Category Archives: “H8”

The Medium is the Message

I have a naive view of art. I think it’s made up of two things, the medium and the message. The medium is the artist’s materials plus his skill. The message is whatever idea he’s trying to convey with his art. Simplistic, yes, but it lets you talk about art without resorting to what the British charmingly call “art bollocks.”*

Great art, for instance, doesn’t have to be particularly original to be great. This

is about as conventional as they come, in both medium (paint on a ceiling) and message (that God loves us). It’s only the artist’s great skill that makes it great art. On the other hand, this

has an even simpler medium, but more complex message (Seurat is trying to give us the “out of the corner of your eye” view, which points out just how fuzzy, temporary, and context-dependent our perceptions really are). It’s great art because it highlights something fundamental about the human condition. Do all our impressions work this way?

It works in reverse, too. Just as great art doesn’t have to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius to be great, so bad art fails not from lack of skill, but because the artist’s skill is used in the service of something false. That’s why you can spot “socialist realism” a mile away, though tremendous effort and real talent went into its production.

Vasily Orlov, The Nature Hunt (1950)

That’s not bad art because of bad technique, or because the subjects are unattractive. It’s not even overtly political. And yet, everything about that painting is wrong. It’s just false, and you can see it everywhere — the figures’ expressions, their postures, the field, the flowers, even the sunlight seems just slightly off. It’s like something your grandma would paint after a few courses at the Y — the old bird’s got talent, but doesn’t have anything to say other than “kids were cuter back in my day.”

Which brings us to now, when the medium IS the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously said — the stuff on TV is true, because it’s on TV. Seriously, try it for yourself. Have you ever made a sustained effort to not watch TV? I don’t mean “turn off the idiot box at home” (though that’s a great idea too); I mean don’t watch a glowing screen, period. It’s nearly impossible. TVs are everywhere, and they’re magnetic. Even if you yourself have Catonian self-control, go to the bar and watch others interact. There are always TVs on at the bar, and no matter what people are doing — drowning their sorrows in whiskey, arguing sports or politics, trying to get laid — you’ll see everyone’s eyes constantly flicking up to the TV in the corner.

Then watch the TV itself. Being in a bar actually helps here, because you want the sound to be off. TV is a passive medium — if ever the family really did sit around and watch shows together, those days are long past. TV is just background noise now, and the people who do the programming most certainly know it. You’ll get the message much better if you’re not distracted by the content (McLuhan said the content is just like a piece of raw meat a burglar brings to distract a guard dog). Is the presenter grim-faced and serious? Whitey did something bad. Is he chipper and upbeat? Get ready for a fluff piece about a Magic Negro. Are there only graphics, words, on the screen of the most visually-dependent medium of all? The Diversity did something bad.

Which suggests a wonderful line of counterattack. Betcha didn’t see that coming!!!

Art imitates life, remember? (For those who remember their Aristotle, this is mimesis (I had to look it up)). Think of SJWs — by their nose rings ye shall know them. Whether it’s mimesis or Marshall McLuhan who’s ultimately responsible, the whole SJW “look” is ugliness-for-the-sake-of-ugliness. The nose-ringers themselves don’t think this, of course; the message they’re trying to convey is that they’re dangerous nonconformist rebels. But see above — Orlov’s intended message was “communism rules;” the thought that picture actually invokes is along the lines of “I wonder who the Kommissar will shoot first if their flower baskets don’t meet the targets of the Five Year Plan.”

Now, take Herr Sturmbannführer** up there. That’s a serious, dangerous-looking man, and not just because he’s got an Iron Cross and two lightning bolts on his collar. He’d still be a panty-dropper even if he were dressed like your typical dude-bro goober. You see where I’m going with this….

The medium is the message. I don’t care what Trigglypuff has to say. She may have all the facts, data, and logic in the world — I know, I know, but let’s stipulate — and I’m still not going to listen, because she looks like Trigglypuff. Meanwhile, Herr Sturmbannführer impresses me despite myself. I know what he’s about — one does not rise to high rank in the Waffen-SS without committing a few war crimes — but I can’t help it, I’m curious. How does a man like this believe something like that?

We need to use this! Our message is right; our look should be tight. We can’t all look like panzer commanders, but we don’t have to — SJWs are such deliberately grotesque slobs, all we have to do is dress like we respect ourselves. Watch our language and habits — don’t get drunk in public, don’t walk around munching on a greasy hamburger, don’t cuss, and for pete’s sake never wear flip flops, tank tops, or sportsball jerseys.

