An aspect of our increasingly ideological age is the things that used to be a part of the culture that have been removed by force or by neglect. The parts pried loose and discarded are easy to see, as they come with an angry mob of deranged lunatics there to do the damage. The bits that are just forgotten and fall out of the shared reality that is our culture are the things missed only by those who remember them.
The opening of the show today is one of those bits that has fallen out of shared reality mostly due to neglect. When I was a young person, you had to read Thoreau and Emerson, so you could learn about transcendentalism. Speaking with younger people recently it seems that stopped happening at some point. The old hippie teachers gave way to activists who have no interest in those old white men.
Transcendentalism is a peculiarity of America that not only influenced what became progressivism but also its traveling partner conservatism. You could probably draw a line from Thoreau and Emerson to the weird secular Gnosticism that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War. Modern progressive rejects individualism, but they embrace the idea of society corrupting the natural goodness of man.
Another line you could draw is from the second wave transcendentalists, who were mostly bourgeois aesthetes, to the middle-class managerial elite of today. Rather than rejecting empiricism, like the first wave transcendentalist, the second wave embraced it but in the context of individual expression. In other words, they loved science as long as it supported their emotional claims.
As nutty as they were, the transcendentalists represented an aspect of American culture that remains with us today. There are hints of it in the parallel society movement and the trad-life stuff that is popular with some young right-wing people. The desire to break free of the corrupting aspects of modern society in order to have an authentic life is something that the transcendentalist would have understood.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Bennett’s Phylactery (Link)
- Reality Of Rural Life
- Bourgeois Life
- It Takes a Village
- Liberty Valance Issue
- The Matrix
- The Reality of Pioneers
- Quiet Desperation
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I guess I had a different experience of “the suburbs” than is alluded to. I grew up in the 90’s and 00’s somewhere that many people would classify as a suburb (perhaps an exurb) of a major city in the Midatlantic, but the way my locality was set up, it was envisioned as a small town and it functioned as one. We had our town fire department, and we were proud of it. Once a year they’d show off all of the engines. The cops were honest and lived in the town and were committed to keeping it safe and… Read more »
In fairness, it’s much harder to make friends as an adult. Particularly when dropped into a new location w/o someone to introduce you around (the other locals usually have an established circle of friends already)
Oddly, I suspect electronic connectivity doesn’t help either, as that reduces the incentive seek out locals. It’s easy to end up in a situation where you’ve lived somewhere 5 years and still don’t know anyone.
This was great and am honored to be the first to up-voot, but did not get the part about “who think it is normal to refer to adults as their first names.”
Agree that there’s a miasma and it’s everywhere in this country. It’s a great topic, the challenges and problems of relocating to a place where one is not local, or has no fambly or roots, on the hope that it will be less pozzed cuz rural. Chickens and goats will save us tho, in any case. Be ahead of the curve and get ur goat now.
Rereading your comment I see you meant kids referring to adults by their first names, as weird. Which makes sense.
Granted: Convenience and instant availability of product is highly characteristic of suburbs, even those that feel like ‘small towns.’ I, too, used to be able to go two blocks away to buy milk – now it’s 25 minutes. But either way that milk and that convenience was totally dependent on outside farmers and trucks to bring everything to you. Now, at least, in any sort of crisis, I know people within a few miles who actually have cows. And many suburbs and small towns used to have local parades and a home-town spirit. The atomization you lament is not based… Read more »
OT
I recently starting checking in to Scott Adam’s’ podcast.
It appears the ass whipping he’s been through recently has placed him in the “No Fuchs given” column.
If anyone has a theory as to why, I’d be curious to hear it.
He’s poking several alphabet agencies, and I wonder if his ire is genuine.
Listen to todays (Sundays podcast). He’s almost asking to be Swatted, and dropped in a joke in Leavenworth.
Dropped in a “hole” in Leavenworth.
🙇♂️
Scott Adams is definitely genuine is my opinion. As to why he doesn’t give a feck, anymore, it’s likely cuz vax regret and the feeling of impending doom that can cause on someone like himself, who is man enuf to acknowledge that he made a huge mistake and might not be long for this world.
Scott Adams was always guilty of scientism, as are many others in the Dissident Right orbit. Back when he was flying high, he was very much of the opinion that only STEM-y stuff mattered and that anything that couldn’t be quantified was balderdash. This results in a very narrow and truncated mind, an autistic view of reality. When someone like that goes through an existential crisis and suddenly has to consider things like philosophy and theology for the first time, it stands to reason they’re going to be rather inept at it. It’s a typical fate among quants. There is… Read more »
NAFTA destroyed middle America’s Middle Class. Millennials are too young to remember what was before. Until manufacturing is returned to the US, rural America will remain disfunctional.
I’d tend to cite China getting MFN treatment, not NAFTA.
Yep. Ross Perot was a prophet.
Of course automation, robotics, and digital technology also played a role.
Somewhat OT, it’s on. Nancy Pelosi just signed a letter demanding Biden end all aid to Israel over Gaza. Hilarity ensued. Point being is that the cities are very, very bad places to be now, and the suburbs are an easy target. Already MA and MI are “asking” people to house “immigrants.” Soon they will demand, and then just take. That’s easy in the atomized suburbs, where there are a lot of houses to take and not much social organization. All those houses are all together. The state can concentrate its forces and people cannot fight back. In the country,… Read more »
Your fears make you persuasive, but it is groundless fear that powers you. We live in a technological system of electrons and civil laws. The breakdown you fear — and perhaps anticipate, just a little? — is an overblown reaction to scattered news events.
Are things trending good? No. Are they trending disastrous? Hardly yet. Wait and see before you rush off to your cabin in the mountains.
It would take 5+ years for your average joe to even have a chance of becoming partially self-sufficient in food, what with learning knowledge skillsets, obtaining and becoming proficient with tools and equipment, preparing a farming environment and system which could be self-sustaining etc.
Don’t wait until the air raid sirens are sounding to get out and start thinking about country living.
Do you think Vladimir Putin, a rich man, is going to risk everything over the Donbass region. I’m sure he trusts the West to fear his nukes enough to not fuck up his plans. I doubt the effeminate West will ever march up to a nuclear-armed bully and kick him in the balls, just to get a taste of nuclear fire up its own ass.
I take it you’ve only had good relations with women. Hell hath no fury!
Yeah, sounds like a good idea X. Wait until the barn is a blaze before you plan your escape.
You have car insurance, home owner’s insurance, life insurance, auto warranty, health insurance, long term cate insurance?
Risk v. loss
Ask what are the probabilities, then decide what policies to get. Food, water, ammo, drug, insurance becoming more & more important.
It’s a great thought that all our great conveniences and “suburban” lives entail accepting certain grubbiness and degeneracy. And fighting back against them might mean being tossed out into the void and losing that comfortable lifestyle. It seems like the westward movement pioneers had everything to gain and nothing to lose, while in our day and age, there is seemingly a lot to lose (selfishly) for perhaps ephemeral gains? Don’t get me wrong, drawing and quartering making a comeback would be fantastic…
I’ve mentioned this here before, but the podcast reminds me. Having read Marx in college and more recently having read/listened to Catholic critiques of modernity, I was looking at things in terms of materialism, and it wasn’t adding up. Then, a while ago, I went to the gas station, and the guy working the register was a tranny. It occurred to me it was easier for this guy to change his body than to change his mind, and that told me that while there are problems of materialism, the dominant issue today is idealism. Looking at it that way, things… Read more »
“God is dead” = 19th century materialism, new age/woke is a yearning for ‘dead’ God.
In secular terms, God is the superego— the scold. The self-denying, masochistic aspect of the Puritan ethic is the internalization of the same. One becomes one’s God in a sense, rather than relying on a present, in-this-world God, or the Church.
This is not un-Biblical, btw. Maybe an extreme interpretation of Scripture. Remember the sermon on the mount. One commits adultery merely by lusting, for example.
In a perverse way, perhaps, the point is not to be a sheep, but to be one’s own shepherd.
Ask Jesus. Seriously. Did He mean to make us more sinful, or was He exhorting us to holiness?
I didn’t clearly understand the post that was being discussed, but my immediate thoughts were 1) it doesn’t sound like he was in a community at all, at least not of like-minded people. Wouldn’t such plans entail at least moving out with a small group? 2) To the argument of, well you’re going to have poor, drug-users, and fat kids watching netflix… ok sure. But why should those people have the same rights as the person whose kids are studying hard and whose dad has some functional contribution to the community, like being the blacksmith? If anything they should have… Read more »
What is jarring is how profoundly wrong his perceptions about Texas in general and Austin in particular are. Texas is vast and there are scattered pockets with the mindsets he fantasizes Austin has, but you won’t be finding any tech mega corps in them for the most part, and they all are menaced in a political sense by huge, sprawling and dysfunctional urban hellholes inside the state. And even if Texas itself somehow avoids descent into darkness over the next decade, it has no leadership or even political will to fight against the frustrated hordes outside its borders. That could… Read more »
You had to mention Dreher, didn’t you. Darn you! 🙂
I don’t know much about Dreher other than he did some kind of cancel attempt against someone on this side of the DR at one point. Is he a shill or something like that?
Dreher is the standard cuckservative who thrives on trashing (and worse) his side to please the Left. The author of the linked piece is just a more carefully hidden version.
