There’s been a heated debate over on Audacious Epigone’s blog on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel is clearly dystopian fiction. When you mention dystopian fiction most people think of 1984 and Brave New World but in fact dystopian fiction is quite a large genre.

An interesting early example is Will N. Harben’s The Land of the Changing Sun, published in 1894. There have been many science fiction dystopias. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants is a provocative 1953 example. The City of the Living Dead, a short story by Laurence Manning and Fletcher Pratt published in 1930, is another. These are technological dystopias but that is in fact quite likely where we’re headed – to a technological dystopia.

Some dystopias are communistic, some are capitalistic, some are theocratic and some are technocratic. You have a choice of nightmares.

Anyone want to make any comment on literary dystopias? Or movie dystopia as well for that matter?

The film Equilibrium may not a high brow masterpiece, but it presents a dystopia where emotion, suffering and, essentially, humanity are removed from life experience. Some people would see this as safe and rational, but it is actually the triumph of nothingness over being.

I think that we should look at dystopias and utopias in terms of for whom. Dystopia for some is utopia for others.

Has there ever been a time in history when it was better to be in the top 1-2% than now? It’s cosmic utopia for them.

The film Equilibrium may not a high brow masterpiece, but it presents a dystopia where emotion, suffering and, essentially, humanity are removed from life experience. Some people would see this as safe and rational, but it is actually the triumph of nothingness over being.

The most interesting dystopias are always utopias gone wrong. That’s why Brave New World is in the final analysis a much more interesting and profound work than 1984. It’s rather odd that Orwell, an idealistic socialist, gave us a dystopia created by people who were more or less straightforward villains. Huxley’s dystopia was created by people who thought that what they were doing was necessary and for society’s benefit.

And the most interesting dystopias always still have a utopian element. The society of Brave New World really is a utopia for most of its citizens – they really are happy with material prosperity, drugs and unlimited sex. They don’t realise they’re living in a dystopia. They don’t realise that they’re missing out on anything.

I think that Huxley’s understanding of human nature was a lot more complex than Orwell’s.

I think that we should look at dystopias and utopias in terms of for whom. Dystopia for some is utopia for others.

Has there ever been a time in history when it was better to be in the top 1-2% than now? It’s cosmic utopia for them.

That’s quite true.

Although I’d say that it’s a utopia for more than just the top 1-2%. For the top 10% life is pretty sweet. And arguably for the top 25% things are pretty darned good.

That’s the big problem. If a society is only a utopia for the top 1-2% it will be unstable and will eventually collapse (just as the ancien regime collapsed). But if it’s a utopia for a very significant proportion of the population, say a quarter of the population, it might be stable for a very long time even if life is pretty terrible (or even really terrible) for a majority.

will eventually collapse (just as the ancien regime collapsed).

Hope springs eternal.

There are plenty of examples of elite replacement. There are also examples of elite domination lasting for hundreds of years and the collapse was of the society/culture/economy, not elite control.

I question whether we can have organized entities without elite control. Maybe the best that we can hope for is an enlighten, competent and benevolent elite, not the anti-thesis of those qualities that we have now.

In a recent thread on AE’s blog @Jay Fink said

It seems the mid 20th Century was an exception to the rule. Monogamy was socially enforced and marriage and children fell into place for most men. After the sexual revolution we returned to the haves and have nots.

I replied
“I think that’s true. It was a unique time in which most men could get decent well-paid secure jobs. Secure being the really important factor. For the only time in human history most men were very attractive marriage propositions for women.

“While the Sexual Revolution did play a part in ending that golden age the most important factors were the disappearance of those decent well-paid jobs and the ending of job security.”

To which I’d add that women have to be hardheaded when it comes to marriage. If a man does not have at least a reasonably decent wage and more crucially if he does not have a secure job it is simply reckless for a woman to regard him as husband material. You can’t blame women for that. If a woman wants to have children she needs financial security.

So this is an example not of technology or ideology but changes to the economic system driving social change.

Recently on AE’s blog @Triteleia Laxa wrote on the subject of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Britain didn’t actually turn into Airstrip One, but Orwell was not crazy to look at various forces in British society, how the USSR had turned, and extrapolate out.

I’m not a fan of HMT, but I still don’t think it was an insane book to write. The women who convince themselves that the US is just like it now, they are mad, but they are also very few.

I think you have to remember that Atwood was writing in the mid-80s at a time when the Religious Right in the US appeared to be immensely powerful. That was to a considerable extent an illusion but at the time Atwood’s speculations seemed to be somewhat plausible.

Since then things have changed dramatically and Atwood’s speculations now seem to have turned out to be wildly implausible. But at the time her fears did not seem entirely groundless. You also have to remember that she was writing before Political Correctness became all-powerful, before Third Wave feminism appeared on the scene, before the Great Awokening, before the LGBTwhatever lobby became so immensely powerful. She was writing at a time when the political landscape was very very different.

Atwood seems to have turned out to be wrong (and I’m not a fan of HMT either), but at the time she didn’t appear to be crazy.

I question whether we can have organized entities without elite control. Maybe the best that we can hope for is an enlighten, competent and benevolent elite, not the anti-thesis of those qualities that we have now.

Political fragmentation might be a way of achieving that. It’s possible that it’s the sheer size of nations (and economies) today that produces such appalling elites, because it produces elites with almost unimaginable wealth and power. It encourages elite megalomania.

It’s also possible that the ancien regime collapsed in France because at the time France was, in terms of economics and population, the closest thing in Europe to a superpower. Which might have caused the French elites to be like our elites today – they just had too much power and wealth which made them just too arrogant and decadent.

Unfortunately political fragmentation seems very unlikely at the moment.

Found it. I went to the “Forum” button first which was dead end, until I saw the “Open Thread” link on the main page sidebar.

My personal best hope for smaller political entities in the near term is a de-facto localism. I have found that in my rural, marginally poor area it’s possible to live a pretty reasonable life and not get hassled.

As a case in point, when my wife and I were in our early 20’s we bought 30 acres on a dirt road and moved an hour south to where we are today (the area my Dad’s side of the family came to when they immigrated from Ireland in the 1880’s, incidentally) . We had a small amount of money saved and wanted no debt, so we undertook to build a little 20’x20′ cabin. We scrounged for cheap material, used a chainsaw mill to saw beams from the property, etc. and got it built, but we had no money for electric, a well, septic and all the rest of those creature comforts. We used oil lamps, a wood stove, propane fridge, hauled water in, and used a bucket toilet. This was all with our newly born first child.

We were somewhat terrified that someone was going to blow us in to the authorities who would tell us we couldn’t live there or some similar fate. Being a small town, people figured it out pretty quickly anyhow, but the response was not at all what I had expected. I lost count of how many people related how they hadn’t had electric for X number of years after they built their own place or a similar anecdote, while they expressed a faith that we’d get it all figured out in good time. The town board and the rest of the local government were in the know too, figured we were just starting out, and left us alone.

We eventually incrementally did get electric, water, and septic done, but it was done as we could afford to pay for it out of pocket. I still have to plow my 2.5 mile road in the winter though since it’s a seasonal road, but as the Building Inspector pointed out a Town Board meeting where were were discussing my plowing, “There isn’t any law that you can’t live in a seasonal property all year long.”

My point with this long meandering story is that this kind of accommodation is possible because my local government sees me as a human, not a managerial abstraction, and relates to me that way. The people that make those decisions also see my kids at the playground and us shopping around town. We live in NYS to boot, which proves to me it’s less about the laws that are on the books but how and by whom they are applied. I’m quite active in the community and am on the town Planning Board, since I want to ensure that this area stays humane and reasonable and that another young couple could get started without a crushing debt load and mortgage. I know that an hour North in the more suburban areas, we could have never gotten away with what we did.

I’m convinced that the national political scene is a lost cause and only useful for entertainment value. If we are going to change reality it’s going to have to start in our homes and radiate out to our neighbors and local communities. Anything else is wasted effort. The Federal Government’s influence is in great part only dependent on how much people allow it to dominate their minds and behavior.

I don’t worry to much about declining birth rates either, though I worry about many of the underlying causes of the same. I have 5 kids so far though, so it’s not like I’m willing to be a part of that declining birth rate! As long as I (and other like minded people) can keep our kids from being indoctrinated by the State and media, that dynamic could all work out fairly well in the moderate term.

The fundamental problem seems to me that all the big issues are way out of my control, your control, or any other individual’s control so that all we can do is keep our little flotillas afloat in the storm. If we can find a little haven of sanity and goodness, we can build it up.

Another worthy one is E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. It seems to me a very prescient picture of our current atomized society, especially given that it was written in 1909. It certainly isn’t accurate in a technological sense, but it really nails much of the spirit of our times.

It’s striking to me that it’s the futuristic dystopias which seem to have been much more relevant than the utopias. Most futuristic utopias just come off as silly now, which is why I don’t give much hope for further technology to turn that around. It’s got a poor batting average.

I’ve cross-posted this reply to a comment by @iffen on AE’s blog because I think it’s an interesting question to pursue.

It’s likely above my paygrade to pull it all together, but I am convinced that bureaucracy is working to destroy us.

I agree. I think that’s just in the nature of bureaucracy. As bureaucracies get bigger they get more oppressive and more intrusive. Even if the bureaucracies comprise people who are honest and sincerely believe they’re working in the best interests of society they will still become more oppressive and more intrusive and will end by turning society into a totalitarian nightmare.

Of course if those bureaucracies also include a significant number of people who are actively malevolent then you have a much bigger problem. But even a benign bureaucracy will be destructive.

And the bigger the nation state the bigger the bureaucracy and the bigger the bureaucracy gets the more impossible it is to control.

Good sci-fi (or speculative fiction) often takes a look at an existing trend and extrapolates it. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with extrapolating it to a somewhat absurd and hyperbolic degree if that makes an interesting point — much of satire relies upon this principle. I think of “The Feeling of Power” by Isaac Asimov, which is the short story where everyone relies on pocket calculators to the degree that they can’t do any sort of math without one. I don’t think anyone ever thought that story was all that plausible, not even Asimov. It’s meant to be somewhat satirical. But the broader point, “Are we maybe losing something by over-relying on calculators?” was valid then and is valid now.

As for Atwood, I’m not old enough to remember it, but I think you’re maybe right that she had a point in the 1980s, and I can say that even though she was scaremongering about people like myself. The short-term trend seemed to be an increase in the political power of religious conservatives. But it turns out all that happened was after losing power for 30+ years, religious conservatives finally got somewhat organized politically and reached a new “local peak”, if you will, before the long-term decline resumed.

The real problem then isn’t Atwood’s novel, it’s the makers of the TV show and its latter-day followers who don’t really have anything they can even point to, aside from their own paranoia, that illustrates that religious conservatives are increasing in power. In that sense it’s no more sophisticated than asking, “Hey, what if the BOGEYMAN were in charge of society?”

So the TV show at least is bad sci-fi, but good propaganda and a model for future leftist propaganda. It conveys the idea that the way everyone except cishet white males lived, up until 15 minutes ago, was a dystopian hellscape, and any attempt to roll back the revolution even slightly will immediately restore that hellscape, so we must be eternally vigilant. I think the left will be pushing this idea for as long as it controls the culture, because it’s a winning idea that holds their coalition together, and because we’re so profoundly ignorant of history that most people will accept a Netflix drama’s account of it long before they’ll open a book, or even before they’ll listen to an old white person’s firsthand account.

Good for you and yours Barb.

You’ve got your lifeboat so in your leisure time just kick back on the front porch and watch the Titanic go down.

Possibly but I thought Orwell’s point was that, no matter the original intentions, attempts at utopia always end up as exercises of naked power. The ideologues are weeded out and the men who wish only to exercise power over others take control.

I would say I’m probably not in a bad position for whatever comes down the pike, but am under no illusions that it is likely to be a pleasant few decades.

I hope that everyone gets their own lifeboat afloat, wherever they may be. If any points are taken from my own story I hope that it is that the world is probably a little more sane than it seems sometimes and that those pockets of sanity might be closer than one would think. Often enough, people are opposed to the NPR consensus, but are too afraid to speak up.

For all of Trump’s idiocy and failures, his election showed the level of dissatisfaction with the current trajectory. As liberalism gets increasingly grotesque this should only increase.

Hello, I’m just testing out the thread.

Anybody read The Mandibles? Thoughts?

The real problem then isn’t Atwood’s novel, it’s the makers of the TV show and its latter-day followers who don’t really have anything they can even point to, aside from their own paranoia, that illustrates that religious conservatives are increasing in power. In that sense it’s no more sophisticated than asking, “Hey, what if the BOGEYMAN were in charge of society?”

Yes, I agree.

So the TV show at least is bad sci-fi, but good propaganda and a model for future leftist propaganda. It conveys the idea that the way everyone except cishet white males lived, up until 15 minutes ago, was a dystopian hellscape, and any attempt to roll back the revolution even slightly will immediately restore that hellscape, so we must be eternally vigilant.

Yep. It is worrying that the type of people who make such TV shows really do believe that. Partly it’s their truly terrifying lack of any historical knowledge or perspective. It’s not that they believe that in the 1950s women were kept barefoot and pregnant and chained to the kitchen stove, which would be ludicrous enough. They believe that was happening in the 1980s.

We’re dealing with people who genuinely cannot distinguish between things that were happening a few decades ago and things that were happening centuries ago.

Propaganda is particularly dangerous when it’s produced by people who sincerely believe their own propaganda line.

Haven’t read it, but did read commenter Achmed E. Newman‘s review of it at his blog and chatted with him about it a bit over there.

With a book like that, I am not much interested in its literariness, but more in the plausibility of the apocalyptic scenario it spells out. In this case, the author locates a sovereign and autarkic Free State in … the waterless and nearly soilless state of Nevada. I understand that she’s just projecting forward Nevada’s former reputation for harboring malcontents and misfits, but c’mon. Nevada might be the state least able to support life autarkically.

Anyhow, Achmed and others have recommended the book for its discussion of … economics! So, make what you will of that.

All those dystopias had an underlying assumption that those lands would remain white. Planet of the Apes and Camp of the Saints are much more accurate because the real world dystopias would be racial, ideology is a thing that stupid white cucks waste their time with.

Unfortunately political fragmentation seems very unlikely at the moment.

What do you make of the fact that over 50% of US counties claim to be 2nd amendment sanctuaries? It’s not fragmentation, but it is fracturing.

1905 was the year that the number of polities began to grow with the secession of Norway from Sweden. We are 116 years down that road, and over 190 countries, up from about 50 when Norway broke away.

Wow quite a story. But I can why that kind of commitment to debt-free living won’t go anywhere politically. Given choice between a mortgage and running water or no mortgage and no running water, I think vast majority will choose former. And of course when the debt comes due and the couple can’t pay, it’s too easy politically to force your creditors to swallow the loss – and once you remove the moral qualms that really is the rational thing to do. Why make yourself a martyr?

It is very unfortunate that AE has quit here. IMHO it was the best part of the UR site.

He will be missed.

PEACE 😇

This thread will be restricted to the AE Community of approved commenters, and others will not be allowed to post here

Very thoughtful and considerate of you Ron

Of course if those bureaucracies also include a significant number of people who are actively malevolent then you have a much bigger problem. But even a benign bureaucracy will be destructive.

And the bigger the nation state the bigger the bureaucracy and the bigger the bureaucracy gets the more impossible it is to control.

I concur.

The #1 thing that bureaucrats want is to keep their job. The #2 thing they want is to make their job larger, so they can get raises, promotions… This is true whether they are sincere or malicious. Each one see himself as indispensable & essential.

Without oversight, bureaucracy runs amok. The UN might have been a sincere effort in the 1940’s. It did OK at the beginning while attention to the project was still high. Jump ahead 80 years and the total lack of leadership has made it a test case for how badly unsupervised bureaucracy degrades.

PEACE 😇

Hello, I’m just testing out the thread

Wondering if AE has you on the auto-approve list? That’d be funny, ID

Homogenous white dystopias are (or were) real, but the way I would put it is places tend to revert to their genetic mean. A place like France or Russia can go insane for a period of decades. That doesn’t mean the insanity is nothing to worry about, if it destroys your life and your family. But eventually the insanity passes, and the place reverts to the mean.

Meanwhile, the Congo will always be the Congo. If France takes on the demographics of the Congo, then it will always be the Congo.

revert to their genetic mean.

What about muh culture?

Doesn’t that play into it?

Not sure if this will be approved because I don’t know if I’m on the “approved” list but…

Am I alone in feeling that I’ve reached Ground Zero with respect to “America”?

That we’ve finally reached the point where (as Larry Auster used to say): “It’s their country now.”

That you don’t give a flying f*ck?

(Let them put transgenders on every girl’s sports team, on every team the US sends to the Olympics? Let that black shot putter burn an American flag – IDGAF.

That you wouldn’t even care if “America” suffered a military defeat?

Yup. And although it got really bad in France and Russia (and let’s not kid ourselves, it got REALLY BAD) –

They always produced high culture. Great literature. Great opera, classical music, ballet, you name it.

In fact, the two might be related.

Congo?

IIRC from Jayman and also supported by Gregory Clark, I think the long-term European norm (dating back to at least the Middle Ages) is for 20-25% of men to never father a child. The number for women is usually just a few points lower. The Baby Boom reduced that number, temporarily, to under 10% in the US. So the point is directionally true, but not as extreme as Jay Fink’s original comment about “haves” and “have nots” made it sound.

We’re about to swing in the opposite direction of childlessness, above the historic norm. I recall a projection that those born in the mid-90s will ultimately have childless rates above 25% (and climbing).

For the only time in human history most men were very attractive marriage propositions for women.

I see your point, and I’d agree with you if you replaced “human history” with “the industrial era”. I would again say, in ancestral European conditions, most men were attractive prospects because most women literally needed a man to survive, much more than a woman in the 1950s did. On an absolute basis the conditions they offered weren’t great, but women look more at the relative comparison here: life alone vs. life with this man.

To which I’d add that women have to be hardheaded when it comes to marriage.

I agree, and I continue to think that there are more marriageable women than men. The men I know who never married by age 35 or so are exclusively NEETs, drug addicts, and/or mentally ill. And I love these guys, some are very old friends, but they simply have zero value as husbands, they bring nothing to the table. The women who are still unmarried in their 30s are a mixed lot — some catches, some to stay away from, but I would still say a large majority are at least functioning members of society without any crippling vices.

Some dystopias are a bit more abstract, however. Like Idiocracy.

Another hypothetical one I might write at some point if I ever get to it – a dystopia where swathes of people simply “leave” society for some matrixesque thing, basically becoming turbo-hikki. In both scenarios the dystopia isn’t because the government stomped on some heads or manipulated, but because the people themselves, well, to put it bluntly, are imbeciles and weaklings.

Sure. Though I can’t pretend I know how to fully disentangle culture and genetics, since both influence the other.

At some level, culture can change very fast, and those moments of national insanity could be considered cultural. But I suppose you could say there’s also a “deep culture” that is more resilient and heritable than “surface culture”, but deep culture is still changing over time. Sometimes a cultural idea has an easier time colonizing one place than another, and genetics may be to blame — the Hajnal line seems relevant here.

Well, I have children, and I don’t want to migrate elsewhere if I can help it, so I have to care about this place to some degree.

But yes, sometime in the past decade, I went from feeling this was my country, my government, to “I just live here.” I went from feeling those are our troops, our boys in uniform, to feeling they are USG’s troops, its nongendered henchpersons in uniform.

Though objectively, I think it’s not so far gone as that. It’s just a feeling. That’s why I’m somewhat ambivalent towards the idea of patriotism — do we celebrate the ideal of what America once was, or move on from it entirely and try to construct some new ideal? I think we’re honestly too civilizationally exhausted for the latter.

Well, I have children, and I don’t want to migrate elsewhere if I can help it, so I have to care about this place to some degree.

It’s not that hard to migrate with children. It all boils down to preparation. I took my oldest with me to China to ensure that she wouldn’t be influenced by her abusive mother who had become an Oxycotin addict after “straining her back” at her desk job.

I’m not going anywhere either. Nor am I giving up hope because a life without hope isn’t life. Just saying that you have to reach a point of Ground Zero before you take action & I was wondering if anyone else has reached that.

I’m not wasting time on getting angry at beefy black women in purple lipstick acting like entitled 2 year olds. If she wants to burn an American flag, let her.

Not my Olympics.

But I do understand that if you’ve got a little girl, you don’t want boys on her track team.

I know a 33 year old guy. Makes a lot of money, lives in a big 200+ year old house in the country that he restored himself, very nice and responsible. I’ve been trying to find a woman for him for a while. His problems are 1. He’s quiet/introverted and 2. He’s like 5’5″.

I think that your perception of the ratio of single men/women is based strongly on area. Places that attract a lot of men from out of state for work are obviously going to have a lot of men.

I think that your perception of the ratio of single men/women is based strongly on area. Places that attract a lot of men from out of state for work are obviously going to have a lot of men.

That might be fair. Though I don’t think there’s that strong a skew one way or the other in the place I live now or the places I grew up.

It’s tough for short guys, but in my experience some women are more focused on absolute height and some to relative height (i.e, relative to her), so I think a decent percentage of women in the 5’0″ – 5’3″ range will still consider a guy who’s 5’5″.

Some men are late bloomers and take a long time to figure it out and get themselves out of their cycles of self-defeat when it comes to women. It’s when those guys graduate out of singlehood that the leftovers really look deeply bleak for the remaining women. I think any man that can function in society can ultimately learn to break out of those patterns. I wonder if your guy might be on the verge of “getting it”. I was never really hopeless with women (at least not by late high school), but I was definitely a *lot* smarter and smoother my last time around.

With the help of the Unz comment-search feature, I can almost pinpoint the moment I started feeling the way you describe, Wency and PB Writer. In mid-August of 2019, I left the following reply to a commenter on Steve Sailer’s blog:

… after the Epstein fiasco this weekend, every old conspiracy theory has a new lease on life. I too feel that trust has evaporated in our country; it is now a *rational* alternative to entertain thoughts of conspiracy when presented with an event like Epstein’s death. Sadly, trust was the lynchpin of the American system, and once it’s gone, the entire system falls into question.

Something about the in-your-face absurdity of the Epstein “suicide” really affected my outlook. In retrospect, it built on my reaction to the Las Vegas massacre of a couple of years earlier. In both cases, it seems to me, our “authorities” felt smugly assured that they could present the public with non-explanation to a dramatic, consequential event, and get away with it. I live in a liberal suburb, and used to love putting out my American flag as a quiet contrast to the rainbow-colored lawn signs proliferating around me. But since August 2019 I have not put the flag out once. I think it just stopped holding the same meaning for me. As I wrote at the time, my sense of trust was gone.

Tellingly, in the Bible the same Greek word, pistis, translates as both “trust” and “faith.”

BTW, when I looked up my old comment, I saw it had been made on a post headlined, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Steve Sailer had taken the name from the title of the poem by Cavafy, which he quoted at length. The passage of another two years has only made the poem more powerful, and prophetic. Here’s the link:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/waiting-for-the-barbarians/

(PS: Thanks to Ron Unz for the opportunity to keep commenting on Audacious Epigone’s blog. It says a lot about the quality of the blog and its commenters that people still want to congregate here.)

I’ve never heard of The Land of the Changing Sun, dfordoom, which would predate the publication of Well’s The Time Machine–still a classic of the dystopian genre, IMO. Thanks for mentioning it.

Regarding literary dystopias, I’m partial to ones that are not full-blown overhauls of society in a distant future, but instead seem like they could be just over the horizon for us, if a few circumstances were to go the wrong way. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange comes to mind, as does That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis–both of which portray a society that is at once familiar and monstrous. The Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns has the same character (although its plot is mostly taken from the 1970s movie Death Wish).

Michel Houellebecq seems to be our age’s master of the “day-after-tomorrow dystopia.” My introduction to his work came by way of Submission, his novel about the Islamization of France (and Europe)–which is fantastic, but perhaps dated after only a few years. I was very impressed by his earlier book, Atomized or The Elementary Particles, which only reveals itself as a dystopian sci-fi novel in its last chapter.

Oddly enough, I’ve noticed that very tall women-over 6 feet-tend to be more pragmatic on height, perhaps because unless they are at the top of the beauty scale, they have to be. Most won’t be pragmatic enough to help your friend, but I’ve known a few who would.

I’m hardly qualified to judge, but I personally think the majority of the populace would be better served if they looked at human beings as ends in themselves more and relationships as ends in themselves less. I think that’s the crucial factor in getting unhappy, single men and women to create sparks. Overall, it’s great if you can have your optimal, 100% fit in life, but most people aren’t going to be that lucky, and their route to a happy, love-filled marriage will have a lot of its root in segregating the true non-negotiables from what you can learn to live with. It’s not necessary for your spouse to share your personality or interests for a marriage to be happy.

So, where do you put the “late bloomer” vs. desperate vs. hopeless mark, age-wise? Besides the men who just didn’t have confidence or social skills until later in life, you also have the crowd that just wasn’t available earlier in life-usually either because they had life problems that prevented dating or because they were in a failed LTR or marriage-but suddenly pop on the market in their late 20s or early 30s. These men can be tricky, depending on where they are in the “market” and, more interestingly, how aware of that fact they are, if they lack experience or if their life has radically changed.

There’s a silver lining to Cancel Culture. It is Enlist Culture. Whatever the Glob purges and rejects, our side can pick up and keep. This is most excellent. Suppose your next door neighbor is throwing out all the family treasures. It’s stupid he would do such thing, but his loss can be your gain. Whatever he tosses, you take home. He throws out a fine painting? You take it and put it up on your wall. If someone throws away his own money and gold, it’s awful stupid, but it’s a golden opportunity for you to take it and rejoice.

So, if the Glob cancels Beethoven, our side enlists him. If the Glob cancels Shakespeare, our side enlists him too. And so on and on. Whatever the Glob cancels, we enlist. What the Glob throws away, we pick up and preserve. If the globsters or wokesters don’t want it, we’ll take it. They obviously don’t want Beethoven, Mozart, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wagner, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Shakespeare, Orwell, Cervantes, Huxley, Voltaire, and etc. Okay, we’ll enlist all of them. They are OURS now since THEY don’t want those figures.

Another thing. As these times have shown, nothing is more outstanding than race-ism. It used to be ‘racist’ was something bad, like KKK burning crosses to scare people or bullies using racial epithets to be mean and nasty. But now, everything cool is ‘racist’ or has something to do with ‘white privilege’.

There are schmucks and there are super schmucks. Cohen is obviously the latter. https://t.co/TOTlzlbWop

— Frank Furedi (@Furedibyte) June 29, 2021

Classical Music is ‘racist’. Western Art is ‘racist’. Western cuisine is ‘racist’. Algebra is ‘racist’. Calculus too. Physics is ‘racist’. Chemistry is ‘racist’. Modern Medicine is ‘racist’. Biology is ‘racist’. All the know-how, skills, and mastery involved in getting a man on the Moon are ‘racist’. Just about everything great, outstanding, awesome, stellar, or amazing is ‘racist’ or associated with ‘white privilege’. It’s almost as if Racism = Astounding Stuff.

