The Biosecurity Complex, Social Media Annihilating Teen Girls' Mental Health, No "Absolute Victory" for Ukraine, "The Dissident Fringe", "Fargo" Meets Montreal Mafia
In the Hungarian Centrist opposition, declaring “crises” as a way of bypassing actual liberal democracy in the West has finally been recognized (thanks to Covid).
Putin ended Covid, but Covid also kind of ended the pretense that the immoral, post-9/11 End of History that replaced the blissful 1990-2001 End of History was a deal with the Devil that card-carrying Liberal Democrats should put up with, because the alternative is, idk... why are we putting up with "crises" as our fundamental freedoms are being dismantled?
I see few such sane Centrists in the US, but in Europe they are plenty. I guess US Libs are overcome by an existential, puritanical zeal, which is not a permitting environment for taking a break for reassessment.
Schmitt stated that liberalism requires a state of exception where the sovereign is permitted to supersede the bounds of law and simply act in an arbitrary fashion. It seems his analysis was rather correct. Also something I wanted to posit to you that I thought of lately. The concept of freedom isn't really a state of equilibrium. The way I thought of it, when freedom emerges it acts as a vacuum and that vacuum is merely waiting to be filled by a new order (Nature abhors a vacuum). So the notion of many libertarians/libertines who think freedom is merely the end goal never consider that freedom is simply a transition phase rather than a steady state. Put another way, if one splits an atom in a nuclear reaction, a lot of energy emerges but those particles will reattach once that energy is dispersed. The splitting of bonds doesn't get rid of those bonds forever, it just produces an environment for new bonds to assert themselves (maybe I'm not technically correct but I hope one reading this gets the idea). The concept of the free market simply presents the environment for a new equilibrium to establish itself but that freedom is simply the transition and this is the blind spot, I believe, that a lot of conservatives/libertarians make because they see freedom as the end goal but its merely the middle chapter rather than the conclusion. This can be evidenced by any type of revolution and also correlates well with elite theory, revolution, and the circulation of elites. The end stage of the circulation is a new equilibrium base and the revolution requires freedom as the mechanism to make this transition: not to be in a perpetual state of transition. Wanted to know your thoughts on this matter, if this makes any sense or if I'm just in a thought experiment spiral to incoherence. Keep up the good work
I grasp what you're saying as nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. Our understanding of the term "freedom" requires conditions that are quite specific and not universally present, and also help to raise the threats to their erosion at the same time.
"Schmitt stated that liberalism requires a state of exception where the sovereign is permitted to supersede the bounds of law and simply act in an arbitrary fashion."
I understand what you are saying and I think we are kind of getting at the same idea. But given the common understanding of freedom requires certain conditions, would that not simply reinforce the notion that it is merely a transition rather than a steady state? Maybe maybe not, I don't know.
Also, I am not a parent but I think Canada is the embodiment of a parent who sent their child to university and that child came back a blue haired male feminist. It really is tragic to watch. Have a good week bruv!
Have you read Huntington's "American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony"? He talks about the four stages of US political cycles: periods of "Creedal Passion" (like the 60s and wokeness), followed by "cynicism," then "complacency," then "hypocrisy" then "creedal passion" again. The book was published in 1980 or so but in it he predicted the next creedal passion period to start in the mid-2010s. Huntington even chided the optimism of that 1980 book in his "Who are We?" book, though left the name of the author to the footnotes.
I don't think the 1980s fits his timeline too well though. 60s was creedal passion, 70s cynicism, 90s complacency, 00s hypocrisy. Peter Hitchens has stated that the 80s seem more foreign than any other decade of his life.
USA has the "necessary and proper" clause in the constitution. Scalia cited it when saying intra-state marijuana sales could be prosecuted federally. Thomas ruled they couldn't.
Or as Thomas Jefferson, the famous lover of small government and individual rights (at least for elites and yeoman farmers) said after he made the Louisiana Purchase:
“A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means”
What necessity and danger had to do with justifying an extra-constitutional land purchase- who knows? Though I am glad he did it.
Almost every critique of "neo-liberalism" is accurate, yet even as flawed as it is it represents a better system than Russia and China. I already lived under totalitarian rule, I'm not going back.
As for Ukraine, you can find a gorrillion narratives about how corrupt and Nazi it is and how justified Russia is to fear NATO and to invade.
Still don't care, as I am a simple man - I want the closest empire to be weakened, and the most remote empire that is least likely to invade strengthened. War remains, by far, a much larger issue for me compared to queer "rights" and BLM chimp outs.
Too much complicated thought leads you to fence sitting and lack of decisiveness. I prefer simple friend enemy distinctions.
Life's flawed, countries are imperfect, peoples, ethnic groups and races badly defined, and everyone wants to manipulate the narratives to favor the ones they belong to.
Russia yes, the PRC (if you’re not a Uyghur) maybe not if we’re talking about quality of life. In terms of human rights and freedom of conscience I would definitely take hard over soft totalitarianism, a monolithic Party organization over a nebulous Cathedral.
You have not lived under "hard" rule then. I have, my parents have been tortured and more. I find the Western vision of life under harsh authority dangerously naive.
You let me know when there are waves of mass migration from the West towards Russia and China.
The Cathedral is not nebulous at all. It's how liberalism and progressivism works - they never stop, and always erode. The Cathedral would collapse in years if the right was intellectual and able to conduct itself within institutions, do proper research and development, invent new technology etc. The problem is the right looks back towards some idealized past that only exists in advertising and movies, and rejects everything "modern", so they have managed to ostracize themselves outside structures of power.
Such huge mistakes have severe consequences. Imagine if Putin would reject some new chip tech that would make missiles more precise because Uncle Teddy was once worried about tech progress.
