Why Civilizations Die

Life arose on Earth around 3.8 billion years ago, although some evidence suggests that life was here closer to four and one quarter billion years ago. It's been a bit of a struggle ever since. A crude understanding of the way of life is the classic, cliched "kill or be killed", but that's inelegant and nihilistic in the way that we characterize petulant, moody, brooding teenagers as nihilists. They aren't really nihilists, you understand, we call them that because we don't really understand nihilism (because Nietzsche is, like, hard, man), and they call themselves nihilists because the word nihilism sounds pretty fucking metal.

A better way to characterize the way of life, and indeed the way of the universe, is that everything has a cost. People think of dollars and cents when they think of the cost of something, but what something costs really means what the requisite exchange is for an intended result. The man lifting weights in the gym is spending time at the gym, money for a membership, and calories and ATP expended during exercise for strength and (more often than not) improved aesthetics. The man who spends his evenings playing vidya instead of working out is exchanging his hours of leisurely (but pointless) stimulation at the cost of doing practically anything else.

In a more natural setting, the eternal war between predator and prey comes at a cost to one or the other's life. For the predator to eat, it must take the life of it's prey. For the prey to survive, the predator must expend precious energy on a fruitless hunt, thereby risking starvation. This is the story of life from the beginning to the present, and beyond. The struggle is an immutable, omnipresent fact of life. It has always been so, and as such, we should expect life to be finely tuned to the need to struggle. Life and death are balanced by the war between predator and prey. While the brutality of failure startles us - either through the agony of being consumed, or the ignoble end through starvation - struggle is not without hope. There is no hope of reprieve from the struggle, other than through death. But there is hope in that, over time, the better will win out over the worst, and the good will accumulate while the bad is washed away.

The accumulation of the better and the erasure of the worse is the very condensed version of how we got from simple single celled organisms to the complex civilization of today. Obviously, this version of the story is a little misleading, as there were quite a few ups and downs along the way, but the general trend of life has been a move from less complexity and less organization towards greater complexity and greater organization. And, again, the point must be stressed that getting from there to here cost something - the countless creatures that were eaten or starved or perished in some cataclysm or unfortunate accident.

This is all well and fine, but at this point all I am doing is reiterating, in a very puffed up fashion, the sort of narrative that you'd find in a middle school zoology textbook. How do we know that life is finely tuned to struggle? Besides going into the wild and observing that animals tend to eat one another, we can go beyond base observations and examine what happens when the opposite conditions are met. What happens to a population that isn't forced to struggle?

Thankfully, this question is not just an idle hypothetical. In the 1960's an ethologist named John B. Calhoun embarked on a series of experiments using lab mice that culminated in the famous (but widely misunderstood) mouse utopia experiment. You can read a scan of Calhoun's paper here. I strongly suggest that you do so.

Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment, naturally, involved observing mice in a literal mouse utopia. A colony of mice was introduced to a controlled environment with unlimited access to food and water, zero risk of predation or natural cataclysm, and thanks to regular testing for the presence of harmful pathogens and periodic cleaning of the mouse enclosure, mitigated risk of disease. For the first year, the mouse utopia expanded rapidly. Between the first year and day 600, the birthrate declined as the mice began displaying increasingly aberrant behavior. After day 600, no more birthed mice survived, and the aberrant behavior reached its crescendo with a complete abandonment of natural behaviors as the mice became withdrawn and solitary. From there the mouse colony collapsed into extinction, with only 27 mice surviving to the close of the experiment. For reference, at it's peak, the mouse colony contained over 2000 individuals.

Calhoun, incorrectly I believe, postulated that the cause of the decline of his mouse utopia was a "behavioral sink", where aberrant behavior formed as a result of all space and roles being filled with no outside release to vent the excess. The problem, I noticed, with this line of reasoning is that the mouse colony never ran out of space. At it's peak, the colony still had room for almost double the population. The 2200 mice that existed seems an arbitrary point of collapse if we are to accept that all 'social roles' being filled was the cause of the colony's decline. Why 2200? Why not 2300? Why not 1000? Why not the 3900 that the colony could, in theory, accommodate?

The answer, I've concluded, doesn't have to do with numbers, but is rather drawn out from the aberrant behavior displayed during the decline of the colony and the natural mating habits of animals. First, copying directly from Calhoun's Wikipedia article for convenience, the following are the irregular behaviors Calhoun observed in his mice:

"...between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against.

After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed."

Does any of this sound familiar?

The next important piece of evidence, which Calhoun evidently did not consider, is why animals breed the way that they do. Of course rabbits fuck (and therefore, reproduce) like bunnies, everyone knows that, but the why actually has to do with... resource availability. Animals favor one of two selection patterns, r or K, a theory (really, less a theory than a simplified categorization of observed behavior) more or less given new life by a Dissident Rightist who calls himself Anonymous Conservative, to whom I at least owe the courtesy of a link.

The two strategies, basically, are quality versus quantity. A population of r-strategists favors quantity, like rabbits and mice. The characteristics of r-strategists with regards to mating are promiscuity, polygamy, low parental investment, rapid sexual maturity, and low tribal loyalty. These characteristics are important for a successful r-strategist because r-strategists inhabit an environment of resource plenty. In order to spread it's genes as effectively and as efficiently as possible, an r-strategist quite literally fucks like a bunny, because investing in a life-long mate, rearing your young, or fighting over (nigh infinite) resources means that your competitor who wastes zero energy on any of those things while burning all of his calories in the pursuit of making more of himself has a genetic advantage over you in the long run. If you have not deduced this already, r-strategists are exclusively herbivores, although herbivores are not exclusively r-strategists (elephants being an obvious example of an herbivore that doesn't clearly fit the r-strategy profile, off the top of my head). The herbivore thing will be a little funny later. In a dark sort of way.

Anyways.

K-strategists, being quality, are the opposites, naturally. A population of k-strategists favors quality, like the wolf. The characteristics of K-strategists with regards to mating are low promiscuity, monogamy, high parental investment, delayed sexual maturity and high tribal loyalty. These characteristics are important for a successful K-strategist because K-strategists inhabit an environment of resource scarcity. Where the r-strategist is reproductively advantaged in an environment of extreme plenty by promiscuity and extreme fecundity, the scarcity of calories available to harvest relative to the calories a K-strategist must expend in the acquisition ultimately mean that promiscuity and extreme fecundity are simply not survivable options. However much a wolf might want to mate with every female he encounters, his young will never survive - and therefore his genes will not pass on - if great care is not taken in rearing of the young. Hence the opposite traits from r-selection manifest in large predatory mammals: Tribalism, monogamy, paternalism, delayed maturity, and - for lack of a better word - chastity.

This all basically boils down to a ratio I referred to in the paragraph above: Calories available for consumption compared to the calories burned acquiring said calories. In simpler, individual terms, we use this rough approximation to gain or lose weight, depending on what your goals are (or aren't - the most grotesque fatbodies I know don't seem to think all that much beyond the reflexive action of shoveling food down their gullets). A 1:1 ratio is stasis, 1:>1 is surplus and >1:1 is starvation. A pack of wolves (that survives to reproduce over a given time period) is probably closer to 1:1 without descending into starvation, while a selected population of rabbits is far more heavily skewed into the 1:>1 range.

What I believe John Calhoun's experiment actually demonstrated wasn't a behavioral sink. I also don't believe his experiment simply showed the consequences of simply introducing an r-selection population to an environment free from culling. If this were the case, we should have seen a population continue to expand exponentially until all available space was occupied. What the rise and then fall of the population seems to show us is that - surprise - an environment does indeed shape a population. In this case, Calhoun took natural features and benefits the average mouse might expect to find in the wild - namely an abundance of calories for cheap - and removed the natural hazards and revealed that the selection strategy will eventually produce and extremely warped population that displays aberrant behavior. In a sense, the 'individualism' Calhoun observed at the end of the mouse colony is r-selection taken to it's superlative form.

Isn't that curious? But what does that have to do with why a civilization dies?

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Near the end of the British Empire, a soldier by the name of John Glubb was stationed in Outremer - the British holdings in the Middle East - where he sated his soldierly boredom by voraciously reading the ancient texts of the old Islamic scholars. Later in life he wrote a fascinating essay called The Fate of Empires, which I strongly suggest you read as well. The Fate of Empires is short enough that I need not explain the entire essay to you - really, go read it. The most important takeaway from the essay, in relation to this one, is that civilizations follow similar life cycles. First comes the outbreak, colonization or conquest by the strong and adventurous. After establishment and a period of growth, a mercantile class arises, which generates wealth. Wealth eventually begets great public works, and then intellectualism, as duty, industriousness, strength, optimism, and virtue fade. In their place, selfishness, sloth, weakness, pessimism and corruption take root. Soon there after, the civilization dies - no longer capable of maintaining itself, it collapses under it's own weight. Glubb noticed that the tipping point in all great civilizations was the onset of great wealth, but he could not explain why.

