Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a review of sorts of a book titillating the usual suspects. Sunday Thoughts is mostly about the various angles to the FBI raid on Trump’s villa last week. SubscribeStar users can find it here and Substack users can find it here.
When it comes time to write the obituary for Western civilization, the focus will not be on the forces of destruction, but the forces of distraction. These are the people who peddle utopian alternatives to the present, thus preventing a real opposition forming up to defend the West from its attackers. The West is not being destroyed by malevolent forces like Wokism, antiwhite radicalism and the concentration of wealth in alien hands, but by the forces preventing an organized resistance.
One of the primary examples of this is libertarianism. The real trick of this evil ideology is that it convinces the victim that he is responding with pure reason to the irrationalism of the rats gnawing away at civilization. In reality he is indulging in fantasy, every bit as ridiculous as left-wing utopianism. The difference is that Marx imagined a world where man was freed from his nature through cooperation, while Murray Rothbard dreamed of you being free from your community.
Libertarianism convinces the victim that cooperation is evil, so he not only eschews any sort of organized resistance, but he also works to prevent it. It is this last bit that allowed it to infiltrate conservatism and turn it into a cat’s paw. Twentieth century conservatism became the great defender of Progressive dominance, undermining any resistance in the name of individual liberty. The result is that otherwise good people volunteer to hang alone rather than hang together.
The true nature of the cult of libertarianism is clear in this review of the most recent Thomas Piketty book, A Brief History of Equality. The author of the review does not beat around the bush attacking Piketty’s ideas. Instead, he warns that it could persuade people to organize against the forces destroying their society. In other words, the crime here is not in being wrong about economics. The crime is in being wrong about politics by advocating against the status quo.
As is custom when critiquing libertarianism, it needs to be pointed out that the author’s revealed preference is for something other than libertarianism. He has steadfastly avoided the dreaded private sector, choosing a life in government, the academy and think tanks. One of things you will never find in the dreaded private sector is a genuine libertarian, because people who work understand that society is not possible without organization and someone enforcing the rules.
Putting that aside, the absurdity of libertarianism is that it starts by agreeing with Marx on human organization. Marx believed that what defined the human condition and drove the flow of history was economic relations. The human condition is defined by man’s economic relations with other men. This is not only the starting point for both Marxism and libertarianism, but the end point as well. Both seek the perfection of human relations through economics.
Of course, Marx was wrong about the nature of man. Humans are not defined by their economic relationships with other men. The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry. The things that define a people are not the product of economic relations but the product of their shared struggle as a people. Culture is the answer to the central question of human organization. “Who are we?” is answered by the traditions, customs and history of the people.
Put another way, culture is the shared labor of the people. It is not just the product of their current labor. Culture is the preservation and improvement of their ancestor’s labor in order top pass it to the next generation. Culture is the shared accretive product of generations of people. That is what defines a people and the individual, not the trading of goods between people. The Marxist and libertarians strip man of his humanity by reducing him to his transactions.
The Marxists and libertarians share something else. Both are a response to the individualism of John Locke. If God holds dominion over the world because he created it, and man was made in God’s image, then it naturally flows that man holds dominion over that which he created. You own you and everything you make because who you are is the product of your labor. This is the bedrock of Western liberalism. We are naturally free because we own ourselves.
Marx saw capitalist economic relations as the source of exploitation, which he defined as men compelled to labor for others. Contrary to popular legend, Marx was not opposed to capitalism, a term he popularized. He saw capitalism as a necessary transition phase to socialism. Eventually, the number of people controlling capital, thus compelling labor, would shrink to the point where people would overthrow them and restore their rights to their own labor.
Libertarianism makes a similar argument. Instead of the holders of capital compelling labor, it is the state. You will note they always avoid discussing who actually owns the state, but instead focus on how the state compels your labor. They tax your labor and force you to so that which you otherwise not do. It is only when the state is eliminated will you be free, because then you will once again own your labor. They land in the same utopia as the Marxist, just by a different road.
It is not hard to see why libertarians despise culture as much as the enemies of Western civilization despise it. Culture defines who decides. The culture of a people defines who makes the final decisions. The answer is always confined to people who are of the people. How those people are selected and by what right they make their decisions on behalf of the people is within that context. Both Marxists and libertarians hate this idea and always oppose it.
This is the great trick of liberal utopianism. One side explicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations in order to reach the promised land. The alleged opponent implicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations but claims to be a defense of those natural relations, which they define as pretty much the same as their opponent’s vision of man in his blessed utopia. In both cases, the goal is a world of pure self-ownership in which man has no debt to anyone but himself.
Whenever the final accounting of Western civilization is done, libertarianism will go down as the greatest hoax in human history. In the name of individual liberty, it commands the followers to build the gas chambers used by their alleged opponents to snuff out the defenders of Western culture. Without out that culture, what is left is a deracinated mass of individuals enslaved to the great ideological state, drugged by cheap consumer goods to avoid contemplating the banality of life.
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Z-man,
I do not call myself a libertarian, but I have been paying attention to some of them in the last few years. Much of your criticism seems off the mark, or perhaps outdated.
It is very possible or even likely that the Libertarian Party’s next presidential candidate will be a non-college-graduate, self-employed, Pro-Life, “open-to-borders” (not “open borders”) comedian named Dave Smith. He is being promoted by the wing of the party that identifies with the Mises Institute, which seems to have quite a few small-c conservatives in it.
If you haven’t before, I encourage you to read the essay “Libertarianism and the Alt-Right” by Hoppe.
https://libertarianism.uk/2017/10/20/libertarianism-and-the-alt-right-hoppe-speech-2017/
What’s called the “Mises Causcus” of the Libertarian Party has been working in the last few years to throw off the leftists dominating the party. The political and ideological landscape may be in flux.
Anyway, the real things preventing change are not ideological but structural–the left has more power and money, as well as a higher number of individuals with political talent and guile.
Brahmins Only, No Dalits Need Apply
– or –
Life is a play and we’re all in the caste…
Z has often mentioned how India’s caste system has infiltrated US based industries, especially corporate IT. Here is the first mainstream media article on the topic, at least that I’ve read. A quick takeaway is that, sound like to me at least, there is absolutely nothing in Federal or State anti-discrimination law that forbids the practice. Pity (or not) the poor EEOC hack who might be tasked to prosecute a discrimination charge by one dot-Indian against another 😀
I suspect the American egalitarian ideal that dot Indians ignore caste would be akin to having decreed that wealthy White slaveholders in the antebellum South work and socialize with even the most cultured of their Negro slaves on equal terms. “Lawdy, Massah Layabout, you sho nuff kind to let us sup wit y’all!” This analogy is far from perfect; my example clearly uses race, but also conveys dramatic differences in social status. I believe the latter is more analogous to caste.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/caste-california-tech-giants-confront-003315657.html
I guess it’s all relative on libertarian scale between various cultures.
Libertarianism is often a gateway to the right wing dissidence because it’s the only one allowed to function. My journey started with contesting the atrocious bureaucratic state of the 3rd Polish Republic, naturally I flocked to libertarians since they offered a critique. Here libertianism is strongly intersected with catholic traditionalists, reactionaries, monarchists and some nationalists which created a pipeline network between various groups familiar with each other. The main libertarian outlet also has been hosting other dissidents for years, which is how I later moved towards classic conservatism and nationalism.
This is one reason why Konfederacja (confederacy of libertarians, catholic monarchists and nationalists) was able to emerge and get into the parliament.
Maybe one reason Mr Zman so harshly criticizes libertarians in America is their moral dissolution and extreme relativism. Here there has been a steady right-wing shift against multinational corporations and immigration restrictions among the libertarians. Many pro-lifers have been libertarian and the opposition towards feminist and homosexual militancy have been a staple of libertarian writings here. Ethnic cultural factors like the national spirit must come into play I suppose.
I would say in reality that few people know what a libertarian is or would think to call themselves one. The decay of western culture has come about without need for the word. It is happening by force of human nature.
My simpler take is that the weak have become enfranchised and empowered and are now in the process of creating a world in which they feel more comfortable. That’s it and that’s all. The weak being females, gays, immigrants, minorities, and those who are slave to their compassion (a legacy of centuries of Christianity, which is primarily the religion of compassion). (Level-headed Christians might object to that, but note I said ‘primarily’.)
The interesting question is whether reality will reassert itself at some point and cultural values will readjust once the weak have pushed their fantasy world too far. Humans always push things too far.
American liberalism and Conservatism are both exceptional at fundamentally (and quite obviously under even the slightest bit of objective scrutiny) lying about reality, but utilizing that lie to transform the “abyss staring back at you” into an aspirational message that resonates with millions. It’s a key trait for why these two ideologies have so dominated the latter half of the 20th century and continue largely unchallenged to this day.
Take egalitarianism and people, with two excellent approaches from both Conservatism and American liberalism. Both ideologies swear all people are equal. Absolutely false, falls apart under the most minute amount of scrutiny from even a small child. A harsh reality though. That sucks. What if I wasn’t born with the right genes or in the right circumstances? Life isn’t fair. We all see it with our own eyes. Jealousy, greed and hopelessness? What about happy fairy tales to make it all better.
