The Write Wing This Week - 3 June 2023
Digesting the pride of the degenerating minions in the flaming wisdom of noble hope
Welcome, dear readers, to this week’s round-up of think-pieces, essays, journalism, wild speculation, rambling schizophrenic esotericism, paranoid-style conspiracy analysis, sour grapes, and megalomaniacal dystopianism from that hive of malignant malinformation that is write wing Substack. The harvest is in, and what a bountiful harvest it is.
This week, we start with several essays on Philosophy in the Service of Life, shudder in nauseous anticipation as Pride Cometh, cavort in the fields with the Political Animals, spread doubt and uncertainty with Unsettled Science, catch up on events in Russia Russia Russia!, contend with Girl Trouble, penetrate the dark inner sanctums of the eldritch rites of Pop Cultism, observe the continued decay into irrelevance implied in the timeless phrase That’s Academic, and as always cleanse our palettes with some short fiction in Pulped.
Fill your french press, get comfy, and let’s get jump in, shall we?
Philosophy in the Service of Life
In last week’s roundup I shamefully overlooked Tólma’s gem Animals and Gods, in which he explores the Greek concept of paideia - the education of the ideal citizen. Per Aristotle, the man who rejects society is an idiōtēs. Without being formed according to the ideals of civilization, the barbarian becomes either an animal or a god … and while civilization needs some number of these, too many will destroy it. But what counts as ideal? It isn’t necessarily the same for everyone, for all people in all contexts through all of time. What is essential for one may be poison for another. Much else to ponder here - the role played by imitation as opposed to the mere transmission of knowledge in the renewal of form, the dangers of over-emphasizing choice and amusement at the expense of necessity and challenge. As always, Tólma is difficult to summarize - you must simply read the whole thing.
Next up Tólma has a long piece on health, vitality, Descartes, and dualism: Medicine as practical philosophy. Descartes is often seen as the apostle of body-denying idealism, but as Tólma shows this couldn't be further from the truth. His dualism goes both ways: mind influences body, yes, but body also influences mind. The interesting question to Tólma is not so much if this is the case, but how it manifests in any given circumstance, what that mind-body connection looks like and how it changes depending on the state of the body and its environment.
Tólma follows with more thoughts on Descartes with Digesting problems. People think philosophy is about asking questions, but which questions? These days it's often the dumbest questions - "what can Spinoza tell us about climate change? for example. There's also a certain unhealthy fixation upon the new, merely because it is new - a sort of intellectual indigestion, brought on in all likelihood by poor physical metabolism. To know which questions are even worth asking, let alone to find the energy to explore them, one must first be healthy - strong, fed, rested, tuned, moisturized, in your lane, asking.
Tólma’s entries this week win him a solid Iridium Torq Award. Set aside the time to read them, they will reward your mind with the best sorts of questions.
Longtime readers of Postcards From Barsoom will know how crucial I consider hope to be. At Becoming Noble Johann Kurtz compares Spengler to Denethor, Tolkien's loyal but despairing steward of Gondor, as exemplars for good and ill of Northern Courage. Both saw far; both had great strength of character, sufficient to hold to their principles in the face of the horror their far vision revealed; but both were blinded by pessimism. Optimism is cowardice, Spengler famously intoned. "Northern Courage" is from Tolkien - the great man's apprehension of an indefatigable and terrible will to fight, and fight well, to the bitterest of ends, in the depths of Fimbulvinter as the darkness of Ragnarök consumed the heavens. However admirable, and Tolkien held it in the highest admiration, Northern Courage is incomplete - it requires estel, a naive hope from the heart and one's very essence, for redemption. Estel makes all the difference between Denethor's despairing lassitude, and the fierce madness of Theoden crying Ride now! Ride for ruin, and the world ending! Death! Death! Death! Both acted suicidally - but only one, admirably. This is a beautiful essay, fully deserving of this week’s Iron Ring Award, and you should absolutely read the whole thing.
Using Socrates as his literary mouthpiece, Plato advocated that his commie Republic feed the plebs a plant-based diet in order to drain them of sprit and render them easier to control, a lesson our rulers have taken enthusiastically to heart. He never considered the possibilities of feeding the lower orders a diet of Dude Weed, though … which, as Raw Egg Nationalist explains in One Nation Under Pot, is something our ruling class is very enthusiastic about. In the era of processed foods, THC and CBD derivatives are liable to start showing up everywhere. Can fatmericans get even fatter and dumber? Studies suggest that yes, yes they can. And that moreover, there are dire political consequences for this. Although I can’t help but think that the bovinification of the average Westerner effectively takes them off the board, making them easy for the regime to dominate ... but much less useful to the regime. And for those of us who don’t fall for dude weed?
