Category: Culture Matters

Tucker Carlson’s Ten-Point Manifesto

From Axios. My comments are intercalated and signaled by ‘BV.’

[Tucker] Carlson said any successor to America’s faltering political system should begin with a shared understanding of what the country “should be,” which he distilled into 10 points.

Fair: The same rules should apply to presidents, federal agents and elites such as Jeffrey Epstein, whose impunity Carlson cast as emblematic of an “Epstein class” enriching itself through a corrupt system.

BV: Of course!

Sovereign: Carlson claimed Israel pushed the U.S. into the Iran war through “bribery or threat or both,” while describing foreign lobbying, corporate control of government and high-interest debt as forms of “slavery.”

BV: As for the claim about Israel, I don’t understand why Carlson makes it. What’s his evidence?  Of course, Israel would be the first nation to be nuked into oblivion should the Islamo-theocrats in control of Iran acquire nuclear weapons.  So Israel, among all the nations of the world, ought to be, and presumably is, the most concerned about the Iranian threat, and is of course pleased that the USA, under Trump’s leadership, is doing something about it.   But the Big Satan (USA) is also in the cross-hairs, as are the nations of Europe.  The IRGC is a threat to civilization tout court.  Tucker should praise Trump for his fearless leadership.

As for “corporate control of government,” Carlson may have a point that ought to concern conservatives. I understand that our government has a 10% stake in Intel Corp.  This deserves discussion and not Hannity-style dismissal.

Productive: America should rebuild farming, manufacturing and craftsmanship while rejecting an economy dominated by finance, real estate speculation, surveillance systems and weapons.

BV: The things mentioned in the initial clause are  taking place under Trump.  As for the second clause, it is impossible that our economy not be devoted in large part to surveillance systems and weaponry given the external and internal threats we face from our adversaries:  The Chi-Coms, NOKO, radical Islam, imperial Russia, and the commie takeover of the Dems by the DSA.

Beautiful: Carlson alleged that urban planners deliberately “uglified” American cities, and portrayed brutalist architecture, graffiti, public drug use and violent crime as deliberate attacks on the public.

BV:  Deliberately?  Attacks by whom?

Healthy: Carlson embraced RFK Jr.’s food agenda, called for universal sobriety and said widespread use of drugs such as Xanax, Adderall and SSRIs had left Americans “half-addled.”

BV: I agree completely.

Honest: Government officials should be punished for lying to citizens, and most classified records — including on the JFK assassination and 9/11 — should be opened.

BV: Yes!  And Trump is doing just that.  The transparency of the Trump administration is in stark contrast to the lack thereof in previous administrations. Example: UFOs/UAPs.  Tucker should thank Trump.

Optimistic: Carlson argued that having children is a biological imperative and the foundation of long-term thinking, while blaming aging and childless elites for policies that disregard future generations.

BV: OK, but if one cares about future generations, then a terror-state such as Iran under the IRGC cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to deliver them.

Wise: Schools should teach how the physical world actually works and what he called unchanging facts about human nature — including innate differences between men and women — rather than credentials, screens and technological fads.

BV: Bad writing, but I agree.

Decent: The U.S. should apologize and pay restitution for killing noncombatants, reverse Trump’s “Department of War” rebrand and stop funding allies that commit what Carlson called genocide, citing Israel.

BV: This is the unhinged Carlson 2.0.  (I suspect that his being cashiered by FOX played a major role in his unhinging.) What noncombatants?  The DOD rebrand is just honesty. War is not just defense: it is attack and defense.  By the way, ‘DOD’ was itself an obfuscatory rebrand; Trump restored the original name.  Finally, to refer to Israel as ‘genocidal’ is an Orwellian inversion of the truth.

United: Carlson called for halting immigration until the effects of AI become clearer, ending benefits for undocumented immigrants and making English the sole language of federal documents and ballots.

BV: I agree entirely re: the second and third points.  The first point obviously needs qualification.

In conclusion, this manifesto is deeply flawed, but does make some good points. I used to think highly of Tucker Carlson,  It is too bad he lost his way.

The European Free Speech Crisis

While reading this depressing article, it occurred to me that the U.K. and the Continent, in their assault on free speech, might be half-wittingly acquiescing in Islamification and entry into dhimmitude.  Why? Because of an excess of empathy unto cultural suicide?  Maybe civilizations, like individuals,  can get old and tired and just give up.