The Conservative story is that although all people are equal, not everyone works as hard. The more you work the better you’ll be at something and success works the same way. Don’t fault your wealthy elite. He worked harder. That noble prize physicist? He just worked harder than you at school. But what about genetics, luck, happenstance, circumstances? The cold hard nature of existence doesn’t care how hard you worked if it hands you a tragedy right? Don’t let reality interrupt a great message. Anyone can work harder, and everyone has an ability to be just as good as anyone else. Great. And there is a brilliant addendum. Why don’t all people work hard if we are equal? Well there is this nefarious force, government, that gets in the way. Conservatives want to stop it, we need to empower Conservatives to do it. If Conservatism can win the crusade against government, we can return to a natural state of equality.
American Liberalism’s tale goes like this. Like Conservatives, all people are equal in their natural state. But it’s not work or government causing it this time. It’s a question of the divine. There is a dark god called White Supremacy. And its demons of Systemic Racism are infesting the world. A great calamity, Colonialism, marred the very earth 400 years ago and we are now in this fallen state of inequality. But all is not lost. The natural state can be returned. Through a spiritual battle, the dark God of White Supremacy can be vanquished and the world can be reborn- Decolonized. Equality will then return.
I would not say Libertarians have the blame for the failure to defend Western Civilization. They were always as irrelevant to the workings of US Society as the Chess Club was to the social workings of a High School.
What caused the failure was mass market corporate consumerism. Which sold prosperity and the Poz together. As simple as that. Per Anthony Bevin re doctors and the National Health program, the corporate mass consumerism “stuffed their mouths with gold,” i.e. gave prosperity in the 1950s through late 1960s, and the illusion of it afterwards. People bought mass third world immigration and hate Whitey along with Tide, Disney, and Kraft foods. They were/are intermingled. People quite literally don’t know any other way to live than Globohomo. Because hating Whitey is a part of buying Coke or Pepsi. Or Nike.
The corporate managerial class is mostly White women now, particularly in the rungs just below CEO. That is certainly the case with Disney. And all those women are filled with the HATE HATE HATE of White men, usually directly because too many beta male nerds insulted them by thinking they had a chance, and Alpha chads pumped and dumped that stuff. The hate is not surprising — it would be shocking if White women did not hate their men. Given that the corporate dream fantasy factory sells women the romantic/sexual dream that is as good for their minds as McDonalds corporate food is for their bodies.
Aneurin Bevan, not Anthony.
It was also interesting that there were lots of movies and TV shows that magically sprang into being at that time based on the new large hospitals that effectively promoted the NHS as a thing to be trusted and normalized as lots of people were rightly suspicious.
Conditioning the population has been going on a long time.
About the propaganda films and television shows, and totally off topic (or maybe not):
Here Stateside, the thing that colored my worldview most happened nearly 30 years ago on freaking NBC Television. The feds had massacred north of 80 people in a fanatically religious but otherwise harmless group’s compound in Waco, Texas. The usual federal lying and media propaganda was not working. So a “fictionalized account of a true story” was rushed into production, and the cult leader and his congregants were presented as demented child rapists and maniacs on a made-for-television movie. Mind you, this was in just a matter of days. It made me think, “what can they do in a matter of years?”
The propaganda has grown even more retarded than the increasingly more stupid general population in the ensuing decades. People by and large are seeing through the political op the Trump raid represents, for example. I honestly think the totalitarians are furious that they can’t make the public think the last election was on the up and up, made-for-TV movie or not. The inability for their lies to have the previous juice makes them angrier at Trump and his supporters than Trump and his supporters do.
Will they rush into production a “fictionalized version of a true account” of what was going on inside Mar-A-Lago? They are dumb enough to do it. One thing Orwell got wrong was that IngSoc, as manifested now in the United States, wasn’t jawdroppingly retarded.
Are you sure it was rushed in a few days?
Maybe it was mostly already prepped?
Seige was between February 28 and April 19, 1993 – TV aired May 23.
Oddly the Wikipedia says
“Todd Everett of Variety.com noted that, even though it was already being filmed during the actual series of events, the film is “an engrossing affair, with no signs of hasty production””
Also interview withe the script writer says
“While all of us involved in the Waco project recognized the dangers inherent in creating a story about a historical event as it was still unfolding”
He also has this
“We also had to choose an ending. No one knew how long the siege was going to last, but it looked like it might go on for quite a while. Everyone agreed that for dramatic purposes the best ending would be apocalyptic — some sort of confrontation between the Davidians and the government. … And after they started shooting early in April ….”
Maybe there is more to this than meets the eye at first glance.
Now I have to go back and rewatch.
Among other odd things are stories about it being faked (especially given they filmed it at the same time – maybe the news was the film?) so for example an odd thing is this current address listing:
ufind.name/Vernon+Howell
Vernon Wayne Howell is Koresh’s real name.
Vernon W Howell is listed as currently living in Palestine Texas and has a previous address of: 471B PO Box, Waco, TX 76703.
Which is the address on the original search warrant for WACO in 93: “” Search of residence of Vernon Wayne Howell, and others, Rt . 7, Box 471-B, AKA: Mount Carmel Center, McLennan County, TX
http://www.jaedworks.com/shoebox/waco.html
Take from it what you will.
@trumpton:
Re the warrant, it almost was universally agreed the warrant could have been peacefully served on Koresh while he was in town. Instead, the ATF dragged along a TV crew for propaganda purposes and some rather unfortunate footage of officers getting killed ended up in the public domain.
A few more quick bits:
The feds denied for years that any incendiary devices had been shot into the compound before the fire started. A very unbiased documentary years later, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, showed an incendiary tear gas cannister was fired into the buildings moments before the fire started. The documentary concluded it might have caused the blaze.
The feds demolished the husk of the building after the blaze despite requests to preserve it as evidence. There were plans to do a forensic analysis on whether the bullet holes corresponded with federal claims about what happened.
@jack
To my mind the whole thing is suspect as to whether it was real or not. Which in some ways makes it worse.
Another fun fact is that Alex Jones when was starting out in Austin used his show to raise 100lk to rebuild the branch Davidian church, which is strange, and Jones used it a lot to promote himself as anti-govt.
Wheels within wheels.
Look at the decades of plague and zombie-focused stories in all formats that they propagandized us with for decades leading up to the Covid marketing effort.
1000x this
One thousand to the 10th power
When TPTB began consistently referring to us as “consumers” as opposed to “citizens” I knew which way the wind had set. All pretense to a representative republic had been abandoned, and it was bread and circuses thenceforth. And now, even that is being withdrawn.
This is O/T. But it struck me as odd.
Trump said the FBI took all 3 of his passports (1 expired). As I’m from Europe is it normal to have 2 active passports in the US at once or do you need dual citizenship?
Maybe you get a diplomatic one for being the president?
He might be an honorary Israeli. They named a city after him.
That would be awkward to explain to those outside the civnat camp.
Could be, seems as likely as anything else.
Possibly another thing everyone knows about above a certain social circle, but no one ever talks about to the proles.
“Yes. U.S. citizens are allowed to have more than one valid U.S. passport at the same time, according to the National Passport Information Center, which is a division of the U.S. State Department. But in most cases, you are only allowed to have two valid passports at a time, according to the NPIC.” (CNN Money)
I also thought there was a limit of one, with a wallet-sized identity card bearing the number, pic, and bio details.
One of the greatest intellectual struggles with the normie is getting them to understand that communism didn’t fail simply because it took away individual motivations to achieve. My boomer dad has always insisted on making the argument that the USSR forced smart people to work as janitors while dumb people were chosen to be scientists or some such nonsense, while all were being paid the same measly wage. As Z man points out, Marxism did define human relations by economics, but choosing to oppose marxism based on economic principles is to ultimately agree that economics is what defines the human condition, and the rest is just technical differences.
a scientist that was unreliable politically might very well end up as a janitor – or worse. you might be selling your dad short; are you Gen-X?
Yes I’m Gen X
And yes I do understand that communism was bad (nothing in my post was an endorsement of communism).
The point of my post is that for 99% of normies, including my father, this sole critique of communism was all that they needed, and my father’s intellectual curiosity never moved past it. This is because the country my father grew up in (America) had already decided to (likewise) frame everything in terms of economic relations. The Marxist argument had shaped our country too. The material prosperity of the industrial revolution had reached its logical conclusion by the 1950s, and people were unconsciously rejecting all the social contracts that had glued people together for thousands of years.
As far as the issue of a smart guy being made a janitor if he didn’t carry water for the ideologies of the state, how many decades now have Americans been forced to adapt to every new phobia and “ism”, as such that you risk being fired from private sector jobs for not conforming and potentially being reduced to working as a janitor, or worse, becoming homeless.
All I’m saying, without downplaying communism’s flaws or endorsing it, is that many of the tangible problems of any system are endemic to any and every system if the vanguards of culture, religion, tradition, etc are lulled into complacency.
Golf clap my friend.
America is reaching the same point that communism got to, just at a lot slower pace.
“The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.”
