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Did you see "Judas and the Black Messiah"? It's pretty good (well, except for the unnecessary and boring parts about Fred Hampton's relationship with his girlfriend) and could form an interesting double bill with the superior "Baader-Meinhof Complex."
An interesting thing about "Judas and..." is the casting of Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton. Simply put, he doesn't look American. In "Get Out" this was less of a problem because he mainly shared the screen with whites, but as Hampton he shares the screen with black Americans and doesn't look like them at all. Samuel L. Jackson actually said he wished an American had played the lead in "Get Out" and got tons of shit for it.
Relatedly a friend of mine from grad school is black, two black parents, from the small-city South and the white Euros in grad school always thought she was mixed-race.
Scottish independence, Orkney independence, etc. are all the logical end point of the global decolonization of the last eight decades. Imagine a world where the British Empire still stood as it did in 1914. No one in Scotland or Orkney would want independence. The empire is strong and people prefer to be associated with the strong. But Britain has been losing territory after territory, decline after decline, for almost a century. Why would you want to be part of this political entity anymore? Think of this way. When the Roman Empire was strong, it's heartland Italy was united. When the Empire fell, Italy fragmented into hundreds of different city states, theocracies, maritme republics, duchies, and kingdoms. And if Scotland and Orkney become independent, dont be surprised by calls for Wessex, Mercian or Northumbrian independence.
In the introduction to James Burnham's Suicide of the West he wrote that he realized the West was in decline after seeing a historical atlas showing the rise and decline of the Roman Empire, Abbasid Caliphate, and finally maps showing the 18th & 19th century European empires compared with the present day(~1960).
As they say, history may not repeat but it certainly rhymes. Lots of parallels between the current Woke ideology and "Shubiyya" movement of the 9th to 11th century Islamic world. Also I read somewhere that one of the Illyrian generals who became the Roman Emperor in the mid 3rd century boasted that he was avenging his ancestors who were conquered by the Romans. Historical memory and ethnic grievances ran deep, even in the ancient world.
Don't know about any Illyrians doing such. The Illyrian emperors were generally excellent soldier-emperors and managed to save the western half of the empire for another two centuries.
Septimius Severus, who was from present day Libya, is recorded by one source as decorating the tomb of the then four centuries dead Carthaginian general Hannibal. Hard to say if this is true or not as contemporary Roman elites probably would have found this scandalous and the Severan dynasty was not well loved by Romans or history. So it might be a case of the equivalent of a modern day "hit piece" being thought of as historically accurate.
From Wikipedia. I got Dacian and Illyrian mixed up. As you said, it could definetely be a hit piece as Galerius persecuted Christians. But I do think there must have been a kernel of truth at least.
"According to Lactantius, a Christian and adviser to Constantine, Galerius affirmed his Dacian identity and avowed himself the enemy of the Roman name once made emperor, even proposing that the empire should be called, not the Roman, but the Dacian Empire, much to the horror of the patricians and senators. Lactantius further states that Galerius exhibited anti-Roman attitude as soon as he had attained the highest power, treating the Roman citizens with ruthless cruelty, like the conquerors treated the conquered, all in the name of the same treatment that the victorious Trajan had applied to the conquered Dacians, forefathers of Galerius, two centuries before."
Interesting, although I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case of a near contemporary historian(Lactantius) trying to cast a predecessor in a bad light in order to make the succeeding Constantinian dynasty look good.
Of note in Burnham's intro to that book is that he pinpoints events in Russia as the beginning of the decline of the west. Today it may be Russia's invasion that fully signals the beginning of the end of the west *as we knew it* (the enemy will still be around wearing the skin suit of the west of course)
Yeah Burnham spends a lot of time on Communism as the existential threat to the West. Burnham was trying to invoke a more muscular approach to the contemporary U.S. foreign policy establishment. It's the part of the book that is most anachronistic in my opinion, but his analysis of Liberalism as the ideology of decline is spot on.
The concluding parts are quite bad for the reasons you said but the idea of the Bolshevik Revolution as the beginning of the decline is correct I think, because leftist intellectuals in the west romanticized it so much
Kinda hard to expand on the idea here but I think global Black ethnogenesis is very much connected to Thiel’s ideas about woke being an attack on western civilization.
On a friends recommendation I started watching the tv show “Atlanta”, a comedy about a group of black friends in the titular city. First two seasons are kinda like a black version of Seinfeld and I’d recommend it. However their was a big gap in production between the 2nd and 3rd seasons, the 2nd being pre George Floyd and the 3rd post. The 3rd season takes place in Europe and the characters have a sense of comradery with blacks there, even though they have no historical connection other than melanin count. This seemed odd to me but it makes more sense if you consider blacks as the unwitting weapon chosen to destroy western civilization.
Thank you. And, how utterly depressing: "My Substack is not a VLOP (Very Large Online Platform), but I could be subject to these new rules at some point next year. If this is the case, I will have to be more guarded in what I say, while leaving enough room for everyone here to read between the lines to understand what it is that I am actually saying."
Very discouraging as well that EFF (who has previously gotten money from me) supports the DSA.
I'm not saying you shouldn't protect yourself . Please do! But I'm just a yokel American not very good at reading between the lines.
