They lit the candle at both ends With a pan to catch the burning wax Raised up as a dilemma suspends Which belief shall accord with the facts All throw their coins in a sophist’s hat For to know the past is not enough The past isn’t truly made of star-stuff But the future is — nothing to scoff at To power his unprofitable turbine farm Did man sow the wind – to no alarm ‘The whirlwind comes of its own accord’ It sustains, if it only sustains in harm They lit the candle at both ends A race of […]

Occasionally, the “manosphere” and some of the other parties on the alt-Right have a dust-up. (Sometimes hilarity ensues.) The critiques that the reactionary and the traditionalist rightists register against the manosphere during these dust-ups are generally valid ones. There is, for instance, no real defense of “pick-up artistry” from the standpoint of someone who takes the idea of community, much less the idea of morality, seriously. Trawling bars and nightclubs, plying young women with “cold openers” and drinks, securing one night stands and upping your “notch count”—these are empty and hedonistic pursuits. They’re disfiguring to the souls of everyone involved: […]

If we can identify a common impulse shared by technocratic liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike, it’s that they all tend to believe that culture is something that can be ignored, and that it amounts to a sort of waste which, being imperfectly accountable on a balance sheet, ought to be ignored when it isn’t being actively denigrated. Understanding history and culture acts like a tax on time, attention, memory, and behavior. It’s an unseen source of mostly unwritten laws. It makes up physical mannerisms, appearance, verbal tics, senses of humor, taste in food, and artistic styles. It’s the common sensibility […]

Every civilization in the history of the World has been a patriarchy. There is not a single exception. Sure, there are some matriarchal cultures. They exist as anthropological curios in remote hunter-gatherer areas or in archeological studies on lost tribes. A mandatory prerequisite for an advanced stage of human social and technical development is strong patriarchy. Every single civilization from China to India, Persia to Egypt, Rome to the Incans, whenever one emerged, that core feature is demonstrated. The cultivation of patriarchy is what likely lead to the advance of the Neolithic Revolution. Patriarchy has been the rule, without exception, […]

The fat acceptance movement, when you get down to it, is one of the most hideous ideological aberrations on the social media scene right now. (And there are plenty of aberrations to vie for those top spots.) It’s almost perfect in its perversity. When other pet causes of the culture war Left try to corrode normalcy, they’re at least somewhat subtle about it. There’s some sort of bait and switch in play. They want you to call a masculinized woman “empowered” or they want you to call some mental illness a “gender identity.” They want you to merely distort the truth. […]

Today America is the center of the world. It is the great and mighty beast around which all nations, strong and weak, orient themselves. Even its softest steps disturbs nations worldwide, and America does not enjoy taking soft steps. It prefers dashing ahead, pounding the ground with great strength and fortitude as if to issue a challenge: “If you want stability and a status quo, it will be my stability, my status quo. My terms, all mine!” That is America’s foreign policy since the Second World War in a nutshell. My way or the highway. And it has been an […]