Hello everyone, I’m making this subscriber thread visible to all readers so that I can get out a few announcements at the same time, but the comments will remain subscriber only. The first announcement is in fact that I’m going to begin making the comments on almost all posts subscriber only from here on out, including the free ones. This is not just because it will make a nice subscriber benefit, but because the scale of the open comment posts have quickly started to grow beyond my ability to keep track and moderate away the OnlyFans bots and genuine nutters. I think the community will be better off for it.
Thanks for bringing attention to the food crisis. I had heard only slight rumblings about this.
Also, your statement: "Well, if “old-school liberals” are going to survive the decade they’re going to need to figure out why this has in fact happened, and fast." strikes me as humorous and sad at the same time. Those "old-school liberals" worked very hard to produce what we have today. They simply didn't foresee its logical conclusion.
My theory is that liberals were very optimistic (like current techno-optimists) about human nature and thought that their ideas were ushering in a new age of magnanimity and equality. Instead, they ushered in an age of totalitarian-minded people who believe that if equality isn't happening, then we must make it happen by any means necessary.
Yes I think the basics is something along those lines. Also, once a secular society was achieved, stripping out the "superstitious" in the dream of governance by pure Enlightenment rationalism, the human need for religious belief was filled by the quest to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth (utopia) through politics, and rationalism was abandoned again. Or something like that.
Great point! Utopia through tech seems pretty popular as well.
I read "Ready Player 1" and "Ready Player 2" (perhaps where Meta is headed) and the author's presentation of tech utopia is pretty depressing, even when they try to give it a hopeful twist.
WW1 and then the Great Depression severely deflated the idea that "progress" would lead to any kind of utopia (the use of atom bombs at the end of WW2 was the exclamation point). But those kinds of glaring facts didn't stop the "progressive" utopians from continuing in their folly.
They were not completely discredited because FDR legalized and politically legitimized labor organizing, and after WW2 and the huge economic expansion, "progressives" followed FDR's schemes and basked in the glow (which they hadn't necessarily created) as the fat and happy (unionized) working classes kept voting for Democrats.
By the 1970s, the post-war economic expansion stalled, and progressivism (in its original sense) died and was replaced in the rising suburban consumer culture with toxic postmodern-relativism (the New Left).
Only had time for the first answer by David Heleniak. Interesting. Never thought-a Conservatives and Christians quite that way. May try to reread or read more later. (Probably no, no TIME.)
to vastly oversimplify, "original sin" is a purity myth:
God/Heaven is spiritually pure and perfect.
The world is imperfect, spiritually unclean and full of suffering, evil ad sin.
That construct did not exist for 100,000s of years of human history/ evolution, it only became increasingly prominent in a number of cultures after the Bronze Age collapse (BAC). The old nature gods of pagans and nomads were inadequate to the rebuilding of agrarian city states because the nature gods didn't offer a model for people to transcend tribalism. So, the religion of the post-BAC city states became about a transcendent God (ultimately in Islam, the concept of Divine Unity, "One God", became the primary theological principle).
"original sin", or purity myth, allowed the people of the city states to:
1. clearly differentiate themselves from the nomads and pagans (which they were frequently at war with), and
2. bring people from different tribes and classes (rulers and slaves) together via transcendent religion.
Transcendent religion provides spiritual, psychological and social order and discipline at a higher order than pagan religion. As such, it enhances the natural, evolved, INHIBITION circuitry in the human brain (see Iain McGilchrist).
The downside is that the upgrade to transcendent religion came at the price of stigmatizing and oppressing "pagan" people. Given the fact that pagans such as the Mongolian Hordes had destroyed all of the major civilizations in the known world over 100s of years, western civilization probably saw even more reason to view pagans as "evil".
PERSONALLY, I'm 50% FUndamentalist Atheist. Was raised that way. But in the society of Judeo-Christianity. I can see both the benefits, and the NOT-unintended consequences.
Two questions, if You have time:
Rousseau then bringing back something Pagan-like? Or not?
And which of Iain McGilchrist? I BELIEVE I've read all his books, WOuld like to read again, but in particular the last one. Bad memory: Forget what it was called. That when I have time for a 2000=page read.
I look at history in terms of systems theory, cultural evolution and psychological/Jungian archetypes. From that perspective what they are saying is consistent with how western civilization evolved and went through several major paradigm shifts (see Gerhard Lenski).
"original sin" was a core part of the paradigm shift from nomadic and herding cultures to settled, agrarian cultures. the corresponding religious shift was from "magic" thinking (shamanism, paganism) to mythic thinking (institutional "temple" religion).
Rousseau was a major contributor to Romanticism, which was a movement that rejected modern agentic values, rationalism, objectivity and "materialism", and attempted to regain a deep sense of subjective, emotional, mythic experience (communion values).
"In his examination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Second Discourse, David Heleniak contends that libertarians are the heirs of the Greco-Roman pagans and the "modern pagans" of the Enlightenment, conservatives are the end product of the Christian doctrine of original sin, and the American Left is the consequence of the doctrine as transformed by Rousseau."
Phew! TYTY. I'm an uneducated savage, so am interested in ALL-a above. I go into it like You do, but on the psychology from self-inspection rather than Jung (who've I've been meaning to get to).
Only thing I've read by Rousseau was "Emile," and it didn't dent my ignorance. Like-ta go further into him. And DH's book sounds FASCINATING. A LOT different than the Way i normally look at things.
May.
Alas, 1000 books I've already paid for, which I'll never read in my remaining years. On list. *italicized.* Plus, money is getting to be an issue until I get my finances under reasonable control. (retired)
I've read Mary Harrington before and liked it. This may, I say MAY (italics), come to pass more and more:
"And in the absence of clear moral leadership, the alarming prospect is that instead we’ll witness a proliferation of Rittenhouses: self-appointed individual guardians of a public order abandoned by the elites whose responsibility it is to uphold."
OTOH, looking at the whole topic in reference to the Rittenhouse debacle was somewhat wide of the mark, IM-not-so-HO. What happened in the Rittenhouse affair is that anybody interrupting a riot is bad by definition. According to Team Rouseau. So You had a bad man kill some people. Should-a been crucified according to this way of thinking, obviously. That being the times these days.
The PROBLEM came because the media (MSM and social), again according to Woke logic, didn't pay any attention to the facts. K.R. killed three White men, and race had little to nothing to do with it at ALL. You'd never have guessed that from the coverage.
Granted, the Repubs are gonna make each and every conflict into a political situation, so can say there are clean hands in that direction. The facts were clear as a bell, and justice was served. It just wasn't the right KIND-a justice, according to the powers-that-be. KellyAnne Conway may have invented the term "alternate facts" for Trump, but she didn't invent the practice, right?
All that to say, I dunno if this PARTICULAR case was about the fundamental question of good/evil humankind so much as a mundane attempt at a lynching by the Leftists who are in power. Per usual, I welcome being corrected, because ICBW. Tho I don't right like that much, I realize it.
For sure - that verse (and much of scripture) point out that the evil in humanity makes us actually evil and in need of a savior outside of ourselves. It does not neglect the fact that there is good (I believe by particularly pointing out that all humans have their being from God and are created in his image).
Perhaps the Bible would argue that even our good is tainted with selfishness and pride. I don't have the skill to walk through that argument well.
Yeah you can get deep in the weeds with those explications but it is true that even the good you (try) to do can come from wrong motivations. A “saying” I came up with: judge yourself harshly and others with grace and mercy(I am in no way an examplar of this)
C'MON MAN! You know me well enough that I'm not gonna let this go uncontested, right, Madjack?
First, You're not ALTOGETHER (italics) wrong. That's unQUESTIONABLE..
M. Harrington's piece showed one thing, and it's that team Rouseau has been alive and well, and RAISED this pusillaneous (spelling) Woke generation. Or generationS. Right? You'll agree with that I would thin'.
I don't have any degrees and didn't have any children. Still, I think most people of sound mind that have looked into it know that CHILDREN are basically selfish biss-tards whose sole aim is to survive. Can't say I REMEMBER it that way, but just stands to the biological imperative. Survive at all costs, right?
They have to be TAUGHT to share. NOT their natural inclination. They have to be TAUGHT the Golden Rule, by whatever name. (You recall I was raised Fundamentalist Atheist, right?) They have to be TAUGHT that there are boundries that outline what is good behavior and what is bad behavior. IOW, moral behavior has to be TAUGHT.
It was us BabyBoomers and Gen-Xers who didn't take responsibility for raising their kids right, right? Or, rather, a LOTTA them.
Nowadays, the stupid has become the fashion. The "self-esteem" movement. SCIENTIFICALLY shown to be WORSE than USELESS. I just recently found out it still goes on TODAY (recall, italics).
And You wonder how come kids came out the way they did? I don't. They're not evil. Humans are a BALANCE of good and evil, right? Any question on that?
Too many just weren't taught that they weren't #1 the center of the universe, and the rest follows, IMHO, and that there ARE limits. That there IS such-a thing as good and evil behavior. And that character develops over time and SHOWS the people that understand the difference.
Sorry, You caught on an expansive moment, Madjack. But I'll fight to the death to maintain that, from what I know, You're an all-around GOOD guy. And that's Your nature to be that Way.
Thanks for the kind words. The classic Christian theology would postulate that we are inherently evil(although at times we can do good). Therefore guardrails are needed: laws, punishment, etc
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external or internal controls on government would be necessary “. James Madison Federalist papers
I've put it on my list to get to the Federalist Papers. Pretty sure I bought them. But thing is, we're neither angels, nor are angels able to govern us, as the term government is meant by Madison. Or at least as I assume what he means.
As You know, although a Fundamentalist Atheist I was raised in America's Judeo-Christian Society. But, ignoramoose that I am, I don't know much about the classic Christian theology, or any OTHER kind-a theology.
But the idea that we are INHERENTLY evil is contrary to common sense. Even kids, hungry for survival as they are, are not INcapable of innate goodness, right? Or hasn't that been Your experience, Madjack?
Do we need laws and punishments? Only the insane (and there's PLENTY of them around lately) would think we didn't. Kids who can't handle authority, because they never spotted any when they were growing up, a LOTTA 'em. From the Rousseau side of parenting, I'm talking about.
