European liberalism has been hollowed out – driven to abandon its core principles not only by its idiotic embrace of the Covid response, but also by much recent history. In thrall to their universal ideology of human rights, liberal politicians have welcomed hordes from the global south to our countries. The foreseeable consequences of their idiocy here have forced them to take a hard line, occasionally against the more unruly of our guests and more frequently against nativist opponents of mass migration. Liberalism, in short, just became too inconvenient for this brave new liberal political project. Then there is the fact that liberalism is above all an ideology of prosperity, and our wealth is slowly slipping away from us. As establishment parties lose support, they find still further reasons to abandon their ideological principles. Now as never before they must muzzle their opponents and keep their parties out of power, all to protect the European liberalism they claim to represent, and and also their own deeply liberal feelings.
The growing unpopularity and distance (from regular citizens and their troubles and sympathies) of the European political establishment has imbued their systems with a rigidity and an illiberal turn… which are all self-excused by references to the ‘Far Right’. In effect, opinions and policy which are moderate and broadly popular (small businesses shouldn’t be crushed by regulation, economies shouldn’t be destroyed by emissions standards, law and order concerns should inform immigration policy) have now been designated as extreme and unacceptable by the power structure. Repression is resulting.
Liberal democracy requires open competition and communication among interests. We’ve never seen a fully repressive society which uses the language of progressivism and liberalism… but if the current trends continue we soon shall, in Ireland and the U.K. And in Germany.
Here on the periphery of the empire, life carries on largely unmolested. There is a certain pressure that is absent, you slowly realize. Daily existence doesn’t feel invested with high-stakes political drama, as it is in the US and in the Western parts of Europe. We’ve seen no walking billboards of Identity, no multinational corporations hoisting the rainbow standard over the metropolitan centers, no skulking knots of young men from former colonies who seem to be unoccupied, and perhaps too attentive to one’s walking by. There are many visitors here in the Balkans, but to judge from appearances and overheard snippets of language, they are almost entirely European tourists.
Female sex based rights are everyone’s rights, without them everyone suffers terribly, as my sisters can attest to and as our mother’s story demonstrates. Motherhood is only and always female. This is a fundamental truth of humanity that must NEVER be erased. Look at every society where women have no rights and are abused and denigrated and disrespected fanatically and liberally and ragingly and compulsively by men. Those societies are fraught with hardship and misery and poverty and destruction. Because women are the spirit of life and connection and when you destroy us you destroy that spirit of vitality in society.
Aug. 25th, 2024
[T]he pursuit of hedonism is fundamentally destructive, tearing our country apart by eroding norms like patriotism and (reasonable) selflessness that once unified us. In contrast, the constrained individualism envisioned by the Founding Fathers is not only part and parcel of American life, it’s an essential part of what made America great.
The “self-domestication hypothesis” is the idea that in the ancestral environment, early human communities collectively killed individuals prone to certain forms of aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and monopolizing food and sexual partners.
Over time, our ancestors eliminated humans—typically males—who were exceedingly aggressive toward members of their own group.
If there was a troublemaker, then other less domineering males conspired to organize and commit collective murder against them.
Women too were involved in such decisions involving capital punishment, but men typically carried out the killing.
Humans tamed one another by taking out particularly aggressive individuals. This led us to become relatively peaceful apes.
But if humans are “self-domesticated,” then why are there so many violent people among us today?
The fact is, humans are not nearly as violent as our nearest evolutionary relatives.
Comparing the level of within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees with human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers.
We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder. And tear overly dominant males to shreds.
Many people are familiar with the findings that bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees.
This is true.
Male bonobos are about half as aggressive as male chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.
Bonobos are “peaceful,” relative to chimps. But bonobos are extremely aggressive compared to humans.
I’ve heard about social workers, all of whom were childless young women, lecturing mothers on why enforcing rules and having expectations of children is bad for their morale. “It makes them feel bad.”
Even, from the same childless young social workers, of someone’s beloved son, “Sometimes you just have to accept that your child will be dependent on the state.”
A mother who wanted nothing more than to be away from the handouts, to give her child what his first family had not been able to, to do so both with love and with rules, was told to give up such goals. Best to let the state handle this. The state knows best.
Confidence is a kind of tell in this context. Confidence often reveals total ignorance.
