Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?
Of course, the life of a bad idea is the result of the people choosing to embrace the bad idea, often when it is obviously a bad idea. Much of what Marx had to say about economics, even in the context of his age, was obvious nonsense. Further, people knew enough about the human condition to know that communism could never possibly work, but intellectuals chose to embrace it anyway.
Put another way, stupid ideas need a special sort of stupid person. Orwell famously wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell was addressing the educated opinion in England at the time that Germany would win the war. The basic concept is something of a universal, as we see today with our “expert” class.
Even so, ideas matter and this age is haunted by bad ideas that should have been relegated to the dustbin of history. That is the show this week. It is a breezy survey of some of the bad ideas that still vex us. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but the things that came to mind when I cooked up the idea for a show. Feel free to add your favorite stupid ideas to the list.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Equality
- Utilitarian
- Progress
- Marxism
- Social Contract
- The Social Construct
- Individualism
- Reason
- The Trouble With These Ideas
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I was thinking more about the individualism point. I agree it does not work in the modern world. The whole idea of being an honorable man of his word is obsolete, unless you are sufficiently removed from the blue hives. To be a man who chooses to do that which is right has become the definition of being a chump. In part, it’s the idea of personal honor and integrity that made Western Europe capable of becoming a high-trust society. Tribal societies have time and again proven to be incapable of maintaining such a society above, say, the Dunbar number.… Read more »
Steve, it seems like white Americans and the Japanese were able to scale up tribalism for a time. I guess being surrounded by oceans encourages that. I’m told that the first act of our Congress in 1790 was to restrict naturalization to free white people of good character. Apparently, the act was repealed 5 years later, according to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790. Given what we know now, what if the founders had remained dedicated to that goal? (All political systems, including ethno-nationalism, have big problems. At the very least, I’d like to encourage a political system that isn’t committed to opposing intractable… Read more »
I wish I could say I have your optimism, but, as you noted, there was only a very short period of time where that tribalism persisted, even to the extent it did. The Sedition Act was specifically created by the Federalists to punish Jefferson and the Democrat-Republicans — criticizing President Adams (F) was punishable, criticizing Vice President Jefferson (D-R) was not. Further evidence is that the law ended just before the Adams administration ended and the Jefferson administration began, when the D-Rs would be beneficiaries, and Federalists would be the J6ers. In many respects, white turned on white in Washington’s… Read more »
The idea that Christianity was a departure in any way from previous religions is incorrect. The prevalent idea that the reverence for the cross is limited to the Christian world is disproved by even the most superficial investigation of its place in religious symbolism. The early Christians used every means possible to conceal the pagan origin of their symbols, doctrines, and rituals. They either destroyed the sacred books of other peoples among whom they settled, or made them inaccessible to students of comparative philosophy, apparently believing that in this way they could stamp out all record of the pre-Christian origin… Read more »
The idea of history being a sort of animate force, with a direction and quasi-moral authority begins most explicitly with Hegel. Lotta religions have an end-times that are inevitable, Christianity is fairly run of the mill here. Betel’s whole thesis-antithesis-thesis “logic” is juvenile: Hegel is a completely overrated thinker whose main legacy was to fill Marx’s head with his bad ideas. Most of Marx’s doctrinal idiocy can be blamed on Marx and all his dim-witted peers that took him seriously.
Hegel devised a machine and called its workings Weltgeist. More of a mechanical thing than a cause imo. Like science recognizing that things break down but not recognizing an ordering principle. Linear time: things working to their end. Not much to say about the beginning, or renewal.
The slave trade was saturated with members of that special tribe. If they knew the farm equipment would be tormenting us in the 21st century they would have brought more over.
And yet virtually all southern slaveholders were white.
To be clear there were some black slaveholders, too. Being in the South did not mean they were Southern. In fact according to the 1860 census, 94 percent of Southerners did not own slaves.
75 percent of Jews in the South premed slaves and many plantations were owned by Northern Jewish investors
Owned not premed slaves
An aside for this weekend. A first for me, seeing the black painted no logo airplanes flying low and slow aimlessly around my area making the windows rattle. Online rationales are–the FBI are gathering electronic data or spying on unauthorized land use-both silly, as TPTB could easily obtain any data from satellites, my feeling is, they do it “because they can”. They’re here, they can see and hear everything, and at any time they can take everything away “because they can”.
I use to live in a high-rise tower in an area where everything else was pretty flat. A police helicopter would buzz that tower at -midnight-, routinely, loud as fuck. Absolutely no care that the hundreds or maybe thousands of people living in that tower were likely sleeping and had to get up for work the next day.
Why did they do this? “Training exercises” and ‘because f-ck you, that’s why’. What are you going to do about it civvie?
Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it? Bad idea or not, the only reason whites continue to be tormented by this problem, is weak white ppl allow themselves to… Read more »
The file name has a typo, it’s called Ep. 215 not 315.
Railroad track, Mr. Gandy Dancer?
Do please commence….
This will increase your love for Ben Shapiro –
https://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message5674120/pg1
Ha! GLP! First time I’ve ever seen a link to there.
Lets just say we should have picked our own cotton.
Who do you think picked it afterwards? It didn’t just stop being picked. They didn’t burn everywhere down.
When we succumb to a bad idea, we start to make bad moves. Bad move results in new bad moves. Soon we’re in a world of crap, all because we had an initial thought which turned out not to be in line with reality.
How do we recover from bad moves? This article goes into it in some detail:
https://dark.sport.blog/2024/03/22/recovering-from-bad-moves/
So oldschool website. Love it.