I’m not sure what the right word is to describe the Cathedral, I meant “nebulous” as opposed to a monolithic Party. Perhaps “composite” would be a better word but I was referring to the fact that we can’t really define the Cathedral the way we can, for instance, the CCP.
The Cathedral thrives because of the limitless cowardice of the Right.
The Right recruits from the professional and middle classes which are strata that bought into the system a long time ago and are socially/psychically/spiritually unable to resist anything...above all the Boss. The organised working classes were crushed in the 70s and early 80s and have no political outlet apart from voting in rigged elections.
The embarrassed and awkward way the Right folded after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case against Biden for electoral fraud gave the game away. The failure of the broad mass of conservatives to mobilise in defence of the Jan 6 patriots or Douglass Mackey indicates that the Cathedral will outlast its critics by many generations.
Also of course the Right’s unwillingness to “clean it out”, i.e. fire the old clerics and install its own. But that’s both cowardice and over-principledness.
Never attribute an abundance of principles to what can best be explained by complacency, cowardice and inadequacy.
It is not clear that the Right has the human capital to replace the Cathedral. The Right is a controlled opposition without the instincts or the experience to run very much. Babbling on about natural law, the constitution, the Frankfurt School or whining about how unfair life is does not constitute evidence of insight or ability. Fitness to rule is established by competition and the established Right has lost every competition that ever counted. Their critics, the would-be Muad'dibs of the vitalist right, are a long way from riding any sand-worms to victory.
Relief (should it ever come) will involve Cathedral-adjacent regional leadership with the relevant skill-set (military, policing, state government, banking) co-operating with Cathedral alumni to retrieve what they can in a post-hegemonic future (one in which Washington is constrained by Russia and China amidst a global economy plagued by escalating resource shortages). The new ruling class will blend elements of the Cathedral-culture with their own particular traditions/influences, which will include some input from the dissident/vitalist scene.
Let me give you a list of totalitarian measures that limit your rights in Russia.
1. Pissing on war memorials, probably the harshest law in Russia atm, every year we get 3-4 cases where the person gets real prison terms for this.
2. Disrespecting the church (in practice only people that post nude images in front of churches or do things like burn religious books get charged) Administrative offense e.i. fines.
3. Bringing photo of nazi's to WWII memorial marches or posting them on online memorial boards (during Covid). There have been a few civil court cases where veterans of WWII managed to get monetary compensation from people they deemed "disrespected their memory"
4. Sell LGBT books without age restrictions or organize any kind of LGBT education for children. This is fairly rarely prosecuted and gets on front page news when used.
5. Protest and print media with the support of western institutions, or for western interest. Advocate for revolution. Few know that the biggest protest movement in Russia over the last 10 years where the protests against the raising of pension age, not any of the liberal issues portrayed in western media. 90% of these cases lead to sanctions against the individual responsible, making it difficult for them to bank in Russia banks etc.
6. Really stupid laws that require you to write "banned in the Russian Federation" when referring to organisations like ISIS (banned in the Russia federation), or Azov (banned in the Russia Federation). There are 45 such organisations.
7. "Obvious disrespect" against representative of the state. In 2021, this law ended up used 51 times with a total amount fined in all cases at $21,000.
In Russia we have a saying: The harshness of our laws is offset by their lack of implementation, these laws aren't actually designed to punish in any real way, but rather as a mechanism to encourage self-censorship .
Does not sound totalitarian to me. Or indeed all that heavy-handed.
The real test of freedom is what you can say in everyday life without being shunned or harassed or blacklisted. Russians tend to be pretty blunt and very frank with each other, but reserved in relation to the authorities. In the West, by contrast, people can mouth abuse about the government, but increasingly cannot talk openly with colleagues, neighbours or even family. The levels of anxiety over opinions is very high.
The q. is the locus and frequency of repression. An occasional prosecution for a crime is one thing, but constant anxiety and suspicion that erodes trust and cohesion across society is quite another. IMO Russia sounds like an oasis of sanity.
While I agree with you sentiment, in my opinion this strategy from the RU government leads to ambiguity in law, and erodes trust in the rule of law. While I am sure that it is an effective means of social engineering, and much less abrasive than the shame based ostracisation from polite society in the west, ambiguity create a sense of anxiety that isn't healthy either.
The Russians are making progress and this cannot be measured by Western experience. Russia will always be a lot less individualistic than the West because of its historical experience. They are better off making mistakes that suit the national temperament than meeting abstract standards of any kind. Russia has been the site of non-stop social engineering by its rulers since early modern times. They can do with a break for a few generations. The challenge facing Russia now is increasing the incidence of family formation and total fertility. Everything else is a minor detail.
Not one of those measures is "totalitarian". Such is the cost of living in a functional society with a characteristic civilizational outlook. If western European elites had a fraction of the sanity demonstrated by current Russian elites, we would be in a much better position.
People who worship Hypersonic Putin in the West (and its colonies, like Hungary) want a cheat code to spare them from the labor of standing up for themselves.
What are the values of the European Union? Well, those change all the time. But if you quit, you won't have a seat at the table to be part of the decision.
I have empathy for these "Lost Atlanticists" who feel that they have been abused by our allies, and I think they're 100% in the right when they suggest our local NAFO skizos to join the front in Eastern Ukraine, instead of posting online - with one caveat: admit that despite their sour view of our Western allies, none wants to live in Moscow, or work under a Chinese boss.
I'm also kind of guilty of this by lionizing the new, Taliban government of Afghanistan, but you have to be really obtuse not too see that it's mostly for the lulz. Or is it?
George...you have inadvertently identified the ultimate future of the West: American leadership, Russian bureaucracy and Chinese management. Just imagining this gets me thinking about seeking asylum in Kabul.
