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Immaturity as Slavery
“… but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a world of secondhand, childish banalities.” – Sir Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance.
The opening quote comes from a part of Alec Guinness’ 1999 autobiography which greatly amuses me. The actor of Obi Wan Kenobi is confronted by a twelve-year-old boy in San Francisco, who tells him of his obsessive love for Star Wars. Guinness asks if he could do the favour of “promising to never see Star Wars again?”. The lad cries, and his indignant mother drags him away. Guinness ends with the above thought. He hopes the boy is weaned from Star Wars before adulthood, lest he become a pitiful specimen.
Here enters the figure of the twenty-first century man-child, alias the “kidult”. He’s been on the radar for a while. Social critic Neil Postman prophesies the coming of “adult-children” in The Disappearance of Childhood from 1982. American journalist Joseph Epstein calls this same creature “The Perpetual Adolescent” in a 2004 article of the same name. But the best summary of this character I’ve yet found is by the writer Jacopo Bernardini, from 2014, to which I can add but little.
The kidult is one who lives his life as an eternal present. As the name suggests, his life is a sort of permanent adolescence. He is sceptical of traditional definitions of adulthood, so has deliberately shunned milestones like marriage and childbearing, in favour of an unattached lifestyle which lasts indefinitely. His relations with other people remain short and shallow; based entirely on fun and mutual use (close friendships or passionate love-affairs are not for him).
Most importantly, the kidult doesn’t change his tastes or buying habits with age. The thresholds of adolescence and maturity have no bearing on the things he likes and purchases, nor how he relates to these things. Not only does he like the same toys and cartoons at thirty as he did at ten, but he continues to obsess over them and impulsively buy them like when he was ten. Enjoying childhood fare isn’t a playful interlude, but a way of life which never ends. He consumes through instant gratification, paying no thought to any long-term pattern or goal.
Although it must not strike the reader as obvious, I think there exists a link between Guinness’ “secondhand, childish banalities” and a kind of latter-day slavery. To see the link needs some prep work, but once laid, I think the reader will see my point.
First to define servility. I believe the conservative writer Hilaire Belloc gave the best definition, and I shall freely paraphrase him. The great mass of people can be restricted yet not servile. Both monopolistic capitalism and socialism reduce workers to dependency, but neither makes them entirely slaves. Under capitalism, society retains an ideal of freedom, enshrined in law. Even as monopolists manipulate the law with their money, the ideal remains. Under socialism, state ownership is supposed to give all citizens leisure to do what they want (even as the state strangles them). In either case then, freedom is present as an ideal in theory even as it ceases to exist in practice. Monopolistic and socialist states don’t think of themselves as unfree.
Slavery is different. A slave society has relinquished even the pretence of freedom for a large mass of the working people. Servility exists when a great multitude are forced to work while having no productive property, and no economic independence. That is, a servile person owns nothing (or effectively nothing) and has no choice whatsoever over how much he works or for whom he works. Most ancient civilisations, like Egypt, Greece, and Rome were servile, with servility existing as a defined legal category. That some men were owned by others was as enshrined by law as the ownership of land or cattle.
Let’s put a little Aristotle into the mix. There are two kinds of obedience: from a free subject to a ruler, and from an unfree slave to his master. These are often confused but distinct. For while the former is reasonable, the latter involves no reason and is truly blind.
True authority is neither persuasion nor force. If an officer argues to a soldier why he should obey, then the two are equals, and there’s no chain of command. But if the officer must hold a gun to the man’s head and threaten to execute him lest he do his duty, this isn’t authority either. The soldier obeys because he’s terrified, but not because he respects his superior as a superior. True authority lies in the trust which a subordinate has for the wisdom and expertise of a superior. This only comes if he’s rational enough to understand the nature of what he’s a part of, what it does, and that some people with knowhow must organise it to work properly. A sailor understands he’s on a ship. He understands that a ship has so many complex functions that no one man could know or do them all. He understands that his captain is a wiser and more experienced fellow than he. So, he trusts the captain’s authority and obeys his orders.
