Quotulatiousness

November 29, 2019

Revolts, civil wars, and revolutions

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian offers his taxonomy of protest with examples from English history:

King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.

  • A revolt is a large-scale, semi-organized riot. It aims, at best (e.g. Wat Tyler’s Rebellion), at the redress of specific grievances. At worst, it’s violent nihilism (e.g. the Jacquerie).
  • A civil war aims to replace one leader with another, leaving the underlying civil structure intact — e.g. any of the Roman civil wars post-Augustus.
  • A revolution‘s goal is total social transformation. We’re stipulating that it’s violent, because while stuff like the Industrial Revolution is fascinating, we’re not looking at peaceful change here in the Current Year. Revolutions are necessarily, fundamentally ideological.

I realize this can cause some confusion, as events I’d classify as “revolutions” are called civil wars in the history books, and vice versa. But the difference is important, because it sheds light on the development, course, and outcome of events.

The paradigm case is the English Civil War, 1642-51. This was clearly a revolution, as it aimed at — and achieved — the near-total overthrow of existing society. When Charles I took the throne in 1625, his kingdom was very much closer to a Continental-style divine-right monarchy than most Britons would like to admit. While the English had succeeded in clawing some of their liberties back from the crown after Henry VIII’s death, the fact remains that the Stuart state, like the Tudor state, was despotic. But by 1625, the despot was completely out of step with his people, and his times.

By 1642, the first revolutionary prerequisite was in place: No clear alternative. There were lots of revolts against Henry VIII, and one of them, the Pilgrimage of Grace, had the potential to turn into a civil war, or even a revolution. The revolts against Elizabeth I didn’t quite rise to that level, but the Northern Rebellion, and Essex’s Rebellion certainly imperiled her government. See also Wyatt’s Rebellion against Queen Mary, the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion against Edward VI, etc. In all of these, the alternative was clear — return to Rome, replacement of one court faction with another, or return to the old ways.

November 21, 2019

“Gosh I miss the good old days” … when the CIA and the FBI were the bad guys, according to all good progressives

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian on the amazing change in popularity of the bad old US cloak-and-dagger set among Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Progressives, and other well-intentioned folks:

For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, reading the news these days is like your first time getting stoned. Everything’s fine, nothing’s happening, and then … what the hell? Wait wait wait … the cloak-and-dagger goons are the good guys now?

For the benefit of younger readers: Back when the USSR was a going concern, the Left spent a great deal of time excusing Commies’ behavior Scooby Doo-style — they would’ve gotten away with it, were it not for those meddling kids! The Reds’ hearts were in the right place, of course, but gosh darn it, the CIA insisted on interfering with spontaneous sovereign people’s movements, and that’s why the Marxist guerrillas invariably had to massacre all those peasants. It was pretty much an entrance exam for NGOs back in the days — if you couldn’t find a way to blame the excesses of, say, Kim Il Sung’s torturers on Ronald Reagan, you couldn’t get a job at Amnesty International.

Naturally, then, all correct-thinking people hated the CIA and their domestic Mini-Me, the FBI. Those two organizations used to show up at college job fairs, and a good way to meet easy girls was to drop in on the inevitable protests. Slap on a Che t-shirt (available at the campus bookstore, natch), do a Ricardo Montalban impression while saying “Sandinista,” and let the magic happen. Don’t forget to stop by the Emma Goldman clinic for some free rubbers on your way back to her dorm room!

Gosh I miss the good old days, but whatever, the point is, watching groovy antiques like Nancy, Bernie, and Hillary telling me to trust the black helicopter guys is like watching Bruce Jenner in drag — you’re embarrassed for him, and scared of his enablers. Listening to them screech about Russia like the most paranoid Reaganaut is so weird, I can’t even come up with an analogy. Yo, guys, THIS was your idea, wasn’t it? Just like it was you guys calling the FBI the American Gestapo all those years? Hello? COINTELPRO? Remember that? Hello? Is this thing even on?

