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At the dawn of the information age, it was assumed that everyone having the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips would unleash human potential in ways that had never been imagined. Instead of vast swaths of information being cloistered in the books of specialists, it would be available to everyone. The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people who would otherwise be denied access to the information.
A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. New movies and television shows are, at best, technically superior, but creatively inferior, remakes of past works. The traditional arts, like painting and sculpture, have been made ridiculous in an attempt to find novelty rather than genuine cultural expression. The creative side of Western culture has reached a nadir as technology has reached its zenith.
The public space, of course, has become so narrow that comparisons to the Soviet era are becoming trite. In the UK, men are being sent to dungeons for the crime of mentioning that foreigners are murdering British school children. In the United States, the secret police is everywhere looking for dissidents to harass. The great democratization of information and the public square has led to a dark age of authoritarian violence and suppression.
Alexander Duggan once said that the end of the Cold War was a catastrophe for the world, by which everyone assumed he meant the Russian world. That was certainly true, as the Russian world had evolved to depend on the Cold War as both a justification for the Soviet system but also the framework in which people lived. Once the Cold War ended, the moral framework collapsed along with the political system, and the result was a generation of chaos.
Something similar may be happening with the flood of data that has washed over the Western world via the internet. We now live in a world where it is plain to see that every creative thing one can imagine has been done and most likely done better than anything that could be done today. Why paint portraits when the greatest portrait painters who ever lived, have already lived? Why sculpt when a machine with unlimited information can produce better results?
No one thinks too much about how the technological revolution must change the way we organize ourselves, because we are awash in the history of the twentieth century where all of the political ideologies were resolved, and liberal democracy was declared the winner. The end of history has left us with nothing but history. The information age has not just made the past accessible, but it has also tuned the past into a great flood that washes over every aspect of the modern age.
The curse of information is most evident in the public square where it is easy to see, or at least it seems that way, that every idea worth discussing has been raised, debated, and judged in the past? More important, every idea that is viewed as dangerous can be compared to something from that past that has been condemned. The reason that everyone with questions is called Hitler and even the slightest push back is fascism is that the information age makes such comparison simple.
Why would a young political activist spend time thinking critically about the world as it is when he can more easily look up ideas from the past and then repackage them for the present age? The reason our politics feels like a technically superior reboot of prior politics is that all of the participants are rooting around in the past for inspiration, rather than thinking of something new. Instead of standing on the shoulders of the past, everyone now trembles in its shadow.
The promise of the internet was that it would unlock the doors to the future, but instead it has walled them off by opening every door to the past. It is simply too easy to find what you need from the stock of existing knowledge than to take a step back and think about what you are seeing. The information age has turned the intellectual space into an endless museum in which we are all trapped, forced into playing roles from the past, regardless of their applicability to the present.
This may explain the woke business. The reason people are creating these bizarre and logically impossible roles for themselves, things like transgenderism, for example, is as a way to escape the conformity of the present. On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed. The solution is to break free from reason itself in order to create new roles to play.
Another piece of this is the American civic religion of progressivism, which treats the past like an angry mob chasing after the righteous. The information age has turned the past into a deadly fog that has descended onto society. The only solution to this is to destroy reality itself since the past is what shapes present reality. The war on biology, reason, truth, and empiricism is a war on the fabric of reality that defines the present and that which makes the past possible, our minds.
In the final analysis, the information age, especially the internet, may turn out to be a terrible curse, rather than a liberating force. For most of human history, the past was of little use, other than the lessons of the past. These were contained in stories and songs, rather than in detailed accounts of the events and participants. The point of the past, in this context, was to inspire, rather than constrain. Our detailed knowledge of the past, in contrast, is a psychological prison.
Ironically, this is not new either. James Joyce wrote about how the Irish were prisoners of their own struggle. The fictional South created by William Faulkner was also haunted by the past. The solution in both cases was the abnegation of that present reality in order to close the door to what created it. The Ireland of Joyce no longer exists, and the South of Faulkner exists only as a bogeyman for the progressive. The solution to the past haunting the present was to abandon it entirely.
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The moral bankruptcy of the US can be seen in the support for the Israeli genocide of Muslims in Gaza. Israel is literally flying drones into refugee tents and blowing off the heads of children. There ain’t a goddamn person within one mile of you who ain’t cheerin’ it on, ‘specially if they got one of them Scofield Bibles mindwashing them. Because Americans have been gelded here at home (and in the UK), they are permitted to channel their rage and fury into non-stop Fox News’ sing-a-longs of root, root, for the home team (The Blue and Whites). The US… Read more »
“The US has been reduced a nation of spectators. Watch the sports. Watch the phone. Watch the comic book movie. Watch the protest.”
There’s that and, TBO, I pay less and less attention to the English-language side of the internet, too. It’s getting harder to find things I actually care about that provides technical information for a problem I encounter. Make a village livable for idiots and, shock and awe, idiots partake.
I know that YouTube is invaluable for many things, but lately, I’m beginning to have to spend more and more time looking for answers to car problems on home-made videos than I used to. It’s filled with all sorts of two-minute videos made by “Asians” that say absolutely nothing, but are promoted near the top of any results.
Well, the lady that ruined it is now dead, joining her son, so I guess there’s that. Break something and die is the new motto.
It is all for more dollars. Show everyone but a white because the market for whites is the smallest market. So, whitey, you have to go. Not enough of you in reality so now we’ll show ruck driver repairmen in you stead.
That may be the case globally, but not domestically. Whites are still a plurality in AINO and possess the vast majority of spending bucks. No, what we see with our replacement in AINO is simply an expression of anti-white racism and the desire for a world without the BEID.
I can’t disagree.
Karma is a terrible thing.
So is Karmala…
“…or a similarly-spirited writer willing to depict this age in all of its demonic, filthy, rotten details.”
See: Lind Dinh.
Absolutely. Even in his self-imposed exile Lind Dinh is hands down the best chronicler of the evils of the dying GAE.
Where is his stuff now? I lost track of him some time ago. I read a lot of his stuff and I can’t say I enjoyed it but it was always informative and well written.
https://linhdinh.substack.com/
Islamists are detritus, Hamas and their supporters (most of the population) are the enemies of civilization and contribute nothing positive, rather, they are a net negative to the world. You don’t get to do things like murder music festival goers and claim the moral high ground, they can all die.
Daniel Greenfield: “free Palestine is a new heil hitler”
Tell it to the IDF, because they’re the ones who killed most of the dead festival goers. Hamas was there to take hostages, IDF invoked up the Hannibal directive to shoot missiles at the cars full of hostages as they drove away.
Maycale,
Shame, facts are fascist.
Sure, but look at the big picture. One of my smaller enemies, Islam, is attacking the hideout of my biggest enemy. The time that the chosen in Western countries spend worrying about Israel is time that isn’t spent persecuting my people.
Interesting, this is exactly how we feel about your people.
I’m no fan of Hamas, but the US isn’t giving money and weapons to Hamas.
Palestinian organizations don’t own our politicians.
I don’t have to worry about my son getting drafted to fight a war on behalf of Palestinian interests.