So what's the internet version of samizdat? And how will it work to support disseminators of dat-information and missed-information?
Again, thanks for this. I had been just deleting your substack emails thinking I could always access them on-line. I will save them now to hard disk and go to your archives and save them because I guess you may have to erase them.
If and when the digital realm is censored, samizdat will be in paper form - or as physical media. The digital realm is too reliant on infrastructure that can be easily controlled.
Maybe this is already figured out (if so, where/how do I find out?). But if not, it is perhaps not too early to put processes/systems into place. Not to be paranoid, but apparently they are or will be after me.
In the wake of Princess Diana's death, Peter Hitchens was disgusted by the large-scale maudlinism on scale. But he knew he couldn't come out and say it. So he wrote about Churchill's funeral in 1962 or so. Everyone got the message and hated him for it.
I don’t think we do, but I think decades of cozy living (not applicable to me and my Balkan brethren who duly undertook several wars in this meanwhile) has stupefied and pussyfied people to the rarefied heights. Basically give the pleb a cheap airline ticket so they can go and drink themselves to oblivion in ____ (fill in random Mediterranean country) and they are good.
Part of me wants to stay and see this thing unravel, see if there’s any honor, wisdom left. If we can somehow rebuild this shit better. The other part tells me to grab my kids and go to Costa Rica because this entire civilization is ending and whatever comes next I’m these here parts won’t be pretty.
Europe died as a result of their Wars of Suicide (1914-1945). What we call "Europe" is part museum, part twitching corpse. Europeans exist now in a pre-colonized state, they're just awaiting whichever conqueror History christens to seal the deal.
Europeans used to be chest-thumping nationalists, the folks who gave us imperialism and colonialism, among other things. Then came 1945, and Europeans were no longer in charge of their own destiny.
Germans in particular went from "Deutschland Über Alles" to the biggest soy-eating metrosexuals on the planet, once they got a taste of the Red Army. Suddenly all this "life belongs to the strong!" crap wasn't nearly so much fun, when they were on the receiving end.
Exactly. The Left in the US is on track to re-engineer fascism, while the Right gears up for class war. It either stupefies you or keeps you on your toes.
Buchanan called this in his WW2 book, well before it was obvious to the rest of us. His lamenting of Europe's fate and how many European Christians died in the wars is also, funny enough, one reason he gets called a Nazi so often
Buchanan was the canary in the coalmine (unless he was Patient Zero) for the massive decades-long campaign to equate any form of nationalism with Nazism.
And after decades of intense cultural conditioning, there are very few people who haven't internalized this as both a taboo topic and a sacred belief.
If I mention immigration restriction in any way in any context to just about all my friends, they have been Pavlovian conditioned to reflexively break out a bigotry accusation.
"The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe."
-Mencken
America will have to find a way to contend with its own population turning against freedom of speech. We have time but based on how things are looking we will have to win undemocratically
In one of his conversations with James Boswell, who was travelling around the continent in his Grand Tour, on 15 December 1764, Rousseau asked him:
‘‘Do you like cats?”
“No,” was the answer
“I was sure of that. It is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave..."
It obviously doesn't work on liberals to point it out but Biden was behind many of the most evil policies of our elites, from the Patriot Act to the fact that you can't get out of student loans through bankruptcy
The average man does not want to be free. He want's to be liked and accepted by his peers. Free-thinking, individualism is mentally hard work - and risks social isolation
Reading about the laws for EU censorship was disturbing to say the least. Thierry Breton is also a sleazy power drunk weasel. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I think this law opens the door up for people to be disappeared down the road. I hope I'm wrong.
Thanks v much for this. Didn’t know about the EU’s censorship regime. It is very messed up. Is there any hope member governments will push back against it? It seems it would have a major impact on domestic elections / prevent something like Brexit from ever happening again, which I guess is the point
on a happier note thanks for the piece on the Orkneys! Fascinating stuff, although an independent Scotland would be even more cringe and horrible than the UK is now
I am glad that I've never ignored my instincts when it comes to the EFF, and have resisted giving them money/time. A long, long time ago they were OK and didn't have too many state-adjacent worldviews. The organization seems like it was slipping even when John Perry Barlow was still alive.
Not at all surprised that they're enthusiastic about this EU people shut'er-upper.
Regarding EU censorship, I still remember Apple’s “1984” commercial in 1984, depicting the personal computer as the hammer against totalitarianism. Digital does not mean freedom. It’s just a transfer of dependencies and control mechanisms. Analog felt much freer in retrospect, but the dependencies were physical proximity to resources and social structures most needed to live (I felt phenomenally free in the middle of Kansas, but I was vulnerable to the elements and local cultures). But if I could live outside of those I was free in a way that’s impossible to imagine today.
Digital feels free and does provide breathtaking access to previously unreachable parts of the universe, but it plainly allows for totalizing and permanent control if adequately harnessed. It’s taken 4 decades, but it seems we are approaching an inflection point(s) where global control is secureable to a critical degree. I can hang out in the middle of Kansas now, and feel much less vulnerable to local social structures and physical elements, but my freedom to exist within the global society is now dependent on adherence to the global rules.
