Today the White House posted this audacious tweet:
George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more.
Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death.
He changed the world.
Now, let's act in his memory. pic.twitter.com/uPSCkxFMRs
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 25, 2024
A few minor corrections:
— George Floyd did not “deserve better”. He was a brute, a drug addict, and career criminal who, among other things, beat a pregnant woman while robbing her, and pointed his gun at her belly to threaten her unborn child.
— George Floyd was not murdered. He died of a massive, self-induced drug overdose while resisting arrest. The police who subdued him were acting according to Minneapolis Police Department guidelines. His death was nether tragic nor unjust; indeed, it was entirely the opposite.
— The “civil rights movement he inspired” was nothing more a nationwide spree of looting and arson, egged on by a corrupt cabal of Marxist grifters and race-baiters calling themselves “Black Lives Matter”, abetted by Democrat oligarchs at all levels of local, state, and federal government. That orgiastic summer of riots, which caused billions in property damage and countless injuries to civilians and police, took place while everyone else was ordered, by the arbitrary power of mayors and governors, to stay home, to give up their livelihoods, not to go to school or church, and even to forgo their final farewells to dying loved-ones.
I’m pretty jaded at this point in my life, and very little in the way of corruption, degradation of principles, and naked power-grubbing surprises me any longer. But even to me, this tweet is shocking: not because Biden’s handlers would try it, but because there is still anyone out there — that is, anyone capable of critical thinking and moral judgment — who would buy it. I know there is a sullen and resentful mass out there, the fat end of the dumbbell-shaped “high-low coalition”, whose easily bought votes and flammable emotions are being whipped up here. But I know also that there are a great many college-“educated” white, left-leaning voters who will be taken in by this as well, and the idea that we are to be ruled by such idiots is perhaps the strongest of all possible arguments against universal suffrage, and perhaps more generally against democracy itself.
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
18 Comments
Those among us who would revoke universal suffrage, either totally or for a particular demographic, strike me as especially naive. You presume the efficacy of voting. I disagree that it is a legitimate expression of the collective will. Why would the system give us the means to dismantle the system? Obviously, it wouldn’t. Mark Twain famously quipped that if voting actually worked, we wouldn’t be allowed to do it.
While I agree that there is much more to the machinery of power than can be affected by elections, neither have they no effect at all, especially in smaller, more local governments.
The vote is neither all-powerful nor utterly irrelevant, and to imagine that it is either is what strikes me as naive.
Assuming that it is indeed genuine, controlled opposition renders the entire process moot. We have seen innumerable examples of dissidents attaining power (supposedly) and then doing nothing. That woman they elected in Greece comes to mind, though her name escapes me at present. Wherever dissidents congregate, the airwaves are soon clogged with the trite, lukewarm rhetoric of pseudo-apostates.
Democracy, being a product of egalitarian sentiment, is inherently flawed. In this postmodern era, it is heresy to even suggest that one consciousness is superior to another. All subjective judgements are held to be fungible. Sub specie aeternitatis, this is true, but it is an inert truth; acknowledging it does not serve us in any way, and is actually detrimental to us. We should therefore not feel compelled to defend it, but disregard it entirely. Technically, everything that takes place within the mind is subjective, but this renders the subjectivity gambit moot as a criticism of any specific truth claim. Unless we can collectively summon the fortitude to defy the tyranny of alethic relativism, which can only be defeated by strength of will, we shall continue to be force-fed shit every day, because we cannot empirically prove it tastes vile. Should we ever obtain that elusive proof, rest assured, the goalposts will once again sprout legs.
Kaczynski observed that our time is unlike any previous era in one crucial respect. Today, the man in the street is powerless to effect meaningful change of any kind. Our elite overlords, whoever we might imagine them to be, are utterly unaccountable. They cannot be brought to justice, either by judicial or extra-judicial means. Never before have they been so ensconced, so impenetrably insulated from the wrath of the common man. The days when Kings could be guillotined and Presidents assassinated are long gone. There is no way out of this.
Autisticus, I believe you’re referring to Meloni of Italy. Anyway, for a counterpoint you might like this column by Dreher, for which perhaps not three but two cheers is apposite: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/revolt-of-the-normies-voters-seem-ready-to-restore-common-sense/
My mistake. I read it, but I’m not sure what comfort I’m supposed to take from it.