Some specific, curious developments that Glubb linked between the downfall eras of the great civilizations he examined included cosmopolitanism and an increase in the presence of foreigners, the loss of martial and religious traditions, the liberation of women from traditional roles, the primacy of higher education, and the growth of state welfare and benefits reserved for the underclass.

If you haven't already caught on to what my argument implies, allow me to hit you over the head with it: The reasons civilizations die is because they prosper themselves to death. We've demonstrated this phenomenon under laboratory conditions, we've experienced it through the many iterations of the civilizational life-cycle, and it's happening to us right now.

Why do you think that is is now, at the apex of Western prosperity following World War II, that this exists?

Or this?

Or this?

Or this?

Or this?

Go to any major city across the United States and the freakish signs of this sort of dis-ease will smack you in the face with the tsk-tsking noise constantly coming out of the mouths of hipster urbanites with a chip on their shoulder for their ruralite cousins and an unrelenting, unwarranted sense of self-importance. The garish hair dye, the obtuse politics, the ugly mode of dress, lumpy bodies, poor aesthetics, weak arms and necks and backs... these aren't mere signs of a culture swirling the drain, hijacked by a merciless cabal of coin-clutchers. These are the outward manifestations of a deeply sick population. This sickness is caused, essentially, by gains at no cost. The prosperity we live in is like nothing that has ever existed in all of history - ever. All the way back to the primordial era of proto-cellular life. At no point was life ever conditioned to live in such absolute plenty. We're living longer, fewer of us die at birth, giving birth, during our childhood, or through the violence of war and conquest. Our lives are mostly sedentary, food is so easily accessible that our underclass is grotesquely fat. Jobs less and less involve direct labor, most of us sit at desks or in chairs, talking on phones or typing on computers. We weren't built to live like this. And given the clear indications of decline, it appears that nature isn't too keen on letting us live like this for a whole lot longer. Someday, the bottom will drop out on us. The imbalance between naturally occurring hierarchies will bring this whole thing toppling to the ground, and the survivors will sit in the wreckage, dazed, confused and covered in ash. It may happen as soon as 10 years from today, or 100, but whatever date it will look like 410 all over again.

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As an aside, the biological reality of unaccounted prosperity equals aberrant behavior conveniently answers the question of why former vassal-states of the U.S.S.R. seem immunized to the call to degeneracy, while their Western neighbors are completely enthralled by hedonistic pursuits. Material prosperity is, ultimately, more toxic than communism.

Go figure.

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Any system that arises out of those ashes (our out of the clay that formed the West, remolded) must take into account the toxicity of accumulated gains without paying the costs. This is why I never really enjoyed or supported Richard Spencer's policy ideas. I met Spencer once, at a clandestine meeting near my hometown [if you're reading this, I asked you if BAP was your Chad-Nationalist alter-ego], and while he was a likable fellow in his own right, I immediately realized that Spencer's policies were designed to entice the shit-lib urbanite crowd. This is a mistake. Supposing, for a moment, that a significant portion of shitty White urbanites can be enticed into a racial awakening by baiting them with "you can have socialism! but only if you let go of darky", that would win one battle while leaving us desperately weakened in the face of our most important obstacle: The decline in quality of our own people. So far as I am concerned, the genetic shredding urban sprawl is a boon to we who wish to make it through the dark of this night. The worst of us migrate to the cities, where our desire (and eventually capability) to reproduce fades under a deluge of alcohol, hedonism, swelling fat cells, and cats. Good riddance.

This also explains why Feudalism, however unrefined it may otherwise be, provided the momentum for the greatest technological advancement in human history. One thousand years of segregating the bad from the good (usually vis-a-vis the gibbet) provided us with the intellectual and social fuel to get us to the moon. We are on the downward side of that rise, but with we catch, or really, make, a new wave, then perhaps we really will be able to claim the stars as our birthright.

The Lost Boys

On any given day, from these ignoble pixels in front of your face, to the furthest shores of the react-o-sphere, we grimly count the evils of these days. Today I set aside time to gripe to you, dear reader, about the tragic fate of men, or what is left of us anyways.

I found this Quora post by a Marine concerning bullying and the innate need for boys to channel their aggression in productive ways through Heartiste. It is illuminating enough that I suggest you read it in full. The author recounts his experience both as a target of bullying who escaped his social hell by beating the crap out of his bully, and his experience as an instructor who discovered exactly how bad things have gotten for young men. Again, read it in full, it's worth every sentence.

It hit me right in the feels.

From what I can gather about Nick Cruz, he was a loser with emotional problems and poor romantic prospects. That roughly describes every single mass shooter, but with the focus on firearms people seem to gloss over who Nick Cruz was and the circumstances that led to him killing other young people. This is very low tier thinking - the sort of immediate reaction that should make conservatives pause and wonder about why they take cultural marching orders from the screeching lunatics colleges and universities make of their very children. But is and ought are very different things, so never mind. Conservatives are useless. Etc.

Jon Davis' post roughly parallels the reactionary critique of the modern world, despite him being, as far as I can tell, conventionally conservative. I haven't read far enough into the guy to nail him down or anything, at least further than saying he isn't explicitly reactionary.

In our neurotic haste to shield the young from the pain of life, we have created a monstrous generation of emotionally stunted losers. The consequence of a padded world with no outlet and no hope of truly introspective self assessment and improvement is that occasionally someone succumbs to the red-eyed rage of fatalism, and kills a bunch of people when he snaps. And it's almost always he, because the very bottom of the demented social hierarchy we've created is always a male, no matter what. In the later days of the West, even the homeliest of women can find an emotional outlet by being someone's (excuse me, someones' plural) cumdumpster. This is not to say that I recommend that sort of thing as a healthy exercise or anything, I am simply observing that even the wretched girls I knew in high school knew how to get male attention by offering them cheap sex. Having an outlet, however distasteful, is vastly better than no outlet. Because, as they say, there comes a time in every man's life where to get to where he needs to go, and finding no doors or windows, he walks through a wall. In the case of Nick Cruz, his breakthrough came out of the barrel of a gun. Assuming we aren't being fed a heaping line of shit about what happened, this is indeed tragic.

Naturally, right next to the screeching about guns from shameless opportunists comes the wailing about yet further anti-bullying programs, tolerance, love, letting every child unequivocally know that they indeed are a special snowflake like everyone else. Which is horseshit. The mollycoddling of our youth has brought us to this exact point. What girls need, developmentally, beyond a strong and healthy father, is not the sort of thing I am prepared to comment at length upon. Nor do I particularly care - because the problem with women, i.e. the sluts, cumdumpsters, fatties, thots, screeching feminists and cluster b attention whores is simply remedied by making our men strong again. The MGTOW movement is completely retarded because the task of fixing women's behavior issues and our civilization generally requires the combined effort of men who are, well, men. The withdrawal of men is the surrender of our civilization. You do not step away and say "No, girls, you need to move."

The problem with men is that they are not men, but instead are weakened, sedated, deprived of masculine hobbies, outlets, mentors, by a quasi-religious cult that is overtly hostile to masculinity in and of itself. I was fortunate, I played football in middle school and high school, and I had a string of coaches who, even if they sucked at coaching football, were men and allowed us to be men. Football was my sparring ring - practice well and you played. Practice poorly, get bested by someone else, and you lost your spot. In the weight room we developed our form and camaraderie, and we finished our lifting cycles with wrestling competitions at the end of the week - a crude bastardization of sumo, classic wrestling and football. Boneyard wrestling we called it, and I looked forward to it even more than hitting a new peak in a particular lift. It was exhilarating, another chance to cut my teeth against the strength of a peer.

That a horde of self-important women blessed by God with a heaping dose of completely fucking retarded took away dodge ball and wrestling and handed kids participation trophies because they wanted everyone to feel nice is the sort of thing that makes me wish death by drawing and quartering was still fashionable. What has happened to men is worse than a mistake. It is the worst sort of evil - the kind that regards itself as the highest good.

It isn't that the bottom of the adolescent social hierarchy is inevitably a man in today's world - that will never change. I can imagine a few blue-hairs shrieking that I simply want to oppress women by placing them beneath men. This is mostly true in a round about way because I've noted, in retrospect, that the most "liberated" of women adore the sort of man who puts them in their place when they're acting up, and who slaps them firmly on the ass when they do something nice, like having a warm meal on the table when you get home or giving you a world class blowjob (if I had any doubts she was a whore they evaporated with the noticeable absence of any gagging noises).