*Famous quote about people in the Soviet Union being aware that the powers tell them bullshit versus...*
It's a very soft totalitarianism where you lose your livelihood for being discovered as a dissident, and your - former - LinkedIn contacts honestly applaud your disawoval. Who puts a gun at their head, like they do in a totalitarian system? Nobody.
If it was hard totalitarianism, they would understand. They don't. This has nothing to do with being an NPC, there are no NPCs in the gulag. Misguided, secular puritanism? Maybe, for the former puritans.
Individuals will not risk getting their porn licence revoked for standing up for you. They will hate you for being revealed as a risk factor, and happily comply. Even double down.
Decadent individualists hysterized by panic after panic, bred and managed by soft power to seek refuge in approved collective hate agains straw men who are dangers to the powers. That is not totalitarianism. It's fucking sinister, sure, but it's not the absolute and transparent rule of a strong man. Russia is totalitarian: no one dares to run against Putin. In the US, the regime's foot soldiers are 100% convinced that they are the "rebels".
Recall that much of this is driven by fears of lawsuits for “discrimination” or “civil rights violations”. (In Hanania’s words, “We have to care what judges think and they read the NYT!”) If they’re perceived as upholding the civil rights violations you’re supposedly committing by being a dissident they know their fate is the same as yours - that’s the gun here. Unless, of course, they genuinely believe that you deserve everything you’re getting for being a bigoted misinformation-spreading denying conspiracist.
Reading this has really made me dizzy, in a world-turned-upside-down sorta way...
Our billionaire class can't just sit happily upon their massive mountains of lucre, but are auditioning for the role of Bond villain, trying to see which political and journalist puppets can best help them frighten the herd enough that we all willingly run into the pen to be slapped with a barcode and zapped with so much fear that we collapse in a permanent fugue state; our Tech overlords, supposedly our best & brightest Promethean benefactors of humanity, have basically hooked an entire generation on digital crack and helped create a world of adult children who really don't care if society collapses around them as long as the Wifi stays on; the viceroys of our Empire sound as deluded as WWI generals and there is no possible blowback or body count that can shake them from their addiction to believing utopia will arrive if only we fight Just One More War!; but to top it off, the only people who sound smart and sane are doomsday preppers, conspiracy theorists and the people who willingly hang out w Alex Jones!??
Does this mean that in order to have any semblance of a normal life without every person in authority desperate to mold and manipulate me, I need to find a ranch in Montana next door to Curtis Yarvin, the Dilbert guy and the Bronze Age Pervert?
I know we all have our own personal historical milestones, those moments from the recent past that marked our road to ruin, and for me one of those is def when after 9/11 George W told us all that we should go shopping.
Once you become a consumer instead of a citizen, it's only a matter of time before the barcode gets slapped on you, your fam, and everything else...
And the worst of it is that the Bond villains today are so f#####g boring!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If we are to be ground down by villains, can't they at least be interesting and colourful? Bill Gates, Justin Trudeau, Liz Truss...uuuughhhhh. They are fake and ghey. None of them ever said anything memorable and they'd be awful to be around. The banality of evil is intensifying.
A ranch in Montana sounds nice...with a local saloon like the one in DEADWOOD. That is what we need...a spot on the frontier, people without self-pity and literate conversation! Paradise!
Ours is the age of the Last Man, even people brilliant in one sphere have little interest in anything else and even people with political or financial power just want to blend in with the herd and don't think past their money and status needs and "career goals".
We are all zoo animals in the 21st century West, no matter how gilded the cage.
Yes...the West is a land fit for zeroes. The Huns and the Vandals were great warriors, but we are ruined by blue-haired girl-bosses and trannies. We shall not be spared any undignity. What irks me most is that the emerging dystopia lacks the colour and excitement of the movies or the pathos of the best novels. We deserve that IMHO.
I really dont care if anyone is a tranny or what color their hair is as long as they have some personality, humor, zest, intelligence and originality (gimme some flava!)
What shocks me is our age of abject conformity, especially (ironically) when everyone can't stop blabbing about their "true self".
The children of the internet age come all colored and bangled on the outside advertising their bespoke identities but are the same identical meat widget on the inside, incapable of saying or thinking anything besides tribal dogma and whatever was either on Netflix or in the NYT.
Globalism and technology have led to mass homogenization, and as humans are becoming postliterate tribalists managed and monitored by their beloved devices, all roads lead back to Nietzsche's Last Man...
I’ve seen many people talking about the teen girl mental health issues and near universal blame for social media. I wonder if that isn’t a convienient boogeyman. I imagine young girls are getting a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed in traditionally male domains. Hard science. Tech. Sports. Girlbossing. Maybe they’re too young to be internalizing and manifesting this sort of thing. Who knows.
Completely agree. People like Haidt want to reduce the problem to "social media usage" because they aren't willing to admit that modern "western democracies" are built on layers and layers of lies and false assumptions.
Fazi is correct about neo liberalism being the problem.
Before the age of Reagan and Thatcher, the Overton window was different. Liberalism promoted civil rights and basic goods being regulated to prevent the commodities markets from pumping up the prices like they did recently.
Liberalism promoted women's rights, not to denigrate women who wanted to raise children, but to make it better for women that wanted a career.
Neo liberalism came about when politicians started to care more about pleasing wall street and other markets, pretending it trickles down on people, while cutting basic services and privatizing some of them while deregulating industries.
That's why we saw Clinton and Blair do more damage than their right wing predecessors. Clinton passed the corporate gop policies because the right could not. He was a Trojan horse.
Clinton and Blair did more damage because they appeared on the Left precisely after the unionised working classes had been suppressed by Reagan and Thatcher.