Funny how it's almost ENTIRELY the very well-off, who don't live close to crime zones, who are MOST in favor or relaxing laws, prosecutions, and punishments. But even some-a them are learning otherwise, the hard way, right?
I guess when you consider the foundational text of Western Civilization is the story of how people were given every advantage—even food dropping from the skies—and still managed to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again. So, I wonder if they could ever learn their lesson...
Interestingly this “foundational text” is not even briefly explicated in our “education” system. It’s like trying to understand Saudi Arabia without understanding the Koran
So true - conservatives used to get a bad rap for banning books and liberals wanted all books available for reading and discourse. Now, the left is banning people and books all over the place.
By the Spanish-American War, 1899, the idea that good americans could be "isolationists", and opposed to joining the imperialist spree and associated "foreign entanglements" going on all over the world, was mostly gone.
Woodrow Wilson's "internationalism" was basically "progressive" imperialism-lite, including a new faux religion and moral panics (Prohibition).
Pretty much all US Presidents since Wilson have been puppets of the military-industrial-complex and various projects of empire building.
I think Trump, who was mostly a Jacksonian ("america first" nationalist), was the only modern exception in the last 100 years.
Thank you for making comments subscriber only. It makes good sense.
I am looking forward to your article on the consequences of the Russia / Ukraine war on China’s behavior going forward. This is the a critical issue that I’ve been thinking about as Xi is not an ordinary thinker. I don’t believe it’s as simple as him taking Taiwan. He is thinking much bigger over a very long time frame.
Pardon me for interrupting, and would be glad to see an article along these lines. But, in the long game, China will crush the West economically. Then they'll be the Confucian Patriarch to the rest-a the world. They've done it already to the NBA. They've got their claws heavily into the universities (at least in the U.S.). They play by a different set-a rules as everybody else does. Dunno if true, but said to appropriate 3 to 600 BILLION (italics) $ in intellectual property.
Ray Dalio's latest book (only one-a his I've read), makes it seem like a foregone conclusion. Now, he's guilty (IMHO) of a very wicked pro-China bias. (Working with them since '84. Sending his son there for high school.) Dunno it affected his analysis tho, or not.
There are plenty of other signs. Taiwan. IMHO, a goner. Just a matter of when. ICBW. Could be VERY wrong, but time will tell the tale.
China is dying faster than the West, they just managed to peak right now. Similar to Japan in the 1980s. They're swinging from brutally enforcing their One Child Policy to the opposite, and it's not working at all. They could still crush us before their regime descends into poverty, though.
You could be right, M. Gast. Guy from China pointed out mebbe a decade ago. THing China's got going for it populace of 1B. It's just mathematics: They'll graduate a MULTIPLE of our STEM people. Especially now that STEM is white supremacy.
As far as China collapsing? CCP will stop at NOTHING to see that doesn't happen. At least to the people in the party. ICBW.
Naw. TYTY. I bought Principles I thin' it was called. I thin' his first. I don't get to most-a what I've bought, and that's not likely to be one any time soon. Alas...
Yes, I believe their attack will not be via the military but economically. China lent big funds to Sri Lanka for port development and then defaulted. China now runs the port.
Yeah, there's several on the what?? "Belt and Road" path that have seen the money comes with conditions.
Can't recall how bad Australia is getting into that money and interdepdence mess.
Thing that bothers me MOST about China's commercial ports are they're going to the extra expense of making them to MILITARY specifications. Presumably, or *I* presume among others, that these can be converted over without two much trouble. All along the Indian ocean, like pearls on a string. Just saw that one time, but I find it VERY believable for them to do that.
“Well, if “old-school liberals” are going to survive the decade they’re going to need to figure out why this has in fact happened, and fast."
I don’t think we should hold our breath.
As a conservative living in left coast liberal land (a 80% liberal college town), I have a self-awarded PHD in old-school-liberal attitudes and behaviors. I hate to generalize along political or ideological lines because yes, certainly there are as many nuanced opinions within the old-school-liberal community, but there is a core of duck talking/walking that helps establish some benchmarks.
From my perspective there exists a core of social and/or economic malcontentedness within the old-school-liberal psyche. Even if seemingly financially and socially successful a deficit of self-confidence or self-worth percolates. It is Peterson’s Human Dominance Hierarchy stuff. My old-school-liberal friends see the little woke monsters as assisting, rather than harming, their old-school-liberal hold on political, social and economic dominance. My old-school-liberal friends are more worried about the wife of the successful conservative home builder contractor gaining a seat on the local School Board or City Council than the risk of having their career canceled because they uttered the wrong phrase at the campus where they work.
I used to count on some of my old-school-liberal friends to join me in opposition to social justice activists attempting to bully the City Council into adopting harmful policies. Today they either stay silent or they join the wokeist student crowd to demand that we, for example, reduce the funding to the police department.
I am really quite frustrated and disgusted with my old-school-liberal friends. I don’t know if their media feeds during the Trump era broke them, or if an extremists gene was always percolating and ready to take over. But clearly they are blowing it. They are making a deal with the devil in supporting these postmodern critical theory campus radicals. It may already be too late. The current SCOTUS nominee would not define what the word “woman” meant. How then will she defend a woman’s rights… a cornerstone of interest for my old-school-liberal friends?
“the counterrevolution is not the opposite of a revolution, but is an opposing revolution.” Once the revolutionary process begins, the old regime is finished. Both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries—who are ostensibly interested in restoring the status quo ante—must found a new regime.”
Who, in your opinion, are the counterrevolutionaries in our play?
My view has been that that American working class that supported Trump are that. It has been a bit confusing to me that the young radicals seem to have much in common in criticism and shared goals for joining forces against the elite cabal of Wall Street and their government and political tools… but instead seem to support that cabal and rage against the working class.
For that reason I have seen the elite cabal and radical left as the same army working on the Great Reset. Most of that BLM money went to Actblue.com. Is there really any space between the old-school-liberal cohort and the young radicals?
The faux "radical left" has been a "controlled opposition" going back to the 1950s/60s. The goal of the neomarxists/Frankfurters was to quit the international class revolution stuff and move onto the "New Left" tactics of promoting the destruction of the national unity myth (and suburban consumerism) so that it could be replaced by relativism and "victim" narratives such as CRT.
Here is a classic explanation of how the postmodern (academic) cultural-left abandoned the working classes in the 1960s and adopted (french) euro-snobery and elitism:
I've been floating along commenting, so am just starting to take some-a Kingsnorth in. But when I'm wrong, i like to be the first to point it out. You really DON'T wanna take EVERYTHING he says to the bank. But insightful to the max:
"Maybe you can best understand a culture by noticing what it demonises. Since 2016, elite voices in Western culture, especially in the Anglosphere, had laid out a new demonology. The baddies were Brexit voters, Trump voters, ‘deplorables’, ‘gammon’, conservatives, religious traditionalists (white ones, anyway) and, if we were feeling more exotic, Viktor Orban of Hungary or some rebellious Canadian truck drivers. What they all had in common was that they were broadly anti-globalist, often nationalist, sometimes culturally traditionalist, largely working class, and - perhaps most importantly of all - opposed to the interests of transnational corporations.
"The more I dug into this, the more something else became clear: the Internet mobsters resisting these new demons, though they presented themselves as champions of the marginalised and overlooked, just happened to have interests which aligned with those of the Machine."
The PRIVILEGED class. Or tryin' to be. That's best I can figure.
I only disagree that I don't see Trump being much use in actually DOING anything in the way of solving problems of this kind. In actual FACT, it has a lot due to his CONSTANT AGITATION over his tenure that things got so bad in the Floyd days, right? Or IMHO.
Trump won in 2016 and garnered 74 million votes in the 2020 election. So who are those people if not some revolutionaries or counter-revs?
In another article on the Substack.com there is a book review that covers the black vote for Trump and how he actually did improve the outcomes in the black community. He got the Mexican government to hold asylum seekers. He accomplished trade agreements that had been talked about for decades. There is a list of real things he accomplished. I have a real problem with this repeat that he did nothing. The corporate media did not report on his accomplishments only his Tweets.
Back to the point. So, these little woke rebels are really just soldiers of the moneyed elite? Or are they indoctrinated campus and media clones sleepwalking to their own destruction? Or a combination of both?
Reading the comment section on The Atlantic, it seems that there is a real and justified criticism over the degradation of economic opportunity and hyper inflationary costs of housing. These are issues shared by the working class.
There are a number of pretty well known ways to define "old school liberal", it would be helpful if N.S. Lyons clarified how he/she is using the phrase.
What I think of as the "left", especially the cultural-left (including the psychotic, radical and extremist cultural-marxists/postmodernists), a group that also usually overlaps with "progressives" (which the "dirtbag left" like Jimmy Dore satirizes for selling out) is now mostly totalitarian and ILLIBERAL in the sense that the original definition of historical liberalism was:
- high-social-trust and representative politics
- tolerance and free speech
- market economics
- individual achievement (modern-rational and agentic values, not premodern-mythic communion values)
- increasing literacy
- increasing economic well being of the urban commoner class
- techno-economic and scientific innovation
(see Henrich @ Harvard's "WEIRD" model* of the cultural evolution of modernity.)
Those aspects of "classical/historical liberalism" are usually more associated with "conservatives" (premodern, mythic ILLIBERALS) now, but actual historical conservatives believed in the restoration of "Alter and Crown" rule, or some similar form of right-wing, reactionary, authoritarian, anti-democratic dictatorship. (Putin and Dugin are somewhat of a hybrid of various types of "left" and "right" authoritarianism).
So, anyone writing or commenting about "old school liberalism" should clarify what they mean. Are they just talking about the senile Boomer hippies from the 1960s and their postmodern-relativist values and offspring, most of whom are D-party loyalists (or something like that)?
Things get strange when taking into consideration that the D-party "old school liberals" of that kind have been in bed with neoliberal, the corporate-state, military-industrial-complex and "Deep State" for a long time, at least as far back as Clinton in the 1990s.
And now many/most of the (never-Trump) Neoconservatives that used to be on the (authoritarian) "right" are also in bed with the D-party elites!
Postmodern social conditions are blurring a lot of lines because social FRAGMENTATION and ATOMIZATION are inherent to postmodernism.
