When I think about the possibility — these days, the near certainty — of widespread political violence coming soon to a theater near you, I think about my teaching days.  Culture matters, y’all.

Anyone who takes even a passing glance at 20th century military history immediately notices collectivists’ tolerance for casualties.  The Soviets admitted to something like 25 million against the Nazis; the reality was probably far higher.  The Nazis themselves were no stranger to suicidal tactics; Luftwaffe pilots were at one point ordered to ram enemy bombers when their fighters ran out of ammunition, and some of them actually did it.  The Chinese in Korea took the heaviest losses in modern warfare; Giap’s North Vietnamese Army was infamous for its “human wave” attacks.  Wherever you find socialists, you find an appalling indifference to human life.

Modern American college kids are far closer to New Soviet Men than you think.  Far, far closer.

If you’re over 40 and have a social media presence, think of your behavior there.  Do you unfriend people?  How often?  Is it easy?  If you’re anything like me, you don’t exactly agonize over it, but you do take some time to think it over.  Even if it’s just Joe Schmoe, some guy you swapped lies with on a business trip, you still think of him as a human being.  You wonder if he’ll wonder what happened if you’re no longer on his friends list.  It’s not a hard decision, let’s not overdramatize, but there’s always at least a small pang of something very much like guilt….

The younger generation doesn’t feel any of that.  They’re so used to lives lived online — 400 contacts in the smartphone, 5000 friends on Facebook — that unfriending someone is nothing more than deleting spam.  The Millennials’ emotional model is Tinder — if it doesn’t appeal to you in every way, right away, just left-swipe it and it’s gone from your life forever.   I often wonder how much of anything they actually feel.

Those are your enemies.  Those are the frontline troops, the NCOs and platoon commanders.  I’d like to think that I could bring myself to give the order to fire if I were absolutely convinced of my cause’s rightness, and the no-possible-alternatives necessity of pulling the trigger.  These kids, it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear them call in an airstrike if someone used real milk instead of soy in their half-caff, triple-foam venti frappucino.

Culture matters, and ours is selfish, simpleminded, superficial, and brutal.  Given half the chance, that’s how they’ll act.

I’ve written a lot about political generations here.  It’s hardly original to me — Peter Turchin and his “cliodynamics” disciples are all about the generational politics (this site is a good example of a disciple).  I think it’s overblown — anything that claims History is a science is overblown; look no further than Marx himself — but useful in moderation.

One point I can’t emphasize enough is that the real fanatics, the whatever-it-takes crazies, almost always come from the generation that was old enough to be fully aware of, but not participate in, some social cataclysm.  World War One is an obvious example, and as you might expect, the fanciest of the Cat Fanciers were all juuuuust a bit too young (or, in the Dwarf’s case, too clubfooted) to participate.  When a generation like that (average DOB of, say, 1905) starts staring middle age in the face, things are going to get very bad, very fast.

A more benign example is George Orwell.  Born in 1903, he had this to say about life before the Great War:

When [H.G.] Wells was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side…Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells.There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to ‘get on or get out,’ your parents systematically warping your sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags…the generally accepted opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings.

Wells was born in 1866, when Victoria’s reign still had almost another 40 years to run.  Orwell was born two years into Edward’s, and the world could hardly have been more different, yet Orwell seamlessly equates H.G. Wells’s youth with his own.  For comparison, this is like someone of my generation (born roughly 1970) taking some Jazz Age relic as our guru.  It’s stuff like this that makes Orwell so hard to take seriously sometimes.

But he had a point for all that.  When you’re a teenager, everything your parents believe is wrong, because they’re your parents.  Teenagers in 1918, though, had a huge, obvious wrong to point at — if it were even possible for your parents to be right about something, they were certainly wrong about that, the War, the industrial meat grinder of the Western Front.  The pedants, clergymen and golfers of 1903 could’ve seen it coming — they didn’t.  They could’ve stopped it any time — they refused.  They still thought dying for King and Country dulce et decorum est, the old, fat bastards, safe across the water, even after an entire generation was wiped out fighting for…. whatever it was they were fighting for.

Orwell’s German equivalents were saying the same thing, for the same reasons.

And so were his American equivalents, when our cataclysm came.  It was the Second World War for us, not the First, but the social result was the same.  It even had the same root cause.  Here’s Orwell again:

There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to ‘get on or get out,’ your parents systematically warping your sexual life…

We forget this now — we’ve been well trained to forget it — but not least among Socialism’s many attractions was the sexual utopia that was to come when the workers seized the means of production.  “Common property” always seems to entail “common wives” — sorry, ladies, but it’s true.  The first thing any chiliastic socialist movement did was preach “free love,” going all the way back to Antiquity.  Every heresy from the birth of Christianity was accused of it; every sect in Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium did it; the so-called “Utopian Socialists” did it (e.g. Brook Farm); even the so-called “Scientific Socialists” did it, such that Marx and Engels were often asked to their faces if they meant all the means of production would be held in common.  It was even more open in the 20th century — it’s no accident, as Marxists frequently said, that contraception was the Socialists’ #1 public health issue.  Monogamy is counterrevolutionary, comrade.