The root of all of these maladies is be found in our evolutionary history. Life has existed on Earth for about a billion years, and for about 99.999% of that span, natural evolution ruled all biological development. Then our species developed complex language skill and ultimately became sentient and dominant. This led to civilization and imposition of artificial man-made evolution. We have now acquired the ability to change our species in real-time versus the slow multi-generational natural model in which fitness was the primary outcome of selection. Why is this bad? Because nefarious powerful actors are using the new tools… Read more »
As long as we have an “educated class” or “men of letters” and an education apparatus this will continue, it’s been happening since Socrates.
My immediate mental picture: Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol
It’s a function of natural inequality. Some people are better at this, others better at that, and that’s OK. People specialize in what they’re good at, and everybody benefits. We made it work— things like the 1st and 2nd amendments, federalism, liberal education, a culture of DIY and well-roundedness, etc. The liberal (in the true sense) Western tradition Quigley talks about. What we have today is contradictory. On the one hand, greater hierarchy and deference to ‘experts’; on the other, the blank slate thing and wide-openness, where we try to incorporate incompatible people and give liars, criminals, and other antisocial… Read more »
If Christianity is responsible for radical egalitarianism, then why, I wonder, did nobody notice it for eighteen centuries after Christ? Why did it only become a thing with the rise of secularists like Thomas Jefferson, or outright anti-Christians like Robespierre?
Christianity is an indefinable mess of thousands of barely overlapping sets of phenomena, so it’s difficult to blame it for anything outside it—or, from where we sit, to gain any sense of “outside it.” Even Nietzsche wrecked on that rock, and we’re all a lot dumber than he was. We do know *who* did it, though, in this case, and it was almost entirely Christians. And it’s Christians now who most offend with “radical egalitarian” lies, e.g., the “black Christians are less criminal than white atheists” and “Hispanics are about family, like old-timey white people” type bs that they spew… Read more »
I think there’s just a moralfagging gene among whites, and it either presents itself in the commie atheist blue hair or it presents itself in the pussy pastel sweater vest evangelical who loves his wife’s black children.
Other people are Chistian. Latin Americans, Africans..Not everybody thinks that Christianity means what non-Christian people have made you think it means. Even in Europe, General Franco was Christian and nationalist.
I bang on the Germanic thing because it doesn’t get a lot of treatment. I learned plenty about Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews in the course of my moral and liberal education, not so much about Franks and Vikings, even though they have more to do with Western Civ than classical antiquity. In the case of the Franks, practically built the thing on the ruins of classical antiquity. Franks adopted Christianity and genocidally imposed it, Vikings assimilated to the people they raided and conquered. I’d guess this tendency to ‘go native’ has something to do with your moralfagging gene lol. Probably… Read more »
And honestly, how much difference is there between Celtic and Germanic people, other than Celts being conquered and Romanized? Can’t escape the notion of the Asiatic Thing going west, via the Mediterranean.
We’ve got a thousand years of evidence that white Christians fought off non whites trying to invade Europe. What’s changed is women now influence all of our institutions to act like women. We almost doubled their lifespan after the Industrial Revolution and the divorce laws ensure every man runs his opinions by his wife before making any decisions.
Christianity is the backbone and uniting force of western civilization whether you like it or not.
LOL! You are a man out of time Vinny. You rockin’ the Italian horn around your neck too bro? That -was- the case. WAS. Today? Have you -been- any churches lately? The vast majority proudly fly the rainbow flag. “Hate has no home here” We are all one in Christ dontcha know?! Sodomy? A-ok! Christianity is a hollowed out shell of it’s former self. The Christianity you describe is the perspective of a yesterdayman who doesn’t leave his house very often which is the unfortunate position of FAR too may Boomers & Grillers too. There was a very muscular world… Read more »
It will be reborn, regardless of the opinion of nihilist naysayers and nietzschean nabobs.
(The ascendancy of the current anti-pope notwithstanding).
“The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by… Read more »
Reason, in the political context is entirely fake and gay and highly contextual. Furthermore, it is a tool of oppression selectively enforced to back the narrative or to get what the elite want. All kinds of rules in our society are said to be based on reason, but they’re not and they aren’t universally enforced anyway. Virtually all of this “reason” is based on prior beliefs propagandized to the population all of their lives. The population did not independently and using rationality come to what they believe through this process of “reason.” Just try to get an egalitarian explain through… Read more »
I’ve commented here before that a lot of the worst things people claim to believe are based on “principles” they would never apply to anything in their personal life or in anything they cared about. Does anyone really allow anything like mass immigration in their workplace, their homes, their neighborhood? The values of the modern West exist entirely in a realm of magic and witchcraft where speaking the right spells brings forth the things you want.
By what means should we negotiate the world if not through reason?
Emotion, fear, hysteria, mythology, and hormones are how most people negotiate the world…
I think the root of the problem is that most people seem unaware of the distinction between rhetoric and argument. Reason applied to argument is a good thing, in that it allows comparison of theory to reality. Reason applied to rhetoric is not, because rhetoric is intended to convince regardless of conformance to reality.
“most people seem unaware”
“Unaware” is a synonym for ignorant. Yes, most people are ignorant. Willfully ignorant.
Real time example of a worst idea ever; mass casualty terrorist attack on major nuclear power that already feels cornered. Not good if there are Nato fingerprints on that
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/mass-shooting-attack-explosions-moscows-largest-concert-hall-reports
MyS-
My thoughts exactly.
Also note that for the first time in over two years the Russians have labeled the situation in Ukraine a, “war.”
Time to double-down on setting up your bugout location and/or fallout shelter.