In The Screwtape Stratagem Mark Bisone of The Cat Was Never Found looks at C.S. Lewis' conception of petty evil. I've often felt that the greatest sin of modernity is that the sins are all so uninspiringly small. Where are our Medicis? Our Caligulas? As Lewis pointed out, this is utilitarian evil: substituting a great quantity of tiny and tasteless sinlets for the great quality of a small number of spectacular perversions and outrageous crimes. Mark thinks that the Internet has supercharged this phenomenon, leading to a horde of devitalized NPCs jerking off to mask porn on Reddit while dabbing their THC vapes. But as this acceleration into flavourless sin porridge picks up, the human quality of the Enemy's minions nosedives. The quality of the opposition, however….
At LucTalks L.P. Koch gives us 5 Ways to Stay Sane in a World Gone Bonkers. Lord knows we need them. Luc advises to take off your shoes so you can touch grass while Zazenning your way into motorcycle maintenance to fix your friend's bike. That and read good books … particularly old ones. Jokes aside, this is excellent advice. We all need more tangible, embodied, real, human experience in our lives. We weren't born to stare at screens (I write, as I swipe-type this into Google Docs on my phone).
ℭ𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔩𝔢𝔪𝔞𝔤𝔫𝔢 of Vagabond does not spark joy as he offers up some surgery for The Cancer of Consumerism. The things you own end up owning you, and the point of minimalism is not to be surrounded only with trinkets that make you happy - it's to free yourself, so that you can focus on the mental, physical, and spiritual development that actually matters. Men will literally live like this instead of going to therapy.
Also up at Vagabond, 𝔥𝔶𝔭𝔢𝔯1𝔬𝔫 advises on Navigating the dark age of social media addiction in Keep Scrolling, You're Unwell. Do you want to be farmed like a barn animal, milked for your attention? As your consciousness fills with virality-chasing dopamine junkies stripped of humanity and dignity by their enslavement to the algorithm? There is a better way.
Sam Mace of Theory Matters thinks that The accumulation of knowledge also matters … but maybe not so much as wisdom. Should we learn less and reflect more? he asks. It's a good question. When was the last time you deepened your relationship with an old and beloved book by re-reading it? Instead of chasing after the next Current Thing? In this age of super-abundant information, it's reflection that's scarce.
The Resavager’s Barbaric Disciple lays out some Religious Considerations for a Modern Day Paganism. No, not the LARPaganism of trying to recreate iron age deities - as he notes, you will never believe in Apollo the way Hesiod believed in Apollo. It is rather the spiritual essence of paganism that must be renewed - the warrior spirit of Dyeus Phater, heroic aristeia, the honoring of ancestors, and above all the centrality of fire. Also this week, the Disciple shares his thoughts on The Joyful Wisdom by Friedrich Nietzsche. Which is a much better translation of the title than The Gay Science.
Ælþemplær has changed his handle and the name of his blog from Luthknight which (believe it or not) had nothing to do with Lutheranism (which ÆLÞEMPLÆR isn't, because he doesn't like schismatics, and therefore prefers Catholicism … don't tell the patriarch in Constantinople though). If you want to know what the new name means, you'll have to read what he has to say On names and enjoy the etymology lesson therein.
Pride Cometh
It’s that time of year again: the high point of the Antichrist’s liturgical calendar, in which we set aside an entire month of festivities to celebrate The Deadliest Sin. Kenaz Filan has some thoughts on Pride and where it got us over at Notes from the end times. No, really. Theologians have been in agreement about this for centuries: pride is the absolute apex of the sin pyramid. Which explains rather a lot when you think about it. Pride demands recognition for being exceptional, for standing out – merely being accepted as normal (which is where this all started out) isn’t enough. Hence the slippery spiral into the sadomasochistic sex dungeon that led from Stonewall to Drag Queen Story Hour. We have such sights to show you.
If pride is a deadly sin, why did Aristotle (who was so influential on the church) speak so highly of it? Or did he? As usual, shifty translations from the original Greek are at fault, and Kenaz sets the record straight on that as he advises us to stop looking for gods in the mirror and get Outside the Temple of Self. Aristotle considered different kinds of ‘pride’. There’s megalopsychos, or magnanimous greatness of soul. Then there’s micropsychos – the small-souled bugman. Big souls are clearly preferable, but are vulnerable to hubris. One of the failure modes is, of course, narcissism ... and it’s no accident, Kenaz observes, that Marcuse lionized Narcissus, with the Me Generation following a few decades later.
The antidote to Pride, Kenaz explains, is Humility, but what exactly does Christianity mean when it says blessed are the meek? It certainly isn’t to indulge in degrading humiliation rituals.
This headline from William M Briggs at Science Is Not The Answer is worth the price of admission (which is nothing, which should not keep you from supporting him): Welcome To Pride In The Ability To Masturbate Into The Rectum Of Another Month. It's not absurd enough for us that we insist on public celebration of pride in the accomplishment of sticking the peepee in the poopoo, surely up there with the conquest of the New World in the annals of human achievement (which you must not be proud of). We also hold that every one of the infinite paraphilias creates a new species of human - an entirely distinct identity, as real as the prolapse of your anus … race, however, is definitely not real.
Morgthorak the Undead covers the permanent civil war that simmers beneath the surface of the disparate rainbow coalition as he has a good laugh at the expense of ageing fruit Andrew Sullivan and the Alphabet Civil War. Sullivan's concern is that the sheer unsettling depraved monstrosity of T will set L, G, and B back to the days before Stonewall. Morgthorak agrees with the liberal for all the wrong reasons. Next up, Morgthorak drags a horror out of the depths of The Tomb of Morgthorak: Miss Lindsey's Dark Secret. No, not James Lindsay's missing spine. "Lindsey Graham is mouthing off about Russia again, but what is he hiding?" The ambiguously Prideful senator is claiming that the Ukies did a deepfake with the video in which he's crowing about dead Russians being the best value for money the US has ever spent (why wouldn't he blame the Russians for that?) Morgthorak points out that Graham has never been seen in the company of a woman. Or a man. What gives?
Political Animals
At The Neo-Ciceronian Times Theophilus Chilton writes about Monergocapitalism and the Diminution of the Human Spirit. The absolutism of Calvinist theology in regards to divine will is mirrored in the absolutism of modern economics in regards to divine efficiency. The invisible hand of the free market binds the visible hand of humans reduced to its factors, who are no longer in any way free. Perhaps there's more to life than mere technique? Theophilus thinks so, and suggests Chesterton's distributism as a superior alternative to both capitalism and socialism.
At Tell Me How This Ends Chris Bray escapes the Baudrillardian nightmare of neo-pronouns and Literally Hitler hysteria by driving around in his freedom machine in Go to America. He takes us along with his family on the road trip, on the way visiting the grave of the Amerindian messiah who inspired the Ghost Dance. Chris also has some advice: Save Your Country With Your Wallet. I'm not the only one thinking about the transformative political potential of boycotts. Being a historian, Chris illustrates his point with an example from America's first period of pre-revolutionary ferment, when the colonies went from "nah, thanks, we're good … nothing in common" to "we're all Americans, fuck the crown" in a mere twenty years. While boycotts of imperial commerce didn't drive this, they did help to crystallize resistance to the king.
In the wake of the National Conservatism or "Nat-C" (heh) conference in the United Kingdom, George Francis at Anglo Reaction presents an interesting argument about why right-wing policy proposals are so consistently nasty in Policy Ascertainment Bias. It's a low-hanging fruit problem: politicians will prefer to support policies that are both good and nice, meaning that all of the good and nice policies are already implemented, and the only ones left over are either bad and nice, bad and nasty, or good and nasty. Since liberals are strongly motivated by being (perceived as) nice, all of the proposals they advocate will be bad. Rightists, who could give a toss about being nice, will therefore mainly advocate for the nasty, since all of the remaining good options on the table are nasty. Yet another reason why democracy is terrible.
Over at Gray Mirror Curtis Yarvin presents a playful dialogue between a cynic and a sinpleton in A new theory of constitutional cynicism. The cynic argues that the Constitution is already effectively dead, having been interpreted into oblivion by constitutional law, and that originalist doctrines are incoherent because they ultimately require us to know what the founders would have thought, if they had witnessed all of the historical events since their deaths, and knew everything we knew (while presumably not forgetting all that we've forgotten, and retaining their essential personalities and dispositions). His foil is of course a conservative, which is to say a classical liberal. Yarvin even brings Fustel de Coulanges into it, arguing that originalism presupposes ancestor worship. Personally, that doesn't bother me. Light the hearth fire and propitiate the household gods … who have surely become evil spirits by now given how badly we've neglected them.
