The real superweapon is located in your intro paragraphs. There is discontent that appears both Left and Right but is actually neither. The old categories are breaking down.
For example, the R3VOLution was not all that right wing. It was a ragtag coalition from all over the place: gold bugs, militant southerners, hippie peaceniks, conspiracy theorists, pot heads, hardcore libertarians, and more. I ran a Ron Paul meetup and was surprised at how many hippie lefties showed up, including some serious green types.
I've walked the neighborhoods and I've distributed a libertarian propaganda newspaper in archetypical Portlandia types of coffee shops. "Anti capitalist" is not identical to socialist. Many of the green lefties want locally owned businesses. They want small scale capitalism vs. Wall St. calling the shots. "Buy local" is a battle cry that's Trumpier than Trump. There are Small is Beautiful green "lefties" who have created local currencies and experimented with alternative voting systems.
The overlap between the Green Left and the Froggy Right is much greater than most people realize.
Meanwhile the Wall St. Right has made a devil's alliance with the Marxissist Left...
Bingo. My experience hanging out at Occupy was very similar - it was not purely left wing, at least initially. Swirling underneath the forced agitation of the culture war is a new coalition trying desperately to form itself.
Peasants should not have to care about politics, it's just abuse from the rulers. Hyper-politization. Make the powerless plebs tear each others throats out...
Yes the ragtag army of the dissident right, redneck survivalists, Old Earth Firsters! who kept their values and didn't become great reset zombies, "MAGA communists," gun owners, hippies who are sick of all the shit, bikers, green off the griders, etc, are the ONLY hope against Gnostic globalist technocratic fascism.
Indeed, and meanwhile the hippies themselves - with their preference for local organic food, skepticism of big pharma, disdain for the educational system, etc. - are increasingly lumped in with the "extreme right". Both emphasize natural living and natural instincts.
Exactly, glad to see more and more people getting this. I was a hippish punk in my youth as I am Gen X not a boomer and now in many ways I am third position. But I didn’t change, the cultural left changed and was taken over by woke idpol.
People say that - "I didn't change, they did" - but I'm not so sure it's entirely true in most cases. It certainly isn't in mine. On many subjects, yes, I've remained fairly consistent; on others I have reconsidered the positions of my youth in light of additional experience, further reading, and so on. Part of that experience being precisely the mass psychosis of woke.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
I am going to push back a little, I liked Uncle Ted when I was an Earth First! leftist and still like him as a dissident. The difference is, I think I understand his message against what he called p.c. in the 90s which was just proto-woke, much better than when I first read him. My understanding has deepened, and I regret a few views I held say 20 years ago, but I truly sincerely believe my core values have changed very little. I still hate corporations and endless war, and am militantly pro free speech. Those used to be cultural left values and they are no more.
I was always against gun control even when I was a leftist, so I am pretty stubborn about holding onto the values I cherish.
The underlying thing is that as we evolve our ideas become more nuanced. We incorporate evidence that we once ignored, acknowledge limitations that once confined us.
The important thing is never our views per se, but our disposition. Those who feel comfortable asking questions, thinking for themselves, have the potential to retain old opinions while acknowledging the value of new or competing ones. I am now in vigorous agreement with many people I once dismissed without necessarily changing my own loyalties or beliefs. This strikes some as paradoxical, but not me.
It is probably the same with you. It is a q. of character or personality, not of ideas. Dogmatists are born, not made. Ditto thinking people. You notice this as you age: analytic capacity (a very mixed blessing) is heritable.
There was NEVER any reason to see hippies as naturally Left or progressive. I once read a book by a famous Polish novelist (Leo Tyrmand) who visited Berkely in the 60s. He took one look at them and wrote that they brought the SS to mind. Admittedly he was pushing things to extremes, but he had a point.
Indeed it would not have occurred to me to connect the Lebensborn to the flower children ... Although this brings to mind a scene from The Man in the High Castle, a party of aristocratic Lebensborn tripping balls on acid.
The real hippies were very, very, privileged and had the money to experiment. A lot of the counter-culture of the 60s was developed by people with interests that had associations people find uncomfortable acknowledging. Much of the stuff we call 'New Age' started to circulate pre WW1 and it exerted a strong influence on everyone across the political spectrum.
The losers and misfits who idolise the 1000 year reich just have no idea how politics and history really work. Fanboys never do. The Nazis fucked over their initial ultra conservative backers in German high society and I expect that had they had their chance over time the more ambitious elements would have spawned any number of innovations that would horrify the true believers then and now. Despite the kitsch to which the fuhrer was addicted, many of the Nazis loved modernism, in particular modern architecture.
By far the most humane, forward thinking and realistic member of the German elite in the 80s, the banker Alfred Herrhausen (who was tragically murdered, conveniently for some, after coming up with a plan to spare post Soviet Russia the horrors of shock economics), was educated in an elite Nazi school as a teenager. If you are not surprised by people you are just not paying attention.
The labels—‘hippie’, ‘libertarian’, ‘leftist’, ‘tea party’—don’t apply anymore. We are entering a new world where it will be Deep State vs Non Deep State
Enters the scene ANW's more-or-less coeval more-or-less compatriot 😊
🗨 [T]he great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. ~~C.S. Lewis
There is no greater rebuke than the clarity or elegance of the way things were expressed in the past. Which is why such things are disparaged by those with an interest in the inflated reputations of today.
