By Whose Authority?

One of the curiosities of this age is that no one ever asks the simplest of questions when faced with a social justice warrior. That question is “Who says?” Given that our society is drenched in moralizing, it seems like a good question. After all, any demands about what you ought to do have to come with a moral authority. The reason you must do something or not do something is because X says so.

What makes this even weirder is the taboos are not passed down to us from some ancient source that we no longer remember. The prohibition against making crossdresser jokes was made up a few years ago. The taboo on noticing things about group behavior dates back to the last century. It seems logical that people would want to know by whose authority these things are now taboo.

Maybe that is why the taboos proliferate. The explosion of things that are now prohibited or required is a form of squid ink. Keeping everyone busy sorting through the latest rules keeps them from asking this basic question. The reason for this is there is no adequate answer to this question. The moral code of what we call our democracy rests on nothing more than an empty space where God and tradition existed.

On the other hand, maybe this is just the natural end point of the process that got going in the late Middle Ages. The search for a rational explanation for normative claims like justice and equality has led us to the madness of this age. Since reason cannot be a moral authority, we have created something like the Krebs cycle that throws off novel taboos through the destruction of inherited traditions and customs.

It could also be that humans are moral animals. Common morality is what is needed to hold a large society together, so extreme selection pressure has been in favor of those who naturally assume there is a moral authority for a moral claim. Perhaps most of us are bred to never ask who says? Those who lack this natural instinct and dare ask this question end up thinking about it on the fringes of society.


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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Who Says?
  • Authority
    • The Physical World
    • The Moral World
  • Macintyre
  • A Godless Religion

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153 thoughts on “By Whose Authority?

  1. Who says so?
    By whose authority?

    They have two answers to those questions.

    First: Everyone says so. It’s part of their common sense. The consensus of their peers.

    Secondly and more personally.
    They hear voices.
    Their pocket idol says so.
    Their “phones” provide continual instruction from the crowd and from the ultimate fount of wisdom – Google. They unquestioningly google accept everything that google tells them.

    • It is profoundly irritating that they think of themselves as bold, independent thinkers when their opinions are literally dictated to them. It has been one of the great surprises of my life that a person can have a high IQ and almost no ability to think independently.

      • LiTS: “It has been one of the great surprises of my life that a person can have a high IQ and almost no ability to think independently.”

        You have to ditch the narrative of your deductivistic reasoning, clear your mind, start all over from scratch, take a trip down
        the Astral Plane, and absorb just enough of the insanity of human psychology to not be driven stir crazy yourself.

        Nothing makes sense until you start to analyze it in terms of Passive Aggression, Social Ladder Climbing, Virtue Snivelling, Psychopathy, and an utter inversion of the classical religious experience.

        Furthermore, it doesn’t harm your analysis if you start by assuming that the average 45yo sh!tlib male has the personality of a 3yo girl prone to staging hysterical temper tantrums in public.

      • “I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
        — Michel de Montaigne, 16th century French statesman and philosopher

      • ON-TOPIC, Jack Cashill just published a monster new analysis of Joe Biden’s subconscious:

        One theory as to where Joe Biden got his fake names
        September 17, 2023
        By Jack Cashill
        https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/one_theory_as_to_where_joe_biden_got_his_fake_names.html

        ===============

        That theory yields precisely the psychology which John le Carré endowed in his ur-traitor, “Magnus Pym”:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Spy

        And it fits perfectly with Biden’s known potato-n!ggery and his seething white-hot resentment of all things Anglo-spherical & Christian.

        ===============

        Anyway, I don’t wanna give away any further spoilers; stop whatever you’re doing right now and go read Cashill’s analysis IMMEDIATELY !!!!!

      • Yet another example why Z would never be elected to public office, let alone be a good politician.

        Admitting a mistake and moving on is not allowed. If only Orange man would admit he screwed up the Covid hoax. His credibility would be off the charts.

  2. Let’s play – Who Says. Who says nature cares about anything? Is nature a personal agent and purpose driven? Who says you have the correct definition of nature at all? Is nature purely material or is it a creation and a supernatural production? Who says various ‘laws’ are constant since many kinds of well attested miracles defy ‘math’? Who says there isn’t a Natural Law? And that ‘rights’ are not simply a result of many living creatures moral nature that resents wrongs done them, and insists it ‘ought’ not be allowed to stand? People don’t say I have a right not to be raped – they say raping me is a horrible thing done to me and it ought not be allowed or go unavenged. Who says people don’t have a moral nature that is innate? And so on.

  3. The internet is starting to fill up with youtube videos of clean-cut young men attending an SJW event and pretending to interview some wayward lass holding a sign and eager to defend the “cause du jour.” He then asks a few common sense questions leading inevitably to a hypocritically insane response by the young lady. He follows by pointing out her error in logic which leads to an emotional meltdown followed by a physical assault. The best of these videos show a cop standing by in the background and watching by with a smirk on his face.

    This is the consequence of banning spanking and stocks in the town square.

  4. Tucker got fired not for single specific thing, rather because he asked those kinds of questions. Nobody else asks them.

    • Maxda: “Tucker got fired… because he asked those kinds of questions…”

      Anonymous Conservative had an excellent piece today about “Cabal” already having staged their first attempt at assassinating Bobby Jr:

      https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/news-briefs-09-16-2023/

      Like Tucker, Bobby Jr has been asking the forbidden questions, such as the nature of COVID’s interaction with the ACE-2 receptor in various ethnicities…

  5. I swear there was an article written some time ago that specified the NYT was a front-runner in creating fake accounts on their comments section to direct discussion the right way. Can’t find it now.

    The bulletproof way of knowing if a comment is either a bot or a mindless leftist is when you read it and it has the fake NPR Smart Person cadence that undiscerning people will mistake for intelligence even when they are talking nonsense.

    • The TV announcer voice cadence is undefeated. When people hear that, it’s the Voice of God.

      • The current system rests on a solid foundation of these kinds of neuro-linguistic tricks. There’s obviously something to them because even I feel something compelling when I hear that TV announcer cadence. They’ve really found something deeply primal here and they use it well to keep us in line. For me, though, I’ve noticed that my deep primal response to this cadence is not obedience but smoldering hate. I’m sure there are people who don’t feel compelled to obey by that cadence but also don’t feel hate or much of anything.

        Perhaps in normal times most people are in that latter group with a solid core of true followers being the obedient ones who set the example that most then follow. Maybe you get a revolution when there are enough people like me who feel hatred and revulsion at those smug, reassuring voices…

  6. The entire woke monolith is built on something I keep coming back to, that I call “presumption of abundance.” That is, if the exceptional economic state of the GAE were in fact permanent, and not exceptional, if material abundance in perpetuity is guaranteed, which it is commonly believed to be, since nothing else has been known in living memory, then what possible argument can there be for not indulging every absurd idea? There’s no downside! We can create whatever utopia we want, and the ubiquitous chain restaurants, the HugeMarts, the good roads, the reliable utilities, the easy travel, the world class medical care, the safe neighborhoods, and above all the gibs, will all still be there!

    • Largely agreed but Elon Musk is illustrative of the counterargument. He has abundance, to put it mildly, but a luxury belief has cost him his son’s manhood. There is a downside, even with abundance.

      • What are you referring to (the son’s manhood)? I know he has a son with whatever wackjob disc jokey girl he was with (I think), but is there something else occuring?

        • His son Xavier is “transitioning” to become a female, “Vivian.” This explains a lot.

