As we’ll see, in a real battle when seconds count, new orders are only a few minutes away. Well, sometimes they’re rather more than a few minutes away. Or not coming at all.
This is also true, of course, in films. Our friend Darius III from Alexander (2004) silently waves his hand to mean “archers shoot!” and also “chariots, charge!” and then also “everyone else, charge!” Keeping in mind what we saw about the observation abilities of a general on horseback, you can well imagine how able Darius’ soldiers will have been to see his hand gestures while they were on foot from a mile or so away. Yet his army responds flawlessly to his silent arm-gestures. Likewise the flag-signalling in Braveheart‘s (1995) rendition of the Battle of Falkirk: a small banner, raised in the rear is used to signal to soldiers who are looking forward at the enemy, combined with a fellow shouting “advance”. One is left to assume that these generals control their armies in truth through telepathy.
There is also never any confusion about these orders. No one misinterprets the flag or hears the wrong orders. Your unit commanders in Total War never ignore or disobey you; sure the units themselves can rout, but you never have a unit in good order simply ignore your orders – a thing which happened fairly regularly in actual battles! Instead, units are unfailingly obedient right up until the moment they break entirely. You can order untrained, unarmored and barely armed pitchfork peasant levies to charge into contact with well-ordered plate-clad knights and they will do it.
The result is that battleplans in modern strategy games are often impressive intricate, involving the player giving lots of small, detailed orders (sometimes called “micro”, short for “micromanagement”) to individual units. It is not uncommon in a Total War battle for a player to manually coordinate “cycle-charges” (having a cavalry unit charge and retreat and then charge the same unit again to abuse the charge-bonus mechanics) while also ordering their archers to focus fire on individual enemy units while simultaneously moving up their own infantry reserves in multiple distinct maneuvering units to pin dangerous enemy units while also coordinating the targeting of their field artillery. Such attacks in the hands of a skilled player can be flawlessly coordinated because in practice the player isn’t coordinating with anyone but themselves.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part II: Commands”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-03.
December 16, 2024
QotD: Movie and video game portrayals of generalship in pre-modern armies
December 15, 2024
QotD: Elite luxury beliefs – cultivated non-disgust
But now they’ve moved on to the kids. It is easy to believe a listless, drug-addled elite might indulge in sexual degeneracy just for the hell of it. But how do we explain kindergarten teachers teaching their pupils about pronouns? Doctors emotionally blackmailing parents by insisting that the alternative to mutilating their children is their suicides? Or civil servants quietly putting gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces?
How do we explain any of this? How do we even explain the emergence of transgenderism at all? There have been transexuals and gender dysphorics throughout history. They were typically understood as an offshoot of homosexuality, the extreme end of the effeminacy spectrum, and a vanishingly small fraction of the population.
But the current contagion is unusual and is clearly artificial. Its scale can only be a result of active promotion. Much of that is accomplished via the media and fellow travellers who champion these activities. But it is helped along by a collection of other professionals, and any attempt to question it is met with energetic pushback.
It is apparent that much of this comes from on-high, a literal top-down initiative. In less than twenty years we have witnessed a journey that began with gay rights and now includes active promotion of sexual deviancy to children, none of it natural or wanted by the majority. There is lots of speculation as to why this may be, including the part it may play in a comprehensive depopulation agenda.
What is apparent is that the professional class who endorse and promote this perceive it as an exercise in tolerance.
The notion of tolerance has typically been invoked for the distasteful, a last line of defence when direct measures fail, not a behavioural response indicating sophistication.
We rely on tolerance for things we dislike but cannot avoid. We learn to tolerate a persistent whine from an air conditioning unit, a noisy neighbour, or a noxious smell. But our goal is always to remove the source of the problem. Tolerance is a stopgap only when more permanent solutions are absent.
Their belief that tolerance is a virtue is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s chattering classes. It is exactly the kind of signal error that exemplifies the disconnect between globalist elites and their obedient cheerleaders. The mechanism here seems to be a kind of learned override to natural disgust or discomfort. When others then object to whatever letter they have just added to the LGBTQWERTY+ community on the basis that it can’t be healthy or normal to endorse this stuff, that learned response includes the flare of superiority at your obvious backwardness.
