One of the many problems that plague this time is the poverty of language when it comes to our politics. We remain stuck with the language of the past, even though the political and ideological structures of the past are no longer relevant. The use of antiquated language forces people to use those old mental structures, which in turn means jamming the present into the molds of the past. The most obvious example is Left and Right, which have lost any real meaning.
Is Ben Shapiro a conservative? He calls himself a conservative, but Steve Sailer calls himself a conservative too. While they may agree on many practical things, it should be clear that they have different motivations. Ben Shapiro’s conservatism is driven by a desire for what is good for his people, while Steve Sailer thinks his positions are good for the country of his birth. They get lumped in with many other people on the Right, but they clearly have different political goals.
Therein lies the main problem with the most basic of political labels. Steve Sailer and Ben Shapiro assume that the rules of morality are rational. If they are rational, then we can reason our way to the correct morality. If we can do that then there is no reason that everyone cannot do the same thing. This is also the position of people like Karl Marx and John Rawls. It is the view of the current Left. They think they have found the right moral system and you just need to realize it.
Right there is the central problem of this age. We hold onto terms like Left and Right but have forgotten why they exist. The Left used to be those who said that the rules of morality must be rational, because the natural world is rational. The Right said morality is based in Scripture and the will of God but shaped by tradition. Scripture does not cover everything, so history, tradition, and custom fill the gaps. Those items are central to understanding the central morality of Christianity.
This is the fundamental difference between Left and Right that has been lost, resulting in the incoherent use of the terms today. Both the modern Left and the modern Right assume that there is one universal moral code that is rooted in reason. Because morality is rational, it applies to everyone, just as the rules of math apply to everyone, so it means it is the duty of those who know to educate those who do not know in the same way we spread other knowledge.
This is what Paul Gottfried and others have been trying, unsuccessfully, to explain to Michael Anton over the last year. His “natural rights” argument must lead to that which he claims to reject, because it relies on the same assumptions and logic as that used by left-wing radicals for centuries. Once you assume morality is based in reason, you must assume there is one universal morality. The next steps from there do not matter as they all lead to the same place, death camps.
Of course, this must lead to the end of tradition. If morality is based in reason, then it means past practice is a form of trial and error, mostly error. The way we used to understand morality, say basing it in local custom, must be wrong because reason has brought us to a new and better understanding of morality. Tradition, history and custom, if they have any value at all, are a warning. Those who cling to antiquated moral claims based in tradition are rejecting reason.
This explains another bit of incoherent vocabulary. The people celebrating diversity are the least tolerant of diversity. The reason for that is diversity for them is a narrow tool, a wedge to be used to separate people from their history, traditions, and customs so that they can more easily be herded into the new moral framework. Diversity is a means to an end, not an end in itself, even if they claim otherwise, because there can be no diversity within a settled moral order.
The biggest problem that arises from universal morality based in reason is that it must come with a duty to impose that morality on others. This is the central insight of Nietzsche, who argued that once you conclude that morality is rational, you must accept it is universal and therefore binding on everyone. This divides the world into moral and immoral actors, where the moral actors are judged not on their individual compliance with moral reason but their willingness to enforce it.
If reason tells us that everyone can and must have the same morality, then there is no room for things like national borders. Borders are about dividing people based on how they think they ought to live. People over there live the way they do because they think that is how they ought to live, while the people over here live as we do because it is how we ought to live. The border dividing the two people is to preserve these moral differences, which flies in the face of reasoned morality.
Similarly, free association is about separating people, which rests on the assumption that people may be different not just in their superficial characteristics but in how they think they ought to live. The men’s club exists because men do not think like women and therefore must have a different moral outlook. Logically, it means they must have different roles in determining how we ought to live. If the moral questions have been settled, then this form of association is unacceptable.
What all this leads to is a way of sorting people in the modern age. If you are sure morality is based in reason, then you are in one camp, along with Locke, Rousseau, Karl Marx, and John Rawls. If you think morality lies outside the domain of reason and is instead based in the supernatural or tradition, then you are in another camp along with people like de Maistre, Burke and even many of the Framers. One camp is on the Left and the other is the Right.
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As a Christian, I have some basic disagreements. 1. Morality is universal and objective, but it transcends reason. Without presupposing morality reason is not possible, or at the very least it is not possible to engage with. Arguing for reason presumes an ought. 2. Morality is not based on scripture. It’s revealed through scripture. Same as an empiricist wouldn’t say the regularity of nature is based on peer reviewed scientific studies. 3. Universal objective morality doesn’t erase boarders. We recognize a multiplicity of goods, therefore even with the elimination of evil, free will isn’t destroyed. Also the expression of the… Read more »
Because the Left is the dominant ideology, supported by the indispensable pillar of mass culture, it tends to bleed into the Right at every turn. It is very difficult to be a pure conservative in modern times. The door is slammed on decisions once the Left has made them. There is no revisiting past errors or overreachings. Once they’re made it’s declared “We’re living in the 21st (or 22nd or 23rd) century. Get with the program!” The domination of thought and mode is one-sided. The Right hasn’t held sway since the Age of Conquests. There used to be a time… Read more »
Most knowledge is obtained not from immediate experience or observation, but in the continuous process of sifting a learned tradition. The process of selection that shaped customs and morality could take account of more factual circumstances than individuals could perceive, and in consequence these moral traditions outstrip the capacities of reason–Hayek
While I like Burke and de Maistre, hindsight shows that no matter how right they were it didn’t matter. What matters is raw power and directing your own morality on the population. The left has always instinctively known this. They do it every day. They thought nothing of lining everyone up for the RNA/DNA shots. You don’t have to believe everything Nietzsche said to understand that the will to raw power is everything and you can build your own fluffy version of morality around it. If this is somehow against God, I don’t se him parting the clouds and intervening… Read more »
I definitely need some new lampshades, for sure.
