Introducing White Ramadan

[1]

Image by KEKM8

3,654 words

My task here is not to argue for or against the “white sharia” meme, but I must offer a brief outline of what that discussion was about before I begin.

Most proponents of the meme simply wanted to use it to advocate for a restoration of traditional gender roles within society. In reaction to the Manchester bombing, multiple “anti-sharia [2] demonstrations have occurred across the country. In a demonstration held in New York on May 25, Milo Yiannopoulos invited commentator Pamela Geller and New York assemblyman Dov Hikind to join him in denouncing CUNY’s selection of Palestinian-American Linda Sarsour as its commencement speaker. The entire demonstration was thus made up of Jewish political activists who opposed the ideology of Islam. The word sharia, which literally translates as “the way,” refers to the various interpretations of Islamic laws of jurisprudence. The fear promoted by these activists is that with large Islamic immigrant populations, Muslims will establish Islamic sharia courts [3] in the United States, as has indeed happened in various parts of Europe.

Incidentally, if you don’t recall Dov Hikind’s previous claim to public notoriety, it was his protest of the release of The Passion of the Christ [4], a movie depicting the final hours of the life of Jesus Christ. Why? Because [5] “[i]t will result in anti-Semitism and bigotry. It really takes us back to the Dark Ages . . . the Inquisition, the Crusades . . .” In response to these protests, Fox Studios actually did pass on distributing the movie [5]. This is Jewish identity activism taken to the point of trying to refuse Christians, in a country that is eighty-three percent Christian [6], the right to watch a movie about the most important moment in their own religious tradition – and making a fairly decent go of it, no less. Meanwhile, amusingly enough, Hikind doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about the sensitivities of black people [7].

Against this background, some proponents of the “white sharia” meme hoped to indicate that they have no problem with Islam, or sharia courts, per se – as long as they’re being practiced by Arabs outside the United States rather than Arabs who are being imported in. Others just hoped to trigger liberals into revealing their own hypocrisy, because if one finds the meme offensive, then this invites the question: which part of the meme is offensive, the “white” or the “sharia“?

The first answer would suggest that the liberal has no problem with sharia as long as it isn’t whites who are practicing it (so why the double standard?); the second would suggest that the liberal does, after all, take issue with the cultural practices of the Arab Muslims they wish to import (so why import them?). Either way, it presents a catch-22 for the liberal who might actually try to explain why he takes offense.

At least some others[1] were attracted to the meme because they thought it would provide a cover for their actual misogyny. Critics of the meme were concerned that these people would, for all intents and purposes, hijack the meme’s meaning to outsiders, and they disapproved of the public relations effect implicit in conflating traditionalist, Western gender norms with things like acid attacks [8], as practiced in many North African and Middle Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, the “white sharia” meme marches on. And it isn’t my job to determine which way the tides will pull, but to ride the waves of the ocean as they form.

What I’d like to point out here is that “sharia” involves a whole lot more than gender relations.

It also includes bans on making riba [9] – usually translated as “interest” – on loans. Thus, most sharia-compliant banks operate as profit-sharing ventures [10].

It also includes rules about food [11], including about how animals must be slaughtered.

It even includes rules about how to take care of a beard, how long it should be, and more [12].

Surely this is oppressive, right? Who would want to have to follow a proscribed set of rules for every single activity they engage in?

I actually think there are extremely important lessons for us to learn here about how to maintain a tribal identity when surrounded by people who aren’t members of your tribe.

Now, I don’t think any of us should be circumcising our children [13]. But when Jews and Muslims practice circumcision, they’re tapping into some rather powerful psycho-dynamics. There’s something to be said for the psychology of hazing [14]. As psychologist Robert Cialdini found in 1959, “Persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.”

In other words, because you were able to read this article for free, you actually value it less than you would have if you had been forced to pay one hundred dollars for it. Had you been made to pay one hundred dollars before reading this, your brain would have taken the easy way out by trying to convince itself that the article was worth a full one hundred dollars, just to relieve the cognitive dissonance of feeling robbed. Now replace one hundred dollars with a mutilated reproductive organ, and reading an article with belonging to a religious tribe, and you may begin to see why religions that practice it have grown to become some of the largest in the world.