BasedTeuton: Dreher always in search of the perfect, the ideal, to suit the vision in his head. Kind of like the suburbanites who imagine some bucolic version of the ‘country life’ without the animal shite and flies. He was raised as a Methodist; converted to Catholicism, and then to Orthodoxy. He divorced his wife and mother of his 3 children and moved to Hungary. Always in search of that heaven on earth that he has a vision of, trying to find the reality that matches his vision. And he calls himself a conservative, but is a color-blind purist. In short,… Read more »
Yeah he made an effort to cancel Thomas accord (sp)
The topic of this week’s podcast reminded me quite a bit of this recent writing by Walt Bismarck (remember him?): https://newaltright.substack.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist
That’s Sean Hannity 2.0, truly puke-worthy stuff for the most part.
#2 reason for leaving SN
“Racial polarization has declined”.
Really?
Did I miss something?
Is that guy writing from a different plane of existence?
What an utter moron.
And as for his white neighbors in the area he moved to, resembling hobbits,(no aspirations of greatness), again, really? May he experience diversity good and hard. (I’m pretty sure Hobbits helped defeat the bad guy, but whatever).
The good thing about that article is the guy revealed his true self. Always good to know where people stand.
I understand The Hobbit reference. Whites in America have dropped several inches in height over the last couple decades. I used to be above average in height and now I am a towering Titan. It was something my friends and I have talked about, how we tower over the generations after us and over rural whites and working-class whites. A theory on this phenomena: What the red pill and the manosphere and the PUAs didn’t realize about R select/ K select theory is that R select reproduction does not choose for height and intellect or even testosterone. This has been… Read more »
TL;DR
Still downvoted, though.
I have never heard of this Bismark fellow but he is pompous prick. “Corn fed blonds will marry meztizos” and all will be good. Uncontrolled immigration is not a problem. So much more in his post but thanks for posting link. The guy could work for the chamber of commerce. With people like him on our side we are screwed
That dude never was on “our side,” or anyone else’s. I think the Alt-Right did accomplish some of the laudable things he mentioned such as normalizing the pushback against anti-whiteness, even while those in that movement also had very unrealistic goals (an ethnostate outside of Israel is pure fantasy at present, for example). The Alt-Right also attracted large numbers of attention whores and grifters, sort of a mirror image of Antifa in that regard. It is telling that the piece mentions Richard Spencer because the writer is cut from the same cloth. I suspect there may be a concerted effort… Read more »
Leftist youth movements are the children of the ruling class demanding their inheritance of power and status before their parents die. The alt right was our first nearly analogous thing, a demand from the barely-losers of “meritocracy”—smart white guys from good families who followed the righteous path of the dutiful student and for that didnt get their regime sinecures—demanding their rightful place in its hierarchy. When Trump didn’t give that to them, they aimed their rage at white losers, insulting the already injured, rather than at anyone who decides anything or has any power over anybody. Our conservatism, our leftism/Jewishness,… Read more »
He is not wrong unfortunately. The number one interracial pairing is white men with “Hispanic women.”. Second most common pairing is white women with “Hispanic men.” That said, what guys like this fail to to take into account is the studies that show this fail to take into account two things. Studies on “Hispanics” never take into account how “white” the Hispanics are. They could very well be South Americans with pure Spanish, Portuguese, German or Italian blood. Second, they fail to take into account economic class. A lot of interracial pairing occurs at the lowest level. Working class and… Read more »
“ Studies on “Hispanics” never take into account how “white” the Hispanics are. ” Indeed. One need only take note of US Census stat’s over the decades. Once there was only one racial choice, Hispanic. It was shown that many people from what we term Hispanic countries, mostly South and Central America, were choosing the Census “White” racial check box. Government couldn’t have this, so they invented another category, “Hispanic-White”. Seems even the Hispanics—whoever the hell they are as a racial grouping—don’t even consider themselves Hispanics. So yeah, I can believe the interracial marriage stat’s wrt Hispanic—White couples. Living in… Read more »
This Walt Bismarck character is a case of a liberal contrarian that edgelorded himself to the other side while still having a liberal mindset. When he bitches about the midwest being full of boring gosspy church ladies he’s making it clear that what he really wants is to be living in a shitlib city watching BBC and taking BBC. And I suspect this is the case for most of the young guys who went to the alt right just to dress up like Hitler, they were just trying to individuate from their shitlib parents like angry teenagers only to fall… Read more »
Another one?
I haven’t listened to it yet, but Youtuber Alex Kaschuta apparently had Anatoly Karlin on, and the show’s titled, “How I learned to stop worrying and love the GAE*”
(*Global American Empire)
BTW, the Youtube videos with Alt-Right spoofs of Disney material of the aforementioned Walt Bismarck can be found at: http://murdoch-murdoch.net/html/walt-bismarck.html
Twenty-three verses here. Papist footnotes report that “This is the first of three poems on the forbidden woman, the ‘stranger’ outside the social boundaries”.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+5&version=NABRE
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+5&version=OJB
The pumping muscle appears again in verse twelve. A writer named T.S. Flanders, a guy who has been bouncing around from sect to sect, asserts that “The heart and soul of Christendom is the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.” Does this not roll off the tongue better than would ‘Eucharistic Central Nervous System of Jesus’?
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/04/no_author/its-time-to-purchase-your-sacred-heart-flag-for-june/
If you have children, you probably don’t want them only around a bunch of kids who say you-uns. Such people are not necessarily salt of the earth, God fearing kind-hearted Christians just waiting to accept your family into their community. Mostly, they are fat, tatted, drug addled and not heading anywhere in life, except to get high. If you do find church going folks, woe to you if you disagree with them over not just religious matters but how the ladies should play patty cake at vacation Bible school. They are a closed club, and if you an’t from there… Read more »
Are you the guy Zman was quoting?
The suburbs, which, to be specific, are within ten to 15 miles of city cores, are where transgenderism and so forth actually take root. Yes, the madness starts in urban neighborhoods, but the real farm teams are the ‘burbs, where most of those denizens hailed, and most of their horrific ideas return and take root. To be honest, I’m quite glad to see the rural areas are getting trashed routinely now because that makes them less likely to be magnets, but reality could change all that in a flash.
They are the nicest refugee camps ever built. Everybody admits this in so many words, whether it’s the suburbanite talking about seeking refuge, or the prog talking about white flight. If someone sees no other recourse, fine, but I often detect pride in being a refugee in the talk. “I left, and if it comes to it, I’ll leave again.”— that sort of thing. I don’t understand that. It seems disingenuous to me to talk about things like civilization when you aren’t willing to take a stand for them. Z is right that it comes down to risk-aversion. Nothing good… Read more »
At the risk of outing myself, let me suggest a place that combines good values and nice amenities: Rapid City, SD.
Birthplace o’ rap, isn’t it?
“Bitch” and “ho” is Somali are hard to rhyme.
(Typos, not attempted plays on Somali-to-English).
Well acquainted. Enjoy it. Hunted there and otherwise visited. Not the place for me. The progressives are moving in. The terrain is not my preferred. Water issues. Is very German, good und badt. Still, an excellent rec especially for midwesterners looking to move within the region. I’m UP Michigan for plan B currently, with “remote” land in hand. What can I realistically get to? Also a part time Alaskan.
I saw paradise. The greatest place that ever was. Christchurch New Zealand, before the Earthquake. Even back then they would not take me (too White, pale, stale, and male I guess). Now its overrun by the Third World. Thomas Wolf was right. You can’t go home again. And here’s the thing. That nice safe suburb? Its gone man. Gone and not coming back, ever. That hipster city Austin? Its gone, its a violent hell-hole now with White guys being arrested and charged with murder for defending themselves against murderous street robberies by vibrants armed with guns. The amount of homeless… Read more »
It is not without irony the Clouds chose New Zealand for their bolt hole. That was stupid on multiple levels.
As a Portlandite I’ve had this same issue. On the one hand I hate the politics of all the goodwhite twits around me, and extreme ends of liberal pretension are ridiculous. But I also get repulsed by the rural lower classes: the opiod/meth druggies, the obesity, the mudsharking, the strange pig-man face thing some of them have going, walmart…
What I want is a group of sophisticated people who also enjoy classical music and aren’t shitlibs. Tarring the right with being declasse was probably the most effective thing the lefties ever did.
Ploppy-
I have very similar feelings about not fitting into and being somewhat annoyed by both groups you mention. I’d add mushy middle normies to the list.
I think these feelings are why I’ve taken to watching the Lotus Eaters on YouTube. They are the sort of friends I’d like to find in the US, but they don’t seem to actually exist.
The people you’re looking for are legitimate rightwing intellectuals. Sad to say, they’re a pretty rare breed. But one you’ve found one, or he’s found you, it’s like happening upon pitcher of ice-water in Death Valley. And you’ll have found a soulmate for life. What we need is a network of such people. This blog is one node of such a potential network.
Yes. Right-wing intellectuals, by necessity more than choice, were America’s first dissidents. They’ve been around but underground forever, even prior to BROWN. The United States has been a garbage leftist empire a long, long time and it only now has been this been made manifest.
Ostei: But rightwing intellectuals don’t have to be social snobs. Life isn’t all sitting around discussing ideas and theories and the arts – as I did in college. The real world includes working class people who can still intelligently discuss social or economic or religious issues, even if they’re not self-proclaimed ‘intelligentsia.’ I saw enough of the ‘intelligentsia’ in eastern Europe. They all proclaimed they were devoted to the best interests of ‘the people,’ but they truly only represented themselves. Lech Walesa was a working man, and Vaclav Havel was an anomaly.
Two of the most profoundly intellectual right-wingers I’ve known were farmers in the rural South. Even where they lived, far away from the psychotic leftwing zeitgeist, they kept their actual thoughts largely to themselves to avoid outright confrontation. If that meta culture had threatened their redoubts, they might have voiced their opinions openly, dunno. One of the two actually made moonshine, in part as a light affectation, in part because he was good at it. The guy also was the best musician I ever heard live. The Havel/Walesa distinction is spot on. I would like to think if the former… Read more »
Ploppy: What you want doesn’t exist – hasn’t in most of human history. You want upper-class pleasures and virtues in a middle-class society. You want the perquisites without the work that’s required to get there.