The big mistake with morality was assuming that it could be algorithmically determined just using a set of axioms and logic. It operates more like a machine learning process (which all more or less mimic an evolutionary process), you have to run through generations of test cases before you can home in to a good approximation of the right answer. And the result can turn into a pile of crap really quick if it turns out your training data doesn’t match up with the actual data. Right now we’re testing behaviorism (its not my fault my dad was mean to… Read more »
Hosannas for using “home” instead of “hone” in. People usually say the latter, which is incorrect.
Ostei: I try really hard not to be the spelling/grammar/diction police but lately . . .
Please people: “Eek! I saw a mouse!”
Versus: “He eked out a victory.”
No reason to feel abashed by having standards. We need more of this, not less. And, to that effect, if I make a mistake, I want to be called out for it.
(Heh. Careful what you wish for.)
It’s still spelled ACKSHUALLY.
In reality, I think that morality is whatever customs and rules will allow you, your family, and your tribe to survive and prosper…For example, sterilizing your children or otherwise preying on them obviously fails in a big way..Carthage discovered that throwing your children in a fire to appease Moloch was a vbig fail..Christianity established societies that worked, and unleashed a torrent of scientific, literary, and general creativity and prosperity….Now we’re back to sacrificing kids to Moloch..
Until very recently the various long-established moralities were the local maxima produced by running a simple genetic (yo, ancestors!) algorithm on hundreds or thousands of generations of Training Data (*) By analogy our present elites are trying to achieve optimal results (i.e. maximising a utility function in n-space) coding in TRS-80 BASIC on a TRS-80, and never having heard of linear algebra, vector calculus, gradient descent, simulated annealing, blah, blah, blah. But no problem, they can re-invent all these wheels as they go… just they’ll turn out square and triangular wheels. What could possibly go wrong? The utter ignorance (not… Read more »
The Right said morality is based in Scripture and the will of God but shaped by tradition.
Umnnnhhhh…..no.
The (pure) Right believes that morals are rational AND are based in Scripture. There is no contradiction between right action and right reason, nor is there an ‘air gap’ between them.
Reason (or reasoning) is a cognitive process that occurs in the brain in order to understand something or make decisions based upon logic. The concept of a deity is, in fact, logical and therefore an artifact of cerebral reasoning. Our species rose to the top of the life pyramid because we evolved complex language skill and used it to nurture/program our young with “wisdom” that enabled them to better survive and thrive in the local environment of their birth. History shows that the most successful mechanism for this form of nurturing was accomplished via religious practices, and the concept of… Read more »
God? Fine. Humans organize around an alpha male, all primates do. But it must be *our* God- I will not bow to another tribe’s, nor place theirs above mine. Even if they say “but look how strong His magic is!” My people, and the gods of my ancestors come first, as should yours- I don’t care who you are, now we understand each other, now we have a level playing field. (Accurately, that is the physical reality: people generate the actual gods, not the other way around. To claim any god or God is the Creator is the deepest, darkest… Read more »
The only rationality that counts is one that promotes the health, happiness, and prosperity of your family and tribe…The fact that the “right” continually signs on to bloody wars of choice proves that it’s not rational, and something else is at work…
Damm. On fire today, pyrrhus.
He’s a bloody funeral pyrrhus…
Oops, didn’t see the MolochiteCarthage comment.
Spoke too soon. A vile lie by treacherous Juden diplomats.
Demerits, though the larger point is correct.
I think the right, or a majority of it, became convinced that “America” was its tribe and that these wars furthered the interests of America. While it was irrational to believe that the wars did any such thing, they were able to be persuaded that they did. So it wasn’t so much irrationality as the triumph of deceit. IMO
Same for seeing “America” as a tribe. It wasn’t. Now everybody can see that it isn’t. But at the time, they bought it.
Erk.. No again. Your religion provides your set of non-negotiable *axioms* direct from (whichever value of) God.
Feel free thereafter to Reason, Talmudise, Philosophise, Thomasise, Theologise, Fantasise, Calvinise, etc., etc., ad infinitum upon these axioms.