You omitted “watch the porn” as the #1 spectator sport of Americans. I cannot stress enough how this is the elephant in the room of addictive soul crushing and mind twisting hateful rot. Porn is more than normalized; it is celebrated as aspirational and empowering and authentic. USA is a Godless society; full stop.
Godless or Satanic?
Satanic.
We are beyond the godless commies.
I admit that even I was a bit surprised that the Republicucks had an Onlyfans whore at their big show. I expect that kind of thing from the Demoncrats but I thought the Goopers were at least still pretending to support Christian morality.
We’re living in a brave new world, where the only fear is of being a prude.
Or a rayciss. If you’re white, anyway.
First response to Zman’s metaphysic is to bring up Gaza? Anything else on your mind?
“root, root, for the home team (The Blue and Whites)”
Of course, being based in Jew York, it is their home team. The national news caters to 13% of the New York Metro population with Israel more often than not being one of the top three stories and then they wonder why their viewership keeps shrinking.
“The moral bankruptcy of the US can be seen in the support for the Israeli genocide of Muslims in Gaza. Israel is literally flying drones into refugee tents and blowing off the heads of children.”
Dude, I already liked Bibi. You don’t need to sell me even more. I’ll raise a toast to him while eating a bacon sandwich. How in the world is less Muslims a bad thing for me?
“Kindness to the enemy is cruelty to your children. Cruelty to the enemy is kindness to your children.”
Don’t care about them anymore than the Sudanese or Ethiopians or Congolese in their endless tribal wars. Not our problem.
Let’s go back to protecting our borders and ships. The world is not our responsibility.
And if the Palis kill all the Israelis or vice versa, won’t change a dang thing in my life or yours.
You’ll also notice that Hollywood has pushed a fixation on “childhood trauma” in its character-development bits on teeeeveeeee and movies. That is to say, the characters spend a lot of time recalling bad stuff that happened to them in their childhood. Generally those recollections serve as a justification for aberrant (or worse) activities by the character(s). Normal humans may have been exposed to some trauma in childhood, whether alcoholic parent(s), divorce, death of a sibling, (etc.) But normal humans do not fixate on that, nor do they ‘act out’ in an uncivil manner due to it. But Hollywood script-writers &… Read more »
Funny you should mention this, but I have noticed this looking at the description of movies. Time and again the main character is “dealing with childhood trauma.” I can honestly say that I have never met anyone who claimed to be dealing with childhood trauma and I have met a lot of people who had tough upbringings. If it comes up at all it is a source of pride.
Sigmond Freud refuses to leave us alone.
I was just thinking about frued after reading this post. He had what I remember as a criticism of technology in his civilization and its discontents: we praise the telegraph that let us communicate with our cousin in America, while we forget the steamboat that brought him there.
hehe, steamboat and telegraph!
incessantly dealing with childhood trauma is a very female activity. Historically, men looked forward. To paraphrase: We are all female now.
Or, certainly, western civilization now is …
I dunno, I meet a lot of people – mostly low-class whites – that love to tell me their traumas. Not childhood traumas exactly…usually recent deaths or medical conditions. But I’m sure they would love to tell me their childhood traumas if given the opportunity.
Does this include the “In my day we had to wear cardboard shoes and walked 5 miles uphill thru the snow to school and had to eat mush sandwiches” narrative, or is that considered just reminiscing?
‘Mush sandwiches’ pah! We just had mush.
We had “shit on a shingle.”
I like to listen to the ‘low class whites’ and their Coronation Street (shite English TV) lives. Everything is a drama. I can’t believe the crap that they consider important and their endless whining about some slag.
The shit in their heads must drive them insane.
I havnt been affected by childhood trauma and I shot my best friend in the face with a bow and arrow when I was 10. I’m sure he’s forgotten about it…
“…the main character is “dealing with childhood trauma.”
Probably, it’s the *screen writer* dealing with childhood trauma. Freud is having the last laugh here.
The (((screen writers))) are all MOT so it’s the projection of Jewish neuroticism…
You shouldn’t believe what they say about themselves, especially when they’re claiming weakness.
“We’re so neurotic!” is not a Freudian statement, self-knowledge aimed at self-improvement, but a judgment against you—a condemnation of the goyishe mind.
Reflection separates us from the animals. They don’t think you are “us.”
Male readers copy the character. Boys want to become Batman.
Female writers want to make the character a copy of themselves.
I’d include feminine thinkers under “female writers.”
Hollywood used to be a meritocracy, but its driving ethnos* reverted to their mean in 3 generations.
(Ethnos, pronounced like pathnos or logos.)
Used to be that everyone understood it was in the overcoming of adversity that character developed.
It’s not the fall that matters, but how you respond to it.
Now it all focused on who caused the fall or who they thought pushed them…
Put on warmer clothing.
Smart comment. I’d add that it not only applies to fictional drama. Almost every public figure has an “origin story” on tap, about some childhood trauma or revelation that decisively shaped their life course. Often this early life episode (whether real or fabricated) is used to excuse, justify, or even vindicate their bad behavior in the present or recent past. I suspect a large number of people in less visible stations of society also view themselves in this way. But this kind of comic-book determinism is the exact opposite of the older conception of character formation in the individual, in… Read more »
Also, to apply this to today’s Z-blog column: Modern culture encourages people to be “authentic” and “different” (which, as Zman notes, is a futile exercise). The elder culture encouraged them to be the “same,” to inhabit the role of the virtuous man—in the profound sense that nearly every person could pursue universal standards of moral virtue.
The latter understanding built Western civilization over many centuries. The former is unraveling it within a few generations.
Ironically, there is nothing so herd-like as the avant-garde. How “different” is one being by impregnating herself with hideous ink and mutilating herself with metallic acne?
If you wanna be different, you gotta look like the man in the gray flannel suit.
‘metallic acne’ – bravo, and unless you have that trademarked – I intend to use it.
My avant garde is wearing a suit and tie to church on Sunday.
Heavens to Betsy! I sure hope you don’t wear a fedora. That makes it a hate crime!
Might as well just add the swastika armband.
no fedora, but considering cuff links
“Smart comment. I’d add that it not only applies to fictional drama. Almost every public figure has an “origin story” on tap, about some childhood trauma or revelation that decisively shaped their life course.”
Once upon a USA one could not run for President unless their backstory began with, “born in a log cabin” … the ‘early life’ before there was Wikipravda.
This plays out on the group level, too. Hence negroes, victims of slavery, Jim Crow and raycissm, are forever justified in whatever pernicious behavior they choose.
That’s why they all need to go back even the supposed good ones…
One reason among many. Failing that, however, I could be quite content living in a white ethnostate somewhere west of the Mississippi. Negro-free white ethnostate, it goes without saying.
My favorite origin story remains that of Dr. Evil: “The details of my life are quite inconsequential… very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with a low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet…”
A therapeutic society avoids certain prescribed questions of right and wrong in lieu of explanations, which really amounts to excuses when all is said and done. Exceptions are made for what goes against the state religion, of course, so, say, racism is presented as evil and the reasons and motivations for it are avoided. Contrast that approach with pedophilia. The race realist never can have a basis for his belief, but the kiddy diddler always will be found to have an excuse. Freud may have been debunked and marginalized, but his influence never waned.