That Apple commercial still irks me because it was not a tool of freedom. It was just another tool. But we all bought it like morons, and all those people got wildly wealthy.
"This diaspora arrives then resists injustice that preceded arrival, that was always there — they are some kind of expeditionary force, bringing equality wherever they go. Without them, you are backward. With them, you are ascendant on a higher moral plane."
I can't tell: is this serious or deep-fried in irony?
I sincerely hope the latter. If this is serious no wonder black people in America are fucked, this level of sentimental idealization could easily poison both the giver and receiver.
It's created a profound neverending cycle of resentment as opposed to lifting black people up. And white people are caught in some weird self loathing thing, which I predict, sooner rather than later will end up turning into resentment as well.
Other races, at least in the US. Don't think either way. Theyre caught in the middle of this. And because they have a more positive self image, theyve started to push back. Look no further than the recent affirmative action ruling. That was asian people driving that case.
Steve Sailer recently spoke about a "coalition of the fringes" that's held together by grievances against white people. I think I agree. I believe it's starting to crack. And black people are probably gonna get fucked hardest when it does.
*RACE WAR
no. But racial tensions are gonna get weirder and worse. And it's mainly because of the obsessive focus on black oppression. Everyone will eventually become a victim.
White Saviorism is the foundational belief of everyone from institutionalists to campus radicals to corporatists to our culture class to every standard American liberal. The 19th-century White Man's Burden lives on as the 21st-century's White Woman's emotional burden.
And in order for White Saviorism to thrive, flourish and meet all the various career and psychological needs of its believers, there have to be a permanent supply of black victims.
I hate the whole "white man keeps the black man down" bullshit. But it's kind of true. In the sense that while black people have been given massive cultural power and preferential treatment, they have been psyopped into perpetual victimhood. And like you said, it does trace back to a neurotic corpo academic savior complex.
Taking this system of oppression olympics outside of the US is a ginormous tactical error. With Canada at least they're trying harder using natives instead of black people/slavery narratives.
On the European side you can only mention MLK and slavery so many times until people divorced from that history entirely start to realize it's all complete bullshit.
Seasoned with smugness and deep-fried in self-delusion it is finger-licking good comfort food for fantasists.
The African-American community is already deeply split along class lines. The degree of economic inequality within the community is greater than in the wider US society. The African immigrants who can do so (most famously the Ibo from Nigeria and some of the Afro-Caribbeans) will prosper while the bulk of the ADOS are confined to the lower portions of the emerging caste system.
Ethnic solidarity is no match for the dollar. Loyalties that conflict with the imperatives of class weaken over time, while those that combine with them grow stronger. DEI style crony-capitalism will ensure that BIPOC ethnonationalism thrives, but it will do so in ways that will bring no benefit to the mass of ADOS.
"The African-American community is already deeply split along class lines."
The whole point of racial quotas is because blacks at any level cannot compete. You make it sound like wealthy blacks don't need quotas; nor do they need virtue-signaling whites who hate their own people and traditional culture. All blacks, top to bottom, need both or they're dead in the water, and they know it.
If smart blacks could compete without quotas and forced integration and they had no interest in lower class blacks they'd be in favor of ending quotas. They instead demand even more.
Also, there's very little difference between high and low blacks compared to whites. They all eat the same food, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, sing a little, dance a little and f**k a little. Yes, there are a very few exceptions, but they prove the rule. In other words, blacks are dull. Even their violence is stupid and boring.
Whites, on the other hand, have a greater diversity of talent, interest and type, a far greater breadth of spiritual vision; that is, before The Great Leveling.
I apologize for hogging here, I just have one more bee in my bonnet:
This argument about "PC died out in the 90s, how come it came back even stronger?" can be answered with a simple analogy: "How come I recovered from that bad flu when I was 30 but it almost killed me when I was 70?"
Thirty years ago the crusade of Left academia to change our thoughts and actions by changing our language was played out in a country still deeply rooted in Christianity, families and communities, and most especially the classic liberalism personified by our Founding Fathers, who were still mostly revered. (Basically the core of our country were still majority white Christians, proud of and confident in their country and its history.)
Fast-forward to the 2010s and the patient has sickened: hollowed out by mass immigration, mass financialization, aggressive secularization, transformed from citizen into consumer, addled and deranged by the endless churn of new techology (most esp Social Media), and demoralized by the weaponization of our historical crimes that cast our country as a bigger, richer version of apartheid South Africa.
Social Justice, like any other virus, works best on a weakened and helpless subject, and once every possible principle and precedent was converted into cash by the market state, it faced very little resistance.
Thiel is wrong that it died out, to use more medical terminology, it just metastasized.
There is an account on twitter called CovfefeAnon that likes to say "The woke are more correct than the mainstream". This is a good example of that. The Classical Liberalism that you mention allows for woke to continue coming back.
The Long Marchers/New Left took Popper's Paradox of Tolerance and snuck a Trojan Horse through it. They were able to piggyback on the Civil Rights movement, craft a more fundamentalist and punitive form of morality based on it, then gradually install their morality and worldview (Oppression defines everything, most esp language) throughout academia and culture. Once you seize the high ground of morality, victory is just a matter of time.