Blut und Erde. That, too, is an abstraction. I have two colleagues with an equal number of Northern European ancestors. The other ancestry is Armenian for one, African for the other. The former is “white,” the latter not — by contemporary American standards.
A shared cultural and historic heritage may be more to the point. Racial mixing may have brought down some civilizations but not all: the Japanese and Persian empires weren’t racially mixed. Even the concept of race is barely 200 years old. If you’re talking about spiritual blood, then take up your cross and “follow me…”
I know several libertarians and how you have described them in this essay is exactly on the nose. One of the guys I know, who makes a VERY good living, literally told me that he thinks all prisons should be abolished. At the same time, he was complaining to me how some black drug dealers kept hiding bags of drugs on his property.
You can’t make this stuff up.
That Kafkaesque anti-white book discussed in the Taki post reminded me of a satirical Polish novel from 2006, The Amazing Career of Anthony K.
The protagonist, a lowly Polish immigrant from Chicago, turns into a black man as a result of a car accident that activated a dormant ancestral gene (out of Africa theory).
Suddenly his career kickstarts as black race hustlers, Democrat party donors and even Republican neoconservatives all race to make political use of the “first Polish Negro”. This book has it all: jewish liberals, Zionists, Affirmative Action grifters, immigrants and George W. Bush, all swimming in the swamp of American politics, conned by a working class bumpkin from Poland turned black senator.
Remarkably lucid for its time, despite its light character. I could’ve seen the shape of things to come on the pages where white opponents were shot down as racists and Republicans cowered shamefully.
OT: am i the only one to notice that things have gone “dark” re:Ukraine? even the pro-Russia sites don’t have any new updates, and haven’t had for a couple of weeks. I wonder if there are secret negotiations going on? if there are, princess zelensky isn’t in on them, that’s for sure…
Not really dark. You just need to know where to look. The Russians have been working the hardened areas of the one thousand mile front. Those areas are massive fortresses of concrete. They pound them with artillery 24×7 and hunt for Ukrainian units out in the open. It is not sexy so it gets little media coverage.
Funny how the Donetsk is surrounded by massive concrete fortified artillery positions that the Ukranians have been building for 8 years. Not seen that mentioned in the media to explain how these fortifications surrounding the donbass magically came into being.
Building huge emplacements to shell your own population is just the sort of behavior you expect from the defenders of democracy
Try the military summary guy, he is still on youtube.
Generally just sticks to the facts from Ukranian/Russian telegram channels from the front line and official stuff from the respective ministries of defense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BAg4nHLd4c
thanks for the link.
The reason things are going dark is that the Russians are winning, albeit slowly. There’s a Youtube channel named “Military Summary,” that gives daily updates with detailed map. The site originates from Belarus. It seems to me pretty good.
Best critique of Libertarianism I’ve seen in a long while. Well done.
The most brittle parts of libertarianism:
Libertarians are generally anti zoning laws. Because of course who doesn’t want to walk into their back yard and have a Taco Bell right behind them. You don’t like hearing orders from the drive through? Buyer beware sucka. That’s what you get for buying a house with an empty field behind it. And if someone wants to convert their garage into tenement housing, well, F YOU, that’s private property sucka. If I wan’t to make my rental into a clown house that’s private property.
Their biggest blind spot however is the “right to free movement of people.” The philosophy is willfully blind and incapable of differentiating between, as what Pat Buchanan once said “a Zulu warrior and an Englishman.” So pack that dead weight into the country. And ironically, 99% of browns and blacks worldwide are either communist or borderline communist as they live and die in tribes.
Of course libertarians completely ignore and discount the price of labor. If you wash the country in 100 million new immigrants, and a framer now makes next to nothing. Well, that’s the real price of framing a house isn’t it. Framers were just overpaid for 200 years. We now have the real price of framing. The fact that Manuel’s angles are off by 10 degrees, well, it was sufficient to get the job done. All of society is made cheap and tawdry because of this, I would say, very (((transactional))) philosophy.
As more than one person has observed, Libertarians are liberals who like to smoke a lot of pot…and very radical liberals at that…
well, to be fair, Sean’s angles weren’t exactly square either :).
“The culture of a people defines who makes the final decisions. The answer is always confined to people who are of the people.” – Unless you’re white of course. Western countries can be riddled with etho-fiefdoms like the diaper heads in Minneapolis but don’t you dare get a clue whitie…
White countries have been smashed by their own media.
Year after year they have worked to undermine the culture and induce a self-negating psychosis in the population based on simple repetition conditioning and flood the zone techniques.
No other set of nations has this.
that’s the thing, this is Darwin in action. whole lot of white people need to die, for the rest to be free.
The people in “Muslim lands” have been beaten into an unnatural shape in the last few decades, too. Like globohomo in the West, the menticide inflicted on them is consistent enough with their nature to allow *some expression* of that nature—only the part most useful to their rulers (like “pathological altruism” in our case)—so they can’t fully resist it.
It’s strange that we’ve all degenerated similarly and simultaneously. Or it isn’t.
White countries don’t have their own media. They have a (((chosen))) media that is doing the smashing to which you refer.
This is an interesting thesis, but a tough one to prove. The first problem is that libertarianism isn’t anything. You have the anarcho-capitalists whose creed is utopian. The most common fallacy today is expressed as, “live and let live.” This is libertinism, not libertarianism. Then you have quacks like Brendan O’Neill who is a communist libertarian. That is a contradiction worthy of an anti-racist scholar. Libertarianism is an empty can with a label that anyone can come along and define.
The reason for this is the same reason for the collapse of our civilization. It is the disappearance of men and the over feminization of all spheres of life. That disappearance has lead to the collapse of standards. I wouldn’t call this system libertarianism. To me, libertarianism is the legal and philosophical framework that the Founders discussed and put into place. They valued valor and virtue far above transacting. Noblemen freely associate and cooperate. Barbarians don’t.
Progressivism in its late stage morphed into consumerism. Consumerism is not libertarianism. Consumerism is reducing human beings into units of consumption and economic output coupled with a totalitarian world view insists that they must therefore be treated as such and for the greater good treated. Of course, the man behind the curtain of consumerism is that consumption is spending and thus exhaustive of wealth. This is therefore antithetical to libertarianism’s economic dimension which holds production and choice of action as sacrosanct. Libertarian economics is antithetical to this vulgar, virtueless, zero-sum consumerism world view.
Consumerism has no standard and cares nothing for virtue and valor. It is vulgar and reduces people to infantalism. The HBO TV series, “Entourage”, epitomizes this as does Hugh Hendry and Yarvin’s elites who cavort about to the incessant pounding of guzzling MDMA at Burning Man. Nineteenth century America was as close to libertarianism as one can get. These men built great wealth, but they had tremendous restraint and virtue. They built beautiful concert halls, civic centers, libraries … … They were great men who held the standard of civilization. They sought to live up to The Founding American creed of valorous and virtuous free people. They worked with the pioneers to bring civilization and construct its gorgeous marvels.
Today the consumerist money lords are Cretans who fly around on jets and float around on cities. Not only do they not sponsor monuments and cathedrals and works of great beauty, they actively fund its destruction. Their works or lack of them reflect the vulgarity of their creed and the vaccuousness of their souls. In civilization if a man wanted to make a statement about his superiority, he did it by commissioning a great work of beauty. Or, he displayed his valor by a successful hunt. The Cathedrals commissioned the entire people to marshall inspiration and effort across many generations. Today, these inferior lady-men just buy stuff with the proper label on it to cover for their puny, undeveloped souls that have been crushed by rap and techno music. Burning Man is the elite!?!? What a joke.
I needed to enlist the help of a young man for a chore this weekend. He is a nice kid but, sadly, a perfect representative of the consumerist. What matters to the consumerist is money. What doesn’t is how it is acquired and what one produces to attain it. As we drove I asked him what he did the night before. He said he went to a sports bar. I asked if it was cool and if he liked it. He, said no; that it was a bunch of white trash. I bit my lip refrained with responding with something like, “Well at least when they travel and regale their friends of a story, they didn’t do it with their daddy’s money.” I did not. Instead I said. “Well, what do you expect from a sports bar. Whether you are a dry waller living in a trailer drinking Coors or a Wharton grad in the Hamptons drinking martinis, watching sports will never be a rarified, distinctively cultured activity.”
He didn’t understand my point. Consumers are hollow husks of a human and consumerism is the great hollowing force.
One of our jobs is to raise the standard and see human beings and civilization as a people who can will themselves to glorious elevation across every dimension of being. That is The West. Consumerism is something else. It is a vulgar bazar somewhere in the East, sanitized by isolation. Its means of attraction is a psy-op called marketing whose sole enticement is an endless series of dopamine hits that mask a consumptions constant degradation. Consumerism destroys the individual. Civilization cultivates the individual and binds them together with a higher purpose.
Consumerism is reducing human beings into units of consumption and economic output coupled with a totalitarian world view insists that consumption must be constantly increased along with the number of consumers by force of the state.
It will be interesting to observe and experience just how consumerism plays out once the demographic collapse already in place really starts its march through civilization (or what we euphemistically term ‘civilization’).
I dare say it will not be pretty.
