I have a similar story. In college, I was playing for the university’s club team. Our last game of the season was the week after the semester had ended, so a lot of the guys on the team had already headed home, especially the out-of-staters, so we only had nine for that game. I had gotten on base in one of the early innings; the pitcher attempted a pick-off, and as I was diving back, I dislocated my right shoulder. (To add insult to injury, the pick-off attempt was successful.) Our catcher popped the shoulder back in (people kinda gasped when he yanked on it really hard to pop it back in, to which he responded: “Don’t worry, I’m pre-med”). Since we only had nine I had to keep playing, but I couldn’t throw anymore, so I moved from third to first. I could still swing a bat without too much pain, and I somehow managed a hit in my last at-bat of the season (though it was basically just a weak dribbler up the middle that got by everyone).

Agree baseball can be scary, especially if you’re playing the hot corner. The other sport I’ve played a lot of is hockey, and I find baseball more nerve-wracking/scary than hockey. I’ve also gotten injured more playing baseball/softball than I have hockey.

There doesn’t yet appear to be a LFer who is the Brooks Robinson of his position. We will know him when he appears, because it will be obvious to all watching.

If he were that good defensively though, would you put him in left?

Didn’t Bonds have a pretty good arm, but played left because of Andy Van Slyke? (and then presumably stayed in left after that partially owing to inertia).

It is interesting how left field does seem to be the least sexy defensive position other than probably first base. It’s often where your worst outfielder goes, and there don’t seem to be any iconic leftfielder defenders at the level of iconic rightfield defenders (Clemente, Ichiro, Kaline, etc). A contrast to the Little League (true) cliche that you stick your worst fielder in right.

A few years ago, a fellow I know who grew up in Cincinnati told me that he would see Rose in his neighborhood because Rose would swing by frequently to pick up a high school girl who lived on his block. I can’t remember if he said this explicitly, but he certainly implied that she was underage, maybe 14-15.

(It doesn’t sound as though Rose was too discreet about this, and did the girl’s parents know about this and were ok with it? I don’t know).

Though he played injured in the World Series he was in.

It was a regular season game between Cleveland and Detroit that they allegedly bet on in 1919, not a WS game.

I daresay, outside of BOS, and over these decades, Williams is going to fade into the distance…

Nah. While I grant that he was not as great as Ruth, Williams is one of the four most dominant hitters of all time, is one of the most iconic players of all time, and certainly transcended the game. He was the best player of his generation between the Ruth and Mantle/Mays eras. If he were going to fade, it would have happened already (his last game was over 60 years ago). He belongs in the pantheon.

And I’m not from Boston.

Prince showed commendable restraint: “He was careful not to sleep with them until they turned 18.”

That’s a remarkably low bar for commendable restraint, I gotta say.

Like most moderns, I don’t think you understand the meaning of sacrifice.

Mircea Eliade in his classic The Sacred and Profane argues that rebirth is a universal theme that harkens back to the original creation in a pure state: when a community engages in ritual associated with rebirth, the original creation event is understood by the community to be made present, so that man is once again in the presence of the divine and renewed and purified.

I wonder: are these prohibitions and practices distant echoes of the long ago time when human sacrifice was practiced by the ancestors of these groups?

Michael Wyschogrod in his excellent book The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel states that indeed circumcision is “the vestigial remains of human sacrifice in Judaism.”

White women do it every day, it’s called “abortion.” They sacrifice perfectly healthy white male fetuses to the gods of Consumerism, Materialism, and Recreational Sex.

Yes, and yet: abortion is even more monstrous than the human sacrifice practiced by ancient cultures.

Human sacrifice as practiced by the Mayans and Aztecs at least gestures at the real meaning of sacrifice – whereby man attempts to mediate the Divine by offering his entire self, and a fellow man acts as a superior symbol for this than an animal – but grossly offends against the moral law by murdering his fellow man. Modern abortion, in contrast, is done purely to cater to the self-indulgent whims of sluts and sybarites. Human sacrifice, paradoxically, depends on a view of human life as valuable (one does not offer what is worthless to the gods), whereas abortion depends upon a view of human life as valueless. It is a rather remarkable ‘achievement’ for our society to have discovered and adopted a more degrading view of human life than the cult of Moloch’s.

…he was something of a high-pitched gadfly who seemed to be trying desperately to imitate P.J. O’Rourke.

I still get that sense about him. I much prefer to read him than to watch him, which I find unbearable due to some of his mannerisms. E.g., if someone he’s interviewing says something aggressive towards him, he’ll give this affected, insincere laugh like some middle school dork who doesn’t know how to respond to an insult.

But that said, I agree with Steve’s concluding remark and am happy with the fact that he’s on our side.

Trump is going to lose to a senile old man who has no business being president. And a significant percentage of the voters will feel very ripped off by this obvious lawfare. But there will never be any kind of revolt or revolution. Americans are too fat and happy for that. That can only happen in a third world country nowadays. What will happen is kind of a slow disengagement from civic life and volunteerism which will not be very pleasant for the country.

But half-Mexican.

Nah, probably less than a quarter and Conquistador-Mexican at that.

But isn’t it true that his predecessors only adopted heirs because they did not have any legitimate biological heirs of their own? Marcus Aurelius didn’t have that excuse.

Would you say that Marcus Aurelius was worse than Nerva? Who if I recall, didn’t reign long enough really to do much, and was basically at the mercy of the army.

