251 thoughts on “Parallels And Precedents”

1. Simplistic stuff. Events do not take place in a vacuum.

2. We started with the decadence of Rome, are currently in the eat their own stage of France, and quickly headed into The Spanish Civil War with so many sides you couldn’t keep track…

3. For those who want to draw parallels (and differences) this is what I see:

   *Rome — unlike the late Empire in the West, we do not rely on foreigners in any real way for military power, that remains in Spec Ops, Artillery, Armor, Air Force, Marines, Intel, and pretty much every and anything directly combat related, overwhelmingly White. Support and non-essential people are mostly non-Whites. And unlike the Empire in the West, the Praetorian Guard (FBI/CIA) are fanatically loyal to a faction not a man. And unlike the Empire, the invading barbarians are very distinct by race and ethnicity and are completely incompatible with our ways. And unlike the Roman Empire in the West, we don’t have broadly appealing entertainment but rather ever more sub-culture and targeted stuff: blacks only, gays only, Lifetime etc. And unlike the Roman Empire our food and (potentially energy in coal) resources remain extremely impressive if not dominant and within our own borders.

   *Weimar — unlike then our security services, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, media, etc. are completely and totally on the side of Cultural or otherwise Marxism. In Weimar, people like Walter Rathenau*, who organized industry for the Kaiser rather effectively were assassinated and their killers never arrested by police broadly sympathetic to their actions, nor prosecuted by prosecutors who were the same, nor convicted by judges who felt the same. These were basically the Kaiser’s men who had been appointed and hired during the Wilhemine rule, and viewed the new system as radical and illegitimate.

   *Rathenau organized and got signed the Treaty of Rapallo which got peace with the Soviets (already re-arming Germany in secret). Even the German General Staff could not protect him from radicals in various secret societies and that went on up and down the German hierarchy as near anarchy prevailed in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat and surrender.

   *Athens — In creating the Delian League, Athens siphoned off money from conquered/subdued city-states. In creating NATO, and other security organizations, the US propped up bankrupt and ineffective nations with American defense and money and people. Without NATO or really US troops Putin can roll west all the way to the Channel, and maybe beyond, as none of the European nations have a military or people or the willingness to spend money.

   *The Soviet Union — the collapse in the 1980s was due to the crash in oil prices driven by the Saudis exhorted by Reagan to deliberately bankrupt the Soviet Regime which relied upon oil for hard currency to buy food and other items it could not always produce. By the time of the Coup in Dec 1991 the Army had not been paid for three years and the KGB a full year. By contrast the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, and we are not anywhere near the military or security services not being paid. [Caveat, if inflation is left unchecked by interest rate rises then the payments to both will be in effect cut dramatically every month and year]. Moreover by 1991 no one believed or defended the Soviet System, while now we have ALL of the elites and most: non-Whites, gays, White women, etc. who passionately believe in the system, genetic evil of White (men) and the hereditary blood guilt of White (men).

   If you asked me for a broad prediction, I’d say Rwanda 1994, Indonesia 1965, Jonestown 1978, Heaven’s Gate 1997, coupled with Pearl Harbor 1941 and France May 1940. With a heaping helping of October 1929 and probably something worse. Biden and Harris seem to be auditioning for the part of Marshall Applewhite and Rev. Jim Jones combined.

   • What, no Habsburgs or Ottomans, who both chose to self destruct in 1914 and 1915, and were finally buried in 1918?

   • It’s not on the scale of the USSR’s pay problems, but there have been recent reporrs of US Navy sailors having their pay delayed enough to prompt them to take out loans:

     https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2021/11/21/report-navy-pay-delays-causing-some-sailors-rely-loans/

4. I can’t read the Anton article as it is behind a paywall. That being said I will agree broadly that this is unprecedented. With a mixture of nearly all collapses mixed.

   First is the mass migration of the non White Third World into the White First World (and even the White Second). This is different, it has not happened in this mass at this level on every White society and culture on Earth.

   Second is the level of complexity that our society which is GLOBAL depends upon. We rely on fossil fuels to transport goods from cheap Chinese labor (no longer so cheap btw) all across the Globe, to Europe, Latin America, Oceania, and North America. This requires an enormous level of both money and manpower with an additional heaping of highly skilled labor just to keep the entire set of machinery running which includes fossil fuel. Cargo ships don’t run on solar power nor windmills. The same can be said for sewage, power, and transport/supply systems which places like NYC, Mexico City, Tokyo, London, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, and other mega-cities completely rely upon. Without that skilled labor AND money and AND resources organized effectively in combination those places collapse as the 7-25 million inhabitants flee to the countryside where they are basically useless for much of anything.

   Third is the anti-civilizational attitude by the women, gays, and non-Whites who run the West and believe in magic not reality. This informs their magic morality where “caring” substitutes for anything rational. Collapse in the form of any number of ways: mass slaughter (seen in Rwanda 1994, Indonesia 1965, and Cambodia 1975) or systems collapse or nuclear war with Russia and China, all distinctly possible. We now have the elites and government demanding an end to all fossil fuel investment and the same with defense stocks while demanding the power be always on and Putin and Xi don’t just roll over their neighbors and everyone else. Its a female/non-White belief that magic voodoo morality beats reality. The anti-White male stuff when that’s the critical skilled labor is equally idiotic and killing the Golden Goose.

   • Funny, but it was open to the world until a few hours ago. My guess is the traffic from here caused them to pay wall it. Too funny.

     • Irony layered like a very large onion.

     • You making a lot of money for others, I hear. Bet it a bit exasperating.

       • You can’t take hits to the bank.

     • They are weak and they are afraid.

   • Try:

     https://archive.md/2021.11.20-141908/https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/12/unprecedented

5. “When was the last time a politician said, “we must defend our republic”?”

   That’s why we call them “Democrat” and “Republican” parties–even those neither of those appellations are descriptive.

   • whom would they say it to? grillers?

6. This unserious (former) country is so far down the rabbit hole, there’s no getting back. The only thing that seemingly matters anymore is paying fealty to various degenerate minority groups. Currently, joggers occupy the top position, but the queers, trannies, legal/illegal aliens, wamenz etc., are clamoring just below. It truly does remain to be seen if the dwindling White majority is going to wake up and save themselves – unfortunately, things as they currently stand don’t look too promising. Added to the above, covid & climate change psycho cults are two more nails in the coffin.

   • Its on a rotation

   • The Constitution has indeed proven to be a “suicide pact”…

7. “It is not a crisis of historical patterns or ideology, but rather a crisis of people. Either the people of the West want to live or not.”

   true, I’d even say it’s worse than that cause not only the people of the west face extinction, but all fair skinned high iq people share this existential dilemma. High iq Asians & russians have the same problems, not even the european muslims or the ashkenazi can shield themselves from this.

   Immigration is harmful at this point cause there’s no one smart out there worth bringing in, the reason tower of babel projects always fail is cause there’s too many sub-optimal humans(savages) on the planet.

   USA was meant to be more than the roman empire, it was the New Atlantis, Atlantis supposedly was the flagship state/region of a civilization which enveloped the whole planet, that’s exactly what usa is.

   The way I see it Usa’s decadence & collapse will far surpass rome’s, roman empire was limited in scope, america’s globalist elite taints almost all corners of the planet. Also, current civilization is much more decadent & degenerate than our forefathers, they probably lacked the imagination our current elite has, that infusion of juish blood must’ve helped.

8. Like Rome, the United States is all but doomed. I’ve given up after the last few years. I’ve seen enough. Perhaps this is premature, but I don’t think so because I’ve come to believe the country’s problems lie mostly with its population and not with its politics; one is downstream of the other, so anything we do will always face a never ending rip tide opposing reform efforts. We simply don’t have enough good people to change things or make reform stick even if we accomplish it (1994 Crime Bill then vs “defund the police” now). Voting in a new party won’t change this dynamic.

   As another poster alluded to, the United States — like ancient Rome — is not an organic country in the same since that Sweden or Japan are, places with a population descended from a progenitor group so most inhabitants share similar personalities, temperaments, culture and cognitive abilities. It’s a motley crew of diverse groups with nothing in common other than the fact that they had nothing in common with the lands they fled. And this makes consensus all but impossible post 1965 immigration. Thus, we are stuck with an endless cycle of counterproductive – even destructive – social upheavals as one side tries to impose its will, without consideration for the whole, on the other.

   American degeneracy is seen in its politics, which are now dominated by two political coalitions: the far-Left and the far-Right. Increasingly, there is no center.

   The far-Left is filled with dangerous, mentally unstable people with negative self-identities, so they are always on the look-out for new enemies. This causes an unending parade of social upheavals because they are the educated class and control society. They are crazed, racist and increasingly authoritarian. They embrace kooky economic theories that have (and will) harm the country. And unlike the far-Right, the far-Left is willing and able to use power.

   In contrast, normie conservatives (even far-Right) are much less educated, occupy blue collar jobs that confer no ability to shape the culture or the economy, they have no organizational ability or long-term planning skills, cannot for the life of them build a coalition, and they are easily deceived into acting against their self-interests or cowed into inaction because they just want to grill and get along.

   The authoritarian far-Right won’t do any better. I can already see the same kinds of people behind the Charlottesville fiasco embracing groups like the NJP and The Patriot Front – both of which have names reminiscent of neo-nazism, have prominent members associated with those beliefs and symbols, and participate in public demonstrations which only serve to discourage normal people, which I’m sure is the point. The federal government spends half a billion dollars per year on informants and agent provocateurs but you’re “grift right” for pointing that out, uh huh. The very moment any republican takes the presidency – even if they are competent and on our side — these people will return to the public square and ruin everything we attempt to accomplish with their worthless theatrics. They’ll pressure the republican into denouncing the Right, which will demoralize the base and empower true grifters, just as Charlottesville did with Donald Trump.

   >“We just gotta do something man. Are you a cuck? At least we’re doing something.”

   >Some guy: “Sure, let’s dress up and give worthless flash rallies around the country at the very moment the democrats look like they are about to lose power. Let’s name ourselves something that has ‘Front’ or ‘National’ in it – totally not scary or reminiscent of fascism in the minds of most voters — and call everyone else a grifter when they ask how we’re getting paid or remind us the Feds have previously co-opted groups just like ours, even leading them to plan criminal acts. *Cough, Michigan governor kidnapping.* I’m sure that will work, just like the hundreds of times it’s worked before. Maybe 1488 times the charm?”

   >“Now you’re talking. Let the revolution begin!”

   >Some guy: “Could you please say that again? This time state your name, home address, and social security number.”

   We could try to take back congress, but nothing would happen. Conservatives are lazy and will immediately go back into hibernation the moment they think they won while the Left will continue their march through the institutions. The far-Right will embarrass itself and be marginalized, probably devolving into neonazism again and maybe a fake machismo purity spiral of “doing something.”

   There is no solution. Either United States will devolve into a far-Left dystopia or it will collapse into smaller, more homogeneous nations where it’s possible to get something done. But maybe we’ll get lucky and the new ruler of Redstan will watch the movie Gattaca and say, “let’s do that but better.”