October 26, 2019

The Frankfurt School and you

Filed under: History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian suggests we consider the origins of a large part of modern progressive thoughts:

Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.

It occurs to me that Our Thing ought to take a long, hard look at the Frankfurt School.

Those were the guys, of course, who pioneered the notion that their political opponents must be mentally ill. Given that

  • all sane people are good; and
  • good people only want good things; and
  • Socialism is a good thing;

then

  • anyone who doesn’t want Socialism wants a bad thing;
  • therefore is a bad person;
  • therefore is insane.

Anyone with the common sense God gave little catfish recognizes this as begging the question. And not particularly subtle question-begging, either, which is why it took over 1,000 pages (!) of ponderous Teutonic prose to disguise it. It’s science, comrades. Only Socialism, or a .38 to the back of the neck, will cure us …

… assuming, of course, that we want to be cured.

The Frankfurt Schoolers assumed this, of course, as did all those freelance critical theorists running the NKVD’s torture chambers. But that was then. The Frankfurt Schoolers were shockingly bourgeois on so many things. They thought homosexuality was a mental illness, if you can believe it, and I doubt even Herbert Marcuse would’ve signed off on “drag queen story hour,” let alone the state-mandated chemical castration of 6 year old boys. Only the peerless enlightenment of the Current Year recognizes this, comrades.

October 3, 2019

The Puritans, then and now

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian thinks on churchiness and churchianity in our times:

The most striking fact about the Middle Ages from a modern perspective is their love of lists, categories, forms. This is partly practical — Church art all looks the same because it has to communicate a consistent message to the aforesaid illiterate peasantry — but lots of it isn’t. They were simply obsessed with forms, with outward order, to the point that even the few true individuals were hard to tell apart — William of Ockham and Thomas Aquinas were as different as two thinkers could possibly be, but unless you’re a subject matter expert, their writings look identical.

“Individuality,” on the other hand, comes from inward experience. What, if anything, did the medieval peasant believe when he went to Mass? Impossible to say, but one of the reasons that’s so is because the form of his “piety” was so all-encompassing. Some years back, a Jew wrote a funny book about trying to live his life by the letter of the Mosaic law. One could do the same thing with medieval Catholicism. Take a gander at the liturgical year — hardly a day goes by without a feast, a commemoration, a celebration. Do all of that, and you’ll hardly have time for anything else. They were so focused on the outward show, at least in part, because there was so much showing to do.

When the Reformation shitcanned all that, piety turned inward. There are zillions of sources for what the Reformed believed (or, at least, said they believed), because the Reformation was a middle-class pursuit and the middle classes were literate … and, crucially, had the free time to be literate. I’m guessing here, but since people are people and always have been, I’m pretty sure that your medieval peasant loved the show of his religion, because it gave him a little much-needed time off from his hourly grind of back-breaking, ragged-edge-of-survival physical labor.

Your middle-class incipient Calvinist, on the other hand, was bored to tears with stuff like “creeping to the cross” — all those billable hours lost (surely no one is surprised that Calvin, Knox, et al were all lawyers or merchants). In their vanity, they insisted it wasn’t enough to seem pious; you actually had to be pious, which meant putting the time you would’ve spent doing public penance into contemplating the state of your soul. Check out The New England Mind — once you fight through prose, you’ll see that the vaunted Puritan piety was little more than Special Snowflakism with a New Testament twist. They’re “individuals,” all right, but only because they’re as obsessed as Tumblrinas with their very own pwecious widdle selves.

The point of this isn’t just to bash Puritans, fun as that is (and as richly as they deserve it). The point is that, as Current Year America is a thoroughly Puritan nation, we have to realize just how historically contingent Puritanism really is in order to beat them.

