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Home » Open thread 6/23/21

Open thread 6/23/21

The New Neo Posted on by

“Too Much Heaven” is almost too much for this guy, who is apparently a vocal coach:

NOTE: I discussed the original Bee Gees “Too Much Heaven” video and reaction videos to it in this earlier post.

Comments

Open thread 6/23/21 — 51 Comments

  1. Gatekeepers:

    https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=24183

    “A popular concept in right wing politics is the gatekeeper or sometimes called the controlled opposition. This is the person or group that appears to be in opposition to the Left, but is an insulation layer between the Left and genuine critics. The function of the gatekeeper is to prevent people from abandoning the political morality of the Left, while at the same time making sure to lose every fight with the Left. They channel opposition into positions that can never succeed.“

  2. Zaphod – fascinating and explains a lot. Reminds me of the FBI ring leading the “insurrection”.

  3. Nice vid. Funny and touching.

    Switching gears…

    As always, Codevilla’s latest is required reading:

    https://americanmind.org/salvo/to-rescue-a-nation/

    Bottom line: our side needs a Washington or a de Gaulle. I’d settle for a latter-day Coolidge or Eisenhower. Have my doubts as to whether those models are still in stock, however.

  5. I couldn’t finish the video. He kept stopping the music at the worst times and that grates on me like fingernails across a chalkboard.

  6. om’s reference to the extremely substandard Chinese vaccines is quite appalling. If these vaccinated but not protected people could now get access to more effective vaccines, would it be safe to take them?

    In the category of “what were they thinking?” I always wonder if this vaccine screwup is the result of a culture where all manners of deception are allowed in matters of political expediency. Of course, when everything in life is subjected to post-modern Marxist deconstructions, then everything becomes political.

  7. TommyJay:

    Don’t be concerned. They have a 3000 year old culture and a highly cohesive (oops, coercive) social structure, and their high speed trains are built on time and run on time.

    Or so I’ve been told. Until those shakey, shakey things happen.

  8. A week or two ago, I had problems posting something that I thought my have been related to a content filter.

    Because of a similar problem in the Sowell thread, I don’t think that anymore, but is instead some kind of technical issue. It could relate to my HTML, which I know better having experienced this how to use. That it wouldn’t post my direct links as I conveyed in that thread, is possibly an issue, but it could just be because I tried multiple times. In any case, I don’t believe it was being censored for some unknown reason.

    The links are still available in the link at my first post there, the National Review post, so there is no need to post them directly.

  9. @Roy – I have started looking up the song being analyzed and listening to it before running the analysis video; that helps a bit with the grating & disconnection.
    I assume that most people who view these already are familiar with the subject of the video, but I’m still catching up with a lot of music that passed me by back in the day.

  10. HumphreyP:

    I found a number of your comments and other people’s comments in the spam folder and took them out and they’re posted now.

  11. Roy:

    That’s what reaction videos do, in part because otherwise they get taken down because of copyright infringement if they don’t interrupt the music. But mostly because that’s what reaction videos are, and some people like them (me) and some people don’t. A great many reactors also provide links to the original video if people want to watch uninterrupted.

    I discussed the original video and reaction videos in this post.

  12. Thanks, Neo.

    The initial problem, what caused it I believe might still relate to something in my HTML, which I will do differently in the future.

  13. Gravity Waves.

    OK. Old news perhaps. I searched this site and Neo mentioned a 2014 discovery of some gravity wave residual from the big bang that some believe is the first detection of gravity waves. But I completely missed the event of Sept. 2015 when two black holes collided and the gravity waves were detected. These two black holes were roughly 30 solar masses each and in the final couple tenths of a second before the merger, they were spinning about each other roughly 100 times per second.

    The nicest description I’ve found is in the Netflix feature, “Black Holes, The Edge of All We Know” starting at 1:03:30. There is also cool material in that show on imaging the radiation emitted near black holes via the Event Horizon Telescope.

    This below is a very succinct and narration free presentation of the simulations in slo-mo, and the measured data itself. The data is played in the audio track in real time so you can hear it.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HxYBMD48Jc

    Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves

    In the final milliseconds of the collision event, the rate at which gravity wave energy is radiated is greater than all the energy radiated by all the stars in the visible universe. And estimated 3×10^49 watts.

    Most of my life I’ve seen these detailed descriptions of gravity wave detectors and their expensive and seemingly hopeless effort to find something.
    This video is a good overview of the LIGO and the event.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10

  15. TommyJay:

    One of the LIGOs in just up the road from here (15 miles or so as the bat flies), and two engineers I worked with now work there. It’s a small world after all …..