   • Omegatron: I think you’ve misread your purported audience, dear. The conservatard grifters who love to label ‘extreme left and right’ as equal eeeviills and use the adjective ‘rayciss’ unironically can be found in scores at other websites. Besides, you wouldn’t want to be tainted by association with nyonotseees, and those ‘blue collar . . . uneducated’ types you decry are not the best choice for building your magic moderate consensus. And surely someone of your erudition belongs among your peers, rather than here with us ol’ rubes.

     • Think I’m wrong? Prove it. Show me the successes. I can’t count any. You’re being defensive because you know I’m right.

       “I think you’ve misread your purported audience, dear.”

       Lady, the fact that you’re responding in the negative proves I know this audience quite well.

       “Besides, you wouldn’t want to be tainted by association with nyonotseees”

       I wouldn’t. Neither do most normal people. But hey, “do something man” if it makes you feel better.

       “And those blue collar.”

       Nice strawman, linking my correct criticism of neonazism tainting the far-Right’s image with the public with my correct observation that conservatives are mostly blue collar, thus have zero power in society. Both are true statements.

       • Your ignorance of American history–especially of the colonizers of this continent in the 17th century stopped my reading at that point. So spare us the teen-age style “Think I’m wrong” Prove it.” bravado. It is boring, and you are a bore. Learn some history. And learn to hold your tongue inn the presence of your betters–especially when you don’t know what you are saying.

   • Side Note: Half a billion dollars annually @ $20k per informant, what the FBI’s Michigan hoax ringleader was paid IIRC, comes out to around 25,000 informants on the federal payroll at any one time. The only way that’s a wild exaggeration is if the vast majority of that money is paid to the federal bureaucracy through salaries or if some of these informants are paid astronomical sums. Even at half that number — or even a fourth — we’re still talking about an enormous number of informants and an enormous number of federal agents seeking them out. Remember that when someone tells you “this time is different, we just gotta do something man.”

     • “American degeneracy is seen in its politics, which are now dominated by two political coalitions: the far-Left and the far-Right.” Who are the far-right that dominate? Nikki Haley? Trump?
       I just saw little white girls run over in a Christmas parade. Our elites are largely to blame for this in my estimation. You want to do math? Let try this, and please correct me if i am wrong. 80 million white men with guns that lean right. Let’s take the 3% most right of that cohort. Let’s half it to those that they feel they have a lot to lose and excluding cowards. 1.5%. ~1 million. I somewhat agree with Z’s analysis that we are not Weimar. I think a case could be made that the germans were an honorable, civilized people. I expect Americans may be less so. After all we are descended from the discontents. My point is that the situation is fluid and could quickly get out of hand. Worse that Weimar.

       • “After all we are descended from the discontents”

         The word you’re looking for is “malcontents,” but even so, your abysmal ignorance of colonial history and of those who did the colonizing is on full display. It’s 6th-grade stuff.

   • I mostly agree with you, but I would counter that the repulsiveness of the authoritarian right is more a flaw of the masses than of the authoritarian right.

     We are under invasion and every living thing that is going to survive and not be wiped out needs to have a survival instinct and the will to fight off invaders.

     It really bothers me we have to constantly debate how best we can defend our land and spaces in some nuanced way that won’t turn off everyone..

     A people who require their defending warriors to be inoffensive aren’t going to make it.

     • Nothing based on NSDAP thinking is really Right Wing unless you are a European or Jew.

       Right Wing is properly Paleo-Conservatism ,isolationist , economically nationalist , socially conservative, pro tradition and pro family .

       Leftism is always a fusion of corporate and state economics, expansionist , interventionist and opposed to family and tradition except as it serves the State

       The NSDAP thinking is state/economic fusion,. expansionist, interventionist, and opposed to tradition.

       Its sort of pro family and sort of economically nationalist with a socialist bend so its what 15% maybe 20% Right at the Start 80-85 % Left ?

       Its kind of our job to communicate rhetorically why living in Right focused society is better . We haven’t been able to do that mainly because a lot of us barely remember one and even when we lived in one up to the early 80’s we were constantly in a sea of Anti Right agitprop tearing down the social fabric and shifting us Left.

       We have to shift it back. Normally I would say this is nigh impossible but as things get harder, its becoming very possible.

       Basic easy filling of needs is becoming no longer a thing, around 1-4 to 1-3 of peak sex age guys (18-30) Pre Covid haven’t had any action in a year, I’d bet half or 3/4 don’t get any regularly, the quality of food is lower and everything is more expensive,

       Beyond that and more important, everyone hates the society we live it.Everyone even the Soc Jus crowd knows how fake and gay it all is

       If we can show folks our way would be better and make sure that hotheads, glowies and the 420 crowd (both meanings) are kept out we’ve got a shot at talking what we want.

   • Have the feds stooped to concern trolling? Unfortunately, that would be quite believable in this age of dumbassery, where even the highest echelons of the Empire are functionally retarded.

     • Yes, that’s your tax dollar at work. Bury them in bullshit and lies, worked like a charm for 100 years. Ain’t workin so good now. The rich fucks see the ice cracking, they’re starting to shit their pants. Afuckinmen.

9. This is an age without precedent because of the media and the fact that Western people’s have been under mind control/lobotomized for 50+ years. There are most for whom this spell has completely destroyed their mind, and there are some whose instincts remained intact (albeit harmed). Secession is the only feasible “positive” way forward.

   It main sound stupid, but as a little kid I watched “Diff’rent Strokes.” As a tyke, I laughed because Arnold was a midget and he said, “Whatchup talkin’ bout Willis.” But we all were imbibing the insane left wing narrative and the idea that the point of life is to root out the great white bigot.

   • Gary Coleman was martyred for you and I. poor little guy never caught a break…

   • Looking back at ’80s popular culture it becomes clear that the Three Men and A Baby… films were intended as vehicles to begin conditioning the masses to accept alternative type marriages and adoption arrangements.

     • that film trope has been around a long time. let me introduce you to Shirley Temple.

   • For years it seemed I was the only one ranting about the Smart Black/Stupid White-themed commercials that were trending on TV, and still are. I recognized it as an anti-white psyop 25 years ago, and we’re now seeing its effects in the ethnomasochism infecting our people.

     • To Sir with Love, lol. The erudite African engineer bringing civilization to England. Love the song though

10. this is a very interesting article i found, when searching for comparisons of german military traditions vs American ones:

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/09/09/an-elusive-command-philosophy-and-a-different-command-culture/

11. “Either the people of the West want to live or not. The real crisis is that there is no agreement on that answer.”
    ————————————-

    Spot on, Z. The idea of comparing present day America to Rome or Russia to me, is just so much like picking the fly chit out of the pepper. The Romans were nothing like Americans. Their Barbarians were of far better quality than ours in the present day. The Soviets are nothing like Americans either. When the old Soviet empire collapsed, it was very nearly replaced with neofeudalism, black markets, and warlords.

    Ours is entirely an issue of cultural suicide, and to my mind, that question was being asked and answered around the middle of the last century. Today the answer is obvious. Whenever our society faces a challenge, our leaders, without exception, make sure we fail with them.

    The answer of course, is similar to the ones that faced Rome and Russia as their fortunes surged and declined throughout history. The remedy to this is that we will have to either start killing Cloud People in dribs and drabs until they either get the message and do their jobs, or there are none left to kill…. or let them take us with them when they fall. After that, any cultural and sociological comparisons are just silly.

    • anything short of this is counter-productive. kill them or join them, it really is that simple (except they won’t let you join them, so it’s even simpler).

12. The subject of the Taki piece today, moral motivation for partisan fervor, ties in nicely with last Thursdays abortion discussion. I say again, give me a better moral motivator for pure partisan fervor for our side than fully embracing the pro-life movement. I am utterly unmoved by any arguments that talk about abortion being good eugenic policy. It has failed as such and if you must insist on killing off the rival Identity groups the most tried and true method is to segregate them geographically and then starve them. The geographic and political separation is part of the plan already and also just something that happens naturally anyway since the ‘others’ are so impossible to live with so we can decide about genocide later. For sure they are openly discussing it about us.
    Incorporating a fanatical anti-abortion moral position within the white identity movement /DR would add steel to its spine. To what lengths are you not justified in opposing baby killers? At what point would your movement seek compromise or accommodation with an opponent whose primary characteristic (defined by your movement) is that they are fanatical, irredeemable, enthusiastic baby killers? Every time “Nazi” is hurled across the divide “Baby Killer!” should be hurled back with even more conviction and outrage. If anyone can come up with something better I’m eager to read and discuss your arguments. It’s a proven winner that transcends politics.

    • There’s a better one on the horizon. Since the left is scraping the barrel on finding new kinds of sex perverts for whom to demand civil rights, they’re down to kiddie fiddlers. Since diddling kids doesn’t have that “it’s people’s private lives” defense that lets the camel’s nose in the tent like with sodomites and ladyboys, once the left starts insisting that we respect the sexual orientation of diddlers we have the perfect moral outrage to stand on with conviction.

      Just keep pointing out that Rittenhouse shot a child rapist, and that the celebrities eulogized that child rapist. Therefore hollywood celebrities are pro child rapist, if not child rapists themselves. Keep going until next time at Thanksgiving when aunt lefty shows up and starts lecturing everyone, the response can be “Oh yeah? So you like touching kids? Is that it?”

      • It is certainly another gift from the enemy that are moving towards embracing this further depravity but it does not supplant the central importance of baby killing. I agree we must add “Child Molester!” to “Baby Killer!” in the list of condemnations though.

        • Speaking of gifts. You catch seth and silvermans Santa inc. Lolz, comments were epic.

      • St. George held a gun to a pregnant woman’s belly as his posse burglarized her house. The scummier the villain, the more the Left transfigures him. They are a sick and depraved people.

        • The point is not to inspire shame in the shameless, the point is to instill fanatical resolve in our side.

          • That is an excellent point.

    • “give me a better moral motivator for pure partisan fervor for our side than fully embracing the pro-life movement”

      Has that worked since Roe? So what are the chances that basing your entire philosophy around abortion — a single issue — will work now? Probably you will fail while energizing the other side and sidelining far more important issues. I’m sure that’s the point. Normie conservatives are always looking for a means to avoid uncouth topics such as race.

      • a.) No where did I state the movement should base its entire philosophy around abortion. I encouraged incorporation as one of the core moral principles of a general white identity movement. How that can be construed as avoiding the race issue I cannot imagine so you’ll have to explain that further.
        b.) The anti-abortion movement has achieved far more success in the practical suppression of their political / moral opponents in the establishment than any other counter movement I can think of.
        I attribute that success to its moral absolutism and the willingness it inspires in its adherents to go to great lengths to establish practical implementation, if not legal status. There are many more places where you can’t get an abortion than where your kids won’t be exposed to critical race theory. That’s because there’s a non-zero chance there will be physical consequences if you attempt to provide abortions in those places.
        Furthermore, I don’t see any court cases coming up anytime time soon attempting to restore freedom of association for instance. The only movement with anything like the same track record of success in opposing sustained efforts by the left is the 2nd amendment movement.