The Fall of France and the Folly of Immigration without Assimilation

France’s Long Slide “is an excerpt from Éric Zemmour’s book, The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation, which was translated by Nathan Pinkoski and will be published by Encounter Books on July 14.” Zemmour offers a perceptive take on rhe MAGA movement’s two phases separated by Trump’s 2020-2024 ‘sabbatical.’ Zemmour appreciates Trump’s world-historical significance.

Excerpts from the excerpt:

. . . in Arab-Muslim civilization, the process [of civilization] that Elias describes has never happened, and passions, impulses, emotions have continued to be suppressed by ferocious, brutal reprisals. When people who have learned to control themselves encounter, on the same soil, those who expect fierce and brutal reprisals that never come, it’s a safari for the latter, where the people who have undergone Elias’s “process of civilization” become game. Against them, anything goes.

[. . .]

The existential anguish of the French people in the face of their disappearance is finally being taken seriously. The “great replacement” is no longer marginalized as a literary fad or a conspiracy theory. The French people’s desire to emancipate themselves from the State’s shackles, standards, and taxes, which enslave them without protecting them, is also recognized by all. Ideological victory has not led to political victory, but we know that it always takes time to move from one to the other.

We saw this in the United States. Trump’s unexpected success in the 2016 presidential election had caused nothing irreversible. Nobody was really ready: neither the candidate’s teams, nor the president. Nor, doubtless, the country itself. The triumph of 2024 has a completely different significance. The MAGA camp engaged in a veritable counterrevolution. A counterrevolution in the sense of the “Counter-Reformation” of the Council of Trent after the Protestant revolution. I don’t think the comparison is excessive. The revolution brought about by the Left in the 1960s tore America away from its age-old history, like a river diverted from its course. France, as we have seen in this book, followed exactly the same path in the 1970s. This revolution, which started in America, set fire to the whole of the West. It was therefore necessary for the counterrevolution to start from America too, if it is to have any chance of prevailing. [emphasis added.]

[. . .]

The 21st century will be terrible: it will be a telluric mix between the 19th century and the Middle Ages. It will see the return of states, peoples, and nations, a confrontation between great powers, where “force takes precedence over law,” in Bismarck’s famous phrase, and where the game between European rivals, France, England, and Germany, will simply be extended to the whole world, with these new players: China, the United States, Russia, India, and Turkey. It will see the return of religious fanaticism carried out by Islam, as in the 7th century, with its cohort of violence, intolerance, sacrilege, and superstition; with tribalism, pillage, massacres, mass rape, obscurantism, and irrationality.

The time has come for every people, for every continent, to return to the very essence of their civilization. This is already happening all over the planet: Russians are rediscovering Orthodoxy and the tsars, even when they were Red; China is returning to the teachings of Confucius, India to Buddha, Islam to Mohammed and the Ummah, Turkey to the Koran and the Ottoman Empire. All of them are returning to their deepest identities in order to tear themselves away from Western universalism, which they experience—partly with good reason—as a dispossession, an illusion, a subjection. Only Europe and the West are slow to reclaim their roots, perverted as they are by a corrupted universalism and a poorly digested humanism. Paradoxically, this Western universalism, once the weapon of European imperialism, has now become its prison, even its deadly poison. In the United States, the Trump network, with Vice President JD Vance as its mouthpiece, no longer hesitates to proclaim the greatness of Western civilization, Jewish prophecy and Catholic majesty, Greek rationality and Roman law. Some European countries, often the smallest, in the east but also in the west of the continent, have understood the danger and are no longer deluded by the suicidal mirages of a nihilistic universalism. That leaves the great European nations, France, Germany, and England, who are the last to understand where the wind of renewal is blowing.

Through word and deed, I’m fighting with all my might to put France back at the heart of this struggle to return to our roots, to the roots of our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman identity, to our genius for freedom, rationality, and beauty. [emphasis added]

Reading Now: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

I first read Stefan Zweig in 1988 when I came upon his The Royal Game  and Other Stories in a Greenwich Village book store.  I purchased a copy from the Village Chess Shop on November 12th of that year.  As  a chess player I had long known about the eponymous story.  It delighted me as much as “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” from the same collection, moved me.

