Wrong Persona

Netflix is premiering a new show with Meghan Markle where she’s going to attempt to position herself as a new Martha Stewart.

The makers of the show are so unprofessional that they don’t understand that the reason behind Martha Stewart’s outlandish popularity wasn’t her recipes or flower arrangements. Stewart has a phlegmatic temperament, which reads as low-anxiety. Her female fans were mesmerized by what they perceived as a non-anxious woman in a culture that plays up neurotic female behavior.

Meghan Markle comports herself as a standard neurotic. The persona of a calm domestic goddess is alien to her every faculty. That’s why she looks so weird surrounded by the same flower pots that made Martha Stewart a billionaire.

Speak Clearly

I very much despise the use of words like “grooming” as a shamefaced stand-in for “rape” and “trafficking” to substitute “pimping.” The same goes for “sex work” instead of “prostitution.”

Let’s avoid this Newspeak and express ourselves clearly.

A Pretty Video

Mrs Uglypants is gone, and I’m back looking normal and sitting amidst digitally generated luxury:

By the way, Klara was in the room during the taping, so if you hear soft rustling sounds in the background, it’s Klara working on her art.

Q&A: Readers Share

Thank you for sharing, друже! I’m very sorry, this is so sad. I can’t imagine how hard it must be. We have mountains of family dysfunction, like everybody from the USSR, but my father steered us off the pro-Russian path. He was very gentle except on the really important issues where he was unbreakable.

You are always welcome here, please know that.

Pakistani Rape Gangs

I wrote about Pakistani rape gangs in the UK back in 2014. It’s good that the tragedy of these victims is being discussed in the mainstream but solving this terrible issue will take more than discussion.

One positive development is that the new Tory leader is Kemi Badenoch who is very black and, hence, openly says that some cultures are superior to others. Now we need people to be able to say what Badenoch does without the protection of race. The British experiment with bringing crowds of savages and unleashing them on the native population has been a disaster. Anybody who wants to object to the word “savages” needs to go read the court transcripts and then come here and explain what happened to their moral compass that they can witness such horrors and not be able to name them.

I spent years being harassed by precisely such savages in Canada. And OK, I wasn’t a child, lucky me, so I only experienced inconvenience, humiliation, and discomfort. But as I’ve been saying for 15 years here on the blog, there are so few places on the planet where you can just go about your day, unmolested and surrounded with politeness and normal behavior. We are mighty lucky to be in such places, created for us by the extraordinary work and self-betterment of preceding generations, and we are pissing it all away.

People have published a lot of good analytical pieces about the rape gangs. The rapists come from highly inbred societies, they are tribal, they abuse high-trust societies, they can’t peacefully coexist with our culture’s love for individual freedom. This is all true but the main thing is that they should be exactly how and what they want – tribal, clannish, rapey – back home. The importance of mass migration for the economy was a myth judging by the endless austerity in the UK.

Impressionable

The chief evildoer in Squid Game 2 looks very much like Elon Musk. It’s not a spoiler because the identity of the evildoer is known to the audience from the start.

The season ended on a scene of terrible carnage orchestrated by this evildoer, and now I feel great hostility even to Musk’s good and important comments on X.

Yes, I’m very impressionable.

The Goals of the Dark Enlightenment

The ascent of the squinting cohort of grim moral fanatics to previously unscaled heights of global power coincides with the descent of mass-democracy to previously unimagined depths of gluttonous corruption. . . Democracy’s relentless trend to degeneration presents an implicit case for reaction.

– Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

Between the hectoring ideological apparatus and the entitled masses, there’s no off-ramp. We are doomed to be trapped in the dysfunction they create. The journey we have collectively traveled in the past 500 years inevitably leads to the current moment with its radical unfreedom. We have painted ourselves into a dismal corner, and there’s no way to paint it over.

All that’s left is a leap to a new stage of the evolution. It’s unnecessary that everybody should evolve at once. Only a few people need to do it. They’ll effectuate a jump into a new species, and that new species will create a completely different road instead of the messed-up one we are on. That evolution will be achieved through technology, possibly Elon Musk’s Neuralink being implanted into some people’s brains.