Most dedicated, obsessive White guy evah!

But half-Mexican.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw

Were (are) you an academic, or on a personal search for meaning?

Neither. I wouldn’t survive a week in academia. Even if the politics didn’t rule me out I’m not cut out for contemporary institutional work. I’m more of a creative type who likes to work alone.

It was essentially a project, like rebuilding an old car. Trying to figure things out is how I keep myself engaged with life, so I took on this question knowing it would be a good challenge.

Care to elaborate on what was your state of mind (beliefs, phase of life, incident(s), etc.) that lead to that initial revelation? [omitting personally identifying details, of course]

Sure. I had been trying to figure out this question of what exactly it is that separates human from animal cognition, because quite clearly we have a lot in common with animals. I was reading lots of scientific literature, particularly on primates and neurology, trying to get some idea of what could be the basis of our special abilities, such as language, deductive reasoning and so on.

This is an incorrect definition of racism. The reader who offered this comment seems to presuppose a classical liberal view of society, which has a tendency to regard unchosen constraints on the individual as ipso facto unjust and to regard merit as the proper way to organize society’s hierarchy: that a society that limits social mobility on account of merit is deficient. But this should not be granted.

There are other way to organize society, and it is far from clear that organizing along individual merit is superior to or more just than these other ways. Why not organize society’s hierarchy according to virtue, as many of the ancients believed? Why not organize society’s hierarchy according to birth, as the medievals believed, who regarded such an order as offering stability and checking ambition? Organizing society along individual merit isn’t really consistent with classical liberal views anyway, as merit itself depends on unchosen attributes and other factors to which the individual has not consented, so even on classical liberalism’s own terms it’s not entirely clear why organizing society along individual merit should be regarded as more just than other ways of organizing society. What counts as merit will also vary depending on what a society values: for example, the reader appears to adopt the modernist viewpoint that only such things as can be quantified or are measurable ought to count as merit. But it’s not clear why the quantitative should be privileged over the qualitative in this way.

If we want racism to retain morally meaningful content, the best definition is the one offered by the late Zippy: racism is injustice motivated on the basis of race. Of course, that simply raises the question of what is just and unjust, but that’s where the debate needs to be had. We cannot agree on what constitutes racist actions until we first agree on a conception of justice.

I would happily ban IVF. We shouldn’t produce children in test tubes.

An odd article by Ahmari, though it doesn’t seem to be directed at Sailer so much as at Lomez.

I’m not that familiar with Ahmari, though I had had a mildly positive attitude toward him on account of him attacking “David French-ism” (where he wrote this great line: “‘The only way is through’—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”) and his association with integralism.

Many integralists seem to have a blind spot regarding race and ethnicity, however. The erstwhile alt-right, in contrast, recognized race as important, but made it ultimate, absolutizing something finite and contingent. What’s needed is a synthesis: a conservatism that recognizes that society (not just the individual) must be oriented toward the transcendent Good as its ultimate good, while still recognizing the importance of particularity (i.e., ethnicity, culture, tradition) as the vehicle by which we apprehend the transcendent Good.

This synthesis seems to be unfortunately rare, but not unheard of: the late Lawrence Auster, James Kalb, and a couple of pseudonymous bloggers come to mind: Throne and Altar and the late Zippy.

Would have been great if after that exchange some congressman had quipped: “I move to repeal the 19th amendment.”

List some Continental European thinkers. If Kirk wrote his book today, who would be the Continental Europeans among the 33 subjects?

The French right is the most impressive (perhaps because that’s where the revolution really took off). My favorite among these is Louis de Bonald (On Divorce, see reviews here and here). Maistre is also good. A bit later in time, Hippolyte Taine is an interesting critic of liberalism. A bit later still, Charles Maurras is very interesting, although an agnostic.

I don’t have any particular love for fascism, but Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini, and (especially) Alfredo Rocco are interesting.

Agree. Also, I’m no expert on Nietsche, but he seems amenable to those looking for an excuse for self-worship.

Nah, it’s funnier to keep it as is.

Again, the state for the leftist is purely instrumental: it is a tool for dismantling institutions of oppression, for weakening the dominant culture and ‘pre-rational’ forms of organization, for reducing our dependence our traditional connections and loyalties. In short, the purpose of the state is fully in the service of furthering individual autonomy and so it tries to destroy anything that stands in the way of this goal. This is the motivation for DIE, for the modern managerial bureaucratic technocratic welfare state, and so forth. Individual autonomy requires a massive state to ensure that no one anywhere might infringe on someone else’s autonomy, and moreover, to fill the void left by all the institutions and informal connections it has destroyed.

But the state for the leftist does not have any corporate existence in itself. The left does not divinize the state nor absolutize it, nor does it regard the state as something that transcends the individual and that provides the context by which the individual understands his identity and his own good, nor as something that absorbs and reduces the individual will to the collective will. This conception of the state belongs to fascism, which is a movement of the right. As James Kalb has written (approximately): the fascist absorbs the individual into the collective, while the liberal reduces the collective to the individual.

Both, however, have the same end result: the totalitarian state.

Wow. Maybe they’ll soon even start letting Christians be pastors.

When he introduced Sailer at his NYC event, he opened with a sarcastic joke unfavorable to Israel (though the target was really more the American mainstream right’s love of Israel rather than Israel per se).

And the left is not “more individualistic” – if anything, they are far more collectivist than the right.