Clinton was elected after Bush 1 and the Los Angeles riots. Blair was elected after Thatcher and Major and the poll-tax riots.
The Clintons and the Blairs are interchangeable power couples. If you ever get the chance, you might like Roman Polanski's THE GHOSTWRITER. It spells out the sensitive stuff, or at least some of it.
Well the whole genealogy of liberalism is a very complicated topic. What you cite as "liberalism" died with the "bourgeois" monarchies of Europe after the first world war. "Neo liberalism" is just using a skinsuit of this dead ideology to gain and maintain legitimacy.
For more on this topic i recommend you look up Nigel Carlsbad blog.
James Pogue previously wrote a piece about the New Right (aka NRX+National Conservativism (including attending the NatCon 2 itself)) which he handled well in my and other's opinions as someone plugged into the actual Natcon movement on the policy side. The Dissident Right is what BAP and Co call themselves so I don't think it's some Boogeyman terminology like you make it out to be. Pogue is also secretly based ans agrees with the DR/New Right on quite a bit even though he claims to be a leftist and is far more favorable to Moldbug then you appear to think.(His From the New World episode with Brian Chau made that clear).
It is hyperstition. Reality is emerging from the imagination. The writers and podcasters do their thing...eventually some kid will embody their ideas and then go on to ride a sand-worm into Washington.
The well-off don't seek change, only comfort. The dissidents come from strata frustrated by the status quo, anxious about downward mobility and with the means to escape the coarsest forms of drudgery.
Don't we all hunger for a scene where we could hang out and make better mistakes (or worse ones, but the scene itself would make us feel younger and better so it would not matter)? The political/affective imperative of our predicament demands a locus for interaction, intrigue, bonding and feuding in meatspace. It would be unbearably sad if such things did not actually exist. I draw a great deal of comfort imagining that somewhere (Dimes Square, a corner of Miami, Montana) there are people gathering and that they are exactly the kind who do not get offended by opinions other than their own, the kind who think for themselves, the ones who just might one day burn Cthulhuland to the ground.
The "dissident right" may in real life amount to nothing more than a few social media accounts. But so what? Leviathan's need for a political foil guarantees that the "dissident right" will surely come into existence. One or two of the commentators on this thread are probably on the relevant list of troublemakers by now.
Another compelling mix of contemporary issues, intertwined with great perspective. I was about to pickup my FT Weekend when I was this hit--SR&C is my weekend must-read now. Keep it up!
"Does anyone know if kids in large North American suburbs are let out unsupervised these days?"
Anecdotally at least, in my wealthy suburb of Dublin, Ohio, one encounters free-range children all the time. It's a very low-crime place with lots of outdoor recreation stuff though.
It was flippant observation at the time, but when I saw my brother's friend ride up on our driveway in the early 90s with a bike helmet on his head I instantly knew something had changed.
I would like to suggest that teenage girls have a predisposition towards melancholy that boys don't have due to fluctuating hormones, rapidly changing bodies and strong social pressure to fit in. In addition, they must resolve the "need" to conform to a physical ideal that media and society propagandize tirelessly should be met. Social media exacerbates the social aspects, and they lack the maturity to see them as merely superficial demands. Staying active in activities that interest teenage girls is a healthy way to balance the unnatural aspects of media usage.
So don't get me started on the trans takeover of women's sport.
What's the attraction in turning up to training day in day out, with a guy in your changing room, and a guy ahead of you in team picks and a guy opposing you? It only takes a few per league.
"People have said this is a great power competition. But the United States isn’t trying to expand its borders, or annex anywhere. It might have done in the past. But it isn’t doing this now."
Smart girlboss this Fiona Hill:
Defines GPC with the one tactic USG isn't using, and makes it vanish in a mist of words
The Hamilton Mob seems to be having the same problem as the Montreal one, successional issues resulting in tit for tat low rent murders and buffoonish figures entering the scene. Looks like ethnic gangs are filling some of the void as the Biker gangs are still present but haven't really grown since the early 00's.
When I lived in Quebec, control of the drug trade was waged between the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine. The latter were affiliated with the mob. The ties between the large construction unions and the mob is another interesting tale.
there's a surreal point, in the midst of many current conversations, when you realize that the person is literally parroting things he/she's heard on TV and passing it off as their own opinion. Not saying that's the sole reason for the current malaise, but it certainly makes ZOG's job easier when it can paint any (actual) Resistance against its neoliberal policy—gilets jaunes, canadian truckers, whatever—as Literally Hitler and the first domino toward the next holocaust.
I read a wild comment over at the Guardian today where a reader said that "we have to escalate our fight against Putin because that is the exact same fight as the one against Trump".
What the left identifies as core tenants can really be reduced to a thrasymachian nominalism - therefore this type of sentiment is arguably needed as part of its [wildly successful] dialectical system to avoid true substantive inquiry.
Sorry for the very late entry this weekend, I was on a trip to Paris.
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In the Hungarian Centrist opposition, declaring “crises” as a way of bypassing actual liberal democracy in the West has finally been recognized (thanks to Covid).
Putin ended Covid, but Covid also kind of ended the pretense that the immoral, post-9/11 End of History that replaced the blissful 1990-2001 End of History was a deal with the Devil that card-carrying Liberal Democrats should put up with, because the alternative is, idk... why are we putting up with "crises" as our fundamental freedoms are being dismantled?
I see few such sane Centrists in the US, but in Europe they are plenty. I guess US Libs are overcome by an existential, puritanical zeal, which is not a permitting environment for taking a break for reassessment.