        • ” The anti-abortion movement has achieved far more success … ”

          You didn’t name any of these successes, so I doubt they exist. In fact, looking at the myriad issues from gay marriage to trans, I’d say the Right has been thoroughly routed everywhere. Anyways, abortion is still legal decades after Roe, so you haven’t had any success there, either.

          “No where did I state the movement should base its entire philosophy around abortion.”

          You suggested abortion should be the prime motivator, which is basically the same thing. Abortion is ranked pretty low in most polls of voter concern, so that obviously will fail.

          • I can’t be bothered engaging in a debate about easily confirmed facts. A refusal to recognize them does not constitute an argument. Also, by definition a movement opposed to liberal democracy has little use for the results of polls, even if their accuracy could be trusted. The point of the Taki article is to shed light on the relative strength of fanaticism vs bourgeois objectivism and my point is suggest a vehicle for instilling that kind of strength and dedication. I remain eager to hear other suggestions.

13. A jewish carpenter? Unlikely.

14. Yeah. We’ve come to the point where all the studies and reasoning are done and the central question is simply whether we would like to stay alive.

    It’s a more nuanced question than people think. To will some end is to will the means to achieve it. We’ve systematically dismantled everything that makes it possible for the next generation to show up and thrive, so one might reasonably conclude that what “we” want is oblivion. Obviously, the conservatives are offering more of the same, attempting to baptize all the pathologies of the liberal democratic death cult into a patriotic ersatz alternative.

    Mitch McConnell’s first wife is a feminist scholar at Smith College.

    • It might be better to ask, given modern technology, if a tiny group of supremely arrogant people want everybody else to die before dropping dead themselves.

15. Peter Heather’s thesis in his book ‘Empires and Barbarians’ is that the Roman Empire fell because its economy was not diverse enough. It was almost entirely based on agriculture. Once it lost its breadbasket in north Africa it could no longer generate the revenue to pay its soldiers.

    The US economy is exceedingly diverse in comparison to Rome. It may just trundle on as long as the right people continue to get paid.

    • Yes, “muddle through” is the war cry of the Normie snit fit. But is that really any way to live one’s life as the cuck’s cuck. I’d rather die with my boots on, thank you very much.

    • uh, the roman economy was based on taxation and tribute. once it bled the empire dry, the entire thing collapsed. people no like workey no money.

    • Peter Heather’s book is historical revisionism. It’s an attempt to ignore mass immigration which sapped the spirit of Rome because immigration and “other” worship are currently in vogue; Peter Ward-Perkins addresses this misconception in his book “The Fall of Rome.” I have no doubt future Western historians will claim “the economy” — somehow, despite previous depressions — killed the United States when obviously the central issue was more about issues upstream of the economy, like the demographics.

      • As far as I can remember Heather actually argued in favour of the migrants bringing down the empire. His point was the soldiers refused to fight them because they weren’t being paid.

        • It’s probably more complicated than what Heather presents. The Goths, for instance, invaded Italy during the early fifth century and destroyed much of the regional economy, leaving some provinces unable to pay even a reduced — by 4/5ths — tax rate. Rome couldn’t pay its soldiers, or much of anything, due to the invasion. Chicken or egg?

          • Heather’s book is very good and does address these issues. The original commenter did not accurately describe the book.

            Heather points out the Persians found out a way to improve agicultural yield( Greek advisers or Roman deserters) in their eastern provinces thus generating the capital necessary to raise a standing army the size of Rome’s. Rome therefore had to double its army at a time when the cost of the army ate up 90% of revenue.

    • Diverse in what sense? Other than agriculture, what booming industries were there ca. 500 AD that Rome was not involved with?

      • Yeah I caught that too. The non-agricultural economy is something new, like last 100 years new. Even in the early 1900s, well into the industrial revolution, there was “agriculture” and “everything else”.

      • the romans focused their manufacturing capacity on war making materiel. they purchased a lot of things in from other countries, with their war profits. a kind of “must always be growing” situation, like ours.

        • Huh. Yeoman agriculture was America’s #1 industry and lifestyle until 1942.

          The War changed us.
          Our techno future was based on its innovations, and the colleges for those educated G.I.’s.

    • The US economy is probably the furthest from being diverse on the planet. It is ludicrously concentrated in “services” and that largely consists of services that add no meaningful economic value.
      When push comes to shove the technorati of Google, Facebook, Twitter et al whose circulation data that serves solely to cater to the psychic well-being of wokels, the financial parasites skimming their 300 basis points and the “insurance companies” crushing the worst healthcare system in the G20 countries add no value. When people are, perforce, focused on the neccesaries: food, clothing, shelter because the vast $40 trillion bubble that enabled all the froth has burst, the US will fare very badly indeed.

      • The Woke economy consists mostly of passing e-docs to each other.

    • Bob, I’m with you. I find that comparing America to Rome has become a tired cliche, as it channels all discussion into well-worn ruts, and disallows much more controversial, grounded speculation on the topic.

      Anton should be ashamed of himself a tad, if you ask me.

      • What’s especially tiresome is that every discussion of comparing America to the collapse of Rome is that it ignores that only half of Rome collapsed.

        • Yes exactly and there were multiple Romes, even in the west: the republic, the classical empire, then a military dictatorship, summing up to more than 1000 years in total. The empire effectively “fell” in the third century before being reconstituted and lasting another two centuries. And even the Visigoth kings who came afterward saw themselves as taking Rome over, not wrecking it. Roman history is fascinating but I think the right comparison to our times is with the Christianization of Rome, not its multi-century “fall.”

          • except the US started christian and ended pagan, while in Rome it was vice versa 🙂

16. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Parallels and Precedents

17. The Zman has noted before that comparison of America to the Roman Republic and Roman Empire is tricky, because the timespan of Ancient Rome was so long that it’s easy to pick and choose things to fit whatever narrative one wants to promote.

    That said: Rome proper may have fallen around 500 AD, but the true wealth, leadership, and culture had already decamped to the Eastern Roman empire…Constantinople. Which lasted another thousand years.

    Perhaps our true ruling elites are planning much the same? Eyes on Australia and New Zealand – the two places most cited as “bugout” havens for the bazillionares in case of a collapse.

    The AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement with Australia suggests it’s important to elites with plans to leave to go to a place that has a credible MAD nuclear triad that isn’t dependent upon the largess of the US.

    BTW, good luck emigrating to either NZ or AUS. It’s like they don’t want to follow the US example or something. Hard and expensive to get into; they jealously guard their citizenship rights.

    • ProZNoV: “BTW, good luck emigrating to either NZ or AUS. It’s like they don’t want to follow the US example or something. Hard and expensive to get into; they jealously guard their citizenship rights.”

      Unless you are Han or subcon. They are swamped with them and more arrive annually. Not to mention the Lebanese and subSaharans. Not certain what the exact racial mix is now (hard to find credible statistics) but it’s trending the same way as every other White nation.

      • Australia is more diverse than Europe, other than France and Sweden.

    • who the fukk would want to live in those arkhaven prison colonies?!

    • No they don’t

      Go walk around Melbourne for a day. Especially near a university.

    • Yeah, Australia is tough to emigrate to if you’re white and not part of the Commonwealth. Other than that, not so much.

      Australia was allowing in more than 500k a year (600k+ in 2019) before Covid. That’s on a population of 25 million. That’s more than 2% a year. And since most of those immigrants are young, you’re looking at close to 10% a year immigration rates for young people, i.e. the future.

      Here’s the list of the Top 10 countries of origin:

      India
      People’s Republic of China
      United Kingdom
      Philippines
      Vietnam
      Nepal
      New Zealand
      Pakistan
      South Africa
      United States of America

      Six of the ten are non-white. Basically, each year, Australia is increasing its non-white, young population by five or six percentage points. That’s the future.

      Australia’s total population might be 85%-90% white at the moment, but I’d bet the children being born are ~65%-75%. And each year that probably drops a couple of percentage points, maybe even as high as five percentage points.

      Australia’s babies will be majority non-white within a decade if it goes back to it old immigration policies. Now, granted, the non-whites will primarily be Chinese, Indian and various other Asians, so Australia won’t devolve into some hellhole like Western Europe or Brazil like the United States. But it sure as hell won’t be some Whitopia.

      • again, immigration is not the problem (now) in Australia. the authoritarian police state government run by insane women and supported by the army and police is the problem. more 3rd worlders ignoring the rules is actually the best thing that can happen to a white country, in these crazy times.

    • Do confuse nuclear powered for Nuclear armed, the contract is for reactors only.
      Either way Australia does not have the population to support them.

18. “the managerial class thinks things are going great”

    Which for them, it kind of is. But I can’t escape the feeling their McMansions (nice as they are) are built on sand.

    • Down the street you can hear them scream “You’re a disgrace”
      As they slam the door in normie’s face
      And now he stands outside
      And all the neighbors start to gossip and drool
      He cries “You guys must be mad
      What happened to the sweet love you and me had?”
      Against the door he leans and starts a scene
      And his tears fall and burn the garden green

      And so McMansions made of sand
      Fall in the sea eventually

      • oh man, a hendrix homage!

        comment checker

      • Axis bold as love. Nice one Z. The TRS guys are doing backflips today. Steady as she goes Zman. I’m counting on you.

    • I actually spent the weekend with people from the DC managerial class. Went to a nice parade in beautiful Old Town, Alexandria. Nice lunch afterward and then to a few nice shops. Later, went to a dinner/party at someone’s house. Almost all of the guests’ livelihoods were government related.

      Believe me, they have no clue what’s happening, though they did seem to mention the state of the country a bit more than usual so perhaps they’re noticing a subtle change in the way the wind is blowing.

      (I should not that these people are either high-enough on the food chain or perform such technical jobs that they’re likely not hammered by the DEI programs. They’re probably not going to diversity training.)

      The world that we consider so unreal and unstable is to them a solid reality that’s been with them their entire adult lives. Everything looks fine to them. Their kids go to good schools and universities, their job is secure, NoVa and DC look fine, the shops are nice, etc.

      They don’t understand why people are upset. They don’t understand why race is an issue for either side. Their couple of black, Asian and Hindu friends/neighbors seem just fine.

      Yes, they live in a bubble world, but it’s not a bubble to them. Everything is real. It’s interesting to be around them. I often feel like a spy or traveler from the future watching a dying people who don’t know that they’re dying.

      • This is very much what university towns are like out here in flyover country. The good times never end and there’s no indication they ever will. But go ten miles down the road and you can be in the middle of a cornfield with only one or two houses in sight, or in an economically distressed small town. The people who occupy these university towns can probably count on one hand the number of times they have visited a local community nearby. For them it’s like visiting a zoo.

      • I liken them to floating in a river that’s headed for severe rapids. You cannot feel the river’s current when you’re floating along with it. But the moment you swim against the current, just briefly, you get that Uh-Oh feeling of being sent where you may not want to go.

        That’s how it feels in my piece of Commieland. All the smiles become more stretched and more topics become verboten because the alternative is fighting a current that’s picking up speed.

