Substack Notes, Vol. 10.4
Oct. 6th, 2024 - Oct. 21st, 2024
The elites are flailing, Harris is failing, the experts are wailing, and some folks are (finally) bailing.
“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive… But to be young was very heaven.” - William Wordsworth
Remember to be grateful that the decked is stacked as it is and the media are as flawed as they are and the American people retain their energy and decency. It could easily be otherwise. Let’s see what happens next…
(Big ups to for finally making notes easily formatted for insertion… )
Oct. 6th, 2024
There’s a great deal of advice out there for treating depression. Forget SSRI’s-barely more effective than placebo in many cases-there is information about the benefits of walks, sunshine, sleep, human company.
The paradox of depression is that you don’t WANT these things. You don’t want anything! The concept of ‘wanting’ or ‘planning’ or ‘improving’ seems like an awful joke. All goals and desires are thoroughly bled of meaning.
If you find yourself lying in bed, too psychically maimed to even switch on the lights and go take a shower, you SHOULD get up… but such measures might take weeks to alleviate your neurological despair, and depression stretches out the concept of future time as well. A month can seem like a decade. Would you work for ten years before you were allowed to spend any money? Would you do the work of cleaning a house that you wouldn’t be allowed to occupy for a decade? Would you put work and emotional investment into a 10-year relationship before having any possibility of pleasure or positive feedback? This is the subjective prospect of a depressed person.
The only alternative is to continue suffering, to a degree and in a way which is uniquely terrible.
Oct. 10th, 2024
, writing about Napoleon and the Siege of Toulon:There was also a total lack of command; everyone from the general-in-chief down to his lowliest aide-de-camp gave orders and changed siege dispositions at will. Buonaparte established an artillery park, put some order into the service, and employed all the non-commissioned officers he could get his hands on. Three days after he arrived, as a result of his own zeal and organizational skills, the army had an adequate artillery — fourteen cannon pieces and four mortars with all the necessary equipment. He produced a stream of orders for the cannon, horses, draught-oxen and stores necessary for the effective prosecution of the siege. He ordered 5,000 sacks of earth a day from Marseilles to build ramparts. He created an arsenal at Ollioules where eighty blacksmiths, cartwrights and carpenters worked, manufacturing and repairing muskets and incendiary cannon balls. He requisitioned skilled workers from Marseilles to make equipment for the artillery and took over a foundry in the region so that he could produce case shot, cannon balls and shells for his mortars. He reorganized the artillery company, obtained powder that was sadly lacking on his arrival, fought with suppliers, and scrounged more cannon from the surrounding region. Within a relatively short space of time, he had managed to gather almost one hundred guns and mortars, which worked twenty hours a day.
-Phillip Dwyer (Napoleon: The Path to Power)
My thoughts:
Leadership demands initiative, decision, delegation, and risk. Modern ‘leaders’ are too often managers, lacking in justified self-confidence and nurtured in hierarchies which have been organizationally insulated from any liability or risk. This ‘safety first’ and collectivist mindset seems to slowly be sapping the drive and initiative and sense of personal accountability from large areas of society.
We used to be a civilization of free men and women and small-and some medium-structures; a landscape of small groups of people taking risk and acting in Dunbar number-sized groups. Now we are a civilization of (in many places): workers, and managers. Leadership is often not a quality which is being selected for, and in many cases it is actively discouraged.
Oct. 11th, 2024
:No disrespect to former President Obama, but I’m truly shocked by his statements on Thursday. To suggest that the only reason black men wouldn’t vote for Kamala is if they are misogynist, and that sitting out the election is “unacceptable,” is condescending and disappointing on so many levels.
If our country were in a different place and the economy wasn’t so incredibly challenging for many working and middle class communities of all colors, and if two deeply flawed candidates weren’t running, Obama’s comments might not be as offensive. But that’s not the case. Most Americans are struggling to survive and struggling just as hard to come to terms with the two choices we have. Scolding anyone under these circumstances is insensitive and counter-productive.
What’s truly unacceptable — and divisive — is that Obama is relying on identity politics to guilt black men into voting the way he prefers. At this critical time, we need a voice who will UNIFY Americans, not drive us further apart based on sex, race, or any other immutable characteristic.
Oct. 12th, 2024
:
People with nothing of value to sell see no use in the marketplace of ideas.
Oct. 15th, 2024
:OK, so why is India still so poor? All libertarian bias aside, India’s central problem is absurd regulation and state ownership. Absurd how? To start: The Indian government strictly protects legal employees, so 90%+ of Indians work “informally.” Our bus driver to Agra was required to take a rest stop every two hours — in a country packed with tuk-tuk drivers zooming around like maniacs. The government caps the maximum size of farms — and bars foreigners (including Non-Resident Indians!) from owning farms at all. A great way to strangle the food supply and impoverish farmers at the same time. The Indian government also crushes construction, most notably with its infamous Floor Area Ratio regulation — in a country where plenty of people sleep on the streets. Developers aren’t even allowed to build skyscrapers in slums — and housing prices in major cities rival those in top Western cities. What about state ownership? Locals told me that private Indian schools cost parents one-tenth as much as public Indian schools cost taxpayers.
Oct. 14th 2024
Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate!
