“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” A well-known quote from the critical observer of political folly – Orwell. We are in such a situation now.
Even though Mother Nature invented sex billions of years ago and made it the basis for reproduction of life, now, at this brief fleeting nanosecond of history, we have legions of pseudo-academics, politicians, media hacks, teachers, and all the other unproductive pustules on the body politic trying to tell us that Mather Nature was wrong. Reality is not in biology, genetics, cellular structure, determining men and women, or even indeed in the history of millennia of cultures and civilizations, from the Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, through to the Romans, Aztecs and all the Western and modern world, but in the delusional rantings of men who think they can become women or perhaps “identify” as cats or toads.
This would be fine if they stayed in their mothers’ basements and ate their food off the floor, but their real objective, aided and abetted by the degenerate political class, is to spread their delusions and depravities to our children—not only that, but to demand that the rest of society that is still sane to bow down to their evil idols.
The trans-mania is not a point of view, or a political opinion, but a worldview, a weltangschauung, a creed, and is thus not open to compromise or debate. This is a fundamental property. A certain political personality (whose name escapes me) noted that:
…the philosophy is intolerant; it cannot content itself with the role of one ‘party beside others,’ but imperiously demands, not only its own exclusive and unlimited recognition, but the complete transformation of all public life in accordance with its views. It can, therefore, not tolerate the simultaneous continuance of a body representing the former condition.
When the force of faith is behind it, reality matters little.
The trans-mania, and the entire glorification of sin that adorns its ugly idols, is such a worldview. And it has to be totalitarian. In his essay, The Prevention of Literature, which is mainly about the effects of totalitarianism on writing, Orwell says,
…Totalitarianism demands, in fact, a continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
We have reached that point that Orwell so feared. The most basic biological and scientific truths about the nature of, not only human beings, but almost all the animals on Earth, is being denied by a diabolical priesthood of deceit, babbling on endlessly that the evidence of our own eyes and ears is not to be trusted.
Our history is being distorted and even language itself is being tortured to be devoid of meaning so that the mindless political drones, aided by their journalist and media succubi, can shepherd their brainwashed masses towards their sexless, conformist future.
It is not clear how far this will go, but the organized lying, propaganda, and persecution of dissidents in Canada, the US, and the West in general, does not bode well. One would expect, as in former more sane times, that the intellectual strata of society would at least be standing up for the freedom of conscience. But, no! Again, as Orwell lamented, …
…The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
Just look at the state of universities in the West today—factories of ignorance, rather than centers of learning. How can you believe that men can turn into women? Doublethink—Holding two contradictory views at one and the same time. Doublethink is an essential part of the totalitarian mind-set. When doctrine has to be changed overnight to accommodate today’s fanaticism, how better to grease its progress than to deny the actual existence of objective reality?
This is not a question of differing political views, but a question of will it be even possible to hold political views (or scientific opinions) when your life and rights can be whisked away by arbitrary powers? This was done to the truckers in the Freedom Convoy, and it’s being done to people who expose the COVID lie machine. These are all real questions that are not being addressed by any of the Uniparty groups (Liberals, Tories, Democrats, Republicans etc.)—they only reflect varying facets of the globalist blob that controls almost all discourse in the West.
None of this can be changed by being ‘nice’ to them. They must be told directly that they are liars, degenerates, and destroyers of civilization. It’s going to be tough, but it must be done. In the words of the old Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known.
Rebel Yell
Category: pessimism
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What if there were no witches?
Well of course there are no witches, you say! No one in their right minds believes that witches exist. No one believes that people are conversing with the devil to get power over others. No one believes that people will sell their soul to the devil for worldly gain. So obviously there is no point in extracting confessions through torture because witches do not exist, right? Nor for that matter does the devil. (Despite what some might like to think about political leaders).
I use this thought experiment to draw attention to the European witch craze of the early modern period 1600-1700 because it relates to a comparable problem of modern society. Though the penalties may differ, the modern equivalent of the witchcraft craze is all around us.
Transgenderism is the latest mania of collective delusion sweeping society.
A very few people of mature age believe they have been born into the wrong sex (as if that were a possible or meaningful statement). They engage in sexual reassignment surgery.
The idea spreads and takes new forms. (Which requires a history of its own).
Some body decides that, in their sovereign and autonomous will, people have a right to declare themselves male or female and further, and, because this assertion is in tune with the spirit of the times, laws are passed that oblige all others in the universe to recognize the right to change “gender”, despite the bearers of this new bundle of rights displaying the inevitable marks of sexual development as a former male or female, as the case may be. Ideology or self will trumps not merely biology, but all previous social conventions. Obvious genetic males invade women’s sports and, thanks to having passed their earlier years as a genetic male, break previous women’s sports records. Thus their performances prove the genetic consequences of testosterone while simultaneously society insists they are female, so denying the reality of genetic consequences.
