better result. But it won't be us.[/quote]
[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]The fallacy of this assertion is that noblisse oblige, while a lovely concept so often fails in practice. The illuminati, rather than working for the glory of all mankind, so often tumbles into the abyss of greed and self-agrandizement. Instead of seeding the galaxy with life originating from earth, I have the feeling that the priviledged class would either stay on earth growing fat while the peasant class toiled through their short, miserable lives without being educated, properly fed, or given the opportunity to develop the talents and brilliance that most probably would exist among them.[/quote]
I definitely agree with you that the "Illuminati" (an actual organized group, but not the one from which rises the fundamental problem) contains the sort of people who would rather rule in a dungpile than serve in someone else's palace. Don't confuse what I mean: I don't mean that the highest among humans in a biological-spiritual sense are the currently highest in the economic sense. The human "rats" have indeed taken over the grain silo and are selling the broken bits that they don't want to the rest of us.

There are, among humans, those whose eye prefers the horizon to the ground under their feet, who would rather explore than exploit, who are able to look above the present struggle to see the glories that might come to Earth one day, if only we do our part correctly. Those are the "highest" in the spiritual sense: the Nietzsches who desire the coming of a better kind of man, who desire that the least of men be replaced by the equals of our present best and that our present best should be replaced by those who are even better.

These are the people who serve the life force, nature's organizing principles as manifested in living things, by striving to better the quality of life - not the standard of living, but the intrinsic biological quality of the living creature.

On the other hand, there are those who care mostly for pleasures, conveniences, and status. Their ambition is to get these things. Being strongly motivated, they often succeed.

Civilizations come into being when hardy and industrious people are able to build them up from the wilderness. They decline and die after the people have become soft from the comfort and ease that civilizations give them. We will go into the apocalyptic post-oil era with two disadvantages: we are too numerous to do without fossil fuel powered agriculture and we are mostly too soft and weak to endure the rigors of a pioneer life.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]The very bad thing about the feudal system is that it is a kind of caste system. Many brilliant minds would be wasted herding pigs when they could have found the cure for AIDS or developed an alternative energy source using blades of grass and sunlight. Many of the brightest people I know are from the serf class originally. And many of the laziest, most self-absorbed, and un-ecologically minded folks I know are from the "Have's" and "Have-more's" class. The feudal system, in my humble opinion: Sucks.[/quote]
When I said that the masses of mankind should have remained at the feudal system, I meant that the preponderance of lesser people - the inferior and the mediocrities - should have been peasants without access to fossil fuel powered machines. And I meant that the "nobles" of the social structure would be the biological-spiritual highest of people, not the greedy money-grubbers that occupy the top of the hierarchy today.

Most of the qualities that make people either better or worse are heritable: carried in our genes and passed to children thereby. In the shuffle, some children born to mediocre parents turn out to be smarter than either of them. And occasionally a mental dud will be born to above-average parents. But these are exceptions. Neither life, nor anything else, is characterized by the exceptions. As a rule, like begets like. Usually, you'll find that smart children are born to smart parents, strong children to strong parents, dextrous children to dextrous parents, talented children to talented parents, and so on.

Public policy would do well to create a caste system - not just any caste system but, rather, the right one - and target opportunity first and foremost to the highest caste. Whatever they can't use may be permitted to trickle down to the lower castes, so long as it doesn't spoil them with inflated expectations for the future.

(I deleted a few comments of small importance where in Chochiyo compared me with people who criticized Galileo and Edison, who turned out to be right in the end. I replied that she had the comparison backwards.)

Jerry Abbott

I don't think it's too late to colonize other worlds, Mr. Jenab. Certainly it's a possibility that we're all going to die in a nigger hell, but maybe not. I'm a bit more optimistic, you see, in that I never discount the possibility of a major scientific/technological breakthrough, something coming at us from completely out in left field. For instance, the recent space flights performed by a small private company show there is hope yet for whites to establish themselves offworld - the best choice at this point being Mars. And America still has the financial power and the technological know-how to easily colonize the moon, were it not for the dead weight of 35 million groids and 35 million beaners around our collective neck. If we can just take back our country, and rid ourselves of these dark-skinned leeches, the stars can yet be ours. In fact, I'm so confident, I've already designed my starship to make the voyage...









http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/my_ships/mauretania.jpg

Another poster, Echus Cthulhu Mythos, joined the discussion. We discussed the possibility of nuclear energy replacing fossil fuels and saving civilization.

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 6:17 pm

[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]Yo Jenab. Do you seriously, in all honestly believe that Humanity is doomed, through and through, completely and utterly?[/quote]
Not exactly. Something like 95% of the people living in 2050 will die from hunger, disease, war, or some combination of those. About that year, the world's human population will reach a maximum of 8 to 11 billion. The human population of the world in 2100 will be under one billion, and perhaps less than a half billion.

That doesn't mean that humanity is doomed. It does mean that humanity is heading for sharply reduced circumstances. And it means one thing more.

If the mission of our world was to grow life and then pass its seed on to other fertile worlds, then that mission has failed. Forever.

[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]Because if you do indeed convince us, then what you say will occur.[/quote]
The end of industrial civilization will occur whether I convince you or not, since the cause is the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels, which does not depend on anybody's opinions.

[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]Why don't you spend your energies doing something positive like say promoting the neccessity of nuclear energies because fossil fuels suck, or join the Mars Society and help them to put people on the Red Planet. Because I am sure that deep down, you don't really want too embrace our doom as a technical species.[/quote]
Right. I don't want humans to lose technology. I don't promote this as a crusade; I merely assert it as a prediction.

Nuclear energy would have postponed the energy peak and kept civilization going a while, but not for long. The world only has so much high grade uranium ores, and we'd run out of them. The combined military stockpiles of U235 and Pl239 would support global civilization for only about 16 years.

If the social program I mentioned - feudalism for the masses, technology reserved for those inclined to pursue the development of independent human settlements away from Earth, with perhaps an economy based on interplanetary commerce (as, I think, it'd have had to be, since on no single world in our solar system other than Earth do all the material necessities for life exist) - then civilization could have held out on Earth for far longer. And when the end came, thousands of years from now, it would come gently. And the spark of technology would continue thereafter, held by those people who left Earth, who could continue the effort of carrying both technology and Earth's life to the stars.

Unfortunately, there came a parade of ideologies: Marxism, capitalism, democratic egalitarianism... that were all hell-bent, in one way or another, on expanding the benefits of technology to the masses. Why didn't someone see where they were all heading? Perhaps someone did, but didn't care. An important point to remember is that the human lifespan is brief compared with the march of events in history. Capitalism, for example, is like a cancer: it grows like mad, kills a world, and dies. But while it can grow, a lot of speculators can get rich, and so they do. Perhaps the world will die as the end result of speculation, but it won't happen in the lifetimes of most of the speculators, so the game goes on.

[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]I believe you have written us off too early. There have been vast numbers of people who have proclaimed environmental destruction by X-year in recent times. What makes you correct as opposed to them?[/quote]
I suppose that I could say, "I'm smarter than they are," but you probably wouldn't believe me. In fact, though, fossil fuel depletion predictions have been around for a long time. They began being circulated episodically in the 1960's or thereabout.

One fellow, M. King Hubbert, correctly predicted that the per capita peak in world oil production would come in 1979 - it has declined ever since. Now the absolute peak, the year in which is delivered to market the greatest number of barrels of oil equivalent - is upon us. From here on, supply will shrink in relation to demand.

The problem with respect to public awareness of the accuracy of the warnings seems to be that the public has a short attention span. The five-day weather forecast, they can deal with. A prediction of a disaster 60 years away, no. Forty years away, no. Twenty years away, still no. Next year - certainly! But when the Crash is only a year away, they will indignantly ask why they were not informed sooner!

[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]The will to survive is a powerful force. Just look at ancient Sparta who took on the might of King Xerxes' horde of 250,000 troops with a mere 300.[/quote]
Well, if the 250,000 must come through a narrow pass that only a few can get into at a time, it might not be so unreasonable to expect the 300 to win. That's the sort of leverage good tactics is suppose to get for your army. But the will to survive saves few who are in so hopeless a position as ours. There are no clever tactical moves that will violate the fundamental laws of nature, in particular the conservation of energy.

Jerry Abbott

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 6:54 pm

[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]Um, whoa, your good at debating. :mrgreen:

I can't really rebutt anything you say, except for the stuff about nuclear energy. Yeah, there is about 20-odd years of uranium left, but the use of thorium and breeder reactor technology would be able to sustain fuel supplies for a time period estimated between 100,000 up to 1 million years.

Personally, I agree that fossil fuels suck arse and we have become too dependant on them and have created freaking oil empires that would rather kill the world than give up their profits. But I also believe when the sh!t hits the fan like it is going to, society will bite the bullet and change to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy can - and will - be the energy source which powers us in the future. That is our only option aside from our downfall as a technical species which you have described.[/quote]
With breeder reactors turning U238 to fissile plutonium, we might be good for 200-300 years. In principle, that only delays the crunch, but it would permit us to do what our ancestors did: ignore the problem and let our descendants feel the pain.

But there's another bottleneck with nuclear power, and that's the rate at which the reactors that now exist and the reactors that can conceivably be built before the hard times hit us, can produce power. It's too late to begin building fast liquid metal breeder reactors now. We couldn't build enough of them in time.

The problems with fission energy never were satisfactorally solved. Nuclear power plants still have, despite assurances from the industry, a poor risk profile when you consider how much territory one Chernobyl can irradiate. Then there's the problem of disposing of radioactive waste.

And there's one other thing. Our civilization uses many petroleum by-products other than energy. There's plastics and fertilizer, to name an important two. You can't make these things from uranium.

Jerry Abbott

Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 7:40 pm

[quote="Jenab"]With breeder reactors turning U238 to fissile plutonium, we might be good for 200-300 years. In principle, that only delays the crunch, but it would permit us to do what our ancestors did: ignore the problem and let our descendants feel the pain. [/quote]
[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]So because we made the wrong decision 50 or so years ago, even given an extra 200 - 300 years, we are still doomed?[/quote]
The basic problem is using energy resources at a rate faster than energy resources are renewed. Any way of living that does that is heading for trouble sooner or later. It's a "when," not an "if."

[quote="Jenab"]The problems with fission energy never were satisfactorally solved. Nuclear power plants still have, despite assurances from the industry, a poor risk profile when you consider how much territory one Chernobyl can irradiate. Then there's the problem of disposing of radioactive waste. [/quote]
[quote="Echus Cthulhu Mythos"]Chernobyl was one-off. It was a poorly designed reactor... That would be impossible to recreate now as all reactors have containment domes and they are designed so that the reactors have safety features within the physics of the reaction which cannot be turned off.... [/quote]
If the correct energy policy been followed, we could have ironed out all the bugs on the moon where a Chernobyl would have hurt few or none, and meanwhile dumping the waste in a large crater or trench reserved for such. Given time, I think that nuclear fission could become a safe source of energy; however, it is time that we no longer have.

[quote="Jenab"]Then there's the problem of disposing of radioactive waste[/quote]
I read the first of your links. It may be that a satisfactory solution to the waste disposal problem has been found. It's unfortunate that it wasn't found sooner.

Jerry Abbott

Having read the webpage he linked me to, I returned to ask Brad_H some questions in regard to the Valkyrie rocket.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:15 am

Brad, I read the thread on Valkyrie starships, and I've some comments.

First, how do you generate the necessary quantities of anti-hydrogen?

Second, how do you come up with the muons for the reaction mass? Is it a byproduct of the matter/antimatter reaction?

Muons are charged, so you can probably direct them with a magnetic field, but...

Third, how is directing a stream of muons against a sail to propel a starship different from shooting cannons astern from the bow of a ship and having somebody in the stern catch the cannon balls? It seems that the reaction forward would be canceled by the reaction backward, in both cases.

Come to think of it, the reason hydrogen is used AS reaction mass in nuclear powered rockets is that its lightness give it an advantage in being accelerated from a powerplant at operating temperature: more kinetic energy per ounce of reaction mass results from the jet. But if we're talking about a matter-antimatter production of energy for the powerplant, it does not seem to be advantageous to choose hydrogen and antihydrogen. Something with a higher melting temperature would reduce the cryogenic demand (and probably the bulk, too). All you'd have to do is keep it ionized so you could isolate it from matter until it is used.

Jerry Abbott

Rather than answer my questions about the Valkyrie rocket, Brad_H posted to contend that the more limited energy resources available after fossil fuel depletion would suffice to keep civilization going and enable spaceflight.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:19 pm

[quote="Brad_H"]However, I still disagree with your pronouncement of ultimate doom. ... Even without fossil fuels, we can still generate enough power for us to retain some industrial & city like existences ... albeit at a greatly reduced level.[/quote]
That's correct. Whoever is alive after all the dying is history may use the remaining sources of electric power - hydroelectric, for example - to run a few cities. And, if some of that power is diverted, hydrogen fuel cells can be prepared for market. And rockets can be made and launched...or can they?

A rocket, or even a fuel cell, is more than the fuel in it. You need steel, and getting steel from your reduced energy supply will involve taking energy from consumers who will pay for it.