Meanwhile, the standard rebuttal to any and all Leftist hyperventilating on Twitter, Facebook, whatever should be nothing more than: Posting a picture of the hyperventilator. Your Ace of Spades types, for instance, spend lots of hours online arguing with Matt Yglesias types. This is Matt Yglesias:

’nuff said. The medium is the message.

*The author of that piece, David Thompson, has an excellent blog.

** Yes, I looked it up. This is, after all, the Internet — I don’t want to get 45 comments from people who can’t see the point because I accidentally called that guy a lieutenant colonel or something.

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The Hard Truths

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Since I just don’t have the time to put together a Friday Book Club — sorry — maybe we can all kick in on this: A list of the hard truths.

I don’t mean stuff like “Blacks commit way disproportionately more crime” or “the 19th Amendment was a big mistake.” While those are true enough, they’re also common knowledge — why do you think the PTB go to such great lengths to suppress any mention of them? For “hard truths” I mean things that we ourselves — the students of History, the “conservatives,” the saturnine — have a hard time looking at straight on, and indeed try very hard to forget. Stuff like this:

Humans can’t handle abundance. One of my favorite “jokes” is that I’m the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. By which I mean: If you grant that we humans are, in fact, great apes — that we share 96% of our DNA with chimps — then 96% of our behavior follows. Any group of humans will invariably behave like an equivalent-sized group of monkeys, because we are monkeys.

Monkeys, like all lower animals, are hardwired for life on the ragged edge of survival. Malthus got it right, back in the 18th century – a given population will always expand to the limits of its food supply, and that explains the behavior of both the population and its individual members. Dogs, for example, will breed any time there’s a female in heat, the males fighting it out among themselves for access. Dogs will eat until they vomit, then go back and eat the vomit.

Humans work the same way. But there’s one crucial difference — while every other population has hard limits on its food supply, ours is effectively limitless. Ask any overweight person (these days, that’s pretty much all of us) who has ever seriously tried a calorie reduction diet. It’s almost impossible, and not just because our foods are packed with high-calorie, glucose-spiking artificial crap like corn syrup. Even if you go all natural, you find yourself overeating, because we have 24/7/365 access to all kinds of perfectly natural products that don’t suit us, and screw us up. Yeah yeah, it’s “healthy,” “natural” food… but do you know how much sugar is in a cup of strawberries?

This isn’t some kind of Paleo diet manifesto. I don’t care what you eat (and I myself am not the paragon of optimized nutrition). I’m trying to point out that abundance is pathological in itself. Because we’re just monkeys, our systems follow a kind of nutritional Say’s Law — supply creates its own demand, such that we give ourselves diabetes eating nothing but “natural” fruits from climates we’re not genetically adapted to.

And it’s not just our food. Our environment, too, is far too secure for our firmware. We’re wired for threat detection. So wired, in fact, that city dwellers who go camping often freak themselves out in the quiet of the forest — did that bush just move?!? Your threat-detection hardware can’t be shut off, so when you take away the constant barrage of stimulus in the city, you actually start to hallucinate threats.

In other words, the abundance of our environment has screwed up our eustress. “Eustress” is beneficial stress, the kind that makes you stronger, and it applies to everything in your body. Lifting weights is eustress on your muscles; solving math problems is eustress for your mind. Everything about our biological life is designed around maximizing eustress — change your material conditions, and your body (and mind!) will adapt. Humans are amazingly hard to kill — even in concentration camps, the numerical majority of those not killed outright by the guards survived to tell the tale.

That adaptability, too, is hardwired. We can’t shut off our eustress-maximization mechanism — “life force,” “will to power,” whatever you choose to call it — any more than we can consciously, voluntarily shut off our hearts. If there’s no stress available in our environment to eustress against, we’ll make some…

…and that’s modern life right there. Again, look at the Kavanaugh circus. The only thing wrong with those people is that they’re bored. Feminism didn’t exist in the 19th century, simply — and it really is this simple — because sex often resulted in conception, and conception opened up the very real risk of painful death. Add infant mortality to the mix — a 1 in 2 chance your child will die before the age of five concentrates the mind wonderfully — and you’ve got all the stress, eu- and the other kind, that anyone could ever need. Only barren spinsters from rich families could afford to worry about politics back then; now we’re all barren spinsters.

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Permanent Revolution

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By the (self-chosen) end of his life, the late great David Stove, one of the fiercest defenders free thought ever had, was arguing in all sincerity that expressing what he called “the equality opinion” should be a death penalty offense. Admit that “society” will always be “unjust” so long as one person has more than another, and the whole catalog of totalitarian horrors follows, by necessity, as surely as ice follows from water and freezing temperatures. He mostly meant “equality” in the material sense (this was c.1991), but even then the Left was making the Harrison Bergeron implications obvious — more looks, more brains, more talent, more drive, more self control, whatever it is, we shall never have Social Justice while anyone has more.

