Making the rounds is a video by Mark Steyn in which he discusses the demographics of Europe and Africa, and Steve Sailer’s “Most Important Graph In The World“.
Take particular note starting at 9:55, if you’ve been wondering why Europe’s leaders don’t seem to give a damn about the future.
I’m busy in the obvious ways this Mothers Day (Mother’s Day? Mothers’ Day?), so I’ll just pass along two articles that are worth your time: Angelo Codevilla on our cold civil war, and Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn on three ways that democracies become tyrannies (the Tocquevillean model, quoted here just recently, is number three).
If I may, readers, I beg you to allow me a momentary departure from our customary rigor and gimlet-eyed realism:
Conjure this up in your mind’s eye: a nickel-iron meteorite, ten or twenty meters in diameter, plows into the National Mall at high velocity on a busy autumn weekday. In stroke, it’s all gone — Congress, the White House, Treasury, Foggy Bottom, Justice, EPA, IRS, K Street, the pundits, the whole enchilada. Just gone. Just a big smoking crater where it all used to be, with, after a little while, a lot of curious Americans peering over the rim…
Just a fantasy, of course, and needless to say the chaos that would follow would be spectacularly awful (not to mention the tragic deaths of all the innocent Washingtonians — of whom, I understand, there may be as many as several dozen — who would perish in the initial impact). But as I read the news day after day, it’s hard not to think about how splendid it would be if we could just, somehow, make it all go away, and give the whole thing another try.
For most of the nation’s history, the Federal government played an almost unnoticeable role in most Americans’ lives.
Imagine!
When I linked to Andrew Sullivan’s New York article about neoreaction last week, I hadn’t realized that it was just one piece of a much larger Festschrift the magazine had thrown together for its April 30th edition. I’ve just had a look at the rest of it.
The collection is, like the modern West itself, large and weak; it is really nothing more than an extended “point-‘n’-splutter”, with scarcely an attempt at rebuttal. The editors clearly think that the core tenets of reactionary thought — e.g., that the West is in serious trouble, and that central aspects of modernity such as democracy, secularism, universalism (and the doctrine if human uniformity that universalism entails), and radical skepsis regarding every tradition and natural category, are at the root of the problem — are so obviously absurd that mere mention of them suffices to discredit the movement. The shallowness, and smug confidence, on display here are impressive; that an editor of a major publication could, for example, completely dismiss the profoundly cultured and erudite Julius Evola with the sentence fragment “Quasi-fascist esoteric weirdo who pretended to be a baron and sported a monocle” betrays a blithe and unreflective ignorance so stupendous that it startles even me.
Imagine, readers, that the West is the Titanic. On the one hand, you have a group of passengers who felt a heavy impact in the night, and have noticed the deck beginning to tilt. They have realized that the situation is dire, and are trying to wake the others.
Among these vigilantes are sailors and engineers with expertise in both the ship’s design and the particularities of the local waters. While calling for the lifeboats, they have also arrived at some well-informed opinions about how this slow-moving disaster happened, and how such things might be avoided in future. They will point out that this part of the North Atlantic is full of icebergs in April, and that the ship had been moving too fast to be able to see its way ahead. They will also point out issues with the design of the ship (below-decks compartments that can fill with water like an ice-tray), and with insufficient caution on the part of the captain and crew (leaving watertight doors open that ought to have been sealed). Those who survive will also remark upon the overweening confidence of the ship’s designers, and of the owners of the White Star Line, in the vessel’s “unsinkability”. As we all know now, the Titanic was very sinkable indeed.
On the other hand, you have the editors of New York magazine, munching hors d’oeuvres and enjoying the band. Their comments are here, if you’re inclined to bother.
According to the Express, Barack Obama is going to be paid $2.5 million dollars for a speech he’s giving in Milan today. This follows on a $400,000 speech he gave on Wall Street a while back, and a $65-million advance he and his wife were given for books they (or someone) will be writing.
Mind you, as far as I’m concerned he’s welcome to get what he can for his road-show. If that desiccated harpy Madonna can go on tour and pull in $300 million, why shouldn’t Barack Obama put his snout in the trough? (I almost said “more power to him”, but I think we’ve had quite enough of that for a while, thank you.) I will, though, just remind Him that He once told us “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” (In fairness, I suppose we should keep in mind that he never said what that “certain point” actually is.)
So: why am I bringing this up? Not, I assure you, to try to enforce some sort of ethical consistency on the part of a Machiavellian left-wing ideologue and preening, unshameable narcissist; I might as well holler up a drainpipe. I’m simply presenting it as evidence that such consistency is nowhere to be found, that those who tell you otherwise are at best fools, and more often liars, and that those who take the moral high ground to lecture us about civic virtue are usually found, on closer inspection, to be standing atop a large and growing pile of dollars.
I just paid a visit to Bill Vallicella’s website — I hadn’t stopped by in a couple of days — and saw that he had mentioned me in a recent post. Bill quoted a remark he had made in a comment-thread back in 2015:
We need a broad coalition of the sane which would include many libertarians, the few liberals who haven’t lost their minds, and most conservatives, with each subgroup tempering its own tendency toward extremism.
I had replied:
I used to hope for this, and believe it was possible, but now, to my sorrow, I just can’t see how it is ever going to happen. With every passing day, and every tick of the demographic clock, we move faster and faster in the opposite direction, and I can see in America today nothing even remotely resembling a coherent political opposition on the Right. As I wrote in my letter to you, I think we have slipped past the ‘event horizon’, and all future timelines now must pass through the singularity. What form that will take, and what will come after, I can barely imagine — but I don’t think it will be pleasant for anyone.
In his post of two days ago, Bill asks whether I am “a bit more optimistic” now that Donald Trump has been elected. It’s a good question. I’d certainly like to be, but to know if such optimism is warranted it’s important to be clear about what our problems are, and whether they are more likely to be solved now that Trump’s in office. Here are a few:
1) The collapse of the culture. Just today Bill posted a piece by Victor Davis Hanson about the near-total victory of the radical Left in our academies. Given that universities are upstream from the ideological future, and that these are where the next generation of ruling elites are likely to come from, it’s hard to see much call for optimism there. I note also the relentless erosion and corrosion of all civilized norms and mores, and the relentless vulgarization of language and discourse. The level of gratuitous obscenity that is routine in public media today would have been unthinkable when I was younger; for a very recent example there is Stephen Colbert’s referring to Donald Trump’s mouth as “Vladimir Putin’s cock holster” on network television. We have fallen very, very far indeed — and as is usual for falling things, the velocity is increasing.