Schmitt stated that liberalism requires a state of exception where the sovereign is permitted to supersede the bounds of law and simply act in an arbitrary fashion. It seems his analysis was rather correct. Also something I wanted to posit to you that I thought of lately. The concept of freedom isn't really a state of equilibrium. The way I thought of it, when freedom emerges it acts as a vacuum and that vacuum is merely waiting to be filled by a new order (Nature abhors a vacuum). So the notion of many libertarians/libertines who think freedom is merely the end goal never consider that freedom is simply a transition phase rather than a steady state. Put another way, if one splits an atom in a nuclear reaction, a lot of energy emerges but those particles will reattach once that energy is dispersed. The splitting of bonds doesn't get rid of those bonds forever, it just produces an environment for new bonds to assert themselves (maybe I'm not technically correct but I hope one reading this gets the idea). The concept of the free market simply presents the environment for a new equilibrium to establish itself but that freedom is simply the transition and this is the blind spot, I believe, that a lot of conservatives/libertarians make because they see freedom as the end goal but its merely the middle chapter rather than the conclusion. This can be evidenced by any type of revolution and also correlates well with elite theory, revolution, and the circulation of elites. The end stage of the circulation is a new equilibrium base and the revolution requires freedom as the mechanism to make this transition: not to be in a perpetual state of transition. Wanted to know your thoughts on this matter, if this makes any sense or if I'm just in a thought experiment spiral to incoherence. Keep up the good work
I grasp what you're saying as nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. Our understanding of the term "freedom" requires conditions that are quite specific and not universally present, and also help to raise the threats to their erosion at the same time.
"Schmitt stated that liberalism requires a state of exception where the sovereign is permitted to supersede the bounds of law and simply act in an arbitrary fashion."
Canada has what is known as the "notwithstanding clause" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms
I understand what you are saying and I think we are kind of getting at the same idea. But given the common understanding of freedom requires certain conditions, would that not simply reinforce the notion that it is merely a transition rather than a steady state? Maybe maybe not, I don't know.
Also, I am not a parent but I think Canada is the embodiment of a parent who sent their child to university and that child came back a blue haired male feminist. It really is tragic to watch. Have a good week bruv!
I am of the Spenglerian mindset that history is cyclical, so therefore how much freedom we have changes from time to time.
Have you read Huntington's "American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony"? He talks about the four stages of US political cycles: periods of "Creedal Passion" (like the 60s and wokeness), followed by "cynicism," then "complacency," then "hypocrisy" then "creedal passion" again. The book was published in 1980 or so but in it he predicted the next creedal passion period to start in the mid-2010s. Huntington even chided the optimism of that 1980 book in his "Who are We?" book, though left the name of the author to the footnotes.
I don't think the 1980s fits his timeline too well though. 60s was creedal passion, 70s cynicism, 90s complacency, 00s hypocrisy. Peter Hitchens has stated that the 80s seem more foreign than any other decade of his life.
USA has the "necessary and proper" clause in the constitution. Scalia cited it when saying intra-state marijuana sales could be prosecuted federally. Thomas ruled they couldn't.
And as they say in the US:
“The Constitution is not a suicide pact”
Or as Thomas Jefferson, the famous lover of small government and individual rights (at least for elites and yeoman farmers) said after he made the Louisiana Purchase:
“A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means”
What necessity and danger had to do with justifying an extra-constitutional land purchase- who knows? Though I am glad he did it.
I'm thinking you should keep thinking...I like your thought, i'll try to keep up...
Almost every critique of "neo-liberalism" is accurate, yet even as flawed as it is it represents a better system than Russia and China. I already lived under totalitarian rule, I'm not going back.
As for Ukraine, you can find a gorrillion narratives about how corrupt and Nazi it is and how justified Russia is to fear NATO and to invade.
Still don't care, as I am a simple man - I want the closest empire to be weakened, and the most remote empire that is least likely to invade strengthened. War remains, by far, a much larger issue for me compared to queer "rights" and BLM chimp outs.
Too much complicated thought leads you to fence sitting and lack of decisiveness. I prefer simple friend enemy distinctions.
Life's flawed, countries are imperfect, peoples, ethnic groups and races badly defined, and everyone wants to manipulate the narratives to favor the ones they belong to.
Russia yes, the PRC (if you’re not a Uyghur) maybe not if we’re talking about quality of life. In terms of human rights and freedom of conscience I would definitely take hard over soft totalitarianism, a monolithic Party organization over a nebulous Cathedral.
You have not lived under "hard" rule then. I have, my parents have been tortured and more. I find the Western vision of life under harsh authority dangerously naive.
You let me know when there are waves of mass migration from the West towards Russia and China.
The Cathedral is not nebulous at all. It's how liberalism and progressivism works - they never stop, and always erode. The Cathedral would collapse in years if the right was intellectual and able to conduct itself within institutions, do proper research and development, invent new technology etc. The problem is the right looks back towards some idealized past that only exists in advertising and movies, and rejects everything "modern", so they have managed to ostracize themselves outside structures of power.
Such huge mistakes have severe consequences. Imagine if Putin would reject some new chip tech that would make missiles more precise because Uncle Teddy was once worried about tech progress.
I’m not sure what the right word is to describe the Cathedral, I meant “nebulous” as opposed to a monolithic Party. Perhaps “composite” would be a better word but I was referring to the fact that we can’t really define the Cathedral the way we can, for instance, the CCP.
The Cathedral thrives because of the limitless cowardice of the Right.
The Right recruits from the professional and middle classes which are strata that bought into the system a long time ago and are socially/psychically/spiritually unable to resist anything...above all the Boss. The organised working classes were crushed in the 70s and early 80s and have no political outlet apart from voting in rigged elections.
The embarrassed and awkward way the Right folded after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case against Biden for electoral fraud gave the game away. The failure of the broad mass of conservatives to mobilise in defence of the Jan 6 patriots or Douglass Mackey indicates that the Cathedral will outlast its critics by many generations.
