Category Archives: Society

The Snowplow Test, by Rod Dreher

Posted on February 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

It still happens, right here in America! People are nice to other people regardless of their politics. From Rod Dreher at theamericanconservative.com:

Normal people: ‘Yay, the neighbors are here to plow our driveway!’ Liberal columnist: ‘What do they want from me? And ick, they like Trump!’ (Patty_C/GettyImages

Los Angeles Times columnist Virginia Heffernan, who lives in Brooklyn Heights but who lives somewhere rurally to escape Covid, recently had a dilemma: her Trump-loving neighbors did something nice for her. She doesn’t know what the right thing to do about it is.

Now, stop right there. Normal people don’t have this problem. Normal people think, aww, how nice, and start thinking of ways to return the kindness. But normal people are not Harvard-educated New York-based liberal journalists. Hence Heffernan’s revealing column. Excerpts:

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.

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Living Off Grid As The Collapse Of Society Approaches: “Why Aren’t More People Doing This?” by Michael Snyder

Posted on February 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

You can leave the rat race. From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Sadly, the lives of most people are defined by the matrix that the vast majority of us are connected to on a daily basis.  In most cases, your income and status in society are defined by whatever “job” has been given to you by whichever corporation you are currently working for.  We like to call ourselves “employees”, but in essence we are basically corporate servants.

Of course most people feel like they can’t quit their corporate jobs because each month they have to make payments on mortgages, auto loans and credit card debts that they owe to giant corporate financial institutions.

And most people also feel the need to constantly “prepare for retirement” by pouring money into corporate securities in the rigged game that we call “the stock market”.

But what is going to happen to all of them when our economic and financial systems completely implode?

During this current economic downturn, millions upon millions of Americans have already lost their jobs, and it is being reported that millions of Americans could potentially be evicted from their homes in 2021.

When things go bad, it is the little guy that gets crushed first.

But you don’t have to wait around for that to happen.

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The West That Was, Part 3, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on January 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

America in the 1800s was a completely different country. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

If we wish to grasp American life in the 19th century, it’s probably best to start by understanding that when America was young, it had no myth. Once we really understand that, the rest falls into place fairly easily. Here’s how Alexis de Tocqueville (in National Character of Americans) described it in the 1830s:

Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.

We all know that national leaders promote myths about their glorious nation: one or more “uniquenesses” that give the people of their nation a fast, easy and noble identity. And assuredly American myths have been promoted all through our lifetimes. But in its early years, America had no such myth. America was a rebellious upstart; a collection of violent and uncivilized farmers who made so much trouble for the British that they eventually pulled out. Some Americans saw themselves as heroic, but educated and powerful people worldwide considered them semi-barbaric.

And so, Americans couldn’t claim glorious ancestors or much anything else to gain fast and cheap self-esteem; they’d have to earn it… they’d have to show the rest of the world that self-governing peasants could out-produce nations guided by enlightened aristocrats. And so the minds of Americans were focused on actual production, education and progress instead of national myths.

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American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God, by Larry L. Bean

Posted on January 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Secession is not just a Southern thing anymore. From Larry L. Bean at lewrockwell.com:

The old saying: “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God” certainly applies to me.

I’m an ethnic Southerner who was raised in the north – but who, for the past 25 years (with the exception of my three year educational exile to the permafrost of Fort Wayne, Indiana) has lived in the Deep South.  In fact, for the past 17 years, I have lived so far in the Deep South that it is really barely Southern at all – being south of the South.  But we were graciously permitted membership in the Confederacy, given the tolerance and ethnic diversity of that particular manifestation of American federalism.  Moreover, only two other states suffered as long as we did in the so-called Reconstruction as did Louisiana.  So we – my state and my person – have earned the bona fides to consider what it means to be Southern, though perhaps by means of a circuitous route.

So permit me to ponder – while pondering is still permitted in our Reunited States.

The South is an embarrassment to many in the various other regions of America as it is constituted today. We are especially anathema to our Betters on the coasts.

Indeed, we talk funny. We’re slow and dumb and backwards and conservative. We cling to our Bibles and guns. We got Donald Trump elected. That alone should make our separated brethren in the Disunted States to want to retroactively secede us. Typically, our kids say “sir” and “ma’am” and, shockingly, we treat men and women differently, and hold comically to the long-since discredited fantasy that only women bear children. We still put flags and flowers on our ancestral graves – especially those of our our veterans – which is apparently why some folks come South for the winter in their black socks and sandals, wagging their heads, and honking nasally and incredulously: “Look Martha, these people are still fighting the civil war.”

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The Immortality Project, by Hardscrabble Farmer

Posted on January 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

To try to mentally prepare one’s self for one’s eventual death is one of the most difficult but most worthwhile things a person can do. From Hardscrabble Farmer at theburningplatform.com:

“Fear does not prevent death, it prevents life.” –Naguib Mahfouz

Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer prize winning philosophical masterpiece The Denial of Death published in 1973 is an attempt to make sense of Mankind’s irrepressible need to create what he dubbed Immortality Projects; a means to deal with our knowledge of the ultimate end to life. The central theme is that our duality of being, as a physical being in the natural world and as a symbolic creature that inhabits a world of his own creation, where reality is what can be conceived. In times past structure rose to explain this conflicted sense of being.

Churches and Divine leaders that could explain why there should be no fear of oblivion. The stories they constructed served to maintain stability in interpersonal relations of larger groups, to focus energies and direct efforts to goals in the future. Our entire civilization, he said, was built to serve as a bulwark against death, or more to the point, our awareness of it, to protect the fragile psyche of our species with an emotional and reasoned armor in the same way we clothe our soft and vulnerable bodies against the elements.