2) Disintegrating social cohesion. As Bill has said himself, many times, “there is no comity without commonality” — and in contrast to the America of our youth, where there was near-universal commonality of basic cultural, historical, ethical, and social axioms, there is almost nothing that is culturally universal anymore. On the “progressive” left, the only solid principles (and they are not even mutually consistent) seem to be (a) that one must make up one’s axioms as one goes along, even as regards the most fundamental and categorical truths of the external world, and (b) that those axioms must fall within very narrowly circumscribed ideological guidelines, which include, first and foremost, the awarding of status according to a towering hierarchy of “oppression” — with the natural and traditional principles that have always provided the scaffolding of civilization sitting at the apex of that pyramid. (Bill himself has posted, just today, an enumeration of just a few of these incommensurable social and ethical postulates.)
Moreover, an essential element of social cohesion has always been a culture’s sense of extension in time, of the present as a link in a chain between past and future, and of living generations being duty-bound to good stewardship of the labors and heritage of the past for generations yet unborn. This “transmission belt”, essential for the survival of any society, is now broken: where the past is not simply forgotten, it is remembered only to be despised. In 2013 I described this problem, and lamented that “we are cut off from both past and future, imprisoned in the present as no generation of people has ever been before.” This pernicious presentism has only gotten worse in the four years since, and the society that I described back then as “this tottering, gibbering thing, this fly-blown, stitched-together corpse of a “culture’”, has only advanced in its decomposition. So: optimism? I think not.
3) Demographic change. The crumbling of social cohesion is accelerated by the pernicious ideologies of universalism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism. They work in destructive combination — and deny, respectively, the existence of persistent and innate differences between human populations, the foundation of objective truth upon which any possible evaluation of such differences might be made, and the importance of commonality for social cohesion (and by extension, social survival). Under this unholy trinity of principles, the West has been flooded for decades now with profoundly alien and unassimilable immigrants, and has willfully blinded itself to the consequences. It may be that the West is slowly arousing itself from its postwar stupor, and awakening to its peril — but I’m afraid it is too little, and too late. (The defeat of Marine Le Pen in today’s elections in France is sad confirmation of this: that she did as well as she did is testament to the awakening, while her resounding defeat by the Eloi cuckold Macron is tragic evidence that it is indeed too little, and too late.)
4) The deepening underclass, and the stratification and encapsulation of the well-off. As I’ve written before, societies that offer high social mobility are subject to a “boiling off” of superior qualities from the lower classes; those who can move up and out, taking their genes with them. Charles Murray’s most recent book Coming Apart looks at this problem in depressing detail, and points out also that people, having risen to higher socioeconomic strata, tend, now more than ever, to find spouses who have similar innate and acquired advantages. This concentrates talent in the upper strata, and concentrates dysfunction below. The effect of this is a widening gap between upper and lower classes, a gap that is deeply resistant to social amelioration because it is due, at bottom, to innate differences in cognitive potential and behavioral traits.
Moreover, there is a strongly correlated difference in birth-rates; members of elite social and cognitive strata have fewer children, and so there is a tendency for every high civilization to produce an ever-diminishing number of offspring having the qualities, both innate and acculturated, that are necessary to carry forward the culture’s store of knowledge, art, and literature, even as that burden grows larger and heavier with every generation. This problem is not going to get better: as far as I can tell, the lesson of history is that it never does.
5) Democracy itself, the universal franchise, and the short-term interests of politicians. I believe that we are seeing in the West the late-stage pathology of the inherent liabilities of democracy — a system that, at the time of America’s founding, had always been well understood to lead, in a few short steps, to tyranny. The Founders were rightly appalled by the prospect of democracy, knowing where it must lead, and so they did what they could to prevent its natural progression in America. But “rust never sleeps”, and so all of the safeguards against democracy that they put in place — subsidiarianism, a limited franchise, restriction of popular elections to one-half of one-third of the branches of government, and so on — have, little by little, rusted away, even as the founding culture and shared sense of heritage that were so clearly understood to be the real foundation of civic durability in America have been deliberately and irreversibly dismantled.
What we see in America now is a perfect socio-political storm: the enormous power now vested in the federal Leviathan makes control of it a glittering, and existentially important, prize; the stakes have never been so high. Meanwhile, this vast expansion of the size, power, and reach of government comes at a time when all of the horizontal ligatures, organic hierarchy, and embedding in past and future time that give a culture health, harmony and order are being deliberately and patiently destroyed. Finally, as I have written extensively elsewhere, the communication revolution of the past decade brings everything into immediate contact with everything else; just as chemical reactions proceed more rapidly under conditions of heat and pressure, social reactions that in earlier times might have taken years or decades to develop now flare and accelerate explosively — far too quickly for any measured or reflective response.
As I said above, these are only a few of the difficulties we face. (As you’ve probably guessed, I could go on at some length about all of this.) So, to answer Bill’s question: am I “a bit more optimistic” in the springtime of the Trump era than I was in June of 2015?
No. Donald Trump’s victory was gratifying, of course, mostly in that it drove a stake through the heart of Hillary Clinton’s political career — but rather than a genuine and lasting course correction, I think it was more like the way a car goes off the road: the driver sees, almost too late, that he’s drifted out of his lane, steers wildly back to center, overcorrects, yanks the wheel even more frantically back the other way, and after a few iterations of this ends up losing control altogether, with disastrous consequences. (The fact that this election came down to Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton is itself evidence of serious and advanced pathology.)
Yes, Trump & Co. are in power now — but do things in America, and the rest of the world, seem in 2017 to be getting more orderly and civilized, or sharply less so?
Do you have the feeling that a fever has passed, and that mutual respect, good sense, and civic health are returning to American society?
Right. Neither do I.
Here’s a remarkably frank look at neoreaction, from the increasingly red-pilled Andrew Sullivan. I’m too busy at the moment to comment — other than to say that Mr. Sullivan still has too much universalism and Progressive optimism in him to grasp the nettle just yet — but it’s encouraging to see the “progress” our side is making. What was, just a few years ago, an obscure intellectual eddy that made not a ripple in the American mainstream is now beginning to have a noticeable effect on ideological navigation.