One's attitude towards the giants of the past is revealing ... there are those who despair of ever living up to it, and are therefore strive to not be so embarrassing to that legacy ... thus Napoleon was inspired by Caesar Caesar by Alexander, Alexander by Achilles, and Achilles by an illiterate steppe chieftain. Then there are those who try to destroy the memory of the past, so that their own shortcomings are not as noticeable. One path leads up ascent, the other to degeneration.
I believe that when the dust settles, the record will show that attempting to conquer the world with hypnosis is an incredibly fragile strategy. It works very well until it doesn't, and then it all falls apart.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
Don't go into the comments section. It may take days to recover, not just from the comments but from the hangover you will experience after inevitably downing half a bottle of whiskey. Then again, most corporate sites eliminated their comments section years ago so you should be safe.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
The VIP feisty cat had this ↓↓ to say wrt MSNBBCNNBCBS, a wee while back 🙂
🗨 the thumb on the scale got too heavy and the leaks around the edges too vast.[...] the fleecing grew too brash and illusions have been shorn instead.
I hope and pray we've reached a tipping point. There are many subtle signs that the spell has been broken for a critical mass of people, so we have reason to be hopeful. Of course, psychopathic rulers are dangerous when they get desperate, as they feel their control slipping away. Right now we, as a civilization, really are on the razor's edge; the situation is much more of a powder keg than most people realize. I believe the parasitic elites know the current order is unsustainable, so more of them, like Musk, will probably defect. As for the elites who do not defect, will they go down with the ship? And if so, how much damage will they cause on their way down? The next few years are almost certainly going to have some of those "weeks where decades happen."
Great essay. Since so much of the future is uncertain, might as well stay hopeful! The path through these times may be perilous, but good things and great possibilities are on the other side!
True, which is no doubt a large part of why he's defecting. When I said "parasitic elites," I should have limited it to the ones that rely on financial fuckery and political rackets for making money, rather than creating anything of any real value.
No, I would disagree with that. The outcomes of SA's racial policies + corruption might be the same as that of wokeness, as they both abandon meritocracy, but I don't feel like they are culturally the same thing. The intent here is simply pillage and plunder. There's much less subtlety and guilt tripping and much more brutality. The whites here are angry at the situation, not pussied out.
The only real difference is that due to the relative sizes of the competing racial groups, American wokeness requires its coalition to include a substantial fraction of whites. That forces a degree of indirectness because you can't out and say "we just want to take your stuff and kill you." But the ideological core is still more or less the same.
I think you nailed it. Here they don't have to brainwash you to let them have your stuff, they simply take. The newly passed "employment equity" law gives minister the right to set quotas (so many black employed, so many black managers, so many black ownership - of private companies!). And there's lots of talk about making these quotas mimic population stats. So, in our team of 8, we will have to fire 2 out of 3 whites. I'm sitting with a vacant position for senior quant, which I haven't been able to fill for over a year, because there's just no senior black quants that I wouldn't have to pay twice my salary. In the meantime, job gets done by lilly white German consultants 🤷♀️. Man, it's just crazy. The only think I can do is pick the most talented youngsters and train them up, but not everyone can do that.
"The only think I can do is pick the most talented youngsters and train them up, but not everyone can do that."
Of course, to do this for white kids, one must first hire them (and under BEE therefore hire 19 additional blacks or whatever the number is). And then what is their motivation to be trained, when the state has already decided that they will not have careers?
Are there loopholes you can use? Eg taking them on as independent contractors. I'm curious how whites cope in SA - given they haven't all starved to death due to unemployment (although I understand the economic conditions are grim for many), there must be workarounds....
At the government level, yes, although many South Africans I've met have been very based. Then there are movements like Afriforum who are essentially carving out a network state for themselves.
Afriforum is attempting to do amazing thing indeed - build self sufficient communities that can take over provision of services and slowly pull the power and gravy train out of ANC's hands. I love the new paradigm emerging - let's stop complaining at the environment, or escaping it, and rather create a new one
There are no shortages of based Americans either. At the US government level, it's BEE, uh, sorry, DEI all the way down.
SA governance is CRT praxis 101. The sexual aspects may not be as prevalent, but that's an simply an artifact of the demographic make-ups of the two countries (as you note above). The identitarian divide-and-conquer strategy is the same.
The difference in sheer rapaciousness pointed out by @marija is only due to the fact that SA has a lead of few decades here. The rapacious aspects of US wokeness are ramping up quickly. Wait until all of the apparatchiks at Yale Law are practicing judges and attorneys.
I don't think it's identitarianism in some abstract sense that's the common factor. It is quite specifically anti-whiteness. Otherwise one might expect to see at least one country with a white minority that uses them as the identitarian battering ram, or at least one country ruled over by a non-white minority (America comes to mind) in which the 'oppressed majority' status of whites plays a role.
Just different levels of the taxonomy, perhaps. James Lindsay called wokeness "Maoism with American characteristics." Maoism wasn't anti-white, but wokeness is everywhere it exists (US, Canada, Australia, Europe, SA).
