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 […]
November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
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 […]
October 30, 2019 – 4:44 pm
Heather Mac Donald has an article up at The New Criterion about racial preferences in college admissions, with particular attention to a case making its way to the Supreme Court that cites Harvard’s discrimination against Asians. Ms. Mac Donald argues that current SCOTUS jurisprudence on racial preferences is an incoherent mess, and that when the […]
October 22, 2019 – 8:24 pm
A few weeks ago, as I recovered from a bad cold, I posted a review, by Michael Anton, of the book Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). At the time I said: The book is essentially a Nietzschean manifesto — though it describes itself not as a work […]
October 18, 2019 – 8:42 pm
Back in August, the New Yorker ran an interview with Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The interview was, of course, adversarial: Professor Wax, a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, is an outspoken conservative and defender of traditional Western values and ideas. In this interview […]
October 1, 2019 – 5:07 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s the latest insanity from the Ministry of Truth: woke math. It’s easy to see why mathematical literacy has to go: numbers don’t lie.
September 26, 2019 – 1:52 pm
Mencius Moldbug: [W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this […]
September 25, 2019 – 9:57 pm
This seems timely: here are the two latest installments of John Batchelor’s ongoing conversation with historian Michael Vlahos about the darkening clouds of civil war. In these two segments (twenty minutes in all), the two discuss messianic and millenarian revolutionary movements, past and present. Things do seem to have ratcheted up a bit, even […]
September 3, 2019 – 7:07 pm
Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is […]
August 31, 2019 – 3:44 pm
We hear all the time — it’s a favorite trope of our current crop of Democratic candidates — that the United States has a shamefully high percentage of people living in poverty. Not so fast, say the authors of a new study. Where these accusations go wrong is that they measure only paychecks, and not […]
August 21, 2019 – 8:19 pm
A young man by the name of Joshua Lawson, who is a graduate student at Hillsdale College, has written a vigorous response to the New York Times’s Orwellian project of “reframing” all of American history as a Marxist narrative of racial oppression. The essay is published at The Federalist. Mr. Lawson provides moral and historical […]
August 19, 2019 – 1:34 pm
If any of you had any lingering illusions about the New York Times being any sort of impartial “news” agency, you can put them to rest. In an all-hands staff meeting last week, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in explicit terms that, the paper’s propaganda war against Donald Trump having suffered a defeat in the […]
August 15, 2019 – 8:27 pm
Michael Anton has published an outstanding essay at Claremont’s American Mind — his best, I think, since his influential “Flight 93 Election” piece back in 2016. The essay begins with a discussion of the mainstream-media narrative surrounding mass shootings, and of the collaboration of the pseudoconservative pundits he calls the “Vichycons” in support of that […]
I’ve paid little attention to the news over the past few days, but two related stories have percolated through. The first is the decision by the city of Charlottesville, VA, to put an end to its annual celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Older readers, who received their education prior to the Ministry of Truth having […]
This morning’s assortment of email alerts included a fine short essay by Anthony Esolen, writing at American Greatness on the subject of “toxic masculinity”. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a longish excerpt: We’ve all been hearing plenty about “toxic masculinity’ these days, and never from people who trouble to tell us what […]
From Richard Fernandez: what happened in Portland this weekend — an unholy merger of self-imagined virtue with willingness to inflict terror — is nothing new. (Just ask Robespierre.)
The New York Times has published an article, with lovely graphics, explaining that the GOP is now an extreme right-wing party, while the Democrats — whose presidential candidates were on stage tonight calling for, among other things, abolishing private healthcare, stripping and redistributing legally earned wealth that they believe to be “in the wrong hands”, […]
Yesterday’s post, in which I attempted a taxonomy of civil war, brought out a long and sorrowful reply from a reader by the name of Casey. I began to respond in the comment-thread, but the concern Casey expressed seems to me so prevalent in traditionalist and conservative circles lately that I thought that I should […]
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 […]
My friend Bill Vallicella has posted another interesting item on the idea of America as a “proposition nation”. Bill, who is quite rightly trying to find a middle way between open-borders multiculturalism and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, begins by citing with approval a quote from Patrick Buchanan: But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, […]
Do you still read the papers? Do you send a letter to the editor now and then, or leave a comment at the online version? Enjoy it while it lasts, warns John Derbyshire. Here.
In Monday’s post about Angela Saini’s race-denialist polemic, I should have added a few words about the deep moral and philosophical errors that lead so many people to fear, and to seek to suppress, the stubborn realities of human biodiversity. (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) For Americans […]