Puritans desperately wanted to be individuals in a world that couldn’t support very many individuals. You need a lot of free time to be a Puritan, and in the 16th century free time was almost inconceivably expensive. Whatever else it was, Puritanism was gross conspicuous consumption — Puritans announced to the world that they alone had the free time to indulge in expensive educations, books, Bible study, and the endless hours worrying about whether or not it’s Biblically justified to paint the altar. In a world where most everyone still knows someone who knows someone who starved to death, that’s one hell of a statement.

September 27, 2019

QotD: Environmental cultists

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are a million examples, but since climate hysteria is briefly back in the news let’s go with that. That Greta Thunberg freak might not know it — she is, after all, a product of modern “education” — but anyone old enough to remember the early 2000s has heard her spiel before. Al Gore kept telling us that the world would end by 2012 or something; he made a movie about it and everything. Hell, several generations of Americans have heard this nonsense before, going all the way back to the original Earth Day in 1970.

Of course, back then it was global cooling that was going to kill us all, and do you see what I mean about True Believers? The very same people who were convinced that we were all gonna die in a new Ice Age in 1970 were certain we’d die of melted polar ice caps in 2006, just as they’re now positive we’re going to get killed by … whatever it is Thunberg is hectoring the UN about. Normal folks’ skulls would’ve exploded from cognitive dissonance, but the eco-freaks don’t suffer from cognitive dissonance. Because, for them, it never rises to the level of cognition in the first place. If “pulling a U-turn on your deepest convictions” is what it takes to stay in the group, well, start peeling rubber. The cult’s leadership will come up with a retcon in due time.

Two interesting effects flow from this. The first is the growing disconnect between the cult’s leadership and the True Believers. A cult with a big enough membership roster stops being a cult and becomes a movement. Movements beget organizations, which by universal law attract grifters, with predictable-as-sunrise consequences. E.g. Christianity. Back in the mid-first century, Christians were sure that Christ would return in their lifetimes — after all, He said so Himself. His comeback tour kept getting postponed, though, and these days you can be the leader of a major Christian denomination without ever bothering with that “Jesus” guy, much less any of the stuff He said.

This is why “global cooling” became “global warming,” which is now “global climate change.” We cognitively-normal folks assume that the eco-freaks keep changing the name to avoid cognitive dissonance. After all, the climate “changes” every day — we call it “weather,” but if you’re looking for evidence that your crackpot eco-doom theories are correct, well, just look at how much the temperature varies from noon to midnight!! But see above: Cognitive dissonance is actually a boon to the eco-freaks, because in cult psychology, disconfirmations prove that you were right all along. The eco-freaks would still trot goofy Greta Thunberg out there no matter what it’s called, and she, poor deluded little sod, would keep on doing her thing, because she’s in the cult. So: They, the eco-freaks, didn’t come up with “climate change;” the grifters in charge of Climate Shakedown Inc. did.

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

September 24, 2019

Bill Belichick’s secret is that he doesn’t have a secret

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m not a Patriots fan so I don’t think of Patriots head coach Bill Belichick as some sort of demi-god … although I have wondered if he’s got some sulfur burns from suspicious handshakes with diabolical representatives … but Severian makes the case that his big secret is that he doesn’t have one:

Head coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots watches the preseason game against the Washington Redskins at FedExField on August 28, 2009 in Landover, Maryland.
Photo by Keith Allison via Wikimedia Commons.

Belichick isn’t some kind of super-genius. Nor does he have some unique insight into the game. He’ll never write a book on “The Bill Belichick System,” because unlike every other celebrity coach, he doesn’t have a “system.” He simply does what he needs to do to win, one game at a time, with the pieces he has. That’s just leadership, in the traditional sense of the term, but so few people in our modern Media-driven culture have seen it that it totally fries our circuits. Surely he must have some double-secret grimoire of football excellence that he consults on the sidelines …?