Thus, the ILLIBERAL "left" is now in a disrupted, psychotic, postmodern, culturally atomized cultural and political stew with what used to be elements of the ILLIBERAL "right" (including the pro-war "right")!
As far as "fixing the problem" goes until there is some kind awareness of the need for "anti-fragile" social institutions, from the legal system to education to government to mass media and the technology sector (and many others), the process of postmodern disruption will not have any meaningful opposition, and Trumpism (populist, neo-confederate resentment) will become the default "solution" that isn't actually a solution, other than convincing the rural and traditional working classes that they need to break away from what western civilization has been corrupted into by postmodernism.
Well done. Have you read Cynical Theories and Woke Racism? Two books I would highly recommend. I define old-school-liberals as liberal progressives not having been indoctrinated into the critical theory dogma. These books basically lay out a clear method to identify the radical postmodernist critical theory brainwashed campus clones through the language and tactics they use. The current SCOTUS nominee identified herself as one by refusing to define "woman". But old school liberals are cheering on her confirmation.
They are like cancer cells destroying the system and old school liberals hold the keys for either injecting the cancer or stopping the spread. If they don't stop it we get Trump.
I've read a lot of James Lindsay's commentary, and listened to some of his videos. I saw several scholars (one of whom communicates with Pluckrose) in a heterodox integral theory group (kinda similar to the IDW) argue about Lindsay's statement that he was voting for Trump.
It is unfortunate and sad that the SCOTUS nominee is displaying such an absurd lack of moral and intellectual clarity, but not surprising.
Here is a similar analysis as Lindsay's of the problem of postmodernism in cultural evolution:
Tho might not be of interest to anybody, I would make a few PROVISIONAL observations. First off, the way I WRITE is altogther different than the Way I talk to people face-to-face. I may give the impression that I've succumbed to "the Big Head" aka lethal self-importance. You dunno me, but I claim to have been beaten down so many times, and have gone overboard so many times, that it's not the case.
In my OPINION, anybody who knows ANYTHING would look at life as running along a SPIRAL. Breathe in=expand. Breathe-out-dissolve. THe error most people make is in thinking that there are HIGHER and LOWER levels to this spiral. This idea that there's a linear progression from stages 3 to 5, and those with level 5 capability are some higher specimen of human being is, to me, laughable. Same reason I'm glad I'm 50% Fundamentalist Atheist. Religious or "Spiritual but not Religious" people often get the idea that THEY'RE a superior being compared to those who aren't Religio-Spiritual.
That devalues people, one way or t'other, to the benefit of no one, right? I'm mean, most moralities have the concept that there's a level where there IS no higher or lower, right? Again, I'm no theologian. Mebbe it's just a principle of Democracy. Looked at one Way, we're all on a plane of equality of a Oneness of things. Not that everyone has the same CAPABILITIES. That's mathematically IMPOSSIBLE. Stupid people pretend to "knowledge" of that "equity" even POSSIBLE, let alone DESIRABLE.
Not arguing there aren't different ROLES that pertain to hierarchy. Learn that from parents, or kids USED-ta. But morally/intellectually superior? (Weeeel, "intellect" is a bad term, but YOu probably know what I mean.)
I welcome ANYone to correct me. I try to learn a thing or two if I can. IF anyone bothered to read this tripe.
I can't leave this one thing lay, or I won't be able to go to sleep in a few. The absolute WORST Religion is the Atheist Religion. Them crowning themselves the be-all and know-all that they had the INTELLIGENCE to see Religion for the hateful, superstitious drivel that it is.
Self-confirming, so can't be any question about it.
I didn't get enough sleep last night. I read summary of Kegan's stages. My experience has been radically different than most, so can't tell to what extent, yet, how much of this is like left-hemisphere blathering and how much I'm just plain weird. I've always acknowledged the latter.
I'm reading the one You posted, but am too dense to see who WROTE it. Copyrighted by one David Chapman, but I can't find anything on him. Also, my RECOLLECTION is that James Lindsay is a staunch atheist. ICBW. At any rate, I'm not buying this hook, line, and sinker, but I'm visually things a lot different, so TYTY for link.
"Cynical Theories" was a real eye-opener for me. I belonged to Professor McWhorter's Substack while he was flushing out his ideas for "Woke Racism."
And, from above:
"Thus, the ILLIBERAL 'left' is now in a disrupted, psychotic, postmodern, culturally atomized cultural and political stew with what used to be elements of the ILLIBERAL 'right'.."
Yeah. But M. Lee, I'm not sure that has-ta lead to Trump. There's a center out there for either party to go for. It's the Independents who elect one president or the other, right? I think the party that successfully ratchets down their extremes or, better yet, abandons them, can actually start work on some actual SOLUTIONS to problems.
Personally, I'd like to see that from the right, because they seem to be willing to acknowledge that there COULD be solutions. The grifters on the left, and the $6B DEI industry they created, are running as fast as they can AWAY from solutions, right?
It is a horrible oversimplification, but it can be argued that the whole left-vs-right narrative is the "problem" and not the solution.
I would reframe the problem as being that the sense making system of western civilization (modern-rational hierarchies of curated expertise) is "fragile to disruption" by networks and other electronic technologies.
"Anti-fragile" sense making is not likely to come from the existing, dysfunctional, left-vs-right paradigm, although you are correct that some very talented geniuses from the "right" are probably going to be among the people that solve social and political problems.
Here is a classic exposé, one of many, of the correlation between mental dysfunction and the left:
TY again. I found out I had NO idea what psychoticism was. But rest doesn't surprise me. My own OPINION is that Social Sciences is an oxymoron. People think that just because they can assign a number to something, that makes them a science. I disagree.
Yeah, "fragile to disruption" ain't the least of it. I'm thinkin' of Transhumanism right now, more than anything. You may be right about left/right. I see it in terms of the two atrocious political parties we have. Both-a them an amorphous blob of contradictory goals, AFAIK.
Will look at both links after finish reading about KEgan's stages and some chores. Phew! Day about shot. Nothin' done.
Anyway, sure to enjoy above link, so I'll get to that one soonest.
I left the USA for Europe in 1991 because I had both an opportunity and a premonition of doom. Lived in Poland and Russia, worked all across the former Warsaw Pact and even hit all 15 countries of the former Soviet Union. Now a citizen in the UK, lived here for 24 years.
Politically active, both in party politics but also on the front lines in defending women's rights.
My sisters are a similar age (late 50s, early 60s) and live in the midwest. Was on a video chat with them a few weeks ago. They were moaning about the possibility that Roe v Wade may be overturned and the right to abortion severely curtailed. Also how upset our late beloved mother would be about current developments (a bra burning second wave feminist, campaigned for JFK). I said 'so what are you doing about it?' A right that rests on a precedent as fragile as Roe v Wade, is only a permission, not a right. There's a woman vice president. Why is no one talking about securing women's rights to reproductive autonomy? Why not revive the Equal Rights Amendment? Maybe give pregnant women protection from discrimination? They basically shrugged and said 'well that all sounds very difficult and there's no legislative consensus for any of those things'. And also (I'm not making this up) they blamed Trump for all women's problems.
So, I despair. I fear for my homeland. And for those who are truly vulnerable because what's coming next may be Armageddon or may not - but it won't be good news for women. For working class people. For that huge number of Americans who have no savings or less than 3 months outgoings (which is an astonishing percentage).
I don’t see US women’s rights progress as a current rational cause. It has been achieved and then some. What is left is old activists unwilling to admit it and still clutching the identities of a 1st and 2nd wave feminist. Sounds like your sisters and mother. Where they are blowing it is in support of the 3rd wave postmodern feminist movement that is not a women’s rights movement. It hit apogee and it now sliding back down to a dark agenda that will result in the cancelation of “woman” as an identifiable group entity to be replaced with WTF? Frankly, Woe V Wade is a distraction and insignificant symbolic issue. The cancelation of women’s athletics by biological men is an example of what your sisters should be concerned about. And the woke sickness behind it is coming to the UK… in fact it is already in Europe and spreading. You should not despair for your homeland, you should recognize that western civilization is in the middle of a critical culture war that will determine if western civilization continues or self-destructs.
When I say I am active defending women's rights - I mean the rights of women to name themselves. To identify our oppression as 'sex based'. Gender ideology is a men's rights movement designed to roll back everything women have gained in the past 50 years. Women have organised and are fighting the good fight here in the UK. We have realised we are fighting for lives against those who chant 'transwomen are women' and 'sex work is work' and believe that having an Only Fans to provide cheap porn is a way for women to pay for university that is not soul destroying. All of those assertions are false. Women are engaged in a knife fight in a phone booth. And many of our fellow women are handmaidens and think appeasing the oppressor is a viable strategy. And I agree about the culture war - it is an existential crisis.
Maybe we should all start rooting for meteor to hit the earth.
“Maybe we should all start rooting for meteor to hit the earth.”
There is a lesson in weak tribal leadership to create and brand mythological opponents to scapegoat in deflection for the failures of weak tribal leadership. For example, police are responsible for the crash in social and economic outcomes in the black urban community… not the actual culprit of decades of failed liberal, economic and education policies. However, events like 9-11 brought the country together and provided opportunities for strong leadership to unify around a larger crisis.
Our western media used to call out that mythology crap and rally around the larger REAL moral crisis. Now our western media joins in promulgating the mythology and manufactures artificial moral crisis to push a tribal political agenda for profit. So I am not confident that a meteor crashing into the earth would fix anything today. It would be blamed on Trump and global warming and that media narrative would be ingested by not only the stupid people, but the highly educated too.
I think we are going to need some type of McCarthyism again to take out the woke. I think if the Republicans win big in 2022, the Democrats are going to split and go to war… old -school-liberals against the campus indoctrinated postmodernist clones… supporting a form of McCarthism to identify and remove the woke cultists from positions of power and influence because they support and preach anti-American ideas… no different than if we allowed Sharia Law to be preached… including breaking up large corporations and sanctioning them and education entities that get any Federal money… for breaking First Amendment compliance rules. This will of course export to the rest of the west.
I came back to say - this subscriber thread is my favourite Substack feature. A marketplace of erudition, ideas, jokes and not a little doom mongering. Perfect. I usually save it for wine o'clock on Saturday.
Very interesting piece. I’ve been a long term hater of that fascist racist Wilson. He started these troubled patterns. We are heading for the rapids, maybe a cliff.