Not everyone is so down on the Constitution. Grant Smith has a Memorial Day book review up at The Radical American Mind of Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines by Robert A. Green Jr. The author was at the tip of the spear in resisting the military vaccine mandate in the name of the Constitution he gave a sacred oath to defend, something Major Smith also knows a thing or two about.
Lorenzo Warby has the twentieth chapter of his Worshipping the Future series up at Helen Dale 's Not On Your Team, But Always Fair: The Social-Imperial State. His argument is that modern Western states have given up the (explicit) colonization of foreign lands for the (implicit) colonization of the homeland. The managers colonize upwards using supranational institutions, while the bureaucracies colonize inwards using the welfare state, both doing an end run around democratic accountability while using Our Democracy as a legitimizing fig leaf. Add in the use of luxury beliefs as social filters by vampire elites whose power is increased as the problems they're nominally responsible for solving get worse, and you have a recipe for the mass colonization of human misery within the open air torture laboratory of the post-industrial market state.
You vill own nossing and you vill be miserable. How did we find ourselves in this situation - landless, lonely, sick from eating processed sludge? To a large degree the answer is enclosure: the legalized appropriation of communal goods. In England this was used to herd peasants into factories. In our age it's being used to turn us into a digital precariat. Over at Position & Decision Sanfedisti reviews Blood in the Fields, a book about the well-documented history of El Salvador's enclosures, in which the subsistence farmers who had lived off the land for thousands of years were pushed off of it by the simple expedient of defining their informal, customary, and communal ownership of the land as not-ownerahip, all in the name of increasing prosperity … not the prosperity of the peasants, of course, but rather that of the coffee plantation owners, who ended up in possession of all the land, while the peasants were converted into tenant farmers or (following industrialization) the urban poor. The enclosures produced poverty for the many and wealth for the few: more of a transfer of prosperity than a generator of it. Of course, the state benefited as well: it's much easier to tax cash crops than it is to tax maize. But was El Salvador made wealthier in the aggregate by the policies? I rather doubt it. The landed peasantry were almost certainly richer by far in all the human factors that really matter - community, health, food, leisure, and so on - than their descendents. Beware classical liberals when they start speaking of GDP. I found this piece deeply affecting, fascinatingly educational, and highly relevant, which is why I am awarding it the week’s second Iron Ring Award.
Harrison Koehli has an important announcement to make regarding Political Ponerology: Marxcissism Is Real. A couple of recent studies examined the psychology of Left-Wing Authoritarians - think Antifa types. It turns out that LWAs are completely lacking in prosocial traits, with no correlation between e.g. altruism and their self-professed concern with social "justice". To the contrary, their politics are strongly correlated with dark triad traits, in particular rampant subclinical narcissism. The radical politics are just a mask for mental illness.
Also up at Political Ponerology is the most recent chapter of Harrison’s ongoing translation of Lobaczewski’s Logocracy - Chapter 18: The Executive. Lobaczewski thinks the executive should be non-partisan, and composed of people with uncorrupted scientific training in the humanities, political sciences, economics, and so on. Nice work if you can find them.
Finally, a triple-H as Harrison replies to Henderson and Hanania on the question of Woke Social Status: Fake But Deadly. Rob Henderson pointed out that the woke invert normal human values - insisting for example that fat chicks are beautiful. Richard Hanania says no, in practice that never works for normal people, so none of this is real. They're both right, Harrison replies: the deranged characteropaths of wokedom really do try to override the human instinctive substratum, and this has very bad consequences for normal people forced to live under the Clown World regime, who have to spend their time playing a demoralizing game of make-believe in order to keep the Marxcissists happy.
