Forum Log

[Friend]: Liberal democracy needs to stop playing nice. People who openly oppose it or promote ideas that attack its foundations shouldn't be allowed to run. [Me]: No doubt that would be more effective (if "win" = preserve the current system) than what the liberal-democracy-organism is doing now. But I'm not sure it could, even if it wanted to. The ruling class may have lost faith. Can it still mobilize courts, legislatures, and armed men to outlaw and arrest opponents? I say arrest because if you just disqualify a popular candidate, you’ve only kicked them out of your game. That doesn’t stop them—it may just mean switching to a game liberal democracy isn’t good at. Take the US: anti-MAGA elites can’t rally young men to defend their institutions, while MAGA leaders can rally theirs to dismantle them.

""" Every civilization is built upon a myth. Not a fiction, but a frame - a sacred narrative that defines the borders of good and evil, maps the structure of the world, and carves meaning into the chaos of time. For the modern West, that myth is the Second World War. We do not merely study that war; we worship it. It is the holy text of the present order, the last moral certainty in an otherwise relativistic age. The world we inhabit was birthed in its ashes, and our institutions, both supranational and domestic, trace their legitimacy to its outcome. """ https://substack.com/home/post/p-164131361

" We are a lot more religious than we look - we just have a religion without a named god, and a theology disguised as an ideology. The state religion of the American Empire (and the British Empire before it) is shared by the bulk of the developed world: Progress. Every sacrifice, atrocity, and grand achievement we create is done in its name. Every major ideology - conservative, liberal, fascist, communist, socialist, or traditionalist - is but a denomination of this grand church. " https://substack.com/home/post/p-160043743

Mood music: The Game Has Changed by Daft Punk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AISkUx8iaBo Global demographics worst-case scenario: "The worst case is that the top-heavy economies, already drowning in debt, collapse. Supply chains collapse with them, leading to global chaos, famine, and a long series of wars - simultaneous with the desperate rush to cull the old and the disabled (as MAID is already doing in Canada) in order to decrease the entitlement burden and avert global terminal civilizational collapse - but it turns out to be too little, too late." https://substack.com/@jdanielsawyer/note/c-103732041

“Men are made; the mountains are already made.” - Miguel Delibes, El Camino (1950) Translated from the original Spanish: “Los hombres se hacen; las montañas están hechas ya.”

" We are now living through the end of another narrative, the one that has dominated all of our lives. The WW2 consensus is ending. ... This consensus has decided not only the answers to the world’s questions but even the questions that we are allowed to ask. This consensus is everything from our political theory to the presuppositions that we carry to the thoughts we are capable of thinking. The WW2 consensus is a meta-narrative through which all westerners have viewed the world and human history for the last 70 years. It is sometimes called the “Boomer truth regime”. Among this meta-narrative’s sacred cows are democracy, the holocaust, the state of Israel’s right to exist, universal suffrage, and equality. Until now, you could be ostracized for questioning any of these. But things are changing. " https://thesaxoncross.substack.com/p/the-axe-is-laid-at-the-foot-of-the

“… Fatalism is thought to be meshed in Islam. “Inshallah” - if God wills it - can breed a sense of resignation, a “why bother?” attitude. That’s the opposite of taking charge and getting things done. It’s also used by non-religious Arabs and it really predates Islam. I was in Iraq for a bit during the second Gulf War and I talked to a young American soldier who was training Iraqis to take over. He said that time and time again their soldiers would literally hold their rifles above their head to shoot. Their belief was that God would guide those bullets, so it really didn't matter if they aimed their guns at all. That’s not great soldiering.” Source: “Why Can’t Arab Armies Beat the West?” (9:55) Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=robmO5AKJ8 “Deus vult” — “God wills it” — was the rallying cry of the First Crusade. Unlike “IF God wills it,” the phrase asserts divine approval, not possibility. That’s a qualitative difference.

Excerpt from a book I’ve just finished re-reading: “ On the fortieth day and the two succeeding we were snowed in by a blizzard. During these long hours of lying blotto in the tent Estraven slept almost continuously, and ate nothing, though he drank orsh or sugar-water at mealtimes. He insisted that I eat, though only half-rations. “You have no experience in starvation,” he said. I was humiliated. ”How much have you—Lord of a Domain, and prime minister—?” “Genry, we practice privation until we’re experts at it. I was taught how to starve as a child at home in Estre, and by the Handdarata in Rotherer Fastness. I got out of practice in Erhenrang, true enough, but I began making up for it in Mishnory.... Please do as I say, my friend; I know what I’m doing.” He did, and I did. " Le Guin, Ursula K.. The Left Hand of Darkness: (p. 215). Kindle Edition.

(Chatting with a friend:) Sadly, games are by necessity “un-productive” - you’re not producing anything unless you add a layer of effort on top of it (e.g., making content). That doesn’t mean gaming is useless. I find its best use is giving us a focus/reason to talk. Men like having something to do when they hang out - going on a walk, stoking a fire, grilling, or playing a game together. However, most modern videogames want you to have a relationship with the game itself, instead of with the people you play it with. Games are no longer the recurrent “30 seconds of fun” that Bungie devs talked about with Halo. I think at some point devs begun emulating social media and their social validation feedback loops. Games don’t have the same mechanics - no likes and comments - but they give you just the right amount of dopamine to keep you playing. Like with Sean Parker at Facebook: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."" — G. K. Chesterton Book: "Orthodoxy", Chapter: "The Paradoxes of Christianity" "Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage." — C. S. Lewis Essay:"On Three Ways of Writing for Children"