Or just Klein Bottle oneself into a Logorrheic Klein Bottle Logosbot… seems to be popular option these days in some corners of the ‘Right’ 🙂
Reason and morality both come from God, so a correct morality is also reasonable. Many want what they want when they want it and thus have no use for either reason or morality. Such people occupy positions of power in our societies now, which is a disaster.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/10/the-fateful-nineties
This essay sort of connects the dots on a lot of stuff. The left clearly metastasized into something different during the 90s
Gottlieb. What a decent, thoughtful fellow. Really I should read more of his.
Anton a disciple of Jaffa?
Well, well, well.
A favorite from the comments:
““Do Natural Rights Exist?”
They do when you own an AR-15 and lots of ammo.”
The comments section over there was a major intellectual circle jerk. I can never get the image of some bougie proper gentlemen sitting debating in a parlor while wild eyes barbarians stand outside the window screaming for blood. We get some of that here too, but was far worse over there. We are WAY past the event horizon for high minded theory and endless debate. Your enemies have no such problems, they deal in intimidation & raw force alone, take notes. So that comment cuts the Gordian Knot of the mental masturbation going on quite thoroughly. Once the barrels are… Read more »
Standing O to your entire comment, Apex.
“…bougie proper gentlemen sitting debating in a parlor while wild eyes barbarians stand outside the window screaming for blood.”
LOL. You can’t reason with a sub-90 IQ.
As I used to put it back in my blogging days, the Age of Ideology is over.
The whole notion of Natural Rights is ridiculous, because humans have lived in tribes since they were monkeys, and your rights in a tribe are dictated by the tribe, and what the tribal boss thinks is needed for its survival…Violate those, and you’ll be exiled, which is certain death….
The philosopher can see past the treeline that the other monkeys have declared is the limit of their world. In other words, both can be true. There can be natural right, denied by the Alpha Chimp to his tribe — but there are those who can see his shortcomings and shortsightedness. Simply because you can point to Y does not logically entail that X does not exist. The existence of tribes and local chieftains do not exhaust the entirety of the capacity of human thought to transcend its time and place. Some of you can, but there are those who… Read more »
*Some of you can’t
“They think they have found the right moral system and you just need to realize it.”
Either that or “we can kick your ass.” This must have been running through Pizarro’s mind when he encountered the Inca.
5 stars. I realized over the weekend that Zman’s attention to morality is to define authority.
A meme from Starship Troopers:
“Violence is the ultimate authority.”
(See Zman’s post on The Executioner.)
“History, traditions, and customs” and language are ad hoc developments over long stretches of time in response to ongoing, specific circumstances. To root these constructs in such concepts as a “people” or a “race” or anything that’s supposedly ineffable eclipses time and resorts to an intellectual Darwimism that mirrors, in reverse, much of what Anton proposes. Gottffried, whom I believe Z admires, does this as well: abridge time so that history, traditions, customs and, to a lesser, extent, language are take to be givens. This is antinomian Right-Wing-ism. The children of the “arrivals” streaming across what used to be a… Read more »
“ The reason for that is diversity for them is a narrow tool, a wedge to be used to separate people from their history, traditions, and customs so that they can more easily be herded into the new moral framework. Diversity is a means to an end, not an end in itself, even if they claim otherwise, because there can be no diversity within a settled moral order.” That hit hard for me Z. That’s a point I’ve always had in my head, once you have full diversity you have no diversity as everything and everyone is fully dissolved into… Read more »
You forgot the halloumi. Nassim Taleb has just blocked you on Twitter.
Civil rights for the left was one big wedge issue. Not only did it keep the population divided, but it opened the way for more legislative and judicial mischief. The left is nothing if not amoral and patient. If they can’t get the cattle cars rolling this year, they’ll wait…
I thought we had solved the inadequacy of the Left and Right labels by recategorizing into Cloud and Dirt. And I believe we have. The problem is not with the new labels, it’s the tendency by some to overly complicate the categorization (cloud adjacent, wannabe cloud, drawing a distinction between managerial and cloud etc.) Your status as Cloud or Dirt is defined by where your heart is, not by where your feet are. For instance, I have some current thing supporting shitlib working class white friends who live in a small midwestern town in another state (which I suspect is… Read more »
It is tough to divide such a fragmented society into simple dichotomy. My problem with your point is, If it rains, will you turn to mud? Trickle down micturition. If the cloud people decide to implement some horrendous policy, will you feel it? And will your friends? A cloud person is insulated from the policies they implement. To me, this divides the cloud from the dirt: a cloud doesn’t feel the rain. Just my thoughts. I suppose it is sort of like a line from Ivan Illyich, where Ivan is decorating his new apartment with, to his mind, unimaginable luxury… Read more »
There’s definitely a lot more ideological diversity in the dirt class than in the cloud class. But they are still all Dirts. Current Thing support is the #1 identifier of the Cloud, many but not all of whom are also NPCs. You could subcategorize both of them if you wanted to, but the umbrella term works.