There's certainly an evolutionary connection between the two, but I think Lindsay overplays the Maoist similarity in order to stay on relatively safe abstract ground and avoid confronting the ethnic dimension. Ultimately he's basically a 90s liberal who just wants to go back to the way things were.
That said, Marxism was from the very start a project aimed at tearing European civilization up at the roots. Insofar as an ethnos is not meaningfully separable from the people who shaped it, annihilating its culture at that level is a type of genocide, and in that respect Marxism has been anti-white from the word go.
"In any case, Musk ultimately grew frustrated enough with the Sacramento iron-clad and impenetrable hysteria that he finally moved his Tesla factory to California. " This sentence should be FROM California TO Texas.
In politics, as in war, the character and aims of any 'ally' are of less immediate significance than their capacity and their demonstrated, observable, role.
With that in mind, Musk is potentially as close to a good guy as we may ever see in the oligarchy. His personal motives are irrelevant. The South Africans who ended up in America are a very mixed bunch indeed. There is no reason to believe that Musk is anything like a natural ally to North American populists or populist-adjacent types. However, he has enough brains to realize that turning North America into a parody of ELYSIUM is not going to end well. All sane people understand that.
For now Musk is maneuvring between the competing forces pretty well, better than Rupert Murdoch (with whom he has much in common).
The troon stuff so close to Musk is not surprising. Silicon Valley is full of transhumanists, ultra-progressives, crypto-reactionaries, accelerationists, spooks, chancers and grifters. Throw in all the migrants, the Burners (as in Burning Man), the kids spawned in the Lebensborn programme at the Stanford sperm bank and DARPA and it is quite a mix. Transexuals embody the experience of being alive in a world besotten with the idea of being rid of unchosen obligations/identities of all kinds...there is no better place on earth for them than the Valley.
What matters is not Musk's views, but the momentum of the forces involved. The most powerful actors are now constrained by the unanticipated strength of what they have unleashed: NATO has overplayed its hand, the geopolitical fall-out from Ukraine is resetting the global economy, the much-accelerated deindustrialization of the US since NAFTA is unsustainable while the social peace established by the New Deal and the Civil Rights eras is eroding fast and the Boomers are (to their surprise) aging and dying. Social media is the only means of mass communication with any credibility whatsoever, so Musk gets to play at being king. His decisions are unlikely to be personal but very, very, strategic.
At this point we all just need to chill, touch grass, eat non-processed food and stay alert.
Exactly. Immediately after I published this - and a few others wrote on a similar topic - everyone lost their minds about Musk appointing a WEF goblina as CEO. He has betrayed us! He cannot be trusted! Etc. Which I think misses the point, he isn't "on our side", this isn't a matter of "trust". He's making strategic decisions to navigate the shifting political landscape as best he can, in order to guide the culture in the direction he wants it to go ... Some of this will be good, some probably not so good, but in the end we are mice running around the feet of dinosaurs.
This is the first I've heard of the Stanford Lebensborn program....
People expect way too much. They want a savior. It's childish and demanding. A pragmatist on the inside with the clout to do some immediate real world good is not to be despised. The system would destroy Musk in a heartbeat if he were any kind of a threat. Musk's license to operate depends on serving the system: they need someone with credibility with the dirt people. If they did not they would put a Dylan Mulvany or a Don Lemon into the job just to show us all who is boss.
You see the same issue with Murdoch. The white-collar conservative peasantry think of Murdoch as an independent champion of their politics...they could not be further from the truth. He ingratiated himself with the system a long, long, time ago and he is fully controllable. The scandal over News of the World was probably the Obama Admin sending a message. The system destroys eminent people all the time: witness the show trials of Conrad Black or Weinstein (whatever a creep the man was or is he was not a rapist in any traditional sense of the word).
I am being cheeky about Stanford. I assume that something akin to the lebensborn programme is being run discretely in one form or another in Palo Alto. Any ambitious kid with maths ability who looks halfway human could have a lot of fun playing games with that theme. It is too good an idea not to be true. A great theme for cyberpunk.
There's always a tension between the ideological and the pragmatic, but in the end it's the latter that gets things done. The real world always requires compromise, and none of us are pure - certainly not so pure as we expect the prominent to be.
There's also the question of degrees of alignment, overlap of interests. This will never be 100%, even between only two people, let alone several billion. It's rather childish to insist that someone be exactly aligned with one's own values and goals before working with or taking advantage of what they offer. For example, Substack. I'm sure Chris Best is very very far from being in agreement with me or any other dissident right writer on the platform, but he provides a platform where we can speak; this is enough.
And yes, the example of Black is a sobering one. He was ruined and jailed over trivia, at least insofar as the public charges went. Money and power are not the same thing. With Musk, though, I wonder if his game is not a bit deeper and longer than merely enriching himself.
Regarding Stanford - of course an explicit eugenics program would never be admitted. Yet the sperm catalogues used by the clinics are quite explicit as to the professional, educational, and physical achievements of the donors, enabling clients to exercise biological hypergamy however they see fit. They tend to choose the highest quality sperm they can get. Assuming the catalogues are accurate they is - there was a recent scandal where a couple hundred women found out the too-good-to-be-true donor whose babies they all chose to bear was in fact a drug addicted schizo who had simply lied on the intake form.
Black was a threat. He was a serious social and political conservative of a kind that the US simply does not produce and would not wish to see produced elsewhere. Black's was a warning and it would have been widely understood by those in the know.
