Alexander wept, for he saw there were no more worlds to conquer …
I get that, man. On some fundamental level. But that makes me a generally unhappy guy. So it is, so it has always been.
For whatever reason, the Leftist is able to externalize that. If there are no more worlds to conquer, well, that’s the world’s fault. I remember hanging out with some of the Political Science goofs at Flyover State. For whatever reason, they rank pretty high for Poli Sci — their department developed some measure of whatzit to better analyze the doodad, you know how it goes, the Karl Roves and James Carvilles of the world all use it.
Anyway, this was 2004, when George W. Bush won his reelection campaign against Kerry. Exactly zero of the Flyover State Poli Sci goofs predicted that. They were all certain that Kerry was cruising to victory. When I pointed out that this seems to be a BIG flaw in their precious model — the election wasn’t even particularly close — their response was instructive: It wasn’t the model’s fault. Rather, it’s that the American public chose to throw a temper tantrum.
That’s seriously what they went with. There’s the actual, observed behavior of 70 million people; and there’s your model; and when the one contradicts the other, the only possible explanation is: All those people are idiots.
(One of those grad students I was talking to ended up doing something “unofficial” yet fairly important for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016; if I’d known that, I could’ve called it for Trump at the very start of election and made a fortune on prop bets).
It’s probably genetic for them, too. Which is either hopeful or depressing, depending, but I think it answers the question: Why does society end up being ruled by Very Clever Boys? They just can’t do anything else. They can’t internalize; they have game the system. Have to. A society that wants to survive must find a system for them to game, somewhere far isolated from the real affairs of people.
Severian, “Me vs. The World”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-14.
December 19, 2022
QotD: When reality fails to follow the model, ditch reality
December 15, 2022
QotD: From The Stepford Wives to The Handmaid’s Tale
Why feminist horror novel The Stepford Wives is still relevant, 50 years on
But before we get to the fisking (I’m running on fumes, y’all; the end of the summer is always the worst time for me), let’s pause for a moment to consider the TV show. You’d think there’d be one, right? Either that, or this is stoyak — The Stepford Wives, coming fall 2022 to Disney Plus. But it doesn’t appear to be. I googled “stepford wives tv show” and got this, which looks trashy enough, but in no way related to the book or movie. There was a remake of the 1970s movie back in 2004, but it bombed.
Odd, no? You’d think that shit would be chick crack — all those Strongk Confidant Wahmens digging into conspiracies and Sticking it to the Man ™. At least, that’s what I thought back in 2004. I thought the casting was dodgy — Kidman was too old (and too glamorous; you really need a pretty-but-not-Hollywood-pretty type) and Matthew Broderick too nebbishy. Nonetheless, I thought the premise would be strong enough to overcome it — oh, you poor, put-upon ladies! But nope.
And then The Handmaid’s Tale happened, as my students would’ve written back in the days, and now I understand why I’m wrong. I should’ve seen it 20 years ago, but better late than never, right? Let’s all have a good laugh at the really obvious thing I missed back in 2004: Strongk, Confidant Wahmens are neither strong nor confident, nor do they want to be either. They want the thinnest veneer of the pretense of the fantasy of those things, delivered to them by a man who comes on like Chad Thundercock, but always somehow has the time to listen to her.
The Handmaid’s Tale, that’s the real chick crack. It’s highbrow bondage porn for the kind of tertiary-educated lady who thinks Fifty Shades of Gray is way too trashy to rent (except, you know, one Girls’ Night with a box of white whine, as a “guilty pleasure”). It gets her all fired up for busting balls at the next partners’ meeting down at the law firm. So empowering!
In The Stepford Wives, book and original movie, the housewives are replaced by robots. The author, Ira Levin, was a guy, and I bet you could tell that just from the one-sentence plot summary. Being replaced by a robot isn’t a “feminist” fear, it’s a male fear. The worry that you’re nothing but a wallet with a criminally underserved dick attached has been pervasive among men since probably the Puritans. It’s a neat trick on Levin’s part, racking up mucho feminist street cred by selling them the #1 male neurosis of the postwar world.
Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.
December 11, 2022
QotD: Democracy
Democracy’s founding fictions reinforce this. It’s easy to see yourself as the People’s Tribune, I imagine, if you just look at the numbers. All those people voted for you, which confirms how wonderful you are!
A better analogy is the professional sports team. Lots of people wear the team apparel of the Los Angeles Chargers. You can find lots of online forums passionately devoted to them. Lots of L.A.-area bars are festooned with Chargers’ stuff. The bobbleheads at ESPN talk about the Chargers several times a day. And yet, come game time, the Chargers only get about 32,000 fans at the stadium. Those are the actual voters — the rest is just social media noise. And it’s worse than that, actually. We all know that the vast majority of people who picked up a Chargers’ shirt because it was in the clearance bin, or ordered a drink at a bar with Chargers’ memorabilia on the shelf, would never bother to attend a game. So even people who think of themselves as “Democrats” or “Republicans” barely bother to vote, much less follow “their” team in office. Even the groups that get pandered to the most — old people, veterans, union goofs — don’t turn out in proportionate numbers.
Come election day, the People’s Tribunes are decided by old cranks on loan from the home, a few office drones on their lunch break with nothing better to do, and homeless people lured in with a promise of a short dog and some change.