He was right. A Stove-ian look at the history of philosophy forces one conclusion: The whole of Western social thought, stem to stern, top to bottom, is an attempt to change Envy from a vice to a virtue. (This includes theology). And the reason for it is simple: Philosophers have less. Less looks, less self control, less money, less power, and often less brains and drive, too, and they damn well know it. The only thing they have more of is talk.

Up to about 1500 or so, this didn’t matter, since nobody who had more ever listened to philosophers. But by 1500 or so, European society was prosperous enough that lots of people had more, such that it was obvious that having more is not due to God’s special favor (which used to mean “blue blood”), but is largely chance. As the now unjustifiably obscure philosopher Rodericus Stewartus once said, “Some guys have all the luck,” and instead of taking that as proof of God’s special favor like the bluebloods did, your Martin Luthers and John Calvins …

…well, ok, they took it as proof of God’s special favor, too, but they also — in a leap of “logic” that makes sense only to them and modern-day Leftists — concluded that God’s special favor can be purchased by saying the right things. How do you know you’re among the Elect? By having more… then feeling the overwhelming urge to lecture everyone about how sinful having more is (see the famous Codex Murus for examples).

But the philosophers still aren’t satisfied, because while the guys who listen to them have more, all right — that part of the doctrine’s rock solid — they themselves still have less. And that doesn’t follow, because not only do they say the right things, they’re the ones telling everyone else what to say! But when you point that out to the guys who have more — those Puritan merchants who just bought Manhattan for a handful of beads, for instance — they tell you to go get a job, parchment breath.

I’m sure y’all have noticed the inverse relationship between material prosperity and intellectual rigor, so fast forward a few generations. Now it seems that “having more” is actually the default condition of mankind. And yet, the philosophers still have less. Which can only mean: There is an active conspiracy against the philosophers. It’s the ____’s fault we don’t have more. Fill in the blank with whatever you like: Jews, Capitalists, Aristocrats, Designated Hitters, it’s all the same, only the names have changed.

And now we come to the heart of the problem: Material prosperity produces these people, in the same way Stove says “the equality opinion” produces secret police and slave labor camps. Indeed, it’s the exact same process, because the idea of The ___ Conspiracy simply is “the equality opinion.” One’s expressed intellectually, the other emotionally, but it’s the same thing. Objective considerations of emergent historical phenomena compel us to conclude, comrades, that first we must kill all the Kulaks, and then we shall have Utopia.

The only social policy question, then, is: What to do with these people? A certain level of material prosperity will produce them. It’ nature’s way of keeping the balance — just as a predator or a pathogen always evolves to kill off an over-abundant grazer, so human over-abundance results in an intellectual pathogen to keep us from amusing ourselves to death.

That’s what college was for, back in the days — a containment room for intellectual pathogens. When Harvard was just a four-year sleepaway camp for the sons of privilege, letting them sow their wild oats before joining the family firm on Wall Street, it didn’t matter that all Junior’s professors were moron Marxists. That was probably still the case into the early 90s, when everyone understood what “middle class values” meant — deconstruction and the like are fun to play around with over a few bong hits, but they’re useless out in the ‘burbs, so it doesn’t matter that all the “English” classes at Big State only study Derrida and Zambezi war chants.

The professors got to think of themselves as “revolutionaries,” and we agreed to let them, with our fingers crossed behind our backs — yeah yeah, “revolution,” but only in the sense of spinning around and around and around, constantly chasing your head up your own ass, going nowhere.

But just as material abundance and intellectual rigor vary inversely, so prosperity and pathology vary directly. Now everyone goes to college, and people really believe this shit. For proof I give you the Kavanaugh hearings. That’s a freshman “diversity” seminar, comrades, at any college in the land. And now we’re on the brink of civil war, though everyone with the power to stop it is too flabby and coddled and stupid to realize it.

What’s to be done with these people, should we ever decide to give things like “indoor plumbing” and “living past 35” another go? David Stove said we should shoot ’em all on sight. I’m really hoping someone has a better idea….

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Rage III: The Dying of the Light

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The most important is also the shortest, because by this point you either agree or disagree.

The Cat Fanciers had an ideology. It’s not hard to find. They had a philosophy, too. Nobody’s ever heard of Giovanni Gentile, and you might want to ask yourself why not, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, there was enough intellectual heft behind Cat Fancy that even serious, heavyweight people could buy into it, in full public view. The Black Cat Militia — the fanciest Cat Fanciers of all — was full of professors, doctors, lawyers, industrialists; far from mindless thugs, they were better educated than average, with better degrees (up to and including PhDs in real subjects) the higher up the ranks one went.