So, “consumerism” is exactly what Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard called libertarianism. Got it.
Materialism is materialism, regardless of whether it comes from the 10th International or Cato Institute. Man is not an autonomous economic consumption unit, and does not “own” himself because he “produces” himself. If you “own yourself” due to a Lockean theory of “ownership by production,” then you owe 80% of “yourself” to your genetic ancestors. Tabula Rasa is bizarre nonsense, and without a Blank Slate, Marxist AND Hayekian materialism are incoherent.
My understanding of Rand is that she called herself a philosopher, but that she is more apt to be called an idealist. Her ideal man was an entrepreneur who managed wealth producing enterprises that produced real goods. That is not consumerism.
I think that libertarianism is a mantle that a lot of people put upon themselves in the same manner the neo-cons place the mantle of conservative upon themselves. The neo-cons seem to be deliberate deceivers. My guess is the libertines who call themselves libertarians are just knuckleheads who do not have a clue what libertarianism is. They either think it means, “live and let live” which is libertinism or they are economic reductionists who focus their world view around economic calculation and transaction. I agree with this article that this latter sub-group are essentially materialists – but unlike Marxists, they believe in private property.
My statement is that the founding creed of America and its founders and early citizens is libertarianism. That creed holds human virtue and valor above materialist concerns. The weakness in the project was exactly what they acknowledged. Namely, that the project only works when the majority of the society is valorous and virtuous and are noble enough to embrace the responsibilities of self governance.
The challenge ahead is to acknowledge that their fears were long ago realized and that we need a new arrangement.
As for the race issue the biggest issue for the heritage and native populations of white people in Europe and America is that the most wealthy and institutionally powerful white people have confounded a class struggle with a race struggle. It seems to me that they have been outplayed and bamboozled by the black supremacists. When the black supremacists say they want to abolish whiteness they mean they want to destroy not just “white bodies” but “whiteness” which if they were articulate means “white” culture. Every last achievement of our ancestors will be denigrated, erased or re-told to have been accomplished or surpassed by, “black bodies.”
When corrupt white people say they hate white people or want to abolish white people they are playing a game and showing that they are higher status than the Deplorables. In other words, for them it is just status signaling and they are too stupid to realize they are cheering and laying the groundwork for their own destruction. I suspect there is another group that is using this race war to complete the destruction of America and its constitutional order. For them, if white people and the knowledge and appreciation of Western Civilization are demolished in the process, well, so be it. They will raze the industrial eras titans legend and visages and replace them with their own.
It isn’t much of an argument for the greatness of white people that their vanity and stupidity have them working toward their own demise. I suppose they will float on their yachts in the Caribbean as the last survivors. More likely they haven’t really thought things through. I guess that makes A Great Bamboozlement and Self Deceit an equal partner to The Great Replacement.
There is a wealth of knowledge and value in true libertarianism. There is also knowledge that the Founders should have thought the better of their own concerns and fears that we need to find an answer to. Of course, they did not know the massive monkey wrench that mass scale industrialization would throw at the project. They couldn’t have known. It must be understood and accounted for in building what lies ahead. We misunderstand and throw out all of libertarianism to our peril as much as we seed our destruction by adopting or submitting to libertine, reductive consumerism in the form of the New World/Liberal Order. We have our work cut out for us.
Science denier! Genetics R Real. Denying the reality of genetics violates the NAP.
Is it possible to have the same level of consumerism without moving picture electronic media?
If it was just radio/still images I wonder if the psychological drivers of endless crap would have the same impact?
In a deracinated, atomized society, where law and justice is distributed unequally we’re headed towards jungle law. Libertarians, “rejoice”.
“I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I my brothers and my cousins against the world. That is jungle law. It is the way of the world when the world is thrown into chaos. It is our job to avert that chaos, to fight against it, to resist the urge to become savage. Because the problem with such law is that if you follow it, you are always fighting against someone.” – Nafisa Haji
(What will that world look like, when there are no “brothers”, only isolated consumers?)
I think Z is too harsh on libertarianism. Yet many faults he urges against it (and no doubt other philosophies) seem valid. Perhaps as with many concepts, the truth is somewhere in the middle? It’s human nature to tend to polarize issues. The born-again Christian is sure he must convert everyone he meets, lest they spend eternity in Hell The stereotypical blue-haired cat lady may really believe that the Democrats have all the answers, and that anyone opposing the WEF agenda in the slightest must be a knucle-dragging pickup-truck-driving banjo-playing Trump voter, fit only for some labor in a death camp somewhere. A Libertarian, presumably, must fight any and all government regulation.
Hard money writer Harry Browne, heavily influenced by free-market thinking, and who late in life even ran a few times for President as Libertarian, offered the following bit of wisdom in one of his many books: There is no idea so good that some people won’t take it to an illogical extreme. I believe that’s a very astute observation.
Would that libertarianism go down as the “greatest hoax in human history.” Methinks Z waxes a bit extreme here, but perhaps that may be forgiven since his oeuvre is primarily opinion. There are many contenders for the Hoax title, and in my “little-l” opinion, libertarianism is rather far down the list.
Isn’t it more likely that most, not necessarily all, of the numerous clashing worldviews may have something positive to offer? As much as we like our cherished philosophies, it’s probably closer to the truth that they have some ordinary rocks in the bag along with the gems. Unlike a theory that prohibits contradiction, such as a mathematical theorem or one from physics, most human philosophies need not be perfect in their entirety.
As the fable of the blind men meeting an elephant, each man’s description was partially accurate, but it missed the big picture.
Now I end with a funny quote from Philip K. Dick; that “reality is whatever doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it” is overworked. This, from a character who eschewed social contact, but he may not have been a Libertarian:
“But he had to have SOME contact with people…No matter how hard one tried one could not entirely suspend interpersonal relationships, desirable as it might be.” [from “The Simulacra”]. 🙂
I tend to agree here. I am a former Lib. Never in 20 years as a Lib did I conceive of a Lib—or act as one, such as Z-man describes. However, as he describes a hardcore Lib, I now see why I am no longer a Lib.
As with *all* ideologies, there are short comings which begin to loom large when taken to an extreme. I resigned Lib when my latest Cato article (years ago) came out for yet again “open borders”—the essence of the idea being that we are all “labor units” that should be allowed to contract with the highest bidder for our efforts. Lib ideology not only ignored the obvious welfare state problem, but also the equality and culture (blood) problem among people.
However, there are still a few Lib precepts that I hold close and that I use to defend against our current “nanny” State. Government is not our friend, it is a necessary evil at best. However, the opposite extreme, Randian Individualism, is also a recipe for failure as well.
If I read Z-man’s commentary as perhaps implied, Lib/Marxism an absolute evil, then I disagree. Be pragmatic, take workable concepts as fits current needs, but do not toss the “baby out” as they say.
Those are the exact issues that pushed me away from libertarianism. Their modern defenders of open borders was never something that jived with the rest of the belief system imo
Z put it sufficiently to quote: “If you see a libertarian, punch him. He will know why.”
“The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.. . . . .
Culture is the shared accretive product of generations of people. ”
So which is it, “blood” or shared accretive product? And, over time, aren’t both the blood and the shared accretive product likely to change over time? Humans have been migrating around all over the world since humans came into existence, sometimes displacing other humans, sometimes being displaced, or absorbed. Even if a population exists as an isolated uniformity over a long period of time there will be changes in its culture. Blood sports such as cockfighting and bear baiting, once very popular, have been effectively banned by governments as a response to public opinion. Practically nowhere are dogs now accepted as food, even in the Orient. Blood letting is no longer considered a valid medical technique. Attempting to preserve both racial “purity” and culture in a particular situation is as futile as the unlikely success of organized libertarianism. No group has had a better opportunity to maintain its racial and cultural identity than the Inupiat but they’ve failed.
Right on cue. It’s the “muddy the waters” guy. What time is it in Tel Aviv, btw.
I see you choose to go with the “populations are always changing” schtick. Very nice choice. Of course, there’s always Lewontin’s “there’s more genetic variation with races than between races.”
I’m surprised you didn’t go with “What is white anyway? Are Turks white, what about Greeks? Where’s the line for white begin and end?” That’s always a popular choice amongst the professional trolls.
I’m guessing that you must really, really hate Israeli Jews, right? Or at least you find them the most ridiculous for trying to preserve their people. I mean, they’re the most open about it.
Your canned arguments and replies don’t fly around here. You’ll get way more bang for your buck at Breitbart or the other CivNat sites.
I often wonder about these people. Is it a compulsion to constantly invade and disrupt even the small areas outside the mainstream poison from some NPC programming, or is it a day job?
Both.
It’s their canned responses that’s the give-away. Not quite bots, but close.
Generally best not to respond but sometimes I can’t help myself. Also, they usually don’t like to be called out. They want to big, long debate on migration patterns or whether Turks are white or whatever.
Don’t know if they get paid extra for responses or whether their job is to muddy the waters. Either way, once you see the pattern, it’s pretty easy to pick them out. They’re like a salesman with a list of introductions and responses, except, of course, to a response about their sales technique.