But since no one without a vast, yawning chasm in her soul would ever submit herself to the indignities of “democracy” in the first place, these newly “elected” fools hie themselves to Washington, where the money boys feed their self-delusion. They read about themselves in the newspapers, see their names on internal party polls, and since none of their “constituents” could pick them out of a police lineup, they learn that the only way to keep the applause coming is by doing what the newspapers and the money boys say.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
December 7, 2022
QotD: Career path from recent B.A. to being “an expert” on national TV
Just for giggles, I clicked on the bio of the cutest contributor — called, hilariously, “analysts and associates” — a
womangirlpersyn named Karolina Hird. Here’s her official bio, in full:
Karolina is a Russia Researcher on the Russia/Ukraine portfolio at ISW. She graduated from George Washington University in December of 2021 with a B.A. in International Affairs and a concentration in Security Studies. Karolina’s undergraduate research examined aspects of international law and Eastern European security with a special focus on the rise of Polish populism. She has also conducted research pertaining to Russian objectives and geopolitical strategies on NATO’s Southern periphery.
Did everyone catch that? A Bachelor’s Degree. In December 2021. This gal is all of nine months out of college.
I’ve read my share of undergraduate research. Some of it is decent. There are some undergrads I’d trust to hit the archives for limited purposes. But there are no 21 year old kids on this earth whose judgments I’d trust, because I’ve taught a LOT of college kids, and y’all …But of course she’s not doing anything policy-related. You know how this kid’s career trajectory will go: A few years at ISW, in which she’ll start appearing as a guest on the “news” as a “Ukrainian affairs expert” — and you can tell she’s an expert, because she’s an “analyst” at the “Institute for the Study of War”. Once her looks start going, she’ll move over to a staff job for some politician, then off to a think tank, then maybe a run for office in her own right, then back to the Media as a “senior analyst”. I’d wager many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that this lady couldn’t tell the difference between a MiG-31 and a Mazda Miata, but we’re a year or two away from putting her on national TV as an “expert” on war and peace.
How do you stop that kind of thing? How would you even start?
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
December 3, 2022
QotD: Mantetsu and the Kwantung Army
Thus the South Manchuria Railway Corporation, originally contracted to develop a defunct line in a disputed territory, soon developed into a full-spectrum enterprise. Pretty much all heavy industry in the Japanese areas of Manchuria were divisions of Mantetsu. But since all the heavy industry depended on mines, and transportation, and food and housing for workers, and banks, and schools for the workers’ children, etc., pretty soon Mantetsu ran all of that, too. By the late 1920s, you could argue that Mantetsu was almost its own country.
It even had its own army, and that’s where things get really interesting.
The Kwantung Army was the security force assigned to the South Manchuria Railway Zone. The Japanese weren’t stupid; they knew the perils of independent commands far from home, and they rotated units through with some regularity. Nonetheless, the command staff remained fairly stable over the years … and so did Mantetsu’s.
The Japanese weren’t stupid, but they were people, and people being people, soon enough the lines between the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu began to blur. And since the lines between Mantetsu, the Imperial Army, and the government were already pretty blurry, pretty soon the concerns of one became the concern of all. (Nor was the Navy left out, though I’m not discussing them in order to keep it simple. They were up to their eyeballs in Mantetsu, too, because warships need lots of steel and steel comes from Manchuria).
A small but highly committed and totally ideologized faction developed inside the Kwantung Army. Several, in fact, and one of them (the Imperial Way faction) attempted an actual coup d’etat in 1936. It was put down, and the Imperial Way faction dissolved (in theory), but the problem of an intensely ideologized officer corps remained. Long story short, you had a small group of highly ideologized officers garrisoning a remote province pulling the entire Empire into big, unwinnable wars.
One could make the case that World War II in the Pacific was ultimately caused by about fifteen or twenty guys in the Kwantung Army.
That’s overly reductionist, but it highlights the huge problem with organizations slipping the leash. In theory, there was a clear chain of command, and even the head of the Kwantung Army was a down it a ways — he was subordinate to the Army Council, which was subordinate to the War Minister, who was subordinate to the Parliament, who were subordinate to the Emperor. In theory, lots of people could’ve sacked Gen. Araki, or his mini-me Ishiwara Kanji (a lieutenant colonel through most of it). Equally in theory, Mantetsu had no say in any of it — the Kwantung Army was a formation of the Imperial Japanese Army, not Mantetsu’s private security force.
But in reality, Mantetsu was so wired in to the Japanese government that in a lot of cases, it was the government. But not always, because the same could be said about the Army, and the Navy, both of which were also wired into Mantetsu up to the very top (or vice versa, your choice). And Mantetsu had their Media arm, of course, as did the Army and Navy …
What all this boiled down to, then, was a power vacuum. I know, that seems weird, but a skilled bureaucratic infighter like Ishiwara never lacked for groups to play against each other. The Army and Navy would oppose on principle any move that seemed to aggrandize the other, neither could go against Mantetsu (and neither could control it), and all had to pay at least lip service to the civilian government. Because of this, real power fell to whomever had the balls to grab it …
… which was the officer corps of the Kwantung Army. They assassinated at least two Manchurian warlords, staged a number of false flag attacks on their own positions, and generally got up to however you say “standard issue Juggalo fuckery” in Japanese, up to and including a full-scale war with China.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
November 29, 2022
QotD: People have always lied about sex, but GenZ’ers lie even more than you’d expect
By the end of my last tour of duty, most college kids were dour puritans. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is the thing people keep forgetting about the Internet: People lie. I know we all know that consciously, but we seem hardwired to believe confessions. In the same way that we might not consciously watch TV — might go some distance out of our way to avoid it — but find ourselves staring mindlessly at the blinking screen when we’re in a bar or a waiting room or something. It seems to be hardwired. So when these folks start writing about all the bizarre sexual shit they’re into, we just … believe them. Sight unseen.
