patrick.net

At some point in the past decade, the pendulum began to swing back in the other direction. People like Jordan Peterson began to speak out and gained popularity rather quickly in his fight against the Canadian Parliament legislating compelled speech. A conservatism that absorbed politically homeless marooned liberals and even religious conservatism to some degree has risen to become the counterculture.

I recently observed in a piece that in the absence of religion or religious beliefs something was always going to fill that void. The obvious example often proffered here is the replacement with communism as a new religion that was just as deadly as ancient religions and led to massive human suffering in just the last century alone, and yet doesn't appear to be finished with its mission.

Today we have the resurgence of something similar with leftist totalitarian tinged functionaries that view the managerial state as its new (old/communism) religion (support, guidance, control, power) that can further its other tenets such as wokeism, the various identity movements (DIE) rooted in progressive and Marxist critical studies that explicitly undermine basic science, and even what I would call the cult of climate change or the green cult.

What they all appear to have in common (other than ideological aims to remake the world) is they claim to be rooted in academic research, even if much of it is made up or fabricated to benefit an ideological agenda, yet still peer-reviewed and published as if to merely reinforce that agenda at the level of information dissemination. I’m thinking of the "Grievance Studies Affair” here as just one event that exposed this academic corruption but as someone who has been around academia (probably for too long) I’ve seen it up close and first hand in the social sciences. The EU is particularly insidious in this regard, funding projects that tend to reinforce the dominant neoliberal views of Brussels bureaucrats, or popular beliefs of far-left activists, and any study that might challenge or undermine the social and political engineering agendas of this tribe is simply not funded.

I've seen Left-wingers go Right wing, but I've never seen the reverse except in rare cases when someone leaves oppressive religion and swings the pendulum too far the other way.

https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/new-religions-and-old-heretics?s=r&source=patrick.net

A conservatism that absorbed politically homeless marooned liberals and even religious conservatism to some degree has risen to become the counterculture.

Ah yes, the original definition of “alt-right”: a marvelous term describing the hip, diverse, freedom-loving, liberal-in-spirit coalition with true respect for traditional social values and acceptance of innate differences between men and women, yet championing a society with equal opportunity for all, no special privileges based on sex, race, religion, color, or creed, and with consenting adults able to do as they please.

Of course this powerful term and the movement that it so succinctly described had to be destroyed.

There are two kinds of liberal apostates: those who claim to be a fixed point in a changed world. It’s not me it’s them, claims this sort. And those who undergo a thoroughgoing conversion. Mamet is the latter. He’s a defector.

His break from the left was decisive. “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’” read the headline of a piece by Mamet in the Village Voice announcing his departure in 2008. That title — not his choice — still annoys Mamet. “It just threw me out of the left,” he says. “I think [the Voice] is gone now. Rest in peace,” he adds with a little relish. Not that the headline really misrepresented Mamet’s position: “I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind,” he wrote in the article.

“I didn’t know any conservatives,” says Mamet of his younger self. “You never met a single conservative.” Coming up in theater at his age and living in big cities was to be safely cocooned in a liberal bubble. A place where, he says, bemoaning the right’s latest move was like talking about “terrible weather”: “Did you see what that son of a bitch Nixon, or Reagan, or Thatcher did today?”

And so the conservatism he would grow into was self-taught. “I started reading. I came across The Road to Serfdom,” he says. After Friedrich Hayek came Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. (Sowell, a prominent black conservative economist and, like Mamet, a man who started his political journey on the left, is the person cited more than any other during our conversation.) “My reading got broader and broader and I thought, I’ve got to take this down to the bare paint.” Next came Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers. Out of that came a realization of the “extraordinary brilliance of the American experience.” ...

Mamet’s view of Washington is as unsentimental as his view of Hollywood: “People go into these professions to get power, and power to get sex, or sex to get power, money to get sex or power, and power to get money. That’s what these protected professions are all about… Trump was a countervailing force.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/why-david-mamet-went-right/?source=patrick.net

There are two kinds of liberal apostates: those who claim to be a fixed point in a changed world. It’s not me it’s them, claims this sort. And those who undergo a thoroughgoing conversion. Mamet is the latter. He’s a defector.

Joe Rogan happened to interview Mamet last week, did you know?

Official link:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EGUBSTWebFwgzfr96q2Ci?si=8g82hqhwRUycV41XdaK1ZQ&source=patrick.net

Clips from the interview on Rumble:
https://rumble.com/search/video?q=mamet+rogan&source=patrick.net

Haven’t listened to any of it yet.

