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.

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.

Today, the Russian barbarians tried to fulfill their promises regarding the destruction of the Kyiv dam at the hydroelectric plant. In this way, they want to arrange an ecological disaster for the mass murder of the civilian population in and around Kyiv.

How much longer will… pic.twitter.com/yLUvaSVD7c

— Maksym Borodin (@adnashmyash) August 26, 2024

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.

X continues to be the definition of a ruthless workplace from all I understand.

Push people working there to the max with expectations above most (all?) other tech companies, compensation below (no equity!), but STILL make these people prove they deserve market comp

Just wow pic.twitter.com/1LuYWR0TJP

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) August 24, 2024

I’m so tired of working at a place where nobody cares about achievement that the words “ruthless workplace” make me feel dreamy. All we ever do is complain about his every measure of measuring our work – from student evaluations of teaching to publication and citation number – are unfair and discriminatory. We get together in groups and compare victimhood status.

The arrest of @Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association. I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications. It lowers not only France, but the world.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 25, 2024

I remember how some very, very progressive people would come here and throw tantrums when I said Snowden was Putin’s little poodle. No, they claimed. He was only fellating Putin out of necessity, not love. These were very, very progressive people who used “conservative” as an insult.

I wonder if they received new talking points since then.

No, I’ll never feel fully American:

A woman lived with three “emotional support parrots” in her co-opt who drive her neighbors crazy. They try to evict her, the federal government comes after them for a civil rights violation and forces the co-opt to buy her apartment and give her $165K in damages.

Clown nation. pic.twitter.com/OzmbIKUzDl

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 25, 2024

The basic principle of American life – which is that large numbers of people should stoically accept all sorts of hassle and inconvenience to accommodate one unusual person – is incomprehensible to me. I’d say one unusual person should accommodate a crowd but that makes me un-American.

For a religious person, the #1 task is understanding the will of God and serving God’s purpose.

Neoliberal subjects see themselves as God. So their main goal is to figure out what their “true self” is and how to serve the whims of that true self all the more faithfully.

At the same time, they have convinced themselves that a stable identity core is impossible or at least undesirable because it prevents constant growth. So the “true self” can never be fully known. Because it doesn’t exist. The result is constant striving, constant fussing, rearranging, seeking, medicating, microdosing and manifesting in order to coal out something that isn’t there to begin with.

When a human being becomes completely self-referential, bad things happen. You can’t be the measure of good and ill. No self is big enough for this task.

At first, the constant them-theying of a small boy in Miranda July’s All Fours is grating but it actually plays an important role in the narrative. The main character “doesn’t believe” in the sex binary but the sex binary doesn’t care. It comes for her in all its physiological glory.

The novel presents the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of the egotistical, irresponsible, self-aggrandizing, fluid and self-righteous cultural and political elites of the Western world. It’s scary because they are scary but the novel answers the question of what kind of people it takes to dismantle national borders, defund police, promote racial hatred, and conduct bizarre experiments on small children.

The main character of Miranda July’s novel All Fours is a very woke 45-year-old woman who refers to her own 7-year-old son as “they.” Who could imagine that I’d enjoy reading about her circle of gender-non-conforming, fluid, drug-addled, “experimenting soul” fru-fru ladies who don’t need to work for a living and who perish of boredom in their $2-million LA mansions?

But I did because All Fours explores the subject of a middle-aged female sexual transformation that nobody else wants to talk about. I tried to discuss it here on the blog a couple of years ago but younger female readers got sore over the possibility that there might be something they hadn’t learned about sex by age 16, and I had to quit the discussion before people received unbearable psychic wounds.

The protagonist of July’s novel stops at a motel on a drive from LA to NYC, and all of a sudden it happens. It’s an instantaneous transformation. All of a sudden, she understands the entire history of art that always seemed unnecessarily filled with naked bodies. She understands men in a way she never did before. But it’s too late to do anything about it. When she finally receives the full force of human sexuality, her fertility is gone, beauty is gone, and the capacity to refashion her life in any meaningful way is also gone. The realization that this gift is given to her exactly when it’s of no use strikes July’s character with how exquisitely cruel and unfair the laws of biology are. She has spent her whole life trying to make a mockery of biology. She is even planning to trans her small son. But nature comes back with the inevitability of a hired assassin and hits her with a wave of regret over her entire life before and after this moment.

July’s character is a frivolous, spoilt brat of a woman. She is also one of those eternally immature women who try to use symbiotic relationships to make up for their stunted growth. As a result, she responds to this great crisis in the most bizarre and entertaining ways imaginable.

None of us here are rich, coddled princesses who can sit in our butts all day and prattle about our hormone levels with our equally stunted girlfriends. But we do need to remember that what happened to this character is likely (but not guaranteed because we aren’t factory produced) to happen to us. In the absence of wealth and unlimited leisure, we need a life strategy that takes into the account that in middle age the hereto divergent paths of male and female sexuality suddenly reverse course and approach each other like never before. If people are not prepared, it messes with their heads. I mean, even if they are very prepared, it still messes with their heads but at least knowing about this is a good idea.

The female sexual crisis of middle age has been described in literature a lot but it’s usually done obliquely. The female character in its grip is portrayed as suddenly developing a desire to be an artist or realizing that her husband is uncaring. July’s big achievement is that she speaks of it bluntly and almost clinically, and nobody can pretend they don’t understand what she’s on about.

I can’t recommend this novel to everybody because the many pornographic parts soon become tedious and the protagonist’s intellectual limitations lose their entertainment potential about halfway into the book. The subject, however, is important, and we can see how many women are grateful it’s been raised in the number of positive reviews of the novel.

Trump and Harris are identical in their campaign strategy. Both propose gimmicky things that failed a trillion times before. Harris comes out with price controls that failed every single time in every single country that attempted them. Trump proposes death penalty for sex crimes which led to rapists murdering their victims dramatically more than before everywhere it was tried.

Both policies are stupid and probably not even meant to be introduced. The only goal is to inflame the voters’ emotions because no other sensibility but the affect participates in voting decisions these days. People interpret “self-interest” as “whatever gives me a high at whatever cost.”

Of particular interest are people who say, “if Kamala could solve all these problems, why isn’t she doing it now?” while not asking why Trump failed to deport massively or build the wall or stop the war in Ukraine or do any of what he keeps promising during his first term.

It won’t get better until we demand that it get better. We are allowing these candidates to piss on us and they happily oblige while we wallow in imaginary moral superiority that they peddle.