    • This is the question of whether the current abundance is something like the 4 cylinder engine in a Model T or more like the V-12 you might find in a Ferrari or other supercar. The ruling class is betting that its the former. You can pour in watered down drip gas, kerosene, jet fuel or alcohol and gunpowder and it will still sort of run. This is what the swarthy hordes they think they can replace the White masses with are. If they’re wrong and abundance is more like a carefully tuned supercar engine, then it may seize up if you put the air filter on wrong and a bit too much dust gets into the mixture.

      It’s probably a little of both. The disruptions cause by the Coof panic showed that some parts of the “affluence engine” are pretty rugged. Other components, like the supply chains, turned out to be quite fragile, still haven’t recovered, and may never do so. This is probably the future in the US then. Our society will end up like the Ferrari your dumbass, broke pothead cousin stole and then insisted on driving. It will go wheezing down the street, belching smoke, dragging parts on the ground – and the retard occupants will barely know that anything is wrong.

      • As long as there is a sufficient percentage of whites and east asians then things kind of work, but conditions degrade as that percentage diminishes. And if it gets low enough, things fall apart entirely. i.e. South Africa. But it can kind of muddle along in between that lower extreme and the upper extreme of the traditional west, i.e. Brazil. Although it remains to be seen how a place like Brazil will fare when the GAE’s economic system is diminished and its wealth is no longer spread around the globe. One shudders to picture South Africa in that scenario. You only think it’s bad now.

        • The system isn’t going to run just because we have the sufficient number of Europeans and Asians in our population. Those numbers must be in a position to affect change.

          Asians in general, are not collectivists. They will, in the overwhelming majority, conform to the system they live within and make the best of it for themselves. This has been a tremendous strength for them as they moved in at the financial and opportunity apex of the post ’65 post American globalist system. When it starts coming apart, will they keep with the make the best of it approach, or move against authority and try to forge a system that works better for someone other than themselves (immediate family)?

          For European Americans, we have historically (as Occidental man), formed elites that will forge external circumstances that allow maximal group flourishing and reward optimal individual development and performance that is harnessed for the greatest good. In other words, Occidental man is truly a collective being but whose collectivism involves sacrifice for a greater/higher good.

          Can European/Occidental man in America shake his stupor and organize, probably first to make like Asians and cultivate individual skill to make the best of it and then parlay that power base into a mean reversion to exerting a collective will to forge a great civilization?

          We need more than highly technically competent people pursuing a narrow specialized interest to evade the train wreck. I am not sure we can count on large numbers of Asians to be in the lead with us on this. It is up to Occidental man in America to rediscover his higher nature to make things better. Other peoples will follow. First and foremost we must pull ourselves up and then pull up our fellow folk. Only we can save ourselves now.

          I admire Asians and Asian culture. However, raw IQ alone does not hold the answer. Occidental man living in an Occidental world is the only viable solution and antidote to extinction and the terrible conditions that will be prevalent along that path. We are the keepers and kindlers of our own flame.

          • When I said things will still kind of work if those percentages are high enough, I should have put more emphasis on Kind Of.

            The main 2 points I was trying to express were A. Societal function and dysfunction is more of a sliding scale than an on/off switch and B. It’s heavily influenced by demographics. Of course you have some percentage of whites who are dead weight or counterproductive, the spiteful mutants etc., but these broad truths remain.

            It’s not news, or a coincidence, that small homogenous white and east asian countries have been stupendously successful and stable.

          • Hey JZ,

            Good discussion. But kind of working is anarcho tyranny in the situation where the Asians pursue what boojy life. You’ll still be able to work for globo-homo, maybe live far enough away from the worst dysfunction…

            Of course, that 10% will diminish to 9, 8 … over time.

            I don’t consider that kind-of working, especially if since part of a European’s definition of working is, it is only worth it to me to pursue the status quo when the BS is underfoot but ankle or knee deep is too far, because underfoot will someday be ankle deep.

            Asians have built high functioning societies, but they have done so using massive coercion or because the culture is homogeneous. We don’t have that ingredient here. We have a dumpster fire and an endless supply of fuel for it.

            Only a small percentage of people will work for a big tech, big propaganda, or big consumer product company or get a comfy sinecure, and Europeans will get zero sinecures in this regime.

            That doesn’t kind of work, even if every plane flies properly, the trains run … … I.O.W. This is already too broken to be called kind of working. Granted it can get a lot worse.

        • One aspect to mention that exasperates SA’s race to collapse are racial (meaning White) exclusion laws in employment. All sorts of laws dictate how many Whites can be hired in proportion to Blacks in any profession/industry. I heard that even Black managers beg for exceptions to be made in their divisions as they have no competent Blacks to handle the work.

          We’ve not reached that point here, but AA will certainly play such a role before we collapse as well.

        • Compsci mentioned it, but competent whites to some degree are being shoved aside even now. Many if not most large cities are dysfunctional, and other complex systems are on the same trajectory.

          SA “kind of” works in the sense of, say, sporadic public utilities, which also is starting here. The stunning aspect is our demographics albeit to a lesser degree of late are still a mirror image of South Africa, and most of the wound is self-inflicted. That part could stop but the appetite for fantasy overides the reality of dysfunction. If the Clouds become inconvenienced, things might change but they also seem to indulge delusion.

          • Speaking of self-inflicted damage, Germany has surrendered itself completely to Gaia-worship and turned in its advanced economy card at the front desk. It’s like watching a first world country turn off its lights – forever (or quite some time anyway, decades at the very least). There’s some first-class nation wrecking.

  7. Curses, foiled again!

    Since my favorite question is “Why?”, I see the dratted Zman has asked a far more satisfying and practical question: “Who sez?”

    Zounds, Zman! I shall have my revenge!

  8. As someone in an indoctrination mill, the answer to the question is clear: “We are doing it [whatever that may be] because it is right [in the sense of righteous].” Now, I know the immediate response: “By whose authority?”
    This is where I segue to my longstanding point: the death of inductive reasoning. A powerful mechanism exists in society, one which implants whatever belief TPTB wants into the minds of the proles. This mechanism is unchallenged by observations of observable reality (where inductive conclusions find their genesis). The cause of this tool’s efficacy are multitudinous (addiction to phones, dopamine feedback, loss of Christian morality, Puritanical heritage, lack of attention span, the framing of history as a progressive moral struggle, competition for attention via virtue signaling, advertising, consumer culture, etc.).
    The mechanism is executed thusly:
    1) Establish something is good or bad (major premise) – usually an ism or a signal word.
    2) Say this thing (minor premise) is this major premise. This is the function of the mechanism on specific actions.
    3) Conclusion.

    Example: “Being heard” is good (major). This point is instilled through the culture.

    Then, when TPTB want to alter behavior, they simply use the mechanism to associate something with the major premiese; e.g., Chopping off your d#$# and whining is “being heard.”
    Conclusion is easily writ and writ large: Therefore, chopping off d#$# is good.

    “Dictator” is bad. Putin is dictator. Ergo.

    Nowhere is pushback to be found by observable reality. Observable reality is actually generally scorned (e.g. boys look different from girls); thus, the death of inductive reasoning as a pushback.

    In deductive reason, the general principle is always given from on high. Now, I know, this still tasks us to answer, From whence is this authority to give a major premise?

    I will leave that to the individual to decide. But I think, having listened to half of this podcast and the last, is that the mechanism that instills these beliefs is worthy of investigation, as well as the reason for its success.

