What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: […]
Commenter “Landroll” asks, in response to my previous post about the incremental militarization of the New York City subway system: Like the line from the song says, “Whatcha gonna do about it?” I don’t know what song that is, but: So far, what I’ve done about it has been to move out of New York, […]
January 24, 2024 – 1:42 pm
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) […]
January 22, 2024 – 7:43 pm
Look at this sickening video: At the speed society evolves, so too does warfare. pic.twitter.com/qU9lP5WAGT — Joshua Hartley (@JHartley2) January 22, 2024 This is a technology still in its infancy. The drone you see pursuing and killing this terrified man was guided by someone sitting comfortably in perfect safety far away. It’s possible that the […]
January 16, 2024 – 12:21 am
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 […]
January 7, 2024 – 1:15 pm
Before we wade, in our teeming millions, into the riotous disorder that 2024 is sure to bring, I thought it might be nice to “cleanse our timelines” for a moment in the clear air of a serene and ancient vastness where the vital spirit of remote antiquity still touches the living. Here, then, is Batzorig […]
December 29, 2023 – 10:22 pm
Reading the news in these last days, I’ve been trying to find the right word to describe how it feels to watch the briskly accelerating disorder of all our civic and political affairs. “Shocked” won’t do, as I’ve been expecting it for years. “Appalled”? Well, yes, of course, but that doesn’t really catch all of […]
December 26, 2023 – 6:38 pm
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 […]
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 […]
April 18, 2023 – 12:59 pm
Here’s a thread I posted on Twitter earlier today: When a computer stays on too long, with bloated apps running and leaking resources, it stops working well. What do you do? You reboot it. If that doesn’t work, you do a factory reset. You do whatever it takes to make a clean start. What does […]
“Man as man is conscious of the need of protection and direction, of cleansing from uncleanness, of power beyond his own strength. Through a multiplicity of forms, in different ages and races, this consciousness has sought expression, until at last it finds utterance in an insistent demand for God. Fear, ancestor worship, the personification of […]
March 18, 2023 – 11:01 pm
Sorry it’s been slow again here — I’ve been a bit under the weather. I do have something interesting for you tonight, though: a substantial essay, by a writer I’ve never encountered before, on the stubborn consistency of our perception of physical beauty — in particular, female beauty — across ages and cultures. The essay […]
February 21, 2023 – 5:16 pm
I live on a little dirt road in the piney woods of the far end of Cape Cod. Even in the summer season the Outer Cape is a relaxing getaway, but in the off-season it feels downright remote. If you get out on the forest trails in the unsettled parts of the protected National Seashore, […]
August 30, 2020 – 3:49 pm
I’ve just posted an adaptation of my old (2013) “Small World” essay at American Greatness. Here.
December 14, 2019 – 11:50 pm
I’ve just read Propaganda (1928), by Edward Bernays. Bernays, who died in 1995 at the uncommonly advanced age of 103, was the founder of the modern era of marketing and public relations. (Some would call this a “science”, as it does have an empirical and experimental side.) Bernays makes clear his opinion that the great […]
December 7, 2019 – 2:18 pm
Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built […]
Jefferson: Final cause Madison: Formal cause Washington: Efficient cause America’s British colonists: Material cause
In David Armistead’s fascinating and insightful book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the author distinguishes three kinds of civil war: “successionist”, “supersessionist”, and “secessionist”. Successionist civil wars are those that are fought over which individual shall sit atop a nation’s institutional hierarchy. The king dies. Who will succeed him? In this sort of war […]
Is it possible to balance order and entropy in complex societies while maintaining vitality and avoiding sclerosis and stasis? If we look at societies as living systems, they must maintain a dynamic, not static, equilibrium: to sustain life, energy must flow through them without disturbing the complex balance of internal parts and subsystems. They must […]
I note two related items in the media today: one is this story, about introducing a new “adversity score” to the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the other is this essay, by Heather Mac Donald, about the poor performance of “diversity hires” in elite law-firms. The link between them, is, of course, an unfortunate truth, previously […]
Thirteen years ago I wrote a post entitled Fall Guy, in which I noted that, whereas the summer and winter are seasons of stagnation, balanced upon the solstices and ending more or less as they begin, the spring and fall are times of movement and change: The seasons move in a cycle, and one might […]
November 20, 2018 – 11:58 pm
Traditional culture joins and harnesses the energies of individual lives to a great common structure, in order to lift it into the sky. Not all such programs succeed in getting into orbit; some even explode on the launch-pad. A few, though, may achieve escape velocity. Libertarianism, by comparison, is just a profusion of bottle-rockets.
October 27, 2018 – 4:03 pm
It’s hard to know what to say in the wake of the sickening horror in Pittsburgh today. Evil is real, and it is always at large in the world. Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Virgina Tech massacre, I wrote this: When this sort of thing happens, the natural reaction here in the […]
A habit of mine is to get outside to walk a few miles every day; it lifts the spirit, and clears the mind. Usually I am in one of Cape Cod’s remoter precincts, so I walk a favorite hilly trail in the pine-woods; but sometimes I am in New York, and I take my walk, […]
Around the Outer Cape in the off-season I’m reminded of how many people here are capable of subduing, commanding, and profitably plying the proximate physical world, and how stark the contrast is with the cosmopolitan, soft-handed symbol-manipulators who spend their time and money here in the summer. A great many of the people who live […]
February 8, 2018 – 3:42 pm
Patriotism makes concrete the joining of the self to something that is external, larger than oneself, and abstract enough not to get too bogged down in details, but also immanent in one’s immediate surroundings, in the world one actually lives in. (Religion does this too.) Globalist universalism is too remote. The individual makes his commitment […]
December 12, 2017 – 2:59 pm
How can anything benefit “society”? There is nothing we can call “society” that actually experiences anything at all — and what (and to whom) is the value of a benefit unexperienced? If “society” benefits, it is only experienced by individual persons, each of whom experiences any social benefit or blessing as an individual. There is […]
November 1, 2017 – 4:41 pm
The transgendered have become holy objects because, unlike those of us who are frozen in a conventional relation between our sex and our gender, and are trapped in the matrix of objective and pre-existing natural categories, the transgendered demonstrate the supremacy, and so the apotheosis, of the subjective. In a secular religion that denies the […]
October 8, 2017 – 11:54 pm
After the Las Vegas shooting, I noted that when I was a boy guns were a common and unremarkable part of normal American life: I grew up in a rural area of west-central New Jersey. When I was a boy, all the households around me had a gun or two. We boys used to stack […]
The other day I went for a stroll along the shore here in Wellfleet. The Outer Cape is very nearly the easternmost extension of the continental United States (save for a stretch of coastline in eastern Maine), and as I stood facing the sea I was aware of standing precisely on the boundary of two […]
March 30, 2017 – 10:43 pm
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading The Outline of History, published in 1920 by H. G. Wells. I’m still at it — I tend to have several books going at once, and this two-volume item is about 1,200 pages long. I’ve just read the brief entry on the conquests of Timurlane […]
Sturdy class structures, although they may diminish individual opportunity, keep superior genes, when they arise, within each class. In doing so, then, they strengthen classes at every level. High social mobility, by contrast, tends to “boil off” superior individuals, who, when they are given the opportunity to do so, move up and out — taking […]