The tragedy, as Jon Davis points out, is that young men shielded from conflict are stuck when they hit bottom because there is no natural outlet, no way to climb back up. Men measure one another off of four fundamental traits, according to Jack Donovan: Strength, Courage, Honor, and Mastery. As young man, demonstrating your strength and courage and defending your honor are the basics of building yourself up both socially and internally. The foul women who run the academy and public school system either do not understand this, or maliciously deprive young men of the opportunity to be young men because - and let's not mince our words here - they are evil cunts.

The solution, of course, has little to do with guns, or with bullying, or committees of hags with an unwarranted sense of self importance. The people who bitch the most about guns [rightly] fear their political opponents, who are both armed to the teeth and increasingly irate at the little dictators running amok over their culture. The anti-bullying, pro-committee crusade is an outlet for those who are desperate to validate their sense of self importance because deep down inside they not only do not feel important, but they deeply resent the fact that they are completely dispensable. They contribute nothing but white noise to the ether, untidy sandcastles far below the crest of great waves they have no hope of containing. The age of intellectualism has dragged on too long.

Men must become great again, must become Men again.

Feedback Loop

Everybody signals. Many signals are small, unconscious, or at least unintentional. For example, I speak unaccented English, which should signal to you that I am from somewhere in the Midwest. I don't mean to speak the way I do, it is simply a byproduct of my upbringing. I used to wear band shirts and ripped jeans and uneven haircuts because I was a drummer in a crappy punk band in high school, and I specifically and intentionally wanted everyone to know what clique I belonged to. One signal was unintentional, one signal clearly was not. One I have to this day, one I have long since abandoned.

Everybody signals.

There isn't anything wrong with signals. Signalling is part of communication, it's how we build and maintain our reputation. Reputations help us socialize. Without signals, and therefore without reputation, there would be no interaction beyond a perpetual series of introductions that would fade into meaninglessness once proximity was lost to time and space.

Sometimes people rail against signalling and it sounds to me a lot like the postmodern tears shed over hierarchy. By that I mean that it is pointless and ineffectual and, frankly, stupid to rail against a permanent and ubiquitous phenomenon that is directly caused by the human aspect of being human. You'll never end signalling any more than fat feminists will ever really end hierarchy.

The postmodernists want to obliterate hierarchical arrangement for one of two reasons: either they are personally dissatisfied with their own rank and wish to cheat around the lie of equality by bringing everyone down to a level below where they currently stand, thus allowing them to leapfrog over their natural superiors - or - they are in such an excruciating state of perpetual mental distress (as VoxDay has claimed on several occasions) that they wish for the sweet embrace of nothingness. Reducing the distinctions between unique points interspersed throughout the universe is the same as reducing everything to nothing. The total erasure of time and meaning in a singularity. They long for the release they instinctually believe oblivion offers but are too cowardly to kill themselves. So far anyways - some have claimed that a great millennial die-off is coming. We shall see. Perhaps thots with no marriage prospects will start throwing themselves of tall buildings en masse, but that time has not yet come - if it ever will.

Sometimes postmodernists rail against hierarchy for both reasons at the same time. Never mind that this doesn't make sense, it doesn't have to if you understand that you should not be approaching this sort of thing in a linear, premise premise conclusion format. They certainly aren't.

Slightly downstream from the postmodern camp is the conventional urbanite cohort. Not quite wayward enough to mutilate themselves or dye their hair garishly, but in enough of a state of dis-ease that they will enthusiastically signal their academic credentials. Most frequently this is done by disparaging Donald Trump, as if their collective groan were somehow enough to undo the dawn of the Trumpenreich.

As if.

That part is important in understanding. Kant placed a premium on intentions. The intention of your friend signalling on Facebook is not to bring down Trump through his words and frantic gesticulations against the God Emperor. He may wish it so, but his intention is internal, and yet paradoxically solipsistic. It is paradoxically solipsistic because while his intention is to gratify himself through likes and pats-on-the-back from other thralls of the zeitgeist, he is ironically dependent on positive reactions from things outside of himself. Others. While he may have succumbed to solipsism, the superlative form of selfishness, gratification and relief must come from outside of himself.

You may say something to the effect of this dumb idiot cannot be fucked to pick himself up by his own bootstraps and you wouldn't exactly be wrong. You just wouldn't be telling either of us something we don't already know.

Keeping with that noble tradition, I too am about to tell you something we both already know, but that to my knowledge has not been fleshed out in exact terms.

The tendency of the millennial urbanite cohort to virtue signal is directly caused by the atomizing effect of city life. Cities are no longer centers of economic activity. Cities are high school 3.0 to the high school 2.0 of college. Lonely and emotionally stunted, this last, worst generation is lured to the city for economic reasons and the promise of frequent socialization. While for some the economic prospects do bear the fruits promised, for almost no one does frequent socialization result in genuine, permanent connections. Cheap, alcohol fueled sex and access to euphoria inducing hard drugs reduces inhibitions and long term planning in exchange for immediate gratification. Unfortunately when the high diminishes the user is left with two choices: hangover or redose? When the money runs out and the hangover sets in the loneliness that never really left comes back into view. Hence the pervasiveness of antidepressants and other prescription mood stabilizing drugs. What is remarkable is how nonchalant many people are in this regard. Everyone is medicated and yet no one takes a whole lot of time to stop and marvel at the implications. When you point out the profound and ubiquitous level of unhappiness the immediate answer has to do with some material or monetary want or dissatisfaction. Jobs, free schooling, higher pay. They screech about installing total communism and people who already failed to allow them to sink or swim chide them sheepishly about communism being impossible or killing one hundred million people in less than a century or a million other tired conservative cliches that mean nothing and solve nothing a do nothing because conservatives are tired and useless and cowardly and cretinous. The signalarity operates well inside conservatives' ooda loop, and the bait of virtuous materialism propels their wayward offspring to screech ever more. Each outburst is a feeble attempt at connection, the longing for the lost pats on the head mummy and daddy never ceased, even for a moment, to lavish upon their children lest they hinder their development.

Pure irony.

The rub of the whole stupid affair is that it isn't about installing full communism over the current late-stage capitalism OS. It's about the socialization points - signals - the speaker acquires for saying this, or that, or fuck Drumpf, or whatever. What is said is meaningless. What it results in means everything to a generation that is addicted to the social affirmation feedback loop.

There is a glaring weakness in this system of demented feedback loops hinted at in a (misattributed) G.K. Chesterton quote I've seen bandied about quite a bit recently:

When people stop believing in God they do not simply believe in nothing; they become capable of believing anything.

Something capable of out-turning trickle-down postmodernism in a dogfight is capable of taking the cultural reins and either bringing this insane spiral down to the ground in one piece, or, as they say, crashing this plane with no survivors.

Lamentations III: There Is No Normal Anymore

The noise never ends. I've noticed the TV is on constantly, and it disturbs me. A decade ago it would have disturbed me because television on that scale was a surefire symptom of sloth. My grandmother has been a thrall of the television since before I was born. She will die a thrall of the television. Her son and daughters took her on a surprise visit to Ireland to visit the home of her ancestors. She stayed in the hotel watching TV the entire trip. This is tragic, but not so tragic that I would move heaven and earth to change it. I cannot. Therefore, it does not matter.

No, here, now, where the television buzzes constantly with the chatter of people saying things, I am disturbed because this is a new pattern of behavior. It is not just the television. Laptops and tablets and sometimes the radio constantly make noise. At first, I thought it was an attempt to relieve the onset of tinnitus. Too many loud concerts.

Then I realized what I was hearing, seeing, swimming in.

Talk radio. The news. Shows with panels of chattering teeth and vocal cords, metaphorically jostling for attention, claiming every microsecond as their own, lest some silence slips by into the void. Lectures and sniveling and talking points that have been hashed over so many times that no hash remains, only a blackened carbonized lump.

Over in our corner, I am quite used to people being jacked up constantly on the politics drug. If you've ever been to a college or university, you have surely become familiar with the constant shrieking of wayward progressives. Even libertarians, such that they remain, are constantly proselytizing. Libertarians are shockingly similar to vegans and cross-fit enthusiasts in their constant need to inform you of their particular identity.