It quite didn’t wane a bit. Edward Bernays was his nephew and crated Public Relations aka Propaganda. The Freuds were at the forefront of psychologically conquering the West regardless of whether Siggy’s theories were in vogue or not. “A therapeutic society avoids certain prescribed questions of right and wrong in lieu of explanations, which really amounts to excuses when all is said and done.” Reminds me of this scene from Sopranos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAplqRcc5I0 Ironically, Tony hated the therapy/patient culture himself and longed for an American of Gary Cooper. “The race realist never can have a basis for his belief, but the… Read more »
Your comment on Hollywood and childhood trauma makes me think of the TV reality show Survivor, which is one of the only TV network shows we have watched as a family for over 20 years. After the BLM/George Floyd riots, there was a push for more diversity on TV, which included Survivor. It wasn’t just more diversity on Survivor, but we noticed that most of the cast had a sob story, some kind of trauma in their past that they were trying to overcome. The cast of the show was suddenly filled with fragile, weak people, especially the white ones.… Read more »
Yes, I remember Rupert who won on the first show, he admitted at the start he could only make himself useful and friendly because he was chunky and slow, but he won in the end by becoming the “village hunter” who provided necessary food for his group.
Walking Dead was a pointer.
White main character and son replaced with magics and girl bosses. Only whites left were wierdos and baddies. Boo bad Neegan!
All reality tv is trash! And there’s nothing real about it. It’s scripted soap opera drama.
This is because Hollywood is run by homos who virtually all have childhood trauma, either real or perceived
A lot of good comments on this thread. The longhouse society is profoundly unhealthy for men. On top of it the ultimate crime is being committed against you. Your own kind turning against you, dispossessing you, facilitating an endless invasion of your homeland, demonizing and villifying you and then erasing you from your own past to abrogate your claim on your homeland so you can be colonized and ethnically cleansed from it. That is the entire goal of the entire system. The most normal and healthy response is to reject. When defending your land and your sovereignty, the most basic… Read more »
Tribe Up, Be a Slave/Prisoner, or Die is what it all boils down too Brother…
“The longhouse society” “a death cult.” Crazy whites. While I agree with your observations, you neglect to include that the crazy whites are pawns of a foreign elite, who mostly control our media and government. Although they certainly want others to die, they are no death cult. Those foreign elites are fighting for the dominance of their group over other groups. The crazy whites have always been with us, but they have been weaponized by the foreign elites. So, we have two problems: the foreign elites and the crazy whites. What is the best method of solving these tangled, but distinct, problems?… Read more »
J. Burden has George Bagby on for a few shows to talk about these insane people and how far they go back. I understand who leads the cult.
This is why, IRL, they are always talking about replacing cops with social workers and prisons with mental health facilities and depicting someone commiting violent crime as having a mental health episode. Other than racists, there are no bad people, just people who are unwell and need a hug.
Conveniently, you never solve problems and even more conveniently, you create even more to be solved. Increase the budgets! Add patronage network jobs! Force the longhouse on the private sector!
It is all very convenient.
Excellent point. And case in point, this weekend I watched 3:10 to Yuma (2007). Believe it or not, it’s actually a rather dramatic improvement over the original (1957). That said, the chief villain (Ben Wade), played by Russell Crowe, late in the film reveals that when he was eight years old his father was murdered over a shot of whisky, and his mother abandoned him. Nothing wrong with including backstory, but it’s wrong to even imply that childhood trauma justifies antisocial pathology in adulthood.
1957 version – Glen Ford and Van Heflin – was excellent. Kind of a film noir western (if there is such a thing). 2007 version didn’t make an impression on me. I now have an excuse to rewatch both.
I fully understand and respect your position. However, IMO, the original film was a bit pallid and threadbare. I felt there wasn’t enough meat on the narrative bones. The remake fleshes out the original, and I gotta admit, Crowe is a dam’ good actor. A throwback to when white men weren’t ashamed to be masculine.
James Bond for this treatment, no?
I remember once or twice using the microfiche archives at my local library. I would first go to a giant card catalog and look up some topic and it would refer me to a certain film. Then I would load up that film on a paper and look at it. I did this for some research into papers I wrote in high school and college. I was looking at the exact articles from 50, 60, 100 years ago. It was, truthfully, more of a novelty than anything considering my level of research and expertise, but it was still there. And… Read more »
And an awful lot of libraries are purging their collections of older books, and that microfiche and microfilm. Their excuse is often that they need to make room for more “accessibility,” more computers for digital resources, more room for “community activities,” blah, blah, blah. Some librarians now call for the outright banning of books that are to the right of Obama or FDR. Their main professional organization has been far-left for many years. A terrible state of affairs. Keep good, old books, especially history and literature, and preserve them for the future.
The institution of libraries, like everything else, have become a left-wing social engineering operation. Like so many things, the takeover started in the 1970s. If you look at who engineered the takeover, well it’s the usual suspects. But in any case, yea, look at libraries today, look at what the people who advocate forl libraries talk about, it’s not about being a store of knowledge for the present and future generations, it’s about drag queen story hour, putting gay propaganda in the children’s section, having enough computers that the local bums can look at pornography, providing free resources for illegal… Read more »
And library “Banned Books Weeks” only highlight left-wing stuff that has been contested. Never, from what I’ve witnessed in many libraries, have they highlighted right-wing books that have been rampantly attacked, censored, cancelled.
The children’s book sections are often horrifying, with LGBT stuff on open display, along with biographies of Obama, Hillary, Sotomayor, and whoever the latest Diversity idol is, without any balance.
Yeah, I’ve never seen the libraries or the literature professors promoting Mein Kampf, Rockwell’s White Power or Henry Ford’s International Jew during Banned Books Week…
Exactly same is happening in Finnish libraries.
I was thinking that I might want to order some of the old Ian Fleming James Bond novels, but I heard that they were editing the bad words out of them, so I dunno if you can get the originals anymore, and I refuse to buy their edited versions. I wonder if anybody still prints the Flashman books. Probably not for long. But I already read all of them.
You can still find such books in some used bookstores. Also Alibris and some other websites sell used stuff. You’d better move fast though. Good luck! I enjoyed the Flashman books too. The author also wrote a great memoir of his time in the British Army in WWII.
Quartered Safe Out Here. Highly recommended. Pairs nicely with John Masters’ The Road Past Mandalay.
Loved George MacDonald Fraser, his quote from one of the books about war was great- “the young bucks strutted and boasted, hot for battle and glory, while the old men sipped their drinks by the fire and didn’t say anything at all”.
Check out Second Sale, or Thriftbook. I have a few of the Bond books through them.
All of them can be got on Ebay, and cheap.
The unexpurgated versions still exist in abundance. Get them. They’re worth it. Truly great literature. I just hope you’re not offended by the word “niggerhead.” Heh.