I hope to have more to say about Mr. Sullivan’s essay shortly.
After much wrangling with Bluehost, I believe the server-side caching problems we’ve been having with the site are now fixed. Please leave a comment if you see any more odd behavior.
For today, some climate heresies:
In a post at her blog, Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry discusses a diagram that divides scientific work into four quadrants. The corners of the diagram represent high vs. low priorities on two different axes: the pursuit of some kind of practical utility (X), and the pursuit of basic understanding (Y). In the upper-left corner — pursuit of basic understanding, with low concern for practical application — we have someone like Niels Bohr, or Isaac Newton. In the opposite corner — application above all, with just enough understanding to make a thing work — there’s Thomas Edison. The upper-right corner, where understanding and utility combine in equal measure, is occupied by people like Louis Pasteur.
Who gets the bottom left? In Dr. Curry’s post, we find it occupied by the skeletal scaremonger and cult-Marx cult-hero Bill Nye. Have a look here, and be sure to visit the many links.
We also have some remarks from a recent lecture by another anathematized Actual Climate Scientist, Richard Lindzen. In it he continues in his role as vox clamantis in deserto; all he has ever tried to do is patiently to explain that there are many good reasons for any critical thinker to approach the subject of climate change with wariness and circumspection, and to make clear that the Science is far less “settled” than we are led to believe.
Drs. Curry and Lindzen are not cranks or shills; they are highly credentialed experts who simply will not mute themselves and get in line. For this they are shunned and reviled with all the viciousness that a great and powerful religious establishment can bring to bear.
From the closing paragraph of Dr. Lindzen’s presentation:
[T]here is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ”˜science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.
Read the whole thing here.
Coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef has been in the news lately. It can only be due to global warming, right? Well, no: it may very well be the result of falling sea levels in the region, due to El NiÁ±o. (Have you heard any mention of this coherent and persuasive explication in the mainstream media? Of course not.) Learn more, in considerable detail, here.
Finally, see also this comprehensive takedown, from 2014, of the (apparently) unkillable “97% consensus” myth.
After posting the Sam Harris interview with Charles Murray last week, I browsed through some of Dr. Harris’s other podcasts. Among them I found a conversation with Daniel Dennett on a topic about which the two of them have had a public spat: free will.
Both of these men are, obviously, uncommonly intelligent and articulate, and while each has made arguments on important matters that I find unpersuasive — Harris on the existence of an objective foundation for morality, Dennett on the illusory nature of consciousness, and both of them on what they consider to be the fatuity and obsolescence of religion — I’ve admired both of them for their curiosity, diligence, and willingness to take unpopular positions.
Free will is, of course, a difficult topic that has vexed philosophers and laymen alike for a very long time. I’ve written about it myself at some length. (See the post category here, or the linked series of posts beginning here.) I find Dennett’s position — a carefully threaded form of “compatibilism”, as laid out in his books Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves — persuasive. Sam Harris doesn’t, and wrote a short book of his own to say so. In a review, Dennett called the book a “museum of mistakes”, and there was some tense back-and-forth in print between the two of them. (See the links below.)
Last summer Harris and Dennett both attended a conference in Banff, and during a break in the action sat down in a bar to talk about it all. The result is this podcast, in which they examine their disagreements with refreshingly civilized collegiality. My impression is still that Dennett’s position comes much closer to getting at what is true and important about free will than Harris’s — so much so, in fact, that it rises to the level of what is sometimes called “pwnage”. But you should make up your own minds. It’s an interesting and penetrating discussion.
Have a listen here.
If, like me, you often have trouble finding just the right word, perhaps these will help: A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1811, and the Dictionary of Cant and English Slang, A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highway-Men, &c; from 1737.
I’ve lifted these from the excellent blog From Old Books. I think that makes me a “heaver“.
Once you have listened to the podcast offered in our previous post — a thoughtful and informative discussion of complex topics by two thoroughly civilized adults — I invite you, for perspective, to watch this video by the latest champion of our dying society’s hegemonic cryptoreligion. I refer to that grimacing ectomorph, Bill Nye, who seems suddenly to be everywhere — and who presumes, along with the equally insufferable mediocrity Neil DeGrasse Tyson, to lecture the rest of us about “science” (lectures that seem always to be more like what used, in my day, to be called “propaganda”, or sometimes just “rubbish”).
Look at this astonishing video, which consists of a bulky middle-aged woman warbling about her enthusiasm for every imaginable variety of sexual perversion, while squatting and waddling about the stage in a leotard. Read the song’s lyrics, helpfully captioned for the hearing-impaired. (I understand that they are by Mr. Nye himself.) Learn all about this graceless woman’s insatiable vagina, and about the cultural and spiritual importance of “butt stuff”.
Watch it all, if you can. Reflect on the fact that in the eyes of the mandarins who shape our popular culture, this man — this gangling scarecrow from Hell — is a suitable choice for the instruction and moral guidance of our children, while men like Charles Murray are reviled in our nation’s press and the halls of our academies, and are physically assaulted when they dare to speak in public.
Watch this video and ask yourself how on earth any high culture could possibly have sunk so low in such short years. Think of all that we have squandered and lost. Think of what it means for your children, and theirs.
And yes, by all means, please feel free to burn with rage.
Here’s something to listen to: a roving two-hour conversation between Sam Harris and Charles Murray. Of particular value is their discussion of the hard reality of intelligence, and of its measurability, its heritability, and the cross-cultural reliability of intelligence tests.
Also: the word that changed the history of the world.
There’s been some odd behavior here – strange lags between publishing and items appearing, and comments appearing under the wrong author’s name. I don’t know what’s going wrong, but I do recall there being a recent WordPress update.
I’ll try to sort it out. I invite affected commenters to leave a comment on this post to see if the problem is limited to the previous one. One thing I have noticed: forcing a browser-cache refresh (Ctrl + F5 on Windows) seems to help.
Update: the problem persists. I have contacted Bluehost, but so far have not had much help. For now, please be sure to force a cache refresh (CTRL + F5) when reading or commenting. If the blog vanishes, this is why; I will either be making repairs or finding a new hosting company. (If comments fail altogether, readers can email me using the address in the “About” page.)