But y’all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I want to state, unequivocally and for the record, that my entire knowledge of undergrads’ sex lives is secondhand. I have zero personal experience in this area. But it’s a close secondhand. For one thing, there’s not much to do in College Town that doesn’t involve undergrads, so I ended up drinking at a lot of the same bars, and in vino veritas. Second, kids these days have no filter. None whatsoever. Finally, social media — my last tour was at a SPLAC, where they strongly encouraged the faculty to be “friends” with the student body on their campus social media apps.
And yeah, they SAY a lot of things … but I highly, highly doubt they actually DO much of anything at all.
For one thing, those “student” bars were lucky I and a few other semi-normal profs were still in our “drink away the pain” phase, because otherwise they would’ve gone out of business. Friday and Saturday nights during football season were still pretty lively, but the rest of the week the “downtown” bars had all the crackling energy of singles’ night down at the mortuary.
Kids just don’t socialize much IRL, and when they do, they don’t hook up. In my not-inconsiderable experience, college drinking these days is like college anything — a grim, pinch-faced, assembly-line business. They intend to get blackout hammered, and they get after it like Heroes of Socialist Labor. Pausing for a quickie in the bathroom would mean skipping a turn in the drinking game — and they all play drinking games; it’s bizarre — so no thanks.
And y’all, those are the outgoing ones. The ones who still have some slight urge to see and be seen out in physical space. The rest of ’em never leave their rooms except at gunpoint, and when you force them to, their eyes never leave their phones.
That’s why I’d bet many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that all the “kink” in their social media profiles — even their personal ads — are just for show. They’re not listing all that stuff in order to find someone to have sex with. They’re using it as an excuse not to have sex with anybody, because “having sex with” entails personal interaction and they’re terrified of that. If they ever perfect those VR sex helmets like they had in Demolition Man, watch out, but as of now the whole idea is to seem weird and daring and liberated and kinky, but with no possibility of a follow-up. Oh, you’re into aardvarks and dental tools too? Um … yay? Oh, wait, you dress up as O. a. erikssoni, and I’m only into O. a. leptodon. Sorry!
Severian, “Saturday Miscellania”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-13.
November 25, 2022
QotD: Cults, conspiracy theories, progressives, and “the death wish”
… but alas, he does NOT lose his neuroses, his death wish. That becomes all-consuming.
When the very smart boys in the sociology departments first started studying cults, they assumed — being very smart boys — that cult members would all be dumb, mal-educated yokels. After all, those are the only kind who believe in Magic Sky Fairies, no? But because the urge to suppress or falsify research findings that don’t fit their pre-chosen Narrative hadn’t entirely permeated the academy yet, they actually published their “counterintuitive” findings — the average cult member is smarter, and much better educated, than the hoi polloi.
Which should’ve been obvious by the fact that cults as a general rule don’t bother trying to recruit in slums, or out in the sticks, but DO focus almost their entire recruiting effort near college campuses. They could’ve skipped the fieldwork entirely, and just looked around at the very obvious cult of “Leftism” that they and all their colleagues were already in, but self-awareness has never been a thing on the Left, and that goes triple for the egghead set.
The other thing that becomes immediately obvious in the academic study of cults is that the phrase “suicide cult” is redundant. They’re all suicide cults. Lots of them do us the great favor of admitting it, one way or the other, but THE cult belief is in the imminent immanentizing of the eschaton. The world’s gonna end, and they’re going to be the Big Guy’s right-hand persyns in the new dispensation. The Big Guy could be God, Jesus, the saucer people, Cthulhu, Satan, the Proletariat, whatever — they have a bewildering variety of mythologies, but the underlying belief is exactly the same, every time, and there’s only that ONE belief:
The world is gonna end in their lifetimes, and they themselves are helping to make it happen sooner.
Thus to pscircle back to [the] question: “has there been a historical situation where there is a generalised cult mentality which is attached and detached to a serial cult sequence (coof, ukraine, trump, etc).”
The way I’m interpreting this (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that the Juggalo Cult, unlike all the other known cults throughout history, seems to be able to change its mythology on a dime. We’re all familiar with Festinger, yeah? If not, go read When Prophecy Fails at the nearest opportunity — it’s short, and surprisingly readable for academic sociology. The UFO cult Festinger studied predicted the end of the world. When it didn’t happen, lots of members left the cult … but lots didn’t, and in fact they doubled down — it was only their constant vigilance, they said, that kept the saucer people from destroying the earth as originally planned.
(This is where the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes from, by the way. Festinger coined it).
Note that the UFO cultists didn’t suddenly flip mythologies as a way to deal with their cogdis — oh, we were wrong, it wasn’t the saucer people, it was the Illuminati. And that seems to apply to any “disconfirmation” of any cult belief. Everything that happens, or doesn’t happen, gets folded in. In the same way, there’s only ever one Devil. See e.g. every conspiracy theory on the Internet, ever. When ___ happens, the guys who think the Freemasons control the world blame the Freemasons, the guys who think it’s the saucer people blame it on the saucer people, etc., same as it ever was.
But if the Freemasons step up and take credit for it, the guys who think it’s the saucer people don’t shrug and say ooops. Rather, they build it in — ok, ok, yeah, technically it was the Freemasons, but we all know who really controls the Freemasons! (It’s the saucer people and the RAND Corporation, in conjunction with the reverse vampires. We’re through the looking glass here, people).