  16. om, I’m not too concerned about the quality of governance and its knock-on effects in China per se. Although in this example, it really could have major global impacts. I was thinking more about whether this kind of thing (a maze of deception) is the wave of the future for the western/developed world. (Sometimes when I can’t find the right words easily I just stop typing. Sorry.)
    _____

    om, cool! I was shocked to see that those LIGO laser beams operate at a 1 megawatt power level. Pulsed?

  17. Re: gatekeepers…

    Zaphod:

    I had trouble following the Zman article. First of all, I never knew that gatekeeper was a right-wing concept. Second, what’s wrong with Ben Shapiro? He’s a smart young kid with a fast mouth and his own opinions, some of which may be wrong. I find him interesting and he lands a solid punch now and then. And what the heck is a “groyper”?

    Zman goes off into insidious forces, loose thinking, and conspiracy theorizing. I’m reminded of nothing so much as the youthful “sell-out” rhetoric from the 60s/70s.

    Human society is hugely complex and everyone struggles to make sense of it and find a place within. It’s not all cynicism and plots.

    Thanks for the links. I don’t read all of them, but they do give me a better idea of the alt-right world, if that’s a reasonable categorization.
    _________________________________________

    Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself
    When you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?

    –Neil Young, “Tell Me Why”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LBwAxDU4sE

  19. huxley:

    And the insidious “black body” radiation. Science and physics especially is a white oppressive construct? I don’t know, I’m just a geologist by training/edumacataion.

    TommyJay:

    Don’t know if they are pulsed or not. They had a job posting for a vacuum engineer, or engineer who could run all the various vacuum pumps and associated electronics and instrumentation to keep the beam lines empty. Lots of technology and money necessary to get to and maintain the level of empty for the observatory to work.

  20. I think I did hear about some idiot whining about “black body” radiation. So sad.

  22. Lol, I’ve been waiting for about 10 years for someone to mention Blackbox radiation and black holes as racist.

  25. I very much enjoy watching these reaction videos. It’s delightful to watch youth’s presumptuous dismissal of earlier generation’s music collapse in the face of reality. I’m happy to see their musical horizons widen.

    I share many other’s perception of Shapiro, Lowry, George Will et al that they are not conservatives but rather loyal advocates of the uniparty. They’re far too smart and knowledgeable about political realities to hold the hostile attitudes toward Trump, Cruz, de Santis that they do without there being ulterior motives. However, I do not think that they’re acting as gatekeepers with the job of misdirecting conservatives. Rather, they’re simply protecting their place “feeding at the public trough”.

    To paraphrase Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity greed and self-serving hubris.

  26. @Huxley:

    Herewith a non-subscriber excerpt from a prodigiously long (they always are) Substack article Curtis Yarvin put out yesterday.

    Have a look at the bit about Chris Rufo below. He’s given as an example of how Gatekeepers pop up almost organically. Guy has flashed across the Whitey Firmament like a shooting star because of his opposition to Critical Race Theory… but if you really dig into what he’s doing, well he’s not doing much at all.

    Now, if you follow the news closely… you’ll know that Rufo just held a gathering of the ‘Good Whites’ where he stressed the party line that CRT is NOT… get that… NOT Anti-White. No, Siree. CRT is the Dems Being the Real Racists ™.

    Do you see what he did there? Calling CRT Anti-White is the one Rhetorical Bullet which has any chance of waking Normies up and getting them energised against it, but no, Mister Comet in the Sky (which is precisely the sign that he’s likely to be a: ) Gate Keeper says no… That’s Not Who We Are… We can’t say *that*. Geddit? Does something not begin to smell here?

    Note that nobody is claiming that this is a controlled operation from some evil cabal’s underground bunker. The system will throw up these kind of preening opportunists because the system does that.

    I’m not going to discuss Shapiro much this time as a Gatekeeper because after all he’s such a nice energetic young Jewish Boy and it just fires up people’s immune responses if one expresses anything less than admiration. But his recent sticking up for Black Rock against normal people fiasco should be enough to waken people up to the fact that he’s a media product and has sponsors and paymasters.

    On banning ideas
    “Big things are easier than small things.”
    Jun 23

    Share

    [This is an excerpt from a subscriber-only post.]

    There are three ascending stages of awareness in democratic, or populist, political strategy: issues, ideas, and institutions.

    Issues are for people who are contributing to a common good-faith process. Populists keep thinking about issues until they realize that there is no good faith and they are no longer part of the process. If they stay democrats, their new goal is not to participate in the democratic process, but to restore it.

    So they start thinking about the ideas that have become the process. They realize that ideas are not commercial products in a peaceful marketplace, but psychological weapons on a hostile battlefield. They learn to see their own ideas as weapons, and lose their aversion to settling intellectual conflicts by force. A weapon is a weapon.