Die Kunst der Fuge
Goldberg Variations
Glenn Gould
Moscow, 1957
https://youtu.be/N0Subj-GAlQ?t=1831
Swan Lake
Moscow, 1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g5XTMqWAao
Beethoven Triple Concerto
Rostropovich, Richter, Oistrakh
Kirill Kondrashin
Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra
Moscow, 1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv0U1gh3ChU
Shostakovich Symphony No.5
Mstislav Rostropovich
Grande Hall of the Moscow Conservatory
USA National Symphony Orchestra
Moscow, 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Subj-GAlQ
Swan Lake
Tchaikovsky
Moscow, 1991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj2c6vJvyPA
I’m surprised to find myself grateful that at least one major white country seems to stand for some semblance of sanity and tradition. History is pretty confusing, especially when you’re in the middle of it
*** CORRECTED LINK ***
Shostakovich Symphony No.5
Mstislav Rostropovich
Grande Hall of the Moscow Conservatory
USA National Symphony Orchestra
Moscow, 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbh9MKkV3oU
Gould’s two ‘Gouldberg Variations’ recordings are a black mark against the utility of Canada and Canadians in general.
Second time around he did a bit better, but I can still think of at least 32 reasons why Landowska and a cast of hundreds of others kicked his ass.
And I can think of 109 countries your ancestors were kicked out of.
One of which is Mother Russia.
Not a member of the Tribe, Old Chap. Just have a bit of musical taste.
Update:
ISIS just claimed responsibility for Moscow.
The Russians managed to capture at least one of the gunmen alive.
Thanks. Let’s see what the Russians say. If they think it’s ISIS I’d buy it. But it would presumably be easy for the CIA to concoct a message saying ISIS claims responsibility. In case they got spooked that Putin might finally break a chair over this and kinzhal Langley or something?? Who knows what’s really happening. Why would Islamic nutters be angry at Russia right now?? Then again who’s to say how a wacko reasons??
Russia has been pro-Gaza, and ISIS is long suspected to be a US proxy. I have seen the video (pretty bad). The behavior of the shooters is too calm. Seems like veterans, Special Forces in how they operated. Covering each other, shooting anyone prone dead. That they did not stay and fight, or yell Aloha Snackbar, is pretty suspicious. If I HAD to guess, likely some NATO forces as the low level of Ukranian forces at this stage of the War would preclude that sort of ruthless efficiency. That at least three got away is telling. That’s not an ISIS… Read more »
Putin says Ukraine was involved. So the fat sows you mention might get a couple of millions killed.
ISIS was created by the Mossad, to cleanse the Middle East of Christians.
Cui bono?
In what Universe does ISIS have such a major beef w/ Russia to do this there instead of in say, DC? Or NYC? Non-sensical. If “ISIS” is the best cover the CIA and other Agents of F-ckery can come up with we are scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point for cover stories I’d say.
When I heard about the terror attack in Moscow I thought that Ukraine must be involved. The thing is though, that there’s really no such thing as “Ukraine” and everyone knows it. Ukraine is pretty much just a proxy of Western intelligence at this point. So they’re going to blame ISIS for this. Everyone knows that’s a smokescreen. It’s just another obvious American operation like the Nordstream attack conducted to punish the Russians for Ukraine. If Russia is looking for ways to retaliate in a tit-for-tat fashion they might be try to activate some elements they control in the US… Read more »
Based upon an even stupider idea that Russia is just a gas station masquerading as a country and Putin always bluffs. It may take mushroom clouds to educate the neocon fools.
It seems rather anachronistic- not to say unjust – to essentially project the neuroses and idiocies of 19th Century New England Protestant busybodies backward onto 2,000 years’ and whole nations and empires’ worth of time and place under the equally anachronistic strawman blob of “Christianity.” Egalitarianism and Individualism never arose to proliferate as problems in Christendom until the 16th Century when Protestantism’s founding fathers excreted “the Priesthood of All Believers,” and “Sola Fidei / Scriptura” into the intellectual waters of the Christian world. Blaming the Church / Christendom itself for these anti-hierarchical and atomizing errors for the mere gross fact… Read more »
What I don’t understand is how it’s a “revolution” to point out that caezar and the meanest slave are both creations who owe the same thing to the creator? Why is it a revolution to say that the prince could go to hell for his behavior as prince and the slave could go to heaven in his behavior as slave? Or man and woman?
A really bad idea came in the 20th century and that idea is mass communications/propaganda. I thought the Nazis were the first, but Britain had a propaganda ministry during WW1. The Soviets had one too. They thought it was the duty of the state to indoctrinate people into the party’s ideology through propaganda. They had an official propaganda department/ministry and a head propagandist. You would think that a society with a “dictator” and a “police state” would not need something like mass propaganda to get everyone to get with the program, but even they had propaganda ministries. We have degrees… Read more »
Communications – I recall that even back in the 90s saying you were a Communications major was a way of saying you were too dumb to study anything real. Maybe the current inept propaganda is the result of those people moving into central roles in the regime’s propaganda machine.
A VERY interesting observation!
Television and the smartphone are as responsible for getting us where we are as anything else.
Both are part of mass communications.
Slavery had died out in Western Civilization and then was resurrected to man the agricultural latifundia of the New World, so, in that sense, it was an innovation rather than a tradition. Most Americans, until recently, had a rough-and-ready idea of equality. It meant there was no privileged class above the law. It had nothing to do with equality of outcomes or income equality. Attempts to create such equalities are just tyranny.