No, it’s best to respond in a way as you did, for all to see. This is a great response we can tuck away in our arsenal for when we encounter the same tricks in the future.
I’m not upset with mikey. The response I’d make is that the problem is one of *rate* of change. In light of current technological advance and mass migration, evolution of people and change of culture can not be absorbed in a nondestructive manner.
What Nature intended/designed to take a millennium or more is now considered changeable within a few generations. We are experiencing the results. One side must destroy the other.
Compsci you are too empathetic. You only engage with someone who leads with “when did you stop beating your wife” by rejecting them out of hand, not by engaging their argument, because the argument is a false cover.
Culture is obviously tied to “blood,” ie relational distance. This is just basic math in population studies. It is also obviously acretive: we do not live as our ancestors 2000 years ago did. So mikey’s opening line a sneaky and fancy equivalent of “f*ck you.” So, he can take a long walk off a short pier, and have engagement if/when he attains rationality.
Heh.
I was thinking about making the ‘rate-of-change’ argument; and I can understand it’s appeal.
I then thought that whether England becomes 50% non-white in 50 years or 500 years is no consolation for me: I’d rather it weren’t non-white at all, quite honestly.
Commenter Mikey speaks of the baiting of animals, and this has been the culture at certain times. But nobody pines for it now, publicy. (illegal dog and animal fights are still very popular in England). But a nation changing from white to non-white is a big old deal. It’s unsettling. The people who built the country aren’t about anymore.
“What is white anyway?”
I believe the test is showing a tan line under starlight.
What is White?
My family and close acquaintances.
Not hard to fathom.
I could never enjoy “The Lord of the Rings,” because this obnoxious kid in school never shut up about it. It became impossible for me to pick up the books without it reminding me of him, so I had to beg off. Libertarianism sort of took the same hit. It was the philosophy for the kid who wore a fedora to school and for some reason wore fingerless leather gloves and didn’t know how ridiculous it made him look. They also wore t-shirts proclaiming their atheism, hoping you would engage them in debate when all you wanted to do was avoid them and their canned tamale body odor. I guess these guys were my Nick Gillespie. You rightly rail against negative identities, but this was a case of, whatever these guys were for, I was against.
Liberty is a negative category right and a relatively new concept. Naturally a slave wants liberty, but why would a freeman make liberty his principal? Alright, freedom from onerous taxation and things like that, but that only happens when you sacrifice some of your freedom in common with a lot of other people to put things to rights, and more importantly, keep those gains by fighting when the time comes. Most of the objects of that transitive “free from” would be everything a man holds dear, freedom from bonds of friendship, reciprocal obligations, ultimately meaning. If all these deaths of despair are based on a lack of meaning (as well as a lack of good jobs, good women, etc.) the libertarian utopia would produce even more bodies. “Dropping pack” is not a principle. The boomers tried it in the sixties and (to be fair) their parents, “the Greatest Generation,” fled their organic communities a generation before that, leaving the cities to the forces that still control them to this day. Sure, they were kind of chased out, but they also wanted to get busy with happy motoring, tract housing, GE products, and TV and more TV. That was their LSD. Still is.
“Alright, freedom from onerous taxation…”
It’s not really taxes that is the problem. It’s that they take the money and give us very little in return. Instead of a community pooling its resources for efficiency, they take our money, steal some of it, waste a lot of it, give it to foreigners and most of the rest to operate a police state deigned to control us.
Other countries pay taxes and get services in return.
You make a good point about another thing that I think libertarians get wrong and Southern populists like Hunter Wallace get right. Libertarians will act like all government intervention is wrong and that FDR was basically Hitler (this is the Dinesh D’Souza/DR take on socialism, even colorblind socialism). Attaching people who live on dirt farms to the electrical grid or, you know, curing debilitating diseases like pellagra isn’t a bad thing. It’s the poison in the center of the chocolate bonbon that’s the problem with the program. Scandinavian-style socialism with nothing but Scandinavians works just fine. The real crime of the Great Society was replacing organic communitarian organizations with inorganic centralized bureaucracy. Think of all the “lodges” they loved to ridicule on fifties sitcoms, where the guys went to drink beer, get away from their hectoring wives, wear funny fezzes and moose antlers. Something the shows left out was that the men were paying dues so that they could live decently in retirement, even if that retirement came by way of getting one’s fingers sawn off in a lumbermill. Nowadays you get the pension and disability (if you’re lucky) but you don’t get to drink with men like yourself, and instead of just wearing a funny fez or moose antlers they want to castrate your son. Not a good tradeoff, which is how sleazy greed heads have been able to capitalize on white dissatisfaction for decades without giving whites anything in return for their vote.
“And their canned tamale body odor.” Dude thanks, I spent Friday cleaning my keyboard and now thanks to you, I now have to wipe my friggen coffee off of it!
But in all honesty, that was a killer line! Your comparison reminds me of a South Park episode where Stan joins the Goth kids, the one line – “You know you can’t be one of us non-conformists unless you drink coffee. All of us drink coffee.” fits it perfectly.
I love Zman but his obsession with Libertarians is akin to a passenger on the Titanic complaining about the bartender’s excessive use of vermouth in the Martinis. The Bartender isn’t the guy who hit the iceberg. Rothbard didn’t get us into this mess and Libertarians are just a distraction. Let’s deal with the Piketty types (basically Commies) first; they are the major threat.
Serious question: Would or should the DR be happy with replacing the existing huge, coercive government/State apparatus with one reflecting the “cultural values” of the DR? I wouldn’t be overjoyed with this, even though I might be happier than I am now. I want a smaller, less coercive State no matter who is in charge. I doubt even the DR could all agree on governing tactics even if we all generally agree on broad cultural issues. And the smaller State is easier to manage and less dangerous.
No, because in order for the DR to implement a counter-revolution (for any value of counter-revolution you want to imagine, from cultural to intellectual to political to physical) against its enemies, if will be forced to coerce a lot of people in a lot of different ways, because as much as I hate him, that Black Republican Lincoln was right-
“I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
It is a paradox that many in the DR have yet to come to terms with. In order to get to a place where we can return to a smaller, less overbearing and tyrannical government, we must utilize the tyranny and coercive power of large government to do so. Power first, then principles. Because that is how our enemies fight, and until dissidents become comfortable with that, we will be as effective as the Vichy Right is today.
I have to agree with Rick, most libertarians I know – at least the younger ones – are almost singular in their desire for drugs and other forms of degeneracy. as their immediate political goals.
The older ones espouse this “live and let live” philosophy, even if it means we get swallowed in a sea of genetic diarrhea and we children of Europa vanish forever.
You may be right. My wife agrees with you. I may not be pragmatic enough. There’s a lot of history on my side about small government being better. But it may not be instructive in our present circumstances.
I prefer a large, powerful state of, by and for my people, guaranteeing the continuation and flourishing of my people, to a weaker state controlled by Leftist villains. Quality is much more important than quantity. Culture is far more important than liberty.
by definition, the only people represented by a large and powerful state, are the inner party. and to a lesser degree, the outer party. just like we have now.
But if the state and the people are aligned, this is not a problem. That is clearly not the case in AINO. Quite the opposite.
Yes so do I. Read my comment again. But I prefer small government in defense of the people/culture over large government dedicated to the same purpose. Thanks for your message.
Captain Willard: There is no way to your ‘smaller, less coercive State’ other than through power. Communal power to control those malefactors who always seek power and control over others for their own ends, rather than for the good of the community. In that aspect Z man is correct – much as I currently hate the blackified term ‘kummooonittee.’ If there must be some method of control and organization (and I think we can agree that there must, because all men are unequal – including Whites) then such control cannot be left to chance or busybody tyranny.
The more civic minded generally shun leadership and the limelight. But since no one will ever be ‘left alone,’ we must seize the reins of power and utilize them to our advantage. Pickle Rick is dead on – Power Before Principles. Worry about controlling the size of government once White people genuinely concerned about the future of White people compose your government, of whatever size.
Thanks for your comment. My wife agrees with you and Pickle Rick. It’s a really difficult question. You guys may be right. I will think about it more. I’m just skeptical of big government.
If libertarians can’t get capitalism right, why on earth would I listen to their take on socialism, unless I have unlimited time and leisure to bask in theory? *Particularly* theory about practical matters. The only value of any libertarian philosophy is its accuracy in describing reality and behavior — it’s not ontology or poetry. We can test it. And the results are abysmal.
libertarians are zahab’s white whale 🙂
Libertarianism is the lens through which every (especially new) government program should be viewed: In what way is this better than doing nothing.? What are the costs/losses?
Only when these questions have been answered, and they currently never are,should it be seriously considered.
The analogy that it’s like Marxism is just dumb. I saw something a while ago that wondered What if Libertarianism had named itself “Social cooperation” how would it be perceived?
“….what is left is a deracinated mass of individuals enslaved to the great ideological state, drugged by cheap consumer goods to avoid contemplating the banality of life….”
Thus, you will own nothing and be happy.
also sprach K Schwab.
So how did that work for the USSR? I guess the consumer goods were missing. Communism part 2 I guess we are witnessing in China. Lot’s of consumer goods, but even less freedom/liberty. Interesting experiment.
