There is no moral counter balance to central government abuse of authority. In the U.S., this would be functioning Christian churches

The great struggle of our time is going to be the struggle to retain what is left of our most basic freedoms – the freedom to hold whatever opinions we choose to hold and to express those opinions.

It is very unlikely that Christian churches are going to be useful allies in this struggle. Christian churches are far more likely to ally themselves with those who want to take away our freedoms. Christianity does not have a good track record when it comes to fighting for intellectual freedom. Christians have historically been very keen supporters of censorship.

Manipulating media to discredit challenges is more effective than crude suppression.

That’s really the core of it.

What we’ve seen throughout the Anglosphere has been a slow drift towards a new kind of totalitarianism. Democratic totalitarianism. Totalitarianism by consent. The consent is to a large extent manufactured by the media (including social media).

It’s instructive to look at the rise of Political Correctness in the 90s. At the beginning of that decade, in all the Anglosphere countries, you could pretty much say whatever you wanted. On any subject – politics, the economy, religion, sex, the weather, sports, science. If you expressed some opinions you could expect to be attacked but you could still express those opinions without having to fear any harmful consequences. Censorship (whether it’s censorship by government or by private corporations makes no difference whatsoever) was very mild. It was more or less accepted that grown-ups could read whatever books they wanted to, could see whatever movies they wanted to, etc.

Today (throughout the Anglosphere) you have to think very very carefully before you express any opinion on any of the subjects listed above. You have to ask yourself – will expressing this opinion cost me my job? Will my life be destroyed if I express this opinion? So we rigidly self-censor. Americans and Australians today do the same thing – they agonise before expressing an opinion and they rigidly self-censor.

All this has happened largely without any actual changes in the law. We don’t fear the law. We fear that our employer will fire us.

This has been driven by the media. The media tells us which opinions are acceptable and which are not.

I don’t see any significant difference between the US and Australia, except that the drift towards democratic totalitarianism, totalitarianism by consent, clearly began in the US and was exported from there to the rest of the Anglosphere. This is an American phenomenon. The idea that some opinions are dangerous and must be suppressed is an idea that emerged in the US during the 1990s. It doesn’t seem to me that having “functional Christian churches” and lots of guns has made any difference whatsoever.

The lockdowns in Australia seem set to continue indefinitely. The police now have, in practice, unlimited powers. Which they are using enthusiastically. Mandatory vaccination seems certain to be introduced shortly.

The lockdowns remain extremely popular, and the governments that are using the police and the military to enforce the lockdowns remain extremely popular. There is no effective opposition to the lockdowns.

Now I know what some Americans will say. “It’s because you don’t have guns.” Which is of course nonsense. It’s all about media control. Governments can do these things because the media supports them. In a situation such as this carrying a gun would just get you shot down by the cops.

It seems as the internet has become mainstream, people do not have an interest in anonymous, multinational discussion, with people they do not know. I don’t think we even need a conspiracy theory to explain it.

Instead, people prefer to talk to their friends, on social media. When they have political discussion, they do it non-anonymously, and argue with friends and family, rather than strangers.

That’s an interesting, and important, point.

This move toward totalitarianism is a reaction to the fear of losing control.

I think the idea that the elites are afraid and that they’re in danger of losing control is mostly just more right-wing cope.

Certainly a more economic use of space than “You’re Just a Big Poopy-Head”. 🙂

I think that the spread of social media and the internet explosion of information availability lies at the core of the elite’s reaction and move toward totalitarianism. The Church lost control of information availability and that led to its loss of power. The elites have struggled ever since to maintain some control over information availability and its spread. Available technology has pretty much made that an impossible task. This move toward totalitarianism is a reaction to the fear of losing control.

Actually available technology, and social media, have made social control and control of information availability and its spread much much easier. It’s possible that the elites are going for totalitarianism simply because they can. Simply because it is now very easy for them to do so. Thanks to the internet it is now possible for the elites to crush dissent completely.

Anyone who thinks that the internet means freedom of information is living in a dream world.

So I think you’re half right. Just as during the Reformation, changes in technology have produced cultural changes. But the invention of printing facilitated the free exchange of information. The internet has made it possible for information to be rigidly controlled.

The elites are not reacting out of fear. They are acting out of opportunism. They have seen an opportunity to crush dissent and to move towards totalitarianism and it’s too good an opportunity to miss.

I think that if I had control of your eyes, I could make you see anything I wanted you to see. If I had control of your ears, I could make you hear anything I wanted you to hear. And if I had both, then your sense of “being” would not really be your own at all, or at least significantly not so.

This is likewise true if you had control of a nation, its media and its educational systems, you would likely to be able to impact and mold its population into your morals vastly more so than before.

Public opinion doesn’t exist in the sense of the public having intelligent, coherent, properly thought-out opinions. The public does have wants (or needs if you prefer) but they’re vague and incoherent.

Expecting the public to have intelligent views on a subject like immigration is like expecting five-year-olds to have intelligent, coherent, properly thought-out opinions on the dietary requirements of children. Five-year-olds just know what they want. They want candy and chocolates and they don’t want broccoli. The public wants things that are mutually incompatible and if you try to tell them that these things are mutually incompatible they cry and stamp their feet.

If you control the media and educational institutions you can persuade five-year-olds to want a particular brand of candy and chocolate but you’ll have an uphill battle persuading them that they want broccoli.

There’s nothing wrong with the wants (or the needs) of the public, you just have to understand that those wants/needs are vague and incoherent. This makes the public absurdly easy to manipulate.

Progressives have been successful in convincing the public they can have chocolate and candy and they don’t need to eat their broccoli. Social conservatives have told the public that they have to eat their broccoli and then they still won’t get candy and chocolates because wanting candy and chocolates is wicked.

Do not promote the use of the ignore function.

Ignore is for cowards and must never be used. It should be removed from this site, and I have repeatedly advised Lord Unz to eliminate it.

The Troll Button should also be abolished. It is used entirely by people who are upset that someone has dared to express an opinion with which they disagree and to which they are unable to present a coherent counter-argument. It’s classic passive-aggressive stuff. It’s very amusing that rightoid men like to accuse women of passive-aggressive tactics when they themselves are addicted to the practice.

Use of the Troll Button is the equivalent of a five-year-old calling another five-year-old a big poopy-head. Perhaps Lord Unz could simply replace it with a You’re Just a Big Poopy-Head button.

To be honest I don’t think the Disagree Button is useful either. The Agree and Thanks buttons are the only useful buttons. If you can’t answer someone’s arguments then nobody cares if you disagree with them.

If you can’t handle dealing with schizophrenics, bitter losers and drooling fanatics what are you doing on Unz Review in the first place?

The only female commenter I’ve ever seen on AK’s blog has been ‘Rosie’ who was belittled because most of the things she said were retarded, not because of her avowed gender.