In a sense, of course, the Juggalo Cult does do that — Whitey is always the Devil (do a find-and-replace, swapping in “White supremacy” for “capitalism”, and you could republish the entire Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, verbatim, as your dissertation and no one would be the wiser). But the Juggalos also seem to be unique in that the Apocalypse changes on a dime, too. Festinger’s cult all agreed that the saucer people were still going to destroy the world; they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, because reasons.
The Juggalo Cult, by contrast, lurches from apocalypse to apocalypse. Global Cooling! Global Warming! Global Climate Change! Reagan! Boooosh! Drumpf! Covid! Ukraine! The Supreme Court! THE CURRENT THING!!!!
This, I think, is the reversion to bicamerality — the “digital clock effect” […] The Juggalo Cultists are still oppressed by their two-millennia-old sense of the passage of linear time — it’s baked into their DNA at this point — but they’ve been acculturated to the Endless Now of social media. There is no past on Twitter, nor any future — there’s just retweets and upvotes and replies, and what’s at the top of the news feed is all that is or could ever be, world without end amen.
They’re trapped in an endless loop — everything they do immanentizes the eschaton, because immanentizing the eschaton is simply a matter of tweeting it. And yet, the eschaton never comes. The tweet is merely replaced by another tweet, which is the only thing in the universe. It’s like what some old “paranormal researchers” said ghosts are — little loops of “film”, endlessly replaying the same thing forever. Time passes — the haunted house is bought and sold, remodeled, added to, stripped to the bricks and rebuilt, bought and sold again — but the ghost is still there, endlessly replaying the same scene, because it’s just static, just energy discharge from some kind of psychic dry-cell battery.
The difference being, of course, that these ghosts can actually pull the nuclear trigger … and they won’t even know they’re doing it, in the same way that the ghosts don’t realize they’re scaring the “occupants” of the “haunted house”, because there ARE no occupants, no house. It’s just the flickering, endlessly repeating NOW.
Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-17.
November 21, 2022
QotD: Socialism is nihilism
That seems bizarrely wrong, considering how much effort Socialists put into saving the world. But look at it objectively, comrade (heh heh), and you’ll see that Save-the-World-ism, of whatever flavor, always boils down to Destroy-the-World-ism. Always. It doesn’t matter how the world gets “saved;” it always gets blown up in the process. You still can’t find a better primer on chiliastic psychology than Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. The specifics of each loony doctrine changed, but the underlying presumption was always the same: Kill everyone, destroy everything, and then Jesus comes.
This is true even of millennialists whose doctrines don’t obviously entail killing everyone. Calvinists, for example. I spent decades trying to explain Calvinism to undergrads, and never once succeeded. The gulf between their words and their actions is too vast for the adolescent mind. There are only two logical responses to the doctrine of “double predestination”: quietism, or hedonism. They knew it, too, which is why they started burning people at the stake the minute they got any real power. Look at what they did, not what they said, and you’ll see nihilism plain as day. Calvin’s Geneva was the nearest thing to a police state that could be achieved with 16th century technology. The ideal Calvinist would say nothing, do nothing, think nothing, as he sat in the plain pews of his unadorned chapel, waiting for death and the Final Judgment. Calvinists wanted to grind the world to a halt, not blow it up, but once again the mass extinction of the human race is a feature, not a bug.
Take Jesus out of the equation, and you end up at pure shit-flinging nihilism in less than three steps. Marxism is perhaps the most exquisitely pointless doctrine ever devised. It’s more pleasant to have than to have not, I suppose, but no matter how much everyone has, we’re still just naked apes, living the brief days of our vain lives under an utterly indifferent sky. Marxists are a special kind of stupid, so they don’t realize it, but … they won. Modern Western “poor” people keel over from heart disease while fiddling with their smartphones in front of 50″ plasma tvs. While wearing $200 sneakers. We’re so far from being “alienated” from the fruits of our labor that “labor” is an all-but-meaningless concept for lots of us — and the further down the social scale you go, the more meaningless it gets. The modern ghetto dweller simply is Marx’s ideal proletarian. Does he look self-actualized to you? Ecce homeboy.
I assure you, the SJWs know this. Calvinists to the core, they know better than anyone the utter futility of all human effort. So they do what the original Calvinists did: Displace, displace, displace. Don’t take it from me, take it from a card-carrying Marxist. The end result is the same: Whether you’re a Puritan or an SJW, the only way to escape the crushing meaninglessness of your condition is to spend every moment of every day contemplating your pwecious widdle self.
Throw in the transitive property of equality, and you’ve got people like Hillary Clinton. If Socialism is Nihilism, then Nihilism is Socialism. Far from arguing against the idea … that Hillary et al are motivated solely by hatred, I’m 100% behind it. In fact, I’d argue that the Nihilism comes first — people who have convinced themselves that life is pointless always, always, embrace the biggest and most all-encompassing form of collectivism on offer. What could be crueler, than to be given all this for nothing? It’s not even a sick joke, since a joke implies a joker.
How can you not hate this world, then, and everything in it? More to the point: how can you not hate yourself, for seeing the world as it really is? Ignorance is bliss … but how can you not hate them, too, those poor deluded motherfuckers who still think stuff like God and love and family and the designated hitter might somehow mean something? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity … and if I have to face the existential horror of it all, then fuck it, so do you. “Capitalism,” the “free market,” “representative government” — call it what you will, it’s all just vanity, just another way for the sheeple to keep deluding themselves. Fuck it, and fuck them. Burn it down. Burn it allllll down.
