Write Wing This Week - Issue No. 16 - 5 Aug 2023
The Chinamerican migrant tax plantation; peer group pathology; the sermon on the local maxima; revolution against revolution; the political economy of nationalist Spain
Welcome to this week’s roundup of everything excellent and strange from the burgeoning literary cornucopia of Substack’s shitpoasters.
I’m a little behind this week, having gotten side-tracked with an extended family visit. As a not unrelated aside, since starting these roundups I’ve noticed a tendency for a sudden spike of articles to appear in my inbox on Friday. I’m sure that’s not because some of you are trying to slide in under the deadline. Anyhow, this week I put a firm deadline: midnight Friday, no exceptions. If you hit the publish button after that time, that’s why your piece isn’t here.
We start the digest with several reports from Small Town Heroes working to shore up the home front. Small towns are great for raising kids, and kids have Growing Pains, but do not worry for we have Spiritual Tonics to take the sting out. Does anyone else feel Caught in the Net these days? There’s quite a bit of Political Science this week, as always, and the big political question of our time is whether we’re seeing Imperial Collapse, Turbo-America, or Turbo-Collapse? Finally, the digest ends with a bit of Science, some Philosophy, and as always, the week’s short fiction from the PVLP KVLT.
As always, keep your eyes peeled for the Iron Ring Award winner. Now get cozy, crack open a bottle of Saturday evening scotch, light a Cuban, and settle in for links.
Oh, and all of today’s images (unless stated otherwise) are from the great Ed Emshwiller.
Small Town Heroes
You can’t trust anything these days, and it’s only getting worse. At How to Subvert Subversion,
tells us How To Rebuild a High-Trust Society. His answer start at the bottom, and builds out from there.There’s cheap land in them thar decrepit post-collapse urban war zones! At IM1776 Philip Voodoo proposes that the time is ripe for The Urban Reconquista. Recolonizing collapsed cities is an interesting gamble. It's true there is cheap land to be had. The natives are the primary obstacle, however, and unlike in the case of the wild west the settlers won't be allowed to simply ethnically cleanse them. The settlers of the 19th century enjoyed the protection, however inconstant, of the state's armed force, which their 21st century counterparts will not; to the contrary, the state will act to punish them (but not the savages) for any act of violent self defense. On top of this of course there are regulatory and fiscal obstacles. Taxes will be outrageous, and the incompetent and hostile municipal governments of black-run cities are unlikely to do anything to make a developer's life easier, and much to make it more difficult.
At The Lake of Lerna
wonders if it’s possible to make an actual homeland out of The Great American Migrating Labor Camp. He’s been trying to work within his local political system to keep his adopted town from becoming a derelict boomer retirement community that implodes in on itself as the well-healed seniors pricing the young and energetic out of the town inevitably die off, which turns into a meditation on the political consequences of a population of rootless sharecroppers inhabiting a continental tax plantation. At a certain point, if we’re to have homes worth living in, we need to stay put and build. The anywheres must become somewheres. This is an insightful piece, and gets the week’s first Honourable Mention. Be sure to read it. chases after Truth on the Streets in Organized crime and the homeless. And I do mean a chase, because Dahlgren goes full vigilante when he sees a junkie do a smash and grab. The cops were useless, of course. Police calls have dropped yet lawlessness reigns, because people just aren’t bothering to call the cops anymore. He’s in Seattle, after all. It takes real courage to do something like what Dahlgren did. Unfortunately there is no support from the authorities, who I think do not realize what the short term consequences will be for their own authority. Already they have no authority among the criminal underclass, who as this remarkable account documents have become utterly brazen in their petty predation. They will soon find that they have lost their authority over the average, law-abiding citizen, too. Reading this I could not help but wonder what a dozen or so vigilantes willing to act more like the Punisher than the Batman might accomplish in Minecraft.At The Library of Celaeno the
relates The Saga of Ben from Milwaukee. "Jewish dentist" and "medal of honor recipient" are not usually two things that go together, but somehow they do, and this tale of a true aristocrat of the soul is well worth reading. Later this week the Librarian switches gears to tell us about the local landscaper: Kenny Was a Friend to All. Kenny was the village idiot, but intelligence isn't everything … in the final accounting, it isn't even the main thing.At Old Glory Club
describes The Two Americas of big city bugmen and drag queens, and small-town Alabamans. Try that in a small town.At the New Right Poast
has two compilations this week. First, #82. Blueballed at the prayer breakfast, featuring hot premarital sex with congresswomen, astroturfed hicklibs, the sped-to-premed pipeline, transracialists, model minorities, and sun-starers. Getting the lowdown (hoe-down?) on hiphop-infused pop country and hipster ‘authentic’ country doesn’t make me wish I’d ever gotten into country, but then again, maybe those hicklibs should try that in a small town (and yes, I included the New Right roundups here purely for that joke). Second, #83. I want to claim my t*ts: gaslit boomers, dirtbag left dictators, seagull-subduing chads, urban reconquistas, our first fan art, and more! Dudley seems to pick up on a lot of the same essays that I do, which is a reassuring sign that I’m doing something right.