So when our long-time friend Spencer Case mentioned The World of Yesterday on his Facebook page, I knew I had to have it.  It does not disappoint. Here is a taste to whet your appetite:

If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of that internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release. (220)

To appreciate this passage, it must be savored in the context of the chapter ‘Brightness and Shadows over Europe’ which deals with the run-up to the Great War and the mentality of the individuals and peoples who prepared it and suffered unspeakably in its aftermath.

The sensitive Zweig, born in 1881, couldn’t bear the aftermath, even from afar,  and committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942.

 

UFC Fight at the White House?

A senator in cargo pants, and now this? Matthew Schmitz at Compact thinks something revolutionary is going on. His is a provocative article, and not too long.  I support Trump for a number of reasons, one of which is that he is a fighter.  On the other hand, while there is the decadence of suicidal empathy, there is also that of suicidal brutality.

Panem et circenses!

I am no fan of spectator sports.  We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid* professional louts. I preach the People’s Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.

Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don’t call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)

Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry David said, “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.

In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey opines:

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

Was Abbey a racist? That depends on what a racist is. I’ll leave it for you to decide what a racist is and whether Abbey was one.

_______________

*Can anyone be ‘overpaid’? If enough people like what you sell, and are willing to pay you for it, you may become rich indeed. Think of all the rich schlock novelists. Capitalist acts among consenting adults. That’s the libertarian line.  Or do you prefer more government intervention in people’s lives? For the record, I am not a libertarian. But I’ll take a libertarian over a leftist any day.

One Nation? A Pessimistic Prognosis

Some say that a multi-racial society is possible while  a multi-cultural one is not. This is true as far as it goes but it presupposes that the several races in a society accept or can be brought to accept the same culture. Is the presupposition true? I don’t think so.

Traditional American culture is built on what the Smithsonian has tendentiously called “white values.” These include self-reliance,  “objective, rational linear thinking” [as opposed to what? subjective circular thinking?], hard work, respect for legitimate authority, ability to defer gratification, civility, and control of emotions.  Here is the Smithsonian’s full list.

These values and virtues are universal, not ‘white.’ When I say  that they are universal I mean that they are good for everyone, regardless of race. They are genuine values and virtues the implementation of which will lead to human flourishing.  The values on the Smithsonian list are universal in that everyone can profit from them. They  are ‘white’ only in that whites have excelled in their discovery, articulation, and implementation.

For example, whites are better at deferring or delaying gratification than blacks, which largely explains why, as a group, they do better economically than blacks as a group.  “A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.” (Wikipedia) Social competence consists of the skills needed successfully to adapt to social situations. Lack of impulse control is one sort of social incompetence. Disproportionately more blacks than whites are shot by police in routine traffic stops, not because of ‘racism,’ but  because disproportionately more blacks than  whites ‘blow their cool’ in such tense interactions and engage in threatening behavior which elicits predictable responses from law enforcement officers.  This is not to deny that there are LEOs who commit murder under color of law. There are.  But they are a small fraction of the cases in which LEOs legally shoot and sometimes justifiably kill black  and other ‘motorists’ in self-defense.

The opening question was whether a multi-racial society can survive over the long term. It can, but only if the different racial, ethnic, and religious groups can be brought to accept a common culture.  This will not happen unless all illegal immigration is stopped, illegal aliens are deported, and legal immigration is structured so as to (i) prevent certain groups from entering, e.g., sharia-supporting Muslims, and (ii) gives preference, as used to be the case, to the entry of assimilable groups who share our values, broadly speaking.  For example, U.K. and other English speakers over Europeans, Europeans over Asians,  Asians over Africans.

There is no right to immigrate and every nation has the the right to insist that immigration work to the benefit of the host country and the preservation of its culture.

In the USA that common culture is Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman, and classically liberal, with the classically liberal values of the Enlightenment and the Founders (our greatest generation)  mitigating  the excesses and correcting the mistakes of the Greeks (slavery), the Romans (cruel and unusual punishment), and Christianity (ostracism and murdering of ‘heretics’).

Do we have the will to preserve our civilization and to to mitigate its decadence (due in large part to our great but corrupting affluence and to certain extreme forms of liberalism)?