How satisfying it must feel to have your natural inclination toward superiority endorsed in this way. Like whole food vegans at a Medieval banquet, it must provide an irresistible sense of smugness to know that you are the one-eyed man in the rainbow-decked land of the blind, with the uneducated hopelessly lost in their backward understanding of the benefits of sexual liberation.
While elites and their public relations machine happily endorse this misplaced emphasis on tolerance, all evidence suggests the elites themselves are not tolerating anything, despite what their obedient minions may think. They really are indulging in the cocaine-fuelled all-star human sacrifice orgies for real because they are cosmically bored and rich.
They aren’t rising above intrinsic disgust responses, they have sexualized them. They seem to have fetishized everything we consider unacceptable. Trafficked kids, femboys, chicks with dicks, gangbangs, farmyard orgies, human sacrifice, the lot.
They may even experience a thrill in seeing just how far they can push public morality as many have suggested, and especially how far they can get otherwise normal middle-class people to champion deviancy and hedonism most cultures find distasteful enough to ban.
The excessive promotion of tolerance is a defence against unnatural practices bored elites are rumoured to engage in. The professional class, for all their faults, probably aren’t into human sacrifice or animal orgies. So their response is to elevate the importance of visible acceptance of alternative lifestyles, hence gay kids, castrated boys, invented genders and other absurdities they cannot possibly believe themselves, and all of it instantly conveyed to one’s peers with nothing more than a multicoloured flag.
To top it all when they see how normals react, those unmoved by inept calls to be more understanding about sexual abuse, when they see parents reach for the shotgun at the very idea of sexually mutilating children, they get to invoke the conjoined twin of their cultivated tolerance, namely artificial superiority. The deep belief that they see further than the yokels with their primitive instinct to actually protect the vulnerable and embrace some basic sense of public morality.
These absurd beliefs can be observed in our educated classes because they ostentatiously demonstrate tolerance and its newfound position as the supreme virtue of the post-Christian age, one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever run by elites.
Spaceman Spiff (guest-post) “Praying to Absent Gods”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-07-16.
December 14, 2024
Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum
One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):
This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.
A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.
“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”
Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.
He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:
I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.
I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.
But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.
During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.
And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.
This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.
History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.
And alas, we’ll deserve it.
Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates
The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:
📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.
In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…
Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.
It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.
And a follow-up response to another comment:
THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.
December 13, 2024
Kemi Badenoch … a Thatcher for the 2020s?
In The Free Press, Oliver Wiseman wonders if new British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch will do for her party what Margaret Thatcher did after she was elected leader in 1975:
“I like fixing things that are broken,” says Kemi Badenoch in her interview with Bari on the latest episode of Honestly. Badenoch, 44, was elected as the new leader of the UK’s Conservatives last month. And luckily for her, there are a lot of things that are broken.
One of them is her party.
In July, after fourteen years in office, the Tories were unceremoniously booted from power. They lost more than 250 of their Members of Parliament in the biggest electoral defeat in the party’s history. On the long road back to power, Badenoch must contend not only with a Labour government with a huge majority in Parliament, but also Nigel Farage — the Brexit-backing populist is on a mission to supplant the Conservative Party as the main alternative to Labour.
If Badenoch somehow manages to fix her party and return to power, she must then figure out a way to fix Britain — a country where wages have stagnated for a generation, public debt has ballooned, and there’s widespread anger at high rates of immigration. As another Brit, Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, put it recently in these pages: “Lately it seems that mine is a country with a death wish.” (Read his full account of what ails the UK here.)
In other words, Badenoch has a daunting in tray. And yet many — including Niall — are bullish on Badenoch, who he believes could be a “black Thatcher”.
As a woman in charge of the Conservative Party, Badenoch was bound to be compared to the Iron Lady. But in this case there are undeniable parallels. Much like Thatcher, Badenoch mixes steely determination with charm and charisma. She also, like Thatcher, knows what she believes. Her diagnosis of her party’s problems is straightforward: It has strayed too far from the values that have historically made it — and Britain — so successful.