    • Eloi: “This is where I segue to my longstanding point: the death of inductive reasoning. A powerful mechanism exists in society, one which implants whatever belief TPTB wants into the minds of the proles.”

      E, to the best of muh knowledge, the problem here is not the Proles [indeed, the Proles of muh acquantaince all REFUSED the v@xxines], largely because the Proles tend to trust their own instincts, rather than being mesmerized & hypnotized into submission.

      The problem here is what Z calls, “Managerialism”, what Anonymous Coward calls, “Cabal”, and what I call, the “Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex”.

      Human personalities are completely determined at conception, to include personalities which are utterly malleable at the one extreme, versus personalities which are rigidly implacable at the other extreme, and inserting the DNA code for Passive Aggression into the Animal Kingdom, as the single most Evil phenomenon known to biology, is Massa Lucifer’s crowning achievement, and the means by which he intends to destroy the entirety of his Father’s creation.

      Unchallenged, Passive Aggression is OMNIPOTENT.

      On its own turf, in the realm of human affairs – within the Lawfare Industrial Complex, within the Medical Industrial Complex, within the FIRE Industrial Complex, within the Edumakashunal Industrial Complex, within the j00ish Industrial Complex, within the streetsh!tting pajeet Industrial Complex, within the canine-eating g00k Industrial Complex, etc etc etc – Passive Aggression is unstoppable.

      The only thing that Passive Aggressives fear is Active Aggression.

      Furthermore, Passive Aggressives are born with an innate instinctual understanding that their power emanates from their unity [especially when confronted by external threats], ergo the Passive Aggressives are always united in confronting challenge.

      But what’s even scarier is that the Passive Aggressives are all endowed with the innate instinctual ability to recognize the Loose Cannon – the camouflaged Active Aggressor – who manages to infiltrate their ranks.

      It would take a monumental effort on the part of a phenomenally skilled Actively Aggressive actor to infiltrate the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex and remain hidden there for upwards of several decades.

      But when finally that Actively Aggressive actor is unmasked, all hell breaks loose, in the form of the entirety of the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex acting in unison to destroy the existential threat to the hive mind, namely the free thinking Active Aggressor in their midst:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUXHB5U-Vl4

      Furthermore, this religion of sh!tlibbery is burned into their DNA.

      It’s part & parcel of their Passive Aggression.

      Passive Aggression & sh!tlibbery are INSEPARABLE.

      For all intents & purposes, they are identical phenomena.

      ===============

      There is no “reasoning” involved in any of this – no induction, no deduction.

      There is only the innate instinctual Passive Aggressive loyalty to the Hive Mind.

      That’s why all the sh!tlibs are uniformly v@xxinated.

      They are herd creatures, and hiding in the middle of the herd had always served them profitably [by now, for upwards of several million years], but this time around, following the herd, into the veterinarian’s barn, to be v@xxinated, has sealed their fate.

      The herd failed them.

      And their arch-enemies, the Lone Wolves, the Active Aggressors, the Free Thinkers, are now poised to have the final say in the matter.

      PRO-TIP WARNING: As the Passive Aggressive herd awakens from its power-drunken slumber, and realizes that the free-thinking Lone Wolves are poised to seize power, the herd will become angry & petulant & rageful, and in one final act of nihilism, the herd will seek to obliterate the Lone Wolves.

      We are moving into very very dangerous times.

      ===============

      tl;dr == In this unfolding tragedy of ours, the only useful role for “logic” to play is in reverse-engineering the horror of the psychological motivations of our tormentors, and in forcing ourselves to confront the reality of the grotesquely iniquitous motivations of these Passive Aggressive personality types.

      Free Thinkers will need to summon all of their empirical faculties to make the observations and deduce the implications and form the strategies necessary for surviving what’s coming.

      ===============

      To answer Z’s question in today’s essay: By Whose Authority?

      By the Authority of the Hive Mind of Managerialism.

      By the Authority of the Hive Mind of Cabal.

      By the Authority of the Hive Mind of the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex.

      ===============

      Courtesy of PA, over at PA World & Times:

      https://i.imgur.com/N2Nu4Z9.jpg

      “Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.”

      – Edmond de Goncourt

      • Tl;dr: hive mind. Even bees emit pheromones. I only describe the method through which the new Thing is accepted. If you thought I meant it as a logical proposition, I do not. I also note the chicanery of “people are born with their personalities fixed – including personalities that change.” I know what paradoxes are. This may be. But it is also noncommittal. Your point also ignored the unnaturallness of what is visible. What we see is an intense self loathing that cannot simply be explained by managerialism.

        • And pro tip warning- seriously? Get off your high horse. Fey comments like that are stuff michael anton posts

    • This is what happens when you let them control the frame and rhetoric.

      They frame any criticism of any Jewish person anywhere or Israel as “Antisemitism.” Antisemitism leads to the holocaust. Your criticism may be perfectly valid, but to address the criticism is to lose the argument. Instead of accepting the criticism as being in good faith, they re-frame it as “Antisemitism” and sympathy for the nazis and the holocaust. Instead of discussing how much money we send to Israel, we’re talking about Hitler and the Nazis.

      Or the crime problem when it comes to a certain group. When they show photos/videos of jails and you notice a group is over-represented, instead of talking about why they commit so much crime, we end up talking about why the cops and the law itself are so racist. Once you accept this frame, it is impossible to win. You can only lose and look bad in the process.

      All of this stuff is reinforced in a hundred different ways, mostly because they control the cultural and educational institutions. Nobody ever asks why, for example, the US is loaded with holocaust museums and how these are supposed to prevent a second one despite the fact that the US fought against it. The US has no history of “Antisemitism” No history of pogroms. No expulsions. Instead, “Antisemitism” is promoted as a disease of the White mind that could experience and sudden and unprovoked episode of “Antisemitism” Part of the reason it is so effective is they force our children to take day trips to these museums while they are young and impressionable. They produce movie after movie showing horror-shows of cruelty.

      They somehow managed to present homosexual degeneracy as a civil rights movement to keep the bathhouses open during the GRIDS epidemic. The fact that GRIDS was spread far and wide through those bathhouses is left out of the propaganda.

  9. “That question is “Who says?””

    Musk is learning the answer to that question as we speak.

      • Not really. Netanyahu is despised by the same people who hate Musk. All those protests did not happen on their own, they were paid for and organized by the Deep/Derp State. These are the same people who were able to mobilize those big protests (but only in Tel Aviv not Jerusalem) while at the same time installing Joe Biden, who has single handedly undermined their legitimacy.

        Musk is not our guy, but he is one of the leaders of the pragmatist wing that wants actual results instead of matching purity spirals and corrupt/decadent acts. Bibi, Bezos, and a few other Oligarchs are there as well a few others.

  10. “Who says?”

    “By whose authority?”

    This raises the question of emergent vs. controlled behavior, and the area where I disagree with you the most. Yes, emergent behavior accounts for much of it, but there is a great deal of control. Realizing this also can feed the monomaniacs, we do have to acknowledge that often the crumbs are being tossed to the ducks by someone.

  11. The Question of Caesar’s Wife, and the President’s Son, is instructive.

    In Caesar’s time, his wife had to be above suspicion. In order for him to wield power, he had to be perceived to be a moral person of a moral family. Above suspicion. Caligula and Nero tried to invert that as a measure of power, “see I am above those mortal rules as a GOD!” and for a while they could make stick but not for long, done in by their own elites.