Compsci: I realize you are not personally advocating for this, but I find too often that legitimate criticism of unbridled consumerism extends too far into the devaluing of any tangible man-made item. I treasure many of our possessions because of the human creativity and beauty and tradition they represent, as well as the memories of travel and experiences they evoke. If I need something in which to place some clothing, I strongly prefer it be furniture crafted from wood in a historical White style. But I must also make some allowance for scale, because not everything can be handmade or individually adorned, and I don’t want to relegate the less fortunate Whites to plastic Chinese crap.
I’m not certain I can quantify the role consumerism and/or capitalism played in the development of modern plumbing and electricity, but I value both. Even within a homogeneous community, it is natural for man to seek to personalize or individualize things. Whether it is a tribal hunter carving decorations on his bow or spear, or a better skilled female weaver creating a distinctive pattern for her family’s cloth. And the desire to profit from one’s abilities is equally inherent.
I don’t know where or how to best draw the line between the stultifying sameness espoused by the globalists and futurists, and the ludicrous degree of choice of mustards in the average American grocery store, but I do know I reject both extremes.
Don’t know about China because everything we get is filtered and distorted by all sides involved. Not a big fan of what appears to be their panopticon tendencies. On the other hand, can’t blame Xi for cracking down on soyboy syndrome. With Russia (not the USSR) also not sure what to know. Putin seems to have all the right enemies, and at least gives the appearance of caring about Russians, or at least recognizes that the better things go for the average Russian, the better off he is. He doesn’t equate freedom with tranny hour and sodomy on demand, and neither do I. So there’s that.
It has been said you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. So if being able to know the truth is the measure, I’d say AINO is at least as “unfree” as any other country.
Four questions:
1. did the populace of (what is now) AINO ever have a sense of shared culture and community?
2. if ‘yes’ to Q1; when and why did that change?
3. is it possible for disparate ethnic groups to form a shared community?
4. if ‘no’ to Q3; what does that portend for the continued cohesiveness of AINO?
I’ll take a stab:
1. Yes.
2. It started to end with the first great wave of migration in the late 1880’s. Common culture took hold again after the immigration moratorium of the 1920’s and was nearly restored by 1965.
3. It depends on the preexisting cultural differences. Germans meld into an Anglo culture quicker than Italians, who take longer but eventually do so. Different races cannot form a shared community, though,no matter how hard they try.
4. It’s over and has been over for some time. Much of the governmental and cultural madness is an attempt to prevent the natural racial groupings from splintering off, and that will fail even with police state tactics.
did the populace of (what is now) AINO ever have a sense of shared culture and community?
No. Not even close.
The closest we came was from WWII through the late 60s.
Even then there were serious fractures that were papered over due to existential exogenous threats.
I disagree. There are difference and there are differences. For example, immigration as in the pre WWII
“waves”, like Irish and Italians were basically White and Christians. Ignore the J’s for this discussion. Now compare such to immigration of non-White, non-Christian and such and the speed with which they now arrive.
Basically, my take is one of “closeness” of race and culture and speed with which they enter and assimilate (they mostly don’t as they are not encouraged). If one simply looks at the current racial distinctions and their contributory status in the US as citizens one can rank them as based on their closeness to US original stock.
There were four major and several minor distinct cultures in the US before the mass immigration of the latter 19th century.
Major:
Puritans.
Quakers.
Southern planters
Scotts Irish
Black slaves
Minor:
Jewish
Cajun
Catholic Irish
UM Scandinavian
The mass immigration of the 19th century brought in large numbers of southern and eastern europeans with cultures different again than all of the above.
All those cultures swirled and mixed and created further regional offshoots.
Its just sully to think that people that lived in the Iron range in Minnesota were culturally the same as people in Charleston SC or New York or San Francisco. America is a huge place with lots of regional variation that was sort of hidden by the mass media of the mid 20th century.
1. Yes and No. There was a somewhat shared culture very shallow and basic, but there were various communities with their own shared subcultures.
2. Anti-discrimination (“AD”) laws, which is essentially anti-freedom of association. Perhaps these communities could have survived if AD laws were limited to government employment, maybe even for private employment for employers over a certain threshold number of employees (say 150). But even that is not likely as it would probably have eventually creeped into housing, schooling and accommodations eventually. This more than anything destroyed cohesive local communities.
3. Not sure what you mean by shared, or rather, it depends on how shared. I suppose I could envision a large diverse hub city surrounded by ethnically homogenous enclaves having a sort of “diverse city community” complemented by the suburban homogenous one. If you want to live in Downtown Diversitopia, go for it. Or, if you prefer, you can live in Lily Whitesville, Milan-a-Lago, Little Meheeco or whatever floats your boat and let’s you float in. When you want spicy food or entertainment, you drive into town. Perhaps you even work there with the diverse associate. But then you have your homogenous enclave retreat when you get dyspeptic from the four chile curry. It would require a prioritization of freedom of association over diversity at least in some areas such as housing and probably schooling. It might work. We have it to some extent already, with parts of town where English is rarely spoken.
4. Cohesiveness on a national level for AINO is not looking good. Being force-fed diversity only creates resentment on the part of all involved. IF my modest proposal could work, there might be enough remnant of national cohesiveness, or at least enough self-interest in preserving your homogenous enclave, to cooperate for purposes of national issues. Kind of like if the American Indian tribes could have had a united front or the pagan German tribes against the Romans. In some ways, Ancient Rome operated this way and they did a’right. I don’t know if you want to call that cohesiveness or not.
Zman, I read the Taki’s post first, and I thought this line was first-rate:
“Hamid is Pakistani, a people known for their obsequiousness, so his ability to flatter his target audience is natural.”
Exactly the right observation in a review of a book titled, “The Last White Guy” (or whatever—no sense looking it up). Honest question: did you slog through the whole book? Not that it matters; books like this are more of a business plan than literature: provocative (but obvious) title, plus an author with the right complexion. What’s between the covers could be anything after getting those two right. It’s a product to be bought, displayed, approved of, and left unread. And surely the reviewers of “major” outlets based their entire opinion (glowing, de rigeur) on the title, author photo, and a one-paragraph blurb that sets up the (childish) premise.
You’ll never read a bad, or mildly critical, review of such a book in the mainstream organs. Indeed, the reviewers pathetically vie to outdo one another in terms of their praise, as a display of virtue (and a tactic to cling to their jobs). When T.N. Coates was all the rage, one NYT review called his latest book “more than a must-read: it’s like water or air.” Some people will say anything for a buck.
Made the mistake of reading the first couple pages from the sample on Amazon. As a writer, the guy simply sucks. The publisher doesn’t care, since, as you stated, they aren’t actually selling the books for people to read them.
Makes one wonder how many physical copies were actually printed
It rhymes with none.
But Professor, the *physical* copies are the whole point. The great and good need an OBJECT to display. What is negligible is the *CONTENT*: nobody will read it, because what what matters is not what it says per se, but rather what it says about the person who bought the book.
Out of curiosity I followed Chet Rollins (the commenter above) in reading the extract on Amazon. Chet did not exaggerate: the writing is awful. Maybe it would be tolerable in a short story, but not in a novel. I see that the book has a rather low page count, which may represent an economy on the part of the publisher: Why waste paper and ink on pages no one will ever see?
The cover, on the other hand, is very eye-catching; in fact, it’s a crude drawing of an eye, so you can be sure all your lefty friends will have it placed face-outward on their shelves. The “advance praise” quotes all use the same dozen words, suggesting they’re all rephrasing a template recommended by the publisher.
However, what made me laugh the hardest was the realization that EVEN THE PREMISE of the novel–allegedly an incredible flight of the author’s fertile imagination–is a rip-off of a 1970 movie starring Godfrey Cambridge, titled “Watermelon Man.” I remembered watching it on the late show years ago. That title alone is infinitely better than the present-day retread.
Here’s a link to the DVD on Amazon:
https://amzn.to/3JZZnlQ
“When it comes time to write the obituary for Western civilization, the focus will not be on the forces of destruction, but the forces of distraction. ”
If they do write that – they will be utterly wrong.
What makes the destruction of Western Civilization unprecedented in world history is precisely that it is being done deliberately, purposively, top-down.
Christians know this already; but secular commentators who are prepared to ‘think the unthinkable’ and consider the simplest and most obvious explanation for the pattern of global and national policies, are also realizing that the driving motivations of those in power are actively evil.
e.g. Neil Oliver – a famous BBC TV presenter who has ‘gone rogue’ since 2020, speaking a couple of days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIpLwiaQRRk
“Christians know this already…”
Methinks you haven’t been in a modern, “non-denominational” (where most younger folks attend) church recently. They are all about inclusivity, love-your-neighbor, import the world. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is their new, most-sacred hymn. They are all implicitly anti-White.
The modern Christians are a huge part of the problem.
These people are not Christians; they are spiritual cyphers who use “churches” as vehicles for their pernicious ideology. But you are correct in that the prelates who control the mainline denominations are part of the Power Structure and thus the problem. Rank-and-file Christians, on the other hand, want nothing to do with this perversion of the faith, and for that reason, increasingly stay home in droves on Sunday morning.
