Substack Notes 12.2
Dec. 21st, 2024 - Jan. 15th, 2025
You can add the fires in Los Angeles to the Grooming Gang Scandal, and the 2024 presidential election, and Joe Biden’s electoral fitness, which themselves were added to COVID public health measures, and the efficacy of vaccines, and impact of bail reform, and the serial crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, etc., ad nauseum, to the list of institutional and journalistic failures during the past decade.
Everyone understands the value of independent thinking and moral courage and challenging preconceptions in the abstract but when it’s indicated, by circumstances, that these might be useful exercises most people: believe what they’re told, hide from accountability, and huddle with the crowd.
Ideology and cowardice are the afflictions of our era. Anyone who doesn’t have a worldview that accounts for these two factors is someone who’s lost in modernity, in my opinion.
Dec. 21st, 2024
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Yesterday, a Saudi-born man named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen rented a black BMW sport utility vehicle and drove it into a crowd at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five people and injuring 200. It is the second such attack in German history, following the 2016 Berlin truck attack by the unsuccessful Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, exactly eight years and one day prior.
…
Al-Abdulmohsen is a 50 year-old psychiatrist and psychotherapist who lived in Bernburg, 46km south of Magdeburg. He first came to Germany from Saudi Arabia in March 2006, when he was granted political asylum. German authorities repeatedly refused Saudi Arabian requests that he be extradited. The Saudis accused him of terrorism and human trafficking, for alleged complicity with efforts to smuggle Arab girls to the European Union. Al-Abdulmohsen finally obtained refugee status and permanent residence in Germany in July 2016, and for years he has worked at a government clinic in Bernburg, where he has treated patients for problems with addiction.
Isn’t it sad that these people receive so few resources from the state and feel so culturally disrespected that they feel the need to do these things? If Germany was just a bit more generous or tolerant these events probably wouldn’t happen.
I don’t know what the killer’s motivations were. He posted some stuff online but I’m just going to speculate and assign motivations to him, which is what one does in these situations. I imagine that he was just so broken up about carbon emissions or disproportionately low levels of female executives in German companies. He was fairly famous and vocal and has even been interviewed by major German newspapers… yet still he felt unheard.
Tragic.
Dec. 15th, 2024
:Back in the 90s when I was doing my MA, my tutor, an esteemed professor with links to some top-level writers, told me that my writing was “too masculine.” To mitigate this, she’d decided I should enrol on a module titled “The Myths of Masculinity” normally a woman-only module, but for which she’d got me special dispensation to attend.
I duly turned up for this class with my notebook and pen, and listened attentively while the lecturer intoned about the myths of masculinity and other associated calumnies of the patriarchy.
I have to note at this point that apart from the woman-only class, the lecturer was an openly gay man.
Every lecture consisted of the lecturer haranguing the class abut the evils of straight men and masculinity in general, and, at some point, various class-members would turn around and glare at me. Early on, I did try to take part, and I would raise my hand to ask questions, but it was like I did not exist, the lecturer would scan the class, “anybody…? anybody...?” but pass over me like I wasn’t there.
I understood. This was not a class for me to learn, this was the educational equivalent of a punishment beating for daring to be a straight, working-class bloke who wanted to study literature.
Finally, the semester ended, I handed in my essay and I passed. What I wrote of, I can’t remember, I just looked at the entire process as an exercise in giving someone what they wanted. Which I did.
In retrospect, I didn’t learn much while sitting in the “myths of masculinity” class, apart from this: prejudice travels in all directions.
And now, thirty years later, when the radicalisation of the university is absolute, I’d advise any school-leaver who is interested in literature to avoid university and instead, do the following.
Learn a trade.
Get a library ticket.
The academy is broken.
Protecting children should be the FIRST priority of any valid political unit. After that it should be the protection of civilian lives, followed by the protection of freedoms, followed by property.
When a political unit abandons either of the first two priorities it’s no longer legitimate and its doom is assured.
Trump’s win of Imperial County, which wasn’t apparent until December thanks to prolonged counting, is perhaps his most impressive achievement in the entire state. Imperial is over 80% Hispanic and was lost by Trump in 2016 by 41.5%. Similar progress and related county flips can be observed up the central spine of California, notably in Fresno County, as many of George W. Bush’s 2004 counties came back to the fold with the conversion of much of the Latino working-class to Trump supporters.
I’ve seen many post-election analysis pieces on the Left but the majority of them focus on Trump or his followers as a whole. Yet, most of Trump’s voters also voted for him in 2020.