I sketch this Aristotelian view of authority because it lets us criticise servility without assuming a liberal social contract idea. What defines slavery isn’t that the slave hasn’t chosen his master. Nor that the slave doesn’t get to argue about his orders. A slave’s duty just is the arbitrary will of his master. He doesn’t have to trust his master’s wisdom, because he doesn’t have to understand anything to be a slave. That is, while a soldier must rationally grasp what the army is, and a citizen must rationally grasp what society is, a slave is mentally passive.
Now, to Belloc’s prophecy concerning the fate of the west. The struggle between ownership and labour, between monopoly capitalism and socialism, which existed in his day, he thought would result in the re-institution of slavery. This would happen through convergence of interests. The state will take an ever-larger role in protecting workers through a safety net, that they don’t starve when unemployed. It will nationalise key industries, it will tax the rich and redistribute the wealth through welfare. But monopolies will still dominate the private sector.
Effectively, this is slavery. For the worker is protected when unemployed but has entirely lost the ability to choose his employer, or even control his own life. To give an illustration of what this looks like in practice: there are post-industrial towns in Britain where the entire population is either on welfare or employed by a handful of giant corporations (small business having ceased to exist). To borrow from Theodore Dalrymple, the state controls everything about these people, from the house they inhabit to the school they attend. It gives them pocket-money to spend into the private sector dominated by monopolies, and if they want to work, they can only work for monopolists. They fear neither starvation nor a cold night, but they have entirely lost their freedom.
This long preamble has been to show how freedom is swapped for safety in economic terms. But I think there’s more to it. First, the safety may not be economic but emotional. Second, the person willing to enter this swindle must be of a peculiar mindset. He must not know even a glimmer of true independence, lest he fight for it. A dispossessed farmer, for example, who remembers his crops and livestock will fight to regain them. But a man born into a slum, and knowing only wage labour, will crave mere safety from unemployment. Those who don’t know autonomy don’t long for it.
There now exist a troop of companies that market childish goods for adult consumption. They typically do this in one of two ways. First, offering childish products to adults under the guise of nostalgia. The adult is encouraged to buy things reminding him of his childhood, with the promise that he will relive it. Childish media and products are given an adult spin, and remarketed. Toys are rebranded as collectibles. Children’s films get unnecessary, adult-oriented, sequels or remakes (what Bernardini calls “kidult movies”). Originally child-friendly festivals or theme parks are increasingly marketed to childless adults.
The second way is by infantilising adult products. Adverts, for example, have gradually replaced stereotypical busy office workers and exhausted housewives with frolicking kidults. No matter how trivial, every product that is not related to Christmas, is now surrounded by giddy, family-free people engaged in play. The message we’re meant to get is that the vacuum cleaner or stapler will free us to act like children. By buying these things, we can create time for the true business of life: bouncing and smiling with one’s mouth open.
I believe infantilism to be a kind of mental slavery. In both the above examples, three elements combine: ignorance and mass media channel anxiety into childishness. This childishness then binds the victim in servitude to masters who take away his freedom while robbing him in the literal sense.
An artificial ignorance created by modern education is the first parent of the man-child. Absent a proper and classical education, the kidult’s mind is an empty page. Lack of general knowledge separates him from the great achievements of civilisation. He cannot seek refuge in Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or Dante, for he has never heard of these. He cannot draw strength from philosophy and religion for the same reason. Neither can he learn lessons from history, for the world begins only with his own birth. Here is a type of mental dispossession parallel to an economic one. Someone utterly ignorant of the answers great people have given to life’s questions will seek only safety, not wisdom.