[If it helps, think of how many serious, heavyweight people were in the Freemasons, well into the 20th century. Did they believe all the ooga-booga stuff about Masonic ritual extending back to the time of the Pharaohs? Of course not, but they took the ritual aspects seriously, because whatever else it was (and is), Freemasonry is a brotherhood. Brotherhoods depend on ritual. So did your average obersturmbannfuhrer really believe all that junk about World Ice Theory, Atlantis, the power of Norse runes, etc.? I really doubt it. But the “brotherhood” part? Oh yes; to the bitter end].

What really held them together, though, was an aesthetic. A vision. The only reason the Cat Fanciers’ techno-anarcho-retro-futurism seems weird to us is the same reason nobody’s heard of Giovanni Gentile (or Ishiwara Kanji and the kokutai): They lost the war. It’s no weirder than Karl Marx’s techno-anarcho-retro-futurism, and the only reason “Marxist” isn’t a swear word right now is because the same professors and media figures who were so hot and bothered for Cat Fancy (esp. the Italian variant) switched sides once it became obvious how the war was going to turn out. Stalin’s crimes dwarf Mustache Guy’s by an order of magnitude (and Mao has Uncle Joe beat by a country mile), but wild horses still couldn’t drag an admission out of most “educated” people that mass murder is a feature, not a bug, in the ideology.

For a modern techno-anarcho-retro-futuro thing, I suggest mythologizing the Fifites (already mostly done, I realize), combined with end-of-the-Empire conservationist paranoia:

The light really is dying, comrades, all over the former West. The glories of belief, of science, of the very concepts “logic” and “reason,” are being pushed back into darkness, not just by the Marching Morons, but by smart people who owe everything in their lives to Western Civ. These “people” — decadent and corrupt enough to make an Ottoman pasha blush — would rather see the whole world burn than endure the tedium of their sheltered, cossetted little lives one second longer.

Resist them, or die in a nuclear fire. Why on earth do you think they’re so desperate to arm the Iranian mullahs? It serves no geostrategic purpose. It’s guaranteed to destabilize the region, and that, comrades, is the entire point. If they can’t goad us into a war with Russia over Syria, then give nukes to the mullahs. They’ll use them — you know it, I know it, Obama and Hillary and Soros and John Kerry and John McCain and every faceless bureaucrat at the EU knows it. Bibi Netanyahu certainly knows it, which is why they’ll strike first, and the SJWs can crow about it for the 59.3 seconds it’ll take between that and the arrival of Russian / Chinese ICBMs in our skies. They’ll die, too, but at least they’ll die smug — to the SJW, that’s ultimate victory.

Rage, comrades, rage against the dying of the light. If you can’t fight — and not all of us can — preserve. Be an Irish monk in the Dark Ages, hoarding up humanity’s precious inheritance against the possibility, however remote, that we might crawl out of the caves again. But if you can, fight! The human race depends on it.*

*obviously this is my thought experiment example of how such a mythology might be created. I advocate nothing. All of this is strictly hypothetical.

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Rage Part II: Mythology

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In addition to the camaraderie of the Front, the Cat Fanciers had another great movement builder: Mythology. Forget (((you-know-who))), for the same reason we’re calling the folks under discussion the “Cat Fanciers:” Naming names just clouds people’s minds. Let’s stipulate, for the rest of the series, that (((you-know-who))) are irrelevant. It’s not just possible, but really easy, to construct the Cat Fanciers’ basic movement-building technique without any reference to them. Here goes:

Regardless of whose hand moved the knife, the stab-in-the-back seemed very real at the time. Most veterans took it for granted that international finance capital — which for the majority was NOT synonymous with (((you-know-who))) — was behind both the start and the end of the war (Lenin agreed, which is one of the many reasons so many veterans went Red after the war). It wasn’t true — nothing in human affairs is that simple — but it’s an easy-to-understand explanation that meshes with a lot of the obvious facts on the ground.

I trust I don’t have to spell out how “the fat cats sold us out!” applies to our current situation.