What I am not used to is basic-tier crunchy conservatives being constantly amped up on the politics drug. Sure, I know plenty of weird, obnoxious, or cretinous Republicans. But when it's the guy who quietly reads the Wall Street Journal on his tablet on the train to and from work, when it's the housewife who quietly sighs and rolls her eyes when her siblings bitch about Bush at Thanksgiving, when it's the retired couple who plays tennis on Wednesdays and goes sailing on the weekend...

When you start seeing this from the quiet people who you would otherwise unequivocally describe as normal suburbanites with office jobs and 2.1 kids and a mortgage, you may have your double take moment just like I am constantly having.

Everyone expects this sort of thing out of Millennials. The worst generation of all time must constantly insufflate their own gas while preening incessantly about the virtues of fart-sniffing. More still, they demand that you sniff their farts as well, and they'll demand that your employer fire you should they suspect you of harboring insufficient enthusiasm for fart sniffing. When you see that sort of zeal in crunchy conservative suburbanites, you may pause to wonder.

Some people blame the Crisis of Western Civilization on the Jews. There certainly is no denying that a number of Jews exhibit behavior with regards to their host nations that you might describe as malicious malfeasance if you were the sort of person who tries to be very polite when recounting another's negative traits. Quite frankly, there is enough damning evidence against a handful of them to warrant a serious argument for the sort of wholesale extermination /pol/tards salivate over without twisting yourself inside out trying to square the circle of morality and genocide. Further still, you can't even mention how bad some of them behave without setting off the worst impulses of progressives or Leftists or ultracalvinists - whatever you want to call them. Them. Those people. The other sort of white people.

Still, the counter-Semitic camp is a whole bunch of abyss-gazing by my own reckoning. People seem to readily recognize that Common Filth has stared too long into the void. You may yet come to realize that others on the Dissident Right have as well. This is not criticism, however - I don't blame you if you feel that way. It's almost impossible to not, and only through an intense regimen of isolation from the news and the media and world events have I clawed my way out of that event horizon. I would not definitively say that I am the better for it either.

Still, it lends me some perspective.

Some people blame the Crisis of Western Civilization on other mechanisms. Tied for second best, as far as I'm concerned, is Moldbug's narrative on Ultracalvinism, how the absence of a State religion and a legal prohibition against the establishment of one accidentally created the environment for a particularly hostile and virulent mutation of Puritan Christiantiy to evolve into an anti-religion, or Non-Theistic Christianity, take over our institutions on the sly, and install itself as the defacto State religion. Alongside Moldbug's Puritan Thesis is the narrative in John Glubb's Fate of Empires and the exhaustive work Anonymous Conservative has put into solidifying a biological hypothesis on why our civilization (and, indeed, all successful civilizations) experienced a change in average character before the decline. Professor Bruce Charlton has repeatedly asked if there is a biological answer for our decline and, if you will wait a post or two, I will give you my best shot.

First place is the inward journey. There is something wrong with us. But, again, that ties into Bruce Charlton's question. All of that will be revisited later. While in the interim I can only give you a reasonable guess on why in that regard, I can tell you exactly who to blame for what's coming:

Isaac Newton. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

My general suspicion is that a violent awakening would come from hinterlanders who finally realized the door shut on them and would never open again. Probably the defenestration of Trump (or another Trump-like figure down the road), or a similar political catastrophe. They, of course, are in an actually optimal strategic position even relative to much higher achieving groups like Asians. While not as numerous as the White-Urbanite cohort, they breed faster, are handier and craftier, make up the bulk of our fighting men, own guns, hunt, farm, fish, aren't exceptionally susceptible to postmodern nonsense, etc. They've earned my affection through a slow but thorough assessment of their general characteristics, and despite worrying about them I don't really fret about them. As that one song I've never actually listened to says, country boys can survive.

But now that I consider it, I wouldn't be surprised if the flames of rage reach new heights on the bellows of crunchy conservatives who dutifully paid their taxes and sent their kids to college only to find that their money was wasted on a scheme to exchange votes for handouts to Paco and Jamal and Ahmed and that their kids were somehow transformed into a sick and twisted parody of a human being by Socialist Sociologists and other snot nosed ne'er-do-wells at the ivory tower.

They haven't moved in so long. So long. There's a good screencap floating out there somewhere, where some humble anon ponders the possibility that one day we'll wake up to discover that 60 or 70 million people vanished overnight, lost to the brief but spectacular conflagration of crunchy conservative rage when they finally realize that talking and being civil was just tires spinning in the mud.

Really made me think. I recently came into contact with a progressive I tormented during Trump's ascension. She, and everyone else I gloated at for a few months, are (shockingly) in worse health than before the dawn of the Trumpenreich. Not that I've heard much about Antifa recently, but considering my brief survey of Leftist rank-and-file... Whatever is coming for the Left is going to bring a world of hurt down on their heads.

Lamentations II: AKTCHUALLY

Some time after I began dating my girlfriend I began quietly divorcing myself from a number of friendships.

People come and people go, but unlike the connections that fade with time but otherwise remain pleasant memories, the people of whom I now think and write about have their memory forever tainted by the impetus for their ejection from my social life: They revealed themselves as zealous devotees of the progressive religion. In my professional and familial circles, and in the circle of those loose associates around which individual faces orbit more familiar ones, I am generally forgiving of theological, political, or philosophical diversity. I even maintain a small, but - as I consider it - elite cohort of friends who are decidedly leftist, yet unaffected by the bizarre, social iteration of rabies that is so ubiquitous among my generation. They remind me of a spaceship that uses a black hole's gravity well to perform a slingshot maneuver, as opposed to disappearing into the event horizon. These people, rare though they may be, are the sort of precious social connection you should hunt for, and in the finding, jealously guard a treasure that will serve as an excellent counterbalance to your own eccentricity: the human whetstone, the perfect foil.

Strange though it may seem for a reactionary to pause mid-thought to give praise to his opposite, I do it in juxtaposition of conventional Millennial ultracalvinism. I have become more and more reticent to refer to the political and philosophical proclivities of the passing era by their traditional markers. Perhaps it is simply an exercise in mindfulness as I remember friends who would traditionally be labeled "de la gauche", but are nonetheless the sort of men I would include in my roster were I tasked with the construction of a working model of civilization. But less on the personal side, eschewing the traditional labels of right and left, conservative and progressive, and even some popular colloquialisms like cultural Marxism, makes sense to me because most of these no longer make any taxonomic sense whatsoever. Some of them never made any sense at all. The nationalist vs. globalist divide makes much, much more sense, but even still I find that less precise than I would like. Moldbug is a far greater thinker than I, and so I bow to his ultracalvinism in deference to his rank above me. Furthermore, ultracalvinism is a good 'stealth' descriptor - the sort of word that can phase through social deflector shields long enough to make a fair point that an otherwise sensible person can actually grapple with, as opposed to rejecting out of hand because heresy. I dislike 'cultural Marxism' because it has the opposite effect. I found another excellent term at the Orthosphere blog the other day. Romantic rationalism. If you stare at it long enough, you may just see the shape of a stiletto wedged through some ribs.

But that's less here than there and I've gone all tangential. The reason my girlfriend is important to this essay is because it was through my girlfriend that I became intimately acquainted with provincial American culture. I admit that I am a suburbanite by birth. My parent's choice of home location was certainly a boon in my formative years, as my childhood was beyond happy, but in the suburbs you're always living on the outside of a city while looking forever in. Everything past you really is flyover country. It wasn't that I consciously harbored any ill will to the people beyond the corn field border, I just never thought of them much, and if I ever did - and I know I did - hear of scorn for hicks and hillbillies and rednecks and the like, I didn't think much of it. I knew zero of them, whatever your word for White ruralites may be.

That changed when I found my girlfriend. My introduction to her "hick-ish" family, to use her own words, was illuminating. And despite the cultural gravity well in my immediate vicinity begging me to throw myself in for the cheap social gains (and easy, albeit B or C grade, women), it was in the corn strewn wasteland beyond my hometown that I finally, finally learned to hate. And it wasn't them that I learned to hate. Getting to know the extremely large circle of small town people intimately bound through blood and friendship that eventually begot the woman I love was both beautiful beyond words and sad beyond reckoning. I have never felt such sympathy, and I owe that in no small part to the quality of the people I met, who, despite their material poverty, were endowed spiritually, communally, and otherwise beyond measure. Where the people I met are not what you would call 'educated' - whatever that means nowadays - they make up for it in handiness, craftsmanship, and earthiness. While I have fished for nearly a quarter century, I hadn't picked up a bow or a gun since - I shit you not - Jesus camp.

(My parents, being naive Catholics, sent me, also a naive Catholic, to an Evangelical summer camp. It didn't end well, but that's a story that was only interesting when I was an angry atheist.)