    Finally, they realize that the battlefield of ideas is not level or symmetric, but has a geometry which is a function of the institutions which process and transmit ideas. They see that these institutions are the central nervous system of any oligarchical regime, and focus their energy much more narrowly on ablating and/or replacing this brain.

    In the 2020s, American conservatism—which is American populism, or American democracy—is doing very well to get to the second phase. Perhaps we can both pat democracy on the back, and tell it how much farther it has to go.
    “Critical race theory”

    Recent democratic attempts to “ban” something called “critical race theory” (which, like it or not, is actually just the normal belief system of sophisticated people in 2021) show an interesting mix of promise and opportunity.

    The realization that ideas are not products in a marketplace, but weapons on a battlefield, is the seed of this unlikely initiative in setting legislation at war with education—and passing a law that bans an idea. (Even just in elementary schools!)

    The fundamental awareness here is that, contrary to a certain mantra, culture is downstream from power. Of course ideas can be banned. Power loves to ban ideas, does it all the time, and almost always gets away with it. Worst of all—power is often, though not always, right.

    I oppose banning ideas. I only believe in banning institutions. Power will always have the fundamental right to ban error. With good institutions rather than bad ones, power will never have to use this fundamental right—whose abuse is hardly unprecedented.

    Yet the asymmetric chutzpah of “we can ban ideas, so you must oppose banning ideas” is too much Orwell for any normal, sane person to bear. Finally the normal people snap, and kick feebly back; emotionally, the reflex is understandable; strategically, the central realization is that a war is not an argument; and in war, never act reflexively.

    The fundamental problem with “banning CRT” is that, while culture is downstream from power, no one can dam a river by taking a dump in it. Passing state laws against “critical race theory” is wrong and ineffective, but not because it goes too far—only because it goes nowhere near far enough.

    To be “against” something is to propound a negative—to propose a question, demurely admitting the lack of an answer. Dissidents will never get anywhere till they realize that history is asking them for answers, not questions—and that the larger, more imaginative and more detailed their answers, the more realistic these visions become.

    In other words, big things are easier than small things. Here’s an example:
    The royal coup

    To imagine that the voting taxpayers of America, through their democratically elected officials, should control the curricula administered to their children, is like suggesting that Elizabeth II should rule England. On paper, arguably, she does. In theory, maybe even in practice—she could again.

    So how would her Royal Highness start? By wading into the discourse? On Twitter? Perhaps with a slightly incautious remark about Brexit, or migration, or crime… we know what the result would be: a quick slap on her Majesty’s frail hand… it seems too that our President Hindenburg’s handlers, about whom he increasingly complains on camera, may not be entirely averse to negative-reinforcement therapy in eldercare…

    Yet a younger, more dynamic monarch, in exactly the same legal position—perhaps Prince Charles harbors, in his heart, some hidden hostility to the 20th century—could literally reboot English history with a Second Restoration. Imagine a next coronation which is also both a populist street revolution and a military coup.

    Who would stand against it? Some barristers? A united front of quangoes? Tattooed, diverse, Oxbridge-bred interns, pouring out of Whitehall like hive-mad ants, tearing up the cobblestones in Threadneedle Street and hurling them at the SAS paratroopers? London was always known for her apprentice-riots…

    The oligarchy has absolutely no real defense against any such restoration—and you can be sure they know it. One slightly chaotic but generally nonviolent day, and the whole 20th-century regime is as finished as the Stasi.

    The essence of war is the destruction of the enemy’s capacity to resist. A revolution is a kind of war, hopefully a cold or peaceful war, and most revolutions happen quickly; they involve a catastrophic collapse of the morale of the old regime, which can go from normal to zero in a few days—and which will remain zero, if its institutions are quickly and thoroughly dismantled.

    Yet small tests of the enemy’s capacity to resist can only exercise and strengthen it. When democracy, with its ever smaller, more ragged and less motivated armies, once again attacks straight into the oligarchy’s machine guns, it is just providing a live-fire training exercise.
    How not to dam a river

    This is how big things can be easier than small things: the big things are useful, but hard. The small things are easy, but useless. Culture is downstream from power; power is a wide river, now as wide as the world. Perhaps it can be dammed. It cannot be partly dammed—no matter how many dumps you take in it.

    What is your small thing even supposed to mean? The political strangeness of this smallness cannot be overstated. Yesterday, you sent your son to school in the morning. You picked him up in the afternoon. You were confident that whatever they were doing to him there, it was at least reasonably consistent with your goals as a parent.

    Today, you learn that they are chemically castrating him with Lupron-flavored Jello. What is your response? To push for a new law against school-administered Lupron? Or any other chemical-castration drug? Or shall the legislature prohibit schools from gelding boys, or spaying girls, by any means—except for medical emergencies?