And while Thatcher and Badenoch’s backgrounds are very different — one grew up in provincial England, the other spent most of her childhood in Nigeria — they are both self-made women with an appetite for hard work. Badenoch’s own story, and her family’s, is central to her politics. “I know what it is like to be wealthy and also to be poor,” she says today on Honestly.
There’s one other Badenoch–Thatcher parallel: the circumstances in which they took over their party’s leadership. Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975 — then, like today, a malaise had descended over the country, one that would lift during her time in office. These comparisons may be unavoidable, but does Badenoch welcome them? Bari asked her that in their conversation. “She is a heroine of mine. So it’s very flattering,” said Badenoch. “But it’s also quite heavy and she’s a different person. I admire her. But I want people to recognize that I’m not a pastiche of this person, that I am my own person.”
December 12, 2024
The dispiriting rise of the “kidult”
Freya India explains the need for modern parents to re-embrace some of the more traditional duties of parents in raising children:
It’s pretty much accepted as fact that parents today are overprotective. We worry about helicopter parenting, and the coddling of Gen Z. But I don’t think that’s the full story. Parents aren’t protective enough.
Or at least, what parents are protective about has changed. They are overprotective about physical safety, terrified of accidents and injuries. But are they protective by giving guidance? Involved in their children’s character development? Protective by raising boys to be respectful, by guiding girls away from bad influences? Protective by showing children how to behave, by being an example?
As far as I can see many parents today are overprotective but also strangely permissive. They hesitate to give advice or get involved, afraid of seeming controlling or outdated. They obsess over protecting their children physically, but have little interest in guiding them morally. They care more about their children’s safety than their character. Protective parenting once meant caring about who your daughter dated, the decisions she made, and guiding her in a good direction. Now it just means preventing injury. And so children today are deprived of the most fundamental protection: the passing down of morals, principles, and a framework for life.
One obvious example of this is that adults act like children now. They talk like teenagers. They use the same social media platforms, play the same video games, listen to the same music. Our world moves too rapidly to retain any wisdom, denying parents the chance to pass anything down or be taken seriously, so they try to keep up with kids, who know more about the world than they do. Fathers are “girl dads” who get told what to think. Mothers are best friends to gossip with. The difference between childhood and adulthood is disappearing, and with it, parental protection.
Beyond that, too, there’s this broader cultural message that adults should focus on their own autonomy and self-actualisation. This very modern belief that a good life means maximum freedom, with as little discomfort and constraint as possible, the way children think. Now nothing should hold adults back. They have a right to feel good, at all times. They stopped being role models of responsibility and became vessels of the only culture left, a therapeutic culture, where it’s only acceptable to be protective of one thing, your own mental health and happiness. Listen to the way adults judge decisions now, how they justify themselves. Parents are celebrated for leaving their families because they were vaguely unhappy or felt they needed to find themselves, even at the expense of their children’s security. Adults talk about finding themselves as much as teenagers do. Parents complain online about the “emotional labour” of caring for family, or express regret for even having children because they got in the way of their goals. Once growing up meant sacrificing for family, giving up some of yourself, that was an honour, that was a privilege, and in that sacrifice you found actual fulfilment, broke free from yourself, moved on from adolescent anxieties, and there, then, you became an adult.
But slowly, without thinking, we became suspicious of adulthood. We debunked every marker and milestone, from marriage to children all the way to adulthood itself. Now we aren’t just refusing to grow up but rejecting the very concept of it. Adulthood does not exist, apparently. It’s a scam, a lie, a myth. Adulthood is a marketing ploy, we say, while wearing Harry Potter merch and going to Disneyland. Adulthood is a performance, apparently, that’s going out of style. “There is nothing, there is nobody which/who would really justify the claim ‘you have to grow up’,” seems to be the sentiment. “For whom? for what?”
December 11, 2024
Canada’s current situation, as viewed by Fortissax
Fortissax recently spoke to an audience in Toronto. This is part of the transcript of his speech:
No doubt, many of you already have an idea.