        If they could see the end, the waves dashing against the jagged rocks, then they could understand why we resist. But they don’t want to see. They want to trust. They want to believe. And they don’t go outside enough to understand an analogy to a river’s current.

      • Good story, Citizen. It’s kinda like how fish don’t see water.

      • But over on the Left Coast the golden people are beginning to notice.
        https://www.zerohedge.com/political/never-seen-anything-it-los-angeles-residents-stunned-violent-crimes-creep-wealthier

        The sense of “This isn’t supposed to happen to us!” is quite remarkable.

        • Theses are the same people that started calling homeless junkie bums ‘unhoused neighbors’ a few years ago, same people that gave drivers licenses to illegals. Same people that think it’s GM’s fault that catalytic converters are stolen because GM didn’t build anti theft cages around them when the car was built. All the joggers that were arrested for smash and grabs, were out of jail before it made it onto normies 5 o’clock news cast. I know this I walk amongst them.

      • “I often feel like a spy or traveler from the future watching a dying people who don’t know that they’re dying.”

        That, without question, is the coolest thing I have ever read.

        • Holy sh*t. I realized I know how to make that happen, too.

          Plus, I’ve seen that future. White high civilization will retreat to the extensive cave systems while the Eloi savages slaughter each other in the ruins above.

          CroMagnons we were. CroMagnons we will be. Gots me some plans, I do.

          • Side note: CroMagnon cave art was as subtle as the finest Rembrandt, 60,000 years ago. True intelligence, Sapiens Sapiens, was born in those sheltering caves. Plus, they looked like any Gunter or Giuseppe.

            Extinction? Don’t even.

            Citizen, your chance comment not only unlocked the crystallization of a theoretical model re the memory chains of the radiant ecology- it burns so brightly!- it may yet be a key component in coalescing nascent… efforts…in the background per that Cave future.

            As the bad guys in a Batman movie, we cannot begin to express our profound gratitude.
            All here contribute so very, very much.

      • Amen. You just nailed it These fuckers are in Oblivion. blinded by money, clueless till the end.

        • they are true lotus eaters

19. Americans are a people that could not/ would not get along in their home countries. For most of American history, that worked out pretty well. The new guy would take the crappy job the existing denizens wouldn’t do (at a crappy wage), save, raise kids and BOOM, his kids are American.

    But what do you do when most everyone in the country is descended from the “$#@!-this I’m leaving” gene? What do you do when the official story to the new guys is “white man bad”?

    My ancestors did not stick around to make their Scandinavian/ Mediterranean countries better places. My parents didn’t stick with their mining town or farm. They left.

    I don’t want to be a parasite, constantly looking for a new host. This was a good country with a rich history (warts and all). But I’ll be darned if my sons will be tax slaves for degenerate rulers and ignorant hordes.

    • That’s the question

      Is it worth fighting for? What are the rewards?

      I have to wonder if most white people are at the point where they’re effectively saying that if you want it, you can have it. I’m done.

      I was truly surprised when the Mexicans waltzed right into the south with zero pushback. I always thought, sure you guys can do that in California because no one is from here really so they aren’t going to fight your invasion. But wait til you try that in the south. But nothing.

      Maybe we are just in a dormant state yet to be awakened. Hard to say. But not looking good when people who’d die fighting off Yankees but then some Mexicans just waltz right in with no resistance. And it’s happening everywhere.

      Or is that deep down Americans have always recognized that this place isn’t really ours? Are the usual suspects onto something when they were able to pry our hands off this place by reminding us we, rhetorically speaking, had stole it from Indians? We’re those seeds of doubt always there in some form?

      We’re going to find out

      • well since the mexicans are driving the blacks out, i would call that an upgrade.

      • Of course, all countries, if you go back far enough, result from conquest and “theft.” The US was no exception, and we should not have felt exceptionally guilty. But just because we shouldn’t have doesn’t mean that we didn’t.

        • i don’t think people feel guilty about shit. but they do learn to parrot the lingo..

      • Part of it is the anarchotyranny. The government will refuse to do its job enforcing the border or reforming immigration, but woe to you if you try to do it.

        • that’s why you do things like bring homeless into wealthy areas, that implode the system. give it a good fuckin’ push and down she goes…

    • You articulated what I have been thinking for a few years. I am glad I am not the only one.

      • There is a parallel to this in many countries. They’ll defend themselves to the death against invasions from civilised neighbours. And shrug their shoulders at being inundated by others. Maybe there is a subconscious belief that honour can only be lost to a civilised enemy?

        • I believe it also has to do with middle class whites not seeing brown foreigners as an economic threat. In other words, I don’t mow lawns or fix roofs, so who cares? But bring in an engineer and I’m threatened. The impact of Mexicans/Africans voting for policies they left behind in their shithole countries is just now becoming more apparent.

20. IIRC, one of the late stages in Rome’s collapse was the confusion of gender and gender roles.

    Yup, won’t be long now.

    • One of the diffiuclties with making a comparison to any other civilizational collapse is that ours seems to have elements from just about every other one. The mother of all collapses, in a way.

21. “Like the nomenklatura, the managerial class thinks things going great.”

    I cannot agree with this, and I’m not sure Z believes it either given that in an article last week he stated that the elites are in a frenzy because everything is going sideways and they don’t know why.

    Now, of course, a different take on historical decline, or going “sideways” is provided by Dutton and Woodley who argue that–and this derives from Spengler–we’re in the winter of civilization. This winter has been precipitated by cognitive decline, which began soon after the industrial revolution, and which was triggered by deselection for general intelligence. We’re just much dumber than the people in the 1850s, and stupid people cannot sustain civilization.

    • I think the resolution to the question of whether the elites think things are going well is that the elites can look at official statistics and see that metric is being hit, but can also see protestors and feel like something’s amiss. Elites use the word problem to mean something that can be exploited for political gain, not necessarily a failure of sorts. Because they use words to manipulate people, they simply lack a vocabulary to describe things (i.e. words are tools, not descriptors). They’re anxious, but in denial, so their official story is that everything is fine.

22. “The American ruling elite does not have dusty old books about political theory to justify their belief in themselves as the authentic voice of the people, but they believe it, nonetheless.”

    The “American ruling elite ” does NOT believe they are the authentic voice of the people. They just know they have to convince the peasants that they are. Given their controlled nature of all forms of media, as well as law creation, law interpretation, and law enforcement, makes their ability to do this a slam dunk. As I have been saying for years, nothing is going to change until you can’t buy enough food anymore.

    • When you do not have food, you have *one* problem. When you have food, you have *many* problems.

      • Comfort confuses, calamity clarifies.

        • no tickee, no shirtee

23. Peter Turchin’s book, War and Peace and War discusses another aspect that is often overlooked: the unsustainable growth of the “elite” class, which includes bureaucrats, academics, managers, etc. It is usually accompanied by dependence upon slave labour to do the actual work for all those elites.

    In the West today look how many white women cannot be bothered to raise their
    own children, as such work is unbecoming of elites who went to university to study Marxist sociology and the like. Instead, white women now pay illegal immigrants slave wages to do their child-rearing, while they themselves occupy office chairs in the Human Resources departments or lick envelopes for the Welfare office… these being much more fulfilling and glamourous vocations than being mothers to their children.

    But slaves only remain slaves if they are kept constantly under the whip. The same white women who want the slave labourers would recoil at the thought of keeping the slaves at bay – how unprogressive! The West, it seems, will once again learn the lessons of depending on slave labour, especially now when so many working-class white Westerners yearn to not do labour, but rather to study Sartre, or Marx, or critical race theory… and expect to get government jobs for doing so.

    • Slavery never ends well. Zman once said (I’m paraphrasing) if he could go back in time and tell our forefathers one thing, it would be to pick their own damn cotton.

24. In the realms of engineering and business, the malady of “analysis paralysis” is well known, as is the harm that it frequently causes. A version of this may be called “diagnosis necrosis”, which happens when everyone is endlessly examining our Big Picture state of decline as if that alone is a remedy.

    At some point you have to shit or get off the pot. Which means do something (as in tangible rather than mental masturbation). And since none of us commands any forces large enough to put a dent in the problem, a different paradigm is needed.

    The Wuflu was invented in a lab and spread worldwide in a matter of months. Despite the official lying, it really hasn’t been all that deadly. But what if there was a human equivalent of a virus, with intelligence and focus?

    • Corollary to Anonymous White Male comment re: nothing changing till there is no food to buy. Intelligence or not, nothing provides more focus than starvation. Something would then change – fast.

    • When I was gainfully employed many years ago, I often encountered “analysis paralysis” on committees. I had a line I used which seemed to shake things up, “Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong!” This statement usually followed by dumb silence—which was somewhat the purpose.

      As long as folk focused on me as the fall guy, we were able to make some decisions as I recall.

25. I sure hope Jeff Bezos is wearing a go-pro the moments he leaves Lauren Sanchez to the marauding mob and he sneaks out a secret passageway to his helicopter

    • he’ll be exiting that copter sooner than he thinks…

26. In terms of the American Empire’s dealings with the rest of the world, I agree with Z that it looks more like a much larger version of the Athenian Empire than the Roman Empire. However, the internal American Empire may end up looking more like the end of the Roman Empire.

    Regardless, Z ends with the question that always vexes me: What happened to us? Why did Western Europeans and their diaspora stop caring?

    Just prior to WWI, the West strode astride the world. We were so advanced technologically that we seemed almost an alien race to much of the world. Think of some African or South American Indian as they watched us fly through the air in a machine.

    Then came the Great White Civil War (1914-1945), which seemed to psychologically devastate Western Europe. Granted, it’s understandable to some degree, but it’s not like the Europeans never had nasty wars in the past – 30-year War anyone. They managed to pick themselves up for those and move on.

    Then, there’s the United States. American whites sure as hell didn’t come out the Great White Civil War (GWCW) psychologically scarred. If anything, we came out mentally stronger. And, yet, within a couple of generations, you have the majority of American whites believing either that whites are inherently racist (liberals) or that whites shouldn’t see themselves as a people (conservatives), i.e. the vast majority of whites having given up on their race and culture.

    Sure, you can put some of the blame on the usual suspects who manipulated whites with money and media, but a people with even a modicum of pride and self-love would have been able to fight off such nonsense. (Anyone see the Japanese apologizing.)

    What that says to me (and others) is that the rot started long before the GWCW and long before the small hats gain significant power.

    As Z notes, we have a people in crisis. Western Europeans and their diaspora first became a people with no purpose, then a people with no pride and, finally, not a people at all.

    Whites have lost their way. You don’t have pride without achievement. You don’t have achievement without a goal. That goal should be the survival and resurrection of our people (or, really, peoples), but we live in a time where that goal is considered evil.

    We need to change that moral framework. I’d say that the first step is to get Normie to see whites as a people at all. Luckily, our enemies are doing that for us. The more that they hammer whites, the more whites recognize themselves as a people. We can help that with phrases like “anti-white” instead of racist.

    It’s going to be a long road back because the road that we took to get to this point was hundreds of years in the making.

