Opinions, art, debate
Once again, thank you, Elon.
It was really dire before he got involved and shut down Russians’ comms. I was completely desperate in early February. I thought Ukraine wouldn’t survive the month. And then there was this dramatic improvement.
Please enjoy another quote from Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren. Jack Grundon is a teenage boy who becomes a pariah after attacking the Alawite rapist of his classmate Agatha:
His father: what did he have to say about his father? The man had secured a livelihood without maintaining a marriage; in any other historical context but the modern one, Jack wondered, would it have been conceivable that his life was something other than a failure, a shame? And now that shame had deepened because of Jack, his actions, and because John Grundon, his father, was no longer himself anymore but the one responsible for raising him: Mad Jack, the undesirable lunatic who had squandered, all in one go, his serious chance of getting into a good university and due to striking Basil, the reputation of his entire family. Even if all the accusations of his assault on Agatha were cleared up, that stain would linger. ‘Funny how everyone pretends that
honour doesn’t exist’, Jack thought to himself, ‘but as soon as you embarrass yourself in the wrong way—not by molesting a girl, but by acting against the one inconveniently responsible—suddenly it’s the Victorian Age again…’
People are discussing on social media whether it’s possible to travel internationally with small children. And yes, it’s possible but a more important question is whether it’s necessary. Children don’t need it. It’s done exclusively for adults. We’ve traveled internationally with Klara. She tolerated it as a form of eccentricity in which her parents engage for incomprehensible reasons. I don’t experience any need to pretend that she benefitted from it in a way she wouldn’t have from spending that time at home with her parents.
I’m fairly well-traveled but I don’t see why people turn travel into some sort of a meaning-conferring activity.
There are enormous benefits to being an unsociable curmudgeon. For one, you can’t get cancelled for hanging out with people. Because you don’t hang out with anybody.
There was no need for the old dude to go anywhere and stand next to any women. Whether he did that innocently or not, his memory is now tarnished and his scientific discoveries are downgraded. I hope he enjoyed standing next to the prostitutes for 3 minutes because at least it should be worth it.
Neoliberalism promotes self-indulgence but punishes for it severely. Only the self-control of a sincere medieval monk promises comfort in a neoliberal world.
No, I never heard of these people. I can say, however, that high culture has always been the purview of a tiny minority, and that is absolutely fine. It might feel like the number of stupid people with terrible taste is growing. But it’s not growing. We simply see them more often because of social media. The number of people who can understand and enjoy the novels of Anthony Trollope was always small. The number of those who can understand philosophy is even smaller. What changed is that reading Trollope is a superior form of entertainment because it requires a higher IQ and a better organized brain.
The progressive left that has seized so much of the heights of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment. It IS the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. It enables the spread and growth of machine society by launching an all-out war on any cultural norms that remain to us in the 2020s, norms that act as a brake on the spread of machine values. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer. One attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to heteronormativity to national identities. The other moves in to monetize the resulting fragments.
Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
By the machine, Kingsnorth means the ultra-digital surveillance apparatus produced by the merger of the corporate world and the government in neoliberal societies.
A brilliant statement from a serious philosopher. Zygmunt Bauman would love Kingsnorth.
At a hockey game in Rhode Island, a shooter opened fire, killing two people and injuring three more. Then he shot himself.
The shooter’s wife had left him several years ago because he started posing as a woman and even had transgender surgery. Now he took his revenge, murdering her.
The simple truth is that you don’t win the Dem nomination without African Americans voting for you en masse. In 2020, African Americans gave the nomination to the geriatric Biden because he’d been Obama’s VP. For 2028, African Americans already have Kamala. All of the other candidates are wasting their time. But they got to keep trying and in the process they’ll descend to such depths of BLM-style lunacy that it will feel like the Summer of Floyd on steroids.
I wanted to post this quote from Bothelford’s Gone. In this scene, Jack, a teenage British boy, visits a local abortion clinic:
Jack felt like he was visiting a foreign dictatorship with grey but clean streets, and that he had gone and entered the massive prison system that enabled those streets to remain clean in the first place. This clinic, Jack felt, was the place that ultimately made all the club nights in Bothelford possible, all the accidental products of one-night stands, marriages, and other sexual pairings, followed by more play, more partying, rather than an accounting of sorts. It was interesting in its own way. How would he put it if he had to give a presentation on it in class? The clinic was a secondary contraception in case the pills, condoms, and IUDs failed. The disintegrating sense of fun that the bars and nightclubs bred instead of children relied on the of this bland, hidden core. It was filled with unhappy people and, supposedly, a few rooms above, all kinds of surgical tools.
Edward McLaren, Bothelford’s Gone
Just so you are prepared, this is one of the lighter, less emotionally draining part of the novel. Not because there’s anything cute about the industrial-scale abortioneering it describes but because the rest is even harsher.
There’s been a clarification on the question I answered yesterday:
OK, now I get it, thank you. Yes, there’s a large amount of literature that’s downright political messaging with no additional value. Think poetry by Amanda Gorman. It’s bad, there’s not a spark of talent in it but she gets promoted because it’s politically useful.
In what concerns novels, I want to mention The Deluge by Stephen Markley. He is the author of one of the best novels of American literature of this century, Ohio (2018). I had high hopes for him but then he went full-on propagandist and came up with the unreadable The Deluge. Such a waste of great talent.
Joyce Maynard, who was quite talented in her younger years, also has gone psycho propagandist in the past decade. I can’t even read the garbage she has been churning out.
Overall, just grab the list of the Oprah Book Club, and you’ll see the emanation of the leftist spirit on full view.
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