Also of course the Right’s unwillingness to “clean it out”, i.e. fire the old clerics and install its own. But that’s both cowardice and over-principledness.
Never attribute an abundance of principles to what can best be explained by complacency, cowardice and inadequacy.
It is not clear that the Right has the human capital to replace the Cathedral. The Right is a controlled opposition without the instincts or the experience to run very much. Babbling on about natural law, the constitution, the Frankfurt School or whining about how unfair life is does not constitute evidence of insight or ability. Fitness to rule is established by competition and the established Right has lost every competition that ever counted. Their critics, the would-be Muad'dibs of the vitalist right, are a long way from riding any sand-worms to victory.
Relief (should it ever come) will involve Cathedral-adjacent regional leadership with the relevant skill-set (military, policing, state government, banking) co-operating with Cathedral alumni to retrieve what they can in a post-hegemonic future (one in which Washington is constrained by Russia and China amidst a global economy plagued by escalating resource shortages). The new ruling class will blend elements of the Cathedral-culture with their own particular traditions/influences, which will include some input from the dissident/vitalist scene.
Let me give you a list of totalitarian measures that limit your rights in Russia.
1. Pissing on war memorials, probably the harshest law in Russia atm, every year we get 3-4 cases where the person gets real prison terms for this.
2. Disrespecting the church (in practice only people that post nude images in front of churches or do things like burn religious books get charged) Administrative offense e.i. fines.
3. Bringing photo of nazi's to WWII memorial marches or posting them on online memorial boards (during Covid). There have been a few civil court cases where veterans of WWII managed to get monetary compensation from people they deemed "disrespected their memory"
4. Sell LGBT books without age restrictions or organize any kind of LGBT education for children. This is fairly rarely prosecuted and gets on front page news when used.
5. Protest and print media with the support of western institutions, or for western interest. Advocate for revolution. Few know that the biggest protest movement in Russia over the last 10 years where the protests against the raising of pension age, not any of the liberal issues portrayed in western media. 90% of these cases lead to sanctions against the individual responsible, making it difficult for them to bank in Russia banks etc.
6. Really stupid laws that require you to write "banned in the Russian Federation" when referring to organisations like ISIS (banned in the Russia federation), or Azov (banned in the Russia Federation). There are 45 such organisations.
7. "Obvious disrespect" against representative of the state. In 2021, this law ended up used 51 times with a total amount fined in all cases at $21,000.
In Russia we have a saying: The harshness of our laws is offset by their lack of implementation, these laws aren't actually designed to punish in any real way, but rather as a mechanism to encourage self-censorship .
Does not sound totalitarian to me. Or indeed all that heavy-handed.
The real test of freedom is what you can say in everyday life without being shunned or harassed or blacklisted. Russians tend to be pretty blunt and very frank with each other, but reserved in relation to the authorities. In the West, by contrast, people can mouth abuse about the government, but increasingly cannot talk openly with colleagues, neighbours or even family. The levels of anxiety over opinions is very high.
The q. is the locus and frequency of repression. An occasional prosecution for a crime is one thing, but constant anxiety and suspicion that erodes trust and cohesion across society is quite another. IMO Russia sounds like an oasis of sanity.
While I agree with you sentiment, in my opinion this strategy from the RU government leads to ambiguity in law, and erodes trust in the rule of law. While I am sure that it is an effective means of social engineering, and much less abrasive than the shame based ostracisation from polite society in the west, ambiguity create a sense of anxiety that isn't healthy either.
The Russians are making progress and this cannot be measured by Western experience. Russia will always be a lot less individualistic than the West because of its historical experience. They are better off making mistakes that suit the national temperament than meeting abstract standards of any kind. Russia has been the site of non-stop social engineering by its rulers since early modern times. They can do with a break for a few generations. The challenge facing Russia now is increasing the incidence of family formation and total fertility. Everything else is a minor detail.
Not one of those measures is "totalitarian". Such is the cost of living in a functional society with a characteristic civilizational outlook. If western European elites had a fraction of the sanity demonstrated by current Russian elites, we would be in a much better position.
People who worship Hypersonic Putin in the West (and its colonies, like Hungary) want a cheat code to spare them from the labor of standing up for themselves.
What are the values of the European Union? Well, those change all the time. But if you quit, you won't have a seat at the table to be part of the decision.
I have empathy for these "Lost Atlanticists" who feel that they have been abused by our allies, and I think they're 100% in the right when they suggest our local NAFO skizos to join the front in Eastern Ukraine, instead of posting online - with one caveat: admit that despite their sour view of our Western allies, none wants to live in Moscow, or work under a Chinese boss.
I'm also kind of guilty of this by lionizing the new, Taliban government of Afghanistan, but you have to be really obtuse not too see that it's mostly for the lulz. Or is it?
George...you have inadvertently identified the ultimate future of the West: American leadership, Russian bureaucracy and Chinese management. Just imagining this gets me thinking about seeking asylum in Kabul.
If you live in North America or Western Europe you already live in under "totalitarian rule".
*Famous quote about people in the Soviet Union being aware that the powers tell them bullshit versus...*
It's a very soft totalitarianism where you lose your livelihood for being discovered as a dissident, and your - former - LinkedIn contacts honestly applaud your disawoval. Who puts a gun at their head, like they do in a totalitarian system? Nobody.
If it was hard totalitarianism, they would understand. They don't. This has nothing to do with being an NPC, there are no NPCs in the gulag. Misguided, secular puritanism? Maybe, for the former puritans.
Individuals will not risk getting their porn licence revoked for standing up for you. They will hate you for being revealed as a risk factor, and happily comply. Even double down.