Severian, “A Tyranny of Nihilism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-22.
November 19, 2022
American political parties from 1865 down to the Crazy Years we’re living through now
Severian responds to a comment about the Democrats and Republicans and how they have morphed over the years to the point neither party would recognize itself:
“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.
A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.
I find this extremely useful. I’d add that the postbellum parties do shift ideologies fairly regularly, as PR notes, such that even though they’re still called by the same names, they’re nowhere near the same parties, 1865-present.
I’d add some distinguishing tags for ease of reference, like so:DEMOCRATS:
The Redeemers of the “Solid South”, 1865-1882, when their main issue was ending Reconstruction and establishing Jim Crow.
The Grover Cleveland years, 1882-1896: Still primarily an opposition party, their main goal was reining in the ridiculous excesses of the Gilded Age Republicans. As one of about 100 people worldwide who have strong opinions on Grover Cleveland, I should probably recuse myself here, so let me just say this: Union Army veterans were to the Gilded Age GOP what the Ukraine is to the Uniparty now. They simply couldn’t shovel money at them fast enough, and the guys who orchestrate those ridiculous flag-sucking “thank you for your service” celebrations before pro sporting events would tell them to tone it way, way down. Cleveland spent most of his presidency slapping the worst of this down.
[How bad was it? So bad that not only did they pass ridiculous giveaways like the Arrears of Pension Act and the Dependent Pension Act — think “Build Back Brandon” on steroids, times two, plus a bunch of lesser boondoggles — but they got together every Friday night when Congress was in session to pass “private” pension bills. These are exactly what they sound like: Federal pensions to one specific individual, put up by his Congressman. Grover Cleveland used to burn the midnight oil vetoing these ridiculous fucking things, which makes him a true American hero as far as I’m concerned].
The Populist Party years, 1896-1912: They were more or less absorbed by the Populist Party — William Jennings Bryan ran as a “Democrat” in 1896, but he was really a Populist; that election hinged entirely on economic issues. They still had the “Solid South”, but the Democrats of those years were basically Grangers.
The Progressive Years, 1912-1968: They picked up all the disaffected “Bull Moose” Republicans who split the ticket and handed the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, becoming the pretty much openly Fascist entity they’d remain until 1968.
The Radical Party, 1968-1992: The fight between the Old and New Left, or Marxism vs. Maoism.
The Boomer Triumphalist Party, 1992-2000. It’s an Alanis-level irony that Bill Clinton was the most “conservative” president in my lifetime, if the metric for “conservatism” is “what self-proclaimed conservatives say they want”. This was our Holiday From History, in which “wonks” reigned supreme, tweaking the commas in the tax code while occasionally making some noises about silly lifestyle shit.
The Batshit Insane Party, 2000-Present. The years of the Great Inversion. Today’s Democrats only know one thing: Whatever is, is wrong.
REPUBLICANS:
The Radical Party, 1864-1876: Determined to impose utopia at bayonet point in the conquered South, they started asking themselves why they couldn’t simply impose utopia at bayonet point everywhere. They never did figure it out, and we owe those awful, awful racists in the Democratic Party our undying thanks for that. This is the closest America ever came to a theocracy until The Current Year. Morphed into
The party of flabbergastingly ludicrous robber baron excess, 1876-1896. In these years, J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the United States Treasury. Think about that. FTX, meet Credit Mobilier. You guys are pikers, and note that was 1872. William McKinley deserves a lot more credit than he gets in pretty much everything, but he might’ve been the most fiscally sane American president. Only Calvin Coolidge is even in the ballpark.
The Progressive Party, 1900-1912. For all the Left loves to call Republicans “fascists”, for a time they were … or close enough, Fascism not being invented quite yet. But the Democrats coopted it under Wilson, leading to
The Party of (Relative) Sanity, 1912-1968. Before Warren G. and Nate Dogg, there were Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the only two contestants in the “American politicians with their heads screwed on straight” competition, 20th century division. Alas, superseded by the
Anti-Left Party, 1968-2000. Want to punch a hippie? Vote for Richard Nixon. Or Gerald Ford. Or, yes, the Gipper.
The Invade-the-World, Invite-the-World Branch of the Uniparty, 2000-Present. Wouldn’t it be nice if Bill Clinton could keep it in his pants, and wasn’t a walking toothache like Al Gore? That was the essence of W’s pitch in 2000. Our Holiday From History was supposed to continue, but alas, 9/11. Some very special people at the State Department got their chance to finally settle their centuries-long grudge with the Cossacks, and, well … here we are.
By my count, the longest periods of ideological consistency ran about 50 years … and I’m not sure if that really tells us much, because it makes sense to view 1914-1945, if not 1914-1991, as THE World War, which put some serious constraints on the ideology of both sides.
Trend-wise, what I see is one side going nuts with some huge moral crusade, while the other side frantically tries to slam on the brakes (while getting their beaks good and wet, of course). Antebellum, it was the proslavery side leading the charge, but if they’d been slightly less excitable in the late 1840s, the abolitionist lunatics would’ve done the job for them by the late 1860s. If you know anything about the Gilded Age, you know that they somehow presented the truly ridiculous excesses of the Robber Barons as some kind of moral triumph; this was, after all, Horatio Alger‘s America. Progressivism, of either the Marxist or the John Dewey variety, is just moralizing gussied with The Science™, and so forth.