The second parent is anxiety. Humans have always been terrified of the inevitable decay of their own bodies, followed by death. The wish for immortality is ancient. Yet the modern world, with its scepticism, creates a heightened anxiousness. When all authority and tradition has been deconstructed, there is no ideal for how people ought to live. Without this ideal, humans have no certainty about the future. Medieval people knew that whatever happened, knights fought, villeins worked, and churchmen prayed. Modern man’s world is literally whatever people make of it. It may be utterly transformed in a very short time. And this is anxiety-inducing to all but the most sheltered of philosophers.
Add to this the rise of a selfish culture. As Christopher Lasch tells us, the nineteenth century still carried (in a bastardised way) the ideal of self-sufficiency and virtue of the ancient man. Working and trading was still tied to one’s flourishing in society. Since 1960, as family and community have disintegrated, the industrialised world has degenerated into a Hobbesian “war of all against all”. A world of loneliness without parents and siblings; lacking true friends and lovers. When adulthood has become toxic and means to swim in a sea of disfunction, vulgarity, substance abuse and pornographic sexuality; it’s no surprise some may snap and long for a regression to childhood.
Mass media is the third condition. It floods the void where education and community used to be. The space where general knowledge isn’t, now gets stamped by fiction, corporate advertising, and state propaganda. These peddle in a mass of cliches, stereotypes, and recycled tropes.
My critique of kidults isn’t founded on “good old days” nostalgia, itself a product of media cliches. Fashions, customs, and culture change; and the citizen of today doesn’t have to be a joyless salaryman or housewife to count as an adult. Rather, the man-child phenomenon is a massive transfer of power away from the small and towards the large. The kidult is like an addict, hooked on feelings of cosy fun and nostalgia which are only provided by corporations. These feelings aren’t directed to the good of the kidult but the organisation acting as a dealer. The dealer controls the strength and frequency of the dose to get the wanted behaviour from the addict.
Now we see how kidults can be slaves. First, they’ve traded freedom for safety (false as it is) like Belloc’s proletarians made servile. Unlike the security of a traditional slave, this is an emotional illusion. The man-child believes that there’s safety in the stream of childish images offered to him. He believes that by consuming these the pain of life will cease. Yet man-children get no material or mental benefit from their infantilism. Indeed, they’re fast parted from their money, while getting no skills or virtues in return. The security is merely psychological: a Freudian age regression, but artificially created.
Second, while authority in Aristotle’s sense means to swap another’s judgement for your own, for the sake of a common good you understand; here you submit to another’s judgement for the sake of their private good, which you don’t understand. Organisations seeking only profit or power impose their ideas on the kidult, for their benefit. An immature adult pursues only pleasure, lives only for the present, and thinks only in frivolous stereotypes and cliches implanted during childhood. He’s thus in no position to understand the inner workings of companies and governments. He follows his passions like a sentient puppet obeying an invisible thread, leading always to a hand just out of sight.
In the poem London, William Blake talks about “mind-forg’d manacles”. These are the beliefs people have which constrain their lives in an invisible prison of sorts. For what we think possible or impossible guides our acting. Once mind-forg’d manacles are common to enough people, they form a culture (what’s a culture if not collective ideas on how one should act?). Secondhand childish banalities are such mind-forg’d manacles if we let them determine us wholly. Their “secondhand” nature means the forging has been done for us, and this makes them more insidious than ideas of our own creation. For if what I’ve said above is true, they threaten to make us servile. If enough people become dependent on secondhand childish banalities, as the boy who met Alec Guinness, then the whole culture becomes servile. Growing up may be painful, but it’s a duty to ourselves, that we remain free.
If There is Hope, It Lies in the NIMBYs
~ To my good friend Chris, who – despite the best available treatment – continues to suffer with YIMBY brainrot. ~
If there was hope, it must lie in the NIMBYs, because only there in those nonconforming disregarded boomers, ~22 per cent of the population of Britannia, could the force to destroy the regime ever be generated. The regime could not be overthrown from within a newbuild. It is them and them alone who are capable of preventing further mass migration into these isles. Collective animosity to the transformation of our country over the last seventy years can only be galvanised through the emergence of direct and inescapable negative externalities of the immigrant population being here.