High school textbooks if you can find them, that were printed prior to 1965, for English grammar, English Lit, History, geography and mathematics. Home economics, books on etiquette, old Betty Crocker cookbooks. Children’s story books like the older versions of the Little Golden Books. For tweens, the Beany Malone series of books is interesting.
Good points! I’ve saved some pre-World War II history textbooks on the USA and England which are still very good, and a 1950’s literature textbook that is very worthwhile. I used it recently for some research I was doing.
Speaking of series of children’s books, I read not long ago that the Little House on the Prairie books were being attacked, for ridiculous leftist reasons, of course. That’s the kind of thing that will encourage wacko librarians to get rid of them.
Good points. I kept some very good textbooks that were published before World War II on American and English history. I also have a good 1950’s textbook on American literature, which I used recently in research. It led me to some other good sources too. Speaking of series of children’s books, I read recently that the Little House on the Prairie series has been attacked, for the usual ridiculous leftist reasons. Wacko librarians will be encouraged by this to throw such books out. In England the great children’s books by Enid Blyton have suffered from this. [Sorry, I entered another… Read more »
Can verify. I had a 1963 edition of a sort of a history textbook for middle graders. It was every Presidential administration in a Reader’s Digest format, it even had a picture and quote of JFK on the preface page.
That thing was a gold mine and a blast to read. Quips, quotes, cartoons, in such detail that I would’ve passed as a Constitutional scholar in cuckservative comment sections. I could’ve given even Severian a run for his money.
One of my great regrets, amongst many.
About 15 years ago the Journal of the ALA ran an editorial by a librarian in Lowell, Massachussets who argued that every book published before 1960 should be purged from library collections because of the isms. And the publishers of the journal offered no rebuttal. These are the sorts of maniacs we’re dealing with. Perhaps she’s a descendant of a witch.
“Perhaps she’s a descendant of a witch.”
Definitely a spiteful mutant, at the least.
That’s such a horrendous story for those of us who love learning, but there are so many examples like that. “No rebuttal.” I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still makes my blood boil. We might have to go back to “subscription libraries” like in the old days.
This is one reason why I put up with the hassle of being on the board of directors at my town’s public library. I can very directly impact what’s offered – and not offered – to the few youth who still patronize the library. And it’s a good way to snatch up the old history volumes that they remove from circulation.
That’s great that you’re on that board. Recently a library board in Idaho, I think, was able to get rid of some crazed library staff who were imposing their left-wing madness. Not enough of us do what you’re doing.
“It just doesn’t. It is virtually impossible to find anything written on the Internet older than five years.”
I’d maintain that’s because your “search engine” is inadequate to the task. Try some of the AI attempts such as ChatGPT. Unless they have not been fed such information (and this is a known problem), a well formed question(s) might bring out references to currently hard to find information.
Oh, it’s absolutely a result of the search engine, but it’s by design. AI right now might provide a way to get around that, but there is a reason why the system is trying to clamp down on AI…
Oowie, careful, gents, the idea is to be unable to discern what is real until AI tells us.
Trust, but verify. We’ve been over this before. In this “new age” critical thinking is essential—and perhaps even more so than IQ. Both CT and IQ are related to a certain degree, but not nearly enough to make them synonymous with each other.
The “problem” with this group, is that we by and large demonstrate great skill in CT. So like a fish that does not know it swims in water, folks here don’t know how much they practice such in their daily traverse through clown world.
Looking into the past is the only way to ensure continuity of our people. It’s a way to see what worked, what didn’t work and who should not be allowed in our society, because of their never ending subversive and destructive tendencies.
And yet we continue to let them in bringing their subversive and destructive tendencies into our schools our businesses our hospitals and our court rooms. White Z said even our art, dance, theater, architecture have turned to trash. When was the last time a great artist painted a great painting are a great sculptor made a great sculpture? When was the last time they built a building 1/2 is beautiful as the cathedral of Notre Dame? What was the last Broadway show that you saw that had half the talent of My Fair Lady? Even our automobiles are ugly and… Read more »
I think the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces built in 2020 is pretty cool.
Not sure about Broadway shows. I tend to avoid all of them.
The Church of Saint Sava in Belgrade is another that shows it can still be done
Human skill, creativity and ingenuity are still out there, but they are swamped by the dreck of mass pop culture.
Hoagie – Doozy’s truly are a work of mechanical art.
Now & then I enjoy listening to a symphony on You Tube where you can follow along with the score. It’s incomprehensible to me how (for example) Stravinsky scored the Rite of Spring, or Rachmaninoff, Mozart, et al. I suspect a very few composers of what currently passes for music could come within miles of them (unless, of course, aided by / plagiarized by AI).
Yeah I’m not seeing the problem is looking to the past. It’s the domination of anti white etc worldview that tells you what to think of the past. If anything I would say the typical modern doesn’t know much about the past at all.
We’ve seen it the last 2 weeks of the Olympics. Never have I seen such emphasis on the athletes “struggles” with mental issues and all the excessive hugging and hand holding.
the back story has become more important than the talent.
This is a Millennial thing, most specifically a Millennial woman thing. It came out of the Tumblr “it’s ok to not be ok” navel-gazing. This is the first generation of people who had wide access to the internet and portable devices at an early age, and this is what we got out of it.
Obviously a lot of athletes at the Olympics are no longer Millennials (wow, time flies by fast) but the legacy lives on.
I have notice more athletes and young celebs saying they are “taking time to focus on their mental health.” We used to call that taking a break.
They’ve been doing the sob-stories since at least the late 1990s. I remember the first half of the Super Bowl pregame show was always about “overcoming” this and that. Network TV in general has gotten more saccharine and banal. If it ever was not that.
TV is for drooling idiots now, so not surprising that the content is constant sentimental BS.
The NFL Draft now has multiple “official” broadcasts, one on network TV where they trot out all these sob stories and the other on ESPN where they focus on the Xs and Os of the players getting drafted. Unsurprisingly, women eat up the sob stories and that’s who that stuff is geared towards.
The inclusion of women in sports and sports viewership has led to their destruction. Fancy that. But, hey, the free market.
I don’t have any satellite or cable TV and I noticed how dumb TV really is. It’s nothing more than reality shows with diverse morons screaming profanities at each other over trivial matters and old movies we’ve seen thousands of time before. I tuned into the House Hunters show and my wife noted that all of the people on that program are assholes of the worst kind.
And then the commercials. Crazy how the switched flipped to every TV ad being either blackety-black-black all of the time or a black guy with a white wife. So insidious.
Sometimes commercials show a White man with a black wife, and she’s driving the car while he’s in the passenger seat. It’ll never happen, but I’d like to see a black guy with a Jewish wife….
I don’t have the link right now, but I posted it on Instapundit. An Infiniti commercial with three mixed race couples sitting in an SUV. Of course, Nissan caters to the low credit score crowd, so that’s part of the explanation. Even if your credit sucks, you can trade up to a white woman if you buy this Infiniti.
The couple down the hall in my apartment building is a White guy with a black partner. She’s actually slender and fairly attractive though. I wonder if he realizes that by NOT picking a 500 lb sassy mammy he’s still just as racist as me since the girl looks like a White chick in blackface.