Growing Pains
At Fisted by Foucault
’s Saturday Commentary and Review #132 covered some interesting ground this week, as it always does: "America Has Lost the Plot", Disability Inflation, A "Far Right" EU?, British Liberals' American Turn, Rammstein as Emblematic of "Germany's Right Wing Shift". The part that caught my eye was the first story, highlighting the utterly shameless abuse of special educational dispensations in American universities, where at the Ivy League over a fifth of students are now claiming some form of learning disability in order to get an edge on their classmates. I’ve seen that first hand. The absolute state of American youth. of Instapundit fame admonishes the educational profession: Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone. He suggests that both the weird modern idea of peer groups and suggests that the entire concept of 'cool' originate with age segregation. This mainly benefits crafty olds looking to bilk gullible youngs, since the old will be dead before the young figure out their various grifts. It's notable that there are essentially no bildungsroman set in the twentieth century. A genre based on young boys stepping across the threshold of manhood by winning the respect of older men doesn't map well to a social environment dominated by peer groups. This piece gets an Honourable Mention, and you should definitely give it a read.I realized Glenn was on Substack last week thanks to my first ever Instalaunch (only oughties kids will get this reference) when he linked the third and final instalment in my Depopulocalypse series, From SINK to FLOAT, wherein I tried to think up ways of solving the fertility crisis. That resulted in a big spike in views, so thank you for that, Mr. Reynolds. Since the article was pretty long (in fact, the longest thing I’ve yet published on Substack), I decided to put it behind a paywall in order to give supporters the opportunity to read it before anyone else, and also out of experimental greed. The paywall is now removed, however, so if you’re interested:
Depopulocalypse III – From SINK to FLOAT
V. Solutions to the Fertility Crisis Forget carbon dioxide, nuclear war, bioengineered plagues, or rogue asteroids. Depopulation is one of the most pressing existential threats to our civilization. Fertility rates are in free-fall throughout the developed world. With current trends, our planet will become a global granny state – old, tired, and gre…
At Brogues Britannicus
wonders, Can Modern Bildungsroman Exist? He’s been working on this account of life down and out in a sketchy Eastern European city for a while, and apparently was prodded into finally publishing due to a Note I made on the Glenn Reynolds essay:The City of Crossroads is a strange place. You might think the whole world has been there at one point. It always seems between everything. Neither east nor west, with a port, an airline and a railhead. I live there. I'm an outsider, the same as many there. We were all halfway between, just like the city. By trade, I wasn’t anything much. That's why I was there, there's good money for a man who can keep the bureaucrats happy in this mixed up town. Especially for man who can write well and has an ear for language. At least that's what they told me when I came there. This is my story. I'll tell it as I lived it, and the fact I'm telling it lets you know it's true. I lived every word of it. Remember that.