Moreover, parents apparently have the right to determine that their children, before the ages of puberty or consent, are “transgendered”, and have the right or even obligation to have their sons castrated and dosed with female hormones and surgically altered to mimic the sexual apparatus of a female, however inadequately. These children have never reached the age of consent. They are not allowed to vote or drive a car. Yet they have been compelled to undergo radical alteration of their biological natures for the sake of gender ideology, or as some may prefer, the right of a person to affirm their identity under any and all conditions.
At the same time laws are passed, custody judgments are rendered, and regulatory agencies rule in such fashion as to make it impossible or illegal to draw attention to the obvious facts of sex that might prevail over the self identification referred to as “gender”. Conformity is imposed upon society. Speech is controlled. To permit biologically based arguments against transgenderism otherwise is an impermissible affront to the evolution of our understanding of human rights. Being, in blunt terms, the right to castrate or spay your children and seek to change their sex by invasive surgery and continuous lifelong dependence on drugs to maintain the illusion that people can change their genetic nature to conform to gender ideology.
I know I have presented this in the crudest possible terms because future generations of man (if they are to exist at all) will look back on this age with the same distaste and inability to understand as we look back on the European witch crazes if the 16th and 17th centuries.
The analogy does not hold in all respects, I grant you. Instead of murdering witches we surgically and chemically castrate them. Instead of condemning them, we celebrate their autonomy of will to become who they truly are. Instead of believing in supernatural entities like the devil we believe that people have rights (other forms of metaphysical entity) to affirm their identities at almost any cost imposed on the rest of society. We are forced to abrogate immemorial customs that have governed the relations between the sexes, and people are compelled to violate the plain evidence of their senses.
Yet the essence of the matter is the same: society has become deluded on a massive scale. There are no witches, and never were. Likewise there are no “transgendered” people, and never shall be. No one is born into the wrong sex. The term “gender” as applied to sex is a neo -Marxist null category, an empty set, pure cant. Gender is what you apply to nouns in French and similarly gendered languages (le ou la; der, die,oder das). Gender is a construct of the mind, sex is a construct of billions of years of evolution. One is an epiphenomenon of contemporary craziness, the other the basis of life.
The transgender cult believes that society is on the cusp of recognizing new rights of self affirmation and seeing them recognized by social convention and law. To the contrary, society in contemporary North America is going mad. And a lot of apparently sane people are among them. But there are no witches, just as there are no transgendered people.
Many people are deluded into believing they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ or other culturally specific figures. I imagine the looney bins of China are occupied by many who think they are Mao Tse-Tung ot Chinghiz Khan. We put them on drugs and confine them if necessary. But if I declare myself a female, when I am a male, I am celebrated for my bold self affirmation. We should look on such people with the compassion we have for the mad. Yet contemporary society is rife with enablers affirming that the transgendered delusion is not merely a fact but the newest form of civil right.
It is the enablers of this pernicious nonsense who owe themselves a long talk in the mirror. Madness is not confined to the actually insane, it appears. Otherwise rational people actually find it convenient to believe in transgenderism, the latest phase of progressive moral posturing. Nevertheless, they are factually and morally wrong, and they will do a great deal of harm before they recover their senses.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
From Jonathan Kay in Quillette
“Genderwang is something completely different. It’s a quasi-religious ideological movement that demands public acceptance of the claim that all humans are infused with a soul-like ether known as gender identity—a spirit whose nature trumps the objective reality of biological sex when it comes to policymaking and even interpersonal relationships. Genderwang channels the magical thinking of Christian transubstantiation by demanding that acts of verbal attestation and other sanctified rites serve to literally transform men into women and vice versa. It also casts small children, even toddlers in diapers, as savants whose unfalsifiable pronouncements in regard to their “true” gender identity must be affirmed by doctors as holy writ.”
“One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.” ~ Gustave Le Bon
further reading:
The European Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Catastrophism, Malthus, and Optimism
We are incomparably better off than we were in the past, and only concerted human effort can wreck it. We are richer than Rockefeller. Things have improved hugely in our lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. This point of view was well expressed in a recent interview of Warren Buffet, who spoke of the enormous increase of wealth in American society and around the world in the space of three generations. Rockefeller had no flat screen, and had to go to a football stadium to see a game, nor did he have any antibiotics that cured me only weeks ago. Calvin Coolidge’s son died of a staphylococcus infection that would have been cured by a tube of non-prescription ointment.
If you want to see how much better things have got for everyone, see a video by Hans Rosling. Our ideas of human population, health, income and family size in the world are in the main obsolete by about forty years.
And yet….