Decadent individualists hysterized by panic after panic, bred and managed by soft power to seek refuge in approved collective hate agains straw men who are dangers to the powers. That is not totalitarianism. It's fucking sinister, sure, but it's not the absolute and transparent rule of a strong man. Russia is totalitarian: no one dares to run against Putin. In the US, the regime's foot soldiers are 100% convinced that they are the "rebels".
Recall that much of this is driven by fears of lawsuits for “discrimination” or “civil rights violations”. (In Hanania’s words, “We have to care what judges think and they read the NYT!”) If they’re perceived as upholding the civil rights violations you’re supposedly committing by being a dissident they know their fate is the same as yours - that’s the gun here. Unless, of course, they genuinely believe that you deserve everything you’re getting for being a bigoted misinformation-spreading denying conspiracist.
Reading this has really made me dizzy, in a world-turned-upside-down sorta way...
Our billionaire class can't just sit happily upon their massive mountains of lucre, but are auditioning for the role of Bond villain, trying to see which political and journalist puppets can best help them frighten the herd enough that we all willingly run into the pen to be slapped with a barcode and zapped with so much fear that we collapse in a permanent fugue state; our Tech overlords, supposedly our best & brightest Promethean benefactors of humanity, have basically hooked an entire generation on digital crack and helped create a world of adult children who really don't care if society collapses around them as long as the Wifi stays on; the viceroys of our Empire sound as deluded as WWI generals and there is no possible blowback or body count that can shake them from their addiction to believing utopia will arrive if only we fight Just One More War!; but to top it off, the only people who sound smart and sane are doomsday preppers, conspiracy theorists and the people who willingly hang out w Alex Jones!??
Does this mean that in order to have any semblance of a normal life without every person in authority desperate to mold and manipulate me, I need to find a ranch in Montana next door to Curtis Yarvin, the Dilbert guy and the Bronze Age Pervert?
The future is even weirder than anyone imagined!
"Ask not what your country can do you for. Ask which products you can consume for your country."
I know we all have our own personal historical milestones, those moments from the recent past that marked our road to ruin, and for me one of those is def when after 9/11 George W told us all that we should go shopping.
Once you become a consumer instead of a citizen, it's only a matter of time before the barcode gets slapped on you, your fam, and everything else...
Yup, that one has stuck with me too. I was waiting to see what his first statement would be post attack, and that line was absolutely hilarious.
And the worst of it is that the Bond villains today are so f#####g boring!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If we are to be ground down by villains, can't they at least be interesting and colourful? Bill Gates, Justin Trudeau, Liz Truss...uuuughhhhh. They are fake and ghey. None of them ever said anything memorable and they'd be awful to be around. The banality of evil is intensifying.
A ranch in Montana sounds nice...with a local saloon like the one in DEADWOOD. That is what we need...a spot on the frontier, people without self-pity and literate conversation! Paradise!
Ours is the age of the Last Man, even people brilliant in one sphere have little interest in anything else and even people with political or financial power just want to blend in with the herd and don't think past their money and status needs and "career goals".
We are all zoo animals in the 21st century West, no matter how gilded the cage.
(But you knew this already!)
Yes...the West is a land fit for zeroes. The Huns and the Vandals were great warriors, but we are ruined by blue-haired girl-bosses and trannies. We shall not be spared any undignity. What irks me most is that the emerging dystopia lacks the colour and excitement of the movies or the pathos of the best novels. We deserve that IMHO.
I really dont care if anyone is a tranny or what color their hair is as long as they have some personality, humor, zest, intelligence and originality (gimme some flava!)
What shocks me is our age of abject conformity, especially (ironically) when everyone can't stop blabbing about their "true self".
The children of the internet age come all colored and bangled on the outside advertising their bespoke identities but are the same identical meat widget on the inside, incapable of saying or thinking anything besides tribal dogma and whatever was either on Netflix or in the NYT.
Globalism and technology have led to mass homogenization, and as humans are becoming postliterate tribalists managed and monitored by their beloved devices, all roads lead back to Nietzsche's Last Man...
I’ve seen many people talking about the teen girl mental health issues and near universal blame for social media. I wonder if that isn’t a convienient boogeyman. I imagine young girls are getting a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed in traditionally male domains. Hard science. Tech. Sports. Girlbossing. Maybe they’re too young to be internalizing and manifesting this sort of thing. Who knows.
Haidt made sure to emphasize that social media is not entirely to blame, as he is very wary of monocausal explanations for conditions.
Completely agree. People like Haidt want to reduce the problem to "social media usage" because they aren't willing to admit that modern "western democracies" are built on layers and layers of lies and false assumptions.
Fazi is correct about neo liberalism being the problem.
Before the age of Reagan and Thatcher, the Overton window was different. Liberalism promoted civil rights and basic goods being regulated to prevent the commodities markets from pumping up the prices like they did recently.
Liberalism promoted women's rights, not to denigrate women who wanted to raise children, but to make it better for women that wanted a career.
Neo liberalism came about when politicians started to care more about pleasing wall street and other markets, pretending it trickles down on people, while cutting basic services and privatizing some of them while deregulating industries.
That's why we saw Clinton and Blair do more damage than their right wing predecessors. Clinton passed the corporate gop policies because the right could not. He was a Trojan horse.
That's neo liberalism.
Clinton supporting end of Glass-Steagall Act.
Clinton and Blair did more damage because they appeared on the Left precisely after the unionised working classes had been suppressed by Reagan and Thatcher.
Clinton was elected after Bush 1 and the Los Angeles riots. Blair was elected after Thatcher and Major and the poll-tax riots.
