Yeah, but yesterday I took the day off to show a subscriber and his father around Split as they arrived here from the USA a few days ago. Really fun time.
I can confirm I too was given the Split tour and I emerged with both my wallet and internal organs intact. Though I had to insist he allow me to buy at least one drink.
Not quite the same but an old friend lives in Pittsburgh, PA and has long had an open invitation to his many friends and family to stay with him whenever they’re in town. Of course, he can do this because nobody ever visits Pittsburgh if they can possibly help it. I guess you’ve got distance to protect you rather than undesirability.
Cca 2011 I read a guest essay for Spiked! in which two Swedish libs explained the Swedish model as liberalism's attempt to free the individual from the "tyranny" of family and traditional customs by creating a strong state that would allow the individual to emancipate himself from these institutions and customs.
The German establishment parties have entered into a de facto alliance to keep anyone not on board with the Atlanticist orientation from power, and they are fully prepared to crack down on dissent by any means necessary.
I suspect that the remaining European establishment applauds this stance and is following suit.
Jun 18, 2023·edited Jun 18, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
The popularity of Greens is a good indicator of decadence.
Decadence is costly, like a domestic heat pump. Decadence is not bound by physical reality. The Greens offered a crayon drawing that was acceptable, while times were good:
"The most underrepresented, voiceless group slaving away to keep the European economy going in the 2010s became the Joules. While Germany presented incredible grün progress, in actuality it doubled down on business as usual when it comes to energy, if not regressed, without any meaningful objection from the public. (Germans laughing at Trump’s remarks about energy dependence, a gif you all know by now.) The public, the amplified, verified and deified part of the public was busy debating crayon drawings in the Continental Daycare that we call the European Parliament, IRL and online."
Germany would have a Green chancellor, if Merkel stepped down before 2020. In these times, well, it's hard to feel sympathy for the German voter.
From what I saw AfD is just as retarded - as a technical term - as the True Finns, the Real Swedes (or whatever) and other, demagogue-populist parties: hovering around 15-20% by offering Left wing lunacy multiplied by -1.
How is the AfD retarded -- I admit, I don’t follow German politics as closely as I should. However, I speak German and have watched a lot of Alice Weidel’s speeches in the last month. She’s extremely sharp and reasonable, seems to me.
To be fair the Germans seem to have a quicker learning curve than the rest of the west. They make a mistake and realize it. Everyone else doubles down.
Tom Wolfe once asked Marshall McLuhan how Pierre Trudeau had such success in Canadian politics. McLuhan: "It's very simple. He has a French name, thinks like an Englishman, and looks like an Indian. We Canadians are very sorry about what we did to the Indians."
Relatedly, Barack Obama has an immigrant's name, went to white schools, and looks black.
I've always known Europeans and Canadians to openly say their country is better than the US. They don't think of it as being just as bad historically or contemporarily.
Has this really changed? Norway is Minnesota is Manitoba?
„The German Greens are the worst party in Europe: fanatical believers in Climate Change who insist on upending how all Germans (and Europeans) live their daily lives in order to slay this dragon, war hawks who demand regime change in Moscow, and de-industrialists, whether openly or by accident.“
Nailed it as usual. Please never get married or have kids so you‘ll always finds the time to write such spot-on analyses.
Scepticism about these supposed Canadian school graves is justified by the absence of bodies or other hard evidence. It doesn't seem to warrant the label 'denialism', which therefore gives it a kind of religious crime quality. These secular blasphemy laws are flourishing in the current climate.
One of the most important things right wing public intellectuals can do is to expand the notion of religion from that of just traditional religions like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism etc. to include "secular" ideologies like the LGBT/trans ideologies, to demonstrate that seperation of church and state is impossible(instead of flying say a Christian flag, the US Embassy in Budapest will fly the LGBT flag) and that blasphemy laws protecting state religion(social liberalism) will always exist. Right now the traditional religions(though only Christianity in the West) are at severe disadvantage, as they attacked by the state which funds its ideological rivals.
This is a hard task, and it will probably take generations for the public mindset to fully comprehend the reality. But there is a historical example which can guide us. One interesting fact is that Romans used to consider Christians, atheists. Well what else would you call someone who rejects all the gods you have always known for some crucified carpenter from the periphery of the Empire? That is at least according to the Romans. A Roman intellectual would have never put Christianity and the traditional Roman religions in the same category. But two thousands years later, we put both Christianity and Roman paganism in the same category of religion. Our definition of religion has expanded. We need to do the same with regards to the secular liberal religions.
