Telegram Freedom

I was banned on Telegram two years ago. I never posted anything and had zero followers. All I ever did on Telegram – and I mean it literally – was participate in a translation group that did free translations for a charitable program that helped Ukrainian children suffering from war trauma. That is absolutely 100% of what I did there. And I got a permanent ban for that activity less than 2 months in.

People who use Telegram and “freedom of speech” in the same sentence are as gullible as any fan of Rachel Maddow.

Enjoying the Routine

One more thing I forgot to say about Miranda July’s All Fours is this: if you are 45 and you aren’t excited about your day-to-day, you are doing it wrong and will drive yourself into a depression. The daily routine – and not the trips, the holidays, the celebrations and the special events – should be exhaustively fascinating. Anybody can enjoy a beach vacation but only people who are very right in the head can enjoy a regular Tuesday morning routine.

Perceiving the daily routine as onerous, jail-like, grating, intolerable, etc is the first sign that something is going wrong. The final destination of that journey is not good.

RFK and Family

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s family members have denounced his decision to endorse Donald Trump after he dropped out of the presidential race, calling it a “betrayal” of their family’s values.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/top-stories/blog/rcna168068

It’s now clear why RFK is such a weirdo. He comes from a family of total weirdos who have absolutely no understanding of what a family is and how it’s appropriate to behave in public.

What a bunch of unlikeable, kooky individuals. There should be no political dynasties because this embarrassment is the only result.

American Rituals

I’m going to Matt Walsh’s new movie Am I Racist? on opening night. Are you going? Let’s all go and then discuss it here.

I saw a clip from the movie where Walsh is disguised as a waiter at a racial education dinner for white women. A race hustler says that white women have this deeply annoying habit of gushing to each other how fat or stupid they are. And look, this race hustler is not wrong. She’s wrong in that she says it’s “white women” when the reality is that it’s white American women under the age of 50. All of my friends here in town are either way older than 50 or not white American precisely because of this. One can’t take it because it’s like a ritual. They get together and go at it for any length of time. I’ve never met a European woman who’d do this. Never. Or a US woman in her seventies.

I think Matt Walsh uncovered something he didn’t even expect.

Motivational Morning

Like anyone would want to be 18, with no money, no authority, no certainty, no belongings except anxiety, and no knowledge how life would turn out.

If your 18 was better than this, then never mind.

The Real Russia Collusion

The Biden-Harris administration has been terrible for Ukraine. And it’s beyond annoying that the media managed to sell to most of the country the lie that it’s a pro-Ukraine administration.

The collusion with Russia wasn’t real during Trump but it is now. And it can only get worse with Harris.

Who Is a Globalist?

Globalists aren’t just some shady dudes lurking in the backrooms of the World Economic Forum. We have all been infected with globalist mentality because it’s so dominant. Instead of feeling powerless over the imaginary sorcery of Klaus Schwab, we should work hard to eradicate this way of thinking from our own minds.

What does this mean?

It means simply that:

We should go back to thinking that is based primarily on the category of nation-states.

It no longer comes naturally to us, so we should make an effort. Every time the globalist “everybody is an interchangeable widget” idea visits us, we should banish it and ask ourselves, “how would I think about this if nation-states were real and valid?”

Here are some examples.

1. The war in the Middle East. Should we support Israel or Palestinians? This only gets confusing when we start drowning in the globalist widget mentality of who’s a bigger victim and who has which rights. If, on the other hand, we look at it from the point of view of which side would happily cut our heads off and which wouldn’t, it becomes really simple. Who’s on our side? Let’s support those dudes and not support their enemy. Who has taken more Americans hostage in the past year? Let’s not be for those people.

2. Russia’s war against Ukraine. The same principle operates here. Who loves and admires us and wants to emulate us? Ukraine. Who despises us and wants us to die? Russia. Let’s not be on the side of the people who want us to die.

3. Snowden. This is a fellow who is giving aid and succor to our sworn, mortal enemy. “Yes, but his life is hard, he’s a victim, he suffered badly.” Right, and this is exactly – and I mean, exactly – the narrative that justifies open borders. His life is hard, so screw the nation-state. Congratulations, we just reinvented globalism.

4. Pavel Durov of the Telegram. Here, again, we have the idea that an enemy combatant who is a foresworn foe of our culture has some magical rights that he somehow magically acquired just by the fact of existing and that it falls to us to guard these magical rights of his no matter the cost to us. How is this different from defending the right of some ISIS mullah in London to receive large quantities of welfare while rubbishing the country that gives him this welfare?

The social contract of the nation-state is this: the nation-state guarantees your rights in exchange for your willingness to die to defend it. Outside of the nation-states, nobody guarantees any rights. A trick is being played on us. We are duped into believing that there is such a thing as free-floating rights that everybody possesses by virtue of existing. We decide that the nation-state is not necessary because our rights already exist without it. So we dismantle the nation-state and discover that without being minutely defended and enforced by an actual, strong state structure, all those rights are just a fiction.

I’m not a special cookie in this. My mind is as infected with this crap as anybody else’s. More so, even. So I make a conscious effort to stop, reorient myself, and think about things outside of the framework and terminology suggested by this noxious mentality. Without everybody making such an effort, we’ll never de-globalize.

Ignoble Savage

Taking in some rapey savage from a remote tribe that despises our civilization and does everything to undermine it, investing him with rights that we conceptualized and defended and that are the same rights this savage doesn’t recognize within his own tribe, and then tying ourselves in knots to respect the savage’s possession of these rights no matter what the cost to ourselves is a ridiculous, self-sabotaging pastime with no value.

Yes, I’m talking about Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram. But it’s not just him. It’s the principle of the thing. It often looks like we are scouring the world in search of ululating barbarians to drag over and then defend them in spite of everything they do to show how much they despise us. It’s some sort of a weird masochism where we most love those who want us to die.

Why We Don’t Win

It’s a tragedy beyond words that the Biden administration, with its backroom deals with Russia, is in the White House during Russia’s war against Ukraine. Biden has done everything – and I mean, everything – to prevent Ukraine from winning.

No, I don’t think it would have been better with Trump. I think it would have been identical. This is not a one-person problem. It’s a problem with a culture that doesn’t believe it deserves to triumph. No single individual will rescue us until we learn to want to win instead of rejoicing in the narratives of our own badness.