We don’t particularly want to deal with tweakers or the bottom 5% – but we take the good with the bad. There are plenty of rural, working class people who are normal, and decent, and not at all stupid. No, we don’t discuss the virtues of Shakespeare’s plays with them, but that’s not why we moved here.
The middle-class man in AINO is more than capable of enjoying upper-class pleasures. I do, and I know many others who do. Classical music costs almost nothing to listen to, and even concerts by major orchestras are not exhorbitant. Middle-class people can dine at the finest restaurants, if not necessarily frequently, and they can prepare their own refined fare at minimal expense. We can read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Dante and Mandelshtam, Plato and Nietzsche at no charge. We can visit art museums, even if we cannot purchase their contents. And so forth and so on. That one must be rich… Read more »
Ostei: I don’t believe I said (and certainly didn’t mean to imply) that no one who is middle class can have or appreciate upper-class tastes. But rather that too many want those pleasures of the mind and the arts (which used to be the sole preserve of the wealthy aristocracy) without the working men who firs ensure things like food and shelter (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). Or, as Zman put it, they want to savor the sausage without dealing with the reality of how it’s made (the blood and guts of life). I’m not knocking the desire for or value… Read more »
3g,
You’re positing an antinomy that I don’t think exists to any large degree. Hence, the rightwing intellectual–in contrast to his Leftist counterpart–values the working man and what he does greatly. Hell, Eric Hoffer, a respectable rightwing philosopher, was a longshoreman, for crying out loud. And, although I’m certainly no Hoffer, I have on multiple occasions said that I value plumbers above profs and have had more interesting conversations with tradesmen than with graduate students. I would even go so far as to say that genuine respect for the working man is the sine qua non of the rightwing intellectual.
Well at the bottom you get the folks interbreeding with pigs and that’s an IQ problem that will always exist. But the rural kulaks are just as intelligent as middle class liberal snobs in the cities, the thing is they willfully reject anything that they associate with those liberal snobs. Which unfortunately means that instead of reading Shakespeare they’re putting plastic testicles on their $80k pickup truck’s trailer hitch.
Ploppy: You can either deplore and get infuriated by the guy in his jacked-up pickup who’s riding on your tail on the two lane windy road (and create an unnecessary dick measuring contest) or pull over, let him pass (and possibly crash way down the road) and meanwhile drive at your own more comfortable and safe speed. One can only regulate so much of what everyone else does, and every race and nation has its own bell curve. You deal with the bottom 10% and top 10% as best you can, so long as you have sufficient carrying capacity in… Read more »
Heh heh. You’re certainly correct to point out the reverse snobbery of the rural kulaks, and I would add the working class as well. I know because I caught some of that from my own father who was a very bright guy, but unlettered and decidedly working class in upbringing and outlook. I believe he felt more contempt than pride when I earned my doctorate. Now you might say his was the correct attitude in that regard, but regardless, it was a classic example of reverse snobbery. The country music scene has always been rife with it, too. Probably a… Read more »
“On the one hand I hate the politics of all the goodwhite twits around me, and extreme ends of liberal pretension are ridiculous. But I also get repulsed by the rural lower classes”
Yep… as much as I would like to be a white supremacist, the white people don’t always make it very easy, do they?
Seems that we’ve achieved racial equality in this country by lowering the white trash down to the level of the negroes, rather than raising the negroes up to the level of the whites.
Whites were far worthier of respect and affection before they renounced their own people. They were smarter, too.
I think rural whitefolk are great. This meth situation is grossly over exaggerated. I’ve personally never encountered a meth addict save for when I lived in California. In the Midwest, my experience was that poor blacks downtown did crack and worst case scenario poor whites nearby drank hard on the weekends but still had to keep it together Monday through Friday. Suburbs were safe and the punk teens smoked some weed.
Davidcito: Our real estate agent – a local lady – warned us of certain less salutary streets in town when we were looking for a rental place for our son. Meth/ drug addiction and dealing exists, and it’s sad and regrettable, but it’s not an every day concern, encounter, or problem.
Rural white folk who are landowners with prosperous farms, local tradesmen and business owners are usually GTG. But there IS a rural white-trash lumpenproletariat out there — and they are not all meth addicts. Obese, tattooed, white women with blue or red hair and a nose ring, waddling through the Walmart in pajama pants and a pair of Crocs, maybe riding a mobility scooter… or jonesing for cigarettes and scratch-off lottery tickets on their way back to the trailer park or the disability office. Haggard, unkempt, gray-haired Boomers with “diabeetus” who haven’t had a haircut or a shave in a… Read more »
Each generation has been losing IQ since the 19th century. As a result now our lumpenproletariat is completely degenerate, and our intellectuals are phony poseurs trying to word salad meaning out of the filth they create.
On Bennett’s Phylactery: 1. I’ve enormous respect for any young man who values the well being of his children. Starting with having them in the first place. I’ve followed him for a bit on Twitter. 2. The template of “the perfect suburb” is really just college for adult life. Great buildings, its own police force enforcing strict entry rules, massively hidden and subsidized infrastructure, and an all powerful bureaucracy that will nudge those who don’t fit with warnings, then excommunication. Suburbanites (and I am, regrettably, one of them) just want the college experience, only with our personal values expressed everywhere… Read more »
He is not an ex Mormon. He is a Mormon.
Thanks.
But this is depressing beyond belief.
He’s not setting up an LDS “safe zone” in Austin. How could he possibly be this stupid?
Prognosis: He’s Ex-Mo, but not willing to pull the trigger.
I work with many such. (It’s a ridiculous religion. So is “the US republic”. But there are many benefits, so public allegiance makes a certain amount of sense.)
Growing up in the Deep South, I don’t remember that the Transcendentalists had much of an impact on me. I can’t remember any of Emerson’s poems or essays forced on us in High School. I’ve never read ‘On Walden Pond.’ From excerpts I can say it seems pretty hokey to me. Was Walt Whitman really a poet? I don’t think so. Learning more about Transcendentalism in college, I can’t say I’m impressed. If it’s fundamental to their thinking that human beings are inherently good, they’re flat out wrong. I’m much more impressed about the picture of human beings as described… Read more »
Neither has anyone else. You’re portmanteau-ing.
Walden
On Golden Pond
It’s too bad that the world missed out on more fine performances by Henry David Fonda.
On Golden Blonde is one of the finest films ever made, in my book. Never fails to bring a tear to my eye…
Must be the Alzheimer`s
In certain respects, Eric Hoffer could not be further from either a family man or a community builder. He lived as a transient laborer, by choice; he once wrote (I think it was in ‘The Temper of Our Time’) that he decided at an early age to remain poor and to work with his hands. By the time he became known, after the success of ‘The True Believer’, he was living in a small San Francisco apartment, working part-time as a longshoreman. Somewhere in his diary/memoir ‘Working and Thinking on the Waterfront’, Hoffer tells us what ingredients were necessary for… Read more »
I occasionally listen to the EXIT podcast and I’m a regular listener of yours. The guy who runs that podcast recently did an episode on the whole trad lifestyle delusion and I think you would be surprised just how much you guys agree. I think you may be putting some words in his mouth. He basically says that whoever leans into the future wins and that groups like the hassids, Amish etc exist precisely because they are harmless and pose no threats. I think his main point was that any level of societal change will not be achieved by hiding… Read more »
And I totally forgot – Zman, found this via link at WRSA – on a very similar theme – worth reading.
https://www.highly-respected.com/p/an-independent-red-america-would
To pester you just a bit more this p.m., thanks so much for that link. Greer is absolutely correct. I had heard nothing of the Enid recall result, but it comes as no surprise. Greer did not state it but his implicit conclusion is it will take a lot more pain before anything happens substantively. I do think there is a sorting, dissolution and fragmentation underway, largely for unvoiced and possibly unconscious reasons, and that is somewhat of a white pill, but the black pill is those sorting and dissolving and fragmenting are immersed in the same cultural poison. Most… Read more »
Here I am to piss in everybody’s punchbowl. (And this will be a long, tl;dr comment.) I thought Z’s stellar podcast used the theoretical (early American transcendentalists and fakers like Thoreau) to illustrate today’s physical and social dichotomy of suburban versus rural life. Everyone else seems to have gone off into the ether of American literature and what they read in junior high. Hint – I had to read all that stuff too – and I hated much of it. It’s why I was an English English major – better writers and thinkers, with much more panache. Plus I minored… Read more »
the men all open doors for me or tease me (with my grey hair) as “young lady.”
I loved that part.
It is said that civility costs nothing, and when the safety net disappears, politeness will return, because to snap back or whine will mean you don’t get to eat today. Please, Thank You, You’re Welcome, Pardon Me, and I’m Sorry will make a comeback as will Ma’am and Sir.
” We have not registered to vote or signed up at the local dem/repuke headquarters. ” Good. There should be a law that you can only vote for the office you qualify for having been at least the 3rd generation. So if you move within your state, you can still vote for president, governor and senator. But nothing else. “Oh, I love this new place. Much better than where I came from. Now let me screw it up by voting” I agree with much of what you said. However, you are very lucky to be in a functional rural community.… Read more »
I’ve long believed that “red states” as we call them should be passing tougher citizenship laws to establish residency and voting rights in state elections. i.e. you’re not a voting-eligible citizen in Texas until you’ve lived there 25 years…that sort of thing. The best thing Colorado did back in the early 1990’s was pass the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR). It has neutered Denver in ways that still drive them insane today. Every 2 years we get another bizarre attempt to unravel TABOR. Last year it was “give up your rights to your TABOR refund and we won’t crush you… Read more »
This is great. I’ve independently been commenting that red states should ban government housing and immigration at the state level, as well as all kinds of proxies for liberals to scare the minorities and liberals off. If red states can give homeless people a bus ticket to California, why can’t they do it for the basketball Americans and the liberals? Go live on someone else’s dole. They’ll see a reduction in crime, totally unrelated.
