Facebook, Trump, Obama, and the persistent fallacy of media “hypocrisy”

We’ve been hearing a lot about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data-mining story, in which personal information about Facebook users was scooped up by a firm working for the Trump campaign. The media have been all over it. It’s been terrible PR for Facebook, and the company’s stock has dropped sharply.

The media response was not, however, so negative when the Obama campaign did the same thing, with Facebook’s acquiescence, back in 2012. Back then, the New York Times called Mr. Obama’s social-media manipulators “digital masterminds“.

This has a lot of people over on the Republican side of the aisle blasting the mainstream media for hypocrisy. But if that’s the way you’re looking at this, you couldn’t be more wrong. What the MSM are showing here is, in fact, disciplined adherence to a timeless and consistent political principle:

Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.

How I wish more people understood this!

P.S.

An addendum to yesterday’s “reactionary roundup“:

In the Radio Derb podcast linked to in the post, Mr. Derbyshire reported on the detention and deportation of several identitarian dissidents who had come to England to express their views at Hyde Park’s famous Speakers Corner. One was a young Austrian by the name of Martin Sellner.

Mr. Sellner having been booted out of the country (which, to be fair, any nation has the right to do, for any reason it likes), the English dissenter Tommy Robinson read Mr. Sellner’s speech in absentia. You can read it yourself, here. (The topic, aptly, is freedom of speech.)

For context, here are the latest “hate-crime” guidelines published by London’s Metropolitan Police. They include the following language (my emphasis):

A Hate Incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

Not all hate incidents will amount to criminal offences, but it is equally important that these are reported and recorded by the police.

Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.

Are you getting this, readers? Here we are in London, the birthplace and nursery of the magnificent Western legal tradition, and now in 2018 the very heart of that tradition — objective truth, as supported by evidence — is, like an Aztec sacrifice, to be ripped from the still-living body of the English nation and offered to the gods. (The gods in this latter obeisance are no longer Xipe-Totec and Quetzalcoatl, but their modern replacements: Diversity, Equality, and Multiculturalism.)

It does seem, though there is scant comfort in it, that the authorities, wary of backlash, are proceeding with some caution. Apparently the original guidelines contained this language as well, since removed:

If someone does something that isn’t a criminal offence but the victim, or anyone else, believes it was motivated by prejudice or hate, we would class this as a ”˜hate incident’. Though what the perpetrator has done may not be against the law, their reasons for doing it are. This means it may be possible to charge them with an offence.

George Orwell had a name for this: thoughtcrime. He saw the future of what he called “Airstrip One” with terrifying accuracy, getting the dates wrong by a mere three decades.

Finally: all of this is in perfect conformance to another, higher Law: Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations.

Reactionary Roundup

For tonight, something to listen to and some things to read.

To listen to, we have John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb. This week’s 43-minute installment is dedicated to the cultural and demographic death of his ancestral homeland, the British Isles. It is a melancholy survey of the ruin of a great nation, but some things need to be heard. Please listen, if you have the time.

To read, we have two essays: a Catholic critique of the “alt-right” (now a catch-all term that is used more by critics of anyone to the right of Lindsay Graham than by the variegated dissidents, traditionalists, neoreactionaries, anti-universalists, anarcho-capitalists, Moldbuggians, technofuturists, ethnoidentitarians, critics of democracy, etc. to which it is so carelessly and indiscriminately fastened in the popular media), written by Matthew Rose at First Things, and a response by Costin Alamariu at Social Matter.

Rose considers a defining characteristic of this nebula of right-wing thought to be an antipathy to Christianity, which he ascribes to a belief that Christianity’s universalism has brought the West to a condition of “pathological altruism”. He is right that this is a recognized problem in neoreactionary circles, but in my own experience it does not result in a rejection of Christianity itself — which most Dark Enlightenment types see as an essential part of the traditional Western organism — but of the mutated, radically egalitarian Protestant cryptoreligion that has effectively become the established faith of the liberal, “secular” West. Are there atheists in this mix? Absolutely. Pagans? Yes, those as well. The dissident Right is large; it contains multitudes. But to characterize it as monolithically, or even largely, anti-Christian gets it wrong. (To imagine it as in any significant way anti-religious would be an even greater error.)

Alamariu responds to this:

Regarding Christianity, most people on the “alt-right’ are distinguished from the general population and from the mainstream of American conservatism precisely because they are religious, or rather, traditionalist. Matthew Rose might be acquainted with Twitter accounts like @NoTrueScotist (Tradical). These are not an exception, and are far more representative of the right-wing movement arising now in Western nations than anyone Rose mentions in the article.

Take France as an example. The “alt-right’ uprising in France precedes that in the United States, and began in 2013 with protests against the recently passed gay marriage law, and against mass immigration. Roughly 2% of France still believes in the monarchy”“not a symbolic or constitutional monarchy, but the King in Versailles with the Church ruling France together with the army. A much larger percentage wouldn’t go so far but comes close. They reject the French Revolution, and they reject a Catholic Church that betrayed the monarchy and itself””not to speak of what they think about Vatican II. But these are devout Catholics, many of who belong to the Society of Saint Pius X. Many come from France’s oldest families, including those who founded the French presence in the Antilles and other colonies. Many of these youth form the backbone of organizations like Generation Identitaire in France, a group Matthew Rose would no doubt label “alt-right.’ Their families have long-standing connections with Action Francaise, and more recently with Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement Pour la France. It is an act of arrogance or of ignorance to claim that such people are less devout because they don’t embrace Catholicism in the same way Rose does.

To be fair, Rose in fact argues that to see Christianity as being, in nationalistic terms, pathologically altruistic is a mistake. He writes:

The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, “God has made all the nations [ethnos].’ The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible.

Here Rose relies upon a distinction between “race” and “nation”. This is a particularly modern sleight-of hand, inasmuch as the distinction was essentially meaningless in Biblical times, and is only comprehensible in the context of the modern “proposition nation” — which is, of course, precisely what much of modern reactionary thought calls into question as a sufficient basis for durable and harmonious nationhood, depending as it does upon an axiom of universality and interchangeability of widely divergent human populations.

