It's a new year, and I finally found some idle time to share some idle thoughts on the intensifying insanity around me.
If it is impossible to define what a woman is, how can anyone claim to be one? If there is no objective definition and it's just a matter of feeling, then why isn't my feeling that you're not a woman just as valid? How can your subjective beliefs fill you with so much certainty that you treat them as objective truths that bind other people and trump their beliefs? The only answer is that you're a lunatic and trapped in a self-serving feedback loop of doublethink. Just like the feedback loop in a microphone, this explains why you're so shrill about it.
The recent fascination with AI reveals just how lazy and shallow most people are. These machines are not thinking; they are gathering, synthesizing, and vocalizing mainstream narratives (garbage in, garbage out). Since that's what most people do anyway, I suppose AI makes sense for them as a labor-saving device -- not to save them from thinking, but from having to pretend to think. This laziness feeds a hunger for data centers that has grown so ravenous that more people are now willing to set aside their silly and sanctimonious obsession with "climate change" to generate more power. I would respect these people more if they stuck to their guns rather than sold out, but alas, people are motivated by self-interest before anything else. So, AI has helped expose widespread hypocrisy along with laziness and shallowness.
I've often wondered why we are born when and where we are. For instance,
I could have been been born in the Stone Age, in the Pax Sinica, or in
ancient Rome, but here I am. And what a strange time and place it is.
Many of my ancestors fled the corrupt Old World and risked everything to
cross an ocean and build a society out of nothing (they were not
"immigrants," a term that describes people who flocked here long after my ancestors had succeeded in building something worth
flocking to). I admire my ancestors very much, yet I am surrounded by people who condemn them as evil while feasting on their achievements. My contemporaries make me sick for a variety of reasons, but their ingratitude is one of
the biggest. For whatever reason, fate placed me among these ingrates,
and I am forced to bear witness as they gnaw the last bits of
sinew from the bones of my ancestors' incredible legacy.
Speaking of immigrants, I find it ironic that so many people are outraged at how the federal government is doing some of the very few things it is supposed to do, such as enforce the law, protect the border, and expel invaders. How twisted that this is what gets modern Americans motivated enough to resist the federal government, not the mountain of other activities that are completely unconstitutional yet are illegally perpetrated by the federal government on a daily basis. The irony is even thicker when noting that the federal deportation efforts are quite mild and would be far more forceful in a healthy society. For example, a healthy society would not tolerate citizens who interfere in deportation efforts and give aid and comfort to invaders. This is actual insurrection, not the fake kind from January 6, and a healthy society would charge these people with treason and swiftly hang them. Any public officials acting in the same manner and propping up "sanctuary cities" would receive the same treatment. Indeed, military force and martial law are fully justified when a country is under foreign invasion, especially when the invasion is receiving treasonous domestic assistance. The removal of habeas corpus is much more justified now than it was during the Civil War (when martial law was used by the federal government to support an invasion, not to repel one).
I don't want to hear arguments for immigration from anyone whose ancestors arrived here after the Revolutionary War, and certainly not after the Civil War. Your roots in this nation are too shallow to appreciate or understand it. A nation is a people unified by blood, history, language, and religion (the very word "nation" stems from "natal," as in being born together). You are step-siblings at best and outright enemies at worst. A favorite retort of the latecomers is to invoke the Indians (who are not "Native Americans") and claim that they have greater rights to this land than I do. Yet the very logic of this argument recognizes that my rights are greater than yours and that you lack standing to talk to me about this. As for the Indians, I have partial ancestry in the Cherokee nation, so some of my roots begin even before Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. Moreover, the Indians are not a monolith but rather a multitude of different nations themselves. Immigration activists cannot claim to speak for them all, and many of the Indians fought alongside my ancestors in the Revolutionary War and in the Civil War (on the good side both times, i.e., the ones resisting foreign invasion). The very fact that Indians fought against foreign invasion should serve as an example for us to do the same, not to surrender and wallow in guilt while invaders sweep over us.