Remember, hydrogen fuel cells are net energy losers. It costs two or three times as much energy to prepare the fuel for a cell than you can extract by burning that fuel. And that doesn't count the cost of making the cell housing, the pipes and the fittings, etc. Fossil fuels have been so abundant that we've gotten into the bad habit of sloppy accounting.

Now, as for spaceships and trips to Saturn. Even while fossil fuels were abundant, there was much political noise about "tossing money away into space when there are people hungry here on Earth." Do you suppose that the per capita decibel level will drop when the energy budget is much tighter? I doubt that it will. Politics will be even more heavily against space exploration then than it ever was before.

[quote="Brad_H"]There are massive untapped sources of such power all across the world ... we just havent had to rely on them because fossil fuels, until now, have been plentiful and cheap. Such things will need to be reassessed when that changes.[/quote]
The problem with each of those "massive untapped sources" is the lack of a means of tapping them. More than enough sunlight falls on Earth to replace all use of fossil fuels. There's just the little difficulty that a solar energy collector with a surface area equal to Earth's cross section does not exist and cannot be built. And the same difficulty troubles every alternative you have proposed.

[quote="Brad_H"]The space program would not be forever deceased, even in your grim picture. :)[/quote]
I hope that you are right. But I don't believe that you are.

Jerry Abbott

Interwoven with the above posts was a discussion of Jewish "Holocaust" claims in WW2. That discussion arose because Brad_H made assertions that were either based on doubtful implicit assumptions or contrary to fact. These posts were removed from the thread and put into a separate thread in a special "Soapbox" area, which is reserved for off-topic discussions, with "looser" rules. Supposedly.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:45 am

[quote="Brad_H"]
The space program would not be forever deceased, even in your grim picture. Smile[/quote]
I'll come back to this later.

[quote="Brad_H"]
p.s. Be careful about extoling the virtues of neitzcheism (sp?) & eugenics - although there is some truth in what you say on that topic, remember that humanity has already fought a world war bcause someone tried to stake out the turf of genetic superiority and practice natural selection & extermination to further it. Such paths are mined with great ethical peril.[/quote]
And who is saying that this "somebody" (Hitler) did what his enemies say he did, that he believed what his enemies say he believed, or that he was wrong about judging his group superior in the ways that mattered to him?

Maybe his enemies are lying. The victors write the history books, but what they say isn't necessarily the truth.

National Socialism was crushed by a war in which, except for minor assistance from Italy, it stood alone against most of the industralized world. Considering what they had to work with, the Germans put up an amazing fight - which should suggest, despite their eventual loss, that they were top-notch stuff.

Nobody has ever shown that the economics and values espoused by National Socialism were unwise. The war only proved that there were very entrenched establishments that strongly disapproved of National Socialism's economics and values.

But think about these things:

1. Nature improves species by differentiation and competition. Not by the happy meltingpot method preferred by egalitarians.

2. Germany's economy did soar, before the war, while the industrialized countries on the Gold Standard langished in the Great Depression. The countries with the central banks in them needed war to overcome the Depression. Germany did not need war for that purpose.

3. Germany went to war because of a prior hostile action, namely an international boycott, that prevented it from selling its industrial surplus in exchange for foodstuffs to make up its agricultural deficit. The point to lebensraum was to acquire farmland to feed Germans. And Germany was reluctant to take this step: so reluctant that it endured six years of the boycott before invading Poland.

Hitler's purpose was to unify and revitalize the German people. He wasn't trying to conquer the world. His plans were such that war, when it came, was most inconvenient for him; however, it was considered the lesser evil because the apparent alternative was to watch the German nation slowly starve.

Jerry Abbott

[quote="Brad_H"]I'm almost afraid to ask this question, because I've been enjoying the high level of the discussions we've all been sharing thus far, and I'd hate to see things fall apart after getting off to such an interesting start. HOWEVER, since I'm a child of WWII parents and WWI grandparents (both sides), I'm obliged to proceed ...

Please clarify 2 points for me:

1) Are you in the same philosophical camp of those post-modern Hitler apologists who deny the existence of the Holocaust ?[/quote]
I notice the slant of the question, and I will attempt to compensate for it in my answer.

I'm not certain why a question about Germany's motive in going to war should have provoked an examination of my opinions about the (alleged) Holocaust. There is some sort of knee-jerk reaction, psychological conditioning, that causes every question of WW2 history to lead rather directly to a probing of the questioner's belief in the Holocaust. Like Obi Wan said, "Search your feelings," and see whether you can find the source of that conditioning.

I am among those who are aware that there were no Jews mass executed in Nazi Gas Chambers. This is a popular hoax, which for years has received official recognition and heavy subsidies from governments, and which has a massive public relations drive for the maintenance of belief. What the Holocaust is not, however, is truth. It is fiction, begun as Allied war agit-propaganda and continued as a cash cow by the Zionists.

The cited death toll in the alleged Holocaust has steadily shrunk in the details - specifics of when, where, how and who. For example, Auschwitz was once said to have been where about four million Jews were gassed. A few objections by knowledgeable scholars caused the Zionists to grudgingly revise that total downwardly by almost three million. Yet the total of casualties claimed - that mythical Six Million - never wavered.

One of the best refutations of the theory that Auschwitz was a "death camp" was made by a Jew named David Cole. Cole's excellent videotaped documentary was made at Auschwitz as he was conducted among the alleged "gas chamber" buildings on the grounds there. It records a number of discrepancies and improbabilities that the staff there paper over because it is against the law to express doubt about the Holocaust throughout much of Europe. David Cole recanted after receiving vicious threats, probably alluding to his assassination, by the Jewish Defense League. As it was with Galileo, his earlier work is sound; his recantation is false.

Examinations of the Auschwitz camp in the 1990s by a forensics team from Canada and the United States took samples of brick from the alleged gas chambers and had them analyzed at Alpha Analytic Labs in Ashland, Massechusetts. No significant contamination by cyanide compounds was found. Another examination of the stolen samples was made in Krakow, where extremely tiny amounts of cyanide compounds were found, however only at levels commensurate with those also found in buildings that nobody believes was ever used as a gas chamber, such as the guards' barracks.

The "Holocaust" is a hoax, all right. But it is a gigantic hoax, with bogus textbooks written about it, and with huge "memorials" built to commemorate it, and with the overt collaboration of public figures, and with endless propaganda in the media all swearing to its factuality.

There are known frauds among the photographical evidence offered by the Zionists as "proof" of their claims: altered photographs, photographs with misleading captions, drawings misrepresented as photographs. Some of the photographs allegedly showing dead Jews at a "death camp" actually show dead Germans after the firebombing of Dresden. Some of the photographs do show dead Jews, but they died of typhus primarily and of malnutrition secondarily. Note that the corpses shown are usually emaciated - gassing doesn't take the pounds off like that.

[quote="Brad_H"]
2) Is the post fossil-fuel apocalypse you're portraying nothing more than a backhanded way of re-peating Hitler's dreams of having a "master race" take over and rule the world ? In other words, is this apocalypse something you're looking forward to with wishful genetic-selection fervor, or is it something you're interested in doing your best to help humanity avert ?[/quote]

No, I don't write about the post-industrial age in order to fantasize about the coming of a higher breed of men. It would be very good if such were to occur, but my writing on the "apocalypse" is meant to alert people and motivate them to prepare for it. There is no way to avert the end of industrial civilization. There is no way to save the great preponderance of mankind. And, since most must die, then who should live becomes a matter of some relevance.

[quote="Brad_H"]This is touchy material - I hope that everyone is able to stay cool and level headed.[/quote]

There's no more reason for anyone to be a hothead about Holocaust questions than about the historical deeds of Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. I said "no more reason." But more hotheads do, indeed, usually appear when the specific question on the table are the Jewish claims about Jewish deaths in World War 2. The reason for the greater emotionalism in this particular case is, again, conditioning. Examine yourself; find the source of the conditioning. Try to identify it and then exclude it as a motivator for your thoughts and actions.

Jerry Abbott

Brad_H then posted a stentorious "MODERATION ALERT" in which he said he was obliged to re-locate the thread to The Soapbox. His reason was that Dr. Pellegrino, whose thread it had been in, would be offended if he saw the Holohoax being questioned there. Why would he be offended? Brad_H said that it just naturally followed from Dr. Pellegrino's dad having been a WW2 vet.

ChoChiyo weighed in again to indicate how offended she was.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:24 pm

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Hmm. I wonder whose charred bodies my great uncle Charlie photographed for the army then? Those hundreds and hundreds of charred bodies.

I'm done with this conversation.[/quote]
Yes, there were "charred bodies," and some of the were undoubtedly Jewish.

The Nazis cremated the bodies of typhus victims in an effort to control the disease. That's also why the Nazis used Zyklon B: to kill the rats and lice that carried typhus.

Near the end of the war, the Allies bombed the supply lines so that the Germans could no longer bring medicine or food to the camps. That is why some of the prisoners starved, and it is why typhus spiraled out of control. The crematoria were swamped by the death toll, and it is possible that the SS tried to cremate a few corpses out-of-doors.

Anyway, your Uncle Charlie didn't find any gas chambers, no matter what he thinks he saw.

Jerry Abbott

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:41 pm

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Well, my great uncle Charlie Smith (who just passed away last summer at the age of 98, lucid and brilliant until his last second of life) was a surveyor for the army in WWII, and he himself saw piles of charred bodies left behind by the Nazi's.[/quote]
Undoubtedly, he did. After the Allied bombings late in the war, it was hard for the Germans to resupply their labor camps. Shortages of medicine caused an epidemic of typhus, and many of the prisoners (as well as some of the guards) died as the result. To control the disease, the Nazis were cremating bodies, but the epidemic killed people faster than the krema could handle them. So as a desperation measure, some of the SS tried to burn bodies out-of-doors, often without success. Bodies, being mostly water, burn even less readily than green firewood.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]He saw evidence first hand of the torture and slaughter of hundreds if not thousands of people innocent of any "crime" except the crime of being Jewish or gypsy or black or a "sympathizer."[/quote]
There's quite a bit of excessive claim here. First, your Uncle Charlie didn't see any torture or slaughter. He saw corpses. He may have been told lies about what had killed them. It is helpful for a government to make its soldiers hate the enemy, and our government isn't above using falsehood to achieve that end. The Nazi Homicidal Gas Chambers are exactly where Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction are. Nowhere.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]If anything, Hitler's enemies are guilty of UNDERemphasizing that fact that Hitler was a sick, twisted, evil little man, even if he did build good bridges and good railroads.[/quote]
Nope. Hitler was a man who devoutly wanted to restore Germany to the German people and to restore the German people to greatness, which they fell from after WW1, and which they were prevented from regaining by the Treaty of Versaillais. Hitler saw that Jews owned the media and that they were using those media to popularize anti-German culture. Hitler took those media away and made their presentations conform to the standard of German culture again. Hitler refused loans from Jewish bankers in order that Germany would remain free of obligations of the sort that had ensnared the governments of England and America. Hitler was very wary of communism, both the Soviet Union and the "Red" agitators who were fomenting revolution throughout much of Europe. He knew that many, perhaps most, of those agitators were Jews.

Hitler wasn't a "twisted, evil little man." Any belief in that implausible charicature indicates a lapse of rational thought.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]There is film of hideous experiments on HUMAN BEINGS from the Nazi's own data collections. I have seen some of it on the History Channel, and it is sickening. There are stacks of data on medical experiments performed without anesthesia on children. Children. If that's the master race, then I say, give the world to the monkeys.[/quote]
The History Channel is owned by A&E Television Networks. A&E is a joint venture of Hearst Corporation, ABC, and NBC. ABC and NBC have always been controlled by Jews. The Jew with the ultimate control over ABC at first was Leonard Goldenson, but since 1995 has been Michael Eisner, the Chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company. The Jew who began in charge of NBC was David Sarnoff, then it was his son Robert.

The essential Jewishness of Jewish television has never changed, though the specific Jews involved have moved around a bit. NBC is a good example of that moving around: its executives recently reshuffled among the key positions. Andrew Lack, who had been chief of the network's news division, ascended to become its president and COO. Neal Shapiro, who had been producing Dateline NBC, moved into Lack's old job. Jeff Zucker, who had been producing the Today show, was promoted to NBC entertainment president (a job that apparently was created for him), and Jonathan Wald moved into Zucker's old spot after shoving aside a lonely gentile named Michael Bass, who had been filling in for Zucker. Jews, Jews, Jews... and it's that way in every TV network. And it was that way in Germany, too, right before Hitler slapped their mischievious hands and took their toys away from them.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Once again, it depends upon the quality of those operating the system. Perhaps a pure form of socialism would be a great thing. But there is too much greed and lust for power in this sad world to allow such a pure form to exist. Cancer cells, by definition, are quite vigorous and powerful and can quickly overwhelm the "inferior" noncancerous cells. Do you want cancer cells taking over your body because they are vigorous and hardy?[/quote]
Certainly not. The quality of a cell, or a person, isn't a function of his energy level alone: his aims matter also. However, if the aims are good, the energy level can be a consideration.

Oddly, among the greatest of the anti-Marxists was a Jewess named Ayn Rand (a.k.a. Alice Rosenbaum). She explained why Marxism always fails from a combination of tragedy-in-the-commons (at the grassroots level of society) and economic treason in which The State, having stolen property from each in the name of all, becomes nothing more than a mean, mean manager of everybody's lives.