Orwell used the language of science — “science” and “scientific,” “reason” and “reasonable” are plastered all over his essay on Wells, and indeed all over his writings.  (You’ll recall, for instance, that he contrasted Hitler’s worldview in Mein Kampf with “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense.”)  But for as much as all Leftists everywhere and everywhen talk about how much they Fucking Love Science (TM), we don’t even pretend to bother with it in The Current Year (which is one of the reason lots of people, even in Our Thing, regard Orwell as some kind of conservative).  These days, we’re all about our pwecious widdle feelings…

….which is why it’s no accident that the gospel of our just-missed-the-war generation, the so-called Silent Generation that were responsible for the worst excesses of “The Sixties,” was Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.  Here again, we’ve forgotten — because we’ve been very well trained to forget — that until very, very recently, the Nazis’ besetting sin wasn’t “racism” (or, God help us, “prejudice”), or even “hate” — it was repression.  The Nazis were how they were because they were uptight about sex.

No, stop laughing, I’m serious.  My teaching days are over, I hate assigning homework, but y’all really need to go read this: “Apt Pupil,” by Stephen King.  It’s in a collection, and far be it from me to suggest that you should find a way to not give that greasy commie King a payday (like his idol Barack Obama says, at some point you’ve made enough money), but I’m sure you can find a way to get it.  I’m 100% serious here —  That’s how the Nazis were viewed by most Americans, well into the 1980s.  It’s sex, sex, sex.  King has (quite rightly) always been criticized for going to the gutter the way Democrats vote — early and often — and it’s never been more clearly displayed than here.  Hell, “getting overpowered by a Nazi” was a standard bedroom-fantasy joke well into my college years; “anal-retentive” was such a common bit of psychobabble that it was a standard joke on the late night yak shows.

Thus, the Sixties.  Just as “pedants, clergymen and golfers…systematically warping your sexual life” was to blame, in the minds of our intellectual vanguard, for the horrors of World War 1, so Auschwitz and all the rest could be laid at the feet of Adolf Eichmann’s Daddy spanking him too much, or not enough, while he was potty training.  Don’t take it from me, take it from Marcuse… or Dr. Spock.

From which follows the idea, foisted on my generation by parents who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War if they hadn’t been in junior high at the time (the Vietnam draft ended in 1973), that the answer to all society’s ills is more freedom, more permissiveness, more promiscuity, more “self-esteem.”  The Baby Boomers weren’t responsible for “The Sixties;” they were responsible for “The Seventies,” and look how that turned out.  The “Stonewall Riots” were in 1969, but the celebration of all things gay didn’t really get rolling until the mid-1970s, and Angels in America, the apotheosis of AIDS victims as the New Messiah, debuted in 1991 (Tony Kushner was born in 1956).  Obergefell was merely a valediction to a moment long past.

Which brings us to now, and — at long last — to the point.  The upcoming generation has nothing left to permit.  We’ve got “educators” preaching transgenderism to preschoolers.  Whatever promiscuity, deviance, and transgression can achieve, they have already achieved.  The constant stream of pro-miscegentation ads that assault us everywhere are one last, futile attempt to conjure up a new Final Frontier to be crossed, but it won’t work, because it can’t.  Ditto the attempted normalization of pedophilia, polygamy, and (soon enough) bestiality.  These barely rate a sigh on the outrage-o-meter.

Everyone knows it, too, in the same way everyone knows Communism doesn’t work.  There are still some true believers hanging on in Liberal Arts faculties, just as there are some true believers hanging on in the North Korean politburo, but all of them, the so-called Commies most certainly included, know in their hearts that “Communism” can’t work — it becomes, at best, a kind of virulent National Socialism, as no less a figure than Joe “socialism in one country” Stalin, or Mao “socialism with Chinese characteristics” Zedong acknowledged.  It took 100 years, but here we are, and even the American Left admits it — talking about improving the material lives of the US proletariat these days makes you a “rightwing extremist,” where it would’ve made you a hardcore Liberal just a generation ago.

By my calculations, then, this “more perversion solves everything” hypothesis has about a decade left to run, after which… well, I dunno, but I’ve often said “today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer,” and this is part of the reason why.  You may also have noticed — as Our Betters, the Liberals, ostentatiously haven’t — that the Brown People they’re so furiously importing are ludicrously misogynistic, patriarchal, and homophobic.  Tony Kushner — just to stick with a theme — had better hope American gays really can fly; as he’s Jewish, too, he’ll be among the first our new overlords throw off the nearest 10 story roof.

If we make it that long, it’ll be interesting, to say the least.  Schadenfreude is an ugly emotion, my friends, but it might well end up being the only entertainment we have in the reeducation camps….

The reason I’ve pretty much given up hope is: If there were serious resistance to the Left, there are certain things it would be doing.  These things are so plain, so slap-you-in-the-face obvious, that the fact no one is doing them can only mean the “resistance” has already surrendered.  Things like:

The MAGA Defense Fund.  Right-wing guys get doxxed and disemployed.  Their guys get $300K/year sinecures at “nonprofit” websites nobody reads.  That’s just the way it is.  But look, y’all, $300K is chump change.  It’s a lot to an individual, yes, but crowdsourced from 10 million people?  It’s pennies.  Let me describe to you what drug organizations do; make of this information what you will.