The prognosis is not good.  A good half of the country now comprises an Internal Enemy that has hijacked the Democrat Party and is working to overturn the Constitution and the founding principles  But it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and we fight on to the end.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is Closing

This J.A. Westenberg  article  is troubling for writers and bibliophiles like me  but also helps explain the origin of the bad behavior rampant in the online world. I mean unsourced quotations, mis-quotations, mis-attributions, false attributions and outright plagiarism.  Here is a longish excerpt:

The part of me trained in research methodology wants to scream over verification and provenance and the importance of tracing claims to sources. But I also notice that most people don’t seem to mind. The hunger for documentary certainty, for the well-cited argument, for the carefully fact-checked article, was perhaps never as universal as print-culture intellectuals assumed. Through most of history, most people have been comfortable with a more fluid epistemology: “I heard from a guy who knows,” or “everyone’s saying,” or “my cousin’s friend saw it happen.” The post-truth moment we’ve been living through may be a reversion to the mean rather than an aberration.

What we lose when the parenthesis closes

The Gutenberg Parenthesis gave us real gifts, and some of them may not survive its closing.

We may lose linear argument: the book-length treatment of a complex topic, the patient accumulation of evidence toward a conclusion, the scientific paper and the legal brief and the doctoral dissertation and the philosophical treatise. All of these forms assume a reader willing to follow a chain of reasoning through thousands of words without interruption, building toward understanding that’s only possible at the end. That reading is already rare and getting rarer, and it may soon be as exotic as hand-copying manuscripts.

We may lose historical consciousness. When knowledge was fixed in texts, the past remained present. You could read Thucydides and know exactly what he wrote in 431 BCE. You could trace the evolution of ideas across centuries, watching how each generation built on or rejected what came before. Oral culture has a weaker historical memory because each retelling revises the past. The fluid web, where yesterday’s controversy is ancient history and last year’s consensus is forgotten, may produce a similarly compressed temporal consciousness.

We may lose individual authorship. In oral culture, the tribe speaks through every voice. In literate culture, individual thinkers can depart from consensus and have their departures preserved. Copernicus could be wrong in his time and right for eternity. Darwin could write a book that his contemporaries rejected but that later generations would vindicate. The permanence of text allows genius to speak across centuries. What happens when knowledge becomes fluid again, when every idea is instantly remixed into the collective flow, losing its attribution, becoming another element in the soup?

Hyperreality and the Fraudulence of Fuentes

Christopher Rufo may have come up with the best analysis of the Fuentes phenomenon. He is, says Rufo,

. . . an essentially fraudulent phenomenon. He is a manipulator who pretends to believe in every evil in order to drive clicks, cause chaos, and achieve celebrity, even as a villain.

He has incited division on the Right. Some conservatives think that the kid should be ignored lest his views be legitimized. Others think his views should be debated and refuted. This conservative contretemps can be side-stepped once it is realized that what I called “his views” are not authentically his and put forth in good faith. So his false and contradictory statements, interspersed with some reasonable ones to add to the confusion, ought not be taken at face value. The guy is operating in

. . . what postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality”: a system in which the simulation of reality comes to replace reality itself. Under conditions of hyperreality, symbols of past phenomena lose their original meaning. Emptied out, they then circulate through digital media, where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement. In this way, the hyperreal becomes “more real than real,” masking the true nature of reality. [. . .]

The tone of his discourse is not authentic, serious, or reflective. It is ironic, cynical, and provocative. When Fuentes lauds Hitler and, in another interview, praises Stalin—irreconcilable ideological enemies—he is not expressing a comprehensible ideology that can be scrutinized in debate. He is engaging in a performance, which only becomes coherent when read as a demand for attention.

I would call it performative bullshit of the sort engaged in by Gavin Newsom with his “hand jive,” Kamala Harris, with her hyena-like risibility,  “Tampon Tim” Walz, Swalwell, Cory Booker with his baseball bat,  and other Democrat clowns.  Nancy “The Shredder” Pelosi recently got into the act by tearing apart a fake crown in line with the mindless Faux-King meme.  Trump has them completely under his control so much so that all they can do is flail about reactively with silly memes, endlessly repeated dealings of the race and Hitler cards, all the while saying nothing of substance and proposing nothing positive.

So the best response to Fuentes the political performance artist may well be no response at all.   This too shall pass.