Likewise, when Islam and Judaism provide elaborate rules regarding food, this accomplishes two very important things, regardless of whether the rules themselves make sense or not. First, it ensures that every time they purchase food, Muslims are paying Muslims and Jews are paying Jews to produce it. Second, it helps ensure that Jews and Muslims eat separately, away from the goyim and kaffir. Thus, for Muslims and Jews, every meal helps to reinforce the implicit message that we are different from them.

Consistent, non-SJW liberals – like Gilad Atzmon, and perhaps Milo Yiannopoulos – imagine that they can eliminate these kinds of tendencies from human relations entirely. Rather than instill tribal identities in whites, they sincerely think they can drill them out of everyone else. But no matter how long you condemn the remaining tribalists in a universalistic society, as long as there is even one group practicing tribalism, that group is going to be able to reap the advantages of both tribalism and universalism at the same time, and thus gain an inherent advantage against everyone else. It’s an inherently unstable situation – like a one-off prisoner’s dilemma [15]. The more successful you are at weeding out the tribalists, the stronger the incentive to adopt tribalism becomes.

The Alt Right alternative is to suggest that maybe we’re better off learning to work with human nature, rather than deluding ourselves into thinking we can fundamentally alter it according to our whims. If we don’t exploit these innate human tendencies ourselves, someone else will. And if exploiting these tendencies is able to make a group stronger, then whatever group has fewer moral qualms than our own will end up dominating. One way or another, innate human tendencies will reign supreme. The question isn’t whether that will happen, but simply whether that group will be us.

At the same time that the “white sharia” meme began generating controversy between the various sub-sectors of the Alt Right, a particular holiday was approaching. As you may know, our Muslim brothers from very genetically distant mothers are currently celebrating the holy month of Ramadan.

During the month of Ramadan, Muslims are required to abstain from all food and drink from dawn until dusk. One wonders: is that even healthy? And what about athletes, who need to stay in peak physical shape?

It turns out that it is quite healthy. Blood sugar levels become normalized [16]. “Good” cholesterol levels rise – while “bad” cholesterol levels fall [17]. Systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels fall [18]. And as far as athletes go [19], “few aspects of physical fitness are negatively affected, and only modest decrements are observed.”

But Ramadan fasting absurdly requires a prohibition on all liquids, including water, during fasting hours. This is completely unnecessary for achieving any of the benefits of fasting for general health, fitness, or cognition – and dehydration is a serious problem [20] that does effect both physical and cognitive performance negatively.

When we study performing athletes in a fasted state who aren’t dehydrated, we find that [21] “there are minimal impairments in physical performance” even after three and a half full days of nonstop fasting.

As nationalists, we care about the health of our people. The National Socialists in Germany led the world’s first anti-smoking initiative [22]. Indeed, the very first scientific studies to ever link smoking with lung cancer originated in Germany in the late 1930s [23].

Worldwide, the movement towards organic farming actually began in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany – and according to Corinna Treitel [24], Director of the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis, “We associate organics with promoting social justice, ending world hunger and so on. But it was the Nazis who first elevated organics to the level of state action. Several top Nazi leaders, in addition, ate almost exclusively organic food . . .” Bakeries were required by law to serve whole-grain bread [25], and by the end of the Second World War the SS controlled a whopping seventy-five percent of Germany’s mineral water production.

When normie conservatives complain about “health Nazis” [26] while fighting valiantly for the right to smoke [27] and let kids guzzle extra-large sodas [28], it isn’t really hyperbole. The Nazis were serious about raising the health, fitness, and well-being of the German people, and they weren’t particularly concerned about whether or not they were violating some abstract notion of individual rights – conceived as something independent from the health of the tribe as a whole – on the way to achieving that.

It’s time to introduce White Ramadan.

We want to be smarter than our enemies.

It turns out that intermittent fasting – that is, eating within an eight to ten hour window and going completely without calories (coffee, tea, and water are fine) for fourteen to sixteen hours in between – is an extremely powerful method for staving off cognitive decline.

At a biological level, intermittent fasting slows the process of aging in the brain [29]. Some number of hours after the intake of calories and protein triggers various growth processes, the body starts ramping up a process called autophagy [29]. In this state, the body and brain begin breaking down weak cells.