Alamariu offers this in reply:

Although it’s only mentioned as an aside in his article, central to Rose’s argument is the tired cliché, so beloved of polite conservatives and tamed traditionalists, that “racism is modern.’ This would be news to the devout Catholic Spaniards who spread Rose’s faith across the world and who came up with the concepts of limpieza de sangre, or with the casta system in the colonies and its myriad classifications like mestizo, castizo, zambo, and even more exotic, stratified in a formal racial hierarchy. It would be news to those very unmodern men who made the Law of Manu in India. The truth is what common sense would expect it to be: race is one of the oldest and most robust ways that mankind has had to distinguish different groups, and has always been central to the definition of peoplehood.

Rose gives the example of ancient Greece as the foundation not of racism but of a healthy nationalism, and points to the word ethnos; but as the other word genos implies, ideas of race existed even then. Plato’s republic was an idealized eugenic state modeled on the real-life eugenic state of Sparta, which continued a Dorian tradition of racial eugenics and concern with heredity explicitly promoted in the writings of poets like Pindar and Theognis. The fact that ancient peoples didn’t divide races in the same way we do is not surprising: they didn’t have much contact with either blacks or Asians, let alone Australian aborigines. But the claim that race is a recent invention and therefore can be looked down on by a Gentleman of Tradition is false. It’s a cop-out by weak conservatives who seek merely a kind of status in distinguishing themselves from “vulgar’ racists. It’s a pose and affectation largely for display in front of the Left. In his Politics, Aristotle very clearly says that difference of race is a cause of faction in states, and one of the surest causes of their destruction; the fact that he believed even the different Greek lineages were bound to hate and fight each other does not support the claim, as Rose and other “traditionalists’ imply, that they would have gotten along just fine with a Saxon, a Yoruba, or a Mapuche.

Later on, Alamariu adds:

The assault on health, on beauty, on manliness, on Christianity, on intelligence, accountability and competence as such, has gone a great way to forcing this most vital part of the youth into a virtuous reaction: this recently-spread meme is, in fact, the truth, or not far from it.

There’s much more. Read it all. The Rose article is here, and Alamariu’s response is here.

Rule of law, or rule by whim?

Nobody has brought more clarity to reporting on the tempest of scandals and investigations flooding the political landscape than National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy. As the federal prosecutor who handled the case against the “Blind Sheik” Omar Adbel Rahman for the 1993 Word Trade center bombing, he brings expertise and authority to a topic that would bewilder even the best-informed layman, and he writes with limpid exactitude. It is no small thing to do this so well, and we are lucky to have him.

Today he looks at the increasingly Byzantine convolutions and divagations of the Mueller probe, and in particular its highly irregular prosecution of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates. His article begins:

These columns have many times observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to set limits on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. To trigger the appointment of a special counsel, federal regulations require the Justice Department to identify the crimes that warrant investigation and prosecution ”” crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate in the normal course; crimes that become the parameters of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

Rosenstein, instead, put the cart before the horse: Mueller was invited to conduct a fishing expedition, a boundless quest to hunt for undiscovered crimes, rather than an investigation and prosecution of known crimes.

That deviation, it turns out, is not the half of it. With Rosenstein’s passive approval, Mueller is shredding Justice Department charging policy by alleging earth-shattering crimes, then cutting a sweetheart deal that shields the defendant from liability for those crimes and from the penalties prescribed by Congress. The special counsel, moreover, has become a legislature unto himself, promulgating the new, grandiose crime of “conspiracy against the United States’ by distorting the concept of “fraud.’

Why does the special counsel need to invent an offense to get a guilty plea? Why doesn’t he demand a plea to one of the several truly egregious statutory crimes he claims have been committed?

Good questions.

Mr. McCarthy then explains, in fascinating detail, the charges leveled against Messrs. Manafort and Gates, and the strange deviations from normal procedure, and from the meaning of the law, that the prosecutorial team has made in pursuing these cases.

The article concludes with this:

Think about how bizarre this is. For public consumption, the special counsel alleges breathtaking felony offenses ”” bank fraud, tax fraud, and money laundering, crimes involving over $100 million when aggregated. Yet, to obtain a guilty plea from one of the allegedly serious felons, Mueller finds it necessary to abandon the hair-raising felonies he purports to have found. If these felonies are readily provable, as Mueller has claimed in his indictments, they are supposed to form the basis of any plea under Justice Department policy. If Gates is the mega-criminal nine-digit fraudster the special counsel has portrayed, he is not supposed to get a slap on the wrist. Yet Mueller accepts a plea to minor charges, including a Section 371 conspiracy that is a prosecutorial invention ”” designed to shield the allegedly serious felon from penalties Congress has decreed for the misconduct involved.

These charges against Gates and Manafort have nothing to do with “collusion with Russia,’ the investigation for which Rosenstein appointed Mueller. There is no reason this case could not have been prosecuted by regular Justice Department lawyers. There was no need for a special counsel for this. And regular Justice Department prosecutors, overseen by engaged Justice Department superiors ensuring adherence to well-established Justice Department policies, would not prosecute a case this way.

For the details — and if you care about being an informed observer of this historic it is worth your time to understand them — read the whole thing, here.

It gets worse

Writing at the Federalist, Molly Hemingway gives us the latest on the DOJ’s skulduggery in the Trump investigation: a personal relationship between FBI agent Peter Strzok and the FISA-court judge Rudy Contreras, who mysteriously recused himself was recused after taking Mike Flynn’s guilty plea.

Ms. Hemingway’s story, which is based on newly obtained text messages between Strzok and his mistress, fellow agent Lisa Page, is here.

Worlds in collision

In the comment-thread to our previous post, we see in microcosm the tremendous fissure in American culture and politics. It goes far deeper than mere disagreements about policy; it has reached the point in which the two sides have entirely different conceptions of moral, political, cultural, social, historical, and even human reality — views that are not only incommensurable, but mutually and bitterly antagonistic.

This would be bad enough if the parties were engaged in a merely social dispute, but they are not: they are implacable rivals in a great contest for sovereignty over the entire American nation.