“ All my sympathies are Dirt. 100%. So I am Dirt.” Jeffrey, you’re sort of the “CivNat” of the DR. 😉 I hear ya. I’m a Dirt person as well, but I also understand as sympathetic as I am, as lower class background as I came from—and was raised in—I can’t really walk the walk any longer. I can only be emphatic. Unlike Clinton, I don’t “feel their pain”. Something transformative happened and as aptly stated by Eloi, we nouveau “dirt” people don’t suffer as the rank and file dirt people we so often discuss here do. Ironically, we have… Read more »
Will you feel it? That depends. Dirts–to use y’all’s term–will always feel the cultural atrocities committed by the Clouds, while the latter will suffer no contusions. But the Clouds’ anti-middle class economic policies can hurt fellow Clouds as much as Dirts insofar as there are plenty of the former in the middle class.
That is why I clarify that the middle class white harridan is not cloud, just fancies herself such. Such as when the Victorian middle class would make fools of themselves trying to appear aristocratic (again, my Tolstoy reference).
Guess he is a Cloud with Dirt sympathies. That is not a bad thing.
Despite what Marx said, politics was never about class. One’s class determines one’s views no more than one’s hometown, although both tend to exert an influence. Hell, even race is not determinative, except in the case of negroes and to a somewhat lesser extent, Jews.
No one thing determines one’s views, but race and class are very influential for most. Few can transcend. Few.
Yes yes! Dirt, Cloud, and ferals- something everybody gets, immediately.
“Once you assume morality is based in reason, you must assume there is one universal morality. The next steps from there do not matter as they all lead to the same place, death camps.” The only unity is in death, the only peace any of us will know. Faith isn’t knowledge, after all. Death is the absence of life. Life is speciated, creative, noisy, messy, struggling, even bloody. “Take up your cross, and follow me.” Still wonder about that on account of denying the self, but these days I think it means something along the lines above. I had a… Read more »
“something mystical or negative”
Supernatural might be a better word than mystical. Idk.
Better to call it supranatural.
This is why you’re superior to the other commenters here, Paintersforms. The word ‘spirit’ is the ecclesiological term for the rational nature of the soul. The Pauline tripartition of the nature of man into “body, soul, and spirit” (which you mentioned the other day) is not a literal description. Properly speaking, there are only two elements in man’s composition: The material body and the immaterial form, also known as the soul. If the form has a rational nature, however, which it does in man, then it participates in eternal truth. Thus, men, angels, and God Himself, are spirits, but nonhuman… Read more »
Bwahahahha. And that is why you are superior, Intelligent. You teach us that spirit and soul are too (sic) different words in Hebrew! Please, do Hell next!
Thanks. I get plenty to think about here, though
This is an excellent and very interesting piece. It clarifies a great deal about our ideological environment. A couple of observations. First, I don’t have a problem with the terms Left and Right. As organizational axioms they work just fine. However, they has needs be used more accurately, and I daresay largely in accordance with Z’s conception of who belongs on the Left and the Right. At any rate, before jettisoning this terminology (if we really must), somebody had better come up with a better alternative. Second, while it may be true that the most powerful Leftists fein belief in… Read more »
In truth, the Leftists (if not the CivNats) know full well that there can be no assimilation to a common moral system because no such thing exis?
I think you are making the assumption they are able to escape from thier rabid ideology long enough to think. I think they actually believe what they are saying. That is the scary part.
“…they actually believe what they are saying. That is the scary part.”
Just do. Their cognition is so alien to our way of thinking it’s scary.
They appear sapient, by our measure- but their reasoning and action appear to operate independently of one another.
“Right thought, right action” as the blue-eyed Buddha taught- but their neural or spiritual circuitry doesn’t work that way.
We cannot comprehend, any more than we can comprehend Gottlieb of the CIA torturing helpless German POWs in gruesome human experiments at Camp King in West Germany.
The origin of the “alt right”—before it became a gay op and the term signified something like “non-conservative anti-leftism”—was in taking the claims of the left seriously enough to check them.
They’d say, e.g., that free speech is a “construct” of white male patriarchy. We’d check the polls and find that they’re correct: Only white men support free speech—with the notable exception of the only white men who live in a sort of matriarchy (Jews). The left’s “ought” from that “is”: Free speech and the people who inflict it on us must be destroyed. Ours: No, you.
Etc.
Morality is culturally specific BECAUSE “cult” in the original sense. What you worship determines your ‘culture,’ So “Judaeo-Christian” is a culture based on the worship of a Triune God (yes, the Jews had that but don’t like to recognize it) who handed out Commandments and perfected moral teaching with Christ’s first- and second- Commandments: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38This is the first and great commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40On these two commandments hang all… Read more »
The idea that morality is “based” in reason is actually a Kantian invention, by which he attempted to derive the Categorical Imperative from the process of reason itself. It is certainly not a Traditional view, which considers Kantianism to be heretical. However, that must be sharply distinguished from the claim that morality is knowable by reason and conforms to it, which is a Traditional view. That is a different and necessary concept, for if morality were not knowable than it wouldn’t be anything at all. Bald appeals to custom or tradition have no moral weight in and of themselves, of… Read more »
Morality may indeed treat of ends rather than means, but customary behavior is customary because it produces the desired society as an end. Therefore, custom does indeed fall under morality’s purview.