Arthur Herman has a book that I haven't yet read called The Viking Heart, where he attempts to explain the Nordic countries. His perspective is that of a center-right liberal, but he has written some very good books in the past. Could be worth a read for anyone who likes the subject (can't vouch for the specific book). However Moldbugman also had an old thread where he explained why Sweden sucks and the laundry system alone makes a pretty convincing case
EU obsession with climate change really is something. Educated American libtards say all the right things, but educated western Euro libtards seem to actually believe them. I do not see how Americans give up air conditioning, but I see no limit to what a leftist European government would ask of its population
After the disappointment of Italy I am skeptical of based right wing women in European politics
On the topic of climate change, David Friedman (yes he is the son if Milton but hear me out) has written a bit on his Substack about the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis. To my knowledge no one on the right has touched this argument but it seems like a very powerful argument against the idea that climate change is apocalyptic, and in fact it argues the reverse, saying that CO2 emissions from agriculture were enough to stop us from falling into another ice age 8000 years ago. It would be worthwhile for the right to examine this argument and put the libtards on defense with climate science for once
The Canadian elite's need to atone publicly for whatever historical sins it can dig up (heh) and the German elite's need to atone publicly for our rape of Gaia, helps us take the temperature of the Social Justice religion as it gradually conquers every Western institution and fulfills its destiny as the 21st century's reigning ideology/worldview.
Some of the interesting psychological aspects for me are: how all these deep emotional needs precede fact or reality—the desire to atone precedes the pretext—which for me disproves once and for all the ambient atheistic plaint about religion being an opiate or an oppressive imposition: people need religion more than religion needs people! To organize and cohere around some conception of the sacred, to cry and laugh and condemn in groups, to imagine your heart being big and pure enough to heal the planet—now that rock is dead this is the closest we'll be coming to Dionysian bonding and release anytime soon.
Then there's a German minister crying about the environment (crying Germans! must be a glitch in his software) or a Canadian minister crying about kids who may or may not have been killed in a prior century: not only do modern politicians need to feel our pain, they need to perform a social-media ritual of atonement and renewal, to compete daily in a global Compassion pageant to prove how the Marginalized (Praise them!) are never far from their thoughts. As every Social Justice politician from California to Bavaria is the same person with the same beliefs and could easily be swapped without anyone noticing, Performing Compassion is to this generation is what a Rhodes scholarship was 30/40 yrs ago or winning a battle was 200 yrs ago.
And as these plastic souls trained in the seminaries of the WEF have sort of backed themselves into the sacred and don't really have hearts on fire for god, haven't seen George Floyd in a burning bush or received a painful revelation from Harvey Milk on the road to Damascus, their beliefs are uncertain and brittle, too weak to defend in an open forum, which is why all they can do is ban and banish skeptics and heretics. So this tells me maybe that devotion to the new religion is a mile wide but an inch deep, and until one of our countries is led by a John Calvin of Social Justice, maybe our interchangeable overlords will at some point find a new shiny object to chase.
I think also Social Justice is a sort of Wizard of Oz, as it allows your aspiring ruler to pretend to be a weepy priest out on the Yellow Brick Road but behind the curtain are always the two true ruling gods of our time: Mammon and The Self, who are always clearly visible beneath the tears and speeches.
That's pretty good but I'd say the ruling god is Dionysus, associated with bees (the hive mind), women and intoxication. Occasionally, he was/is depicted as effete. Modern western women are maenads who tear apart any male in their path. Images of sacred victims are worshipped with riots. Speaking of martyrs there's a curious similarity with Christ in that Dionysus was the only Greek god to be murdered and then resurrected.
Concerning Dionysian madness, the maenads of today are obsessed with abstractions called racism and sexism (and human rights). But these are Apollonian in character, manufactured by intellectuals, and are an attack on natural order, one would think. Therefore, Dionysian nature is asserting itself by destroying modernism, not traditional Christianity.
Osiris, Dionysus, Christ—more or less the same dude refashioned for time and place. And the pattern still holds—rebirth, renewal, death and resurrection, mourning and celebration etc—except now in our age of the omnipotent liberated Self we don't worship them, we get to BE them (aka worship our Selves).
I often think of Social Justice as akin to a religious amusement park where you pay your fee and then get to take a crucifix selfie and enjoy that unforgettable day you died (and were reborn!) on the cross for all the world to see (plus you get a glossy photo and a T-shirt of your moment of savior du jour).