So, I’ve been right all along. I’ve said “I’m the only true race-ist”, and now, all the astonishing achievements of the West have been labeled ‘racist’, which should properly spelled ‘race-ist’.
I said Race + Ism should mean belief in the reality of race and racial differences and the need for racial consciousness. Well, the great achievements of the West are indeed race-ist in nature, and Western folks should be proud of this fact. While accidents of geography and history played a role in the rise of the West, it also owed to certain key racial traits that developed among the white race. So, my own version of the Critical Race Theory would attribute many of the accomplishments of the West on those white traits. While those traits weren’t unique to whites, they came to exist in higher degrees among whites, and at some point causes a series of sparks that set the world on fire, for good and ill.

So, the two lessons are:

1. Whatever the Glob cancels, we enlist. It’s sort of like Mao’s rule on guerrilla warfare. “When they advance, we retreat. When they retreat, we advance.” In a similar vein, what the Glob rejects, we retrieve. If the Glob wokesters want nothing to do with Shakespeare, good! Their loss and our gain.

2. With just about everything great, outstanding, and awesome being labeled as ‘racist’, isn’t it about time we admit race-ism is truly awesome? I would argue Western Civilization grew to greatness precisely because of race-ism. And even the ‘wokesters’ seem to agree on some level as they associate the greatest figures and achievements of the West with ‘racism’. “Electricity be racist!” Damn right.

If science and technology are ‘racist’, and if science and technology led to the modern sewage and water treatment system, those are race-ist. You see, race-ism is truly awesome. We need to thank the Glob wokesters for finally noticing and associating all the great stuff with race-ism. They meant it as insult and condemnation, but I would argue they rehabilitated race-ism by associating with the most remarkable achievements of mankind.

Get a load of these whummies or white dummies.

This looks like a Sunday worship. What the hell is wrong with these people?

pic.twitter.com/X2embUNXbt

— Greg (@CasuallyGreg) June 20, 2021

In a nation where blacks are most violent toward other blacks and nonblacks, these pampered whites in their privileged sanctuaries pledge not to be violent toward blacks. ROTFL. It’s like sheep pledging not to be violent toward wolves. But then, if sheep lived in a safe area and knew wolves only from propaganda that featured them as victims of ‘racist’ sheep, they would weep for wolves.

These people show zero concern for all the victims of black violence. It goes to show what animates them isn’t ideology — equal justice and protection for all — but mindless idolatry of blackness as holiness itself. So much of morality in the US(and the West) has less to do with moral reasoning than moral favoritism, which is actually immoral.
It’s like how Americans think they are moral because they support Jews. THAT ALONE makes them moral. So, never mind what is happening between Jews and Palestinians. That is secondary to Jews being holier, and so being pro-Jewish makes one ‘moral’ regardless of the matter at hand because Jewishness = holy holocaust. Same with blacks. The mere fact of being pro-black makes one moral regardless of black behavior. This is moral idolatry, not real morality.

These white minds have been warped by Jews who want it like this. In order for Jews to maintain Jewish Supremacism, they need white submission, and Jews have chosen ‘white guilt’ in regard to blacks as holy icons as their main trick. It seems to work like a charm.

Also, behavior such as this shows that secularism and rationalism have failed. Secularists claimed to be see reality based on facts and reason. They also claimed to be ironic and skeptical. But humans are naturally spiritual and emotion, and all those facts/data and glib satiric attitudes failed to satisfy their need for faith. As they rejected Old Time Religion, this is what they have left: Negrolatry disseminated by Pop Culture and Academia.

Democracy is dead in the US for one main reason. The biggest power goes unnamed and un-blamed while it blames the less powerful and the powerless.

What is the essence of modern democracy? Everything comes under criticism and scrutiny. Those are the rules. There are no sacred cows. In US history, even revered figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were not sacred. People still found faults with them; they didn’t worship them like the cult of MLK. And Anglo-Americans, though dominant before Jews took over, were never shielded from criticism, and if anything, they were full of self-criticism and reform.

Unlike a monarchy or autocracy where a certain powerful entity cannot be questioned, criticized, or challenged, a democracy is a system where all must be questioned and challenged, especially the powerful. It must also be secular and rationalist because sacred cows aren’t supposed to be challenged. A system dominated by sacred cows is a theocracy, not a democracy. This is why the US had separation of church and state. Sacred cows belonged in the realm of the church. In the realm of the state, it was about men and their affairs. As men are not gods, they have flaws, and that means all must be scrutinized and exposed when they’ve done wrong.
Communism, though secular in the anti-religious sense, was essentially theocratic or ideocratic. It wasn’t a system of free flow of ideas but a system that insisted on the one correct idea. Thus, even in its rejection of god, it held onto dogma with an iron fist. As such, it was a secular theocracy.

US used to be a secular democracy, but now it’s turning into a secular theocracy, albeit one bound not so much to an ideology as to idolatry, mainly of Jews, blacks, and homos, the Tri-Supremacy.
As such, it’s bound to grow ever more corrupt and insane on the basis of “whatever the sacred Jews want, holy blacks demand, and magical homos desire, we must deliver.” No democracy can be healthy when certain groups, especially powerful ones, go unchallenged and un-criticized. And when the most powerful group(Jews in current US) goes un-named and unblamed, it is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy. In the US, we have an ethno-oligarchy of Jewish Supremacism.

In a democracy, all sides are criticized and all sides are defended. This makes them all human. No side is divine and perfect, and no side is totally evil and dehumanized. The trick is criticize all sides and groups without CONDEMNING them. In National Socialist Germany, the Jews were condemned. When one side is shielded from criticism while another side is abused with nonstop vitriol, the end-result is master-slave relationship than a democracy. And in the current US, it has gone way past criticizing whites. Whiteness is condemned, much like the bourgeoisie was condemned in communist nations. Jews use media, academia, state, and entertainment to condemn and dehumanize the very notion of whiteness, European identity, and Christianity. (Jews understood from communism that iconoclasm against Christianity only ennobles it. Russian and Polish Christians take pride in their oppression under communism. Communists attacked religion and destroyed churches. Jews figure a better way to destroy Christianity is to inject it with the germ of degeneracy and decadence to take root as the new ‘holiness’. Instead of attacking the body of Christianity, the trick is to corrupt its very soul. No wonder Jews seek to replace Jesus with George Floyd and BLM. No wonder Jews seek to wrap Jesus with globo-homo symbols. Such a clown-christ would be gutless and spineless. Can one imagine a globo-homo jesus attacking the money-changers in the temple? Hardly. Such a clown-christ would have danced with the money-changers and acted like Justin Trudeau. So, instead of iconoclasm, Jews chose iconoplasm to destroy Christianity, and it is now indeed pretty much dead.)

In a democracy, all classes come under criticism, all classes are defended. In a communist system, the proles were always right, the bourgeoisie were always wrong(even though, ironically enough, the communist elites took the role of the neo-bourgeoisie). The Proletariat was consecrated, the Bourgeoisie were condemned, with nothing to redeem it.
As with class, so it must be with race and ethnicity. In a democracy, all races and ethnic groups must be defended, and all must be criticized. That would recognize the humanness of all groups. They are people, and as such, they all have human value but also have human faults. But when some groups are shielded from any criticism while certain other groups come under endless criticism that turns into outright condemnation, the system is no longer democratic but a master-slave dynamics.

Current US is where Jews are masters, whites are slaves. Jews berate and whip whites ceaselessly for being ‘racists’, ‘white supremacists’, ‘nazi’, and etc(when not kvetching endlessly about ‘white privilege’ and ‘white fragility’), but whites dumbly and stupidly praise Jews, obey Jews, and protect Jews from any criticism. Yes, white slaves defend their Jewish masters who whip them 24/7.
How is this a democracy? (In current US, rich powerful Jewish ruling elites with supremacist control of all the key institutions blame white truckers and hillbillies for their ‘white privilege’ and ‘white supremacism’. Incredible. Jews who force the US to support terrorist Israel that sponsors terrorism all over Syria have the temerity to accuse whites who question the system of being ‘domestic terrorists’.)

In a way, it’s worse than the state of affairs in National Socialist Germany. The Jews there knew they were condemned and dehumanized. They didn’t praise Hitler and the Nazis. But in the US, the very whites who are being insulted, persecuted, and dehumanized by Jews suck up to Jews like a bunch of pathetic dogs. Unable to process the fact that Jews are their oppressors, they bark at China, Iran, or Russia as the cause of their mounting misfortunes and in the hope that their Jewish masters will stop beating them and feed them instead for barking at China, Iran, Russia. White dummies or whummies have to be the stupidest bunch of morons in the world. At the very least, the Palestinians know they’ve been condemned and dehumanized by the loathsome Zionist Imperialists. But whummies, though dehumanized by the Jews, are always wagging their tails and sucking up to Jews to roll over and play fetch… even though Jews kick it and say ‘bad doggy’ all the time.

Unless we break the taboos and name the Jew, there is no democracy in the US. When the most powerful group goes unnamed and un-blamed, where is the democracy? We’ve been told that, unlike a monarchy or autocracy(let alone a totalitarian tyranny), what distinguishes a democracy is the freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and the right(and even responsibility) to speak truth to power. More important than elections is this factor of noticing who has the power, calling it what it is, and criticizing its abuses(as all forms of power have its corruptions and rots).

But Jews have decided the US must be a Judeocracy. Why are they afraid of real democracy? Because, on some level, Jews have realized that too many of their kind play dirty and it’s just the way it’s going to be. If Jews were confident of their cleanness, they wouldn’t fear democracy and free speech so much. But they know they are addicted to supremacist gangsterism, and that means they must keep the power to suppressing freedom and equality of justice.

Jews play dirty, and that’s the basis of their power. As Jewish corruption is becoming so obvious, Jews would rather not have us practice free speech and call out on Jewish evils. So, they seek monopolization of the internet and work with government to shut down any voice critical of Jewish Evil. Democracy is dead in America, and Jews and their cuck dogs killed it.

Even a dissident voice like Charles Murray tells us that the main reason we must address the the truth about race is to prevent the emergence of White Liberation that may challenge Jewish Power. What a scummy lowlife cuck.

Why do you ignore the obvious connection between Islam and Globalism?

Muslims are #1 in the hierarchy of ‘woke’ thought. It is very easy to see the connection. Look at this Anti-White & Anti-Jewish flag.

In the U.S., Jews are Whites. Misattributing responsibility for Muslim actions is a two fold error. Not only does it drive off “White Jews” a potential ally. It fails to target the real threat of IslamoGloboHomo.

PEACE 😇

But yes, sometime in the past decade, I went from feeling this was my country, my government, to “I just live here.”

It’s a more realistic attitude. No country is special. Every country even at the best of times is a mixture of good and bad. And no democratically elected government (in any country) has ever merited more than grudging obedience.

No country is special because no group of people is special. Whether the group of people is a race or an ethnicity or a nationality or whether it comprises the adherents of a particular religion or ideology or whether it’s a social class or whatever, any group of people will be more or less less the same. It will be a mixture of the virtuous and the vicious, the intelligent and the stupid, the generous and the greedy.

That doesn’t mean you have to be ashamed of belonging to such a group but it does mean that you have to significantly lower your expectations. Which may be a psychologically healthy thing to do.

I went from feeling those are our troops, our boys in uniform, to feeling they are USG’s troops

Personally I have never had idealistic notions about Australian troops because during the whole of my lifetime Australian troops have fought in numerous wars, and in not a single case was their involvement justified. I feel some sympathy for the poor bastards who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. Since then we’ve had a volunteer army and volunteer armies are in my view essentially mercenaries. They’re paid to kill people and that’s what they do. They’re not essentially any different from Mob hitmen.

Some delude themselves into thinking they’re serving their country but not once in my lifetime have Australian soldiers actually fought to defend Australia.

Losing delusions is painful but necessary. It’s healthy to lose delusions.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/24/elizabeth-holmes-taste-for-travel-celebrity-admissible-in-theranos-trial/

Holmes was an amateur. She fooled a lot people with blood-testing, but Covid-Conspiracy fooled the whole world and altered political outcomes.

If you got power, you can sell shit for gold.

Regarding literary dystopias, I’m partial to ones that are not full-blown overhauls of society in a distant future, but instead seem like they could be just over the horizon for us, if a few circumstances were to go the wrong way. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange comes to mind

Good point. It really does take very little to flip a sane sensible society into a dystopia. And a dystopia can sneak up on you without your being aware that it’s happening.

And A Clockwork Orange is one of the most chillingly plausible of all literary dystopias.

On the subject of obscure and forgotten dystopian fiction there were a couple of interesting 1970s British TV series dealing with the subject – The Guardians and 1990. 1990 is particularly interesting as an anticipation of Cancel Culture.

I know several (around 10) never married men over 35. None are mentally ill or drug addicts, most don’t even drink. I’m not sure what NEET is. One of these guys (a Chinese American) is actually a millionaire (through investments) and he still can’t get a date. When he tries to talk to women at work he gets written up for sexual harassment. They just don’t like him.

One thing most of these guys have in common (besides myself and one other) is they are very cheap/thrifty. A few so cheap that I guess they are mentally ill afterall. For example the Chinese Millionaire will not turn on his AC even if it’s 110 outside and he refuses to get a cell phone because he thinks it’s an outrageous waste of money.

We’ve had World War G and World War T and people are wondering that’s coming next. My guess is that the next war will be World War V. World War Vegan.

It’s already started in Australia. Suddenly within a few months supermarket shelves are packed with vegan food and non-vegan food is disappearing from those same shelves. The current push behind veganism is extraordinary.

My prediction is that over the next few years we will see a very strong push to de-normalise meat-eating. Not just to de-normalise it, but to demonise meat-eating.

Within ten years people will be getting cancelled when it’s discovered that at some point in the past they were meat-eaters.

“ I took my oldest with me to China to ensure that she wouldn’t be influenced by her abusive mother”

Did it require all that? Are OxyContin addicted so organized they can find you anywhere you might choose to hide in the lower 48 or even Alaska?

“ One of these guys (a Chinese American) is actually a millionaire (through investments) and he still can’t get a date.”

He’s asking the wrong girls.

I think there are quite a few never married men over thirty once you cross tab for graduate school or men in long term relationships with career woman. The ‘Ted’ character in Schitt’s Creek seems familiar; 30-something guy with career demands hooking up with similarly situated women for as long as their divergent career paths permit.

The men I know who never married by age 35 or so are exclusively NEETs, drug addicts, and/or mentally ill. And I love these guys, some are very old friends, but they simply have zero value as husbands, they bring nothing to the table.

I have to disagree with you here. In fact, this whole paragraph of yours strikes me as being very historically inaccurate.

It used to be commonplace for men to marry (or for widowers to remarry) rather late in life, and this was true throughout the many centuries when life expectancies were a lot shorter than they are now. Cervantes married at 39, which even in 16th century Spain wasn’t considered quite over the hill yet. The novels of Jane Austen are filled with bachelors marrying between their late 20s to late 30s. Aristotle counseled that the proper age to bring a wife into one’s house was 30. Adjusted for modern life expectancies, saying that 35 is the new 30 doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

In any case, I rather doubt that any of society’s present woes are due to men not marrying soon enough. There is nothing wrong with taking some time to establish yourself and sort some things out first. I think the main problem is that men are getting paranoid thinking that if they wait until they’re 35, the 20-year-old women will consider them too old, and in this they may be right. Now this really is a problem, but it’s a problem with the conditioning of modern females, not with men per se.

I think the main problem is that men are getting paranoid thinking that if they wait until they’re 35, the 20-year-old women will consider them too old, and in this they may be right. Now this really is a problem, but it’s a problem with the conditioning of modern females, not with men per se.

There’s a real hysteria about age differences in our bizarre modern world.

But then our modern civilisation is increasingly hysterical about almost everything. Hysteria is the hallmark of our civilisation.

Muslims are #1 in the hierarchy of ‘woke’ thought

Beyond ridiculous, blacks are easily on the number one list as portrayed by all the jewish propaganda outlets.

It sent them crazy.

But they were extreme Israeli partisans and for open borders for the U. S. before Donald Trump was born.

You did not address the imbalance.

And a few more items. You are not addressing the questions or points that I present.

I care not one whit about Israel’s immigration policies. I care about the policies of the U. S. Israel’s immigration policies are not the subject. The subject is the high % of American Jews who support Israel’s restrictive immigration policies while at the same time pushing open borders for the U. S. That tells us that immigration policy per se is not the basis for making the decision. That tells us that there is no consistency. That tells us that they are identifying with and favoring Israeli citizens over their fellow Americans.

If you need to pretend that you can’t understand the connection between open borders and effective altruism then there is no point in my engaging in dialogue with you.

I was asleep. I also don’t get what points you are referring to, that I am not addressing. Where are they? I am so confused.

Never mind.

I’ve gone through your later points. They are made as if they are restated, but I cannot find the original statements.

It doesn’t matter, I have summarised them below, fairly, I hope.

1. Jews have predominantly been open borders since before Donald Trump was born.

I disagree with this. Open borders as a mainstream position is recent and unwired.

2. Jews tend to be pro-Israel extremists.

I disagree with the extremist point, but they have certainly tended to be sympathetic to Israel.

A small minority have been extremists.

I see money, with strings, given to Israel and protection from UN anti-whitism/anti-Semitism; but these are not forms of “extreme” support.

3. Jews identify with Israeli citizens over American citizens.

I disagree strongly.

The majority support Israel like people support their favourite sports team. Both involve little opportunity cost, so they can “go all in” without risk.

A significant minority go further. They have made Israel representative of their inner child. In the same way that many, equally abstract, white Americans have made American blacks their inner child. A workable synonym for which might be called the “soul”.

It consists of everything they miss about themselves, which they perceive that they have had to repress to be an adult in today’s world. This mostly operates within the unconscious.

This theory has tremendous explanatory power.

4. There is a connection between effective altruism, open borders and the Enlightenment.

This is true, in a way; as they all require the individual to convince themselves that they are almost wholly a rational being; that other parts of them are an alien, evil imposition.

I think this can be explored much better than I am able to here, but I must point out that success in the modern bureaucracy, journalism, academia and so on, requires a lot of this self-delusion; the results of which are extraordinary.

This also has immense explanatory power: from the centering of sexuality in modern culture, to individuals’ reactions to being questioned or having this pointed out, to the odd blind censoriousness of the contemporary elite “liberal” and their stupid, stilted arguments.

Replied @ #62, as best I could, given the missing source.

Muslims are #1 in the hierarchy of ‘woke’ thought

Beyond ridiculous, blacks are easily on the number one list as portrayed by all the jewish propaganda outlets.

Islamic propaganda outfits, like the New York Dhimmi Times, have separate hierarchies for race & religion. Muslims are the #1 religion, Black is the #1 ethnicity.

Hence the Anti-Semitic woke media embrace of Islamic BLM. It combines both #1’s.

PEACE 😇

I strongly agree. I would invest in alternative meat product creators, if you can find one that is not already valued as if it will replace the entire cattle industry.

As always, this next step in the culture war will mostly pit those who prize their ancestral cultures against those who prefer their abstract morals of the moment. There will be exceptions, like ancestral vegetarians, who the endlessly abstract will adopt as pets, to try to show to themselves that they are not actually dead inside.

I already know my defense against the anti-meat inquisition. “Well, you also eat my friends. I have great conversations with plants, if mostly trees. I talk with animals too, but I’ve got to eat something. That’s the way of life. Now say sorry for eating my friends.”

10 years is way too aggressive for that. I think you still need better and cheaper meat substitutes first.

I imagine if the way this happens, if it does happen, is the megacorps (and not the law) will take the lead, agreeing almost at once to stop serving meat. Within the span of a single year or two, meat will go from being served almost everywhere it is today to not being served at any chain restaurants or being available from corporate grocery stores or food distributors (i.e. Sysco). You’ll still be able to get it directly from farms or butcher shops for several more years, until the law then changes or those businesses are simply unable to function in the economy as banks, etc. cut them off.

Or perhaps all that will happen is meat will be taken out of the hands of the masses, but elites will still have access to their artisanal organic free range locovore meats sourced through a guy who knows a guy, and there will be a loophole in the law or the corporate codes for this sort of thing.

But I continue to maintain my view that there’s not really going to be a new World War in the model of Wars G and T. Those, plus racism, are enough to maintain a cultural Forever War. World War G itself isn’t really over — I think even if gay relationships represented 50% of relationships portrayed on children’s cartoons and the Bible were banned as hate speech, it *still* wouldn’t be over. The left can never be satisfied.

[[[ moved from prior thread ]]]

I do like your comparison of Trump to Rodney Dangerfield

Rodney Dangerfield was a skilled, highly intelligent actor. It is actually quite difficult to portray comedy in film.

You recognition of Donald Trump’s brilliance and acumen is appreciated.

PEACE 😇

I have to disagree with you here. In fact, this whole paragraph of yours strikes me as being very historically inaccurate.

I think you misunderstand my point entirely. I wasn’t saying anything about history in that paragraph, and I wasn’t saying anything about what ought to be. I was merely observing what *is*. And my observation is that good single men are a dwindling resource by that age and don’t compare very well to the women that are left over.

McCarthy (and Scalise) vote with the Democrats to remove historical statues from the Capitol. Shameful, cowardly, and will win them no support.https://t.co/mmVKYc0MQ7

They threw in this pathetic, overused talking point too, just to insult voters' intelligence: https://t.co/fWj22KFDqj

— Allum Bokhari (@LibertarianBlue) June 29, 2021

Republican Party US House Politician Whore Kevin McCarthy is a treasonous and duplicitous minion of the Ruling Class of the American Empire.

US House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is a treasonous politician whore who pushes mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.

Kevin McCarthy is a disgusting politician whore for the Republican Party CHEAP LABOR FACTION.

Kevin McCarthy pushes multiculturalism and the erasure of the border between the United States and Mexico.

Kevin McCarthy is attacking the historic American nation by pushing mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.

Thomas Martel — VDARE(2014):

McCarthy is apparently trying to stay afloat in the demographic tide that has destroyed conservatism in California, and he doesn’t care who he has to drag down with him. He certainly has no intension of reversing or even stopping the tide. Instead, he is pandering to Hispanics to buy himself another term or so in Congress. Eventually he will be swept away, and he must know this. But he probably figures he can become a Big Ag lobbyist.

And there is something even more disgraceful about McCarthy’s pandering, because immigration changes our national identity, unlike many other bad policies supported by the Stupid Party. McCarthy would not be pushing Amnesty for Irish, or Somali, or Asian illegals. He does, however, increasingly fear Hispanic voters. So, to appease one particular ethnic group, he will gladly rip apart our country’s immigration laws, effectually erasing the border. This is tribal favoritism, GOP style.

McCarthy is taking sides with a racial minority group at the expense of the American nation. For that, he is another profile in treason.

https://www.unz.com/article/steve-king-furor-shows-dems-are-the-real-racial-nationalists-and-conservatism-inc-is-a-threat-to-america/#comment-2760996

Tweet from 2015:

GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy: A Profile In Treason https://t.co/ZOeJ3FSGL5 McCarthy Is A Whore For GOP Cheap Labor Faction #immigration #UKIP

— Charles Pewitt (@CharlesPewitt) January 29, 2015

The anti-meat movement is deeply retarded in it’s basic premises. It is true, that there is too much meat consumed on average in America. This has led to the immoral absurdities of factory farming to meet that insatiable demand at rock bottom prices. I support the idea that people should eat less meat, and even though I raise a fair bit of my own meat, I really don’t eat a crazy amount of it.

Modern meat production (like much of modern agriculture) is really extremely inefficient in a big picture sense. Cattle and other ruminants are amazing for their ability to turn grass (which is completely indigestible to humans) into milk and meat. It’s insanity to pen them up in containment barns and feed them large quantities of grains which require the richest farmland to grow. Grass will grow wonderfully on more marginal soils which would never grow corn or soy.

My own area used to be dotted with small dairy farms, sheep farms and the like up till a few decades ago because the hilliness and heavy clay soils make it unsuitable for most tilled crops, but great for pasturage. Now the farms sit mostly abandoned and growing up into brush.

Such is the stupid, false economics of modern society.

Areas like mine should be growing all the meat and the high end cropland should be growing crops for human consumption, not corn and soy to feed animals and produce ethanol.

Point is, most of the arguments against eating animal products are predicated on the stupidity of our current economic priorities, and not a reasonable utilization of land to it’s best advantage.
In that way, it’s really not unlike World War G or World War T in the least. They all derive their conclusions from a fundamentally flawed point of view.

My own area used to be dotted with small dairy farms, sheep farms and the like up till a few decades ago because the hilliness and heavy clay soils make it unsuitable for most tilled crops, but great for pasturage. Now the farms sit mostly abandoned and growing up into brush.

Thanks, this is an interesting perspective. I’ve had the thought before that it’s odd that we raise cattle as if they were swine.

I maintain a position that a man ought to be prepared to kill his own meat. I think it’s important to remind ourselves how the meat comes to us, and if nothing else, to go hunting periodically. If you can do that and still feel good about eating meat, then so be it. But if the way a man accepts his meat-eating is by burying his head in the sand and not thinking about it, that seems unvirtuous to me.

No one I know does this anymore, and sometimes my wife thinks I’m acting like a hobo, but I always save bones — pork, chicken, turkey, or beef — and make my own broths out of them. I also sometimes pick up pigs’ feet or neckbones from my butcher for the same purpose. A thick, natural broth (the sort that becomes a thick gelatin in the fridge) is delicious, filling, and nutritious as the base of a proper stew, and so much of this goes to waste nowadays.

One of these guys (a Chinese American) is actually a millionaire (through investments) and he still can’t get a date. When he tries to talk to women at work he gets written up for sexual harassment. They just don’t like him.

I hope for the day when seething over a woman not finding you attractive is no longer considered serious conversation.

A few so cheap that I guess they are mentally ill afterall. For example the Chinese Millionaire will not turn on his AC even if it’s 110 outside and he refuses to get a cell phone because he thinks it’s an outrageous waste of money.

He sounds fun. Like dating Howard Hughes in the hotel recluse phase.

Yeah, extreme miserliness (and this sounds like 4 SDs above the mean sort of miserliness) is a sign of OCPD. Close enough to mentally ill, or at least it’s a severe personality problem that’s very unappealing to women. And also it offsets any advantage the wealth might convey — better to marry a manager at Wendy’s who will at least let you turn the AC on.

I’m of the same mindset as yourself when it comes to meat. I supply the majority of the meat that we eat, and I do some of the butchering and most of the slaughtering myself. It’s honestly never easy to go up to an animal that one has raised and put a bullet in it, but I’m glad that I do it anyhow, for the reasons you stated.

My wife and I were vegetarian for a few years, until we bought our land and it really only made sense to utilize it by grazing things on it. My animals have very good lives until it’s time to eat them, and even then the end comes quick and clean. We came to the realization that it was less about what we were eating than how it was done, in a moral sense.

We do the same stuff to all the bones and organs. Heart stew is great and I love the broth that comes from boiling the heck out a carcass. That’s where all the nutrition is anyhow compared to just muscle meat. When I butcher a sheep, the only thing that doesn’t get used is the actual entrails, head, and sometimes the skin. Things like lungs and livers that I’m not eating go to the dogs. Sheep forelegs also make great dog toys! They are very happy with that arrangement!