The big difference between then and now, of course, is that the grand moral crusade of The Current Year is open, shit-flinging nihilism. The “opposition”, such as it is, is also full of shit-flinging nihilists; they just don’t want to go before they’ve squeezed every possible penny out of the Suicide of the West. So … yeah. We’re overdue for a big ideological change. And we shall get it, never fear; we can only hope that we won’t have to see it by the light of radioactive fires.
November 17, 2022
QotD: The Dummies’ Guide to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Who: Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor in the mid-late 2nd century AD. The last of the “Five Good Emperors”, Marcus spent much of his time dealing with barbarian incursions and plague. There are some good biographies of the man, but Wiki covers the high points.
What: Because of the above, the Meditations were something like Marcus’s private self-help manual. He’s reminding himself to remain literally Stoic in the face of serious, seemingly unsolvable problems.
When: Late 2nd century AD. Greco-Roman philosophy was well-developed at this point; Stoicism was part of the classical tradition.
Where: In general, the European part of the Roman Empire. Specifically, on campaign against the barbarians – Marcus wrote a lot of the Meditations at the front.
Why: Because this man was the richest, most powerful individual in his world … and hated it. As a Stoic, he believed that virtue was its own — and, indeed, the only — reward, but as Roman Emperor he was forced to do un-virtuous things all day every day. It’s good instruction for how to live with yourself — how to be a man in a world that so often forces you to act like a snake.
Essential Background: Not much beyond the above.
Nice to have: The basics of Stoic doctrine. Specifically, their belief that “living virtuously” and “living according to nature” were basically synonymous, and that they were the only way to true happiness. A little Stoic epistemology, too — as their way of life depends on seeing the true nature of things, their standards for knowledge (what we’d call “justified true belief”) are extremely high. A statement like “pain is indifferent” is clear, and useful, on its own, but knowing the Stoic view of knowledge helps one appreciate just how prevalent the “indifferents” are, and how tough being truly indifferent is. Also nice to know: The wholesale adoption of Marcus by medieval Christians. There’s a very strong Stoic streak in Christianity’s first 1500 years; Marcus is always up there with the very best of the “virtuous pagans”.
None of these are necessary, though — you could lightly edit the Meditations (taking out the “thank you’s” at the start of Book One, explaining a few allusions) — and publish it today as a self-help manual. Also not necessary: Any real background in ancient philosophy. Back then, “philosophy” meant “a way of living”, not “a system for investigating the world”. Since Marcus is convinced of Stoicism’s truth, he doesn’t spend any time engaging the doctrines of other schools.
Severian, “Reading the Classics: An Illustration”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-14.
November 12, 2022
QotD: The short careers of secret police chiefs
(The Romanian Securitate had public intimidation down to an art form. They’d follow random guys around using big, obvious details, the better to prove to the proletariat that everyone was suspect. It is to them, not Mafia dons or aspiring rappers, that we owe the now-standard Eurotrash track suit look).
Secret police goons suffer from two serious structural problems, though, that not even the guys in Stove’s book [The Unsleeping Eye] really ever solved. The first is the obvious one, that guys who know where the bodies are buried are always at risk of using that knowledge. Napoleon’s guy Joseph Fourche, and FDR’s main man J. Edgar, lived out their natural lives (as did Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham), but of them, only Fourche lived in anything approaching what we would call an ideologized society, and that was small beer.
The rest of those guys died in harness, because of course they did. Adolf Hitler was an especially stupid dictator, and Heinrich Himmler an especially servile little freak, but I have no doubt that if the Reich had gone on much longer [Himmler] would’ve shanked [Hitler]. If Heydrich hadn’t gotten perforated in Prague, he no doubt would’ve gone after [Himmler] even sooner. Lenin and especially Stalin burned through secret police chiefs on the regular, because they pretty much had to.
I don’t know about the goons in the Chinese etc. secret police, but I’d be shocked to find anyone with more than a few years’ tenure, because purges are simply a way of life in totally ideologized societies. For every Khrushchev who manages to hang on – n.b. he was a Red Army commissar during the war, i.e. a not-so-secret police goon — there are fifty guys who live fast and die hard, because that’s just how totalitarians rule.
The stoyaknik, of course, is well served to consider the current scene as if he were watching the Politburo of an exceptionally deluded Commie regime, one made up almost entirely of ruthless yet clueless retards … who still believe, for the most part, in Communism.
That was always the problem for Kremlinologists in evaluating the USSR — whatever the Boss of the moment decided would, of course, immediately be retconned into the Scriptures by the Academicians, but what did the Big Guy himself think about it? That constrained his choices. Stalin and Khrushchev were true Communists, there’s no question about that, but they came up in the school of the hardest possible knocks — if they needed to do something directly contrary to Leninism in order to hang on to power, then Comrade Ilych can suck it.
For anything short of mortal, though, they’d more often than not behave as stereotypical Commies, so the first thing any Kremlinologist had to do was determine the seriousness of the situation from the Politburo’s perspective. Not an easy task, as you might imagine, and what made it worse was: as the USSR gained stability and Communism matured, the old school hardasses all died off and were replaced by True Believers. Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, didn’t start making his mark until after Stalin’s death, and he wasn’t a real up-and-comer until after Khrushchev — that is, he started rising through the ranks only after the hard boys were gone.
Thus, while Khrushchev was a true Commie, he still had some hard reality to constrain him. Gorby didn’t. He really believed all that Marxist-Leninist horseshit about democracy and etc.; he was far more doctrinaire than the earlier generation could possibly be. Thus Kremlinologists were forever baffled when he did stupid things that made no sense from the Realpolitik perspective, but were perfectly in keeping with the Scriptures. They thought Perestroika was some big 4D chess feint, for instance, instead of just a soft boy doing something noodle-headed.