    • My pet theory is it started with the Great Schism. The Great White West was founded with the Church as its heart. The Church always has had a specific way of organizing itself that allowed Christendom to flourish and expand. Eventually the office of the Pope was able to claim for itself great political and financial power and managed to dominate the “better” half of Christendom and break away from Church. The corruption of the Papacy inevitably led to the Reformation and thus moral decay happened when anyone could invent their own “church” with private interpretation of absolutely everything. When the Enlightenment happened there was nothing there to keep us on track. Now the West is completely given over to Satan.

      I am a lousy student of history though, so I could be way off! It’s probably spergery to pick the day everything started going to shit. My thesis is based off the assumptions that the Church is vital to functioning of Christendom (aka the West) and that the true Church is still with us as Orthodoxy. Most will disagree with me but the Orthobros will give me up-fingers.

      • Certainly, the decline of religion and the Enlightenment are the two most talked about, and rightly so. Those absolutely played a part. Everything became relative.

        I’d add that a nearly unbroken 500-year winning streak for Western Europeans can do a lot to chip away at your resolve. Trust fund kids are rarely as stout as their ancestors who built the society.

        Ed Dutton may also be on to something when he talks about the falling morality rate and “mutants.”

        All I know is that future historians will look at this time in amazement – and probably use it as a parallel for their own times, just as we use the Roman or Athenian Empires to understand our own time.

      • I think you’re largely right about the corruption of the Papacy and its pursuit of temporal power being a large source of our current cornucopia of problems. That was one of Dostoevsky’s points in “The Grand Inquisitor.”

        • But oddly, it seems the West was near its peak during the times of Papal power, and ever since abdicating its lands and role as Western arbiter things have gone to sh*t.

          Orthodox patriarchs were also not exactly poor.

          • It’s not about well off or even corrupt clergy. It’s about absolute centralized power. The Church was designed to withstand corruption and it’s done pretty well to this day!

    • Then came the Great White Civil War (1914-1945), which seemed to psychologically devastate Western Europe. Granted, it’s understandable to some degree, but it’s not like the Europeans never had nasty wars in the past – 30-year War anyone. They managed to pick themselves up for those and move on.

      Well, in historical terms, we’re still in the aftermath. The Thirty Years War was still reverberating through Europe of 1720.

      We may still pick ourselves up and move on.

      • Wars did not have the technology that 1914-1945 had. Yeah, prior wars were nasty throughout history, but now they were existential and widespread. Nothing since seems to have reversed such trend, indeed we have even more technology at our disposal and the next war will not be a “brother war”, but rather a racial war which will inevitably be of the existential sort.

        • you really should read up about the 30 years war; i’ll give you a hint: WWI would be a pimple on the butt of the 30 years war, in terms of sheer destruction of western european society.

          • And let’s not forget the invasions from the south and east–Germanic tribes, Huns, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, etc. The damage done by these peoples is incalculable.

          • 30 years war within primarily the Holy Roman Empire is not the world—as from Atlantic to Pacific. Vicious as it was, it did not produce bio, chemical and nuclear weapons. If everyone in central Europe had died, it would not have the same potential impact as a future conflict using such weapons as we have today. If Central Europe is your limit of concern, fine. It’s no longer mine.

    • One difference between us and Japan is the level of immigration. Once a critical mass of diversity is reached, it seems return is nigh impossible without drastic measures. Diversity pets also support particular candidates which become the power base – while still technically a “minority”, that base becomes the margin of victory which can’t be ignored (at least with lip service if nothing else). Add in other factors/incentives (cheap labor, daddy/mommy issues, lawfare for wrong think, expand consumer base, social acceptance reinforced with relentless propaganda from every sector) and you have a perfect storm for disaster.

    • I’ll tell you when and how the decline started. The early, incubation period, started with mass movie watching of silent era. super tight controls on what could be shown (Hayes Code) kept the contagion in check, for the most part. TV was the crack cocaine of entertainment though; so early 1950’s for the start of the cultural…trans-mutation is the only word i can come up with. and the thing that bears most scrutiny, is that the deterioration of social norms was present even when there was no obscenity in the viewed material (although obscenity would of course supercharge the deterioration). my theory is that by showing people behaving badly, over and over, the wider population became desensitized and radicalized (as far as their entertainment interests) and basically programmed to copy what they had seen. even the sitcoms of the era, emphasized naughty behavior by adults and children, just like entertainment today emphasizes trannies and queers.

      • Wasn’t there a study that showed, by coincidence at least, that when TV is introduced to a culture that it’s “replacement rate” drops?

        • Women model what they see on television. ( Men too at a level, I’m sure, but soap opera watching is not a male pastime. ) I read someplace that in rural Brazil the women used to have big families. Then the birthrate started dropping off for no clear reason. Some clever researchers tied it to the coincident arrival of cable TV and daytime soap operas, which depicted the lives of affluent urban women with 2-3 children max.

        • yes there was. tv is not benign. your brain is not relaxed when watching tv, it is active. the attraction of tv is strong enough to overcome (or more accurately, override) the procreative instinct.

      • Yeah, jewywood and kosher tv happened, here we are now in madness and destruction, according to plan, yes?

    • The achievements of whites have become mundane and been exported so much to the rest of the world that no one can make a legitimate comparison to what a society run by the lower races would really be like. Even in the poorest African country they still are getting a hold of cheap jeans and t-shirts when by themselves they’d be wearing animal skins. China, without the west to steal technology and buy food from, would be 99% peasant farmers whose only hope in life is to be able to afford some magic powdered tiger penis to cure the endemic disease caused by them farming with their own poo.

      • Don’t sell the Chinese short. They built their economy into the second largest less than 40 years. Beg, borrow, steal—whatever it takes they did. We seem to think if we just packed up and left, they’d revert. That ship has sailed.

        20 years ago we already had faculty collaborating with Chinese faculty in research projects and the one thing I remember was that the collaboration was considered mutual and beneficial according to those involved. I knew then something had fundamentally changed.

        Maybe they might not have that creative ability we like to pride ourselves on, but they sure have the intellectual capacity to build on what they have and support a 1st world technological society. More to the point, they have a government which can motivate, plan, and drive in a concerted direction.

27. “What is most interesting in Anton’s essay is what is not mentioned. For example, the Roman Empire in the last two centuries was a system run by people who had no hand in creating it. ”

    I.E. The –most important part—, which is why all these essays and grand pontifications which ramble on for pages are for the most part mental circle jerks.

    It is infuriating to me because it isn’t just people who are paid to wax poetic but society as a whole that suffers from this severe affliction. Endless banter, endless theories, angst, hand-wringing, etc. Always looking for new solutions, new data, new theories. It is absurd.

    Imagine trying to solve a physics problem where you remove the constant from the equation. Let’s say you want to create some advanced propulsion system and expend trillions of dollars and decades of effort to build this engine so we can travel at fractional light speed. Yet nowhere in your equation is the letter “c” (speed of light constant) mentioned. What could you -possibly- solve without it even with such time and money exerted?

    We live in the land of the “c” deniers and you can write paragraphs, essays, or even entire books and it means f-ck all until you acknowledge the existence of ‘”c”. We have spent enough money to -literally- build an advanced propulsion system and a self-sustaining lunar colony attempting to ‘fix’ a problem that is missing the the most important constant in the equation and it appears we will continue to do so until the train runs out of track.

    Let me save any hand-wringing and angst that may appear here as it sometimes does— Race and IQ are real. That is your “c”, your constant. Simple as…

    The saddest part is this- if you are a normie or a bleeding heart leftie, were you to acknowledge this simple fact you would do more to uplift your ‘pets’ in a few years than has been accomplished in the past 6 decades, but this will –never– be said out loud. Instead you will indeed ‘Flight 93’ this entire thing into the earth when you had a highly skilled pilot (acknowledgment of IQ differences) in the cockpit the whole time. Once again, simple as…

    • “The –most important part—, which is why all these essays and grand pontifications which ramble on for pages are for the most part mental circle jerks.

      It is infuriating to me because it isn’t just people who are paid to wax poetic but society as a whole that suffers from this severe affliction. Endless banter, endless theories, angst, hand-wringing, etc. Always looking for new solutions, new data, new theories. It is absurd.”

      Sounds like you have described the world of academia. Average to above average intelligence people that have to find “subtleties” and “nuance” in the perception of reality. Rather than accept that life is a bitch, they have to justify their positions by concocting grandiose schemes about how to make life better. They never do, of course, but they can’t admit this. They are like communists. The reason communism has always failed is because “true” communism has never been tried. They’ll get it right this time, for sure. They do not have the intellectual honesty to admit that creating enduring social structures (like government) cannot be perfect because man is not perfect. They also have a blind spot that human nature is not fixed but is infinitely malleable. They keep trying to change it, but the human nature that actually works is genetic and should be left to find it’s own level. Then keep those rules in place so that the masses understand that these are the rules of the contract, no exceptions. Once people feel there is a continuity and stability of the rules, they will perform to the best their imperfect natures allow.

      • What’s funny about academics and their unending search for subtlety and nuance is that all their constant blather can be easily replaced by knowing the 2-4 biggest variables and planning on 15-20% attrition. In agriculture, this would basically boil down to knowing your growing zone, soil quality, and fertilizer needs, and planting about 10% more acreage than you think you need. In framing construction, you need to know board quality, span, and weight load, and go about 20% “stronger” than required. Even in politics, you really just need to focus on crime, trade and infrastructure and keep expenditures about 5-10% below revenue. In any field, more precision than this doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.

    • Quite true. But even the HBD crowd, Sailer, Murray, etc., can’t seem to accept the true reality of race.

      They’ll provide endless charts and graphs about racial differences and then crickets about white identity.

    • The infuriating part is that I won’t deny nurture has a role, but my counterparts seem completely unable to accept that nature also has at least some role. Nurture may get you X far, but only within the limitations nature has provided. Personally, I peg the ratio at 70/30 nature/nurture, but you can’t even get AWLFs of either gender to admit 10/90. Simply accepting reality, and then working with rather than against it will have much better results.

      • Immediate problem I find with AWFL’s is that they all “KAGO” (know a good one) and always attempt to extend that one data point to describe/support all members of a group. Logical fallacy of course, but none are known for their reasoning skills when applied to HBD.

      • They’ve watched Trading Places too many times. All blacks are just waiting to have their inner genius unshackled; to be domesticated. Meanwhile, all whites are the recipients of unearned privilege, whose natural state is lying drunk in a gutter.

    • “The saddest part is this- if you are a normie or a bleeding heart leftie, were you to acknowledge this simple fact you would do more to uplift your ‘pets’ in a few years than has been accomplished in the past 6 decades.”

      You assume they actually want to uplift their pets. Then they wouldn’t have pets.

    • Put this on your christmas cards

      https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-zoologists-martin-and-osa-johnson-with-pygmy-people-for-the-movie-94219642.html?

      It’s nurture, honest.

28. Most good people will eventually leave Los Angeles, leaving only thugs and immigrants to provide security for the rich Hollywood types. I wonder how long that will last before it turns ugly?