But really I would say the main difference between classic Dionysian frenzy and today is that those people—esp the woman—deeply needed times of release, as they lived most of their lives under tight social and religious strictures. They had a lotta boredom and sadness bottled up for the god of the thyrsus to help them release!
Now that there are no strictures, no Thou Shalt Nots, our maenads are just playacting and performing for the black mirror of their phones—or, more or less, no pressure means a tepid stale release.
Ours is the age of the empty gesture, for better or worse.
"But really I would say the main difference between classic Dionysian frenzy and today is that those people—esp the woman—deeply needed times of release"
You may be right. Trouble is, they're still sad and bored regardless; so it could be something more fundamental to their genetic strain. For example, Chinese myth, to my knowledge, has no such figure as Dionysus, or Amazons for that matter. Chinese women are noted for their submissiveness compared to European women and modern, liberated women of European descent don't like this one bit.
Dionysus was associated with "indestructible life" or Zoe, according to Kerényi. He would have come into existence during the time of the giants – who ate parts of his body – and were the ancestors of humans. This would indicate that Dionysus is very ancient.
Kerenyi's "Dionysus" is somewhere close to the top of my reading queue. excited to get at it. is there anything more fun than tearing off a hunk of burning meat, getting hammered and dancing all night? Now we call it 4th of July ;)
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Next entry of the FbF Book Club will be up tomorrow. Tonight I will be watching Croatia vs. Spain in the Cup Final.
>Saturday Commentary
It's Sunday!
Yeah, but yesterday I took the day off to show a subscriber and his father around Split as they arrived here from the USA a few days ago. Really fun time.
Do you do that for all subscribers?
I do my best to meet up with every subscriber that shows up here.
That's awesome! As a massive madrid fan always wanted to see where Modric started
I can confirm I too was given the Split tour and I emerged with both my wallet and internal organs intact. Though I had to insist he allow me to buy at least one drink.
Not quite the same but an old friend lives in Pittsburgh, PA and has long had an open invitation to his many friends and family to stay with him whenever they’re in town. Of course, he can do this because nobody ever visits Pittsburgh if they can possibly help it. I guess you’ve got distance to protect you rather than undesirability.
Croatian tempo.
He's six days early!
Very nice. Where’s the part on France?! what a tease...
Go into the back catalogue of SCR's and you'll see a lot on France.
Yes yes I joke
Cca 2011 I read a guest essay for Spiked! in which two Swedish libs explained the Swedish model as liberalism's attempt to free the individual from the "tyranny" of family and traditional customs by creating a strong state that would allow the individual to emancipate himself from these institutions and customs.
There we go. A perfect encapsulation of the essay that I shared.
The German establishment parties have entered into a de facto alliance to keep anyone not on board with the Atlanticist orientation from power, and they are fully prepared to crack down on dissent by any means necessary.
I suspect that the remaining European establishment applauds this stance and is following suit.
The popularity of Greens is a good indicator of decadence.
Decadence is costly, like a domestic heat pump. Decadence is not bound by physical reality. The Greens offered a crayon drawing that was acceptable, while times were good:
"The most underrepresented, voiceless group slaving away to keep the European economy going in the 2010s became the Joules. While Germany presented incredible grün progress, in actuality it doubled down on business as usual when it comes to energy, if not regressed, without any meaningful objection from the public. (Germans laughing at Trump’s remarks about energy dependence, a gif you all know by now.) The public, the amplified, verified and deified part of the public was busy debating crayon drawings in the Continental Daycare that we call the European Parliament, IRL and online."
https://www.magyar.blog/i/77733617/the-theory-applied-to-the-elites
Germany would have a Green chancellor, if Merkel stepped down before 2020. In these times, well, it's hard to feel sympathy for the German voter.
From what I saw AfD is just as retarded - as a technical term - as the True Finns, the Real Swedes (or whatever) and other, demagogue-populist parties: hovering around 15-20% by offering Left wing lunacy multiplied by -1.
How is the AfD retarded -- I admit, I don’t follow German politics as closely as I should. However, I speak German and have watched a lot of Alice Weidel’s speeches in the last month. She’s extremely sharp and reasonable, seems to me.
To be fair the Germans seem to have a quicker learning curve than the rest of the west. They make a mistake and realize it. Everyone else doubles down.
It’s fools and rogues all the way around in the western world and I include Russia in that. China is going to eat our lunch.
China won’t eat us.
It can’t, too busy eating China.