Technically, actual historical fascists were (nationalist) revolutionaries, most starting out as (internationalist) marxists, that were opposed to democracy and "liberalism" (capitalism).
Actual, historical fascism was a nationalist and "tribal" reaction against both "liberalism" and against the failed form of marxism at that time.
Woodrow Wilson was about as racist, xenophobic, psychotic and authoritarian as anyone else in the ruling elites were, which included a sense that technological and economic "progress" would solve the major social and political problems via some kind of "missionary" process (as rooted in Victorian 1800s type stuff). Wilson's zeal was very religious, and that kind of thinking was common in the upper social classes that put him in power.
The problem was the "progress" created as many problems (nuclear bombs, the eventual destruction of the farm and manufacturing economies) as it solved.
What "progress" really didn't solve was the problem that Nietzsche pointed out:
"... God is dead, and we killed Him ..."
---
I would generalize that to mean that the traditional sense-making (metaphysical) system in western civilization was disintegrating as a result of technological and cultural disruption, creating a growing sense of alienation and social disorder.
Traditional, mythic culture had a long decline. By about 1492 the decentralized politics of western europe that resulted from the collapse of the Roman Empire began to reverse and new "nation state" empires were formed by consolidating city-states and small kingdoms into larger empires.
New technologies, new "liberal" social institutions and practices developed, the economy of an expanding, literate urban commoner class contributed, weirdly, to the ability of the newly reconstituted empires in their colonial conquests.
Politicians took over the church in order to turn it into a political instrument (see Leonard Liggio, a paleolibertarian historian) and sweep aside some of the older, decentralized, "liberal" political structures (Spain's version of the Magna Carta, cortes, fueros, communas). Liggio found descriptions in old books of medieval peace movements and peasant's rights movements going back to something like the 1300s at the Abbey of Cluny that spread along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and in the Spanish March (frontier of the territories of the Moors).
So, by about 1492, all of that kind of messy, decentralized, local-ish, liberal, working class political culture was seen as an impediment to empire building.
One side effect was the counter-Reformation. Many of the more rigidly orthodox ideas that developed from the newly politicized church were later carried into the counter-Enlightenment. That is when Rousseau shows up and puts his anti-rational, anti-science (Romanticist) "spin" on that old material.
The faction of the "left" that followed Rousseau's ideas are carrying some weird, reactionary, authoritarian (ILLIBERAL) baggage.
Just now saw email. TYTY, I didn't have time for more than abstract. Sounds INTERESTING proposition. Like I "said," I put Rousseau's Discourses and suchlike as well as DH's book on list.
The Takeover of America’s Legal System was a great read.
It’s very scary that the left has infested (1) the students, (2) the Universities, (3) the law firms, (4) the prosecutors and (5) the judges. It appears to be Game Over.
I think we all can do ourselves a great service by staying out of the legal system and being good citizens. Thus avoiding the stench that emanates from within.
This is where I get a little perturbed at Republicans. 50 Senate seats did no good. And, IMHO, the reason they only had 50 was the two Georgia Senators, and that was largely a reaction to Trump, right?
Righteous anger FEELS GREAT! Doesn't win many seats, tho, is the problem. Giving up enough individualism to get organized? Only a potential for the Republicans. Advantage, Leftist #*($#*.
Without a Pandemic Trump would still be in office the Senate in GOP hands and the House with a smaller Dem majority. Can we blame Trump for the Pandemic?
Correct, and no, we can’t blame T for the pandemic. Though, as you know very well, democratic orthodoxy says the pandemic is T’s fault. And that will not change no matter what.
Argh. YOu don't have a crystal ball either. Odds of Trump winning were shown in the counts. Pandemic or no, who knows?
And, yeah, some DID blame Trump for consistently downplaying the severity of the Pandemic. Because he knew it was damaging politically. No other reason. But, yeah, he did good to finance the vaccines and didn't get the credit. Nor did he make it widely known that he GOT the vaccine, did he? Couldn't have THAT.
I think it is pretty well accepted that mail in balloting resulted in the record number of votes in an election that was polling Democrats as having low enthusiasm for their candidates.
My question wasn’t if Trump’s policies and reactions to the pandemic deserve blame. My point was that the pandemic changed the entire election due to the widespread implementation of mail-in ballots. Something that 85% of OECD countries reject due to experience with hard to prove ballot harvesting fraud. You made the case that he somehow caused the Georgia Senate runoff to go to Democrats. That is the anti-Trump talking point, but the Democrat voter turnout exceeded all historical records and trends… and this was directly related to the use of mail-in ballots.
Interesting that Stacey Abrams after doing such a marvelous job collecting all those Dem votes came out to say she supports voter id.
Yes, mail in ballots is what caused the election to go blue. Mark Zuckerberg spent about $400 million in precincts (Atlanta, Philadelphian, Detroit, etc…) that were heavy blue, but not turning out historically. So the money went to teams of people to canvas neighborhoods to get ballots and take them to the polling places. This is very well documented in several news sources. It is also true that such activity, if it were done at a polling station, is illegal. But somehow our legal system couldn’t see that mail in ballots would be needed for a pandemic, so the mail in ballot harvesting was hunky dory. Makes me sick.
Any fool would support voter ID. (Well, I do, so that makes one. ;)
I'm not certain that mail-in ballots are, by themselves, the reason for the big turnout. You understand, don't You, that Trump himself was the reason for the extraordinary turnout on BOTH the Left and the RIght, right? Look no further for the reasons, and You won't be susceptible to pro-Trump talking points.
I wish that were going to be enough, Brian. COULD be, but dunno. Depends on who's MAKING the laws and which ones they DECIDE to enforce. I wouldn't put it past ANY-a them.
Also, the Supreme Court isn't the only holdout. One thing Trump did (and You know I didn't find MANY-a those, Brian ;) was load up the Fed courts with Conservatives. Dunno numbers tho, so there is that.
I sent him your peace, “ no the revolution is not over yet” and he said it was very very good so he is now aware and paying attention to your writings. I think you and Wesley are on the same level - quite brilliant.
So a manddarin speaker told me that your Chinese character means upheaval or chaos. Please, who is your avatar and why did you choose the nom de plume NS Lyons. Why hide your real identity?
Because I have a day job that still pays the bills. Plus writing is way more fun this way, trust me. N.S. Lyons was chosen almost completely at random while in the shower, despite my admiration for C.S. Lewis, and the avatar is an inside joke.
TY for opportunity to comment. My own personal OPINION (italics) is that of the issues You presented, the most important ones are that brought up by Paul? Kingsnorth. Aren't they. I'm not minimizing Ukraine to the geopolitical effects of it. Not by any means.
But if Western Civilizations utterly collapses, as more than one sign points to? Will read M. Kingsnorth's articles later today, most likely. But from the quotes, I think it pretty safe to say You can bank on what he "says."
Again, if Democracy craters itself, what matter if any other country was gonna do same or not?
TY for Your writings, M. N.S. Lyons. Been a great pleasure, and look forward to the future.
I am late to this thread as I just joined. But re "The West’s ongoing decline has caused its elites to lose faith in their cultural inheritance, and this loss of faith has now reached pathological proportions. As a result, the leading lights in Western society - the cultural elites, and sometimes the political and economic elites too - are dedicated not to upholding the cultural forms they inherited, but to turning them on their heads, or erasing them entirely… "
I am reminded of the infamous quote from Sir Edward Gray in 1914 in the run up to WWI: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."
I have to admit to having the same feelings in recent years. That the lamps are going out all over Western Civilization. I still struggle to understand why the West came to hate itself so much. It's obviously not the whole west or even most people in the West, but those who control the institutions and thus the dialogue, do, and therein lies the problem. We've gone from the "West is great but imperfect and we just need to fix the few imperfections but the overarching principles are still brilliant" to "the West is the origin of all our sins and we'd be better off had the West never emerged" in a remarkably short time.
At the same time I remind myself there is always an inherent human attraction to doom and gloom and perhaps we are risking giving up too easily because we secretly yearn for doom and gloom? Who knows!
My New Year's resolution was to stop growing vegetables (other than asparagus and rhubarb). Everything that has happened since then makes it clear that my desire to escape returning to my childhood as an unpaid garden slave for my parents will need to remain unfulfilled. Also, I've just topped up my stock pile of flour, seeds, dried pulses, canned tomatoes and canned fish. I didn't actually have dystopian future complete with famine and roving bands of cannibals on my bingo card for 2022. It may yet happen. And I'm in the UK.
I'm guessing you use Pocket to save links and whatnot. They're changing their login policy so curious what you'll migrate to? Ive been looking at Evernote.
Thanks for bringing attention to the food crisis. I had heard only slight rumblings about this.
Also, your statement: "Well, if “old-school liberals” are going to survive the decade they’re going to need to figure out why this has in fact happened, and fast." strikes me as humorous and sad at the same time. Those "old-school liberals" worked very hard to produce what we have today. They simply didn't foresee its logical conclusion.
My theory is that liberals were very optimistic (like current techno-optimists) about human nature and thought that their ideas were ushering in a new age of magnanimity and equality. Instead, they ushered in an age of totalitarian-minded people who believe that if equality isn't happening, then we must make it happen by any means necessary.
What do you think?
Yes I think the basics is something along those lines. Also, once a secular society was achieved, stripping out the "superstitious" in the dream of governance by pure Enlightenment rationalism, the human need for religious belief was filled by the quest to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth (utopia) through politics, and rationalism was abandoned again. Or something like that.
Great point! Utopia through tech seems pretty popular as well.
I read "Ready Player 1" and "Ready Player 2" (perhaps where Meta is headed) and the author's presentation of tech utopia is pretty depressing, even when they try to give it a hopeful twist.
WW1 and then the Great Depression severely deflated the idea that "progress" would lead to any kind of utopia (the use of atom bombs at the end of WW2 was the exclamation point). But those kinds of glaring facts didn't stop the "progressive" utopians from continuing in their folly.
They were not completely discredited because FDR legalized and politically legitimized labor organizing, and after WW2 and the huge economic expansion, "progressives" followed FDR's schemes and basked in the glow (which they hadn't necessarily created) as the fat and happy (unionized) working classes kept voting for Democrats.