Spiritual Tonics
It's the long lazy days of summer, and
has been having trouble finding the inspiration to write, so instead LucTalks about some Short Notes taken from Notes:Ernst Jünger, when asked why he is so confident that life after death is real:
“Above a certain intellectual altitude, everybody has basically accepted this, like Leonardo, Plato, Goethe, Schopenhauer … This is actually quite self-evident for me.”
At Political Ponerology
compares and contrasts Supernatural Evil and Ponerology, Does evil originate with biopsychosocial mechanisms or negatively polarized hyperdimensional entities? Why not both? And lets not confuse formal and final causes.At The Neo-Ciceronian Times
takes half an hour out of his busy schedule to explain Why Christian Men Should Be Physically Fit. I had a pastor as a teenager with a handshake like a dead fish. Not coincidentally, his sermons had the same texture. As a boy with healthy aggression levels it didn’t do much to endear the church to me.At Notes From the End of Time
continues his series on the sins, building on the previous week’s essay on acedia to write of The Sickness Unto Death: despair. preaches A Sermon Concerning Local Maxima and proposes that you run an inexpensive experiment to see if he’s right: act as though certain things are true, and observe what happens. “You have been told, “be wary of reasoning about values, for you cannot get an ‘is’ from an ‘ought’.” But I say to you: you ought to join the fork in your own mind, and understand the most important fact about values: Facts come from values, not the other way around.” This is a worthy antidote to the sins of enervation that Kenaz has been discussing. Ektropius’ sermon here is short, sweet, dense, and vitalizing. You must read this honourable mention.
Caught in the Net
At The Reversion
explains how to create a personal knowledge repository: Future-proofing Your Knowledge in the Age of Information Overload. He suggests using Obsidian to build your own personal memex, so that you can keep a record of all of the interesting things you come across online, before they all get censored off the Internet or over-written by woke LLMs.The Honest Broker
thinks that all the constant rebranding of web platforms is a clear case of the euphemism treadmill and that this means We Have Entered the Self-Loathing Stage of the Internet. Does this mean Twitter is the new n-word?At The Remnant Chronicles
updates us on a few ongoing projects and recent life events in Chronicle #1. The Bitcoin Times has its sixth issue coming out, and Svetski is writing a book, The Bushido of Bitcoin, which I don’t think will be written by the Bitcoiner LLM he’s developing, the Spirit of Satoshi. I’m looking forward to reading about Bitcoin Nietzscheanism.The Eucatastrophologist
thinks that the always online, fully legible and transparent life lived entirely in the eye of the public has an ugly consequence: The obliteration of subjectivity.
Political Science
At bad cattitude
lifts an idea from the Three-Body Problem to explain how to derail a civilization. Could the turn towards fuzzy magical thinking that rejects meritocracy and perceivesFrom
: What is going on? Are you taking crazy pills? Why is your boss acting like Xi Xinping? This essay lays out how the scale of the modern world has empowered a group of ‘managers’ whose beliefs and incentives fuel constant expansion into ever more corners of your life. Make some time; this is a big piece, but once you start it, you’ll want to finish it.From
: N.S. Lyons has done it again writing another potentially discourse defining piece. He first came to my attention with No, the Revolution Isn’t Over and later with Reality Honks Back, his look at the Canadian trucker protest. The trucker piece caught my attention with his introduction of the terms “Physicals” and “Virtuals,” which, in my mind, is still one of the best sets of descriptive labels for our current political divide out there [ed: I agree by the way, Reality Honks Back was very good]. His newest piece, The China Convergence explains in great detail something that is obvious for those of us who read extensively about the nature of technique and the administrative state: the US and China are far more alike than they are different. If it can help us get past using terms like “capitalist,” “communist,” “liberal,” or “socialist” that alone would be a win. Lyons goes into great depth looking at the phenomenon of the administrative state, its roots, and its development. He coins a term, the managerial doom loop:the larger and more complex an organization grows, the exponentially more managers are needed; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power for the managers; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion, including by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucracy to take over ever more functions of the broader economy and society; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be educated, which requires more managers…
This is a term which should be entered into dissident right lexicon and weaponized. Lyons also correctly draws the connection between the underlying ideology of current managerialism back to the Enlightenment, detailing the core managerial values: Technocratic Scientism, Utopianism, Meliorism, Liberationism, Hedonistic Materialism, Homogenizing Cosmopolitan Universalism, and Abstract Dematerialization. Once the groundwork is laid, Lyons makes a detailed examination of the development of managerialism in both the US and China, their similarities and differences, and the ways in which the two systems are really two versions of the same phenomenon and are converging into what he calls “The Total Techno-State”. Really, the hour and a half to two hours you dedicate to reading this piece will not disappoint you.