It’s really not about being a martyr, it’s more about who you are beholden to. If one needs the income from their job at Corporate Inc. to finance a tenuous high debt lifestyle it’s going to be pretty hard to take a firm line when they require a rainbow flag tattoo on every employees’ forehead.

Also, it’s not as if it’s necessary to go as primitive as I did to make a similar dynamic work. I built my 20’x20′ cabin for around \$10k cash. If I had had even \$30k at my disposal I could have started out with most all the basics done. My resources were very tight, and I had no wish to continue living in a trailer with a postage stamp yard, so I was pretty motivated to do what it took, even if it meant roughing it for a while.

Now, I have everything pretty well set and while there were some inconveniences, it really wasn’t that bad. After all, I still outperformed the living standards of most of humanity up until just 100 years ago or so even at my most primitive! I honestly kind of miss the ambiance of oil lamps now that I have them new fangled ‘letric lights.

There is a lot of romantic BS out there about the charms of “living simply”, and while much of it is indeed BS, I wouldn’t trade my past experience for anything. It puts material necessities into sharp perspective. You realize what a man really needs in life to be happy.

So, I really don’t find my experience to be that of a martyr at all. I’m quite well set up where I want to be in a very secure position, and I don’t see why folks would find some sacrifice of comfort to be an unreasonable trade for that. Certainly the vast majority of people won’t choose that path, but it seems an eminently reasonable way forward for those who are of a contrarian spirit in one way or another.

I suppose it’s true that it is very easy to make others foot the bill in today’s society for irresponsible decisions, whether by defaulting on debts or other means. That is moral rot as far as I’m concerned. If people want to play those games I can’t stop them, but I won’t participate myself and I won’t have anything to do with those who do.

I am certainly not advocating my own path as the basis for a broad based political movement. The sanity of a local government that allowed me to do what I did, is what I’m primarily advocating for.
Even though we live in a bureaucratic morass of a country, common sense can still be found in some areas when you break it down to the local level.

We are 116 years down that road, and over 190 countries, up from about 50 when Norway broke away.

Yes, on the face of it, history seems to be on the side of decentralization and self-determination. But simultaneously, globalism advances through non-sovereign power: economics, technology (especially communications technology), and the force of the burgeoning world population. More people, more countries, and yet a global surveillancist super-consciousness has never been closer at hand.

When I butcher a sheep, the only thing that doesn’t get used is the actual entrails, head, and sometimes the skin.

Years ago , we had a semi-feral ewe with a wild and wooly coat. It really looked like a sheep crossed with some kind of hairy monster. She was too wild for the shearers to bother getting the coarse wool off her back, so when butchering time came, as a lark we had that wild and wooly sheepskin tanned and preserved as a sort of novelty item since such a weird pelt had no market value. When my daughter came along, I stuck the sheepskin among her bedding to hedge against frostier nights. As she grew up, my daughter used it as a cover, a cushion, a costume and a playground. At one point I tried to convince her to give it up to save space, but her eyes got big and she mounted as spirited a defense of her property as I’ve ever seen.

She still has it.

Just FYI on those “useless” sheepskins.

Mr. Unz:

In this comment from June 12th, Audacious Epigone confirmed that commenter AaronB was “in the auto-approval bin here”, but that his “lack of auto-approval comes from somewhere else on the site the blog doesn’t have access to.”

My familiarity with AaronB’s commenting history is extremely limited and I am not privy to any information beyond that which can be gleaned from the thread from which the comment I cited above is from. With that said, I wonder if, in the interest of facilitating free speech and open dialogue, you might consider implementing whatever tweak would be necessary in order to enable Mr. B to comment in this thread?

At least they were honest about their preference for Air Conditioning.

in the interest of facilitating free speech and open dialogue

Along these same lines, a comment section limited to AE’s approved commenters will die a slow death. Further, most will agree that we do not have all the interesting and important questions, much less the answers. Expenditure of moderation time seems to be the issue which got us moved from the generic open thread.

Your mention of AaronB reminded me of a question that I was hoping you would answer. According to your religious beliefs, are people, such as AaronB, who are involved in keeping the Israeli state a going concern, considered apostates or heretics?

COMMENT PROPAGATION QUIRKS- DISCREPANCIES- PHANTOM COMMENTS, etc.

– Upon checking my personal commenter archive page (i.e., the URL hyperlinked by default from each commenter’s handle) no more than twelve hours ago, my attention was caught by something odd. The comment count for the thread under the final AE blog post that had just closed for comments on June 30th, after I had posted #393, now showed as 394 with 1 New. When actually loading the thread, however, I found it unchanged: 393 comments, the last being mine. I tried refreshing the page several times, and also tried not just a different browser but an entirely different network to access the site, all with the same result.

Finally, upon checking dfordoom‘s comment archive page, I found the missing 394th comment: a reply he had made, apparently after the thread had already closed, to the comment Marty had made reporting that dfordoom’s blog was blocked by FedEx. This is actually an odd bug that I had discovered long ago; on a given commenter’s archive page, it remains possible to reply to comments in threads that have long been closed, but such replies are visible only on the commenter archive page where they were made (so few, if any people ever see them).

– Mention was recently made by commenters res and Almost Missouri of odd discrepancies involving various comments appearing in one’s comment feed but not in the thread itself, and vice-versa.

Sometime within the past few months, I noticed the following with a comment of mine that I had posted to a Steve Sailer thread. From the time it had cleared moderation and appeared in the thread, there was an additional delay of as much as several days before the comment finally appeared on my “commenter archive” page as well.

– Starting from at least this past March, I have many times found that newer comments (not only my own but from others as well) that appear in the browser in which my posting info is saved can take many hours to finally appear in any other browser instance in which I am not recognized.

just closed for comments on June 30th, after I had posted #393, now showed as 394 with 1 New. When actually loading the thread, however, I found it unchanged: 393 comments,

Apparently the message that comments are closed:

‱ Is included as a new message for the count.
‱ Does not have a time stamp to advance the thread cookie for new messages.

The “1 New” condition will linger until the cookie expires.

odd discrepancies involving various comments appearing in one’s comment feed but not in the thread itself, and vice-versa.

Mr. Unz mentioned elsewhere that the commenters collections was going to receive some batching/caching treatment to improve performance. It is unsurprising that there are delays between thread posting and appearing in the author’s collection.
____

AaronB and a few other posters, have unusual post behaviour across the site. For example, his posts (under other authors) sometimes show up as white background never receiving the blue, new treatment.

I suggested that he report this in the Bugs Thread which Mr. Unz monitors, but I do not know if he did so.

PEACE 😇

Yes – actually I think me mentioning this is what spurred Achmed Newman’s response/post about his review.

I read it when it was fairly new and it was tough to get through in the sense that I really was able to imagine the deprivation that people went through with runaway inflation and massive shortages. At the time I didn’t think it was more of a warning rather than a forecast but these days I am feeling like the needle has moved substantially towards this being a real possibility within a generation.

Our only saving grace as a country is that our geo-political opponents/competitors have their own problems and are perfectly capable of making mistakes that inadvertently benefit us. That said, I am not sure if we have ever had a less capable set of national politicians and/or federal institutions than we do now.

deprivation that people went through with runaway inflation and massive shortages.

The key advantage for the U.S. is that most of the “deprivation” scenarios are driven by shortages of food or energy. The U.S. over produces food (dramatically). And, if faux-green stupidity can be shelved, we are also an energy exporter. Certain consumer end products, like iPhones, may be temporarily in short supply, but that is not “deprivation”.

Long term, inflation will actually help. Artificially cheap imports will suddenly become much more expensive. This will lead to more production in America by Americans. I know that the extreme Leftoids here hate the term MAGA Re-Industrialization. However, it really is:

    ‱ Judeo-Christian Main Street Populism, versus
    ‱ Globalists who hate Judeo-Christian values

Permanently ending dependency on the Elite CCP and its trade exploitation mechanisms will be a giant victory for Americans who support MAGA values.

PEACE 😇

There’s a silver lining to Cancel Culture. It is Enlist Culture. Whatever the Glob purges and rejects, our side can pick up and keep. This is most excellent.

There’s a flipside to this as well. And also excellent.

As the major media increasingly decline to portray straight white men positively, or even to portray them at all, straight white men for the first time in several generations are free to define themselves without the meddling media and advertisers bending men’s identity to suit their nefarious purposes.

Pundits who whine that the media “do not portray people who look like me” are not in fact serving their people well. They are really advocating for their people to be next in line for Molochian sacrifice.

Straight white men have been getting eviscerated on that altar for a century. We are finally entering a phase where the “friendly” media seduction will cease and men will find it easier, even necessary, to think for themselves and define themselves. This can only be an improvement.

I imagine if the way this happens, if it does happen, is the megacorps (and not the law) will take the lead, agreeing almost at once to stop serving meat.

Yes.

But I continue to maintain my view that there’s not really going to be a new World War in the model of Wars G and T. Those, plus racism, are enough to maintain a cultural Forever War.

I agree. I know that many people on the Right are convinced that there’s going to be big push to normalise incest or paedophilia or polygamy but I don’t see it happening. I think it’s very unlikely.

What’s interesting is that World Wars G and T have not really been about sex at all. Homosexuals have had the freedom to do what they like sexually for half a century. These wars are not about sex, they’re about identity. They’re about replacing normal organic identities with artificial identities.

The left can never be satisfied.

The Right has been firmly in charge for at least forty years. Identity politics is and always has been a weapon to destroy the Left.

We are 116 years down that road, and over 190 countries, up from about 50 when Norway broke away.

Yes, on the face of it, history seems to be on the side of decentralization and self-determination. But simultaneously, globalism advances through non-sovereign power: economics, technology (especially communications technology), and the force of the burgeoning world population. More people, more countries, and yet a global surveillancist super-consciousness has never been closer at hand.

You have to remember that most of these supposedly sovereign nations are not sovereign in reality. Their capability to defend their sovereignty in the face of pressure from great powers (especially the US) is close to zero.

Australia for example is not in any sense a sovereign nation. Back in the 1970s there was an Australian Government that tried to behave as if Australia was a sovereign independent nation. That government was overthrown in a bloodless coup. Since then no Australia Government has ever even contemplated not slavishly toeing the US line.

If countries cannot pursue policies in their own interests without facing the certainty of being bombed or invaded or having theirs governments overthrown then the idea that these are independent countries is pure fantasy.

Along these same lines, a comment section limited to AE’s approved commenters will die a slow death.

Yes. Setting up the AE Community Open Thread was a good and sensible short-term solution. We still need a long-term solution but this has bought us some valuable time.

Obviously Ron Unz doesn’t have the time to handle running and moderating this blog along with all the other things he has to do. The best long-term solution is clearly to find someone who is willing to take over the job of moderating this blog and just as clearly that will have to be someone acceptable to the people here and acceptable to Ron. But at least we now have time to work towards that goal.

In the short term the best thing we can do is to make the AE Community Open Thread a raging success. My guess is that that’s the best way to convince Ron that it would be worth his while to appoint a moderator.

You have to remember that most of these supposedly sovereign nations are not sovereign in reality.

Yes, this was more or less my point. Sovereignty counts for less now, so even as you get more “sovereign” nations with more people, they act less independent, slavishly toeing the same globohomo line as everyone else, i.e., the act less as if they are sovereign.

Since then no Australia Government has ever even contemplated not slavishly toeing the US line.

It is understandable that it appears to be a “US line” that everyone must slavishly toe, since the US is the largest power subject to globohomo, but in reality the US is (mostly) slavishly toeing the same globohomo line as everyone else. Ordinary Americans have no interest nor desire to force policy on the antipodes, Syria, Venezuela or anywhere else. But ordinary Americans don’t get to choose.

Everybody talks of The Handmaid’s Tale, fashionable I think largely because it has the right villains, but a much more accurate view of where we are likely headed lies in her “Oryx and Crake”. Written in 2002 it’s frighteningly believable in light of the past couple of years.

My guess is that that’s the best way to convince Ron that it would be worth his while to appoint a moderator.

I would nominate you for the position. Without hesitation.

Did you see what I had pointed-out concerning the reply you had made to Marty‘s comment reporting that your blog was blocked by FedEx? It seems, by all indications, that said reply of yours is visible only on your personal comment archive page. It would appear, as per what I explained in my previous comment, that (likely without even realizing it) you had posted that reply after the thread had been closed– either from your comment archive page or from a cached instance of the thread page that had not been updated to indicate that the thread had been closed (hence, the REPLY button still appearing). That latter scenario is one I also recall having experience with at some point, but neglected to mention in my previous comment.

@A123:

Thank you for your detailed reply. I acknowledge the validity and accuracy of at least much of what you pointed-out and articulated. I am not sure, however, that you fully understood at least two of the specific bugs and quirks that I reported.

You would be as good as anyone. You come across as very fair and level headed. You seem to respect a wide range of opinions, even those you disagree with.

@A123:

Thank you for your detailed reply. I acknowledge the validity and accuracy of at least much of what you pointed-out and articulated. I am not sure, however, that you fully understood at least two of the specific bugs and quirks that I reported.

Sorry. I only was able to identify a few of the technical issues you raised as “known” to the UR site.

The intermittent issue that gets me the most is when the site says ignores the “Reply” feature. The de-threading is very unpredictable. However it is most common if you are responding within 5-10 minutes of a post. If you notice in time, you can delete your message and attempt a new Reply which usually works.

Also, I start having issues loading threads at about 300 posts. The trim feature does not help. I can limp up to about 400, but after that it usually becomes unmanageable.

PEACE 😇

My guess is that that’s the best way to convince Ron that it would be worth his while to appoint a moderator.

Maybe, but I don’t believe he cares about stuff like that. He just wanted to get us off the generic open thread in order to reduce moderation time.

Barbarella — Utopia or Dystopia?

You make the call.

PEACE 😇
__________

That’s a great story, thanks for sharing. Hopefully it will become a family hairloom to be enjoyed by her own children someday!
I’m always wanting to save more of the hides than I do, so hopefully this will spur me on to do better in that regard.

Is it just me, or are the people who embrace The Handmaid’s Tale the same kind of folks who embrace terms like ‘Birthing Person’ as a valid social reference?

It is understandable that it appears to be a “US line” that everyone must slavishly toe, since the US is the largest power subject to globohomo, but in reality the US is (mostly) slavishly toeing the same globohomo line as everyone else.

But “globohomo” is entirely an American thing. It’s an American invention. It wasn’t imposed on America from outside. Globohomo is as American as baseball or Mom’s apple pie. Only American culture could have produced globohomo. It’s the kind of thing you can only get when you combine American Protestantism, American Exceptionalism and American liberalism.

Ordinary Americans have no interest nor desire to force policy on the antipodes, Syria, Venezuela or anywhere else. But ordinary Americans don’t get to choose.

I kinda agree with that, up to a point. But I do think that many (and I’m saying many rather than all) ordinary Americans genuinely do believe that the US has both a right and a duty to impose American cultural values on the rest of the planet. You can’t just blame the US Government or American elites.

Expenditure of moderation time seems to be the issue which got us moved from the generic open thread.

In not wishing to subject myself to at least many of the individuals and much of the discussion there, I am surely not alone here.

Before continuing, let me take this opportunity to mention that there remain a number of topics and threads, going back as much as two weeks or more now, that I have been meaning to followup on. I have even invested a not inconsiderable amount of time drafting various replies. Unfortunately, I have yet to manage to complete any to the point of being ready to post.[1]

A great deal of my time and energy in recent days has unfortunately been consumed in responding to the absolutely scurrilous attempts at character assassination that a particular individual has been repeatedly, and with utter impunity and lack of any compunction, lashing-out at me with.[2]

According to your religious beliefs, are people, such as AaronB, who are involved in keeping the Israeli state a going concern, considered apostates or heretics?

That is a good question but not one that readily lends itself to a simple, easy or brief answer. The shortest answer would be: Not necessarily, and certainly not in all cases. With the caveat that to do the question justice would require far more time and effort than I am able or inclined to muster at the moment, I shall attempt to elaborate and elucidate somewhat.

My guess is that that’s the best way to convince Ron that it would be worth his while to appoint a moderator.

Maybe, but I don’t believe he cares about stuff like that. He just wanted to get us off the generic open thread in order to reduce moderation time.

Unfortunately I think that’s the case. I don’t think he’d be interested in appointing a successor to AE unless that person was prepared to run the AE blog as a regular Unz Review blog with lengthy articles and all the work that that would entail.

Barbarella — Utopia or Dystopia?

You make the call.

Any world which contains a young Jane Fonda (before she had her sense of fun surgically removed) wearing sexy skimpy outfits and doing strip-teases sure looks like Utopia to me.

But “globohomo” is entirely an American thing. It’s an American invention. It wasn’t imposed on America from outside. Globohomo is as American as baseball or Mom’s apple pie. Only American culture could have produced globohomo. It’s the kind of thing you can only get when you combine American Protestantism, American Exceptionalism and American liberalism.

This is mistaken. Where in Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Emerson, Theroux, Melville or Hawthorne is globohomo? And if you do think it stems from those Exceptional Protestant American Liberals, why did it not manifest until the late 20th Century, after the US ceased being so exceptional, Protestant and (classically) liberal? When was the election where the US voted for globohomo? It never happened because globohomo has no organic constituency. Australia has Protestantism, Liberalism and Exceptionalism. Why doesn’t Australia grow globohomo if those are the ingredients?

To be fair, you can find the occasional bluestocking, like Hillary Clinton, who claims to be exceptional, Protestant and liberal and who promotes globohomo. But if the least popular living US politician is your basis for what is “American”, the basis of your argument fails.

And to be sure, the Clinton-, Obama-, and Biden-enabled globohomists are hard at work creating and importing a constituency and retconning a rationalization for globohomo, so maybe a day will come when globohomo really will be the majority position, but if so, by then this will no longer be America.

This is mistaken. Where in Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Emerson, Theroux, Melville or Hawthorne is globohomo? And if you do think it stems from those Exceptional Protestant American Liberals, why did it not manifest until the late 20th Century, after the US ceased being so exceptional, Protestant and (classically) liberal?

Globohomo evolved in the US, beginning in the 1960s.

Ideologies evolve. Look at modern liberals. They’re not your grandfather’s liberals. American liberalism was becoming something quite different from classical liberalism by the late 60s. Up until that time American liberalism was quite benign and even in some ways admirable (if often misguided).

The distinctive American brand of Protestantism permeates American culture. Liberals absorbed a lot of aspects of American Protestantism without being conscious of it. They absorbed an obsession with sin, an obsession with sex, a messianic fervour. When combined with the new strand of American liberalism the result was a potent and dangerous brew.

An obsession with sin is a very nasty thing when it becomes separated from other Christian concepts such as forgiveness and redemption. Secularised Puritanism is infinitely worse than religious Puritanism.

And American Exceptionalism is something that has just grown and grown. It’s stronger today than ever before. WW2 and the Cold War kicked American Exceptionalism into overdrive where it’s been ever since. When you add that to the mix you get an even more dangerous brew.

The current brand of Exceptionalist, Protestant-influenced liberalism is relatively new. Even 1950s American liberals would be horrified by it.

I want to emphasise that up until the 1990s America really was a nation to be envied and admired. What remains of the old America is still worthy of admiration. But globohomo could not have evolved anywhere else but America because the necessary ingredients were not to be found anywhere else.

Australia has Protestantism, Liberalism and Exceptionalism. Why doesn’t Australia grow globohomo if those are the ingredients?

Australian Protestantism has nothing in common with American Protestantism. It has different roots. There has never been such a thing as Australian Exceptionalism. It has never occurred to any Australian at any time that Australian cultural values should be imposed on anyone else. And we had a different kind of liberalism as well. Much less right-wing than the American variant. Much less of a love affair with capitalism and free markets. And it had a paternalistic streak. And Australian liberalism has never had any trace of messianic fervour.

the comment Marty had made reporting that dfordoom’s blog was blocked by FedEx.

This might be an opportune moment for me to insert a rant about censorship.

There are two ways that censorship can be enforced. I can be done directly by the government. Or there’s the American system under which private corporations act as the censors. It is absolutely critical to understand that both these systems are systems of censorship, and that censorship by private corporations make just as much of a mockery of the First Amendment as government censorship. Either way you end up not having freedom of speech.

In many ways censorship by private corporations is worse than government censorship, because it means that the person who is being censored has no right of appeal and doesn’t have to be told why he’s being censored. He doesn’t even have to be told that he is being censored.

In Australia books and movies are and always were subject to government censorship. Many books and many movies were banned. But the government had to do it openly, through government instrumentalities which were subject to public scrutiny. Avenues of appeal existed (and were often successful). Government censorship boards had to give reasons for their decisions. There is also the possibility of compromise and negotiation. This happened when Ken Russell’s film The Devils was released uncut in Australia with an R-rating (equivalent to an American X-rating) on the condition that all advertising for the film had to carry a special warning.

When the Australian Government censored Andrew Bolt on political grounds they had to do it openly and he had avenues of appeal.

Governments can be subjected to pressure when they behave oppressively. It is possible to fight back.

I’m not drawing any distinction here between censorship of sexual material and political censorship because in practice both work the same way.

It’s also worth pointing out that distinctions between censorship of sexual material and political censorship are often not clear-cut. The Australian censors subjected The Devils to special attention not because of sexual content (which they could easily have dealt with by making a few very brief cuts) but because of concerns that some people might find the ideas in the film upsetting.

I do understand your point.

I was responding to something I felt was important at the time, but evidently wasn’t something you actually wrote. My apologies.

Thanks for the informative reply. I think that when considering the JQ (an interest of mine), whether one is considered an apostate or a heretic by other Jews is a point to consider.

Regarding AaronB: When one puts personal information out in the comment section it is considered fair game (by me). I appreciate your different view.

Regarding JIE: You felt compelled to inform us that he approved of the Nazi Holocaust. He felt compelled to inform us that he thought you were a chickenhawk. On the surface there appears to be some sort of equivalency there, however, you were informing on a political belief while he was informing on a personal behavior or tendency.

Tracing back to my comment regarding AaronB, you both made comments and I feel free to comment and form my own opinions regarding the both of you. I had already decided that you likely had homosexual inclinations based only on your comments at AE’s blog. I was unaware of the other comments covered in your exchanges with JIE. I have no reason to not believe that you are not trying to deal with the tendency in an honorable way and one which I assume allows you to conform to your religious teachings.

How many will take the time and the patience

Hardly any.

I have even invested a not inconsiderable amount of time drafting various replies. Unfortunately, I have yet to manage to complete any to the point of being ready to post.

Good, I’ll watch for them. Many here are bored by the JQ. I am one of the few who is interested in the subject while not being a Jew-hater or a Defender of the Faith.

Doom, you are obviously down on democracy. What alternative do you envision?

much more interesting and profound work than 1984.

I strongly disagree with this.

Orwellian is unique.

His terms and prescient concepts are highly germane to our current political scene.

BNW was interesting, but basically an often told story of the transformation of replacement elites.

Globohomo evolved in the US, beginning in the 1960s.

Ideologies evolve. Look at modern liberals. They’re not your grandfather’s liberals. American liberalism was becoming something quite different from classical liberalism by the late 60s. Up until that time American liberalism was quite benign and even in some ways admirable (if often misguided).

You are correct that movements change and the correct term for it now is IslamoGloboHomo. It is a scimitar wielded by Muslims against Judeo-Christian values across the globe.

The centers of power for IslamoGloboHomo are in Europe. It is driven by German apostates, with a great deal of assistance from France and Brussels. Immigrants to the U.S., like George IslamoSoros, brought the taint of this movement with them. NGO’s funded by The IslamoSoros do their best to:

‱ Oppose Christianity in Hungary
‱ Oppose Judaism in Israel
‱ Promote Islamic migration to Europe

You do not have to look further than the Muslim rape statistics across Europe to see the threat of sexually deviant Islam when it comes into contact with Christian girls.
____

Part of IslamoGloboHomo is the Muslim practice of Taqiyya (1) deception. Muslims trick Jews and Christians into being “useful idiots” thus disguising & mislabelling their activities. Groups like SPLC are very Muslim. Sadly, you can find far too many easily duped individuals who accuse them of being a Jewish.

Until the Muslim Problem is fixed, IslamoGloboHomo will continue to run rampant.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/taqiyya.aspx

But globohomo could not have evolved anywhere else but America because the necessary ingredients were not to be found anywhere else.

Not really. Globohomo is just the latest iteration of something that has happened many times before. Weimar and the Roaring ’20s were globohomo. Revolutionary France was globohomo. Savonarola’s bonfire was a reaction to Florentine globohomo.

The essential ingredients seem to be these, all of them amounting to a comprehensive denial of reality and the standards applicable thereto.

1. The debasement of money by otherwise insolvent governments trying to hide their indebtedness. When the monetary standard is not upheld it tends to erode every other type of standard, too, resulting in a broad-based miasma of moral hazard.

2. Arbitrary government by politicians who will not enforce the law but rather cling to power by their fingernails through a turnabout of pandering and threats. (What was the Reign of Terror other than “cancel culture” with a guillotine?)

3. Popular disengagement with work and family life (the foundation of these institutions, i.e. property, having been undercut by arbitrary law and arbitrary money), and their replacement by ideological novelties.

Although these things never end well, they do always end, usually by the world convulsing in some sort of catastrophe. This ridiculous age of ours will be followed by a time when standards have returned, but it us who have the thankless task of building the bridge from here to there.

I don’t think it’s the same people pushing those things for the most part, but I do think any woman who is so engrossed in leftist politics that she’d cosplay as a “handmaid” is going to be a sufficiently orthodox leftist that she’ll at least pay lip service to all the Current Year shibboleths.

Globohomo is just the latest iteration of something that has happened many times before. Weimar and the Roaring ’20s were globohomo. Revolutionary France was globohomo. Savonarola’s bonfire was a reaction to Florentine globohomo.

There are many good points in the current back and forth which I’m too busy to address right now, though I’m enjoying the progression.
I agree with your sentiment above to a point, though I would make a bit more of a distinction placing “globohomo” as a more recent, and to doom’s point, a more American export.

All of the examples are of degenerate decadence, a thing which all societies seem to experience eventually. They were however, comparatively isolated to the society in question. The spirit of the French Revolution or Wiemar Germany certainly traveled to an extent, but did not permeate into the mass of the common populace the way globohomo targets even the lowliest prole for ideological submission.

“Globohomo” is much more global in scope because of the cancerous ubiquity of America’s cultural exports and hegemonic global influence. Current communication technologies also make it’s spread much quicker and widespread than would have been possible at any other time.

Oftentimes I hear discussion of whether we are headed for (living in) 1984 or BNW or which is the more pertinent/ accurate vision.

I personally see it as both, not either/or. People largely choose their subjugation now, as in BNW, but if the going gets rougher as far as water, food, or energy scarcity is concerned, things will get more overtly authoritarian quickly. There just isn’t any point in stomping the boot if one doesn’t have to to exert the desired control.

I always preferred 1984 as a work though, read into that what one will!

Current communication technologies also make it’s spread much quicker and widespread than would have been possible at any other time.

This point is certainly correct.

“Globohomo” is much more global in scope because of the cancerous ubiquity of America’s cultural exports and hegemonic global influence.