I. Perception Management: This term is itself a lie that is really a deadly combination of two things; – Systematic Lying – If we just say something enough and get people to believe it, then it will become true. This was first applied heavily in the 80s to the economy. When we passed from an economy based on producing things, to consuming things, this idea really took hold. Regularly the nightly news would openly tell you that consumers needed to perceive that things were good and so things would be good. It would keep the consumer spending. I was very… Read more »
The part of perception that is true is that unless customers are buying goods, there’s not much point in producing them. Like it or not, a manufacturing economy requires a consumer economy. And by then, it was pretty obvious that if anything, Bernays understated the ability to turn people into sheep. Witness the civil rights movement. To the extent that people believed racism was bad, it was bad. Which ties in with Zman’s argument about rationalism. For time immemorial, “Because I don’t want him working for me” was all that needed to be said. But in this new age, you… Read more »
The robot historians will surely comment on the amount of magical thinking that has taken hold in our society since the 80s. The idea that financial shenanigans create wealth, the nonsense that Obama perpetrated about sending everyone to college so they could earn more money. All of it speaks to a general failure to understand cause and effect and its replacement by a pseudo New Age “manifesting” concept. You visualize wealth and it appears. You visualize the egalitarian utopia and there it is. Slogans replace thought everywhere.
Diversity is our strength. Visualize whirled peas!
Pozymandias: “the nonsense that Obama perpetrated about sending everyone to college so THEY could earn more money”
That sentence is ackshually factually true, if “THEY” refers to the Banksters who are earning interest on the loans, and who control the politicians which steal money from the treasury to make certain that the Banksters will be paid in full.
They? Them?
Who? Whom?
Never misunderestimate the manifold genius which was the mind of Saint Joseph Djugashvili.
I’m still wondering who Ken was and how he died.
Great show today. The theme of the “Whig Interpretation of History” (constant progress) is the forever belief for Leftists.
I can sort of somewhat see how one would think equality was partly the fault of Christianity, but upon closer scrutiny it does not really hold, at least not with traditional Catholic and Orthodox. Catholicism (at least traditional form) and Orthodox are nothing if not hierarchical – the antithesis of “equality.” There is the “imago dei” concept which endows each human being with a certain level of dignity, but there is a clear distinction between being made in the image of God and being a child of God. Only those validly baptized are considered children of God (despite all the… Read more »
Trinitarianism tells us that most—but not all!—humans are equally stained by originated original sin. To this defamatory doctrine, which amounts to punishing billions of innocents for the disobedience of JUST TWO humans, Trinitarianism adds the incoherent and grossly narcissistic doctrine of imago dei. We are supposed to be like a pure spirit who exists necessarily, never errs, and is omnipotent. The doctrine of imago dei is humanist, pseudological drivel. It’s arguably one of the worst errors of ontology ever conceived, but some pushy, pig headed people spread the poison over much of the Earth during the past 550 years. Even… Read more »
Trinitarianism does not imply original sin. Indeed, all it says is that there are three facets of God, and were in existence at the beginning, well before man appeared on the scene.
The doctrine might be in error, (and there are good reasons to think so) but it has nothing at all to do with a possibly apocryphal Adam and Eve.
It was largely Protestant Christianity that did away with this and really opened the floodgates of equality (every man a pope). To be fair, if one accepts the Gospels as part of the faith, it was Jesus who did that. He was the one who said the Holy Spirit was coming to each, and writing the Law on your heart. If Acts is part of your sect’s scriptures, you also recognize that it was Peter and later Paul who basically over-ruled Jesus. To borrow from a meme I’ve seen lately, to change from living the life He preached to worshiping… Read more »
Well there’s your freedom of speech and conscience everyone wants so badly
Very true. It should be called Paulianity rather than Christianity.
Late to the thread, but here goes. Nietzsche contended in his work, The Antichrist, that Paul was a disaster for followers of Jesus. As a Pharisee, he brought with him habits of mind inimical to the mystical, and yet highly practical, teachings of Jesus. Nietzsche’s thoughts on the matter are worth consideration. Then overlay this with the centralized, authoritarian approach formulated by the actions of Constantine, who in a way aspired to the role of Pontifex Maximus of Roman society, but with a harder edge. Since this was a time of crisis for the late Roman world, this harder edge… Read more »
Andrew Anglin is coming around slowly to the idea that Western civ needs stakes driven through its hearts*. He exaggerates about the vampires’ ball being over, his Russophilia is malformed, and he’s too worried about development. Still, he’s learning to love garlic.
The Vampire Ball Is Over
https://www.unz.com/aanglin/the-vampire-ball-is-over/
“The key point here is that the colonial project never ended, and in fact became much worse. The colonial project was the precursor of modern globalism.”
============
* At east 200m given voter rolls in the UK, USA, and Canada.
In fact, the precursor of the West’s modern colonialist-imperialist project is Abrahamic supremacism. This is why China, India, and Nippon must make peace (while pretending still to be in conflict). Then, after the USUKIEU have been contained and crippled, they need to turn on Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Modern globalism is animated by the vision of Isaiah 66:22-24. “Just as the new heavens and the new earth which I am making Shall endure before me—oracle of the Lord— so shall your descendants and your name endure. From new moon to new moon, and from sabbath to sabbath, All flesh… Read more »
Precedent, legal or otherwise (especially otherwise), is among the most poisonous of ideas. It requires untold assumptions about the people who set the precedent, their circumstances, goals, and motivations, which are often ill considered or not considered at all, if even recognized. Ultimately, it not only removes accountability from the contemporary decision maker, but even worse, retards the thought process which should go into making decisions. Until eventually you arrive at “brawndo is what plants crave!” You could write an encyclopedia of examples. Here are a couple of big ones The first big wave of non English immigration to America… Read more »
Natural selection is an influential idea. Is it a good idea or a bad idea? And if it’s a good idea, are societies subject to natural selection vis-a-vis one another?
If anything, societies tend to be subject to artificial selection, not natural selection. Natural selection says a small, incremental change will be favored if it provides a competitive advantage. No mechanism of natural selection would explain the overweening parasitic class that all late stage governments become.
Punctuated equilibrium, on the other hand…
A successful societal model can carry a lot of parasitic load until finally it no longer can.