    Now we have the President’s Son, who has to be seen as the most immoral person (I think the Regime WANTED the pictures of the Son’s depravity out there for everyone to see) and above the law. As a power flex to show they are GODS. It is the same with BLM, the transgenders, Drag Queens in every kindergarten, etc. It is that desire for power. And every movie bad guy in the last century has always been presented to be all about POWER, to posture as a God. Humans are conditioned to rebel against notions of leaders as GODS and leaders often cannot avoid posing as GODS.

    There is a reason both Xi and Putin pose as super-bureaucrats when they are otherwise, as it is a useful pose to deceive what they really are, while our most low level bureaucrats like to pose as GODS see New Mexico, Michigan, California, DC.

    • Xi and Putin: cool people & badasses playing the role of bureaucrats

      Joe and entourage: losers and weaklings playing the role of degenerates (what they imagine to be cool people).

      • One aspect of modern culture that has become more and more apparent is that degenerates are not cool.

        In previous generations you had the Hunter Thompsons, Cheech and Chongs, and Timothy Learys that sold degeneracy as an edgy counterculture. It worked for a while, but only because the media portrayed a strawman of contemporary culture as consisting boring squares.

        Few people think potheads are cool now, and the new degenerates like trannies is more of a terror campaign to accept than something subtly propagandized.

        • Trannies definitely are meant to terrorize and control. I just read that Nashville elected one to its city government yesterday. Who needs Leninism when the masses voluntarily comply out of fear?

    • Don’t sleep on Xi.

      He’s a bit soft around the middle now, but the dude did spend a few years in an out-of-the-way hard labor camp when it appeared his political career was over before it started.

      As for Putin, go listen to his anecdote about what his grandmother told his grandfather as she bled out from a German bullet.

      Yet, the fruits and nuts leading the GAE believe they can out-tough people from these backgrounds.

      Right…right…

  12. For those of us who revere the Western corpus of knowledge and wisdom, postmodern Leftism’s almost complete absence of authority and intellectual roots are arguably its biggest failings. Realistically, the people pushing this crap can go back no further than the 1960s to find any intellectual–let alone cultural, traditional or religious–basis for their deranged assertions and taboos. Thus, pomo Leftism’s basis is only decades old. The justification for Western traditionalism, on the other hand, extends literally millennia into the past. It’s really no contest. Who you gonna trust? Somebody whose intellectual support derives from a pack of gibbering, French, postmodern charlatans in the 1960, or somebody whose basis includes Parmenides, Plato, Christ, Paul, Shakespeare, Descartes and Dostoevsky?

    PS–Z seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the late medieval sources of our current discontent. I wonder why that is. Perhaps he’ll favor us with an explanation someday.

    • “postmodern Leftism’s almost complete absence of authority and intellectual roots are arguably its biggest failings”

      Correct. And given how quickly the delusion du jour (almost hourly) changes now, that only will get worse. The Winston Smiths cannot keep apace. This along with modern Leftism’s suicidal impulsiveness*, to the degree that differs, is its Achilles Heel and reasons for optimism.

      *I go here too often, but the presence of nukes makes this different: yes, the Soviets, but they were not attained until Stalin, fortunately. Our Lenins and Trotskys have them, unfortunately.

    • Au contraire, modern leftism can trace its roots all the way back to an ancient reptile that told the woman that if she disobeyed she would certainly not die but rather be like God. Theyve been at it in one form or another basically since then. Then cover stories come and go but there is always the central promise they are chasing

      • Ah yes, the Reptilians. They just keep seeping in with their crazy stories. We must pump harder or the minnow will be lost.

  13. This dovetails with what people are saying already in the comments, but does anyone feel that the left sort of has a “terrain earning system” mentally where once they detect it they will end the conversation block you accuse you etc.

    So for instance talking about black on black crime will set there alarm off. Not because talking about it is racist but because they think it’s something a racist hiding there power level will say. So on a weird way, they are actually creating a situation where someone will say “you’re never going to debate me, so I’ll just say ni__er ni__er ni__er and troll you”.

    It’s sort of a you know I know and I know that you know yet we won’t say it phenomenon that happens in these debates

    • We must be more disciplined than that. We were grilling when they were choosing and taking all the ground.

      Have some crime stat graphs ready to send them. AmRen just released an analysis of NYC 2022. It is ugly.

      Aside from that CounterCurrents just released a talk by Greg Johnson about how to converse about “Diversity.”

      It is along the lines of: Diversity is a euphamism for fewer white people. Why do you want fewer white people? What is wrong with white people? Are you not white? What will happen as your children and grand children become a smaller and smaller minority and live amongst people who have watched whites like you say it is perfectly fine to abolish whiteness?

      You can do the same with black on black murder and one or two examples of blacks mass killing whites and asking why the blacks never get upset about them killing each other and why when they mass kill us why it doesn’t matter. I think blacks have killed 500K blacks since the 60s. I think they have killed more whites than whites who died fighting WWII. I need to confirm this, but I think that is correct. That should be an eye opener. “Did you know that … ?”

      I think a bit of Socratic questioning is much more effective than giving them what they want; to see you sperg out and prove that they are morally superior to those racist white supremacists.

      The hour is late and we have to get it together if there is any chance in this information war.

      • Facts don’t make a difference with the left. Using unapproved facts is a sign of your being a heretic. After St Floyd’s ascension to Heaven, Instagram banned FBI crime dtatistics

      • To even be aware of the black versus white crime statistics shows that you have racist impulses.

  14. I’m pausing the podcast to comment.

    The people with high IQ, many times, DO think the rules/laws don’t apply to them.

    Cause they’re smarter than you.

    • The people with high IQ dont nesessaringly have common cense . Descartes set up his metaphysic such—- animals have no souls so they dont feel pain. You can kick the dog all you want and if the animal howls its like an alarm clock. alarm clock makes noise but it feels no pain. This was the father of modern philosophy and a genius mathematician. As regards to moral claims they are programmed thru the smart phones in everybody,s pockets. Gays cannot get married in Moscow . This is a reason to risk nukes flying

    • A problem in many societies, including ours, is that in many instances the rules (and laws, and morals, and…) DON’T apply to the elite, the priveleged, the Inner Party. Examples of this abound, I won’t need to belabor the point.

      Please note that I am by no means saying that anyone should be above the law, only that many are above it.

  15. “Common morality is what is needed to hold a large society together, so extreme selection pressure has been in favor of those who naturally assume there is a moral authority for a moral claim.”

    Not only that but it’s possible that specific moral codes that are adaptive have survived selection while others are extinct. That doesn’t mean there is a universal moral code any more than there is a universally adaptive body type or skin color.

    This raises the question of whether Wokery is somehow adaptive or simply another evolutionary dead end. The decline of the GAE suggests the latter but it could be a temporarily successful strategy for dealing with some current environmental pressure. Mass hysteria is another potential explanation.

    • Indeed…But the current woke moral code (which, admittedly many of us simply ignore) is so dis-functional that it can’t survive…The people adhering to it simply don’t have enough children to perpetrate this insanity for very long, and if they manage to get the whole country to obey it…the USA will collapse, demographically and functionally…..

      • Exactly. This is why transgenderism advocates resort to violence, and why the Woke jihad against Russia is so very dangerous. They probably cannot sustain it but very well might light the world afire as a result.