    The public debates. Hackles are raised. Elections are held. The law passes. And next month, your son is back on Lupron… it is a medical emergency, they explain…

    Such is democratic politics in the 2020s. All the victories of democracy over oligarchy are temporary and symbolic; they consume the energy invested in them, and release no energy back; their objective effect is to (a) dissipate this energy, and (b) promote their promoters. While predictable defeat is a grift by definition, it’s an unfortunate fact that even victory can be a grift.

    If “critical race theory,” which is no more than the official philosophy of the most prestigious intellectual institutions in the country—it was already normal, if not yet universal, at Brown 30 years ago—is the intellectual poison its critics portray, what on earth could be the value of passing a law requiring these intellectual poisoners to not serve poison—or, maybe, just a little less poison? This is a pretty strange response to learning that your child is being poisoned at school. Some kind of victory!

    How would such a law even be enforced? By what judge? The jurisdictions of America must be festooned with ‘50s-era laws prohibiting the teaching of “communism.” How’s that working out for you, ‘50s America? Do you still like Ike?

    And the first time some social-studies teacher in Iowa shows some typical product of 21st-century race-logic to his first-year Holocaust class, what is supposed to happen? A new Scopes Trial? With… what judge? Any judge could already rule that any part of our racial regime facially violates many statutes which literally dictate race-neutrality. Any such fool would be quickly overruled anyway, so why should he bother?

    The fundamental principle of the 20th-century public education system is that the content and methods of education are determined by experts in education, not by elected representatives. Education policy is oligarchical, not democratic. Or rather: education policy is scientific, not political.

    This is simply how our system of government works. You don’t like the way it’s working—and your solution is to make it work the other way, and put politics back in charge of government—but just in this one case? Is the educational system working fine, except in this one case? The whole scientific-policy regime, except this one case?

    Of course, no one who wants to ban “critical race theory” (the label is in quotes because, now that it has been “targeted,” it will learn to deny itself and disappear) actually thinks all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds, except for this one case.

    Generally these pundits will admit that their victory is only one small step in a much longer, more difficult journey; that in many ways, yes, it is a symbolic victory; but we have to start with something small and doable… this is exactly the Queen’s attitude when she decides to make that little joke about Hengist, Horsa and Sadiq Khan. Small things are the most difficult and dangerous, because they project the most weakness.

    By acknowledging that power is upstream from culture, and the only way to change the culture is to replace the stream of power and status that it lives on, we admit that we are not in the marketplace of ideas, but the battlefield of ideas. By convincing a bunch of state legislatures to pass a bunch of bills “banning critical race theory in the schools,” we show our supporters that we have fired a serious first shot in that battle.

    It is easy to see that nothing really has happened. The legislators have no skin in the game. In fact, they love to posture at their peasants with meaningless, unenforceable gestures. The people whom the law is written to restrain do not care about it, are not accountable to it, and in fact get the rare chance to feel like Nelson Mandela for their 15 minutes—especially if it is somehow enforced against them, as in the Scopes Trial.

    But it’s a victory, right? Well, no, not really. A tactical victory is not a strategic victory unless it makes the strategic problem easier—unless it moves the pieces on the field to new positions from which it is easier, not harder, to win.

    Actually, the position of curriculum laws like this is impossible. When you demand a small amount of power, you declare yourself only ready for a small amount of power. No one is ready for any power who is only ready for a sip of power. If you take that sip, it instantly makes you a target. You do not have the energy to defend the symbol of your legislation, much less to enforce it with a wave of demonstrations, litigation, etc. At best it is just another dead letter, like all those old laws against communism.

    And as a democratic movement, your power is only borrowed from the people. When a people uses its democratic power and gets no actual results—which is what always happens with postwar American conservatism—it enters a condition psychologists call “learned helplessness.” It learns that doing anything means doing nothing—so why do anything? By failing, you are actually training your supporters to be losers.

    For this useless sip of power, you are draining your energy supply. And that energy is going straight to the enemy, who now has a monster for his own fundraising efforts. To end by being useful to your enemies is the final humiliation of defeat.
    The battle seen from both sides

    The psychology of the struggle over “critical race theory” is easily read in one story: a profile of one Christopher Rufo, in the New Yorker, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

    Rufo’s success as a conservative pundit makes him look like a young Tiger Woods or Mike Tyson, a once-in-a-lifetime patriotic thought leader. From just about nothing, his vertically-integrated attack against “critical race theory”—from investigation to legislation—has swept across red-state legislatures and is already law in a handful. If useless, Rufo’s wildfire crusade proves a fortiori the impotence of all conservatism—because no one in conservatism gets this level of results. Like, no one.