A desired society is indeed a kind of an end, but it is not a moral end. A desired ham sandwich is not a moral end, either. Morality would only pronounce on the circumstances in which eating a ham sandwich would be demanded, proscribed, or left to one’s own discretion. Likewise, morality only concerns itself with whether a desired society is right to desire. The mere fact that it is desired does not make it morally sanctioned.
The desired society is the society that best serves the folk. What is best for the volkisch milieu is certainly moral in that particular context.
Additionally, and by your own lights, morality should have nothing to say about strictures concerning the consumption of ham sandwiches insofar as eating is a means rather than an end. Rather, morality applies to ham sandwiches only to the extent which their consumption provides pleasure, nourishment, and perhaps health.
Intelligent Dasein: “In certain cases, it may be a matter for morality to decide that certain customs should be changed or not observed at all, for wicked acts are not hallowed by the mere persistence of habit.” This statement presumes, like Michael Anton, the existence of universal morality – akin to universal “natural rights” – both of which are guaranteed by a universal God. As a Christian, I believe in biblical morality. A Mohammedan or a Hindu believes in a different god(s), different morality, and different ‘rights’ – and these differences are expressed via different customs, traditions, and history. Those… Read more »
This is insane.
It debars the possibility of further discussion, but it has the advantage of making explicit the beliefs shared by others on this forum who only cagily hint at them. This is what happens when kitschy, alt-right bloggerel, which should never have been spoken more than half jokingly, is embraced by the literal-minded with absolute seriousness. I fear a joke has been played on you, 3g4me.
Dasein, you dishonor other’s ancestors, and their gods.
By what authority do you do this?
Must we all submit, then, to that authority? To the Will you have descried, cleric?
I am finding you more & more of an insufferable smug cunt the more you post.
One thing I will give Vox Day whom I generally despise, is that he rightly castigates and then usually summarily bans “Smart Boys™” with a vengeance.
His issue is one of degrees where anyone who doesn’t agree with him gets a crosshair on their back because he is THEE Smartest Boy. Not seeing this dripping irony is part of the comedy he exudes. But people who passed their 100 level Philosophy course and then start pontificating are generally objects of ridicule.
Philosopher, heal thyself…
Apex, your comment follows upon Z-man’s from yesterday. Z-man is of course more “polite”, but your “insufferable smug cunt” description is wonderfully refreshing and more to the point. As I’ve hinted before and now will plainly state, ID is a “midwit” as aptly described by Edward Dutton in his writings. ID has a way with words, but careful analysis of these words show they are penned more to *impress* than to *enlighten*. In the end, they most often revel limited understanding of the topic at hand. Of course, the person most impressed by these words is ID himself, which is… Read more »
Agreed with ID. I’ll add another quote: “The assumption of universality in anything – even something as fundamental as ‘the human condition’ – is a White, western concept that is not transferrable inter-racially nor internationally.” From a straightforward, evolutionary standpoint, this is a species of nihilism: Since Asian and African elephants do not share something as fundamental as ‘the elephant condition’ – a white, western concept! – none of our observations or experiences with an elephant in Thailand can have any bearing on our similar experiences with African elephants. Aside from being really big and having trunks, we can say… Read more »
Whoops! Look I picked the wrong side here, ID. You are getting gang-tackled. Never mind, I was wrong and you are a terrible person. How dare you write well and challenge the Current Thing…
Oh wait, that’s THEIR side. We are all free-thinkers here who are gentlemen and don’t call people cunts.
Back in Base Level Reality, if you’d grown up around Thai elephants and worked with them every day of your life and gotten to know them intimately, and then (without any further research) been teleported to the Kruger National Park and dropped in the middle of a herd of African elephants, you’d be trampled to a pancake and/or tossed and dismembered long before you could engage in further taxonomy, let alone meditations upon Platonic Forms or Aristotelian fine gradations. Because as Big Bird and Diverse Friends used to tell us as kids, One of these Things is not (much) like… Read more »
” Once you assume morality is based in reason, you must assume there is one universal morality. The next steps from there do not matter as they all lead to the same place, death camps.” The slippery slope looms large with that proposition, which makes it possible that everyone would end up in a death camp if they lived long enough since what is presented as universal morality is constantly evolving. What was yesterday’s universal morality is immoral today in many and likely all instances. Eugenics, for instance, is an example where adhering to the universal morality of little more… Read more »
Jack Dodson: “Morality is based in neither reason nor tradition or the supernatural. It is based in raw power and in who decides what morality is. Ditto law. Who decides is far more important than what is decided, which makes the argument for tribalism the strongest and the argument for diversity the most absurd.” It turns out that just as soon as Elon Musk started badmouthing the (((ADL))), the (((Lawfare Industrial Complex))) retaliated with a criminal investigation of Tesla’s finances… ========== Justice Department Probe Scrutinizes Elon Musk Perks at Tesla Going Back Years https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4183712/posts ========== J00z don’t lose. Sanhedrin for… Read more »
There must be a hierarchy to the retaliatory lawfare. Minor transgressions get you a legalistic sounding DOJ probe. Major ones, rape charges in Sweden. Critical ones, assassination. These would also be influenced by the target’s ability to fight back or defend himself. Musk, I am sure, has the best personal security money can buy, which nowadays is pretty good.
tl;dr: Shapiro should not be here because he is right.