Musk's game is obscure. He is no engineering genius, nor a great businessman. My guess is that his financial backers are defence connected aerospace interests who feel the need to manage a very strong social media presence to leverage whatever deals they need to cut. Ultimately, his beliefs are his own business. If he makes life easier, rather than harder, for the dirt people more power to him.
Re Stanford schizo...LMAO. Probably no worse than a few of the current generation of medical students. A great prac for studying natural selection in hominids.
Not sure it was Stanford to be clear ... Think it was in California, though. A literal sneaky fucker.
Musk is far more of a salesman than an engineer - but of a particularly impressive sort, a visionary who can inspire buy-in into his vision from an incredible cross-section of society, including those with the ability to fund it. He often strikes me as a bit naive though.
And yes, it was quite clear that Black was being made an example of.
Somewhat tangential to your point, the publication of; The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in 1994 was a watershed in the culture of censorship. A positive review of the book was hard to find and the backlash against anyone daring to endorse The Bell Curve's data and conclusions was withering. Yet it was very obviously true. It became unacceptable to discuss the obvious differences in intelligence between ethnic and racial cohorts. The author's conclusions were happy enough. The category differences are remediable, or at least they have been historically. My comment is just a footnote. The media response to the book was eye opening. A virulent, hysteric and darn near unanimous condemnation of the authors and the book. Just for telling the truth.
It's a truth that strikes at the heart of the postwar liberal project, because it calls into question both its moral foundation and its feasibility. Hence the visceral reaction.
The stuff about race is IMHO a smokescreen. The real agenda is not hurt feelings or b.s. liberal ideology, but stabilising the class system for the benefit of marginal members of the privileged orders and ensuring the recruitment of diversity into their ranks to ensure that elites cannot be criticised. The beneficiaries of this agenda have the most to gain by suppressing talent in the lower classes (as we can see by the state of education) and they are delighted to make common cause with the most unruly legatees of the social reforms of the 20th c to achieve this.
If anything Murray is on much the same page as his critics. He is simply not hysterical in his commitment to pieties about Civil Rights. Murray has very little interest in the welfare or dignity of lower class or poor whites and is content to see unearned privilege retained by dullards in the best suburbs.
Yes, there's no question that elite commitment to racial justice and so on is for the most cynical of reasons. Diversity mandates mean for example that positions can be filled with untalented members of other groups who will not show up the elite's own talentless scions, thereby blocking advancement of the offspring of the lower classes, some of whom might actually be a threat.
I think the sacking of Tucker is the most significant event of 2023 thus far. It makes absolutely no sense financially, and even brain dead TV watching boomers might start to question why Fox would do something this crazy. Maybe they will start to realize that the internet can be used for other things besides "looking at pictures of my grandkids".
I read this essay three times and once to my tired wife who fell asleep 3/4 the way through (she was slightly admonished) but we both agreed that it was a good essay with rays of hope sprinkled through out. I personally needed to read it and absorb the sunshine in an another wise perceived cloudy dismissal future that has cast a dark pall for our country and the world as a whole. I haven’t really seen Elon make the necessary moves to Twitter to make me get back on the site just yet and he apparently just hired a new CEO who is or is not a WEF alumni so there’s that! Again great read love your writing and this coming from a “boomer” keep up the great work!
Since I am not on Twitter, I appreciate your examples of Musk’s noticing the previously unnoticeable. And so thankful that Musk has thrown his hat into the ring on these issues!
Great stuff!
The real superweapon is located in your intro paragraphs. There is discontent that appears both Left and Right but is actually neither. The old categories are breaking down.
For example, the R3VOLution was not all that right wing. It was a ragtag coalition from all over the place: gold bugs, militant southerners, hippie peaceniks, conspiracy theorists, pot heads, hardcore libertarians, and more. I ran a Ron Paul meetup and was surprised at how many hippie lefties showed up, including some serious green types.
I've walked the neighborhoods and I've distributed a libertarian propaganda newspaper in archetypical Portlandia types of coffee shops. "Anti capitalist" is not identical to socialist. Many of the green lefties want locally owned businesses. They want small scale capitalism vs. Wall St. calling the shots. "Buy local" is a battle cry that's Trumpier than Trump. There are Small is Beautiful green "lefties" who have created local currencies and experimented with alternative voting systems.
The overlap between the Green Left and the Froggy Right is much greater than most people realize.
Meanwhile the Wall St. Right has made a devil's alliance with the Marxissist Left...
Bingo. My experience hanging out at Occupy was very similar - it was not purely left wing, at least initially. Swirling underneath the forced agitation of the culture war is a new coalition trying desperately to form itself.
COVID accelerated this.
Peasants should not have to care about politics, it's just abuse from the rulers. Hyper-politization. Make the powerless plebs tear each others throats out...
Yes the ragtag army of the dissident right, redneck survivalists, Old Earth Firsters! who kept their values and didn't become great reset zombies, "MAGA communists," gun owners, hippies who are sick of all the shit, bikers, green off the griders, etc, are the ONLY hope against Gnostic globalist technocratic fascism.
Gnostics are like Jedi, there are many bad ones and a few good ones. Submitting to the void dragon is easy, it's carved into your very DNA.
