Monthly Archives: November 2019

Beautiful Lies, And A Vulnerability of Academia

November 30, 2019 – 7:03 pm
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies

In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia: I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (12)

Beautiful Lies, Cont’d

November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies

I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago. There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Society and Culture | Comments (5)

Humans

November 29, 2019 – 1:52 pm

The other day I was out for a walk in Prospect Park and ran across this: I was reminded of this, which is 39,000 years old: Some things never change, I guess.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

Happy Thanksgiving

November 28, 2019 – 11:42 am

We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?). I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Beautiful Lies

November 27, 2019 – 3:51 pm
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies

Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. “Mencius Moldbug”, has published the second installment of his five-part “Clear Pill” essay series over at The American Mind. The new essay is about how coordinated, pervasive error enters the national culture in distributed, democratic societies — i.e., without the top-down influence of centralized, authoritarian control. The essay is long — in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Service Notice

November 24, 2019 – 8:43 pm

Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Spiders From Mars

November 20, 2019 – 10:38 pm

Staying on message from our Bowie post of a few days ago, here’s a story about Life On Mars  —  and not just lichens or something, but bugs.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

Poetry Corner

November 19, 2019 – 12:20 am

Steve Sailer famously said that “political correctness is a war on noticing”. There are patterns to reality so stubborn and prevalent that they enable us to make more or less reliable predictions. This is “induction”: reasoning, from accretion of the particular, to general rules that we believe in with increasing confidence as the data accumulate. […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Marginalia | Comments (1)

And Now For Something Completely Different

November 17, 2019 – 12:33 am

A little while back I had David Bowie’s 1977 song Heroes — probably my favorite of all his songs, and that’s saying something — stuck in my head. I thought it might be fun to go downstairs to the studio and see if I could knock it off on my own. Here’s a rough mix […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (9)

President Pete?

November 14, 2019 – 11:23 pm

I see that Pete Buttigieg is now leading the pack of Democratic candidates in polls for the Iowa caucus. I don’t think Mr. Buttigieg, should he win the nomination, will do very well at all against Donald Trump in the general election. It should go without saying that we would not even know his name […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Hard-Hitting Journalism From The Beeb

November 13, 2019 – 10:08 pm

Commenting on our previous item about immigrant gangs in Sweden, and the wave of bombings and shootings they have brought to that previously peaceful nation, reader “Whitewall” offered up this link, from the BBC: Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on? The first subheading asks: Who is to blame? If you thought they might […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Rubbish, Jihad, Immigration, HBD | Comments (2)

“Swedish”

November 12, 2019 – 9:46 pm

Denmark has now instituted border checks with Sweden in response to Sweden’s inability to control its tide of violent crime. According to The Guardian: Denmark has temporarily reinstated checks at its border crossings with Sweden after a spate of bombings and shootings in the Copenhagen area that authorities say were carried out by members of […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Immigration, HBD | Comments (5)

Back

November 12, 2019 – 8:42 pm

I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore. It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight. I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Service Notice

November 7, 2019 – 10:40 pm

I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Vlahos On Civil War, and a Repost From June On Taxonomy

November 5, 2019 – 7:06 pm

Michael Vlahos, who for years now has been discussing with John Batchelor the possibility and growing likelihood of a third American civil war, now has a new article up at The American Conservative. He writes about the steps that lead to a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, at which point the outcome is determined by a […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (5)

Morsels from GKC

November 4, 2019 – 5:42 pm

I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones I’ve selected so far: ‣   If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Religion, Apophthegmata | Comments (1)

Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?

November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium. Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, Reaction | Comments (8)