Over at The Worthy House, Charles Haywood reviews Legality and Legitimacy by Carl Schmitt. This work, published in 1932 as the question of what constituted a legitimate government in Germany was becoming rather pressing, is not as well known as Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (which Charles argues in this recent interview is widely misunderstood by a lot of people who parrot the phrase 'friend-enemy distinction', due to misapprehension of the distinction between inimicus and hostis, or private and public enemies). Schmitt argues that in a legislative state, such as Weimar Germany or the USA, legitimacy is conferred by electoral victory under fair conditions - meaning that, ceteris paribus, any given contender has an equal chance of winning the people's favour. The problem is that once in power, there's a strong temptation to hold onto it by tilting the playing field or simply closing the field entirely, as indeed in Schmitt's time was the expressed intent of both the Communists and the NSDAP. Schmitt's solution was for an executive authority to deny participation to those who would deny equal chance - a similar principle to Popper's tolerance paradox. As Charles argues, the situation now is very different: we must contend with a state that is already illegitimate, and is actively denying equal chance to challengers. Schmitt's solution, therefore, is not applicable … but there are other ways….
Nelson R. Elliott has finally given a proper name to his newsletter, appropriately enough The Techno-Canton, and this week he writes about Aging in the Techno-Canton. Nursing homes are a special kind of mechanized unlife: sterilized of both germs and joy. They're also practically inevitable, given the structural realities of the modern economic, social, and urban architecture. It would be much better for seniors to live in walkable communities, with grown children if they have them, but there are challenges to this such as inflation and the "health care" insurance ponzi that make this difficult to achieve on a large scale.
What is a country, really? The Saxon Cross proffers a few thoughts on Nation-States and Folklands. The folk is really what's primary - the more ancient and permanent substratum on which the whole edifice of legislative bodies, legal systems, borders, and so on is erected. Ignoring it is rather like pretending your neocortex can ignore your cerebellum. And of course, modern states don't just ignore the folk, but actively denigrate it - claiming to be 'imagined communities', and that any talk of folk is pure Nazism. But does one cease to be an American if one rejects the sanctity of the Constitution? Does an Englishman stop being English because he rejects Westminster? Does a German suddenly become Polish because the borders move?
Over at a plague chronicle, eugyppius writes that The disruptive climate activists of Letzte Generation are thinly veiled agents of the state, who have received a broad license to disrupt and vandalise in furtherance of the Green agenda. These are the clowns gluing themselves to paintings in order to stop cows from farting. As ever, they're funded by the very regime they claim to oppose - manufactured dissent so that the state can pressure itself to do what it already wants to do (but lacks organic public support for). Also, what is up with these names? ‘Extinction Rebellion’, ‘Last Generation’. What are they trying to say here? Rhetorical, we all know it’s a death cult.
In On Wokeness, Its Nature, and Its Prospects, eugyppius explains the woke alliance in Jouvenalian terms as a high-low alliance which got its start on universities by administrators (the would-be high) joining forces with diversity admits and affirmative action hires (the low) to go after the traditional, merit-based, tenure-protected professoriate (the middle). He's doubtful it can be reversed at this point, advising that the best thing we can do is just walk away from the whole mess and watch as the revolution inevitably eats its own. Arguing with them is a bit pointless, as he notes that at the end of the day there's no real intellectual system there - it's just a means to power, and so long as it works they can't be talked out of it. I generally agree, except in the case that an audience is present, and the woke can be used as foils to demonstrate the intellectual vapidity of their pseudophilosophy. Then again I feel like that's already been done. Very few still consider the woke to be intelligent or honest, and the battle lines are largely drawn at this point.
It's been a hot minute since Niccolo Soldo posted one of his infamous interviews, and the lazy Croat has finally put one up at Fisted by Foucault: The Taormina Interviews: Lee Fang - ChiCom Sleeper Agent, subtitled "From College Political Dork to Nerd Journo, How He's "Changed" like Matt Taibbi, Corruption in Government, Media, and Corporations, and the HQ (Hapa Question)". If you haven't read one of Soldo's interviews before, they're a treat, and this one is no exception.
Soldo also has the latest instalment of his ongoing series on colour revolutions available for his supporters: On US Hegemony, the Quest for a New Economic Order, and Colour Revolution Tech. And if you haven’t been keeping up with his weekly news roundups, you’re missing out. Saturday Commentary and Review #126 was excellent: Saudi Arabia's Modernization and Liberalization, Germany's AfD Ascendant, Slow US Adoption of 5G Tech, We're All Bourgeois Now, Single Origin Theory Of Humans Dead?
Unsettled Science
Josh Mitteldorf has some Unauthorized Science for us in the form of Schoch Waves from our Solar System and Beyond. This is a review of Robert Schoch's book Forgotten Civilizations, in which Mitteldorf focuses on the chapters concerning cosmoclimatology - all the ways the universe can reach down and touch us, from solar flares to cosmic rays to interstellar dust clouds, all in the context of the archeological mysteries pointing to the existence of a lost ice age civilization wiped out in an antediluvian cataclysm.