This is a common misperception: the ‘collectivism’ of the left is not a true collectivism, and in fact everything it does is in service to its supreme objective of furthering radical individual autonomy.

The left recognizes no corporate existence of anything over and above the individuals that comprise it: everything is reducible to the individual and his desires; all corporate entities exist only by convention. A nation is an accidental heap comprised of the individuals living within a particular region having arbitrary boundaries; the family is whatever its members say it is; race has no real existence outside its social construction as a tool of oppression. (The collective identity permitted to favored minorities is only a tool to further the ultimate goal of radical individual autonomy by destroying any collective identity that the dominant majority and culture might have.)

In fact, I would say that this is arguably the true distinction between left and right: the right recognizes the existence of corporate entities that transcend the individuals that comprise it, whether this be the family, race, nation, the Church, etc. (different variants of the right recognizing one or more of these), while the left does not.

The reason the left is perceived as being collectivist by some is stated well here:

Fascist” in the modern internet usage just means “someone on the internet with whom I disagree.” I don’t know Lomez’ political views, and for all I know he’d be right at home with Franco and Pinochet

Even Franco and Pinochet weren’t fascists.

“A chicken in every pot, an ice axe in every Trot!”

It’s interesting that these high-intelligence, on-the-spectrum types seem very good at pushing the logical implications of the liberal worldview to its extremes, to the point even where they will inadvertently get canceled for their views, yet seem unwilling – or more likely, unable – to question the framework itself. For example, in the passages you quote, Stallman implicitly and uncritically accepts the liberal conception of harm and the liberal view of sexual morality as reducible to consent.

You see this also in the ‘tranny’, ‘singularity’, and ‘downloading my mind onto a computer’ phenomena: computer science nerd types seem to be disproportionately involved in these desires to liberate our minds from our bodies, desires which strike most people as extreme and inhuman. Yet all of these phenomena are justified by the liberal ideological sine qua non of radical individual autonomy, which is simply unquestioningly accepted by these types as the ultimate good.

So the simplest explanation is the complicated one?

…except with more beautiful women in Big Night on the Town dresses…

Yeah was not expecting that.

…back in the days when white men like William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal hissed at each other on network television…

That was pretty funny.

Good article, anti-white hatred is indeed what we should be drawing attention to, not simply generic ‘racism’.

I agree that this anti-white hatred and related DIE phenomenon are not primarily the consequence of the Frankfurt school, even if the latter has influenced the former’s vocabulary and helped its ‘intellectual’ leaders frame things, and I also agree that courting votes from the Democratic client groups incentivizes the Democratic Party to demonize whites, but I do think there is a deeper ideological basis to the anti-white hatred and wokery that stems directly from liberalism:

I bought my first ice axe and I brought it home on the subway and people were legitimately afraid of me. …

Umm… are you sure they were afraid of you because of the ice axe? Speaking for myself, I’d be plenty terrified of this person without the ice axe.

And by speaking for myself, I of course mean I’m speaking for normal people everywhere.

I bought my first ice axe and I brought it home on the subway and people were legitimately afraid of me. …

Well, at least we know he’s not a Trotskyist.

If the West’s predicament is really caused by “the Enlightenment”, then we’re just screwed. There will never be a consensus to chuck science and the fruits thereof and almost no one actually wants to be ruled by churchmen–of any stripe. (Yuck.)

It isn’t that dismal. Science is here to stay, and can be reinvigorated by being put in it’s proper place, which is not as a guiding principle, but rather as subservient to the higher truths.

There’s a reason science emerged from a culture that worships the Truth as God. It’s the same reason that science is stalling and devolving into scientism as our society slides into subjectivism and skepticism.

If the West’s predicament is really caused by “the Enlightenment”, then we’re just screwed. There will never be a consensus to chuck science and the fruits thereof and almost no one actually wants to be ruled by churchmen–of any stripe. (Yuck.)

Indeed, we are screwed. Or rather, the problem is much deeper than most are willing to acknowledge, in part because acknowledging the full extent of the problem would implicate most of us to some degree. And people naturally will avoid thinking that might lead to such a conclusion. Also, because people find it too depressing to think about, as you do, so they would rather avoid thinking about it. But until it is so acknowledged, we’re screwed.

To say that we need to chuck science if we give up on the Enlightenment is a strawman: it is the philosophy of the Enlightenment we need to reject, not scientific advancement. Besides, the Scientific Revolution began a century before the Enlightenment, so obviously we can have science without the Enlightenment since it’s been done before. Surely you know this, so why are you tying the two together?

Ultimately, the Enlightenment must turn against science, too, since it demands that we conform our minds to objective reality, but the Enlightenment project is to liberate us from such demands:

Did you really think the Enlightenment would spare you, science?

Simply destroy minoritarianism–toss its adherents out of our societies–and we can keep the Enlightenment, republicanism and sane, prosperous, free nations.

Of course, this is the hue and cry of liberalism’s right wing every generation: let’s just go back to an earlier version of nicer, tamer liberalism. The problem is that these earlier versions of liberalism are not stable: you can’t reject just one or two features of liberalism and expect it then to stay put. Any philosophical or political ideology will take on a life of its own and develop according to its internal logic. These things are larger than we are. Liberalism must be rejected at its root.

I do find it ironic that the allegedly practical man of Northwestern European descent tends to be in reality the most impractical person when it comes to politics, precisely because he is unwilling to to do the intellectual work required to understand the problem and focuses instead on whatever particular symptom happens to be his bugbear.