Beyond the froth of electoral politics, and at deeper levels, a movement has arisen that, since the 1970s, has proclaimed a revolution against this wealth. Its success has been spectacular. It dominates governments. It has the majority of population in its grip. Highly intelligent people believe it to be based in incontrovertible fact. Policies are devised at the most minute levels to adapt to its dictates: plastic spoons are banned, grocery bags are switched from paper to plastic and back again, on lines of reasoning adapted to this theory. More than this, energy production is curtailed, pipelines not built, even when they are proven to be safe and effective, and vast tracts of land are turned over to solar panels and wind turbines which have demonstrably less effectiveness in generating energy than machines that burn fuels.
This doctrine announced itself in the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” paper in 1972. Earth’s carrying capacity is limited; we are overstepping natural limits; catastrophe lies ahead unless we do something; the population pressures we humans place on the planet need to be reduced – by reducing the number of people. You don’t have to dig to deep to find a deep pessimism in this doctrine.
The blurb for the Club of Rome’s book starts like this:
“Published 1972 – The message of this book still holds today: The earth’s interlocking resources – the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology.”
The ideology is a combination of warmed-over Thomas Malthus (overpopulation) with a belief in central planning of the world’s economy that would cheer the heart of Karl Marx. It dominates political assumptions. It is the principal form that leftism took when the Communist system collapsed in the Soviet Union.
We have never been so wealthy, and we have never been so pessimistic about our collective futures.
This is the central contradiction of our times. Most western governments are busy harming the economies of our countries with a view to preventing climate change. Pessimism may wreck the rising tide of wealth creation, which has been fueled by technology, energy production, and civic culture.
More than anything else, I remain a believer that things will get even better, if we only give progress a chance. The pessimists – in the form of Malthusians, limits to growthists – are now in charge. It is their day. We have federal ministers in this country who are seriously bent on wrecking the economy of the one province in Canada that pays the pensions of the rapidly aging populations of Ontario and Quebec.
For a more eloquent exposition of the optimistic view, I again recommend the recent interview with Warren Buffet by Charlie Rose. Buffett expresses the hopeful view, which I think is well justified. I don’t buy into the dark views of ecological doomists.
Asabiya
Peter Turchin reintroduced me to the concept of asabiya in his War and Peace and War.
Asabiya is a term borrowed from the Arabic philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). Asabiya is the power of a society to accomplish things collectively, such as build an empire, a cathedral or a bridge, or fight a war. If you want to experience the power of asabiya, just consider how the entire British nation and its institutions buried their monarch. mourned her loss, televized the funerals, held complex ceremonies in centuries-old churches, organized 4000 soldiers, sailors and airmen and the the top ranks of the governing classes into parades, solemn processions, and ceremonies of the state church, as the people organized themselves into disciplined throngs of hundreds of thousands enduring hours of patient waiting in order to flow past the coffin of the dead Queen.
Says Turchin:
“Different groups have different degrees of cooperation among their members, and therefore different degrees of cohesiveness and solidarity…. Asabiya refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic quantity; it can increase or decrease with time. Like many theoretical constructs, such as force in Newtonian physics, the capacity for collective action cannot be observed directly, but can be measured from observable consequences”.
Great Britain manifestly has huge asabiya. So does the United States or Japan. Canada had asabiya. It demonstrated this in two world wars. Whether it still has asabiya is doubtful. It is rent by too many ethnic fissures, and the group most asabiya-endowed, English Canada, is constantly denigrated and weakened by the governing Liberals as a matter of multicultural policy. “Diversity is our strength.” The French Canadians fear English Canada’s asabiya and seek always to diminish it. For that matter, all of woke ideology is an attempt of the political left and their black allies to weaken the asabiya of the American people – “white fragility”, “systemic racism”. So is the attack on organic sexual divisions in the species a different form of attack on asabiya, as the idea of fixed sex roles, indeed fixed anything, goes against the idea of personal choice.
Life is not a matter of expressing our puny selves. It is a matter of belonging to something great. Think if the political left as being in a permanent war against every other kind of asabiya but their own, when theirs is a weak and hate-filled search for enemies.
Asabiya is real, though not material.
We don’t live in that world – of pronouns and diversity, but of power and strength
We live on a world of power, land, strength and resources, not of which pronouns to use or to celebrate diversity. Konstantin Kisin explains the brutal truths we need to hear.
Eric Weinstein talks to Glenn Beck
I can’t say it better, so I will let Eric Weinstein say it.
- Kletopcrats have been in charge for decades
- We are cannibalizing the people who are capable of generating growth
- Magistan summons forth Wokistan, and Wokistan reinforces Magistan.
- Nationalism is destroyed as the nation is destroyed.
- Moral sentiments are the basis of social unity, and we are destroying it.