On its own, something like the stab-in-the-back is a necessary but not sufficient condition for building a revolutionary movement, because it doesn’t suggest anything to replace the fat cats. This is why Bakunin-style anarchist movements always fail — they’re great with the “first, we kill all the ____” part, but they’ve got nothing for “and then we shall have Utopia, in which ____.” It’s the same problem all those chiliastic sects had back in the Middle Ages — they filled in the blank with “Jesus returns and the world ends.” People are stupid about utopian fantasies — cf. Socialism’s current appeal, 100+ million corpses notwithstanding — but it’s got to be small-u.*

What you need is a kind of two-way myth. You have to mythologize both the past and the future, such that both are really just two sides of the same myth. That’s why Karl Marx’s rare pronouncements about what the Communist future would look like invariably invoked an idealized past. Rousseau gets my vote for The Original Commie, if only because he expressed it best:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Marx devoted umpteen pages to “proving” that all of human history was just a run-up to the industrial revolution, which was the precursor of Communism, which was really just a return to Rousseau’s eden. It sounded all precise and scientific — Leftists have claimed to have a monopoly on Science for going on 300 years now — but it was really just a prelapsarian fantasy.

So, too, with the Cat Fanciers. They, too, fucking loved science, but only in the service of a higher Romanticism. Their vision of a Cat Fancy future was a series of all-but-medieval market towns, linked by autobahns and defended by peasant farmers with air support. No, really — that’s what the Black Cat Militia was expressly designed to do. Lenin said Communism is “soviet power plus electrification.” Mustache Guy wasn’t that pithy, but “feudalism plus autobahns” is a pretty good summary of their weird futuro-retro-techno thing.

Here’s how it works:

Part III soon.

Lenin didn’t really have an answer either, of course, for what goes in the second blank; Mustache Guy didn’t either, for that matter. But they had big huge books that sure seemed* to be offering an answer, and that was enough.

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Movement Building 101

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I am not a revolutionary. I am not a counterintelligence agent (although that’s just what a COINTELPRO bastard would say, isn’t it?). Unlike so, so many folks in Our Thing, I am not a 37th-level ninja paladin who got thrown out of the Green Berets for being too much of a badass. I’m just a guy who reads History. Meaning: all of this stuff is undoubtedly covered in Chapter 1 of some basic counterinsurgency manual somewhere, because it’s obvious. Still, until such time as someone forwards me that manual, this will have to do.

Think of “direct action” — entirely legal, completely aboveboard direct action, I hasten to add — like a multiplayer video game. I don’t play them myself, since I don’t feel the need to get called a “n00b fag” by some 12 year old in Singapore, but we all know the basics. You need organization, communication, and mission.

Organization is the trickiest part in the real world. Your Dungeons and Dragons-type role playing games work because everyone who starts the game already knows the rules. The graphics have gotten a lot more sophisticated since then, but the basic setup hasn’t changed since Gauntlet. You need a Warrior, a Wizard, a Valkyrie, and and Elf (and Elf, of course, needs food badly). Each has his advantages and disadvantages, and they balance…

In the real world, of course, there’s no way of telling who’s what among a given batch of recruits, and you have to work with the material you have. This is why armies have ranks. More to the point, this is why the geniuses behind modern RPGs added ranks to their games. You may not know who MurderDeathLord69 is in real life, but you know he’s a 39th-level paladin… and you know exactly what that is, because the objective standards are easily accessible. It’s possible to game the game a little bit — maybe he racked up all those kills playing on the easiest difficulty setting or something — but not much.

Best of all, not only does a rank system indicate levels of relative competence, it’s ruthlessly self-regulating. We’re guys; we compete. Put a game, any game, in front of a group of guys and they’ll immediately start choking each other out. Everyone with less kills than him is gunning for MurderDeathLord69’s ass just on general principles. Our Thing’s Direct Action Group will need — in addition to a much better moniker — a rank system, the more elaborate the better.

It’s certainly possible to create this kind of thing from scratch. The SS went from seven or eight clowns in skullcaps and lederhosen to de facto rulers of half of Europe in 20 years; the Bolsheviks were a recently formed splinter party when they took over the Russian Empire. But it’s not necessary. There’s a gamer-type group out there that has almost everything already in place: The “Pickup Artists.” “Neomasculinity” appears to be a lot of things, not all of them entirely coherent, but tell me this isn’t a political goon squad* waiting to happen:

weightlifting and fitness
individual responsibility
hard work ethic
lifestyle optimization

etc. Give them a rank system based on something other than “notch count” and you’re all but set…

….provided you have decent communication. Roosh V, the dean of “neomasculinity,” famously had his “meetups” disrupted due to “safety concerns,” meaning that the cops would probably arrest his guys if they tried to defend themselves against Leftist provocation. Which wouldn’t have happened if Roosh had had better operational security, but again, he’s not a KGB mastermind; he’s just a guy who wants to sell books about how to get laid.** He tried being aboveboard about things, believing — with almost comic naivete — that “free speech” really means “free speech.” A Direct Action Group, obviously, wouldn’t make that mistake.