Egos desperate… to push their pet theories

Physician, heal thyself.

“There are two types of nations: those that use the metric system and those who have put men on the moon.”

In an effort to be helpful, I am attempting to uncover the secret of Jewish power.

I have acquired a number of these ceremonial tablets. They have strange symbols imprinted upon them.

At first I couldn’t make heads or tails of the symbols. Fortunately, I was able to scan one of the tablets. I employed sophisticated AI technology to crack the ancient cipher:

Now I have to figure out how to interpret the images.

Know this, Judea: the Deplorable Goyz of Unz shall not rest until we know everything.

First, in your description of liberalism, and then in your assertion that southern states were not hierarchical…

I never asserted this, in fact I acknowledged that the South was hierarchical in my reply to Corvinus.

I have no problem your arguing that slavery ought to be associated with the right, I wasn’t really disputing that: my point is that moderns tend to look at just that one feature, and conclude from that that the South must have been right-wing ideological extremists. But this is too simplistic and reductionist. As I mentioned in my reply to Corvinus, any liberal ideology will have conservative and right-wing elements mixed in. There is also the fact that while we can say that slavery is a ‘right-wing’ institution, underlying the Southern understanding of slavery was a more liberal, modernist conception of property as opposed to a more traditional conception.

In fact of all the many liberal principles, there is no higher than

“The basis of all rights flows from the right of self-ownership.”

I wouldn’t say that this is the highest principle of liberalism, but rather perhaps the highest principle of a certain libertarian strand of liberalism associated with the likes of Murray Rothbard. John Locke, of course, might be said to have defended the self-ownership thesis, but for him this was a proxy: Locke famously denies that we own ourselves; rather God owns us, and we are merely His stewards.

(The self-ownership thesis famously suffers from circularity unless stipulated to be axiomatic, but trying to claim that it is axiomatic comes with its own insuperable problems since it is not self-evident.)

Liberalism recognizes the supreme value of individuals, and individul rights are put above political rights of the state…

Indeed, but this cannot be done consistently, because liberalism is not coherent at bottom (but getting into that is a larger topic than I have time for at present). But the upshot is that all forms of liberalism will end up denying rights to some groups in the name of individual rights: certain groups are seen as obstacles to achieving full autonomy and equal individual rights, so these groups must be suppressed to some degree or another. We see this today in modern forms of liberalism, with its attitude towards those not yet born, and increasingly toward those with ‘white privilege’. It was present in earlier forms of liberalism as well, but the targets were different. Moreover, liberalism requires a hierarchical managerial class to ensure equal freedom for all, all while denying its own authority. This doesn’t remove authority and hierarchy, it just makes it sociopathic and unaccountable.

I am replying to applaud your post (site restrictions prevent me from just clicking Agree).

Thanks for the encouragement, Bill P, that may help motivate me to do it.

“Pro tip: a democracy/republic is controlled by the masses.”

I followed you up to this point but I have to disagree with the quoted sentence. A democracy is controlled by the minority that creates, molds, and shapes public opinion. The average person is incapable of much original thought. He/she/it believes what the media masters tell him/her/it.

No.

Indeed. It escaped my notice that Sailer had even mentioned white nationalists in his post, let alone point and sputter at them.

But, I didn’t address those topics in my comment because the degree of engagement with the Jew-obsessives that can be tolerated by any one person is finite.

And anti-Semites find it more interesting to read contemporary Jews writing about old Jews than to read old Protestants whom nobody writes about anymore. So, anti-Semites, like Jews, overestimate the Jewish role in whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.

And, at the other end of the chute, we see dueling paranoias. An “anti-Semite” in America is more than happy to sell a Jew a gun. Where else is that true?

…the Jewish role in whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.

E Michael Jones might be all over the story of Jews’ role in legalizing pornography, abortion, and contraception, and replacing compulsory prayer with Darwin in public schools, but their critics at this site are silent about it. Because these critics support those things, those particulars can’t possibly be part of the Great Jewish Conspiracy.

Hi Bill P,

Thank you, I’m glad you like what I’ve written.

Unfortunately, the extent of my writing is mainly just comments such as these at a few blogs here and there. I think I would enjoy blogging and have toyed with the idea of starting my own blog (and have even drafted some things that I would post there should I ever go ahead with the idea), but have found it difficult to find the time to dedicate to it.

Of course any group or individual with a commitment to liberalism will have some conservative elements mixed in, if only because a completely thorough-going pure liberalism is impossible in principle. So I would not deny that the South appealed to various conservative sentiments such as tradition and hierarchy. As did the North, by the way: the maintenance of the Union and the preservation of her authority is nothing if not a conservative sentiment.

Nonetheless, I maintain that the Southern fire-eaters were animated by a liberal spirit to a large degree: the ideology that informed their arguments would have been unrecognizable to a traditional European conservative, for example. And ‘states’ rights’, while today regarded as a conservative sentiment (but that is because today’s mainstream American conservatism is itself a part of the broader liberal tradition), is fundamentally a liberal idea, influenced by liberal thinkers such as Jefferson. The arguments for secession were not rooted in any sort of conservatism.

First, it was Trump Derangement Syndrome. …

?

When has Sailer talked much about Trump? On twitter? He doesn’t seem to do much of it on the blog.

At any rate, as far as the stereotype I associate with Trump Derangement Syndrome, I would never have thought to put Sailer in that category.