Europe exported IslamoGloboHomo to America, so you need to go upstream to find the source of the problem. The cancerous ubiquity of Europe’s cultural exports.

For example, The French film “Mignonnes” was made by European Muslims in the hope of making underage girls more available to Muslim men. There was no American involvement until it was translated as “Cuties” and released here.
___

The quick spread is exacerbated by the existence of The United Nations. This body is pushing degenerate global standards at a fantastic rate. America is one of the few nations resisting UN depredations, while the EU supports the corrupt organization and its NGO’s.

PEACE 😇

Doom, you are obviously down on democracy. What alternative do you envision?

I regard democracy the way I regard my car. My car is old and beaten up. There are a few worrying knocking noises. A lot of things no longer work (such as the air con). The bodywork has quite a few dings and the paintwork is in terrible condition. But it’s the only car I’ve got and it’s the only car I’m going to have in the foreseeable future. Obviously a new car would be the ideal solution but since that’s not gonna happen the priority is to keep the car I’ve got running. It will never be pretty and it will always leak oil and make funny noises and the damned air con never will work again. But it runs, after a fashion. It will get me from Point A to Point B.

Democracy is an insane system but we’re stuck with it. It will never work well but it could work a lot better. The first priority is to tackle the institutionalised legal corruption – campaign donations are in fact bribes and when retired politicians get cosy sinecures in the corporate sector or ludicrously inflated speaking fees, all for services rendered, those are bribes too. That kind of corruption needs to be cleaned up but it’s not politically do-able at the moment.

Obviously the power of traditional media oligarchs and social media oligarchs needs to be broken. That’s not politically do-able at the moment either.

Some tinkering could be done to electoral systems but that’s also not politically do-able at the moment.

Globohomo is just the latest iteration of something that has happened many times before. Weimar and the Roaring ’20s were globohomo.

No they weren’t. They were just decadent. The globo part was missing. The missionary zeal was missing. It’s the missionary zeal that is the defining characteristic of globohomo.

Decadence has happened many times. And ideologies driven by missionary zeal have happened before. It’s the combination of the two that is unique, and I’d argue that that is a distinctively American mixture. Decadence has never before been turned into a world-conquering religious faith.

BNW was interesting, but basically an often told story of the transformation of replacement elites.

Brave New World offered two very profound insights. Firstly, you can exercise totalitarianism through material prosperity, drugs and sex and if you do that you don’t need terror. Sure the Romans used Bread and Circuses but their objective was not totalitarian and they were also happy to use terror.

Secondly, you can make people genuinely love totalitarianism. Not pretend to love it, as in 1984, but genuinely love it.

But certainly Orwell came up with some great insights as well. Maybe Orwell understood power more clearly, while Huxley had a better understanding of human nature. I think we’re more likely to end up with BNW.

Thanks, I guess, for the upbeat and encouraging words.

I guess I should have made my opinion clearer. BNW does not have the “heft” and political significance of 1984. BNW would likely have faded away to the dustbin were it not coupled by comparison to 1984. Comparing the significance of the two is comparing apples to oranges, and moving in the direction of comparing apples to rocks.

I actually was posting more in agreement with you than anything and as a general reflection on the topic but I didn’t make that entirely clear.

My apologies for that.

My apologies, but I’m really not seeing that IslamoGloboHomo angle.

Any cultural importation from Islam or Europe is negligible, compared to the flood coming from the U.S.
Also it seems that more Muslims find America to be the degenerate Great Satan and wish to keep to their traditional mores than anything else.
As far as Europe goes it also appears to me that they are brought down by a lack of will to exist after they were broken by the World Wars, combined by drowning their sorrows in acceptance of American style consumerism.

Certainly I’m no fan of the U.N. but I would say that the cultural erosion through Hollywood and other American pop culture is much more corrosive.

Consumer culture is the root of the rot, in my mind. We are called to create and build, not consume like pigs at a trough.

Thanks, I guess, for the upbeat and encouraging words.

Hey, by my standards that was pretty upbeat!

You’ll note that I said that these things are not politically do-able at the moment. Things could change. There’s a lot of disillusionment out there. The problem is that it’s unfocused. That could change as well. Political upheavals can take a long long time to build and then suddenly everything moves incredibly fast. And non-political crises (like COVID) can destabilise what appeared to be a stable system.

Things could change and opportunities could arise.

Things could change and opportunities could arise.

Then we take that night train in from Germany. 🙂

No they weren’t. They were just decadent.

I don’t agree with Intelligent Dasein here, but I also question: does it make sense to call a single decade “decadent”? I’m not so sure, or at least it doesn’t carry quite the same meaning as the terminal decadence we’re caught in now.

I use “decadence” to mean civilizational exhaustion and anomie. Civilization wasn’t exhausted in the 1920s, it was just tired of war, but it was booming on many fronts.

The difference between then and now is a feeling that there is nothing left to explore. Technology has stagnated, and we still have basically all the problems that existed in the 1960s and no new solutions for them on either side. This is the difference from the 1920s — back then, there were new problems and new solutions.

Decadence has never before been turned into a world-conquering religious faith.

Well, what we have is a quasi-religious faith that takes root amid decadence, but I don’t think the faith is spreading the decadence. The former Warsaw Pact countries are still decadent, despite resisting American culture throughout the Cold War and continuing to resist Wokeness to this day.

And I also think a Woke singularity just might offer a temporary path out of decadence, in the sense that Revolutionary France was many things, but it wasn’t decadent. A massive purge or genocide of rightists, a total breakdown of American democracy, a replacement of the US Constitution would actually be signs that decadence had taken a backseat. Continuing gridlock in politics and the slow-but-contested bleed of the culture war and the total evaporation of all social bonds, meanwhile, is pure decadence.

A question for my fellow AE commenters.

Do people, for example David Brooks, not know that they are the enemy? Or, do they know it, and they try to “finesse” their position into one of maintaining influence and power.

Look in Wiki and see if there is an entry called Huxlian.

I personally think that decadence is an appropriate word.
Even during the fall of the Roman Empire their was considerable bleed from one “period” to the next. There was no hard transition when one civilization stopped and another took over. Civilization never becomes fully exhausted, though in the birds eye view of time it’s possible to identify very different eras. These are more of a classification aid though, than something evident to those undergoing those changes.

Events like the French Revolution or Weimar Germany/ Roaring 20’s were significant inflection points even though, as you point out, civilization did not stop outright from full exhaustion. Those events really did mark the end of their respective eras, although I would chose WW1 over the Roaring 20’s as a more accurate analog to the French Revolution. The Roaring 20’s were more like the drunken binge to kick off the beginning of the age of the unmoored consumer.

I somewhat agree with you on the French Revolution’s decadence. The late monarchy which preceded it was more “textbook” decadent. However, the French Revolution didn’t really provide a solution to that decadence and devolved very quickly into it’s own destructive absurdities and obsessions. Similarly, Woke is not flaccid, it is rigid and puritanical. However, it is still an expression of social dissolution which provides no path forward, and therefore still appears eminently decadent to me.

Maybe we should just stop using the term decadent and just say or describe what we mean. Decadent is somewhat a buzzword. Everyone knows it is bad stuff, but no one seems to know exactly why, or exactly what is contained within the word.

Globohomo evolved in the US, beginning in the 1960s.

Hmm, any particular 1960s subculture in the US? Maybe a subculture that wasn’t too prominent from 1776-1959? Unlike Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism.

Is Hollywood, one of the main engines of globohomo export, dominated by American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalists too?

Can you name any of the people who have been subjecting the planet to globohomo cultural imperialism since the 1960s?

Rather than indulging in vague generalities without any actual evidence, why not consider what actual people said and did. For example, these American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalists said the following:

George Washington: “Avoid foreign entanglements”

John Quincy Adams: “America… goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

etc.

Somehow, it is hard to find the making of globohomo in the words of these men from the zenith of American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism. In fact, they are entirely the opposite. Yet, for some reason you insist we ignore actual evidence in favor of a theory based on … what exactly? Jane Fonda?

I think David Brooks probably just thinks he’s right. He isn’t trying to be anyone’s enemy or finesse an opinion. He just tries to do objective analysis.

And the thing is, he actually has a track record of being incredibly right over the years, at least concerning cultural trends. He is no kind of political force or ally (and that’s why everyone hates him), but as an analyst he has been remarkably successful.

I think the one explains the other.

Any cultural importation from Islam or Europe is negligible, compared to the flood coming from the U.S.

Yep. American cultural power is overwhelming and simply crushes everything in its path.

There’s also the fact that the producers of pop culture outside the US have had to to conform to American cultural values in order to access the vast American market. If you’re making a movie in France or Britain or Australia and you want to to get released in the US you have no choice other than to conform to globohomo.

As far as Europe goes it also appears to me that they are brought down by a lack of will to exist after they were broken by the World Wars, combined by drowning their sorrows in acceptance of American style consumerism.

Yes, I agree. WW2 discredited the idea of European civilisation in European eyes. The Europeans adopted America as their model.

Consumer culture is the root of the rot, in my mind. We are called to create and build, not consume like pigs at a trough.

Yes. I think that the massive increase in material standards of living over the past century was a good thing but the problem was that consumption became an end in itself. It’s nice to have consumer goods but you don’t need to replace them anywhere near as often as most people do. And a lot of consumer goods are things people don’t need at all. They’re just an excuse for spending money. They’re just retail therapy.

but I also question: does it make sense to call a single decade “decadent”? I’m not so sure, or at least it doesn’t carry quite the same meaning as the terminal decadence we’re caught in now.

I use “decadence” to mean civilizational exhaustion and anomie.

Good point. Most people associate decadence with hedonism in genera and sexual licentiousness in particular but your definition is probably more correct and more useful.

Most periods of “decadence” were nothing more than periodic swings in the moral pendulum. In England you had the extreme moral repression of the Commonwealth in the 1650s followed by a dramatic swing towards licentiousness in the Restoration period. The 19th century began with the free-wheeling hedonism of the Regency period (gambling, drinking and whoring) then there was a dramatic moral backlash in the mid-Victorian period. The Decadence of the 1890s was a natural reaction against the moral repressiveness of the previous few decades.

Weimar/The Roaring 20s was a pretty natural reaction to the horrors of the First Word War. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll (or in this case jazz rather than rock’n’roll) understandably had a lot of appeal. By the 40s and 50s we were back to being straitlaced again. The Sexual Revolution was (I would argue) a fairly normal swing of the pendulum back the other way.

But then a curious thing happened. The pendulum just kept on swinging towards licentiousness and hedonism. The expected moral backlash against the Sexual Revolution and the Drug Culture didn’t really happen.

Or perhaps it did. But instead of the normal moral backlash we got Political Correctness and Wokeism. Both of which are very moralistic in their own perverted ways. And both of which are essentially weird mutated forms of Puritanism.

The difference between then and now is a feeling that there is nothing left to explore. Technology has stagnated, and we still have basically all the problems that existed in the 1960s and no new solutions for them on either side. This is the difference from the 1920s — back then, there were new problems and new solutions.

Yes.

Look in Wiki and see if there is an entry called Huxlian.

Now we’re talking about influence. Orwell has certainly been much more influential.

I read a volume of Orwell’s essays recently and was amazed at the shallowness and wrong-headedness of his ideas. There are occasional flashes of brilliant insight but mostly they’re complete nonsense. Orwell’s own political views were stunningly naĂŻve. The man believed in democracy. What can you do with such a person?

The man believed in democracy. What can you do with such a person?

I suppose that it’s easy to be down on democracy since it has devolved into such a degenerate and dysfunctional system at this point. I’m certainly as guilty of it as anyone else.

On reflection though I’m not sure it’s completely warranted or entirely the fault of democracy per-se. All governments are an imperfect compromise in one way or another, and all subject to their own distortions from their ideal form. On balance, I’m not sure that democratic systems are inherently worse than any of the other alternatives out there.

Do you have an ideal government that you would prefer in some magic world where we are given the choice?
For myself I’ve always thought that small tribal systems (essentially pre-government) have substantial appeal. They are relatively responsive to the actual needs of the group and an incompetent chief is relatively easy to depose. Barring that, smaller scale democracies where direct democracy is actually possible for a select citizenry seem quite reasonable. You’ll notice I tend toward smaller systems as a personal preference.

Thinking of when Orwell was alive and the strength of totalitarian regimes, it’s rather understandable to me that he would be bullish on democracy by comparison.
I haven’t read Orwell’s essays so I’m just shooting from the hip there. I’ll have to look them up and give them a try sometime.

Somehow, it is hard to find the making of globohomo in the words of these men from the zenith of American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism. In fact, they are entirely the opposite.

Which is why I made it quite clear that globohomo is a modern development. It’s maybe half a century old at most. But it has its roots in the past. Every new ideological variant has its roots in the past. In the case of the US there were distinctive cultural traditions that didn’t exist anywhere else in quite the same form. Those cultural traditions, over the course of centuries, evolved in ways that eventually brought globohomo to birth. That wasn’t George Washington’s fault.

I understand that as an American you love America and you find it very disturbing to accept the idea that America has become an incredibly destructive force for evil.

But I have never claimed that the US was always a destructive force for evil. That’s a tragic modern development.

And I don’t think the tragic change would have happened without WW2 and the Cold War. Those events changed American liberalism. American liberalism became obsessed with global moral crusades and American liberals became obsessed with the idea that the mere existence of alternative forms of government or alternative ideological beliefs or cultural values was an existential threat to American liberalism. They came to believe that if the US did not impose its values on the whole world then either the commies or the Nazis would take over America. American liberals became both paranoid and hyper-aggressive and they developed that missionary zeal that we now know all too well.

I don’t know why you imagine I think George Washington was to blame.

He just tries to do objective analysis.

Is this a good example?

As I say, there are (at least) two elements to wokeness. One focuses on concrete benefits for the disadvantaged — reparations, more diverse hiring, more equitable housing and economic policies. The other instigates savage word wars among the highly advantaged. If we can have more of the former and less of the latter, we’ll all be better off.

On reflection though I’m not sure it’s completely warranted or entirely the fault of democracy per-se.

I will repeat a comment that I have made before in case I was perceived to be trolling or sarcastic (not that I ever do that). I have come to question whether we have the ability to create and maintain a Democracy. (Except for small scale town council meetings). In other words, such an ability may be above the pay grade of humans.

They came to believe that if the US did not impose its values on the whole world then either the commies or the Nazis would take over America.

Had it not been for the U. S., the commies or the Nazis would have taken over the world.

Whose values would you have us impose? Is it even possible to try and impose values other than one’s own?

I made it quite clear that globohomo is a modern development.

Yes, I agreed it is a more recent thing than America.

But it has its roots in the past.

Ya see, now yer sayin’ two things at once. Either it’s recent or it’s old. It can’t change depending on which is a more convenient argument at the moment. This is probably some kind of motte-and-bailey thing.

In the case of the US there were distinctive cultural traditions that didn’t exist anywhere else in quite the same form. Those cultural traditions, over the course of centuries, evolved in ways that eventually brought globohomo to birth.

Except that those cultural traditions were antithetical to globohomo. I suppose it is possible that roots could spawn an antithetical flower, i.e., that anti-globohomo could spawn globohomo, but that’s not how things generally go. Orchid roots don’t generally spawn edelweiss flowers. As mentioned, if you can show some specific who/what/when/how examples of this actually happening rather than just airily proclaiming it as an axiom, it would make this line of argument more persuasive.

I understand that as an American you love America and you find it very disturbing to accept the idea that America has become an incredibly destructive force for evil.

No, I grew up around lefties. All my life I’ve been hearing the idea that America is evil. I’m long past being disturbed. My objection is not emotional; it is logical: the logic of which I’ve already laid out in these last comments.

And I don’t think the tragic change would have happened without WW2 and the Cold War.

You could argue it goes back a little further: to WWI when the Wilson administration waged a long, vigorous and dishonest campaign to get the US involved in that disgraceful war. Unfortunately for the globalists, Americans snapped back to their natural isolationism immediately afterwards, much to Franklin Roosevelt’s fury when he wanted to get the US embroiled in the new World War a couple of decades later. But the aspect relevant here to the original question (is woke globohomo the result of American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism or of something else) is that all these globalist involvements: WWI, WWII, the Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War, were the work of Democrat administrations, and to the extent they were opposed politically, they were opposed by Republicans. In the 20th century, the Republican party was the party of American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism, while the Democrat party was the party of ethnic anti-Protestant Internationalism. So the argument that globohomo was spawned by American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism sounds good, until you look at the actual evidence, which happens to run entirely against it.

I do understand that from the other side of the earth, these nuances may be less apparent, which is why I am spelling them out, since foreigners tend to conflate things that happen to America with things that are American.

Good argument.

On reflection though I’m not sure it’s completely warranted or entirely the fault of democracy per-se. All governments are an imperfect compromise in one way or another, and all subject to their own distortions from their ideal form. On balance, I’m not sure that democratic systems are inherently worse than any of the other alternatives out there.

To continue with my car analogy. My car is old and beat-up but if I had the money and the willingness to spend that money it could be turned into a reasonably reliable and satisfactory means of transportation. I can’t turn it into a Porsche and it will never be a luxury prestige car but it could be made to run a whole lot better.

Democracy is like that. It will never be a great system, it will never be anywhere near perfect, it will never live up to the insanely high hopes people once had of it, but it could be made to work a whole lot better. And it’s what we’ve got. If we ditch it we might regret it.

Do you have an ideal government that you would prefer in some magic world where we are given the choice?

I’m sceptical of perfect governments and perfect worlds.

For myself I’ve always thought that small tribal systems (essentially pre-government) have substantial appeal. They are relatively responsive to the actual needs of the group and an incompetent chief is relatively easy to depose. Barring that, smaller scale democracies where direct democracy is actually possible for a select citizenry seem quite reasonable. You’ll notice I tend toward smaller systems as a personal preference.

Direct democracy would have its dangers. Most people are not that interested in government. Direct democracy could end up being dominated by small highly motivated cliques. And direct decision-making by the citizenry has upsides and downsides. The citizens can too easily be manipulated by emotion.

They came to believe that if the US did not impose its values on the whole world then either the commies or the Nazis would take over America.

Had it not been for the U. S., the commies or the Nazis would have taken over the world.

You’ve misunderstood my point a little (or more likely I didn’t express myself very well). What I meant was that American liberals in the 1950s still saw Nazis as a threat. They still see Nazis as a threat today. Seeing Nazis as a threat in the early 1940s was perfectly rational. Seeing them as a threat after 1945 was and is deluded.

The commie threat was overblown. The US was never in the slightest danger.

My real point was that, whether you believe their fears were justified or not, the fact is that American liberals decided to launch the first global culture war. They decided that their war against communism would be to a large extent a cultural war. That was something that hadn’t really happened since the Thirty Years War. And a culture war is not quite the same thing as a religious war, although it’s similar.

Whose values would you have us impose? Is it even possible to try and impose values other than one’s own?

Normal healthy countries don’t try to impose their values on others. Wanting to impose one’s values on others is a sign of madness, in both countries and individuals.

Ya see, now yer sayin’ two things at once. Either it’s recent or it’s old.

No I’m not saying two things at once.

New ideologies (or even new religions) don’t magically and instantaneously appear out of thin air. Ideologies are built on the foundations of earlier ideologies and ideologies change and mutate. You don’t just create an ideology like globohomo from scratch. New ideologies contain elements from earlier ideologies. And ideologies draw on cultural traditions, and cultural traditions evolve over time.

If globohomo is not distinctively American then how do you explain the observed fact that it arose in the US and has been imposed on the world by the US?

If globohomo is not distinctively American then how do you explain the observed fact that it arose in the US and has been imposed on the world by the US?

The observation is imprecise. Deconstructionism, Freudianism, and other forerunners of wokeness did not arise in the US. To the extent that Americans are aware of woke crap, they generally oppose it. US media outlets pushing this stuff are not typically owned by heritage Americans. Foreign media outlets pushing this stuff are not typically owned by Americans, or often even by foreigners whose heritage is native to those countries, either. A large portion of northern European media that pushes globohomo is owned by the non-American Bonnier family, for instance.

To be sure, an increasing number of US institutions have been converged into the globohomo mission, but this is not organic, this is imposed top-down by infiltrator cliques, the US military being the most recent prominent example. Neither the soldiery nor the civilian population who provides recruits asked for the military to go globohomo. This was entirely imposed by a small cadre of political actors, against the wishes of the people they were imposing it on, the same as in any other country.

Now since I’ve answered your question, maybe you’ll answer the questions I’ve been posing: if globohomo is American Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism…

‱ Why did globohomo only manifest in the US long after the US ceased being so exceptional, Protestant and (classically) liberal?

‱ How can globohomo be “American” when globohomo platform has never won a American election mandate?

‱ Why is the whole history of US globohomo foreign policy dominated by the anti-Protestant ethnic party, and why was it opposed by the Protestant exceptionalist party?

‱ What are the names of the mysterious Elders of Protestant Liberal Exceptionalism who are imposing globohomo everywhere?

‱ Why is it that when actual agents of globohomo are identified, they turn out to be distinctly un-Protestant and with typically shallow roots in America?

not seeing that IslamoGloboHomo angle. … Any cultural importation from … Europe is negligible, compared to the flood coming from the U.S.

The Elites are organized and centered in Europe. The #1 IslamoGloboHomo event each year is the World Economic Forum held in Davos Switzerland.

I do see your point. SJW Elites move freely between the U.S. and Europe. While the leadership is headquartered in Europe, much of the execution is done in the U.S. The UN draws a huge number of IslamoGloboHomo NGO’s to NYC.

Muslims find America to be the degenerate Great Satan and wish to keep to their traditional mores than anything else.

The #1 Muslim traditional more is Jihad against Infidels, including Christians. You can see IslamoGloboHomo in Europe targeting traditional Christian values in Hungary. (1) (2)

Hungary’s new law, which enacted a variety of anti-abuse and anti-pedophile laws, also banned LGBT content or content that promotes children changing their gender from being shown to children under 18. The law has been criticized by a number of EU countries.

“The liberal mainstream has launched an unscrupulous fake news campaign against Hungary because we have made it clear that parents have the exclusive right to educate their children about their sexual orientation. But no matter what they say about us, we won’t let go of it! Get your hands off our children!” SzijjĂĄrtĂł wrote

Target: The child protection law construed by liberals as homophobic, von der Leyen sees it as discriminatory

The debate is about the fact that Hungarian law discriminates against a minority, which is prohibited by the EU Treaty.”. The EC president plans to send an official letter of formal notice to Hungary for violating the protection of minorities, which is the first step in an infringement procedure.

This is not the first time that the Elite EU leaders of IslamoGloboHomo have targeted Christians. They also tried to deliberately endanger Christian children In Hungary and Poland with mandatory transfers of Muslim Rape-ugees.

Mutti Merkel invited & welcomed millions of faux refugee Muslims to Europe. No one rational can blame the U.S. for her leadership of the IslamoGloboHomo movement.

PEACE 😇
_________

(1) https://rmx.news/article/article/hungary-s-child-protection-law-has-its-foreign-supporters

(2) https://rmx.news/article/article/european-commission-to-launch-infringement-procedure-against-hungary

In the recent Batley & Spen by-election in England, the Labour Party, an organisation that spends more time kneeling to BLM than talking to workers, ended up winning, by loudly proclaiming their support for the Muslim sides in the Kashmir and Palestine conflicts.

One leaflet even sought to persuade voters against the Conservatives by showing Boris Johnson shaking Narendra Modi’s hand.

The constituency, despite being rural and in Yorkshire, has a lot of Muslims in it and these were the issues that they said they cared about most.

This coalition is odd, especially given the culture clash which preceded the election at a local school, where a secular teacher has been forced into hiding after showing a cartoon of Mohammed.

It seems that Muslims voters are most interested in the advances of Muslims worldwide, and are happy to ally with progressives as long as progressives support Muslims elsewhere and keep progressivism away from Muslims too. Progressives also seem to like this deal.

That the winning Labour candidate is a white lesbian did not stop her; although it did persuade one excitable Muslim activist to talk over her on the street.

It is the Submission coalition. Muslims ask for education and immigration; while progressives get everything else.

I don’t believe in your theory, but this is a real electoral force in much of Western Europe. It isn’t that strong yet, but it is getting stronger.

You can also see it in how progressives go apoplectic over Weinstein, Cosby or Trump, but studiously ignored tens of thousands of white underage girls being abused by Muslims for years. Odd.

Democracy is like that. It will never be a great system, it will never be anywhere near perfect, it will never live up to the insanely high hopes people once had of it, but it could be made to work a whole lot better. And it’s what we’ve got. If we ditch it we might regret it.

I can fully agree with that sentiment. As I said, I think that all governments are imperfect forms subject to their own downsides. The worship of democracy and the vilification of all alternative forms of government in most of our modern discourse is just plain silly.

My question about your preference in government wasn’t intended to sound snarky, though I can see how it may have come across that way. If so, you have my apologies. I am actually curious though what form of government you would prefer if given the choice. As you say, perfect systems for perfect worlds will never exist, and utopianism is a seductive but dangerous trap, but I think it would put the discussion into further perspective if you stated your positive preferences.

To your points on direct democracy, I acknowledge that all these potential downsides are possible. However, given a relatively small populace (since larger populations make direct democracy technically unfeasible anyhow) it becomes at least harder to obscure a people’s concrete interests. It’s much easier to connect the causal dots between policy and outcomes in a small state.
I would also advocate the idea of limiting the vote as was done in early America or Athens. Voters should have a real stake in the consequences of their vote or it becomes a pure exercise in demagoguery and rabble manipulation.

As a practical matter, I’m in agreement with your car analogy. I grudgingly accept what we have, push a bit to make it more amenable where I can, but mostly ignore it as much as possible to focus on the actual society I can influence in my relationships with my neighbors and community. That to me seems the best tactical choice.

My question about your preference in government wasn’t intended to sound snarky, though I can see how it may have come across that way.

I didn’t take it as snarky at all.

I would also advocate the idea of limiting the vote as was done in early America or Athens. Voters should have a real stake in the consequences of their vote or it becomes a pure exercise in demagoguery and rabble manipulation.

If you’re going to have democracy you have to have universal adult suffrage. Limiting the vote would be seen as naked tyranny – the rich would have full political rights while the poor would have none. No matter what method you used to limit the vote (educational qualifications, home ownership, whatever) it would in practice come down to stripping the non-rich of all political rights. It would not only be seen as naked tyranny, it would be naked tyranny.

Either everybody votes or no-one does.

I am actually curious though what form of government you would prefer if given the choice.

I’d favour monarchy, but it would have to be a real monarchy. Constitutional monarchy is just a variant of democracy so it doesn’t count as an alternative. Constitutional monarchy in theory has advantages over a republican democracy but in practice the results haven’t been inspiring.

The big advantage of monarchy is that a monarch has an overwhelming incentive not to trash the country because if he does so his heirs will inherit the mess. And monarchy provides the ideal focus for national loyalty. Monarchy is also inherently less oppressive than other systems. As long as you’re loyal to the King you’re a good citizen. In a monarchy there’s no need to impose ideological uniformity. The problem with Proposition Nations is that loyalty ends up being defined as loyalty to the current ideological fad.