There are no good ones the world is not evil as given that world view leads directly to trans cult and transhumanism.
As above so below, this world of malicious parasites is a reflection of the celestial beaurocracy that rules over it...
If you think there is "celestial bureaucracy," you might want to rethink things. :-)
A lot of hippies I know talk about "woke leftists" in much the same tone as boomer hippies would have talked about "squares".
Indeed, and meanwhile the hippies themselves - with their preference for local organic food, skepticism of big pharma, disdain for the educational system, etc. - are increasingly lumped in with the "extreme right". Both emphasize natural living and natural instincts.
Exactly, glad to see more and more people getting this. I was a hippish punk in my youth as I am Gen X not a boomer and now in many ways I am third position. But I didn’t change, the cultural left changed and was taken over by woke idpol.
People say that - "I didn't change, they did" - but I'm not so sure it's entirely true in most cases. It certainly isn't in mine. On many subjects, yes, I've remained fairly consistent; on others I have reconsidered the positions of my youth in light of additional experience, further reading, and so on. Part of that experience being precisely the mass psychosis of woke.
I am going to push back a little, I liked Uncle Ted when I was an Earth First! leftist and still like him as a dissident. The difference is, I think I understand his message against what he called p.c. in the 90s which was just proto-woke, much better than when I first read him. My understanding has deepened, and I regret a few views I held say 20 years ago, but I truly sincerely believe my core values have changed very little. I still hate corporations and endless war, and am militantly pro free speech. Those used to be cultural left values and they are no more.
I was always against gun control even when I was a leftist, so I am pretty stubborn about holding onto the values I cherish.
The underlying thing is that as we evolve our ideas become more nuanced. We incorporate evidence that we once ignored, acknowledge limitations that once confined us.
The important thing is never our views per se, but our disposition. Those who feel comfortable asking questions, thinking for themselves, have the potential to retain old opinions while acknowledging the value of new or competing ones. I am now in vigorous agreement with many people I once dismissed without necessarily changing my own loyalties or beliefs. This strikes some as paradoxical, but not me.
It is probably the same with you. It is a q. of character or personality, not of ideas. Dogmatists are born, not made. Ditto thinking people. You notice this as you age: analytic capacity (a very mixed blessing) is heritable.
There was NEVER any reason to see hippies as naturally Left or progressive. I once read a book by a famous Polish novelist (Leo Tyrmand) who visited Berkely in the 60s. He took one look at them and wrote that they brought the SS to mind. Admittedly he was pushing things to extremes, but he had a point.
Indeed it would not have occurred to me to connect the Lebensborn to the flower children ... Although this brings to mind a scene from The Man in the High Castle, a party of aristocratic Lebensborn tripping balls on acid.
The real hippies were very, very, privileged and had the money to experiment. A lot of the counter-culture of the 60s was developed by people with interests that had associations people find uncomfortable acknowledging. Much of the stuff we call 'New Age' started to circulate pre WW1 and it exerted a strong influence on everyone across the political spectrum.
The losers and misfits who idolise the 1000 year reich just have no idea how politics and history really work. Fanboys never do. The Nazis fucked over their initial ultra conservative backers in German high society and I expect that had they had their chance over time the more ambitious elements would have spawned any number of innovations that would horrify the true believers then and now. Despite the kitsch to which the fuhrer was addicted, many of the Nazis loved modernism, in particular modern architecture.
By far the most humane, forward thinking and realistic member of the German elite in the 80s, the banker Alfred Herrhausen (who was tragically murdered, conveniently for some, after coming up with a plan to spare post Soviet Russia the horrors of shock economics), was educated in an elite Nazi school as a teenager. If you are not surprised by people you are just not paying attention.
The labels—‘hippie’, ‘libertarian’, ‘leftist’, ‘tea party’—don’t apply anymore. We are entering a new world where it will be Deep State vs Non Deep State
💬 the Green Left and the Froggy Right
Colour unites! 🤸
It's not easy being green.
It gets somefold harder if 'green' is prefaced with 'ever' 😇
Great article!
It reminds me of what the German philosopher Arthur SCHOPENHAUER once said:
“All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
second, it is violently opposed;
and third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
Late-coming by some century after, the English mathematician & philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (of 'footnotes to Plato' renown) is not to be had 😉
🗨 Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Great quote.
And probably said better and more intelligently than what gets said after.
Enters the scene ANW's more-or-less coeval more-or-less compatriot 😊
🗨 [T]he great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. ~~C.S. Lewis
It's the mark of subject mastery that one can clearly explain an idea to anyone. Which indeed says a great deal about modern academics.
There is no greater rebuke than the clarity or elegance of the way things were expressed in the past. Which is why such things are disparaged by those with an interest in the inflated reputations of today.
One's attitude towards the giants of the past is revealing ... there are those who despair of ever living up to it, and are therefore strive to not be so embarrassing to that legacy ... thus Napoleon was inspired by Caesar Caesar by Alexander, Alexander by Achilles, and Achilles by an illiterate steppe chieftain. Then there are those who try to destroy the memory of the past, so that their own shortcomings are not as noticeable. One path leads up ascent, the other to degeneration.
We've been at stage 2 for a while overall, stage 3 for a while in a large plurality.