But whereas Rand did very well teaching us why Marxist socialism does not work, she ignored the biological factor and tried to impute Marxism's weaknesses to forms of socialism that are relatively untroubled by them. National Socialism is one such form.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Pure bred animals are often, eventually, bred into unhealthiness and unsturdiness by excessive inbreeding. Note the rampant hip displacia in large pure bred dogs and the nasal/breathing problems common amongst bull dogs and other breeds bred for the "pug" nose. There has also been some evidence of psychological instability in some dogs bred for "superiority."[/quote]
Ah, your mistake. Those dogs were bred for show, not for superiority. Inbreeding does cause bad recessives to be reinforced at a frequency much higher than is the rate with cross-breeding. But the whole point to eugenics is to eliminate poor genes, and this is done by combining inbreeding with culling. Whenever a defective child is born, if the defect is serious, the child is barred from reproduction. If those dogs you mentioned had been culled for physical defects, the rampant hip displacia would have been eliminated long ago.

[continued...]

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]The gene pool must be diverse or bad stuff happens--like the European royalty's hemophilia situation.[/quote]
Ditto for hemophilia. Inbreeding by royalty did not proceed with eugenic health in mind. It merely sought to assure that the same family remained in charge of the nation in perpetuity, and the genetic health of that family was a secondary consideration, if it was a consideration at all. Eugenics would have culled the hemophiliacs, preventing them from breeding more hemophiliacs, and leaving only non-hemophiliacs among the little princes and princesses.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Also, the mentally retarded and physically handicapped were regarded as worthless by the Nazi's. This would have flung Stephen Hawking into the burn pile. Not to mention dozens of other wheelchair bound individuals who make a wonderful contribution to the world.[/quote]
Stephen Hawking is an exception, and nothing whatever is characterized by exceptions. Furthermore, brilliant as he is, his insights were those for which the time had come. Black holes, already predicted by relativity, were fair game for quantum mechanics to estimate what happens as vacuum fluxes occur near event horizons. Somebody would have postulated Hawking radiation, sooner or later. Hawking was the one who first did so. One Hawking does not compensate for millions of Jukes.

[quote="William G. Simpson in Which Way Western Man"]The financial burden imposed upon the well-constituted by the care of the feeble-minded is hard to estimate exactly, although it is “known to be enormous”—far more enormous than the citizens of any State have as yet been willing to shoulder. “To the cost of maintaining the hospitals must be added the loss of the earnings of the inmates.” Huntington stated that in 1924 all the states of the Union put 9 percent of their total budgets into the care of mental defectives, New York State 23 percent. But he adds that “all the states ought to have spent five or six times as much if the mentally defective were to be cared for in such a way as to eliminate the danger that hereditary mental defects would be transmitted to posterity.” It was stated in Time for June 17, 1940 that “Detroit spends $287 a year to educate a subnormal child, $58 for a smart one” (which, by the way, hardly looks like our much-vaunted “equality of opportunity”). On a single feeble-minded family, the notorious Jukes, New York State is known to have “spent upwards of $2,000,000.” Yet in 1915, out of 1200 or more Jukes still living in the State, only three were in institutions. “The original Max Juke or his wife or his two sons and three sisters with whom they consorted, could have been sterilized for about $250, or segregated for life at a cost of $25,000.” Instead, they were left at large to perpetuate their kind, and to pile up their record of theft, murder, rape and disease, at a cost to society beyond all calculation. I allow that this is a very extreme case, but there are only too many others that more or less resemble it.[/quote]
[quote="Jenab"]Hitler's purpose was to unify and revitalize the German people. He wasn't trying to conquer the world. His plans were such that war, when it came, was most inconvenient for him; however, it was considered the lesser evil because the apparent alternative was to watch the German nation slowly starve.[/quote]
[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]Sorry, but that's just wrong. From the beginning, Hitler's "master race" horse manure had one purpose: world domination. A "master race" and a bunch of "slave races." Perhaps the war came at an inconvenient time for him, but boo hoo. It merely prevented him from murdering countless other human beings.[/quote]
I believe that you are the one who has been misled. Hitler wanted to unite the Germans and restore them to greatness. He wasn't after world domination, though it is true that he believed his own race to be specially gifted. Hitler knew that he had no means with which to conquer, say, China, which he could have at least gotten to overland. He certainly had no means to challenge the United States.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]He picked out a scapegoat, namely the Jews, who already had a bunch of propaganda-crap thrust on them from ignorant fools in terms of being "Christ killers," and because their values were of a strong, economic-minded, education-valuing, family-oriented middle class nature, they were thinkers, and thus, dangerous. Therefore, an evil twisted (though possibly brilliant) mind could do only one thing. Kill them all. Or as many of them as possible.[/quote]
Again, you've been spouting Zionist propaganda uncritically. The Jews did historically have something to do with the murder of Jesus of Nazareth. In Judea, Jesus stood accused of sedition and was examined by the local Roman governor who found no fault with him. But Jesus' accusers were the Jewish secular and priestly leadership, who anticipated Pontius Pilate's "not guilty" verdict and staged a "demonstration" to make Pilate change his mind. A mass of Jewish rabble was being barely held in check by the Pharisees, who warned Pilate that they could not be responsible for what "the people" did if Jesus were not executed. If a large riot broke out, the local Roman garrison might be unable to put it down and require assistance from the Emporer, who, after the fighting, might regard Pilate as unsuited for his office. So Jesus was sent to die, even though the governor believed he was innocent of the charges against him.

Apart from the accuracy of the Christ-killer charges, you are wrong about the relation of the Jew to the non-Jewish societies which host them. They are not simply one minority among many: they are the "master" minority, the one that unfailingly gets its hands on the levers of power. They did it in pre-WW2 Germany, and they did it again in the Soviet Union, again in England, again in the USA, and elsewhere.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]His hyperactive, orgasmic, psychotic rantings sucked in the minds of those less prone to think and set them on a hideous course. (My God, he reminds me of TV preachers of the ilk of Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker. ACK.)[/quote]
What is very clear is that you have not so much as understood a single one of his speeches. I have read them in translation - I do not speak German. I have read Mein Kampf, and I'd wager that you haven't. Here's a typical Hitler statement:

"Germany does not ask from other countries what she is not prepared to give in return."

I had this one translated for me.

"...sie entspricht dem Gebot, das deutsche Siedler aus allen Tielen des Altreiches hierher gerufen hat. Die aelteste Ostmark des deutschen Volkes soll von jetzt ab das juengste Bollwerk der deutschen Nation und damit des Reiches werden!"

Meaning: "...they correspond to the command felt by German settlers from all parts of the old Reich that they are here. The oldest frontier of the German people should be from now on the youngest bullwark of the German nation and thus of the German Reich."

Hitler had a talent for projecting his voice when speaking to an audience, and he had practiced mannerisms...as do many other politicians, and preachers, as you might have noticed. In personal conversation, he used a mild tone of voice, usually.

[quote="Pirate Queen ChoChiyo"]I'm sorry, but I know too much about what happened there. My dad's father's family got the hell out of Germany at the beginning of this lunacy (and no, they weren't Jewish. They were just smart enough to see what would come as the result of what Herr Hitler was setting into play.) Any race or individual that can dehumanize any other race or individual to the point of slaughtering them by the thousands is EVIL. And I will stand by that statement, no matter what.[/quote]
I doubt that you know anywhere near as much as you think you do. The slant to all your views: all the Nazis were bad, especially Hitler who was evil incarnate, and all the Jews were both innocent and good, etc. That alone suggests that much of your "knowlege" is pure conditioned bunk.

Jerry Abbott

Here's a post by Brad_H. Notice the tone: he's trying to sound like a cross between a patient magistrate and Buck Rogers in a Tight Spot.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:37 pm

Ok Jerry, I did a little digging around.

Is this your homepage ?

http://www.jabpage.org

Please confirm. Everyone else is encouraged to NOT respond for the moment, until we hear from Jerry one way or the other.

Here is my reply to Brad_H's post, above.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:57 pm

Yes, that is my website. Or, anyway, it is one of them.

Jerry Abbott

Here was Brad_H's immediate reaction.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:00 pm
[MODERATION ALERT]

Kiltannen is not around at the moment, so I'm going to take the liberty of acting in his stead.

JENAB: The IBDoF prides itself on being an equal opportunity website, where all races, creeds, and faiths are welcome ... provided they demonstrate a willingness towards peaceful co-existence. Your website, and the vews you've begun expounding upon in this thread are strongly pro-Hitler & anti-semetic. This is incompatible with the posting guidelines of the IBDoF.

Accordingly, I am applying lockage to this thread.

Please take this as a polite warning to refrain from posting additional pro-nazi/anti-semitic and historical-revisionist propaganda anywhere else in the IBDoF.

- Ye Asst Admin.

A senior moderator, Kiltannen, followed up Brad_H's post with a few comments of his own. He said that he did not agree with Jenab (me), but accepted "the commonly held historical view." He attributed his readiness to believe that view to the fact that his father told him about his experience in WW2, including five years in a German POW camp. Kiltannen did not relate any of his father's experiences there. (I think that if any of those experiences was witnessing a gas chamber execution, he'd have related them in a hurry.)

Kiltannen admitted that his opinions on WW2 are biased.

Kiltannen said that the heretofore loose rules pertaining to discussion content in the open forum for off-topic discussions, namely "The Soapbox," would be tightened with "explicit posting guidelines about certain subjects."

Kiltannen expressed appreciation for certain acts of restraint on my part, including that I did not repeat the link to my website when I quoted from Brad_H's post wherein he did link to my website. He said, "I appreciate that courtesy, and encourage you to participate in other discourse on the IBDoF if you are comfortable doing so without expressing opinions which follow a revisionist history - revisionist from the point of view of commonly accepted history."

The following was lifted off
http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=291
The material in [color="Red"]Red[/color] was added only after I began responding to other people's various assertions in regard to WW2 history.


Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2003 9:33 pm
Post subject: Posting & Debating Guidelines

This is the soapbox.

People WILL get on their high horse here.

Political comments, discussion on religion & almost ANYTHING else are not only allowed - they are encouraged. The purpose pure and simple - is to contain as much OT discussion here as possible. This will help keep the signal to noise ratio in the rest of the board fairly good [I hope].

It should be taken as a given that many people will post an extreme, perhaps even a hyperbolic, viewpoint.

If you think that there is ANY chance that you personally will be sufficiently offended by the comments of SOMEBODY ELSE that it will affect your ability to continue to have discussions with them on the rest of the board - Please Leave the thread alone. NOT THE BOARD AS A WHOLE
But if you must, then leave the Soapbox.

If anybody feels they need to do this, we should respect their choice to do so. We are a virtual community - and some of our opinions WILL differ HUGELY - that means we must have a way of keeping those differences in a place where they can remain civilized.

I WANT the Soapbox to remain open - I want there to be the loosest possible rules in here.

Please let's all make it possible by remembering that part of the purpose of the Soapbox is to intentionally throw into discussion those extreme opinions we may have some interest in exploring.

This freedom of discussion in the Soapbox should not be mistaken for a license to perform personal attacks on other individuals. General rules of courtesy do apply - It is ok to name a general group of people and make a generalised insult, it is NOT ok to name a person and start a personal attack.

I WILL begin to police the soapbox if it becomes an on-going problem for our community.

[color="Red"]A few minor additions to the rules seem in order.

* Racial Slurs & outright discrimination of any kind will be frowned on.
* Encitement to hatred, and promotion of violent tendancies of any kind.
* Historical Revisionism in the most extreme fashion. [The line here will be a tough one - but ALL moderator decisions will be final]
* Promotion of illegal activities. [Distinct from immoral - No Hash Brownie recipees, or such like things]
* XXX material - or even really any R-Rated style material. Lattitude will be shown - but the general intent is to keep the whole board family friendly.[/color]

Kilt

[quote="kiltannen"]This is the soapbox. People WILL get on their high horse here.

Political comments, discussion on religion & almost ANYTHING else are not only allowed - they are encouraged. The purpose pure and simple - is to contain as much OT discussion here as possible. This will help keep the signal to noise ratio in the rest of the board fairly good [I hope].

It should be taken as a given that many people will post an extreme, perhaps even a hyperbolic, viewpoint.

If you think that there is ANY chance that you personally will be sufficiently offended by the comments of SOMEBODY ELSE that it will affect your ability to continue to have discussions with them on the rest of the board - Please Leave the thread alone. NOT THE BOARD AS A WHOLE But if you must, then leave the Soapbox.

If anybody feels they need to do this, we should respect their choice to do so. We are a virtual community - and some of our opinions WILL differ HUGELY - that means we must have a way of keeping those differences in a place where they can remain civilized.

I WANT the Soapbox to remain open - I want there to be the loosest possible rules in here.

Please let's all make it possible by remembering that part of the purpose of the Soapbox is to intentionally throw into discussion those extreme opinions we may have some interest in exploring.

This freedom of discussion in the Soapbox should not be mistaken for a license to perform personal attacks on other individuals. General rules of courtesy do apply - It is ok to name a general group of people and make a generalised insult, it is NOT ok to name a person and start a personal attack.

I WILL begin to police the soapbox if it becomes an on-going problem for our community.

Kilt[/quote]

[quote="Brad_H"][MODERATION ALERT]

Kiltannen is not around at the moment, so I'm going to take the liberty of acting in his stead.

