Btw, I have a gut sense Zeihan is a cutout and charlatan—he’s never rung true to me, and always seems too glib with an answer that makes sense at first hearing.
When Zeihan stays in his lane - demographics and finance, primarily - he's really good and offers much to learn. When he strays out of his lane, he really gets it wrong and that's when he comes off as a cutout and charlatan.
Discernment is very important. Knowing what someone really knows versus what they don't is critical because everyone's a reactionary about what they know best. I don't mind people straying out of their lane, but they need to be careful when doing so and have the humility to say they're out of their element. A lot of them don't because being part of the intelligentsia means you can never be wrong.
That’s true, and I guess my own bias is to discount someone much more when they pontificate in areas as experts when they should know better. Hubris leads to a lot of trouble.
Two points: I think being more black pilled than most, I believe the surveillance state (FBI and company) is so underreported. Which leads me to say—the under 30 males? Yeah, we have them here in form of the migrants. And I do believe they’re fighting age men to use against the American populace, under the control of surveillance. This will be one aspect of internal conflict: Americans against the imported terrorists.
Secondly, I believe this cycle of the fourth turning may be worse than prior ones in terms of a violent resolution to the conflict in this turning. So, there may be more native born over 30 men who will be forced to fight to defend their territory—city, county, state, etc.
"We can take the high road all we’d like, but that only works with people who see you as part of the same collective"
Sebastian Junger's book Tribe (paraphrase): "Anyone who thinks a nation isn't just a really large foxhole hasn't thought it through." (The Israelis learned this recently.) It's a great book.
"The biggest realization Americans must come to is that one side wants justice, while the other side seeks total victory."
Most conservatives and normies still live by Lockean, Enlightenment standards: justice is served by following particular procedures even if we don't like the outcome sometimes.
The postliberals have abandoned John Locke's value-neutral state and procedural justice in favor of outcomes: if bad people get hurt, regardless of how it happened, that's justice. To get back to Junger, this easily morphs into: justice is when my tribe benefits and yours gets screwed.
The Left embraced this accidently so you get the absurdity of uber-educated, white, liberals actively pushing for a race war. The Right is struggling still working the transition out. Deneen and Amari want a Catholic theocracy. Nick Fuentes wants a white ethno-state. Most normies just want a sane country back but a country (a tribe) requires a religio-philosophical grounding of some kind, which isn't provided by (or even possible within) a Lockean, value-neutral state. That's why postliberalism is rising across the entire Western political spectrum: Locke and Mill got run over by a bus driven by a nasty German named Nietzsche.
Many like to say that some external shock (currency collapse, strategic defeat) will solve this by forcing us to work together for survival. 30 years ago that may have been true; it's not today. A tribe that disagrees on "good", "evil", "sacred", and "profane" is no longer a single tribe. A crisis won't pull them together but drive them further apart. I want to be wrong about that for America. But all evidence indicates we're there. In the interest of lack of bloodshed, I would make a Hobbesian bargain with the woke, but they're totally incompetent (not surprising when your ideology ranks intersectional scores above SAT scores.) The religious integralists are competent but (Amari / Deneen fantasies aside) the lot of them would fit into a Starbucks. Which leaves Nick Fuentes and his ilk. Can someone please find me door #4, because 1-3 look pretty crappy.
BTW: Like the duck lady, I ended up with 5 roosters once. Huge fights and the hens wouldn't lay. 3 became target practice. Now I have lots of eggs.
Looking at it from a military perspective, the U.S. armed forces boast about how their morale is high, how everyone fights for each other regardless of race, religion, politics, etc. I don't doubt it, but I also feel like it's something that ends when the uniform comes off. America is too individualistic and the reason why the military functions so well is because it's an Anglo-style bureaucracy where you do your job or you don't get paid. It's sort of like the LAPD cop who serves multicultural LA, but lives in mostly-White Simi Valley, something which became a point of contention during the trial of the officers who beat Rodney King, as well as the OJ trial.
If America's a nation, it's a very strange one.