If material progress is accelerating then societies that respond successfully to the competitive pressure of material progress are by definition progressive societies. But then to make of progress a religion, to fetishize it in other words, is an error. Some ideas are just bad. Some progressive societies will fail: those more likely to make of progress a religion will be more likely to fail.
That’s definitely true. You are describing punctuated equilibrium in societal terms.
First sentence 2nd paragraph. Horrors! I cringe.
Individualism is a good idea taken too far. Any idea can be taken too far. It is probably why Europeans invented science and conquered the world. Now it has been perverted by exaggeration. I would say the same is roughly true of reason Worst ideas: yes social constructs is certainly a candidate. It is psychosis converted to a social fashion and equaly destructive on the macro level as a psychosis is on the micro level. Feminism although a spinoff of the equality mania, is so destructive to human procreation and happiness that it deserves it’s own mention. No fault divorce,… Read more »
Individualism is a good idea taken too far. Any idea can be taken too far. It is probably why Europeans invented science and conquered the world. Now it has been perverted by exaggeration. I would say the same is roughly true of reason.
I understood Zman to have said roughly this, more that it no longer applies under changed circumstances, but it’s not as obvious as it might be.
The rest of your post, abso-fuggin-lutely.
“Standing police forces may be extremely bad. Just like you have jury duty, annoying but extremely much better than almighty professional judges, I like the old Western idea of the posse. Let the able-bodied men of the community serve a few days a year as law enforcement. It prevents the forming of a professional caste of LEOs who then have interests independent of the community at large. This would also create a sense of armed community between the men. There could still be a detective branch for investigation. But a police state is hard to make when the police are… Read more »
DEI:
Didn’t.
Earn.
It.
[…] weekly podcast. Highly […]
The first enshrinement of Equality was probably 1215 England’s Magna Carta where The King was no longer above the law.
Took a little while to fully trickle down to Dennis The Peasant.
It was also the beginning of trial by jury which, although imperfect, is far preferable to trial by regime judge. I would our that in the pro column Also, a king not exactly almighty at home probably prevented Britain from making many of the strategic blunders the rulers of France, Germany and Russia rushed into. First Britain and then it’s American spin-off, came closer to winning the global Risk game than anyone else. That suggests there is something extremely right about Anglo culture that they either stopped doing or have perhaps taken too far. It is unfathomably tragic if the… Read more »
Occam’s Razor suggests that the perpetual drive for change is simply because every change is
A. An opportunity for grift
2. An opportunity to punish.
iii. Both.
Plus alleviation from boredom. People are naturally attracted to New
Yep. Sheer boredom is incredibly underrated as a spur to insane thoughts and acts. Re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial “Guns of August”, you can almost sense the frantic desire of many ordinary Europeans to throw aside their dull, peacetime existences and “leap into the cleanliness” of what they thought would be a short, bracing war. By 1918, I imagine most of the them still left were desperate for a boring but peaceful suburban existence.
A very big, popular lie is “We the People…do ordain and establish this Constitution…”. If not for the expedient whoppers in the declaration of “Separation”, this verse of holy scripture would contend for recognition as the most insidious thing published since the Koran.
Are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Hyphothesis? It’s the idea that language determines our reality. Very popular as a premise in sci-fi, but when applied to real life, it’s nonsense on stilts.
I have written about it a few times. They still taught it in school when I was a student. I think it is banned now. It is not nonsense on stilts, but they did get the causation wrong. Language tells us about how people see the world, both language and cognition are consequences of evolution.
Having a word for something is pretty darn useful for thinking of a concept.
It’s why the word anti-white is so powerful. It changes (expands, really) how a person thinks. There’s a reason Jews use the word antisemitic instead of racist. It’s not just because it’s more precise.
One example I always noticed was the word “race.” In Spanish and Italian, the word “raza/razza” means both “race” and “breed.” It’s the same word they use to refer to dog breeds and to differentiate between blacks or whites for example. Even in English we once used this word “race” in place of “breed.” You can catch Darwin using the words “preferred races” to describe both animals and humans for example. Then after the 1960s, there was a split. Breed was relegated to animals, while “race” was used to mean people. It was a subtle change at first, but the… Read more »
If you said “language determines our understanding of reality” it would be quite true. Yes a grasp of reality probably came before language but once language facilitated communication it became very hard to communicate or even think about things that language was not good for.
This ties into math being a very precise language of logical relations. Physics often pushed for new math to be understood because physics couldn’t progress without the math required to describe it, ie the highly precise language
To tie to the discussion about Sapir–Whorf, if McCarthy had a better language than ideology, he may have been more precise than “communists.”
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=31754#comment-396412
It was a bad idea for America to let the Russians get nukes.
For 5 years, up until 1949, the U.S. had sole monopoly over nuclear weapons. That was a glorious window of opportunity squandered. Moscow could have been threatened with nuclear destruction unless the Russians agreed to American conditions — which could have been everything from cessation of its nuclear research to outright surrender. Oh well. Fools’ game.
Or maybe we should have let Patton go loose on the Ruskies like he wanted. Then again maybe that’s why he had that unfortunate accident.
Winning a land war against the Russians in 1945-46 would have been a dubious proposition
Dubious is subject to definition I guess. Russia was a beaten/weakened people at the time. Yes, they were, but we did not know it. Their losses were staggering and could not be made up if faced with a concerted and determined allied effort to conquer Russia. Problem was, America was not into such self sacrifice and even in WWII was casualty adverse. Who would trade a million deaths for Russia dominance?
As to blackmailing the Russians into a non-nuclear producing country, how’s that worked anywhere?
“Land war against the Russians in 1945-46”? They were OUR ALLIES in 1945.
The communist Soviet Union of the show trials, the Purge, the Katyn Forest massacre, the gulag, the Holodomor, and the mass rapes of German women was OUR fucking ALLY.