There is also something to the postmodern condition (not the ideology) where it's difficult for a materialist/consumerist ideology to latch on to anything concrete. It's hard to truly "believe" in anything anymore the more you get pulled into mainstream western culture. That wokeness is so malleable, able to contradict itself so easily and without any real theory of governance beyond "do what we say to create equality", is no longer a flaw that turns people off but possibly a strength
Alan Bloom has a long discussion of Nietzche in this context in his last book. Bloom isn't necessarily entirely on the right but it's impressive how early he was in identifying what it is we're up against
Oh it’s victory if The Moral High Ground is more important than the actual high ground.
They practice the rights of the conquest and enjoy the fruits of victory because we are cowards who let them do it by words. No sane person believes this, our defeat was we remain law abiding. Cast off the laws THEY DESTROYED and we are free, at least of them.
Maybe I was not paying attention, but as I remember the 90s were not rooted in anything much beyond MTV. Consumers in the Bible Belt were hoovering up porn for their VCRs while Madonna was receiving plaudits from feminists (never mind the revealing moment IN BED WITH MADONNA when Louise Ciccone laughs at the report that her make up assistant had just been raped). The Boomers were cheerfully re-engineering capitalism for the sake of quarterly profits. The cultural mood had less to do with either Christ or the Founding Fathers than they did with AMERICAN PSYCHO and GLAMORAMA (they neatly bookended a decade of excess and marketable nihilism). The 90s saw the Rodney King riots (sparked off by media reports of the beating that included superbly cut portions of the available video that neglect to show three of his friends not being beaten, since they were not on PCP and were not violent with the cops), the Branch Davidians, Ruby Ridge, OKC bombing, the first arrest of Julian Assange and the riots in Seattle to protest the WTO.
Dirty as they were, the snows of yesteryear seem pretty good now.
"Outside of possibly Poland etc" But Poland is sick, too! Their anti-Russian derangement is so extreme as to merit its own entry in the DSM. A better candidate for the title of last still somewhat sane European country would be Hungary.
Objectively speaking Poland is doing relatively well to the rest of Europe. Its issue with Russia has to go through a historical process before concluding.
I've been thinking a lot about black assimilation in America, or the lack of it. While silly, for me one thing that really drove home how separated black culture is from the rest of America is the rather harmless genre of black people on Youtube reacting to hearing extremely popular "white" music for the first time in their lives (think stuff like The Beatles)
This is also how the Hebrew Israelites, We Wuz Kangz, skepticism towards vaccines, Kanye's antisemitism, washing chicken with soap, etc. take white liberals I know completely by surprise when they pop up in the news, and have to be suppressed by corporate media, lest we realize how far apart the dream of true assimilation still is, and how out there black culture can get due to its separation
It gets even more complicated when I think about it.
American blacks are their own small but powerful culture within the US. But then there's a number of separate subcultures off that. Think the southern christian types vs inner city chicagoans that like rap and wear du rags.
Yet they seem to have a unity with all of these that none of the other races do. And I'm not sure if it works that same way with black people in Europe or anywhere else.
Yeah they have subcultures but the culture as a whole seems to be defined as opposition to the white man. This is how you can have Nigerians in Ireland, a polity that did not exist during the black slave trade, assaulting Irish people and claiming slavery as the justification.
I'm not sure if I agree you can pin "opposition to whites" as the whole of black culture.
Racial unity is a huge thing with blacks though. A lot stronger than latinos/asians/whites. You'll see black people push back on Asians, but albeit not nearly to the level of whites.
On the Nigerians vs. Irish. That sounds two fold
>black ethnocentrism
>Niccolo's turbo america theory.
You can argue which is the stronger driving factor there. 60/40 I guess. But I'm not sure which way
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....and have a good weekend, everyone!
Thiel's essay title seems like a borrow from Heather Mac Donald's 2020 book The Diversity Delusion; reviewed here under the title How Diversity Narrows the Mind by....yours truly: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Did you see "Judas and the Black Messiah"? It's pretty good (well, except for the unnecessary and boring parts about Fred Hampton's relationship with his girlfriend) and could form an interesting double bill with the superior "Baader-Meinhof Complex."
An interesting thing about "Judas and..." is the casting of Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton. Simply put, he doesn't look American. In "Get Out" this was less of a problem because he mainly shared the screen with whites, but as Hampton he shares the screen with black Americans and doesn't look like them at all. Samuel L. Jackson actually said he wished an American had played the lead in "Get Out" and got tons of shit for it.
Relatedly a friend of mine from grad school is black, two black parents, from the small-city South and the white Euros in grad school always thought she was mixed-race.
I did not see it.
How the deep state neutralizes its opponents
Scottish independence, Orkney independence, etc. are all the logical end point of the global decolonization of the last eight decades. Imagine a world where the British Empire still stood as it did in 1914. No one in Scotland or Orkney would want independence. The empire is strong and people prefer to be associated with the strong. But Britain has been losing territory after territory, decline after decline, for almost a century. Why would you want to be part of this political entity anymore? Think of this way. When the Roman Empire was strong, it's heartland Italy was united. When the Empire fell, Italy fragmented into hundreds of different city states, theocracies, maritme republics, duchies, and kingdoms. And if Scotland and Orkney become independent, dont be surprised by calls for Wessex, Mercian or Northumbrian independence.