JENAB: The IBDoF prides itself on being an equal opportunity website, where all races, creeds, and faiths are welcome ... provided they demonstrate a willingness towards peaceful co-existence. Your website, and the vews you've begun expounding upon in this thread are strongly pro-Hitler & anti-semetic. This is incompatible with the posting guidelines of the IBDoF.

Accordingly, I am applying lockage to this thread.

Please take this as a polite warning to refrain from posting additional pro-nazi/anti-semitic and historical-revisionist propaganda anywhere else in the IBDoF.

- Ye Asst Admin.[/quote]
Thread URL:
http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=501&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0

In a thread originally started to ask for opinions regarding the exploration and colonization of space, I posted to express doubt that any such colonization would ever take place, due to fossil fuel depletion, a problem that I believe will preclude those human endeavors. I set the blame for the reckless over-use of fossil fuels on the egalitarian ideology and suggested how those fuels could have been used in such a way to avoid an apocalyptic end of the industrial age, and a massive die-off of mankind.

Subsequently, in reply to a post by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo I used some ideas based on Nietzschean philosophy and my understanding of biological heredity to show that there is such a thing as opportunity badly targeted, entailing a waste of the resources. I again tried to explain how fossil fuel depletion would - as I still think - prevent humans from colonizing other worlds and why our species should have used fossil fuels from the beginning with the primary aim of securing a permanent footing in space which could thereafter function without recourse to trade with Earth. I said that we wasted much of our opportunity to do that by "feeding the hungry" out of humanitarian, egalitarian sentiment.

After that, in a reply to Echus Cthulhu Mythos, I described how serious I believed the die-off was going to be and gave a rough timeframe for it. I again asserted my opinion that humans were nearly finished as a technical species. I said that it wasn't my wish that this occur, but rather a prediction, my best estimate of how the future will play out. I attributed a measure of blame to capitalism, Marxism, and democratic egalitarianism, and in particular I mentioned that capitalism's failure was the result of the human lifespan being brief in relation to the march of events in history.

Echus Cthulhu Mythos and I thereafter began a debate over whether nuclear power could stave off the die-off and rescue civilization. I was led by this discussion to believe that nuclear fission might eventually become a safe source of energy, and I think that I might have convinced Mythos that it's pretty much too late to rescue civilization.

At about that point, Brad_H posted to say that whereas perhaps a massive die-off was unavoidable, technical civilization might not be doomed after all, since non-fossil power sources, such as hydroelectric plants, could at least keep some technology going and maybe even enable spaceflight. However -- and this is what set off the chain reaction that led to the locking of the thread -- Brad added:

[quote="Brad_H"]p.s. Be careful about extoling the virtues of neitzcheism (sp?) & eugenics - although there is some truth in what you say on that topic, remember that humanity has already fought a world war bcause someone tried to stake out the turf of genetic superiority and practice natural selection & extermination to further it. Such paths are mined with great ethical peril.[/quote]
Now, I did not intend to launch into a discussion of Adolf Hitler or National Socialism. But I do know a thing or two about those subjects, and I also knew that the ethical perils that some perceive are not the ethical perils which actually exist. Or, at least, the perpetrators are not always who they are said to be. But that quote is the origin of what happened afterward.

I replied that one should be wary of assuming that the enemies of Hitler and of National Socialism always told the truth about same. I said, "Nobody has ever shown that the economics and values espoused by National Socialism were unwise. The war only proved that there were very entrenched establishments that strongly disapproved of National Socialism's economics and values." I meant that just because somebody loses a war doesn't mean that his idea was a bad idea; it only meant that someone else didn't like the idea (perhaps because it conflicted with his own goals or welfare).

I can do no more or less than tell the truth when I sense that someone else might be wrong. So that is what I did, even though I had not, originally, planned to introduce National Socialism into the thread as an off-topic topic for debate.

Brad_H then asked me: "Are you in the same philosophical camp of those post-modern Hitler apologists who deny the existence of the Holocaust?"

I regarded that as a loaded question, one which presumes a conclusion about the (alleged) Holocaust. Since my opinion is contrary to that conclusion, I was obliged to say so. To do otherwise would be dishonest. Remember, Brad did ask.

Brad also asked: "Is the post fossil-fuel apocalypse you're portraying nothing more than a backhanded way of re-peating Hitler's dreams of having a "master race" take over and rule the world ? In other words, is this apocalypse something you're looking forward to with wishful genetic-selection fervor, or is it something you're interested in doing your best to help humanity avert?"

In fact, there is no way to avert the end of the industrial age. Whether I'm "looking forward" to it, or not, is irrelevant. It may be that the die-off will, like a thundercloud, have a silver lining. But I'm hardly in a position to affect events in one way or another, except to alert people and motivate them to prepare themselves.

[continued...]

Pirate Queen ChoChiyo posted again to relate some observations by her Uncle Charlie, who she says was an American soldier who was among those who took possession of the German labor camps from the Germans. She said that he had spoken of seeing "charred corpses." I don't doubt that he did; I just happen to know why those corpses were there. But ChoChiyo went further, alleging that her Uncle Charlie had witnessed tortures and slaughters that, in fact, he did not see. Whereas her Uncle might have believed what his government told him, there's no more reason for her to believe it than that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction - invisible ones.

ChoChiyo gave an incomplete summary of the hereditary effects of inbreeding, which I amended in my response by referring her to the eugenic practice of culling to eliminate bad recessive genes.

She also expressed her belief in the standard, charicaturized version of Adolf Hitler's personality that was popularized in American war propaganda.

To each of those points, and others, I replied.

Brad_H posted an appeal for the thread not to wander too far off the topic into politics.

But at about that same moment, I posted a lengthy reply to the questions Brad had asked me earlier, namely, whether I "deny the existence" of the Holocaust and whether I want an apocalypse to occur to further a racial agenda.

Again, Brad did ask. And I did answer, using my honest opinions.

Brad_H then posted a MODERATION ALERT, saying he would relocate the thread to the Soapbox, and his reason was that he hoped to spare angry feelings on the part of Dr. Pellegrino.

Meanwhile, I'm still responding to what Brad had written earlier. I wrote that whereas I hoped Brad was right about a post-Crash renaissance of spaceflight, I didn't agree with his assessment of the odds.

Pirate Queen ChoChiyo wrote again to ask where the charred bodies her Uncle Charlie had photographed had come from. And I answered her again: the bodies were burned as the Germans tried to prevent the sperad of typhus. (They used Zyklon B for the same reason.)

Brad_H searched the web, probably using my name as a key word, and found my website. He posted the URL to my website within the thread. I wasn't going to do that. I don't mind people visiting my website: it is there for people to see. And although I already have a high traffic rate, it never hurts to get more. But the point is, I don't usually plant my URL in other people's forums. Brad did it as his own idea. He asked me whether the website is, indeed, mine.

[quote="Brad_H"]Ok Jerry, I did a little digging around.

Is this your homepage ?

(My homepage URL deleted as a courtesy.)

Please confirm. Everyone else is encouraged to NOT respond for the moment, until we hear from Jerry one way or the other.[/quote]

I didn't see Brad's post (quoted there) until after I'd posted another reply to ChoChiyo.

When I did see Brad's post, I told him that the website was, indeed, mine.

Brad_H immediately locked the thread.

So, was the lockage appropriate, or inappropriate, per the reasons for which the Soapbox subforum was created?

Jerry Abbott

I was almost certain that the senior moderator, Kiltannen, would notice that his fellow moderator, Brad_H, had led the discussions where they went by putting provocative statements into his own posts, intended to elicit comment from me, which he then slammed me for making. He did that repeatedly throughout these exchanges.

Brad_H warned that an open discussion of eugenics and Nietzschean philosophy can lead to "great ethical peril." He alluded to WW2 and the Holocaust as an example of that peril. Naturally, I had to say something, because I thought that his warning was unfounded and that his conclusions were wrong.

It could be that this was only the bait that Brad_H had set in his trap. Brad_H's purpose, all along, might have been to get the formerly loose rules of the Soapbox tightened with those "exceptions" which the Jews usually favor, in preference to a truly open debate forum.

Brad_H used his estimate of another man's opinions to justify a very ostentatious MODERATION ALERT!

Brad_H went so far as to ask whether I had made certain speech ELSEWHERE than on the IBDOF forum, namely, on my Website. Apparently, it's a "Hans Schmidt" kind of thing where you can be punished for something you said outside the usual jurisdiction. When I acknowledge the website as mine, Brad_H slammed the thread closed.

But I was wrong. Kiltannen surprised me by telling me that Brad_H's actions were justified.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:05 pm

[quote="kiltannen"]
This being said, there are some things that will NOT be welcome even in the Soapbox:
Racial Slurs & outright discrimination of any kind will be frowned on.
Encitment to hatred, and promotion of violent tendancies of any kind.
Historical Revisionism in the most extreme fashion. [The line here will be a tough one - but ALL moderator decisions will be final]
Promotion of illegal activities. [Distinct from immoral - No Hash Brownie recipees, or such like things]
XXX material - or even really any R-Rated style material. Lattitude will be shown - but the general intent is to keep the whole board family friendly.[/quote]
On my website, I sometimes poke racist fun at non-Whites - it's in popular demand on my side of the political correctness fence. But of course I'll have none of it in my posts here.

Promotion of violent tendencies sometimes involves a judgment. In works of fiction, violence is sometimes held to be good, or at least better than an alternative, or, failing that, carried out by the main character because a hero's gotta do what a hero's gotta do. In most stories, this is understood and accepted, and nobody complains about it. But if the story is politically controversial, as, say, Dr. William Pierce's The Turner Diaries has become, the same plot technique is used to villify the author and blame him for "inspiring" acts of violence in the real world.

The Justice Department has criteria for criminalizing threats. Someone who threatens a specific harm to a specific person in personal or public communication has broken the law. When either the harm or the intended target are left unspecified, the law has not been broken. (Check that with an expert: I'm not a lawyer, but that's what I believe is true.)

One does not break the law by glamorizing violence, using it to enhance the appeal of a tale, or else most of the fiction writers in the country would be in jail.

As for historical revisionism: how do you know when the revisionist is wrong? What if he's right and the "Official Version of the Story" is really a "Big Lie"?

I have no interest in narcotic drugs. I don't plan to take any. I won't encourage anyone else to do so. In fact, I think people would be better off giving their favorite person of the opposite sex a backrub. If she wants one, of course.

Likewise, I've no interest in posting dirty pictures. I've been sometimes victimized by spammers who posted obscene images on my guestbooks (I don't have a guestbook now for that reason). Anyway, I'm all for the family-oriented posting environment.

Jerry Abbott

By the way, did you notice how Kiltanen's rule against historical revisionism is woven in with a rule against pornography?

I wonder if those other rules were set there because it had just then happened to occur to Kiltannen that they might be needed, or whether the reason was to put the bad political smell of pornography on historical revisionism.

I really don't know.

Anyway, Brad_H posted to accuse me of having written an antisemitic statement. I checked, and it turned out to be a joke about how many Jews would declare themselves unobservant in order to eat a tasty unkosher meal. Some antisemitism, huh?

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 9:12 pm

I am not aware that I have made any antisemitic statement. I did suggest that Jews would overlook traditional Jewish dietary laws if tasty foods involving proscribed combinations (e.g., milk and meat) were offered them. But this is humor, not antisemitism.

A similar statement made about Christians overeating when presented with tasty food would not be regarded as "anti-Christian" even though gluttony is considered a deadly sin by some Christians. It may be that someone around here is looking for an excuse to be offended.

In fact, I'm not altogether sure what is, and what is not, an antisemitic statement. Could I have a definition, please?

I would like a definition that answers these questions.

1. All all antisemitic statements necessarily false? Or can the truth be antisemitic?

2. By what standard is the truth or falseness of a statement judged when there is a difference of opinion regarding same?

Jerry Abbott

Another poster, Hunter Berwick, said (Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 9:19 pm),

[quote="Hunter Berwick"]Well, here's your definition dude.

anti-Semitism
n (1882): hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group -- an.ti-Se.mit.ic adj -- an.ti-Sem.ite n [/quote]

To that, I replied (Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 9:31 pm),

[quote="Jenab"]That's the definition I knew about. Brad asserted that my joke about Jews declaring themselves non-observant in order to eat a good unkosher meal expressed no hostility toward Jews. Accordingly, it seemed to me that Brad had some other definition in mind, and I wanted to know what it was, exactly, in plain English.[/quote]

Kiltannen posted again to answer the two questions I had asked him.

[quote="kiltannen"]It is possible that the truth could also be anti-semitic. But in regards our updated posting guidelines - we do desire to avoid racial slurs and discrimination on the IBDoF .

Therefore a discussion on the nature of anti-semitism and whether some Anti-semitic viewpoints are justified, is not something I want to have my board used for. It's Off-Topic, and far enough outside the stated goals of even the Soapbox that I don't want to have any level of discussion on the topic. [/quote]
What does "far enough off topic" mean to a thread created expressly for the purpose of containing off-topic discussions? Obviously, this is just his way of papering over a concession of special consideration to Jewish sentiments.

[quote="kiltannen"]2. Simple standard. Mine. If I feel that a statement being presented as the bald truth is so far from the truth that it is in fact misleading - I will call it out for what my opinion sees it to be. I will then ask for further discussion on that subject to be held elswhere other than my board.