Of course I live in a place that’s basically a non-stop Leftist freakshow crossed with a south Asian slum. Just today, I saw a strung-out looking White dude with dreadlocks in his beard. The fun never ends here.
Here’s the picture:
Nicole Brown Simpson, call your office…
Insidious, but also hamfisted. They no longer even try to be the least bit subtle.
Paraphrasing 1984 – the future is a fat, tattooed woman crying on TV over her “issues”…forever.
That’s been the case with the Olympics for about 15 years. They’re now unwatchable.
It may be that the myths and legends of the past were not merely technological limitations to conveying history. Maybe a too-detailed understanding of facts gets in the way of the point of the stories. Imagine knowing everything about Antinous and Penelope prior to Odysseus returning. It might make understanding the story impossible; it might even make analyzing the story impossible, drowning as it would be in the particulars of every lived second of everyone’s life. How many normies have collected infinite facts about WWII – Easy Company, or Patton, or what Rommel did or did not do in some… Read more »
It did. Unfortunately, it was the human potential for evil stupidity that got released.
It’s probably true that the majority of people always were stupid. The internet just makes us more aware of them.
Exactly. One of the theories under IQ and HBD science is that we see a child’s IQ firming up in later life as he begins to shape his own intellectual environment, hence stability in IQ measurement across later years. We all live in a bubble of our making so to speak. That being said Jeff, your bubble was probably to surround yourself with the smarter segment of the populace. I certainly never was expose much to such people in such numbers until the internet came into common use.
And awash in them.
It’s another version of the “is/ought” problem, with the same solution. It’s most easily seen in religious language: “Because it is impossible to avoid sin, you ought not to try.” But that’s not true: You are morally obligated to try, even though you know you will sometimes fail. Same thing here: “It has all been done before; therefore, I shouldn’t try to do anything.” The answer is the same: No, you are morally obligated to try, because that’s what life is. I’d ask the upcoming generation: Are you a man, or an amoeba? There’s an idea from the past that… Read more »
I would ask that question of every generation because it seems to me that we have a lot of amoebas amongst us…
This is one of the more thought-provoking pieces Z has ever written. But there is another way of looking at history. Hence, instead of rupturing historical continuity in order to destroy an unpalatable present reality, history can be transmogrified in order to create a new reality favorable to those in power. And indeed, I think this is what has happened. The Left, beginning in the second half of the 60s, conquered the discursive field known as history and embarked upon a comprehensive revisionary project that, in Manichaean fashion, sacralized colored people, the insane and women, while condemning the Blue-eyed Ice… Read more »
It is important to note that this movement preceded the internet, by decades, and did not need the internet to advance. But it happily makes use of the internet to achieve its goals.
I think the internet arrived after our destruction was already accomplished. “Old internet,” the catalog of almost all human accomplishment (including all the latest stupidities and horrors) internet, now nearly erased, was the last gasp of the remnant. “Social media”-era internet was always a grave dance—a post-apocalyptic public-private partnership that the people are invited to join, and all good citizens do. Remember, when we greybeards filled the tubes with the art, music, philosophy, literature, etc., of every great civilization, almost nobody downloaded it. Now almost everybody opposes downloading it. It’s a shift of emphasis, the attitudinizing of a fact, not… Read more »
Indeed. More important than the various media were the monomaniacal will of the New Left, and the crashing incredulity of what passed for the Right. As the Left mutated from Marxism to a more virulent postmodern fascism, the Right stood transfixed by the USSR. In consequence, a hellish viper was vexed to nightmare on the fruited plain.
There’s room here for an extended essay on the writings of Jacques Ellul about Technology and how it shapes us as much if not more than we shape it. Also McLuhan, and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (fanciful but inventive solution for these dilemmas).
Leaving Bernays and Friends out of the list as I don’t think we all grok (hi 3g4me) their ‘contributions’.
Can remember being introduced to the writings of Ellul as a know-it-all young engineering student and being totally dismissive. Wronggggg.
*as I think we all grok their…
Ellul is unfamiliar to me. Thanks for wising me up. I’ll have to see what he’s got to say.
The happiest I’ve ever been in the past couple of decades was when I went hunting in the Rockies with one of my sons for elk and went completely dark for a week. No TV. No internet. No X. No Gab. Nothing. Just beautiful silence. A bouquet of stars every night, hot coffee on a chilly morning. Just working on tracking the elk, exercising breath control for the perfect shot and executing. One of my friends calls the system mind rot and ignores it and encourages me to do the same. I think he might be on to something. Crazy… Read more »
One of my friends calls the system mind rot and ignores it and encourages me to do the same.
That brings to mind the theme of another film, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The Regime can do people great harm one way or the other, but if you ignore it the power over you diminishes, even if it doesn’t go completely away as was the case with Freddie. Detaching from what your friend calls the “mind system” is at least part of the answer.
Yep. Sitting alone in the snow-dampened silence, rifle in hand, scanning for movement is such a blessing.
Living in the Rockies definitely helps the mental state…
My redoubt is in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of corn country.
When I first moved here, the silence was creepy; until I embraced it. Now, when the sun is coming up, and it rained the night before, one can hear the water perking into the soil. At first I thought I had a leak in a water hose.
It has sharpened my senses immensely. The life that abounds, unbothered by the bullshit that we discuss here, is a cathartic respite from the insanity around me.
Ever see Children of the Corn? Eh. No need. It’s pretty lame, anyway.
Solitude has always piped its siren call. Stylites, monks, mountain men–they all saw fit to separate from the society of their fellow man. I’m surprised there’s not a mass exodus to the mountains right now.
I think the greater problem is not the presence of the past but more that past lessons are being ignored. The roles of the sexes, of corruption, of overbearing state power and of new age religions are all scourges familiar to students of history, as opposed to of narratives. We are busily redoing the worst mistakes of history instead of learning from them, fed by an abundance of resources, the constraints of which have traditionally put an end to such excursions into collective madness. Today the supply lines of resources are longer, allowing us to enter into levels of collective… Read more »
And we as a people are ill prepared for the boots of calamity…All we need to do is look at what is happening elsewhere and know we aren’t prepared at all for anything coming at us like a freight train…
Trying to wake up those still asleep is a waste of precious time now. As you advocate, people need to get their own family and dependents prepared to survive wild events. Micro, not macro, now.
LPs brought us music so good it killed kids learning music from the family singing around the home piano. Now, every classical or popular music composition is almost free on the streaming services. TV was supposed to bring in an age of people watching science lectures and Shakespeare. The result under the internet is Kamala Harris speeches and porn. All that may bring the Taliban taking over and shutting everything down.
“TV was supposed to bring in an age of people watching science lectures and Shakespeare.”
Does anyone expect—given our new “diversity”—a bunch of muds sitting around a TV watching the highest form of White expression/art/science? Of course not.
However, there is an exception, East Asians. Yep. China and Japan and Korea went from a history of using an ancient Asian string instrument called the guqin, to fully staffed Western orchestras playing Mozart and Beethoven. They adopted Western science, dress, and much culture as soon as they were exposed to it. Why? They were not mud people.