Cue up Osama Bin Laden's quote about the "strong horse".
The mandate of Heaven.
“Phoenix and The Birds of Prey” by Mark Moyer, about Vietnam.
Take; The peasants back the strong horse, aka Mandate of Heaven. “Grab them by the Balls and their hearts and minds will follow.”
Iraq - Bing West (who would be a great get Nico) “The Strongest Tribe” or why we won the surge, because the Americans were the Strongest Tribe.
In the introduction to James Burnham's Suicide of the West he wrote that he realized the West was in decline after seeing a historical atlas showing the rise and decline of the Roman Empire, Abbasid Caliphate, and finally maps showing the 18th & 19th century European empires compared with the present day(~1960).
As they say, history may not repeat but it certainly rhymes. Lots of parallels between the current Woke ideology and "Shubiyya" movement of the 9th to 11th century Islamic world. Also I read somewhere that one of the Illyrian generals who became the Roman Emperor in the mid 3rd century boasted that he was avenging his ancestors who were conquered by the Romans. Historical memory and ethnic grievances ran deep, even in the ancient world.
Don't know about any Illyrians doing such. The Illyrian emperors were generally excellent soldier-emperors and managed to save the western half of the empire for another two centuries.
Septimius Severus, who was from present day Libya, is recorded by one source as decorating the tomb of the then four centuries dead Carthaginian general Hannibal. Hard to say if this is true or not as contemporary Roman elites probably would have found this scandalous and the Severan dynasty was not well loved by Romans or history. So it might be a case of the equivalent of a modern day "hit piece" being thought of as historically accurate.
Didn't Hannibal die in exile in Asia Minor? Before he died, he had some choice words about Riman vengeance against an old man.
Supposedly died in Bithynia. But I don't think any of the stories of his death that survive are from contemporaries, so who really knows.
From Wikipedia. I got Dacian and Illyrian mixed up. As you said, it could definetely be a hit piece as Galerius persecuted Christians. But I do think there must have been a kernel of truth at least.
"According to Lactantius, a Christian and adviser to Constantine, Galerius affirmed his Dacian identity and avowed himself the enemy of the Roman name once made emperor, even proposing that the empire should be called, not the Roman, but the Dacian Empire, much to the horror of the patricians and senators. Lactantius further states that Galerius exhibited anti-Roman attitude as soon as he had attained the highest power, treating the Roman citizens with ruthless cruelty, like the conquerors treated the conquered, all in the name of the same treatment that the victorious Trajan had applied to the conquered Dacians, forefathers of Galerius, two centuries before."
Interesting, although I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case of a near contemporary historian(Lactantius) trying to cast a predecessor in a bad light in order to make the succeeding Constantinian dynasty look good.
Everything went downhill after the praetorians murdered Pertinax
Right on!
Of note in Burnham's intro to that book is that he pinpoints events in Russia as the beginning of the decline of the west. Today it may be Russia's invasion that fully signals the beginning of the end of the west *as we knew it* (the enemy will still be around wearing the skin suit of the west of course)
Yeah Burnham spends a lot of time on Communism as the existential threat to the West. Burnham was trying to invoke a more muscular approach to the contemporary U.S. foreign policy establishment. It's the part of the book that is most anachronistic in my opinion, but his analysis of Liberalism as the ideology of decline is spot on.
The concluding parts are quite bad for the reasons you said but the idea of the Bolshevik Revolution as the beginning of the decline is correct I think, because leftist intellectuals in the west romanticized it so much
Liberalism is the setup
Communism is the punchline
The Scottish Independence campaign never made sense to me because their biggest goal after getting independence was joining the EU.
Excellent as always, thank you.
Kinda hard to expand on the idea here but I think global Black ethnogenesis is very much connected to Thiel’s ideas about woke being an attack on western civilization.
On a friends recommendation I started watching the tv show “Atlanta”, a comedy about a group of black friends in the titular city. First two seasons are kinda like a black version of Seinfeld and I’d recommend it. However their was a big gap in production between the 2nd and 3rd seasons, the 2nd being pre George Floyd and the 3rd post. The 3rd season takes place in Europe and the characters have a sense of comradery with blacks there, even though they have no historical connection other than melanin count. This seemed odd to me but it makes more sense if you consider blacks as the unwitting weapon chosen to destroy western civilization.
Ok I was behind on my reading and just read your piece on France's riots. I think you covered the idea there. Thank you.
https://open.substack.com/pub/niccolo/p/us-state-department-trained-french?r=ivpje&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you. And, how utterly depressing: "My Substack is not a VLOP (Very Large Online Platform), but I could be subject to these new rules at some point next year. If this is the case, I will have to be more guarded in what I say, while leaving enough room for everyone here to read between the lines to understand what it is that I am actually saying."
Very discouraging as well that EFF (who has previously gotten money from me) supports the DSA.
I'm not saying you shouldn't protect yourself . Please do! But I'm just a yokel American not very good at reading between the lines.
So what's the internet version of samizdat? And how will it work to support disseminators of dat-information and missed-information?
Again, thanks for this. I had been just deleting your substack emails thinking I could always access them on-line. I will save them now to hard disk and go to your archives and save them because I guess you may have to erase them.
Be well and be safe.
Thanks again.
If and when the digital realm is censored, samizdat will be in paper form - or as physical media. The digital realm is too reliant on infrastructure that can be easily controlled.
Maybe this is already figured out (if so, where/how do I find out?). But if not, it is perhaps not too early to put processes/systems into place. Not to be paranoid, but apparently they are or will be after me.
I wish I had saw your comment before posting.
The EFF's trajectory has been very disappointing :(
In the wake of Princess Diana's death, Peter Hitchens was disgusted by the large-scale maudlinism on scale. But he knew he couldn't come out and say it. So he wrote about Churchill's funeral in 1962 or so. Everyone got the message and hated him for it.
Integration of black Americans is proportional to their income level.
Diversity is inversely proportional to income level.
So where do we go from here? My disgust for Europe hit the high in Feb 22, and this now cements it. All to Hungary I guess
Europeans like being slaves. A slave doesn't have to make tough choices or take responsibility.
I don’t think we do, but I think decades of cozy living (not applicable to me and my Balkan brethren who duly undertook several wars in this meanwhile) has stupefied and pussyfied people to the rarefied heights. Basically give the pleb a cheap airline ticket so they can go and drink themselves to oblivion in ____ (fill in random Mediterranean country) and they are good.
Part of me wants to stay and see this thing unravel, see if there’s any honor, wisdom left. If we can somehow rebuild this shit better. The other part tells me to grab my kids and go to Costa Rica because this entire civilization is ending and whatever comes next I’m these here parts won’t be pretty.
Europe died as a result of their Wars of Suicide (1914-1945). What we call "Europe" is part museum, part twitching corpse. Europeans exist now in a pre-colonized state, they're just awaiting whichever conqueror History christens to seal the deal.
Europeans used to be chest-thumping nationalists, the folks who gave us imperialism and colonialism, among other things. Then came 1945, and Europeans were no longer in charge of their own destiny.
Germans in particular went from "Deutschland Über Alles" to the biggest soy-eating metrosexuals on the planet, once they got a taste of the Red Army. Suddenly all this "life belongs to the strong!" crap wasn't nearly so much fun, when they were on the receiving end.
i guess like the Tao says, once something reaches its maximum extreme it transforms into its opposite.
Exactly. The Left in the US is on track to re-engineer fascism, while the Right gears up for class war. It either stupefies you or keeps you on your toes.
Buchanan called this in his WW2 book, well before it was obvious to the rest of us. His lamenting of Europe's fate and how many European Christians died in the wars is also, funny enough, one reason he gets called a Nazi so often
Buchanan was the canary in the coalmine (unless he was Patient Zero) for the massive decades-long campaign to equate any form of nationalism with Nazism.
And after decades of intense cultural conditioning, there are very few people who haven't internalized this as both a taboo topic and a sacred belief.
If I mention immigration restriction in any way in any context to just about all my friends, they have been Pavlovian conditioned to reflexively break out a bigotry accusation.
"The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe."
-Mencken
America will have to find a way to contend with its own population turning against freedom of speech. We have time but based on how things are looking we will have to win undemocratically
In one of his conversations with James Boswell, who was travelling around the continent in his Grand Tour, on 15 December 1764, Rousseau asked him:
‘‘Do you like cats?”
“No,” was the answer
“I was sure of that. It is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave..."
Hell, look at 9/11. In the 1990s, Biden proposed something much like what later became the so-called "Patriot Act". This proposal sank like a stone.
Come 9/11 and Americans could not surrender their civil liberties fast enough.
It obviously doesn't work on liberals to point it out but Biden was behind many of the most evil policies of our elites, from the Patriot Act to the fact that you can't get out of student loans through bankruptcy
Safe? What about being entertained? Surely that takes priority?
The average man does not want to be free. He want's to be liked and accepted by his peers. Free-thinking, individualism is mentally hard work - and risks social isolation
Reading about the laws for EU censorship was disturbing to say the least. Thierry Breton is also a sleazy power drunk weasel. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I think this law opens the door up for people to be disappeared down the road. I hope I'm wrong.
They'll just punish them with fines/de-banking/etc., rendering them "un-personed".
It's enough for now certainly. Wife caught being based online? Embarrassing! And not looking good at the next round of lay-offs.
That's enough for normal people.
But disappearances etc provoke pity and fear, and you would need a very strong state without even the fig leaf of Our Democracy to hide behind.
Thanks v much for this. Didn’t know about the EU’s censorship regime. It is very messed up. Is there any hope member governments will push back against it? It seems it would have a major impact on domestic elections / prevent something like Brexit from ever happening again, which I guess is the point
on a happier note thanks for the piece on the Orkneys! Fascinating stuff, although an independent Scotland would be even more cringe and horrible than the UK is now
I am glad that I've never ignored my instincts when it comes to the EFF, and have resisted giving them money/time. A long, long time ago they were OK and didn't have too many state-adjacent worldviews. The organization seems like it was slipping even when John Perry Barlow was still alive.