More from eugyppius : As enthusiasm for the vaxx falls ever lower & millions of unwanted doses expire, the German press discover that maybe big pharma & their political enablers are not our friends after all. Looks like they're going to have to destroy something on the order of a hundred million doses they can't even give away. Same thing happened with the swine flu a decade ago. These people never learn, but it's not like they hold their positions due to their competence.
At bad cattitude el gato malo suggests that maybe it's time to dismantle the security state in 3/16: the day that will live in infamy. Apparently they're (you know who they are) using LLM-powered chatbots to try and talk people into keeping current with their gene therapy. Short term I can see that being mildly effective. On morons. Long term, like everything else they do to try and sweep back the tide, it's just going to destroy their credibility even more: it will just be assumed that any regime stans one runs into are AIs. The cantankerous cat also looks at some recently FOIA'd Israeli health data which shows rather unambiguously that covid was not dangerous to the young and healthy until "something happened". What was that "something"? Public health authorities can't quite seem to figure it out, but whatever it is, they know it's definitely not what you're thinking, you science-denying conspiracy theorist.
Has that pesky racial IQ gap gone away thanks to improvements in the standard of living? Steve Sailer takes a look at data from the absolutely massive Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study in Mind The Gap and finds that … no, no it hasn't. Blacks remain stubbornly 1 standard deviation below whites; Asians continue to be ⅓ of a standard deviation higher than whites. Shocking, I know. Eventually liberals are going to have to admit they've been wrong about this for the last few generations. C'mon guys - stop being science deniers. I want my society back.
At Science Is Not The Answer, William M Briggs observes that The Only Way To Avoid Illegal Discrimination Is To Illegally Discriminate. It's a simple principle: since discrimination is proved statistically, via disproportionate representation, one must have quotas to avoid underrepresentation of designated victim groups; since achieving perfect demographic representation is impossible, to avoid lawsuits one must overrepresent designated victim groups. These are the bitter fruits of pretending that the races and sexes are ‘equal’ in any meaningful sense, and that therefore any difference in outcomes is ipso facto evidence of bigotry. Next from Briggs: John Kerry To Peasants: Die, To Save The Planet. Kerry wants to shut down farms. It cannot be said often enough: the green cult is a death cult, and we are the carbon the cultists want to reduce.
Russia Russia Russia!
At The Slavland Chronicles Rolo Slavskiy asks Did You Know That Poroshenko Offered Russia the Donbass, But Putin Refused It? I did not. You may have been hearing news about drone assaults on Russia’s capital. Rolo thinks that The Moscow Bombing is Part of a Psychological Warfare Campaign Being Waged Against Russia, which seems likely.
There’s more Russia analysis from Simplicius The Thinker over at Simplicius’s Garden of Knowledge. First a headline digest: The West's Tone Drastically Shifts. Simplicius has noticed that Western propagandists are markedly less confident of late than they have been previously. Positively gloomy, in fact, regarding Ukraine’s prospects against the demonic Siberian bear. Then a sitrep: Kiev Rocked as New Satellite Photos Prove Patriot Destruction. Looks like the Russians are droning Kiev in response to the droning of Moscow. Finally, Putin Strikes Back - Destroys GUR Bunker?
Girl Trouble
In (Never) Blame Feminism Janice Fiamengo dismantles Joel Kotkin's milquetoast mewling about the absolute state of World War Sex. Chestless man that he is, Kotkin does the "men getting destroyed, women hardest hit" bit, while wringing his hands that all the signs of social breakdown - high male suicide rates, low levels of family formation, men increasingly turning their backs on society to languish in an unlife of screens, porn, pills, and vidya - all just sort of happened, out of nowhere. Fiamengo corrects him on both counts: it is in fact men who are most severely afflicted by this state of purdah, and it is most directly feminism, and the legal, economic, policy, organizational, educational, and propagandistic assaults it has inspired, that is to blame. She also argues that reversing these injustices is essential to solving the demographic crisis, which is just obviously true.
At A Ghost in the Machine Daniel D observes that American Culture Makes Women Unattractive. He's not just talking about the obesity and the neon hair, although God knows that's a factor. It's the attitude. American women are simply unpleasant to be around. This is something that every guy who's been abroad for any length of time has noticed. Almost anywhere you go, the women are more cheerful and more appealing than they are at home.