AS,
I am no optimist regarding our situation. Democracy, at best, can only work in a cohesive, high-trust, relatively virtuous society with a carefully resticted franchise — and even then only with constraints and limitations. We are no longer anywhere close to being in such a situation here in America, which is now more like a rotting corpse lying in a forest than a healthy nation.
You might agree with some remarks I made over at Bill Vallicella’s place the other day:
PS: I should caution you that if you go to Bill’s website to comment, you’ll find that he moderates incoming replies. If your posts are too long-winded, or come across as too haughty or condescending, he won’t publish you. (I have a smart filter that does the same thing automatically.) Be polite, and be brief, and don’t give lectures.
Bill is another pseudo-apostate who is guilty of the same petty censorship he decries in others. He’s a smart man, but not smart enough to realise that Jesus was a creation of vengeful Jews who sought to bring down Rome from the inside. Christianity was a Trojan horse, and it still operates in the fashion its creators intended today. The Western mind is so deeply infected with this malware, I don’t see any hope of ever fully extracting it. I explained all this to Bill a few years ago. It was not well received, as I’m sure you can imagine.
AS,
Good Lord, sir. Are you always such an insufferable prig? Are you really so full of yourself?
I can only hope that you are young — you certainly seem to be — and that the years will, if you permit them to, teach you some humility, some wisdom, and some manners — and will teach you to pause for a moment before insulting your betters, and before dismissing entire civilizations with a wave of your hand.
Please leave, and don’t come back.
I didn’t imagine you would take offence on his behalf. It’s quite a woke stance to take. I think perhaps I offended your subconscious Christian sensibilities, which everyone in the West has. I’ve encountered several abrasive personalities during my time online, but I certainly never considered myself to be one of them. What I’ve said here is a simple fact, that Bill is in thrall to the Christian cult. Those of us who were not brought up with it do not succumb to the misty-eyed reverence. We are free to see it for the Kabbalah magic trick it has always been.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Christianity is the antecedent of all egalitarian ideologies. More specifically, the Christian doctrine of soul equality; the innate value and intrinsic worth of all who bear a human (or semi-human) countenance. The neo-Christian is the unwary pseudo-apostate who has rejected the institutional Christianity of his forebears, and thinks himself enlightened for doing so, yet in his breast still beats the heart of a Christian soldier. By transmuting ‘all are equal before god’ to ‘all are equal before the law’, he remains axiologically a Christian. His subconscious assumption, that everyone is equal in moral worth and potential, is non-negotiable. His faith in equality is unshakeable, for he is a true believer. It is axiomatic for him, and he will never permit open discussion. And so, by silencing all dissenting testimony, he creates the illusion that no evidence contradicting his faith exists. Without this censorship, his defeat would be inevitable. Having delayed said defeat indefinitely, the lies he tells in place of the truth are free to flourish unopposed. As years become decades and decades become centuries, these falsehoods fossilize into facts, and the truth is lost to time.
The assortment of classical liberals, conservatives, reactionaries and traditionalists who have appointed themselves our cultural vanguards are all neo-Christians. Consider that the Nazis were explicitly opposed to egalitarianism, communism, international finance, usury, fiat currency, immigration, multiculturalism, multiracialism, miscegenation and sexual perversion, while the powers that be explicitly advocate all these things. The dichotomy couldn’t be simpler, yet our neo-Christian vanguards, who cannot bear to admit that wokeness is an inevitable consequence of Germany losing the war, continue to parrot the oxymoronic drivel that our (disproportionately Jewish) elites are fascists. In a pathetic attempt to deflect the Left’s moral indictments back at them, they affirm and uphold the egalitarian value system. “The Left are the real racists! The Left are the real fascists! The Left are the real Nazis!”
The Nazi attempt to extract this tumour at a pre-terminal stage was systematically sabotaged. Now it is metastasizing, entering its “red hypergiant” phase. Some among us have questioned why, despite having a considerably higher death toll, communism is not widely reviled like Nazism. The reason is because communism is not a departure from Christian axiology; it deifies the lower classes and demonises the strong. “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” It is Darwinism in reverse. Unless we successfully extract the Christian cancer in its entirety, we will never traverse the psychological Rubicon.