Further Update: Deleting cookies for malcolmpollack.com in my Chrome browser may have fixed the problem. Please try this; instructions are here.
Here’s an excerpt from a column by Ulrich Baer – a “vice-provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity” at NYU — in yesterday’s New York Times:
The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections ”” not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities ”” should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.
That’s quite a mouthful. Let’s examine it before swallowing.
The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks.
This may be true in private life — an employee certainly can’t expect to be able say anything he thinks in a business meeting, or a child in her parents’ home, without consequences. But if we are talking about the law, and therefore about public institutions, then the matter is clear: with the exception of a few extremely narrow and clearly defined exceptions, the freedom to say “anything anybody thinks” is explicitly enshrined in the First Amendment. This applies with particular relevance to exactly the sort of speech that is coming into question in recent years, namely opinions about political, social, and scientific controversies.
It means balancing the inherent value of a given view…
The “inherent value”? According to whom? It’s our differing valuations of ideas and viewpoints, descriptions and prescriptions, that makes the airing of opinions and arguments so vitally important in the first place, and that makes their suppression so dangerous. If everyone agrees about a thing, what is there to discuss? If there’s no dissent, why have a First Amendment at all?
…with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.
Yes, of course — but the answer to that is simple and obvious: don’t suppress speech.
Free-speech protections ”” not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities ”” should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents…
Is it not precisely the “right to participate in political speech as political agents” that the author of this essay proposes to limit? Is that not what recently happened, for example, to Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Sommers, presumably with Provost Baer’s approval?
…can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.
Let’s leave aside “attacked” and “demeaned”, which in this context simply mean “disagreed with”, or “disapproved of”. But “questioned”? This is the darkest and most revealing word in Mr. Baer’s essay. His position, just to make it clear, is that there are questions we must not be permitted to ask.
Excuse me, Mr. Baer, but: permitted by whom? The Left is fond of railing at inequalities of power. Who, then, shall wield the power to decide what others may question?
Forgive me for asking.
I’ve been too busy over the past few days to put pen to paper (or pixels to page). The world seems more frantic than ever, and it’s hard to keep up.
So, here’s a pause, a musical interlude, for you; let it be a little five-minute fermata. The music is by the lavishly gifted composer and arranger Vince Mendoza, and it was recorded and mixed by your humble correspondent, ‘way back in 1990.
We still have music. And dogs. And musical dogs.
I’ve said from the beginning that the prevailing narrative about the chemical-weapons attack in Syria — in brief, that Assad did it — makes no sense. I’ll say this, too: not only does it make no sense, but it so obviously makes no sense that any sensible person should doubt it in the absence of overwhelming evidence.
Yet two days later President Trump launched a cruise-missile attack on Syria on the basis of this narrative, which could hardly have been confirmed so quickly even if it were true. In doing so he may have achieved some ulterior goals — to impress Xi Jinping, perhaps, and to weaken the mainstream media’s relentless Trump-is Putin’s-puppet narrative — but it was a terribly impulsive move, and has done serious damage to any hope of better relations with Russia. I was shocked when it happened, and deeply disappointed.
After the Tomahawk salvo, the Trump administration put out a report arguing that Assad was indeed behind the gas attack. This week an eminent academic, Theodore Postol (who is a professor emeritus of science, technology, and national-security policy at M.I.T., and a former high-level Pentagon adviser) has published a detailed analysis of the administration’s report and the available evidence. He has concluded that it is, not to put too fine a point on it, rubbish. The evidence, says Dr. Postol, shows that the sarin container was not dropped from the sky, but positioned in the middle of a road and smashed open by a bomb mounted directly on top of it.
Dr. Postol’s report is moderately technical. You can read it here. You can also read an excellent summary of the reasons to doubt the Trump Administration’s account of the attack, here.
For all of this I owe a hat-tip to John Batchelor and Stephen Cohen, who discussed these matters on Tuesday evening. You can listen to their conversation here.
A few years back I re-read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I had first read as a teenager, far too young to appreciate it. Upon re-reading it I realized that it was among the most accurately prescient works of speculative fiction ever written, and when I saw a reference to it online just now I went back to look for the post I was sure I had written at the time, but apparently never got around to writing. I’ll remedy that, briefly, here.
What makes BNW so spectacularly farsighted? Three things, at least:
First, and least, is that it foresaw the enormous expansion of the managerial state, and the reduction of human life to a closely supervised pursuit of pleasure, stripped of all higher purpose or any sense of the transcendent.
Second, it predicted, decades before the mechanism of inheritance was understood, that we would soon achieve technical mastery of genetic engineering.
Most important of all, though, is that it foresaw the radically entropic dissolution, for social and ideological ends, of what is, in human terms, the primary natural category — namely the distinction between male and female. Furthermore, Huxley clearly understood that this could only happen if reproduction was completely decoupled from sexual activity, and indeed from all human experience. Only technology could make this possible.
In this era of entropic postmodernism regarding every aspect of human nature and experience, Huxley’s vision is the only logical way to sustain the march of atomizing, deracinating, and dehumanizing “progress” that has overtaken Western civilization. That Aldous Huxley saw this all so clearly in 1931 is, to put it mildly, remarkable.
…in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
With that in mind, here’s a good item from Hanson today, on the demands a certain religion makes on its adherents.
At the moment I must confess to being almost utterly exhausted, for some reason, by news and events. It’s not for lack of material to comment on: the Western polity is disintegrating, our nuclear fleet is steaming toward North Korea, there’s a mad killer on the loose, and that’s just the stuff above the fold — but none of it seems surprising, or even terribly interesting anymore. Frankly I’m having a hard time thinking of anything to say about it that I haven’t already said, or that hasn’t been said many times over by others. What’s happening is simply what anyone who’s been paying attention will have expected to happen, for explicable (and, by now, well-explicated) reasons.
What we can count on from this point forward is acceleration. I’ve written before about the similarities between the human world-system and the behavior of gas particles in a shrinking container: as the average distance between particles decreases, the pressure and temperature go up. That distance, in the human world, is now falling toward zero, and reactions that would have happened very slowly, if at all, in a cooler and more spacious world are now happening faster than we can comprehend, or adjust to. (The pace of this change has been increasing for centuries, but the acceleration was slow at first. It is slow no longer.)