    • They’ll outsource security like they already increasingly do. Another golden era for security contracting is around the corner.

      • Los Angeles is not like other cities, it’s much more diffuse. there are no walkable parts, you have to use a car. it is indefensible; murders already happening in wealthy enclaves. Malibu is protected by an impenetrable wall of 6′ wood fences, made crumbly by the sun.

29. Zman: Brilliant essay. So very typical of why I read here daily – only you cut to the chase and boil all the historical comparisons down to what truly matters – do White people still retain the will to survive or not.

    My husband and I attended his office Christmas party a few nights ago, and it was like a time warp. Although there was only a costume suggestion, the theme was The Great Gatsby (after talking with the woman who organized it I’m not certain this was consciously ironic or not). There they were, the generally older crowd about 85% White, the rest a mix of younger subcons and blacks. Half of the women (usually the oldest and fattest) wore glitzy flapper-style dresses purchased from Amazon. They actually hired a band (primarily White musicians fronted by a black male and female singing duo). The music was, with a handful of exceptions, all Motown hits from the 70s and early 80s, the last time blacks and Whites generally listened to the same music.

    As I noted to my husband, people have the right to relax and enjoy themselves and I didn’t mean to be uncharitable, but it all had the air of unreality. I can’t use the popular comparison of the band playing on the Titanic because they actually knew they were sinking. These people were, almost to a man, blissfully unaware that any economic or social catastrophe was approaching. It was all predictions of a terrific economic year in 2022, and the company is a family, and we can all get along just great.

    One can only pity the dead men walking and yet simultaneously be determined not to share their delusions. Interesting times.

    • “These people were, almost to a man, blissfully unaware that any economic or social catastrophe was approaching. It was all predictions of a terrific economic year in 2022, and the company is a family, and we can all get along just great.”

      Is it unawareness or denial? I honestly don’t know and was in a similar situation last night, sans the Gatsby motif, and now and then things got real but were quickly clawed back. My take is quite a few know the iceberg has been struck but choose to savor the time before the ship sinks.

      • Nah most of these types float a cope of the sort that if some half dozen things happen exactly as they should then the system will righted. They won’t/can’t acknowledge that those half dozen things are either never going to happen or have already been tried and failed (“real liberal democracy has never been tried!”)

      • I write for a college sports website, and the vast majority of subscribers are your prototypical Grillers. Aside from the usual sports forums, there are also a couple where political discussion occurs. I monitor those forums to get an impression of just what the Grillers are really thinking. My impression is that approximately one third of them are oblivious and clueless. However, the other two thirds at least have an inkling of the anti-white agenda and the encroaching madness of the times. Very few of them are red pilled like us–they wouldn’t be Grillers then, would they?–but they are headed this direction by fits and starts.

        • Ostei: ” . . . but they are headed in this direction by fits and starts.”

          Perhaps, but I’m not convinced that will be sufficient to change anything. One of my husband’s high school friends meets your definition in many ways. He finally bought a gun a few years ago. He’s willing to acknowledge racial reality in private. But nothing substantive – about his lifestyle or family or future – has changed. To the best of our knowledge, he is still counting on his federal pension to see him through the coming decade(s), he has no real plan to move from his majority non-White area, and he took the vax in order to accompany his wife on a cruise.

          So while he may believe things are breaking down or harbor concerns about his White son’s future, in his heart he doesn’t really seem to accept that the U.S. he grew up in is dead and gone, and that it is likely to come apart in his lifetime. It’s all theoretical to him, because he can still insulate himself.

        • so what you are saying, is the great griller herd is stirring. hmm, grillers as the new buffalo, i like it, it fits.

          Griller Soldier, mulleted Normie
          There was a Griller Soldier
          In the heart of America
          Stolen from Europe, brought to America
          Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

    • These things stop becoming fun once you understand that outside the world is a mess. Rather than pretending to be flappers they should be cleaning their rifles.

      Like those people in Waukesha. They had this illusion things were still as they were 50 if not 75 years ago. What was their theme of the day?

      Bottom line, these kinds of respites from reality are for the winners. They’re great when your station in life is secure. They’re de facto victory celebrations. Performing them while hungry wolves are outside is a recipe for tragedy.

    • Reminds me of a CompuServe company picnic I attended in the mid-90s. “Oh, that internet thing? We don’t think it’s going to take off.”

      • I remember a comic in the late 90s or so saying ‘imagine if communications technology had worked in reverse. People would be saying, you gotta ditch the internet and email and get yourself a phone; you can actually TALK to the person!’

30. Listening to a podcast on early English history helps one understand how little Anglos have changed through time. In the Bronze Age Britain, some regions relied upon pork and others relied upon beef for protein. We see this outcome carried through today to regional differences in American BBQ that correspond roughly to the same English regions and peoples that colonized early America.

    Likewise, it bears remembering that with the fall of Rome came a dark age in Britain. As the Romans left the island, they took their technologies and ways of governance. Glass and pottery manufacture ground to a halt and the majestic villas gradually receded into the earth. Kings arose and life returned to the English historical mean .

    The ZMan brings up a great point about our current dilemmas being a crisis of the make up of the populace rather than anything else. The people coming here are vastly different than the natives and they bring their abilities and culture with them. Most of what they bring will lead to poor outcomes for the vast majorities of Americans.

    Thus, we are at a crisis that is not unprecedented. It’s actually quite typical. Our country, as we change, will eventually revert to some collection of the capabilities and social structures of our alien invaders.

    Hopefully, like our British in England ancestors, we too can throw out the invaders and return to the American mean.

    • I’m not sure why, but this comment brings to mind a long-ago zombie novel about how the remnants of civilization retreat northward to arctic border regions where they are “defended” by the ambient cold weather because the zombies freeze in the ice which then stops their migration. In real life terms, most of the current invasion is driven by the freebies and mid latitude balmy weather. Methinks you won’t find much vibrancy in Northern Alberta when the freebies dry up and everyone must fend for themselves. And why is it that the best snipers in the world come from Western Canada and Siberia?

      • And (snipers) Finland.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4

      • Hard times make hard/tough men. Famous snipers are not just good shots, they must endure all sorts of hardship tracking and finding their “prey”. Read about them and their exploits and you’ll appreciate the toughness and endurance in the field.

      • In WWII the kiwis had many great snipers because their country was overrun with rabbits in the 30s and they got lots of practice culling the bunnies.

      • But… Somalis in Minnesota?

      • Because polar bears are, like, really, really fast?

        ****

        And they are. Blazin’.
        Pipeline welders in Alaska build a big metal cage they move along with each stretch they’re working on.

        During a snowstorm, the bears suddenly smash into that cage, like appearing out of nowhere. Ya can’t see them in the blizzard, so that’s when they strike. The cage rings like a bell when they hit it.

        • polar bears are genuine man eaters, too :).

    • The first question we have to ask is if this land is cursed or not. Do we even belong here?

      That’s a question a lot of people never considered. But it’s critical because you only fight and die for what you believe in, and if you don’t believe then you are probably going to lose.

      I look at California. People were not from here, so the moment things got tough they fled. They weren’t going to suffer for this place. They’d come here to have some fun, do the California thing, the California phase, and when the Mexicans started arriving it was off to Idaho.

      So many Americans are somewhat rootless. Or their roots are only as deep as some weedy plant you can yank out with a little bit of muscle. How many trees do we have here? How many people that when you yank and yank they don’t come out? I had a guy come remove a tree from my yard and stump grinded the thing but somehow it started growing again and now it’s just as big as it used to be.

      Trees fight to live. They will find a way to grow. Do we?

      We are going to find out. Like I say, if we had one ounce the will to live and thrive as a tree we’d all be in good shape. If we had one ounce the will of a pet cat we’d be better off.

    • bbq came from britain, who knew?

      • If it’s made from beef and even vaguely edible, it’s been eaten in Britain (or, rather,England, it’s not for nothing that the Welsh are known as sheep-shaggers, they ate them too))

31. > What is most interesting in Anton’s essay is what is not mentioned.

    From what I’ve read of him, this is pretty much Anton’s classic style. Get as close to the edge of acceptable discourse as possible, and leave the discerning reader to fill in the blanks. Given his open conversations with dissident figures, it’s doubtful he’s unaware of these holes in his articles. His position, however, forces him to use plausible deniability that he’s not crossing over to complete wrong-think.

    Hillsdale is extreme right when compared to most universities, but that still makes it only smack in the middle of the political spectrum in terms of acceptable general discourse.

    • Anton comes probably as close to the line/reality as anyone can without being disappeared outside the world of dissidents.

    • Very interesting times. Anton is (was?) a Jaffaite/Clarmonster. I’ve been reading the Glenn Ellmers book, “The Soul of Politics” which is about the philosophy of Jaffa. A lot of it is a boring rehash of the usual Jaffaite drivel, but the last two chapters almost read like an admission that the Jaffaite notion of America as the bearer of the Universal Idea of “equality” and the final eschaton of an Americanized humanity guided by Natural Law and Great Statesmen like Lincoln and Churchill is a failure. Ellmers and Anton, at least, are groping toward the truth.

      They’ve still gotta come to terms with the real Lincoln, rather than the Jafffaite fiction tho.

      • The Claremont people seem to be fine with paying lip service to Lincoln, while going against everything a modern Lincoln would do in our current situation.

        If that keeps the donor money from clueless Jaffaites flowing, I’m fine with that.

      • Not a Lincoln scholar, but I wonder about him. Very race realist rhetoric early on, willing to preserve slavery to preserve the union iirc, but also willing to wage war to preserve it, which ended up destroying it. Technically didn’t free any slaves, and it looks to me unleashing the crazies was a desperate move at the low ebb of Union fortune.

        I have a feeling he was a much more complicated figure than anyone will say, not the great good or evil, but more like an ambitious schlep swept along by history.

        • In the Jaffaite theology, Lincoln is a world-historical individual tasked with the prophetic mission of rediscovering that what the Founders REALLY meant was equality as the foundational American principle, leading the American people toward that goal and atoning for the sin of slavery, through the destruction of of the South.

          I’m not making that up, either. Lincoln and “liberal democracy” are for them, the end of history. The United States is “mosaich”.

        • Prosecuting a needless war that resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans at each others’ hands puts him squarely in the “evil” category.

          • If early 19th century abolitionists had had a scintilla of intellectual integrity they would have condemned and exterminated the African slave traders like Tippu Tip, just as now the suppliers of illegal drugs like Pablo Escobar are the quarry of international law enforcement. But abolition wasn’t really the goal. The Puritans of the Northeast were carrying on the War of the Three Kingdoms fought between their ancestors and the Catholic Stuarts.
            Lincoln could have purchased every slave in North America and sent them back to their homes but he and his associates preferred to waste the lives of Northern soldiers, many of whom were, ironically, Catholic Irishmen, taking the lives of perhaps 600,000 young men and destroying a huge portion of the country’s wealth over what originated as an argument of divine right of kings in 1649.

          • The buck stops here, so fair enough. War was probably coming no matter who was in office, though.