Alas, the triumph of Christianity in the West has been so complete that there are none left who truly stand outside it. All of the supposed revolutions against Christianity have merely been re-interpretations of Christian ideas. How could we tell the genuine dissident, should he ever materialise, from the charlatan? A true apostate would dare to say the unthinkable. He would say that we have no moral obligation to any people other than our own, our only duty is to eradicate obsolete hominids, and that doing so should stir no more emotion in us than swatting a fly. Anyone who has a problem with this has not transvalued Christian ethics (soul equality). We must reject such notions as the brotherhood of man and the fraternity of all peoples. We must abandon universalism and embrace particularism.
I suggest a thorough deprogramming course to extract the Levantine malware buried deep within your psyche. Christianity’s Criminal History by Carlheinz Deschner, The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey, Dominion by Tom Holland, The Jesus Hoax by David Skrbina, and On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier are invaluable resources. César Tort is the foremost authority on the Christian psych-op. Two seminal texts, Judea vs Rome and Why The White Man Must Abandon Christianity by Ferdinand Bardamu, are available on his site. My own essay On the Aetiology of Wokeness is now nearing completion. If all of this literature, combined with the collective scholarship of Kevin MacDonald, Andrew Joyce, Thomas Dalton, Edmund Connolly, Brenton Sanderson, Tobias Langdon and Thomas Goodrich were ever to become public knowledge, it would be the sociopolitical equivalent of Krakatoa.
Bill and I ran into this pompous cretin a few years ago and were also forced to break off contact with him. He is blind to his own folly. For instance, I see that he is still peddling crack-pot claims regarding Jesus of Nazareth. I responded to this by writing:
“Reading Mr. Spasticus’ most recent missive, I am reminded of the Italian adage, “L’ignoranza è la madre dell’impudenza.” That he takes dross such as Deschene’s Christianity’s Criminal History, which no reputable academic historian or informed student of history would regard as a serious work of scholarship, is evidence enough for its aptness. But if more is required, one only has to turn to his gleeful approval of Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, a work that denies the historical existence of Jesus, a view rejected by ALL respected scholars in the field of biblical history and exegesis, from orthodox Christians to those professing religious agnosticism, such as Bart Erhman. Finally, Nixey’s book, full of errors and distortions, is more a ideological tract against Christianity than a thoughtful consideration of the complex and fluid relationship between pagans and Christians in the late Roman world (See, for example, the blistering review of the notable scholar Prof. Dr. Roland Kany in Frankfurter Allgemeine, “So lest doch nur, wie bös sie waren! (October 10, 2019), which exposes her shoddy scholarship and which can also be read in translation. This response may seem harsh, but books that he cites, which reflect the terrible cultural decadenza of the present moment. easily lead the ill-informed and gullible astray, as evidenced in the cocky pronouncements of Mr. Spasticus.”
Thank you, Vito. I could tell from his first comment — a logorrheic, meandering screed that my automatic spam-filter very sensibly sent straight to the rubbish-bin — that this was someone I’d end up having to eject.
I’ve only banned a handful of commenters in the twenty years I’ve been at this; I try to be patient and civil, and to engage with all comers, no matter how wearisome. But in this case I was too patient, and probably too civil as well.
P.S. If A.S. really is autistic (and he certainly seems to be), I’m sorry for his affliction. But I’m under no obligation to provide a platform for his obsessions, his rigid, condescending tone, or his bloated, palaverous philippics.
I know the type well: ostensibly seeking “dialogue”, when what they really have in mind is simply to lecture us and correct our errors; a “dialogue” with Socrates himself wouldn’t budge him an inch. (I’m sure that’s just because Socrates was merely a fool in need of a better education.)
No thanks. Mr. Spasticus is welcome to start a blog of his own, and to fill it with a billion words, if he likes, on whatever topic winds his stem, but this is my house, and I’ll decide who my guests are.
i’ve been reading here for a very long time, but, to my recollection (admittedly well into what feels like senescence), have never posted.
i break silence only to say that your writing is beautiful, and that i’m stealing “bloated palaverous philippics”.
keep on keepin’ on, mr. pollack.
john doran,
Thank you so very much for your kind words, and for having visited the blog all these years. Your comment made my day.