As I wrote in 2013:
As the temperature and pressure continue to increase, what will happen? It seems likely that there will be increasing chaos in the human world, as systems and structures designed for a larger, cooler, slower world can no longer keep up with the pace of change. In universities, students majoring in technical fields find that much of what they’ve been taught is out of date even before they graduate. Governments struggle to control and regulate technology that is already obsolete by the time new laws come into effect. Centralized, detailed governance at the scale of large nation-states is too large, too inertial to keep up with the rate of change; we may soon see such political entities breaking apart under the increasing heat and pressure…
In short, the smaller and hotter the world is ”” in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles’ will impinge on each other in a given time ”” the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy’ it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace ”” the legislative processes of large democracies, for example ”” to respond effectively to innovations and crises.
So! – here we are. (And if you think things are moving fast now, just wait a little.)
I’ll add this:
As the accelerating impingement of the horizontal present becomes overwhelming in human lives, it becomes harder and harder for any ordinary person to think about anything else. The past seems too irrelevant, the future too unstable and unpredictable, to give much thought to either. The effect of this narrowing presentism is that faith in institutions and traditions erodes, as these essential structures, which till now have been the framework and scaffolding of every culture and society, lose their necessary foundation: the reassuring solidity of extension in time. And as stabilizing structures crumble, chaos increases.
What has happened so far was predictable — but what will happen after a few more years of this acceleration is not. It is probably right to say, as many have said, that we are very rapidly approaching some sort of Singularity, with conditions so novel that the laws that have channeled history to this point may well no longer apply. One thing to keep in mind also is that linear extrapolations at any point of an exponentially rising curve will always underestimate the future Y value of the function. Things are going to come faster than you think.
So: with all this in mind, I find myself with less and less to say about the kaleidoscopic details, about the news of the week, about the gathering whirlwind of social debris flying past my window. I am more inclined simply to stand, as best I can, well back.
The focus may be a little different here, and posts perhaps less frequent, for a bit.
Daniel Dennett has a new book – From Bacteria To Bach And Back. I haven’t read it, though I likely will.
Thomas Nagel reviews it, here.
I’m sixty-one today. That’s getting on a bit, but fortunately I have the body of a twenty-five-year-old. (It’s in the trunk of my car, if you’d like to have a look.)
As always, we extend natal salutations to: Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber’ Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, Samuel Beckett, Harold Stassen, Stanislaw Ulam, Eudora Welty, Howard Keel, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Ken Nordine, Don Adams, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Seamus Heaney, Paul Sorvino, Jack Casady, Tony Dow, Lowell George, Al Green, Ron Perlman, Christopher Hitchens, Max Weinberg, and Garry Kasparov.
Every Tuesday night at 10 p.m. Eastern time, Professor Stephen F. Cohen appears on John Batchelor’s radio show for an hour-long discussion of America’s difficult relationship with Russia. I try not to miss it, because Professor Cohen’s expertise is profound, and his insights often differ sharply from what we are fed by government and the mainstream media.
Given recent events, this weekly interview is more valuable than ever. You can download a recording of last night’s discussion here.
Sorry for the lack of original content here lately – I’m weary of the news, and temporarily abandoned by the Muse.
Here’s something out of the ordinary for you, then: a huge clown in whiteface channeling Johnny Cash to sing “Pinball Wizard”. (That would be extraordinary enough all by itself, but this man has a voice, and a musical gift, as large as his towering frame. Have a look at his other videos as well – for example this one.)
From Imprimis, the monthly newsletter of Hillsdale College, here is an outstanding article by Christopher Caldwell: How To Think About Vladimir Putin.
I would excerpt it here, but it’s all so good that I’ll just urge you to go read the whole thing.
Here’s yesterday’s headline from the New York Times, delivered apparently without irony:
Syria Strike Puts U.S. Relationship With Russia At Risk
The nice thing about propaganda is you can turn on a dime to keep the target in the crosshairs.
Don Rickles is dead at 90. Little by little dies an era.
The NightWatch newsletter comes over the transom in the wee hours every night. From today’s edition:
Special comment for new analysts. It always is wise to investigate as many versions of a story as are available. Each adds something to the reconstruction of what happened. The open source coverage of the chemical attack at Khan Shaykhun on 3-4 April is the latest example of the need to reserve judgment until the facts are established by credible evidence.
Open source coverage has established beyond doubt that a chemical attack or incident occurred. The Syrian rebel leaders are consistent in blaming the Syrian air force as having dropped chemical bombs. The government is equally insistent that it has no chemicals to use. Both have motives to lie. Both have used chemicals in the past, but only the rebel version of the latest incident received attention at the UN and in mainstream news coverage.
There is another version of what happened worth considering. For example, the London based news website Ra’y al-Yawm published the following version of events.“Syria: Sources Confirm That the Explosion of a Chemical Manufacturing Workshop Belonging to Armed Factions is Responsible for Killing Scores in Khan Shaykhun in Idlib. Syrian Army Denies Possessing Chemical Weapons, and Russia Denies Conducting Raids in the Area.”
“Military sources in Syria have spoken to our correspondent about accusations against the Syrian and Russian air forces of using chemical materials and toxic gases in an attack that killed or wounded scores of people in Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib countryside.’
“The sources stated that a workshop used for fitting rockets with poisonous gas payloads exploded in Khan Shaykhun, killing or wounding the workshop’s personnel and causing a release of toxic substances that injured nearby civilians.
The news website is anti-American, but also very pro-Palestinians and pan-Arab. It is no friend of the Syrian government.
In terms of Means Opportunity and Motive (MOM), both sides could be responsible. Various rebel opposition groups have posted video images of their chemical weapons labs from time to time. We know some rebel groups use chemicals. The alternative story raises a question as to whether Western intelligence agencies knew or suspected that the rebels had a chemical or other weapons storage facility in Khan Shaykhun. If so, the location would be a target.
As to opportunity, an air attack would provide credible cover for a disastrous accident or for an accurate aerial bombing of a rebel weapons storage location that contained chemicals as well as conventional weapons. The alternative is plausible and similar events have occurred outside conflict situations, such as the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984.
As for motive, the war is going against the rebels. They have an urgent need for outside help to restrain the Syrian government forces and the Russians.
As for opportunity, the fighting in Idlib has not seemed to be going so poorly for the government that it required a chemical attack to cause a breakthrough. There is credible evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons to try to reverse deteriorating tactical situations or to break hard core resistance. We do not have the sense that either condition applied to Khan Shaykhun.