Also a king doesn’t represent any one social class because he’s above and apart from all social classes.

Monarchy has lots of problems but it might be the least worst system. Maybe. I’m not all that confident.

If you value freedom, if you like the idea of the government basically leaving you alone, then monarchy is probably the best choice in the long term.

Doom, you are obviously down on democracy.

The biggest problem of all with democracy is that it is inherently oppressive. In a democracy every single thing will eventually become politicised. Which means that everything is the government’s business. So you end up with the government telling you what you should eat, what you’re allowed to say and what you’re allowed to think. The government will tell you what things you’re allowed to do in the bedroom, and with whom.

You will end up being told what movies you should watch and what movies you’re not allowed to watch, what books you should watch read and what books you’re not allowed to read. They may not do this directly. They may simply allow private corporations to do it. The end result is the same. What movies you want to watch and what books you want to read become political issues.

You’ll end up being told where you’re allowed to drive your car. Because that’s a political issue.

You’ll be told if you’re allowed to turn the air con on or not, because that’s a political issue. You’ll be told whether you’re allowed to walk your dog on the beach or not because that’s a political issue.

You’ll even be told whether you’re allowed to ask a woman if she’d like to have a cup of coffee with you, because that’s a political issue. And you’ll be told that you have to ask men in frocks to have a cup of coffee with you, because that’s a political issue.

And I’m not talking about America or about Wokeness. I think that totalitarian oppressiveness is just the natural end point of democracy. The exact form that the totalitarianism will take will vary from country to country. So don’t take this as an anti-American comment.

It’s interesting to look at 19th century Britain. At the beginning of the 19th century Britain was totally undemocratic. And the government pretty much allowed people to do whatever they wanted. As Britain became more democratic the government became more and more intrusive. The government became more and more of a moral policeman.

Democracy and freedom do not go together.

I can see these points in favor of monarchy and against democracy, and I like to think they might be true. But then I wonder, isn’t North Korea a hereditary monarchy for all intents and purposes? The difference, I suppose, is that its rulers still feel they require an ideology to rule. Though realistically I think any modern monarch that hopes to rule a former democracy is going to require an ideology.

As for a constitutional monarchy, I think two things can be said on its behalf. First, there’s a lot to be said for a system of government where the monarch shares power with a legislature. The monarch provides a check against democratic madness, while the legislature provides a means of popular expression. You could also put Iran in a similar category. The main fault of these systems would seem to be that, at least in the European case, the legislature always wins in the end.

But I do think that, in times of political crisis, it’s better to have a monarch, even an impotent monarch, than not. At worst, he’ll make the situation no worse, and at best, he can be a force for good. In moments when men aren’t sure who to follow, the guy that they’ve theoretically all sworn loyalty to can make a pretty good case. And most likely, he’ll be a relatively normal guy deep down and not an ambitious sociopath or a fanatical ideologue, which is the best a nation can hope for in those moments.

The most famous example is Italy’s King removing Mussolini. But I wonder if a Russian Constitutional Monarchy would have been better insulated against a far-left coup than the brief Russian Republic of 1917 turned out to be. I also wonder what the role of the Kaiser might have been in the 1930s if the Weimar Republic had been the Weimar Constitutional Monarchy.

Of course, a case can also probably be made that the longer the monarchy is powerless, the more degenerate it becomes, the less likely the monarch will be of any use in a crisis. But I still don’t know that it could do any harm. Is there a single example of a good thing that has been prevented by a constitutional monarch, or a new evil that has been unleashed by one?

I’ll miss this blog. A.E. always came up with interesting topics. I just had a bad ten days. Ten days ago I got sick and was feeling short of breath so I went into a MedCheck. A doctor there said my oxygen was really low so he was calling an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I was in the hospital five days. I had caught Covid. In the morning I would get dexamethasone, a steroid to reduce lung inflammation, and at night they gave me remdesivir, which lowers the viral load. I googled this combination later and it was what Trump got when he had Covid. At the end of five days my physician there came in and said my inflammation levels had dropped and I looked better so I could go home.

I hadn’t got any of the vaccines for it yet. I was worried about the long term effects of the vaccines since they were rushed through testing and I thought if I got Covid it might not be too bad. I got it worse than I thought I would. They said they don’t know why some people get it worse than others. I think, though, that if I had been 34 instead of 64 it wouldn’t have been as bad. I now think anyone over 60 like me should get vaccinated because the dangers of the disease start increasing as you get older.

I don’t think it should be made mandatory, though, and younger people could go without getting vaccinated. We should have always focused on protecting older people during this epidemic instead of the economically destructive mass lockdowns and all the money printing that followed that is going to lead to large scale inflation. The vaccines are available now to everyone and older people should be encouraged to get them and that will keep deaths down from now on.

Yeah, let’em eat cake.

The government became more and more of a moral policeman.

Just a short note, as I have to go celebrate Independence Day!

As conservatives have pointed out, the government has slowly absorbed all power to itself. It’s really a fascist state now. People like Putman and Murray have pointed to the collapse of other institutions in society. The little platoons are kaput.

The effect of this is that the elites no longer have other groups, institutions, organizations, religions, etc. which they can coopt or utilize to facilitate control. They are absolutely completely dependent upon the power of government and this has produced things like woke capital. They have bet, without hedging, (which is a critical and unusual mistake on their part) on the passing of white America and civic nationalism.

This is also the reason the elites are desperate to control the media. The nature of open media like the internet and utubes can present problems for them.

The elites are breaking for pure political control and power over principles, see R. B Ginsburg as opposed to Justice Brennan.

Wishing America a great Independence Day!

Don’t tread on me you are messing up my TV schedule.

How/where do you think you caught it?

the government has slowly absorbed all power to itself. It’s really a fascist state now. People like Putman and Murray have pointed to the collapse of other institutions in society. The little platoons are kaput.

To what extent do you think this is a result of the Federal government having, in effect, infinite funding via the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency? After all, when one actor has infinite money, it is natural for it to buy, bribe, and influence every obstacle it encounters. So in any situation where one party has infinite funding, in the long run that party will have its financial fingers in everything else, except the extremely rare group/person who is above the lure of money.

One might observe that non-US dollar democracies also have minutely micromanaging governments even without having the global reserve currency, but I think that in practice all the major central banks “coordinate” policy so that no one gets too far out ahead (or behind) in the devaluation game, which means that in effect, every big government is printing money at about the same rate. Some may want it more than others at any given moment, but that’s what those central banking confabs are for figuring out.

Anyhow the main question is does democracy inevitably slide into totalitarianism, as observed in Book Four Chapter VI of de Tocqueville* (he uses the word “despotism”, though he concedes it’s not quite accurate), or is the descent caused by, or at least made more rapid and more poisonous, by the agency of free money for the governing class?

It seems to me that monarchy can be the very best of systems if one has a good king and the very worst of systems if one has a bad king. History seems to bear this out with some monarchs whose characters either destroyed or edified their countries.

To go back to our favorite bugbear of technology, part of the reason that something like the medieval monarchy was relatively limited in it’s tyranny was the slowness of communication and transportation combined with the counterweight of the lesser nobility. These effectively made the kings powers often more notional than actual. Checks and balances such as the nobility are critical in formulating any government and I also wonder if monarchy would too easily turn into pure despotism given the powers of modern communication/ surveillance technology. It’s an interesting line of thought anyhow to imagine how the modern age might pervert archaic forms if they were resurrected.

It occurs to me that this is actually the framework of the Dune series by Frank Herbert. It imagines a future that has largely abandoned democratic forms in favor of a neo-aristocracy. The Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit provide counterbalancing forces to the Houses of the Landsraad. The reign of Leto II provides a kind of meditation on the Platonic unattainable ideal of the philosopher king as well as perhaps an picture of how prescience (if we choose to use that as a stand-in for technological omniscience) shapes even a benevolent monarch.
I thought that Dune’s vision of the future was arresting in it’s departures from many typical science fiction conventions. Have you read the series or had any thoughts on that?

The big advantage of monarchy is that a monarch has an overwhelming incentive not to trash the country because if he does so his heirs will inherit the mess.

I don’t think I can agree with that point since the same point could theoretically made for democracy if that term is substituted for monarchy. There seem to have been plenty of historical examples of monarchs trashing their countries through pride, stubbornness, venality or any number of other personal failings. It doesn’t seem to me that any governmental form can be immune to the inherent idiocies of humanity. Again, any government that focuses on a single individual is likely to reflect that person’s character for good or bad.

I would tend to agree with your point not just with democracy but most any human institutions. Pretty much all systems will become corrupt and break down because of human’s imperfect nature.
My only additional thoughts are that modern technology makes this process much quicker than in the past and the unmanageably large scale of government makes it much harder to address or reform the process.

But then I wonder, isn’t North Korea a hereditary monarchy for all intents and purposes? The difference, I suppose, is that its rulers still feel they require an ideology to rule.

North Korea seems to be an interesting hybrid. They have a lot of the advantages of monarchy. Their system has been very stable. But a true monarchy has to be essentially non-ideological. Of course it’s possible that North Korea will evolve into a true monarchy.

China is another weird hybrid system. It’s not monarchy, it’s not a dictatorship in the classic sense, it’s not particularly ideological (I’d say that the ideology of the CCP is pragmatism), it’s not free-market capitalism. It’s a system all its own.

But I do think that, in times of political crisis, it’s better to have a monarch, even an impotent monarch, than not. At worst, he’ll make the situation no worse, and at best, he can be a force for good. In moments when men aren’t sure who to follow, the guy that they’ve theoretically all sworn loyalty to can make a pretty good case.

Existing constitutional monarchies don’t work because even though in theory the monarch has certain powers, in practice he has none at all. At the very least a monarch has to have the real effective power to dismiss a prime minister and to dissolve parliament entirely on his own initiative. In practice he’ll do this very seldom (if he did you’d have chaos and the one thing monarchs do not want is political chaos), but he has to be able to do it. And he has to have the actual effective power to veto legislation. Again he won’t do it very often, but he has to have the recognised power to do so.

Also, what I’ve read of the Bismarckian system suggests that it would be worth taking a closer look at.

As conservatives have pointed out, the government has slowly absorbed all power to itself. It’s really a fascist state now.

I agree totally.

Kind of changing the subject slightly, we’re also moving towards a more rigidly class-based society. In most cases ideological positions are just a smokescreen for class warfare. Support for things like LGBTwhatever and Wokeism are largely class markers.

So we have a combination of pure power politics and class politics.

The ideologies are important insofar as they provide the necessary smokescreen. It’s still worth attacking the ideologies, but only as a means of indirectly attacking the real agendas of the elites.

Have good Fourth of July!

Anyhow the main question is does democracy inevitably slide into totalitarianism, as observed in Book Four Chapter VI of de Tocqueville* (he uses the word “despotism”, though he concedes it’s not quite accurate), or is the descent caused by, or at least made more rapid and more poisonous, by the agency of free money for the governing class?

I think it’s inevitable that democracy will slide into totalitarianism as long as several other factors are present – large populations (which result in large impersonal bureaucracies), mass education and mass media. Mass media is a major factor.

But obviously a supply of free money allows the regime to provide the masses with Bread and Circuses. That allows a Huxleyan situation to develop, where the population welcomes totalitarianism.

To what extent do you think this is a result of the Federal government having, in effect, infinite funding via the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency? After all, when one actor has infinite money, it is natural for it to buy, bribe, and influence every obstacle it encounters.

SJW Globalism would be just as bad in a hard money system. Some examples:

-1- Unfair trade deals that send U.S. jobs overseas receive a budget score as “free” or “positive” even though they are long term destructive.
-2- Funds spent on schools can be used to educate or indoctrinate. Anti-American teachers paid in gold would still be corrupt.
-3- Defunding law enforcement in places like Portland and Minneapolis would ” save” hard currency in the budget.

Just to be clear, I am not holding up the current Fed as a paragon of virtue. However, the Evil DNC Elites would use gold to deploy their Fascist Storm Troopers of Antifa if fiat USD was unavailable.

PEACE 😇

How/where do you think you caught it?

I didn’t get Covid at work. I do accounting work for the military and they shut our building down 14 months ago and we have been teleworking from home since then. I didn’t get it from friends or family. I have a couple old college friends I socialize with but they were vaccinated and I didn’t see them for a long period of time until they got vaccinated. I have a niece and sister up in Noblesville, a town about 20 miles north of Indianapolis where I live, but I last saw them two months ago.

So I must have got it from a random stranger while I was out going around. I live in Indianapolis, a big liberal Democrat city which had very strict restrictions about mask wearing, socially distancing and so on. That may have helped to protect me. It also helped that I’m in very good health for my age and that may have helped to enable me to resist catching it. Indianapolis was the last city in the state to end its restrictions in June. That made me more exposed to other people. Many of the white suburbanites have been vaccinated but large numbers of inner city blacks here haven’t been so I suspect I got it there. Indianapolis is pretty far north so we don’t have a large poor Hispanic class.

large populations (which result in large impersonal bureaucracies), mass education and mass media.

I tend to agree, though I think fiat currencies massively inflate the power of the fiat currency owner, for obvious reasons.

The large bureaucracies inherent to large populations, and mass education used to be mitigated (and still are to some extent) by devolved (decentralized) political structures: US states, Swiss cantons, etc. So it is possible to constrain the ill effects of those things by “distributed sovereignty”. But in a world of global, instantaneous communications and near ubiquitous access, constraining mass media is a much taller order. It is happening to a certain extent as nations constrain the media within their borders, but “borders” is a slippery concept in digital comms.

And “distributed sovereignty” itself has taken a beating over of the last century and a half. First when the abolitionists destroyed states’ rights at gunpoint, and then when the “Civil Rights” [actually anti-civil rights] movement did it again (albeit slightly less violently), massively centralizing and bureaucratizing political power in the US.

The problem with decentralization is that small decentralized powers are always at risk of being pushed aside by larger more centralized neighbors, so for global competition the incentive is to get as big and centralized as possible, but for freedom and independence, one wants to be as small and decentralized as possible. Switzerland and the US had formerly squared this circle with local sovereignty, but the globohomo forces have steadily eroded this.

I have a couple old college friends I socialize with but they were vaccinated and I didn’t see them for a long period of time until they got vaccinated.

These vaccines seem pretty “leaky” so I wouldn’t discount this source.

By the way, did anyone suggest treatment with Ivermectin? I heard Trump used that too, but it wasn’t publicized to avoid the hydroxychloroquine-type backlash from those who would rather kill people than admit Trump may be right about something (i.e., the entire media class).

Indianapolis is pretty far north so we don’t have a large poor Hispanic class.

Being northern hasn’t protected other towns, like Chicago and Minneapolis, lol.

But a true monarchy has to be essentially non-ideological.

This is an interesting point. Thinking about my previous comment to you, it is an imprtant distinction since when monarchy or another form of authoritarianism becomes ideological it becomes totalitarianism. King+ideology=Stalin.
It’s probably no coincidence that ideology didn’t really exist previous to the regicidal movements of the French Revolution, Communism, etc. Ideology is an invention of modernity, one which seems to me centered on mankind’s search for systematized meaning apart from religion.

These vaccines seem pretty “leaky” so I wouldn’t discount this source.

I hadn’t thought of that but now that you mention it, yes, I could have had Covid passed to me from an already vaccinated person. Ivermectin wasn’t discussed. I got the only FDA approved drug, remdesivir. There’s controversy over how effective that is. I feel like the steroid, dexamethasone, I got to reduce lung inflammation did help. They let me go home because my inflammation levels were dropping. The whole hydroxychloroquine issue was because of the way the studies were done. It worked in early treatment but not late treatment. It also worked because it is a zinc ionophore that helps with the uptake of zinc. It is actually the zinc that is doing the work. So it helps to include zinc with it and some studies didn’t add the zinc.

I did two preventatives that may have worked in keeping a younger person from getting a serious case but didn’t work for a 64 year old guy like me. I took zinc and a natural zinc ionophore, quercetin, that is found in fruits and vegetables. I also took another natural zinc ionophore, green tea. Some researchers think the lower Covid death rates in Asian countries were partially because they drink green tea and eat a lot more fruits and vegetables than Americans do.

The second thing I tried that wasn’t effective in my case but might help others is added vitamin d. Eighty percent of Covid patients entering the hospitals were found to be vitamin d deficient. Blacks, due to their darker skin, have an especially hard time absorbing enough vitamin d from the sun and have higher case rates. Many nursing home patients don’t go out in the sun much and giving them vitamin d supplements would help. I’m recovering pretty fast so it is possible these added things I am taking may have helped some but it is hard to know for sure.

It seems to me that monarchy can be the very best of systems if one has a good king and the very worst of systems if one has a bad king.

With monarchy you get an occasional very bad king and an occasional very good one.

Wth democracy you get a succession of mediocre, corrupt, self-serving incompetent leaders with an occasional spectacularly bad one. But you won’t get any really good leaders.

I would tend to agree with your point not just with democracy but most any human institutions. Pretty much all systems will become corrupt and break down because of human’s imperfect nature.

The trouble is that democracy is based on the belief that human nature is perfectible. That eventually we’ll have an enlightened, well-educated, rational electorate. Other systems are a bit more realistic about human nature.

But yes, any system will come up against the problem that human beings are corruptible and therefoe all human systems are corruptible.

the unmanageably large scale of government makes it much harder to address or reform the process.

Yep. Scale is a problem. Once you have a population in the tens of millions you’re going to have a gigantic bureaucracy that will be effectively unaccountable and totally out of touch with ordinary people.

And big nation states end up being Too Big To Fail. They can just go on getting more oppressive and more inefficient and more corrupt without collapsing.

To what extent do you think this is a result of the Federal government having, in effect, infinite funding via the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency?

I don’t believe that it is “the” cause. Although, it seems pretty obvious that printing money allows the actual size of the government to grow more easily than if they were dependent upon the taxman. To a certain extent the government has been filling voids. And “we” are responsible because we are always saying that the government needs to do something about situation X.

It is a question of organized and coordinated activity by groups of people to solve problems. We seem to have forgotten or cast aside almost everything except: the government needs to do X.

The problem with decentralization is that small decentralized powers are always at risk of being pushed aside by larger more centralized neighbors

Yeah. Small states only survive as long as their more powerful neighbours choose to allow them to survive.

The only way a small state can survive is by having a viable independent nuclear deterrent.

It’s probably no coincidence that ideology didn’t really exist previous to the regicidal movements of the French Revolution, Communism, etc. Ideology is an invention of modernity, one which seems to me centered on mankind’s search for systematized meaning apart from religion.

Prior to the American and French Revolutions the closest thing to an ideological state might have been the Commonwealth in England in the 1650s. Yes, there was a huge religious dimension to it but I think there was some ideological dimension as well.

Mostly though ideology seems to have been a product of the Enlightenment. And yes, I agree that it was a substitute for religion.

Is there an escape from ideology and totalitarianism in the modern world? I suspect that if you have democracy you have ideology, and if you have ideology you end up with totalitarianism.

It’s interesting that China today is much less ideological than the United States (or the West in general). The scary thing is that even the Soviet Union in its later stages was probably in practice less ideological than the modern democratic West.

To a certain extent the government has been filling voids. And “we” are responsible because we are always saying that the government needs to do something about situation X.

Which gets back to my point that in a democracy everything gets politicised, so everything becomes something that the government needs to do something about.

I had already decided that you likely had homosexual inclinations based only on your comments at AE’s blog.

Below are links to select past comments of mine that are particularly germane, with key, representative excerpts.

November 2019, AE (Audacious Epigone):

– All nations should, at a bare minimum, follow the example of Russia in using the Law to protect minors from pernicious “LGBTQ” propaganda and proselytization* efforts.
[…]
– None of the positions I have articulated above or elsewhere are contradicted or compromised by what is a fact that I have not only not attempted to hide or deny, but have actually made fairly obvious (at times even explicitly) in a number of comments I have posted here at TUR: My own fascination with the magic of adolescent boys. (Who couldn’t be?) This affinity, while having an undeniable erotic element, is much more than that. It is both far more complex as well as far more wholesome than any mere carnal lust ever could be. Moreover, any such desire, even at the rawest level, is emphatically not to bugger, sodomize or in any other way desecrate, defile, corrupt or emasculate such precious creatures (who could?) but to celebrate them; to see them frolic, delight, and thrive, in all their natural glory, as boys.

Most people do not think it advisable to allow 13 year old children (male or female) to make their own decisions whether to engage in sexual activity. If they are of the same age, it is not illegal or particular scandalous (depending upon the family/community). However, if one actor is older (male or female), then it is universally unlawful and condemned. In my opinion, it is vile, exploitive and evil, and cannot be made into anything else by the intensity of the desire of the adult no matter how many nuanced stipulations are put forth.

I suggest that you keep this desire to yourself. You should refrain from engaging in any and all activities with teenage boys. You should never, under any circumstances, allow yourself to be alone with an adolescent boy.

What tends to happen if you have an incompetent or underage monarch is that you have other centers of power trying to dominate that monarch. In a healthy system not dealing with intense external pressure, this can work. Best case, you have a figure like Kangxi who is trained effectively and takes power smoothly. Less ideally, you can have a guy like Basil II, who took power after purging people trying to dominate him, or a puppet monarch happy to play the ceremonial role while others do the governing, so long as everything is understood.

It’s when these conditions fail that it doesn’t. You’ll note that the quality of Roman emperors took a sharp nose dive toward the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th centuries, in both East and West. The East managed to hang on, recover, and thrive, despite the Huns running wild. The West didn’t. That implies something different in the challenges they faced and their inherent advantages as locations rather than the identical political system they had around 400 AD, complete with a puppet monarch being dominated by competing court factions.

I’ve come to believe that it is less the system of government and more the amount of legitimacy that underlines it that matters, if that makes sense. Whether the system is a republic, a monarchy, a dictatorship, a theocracy, or a democracy, it seems as though the system always runs into trouble when that elusive but real thing runs dry. Imperial dynasties tend to fall when they lose legitimacy, and so do republics.

I’m also a very old-fashioned non-universalist when it comes to political theory: individual nations need solutions that work for them specifically. That might not be what works for another nation. And this has more to do with immediate circumstances than anything else. I’m not disputing that culture is important and does not play a role in the political arrangements that different countries work out, of course, but the dynamics of that tend to be more subtle.

>North Korea seems to be an interesting hybrid. They have a lot of the advantages of monarchy. Their system has been very stable.

It’s only stable because, among other things, the Kims have been willing to resort to measures to stay in power that few others in the modern world would be willing to go to, and some of those measures weren’t really reproducible elsewhere. West and East Germans remained in contact throughout the Cold War in a way that just wasn’t possible in Korea, for example: from the 1960s to the late 1980s, South Korea was itself ruled by a (well, duh, naturally) deeply anti-Communist military dictatorship, albeit one never on the DPRK’s level of totalitarian horror. Lay North Korean access to the outside world was nearly nonexistent until the system nearly fell apart in the 1990s.

Another crucial factor is that there very little desire from anybody involved-China, South Korea, the US-for an overnight collapse to happen in Pyongyang. The North Korean military is, beneath the numbers and parades and nukes, pretty pathetic relative to the ROKA. I don’t think Kim Jong Un is under any illusions about that.

>Also, what I’ve read of the Bismarckian system suggests that it would be worth taking a closer look at.

From what I’ve picked up, the reason Bismarck was willing to allow certain limited democratic features in the Second Reich was because in the 1870s, Germany was still a predominantly rural country. Peasants there, like peasants everywhere, tended to be deeply, authentically conservative. They could be relied upon to support his policies, especially when he introduced the carrots for the lower classes.

Of course, things didn’t stay that way. Within 30 years, Germany had become an urbanized, industrialized nation. The result was that Germany had the largest non-ruling Marxist party in the world, albeit one that had a stable place in the body politic and wasn’t interested in overthrowing the state like their Russian counterparts. There was a lot of interesting domestic tension in pre-war Germany.

(The comparisons to China are pretty obvious, and real: China just operated on a much more massive scale. The big difference is that the CCP is more authoritarian than the Kaiserreich ever was, and I’d argue part of that does owe to the fact that the CCP does have an ideology. I’d say China is generally better than the US is at making sure ideology does not get in the way of getting stuff done at home, but that doesn’t mean the CCP is non-ideological. And Xi’s consolidation of power has strengthened it, not the other way around. I think Xi genuinely believes that corruption is incompatible with being a good ChiCom-the anti-corruption drive wasn’t just about removing potential rival powers.)

>The most famous example is Italy’s King removing Mussolini. But I wonder if a Russian Constitutional Monarchy would have been better insulated against a far-left coup than the brief Russian Republic of 1917 turned out to be.

I have a hard time imagining the Bolsheviks themselves (whom Durnovo had on the edge of implosion) coming to power without the degree of social collapse caused by WWI-if you asked an observer at the time, they’d have said that fascist movements had a better chance in Russia, whereas Marxism had the best chance in Germany, ironically enough. Overall, it’s hard to understate the deletrious impact that the war had on Europe.

(The rise of fascism, and especially Nazism, to official power is similarly impossible to explain without the war and how it just changed the Overton Window. Adolf Hitler, in many ways, personified a man who never came home from the war and sought to continue it by various means throughout his postwar life.)

That said, the problem with this is that the Tsarist system was explicitly ideologically tied into *personal autocracy*, which was always going to be difficult to marry to governing a rapidly industrializing society joining the modern world. Under Nicholas II, difficult became impossible-leading to “autocracy without an autocrat” and the discombobulated nature of Tsarist politics in the final couple of decades of the monarchy.

The Labour Party, an organisation that spends more time kneeling to BLM than talking to workers, ended up winning, by loudly proclaiming their support for the Muslim sides in the Kashmir and Palestine conflicts.
…
Muslims voters are most interested in the advances of Muslims worldwide, and are happy to ally with progressives as long as progressives support Muslims elsewhere and keep progressivism away from Muslims too. Progressives also seem to like this deal.

I mostly concur.

However, there is a problem with your assertion “keep progressivism away from Muslims”. Islam is the beating heart of modern Progressivism. The last thing they want is separation.

Perhaps the Rainbow and Crescent flag will help readers visualize the inexorable connection between Islam & SJW. You cannot have one without the other.

PEACE 😇

the inexorable connection between Islam & SJW. You cannot have one without the other.

This seems like such a non sequitur. Sure, you have given some examples like the movie “Cuties” and some Muslim white girl groomers, but I’m sure that similar random examples could be given to support the notion that there is an “inexorable connection between Peruvians and SJW” or “Poles and SJW” and so on with any other group. I haven’t seen anything you’ve posted that remotely points to how Islam is “behind” Wokeness.

I can’t overstate how strange this stance seems to me. It’s as if someone started claiming that Marx was actually heavily influenced by Sioux medicine men, and Marxism is actually a machination of the Red Indian to get back at the White Devil.

{sigh}
I have little doubt that this reply of yours came from sincere and even noble instincts– ones that I not only can only respect but, ironically, actually at least mostly share with you. Moreover, you certainly have never demonstrated the kind of hostile bias against me and tendency to assume bad faith and ascribe ill intent and motives to me that certain others here have. Quite the contrary, and for that I remain grateful.