I think the right-wing post-liberals have interesting ideas, but most of them are unrealistic. I think the most likely salvation for the Right will actually be a Caesar-like figure. People act like there's no precedent for it in American history, but there kind of actually is - George Washington. American Hitler is out of the question and I wouldn't want that anyway, but what we need is someone to tame the administrative state, not someone who sends leftists to prison camps. Without the administrative state, the Left is actually quite impotent. Washington was hardly libertarian, though he'd also oppose today's Leviathan. He'd be extremely at odds with the establishment today, but he wouldn't be Francisco Franco, either.
Once the administrative state has been tamed, I think the true nature of American culture will reveal itself because there will be nothing holding it back.
As much as I swear by the man, I think Neil Howe is overly optimistic about our chances during this Fourth Turning. Part of the reason is demographic - not only our diversity, but our age. Older Americans are still predominantly White, so they have more of that nationhood gene. Younger Americans don't. Yet there's more older Americans than younger Americans. Again, I'm still not sure how this is going to work out in practice, but it's pretty clear this Fourth Turning will be quite different from all the other ones for this reason. I don't think anyone can make a prediction without first acknowledging just what a different country we are from all the other eras in our history.
We've been taught to think animal kingdom is more fair and just than human society. I'm not sure why anyone would think that. Animal kingdom is literally survival of the fittest. On farms, order is maintained by the strongest of animals: humans. So yes, people should look to nature for lessons on how things really are, but dispense with their Disney movie-fantasies of what animals are like.
One of the better lessons the animal kingdom can teach (just ask my hens): girls derive a disproportionate share of the benefits from civilization, since jungle law is an especially bad place for women.
It sounds like you want someone who wants to be "dictator for a day". :-)
No sweat. Sure are Haitians eating pets. I am always amazed at Americans being amazed by that. Ok, I am German and grew up in wealth never being hungry. But my mother was 15 when WWII ended and my father was 13. They told me what people were considering good food at that time and it grozed out me and my siblings. The worst part was my mother telling me about a teacher who caught flies and ate the yellow of them. Of course Haitians eat cats and dogs. Believe me there were no cats and dogs in Germany after WWII as pets. Only cats and dogs who were useful to either ward off thieves or to keep mice from eating grain. Haiti is a very hungry and poor place and you don´t lose such habits by moving to another place. Get over it. It is not a sign of special savagery but a sign of desperate poverty. The problem with liberals (same in Germany) is their rosy colored view of the world. Anyhow, of course we were savages when we moved to the bay area from Germany in 1969. I was in Kindergarden then and I was used to the savagery of German kids. Although Germany wasn´t hungry anymore still it was a fairly brutal place and I was used to endless fighting with boys of my age. The only kids who reciprocated and fought with me were black kids who - as I later learned - were bused in from Oakland. The white kids would cry and call for the teacher when I hit them as I was used to do in Germany. Endless complaints to my parents were the result. Same with my older brother who was in primary school. It is crazy to educate your kids to be sheep and then invite wolves. Germany is now like the bay area was in 1969. The Arabs from a war zone play the role that us kids played in the Bay area. I don´t blame the Haitians. I blame the white liberals who first emasculated the population and then call them racist when they can´t cope after being flooed with people from effectively a war zone.
"It is crazy to educate your kids to be sheep and then invite wolves."
Wow. That's powerful. I'm stealing that.
I agree - it's tough to blame the migrants when, at the end of the day, they're fighting for survival (in the most selfish way possible), and they would've never come here if not for the leftists who invited them in.
There was a time when I was carrying my infant in front of my house while getting out of the car. Three “youths” suddenly appeared walking along the street yelling, “Hey white boy, hey white boy!” My blood ran hot but I knew it best not to engage. Anyone willing to threaten or harm a parent while with his child is a clear danger and a literal menace. I think the father in this case was out of sorts and disoriented by how completely out of line everything was (including whomever was filming this attack). He lived to see another day and possibly prevented a massacre of his entire family by this evil man.
The way I try to characterize mental preparedness is when you first see a mouse in your building, it is very unnerving and stressful. Your heat skips a beat and you likely freeze. But then you realize you can steel yourself to see it again. Then you don’t gasp or say anything when you see it. We have to have that mental preparedness for unthinkable acts that could cross our paths. Any of these lunatics might have a knife, a screwdriver, scissors concealed. We have to be smart but prepared.