Severian, “Book Review: The Unsleeping Eye by R.J. Stove”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-09.
November 10, 2022
The headscratcher that was the American midterms outcome
As the voters went to the polls on Tuesday, it was easy to find doom-and-gloom-mongering among Democratic stalwarts and most of the mainstream media (BIRM), and chest-thumping triumphalism on the right. Both sides seemed to agree that the outcome was going to be somewhere between a red landslide and a red wipeout. So … how do we square the expectations of both sides with what actually happened? Chris Bray makes an attempt:
Eight percent uptake of the much-touted bivalent booster, 75% wrong track sentiment, pretty good night for the party in power. Multiple signs of a total loss of trust and respect for the existing order equals a decision to more or less stay the course.
Tribalism is the first explanation, sure. If you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with a D behind its name, Democrats would vote for it; if you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with an R behind its name, Republicans would vote for it. John Fetterman is headed for the United States Senate. Go ‘way, I’m ‘batin’.
And I agree with the argument that Republicans didn’t offer much of a plan or a vision, a premise you can check by reading Kevin McCarthy’s Commitment to America. More mush from the wimp.
But the other thing, and you can argue with me about this, is that the society of the spectacle madness of messaging without regard to reality actually achieves its purpose, no matter how absurd it is. We have to add $3 trillion in extra debt-funded spending to the economy to reduce inflation! If you vote Republican, they’ll kill our children!
Amazingly, this turns out to work pretty well. The available evidence suggests that we have a sizable population that cannot assess fact claims. I propose that we test this with sample messages to voters: If you vote for bubblegum trees, the sky bees will give you a diamond-crusted ribeye! (Ohh, I have to vote for bubblegum trees!) If you’re out in public, look to your left; then look to your right. At least one of those people thinks Karine Jean-Pierre makes some pretty good points.
Sarah Hoyt strongly believes that the busy midnight vote-finders of 2020 were just as busy on Tuesday night:
As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.
Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember this:
And we know damn well it was a Trump landslide before that.
So for the Republicans to have picked up any seat, this was the tsunami to end all tsunamis.
I know the usual idiots are out there, already saying “It was abortion: the Womyns came out in force to vote dem.”
Are there women who are single ticket abortion voters. Sure. Most are older than I and are determined to make sure their actions and choices are validated a posteriori. They’re an ever dwindling minority. Married women vote more and more for the right every time. Single women? Who knows? But I suspect there’s been a shift in that too after the last too years. And most of them don’t see that career path ahead they once did.
Then there’s the other bs which is of course “The people don’t want to be free.” That’s bs. The people, every time they can express their displeasure do so. But having the vote taken away from them via fraud means THEY each individual thinks he or she is alone.
Things like “Let’s go Brandon” sweep the nation, but there’s no major legal or financial movement to protest the fraud, because each person thinks “I guess all these idiots are so beaten down they like beaten down, and I’m the only one who is angry.”
Meanwhile the perpetrators know what the people think, and erect barricades in DC to protect themselves from the anger they sense but can’t seem to bring out into the open.
Yes, we’re getting the house, and probably not the senate. Which means a good five/six seats fraud. I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of Dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.
At Founding Questions, Severian is appropriately sanguine about the notion of “adjusted” or “fortified” ballot counts in disputed races:
So the “elections” were fun, eh? By far the best “news” from the Dissident perspective is that they did, in fact, pull out all the stops for S-s-s-Strokey. As I think it was Based 5.0 who quipped below, it looks like dual-passport-holding Muslim carny barkers aren’t going to be making America great again. Here’s hoping they’re stupid enough to fall for the “Dr. Jill” trap twice — now they’re stuck with Strokey the way they’re stuck with Tapioca Joe, because Giselle is Dr. Jill on steroids (perhaps literally). Eh, Dr. Jill had 40 years in [Washington, DC] to get a taste of the finer things; Giselle’s price is probably far lower. But until Strokey resigns for health reasons and is replaced […] the image of a tatted-out, brain-damaged hobo in a hoodie shuffling around the Senate floor is so on the nose, no novelist would dare use it.
[…]
I bet if we look back on it, we’ll see the state (lowercase s) Media freaking out first, dragging the Official State (capital S) Media with them. It makes sense, given the perverse incentive structure of the Media. Stick with me here:
Joe Schmoe (D) is running for Congress in Flyover State. Obviously The Media wants him to win, because (D). And they’re sure he’s going to, because his opponent is some “ultra-MAGA” yahoo. But Reality is what it is, and suddenly the yahoo is getting closer and closer …
At that point, The Media’s perverted incentive structure kicks in. The “reporters” at the biggest local rag in Flyover State, the Toad Suck Times-Picayune, only care about one thing: Getting the fuck out of Toad Suck, trading the Times-Picayune for a slot somewhere higher up the chain. Now, there are only two ways to do that: Be a hard-hitting, straight-shooting newshoun …
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh Jesus, I’m sorry, I thought I could type that with a straight face, but I can’t. Give me a minute …
… ok, there’s only one way to move up in The Media, and that’s by proving yourself a more zealous cultist than the next guy. So our Heroic Journalist starts doing what he thinks the Inner Party wants, which is of course “propping up Joe Schmoe for all he’s worth”. But here’s the rub: He’s not privy to what the Inner Party actually wants. Of course he’s not; after all, he’s riding a desk at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune. And of course everybody in a similar position, nationwide, is doing the same thing …
… but they’re all at least kinda sorta privy to the real polls that come down from the big organizations (recall that there are maybe three companies that control all the newspapers in the US), and so he knows things are looking grim for Joe Schmoe. More importantly, he sees that Tapioca Joe himself is out stumping for Democrats, and not in battleground states — they’re putting Brandon out there in supposedly safe Democratic districts.
