Category Archives: Reaction

Breach Of Contract

In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting […]

Axioms And Theorems

Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

A Lowell, MA High-school girl’s basketball team had to forfeit their game yesterday after three of their players were injured by a mentally ill young man playing on the opposing team. The male player, who is over six feet tall and has facial hair, says he’s female. The triumph of subjective fantasy over objective reality […]

One Nation, Divisible, Under Nothing Much At All

In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote: The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) […]

Trojan Horse

Making the rounds today: the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, just spoke at the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos — and having taken the stage, used the platform to denounce everything that the malevolent WEF seeks to accomplish, and to warn the world of the danger these people present to human flourishing. […]

Right, And Wrong

Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here). The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc […]

Wisdom vs Folly: Compare And Contrast

I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen. How did I come across this? […]

The Relativity Of Principle

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella links to two contrasting articles. The first, by Binyamin Applebaum, an editor at the New York Times, is a panegyric on the presidency of Joe Biden. The second, by Peter van Buren at American Conservative, is a jeremiad called “Evening in America”. It’s a stark and fascinating juxtaposition. In […]

Mind The Gap

The cataract of aliens pouring over our southern border has risen, in December of last year, to a rate of about three-and-a-half million a year. (Can anyone, at this point, doubt for a moment that this an intentional feature of government policy?) Meanwhile, as our efforts in Ukraine slump toward failure — as has been […]

Fat And Sick

The muse isn’t singing for me tonight, so I’ll just leave you with this: “Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in […]

Is This It?

Back in 2020 I published an article at American Greatness on the subject of civil war. In it I wrote: One of the peculiarities of civil war is that it is hard to say, except in retrospect, when a nation has passed the point of no return. There is rarely anything so distinct as Caesar’s […]

Notes From The Zoo

We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]

It’s Not A Feature, It’s A Bug

There’s a branch of science called “forensic entomology”. It’s used in criminal investigations to determine the time of death for corpses by examining them to see what species of insects have invaded the body. There are specific timelines for this, depending on where the body is found, and I understand that it provides a pretty […]

A Disease Of The Heart

Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, […]

Separation Anxiety, Cont’d: Michael Anton Replies to “Anonymous”

A couple of days ago I posted some commentary on Michael Anton’s recent article on “national divorce”. Asylum magazine has now made available online Michael Anton’s response to an anonymous reader’s critique of his dialogue on the topic of “national divorce”. (You can read it here.) Mr. Anton seems irritated; his rejoinder is titled “How […]

This Is The Hell We Are Building For Ourselves

Get a load of this.

Theodore Kaczynski, 1942-2023

I ought to have noted the death, last Saturday, of the mathematician and terrorist Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski, who died last Saturday at the age of 81. From Wikipedia: He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured […]

As I Was Saying…

For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]

P.S.

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

My old friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has put up an item about my “accelerationism” post, and some discussion has ensued in the comment-thread. You can read it here.

Should We All Now Be Accelerationists?

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

In case you haven’t noticed, America, and the West more generally, are falling to pieces. How so? Here’s a brief, but far from exhaustive, list: — Public confidence in the government and media are at all-time lows; — The printing of money in order to support government spending at an astronomical rate has triggered dangerous […]

Tunnel Vision

On The Ramparts

I’ll share with you a podcast I just ran across: an interview with embattled University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. The podcast’s web-page introduces Professor Wax as follows: Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Amy attended and graduated summa cum laude from Yale University […]

The Demon-Haunted World

The title of this post refers to a book by the late Carl Sagan, in which he argued that scientific naturalism was a light that could drive out the demons that have bedeviled humanity throughout most of history. He’s right about the bedeviling, and the need for a positive force to keep the demons at […]

That Was Then…

Making the rounds yesterday was an image of an examination paper for the eighth-grade students of Bullitt County, Kentucky, back in 1912. I very much doubt that most college-educated adults could pass it today. One might argue that there is no longer any need for a person to carry around this much general knowledge, as […]

Why Do We Hate Ourselves So?

I’ve just read a fine short essay, by Michael Lind, on the widespread, pestiferous cryptoreligion that despises humans and worships “the planet”. A brief excerpt: Humans are not the only species that hunts prey or modifies its surroundings to gain an advantage. It is our self-flagellating that sets us apart from other animals, not the […]

Prometheus, Part 2

Yesterday I posted a transcript of reporter Kevin Roose’s conversation with the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM chatbot known as “Sydney”. By now I think many of you will have heard about this, here or otherwise, and will have some sense of where all this has got to. (If you haven’t, you can have a look at yesterday’s […]

Small States Are Wunderbar!

I’ve got something entertaining for you: the thoroughly based Hans-Herman Hoppe (author of Democracy: The God That Failed) in a panel discussion on the merits (or in Hoppe’s view, the pestilential demerits), of the E.U. Among other things, Hoppe argues the case for subsidiarianism and decentralization (which, as readers of this blog will know, I […]

The Department Of Reality

Here’s one of the best essays Moldbug has published in a long time: The Cathedral or the Bizarre. In it he revisits the foundations of what, way back in Chapter 4 of his Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (2008), he first called “the Cathedral”: the curiously coordinated institutions of journalism and academia that seem to […]

The Confusion Of Tongues

I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over […]

On Leftism And Entropy

Here’s a brief item of mine, just posted at American Greatness.

