If Wishes Were Fishes — a Teachable Intermezzo: “This is the most significant reality of the world picture now: the wishes of the manager class are going in one direction while the actual dynamics of economy and politics go in the opposite direction. The managers wish for their management of systems to become as centralized and top-down as possible; but the very systems they manage are breaking down and seeking to reorganize at smaller scale, distributed locally. The tension entailed is explosive. Forgive me for reiterating a basic principle driving this moment in history: everything organized at the gigantic scale is steaming toward failure: big governments, giant companies, the huge capital investment firms, global shipping, energy production, chain retailing, mass motoring, big electricity, big medicine, big education, big anything. They are all fixing to fail while our politicians and economists make plans based on consolidating them into one super-gigantic mega-system that will run flawlessly on computer tech magic. The failures of each giant system will only amplify and ramify the failures in all the other systems. Take that as axiomatic.”
Purity of Arms: “‘Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important,’ the ultra-influential academic ideologue Judith Butler, herself Jewish, already stated in 2006 in the wake of a Hamas deployment of suicide bombers in the Second Intifada. This mood and its agents ultimately represent a metaphysical and intellectual sickness of hatred and self-hatred as opposed to a strictly political stance. Its antidote is the beauty of disciplined and decisive action.”
Quit Your Job: “…become the wild and ambitious elites you wish to see in the world. Live by instinct in the untracked frontier, shoot your shot, and live or die by your intuitive visions of what must be done. You can carry out your cosmic duty and win glory only in the bold attempt.”
Selective Coinage and the Rebirth of Philosophy: “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, masculine leftism fell with it. In the West, right and left, for all intents and purposes, are ideological masks for archetypally masculine and feminine orientations towards the world. Voting trends in the West, post-USSR, bear this out. Bitcoin and the abundance of crypto-capital it inspired is deeply ambitious, assertive, technical, action-oriented, irreverent, and energized by risk-taking. These qualities are foreign to an orientation that prioritizes safety, perpetual dialogue, social consensus, moral shaming, and the current thing. The crypto phenomena is a masculine enterprise. Exceptio probat regulam.”
Sky Burial: “… he wasn’t one of those monks would spend all his time meditating in an abattoir and didn’t think he would like to be one even were he given the opportunity.”
The Red Hand Files: “I discovered that it was simply impossible to grieve in icy water. This revelation began my love affair with cold-water swimming. When I am in London, I wake up early, walk through the woods with some other wild swimmers, and jump into the lake. During winter, with water temperatures dropping to freezing, this is nothing less than a catastrophic outrage to the nervous system and an excruciatingly intimate engagement with one’s mortality. This encounter obliterates all anger and worldly woes. To quote Roger Deacon’s beautiful book, Waterlog, you plunge into the lake with all your raging devils and clamber out ‘a giggling idiot’. In icy water, with our adrenaline and endorphins running riot, we are returned to our innocent, primordial selves via an internal ecstatic screaming to be born defiantly afresh.”