The Blank Slate Theory is pernicious and perhaps the best example of paving the road with good intentions; we get to witness in real times its utter falsity. Boeing simply is the idea writ large of television as the great equalizer.
Absolutely. You gotta give them credit. They are not a tremendously creative people, but they know a good thing when they see–or hear–it, are not too proud to replicate it, and sometimes may even be able to improve upon it. I’m thinking here of Japanese food culture. The Japs make what, in my opinion, may be the gest gins on the planet, very respectable beer, and whisky even the Scots must recognize. They’re also great devotees of fine western steak, and have made great contributions to the steak/steakhouse industry. Additionally, many connoiseurs of cutlery believe Japanese knives are the best… Read more »
We used to be regaled at the university with demonstrations of “The Suzuki Method”—a popular approach to music education, particularly for teaching young children how to play the violin. It was developed by Japanese violinist and educator Dr. Shinichi Suzuki in the mid-20th century. The method is based on the idea that musical ability is not an inborn talent but can be developed in every child, much like language acquisition. The President of the university loved these kind of shows put on for visiting dignitaries. These guys were serious in anything Western they took to heart. In 1860, the Japanese… Read more »
Afraid I can’t agree with Dr. Suzuki. I’d say musical ability, like its cousin intelligence, is highly heritable. And if you don’t inherit it, try as you may, you’ll never be able to play the Rack 3 or conduct the Philharmonic.
I think of the Suzuki Method as a seine net; you catch the natural talents that otherwise would have been missed at an early age.
The future plodders and journeymen gain something too… which is not to be sneezed at.
Teaching music, particularly art music, is always praiseworthy regardless of the theory and technique behind the pedagogy.
Japanese make the best traditional Gastronomie Larousse no post-modern fusion or molecular wankery French cuisine these days, too.
That being said, the Japanese Housewives’ pasta-lesson scene in the movie Tampopo is hilarious. Better Asian countries for Italian food than Japan.
What the Vietnamese have achieved thanks to their exposure to French food is also not to be sneezed at.
I had no idea of Japan’s yen–so to speak–for French cuisine, but I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ll say this–French food seems to be dying out in AINO. I dare say the number of high-quality French restaurants per capita in this country has never been lower. The competency crisis striking again? Preparing classical French cuisine is dashedly difficult, and perhaps beyond the ken of those who pass for chefs these days.
The fusion of French and Vietnamese cuisine is interesting because seemingly so incongruous, but I really know very little about it.
CCTV Channel 15 does a good line in big-boobed birds in qipaos strumming their pipas. Some traditions are worth hanging on to.
What a spectacular piece, Z. And – I think you hit the nail right on the head with that comment about creators seeking novelty in lunacy. Ditto the guys talking about how childhood trauma being the source of ‘origin stories’ and justification for that lunacy. The queer and trans communities are almost 100% founded on it. They all came from abusive families. Whenever anything bad happens to them it’s never their fault – it’s the fault of people picking on them, enabled by a deeply flawed and evil society. The writers of our time. They are living out their own… Read more »
I think we all have our traumas, I certainly have, I’ve known many ‘crazy’ people. What I say is, the trauma ceased to be real the moment it ended, you deal with the impression it left, and the habits of mind, which only seem real. Most people cope, and if they’re lucky the cope isn’t too self-destructive. Or maybe that’s a curse, because it becomes something you don’t have to deal with. I cope too, but every now and then I face the things. That’s scary, sometimes not very scary, sometimes so scary you forget it’s not real anymore. But… Read more »
The battle over the past seems to have a less than benign purpose. Someone once made a great observation about controlling it.
They are screaming about Hitler while preparing Pol Pot
Fantastic! I am stealing this for use in the field.
Yea and the big question is what are we prepared to do about it…
This may explain the woke business. The reason people are creating these bizarre and logically impossible roles for themselves, things like transgenderism, for example, is as a way to escape the conformity of the present. On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed. The solution is to break free from reason itself in order to create new roles to play. Didn’t someone here previously point to the priests of Cybele cutting their junk off to please their goddess… Read more »
Z, with regard to “new” ideas, innovations and the like. It’s not so much that there aren’t new things, it’s just that new things don’t often happen at the speed of time preference. Generations primed on and ever decreasing wait time now expect instant gratification. Sweat is icky, just take this fat burner and pose for pics next to the weights. Pain has been redefined to include the momentary discomfit, just take these pills and pose for pics. Somewhere in the piles of clay tablets is a script by a grey hair who was me in a previous life that… Read more »
This. Attention spans have decreased dramatically likely due to the bombardment of mass amounts of digital information, which seems chief among many reasons. People talk about things being memoryholed–the apparent State assassination attempt of Trump, for example–as if there has been coordinated effort to erase the event, but a reason perhaps as probable is the crowd moved on to the next shiny object before the next one that came after it and the hundreds that followed thereon. If something that significant and momentous cannot hold the public imagination due to the proliferation and volume of noise nothing can. Can the… Read more »
Exactly. The human brain was not built to process all the stimuli constantly bombarding it in the internet age. The analogy I like is that you should treat information entering your brain like you would treat food entering your body. Just as sitting at a limitless buffet of junk food would make us unhealthy, so does consuming a firehose of junk information.
Yes. Rather than an argument over who gets to bombard the brain with voluminous amounts of information, a humane and sane civilization would ask whether it should happen at all. We obviously do not live in that society. The AMA and APA are too busy claiming racism is a pandemic to take the time to understand the full effects of overloading the mind with junk info.
I like this. AINO’s culture and information as a mudslide of pork rinds, ranch dressing, fried cheese and Kool Aid.
Things like transgenderism is a way to escape the conformity of the present.
Or more likely, it is a symptom of mental illness.
Zman wrote, “On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed.” The ancients had this figured out 2,500 years ago. “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun! 10 Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us.” Ecclesiastes 1:8-10 NAB It’s all futile and pointless. He goes on to say that at the end of the day… Read more »
Ecc.12:13,14 (spoiler alert) The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
For someone to claim, 2500 years ago, that there is nothing new, is to laugh.
That was so in their era, their season, their generation, perhaps.
What I dread is the something new that is being created now.
When you think about it King Ecclesiastes was right.
Youre talking about how, not why. And to be strictly honest, the how isn’t all that new either.
I saw this bit of regime water-carrying today on a CNN article about the latest stabby but mostly peaceful cultural enrichment in England, “UK police remain on high alert after days of far-right riots earlier this month, spurred by disinformation around a deadly stabbing attack in the north of England.”
See, it’s not the murder of indigenous Brits by foreigners that angers people. It’s the “disinformation” about those crimes that riles them up, you silly goose! Now go turn yourself in to the local constabulary for having unapproved thoughts.
Pravda has spoken.
“Badthinker proles unbellyfeel IngWoke.”