The NIMBY’s dug-in heels expose the costs of the unnatural population boom that has been imposed on us, through hospital appointment delays, waiting lists, the lack of available school placements, etc. and through these problems the British are made incapable of following the path of least resistance and fleeing their local ship and scurrying to cheaper houses elsewhere. NIMBYism will push us all against the wall and ensure we confront the real and existential threat facing our people.
Let us suppose we disregard the NIMBYs, fall to the knees of our enemies, and beg them to build more houses regardless of the protestations of white Lib Dem voters: for whom would they really be for? Such housing would only be accessible to the middle class and subsidised immigrants.
Around 80% of the population increase since 2001 has been due to immigration. Many settlements across the country such as Sunderland have seen a population decrease since 2001, yet have had vast newbuild suburbs tacked on around the area, so it has to be stressed that these houses being built are not for those already here.
The goal of house building is instead an attempt to maintain a semblance of stability as our occupation government intends to push immigration each year into the millions. The price of housing can never be brought down under this arrangement. All we can currently control locally in our own communities is how much space is opened up for displacement populations to be moved in. For a country that has had a negative birth-rate for decades, you would think that there would be no seething cries for concreting over the remaining pleasant lands unless there were some unnatural force being pulled forth from abroad artificially ballooning the demand for housing.
Quell your trivial lamentations, for if we are unable to own homes and the rent becomes too high we can always live with our families and they (the potential repopulators) can continue living elsewhere. The gap between rental supply and demand is like a Thermopylaen dam, holding back the forces of change and securing what remains of the villages and towns that we grew up in.
It is worth looking at the impulse towards YIMBYism before continuing on with the defence of NIMBYism. YIMBYs are, basically, a self-interested cohort of deracinated individuals incapable of feeling any sincere communitarian connection to the country they purport to care about. No one who ascribes to YIMBYism in the present could ever truly be right wing, and they are certainly not nationalists by any real definition.
The motivation for YIMBYs is the desire for personal material gain irrespective of the consequences to the wider nation as a whole. You would have to be deeply, spiritually indolent to be aware of the racial dimension to the present struggle yet continue to spend your time focused on pushing for as many things to be constructed as possible (lest the Roman goddess Maia smite you down from her Olympian high-rise building).
This can all be contrasted with NIMBYs, where, on the surface it seems to be primarily a cause wrought from self-interest, yet there is an implicit racialism, or at least communal collectivism, that animates them into spending so much of their time trying to stop the construction of anything near their homes.
There is a subconscious understanding granted to NIMBYs, by their blood and bones, that any and all development is wedded to the immigration issue, even if they do not articulate their reasoning as such. Even if they are outwardly liberal and vote for the uniparty, in one garish form or another, they have still been compelled to try and halt the stampede of construction; compelled by grander tribal considerations beyond their conscious control and far beyond the petty desires of their local area.
NIMBYs, God bless them, sit atop the large ball and chain shackled to the YIMBY bug man that is desperately trying to claw the nation towards total multiracial capitalist dystopia, under the guise of it being ‘based’ someday.
The NIMBYs, by their actions, are making it as difficult as possible for those in power to bring about their desired thousand-year panopticonic hell of global technocratic control. They exclaim with righteous fury ‘the character of the area will change’ and, with this implicitly reactionary rallying cry, they proclaim a stand is being taken in defence of what our ancestors left for us; in defence of what is ours, in defence of what we must dutifully preserve for those that will come after us. If you oppose these sentiments and side with the YIMBY cause of pro-building you are anti-white.
Who else is deserving of praise when these issues are discussed in our circles but the late great Richard Beeching, without whose cuts to our rail infrastructure we would be deprived of rural Britain in its frozen primordial state. This is the power of Levelling Down, the inadvertent preservation of what really matters, of what we conjure in our mind’s eyes when we hear the word ‘England’.