Syria and Russia are less careful about civilian casualties than Western powers have tried to be. The Russians and Syrians tend to consider civilians in rebel held areas to be sympathizers or actual supporters of the rebels. The rebels also are not careful about killing civilians, sending them back to Allah, they say.
The above statements are about general intent to use chemicals, past practice and present means.
As for this attack, the Syrian air force is essentially a subset of the Russians. Both have motives to lie about a chemical attack, but both have no motive to conduct a chemical attack because the fighting is going their way. We judge the Russians would know whether Syrian aircraft dropped bombs with chemical weapons. Their denial is self-serving, but that does not make it a lie.
There is much about the ground battle situation that is not known. We remain agnostic about who was responsible for yet another disaster in Syria.
The point of this essay is that the other explanation confutes the rebel story and cautions against a quick rush to judgment based on only one side of the story. One point of certainty is that both sides have used chemical weapons in the war. One of the practices that analysts are prone to indulge is called “premature closure,’ which means drawing a hard conclusion before all the pertinent evidence has been discovered.
Meanwhile, the war drums are getting louder here in the West, and even Donald Trump seems willing to dance. Lewis Amselem, A.K.A. “DiploMad”, has just written a post called Syria: The Siren Song of War. He asks exactly the right question:
Bottom line: Do we have the ability to “repeal” Assad? Yes. Do we have the ability to “replace” Assad? I doubt it.
Also: Scott Adams “calls bullshit”.
The world is in an uproar about the apparent gas attack in Syria. Western nations, and the Western media, have blamed Bashar al-Assad. The Russians say their man Assad didn’t do it; that a conventional bombing strike against a rebel storehouse must have released toxic substances that were to be used in chemical weapons.
I have no doubt that Mr. Assad is a brutal and ruthless man, and I do not ascribe to him any moral compunction that would have stayed his hand. I must say, however, that I have no reason to doubt that he is shrewd and intelligent, and so I cannot imagine that he would not have seen the colossal stupidity of making such an attack — especially right now, when the world, which is so weary of this civil war and the chaos it has caused, had all but abandoned the idea of removing him from power. Was there some tactical gain he achieved — with a gas attack, far from the front lines, that killed a hundred or so people, many of them civilians and children — that could not have been accomplished with conventional ordnance? If so, I can’t see it.
For Assad to have done this thing, then, makes no sense. It certainly makes far less sense than the alternatives: that the Russian account is correct, or that it was a false-flag operation mounted in reaction to the diminishing prospect of a Syrian regime change.
These considerations are, it seems to me, so obvious that I think it is their relative absence from the mainstream discussion of this event that wants explaining. (It’s certainly just the thing if you want to make a case for U.S. action against the regime, and by proxy, against Russia.)
Always ask: cui bono?
This from our e-pal Bill Keezer just now:
California Senate OKs statewide illegal immigrant sanctuary bill
Educated readers will recall that United States history already includes some examples of such “nullification”; for fans of peace and order, or of the Union as presently constituted, the precedent is not particularly encouraging. Leaving that aside, however, one effect of this, should it become law, is that it would create a great flood of illegals deciding, like Jed Clampett, that “California’s the place you oughtta be!” The effect on California’s already-overstressed public services, healthcare, education, and prison system should be instructive.
A parting thought, if you will forgive the harshness of the metaphor: the combination of this initiative, and its likely effect, with growing support for “Calexit” puts me in mind of Aesop’s fable about the fox and the fleas.
“The teacher asked once what did we talk about when we talked about happiness. And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably the most accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm – whether it’s something or someone – towards us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being safe in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness.’
”• Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition
It’s been a busy few days, with little time to write. (Nor, to tell the truth, have I had much I’ve wanted to say.) I spent the weekend playing music with friends, which is a much healthier pastime than brooding on the great sucking vortex that forms the current, crepuscular era of Western culture and politics.
With regard to said vortex, however, here are two recent gleanings: Victor Davis Hanson on the Alt-Left, and the irrepressible Jim Goad (good on substance, if not exactly my kind of style) on this endless Trump-Russia business.
Evola:
Indeed, no one can ignore the deep crisis of the ”˜rationalising’ of existence attempted by bourgeois culture, given the many examples of the emerging of the irrational or ”˜elemental’ (in the sense of the elemental character of a force of nature) through the fissures of this culture on every level.
Today, with the return of this obsession with ”˜rationalising’, there is a tendency to render service to an ideal that is not political but ”˜social’ and which belongs to physical comfort, and to marginalise and discredit everything that is comprised of existential tension, heroism and the galvanising force of a myth. But it has been correctly pointed out that a profound crisis is inevitable at the point when prosperity and comfort will finally become boring. The early signs of this crisis are already apparent. They consist of all those forms of blind, anarchic and destructive revolts embraced by a youth that, precisely in the most prosperous nations, notice the absurdity and senselessness of an existence that is socialised, rationalised, materialistic, and dominated by the so-called ”˜consumer culture’. In these revolts, this elementary impulse finds no object and, left to itself, becomes barbaric.
– Fascism Viewed From the Right, 1964
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading The Outline of History, published in 1920 by H. G. Wells. I’m still at it — I tend to have several books going at once, and this two-volume item is about 1,200 pages long.
I’ve just read the brief entry on the conquests of Timurlane (Tamerlane) — who, as I’m sure you know, was very good at conquering, but not so much at anything else.
We read:
[I]n the fifteenth century a last tornado of nomadism arose in Western Turkestan under the leadership of a certain Timur the Lame, or Timurlane. He was descended in the female line from Jengis Khan. He established himself in Samarkand, and spread his authority over Kipchak (Turkestan to South Russia), Siberia, and southward as far as the Indus. He assumed the title of Great Khan in 1369. He was a nomad of the savage school, and he created an empire of desolation from North India to Syria. Pyramids of skulls were his particular architectural fancy; after the storming of Ispahan he made one of 70,000. His ambition was to restore the empire of Jengis Kahn as he conceived it, a project in which he completely failed. He spread destruction far and wide; the Ottoman Turks — it was before the taking of Constantinople and their days of greatness — and Egypt paid him tribute; the Punjab he devastated; and Delhi surrendered to him. After Delhi had surrendered, however, he made a frightful massacre of its inhabitants. At the time of his death (1405) very little remained to witness to his power but a name of horror, ruins and desolated countries, and a shrunken and impoverished domain in Persia.
