Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Procreational slack-off among white Boomers and their generational successor cohorts plays a role in the 'replacement' of whites. Note also that it provides a soupçon of justification for wide-open borders to allow in potential taxpayers to support the welfare state.
This might be worth discussing.
Because the demand exceeds the supply, new variants of 'racism' have to be invented by leftist race-hustlers. One of the latest is digital blackface. (I wrote this in March of last year.) What might that be? Here:
Digital blackface is a practice where White people co-opt online expressions of Black imagery, slang, catchphrases or culture to convey comic relief or express emotions.
[. . .]
Digital blackface involves white people play-acting at being black . . .
The complaint seems to be that whitey engages in 'cultural appropriation.' If that were a legitimate complaint, then so would the retort: but then so does blacky. Black folk regularly play-act at being white when they practice self-restraint, show respect for legitimate authority, are punctual, work hard, defer gratification, speak correct English, are self-reliant, reasonable and objective, study mathematics and science, save and invest, plan for the future, act responsibly towards themselves and others, listen to and play classical music, enjoy the fruits of high culture, and so on.
So one might ask, rhetorically, "By what right do blacks appropriate OUR culture? OUR white values and virtues?"
But I don't ask that question.
What I have insisted on, again and again in these pages, is that whites do not own the above values and virtues. They are universal and available to all. It is just that whites are better at isolating, describing, and implementing the values that belong to all of us.
Blacks will always be on the bottom as long as they think that they are 'acting white' when they practice self-restraint, show respect for legitimate authority, are punctual, work hard, defer gratification, speak correct English, are self-reliant, reasonable and objective, study mathematics and science, save and invest, plan for the future, and so on, as per the above litany. You are not 'acting white' if you live in accordance with the above values and virtues; you are acting humanly and optimally, and in a manner that will lead you to success and happiness.
Whitey wants you black folks to be happy! Do you know why? Two reasons, the first self-interested: happy people don't cause trouble, and we don't want trouble in the form of criminal behavior directed against us. That happy people don't cause trouble is a generic statement. I explain what a generic statement is here: but you will need an attention span, above-average intelligence and a modicum of philosophical savvy to follow it. That happy people do not cause trouble is a Dennis Prager riff. I borrow it; I endorse it. (Always give credit where credit is due. It's the decent thing to do. Plagiarism is to be condemned, whether done by the president of the USA or the president of Harvard.)
The second reason is that most of us genuinely want you to do well for yourselves.
Cultural appropriation? What could possibly be wrong with that? Appropriate, i. e., make your own, whatever is good from any culture. Take it on board. Develop it. Profit from it, intellectually, spiritually, and morally.
Legutko tends to exaggerate, as witness the final sentence in the following quotation, but the point he is making is true and important.
In today’s world entertainment is not just a pastime or a style, but a substance that permeates everything: schools and universities, upbringing of children, intellectual life, art, morality, and religion. It has become dear to the hearts of students, professors, entrepreneurs, journalists, engineers, scientists, writers, even priests. Entertainment imposes itself psychologically, intellectually, socially, and also, strange as it might sound, spiritually. A failure to provide human endeavors—even the most noble ones—with an entertaining wrapping is today unthinkable and borders on sin.
― The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
Yes, even priests. The Catholic priest who during a supposed 'sermon' goes on about the Stupor Bowl. And then there is Bergoglio the Clown:
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Read all about it.
. . . how long until mere disagreement with the ruling class and their regime is deemed insurrection?
Top o' the Stack.
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Caesar and Christ, epilogue
As it went with Rome, it may well go with us. I would have no trouble giving current examples of each of Durant's seven causes.
Perhaps an eighth should be added: the regime's provision of panem et circenses, pornography, and legalized drugs to keep the populace distracted, docile, dumbed-down, and doped-up.
I watched a few minutes of the Grammys the other night and a few minutes of the Stupor Bowl and its half-time show. It occurred to me that we have an advantage not enjoyed by Augustine: we can watch the decline and fall of a great republic on television.
But it ain't over 'til it's over. So we fight on in the gloaming, ready for a long twilight struggle.
A mixed bag for your enjoyment, but mainly mine. I post what I like and I like what I post. And I post what I've posted before. Links go bad, and even when they don't I never get tired of the old tunes I like. It's Saturday night, friends, pour yourself a stiff one and relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow. I am drinking the fermented juice of the agave cactus mixed with a little orange juice and ginger ale. What's your libation?
Forget for a time the swine who have taken over our great country, and enjoy the moment.
Thelonious Monk, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
Wes Montgomery, 'Round Midnight
Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away. In 7/4 time.