By the 1970s, the post-war economic expansion stalled, and progressivism (in its original sense) died and was replaced in the rising suburban consumer culture with toxic postmodern-relativism (the New Left).
Biggest and most important philosophical divide: is man naturally evil or good. I’m in the evil camp.
Mary Harrington has a really good piece on this divide today, which she's dubbed Team Rousseau vs. Team Original Sin: https://unherd.com/2021/11/why-anarchy-has-come-to-america/
These guys beat her to it by several years:
https://attackthesystem.com/2009/12/18/on-paleocons-and-pagans/
Only had time for the first answer by David Heleniak. Interesting. Never thought-a Conservatives and Christians quite that way. May try to reread or read more later. (Probably no, no TIME.)
to vastly oversimplify, "original sin" is a purity myth:
God/Heaven is spiritually pure and perfect.
The world is imperfect, spiritually unclean and full of suffering, evil ad sin.
That construct did not exist for 100,000s of years of human history/ evolution, it only became increasingly prominent in a number of cultures after the Bronze Age collapse (BAC). The old nature gods of pagans and nomads were inadequate to the rebuilding of agrarian city states because the nature gods didn't offer a model for people to transcend tribalism. So, the religion of the post-BAC city states became about a transcendent God (ultimately in Islam, the concept of Divine Unity, "One God", became the primary theological principle).
"original sin", or purity myth, allowed the people of the city states to:
1. clearly differentiate themselves from the nomads and pagans (which they were frequently at war with), and
2. bring people from different tribes and classes (rulers and slaves) together via transcendent religion.
Transcendent religion provides spiritual, psychological and social order and discipline at a higher order than pagan religion. As such, it enhances the natural, evolved, INHIBITION circuitry in the human brain (see Iain McGilchrist).
The downside is that the upgrade to transcendent religion came at the price of stigmatizing and oppressing "pagan" people. Given the fact that pagans such as the Mongolian Hordes had destroyed all of the major civilizations in the known world over 100s of years, western civilization probably saw even more reason to view pagans as "evil".
PERFECTO! (Got it.)
PERSONALLY, I'm 50% FUndamentalist Atheist. Was raised that way. But in the society of Judeo-Christianity. I can see both the benefits, and the NOT-unintended consequences.
Two questions, if You have time:
Rousseau then bringing back something Pagan-like? Or not?
And which of Iain McGilchrist? I BELIEVE I've read all his books, WOuld like to read again, but in particular the last one. Bad memory: Forget what it was called. That when I have time for a 2000=page read.
TY again.
I look at history in terms of systems theory, cultural evolution and psychological/Jungian archetypes. From that perspective what they are saying is consistent with how western civilization evolved and went through several major paradigm shifts (see Gerhard Lenski).
"original sin" was a core part of the paradigm shift from nomadic and herding cultures to settled, agrarian cultures. the corresponding religious shift was from "magic" thinking (shamanism, paganism) to mythic thinking (institutional "temple" religion).
Rousseau was a major contributor to Romanticism, which was a movement that rejected modern agentic values, rationalism, objectivity and "materialism", and attempted to regain a deep sense of subjective, emotional, mythic experience (communion values).
------------
https://www.lulu.com/content/844957/shop/david-heleniak/rousseau-and-the-real-culture-war/paperback/product-1weyr54.html
"In his examination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Second Discourse, David Heleniak contends that libertarians are the heirs of the Greco-Roman pagans and the "modern pagans" of the Enlightenment, conservatives are the end product of the Christian doctrine of original sin, and the American Left is the consequence of the doctrine as transformed by Rousseau."
Phew! TYTY. I'm an uneducated savage, so am interested in ALL-a above. I go into it like You do, but on the psychology from self-inspection rather than Jung (who've I've been meaning to get to).
Only thing I've read by Rousseau was "Emile," and it didn't dent my ignorance. Like-ta go further into him. And DH's book sounds FASCINATING. A LOT different than the Way i normally look at things.
May.
Alas, 1000 books I've already paid for, which I'll never read in my remaining years. On list. *italicized.* Plus, money is getting to be an issue until I get my finances under reasonable control. (retired)
TYTY, if I didn't already say so, M. e.pierce!
Just read it. Agreed, very good. Thanks
I've read Mary Harrington before and liked it. This may, I say MAY (italics), come to pass more and more:
"And in the absence of clear moral leadership, the alarming prospect is that instead we’ll witness a proliferation of Rittenhouses: self-appointed individual guardians of a public order abandoned by the elites whose responsibility it is to uphold."
OTOH, looking at the whole topic in reference to the Rittenhouse debacle was somewhat wide of the mark, IM-not-so-HO. What happened in the Rittenhouse affair is that anybody interrupting a riot is bad by definition. According to Team Rouseau. So You had a bad man kill some people. Should-a been crucified according to this way of thinking, obviously. That being the times these days.
The PROBLEM came because the media (MSM and social), again according to Woke logic, didn't pay any attention to the facts. K.R. killed three White men, and race had little to nothing to do with it at ALL. You'd never have guessed that from the coverage.
Granted, the Repubs are gonna make each and every conflict into a political situation, so can say there are clean hands in that direction. The facts were clear as a bell, and justice was served. It just wasn't the right KIND-a justice, according to the powers-that-be. KellyAnne Conway may have invented the term "alternate facts" for Trump, but she didn't invent the practice, right?
All that to say, I dunno if this PARTICULAR case was about the fundamental question of good/evil humankind so much as a mundane attempt at a lynching by the Leftists who are in power. Per usual, I welcome being corrected, because ICBW. Tho I don't right like that much, I realize it.
Honestly I think her Rittenhouse angle was just to tie the article to current events at the time. This is the kind of thing editors like.
Ah. Not a writer, never claimed to be one, so thank You for correction.
It is a huge divide, for sure!
I side with Paul on this: "All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.
Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.
The poison of vipers is on their lips.
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes." (Romans 3:12-18)
This seems to be the normal human condition that all humans must acknowledge and struggle against. Not everyone agrees with this, of course.
Great verse!! Thanks
Hmm. Yeah, that's one side. I don't DISagree with it. Just would note that people normally have facets.
For sure - that verse (and much of scripture) point out that the evil in humanity makes us actually evil and in need of a savior outside of ourselves. It does not neglect the fact that there is good (I believe by particularly pointing out that all humans have their being from God and are created in his image).
Perhaps the Bible would argue that even our good is tainted with selfishness and pride. I don't have the skill to walk through that argument well.
Yeah you can get deep in the weeds with those explications but it is true that even the good you (try) to do can come from wrong motivations. A “saying” I came up with: judge yourself harshly and others with grace and mercy(I am in no way an examplar of this)
Oh! Sorry. Should-a thanked You like Madjack did. Like I said, couldn't disagree with it.
I gotta be honest. I've read Genesis (mebbe a little Exodus) and the Gospels a few times. But it's been decades, and I should check back in with it.
IOW, Your skill surpasses mine, no doubt about it.
C'MON MAN! You know me well enough that I'm not gonna let this go uncontested, right, Madjack?
First, You're not ALTOGETHER (italics) wrong. That's unQUESTIONABLE..
M. Harrington's piece showed one thing, and it's that team Rouseau has been alive and well, and RAISED this pusillaneous (spelling) Woke generation. Or generationS. Right? You'll agree with that I would thin'.
I don't have any degrees and didn't have any children. Still, I think most people of sound mind that have looked into it know that CHILDREN are basically selfish biss-tards whose sole aim is to survive. Can't say I REMEMBER it that way, but just stands to the biological imperative. Survive at all costs, right?
They have to be TAUGHT to share. NOT their natural inclination. They have to be TAUGHT the Golden Rule, by whatever name. (You recall I was raised Fundamentalist Atheist, right?) They have to be TAUGHT that there are boundries that outline what is good behavior and what is bad behavior. IOW, moral behavior has to be TAUGHT.
It was us BabyBoomers and Gen-Xers who didn't take responsibility for raising their kids right, right? Or, rather, a LOTTA them.
Nowadays, the stupid has become the fashion. The "self-esteem" movement. SCIENTIFICALLY shown to be WORSE than USELESS. I just recently found out it still goes on TODAY (recall, italics).
And You wonder how come kids came out the way they did? I don't. They're not evil. Humans are a BALANCE of good and evil, right? Any question on that?
Too many just weren't taught that they weren't #1 the center of the universe, and the rest follows, IMHO, and that there ARE limits. That there IS such-a thing as good and evil behavior. And that character develops over time and SHOWS the people that understand the difference.
Sorry, You caught on an expansive moment, Madjack. But I'll fight to the death to maintain that, from what I know, You're an all-around GOOD guy. And that's Your nature to be that Way.
Thanks for the kind words. The classic Christian theology would postulate that we are inherently evil(although at times we can do good). Therefore guardrails are needed: laws, punishment, etc
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external or internal controls on government would be necessary “. James Madison Federalist papers
I've put it on my list to get to the Federalist Papers. Pretty sure I bought them. But thing is, we're neither angels, nor are angels able to govern us, as the term government is meant by Madison. Or at least as I assume what he means.
As You know, although a Fundamentalist Atheist I was raised in America's Judeo-Christian Society. But, ignoramoose that I am, I don't know much about the classic Christian theology, or any OTHER kind-a theology.
But the idea that we are INHERENTLY evil is contrary to common sense. Even kids, hungry for survival as they are, are not INcapable of innate goodness, right? Or hasn't that been Your experience, Madjack?
Do we need laws and punishments? Only the insane (and there's PLENTY of them around lately) would think we didn't. Kids who can't handle authority, because they never spotted any when they were growing up, a LOTTA 'em. From the Rousseau side of parenting, I'm talking about.
Funny how it's almost ENTIRELY the very well-off, who don't live close to crime zones, who are MOST in favor or relaxing laws, prosecutions, and punishments. But even some-a them are learning otherwise, the hard way, right?
I guess when you consider the foundational text of Western Civilization is the story of how people were given every advantage—even food dropping from the skies—and still managed to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again. So, I wonder if they could ever learn their lesson...
Fair - in fact, the Bible seems to make the point that no human really learns and thus needs a savior.