Rosie’s comments are in general no more retarded than the comments of countless male UR commenters. This is Unz Review, where babbling insanity is the norm. You have to remember that AK filters out most of the worst drooling insanity on his blog. Spend a few minutes on just about any other Unz Review blog and you’ll think you’ve wandered into the locked ward of a mental hospital.

Rosie was consistently singled out for attack on UR not because her comments were crazier than the average UR comments, but because she was a woman. You could be forgiven for thinking that the intention was to let women know that they’re not welcome on UR.

I’m not saying that Rosie didn’t make retarded comments on occasion, but dozens of other commenters would say much more retarded things and be given a free pass.

Watching the treatment of Rosie was like seeing a textbook demonstration of How Cancel Culture Works.

Today in the modern era we have the opportunity for truly effective totalitarianism, which as the name implies, extends to nearly all facets of our lives. Nothing is safe and there are few places to hide from the technological might of the State, which is much more frightening to me than the relatively bumbling control of past era’s.

Our modern totalitarianism actually works by means that are uncannily similar to the means used in the past by churches. In the past the churches had incredibly effective means of sniffing out wrong-thinkers and forcing them to conform. Very similar to social media. And you could be sure that in your local parish church there would be plenty of people keen to act as Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police, eager to denounce any non-conformity. Again, just like social media.

And mostly if you were a wrong-thinker it wasn’t the law or prosecution by the State that you had to worry about. You were more likely to simply have your life ruined after you had been denounced as a heretic, a sinner, a godless heathen or a wicked immoral person. Again, just like the way social media works today.

This didn’t start to change until Christianity began to decline in the 18th century.

You could argue that Christianity invented Cancel Culture.

Agreed, except I stick by my use of the word “needs”. I am discussing the deep emotional needs of individuals, for which people often sacrifice everything else, including their lives.

I’d be prepared to go along with your usage of the word. When I use the word “wants” I”m only doing so to distinguish such desires from the very basic needs (food, clothing, housing, medical care). So I think we’re really pretty much in agreement.

Contemporary conservative politics achieves none of the practical successes that it wants because it refuses to recognise people’s emerging needs and complexities, until too late. Progressives are constantly playing with advantage, because taking people’s feelings seriously is what they do best.

Progressives have been much more successful not so much at addressing people’s needs but rather at addressing people’s wants.

In the economic sphere the Economic Right triumphed because they had a message that the middle class wanted to hear – that greed really is good, that there’s no need to have a sense of social responsibility, that the wealthy are wealthy because they’re virtuous, that the poor are poor because they’re lazy, wicked and stupid.

But in the social and cultural spheres what you might call the Cultural Right has been spectacularly unsuccessful at addressing the things that people want. They have tried to sell an idea of society that people abandoned half a century ago because they felt that it failed to address their wants.

For example, while women have an ever-growing realisable need to transcend traditional female virtues because technology has freed them to do so, conservatives have just said “no, they don’t”, while progressives have framed their political programme to meet those needs and have captured women’s votes. The only reason why conservatives get any women’s votes is because they now present a political platform from the progressive yesterday.

They haven’t displayed any ability to articulate an alternative vision that is viable and sellable. Many women today are not satisfied with their lives but you’re not going to win their support by suggesting that we should go back to the good old days when all women’s lives revolved entirely around child-rearing and you’re not going to win their support by suggesting that women should go back to regarding sex as an unpleasant but unfortunately unavoidable marital duty.

Maybe the Cultural Right should try actually asking women what they want? It’s noticeable here at Unz Review that when a woman commenter steps forward and tells the UR commentariat some of the things that women want she is almost invariably shouted down and reviled. On occasions it’s even hinted that she has no business here and should be at home washing diapers.

But democracy will always lead to tyranny.

It depends upon what the elites believe to be in their best interests. A casual reading of the NYT will show you that they believe their hold on power depends upon dividing Americans by race.

I don’t disagree, but my theory is that democracy always inevitably leads to tyranny because it’s in the very nature of democracy, regardless of the particular agenda of a particular elite.

Democracy encourages ordinary people to become involved in politics and to think politically. That promotes the idea that every aspect of life is political. That further encourages the idea that the government has a duty to be involved in every area of life. It also encourages the idea that everyone’s business is everybody else’s business, and that it is right and proper to tell other people how to live their lives. In practice that mens it encourages the belief the the government has a duty to tell people how to live their lives.

It encourages the idea that if there is a social problem that problem must exist because the government is not being sufficiently energetic in telling people how to live their lives.

If you look at 19th and early 20th century England you get a wonderful case study. As the political system slowly became more democratic the government became more active in interfering in areas of life which had previously been considered to be none of the government’s business. This happened because in a democracy the best way to get elected is to tell people, “If there are problems then my government will act to address those problems.” That invariably means more laws and increased police powers.

In 19th and early 20th century England you also see the rise of the idea that the government should act as a moral policeman.

I’m not suggesting that societies prior to democracy weren’t oppressive, but they were oppressive in a less stifling, paternalistic, totalitarian way. And in Europe much of the oppressing was left to the churches.

If you’re implying that I’m an ex-Trotskyist then you’re totally wrong.

My mistake. I thought that you wrote in a comment that in earlier years you hung around with such groups.

That’s OK. I used to know a couple of Trotskyists, but I only knew them socially. I wasn’t involved with them politically and I didn’t share their politics. They were nice guys but politically I thought they were totally nuts, even at the time. They were awaiting world revolution, which they expected real soon. If not next week, then the week after for sure.

At the time I was a completely mainstream moderate social democrat.

I have mentioned before having known some Trotskyists so it’s understandable that people might jump to the conclusion that I’d been a Trotskyist myself.

For some reasons (an this question should be really explored) the strategy of virus elimination or the covid zero strategy as they call it in Australia was never put on the table.

Australia’s covid zero strategy is now in tatters.

I was in favour of that strategy but its failure is now painfully apparent.

On the other hand, French, German and Italian films were largely arthouse (not commercially-oriented) after WWII

That’s simply not true. Arthouse movies were a small fraction of the total output. If you think Italian cinema was just people like Fellini and Antonioni then you don’t know much about Italian cinema of that era.

And a lot of the German movies made in the 50s and 60s were krimis, which were totally commercially oriented.

No one group had enough power to become seriously oppressive.

Powerful and fanatical groups sweeping to power and implementing their rigid ideology is the norm. I think you and others do not appreciate how “unfree” we have always been.

Yes, that was the point I was making. There was a very brief window during which no one group had enough power to become seriously oppressive. It really only lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s.

When people look back to Golden Ages of Freedom they’re actually looking back to the happy times when their group was the one doing the oppressing.

Surely an ex-Trotskyist would have full knowledge of something like the Red Scare in the U. S.

If you’re implying that I’m an ex-Trotskyist then you’re totally wrong.