“The men’s club exists because men do not think like women and therefore must have a different moral outlook.”
No, the men’s club exists because we men need a space away from women and be free to be men. 😏
But then that enforces your “Right to Free Association”. And we can’t have that.
Even traditional male and female only events are now getting the inclusivity treatment. There’s a modern push for baby showers with both husband and wife present. Who is pushing this crap? The men would rather gouge their eyes out with a rusty spoon than go to these, and the women surely don’t want to deal with their bored husbands rolling their eyes as yet another onesie is unwrapped..
I am a 92 year old white widow after 43 years of marriage and two sons; mine was a good education and what used to be a normal view of men – i.e. they were men and that explained more or less everything. I remember being horrified when coming to America in 1960 at the new tendency to have men present at childbirth about which there is nothing aesthetic or inspirational except the miraculous aspect of new life. Screaming, blood, liquids – why get a man in there unless it’s revenge? Do the men really want to be there or… Read more »
ann thompson: Natural childbirth, as it is now termed, did not originate in America but in France. Doctors Leboyer and Lamaze were the pioneers. American Dr. Robert Bradley was the less-well known American proponent. And fathers assisting in childbirth in America was almost unheard of in 1960. The practice did not become the fashion until the 1970s – and even then was not nearly as widespread as it is now. There is nothing inherently uninspirational about giving birth. We have corporeal bodies as well as souls – and if Jesus did not disdain taking on flesh, why ought we consider… Read more »
I had laboriously typed a long reply (need to get my danged keyboard ‘r’ fixed) which seems to have vanished into the ether. I am not going to recreate it, but I believe you are wrong – factually, emotionally, historically, and spiritually.
I must agree with ann; the Red Tent is a sacred space, men don’t belong there. “Because men” is also a perfectly fine reason any woman can understand. The Hebrews of Jacob’s time reserved the Red Tent for women’s menstruation and midwifery. (It was the one place they could get away from the men.) These are feminine mysteries of blood, pain, and potential death; thus that segregation is sacred, for women alone, as a boy’s initiation into manhood must also be for men alone. Micheal Savage was right- a man should be at the bar, drinking a nervous tot and… Read more »
Sigh. Leboyer and Lamaze were French, not American. Almost no births were attended by American husbands in 1960 – the whole thing was popularized in the 1970s and even than at least half of hospital births kept dad out of the delivery room. The idea of birth being ‘private’ is also historically inaccurate. For the poor, it would be the midwife and female relatives and friends. For the nobility and especially royalty, there were official observers (often male) to verify that the child was of the body of the wife/queen and whole and normal. A very public event. The only… Read more »
Alzaebo: Considering women wouldn’t be able to experience the ‘mystery’ of childbirth without male assistance in the first place, I strongly disagree with you. The idea that menstrual blood and procreation are some sort of unclean, female ‘mystery’ is neither White nor Christian. It was/is the juice who have their ritual baths for ‘purifying’ women after their period or childbirth. The Catholic church retained this, for some reason, with the medieval ritual of ‘churching,’ when a woman first was purified and then blessed after giving birth. The gypsies (subcontinental Indians of low caste) and the haredi joos also share your… Read more »
To see her screams and struggles? To know “we did this to her”? We’re men, remember- the emotions are too damm overwhelming, a kind of grief, shame, terror, debt, awe- we can’t handle it. Pussies. Darn tootin’ we are. We don’t belong here. This is our beloved, the one we sleep with. Female ranchers calving find it kind of fascinating. Us guys can’t relate, literally. I once had to muscle a cow up a ramp whose womb had fallen out- judas effing priest. Poor dear, my gods. Won’t take a plate? Good. Can’t women get a break? That’s a pretty… Read more »
Sorry, but unclean? Unholy?
No. Total opposite.
Too holy to touch or see.
A Mystery – forbidden to men is the sacred power, the Fount.
Agreed. The Female Blood Taboo for males is strong and pretty much universal. You wouldn’t find a Japanese man emoting and soy facing as his wife pops out a sprog. Hopefully he’d be doing compulsory overtime or leering at schoolgirls as is meet and proper for his station in life. Rural Japanese villages until C19 had their version of the Red Tent (a separate dwelling for menstruating women) and to this day it is customary for Japanese women to return to their parents’ house for the final weeks of pregnancy — that way any potential ritual pollution / bad luck… Read more »
A little off topic, but I’m starting to fear for Michael Anton’s mental health. I don’t know if anyone else saw this, but he had a bit of a public meltdown over Sebastian Gorka a couple of days ago:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-dishonorable-doctor/
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if what he says about Gorka is true, but even so it seems a little cringy to whinge about it to everyone.
Sounds exactly like petty faculty lounge drama. Two stuffed shirts imagine that their tiny dramas are as important to everyone else as they are to them.