    • “Wokery” is a recrudescence of iconoclasm.

      There are three kinds of wokesters.

      1) those who are true believers in the cause.

      2) those who go along to get along and avoid the bullying behaviour of the true believers.

      3) the cynics who created it, who know it’s BS and use it as a weapon to attack their religious and political enemies.

      • The curious thing is how the woke believe they are iconoclasts, yet simultaneously, theirs is the regime’s morality. This isn’t necessarily the dichotomy you might think it is, but to not be so, it requires an admission that it is a revolutionary regime, which we don’t seem to be getting.

    • The phenomena we group into “wokeness” thrive at the intersection of sociopathy and obedience, so that’s what it “selects for”: sadism aimed downward, desperate approval-seeking aimed upward.

      Increasingly it also prevents its victims from breeding.

      Unlike Enlightenment liberalism, that adds up to a normal, precedented, proven, Darwin-approved strategy.

      • ” the intersection of sociopathy and obedience”

        Brilliant. It also is permanent infantilism, which includes always seeking approval.

  16. Another one of these, huh? I think I’ll pass.

    The phrase “moral code” does far too much work in the Z-Man’s productions, which allows for a great deal of equivocation and confusion. If you really want to start making sense of the social dynamics around you, you should learn to distinguish between the following concepts: Religion, myth, natural law, positive law, and “that’s just life (i.e. culture).

    1. Religion. That which pertains specifically to the worship and service of God is religion. Without going too far into the details, it can be seen that things like rites and dogmatics belong here, but not every type of belief is eo ipso religious in nature, as if nothing could be distinguished between religious belief and belief in general. The fact of a transcendently existing God is well-enough understood and knowable through the use of natural reason, so mere “belief in God” is not necessarily religious, either. Ours is an irreligious age, and religion plays very little role in public life at the present time.

    2. Myth. A structured belief in the symbolic significance of one’s actions and passions is myth. Every type of organization requires a myth to explain why individuals must adapt their behavior to the good of the collective. It sets forth the rationale for individual sacrifice and the justification for the social order, including the vesting of authority and the divvying up of rewards. Religion involves myth but myth does not necessarily involve religion. Communism and socialism are vast, deeply powerful and explanatory—but nonreligious—myths. When The Z-Man insists that “progressivism is a religion!”, what he really means is that progressivism is a myth.

    3. Natural Law. The properties belonging to a thing owning to the type of nature that it has, is natural law. The determination of the natural law consists in the proper determination of what each thing is, no more and no less. For instance, it is a natural law that a dog is a four-footed animal. A non-animal is, by definition, not a dog. A dog specimen with three legs is missing one of its natural legs, either through accident or defect of nature, but there is no such thing as a “naturally” three-legged dog. Four-footedness belongs to the dog’s essence, which it is in man’s power to know but not to alter. The Z-Man, at times, affects a nominalist attitude which denies essences altogether, but without essences both life and thought are impossible, so this cannot be right (see below).

    4. Positive Law. The laws made by a properly constituted authority, concerning contingent particulars, are positive law. For example, if a town has a water shortage due to drought, and the mayor invokes his authority to limit lawn-watering to Wednesdays and Thursdays, that is a positive law. There is no necessary connection between Wed/Thur and watering, and there is no natural law against such a thing; but, since in the nature of the case some limit has to be set, a positive law is issued which proscribes watering outside of those days, making a crime out of something which is not, so to speak, a crime against nature. This seems to be the bulk of what The Z-Man means by “moral code.” Whenever he gets on a roll about “moral code”-this and “moral code”-that, he is really talking about positive laws, especially those he disagrees with.

    Even the positive law has a natural end. The nature it seeks to preserve is the good of society as a whole, which requires, from time to time, the observance of positive limits. The concept of “natural rights,” which The Z-Man also loves to pillory, is invoked when the positive law becomes odious and violates the natural law pertaining to men. The Z-Man loves to insist that natural rights are not material objects, as if this somehow invalidated their existence. We already know that they are not material objects, and we already know that do not, of themselves, have the power to produce effects. The “natural right” simply sets the limit to the positive law an individual man is bound to observe. No one is bound to accept the authority of a positive law that violates his natural right; and he may, in good conscience and with perfect justification, rebel against it if he can.

    5. “That’s Just Life,” (i.e. Culture). Here we have a final, catchall term that includes the sum of accidents, chance events, and pragmatic compromises we inherit as the burden of history, both for good and ill. They are not laws of any kind but destiny, fate. They set the conditions in which we must operate. One may legitimately question the justice of such things (for they are often unjust), but the conditions cannot be altered without effort, and the efforts to alter them may incur more costs than benefits.

    Once you have a grasp of these things, then you may begin to analyze society with some degree of accuracy. However, the insistence that “reason cannot provide the basis for normative claims” vitiates such efforts from the start. If reason does not provide such a basis, what does? Irrationality? That certainly will not hold.

    When we say that reason provides the basis for a just ordering of society, we are not trying to root the claim in the reason process itself, as the Kantians and other Enlightenment rationalists do. We are rather referring to the logos-structure of reality, which is the object of the natural reason. The purpose of the natural reason is to know and understand the essences or quiddities of material objects. These essences endow the object with its nature, genus, and species, under which are annexed the properties that pertain to it, i.e. the natural law. The natural law pertaining to man dictates that he must live in a society, for man is a social animal. The organization of that society is, in a certain respect, left to the latitude of the positive law, but the positive law does not supersede the natural rights of the men who constitute society.

    Despite the best efforts of the legislatures, injustices wil remain due to the historical legacy of living in an imperfect world, but it is not even possible to ask “By whose authority?” in response to a law one finds odious, without recourse to the natural law.

    This should not be too hard to understand.

    • “Whenever he gets on a roll about “moral code”-this and “moral code”-that, he is really talking about positive laws, especially those he disagrees with.”

      Absurd. Much of the moral law is not now and never has been codified, much like the phantasmic natural rights you believe exist in the ether, which at best are cited as bases for constitutions and positive laws.

      All laws and rights are the result of forces of arms, and moral codes usually depend on what amounts to peer pressure.

      • The feeling of peer pressure is a passion, not a law. Social pressure may enforce a law (or a nonlaw) but it cannot make one.

        If social pressure conduced automatically law, the n the true law, sans particulars, would be, “I am obliged to do whatever I am pressured to do,” which is, of course, not a law at all. This is simply a definition of tyranny.

        It is true that, in actual life, men may have a tyranny imposed on them, but it is not true that they are obliged to accept it as legal.

        • Your main error, one you make repeatedly, is in thinking that all there is to know on this matter was in that intro to philosophy course you took as a freshman decades ago. You insist on recasting what I say in those terms, because you are wholly ignorant of the vast body of knowledge that lies outside the very narrow scope of that one college course.

          • Well said. I think he has a lot of confusion about the legal code and enforcement as well.

            Anglosphere people emphasized natural law/rights and openly stated it had to be based on a highly moral and single people. Self governance was not just related to law, but to the moral and behavioral code of a noble people. Positive law/rights are fine, but the people who usurped us took advantage of natural law to introduce a positive law. The basis of that positive law was anti-white, anti-American wealth redistribution and racial dispossession. It was created not to seek just arbitration and administration but to explicitly weaken and dispossess the European Heritage American nation.

            Even Rufo is now openly acknowledging this.
            In any case, this poster does repeatedly stay in the realm of a very abstract theory.