What would the demography and texture of life of rural areas look like had those arterial transport lines not been severed by the British Railways Board at that moment in time? Those geniuses of bureaucracy looked only at immediate cost-saving measures yet ensured much of Britain would progress far slower than the urban warts in the fore, much like how Eastern Bloc states were shielded from decades of societal and cultural degeneration occurring in the west.
This has already played itself out before in our past. In Victorian Britain, Peterborough and Swindon were enlarged and urbanised due to their status as railway towns, and in contrast, towns such as Frome and Kendal remained intact due to being bypassed by the main lines. What could be argued to have been unfortunate then has been insulating for rural areas affected in the same way now.
It is far harder to displace local economies and people when there is simply no infrastructure to enable newcomers moving in, and those in power know this. Even in official government reports, our overlords lament how the rural areas of our country continue to be white spaces (in contrast to our grey polyglot citadels to nowhere), which has only been possible because of our inefficient and underdeveloped infrastructure.
Even setting aside the more esoteric takes on NIMBYism, NIMBYs have plenty of legitimate reasons to be opposed to construction in the areas they live in. Villages and towns throughout the country are under threat of being subsumed into a mass of soulless commuter zones around the nearest city. Everything is set to be absorbed into a blob of suburban prison cells without community or belonging, all to line the pockets of parasitic housing companies and give ascent to the ethnic machinations of our destructors.
People who live in these places know that expansion means that everything outside of their front door will look and feel more like London and they correctly reject it. People instinctively recoil at the efficiency with which 5G towers were pockmarked across our landscape during the Covid ‘Lockdowns’ and people are right to be repelled by all of the slick technological wonders of ‘smart homes’ sold to us by our masters. None of these things are congruent with how anyone deep-down wants Britain to be.
YIMBYism is deceptive in its overall presentation as being the sensible or reasonable option, in contrast to the supposed extreme positions of many NIMBYs (which is a self-own in its own right), but YIMBYs do not actually care about real development of this country. Most, if not all, of the real solutions that would give us good-quality, affordable housing would be contrary to a policy of deregulating the economy and doing whatever international finance asks of us to be done to our land and people.
Such solutions would likely be decried as socialism or communism and with it the YIMBY would expose himself as but a pawn of the oligarchs, no longer a Briton in character or spirit. These points though are a distraction away from what really matters and such policy debates can only be relevant in a post-regime world without the albatross of near-imminent demographic erasure around our neck. The elephant in the room is quickly forgotten about if you even momentarily entertain the notion of house prices mattering beyond any other silly partisan issue discussed in Parliament.
But it is not just housing that is in contention. All forms of expansion and growth are, in the long-term, detrimental to our people whilst we are occupied. Everything done freely in our liberal, capitalist country in the last 50 or so years has been to the detriment of the people our economy is meant to be built around. Every power plant built or maintained allows Amazon warehouses to keep their lights on. Every railway built or maintained ensures employers can reasonably expect you to submit to the Norman Tebbit mindset for how we are to live and work. Every new motorway has facilitated increased population mobility and with it the new motley generation of white collar serfs defend their creators, scuttling across Britain’s surface unable to understand why the older, whiter parts of the country might have deep-rooted connections to the places they live.
This new generation, marketed as the ‘Young Voters’ or ‘Young People’, do not really exist in the same way that Boomers and Gen Xers do. Trying to appeal to or identify with this spectral universal generation of youths is to view these issues through an inherently post-racial lens, and by extension, to misunderstand the driving motivations of NIMBYism. The older generations, which are the bulk of those that sympathise with NIMBYism, are the only ones that matter politically and economically and counter-signalling them is implicitly a form of anti-white hatred.
The temporarily-embarrassed plutocrats in our midst are becoming more and more apoplectic when confronted with the reality that the vast majority of the British people want nothing to do with Singapore-style excess capitalism, no matter how desperately they attempt to sell to them the potential material gains and goodies.
