Category Archives: Culture

The Discovery of Civilization

Article by Jayant Bhandari.

Excerpts:

Unknowns lurked in every corner of my stay in the UK, crystallizing many ideas I had never known or thought of in my wildest imagination. Lacking anything akin to the Ten Commandments, India has no prohibitions for sins, certainly not lying. I grew up firm in my view that you say what makes you look good and what gets you the most resources. It would take me a year after my arrival in the UK to realize that people might speak the truth for the sake of speaking it.

At the office where I worked in Manchester, I compiled a newsletter, placing the list of all the projects they were working on at the back page. To create the impression of a more extensive workload, I would add old projects to make the list appear crowded. One day, a consultant told me I had overblown his contributions. I was surprised. Why would he want to undercut the promotion of his work? In those days, political correctness and multi-culturalism weren’t the thing. If you strayed too far away, you were told.

I was experiencing civilization for the first time and had stepped into the unknown. The cloud that had always lingered in my mind started lifting, and my body began to change, albeit hindered by half-starvation. It would set a decades-long process to readjust my thinking and decision-making. With a crisper way of reasoning, how and what I comprehended from the spoken and written word began to evolve. I found myself less focused on converting others to my opinions and more engaged in exploration and searching for truth. Consequently, my interactions with people changed significantly, leading to fewer conflicts.

During the first few months in the UK, I initially harbored thoughts of exploiting the system, viewing it as payback time for the British colonization of India. However, this perspective began to dissolve in the face of a stream of compassionate, generous, helpful, moral, fair, dutiful, and upright people.

This chimes exactly with what Vishal Mangalwadi writes in his book: “The Book That Made Your World“, in particular the beginning of chapter 14, on “Morality”.

The Hysterical Style in Western Politics

Why the political rhetoric of Western nations is growing ever more insane and unhinged.

Article by eugyppius.

Extract (conclusion):

The hysterical style arises from a fundamental change in the nature of western government, which has been underway since the early twentieth century, and which has recently accelerated. Managers and administrators have replaced politicians as the primary political actors. Along the way, state power has been diffused and deformalised. Today, a wide array of bureaucrats, stakeholders, NGOs, philanthropic enterprises, journalists, academics and advisory committees all have a say in politics. Hysteria is a means of coordinating all of these widely scattered people and getting them to push in the same direction. The more distributed and generalised state power becomes, the more the hysterical style will grow in importance.

In this brave new system, there is no distinction between media propaganda and political processes. Press hysteria is about much more than simply marshalling support or directing public opinion; it is how our states coordinate their diffuse organs. Because Western nations cannot stir themselves without these hystericising impulses, their scope of action has become remarkably constrained. They have serious problems fixing anything, reforming anything, getting rid of anything, or instituting anything, unless they can do so in response to some minimally credible emergency somewhere. Politics ought to be predictable and boring, at least for those countries that can afford to make it so. Instead, we have unwittingly bred an insane system that is forever losing its mind over ephemeral and often quite illusory problems.

Still worse, all the hysterical appeals presently in circulation appear to be locked in competition with each other for attention and buy-in. Thus the hysterical style is forever escalating, with tamer appeals like those of Fridays for Future losing out to the more extreme rhetoric of Letzte Generation, with Pistorius warning of imminent war in five to eight years because he has to shout over the climateers, and with the anti-AfD contingent reduced to Nazi comparisons because they have to make their bête noire sound even worse than Putin. Trifling things like accuracy and honesty are impossible in this competitive system; the hysterical style rewards instead manipulative imagery, facile historical analogies and apocalyptic scientific models. Moderation is likewise hopeless, as it is easily out-competed and as over time the hysterical system selects for crazy excitable people who prefer to live frantic anxious overdramatised lives.

All narratives in the hysterical style have an acute phase, when they first burst onto the scene and command the most attention; and a longer post-acute phase, after they have been out-competed by other things to panic about. Ominously, post-acute hysterias never quite go away, and they continue to exercise some degree of control on the institutions of government for years or even decades. I suspect one reason that Europe can’t close its borders to the third world, is that this would require a coordinating border security hysteria, which is precluded by the persistent influence of the 2015 open-borders maniacs. The Covidians have likewise become a chronic political affliction, who will strive for decades to realise the next pandemic and reimpose random mask mandates wherever they have any power. You have to wonder what it betokens, as ever more post-acute causes accumulate at the margins of influence, subtly pushing politics towards irrational ends and forever threatening to erupt all over again.