The fact of the matter is this: 25% of the people in this country are, or soon will be, foreigners. Most of them are not the children of immigrants but fresh-off-the-boat migrants.
The economy? It’s in the dumps. Canada has the lowest upward mobility in the OECD for young people. One of the lowest fertility rates in the Western world. And the fastest-changing demographics in the Western world — as I’m sure you’ve all noticed here in the streets of Toronto, the old capital of Anglo-Canadians.
Think about this: approximately 4.9 million foreigners are classified as “temporary migrants.” Combine that with permanent residents, refugees, and immigrants, and that number swells to 6.2 million in just four years.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Crime is reportedly the highest it’s ever been. We have no military. The Canadian Armed Forces has faced retention issues for two decades. And what is command preoccupied with? Men’s bathrooms stocked with tampons and servicemen being “radicalized” by wearing extremist clothing like MAGA hats.
Let’s not forget foreign influence.
The Chinese Communist Party exploited the Hong Kong handover in the 1990s to infiltrate Canada, using British Columbia as their foothold. As Sam Cooper exposes in Claws of the Panda and Willful Blindness, they established a stronghold in Metro Vancouver, taking over the business community.
This “Vancouver Model”, as we Canadians ironically call it, normalizes our capitulation to foreign hostiles. Triads, working hand-in-glove with the Chinese communists, built a global drug empire. Fentanyl, mass-produced in football field-sized factories in China, is shipped to Vancouver and distributed across the entire Western Hemisphere.
Let this sink in: more Canadians have died from this economic warfare than all our soldiers lost in the Second World War.
And now, there’s India.
Intelligence agencies from the Republic of India have demonstrated their ability to conduct assassinations on Canadian soil. Recently, a Khalistani nationalist and separatist was killed — a figure I’ll leave to your sympathies or judgments. Regardless, this marks a disturbing shift.
India weaponizes its diaspora against the international community. In exchange for non-alignment with China, the West — particularly the Anglosphere — uses Indian migrants as wage-slave labor to suppress costs.
The result? A disaster.
In Canada, Australia, the U.K., and increasingly the United States, we see Indians climbing the ladders of power, pursuing their own interests — often brazenly. In Brampton, part of Greater Toronto, a 50-foot statue of the Hindu god Hanuman looms.
And let’s not forget the Punjabi Sikh population. They openly support an independent Khalistan — or remain at best indifferent to the cause. They have infiltrated Canada’s state apparatus, even reaching the Ministry of National Defense, where Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs during Kabul operations over broader Canadian interests.
In Surrey, British Columbia, the trucking industry is effectively controlled by Sikhs. In online spaces, Sikh nationalists demand Brampton be recognized as a province, seemingly aware that their homeland exists more abroad than in Punjab itself. The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, serves as yet another example — barred from entering India due to his sympathies for separatism.
But foreign influence is only half the story. Among our own lies another problem: disintegration.
Decades of Western alienation and economic parasitism by the federal government are fueling separatist movements in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is polling higher than the ruling CAQ, openly advocating for secession from Confederation.
Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives court immigrant voters, alienating native Canadians and abandoning their base.
And then there’s the economic misery.
The average Canadian home costs $700,000. The median income? Just $48,000. Upward mobility is nonexistent. The managerial regime hoards wealth and power, gatekeeping opportunity through credentialism, exorbitant tuition, and crushing taxes.
55% of Canadians have post-secondary education, and yet most have nothing to show for it. The regime is not run by titans of intelligence or visionaries. It’s run by ideologues — loyal to their cause, not to competence or merit.
The final insult: demographics.
Over the next six years, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become majority non-Canadian. The 50% threshold will be breached, with profound consequences for local politics.
Ontario will hover just above 50%, while Quebec and the Maritime provinces will remain over 70% and 80% Canadian, respectively. This is not a death sentence, but it is a profound transformation for Western Canada, which has historically been more propositional and less identitarian than the East.
This is where we are.