I’ve heard people say that having children is bad for the planet, or will get in the way of their having the careers they want, or just doesn’t suit their lifestyle. They are certain that they do not want children.
And I’ve seen some of those people completely change their minds, their partners baffled and hurt, their trust breached. The thing is, it shouldn’t be surprising that people change their minds on this subject. Especially women.
As a society, we’ve become fanatical in our pursuit of never having a sad or unpleasant moment. Do make sure that everything is comfortable and easy and causes you no concern. What we forget in our quest for comfort and ease, with nothing else to strive for, is that comfort and ease quickly become dull, banal and generic. They are inherently uninspiring. The people who have successfully created a life for themselves that is only comfortable and easy—as opposed to one that pursues engaging comforts in between challenging work—become grim and grey. They are the blank-eyed drones, easily coerced and easily convinced, so long as their comfort and ease do not go away.
Aug. 29th, 2024
Freddie DeBoer:
I think modern disability politics are, speaking broadly, about as unhealthy and misguided as any non-crazy/non-fascist political tendency can be, and I say so often. Because of this, I’m sometimes accused of having insufficient sympathy for people who suffer from particular disorders. Specifically, I’ve been told on multiple occasions that I don’t have the requisite respect for the difficulties faced by people with ADHD. But this is precisely the category error that I’ve tried to critique: ADHD, the neurodevelopmental disorder, is a vexing condition that deserves our compassion and, more importantly, treatment. The bizarre all-encompassing identity of I-Am-ADHD that a lot of too-online people have crafted, in contrast, is toxic and destructive, and I mock it because it deserves mockery. And in general, some people are guilty of exploiting the special sensitivity we apply to medical issues, using that sensitivity as leverage to self-define, climb the social ladder, and gain subtle power over others. I find that quite offensive, and I will happily say so to people’s faces, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with caring for those who are struggling with ADHD.
“I have ADHD and it causes great difficulty in concentrating and staying on task, in a way that has presented serious challenges in my life” is a statement that prompts immediate compassion for me. “ADHD people are deeper and more creative and more unique and also you can’t criticize me about anything ever because I have this” - which is genuinely not much of an exaggeration in some of these discursive spaces - is an attitude that adults should feel free to dismiss as laughable and self-interested.
This, of course, can be equally applied to DID, bipolar disorder, disabilities, etc. etc. Ironically enough, the mental disorders that actually cause much of society’s disordered and bad behavior (borderline/histrionic personality disorder, narcissism) are rarely mentioned as excuses for bad behavior or distorted thoughts. Why? Simple-these personality disorders do not earn the sufferer the same level of sympathy (status).
The global economy is having the worst case of the Mondays that some of us have ever witnessed. Countless portfolios are rapidly becoming “unburdened by what has been.”
, pulling from Reddit to borrow a gender change testimonial:
Before I started transitioning I was content with my life. Not really happy or sad, just sedated. Almost blissfully unaware of the body horror of gender dysphoria that was so deeply repressed.
Initially I thought I was one of those people who had no issues with my body, and was purely motivated by the gender euphoria of being a woman. After getting my hands on estrogen starting my transition I'm realizing that's definitely not the case. I've had some of my highest highest [highs], but also some of my lowest lows in the past three months.
I've been spending an increasing amount of time mourning the version of me that never got to exist. Maybe in another life, she started transitioning before male puberty and could live a happy life. I feel like it's a never ending treadmill and no matter how much progress I make, I'm never going to escape the pain of not having been born a cis girl.
Six months ago, his Reddit posts were all about audio engineering. Four months ago, he started experimenting with gender instead. He went from being “content” with his life and having “no issues” with his body to contemplating suicide because of the body he’ll never have. He’s just 26 years old.
These kinds of personal accounts are harrowing… and important. This is ultimately the face and fruits of gender ideology. This life, and millions like it.
Universities have become a kind of halfway house for the most neurotic and conformist members of the educated class. People who care about truth and are passionate about their work would be outraged by DEI and IRB requirements and less likely to stand for them. If you go into academia, however, because you want the status of being a professor so it can make you feel like an intellectual who is more enlightened than other people, then the more paperwork the better.
You would think people who try to become professors are those most interested in ideas. My experience is, if anything, the opposite. They’re the kind of people who like the idea of thinking about themselves as people interested in ideas, but actually lack genuine curiosity about the world. If they did have curiosity about the world, they would go participate in it, where they’d have real experiences, find out how it works…there are exceptions, but the majority of academics have little to nothing important to say because they’re playing a status game, not a truth game.