Not at all surprised that they're enthusiastic about this EU people shut'er-upper.
Regarding EU censorship, I still remember Apple’s “1984” commercial in 1984, depicting the personal computer as the hammer against totalitarianism. Digital does not mean freedom. It’s just a transfer of dependencies and control mechanisms. Analog felt much freer in retrospect, but the dependencies were physical proximity to resources and social structures most needed to live (I felt phenomenally free in the middle of Kansas, but I was vulnerable to the elements and local cultures). But if I could live outside of those I was free in a way that’s impossible to imagine today.
Digital feels free and does provide breathtaking access to previously unreachable parts of the universe, but it plainly allows for totalizing and permanent control if adequately harnessed. It’s taken 4 decades, but it seems we are approaching an inflection point(s) where global control is secureable to a critical degree. I can hang out in the middle of Kansas now, and feel much less vulnerable to local social structures and physical elements, but my freedom to exist within the global society is now dependent on adherence to the global rules.
That Apple commercial still irks me because it was not a tool of freedom. It was just another tool. But we all bought it like morons, and all those people got wildly wealthy.
I would go back to analog in a heartbeat.
"This diaspora arrives then resists injustice that preceded arrival, that was always there — they are some kind of expeditionary force, bringing equality wherever they go. Without them, you are backward. With them, you are ascendant on a higher moral plane."
I can't tell: is this serious or deep-fried in irony?
I sincerely hope the latter. If this is serious no wonder black people in America are fucked, this level of sentimental idealization could easily poison both the giver and receiver.
It already has.
It's created a profound neverending cycle of resentment as opposed to lifting black people up. And white people are caught in some weird self loathing thing, which I predict, sooner rather than later will end up turning into resentment as well.
Other races, at least in the US. Don't think either way. Theyre caught in the middle of this. And because they have a more positive self image, theyve started to push back. Look no further than the recent affirmative action ruling. That was asian people driving that case.
Steve Sailer recently spoke about a "coalition of the fringes" that's held together by grievances against white people. I think I agree. I believe it's starting to crack. And black people are probably gonna get fucked hardest when it does.
*RACE WAR
no. But racial tensions are gonna get weirder and worse. And it's mainly because of the obsessive focus on black oppression. Everyone will eventually become a victim.
White Saviorism is the foundational belief of everyone from institutionalists to campus radicals to corporatists to our culture class to every standard American liberal. The 19th-century White Man's Burden lives on as the 21st-century's White Woman's emotional burden.
And in order for White Saviorism to thrive, flourish and meet all the various career and psychological needs of its believers, there have to be a permanent supply of black victims.
100,000%
I hate the whole "white man keeps the black man down" bullshit. But it's kind of true. In the sense that while black people have been given massive cultural power and preferential treatment, they have been psyopped into perpetual victimhood. And like you said, it does trace back to a neurotic corpo academic savior complex.
To keep things on point with Niccolos essay here.
Taking this system of oppression olympics outside of the US is a ginormous tactical error. With Canada at least they're trying harder using natives instead of black people/slavery narratives.
On the European side you can only mention MLK and slavery so many times until people divorced from that history entirely start to realize it's all complete bullshit.
Seasoned with smugness and deep-fried in self-delusion it is finger-licking good comfort food for fantasists.
The African-American community is already deeply split along class lines. The degree of economic inequality within the community is greater than in the wider US society. The African immigrants who can do so (most famously the Ibo from Nigeria and some of the Afro-Caribbeans) will prosper while the bulk of the ADOS are confined to the lower portions of the emerging caste system.
Ethnic solidarity is no match for the dollar. Loyalties that conflict with the imperatives of class weaken over time, while those that combine with them grow stronger. DEI style crony-capitalism will ensure that BIPOC ethnonationalism thrives, but it will do so in ways that will bring no benefit to the mass of ADOS.
"The African-American community is already deeply split along class lines."
The whole point of racial quotas is because blacks at any level cannot compete. You make it sound like wealthy blacks don't need quotas; nor do they need virtue-signaling whites who hate their own people and traditional culture. All blacks, top to bottom, need both or they're dead in the water, and they know it.
If smart blacks could compete without quotas and forced integration and they had no interest in lower class blacks they'd be in favor of ending quotas. They instead demand even more.
Also, there's very little difference between high and low blacks compared to whites. They all eat the same food, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, sing a little, dance a little and f**k a little. Yes, there are a very few exceptions, but they prove the rule. In other words, blacks are dull. Even their violence is stupid and boring.
Whites, on the other hand, have a greater diversity of talent, interest and type, a far greater breadth of spiritual vision; that is, before The Great Leveling.
I apologize for hogging here, I just have one more bee in my bonnet:
This argument about "PC died out in the 90s, how come it came back even stronger?" can be answered with a simple analogy: "How come I recovered from that bad flu when I was 30 but it almost killed me when I was 70?"
Thirty years ago the crusade of Left academia to change our thoughts and actions by changing our language was played out in a country still deeply rooted in Christianity, families and communities, and most especially the classic liberalism personified by our Founding Fathers, who were still mostly revered. (Basically the core of our country were still majority white Christians, proud of and confident in their country and its history.)