Our sovereignty is compromised. Our identity is eroded. But we are not yet defeated. What happens next depends entirely on us.
December 9, 2024
“Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time”
Chris Bray checks in on the vocational mental health clinic known as the New York Times:
Non-binary New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen
A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.
This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.
After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me … shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”
I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.
This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen.
Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.
“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”
Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:
I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.
For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.
I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.
All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.
December 8, 2024
The potential for retribution in a second Trump presidency
Francis Christian meditates on whether or how President-elect Donald Trump will indulge in eye-for-an-eye revenge against the individuals most clearly involved in the lawfare and other attempts to derail his re-election:
It was the English poet Alexander Pope who admonished us in the manner of the New Testament that “to err is human; to forgive, divine” — Errare humanum est, ignoscere divino.
The Old Testament in contrast, has the equally familiar and perhaps far more popular, “eye for an eye“, and in one of the most revolutionary statements ever uttered, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talked about us “having heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye’ — but I say unto you, love your enemies“.
To wish to take revenge upon one’s enemies is therefore human, but Jesus is asking mankind to rise above this basic instinct and instead, to forgive and love one’s enemies. This was all of course part of His Mission on earth — to change by His Life, His Cross and the Resurrection, the destiny of human beings from being bound to basic instincts and death — to being bound for eternal life, a different destiny and a new creation.
The mavens of Hollywood of course march to a different and more ancient tune (which has been handed down unchanged to them) and generations of movie goers and consumers of media have been brought up on the idea that revenge of the most explosively visceral kind is a good thing, even a noble thing.
My readers will undoubtedly have their own sincerely held beliefs about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us and once again, I do not wish this essay to turn out to be a sermon! What I wish to address instead, is to ask the question: what is the place for retribution, vengeance and revenge in the conduct of statecraft?
In other words, when President elect Trump said in a recently widely publicized interview that he was, “not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly“, was he declaring a principle of statecraft that makes for a fulfilling and productive Presidency? And is this also a principle of statecraft that will “make American great again?”
In typical, inimitable and endearing Trumpian fashion, the President-elect also added the tongue in cheek comment: “I am always looking to give a second and even third chance, but never willing to give a fourth chance — that is where I hold the line!”
It could be argued from the life of no less a colossal figure than Julius Caesar that decisive and devastating revenge upon one’s enemies makes for a strong and respected ruler and nation. Whilst still a private citizen, Julius Caesar was captured by pirates on the way to the Greek island of Rhodes (to which he was travelling in order to learn oratory from the famous professor Molon). Caesar raised his own ransom — then raised a naval force, captured his pirate captors and had them all crucified.
The later assassination of Caesar and the subsequent civil wars that rocked and roiled Rome is the subject of Shakespeare’s magnificent, Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The subsequent rule of Augustus Caesar was marked by stability, expansion of the empire, the building of roads and bridges (via which the Gospel was to travel), the making of sea and land routes safe for travellers (again, to the advantage of the early Christians taking the Gospel to Asia and Europe) the consolidation of Roman power — and the rule of (Roman) law. It was also during the reign of this austere, learned emperor that Jesus was born in a manger, in the Roman province of Palestine.
H/T to Brian Peckford for the link.
Why your landscape photos are boring 🥱
Yorkshire Photo Walks
Published Jun 9, 2024In this video Tom outlines a five-step process for turning your landscape photos from flat, boring shots to professional looking images.
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December 7, 2024
QotD: Game of Thrones as PoMo “deconstructionism”
Again, I guess I can forgive my colleagues, under-sexed little closet cases that they are, for being distracted by the boob cornucopia up on screen, but in the books, anyway, this comes through plain as day: Everyone in Westeros is either a psychopathic scumbag, or dead. In the very best PoMo style, the author is rubbing our faces in his belief that, since it’s extremely difficult to be heroic — or, all too often, merely decent — everyone who even thinks about trying is a fool, and deserves all the awful shit that happens to him. I’m told that back in the 18th century, a fun topic of debate at salons is whether a society of atheists could endure. Martin’s entire oeuvre seems dedicated to proving that life — mere, grubby, eating-shitting-sleeping existence — will continue in a society composed entirely of scumbags … but he has no idea why.