    And indeed, while I hate to say this, Wallace-Wells guts Rufo like a fish—so neatly that the victim doesn’t even feel the knife:

    At my lunch with Rufo, I’d asked what he hoped this movement might achieve. He mentioned two objectives, the first of which was “to politicize the bureaucracy.” Rufo said that the bureaucracy had been dominated by liberals, and he thought that the debates over critical race theory offered a way for conservatives to “take some of these essentially corrupted state agencies and then contest them, and then create rival power centers within them.”

    Rufo is so amazing that he has reached stage 3, and is talking about institutions. He has also reached his limit, and what he is saying makes no sense.

    Who is going to “contest” these “essentially corrupted” agencies? With the assistance of this… law? Which does not help patriots fire their enemies, or hire their friends? Who will these “rival power centers” be made of—existing employees, or new ones? Will they be in the closet, or out and proud—hiding their power levels, or flaunting them? I cannot think of any cogent answers to these questions, and I suspect the very talented Rufo has simply not looked far enough ahead.

    Wallace-Wells, a cold-eyed sicario of the interview form, a killer at the top of his game, pounces:

    I thought of the bills that Rufo had helped draft, which restricted how social-studies teachers could describe current events to millions of public-school children, and the open letter a Kansas Republican legislator had sent to the leaders of public universities in the state, demanding to know which faculty members were teaching critical race theory. Mission accomplished.

    Mission accomplished. A new reign of tyranny, comparable only to the evil crimes of the tyrant McCarthy, or maybe just Hitler, has settled over the clear pool of science and education. Our democracy itself may be at risk! To defend American values from this Hitler 2.0, subscribe now—for a limited time, receive a free Juneteenth vibrator.

    There is a perverse beauty to Rufo’s gaffe of “politicizing the bureaucracy.” This line is half fish and half fowl. To use the proper Russell conjugation, he is either “politicizing the science,” or “democratizing the bureaucracy.”

    But we can ask an objective question. Suppose science has been politicized; suppose the bureaucracy has been democratized. How much has this happened? What is the quantitative magnitude of the insult to sacred oligarchy? On a scale of 0 to 1, where 1 means that science has been completely politicized, and 0 means the bureaucracy is perfectly impervious to democracy, how far has Rufo gotten us?

    To evaluate qualitative abstractions on a unit scale, bound your range. How much of the job have you done? How much more could you do? If you could do ten times as much, and the job would still not be done, you have done no more than 10% of the job.

    After the passing of one of these laws, how much more power could politicians obtain over educational curricula alone? It seems clear that they could easily take a thousand times as much power over the contents of textbooks, and still not have absolute power. If this is true, Rufo has not even solved 0.1% of the problem—even just in education.

    Wallace-Wells has a different but equally valid perspective. To him, the principle that science is above politics—that bureaucracy is above democracy—is sacred. Like any guardian of a sacred idol, he regards even the slightest blemish on oligarchy’s golden skin as a horrific sacrilege.

    That the idol got scratched is the problem—not mitigated by the fact that it remains 99.9% intact. Are we supposed to let these Neanderthals just win? They will come back and violate ten times as much. Our god will be only 99% intact. This is what happens if we let these human beasts drop even one single trout in the clear water of science…

    It is only natural that this zero-tolerance approach makes the enemies of oligarchy very excited when they score a point against it. The enemy is seen screaming and running around, so some serious damage must have been scored against him. No—actually, the damage is negligible. But overreacting is part of his business model.

    This is what happens in 2021 when democracy fights oligarchy. The better democracy does, the more oligarchy wins—because the victories of democracy are symbolic and sterile, whereas the defeats of oligarchy are cosmetic and energizing. When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

  27. A more serious criticism of Shapiro has been that he is too easy on corporatists and their rent seeking behavior, free trade and open borders (?). With others it is (unstated) because he is an Orthodox Jew (gasp).

    As for Lowry and Will, do they matter at all anymore to anyone except the GOPextinct and the Chamber of Commerce?

    And a tome is posted. Sheesh.

  28. Here is clear example of Rufo being grossly hypocritically inconsistent.

    White Identarianism is Bad. Other kinds of Ethnic Identarianism are Good.

    https://gab.com/JohnRivers/posts/106461139268733669

    If that is not Gate Keeping then I do not know what is.

    Readers will not like some of the comments below and will not like the man who posted the comparison and will get all upset because it’s Nasty Old Gab. But the simple fact is that there is no other big platform where these ideas can be aired. Anyone who cannot understand that it’s often necessary to dig in the mire to find shiny diamonds of this Truth Substance we all seem to love so much around here needs to get out more.

  30. Zaphod:

    TLDR. I did follow the first Zman link to National Review on Chris Rufo and found it confusing. Plus Zman himself said:
    _________________________________

    The gatekeepers immediately leapt into action to lecture them that saying CRT is antiwhite is wrong. Suddenly, the purpose of conservatism is to prevent anyone from noticing that the cultural revolution is explicitly and overtly antiwhite. It almost seems coordinated.
    _________________________________

    Oo-oo-oo-oo!