Interesting post, Steve.

While I never cared much about the so-called Neoreactionaries (Mencius Moldbug a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin), they were at least more insightful in their analysis of the etiology of American liberalism by tracing it back to the Puritan influence than that monomaniacal segment of the alt-right with their crude Rube Goldbergesque, triple bank shot, 4D-chess attempts to connect all baleful developments to the influence of the Jews.

***

The leftist ideological center of America in the first half of the 19th Century was of course Boston…

From Henry James’s The Bostonians, set at a little later time in Boston (second half of the 19th century), a description of the character Miss Birdseye, who was thought to be a parody of Elizabeth Peabody:

[S]he belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her from being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements…

[W]henever money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two classes of the human race… It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage… She was in love… only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more appealing.

***

In contrast, the rightist ideological center of America during this era was Charleston, South Carolina, base of John C. Calhoun and the fire-eaters who launched secession in 1860.

I think to identify the Southern fire-eaters as the rightest ideological center of America is anachronistic, a consequence of our modern perspective and how we associate slavery with the right. But in reality, the ideological spirit that animated the Southern fire-eaters was quintessentially liberal: they conceived of themselves as the heirs of Jefferson (the most radical liberal of the major founders) and were anti-authority, pro-popular sovereignty, and supported radical individualism and what we today would regard as a very ‘leftist’ and ‘activist’ theory of jurisprudence. Their conception of property was also thoroughly modernist.

The Civil War was a war between two liberal factions: the egalitarian ideology of which the radical northern abolitionists were the paradigmatic representatives, versus the individualistic and anti-authority ideology of which the southern fire-eaters were the paradigmatic representatives.

Someone who represents something closer to a more authentic ‘right’ of the time was Orestes Brownson.

True. In fact, German philosophical influence was so profound it created the modern American law school.

In the 1870s, the dean of Harvard law, Christopher Langdell, re-organized the law school to be very Germanic in nature (before that it wasn’t considered prestigious or profitable). Not only did he create a standard first-year curriculum (copied by every other law school and to this day largely unchanged), but introduced the “Socratic method” in teaching, where a teacher basically puts one student on the spot each class and pushes them through questioning to absurd limits. This was copied from German ideas about such pedagogical questioning being used in sciences. It was thought that by treating law as a “science” it would rigorize and regularize the irregular American common law, discovery truths about it unknown, and thus tame the wild beast into something like chemistry, physics, or biology was becoming.

Of course it failed on those accounts. Human-made law isn’t a science. And Langdell and his Protestant associates were deliberately ignoring the 1500+ years of Catholic and Orthodox philosophy (e.g. Aquinas) on discerning a valid law and justice — i.e. with regards to Christian truth. You can’t claim there’s a universal just law principle without recourse to God and natural law.

But what the Socratic method and standardized courses did allow was for a small number of faculty to teach a large number of students and sell them textbooks. After that, law schools were huge money makers for American universities.

Some of the Jewish radicals (e.g. Emma Goldstein) came to the US already radicalized and influenced by Marxist or anarchist thinkers. But ultimately, radicalism in the US was a dead end. Emma Goldstein was sent packing back to the USSR. Chuck Schumer does not see Emma Goldstein as a role model.

The predecessors of todays Democrats did not bring their politics from the shtetl and were greatly influenced by and looked up to the great American WASP thinkers and politicians. The Yiddish radio station in New York had the call sign WEVD in honor of Eugene V. Debs (and not Emma Lazarus). My late father in law was also named Eugene in his honor. The uber-WASP FDR (and even more so Eleanor) were looked upon as gods in many Jewish households.

The Jews did not land in America as a rich elite obsessed with race and gender issues. This kind of nonsense is a luxury for rich women. Their original concerns were the bread and butter concerns of working class people – organizing for a better pay and shorter work weeks and safer conditions in the garment making sweatshops and so on.

the roots of American left of center ideology are distinctly Protestant, obviously going back to the Puritan side of the English Civil War of the 1640s

Puritans vs Cavaliers, Whigs vs Jacobites, liberals vs Tories, abolitionists vs slave-owners, John Stuart Mill vs Thomas Carlyle (although they were actually buds!)… I’m sure there were some softball games between Unitarian and Episcopalian seminarians that got quite nasty as well.

The current ideological divide in America has deep roots in the political history of Britain and the early American republic that have nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish influence. When reactionaries go off about how today’s radical left is all a product of da joos, they are being, in my view, bizarrely self-deprecating (assuming they’re of Protestant descent, which many doubtless are). We’re living in a world built by Protestants.

In the US, by the early to mid-20th century, the Jews were playing the game better than anyone else, but they were still playing a game invented by Protestants.

History is rapidly forgotten indeed.

Looking at primary sources myself, struggling through s’s spelled like f’s, I am very sympathetic to Yarvin’s view that the American Revolution was a left wing project, that the British loyalists were much farther right.

It’s crazy to mythologize things to the point that Emma Lazarus becomes an honorary founder, but it’s clear that America is not such a conservative country when you actually read primary documents outside of the Federalist Papers.

Boston was majority Unitarian by the end of the 18th century, IIRC. That’s about when the last of the old guard Puritans were forced out of Harvard and pastoralized.