So our man at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune consults his own personal political tea leaves, and he concludes: We’re gonna lose. The “red wave” is real. So again, he starts doing what he thinks his masters want, the thing he thinks will get him noticed at the higher levels: He admits the truth, or as much as he personally can stomach, and starts laying in the groundwork for #TheResistance, same as in 2020. Oh, Kari Lake is ahead 8% over Abortion Mouse there in AZ (give Ace of Normies this, he coins a good nickname), well obviously that’s because of bigotry MAGA yadda yadda and don’t forget the Russian hacking!
But here’s the problem with that: It does get him noticed by the Big League club, but in the exact opposite way. So long as everyone stays on point, you can brazen it out through the inevitable “fortification”. Had everyone stayed on point, a “worryingly tight race” — they’ll admit that much, for verisimilitude — can easily be turned into one of those 3am miracles the Dems are famous for. Hey, whaddaya know, all the mail in ballots were for Joe Schmoe. What a surprise.
But now that the Toad Suck Times-Picayune is running stories about the challenger being ahead, the Big League clubs have to at least acknowledge it, the school of fish effect takes over, and pretty soon you’ve got the entire Media in panic mode. Which has the further effect of making the freelance riggers even crazier, so that the regularly scheduled 3am ballot drop is being disrupted by mysterious “hiccups” at key locations — you know, “cyberattacks” and whatnot (why the fuck is a voting machine connected to the internet in the first place?), and so on, plus all the mailmen and so forth dumping a whole bunch of ballots from red districts into the nearest streams, culverts, and landfills. Jimmy Hoffa is probably up to his eye sockets in Republican ballots out there in the foundations of Giants’ Stadium…
And so the weird shit we see above, and the odd “had a Narrative all ready” vs. “are clearly scrambling” coverage of different contests.
I can’t think of a better way to really shore up the idea that ALL elections are rigged than that. Wait a minute, the “red wave” was on last week. You guys admitted it. Early Tuesday afternoon, every talking head on tv looked like he was weaving a noose under the “news” desk; you’d expect “journalists” hanging from the rafters by 7pm.
But … ooops! Short of actually being caught on camera throwing Republican ballots in a bonfire, or openly xeroxing Democrat ones — and it’s only mid-morning of the day after, give it time — I can’t think of a clearer way of announcing that it’s ALL rigged than that.
November 8, 2022
QotD: Marx was right about “commodification”
Marx was right about three critical things: Commodification, alienation, and class consciousness (again, bearing in mind that “right” in this context means “correct diagnosis”, not “correct in every particular”).
If it helps, you can swap in financialization for commodification. Briefly, it’s the ever-accelerating phenomenon we’ve all observed: burning through social capital in order to make a buck. Things that should not be subject to market forces are not only turned into commodities, but soon become the only commodities, or the only ones that matter.
Consider pretty much everything about the “laptop class”. E.g. the laptop itself. It commodifies time. Now you have the “ability” to work even when you shouldn’t. It is now virtually impossible to leave work at the office. For those of us who are independent contractors, this is a nice bonus — we can invoice every minute of our time, which means we can work as much (or as little) as we want to. For everyone else, though …
See what I mean? It’s simply understood that you’re never off the clock. Throw in the rest of the paraphernalia of laptop-class work — smartphone, social media, etc. — and nobody thinks twice about sending you stuff on a Saturday, a holiday, at your kids’ dance recital, at a funeral, whatever. People still have the residual social habit to say “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry for your loss” when you explain that you couldn’t get to that email because you were at your Mom’s funeral … but not for long, because you can already hear it in their voices: “Yeah yeah, sucks to be you, now will you please get me that TPS report!”
Same way with social media. You will be fired for expressing certain kinds of opinions, even on your “private” accounts, because the assumption is that there is no privacy. You don’t own you. You are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GloboPedo, and while we’re tempted to get outraged at the kinds of opinions for which you will get fired, that’s why those old Leftists — the ones we’re increasingly coming to resemble — would say “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The kind of opinion is epiphenomenal; it’s the principle that matters, because you are not a commodity.
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
November 4, 2022
QotD: History while it’s happening
Well, future historian, since I know how much that sucks, I’ll spare you. If you’re plowing through my papers (you’re welcome for all the Slave Leia pictures, by the way) and you get to the “Impeachment of Donald Trump” section, you’ll have something. Maybe nothing interesting, or particularly coherent, but at least it’s something. Professional courtesy.
If nothing else, this impeachment fiasco confirms that we’re ruled by fools. No earth-shattering insight, that, I realize, but there it is. Really it’s just math — since most people in all times and places have been fools, it stands to reason that nearly every human who has ever lived has had a large part of his fate decided by an idiot. This is true even of those blessed to have seen good leadership in action, as even the best men are fools about lots of things. Up to and including the things that make their reputations. George Washington, for instance, was indisputably a great leader, but a terrible general — with Cornwallis trapped on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia, he had to be talked out of moving the Continental Army north, to reconquer New York. He was one of history’s great captains, but I bet I could take him in a game of Risk.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
October 31, 2022
“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”
At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:
I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.
The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …
… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.
The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.
Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.
Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.