We kind of “half way”’d it. A couple acres on the fringe of the burbs. We aren’t ready to go remote, at least not yet. It’s quiet all day and dark at night. The city sprawls at the horizon, but it is “over there”. The small town up the road a mile has a few local shops and a couple restaurants. Still getting used to that, but we’re emotionally secure as well. Me, my wife, a dog, and peace and quiet. Our youngest is 18 and moving out soon to a halfway house. (college). The other two are grown and… Read more »
Sterling, brilliant comment. I will buy your book, which surely will be shorter (just kidding!). As you may recall, I’m a native rural Southerner who lived abroad a long time with all the yadda, yadda, yadda that went with it. When we moved back here decades ago, it actually was an initial cultural shock even though it was home. Now the only thing I regret is the time we spent away. During the first wave of internal migrants/Yankees, a popular local bumper sticker was I DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH. This latest wave largely has not been… Read more »
Jack: Many thanks. I actually listened to Zman’s podcast today, and jotted a few notes because I thought it was so en pointe and I wanted to address them. And being lazy, I didn’t want to go back and edit and condense.
It was a particularly good and insightful podcast today and I do need to leave a complete reply to it this weekend if I get a chance. Sometimes I think Z just claims to ad lib his best spots, but he’s a pretty straight up guy so he’s likely being truthful. I’m glad you didn’t condense, by the way, because some things do need to be fleshed out. To add to my last reply, the worst thing you could have done, and wisely did not, was act as an evangelist on the issues of the day to the locals. Eventually… Read more »
Can’t be easy for a woman to piss in a punchbowl. Not much in the way of sites and a barrel. I suppose you have to rely upon Kentucky windage.
sights
**sigh**
It only becomes a penalty after Z installs the edit button.
Thank God.
Quite apologizing, put on your “big boy pants” and do what everyone else does—blame your spell checker! 🙂
Ostei: You get my first ever emoticon. 😁
I much prefer that emoticon to the middle finger emoticon…
3g4me, God bless your wisdom. That gray hair was honestly come by. I don’t know if anyone ever slung a “Physician heal thyself” in your face; but I get the feeling you would be more than justified in saying “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.” We are kindred spirits; and I hope my own experiment in choosing a final place fares as well as your’s seems to have done.
The real problem with this guy is that Appalachia didn’t “just happen.” The things he is looking for caused Appalachia. They caused Kensington ave. They caused all the awful things we see across the US. He’s not escaping Appalachia, he’s CAUSING it. When he’s bellyaching about the social problems he sees in others, he should remember them when he’s hiring some brown guy to mow his lawn, some brown woman to babysit his kids and buys some made in China junk in the bigbox corporations sucking wealth out of communities across the US. The people he complains about are the… Read more »
Hear, hear. Ironically, this very phenomenon gives those brain-drain areas at least a semblance to survive what is coming.
As a guy working at an industrial plant as a maintenance tech, I think my co-workers and operators would agree that we want management to stay as far away from us as possible. So the feeling between the managerial class and us is mutual. They stay in their admin building and we stay here.
Once upon a time, in a refinery long long ago, an operator got killed in an industrial accident involving malfunctioning equipment. After the uh-oh squad finished their concern dance, I got called in to make sure it never happened again. First, I asked the guys in the field what they thought should be done. Then consulted with the “wise” old-timers in the main office. Both opinions were unrealistic fantasies, so I just focused on reality and acted accordingly. Problem fixed (but not cheap) and my reward was to be ostracized as a heretic. Everyone has a place in the puzzle… Read more »
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an interesting essay on Thoreau that is well worth reading as a skeptical take:
https://digital.nls.uk/rlstevenson/browse/archive/90445557
And with all this, not one word about
pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of
flesh and blood. It was not inappropriate, surely,
that he had such close relations with the fish.
Excellent podcast today. Loads of wisdom were dispensed. Zman’s voice has always settled quite well on the ears, yet it was notably soothing during this episode. He has carved out a remarkable niche of his own among sociopolitical commentators. Dare I say he “transcends” the standard rhetoric of this age?
His voice sometimes makes me want to take a razorblades to my wrists.
Would you prefer a higher pitched voice? A vocal fry? A lisp? An NPR voice, with the dweebly music overdubbed.
Great podcast, now let’s go deeper into root causes. Affluent civilization begets the death of hardship, existential gauntlets, and the culling that drives fitness evolution. Absence of culling enables pathogens and parasites to thrive, and ultimately pose a lethal threat to the host. And yes, this model applies at the societal level, not just for individuals and tribes. We need environments (towns, villages, cities) that reinvigorate culling in some palatable form such that our DNA improves with each succeeding generation. And how to get there is no easy problem. Education, persuasion, and voting have been failing spectacularly for centuries now,… Read more »
There’s another line from Emerson to our thing, nothing like what we think of when we remember transcendentalism from school. My teachers were boomers, so Emerson, like all historical good guys, was a hippie. And some current righty trad stuff is reminiscent of that*. But also, the genealogy of “right-accelerationism” is Emerson > Nietzsche > Deleuze > Land > any variation of “Collapse is necessary and will necessitate (or at least whisper, to some) what’s next.” That’s not how anyone actually got here. Deleuze is a car-sized pothole in that road. His most ardent disciples don’t read him. But that’s… Read more »
It is almost unbearably funny that hippiness, “back to nature,” nudity, seems to have many Germanic roots. How would the stern failed painter explain this?
(Long ago, I had a wonderful hippie girlfriend whose ancestry was 100% German. Don’t get me started on my memories of her…)
These are expressions of the Volk, which must be accommodated in any nation that gives voice to the people. The question is, “How can we allow the expression to these hippy feelings without dooming ourselves to suicidal utopianism?”
“How can we allow the expression to these hippy feelings without dooming ourselves to suicidal utopianism?”
Speaking as one who would have qualified as a hippy in my late teens (and incidentally, am of majority German lineage), it’s not difficult at all. In my case, I grew up. So I guess the question is how do you make others grow up.
Limited war allowed warrior/honor culture to thrive (and counterbalance the hippy and the nerd) in a way sportsball hasn’t.
That started ending when the revolutionary French went total war, culminating in the Nazi sperg-out reaction about a nation not fighting and expanding is dying, or something like that. Now warrior culture is anathema, so we’re left with the hippy and the nerd.
Guessing off the top of my head.
Or hippie? Idk.
“warrior/honor culture”
This is the answer to my question. I don’t know how to instutionalize this, but thank you.
Yeah, Freikörperkultur. I’ve seen it. Mostly unpleasant to look at.
A family is not a 20 year event. You have to find a spouse for your children so that your progeny is elevated instead of immiserated. It must be somewhere that your kids can join you and you can be a grandparent, and hopefully a great grandparent, instead of an occasional casual visitor. You must be a good custodian of your family heritage by sowing your seed in a fertile field, not casting it upon the rocks or amongst the thornbushes. You have to be somewhere where there is a sufficient pool of quality people for your sons and daughters… Read more »
“ A family is not a 20 year event. You have to find a spouse for your children…” Spot on. I was of the opinion that everything would settle down and we’d be free when the kids went off to college. Boy was I wrong. Fortunately I married a smarter and better person than me. She now is super grandma, but always to fill in the gaps where the kids need help—like the time between semesters at the private schools the grandkids attend. When the grand children “visit”, we go with the program—TV stays off, no electronics allowed, reading and… Read more »
10 REM PUFF DIDLEY DINT KILL HISELF
20 GOTO 10
Checking Wikipedia… Hmm… Puffy still alive – for now. It’s best to go on record early with these things though so I’ll join you. Puffy did not kill himself.
This is a sales post. He is a consultant abd ge is Hopi g to fund his lifestyle off it. But this is a great topic Z. That question “why”? Is spot on. But it’s cleared up when you realize he is selling a fantasy at 80$ a month
I’m pretty sure he has mixed race kids. So he only goes so far.
The dollar sign goes BEFORE the numerals. You’re placing it last isn’t clever or amusing.
I notice others that have done this as well so perhaps there’s a new push to further confuse the written language.
should have been -your-
The American Renaissance is probably the era of American writing I know the most about. I would not say that Emerson rejected empiricism; rather, I contend her perceived the shortcoming as the industrial era continued to reshape society. I believe that this message is essential in the current moment, for the inability to trust intuition and individual experience of profundity is one of the disabilities the average American possesses. To be fair, I haven’t listened to the podcast yet (Google Podcast stopped working today, so I must find another app), but I hope you recognize the value of the Romantics.… Read more »
Eloi: “…the inability to trust intuition and individual experience of profundity is one of the disabilities the average American possesses…” Intuition lives in the Amygdala, and is now largely unique to the Red States; whereas fantasy & delusion & mesmerizability & hypnotizability are now largely unique to the Blue States: https://tinyurl.com/5t44x5n7 What I fear is that pharmaceutical agents such as Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors [SSRIs] are silencing the voice of Reason in the Amygdala, and possibly even amplifying the voice of Insanity in the Insula, and are pushing White sh!tlib personalities into chemically-induced psychopathy & maybe even sadism. G0d only… Read more »
Once in my twenties, while under an incredible amount of stress (so bad I had exploding head syndrome), I relented and took some SSRI’s. After a week, I tossed them. They made me have unsettling thoughts and a disconnect I could recognize as dangerous. I have no doubt most modern spree killers are on them. (This, of course, being the reason medical records are sealed.)