I believe that when the dust settles, the record will show that attempting to conquer the world with hypnosis is an incredibly fragile strategy. It works very well until it doesn't, and then it all falls apart.
I can not watch/listen to NPR, CNN, .... they are black holes for truth.
lots of blogs I used to read have dissapeared in the great rendering. Substack has been a light in he darkness.
On the occasional instance in which they darken my sensorium, it is a remarkable experience, like peering into a sanitarium....
Don't go into the comments section. It may take days to recover, not just from the comments but from the hangover you will experience after inevitably downing half a bottle of whiskey. Then again, most corporate sites eliminated their comments section years ago so you should be safe.
I wouldn't be surprised if half the comments are written by ChatGPT to give the illusion of popularity and robust discussion.
Agreed! The comments section can make one be tempted to despair.
The VIP feisty cat had this ↓↓ to say wrt MSNBBCNNBCBS, a wee while back 🙂
🗨 the thumb on the scale got too heavy and the leaks around the edges too vast.[...] the fleecing grew too brash and illusions have been shorn instead.
Every lie incurs a debt to truth, and the chickens are finally coming home to roost
The bill always comes at the end.
Our skies are black with 'ems the homesick birds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (h/t JMG aka John Michael Greer)
MSNBBCNNBCBS
👍🤣🤣🤣🤣
I hope and pray we've reached a tipping point. There are many subtle signs that the spell has been broken for a critical mass of people, so we have reason to be hopeful. Of course, psychopathic rulers are dangerous when they get desperate, as they feel their control slipping away. Right now we, as a civilization, really are on the razor's edge; the situation is much more of a powder keg than most people realize. I believe the parasitic elites know the current order is unsustainable, so more of them, like Musk, will probably defect. As for the elites who do not defect, will they go down with the ship? And if so, how much damage will they cause on their way down? The next few years are almost certainly going to have some of those "weeks where decades happen."
Great essay. Since so much of the future is uncertain, might as well stay hopeful! The path through these times may be perilous, but good things and great possibilities are on the other side!
It doesn't need to be everyone of course.
I'm not so sure Musk is parasitic. He actually makes stuff. I don't really begrudge him his billions for that reason.
True, which is no doubt a large part of why he's defecting. When I said "parasitic elites," I should have limited it to the ones that rely on financial fuckery and political rackets for making money, rather than creating anything of any real value.
Yes, exactly. People who want to do stuff are defecting from a system that is only built to take stuff.
He's an ethnic neocon frontman
One of the worlds richest? Don't make me laugh... his thirteen family chums in the city of london have that honor. Worth 1000's of trillions
*publicly richest
In any case, $240B is not nothing.
Sauce on the tribal and familial affiliation?
Ah wait his name is jewish but he might not be one XD
Musk isn't a Jewish name. His mother's name is German, via Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.
Do you even early life bro?
Elon is jewish, not musk
Made my day! I pray you are right, John Carter!
Interesting
Here comes my sweet reward for training me hard to not comment before reading what's been already said 😂
Not for nothing, South Africa is easily the wokest country in the world now. With all the devastating consequences that entails.
No, I would disagree with that. The outcomes of SA's racial policies + corruption might be the same as that of wokeness, as they both abandon meritocracy, but I don't feel like they are culturally the same thing. The intent here is simply pillage and plunder. There's much less subtlety and guilt tripping and much more brutality. The whites here are angry at the situation, not pussied out.
The only real difference is that due to the relative sizes of the competing racial groups, American wokeness requires its coalition to include a substantial fraction of whites. That forces a degree of indirectness because you can't out and say "we just want to take your stuff and kill you." But the ideological core is still more or less the same.
I think you nailed it. Here they don't have to brainwash you to let them have your stuff, they simply take. The newly passed "employment equity" law gives minister the right to set quotas (so many black employed, so many black managers, so many black ownership - of private companies!). And there's lots of talk about making these quotas mimic population stats. So, in our team of 8, we will have to fire 2 out of 3 whites. I'm sitting with a vacant position for senior quant, which I haven't been able to fill for over a year, because there's just no senior black quants that I wouldn't have to pay twice my salary. In the meantime, job gets done by lilly white German consultants 🤷♀️. Man, it's just crazy. The only think I can do is pick the most talented youngsters and train them up, but not everyone can do that.
BEE is a truly poisonous doctrine.
"The only think I can do is pick the most talented youngsters and train them up, but not everyone can do that."
Of course, to do this for white kids, one must first hire them (and under BEE therefore hire 19 additional blacks or whatever the number is). And then what is their motivation to be trained, when the state has already decided that they will not have careers?
Oh no, I can't employ white kids. Nor foreign black, even with work permits. HR doesn't forward those CVs at all.
Are there loopholes you can use? Eg taking them on as independent contractors. I'm curious how whites cope in SA - given they haven't all starved to death due to unemployment (although I understand the economic conditions are grim for many), there must be workarounds....
50+1 shades of woke 😏
wokeness = pillage whitey
As such the ANC are well suited for that role
At the government level, yes, although many South Africans I've met have been very based. Then there are movements like Afriforum who are essentially carving out a network state for themselves.
Afriforum is attempting to do amazing thing indeed - build self sufficient communities that can take over provision of services and slowly pull the power and gravy train out of ANC's hands. I love the new paradigm emerging - let's stop complaining at the environment, or escaping it, and rather create a new one
Precisely.