Douglas Murray says it all
Things are as they normally are. We have been extremely lucky to have avoided revolution completely and great civil unrest since the 1960s. I could blog all day about BLM, defunding police, anarchists, the Democrats. What I observe is an anti-white anti-rational, anti-Enlightenment cultural and would-be political revolution. That is the part of the elephant that I can feel. It is against standards of any kind, the truth, the possibility of truth, the Enlightenment (viz David Hume). It is generated by malignant forces of the Left (because that is what they call themselves) against the rest of society, which they imagine to be on the brink of fascism. As I look around the principal fascist forces call themselves Antifa.
I think we are in a nearly desperate situation, but I think it can still be turned around. But we are in for a decade of increasing civil disorder, greater poverty, and stresses that will lead to war.
Douglas Murray captures my feelings exactly. We have had it so good for so long that we have tolerated fools and termites in universities undermining the bases of intellectual and moral standards. By their fruits ye shall know them.
Matthew 7:16-20, King James Version
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
I am reaching the point where this man makes sense
It is not about your health.
I spent an evening with a well-meaning Torontonian lady last night, in an over-priced restaurant serving pretentious food. Her entire conversation was focused on COVID avoidance procedures here and in Toronto. Every aspect of family life and education has been re-organized to avoid COVID, including a changing station for clothes when the kids come home from outside. From her conversation it would appear that most other families of her social class are equally as vigilant in protecting against the contagion. She spoke of widows not even able to see their husbands in their dying moments and unable to mark their deaths with a funeral.
As Rebel Yell has tirelessly shown, a huge gap exists between the actual risk and what is the perceived risk of getting sick, let alone dying from COVID. If Toronto remains enslaved to these avoidance practices, we will never recover our society and economy.
I keep thinking the COVID scare is a dress rehearsal for totalitarian social control. That is what the man in the video above has concluded. I don’t know whether all that he says is true, but the suspicion is growing.
In the meantime the Trudeau Family Regime (TFR) gets away with $250,000 in speaker’s fees from the self-promoting Kielburger brothers. Noting to see here. Move on. Parliament is not in session. Indeed, maybe Parliament can be permanently dispensed with.
It is not about your health.
The other suspicion that I have is that the people who run the world got so freaked out over Trump’s election that they have panicked and gone overboard. They are now running a candidate who is obviously demented in senility, and they are not even pretending that he will be President for long if he wins. We are in very dark place right now, and it will get worse.
Social distancing for everyone except protesters at Black Lives Matter rallies.
After all, we have to respect the historic moment.
Fatuity
Zuckerberg and Harari – the latter is one of the most over-rated gasbags of the modern world – talk past each other for an hour and a half. Harari is concerned with the implications of Artificial Intelligence, and Zuckerberg with the breakup of the Internet into national jurisdictions. All of which is reasonable from their perspectives.
I am going to say something outrageous here: I do not think these people are all that bright. I invite you to watch the show (I suggest from about 28 minutes into it). Yes I am aware that Harari has three hugely best-selling histories of everything on the market, and he is currently fashionable. And we all know that Zuckerberg is a Master of the Universe with many tens of billions of dollars in his grasp. I have neither the billions nor the best sellers and I could be accused of envy.
Zuckerberg thinks AI is a set of methods that improve processes everywhere. It should not be personified, as Harari does. Perhaps I should not be so harsh on Zuckerberg. He makes a few reasonable points. Nevertheless I find him banal, even if largely right .
Harari thinks the forces of efficiency and morality have split, and this has given a boost to totalitarian regimes. “Some system far away can know me better than my mother”, and that system can be hostile.
This, he says, is a situation we never had to deal with before.
Zuckerberg observes that there is no metric to optimize society. Harari conceives that “free will” is an illusion, and that what people imagine is their own will is an implant, so to speak, of the persuasive arts developed through the Internet.
My understanding of this attitude is shaped by what I heard recently from some left wing academic (I know, a pleonasm). He argues that the “press” needed to become professionalized , that is, turned into a self regulating professional body with powers of certification and disaccreditation, in the manner of lawyers, doctors or occupational therapists. He based his views o the terrible events of recent years, Brexit and the election of Trump.
It is difficult for those of us who look upon Brexit and Trump as perfectly understandable to sympathize with the shock that these two events delivered to the political Left. More even than the fall of Communism in 1989, the fall of Obama/Clinton and their replacement by Trump was their own personal “collapse of Communism”, their god that failed. And Brexit likewise has overturned the rule of the chattering classes in Britain, and they are fighting back as hard as they can to reclaim their accustomed role in ruling opinion.
Harari would argue that the customer is no longer right, because his opinion has been hacked by AI and manipulative algorithms. Zuckerberg, to his credit, demurs. These questions are not new, he says. In that he is perfectly correct. And I also agree with Zuckerberg that that technology has not made this problem more acute now than it has ever been, and thus I think Harari is merely handwringing. But he will not shut up about his concerns. Zuckerberg, by contrast, seems more rooted in the world of practice.