It is very amusing today to hear social conservatives and conservative Christians bleating about oppression and declaring their undying support for freedom of speech. Social conservatives and conservative Christians have been in the past extremely enthusiastic persecutors and oppressors. And conservative Christians would just love to return to the Good Old Days when they got to persecute people.

it is becoming apparent that classical liberalism is not going to be the end of history.

I agree. It’s kind of a pity, in the social sphere at least (I despise economic liberalism). Social liberalism is overall far from perfect but it’s better than the alternatives.

But democracy will always lead to tyranny.

Anyhow, another way to ask the original question is, if Islam never existed, would the SJW Left be any different from how it is now?

I think the answer is no, it would be practically the same.

I agree. Islam has had zero influence on SJW ideology and zero influence on SJW political objectives.

Muslims in the West have little choice other than to align themselves with the Cultural Left. They are (quite legitimately) terrified of the fanatically pro-Israel MAGAtards and the fanatically pro-Israel Religious Right. In Europe the “far right” consists of little more than Zionist front organisations. Even in Australia the Right is rabidly pro-Israel.

Perhaps community solidarity is one of those things that no one wants to give up if they have it (especially if they can observe others who lack it), but no one who doesn’t have it wants to make the sacrifices needed for it to happen.

People who’ve never experienced real community solidarity simply have no awareness of the advantages it offers. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Conversely, people who have been brought up in an atmosphere of intense and rigid community solidarity simply have no awareness of the advantages of the freedom one experiences without rigid community solidarity. They’ve never experienced that sort of freedom, so they don’t know what they’re missing.

the Amish also hold little appeal to the English.

Which means that while the Amish may survive they’re not a useful model for the future.

It may be that the latter half of the 20th century was an odd interim between the dismantling of conservative norm and the setting up of the new Woke Orthodoxy which is ascendant. It may have been, in retrospect, a time unusually tolerant of a diversity of opinion.

I think it may have been a period in which opposing political forces were fairy evenly balanced. Up until the 1980s neither the Economic Left and the Economic Right had achieved total predominance. Christians had considerable political clout, but secularists had roughly equal power. Social conservatives and social libertarians had a kind of balance of power as well. Feminism was strong but not all-powerful.

No one group had enough power to become seriously oppressive. That misled us into thinking that tolerance was going to be the norm. In reality there were plenty of groups with the desire to impose their views on others, but they simply lacked the power to do so. As soon as some groups obtained that power they did in fact become oppressive.

In other words, maybe the only defence against oppression is a balance of roughly equal forces. That balance no longer exists.

I think it an excellent thing that various groups of mutilated men and women who want to sleep with women and women who want to have more nice things all can’t get along well, because it provides a lack of cooperation that exposes them to more permanent solutions.

It does mean that there are potential cracks in the Coalition of the Fringes. Cracks which could be exploited.

Of course one thing we can be certain of is that the Right (both the mainstream Right and various dissident rightist groups) will fail abysmally to do anything to take advantages of such opportunities.

I still have vivid memories of a thread at Unz Review on the subject of the trans madness threatening to destroy women’s professional sports. When a couple of commenters were rash enough to suggest that maybe this issue was an opportunity for the dissident right to actually gain some support among women they were howled down by the geniuses of the dissident right whose attitude was, “Hey, why would we want to win support among women? We should celebrate anything that hurts women.”

I am, therefore, not just saying that everything will be fine, even in the medium term. I am instead trying to pull out what really give Wokism its success, so that other better and more consciously designed systems can outcompete it. Wokism serves the real needs, not just of the minority of its antisocial adherents, but of many others too. It is those needs which competitors need to meet, rather than just dismissing them.

Now that I agree with.

To some extent Wokeism is successful, not just because it serves real emotional needs, but because there are no viable competing ideologies. The Economic Left is dead. All the mainstream Right has to offer is Greed Is Good. The various non-mainstream rightist movements such as the dissident right offer little but crazy conspiracy theories and bitter hate. The Religious Right is crazy and (mercifully) has declined into political irrelevance. Moderate liberals are keeping their heads down for fear of being cancelled and they don’t offer the same opportunities for virtue-signalling.

But trannies are the real misogynists.

You mean the ones who are so misogynistic that they will self-mutilate in an attempt to become women? That is a hard sell.

Not when you give it some thought. You’re a man who wants to be a woman. You pump yourself full of female hormones. You get yourself surgically mutilated. You buy pretty frocks. You wear makeup. Then you look in the mirror and what you see is a bloke in a dress. You see a sad caricature of a woman. You realise that nobody who is attracted to women is going to want to date you or sleep with you. They want to date or sleep with real women.

You think you’re not going to develop a seething hatred of real women? You think you’re not going to hate real women because they do have people wanting to date tham and sleep with them?

Mostly I don’t disagree with you but I think you’re a tad over-optimistic that things will sort themselves out. The problem is that there are people with a strong vested interest in ensuring that social conflict continues indefinitely.

In fact things already had sorted themselves out by the 1980s. Women could do pretty much what they wanted to do. Homosexuals and lesbians could do pretty much what they wanted to do. Women (and men) were free to express their sexualities more or less as they saw fit.

But that meant that feminist and LGBT political activists no longer had any justification for their own existence. So imaginary grievances had to be created, and in order to ensure that those political activists continue to be comfortable and prosperous and have unlimited opportunities for virtue-signalling new imaginary grievances will continue to be created.

World War T is not a war fought to achieve certain objectives. The war is an end in itself. It must go on forever.

Lesbians would also have been much better off keeping their distance from the male homosexuals, with whom they have zero interests in common. And they should never have remained in a coalition with the woman-hating trans crowd.

They have plenty of interests in common; both of them wish to see men with less power over them.

In fact lesbians are now in the position where men have more power over them. The only difference is that the power is being wielded by men in frocks. And whereas ordinary men generally like women, the men in frocks don’t like them one little bit. It’s giving the lesbians the chance to discover what it’s really like to be oppressed. They’re now encountering the testosterone-fuelled rage of men who would like to be women but can’t be, and those men are driven by a seething hatred of real women who have no difficulty in being women.

It’s a good example of a political alliance that seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a colossal self-destructive mistake.

You might be interested to know that in Australia we now have troops in the streets enforcing the lockdowns. Yes, the lockdown is now being enforced by the military. We are pretty close to being under martial law.

And the other good news is that there’s overwhelming popular opposition to the anti-lockdown protests.

Will the military be used to suppress further anti-lockdown protests? It seems possible.

The lockdowns are expected to last until the end of the year.

But it’s not that bad. I believe we’re still allowed to take off our masks in order to eat. For the moment.

This comment has a “Dems R the Real Racists” feel.

But trannies are the real misogynists. Anyone who hasn’t noticed that has only failed to do so because they’re trying desperately hard not to notice it.