Interestingly this “foundational text” is not even briefly explicated in our “education” system. It’s like trying to understand Saudi Arabia without understanding the Koran
So true - conservatives used to get a bad rap for banning books and liberals wanted all books available for reading and discourse. Now, the left is banning people and books all over the place.
By the Spanish-American War, 1899, the idea that good americans could be "isolationists", and opposed to joining the imperialist spree and associated "foreign entanglements" going on all over the world, was mostly gone.
Woodrow Wilson's "internationalism" was basically "progressive" imperialism-lite, including a new faux religion and moral panics (Prohibition).
Pretty much all US Presidents since Wilson have been puppets of the military-industrial-complex and various projects of empire building.
I think Trump, who was mostly a Jacksonian ("america first" nationalist), was the only modern exception in the last 100 years.
Thank you for making comments subscriber only. It makes good sense.
I am looking forward to your article on the consequences of the Russia / Ukraine war on China’s behavior going forward. This is the a critical issue that I’ve been thinking about as Xi is not an ordinary thinker. I don’t believe it’s as simple as him taking Taiwan. He is thinking much bigger over a very long time frame.
Pardon me for interrupting, and would be glad to see an article along these lines. But, in the long game, China will crush the West economically. Then they'll be the Confucian Patriarch to the rest-a the world. They've done it already to the NBA. They've got their claws heavily into the universities (at least in the U.S.). They play by a different set-a rules as everybody else does. Dunno if true, but said to appropriate 3 to 600 BILLION (italics) $ in intellectual property.
Ray Dalio's latest book (only one-a his I've read), makes it seem like a foregone conclusion. Now, he's guilty (IMHO) of a very wicked pro-China bias. (Working with them since '84. Sending his son there for high school.) Dunno it affected his analysis tho, or not.
There are plenty of other signs. Taiwan. IMHO, a goner. Just a matter of when. ICBW. Could be VERY wrong, but time will tell the tale.
China is dying faster than the West, they just managed to peak right now. Similar to Japan in the 1980s. They're swinging from brutally enforcing their One Child Policy to the opposite, and it's not working at all. They could still crush us before their regime descends into poverty, though.
You could be right, M. Gast. Guy from China pointed out mebbe a decade ago. THing China's got going for it populace of 1B. It's just mathematics: They'll graduate a MULTIPLE of our STEM people. Especially now that STEM is white supremacy.
As far as China collapsing? CCP will stop at NOTHING to see that doesn't happen. At least to the people in the party. ICBW.
Is the book (Ray Dalio) you are referring to The Changing World Order ?
Yeah, it was! Could NOT recall it at the time.
He has several. Thank you.
Naw. TYTY. I bought Principles I thin' it was called. I thin' his first. I don't get to most-a what I've bought, and that's not likely to be one any time soon. Alas...
Yes, I believe their attack will not be via the military but economically. China lent big funds to Sri Lanka for port development and then defaulted. China now runs the port.
Oh! Sheesh on ME! I just saw it was You, Brian.
Yeah, there's several on the what?? "Belt and Road" path that have seen the money comes with conditions.
Can't recall how bad Australia is getting into that money and interdepdence mess.
Thing that bothers me MOST about China's commercial ports are they're going to the extra expense of making them to MILITARY specifications. Presumably, or *I* presume among others, that these can be converted over without two much trouble. All along the Indian ocean, like pearls on a string. Just saw that one time, but I find it VERY believable for them to do that.
Yes, I’ve read this too.
Good to hear! I wonder if that's two INDEPENDENT sources of the info. USED-ta be the old standard in journalism. Loooong ages ago.
Good stuff.
“Well, if “old-school liberals” are going to survive the decade they’re going to need to figure out why this has in fact happened, and fast."
I don’t think we should hold our breath.
As a conservative living in left coast liberal land (a 80% liberal college town), I have a self-awarded PHD in old-school-liberal attitudes and behaviors. I hate to generalize along political or ideological lines because yes, certainly there are as many nuanced opinions within the old-school-liberal community, but there is a core of duck talking/walking that helps establish some benchmarks.
From my perspective there exists a core of social and/or economic malcontentedness within the old-school-liberal psyche. Even if seemingly financially and socially successful a deficit of self-confidence or self-worth percolates. It is Peterson’s Human Dominance Hierarchy stuff. My old-school-liberal friends see the little woke monsters as assisting, rather than harming, their old-school-liberal hold on political, social and economic dominance. My old-school-liberal friends are more worried about the wife of the successful conservative home builder contractor gaining a seat on the local School Board or City Council than the risk of having their career canceled because they uttered the wrong phrase at the campus where they work.
I used to count on some of my old-school-liberal friends to join me in opposition to social justice activists attempting to bully the City Council into adopting harmful policies. Today they either stay silent or they join the wokeist student crowd to demand that we, for example, reduce the funding to the police department.
I am really quite frustrated and disgusted with my old-school-liberal friends. I don’t know if their media feeds during the Trump era broke them, or if an extremists gene was always percolating and ready to take over. But clearly they are blowing it. They are making a deal with the devil in supporting these postmodern critical theory campus radicals. It may already be too late. The current SCOTUS nominee would not define what the word “woman” meant. How then will she defend a woman’s rights… a cornerstone of interest for my old-school-liberal friends?
"Once the revolutionary process begins, the old regime is finished."
Beg pardon. WHO said this?
It's from the article on the Spanish civil war I quoted in the above.
So…
“the counterrevolution is not the opposite of a revolution, but is an opposing revolution.” Once the revolutionary process begins, the old regime is finished. Both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries—who are ostensibly interested in restoring the status quo ante—must found a new regime.”
Who, in your opinion, are the counterrevolutionaries in our play?
My view has been that that American working class that supported Trump are that. It has been a bit confusing to me that the young radicals seem to have much in common in criticism and shared goals for joining forces against the elite cabal of Wall Street and their government and political tools… but instead seem to support that cabal and rage against the working class.
For that reason I have seen the elite cabal and radical left as the same army working on the Great Reset. Most of that BLM money went to Actblue.com. Is there really any space between the old-school-liberal cohort and the young radicals?
The faux "radical left" has been a "controlled opposition" going back to the 1950s/60s. The goal of the neomarxists/Frankfurters was to quit the international class revolution stuff and move onto the "New Left" tactics of promoting the destruction of the national unity myth (and suburban consumerism) so that it could be replaced by relativism and "victim" narratives such as CRT.
Here is a classic explanation of how the postmodern (academic) cultural-left abandoned the working classes in the 1960s and adopted (french) euro-snobery and elitism:
https://vimeo.com/247848325
Jordan Peterson and Camile Paglia, 2018?
I've been floating along commenting, so am just starting to take some-a Kingsnorth in. But when I'm wrong, i like to be the first to point it out. You really DON'T wanna take EVERYTHING he says to the bank. But insightful to the max:
"Maybe you can best understand a culture by noticing what it demonises. Since 2016, elite voices in Western culture, especially in the Anglosphere, had laid out a new demonology. The baddies were Brexit voters, Trump voters, ‘deplorables’, ‘gammon’, conservatives, religious traditionalists (white ones, anyway) and, if we were feeling more exotic, Viktor Orban of Hungary or some rebellious Canadian truck drivers. What they all had in common was that they were broadly anti-globalist, often nationalist, sometimes culturally traditionalist, largely working class, and - perhaps most importantly of all - opposed to the interests of transnational corporations.
"The more I dug into this, the more something else became clear: the Internet mobsters resisting these new demons, though they presented themselves as champions of the marginalised and overlooked, just happened to have interests which aligned with those of the Machine."
The PRIVILEGED class. Or tryin' to be. That's best I can figure.
I only disagree that I don't see Trump being much use in actually DOING anything in the way of solving problems of this kind. In actual FACT, it has a lot due to his CONSTANT AGITATION over his tenure that things got so bad in the Floyd days, right? Or IMHO.
Trump won in 2016 and garnered 74 million votes in the 2020 election. So who are those people if not some revolutionaries or counter-revs?
In another article on the Substack.com there is a book review that covers the black vote for Trump and how he actually did improve the outcomes in the black community. He got the Mexican government to hold asylum seekers. He accomplished trade agreements that had been talked about for decades. There is a list of real things he accomplished. I have a real problem with this repeat that he did nothing. The corporate media did not report on his accomplishments only his Tweets.
Back to the point. So, these little woke rebels are really just soldiers of the moneyed elite? Or are they indoctrinated campus and media clones sleepwalking to their own destruction? Or a combination of both?
Reading the comment section on The Atlantic, it seems that there is a real and justified criticism over the degradation of economic opportunity and hyper inflationary costs of housing. These are issues shared by the working class.
Sorry, I don't always remember what I read.
There are a number of pretty well known ways to define "old school liberal", it would be helpful if N.S. Lyons clarified how he/she is using the phrase.
What I think of as the "left", especially the cultural-left (including the psychotic, radical and extremist cultural-marxists/postmodernists), a group that also usually overlaps with "progressives" (which the "dirtbag left" like Jimmy Dore satirizes for selling out) is now mostly totalitarian and ILLIBERAL in the sense that the original definition of historical liberalism was:
- high-social-trust and representative politics
- tolerance and free speech
- market economics
- individual achievement (modern-rational and agentic values, not premodern-mythic communion values)
- increasing literacy
- increasing economic well being of the urban commoner class
- techno-economic and scientific innovation
(see Henrich @ Harvard's "WEIRD" model* of the cultural evolution of modernity.)
Those aspects of "classical/historical liberalism" are usually more associated with "conservatives" (premodern, mythic ILLIBERALS) now, but actual historical conservatives believed in the restoration of "Alter and Crown" rule, or some similar form of right-wing, reactionary, authoritarian, anti-democratic dictatorship. (Putin and Dugin are somewhat of a hybrid of various types of "left" and "right" authoritarianism).
So, anyone writing or commenting about "old school liberalism" should clarify what they mean. Are they just talking about the senile Boomer hippies from the 1960s and their postmodern-relativist values and offspring, most of whom are D-party loyalists (or something like that)?
Things get strange when taking into consideration that the D-party "old school liberals" of that kind have been in bed with neoliberal, the corporate-state, military-industrial-complex and "Deep State" for a long time, at least as far back as Clinton in the 1990s.
And now many/most of the (never-Trump) Neoconservatives that used to be on the (authoritarian) "right" are also in bed with the D-party elites!