The more interesting question is why millions of citizens who voted against Trump (or at least not for him) in earlier elections voted for him this time… but that’s a more difficult and awkward question to explore. It’s much easier to sketch fictions of racist and sexist voting blocs than question one’s own assumptions and values.
Jan. 8th, 2025
Writing about gender-confused kids, :
How do I know that your parenting contributed to this? From your own words. Here is what I read from you in your shock:
“We let him do whatever he wanted and supported him in everything. Why is this happening?”
“We raised her in feminist-egalitarian household and shielded her from patriarchy.”
And now, today, when your son is 19 and tells you he’s a troon, I read this from you:
“We call him by his chosen name, but we really struggle inside.”
“We try to gently ask him why he believes he’s a woman.”
Blunt talk: do you fucking hear yourselves? Why are you calling him by his “chosen name?” Why are you gently asking him questions that aren’t even real instead of calling out his lie and telling him, “no”?
Because you were “gentle parents,” even before that term was widespread.
Completely accurate from my perspective.
Jan. 9th, 2025
Jake Mackey:
I am 53 years old. The last four years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I've ever lived through.
Noam Dworman, host of the Comedy Cellar Podcast, put it this way:
If—
“the general atmosphere of fear that we lived through as people who want to speak and live our lives freely—if all that change in American society had the fingerprints on it of a particular leader, that leader would be a fascist. If any leader had brought that change into our lives, that would be the most fascist experience with a leader we have ever seen in this country.”
Jan. 9th, 2025
:Gentle parenting, or conscious parenting, professes to foster compassion and emotional self-understanding in a child. It’s about respecting the emotions of a child and the motivations behind those emotions. If a child has a tantrum, hits, or generally misbehaves, it is because she is frustrated — and a parent’s job is to address the root cause of the child’s frustrations. A child should be understood, never punished. This is because for a gentle parent, children aren’t bad. They aren’t even neutral. They are inherently good. As a mother myself to two teenagers, this is news.
Gentle parenting flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes. This is crude behaviourist psychology, treating the human as a kind of input-output machine. Under this model, gentle parenting ignores the depth and complexity of a child’s soul — including the baseness therein — and, because it ignores it, the technique also fails to nurture the depth of a child’s soul, resulting in, unsurprisingly, children who have shallow souls.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable and intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.
Jan. 9th, 2025
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In the weeks since the election, prominent progressives like Last Week Tonight host John Oliver and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki have doubled down on the messaging wars, attempting to confuse and shame voters for caring too much about trans issues. In a heated rant, Oliver claimed that there are “vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere,” that there is “no evidence” that it’s unsafe or unfair for boys to compete against girls, and — in any case — “it is very weird for you to be so focused on this subject!”
Unfortunately for Democrats, it doesn’t seem to be a messaging problem. The more the public learns about trans issues — like paediatric gender transition and “gender-inclusive” sports and spaces — the less supportive they become. People resent being manipulated and lied to, even if the speaker sincerely believes it’s all in service of a good cause. And the more sunlight trans issues attract, the less people are willing to believe the cause is noble and just.
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Is the Trudeau regime in its last days? Remember when “human rights” NGOs like Amnesty International sided with him against the truckers? I member!
Jan. 10th, 2025
:The [grooming gang] phenomenon serves as a searing indictment of liberal groupthink. It demonstrates in the starkest of terms how bad things can get when people prioritise adherence to ideological dogma over dealing with social reality in all its complexity. And it raises questions about a range of topics – Islam, mass immigration, multiculturalism, women’s rights, etc – that simply cannot be satisfactorily answered by chanting the sort of leftist mantras we’ve been forced to listen to nonstop for over a decade.
Bear in mind, also, that this stuff was going on at the absolute peak of the #MeToo and woke eras. 'Feminists’ built careers grandstanding against ‘everyday sexism’ and pretending plush university campuses were dominated by a ‘rape culture’, at the same time as they were seeking to smear the few people speaking in plain terms about actual violent sexual exploitation of underage females as bigots. They fought an imaginary rape culture, while turning a blind eye to a real one for political reasons.
‘Anti-racists who chant ‘silence is violence’ and claim to be traumatised by ‘microaggressions’ said absolutely nothing about the racially and religiously motivated nature of these heinous crimes. Rather than ‘standing up’ for the victims, they went around hounding their relatives and demanding that discussion of the subject was censored. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: these people are the biggest frauds on the planet.
Observations from recent conversations with liberals/lefties
Universal moral principles don’t exist and aren’t desirable; always do what’s best for you.
Even when I explain that social justice puts me in a box that white people prefer, to white people, it is deflected to be about how white people are still racist, and it’s a question of power.