…I think social media took things to a whole new level. Therapy culture mixed with social media is, in my opinion, a very damaging combination. Therapy culture encourages girls and young women to focus on themselves and their feelings; social media then not only spreads these messages but constantly reminds us that we are each a self. That we are the main character. That our selves are something to be endlessly managed and obsessed over.
Oct. 16th, 2024
Apparently German and American legislators evidence many of the same stupid tendencies:
This law is not going to make Germany more secure or stop mass migration, although it does contain provisions to enforce the “Dublin system,” by denying government benefits to asylees who first registered in another country. On the other hand, it also expands the powers of our security services, because heaven forfend the people in charge miss a single opportunity to do that.
But perhaps most absurd, as NiUS reports, are its amendments to our knife prohibitions. Every time there’s a stabbing, we have to go through much handwringing about how dangerous knives are and how many people they’re responsible for killing, even though terrorists manifest a relentless indifference to no-knife zones and are strangely unlikely to observe criminal statutes on things like blade length. Prohibiting knives, as they are a useful tool, also turns out to be an extremely awkward legislative project, and one to which the clowns who rule us are particularly unsuited. In internal negotiations, these slow and confused people were confronted with things they had never thought about before, such as what actually constitutes a knife, and all the inconvenience a blanket prohibition on knives might cause, and in what contexts knives might still be legitimate. What they came up with is deeply emblematic of the state of German governance in the Year of our Lord 2024…
“Art can’t be the lie that tells the truth in a world that cannot recognize lies.”-Jonathan Rosen
Oct. 19th, 2024
Speaking as someone who grew up in a stable family, then had to watch and interact with an entire generation of people who didn't....
No fault divorce wasn't a mistake.
It was Treason.
This is the reason no young people will marry or have kids... And everyone was complicit.
Churches most of all.
Preachers and elders could have done what their forefathers did when men and women abandoned their families: Excommunicate, exile, shame, and austricize the responsible parties the way they would with prostitutes or divorcees in the past.
Instead they derelicted the one thing that was clearly their responsibility: The social enforcement of the Marriages THEY PERFORMED.
Rome analogies are overdone, but this is the one thing where America does resemble the late republic, you read accounts of Rome in the first century BC and Julius Caesar, Pompey, Antony... Everyone had multiple divorces.
Then poor Augustus had to move heaven and earth and institute really draconian punishments to try and FORCE people to marry and have kids, Roman birth rates, and specifically aristocratic birth rates, were collapsing so dramatically.
And "Christian Conservatives" were the one who did it. Ronald Reagan passed no-fault Divorce and the Churches didn't hold the line and brutally enforce the old standard in the face of the legal change.
No one the various "Defense of Marriage" Acts didn't work to stop gay marriage. The Boomercons wouldn't defend their own marriages and children from the most minor romantic spats at the apex of American financial stability and living standards.
Oct. 21st, 2024
& :
“[A] renewables-only grid would be outrageously expensive. So much so that nobody’s ever managed it. The technology just isn’t there for it. Solar power works where taxpayers kick in fat subsidies, otherwise forget it…
…For solar to serve as the backbone of a grid, it needs to be backed with storage. That can come in the form of batteries, hydrogen, or pumped hydro. All of these are expensive; none of them scale. Storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a chemical battery costs an order of magnitude more than just generating it in a nuclear power plant. Which is why a 100% solar grid would be insanely expensive, even though generating solar power is basically free.
Unfortunately, that dirty little secret—a fundamental reality of the operation of the energy grid—is often left out of the energy conversation. The solar hype machine continues to tout the benefits of solar without much understanding of how solar fits into a more complicated picture.”
Higlights:
White liberals, as a class, are people who think that they’re the exception to all of their rules. They think broadly associating themselves with a given cause, performatively and explicitly, means that they can always escape from the critiques of that cause. They throw around a lot of academic antiracist terms they learned on Twitter which were themselves cribbed from Tumblr, and thus imagine that they are somehow exempt from that tradition’s various critiques of “whiteness.” They think they’re allies to LGBTQ people because they call Melania Trump a fishy queen and say they’re gay for Billie Eilish. They talk in terms of universal indictment of men, in fact openly mock the “not all men” stock phrase, but everything about their comportment as self-styled male allies demonstrates that they think they personally put the “not” in “not all men.” They believe they get to type “ion” instead of “I don’t” into an Instagram caption, despite growing up lily white in Chevy Chase, Maryland, because every single day of their lives they wander around thinking that they are the exception to every rule.
A decent and very in-depth article about ‘misinformation researchers’:
“The idea that Kamala Harris could succeed to the presidency on her own merit with a straightforward campaign is obviously a ridiculous one, as proven by her feeble attempt to win the Democratic nomination in 2020 and by her abysmal ratings as Vice President. So, the Democrats formulated a pragmatic campaign strategy: give the public no policy information or soundbites from Harris until after the election itself, run a rehearsed and milquetoast campaign bereft of live interviews, avoid all challenging questions, and ignore the glaring hypocrisies. The problem with this strategy should be that it requires full media compliance to achieve success. For the Democrats, this is no problem at all—not a single mainstream media outlet has remotely questioned the Democrats’ unprecedented circumvention of the democratic nomination process, let alone pressured Kamala to agree to an additional debate or to sit down for a substantive, challenging interview.”