They set up a “nonprofit” like the Left does.  The Red Cross, as is well known, only disburses a tiny fraction of its donations to people in need.  So they set up a “Shave the Whales” 503(c) to study the impact of blah blah blah in one of those Caribbean countries that has loose banking laws and no extradition treaty with the US.  Shave the Whales hires some local subcontractors — minority subcontractors, natch — to build the Fakey Q. Fakenstein public health clinic down there.  If the clinic never does manage to get much past putting an “under construction” sign on a weedy abandoned lot somewhere, well, you know how contractors are.  Meanwhile, the funds go into the Caymans bank, and come out as paychecks to guys who need them.

Of course, drug organizations deal in cash.  They’d love to use PayPal, Kickstarter, etc., but the good law-abiding SJWs at those organizations refuse — quite rightly!! — to aid and abet such a disreputable enterprise.  So the cartels use Western Union, just like their footsoldiers hardworking undocumented pre-Americans who just want to make a better lives for their families do.  And if that doesn’t work, they put a guy with a briefcase full of cash on a charter flight and send him down there, where he hands it off to another guy who takes deliveries of such briefcases when he’s not sipping margaritas on the beach.  It’s a tough life, obviously, and that’s why you shouldn’t sell drugs.

Awareness-Raising.  It would be great, obviously, if one of us could get some face time with Mr. Soros, and calmly, politely, rationally explain our perspective to him.  Similarly, it would be nice if our guys could calmly, politely, rationally walk up to, say, Rachel Maddow’s door — NOT to kick it in and threaten her family like the Left did to Tucker Carlson — but to calmly, politely, rationally explain our views of her and her coverage.  Alas, neither of those are possible.  Nor is it possible to get a meeting with the execs at, say, NBC and calmly, politely, rationally explain to them why we think they shouldn’t be putting anti-white propaganda on the air in the guise of TV shows.  Nor with the Madison Avenue ad boys, to calmly, politely, rationally explain ditto.  After all, those high and mighty folks — though they’re surely reasonable folks who have all Americans’ best interests at heart — don’t take meetings with just anyone, so they’ll never hear our calm, polite, rational views….

The local people, on the other hand…. them we can reach.  Local tv anchors shop at the same stores you do.  The marketing director of the local rag is right there in the phone book.  It would be pretty simple to walk up to the people who air the shows, buy the ads, etc., and calmly, politely, rationally explain to them why we’d prefer it if they didn’t do that anymore.  Bezos can buy the Washington Post; can he bail out every local Times-Picayune in the nation?  NBC has deep pockets, but they’re not bottomless….  Polite, rational, calm face-to-face talks.

Targeted Boycotts.  Hell, it probably doesn’t require a face-to-face meeting.  It probably doesn’t even require total cord-cutting.  In the days of streaming TV and the internet, local propaganda media outlets work on razor-thin margins.  They also rely on survey metrics, Nielsen and whatnot.  I’d bet a local targeted boycott, NOT of the advertiser, but of the station / newspaper that runs the ad, would do wonders.  What would happen, do you think, if half the households in a smallish city simply turned off their TVs in primetime, even just for a night?  It’d seriously fuck with their metrics, if nothing else.  Get them chasing their own tails.  Can [pick your miscegenation-promoting company] afford to throw money at region after region, trying to figure out what’s going on with its ad buys?  The NFL got threatened with lawsuits from big companies when its viewership dropped slightly after the Kaepernick thing.  We can’t bankrupt the NFL, or the Washington Post, or NBC, but we CAN bankrupt their local affiliates.

A rolling TV blackout, once a week, switched up every few weeks to keep them guessing.  Again, you’re not hitting, say, Levi’s jeans – they have much deeper pockets than we do.  You’re hitting the outlets that show Levi’s commercials.  Make all the pozzed ads you want, boys; it don’t mean a think if there’s no place to put them.  Then, just to be sure the message is clear, hold a “turn ON your TV” night.  Stick-and-carrot, see?  The programs on which the poz propaganda appears gets boycotted; the programs that show plain old ads get watched.  If Leave it to Beaver reruns on the local public access station are suddenly the most popular show in prime time in a smallish urban market, that’s really going to explode some heads.  The metrics get messed up, the poz-pushing companies sink their ad buy dollars in the wrong place, and the local stations show what we want them to show…

A real resistance would, I suppose, think about doing such a thing.

Guerrilla Marketing.  If the resistance were serious — and I preemptively denounce them, and all of this — they’d start going Sabo-style on smaller communities..  The point here is to get inside the Left’s heads.  If a few more people get redpilled from the guerrilla ads, that’s great, but secondary.  The primary objective is the get the Left freaking out, and to publicize the freakout.  The message to them is: We know where you live, and there are lots of us — way more than you think.  Which will cause them to send a message in return: We can’t tolerate dissent, any dissent, even if it’s just a billboard or a flyer on a lamppost.