Fast-forward to the 2010s and the patient has sickened: hollowed out by mass immigration, mass financialization, aggressive secularization, transformed from citizen into consumer, addled and deranged by the endless churn of new techology (most esp Social Media), and demoralized by the weaponization of our historical crimes that cast our country as a bigger, richer version of apartheid South Africa.
Social Justice, like any other virus, works best on a weakened and helpless subject, and once every possible principle and precedent was converted into cash by the market state, it faced very little resistance.
Thiel is wrong that it died out, to use more medical terminology, it just metastasized.
There is an account on twitter called CovfefeAnon that likes to say "The woke are more correct than the mainstream". This is a good example of that. The Classical Liberalism that you mention allows for woke to continue coming back.
The Long Marchers/New Left took Popper's Paradox of Tolerance and snuck a Trojan Horse through it. They were able to piggyback on the Civil Rights movement, craft a more fundamentalist and punitive form of morality based on it, then gradually install their morality and worldview (Oppression defines everything, most esp language) throughout academia and culture. Once you seize the high ground of morality, victory is just a matter of time.
There is also something to the postmodern condition (not the ideology) where it's difficult for a materialist/consumerist ideology to latch on to anything concrete. It's hard to truly "believe" in anything anymore the more you get pulled into mainstream western culture. That wokeness is so malleable, able to contradict itself so easily and without any real theory of governance beyond "do what we say to create equality", is no longer a flaw that turns people off but possibly a strength
Nietzsche crafted the motto of 21st century America: "Nothing is true and everything is permitted."
I think he also foresaw how destabilizing this would be both for societies and individuals.
Alan Bloom has a long discussion of Nietzche in this context in his last book. Bloom isn't necessarily entirely on the right but it's impressive how early he was in identifying what it is we're up against
thanks! i'll look for it
Oh it’s victory if The Moral High Ground is more important than the actual high ground.
They practice the rights of the conquest and enjoy the fruits of victory because we are cowards who let them do it by words. No sane person believes this, our defeat was we remain law abiding. Cast off the laws THEY DESTROYED and we are free, at least of them.
Maybe I was not paying attention, but as I remember the 90s were not rooted in anything much beyond MTV. Consumers in the Bible Belt were hoovering up porn for their VCRs while Madonna was receiving plaudits from feminists (never mind the revealing moment IN BED WITH MADONNA when Louise Ciccone laughs at the report that her make up assistant had just been raped). The Boomers were cheerfully re-engineering capitalism for the sake of quarterly profits. The cultural mood had less to do with either Christ or the Founding Fathers than they did with AMERICAN PSYCHO and GLAMORAMA (they neatly bookended a decade of excess and marketable nihilism). The 90s saw the Rodney King riots (sparked off by media reports of the beating that included superbly cut portions of the available video that neglect to show three of his friends not being beaten, since they were not on PCP and were not violent with the cops), the Branch Davidians, Ruby Ridge, OKC bombing, the first arrest of Julian Assange and the riots in Seattle to protest the WTO.
Dirty as they were, the snows of yesteryear seem pretty good now.
"Outside of possibly Poland etc" But Poland is sick, too! Their anti-Russian derangement is so extreme as to merit its own entry in the DSM. A better candidate for the title of last still somewhat sane European country would be Hungary.
EXACTLY...a collective death-wish is the very essence of sickness.
Objectively speaking Poland is doing relatively well to the rest of Europe. Its issue with Russia has to go through a historical process before concluding.
I've been thinking a lot about black assimilation in America, or the lack of it. While silly, for me one thing that really drove home how separated black culture is from the rest of America is the rather harmless genre of black people on Youtube reacting to hearing extremely popular "white" music for the first time in their lives (think stuff like The Beatles)
This is also how the Hebrew Israelites, We Wuz Kangz, skepticism towards vaccines, Kanye's antisemitism, washing chicken with soap, etc. take white liberals I know completely by surprise when they pop up in the news, and have to be suppressed by corporate media, lest we realize how far apart the dream of true assimilation still is, and how out there black culture can get due to its separation
It gets even more complicated when I think about it.
American blacks are their own small but powerful culture within the US. But then there's a number of separate subcultures off that. Think the southern christian types vs inner city chicagoans that like rap and wear du rags.
Yet they seem to have a unity with all of these that none of the other races do. And I'm not sure if it works that same way with black people in Europe or anywhere else.
Yeah they have subcultures but the culture as a whole seems to be defined as opposition to the white man. This is how you can have Nigerians in Ireland, a polity that did not exist during the black slave trade, assaulting Irish people and claiming slavery as the justification.
I'm not sure if I agree you can pin "opposition to whites" as the whole of black culture.
Racial unity is a huge thing with blacks though. A lot stronger than latinos/asians/whites. You'll see black people push back on Asians, but albeit not nearly to the level of whites.
On the Nigerians vs. Irish. That sounds two fold
>black ethnocentrism
>Niccolo's turbo america theory.
You can argue which is the stronger driving factor there. 60/40 I guess. But I'm not sure which way
Very good weekend review, as always, Nick. Look forward to it.
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