Category: Politics

I’ve been getting into The Clash lately.

Okay, okay: this probably isn’t the appropriate season for the music of an angry Socialist punk band (it ain’t Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” album), but I couldn’t help it. I got pulled in last week by this Spotify podcast, Stay Free: The Story of The Clash.

It’s really good. I think it’s “overproduced,” in the sense that it tries a little too hard to be jumpy and punchy, making it a bit too disjointed. Each episode so far has started in medias res, then it jumps back, then returns to the middle, then back, then to the middle. I find it a bit disorientating, wholly unnecessary, and mildly disrespectful of the listener’s time.

However, it is really good so far (I’m 3/8ths of the way through).

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The brief sidelight about drummer Terry Chimes (Episode 3; 15:00-20:00) is instructive.

Chimes was a butt of jokes because he wasn’t political. He was in the band to make money. That didn’t sit well with the rest of the band members, who let him know it. He finally quit shortly before the first album came out. (In retaliation, the band named him “Tory Crimes” on the credits.)

Years later, Chimes was interviewed and said, though he didn’t realize it at the time, everyone in the band was angry about life in general, which is why they were leftwing radicals:

Every one of those people, no exceptions, came from a broken home. I came from a happy home. When [the manager] would say, “The world’s horrible, it’s out to get you, you have to

Taki Magazine is the most fearless sophisticated publication on the planet.

It allows writers to speak their minds, regardless of their reputations and regardless of whether their words skate into forbidden territory (read: “race”).

But it’s not an alt-right publication of clickbait inflammation. It’s smart, erudite, and urbane.

I’ve noticed that this month it is veering heavily to the “smart, erudite, and urbane” side of its formula.

It’s sounding a considered alarm bell to its readers and fellow-travelers, advising them to resist conspiracy theories and despairing resignation.

But it’s doing so with verve.

Exhibit A: David Cole’s recent piece, assuring folks that they are complete idiots if they stop voting because of the Democrats’ voter fraud.

He points out that there has always been voter fraud and it’s primarily the Democrats (which makes sense; such things are the province of the big cities), but that doesn’t mean it’s futile to vote. Far from it.

But that’s exactly what the Left hopes happens. By allegedly perpetrating massive voter fraud this year (see below), they hope to discourage all opposition. The result? A George Soros world.

David Cole minces no words about what this would mean:

The worst of the worst on the left aren’t wizards, and if they’re to be effectively countered, it’s vital to understand how they do what they do. George Soros isn’t a warlock. He’s all too human, though arguably one of the most evil humans to ever draw breath. I’ve said this on Twitter and it sounds hyperbolic, but I’ve never been more serious in my life: The greatest tragedy of the Holocaust is that the one Jew who deserved to

November 2020: When holding leftist beliefs officially became a sign of monotonous conformist thinking

How did Biden pull off his victory?

He didn’t do as well with minority voters as every presumed he would.

The Catholic vote continued to hover around 50% like it has for 20 years.

So what did it?

Answer: Elitism.

You see, only rubes, hicks, rednecks, wife-beaters, and Elvis fans vote for Trump. In order to mark yourself as (oh so) above the unwashed, you vote Democrat. And if you’re really smart and want people to know how good you are, you fly rainbow (like I see at Notre Dame University) or BLM banners (like I saw on Lake Shore Drive in ritzy Grosse Pointe over Thanksgiving weekend).

I had that feeling throughout 2020: the feeling that Biden voters looked at their leftist support as badges of virtue . . . of being “with it” . . . of wokeness . . . of truly understanding things.

“Nothing,” this poseur line seemed to say, “signals intellectual distinction like agreeing with the New York Times.”

And it was reinforced, I felt, by suburban living, where conformity is, was, and always will be, the enduring trait. We laugh at the 1950s cookie-cutter houses, competition to get the newest TV, buying a paneled station wagon, keeping the wife in the kitchen, and voting for Ike.

But now everyone in the suburbs has two incomes, the most-recent iPhone, and McMansions.

And votes for Biden.

That, anyway, is how I felt.

I had no proof.