32. I guess the parallels to Weimar are too obvious to mention. Why search the distance mists of time when a recent historical template exists? Sorta same players and manifestations of pathology. Nonetheless, Carthage must be destroyed.

    • Modern America is nothing like interwar Germany. The only point of comparison is both times were populated by bipeds. Otherwise, there are no useful comparisons.

      • Fpr one thing, the dollar is incredibly strong versus every other currency.

        That was not the case for the German mark between the wars.

        • Wild Geese: True, but only because every other currency is weak as well. What really backs up ‘confidence’ in the dollar? Our moribund ‘service economy’? Our purported reserves of gold? Our diversity? When I ask my husband if his customers discuss (or if he gets a general sense of) why they buy and sell he says the majority don’t even know – they just go wherever they think they can make a quick profit. There are some who make plans for an uncertain future, but they still play the market because $.

          • 3g4me-

            The USD is figuratively the cleanest dirty shirt with no viable alternative.

            Europe is non-competitive, has no natural resources or nukes.

            China has massive internal problems and no one really trusts them. They lack clean water, arable land, and have an insane %age of wealth tied up in overinflated junk real estate. At present, they don’t seem able to project military force.

        • Not as true as you’d like to think. Too lazy to find it but a write up on the interwar currency issue made the case that the WWI reparations A) made the mark the ‘reserve currency’ of Europe since there were so many floating around (similar to how what makes the dollar “reserve” is the amount of debt) B) then made the German economy addicted to the cheap debt used to create the marks.

          • I’m partway through reading, When Money Dies… and at this point I believe the author has implied your points about the German mark between the wars.

      • The analogy is weird. There are too-obvious parallels: worker immiseration via inflation; tradition and reality mocked with “degeneracy;” normies beaten in the street by leftists if they complain; rival genocidal plans openly aired; etc. For the comparison to fit, we have to be seen as ruled by *every* non-Nazi Weimar faction—and also they’re The Real Nazis…and they’re Jews.

        If there’s an insight there, it’s that our rulers are as bad as all the bad regimes in living memory put together. Plausible. But they’re not *like* them all.

        • Then Nazis did not spring from nothing. They were not intellectuals, but they rode a long and deep intellectual tradition in Germany. Then you had the long military tradition upon which they built. We simply have none of those things in America. Of course, the interwar years were marked by the massive power vacuum created by the old regime collapsing after the war. Frankly, the circumstances that gave rise to the Nazis are interesting for their uniqueness. It is one of the few genuine outliers.

          The flag and costume types will not hear it as central to their fantasy is that this is Weimar all over again. It is what motivated Antifa and the various groups that form up to fight with them.

          • I concede that the nazi were a decidedly Teutonic movement. But you grossly overstate your case that no points of comparison exist. Rhymes, at the very least.

          • here are the comparisons i can think of off the top of my head:

            1. great financial insecurity
            2. break down of long held societal norms
            3. widespread degeneracy by the citizenry
            4. absolute polarization of politics
            5. chaos and violence in the streets, continuously
            6. communism and fascism battling for control of the inner party
            7. high levels of narcotics usage

          • would love a post on the sui generis nature of the nazis. of course, it will be hard to avoid concluding that it was AH that was truly at the center of the riddle, the catalyst that set everything in motion 😛

      • “Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and a mecca for crossdressers and transvestites where the first male-to-female surgery was performed – until the Nazis came to power, new book reveals.” Daily Mail, November 2014.

        The Greeks had gays to be sure, but the cultural flowering that was Weimar invented the abomination of trans bottom surgery. They had Bolshevik subversives. We have cultural Marxists. They were a democracy with suffrage, as are we. Reactionary anti-semitism arose in Weimar. Their elite hated rural volk, so do ours. I guess we will see if hyper-inflation arises here. Maybe that will settle the debate. Bipeds aside, similarities existed. Tut, tut, harrumph it’s bad form to troll one’s own comments section old boy.

        • i bought a book all about the sex stuff in weimar. very interesting to say the least – with pictures! When the SS finally cleaned house of the SA (so long Ernst, it’s been grand!) they caught all the leadership literally in bed with their favorite butt boys – and machine gunned the lot of them. the movie “The Damned” 1969 shows this event in great detail.

          • https://historycollection.com/17-reasons-why-germanys-weimar-republic-was-a-party-lovers-paradise/12/

            Here they maintain that ordering a child prostitute was as easy as ordering a pizza! Pizza, get it. Also, weird confluence of sex and violence. Mutilated women, you know, the usual. Party lovers paradise indeed.

33. There is also the fact that the Roman Republic failed when the economic arrangements supporting it failed.

    Every state eventually “fails”. They can’t be expected to endure forever because events and conditions both within them and outside their borders change in ways to which they are unable to adapt. With some it happens quickly, see Simon Bolivar and Gran Columbia. Others, Rome for instance, take longer, although Rome in 455 AD bore no resemblance to the Rome of 509 BC.

    The US seems unable to come to terms with changes in the international scene, the increasing viability of the Chinese regime and uncontrolled immigration in particular, and its own confusion over what its goals and means should be domestically. Should pirate capitalism be the basis of an economy structured by a parasitic legal profession and financial witchcraft?

    • I think out of necessity, and it is not going to come about easily, will be a return to an economy based on labor and manufacturing rather than finance. Or something like that. Maybe be it’s just my own bias because the only business that ever interested me was making things. I used to make furniture or work for a furniture maker just out of high school before I went off to college. Man that was fun and satisfying. But there was no future in it. My foreman made $7 an hour and I made $4 or something. And the manger made $10. The owners barely made anything. Everything economically went into the FIRE industries. Finance, insurance, real estate.

      • Falcone: And all the furniture making has been exported. You can’t find anything new today that’s not cheap garbage made in Asia. I have bought some lovely pieces for myself and my son/daughter-in-law at consignment stores – quality craftsmanship and solid wood, all American made a generation or two ago. In many ways I’m rescuing cultural artifacts, the same as buying old children’s books or (if I could afford it) old silver services. From a people who valued craftsmanship and beauty to a people who consciously melt it down and destroy it purely because of it’s financial value, utterly unappreciative of the aesthetic it represents.

        • I curse all the particle board cabinetry and counters regularly. The tenants are rough on it and it falls apart at the slightest stress or contact with water. But that’s all you can get anymore without spending an arm and a leg.

          Meanwhile we have handmade pieces of furniture in my home that are built like tanks and are older than I am.

          • Drives me nuts. I live in a deciduous forest and i can’t get hardwood. When i was a kid, they tore down an old hotel in covington ky. Dad did salvage. They used 1×4″ and 1×2″ solid black walnut for furring strips for paneling. Even back then i remember him dancing around happy when he discovered the wood.

          • Nice stuff in a rental only lasts until the tenant gets herself a nice unemployed boyfriend who funds his alcohol addiction by selling said nice stuff.

          • “….a nice unemployed boyfriend who funds his alcohol addiction by selling said nice stuff.”

            We’ve never had a tenant sell the cabinets, washer, dryer, stove or refrigerator out from under us while they still lived there, but a few have taken them with them when they moved. On the other hand, we’ve had tenants leave their own behind because it was too much trouble to move them. Had to haul an extra functional washer and a broken (but not irreparably so) dryer up out of a basement just a couple weeks ago.

            More often, they just junk them up and we have to clean them. We just had about 13 hours of cleaning time into a stove that was pristine when the tenants moved in a year and a half ago. We realized we should have just called it a loss and gotten a replacement, but it’s a really nice stove and we hated to give up on it just because it was filthy.

        • I know. The loss of our furniture making is heart breaking. But there was a furniture maker up in Ceres Ca. His prices weren’t too bad but all made in America. Or right here in California. Is this america? He he

          What held me back was his name, can’t remember off the top, but sounded ((())). So my gut sense was he was kind of a scammer. Or that he’d go through the motions of making real furniture but then he’d skimp in areas that mattered. I could be wrong but I never went ahead and plopped down money for his stuff.

          Edit: just researched for his name. Stuart David. What you think? (((JJJ))) or not? Didn’t SNL once have a game show skit built around this same question? Or was it Cracked magazine?

          • A jewish carpenter? Unlikely.

          • Falcone: No clue and never heard of the guy. I’m not talking about pieces done by individual carpenters – I’ve bought mahogany and cherry pieces from the old American North Carolina based Drexel Heritage and Pulaski. I have my late mother-in-law’s pieces from Huntley (also from North Carolina which disappeared and merged with Thomasville). Plus I bought some mahogany things overseas – the wood is beautiful but the craftsmanship and detailing is not quite the same as the older American stuff.

          • seems like there is a lot of US based furniture on Etsy. might be wrong, but judging by comments the stuff i am talking about is hand made in the US by a single guy, or a small shop.

          • Should be plenty of Amish selling furniture online.

            Be prepared to pay for that level of craftsmanship.

          • You can still find decent Made In America furniture. Not far from where I live we have the county fair during the summer and for the last twelve years, or so there are several Amish and other vendors from the Pennsylvania Dutch Country displaying lots of furniture that they have made.
            Some items are nice – albeit rather plain – while others a examples of beautiful detail. All of them are rock solid and very well made. There was one dining room set that was constructed of weathered cherry and it’s construction was simple yet beautiful. Unfortunately the Mrs. didn’t like it and I had to compromise on something else, but they are out there.

        • you can get some pretty sweet Midcentury furniture (made in the 50’s and 60’s) for about the same, or less, than similar new pieces. like a genuine Eames chair for under $2k.

          • Even low-end stuff from the early ’60s or before is a whole level of craftsmanship above the particle board crap. Even bottom end stuff often used hardwoods and dovetailed joints. Goodwill level crap from the early ’60s blows IKEA away.

            Particle board was invented in 1950 and by the mid-60s it had gone mainstream and the rest is disposable history.

        • We still get this American made stuff if we need something:
          https://thisendup.com/classic-sofa/
          That couch may not be tops in comfort but it cannot be destroyed.

        • 3g4me,

          Almost 20 years back, my wife & I over several years purchased some furniture pieces from Stickley, a direct lineal descendant from a business founded by one of the Stickley family, originally craftsmen working in the Arts and Crafts tradition. Their production facility is in New York state. Among the pieces were some nice quarter-sawn oak items. We wound up with a 3-leaf dining table with two end chairs and 6 side chairs, a large china cabinet, a 2-leaf kitchen table with 4 chairs, two couches, a nice settle, along with several occasional cabinets, an entertainment center, several side tables (including a 3-piece nesting table set), and my favorite perch, a Morris chair. Materials are very good, hardware is excellent, and the joinery is exceptional. We stretched the purchases out over a few years, but it was still a big gulp for us; we don’t regret the expenditure at all.

34. when normandy conquered britain in 1066, all ownership of everything, was in norman hands within 2 years. the previous anglo-saxon elite were returned to the general population, sans their property. i suspect same thing will happen here, to the eager beaver cadres working to tear down the place.