Ry Cooder, I Think It's Going to to Work Out Fine
Jeff Beck, Sleepwalk. The old Santo and Johnny instrumental from 1959. Remember this one, Catacomb Joe?
Danny Gatton, master of the Telecaster. Phenomenally good, practically unknown.
Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. When your name is 'Bob Dylan' you have your pick of sidemen. A great band. "The walls of pride, they're high and they're wide. You can't see over, to the other side."
Joe Brown, Sea of Heartbreak. Nothing touches Don Gibson's original effort, but Brown's is a very satisfying version.
Elvis Presley, Little Sister
Carole King, You've Got a Friend
Buddy Guy, et al., Sweet Home Chicago. Sanctuary cities are not so sweet these days, are they? Looks like everyone is playing a Strat except for Johnny Winter.
Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. A fine, if quirky, cover of the old George Reeves hit from 1959.
Marty Robbins, El Paso. Great guitar work.
This Stack leader has her stuck at the aesthetic stage.
I'm on a Kierkegaard jag again. I've been reading him all my philosophical life ever since my undergraduate teacher, Ronda Chervin, introduced him to me.
For an easy introduction to the Danish Socrates, I recommend Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). Well done and heart-felt as only the female heart can feel.
Wikipedia:
Søren (Danish: [ˈsœːɐ̯n̩], Norwegian: [ˈsøːəɳ]) or Sören (Swedish: [ˈsœ̌ːrɛn], German: [ˈzøːʁən]) is a Scandinavian given name that is sometimes Anglicized as Soren. The name is derived from that of the 4th-century Christian saint Severin of Cologne,[1] ultimately derived from the Latinseverus ("severe, strict, serious"). Its feminine form is Sørine, though its use is uncommon. The patronymic surname Sørensen is derived from Søren.
Nomen est omen?
I am also on a Hannah Arendt kick. I've got four of her books in my library. Her The Human Condition has been languishing on my shelves since aught-six, with only a few pages showing marks of attention, but now I am diving deep into its labyrinthine riches. An astonishing product of wide-ranging erudition, it is packed with insights and intriguing suggestions.
It's long on Teutonic Tiefsinn and somewhat short on Anglo-Angularity, if you catch my drift, but I've done my time on both sides of the Continental Divide and frequently wander back and forth as is the wont of a maverick. The maverick schtick is supposed to convey that philosophical bipolarity, or, to try a different metaphor, my philosophical amphibiousness: I am at home on the dry and dusty desert ground of nuts-and-bolts analysis, but also, though in lesser measure in my later phase, in the muddy waters and murky fluidity of Continental currents, not to mention the oft-neglected backwaters of Scholasticism.
The Human Condition show unmistakable signs of Heidegger's influence, but the man is not mentioned even once, for reasons I suspect but will keep to myself for the time being. And while classifiable as a work in political philosophy, in THC there is no mention of, nor Auseindandersetzungen with, either Leo Strauss or Carl Schmitt, again for reasons I suspect but will keep under my hat.
A 5 February 2024 memo to self reads:
Compare Arendt to Schmitt on the nature of the political. Arendt: action (praxis) constitutes the political realm. Action (vita activa) is acting together, the sharing of words and deeds, and thus co-operation (HC 198). For Schmitt, by contrast, the Freund-Feind opposition defines the political.
More grist for the mill.
I know what conservatives such as Sean Hannity mean when they employ the above expression, but the expression is inept. There cannot be two tiers of justice, one for the rulers and the other for the ruled, or one for Democrats and the other for Republicans, for the simple reason that justice in Anglo-American law is equal justice, one justice for all. A guiding principle of our republic, as the Pledge of Allegiance attests, is "liberty and justice for all." We are all (to be considered to be) equal before the law. Whether you are Joe Biden or Joe Blow, you are subject to the same laws. And the same goes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It is a guiding ideal essential to our system of government. That it is being egregiously violated in the case of Trump does not make it any less of an ideal.
Joe Sixpack will say, "This is all just semantics." That is the sort of response one expects from a barfly at Joe's Bar and Grill. Someone who says that has not grasped the truth I have been hammering on for the last twenty years: Language Matters!
Julian Epstein, Democrat, on Crooked Joe. (HT: Tony Flood) There is hope for some Dems.
I present a number of arguments, some 'liberal,' atop the Stack.
I am well aware of the infirmity of reason, and of the stupidity and suggestibility of people, especially in this Age of Feeling and Xed-out attention spans. And so I am well aware of just how little is accomplished by calm and careful argumentation in these dark times. But we need to have arguments at the ready for those fence-sitters, many of them decent young people, who are open to reason and have not yet been hopelessly corrupted by our decadent culture.