Jim Kalb On Our Mass Craziness

James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]

When Pigs Fly

If you’re like most people — and most people are! — you’re probably looking at the news, and the fantastic things you are asked to believe, with a deepening feeling that either everyone’s gone completely mad, or that you have. If it’s any comfort, let me reassure that you haven’t gone insane, and neither has […]

Lara Logan En Fuego!

Hat-tip to our commenter Jake for this one.

Everything Is Fine!

Here is a caustically sarcastic item by Michael Anton that I encourage you all to read and share.

Negative Feedback

I’m 65, soon to be 66. My lovely wife Nina is about a year-and-a-half older. (She “robbed the cradle”!) We are already both eligible for Social Security. Neither of us had been planning to file for it yet, though, because for each year you wait (until you’re 70), the benefit rate that you lock in […]

Swan Song

Watching those truckers standing up for their liberties against Justin Castreau has me in a feisty temper tonight, and so here’s a post that fits my mood. I have a friend who, back in the heady days before everything became so grim and tedious, used to be a leading light, with a large following, of […]

There’s No Crying In Baseball!

Richard Hanania has just published an excellent piece at Substack on the enfeebling and corrosive effect of the feminization of public affairs. The problem, as he describes it, is that the natural asymmetry between men and women gives women a pass when they respond emotionally to the rough-and-tumble that is an inevitable part of every […]

“An AIDS Of The Mind”

Following on that essay on “mass formations” at American Greatness, Bill Valicella’s reply to it at his place, and my own follow-up post from a few days ago, JM Smith has posted a substantial contribution to the discussion over at The Orthosphere. Professor Smith’s post brings to the conversation Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 study of […]

On “Mass Formation” In The Here And Now

Recently I published an essay at American Greatness about the idea of “mass-formation psychosis”, a concept that has gone “viral” after being discussed by Dr. Robert Malone in a widely viewed interview with Joe Rogan. (The interview was, within days, widely censored on media platforms — which is, we should note, relevant in itself.) The […]

Point Deer, Make Horse

The astonishingly prolific Victor Davis Hanson observes Insurrection Day with a fine essay on just who constitutes the actual threat to the American Way. Read it here. If you are wondering, by the way, what the title of this post refers to, you can read the story of Zhao Gao over at Spandrell’s place, here. […]

Zemmour: A Ray Of Hope For The West

With thanks to Bill Keezer, here is a translation of a speech given by the Frenchman Eric Zemmour announcing his candidacy for President. May he prevail! My dear Countrymen— For years, the same feeling has swept you along, oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk down the streets in […]

The Religious Stance

I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.) At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional […]

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Well, that was fun. Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and various other Democrats around the country, and Democrat propositions, were defeated. It was nice to see all those folks on the other side wailing and gnashing their teeth, and blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ (which is pretty funny, given, say, the victory […]

This And That

Sorry for the thin content here – we have one week here in Brooklyn till the movers come, and plowing through 40 years’ accumulated detritus, sorting what is to be moved, stored, sold, donated, and jettisoned, while taking care of last-minute medical stuff before we move 300 miles away from where all our doctors are, […]

Prime Time!

Tucker Carlson interviewed Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, for an hour today. That’s quite a development, I think. Back at the end of July, I noted in a Twitter thread that a new and influential troika had taken shape: “Moldbug, [Michael] Anton, and BAP [“Bronze Age Pervert”] have emerged as the three corners of the […]

Nothing To See Here

Curtis Yarvin, the former Moldbug, commented at once on yesterday’s big fizzle. In a post written late yesterday, he offered a quote from Twitter: The Internet impresario Kantbot, who has become one of the most obnoxious literary talents since Marx or possibly Wyndham Lewis, still captured the day perfectly: Imagine storming the Capital of the […]

The Locust Years

I am chastened by the discussion in the previous posts. (See here and here.) All I had sought to do in my original remarks was to point out the natural advantages of cohesion, compact unity, patriotism, faith, competence, and positive worldview that Red America has over Blue, and to suggest that whatever happens next, we […]

Red America, Cont’d

A lively discussion has ensued in the comment-thread to our previous post. Commenter “vxxc” argues that my assessment of the natural assets of the Red coalition is too optimistic: that our lack, so far, of functional organization puts us at a lethal disadvantage in the gathering struggle. I, on the other hand, think this is […]

La Différence

I’ve just read a pithy and sensible article at Quilette on the subject of psychological and behavioral sex differences. The essay was written by David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and it disputes the social-sciences orthodoxy that sees all such differences as social constructions, remediable (as if remediation were actually […]

Great Is Truth. May It Prevail.

Just in (I have bolded the key passage): The Department of Justice today filed a statement of interest in Idaho federal court defending Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act against a challenge under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. “Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes” said Attorney General […]