After a short period of the customary sizing-up of a foreign male romantically interested in his daughter, my girlfriend's dad took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew about firearms and bowhunting. He lent me his old bow, somewhat oversized since he is quite tall. Under his tutelage, I took my first deer this year. I am forever grateful to him for that, as I had no one to show me the ins and outs of the ancient art. Someday I will pass that knowledge on to my sons. And while people come in all sorts of flavors, the overall earthiness and communal orientation of the ruralites I encountered puts the spray-tanned, Escalade-driving soccer mom culture of suburbia to shame. I passed out candy maybe once ever 20 minutes this year at Halloween. My girlfriend's parents step out on their door at 4pm and don't step back inside until the procession of kids in costumes ends. And when you go out there, you see the telltale signs of the communal values so many people on the Dissident Right lament the lack of in more populated areas. Everyone knows their neighbors. Families still have large, extended gatherings. Pregnant women are abundant. Etc.

But don't take this uptalk for the idealized vision of a utopian fool. There is a tremendous amount of sadness out there. There's a lot of rust, a lot of poverty, a lot of alcoholism and drug addiction. I had a strange, chance encounter with a young friend of my girlfriend's sister who offhandedly made a comment about her stepfather who used to beat her regularly before her mom dumped him, and was somewhat taken aback by the nonchalant attitude. It wasn't what you would call justification, but it was a sort of shrug at a commonality. The jobs are dwindling, and the town my girlfriend comes from is getting by better than most thanks to a few remaining factories, but for years everyone's been on edge about who will close shop for the penny wages of East Asia next. When I talk to people about their lives out in the sticks, I get a lot of pessimism:

How long have you lived here?

My whole life.

Yeah? Do you like it?

Hell naw, man. It sucks out here.

Why don't you leave?

Everyone I know lives out here. We've always been out here. 

And there, right there, is where you get the gold shining behind layers of shuttered factories and rust. People I know from the suburbs pay lip service to not wanting to leave family and friends behind, but given the opportunity to go elsewhere, they cross country on the next flight out. People from where I've been spending my free time know there's better somewhere, and they won't go. That's some blood and soil shit right there, even if they don't know it's blood and soil, nor do they articulate it as you or I might. They just do, and their stoic resignation to their grim fate as the grand losers of globalism reminds me of that Oswald Spengler quote about the Roman soldier who died at his post in Pompeii.

And that's where the hate really sets in. You go out there and you see what I saw, and suddenly the vitriol piled on Heritage America from the coasts becomes intolerable. At first it was annoying, but then you see the rust and the closed factories and hear about the occasional suicide and your blood just boils. Moldbug once made a passing comment about how despite his decidedly brahmin upbringing, he found himself utterly horrified by the sheer and unjustified hate spewed forth from the coasts against middle Americans. I remember reading that when I first encountered UR, and like my previous disposition about the relationship between the city and the country, it went over my head. Now? Every encounter I have with an urbanite is likely to produce some frivolous yet vicious banality, a conversational trope used to juxtapose the backwards, awful, evil faceless hinterlander against the virtuous, enlightened, beneficent urbanite speaking to you.

You know, the sort of people who hate black people and vote against their economic interests.

There was a time where when I'd hear that sort of thing my eyes would roll into the back of my head and I'd sigh and silently here we go AGAIN to myself. I hear that now and I flash back to the first Christmas after I started dating my girlfriend. We'd been together for barely two months and these total strangers took me into their house, belatedly bought me inexpensive but utilitarian gifts, and lavished me with food and company and the sort of cheer you'd think they'd save for an old friend long thought lost who stumbled through the door. I remember her dad explaining to me, in his particular fashion, how to set up the sights on his old compound bow, where to aim. I remember the farmer who not only let us pass through his land but helped us search while we were tracking a wounded buck. I remembered the small but charming interactions I'd have with strangers in a small town. And I remembered every lamentation from some broke, broken middle aged schlub or old timer as they recalled the respectable prosperity lost to the maelstrom of globalism, and the people alcoholism floated down the drain.

Every time I stumble into one of those AKTCHUALLY conversations with some nu-male soyboy, I am reminded of my own peculiar 'wait a minute' moment. Life is a series of lights going off in your head across the perils of time and entropy, and like Moldbug's comment on his upbringing, this light had a herald some time prior but didn't make sense until I got my hands dirtied myself.

The Dissident Right, by virtue being unconstrained by conventional, suppressive morality, has produced a patchwork quilt of  explanatory narratives that seek to unravel the mystery of the decline of the West. Some of these are excellent - Anonymous Conservative's r/K selection and Moldbug's formalism for instance. Some are less so - the abyss-staring neuroticism of much of the Alt-Right no longer seems quite as edgy and funny to me as it did previously, as I see no resolution to any of our problems coming from that quarter.

That said, for good or ill I sometimes wonder if we're overthinking much of AKTCHUALLY culture. While what I read from the broad Dissident Right is vastly, vastly superior in quality over basic conservative, libertarian and progressive writers, I suspect that the petty motivations and virtue signalling and desperate desire for social affirmation make up 100% of the fuel that drives 99.9% of wastrel progressives. Sometimes I think we see forests and not trees, or the reverse, or however you want to frame it.

I constantly wonder what it is I am missing - I'm always missing something, somewhere.

And ironically, that is what drives me nuts about most people.

They don't.

A Very Small, Cautiously Distributed White Pill

From Thermidor Mag: A sobering but honest assessment of the organization of the Left and the Right, today.

If I were to give you a tl;dr of an essay I would otherwise strongly encourage the broad Dissident Right to read in full, it would be this: We have reached peak Kali Yuga, because the Right, which traditionally represents order, is wildly out-ordered by the Left, which traditionally represents chaos. Indeed, the sorry state of the Right across the West is something of a curiosity in the esoteric and the exoteric. How did things get so bad? Historians may some day write a book worth reading, but that day is not today and so we press on.

I do my best thinking at work, which is unfortunate because the nature of my trade does not spare me a lot of time to jot down thoughts. Business is busy, and something always requires my attention. In some respects this is fortunate, as I have never felt that what I do is corporate make-work. Perhaps this is because I am in a white collar position that deals with blue collar workers everyday - although this is a bit of an amusing stretch because my office dress code is casual and I wear a flannel and jeans every day. My entire working career up until I graduated, I was blue collar. Mostly labor, although I had a couple of neat specialist type jobs (calibration and quality assurance) while I worked my way through college. I can tell you definitively, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the moment I stopped being a suburbanite miscreant and started to actually become something good was the moment I was forced to do hard labor for a paycheck. I had my "I'm not going to die this way" moment in a meat packing plant, after a coworker was grievously injured. I'll spare you the details, but while this man survived, he was missing a rather large chunk of his body. Large enough that I submitted my two weeks notice, moved home and enrolled at my local community college.

It sucked.

I was halfway to my Associate's when all my high school friends that went to college graduated. Most of them moved into the city (where most of them still reside), and a handful got married and started families. As far as metrics and measurements go, I was barely beyond square one. And it sucked. Oh it sucked. Community college, at least where I was, is a cheerless endeavor. Most of the students I encountered were the sort of late-teens/early-twenties kids who really just wanted to smoke pot and play guitar in mom's basement, but the 'rents forced them to make something of themselves. Maaannnn. Then there were the immigrants, who were usually earnest but either dumb, or spoke very poor English, so communication was... challenging. And lastly, about one student per class was a late thirties or forties something who belatedly was trying for a career change, or to improve themselves, or whatever. Those people, the middle aged American students, were like fucking gold, because when group projects were assigned they would always do their work. I sought those people out for every group project I possibly could, not because I am lazy (I'm not), but because I was tired of pulling weight for the potheads. And I would pull that weight, because at the end of the day that project had to be done and there are a lot of teachers that don't care if the pothead didn't do x y or z assigned task. It had to be done, so I would make sure that I had backup in case someone "forgot", or whatever.

Like I said, it sucked. And the entire time I'm working mediocre wage jobs - thankfully I haven't made minimum wage since high school, an anecdotal shiv between the ribs of the do gooders who ceaselessly remind us that minimum wage sucks and it's not enough and it's unjust and you should feel bad so abloo bloo bloo. And on top of that I would routinely go into the city to visit my friends who all had (seemingly) a lot of money and were living fast and large while I was at home plugging away at... community college. I was constantly reminded of what I fretted away by being an unserious student during college try one. The friendships strained, relationships gone, opportunities that never materialized.