    I click your John Rivers gab thread and drop into a confusing mishmash about Jewish and White Identity.

    Your links usually leave me feeling I’ve entered the middle of a conversation and I lack most of the context. So as Jeremy Irons once said:
    _________________________________

    Maybe you can tell me what you think is going on here. And please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever.

    –Jeremy Irons, “Margin Call”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHl7hKlVj4

  31. @Huxley:

    Let’s leave aside all the inside baseball and obiter dicta then — altho as thought experiment imagine that you had never heard of Joyce and stumbled across a paper on him. Fact that you don’t grok something doesn’t mean it’s crap.

    (A) Do you agree that attacking CRT as being Anti-White (which it clearly is) cuts to the chase and is the most likely to succeed approach to defeating it and the evil ideology which lies behind it?

    (B) If you do agree that Calling the Thing what it Actually Is is important — especially when the bare naked thing is so obviously evil and leading towards terrible outcomes for White Americans — not Black Americans, not Brown Americans, Not Purple Polka-Dotted Americans, but White Americans…

    (C) Then do you think that Rufo is helping or hindering the issue by insisting loudly that CRT is NOT Anti-White? To my mind this is unhelpful deflection and obfuscation. CRT is an attack on Whites. To pretend otherwise is lying. Why lie? What would you think of a General who tried to rally the troops with a speech about how The Enemy Don’t Hate us and Want us Dead?

    If you have major quibbles about (A) or (B), then there is little point in progressing to (C) and we will just have to agree to differ. Which is fine, of course.

  32. Can’t Do! can’t accept the concept that Criminal Racism Theory just like his Caucasian Racism Theory are bad for everyone. It’s his feature, a root defect.

  33. Zaphod:

    Now you’re going to cross-examine me? Is that how you treat children and golden retrievers? 🙂

    So, with Rufo and I guess Shapiro et al., they don’t bang the antiwhite drum loud enough or deny it.

    Then framing the current conflict in racial terms with the bottom line going White Identity to oppose all the other identities is the best or only strategy?

    I’m trying to understand here. Not have a Socratic dialog.

  34. @Huxley:

    I think framing CRT as Anti-White is the optimal strategy because (a) it happens to be the truth and (b) Normie Whitey has to be shaken awoke and made to understand that They are Coming for Him.

    Everything is about Race and Class in the West today. History is Back and bigger and better. There’s clearly an element of Class given that the Oligarchy and its still largely White Managerialist Bugmen Pissboy ‘Elites’ are using Immigration == Race and Demographics as weapons against the legacy White populations.

    I’m interested in how to win. I mean really win. Not interested in moral victories or embarrassing or confuting those who cannot be embarrassed. If arguments don’t directly address Race+Class / Who Whom? then they have little utility in the fight.

  36. Zaphod:

    Thanks. I’m trying to be sure of the terrain here. Is that the major piece or is there more to know at the macro level?

    om:

    Could you knock off the bad-mouthing? I get that you disagree strongly with Zaphod.

  37. @Huxley:

    For the purposes of this debate, I hold that at the macro level, the system of Western Liberalism we inhabit more or less automatically throws up Antibodies and Gatekeepers to any dissident ideas which come along. Why? Because the existing system rewards those people. Which argument is likely to get Rufo more political donor funding? CRT is Anti-White or CRT is Racist and the Dems are the Real Racists ™? You know. I know.

    I don’t expect you to read a long Yarvin post or to follow a guy like Z-Man on a regular basis and read his comment feed ditto if these things do not appeal to you.

    But then think about your involvement in this forum and others you might follow. Your understanding of and appreciation for the views therein are molded not just by reading one article taken at random but by osmosis over a longish period of following them and their sometimes acrimonious comment debates… It is a truism that we often get more out of comment feeds than we do out of blog postings. It’s also a truism that this occurs on a longish timescale and requires much sifting through dross.

    Now imagine a newly-minted imaginary Prog who wishes to investigate alternative viewpoints showing up right here right now.

    So yes, there’s probably a metric crap ton of assumed givens (not to mention the pleasure of having certain of my pre-existing prejudices buttressed :P) which I pick up on in a Yarvin or Z Man post which you may miss out on on first reading. Not much I can do about that except recommend that you get your hands dirty. And dirty they will become. But intellectual and moral cleanliness and hygiene are largely defined by the Western Liberal System invisible water we swim in. You’re likely more intelligent than I am, and are perhaps more methodical and inclined toward critical thinking. From your comment history it’s clear that you have given a great deal of thought to morals and ethics, so you have little to fear from a walk on the Wild Side. (Well perhaps I lied a little there. Nobody is ever totally safe once off the beaten path.)