Given the intensity with which this piece has been recommended, and its sheer scope, I am taking the unprecedented step of bestowing the week’s Iron Ring Award upon a piece that I, uh, haven’t actually read yet. But I’ll certainly be blocking out time to read through this beast on the weekend, and I have a feeling you should too:
has been writing a lot about the administrative state himself at his own excellent Seeking the Hidden Thing, and this week he brings us the thrilling conclusion to his series on Jaques Ellul’s Autopsy of Revolution in Man or Machine? The "Necessary" Total Revolution: Part 6 of a Deep Dive into Jacques Ellul's "Autopsy of Revolution". If a revolution against the permanent revolution is necessary to safeguard our humanity, if growth in all its forms is ultimately incompatible with the continued existence of mankind, then the administrative state must be dismantled in its entirety … which means giving up all of our modern comforts. There isn't much appetite for that. Wat do? Very good work from Kruptos here, and a well-deserved Honourable Mention.
At a plague chronicle this week
presents us with The true and the false vision: Towards a general theory of political stupidity. How much of what bedevils us is the simple consequence of the blundering bureaucracies grinding through ill-considered policies adopted for no good reason and never changed? Next he has Three Grim Myocarditis Updates. People aren’t exactly dropping in the streets but the jabs don’t seem to be doing anyone much good. Shocker. Finally, a remarkably tone-deaf price hike as German discount supermarket chain joins forces with the schoolmarm state to teach their lower-income customers an environmental lesson about the "true cost" of food by overcharging them. If you want to imagine the future, picture a finger wagging in your face, forever. of The Slavland Chronicles gives us a Clown World Report: Things Are Queerer Than Ever in Ukraine. Blockade running of Ukraine’s Black Sea port; Gonzalo Lira arrested for trying to leave the country that dislikes him so much they tortured him the last time they arrested him; Ukraine’s new spokestranny. Rolo doesn’t think the African pivot will amount to much. He’s also got some interesting numbers on Central Asian migration into Russia: things aren’t so different there as we like to imagine. Rolo also reports that Zelensky is having the Ukrainian Orthodox Church switch to the Gregorian calendar, at least for Christmas, which reverse something like a thousand years of tradition. of The Worthy House reviews The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands by Alexander Watson. Most Americans have never heard of Galicia, but the history of this scrap of land, currently in Ukraine but claimed by Hungary and Poland, is essential to understanding the ethnic rivalries feeding into the current conflict.Franco's Spain is one of the few successful rightist countries of the twentieth century, but it gets relatively little attention. Charles uses his review of The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War by Michael Seidman to explore the political economy of nationalist Spain during the Civil War. Despite starting well behind the Republicans economically, the practical policies instituted by Franco led the nationalists to a dominant position by the end. As Charles explores, there are obvious lessons here for today's right. An Honourable Mention for Charles’ work here. It’s a solid analysis and well worth your time. Read it.