It might also be opportune at this point, before proceeding any further, to acknowledge that this entire area of discussion is one that is understandably highly fraught from any angle. And that given such sensitivity and how subject to being misconstrued much of my intricate, and likely relatively abstruse and verbose writings on the topic can be, I fear that in posting them, I may have often exceeded the limits of what can realistically and reasonably be expected of most readers.

With all that said, and with great reluctance at the risk of offending or alienating you, I am afraid that this reply of yours leaves me no choice but to point-out that it is little more than an emotionally charged, overwrought, quite obviously reflexive mixture of nonsequiturs, straw men, false dichotomies and red herrings that have little connection or relevance to anything I actually wrote. I have to question just how thoroughly you even read my comment. I shall proceed to respond substantively, in detail, to your statements and characterization, attempting to be as clear and concise. And, despite my not inconsiderable disappointment and even hurt, to remain calm, measured and unblinded by emotion.

I never suggested that for any adolescent, of any age or sex, to be sexually active in any way, with anyone is ideal, anywhere near ideal, desirable, positive or even acceptable in any inherent or absolute sense. Nor did I in any way so much as imply that any behavior on the part of any adult would or could be justified or excused on account of any intensity of desire on the part of the adult.

The trouble is that democracy is based on the belief that human nature is perfectible.

Isn’t this really more of an Enlightenment/ Modern belief than one which is inherent to Democracy? I don’t imagine that the Athenians had any such beliefs underpinning their government and even the American founding fathers seemed to have had in general a healthy wariness of the fickleness of foolishness of people. In the latter case, that seems to have informed the intentional move away from direct democracy and the institutions of strong checks and balances within the government as a limiting structure.
So I would say that the idea that man is perfectible is not really the basis for democratic systems, but it does more often than not go hand in hand because of the other ideological assumptions of our liberal age.

As far as your preference for monarchy, I think that it is totally understandable and I’ve often leaned heavily that way myself. At some point, I basically decided that I was actually more attracted to the social scale and decentralization that went along with monarchy than monarchy as a piece.
I still think it’s a reasonable enough choice though.

Most people do not think it advisable to allow 13 year old children (male or female) to make their own decisions whether to engage in sexual activity.

I’m going to make a couple of observations here.

Firstly, this is one of those subjects that can no longer be discussed. It just isn’t possible. In the 1970s it could have been discussed. Maybe even in the 1950s. Heck, even in the Victorian age. But not today. Today the subject is surrounded by an electrified fence topped with razor wire and patrolled by guard dogs. With a big sign on the fence saying Verboten.

Secondly, I’m not sure we should discuss it. God knows we’re already regarded as dangerous Nazi white supremacists and there are people who would love to find a way to shut us down. Discussing this topic in any detail could be putting a target on our collective backs.

I’ve come to believe that it is less the system of government and more the amount of legitimacy that underlines it that matters, if that makes sense. Whether the system is a republic, a monarchy, a dictatorship, a theocracy, or a democracy, it seems as though the system always runs into trouble when that elusive but real thing runs dry. Imperial dynasties tend to fall when they lose legitimacy, and so do republics.

Yes. Legitimacy doesn’t necessarily come from the ballot box. Any regime that remains in power does so because it has legitimacy. Even if it’s a dictatorship, if it remains in power it does so because it has enough legitimacy to do so. There can be cases where a dictatorship can have more actual legitimacy than a democracy.

At the moment we’re seeing democracy slowly losing legitimacy.

There’s an interesting critique of the Based Zoomer idea (which AE subscribed to at one time) over on Anatoly Karlin’s blog.

Of all the right-wing copes that I’ve encountered over the past few years the Based Zoomers cope may be the saddest. Considering that indoctrination specifically of the young in schools is steadily increasing and indoctrination of the general population through media and social media is steadily increasing I was never able to understand how anyone could imagine that Generation Z was going to magically turn out to be more nationalistic or more socially conservative than Millennials.

And I could never understand how anyone could imagine that Zoomers were ever going to reject Wokeism.

You can’t just keep hoping that sooner or later there’s going to be a backlash in favour of social conservatism, nationalism, immigration restrictionism etc or just keep hoping that by some process of wishful thinking a generation will come along which spontaneously decides to rebel. You have to have a strategy to bring that about. You have to have a strategy to reach the young. You have to offer the young something that will make them feel good.

one of those subjects that can no longer be discussed.

I don’t consider that I have “discussed” the subject. I told him what I thought was best for him and adolescent boys, behavior wise. I will re-iterate my points and will not engage him on the subject again.

You have a mental illness/fantasy/obsession. Acting out this fantasy will harm an innocent life and if discovered will end with you in prison. You have already legitimized your fantasy under conditions that you attribute to the boy. (How do you know what people want?) We don’t allow children to have everything they want or think they want. Do not tell people of this illness/fantasy/obsession. Stay in the closet. Don’t open up.

Do not allow yourself to be alone with any adolescent boy.

Do not reply to this comment. This is my last reply.

The legitimacy of a regime or a political system depends to a large extent on appearing to be a winner.

Take the Soviet Union. There were all sorts of reasons for the people of the USSR to dislike the regime but in WW2 the Soviet system kicked serious butt. Despite the immense disadvantage of suffering a surprise attack by what was reputed to be the most formidable military machine on the planet the Soviet Union not only survived, it won. And won convincingly. The Soviet system proved to be decisively superior to the Nazi system.

And from 1945 to 1965 the Soviet system looked like a winner when it came to science and technology. The Soviets had a commercial jet airliner (the Tupolev Tu-104) in service before the Americans had one. Up until the late 60s the Soviets won every event in the space race, and as late as 1971 they beat the Americans by conducting the first landing by an unmanned spacecraft on Mars. Whatever people’s reservations about the regime may have been you can be pretty sure that to the average Soviet citizen beating the Americans into space would have felt pretty damned sweet. People might not have loved the Soviet system but it gave the appearance of being a winner.

Take Castro. Despite repeated efforts by the Americans to overthrow him he remained in power. He ended up looking like a winner. That gave his regime immense prestige.

The same applies to American liberal democracy in the immediate postwar period. Americans firmly believed that they had beaten Hitler. American liberal democracy had proved itself a winner. And America dominated the world after 1945. American liberal democracy had total legitimacy because it was a winner.

That started to change with the Vietnam War. American liberal democracy started to look less like a winner. And then in the 70s Japan started to decisively outperform the US industrially. If the Japanese could make better cars and better TV sets and better stereos and better everything else than America then maybe the American system wasn’t a winner after all.

It should be noted that what matters is the perception of winning. It doesn’t matter if the reality is quite different. When it comes to politics perceptions are all that matter.

one of those subjects that can no longer be discussed.

I don’t consider that I have “discussed” the subject.

Oh yes, I realise that you weren’t entering into a discussion on the subject. I was merely hoping that no-one else would chime in and turn it into a discussion. I think that would be unwise.

I think you and I are probably pretty much on the same page here in not wanting to see this develop into a full-blown discussion.

I’ve got an older example: the Roman Empire.

The simultaneous greatest advantage and weakness for the Romans, and later the Byzantines, was the fact that the “emperor” held an office, however God-exulted it was. Augustus made it an ad hoc creation, and it largely stayed that way. He was not the Son of Heaven or King of Kings, he was there to do a job. If an emperor was well liked and legitimate enough with the powerful factions of society that existed during the era, he could pass the office onto his son. But that’s as far as it went. When a dynasty lost legitimacy, God-or the gods-never stepped in to help. Even during the Byzantine era, this was still the case. In some ways, even moreso thanks to the unique geography of Constantinople. The civilians of the city could and did attempt to overthrow rulers who they thought were illegitimate.

The great downside of this was when there was uncertainty at the top, damaging civil war was usually the result. This was the case even when the empire was healthy: with the exception of the downfall of the Flavians (and that was a very close run thing), the downfall of a dynasty led to civil war. But it happened much less often. Other military revolts against a sitting, legitimate emperor did occur-Saturninus under Domitian, Avidius Cassius under Marcus Aurelius-but they were crushed quickly. This changed during the 3rd Century. The constant disasters, economic, biological, military, or otherwise, made imperial legitimacy minimal. This led to a constant game of usurpation and civil war when the empire could ill afford it. Even when the empire had recovered and was thriving in the 4th Century, that scar didn’t heal, as the frequency of civil wars showed.

This cycle oddly replayed itself in the Eastern Empire as the West declined and fell. Throughout the 400s, as the East stabilized, the constant pattern of civil war and usurpation finally faded away. But it came roaring back with a vengeance in the 7th Century. When Phokas overthrew Maurice in 602 AD, it seems to me as if the army had lost what we might term “institutional memory” from the 3rd Century of how dangerous what they were doing truly was. And this cycle proved even more permanent. The collapse of the Roman East in the 7th Century meant nearly 3/4ths of the imperial wealth was gone: and there was a permanent stain of illegitimacy around the office. It would take even more centuries for that wound to heal.

>It should be noted that what matters is the perception of winning.

But false perception can’t continue indefinitely. External pressure will come. Internal failures will happen. Credit to spend will run out. A system that is not robust will reveal itself. America is headed there.

I suppose as I mean the terms “decadence” and exhaustion, the destructive absurdities of the French Revolution *are* what makes it not decadent. The revolutionaries were able to overthrow the government, transform French society almost overnight, and then ultimately conquer or subdue most of Europe. That’s not decadence, as I mean the term. Or exhaustion, if you prefer.

I’d contend that our society is the most exhausted that has ever existed, far more than the Romans. We’re able to survive, despite this fact, because, as someone cited upthread, we’re living in a “Waiting For the Barbarians” moment. We’re fragile, but we’re too exhausted to do anything about it, and there is no external force capable of doing much about it either because every other civilization is at least somewhat exhausted as well.

Wokeness is a disease of exhaustion. An actual sturdy and energetic society would reject it. And if it ever faced the battlefield against a real and determined opponent, it would collapse. It thrives in places where people spend all their time talking politics and doing nothing, i.e. online. And it’s able to spread into the real world because not much is going on there, either.

Islam is, in theory, racially agnostic, with all believers being equal regardless of race or origin. Theory and practice don’t always align, of course. Malaysia is a great example of Islam being very tied into racial identity, and the Saudis casually people from poorer Islamic countries like crap, even if they are there as engineers rather than day laborers.

Nevertheless, the implicit “non-white” racialization of Islam by leftists in as a tool against MAGA-hat wearers or guys with statues of Sulla on their Twitter profile tends not to resonate with actual, believing lay Muslims, whom affluent American progressives are unlikely to ever interact with on any non-trivial level. They are raised from childhood to believe that their religion represents the final, correct form of monotheism which will eventually be embraced by all mankind. That’s not compatible with “woke” theories on morality being intrinsically tied to race.

(And since when were second generation Americanized immigrant kids representative of general attitudes in the cultures where their parents originated from? The truth is, wokeness is a deeply American thing that we’re exporting. Saying that foreigners are the ones behind it is not just not right, it’s not even wrong.)

Main thing I’d contend is that America just had more “credit” to waste than any society that has ever existed in mankind’s history around 1990.

It seems to be taken for granted by many of our elites that America’s capabilities are infinite and America’s structures can take indefinite levels of stress. Nothing mortal ever is, and nothing built by mortals ever can.

This seems like such a non sequitur. … I haven’t seen anything you’ve posted that remotely points to how Islam is “behind” Wokeness.

Your position is incomprehensible. You claim that you cannot see a blindingly obvious connection. Everywhere you see SJW you see Islam. Let us review the visual evidence.

Here is a typical picture from Islamic BLM showing the direct connection between SJW anti-Semitism and Muslim causes.

Here is another example of illegal trafficking of Muslims to Europe under the SJW Muslim Antifa and Rainbow flags.

Everywhere you have Islam in Christian lands… you have rape and sexual degeneracy. This is Islam in Europe, according to the Europeans who are living with the horror of SJW Muslim Rape-ugees every day.

You do not have to believe me. Believe the victims of Muslim sex criminals.

How can you *not* see the obvious connection between SJW and Islam?

You cannot fix real world problems by sticking your head in the sand and denying they exist. Open your eyes to the truth.

PEACE 😇

Peaceful transfers of power are probably the most important thing in any political system. If civil war is frequently the result of your ruler dying, then it doesn’t matter how good your system is at producing good rulers — that system will ultimately be the death of your state.

My sense is that the Byzantine system was less stable than the feudal Catholic one, and it had to do with this very fact. Medieval Catholic Europe had its share of civil wars, but people generally respected the notion of inheritance from father to son, and it was rare that it would have nation-wrecking civil wars except in cases when the king lacked a son. What’s interesting (and seldom mentioned) is that even the Investiture Controversy — seemingly unrelated to matters of succession — wrecked the reign of the childless Emperor Henry V.

The only very clear counterexample I can draw is the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War in the late stages of the Hundred Years War, though it’s probably relevant that the French King Charles VI was mentally ill. I’m not aware of any analogy to the political events surrounding the Battle of Manzikert within contemporaneous Catholic Europe — was any Catholic usurpation ever simultaneously so brazen, illegal, and destructive?

I suppose you could argue the Byzantines had tougher enemies, and that their more centralized system was able to maintain a more robust military than what feudal Europe achieved. What would have been the fate of the Capetian Kingdom of France if it was situated in the Balkans and Anatolia? I’m not sure, but likely not any better than what became of Byzantium.

the implicit “non-white” racialization of Islam by leftists … tends not to resonate with actual, believing lay Muslims, … They are raised from childhood to believe that their religion represents the final, correct form of monotheism which will eventually be embraced by all mankind. That’s not compatible with “woke” theories on morality being intrinsically tied to race.

The most prominent Muslim thinkers in the U.S. today are Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib. They are following in the historical footsteps of U.S. Muslim leaders like Louis Farrakhan. A similar dynamic exists in Europe. This is the activist Islam that I am talking about.

Real Muslims, like these examples, are very SJW. If there is a population of “lay Muslims” that oppose SJW Islam — Why are they not speaking out against Omar, Tlaib, and Farrakhan? As long as no prominent Muslims openly oppose SJW Islam, I have sound footing to support the fact that SJW and Islam are inextricably linked.
____

As a related issue on this point. Why are sex criminals heavily over represented in 1st generation Muslim migrants to Europe? They did not suddenly learn to become predators when they arrived. They brought Muslim predatory beliefs with them (1)

The body of a 13-year-old girl was found on Saturday on a grass verge in a residential area of Vienna. Authorities suspect she had been drugged, and sexually abused before being killed.

After the nationalities of the suspects were revealed, the ruling Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) promised to speed up the deportations of criminal asylum seekers. “There will be no deportation stop to Afghanistan with me,” said Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Your belief in some idealized form of overseas “lay Islam” does not align with the behaviour of 1st generation migrants arriving from overseas. Evidence indicates that overseas Muslims are just as dangerous as those in Europe and the U.S.

PEACE 😇
_________

(1) https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/01/murder-of-austrian-teenage-girl-sparks-row-over-deportations-policy

We’re fragile, but we’re too exhausted to do anything about it, and there is no external force capable of doing much about it either because every other civilization is at least somewhat exhausted as well.

I don’t think other civilisations are exhausted. It’s more that the West (and when I say the West I mean the United States since other western nations simply do not count) has a gigantic military machine capable of crushing every other civilisation.

The West might be exhausted and other civilisations might be dynamic and energetic but the West is like an exhausted elephant surrounded by energetic mice. No matter how exhausted the elephant is he can crush the mice at will.

Peaceful transfers of power are probably the most important thing in any political system. If civil war is frequently the result of your ruler dying, then it doesn’t matter how good your system is at producing good rulers — that system will ultimately be the death of your state.

Yep. At the moment the two systems that handle transitions of power well are liberal democracy and the Chinese system.

Monarchy has never come up with a totally satisfactory way of ensuring smooth successions in the long term. Perhaps it’s just not possible. It’s true that modern monarchies have well-defined systems to establish the line of succession but there’s always the problem of what you do if you get a halfwit as king. If he has to be deposed how do you do it without causing a crisis?

One of the many puzzles of our bizarre modern age is the embrace of gender identity politics by Third Wave feminists (older Second Wave feminists are not so enthusiastic). Gender identity politics effectively erases women. If there are 117 different genders then “woman” as a category becomes trivial and irrelevant. Why would feminists be happy to go along with this?

I think the answer is that women have been a grave disappointment to feminists. Despite the best efforts of feminism women tend to remain women. They still tend to gravitate towards traditional female occupations. They still tend to like clothes. Many enjoy sewing. They like chick flicks. They read chick lit. They’d rather play tennis than rugby. They like girlie stuff.

Even worse, most women stubbornly and wickedly remain heterosexual. Some are even brazen enough to actually enjoy heterosexuality. Feminists just can’t seem to convince women that women don’t need men.

Maybe the embrace of gender identity politics is a way of dealing with the seething hatred that so many feminists have towards women. Erasing women is a way of punishing them.

Africa maybe isn’t exhausted. But I do think everyone else is, to some degree.

China isn’t really in an expansionistic poise — it’s in a decadent/exhausted one. Contrast modern-day China with Manifest Destiny America, or Victorian England or Spain/Portugal in the Age of Discovery, or with the Roman Republic. I don’t think it’s analogous to any of these places. It’s more analogous to Japan or Korea when those places were booming, except bigger and more authoritarian and more distanced from the US. As a result of its size, it can do some things those places can’t, but it also faces many of the same limitations.

China is rising economically, and as a result of its economic rise its state power is increasing and will probably exceed USG’s state power, but China is still more afraid of losing what it has than in pursuing what might be. Its population is shrinking and is far, far more focused on accumulating personal wealth than pursuing patriotism or honor or glory. It’s still pretending to be a Marxist-inspired state, unable to innovate new forms that are more appropriate to the moment. All these are hallmarks of a civilization that is tired, not one on the rise.

It wasn’t the result when the empire was healthy and the ruling party had legitimacy: the Byzantine revival partially took place under multiple child emperors dominated by interlopers. It’s when that wasn’t the case that problems happened.

That’s really not terribly different from any other society, even bloodline based ones: the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, to take one example. When your system loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, you will eventually get people ignoring or challenging you.

>My sense is that the Byzantine system was less stable than the feudal Catholic one, and it had to do with this very fact. Medieval Catholic Europe had its share of civil wars, but people generally respected the notion of inheritance from father to son, and it was rare that it would have nation-wrecking civil wars except in cases when the king lacked a son.

I think it was more prone to civil war, but it was also more stable than most Western European kingdoms. (They lasted a lot longer while dealing with far tougher predators.) This came with centralization over feudalism: no matter who won, everybody kept buying into the imperial system. Charlemagne’s empire fell apart after he died because people didn’t, and that’s because he lacked the institutions the Romans had to keep people bound, invested in the state.

>I’m not aware of any analogy to the political events surrounding the Battle of Manzikert within contemporaneous Catholic Europe — was any Catholic usurpation ever simultaneously so brazen, illegal, and destructive?

No less brazen, illegal, and destructive than Roman civil wars tended to be. The empire just happened to be in a particularly weak position when the crisis of legitimacy came at the worst time imaginable. Diogenes was in a deeply precarious political position to start out with, and he’d gambled the already repeatedly debased fisc on his campaign. Still, the Byzantines were, in the end, what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire. They retained the political conceptions of that, rather than switching to Germanic notions of blood inheritance, with all the weaknesses and strengths that entails. Here, the weaknesses were on full display.

I think the Crusaders were genuinely puzzled when the crowds in Constantinople jeered Alexios IV from the walls. It wasn’t cynical (the Venetians, on the other hand…): they probably really believed Alexios IV would be welcomed back based on his bloodline. Why wouldn’t they? That’s how it worked in their own societies, and however odd the “Greeks” were, they were still supposedly Christians. But this wasn’t the case in Byzantium: the emperor held an office. If he had no legitimacy in the eyes of the people of Constantinople, the military, or bureaucracy, said elements felt they had the right to remove him, and would. His father had been deposed nearly a decade earlier. As far as the mob was concerned, they owed him nothing, and they certainly weren’t going to back up the ridiculous promises he made to the “Latins”, who really should have known better.

>I suppose you could argue the Byzantines had tougher enemies, and that their more centralized system was able to maintain a more robust military than what feudal Europe achieved. What would have been the fate of the Capetian Kingdom of France if it was situated in the Balkans and Anatolia? I’m not sure, but likely not any better than what became of Byzantium.

Easy: they would have met the fate of Sassanid Persia. While more centralized than its predecessor state, the Sassanids lacked the degree of Roman style centralization: it had certain aspects of “feudalism” to it, including the independent power bases of aristocrats. When the Arabs came, they cut their own deals with the invaders.

Posters here seem to think I am the only one who sees ties between SJW’s and Anti-Semitism. That is not the case. For example (1)

The Systemic Antisemitism Of Woke Culture/Leftism

The far left has been injecting Antisemitism into the American political discourse since the early 1970s when leftist African American leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Louis Farrakhan, and the beloved bigot, Al Sharpton, all went public with their Antisemitism. One would think that in today’s times of wokeism and cancel culture, the Jew-haters of the left would be exposed, shamed, and weeded out of the leftist movements. However, the opposite is happening. antisemitism

Where Louis Farrakhan treads, Islamic hatred of infidels (Jews & Christians) is sure to follow.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://lidblog.com/antisemitism-of-woke-culture/

Posters here seem to think I am the only one who sees ties between SJW’s and Anti-Semitism.

I think most people here are aware that there’s a strong antisemitic strand in SJWism. Where people take issue with you is your attempt to link SJWism with Islam.

The only thing I’ll add is that in my experience human beings are masters of self deception and self justification. Many if not most abusers of one stripe or another have stories they tell themselves which justify their actions in their own minds.
That isn’t to suggest that Dissident is guilty of that but even if he is assumed to be completely in earnest, that line of thought goes too quickly down a slippery slope which is quite likely to be used as justification for someone with bad intent.

Louis Farrakhan and the NOI in general has never had any credibility with other Muslims. Their focus on black nationalism doesn’t jive with the supposed universality of Islam and their theology is bizarre if not outright contradictory to mainstream Islam’s teachings.

I’m no particular friend of Islam and consider them to be an interloper to Western culture. Islam certainly believes that they should inherit the earth, does not share Western values, and should be guarded against. However, I have a very hard time taking an argument seriously which conflates NOI with Islam as a whole. It is either disingenuous or fundamentally ignorant of Islam.

Personally, I don’t have much use for the Jew-myopic explanations for all the West’s woes that often enough proliferate on Unz. They get tiresome quickly and explain little. Substituting Muslims for Jews as a universal bugbear makes perhaps even less sense to me and seems equally superficial.

I’m afraid we’ll have to respectfully agree to disagree on this, A123.

F to AE.

a strong antisemitic strand in SJWism.

Will you elaborate on this? The only way that I [can] see anti-Semitism in SJWism is if one equates criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism.

a strong antisemitic strand in SJWism.

Will you elaborate on this? The only way that I [can] see anti-Semitism in SJWism is if one equates criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism.

I’d accept your correction. There’s a strong anti-zionist strand in SJWism which of course is not necessarily anti-semitic. It can be anti-semitic, but not always. Among SJWs anti-zionism is definitely not necessarily anti-semitic, and among white SJWs it’s very rarely anti-semitic.

I think @A123 pretty much equates anti-zionism with anti-semitism and I should not have been careless in my reply.

And @iffen;

The only Islam that I care about is the one threatening Christians, primarily in the the U.S. and Europe. You have given *no evidence* that this Real Islam is anything other than SJW. Infidel (Jewish & Christian) Whites are enemies to believers in Real SJW Islam. Ilhan Omar, Rashid Tlaib, and Louis Farrakhan are the leaders of Real Islam in the U.S.

You have not proved that an overseas “lay islam” exists that is different from Real Islam in the U.S. and Europe. Even if you somehow cross that barrier. The existence of a silent overseas “lay islam” that refuses to challenge Real Islam renders it irrelevant. Defending Judeo-Christian values from Real SJW Islam means calling out the threat.

You can close your eyes to the existence of Real Islam in the U.S. & Europe, but that will not make the threat go away. You disconnect yourself from the real world situation by trying try to so, even if you find other UR posters who share your minority beliefs.

PEACE 😇

You first post was quite accurate. No correction was needed

Look to SJW Islamic leaders like Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib. Their Anti-Semitic intolerance is just as bad here in the U.S. (1)

The far-left members of the Democratic “Squad” have fallen largely silent on the Boston rabbi who was stabbed eight times outside of a Jewish school.

Aside from Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), who represents the district where 24-year-old Khaled Awad nearly murdered Rabbi Shlomo Noginski, none of the Squad members have condemned the anti-Semitic attack. The Washington Free Beacon contacted each of the House Democrats associated with the Squad–Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), Cori Bush (D., Mo.), and Pressley—none of whom responded to requests for comment about the attack.

Real SJW Islam refuses to condemn the stabbing of a rabbi in the U.S. A subject that has nothing to to with Israel or Zionism.
____

The DNC is in a tough spot. They are walking a tight rope between the old and the new. And, the Anti-Semitic SJW’s are becoming restless. The DNC cannot dodge the issue forever. Generational change will soon “age out” many Jewish senior leaders in the Democrat party, which could be the signal for full “Corbyn-ization” of the DNC.

PEACE 😇
_________

(1) https://nypost.com/2021/07/03/rabbi-stabbed-eight-times-out-side-a-boston-jewish-day-school/

Are you a reader and/or admirer of Mark Steyn?

I am.

Which is not to say, as with anyone I like and/or admire that I necessarily agree with him.

I noticed a lot of feminists prefer classifying themselves as non-binary instead of women.

All the different gender categories can hurt biological women in sports as transexual men can say they are women. If feminists were really advancing the interests of women they would oppose this. It would be one of their top priorities right now.

Maybe some of the early feminists had good intentions but today feminism just seems like another branch of Marxism, it probably was from the start.

I think a lot of it was based partly on believing in something like Strauss & Howe generational cycles. I think these are mostly nonsense. Though I believe longer, civilizational cycles have some truth to them, such as Turchin and Glubb.

I also think it was based on thoughts of differential breeding. But again, your Republican 1.9 TFR minus defections is not going to make a dent on white Democrats’ 1.7 TFR, or whatever. Breeding can make a difference, in several decades’ time, if you’re reliably and repeatedly achieving 4+ TFR (maybe losing 1 or 2) against their TFR of 1 or 1.5. Maybe that will turn out to happen and impact America’s demographics, but it’s coming from a much smaller base of (deeply pious) conservatives and needs time to get going.

I think the 22nd century will be shaped, one way or another, by the rather atypical profile of who is actually breeding in the 21st, but probably not until then.

All that said, I do think it’s possible that some parts of SJWism will retreat in the next decade or two. Two (related) areas for likely retreat: crime and blackness. Crime is one of those topics that gets normal apolitical people upset in a way that “CRT in schools” does not. Most people are not pathological altruists, and crime is acceptable only when it’s not happening to them.

I also think we might be approaching “peak blackness”, that Hispanics and Asians won’t let blacks control the conversation forever. They might also be reluctant to allow the coming infinite African surge into America.

But it might be that for any sort of reaction to happen against the left, the left has to actually rule. Politically. We all sort of know we’re going to experience a time where Democrats are the dominant party for at least a generation (especially once they kill the filibuster and get their new states). As for when that starts, it looks like a 2024 event at the earliest.