I’ll add one nuance to Rufo’s take:  Fuentes is probably not fully self-transparent in his fraudulence. He knows not fully what he does. He is a confused kid who craves and receives attention, attention that has gone to his head; a kid  mesmerized by the high tech that permits him to propagate his performances and baseless asseverations, but is also — let’s be fair — truly troubled by what troubles a lot of the Zoomers. They’ve been cheated by the abdication of authority on the part of parents, teachers, and clergy.

Which brings me to my last point: the Zoomers do have legitimate grievances, some of which have been mentioned in the previous comment thread.

Related:  The Bonfire of the New Right’s Vanities

Is God in Bad Taste?

Some anti-Searlean remarks over at the Stack.  It begins like this:

John R. Searle has quit the sublunary for points unknown. We wish him the best. Since his 1969 Speech Acts, he has been a major contributor to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of society. How best do we honor a philosopher? By reenacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically, with an eye to learning what he has to teach us.

Trump has Made News Great Again

Politics in hyperdrive. Who can keep up? And to what extent should one keep up? Here are a couple of articles that caught my eye:

The Islamic Republic's New Lease on Life. Mercifully brief, and very interesting.  In Foreign Affairs, by one Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar.  I'd be interested in Caiati's and Soriano's comments. 

Elon Musk is America's Dumbest Smart Person.  Roger Kimball is right, and he is a very good writer to boot,  unlike so many journo-punks now churning out bad prose. How do I know Kimball is a good writer? It takes one to know one.

It's a funny world. My opinion of the 'pre-historic' Fetterman has gone up during the same period that my opinion of the engineering genius Musk has gone down.  

I would put it like this. Donald Trump has injected the 'art of the deal' into politics. He has brought the transactional skills of a consummate businessman to bear with impressive results. He was politically naive but the seemingly providential interregnum provided him with a 'sabbatical' during which to 'bone up' with the help of brilliant advisors. That, and the stark contrast with the mentally inept, morally corrupt 'Traitor Joe' Biden have brought the Orange Man to power. Maybe God had a hand in it, or we just got lucky. I prefer not to bluster about the unknowable.

Musk, on the other hand, remains politically naive. You can't engineer politics.  

As for how much time should be spent following the events of the day, see my Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

Musk's third party doesn't have a chance, and in any case, Third Parties are nothing but discussion societies in political drag, as I argue over at the Stack.

Postmarked Utopia

Ed Farrell, a long-time friend and reader of Maverick Philosopher since April 2010, tells me that he has a Substack up and running, entitled Postmarked Utopia.  Please do bring him some traffic. Here is the initial paragraph of his inaugural post:

I've called this site "Postmarked Utopia" not because I live in Utopia but because I live in a wannabe utopia: the progressive western world, which has once again embarked on the great project of destroying its cultural foundations so that some sort of free-and-equal paradise might rise like a phoenix from the ashes. With variations, this is the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try at this. At the moment we're stalled in populist uprisings. Will we get past this? I hope not. If the past is any guide, Utopia is a bitch and delivers only brain-death and servitude. 

 

The Atheist

Substack latest.

A rumination 'inspired' by Paul Brunton. An embedded article confronts Sam Harris, one of the "four horsemen" of the New Atheism, which is now old hat.  As old hat as the expression I just used. There's nothing new under the sun,  saith the Preacher, and in these hyperkinetic times, what's new gets old quickly. The New Atheism is as passé as folk music, as passé as blogging, although some among the superannuated are still at it and will be until blindness, dementia, or death doth part us from it.  

Curiously, thanks to Trump, Vance, and others, Christianity is now 'cool' among a large segment of youth. But don't get too excited about this development: it is in good measure driven by conformism and crowd behavior and by the lust to turn a buck, as witness 'prayer apps' and Martin Scorsese's latest offerings.

If you need an app to pray I will say a prayer for you. As for  Scorsese's latest, I didn't watch any of it, considering it, whether rightly or wrongly, sullied by his and his pal Robert de Niro's glorification of mafiosi and other assorted scumbags in such productions as Goodfellas and Casino. 

Richard Dawkins on Christianity and Islam

Here (HT: Catacomb Joe):

Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

I hope to say more about this later. Now I have to prepare for a meeting with Brian the Calvinist.  First lunch and casual conversation about the events of the day and the latest outrages of the depredatory Left, then intense philosophical conversation about Jesus and the Powers, a stimulating albeit flawed book, and finally  two or so hours of battling over the 64 squares. 

That's the kind of socializing I like. Otherwise, solitude rules.