Postmodern social conditions are blurring a lot of lines because social FRAGMENTATION and ATOMIZATION are inherent to postmodernism.
Thus, the ILLIBERAL "left" is now in a disrupted, psychotic, postmodern, culturally atomized cultural and political stew with what used to be elements of the ILLIBERAL "right" (including the pro-war "right")!
As far as "fixing the problem" goes until there is some kind awareness of the need for "anti-fragile" social institutions, from the legal system to education to government to mass media and the technology sector (and many others), the process of postmodern disruption will not have any meaningful opposition, and Trumpism (populist, neo-confederate resentment) will become the default "solution" that isn't actually a solution, other than convincing the rural and traditional working classes that they need to break away from what western civilization has been corrupted into by postmodernism.
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* https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/overview
Well done. Have you read Cynical Theories and Woke Racism? Two books I would highly recommend. I define old-school-liberals as liberal progressives not having been indoctrinated into the critical theory dogma. These books basically lay out a clear method to identify the radical postmodernist critical theory brainwashed campus clones through the language and tactics they use. The current SCOTUS nominee identified herself as one by refusing to define "woman". But old school liberals are cheering on her confirmation.
They are like cancer cells destroying the system and old school liberals hold the keys for either injecting the cancer or stopping the spread. If they don't stop it we get Trump.
I've read a lot of James Lindsay's commentary, and listened to some of his videos. I saw several scholars (one of whom communicates with Pluckrose) in a heterodox integral theory group (kinda similar to the IDW) argue about Lindsay's statement that he was voting for Trump.
It is unfortunate and sad that the SCOTUS nominee is displaying such an absurd lack of moral and intellectual clarity, but not surprising.
Here is a similar analysis as Lindsay's of the problem of postmodernism in cultural evolution:
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
Tho might not be of interest to anybody, I would make a few PROVISIONAL observations. First off, the way I WRITE is altogther different than the Way I talk to people face-to-face. I may give the impression that I've succumbed to "the Big Head" aka lethal self-importance. You dunno me, but I claim to have been beaten down so many times, and have gone overboard so many times, that it's not the case.
In my OPINION, anybody who knows ANYTHING would look at life as running along a SPIRAL. Breathe in=expand. Breathe-out-dissolve. THe error most people make is in thinking that there are HIGHER and LOWER levels to this spiral. This idea that there's a linear progression from stages 3 to 5, and those with level 5 capability are some higher specimen of human being is, to me, laughable. Same reason I'm glad I'm 50% Fundamentalist Atheist. Religious or "Spiritual but not Religious" people often get the idea that THEY'RE a superior being compared to those who aren't Religio-Spiritual.
That devalues people, one way or t'other, to the benefit of no one, right? I'm mean, most moralities have the concept that there's a level where there IS no higher or lower, right? Again, I'm no theologian. Mebbe it's just a principle of Democracy. Looked at one Way, we're all on a plane of equality of a Oneness of things. Not that everyone has the same CAPABILITIES. That's mathematically IMPOSSIBLE. Stupid people pretend to "knowledge" of that "equity" even POSSIBLE, let alone DESIRABLE.
Not arguing there aren't different ROLES that pertain to hierarchy. Learn that from parents, or kids USED-ta. But morally/intellectually superior? (Weeeel, "intellect" is a bad term, but YOu probably know what I mean.)
I welcome ANYone to correct me. I try to learn a thing or two if I can. IF anyone bothered to read this tripe.
Weeel, I finished reading the above, and it FASCINATING. But, imho, wildly unrealistic.
But see not a subject anyone wants to take on, so will leave it at that. TYTY, can't TY enough for the link, e.pierce!
I can't leave this one thing lay, or I won't be able to go to sleep in a few. The absolute WORST Religion is the Atheist Religion. Them crowning themselves the be-all and know-all that they had the INTELLIGENCE to see Religion for the hateful, superstitious drivel that it is.
Self-confirming, so can't be any question about it.
I didn't get enough sleep last night. I read summary of Kegan's stages. My experience has been radically different than most, so can't tell to what extent, yet, how much of this is like left-hemisphere blathering and how much I'm just plain weird. I've always acknowledged the latter.
I'm reading the one You posted, but am too dense to see who WROTE it. Copyrighted by one David Chapman, but I can't find anything on him. Also, my RECOLLECTION is that James Lindsay is a staunch atheist. ICBW. At any rate, I'm not buying this hook, line, and sinker, but I'm visually things a lot different, so TYTY for link.
Am I totally blind stupid and that link WAS James Linday's writring?
"Cynical Theories" was a real eye-opener for me. I belonged to Professor McWhorter's Substack while he was flushing out his ideas for "Woke Racism."
And, from above:
"Thus, the ILLIBERAL 'left' is now in a disrupted, psychotic, postmodern, culturally atomized cultural and political stew with what used to be elements of the ILLIBERAL 'right'.."
Yeah. But M. Lee, I'm not sure that has-ta lead to Trump. There's a center out there for either party to go for. It's the Independents who elect one president or the other, right? I think the party that successfully ratchets down their extremes or, better yet, abandons them, can actually start work on some actual SOLUTIONS to problems.
Personally, I'd like to see that from the right, because they seem to be willing to acknowledge that there COULD be solutions. The grifters on the left, and the $6B DEI industry they created, are running as fast as they can AWAY from solutions, right?
It is a horrible oversimplification, but it can be argued that the whole left-vs-right narrative is the "problem" and not the solution.
I would reframe the problem as being that the sense making system of western civilization (modern-rational hierarchies of curated expertise) is "fragile to disruption" by networks and other electronic technologies.
"Anti-fragile" sense making is not likely to come from the existing, dysfunctional, left-vs-right paradigm, although you are correct that some very talented geniuses from the "right" are probably going to be among the people that solve social and political problems.
Here is a classic exposé, one of many, of the correlation between mental dysfunction and the left:
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/why-it-took-social-science-years-to-correct-a-simple-error-about-psychoticism.html
also see:
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/
TY again. I found out I had NO idea what psychoticism was. But rest doesn't surprise me. My own OPINION is that Social Sciences is an oxymoron. People think that just because they can assign a number to something, that makes them a science. I disagree.
This a little orthogonal came in today. Science on drugs is corrupted, by the pharmaceutical companies, greed, &c. Go figure. https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/a-damning-opinion-piece-in-the-british
When I dream? Third party. Know it's impossible odds. Things happen. I won't live long in any event.
Yeah, "fragile to disruption" ain't the least of it. I'm thinkin' of Transhumanism right now, more than anything. You may be right about left/right. I see it in terms of the two atrocious political parties we have. Both-a them an amorphous blob of contradictory goals, AFAIK.
Will look at both links after finish reading about KEgan's stages and some chores. Phew! Day about shot. Nothin' done.
Anyway, sure to enjoy above link, so I'll get to that one soonest.
I left the USA for Europe in 1991 because I had both an opportunity and a premonition of doom. Lived in Poland and Russia, worked all across the former Warsaw Pact and even hit all 15 countries of the former Soviet Union. Now a citizen in the UK, lived here for 24 years.
Politically active, both in party politics but also on the front lines in defending women's rights.
My sisters are a similar age (late 50s, early 60s) and live in the midwest. Was on a video chat with them a few weeks ago. They were moaning about the possibility that Roe v Wade may be overturned and the right to abortion severely curtailed. Also how upset our late beloved mother would be about current developments (a bra burning second wave feminist, campaigned for JFK). I said 'so what are you doing about it?' A right that rests on a precedent as fragile as Roe v Wade, is only a permission, not a right. There's a woman vice president. Why is no one talking about securing women's rights to reproductive autonomy? Why not revive the Equal Rights Amendment? Maybe give pregnant women protection from discrimination? They basically shrugged and said 'well that all sounds very difficult and there's no legislative consensus for any of those things'. And also (I'm not making this up) they blamed Trump for all women's problems.
So, I despair. I fear for my homeland. And for those who are truly vulnerable because what's coming next may be Armageddon or may not - but it won't be good news for women. For working class people. For that huge number of Americans who have no savings or less than 3 months outgoings (which is an astonishing percentage).
I don’t see US women’s rights progress as a current rational cause. It has been achieved and then some. What is left is old activists unwilling to admit it and still clutching the identities of a 1st and 2nd wave feminist. Sounds like your sisters and mother. Where they are blowing it is in support of the 3rd wave postmodern feminist movement that is not a women’s rights movement. It hit apogee and it now sliding back down to a dark agenda that will result in the cancelation of “woman” as an identifiable group entity to be replaced with WTF? Frankly, Woe V Wade is a distraction and insignificant symbolic issue. The cancelation of women’s athletics by biological men is an example of what your sisters should be concerned about. And the woke sickness behind it is coming to the UK… in fact it is already in Europe and spreading. You should not despair for your homeland, you should recognize that western civilization is in the middle of a critical culture war that will determine if western civilization continues or self-destructs.
When I say I am active defending women's rights - I mean the rights of women to name themselves. To identify our oppression as 'sex based'. Gender ideology is a men's rights movement designed to roll back everything women have gained in the past 50 years. Women have organised and are fighting the good fight here in the UK. We have realised we are fighting for lives against those who chant 'transwomen are women' and 'sex work is work' and believe that having an Only Fans to provide cheap porn is a way for women to pay for university that is not soul destroying. All of those assertions are false. Women are engaged in a knife fight in a phone booth. And many of our fellow women are handmaidens and think appeasing the oppressor is a viable strategy. And I agree about the culture war - it is an existential crisis.
Maybe we should all start rooting for meteor to hit the earth.
Bingo!
“Maybe we should all start rooting for meteor to hit the earth.”
There is a lesson in weak tribal leadership to create and brand mythological opponents to scapegoat in deflection for the failures of weak tribal leadership. For example, police are responsible for the crash in social and economic outcomes in the black urban community… not the actual culprit of decades of failed liberal, economic and education policies. However, events like 9-11 brought the country together and provided opportunities for strong leadership to unify around a larger crisis.
Our western media used to call out that mythology crap and rally around the larger REAL moral crisis. Now our western media joins in promulgating the mythology and manufactures artificial moral crisis to push a tribal political agenda for profit. So I am not confident that a meteor crashing into the earth would fix anything today. It would be blamed on Trump and global warming and that media narrative would be ingested by not only the stupid people, but the highly educated too.