            Even rules of armies and rules of engagement change based on context. ID’s last post describes to a T the left’s means of domination that we now live under. We can argue about rights all we want. In the end, like the Continental Army who avoided open field battles so they could win, we are going to have to engage to win and then if we do so, reconstitute our own regime that learns from the lessons of this massive train wreck where philosophical musings based on a couple of college intro courses taught by weak intellects have been steam rolled by the will to power.

          • This is a strange claim to make, since you are not really in a position to know anything about my life. But I do know my own life, and I know that the substance of your claim is ridiculous. Pigeonholing others without evidence is solipsistic, and you’re accusing me of being ignorant?

            Just what exactly is this vast body of knowledge I am unaware of? I hope you’re not about to tell me “HBD.”

            The shoe is really on the other foot, here. If you were aware of anything other than your own invented facts and stipulative definitions, you would know that your opinions are not novel, nor are they unique to yourself. It’s just that they aren’t really held by anybody because they are unserious. Pace your “Theory of Everything,” society is not a random walk. But if you think it is, then you have no grounds for complaining about where that walk took you. On the other hand, in the mere act of saying that something isn’t right, you are giving the lie to the nominalism you otherwise confess.

            Why don’t you give up the Darwinism and the atheism? What exactly are they doing for you, anyway?

        • All law is to some degree tyrannical*. We mostly accept this to maintain and enforce order. Westerners once tended to want more flexibility and at one time avoided the codification of those things in life that did not really intrude on order. Those days are gone, obviously, and the appetite for tyranny has increased. And, yes, social pressure is or can be tyranny, too.

          *No, this isn’t an argument for lolbiterianism but the rationale behind what we once considered limited government.

  17. This is a good jumping off point for framing and rhetoric. Because all of these moral claims come down to framing and rhetoric. When they decide to tackle their rights to have “relations” with children, it will be framed as the rights of a child to bodily and sexual autonomy and NEVER from the point of view of the adult. That’s the key. This stuff is never framed as what it is and always framed from a sympathetic view. The same is true of the rhetoric. Their rhetorical tricks always leave the target with a sympathetic view of whoever they are carrying the water for. The “left” are absolute masters of this. The next time some criminal is shot by a cop and BLM notices, just look on in awe as they turn said criminal into a saint.

    • Great thinking Tars. They do look at it from the point of view of the child. However, it is a Satanic inversion of that point of view. For them, the child is liberated and free to experience and explore sexual pleasure.

      Even thinking and writing that makes me feel ill from head to toe. The framing is totally wrong. The child is vulnerable and even nature has not made it ready for the sex act if it is pre-pubescent. Moreover, the child must develop to live and relate to its peer group in terms of sexuality and reproduction. That person’s sexuality is meant to be expressed intra generationally and only when it is ready and is sufficiently developed not just sexually, but intellectually and morally.

      In any case, all of their framing is a moral inversion. It is always framed as protecting something. ‘I am protecting the child’s right to be sexually active whenever it wants’, essentially.

      Every issue they have uses the same logic. ‘How dare you not let me protect and keep safe (insert name of some ginned up non-specific non-victimized category or group)’ We have to have the moral courage and fortitude to say No! You are exploiting and manipulating and the sum result of your ideas and actions are evil manifest.

      Ultimately, we need to have control of institutions to back that up. In the meantime we must assert our will in the institutions close to us. Local and state gov; home; local schools and/or build our own. In my opinion local government and home schooling are where a lot of energy should be spent. The White Papers substack has good info on how to start commandeering state governments to address the alien invasion.

      I rambled, but I love the insight into framing Tars. That is crucial. Always see and call out their framing’s Satanic inversion.

    • We will be told that if we don’t let young children have anal sex with grown men, the children will commit suicide. So anyone opposing pederasty is evil and wants kids to die.

  18. “by who’s authority”
    Unless you put these cunts in their place they are the authority. Engaging them in rational conversation doesn’t do shit.

    • Yes, and nothing is more fun (at least for me) than dressing down a Karen and forcing her to walk off with tail between her legs….

      • Pyrrhus.
        Where I come from the word “cunt” is gender non-specific.
        “Dressing down a Karen” is basically like picking on the retarded kid.

    • I’m splitting hairs here, but it does give rational people the rationale to put them in their place. Of course, rational people need to have the stones for it, first, and that’s the more fundamental problem.

      • “Of course, rational people need to have the stones for it, first, and that’s the more fundamental problem”

        I see it as THE fundamental problem.

    • The issue is primarily one of power. When the SJW’s have the authority it means they have the power and if they agree with any your opposing views then they have in effect ceded some of that power to you. As we should all know, an individual or group in power is not very likely to give up any power especially to those they deem inferior.
      Another reason to not engage with them is they would rather be comforted by lies than hurt by the truth.

  19. Liberalism (SJW-ism, whatever) can’t exist without the False Consensus Effect, and I think that’s where all this ultimately comes from. You can push False Consensus through the standard institutions — Media, Academia — but Social Media is an entirely new force multiplier. The Massively Online are online 24/7, so what looks like hundreds of posts — and therefore an overwhelming prevalence of an opinion — is really only one or two lunatics egging each other on at 3am.

    Before Social Media, they had to push their opinions as truth on the retail level. You had to go to college to learn why Marxism is The Science. Now it’s wholesale, which is why they’ve gotten so much more visibly insane this last decade and a half (recall that social media really only got going circa 2010).

    • I guess that would be a good reply:
      Q: “Who says?”
      A: “Everyone”
      Sure I could pick it apart and ask “Who is this ‘everyone’?”, “Is this ‘everyone’ always right on everything?”, “Who told them?”, etc., but, I’ve already lost, quantity having a quality all it’s own.

      • Since “everyone” now means “all my Twitter pals,” that’s right. I agree that this false consensus, as Severian called it, accounts for about 99 percent of the current madness. Social media is the most feminine thing ever and the digital matriarchy has consumed society writ large.

  20. Where I’ve “struggled” with this is with close minded acquaintances who think the empire has morality on their side in the Ukraine-Russia war. I’ll ask “Who says? The guy on TV who sniffs little girls at photo-ops?” and I’ll get back…weird answers. The short version is that since the empire defeated Slavery, Jim Crow, Hitler, and Tojo that it’s moral claims will always reign supreme.

    • Ha. Russia got rid of serfdom before America did slavery. Russia never had Jim Crow–not that there’s anything wrong with Jim Crow, wot. And Russia probably had more to do with defeating Hitler than did the US.

      • Without the Soviet Army, there’s no way the US could have defeated Hitler without the atom bomb…That’s why such vast amounts of money were poured into the Manhattan Project…

          • p.s. Imagine my rage when I found the Rape of the German Women was organized as a form of Morgenthau Planning.

    • How many of those close acquaintances even know who Tojo is? My experience is that those on the Nuke Moscow train believe Trump and Hitler, to the degree they are different, are the only evil men in history and the only ones they can name.

  21. “Who says?”

    Quite simply, the ones with the power to destroy you (or at least make life uncomfortable).

    • Social status discomfort is the greatest weapon, or rather own-goal, of the whole conflict.

      What passes for the right will avoid any and all discomfort of actually embodying any aspect of the conflict.

      They find biblical reasons for holding their tongues. They find practical reasons. They find utilitarian reasons. Economic reasons. But it all traces back to the comforts of their social standing.

      The great divorce will never come as long as both sides subscribe to the same social caste system.