The problem is exacerbated by the ever-increasing centralization of American sovereignty in the Federal government, control of which meant far less in the early days of the Republic, but which has now become a struggle with truly existential stakes for the nation’s future. (Imagine a fully loaded tractor-trailer careening down a mountain road, with two mortal enemies in the cab fighting for the wheel, and you will have a sense of American political society in the early decades of the new millennium.)

This centralization, which has raised the stakes of political struggle to such dangerous heights, is itself a central battleground in our cold civil war. Were we able to return to the vision of government that the Framers intended — a federation of States, operating on the subsidiarian premise that government should be as local as possible, with the Federal apparatus limited to powers and responsibilities that are few and carefully enumerated — control of Washington would matter so little that there would be almost nothing there to fight over.

The singular exception to this, in America’s history, was of course the great question of slavery, now resolved at the cost of 600,000 lives and the subjugation of the South. That great civil war was a chastening lesson in the limits of comity and the willingness of Americans — and all people everywhere — to shed each other’s blood over incommensurable political and cultural axioms. (It left a terrible wound that was very slow to heal — to the extent that it healed at all — and that is now, in an ominous symptom of accumulated tectonic stress, being torn open again.)

Another crisis of comity now threatens us all: one that is, perhaps, even more ominous than that of the 1800s, in that there can be no geographical solution. I am not alone in thinking that we are already far closer to the breaking point than most of us realize.

The mouths of babes

We’ve been treated in recent days to the spectacle of schoolchildren marching in the streets to demand legislative restrictions on gun acquisition and ownership. This sort of thing is nothing new; I remember my own adolescence, in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and the student protests of that era.

When you’re that age, it’s fun and exciting to do what we saw the kids doing this week: to play a little hooky, block some traffic, make some noise, taste the thrill of shared, unbridled emotion — and, most of all, to get a lot of attention while lecturing your elders about how the world could be easily and profitably improved, if only they could see past their fossilized habits of mind (or, failing that, be pushed out of the way).

Looking back on my own ardent youth — which by happenstance took place in a curious epoch, as whenever we are young, in which old folks were fools and children were wise — my nostalgic impulse is to say “more power to them”. In doing so, I’d be echoing the sentiments of a great many in the media and chattering classes who insist that these children should not only be listened to — which I’m happy to indulge for a minute or two if I must — but given the vote.

The nostalgic impulse, however, quickly passes. Reason and wisdom regain the helm. “More power to them”?? God help us all. These are teenagers, folks. Have you ever been, or had any intimate association with, a teenager? If so, you will agree that the amount of power they should have over public policy is, quite precisely, zero.

Every adult knows this, of course, which means that those calling for this ludicrous expansion of an already far-too-inclusive franchise do so for cynical and tactical reasons. Can you imagine that if these cherubs were marching for Israeli-style school security, or for sensible immigration restrictions, or for an end to the poisonous cult-Marx grievance-mongering that has ruined all of our institutions, that they’d be the media darlings they are today? Of course not. If high-school seniors were marching for the right to carry pistols in class to defend themselves, would the Governor of New York beclown himself, and soil an expensive suit, to egg them on? No. (Duh.)

Ah, but then I have to ask myself: how would I feel if they were demanding such things? Wouldn’t I see them as the great hope for the future? Wouldn’t I be thrilled that a new generation of American youth had finally wised up to the catastrophe that my own generation of lotus-eating Utopian Universalist cryptoreligious hippies had wrought upon their magnificent heritage and birthright?

Well, yes. You bet I would! I’d be climbing a lamp-post to cheer them on.

But give them the vote? Are you kidding? They’re children. Have we lost our minds?

Service notice

Well, I’m back up, it seems. The technical problems on the backend appear to have been due to some gummed-up WordPress plugins and an old version of PHP.

I’ll confess that I had begun to suspect that something darker was happening. My recent exclusion from Google search results (while Bing and DuckDuckGo results were unaffected) has got me looking over my shoulder a bit, I guess. (I’d like to think there’s an innocent explanation for that, too, but I don’t have one.)

Anyway, I’ll ask you all to let me know if you notice any problems henceforth — in particular, slow loading, or any reappearance of the caching issue that caused the comment-box to be pre-populated with the previous commenter’s information.

Thank you all for your patience, and I hope to get back to normal output shortly. It’s bracing to have the site working properly again.

You must look at evil, because evil looks at you

With a hat-tip to our friend Bill K., here’s a good, short video (just over four minutes) on the realities of evil, guns, progressive hoplophobia, and protecting our schools.

Service notice

A busy couple of days. Back shortly.

I’ve noticed also that there have been a lot of backend errors recently that have been affecting connectivity here. I’m investigating and hope to have a resolution shortly. Thanks for your patience.

Update, 3/12: The backend problem persists. (Just posting this update took me half an hour.) Support ticket submitted with my hosting/security vendors.

One thing leads to another

“Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy intoxication extravagance Vice and folly?”

John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 21st 1819

North Korea: is Donald Trump just another chump?

Big news tonight about a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un. Most commentators, including many I respect, are suggesting that Mr. Trump is being played, just as previous presidents were. I’m not so sure. Here’s why.

What’s different this time around is that Trump is using a different lever, and he isn’t using it directly against North Korea.

Who does North Korea depend on for its survival?

China.

What does China depend on for its economic survival?

Trade with the United States.

I’ll leave it there.

The 9th Circus

Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals allowed a children’s climate-advocacy group to proceed with a lawsuit against the Trump administration for not preventing global warming. The suit argues, with a straight face, that inaction by the Federal government to produce what the plaintiffs believe to be necessary carbon-reduction policy violates the children’s Constitutional rights — and the Court finds this plausible enough to let the suit go forward.

Madness.

Heart of the matter

Walter Williams:

“We must own up to the fact that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society.”

Is Putin bluffing?

If you didn’t listen to the John Batchelor show last night, you missed an informative (and worrisome) conversation between the host and Professor Stephen F. Cohen about the new U.S. – Russian arms race.