The best way to communicate is through obvious, but plausibly deniable, code. I keep suggesting the white Patriots’ hat as an unofficial uniform, because it’s the best thing I could think of on short notice. It would be easy to use hat pins as rank markers — a shamrock is a “cell leader 3rd class” or something. The “Pickup Artist” forums already have the stuff in place for long-distance communication; you just have to come up with some esoteric lingo (the #1 PUA skill, far more advanced than stuff like “actually meeting girls”). You could communicate in what passes for “clear” on a board like that — nobody would know that “I kiss-closed an HB8 with my sick DHV, brah” actually means “we’re boycotting the local Starbucks; look for the guy in the white hat with the shamrock pin.”

Speaking of boycotts, mission is the final frontier. Video games have the mission built in, complete with victory conditions. Movement-building needs short and long game; side quests within the main mission. As Style B revolutionaries (see what I mean about the esoteric lingo?), we can put the long game almost entirely on the back burner: We know what “American” means, so we don’t have to come up with elaborate theoretical productions to justify “getting back to The Real America.” We do have to have a long-range goal, of course, but that’s another post…

The short game is what counts, and this is where the nerdy nature of Our Thing is a yuuuuuge advantage. Leftism is incredibly fragile, and its weakest where the Left has the most control. Getting the one auto mechanic in a college town to develop mysterious supply problems whenever a professor’s car is in the shop would drive most of the eggheads to tears in short order.*** Remember, these are people who need to flee to their “safe spaces” whenever someone calls them by the wrong pronoun. There are a million little things — completely legal things — that will drive them to screaming hysterics. See e.g. “Manosphere” blogger Matt Forney inducing crying meltdowns in Millennial feminists just by retweeting their own abuse of him.

Break the Direct Action Thing into small cells. I suggested the Fight Club model once, and that works — a few guys, decentralized, with full plausible deniability, each doing its own little Project Mayhem thing on targets of opportunity. Such higher-level mission coordination as is needed can be done on the “Game” sites, disguised as MurderDeathLord69 talking to his World of Warcraft squad about hitting da club for a little pickup action. So long as the Project Mayhem cells don’t overlap — and if everyone’s wearing his white Pats hat, with the proper pins, they shouldn’t — it’s all good.

not an insult. Any successful revolutionary movement depends on its street-level headbusters, and while I do not advocate actually “busting heads” in any but the most metaphorical sense, our Direct Action Group would function much like the “goon” used to back when hockey was fun: You know he can* drop the gloves, but if he’s doing his job right, he never needs to.

** Poetic license. It may not be obvious here, but I respect Roosh a good deal (though I have never met the man, or even interacted with him online). I obviously don’t share a lot of his views, but he’s built one hell of a movement out of nothing.

***getting the mechanic on our side will be a snap; the “town/gown” split is very real, and trust me, the “townies” fucking hate the eggheads — almost as much as the eggheads hate them, for their NASCAR-watchin’, nuclear family-havin’ ways.

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A Brief History of (Liberal) Time

The obvious, fascinating question this raises: If we know* that Policy X takes Y number of years to mature — as we must, since every Liberal assures us that it’s all Obama’s doing — then why don’t they simply enact these wonderful policies to benefit themselves? Why leave Trump the “legacy” of a great economy, instead of simply having a great economy yourself? I guess Liberals are right — their greatest weakness is that they just care too much. They’re so concerned about helping Donald Trump feel better about himself that they’ll take five or six straight “recovery summers” on the chin, just to leave him a “legacy.”

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2 Legit

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You can reduce every single political problem the West is currently experiencing to one word: Legitimacy. By what right do our rulers rule us, and who counts as “us”? Every successful political movement has an answer.

Yes, even the Left. They may not remember it themselves — they don’t read much that isn’t Harry Potter, and for them History begins anew each dawn — but even the “everything is a social construction” crowd once thought this through. They concluded that, though races, nations, borders, etc. are of course “social constructions,” we’re all members of the Proletariat — or, at least, we will be, when we’ve killed all the class enemies — and so the government of the “vanguard of the Proletariat” (i.e. them) is legitimate.

It’s not the most elegant argument to have graced the pages of a political science text, but when your whole family gets shipped to Siberia for disagreeing with it, it’s remarkably persuasive.

The Human Biodiversity (HBD) crowd, on the other hand, hasn’t thought this all the way through. If they — we, I guess, though with more asterisks than MLB home run records — want to be more than just a bunch of internet gadflies, they’ll have to resolve the fundamental contradiction between HBD and democracy.

Social contract theory — by which representative governments become “representative,” hence legitimate — presumes rough parity between the contracting parties. It’s the basis of citizenship. Have you ever wondered just why America opened her borders in the 19th century? Vox Day et al like to bang on about the Naturalization Act of 1790 and its “free white” requirement, but Congress could have limited immigration in any way it chose — not just by race, but by country of origin, skills, literacy, whatever. Instead, the naturalization acts specify “loyalty to the principles of the Constitution.”