Until now.

It turns out white suburbia turned out en force for Biden.

Trump 2020 outdid Trump 2016 in … Read the rest

The supernatural and paranormal. Postmodernism and critical theory. What could be the connection?

Over 40 years ago, Norman Cohn, author of that masterpiece about countercultural movements in the Middle Ages, The Pursuit of the Millennium, wrote a review about a little-known book by a young genius who would commit suicide at age 34.

The author: James Webb, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, a man who Colin Wilson considered “one of the most brilliant minds of his generation.”

The book: The Occult Establishment (1976).

Cohn said:

[T]his book performs an important task. It offers the most vivid portrayal yet given of that hydra, irrationalism; and leaves one waiting, with curiosity if not with trepidation, to see what the next head will look like. 

“In Pursuit of the Irrational,” The Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 1977

The Occult Establishment is now out of print. Amazon says my copy is worth $100, if only I hadn’t beat the hell out of it with my underlinings and side notes.

But I didn’t know it would go out of print, and I didn’t know Webb was a genius of the first order.

Besides, I probably couldn’t have helped myself anyway.

The book is packed with fascinating (underline-worthy) facts about the 20th-century occult.

What is the Occult?

The “occult” is an umbrella term. It means anything pertaining to the mystical, supernatural, magical, and paranormal that falls outside religion or science.

Both religion and science use reason and logic to construct their “systems.”

The occult, on the other hand, embraces the irrational.

Religion and science seek to explain, but the occult revels in the unexplainable.

The occult, in fact, could … Read the rest

What do the violent extremes on the Left and the Right have in common?

They tend to come from fatherless or divorced homes.

That’s Mary Eberstadt’s observation in “The Fury of the Fatherless” in the current issue of First Things.

She recites the well-known statistical facts about fatherlessness in the inner-cities (65% of blacks are born into fatherless homes) and that “absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.”

She then points out that the BLM movement itself seems almost intuitively drawn to promote a society without fathers.

The BLM website at one point declared: “We disrupt the Western-­prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

Eberstadt: “Note the missing noun: fathers. It is as if fathers—as distinct from “parents”—had ceased to exist. And indeed, for at least some of the people drawn to BLM’s ideology, fathers have ceased to exist. In this sense, BLM is a direct heir of the founding document of identity politics, the Cohambee River Collective Statement put forward by black feminists in 1977. That manifesto spoke of women and children only—never of fathers, brothers, or sons.”

Alt-Right Daddy Problems

She also points to anecdotal evidence that it’s not just a Leftist problem, though her instances are all pointed at divorce only, which can be, but isn’t normally, the same thing as being born entirely out-of-wedlock or with no father in the picture:

“The founder of the white nationalist group Identity … Read the rest

The Left is turning the United States into a nation of chumps. It won’t end well.

In progressive circles, “justice” doesn’t mean fairness or evenhandedness; it describes a world in which every problem is the fault of some entrenched power group. Therefore, every solution should involve both special aid for the victims and some sort of punishment for those who created the problem.

James B. Meigs

What happens when folks are rewarded for not playing by the rules or following the social norms that keep a society functioning?

It turns the rest of us into chumps.

What happens when it happens too often?

Well, people get really angry. More people start cheating the system.

People just come to the conclusion that the system isn’t fair and it isn’t worth participating.

Those are things pointed out in this splendid essay at City Journal: “The Chump Effect.”

The one effect that it doesn’t address, though, is the possibility that a society could suddenly tilt from a law-abiding one where it’s the norm to pay your taxes and fees, to one where only a chump pays his taxes and fees.

That side of the Chump Effect was touched upon in this Econtalk podcast episode: “Michael Munger on Crony Capitalism,” in the context of Chile and Argentina.

“If you don’t pay your taxes in Chile, other people think, ‘Well, you’re a terrible person.’ And if you do pay your taxes in Argentina, people think, ‘Well, you’re an idiot. You’re a chump. Nobody does that.’

Argentina hired soccer players and actresses to go on TV and do ads about how you should pay your taxes. … Read the rest