I habe read some of Steyn’s material, and often agreed with his points. However, there is something about his style that never clicked with me.

P. J. O’Rourke is probably my favorite political author. Even when I disagree with him, his works are quite engaging.

PEACE 😇

Has anyone else gotten the Wrong Post Type / Admin error recently?

It blocks the edit window that I desperately need to fix typos. Such as “habe” vs. “have”…

PEACE 😇

Yes, I find this an equally interesting conundrum. Feminism has spent literally decades agonizing, analyzing, and pontificating about women’s bodies, the meaning of women’s bodies, the inherent exceptionalism of women, and so on, that it seems exceptionally strange to suddenly switch to the belief that woman exists as nothing but a personal construct.
It rather seems the equivalent of the Pope announcing that the Catholic Church no longer features Jesus, but still considers itself Christian.

However, I honestly don’t suspect that many feminists actually do that much thinking about what they believe and why (a charge which in all fairness can be leveled at the majority of any group). I suspect from my own observations that most women including those who consider themselves feminist support gender ideology for very simplistic reasons.

Gender ideology is accepted simply because it is “progressive”, and only Nazi’s stand against #progress.

It is also “nice” to support #minorities. Only Nazi’s would oppress downtrodden minorities.

Wokeness possesses an impenetrable religiosity in it’s worldview and does not lend itself to picking and choosing. Once it’s tenets are accepted, the world must conform to it’s precepts and all of it’s precepts must be taken whole cloth. As the yard signs say…”Black Lives Matter, Science is Real, Love is Love, etc.” You must believe the whole creed. Only Nazi’s are against those things.

I would say that the mundane and simple factors of conformity and niceness have more to do with acceptance of gender ideology for most, than anything else. Generally those factors have more sway over women than men.

I noticed a lot of feminists prefer classifying themselves as non-binary instead of women.

https://www.unz.com/anepigone/bisexuals-are-mostly-straight/

Our departed host had something to say on that point…

I think that trendiness explains a lot of that “non-binary” nonsense. It’s kind of risk free anyhow since no one can define what “non-binary” means precisely. In practice it can mean the same thing as straight but with infinitely more virtue signalling and social relevance points attached.

Maybe some of the early feminists had good intentions but today feminism just seems like another branch of Marxism, it probably was from the start.

It’s possible that there are and always have been several different feminisms.

The first version was the one that began with Mary Wollstonecraft and it was very much an Enlightenment thing. It was associated with ideas like sexual freedom and atheism and rationalism.

19th century American feminism was quite different – it was very much a Christian movement, very much anti-sex, very Puritanical.

If you fast forward to the 1960s and 70s and Second Wave feminism there were very obviously two feminisms. The Germaine Greer brand of Second Wave feminism was a descendant of the Mary Wollstonecraft variant – very pro-sex and generally very pro-men. Then there was the anti-sex variant (the Andrea Dworkin variant) – fanatically anti-sex and fanatically anti-men.

There was also the divide between equity feminism which simply sought to have women given equal opportunities, and the gender feminists who wanted to overturn the patriarchy and create an entirely new society.

Perhaps we need to stop thinking of feminism as monolithic.

Interestingly, in the 70s and 80s there was also a very very sharp divide among lesbians between the political lesbians and the “bar dykes” – the political lesbians saw having sex with other women as a revolutionary political act while the bar dykes slept with other women because they enjoyed it. The political lesbians were always angry and had an insane hatred of men, the bar dykes tended to like men very much and they liked fun.

Even more interestingly the bar dykes in those days seemed to be much more comfortable with the idea of being women.

Most political and social movements are not monolithic.

All that said, I do think it’s possible that some parts of SJWism will retreat in the next decade or two. Two (related) areas for likely retreat: crime and blackness

One area in which there might well be a major pushback is #metoo-ism. The #metoo thing is not just targeting Evil White Men. Every single man, black or white, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, Jew or Gentile, is a potential target.

There are a lot of rich liberal men who are very nervous at the moment. They could get fed up and start pushing back.

Gender ideology is accepted simply because it is “progressive”, and only Nazi’s stand against #progress.

It is also “nice” to support #minorities. Only Nazi’s would oppress downtrodden minorities.

Yes. A lot of women haven’t thought through the implications of the gender stuff. I’ve found that when you explain some of the implications to them they suddenly become horrified. They start to realise that it really is anti-woman. When heterosexual women start to realise that an agenda is driven by hatred of women they tend to lose enthusiasm for it.

I could see that. I’m predicting now that Cosby will ultimately be rehabilitated. Remembered primarily as an African-American trailblazer, the Jackie Robinson of comedians. The way most people will remember the story, he had a brush with the law like so many African-American men, but it was an ambiguous he-said/she-said sort of situation involving an overzealous white Republican prosecutor that never would have put a white man in jail for the same offense.

I could see that. I’m predicting now that Cosby will ultimately be rehabilitated.

Probably. It has now become obvious that if you’re man, black or white, and you’re accused of a crime involving sex then you have zero chance of a fair trial.

I’m sure that some of the men who’ve been #metoo’d have been guilty, but I think it’s very obvious that many have been entirely innocent, or at worst have been guilty of misbehaviour so trivial that it should not be a matter for the law.

If the Cosby fiasco discredits #metoo then that’s a very very good thing. And an opportunity to inflict a genuine defeat on the Cultural Left.

Even some liberal women must be getting concerned at the prospect of seeing husbands (or faiths or sons) destroyed by insane and malicious accusation. And destroyed by ambitious and cynical prosecutors.

Don’t worry, if doubts on gender ideology start to crop up all that’s needed is to chant the sacred words, “Trans women are real women!” once for each gender! That should clear it up.

I’ve mostly interacted with hard core wokesters on racial/ class issues not sex and gender. However, on racial orthodoxies they seem to retreat into blind dogmatism when confronted with nuanced arguments that don’t conform to their presuppositions of those who don’t see the world as they do.

Women who are not indoctrinated “true believers” seem to be able to see the absurdities of gender ideology easily enough when given the chance. When they do, they seem to be more stridently against it than most men. At least this is true of many of the more traditionally minded women in my circle of friends.

More evidence that non-US SJW importation of Muslims is directly tied to violent crimes like murder and rape: (1)

Populist Party Leader: Mass Migration Has ‘Destroyed’ Sweden

Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson has claimed that mass migration and “imported crime” has destroyed his country after a police officer was recently shot dead in a no-go zone.

Mr Åkesson stated that following the fatal shooting of the police officer in BiskopsgĂ„rden in Gothenburg last week that “organised and largely imported crime celebrates another victory over Sweden.”

…

“If, for example, you have deprived someone of their life — the situation in the home country is a completely uninteresting detail — then you should be returned there, however reluctant you may be,” he stated.

Deportation of criminal migrants has been a major issue in Sweden for years, whether it has been activists blocking deportations or courts refusing to remove convicted migrant criminals, as was the case last year with a migrant who raped a child over 100 times but managed to avoid being deported…

SJW migration is directly linked to the creation of “no-go” zones in Europe that are unsafe for Infidels (Christians & Jews), especially Infidel children.

No U.S. involvement in this SJW Islamic problem. If there is a connection, it is U.S. followers want to be more like European SJW leaders.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com/2021/07/populist-party-leader-mass-migration.html

Sweden: No Deportation for Migrant Who Sexually Assaulted 11 Women in Two Weeks https://t.co/C7MmuIg3fZ

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 1, 2019

on racial orthodoxies [wokesters] seem to retreat into blind dogmatism when confronted with nuanced arguments that don’t conform to their presuppositions of those who don’t see the world as they do.

Being an SJW is about emotions, feelings, and obedience to dogma. Logic and consistency are anathema to SJW’s. Anything they do not like can be twisted into a “micro aggression”. Anything they feel they want can be characterized as resistance.

The fact that the lengthy list of SJW faith based beliefs contains mutually exclusive concepts would be unworkable if rationality applied. However, this is not an issue for true SJW’s. Dogma in the “Faith of Feelings” includes extreme compartmentalization that enables simultaneous belief in contradictory concepts.

PEACE 😇

Women who are not indoctrinated “true believers” seem to be able to see the absurdities of gender ideology easily enough when given the chance. When they do, they seem to be more stridently against it than most men. At least this is true of many of the more traditionally minded women in my circle of friends.

Yes. And I’ve actually found that even liberal women (moderate liberal women anyway) can see the absurdities of gender ideology when you point them out.

When it comes to the crunch, for most women being a woman is very very important. They may believe a great deal of feminist rhetoric but they don’t want to give up on being women.

If you ask the average woman if she believes men and women are equal she’ll say yes, of course they are. If you ask her if men and women are the same she’ll probably say yes because that’s the conventional answer these days. But if you press her, if for example you ask her if she thinks her husband’s mind works the same way hers does she’ll laugh and say of course not.

One thing that seems to work is to suggest to a woman that maybe there’s more to being a woman than having a vagina. That maybe it’s all about her whole life experience, from being a little girl, then hitting puberty, getting her first period, watching her body gradually become a woman’s body, going through the emotional turmoil of developing an interest in boys, etc. Then you ask her how a man wearing a frock can possibly know anything about what it’s like to be a woman. Most women seem to regard that as a fairly potent argument against the trans stuff.

Being an SJW is about emotions, feelings, and obedience to dogma. Logic and consistency are anathema to SJW’s.

Being a human being is about emotions, feelings, and obedience to dogma. Logic and consistency are anathema to most human beings.

Whether we’re an SJW or a dissident rightist or a liberal or a conservative or a Zionist or a communist or a feminist or a fascist, emotions, feelings, and obedience to dogma are what mostly drives us.

If you want to defeat SJWs you have to come up with political strategies that appeal to emotions and feelings. You won’t get very far with logic.

And few of us ever manage to be entirely consistent.

Peaceful transfers of power are probably the most important thing in any political system. If civil war is frequently the result of your ruler dying, then it doesn’t matter how good your system is at producing good rulers — that system will ultimately be the death of your state.

Yep. At the moment the two systems that handle transitions of power well are liberal democracy and the Chinese system.

It looks like Xi just ended one of the keys to China’s success handling transitions of power: (1)

China’s first weakness is strongman Xi himself. Instead of selling off inefficient state-owned industries and banks, which still make up a significant portion of the Chinese economy, he is trying to recentralize power. He has done away with the improvement of Hu Jintao, his predecessor as Party leader, which set the expectation that CPP leaders would step down after two five-year terms. This was Hu’s attempt to begin to modernize Communist Party governance by trying to regularize changes of leadership. Instead, Xi is trying to return China to the bad old days of succession struggles after a political strongman (now Xi) dies or is incapacitated. In addition, the private economy continuing to carry the burden of sclerotic state-owned “key” industries and banks will slow Chinese economic growth.

The release of COVID-19 from the Wuhan Bio-Weapon Virus Laboratory has badly destabilized the political situation and turned the CCP Elites on each other.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/china-is-weaker-than-xi-will-admit/

Whether we’re an SJW or a dissident rightist or a liberal or a conservative or a Zionist or a communist or a feminist or a fascist, emotions, feelings, and obedience to dogma are what mostly drives us.

Everyone agrees that neither aside is 100% either way.

It would be better to ask — Comparing the two sides, which is more like to be rational:
    — Judeo-Christian Populists?
    — SJW Globalists?

That leads to a much more valuable observation of real world, human behaviour:
    ‱ Christian Populists are much more likely be rational.
    ‱ SJW’s are near certain to be illogical & driven by feelings.

If you want to defeat SJWs you have to come up with political strategies that appeal to emotions and feelings. You won’t get very far with logic.

Conceding the terms of battle to the enemy and fighting only on feelings is a guaranteed losing strategy.

The need to survive gives humans a built in rational response to threats. Rationally showing the danger of SJW mythology is strong position that should not be abandoned.

PEACE 😇

It would be better to ask — Comparing the two sides, which is more like to be rational:
— Judeo-Christian Populists?
— SJW Globalists?

To be honest it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Conceding the terms of battle to the enemy and fighting only on feelings is a guaranteed losing strategy.

You cannot fight a Culture War on a battlefield of rationality. People are emotional. People are supposed to be emotional. It’s what makes us human. Men and women are emotional. It’s OK to be emotional.

Ideologies based on rationality tend to be very nasty and tend to have very unpleasant consequences. Marxism-Leninism and free-market economics and economic globalism and economic rationalism – the history of the past century is littered with inhuman rational ideologies.

And the idea of rational populism is simply absurd. Populism by its very nature is a politics based entirely on emotion. Which doesn’t make populism bad or wrong. It just makes it human.

You cannot fight a Culture War on a battlefield of rationality. People are emotional. People are supposed to be emotional. It’s what makes us human. Men and women are emotional. It’s OK to be emotional.

So… In your world view the most emotionally evocative side must win? Even if that unrealistic emotion leads to actions that are ultimately self destructive?

That is a very grim view of the “human condition”.

Ideologies based on rationality tend to be very nasty and tend to have very unpleasant consequences.

Ideologies based primarily on dogma, detached from rationality, are much worse. They create dystopian outcomes. Mao’s anti-factual “Great Leap Forward” led to mass starvation and 35-40MM dead (1) due to its illogic. No amount of emotional commitment to The Little Red Book could feed people.

And the idea of rational populism is simply absurd. Populism by its very nature is a politics based entirely on emotion. Which doesn’t make populism bad or wrong. It just makes it human.

Where did you get the idea that Populism is inherently non-rational? Perhaps you are confusing the Populist Party (circa 1890’s) with modern day Populism?

There is nothing inherently emotional about it: (2)

POPULISM — a belief in the power of regular people, and in their right to have control over their government rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite. The word populism comes from the Latin word for “people,” populus.

One can certainly overlay emotional, such as humorous, appeals to sell rational Populism…
 

 

However, the foundational building blocks of modern Populism are grounded in dry, unemotional necessity. For example — MAGA re-industrialization policy is based on the rational need for U.S. production of real world goods to establish both personal & national security.

PEACE 😇
_________

(1) https://scottmanning.com/content/the-causes-of-starvation-during-the-great-leap-forward/

(2) https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/populism

So
 In your world view the most emotionally evocative side must win?

I believe that the most emotionally evocative side will win. I don’t have to like it and you don’t have to like it but that’s how things appear to me.

Even if that unrealistic emotion leads to actions that are ultimately self destructive?

People are generally not capable of understanding that their emotions can lead them to actions that are ultimately self destructive. Because people behave emotionally, not rationally.

One interesting little thing I forgot to add to this: the Byzantines had been through their 1204 situation twice before in their history, at a similar low point for the empire. Justinian II and Leo III were both sponsored by foreign powers for the throne, by the Bulgars and the Arabs, respectively.

In both cases, though, Constantinople escaped unscathed. In Justinian’s case, he was mocked from the walls, too, but once he was in the city, he was easily re-accepted as emperor. It’s pretty easy to see why. Justinian was the former emperor himself, the great-great-grandson of Heraclius. He then paid the Bulgars off, and they left. The incentives for the foreign army in question were also different. As 717 proved, the Bulgars had little incentive to see Constantinople gone when the alternative was an aggressive and expanding Umayyad caliphate, at the time a superpower.

But Leo? Random provincial army commander with no claim to the throne, sponsored by an enemy that wished to see the empire’s extermination in far more explicit terms than the Crusaders. Once in power behind the walls, he just double-crossed the Arabs. Alexios at least tried to pay what he owed. And yet, he got away with it. Constantinople held out. What happened?

A lot of things happened, of course. Leo, of course, was not the hapless Alexios. Constantinople in 717 was not Constantinople in 1204. The Arabs were not the Latins: they did not have a traditional place within the Byzantine governmental apparatus as the Latins came to have during the Komnenoi era. But there is another difference, and it has to do with this question of legitimacy I keep harping on. In 717, nobody had any. Six emperors had come and gone. It was pretty clear the state needed a general. Leo was as good a choice as any. As it turned out, thanks to his background (he originally came from Syria before being deported to Europe as a kid, spoke fluent Arabic, and probably understood their culture/mentality better than any other medieval European monarch), probably the best one. There was no serious objection to him taking over, and no serious opposition during the siege.

In 1204, legitimacy still rested with Alexios III Angelos. That he was the one of the worst emperors the Roman Empire ever had was immaterial. He was the accepted ruler. There was no pressing reason to replace him in the eyes of the people, hence their overt rejection of Alexios IV. Once Alexios IV was installed, it was clear he was the puppet of the Crusaders. He lacked legitimacy, hence the coup that would ultimately lead to the sack.

So, in a weird way, the fact that the legitimacy well had not yet reached rock bottom, and would only do so when the new guy took power was what led to the sack.

People are generally not capable of understanding that their emotions can lead them to actions that are ultimately self destructive. Because people behave emotionally, not rationally.

Humans have a driving, fundamental, rational instinct to survive. This is reinforced as the most emotional, least rational, individuals remove themselves from the gene pool (1). This does not mean that genetically sound humans are unemotional. It means that there is a practical balance between emotion and rationality.

I see something genetically broken in SJW Globalists who … “are not capable of understanding that their emotions can lead them to actions that are ultimately self destructive”. It is not a quick process, but these extreme anti-rational, excessively emotional SJW’s will be weeded out by lack of survival instinct.

PEACE 😇
_________

(1) https://darwinawards.com/

Interesting (and reasonably balanced) article at Salon (yes, really) – When evangelical snowflakes censor the Bible: The English Standard Version goes PC. It’s about the extraordinary contortions performed by Evangelicals to make the Bible PC without appearing to do so, and if possible without anybody noticing.

https://www.salon.com/2021/07/10/when-evangelical-snowflakes-censor-the-bible-the-english-standard-version-goes-pc/

extraordinary contortions performed by Evangelicals to make the Bible PC

Thanks for more proof that there is a problem trying to blame Protestants for SJW Globalism. The Euro-Centric Christian traditions (Catholic & Evangelical) are the most “woke”.

The collapse of Catholicism under the current failed papacy has been rapid & widespread. The decline is so dramatic, they are actually being sued for abandoning Christianity: (1)

Wealthy Florida parents who pledged \$1.35 million to their daughters’ exclusive Catholic school are suing for breach of contract — accusing it of abandoning a Catholic education in favor of going “woke” and forcing kids to “check their white privilege.”
…
the school turned its back on Catholicism to go “woke,” their 13-count, 45-page lawsuit claims.
…
The Scarpos claim they were betrayed by the school suddenly “embracing the new, politically correct, divisive and ‘woke’ culture where gender identity, human sexuality, and pregnancy termination among other ‘hot-button issues,’ took center stage,” the lawsuit said.

The school “insidiously indoctrinated its students, requiring that they ‘check their white privilege’ and feel sufficiently guilty merely because of their skin color,” the lawsuit said.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://nypost.com/2021/07/09/florida-parents-sue-catholic-school-for-going-woke-after-1-35m-pledge/

That’s all interesting. This is clearly a topic you’ve studied in depth — I surely have more interest in Byzantine history than the average guy, but I clearly haven’t dug into it to nearly the degree you have.

You know, if you’ve ever read Spandrell’s blog, he was gathering a pretty good readership once upon a time simply by bringing up lessons from Chinese political history (about which even most well-educated Westerners are ignorant) and applying them to the present political moment. I wonder if you could expand these ideas into essays and do something similar with Byzantine history. I would read it.

Yeah, I read that article. It certainly didn’t make me think “reasonably balanced” though. I don’t think he ever mentioned that the KJV mostly used the word “servant” to translate “doulos”. At one point he talks about the Gideons replacing the KJV with the ESV, without ever mentioning this fact — as if the word “slave” was suddenly being buried by them.

I don’t use a Bible that has this word “bondservant”, but there is a legitimate case for not using the word “slave” when communicating to the average person, which is that it’s triggering and almost no one nowadays can think about the word “slave” objectively. Using it creates a failure in communication, and what good is a translation that fails to communicate to its intended audience? Moreover, Christians as such don’t really have a dog in the fight — the translators here are not trying to defend slavery or to reverse the caricature of it that exists in the popular mind, they’re simply trying to prevent Biblical references to it from being a mind-killing obstacle to people.

This isn’t the same as de-gendering the Bible as some liberal translators have tried to do (and which this guy defends). This is an explicitly modernist project for the purpose of undermining God-given sex roles. Christians do have a dog in that fight — if sex roles trigger you, then that’s on you.

It should be obvious these things are not the same, and this guy’s efforts to conflate them (without even trying to consider that the opposing side has a case) just show he really has an axe to grind and can’t think objectively about these things.

The Euro-Centric Christian traditions (Catholic & Evangelical) are the most “woke”.

The Evangelicals really are in awkward position. They can’t possibly admit that the Bible says slavery is A-OK. But if they pretend that the Bible doesn’t really say that then they’re opening themselves up to pressure to surrender on every other issue as well (abortion, homosexuality, etc).

So if they stand their ground and fight they’ll get badly mauled, but if they retreat the retreat will turn into a rout.

I don’t use a Bible that has this word “bondservant”, but there is a legitimate case for not using the word “slave” when communicating to the average person, which is that it’s triggering and almost no one nowadays can think about the word “slave” objectively.

It’s certainly true that most people think that whenever slavery has existed it’s always been like slavery in the American South, which is clearly wrong. Slavery in the ancient world, slavery in the Islamic world, slavery in the American South were all quite different. In fact it’s probably true to say that slavery has been slightly different in every culture that has practised slavery.

And yes I agree, there’s no chance that modern westerners are going to comprehend the idea that slavery in the ancient world was different.

The subject is interesting mostly because it’s a sign of how much pressure is going to be put on Christianity to become PC and Woke on other issues.

Dealing with the historical context seems more practical than trying to edit the Biblical language.

At the time the original New Testament books were written, slavery was universal & accepted. A work ‘advocating a slave uprising’ would have been burnt, probably along with associated Apostle.

Similarly, as I pointed out to VK and others, “100% of All Jews” were not in the Temple lending money. In fact, only small number of people were being called out by Jesus. There should not need to be an text change for Christians to understand this.

The correct Evangelical response to those demanding edits should be “Sod Off”. Or, they could edit Exodus:
    22:18 Thou shalt not suffer an *SJW* to live.
    22:19 Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.

PEACE 😇

The subject is interesting mostly because it’s a sign of how much pressure is going to be put on Christianity to become PC and Woke on other issues.

This part is true. But in that case, the gender-neutral stuff, which is being pushed by leftists, is a better example, and one that’s pretty well-known by now. The NIV tried to go extremely gender-neutral in the early 2000s but there was a strong backlash, Christian bookstores refused to carry it. So they walked it back halfway in the update that came out around 10 years ago, and this time they succeeded: despite this leftist shift, the NIV is still the best-selling version.

The obvious battleground is homosexuality. I notice that leftist churches always push the narrative that Paul’s word arsenokoites (literally, “man-bedders”) is a bewildering mystery: “Who knows what it could possibly be describing? Man + bed — it’s nonsense!” You can find tons of people on the Internet arguing this point.

And yet none of the Bible translators give them any room on this: the NIV continues to translate it “men who have sex with men”. I suppose that will change eventually, but the lesson seems to be that Bible sales are even more weighted towards conservative Protestants than church attendance is, and this fact will probably always be true. No one wants to risk losing that audience by creating a version to appeal to Mainliners who don’t read the Bible anyway.

To really crush the Bible, you would ultimately need a top-down directive, such as China’s “state-approved” version. I don’t think Woke Capital alone can do it.

You are just taking this opportunity to let go with your anti-Christian and anti-Evangelical rhetoric.

You can’t tell people what Bible they should use and you can’t dictate how they should interpret those scriptures.

You want to blame Evangelicals for trying to impose values. You want to hold on to muh values. Then you turn around and try to tell them what they should read and how they should interpret what they read.

I call BS.

You are just taking this opportunity to let go with your anti-Christian and anti-Evangelical rhetoric.

In this case I’m really not doing that. I thought the article was interesting because it’s an example of a Culture War battle that non-Christians are possibly not fully aware of. Or, more to the point, non-Christians may not be fully aware of the implications if Christians lose this battle. Because if Christians lose the Battle for the Bible that will negatively affect everyone who opposes Wokeness and PC, including non-Christians. It will be another step in the campaign to impose Wokeness and PC on all of us.

In this particular case as far as I’m concerned it’s a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation. The most threatening enemy at the moment is the Wokeists/SJWs (they’re the ones actively aiming at totalitarianism) so I’m willing to line up with the Christians (and even the Evangelicals) on this issue. I’m willing to line up with the Christians (and even the Evangelicals) on the issue of control of the language.

You can’t tell people what Bible they should use and you can’t dictate how they should interpret those scriptures.

Agreed. But I suspect that you’ll find that the Wokeists/SJWs would very much like to tell Christians what Bible they should use and to dictate how Christians should interpret those scriptures.

What I thought was really interesting about the Bible Wars issue is that it’s a prime example of the Wokeist/SJW strategy of trying to manoeuvre their opponents into a no-win situation.

Thanks, but I’m nowhere near as well-read as you think I am. In a few years time, it might be different story. And truth be told, Chinese political history is a lot more practical. Even as late as Chiang and Mao, you’ll find Chinese political figures making references to events or quoting people from the Warring States period. It’s helpful to note what is going on.

The really cool thing about Byzantine history (other than continuing the Roman tradition of resilience in the face of conditions that could and did shatter contemporary states) is that you pick up a lot of stuff by osmosis, thanks to their geography and longevity. If you are a bit of a history junkie like me, it’s great bang for your buck. Sassanid Persia, the papacy, the rise of Islam and the various caliphates that followed, Charlemagne and the HRE, the foundation of the proto-Russian state, Venice and the rise of the Italian communes, the arrival of the Turks, the Crusades… you end up dealing with them all. Nothing that’ll give you true expertise by itself, of course, but enough that you aren’t blind and can map things together. More importantly, it’ll allow you to sense BS when Talking Head X tries to manipulate history in the service of ideology, or at least give you the tools to learn how to do so for other topics in history.

>To really crush the Bible, you would ultimately need a top-down directive, such as China’s “state-approved” version. I don’t think Woke Capital alone can do it.

Even the Chinese aren’t interested in doing that. Christianity is rapidly growing in the PRC, albeit in a “state-approved” form.

The thing about religion is that it demands sacrifice, profundity in the face of logical self-interest. That’s not something that’s compatible with following every social trend that comes by. Those that do will follow the latter in the end, not the former, leaving behind by natural selection those that don’t.

Biden intentionally drove up fuel prices with deranged ‘green’ policies, and the DNC’s inflation has arrived.

The more accurate values from ShadowStats are even more dramatic than the official CPI #’s.

PEACE 😇

BREAKING! US core #inflation rose to 4.5% in June, higher than expected and the highest level since 1991. Headline #CPI also higher than expected at 5.4%! pic.twitter.com/yIiBuYSZ53

— jeroen blokland (@jsblokland) July 13, 2021

The really cool thing about Byzantine history (other than continuing the Roman tradition of resilience in the face of conditions that could and did shatter contemporary states) is that you pick up a lot of stuff by osmosis, thanks to their geography and longevity. If you are a bit of a history junkie like me, it’s great bang for your buck.