Nope. Belichick’s secret is what he doesn’t have: A huge ego, a “system,” the my-way-or-the-highway mentality that infects nearly everyone given the tiniest smidgen of real power. An example: He once countered (and, of course, defeated) a ferocious defense on crappy field conditions by lining up a sixth offensive lineman as a tight end. Perfectly legal, but nobody else would’ve ever dreamed of doing it.

The Patriots are famous for using their (perennially excellent) tight ends more than any other team in the league, so naturally the opponent spent all week scheming to take away the TE. When Belichick kept his tight ends off the field, the opponent had no idea what to do; their quick cover linebackers got plastered by the extra linemen, and the Patriots’ running backs ran wild.

The lesson from this is twofold: First, that he would think to do it in the first place. Again, it’s perfectly legal. Teams do it all the time, actually, except they do it in goal line situations — instead of cramming the ball up the middle, they send a soft-handed lineman over into the corner of the end zone. He’s too big for anyone back there to cover, so if the QB can get it to him it’s an easy score. All Belichick did was run the same personnel out in the middle of the field. Simple, but football is the most conservative sport in existence — nobody does anything that hasn’t been done a million times before.

The second takeaway is that Belichick had enough control to pull it off. Nobody likes getting his playing time reduced, and tight ends in the modern game are highly-paid gentlemen accustomed to frequent success. Even if they wanted to, most coaches wouldn’t be able to take their glory boys off the field for an extended period — the players would riot, the Media would crucify him, and the fans would go nuts. Belichick’s guys bought in enough to follow the gameplan without complaint. He gave them the credit when the team won, but he would’ve taken the heat if they’d lost. Again, that’s not some special football coaching technique; it’s just leadership.

September 2, 2019

QotD: The abolition conspiracy of the 1850s

Filed under: History, Law, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the “slave power conspiracy” was a misnomer. Oh, the Southern senators all voted together, but that’s not a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” implies an end, a goal, and the slave power simply didn’t have one. Their actions were purely negative, and if that meant absolutely nothing got done, well, so be it. They were deeply skeptical of federal power anyway; if vetoing anything and everything that might somehow affect slavery meant that the nation would simply drift along, directionless, that suited them just fine.

But there was another conspiracy afoot in the 1850s: The abolition conspiracy. You don’t hear about this one in high school history because the victors write the textbooks, but it was quite real. And this one really was a conspiracy, in that they had a clear goal: The end of chattel slavery. And it was a conspiracy in a more fundamental sense, in that it was illegal. The so-called “slave power conspiracy” was obstructionist to the bone, but it’s perfectly legal for legislators to vote against proposed legislation. It’s not legal to advocate armed insurrection but that’s what the abolitionists did.

On October 16, 1859, a lunatic abolitionist named John Brown led a partisan band in an attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He wanted to distribute the stolen guns to local slaves, thus sparking a race war. We know this because Brown was captured alive, and the great state of Virginia put him on trial, as they were legally required to do. Being a fanatic, and knowing that he was a dead man already, Brown took the opportunity to advertise his cause to the world …

At which point it became obvious that not only did Brown have the financial backing of several prominent Northerners, but he had the moral backing of a large segment of the Northern population. Brown became a martyr, literally — he was frequently compared to Jesus Christ in Northern periodicals. The important thing to note is this: Brown was captured in armed insurrection against the United States, and lots of the country was ok with it. This man simply decided that the legal processes could never result in the outcome he deemed morally necessary, so he took the law into his own hands — with the active connivance of prominent Northern financiers and intellectuals, and the avid approval of many Northern citizens.

Remember that, and Southern belligerency makes a whole lot more sense. The North was obviously ready to go to the gun in 1861, because they’d already gone to the gun in 1859. The “John Brown Moment,” then, is the point at which violence becomes inevitable, because one significant, influential segment of the country not only passively tolerates it, but actively cheers it.

Severian, “The John Brown Moment”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-16.