As to your account on ego and profundity, I would say that I believe in an objective reality experienced subjectively. I understand they flatter themselves subjectively, but that, objectively, they understood nothing.
When still working, I had what my doctor called “zingers” something like IED (Intermittent explosive disease) where you go all viking berserker. They sounded like a heavy wooden chair being dragged across a stone floor.
Bourbon, spot on. Say what you will about Jordan Peterson, but on the above topic he’s a good example (of a bad example). In his early writings he *praised* SSRI’s and how they “helped” him in his life. I remember reading such and thing “WTF”. Then, a few short years later, he was on death’s doorstep due to the continued use/abuse of them, and he needed to be airlifted to Russia to find a detox protocol for these poisons. Literally months spent on death’s doorstep being slowly weaned off of these mind altering poisons. He seems well now wrt his… Read more »
It was benzodiapines, not SSRI’s that Peterson had to go through an arduous withdrawal from. As bad as SSRI’s can be, an addiction to benzos is much worse.
What Peterson expressly wrote about and praised was *SSRI’s*. Of that I’m certain. What he crashed hard on was indeed, benzodiazepine (or derivative). Sorry if there is a confusion, but I consider it “a distinction without a difference” to the point being made. The point remains, to wit, the taking of psychoactive pharmaceuticals is not without risk and certainly over prescribed. I roomed with a guy as a freshman in the dorm who had a bottle filled with Stellazine (Thorazine lite) among any number of other prescriptions. This guy was loopy as all hell and finally was forcibly removed to… Read more »
Yes, you are correct. Bene’s, but it was I remember distinctly SSRI’s Jordan wrote about. He was in the bag for psychotropics early on, which I found surprising given my impression of the man’s intellect. A dangerous crutch indeed.
“Romanticism, of which Transcendentalism is a byproduct of, is the rejection of the materialism …”
Agree mostly but European romanticism itself is part of European esoteric currents of the late 18th and early 19 centuries. But I would be going too far afield to write about these here. Various books on the relatively new area of scholarly endeavor of “Western esotericism” going into this more deeply (e.g., Faivre, Hanegraff, Versluis, Stuckrad).
Sorry, “go”, not “going.” Pity one can’t correct inadvertent mistakes in posting.
Not at all.
Misspelled words, poor grammar choices, poor punctuation etc. haven’t been programmed into ChatGPT. Yet.
Even our host makes errors.
I vastly prefer this.
Absolutely, and Transcendentalism features esoteric elements. I believe there there is an ideal, spiritual realm, and we occasionally catch glimpses of it, if we are observant. This is inherently subjective, the basis of one aspect of the esoteric. Now, I am not saying I am an Emersonian, becoming a transparent eyeball, and I do not believe in an oversoul, but I do believe that there are currents beyond the material (but not simply rejecting the material; thus, not simply a rejection of empiricism). Nor, to be clear, am I saying I support the wicked practices of esoteric groups (Illuminati/ Rosicrucian,… Read more »
“The American Renaissance is probably the era of American writing I know the most about.” Eloi, why did the Transcendentalists emphasize individualism so much? Emerson’s best known work is “Self-Reliance,” after all. It all seems so foolish. The reason they were not tortured to death by the natives was because of their collectivism. Thoreau could only write Walden because Emerson let him live on his land. How “self-reliant” of him. I tend to regret the time I spent reading those guys because they seem to lack self-awareness as much as some black who thinks that they won a formal debate… Read more »
I place the work in context. I think Walden (Thoreau, I know) is largely nonsense. Some beautiful passages, yes. I think Emerson’s actual spiritual beliefs are nonsense, though he does have some great speeches (I really like the Harvard Commencement Address – the sun shines today, also). I should be more careful to explain that the Transcendentalists offered another angle to the world that the empiricists (such as Locke, Hobbes, and Bacon) had come to dominate and stifle the world in the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. As mentioned above, I am no Transcendentalist. I am no prepper. But I am… Read more »
Your post is delightful in that it grasps at the ephemeral, as much as we are able.
(Oh, all those lost girlfriends from 20 years ago! Paul Simon has done some breathtaking work.)
I tend towards brutal empiricism and I appreciate you reminding me of what I sometimes overlook.
And, sorry to dominate the posting today, but I love this topic. I do not use the American Renaissance and Transcendentalism interchangeably. For me, all of the writers of the era were wrestling with the key issue of an American voice and an empirical mindset. I find this tension fascinating. Poe even wrote a poem about how the scientist has killed poetic sensibility. What is ironic, or appropriate, is that Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, much like Edwards in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” used science and the techniques of the scientist in order to highlight the shortcomings… Read more »
Are you familiar with Poe’s Eureka? I haven’t read it, but from what I’ve heard, it seems to address your greatest interest: a romantic trying to come to terms with the successes of the scientific revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka:_A_Prose_Poem
If I could assign homework, I would assign this prose poem to you 🙂
I absolutely have. I first heard about it with the claim he predicted the Big Bang Theory in this piece. I find it perfectly emblematic of works such as “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” where the author confronts divinity with rationalism. I believe his approbation of the limits of science, and how he fills in the gaps, is a perfect indictment of the limits of science. I find it, however, a bit unmoored, while still interesting. His reliance of terms as the basis of reasoning was, to me, a failure. Words are ersatz.
Dude… A reading:
https://youtu.be/cC7yFkE-f8g
Spectacular, Z. You are right – there is a LOT of fuzzy thinking going on in the prepper/off grid/parallel society camps and you hit the nail right on the head with all of them. But… I wonder if maybe you missed the boat with our young exile with the Twatter poast? Is he seeking an impossible Utopia? Or is he seeking his tribe? People in the country towns get clannish and mistrustful of outsiders and it takes a certain personality profile to parachute into their communities and make a go of it. (You could do it, I would suspect). I… Read more »
The prepper thing gets me. I have a shelf of Ayn Rand and a shelf of libertarian fantasy novels from the long-long ago. Neithet of them are “me” anymore. And having thought through “off grid” at length, it is a suicidal idea. Ask Randy and Uncle Ted: there is no such thing as running far enough to escape the Eye of Sauron. Galt’s Gulch would be Donner Pass with fancy tobacco. You must live in the world, though not be of it. BUT, the system is fragile and you must be a good steward. You cannot just stuff your face… Read more »
There is an in between. You prep to “shelter in place”. The assumptions being to take care of yourself until things settle down enough for some restoration to take place of basic infrastructure. This may also not take place and you’ll only prolong the agony. YMMV.
If the Singularity*** does indeed coalesce into ackshual tangible physical reality, then two things are certain: 1) No one who failed to prep will survive. 2) The only people who will have any chance of surviving will have prep’ed in advance. Prepping simply gives you a very slim opportunity to persist [if you’re willing to seize the opportunity and work with it]. Whereas failing to Prep insures your demise. =============== ***Whatever the “Singularity” proves to have been: Thermonukular War, V@xxpocalypse, White Genocide, etc etc etc. =============== PS: Prepping includes having refused the COVID v@xxines & having remained Pμrebl00ded [which you… Read more »
It’s like not tailgating the car in front of you-prepping simply gives you a longer length of time in which to make a more reasoned decision, instead of panicking and slamming on the brakes.
I realize that if I cannot get 5 gallons of gasoline for my generator, stuff has gone so sideways that there is nothing that I can do to “prep.”
Long before you get to the point that you cannot get those 5 gallons of gasoline, it’s become far too valuable for other uses than running a few lights and binge watching Buffy. Indeed, the sound of a running generator is a zombie magnet…
You don’t have to live autonomously. Focus on non-fragile.
I believe you are making my point. I dont see serious people discussing moving to a cave in the desert to eat bugs and contemplate the void until the Big Flash gets them anymore; thats just people selling goofy books and supplements to the gullible. But the Z podcast expressed perplexity at the Twitter guy’s “sustainability” in a suburban setting. This is an “ant versus grasshopper” thing that rejects the false dichotomy of “you’re a sheeple if you arent living alone on a mountain with a Main Battle Rifle but without indoor plumbing.” Since the ‘rona, most white people with… Read more »
I used to joke, in a time long passed, that my preparations for collapse was a rifle and a list of the Mormons in my city. Alas, that seems a bit too risqué these days.
Filthie, you’ve touched on something that I find riffs with Zman’s remark that it’s not about the place but about the people. In my 60+ years, I’ve lived in every sort of place from huge metros in California’s Bay Area to a town of 10,000 in what could easily be described as the Appalachia of northern California. Cities spawn crime and cultural filth because the anonymity and diversity create a pervasive depersonalization that transforms individuals into generic consumers. Sometimes you can intentionally band together with a few like-minded folk to foster an oasis of meaning and purpose in the urban… Read more »
It really does take a village. I grew up in a small town of 1200 with no access out or in except by boat or plane, so you needed either money or a large boat. Everyone knew whose kid you were and it was not unusual to come home and have my mother meet me at the door with “And just what were you doing hanging around the insert location here?”. Someone had seen me and called her, knowing that I was not supposed to be there. It also worked the other way, as we all knew whose truck NOT… Read more »
Great show Zman! I actually enjoyed the more off the cuff shows from time to time. One absolutely vital subtopic from the entire show is the ignorance that most folks under 40 have of the origin of the history of Western thought, culture, and philosophy. Perhaps I am living among the hoi polloi, but I know very few people who own or read books at all. When folks come by to visit they are always shocked by the number of books I own. Inevitably they ask, “Have you read all these?” It really blows their mind when I assure them… Read more »
Herm… how deep do we have to go, A? I am 60 and I got the “writing on the wall” but missed that second one and will have to look it up. But… I think I will survive. Through this and other sites I have access to clarity of thought almost on par with that that went into the writing of the Bible. The kind of lunacy destroying us in our day is not going to be fixed by reading more academic books – it will require busted skulls, stretched necks and heated exchanges of steel and shot. Critical thinking… Read more »
Correct, Filthie. It reminds me of Citnavs like VDH who think that all we have to do to defeat the lefties is read them the Constitution in a louder voice. This is going to come down to bare knuckles.