Never forget that basic fact of history when you are evaluating just how fucked up the U.S. Government really is.
We did many horrible things in the war as well. Much of it has been scrubbed from the history books, but that is the right of winners. We killed over two million German civilians after the war ended.
Patton would have had his arse handed to him. Driving 300 miles in a week through empty countryside isn’t the same as taking on an army that just destroyed the greatest military force of all time.
“Let the Russians get nukes,” LOL.
As I understand it, the Jewish communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg gave the Russians the nuclear secrets, for which they were tried, convicted, and executed at Sing Sing.
But then their fellow Jews in Hollywood created a propaganda campaign to bamboozle the goyim into worrying about the “horrors of McCarthyism” and “witch hunts” rather than Jewish communist spies in the nuclear program…
According to former Soviet sources, Julius and Ethel were just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t watch many recent Hollywood films, but wasn’t there something about this released last year (2023)?
The Manhattan Project was riddled with Soviet spies, so many that the identities of some remain unknown to this day. Incidentally, all the known ones were jewish.
It still took 5 years. The concept of a nuke bomb was not really a secret. Engineering was really the key. Russia just needed to put resources toward such a goal.
Does anyone remember Z Man’s take on McCarthyism?
I don’t know the details of that time period, but it wouldn’t surprise me if McCarthy was describing a takeover of the culture by the chosen and their partners, the liberal whites.
Because whites in the 20th century tended to interpret the world ideologically instead of tribally, the only way McCarthy could describe what he was seeing was “communism.”
To tie to the discussion about Sapir–Whorf, if McCarthy had a better language than ideology, he may have been more precise than “communists.”
LineInTheSand: “the only way McCarthy could describe what he was seeing was ‘communism’.” I used to have the darnedest time trying to convince lolbertardians that there was no difference whatsoever between an Emma Goldman on the one hand, and a David Ricardo on the other hand; one was a j00ess attacking you from the Left, and the other was a j00 attacking you from the Right; point being that with the j00z, you are always under attack from all possible angles at all possible times and by all possible means. About ten years ago, the LOLbertardians would still try to… Read more »
Russia was a very poor (and partly occupied) country during World War II. We didn’t just “let” the Russians get nukes, we unwittingly paid $20 billion (in 1996 dollars) for their development cost.
I do not think that would have worked. America had 300 bombs in 1950, but no way to deliver them to Russian cities, other than cities in the far east of Russia. Plus, the Soviet Union was still fully mobilized with 400 division on the border of Western Europe. Meanwhile, NATO was down to half a million men. In such a scenario, any damage done to Russia with nukes would be met with an annihilation of Western Europe. Frankly, the better version of the past is where the United States tells the brits to fight their own battles and stays… Read more »
Funny how the world managed without us for thousands of years, but all of a sudden we’re the “indispensable nation.”
What? A B-29 taking off from a German base can’t reach Moscow? Something of a range of 2500-3000 miles comes to mind.
By the end of the war, Soviet air defenses were pretty good. Getting that bomber to the target would have been very hard. That and we now know the Soviets were spying like crazy on us. Harry Dexter White was senior treasury official and a Soviet spy.
I am not saying would have been impossible, but it was not a lock either. If the US failed to decapitate Russia, the red Army would have chased America off the continent. Even if a decapitation strike worked, the Red Army would still march to the Atlantic.
I’m not quite convinced of Russian might as you are. Russia lost for example, their entire cohort of men born in 1920. That’s how staggering their personnel loses were. We supplied them with their war materials. For example, all of their supply trucks and a good part of their air force. There were also a great number of Russia prisoners that were less than enthusiastic about returning to Russia—they were willing to fight against Russia as they were fighting for Germany just a few months before. After the fall of Berlin, they were vulnerable had the allies decided to move… Read more »
In the end, the Helsinki Final Act let the USSR have the spoils of WW2.
Fascists won in the streets. As far as Germany defeating Russia, who knows, but maybe in a one-front war they could’ve.
Something about a united, militaristic Germany freaks people out, seems like. Mentioned it before, but there were elements in the Anglosphere that would’ve been fine with Germany dominating Europe. Once the shooting started, public opinion made it impossible.
For all the posturing of the Cold War and ranting about Putler, people have never been so willing to go hot with Russia. That’s probably a good thing, still kind of puzzling.
If I had to guess, it’s an ancient dynamic the Russians aren’t part of. Germanic in-fighting, or something.
Incidentally, I knew a half-Swedish woman who was that freaked out by Russia. Didn’t know at the time Rus were Swedes. Proximity, obviously, but maybe also a similarly ancient dynamic there?
I think most analysts would say that Germany would have knocked out Russia if it was a one front war and the German generals had been allowed to run the war. Even in a two front war, the Germans should have knocked the Russians, but the civilian leadership of Germany made important blunders. That said, once Russia stopped the German advance, it turned into a terrifying war machine that by the end of the war was the best army on the planet.