At À Rebours
explains how to Replace the Regime With This One Weird Trick. Dexia gives a look at "Enclavism", which is essentially a project to build a parallel polity that remains permanently out of synch with the historical cycle of mainstream society, as a means of fending off collapse. Can we break the anacyclotic wheel? And should we even want to? transcribes a speech from James Lindsay: Woke is Marxism, Evolved to Attack the West. has a punchy review of Rufo's American Cultural Revolution at American Mind, in which she recommends doing the opposite of what Ibram X. Kendi advises (always a good idea) and forming The Department of Racism. She says that’s just what the left will call it, regardless of what we call it, but I think we should officially call the enforcers of colour-blind meritocracy the Department of Racism just to agree and amplify. How funny would it be if in a hundred years ‘racism’ and ‘meritocracy’ really were seen as synonyms, but in a good way?At Not On Your Team, But Always Fair
writes on Debanking, PEPs, KYC, & AML, and explains with her insiders perspective how three letter acronyms have fouled up corporate finance. Overzealous regulations put into place to interfere with money laundering have been weaponized by bluehairs to yank banking privileges from naughty lads such as Nigel Farage, although as Helen notes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Huge numbers of others have been debanked for absurd reasons, and because they aren’t famous, no one notices. Not only is this morally reprehensible, Helen notes, it’s economically suicidal.Also at Not On Your Team, But Always Fair this week is Chapter 28 in
’s Worshipping the Future series, The Transcult: II. Feminism, Lorenzo says, isn’t wholly to blame for gender theology, but the hostility of feminist theorists to empirical science laid the foundation. Ah, the irony.At
’s own site Lorenzo from Oz he takes a look at Breadwinners, homemakers and the decline of patriarchy. Men have occupied the provider role in essentially every known human culture, and this has been true since at least the paleolithic, a consequence of our uniquely helpless babies and long adolescences.
Imperial Collapse, Turbo-America, or Turbo-Collapse?
of Fisted by Foucault takes a sober reality check: The Allure of Wishful Thinking. The South thought it could win the Civil War on the strength of its esprit de corps and forgot about the strength of the North’s mines. America has problems, at home and abroad, but are those problems really terminal? Or are people fooling themselves? The question we should ask isn't whether the USA is weakened compared to its earlier state, but how it compares to the competition, and the truth is that the BRICS countries have a long way to go. It’s very important to challenge your assumptions with disconfirming data, and you should therefore read the whole of this Honourable Mention.Unlike Soldo,
thinks that we’re seeing the signs of The Hegemon Beginning To Unravel. With Niger falling to a pro-Russian coup, it seems that African dictators aren’t so worried about angering Aunt Samantha anymore. He’s also been counting up Ukraine’s battlefield losses in the wake of the failed offensive, and estimates them at ‘extremely high’.The unclean cackling echoing in The Tomb of Morgthorak is
chortling at America: Once a republic, now a falling empire.Whether or not America is collapsing, American democracy certainly has, as the
demonstrates with his Anatomy Of A Domestic Coup.At A Ghost in the Machine
gazes into the dreams of the mad god Azathoth in Clownworld Craziness. What exactly is a dream, and what exactly is a joke? It’s increasingly hard to tell, as his review of the week’s headlines reveals.At Tell Me How This Ends
advises us to Fall Back on America. America’s Green Zone is a paranoid swamp whose influence over the vast barbarian hinterland isn’t nearly as strong as it thinks. Maybe escaping them is as easy as ignoring them.If the GAE falls apart, whither its European gimp? At the TrendCompass
asks, Is the EU about to begin disintegrating? Soon, he suggests, ‘Intermarium’ could become a household term. I’m not holding my breath but a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans would be an interesting turn of the worm.
Science
Whence did the Sons of Aryas emerge, first to tread the world beneath their jeweled sandals? At Nemets
gives an overview of the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat Debate.At Grey Goose Chronicles
explains Why are you so WEIRD? through an anthropological lens. The origins of we Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic freaks are complicated, and not clearly understood, with different schools of thought emerging from studies of Bronze Age and Germanic societies, and a lot of sloppy thinking arising from misunderstandings of the origins of the modern nuclear family structure itself. Sexual egalitarianism, for example, is much older than the last hundred years or so.’s Unauthorized Science this week is on the world’s collapsing ecosystems, with regards to which he thinks that CO2 is the Least of our Worries. The environmental movement has been completely derailed by the carbon obsession, and even driven to madness – witness Germany cutting down its forests for firewood, when it turned out that solar and wind were poor heating choices.Following up on his piece on the subversion of Green politics from last week,
continues his dissection of The sad skinsuiting of the environmental movement: turning a blind eye to the effects of unchecked world population growth due to obsession with egalitarianism with Part 2 at The Neo-Feudal Review.