Please note - I am not singling you out in this comment - I am replying purely in the context of how your question relates to what I permit to be discussed on my board. As a philisophical question - interesting. It sits right up there with the sound [or lack thereof] of a tree falling in the forest with no-one there to hear it. [/quote]
That first paragraph (after the 2) is actually a good reason. It's the "You can criticize Jesus, just don't go into a church to do it" defense of censorship. Kiltannen baldly stated that his "open forum" with "the loosest possible rules" is not so open or so loose as to permit someone he disagrees with from saying what he believes isn't true.

And that's exactly how "open" most liberal or Jewish controlled debate boards are. As long as your opinions don't conflict with theirs, you may speak.

Neither is he precisely singling me out - anyone else with my opinions on the Holocaust would also get the same "shut up you Nazi" treatment. So his special rules favor Jews, not any particular Jew, and burden White nationalists, not any particular White nationalist. How fair.

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2004 10:33 pm

Okay, thanks kilt. The truth can be antisemitic, and so there are truths that cannot be spoken, lest a certain group be offended.

That is, more or less, what a Canadian "human rights tribunal" once told Ernst Zundel: "The truth is not a defence... Intent is not a defence... That the statements communicated are true is irrelevant..." Zundel kept embarrassing this group with truths until they had him kidnapped by the US government, illegally deported to Canada, where he is being held by the Canadian government as a threat to Canada's national security - a ridiculous charge.

When one group's sensibilities are regarded more highly than other people's right to tell the truth, what happens is that the favored group starts inventing excuses to be offended as a backdoor method for asserting themselves, for pushing themselves ahead of others.

Still, it's your forum. So I'll post by your rules.

Jerry Abbott

Another poster, Edge, expressed his opinion that the truth can't ever be antisemitic. He said that antisemitism is an attitude, or perhaps hatred or discrimination, none of which equates with truth. He asked "How can truth have a hatred of Semites?"

Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 8:41 am

[quote="Edge"]"Truth can be anti-semitic"? What absolute, unadulterated rubbish. Antisemitism is an attitude, i.e. hatred and discrimination. What does that have to do with 'truth'? How can a hateful attitude in any way equal truth? How can truth have a hatred of Semites? Gah.[/quote]
Actually, I agree with your opinion here, Edge. But Kilt said that speaking some truths can be antisemitic. I'd go even further than that.

When two people, or two groups of people, disagree about what the facts are in regard to an alleged significant historical event, it should not be presumed that either of them is motivated by anything except a desire to see truth prevail. If one side tries to shut up the other side by alleging "irrational hatred" of some sort, the attempt should be viewed with suspicion, much like the Wizard of Oz saying "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

A law of politics seems to be that whenever any group's sensibilities become more important than truth - for example, if some truths are antisemitic and it is held that nothing antisemitic may be spoken - that group loses no time in finding as many ways to be offended as possible: they acquire thin skins and a habit for making loud complaints. If the law is used to enforce that scale of importance, then it is possible that the groups whose sensibilities are protected will be able to use them to take rights away from other groups.

In my opinion, it is bad judgment to make that kind of law.

Jerry Abbott

Brad_H believes that he has been given license to be high-handed in enforcing his interpretation of the new rules. Here is his post in reply to my previous post (which I made in reply to Edge).


Jerry,

Let me politely remind you a 2nd time of what Kilt said above:

[quote="kiltannen"]a discussion on the nature of anti-semitism and whether some Anti-semitic viewpoints are justified, is not something I want to have my board used for. It's Off-Topic, and far enough outside the stated goals of even the Soapbox that I don't want to have any level of discussion on the topic[/quote]
Please do not use "I was just answering a question that I was asked" as justification for re-veering back across posting guidelines that have already been clearly demarked. The topics of anti-semetic justification, historical revisionism regarding Hitler & the holocaust, and any other topic that involves violence and discrimination is VERBOTEN.

Thank you.

[quote="kiltannen"]a discussion on the nature of anti-semitism and whether some Anti-semitic viewpoints are justified, is not something I want to have my board used for. It's Off-Topic, and far enough outside the stated goals of even the Soapbox that I don't want to have any level of discussion on the topic[/quote]
[quote="Brad_H"]Please do not use "I was just answering a question that I was asked" as justification for re-veering back across posting guidelines that have already been clearly demarked. The topics of anti-semetic justification, historical revisionism regarding Hitler & the holocaust, and any other topic that involves violence and discrimination is VERBOTEN. [/quote]
The subject of my post wasn't historical revisionism or the nature of antisemitism. It was a question about wisdom of certain kinds of laws. Indeed, your reply to that post was a fine illustration of what can happen when laws are used to protect some groups' sensitivities at the expense of denying to others the right to express what they believe is true. The "VERBOTEN" area just keeps getting larger as the favored group continues to expand their sensitivities into more and more areas.

The topic of this thread is "posting and debating guidelines," and the subject of my post was consistent with that topic. Beyond that, Kiltannen said: "I WANT the Soapbox to remain open - I want there to be the loosest possible rules in here."

Then I came along, and that was changed with this exception, among others:

[quote="kiltannen"]A few minor additions to the rules seem in order.
...Historical Revisionism in the most extreme fashion. [The line here will be a tough one - but ALL moderator decisions will be final]...[/quote]
What is "VERBOTEN," according to Kilt, is historical revisionism in "the most extreme" form. I don't even know what that is. All I can see is that there are disputing parties about what the truth is, and one of them has been favored by the governments whose armies won WW2.

None of the other recent tightenings of the loosest possible rules apply to me. I haven't and won't post pornography here. I haven't and won't threaten violence here. Etc.

Jerry Abbott

Here's Brad_H's post in reply to my post above. He's just on a tear, now, as the duly appointed hangin' judge. The quote he makes within his own post is from something I'd said in a different thread, which I'll get to hereafter.


My post was not an invitation for further discussion on this matter. Furthermore ...

[quote="Jenab"]I put up with that in generally good humor because there might be someone, higher in authority, whose eyes might be opened to the situation without my having to say anything directly. It's best if he figures it out for himself.[/quote]

"Putting up with" is a 2-way street.

I bear you no malice, Jenab. However, the moderators of this forum are tasked with helping to maintain a peaceful & equal opportunity coexistence here, and your ongoing attempts to push the boundaries of posting guidelines, and to play moderator against moderator, are neither appropriate not welcome. Your continued presence on this board is entirely at our collective discretion ... subject to your ability to demonstrate restraint.

By 'restraint', I'm suggesting you desist in re-raising the anti-semetic and historically revisionist views already covered by the material on your homepage (which currently seems to be down, BTW). Questions by others on these matters are NOT to be used as an invitation to re-expound, at length, on these unwelcome, disruptive and off-topic subjects. You already responded appropriately to my "Farnham's Freehold" reference elsewhere, so I'll take the point as being understood.

Hopefully you won't misconstrue my responsibility for maintaining peaceful co-existence in this forum as somehow being an opportunity to get your daily "fix" of social pariahdom. Such is not intended.

In any case, there are an infinitude of other topics available for people to discuss here in the IBDoF - if those are not sufficient for you, then you are politely encouraged to look elsewhere (outside the IBDoF), for an alternative platform for your ethnic and political self expression.

No more quibbling please. The gist of the guidelines should be clear by now.

- Finis -

Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 6:25 pm

I suppose that will do. Enough of my thinking is available to those who read this thread hereafter that most of them should be able to extrapolate where I would have gone, if I'd been allowed to continue speaking. Those who can't, or won't, make the necessary effort, them I couldn't have reached anyway.

Don't consider my website going down as especially troublesome to me. Someone is always attacking it, in one way or another. It will return, as it always has.

Jerry Abbott

I had created a thread in a subforum devoted to the fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. My particular thread was intended for a discussion of his book: The Rolling Stones.

Brad_H posted an off-topic comment: "Incidentally, I've mentally pegged you as a fan of Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold."

Now, this was bait. Farnham's Freehold is a book about racism, and it presents an argument in favor of racial nationalism. Brad_H intended his post as incitement, an effort to elicit from me a reply that he could complain about.

I enjoyed reading this thread, thank you very much.

[quote="Brad_H"]Ah. Thx.
Incidentally, I've mentally pegged you as a fan of Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold" :wink:[/quote]
Farnham's Freehold did interest me. But if I were to print the reasons explicitly, it would probably be another cause for trouble requiring the intervention of a moderator. About the same thing could be said in regard to Starship Troopers, even though the struggle in that book was bumped upward by one order of generality.

Jerry Abbott

[quote="Brad_H"]Your restraint in the above response was admirable. Thank you. :thumb:

I confess that that was a wee bit of a test, on my part. :wink:[/quote]
I knew that. I'm experienced enough with moderators with whom I've had disagreements to know when I'm being provoked or baited.

Present company excepted, of course, but...

Sometimes, a forum moderator or a game host becomes aware of my politics and, for that reason, wants me gone from his forum or game. But he also wants to appear as if he is following due process. So it becomes a sort of game of creating pretexts.

I must endure exaggerated politeness intended to cover sarcasm. I must recognize when I'm being invited, obliquely, to do something contrary to the rules. And the like.

I put up with that in generally good humor because there might be someone, higher in authority, whose eyes might be opened to the situation without my having to say anything directly. It's best if he figures it out for himself.

Jerry Abbott

Okay, I think that's the whole thing.

No, wait! There's a bit more...

Someone has begun a thread that jokingly constrasted Americans, British and Canadians. For example:

Canadians travelling abroad hope that they are not mistaken as Americans.
Americans travelling abroad hope to be mistaken for Canadians.
Brits travelling abroad can't possibly be mistaken for anyone else.

That sort of thing. Notice that all of the referenced countries are majority White, and, in fact, the founding race of all three nations is the White race.

I submit that this is why it was politically "acceptable" to spoof them.

Here is the post I wrote in reply to the original poster of the thread:


Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 5:08 am

I can see why some of this might be humorous. It's not "Mark Twain" caliber stuff, but it's good for a smile. Why these three groups, though: Americans, Canadians, and Brits? Are any other groups likewise fair game for humorous contrastings?

Of some groups, such as Nigerians and Kenyans, we might not be familiar enough with their personality differences to tell one from another. In fact...oh nevermind.

But there are other groups that we know enough about to spoof, yet we don't dare. Why is this?

Jerry Abbott

"To know who are your rulers, first know whom you may not criticize."
George Orwell

In response to that post, I received a Private Message from Kiltannen, and here is the gist of what he said:

1. He said that he appreciated my earlier statements that I would abide by the rules of his board.

* And I was abiding by the rules of his board. I hadn't broken any of them.

2. He quoted my post in regard to the jokes about Americans, British and Canadians, using bold-face to highlight the words "yet we don't dare. Why is this?"

3. Kiltannen said that he didn't appreciate my "attempting to skirt the edge."

* What that means is that he was now going to broaden the restrictions and further narrow the permitted subjects of speech because he had just discovered that the freedoms he'd left available to me the last time were still too great for his comfort.

4. He said that the moderators of the IBDOF forum had a "lower tolerance of certain subjects" for me than for anyone else on the board.

* I suppose that meant that it isn't sufficient that I obey the rules. I must also anticipate what further rules might be imposed later, if I were to use my freedoms under the rules as they are now, and obey the more restrictive rules (as best as I might estimate them, and I'd better get it right or else) before they are actually put into effect.

5. Kiltannen requested "politely but firmly" that I edit my post to delete the words, "...yet don't dare. Why is this?"

6. Kiltannen said that neither he nor any of his fellow moderators would edit the post or remove that comment; he only "requested" that I do so.

7. He said that I should examine my motives in posting the comment (those highlighted words).

* I know darn good and well what my motive was. I wanted to spark people's thinking about the Jews, and make them realize that I am right.

8. Kiltannen said that he would open a discussion on the topic of "Groups we don't dare to spoof," provided that I would not in any case use that thread to suggest why "we protect some races from name-calling, finger-pointing, or being the butt of a joke." [Underline emphasis in quote is mine.]

* In other words, everybody else would be free to post Jew-friendly remarks, probably referring copiously to the Holocaust as a historical fact, whereas I would be prevented from talking back in any substantial way. No thanks.

9. He said that he would "obviously" monitor the thread in which I had made the post with those highlighted words and discuss any further problems he had with me directly.

10. Finally, he said that he was sharing his PM with the other moderators.

Kiltannen again PM'd me with more of his thoughts.

He said that he was sure that I was aware that there has been some significant concern on the IBDOF forum about my attitude toward the Jews, the Holocost [sic], and Blacks.

He said that he would be "brutally clear" by telling me that he had not (quite) decided to ask me to leave his site. He said that he does try to foster open discussion...

(Laugh as long as you like.)

...but that my view of the world was so radically different from his that he wanted no part of it. He said that he didn't want my "view of the world" promoted on his site in ANY way.

He said that I had been asked to refrain from raising controversial topics.

(Shh. Laugh later.)

And he said that he meant controversial in his eyes. He conceded that I seemed to be "highly intelligent" but held "misguided views" despite that intelligence. He said that he expected me to use my intelligence to anticipate what would offend HIM, and then not post anything of any such nature.

He said that he didn't want my ideas "polluting" his site.