Sabo works in Shitlibopolises like LA and NY.  That’s cool, but it won’t have nearly the impact.  A resistance would, I think, work the college towns.  Young White males are angry, and confused, but apathetic.  Give them a demonstration.  Show them how little it takes to achieve a dramatic effect — the Left will go nuclear; they can’t help themselves.  Paper every coffee shop in a college town with “It’s Ok to be White” flyers.  Draw little “OK” hand symbols on the corners of Leftist political flyers.  Hang out in the library stacks — check for security cameras! — and scribble “it’s ok to be White” on the flyleaves of every book… or, at least, I’d think that’s what a resistance would do.  It’s illegal, obviously — it’s vandalism, which is wrong wrong WRONG (unless the Left does it, of course) — but I suppose a real resistance would be willing to risk it.  Hypothetically.

See what I mean?  Nobody’s even thinking about doing these kinds of things, or else they’d be doing them.  Serious preparations for serious action are impossible to hide.  Read any history — even the big “surprises” like Pearl Harbor, Operation Barbarossa, etc. were telegraphed way in advance; a whole bunch of people, way high up, knew something was coming.  This is why countries always announce their annual war games well in advance.  If anyone were serious about resisting the Left, they’d be doing something along these lines.   But they aren’t — which is good, of course, because I denounce all this — but it also means that they won’t, because they can’t.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Ace of Spades, on the “anti-fa” attack on Tucker Carlson:

Do these people think that their leftwing politics and favorable coverage from Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Brooke Baldwin protects them at their homes or when walking down the street alone?

Yes, obviously — because it does.  Even making a Leftist uncomfortable is a federal pound-me-in-the-ass-prison offense now.  Any person caught doing anything like what was done to Carlson to, say, Don Lemon would be hatecrimed into GenPop in the nastiest prison in the land, with a life expectancy of hours (see also: Robinson, Tommy).

Do you honestly believe that the edgier elements of the evil rightwinger coalition will permit you to retain your feeling of physical safety?

Again, yes, and again, obviously — see above.  There’s no “evil rightwinger coalition,” because the minute such an organization filed its paperwork, it would be infiltrated and doxxed, as would all its members.

The Z Man, on modern media:

The approved media does not just want to shut down your ability to speak and hear alternatives. They want to stop you from eating. When Trump says the media is the enemy of the people, this is exactly what he means. That’s why the Wall Street Journal hired Yoree Koh to try and deprive dissidents of a way to make a living.

As I mentioned over there, these are precisely the kinds of situations the Kitten Patrol was supposed to prevent.  One didn’t threaten the Cat Fanciers’ people without the Cat Fanciers’ people responding in kind.  Not only that, but the various branches of the Cat Fancy party would put guys on the payroll who — thanks to their political activism — couldn’t make a living any other way.  Got doxxed and disemployed?  The Party’s got your back… certainly including helping you get some revenge.

But see Ace’s bit above, right?  Well…  let’s do another little thought experiment.  There’s a type of organization that exists in America that does what it wants.  It operates on the same kind of principles, and it’s got law enforcement all over it 24/7.  And yet it still does what it does.  I’m speaking, of course, about drug cartels.  How do they do it?

They have membership rosters.  They don’t get messed with, without massive retaliation.  They take care of their own.  They move gazillions of dollars.  They communicate easily with each other.  How do they do it?

I dunno, not being a drug kingpin or a DEA agent, but I suspect that moving money out, at least, is as simple as sending a good old fashioned Western Union wire transfer to one of those countries they use, the Caymans or whatnot.  Getting it back into the country is as simple as setting up a “nonprofit,” a midnight basketball program or whatnot, and putting some down-and-out comrades on the payroll.  They file their taxes, etc., everything nice and aboveboard and legal.  As for communication, well… if the folks setting this up don’t have some way to get around that (“burner” cell phones, ham radio, good old fashioned 1950s spycraft), then they deserve to get caught.  Hell, a Protonmail VPN probably gets it done – invite only, with cutouts and pseudonyms only….

However it’s done — and again, a) I have no idea how to do it, and b) this is all hypothetical anyway, I denounce it all — it’s about the only way to make the madness stop.

If it can be stopped, but that’s a rant for another day.  But I know this: If Tucker et al had an organization behind him, this shit would not be happening, nobody would be getting shut down on YouTube, and the Left would be leery of unleashing the Twitter mob.

1856, not 1860.  The Democrats won tenuous control of the House last night, so I suppose the civil war will be delayed a few years.  As I said yesterday, it’s not a question of IF the Left starts shooting, only when.  They now have sufficient ability to be pains-in-the-ass enough that they don’t feel forced to go to the gun… yet.  But the lunacy will come fast and furious now.  The day is not far off, kameraden, when we’ll look back on 2016 as a sane, peaceful golden age.

