Substack Notes, Vol. 10.2
Substack Notes, Vol. 10.2
Sep. 4th - Sep. 25th, 2024
As I finish my essay ‘The Dying Dream of DEI’ and my micro-story, ‘The Gift’ I probably won’t post anything for a few days. Here are some accumulated notes which grabbed my interest, from weeks ago:
( has the best meme compilations I’ve ever seen… )
Sep. 4th, 2024
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There’s a kind of sanctimonious dismay on display in Germany, after the AfD won a resounding comparative victory in state elections. This is a familiar response in Europe at this point: we’ve seen in in France, and Austria, and Italy, and Poland, and…
There’s always this advertised sense of schoolmarmish disapproval - “we’re not mad… we’re just disappointed.” NEVER have I heard one of the politicians or media personalities or NGO creatures take the most direct route, and ask: “what is the nature of our blindness and what is the depth of our policy bankruptcies, which have driven millions of people to a party (despite our media-government oligarchy) which we have constantly stigmatized?”
Maybe it’s not the voters. Maybe it’s YOU.
Illiberal nationalism, or fascism, met a spectacularly violent end in 1945. Communism persisted longer before finally succumbing to its own collapse in 1989. Liberal democracy is all that is left, and the big questions are whether it is also doomed to fail and what its collapse might look like. Pondering discussions surrounding the German budget for 2025 has given me a dark suspicion of what the answers to these questions might be. I suspect that liberal democracy will not so much collapse, as it will become mired in its own myopic imprudence, more and more bound by its unrelenting tendency to mortgage the future for small gains in the present, until all accounts are empty and there are only debts to pay and nothing left to borrow.
Sep. 4th, 2024
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The historical status quo in the United States was effective and eminently practical. Men who did things ran the nation: businessmen, soldiers… Politicians navigated a course between these people and the public, but their power was constrained and their rule regarded with suspicion. The thinkers (the utopians, academics, bohemians, writers, clerks) were situated far from power.
The smarter and more ambitious thinkers resented this greatly. They imagined that they could sculpt a Utopia if only given access to the levers of power.
Their resentment came to a boil in the 1960’s, fed by social divisions and violent fantasies and an almost complete lack of traditional responsibility many of the thinkers reconceptualized their raison d’etre as agents of dissolution of the old order.
The dream of the Left became: to upend the old status quo, and establish a new one, with the thinkers in charge and no patience given or toleration allowed for doubters or skeptics or ‘counter-revolutionaries’.
Those thinkers still long for the levers of power. In some cases they’re now beginning to gain some handholds. They’ve made a kind of mutual assistance pact with the lawyers and the bankers and most of the politicians.
That is the struggle of our age. Who will grasp the levers?
In my city, teenagers stealing cars just hit another car and killed an older man. The 13 year old driving had more than 13 prior counts of theft.
I read Gulag Archipelago, and the most awful chapter in all three volumes was called “The Kids,” about the Soviet children growing up completely without morals who would travel in packs and beat up anyone they could to take their stuff, rape teachers on field trips, steal anything.
When the Nazis occupied the city, and had consequences for crimes, those kids followed laws and worked quietly in factories for two years, then the Nazis left and it went back to the same lawless chaos.
In the Soviet Union, not punishing street criminals was a way to punish political criminals. In and out of gulag, the government didn't have to threaten you and take your property, they encouraged a criminal class by not punishing them or punishing them only very lightly and just let the criminals threaten and punish others. It was a help to the government’s plans.
Sep. 5th, 2024
:[M]ovements designated as populist are not simply hostile to the policies of their opponents but also to the cultural values of the elites. It is this direct challenge to values represented as mandatory by the dominant institutions of society that anti-populist commentators find so hard to accept. As the political theorist Margaret Canovan pointed out, unlike other social movements, populism does not merely challenge the holder of power but also ‘elite values’. So, its hostility is also directed at ‘opinion-formers and the media’.
In effect the values espoused by populist movements offer an alternative to the political culture of the elites. It just so happens that of the values of populism resonate with many people in society.
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Why is Thomas Sowell not a household name?
He’s a black professor.
He’s one of the greatest living intellectuals in the Anglosphere.
The BBC and the Guardian should be all over him, with weekly fluff-pieces.
Why aren’t they?
Simple. He’s a conservative.
They can’t hope to beat him in an argument.
They don’t want to be seen attacking a black man.
So they just ignore him, and hope that no-one notices.