    Another random thought just popped into my woolly brain. When critiquing an all-pervasive system we have been born into and educated in, is it even possible to formulate concise critiques which are not offensive and ‘primitive’? Possibly there’s no middle ground between Who Whom? and esotericism — whether that be Evola, Junger, or becoming familiar with a large body of more mundane work — e.g.. a Blogger’s history and debates around his postings.

  38. This guy’s accent is weird.
    I can’t really follow what he’s saying. If he is a vocal coach then hopefully he sings better than he speaks in my personal and humble opinion.

    Quite a performance. One feels joy radiating from the Tres Hermanos.

  39. Oh right… apparently there’s a video at the top of this thread! 🙂

    I think it goes without saying that when I think of Reaction Videos…

  40. Zaphod:

    Here’s a story I’ve told here but you may not have heard. It’s relevant to our discussion.

    When I was a teen I had a surfing buddy, who was a great guy. He was smart, decent and fun. He came from a straight-arrow family. His father was the high school principal. We shared interests in wacky stuff like Atlantis and the Sasquatch. We would talk, while waiting for waves. 

    After high school I went to college and he went into the Army. He had what it took to become a Green Beret and a pilot. While in the Army, he also got into arguing the Bible with evangelical Army guys. He read the Bible to refute them, but in the process he had a conversion experience. However, at the same time he fell in with Christian Identity types and his Christianity merged with White Supremacy. For real.

    We met up later in our hometown. After he checked to see whether I was Jewish  — my stepfather was — he pulled the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” out of his footlocker and explained to me that the true way to read the Bible was to substitute the White Race for the Chosen People. I didn’t know what to make of it.

    He was changed in classic Christian conversion ways. He believed in God, the Ten Commandments, tried to live them, and he felt he had a mission from God. I didn’t know what to make of it.

    Some years later I returned to my hometown and called his family’s house to see if my friend was around. His father answered the phone. He said his son had gotten into trouble and he didn’t want to talk about it.

    More years passed. The internet happened  I googled my friend — a bit difficult because he shared his name with an American rock star — but I got the story.

    My friend had become the second most powerful paramilitary KKK leader in the Southeast. No fooling. He was serious and he put his convictions into action, marching around in a military uniform with a white cross and plotting to obtain a rocket launcher to use against the Southern Poverty Law Center. (I think the Walt Goggins character in “Justified” was partly based on my friend.) At least that’s what the Feds got him on. 

    My friend thought he had God on his side and stupidly defended himself in court. It didn’t go well. He served ten years.

    Part 2 later.

  41. @Huxley:

    That’s certainly relevant. However it doesn’t mean that the SPLC is your friend. It also doesn’t guarantee that objecting to the SPLC’s activities and committing the thoughtcrime of noticing its historical leadership and donor list representational skewedness will automatically suck you down the rabbit hole into some dystopian nightmare of KKK/Nazi caricatures — and your friend *was* seemingly a bit of a Central Casting Caricature although I don’t doubt that these people exist. But these outliers and Hollywood morality tales about them certainly are useful. As Gatekeeper Warnings for the Elites to wave at the Peasantry. And as warnings of what stupid shit not to do for intelligent Dissidents.

    Dig into anything and you run the risk of going off the rails. Try arguing against the Standard Model in physics and see what happens to your postdoc or your funding. Or you might go genuinely insane and become a crank. Either way you will be called a crank.

    I think I’ve made it clear before that Noble Gestures are stupid. Especially where FedGov Leviathan is concerned.

  42. However it doesn’t mean that the SPLC is your friend.

    Zaphod:

    Slow down. I never, ever said that.

  43. @huxley:

    And I didn’t say you did say that. I have an unfortunate tendency to be a little undisciplined and allow stray thoughts to sprout in my stream of consciousness. But reading what I typed it could be construed that I am refuting something you claimed which you did not. Apologies if it came out that way. I just deeply loathe the SPLC and you just can’t keep a good foaming at the mouth Deplorable down once an idea bubbles up into his head.

  44. “was at lunch with some ppl and this chick got bored and was like, “i wonder what’s in the news”, and picked up her phone and started scrolling and steering the conversation to what she’d just read

    the power to control what’s in the news when ppl ask themselves, “I wonder what’s in the news” is an incredible power to have

    it’s basically a form of mind control”

    https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/06/23/open-thread-6-23-21/#comment-2561049

    An obvious point, but one which needs to be made more.

    Now this “John Rivers” guys says about 100 deeply objectionable things every day on Gab. I think he’s a bit much even for me. But if you’ve been inoculated such that you shy away from Bad Nazi KKK Man on sight, you’re going to miss out on the occasional gem he comes up with.