As the Z Man pointed out yesterday, a Democrat-controlled House pretty much guarantees Trump’s re-election in 2020.  He’s at his absolute best playing rope-a-dope with lunatics, and the larger, dumber, browner, even-more-hormonal cat ladies of the new-look Democratic Party are the dopiest dopes to ever chase a rope.  All “investigations” of Trump to date have revealed far more dirt about the Democrats than the President, and since it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that none of 2016’s shenanigans could’ve happened without the active collusion of Barack Obama, he has a much better hand than his opponents.  I’d say that the Dems are about to learn the cardinal rule of poker — if you can’t spot the sucker in your first 15 minutes at the table, then you’re the sucker — but that implies the Dems are capable of learning anything.  If you enjoy the spectacle of all-out human folly, as I do, these are heady times indeed…

Wilmot Proviso.  ….or not.  I love a good train wreck as much as the next gleeful sadist, but the neverending march of feckless stupidity just grinds me down.  Barbara Tuchman had her flaws as a pop historian, but a way with a title wasn’t one of them.  The March of Folly is the greatest title for a history book ever penned, because it pretty much describes History entire.  You can’t study the history of anything for too long before you conclude that the real driver of man’s fate isn’t God, or the forces of production, or class conflict, or the clash of ideologies — it’s vapid, hubristic Dunning-Kruger cases getting bored.

Take the Mexican War.  It was obvious to everyone, certainly including the Mexicans, that the United States was going to attack Mexico.  James K. Polk practically ran on it in 1844, and by 1846 everything was ready.  The fact that this was naked aggression, and that the supposed casus belli — the strip of Texas between the Brazos and the Rio Grande — is obvious bullshit to anyone who’s ever been there, didn’t even register.  Everyone wanted to throw some weight around, and Mexico — just then getting over one of its periodic revolutions — was convenient.

Until David Wilmot added his famous Proviso.  He tacked it onto an appropriations bill, the sneaky bastard, so that in order to get their splendid little war, everyone had to put their cards on the table.  The Mexican War was a war for slavery; the vote on the Proviso made it obvious to even the dimmest-witted.  After all, the vote was taken just three months into the war — American troops were barely arriving in the theater, much less actually winning on the battlefield.  The fact that nobody cared — that Congress got out of the Proviso with procedural shenanigans — showed just how badly inertia had already set in.  Events were going to take their course.

Last night’s election strikes me as a Wilmot Proviso type scenario.  Over the next two years, everyone will have to put their cards on the table for everyone to see.  It should be momentous… but it’ll pass unremarked.  Congress will do what it does with procedural shenanigans; Trump will do what he does by executive order, and nothing will get done.  We voted for things to continue as they are… and they will, God help us.  The political theater will be train-wreckily entertaining, but nothing of consequence will happen in the legislature.

John Brown moments.  Which it never does, you know?  If you look at the run-up to the Civil War — the first one, I mean — you see Congress, the President, the whole political class, desperately doing nothing.  Stephen Douglas was the best politician of the era, but even he could only kick the can down the road for a few more years.  The People had other plans, as it always does, and eventually some lunatic decided to take matters into his own hands, as they always do.  At least your John Brown moments are fairly easy to recognize.  At some point, the lunatics are going to let one of their own take the stand after committing some atrocity, and then it gets really fun.

The Hardest Truth.  I’ve written about this before, but I’m starting to think it’s the only truth about humans worth stating in these latter days:  People can’t handle ease.  Human culture reached its apex in London in 1911.  Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf both said that the Modern world began in that year, and since that’s the only thing those two could possibly agree on, it must be right.  We lived at the glorious apex of the human race for three years… then our civilization committed suicide, because we were bored.  But it was Arkansas-style suicide — having shot ourselves in the heart in 1914, we shot ourselves in the head, just to make sure, in 1992.  The long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union was over, so to celebrate, we elected a slavering poonhound and his harridan gangster wife to guarantee we never got anything out of the victory.  Better an end with horror than a horror without end, amirite?

The Postmodern State.  If you follow Hobbes, like I do, you believe the State’s sole purpose is to provide physical security to its citizens.  But I’m starting to think that’s wrong.  Hobbes, like all Modern thinkers, faced the problem of legitimacy — a Modern state requires modern arms to defend it, which requires more buy-in from the citizenry than Divine Right Monarchy can get.  But we don’t have modern arms anymore; we have postmodern arms.  There will never be another mass-conscription, saturation-bombing, ships-lost-with-all-hands kind of war — the West lacks the political will, and though the East has the political will, they can’t defend against nuclear weapons.  If they attacked, the West would lose… but long before acknowledging the loss, they’d push The Button, and that would be that.

Either way, the West’s physical security isn’t militarily threatened.  No Red Army boot will ever step on American soil.  It’ll either be localized, distant, low-intensity conflicts, or the end of the world.  We could easily keep on losing all the wars we’re currently losing, plus a few more, with a military half the size of our current one.  Eventually we’re going to figure that out, taxes being what they are.  And then what?

There are alternatives to classical political theory, ones that grant legitimacy to the ruling power sufficient to keep the State running, but they’re not in English.  One is Volksgemeinschaft.  Another is kokutai.  The downside: They entail a police state, pretty much by definition.  The upside: We’re in a police state already; most of us just don’t acknowledge it yet.  If there’s an alternative that doesn’t boil down to straight-up African-style Big Man gangsterism, I surely don’t know what it is.  Guess we should start looking into that, eh?

In Evan Maloney’s fun little campus-bashing documentary Indoctrinate U, there’s a psychology prof who’s been outed as a conservative (and, of course, harassed out of employment and blackballed from academia, because Liberals are all about the dissenting viewpoints and how dare you suggest otherwise!!!).  Maloney then interviews several of her former students:

“Oh yeah,” they say, “we all knew.”  He asks them just how they knew, and they all reply with a version of “because she was the only professor we had who didn’t go off on political rants all the time in class.”