The thing is that she needed these labels to allow herself the sense of internal security to step outside of the type of even more stupid “men must do this, women must do this” mantra that you often see here.

But the “men must do this, women must do this” mantra had already ceased to be a threat by the 1980s. The idea that that mantra is a problem is a classic case of creating an imaginary threat that must be combated. The only people who still take that mantra seriously are a tiny minority of bitter loser men, who are unfortunately over-represented here at Unz Review. Spending too much time on Unz Review can give one the impression that there are lots of knuckle-dragging male misogynists out there. There aren’t. It’s just that if a man is a bitter loser male misogynist chances are he’ll end up commenting at Unz Review.

the biggest differences between the “privileged” people and the rest, were never sex, race or other identity groups, but psychological maturity and intelligence.

Up to a point. It’s certainly true that the biggest differences between the “privileged” people and the rest, were never sex, race or other identity groups. The biggest differences were power and money. Identity politics is useful to those who have power and money because it distracts people from thinking about power and money.

The worst thing about the gender identity stuff is that it’s so incredibly misogynistic. It trivialises women. It tells a woman that the fact that she is a woman is irrelevant and unimportant and meaningless. It started by telling women that anyone can be a woman. All a man needs to do is put on a dress. And it has gone beyond that and is now erasing women altogether.

It turns being a woman into a joke. And it’s a deliberate and conscious misogynistic attempt to turn women into a joke. “Hey, I have a beard and a penis but I’m a woman because I’m wearing a frock.” It turns being a woman into meaningless play-acting.

The gender identity stuff has only been able to gain a hold because feminism has now been colonised by men in frocks. And those men in frocks have a burning hatred of women.

It’s not about being inclusive. It’s about mocking women.

It’s also an inevitable consequence of the fact that feminism no longer has any independent existence. Feminism is just one small part of a larger coalition and it’s the most powerless part of that coalition. That coalition includes much more powerful groups that are actively hostile to women. The most powerful group is the LGBT lobby and the LGBT lobby is now effectively the trans lobby. They dominate it completely. And what unites the trans crowd is their contempt for women.

Feminists would have been better off keeping their distance from the LGBT lobby. They have zero interests in common.

Lesbians would also have been much better off keeping their distance from the male homosexuals, with whom they have zero interests in common. And they should never have remained in a coalition with the woman-hating trans crowd.

When a man with a penis and a beard puts on a frock he thinks he now has the right to have sex with lesbians, and if lesbians turn then down the lesbians get labelled as Nazis.

I don’t see much inclusiveness here. What I see are vicious power games, with women as the victims.

None of those genders describes you?

I’ve never felt the need or the desire to be pigeon-holed into some rigid closely defined category invented by somebody else. That seems rather oppressive to me. There are two sexes, male and female. I belong to the male sex. I’m not aware of having any gender.

Until a few years ago I had never met anyone who required a gender to which to be assigned.

Wokism, with its extreme flexibility and constant innovation, isn’t so much an ideology as a confused impulse towards inclusion

It seems to me that Wokeism is more about exclusion than inclusion. It’s about defining who is acceptable and who isn’t.

For example if you belong to one of the 117 different approved genders you’re acceptable, but if you’re “cishet” you’re not acceptable. And “cishet” embraces at least 95% of the population. So Wokeism excludes most people.

Actually, the complete absence of actual evidence applies to your Blank Slateism.

Actually, the complete absence of actual evidence applies to everything in the social sciences. Because they’re not science, they’re pseudo-science. And, to a large extent, everything in the social sciences is just political beliefs dressed up as science. It’s like trying to argue about whether Vertigo is a better film than Citizen Kane. In the end it’s just a matter of opinion.

It’s not my Blank Slateism. I’m just a sceptic. When someone believes something that they appear to believe it because it’s emotionally necessary for them to do so I suspect that they’re looking for a cope.

Blank Slateism cannot be proved or disproved. It’s a political belief.

The two main differences are that blacks suffer from “slave mentality” (Caribbean and African immigrants don’t, at least in the first generation) and from a deep-seated resentment at being treated as 2nd class citizens (if that) for hundreds of years. A resentment that I think is fully justified on their part. However, the crucial point is that this resentment has metastasized (with massive encouragement by black “leaders” and white liberals) to the point that it is fatally crippling to a sense of identity and self-worth for the individual and for the race. They have become zombies under the total control of the white liberal mind.

I agree. So it’s a matter of cultural differences.

The fact that there are IQ differences between different races is close to being irrefutable.

Close, but no cigar. You can’t separate out the cultural influences so again you’re in the realm of things that can neither be proved or disproved. You’re in the realm of political belief. Whichever side you take in that argument it comes down to being a political belief.

I am saying that they are clumsily moving towards more tolerance.

They think that they are clumsily moving towards more tolerance. Up until the 90s they really were clumsily moving towards more tolerance.

The problem is that they decided that the only way to have complete tolerance was to enforce tolerance. That’s like guaranteeing a man’s freedom by locking him up.

Partly the change occurred because all the battles had already been won. By the 1990s tolerance had already been achieved. What do you do if you’re a political activist and there are no more battles left to fight? The answer is that you invent imaginary enemies who must be defeated.

You’re in the same situation as the US military which has had no viable enemies for nearly thirty years. So they keep trying to manufacture new enemies (even if they’re imaginary), otherwise the gravy train stops.

And the political activism gravy train must never be allowed to stop.

There’s also the problem that in looking for new battles to fight they’ve been forced into fighting over issues that are clearly nonsensical and absurd (such as pretending that a bearded man in a frock is actually totally a woman). The only way to defend such absurdities is by adopting an ultra-aggressive approach. You can’t persuade people that bearded men in frocks are women by means of rational argument. You have to threaten people to make them believe such things. There’s the added problem that the trans issue is being pushed by people who are seriously mentally disturbed.

Very surprised – I have constantly read that Cleopatra nearly bankrupted MGM (if that was the studio) and brought an end to that type of historical epic film which until then, was a regular production in Hollywood.

Cleopatra lost money because 20th Century-Fox spent an insane amount of money on it. The budget was unbelievable, partly due to Mankiewicz’s incompetence as a director. It cost so much to make that no matter how well it did at the box office it was simply not possible to recoup the costs. But it was a massive massive hit.

If you want to see a truly excellent Hollywood epic from that era watch El Cid instead. An infinitely better film.

What would be sufficient evidence though?

The most obvious evidence I can think of is the fact that black fertility is always higher than white, in every place, and far as I can tell, in every time — at least in the US, it’s been true in every Census since the country was founded. Blacks are still affected by fertility trends, but they resist anti-natal forces just a little better, for reasons that I’d argue are genetic.

But since there are profound cultural differences between blacks and whites we’re still left with the problem of the complete absence of actual evidence.

I’ll have to look up Clark Ashton Smith more.