August 23, 2019

Reasons to expect an even weirder (and scarier) US election in 2020 than in 2016

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why the First World War was inevitable (because of the fecklessness of all the world leaders at the time) and then points out that the same sort of inevitability seems to be playing out in the run-up to the 2020 US elections:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege,* or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.

That’s where the modern political landscape gets so terrifying. Looking at the paper from the establishment Democrats’ point of view, their course of action seems obvious. And credit where it’s due, even Slow Joe Biden and Fauxcahontas are smart enough (or, more likely, have hired people who are smart enough) to see the obvious once it gets rubbed in their faces a few dozen times — Slow Joe is playing the above-it-all unifier, while Dances with Socialism has gone on a Hillary-esque “listening tour” for The Media’s benefit. Should they choose, The Media can now memory hole all the “fake Indian” stuff, and yell “racist!” at anyone who tries to dredge it back up …

… but I don’t think they’ll choose to. The human factor always wins, and the humans (using the term in its strictest biological sense) in The Media are fed up close to bursting. The mask is completely off “The Squad,” and The Media couldn’t be happier. I’m sure that, in their heart of hearts, Nancy Pelosi et al don’t have a problem with BDS, or the Green New Deal, or any of the rest of it. But flying to Israel on the taxpayer’s dime to support Palestinian terrorism just doesn’t play in Peoria, and the Establishment Dems know it. The Media, however, do not — just look at the coverage.

I’m also quite confident that Nancy et al are even, in their heart of hearts, ok with “Antifa” shooting at cops and firebombing ICE offices. Nancy, after all, came up in the heyday of Jim Jones’s San Francisco, so she’s no stranger to political violence. But The Media absolutely cream themselves over “revolutionaries.” They’ve kept this stuff under wraps so far — Nancy et al have convinced them it’ll hurt Donald Trump more than it will hurt them if they keep it bottled up — but every single person in The Media had xhzhyr first wet dream about Che Guevara. I doubt they can keep it in their pants too much longer, especially if — as seems all but certain — “Antifa” commits some gaudy, gross atrocity in the 2020 campaign season.

Nor can we discount the human factor regarding Normals. Every day brings a new insult — Twitter colluding with China to suppress democratic protests in Hong Kong while all-but-openly banning anyone to the right of Mao; gender-and-race-swapping comic book characters; anything and everything to throw sand in Normals’ faces. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was The Great Fuck You, I can’t even imagine what it’ll look like in 2020, after four more years of this stuff ramped up way past 11.

It’s not looking good, but since the idiots in charge have never even thought about looking up from the paper, the whole thing is going to catch them completely unprepared. Forget “that’s how you got Trump;” this is how you get the Somme.

* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.

Loving “science”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains the differences between how ordinary people view science and many progressives “f*cking love” science:

For the benefit of younger readers: If you think Lefties Fucking Love Science(TM) now, you have no idea of the torrid affair they carried on with it back when the USSR was still a going concern. Karl Marx, of course, pretended that his sub-Hegelian flatulence was the only truly scientific world view, and his disciples have been playing along ever since. “The facts have a liberal bias,” you’d routinely be informed, by people who spent $200 to have their chakras cleansed by a Navajo shaman once every two months.

I can’t think of a better illustration of what I call (for lack of a better term) the Left’s grammar problem. Lefties tend to get nouns and verbs mixed up. “Science,” for instance. I’m not going to go all Vox Day here and start making up words, but when normal people say “science,” we generally mean it as a verb:

    “Science” is what scientists do; it’s shorthand for “applying the scientific method.”

This is why, when we’re presented with a startling new find from the white coat guys — that the polar ice caps have all melted, say — we ask to see the lab work. If it’s really science, then we should be able to replicate the experiment ourselves. Or, at the very least, you should be able to show us the satellite photos…

Which nicely highlights the Left’s notion of “science.” To them, it’s a noun:

    “Science” is a fixed body of knowledge; upon which “scientists” operate the way theologians work on the Bible.