And then I graduated from community college. Well, I never "graduated" like cap and gown. I finished my last test, handed it to the teacher with the smug assurance that it was mathematically impossible for me to fail the course given my average prior to the final, got in my car and I had the strangest sense of elation. I passed from one end of campus to the other on my way back to my house and I realized that I would never look at that community college as a student ever again. It was over.

Now the story doesn't end there because I went on to a state university, but that is a whole different struggle session - figuratively and otherwise. I didn't feel the same elation when I graduated because I had routine encounters with SJWs and I suddenly understood exactly how bad things were. I also learned to hate, and have nursed serious fantasies of ovening the Left, so with graduation came not elation, but relief that I would never see those wretched people ever again. And in any event it's immaterial relative to the Thermidor link.

But this is:

I thought a lot about being at square one, the paucity of the Right's organization, and where I was relative to where I ended up. I don't have any organizational advice off the top of my head, sans perhaps a cautious word against descending into the feral rage that peering too deep down the anti, sorry, counter-Semitic abyss seems to bring upon gazers. That advice has not been particularly well received when I have offered it to peers irl, so ignore it if you can't help but huff and puff about coin clutching civilizational saboteurs.

There are actually two takeaways I offer to you.

First, is the Dissident Right's status as having "no institutional base of operations to call its own, no patrons, no money, few friends, and many enemies", is as much of a boon as it is a disadvantage. I need not reiterate exactly how bad that is because I put the Thermidor link at the top of the page. But in a way it's good because it gives us the opportunity to build. "One pathology of our age is a childlike credulity in the magical efficacy of complaint. Don't complain, build." Having nothing while setting out to do a great thing (saving our civilization is no idle task, as you may have noticed) gives us an opportunity similar to finding a virgin, unspoiled, unclaimed continent teeming with space and biomass and mineral resources. We owe no debt to anyone, and we eat whatever we kill. Its ours, the pathway to salvation rests solely in our hands. No one is coming, the boomers are useless, and previous generations that actually had the balls to fight are long since dead. That's a tremendous amount of pressure, but with that comes a tremendous opportunity for glory. And in the vacuum left by the New Old Right we can build unimpeded if we have the vision, the cunning and the drive.

I dream of an immortal civilization, and the stars.

Second, there is a boon in that the Left is finally consuming itself in earnest. Where exactly the outpouring of sexual harassment accusations among prominent Leftists come from is a story for another day. What is important is that the long predicted fractures are finally bursting, and the Left can no longer suppress its desire to consume itself. It was inevitable. One of the great, inadvertent gifts the Left bequeathed upon us was driving sane and healthy white men away. This doesn't just help us separate the wheat from the chaff, it may also be that non-White Leftists no longer regard White men as threatening, and therefore have focused their attentions on other fronts, knowing that threat numero uno has been subdued... soydued. Sorry. But having noticed that White Prog men are overwhelmingly pajama boy knock offs, I can't help but suspect that Blacks and Mexicans, who are largely only exposed to White men who are pajama boy knock offs vis-a-vis the White urbanite cohort, regard White men as the sort of literal progressive equivalent of Satan. And I don't mean as how we conceive of the progressive religion as a warped version of Calvin's heresy. I mean that White men are slowly, but surely, in the minds of minorities being converted into a sort of omnipresent but immaterial satan to be invoked for bad things but never really materializing as the big bad colonizers that once conquered the planet using steel and sails and muskets. On a long enough timespan, were the minority coalition to hold itself together (suspend your disbelief for a moment), White men might devolve in the same way that devils devolved into imps and hobgoblins and other mischievous sprites. Of course the coalition won't hold together. It isn't. It never could. They're tearing themselves apart because they lost their unifying enemy - strong White people - and all that remains is the steady and sure degeneration of the remaining Left. That the smartest blacks and mestizos do not breed because we send them to schools on our dime where they are forced through the same crucible shredding the White population... its not going to end well for the populations that so desperately need quality individuals. That the weakest Whites are producing fewer and fewer children also bodes poorly for the minorities that remain, as one day they may run headlong into some very angry, heavily armed ruralites.

But that's not my problem. That the Left is pulling an ouroboros isn't either. It is said that the best time to strike is while the iron is hot, but it's also been said that you should never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. My hot hot take is that its the small steps that will get us places, the little things we have neglected, the small sacrifices that reap large dividends. No one else is thinking about building, they're too busy consuming.

Counter-Advice on White Birthrates

Advice From The Abyss, Staring Back

I wasn't really sure whether or not the particular individual PA quotes here is serious, or partially tongue in cheek. For my purposes it doesn't matter as the general sentiment is echoed among the various flavors of Dissident Right, and therefore it is worth addressing briefly.

Our chief concern should not be quantity. Everyone else is playing quantity. Historically, quantity is not our strength. Quantity is not how we got from point A to an improved point B. The ancient regime of Feudalism improved our people by segregating those who could not from those who could. Generally separating wheat from chaff fell under the jurisdiction of a local lord's willingness to enter into a labor contract with a particular individual, or approve his request to marry. Far more often than modern humans would find comfortable, however, the separation was effected by the permanent removal of a "could not" vis-a-vis the gallows. Feudalism had many other benefits, particularly the organization of a serious system of defense in the vacuum left by Rome's collapse, but the story of our people's biologial improvement lasted well past the demise of the Feudal system and propelled us into the dawn of the greatest era of human technological advancement of all time. Contrary to the fashionable screeching from wayward (and incidentally extremely low-quality) White progressives, the systemic exclusion of the worst of our people gave us the physical means to conquer the world.

Sadly, all good things end eventually. The ancient and patriarchal relationship between the nobles, the clergy and the commons vanished under a tidal wave of capital: The post-Vatican II Catholic Church is a joke, our aristocracy spent it's last blood in a horrific World War at the turn of the century, and their replacements - globalist oligarchs - are only matched in their disregard for the tradition of noblesse oblige by their wild incompetence. Far from being explicitly conspiratorial, with a coin-clutching merchant cackling behind every affront to our people, our history, and our tradition, it is far more likely that the general demise of the West coincides with the general decline in the quality of our leaders. That is not to say that certain specific events aren't attributable to what you might call a shocking set of (((coincidences))), but ultimately that is neither here nor there. The waters are rising and we cannot save everyone, and even those endowed with the most vicious malice towards our people may ultimately find that they are hoisted by their own petards.

The gallows, however, remain in function, albeit not so much in form. The great evil of modernity, like all chaos, is ultimately self-consuming. Rampant hook-up culture, cheap and effective birth control, Tinder style "relationships", the bitter resentment of feminism, the genetic dead end of miscegenation, careerism, atomized urbanite individualism and Tumblr/blue-hair activism are all fires burning too hot to sustain themselves. These fires must burn, because we are overbred. Our success has allowed weakness to flourish, and the devil must take his due. He who would defend everything, defends nothing is an ancient aphorism that might steer you in the right direction. Our projected minority status in our own homelands, of all things, is certainly cause for worry. But the best salve for the mess we have gotten ourselves into is careful planning, not the wild neuroticism of day traders watching the market collapse.

Feudalism is not coming back - at least in it's medieval form - but the lessons we learned can help us pull ourselves out of the mess we created. Half of it is literally letting those who should breed continue to not breed, and perhaps encouraging them to do so where possible. We are going to have to accept some losses. Believe me, having recently come out of college I can definitively say that White Liberalism is a political expression of biological unfitness. We are gaining far more, long term, by simply cutting these people loose. I have attempted to express to my parents and other older conservatives with fairly unsatisfactory results how college-tier liberalism isn't just a matter of commie professors brainwashing kids - there is actually something wrong with the people who buy into this stuff, and the more they've been bought in the more wrong there is. And I do mean physically and mentally.

Strive for quality. Almost everyone else is playing the quantity angle, and almost everywhere else is complete garbage. Its time to swim against the grain. Great investors know that the worst thing to do during a market panic is to join the panicked crowd in attempting to sell everything. Hang tight, buy whatever seems like it will gain its value back, and never ever panic. Someday this whole thing will collapse. Civil war will come, the lights will go out and never come back on, boats laden with starving, angry Africans will wash up on our shores like Camp of the Saints, whatever. Make ready to build something new on top of the ruins, something right, something of high quality and worth preserving to pass down forever. Something good, beautiful, and noble.

Find a nice girl - no girl is perfect and she doesn't need to be right wing. Women in the thralls of love (read:convinced their about to marry 'up') have completely malleable political opinions. Get married. Have kids. Raise them right. Be a good man. Be good at being a man. 

Revolt against the modern world.