Lamenting macro-issues, such as today’s post, is a purely intellectual exercise that offers unique insight accompanied by the illusion of improved understanding and an advance toward remedy. But we’re not going to “think” our way out of the mess we’re in either. It’s going to have to get tangible and ugly soon, and a strong back will serve you better than a bright idea when that happens. The parasites aren’t going to off themselves.
This is the case for a lot of people. But not for those who are actually using the internet as a tool of self-empowerment. It is through the internet that I found a mitochondrial fission/fusion protocol using supplements you can buy on line that actually works. Same for a stem cell and senolytic protocol. It is the internet that allows me to follow progress in development of partial epigenetic cellular reprogramming that I will no doubt be using by the end of this decade. People who use the internet for technical and self-empowerment purposes derive the intended benefits from the… Read more »
You provide evidence for my point. There are those who can make use of the internet for higher purposes (you decide such purposes). And those who cannot/will not. The majority of the populace will use the internet for no higher purpose than banal amusement.
Wait, you are going to tell us you found “fountain of youth” supplements and not put the links in? Either you are not on the payroll (and don’t get kickbacks) or you are selfish and do not want to share your eternal life secrets! 😁 For the record, I’m highly skeptical of any supplement being able to directly affect any of those mechanisms as anything absorbed through the gut simply doesn’t work that way but am direly curious about what you found. (I’m a classically trained biochemist/genetic engineer but hated the glacial pace of lab work, just for the record)… Read more »
Discerning people can still discern. It just turns out there were never really all that many of them, relatively speaking, and still aren’t. Probably fewer all the time, given demographic trends. Nowadays, rather than “suffer” from their menial stupid jobs, or in addition to suffering from their menial stupid jobs, the great masses suffer from tik tok brain. I don’t know if this is any more or less eugenic than having them plow a field all day or replace bobbins at the textile plant. Either way, they are not good for much more than life at subsistence level. Their lack… Read more »
The difference being, who is steering the ship. We were hypnotized by the civic religion of Civil Rights. Malevoent action parasitizes our greatest weapons, most especially our knowledge bases. It depends on what is highlighted. Christianity could be a warrior religion, were key passages highlighted. Colonization uplifted the world, because of who was doing it. Colonization today is destroying the world, because of who is doing it. (Soros proposes human trafficking bonds.) The Enlightenment’s attempt to end inter-Christian wars became an excuse for technocracy. You can take the white man out of civilization, but you can’t take civilization out of… Read more »
A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. Agree, and disagree. Creative output from the traditional sources has ground to a halt, yes. Hollywood and mainstream network TV or streaming services, record labels, big AAA video game studios, and art institutions are all allergic to creativity and ingenuity in this day. Reboots, remakes, prequels, spin-offs, the same thing as last time with a different colored paint, focus group tested stories and plots, the four chords of pop music and autotune, and a mirror painted red sold… Read more »
“The new creativity is out there but you have to look for it.”
Speaking of that: here’s a small publisher in Texas with some interesting titles.
https://www.fallingmarbles.com/
Falling Marbles you say? Texas? I could swear those @#$%ers live on the floor above me in Hong Kong. Day and night. Especially night.
The one good thing about the internet is it has brought with it the concept of “internet time.” IT manifests itself as a almost universal modern day perception that everything must happen immediately and the sell-by date of everything is reduced to essentially zero. Wokism is already on the way to being “old and busted,” and the Alphabet People must nervously look over their shoulders for who will supplant them as the celebrated flavor of the moment. Just as nobody bothers to be Rembrandt or Michelangelo anymore, the great unwashed will eventually find the firehose of the past to be… Read more »
The first thing this makes me think of is the printing press, and Protestant literacy. Reading Scripture, especially the Hebrew Scripture. Identifying with the Jews, eventually. Here we are again, at something like the BC/AD boundary, another End— at least we think so. Seems to me, anyway. Talk about being haunted!
Don’t forget the AD part, don’t sweat it.
I don’t know if I would call today’s creative works technically superior. Everything is too perfect, too steady, everybody uses the same camera movements and editing cuts. It’s actually pretty boring. There’s a certain amount of artistic appeal to a fast zoom on film with the older equipment that wasn’t as refined as it is today. There’s also the issue of the film stock they use. Like music on digitized master tapes, there’s nothing more appealing to me than older film stock that has been digitized. It just looks good to the eyes. You can see the same thing with… Read more »
“The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people…” Nothing wrong with today’s musing—except it misses the point or essence of the problem. Those of us involved in the HBD community understand the essence of the problem—or at least have a theory to explain such. The reason we’ve not unleashed the potential of the people is that there is *no* potential to unleash! (None of this is to degrade the usefulness of the general populace. They have *their* purpose.) Leaving aside the phenomenon that we are becoming more stupid and corrupt as… Read more »
‘In summary, you can lock a bunch of Monkeys in a Radio Shack, but they won’t build a radio.’
no but they would try to sell you batteries.
“On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual” The tragedy here is that they actually can’t see their own uniqueness through all the tattoos, piercings, hair dyes and other ways they want to decorate the book cover. There are types but every single one of us is unique. I have worked with animals for years and it has amazed me that even though they’re different personality types say within cats each one in the type is still unique. I look around the world and am awed at the sheer number… Read more »
There is no new “information age”, or at least not one’s that’s radically different from the pre-internet age. High quality information is as hard to obtain as it has always been, at least since the invention of the printing press. What the internet has made possible is low-level rubbish (e.g. social media posts and pictures) whizzing about at the speed of light. Worthwhile information is cordoned off and is either not accessible or you have to pay for it. Let’s delve into this in more detail. There’s a hierarchy of raw data at the base, then information one level higher… Read more »
“Even if the raw data is available, humans have to work on it to make it information or something higher. ChatGPT won’t do the trick. Once data has been transformed into “value-added product”, it’s going to be yet harder to obtain.”
Sure, but that’s the capitalist system. Who’s gonna do the work without some renumeration? ChatGPT is gonna be a “charged for” service eventually. There can be no such thing as “information must be free” if you expect someone else to do the access and sorting for you. Better the information is available—at a price—than not.
Yes, and that’s what I’m saying in my fifth paragraph. I’m really taking issue with Al Gore’s BS “information superhighway,” with the implicit that there was going to be “lots of information for free, free, free! A stance with which quite a few dolts apparently still subscribe to. Whereas economists rightly teach us that there ain’t no free lunch.
I’m not complaining about the cost of information either — it costs to produce it. Though I do take issue with the monopoly pricing power of publishers and tech giants
Free information is often worth its cost. My apologies for the misread of your comment.
There’s no such thing as a free meme…
I’d like to thank you for being my go-to source for goings-on in the macramé community.