> But then in high school (a very run of the mill public school mind you in a small Southern town) we read Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Faulkner, Longfellow, Hardy, Dickens, Scott, Shakespeare, Frost, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Poe, etc. just to name a few. My education in a rural high school was a mixed bad, but I was blessed with some excellent English teachers, which I am now thankful for. At the time though, I universally gave them a hard time. Once we were tasked to read “Thanatopsis” by William Bryant, which was a sort of soothing meditation on death. I wrote… Read more »
“To a Waterfowl” is far superior, still Bryant in his youth but less precocious and more vulnerable.
Yes. Extremely important point that is not emphasized enough. I practically grew up in libraries reading books. I got a damn good liberal arts education. As a high-schooler and undergrad I read stuff like Tocqueville, Thoreau, Twain, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Federalist Papers, and so on. In grad school I read, and later as a professor taught, Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Nietzsche, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke. In true Socratic fashion, the more I read, the more I became aware of what I didn’t know. I was in awe of the Victorian and Edwardian-era British academics who made careers out of studying… Read more »
> They were adults, they had no access to the internet, no cell phones, and plenty of time to read. And they read what they were assigned word-for-word, in detail, over and over, and they were ready to discuss it.
This is the home life of my kids, well, outside of it being a prison. They can also play with Legos for hours. Removing instant dopamine hits does wonders, as it requires slow, methodical work to get the same sense of entertainment. The solution required, eliminating electronic media, is not hard, but no one is willing to do it.
Chet is correct – the dopamine flooding youths’ brains are causing the same thinning of the cortex as sustained cocaine use. No cell phones for my children (and I do not stare at them myself – otherwise, I am a gross hypocrite).
“They did not understand ANY references or idioms from classic literature, but they sure as hell know everything about sportsball, rappers, and celebrities.” Yep, 35 years ago it seems we were all decrying the lack of “cultural literacy” (Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr.) coming about in the society. I see this as “planned”—if you don’t know your past, you can’t object to your current situation, nor avoid an even worse future. I was blessed with being a part of the last generational cohort to have a grounding in the Western canon. Not just in college, but in HS as well.… Read more »
“Yep, 35 years ago it seems we were all decrying the lack of “cultural literacy” (Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr.) coming about in the society.” Well, it’s here. Students do not know anything about the Civil War — or even what century it was in. They do not know anything about World War II or Pearl Harbor. They do not know that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese. They do not know anything about the Vietnam War or even when it happened. Obviously SOME of them know SOME of that stuff, but many — perhaps most — do… Read more »
“they do not write paragraphs”
Alas, that goes for several Z-man posters as well…
PS–I wonder how much of the ignorance you describe centers upon vibrant students? I have no doubt whatsoever that white students, too, are of a far lower caliber than those of 30 years ago, but I imagine increased vibrancy levels have also powerfully exacerbated ignorance.
We often decry the programming that the youth are getting. There are many narratives about the Civil War for example, that most “educated” people believe. The South as pure evil, Lincoln as a demigod, etc… The impression that I get from many young people though, is that they do not have this programming. They don’t have *any* programming. They don’t have the “wrong” view of the Civil War but no idea it happened, just as you’ve observed. Their view of history must be as a series of random, disconnected events floating in a void with no causal linkages. This mirrors… Read more »
Ostei. Yep, it’s across the board wrt student illiteracy. I do not exclude Whites. I do though forgive the few instances of poor form in this group as we are *all* guilty at times and time is short for response. Just like spelling and grammar errors, we have no ability to correct postings and the spell checker at times is a creative genius. 😉 Xman. As to writing paragraphs and expression of thought…yesterday I shared a story of tutoring college athletes (mostly Black). Wife also assigned written papers—once! What was turned in, I got to look at. The star football… Read more »
I work as a tutor with older school kids. It’s terrible. Even when they study classics, it’s only through a DIE lens. For example, the current text is Othello. They spend all their time writing about racism and sexism. None of the broader themes of the play or its true significance are even hinted at. And the rest of the curriculum is filled with modern woke garbage like the execrable Carol Ann Duffy’s “poetry”.
This is known, and has been commented upon by those wiser than I.
Still doesn’t change anything. We live in the times we are given and all else seems trivial.
Funny that this topic should arise. Just last night I was thinking about the challenging literature I read in junior high and high school. As early as the 7th grade (1979-80 for me), we were reading the likes of Fitzgerald, Poe, Shakespeare, Melville, Chaucer, Cather, Twain, Hemingway, Steinbeck and the like. I can only imagine what the 7th-grade kiddos in my old junior high are doing in English class today.
As someone who has has firsthand knowledge of the situation, I must say that the issue is not just the crap material (which it is ); it is the laborious pacing and teaching. Every three sentences, “Best Practices” says that the student must stop and answer comprehension questions. Of course, the issue then becomes they never actually read. Who among us would actually read if we had to stop every thirty seconds and answer a question?
You will be happy to know, however, that 9th graders just spend over a month on Night by Weasel.
Night is a good read, but not a month, nor in place of the other authors mentioned above. Forgetting about the nature of the author and the story setting, there are many reasons to read it wrt human tragedy and human weakness. Elie Wiesel and his relationship to his father and inability to keep him alive—even to the point of wishing him dead—and subsequent life long guilt is greatly moving and part of the human tragedy, which we can all relate to.
All BMW SUVs are already built in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Many of Michelin tires going on them are also made nearby. Volvo says they are also building a plant in the area too (not sure if will be for cars or trucks).
Part of it is a relatively low cost, right-to-work state. Probably just as important, South Carolina has 4 nuclear power stations – making electricity costs affordable and stable, unlike Germany.
HAR!
Ya hear that, Dissidents? Canada’s gonna be building your cars!
Learn to love brass lamps, rumble seats, and wind. 🙂
My fine GMC Sierra from many years ago (2006) was built in Canada. Canadians build stuff well.
Agreed: go easy on the Canucks. Canada is one of my favorite states.
They can’t even make a good hockey stick anymore… 😂
Where can we go for retirement? IIRC, Someone said there were two places left in the US that were massively majority white, sort of like the 1950s. But I can’t remember what they were, and I can’t locate the comment. Does anyone know? I need to do like Zman pretty soon. Any good candidate rural locations? Thanks in advance!
Possibly thinking Maine, New Hampshire and Idaho. They’re pretty tidey whitey.
Hmmmmmm.
I have heard that a good retirement strategy is to go straight into the mouth of the cat and move to the far east, Apparently there are still places where if you have $60,000 dollars US – you’re a millionaire. Money talks, and the local little clippers are well behaved, industrious and eager to please and serve.
But whadda I know?
Don’t take this the wrong way, but unless you are a truly exceptional, perceptive person, you should probably not retire to a small rural community. Stick to somewhere similar in character to where you have lived your life, whether where you live now or in a state of your choice. It is extraordinarily difficult to fit into somewhere you have no roots, particularly as you get older. At least when you are younger, your kids will make friends with the locals, but without that in, you will probably always be an outsider. There are ways to do so as a… Read more »
Even if you have old roots, like a hometown, a certain percentage just doesn’t fit in. A good hint is if you didn’t fit in with your peers during High School, it likely won’t be any different with time. Some of the jerks will mellow out, but the difference in personalities, temperaments, and interests remain the same.
This is a really good point, for the average person it takes a long time to break into the community life of a small town. Especially if you are not going to be working or operating a business, there are limited opportunities for you to get to know other community members. People also need to have their eyes open as to how widespread the trashworld mindset has become. As Zman alludes to in the podcast don’t expect these small towns to be Mayberry with updated tech stuff.
But a small town is not only a place to find community, it is also a place to be left alone. Depends upon what it is you seek.
Depends on what you mean. Everyone knows everyone else, and an effort to stay hidden will be noted. Soon the local gossip will be that you are a serial killer on the lam or an unregistered sex offender. Which is fine, until everyone starts treating you as if you are.
You can have your privacy, sure, but at the cost of exile and isolation.
This is true. I still recall the time my mom drove me out to a small town on the Chesapeake Bay northeast of Baltimore. It was supposedly “quaint”. She parked and we started to walk down Main street. Soon a pack of zombie teenagers materialized though and started following us about 100 yards back. Serious, they were thin, pale, and did not look like they were going to violin practice. It’s important to visit these places in rural America because a lot of them have a high, um… zombie quotient. This was way back in the 80s too. I can… Read more »
A lot of the posts in this particular thread make it seem like the choice is a binary between fitting in with the Good Ol’ Boys and Church Ladies or being a totally isolated outcast and pariah with no friends. As a guy in his late fifties who grew up in these rural parts I can say that is not that simple. Even in a place with a low population density, you still get cliques and subcultures. When I went to HS out here I wasn’t hanging out with the Jocks, Preppies or Rednecks. I was hanging out with the… Read more »
Randy, you’re assuming you’ll be able to retire. The way the economy is going, that might not be possible. Sorry, but I’m black-pilled today.