By the time the Germans launched Barbarossa it WAS a one-front war — and they came damn close to winning it. Wasn’t Guderian’s column within 50 miles of Moscow and the city was evacuated before he was finally stopped? I partially agree with the sentiment that Hitler didn’t “let the generals run the war,” but only partly. When you’re doing stuff like invading Russia it is such a world-historic event that there really is no rulebook and no road map. Do you take Moscow first, or Stalingrad? Who knows? Luck and fate play as much of a role in such… Read more »
German generals, like Halder, planned the capture of Moscow to try and knock Russia out of the war in contravention of Hitler’s orders to concentrate their attack on the resources (wheat and oil) of Ukraine and the Caucasus. It worked for Napoleon, after all! This was the reason Hitler was unwilling to let his generals run the war. However, both men’s actions were motivated by bad economics. In Napoleon’s case, the Continental System (Blockade) led to the unwinnable Peninsular War as well as the disastrous Invasion of Russia. For Hitler, the conquest of Russia was made necessary by his Shrinking… Read more »
And then one day, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, the NY Post decided to print an article about a 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonating on Washington DC & the Pentagon: “A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the center of the sun. https://nypost.com/2024/03/23/us-news/what-would-happen-to-washington-dc-if-attacked-by-a-nuclear-bomb/ “…In the first fraction of a millisecond after the bomb strikes the Pentagon, there is light. Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength.… Read more »
“Something about a united, militaristic Germany freaks people out, seems like. Mentioned it before, but there were elements in the Anglosphere that would’ve been fine with Germany dominating Europe.”
There were opposing elements programming Anglos to fear “The Hun,” and who would ultimately sacrifice the entire British Empire (in an ultimately futile attempt) to prevent Germany becoming the European hegemon, in what’s probably history’s most extreme example of a Pyrrhic Victory.
“I do not think that would have worked. America had 300 bombs in 1950, but no way to deliver them to Russian cities”
UPS?
Mu old normie con self world have applauded that. Now I see the wisdom of checks and balances on the Geo macro level. Image Globohomo with a nuclear monopoly. That does not sound like a good idea
Maybe you shouldn’t have pissed away trillions on War.
The Manhattan project (and FDR’s administration) were thoroughly rotten with communists and communist sympathizers.
The US gave the Soviets the bomb on a silver platter.
Haven’t listened yet to the podcast, but along with LFMajor’s Universal Suffrage (#2), my top three would be: (3). America’s entry into WWI. Wilson almost single-handedly (with some help from certain bankers) put an end to the notion that America could and should avoid participation in the idiotic political butchery of our European cousins. One of the greatest strengths of America in the 19th century was our steadfast adherence to this principle. By accepting the argument that our interests were inextricably aligned with theirs, we foreve abdicated our freedom to abstain from the wars that invariably turn into pointless bloodbaths.… Read more »
Yes. If your ideology is the Truth, and someone doesn’t adhere to the thing, they have to be converted for their own good, of course, OR, their existence puts the lie to your Truth. You know, like people say about religion.
Worst idea: Sola scriptura — Protestantism. The idea you can interpret the Bible on your own. Even if you learn the ancient languages, that takes decades, and there are different interprations on what the old words mean.
Yeah, that’s rather bad. Sola scriptura leads straight to the ironic inference that the entire “New” testament may be set aside and ignored insofar as correct doctrine is concerned. Not a jot of it is known to have been written before the disappearance of the master’s body. It there’s any truth in the faith, it was set forth by the master himself BEFORE his disappearance. Funny that he didn’t order a few of his stooges to write everything down in his presence, leaving enough time for him to proofread it, to correct it, and to have it copied exactly a… Read more »
Yikes, But Sola Scriptura Protestantism, itself, was an offshoot from another breakaway branch, the papists of the west who themselves broke away from the eastern One Church patriarchs. This is why I realized monotheism itself tends towards its own tower of Babel, trying to shoehorn even the most distant of relatives into living under the same roof. Wouldn’t that be an example of forgetting one’s own lesson? Maybe we shouldn’t insist that the hyenas be caged with the kitties. Physics (“the Creator”) is universal, but that doesn’t mean mankind is meant to be interchangeable cogs. The Zman: “…they would take… Read more »
Not quite; let’s not downplay the significance of the difference between a split between de facto peers at the highest level on the one hand, and a revolt by a gaggle of debauched junior clergy and hobbyist laymen on the other.
“Feel free to add your favorite stupid ideas to the list.”
I think the idea that there is a universal morality has proven to be a bad idea for those who believe it, because most of the people on the planet will not or cannot reciprocate it. The Golden Rule is a great example. Or the non-aggression principle.
Universal morality probably works out fine if everyone in the population sincerely feels it.
But an idea that is even worse than universal morality is pineapples on pizza.
Hey!
It’s pineapples AND ham.
The salt from the ham balances the pineapple.
At least, that’s what a friend told me…..
🙄
A better word I found for “individualism” is “eccentricity”.
British society, for instance, was amiably fond of its eccentrics.
One can, however, take an amusing quirk a bit too far.
Then the too far gone become today’s totalitarians, oddly.
Play along or else!
Britain had eccentrics, AINO has Psychopaths, one’s an endearing adornment, the other less so.
I have much affection for Old England. The eccentric Colonel who marches into an exotic village in the jungle and declares that henceforth, human sacrifice shall be murder, punished by hanging. And then writes silly exotic poems in his free time when he’s not hunting lions and tigers with black powder muzzle loaders. Or inventing a new machine or telegraph .That is eccentric at its best.
(what you guys have on your island now horrifies me but I suspect you might agree)
Huzzah, Bile! Let me take this offtopic a bit, as I’ve always wanted to tell you that you were right all along. Speaking of bad ideas… My favorite uncle Dolphie was an idiot. Instead of saving Germany, he tried to save Europe, and lost both. Got his people and his nation wiped with his overreach. Now the Communists own almost everything west of the Urals. The Poles were already murdering Germans; he should’ve let the bloody Poles defend Poland against Stalin’s divisions massing at the border, and then let’s see Churchill’s bleedin’ “secret treaty” take on the USSR! I understand… Read more »
You don’t just have to accept the pineapple on your pizza, you have to celebrate it!
And you’re not celebrating hard enough! Celebrate harder!
Pineapple is our strength comrades! It’s the PIE principle. Pineapple, inclusivity, equity.
“Pineapple is our strength”
That’s great. Made me laugh and is as accurate.
The pineapple will continue until morale improves.