I have no idea why this idea (if that’s the right word) is so deeply appealing to academics, but evidently it is … and these are the people who are teaching your children.
Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.
December 6, 2024
Hegseth is clearly unfit to be Secretary of Defense because LOOK! A SQUIRREL!
I don’t recall having heard Pete Hegseth’s name before Trump nominated him to be the next Secretary of Defense, but Chris Bray clearly thinks the accusations are purely partisan:
Pete Hegseth is being Kavanaughed. And the only people dumb enough to fall for it are Republican senators.
I was willing to hear arguments that Hegseth wasn’t the best choice for Secretary of Defense. In his 40s, he’s on his third marriage, and while the rape allegation from his visit to a conservative conference in Monterey is clearly false, I was wide open to the argument that his actions demonstrated poor judgment. I was prepared to hear an argument. Like many combat veterans, Hegseth had some post-war chaos in his life. Discussion was merited.
But the more these arguments have been made, the dumber they’ve become. We’ve seen this play, and we know the third act: more heat, less light, the descent into completely irrational ranting.
Let’s pretend to take this number at face value, for the sake of argument, though Warren is egregiously misrepresenting the estimate about unreported assaults. Let’s just look at the structure of the claim: In 2023, while Lloyd Austin was the Secretary of Defense, 29,000 troops were sexually assaulted. Therefore, Pete Hegseth must never become the Secretary of Defense.
This is the kind of argument people make when they’re piling on, in an atmosphere of hysteria. It has no logic or order to it, and it does the opposite of the thing it’s intended to do: It depicts current leadership as failures, while arguing against a course correction. Bob punched me in the face, which proves that John is very bad. This is currently the logical structure of half the “news”.
In another Martha-do-you-hear-yourself moment, Lloyd Austin himself recently attacked Hegseth for arguing that women shouldn’t serve in the combat arms:
But read this carefully, and look for the own-goal:
Women serving in combat are facing more danger than men, Austin said.
Therefore, women should serve in combat. Explain the logic, Lloyd. Amazingly, the journalist who reported Austin’s comments missed the implications, mindlessly typing up the claim that women in combat are in more danger than men, then — next paragraph! — framing that statement as a rebuke to someone who warned that the service of women in combat “made fighting more complicated.” We’re not discussing; we’re ritually lining up behind our teams.
Liberal cabinet minister accepts “free” Taylor Swift tickets
I’ve often joked that it isn’t surprising that politicians can be bought … what is surprising is just how little it can take. This situation isn’t quite as clear-cut as that, but it looks bad to everyone except Liberal Party insiders:
Former Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan in happier times (yeah, it’s the only picture I have of the minister).
On Tuesday we learned that federal Liberal cabinet minister Harjit Sajjan will be attending a Taylor Swift concert at BC Place in Vancouver, in a private suite, courtesy of PavCo, the Crown corporation that operates the stadium. The federal government partially funds PavCo, including $116 million earlier this year for improvements to the stadium in advance of the 2026 World Cup.
It’s a textbook conflict of interest. Open and shut. Dead to rights. So much for Sajjan’s political career. Only … not. The only people who seem to disagree that it’s a conflict are federal Liberals and, sorry to say, the office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner — because Sajjan donated $1,500 to a food bank as a gesture to compensate for the coveted opportunity.
“If an item is paid for through a charitable donation, then it would not be considered a gift,” a spokesperson for the commissioner said in response to questions from National Post. “In the case of Minister Sajjan, for example, the original market value of a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert in Vancouver was roughly $600.”
Where do we even begin with this nonsense?
PavCo offered private-box seats to various dignitaries on the understanding they would donate some appropriate amount of money to good causes. Sajjan says he’s proud to have participated.
But you can’t “pay for” a free concert ticket — to use the commissioner spokesperson’s term — by giving money to a food bank. That’s like The Keg offering you a free dinner so long as you pay for it at Montana’s … except food-bank donations, unlike steak dinners, come with tax receipts.