An excellent point. Any subject that is inherently interesting in itself and also leads off into other equally interesting subjects is great fun to pursue.

The thing about religion is that it demands sacrifice, profundity in the face of logical self-interest. That’s not something that’s compatible with following every social trend that comes by.

Traditional religions are also not something that are compatible with hyper-individualistic consumer consumption as is our current model in the US. Although, Wokeness has all the hallmarks of a secular “religion”, complete with salvation narratives of self-sacrifice. (Give up your job promotion or cultural pride white person, or you’ll never be free of your racist stain!)

I suppose that the purest expression of traditional religions have always existed in tension with the State. The State can either co-opt it to reinforce secular power it such as China does or the elevation of the Christ the King symbolism did in Europe, or set up alternate pathways for the religious impulse as was the case with Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or American Woke.

Otherwise, the teachings of Christ or the Buddha, followed too faithfully, might make for less than ideal citizens in the eyes of the State.

I read the article, and it was interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

The saddest part is that is a completely unnecessary corner for Evangelicals to paint themselves into.

Of course early Christianity and Jesus did not go out of their way to condemn slavery (or any number of other worldly unpleasantries). Besides slavery being an inescapable fact of life at the time, Jesus recognized that mental slavery to hating and railing against injustice can be the most profound spiritual bondage. Jesus’ message was not one of immediate earthly utopia since that is an impossibility with human nature as it is. The only hope is for the individual to operate transcendently in a fallen and imperfect world.

This plays into the Jew’s dissatisfaction that Jesus did not seek to overthrow Roman rule. Jesus recognized that it really didn’t particularly matter in a spiritual sense if Rome was governing. The Jews wanted their own temporal utopia, but as Jesus said, his kingdom is not of this world.

This is where SJW’s get it all wrong, as do all utopians. They can get trapped in an infinite and ever escalating cycle of outrage which becomes it’s own justification.
It shouldn’t be too hard for Christians to articulate why this is undesirable and counterproductive and while a seeming lack of pursuing systemic political change in no way absolves the individual from his own responsibility to be God’s instrument in the world, regardless of it’s state.

Sup everyone what I miss

I suppose that the purest expression of traditional religions have always existed in tension with the State.

I was going to offer classical paganism, especially the Roman variant, as an example of a traditional religion that was in harmony with the State. But maybe that wasn’t really the case. The officially sanctioned worship of the gods may have been in harmony with the State but in practice a lot of people followed any one of a multiplicity of pagan cults (the mystery religions, the cult of Isis, etc) which were possibly much less in harmony with the State.

I think that depends on the era. It was a question of scale. When Rome was a traditional Italian city-state where everybody participated in government, people probably genuinely believed in the state religion. The Romans were famed for their religious piety for a reason, and this wasn’t cynical: in the ancient world, there was no such thing as separation of church and state. It was axiomatic to the ancient mind that the divine played a role in who succeeded and who failed.

But the worldview of the Romans had changed by the 1st Century BC, well before Christianity. Men like Caesar and Cicero were now defending Roman religion on the grounds that it was good for public order, with no further justification necessary. The difference was that Rome was an empire now. Not only were the traditional forms of civic participation eroding, Rome had come into contact with more sophisticated strands of philosophical and religious thought, especially in the Greek East. The old gods were still prayed to, of course, and given sacrifices. But the visceral piety was gone. People were finding more satisfying, relevant belief systems.

More broadly speaking, traditional paganism was inherently a diffuse variety of different traditions. They were heavily rooted in local customs and culture. I’ll pitch a modern example that’s not too dissimilar: in rural Java, the local brand of Islam has a syncretic streak that clearly takes influence from pre-Islamic traditions in a way that’d never been considered acceptable in the Middle East. However, this has been eroding fast over the past couple of decades. Why? Because Indonesia began to rapidly urbanize and globalize in the 1980s and 1990s. People were moving to the cities. The traditional brand of Islam was rooted deeply in a kampung setting. Remove that setting, and the rituals are no longer relevant or profound, especially to the middle class. Orthodox Islam is the natural replacement. That doesn’t mean rural Javanese Islam is extinct, but the ground supporting it is far weaker today.

I suspect something similar happened in ancient Rome as their version of globalization took off. The local cults remained relevant, but the ground underneath them became shakier, and foreign cults came and went throughout the centuries in Rome itself. In their case, though, the 3rd Century came along and completely snapped the links between people and their old institutions. The cults of Mithras and Sol Invictus were filling the same void that Christianity did. It’s likely that in the 4th Century, many upper class Romans viewed Christianity as the current imperially favored cult that would fade with time: and, indeed, under Constantine, it was nothing more than the religion being patronized by the imperial family.

However, the world had changed. The empire had become a more integrated unit by necessity. That meant some kind of religious cohesion was probably going to happen. I think it is deeply telling that Diocletian, a strong religious conservative who wanted to revive the traditional Roman state religion, still tried to revive it as a coherent, empire-wide thing. That had never been what it was in the previous centuries.

It’s fair to say that Christianity Romanized (or in the East, Hellenized) as much as Rome Christianized. Perhaps even moreso.

I think the main difference between Western Europe and the rest of the world is that the church could eventually carve out its own independent social role due to the collapse of centralized government. This took time to play out-nobody would have thought the church was stronger than Charlemagne-but it was a real, profound difference. There’s no way something like the adoption and subsequent abandonment/persecution of Buddhism under the Tang could have happened in Europe. The government didn’t have enough power to get away with that. Of course, this melded with Christianity’s absolutist nature and lack of potential rivals, but it was still true.

(You don’t even have to leave Christianity to find a counterpoint: as long as they didn’t try to mess with fundamental doctrine, Byzantine emperors would continue to dominate the clergy until the end. The church was an important power faction in society, but so was the army, the people of Constantinople, and the bureaucracy, all competing for imperial patronage. Something akin to the papal reform movement would have been impossible to launch.)

Re: wokeness: one of its structural problems is that it doesn’t really offer anything to those in condemns in a society conditioned to respond to universalistic religious ideals. And underneath the surface, it doesn’t offer much to those it praises, either. It’s a religion that mainly benefits the people who propagate it, who are by and large affluent. That’s not tenable in the long haul.

Poll results that discredit the DNC… You know… The Usual. (1)

VOTING REFORM: 70% WANT ALL MAIL-IN BALLOTS RECEIVED BY ELECTION DAY.

Seventy percent (70%) of voters want all mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day. A Scott Rasmussen national survey found that 21% are opposed to that requirement and 9% are not sure.

Those totals include 47% who Strongly Favor the Election Day deadline and 11% who are Strongly Opposed.

Requiring mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day is favored by 83% of Republicans, 63% of Democrats, and 55% of Independent voters. In fact, that requirement is favored by a majority of every measured demographic group.

The survey also found that 65% believe government agencies should be required to report the vote totals from all ballots either on Election Night or the next day.

Plus, 76% favor Photo ID for voting.

Also: 57% want Ballot Harvesting banned, only 20% disagree.

None of this, of course, is what the Democrats are offering in their new HR4 “voting rights” bill, the whole point of which is to insulate a Democrat-run government from what voters want.

The Fascist Left channels more of its spirit from 1930’s Germany every day. It is scary how many #NeverTrump crazies are out there opposing the obvious common sense of MAGA and embracing Biden-omics.

PEACE 😇

(1) https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/461788/#respond

The obvious analogue to late Mediterranean Paganism, which I seldom hear people bring up, is contemporary Hinduism. Hinduism has this more ancient surface level, in which you really have the countless gods and their various stories, and you make sacrifices to those gods and seek a personal connection with them. But more philosophically-inclined Hindus have a much wider range of views about the nature of the gods, including basically monotheistic ones.

I have to conclude that classical polytheism, in which the gods behave like characters from a Shakespearean play, is very unsatisfying to sophisticated societies. It adequately answers the sort of questions that an unlettered farmer or warrior might ask, but it offers very little for the questions that a student of philosophy might ask. So I think monotheism almost always outcompetes polytheism in the end. You have basically three historical cases:

In the Hindu case, they managed to develop their own homegrown monotheism of sorts, which was able to survive (though with significant losses to Islam in particular). I believe it had also pulled in some ideas from Buddhism by the time Islam was a threat.

In the Roman case, philosophers tried to do this, but they had a late start — Judaism already had its admirers before Christianity, and Christianity pulled in pretty much all of them and then outcompeted the monotheistic or dualistic imitators that followed behind it. Also, it probably didn’t help that Diocletian was trying to bring back an archaic form of Paganism that the educated classes had already rejected. Several decades later Julian tried to elevate the newer, monotheistic paganism, but Christianity had far too much momentum.

In Northern Europe, society was too primitive to develop any sort of homegrown monotheism, and so Christianity overcame polytheism from Ireland to Russia in the absence of any real monotheistic competition.

Thanks. I was going to make a similar point, but you have stated it very well indeed!

Several decades later Julian tried to elevate the newer, monotheistic paganism, but Christianity had far too much momentum.

Do you think that Julian’s concept of paganism could have competed successfully with Christianity had it been tried a century earlier? Or perhaps a century-and-and-a-half earlier?

We’re in full lockdown at the moment. We have to wear masks even inside our own homes. We’re all pretty much under house arrest.

Anecdotally there seems to be some evidence that people are being coerced into getting vaccinated by the implied threat that they may lose their jobs if they don’t. Anecdotally there also seems to be some evidence that there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of being vaccinated.

Wow. Where are you? Where I am in NY State it’s all basically fully normal.

Even though un-vaxxed are supposed to still mask up it’s evident that no one does. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s actually been my observation that the vaxxed are more likely to still be the ones masking.

Well, of course I have a biased answer because I think Providence had a hand here. But if I take a step back from that, my sense is that for things to have a strong chance of really going differently, the Romans probably would have needed a pretty solid alternative in place by the time of Christ. Though we can also imagine scenarios where the anti-Christian alternative is partly successful and the empire ends up divided — the Greek-speaking East goes Christian, while the Latin-speaking West goes another way.

Of course there were mystery cults around at the time of Christ, but we don’t understand them very well. And the most prominent of them, Mithraism, was based on a Persian deity and couldn’t rightly claim to be a “homegrown” Roman religion either. In any case, these cults were intentionally secretive and exclusive, which doesn’t work so well for a state religion. Julian probably had something close to the right formula for a “homegrown” monotheistic competitor, but if you’re trying to effect a major change like this, I think it also helps if you have one or more charismatic prophets you can point to, and not just government decrees.

Wow. Where are you? Where I am in NY State it’s all basically fully normal.

I’m in eastern Australia. If you rate COVID Hysteria on a scale from 1 to 10 our state government is currently at level 11. They’re basically running around in circles crying, “OMG. We’re all gonna die.”

Of course there were mystery cults around at the time of Christ, but we don’t understand them very well.

Yes. There’s really so much about the ancient world that we understand very poorly, or even not at all. The mystery religions being one of the big things that we don’t really know much about.

And as far other ancient civilisations are concerned, we really know hardly anything about how they lived and what they believed.

Take the Minoans. An extremely advanced, spectacularly successful and very long-lived civilisation. We know pretty much nothing about what they believed.

We know bits and pieces about ancient paganism as it was practised in some places, that’s about all we can say.

And the most prominent of them, Mithraism, was based on a Persian deity and couldn’t rightly claim to be a “homegrown” Roman religion either. In any case, these cults were intentionally secretive and exclusive, which doesn’t work so well for a state religion.

And the Cult of Isis wasn’t homegrown either.

if you’re trying to effect a major change like this, I think it also helps if you have one or more charismatic prophets you can point to, and not just government decrees.

The popularity of the mystery religions does seem to indicate that state cults were not really seen as spiritually or emotionally satisfying.

>The popularity of the mystery religions does seem to indicate that state cults were not really seen as spiritually or emotionally satisfying.

City-state cults just didn’t scale well to an imperial level. For the Romans, this coincided with their exposure to more sophisticated philosophical and religious thought from the Hellenistic and Middle Eastern worlds.

Re, Julian: the main problem was that he was trying to make traditional paganism into something it fundamentally wasn’t. Paganism was a diffuse collection of local traditions, each intensely tied into the life of the city or region where it came from. This wasn’t compatible with the new political conditions that the 3rd Century created.

I don’t think the Christianization of Rome was a fait accompli at this point: for most of the 4th Century, Christianity was the imperial-favored religion, not the state religion as it would become later. But it would have been more feasible to pick a different cult that fit the needs of the age better rather than to try and revive a failed one. It’s worth noting that Diocletian tried to revive the Olympian pantheon 60 years earlier. Unlike Julian, he was not going up against a religion that had been favored by the imperial family as long as anyone could remember, and also unlike Julian, he had no qualms in employing systematic state-sponsored brutality against those he perceived (not just Christians) as disrupting Rome’s relationship with the gods. It still didn’t stick.

This isn’t anything close to an educated statement, but my suspicion is that the two decisive factors were the scale and complexity of India and China as places, and the robustness of native traditions compared to the localized paganism found elsewhere in the world.

Outsider religions could-and often were-adopted. But it was always within the existing framework rather than overriding it. I don’t know enough about India to comment on it, but China has a bit of a history of religions being adopted by an imperial dynasty during its rise to power (Buddhism for the Tang, the White Lotus-apocalyptic mix of Buddhism and Manicheanism-for Ming Hongwu as a Red Turban), only for it to be discarded in favor of orthodox Confucian traditions later.

I looked a bit and it appears that Australia has 1,263 active Covid cases, with 18 of those being serious, and 2 deaths this year.

This is an interesting case as it appears to frame Australia’s approach as a success, at least strictly in terms of containing Covid (which is a least in theory possible on an island).

However, Covid is not going to be completely eliminated no matter how successful a vaccination campaign. Like the flu it’s here and will stay. At some point one has to suck it up, get back to normal and open up the borders.

I would presume that most everyone who wanted the jab and is in a risk group have had ample opportunity to get it.

What is the Australian government waiting for and what are they trying to accomplish? Perhaps nothing and as you say they are just in full freakout mode. That seems crazy to me since what is the off-ramp?

Are they really mandating masks inside your own home? If so, does anyone actually pay attention to that?

What is the Australian government waiting for and what are they trying to accomplish? Perhaps nothing and as you say they are just in full freakout mode. That seems crazy to me since what is the off-ramp?

It’s the state governments rather than the Federal Government in Australia that are responsible for the lockdowns. And, interestingly enough, state governments of both political stamps are equally committed to draconian lockdowns.

In a way I think they’re victim of their own success. They did go very close to eliminating the virus. To give up on elimination now would make all their previous efforts seem to have been futile. They’re in the same position that Great Powers often find themselves in in wars – having expended vast quantities of blood and treasure they feel compelled to keep striving for Total Victory, otherwise all those sacrifices will be seen as having been in vain.

This is a quote I found elsewhere.

“How short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples’ approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success, there were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the twentieth century came the discovery of its fragility and friability. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

My response was that I think Solzhenitsyn was right. Whatever the motivations of colonialism, even if some of those motivations were laudable, colonialism has destroyed the West.

Expansionism may have been an expression of the extraordinary dynamism of European civilisation but it has turned out to have been a fatal flaw.

They did go very close to eliminating the virus. To give up on elimination now would make all their previous efforts seem to have been futile.

The virus will probably become endemic and people will just learn to live with it. In the United Kingdom hospitalizations have increased 500% from the same time last year and half of all hospitalizations involve already vaccinated people. The two theories on why the vaccinations aren’t working is that either they don’t protect against variants or they have only short term effectiveness. If they have only short term effectiveness then you will need a yearly shot like the flu shot. They won’t be like a tetanus shot that lasts ten years.

If the vaccines work poorly protecting against variants, many people won’t bother getting them. If you need a yearly shot, many young people won’t want to get a yearly shot for the rest of their lives. We don’t know yet the side effects from multiple shots.

I had it three weeks ago and, according to x-rays, came out of it with no lung damage and am totally back to normal. I’m 65 years old. There are things I did that would help people recover like I did. They would include maintaining a normal weight, don’t smoke cigarettes, eat a healthy diet and take supplements like quercetin, zinc, vitamin d and vitamin C. I don’t think the government should be telling people what kind of health habits they should follow but the media should get that information out.

“Expansionism may have been an expression of the extraordinary dynamism of European civilisation but it has turned out to have been a fatal flaw. ”

No. Colonialism has been a pattern of human civilization and Western civ in particular going back thousands of years. The Greeks planted colonies all around the Med; Massilia/Marseille being one of the most successful. What the Euros did was a natural continuation. The problem was that the North American policy – exterminationist race war coupled with massive settlement and population expansion, leaving fragments of foreign population that cannot possibly pose a threat – was not systematically applied everywhere. For example had that been applied in Africa, to all Bantu populations, you’d have another USA-scale economy south of the Congo. And of course the American slaves should never have been decreed to be identical with whites.

And of course China – excellent imitators, always – is applying the North American policy to their own internal foreigners. Remains to be seen if their demographics will hold up long enough to let them start applying it elsewhere, but signs point to “no”.

The problem is a failure of identity – a failure to correctly identify “the other”; a refusal to believe that such a thing can exist. The bubble of unprecedented security imposed by Pax Americana is part of the cause. Christianity and its “there is neither Jew nor Greek” is another part. But Pax Americana is falling to pieces and Christianity is dying.

These problems solve themselves.

The problem was that the North American policy – exterminationist race war coupled with massive settlement and population expansion, leaving fragments of foreign population that cannot possibly pose a threat – was not systematically applied everywhere.

Even apart from the moral considerations it wouldn’t have been possible. The European empires were only held together by bluff and prestige. The British for example could never have held their empire had they faced any serious challenge. Once British prestige collapsed in WW2 their empire was doomed.

And it isn’t easy to work people up into a sufficient state of hatred that they’re prepared to commit genocide in cold blood.

And I’m not suggesting that there was an exterminationist race war in North America. I don’t think that’s a fair assessment at all of what happened. There was dispossession certainly but there was no deliberate policy of genocide.

Here in eastern Australia we’re now under even stricter lockdown. With hundreds of cops patrolling the streets to enforce the rules. Even though there have been no cases at all in the part of the country in which I live. I’m still yet to meet anybody who has had COVID.

And again it’s anecdotal evidence but judging by a conversation I had today resistance to the idea of vaccination seems to be growing.

But the good news is that even though overseas trips are now a thing of the past for ordinary Australians our politicians are still jetting about all over the world. The Queensland Premier has just arrived in Tokyo to have a lovely time watching the Olympics. You don’t suppose the lockdown rules apply to our political elites do you? Rules are for the little people.

Well, here’s the advantage of the Julian-esque approach as I see it: you instantly have at least some buy-in from people who liked the old Paganism. The goal is to convince everyone who doesn’t like it that the old Paganism can be spiritually nourishing, because it has room to incorporate many of these other ideas that you find more interesting. Diocletian didn’t attempt this.

I have to think it’s not a coincidence that of the non-Pagan alternatives, it was Christianity that ultimately won out. And I doubt that if Constantine had picked, say, Manichaeism instead, that the Manichaean faith would hold the same place in the West as Christianity does or did. Though Christianity might well have not reached the geographic extent that it did, either.

It’s interesting how poorly understood even something like Zoroastrianism is — and that’s both a former imperial state religion and still, technically, an extant faith! I was recently reading on this and realizing that historians’ efforts to date the life of Zoroaster range over about a millennium; the closest thing to a consensus is the latter part of that millennium, around 600 BC, but no one really knows.

Incidentally, the oldest Zoroastrian manuscripts date back to around 1000 AD (and were actually found in China), and we also have no real idea how much they have in common with the teachings of Zoroaster himself, perhaps 1500 or 2500 years earlier. The challenges of the Christian, with numerous New Testament manuscript fragments that can be dated to the second century AD, seem much smaller in comparison.

The reason why I’m a bit skeptical about Julian’s reforms is that he was trying to reverse not just Constantine, but Diocletian himself: he wanted to go back to the Principate system. It’s pretty clear that Julian wanted to model himself off the Antontine dynasty. This was about as realistic as the Flavians restoring the Republic. And this isn’t unrelated from the religious changes: in the 1st Century and 2nd Century empire, there was no such thing as a broadly unifying paganism. Each city and region had their own cults. This was not compatible with the more integrated empire that Aurelian and Diocletian and Constantine created, which required religious consolidation.

When you combine that with his poorly executed invasion of Persia, you get the picture of someone with a lot of potential, but not the patience or maturity to get something on that scale done *at that time*.

But bearing that in mind, though, Julian was still a young man when he died. There’s no reason why he couldn’t have been on the throne for multiple decades, learning as he went along, and it wasn’t like he was incompetent at governing even starting out. Even taking away Ammianus; pro-Julian bias, his record in Gaul and Germany proved that.

In the end, we’ll never know what could have been. I don’t think Julian could have ever done away with the permanent changes that the 3rd Century created and would have had to reconcile himself to that. But once he did, who is to say? Christianity’s position as a religion was far from the effective state religion that it would eventually become, and out in the countryside, where most of the population lived, things were especially slow to change.

>And I doubt that if Constantine had picked, say, Manichaeism instead, that the Manichaean faith would hold the same place in the West as Christianity does or did.

Again, Christianity Romanized as much as Rome Christianized. This wasn’t hard, especially in the Hellenized East where Christianity was a very natural fit with the local culture. Manichaeism would have had a harder time pulling that off.

I’m curious about Aurelian’s choice of Sol Invictus as a patron deity as a potential divergence, though… it is significant not least because it shows the broader societal shift toward monotheism, well before Constantine.

>It’s interesting how poorly understood even something like Zoroastrianism is — and that’s both a former imperial state religion and still, technically, an extant faith! I was recently reading on this and realizing that historians’ efforts to date the life of Zoroaster range over about a millennium; the closest thing to a consensus is the latter part of that millennium, around 600 BC, but no one really knows.

You can get hints of what Zoroastrianism was like by observing Islamic emphasis on ritual purity and prayer. Persian culture had a similar role in shaping Islam that Greco-Roman culture did with Christianity.

Well, here’s the advantage of the Julian-esque approach as I see it: you instantly have at least some buy-in from people who liked the old Paganism. The goal is to convince everyone who doesn’t like it that the old Paganism can be spiritually nourishing, because it has room to incorporate many of these other ideas that you find more interesting.

Do you think that in today’s world there’d be any chance of a kind of pagan/Christian hybrid synthetic religion gaining any traction?

Well, I think that’s largely what “spiritual but not religious” is. At least in the US, there are a lot of people out there (women especially — and by women, I mean cat ladies) who don’t deny God and don’t deny that Jesus was on to something, but who have their own personal mishmash of spiritual beliefs. Maybe allowing for the occult, or for astrology, soulmates, and so on. Perhaps trying to invoke some Eastern mysticism as well (especially through yoga). Of course, such mishmashes never really have anything like a systematic theology.

You can have cults or other “new religious movements” that do go down this path and do have something more like a systematic theology, but I guess I don’t think such things will ever become a dominant national religion.

The problem with all new religious movements is that there’s a certain hokeyness to them, in that they’re very plainly invented from whole cloth. Usually the founder claims some sort of divine revelation, but the divine revelation somehow always seems to come to a guy who demonstrates Dark Triad personality traits and/or has had run-ins with the law related to fraud in his past. And the revelation he receives always seems to translate to him becoming rich/powerful within the organization and most likely having sex with a large percentage of the female members.

Christianity argues for certain biographical points in Jesus’ favor to get away from this. Islam does much the same with Mohammed (even if the points there aren’t quite as strong). You can either accept or deny those points, but there’s no denying that the points are very relevant to people accepting a faith. I’d argue that Mohammed was basically the same sort of person as Joseph Smith, but he arrived under more ideal conditions for starting a major world religion. The present-day is almost certainly a worse time than Mormonism’s founding days — but who knows what the future holds?

It’s interesting how poorly understood even something like Zoroastrianism is — and that’s both a former imperial state religion and still, technically, an extant faith!

Religious history as a whole is not as clearly understood as one would like it to be, even in comparatively recent times. Take 19th century England. We have some data on church attendance, but church attendance doesn’t necessarily mean all that much. For how large a proportion of the population was Christianity actually a central part of life? How many people were simply cultural Christians? What of the countless small sects (some of them very weird and wonderful) which proliferated?

We know that the late Victorian and Edwardian eras saw an upsurge of interest in the occult, in esoteric cults such as Rosicrucianism, ritual magick and the beginnings of neo-paganism. How significant were these things, and how seriously did their practitioners take them?

There were certainly atheists and agnostics but were they a significant share of the population?

To be clear, my argument is not that Julian the Apostate could ever have succeeded with his project, in 360 AD. My argument is something more like, if Augustus had been far-seeing enough to envision the problems for the Roman state religion coming down the pike, and he cared enough to preserve it, then perhaps he could have attempted some reforms in the direction of what Julian did, and met at least partial success, especially if the rest of his dynasty carried on with the project.

But all that is another way of saying Roman Paganism never really stood a chance, without some pretty large departures from our world.

Another interesting and somewhat related question: what could have or should have been done to forestall the fall of the Roman Empire? I read an argument once that the best that could have been done is to achieve a more gradual transition to the Middle Ages, because the Western Empire (unlike the Eastern) wasn’t productive enough to support something like the Roman state in the long run. But what emperor was really going to pursue that sort of transition?

You can get hints of what Zoroastrianism was like by observing Islamic emphasis on ritual purity and prayer. Persian culture had a similar role in shaping Islam that Greco-Roman culture did with Christianity.

That’s an interesting thought — I always thought of those elements of Islam as being descended from Judaism. But perhaps not? I have heard that argument before though that Islam was permanently Persianized by the conquest of Persia, though I always imagined this had more to do with schools of formal Islamic theology and not basic Muslim religious practice.

I’ve heard an argument before that something like 20-30% of Americans being committed believers is a fairly stable long-run number. At times, regular church attendance is a multiple of this number, at other times it isn’t, but this reflects the movements of more marginally-attached Christians far more than changes in the core of committed believers.

The problem with all new religious movements is that there’s a certain hokeyness to them, in that they’re very plainly invented from whole cloth. Usually the founder claims some sort of divine revelation, but the divine revelation somehow always seems to come to a guy who demonstrates Dark Triad personality traits and/or has had run-ins with the law related to fraud in his past. And the revelation he receives always seems to translate to him becoming rich/powerful within the organization and most likely having sex with a large percentage of the female members.

I agree with that. There have been examples of successful modern synthetic religions but most are tainted by such problems. And the problem today is that even if a charismatic leader emerged he’d probably get #metoo’d.

And trying to get neo-pagans to unite would be like trying to herd cats.

I’ve heard an argument before that something like 20-30% of Americans being committed believers is a fairly stable long-run number.

That’s probably fairly accurate. In other western countries I’d guess the numbers are way lower.

If we assume that as recently as the 17th century most Europeans were committed believers the interesting question is when did the numbers start to plummet? And was the decline inevitable?

My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that western Europe had probably already reached the stage of no more than 20-30% being committed believers by the mid to late 19th century.

Is Christianity in the West (outside the United States) in the same position as paganism in the 4th century? What would be needed to revive it? Can it be made compatible with liberalism? Or would that make things worse?