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It pains me to say so but this kind of policy-free and almost entirely vibes based campaigning is what aggressively feminine-coded politics looks like…
Sep. 10th, 2024
"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer”
-Hannah Arendt
Sep. 11th, 2024
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Mos Maiorum
The Mos Maiorum, or "custom of the ancestors," was a fundamental set of traditional values and social norms that guided Roman life. It represented the unwritten code of conduct inherited from the ancestors, emphasizing virtues such as duty, loyalty, discipline, and respect for authority. The mos maiorum was integral to maintaining the stability and continuity of Roman society, serving as a moral compass for both public and private life.
At its core, the mos maiorum encompassed a range of virtues. Pietas (piety) was one of the key virtues, emphasizing duty towards the gods, the state, and one's family. Fides (faithfulness) and gravitas (seriousness) underscored the importance of integrity, reliability, and dignity. The mos maiorum also stressed auctoritas (authority) and dignitas (dignity), reflecting the social hierarchy and the respect accorded to those in positions of power and influence. These values were taught from a young age and were expected to be upheld throughout one's life. The mos maiorum had a profound influence on Roman politics, law, and family life. It shaped the conduct of public officials and the operation of the government, promoting a sense of duty and responsibility towards the Republic. In the legal sphere, it reinforced the principles of justice and equity, ensuring that the laws reflected the traditional values of the community. Within the family, the mos maiorum guided relationships and responsibilities, with the paterfamilias embodying these values and passing them down to future generations. This adherence to tradition and ancestral customs was seen as vital to the preservation of Roman identity and societal cohesion.
Sep. 13th, 2024
:During the Summer of 2020, when madness was allowed to run wild in many American cities, and achieved fever pitch in Portland, many storefronts erected what I dubbed “don’t hurt me” walls. In an often fruitless effort to be spared the vandalism that erupted every night in some parts of the city, store owners would publicize their fealty to the cause. Black Lives Matter posters were nearly ubiquitous. More niche messaging included “amplify melanated voices” and “defund + demilitarize + dismantle police.”4
In his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel wrote of a fictional greengrocer who posts a flyer in his window that reads “Workers of the world, unite!”. Havel asks—"why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?” Havel answers:
“I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
Pride Northwest has effectively compelled a large fraction of the companies that do business in the city to ante up if they hope to be left in peace. Pride Northwest has turned the businesses of Portland into Havel’s hapless green grocer. They have created a Don’t Hurt Me parade.
Sep. 13th, 2024
It’s just incredible to watch it play out in real time, the Democratic party totally abandoning even the fig leaf of democracy in how their party chooses nominees. Not even pretending, anymore.
-Freddie DeBoer
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“They” spied on [Trump’s] campaign, sabotaged his policies, demonized his supporters, invented hoaxes to impeach him, then prosecuted him four times on flimsy or fake grounds, and yet he still stands. As many speakers at the convention said, “they” also tried to kill him. When he was president, the economy boomed, the world was at peace, crime was the lowest in the history of the world, wages high … until “they” stole the election from him and instantly turned America into Venezuela.
The truth, of course, is immensely different, but there are enough shreds of verity in Trump’s skewed version of events for the narrative to seduce. If you largely believe it, as a plurality of Americans seem to, you will vote in unheard-of numbers this November, in what might be the most multi-racial, working-class coalition the modern GOP has ever assembled. And this “enemy of democracy” will actually be shown to be its unifying salvation.
That there are so many of us who feel queasy at the thought of getting low-level proles fired from their jobs for sounding off online is a very good thing. It speaks to the fact that, unlike the enemy, we actually have a moral centre. Notably, this was never a serious debate on the left. Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now.
Over the [subsequent] decade… we have seen people get cancelled for refusing to use the right pronouns, for refusing to genuflect before the rainbow, for wearing red hats in public, for donating to the wrong political causes, for getting into arguments with black people, for being related to someone who used a racial slur, for voicing words in Chinese that sound like racial slurs, and on and on without rhyme, reason, or limiting principle.
The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity.
This is not merely an Internet phenomenon, with consequences limited to those who draw the terrible gaze of the beast with a million eyes. You have almost certainly felt this in your personal life, the subtle, steady pressure to bite your tongue in every social and professional situation, the knowledge that if you say too much, if you cross one of the myriad invisible, ever-shifting red lines in the left’s mutable cat’s cradle of taboos, you risk total social and professional death.
Sep. 25th, 2024
:I’m going to make a statement that is both trivially and highly controversial — there are enemies of progress.
There are people who if they had not existed in the past would result in a vastly more competent, more advanced, and more healthy society today. It includes zealots who arrested and censored Galileo for daring to suggest that the earth revolves around the Sun. It involves those who protested nuclear energy and resulted in the establishment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an agency that has unilaterally banned new nuclear power plants for 50 years. It includes those who cut off access to life-saving drugs for bureaucratic compliance, leading to the “invisible graveyard”. They are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.