I recently took a break from writing to look for a job and stabilize my psychological condition. The body can feel weak, achy, inflamed, fatigued when marshalling resources to fight a contagion or infection. I think that sometimes the mind creates its own symptoms, in reaction to some stressor or aggravation or as an impetus to change directions or move forward. The three most useful things I learned in therapy were:
Everyone has a point of view. Everyone feels justified. Everyone has their own slights and hurts and reasons. Empathy can allow you to connect with ANYONE (whether or not that’s advisable is another thing altogether).
Pay attention to the way people speak, as well as what they say. Words can be signals, jabs, hints, expressions, pleas, armor, warnings. There are the words we use and our tone and carriage… and then there’s our intent in speaking. Mentally ill people often do not understand their own intent. They can be cruel and manipulative and selfish without (fully) understanding their own aims. This is called a lack of insight, and it is a common feature of human psychology,
Pay attention to the feelings in your body and the thoughts/emotions in your mind. The ‘conscious mind’ is a tiny passenger, sitting atop a vast, lumbering creature over which it has little control and which it rarely understands. Just as a heart or a liver can produce sensations which may indicate changes or problems, so will a brain (mind). We all have fluctuations in mood/perspective/optimism/self-regard… but if you have found yourself anxious or despondent or anhedonic for weeks or more and movement and sunshine and socialization don’t seem to be helping it may be a good idea to consider your life and your dreams and your thoughts. During such periods I find it helpful to cease my political (and even philosophical) writings, and to disengage from social media and YouTube.
I recently took a drive up to Okeechobee, for no particular reason. ‘Small Town America’ will soon be a trope, and a milieu, and a fictional meme set, even more than it already is… much like the (make believe) worlds of the Samurai or 18th Century English gentry or ‘Cowboys’ are for us, now.
I miss it already, and I’ve barely known it, and it’s not even gone!
But… none of that has anything to do with the main aim of this post (lol). The ‘news cycle’ moves so fast in our age of consumerist hyper-reality that it can almost give one motion sickness, and there was a glut of Substack Notes from about 2 months ago (selected by me) that remained unposted here. Most of these Notes are probably not narrowly time-constrained (a lot of my commentary and the things I read are very general) but I thought it might be interesting to post them anyway. Substack Notes: Time Capsule… I like it.
I might also do a ‘Notes’ recap of the year’s happenings closer to December.
Enough from me-enjoy.
June 4, 2024:
:The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.
Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.
Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.
The ultimate intended outcome is that the afflicted willingly embrace self-destructive behaviors and ideas. Thus, all moral constraints can be eschewed in the pursuit of “just” and “virtuous” causes.
Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.
For a time, many refused to believe that anything was actually wrong. The tide of populism was, they insisted, a momentary manifestation of frustration. The decline of each of our institutions was viewed in isolation, as a problem of poorly selected leadership, which could be corrected after the next election or with a changing of the guard. The sense of hopelessness that people felt was explained away as the temporary consequence of the rapid transition away from industrialism and the ushering in of the digital age.
In this light, though there were problems, they were distinct from each other and would be corrected in time.
Can any serious person believe this now?
June 11, 2024:
June 11, 2024:
June 11, 2024:
writing about the dramatic results of European elections (in Germany):Above all it is the youngest voters who are leaving the Greens. Among those 24 years old and younger, 34% voted either for the CDU or the AfD. This is a stinging rebuke for a party that has presented itself as a youth movement and as the way of the future. The problem is both that climate politics are losing their salience for much of the electorate, and that the Greens have terrified everybody:
The decisive factor for the Greens … is that their issue of climate protection has not attracted voters, but rather deterred them. Since Economics Minister Habeck’s Heating Ordinances, the mood has increasingly turned against climate protection and more and more against the Greens.
“We have overestimated the willingness to change,” Green veteran politician Jürgen Trittin said …
The problem for the party is that it cannot hope that anything will change here… One way forward might be to distance themselves from climate issues, and rather to emphasise that they will not leave people to fend for themselves when it comes to climate change … and to ensure social balance. “We have to tell the story differently,” a leading Green politician says.
When the party leaders .. appeared before the press … on Monday afternoon, it seemed as if they wanted to put this realisation into practice straight away. They spoke of “security” again and again. This kind of talk is otherwise familiar only from the CDU …
June 12, 2024:
For Democrats campaigning on Trump’s threat to democracy, the contrast couldn’t be clearer. Trump loses in court and attacks the system. Hunter loses in court and his dad says he will respect the process.
But the case is not that simple. To start, Hunter Biden, faced with the charge of lying on an application for a gun permit about his drug use, almost got away with an absurdly cushy plea deal. Nearly a year ago, Judge Maryellen Noreika peppered Hunter’s lawyers and prosecutors with questions that unraveled a plea agreement where the president’s son would admit only to a misdemeanor. The public and the judge learned that Hunter’s lawyers believed the agreement would shield him from any future prosecutions from the Justice Department at all.
June 12, 2024:
: “There can rarely have been a story more starkly at odds with easily discoverable fact than the imaginary plight of large numbers of black men in the 21st century USA living in fear of violence and oppression at the hands of their white fellow Americans. Any fair-minded narration of events of the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd whilst being arrested by a Minneapolis police officer, would have been a very different telling than the one that gushed hysterically from the Western world’s mainstream media.”
“If [Progressives] could just stop making things worse it would be an enormously greater contribution than they’re likely to make any other way.”
-Thomas Sowell
June 13, 2024
The new Star Wars show The Acolyte is almost universally (among the critics I respect) regarded as a mess: a shallow, unstructured, boring meander, bracketed by the usual tropes of angry and incontinent badass female characters and silly moral ambiguities masquerading as profundity and episode plots laden with plot contrivances and lazy characterization…
The critics on Rotten Tomatoes loved it of course.
June 13, 2024:
Interesting factoids from :
(>) The general public believes that the average profit margin made by American corporations is 46.7%, while the actual average is just 3%. (source). Research broadly suggests that humans have an inbuilt anti-capitalist tendency. People tend to think of market exchanges as a type of scam where the seller benefits at the expense of the buyer. My guess is that sex is an exception to this pattern. Put differently, people intuitively seem to believe that buyer (of sex) is benefiting at the expense of the seller. Perhaps because in this domain, buyers tend to be male, and sellers female.
(>) Although the majority of U.S. voters oppose it, 89% of Ivy League graduates are in favor of strict rationing of meat, electricity, and gas to fight climate change.
June 14, 2024:
:
This week we have: Biden stiff, his limbs locked, and his face looking confused, for a painfully extended period of time while everyone around him dances and claps at a Juneteenth celebration. He looked like he’d stumbled out of a nursing home but into a nice background while Doug Emhoff stood by, all “I should be in a hot tub in Malibu right now.”
We also have Biden rambling a bunch of nonsensical syllables in a speech and seeming to not notice. We have him with the G7 leaders to watch a demonstration but wandering away, looking confused, alarming the other Gs, until the Italian prime minister pulls him back into the group. Four more years! Four more years!
June 17, 2024:
:Conscripts are sullen at the best of times. These are not the best of times. The current social reality is that the young men who would make the best soldiers – already fit, motivated, and self-controlled – are precisely the cohort that most loathes the regime, for the regime has for their entire lives taken every opportunity to tell them how much it loathes them. Forcing them to fight on its behalf is not going to endear it to them. Putting weapons in the hands of people who despise you and then teaching them to use those weapons at a professional level might be... not the best idea.
June 19, 2024: