Category Archives: Philosophy

Where’s Your Loyalty? By Jeff Thomas

Posted on March 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

When it comes to political loyalty, is your loyalty to symbols or concepts?  From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

loyalty

Recently, after reading an essay of mine, a reader angrily questioned my loyalty to the USA. My immediate reaction was that I’m not a US citizen. I therefore tend to observe the US dispassionately, just as I’d observe any of the nearly 200 “foreign” countries in the world.

But, as I’m British, what if he’d questioned my loyalty to the UK? Would he have a valid point? Well, at the very least, he’d certainly have a question worthy of an answer.

I, of course, have a legal right to live and work in the UK, and yet I choose not to. It’s simply not my idea of a great country in which to reside. As much as I regard the traditional English village to be an ideal environment in which to live, I reside elsewhere. The reason is that I place a very high value on personal freedom, a nonintrusive government, and a populace that doesn’t feel that it’s entitled to largesse that’s been forcibly taken from another segment of the population.

But that doesn’t exactly address the question of “loyalty,” does it? Well, there, I must confess, I tend to answer the question with another question. Whenever someone speaks to me of his loyalty to his country, I’m inclined to ask him to define “country.”

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Is Your Wealth Durable? By MN Gordon

Posted on March 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

If you’re banking on pieces of paper and computer entries for your kids college educations or your own retirement, you might want to reconsider. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

“Money is not the definition of wealth.”

– Unknown

America’s Oldest Family Farm

John Tuttle arrived in the New World from England in 1632.  He was not empty handed.

He had a land grant from King Charles II.  It was for a small, 20 acre plot of land located between the tidal waters of the Bellamy and Piscataqua rivers, in what became Dover, New Hampshire.  There, the Tuttle family farm expanded and prospered for over three centuries.

Along the way, the Tuttle’s withstood many tests.  Revolutionary and civil wars, the industrial revolution, economic depressions, financial panics, relentless competition, plagues, droughts, government encroachment, and countless other assaults to prosperity.

For a business to survive nearly 380 years in the same industry, with the same family owners, is a remarkable achievement.

Started in 1632, Tuttle Farm became America’s oldest continuously operated family farm, passed down across 11 generations of Tuttles from father to son.  What was their secret?

The Tuttle family, from its beginning in the New World, chose a productive path.  The second Tuttle, also John, born in 1646, owned a sawmill, had an ownership interest in several sailing vessels, and served for a time as judge of an early colonial court.  All this was in addition to his efforts running the family farm.

Yet the Tuttle’s success wasn’t without setbacks.  The third generation, also John, was the casualty of an Indian attack at a sawmill on the Upper Falls in 1712.

Still the family continued to prosper.  According to local legend, Tuttle maple syrup was purchased by Abraham Lincoln.

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Posted in Investing, Money, Morality, Philosophy

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America’s Resource Curse, by Eamon McKinney

Posted on March 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ample resources devoted to a problem sometimes don’t solve it, they make it worse. From Eamon McKinney at strategic-culture.org:

As with Americas war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, all resources do is obscure the underlying problem and present false solutions.

It was some twenty years after the end of the Vietnam war that a security conference was held between leading military figures from both America and Vietnam. Following the conference a U.S. Air Force General approached a Vietnamese General. The American had been a fighter pilot captain during the conflict, the Vietnamese general had been a Colonel in the N.V.A. The American asked (paraphrasing): “You have to tell me, we knew your Army was continually crossing the Mekong, we flew sorties up and down the river and could never find your bridges.” “I know,” said the Vietnamese, “we built them three feet under water.”

In that instant the American understood why America lost the war. His “Road to Damascus” moment was informed by how the different combatants approached problems. Had that been an American problem, how an Army crosses a wide, deep and fast flowing river, they would have solved the problem differently. They would have built a suspension bridge, they would have had bases on either side to protect it. They would have had Bowling alleys and Burger Kings and would have been flying in Bob Hope to entertain the troops. Why? Because they could, when you have resources they become the answer to every problem. The Vietnamese didn’t have resources, so they were resourceful.

And that, as the American realized, was why the Vietnamese won, and America lost.

The general may have learned a lesson, but if he told anyone, no one listened. Many of the same mistakes were repeated in Afghanistan, with the same results. Resources are not the answer to every problem. As with Americas war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, all resources do is obscure the underlying problem and present false, ineffective solutions.

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Posted in Government, History, Money, Philosophy

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Back In the USSR, by Good Citizen

Posted on March 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

Russians may be set to reject their dalliance with Western culture, and that may not be a bad thing. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.substack.com:
A brief glitch in the Russian Matrix.

It was probably fun while it lasted. A brief thirty year flirtation with western decadence and shameless mass consumerism in post-soviet Russia is quickly coming to an end. It took two decades to get the engines going but now it’s time to shut them down again. The remnants will stick around for a generation or so, but the speed with which fashion and trends enter and exit the popular culture will ensure Russia crystallizes this moment in time in a similar way to the nations trapped behind the iron curtain in the middle of last century. It won’t be quite the same however because this time things are different.

This time it’s the west that’s degrading toward the worst elements of the USSR faster than Russia. Every horrible thing they tell us about Putin and Russia exists in the west and ten-fold in some cases. Political prisoners held without trial. Censorship. Pravda media. Kangaroo committees. Secret police for internal coups. Shutting down protests of one political nature while allowing others. Unequal protection under the law. Oligarchies posing as democracies. Fascism posing as liberalism. Things are certainly trending backward toward tyranny to say nothing of coerced bioweapons injections and democidal agendas. How about surrounding Russia with secret bio labs for twenty years and doing experiments on Ukrainian soldiers?1

We haven’t even arrived at the endless bloody wars for greed and profit that saw no cries or pleas of mercy, no Iraqi, Afghan, Yemeni, Libyan or Syrian flag emojis or disgraceful America-phobia of the likes we’re presently witnessing against Russia. The depleted uranium used by American forces in Falluja alone sent the cancer rates sky rocketing among locals there. Did you see any western monuments light up with the colors of the Iraqi flag for them? We did see western governments nod in approval as Colin Powell spoke of fictitious weapons of mass destruction at the United Nations. Selective outrage is a funny thing, reserved for certain peoples, with certain agendas, all of whom should certainly never be trusted again.

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Posted in Collapse, Culture, Governments, History, Imperialism, Media, Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Society

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Mike Rowe Scholarship Highlights The Lost Virtues Of Hard Work And Sweat, by Salena Zito

Posted on February 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

There’s nothing quite like an honest day’s work, it’s good for the soul. From Salena Zito at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

Tracy Wilson is sitting in the cutest little ranch house in this Calvert County town. It is her dream house—literally her dream house, she explains, as she has had the image of this very home in her mind, down to the color scheme of the exterior.

It is 4 in the afternoon, and the single mother of two just got home from another dream—her job. She spends her days working as an instrumentation technician in the flight test program at Boeing.

“I get to spend my days working on F-18s,” she exclaims several times during the interview. She says it with such joy that her appreciation for her craft becomes infectious.

Life wasn’t always this balanced for the Exeter, Pennsylvania, native. In her senior year of high school, she underwent open-heart surgery for a hole in her heart after the healthy basketball athlete suffered a stroke. “The stroke temporarily took my speech and my handwriting,” she said. “So I was freaking out because I was so ready to start the next part of my life after high school.”

She recovered but found her life directionless after high school. Wilson explains that she wanted to go to college, but without any clarity on what she should pursue and little money to attend, she bounced from career to career, trying to find her greater purpose.

In between, she married, had two boys, divorced. She found herself still searching, still wanting to better herself, still deeply committed to the work ethic her parents had taught her, yet living on the edge of poverty, cleaning houses, exhausted and still struggling to put food on the table.

“One day, I was sitting on the couch feeling sorry for myself, watching TV, and I—this commercial came on for York Technical Institute, and something about it clicked in my brain. I went to their website, and the electrician program caught my eye,” Wilson explained.

“I’ve always loved working with my hands,” she told me.

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Posted in Business, Labor, Morality, Philosophy

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Reality Honks Back, by N.S. Lyons

Posted on February 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

An excellent article about the Physicals and the Virtuals, from N.S. Lyons at theupheaval.substack.com: (h/t Western Rifle Shooters)

Like many, I have spent the last couple of weeks a bit entranced by the trucker protests happening in Canada (and now around the world, from Paris to Wellington). I initially tried to document here every twist and turn of the Freedom Convoy drama, but found it nearly impossible. Events continue to unfold very quickly. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just invoked the Emergencies Act (i.e. martial law), allowing him to suspend civil liberties and basically do whatever he wants (more on that later) to crush the protests. So they may soon be quelled. Or perhaps not. No one can yet say precisely how all this may end.

But in any case news and commentary detailing the protests can now be found everywhere, so I’m just going to assume you already have a familiarity with what’s happening, as I want to try to distill a few more unique thoughts on why I find these protests so striking.

Specifically, why all this seems like such a perfect reflection of the Reality War.

In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”

In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Horseshit, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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The Democracy Disconnect in Canada Highlights a Big Mistake Conservatives Make, by Sundance

Posted on February 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

Most conservatives haven’t a clue how to fight an ideological and philosophical battle. From Sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com:

When the terms “freedom and liberty” are allowed to be defined as extremist sentiment, what you end up with are Canadian federal police beating people in the streets and arresting citizens who petition their government for freedom. Meanwhile, the ever fearful and politically correct conservatives in Parliament grasp their pearls while simultaneously cowering to avoid labels.

Somewhere there is a radical called Saul Alinsky, the trainer of modern revolutionary communists and political leftists – who dedicated his training manual to Lucifer, smiling as he watches the results of his teachings. Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of what is to come from this.