He said, direct quote: "I am loath to admit that you are so far beyond common courtesy and honesty that you won't hold to the promise you readily made."

* I promised to abide by his rules. And I did. Notice what he is doing here. He said that I was "skirting the edges," which means that I was still legal, even though something I wrote caused him discomfort. Then he progressively elevates his discomfort into an imputation of rule-breaking on my part. Kiltannen dishonestly accused me of breaking a promise that I had never made, whereas in fact I had kept the promise that I did make. He dishonestly accused me of dishonesty.

Kiltannen said that "some leeway" will be shown when I was discussing literature, "some - not a lot."

* I suspect that this was a reference to a passage I quoted from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, to wit:

[quote="Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers"]Major Reid gave us a busy time.

But it was interesting. I caught one of those master's-thesis assignments he chucked around so casually; I had suggested that the Crusades were different from most wars. I got sawed off and handed this: Required: to prove that war and moral perfection derive from the same genetic inheritance. Briefly, thus: All wars arise from population pressure. (Yes, even the Crusades, though you have to dig into trade routes and birth rates and several other things to prove it.) Morals—all correct moral rules—derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level—as in a father who dies to save his children. But since population pressure results from the process of surviving through others, then war, because it results from population pressure, derives from the same inherited instinct which produces all moral rules suitable for human beings.

Check of proof: Is it possible to abolish war by relieving population pressure (and thus do away with the all-too-evident evils of war) though constructing a moral code under which population is limited to resources?

Without debating the usefulness or morality of planned parenthood, it may be verified by observation that any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out by breeds which expand. Some human populations did so, in Terran history, and other breeds moved in and engulfed them.

Nevertheless, let's assume that the human race manages to balance birth and death, just right to fit its own planets, and thereby becomes peaceful. What happens?

Soon (about next Wednesday) the Bugs move in, kill off this breed which "ain'ta gonna study war no more" and the universe forgets us. Which still may happen. Either we spread and wipe out the Bugs, or they spread and wipe us out—because both races are tough and smart and want the same real estate...

...But does Man have any "right" to spread through the universe?

Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics—you name it—is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is—not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.

The universe will let us know—later—whether or not Man has any "right" to expand through it.

In the meantime the M.I. will be in there, on the bounce and swinging, on the side of our own race.[/quote]
The thread in which this was posted was entitled "Favorite Scenes from Starship Troopers." Okay. The passage quoted above was my favorite scene. Now Kiltannen is hinting that I might get into trouble for political incorrectness if I mention what a highly respected author, "the grandmaster of science fiction," wrote in a world-famous novel.

Kiltannen said that his board is not a forum for recruiting for my ideas. He said that he believed that "all men are created equal in the sight of God" and that I do not. (He's right there.) And because he and I disagree, I may not express the ideas he disagrees with.

He said that his site is not a democracy, nor is it an open political forum. He said, "It is in fact most closely resembling a Monarchy." Him being king. Well, I didn't expect a democracy. I only expected that he had been telling the truth when he published the rules by which the Soapbox subforum would be governed. That's all.

In fact, he said: "It is MY view of the world that I wish to have promoted."

He said that I had not been expelled and that he hoped that it didn't become necessary to expell me, but that expulsion would indeed follow any continued attempts by me "to push" my view of the world.

* Yeh, like I can force people to agree with me. Uh huh. "Push."

Kiltannen said that he had edited my account to notify me by a pop-up and by an email, and he asked me to leave that notification in place. He said he expected to have to notify me only rarely: as he previously stated, he believed me intelligent enough "to work out what will offend" him, if I really tried.

He wrote: "This message is intended to notify you that my patience is thin."

Kilt,

Having just now read your PM's, I will leave your forum at once and not return.

Your argument for censorship in regard to my ideas is the only good argument that I've encountered. It's a version of the "You may criticize Jesus, as long as you don't go into a church to do it" argument.

You've forthrightly stated that you intend to use your forum, and all its subforums, including the Soapbox, to promote your views and values.

This, however, was after you had promoted your Soapbox as...

1. A forum with "the loosest possible rules."
2. A forum meant "to contain as much OT discussion here as possible."
3. A forum in which one may "post an extreme, perhaps even a hyperbolic, viewpoint."
4. A forum in which anyone who might be offended should yield the right of way to offensive posters:
[quote="kiltannen"]If you think that there is ANY chance that you personally will be sufficiently offended by the comments of SOMEBODY ELSE that it will affect your ability to continue to have discussions with them on the rest of the board - Please Leave the thread alone. NOT THE BOARD AS A WHOLE - But if you must, then leave the Soapbox. [/quote]
5. A forum whose purpose "is to intentionally throw into discussion those extreme opinions we may have some interest in exploring."

And then I come along, and suddenly you are having second thoughts. The reason you are reconsidering the value of free speech is that a group I've named is politically influential, perhaps enough so to cause you trouble. The Jews demand "special consideration," and so you intend to give it to them, while papering it over with the excuse that suddenly you just realized that you really intended the Soapbox to promote your views and values, not all that free-speech stuff you said it was meant for earlier.

Well, okay. Not a problem. It's a big internet, and I'll have no trouble finding a new forum.

I'm rather disappointed that you chose to give Brad_H a free rein with creatively interpreting your original rule revisions, in which you only barred "extreme" revisionism. Brad took that to mean he could bar any opinion that conflicts with his own. And you let him get away with it.

You're welcome, of course, to continue to post my celestial mechanics treatises. The transfer orbit treatise is my original work, and the one on orbit determination is my work, based on a cited reference, and I reworked the same example problem that the author of my reference worked (however, my numbers are more accurate).

Goodbye, kilt. I wish you luck in getting yourself free of those who dominate you on your own board. I won't mind if you delete the "Jenab" account. Thanks!

Jerry Abbott

[color=black][font=Verdana]Damn Jerry, you're good! I can easily envision them squirming in their seats as to what to do about you. [/font][/color]

[color=black][font=Verdana]I’ve mentioned it before but I’ll say so again here, you should write a book.[/font][/color]

[color=black][font=Verdana]Keep it up Jerry you make some damn fine posts.[/font][/color]

http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=10587
Hey Jenab, I was wondering what you thought about this Hydrogen vehicle. Would this alter your views any?

[QUOTE=Cracker oftheWhip]http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=10587
Hey Jenab, I was wondering what you thought about this Hydrogen vehicle. Would this alter your views any?[/QUOTE]
Not really. The point is not how many miles a car can run on a gallon of hydrogen fuel. Rather, the main point is that it takes more energy to produce a gallon of hydrogen fuel than you recover by burning that fuel.

On a small scale, it may be possible to create fuel cells for the few who can win the bidding wars for them - the energy to create the fuel cells would come from solar power (until the solar panels quit working), from hydroelectric power, or from windmills. But then there's a storage problem for hydrogen: the atoms are so small they leak out of nearly any container when the hydrogen is kept gaseous. Longterm storage requires solidification, which involves a heavy cryogenic burden.

Also, the energy that creates hydrogen fuel cells comes at cost to other energy demands in a world where energy is scarce.

So, no, I doubt that hydrogen fuel cell technology will ever amount to a hill of beans post-Crash.

Jerry Abbott

Well, what chance do you see of this concept (http://www.supelec.fr/lss/NCN/two-wheels.html#PDP) coming to fruition.

Well it happened again. These Jewish forum moderators are everywhere, it seems. The post to follow are those I made in another forum, The Peak Oil News and Message Boards Forums.

http://peakoil.com/forums.html

These posts appeared in their "Open Discussion" Forum, prominently advertised as follows.

Open Discussion - Off Topic Posts!
The Open Forum is for ANY topic and is not necessarily energy related.
Anonymous posting allowed
http://peakoil.com/forum3.html

The censorious moderator this time is Aaron.

[Note: Aaron excerpted the posts below, which offended him, from another discussion thread. As the title for the new thread, in which these posts appeared, Aaron selected "Pointless Racism," and selected me as the new thread-starter.]


Posted: 2004-10-24, 21:09:48

[quote="jrob8503"]Now, I understand, not everyone believes in the above. Their are still a couple ignorant assholes that have ancient views of the world. If we can get the majority to change, then we can jumpstart the change in this country.[/quote]
Liberals impress me as being people who have gotten way ahead of everyone else on the philosophy of disaster. Their ideas sound good on paper, but, one by one, they prove devastating in practice. The liberal problem seems to be one of insisting on impractical "shoulds"� for human behavior. People "should"� love each other. Marxism "should"� work just fine. Different races "should" get along fine together.

When they've led people far enough down that road for the signs of ruin to be obvious, some of the liberals, like me, stop being liberals. The rest of them produce blindfolds, gags, leashes, and tie everyone up, and continue marching and singing hymns about social justice and racial equality loudly enough to smother any whimpers from their prisoners.

And nothing will suffice to show some liberals the error of their ways. They'll preach morals to the very laws of nature and would advise God on the right way to do things. They start with their wants, and convert them to shoulds, and statistical evidences of their failure will simply not attract their notice.

I think that the reason liberals err so badly about fact, and thus the reason for why there exists any controversy over race, is that liberals attempt to deduce fact from their moral sense. That doesn't work because Nature has never been under any compulsion to be nice. A person is never informed about the facts of existence, or about the laws of nature, by way of his moral sense. That is, moral sense is not a substitute for eyes and experience.

Moral sense tells you what to do about the facts, once experience has made you aware of what they are, of what you're up against. But Liberals, by the attempt to produce facts from moral sense, ask themselves how things should be. The races "ought" to be equal because that's "fair." Setting the races equal before the law is as ignorant as trying to assign values to mathematical and physical constants through legislation - something that arrogant legislators have also done.

Jerry Abbott

Aaron wrote, quoting me as saying...

[quote="Jenab"]Setting the races equal before the law is as ignorant as trying to assign values to mathematical and physical constants through legislation - something that arrogant legislators have also done.[/quote]
He asserted that I misunderstood genetic relationships. He further asserted that "race" is "an artifact of historical ignorance of genetics," which does not exist as a physical condition being.

Posted: 2004-10-25, 15:59:44

[quote="Aaron"]You seem to misunderstand genetic relationships. So called "race" is an artifact of historical ignorance of genetics, and does not in fact exist as a physical condition of being. I assume that from your above quote, you contend that these so called "races" should be adjudicated differently?[/quote]
I disagree with you for reasons. There has been talk among anthropologists to the effect that race does not exist among humans because a statistical measure of genetic variance, FST, for humans generally is about .156, and anthropologists have a convention (or some of them do) that the minimum FST required for subspecies recognition is .25.

There are human populations between whom the FST is on the order of .25, but because there exist, also, intermediate types the average human FST is less. I've already shown why it is an error - of the slippery slope kind - to deny that race exists simply because racially intermediate types exist.

It's easier if I argue by analogy because that defuses the "hostility factor" (or maybe it would be better called the "pious defender of the dogma factor") that often possesses liberal minds when they argue race with a racist. In fact, I didn't invent this analogy. I've heard liberals compare race in humans with the colors of the rainbow. But it served my purpose rather well.

Between green and orange, there's yellow. Between the purest green and the purest yellow, there are intermediate shades of greenish yellow and yellowish green. From one end of the spectrum of visible light to the other end, there is no sharp division. Yet color exists. We have no difficulty seeing it. We have no qualms about saying that we see it. It doesn't bother us that there are no neat divisions between green and yellow, etc.

We appreciate that we could, if we wanted to, call every wavelength in the spectrum by a unique and fanciful name, assigning names to colors down to Angstrom resolution. If we did this, we'd still understand that red is not yellow, that yellow is not orange, that orange is not green, that green is not blue, that blue is not violet, despite the existence of every intermediate color.

There are social implications of race, certainly. But race is not a social construct: it's as biological as the difference between robins and crows.

Jerry Abbott

What I think is happening is that Aaron believes he can win a quick debate with me on the existence and significance of race, his answers being "it doesn't" and "none," respectively. When he found that he could not win, he censored. It's the pattern of behavior we usually see from Jews, though I'm not certain that Aaron is Jewish.

Posted: 2004-10-25, 22:24:14

[quote="Aaron"]Nice reply Jerry. I could not disagree more... but well reasoned post.[/quote]
I always try to give well-reasoned replies, even though I know that reason does not persuade many in a dogma-ridden culture. Before reason has a chance to prevail, the dogmatic mind needs a shock. An illustration is in order.

A couple weeks ago, a young woman asked whether she might live with me in my house. I indicated my desire to stay on friendly terms with her family, and was she sure? She affirmed that she did, indeed, want to shack up with me. So I said OK.

She moved in, and she brought her small dog in with her. I had to leave my two cats outside the house because they distrusted the energetic little doggie. I cooked her meals, washed the dishes, did her laundry, gave her backrubs from toes to scalp and everywhere in between. I liked her and didn't mind doing it...there was just one problem. She smoked. I didn't like that cigaret smell, and I said so.

She agreed to quit smoking, just as soon as the last cigaret was gone from the package in her purse.

Now I should mention that I've quit smoking, and I know a few things about it. First, quitting is an easy thing to say that you're going to do while you've still got cigarets left to smoke. It's a day after the last one is gone that you're having second thoughts. Really bad second thoughts. The quitting-smoker has rationalizations and excuses for why this just isn't the right time to quit; then comes paranoia, the jitters, and hating the world... It gets worse for about two weeks, and after that the craving for tobacco starts slowly to slack off. If you can make it to 90 days without a nicotine fix, you're probably out of the woods.