The issue is this: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has abandoned the commitment to parity that prevented mutual destruction during the Cold War. The expansion of NATO beginning in the 1990’s, and the abrogation of the ABM treaty by George Bush, pushed Russia, apparently deprived of effective retaliation to a U.S. first strike, and confronted by NATO forces now deployed right up to its borders, into an increasingly tight corner. On March 1st, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia now has a new generation of nuclear weapons that render our missile defenses obsolete — and if his claims are true, the new weapons not only restore parity, but have given Russia tactical (and therefore strategic) superiority.

You can hear the discussion in two parts, here and here. See also the relevant section of Putin’s March 1st speech, here.

Pentimento

Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology.

It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.

PJB on tariffs

If you’re familiar with Patrick Buchanan, you won’t be surprised to know that his latest column is a ringing defense of tariffs.

An excerpt:

“Trade wars are not won, only lost,’ warns Sen. Jeff Flake.

But this is ahistorical nonsense.

The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900.

Bismarck’s Germany, born in 1871, followed the U.S. example, and swept past free trade Britain before World War I.

Does Senator Flake think Japan rose to post-war preeminence through free trade, as Tokyo kept U.S. products out, while dumping cars, radios, TVs and motorcycles here to kill the industries of the nation that was defending them. Both Nixon and Reagan had to devalue the dollar to counter the predatory trade policies of Japan.

Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits, and, in the first decade in this century, we lost 55,000 factories and 6,000,000 manufacturing jobs.

Does Flake see no correlation between America’s decline, China’s rise, and the $4 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up at the expense of his own country?

The hysteria that greeted Trump’s idea of a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum suggest that restoring this nation’s economic independence is going to be a rocky road.

In 2017, the U.S. ran a trade deficit in goods of almost $800 billion, $375 billion of that with China, a trade surplus that easily covered Xi Jinping’s entire defense budget.

Read the rest here.

“Liquid modernity”

With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s Rod Dreher commenting on this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water. (If you aren’t familiar with the story — due, perhaps, to your having been in a coma for several months — it is about a woman who enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with an anthropoid fish-creature.)

Mr. Dreher offers an acute comment from a reader:

[T]he turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.

This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.

Revenge it is. Another of Mr. Dreher’s commenters quotes Jimmy Kimmel, hosting the Academy Awards on Sunday, on another popular movie:

“We don’t make films like [pederasty celebration] ‘Call Me By Your Name’ for money, We make them to upset Mike Pence.”

Whither hence, readers?

Two kinds of people

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 year-round in my little town — with the general exception of retirees from elsewhere — have these skills, and knock together a living building and repairing things, and/or pulling food from sea and marsh and forest. (The sexes seem sharply distinguished as well, which I think is not a coincidence.)

In Gurdjieff‘s system of inner work, the practice of “self-remembering” stressed awareness of the body. This is effective because the grounding of our experience in the physicality of the body is what brings us back to our actually existing selves in the present moment: to what is real, now. Practical engagement with the physical world works in the same way to keep a life of symbols, ideas, and abstractions from becoming wholly unmoored from reality and drifting off into cloud-castles and hallucinations. The physical world, and its truths, are stubborn, and persistent, and in the end will make their claim on our attention, whether we like it or not.

This division, between those who must in some way engage and control the physical world in their work and those who do not, is a chief feature of the great cultural fissure in present-day America.

It all makes me aware, when I’m in New York, of how brittle and technology-dependent the whole shebang is nowadays. if something goes badly and suddenly wrong — a Carrington Event or something like that — it won’t be pretty, and it would be good not to be in the cities.

ZMan on tariffs

In a recent post I declined to comment on the proposed imposition of new tariffs, pleading ignorance of the subject. The uncommonly astute blogger calling himself “ZMan”, however, has a definite opinion. An excerpt:

The fact is, the current trade regime ushered in after the Cold War, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like Pat Buchanan warned about 30 years ago. Open trade with Canada, an English-speaking first world country, is mostly beneficial. Trade with Mexico, a third world narco-state that now operates as a pirate’s cove for Chinese and American business, has been a disaster. NAFTA has made Mexico a massive loophole in American labor, tax, environmental and trade policy. A loophole ruthlessly exploited by China.

The current trade regime is also at the heart of the cosmopolitan globalism that seeks to reduce nations to a fiction and people to economic inputs. This neoliberal orthodoxy has eroded social capital to the point where the white middle class is nearing collapse. It’s not just America. The collapsing fertility rates in the Occident are part of the overall cultural collapse going in the West. Slapping tariffs on Chinese steel are not going to arrest this trend, but it does open the door for cultural critiques of the prevailing orthodoxy.

That’s the reality our betters would just as soon not allow back into the conversation. The fact is, a nation is its people. What defines France is the shared character and shared heritage of the people we call French. What defines a people is not the cost of goods or the price of labor. What defines a people is what they love together and what they hate together. It is the collection of tastes and inclinations, no different than family traditions, that have been cultivated and passed down from one generation to the next.

Even putting the cultural arguments aside, global capitalism erodes the civic institutions that hold society together. Instead of companies respecting the laws of host nations and working to support the welfare of the people of that nation, business is encouraged to cruise the world looking for convenient ports. There’s a word for this form of capitalism. It’s called piracy. Global firms flit from port to port, with no interest other than the short term gain to be made at that stop. Globalism is rule by pirates.

This resonates well with my view of globalist capitalism generally, and of its innate antipathy to national particularity. The usual arguments for and against free trade are economic, but at this point in my life, and in my study of history and culture, I have come to believe that there are far more important things than money.

Read the rest here.

How many fingers, Winston?

Planned Parenthood tweeted this the other day:

Theodore Dalrymple:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Don’t let them do this to us. Don’t give in.

OK, Google

While responding to a comment to a recent post just now, I wanted to add a link to an earlier item of mine: Can Progressivism Really Be A Kind Of Religion?

I thought the quickest way to find it might be to look it up in Google. I typed in the title, and … nothing. (This is odd, because Google used to give my website fairly high priority in search-result rankings.)

I went to DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t filter results, and my post was at the top of the list. I went back to Google and put the title in quotes, but my post still didn’t appear.