Philosophy
At Contemplations on the Tree of Woe,
contemplates the woeful Errors of Ayn Rand. I can’t believe his mom gave him Atlas Shrugged when he was 16. Then again, my uncle gave me Starship Troopers when I was like 8. I think I got the better deal tbh. In any case, it left a pretty deep mark on him, and he spent decades as an Objectivist, meaning he’s had a long time to think through the critiques. Me, I read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead in university, and enjoyed them, although I found Galt’s infamous 50-page monologue to be a bit much. meditates on Instinct, Will, Intuition this week. The will can will the good and the bad, and it isn’t always, or even usually, possible to know beforehand what the outcome will be. So how do we will the good? Or is this perhaps the wrong question to ask?At Dark Futura
describes The Dissipative People. These are people who are completely out of phase with their own natural cycles, who have lost the ability to recognize the signals from their own body, and who as a result are walking engines for entropy. Our society makes a lot of them.At Classical Ideals
waxes poetic on the subject of How the Poet Invented Language. All language – really, in my opinion, all thought – is metaphor when you get to its essence, and poetry is the art of renewing language, making it vital again by saying old and eternal things in new ways. of Astral Flight Simulation puts out an incredible 4 hour podcast introducing the political thought of Mencius Moldbug: An Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives.At 2cb's Weekly Touchbase the
sees what can be gleaned from Reading the Experts on the Rise of Transracialism. It seems there are people who believe they can literally change their DNA with the power of positive thinking.
PVLP KVLT
At Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry editor
explains Why We Built an Artistic Cooperative. Fiction should be an antidote to despair. Also at P3, Frank has put out at help wanted ad: A Call to Arts. P3 is looking for illustrators, ideally in the style of Norman Saunders, Basil Gogos, or William Stout:
of Semantic Sybarite has been entertaining us for some time with his unsettling AI girlfriend vignettes. Now he’s turned his hand to long-form fiction with Realms of the Unreal.The sunlight kissed King Finnbar's head, warming his cheeks and returning his white hair to its original gold as he watched the last of the wagons roll through the narrow pass, steep rock rising high either side. And only just in time. From his vantage point on the high rocks he could see the hell-horde flooding into the valley they'd just evacuated, their hatred like a dark cloud spreading across the plain and surging into the foothills. The smoke rose behind them, Finnbar's past burning as he watched. Four hundred years of his people building, gone in a few short months of conflict. Folly and flame, that would be his legacy.
Here’s the opening paragraph to chapter 1, Keep Your Head Above Water:
It was 2020, late summer heading into autumn, and none of us were working except Emory, who had a long-distance programming job that on top of my disability checks and Neal's outsized unemployment checks was more than enough to keep the rent paid, the fridge full, and the three of us hammered all day long.
At IM1776 Benjamin Braddock reviews Oppenheimer in American Prometheus, touching on Nolan's anachronistic film-making, the cultural impact of the Bomb, and how innovation gets strangled by regulations.
My friends, that’s everything for this week. I hope you found much to divert, entertain, and enlighten.
As always, a huge thank you to the blog’s supporters, the \jeds who keep this project going. At the moment, Substack is my sole source of income. I generally keep the blog’s content free for all. That means the patricians of the soul who contribute their beer money to this project really are doing so from the pure generosity of their giant hearts. There is good karma in that. There’s also a ticket to Deimos Station, the orbital platform from which we are planning the liberation of the Silent Planet. If you want in, you know what to do....
In between writing on Substack you can find me on Xwitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom.
Thanks John (and Kruptos), I'm honored. I've sworn to keep it short from now on haha.
That new bidet seat is gonna get a sittin' this weekend.