Happy birthday, America. Never in my lifetime has the fate of the Union seemed more precarious. To begin our 245th year, President Trump gave a rousing defense of the traditional American nation at Mount Rushmore. Unlike the terrible forces arrayed against him, this man truly loves his country, and he understands the awful threat it […]
When football season opens, if it does, we’ll be hearing two national anthems. (Readers of a certain age may remember one of them; it went with the deprecated American nation we all grew up with.) The NFL will be playing the “Black National Anthem” before “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Why would one nation have two national […]
It surprises me that anyone on the Right (or for that matter, anyone of middle years or older who grew up in the former United States, and feels that he or she has had a pretty good life) would have any hesitation at all about supporting Donald Trump — not only in the upcoming election, […]
With a hat-tip to my e-pal David Duff, here is an open letter written by a black professor at UC Berkeley urging us not to be taken in by the infantilizing Democrat race-hustle known as Black Lives Matter. The writer makes the essential points: that BLM promotes a malignant, paternalistic ideology that “strips black people […]
Here are two black voices that have very little chance of being heard above the din. Both are tenured professors at Ivy League universities: Glenn C. Loury of Brown, and John McWhorter of Columbia. (Given, by the way, that Brown University was founded on slave-trade wealth, and Columbia was named after noted unperson Christopher Columbus, […]
I wrote a while back about the tidal forces straining the Left as it falls deeper into the gravity well surrounding an all-consuming singularity. In a sharp essay just published, Matt Taibbi looks at the disintegrating American press.
I’ve long supported subsidiarianism – the idea that government should be as local, and locally accountable, as possible. I’ve also been saying for years that the U.S. has become so large, and so diverse, as to be ungovernable by central authority. What’s worse, the power held by that central authority is so pathetically insecure that […]
Well! As I write an ISIS-style warlord, a rapper named Raz Simone, has declared a portion of a major American city — Seattle, Washington — to be an autonomous region no longer part of the United States of America. He is enforcing his rule over the Capitol Hill neighborhood of that city in the usual […]
I’ve said for years that the missionary Progressivism now in control of every aspect of our civilization can only be properly understood as a religion. And just as the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century were attended by great waves of repentance for our sins, and the fear of Hell, exactly so is […]
We hear a lot these days (possibly the understatement of the year) about bias; in particular “implicit bias”. In a recent article about racism, though, a young black writer mentions some other kinds of bias: First, our intuitions about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what we can easily recall—news items, shocking […]
The late Yuri Bezmenov explains. (To bring this fully up to date, we would swap out “Marxism”.)
I’m browsing my old posts, to see how much of our current state of affairs was visible in prospect years ago. Here’s a long excerpt from something I published back in 2012. * * * * * * * … Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation […]
This Corona-chan crisis has been an excellent experiment in determining just how much we are willing to imprison and fetter ourselves to avoid danger. Our prolonged interval of peace and prosperity since the Second World War — our isolation from the hormesis of what, throughout history, have been regular calamities and stresses — has made […]
Over at American Greatness yesterday, Mackubin Owens has written a short piece entitled ‘Pandemic Is Shining a Light on the American Character‘. Indeed it has. There have of course been many Americans who have shown great courage in manning their stations, and keeping necessary infrastructure working, despite personal risk. Had it not been for them, […]
Two motives must be kept in mind as we debate public policy regarding this lockdown: First, elected politicians have one universal and overriding priority, which is to preserve their seats, and so to minimize short-term public risk. If they are faced with a choice between, say, liberty and security, they will consistently, and quite naturally, […]
Our e-pal Bill K. sent along the following updated parable this morning: * * * * * * * * * * * * * The ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER This one is a little different … Two Different Versions … Two Different Morals OLD VERSION The ant works hard in the withering heat […]
Here are the latest Wuhan Red Death stats from the CDC. The page shows the week-by week numbers since the beginning of the outbreak. As of May 1st, the revised U.S. total is 37,308. Enjoy your new economy.