We should aspire to be more like Iran, a Tehran-on-Thames, a country that actively restrains the degree to which businesses can expand so that everything stays small and localised. People yearn for flourishing high streets and dignified work local to where they were born, something Iran has succeeded at maintaining with its constitution and system of dominant cooperatives and Bonyads. This is tangential to the NIMBY/YIMBY divide but integral for understanding what is going on.
The British people want the things that they care about protected and secured and valued above the interests of capital or the growth of the economy. Our people have simply had enough of growth, progress and rapid change that they did not vote for, and their views on construction and economics are shaped by that impetus. Brexit Bonyads are inevitable.
If anything is to be conceded to the YIMBYs, it is that their urge to make things more efficient is understandable (natural really for any European man) and a good impulse to have. However, this impulse is being exploited against us, a form of suicide via naivety, where we continue pursuing these instincts in spite of the fruits of said efficiency. My position on nuclear power plants would probably be different if we were the ones in power, or perhaps the small percent chance of something going wrong and having all of Britain’s wildlife poisoned would prevent me from ever endorsing them.
Let us suppose we put pressure on our current regime, a regime similar to the Soviet Union except without any of its upsides, to build a nuclear power plant: can we trust that the diversity hires, rotten civil service and corner-cutting private contractors will not bring about a disaster worse than what occurred at Chernobyl?
Point being, many things which are bad for us now are not bad for us in principle (and vice versa), something atom cultist YIMBYs are incapable of understanding. YIMBYs are equally incapable of understanding why one might be averse to scientific innovations that amount to playing God and making Faustian economic bargains. Money spent on scientific research is better spent on just paying people to leave.
There is an alternative lens to look at everything through though. For those that do not just want to talk all day about nuclear power plants with people that wear polyester suits, for those that have higher values beyond ‘Jee-Dee-Pee’, for those that are capable of having principles they would put before their immediate personal comfort, there is the true way forward.
It is our duty to be revolutionaries, in the vein of Hereward the Wake, villainous rebels resisting the occupation government perched above us. NIMBYism is a successful strategy for a time, this time, in which we have no realistic chance at having power. Frustrating outcomes and disrupting their long march onwards is all we have in our illusory democracy.
Inefficiency is a good thing. We must crave blackouts like houseplants crave sunlight. Our only hope for liberation and true prosperity lies with our regime being as broken as possible. Our people must be pulled from their comfortable position in the warm, crimson-coloured bathwater and alerted to the fragility of their collective mortality. The international clique and their caustic bulldozer of modern progress now have a sputtering engine; it is all grinding to a halt and there lies the hope for our future.
Do not fret! Do not return like a battered housewife to those that wish to destroy us the moment things become inconvenient. Imagine pre-1989 Poles wanting to hold the Soviet Presidium to account, putting pressure on the government to be more efficient, the same government that is occupying their people – that is how ridiculous YIMBYs look to authentic British nationalists and patriots.
Our whole lens must be different if we are to meet the almost-insurmountable forces that tower above us, wishing for our end. As the Book of Job attests, the righteous suffer so as to test their faith in God, to make them more like Him, and to bring Him glory. So too must we be prepared to tolerate personal discomfort if we are to survive as a people, and it is absolutely a question of survival.
Existential threats require recalcitrant attitudes and policy positions and being unable to own a house or having to pay higher rent is a small price to pay to escape the present railroad we have been stuck travelling along since 1948. We all have a collective skin in the game. If the actual issue is not solved (the solution being our regime destroyed and immigration ended) then Britain, as it has existed for more than a millennia, is permanently erased off the map.
The inability to ‘live it up’ as a young voter in the supposed Gerontocracy is not something deserving of any hand-wringing, much less wall-to-wall tweets discussing housing and pensions every day. Some things, most things, matter more than housing being unaffordable and energy bills being costly.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel and until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. Every wrench in the system creates another ripple, another scenario where the masses have their eyes opened to what has happened to their country and what is intended to be done with it in the future.