There are no shortages of based Americans either. At the US government level, it's BEE, uh, sorry, DEI all the way down.
SA governance is CRT praxis 101. The sexual aspects may not be as prevalent, but that's an simply an artifact of the demographic make-ups of the two countries (as you note above). The identitarian divide-and-conquer strategy is the same.
The difference in sheer rapaciousness pointed out by @marija is only due to the fact that SA has a lead of few decades here. The rapacious aspects of US wokeness are ramping up quickly. Wait until all of the apparatchiks at Yale Law are practicing judges and attorneys.
I don't think it's identitarianism in some abstract sense that's the common factor. It is quite specifically anti-whiteness. Otherwise one might expect to see at least one country with a white minority that uses them as the identitarian battering ram, or at least one country ruled over by a non-white minority (America comes to mind) in which the 'oppressed majority' status of whites plays a role.
Just different levels of the taxonomy, perhaps. James Lindsay called wokeness "Maoism with American characteristics." Maoism wasn't anti-white, but wokeness is everywhere it exists (US, Canada, Australia, Europe, SA).
There's certainly an evolutionary connection between the two, but I think Lindsay overplays the Maoist similarity in order to stay on relatively safe abstract ground and avoid confronting the ethnic dimension. Ultimately he's basically a 90s liberal who just wants to go back to the way things were.
That said, Marxism was from the very start a project aimed at tearing European civilization up at the roots. Insofar as an ethnos is not meaningfully separable from the people who shaped it, annihilating its culture at that level is a type of genocide, and in that respect Marxism has been anti-white from the word go.
Africa is not 'woke', it's just Africa. 'Woke' is the how the white West expresses its desire to become like Africa.
Yes.
"In any case, Musk ultimately grew frustrated enough with the Sacramento iron-clad and impenetrable hysteria that he finally moved his Tesla factory to California. " This sentence should be FROM California TO Texas.
Yes.
An insightful piece.
In politics, as in war, the character and aims of any 'ally' are of less immediate significance than their capacity and their demonstrated, observable, role.
With that in mind, Musk is potentially as close to a good guy as we may ever see in the oligarchy. His personal motives are irrelevant. The South Africans who ended up in America are a very mixed bunch indeed. There is no reason to believe that Musk is anything like a natural ally to North American populists or populist-adjacent types. However, he has enough brains to realize that turning North America into a parody of ELYSIUM is not going to end well. All sane people understand that.
For now Musk is maneuvring between the competing forces pretty well, better than Rupert Murdoch (with whom he has much in common).
The troon stuff so close to Musk is not surprising. Silicon Valley is full of transhumanists, ultra-progressives, crypto-reactionaries, accelerationists, spooks, chancers and grifters. Throw in all the migrants, the Burners (as in Burning Man), the kids spawned in the Lebensborn programme at the Stanford sperm bank and DARPA and it is quite a mix. Transexuals embody the experience of being alive in a world besotten with the idea of being rid of unchosen obligations/identities of all kinds...there is no better place on earth for them than the Valley.
What matters is not Musk's views, but the momentum of the forces involved. The most powerful actors are now constrained by the unanticipated strength of what they have unleashed: NATO has overplayed its hand, the geopolitical fall-out from Ukraine is resetting the global economy, the much-accelerated deindustrialization of the US since NAFTA is unsustainable while the social peace established by the New Deal and the Civil Rights eras is eroding fast and the Boomers are (to their surprise) aging and dying. Social media is the only means of mass communication with any credibility whatsoever, so Musk gets to play at being king. His decisions are unlikely to be personal but very, very, strategic.
At this point we all just need to chill, touch grass, eat non-processed food and stay alert.
Exactly. Immediately after I published this - and a few others wrote on a similar topic - everyone lost their minds about Musk appointing a WEF goblina as CEO. He has betrayed us! He cannot be trusted! Etc. Which I think misses the point, he isn't "on our side", this isn't a matter of "trust". He's making strategic decisions to navigate the shifting political landscape as best he can, in order to guide the culture in the direction he wants it to go ... Some of this will be good, some probably not so good, but in the end we are mice running around the feet of dinosaurs.
This is the first I've heard of the Stanford Lebensborn program....
People expect way too much. They want a savior. It's childish and demanding. A pragmatist on the inside with the clout to do some immediate real world good is not to be despised. The system would destroy Musk in a heartbeat if he were any kind of a threat. Musk's license to operate depends on serving the system: they need someone with credibility with the dirt people. If they did not they would put a Dylan Mulvany or a Don Lemon into the job just to show us all who is boss.
You see the same issue with Murdoch. The white-collar conservative peasantry think of Murdoch as an independent champion of their politics...they could not be further from the truth. He ingratiated himself with the system a long, long, time ago and he is fully controllable. The scandal over News of the World was probably the Obama Admin sending a message. The system destroys eminent people all the time: witness the show trials of Conrad Black or Weinstein (whatever a creep the man was or is he was not a rapist in any traditional sense of the word).
I am being cheeky about Stanford. I assume that something akin to the lebensborn programme is being run discretely in one form or another in Palo Alto. Any ambitious kid with maths ability who looks halfway human could have a lot of fun playing games with that theme. It is too good an idea not to be true. A great theme for cyberpunk.