      • “The great divorce will never come as long as both sides subscribe to the same social caste system”

        Precisely. They are enemies; they merely disagree on means and methods.

      • “The great divorce will never come as long as both sides subscribe to the same social caste system.”

        Bingo. Peer pressure enforces compliance far better than guns and ammo.

    • True, but begs the question of who are these people and their real numbers.

      Rush Limbaugh had this problem early on. His (Leftist) detractors flooded his show sponsors with thousand of e-mail threats and complaints designed to alienate his sponsors and remove Rush from the airwaves. Rush fought back by hiring a tech savvy company to investigate the source of these “complaints”.

      His sponsors were under the impression that there were large swaths of listeners being alienated. However, what was shown by investigation was that there were perhaps a dozen or so activists who were responsible for 90% of the hate mail sponsors were receiving. Thus Rush survived this attack and such tactics were no longer effective.

      • Yes the power of pluralistic ignorance social proof is massive. Especially in the post-social media epoch.

        Us badthinkers encounter this constantly even among dirt people who reflex their anti-racist proofs at every opportunity. But the striver cloud class is pozzitively presumptuous that their views are not just reflective of the current moral apex but that anyone they would share time with or even like personally would naturally be the same.

        Orangeman thru Covid has been an absolute wrecking ball in this regard. I’ve burned a wide swath through the sheeple and progs in my life by merely making it known that I am not a part of their death cult. Their response is always the cogdis of “how could a good person hold such bad people beliefs?”.

        Wealth and assets can be tasked to turn away the rabid minority but still, most will not even speak up among their own circles because the status quo serves their comforts and status.

        Our own moral flimflam of desiring the death cult to be destroyed and yet continue to cash checks signed by the death cult is just the economic side of this same status addiction.

    • Yes. Those who control the media agree on all the taboos and they can act in concert to impoverish and exile you. To ask Z Man’s question, “By Whose Authority?” is all that is required to be crushed. That is why they never have to answer the question.

      Further, our long run of affluence has led people to believe that they can have a comfortable life if they just don’t challenge the media’s moral consensus.

      • “Further, our long run of affluence has led people to believe that they can have a comfortable life if they just don’t challenge the media’s moral consensus”

        Or is it rather “led people to believe they have something to *lose* if this s**tshow stops? Affluence makes cowards of us all. 🙁

  22. I live in a community with what I would call progressives and many would call “woke”.

    The truth is that people in this community do ask these questions. The primary question is “How do you be a decent human being?”

    They would say that the authority for “SJW” ideology is that it attempts to give society a healthy ethical framework.

      • From what I understand the health and ethics of humanity and society.

        I don’t want to speak for them but that’s what I get from my conversations.

        • Yes, Line, good and honest reporting from behind the lines.

          Thank you, Howie.

          We look like savages to them, don’t we?

        • I live around these people as well. And, yes, they simply believe that their views are good and correct. That’s their authority, at least in their own minds.

          They believe that they are on the side of angels.

          When we question their authority, they are quite honestly confused. It’s never dawned on them that they aren’t the good guys.

    • For your average left-of-center (LoC) person, I believe authority just comes from an ambiguous sense of “human decency” borne from religious and political figures through time that appeal to the LoC person, which is then married to a belief that human history bends towards progress. As if you replace God with History.

      I don’t think they even have a concept of authority because to the modern left authority is a bad word. It’s more “consensus” than authority. Even though consensus is used like a weapon which may as well be the fascist boot.

      • They’ve never been too chary of citing Fauci as an authority to justify the Covid Captivity.

        The only consensus that concerns Leftists is an intramural one that they can then impose upon recalcitrants without.

    • To echo Z, who defines a “decent human being” and why do these people get to impose that definition on the rest of us?

      Why does the white liberal get to define what a “healthy ethical framework” means?

      Their morality isn’t my morality so why do they get to impose it on me? By what authority do they do this?

      Is their morality based on nature? Nope. Is it based on ancient writings that our people long ago agreed upon? Nope. They are simply demanding that I live by their rules for no other reason than they say so.

    • Aye. Best way to be a decent human being is to hate and betray your own people (whites), destroy their civilization and countries, and give them to half-literate savages.

      Well done, old chap, well done.

    • I did not downvote you, but this is overgenerous, to say the least. Most of those people can’t tell you why they believe what they do because they are hollow automons regurgitating slogans and platitudes. They easily will do a 180 when that is pumped into them. Their moral code is consensus real or perceived.

      • “Trump is Hitler”
        “Black Lives Matter”
        “Get the jab, it’s safe and effective.”
        “Save Ukraine!”
        “Free Tibet!”

        “Free Tibet”…poor, poor Tibet. I wonder what Richard Gere is up to these days.

        • Interesting thing about Tibet, it’s not Tibet anymore. The Chinese basically have swamped the native Tibetan population with immigrant Chinese.

          I feel their pain….

    • You guys who downvoted or argued with Howie are killing the messenger.

      He’s right that white liberals have an invulnerable sense of self regard that derives from their belief that they are unquestionably a good person. And you’re NOT!

      If you asked my liberal friends why they think my beliefs are wrong, they would say that, although I am a good person to them, my beliefs are selfish and hateful and that I misinterpret changes for equality and righting past of wrongs as attacks. I am unwilling to be a good person like them and surrender my privilege.

      And all of these unquestionable beliefs about what constitutes a good person are put in their heads by the media.

      • You seriously have liberal friends? It’s hard for me to comprehend how a dissident could have a Leftist friend, unless you simply agreed never to discuss politics. I have no Leftist friends, although there are numerous Leftists in my extended family. I am estranged from many of them.

        • Some friends I’ve had for 20+ years before we cared about politics. Now we avoid the topic as best we can.

          It’s not easy. Liberals are so used to having their beliefs constantly reinforced that they can’t imagine that others don’t share them. Most recently, one blithely referred to Putin and Musk as evil. It is beyond his wildest powers of imagination that anyone might not agree.

          • Try being a DR type. You can’t find an ally. Just had dinner with an old friend who is a die hard Rep *and* Trump supporter. We shared *no* common ground or view of the political situation—except to agree we’d vote for Trump in the next election. 🙁

            But really, like a reformed alcoholic, it’s getting easier for me to listen to the “same old, same old”. Day by day as they say.

  23. My time in the US military has helped me get very good at asking, ‘By who’s authority?”. Way too often I’m dealing with someone who “quotes” some regulation, but is really just making stuff up or repeating something heard elsewhere. I absolutely love asking them to ‘show me the reg’. In today’s internet age, if you can’t produce it, it doesn’t exist.

    It’s also great training to make new NCOs find the answers to the ‘who’s authority’ questions. It helps them understand who has what authorities and what their own authorities are.

    Yes, I know, the modern US military is a joke, but some of us old-timers are still trying to teach the young ones the right things. It’s most likely quite futile, but what else am I gonna do while I wait to retire? Go along? What fun would that be?

    • It’s not futile, because you’re doing your effing job and your job isn’t to save the military, but to stand as an exemplar to those who fall under your leadership.

      The US Army NCO creed:

      “I will earn their respect and confidence as well as that of my Soldiers. I will be loyal to those with whom I serve; seniors, peers, and subordinates alike. I will exercise initiative by taking appropriate action in the absence of orders. I will not compromise my integrity, nor my moral courage.”

    • “ …the modern US military is a joke, but some of us old-timers are still trying to teach the young ones the right things.”