I think we are going to need some type of McCarthyism again to take out the woke. I think if the Republicans win big in 2022, the Democrats are going to split and go to war… old -school-liberals against the campus indoctrinated postmodernist clones… supporting a form of McCarthism to identify and remove the woke cultists from positions of power and influence because they support and preach anti-American ideas… no different than if we allowed Sharia Law to be preached… including breaking up large corporations and sanctioning them and education entities that get any Federal money… for breaking First Amendment compliance rules. This will of course export to the rest of the west.
I came back to say - this subscriber thread is my favourite Substack feature. A marketplace of erudition, ideas, jokes and not a little doom mongering. Perfect. I usually save it for wine o'clock on Saturday.
Glad you enjoy it! It's also helpful to know when people like to read this stuff; I really have no idea.
Very interesting piece. I’ve been a long term hater of that fascist racist Wilson. He started these troubled patterns. We are heading for the rapids, maybe a cliff.
Technically, actual historical fascists were (nationalist) revolutionaries, most starting out as (internationalist) marxists, that were opposed to democracy and "liberalism" (capitalism).
Actual, historical fascism was a nationalist and "tribal" reaction against both "liberalism" and against the failed form of marxism at that time.
Woodrow Wilson was about as racist, xenophobic, psychotic and authoritarian as anyone else in the ruling elites were, which included a sense that technological and economic "progress" would solve the major social and political problems via some kind of "missionary" process (as rooted in Victorian 1800s type stuff). Wilson's zeal was very religious, and that kind of thinking was common in the upper social classes that put him in power.
The problem was the "progress" created as many problems (nuclear bombs, the eventual destruction of the farm and manufacturing economies) as it solved.
What "progress" really didn't solve was the problem that Nietzsche pointed out:
"... God is dead, and we killed Him ..."
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I would generalize that to mean that the traditional sense-making (metaphysical) system in western civilization was disintegrating as a result of technological and cultural disruption, creating a growing sense of alienation and social disorder.
I think that last paragraph pretty well sums it up. Going on how long? Dunno. Where it's heading? The ILliberals You mentioned above.
Traditional, mythic culture had a long decline. By about 1492 the decentralized politics of western europe that resulted from the collapse of the Roman Empire began to reverse and new "nation state" empires were formed by consolidating city-states and small kingdoms into larger empires.
New technologies, new "liberal" social institutions and practices developed, the economy of an expanding, literate urban commoner class contributed, weirdly, to the ability of the newly reconstituted empires in their colonial conquests.
Politicians took over the church in order to turn it into a political instrument (see Leonard Liggio, a paleolibertarian historian) and sweep aside some of the older, decentralized, "liberal" political structures (Spain's version of the Magna Carta, cortes, fueros, communas). Liggio found descriptions in old books of medieval peace movements and peasant's rights movements going back to something like the 1300s at the Abbey of Cluny that spread along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and in the Spanish March (frontier of the territories of the Moors).
So, by about 1492, all of that kind of messy, decentralized, local-ish, liberal, working class political culture was seen as an impediment to empire building.
One side effect was the counter-Reformation. Many of the more rigidly orthodox ideas that developed from the newly politicized church were later carried into the counter-Enlightenment. That is when Rousseau shows up and puts his anti-rational, anti-science (Romanticist) "spin" on that old material.
The faction of the "left" that followed Rousseau's ideas are carrying some weird, reactionary, authoritarian (ILLIBERAL) baggage.
https://phillysoc.org/liggio-the-hispanic-tradition-of-liberty/
Just now saw email. TYTY, I didn't have time for more than abstract. Sounds INTERESTING proposition. Like I "said," I put Rousseau's Discourses and suchlike as well as DH's book on list.
The Takeover of America’s Legal System was a great read.
It’s very scary that the left has infested (1) the students, (2) the Universities, (3) the law firms, (4) the prosecutors and (5) the judges. It appears to be Game Over.
I think we all can do ourselves a great service by staying out of the legal system and being good citizens. Thus avoiding the stench that emanates from within.
This has to be the most terrifying. And old Joe nominated one of them to the bench.
😡😡
This is where I get a little perturbed at Republicans. 50 Senate seats did no good. And, IMHO, the reason they only had 50 was the two Georgia Senators, and that was largely a reaction to Trump, right?
Righteous anger FEELS GREAT! Doesn't win many seats, tho, is the problem. Giving up enough individualism to get organized? Only a potential for the Republicans. Advantage, Leftist #*($#*.
Without a Pandemic Trump would still be in office the Senate in GOP hands and the House with a smaller Dem majority. Can we blame Trump for the Pandemic?
Correct, and no, we can’t blame T for the pandemic. Though, as you know very well, democratic orthodoxy says the pandemic is T’s fault. And that will not change no matter what.
Argh. YOu don't have a crystal ball either. Odds of Trump winning were shown in the counts. Pandemic or no, who knows?
And, yeah, some DID blame Trump for consistently downplaying the severity of the Pandemic. Because he knew it was damaging politically. No other reason. But, yeah, he did good to finance the vaccines and didn't get the credit. Nor did he make it widely known that he GOT the vaccine, did he? Couldn't have THAT.
I think it is pretty well accepted that mail in balloting resulted in the record number of votes in an election that was polling Democrats as having low enthusiasm for their candidates.
My question wasn’t if Trump’s policies and reactions to the pandemic deserve blame. My point was that the pandemic changed the entire election due to the widespread implementation of mail-in ballots. Something that 85% of OECD countries reject due to experience with hard to prove ballot harvesting fraud. You made the case that he somehow caused the Georgia Senate runoff to go to Democrats. That is the anti-Trump talking point, but the Democrat voter turnout exceeded all historical records and trends… and this was directly related to the use of mail-in ballots.
Interesting that Stacey Abrams after doing such a marvelous job collecting all those Dem votes came out to say she supports voter id.
Yes, mail in ballots is what caused the election to go blue. Mark Zuckerberg spent about $400 million in precincts (Atlanta, Philadelphian, Detroit, etc…) that were heavy blue, but not turning out historically. So the money went to teams of people to canvas neighborhoods to get ballots and take them to the polling places. This is very well documented in several news sources. It is also true that such activity, if it were done at a polling station, is illegal. But somehow our legal system couldn’t see that mail in ballots would be needed for a pandemic, so the mail in ballot harvesting was hunky dory. Makes me sick.
Any fool would support voter ID. (Well, I do, so that makes one. ;)
I'm not certain that mail-in ballots are, by themselves, the reason for the big turnout. You understand, don't You, that Trump himself was the reason for the extraordinary turnout on BOTH the Left and the RIght, right? Look no further for the reasons, and You won't be susceptible to pro-Trump talking points.
I wish that were going to be enough, Brian. COULD be, but dunno. Depends on who's MAKING the laws and which ones they DECIDE to enforce. I wouldn't put it past ANY-a them.
Also, the Supreme Court isn't the only holdout. One thing Trump did (and You know I didn't find MANY-a those, Brian ;) was load up the Fed courts with Conservatives. Dunno numbers tho, so there is that.
They (progressives 🤮) could impose themselves on us through the legal system for sure. Would not put it past them.
Have you meet Wesley Yang? Does know you?
No, though I'd be happy to meet him. I follow his Substack.
I sent him your peace, “ no the revolution is not over yet” and he said it was very very good so he is now aware and paying attention to your writings. I think you and Wesley are on the same level - quite brilliant.
So a manddarin speaker told me that your Chinese character means upheaval or chaos. Please, who is your avatar and why did you choose the nom de plume NS Lyons. Why hide your real identity?
Because I have a day job that still pays the bills. Plus writing is way more fun this way, trust me. N.S. Lyons was chosen almost completely at random while in the shower, despite my admiration for C.S. Lewis, and the avatar is an inside joke.
So is there avatar some great mass murderer pope from antiquity?
Nope
one of the monks in northern england that tried to hide scripture and other books from the marauding viking pagans??? :)
TY for opportunity to comment. My own personal OPINION (italics) is that of the issues You presented, the most important ones are that brought up by Paul? Kingsnorth. Aren't they. I'm not minimizing Ukraine to the geopolitical effects of it. Not by any means.
But if Western Civilizations utterly collapses, as more than one sign points to? Will read M. Kingsnorth's articles later today, most likely. But from the quotes, I think it pretty safe to say You can bank on what he "says."
Again, if Democracy craters itself, what matter if any other country was gonna do same or not?
TY for Your writings, M. N.S. Lyons. Been a great pleasure, and look forward to the future.
I am late to this thread as I just joined. But re "The West’s ongoing decline has caused its elites to lose faith in their cultural inheritance, and this loss of faith has now reached pathological proportions. As a result, the leading lights in Western society - the cultural elites, and sometimes the political and economic elites too - are dedicated not to upholding the cultural forms they inherited, but to turning them on their heads, or erasing them entirely… "
I am reminded of the infamous quote from Sir Edward Gray in 1914 in the run up to WWI: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."
I have to admit to having the same feelings in recent years. That the lamps are going out all over Western Civilization. I still struggle to understand why the West came to hate itself so much. It's obviously not the whole west or even most people in the West, but those who control the institutions and thus the dialogue, do, and therein lies the problem. We've gone from the "West is great but imperfect and we just need to fix the few imperfections but the overarching principles are still brilliant" to "the West is the origin of all our sins and we'd be better off had the West never emerged" in a remarkably short time.
At the same time I remind myself there is always an inherent human attraction to doom and gloom and perhaps we are risking giving up too easily because we secretly yearn for doom and gloom? Who knows!
My New Year's resolution was to stop growing vegetables (other than asparagus and rhubarb). Everything that has happened since then makes it clear that my desire to escape returning to my childhood as an unpaid garden slave for my parents will need to remain unfulfilled. Also, I've just topped up my stock pile of flour, seeds, dried pulses, canned tomatoes and canned fish. I didn't actually have dystopian future complete with famine and roving bands of cannibals on my bingo card for 2022. It may yet happen. And I'm in the UK.
I'm guessing you use Pocket to save links and whatnot. They're changing their login policy so curious what you'll migrate to? Ive been looking at Evernote.