Rape Culture

Yet more heads roll! Amusingly, the string of sexual crimes by Leftists now includes Harvey Weinstein's brother, Amazon's Roy Price, New Republic Editor Leon Wieseltier, director David O. Russel, director James Toback (now accused by 238 women), the proprietor of a prog videogame forum and bourgeois commie LARPer and Jacobin contributor Sam Kriss. We've come a long way from Harvey. I'd pause to say something about how I'm still not tired of winning, but I have more pressing questions.

First, why? The scale of the accusations since Weinstein was outed is almost mind boggling. Almost. It's no secret that male feminists have ulterior motives when they sign up for the equality struggle session. Every once in a while a low to mid tier male feminist with name recognition would be outed for some sort of sexual impropriety against the, erm, fairer sex. Anyone who somehow avoids the news, but attended college with millennials would harbor similar suspicions. Most men I met in college had very little sympathy for feminism, but all men who sympathized with feminism were lackluster examples of masculinity. There is a certain, delicious irony in hearing individuals who only barely resemble a man bitch about "toxic" masculinity. Chiefest among those accused of the crime of toxic masculinity were fraternities. If you ever have the opportunity to listen to some soymen bitch about Greek Life, hold off on interjecting and just listen. You will very quickly realize that the animosity SJWs hold towards the Greek system is not just based in resentment, but also ressentiment. I touched on this in my very first post:

Didn't get a bid from a fraternity or sorority? Resent that you don't get invited to their bangin ragers? No problemo famalam, just call them racist and the school will be right there, just like your stupid fucking helicopter parents, to put those above you on their knees in supplication, begging for mercy. That is power, but cheap and easy and wholly devoid of obligation, responsibility or the burden of care and foresight.

As I see it, the ressentiment soymen hold for fraternities is inseparable from their sexual frustration. At the end of my teens and into my earliest twenties, I was a frat boy. I jokingly told my non-Greek friends that a fraternity is more or less a glorified drinking club. Sure, to a large extent that is true. But fraternities also serve as easy access to women. Joining a fraternity is a status booster. I'm not as erudite as Roissy when it comes to explaining how the sexual market works, so bear with me. Women, being hypergamous, are particularly aware of where men rank on the social hierarchy - or at least how men present their rank, as there appears to be little difference in the female mind. This explains the efficacy of 'game'. Membership in a fraternity checks off a bunch of qualifiers that boost relative status: Trial by fire vis-a-vis pledging, popularity through the easy friendship of membership, access to resources through alcohol and parties, exclusivity through invitations to closed parties, etc. There are other benefits (primarily post-graduation networking), but that is relatively unimportant when you're trying to rail some thots. I certainly never boasted about how great a job I was going to have when I was flirting. And none of this is to say that all of my frat buddies slayed pussy non-stop. A fraternity will certainly get you through the door, and give you a higher initial status, but its up to you to close the deal. There were guys who brought home some strange every night, and there were a handful of guys who didn't even touch a woman. But that doesn't matter, because to an outsider all that is visible is the long line of women one-night-standed by a bunch of Chads. Hence, ressentiment. Amusingly, despite the incessant bitching from prog women about the Greek system, I have yet to meet a feminist who wasn't deeply flattered by the prospect of getting railed by a frat boy. The incongruity between what a woman says and what a woman does is a dead horse I don't need to beat.

Being shut out from the (perceived) access to pussy vis-a-vis fraternal organizations, men who still have a sex drive turn elsewhere. There are a whole bunch of strategies to getting laid in college, some good and some bad, but for some reason there is a very obvious, very loud and outspoken, and very wretched group of men who decided being a yes man white knight to a woman's worst impulses was the best. Really, for them, it was the path of least resistance. I normally would scoff, but evidently the thirsty are quenched every now and again. Sorta. Do yourself a solid - if you aren't the sort of person that reflexively flinches at cringe - and compare the woman's account of her unwanted encounter with Sam Kriss (below), and the secret recording of Harvey Weinstein attempting to seduce that model.

Fucking cringe.

I don't even need to lead you where I want to take you, the cringe is so very real. I could tell you a few stories about buddies (fraternal or otherwise) who failed spectacularly in seducing women while in my vicinity, but without a face or a name, the anecdote is more or less meaningless and hogging up space. Suffice it to say I've seen some godawful pickup attempts, but the rub is that I have never in my life seen anything in person that makes me cringe as hard as listening to Weinstein's pathetic pleading and demanding, or reading Sam Kriss's increasingly desperate attempts to get the girl in the above picture to come home with him. There is a certain sense of entitlement that you might see in the way both men attempt to ingratiate their sexual urges, and this sense, I think, is key to understanding the why here, and much more broadly, the why of why our ruling class is failing and consuming itself.

There are a lot of ways to distill the problem of the modern world and the crisis of Western Civilization. Brett Stevens refers to our pathology as both hubris and solipsism. I would add to that, because I generally agree with Stevens, by saying that most people want something for nothing, and as the eventual consequence of racking up physical, metaphysical and spiritual debt has yet to arrive, most people willfully delude themselves into thinking that the debtor will never actually collect his due. People like Harvey Weinstein, his brother, Sam Kriss, the idiot burning his Lefty vidya games forum to the ground, and male feminists generally are cut and dry examples of something for nothing. Pledging allegiance to the degrading nonsense of postmodernism requires no effort, and costs nothing (save for what Theodore Dalrymple said about the purpose of communist propaganda). Whatever effort steeled the Leftists of yore, the Anarchist terrorists, the Communist infiltrators and the Marxists of the Frankfurt School is worthless now, because their sons paid no price for their father's efforts. It is actually not surprising that the bourgeois fucktards who were handed the cultural controls of the greatest technomagic civilization of all time have gone and fucked up everything by trying to fuck everything. And it's even less a surprise that they had no grace doing so! They were untested! They paid no price, burned no calories. For Christ's sake, Sam Kriss is the scion of rich bourgeois urbanites, and contrary to his socialist creds he tried to puff himself up to his would be cumdumpster based on the astonishing wealth of his progenitors.

A long time ago Roissy (I believe, I actually don't want to dig through the CH archives to find this particular post) shed some light on the old "grass is always greener" adage. If I remember the chain correctly, George Clooney's manager envies the way that extremely attractive women will simply slip Clooney their numbers. This manager, no schlub himself, has a name that carries weight (being the manager of an A list celebrity tends to do this), and himself attracts many women, though not as many as Clooney. The managers friend who... maybe was in a band or something, envies the manager, but himself reels in a lot of women vis-a-vis being a musician, and the bartender envies the friend, who is in turn envied by so on and so forth, all the way down the line with men who do slightly worse, sexually, envying their betters. The story eventually ends with some guy who goes home to his Japanese love pillow envying his friend who has a female coworker he talks to regularly. I forget what the moral exactly was, but why I am bringing it up is that a man who harvests desirable anything without effort is a man untested.

We are all born virgins. In the seemingly ancillary story I hamfistedly related to you above, we all start at Japanese love pillow, and we all know the peak is George Clooney. Or maybe some other actor with better taste. Just roll with it, it's a lame metaphor anyways. I don't actually advocate hedonism or the PUA lifestyle, despite the sex metaphor you're about to be shoved into.

Leftists look at George Clooney and say my life would be so much better if I were him, and they either inherit the building blocks of staggering sexual prowess (fame, power, wealth, access) and fuck it up royally by never putting in the work, or they hover as male feminist allies/lesser betas, watching in anguish as their oneitis slowly morphs into a cumdumpster courtesy of a long line of Chads. Hence, ressentiment. Much to their surpise, the Left's shortcut to power only enfeebles them more (to borrow from PA again).

You never, ever, ever want to just look at the goal, because it isn't the goal that makes you better, it's the lessons and character and muscle you accrue along the way. We all want to be Emperor, but without the conquest... the top of the mountain is just a pretty view if you didn't climb up it yourself. 

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There is fairly good reason to believe that the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein was simply the crack necessary to burst the dam. Given that the sexual impropriety among modern Leftists (and, according to Thermidore, the Leftists of yore) is fairly common, we should expect that there is a significant population of young women who have experienced anything ranging from mild discomfort to straight horror, who are more than willing to spill the beans given that being a sexual victim itself is a profitable way to harvest attention - the only currency that really matters to women.

Some have pointed to Bannon being the source, although I am fairly unconvinced. I am extremely unconvinced that there is anyone "directing" the outflow of victims from the shadows of our Leftist overlords, much as I would otherwise like to believe.

What is important is that this is tearing the Left apart. Complete madness.