Have I now run afoul of Google’s heresy-detectors? Have I been added to some Index Librorum Prohibitorum? It seems odd, as I am a relatively obscure site, and pretty tame as far as heresies go. Indeed, one result that did appear was an article at Social Matter linking to my post, and I’d have thought that SM would be a far more visible feature of the reactionary skyline than this humble dwelling, and one that throws a much larger shadow upon the Cathedral’s towering facade.

Maybe this is due, somehow, to my having changed the title of the blog recently (though the URL didn’t change). I wonder.

Beyond my ken

A foreground item in the news in these last days has been President Trump’s announcement of tariffs on various goods. As with everything else he says or does, (or, for that matter, anything that any prominent person says or does these days), there has been pugnacious disagreement.

I’m not going to comment on this one. Why? Because I don’t know enough to have an opinion. The question of trade protections — subsidies, tariffs, and negotiated preferences — has existed since trade between nations began, and has been an important part of American history since the continent was settled. It has always been the subject of contention and disagreement. Right now I’ve been reading the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and it was a difficult topic for them too, often raised in their letters.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” That’s my position on tariffs. Sorry to disappoint.

If you know more about this than I do, readers, your comments are welcome.

Hair piece

It’s a dreary day here, and I find myself at a loss for anything interesting to say. Instead, then, I give you Russian politician Valentina Petrenko. And her hair.

 

 

 

Are we loving modernity yet?

I was back at my old alma mater, Power Station Studios, earlier today. It’s on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. Nearby, some expensive apartment buildings have gone up. If you’re lucky enough to afford one of these tony residences, here’s your front door:

 
Is it me, or did we miss a turn somewhere?

 

“Land reform”

South Africa is moving rapidly toward “expropriation without compensation”: the confiscation of white-owned farms and transfer of them to black owners.

Displacement of white farmers in Africa has happened before, in places like Kenya and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Agricultural productivity plummeted. It will do so here as well.

In his book Suicide of the West — which I recommend to you all — James Burnham, writing in 1964, described what had happened in Kenya:

[T]ake the famous White Highlands of Kenya that liberal publicists are fond of citing as an example of colonial and racist exploitation. The Highlands are the part of Kenya that, by its temperature, rainfall and soil, makes successful farming possible. They comprise in all about 45,000 square miles. Of these, 37,000 square miles are, as they have been in the past, farmed by African Negroes. The Europeans have been farming about 4,500 square miles, one-tenth of the lot: virtually all developed from scratch in the course of the past sixty years. From these 4,500 square miles the Europeans have been raising sufficient commercial crops to make up 80 percent in value of Kenya’s export total of all goods and products””the factor on which Kenya’s long-run economic development inevitably depends.

But this is because the Europeans have the best land, the capital and so on, ideology at once protests. The facts teach otherwise. Much of the Highlands land””considerably more than the 4,500 square miles that were the European maximum””is at least as good; all of it is of the same basic character. Comparative studies have been made of African and European farming operations that are closely comparable in all respects, including available capital. They show that the European-farmed land produces approximately four times as much per square mile as the African-farmed land: approximately £4,300 in annual value as against £1,100. It is certain that the economic condition of the Highlands, and thus of Kenya as a whole, will continue in the next period the worsening that began several years ago, and that there will be less food for Kenya’s inhabitants. As the Europeans continue to leave, their highly productive, technically advanced and efficiently managed farms are being broken up into subsistence plots or small uneconomic units, both types largely in the hands of incompetent Negroes. Very probably thousands of acres of the Highlands will revert rather soon to the sterility in which the Europeans found them sixty years ago, cropped down to sour bare soil, perhaps, by cattle and horses kept to expand a tribe’s prestige and status rather than its food supply. It may not be long before the rising young nation of Kenya is added to the list of those living by the surplus food of the citadel of world imperialism. There is no mystery here. It is simply that the native leaders of Kenya’s African inhabitants want other things more than they want food.

South Africa’s white farmers have been under brutal assault for many years now, but things are quickly going to become even more dangerous for them. I imagine many of them are already making arrangements to leave. (I expect they would be welcome in Eastern Europe.)

Meanwhile, the world will watch as South Africa becomes, not Wakanda, but another Zimbabwe.

Après moi, le déluge

Our e-pal Bill K. sends along this link to a mordant little item at Gates of Vienna. The gist:

– Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French President, has no children.
– German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
– Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has no children
– British Prime Minister Theresa May has no children.
– Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
– Holland’s Mark Rutte,
– Sweden’s Stefan LÁ¶fven,
– Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel, and
– Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, all have no children.
– Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, has no children.

So: if you’ve wondered why the leaders of Western Europe don’t seem to care about its future, a fair question is: why would they?

One commenter makes the heartening point that the presidents and prime ministers of the Visegrad nations — Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia — have 26 children between them. Another reminds us that Marine le Pen has three.

The future belongs to those who show up for it.

Common ground?

Our reader, the indefatigable JK, has sent along a column by David French about “gun-violence restraining orders”, or GVROs. Mr. French argues that they are a plausible compromise between the community’s collective interest and the individual right guaranteed (not “granted”, mind you!) by the Second Amendment.

Mr. French outlines some limitations that would, in his opinion, need to be in place:

While there are various versions of these laws working their way through the states (California passed a GVRO statute in 2014, and it went into effect in 2016), broadly speaking they permit a spouse, parent, sibling, or person living with a troubled individual to petition a court for an order enabling law enforcement to temporarily take that individual’s guns right away. A well-crafted GVRO should contain the following elements (“petitioners’ are those who seek the order, “the respondent’ is its subject):

1. It should limit those who have standing to seek the order to a narrowly defined class of people (close relatives, those living with the respondent);
2. It should require petitioners to come forward with clear, convincing, admissible evidence that the respondent is a significant danger to himself or others;
3. It should grant the respondent an opportunity to contest the claims against him;
4. In the event of an emergency, ex parte order (an order granted before the respondent can contest the claims), a full hearing should be scheduled quickly ”” preferably within 72 hours; and
5. The order should lapse after a defined period of time unless petitioners can come forward with clear and convincing evidence that it should remain in place.

