Category Archives: Society and Culture

It’s A Hell Of A Town

A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count […]

Any Questions?

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” – Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

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 […]

Repost: On The Taxonomy Of Civil War

In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted […]

Say Her Name

Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally. Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, […]

Concentric Circles

Bill Vallicella has a fine post up at Substack today, in which he responds to the complaint that for an American president to speak of “America First” is, as Bill Kristol put it a few years back, “depressing and vulgar”. My only quibble with the piece is that Bill didn’t unpack, for those who might […]

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 […]

The Bonfire Of The Sanities

Here’s a news story. I’d say it was “shocking”, or “amazing”, but at this point it really isn’t. It’s bad, though. In brief: New York City has signed a no-bid contract with a “W/MBE” company (i.e., not run by white men) to make debit cards to be issued to “migrants”. The cards will have no […]

Invasion Of The Mind Snatchers

I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty. The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. […]

Uh-Oh

I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset. These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps […]

Invention, The Mother Of Necessity

Imagine for a moment what a collapse of the modern communication grid would be like. All of a sudden, you can no longer make or receive phone calls, emails, or text messages. You try to go to the Internet — news services, social media, etc. — to find out what’s happening, but you can’t. You […]

Jim Kalb On Inclusiveness

I’ve just read Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It, by James Kalb. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Jim was the original proprietor of the influential blog View From The Right (archived here), which he then handed off to […]

Asymmetrical Warfare

In America, we hear a great deal about the “rule of law”. We flatter ourselves that we have managed, by the genius of the Founding, to find a way to be ruled, not merely by the vector-sum of the will of powerful men, but by a set of abstract principles. We imagine that in this […]

Aristophanes, Call Your Office

Making the rounds today is a graph taken from the Financial Times, showing that there is a widening gap in political outlook, across the developed world, between males and females aged 18-29. The source article is here, but it’s paywalled, so I’ll sum it up for you: women are moving sharply to the left, while […]

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) […]

How Many Fingers, Winston?

Here’s something refreshing: James Hankins, a senior professor of history at Harvard, having been pestered by the harridans of the university’s Diversity Office to provide a personal statement of his commitment to the Cause, has penned a tart reply (cf. the Reply of the Zhaporozhian Cossacks to Mehmed IV). We read: Dear Members of Harvard’s […]

Gird Up Thy Loins

Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest. Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts […]

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 […]

The United Metastates Of America

Have you heard of “superheating”? If you haven’t, Wikipedia describes it as: “the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling. This is a so-called metastable state or metastate, where boiling might occur at any time, induced by external or internal effects… This may occur by […]

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 […]

I Bet It’s Only Because She’s Gay

Well, Claudine Gay has stepped down as president of Harvard. She was already listing badly after her embarrassing testimony before Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, and Christopher Rufo’s withering barrage of examples of her chronic plagiarism finally holed her below the waterline. Needless to say, in her resignation letter she made no apology for her […]

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 […]

This Is Your Child On Modernity

Watch this video (it’s brief): We have a serious mental health crisis in this country pic.twitter.com/dumx4nZagc — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 21, 2023 This is what we get when we tear everything down — all the sturdy scaffolding that children have relied on throughout history to learn to be adults — without putting anything […]

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 […]

After Reconstruction, Now Deconstruction

In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into […]

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, […]

Divide And Conquer

The always-thoughtful Richard Fernandez posted the following thread recently on Twitter: The catastrophic loss of institutional trust has made it imperative for the establishment to roll out virtual reality, not through goggles and special chairs, but by manipulating the entire information environment so that we live inside a lie. One way to detect that you […]

Sailer At VDare

Steve Sailer recently gave his first public speech in a decade or so at VDare’s summer conference (which was held a couple of weeks ago at the castle they now own, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Here it is:

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 […]

Separation Anxiety

I’ve just read an engaging pair of articles at Asylum magazine: an item by Michael Anton on the possibility of “national divorce”, in which he makes the case for breaking up the United States, and a rebuttal to Anton’s position by an anonymous author. (You can read Michael Anton’s original post here, and the response […]

This Is The Hell We Are Building For Ourselves

Get a load of this.

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.) […]

Crime And …

Someone in an Urbit chat group just posted a link to an article I’d never seen about vote fraud in the 2020 election. The essay was written in December of that year on a blog called The Adventures of Shylock Holmes, and it is probably the best analysis of the question that I have yet […]

Three Years On

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the death of America’s holiest martyr, the sainted George Floyd. His joining of the choir invisible, while hospitalized after resisting arrest, ignited — as readers may recall! — a national convulsion of rioting and chaos that resulted in widespread social and physical devastation. I’m a day late, but I […]

Time-Hopping

One of the greatest Roman citizens of the late Republican era was the statesman, lawyer, and orator Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). A little while ago, wanting to dig a little deeper into the man’s life and work, I ordered a book called The Complete Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero (now out of print, […]

No Can Do

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

Over the past week or two I’ve been kicking around the idea of “accelerationism” — that the best way forward for this rotting society is to give its most destructive factions free rein, so as to make the disease progress so rapidly, and to such extremes, that it either provokes, at last, an “immune response” […]

Contra Accelerationism

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

Our commenter mharko has given us a link to a brief video making an argument, from a Christian perspective, against accelerationism. The presenter, Jonathan Pageau, calls it “dancing with death”. Here it is: There is an interesting “as above, so below” theme running through the argument. The idea is twofold: first, that there is an […]

Just So

“Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter.” — Mencken

More On Acceleration

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, commenter “mharko” (who also has things to say over here from time to time), left such a fine comment on Bill’s accelerationism post that I am going to repost it here: I had a thought mulling these things over while pulling weeds and cultivating soil that I wanted to risk […]

Here We Go Again

A couple of weeks ago, after a brief trip back to New York City (where I’d lived for more than forty years, and where my wife and children grew up), I wrote: I’m glad to be back on my little dirt road in the woods — NYC this time around seemed, in its accelerating degeneracy, […]

Should The Culture War Take A Back Seat?

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

On April 27th, Josiah Lippincott published an essay at American Greatness arguing that we’ve lost the culture war, and that the way forward is for the Right to focus squarely on the issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016. Lippincott’s article, which you can read here, stakes out the argument as follows: Immigration, trade, […]

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 […]

Wait – What?

The big item in today’s news was that Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox has come to an abrupt end. This is a watershed in American media history (and likely no small moment in America’s political history, too). For starters: Fox News just became completely irrelevant. An enormous number of that outlet’s subscribers, who saw saw […]

Does Civilization Still Make Sense?

An important concept, and one that I’ve written about myself, is the idea of “time preference”: how willing a person is to defer present consumption or enjoyment in order to earn a dividend in the future. The classic example is the “marshmallow test”, in which small children are given a marshmallow, told that the adult […]

Close Encounters

It’s jarring when, at a dinner gathering or small social event, you encounter a mind that conceives reality in a way so utterly, radically, axiomatically alien that you cannot believe you both could possibly inhabit the same objectively existing world. This happened to me recently at a friend’s house. The person in question — a […]