You may remember a popular meme from some years ago that went like so [30]:

In an episode of “Cheers,” Cliff Clavin, the trivia-spouting, quirky, irksome mama’s boy mailman is seated at the bar describing the buffalo theory to his buddy, Norm Peterson, the beer loving heavyweight bar stool sitting perpetual patron.

Cliff expounds his “Buffalo Theory” to Norm:

Well, you see, Norm, it’s like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it’s the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.

And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.

While this is obviously nothing more than a joke, this actually is basically how autophagy works in the brain. Amyloid-beta, for example, is a kind of “junk” material that accumulates within the neurons of the brain and ultimately causes Alzheimer’s [31]. By keeping the brain in junk-cleaning mode for longer, fasting drastically reduces the risks of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease [32].

And at the same time that it does all this, intermittent fasting also increases the rate at which new neurons in the brain are created [33]. Among other things, this actually reduces depression [34] by boosting the activity of a protein known as BDNF – the same protein that conventional antidepressants take four to six weeks to begin activating. Studies in mice find better learning and memory [35] in fasted mice – and we know that fasting increases neurogenesis in the hippocampus in humans, which is the center of memory in the human brain as well.

We want to live longer than our enemies.

At the same time that intermittent fasting causes the brain to start cleaning out junk, it also causes the body to start cleaning out cancerous cells. In case you didn’t know this, literally everyone has cancer all the time [36] – in the sense that everyone has cancerous cells constantly forming and multiplying inside their bodies. You, as you read this, and I, as I write this, literally both “have cancer” right now. But we don’t say that a person “has cancer” until those cells get out of control. Yet, they’re always there – “preventing cancer” is just a matter of keeping the body on top of fighting them while the population of cells is still small. Intermittent fasting makes sure this happens [37], and as a result, people who practice intermittent fasting have drastically lower rates of cancer.

In fact, intermittent fasting is one of the only known, guaranteed ways to extend lifespan in general. In every known species ever studied so far, intermittent fasting extends lifespan [38]often beyond what was believed to be the maximum possible lifespan for that species. On average, the research found that in any given species, intermittent fasting will likely extend lifespan by about thirty percent [39] – and again, it does this by acting directly [40] on the very biological pathways of aging themselves [33].

And we want to be more physically prepared than our enemies.

Those with fascist sympathies are generally fond of something attributed to Socrates:

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.[2]

Of course, people have different goals for fitness. If you’re skinny and your goal is simply to get YUGE regardless of mental or long-term physical health, intermittent fasting isn’t the most efficient way to get there. It won’t prevent you from getting there, by any means – a cursory search through Martin Berkham’s archives of client reports at LeanGains [41] will show plenty of skinny guys gaining significant amounts of muscle on his intermittent fasting protocol. And I’m proof of this, myself: I put on some forty pounds of muscle over the course of a couple of years without gaining any fat at all. Squeezing all of my calories into an eight-hour window ultimately made it easier for me to take in the amount of calories that I needed, by teaching me how to eat a lot more in one sitting (and undoubtedly by training my stomach to stretch, as well). But it obviously doesn’t make your job easier at first.

Let’s be real, though: you’re not planning on deadlifting seven hundred pounds in real life. If you’re already a big dude, intermittent fasting will unequivocally help you cut fat while keeping and building muscle. And if you’re scrawny, you’re not likely to get YUGE without steroids, anyway. But pro bodybuilders are known for dying early from heart failure [42]. Steroids, no doubt, play a role in this, but the other factor is that even without using steroids, the traditional “bulk” stresses the heart by forcing it to work overtime to circulate blood throughout the body’s newly increased mass, including both the fat and the muscle. If you can gain strength and muscle without putting on so much “bulk,” then, this is unequivocally healthier all around.

If YUGE GAINZ really exist purely for the A E S T H E T I C S, and they come at the expense of long-term cognitive and physical health, are they worth it? What are the A E S T H E T I C S actually for, anyway? To appeal to women? Women don’t even find the pro bodybuilder look attractive [43] – and even those that do don’t want those men for relationships. If your main interest is in taking advantage of the degenerate American landscape by getting SWOLE so you can screw thots, you aren’t in the right place. If your goal is to help save our people by building a family and then staying in mental and physical shape long enough to outlive our enemies while passing on knowledge and wisdom to your children and grandchildren, then intermittent fasting is an extremely powerful tool that will contribute more towards helping you achieve these goals than any other single practice will.