The cathartic “I’d beat him to a pulp” talk gets old. I haven’t experienced a ton of violence, but I’ve experienced some. It is fast, automatic, and brutal. You either know what to do or you’re going to lose. Anyone who says “I don’t know what I’d do” or “what I’d do would depend on the situation” or something like that is going lose. Someone I knew suddenly came at me one day, thinking he was going to play a joke in me. I didn’t even stop to figure out what was going on. I jammed up his attack and hit him hard enough in the stomach that he doubled over for a couple of minutes. How many “keyboard warriors” are going to have that kind of skill, conditioning, speed, and ruthlessness? I don’t mean to say that to discourage people, just to point out that reality. Be smart. Assymetric fighting. Have a cane or umbrella with a sharp point. Someone pulls out a knife, hit them with a chair or a 2x4 or cane or something. Attackers often come in a pack. There are videos where people have faced off against two people. Don’t Bruce Lee that shit. Put one attacker in front of the other. Who ever practices that?
Self defense talk so often is like dummies arguing over caliber of a pistol, or getting a carry license and barely knowing how to shoot or use cover or practice off hand drills or pick something. No low light shooting practice, pick something. You don’t have to be a professional to get some training, and some training will put you far ahead of any adversaries.
Going back to the baby slapping, it was a failure of tactics. The man should get between the other guy and his wife and child, then they all get out of there while trying to talk the guy down or say whatever they can say to distract or redirect him, but keeping a strong posture and speech. Mental training is just as important as physical.
This is all good wisdom. Those who are primed for violence will always have an edge over someone who isn't, no matter how well-trained the latter might be. Making that mental switch between peace and war is difficult.
I didn't really get into what the man should've done because there's not enough information on how the scenario materialized in the first place. It's very possible they were chased down by the violent man. Without knowing how he got so close that he could slap the baby, there's just no way to discuss how to prevent such an encounter from happening in the first place, which is obviously the most important consideration.
Btw, I have a gut sense Zeihan is a cutout and charlatan—he’s never rung true to me, and always seems too glib with an answer that makes sense at first hearing.
When Zeihan stays in his lane - demographics and finance, primarily - he's really good and offers much to learn. When he strays out of his lane, he really gets it wrong and that's when he comes off as a cutout and charlatan.
Discernment is very important. Knowing what someone really knows versus what they don't is critical because everyone's a reactionary about what they know best. I don't mind people straying out of their lane, but they need to be careful when doing so and have the humility to say they're out of their element. A lot of them don't because being part of the intelligentsia means you can never be wrong.
That’s true, and I guess my own bias is to discount someone much more when they pontificate in areas as experts when they should know better. Hubris leads to a lot of trouble.
Two points: I think being more black pilled than most, I believe the surveillance state (FBI and company) is so underreported. Which leads me to say—the under 30 males? Yeah, we have them here in form of the migrants. And I do believe they’re fighting age men to use against the American populace, under the control of surveillance. This will be one aspect of internal conflict: Americans against the imported terrorists.
Secondly, I believe this cycle of the fourth turning may be worse than prior ones in terms of a violent resolution to the conflict in this turning. So, there may be more native born over 30 men who will be forced to fight to defend their territory—city, county, state, etc.
"We can take the high road all we’d like, but that only works with people who see you as part of the same collective"
Sebastian Junger's book Tribe (paraphrase): "Anyone who thinks a nation isn't just a really large foxhole hasn't thought it through." (The Israelis learned this recently.) It's a great book.
"The biggest realization Americans must come to is that one side wants justice, while the other side seeks total victory."
Most conservatives and normies still live by Lockean, Enlightenment standards: justice is served by following particular procedures even if we don't like the outcome sometimes.
The postliberals have abandoned John Locke's value-neutral state and procedural justice in favor of outcomes: if bad people get hurt, regardless of how it happened, that's justice. To get back to Junger, this easily morphs into: justice is when my tribe benefits and yours gets screwed.