That’s quite bitchy and feminine, although a response probably was justified.
Gorka is a little bit off. The night of the Syria bombing in 2018, Tucker had Doug Macgregor on side by side by Gorka, and Gorka went insane at Macgregor’s criticism of the bombing. Accused him of hating America, being a coward, etc., etc. Red in the face on television. Macgregor was mostly stunned into silence.
In the time since, I’ve heard Gorka do the same on several Twitter Spaces. He uses his physical height and voice to intimidate other people and shows all the signs of being an insecure thug.
Gorka called me a moron on twitter because I criticized him for being against free speech when he called for the banning of Nick Fuentes. (Fuentes was demonstrating a mathematics exercise on baking cookies. Six million cookies.)
Gorkha is another piece of work. He had a pretty based reputation, but after he got fired from the Trump administration he threw in with Christian Zionist snake oil salesmen. My guess is that Gorkha was bad mouthing Anton to the people who pay his salary, some of whom already suspect him of heresy.
I tend to believe Anton’s version, but it did sound a bit… hysterical. It’s hard keeping one foot in, and one out.
I don’t know if Gorka still does the show on youtube (don’t care enough to look it up), but a couple years ago I listened and I have to say it was the most boring, useless show among those on “the right.”
I think I have mentioned somewhere that the world of these people is petty and small. I did not think about it when Anton started attacking me a year ago, but if i had I would have ignored him entirely. The world of petty slights and even pettier privileges is not a world that interests me. It is a very feminine world. That post by Anton is a great example. He sounds like a women relating a story about her ex-husband.
I think Ben Shapiro got sent to the right to monitor things, and probably has a hotline to Shin Bet and Mossad.
There’s an old photo of a young Andrew Tate in an IDF uniform beside a certain blue-and-white flag. He’s a Ghetto Epstein. Shapiro came out of nowhere, as well, touted as a wunderkind. He moves his op to Nashville and voilá! Nashville has a new trans-friendly (((mayor))). And, behold, a school shooting with a scrubbed manifesto to make that election happen. Shitlib mommies in Williamsboro and Rutherford counties got the message: pay protection or Kaylee and Jaden gets it. Nashville is a state capitol in the South, and a Trump stronghold, mind you. Apple don’t fall far from the tree… Read more »
ironically while daily wire is based in nashville, shapiro actually lives in florida because nashville is just not the place you live if you want to adhere to kosher dietary restrictions (its a bbq mecca)
Straussians fear a strongman. If you knew the Straussian crowd at places like Boston College and Harvard back in the 90s and 00s, you knew a group of very effete, soft men. All of them. Mansfield, one of the least masculine men of the 1990s, even wrote a book on “Manliness.” They have an ancestral fear of force, no matter how many books they write on Machiavelli or op-eds urging another bombing of Iraq. The debate with Anton and Claremont is futile. They are not capable of seeing past this moment, an observation I make with some irony. They are… Read more »
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
A lot of armchair political theorists are terrified of getting punched.
“Ben Shapiro’s conservatism is driven by a desire for what is good for his people, while Steve Sailer thinks his positions are good for the country of his birth.” This could be an entire article or series of articles. Shapiro has openly stated that his sole motivation is to benefit his nation. He had his awakening as a student at UCLA when the campus radicals were rabidly anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian. His goal is the perpetuation of Israel and the Jewish people. He is in America not to fight for America, but to fight for Israel. And why does he fight for Israel… Read more »
But our national religion is universalism/egalitarianism. The biggest sin is to point out someone is not one of us and does not have our best interests at heart. If not for this prohibition, people like Shapiro would have no reach and no ability to propagandize the people via his radio show. We simply would not allow one small ethnic tribe to control the media and banks. They would not be allowed to be judges or politicians either.
tl;dr: Shapiro should not be here because he is right.
(psst- kind of cryptic. Upvoted because I think I know what you mean…I think.)
Today’s post gives rise to a very interesting conundrum. For most of our evolutionary history (including the early millennia of civilization), change was largely a slow process and ancient wisdom (tradition) remained applicable to everyday life. But we now live in a modern era of hyper-accelerated change; who still remembers fax machines and pagers? Therefore, can tradition still benefit us in this new mode of rapid change and forced adaption? I’m inclined to argue that yes it is, because it has served our species quite well during our entire history; i.e nurturing our offspring with wisdom proven over time. But… Read more »
“Religion and church attendance is nearly extinct; another major blow to wisdom training.” The One True God is being replaced, as surely as the One True God replaced the Greco-Roman and Germanic Pantheons. This is a titanic shift and the consequences will be rolling in for some time. Christianity, particularly in its institutional forms, is diminishing in the culture. I’d venture a guess this is true for religion worldwide. I assume most Hindus no longer have a genuine belief in their pantheon including the elephant-god. Here’s a claim from 2013 that the Mormon leadership no longer believe their foundational documents:… Read more »
The Church itself is the useful portion. Birth, adulthood marriage, death and so forth all have a transcendent quality. The Church as a venue is the loom of community, weaving people into a coherent group via mutual recognization of these transcendent events.