The conservative is an instinctive defender of traditional, organic structures, “which function precisely because of their organic nature, that is to say because nobody planned them consciously or with intent” (p. 15f). The leftist, meanwhile, is an innovator, who deploys his theories and utopian hopes against the received tradition. Like many organic things, our traditional institutions have an intuitive appeal that is nevertheless difficult to articulate and entirely foreign to leftist theory. Things like marriage and the family, religious communities, and even the human immune system, are organic solutions to ancient problems, worked out over millennia of cultural and biological evolution. Not even their most ardent defenders understand their purposes or functions fully. Conservatives are therefore rhetorically disadvantaged: “The only conclusive proof that these structures are irreplaceable comes when one has destroyed them, and realised that no replacements are in sight. But then it is too late.” The leftist critique of traditional institutions, meanwhile, undermines the functioning of traditional society. ...

The problem is that we live in an inverted order. The leftist opposition has taken charge; the conservative conformists have been driven into the opposition. The left sustains this inversion through its permanent revolution, its constant and ever-renewed assaults on the stability of society. The conservative, who remembers only his former position in the ruling class and remains fixated on returning to the halls of power, neglects populist solutions and seeks only to ingratiate himself with the leftists who hold the keys. ...

This “three-fold own goal – to fail to advocate for your own position, to make yourself responsible for it nevertheless, and to vilify it on top of that” is central to a broader cultural process, via which traditionalist political positions are condemned as heresy by left- and right-wing parties alike, banished from polite company, and finally censored and even criminalised. ...

MKH sees this broken approach as a misbegotten attempt to appropriate the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions. “[T]o learn from one’s opponents does not mean, necessarily, that it is a good idea to copy them” (p. 51); the ideological asymmetries of left and right confound conservative hopes of reverse infiltration. To begin with, leftists got into power by playing to the sense of fairness that prevailed within the twentieth-century liberal establishment. This older guard of elites were prepared to concede access and even power to their political opponents; in their minds this largesse confirmed their own legitimacy. The left knows no such fairness; as soon as they took charge, they set about bricking up all the passages via which they came to power themselves. Today, the establishment left demands nothing so much as absolute conformity to its views, and admits mostly yes-men and careerists to its circles. There will be no equivalent institutional march for the right. ...

For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. ...

The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards.

The trucker protest in Canada gave us a glimpse of the power of the people. The indignation and disgust heaped on them, and the emergency law enacted to stop them showed how scary this was for both sides of the political spectrum. This is the only possible hope, populism - and that is why both populism and freedom are now ultra-right-wing horrible dirty words that you cannot even utter in mixed company without fear of retribution.

you only have to look at the strange forces brought to bear on the protesters – asset seizures, etc – to see what an enormous threat they were

Populism transcends left-right binaries, for example, temperamentally right wing people wanted Amazon broken up because it destroys small indigenous businesses, those on the left because its not fair to the workers.

There's also a strange tension between the "democracy is a sham, protests don't work" and the needs of the regime to constantly manage public opinion. If they really were indifferent to public opinion the wouldn't expend so much time and resources doing so.

The truckers were in effect a kind of revolution without the guns. Starting with some 20% approval as the strike evolved approval climbed into the > 60%. Polling has been nearly impossible to find anymore. We understand why.

Ironically, given the striking similarities between the cognitive styles and left and right and the cognitive styles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, these terms may be more apt than we'd expected.

I suspect confidence is the determining factor. The leftists lack the confidence to let it all happen. They are control freaks. Hence the reason all they touch is destroyed.

The BBC routinely show women with young kids on boats in the English channel making a dangerous journey. The reality is some 99% are young men.

Women are famously easier to manipulate in this way.

Which is why no sane society lets them within a mile of politics.

... for the last few decades in the US, the only immigrants it was hard to get into the country for even a visit were mail-order brides, especially those from Eastern Europe and Asia. The excuse was always that they were trying to protect them from being exploited, of course, but oddly enough that never applied to brown fruit-pickers working for below minimum wage.

"He went to Washington to do good. He did very well, indeed." ...Unknown.

Plus lifetime, gold plated health insurance. Lst checked under Obama - MoC family plan with vision, dental, drug-alcohol rehab, mental health and zero deductible was $50/year. Who knows with inflation it may have doubled to 100 bucks yearly.. thank goodness Congress were able to vote themselves pay raises to absorb the impact.

Don't know about NZ, but here in the mother country I've often wondered if a truly balls to the wall traditional party would clean up. I mean, ending mass immigration, cutting all the bullshit and focusing on nuts and bolts things, including reducing the size of government.

I can't help thinking it would be massively popular. Especially if they just bluntly stated all the woke stuff is bullshit. I'd vote for them.

Like you my main memory from the Merkel’s Great Replacement will be the following: A video of Syrian “refugees” stepping out of a train at the Vienna main train station. While Austrians are welcoming them with flowers and open arms as a warm welcome, two Syrian teenagers give a hateful look at the camera and both make the “throat slicing” gesture with their right hand. And the apologizing comments from the journalist were even more scary: “You have to understand these kids have seen too much destruction and suffered from much deprivation.”