Free will doesn’t exist. People are, therefore, not responsible for their successes or failures.
DEI has no issues because white men still have disproportionate power in the workplace.
While there is no universal morality, people can still vote the “wrong” way. And those people are terrible.
Finally, women are assholes to women because of patriarchy.
I’m so tired of this. I’m tired of repeatedly meeting the same types of women. At least Substack and my writing communities brought me to women who think for themselves.
This book changed me in 2020.
When I saw it was being shadow-banned from libraries, I bought it for the library where I work because I wanted to take a strong stand for intellectual freedom in libraries, adding works to our collection that go against social expectations.
I read it and I realized Abigail Shrier was exactly right.
She convinced me it was wrong to go along blindly with this ideology in order to “just be kind”. We are in fact harming so many young children by not pushing back against this ideology.
I spoke up with my questions and I lost close friends. I was even pushed out of my church at the time for asking the same questions that Shrier asked about how to best support kids with gender dysphoria.
And I am so very glad to see that she is finally being vindicated! Thank you for your work on this issue Abigail Shrier and for being a fine example of what brave journalism should be!
Jan. 12th, 2025
:I saw the photo below at an exhibit and it stuck with me over the years. In New York City alone, half a million women are employed as caretakers of other women’s children. Many of these nannies have kids of their own, creating a domino effect of outsourcing. Nowhere else on earth will you see so many black and brown nannies pushing around strollers with white and yellow babies.
Nature abhors a vacuum. All sorts of unsavory influences have filled the void. An industrial complex of parental outsourcing services has emerged. Leftist local governments have implemented “free” universal pre-K programs to institutionalize kids at earlier ages. “Free” means taxpayer-funded red guard commissar grooming operations. Teachers and administrators indoctrinate their values and beliefs at the expense of the parents’. Even at meals and car rides, which used to be idle time for family bonding, iPads and phones have taken over. The mimesis of peer pressure and social media are difficult for young, impressionable minds to resist. By the time therapists are brought in to take their outsourcing cut, it’s mostly too late to subvert the subversion.
Jan. 12th, 2025
:Perhaps the most pernicious part of the white "anti-racist" worldview I uncovered the history of in my book Redefining Racism is its idea that ALL white people are racist by definition and that the best a white person can be is an "anti-racist racist."
This view was invented entirely by white activists working within the all-white "New White Consciousness" cult. While inspired by radical black activists who held hateful attitudes, no black activist taught them this view—they came up with it themselves.
I'm not the first to notice the similarities between this idea and the Catholic concept of original sin—John McWhorter, Peter Boghossian (a friend who blurbed the book), and others have also noted this—but I appear to be the first to have tracked its origins.
What fascinates me most about this is the draw to guilt—and an accompanying lifelong, never-ending path to overcome that feeling—that repeats in spiritual and pseudo-spiritual movements. Not only is it immensely powerful for organizing people, but people seem to seek it out. Even while it denigrates them, it provides them with a deep sense of purpose.
What does this say about human nature?
Jan. 12th, 2025
Jan. 13th, 2025
:Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—had just come out, and [Amy Chua] was getting pummeled in the media for demanding that her daughters get straight A’s and play the piano or violin. She was called the “worst mother ever.” There were death threats.
…
“Three hours later, probably after a beer, [J. D. Vance] writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’ ” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’ ”
Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw”—Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.
Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’ ”
Jan. 13th, 2025
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Politically, this feels like a moment of re-set that is more significant than any I have lived through previously. The victim narratives that have provided a core cultural logic for the last few decades have gone eerily silent. It is hard to imagine BLM eruptions happening next summer with any real conviction or energy. Likewise, one doesn’t expect another round of MeToo defenestrations to be carried out in the legacy press — our version of an Inner Party purge.Narratives of oppression have long anchored what Hannah Arendt already in the 1960s identified as a “politics of repudiation,” in which the governing classes point to the rottenness of America and thereby release themselves from allegiance to the nation, and from the claims of the common good upon their conscience. This frees the establishmentarian Left to pursue projects that are deeply unpopular, and often harmful to the majority. Victimology provides the ultimate “permission structure” of progressivism.
Jan. 14th, 2025
Cormac McCarthy used 'carrying the fire' as a symbolic expression of civilization (and courage, two things which are closely linked, although that's rarely noted) in several novels: The Road, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian...
New York’s DEI regime insisted that crime was falling while the city spiraled into anarcho-tyranny for years. Even after a woman was lit on fire by a blackout drunk illegal immigrant that they housed and fed at taxpayer expense, they said rising anxiety was just a perception. The Governor and Mayor keep wishing away the fact that they have turned the greatest city in the world into a dumpster fire for its 400th birthday.