We’ll eat ourselves, we already are, this is what it looks like.
Tom Wolfe once asked Marshall McLuhan how Pierre Trudeau had such success in Canadian politics. McLuhan: "It's very simple. He has a French name, thinks like an Englishman, and looks like an Indian. We Canadians are very sorry about what we did to the Indians."
Relatedly, Barack Obama has an immigrant's name, went to white schools, and looks black.
"Residential School Denialism" shows how desperate Canada is to join the self-hating club. They envy America with all its skeletons in the closet.
Canada doesn't even have proper police brutality. How will they be like Netflix?
I've always known Europeans and Canadians to openly say their country is better than the US. They don't think of it as being just as bad historically or contemporarily.
Has this really changed? Norway is Minnesota is Manitoba?
This is a way to parade their own virtue to indeed prove their superiority to the USA.
The lunacy of the mass graves has been investigated and refuted several times ...
>"Germany continues to debase itself in ways that grow more comical by the day"
>In other news, Germany recently announced that it will pay billions to the remaining holocaust survivors.
„The German Greens are the worst party in Europe: fanatical believers in Climate Change who insist on upending how all Germans (and Europeans) live their daily lives in order to slay this dragon, war hawks who demand regime change in Moscow, and de-industrialists, whether openly or by accident.“
Nailed it as usual. Please never get married or have kids so you‘ll always finds the time to write such spot-on analyses.
Don't say this to my mother or she will lose it on you.
Haha
Scepticism about these supposed Canadian school graves is justified by the absence of bodies or other hard evidence. It doesn't seem to warrant the label 'denialism', which therefore gives it a kind of religious crime quality. These secular blasphemy laws are flourishing in the current climate.
There’s another popular one mass graves myth by a defrocked Canadian minister that has been making the rounds since the 90s
RCMP investigation refutes
Keeps coming back-
The actual problem is no accountability for lies in the Press.
Or maybe it’s freedom of speech.
I doubt mankind’s ability to be free if freedom means no consequences, which along with gain for being scum is what they want.
Re: Canadian residential schools
One of the most important things right wing public intellectuals can do is to expand the notion of religion from that of just traditional religions like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism etc. to include "secular" ideologies like the LGBT/trans ideologies, to demonstrate that seperation of church and state is impossible(instead of flying say a Christian flag, the US Embassy in Budapest will fly the LGBT flag) and that blasphemy laws protecting state religion(social liberalism) will always exist. Right now the traditional religions(though only Christianity in the West) are at severe disadvantage, as they attacked by the state which funds its ideological rivals.
This is a hard task, and it will probably take generations for the public mindset to fully comprehend the reality. But there is a historical example which can guide us. One interesting fact is that Romans used to consider Christians, atheists. Well what else would you call someone who rejects all the gods you have always known for some crucified carpenter from the periphery of the Empire? That is at least according to the Romans. A Roman intellectual would have never put Christianity and the traditional Roman religions in the same category. But two thousands years later, we put both Christianity and Roman paganism in the same category of religion. Our definition of religion has expanded. We need to do the same with regards to the secular liberal religions.
Hi Niccolo and Happy Father's day to all
.Great American commercial....about 1 minute long:
https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1669770839724621831
Thanks. I needed that today.
Arthur Herman has a book that I haven't yet read called The Viking Heart, where he attempts to explain the Nordic countries. His perspective is that of a center-right liberal, but he has written some very good books in the past. Could be worth a read for anyone who likes the subject (can't vouch for the specific book). However Moldbugman also had an old thread where he explained why Sweden sucks and the laundry system alone makes a pretty convincing case
EU obsession with climate change really is something. Educated American libtards say all the right things, but educated western Euro libtards seem to actually believe them. I do not see how Americans give up air conditioning, but I see no limit to what a leftist European government would ask of its population
After the disappointment of Italy I am skeptical of based right wing women in European politics
On the topic of climate change, David Friedman (yes he is the son if Milton but hear me out) has written a bit on his Substack about the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis. To my knowledge no one on the right has touched this argument but it seems like a very powerful argument against the idea that climate change is apocalyptic, and in fact it argues the reverse, saying that CO2 emissions from agriculture were enough to stop us from falling into another ice age 8000 years ago. It would be worthwhile for the right to examine this argument and put the libtards on defense with climate science for once
The Canadian elite's need to atone publicly for whatever historical sins it can dig up (heh) and the German elite's need to atone publicly for our rape of Gaia, helps us take the temperature of the Social Justice religion as it gradually conquers every Western institution and fulfills its destiny as the 21st century's reigning ideology/worldview.