Really the question is: at what point in a descent into madness does a person become incapable of being a reliable party to the social contract that forms the framework under which our rights are respected? We already exclude some parties: children, felons, non-citizens, etc.

Mr. French continues:

Let’s empower the people who have the most to lose, and let’s place accountability on the lowest possible level of government: the local judges who consistently and regularly adjudicate similar claims in the context of family and criminal law.

Advocates for GVROs have been mostly clustered on the left, but there is nothing inherently leftist about the concept. After all, the GVRO is consistent with and recognizes both the inherent right of self-defense and the inherent right of due process. It is not collective punishment. It is precisely targeted.

I haven’t yet looked to see if there have been challenges to the constitutionality of California’s law. I have a feeling that, given the Second-Amendment limitations that even conservative members of the courts have already found permissible, it would be allowed to stand. I would also strongly prefer that such laws be left to the States (but then there are very, very few things that I ever prefer to see implemented at the Federal level).

My inclination is that this is a reasonable proposal. Unlike the ignorant, ineffective, and inflammatory “solutions” that cringing Eloi hoplophobes seek to impose on every law-abiding American, GVROs might actually save a life now and then, while having a minimal, and far more justifiable, impact on our rights and liberties.

Might they be subject to abuse? Yes. But if they are imposed narrowly and individually in local courts, with demanding criteria, the tradeoff might be an acceptable one. (Readers will know that I am no moderate when it comes to gun rights — but the other side of the tradeoff is to have people like Nikolas Cruz armed for slaughter. Nothing is simple.)

What say you, readers?

P.S. David French responds to a critic, here.

P.P.S. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway): no matter what we end up doing about GVROs, we should protect our schools. How can any reasonable person disagree?

Resolve

Strength of will is the Second Amendment of the personal virtues: the one that secures all the others.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Goodness: might there be hope for England after all? Meet the man who could be the next Prime Minister: here and here.

Intelligent, educated, gentlemanly, articulate, and deeply reactionary, with an abiding love of his ancient nation, its people, and its culture: what’s not to like? May he prevail.

Time out

Now and then it’s good to step back from the dumpster-fire of current events and media. A quiet rainy day in the Outer Cape, with my lovely wife off in Europe visiting our grandson, is such an occasion.

I spent the day with my friend Alec, an avid outdoorsman, who has very generously been teaching me fly-fishing. (Being of Scottish heritage, this is something that is surely in my blood, but I’ve neglected it all my life.) The narrow land around Wellfleet is dotted and crisscrossed with ponds and streams and estuaries, alive with trout and bass and pan-fish, and I realized a while back that to live here and not to take up fishing would be to waste a great blessing.

So, little by little, under Alec’s patient and expert tutelage, I’ve been getting the hang of it. Today he began to teach me the art of tying flies, and I managed to assemble two “Wooly Buggers“. It is with immense satisfaction that I report they came out surprisingly well. I think I’m hooked.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in his truck, bumping along sandy fire-roads in the woods, as Alec showed me some of his favorite hidden spots. We’ll fish them in the spring.

I hope you will forgive me for not commenting on the new FISA memo, or the assault on the NRA, or any of the rest of it. My enthusiasm for that sort of engagement ebbs and flows, and just now I’ve had enough to last me for a while. It’s unwholesome to dwell on that stuff too much. Sometimes it’s better just to go for a walk in the woods.

Crossing the Rubicon

Last night CNN put on a televised “Town Hall” meeting on guns. I didn’t watch it, but from what I’ve heard my impression was that it was neither civil nor productive. (Astonishing, I know.)

Charles Cooke comments on it, here. He calls it a “disaster for our discourse”.

All comity and presumption of goodwill is rapidly boiling away in America. A glance at the history of civil wars, going all the way back to Rome, should fill any honest observer of the current scene with a dark foreboding. We are at the point now where a critical threshold is being crossed: the widespread ascription of irremediable moral evil to a rival political faction. This is a prerequisite of, and generally a precursor to, publicly sanctioned violence. I hope I am exaggerating the severity of this crisis, but I fear I am not.

P.S. Just wondering: in the aftermath of the Parkland atrocity, has anyone blamed the shooter? If so, I must have missed it.

A very grievous loss

As the din of political combat intensifies all round us, and comity and goodwill vanish in the smoke and fires of battle, I thought it might be good to remind ourselves of what real statesmanship and patriotism look like, and to remember that even in the darkest times it is possible to rise, however briefly, above the fray to remember our common humanity, and to reflect on the brevity of our lives and the transience of our worldly aims.

Take a breath, then, and read Winston Churchill’s eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, who had died just as Hitler was laying waste to London in the early days of the War. Try, if you can, to read it slowly, and to hear it in the great man’s voice.

DUI and the Constitution

Here’s a legal article with an “arresting” preamble:

I hope to convince you in the next hour, some of you, that the greatest single threat to our freedoms, the freedoms set forth in the Bill of Rights, is not from Iraq or Iran. I don’t think it’s from North Korea. I don’t think it’s from the extremists of the Muslim world. The threat, as it has always been throughout history, is internal: It is from within. But I do not think it is terrorists or extremists on the right. I hope to convince a few of you that the greatest single threat to our freedoms today comes from a group consisting largely of American housewives. They call themselves the Mothers Against Drunk Driving. MADD.

Can the author make the charges stick? Have a look here, and decide for yourself.

Selective enforcement?

Here’s a article that asks the question: if Russian trolls are indictable for election-meddling as unregistered foreign agents, why not Christopher Steele? Why not, as criminal co-conspirators, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign?

On sovereign power, and the right to bear arms

For those who would ban all guns in private hands — and I know many of you personally — some Q & A:

What are arms for?

They are power multipliers. Who has arms has power over those who do not.

What does it mean to be sovereign? What is it that distinguishes the sovereign from whom he rules?

The sovereign has power over those he rules.

In America’s democratic system, who is sovereign?

The people are sovereign.

If arms confer decisive power, and the people allow themselves to be disarmed by the State, who gains power? Who loses power?

The State gains power; the people lose power.

If the people cede their arms to the State, then, who is really sovereign?

Clearly it must be the State, and no longer the people.

Any questions?