But doesn’t the internal logic of the Calvinism of the Puritans naturally lead to Unitarianism and Universalism? To take the latter first, trying to reconcile a God Who is Goodness itself with a God who from eternity predestines some to eternal damnation while denying free will is a hard circle to square, and so the descendants of the Puritans took the first horn of the dilemma and rejected the second and became Universalists. Presumably, their proto-sola scriptural positivism led them likewise to regard the concept of one God in three Persons as a contradiction and resulted in their embrace of Unitarianism.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be freely preached and disseminated; for there is no country in Europe so subdued by any single authority as not to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth from the consequences of his hardihood… But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-f‚, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

So, what was once good was made bad.

Except that progressivism was rotten from the start.

This is a very weirdly written NYT article.

For example, this passage is confusing:

The man arrested in the case of Ms. McGookin, a 40-year-old occasional fringe political candidate from Brooklyn named Skiboky Stora…

Makes it sound as though the person named Ms. McGookin is named Skiboky Stora.

And this passage:

And this is to say nothing of the less manifestly aggressive, if pervasive, abrasions — the distillation of any middle-aged woman who complains about anything to the favored signifier of oblivious bourgeois entitlement, the “Karen.”

As well as this one:

…as if it warranted no consideration that a psychological malady might find such brute expression in an antagonism directed at women….

And this one:

The Police Department surely does not have as part of its remit the eradication of sexism across the culture. …

all distract from whatever message the authoress is trying to convey by drawing attention instead to her bloated and unstylistic prose.

In other news, The US reaches Ukrainian levels of corruption…

So corruption levels in the U.S. are decreasing?

Garth Brooks also tried out for the San Diego Padres.

Churchill was also an accomplished polo player, so I guess he gets to tick off both the artist and jock boxes.

In my high school, choir was oddly high status (band was not). Consequently, a number of jocks were in it. Overall, I’d say they were above-average singers, and several were quite good and in the top ‘chamber’ choir.

How many rock stars died of AIDS in the 1980s-1990s? There was Freddie Mercury and then there was … uh … there was that guy in the B-52s. It’s an especially limited toll considering that more than a few rock stars were needle junkies, the other main way to die of AIDS.

Does New Wave count as rock? I don’t know how many died of AIDS, but there seems to have been a lot of New Wave musicians who were homosexual.

When did this golden age end? You are trying to separate what you don’t like from what you do, without realizing that the pop culture you praise was part of a liberal culture that provided the space for the excesses of the last 50 years. You are no different than some of the online types who try to romanticize the 90’s as a time before things “got bad.”

Slippery slope is real. That’s why people recognized rock and jazz as degenerate. The same goes for novels and movies, they all slowly rolled back civilizational standards. Even noir, which has a shallow element of machismo, still often promotes premarital sex or degeneracy.

You guys are basically normies who got freaked out in recent years. You see no connection between “Dazed and Confused” and the world it represented and what we have now.

Slippery slope.

but taking away unjustified privileges is not anti anything.

But there’s the rub, no? First, what counts as an unjustified privilege? And second, is an unjustified privilege ipso facto wrong?

The answer to the first is going to depend on the assumptions you bring to bear on the question: a meritocratic liberal will answer differently from a woke leftist who will answer differently from a traditionalist monarchist. For example, the latter might say that tradition is sufficient to justify a privilege, and that therefore the privilege in question is justified, whereas the meritocratic liberal and woke leftist are unlikely to be convinced by such an appeal.

Certainly, taking away an ‘unjustified’ privilege can be ‘anti’ something if it disproportionately disrupts the order of society.

Also, fascists helped to pioneer architectural modernism. Nikos Salingaros, disciple of Christopher Alexander, briefly touches upon that in an interview.

JK. You speak of consumerism, but also point out that the fascists pioneered architectural modernism, and certain aspects of the movement are prominent in Nazi and Soviet architecture. So are all these part of something more general?

NS. Actually, all revolutionary movements following World War I wanted a break with the past, and especially with the look of the past, so they embraced buildings that looked sleek, white, and metallic like the machines of the time. They implemented the world revolution that would rebuild humanity through industrialization. This is the link to consumerism, since industry can only produce if the population consumes. Marxism and capitalist consumerism are antithetical, but the socialist state like the capitalist state was fixated upon massive industrial output. And the modernist architectural pioneers were willing agents of industry, making up wild explanations for why the “new” materials were superior, practically and ethically. They sold an industrial product and were rewarded with commissions, fame, and academic positions. Coincidentally, they put traditional construction techniques and a vast network of local building and craft traditions out of business. States, both on the left and on the right, just loved this depersonalized approach to building, where the individual no longer matters and everything is sacrificed to an imposed utopian vision. So you lose the human checks and balances and the industrial system takes over.

Jews were not heavily involved in the advent of modernist architecture, that was primarily spearheaded by gentiles.

There are of course some famous Jewish names among contemporary architects: Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind. I associate Jews more with postmodernist architecture than with modernist architecture proper, but I don’t know if that would hold up under closer scrutiny.

Yet, there are a lot of chimpanzees who have somehow managed to comment here.

There was a reactionary lesson in the show that is now conventional wisdom, but in pre-Roissy 2003 wasn’t: be as masculine as possible to get women.

Is it really true that this wasn’t understood back then?

Certainly, at least by my high school years, it was obvious to me that the guys who did well with women were generally the confident/cocky ones who teased them. You didn’t have to have exceptional observational skills to see this.

Marie Dressler was the weirdest movie star of the Depression: a fat 60-something lady.

Another one I don’t get from early Hollywood is Mae West.