You have a treat in store for you. Lovecraft and Howard were great writers and I admire them unreservedly but Clark Ashton Smith was the greatest of the trio.

He was also one of the great American Decadents.

The “breeder” theories seem to be popular with people who have a desperate need to believe in them. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of a cope.

I wonder what I’m trying to cope with?

For some people the “breeder” theories are a desperate attempt to prop up HBD. When you have something like demographic decline which seems to be overwhelmingly obviously a cultural change some HBD enthusiasts see that as a threat to their HBD theories. They get very upset about having to admit that culture might have profound effects.

I’m not suggesting that is so in your case.

We could also attribute the decline in attrition partly to changes in the state of “English” society, though if this is true, it’s fascinating that Amish were more likely to attrite into a society that involved the same sort of hard agricultural labor as the one they left behind, the same expectation of early marriage and lots of children. And they’re less likely to attrite into a society with pizza delivery and Netflix and Xbox and total liberal freedom of lifestyle.

If you’re brought up in a really extreme cultural milieu (and you can’t get much more extreme than the Amish) then leaving that cultural milieu would be terrifying. Especially if you’ve been taught that the world outside the Amish community is not merely terrifying but incredibly wicked. So the decline in attrition may be due to the same factors that make it difficult for people to break away from cults like Scientology. In the 19th century breaking away from the Amish community would not have been traumatic – you’d simply be moving from one cultural milieu to another fairly similar milieu.

And no, I’m not saying that the Amish are cultists in the sense that Scientologists are cultists.

I’m inclined to attribute the decline in attrition at least partly to genetic factors (and I know I’m not the only one — I think Greg Cochran has made this point before). Basically, as people who were less genetically inclined to stick with the Amish boiled off, you’re left, over time, with people who are biologically much less likely to leave the Amish.

It’s a possibility, but again there appears to be zero actual evidence to support such an idea. There’s still nothing more than wishful thinking driving these “breeder” theories.

The “breeder” theories seem to be popular with people who have a desperate need to believe in them. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of a cope.

All that said, inability to make consistent use of birth control is probably a lot more innate, a lot less culturally mediated. Refusal to abort among such people might be more culturally mediated, but I think just as often it’s also innate.

That may be so but I don’t think there’s any actual evidence for such a view.

The incredible rapidity with which societies that once had very high birth rates have now become societies with incredibly low birth rates suggests that human reproductive patterns are overwhelmingly culturally mediated.

Let me introduce a new word to your vocabulary that you desperately need to learn — hypocrisy.

“Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform.”

And that of course was why I trolled you with the MAGA Zionist thing. Which you fell for, as I had hoped. I was trying to confront you with your own tendency to try to discredit opinions you don’t like by attaching emotional pejorative labels to them. You like to attach labels like “Islamo” or “atheist” to any opinion with which you disagree in an effort to avoid actually addressing the opinion with coherent arguments. I thought that if I labelled your MAGA fantasy as “Zionist” it might sting a bit. Which it evidently did.

If the government crushes the Amish, their fertility will probably plummet (though I still think they might not fully converge to the white average).

The problem with a “breeder gene” hypothesis is that you still have to prove that the desire to have more children can be passed on to those children as a genetic inheritance (rather than a cultural inheritance). And I’m sceptical about that.

Do the Amish have lots of children because the Amish just happen to carry a “breeder gene” or do they have lots of children because of their cultural beliefs? If a South Korean kid (South Koreans being at the moment just about the least procreative people on the planet) was raised by Amish would she grow up to want to have eight or nine children? If an Amish kid was raised by South Koreans in South Korea would she grow up to want just one child?

I don’t think we know the answer, but I do think that any kind of belief in a genetic inheritance that causes people to have more children is a belief based mostly on copium.

We need to compare & contrast your proposal versus mine. So, the two options are:
• Atheist Townships (dfordoom)
• Christian Populism (A123)

I did not propose atheist townships. That’s a deliberate distortion and a straw man.

Also you did not understand my proposal at all. I was not advocating the complete dissolution of central government, I was merely advocating a shift in power away from centralised governments towards decentralised governments.

I know it’s not practical (unless the current power structure starts to crumble) because the trend has been towards more centralisation (resulting in more bureaucracy and more oppression). But my original point was that it’s difficult to expect people to have an emotional attachment to the remote bureaucratic power structures which characterise the modern nation state.

Replacing the people currently at the top with MAGA Zionists won’t help. The MAGA Zionists might well turn out to be more oppressive than the SJWs. I’ve seen nothing that would convince me that the MAGA Zionists would be any more tolerant of dissent than the Wokeists/SJWs.

Do you explain Brexit in purely economic terms?

No, although certainly the people who voted for Brexit were people who were not benefiting from globalism. I think people voted for Brexit in the misguided belief that it would mean a return to the good old days. They didn’t realise that their real enemies were in Westminster, not Brussels. It was their own elites, not the EU elites, that were the problem.

It was very much like the MAGA thing – a desperate need to believe that it would be possible to turn the clock back. Which I understand – the past really was better, in some ways.

In both cases you had ordinary people who were understandably and justifiably disillusioned but they were unable to understand what had actually gone wrong.

Why would you want to move on to a new topic when we have clarified or exhausted the previous ones?

You mean the Crusades comment? It seemed me me to be a logical follow-up to the recent discussions on Byzantine history and Christian history. So not a new topic but just a new aspect of an existing topic. The Crusades were another consequence of the decline of Roman/Byzantine power.

And I assumed that people here were capable of multi-tasking. In the Good Old Days of AE’s blog we’d have multiple comment threads running at the same time.

It also offered A123 the chance to jump in and point out that the Crusaders were just Christian Populists. They were the MOGA (Make Outremer Great Again) movement.

Let us compare to your fantabulous phantasm of Atheist Township rule.

What on Earth does this discussion have to do wth atheism?

Christian Populism contains a correction method to deal with anyone who falls to corrupt slime:

MAGA Zionist Populism will end up being as corrupt as any other national political movement because there’s so much money involved. You can’t run an election campaign at the federal, or even state, level without lots and lots of money. The MAGA Zionists will open their legs for anyone who waves a cheque book at them, just as every other national political movement or party does.

And the problem is not just corruption. The more centralised political power is, the more bureaucratic it will become. The more bureaucratic it becomes the more oppressive it becomes. That’s the nature of the modern bureaucratic nation state.

If the MAGA Zionists gain power the only difference from the current situation will be is that you’ll be oppressed by MAGA Zionist Populists instead of being oppressed by Wokeists and SJWs.

And the MAGA Zionists will still be corporate whores.

Since we’ve had interesting discussions on Roman history with particular relevance to the Middle East, another Middle Eastern historical topic:

The Crusades – a good idea or a terrible idea?

Could the Crusader states ever have had a realistic chance of long-term survival? What would have needed to happen to give Outremer a chance of survival?