Pine Grove

Today I paid a visit to one of the Outer Cape’s old burial grounds: the Pine Grove cemetery in Truro. It’s a remote spot, some distance down a wooded dirt road off one of Truro’s smaller byways.

 
The place has some notoriety: in 1969, a man named Tony Costa murdered, sexually violated and dismembered (in that order, apparently) four young women in a small brick crypt there. You can read about it here. The little crypt is still there, with a loose wooden door. I went in; the inside contains some macabre graffiti. It’s a strange thing, to be in such a place, and I didn’t linger.

I did spend some time looking around the graveyard. It being a Monday afternoon in February, a time when the Outer Cape is almost deserted, I had the place, and its silence, all to myself.

The cemetery goes back over 200 years, and the names on the older graves are familiar out here: Ryder, Rich, Lombard, Atwood, Higgins. I am always affected by the way old cemeteries telescope the lives of families — lives as rich and complex as any of our own, with the full measure of joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, toil and leisure, love and loss — into a few names and dates, and a mossy patch of earth. You see the tiny graves of young children — “Dear Bertie” was one — and you can’t help adding up the dates to imagine the loneliness of a woman who survived her son by forty years, and her beloved husband by twenty.

One thing I noticed was how many of the men were lost at sea, and how young. Many of them were in their teens. I thought about their brief lives and awful deaths, and the worry, waiting, and, finally, grief of a mother or a wife — all of it borne so long ago, and all of it put away forever, now, under some moss and grass in a piney wood under an empty sky.

Another thing I noticed: how many of the women in the older graves were named “Thankful”. These “hortatory” names were popular among the Puritans of Sussex, but less so among the East Anglian communities that were the source of so much of early New England settlement. It makes me curious about the geographical origins of these Outer Cape families.

“Thankful”. Not a very fashionable idea these days, I’m afraid, despite all we have to be thankful for. Quite the opposite, it seems.

How are gun ownership and homicide rates correlated worldwide?

We hear ad nauseam that more-enlightened countries around the world have lower homicide rates than the US because they have fewer firearms in private hands. This is repeated so often that a great many people simply believe it to be true. The correlation, however, actually goes the other way, as I demonstrated in this post from 2015.

I’ve just run across an article from 2014 that looks at the numbers in considerable detail (including a helpful Excel file you can download). Read it here.

What is the “Russia Investigation”, anyway?

Nobody has written with more clarity on the web of intrigue surrounding Russia, the FISA court, the Mueller probe, election-tampering, possible abuses of power by the Obama-era FBI, DOJ, and IRS, and alleged “collusion” than the former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. His latest column explores, with lucidity and detail, the difference between a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence operation, and why the distinction matters. He also examines the powers of the President regarding such things, and the question of what “obstruction of justice” could possibly mean as applied to the Chief Executive.

It’s one of his best so far. Read it here.

Service notice

I’ve once again raised the comment-form caching issue with my hosting service, Bluehost. I’m hoping that this time they will get it sorted out, once and for all. Thank you for your patience.

Reaping the whirlwind

It’s happened again: a massacre at a school, a shock of grief and horror and powerlessness in the face of evil, and a spasm of reaction on the part of hoplophobes, sheltered liberals, mainstream media, and Democrat opportunists (a Venn diagram with extensive overlap) to demonize gun-rights advocates and to call for government to “do something”. That “something” invariably involves, in some way or other, a wish to make guns, especially scary-looking ones, go away, no matter how irrational that is, how much it involves the abrogation of essential rights, how practically and politically impossible, and, ultimately, how ineffective such an attempt would be.

The one thing that could actually work: protect the schools. We protect our banks, celebrities, and politicians with guns. We protect our children with… signs.

I’ve written again and again about this. I’ve offered some excellent links for the reader, and will give you a few of them again at the end of this post. I also encourage you to look over our collected posts on the topic, here.

I’m not going to rehearse all of that now. But I will quote something I wrote back in October, after the Las Vegas massacre:

I am 61 years old. 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 up hay-bales and put targets on them (a charcoal briquette was a favorite choice) to shoot at with a .22. Schools and scout-troops often had rifle ranges; I myself got a marksmanship Merit Badge while at summer camp with the Boy Scouts. I don’t recall being aware of any gun laws at all; you could buy ammo at the general store. (Gun safety was a big deal, though, and kids were taught to handle firearms carefully and respectfully.)

This was the state of normal (non-urban, middle-class, predominantly white) American culture half a century ago. Guns were an unexceptional part of that bygone world, and were easily accessible to all of us (you could order pretty much any gun you liked through the mail, by sending cash in an envelope!). Somehow, though, we hardly ever murdered each other, and mass shootings were very, very rare.

Something has changed, obviously. And it isn’t access to guns.

To those on the Left, shrieking for the government to make the pain stop by exerting more control — you celebrities, politicians, editors, and yes, you goodthinkful liberals that I know personally here in New York, many of whom I have called friends — I’ll say this:

While you were, over the last half-century, systematically destroying, displacing, denouncing, and dismantling the historic American nation and its civil society — all moral norms, every basis of public commonality, all respect for our history and heritage, public expression of religion, the nuclear family, sexual restraint, and every natural structure and category and hierarchy that held civilization together and gave young people a framework within which to learn dignity and duty and gratitude and belonging and meaning and self-control — while you were doing all that, what did you think was going to happen? And now you want to “fix” the moral and social wreckage you’ve created by disarming us against your future predations upon our rights, our culture, and upon the society we still hope, against hope, to restore and preserve?

Go to hell. This sickness is your fault, not ours. You will not degrade us any longer. If you want our arms, come and take them.

Some links:

‣   Larry Correia’s outstanding essay covering all parts of the gun-control argument.

‣   Five Thirty Eight: Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence.

‣   “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.”

Bootstrapping

By now you may have heard of a movie called Black Panther. It’s a Marvel Comics offering about a fictional, technologically advanced African Utopia called Wakanda. I haven’t seen the movie (I don’t think it’s even out yet), but I can certainly understand all the buzz, and why America’s black community would be happy to have a unifying and uplifting movie to rally to.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is the extent to which the picture seems, to many people, not to be fictional at all. I recall seeing, for example, an NBC tweet saying that the splendor and sophistication of Wakanda (which, if I understand correctly, derives its wealth from the existence of a miraculous mineral called “vibranium”) “will prove to the colonialists that if they had not interfered with Africa, we’d be so far advanced.”