If you are at all familiar with Mr. Charlton’s work, you will know that he consistently emphasizes the inability of today’s Christians to rely upon mainstream “Christian” churches, as most of those institutions have been thoroughly subverted and co-opted by the global technocracy.
Right; this is like saying literacy and knowledge of history is worthless because the modern institution of academia has been converged. Something 2000 (or 500) years old, and you judge its entire worth by the last 25 years?
Very remarkable that October 31, 2017, was the 500th anniversary of one of the most significant events in world history, yet basically ignored. On Oct, 31, 1517 Martin Luther affixed his “95 Theses” to the door of Wittenberg Castle church, the beginning of what is called the “Reformation”. One would think that the most Christian country on earth, the USA, would have spent much of that year analyzing that event and what it meant for Christians and others. Any celebrations or investigations were so subdued as to be invisible.
I fail to see the remarkableness. The people running the national conversation organs are literally Christkillers.
These people are Christians like playing Call of Duty makes me a Navy Seal.
To be fair, given how low military recruitment standards are dropping, you sound overqualified.
Thanks for the link.
Mr. Oliver has in fact mentioned the most Truth I’ve seen from a TV interview for some time. It’s up there with Frank Rizzo’s “I’ll take yuz physically!”.
Well done, sir.
Another somewhat related problem with libertarianism is that it appeals almost exclusively to spergy, high-IQ White men. Sure, there may be a handful of women and nonwhites who get into libertarianism, yet they are so rare as to be unworthy of mention. Meanwhile, these White guys who embrace libertarianism are almost always race-blind. They buy into an extreme form of individualism that takes no account of easily observed group differences. They can’t or won’t even do a headcount of their own ideology to notice that ideology’s readily apparent demographic pattern. Most libertarians favor open borders, oblivious to the fact that an influx of third worlders will render the ultimate triumph of libertarianism even less possible than such a triumph is under our current demographics.
As Zman stated, libertarianism is utopianism and therefore isn’t really possible for any sizeable population no matter what the particular scenario. But let’s pretend for a second that it might be possible. Under what circumstances could it emerge and last? Only in a situation where the values of spergy, high-IQ White men define the larger culture. There could be no acceptance of “diversity is our greatest strength” or even so-called color-blindness. Such a culture would have to embrace an outlook on race that has practically no fanfare among libertarians. In other words, the extreme individualism that characterizes libertarianism is a self-negating force and just one of several elements that places libertarianism in the realm of fantasy.
Another form of harmful distraction is to get bogged down bashing Libertarians for fun and sport. They are inconsequential in today’s political universe, so why waste endless keystrokes on them. If it’s just about the cathartic benefits of venting, there are a lot of other targets that are more worthy of disparagement. At some point, this kind of bashing just becomes bullying rather than enlightenment.
You’re probably right that it we shouldn’t “waste endless keystrokes” on libertarianism or libertarians. That said, I didn’t think that I was “bashing” them. I merely intended to point out one specific element of their belief system that renders it unworkable. Libertarians are often quite intelligent and could potentially make for good allies to dissidents. In that sense, it might be useful for dissidents to point out the problems with libertarianism in an effort to help those potential allies to see the light. Of course, that is assuming that dissidents (and whatever allies/converts they manage to gain) have any chance of saving Clown World from itself at this point. That, I admit, may not be a realistic assumption.
That’s why I focus on colorblind civic nationalism. That’s the official ideology of the GOP and what’s keeping whites from organizing as a group.
Absolutely. Colorblind civic nationalism is likely the greatest impediment to Whites organizing as group. Nevertheless, libertarian individualism is also a problem in that regard. In fact, at the hear of colorblind civic nationalism is often a sort of libertarian individualism, however vaguely defined it may usually be. The two are seldom mutually exclusive of one another. To counter one tends to require countering the other.
Agree. Libertarianism is very much related to colorblind civic nationalism. However civic nationalism is more dangerous because it acknowledges culture; indeed, it appeals to whites because it says that our culture, our values, are the best and, sooner or later, everyone will recognize that.
But, like Libertarianism, colorblind civic nationalism demands that you remain an individual and most certainly that you abhor identity politics.
A libertarian society would permit [near] absolute freedom of association.
See? Not all libertarian ideas are bad; we’re a big tent, not just unlimited immigration advocating pot-smoking child-rapers 😀
Libertarianism doesn’t understand that the only people who want libertarianism are whites.
What do libertarians do when faced with a group that puts the group over the individual? What do individuals do with face with other individuals who play as a team?
You would need to abandon your individualism and play as a team. Thus, the libertarian utopia would last about a week.
Look at it this way. We have a market economy. The libertarian believes that a total hands-off role for the government, except in ensuring “individual rights”, is the only acceptable way for it to operate. The left believes that a powerful government can use that market economy to advance its own agenda. Put the two side by side and it is just reality that the left’s policy of action will beat out the libertarian inaction every time. The only thing the libertarian can do when faced with this reality is whine and complain but also does not feel that he (and yea it is a he) can do anything because it goes against his principles. So, the left wins every time.
Libertarians are irrelevant, though, right? Not really – this is basically the way the cuckservative has operated since the Civil Rights Era. This is the way they still talk, even after decades of this going on. So, no, libertarian thinking is not really inconsequential, it is one of the sources of the cuckservative mind virus and must be vanquished.
I’ve belabored the point of Lib bashing for years here. They seem to tempting a target.
I don’t know if they are inconsequential. There seem to be enough of them, or at least enough folks leaning that way, to have an influence. Many election margins are rather razor thin (even with the cheating hurdle) and their ideas still have influence.
I don’t often buy the “gatekeeper” critique, but libertarianism and especially “Big L” are definitely a catchment basin that interrupts many a dissident’s political development towards Truth, Beauty, and Justice. They get 2-3% of the vote in actual elections, so they have substantial numbers, millions of adherents. The movement also tends to be whiter than milk in a Siberian blizzard, and to be college educated and smarter than the average bear. They are eating our slice of the pie, giving what should be Our Guys self-harming delusions.
Nope. People with rudimentary intellect will see right through libertarianism fairly quickly. I am content to let them hang alone; most are fakes anyway. Libertarianism is comprised mostly of virtue signalling to other stupid people and a means for the dull and vapid to pose as intellectuals and individualists.
“I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
“Socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.”
Eh, credit where it is due, glenfilthie is wrong. “Classic libertarian” reading list is Locke, Adam Smith, milton Friedman, Rand, Hayek, JS mill, and Hugo grotius. And thats just what I can see on the shelf from here. Intellectual lightweights they are not. Libertarianism, especially the Cato sort, is the sine qua non of “you have to be really smart to believe something so crazy.”
“Another somewhat related problem with libertarianism is that it appeals almost exclusively to spergy, high-IQ White men. ”
This is not a “problem”
It is a problem in a diverse society that consistently demonizes White men. My argument is NOT that libertarianism is bad because it appeals to White men; my argument is that libertarianism is not remotely workable in a culture that despises the values of White men. Change the culture — which would require a significant demographic change — and perhaps libertarianism would become more workable. Nevertheless, it would remain incredibly doubtful that such an ideology could maintain its rule for very long amongst a sizeable populace. Libertarianism is too lax and would permit its worst enemies to quickly or gradually grow strong enough to supplant libertarianism.
The libertarian movement is a cul de sac similar to wignatism, which has the clear effect of diverting and neutralizing the social, cultural, and political power of white men.
And whoever downvoted that probably has a youtube video of him, overweight, stripping to his G string undies at the National Libertarian Convention.
The problem is that in a world populated almost entirely by low-IQ non-white non-men a libertarian system could only be realized through violent worldwide revolution and maintained by the most brutal and extensive secret police apparatus imaginable.
A few libertarians have been clear-thinking enough to understand this. Less than a few have embraced it.
Your mention of “big-L” Libertarian support of open borders (after all, limits on immigration would be government regulation, and we can’t have that!). This is (or was) an official plank of the party, as is (I think) opposition to age of consent laws. Those are two positions that I blame for me never joining, nor donating money to, the LP. The above notwithstanding, I continue to admire much “little L” libertarian thought.
I have always thought that was the Achilles’ heel, or some larger body part, of libertoidinism, that it’s an Anglo-Dutch dork-male fetish which will never be revered by women and the Global South, who have demonstrated the tendency to vote themselves new benefits. Of course very few libbies aren’t also race fantasists, they even considered gonads a self-determined free market free choice before the fad caught fire in the Obama years; so bringing up the demographic impracticality and non-viability of their ideology “does not compute” to them.
Because of “The Sixties” commie/Marxism was the #1 nuisance fringe religion most Westerners encountered in the culture, until the international proletariat had the wipe-out tutti di wipe-outs at the end of 20th C. Deep down every liebertarian knows his shtick will never be as fashionable as communism was, or could again be, and I think he seethes about this.
> Of course, Marx was wrong about the nature of man. Humans are not defined by their economic relationships with other men. The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.