    • Yes, something along those lines

      There will be a big shakeout with the pretenders at the margins getting crushed and thrown back into the general population

      That pretty much defines Los Angeles. Lots of “rich” people in expensive homes but really no land to speak of. In the context of current day Los Angeles, they are very well to do. But when SHTF what’s that postage stamp size lot going to do for you? And their fake jobs will be no more. Better pack up the Land Rover and start driving til it runs out of gas.

35. two interesting old movies I watched recently: No Blade of Grass (from England), and Panic in Year Zero. In the English one, they are eating each other within a week. and in both, violent rapes are quite common. You never can have enough ammo, and even your best friend or your closest relative will kill you for the last piece of bread. One interesting item is that the women almost always counseled the wrong course of action because they think with their emotions, and the group only survived because the men made the hard cold decisions and eliminated the slackers.

    • haven’t seen PAnic for probably 50 years!? women will always counsel surrender, plus they don’t mind the rapey thing once things get extra spicey in the world.

      • In Reich’s book on his genetic research, he more than once describes “sudden” population changes were the males of a particular settled people dies “out” while the female lineage continues on. Seems women are more than happy to mate with the “new sheriff in town”. 😉

        • Women are hypergamous.

    • IOW, Patriarchy works!

    • > One interesting item is that the women almost always counseled the wrong course of action because they think with their emotions, and the group only survived because the men made the hard cold decisions and eliminated the slackers.

      One common phrase I tell my wife when someone gets justifiably railed for being a public nuisance is “Some people need to get bullied.” She doesn’t understand it, never will, and should never need to.

36. russia also sees itself as the heir to imperial rome; czar being a version of Caesar.

    Wouldn’t the War of 1812 be a better comparison to the Peloponnesian War? Athens and Sparta were both distinct polities, with a shared ethnic heritage.

    • and part of the america-is-rome twaddle posits britain in the role of hellenic greece.

    • If I am not mistaken, the Moscow as the Third Rome was a slavophile idea meaning that Russia was the seat of the Christianity. Moscow–>constantinople after the Schism–> Moscow after Constantinople fell to the Turks.

37. “The American empire is looking similar to the Soviet empire at the end. ”

    The similarities are indeed eerie, but this is more like the USSR circa the late Seventies. Only in its final days of the Eighties did Gorbachev mildly acknowledge the shortcomings of the USSR’s totalitarian system and introduced glasnost. The dying American Empire is a long way from acknowledging its shortcomings or allowing the free exchange of ideas and unfettered speech (which the Soviets never really did, either, although they flirted with the idea).

    Another analogy you did not mention is to the final stages of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks identified an ethnic group they found unreliable and unleashed a genocide, which obviously is underway here. Further, they lived under the illusion that the territories the Ottomans had dominated would remain under their rule. That last part was really brought home to me last night when I listened to a totally delusional and shocking podcast that featured Jay Nordlinger of National Review interviewing/fellating John Bolton. These two vile monsters discussed the world in terms of what the United States would allow and not allow, how the Empire should define boundaries for other nations, and so forth, acting as if this were the Nineties rather than post-Afghanistan America. It was so unattached from reality it seemed like parody at times. The Young Turks right up until their Empire dissolved had similar discussions about territory long lost to independence. I took note that Bolton, mostly, did not hesitate to refer to the Banana Empire as an empire.

    I expect in the next few years the first American military bases will be expelled from Europe. It may be over something as significant as fatigue with the Forever War with Russia, or something cultural like the promotion of anal sex in the Visegard Group. In a sense, this started on the other side of world in the Eighties in the Philippines, so this has longer roots than we appreciate.

    Internally, the Ottomans literally killed off some of their brightest minds with the Armenian genocide. Likewise, the Banana Empire is marginalizing the only ethnic group that is capable of a functioning society like the one it had until the last thirty or so years.

    As you wrote, no analogy is exact but much of what we are witnessing has a lot of rhyme.

    • I just finished reading Midnight in Chernobyl and it’s pretty clear that single incident ripped the guts out of the Soviet economy and led to the USSR’s downfall.

      I wonder what form America’s version will take?

      • I’ve been torn on that or Afghanistan as what discredited the regime the most. Afghanistan certainly discredited the military, which was always looked upon favorably. Of course, America has its own Afghanistan and Covid is our Chernobyl.

        • In the book the author does point out that the Chernobyl incident collapsed the credibility of the Soviet scientific and technical bureaucracy. Those institutions were certainly important pillars in the strength of the Soviet empire.

          Covid should have had a similar effect in the West, but it has not. I attribute this to the, “mass formation,” effect described by Professor Desmet. This effect appears to have gripped the minds of at least half the minds of Western populations.

          Unfortunately, this formation is concentrated among the managerial, media, and academic upper middle classes.

          • I think that Covid and Afghanistan are the first solid hits on the regime’ credibility. It will take something larger to start the downfall.

            A military disaster such as the loss of one or more aircraft carriers and escort ships in a fight with China and/or a Pearl Harbor type attack on our Pacific bases. Our feeble, inept and woke response will destroy the militaries credibility.

            Domestically it could be a Cat 5 hurricane or an earthquake that destroys one or more major cities, the ineffective government response which can’t be covered up does the damage to credibility.

          • the consequences of the covid response holocaust are only now beginning to be felt. give it another year and fauci will be dead (and not in his bed).

        • That’s a great analogy between the USSR’s Chernobyl response and the USA’s Covid debacle. Chernobyl revealed more about system failures, and Covid has revealed more about personal failings and weakness, but, yeah, the parallel is very striking.

      • how did it rip the guts out of the soviet economy?

        • The total direct losses were estimated as high as $13 billion in 1986 dollars. The USSR’s total defense budget was something like $30-40 billion in those days.

          During the initial incident they were pulling men and material in from across the Soviet Union. At one point they had a fleet of 80 helicopters dumping all kinds of crap on the reactor core to extinguish the graphite fire and quench the reactivity.

          Other losses included destroyed and irradiated equipment, irradiated farmland, the city of Pripyat, millions of kilowatts of electricity, relocation costs for those in the exclusion zone, and the ongoing medical care for those injured in the incident.

          On top of all this, the Soviets lost decades of R&D and intellectual property they had invested in the RBMK reactor design that was to power their empire’s future. The Chernobyl reactors were 1000 MW designs, before the disaster the Soviets had future designs rated for 2000 MW.

          The disaster forced the Soviets to realize the dangerous aspects of the RBMK design and shelve their future plans for it.

          In terms of political costs, there were two Soviet 1500 MW RBMKs in Lithuania that became the target of post-Chernobyl nationalist anger which sparked the protests that eventually led the Baltics to split from the USSR.

          • “…there were two Soviet 1500 MW RBMKs in Lithuania that became the target of post-Chernobyl nationalist anger which sparked the protests…”

            And once ‘the world’ realizes Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J are American companies…?

          • thanks for the good reply.

    • I really enjoy disliking Jay Nordlinger at National Review. On the other hand, he is such a clueless dork that I end up pitying him.

      He used to a podcast with Mona Charen and his exaggerated supplication to her was cringeworthy. It was clear to me that she saw him as a pathetic beta orbiter goy.

    • I’ll say the same thing about Nordlinger as I said about Bob Dole this morning. I didn’t know he was still alive.

38. All I will say is I had a vision that all of those large fancy estates in the Hamptons become a vacated ghost town

    It’s strange thinking it, but there will be a time when all of those houses are vacated and run down like the old southern plantation homes

    Or like Detroit where there are trees and weeds growing up through the floorboards of those grande ole mansions

    Interesting times for sure

    • An interesting thing about the explosion of private security since the Cold War is it assumes these private actors will always play by the rules and never work for the enemies of their employer. They should be reading up on how that worked with the Praetorian guards.

      • If the paymasters of private security personnel can’t pay them with anything of value, or pay them enough to show up for work, they will melt away and defend their own.

        Times are good till the money runs out.

      • How is that working in South Africa? Have the security forces there turned toward robbing the ruling class yet?

        • been a couple of coups in africa recently, so “yes”.

        • I think the difference is here we have a different layering of wealth. We have the truly rich and we have a wedding cake of layers down to the somewhat wealthy. There are a lot of layers here covering millions of households and people Not so much in South America. There it’s either you are super rich, average, or poor.

          We have yet to go through a shake out that separates the somewhat wealthy from the super rich, but it’s coming.

          • I live in South America, have traveled widely in it visiting friends (Latinos all) and disagree, South America–particularly Colombia, Perú, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.– has a growing upper middle class who live quite well, as I’ve experienced first hand.

          • where doesn’t the “upper middle class” live well? south america is a violent shithole, and the economy in argentina is collapsing for about the third time in 20 years. buenos aires has just about the highest level of anti-depressant usage per capita, in the world. and finally, if it is so god damned good down there why does everyone there want to come here?!

        • I don’t know. How about you write an essay on it and I’ll take a look.

        • Barnard: I don’t know if the ruling blacks in South Africa hire exclusively black or White or a racial mixture of security guards. The few financially comfortable White South Africans who remain continue to hire black security guards, many of whom conspire to rob, torture, and kill their employers.

          Of course, I don’t know how many White South Africans with a solid military background remain in the country, or if it’s legally permissible to hire them. And, even if it is, would they choose to work for the remaining race-blind Whites who’ve gone along with the destruction of their world?

          • Look at who remains the wealthiest people in South Africa. Those other than Boers and English are Fellow White. The game can be played a long time.

      • Yep, things are going to go haywire with a million moving parts and divided loyalties and all the rest. People are going to need a lot of money to keep up their private security, and people who think they’re rich will find out they can’t keep up with the payments. Then what?

        Going to suck being them. They better have good looking daughters.

      • Niccolò Machiavelli had a lot to say about condottiere, in addition to praetorians.

        The dying empire we should be studying as most closely resembling ours is the British one. The irony isn’t lost on me that the United States played a great role in destroying it after 1945.

      • zman: It’s a trope of TEOTWAWKI novels that the private security forces hired by either the political or entertainment elite or even the wealthy preppers turn on their employers. It’s always some low-level bureaucrat who ends up proclaiming herself “President” because all those above her ended up dying in the scramble for bolt holes. And the Hollywood actresses found ravished and ruined by the mob because their poorly-paid and socially scorned staff rob the mansion and abandon someone who can no longer provide anything of value. The more optimistic writers choose to depict a split in the military security forces supporting the latest political claimant, with a minority always beginning to suspect they’re being lied to about what happened and at whose behest.

        • Don’t you feel this scenario is coming though?

          Or are we just caught up in our own minds? Might we be the cultists sure that the end is coming?

          Hard to say at this point but I’m betting on the former. I’m betting on things falling apart. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. But whatever the case, I don’t want to grow old in Los Angeles. I came here moons ago to have fun. Not to die.

      • “An interesting thing about the explosion of private security since the Cold War is it assumes these private actors will always play by the rules and never work for the enemies of their employer.”

        Much less stick around when the crap really hits the fan.

    • It is scarcity, I suspect, that will turn private security against the ultra-wealthy. The oligarchs really should be keeping their eyes on their private pilots initially.

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