April 25, 2020 – 12:39 pm
I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog lately. Life is beginning to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, with few new impressions to think or write about (other than the books I’ve been reading in the evenings the past couple of weeks, which I’m still digesting). I’ve been spending a lot of time down […]
April 17, 2020 – 12:39 pm
Our reader the indefatigable JK has introduced me to a blogger I’d never heard of: B.J. Campbell, whose posts are collected under the title Handwaving Freakoutery. The post that JK sent me today is about the possible consequences for social order of this ongoing (and, increasingly, arguably unconstitutional) lockdown. It begins with an amusing roundup […]
Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey published a brief item today about the cost, in human life, of this indiscriminate shutdown of the American economy. A key excerpt: Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase […]
Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this Wuhan-virus emergency is how clearly it reveals the breadth and depth of the great fissure dividing the nation. In times of crisis, families set aside their internal squabbles: Me and my brother We fight with each other But woe betide The guy from outside. When the towers fell […]
Curtis Yarvin (whose erstwhile nom de plume “Mencius Moldbug” we will, for the time being, continue to mention), has posted a new essay calling for a temporary dictatorship to combat the Wuhan coronavirus. After a discussion of the many, many shortcomings, weaknesses, and debilities of our national government, and of democracy in general — which […]
March 22, 2020 – 11:18 pm
I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that our reaction to this Wuhan virus, if it keeps the economy comatose for any appreciable length of time, will do more damage than anything the disease itself might have wrought. On the more benign end of the scale, we have at minimum a crisis that has already been […]
People have been likening the economic devastation caused by this health crisis to the effects of war. Here’s a thought that occurred to me today: in the aftermath of wars (or other great disasters), a major part of the economic recovery consists of rebuilding all the infrastructure that’s been destroyed. (After World War II, the […]
March 20, 2020 – 11:24 pm
The great Black Swan of our age has alighted upon our shores, and it catches us at the end of a great historical anomaly: an era of peace, safety and prosperity of such uncommon length that most of us have never known anything else. (This goes a long way, as I’ve argued elsewhere, to explaining […]
A young person, someone I am very fond of and have known for many years, wrote me today with a harsh assessment of Donald Trump, surprised and disappointed that I would defend such a man against some of the charges recently leveled against him in the press. Mr. Trump, in my correspondent’s opinion, is “a […]
March 11, 2020 – 11:58 am
Over at American Greatness, Chris Buskirk discusses what Wuhan coronavirus should teach us about self-reliance. Here.
Making the rounds today: These imbeciles are our cultural overlords. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder that they only have what power we give them.
February 27, 2020 – 10:34 pm
As the world sinks deeper into panic over the coronavirus outbreak, I’ll remind you again to have a look at Curtis Yarvin’s paean to global decoupling, published last month at The American Mind. (I’ll drop a link also to a far briefer item of my own, from 2018.) Not long ago — in my own […]
February 24, 2020 – 11:29 pm
Here’s a chilling item from Rod Dreher about the green shoots of totalitarianism now rising in our academies. How we arrived at this place — how this became possible, and what led to its becoming actual at our specific point in history — is an important question about the great cycles of human societies. But […]
February 8, 2020 – 5:43 pm
John Batchelor is in Baku again this week — I don’t know how he does it, at his age — but he managed to continue his weekly conversation with historian Michael Vlahos on the question of American civil war. This week, Mr. Batchelor comments on an obvious metaphor from this week’s news that I (somehow!) […]
February 6, 2020 – 1:23 pm
Growing older has its consolations. Among them are a blessed respite from the tumultuous urgencies of youth, and the time and perspective for contemplation and deeper understanding. That perspective and understanding can, however, leave the contemplative geezer feeling at times downright disconsolate, when he looks around himself and sees how much there is in our […]
January 22, 2020 – 10:55 pm
“Impatience and ignorance are characteristic of democratic ages; coarsely ambitious men generally are at the helm of state; dignity is wanting in the conduct of affairs, although arrogance is not lacking; the decay of the family, especially in America, to the status of a mere household, removes one of the ancient supports of social tranquillity; […]
January 20, 2020 – 4:51 pm
Martin Luther King — or, at least, the man as publicly imagined — would be aghast if he saw how the politics of collectivist grievance-bloc identitarianism — ‘Bioleninism’, to give a nod to the subject of our previous post — has come to dominate American life in the decades since he died. People should be […]
January 18, 2020 – 12:32 pm
In a comment on our previous post, Professor J.M. Smith said: Our society is shot through with an incredible amount of intelligence, but a great deal of it seems to work in service of things that are low and stupid. Think of someone snap-chatting selfies using a smartphone and the internet. The end of their […]
January 16, 2020 – 5:59 pm
Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death […]
January 14, 2020 – 11:47 pm
Over at Unz Review, Steve Sailer comments on Baltimore’s homicide statistics, in which 303 murders were committed with handguns, and only 9 with long guns (the stats lump together rifles and shotguns, so the number of rifles used was almost certainly fewer than 9). Blunt objects and knives each were used in more murders than […]
January 10, 2020 – 11:08 pm
Women and demographic minorities living in the modern West inhabit the least racist, least sexist society that has ever existed. They have greater liberty, and a broader scope of opportunity, than they have ever had anywhere on earth. Yet to listen to public discourse, or to look over any university’s curriculum, would give a newcomer […]
January 9, 2020 – 10:04 pm
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen […]
December 20, 2019 – 6:34 pm
Some good news: a major MS-13 bust in Long Island.
December 19, 2019 – 6:39 pm
Looking out over the rubble of our political system today, I’m reminded of a post from 2015, in which I argued that the political struggle of Right versus Left is not a contest of different policy preferences, but something far more basic, and more universal, even than human existence itself: the struggle against entropy, against […]
December 4, 2019 – 1:37 pm
In a recent item at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla acknowledges that America is divided beyond the possibility of reconciliation. [R]estoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition […]
November 30, 2019 – 7:03 pm
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 […]
November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
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) […]
November 27, 2019 – 3:51 pm
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]