Which is how all but the deepest-cover shitlords get blown.  Unhinged political rants are so common in academia, in every class from the loopiest Angry Studies seminar to the hardest of STEM labs, that simply not acting like an SJW lunatic during class time is unusual enough to get you noticed.  It’s like being the first guy to stop clapping for Dear Leader at a North Korean politburo meeting.*

If I were still teaching, I’d be the only guy not all but physically dragging my students to the polling station today.  Thus, I’d be outed.  I thought my time had come on November 9, 2016, when I was the only guy on campus over the age of 22 who didn’t look like I wanted to slit my wrists, but somehow nobody dimed me to the Thought Police.  I’d like to say that’s because I was one of those inspiring Dead Poets’ Society-type motherfuckers, but in reality, it was probably just shell shock — the NPCs’ wires were still too fried to even notice that I wasn’t wearing sackcloth and ashes.

After two years of Trump, there’s no way that’s happening today.  If I were teaching now, I’d be reported.  However today’s vote turns out, thank you  Jesus for early retirement.

*It’s a mark of Orwell’s genius that he even thought this through.  I always wondered why the put a time limit on the Two Minutes’ Hate…. until I realized that, Stalinists being Stalinists, no work would get done otherwise; they’d keep ranting until they dropped from exhaustion (and the first guy to pass out would probably still get shot).

We were discussing art, philosophy, and national character in the last post.  I know, I know, that’s pretty damn pretentious for a post that ends with a picture of Batgirl, but it’s true for all that.  Contrariandutchman came up with the phrase “weapons-grade philosophy” to describe the stuff that Europeans seem so good at — and so good at keeping contained — that we poor Colonials aren’t, and don’t….

…or maybe not.  Either way, to talk about this stuff, we need some definitions.*  I propose the following:  Art is an attempt to say something true about the human condition.  Philosophy is an attempt to discover the Truth in itself.

Trite?  I suppose.  But it’s a start.  For one thing, it gives us a relatively “objective” measure for determining both if a given piece is art (philosophy), and, if so, is it good or bad.  For example, this:

It’s art, and it’s bad.  It’s art because it is trying to say something true about the human condition.  It’s bad art, not because of any flaw in the artist’s technique, but because what it’s trying to say is false.  Just as one drop of raw sewage turns even a barrel of the finest wine into sewage, so even the most technically excellent art is mere propaganda if it doesn’t say something true.

Obviously this means comprehensibility is key, and this is where “weapons-grade philosophy,” like Modern art, loses a lot of us.  Just as I can’t tell what the hell the artist is trying to do here

I can’t make heads or tails out of Hegel, or Heidegger, or the whole lot of Froggy Incomprehensibles.    If nothing else, then, their works are bad philosophy, since the Truth is accessible to all rational minds.

[And here’s where the drive-by neckbeard chimes in: “How do you know it’s bad if you don’t understand it?  Maybe you’re just to stupid to see blah blah blah.”  Stow it, Junior.  I spent a lot of years in grad school; I speak at least Conversational PoMo.  More to the point, I understand the “for Dummies” presentation of their thoughts just fine… and the fact that an educated person needs a “for Dummies” presentation confirms that there’s something seriously wrong with their philosophy.  Nietzsche, for instance, said everything Foucault said, and while the Manly Mustache Man’s conclusions might be hard to stomach, no educated person has ever had the slightest difficulty with Nietzsche’s prose.  Foucault’s stuff is bafflegab, stem to stern].

This not to say there’s nothing to Hegel et al.  It’s a cheap joke that there’s no opinion so absurd, that some philosopher has not held it, but it’s not true.  Every philosophy has a kernel of Truth in it.  Just to stick with one name, Hegel was on to something with that thesis-antithesis-synthesis stuff.  The Logical Positivists would have you believe that there are only three ways thought can go wrong: Contingent falsity, self-contradiction, and meaninglessness.  But the most level-headed of the Logical Positivists wrote a wonderful essay disproving that, and he ends up throwing his hands in the air: “Hegel just is different from Plotinus, and again from Foucault, and so on.”

The reason this stuff matters is: “Weapons-grade philosophy” has broken containment.  Contrariandutchman notes that Europeans generally don’t have a problem with this stuff — guys like Foucault, Camus, et al fairly obviously don’t take their own bloviation seriously (Camus, you’ll recall, is the guy who spent a lot of his long, rich, famous life proclaiming that the only real question in philosophy is suicide.  Life is so obviously pointless, this celebrity proclaimed, that if we were consistent we’d simply off ourselves.  Camus died in a car crash, on his way to his publishers’).  The problem is, guys on Europe’s fringes do take this stuff seriously — Lenin and Barack Obama, just to name two.  For guys like that, absurdity is a feature, not a bug, of Continental philosophy.

Are there any worthwhile American philosophers, under the definitions I’ve suggested?  Any great American artists?  I dunno, but we’d better find some — as we slide further and further into decadence, the more appealing this kind of nonsense gets.  We need to chase it back across the Atlantic, where Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys and their enablers can play around with it for as long as Monsieur le Taxpayer is willing to foot the bill.  It’s weapons-grade, all right — this stuff will get you killed.  Ask any kulak.