What lies before us is a task seldom asked even of our ancestors, it is a task of securing our existence before the brink, of pulling everything out from the abyss before it is brought to a state of total oblivion. There are no mechanical little fixes to any of this, civilisation does not work like that and all of the Poundburys and HS2s in the world will not improve our lot in this current epoch. The finest of McTrad housing estates will never be more beautiful than God’s raw, untouched nature.
NIMBYs instinctively know they are in a death battle and understand what really matters in this world. YIMBYs, on the other hand, think this is all algebra that requires university-brained midwits to solve. Damn the YIMBYs. Go forth thy NIMBY warriors, heroes of the fields and hedgerows, paragons of Arthurian legend; lead Britain back to its pre-modern, Arcadian state!
To conclude, a simplistic allegory will be provided: we are farm animals, farm animals on a big gay tax farm. If more barns and cottages are built things will not improve for the animals. More generators will just allow the farmer to expand the slaughterhouse. The solution is not more generators or more buildings on the farm. The solution is to shoot the farmer.
How to contain an increasingly assertive China?
Tensions in the South China Sea are on the rise. The United States has just pledged to defend Philippine vessels if they are attacked over there, after Beijing and Manila blamed each other after a China Coast Guard ship fired water cannons at a Philippine boat. The incident may well be deliberately provoked by China to test the commitment of the United States in the region.
A few weeks ago, a record-breaking number of Chinese warships were spotted in waters around Taiwan within a 24 hour period. This was followed by the unexplained firing of China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Xinping. In the same week, Taiwan held major military drills that simulated an invasion of the island, centred around defending vital beaches and airports.
This volatile mix of escalation and uncertainty is breeding a sense of anxiety for China’s regional neighbours who are all in tense dispute with China over its legally baseless claim to the entirety of the South China Sea – and all the vast mineral wealth beneath the waves.
ASEAN – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – could well play a role here. This is a political and economic union of 10 member states in Southeast Asia. With lingering fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan within the next five years, ASEAN nations must build stronger ties between themselves to act as a stable and unified counterweight to China. This would not only help to push back against Chinese aggression in their own waters, but also give support to Taiwan in any eventual outbreak of war. Furthermore, it would alleviate the burden on the United States.
If ASEAN partners do not present a united front on territorial disputes in the South China Sea then the door will be left open for China to isolate certain nations and coerce them into giving in to Chinese demands. Given its rather particular interpretation of international boundaries, it is only a matter of time before China engages in legal warfare to challenge international boundaries, to the extent it has not already.
Malaysia already experienced something along these lines, albeit not coming from China. Last year, a French court ordered it to pay $14.9 billion to the heirs of the last sultan of Sulu, a part of Malaysia whose sovereign enjoyed compensation from the British when they ruled over the area, which is resource-rich. The newly formed Malaysian state simply continued to pay the heirs an annual stipend of $5,300, until in 2013, following an armed incursion from the Philippines by a group claiming to be the heirs. The French court decision to rule in the way it has is highly controversial, to say at least. The arbitrator who issued the award in the case, Gonzalo Stampa, has now even been slapped with criminal charges in Spain over his role.
In sum, even internationally well-accepted boundaries do not seem safe from legal challenges. Looking at how China has been treating Lithuania, after it was deemed too friendly towards Taiwan, Asian countries should not exclude that the increasingly assertive Chinese state tries to turn courts into an extension of its foreign policy domain.
It would be foolish to underestimate the chances of war in Asia breaking out. Decades of smaller scale lopsided conflicts have already blindsided us to the possibility of large-scale devastating conflicts and we can’t allow that to happen again.
One only needs to look at how Russia took advantage of western dithering to launch the largest war this century which has killed thousands and displaced millions across the European continent. The war in Ukraine is predictably capturing the much of the West’s attention given the acute geopolitical headache it poses, but this is allowing China to escalate tensions around Taiwan and the South China Sea under the radar.