>We now live in a world where it is plain to see that every creative thing one can imagine has been done and most likely done better than anything that could be done today. It is not a matter of a lack of will to greatness, it is far worse. The problem lies in both conception and execution. If artists were merely executing competent recapitulations of past achievements, this would be one thing. And not such bad of a thing, either. But CultureBerg — as described by Tom Wolfe in the Painted Word — fears and hates achievements it cannot… Read more »
I see the essence of the problem as two fold: 1) Lot’s of low lying fruit has been picked. Hence we see a lot of “same old, same old”. Novel ideas come along increasing rarely. Nothing unpredictable. 2) There’s an insatiable need for more and more media to fill the competitive demands of the internet. Entrepreneurs are battling fearlessly for eyeballs. Hence repeats of old ideas and story lines. There was a time when the main media of the day, TV, had three channels. They could afford to turn down many novel ideas. Today, I can name dozens of content… Read more »
The low-hanging fruit theory is certainly applicable to science, and perhaps even philosophy. But the arts? I’m not so sure. The Fifth Symphony, Vitruvian Man, and “The Masque of the Red Death” were not sitting there in the ether waiting to be plucked by Beethoven, Leonardo and Poe. They were created. Had those three geniuses never existed, neither would their extraordinary works. Hence, the dearth of artistic genius in postmodernity is due not to an absence of pomegranates within easy reach; it is a function of cognitive decline. Or perhaps our abandonment by God.
It’s a matter of numbers needed and what of quality can be provided. Let’s take movies. Most, not all, movies bore (or worse insult) me. Why? The plot line is—to me anyway—hackneyed, the acting often bad, the plot fantastical, with waay too much dependence on fast GGI to hold audience attention. I’m old, I’ve seen my share. Nothing new under the sun as they say. I was at the theater, first in line, to see the 1978 movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. They made at least 5 of these. One worse than the other. Never saw another one, but the… Read more »
All you say may be true, and probably is. However, the phenomenon you describe can be explained more plausibly as a function of cognitive decline than as a depletion of artistic possibilities, which, at any rate, are inexhaustible.
Yes, the age of information became the age of mass malformed information but the internet was a bonanza for those few who would go on to sharpen their understandings among other men who were searching outside the lines of orthodoxy containing all ideologies. It doesn’t matter that this is one percent of the population, it matters only that meaningful discussion has greatly advanced from thirty years ago, and that has advanced understanding in those people who read them.
One of the most difficult things to accept about the present situation is how stupid the people that make up the ruling class and their functionaries are. I had always assumed that self preservation and will to power etc. would place certain limits on how far they would push incompetents up into positions of autonomous authority; that certain institutions crucial to maintaining societal vigor would be protected from corruption by necessity but it isn’t true. It could very well be that the original intent included those kinds of limits but it appears that once you let the imbecile’s nose under… Read more »
Yes, but.
I call the last 500 years the Age of Gutenberg where only intellectuals got to publish. But now with the Age of the Internet everyone gets to publish.
It’s going to take a while for things to get sorted. But one thing seems clear. The old political structure of the Age of Gutenberg, the Dictatorship of the Intellectuals, is crumbling.
Narrative and authority don’t have the oomph they used to have. No doubt there’s good and bad to that, but for now, idk, maybe it’s necessary?
I’m sure they’ll make a comeback, strong as ever, once the rot is cleared. Amazing it’s been 500 years or so, this ‘revolution’. Started with a bang, though.
The scope of things! I wish I could live longer, just to take in one age.
Ah yes, Gutenberg. The internet has enabled me to have the entire six volumes of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the entire works of Mark Twain, and many obscure books from the late nineteenth century all on my Kindle via the Gutenberg Project. They cost me nothing and it took mere seconds to download. Haven’t been in a library in years.
I can’t stand reading real books on kindle or archive. Do it if I have to but they are too hard to use. Can’t flip around etc
If you don’t have the actual thing in your mits, you don’t truly possess it. What they grant you, they can just as easily take away.
Not only was the promise of the internet never really realized, the cost has ballooned out of control. Every year it seems to increase or introduce new costs. Despite the total inability to keep anything secure, more and more information and control are put on it for little benefit.
Someone else mentioned too, but it’s all so temporary. For instance, if for whatever reason Z doesn’t make his webhosting payment this is all gone, forever. The whole Internet is like that, nothing but temporary knowledge.
Not to mention easily manipulated source material. You can learn a lot from newspaper archives, reduced to paper, frozen in time. What about digital archives? Easily manipulated? You bet.
They are already doing it. Amazon is “updating” ebooks you bought and paid for. Sony allowed you to “buy” movies and after they no longer had favorable terms with the movie’s owners, you could no longer play the movie. Whenever I have an ebook I like and want to keep for reference, I find a paper copy. As for the newspapers, it really doesn’t make a difference. Look at Charlottesville. All of the favorable coverage by people who were there are long gone and the only record that exists are copies of the newspaper or microfilm of them. ALL LIES.… Read more »
It is not tangible and durable; it is ephemeral and diaphanous.
There’s a natural human hierarchy within groups as well as between them. Some people will have questing minds, but most will limit their mental energy to their own narrow needs and little else. It would be strange if the proles suddenly sought to imorove rather than just consume/enjoy. It’s a bad thing that the people in charge allow the entertainments to be pure lies and wickedness, because so many people have weak mental defenses against this. But, as we know, the ruling class is evil, so we can only expect this to get worse. I wonder if a new form… Read more »
AmGreatness is running an article claiming Harris is anti-Black.
They just can’t say it.
Lemme guess–the soft bigotry of low expectations. :rolleyes:
This post is a lengthy, and much better reasoned take on a situation I have conceptualized as, “information diarrhea.”
Most people don’t have the finely tuned powers of discernment and the ability to disengage from the endless torrent of information available.
Heck, this is something I find myself struggling with.
Oswald Spengler was right
About what?
To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
If that’s you and not a Spengler quote, I’m impressed!
This is a weird topic to discuss today since I’ve had anxiety for a week or so. Its one of those things that, like clockwork, can happen every eighteen months and sometimes every few years, then it evaporates as if it never existed.
I will say that all the BS happening in the world right now can be normally very bothersome. But when your going through an anxiety episode, it seems irrelevant.
But I will say that when this current age ends, we will doubtless have learned some lessons that will hopefully bring in a new enlightenment
Isn’t there a difference between the Information Age and the internet age? In the 90s I had Lexus nexus in college and microfiche but mostly relied on books.
In essence no (IMO). What we have is increasing/improved technology which means the Model T we grew up with is now a Dodge Challenger. But in the end, it all bits being downloaded, i.e., information.
The internet is the very definition of “pandora’s box.”
For the first decade, it was pretty sweet. It’s become a scourge on humanity.
Explains the SciFi trope that computers are banned.
There are more artists, of higher skill, living today than there ever were in the past. Look at Art Renewal Center’s Salon competition entries to see. The issue is that high-quality art is drowned in a sea of slop, now mostly automated. Curation is the main issue, not gross amount.
[…] ZMan is not optimistic. […]
Yikes, black pill!!
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/08/12/america-is-entering-end-times/
That’s PCR’s shtick though, he’s been publishing the same thing for the past (at least) 20 years.
I wondered. I only look at him once in a while so I don’t know if he has done this before
I can’t honestly disagree with anything he wrote there. The only thing that was stupid was when he called MTG “astute”. She’s a class A retarded slob. Other than that, it’s hard to disagree with the rest of it.
Ooo! “Nadir”! Good vocabulary