The Left embraced this accidently so you get the absurdity of uber-educated, white, liberals actively pushing for a race war. The Right is struggling still working the transition out. Deneen and Amari want a Catholic theocracy. Nick Fuentes wants a white ethno-state. Most normies just want a sane country back but a country (a tribe) requires a religio-philosophical grounding of some kind, which isn't provided by (or even possible within) a Lockean, value-neutral state. That's why postliberalism is rising across the entire Western political spectrum: Locke and Mill got run over by a bus driven by a nasty German named Nietzsche.
Many like to say that some external shock (currency collapse, strategic defeat) will solve this by forcing us to work together for survival. 30 years ago that may have been true; it's not today. A tribe that disagrees on "good", "evil", "sacred", and "profane" is no longer a single tribe. A crisis won't pull them together but drive them further apart. I want to be wrong about that for America. But all evidence indicates we're there. In the interest of lack of bloodshed, I would make a Hobbesian bargain with the woke, but they're totally incompetent (not surprising when your ideology ranks intersectional scores above SAT scores.) The religious integralists are competent but (Amari / Deneen fantasies aside) the lot of them would fit into a Starbucks. Which leaves Nick Fuentes and his ilk. Can someone please find me door #4, because 1-3 look pretty crappy.
BTW: Like the duck lady, I ended up with 5 roosters once. Huge fights and the hens wouldn't lay. 3 became target practice. Now I have lots of eggs.
Looking at it from a military perspective, the U.S. armed forces boast about how their morale is high, how everyone fights for each other regardless of race, religion, politics, etc. I don't doubt it, but I also feel like it's something that ends when the uniform comes off. America is too individualistic and the reason why the military functions so well is because it's an Anglo-style bureaucracy where you do your job or you don't get paid. It's sort of like the LAPD cop who serves multicultural LA, but lives in mostly-White Simi Valley, something which became a point of contention during the trial of the officers who beat Rodney King, as well as the OJ trial.
If America's a nation, it's a very strange one.
I think the right-wing post-liberals have interesting ideas, but most of them are unrealistic. I think the most likely salvation for the Right will actually be a Caesar-like figure. People act like there's no precedent for it in American history, but there kind of actually is - George Washington. American Hitler is out of the question and I wouldn't want that anyway, but what we need is someone to tame the administrative state, not someone who sends leftists to prison camps. Without the administrative state, the Left is actually quite impotent. Washington was hardly libertarian, though he'd also oppose today's Leviathan. He'd be extremely at odds with the establishment today, but he wouldn't be Francisco Franco, either.
Once the administrative state has been tamed, I think the true nature of American culture will reveal itself because there will be nothing holding it back.
As much as I swear by the man, I think Neil Howe is overly optimistic about our chances during this Fourth Turning. Part of the reason is demographic - not only our diversity, but our age. Older Americans are still predominantly White, so they have more of that nationhood gene. Younger Americans don't. Yet there's more older Americans than younger Americans. Again, I'm still not sure how this is going to work out in practice, but it's pretty clear this Fourth Turning will be quite different from all the other ones for this reason. I don't think anyone can make a prediction without first acknowledging just what a different country we are from all the other eras in our history.
We've been taught to think animal kingdom is more fair and just than human society. I'm not sure why anyone would think that. Animal kingdom is literally survival of the fittest. On farms, order is maintained by the strongest of animals: humans. So yes, people should look to nature for lessons on how things really are, but dispense with their Disney movie-fantasies of what animals are like.
One of the better lessons the animal kingdom can teach (just ask my hens): girls derive a disproportionate share of the benefits from civilization, since jungle law is an especially bad place for women.