Channeling Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

From the Hill:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted “half-baked, spurious nationalism” in the United States in an emotional speech Monday night after receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain 'the last best hope of earth' for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said in the speech.

The Arizona senator said “we live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil” and said Americans “are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.”

“We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did,” McCain said.

“We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent.”

There are several curious remarks in the above passage, but the one most worth commenting on is people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems. Although these words were doubtlessly written by an aide, it none the less serves as a tell, a passable reconstruction of what John McCain sees when he looks in the mirror.

I solve problems.

In another era John McCain would have been an unimpressive middle manager. Alas, today, he is an unimpressive Senator. It's funny, not ha ha funny but gallows humor funny, that this man and his peers regard themselves as problem solvers.

The post-World War II order saw to it that the citizens of the West be rewarded with an expanding set of entitlement programs. The first-level flaw with our model of entitlements is that there must be a larger pool of payers-in to recipients, such that social security, to quote Rick Perry, is a ponzi scheme. So long as the ratio of payers to receivers is maintained, everyone is happy. Unfortunately the birthrate of the West declined and the ratio of payers to receivers skewed wildly, and the whole house of cards began to groan under the weight of the Baby Boomers.

Enter Mr. McCain, et. al. Instead of looking at the conundrum and asking the basest of questions - why did the ratio of payers to receivers change? - our democratic overlords simply said "We'll just add new people" and rewarded themselves with raises and accolades and fancy parties. A whole new categories of problems emerged from the importation of new tribes, and to smooth over the turbulence an ex post rationale called a proposition nation crept into the education of young Westerners. Now only those who actively seek the truth discover how heinous the lies they were taught are, and worse still those actively resisting lies almost always face some sort of social sanction from ostensible members of their own tribe. What an incredible mess, though you who read this are doubtlessly well aware of the scale of this whole catastrophe.

So why point it out?

Because the hubris of John McCain is a worthy example of how not to lead and how not to solve problems. It's easy to look up to a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander. The greatest men that ever lived get their due recognition, but even when the bad and the failed become a cultural byword for treachery or loss, like Benedict Arnold or Pyrrhus of Epirus, we seldom stop to pause and wonder where exactly they went so wrong. In the case of McCain, whatever his personal failings are (and I have no desire to recount all that I have heard about Mr. McCain), there is an argument to be made that it is not McCain's failures per se that we should focus on, but rather that there exists a system that allows men like McCain to take power beyond their measure.

In a sane era, John McCain would have been an unimpressive middle manager.

Observations at a Wal-Mart

It's hard not to get angry. I went to Wal-Mart the other day. If ever there was a sentence that packs all the frustration, anger, fear and crushing soullessness of Globalism into a handful of words, it's "I went to Wal-Mart".

Wal-Mart is a crazy place. The lighting is designed in such a way that you are supposed to forget the passage of time. There is no outside reference, absent the front doors, by which you would naturally be able to tell what time of day it is. Supposedly, this is one of Wal-Mart's devious psychological hacks they employ to get you to spend more time shopping. I've also been told displays are moved around randomly to get the same effect, but I grudgingly concede that I've only been told such a thing. The things I just listed about Wal-Mart are the sort of things, heresay really, that gets tossed around a Sociology 101 classroom by matriculated idiots who will still be idiots whether they graduate or fail out.

What's really creepy about Wal-Mart is the people. In the right spot, Wal-Mart is just another department store. The Wal-Mart I frequent most often is far, far out in the boonies, too far out for non-Heritage Americans. As such, this Wal-Mart (and all other out-in-the-country Wal-Marts I have ever visited) is naturally influenced by the people in the same way that a nation does not make a people, but rather the people make a nation. Out in the sticks, Wal-Mart is quiet and orderly and the people are nice enough for being employed by a soul crushing corporation. I usually stop by on the way out to the farm that I plink at to pick up paper targets and a box of 9mm for the landowner as a tip.

I happened to go to a suburban Wal-Mart the other day. The only other time I have ever done this was late at night, when no one was around. In the light of day the difference is... staggering. The particular suburb where this Wal-Mart is located has a large Asian population, and because I am friends with a number of Filipinos from this suburb I tend to forget that "Asian", according to the sort of people who do demographics, includes Arabs and Persians. I am, of course, annoyed by visual reminders that our bourgeois globalist overlords favor dollars over national health, but there is a certain sadness that goes beyond "my people are under threat".

The burkas, of course, are an affront to my people and my culture - they do not belong here and need to go back. Worse, though, are the "Westernized". An older Persian couple (they weren't ugly enough to be fully Arab) passed by with a screaming child. A child throwing a tantrum is the sort of audible annoyance that immediately calls your attention. Maybe its the parenting instinct. But what kept my eye on the couple wasn't their wailing offspring. As far as I could tell, they were handling the screaming toddler as best as I've ever been told you can, by letting him tucker himself out. There was something off about the way they held themselves, their dress and affectations. They didn't quite fit in and I can't put my finger on it but it wasn't necessarily their skin color. The woman's jewelry was garish and her garments slightly clashed, and the man looked like the Persian version of "dad-core". They were "Westernized" and materially minded, status oriented, probably second generation immigrants. If you talked to them I'd be willing to wager that they were embarrassed by their primitive and backwards countrymen, in the same way that the handful of wealthy, suburban Negros I have met detest their feral, ghetto-spawned brethren for "being a bunch of niggers" [actual quote]. I doubt they attended Mosque with any sort of frequency. I've seen these sort of people before, the "lapsed Catholic" version of Muslims. At one point in time I was friends with a young man slightly younger than me who looked and behaved the part, but I cut off contact as his frantic desire to "fit in" with high-status, degenerate White society inculcated poor life choices. I am not particularly forgiving with my White friends who still use drugs, but knowing that many of the craziest Muslims had, at one point, lived the alcohol and drug fueled degenerate lifestyle before radicalizing, I thought it best to eject before this young man, uh, spontaneously exploded.

The thing about globalism isn't just that what is mine is under siege. I am, of course, particularly sensitive to things that concern me in particular, but the same insatiable appetite will, if given enough time, reduce all people to an indistinguishable mass of wallets. Some people say this is what the globalist explicitly want. Some people say this is just late stage capitalism, an incidental and accidental result of run-away prosperity. Whatever the case, the trade of tradition and purpose for deracination and material comforts must be tackled capably by the capable.

Most people do not live meta-ideological lives. Most people reside in the plains between the peaks, so to speak, and are motivated by immediate, material benefits. You can hardly blame the Indians, Persians, Arabs, Africans etc. for wanting to escape the abject poverty of their homelands. Blame, such that it can be reasonably attributed, probably falls the most on us. Not for creating the conditions of poverty within x y or z homeland. "Colonialism" is the Left-wing hand-waving equivalent of the Young Earth Creationist "because the Bible says". The poverty of a particular nation - or the lack thereof - is entirely controlled by the aggregate quality of a particular people. African societies are particularly bottom heavy, therefore it is no surprise that Africa is a perpetual hellhole. Extending an invitation for Africans, Arabs, Persians, Indians etc. to depart their failing states for our prosperous shores is unspeakably evil without even considering that the only reason a certain subset of White people do it just so they can play out the classic "fuck you, dad" on a societal level.

Particularly unintelligent societies are the sort of societies that can least afford to lose the handful of high IQ individuals they occasionally spawn. Believe it or not, there are some Africans with IQs above 120, but depriving their countrymen of the fruits of their intelligence is evil vis-a-vis scarcity, and becomes akin to genocide when you understand that the smartest minorities in the U.S. are ushered into the university system, which encourages miscegenation and degeneracy, and discourages family formation. Progressive immigration policies, taken to it's furthest conclusion, will result in the total obliteration of high-IQ genes in populations that desperately need internal leadership. Africa's coming population boom is a cold and brutal warning of the hell our "good intentions" have spawned through our idolatrous worship of Equality.

This particular fuck-up is one, only one, of the catastrophic mistakes our current elite have made over the past, oh, two hundred or so years, give or take. Certainly within the past sixty years the incompetency (or intended malevolence) has increased exponentially. What this means is that there is room for a new elite. Given the wild reaction the powers that be have had to the relatively small dissident right movement, I'd wager that the elite are particularly aware that they may be dethroned. You might even call them paranoid, given the massive "no platform" entrenchment around most major institutions and corporations. Would be elites, such as the Alt-Right (if they ever get around to realizing what their goals are supposed to be), would do well to catalog the failures of the current elite, make accurate predictions of future failures, and offer convincing solutions to the problems that the elite continue to spawn.

And try not to bitch about the kikes too much when you get around to it.