      Hang in there. If the SHTF, your experience and knowledge will be needed—and those needing you will not be a joke.

  24. I run into this a lot at work and especially back when I was teaching. People just assume they can’t do this or that because they think it is taboo. I’ll often ask, “Says who?” And if it seems reasonable, I’ll let them do it. This is common for parents who just obey whatever the local school administrator tells them. The school might claim they have a rule against taking two math classes in one term. The parents have a bright kid, and math class A is not a prerequisite to take class B. So why not let the kid double up. Then they get moralized to by the school because they tried it once, and the other kid couldn’t do it…so they banned it. That’s nuts! So I coached the kids on how to say it, and the parents how to basically keep pestering the administrator until they got the result. I would tell them a simple fact: they don’t care about your kid. Their goal is to make you go away. So they’ll say they’ll consider it, promise to follow up, and never follow up. There’s no rationality behind it and no moral authority. They’re lazy and stupid and simply don’t want to be bothered.

    At work, I have coworkers who freak out any time a customer says something negative or asks for something. It’s a strange paranoia. The customer has no moral authority over us. And they’re probably not even mad. How about we just answer their question and try to reach a solution that works for us both? The customer is not always right – another bizarre moral code. To get people off the dime I’ll often joke, “The customer is always right. The customer is not always correct.”

    The tranny thing is starting to create real problems. These are crazy people. But we have to pretend they are not crazy. Like the masks and the vaccines, I think people play along just a little longer and then start quitting on it. Insanity is not moral. Demanding people accept insanity as truth is evil. Satan lives there.

    I’ve always considered myself a spiritual person, a Christian, who is not a fan of organized religion. But I never really thought Satan was real until the explosion of porn and the flat out evil actions of the powers-that-be.

    • “The tranny thing is starting to create real problems.”

      Quite so. I often think back to my early years at the university. There were trannies in abundance, but they were on the fringes and “politely” ignored. Perhaps that was the essential creation of today’s problem, they were ignored! Soon they began to think their mental illness was normal and should be enabled?

      A simplistic explanation from a reformed academic, but one that keeps coming to mind as I navigate through today’s degeneracy aka modern society.

      • @Compsci

        this might be a cope but if you simply don’t talk to a tranny you don’t have to worry about mispronouning them. So you’ve effectively stripped them of there power.

  25. Throwing fat guys off a tall building (especially Kevin Williams, Jonah Goldberg, etc.) is a physics experiment I could really get behind.

    It’s for SCIENCE, damnit! Trust the science!

  26. The SJW fears not asking “who says?” because he knows that what the corporations say, the media say, the govt say, the colleges say, the banks say, the people who use force and burn down buildings and commit street crimes, etc. . .THAT’S WHO SAYS!

    Our current madness is surely a descendant of the New Left from the 60s who where self-styled fighters of authority and conformism. But they were always screeching inversion moralistic tyrants and it becomes clear now that they are in power. Talk is useless; we’re LONG past good faith discussions.

  27. Perhaps most of us are bred to never ask who says? Those who lack this natural instinct and dare ask this question end up thinking about it on the fringes of society.

    I too am a natural contrarian. This is something all dissidents should be conscious of. Am I in the dissident space because so many people aren’t?. If we were on a different timeline and the American regime were somehow nationalistic, race-realist, and God-centered, would I be the dissident guy who’d be questioning or opposing nationalism, racism, and God?

    Our answer may frighten us to our very core…

    • “If we were on a different timeline and the American regime were somehow nationalistic, race-realist, and God-centered, would I be the dissident guy who’d be questioning or opposing nationalism, racism, and God?”

      Not necessarily, I think. Maybe in that ideal world you’d find your niche and be pissing people off in your sphere over smaller issues. One thing I noticed in myself and many contrarians is they ultimately like some ordered system to belong to.

    • Hmmm. I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one here who was at one point voted “biggest complainer” in his class?

    • Socrates was the first—and perhaps ultimate—“contrarian”. He was executed.

      He is remembered for such contrarian behavior 2500 years later. His dialogues are required reading for all budding philosophy majors in the Western world. I really can’t think of a more appropriate role model and mentor. No moral failing in being a good contrarian.

      • Socrates was the first subversive revolutionary, calling into question all the time-honored traditions and social mores of his day and perverting the youth with the mind virus of “reason”. He is the last person a person on “The Right” should hold up as a role model.

        • Aren’t *we* calling into question all the time-honored traditions and social mores of our day by perverting the youth with race realism and alternatives to liberal democracy?

          • No. Race realism is the time-honored tradition. Anti-white racism is the hideous innovation of comparatively short stint.

        • I’ll attempt to explain why Socrates would make a good role model for the Right or even the DR.

          Socrates simply challenged the rationale and reasoning of those who approached him and claimed to be “knowledgeable” or in his day, “wise”. Since these people were not really wise, it was a simple—but often lengthy—process to expose these people by showing the inner contradictions in their thought processes/beliefs. The assumption being such contradiction indicated error or falsehood of understanding.

          Today I see all sorts of people in authority and positions of influence who are not “wise” as Socrates would define. They are simply poseurs who have risen well above their appropriate/earned level of value/importance to society.

          There was no scientific method in Socrate’s time, but there was a struggle to define reason and logic—which is the ultimate basis of the modern scientific method.

          Imagine in recent history a modern “Socrates” challenging the FDA, CDC, WHO on their Covid recommendations during one of their national broadcast dog and pony shows put on for the rubes? Of course, that assumes that these poseurs would engage in such dialog to support/defend their positions, rather than simply impose them.

          We had some of these type of Socratic-like challengers, but their skepticism/concerns—supported by logic and reason—were suppressed/ignored by the establishment.

          In Socrates’ time, they executed such folk. Today, they repress them with censorship and threaten their livelihood through job loss.

          We don’t need less Socrates’ in society, but more. If not more, then at least a kernel of such thinking in each person of a well constituted populace. If Socrates is a subversive, then I’m a subversive and, if you read the commentary here long enough, you’ll probably find most of us are so.

          Finally as to the “subversive” as in undermining the traditional structure of a well functioning society, I refer you again to the Crito. Socrates toward the ending makes the case for supporting the State in his unjust verdict and condemnation by *not* fleeing. In short, he was a *good* citizen and accepted a sort of “social contract” in which he acknowledged that as he had accepted the State’s benefits he must therefore accept the State’s evil.

          Sounds to me like an upstanding citizen from the State’s point of view or anyone who is not an anarchist.

    • I, too. I never understood the appeal of organized religion because it seemed to me even as a child that people went to church for many reasons, few of which had anything to do with the love of God. I was always the one to speak up, embarrassing to adults as I was because I could see that they were phoney, and ask but why is it that way, and what if we did it this way, or why can’t I just walk across the hall and ask the SVP my question, why do I have to go up 10 levels and wait for my answer to come back down 10 levels to me, while my boss in a meeting is frantically waving his arms behind someone going you can’t SAY that. It’s so tiresome.

    • That’s a good question. However, I for one, am not a natural contarian. I was, in most respects, a patriotic American conformist until America was replaced by a postmodern Assyria.

    • I’m of the mind that if the majority is doing it, the action is elsewhere, which often leads me into contrarian positions. But I’m a dude, so ultimately masculine, and I think that constitutes a hard dividing line. So I’m not so uncomfortable treading boundaries. FWIW.

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