What “scientists” do in the Left’s world, then, is what normal people call “hermeneutics.” This is why the bizarre phrase “the science is settled!” makes sense to Leftists. You don’t get to see God’s lab work, after all, and you’re not allowed to make up new Scriptures. To them, an ordinary person challenging a “scientist” on a point of “science” is like a layman challenging the Pope on a point of theology.

August 3, 2019

QotD: The 1968 election and the schizoid break of the American media

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… in hindsight 1968 was obviously the country’s schizoid break. The Democratic Party didn’t go completely off the rails — cf. all the candidates they ran, 1972-2004, who were the definition of anodyne — but The Media sure as hell did. 1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive, you’ll recall, with Walter Cronkite proclaiming the war unwinnable. It doesn’t matter if Cronkite was right or not (of course he wasn’t); nor does it matter if his proclamation actually made everyday Americans lose faith in the war. What matters is that The Media believed it, with all their hearts and souls. No profession is dumber, or more addicted to singing hosannas to itself, than journalism. And then they “got” Richard Nixon, and that’s all she wrote — from there on out, The Media decided they were the country’s real rulers, and what they want, they get.

Fortunately for the Democrats, what The Media wanted and what the Democratic Party wanted were in the same ballpark for most of the next three decades. But then Bill Clinton happened, as my students would write. He played The Media’s Messiah fantasies for all they were worth, such that every bobblehead in the country was still defending him as Liberalism’s avatar even as he was governing (in the few odd moments he bothered) as Newt Gingrich’s mini-me and acting like a frat boy on nickel beer night at the strip club.

You just don’t get over something like that.

Which brings us to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Boy do these look different in hindsight! […] I knew The Media was all-in on the Democrat, like they always are. But at the time, I thought that was a tactical decision. That is, I really believed that their attacks on W. were calculated political moves, designed to drag Gore and especially Kerry over the finish line. I thought that only the Mother Jones types were delusional, Iranian mullah-style fanatics.

Nope. The Media — ALL of them — really did see W. as the antichrist, the Twelfth Invisible Hitler (as the Z Man likes to put it) come to destroy the world. So when despite all their sacrifices to Moloch the Chimperor won, The Media went full retard. Like UFO cultists who keep the faith by telling themselves only their fervent prayers staved off the apocalypse, The Media convinced themselves that only more Social Justice would do …

Severian, “The Spirit of ’68”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-01.

May 23, 2019

Those “theories of history”

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian starts off talking great-man versus vast-impersonal-forces-of-history then segues into passivity (not Severian’s, but the widespread use of the passive voice):

Lionel Royer (1852-1926). Vercingetorix jette ses armes aux pieds de Jules César (Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar)
The painting depicts the surrender of the Gallic chieftain after the Battle of Alesia (52 BC). The depiction of Gauls with long hair and mustaches is also called into question today. The horse is a Percheron, although at this time this breed was not in Gaul. The rectangular shield also does not accord with the time when they were mostly oval.
Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay. — http://www.mairie-le-puy-en-velay.fr/ via Wikimedia Commons.

Academics, of course, are all in on “social” explanations of historical phenomena. Being weak, ineffective people themselves, with no experience of life, the very idea of a Caesar frightens and repels them… so they construct theories of History in which it is impossible for a Caesar to exist. On this view, “social forces” (what they used to call “the relations of the means of production”) tore the Roman Republic apart; the Empire was its inevitable next stage. Assign whatever name you like to the Imperator — whether Caesar, Marius, Sulla, or Miles Gloriosus, he’s just the temporary face of the vast, impersonal social forces that control our fate. None of this “History is just the biographies of great men” for them!

The eggheads have a point, though, albeit not the one they think they’re making. The Roman elite’s social system was designed to produce a certain type of man. Whether Gaius Julius Caesar was personally the embodiment of that system, or a perversion of it, is irrelevant — the system was designed to produce men like Caesar, fellows with a very particular set of skills. Eggheads have never seen one, but anyone who has kicked around the world outside the ivory tower for a bit has met that type of guy. The skills themselves are fairly common, at least in embryo. Whether a potential Caesar becomes actual might well be merely a question of opportunity and scale.