We need to ditch the Jews and their neurotic tales.
Let the dead sea pederasts go!
We need to formulate our own empowering beliefs and expression. WE have REAL heroic ancestors. Our People have produced the greatest works of philosophy and all manner of art works. And the greatest feats.
It’s time to flourish Our People.
Not a very popular idea around here, but it’s obvious that Christianity is an animated corpse. A new religion will be born eventually. No idea what it will look like. It’ll take fire, rapine, Steppe Invaders, Sea Peoples, Tunguskas to forge a credible new one. If past performance is any guarantee of future outcomes, just pray (heh) that we do not have to attend the birth — could be a bit like that scene in Alien. Christianity had a good run. As Frederick the Great shouted to his troops at the Battle of Whatever: “Dogs! Do you want to live… Read more »
I’ve been asking mechanics and muscle car gearheads where they learned their skills, since I don’t know which end of the wrench to hold.
From men. They soaked it up, just hanging around the older men doing guy things. Girls used to hang around the kitchen, learning household skills meet to women.
Excellent post.
Capitalism, too, works against tradition by subjugating it to market forces. To cite a petty example from sportsball, look at how traditional regional rivalries–Oklahoma versus Nebraska in football–have been ripped apart by universities’ headlong pursuit of filthy lucre. If it’s a choice between tradition and money in a capitalist society, money wins every time.
To peel the onion again – even ‘reason’ is suspect here in the same capacity as ‘diversity’. It is only a tool to enforce a morality. How could reason justify men can become women when there are demonstrable genetic, physical, and psychological differences? What reason could lead you down a path where denying the biological imperative of reproductive behavior is oppression? ‘Reason’ is just another means to an end.
Leftists’ supposed fealty to the God of Reason is more of an illusory conceit than a concrete reality. In many respects, these people are more irrational than practitioners of voudou. They give reason a bad name.
Mostly agree, but don’t most religions trade in universal morality, too? It seems to me Christianity and Islam both do.
Judaism by contrast works on tribal morality: moral obligation is owed only to the tribe, hence their butthurt over Leo Frank’s quite justified lynching.
But as I say, I think you’re onto something here.
What’s most interesting is that the morality as reason side – the globalists – had the upper hand for the past 30 years but now that it waning, both domestically and, moreso, internationally. The globalists controlled the most power country that the word has ever seen and attempted to impose their morality on the world. The world is pushing back and is discovering that the globalists can’t stop them, though they can inflict pain. Even at home, people (whites, really) are beginning to question the morality based reason side. As Z has noted, the second that you ask yourself, “What… Read more »
> The men’s club exists because men do not think like women and therefore must have a different moral outlook. Relations between the sexes have been extensively damaged by refusing to acknowledge such an obvious thing. It used to be an assumed, unspoken rule women would accept being under the direction of a man . The man would receive a small, personal kingdom in the form of a family, the woman receives protection and provisioning. Both positions have their moral codes of conduct. It is immoral for a woman to contradict and usurp her husband’s authority, and it would be… Read more »
The “rational” moralists are leading us down the road to perdition. If they’re not stopped relatively soon, there will be no traditions and their attendant morality(ies) left to celebrate, let alone remember. They’re literally wiping out our histories.
For morality to apply to a nation state there must be the element of loyalty to that nation state. Ben Shapiro has morality and loyalty to his nation state. That nation state is not America.
The former nation state of America is ruled by a foreign cabal. That cabal is only interested in their nation state’s interests and well being. Since that cabal owns the media and the government it will be very difficult for those who are loyal to America to ever regain control of America.
Difficult to regain control of America from the cabal, yes. But the word is spreading rapidly about the cabal, and the cabal is trying desperately to keep a lid on it, and not having much success.
The argument for and against Sati in Colonial India comes to mind. When General Napier was asked to respect the Indian custom of burning widows on their husband’s funeral pyre: “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” The difference, of course, is that General Napier wasn’t in his… Read more »
In the specific case of Suttee, I will argue for General Napier. Sati is a perversion of hygenic cremation, a rite of Indra, god of fire- brought to India by General Napier’s Aryan ancestors. Thus, Napier claims first right; sati is blasphemy against the Vedic gods, punishable by death. Also, read Napier’s account. The vile priests, jealous of the young wife’s beauty, declared that the signs were inauspicious for her husband, he must be bathed in the holy Ganges. They “bathed” him so lengthily and repeatedly for three days he finally drowned. Then they had to throw his bride on… Read more »
“His “natural rights” argument must least to that ”
Least sb leads surely?
Thanks. For some reason the power keeps clicking on and off, so it was a bit of a hassle to get this posted. Version control may have suffered as a result.
Are you still in Lagos or has it degenerated into Johanessburg? Time for a backup generator!!!!
Lagosian Power & Electric. Look at us. We the engineers now.
KER-ZAP! pop. ⚡💥
“Oh, we now have an opening for a Lineman at LP&E.”
Don’t steal the transformer oil. It’s not for cooking, really.