Aug. 30th, 2024
Hadley Freeman writes in The Free Press about her elite education: rote, inflexible, and endlessly status-seeking:
I’d been working in features journalism for 12 years at this point. I’d learned how to fake sassiness, and I could even fake having an opinion sometimes. But all I was actually doing was copying the opinions of others around me and putting a funny little spin on them, because I realized readers like funny little spins, and I lived to please. Or to put it another way, I just wanted to get good grades. So when I wrote an article, I didn’t think, Is this a fair representation of how I see things? I thought, Is this what people want me to write? Because that’s how I’d been taught to think…
I suspect that this kind of thinking/writing/behaving explains a fair amount about the state of legacy media journalism (i.e., Twitter) in our country today.
The most dangerous and corrosive people usually prove to be the ones brimming with certainty and self-righteousness.
We have a binary political system, but political attitudes and opinions aren’t binary.
You can oppose Trump and still recognize that Harris is a weak and vacillating candidate, with some policy failures and an unimpressive degree of democratic legitimacy.
You can acknowledge that she is far less personally popular than Clinton, Obama, Biden. You can admit that she is (now) a vacuous public speaker.
Ironically, if you admit these things you will be more convincing-for arguing them appears dishonest, or delusional.
The partisan quality of our media is never more blatant than with crime stories: coordinated immigrant gang violence against police is completely ignored, trans school shooters are mostly suppressed, urban murder rates are never discussed. Imagine if white supremacists were committing any of these crimes! That’s the difference between news and narrative value.
"Autism" is now a meaningless word. It means nothing and everything. When a person uses this word, I have literally no idea what they're talking about.
And you don't either. You can't know. Because it's become a label for:
-Actual autism (but only rarely)
-Being shy
-Being sensitive to intense stimulation
-Borderline Personality Disorder
-Narcissistic Personality Disorder
-complex PTSD
-Being naturally fidgety
-Being intellectually slow
-Being an indulged child who only eats chicken tendies
Freddie DeBoer:
This is, to me, a Rosetta Stone for early 21st-century liberal politics, an impossibly perfect symbolic object. A bunch of young idealistic Millennials who tweeted all day about intersectionality and dismantling patriarchy worked for an organization that thought nothing of exploiting its internal culture of immense professional pressure to compel vulnerable interns to drink piss.
The idea that functional communities or healthy individuals or happy lives can be generated through government hand-outs is demonstrably wrong.
The BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) provides Native communities with food, free housing, excellent schools, college scholarships, local and socially supported policing… and these communities are the most miserable in the US.
Adult addiction often approaches 80%. Domestic violence is rampant. Just visit these places! The despair is palpable. It’s the ruination of a once-thriving culture. Does anyone believe more or better government spending is the answer? There are simply many social pathologies which federal spending cannot solve.
The BBC has breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, a new study has found. The report concluded that the BBC had “repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism,” and its authors reserve the harshest criticism for the BBC’s Arabic channel. One contributor, Mayssaa Abdul Khalek, is said to have called for “death to Israel” and defended a journalist who tweeted “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.” One former BBC executive said there was now an “institutional crisis” at the UK’s state-funded broadcaster.
A doctor is no better than a non-doctor, and in our culture is often worse, in answering questions like “Is it morally right to do X?”
It does not make the doctor wiser or more moral if he can answer, with perfect certainty for every X and every Y, “If I do X to this body, what happens to Y?”
And, even if the ability to answer these questions did make one moral, many cannot answer many of these queries. Others do answer, but their answers are wrong, or insane.
Yet we, as a culture, have most unwisely ceded to doctors moral authority on many of these questions, grateful, perhaps, that we don’t have to wrestle with the ethics and morality of certain difficult situations.
We did this because of scientism. This is the fallacy that those who claim to know how things work get to say what should be done with these things, and under what circumstances. This is like letting your mechanic decide you must install hydraulic lifters on your car, and be barred from driving it to Church. Or it’s like an HVAC technician being empowered to go house to house and convert furnaces he does not like to look of to blow only cold air.
Or it’s like letting a doctor decide a girl is really a boy, seizing the girl from her parents, and drugging her against her parents’ wishes.