One the subject of nation states and patriotism, both the modern bureaucratic nation state and liberal democracy suffer from the weakness that their legitimacy is based entirely on their ability to deliver high (and increasing) material standards of living. If a situation arises when they can no longer deliver that then their legitimacy will evaporate overnight.

People generally despise politicians and they have done so for at least a century. People regard Congress and Parliaments as little more than dens of thieves. They assume that politicians are corrupt, cynical and self-serving. People dislike and fear the massive bureaucracies of the modern state, and they have done so for at least a century.

People put up with these things because the system provides them with a high material standard of living. There are shiny new consumer goodies in the shops.

What passes for patriotism these days is a devotion to those high material standards of living and those shops all of consumer goods.

I don’t think the modern bureaucratic nation state can ever regain any real legitimacy or find a way to inspire any genuine patriotism.

Europe provides a good example. The populations of European nations were happy to give up their national sovereignty and join the EU because they thought that joining the EU would make them richer. And people throughout the West accepted globalism because they thought that it would make them richer. The loss of sovereignty and the loss of national identity didn’t worry them at all.

But we still have not seen the “crest” of the wave created by the latter-1900s baby boom. Bangladesh already has more people than Russia crammed into a country about the size of the state of Louisiana, and the amount of land is shrinking into the sea. Nigeria is going to have a bigger version of that issue no matter what the future birth rate is, because the boom has already happened.

That’s why I’m not really worried by declining birth rates. I note that it’s happening but I don’t lie awake at night worrying about it. The benefits of a gradual decline in the global population are likely to heavily outweigh the costs. In the long term it’s unlikely that we can continue to have advanced technological civilisations unless the global population is reduced substantially, and declining birth rates are a painless way to do that.

I want advanced technological civilisations to survive. A world reduced to a subsistence agriculture existence does not appeal to me, even if in such a world people started going to church regularly again.

And I have no desire to see the world become Amish World.

It’s probably a good thing that pro-natalist policies don’t seem to work.

The conflict is between those who believe in a traditional nation state and those that don’t.

Correct. I count myself among the former. That’s why I call myself a Nationalist.

One of the things that is often overlooked is how incredibly un-intrusive government was in the 19th century. You could go through life without ever having any actual contact with the government. The bureaucratic apparatus to allow the government to become really intrusive didn’t exist.

Two hundred years ago government pretty much left people to decide for themselves how to go about the business of living. There were very few laws. If you broke one of those laws or tried to overthrow the state then the state would come down on you like a ton of bricks but unless you were a revolutionary or a murder or a thief you could assume that the government would to a surprising extent leave you alone. You could for example raise your kids however you wanted.

What’s interesting is that in the late 19th century you get liberalism (with its emphasis on freedom) becoming the dominant ideology but then in the 20th century you get the staggering growth of bueaucracy, so you have nation states that in theory were liberal but in practice they became much more oppressive than nation states in the pre-liberalism era.

What we have today is the modern bureaucratic nation state, not the traditional nation state.

If you remove the environment, only genetics is left. There is nothing else.

But you can’t remove the environment. We’re social and cultural creatures. You can’t raise humans in a laboratory which is what you’d have to do in order to eliminate the possibility that what you think are genetic effects are actually social and cultural effects. And you can never create a society in which the social and cultural environment will be the same for everybody.

So any theories about human behaviour cannot be scientifically tested in a meaningful way.

When you have a viable plan to “capture” the government get back to me.

Trump did it,

No, the government captured Trump.

That’s why your idea of “capturing” the government is unworkable. When you have an entire political/economic system that is corrupt then anyone who “captures” the government just gets absorbed by it, and ends up being just as useless and corrupt as all the other swamp creatures.

And that’s what would happen to A123’s fabled Christian Populists. They’d become just as corrupt and just as slimy as the current crop of swamp creatures.

On top of that you have the problem that any movement aimed at reforming the system through the political process will attract a large number of grifters and fakers and cynical self-servers. They’d sell their supporters out within five minutes of “capturing” the government.

If you “equalize” the environment, only genetic “breeders” will be producing children.

Assuming that genetic breeders exist. Which is a huge assumption.

It’s like speculating on the reproductive habits of unicorns without going to the trouble of first establishing that unicorns actually exist.

Also we’re not equalising the environment. Unless you think that the upper middle classes inhabit the same social environment as the poor, or that rural people and urban people inhabit the same social environment.

It may seem strange to say this but we don’t actually know why people have children. Or why they don’t have children. We have lots of theories but they’re no more than theories. We don’t know why the demographic collapse has happened.

I said the other day that one a scale of 1 to 10 Australia governments were now at 11 on the COVID Hysteria Scale. They’ve now ramped that up to about 14.

Of course they do have a point. Maybe we should have permanent lockdown. After all is there really any valid reason people should ever want to leave their homes? If you’re leaving your home you’re probably up to no good.

And is there any reason that we need shops and cinemas and restaurants and bars and children’s playgrounds? They just encourage anti-social behaviour. When I see people walking their dogs or children playing in a park my immediate impulse is to call a policeman.

We also need to rethink the whole housing thing. Is it really necessary, for example, for married couples to live under the same roof? It’s very unhygienic. And if they’re practising Covid-Safe Sex (always remain at least six feet away from each other and make sure you wear your Hazmat suit) there’s no reason at all to live under the same roof.

As for children living in the same houses as their parents, that’s just crazy. Much too risky.

We need to learn that being an isolated alienated atomised individual is a Good Thing. It leaves us more time for the important things in life, like online shopping.

I just want people to be safe.

Unless, of course, you start to see Karlin’s theorized phenomenon where large populations of modernity-resistant “breeders” show up sooner among whites and Asians.

Karlin seems to be a nice guy but his “breeder” theory is the most spectacular example of copium that I’ve ever come across. “Breeders” are like unicorns. They’re a touchingly child-like fantasy.

Believing in them is a bit like believing in the rising tide of Christian Populism.

They’re both examples of the increasing tendency of right-wingers to believe in comforting fairy tales.

The little platoons have collapsed and no one knows why.

That’s true. But it means you’ll never really have that emotional patriotism that you hanker for. Governments will become more and more remote and people will feel less and less connection with the nation state. You’ll have nation states held together by inertia, by greed, and by increasing levels of totalitarian social control. Patriotism in any real sense is a thing of the past.

It is already happening in that Australia, and to a certain extent, the U. S., are at the mercy of Red China.

LOL.

The only path to salvation will be to “capture” the government and use that power to reverse the damage.

When you have a viable plan to “capture” the government get back to me.

Well, its not really incompatible. My experience with groups is indeed that trannies(or lesbians) take over whenever it is female dominated, so it may very well be that trannies are leading the charge because they can now employ the vast firepower of feminist organizations behind them which helps them get both status and wealth.

