Proud to be a Republican:
Curtis Yarvin once said that the right cares about power the way a wine snob cares about alcohol but the left cares about power the way an alcoholic cares about alcohol.
Republicans in Alabama showed us how to care.
Resentful Mothers
They should learn German and listen to Thomas Bernhard in the original. I’ve done an hour of listening, and I’m attending the Faculty Senate in a state of luminous bliss. I don’t even know what people are ranting about because I’m sitting in an armchair in a Viennese salon in the 1980s.
People should occupy their minds, is what I’m saying. It doesn’t have to be German. Any fresh intellectual endeavor works great.
Emotional Agitation
OK, so I started listening to the German version of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, and it sounds very different. The German voice actor is reading the story in a much more emotional way. Have you heard Hitler’s speeches? The recording of the novel is not that intense but still much more intense than the English version.
The novel is titled Holzfรคllen. Eine Erregung in German. The English translator cut out the “eine Erregung” part, and the English actor had no way of knowing that emotional agitation is present even in the title of the novel.
I love listening to it in German. Now I wonder what it sounds in Spanish, if a Spanish audiobook exists.
Book Notes: Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian post-war writer, is the main literary inspiration of my favorite Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. He’s a genius but his books are of the kind that you either absolutely detest or abjectly love. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but I myself am in the camp of abject worshippers.
Woodcutters is a very typical Bernhardian novel. It’s an inner monologue of a very fussy, neurotic writer who spent 20+ years in London and comes back to Austria for a brief visit. The narrative is purposefully repetitive. The writer uses the expression “as I sat in the wing chair” over a hundred times. He’s attending an artistic dinner in the house of a rich artsy couple he used to know back in the 1950s. The writer hates everybody at the dinner and his inner monologue is delightfully venomous and gossipy. If you are not into inner monologues of repetitive neurotics, you won’t like the book. But to me it’s a “shoot it straight into my veins” type of enjoyment. I listened to an Audible version, and the voice actor is perfect for this role. If you like Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion, read Woodcutters. I will now listen to it in German while the memory of the novel is fresh in my mind.
AI-generated Political Ads
I’m saddened by the short-sightedness of the people who think that AI-generated political ads are cool, based and funny. They are not cool. They are the end of the political process. Using the physical likeness and the voice of people to make false representations should be illegal.
Right now an ad is being run in Kentucky showing Thomas Massie laughing and hanging out with AOC and Ilhan Omar. How many people will not read the tiny letters at the bottom of the screen saying it’s AI? How many people will think this really happened?
Do you realize how easy it is to have AI generate a video of anybody saying anything and engaging in any kind of perverted act? Forget the political process. What if somebody decides they want your job or your house? Or to take your kids away? Manufacturing a video of you engaging in acts of pedophilia is very easy. Why are we accepting that it’s normal and funny to make such videos?
That little prick in LA who is manufacturing these AI videos about Newsom, Harris and Bass is not cool. He should lose the race. I don’t care that he calls himself a Republican. He’s a total shit stain. And by the way, even putting aside the AI aspect, the videos are tasteless and stupid. We are going to accept this civilization destroying crap for a freshman-level prank?
What’s wrong with everybody? Is nothing more important than a couple of guffaws? The idea that we need to be entertained all the time and that being entertained is worth absolutely any tradeoff is wrong. Exactly at the time when everybody needs to embrace self-discipline and boundary, people let themselves melt into a puddle of goo.
Luรญs Graรงa
Luรญs Graรงa is a Portuguese right-wing nationalist who wants to reawaken national pride, virility and patriotism in European countries. He spent years trying to locate the remnants of nationalistic pride in Europe. In 2013 he traveled to Ukraine and was shocked to discover a right-wing paradise there. The cult of strength, manliness and true Western pride he found there had a narcotic effect on this right-winger.ย
Graรงa wrote a book about it titled Ukraine: An Identitarian Perspective. I’ll tell you about his argument in subsequent posts but for now I want to say that I’m very happy that I finally found a right-winger who has managed to figure out that Ukraine is the future of nationalism and Western rediscovery of its own greatness.
Renaming
The university has renamed academic hiring into “talent acquisition.”
Lord, grant me patience because I’m at the end of my tether.
Russian Philosophy
Dugin is the only thinkerโand I cringe to apply this term to himโthat Russia produced in decades. They don’t have anybody else with a recognizable name, and it’s all postcolonial wokeness of the lowest caliber. A valenki-clad Frantz Fanon.
The Russian rage isn’t about the NATO. It’s about this. It’s about wanting to be a global player and being utterly unable to live up to your own expectations. It’s about not being able to match the intellectual output of the tiny Poland, let alone the tiny Austria. It’s about not being able to hack it and seething with impotent anger over this obvious fact.
Women and Video Games
What are these people on about?
Women probably play more video games than men at this point. Who do these commenters think plays Gossip Island or any of the five trillion games where you have to help a freshly divorced single mother to handle her dates and gossipy friends? Who plays the games where you have to unravel knitting? Who plays makeover, fashion, and interior design games? Who plays the games where you plant flowers or help women who rescue infants from the trash in spite of dire poverty? Who plays the games where you run a maternity ward? What about the game where you have to put toddlers on potties? Or prove something to a cheating boyfriend? Or impress a fiance’s parents?
I could go on like this for a long time but you get my drift. People need to liberate their mentality from silly assumptions.
The Borders of the Self
It is high time to create a list of authors, publishers and content creators of whatever type you enjoy who would never do this to you:
Nobody will protect the boundaries of our inner self. We will have to protect them ourselves. We will have to close ourselves down and patrol the perimeter. We will have to do our own border policing. Nothing that hasn’t been pre-vetted gets to come in.
There is no task more important at this moment than to establish very strict and impenetrable boundaries between our inner self and the world. The biggest class difference a decade from now will be between people who boundaried up hard and those who failed to do so.
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