My girlfriend didn't last a week. She interpreted my refusal to let her smoke as meanness. Yes, I was just a mean, mean man. She wanted to go back to her daddy because he always let her smoke. So I told her to pack up, which she did. And I took her back to her daddy and left her there.

Strongly held dogmatic beliefs are like drug addiction. The believer persists in holding them despite all the reasoned argument in the world, despite mountains of statistical evidence, despite the evidence of his own eyes. Challenges to those beliefs cause discomfort, and it's not uncommon for liberal moderators to be more prone to censor well-reasoned racist arguments than racist jingoism.

MSNBC once had a board titled "Race In America." It no longer does. Wonder why? I'm a substantial part of their decision to scrap it, even though I never said anything they could call "hateful."

At another forum, The Internet Book Database of Fiction, a moderator lured me into a discussion the Holocaust and then found fault with me for expressing my honest opinion in reply. The uber-moderator, when he found out about it, backed up the junior moderator knowing full well what he'd done. My comments on the IBDoF forum may be censored by now, but I'd saved copies of my posts there and reposted them on the Vanguard News Network.

What prompts this kind of behavior? I think that it's a fear of having one's errors exposed, of being shown to have an obligation to revise cherished opinions. Few liberals take to heart the idea that the loser in debate gains more than the winner does. The winner merely gets the satisfaction of having defended the truth. The loser gets the knowledge of truths that he had not known before. Scientists usually appreciate this. Political liberals, particularly when they contend with racists, usually do not.

[quote="Aaron"](Although you never answered my question about legislative treatment of "races") Smile[/quote]
A nation is a race. A country is a political instrument built by a nation to serve their interests. No country should ever have more than one race among its permanent residents. Someone of a foreign race should never have legal citizenship. The rights of citizens should never be given to non-citizens.

[quote="Aaron"]I accept your analysis that we can endlessly divide genetic variations into the "rainbow" where these varieties merge into the single human race idea, and still recognize the differences which are obvious.[/quote]
Obvious, indeed. But not only the immediately obvious...

[quote="Aaron"]But we are not just speaking of superficial differences like hair color/texture, skin tone or other mostly irrelevant attributes. If we were, then who would care? What possible difference would hair color make to anyone? Underlying this is the implication that these superficial differences have more important parallels, in characteristics of intellect, disposition, and even morality. This unsubstantiated leap from the surface differences of color etc between humans, to meaningful differences in capability is quite a stretch.[/quote]
...You can also recognize differences that become obvious upon examination, and some such differences are quite well substantiated. Examples include the persistent racial gaps in the results of more than 80 years of intelligence testing, decades of law-enforcement experience with racial differences in behavior, statistical data concerning differential STD-infection rates from the Centers for Disease Control, and the like. You can reach many well-researched conclusions about race that don't have anything to do with skin color.

[quote="Aaron"]The nature/nurture debate still rages, and science still has some ground to cover in understanding our genetic legacy, but the archaeological record seems pretty clear. You and I, and indeed everyone on this planet has a common genetic heritage and despite genetic drift over time, the human genome shows a much smaller set of variations than the "race" definition would indicate on it's surface.[/quote]
The manner in which the FST=.156 for humans was used to prove the non-existence of race in humans was invalid, probably intentionally so. Asking someone to accept it as proof that race does not exist in humans because of the existence of racially intermediate types is like asking someone to accept that green is blue because of the gradual nature of the color-change in the spectrum. The FST distance between Brits and some African groups is close to 0.25. There are pairs of groups having genetic distances even larger. Such groups are different races just as certainly as blue and green are different colors.

[quote="Aaron"]Perhaps all of this is meaningless if the promise of real genetic engineering is finally realized. Homotechnicus here we come.[/quote]
Remember Peak Oil. It may be that H. sapiens and his cousin hominids are perforce nearly finished with technology.

Jerry Abbott

Another poster, cthulhu, wrote to make some elementary points regarding the respective importance of heredity and environment in the development of individual potential. He used an analogy involving an anti-racist owner of a plow horse asking a racist by what means the plow horse could be "trained" so that it would become a champion race horse.

Cthulhu appears to be one of us. In his post, he also wrote: "Some say that anti-Semitism is a problem in the world. The truth is that anti-Aryanism seems to be the larger problem."

Yet another poster, jpatti, wrote to rebut cthulhu, and next I present my reply to jpatti.

Posted: 2004-10-27, 05:17:49

[quote="jpatti"]There's a few things your analogy leaves out.[/quote]
His analogy was quite adequate and didn't leave out anything important.

[quote="jpatti"]First, different breeds of animals were bred to have different genes. A whole bunch of intelligence was put into it beyond natural selection. Thus animal breeds differ a lot more than human "breeds"... cause no one's been breeding humans for different purposes.[/quote]
Natural selection is potent by itself in differentiating species into racial types with distinct characteristics. Every mammal in existence traces its ancestry to a single mammalian type in the distant past. Men, apes, horses, dogs, cats, cows... all have a common ancestor who lived in the late Triassic or early Jurassic Period, about 200 million years ago.

[quote="jpatti"]Second, you completly ignore the concept of hybrid vigor. By definition, a breed of animals is relatively uniform in genetics and therefore relatively susceptible to problems - genetic disorders, disease, etc. Animal breeders who want animals for *useful* purposes tend to cross two breeds to increase the genetic diversity, which results in hardier animals.[/quote]
I frequently read this mistaken conception about "hybrid vigor." Yes, there is such a thing. But there is a condition for getting it, and a limitation to its effect, and you are apparently familiar with neither of them.

Hybrid vigor does not appear with just any racial cross. In order to get it to appear in offspring, the parents must be of relatively pure stock. Further, hybrid vigor exists only in the first crossed generation, which farmers call the F1 generation when they speak of crops. Subsequent generations do not exhibit hybrid vigor and generally are a motley bunch for whom more was lost than gained by the racial crossing of their grandparents.

Animal breeders cross breeds to increase the market value of livestock or to impart special characteristics to crops - they do not do it to "increase genetic diversity." The seed from hybridized crops won't grow crops in turn. Farmers raise hybrid cattle to sell (meat), and they do not use them for further breeding.

[quote="jpatti"]For instance, two very good breeds of rabbits for meat purpose are the New Zealand and the Californian. Yet, the most successful meat-raisers out there raise a cross of the two, rather than either of the purebred, because of the principle of hybrid vigor. Crossbred animals are stronger, healthier and produce better than purebred animals. The *individual animal is stronger than it's parents.[/quote]
An offspring fortunate to possess hybrid vigor derives from parents of pure stock. Hybrid vigor does not arise from already crossed parents. The purpose of crossing to get hybrid vigor is to produce that F1 generation for its enhanced size and market value. That's why your rabbit ranchers do the crossing. But it's a one-shot thing. If they got rid of their pure race rabbits and tried to use the hybrids for further breeding, their stock would deteriorate, and they would never be able to repeat the hybrid vigor thing.

[quote="jpatti"]Third, a smart breeder, even if he is raising purebred animals, does not make decisions entirely based on just the breed... Obviously, I would happily introduce the genes of a different breed to my flock if the individual animal involved had the trait I am breeding for. The point being that the actual traits of a specific individual trump the average traits of the breed.[/quote]
Right. Eugenics uses inbreeding to find and eliminate defective genes. Inbreeding can produce inherited defects only if there are defective genes in the genotype of the breeding population. But after the genotype has, through several generations, been shaken down - after all the defects have been found and eliminated - then it may be advantageous to acquire specific traits from an outside group through outbreeding. Care must be used in the selection of the imported "stud" to minimize the defects that must be found and eliminated by subsequent inbreeding. But, in the long run, this is the means of improving the genetic quality of the breeding group.

[quote="jpatti"]Finally, in addition to hybrid vigor in individual animals, genetic diversity in a species overall greatly improves the chances of survival of the species.[/quote]
As long as the diversity does not involve any inclusion of inferior genes. It's hard to imagine many situations in which a stupid man will do better than a smart man, all else being the same. (I know you could write fiction to that effect, but fiction is not the real world.)

[quote="jpatti"]These are basic breeding principles: applying intelligence and forethought to the traits you're breeding for...[/quote]
Yes.

[quote="jpatti"]...taking advantage of hybrid vigor...[/quote]
Only for stock intended for sale.

[quote="jpatti"]...that you breed based on individual traits, not breeds...[/quote]
Wrong. The inheritance of physical characters does not proceed by means of a single, smooth, overall averaging of an organism. Characters are inherited in "Mendelian units" - a cluster of cells or tissues - that are not guaranteed to function well together in the individual who inherits them. If a man from a small race mates with a woman from a large race, their child may grow up to be a large man with a small heart, unable even to climb out of bed. Lots of such mismatches are possible - e.g., some types of impaired vision - and nearly all of them are very bad.

What makes a race distinct from "humans generally" is that they've developed a heritable standard for their Mendelian units that will nearly always result in well-constituted children. That's why you are incorrect to suggest that breeding be only for individual traits.

[quote="jpatti"]...and that genetic diversity protects a species from extinction.[/quote]
I hope that I've shown you that diversity is a good thing on the condition that one's outbreeding strategy acquires only superior genes, or at least that any inferior ones so acquired are ruthlessly culled out of the breeding group. Further, it must avoid physical, neurological and biochemical mismatches among the Mendellian units.

[quote="jpatti"]These empirically proven principles are utterly ignored when racist people invoke genetics to "explain" racism.[/quote]
Racists are not usually as ignorant as you imagine. You've been mistaken on several topics that you have sought to treat, such as hybrid vigor and genetic diversity, and you apparently knew nothing about the danger of producing mismatched characters in offspring.

[quote="jpatti"]If I were "breeding" humans for survival, I'd choose for genetic diversity first.[/quote]
You can get all the diversity you need for hybrid vigor without going outside a race. An extended family, inbred for generations with the strict culling of defective offspring, can get all the diversity it may need from another, similarly inbred family of the same race with less danger of an impairment caused by mismatched parts.

The jokes about malformed and feebleminded in-bred hillbillies exist because hillbillies didn't realize that you must kill the defectives in order to eliminate the defect...then go mate up another child and try again. Where there are defects to be inherited, they will appear, and the more defects there are, the more often they will appear.

The early generations will produce far more strikeouts than homeruns, but if all the strikeouts are culled, leaving only the homeruns to reproduce, the next generation of babies will have fewer defects. Repeat this business over several more generations, and the inbred children will no longer be defective: you'll have far more homeruns than strikeouts.

[quote="jpatti"]Secondly, I'd choose intelligence and the ability to learn, which would certainly include a number of white folks, but not racists of any color. Racists never got past the generalization level of thinking and categorizing, which is a fairly low-level of abstraction. I'd want brighter people than that. Given that intelligence is more useful to humans as a species than most anything else, racists would be automatically disqualified.[/quote]
I see that there is another facet of heredity that you don't know about, namely genetic regression. It happens because individual organisms display phenological characters based on their dominant or paired-recessive genes. Those recessive genes that are paired with a dominant gene don't "show." However, they can show in their children.

What this means is that the race of the parents acts as though it were two additional parents to the children. The IQs of children born to two White parents each having IQs of 120 will be distributed around IQ 110, not around IQ 120. That's because 110 is the number halfway between the average for the parents (and those "showing" genes) and the average for the parents' race (represented by those genes the parents carry, but which do not "show").

For the same reason, Black parents each with IQs of 120 will produce children having IQs distributed around 102, because the average IQ for US-resident Blacks is 84.

If you can find a mating pair of African Blacks with IQs of 120, their children would be distributed around IQ 95.

Jerry Abbott

Aaron posted again in an attempt to refute my idea that race and nation are the same thing. To follow is my post in reply.

Posted: 2004-10-27, 05:58:21

[quote="Jenab"]A nation is a race. A country is a political instrument built by a nation to serve their interests. No country should ever have more than one race among its permanent residents. Someone of a foreign race should never have legal citizenship. The rights of citizens should never be given to non-citizens.[/quote]
[quote="Aaron"]A nation is NOT a "race". A nation is whatever it collectively defines itself as.[/quote]
The word nation derives from the Latin root word "natal," which means "pertaining to birth." The logical, literal meaning of nation is "people related by birth."

The word nation may have acquired other meanings, but most of those other meanings confuse the fact that families that grew into tribes, and then into several tribes, and then into many tribes, constitute what the ancients called a nation, and that is how we should be using that word too.

Decisions are never made "collectively." Every decision is made individually. When a vote is taken about what "society" ought to do, a tally is made of all these individual decisions in regard to the identified possibilities for proposed action. The option that acquires the greatest number of individuals' choices is the one that is democratically implemented. But what that means is the choice of those who voted for it will be implemented. The choices of those who voted otherwise are not implemented. There really is no "collective mind" at work in making the decision. In reality, what happens is that some prevail over others.

Your definition of "nation" better defines "People" (notice the capital P). For example, the Jews, not being all of one race, are a People. The Ashkenazim might be a race, but not every Jew is Ashkenazi.