A terrifying notion, that, when you look around the modern West. The one characteristic all effective elites have in common is the self-knowledge that they are the elite. The British, for instance, thought nothing of sending some 19 year old kid, whose slim formal education was mostly Latin and Greek, off to govern the Punjab. It worked, largely because that kid, whatever his defects of intellect and ability, had character, of the kind you just don’t get without a pedigree stretching back to Hastings.

Again, if you’ve ever met one of the horsey set you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the most accessible American equivalents are the sons and grandsons of career army officers. Think of Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, as played by Gary Sinise in the movie. That kind of guy always completes the mission, or dies trying, because it’s simply unthinkable that he won’t. After five generations, West Point is in his DNA…

May 15, 2019

“Our” intellectuals and how they got that way

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Over at Rotten Chestnuts, Severian says we should blame the eggheads:

Because its goals were impossible, The Revolution didn’t go as planned. For every two self-deluded fools who thought the Soviet Union was a new civilization, there were five who knew exactly what the Communists were about. Bomb-throwing anarchists had terrorized European cities for years before 1917, and Red atrocities during the Civil War were no secret. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look, then, that horrors like the White Sea Canal were features, not bugs, of Communism.

If you’ve read your Festinger, you know what happened next. The True Believers searched frantically for any “explanation” that wouldn’t invalidate their precious Marxism, and Antonio Gramsci gave it to them. Though he didn’t coin the term “false consciousness” (Georgy Lukacs did), Gramsci weaponized it. The reason the Bolsheviks are forced to do all that awful stuff — which we don’t admit they actually did! — is that The People lack the proper revolutionary consciousness. They still believe in stuff like “God,” “free speech,” “not getting starved to death while the Party fatcats drive around in limos,” etc.

And where do they get this “false consciousness,” comrades? Why, it’s the same place the Western proles get theirs, which is also why the Western proles haven’t joined The Revolution (yet!), in fulfillment of the scriptures. Gramsci called the false consciousness installation process “hegemony.” There are a zillion unread academic tomes covering all the nuances, but the basic idea is simple enough: The ruling class controls the institutions; the institutions transmit culture; therefore, the culture takes ruling class values for granted.*

The solution, therefore, is as simple as the diagnosis: Capture the institutions, change the culture.

I trust y’all see where this is going. The best conspiracy theories are the ones that are actually true, and this one is. You want a grand conspiracy to destroy Western Civ? Here it is, laid out as openly as Marxist prose can express it, in excruciating detail. If anything, I’m being unfair to Antonio Gramsci. He put it all together in true kommissar style, but these ideas were everywhere on the Left in the early 20th century. In America, for instance, Progressives like John Dewey had been maneuvering to get control of elementary schools since the late 19th century. Progressives just looooove putting their hands on children. Have you noticed?

Every single insane, culture-destroying, gulag-enabling idea the Left has had in the last 200 years, starting with Karl Marx’s sub-Hegelian flatulence itself, can be traced directly back to some fucking egghead. I’ll repeat that: DIRECTLY. You can find their works, and quote them, because this stuff is in every syllabus of every Humanities class of every college in the Western world. The prose is opaque as only PoMo prose can be, but the main ideas are easy enough to decipher….

…I wrote “ideas,” but there’s really only one “idea.” Since The Revolution obviously ain’t gonna happen — it seems even Leftists can acknowledge one tiny aspect of reality, if you give ’em twelve decades and 100 million bodies — the Left’s entire program, top to bottom, stem to stern, is shit-flinging nihilism. Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go — not because it’s Western, but because it’s Civilization.

May 7, 2019

QotD: Competitive Wokeness

Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I love competitive #Wokeness.