Pop Cultism
The Eucatastrophologist Duncan Reyburn takes "a quick peak under the mask of the will to oscillate" in Metamodernism. Metamodernism, if you haven't heard of it, is what is supposed to come after postmodernism: an oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodernist irony, enabling the two to hug it out and emerge with a smile on their face. It's an empty smile, though, one that does not reach the eyes, in which one can see the inner void where a soul should be. Modernism and postmodernism are just different forms of nihilism, and the product of two nulls is still a null, no matter how many recursive loops you wind around it. It's absurd and contradictory, like all nihilist antiphilosophies … but for all that, a useful concept with which to examine contemporary culture, which with deep sincerity attempts to manufacture meaning out of the meaningless, sincerely believing that it's better to be nice than right even while as denying the very concept of rightness makes a mockery of any notion of belief and calls into question just how 'nice' the delusional hall of mirrors really is.
Dudley Newright at the New Right Poast headlines with the Magic the Gathering card we’re all talking about in his roundup #65. We wuz heirs of Isildur. I’ll admit, that made me see red – walked right into their trap! – but some of the response tweets were hilarious. “Someone call the cops, that guy stole Aragorn’s sword.”
At Seeking the Hidden Thing, Kruptos brings Jacques Ellul to bear on Wizards of the Coast's newest defacement of European culture in Black Aragorn? Consumer capitalism will digest your civil rights revolution and sell it back to you in the form of a Magic the Gathering card with an incongruously Sub-Saharan nobleman in a Norse-Germanic setting. All part of the permanent revolution by which the regime perpetuates itself. The real target audience of this, of course, is not black people - it's the badwhites who might resist the regime, who cannot be allowed to have stories or archetypes of their own, and must be humiliated by having those symbols defaced. But to react against this is also to play the game - to have your energies diverted into empty theatricality. The answer? Ignore and build.
Kulak of Anarchonomicon goes to the movies in Review: BlackBerry. I hadn't heard of this Canadian movie at all, and apparently neither has anyone else … as usual for Canadian movies. BlackBerry, as usual for Canadian tech companies (see also: the fabled Avro Arrow) had a fantastically high quality product that ended up crashing and burning: the manufacturer, Research in Motion, went from a $66 billion market cap to bankruptcy when they abandoned the core principles behind its product design. I never had a crackberry myself, but as Kulak points out, they couldn't be more distinct from the data-harvesting distraction leashes we're all addicted to now: privacy was built in seamlessly throughout the network; both design and manufacturing were performed in North America to exacting standards; and the physical keyboard that dominated half the surface meant that the device was focused entirely on email and text messaging, and therefore a genuine productivity tool, rather than being a portal to the Infinite Scroll of Doom. The movie itself is essentially a rise and fall epic, which Kulak argues provides a masterclass in tech startup culture, demonstrating the factors enabling a company to ascend to the heights of market dominance (at one point controlling half the cell phone market), only to flame out in a spectacular loss of faith in itself as it tried to play catch-up with Apple.
At The Carousel, Twitter anon Hamilton Wesley Ellis remembers When Pharma Shilled Radiation and People Melted in The Radioactive Power of Advertising. Radioactive health tonics sounds like a particularly insane oxymoron to the modern ear, but in the years following the discovery of radioactivity people hadn't yet figured out that too much radiation was a very bad thing. The descriptions of the consequences of radium poisoning are gruesome, to say the least. There's a lesson here, too, about believing the marketing buzz about whatever new miracle cure is making the rounds, whether being hawked by pharma, or promoted in alt health circles.
Hamilton Wesley Ellis has his own Substack, Mother$uperior's, neglected for almost a year, because his last post, A note to wolves, is quite good:
Politics is dead. Culture is ash. Now is the time of Wolves. The United States, a once-lofty ideal conceived by White men of genius, now exists in name only. The only thing keeping Indiana and California in a nominal union is a decaying framework of laws, enforced by a decaying central apparatus that is intentionally being impoverished and weakened in lieu of globalist corporate control. As midterm elections come up, every stump speech and political ad and campaign promise are nothing more than the writhing of maggots in the putrefying corpse that we once knew as civilization.