The government shutdown in October shed more light on how dependent and depraved Americans have become. Everyone was fretting over the curtailment of SNAP, a federal welfare program that is not authorized by the Constitution and should not even exist. When I reflect on how large numbers of people demand an unlawful government program of this sort while condemning a lawful (and vital) program such as border protection, I feel intense disgust.
More generally, people no longer have the ability to distinguish between rights and privileges. For example, many people believe that the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from pulling funding from universities, denying visas to foreigners, or firing government employees based on their speech. Yet federal funding, visas, and jobs are not rights and may be denied for any reason (indeed, federal funding for universities is blatantly unconstitutional and should not exist at all, like SNAP). Freedom of speech means merely that the federal government cannot prevent you from speaking; it does not mean that the federal government must continue supporting you even though you engage in offensive or harmful speech. Freedom and
responsibility are a package deal. If you want freedom, then you need to stop depending on federal favors. But no,
the people today are so craven that they demand both freedom
and funding (i.e., freedom with privileges and without responsibilities). To make matters worse, the judiciary agrees with all this and has transformed privileges into rights, making reform within the system impossible.
It's hard not to notice that the left is becoming quite bloodthirsty lately. They have cheered the execution (or the attempted execution) of several prominent individuals, often for nothing more than uttering controversial ideas. The left's grotesque celebration over the murder of Charlie Kirk was instructive, for it showed to a wide audience that it is pointless to engage in civil discourse with these maniacs. Civil discourse is for the civilized, not for barbarians. The left's thirst for blood shouldn't surprise anyone, though. For one, leftism rejects God and the supernatural to fixate on the things of this world, and the things of this world can never fill the spiritual hunger that everyone carries within him. Attempting to do so just makes the hunger even worse and more destructive. For another, leftism embodies just about every weakness and vice in human nature: envy, vanity, laziness, pride, vulgarity, wrath, etc. Leftism is attractive because it is easy and places no restraints on the id or the ego, which can be bloodthirsty when they don't get their way. In other words, leftism is the belief system of a spoiled child rather than a dignified adult. Any leftist over the age of twenty is a pathetic case of arrested development. Just consider a few differences between real virtue and leftist "virtue":
- Giving some of your belongings to the needy (real virtue). Demanding that government forcibly redistribute wealth to the needy (leftism).
- Engaging in civil discourse in a sincere effort to change people's minds (real virtue). Shouting down, canceling, or killing people who disagree with you (leftism).
- Exercising self-control in an effort to improve yourself and, by extension, the world (real virtue). Doing nothing to improve yourself while demanding that governments threaten, prod, and punish other people into acting how you think they should act to make the world a better place (leftism).
Something else about the murder of Charlie Kirk is that it likely resulted from his growing reluctance to support Israel, which infuriated the owners of official conservatism who financed his rise to fame. Charlie forgot that he had made a Faustian bargain and that his soul no longer belonged to him; when he tried to reclaim it and follow his conscience, it was too late. If leftists were smart, they would find common cause with Charlie because they themselves are experiencing a backlash for criticizing Israel.
On a related note, I am sick and tired of the widespread notion that leftists are intellectuals while conservatives are simpletons. The leftist "intellectuals" who infest academia and the professions (my own included) depend heavily on government activity and funding for their parasitic existence, which is precisely why they always advocate for more government (though they dress it up in the language of idealism, as all tyrants and parasites do). A true intellectual embraces ideas even when they offer no personal advantage, and the fact that modern "intellectuals" cling to leftism proves that they are just as basic and self-interested as pretty much everyone else. These "intellectuals" are also driven by vanity in that they yearn to feel more important and better than everyone else, so they reflexively embrace beliefs contrary to those of the ordinary, conservative folk whom they look down on. A core distinction between conservatism and leftism is this: conservatism is humble wisdom gained from centuries of history and experience; leftism is arrogant rejection of history and experience to re-invent the world according to a supposedly rational design (which never works but piles up many bodies by trying).