There’s another great line from another movie about the Irish, The Quiet Man.

The John Wayne character has called on his love interest (Maureen O’Hara) and taken her out. He says something that insults her, and she makes to hit him. The chaperone (Barry Fitzgerald) exclaims:

Is this a courtin’ or a donnybrook? Have the good manners not to hit the man until he’s your husband and entitled to hit you back.

Thanks. I had forgotten about Derbyshire and abortion.

I didn’t know about Ponnuru’s views on Trump, and I know nothing about Klein, but back when I read NR I always found Ponnuru to be one of the more intelligent and thoughtful writers there (certainly much more so than Lowry), and the rare type who was willing to engage with those to his right (e.g., Auster) rather than simply to denounce them.

Charles Cooke, is, as you say, too libertarianish for me to have ever really taken seriously.

Kathryn Jean Lopez always seemed like a shallow writer to me.

I don’t really disagree with any of this, but I think ‘Minoritarianism’ is more a symptom than a cause. It is the loss of civilizational self confidence that allows the Minoritarian bacillus to invade. It’s sort of like (apocryphal) Chesterton’s aphorism “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He will believe in anything.” While it may not be true theologically, it is true, and how!, culturally.

Of course, prior to Trump, it was clear that the self-immolation of National Review was only a matter of time: they ran editorials by Jason Lee Steorts endorsing ‘gay marriage’ around the 2011-2015 time frame.

NR was quick to clarify that this was not their official editorial line on sodomy, but recall that when John Derbyshire dissented from NR‘s official line on race in 2012 (and this in an article that wasn’t even for NR), he was summarily dismissed.

So in other words, if you write common sense suggestions for how to deal with blacks, that’s beyond the pale, but if you write that sodomitical relationships deserve to be treated equally to marriages, that’s just open, vigorous debate.

But hey, I’m sure they’ve held the line against increased capital gains taxes!

Citizenism is implicitly pro-white, because, the whites are, after all, the majority…

It doesn’t work that way though. For some corporate entity to flourish, it must be recognized as having an existence over and above the members that comprise it, and as having collective rights that follow from this. For example, one could argue that citizenism is implicitly pro-family, because every citizen is a member of a family and most people want their families to flourish. Yet, unless the family is recognized as an indispensable good in its own right irreducible to the rights of the individuals that comprise it, and supported and promoted by society and by state policy, it will gradually dissipate because relying on mere custom and habit alone is not strong enough to withstand the incentives for individualism and selfishness, especially when it is only individual rights that are recognized by government.

Whites ought to advocate for their collective rights, just as a man ought to advocate for his family’s rights, but subordinated to the common good and while still recognizing what is owed in justice to other races. Whites ought also to reclaim their moral authority and leadership in society. This latter is admittedly a tall order, as this would first require us to repent of our liberalism and collective wickedness.

Very nice to see Deaton questioning a lot of conventional economic wisdom, even going so far as to question the efficiency-über-alles sacred cow.

On the free trade question, Ian Fletcher’s book Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why is an excellent take-down of free trade ideology.

Power: Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game. Without an analysis of power, it is hard to understand inequality or much else in modern capitalism.

This is a huge blinder among classical and neo-classical economists. Like the old joke about economists assuming there is a can opener when presented with a challenge of having a canned peach on a deserted island, classical economists assume a “free market” as the default, theoretical construct when such a beast has never existed and never will.

Philosophy and ethics… human well-being.

Here I quote John Boyd (of the OODA loop fame): “people first, ideas second, hardware third.”

Empirical methods… econometrics… Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms that are plausible, interesting, and worth thinking about, even if they do not meet the inferential standards of contemporary applied economics.

I find this very amusing, because, back when I was working on my Ph.D. in history, I was steered toward choosing econometrics to satisfy one of the two methodology requirements, because it was deemed necessary to have “hard” quantitative analytical skills (for the other, I chose wargaming/simulation building, aka mathematical modeling of battle outcomes, similar to what Trevor Dupuy did with his “quantified judgment method”). To be sure, quantitative skills are highly necessary. But they are not sufficient for building causal models for large scale phenomena, for which certain art of “intuitive” sense (or dare I say, wisdom from studying history) is required.

Humility

This is asking too much of a highly intelligent people. 😉 In all seriousness, much knowledge is taught in academia these days, but little is taught of virtue – and I mean genuine virtue by this, not what passes for it these days (“virtue-signaling”). What elites talk of noblesse oblige today? “Meritocracy” combined with the decline of Christianity have been a disaster for the leadership ethics of this nation.

Second thoughts… unions

I also have second thoughts about unions these days, precisely because Big Business has become overwhelmingly powerful. But I have also seen the excesses of institutionalized unionism run amok (basically operating as a powerful arm of the Democratic Party and wrecking businesses and economies). This is a thorny issue – how do we create organizations that can advocate well for the workers and curb the excesses of corporate power without those organizations turning into corrupt instruments of the leftist political parties?

skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers… immigration

Completely agree here. I used to be a standard free market advocate who argued for international free trade and (legal) immigration. Both have been devasting for the downscale and the lower middle class in the United States and have contributed significantly to it becoming a “high-low” society where the vital middle class has shrunk dramatically. I still think it’s a good idea to encourage as much business competition as possible within our borders, but it’s well past time to erect barriers to prevent looting of our domestic market by foreign mercantilists. As well, by now, we all know that immigration – of both high and low – damages domestic workers.