Morgoth takes the long and winding road from authentic kippers to Baudrillard's Kipper and the Great Reset. Preserving fish, not flavoring them, is the function of smoking them, yet the smoked fish you buy in the store don't keep outside of the fridge. Yet we're still only partway through the doom spiral of simulacra: the fish are still real. Vat-grown 'fish' are next on the menu … but maybe consumers will reject those, as they have so far turned their noses up at Beyond "Meat". No problem, say the technocrats: we'll simply reengineer human desire. And if human nature proves insufficiently malleable, well, we can hatch humans out of silicone sacks and control every facet of their genetics and upbringing, Brave New World style. In the world of the simulacrum, even the humans will be literally fake and literally gay.
That’s Academic
Why do political economists hate school so much?
At Doc Hammer's Anvil, Doctor Hammer casts a gimlet eye in the direction of The Wastefulness of Schools. If government schools actually work - as in successfully educating young people - it should be easy to prove, given that we've been using this model for so long. The Doc is … skeptical. Even if you accept that a system designed purely for signaling instead of, you know, education, is acceptable. Which it isn't. Apparently there's a debate happening among the econ bros as to whether school is providing value for money, and this is the Doc's point by point response to some weak defenses of the system's sacred honor.
Christopher Brunet of Karlstack has 24 More Academic Scandals to tell us about. Yes, 24 of them. That's a record. His previous high score was 8. Although, looking at the progression, it seems to increasing rapidly: 4, to 6, to 8, to 24. By this time next year he'll be offering details on thousands. Which I'm sure would still be a drop in the bucket. At this point I'd be unsurprised to learn that the majority of academics are scandalous.
Katy Barnett of What Katy Did considers Activism versus Advocacy in academia and finds the former to be - what’s the word? - problematic. As she puts it, activism and academia are oil and water.
Pulped
A new vignette by Paulos up at Myth Pilot: Do You Still Believe in Rome?
You march into the city to the sound of keening women, rose petals strewn before your feet, and the Eternal City opens before you.
Steven A Richards has some psychologically intense short fiction up at Semantic Sorcery, My Stalker:
My ex-boyfriend, the stalker, texts me about once a week. Not on any kind of schedule, although it tends to be in the evenings, probably when he's drunk. If he were a normal creep he'd text things like I love you please answer me or I could fuck you into another world or I miss you baby, but my stalker is no normal creep. He's never even sent a dick pic or a jerk-off video. Instead, last week, he wrote: The reason I'm obsessed with you is that you know what it's like to ruin everything and have to live with never being happy. A few weeks ago, it was I think it's beautiful how you suffer to make art out of your life.
At Soaring Twenties, A World of No White Paint by Victor D. Sandiego :
Tuesday. Hollis Jenkins walked to the mailbox. Never a letter, but he had to clean out the junk every damn day. If not, some kid would pull it out and throw it in the street because he could. Mean or unpleasant or merely bored. A world of because they could.
Katy Barnett has Chapter 14 of her fantasy novel The Hidden People posted. She’s making pretty good progress with that.
Finally, Frank Kidd offers up an alternate ending to his story Electric Gothic Nightmare, the original version of which was featured in this space a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t so much an alternate ending, as an extension of the one that came before.
The bulldozer roared to life, coughing black smoke, obscuring its blinding floodlights for but a moment.
The hand did not release her but dragged her screaming across the gravel. The hand picked her up from bloody knees. The hand slammed into the side of her face.
She lay in the bed of a truck. Her world narrowed. It dimmed.
A glass eye. The dozer’s roar. Blinding lights. Blackness.
Which makes me wonder … is this really the end for Jackie?
That’s all for this week, my dear readers! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoy putting it together, and found much to delight and enlighten. The Delightenment is the name of the game here on Barsoom. Don’t forget to
for more!
In between writing on Substack you can find me on the bird site @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active on the Russian den of iniquity at Telegrams From Barsoom.
Jeez, another one already! How time flies...my tab bar still has some of last week's selections. This is fast becoming one of the essential series on here. Does anyone else get the feeling that we're cresting to a consummate peak right now? A sort of idyllic moment where everything feels vibrant and exciting and essential, a small untouched corner of the internet, bristling with authenticity and interesting digressions. A lighthouse at the edge of the map, away from the creeping madness of the world. Such things don't last, you know. It's only a matter of time. Close your eyes, breath it in, exhale, and enjoy it while it lasts. These elysian days are surely numbered, we might as well enjoy them while they last.
Wow, what an honor. Thank you for such high praise John. There's a huge amount of quality here, both in your commentary and the original works. Love to see it.