The Clintons and the Blairs are interchangeable power couples. If you ever get the chance, you might like Roman Polanski's THE GHOSTWRITER. It spells out the sensitive stuff, or at least some of it.
Well the whole genealogy of liberalism is a very complicated topic. What you cite as "liberalism" died with the "bourgeois" monarchies of Europe after the first world war. "Neo liberalism" is just using a skinsuit of this dead ideology to gain and maintain legitimacy.
For more on this topic i recommend you look up Nigel Carlsbad blog.
James Pogue previously wrote a piece about the New Right (aka NRX+National Conservativism (including attending the NatCon 2 itself)) which he handled well in my and other's opinions as someone plugged into the actual Natcon movement on the policy side. The Dissident Right is what BAP and Co call themselves so I don't think it's some Boogeyman terminology like you make it out to be. Pogue is also secretly based ans agrees with the DR/New Right on quite a bit even though he claims to be a leftist and is far more favorable to Moldbug then you appear to think.(His From the New World episode with Brian Chau made that clear).
I don't believe that there is a "dissident right". It's a collection of people with social media accounts, some who do writing, others podcasting.
Go tell all the right wing Twitter anons to stop calling themselves Dissident Right then...
Already did a couple of months ago. Lots got mad.
It is hyperstition. Reality is emerging from the imagination. The writers and podcasters do their thing...eventually some kid will embody their ideas and then go on to ride a sand-worm into Washington.
The well-off (aka The Rich ?) can afford to be dissident...
Working stiffs havent the time or dosh...
or: for working stiffs it's A Luxury...
The well-off don't seek change, only comfort. The dissidents come from strata frustrated by the status quo, anxious about downward mobility and with the means to escape the coarsest forms of drudgery.
Diffident right then.
Don't we all hunger for a scene where we could hang out and make better mistakes (or worse ones, but the scene itself would make us feel younger and better so it would not matter)? The political/affective imperative of our predicament demands a locus for interaction, intrigue, bonding and feuding in meatspace. It would be unbearably sad if such things did not actually exist. I draw a great deal of comfort imagining that somewhere (Dimes Square, a corner of Miami, Montana) there are people gathering and that they are exactly the kind who do not get offended by opinions other than their own, the kind who think for themselves, the ones who just might one day burn Cthulhuland to the ground.
The "dissident right" may in real life amount to nothing more than a few social media accounts. But so what? Leviathan's need for a political foil guarantees that the "dissident right" will surely come into existence. One or two of the commentators on this thread are probably on the relevant list of troublemakers by now.
Our classroom in elementary school was the last scene where that would happen. No politics to spoil the magic.
Another compelling mix of contemporary issues, intertwined with great perspective. I was about to pickup my FT Weekend when I was this hit--SR&C is my weekend must-read now. Keep it up!
Thank you and will do, Joshua.
"Does anyone know if kids in large North American suburbs are let out unsupervised these days?"
Anecdotally at least, in my wealthy suburb of Dublin, Ohio, one encounters free-range children all the time. It's a very low-crime place with lots of outdoor recreation stuff though.
It was flippant observation at the time, but when I saw my brother's friend ride up on our driveway in the early 90s with a bike helmet on his head I instantly knew something had changed.
Ugh, have never worn a bike helmet in my life. Never will. Unspeakably ghey.
I would like to suggest that teenage girls have a predisposition towards melancholy that boys don't have due to fluctuating hormones, rapidly changing bodies and strong social pressure to fit in. In addition, they must resolve the "need" to conform to a physical ideal that media and society propagandize tirelessly should be met. Social media exacerbates the social aspects, and they lack the maturity to see them as merely superficial demands. Staying active in activities that interest teenage girls is a healthy way to balance the unnatural aspects of media usage.
So don't get me started on the trans takeover of women's sport.
What's the attraction in turning up to training day in day out, with a guy in your changing room, and a guy ahead of you in team picks and a guy opposing you? It only takes a few per league.
"People have said this is a great power competition. But the United States isn’t trying to expand its borders, or annex anywhere. It might have done in the past. But it isn’t doing this now."
Smart girlboss this Fiona Hill:
Defines GPC with the one tactic USG isn't using, and makes it vanish in a mist of words
Her entire UnHerd interview reads like a pitch for an advisor gig to the next President.
You got it in one, Niccolo. The pitch is everything. It defines them. It is always about the next gig.
Washington is just Hollywood for ugly people.
The Hamilton Mob seems to be having the same problem as the Montreal one, successional issues resulting in tit for tat low rent murders and buffoonish figures entering the scene. Looks like ethnic gangs are filling some of the void as the Biker gangs are still present but haven't really grown since the early 00's.
When I lived in Quebec, control of the drug trade was waged between the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine. The latter were affiliated with the mob. The ties between the large construction unions and the mob is another interesting tale.
there's a surreal point, in the midst of many current conversations, when you realize that the person is literally parroting things he/she's heard on TV and passing it off as their own opinion. Not saying that's the sole reason for the current malaise, but it certainly makes ZOG's job easier when it can paint any (actual) Resistance against its neoliberal policy—gilets jaunes, canadian truckers, whatever—as Literally Hitler and the first domino toward the next holocaust.
I read a wild comment over at the Guardian today where a reader said that "we have to escalate our fight against Putin because that is the exact same fight as the one against Trump".
Any opposition is literally Hitler.
What the left identifies as core tenants can really be reduced to a thrasymachian nominalism - therefore this type of sentiment is arguably needed as part of its [wildly successful] dialectical system to avoid true substantive inquiry.
very much so
Alex Jones shouldn't apologize for being an entertainer.
Very good commentary this weekend! Thanks. Reposted on gab, plus emailed links to local friends.
If it seems like it’s one crisis after another, this is not an accident, comrades….