If those were big confounding factors, we should expect to see a starker difference between white and black than we do.

Political correctness in the ’90s was often dismissed as some silly fad by mainstream conservatives: mildly annoying but ultimately benign, something to mock and kvetch about, but not something worth devoting serious effort to oppose. Moderates and liberals tended to present it as mere politeness, a set of social norms to avoid giving unwanted offense to facilitate living together in a pluralistic society. Both these views are to misunderstand the fundamental nature of political correctness. In fact, political correctness is an expression of mature liberal ideology and functions as a comprehensive enforcement mechanism for conformity to this ideology. The result is a rigidly uniform society that tolerates no dissent from politically correct orthodoxy, that abolishes any rational politics, and that destroys community and deprives life of any meaningful choices. The rise of ‘wokeness’ in recent years with its cancel culture and periodic two-minute hate sessions against anyone who traduces woke norms is simply the culmination of the internal logic of political correctness working itself out.

James Kalb is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the nature of political correctness. Here is an old essay of his from the late ’90s where he defines an analyzes it:

PC and the Crisis of Liberalism

And here’s a short blog post (not by Kalb) describing the anti-social nature of PC:

Is Political Correctness Merely Niceness?

He professed in an interview he was bored with reading free market economists like Mises or Friedman and wrote a particularly nasty obituary of the free market economist Murray Rothbard.

Well, I don’t know if the obituary was deserved or not, but Rothbard was a hack when it came to the philosophical defense of his particular brand of libertarianism (anarcho-capitalism) and is overrated.

However, I’ve read of an anecdote he recounts where that pernicious she-devil Ayn Rand demanded of her followers that they reject Christ and agree that He was the source of all evil. Rothbard, whose wife was Christian, refused. He thereafter parted ways with Rand. So I give him credit for that.

Thanks. Interesting article.

Yeah, I don’t follow the game closely enough any more really to know for certain, but my impression of seeing power plays is that a lot of goals are scored on some variant of one-timer, but yeah, maybe more with the waist-high type like you suggest.

” once at a performance of the musical Annie with his wife and kids in 1976 (?), looking like a civic monument”

He was laying toppled on the floor and covered in anti-white graffiti?

Also playing ‘off-wing’ is pretty much required for a successful one-timer, which seems to be a big part of the game these days.

I never played at an elite level, but based on my experience, I would agree that errors – and walks – are more psychologically damaging than hits. I wouldn’t say so much because of the potential for acrimony, but because they are perceived as missed opportunities where you are shooting yourself in the foot, whereas a hit is more perceived as someone beating you fair and square.

However, for the offense, I think a hit is more psychologically motivating than getting on base via a walk or an error.

I remember reading that Richards had been considered for the title role in Monk. That could have been interesting.

‘Liberal’ and ‘right’ are not opposites: one can be both a liberal and on the right.

‘Right’ and ‘left’ are relative terms and depend on the society and era. In today’s society, Sailer is on the right.

‘Liberal’, however, is an objective term that has an essence. And so in that sense, Sailer can be described as a liberal, though with various illiberal commitments (no one can be a truly thoroughgoing liberal, since liberalism is incoherent at bottom).

But just about everyone on the right today is a liberal of one variety or another, including those on the non-mainstream right. Those who aren’t are still usually some flavor of modernist.

That’s interesting. I was too young for Seinfeld when it was on the air, but now having watched reruns I’d say I’d prefer it to any other sitcom I’ve seen, while I find most other sitcoms from that era dated. The Office is funny too, but I’d still go for Seinfeld first.

What do you think about the “He Gets Us” ad? I thought it did more damage to Christianity in 30 seconds than Richard Dawkins did in his entire career. Hilarious.

Well said.

Those ads are nauseatingly treacly and conspicuously obsequious toward the reigning liberal pieties.

it was a mainstream evangelical organization, backed by the same people who give money to the Alliance Defending Freedom.

So it’s an ostensibly conservative Christian group that put these ads on? That’s even more embarrassing. I would have guessed a liberal Christian group that ‘ordains’ women and is fully on board with LGBT, e.g., ELCA.

Accept “liberalism” really has nothing to do with it.

…

“The problem”–the crisis in the West–is entirely minoritarianism–this toxic ideology that normies must bend over to accommodate minorities

Um. Where do you think minoritarianism came from? It came from liberalism. ‘Minoritarianism’ is merely a symptom of the deeper malaise that afflicts us.

What someone thinks about state medical provision, or building public transit vs. highways, or wind power–or even actual classical liberalism on free trade vs. higher tariffs–has basically nothing to do with “the problem”.

Is this what you think liberalism is?

This is very good. A keeper, actually.

It deserves to be the standard definition of midwit available everywhere on the web.

This is the best reason to keep abortion, it not legal, at least fairly easy for black women to get.

I don’t know how long I’ll have to keep posting this but,

1) Mass abortion did not reduce crime. History shows the exact opposite.

2) Prior to the mass abortion era, the black portion of the US population was shrinking. Since the mass abortion era, the black portion of the US population has been relentlessly growing.

These are just facts, unrelated to anyone’s opinion of abortion’s morality.

If you want a lower-crime, less black society, abortion is your enemy.

If you like high crime and more blacks, abortion is your ally.

It doesn’t matter what your personal “morality” happens to be, this is just the ways it works in the real world, rather than in Steven Levitt’s debunked but strangely popular theories.