My wife and chose to pack up and move to a semi-rural area of the South.
One difference between the South and New England is the distance between the classes. New England and New Jersey has it’s rich towns and neighborhoods well separated from the working poor. It’s become a running joke with us – drive past a beautiful luxurious house, and in less than a mile you will pass a shack or trailer.
From what I’ve seen, many parts of the South are the last areas where there is actual integration of social classes. That’s not the case in urban areas there, either, but outside the cities you will see rich and poor in close proximity.
As for Z’s Austin exemplar, you know the Dirts he lived among in Appalachia were glad to see him leave, too. He’ll likely end up back in his place of origin when the Austin freaks disappoint him and fail to live up to his expectations.
What is this about “Austin exemplar”???? And how the hell do I get my f***ing photo out of these posts. Zman? Can you fix this? Otherwise no more posts from me. Sorry.
Use a fake email address
Or you could use your real email address if you haven’t done anything silly like fill in deets about yourself. No point in doxxing yourself.
“Austin exemplar” was the guy who fled Appalachia convinced he was about to be sodomized and then eaten. Unlike Zman, I suspect the guy is a total asshole.
I’ll bet he gots a reaaaaal perty mouth.
Maxda: Yes. But there is a distinct difference with the old, local monied class and the newcomers from the cities (almost uniformly ‘retirees’ – bah, humbug). There are some seriously wealthy people here, who live modestly and whose wealth is in acreage, livestock, and family. They could buy stocks and jewels and travel the world, but they put their money where their values are – in family and local community. The incoming retirees, on the other hand, build 5,000 sq. ft. mansions on 1-3 acres, preferably with a water view. And they have brought with them mestizo contractors, and ethnic… Read more »
The alienation of whites from themselves has to be one of the most beastly products of the modern age. As someone who grew up in a mixed income small town, I am routinely dismayed at the corrosive effects of suburban life on its denizens, who simply cannot imagine life outside their income bracket. On white females this has induced the cuckoo effect, in which the care and consideration they would have bestowed on the less fortunate in their own communities has been forcibly transferred to ‘the other’, while in white males this has transferred hero worship of their own ancestors… Read more »
I’ve never thought of it that way but you’ve got a valid point. I’ll have to ponder this over the weekend.
That’s quite insightful, IM. Suburbs are simultaneously white ghettos and isolation chambers.
Jack Dobson: “Suburbs are simultaneously white ghettos and isolation chambers…”
What terrifies me moast about the suburbs are the 95-lb AWFLs trying to hold back 120-lb pitbulls from attacking you.
Around here, you can’t walk on a sidewalk anymoar unless you’re c@rrying, and your c@liber is greater than or equal to .40 or 10mm, and, even then, I would want a very large m@g@zine to make sure that I could finish the job.
Hah, brought an incident to mind that happened today. Took wife out for lunch and went to a thriving outdoor bar and restaurant owned by a Navy Seal, “Trident”. The atmosphere is pure White testosterone on steroids. Filled with rednecks, active duty LEO, military, and other personnel and retirees. Just as we parked, a crowd of firearms instructors were leaving. Shirts, badges, vests, duty belts, multiple mag’s…armed like in a grade B movie. Wife looks at me and says, what is this place? I said, don’t worry the food is good and it’s safe. 😉 That’s probably the only redeeming… Read more »
If Occasional Cortex saw that place, she’d require shock treatment in an asylum in upstate New York for a few years before she could return to polite society.
One of the big reasons Whites fail to organize is because of their tendency to be warehoused in the suburbs. Being spread out for many square miles around the city in “neighborhoods” where no one knows their next door neighbor renders them quite harmless and docile.
Outgroup preference is a real thing among whites, and only whites. And, if not radically curtailed within the next 50 years or so, it will prove terminal.
As a man who grew up in a rural area in a lower class home then moving up in class and raising children in the suburbs i find as i get older a longing to go back to that small community i left behind years ago, it helps that my wife was also raised in that rural area. The good thing is that there is already a people and a community that we are familiar with, the bad thing is our children we raised have no affinity toward it. That small home town community does not have cool restaurants and… Read more »
Lived in Austin and a lot of other fashionable and very unfashionable places. My advice to the young man- don’t be a snob.
This is underrated advice.
It’s amazing how far you can get in life simply by saying, “Yes Ma’am” and “Yes Sir”.
I think once you quit hearing “sir” and “ma’am,” the rest is soon to foller…
Society can’t totally corrupt the individual. There’s too much fire, too much passion, being built in the individual’s chest to be swamped by the cold water of society. Even in Japan — the most conformist, ass-licking society in the world — the individual manages to eke out an existence. All hope is not lost for the individual.
From you and Ed Dutton I’m getting these points:
1.) Normie, by nature, can’t “wake up”
2.) Elites, by nature, rule civilizations
3.) The traits that distinguish normies and elites can’t be repressed by environment (or hopeful wishes)
4.) Our outstanding civilizational achievements have come, and will always come, with dysfunctional trade-offs because such is the nature of the human condition
I don’t disagree, exactly, but then what is the point of engaging with politics at all? Why care about events whose outcomes are the predetermined outputs of a massive biological calculator?
Frank, as you point out, if the future of humanity is determined by biology, what’s the point of talking about it? The cosmic joke may be that we are determined to talk about outcomes that we can’t change. What could be funnier than robots programmed to discuss their free will? And that we’re determined to laugh at the joke? But just like some people are smarter or more creative than others, some people may have more free will and more ability to change how determined consequences are manifest in the world. Some people may have the ability and opportunity to… Read more »
IMHO If you accept that life is purely material then you have to believe events are predetermined. That’s because the materials always interact with each other according to nature’s laws, whether it’s two atoms in lab or infinitely more making up the human brain. Just because we don’t have enough information to predict future events doesn’t mean their outcome isn’t certain. Think of when you let your little brother “play” video games with you by giving him a useless controller. To him, the events onscreen are so unpredictable he falsely believes he’s controlling them. But that doesn’t change the fact… Read more »
You may well be right. However, there may be cases where a person can understand a determined system and react to that understanding with some degree of free will. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and Turing’s Halting Problem may be the purest expression of what I’m talking about. (Both of these are just formal expressions of the ancient Liar’s Paradox.) Gödel was able to understand the limitations of arithmetic reasoning. While he couldn’t change these results, he could tell us to no longer pursue formalizing intelligence, like Whitehead and Russell attenoted in the Principia. Some humans may have some ability to react… Read more »
“ …a person can understand a determined system and react to that understanding with some degree of free will.”
Precisely. Knowledge is power. I can’t fight off a cougar in the wild with my bear hands, but I can understand when he is stalking me (as in deciding upon his next meal) and when he is just curious as to a strange creature he’s never seen before. From there I can choice how to react with a higher probability of a successful interaction with this creature than if I simply scream and run.
I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at. Rather that in a purely materialistic universe, there is no such thing as “randomness” even at the quantum level. “Randomness” means just that we don’t know the cause(s) or input(s) of something. It’s not that something physical called a “probability field” “collapses” when a particle’s spin is measured. The particle had that spin before we measured it. We just replaced a probabilistic value we didn’t know with an actual value we do. Upshot is that in a purely materialistic universe, everything is deterministic. Everything that ever happens in such a universe could… Read more »
Steve: “Everything that ever happens in such a universe could be predicted knowing only the state of all matter and energy in the universe at any arbitrary point in time.”
Or not. Who knows? Can there be pockets of limited free will?
This is to what I afix my unlikely hopes.
Frank: “Elites, by nature, rule civilizations”.
What we are seeing in modrenity is that PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVES rule societies.
“Why care about events whose outcomes are the predetermined outputs of a massive biological calculator?”
Because that is also a part of the biological calculator.
There’s always Pareto’s Circulation of Elites to consider. Foxes and Lions and whatnot. His concepts of Residues and Derivations falls right inline here too.
I occasionally see posts here and around the dissident-sphere about the hopelessness of reaching Normie. Well, I concur. The idea most people have of “revolutions” is a bunch of peasants with obsolete rifles charging some government building. I actually think a lot of early Soviet films might be to blame for this. They made some real propaganda masterpieces back then with very good cinematography and I think that footage was later adopted by Western documentaries whenever they needed a scene of a revolution. The Soviet movies were bullshit though. There will never be more than a minority of people fed… Read more »
At whatever age I have attempted his writings — and I’m 60+ now — I have always found Emerson to be completely unreadable. It’s like wrestling with fog. Some time ago, it became clear to me that the newly independent United States felt an urgent need of what would now be called a public intellectual, and Emerson was one of several in New England who fit the profile — Channing was another. Thoreau is at his best in his travelogues: the Maine woods, Cape Cod, canoeing the Assabet, Concord, and Merrimack rivers. Walden is mostly annoying, especially when you find… Read more »
Yeah, I used to really admire people who made a name living outside of society either literally (think survivalists) or more abstractly (think James LaFond). The reality is that these people rely on the society they claim to hold in contempt. If there weren’t suckers growing grain and coining silver pennies at the mint, there would be nothing for the highway man to rob. Last I heard, James LaFond lives in a patron’s suburban back yard, camped in a tent. He calls it “the yurt of the Great Khan”.
Unreadable could describe most writers’ attempts at creating a great American literature prior to Mark Twain. Try reading James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans is a great story, but a terrible novel. Herman Melville is probably the best of that early 19th-century lot.
Moby Dick is unreadable dreck IMO. He became a ‘great author’ by choice of late 19th Century slackademians, IIRC.