Some of the interesting psychological aspects for me are: how all these deep emotional needs precede fact or reality—the desire to atone precedes the pretext—which for me disproves once and for all the ambient atheistic plaint about religion being an opiate or an oppressive imposition: people need religion more than religion needs people! To organize and cohere around some conception of the sacred, to cry and laugh and condemn in groups, to imagine your heart being big and pure enough to heal the planet—now that rock is dead this is the closest we'll be coming to Dionysian bonding and release anytime soon.
Then there's a German minister crying about the environment (crying Germans! must be a glitch in his software) or a Canadian minister crying about kids who may or may not have been killed in a prior century: not only do modern politicians need to feel our pain, they need to perform a social-media ritual of atonement and renewal, to compete daily in a global Compassion pageant to prove how the Marginalized (Praise them!) are never far from their thoughts. As every Social Justice politician from California to Bavaria is the same person with the same beliefs and could easily be swapped without anyone noticing, Performing Compassion is to this generation is what a Rhodes scholarship was 30/40 yrs ago or winning a battle was 200 yrs ago.
And as these plastic souls trained in the seminaries of the WEF have sort of backed themselves into the sacred and don't really have hearts on fire for god, haven't seen George Floyd in a burning bush or received a painful revelation from Harvey Milk on the road to Damascus, their beliefs are uncertain and brittle, too weak to defend in an open forum, which is why all they can do is ban and banish skeptics and heretics. So this tells me maybe that devotion to the new religion is a mile wide but an inch deep, and until one of our countries is led by a John Calvin of Social Justice, maybe our interchangeable overlords will at some point find a new shiny object to chase.
I think also Social Justice is a sort of Wizard of Oz, as it allows your aspiring ruler to pretend to be a weepy priest out on the Yellow Brick Road but behind the curtain are always the two true ruling gods of our time: Mammon and The Self, who are always clearly visible beneath the tears and speeches.
That's pretty good but I'd say the ruling god is Dionysus, associated with bees (the hive mind), women and intoxication. Occasionally, he was/is depicted as effete. Modern western women are maenads who tear apart any male in their path. Images of sacred victims are worshipped with riots. Speaking of martyrs there's a curious similarity with Christ in that Dionysus was the only Greek god to be murdered and then resurrected.
Concerning Dionysian madness, the maenads of today are obsessed with abstractions called racism and sexism (and human rights). But these are Apollonian in character, manufactured by intellectuals, and are an attack on natural order, one would think. Therefore, Dionysian nature is asserting itself by destroying modernism, not traditional Christianity.
Osiris, Dionysus, Christ—more or less the same dude refashioned for time and place. And the pattern still holds—rebirth, renewal, death and resurrection, mourning and celebration etc—except now in our age of the omnipotent liberated Self we don't worship them, we get to BE them (aka worship our Selves).
I often think of Social Justice as akin to a religious amusement park where you pay your fee and then get to take a crucifix selfie and enjoy that unforgettable day you died (and were reborn!) on the cross for all the world to see (plus you get a glossy photo and a T-shirt of your moment of savior du jour).
But really I would say the main difference between classic Dionysian frenzy and today is that those people—esp the woman—deeply needed times of release, as they lived most of their lives under tight social and religious strictures. They had a lotta boredom and sadness bottled up for the god of the thyrsus to help them release!
Now that there are no strictures, no Thou Shalt Nots, our maenads are just playacting and performing for the black mirror of their phones—or, more or less, no pressure means a tepid stale release.
Ours is the age of the empty gesture, for better or worse.
"But really I would say the main difference between classic Dionysian frenzy and today is that those people—esp the woman—deeply needed times of release"
You may be right. Trouble is, they're still sad and bored regardless; so it could be something more fundamental to their genetic strain. For example, Chinese myth, to my knowledge, has no such figure as Dionysus, or Amazons for that matter. Chinese women are noted for their submissiveness compared to European women and modern, liberated women of European descent don't like this one bit.
Dionysus was associated with "indestructible life" or Zoe, according to Kerényi. He would have come into existence during the time of the giants – who ate parts of his body – and were the ancestors of humans. This would indicate that Dionysus is very ancient.
Kerenyi's "Dionysus" is somewhere close to the top of my reading queue. excited to get at it. is there anything more fun than tearing off a hunk of burning meat, getting hammered and dancing all night? Now we call it 4th of July ;)