*Did you know Ayn Rand her own self once tried to come up with an Objectivist aesthetics?  Seriously — I came across a battered old copy of The Romantic Manifesto somewhere in the university stacks back in grad school.  It’s as hilarious as it sounds.  I love bringing it up to Libertarians.

Once again, I’ve got nuttin’, so a few brief random thoughts:

Words and things. Blogfather Morgan has a good piece on Don Lemon’s stupidity yesterday, and the dimness of Leftists in general.  Quoth he:

It is the kind of ignorance that can come only from people who haven’t done things. Like “Buy your meat in the store where no animals were harmed.”  Or “Move those deer-crossing signs to someplace with less traffic…”

As with all things Left, this comes down to four possibilities:

• Ignorance
• Stupidity
• Malice
• or some combo of the three.

As Don Lemon is paid to be an idiot on TV, I’m going with malice over stupidity here.  But long experience of undergraduate teaching suggests that ignorance — deliberate, systematically imposed enstupidation — accounts for most of it in the younger generation.

For once, I’m totally in agreement with the hardcore Leftists in the teachers’ unions: “Teaching to the test” sucks, it isn’t real education, it’s worse than useless.  But as the Federal money spigot shuts off if everyone doesn’t test above average, “teaching to the test” is what everyone does.  So, by the time I got them in undergrad, they were so used to regarding all statements in isolation that stuff like “buy your meat in the store where no animals were harmed” doesn’t even register.  For them, “meat” is “a product you buy in the store,” and since Everyone Knows (TM) that harming animals is wrong….  Throw in text messaging, Twitter, etc. — where every message must of necessity be a discrete unit conveying one and only one message, and I can’t really even blame them for this.

Once again as Farce.  Hey, where have I heard that “every message must be a discrete unit” blather before?  Ahhhh yes, it was Derrida: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte;” there is nothing outside the text.”  I remember getting this stuff in Eng Lit seminars back when Deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and other such mind-viruses were breaking containment in the Ivy League and infecting the whole university system.  Turns out the old Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkey was right after all.  Oh, and just for giggles, read up on the Ivy League’s favorite Deconstructionist, Paul de Man — Soros is far from the first Nazi collaborator they’ve excused and championed because they like the cut of his jib.  Why, it’s almost as if the Left has no problem at all with Socialism-spouting anti-Semites!!!

Speaking of anti-Semites, yes, it’s true, there are some vocal — very, very tediously vocal — ones in Our Thing.  But: I’ve never actually met anyone in Our Thing (I keep wearing my white Boss hat out in public, hoping to meet a fellow thoughtcriminal, but so far no luck).  I have, however, met several frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semites — in academia.  As nobody in academia is to the right of Bernie Sanders…. well, you figure it out.  If you’ve spent any time on campus in the last 20 years, the Left’s reaction to the Synagogue Shooter is hilarious.  I know you really really really want to bash President Trump with this, but you really ought to take down those “Israel is a Fascist State!” posters and the pictures of Bibi Netanyahu sporting a swastika before you do.

Batgirl.  Having won my pyrrhic victory with Sting in a Thong, it’s only right that I take Contrariandutchman’s suggestion and post a Batgirl pic.  This one’s for you, comrade.  I know, I know, she’s a lunatic even by Hollywood standards, but Alicia Silverstone really was something back in her day, wasn’t she?

Happy Halloween, y’all.  Maybe next year we can all go trick-or-treating together in the reeducation camp.

What are the odds of the “MAGABomber” and the Synagogue Shooter living to face trial, do you think?  In the case of the former, one of three things seems likely:

1. He’s just a garden-variety lunatic, inspired — but not incited — by the Media.
2. He’s a lunatic who was incited by the Media, and is happy to talk about it.
3. He’s a full-on Deep State patsy.

Frankly, I don’t see the Powers That Be risking a trial for this guy, since even (1), the most benign scenario, means letting this weirdo take the stand to talk about how much CNN sucks.  If — IF — they were absolutely sure (1) was the case, the smart move would be to let the guy talk, because then they could tar everyone to their Right as a Sayoc-style fake-Indian male stripper crazy doofus… but they won’t, because they’re not smart, and because they’re egomaniacs.  CNN et al won’t be able to stand getting trashed by this guy on live TV.

I don’t discount (3), but even I find it hard to believe the PTB are that fucking stupid, even now.  My money’s on (2), because crazy people, while crazy, aren’t unpredictable.  They have a “delusion architecture,” as the term d’art is, and though the “break” part of “psychotic break” is sudden, there’s a long buildup that’s obvious in retrospect.  Hell, read any story about the guy, even in the Media — it’s clear he’s been deeply weird for a long, long time.

Given all that, I hope for Sayoc’s sake that he’s truly a lunatic, a barking-at-the-moon schizo whose madness is plain from a mile away.  If it is, he might live, since the Media can write him off as a madman and just not cover his trial.  Otherwise, I’m pretty sure he’ll be “shot while trying to escape,” or commit suicide by shooting himself four or five times in the head, or any of the other charming fates that these days are called “Arkancide.”