No, seriously — it’s high time you people out in the real world got to experience one of the defining joys of life in the ivory tower. In the ivy-covered halls of academe, the Marxist Postcolonialist Feminsts have longstanding beef with the Postcolonialist Feminist Marxists. They’d each happily feed the other into a wood chipper, even though to outsiders it would look like the pot executing the kettle for counterrevolutionary crimes. If you’re the sort who takes schadenfreudy delight in very obvious folly, university life is hilarious.

It’s even funnier if you take these buffoons at their word. Compared to the pronouncements of your average Angry Studies professor, Pol Pot was a sane and balanced man. In reality, of course, university people are so soft and coddled, they make the Eloi look like the Sons of Anarchy. Spending so much time around college folk is one of the main reasons for my mantra: “Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.” They talk a fearsome game, these campus Ches, but they cry if the cafeteria is out of free trade sustainably sourced indigenous grown gluten free soy milk. When the zeitgeist shifts, they’ll be the first to knuckle under.

Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.

March 14, 2019

Life in the modern academic paradise

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:

Imagine you’re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it’s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?

Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.

That’s life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is “fusion,” you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture — from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe — does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can’t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It’s intersectional genderfluid heaven….

…. and every single person in it is miserable. I’m serious — if it’s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two — they’re too young and dumb to know better; they’ll be fully reeducated by junior year — but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which — since, again, they control everything — means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.

How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. It’s one hell of a show…

February 1, 2019

Severian explains why he quit teaching

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spoiler: it wasn’t fun anymore. As to why it wasn’t fun, it was (say it together with me) the youth of today:

It’s not that kids today are mal-educated, woefully ignorant, and wouldn’t know serious academic work if it bit them on the ass. Those are all true, of course, but that’s the way it has always been — I have no doubt Plato said the same thing about Aristotle (and Socrates no doubt said it about Plato). In my experience, the rueful phrase “back when I was in college” first escapes your lips approximately 36 hours into graduate school.

It’s not the quantity of ignorance, then, but the quality. Generation Snowflake really are New Soviet Men. If you’ve read about life under Stalin, especially, you’ll know what I’m talking about — at once invincibly self-righteous and cringingly subservient, modern students come across like junior volunteer commissars. If they don’t already know it, it’s by definition not worth knowing… and you’re an asshole — to be avoided, undermined, ignored, or (very, very grudgingly) tolerated, as the situation dictates — for trying to make them “learn” something new.

They’re not sociopaths, exactly, but that’s close enough to what they are that we’ll go with it. For instance: They have no problem asking you to move due dates, even for big things like midterm exams, if it inconveniences them. And just them — the rest of the class should still have to take the exam on Friday; it’s just that she, Suzy Snowflake, has a big sorority function that weekend that she really needs to prepare for, so she should be allowed to take it Monday. Nor do they have a problem with lying on spec, just to see if you’ll bite. Tell Suzy no, she still has to take the exam on Friday like everyone else, and there’s a decent chance you’ll be getting a “dead Grandma” email from her over the weekend — my Grandma died suddenly this Friday, I had to go home for the funeral, I’m so broken up, I’m free to take the makeup exam on Monday.

No, I’m not joking, and yes, you can check Suzy Snowflake’s social media and find pictures of her downing shots at the big sorority do Saturday night. And yes, she knows those pictures are out there; Generation Snowflake regards the concept of “online privacy” like your cat thinks about calculus. It’s just that hey, maybe you won’t check. Worth a shot, right? If anyone should be upset it’s her, for making her feel bad by doubting her story. She’ll saunter into class on Monday like nothing happened…. because to her, nothing did. She threw a Hail Mary, it got intercepted, oh well, what’s new in the Netflix queue?

Faced with that, any attempt at education is like King Canute ordering back the tides. It’s excruciatingly pointless, and that’s why I quit. Life’s too short to spend raging against the inevitable.

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