A National Divorce From Reality: “Douglas MacArthur famously stated ‘It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.’ Conservatives still have not grappled with the fact that their political will has been consistently shown to be much smaller than that of liberals. The Floyd Riots showed just how primed for derangement and aggression liberals have become. The Kyle Rittenhouse incident, very lionized by conservatives, illustrates the discrepancy. Rittenhouse was not a militiaman defending his community. He was a well-meaning teenager in basically warzone conditions who was chased by a mob of mostly unarmed people for his crime of interrupting their attempts to light a dumpster on fire.”
Classical Music and the Right: “Musical genius can exist today and I hear there is ‘popular’ music composed now that is equal to any great classical piece both in the inspiration of its melody and even in the refinement of how this is orchestrated and developed. But it’s by necessity very rare for two reasons. First the young musical genius finds himself alone and having to start almost from scratch; he is not introduced to a wide variety of forms, learned ‘tricks,’ and traditions of composition through mentorship which could give him a way to develop his skills in a sophisticated way. Even a cook with great taste and native skill would be lost and at great disadvantage without the accumulated knowledge and skills of a great culinary tradition. The second reason is the very one such a tradition of mentorship and skill refinement and memory no longer exists: it’s no longer needed. There isn’t a class of people of taste such as the European aristocracy, who have the emotional and cultural sophistication to need this music or any other high art for that matter.”
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis: “The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.”
Dear Mr. Thiel: “Before we even begin to list the practical reasons why the assault on manliness has been such a disaster for society, we must consider the deep injustice of this situation. For the sake not merely of society, which flounders and collapses in the absence of true male strength and leadership, but for that of the souls of the boys who are daily wasted as spiritual cannon-fodder in the War on Nature, we must offer a widespread alternative on a broad scale.”
How to Read Dialogues: “…’there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds.'”
The Psychedelic “Tradition”: “If you talk to certain shamans in the Amazon, some of them dread doing ayahuasca. They view it as something horrible that they go through in order to make these necessary deals and to gather important things for their tribe (we’re not talking about knowledge or amorphous emotional outcomes). They are not doing it for introspective or wisdom-gaining purposes.”
The Stories We Tell: “As BAP and others have mentioned, cinema is a tremendous way to influence culture. ‘No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark,’ said Frank Capra. So let’s get talking.”
Warrior, Soldier, Noob: “Last week, a tiger shark specimen killed and partially ate some twenty-year-old at a beach resort in Hurghada, in the Egyptian Red Sea coast. The tragic event happened in the presence of the victim’s father and girlfriend, and since it happened to be caught on camera, it quickly became viral. Of course, you could say these attacks are statistically rare; for the unfortunate person’s perspective, however, the probability is 100%: a powerful argument for the meaninglessness of numbers regarding raw human experiences…If you can, please try not to watch the video of the shark attack (or any other war porn clip, for that matter). Those things happen again in the psychosphere every time you hit play. I watched, but you don’t have to. Allow the dead to rest in peace.”