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The Underclass, by the Bionic Mosquito

Posted on January 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

Over seventy million people are considered an irredeemable and deplorable underclass because they supported Trump and they despise their self-anointed betters. From the Bionic Mosquito at lewrockwell.com:

Paul VanderKlay commented: “The underclass knows the overclass better than the overclass knows the underclass.”  I replied, in the comments to the video (modified slightly for clarity):

Something really worth considering in understanding the political and world events (and the media that has covered these) that have played out over the last years.

This, in the context of events at the capitol, etc.

I have been thinking about when the political division in this country took such a toxic turn – not just toxic between and amongst politicians, but toxic toward and between some multiple number of tens-of-millions of people.

I would point to the roots of it in the political strategy of Antonio Gramsci, who knew that communism would not come to the West via a division between the workers and the owners/capitalists, but only through the creation from below of a new culture – one that by design would crush Christianity.  And this would be true enough; we are living it.

I would also consider the manifestation of this strategy in the 1960s and the cultural revolution that was plainly visible at the time.  Certainly, by the 1990s, the toxic ideas of critical theory would begin to permeate academia to the point where today the various disciplines of the liberal arts are all lost to corruption (with STEM now being dragged through the wreckage of their wake).

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The West That Was, Part 2

Posted on January 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

Back before the US income tax, central banking, and World War I, America felt a lot different. There was an energy and confidence that’s vanished now. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

Part 1

America, 1910

1910 was well before my own time, of course, but I knew at least ten people who lived through it as adults, and discussed the era at some length with one of them, my great uncle Dave. And so this is an era I feel I can still reach out and touch.

One of the more interesting things about this era regards our separation from it. The great event that forged this divide was World War I, which is greatly under-appreciated in modern discourse. Schools cover World War II in great depth, but run through World War I fairly quickly. World War I, however – “The Great War” – changed human affairs and human consciousness far more than World War II did. The world before and the world afterward were very different places.

Bear in mind, however, that in 1910, people lived very similarly to the way we do. They (particularly in the cities) lived in houses with central heating, refrigerated their food, and ate the same foods we eat today. They had newspapers, affordable and rapid transportation, access to medical care, telegrams (delivery in an hour or two was common) and so on. Even movies and radio were starting to spread. Cars were arriving, as were electricity and telephones. Airplanes were starting to appear in the skies. Railroads went almost everywhere.

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Got Ammo? by Southern Sage

Posted on December 29, 2020 | 9 comments

It’s all heading toward wide scale violence. From Southern Sage at theburningplatform.com:

For years I have been skeptical – to say the least – about the globalist conspiracy theories. No longer. These evil bastards really do exist and they really are working together to implement their crackpot ideas. It reminds me of the late 19th and early 20th century, the so-called Gilded Age, when many Americans began to suspect that the side that won the Civil War was controlled by a greedy, grasping, amoral, corrupt gang of early “Masters of the Universe”, who used their money to buy Congress and turn the laws to their advantage.

The suckers were the decent, hard-working Americans who still believed the USA was the country put together by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and the rest; many of them had fought to preserve that country and were enraged to find that they had been snookered. Of course, Southerners had already figured it out the hard way. There were populist uprising across the country that, while “mostly peaceful”, included quite a bit of non-peaceful activity, such as the Homestead strike when furious workers killed or beat the living shit out of the hired mercenaries of Andrew Carnegie and his henchmen.

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The Most Hopeful Scenario for 2021, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on December 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

That scenario has about a .0000001% chance of happening. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Choose wisely, America, or the options for a positive outcome will vanish like mist in Death Valley on a clear July afternoon.

From the point of view of evolution, the most hopeful scenario for 2021 is the sudden and complete collapse of everything that is obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic. When obsolete systems and entities pass away quickly, the cost and pain are processed and absorbed quickly as well: enterprises go bankrupt and their assets are liquidated, failed ventures close, and schemes that didn’t yield the desired benefits are scrapped.

This is the evolutionary process. Whatever has lost its selective advantages will succumb to selective pressures and fade away.

The problem arises when self-serving insiders siphon resources to keep their obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic gravy-train protected from selective pressures. Keeping a terminally ill human alive is an analogy: it’s possible to extend the life of a terminally ill person at enormous expense and effort, but the patient isn’t restored to their previous health or vigor–that is no longer even a possibility. They are no longer their previous self, and this is why people choose to avoid extraordinary interventions in their final phase of life.

Economically obsolete / terminal entities, on the other hand, always choose extraordinary monetary interventions to keep their gravy-train alive, even if they bleed the rest of the economy dry in the process.

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The West That Was, Part 1, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on December 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

Not too long ago at all, America was a dramatically different country. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

America, 1960

A great tragedy of our era is that young people have no feeling of what Western civilization was like. In the government owned and operated schools where they sat for years, they were presented with a litany of the West’s failures, most of them exaggerated, or even imagined.

In this post, and in several that will follow, I’ll be ignoring anti-Western propaganda. To obsess on flaws is dishonest and destructive. The fact that the people of the West have been conditioned to require that viewpoint is not something I’ll indulge. All civilizations have had their failures, and our Western civilization stands out, not as the worst, but as the least bad.

My goal for this series of articles is to give you a deep sense of Western civilization and the cultural assumptions that informed it. I’ll be careful to stay with the truth of each era, but what I want is for you to understand the West that was, down to your bones.

That’s a tall order, of course, especially for short posts, but that’s what I’m going for. And to get the best start possible, I’ll begin in my own time, describing the America of about 1960. To be precise, I’m probably best describing the years 1953-1963; after the Korean war and before the assassination of John Kennedy.

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