In fact, the lockdowns and structural economic changes alone will have a similar effect to what happened in the post-Soviets.

I certainly think the lockdowns and the inevitable economic chaos they’re going to create could cause birth rates to really start to plunge in many western countries. We could be looking at Singapore or South Korea-level fertility (maybe around 1.0).

But artificial famines (possibly by interrupting supply chains or denying shoppers) or wartime deaths are still on the table.

It’s more likely that our governments will bungle their way into destroying our economies, and then birth rates will really start to hit rock bottom.

I’d like to see population decline but Id like to see it properly managed. But I don’t think western governments today are capable of managing anything intelligently. Whether birth rates continue to fall or whether they recover slightly we’re still in for a very rough ride.

And the scary thing is that the quality of political leadership in the West continues to decline. I mean, Boris Johnson. Dear God.

I’d be curious if there’s new information here. Last I saw, the UN was still projecting for SSA to have TFRs in the 3-4 range by mid-century

Kenya’s TFR has dropped from 8.0 in 1975 to 3.5 and it continues to plunge. At the present rate they’ll be below replacement level within fifteen years. At the present rate they’ll be at Singapore levels (less than half replacement level) by mid-century.

polite society in the US doesn’t really even have language to prevent migration from Africa

Another example of my point that the US is its own distinctive civilisation, radically different culturally from the rest of the western world.

Britain seems to be in between. They’re unbelievably Woke and PC and they’re now well on the way to being a police state. They seem to be culturally and politically halfway between the US and the rest of the western world.

Of all western nations I’d say that Britain is the most comprehensively doomed.

Isn’t the TFR dropping in many African countries?

Not just dropping. In many African countries it’s plummeting at a breathtaking pace.

This is the big demographics story of today and almost nobody is aware of it. Most people (on both Left and Right) are still buying into Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb hysteria.

Classical liberalism has been a major pillar in the creation and functioning of modern nation states. Without “patriotism” nation states will fail. You are a perfect example with your indifference to “team Australia” of the failing nation state.

If nation states are to have a future they’ll need to be organised differently and function differently. They’re going to need to be more granular. Based more on local and regional loyalties, with more local and regional autonomy. I think that’s the only way to build some kind of emotional sense of belonging, which I’m assuming is what you mean by patriotism.

We know that the Federal Government doesn’t give a damn about us and has no understanding of real problems that face real people. In Australia we also know that state governments don’t give a damn about us and have no understanding of real problems that face real people. But there’s a chance of persuading people that their local mayor might actually understand their problems, and might even care.

In Australia local government has just enough power to harass us with silly regulations but not enough power to do anything to improve our lives. And, crucially, local government lacks the power to intervene effectively for us with state governments and the Federal Government.

If I lived in East Gippsland in Victoria and it had an effective regional government with actual power you might have some chance of persuading me to identify with Team East Gippsland, and if that regional authority had sufficient power to intervene on behalf of the people in that region then I might feel slightly happier about the Team Australia thing.

Short version: in nation states today power is too distant and too impersonal.

Christian Populism is alive in well in the UK. While BoJo is a dubious leader, BREXIT is a success.

LOL. Brexit had zero to do with Christianity. It may been populist, but it certainly wasn’t Christian Populism. Populism might be viable in western Europe, but it won’t be Christian. Your view is pure wishful thinking.

The Visegrad 4 nations are using their grouping to fight for Christian Populist values.

I don’t see Christianity having much future in eastern Europe. Communism had the paradoxical effect of preserving Christianity in eastern Europe, by slowing down the drift towards consumerism and hedonism and mass entertainment degeneracy. With communism gone eastern Europe will in a couple of decades be as secular and pozzed as western Europe. Your view is pure wishful thinking.

I think you are over reaching when you state that extraordinarily distant enclaves (such as new Zealand and Australia) are permanently incompatible with Christian Populism. There are very unique pressures on those nations coming from CCP Elite Colonial ambition.

Now you’re just talking absolute nonsense. Australia has been a hyper-secular society for a century. Christians have been for many decades a tiny insignificant minority, and the overwhelming majority of Australian Christians are incredibly pozzed and incredibly Woke.

You’re basing your fantasies on the US, which is a totally different culture. Christian Populism and the MAGA cult are not exportable. Do you have any idea how much Trump and the MAGA crowd are loathed and despised in Australia? Even by Australian Christians. We don’t have a Religious Right and we never did.

Australia and the US have different histories. Christianity has played a very minor role in Australian history. Catholicism had some influence but that evaporated half a century ago.

As for your bizarre ideas that the evil Chinese commies are behind it, they’re simply laughable.

That is one thing and the WEF’s radical plans another.

If depopulation is to happen it should be one prospective mother at a time, without starving the existing population.

That’s how it will happen. Nobody is going to try to achieve depopulation by starvation or genocide or
(according to bizarre rightoid conspiracy theories) vaccinations. That won’t happen because it would have a negative effect on corporate profits and the mega-corporations are not going to permit that to happen.

And it’s unnecessary since birth rates have already plummeted or are in the process of plummeting globally.

On a completely selfish level, its possible too that feminist organizations need to keep picking fights in order to maintain their viability, including funding from donations, etc.

Yep. There are no feminist battles that need to be won and there haven’t been since the 1970s. The LGBT crowd got everything any reasonable person could want by the 80s. But all those “activists” want to stay on the gravy train. So they keep inventing meaningless new battles that supposedly have to be fought.

The main objective of these movements is to ensure a continued flow of money into the pockets of the leaders of the movement and those full-time activists who are otherwise unemployable.

In 1964, Frances A. Yates advanced the thesis that Renaissance Hermeticism, or what she called “the Hermetic tradition”

I’ve read several of her books. They’re fascinating stuff. She’s well worth reading. I was somewhat blown away by her The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. And Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, her most famous book, is one I’d highly recommend.

You can never think about the Renaissance the same way again after reading her books.

On a global scale, this means only Africa is heavily reproducing where as the rest of the world is declining

African birth rates are plummeting.

In Western Europe, it is mainly low IQ natives and migrants who are reproducing where as the middle of the road IQs or higher tier is declining.

Is that really true? I know it’s an article of faith among rightoids that the poor are breeding like rabbits, but is it true?

And immigrant birth rates start falling rapidly among the second and third generations.

Point is – demographic decline is not going to save us and usher in a great world of futuristic technology if we just continue to wait. At most, what we will see is a long decline in living standards or a long stagnation if you will, leading to what I call “Global South Africa” – lots of low IQ poverty that is surrounded by high IQ gated communities until finally, the whole thing breaks.

Demographic decline will not save us on its own but it’s an essential component of any strategy with any chance of saving us.

I predict that we will have a new dark age in the West by the next century.

Probably, but high birth rates would hasten the coming of the new Dark Age.