“If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?”
Interesting question. But are rich people tormented by the consequences of anything? Usually not. Consequences are for the dirt people. So I’m pretty sure if the Ghost of the George Floyd Riots had visited the Amistad, the slaver would have kept on westward.
If only a spirit had visited one of the Georges and intoned (spiritually), “If you follow this path, the Duuuke of Sussex will marry an octoroon prostituuute! Oooooooo!”
In the Monty Python version the ghost becomes so exasperated at the king’s inability to grasp what a “yacht girl” is, he kills himself (again).
Hahaha! Prince Ritchie Orcson shall never be king!!
Unfettered and undeserved universal suffrage.
Not having skin in the game, or enough smarts to even get in the game, has been the 1000 weeping leaks that has waterlogged the ship.
Meritocracy should consider property as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMTz9nIUkGc
“Service guarantees citizenship! Would you like to know more?”
“I’ve been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man. There is no New Man. We tried so hard to create a society that was equal, where there’d be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there’s always something to envy. A smile, a friendship…something you don’t have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a Soviet one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.” — Commisar Danilov, “enemy at the Gates”
Hmmm
Almost like everyone is different; an individual.
“The private life is dead.”
-Strelnikov
“Strelnikov is dead.”
Private Schweik’s Commandant
You don’t have to drive to work on busy city streets in the morning rush more than 5-6 times to conclude that “bad ideas” are frighteningly common, short-sighted, dangerous, and the product of a temporary insanity that befalls otherwise normal people in the selfish pursuit of “I’m going to do what I want, f**k you.” “If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?” Um, yeah. Very few people sit around worrying about their descendants 50 years from now when there’s money to be made today. Just like… Read more »
Nah. The black problem is because of the inherent nature of blacks. Violent outbursts, inability to delay gratification and control impulses…. You know, kind of like toddlers.
Shoot, meant to reply to filthie below.
Just like that guy nearly killing 40 people in traffic and driving everyone into fits of road rage. He coulda got up 5 minutes earlier and saved everyone (and himself) the horror. But he decided to run that a light and nearly t-bone that father of three driving his kids to school. “F**k you! Get out of my way! I’m late and your life means nothing to me right now.”
South Florida on I 95 on a daily basis… South Florida on any road or side street on a daily basis!
Nope.
You can’t lay America’s nigger problem (I’m sorry, but that’s what it is) – on Christianity. Devout black families were every bit as well behaved as devout white ones. Christianity was and is one of the few remaining stabilizing influences on blacks.
The blame for the collapse of the black family – which drives almost all the other behaviour problems with blacks – can be laid at the feet of neoliberal permissiveness and tolerance.
In fact it has snowballed in white families too.
Well, to be fair, that old black lawyer,(I’m too lazy to look him up), said that crime “is a cultural thing” when he suggested that boo boo not be held accountable.
When I was in school our bus went thru a black neighborhood — this during the late 60s — and the bus was more than half black. Those kids were the most well behaved you ever saw — no swearing, loud talk, nothing. Imagine that same situation now.
That’s what forcing (sometimes violently) your cultural norms on black people will do.
But you can only hold a chair over your head for so long. At some point, you have to put it down. It’s not the job of whites to look after blacks and force them to act more white.
Let blacks be black – in their own neighborhoods or, even better, their own countries. Separate is the answer, not imposing our values on blacks.
Exactly Citizen. And in support of your statement, I point out that after the Civil War we were able to co-exist with Blacks (up to a point) via segregation. Sure, unpleasantries occurred, but nothing like what we have now trying to integrate them into a civilized, White society.
The “talented tenth” made out like bandits, but the other 90% not so much—especially after their (Blacks) best and brightest took off like a bat in hell from the rest.
It seems it’s possible to hold the chair over one’s head for a long, long time to keep whites from minding their own business, but not to keep blacks from burning, looting and murdering?
Methinks its not the getting tired part…
Nonsense.
Modern Christianity (with the obvious exception of certain cults and sects) does not impose a moral code on anyone. The individual chooses to accept those moral codes and impose them on himself. Even the stupidest blacks improve dramatically when they adopt faith.
No, you lay it on biology. As to those devout, well-behaved black Christians, so what. Their cousins, nieces, nephews and grandchildren destroyed any neighborhood that they moved into. Sure, imposing white values via Christianity helps keep down blacks’ natural behavior, but why is it our job to save the blacks? Also, what right do we have to impose our culture on blacks? The blame for the collapse of black families is nature, not liberals. You sound like some 19th century Yankee missionary who feels its whites’ duty to raise up the heathen. How long do whites have to look after… Read more »
“ How long do whites have to look after blacks and force them to act more white? Forever? ”
It won’t be forever, because we are destroying ourselves in the process. And when we are gone, the situation will remain the same—except there will be no comparison point (White culture and achievement) by which to judge Black progress. That’s really the entire point of the process we are undergoing today. It’s not “uplifting” Blacks, it’s “destroying” Whites.
This so much. Separation is the answer. Even if you wanted to make them more white, we have all of the data in the world proving it is impossible. The best society is a society without them. Whatever it would cost to send every black to Africa would be worth it.
Don’t look now, C… but your people are slowly devolving the exact same way the blacks are. Consider: the divorce rate is 50%. 80% of those divorces are driven by unhappy women. 25% of North American women are on antidepressants and prescribed psychotropic drugs. Drugs are now a huge problem for whites too. Fatherlessness has produced two generations of soys, incels and faggots. If I had to critique the dissidents, it would be to refute this notion that IQ equals virtue. It doesn’t. The black problems are the result of white neoliberalism. We used to lower the boom on black… Read more »
No one forced Christianity on blacks!
That’s why they have their own churches, POST civil rights era.