The dynasty founded by Timur in Persia was extinguished by another Turkoman horde fifty years later.
It’s a dreary story, and I think we should all be glad not to have lived through it. One thing in particular, though, stuck in my mind. In case you missed it:
Pyramids of skulls were his particular architectural fancy; after the storming of Ispahan he made one of 70,000.
My word, I thought to myself, what a thing to have to assemble. I decided to do some calculations.
Let us assume that the pyramid in question is square, and not triangular, and not based on some other polygon. (I can’t confirm this, but it seems likely, as the square pyramid was by far the most popular kind in the ancient world.) If that’s so, then the total skull-count would have to fit in somewhere along the square-pyramid number series, which begins with 1, 5, 14, 30, 55, 91, 140, 204, 285, 385, 506, 650… (This sequence, by the way, is item A000330 in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.)
The general formula for the nth item is (n (n+1) (2n +1)) / 6.
The 58th entry in this sequence is 66,729, while the 59th is 70,210. (Timurlane himself, by the way, may not have been familiar with this formula. I would hate to have been standing around watching this thing go up if he got close to the end and realized he was a few skulls short.)
We’ll go with the closest approximation, and say that the pyramid Timurlane built in Ispahan used 70,210 skulls, which means it was 59 skulls on a side, and 59 layers high.
How big is that? Well, we’ll need to simplify, I think, by assuming spherical skulls. (I hate to do it, but I don’t have all night here, and at least it isn’t as bad as this. And no Cromwell jokes, please.) The average male human skull has a circumference of 22 inches or so. Dividing by pi, we get a diameter of 7 inches.
So now we need to calculate the height of a square pyramid of stacked 7-inch spheres 59 layers high. The formula for that, where d is the diameter of the spheres, and n is the number of spheres on each side of the square base, is: d + d(n-1)√1/2.
The result? Timurlane’s pyramid of 70,000-odd skulls at Ispahan was 24.5 feet high. The base was 34.4 feet on a side (59 x 7″).
Now comes the tough part: how the hell do you build such a thing? How do you climb up that slippery mess, neatly piling skulls, without knocking the whole thing down? The only way I can imagine would be to have built some sort of superstructure from which people could dangle as they dropped the skulls into place. What an effort!
I have a feeling Timurlane himself didn’t hang from ropes placing skulls; if I know anything about Army work, this would be the sort of thing he’d have delegated. Did he have a skull-pyramid team that traveled with him? I bet he did. It’s pretty specialized work.
For some reason, Mr. Wells is silent on this important historical question, so I decided to look on Google just now. I didn’t find much of anything about how Timurlane did it, but I did find this.
Over at Social Matter, William Fitzgerald has posted this excellent analysis of the Gulenist movement’s role in last year’s coup attempt in Turkey. If you have any interest in this sort of thing you should make sure you read it.
If you’re like me, you may be feeling “out of step” because you’ve been having trouble adopting the Progressive way of thinking about things. You have to watch everything you say in public, and your maladjusted belief system may have cost you friendships, or even your job!
Have you found that despite all this, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t unsee all of that stubborn “reality” right before your eyes?
Well, folks, help is on the way! Soon you’ll be able to fit right in. It turns out that to think like you should, all you need to do is disable parts of your brain.
Here we have a perfect example of what the late (and greatly missed) Lawrence Auster called the Unprincipled Exception:
Hijab becomes symbol of resistance, feminism in the age of Trump
The Muslim hijab as a symbol of Western-style feminism? Could anything be more obviously absurd? Clearly, then, absurdity doesn’t matter here: this is nothing more than the grabbing of whatever is closest to hand and using it to bludgeon an opponent. It is like an angry housewife throwing the dishes.
Feminists: both you and Islam have a common enemy, namely the traditional culture of the West. Islam will, of course, gladly help you destroy it.
But do you really imagine that once you have leveled and pulverized Western masculinity and femininity — and by doing so, have brought down the twin pillars of your civilization — you will then make agreeable terms with Islam?
Sturdy class structures, although they may diminish individual opportunity, keep superior genes, when they arise, within each class. In doing so, then, they strengthen classes at every level.
High social mobility, by contrast, tends to “boil off” superior individuals, who, when they are given the opportunity to do so, move up and out — taking their genes with them. In this way every class, at every level, loses its best people to a class above it. Because the class system is not bottomless, this means that the lowest classes continuously deteriorate, while more gifted individuals cluster in the higher classes. (This latter tendency is perhaps mitigated, somewhat, by the somewhat lower likelihood of inferior higher-class individuals moving downward in class.) This necessarily increases social inequality, and therefore social tension. It also instantiates the “Peter Principle”, in that individuals will rise until they find their level of social or professional incompetence, then stay there. This leads to the presence at every level of individuals who are not naturally well-fitted members of that class. This has an entropic and disordering effect on organic hierarchies.
On the other hand, too rigid a class structure prevents the ascension of exceptional individuals, and so not only thwarts individual liberty, but also blunts the leading edge of a society’s progress and accomplishment.
So: What is the proper balance? What is it that we should be seeking to optimize?
In his latest column, Patrick Buchanan weighs in on the Trump/Russia story.
The propaganda war is ablaze: the MSM would have you believe that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere with the election — although nobody has ever produced, or even claimed, that there is any evidence of collusion for this purpose (beyond various people having contacts and connections), given any particulars of any conversation (let alone of any quid pro quo), or so much as suggested that the vote was tampered with in any way. Indeed, all that is known to have been compromised, by somebody, are the emails of John Podesta and the DNC — which revealed only the unethical machinations of the Democrats, in collusion with the media, to help ensure the coronation of Hillary Clinton. The New York Times also reported that the Obama administration, in its last days, altered privacy rules and disseminated this classified intelligence to multiple government agencies, including those of foreign countries.
Meanwhile, multiple felonies have plainly been committed in the repeated disclosure to the media of what should have been carefully secured intelligence.
Where is all this going? As a friend of mine used to say: “you tell me, and we’ll both know!” It seems safe to say, though, that there’s much, much more to this story — and that the stakes, on both sides of the aisle, couldn’t be higher. We are headed for a very interesting spring and summer.