    You may say what I have just posted from him is trite. Maybe. But please tell me the last time Rufo or Shapiro said what I just quoted. They didn’t. And they won’t.

  45. Zaphod:

    So…Part 2.

    I’m a curious fellow. I wanted to understand my friend. I’ve got the internet and I know how to use it, so I started reading white supremacy/neo-nazi sites like StormFront. My friend had cast a significant shadow in those circles and I learned more about him and his milieu.

    There are still things I don’t understand. But I did read enough to know that I can understand and sympathize with some of my friend’s concerns and aims. Which doesn’t mean that I agree with all of it or his strategy.

    Things have turned anti-white. CRT being a great example. What we do about that is another issue. I’d like to think it will slip into oblivion without my help, though that doesn’t look likely.

    I’d like to think we get past racial identities by getting past them. That may be naive. I don’t know what to do. Though I am also very circumspect about adding fuel to that fire.

    My Hindu-Christian instincts are to keep preaching God and love and looking to the long run. You may see that as naive.

  46. @Huxley:

    Hindu-Christianity …. Who would be the Spokesbugperson for that? Ben (heh) Kingsley and his Spinning Wheel? 😛

    https://www.life.com/people/gandhi-and-his-spinning-wheel-the-story-behind-an-iconic-photo/

    And there’s another little crooked hooked bit of Hindu Iconography is a bit Problematic.

    I acknowledge your point about Incendiaries. But only Rajasthani Widows leap meekly onto the pyre others have prepared for them. I also acknowledge that the “It’s either Us or Them” argument has a rather nasty logic all of its own. But History shows the way here.

    StormFront is a bit much. I work on the theory that the most strident Hail Fellow White Men Let us Go Forth and Mightily Smite the Joos and then celebrate at Piggly Wiggly types are Feds and associated Honeypots. YMMV.

    Counter-Currents, Z-Man, Frodi Midjord, Kevin MacDonald, V-Dare (Derbyshire and friends) are probably where the real ‘danger’ lies as they’re not out-and-out Fanatical Caricatures.

  47. Zaphod:

    I’m just an old hippie who maybe smoked too much dope or took too much acid then later had a born-again experience with Joan of Arc as the fuse.

    I make no apologies nor claim any particular authority.

    All of human history is problematic.

    A nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

    Someone said that. Or maybe I dreamed it late at night.

  48. @Huxley:

    It’s always a pleasure to debate with you.

    To paraphrase, He Said a Lot of Other Things too. I always liked the one about Paternity being a Legal Fiction. That’s almost Halachic in its wisdom.

    Ironically I started out thinking I was Kinch and learned in middle age that I’m rather more Bloom than Blade. So I can’t quite wind myself up far enough to exterminate all of the brutes. It’s a nightmare, alright! 🙂

  49. “I hold that at the macro level, the system of Western Liberalism we inhabit more or less automatically throws up Antibodies and Gatekeepers to any dissident ideas which come along. Why? Because the existing system rewards those people.” – Zaphod

    I pulled up an old Milton Friedman quote in the context of CRT and public choice theory, which I think is pertinent to your observation.

    “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.” – Milton Friedman
    https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/738162-i-do-not-believe-that-the-solution-to-our-problem

    My original comment is here, showing how the topics overlap:
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/06/22/five-tenets-of-crt-and-what-they-mean/#comment-2561067

    PS – thanks to you and huxley for the discussion; I don’t remember ever having read the story about his friend – it was quite interesting and provided lots of material for pondering.

  50. “It is a truism that we often get more out of comment feeds than we do out of blog postings. It’s also a truism that this occurs on a longish timescale and requires much sifting through dross.” – Zaphod

    That is very true, if you take “more” as being “in addition to” rather than “superior to” – although I’ve read some blog posts where the comments were indeed of higher quality than the blogger’s thoughts.
    Neo’s Salon is the only one where I read everyone’s comments all the time. I dip into Powerline, According to Hoyt, J. E. Dyer, and others as the fancy takes me.
    The timescale is important when reading long-established blogs, as the commenters form a reasonably stable community and you have to know their idiosyncrasies to recognize trolls and sarcasm.

    Sometimes there are nuggets among the dross, and I bring them along over here to share if appropriate.

    PS The comments on Powerline’s The Week in Pictures and Ammo Grrrll regular features are particularly good seams for mining, if you like humorous (and serious) memes and personal stories.

  51. Viva Frei has a lovely piece about Canadian Bill C-10.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Z6VSfVTeo

    Basically, they want to give the government complete control over content on the internet in Canada. And just rammed through a bill @ 2am in the morning to push it, trying to get their “other house” to pass it too before elections in the fall get them tossed out of office.

    Yeah, that’s a great idea. :-/

    It’s time for a revolution in Canada, as well as here. >:-/

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