The United States was, indeed, a “proposition nation” — the proposition in question being “the validity of the social contract.” The 1802 act (which keeps the “free white” provision) makes this clear: Renounce your previous allegiance (including titles of nobility), be of good moral character, be loyal to the principles of the Constitution, and you’re in. If all men are indeed created equal (= “equal enough to legitimately sign the social contract”), then it follows that anyone who renounces his previous allegiance and swears to abide by Constitutional principles is legitimately an American. It’s the closest thing to literally signing a social contract a 19th century government could administer.

But again: A legit contract absolutely requires rough parity between the contracting parties. We don’t let four year olds sign binding legal contracts because they don’t have the mental equipment to understand what they’re signing. Signing on to “the principles of the Constitution” was pretty basic until after the Civil War, because back then the only interaction most folks had with the Federal government was at the post office. That’s why the 1862 Homestead Act, for instance, came with citizenship attached — declare your intention of becoming a citizen, and 160 acres in the West was yours for the taking. Subsistence farmers on the frontier are equal, or equal enough, when communities arise organically and the only permanent government official is the town postmaster.

Modern life, needless to say, is a bit more complex than that. As you know, we all inadvertently commit three felonies a day. Who can say what “the principles of the Constitution” even are anymore? Hell, can most people even pass a basic civics exam? Is this thing graded on a curve?

So much for re-signing the social contract, eh?

And falling back on the “representative” part of “representative government” won’t do, because the hardline HBD folks have been quite clear about this: There is an absolute cutoff between “competent” and “not competent.” IQ is destiny, remember? Read the comments on any “alt-Right” site — Blacks, you’ll be told, are inveterate criminals because the average Black IQ is 85. If the nice white high IQ readers of the Wall Street Journal (3rd link above) commit three felonies a day, what hope do ghetto dwellers have? Any “representative” of the “Black community” — which has been a real, untouchable, national thing for going on a century now — will, by definition, only represent his/her group… which is below the participatory threshold.

Right there you’ve just disenfranchised 13% of the population. But it gets worse, because the number 100 gets thrown around a lot on HBD sites. 100 is, supposedly, the average national IQ needed to maintain an advanced postindustrial society like ours. Surely I don’t have to tell y’all what average means. So now you’ve disenfranchised 50% of the population, and you still haven’t addressed the three felonies a day we 100+ IQ brainiacs are committing….

I think we all — Left and Right, cat people and dog people, Crips and Bloods, Team Edward and Team Jacob, Hufflepuff and Slitherin — can agree that any government that only represents at best 49% of those under its jurisdiction is not legitimate in any modern sense. (For further examples, see the EU, the unelected unaccountable nobodies who are responsible for the European version of this mess). By what right, then, do the rulers rule?

I’ve got an answer for you, but you’re not gonna like it.

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Friday Quick Take: Saving America with Old Photos

7 Replies

Chateau Heartiste has a brilliant suggestion. Saving America might be as simple as showing Americans old photos.

This is the world we had:

This is the world we have:

How did we get here? And which one would you rather live in?

I’ve written about this before, at greater length. Aesthetics is a seriously underrated part of politics. Fascism was appealing at the polls in no small part because it looked cool and menacing. Consider this

versus this:

Himmler is a doofy-looking guy no matter what he’s wearing (which is why I picked him for the illustration), but a doofy-looking guy in that uniform is extra-terrifying — especially if you’re better-looking, or more popular than he was in high school.

It works the other way, too:

North Korea is a nuclear-armed state with perhaps the largest per-capita army in the world, but we simply can’t take them seriously because of stuff like this.

Aesthetics matter. “Pepe the Frog” was effective counter-propaganda because it was instantly recognizable — and because the Left lost their shit so hyperbolically — but a real movement needs to have counter-propaganda that’s both effective and appealing. Fortunately, the Left has made it easy for us. Take those pictures from the Fifties, caption them “it’s OK to be white,” and plaster them all over social media, then sit back and watch the fun. Don’t reply, don’t engage in any way… until the furor subsides a bit. Then ask them just why everyone is freaking out. Their responses — complete with pictures of the commenters — is all the counter-propaganda you’ll ever need.