It sounds like you want someone who wants to be "dictator for a day". :-)
No sweat. Sure are Haitians eating pets. I am always amazed at Americans being amazed by that. Ok, I am German and grew up in wealth never being hungry. But my mother was 15 when WWII ended and my father was 13. They told me what people were considering good food at that time and it grozed out me and my siblings. The worst part was my mother telling me about a teacher who caught flies and ate the yellow of them. Of course Haitians eat cats and dogs. Believe me there were no cats and dogs in Germany after WWII as pets. Only cats and dogs who were useful to either ward off thieves or to keep mice from eating grain. Haiti is a very hungry and poor place and you don´t lose such habits by moving to another place. Get over it. It is not a sign of special savagery but a sign of desperate poverty. The problem with liberals (same in Germany) is their rosy colored view of the world. Anyhow, of course we were savages when we moved to the bay area from Germany in 1969. I was in Kindergarden then and I was used to the savagery of German kids. Although Germany wasn´t hungry anymore still it was a fairly brutal place and I was used to endless fighting with boys of my age. The only kids who reciprocated and fought with me were black kids who - as I later learned - were bused in from Oakland. The white kids would cry and call for the teacher when I hit them as I was used to do in Germany. Endless complaints to my parents were the result. Same with my older brother who was in primary school. It is crazy to educate your kids to be sheep and then invite wolves. Germany is now like the bay area was in 1969. The Arabs from a war zone play the role that us kids played in the Bay area. I don´t blame the Haitians. I blame the white liberals who first emasculated the population and then call them racist when they can´t cope after being flooed with people from effectively a war zone.
"It is crazy to educate your kids to be sheep and then invite wolves."
Wow. That's powerful. I'm stealing that.
I agree - it's tough to blame the migrants when, at the end of the day, they're fighting for survival (in the most selfish way possible), and they would've never come here if not for the leftists who invited them in.
There was a time when I was carrying my infant in front of my house while getting out of the car. Three “youths” suddenly appeared walking along the street yelling, “Hey white boy, hey white boy!” My blood ran hot but I knew it best not to engage. Anyone willing to threaten or harm a parent while with his child is a clear danger and a literal menace. I think the father in this case was out of sorts and disoriented by how completely out of line everything was (including whomever was filming this attack). He lived to see another day and possibly prevented a massacre of his entire family by this evil man.
The way I try to characterize mental preparedness is when you first see a mouse in your building, it is very unnerving and stressful. Your heat skips a beat and you likely freeze. But then you realize you can steel yourself to see it again. Then you don’t gasp or say anything when you see it. We have to have that mental preparedness for unthinkable acts that could cross our paths. Any of these lunatics might have a knife, a screwdriver, scissors concealed. We have to be smart but prepared.
The cathartic “I’d beat him to a pulp” talk gets old. I haven’t experienced a ton of violence, but I’ve experienced some. It is fast, automatic, and brutal. You either know what to do or you’re going to lose. Anyone who says “I don’t know what I’d do” or “what I’d do would depend on the situation” or something like that is going lose. Someone I knew suddenly came at me one day, thinking he was going to play a joke in me. I didn’t even stop to figure out what was going on. I jammed up his attack and hit him hard enough in the stomach that he doubled over for a couple of minutes. How many “keyboard warriors” are going to have that kind of skill, conditioning, speed, and ruthlessness? I don’t mean to say that to discourage people, just to point out that reality. Be smart. Assymetric fighting. Have a cane or umbrella with a sharp point. Someone pulls out a knife, hit them with a chair or a 2x4 or cane or something. Attackers often come in a pack. There are videos where people have faced off against two people. Don’t Bruce Lee that shit. Put one attacker in front of the other. Who ever practices that?
Self defense talk so often is like dummies arguing over caliber of a pistol, or getting a carry license and barely knowing how to shoot or use cover or practice off hand drills or pick something. No low light shooting practice, pick something. You don’t have to be a professional to get some training, and some training will put you far ahead of any adversaries.
Going back to the baby slapping, it was a failure of tactics. The man should get between the other guy and his wife and child, then they all get out of there while trying to talk the guy down or say whatever they can say to distract or redirect him, but keeping a strong posture and speech. Mental training is just as important as physical.
This is all good wisdom. Those who are primed for violence will always have an edge over someone who isn't, no matter how well-trained the latter might be. Making that mental switch between peace and war is difficult.
I didn't really get into what the man should've done because there's not enough information on how the scenario materialized in the first place. It's very possible they were chased down by the violent man. Without knowing how he got so close that he could slap the baby, there's just no way to discuss how to prevent such an encounter from happening in the first place, which is obviously the most important consideration.