Christianity and Liberalism

Theologies for Life and Death

Article by “RT: Restoring Truth”.

Excerpt:

A couple years ago, I stumbled upon a copy of J. Gresham Machen’s famous book, Christianity and Liberalism. The bold juxtaposition caught my eye, so I decided to read it. I was immediately hooked; its cogency and warmth are compelling enough, but considering that it was written 100 years ago, its timelessness is remarkable, too. It easily could have been written just last week.

Visit any mainline church, and you’ll likely encounter the same ear-tickling theology that Machen denounced in his book. Under venerable old steeples, liberal shepherds feed sanctified progressivism to their unsuspecting, but hungry, flock. Instead of feeding on biblical (and now offensive) truth, congregants in open and affirming churches can enjoy vague discussions of spirituality mixed with calls to woke repentance.

[. . .]

It’s well past time to reclaim the name of Christianity from the counterfeiters on the left—not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of souls who unknowingly trade in its false currency. Theological liberalism in all its fashionable forms—inclusive Christianity, interfaith unity, and progressive Christianity— is a road to perdition. Ultimately, what we believe about God and man is our theology of life, and eventually it will be our only comfort in death.

The Revolution of German Farmers | Eva Vlaardingerbroek & Anthony Lee

Interview with Jordan Peterson.

From the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with German farmer Anthony Lee and journalist Eva Vlaardingerbroek. They discuss the ongoing farmers’ protest, the war on efficient agriculture, what is now being panned as the failed German state, the ludicrous net-zero goals creating excess electric vehicles while cutting off the generation of power, and how a grassroots movement can make genuine change at the local and national levels.

Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a Dutch journalist and previous YouTube host of the “Let’s Talk About It” program on the channel Riks. Vlaardingerbroek has published opinion articles in newspapers such as the Dutch weekly Elsevier Weekblad and appeared on programs like Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. She advocates for a cultural return to faith and a rejection of the WEF manifested, globalist ideology.

Anthony Lee is a German farmer who has become outspoken in recent months as he followed news of farmers struggling all across Europe. Now affecting his home country, the time has come to take a stand, and not just for German farmers and workers, but for everyone.

This episode was recorded on January 15th, 2023

Fighting for Truth in Climate Science Is Important

Article by H. Sterling Burnett.

Excerpt:

I don’t claim mine is the majority view on this point. Indeed, my life would be easier—and based on offers that have been made to me, my living standard higher—if I conceded the science and joined with those pushing draconian restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and profiting from various green energy boondoggles. All I have to do to receive higher pay, accolades, and to bring an end to the abuse and threats from those who think I’m “worse than the Nazis” (something said and written to me a number of times), is to play the game and join the consensus. All that’s holding me back is my stubborn, arguably foolish, belief that I should speak the truth on this and other matters of public import of which I am knowledgeable as I see fit, let the chips fall where they may.

Ring cites as an example of playing defense, at a great cost to society, the response of big oil companies to the various lawsuits filed in multiple political jurisdictions by cities, states, and various activist groups. Oil companies have largely conceded the science, saying in effect, “Our products have been beneficial, producing a lot of good, but are also changing the climate for the worse, so we agree we must phase them out in a timely fashion. Not now, but over time, and in the meantime, we’re investing in lower carbon solutions.”

That’s like a popular but abusive spouse saying, “Look, I’m a pretty good guy and contribute to society, but along the way, I beat my wife. But I’m doing it less now than in the past, and in the future I expect to stop doing it entirely.” That’s not a very compelling argument.

The fight for sound science, per se, but climate science, specifically, is a fight for truth and all the progress science can provide. It’s a moral fight. That is why I continue to fight for what I believe to be the truth about climate change, even in the face of ad hominem attacks in print, through email, and online, attempted and sometimes successful censorship, and the occasional threat of physical violence and death.

How the West Was Defeated

Article by Pepe Escobar.

Excerpt:

Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.

The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.

At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.

Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.

Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.