Reason is for the reasonable, just as civility is for the civil.
But it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.
The good are not the weak, but those capable of violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.
Otherwise, are you fit for this world?
On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?
More grist for the mill. We blog on.
I study everything, join nothing. He studied everything, but joined the Trappists. Therein one root of one of his inner conflicts. His natural bent was to range freely over the cartography of the mind, but he voluntarily accepted intramural enclosure physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. My impression from study of the seven volumes of his magnificent Journal, wherein one meets the man himself as opposed to the 'organization man,' is that the first and second vows were easy for Merton to keep. You might wonder about the second, but there is only one lapsus carnis known to us, so well known in fact that it needs no commentary from me. But he chafed under the vow of obedience which demanded of him that he submit to his intellectually inferior superiors. Stability, too, he found difficult given his gyrovagal and maverickian tendencies. The temper of the times, the fabulous and far-off 'sixties, did nothing to tame the gyrovagus in him.
One of the underlying questions is whether the truth, absolute and eternal, can be captured and owned by any one temporal institution and any one system of dogmas. Well, why not? If God can become man, a particular man, why can't the absolute and eternal truth be correspondingly 'incarnated' in a particular church with its particular and exclusive set of rites, rituals, and dogmas? If the God-Man established a church, what more could you want by way of ecclesiological validation?
But which church did he establish? The RCC?
Would it be in keeping with Protestant principles that some Protestant denomination lay claim to being the one, true, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? I'm just asking! In this blog I conduct my education in public and try to seduce people into helping me do so.
People foolishly oppose generalization. One often hears, 'Never generalize!' But that itself is a generalization in the imperative mood. The partisan of brute particularity who so opines is hoist by his own petard.
So it was with pleasure that I heard Dennis Prager one day remark that "Generalizations are the mother of wisdom." But my man had the cart before the horse. Being a quibbler and a pedant, I cannot forebear to suggest an improvement:
Generalizations are the offspring of wisdom
Or perhaps:
Generalization is wisdom's distillate.
For wisdom does not spring from generalization; it is rather that (true) generalizations spring from wisdom as its expression and codification.
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:
. . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")
Sometimes it doesn't. I know that Kierkegaard is a genius and that I am not.
I solicit comments on the following excerpts (bolding added):
The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule. To answer the question posed by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s edited volume, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America: it already did happen here! The project all along has been, and still is, to end politics. That is, to foreclose as illegitimate public debate and disagreement on issues allegedly settled by science and administered via expertise. As our personal freedom to abuse our bodies, sate our appetites, and neglect our duties ever expands, our actual freedom to govern ourselves and determine our collective future radically contracts. The people writing these ostensible democratic laments are all in the intellectual lineage of those who brought us to this point. Their aim is to complete the project. Trump’s aim—however inchoate or implicit—is to reverse it. Who’s the real anti-democrat?
Earlier in the piece we read:
In any event, it’s rich to read the Left fret about the end of “democracy” when they have spent so much conscious effort undermining its necessary preconditions. They have done so, I think, for two reasons. First, they long ago came to equate liberty with license. Philosophically, once nature was discarded as the standard by which to guide and judge human life, the satisfaction of appetites became the only conceivable end. Hence in matters of personal morality, the contemporary Left is a curious combination of libertine and censor. Any physical—especially sexual or pharmaceutical—act that does not draw blood or pick a pocket is permitted. There are no mores that are simply necessary to society or to personal well-being. If you’re not directly harming someone else, then no one has any business even passing judgment on what you do. But you deserve to be crushed for thinking or saying the wrong thing—especially for passing judgment! Witness the recent massive freak-out over Penn Law professor Amy Wax’s praise of the once-commonplace concept of “bourgeois norms.” How dare she!
My take on Amy Wax:
I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,
It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.
Of course I agree with this brave little sermon. But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions. Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.
Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.
They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending. If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'
It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.
It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.
Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.
Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?
But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?
Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.
Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson.
In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'
Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic. And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."
Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."
As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.
To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.' After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?
Are these the implications here? I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair? Am I missing something?
Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!
Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…
Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…
You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…
if you do nothing else in what remains of this year, read that essay. please.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
From the Jacobin article: >>Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists”…
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence >>Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable…
Hey again, Bill. Is it okay to ask another question? Why do you qualify “That may suffice to refute certain…
I didn’t mention Schmitt because I am not sure I want to go as far as he goes, or draw…
2 responses to “Procreational Slackers”