I don’t think that they did. The English military would never go into the vaunted degree of esteem that say the Prussians did with their infantry, or even the nigh unbeatable mythos of the Grande Armee.

All Great Powers engage in propaganda. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that the British were the only ones who did so. But I think that British propaganda was remarkably successful and effective, and was done with considerable subtlety. The propaganda of other Great Powers seems crude by comparison. British propaganda was directed both at their own population, and their subject populations. And it was also directed very much at the Americans.

They managed to convince the British lower classes (who were treated with loathing and contempt by the ruling class) that they benefited from the Empire. They managed to convince the world at large that the British Empire was a benevolent and civilising endeavour and that it was the result of wisdom and a sense of duty, rather than the ill-judged, cynical and hypocritical undertaking that it really was.

They managed to a surprising extent to convince Americans of all this, which was necessary since the Empire was an absurd luxury which Britain could not afford and was incapable of defending. Americans at the time, and to a surprising extent today, actually believe that Britain was up to 1914 the most powerful nation on Earth when in reality Britain was the least powerful of the 19th century Great Powers and was governed by half-wits.

Corelli Barnett’s books provide an eye-opening view of the reality behind the illusion.

It was just that as an unified whole and with a strong navy, there were entirely capable of projecting force and playing the Great Game, which they did with effectiveness.

It was largely bluff. They had a huge navy but it was not huge enough to defend the Empire. In the First World War it was the Imperial Japanese Navy which defended the British Empire. The British navy was strong enough to contain the German High Seas Fleet (despite the tendency of British capital ships to explode if you looked sideways at them) but could not defend the Empire as well.

And that latter part was certainly not just propaganda.

Propaganda was an essential component.

The British had to sell their propaganda to the Americans because they were dependent on American money and American military assistance. By the late 19th century British industrial might an illusion. Having industrialised first they had a backward disorganised inefficient industrial sector. The British were only able to fight the First World War successfully because they were able to persuade Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, Indians and Americans to shed their blood for the sake of the British Empire. And because they were able to persuade the Americans to pay for Britain’s war efforts.

They did the same thing in 1939. They became involved in a war they could not afford to fight and were laughably incapable of fighting but they persuaded the Americans to pay the bills and shed American blood for them.

Anglos were the best naval power, but on land they were very beatable by Europeans.

But they were very good at propaganda. They managed to create a myth of Anglo martial prowess and managed to persuade people to believe that myth.

They also managed to create a myth of the glorious British Empire, which was in fact a ramshackle anarchic mess held together by bluff. Once the British Empire was challenged it collapsed like a house of cards.

LEXX is extremely cheesy, but that’s part of its joy: the utter weirdness of the universe, and its own internal logic. I mean, where else do you get undead hippy assassins, giant asteroid-sized insect rivals to humanity, and partially conditioned sex slaves reconditioned into suicide battle slaves all inside a living ship that’s looking forward to giving birth?

Its very, very wild.

Yep. LEXX is so much more fun than most sci-fi TV series. It’s inspired craziness with a willingness to take risks. It’s what science fiction should be – wild imaginative leaps. And it absolutely glories in its cheesiness.

Compared to the turgid politically correct dreck that passes for for most TV sci-fi it’s brilliant stuff.

This is why we should never see anything in terms of infinite progress, and what we have in the last 300 years could be a one-of-a-kind event that our species will never replicate again.

Yes, precisely.

The economic growth at all costs, population growth at all costs, let’s just use up all our resources as quickly as we can model is reckless insanity.

And the idea that technological progress will continue indefinitely at the breakneck pace of the 19th and 20th centuries my be pure wishful thinking.

We’re actually getting a lucky break. Population decline is happening naturally and we have the opportunity to reduce population to saner levels without any need to resort to inhumane measures and without any unpleasantness.

Fortunately pro-natalist policies are very very unlikely to have any appreciable effect so we’re almost certainly going to get population decline no matter what we do.

We are unlikely to run out of resources.

That’s a huge gamble. The high birth rate option is very much a massive gamble. What if we run out of resources here on Earth before we figure out how to access those supposedly unlimited resources?

Demographic decline means making a much more realistic and sensible gamble. If the population falls significantly we could conceivably buy ourselves another couple of centuries, during which time we might develop the technology to allow us to reach and access those supposedly unlimited resources.

If we go for high birth rates we’re staking everything on the assumption that our next throw of the dice will be a lucky one. We’re staking everything on the assumption that we’ll develop Star Trek technology soon enough to save ourselves from the collapse of advanced technological civilisation.

And given the fact that we’ve already used up all the easily accessible resources that would be required to build a new advanced technological civilisation we should assume that if advanced technological civilisation does collapse we will never be able to rebuild it. We’ll be facing a subsistence agriculture future.

If you favour the high birth rate option you’d better lay in a big supply of hopium.

So are the Neo-Malthusians right on a long timescale? (resources are not strictly limited to what we have at the moment)

I think it would be wise to assume that resources are strictly limited to what we have at the moment. Anything else is science fiction fantasy daydreams. You know, like faster-than-light travel, space colonies and stuff like that. Geek wishful thinking.

as I find that ideological fervour is mostly a complicated form of self-hatred.

Could be.

I also note that I’ve never met a woman, who is in the grip of fervent feminism, who seems to be happy.

It’s kind of sad that none of these liberationist movements seem to have made anyone happy. I’ve even encountered male homosexuals and lesbians who say that being gay was much more fun when they were closeted and they had their own distinctive subcultures.

So yeah, ideological fervour seems to be a recipe for making people angry and miserable.

the truth is that the feminist movement could not have been more successful.

The feminist movement was immensely successful in achieving its goals. Whether the achievement of those goals actually benefited more than a small number of privileged upper middle class women is debatable. Whether those goals were ever intended to benefit more than a small number of privileged upper middle class women is also debatable.

But feminism certainly benefited the corporate bottom line.

BTW I’m not one of those knuckle-dragging Unz Review misogynists who wants to take the vote away from women and force women to be baby-making machines (often in the service of some weird fantasies about breeding warriors to fight a race war).

I think some kind of feminism was desirable but I also think that women ended up getting the wrong kind of feminism foisted on them. What they got was a misogynistic brand of feminism that saw men as superior creatures who had to be slavishly emulated and wanted to turn women into men in skirts.

I guess in LEXX, the Shadow Empire gets destroyed because they don’t wipe out the Brunnen-G.

You’re a closet LEXX fan? Awesome.

Just remember that Conformity is Freedom.

Orwell, not Huxley.

It’s Orwell without the “boot stomping on a human face” bit. Which is not orthodox Orwellism. It’s heretical Orwellism.

We’ve chosen conformity rather than freedom, which is perhaps something that people will always do. People really don’t seem to like freedom all that much. For most people freedom means the freedom to conform.

Like people who express their individuality by getting tattoos, just like every single person in their peer group.

I personally do like freedom, but I’m weird.