Yes, this is dumb. But nobody has suggested an alternative beyond trying to legislate away centuries of racial guilt, as if there were a huge difference between legislating away the unease caused by the guilt and the guilt itself.

More Dark Enlightenment

If you claim that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you’re committed to working your ass off not to be one—which is really the best that any of us can promise), then you must believe that people are fundamentally born equal. So if that’s true, then in a vacuum, factors like skin color should have no effect on anyone’s success. Right? And therefore, if you really believe that all people are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in the real world, the only thing that you could possibly conclude is that some external force is holding certain people back. Like…racism. Right? So congratulations! You believe in racism! Unless you don’t actually think that people are born equal. And if you don’t believe that people are born equal, then you’re a fucking racist.

– Lindy West, “A Complete Guide to Hister Racism”

This is beyond magical thinking. This is a system of belief that requires you to disregard the evidence of human multiplicity that you observe every minute of every day. Believing in the Tooth Fairy is less nuts than this because not every interaction with another human being offers decisive evidence that there is no Tooth Fairy. Yet absolutely any form of engagement with humans or any part of human culture does definitively and exhaustively demonstrate that we are not born equal in a way that conditions our “success.” Nick Land calls the state in which Lindy West placed herself to write the quoted article “sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances.”

That there is some poor, deluded Lindy West somewhere wouldn’t be important or interesting to discuss. But the quoted belief is now the foundation of a massive quantity of legislation defining much of our lives. People lose their jobs, are hounded out of productive existence, demonetized and demonized for doubting that Lindy’s Gnostic delirium is absolutely, undeniably true.

But that’s not enough. We are dismantling the biggest achievements of our civilization to keep alive the fantasy that anybody can be anything they want. Land wrote before gender theory became enshrined next to disparate impact but we are now seeing how the next stage of the delirium – men can be women can be men can be both – has become not only normalized but shrilly, aggressively dominant.

Falsifying the present, looting the future, sacralizing grievances – be they of the dominant Left or the dissident Right – this is what democracy does. Says Land, because I’m still retelling his book The Dark Enlightenment and will continue to do so in the next post.

What Is Dark Enlightenment?

Nothing conforms more exactly to the “general will” than the legislative abolition of reality.

Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

It’s true, isn’t it? We’ve seen very dramatic examples of this with transgenderism, BLM, “hate crimes.” An even bigger example is the enshrinement of democracy as the most virtuous pinnacle of societal organization. Democracy functions on the basis of bribing the howling, desiring masses by promising to feed their ever-growing appetites. “I’ll abolish taxes on tips!” – “Me, too! I’ll abolish them even harder!” Vote for me today, and I’ll let you devour tomorrow.

This is why democracy is intimately hostile to civilization. Civilization means depriving yourself today to invest in tomorrow. Democracy means robbing tomorrow to win today. Any civilizational project involves privileging the future. It’s not “gimme” but “I give this to the future.”

People like to be flattered. They love their appetites. Nothing flatters them more than having their appetites consecrated as political ideals. “Take away from him and give it to me” sounds kind of shabby. But if you call it “social justice” or “progress”, this immediately elevates you from a primitive coveter to a political being. Democracy, thus, is by its nature progressive. Appetite is the opposite of stasis. Feeding and glorifying the appetite is the opposite of conserving.

Unless it’s unclear from the above quote, I’m retelling Nick Land’s book The Dark Enlightenment. For my own part, I want to add that there were two famous Soviet sci-fi and fantasy authors, the Brothers Strugatsky. In one of their novels, Socialist scientists are trying to create a new type of human being. This individual, called “A Completely Satisfied Human” would have all his needs satisfied. The Socialist scientists in the book reasoned that, since this new human wouldn’t have to waste time or energy on satisfying his needs, he’d start creating. His creative capacity would be unleashed and he’d regale the world with extraordinary intellectual and artistic bounties.

When the Completely Satisfied Human was finally activated, though, he evinced zero interest in creating or giving. Instead, he manifested himself as a huge, desiring maw of need, devoured every material object in the vicinity, cocooned himself in his possessions, and tried to take ownership of time itself.

Yes, Soviet authors had a clear political reason to condemn complete satisfaction of needs. This doesn’t mean we don’t have political reasons to turn it into our deity.

More to follow.