In any case, massive gains still absolutely can occur with intermittent fasting because gains have more to do with training intensity and total calorie intake than they do with timing. Brad Pilon of Eat Stop Eat [44] coaches clients to gain significant amounts of muscle even with weekly twenty-four hour fasts. Followers of the Warrior Diet [45] have achieved the same results by fasting all the way through entire days and then consuming a single nightly maximum-calorie meal. Both of these protocols are more extreme than the LeanGains style I recommend: fasting for sixteen hours per day and eating within an eight-hour window. Adherents who follow even these strategies properly have no difficulties gaining mass as long as they strategize their calorie intake intelligently enough.

The secret of all of these methods is that once you adapt to them, not only do they become incredibly easy, they feel amazing. Most of us can’t imagine skipping a meal because we know we would become “hangry [46]” – a portmonteau of “hungry” and “angry” – as a result of low blood sugar. But the experience of being “hangry” isn’t inherent in skipping a meal. It comes from being dependent on sugar as a fuel source, and then depriving your body of that fuel. You adapt to the process of fasting in exactly the same way you adapt to the process of lifting weights: the more you expose yourself to a difficult stimulus, the easier handling that stimulus becomes. Specifically, relying on the burning of body fat for energy while in the fasted state trains your metabolism to use fat for energy more efficiently. And since fat as an energy source burns more slowly than sugar, this eventually contributes to producing a calmer, more level mood that is no longer dependent on the ups and downs of fluctuating blood sugar levels to provide the body and brain with energy. Perhaps this is why studies on intermittent fasting find that it results in reductions in irritability, tension, anger, and fatigue [47] along with improvements in self-confidence and positive mood – all things that our people could desperately use. As mentioned earlier, Muslims fasting during Ramadan see general benefits for heart health, including reduced blood pressure, which also ultimately results in a subjectively lowered sense of stress. Research on intermittent fasting finds that it has effects on the cardiovascular system that are actually similar to the benefits of exercise itself [48].

There is nothing more stereotypical of Boomers who blindly trust their government and rely on outlets like CNN for their news than belief in the meme that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” As it turns out, the studies behind these claims were bogus – to be more specific, they were observational studies and not controlled studies, and the way the media interpreted them was bogus. Some of them were based on groups which, in the words of the researcher himself [49], “appear to represent people ‘on the run,’ eating only candy or soda, or grabbing a glass of milk or a piece of cheese. Their higher BMI would appear to support the notion that ‘dysregulated’ eating patterns are associated with obesity, instead of or in addition to total energy intake per se.” In other words, if the alternative choice people made was grabbing a candy bar out of a vending machine, then sure, people who ate oatmeal at home would have had outcomes that were superior.

Rejecting this meme is one potent way we can try to expand our reach towards “normies.” We can show them – in arenas beyond the political – that when we reject the supposed mainstream consensus, we know what we’re talking about. We can show them that joining us in rejecting those myths could carry incredibly significant tangible benefits for their personal lives as well. And if they don’t believe it now, they’ll have to believe it two or three decades hence when researchers specifically recruit members of the Alt Right to study our longer lifespans and drastically lowered rates of cognitive decline in old age. As a practitioner who has achieved a high state of physical health and fitness while practicing intermittent fasting (see here for a recent photo of me [50]), I fantasize about a world where we come together away from the breakfast tables and TV sets as we begin our days with action – where we come together in the afternoons to have “breakfast” (literally, “breaking the fast”) and talk about what we’ve achieved so far. But whether you share my specific vision or not, rituals like these are what we need. And it would sure as hell be a healthier practice to reinforce the uniqueness of our community than chopping up our children’s dicks [51].

If you’re interested in learning more about the Cassielite madhhab of white sharia, or getting help adapting it to your personal schedule and circumstances, feel free to contact me [52]. I’ll be happy to share anything I know.

In closing,
رمضان أبيض مبارك!
[3]

Notes

1. Of course, the editors of Wikipedia here might add, “[who?].”

2. A paraphrase from Xenophon’s Memorabilia [53], 3.12.7.

3. Ramadan abyad mubarakHappy White Ramadan!