Another interesting aspect of leftists is that they they claim to reject religion in favor of science, yet they embrace beliefs that are non-scientific and religious in nature. For example, there is nothing scientific about opposing racism or sexism; instead, a purely scientific worldview would be highly racist and sexist. Leftists display an irrational sentimentalism that resembles Christianity, yet they reject Christianity because they are too stupid to realize that their own ideas were enabled by it and stem from it.
A Muslim socialist is perhaps the most anti-American creature imaginable. The fact that one was elected as mayor of New York is just one of many signs that this country is cooked.
Regarding socialism, it is growing more popular despite its blood-soaked history because most people are too foolish to realize that our multiplying problems are the result of too much government, not too little. We do not have limited government, the rule of law, free markets, or capitalism anymore (indeed, we rejected them at least a century ago), so it is impossible to accuse any or all of these things of having failed.
Even if someone could convince me that giving government even more money and power to enact socialism will work if done "right," I would not want to live under it. I'm an American. I want to live a life of personal freedom and personal responsibility, which means there should be no artificial barriers above me and no safety nets beneath me. I would rather be free and destitute than unfree and prosperous. So would any red-blooded man. Freedom is not for the faint of heart, which is why it took an extraordinary people (my ancestors) to create a country devoted to it. But most people today are weak, dependent, and depraved, so they fear personal responsibility and are eager to live in the equivalent of a prison where they don't have to worry about where their next meal comes from. I should not be put in shackles to make life easier for spineless worms, no more than Gulliver deserved to be staked down by the Lilliputians. It's already bad enough that government plunders me to support the unlawful welfare/warfare state.
Many "Americans" are so far gone in their love affair with socialism that they admire Luigi Mangione for allegedly murdering a health-insurance executive by shooting him in the back. Luigi denies doing it, but people praise him for such a cowardly act because it supposedly strikes a blow for "free" (socialistic) healthcare. Consider how they praise this sort of violent behavior while condemning the peaceful behavior of Charlie Kirk, who used only words in his quest for reform. This alone should demonstrate that anyone who admires socialism is sick, twisted, and evil.
I've become fascinated with police bodycam videos. These were demanded by the BLM crowd in one of the biggest own-goals in history, as the videos clearly show that large numbers of barbaric thugs roam this land and are often treated too mildly by the police. Many of these thugs are not hardened criminals, but ordinary citizens who become obnoxious, belligerent, and violent when confronted with any semblance of authority.
Speaking of criminal justice, there is a good explanation for why America embraces the death penalty but Europe rejects it. It comes back to the notion of personal responsibility, which is the main pillar supporting personal freedom. Europeans reject these things and prefer to live as wards of the state rather than as free men. Quite naturally, they are soft on crime because they don't truly believe that criminals are responsible for their actions. Instead, they view people as children to be taken care of in a sickening sort of paternalism. In America, we believe (or used to believe) that people are responsible for their actions and that this is precisely what entitles them to freedom. If people abuse freedom and act irresponsibly, they must therefore be held accountable. This means that if you take a life without justification, you have surrendered your right to your own. Any society that disagrees with this can never truly be free.
Again, I find myself living in a bizarre time and place, and this leaves me with little role to play other than a disillusioned critic. I would have loved being a professor, a judge, a father, or a husband, but none of those paths were truly open to me. Academia would require me to accept and endorse the virulent leftism that reigns there. The judiciary would require me to uphold and enforce laws that I know to be unconstitutional. Fatherhood and marriage would empower the family-court system to invade and destroy my life on the whims of a woman (a bullet I already dodged once). I will not subject myself to those things or legitimize them by participating. One benefit of inhabiting a sick society, though, is that it frees me to be myself and do my own thing. I don't have to fulfill any of the traditional roles that a healthy society would require, and the fact that this society alienates honest and productive men like me will hasten its demise. From those ashes, something good can emerge again.
In the meantime, perhaps the only way to slow down or pause the decline would be a Pinochet-style dictatorship that makes the hard choices that lily-livered politicians cannot (e.g., expelling invaders, punishing their helpers, slashing and burning the welfare state, etc.). The rule of law is already dead anyway, so we might as well make the most of it and do some good.