Allow me to highlight the point with two easily referenced examples from Canadian media (infiltrated with ideological stenographers) and contemplate the larger message against government saying we must “defend our democracy” while removing political protest. Notice the evolution of the collective narrative in just a few days.

The word “freedom” is extremist (Feb 13) … Conservatives are “extremist” (Feb 18)

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Tyranny

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Reality Always Wins, by The Zman

Posted on February 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

Reality is always the benchmark for hypotheses and all other assertions. From The Zman at takimag.com:

One of the many excellent uses of reality is that it can be used to test ideological and political theories. No matter how good the idea seems in the lab, the only way to know if it will work is to give it a go in the real world. The best example of this is the seventy-year social experiment called communism. The acolytes of Karl Marx tried to prove that the human condition was nothing more than a social construct.

Granted, reality can be a cruel master. No one really knows how many people Stalin murdered while getting the experiment going. The best guess is tens of millions died under Soviet communism. Then you have the Asian experience. The Black Book of Communism puts the number at 94 million. It is a good reminder that reality can remain stubborn longer than the ideologues can pile corpses.

It looks like the rulers of the Global American Empire are ready to put their favored ideology to the test in the real world. Multiculturalism is pretty much a religion with the ruling classes, despite the fact that most of them live like white nationalists. For them, “diversity is our strength” is not just a marketing slogan. They really think that diversity in all of its forms is the key to creating a global paradise.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, race relations, Science

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The Terror, by NickelthroweR

Posted on February 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

What it’s like to be mega-cancelled. From NickelthroweR at theburningplatform.com:

I was taking a break from cutting firewood and I sat down at my computer to see if anyone had responded to my post over at r/antiwork.  I’m not a popular guy over at r/antiwork and my comments usually get downvoted into the negative.  But, this was my first ever post over at the site and I was curious as to what the 4 or 5 commenters would have to say about what I had written but it wasn’t 4 or 5 commenters.  I looked at the numbers in disbelief and then I looked again and that was when I felt the first twinge of terror.

For those of you that do not know, r/antiwork is a forum populated by fierce/brave Communists that wish to destroy Capitalism so that they can all receive UBI so that they can focus on being Influencers, Podcasters and YouTubers.  After all, they did figure out that work is difficult, and they most certainly want to share that philosophy with everyone so as to justify their lifetime free ride of goods and services that are OWED to them.

A popular topic over at r/antiwork is the job interview process.  I understand the frustration of interviewing in a bureaucratic hyper-regulated system can cause a lot of anger but the corporation has boxes that it must check in the hiring process or be sued into oblivion.  You’ve got to interview every single minority group, the alphabet people, radical feminists, etc, even if you’ve already decided on promoting someone in-house.  That doesn’t matter, HR still has to pretend as the bureauracy demands that it go through the motions.  The Maoists over at r/antiwork do not understand that it is their own woke idealogy causing these problems but to them, it just looks like malice from an evil corporation.

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Posted in Collapse, Economics, Economy, Government, Labor, Media, Philosophy, Politics

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The Necessity of Human Action, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on February 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

You are responsible for the course of your own life. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

In 1987, Levon Helm, a former cotton farmer from Arkansas, sat brooding in his yard, trying to describe why his apparent success had turned to near-bankruptcy:

“Well, it’s hard to put your finger on. You get behind financially and once you get behind financially, you seem to get behind spiritually. And your luck turns against you.”

Levon’s perception of his situation is a common one. He had become quite successful, but had never learned to understand more about economics than, “If you got it, spend it.” As a result, throughout his life, he repeatedly found himself in monetary difficulties. He habitually lived in the moment and didn’t invest much time analysing what his actions would need to be to assure a sound economic future. Unfortunately, his approach to his future is, to a great extent, the approach of the vast majority of people.

Let’s take his comments one sentence at a time:

“Well, it’s hard to put your finger on.”

In this comment, Levon begins by stating that he doesn’t really understand what’s happened to him. As someone who hasn’t given much thought into the subject of economic study, his personal outcome is a mystery to him—impossible to fathom.

“You get behind financially and once you get behind financially, you seem to get behind spiritually.”

He then relates a basic truth—that a by-product of financial decline is a spiritual decline. Morals are often compromised in order to survive the financial debacle and, frequently, a sense of emptiness and failure takes over.

“Your luck turns against you.”

In this last statement, he disavows any personal responsibility for either his monetary problems or any human action that he might have taken that could have corrected the situation, since the elusive and incomprehensible “bad luck” has taken control—a force that he believed he could not have overcome.

And so, Levon led a life of repeated success and loss, never learning that, from the outset, the course of his economic life was of his own making. Had he chosen to understand and anticipate economic events and adjust for them, he could have taken charge of his financial life. Instead, he became a casualty of those events.

Unfortunately, his entire problem could be defined as a lack of human action.

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Posted in Business, Debt, Economy, Philosophy, Psychology

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