As for the Synagogue Shooter, I doubt he’ll live through the week.  We’ve come a long way from the days when the Media could just memory hole Nidal Hasan — remember him? — and anyway he only shot up an Army base.  That’s the problem with lunatics, you know?  They can be goaded into doing something spectacular, but you never know what they’ll do afterwards.  Initial reports say this guy hates Trump almost as much as he hates Jews.  They’re sure as hell not going to let him say that on the stand, and since they couldn’t ignore his trial should there be one, I’m betting Bowers comes down with a 9mm migraine here in the next few days.  No autopsy at the family’s request.

Teaching and Indoctrination.  A decent piece by the Federalist, only going of the rails at the end.  The author is a teacher, so of course his solution is “better teaching.”  While I have some sympathy for this point of view, even Dead Poets’ Society couldn’t do much with today’s curriculum.

Good teachers (which include parents, mentors, and other knowledgeable adults) train students in methods of thought while supplying the stuff of thought. They teach a person to evaluate an argument properly, find actual solutions to problems, and determine what is true and what is false.

Yes yes, but what if nothing’s true and everything’s false?  What if “the stuff of thought” you’re required to supply is just ass-pulled self-esteem special-snowflake PoMo bullshit, as it has been for going on three decades now?  When the Facts contradict the Narrative — as they must — ditch the Facts and keep the Narrative.  “Thought-terminating cliches,” these are called, and while the man’s right — replacing Maya Angelou with Tacitus wouldn’t do any good — he’s right for the wrong reason.  It doesn’t matter what Tacitus has to say, because Tacitus is a Dead While Male, and that’s all ye know in this world, and all ye need to know.  Any student who says otherwise will get sent to the principal’s office, while any teacher who says so will be sent to the unemployment office.

Sting in a Thong.  In steering y’all to John C. Wright’s excellent essay on the Unified Field Theory of Madness, I suggested that while Mr. Wright has me beat on name recognition, sales figures, award nominations, etc. (to say nothing of quality of thought or prose), he doesn’t have sexy sexy pictures for section breaks like I do.  To which he replied that he does too have sexy sexy pictures, of Catwoman.  As I am a Southerner by both upbringing and temperament, nothing gets my blood up faster than being the underdog in a pointless, self-destructive blood feud, so I promised massive retaliation.  Here ya go;

General Pickett would be proud.

“How can it not know what it is?”

And thus were launched a million books, undergraduate courses, and web pages (“Blade runner and philosophy” gets over 4.3 million hits as of this writing).  “To know X” seems to mean something like “the ability to bring X into your consciousness.”  Which seems to imply at least three further things:

1. That X remains stable over time;
2. that the “bringing to consciousness” process is consistent and reliable;* and
3. that you — that is, the knower — remain stable over time.

All three are “problematic,” as the kids say these days, and not because of “epistemic privilege” or whatnot, but for real, obvious reasons.  For instance, you can’t say that someone trained in the old school still knows astronomy after Copernicus, since (1) is no longer true.  Problems with (2) are, of course, the foundation of The Worst Argument in the World, but there are lots of other problems with it that don’t rely on Froggy incomprehensibility.  What if you have a brain tumor, for instance?

(3) is the Blade Runner problem, or, if you prefer, the John Locke problem — Locke’s version of “representationalism” seems to imply that we’re different people whether we’re asleep or awake, since “self” means “continuity of memory” and that’s highly state-dependent.  However you phrase it, though, it’s clear that while Rachel has always physically been a replicant, she’s never been conscious of it, which means that while everything about her remains exactly the same, she’s a completely different person once Deckard tells her the truth.  She still has “continuity of memory,” all right, but all those memories are lies.

This is the NPCs’ problem, and it’s not an abstract philosophical thing you can hash out over a few righteous bong rips.  I want you to seriously consider what it’s like to learn that you have been deceived — systematically — every single day for your entire life.  Not everything is a lie, of course — 1-3 all play their part — but nothing you thought you knew holds up, which means you don’t hold up.

What is it like, in other words, to actually be Rachel, or Neo, the moment the truth hits?

That’s why we can’t simply say something like “go talk to people, dorkus!” and expect this to deprogram an NPC.  They’ve been talking to people, in “real life” even, but all those “people” are in the same boat they are.  Instead, I’d urge anyone who suspects he might be an NPC to go out and observe others’ behavior.  Go to a coffee shop, for instance.  Even the “real” people having “real” conversations with their “real” friends spend most of their time looking at a glowing screen.  Even seemingly best friends drop each other the instant the phone dings.  Students sit glued to laptops, headphones blaring, and even then they still stop every five minutes to look at their phones.

From there, go home and check your social media accounts.  See who your “friends” are, by which I mean “the people you ‘interact’ with the most.”  Now, turn off the computer and try to write a description of your top 5 friends.  What makes Dakota different from Britney from Justin from Dustin from Kylie?  Anything?  Can you describe any of them, such that I could pick xzhm out of a crowd?

If not, you may be an NPC.

*Leaving aside awesome but way-above-my-pay-grade theories like those of Julian Jaynes.