[quote="Aaron"]I would suggest that an IQ test should be used for citizenship requirement. How you got to where you are is irrelevent... we care what you are capable of, and what you do on an individual basis. Blanket groupings of individuals is meaningless and obscures the accomplishments & failures of the individuals involved.[/quote]
For my answer to this, see my post to jpatti, above.

[quote="Jenab"]...You can also recognize differences that become obvious upon examination, and some such differences are quite well substantiated. Examples include the persistent racial gaps in the results of more than 80 years of intelligence testing, decades of law-enforcement experience with racial differences in behavior, statistical data concerning differential STD-infection rates from the Centers for Disease Control, and the like. You can reach many well-researched conclusions about race that don't have anything to do with skin color.[/quote]
[quote="Aaron"]Correlation is not causality. I could just as easily divide groups by geographic location, language, or any arbitrary category and make the same claim. Statistics, damn statistics and lies...[/quote]
You are suggesting that mathematics tell us nothing, or that only dishonest people use mathematics? There is nothing about, say, the terrain of a geographical region that imparts or controls characters inherited by offspring. While you might be able to gerrymander up a region to display an IQ differential, the heredity of intelligence would still depend on the genes of the people involved. The same is true for language, or for any other arbitrary (good word) category you may imagine. Genes are not "arbitrary" to inherited traits.

[quote="Aaron"]Some groups do differ genetically from others, but how groups are divided depends on which genes are examined; simplistically put, you might fit into one group based on your skin-color genes but another based on a different characteristic. Many studies have demonstrated that roughly 90 percent of human genetic variation occurs within a population living on a given continent, whereas about 10 percent of the variation distinguishes continental populations. In other words, individuals from different populations are, on average, just slightly more different from one another than are individuals from the same population.[/quote]
The range of height (of stature) among White men, as well as that range for White women, is greater than the difference of the average stature between White men and White women. And yet men are not women. Likewise, it may be true that there are two tribes of Blacks in Africa who differ with each other more than either of them differs with an Englishman, but that doesn't mean that the difference between the Zulu and the Englishman is small. What it means is that Blacks are not one race, but several, and that judging racial categories by skin color alone can be misleading.

[quote="Aaron"]Because traits such as skin color have been strongly affected by natural selection, they do not necessarily reflect the population processes that have shaped the distribution of neutral polymorphisms such as Alus or short tandem repeats. Therefore, traits or polymorphisms affected by natural selection may be poor predictors of group membership and may imply genetic relatedness where, in fact, little exists.[/quote]
That's true. There is a great genetic variation between Blacks in Africa and the Negritos of the Philippines, even though both races are dark-skinned, broad nosed and have fuzzy-knappy black hair. The features that are not preserved by evolutionary adaptive pressures do diverge across time, and these two Black races have been separated by thousands of miles for hundreds of thousands of years.

Jerry Abbott

The above post was the last one that I was allowed to make. Aaron permitted himself to have the Last Word, then he locked the thread so I could not reply.

Aaron asked me whether we were bound to equate race with national identity because of "the accident of geographic isolation." He asked me, knowing that he was about to lock the thread. If this guy isn't a Jew, he puts on a darn good imitation act.

Aaron asserted that nations were the result of the "desires" of their members, that nations are "inclusive" nowadays, and that the "genetic profile" of the people in it don't matter.

Aaron said that of course decisions are made individually (even in a democracy) but "the gestalt of these individual notions congregate to produce an outcome."

If I understand what Aaron means by gestalt, he's wrong. There is no collective mind among the voters; therefore there is no gestalt. The situation is that the individuals comprising the largest faction among the voters will have their way, and the wishes of the lesser factions will be required to yield.

(I didn't get into the complications of various forms of democratic corruption, wherein power caters to the wishes of well-monied special interest groups. Democracy in the classic sense is, after all, bad enough without that particular aggravation.)

Aaron explained that he did not mean that all those who use statistical methods are liars. Rather, he said, he meant that correlated data does not necessarily indicate causality - which, of course, is true. A strong correlation strongly implies a relationship of some sort, but the relationship isn't always a causal one. For example, the trend of two variables can be the result of a third variable, which causes them both. But where you have a strong correlation, you have a low probability of there being a purely random association between the two correlated variables, and a causal relationship can't be ruled out automatically.

Aaron said his point was that traits affected by natural selection may be poor predictors of group membership - meaning, for example, that possibly not all dark-skinned persons are niggers. Or, perhaps, that not all high-IQ persons are White. On the other hand, I had not suggested otherwise. The physical characters, including those that customarily mark off the races, are distributed characters. The smartest Black is smarter than the dumbest White. Aaron may be scratching a pontifical itch by responding to claims that I never made.

Aaron responded to my statement that "Blacks are not one race, but several" by saying that the genetic variation within races proves that race doesn't exist except as a statistical abstraction. And then he locked the thread.

[QUOTE=Jenab]...Aaron responded to my statement that "Blacks are not one race, but several" by saying that the genetic variation within races proves that race doesn't exist except as a statistical abstraction. And then he locked the thread.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, right, there are no races, yet there is so much racism.

Jerry, you're right. Aaron and Patti argue like Jews. I noticed this:

Originally Posted by jpatti
Secondly, I'd choose intelligence and the ability to learn, which would certainly include a number of white folks, but not racists of any color. Racists never got past the generalization level of thinking and categorizing, which is a fairly low-level of abstraction. I'd want brighter people than that. Given that intelligence is more useful to humans as a species than most anything else, racists would be automatically disqualified.

Ipso facto, when a "bright" race denier obviously loses a debate about genetics/intelligence with a low level goy thinker like you, a racist, it seems only fair that the winner should be able to "disqualify" the "bright" Jew as acceptable breeding stock, except maybe for a petting zoo. Hell, the loser set the standard, not you.

Man, I bet you've got some nice goats with your grasp of livestock husbandry.

[QUOTE=White Will]Man, I bet you've got some nice goats with your grasp of livestock husbandry.[/QUOTE]
The goats are just pets. I did raise them from birth. They're the children of a previous buck and nanny I owned, MTRIP. I'm not planning a major goat ranch: don't have enough room for all that many goats.

[QUOTE=Jenab]The goats are just pets. I did raise them from birth. They're the children of a previous buck and nanny I owned...[/QUOTE]

It's OK to call 'em kids.

I went back to the begining and read this entire thread. You are a first rank analyst and debater, Jerry. You sliced your hypocritic opponents to ribbons in their own forums, and with such care and grace. The real value of your arguments is wasted for the most part in those insignificant groups you stirred up, except to expose our reasonable, rational ideas to them. This thread should be required reading for WN's, whose debating skills generally leave a lot to be desired. THAT's where your skills have the most value: with our own. You should work up an instructive monthly feature in Dr. Bob's Thunderbolt of Truth to showplace your wisdom and rightly give the appearance of more editorial depth.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/82622.php

The following post has status hidden:

Post peak oil die-off can't be avoided by any means
by Jerry Abbott • Monday November 08, 2004 at 02:52 PM
goatlyones@moonshinehollow.com Hillsboro, West Virginia, USA

The steady decline in fossil fuel availability will at some point trigger an end to mechanized, chemically assisted agriculture. Global food production will drop to 10% of what it had been, and about 95% of the world's population will starve.

It is not possible to rescue most of humanity from death by famine or by war. Corrective measures that might have had some significant effect, if imposed 60 years ago and rigorously enforced thereafter will not save us now. It's simply too late.

During the Middle Ages, for several centuries the human population of Earth hovered around 500 million. And that's exactly where it will return by the year 2100. From a high somewhere between eight and twelve billion in 2045, the human population will suffer war- and famine-related losses averaging perhaps 150 to 200 million lives per year for the next half-century.

The reason the global human population was restricted to a half billion for so long is that a half billion is about as many people as hand-tool and compost-heap farming could support. The industrial revolution, the invention of the tractor and the mechanical harvester, the discovery of chemical stimulants for farm crops (made from oil), and the development of chemical pesticides (also made from oil) are what made our tremendous population growth possible.

We are running out of oil. And we will run into trouble before the oil is completely gone. Agribusiness is, after all, a business: it will be carried on for as long as it can be carried on profitably, and not one day longer.

Every species of living organism follows a characteristic pattern of population growth. If the species' numbers are not limited by predators, then they will be limited by the full utilization or by the depletion of the first essential resource to fall into short supply. Often, that resource is food.

When caribou were introduced to a Canadian island years ago, they had much moss to eat. But there were no wolves on the island, so over the years the caribou kept munching on moss and breeding up more caribou. The herd grew in numbers. Then, one year right before winter, one of the caribou ate the last mouthful of moss. Canadian foresters were able to save the last three dozen animals of what had been a herd of thousands.

The end came swiftly. A generation before the end, there was no obvious sign that the end was near.

That is where we are with the energy resources we require to grow our food. At the moment, optimists abound with ideas about new technologies and alternative energy. None of those ideas will save us.

Nuclear power? If a sufficient number of reactors had been built already (assuming they were safe), then we could keep our lights on until we passed "peak uranium" in 50 more years. We might have used some of the electricity generated by nuclear fission to electrolyze water and so obtain hydrogen to run machines, but you can't get artificial fertilizers and pesticides from uranium. But, alas, those reactors weren't built, and now it is too late to build them. We need oil to build reactors, and only after the reactors are built can we get any energy from them. And they never did get the safety kinks out, anyway.

Solar power? Good idea in principle, but not nearly good enough in practice. To be sure, more than enough energy from sunlight strikes Earth to make up for a complete loss of fossil fuels. There's just the little problem that a solar energy panel of sufficient size does not exist and cannot be built. And, like nuclear reactors, solar panels must be constructed with a source of already available energy - which we soon will not have. So while a few people might keep the lights on in their houses, or heat their water, with solar energy, it isn't a means of running our whole civilization or continuing with mechanized agriculture.

Hydrogen fuel cells? Forget that. To create a hydrogen fuel cell, you must spend three times the energy that you can recover by burning the hydrogen it contains. Hydrogen is not an energy "source"; it's an energy carrier. (Think: flashlight battery.)

Okay, let's go Star Trek for a minute: antimatter. Can antimatter possibly save humanity from almost complete starvation? No. Antimatter is also an energy carrier, not an energy source. It is made in subatomic particle accelerators one little positron or anti-proton at a time and warehoused in magnetic fields. Although the energy to be recovered by reacting antimatter with matter is tremendous, it requires an even more tremendous expenditure of energy to get the antimatter to begin with.

The optimists, all of them, are wrong. There simply is no way to save the mass of Mankind. Most of us are going to die, and there is nothing that can prevent it.

Now, you don't have to be one of them. The situation is a bit like the two men in the story who, while taking a walk through the woods, meet a hungry bear. The bear, knowing dinner when it sees it, licks its chops and goes running at the men. The men, not wanting to be the bear's dinner, begin running in the other direction.

Suddenly, one of the men shouts: "Wait! I've got an idea!" He stops running, and so does the other man. Sitting on a tree stump, the man who shouted takes off his stiff formal business shoes and puts on his sneakers.

"What are you doing?" the other man asks, alarmed because the bear is rapidly getting closer. "What is your brilliant idea?"

"I just realized that I don't need to outrun the bear," said the man now wearing the sneakers. "Only you." And off he runs.

If you prepare yourself well enough to survive while others die, if you can live until the world's human population is again in balance with the food supply, then you will have escaped from the apocalyptic bear.

Abandon all hope, however, that the masses can be saved. They cannot be, not by any means. The arithmetic is simple, and there is only one right answer.

When hard times become really hard, there will be strong efforts by those who did not prepare to take food and fuel away from the prepared. Some of this robbery will be the usual informal banditry: "Stick-em-up, hand over that jar of peas and nobody gets hurt." And some of it will be more formal and institutional: the local constable or sheriff, following the tax assessor's route through the local area, will try to discover how much food you have, and then he'll confiscate most of it.

The justification bandied about for the institutional banditry will be that "hoarding is evil." Nothing could be further from the truth, and anyway the word "hoarding" is a maliciously loaded term. It implies that evil exists where there is none; it confuses robbery with fairness; it sets at naught the virtues of wisdom and frugality; it sacrifices the interests of better people to those of worse.

At present, and for the next few years, it will be possible for anyone to make himself better prepared for the coming hard times. Anyone at all can join the ranks of the prudent, the foresightful, the wise. All he needs to do is reduce his consumption of luxury goods, pleasure goods, and other frivolities, investing the money instead in more sensible famine preparations. Anyone who will not do that has chosen not to do it.

Everyone should live or die by his own decisions. When the times become very bad, no one will have a moral claim on anyone else's goods or time. It is wrong to require the provident to support the self-indulgent; it is wrong to force the wise to share with the fools. Anti-hoarding laws won't save anybody. They will only ensure that everyone dies together.

There is no way to save everybody, and it matters which people do the surviving.

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Kill Yourself Now And Avoid The Rush Monday November 08, 2004 at 05:53 PM
The wit and wisdom of Jerry Abbott Troll - proudly mixed race Monday November 08, 2004 at 05:21 PM
inbreeding is a looming problem cornhole Monday November 08, 2004 at 05:13 PM
The author of this article is a white supremacist Troll Monday November 08, 2004 at 05:04 PM
What an utter load of garbage! your a sad sick piece of neo-nazi shit Monday November 08, 2004 at 04:26 PM