Well, with all the publicity the film’s getting, I’m sure any colonialists still at large in the world will take note. But at the risk of seeming stingy, Wakanda doesn’t exist — and I do think it’s a bit of a reach to use a thing that doesn’t exist to prove a historical counterfactual.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is as a cultural variation of Anselm’s ontological argument: Wakanda must exist.

Chronicles of the Cold War

Most Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., the radio host John Batchelor (whose program, as I have mentioned before, is one of the most interesting and penetrating news sources in all of media) has an hour-long discussion with the Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen about the new Cold War. If you take any interest at all in this increasingly ominous situation, I urge you to listen; you can catch the show live on WABC AM (770) if you are in the New York area, or you can stream the show live, free of charge, from anywhere using the iHeartRadio website or mobile app. The Batchelor show is also available as podcasts after the fact, here.

Meanwhile, here’s a summary of Professor Cohen’s recent commentary on what the press call “Russiagate”, and he calls “Intelgate”.

Cohen believes that we have stupidly squandered all hope of detente and strategic partnership with Russia, who might have been a worthwhile friend in this new era of global realignment. I think he is exactly right, and that we have conducted ourselves with terrible and prideful unwisdom.

Robodogs

I’ll confess that I find this a little creepy. You?

Road to recovery

I think perhaps I’m turning the corner, now: no more fever, at least, though I’m still shockingly depleted. I say “shockingly”, but I suppose I should face facts: I’ll be sixty-two in April, and although I’ve always had the constitution of a lion, and have almost always managed to fight off whatever virus or bug has threatened to get hold of me, nothing lasts forever. Perhaps I’ll even get a flu shot next year. I have to say, though: if this is to be the “new normal”, I say the hell with it.

I’ve been too addled to read much, or write at all, and haven’t really paid any attention to the news. I did notice, though, that our mainstream news outlets seem to be fawning over Kim Jong-Un’s sister, who is attending the Olympics, and that they have got some well-deserved heat for it. (CNN, for example, said she was “stealing the show!” — as if she were Kate Middleton or some other society-column luvvie, instead of the director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the world’s most brutally oppressive dictatorial regime.)

Again I am tempted to use the word “shocking” — because it ought to be — but by now it’s hard for me to be shocked by this. Our culture has become so degraded, its organs of perception and discrimination and comprehension so atrophied, that we’ve lost all moral and intellectual depth, and all sense of extension and persistence in time. We have become as children, captured by one shiny thing after another, informed only by the feelings of the moment.

Even the one thing we now seem to care about to the exclusion of everything else — the ostentatious piety of championing “victims” and denouncing their “oppressors” — is forgotten here. Think of that! Here we have a real oppressor — one whose family actually enslaves, tortures, starves and murders truly helpless men, women, and children — and she is wafted to celebrity by a doting press. How is this possible? The answer is simple: she is not Western, not male, not capitalist, and not white — and Donald Trump has declared her family to be enemies of America. This should tell you everything you need to know about what really motivates our mass-market media.

It’s easy just to go numb to it all — it’s in our nature, after all, to get used to awful things that don’t go away — but every now and then the awful depth of this insanity, this pathology, jumps back into focus, and it is terrifying.

Service notice

As someone who is very rarely unwell, it’s always a jolt to be reminded how debilitating a nasty cold can be, especially as I get a bit older. Writing seems to be quite out of the question this evening (indeed I stared at the page for a good two or three minutes just now just to assemble this sentence).

Back before long, insh’Allah.

Update, Feb. 10: Getting worse, not better. I’m afraid this must be the flu. Please browse our archives, or try the “Random Post” link at upper right. (See also Jacques’ most recent comment, here, on a world gone mad.

About time!

Back in late November of 2016, the New York Times lamented, in its smugly named “Interpreter” column, that democracy was suddenly in danger around the world. (What might have happened around then that would have put them is such a frame of mind? I feel as if I’m forgetting something…) They called upon two boyish boffins who, having “crunched data”, announced that the warning lights are flashing red. This, we are to understand, is both surprising, and bad.

We read:

Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,’ which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.

“Political scientists”. Well, if science is what they’re doing, then their theory ought to be falsifiable, if I remember my Popper correctly. It makes me wonder if they’ve crunched the data for, say, Athens, Rome, Berlin, Caracas…

Anyway, the key datum in this piece is that the number of people who consider it “essential” to live in a democracy has declined — “plummeted” says the Times — in an assortment of prosperous democracies, particularly among the younger generation. This, says one of the striplings who did the research, “should have us worried”.

Really? It doesn’t worry me at all. Indeed it fills me with hope that we might be rearing a new generation of exceptional perspicacity and good sense. How on earth could anyone not an imbecile read the vast and varied book of history and conclude that it is “essential” to live under democracy — or, for that matter, under any particular form of government at all? “Red lights flashing”, you say? Good. Let them flash. Let us examine democracy for what it is: one possible form of government among many, with inherent and irremediable liabilities, and such a frightening track-record at the time of America’s founding that Framers tried their utmost — and failed nevertheless — to keep it at bay. The article left me feeling upbeat and refreshed.

“Well, fine,” I hear you ask, “but why mention it now? That article’s more than a year old.”

Here’s why: a post I ran across just recently over at Unamusement Park. Go and have a look. And if the name of the second party quoted seems familiar to you, you can refresh your memory here.

The horror

Here.

Be here now

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 to it, then resumes natural, ordinary, local life, but with a vital sense of belonging leached away. This is a terrible trap — or a convenient means of abdication. Either way, it does a nation no good.

Lex-arcana

OK, logophiles: below the fold is a list of the words that, according to this item at Slate, David Foster Wallace had circled in his dictionary. (I would link each word to its definition, but it would take me hours, and I can’t be bothered. Looking them up should help you pass these long evenings in the hibernaculum.)

Read More »