Please don’t be shy about commenting when you have anything to add; as you can see above, commenters have to work pretty hard to annoy me. (Very few people are capable of Spasticus-tier obnoxiousness.)
Nothing to add re: democracy. All well-stated. It is a delusion and becomes incapable of reform.
AS has a point: Christianity has lost its immune system and is morbidly egalitarian by now. It could not hold Christendom (which blew itself up in two World Wars) and has utterly failed at least one of what Bruce Charlton has termed the Litmus Tests.
Christian ecclesiology is long gone, and the theology/metaphysics and, consequently, the apologetics are having a very rough time of it. So the West finds itself in undiscovered country: our civilization no longer has an organizing religious principle.
We were taught the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables. What do kids teach their grandkids today to impress a moral code on them? I don’t go to church anymore or keep fasts or tithe and no longer see the point of a religion that only seems to impose the burden of praxis. I can stitch together something from the physical and biological laws of Nature but most people can’t. You should watch the Netflix series “Baby Reindeer” to see how utterly adrift and damaged younger generations have become.
I won’t be around to see it, but I expect at some point the people who emerge successfully from this interregnum will have a new theology and metaphysics. As someone who’s always loved old structures, old mountains and forests, old handtools, I am sorry to see Christianity go. (And I’ll add: I’d love to be proved wrong, but I perceive Christianity really is going. Charlton and the other Romantic Christians are trying to salvage something but I don’t think it will work. And I’m sure I’ll draw some comments about someone’s TradCath or Ortho parish with young families.)
The One God replaces the Many Gods and now the No God shows up to exile the One God. This is new territory for mankind.
AG,
I agree with your somber assessment of where matters stand, but contra our garrulous gadfly, I don’t see it as an indictment of Christianity itself. Was Richard Coeur de Lion weakened by Christianity? Was Charlemagne? Was Martel? Was Joan of Arc? Was Eisenhower? Were they fighting for what Nietzsche called a “slave morality”?
What I see is the late stage of a corrosive process, beginning in the Enlightenment (or perhaps even with the early Nominalists), of a radicalization of doubt that slowly became a “universal acid” that has now eaten away all belief in any transcendent metaphysics and objectively existing order. Every tradition, every moral intuition, any natural understanding of category and hierarchy, now must be hauled into the dock to justify its existence. This is a thing that cannot be done; it is an endless, regressive quest to prove, not our theorems, but our axioms themselves.
Christianity with its axioms removed turns the great civilization of the West into nothing more than a rotting skin suit, worn by savages who have nothing else to clothe themselves with. The stench of its decomposition reeks in our nostrils.
Hi Malcolm,
Great post and comments.
I agree that we’re in a late stage of a corrosive process, but there’s something else going too. The corrosive doubt is close to universal but not fully. And, in some weird way, it’s accompanied by a perverse creativity. A new system of fanatically held beliefs has been developing. They’re never doubted. It’s basically illegal to doubt them.
Take the example of Biden’s disgusting little sermon about “George Floyd”. The message is that the most obviously worthless and evil people in society are not only entirely blameless victims of oppression, but positively angelic; they’re the most noble, beautiful, inspiring people. Whatever they do (including the worst violent crimes) is acceptable or even good because they do it. And behind that message is the axiomatic belief in some lunatic concept of “equality”. Since Floyd is a thoroughly despicable person, we have to now believe that despicable things are good, or no worse than good things. (Otherwise, we’d have to think that some people are inferior to others.)
We’ve now reached the point where our sick commitment to “equality” leads to an explicit celebration of obvious evil and degeneracy and condemnation of virtue and decency. (We can’t level up but we can always level down.) In effect, Biden is telling us to accept murder, assault, theft and arson so as to avoid drawing any unflattering conclusions about certain special groups of people.
I don’t really understand it but this seems to be part of what’s happening. For some reason, the universal acid has no effect on the “equality” axiom. Everything else dissolves, but this one belief is never questioned or even acknowledged. And that one axiom, unconstrained by any others, seems to be a big factor in the corrosive process. Every sane belief is eventually denied because it conflicts somehow with the belief in “equality”.
But why is that? Why didn’t the Enlightenment destroy the belief in “equality”?
It might have something to do with Christianity. Or maybe “equality” is just a very useful meme in the high-low coalition you describe.