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The Right to Flip Off the President

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In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post by about “her right to flip off president” by one Juli Briskman who was photographed doing just that and got fired by some company called “Akima”, she concludes thusly (sounds deep, but it’s not):

“Let’s call this “autocratic capture.” Autocratic capture is not new to the world, but it is new to this country, and it is up to all of us to keep it from taking root. Our democracy depends on it. As James Madison warned in the early days of the United States, the “value and efficacy” of free elections “depends” on Americans’ “equal freedom” to examine the “merits and demerits of the candidates.”But if Americans can keep their jobs only when they refrain from criticizing the president, then that freedom is lost. And once the freedom to speak is lost, then the rest of our constitutional rights will not be far behind.”

Wrong, lady. You already have a right to flip off the president. The president isn’t retaliating against you. The government isn’t retaliating against you. And your employer has a right to hold you to certain standards of behavior to remain in its employ (I know this is a opinion that’s increasingly frowned upon, but that’s the way it ought to be.)

Now, you weren’t fired for “criticizing” the president. Flipping someone off isn’t criticism. “Criticiizing” involves pointing out where you differ in opinion with someone and providing an argument supporting your position over theirs.

Flipping someone off is just rude, especially in public. You weren’t “examining the merits and demerits of a candidate”.

An employer has the right to look at that behavior and say, “hmmm, if people know she’s one of my employees and she’s this rude in public and millions of people find out, that reflects poorly on my company. I don’t hire rude people. I hire well-adjusted adults. I don’t need this.” Which is why the company had the policy you violated in the first place.

Your right to free speech does not protect you from the social consequences of that speech. It just means *the government* can’t do anything about it. That is the extent of your constitutional(ly protected) right.

Now that right is increasingly put in danger, but not from the direction you think it is. “Hate Speech” laws, which people are attempting to morph into “Compelled Speech” laws — that’s where the real danger is. And regardless of what you think of the rest of his politics, that is not coming from the President.

Since you brought up James Madison, yes, he would agree you can’t be fined or put in jail for flipping the president off. But he would not agree your employer couldn’t terminate you over it. In fact, I suspect he himself would have terminated you over it. People didn’t tolerate public rudeness very well back then, and that was not a bad thing, IMHO.

Here’s a thought question… flipping someone off is a sign of disrespect. Perhaps the ultimate sign of disrespect. And I, at least, think everyone (including you) has the right to show disrespect for people they don’t like. That being said .. isn’t that “hate speech”?

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Rotten Chestnuts

Because Life Is Not A Bumper Sticker

Category Archives: “H8”

The Medium is the Message

*The author of that piece, David Thompson, has an excellent blog.

** Yes, I looked it up. This is, after all, the Internet — I don’t want to get 45 comments from people who can’t see the point because I accidentally called that guy a lieutenant colonel or something.

The Hard Truths

Permanent Revolution

Rage III: The Dying of the Light

*obviously this is my thought experiment example of how such a mythology might be created. I advocate nothing. All of this is strictly hypothetical.

Rage Part II: Mythology

Lenin didn’t really have an answer either, of course, for what goes in the second blank; Mustache Guy didn’t either, for that matter. But they had big huge books that sure seemed* to be offering an answer, and that was enough.

Movement Building 101

** Poetic license. It may not be obvious here, but I respect Roosh a good deal (though I have never met the man, or even interacted with him online). I obviously don’t share a lot of his views, but he’s built one hell of a movement out of nothing.

***getting the mechanic on our side will be a snap; the “town/gown” split is very real, and trust me, the “townies” fucking hate the eggheads — almost as much as the eggheads hate them, for their NASCAR-watchin’, nuclear family-havin’ ways.

A Brief History of (Liberal) Time

2 Legit

Friday Quick Take: Saving America with Old Photos

The Right to Flip Off the President

*The author of that piece, David Thompson, has an excellent blog.

** Yes, I looked it up. This is, after all, the Internet — I don’t want to get 45 comments from people who can’t see the point because I accidentally called that guy a lieutenant colonel or something.

*obviously this is my thought experiment example of how such a mythology might be created. I advocate nothing. All of this is strictly hypothetical.

*Lenin didn’t really have an answer either, of course, for what goes in the second blank; Mustache Guy didn’t either, for that matter. But they had big huge books that sure seemed to be offering an answer, and that was enough.

** Poetic license. It may not be obvious here, but I respect Roosh a good deal (though I have never met the man, or even interacted with him online). I obviously don’t share a lot of his views, but he’s built one hell of a movement out of nothing.

***getting the mechanic on our side will be a snap; the “town/gown” split is very real, and trust me, the “townies” fucking hate the eggheads — almost as much as the eggheads hate them, for their NASCAR-watchin’, nuclear family-havin’ ways.

Lenin didn’t really have an answer either, of course, for what goes in the second blank; Mustache Guy didn’t either, for that matter. But they had big huge books that sure seemed* to be offering an answer, and that was enough.