I recently tried that book again. Awful, with what jumped out at me in current year as an early homoerotic theme, via the aboriginal Quee whatshisname.
Mostly remember the long preamble about the whaling industry. Like a novelist who does his research. Some might prefer to skip both Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans for the film versions.
Regarding Moby Dick — well, to each his own. I’ve read that book straight through several times on my own (no classwork here!) and enjoyed it. But I agree it’s not for everyone.
Two editions stand out: the 1930 Random House edition with illustrations by Rockwell Kent, and the 1983 Univ of California edition, with Barry Moser wood engravings. Goog ’em.
I found Walden to be one of the most pleasant satisfying reads ever. I cherish the memory of reading it.
When one snipes about Thoreau having dinner with his mother, it’s like criticizing the Pieta because Michelangelo picked his nose.
Admire the art as a distillation of the person’s finest thoughts and intentions. No brilliant author or artist can live to the standards of his work.
[and I find his travelogues a bit of a bore].
Yep. I found Emerson to be what he looked like: a pompous ass. As for Thoreau, he was the one of the first of a very common modern type: a BOBO. He talked a lot about escaping the horrors of modern civilization but never went too far enough into the wilderness that he, as you mention, couldn’t pop back for a big meal with his liberal bum-chums.
Homeboy sounds like he wants to recreate the weird Yankee communal movement of the 19th century that was intimately tied up with the Transcendentalists- one that led to little bible thumping New Englands full of sober, industrious abolitionist Protestants further and further West. The kind of people who did not like Appalachian Dirt People migrating west. None of these guys will have the stones to defend their fantasy “community”, though, because sterile suburban bugmen can’t fathom doing that. Invented communities of trad hipsters will cave when the Gaystapo comes to town. They, unlike Dirt People, can renounce their heresy and… Read more »
South Cackalaky is full of utopian settlements. The methodists had a big old thing in the post-reconstruction era; Erskine etc still survive.
People have been trying to get back to nature with their own and without the nasties since Cane murdered Abel.
Based on Bennett’s link, his profile image, and some other in-joke looking references, I don’t think the phylactery he’s referring to is the Orthodox Jewish one. Fantasy author and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons used the same word to be the kept soul of an undead sorcerer, like the needle that Russian mythological character Koschei the Deathless kept his soul in, which meant that he couldn’t be killed except by the destruction of the needle. In Gygax’s incarnation, the destruction of the phylactery.
(Off topic aside)
He is a passionate Mormon. Which is essentially Jewish or freemaso inc ti me
This Bennett character was a founding Mormon
I’m about 3/4 through the episode so please forgive me if I end up repeating a point that was made in the conclusion.
My initial reaction, as you pointed out the contradictions, is that this man wants Bethesda, before Betty Friedan ruined it.
Which is admirable. My neighborhood would be idyllic if not for the AWFLs.
I have the feeling that if the target of the host’s critique had said he was organizing a local park cleanup deliberate organization for the weekends with beer and wings after, instead of an insular bedroom community, Zman would have a different take.
Maybe, but one is making an existing community a better place, while the other is trying to create a new community while maintaining the insularity that they were fleeing from in the first place.
People have commented on the fact that someone being a Christian is all well and good, but that does not mean that children and nephews and the like will be acceptable members of the community. Bennett is going to learn this lesson. The harpies and wackos have to infect everything that is good.
“The harpies and wackos have to infect everything that is good.”
I proclaim that Steve is dictator. How would he solve the problem that he identified?
Don’t need to be king. Oppose the harpies and wackos to the best of our ability. They self-identify pretty quickly. Then just keep inconveniencing them until they leave. If absolutely compelled to let trannies into the girl’s locker room in high school, close the school. Convert grocery stores into members only private clubs. Make on-street parking require a permit, and, gosh, darn, we are all out of permits. Sheriffs used to do it all the time in “may issue” states to keep guns out of the hands of trouble. That can be done in a smaller community, while it may… Read more »
Steve’s solution is unworkable because of the carrying burden of defense. It is disproportionately costly in time, money, inconvenience, stress, etc to “outharass” people who are deliberately infiltrating. It can work against the isolated and unorganized, but that is not the Enemy.
The pioneer spirit is lost. You don’t have to go far either. Old mill towns outside of cities but within metro areas are waiting for revitalization. They usually have infrastructure already built. What is lacking is the will and time. The will of the “leftover” population but also newcomers who would still pay a fortune to be around an already built trendy restaurant instead of fostering and developing new ones. If you can go to far, start with the frontier next door.
Agreed but the problem with the last round of ‘gentrification’ was that it was basically a gathering of hipsters. Restaurants and entertainment only go so far. Cities got big and became homes for normal people because of industry. In the big picture, burbs, exurbs, and work-from-home track the decline of industry and the rise of finance— are transitional. The good news is, after the collapse, people will have to get back to work, whether on the farm or in the factory. Probably a smaller population, I’d add. Not sure how high-tech fits in, because I’m not sure how sustainable it… Read more »
Tech devalues too quickly and needs a constant stream of cash. Hence why what used to be free with the purchase of a computer in the beginning, is now a monthly fee. All the tech layoffs of the last two years, they can’t compete with a 5% interest rate. They’ve relied on ultra low interest rates for the past 20 years in my opinion. Its the echo of the 90’s bubble, with low rates providing the hot air.
Subsidies, too. I forgot to mention that. Al Gore built the internet, Elon Musk’s business model, etc. 😆
Yeah but the point is if hipsters and techie scum can colonize defunct neighborhoods and create insular communities that last for decades, why can’t Yt Ppl?
Everybody worships money, and the dynamic will change drastically when it deflates.
When money deflates, the real value of things is exposed.
They’re toxic brownfields in Michigan, which is where I was raised. Revitalization means tourism, the old manufacturing plants and their people are long gone. Nature has aleady retaken.
You mentioned doing a show on Karl Popper at some point. Still planning on doing that one?
A person does not simply persue Popper. He piques a person’s passions precisely when presented with Popper’s paradox of progressive pieties, not responding to a poster’s pithy petition for Popper’s postulations.
Nattering nabobs of negativism–Spiro Agnew
America is steeped in Gnosticism and European occultism of various kind, has been since well before its official founding. Gnosticism’s cults and various schools (mind-mold academies) went strato in the centuries after Christ, with endless permutations and metastases, complex and tricksy narrative tracts, including Mary as a foundational, celestial deity. All foul, all attractive, all lies, full of pretty words and images to capture the human mind. America is archetypally Gnostic. Those cults no longer are underground, but serve as fundament and religious focus of the nation. The spiritual air that Americans breathe. D.C. is little more than a vast… Read more »
Mary is NOT worshiped by Catholics or Orthodox.
I have seen you at other sites always saying this. you love to push this bs.
You and your pagan protestants heretics have such a hatred for the Mother of God that you are condemning yourself to Hell.
Why r u so obsessed with the “Immaculate Heart”? Why do the shamans teach that Mary can hasten the second coming by her intercession?
In fact, why couldn’t the god of bad patriarchs confer untaintedness—freedom from originated original sin—to Liz every other Israelite female born in her time? And to every Greek?! Is the plan of salvation not the god’s own but one dictated by an eternal law beyond the god’s control? Or does the god of Mishle 5 just like playing games with its lab bonobos?
to Liz and every other
If God is the alpha and Omega the beginning and the end He always was and always shall be how could he have a mother?
A Protestant friend wants to know.
So the ladies don’t feel put-out.
Paintersforms —
That is correct. It was correct 1500 years ago, and it is correct now.
Women want — demand — a FEMALE deity, and will rebel endlessly against the actual deity, who is masculine and a Father. So ‘churches’ find endless ways of placating them with female deities and semi-deities.
Agreed, that Mary is not worshipped but rather asked for intercession.
But may I ask you why you do that? What part of the Bible commands that? Where’s the verse that says, “Seek the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul… oh, screw that. From here on out, just memorize what the small hats, um, I mean big hats say, and you are good to go. I’ve been meaning to replace that narrow door with high speed rail for some time.”
If Father says no, go ask Mother–
Always funny to see Protestants go all to pieces when the topic of the Virgin Mary gets brought up. Sad, but funny.
Mary is to prots what Jesus is to Jews . St alphonsus says you can be saved if you reject her; all graces come through her
Micoyote — I said nothing about ‘worship’ in my comments. I said Catholics consider her a ‘deity’, which assuredly they do, naming her publicly the Queen of Heaven and the co-Mediatrix of redemption, along with Christ. Catholics say they ‘revere’ and are ‘devoted’ to her. Please restrict your criticisms to comments I actually have made, instead of a comment you wish me to have made. I was raised Catholic and have much love for Catholic people. They are not excluded from heaven, but they are idolatrous in their relationship to Mary, who was only a human being in this world.… Read more »
Word salad aside, there is not INE Protestant church in my region that lacks a rainbow flag.
So why when I go into a catholic church do I always see a giant statue of Mary holding a tiny baby Jesus?
You’re mixing up a lot of terms and concepts you don’t understand. Put down the bong.
America is the most practical of the great nations, owing to its youth. This GAE is Old World business grafted onto it for the time being, for the sake of empire. Left alone, America would’ve developed its own tradition. The transcendentalists were a first step in that direction, not the destination.
The imprecations of Mariolatry aside, the point about Gnosticism is well taken. Our ruling class especially appears to function as an interrelated series of cults, more a Venn diagram than nesting dolls, each dependent on some exclusive information that they jealously guard from the uninitiated.
I am thinking more of the intelligence services here, but that does not necessarily rule out the more esoteric varieties, with their pizza parties and such.
In an environment where it is impossible to know the truth, anything is possible. Tailor made for cults.
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