The UK’s DEI regime has blocked an inquiry into its role covering up mass rapes. Vulnerable girls were abused for decades by predominantly Muslim Pakistani men that it imported. Unruly peasants are sent to prison for memes, while rapists are freed to make room for them. This is guaranteed to stoke larger fires in the future that will make the Stockport riots look like the candle on a birthday cake.
Jan. 14th, 2025
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Electricity prices are getting more expensive, and disruptions of service are getting more common. The spike in electricity prices have been particularly pronounced since 2020. And these negative changes are concentrated in certain states that have implemented Green energy policies.
Now a significant portion of these price increases are related to general inflation (a big problem in itself), but when one looks at state-level variations, the causes become much more clear.
Jan. 15th, 2025
:The typical Bernie Sanders supporter is not the slightest bit representative of the broader American working class. They are just the latest flavor of affluent Leftists who like the idea of being seen as defenders of the working-class or protetariat. Whenever those activists are forced to choice between their own ideological views and the actual views of the American working class, they will abandon the working class and likely feel smug about it.
Working-class populism tends to focus on their rage:
Incompetent elites who govern without accountability or demonstrated results.
Governing elites who ridicule traditional working-class values (particularly patriotism, religion, community, and family).
Cultural outsiders, particularly Leftists and illegal immigrants, who are perceived as undermining traditional American values.
Working-class resentment of rich billionaires is largely focused on those billionaires who openly support the above. Rich billionaires who largely focus on getting rich by hard work or openly side with working-class politics are not resented. In fact, many of them are revered, or at least respected.
Jan. 15th, 2025
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The inconvenient political opinions of the rabble are reconstructed as “targeted fake news,” “manipulation” and “disinformation” proceeding from a rotating cast of villains from other countries – presently the ominous Putin-Musk-Zuckerberg triad. In this way, our politicians conflate their own people with foreign enemies and seek to deprive their citizens of the right to free political expression under the cover of maintaining “social cohesion” and defending “our democracy.” These lunatics would like nothing so much as to shut down the entire internet, which is an enormous thorn in their side – not because Musk has occasional conversations with blacklisted German political personalities on Twitter, but because it has given millions of ordinary people a voice. We’re not supposed to have a voice, we’re supposed to shut up.
The Campbell quote made me laugh.
Courage is a rarely seen virtue in the modern world?
Mostly True. There have been a number of notable dissidents who have stood up against censorship, mobs, and lawfare, but that's largely been countercultural traditionalists against the modern culture of stifling conformity that has prevailed for much of the past decade.
Most modern virtues involve restraint?
ROFLMAO!
Self-restraint, in almost every context other than self-censorship for everyone insufficiently woke, has not merely fallen out of favor as a virtue in modern culture, it's been actively demonized. Inhibition and self-regulation have been rebranded as repression and oppression. It's the LACK of restraint that has been made a modern virtue: "self-expression" understood as little more than the glorification of hedonism and complete surrender to the basest passions. Eat whatever you want and then have a liposuction or Ozempic. Sleep as much as you want and do as little work as you care to and then demand that government provide for your needs. Have sex as often as you want, any way that you want, with whoever you want, and be celebrated by society for "challenging heteronormativity" by making your queerest perversions public. Embrace the recreational use of mind-altering drugs and find yourself culturally in the company of famous musicians, actors, and tech innovators. Even those who preach restraint in the area of carbon emissions are blatant hypocrites, jet setting around in private planes to and from massive private mansions, with far greater carbon footprints than the poor proles they hector about daring to drive to work. To throw tantrums in public is now upheld as a moral form of activism and to miss work or school because of it is now pampered and excused as caring about the right things. Heck, even riots, arson, looting, and assassination have become valorized as a somewhat legitimate expression of political frustration (at least, are long as your cause is "progressive" or demographic is "oppressed").
Modern 'Liberalism' has degenerated into mere Libertinism, concerned almost solely with removing all remaining negative consequences that Nature might otherwise impose for lack of self-control. It's true that this is contrary to producing courage as a virtue. This worldview implicitly rejects the possibility, much less any responsibility, for "the oppressed" to need to display courage (rather, those with power are obliged to remove all obstacles for them and 'empower' them regardless of their own efforts or lack thereof). Likewise, this worldview refuses to credit anyone opposing the culture with 'courage', but rather attributes them only with malice and/or ignorance. Yet to draw from that culture of cowardice a dichotomy of courage v restraint is unfounded. Courage can be opposite of external restraints, sure, but it is born from applications of self-restraint: discipline, integrity, conscientiousness.