We’ve heard an awful lot about how the election of Donald Trump has emboldened and “enabled” hate-filled right-wingers to express themselves with vandalism and assault. In particular there’s been a rash of swastika-scrawling, and of bomb-threats against Jewish centers.
When these things happen, we on the dissident Right simply wait, knowing that the odds are very good indeed that it’s a false-flag job, and that the perp will turn out to be some member of the group ostensibly (and ostentatiously) victimized. This is because we know a thing or two about the two sides here, and the way they behave. As I said in a post on this topic back in December:
Most conservative, traditionalist sorts are fonder of order than chaos, of tidiness than graffiti, of civility than insult, of police than hooligans, of those who obey the law than those who break it, etc. In short, they are much less likely to deface public buildings with graffiti, and to lie to the police about things that didn’t happen, than the good souls who brought you Ferguson, Baltimore, Occupy Wall Street, the Rolling Stone rape story, the Michael Brown mythos, and so on. Even when they are sufficiently aroused to assemble in protest, they do not break things, or defecate on flags and police cars. They show up, mill around for a while, tidy up after themselves, and go back to their homes and jobs.
The pattern is extremely consistent:
1) Some act of vandalism or assault against an oppressed minority is reported: a swastika, a noose, unwitnessed harrassment or bullying, a bomb threat, etc.;
2) The “mainstream media”, and their avid consumers among blue-empire Goodwhites, are noisily and flamboyantly appalled that such right-wing “hate” still exists in The Current Year;
3) Eventually the perp is exposed, and turns out not to have been any sort of righty at all, but rather a member of the oppressed minority, or some generic lefty seeking to cast opprobrium upon Badwhites;
4) The offense is swept from memory, and the story swiftly interred by the media;
5) Repeat.
“Periodic sackings are part and parcel of living in a major city.”
– Honorius, 410 A.D.
Well, here is something quite remarkable for our time: an actual “conversation about race” in which two people, with completely incommensurable axioms and worldviews, discuss the topic for a full hour without shouting each other down, or resorting to violence. (Astonishingly, there isn’t even any mention of Hitler.) The interlocutors are Jared Taylor, of American Renaissance, and one Amna Nawaz of ABC News — who, if it isn’t too simplistic to describe the landscape this way, neatly represent entirely opposite poles of contemporary Western social thought.
They do not, of course, alter one another’s views on the subject one iota, but they actually do manage to sit across from one another for an hour and just talk. (Right past each other, like a couple of neutrinos.)
Will this help anything? No, because their worldviews are, as I said above, incommensurable. It quickly becomes clear that Mr. Taylor and Ms. Nawaz can’t agree about the most basic values and units and categories by which any human mind frames and organizes and measures the world. There is almost no common ground even regarding truth itself — moral, historical, biological, cultural, political or otherwise. But at least the encounter, however futile, proceeded with a brittle civility, which is far better than usual for this sort of thing.
I won’t score the “debate” — what would be the point? (Well, OK, maybe I’ll just say that I think that Mr. Taylor’s presentation is far more consistent, and far better grounded in history and human nature, than Ms. Nawaz’s, which rests almost entirely on the tenets of the modern West’s dominant universalist religion.) Mainly I offer it as a gloomy example of how little commonality there is between these radically antagonistic visions of reality, and how little chance of any “conversation” making any difference to anything. Keep in mind that this entirely unproductive interview is as good as it gets.
I was saddened yesterday to hear that Chuck Berry had died. (He was 90, and so it was bound to happen soon, but it was a jolt nevertheless.)
He was a majestic, and majestically stationary, feature of my generation’s musical landscape. He was always there, a great peak on its eastern horizon, and the shadow he threw across it at the dawn of rock music never seemed to grow any shorter.
He made his first record a year before I was born, and was already venerable by the time I started listening attentively to this nascent musical form, beginning in the early 60s. Probably my introduction to Chuck Berry’s music was the Beatles’ early covers of Roll Over Beethoven and Rock And Roll Music, but trying to remember exactly when you first heard a Chuck Berry song is, for an American musician of my age, like trying to remember your first cheeseburger.
He was a tremendously influential innovator, but unlike some of the artists he influenced — most notably, the Beatles — having discovered a new and fertile continent, he made himself comfortable at the water’s edge and remained there. But everyone who came later to explore and improve this new world did so by way of the city he founded, and they all picked up the local accent.
Here’s an example of that: Chuck Berry schooling a disciple you may recognize.
I’m sorry he’s gone, and grateful that he lived. Wish I could’ve watched him duckwalking through the Pearly Gates.
We’ve devoted some space lately to the mutated and camouflaged religion (and not just any religion!) that goes by the name of Progressivism. (Once you’ve spotted it, you can’t un-see it; it’s as plain as this owl.)
But why the camo in the first place? Moldbug explains:
The question is: why? How did we fall for this? How did we enable an old, well-known strain of Christianity to mutate and take over our minds, just by discarding a few bits of theological doctrine and describing itself as “secular”? (As La Wik puts it: “Despite occasional confusion, secularity is not synonymous with atheism.” Indeed.)
In other words, we have to look at the adaptive landscape of ultracalvinism. What are the adaptive advantages of crypto-Christianity? Why did those Unitarians, or even “scientific socialists,” who downplayed their Christian roots, outcompete their peers?
Well, I think it’s pretty obvious, really. The combination of electoral democracy and “separation of church and state” is an almost perfect recipe for crypto-Christianity.
As I’ve said before, separation of church and state is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic. What you really need is separation of information and security. If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, a constant danger in any democracy for obvious reasons, the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it’s a church. Dropping theology is a no-brainer. Game over, you lose, and it serves you right for vaccinating against a nonfunctional surface protein.
The strategic-security situation has been a neglected topic here for a while. Time to catch up a little.
One of the most septic, and possibly most infectious, areas of conflict at the moment is Yemen, the site of a deepening proxy war between Islam’s major players. The nation is completely dysfunctional, with almost no chance of recovery, and it is a stronghold of al-Qaeda — an organization that is anything but “on the run”.
Recently the analyst Thomas Joscelyn testified before the Senate Foreign Relations committee on the situation in Yemen. His report is here. He was also interviewed by John Batchelor, and you can listen to the discussion here.