There's always a tension between the ideological and the pragmatic, but in the end it's the latter that gets things done. The real world always requires compromise, and none of us are pure - certainly not so pure as we expect the prominent to be.
There's also the question of degrees of alignment, overlap of interests. This will never be 100%, even between only two people, let alone several billion. It's rather childish to insist that someone be exactly aligned with one's own values and goals before working with or taking advantage of what they offer. For example, Substack. I'm sure Chris Best is very very far from being in agreement with me or any other dissident right writer on the platform, but he provides a platform where we can speak; this is enough.
And yes, the example of Black is a sobering one. He was ruined and jailed over trivia, at least insofar as the public charges went. Money and power are not the same thing. With Musk, though, I wonder if his game is not a bit deeper and longer than merely enriching himself.
Regarding Stanford - of course an explicit eugenics program would never be admitted. Yet the sperm catalogues used by the clinics are quite explicit as to the professional, educational, and physical achievements of the donors, enabling clients to exercise biological hypergamy however they see fit. They tend to choose the highest quality sperm they can get. Assuming the catalogues are accurate they is - there was a recent scandal where a couple hundred women found out the too-good-to-be-true donor whose babies they all chose to bear was in fact a drug addicted schizo who had simply lied on the intake form.
Black was a threat. He was a serious social and political conservative of a kind that the US simply does not produce and would not wish to see produced elsewhere. Black's was a warning and it would have been widely understood by those in the know.
Musk's game is obscure. He is no engineering genius, nor a great businessman. My guess is that his financial backers are defence connected aerospace interests who feel the need to manage a very strong social media presence to leverage whatever deals they need to cut. Ultimately, his beliefs are his own business. If he makes life easier, rather than harder, for the dirt people more power to him.
Re Stanford schizo...LMAO. Probably no worse than a few of the current generation of medical students. A great prac for studying natural selection in hominids.
Not sure it was Stanford to be clear ... Think it was in California, though. A literal sneaky fucker.
Musk is far more of a salesman than an engineer - but of a particularly impressive sort, a visionary who can inspire buy-in into his vision from an incredible cross-section of society, including those with the ability to fund it. He often strikes me as a bit naive though.
And yes, it was quite clear that Black was being made an example of.
Great analysis. Thanks.
Somewhat tangential to your point, the publication of; The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in 1994 was a watershed in the culture of censorship. A positive review of the book was hard to find and the backlash against anyone daring to endorse The Bell Curve's data and conclusions was withering. Yet it was very obviously true. It became unacceptable to discuss the obvious differences in intelligence between ethnic and racial cohorts. The author's conclusions were happy enough. The category differences are remediable, or at least they have been historically. My comment is just a footnote. The media response to the book was eye opening. A virulent, hysteric and darn near unanimous condemnation of the authors and the book. Just for telling the truth.
It's a truth that strikes at the heart of the postwar liberal project, because it calls into question both its moral foundation and its feasibility. Hence the visceral reaction.
The stuff about race is IMHO a smokescreen. The real agenda is not hurt feelings or b.s. liberal ideology, but stabilising the class system for the benefit of marginal members of the privileged orders and ensuring the recruitment of diversity into their ranks to ensure that elites cannot be criticised. The beneficiaries of this agenda have the most to gain by suppressing talent in the lower classes (as we can see by the state of education) and they are delighted to make common cause with the most unruly legatees of the social reforms of the 20th c to achieve this.
If anything Murray is on much the same page as his critics. He is simply not hysterical in his commitment to pieties about Civil Rights. Murray has very little interest in the welfare or dignity of lower class or poor whites and is content to see unearned privilege retained by dullards in the best suburbs.
Yes, there's no question that elite commitment to racial justice and so on is for the most cynical of reasons. Diversity mandates mean for example that positions can be filled with untalented members of other groups who will not show up the elite's own talentless scions, thereby blocking advancement of the offspring of the lower classes, some of whom might actually be a threat.
I think the sacking of Tucker is the most significant event of 2023 thus far. It makes absolutely no sense financially, and even brain dead TV watching boomers might start to question why Fox would do something this crazy. Maybe they will start to realize that the internet can be used for other things besides "looking at pictures of my grandkids".
Extremely well crafted. Okay, so that was three words. Still somewhat economical.
(please delete this comment. sent apparent typos via demios station)
💬 typos via demios
There's smth to be said for karma's bitchiness 😂
They do this to me all the time 😑
I read this essay three times and once to my tired wife who fell asleep 3/4 the way through (she was slightly admonished) but we both agreed that it was a good essay with rays of hope sprinkled through out. I personally needed to read it and absorb the sunshine in an another wise perceived cloudy dismissal future that has cast a dark pall for our country and the world as a whole. I haven’t really seen Elon make the necessary moves to Twitter to make me get back on the site just yet and he apparently just hired a new CEO who is or is not a WEF alumni so there’s that! Again great read love your writing and this coming from a “boomer” keep up the great work!
Elon is far from perfect, and the same is true of Musk Twitter. But we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Since I am not on Twitter, I appreciate your examples of Musk’s noticing the previously unnoticeable. And so thankful that Musk has thrown his hat into the ring on these issues!