There’s a reason the powers that be have tried to dilute the primacy of blood and culture of a people in favor of a nebulous diversity and purely transactional relationships. They think they can dilute culture down to whatever is on Disney+ this month and remove all bonds of blood. Transactional economies are just the start, as their vision of a post-scarcity word will remove even that relationship.
This goes into the book review in Taki, where it’s clear their dream is an individual who has no unique characteristics, just a flat earth of people who all look the same, talk the same, and act the same. Whiteness is the current enemy, as they are still the most ascendant people, but eventually they will move to Asians with the same script to remove the top performers, then and start a slow genocide of the lowest performers of earth until they get to their ideal perfectly average sexless person.
Such an unnatural global people would reach their ideal an equality of sorts, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more spiritually dead world.
Excellent post! The paradox of multiculturalism is that it culminates in the erasure of all distinct cultures; it would more rightly be deemed anti-culturalism. And the ultimate aim of elite-driven “diversity” is to render all us plebes (“dirt people,” in the wonderful parlance of Zman) a bunch of nondescript, racially and sexually ambiguous, consumer automatons of the global technocracy. The champions of such “diversity” therefore war against genuine diversity in a disturbingly Orwellian fashion.
Butt hay–kno mor whi suprimissee
“The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.”
How did that work out for Cain and Abel?
That’s really illogical, and you know it. Aside from being one possible counter example against a generally accepted precept in this group, you are quoting from a book you refer time and time again to be a fairy tale. Quite dishonest.
Compsci: You are absolutely correct to call out Ben for dishonesty (come on Ben, you can and have done better) and yet his larger point – that blood alone does not suffice – is rather important. Many here have indicated they are estranged from parents or would be estranged from spouses and children if they were to express their truest beliefs.
Blood is too often interpreted as meaning immediate family, when it is better and more accurate to consider it shared ancestry. And those closest in ancestry may well be inimical to true racial and cultural community.
I shared two links in this vein with a friend which may prove thought provoking:
https://survivalblog.com/2022/08/13/illustrative-family-reunion-camping-trip-macham/
The second link is from commenter here Arthur Sido’s blog – powerful truths that will be hard for many Christians to stomach precisely because they’re true:
https://www.arthursido.com/2022/07/many-of-us-deserve-to-be-replaced.html
Powerful and true link there. I remember the rage I felt at the mother of that beautiful Hinnant child when she said her son “didn’t see color,” as if the burden of proof was on her after some black savage murdered the boy. To survive, we have to learn to shun and jettison people who are this insane.
Worked quite well for Abraham.
I think most of us here are libertarians inside. We just want to be left alone. We don’t have a desire for power or to run other people’s lives. We need to strangle that inner libertarian. We have to internalize the Chinese saying, “If the tiger gifts his teeth and claws to the dog, the dog will oppress the tiger”.
I’m not. Mind you, I am mature enough to understand that rights and freedom come with responsibility and obligation. That is why they get completely stupid on subjects like drugs, sexual degeneracy, and other social ills.
It depends on how far you go into the general Lib belief system, and what you believe can be enacted/accepted/endured and still wish to live in such a Libertarian structured society.
Just to take one example—free choice drug use, which on the surface seems farcical. In a Lib society, a drug user would be free to use drugs and required to accept the results of such use—which would be death (from excessive use, starvation, or exposure) or imprisonment (for illegal behavior).
Now the immediate response is to say no decent society/culture will/should put up with such. But is that any different from what *currently occurs* every day in our cities? Have we won the war on drugs—even made progress? Nope. Drugs are more dangerous, available, and cheaper than ever in our more enlightened, non-Lib society. We are all Lib’s here, we just don’t admit it.
Did someone mention Lib is the wet dream of speedy Whites? 😉
Speedy => Spergy
I don’t know. colorblind civic nationalism might give libertarianism a run for its money in the destruction of the West, or, at least, the United States.
It’s a very seductive ideology for many whites. It agrees that culture is what matters, so we just need to get non-whites to accept our culture and everything will be fine.
But, like Marxism or libertarianism, colorblind civic nationalism strips away people’s humanity by never asking why our culture came about.
Civic nationalism offers whites the false hope that our problems can be solved within the system. “If our media or government would just promote goog values, we’d be fine,” they say.
And that keeps them from organizing against the system.
If Libertarianism is all about opening up economic transactions without regard to culture or blood, it could be argues that civic nationalism is a child of libertarianism. The banning of covenant communities, discrimination in employment, and other measures was a vast opening of economic capital to everyone without regard to race, class, or religion.
That would be one “benefit” of a Lib inroad into society—free association. One could build and maintain White enclaves which are currently closed to us.
CoaSC,
“It agrees that culture is what matters, so we just need to get non-whites to accept our culture and everything will be fine.”
You are 100% spot on with this. The libertarians and conservatives I know can’t get past this part. No matter what the non-whites do, they refuse to accept reality. They will die on the hill trying to cram that square peg into that round hole. I cannot understand it. Well, maybe I’m being a little harsh. It took me a while to get to this side of the great divide too, but not nearly as long as it is taking for these folks.
A lot to unpack today. First, I have never encountered anyone in my life that views cooperation as evil. And I don’t think that straw man actually exists. Ditto for the obvious benefits of organization. Most people engage in cooperative and organizational behaviors reflexively for the simple reason that it works in the evolutionary sense. Both lead to positive outcomes more often than not. And as for the idea of cooperating and organizing as a precursor to solving the big problems of society, I hope these efforts succeed. Whether it’s voting harder or forming a new dissident political party; by all means, go for it. I wish you success.
Is the probability of success 100%. Hell no! Most folks here have already given up on vote harder, and Libertarians failed miserably trying to create a new dissident political party, so no guarantee that will happen any time soon either. Is it therefore prudent to have a backup plan? Absolutely! Should this plan avoid the pitfalls of the past (hard lessons learned) and take advantage of modern technology to maximize the opportunity for success? Of course it should. Does pissing and moaning about the failure of Libertarianism increase your chances of survival in the coming Brave New World? Are you kidding me?
That’s not the point. The point—to me anyway—is are there Lib ideas that are useful to the cause. To me and I believe others who think about it, yes. Take the good, reject the bad, form/perfect a new philosophy, move on.
I have no objection to making maximum use of one’s brain and cognitive ability to try and ascertain ideals, be they philosophical or aesthetic. That is a privilege of affluence and having lots of spare time to think about things. But if all you do is mental masturbation, then you are at great risk of being one dimensional, which has never been a formula for survival in a cruel world.
A good alternative to the libertarian economists is Heinreich Pesch, S.J., whose work is summarized here: https://distributistreview.com/archive/heinrich-pesch-on-solidarist-economics
I have written about distributionism in the past. I did some posts on Belloc years ago. I should probably circle back to that material since it has been a long time. I must admit that I struggle to accept the leap of logic from natural law to natural rights. The chasm between the is of natural law and the ought of natural rights can never be closed, so I have some issues with distributionism.
I admit I know almost nothing of distributionism or “natural rights.” I DO, however, have some familiarity with another phrase Z used. This is an allusion to Hume’s analysis of the “is-ought problem” as it’s now called. The case is, in fact, precisely as Z states: One cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” If one takes that as true, one can infer (as I do) that any claim of “rights” existing in nature is utter fantasy. This follows from the definition that a “right,” similar to moral values, customs, and human-created “laws” or “rules” are entirely human creations, existing only in the abstract. To preface “right” with “natural” (if the implication is that such “right” is granted by Nature) is the height of folly, showing an utter lack of awareness of how the physical universe operates. “Ought” by no means implies “is.” To claim otherwise is a species of magical thinking, the belief that one’s wishes or whims alone can alter the outside world.
Hume was just wrong because his premise was wrong: People are NOT blank slates of purely random motion, they have observable, repeating, often quantifiable characteristics. Because genetics are real.
Generally speaking (emphasis on generally), the rules/laws/ “rights” for a culture should follow the contours of their accepted traditions, as those are a reflection of genetic capacity and proclivity. You cannot ban Han from gambling or Hutus from raping, they just are driven to do such things, to the point where they dont have those concepts because those actions are just “how it is.” If you ban hippies from toking up or Boomers from grilling, they are just going to do it anyway, and you just have a lawless society. Therefore, in many BUT NOT ALL cases, in the politico-legal realm you can derive an aught from an is by observing the genetically-determined capacities of the particular polity.
In one sense, “rights” do not exist in nature. But this statement is only true by reducing the definition of nature to the state of physical and biological laws. Does society not exist in nature? Can we not speak of functional and dysfunctional societies, for example, as there are healthy and diseased bodies? Can the properties of societies be observed? Are relations between individuals social properties, and are some of these required for functional societies?
If you continue down this line of reasoning, you will arrive at a concept of natural rights.
My admittedly limited understanding of distributism is that it is essentially mom & pop capitalism. That is, private ownership of the means of production with restrictions to prevent (or at least deter) concentration of capital in a few hands. Sounds great in theory; not sure how it would be implemented. We currently have various anti-trust laws which seem to be aimed somewhat at that goal, but that does not seem to have prevented it. Maybe those laws are aimed at the wrong thing? Or the system is just too corrupt? How would distributism (or any system) avoid the corruption problem?