A potential war between China and Taiwan is likely to draw in The United States and make Russia’s war against Ukraine look almost trivial in comparison – impoverishing billions and bring ruin to the wider region.
Indonesia has been singled out as one of the ASEAN partners unwilling to fully show solidarity in opposition to China’s territorial stances when it comes to the South China Sea, but it is not the only one. ASEAN trading nations should take notice how even Germany, always wary of conflict and probably the most diplomatically minded of Western nations, has decided to send two warships to the Indo-Pacific in 2024, repeating what it has already done in 2021.
Germany’s purpose is to make clear to China that pursuing good trade ties should not mean allowing just anything. According to German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, the aim of this move is to demonstrate that Germany is “dedicated to the protection of the rules-based international order that we all signed up to and which we all should benefit from – be it in the Mediterranean, in the Bay of Bengal or in the South China Sea.”
Those ASEAN countries that are still on the fence should take note.
In Defence of Political Conflict
It’s often said that contemporary philosophy is stuck in an intellectual rut. While our forefathers pushed the boundaries of human knowledge, modern philosophers concern themselves with impenetrable esoterica, or gesture vaguely in the direction of social justice.
Yet venture to Whitehall, and you’ll find that once popular ideas have been refuted thoroughly by new schools of thought.
Take the Hegelian dialectic, once a staple of philosophical education. According to Hegel, the presentation of a new idea, a thesis, will generate a competing idea or counterargument, an antithesis. The thesis and the antithesis, opposed as they are, will inevitably come into conflict with one another.
However, this conflict is a productive one. With the merits of both the thesis and the antithesis considered, the reasoned philosopher will be able to produce an improved version of the thesis, a synthesis.
In very basic terms, this is the Hegelian dialectic, a means of philosophical reason which, if applied correctly, should result in a refinement and improvement of ideas over time. Compelling, at its face.
However, this idea is now an outmoded one. Civil servants and their allies in the media and the judiciary have, in their infinite wisdom, developed a better way.
Instead of bothering with the cumbersome work of developing a thesis or responding to it with an antithesis, why don’t we just skip to the synthesis? After all, we already know What Works through observation of Tony Blair’s sensible, moderate time in No 10 – why don’t we just do that? That way, we can avoid all of that nasty sparring and clock off early for drinks.
This is the grim reality of modern British politics. The cadre of institutional elites who came to dominate our political system at the turn of the millennium have decided that their brand of milquetoast liberalism is the be-all and end-all of political thought. The great gods of this new pantheon – Moderation, Compromise, International Standing, Rule of Law – should be consulted repeatedly until nascent ideas are sufficiently tempered.
The Hegelian dialectic has been replaced by the Sedwillian dialectic; synthesis begets synthesis begets synthesis.
In turn, politicians have become more restricted in their thinking, preferring to choose from a bureaucratically approved list of half-measures. Conservatives, with their aesthetic attachment to moderate, measured Edwardian sensibilities, are particularly susceptible to this school of thought. We no longer have the time or space for big ideas or sweeping reforms. Those who state their views with conviction are tarred as swivel-eyed extremists, regardless of the popularity of their views. Despite overwhelming public dissatisfaction with our porous borders, politicians who openly criticise legal immigration will quickly find calls to moderate. If you’re unhappy with the 1.5 million visas granted by the Home Office last year, perhaps you’d be happy with a mere million?
The result has been decades of grim decline. As our social fabric unravels and our economy stagnates, we are still told that compromise, moderation, and sound, sensible management are the solutions. This is no accident. Britain’s precipitous decline and its fraying social fabric has raised the stakes of open political conflict. Nakedly pitting ideas against each other risks exposing our society’s underlying decisions and shattering the myth of peaceful pluralism on which the Blairite consensus rests. After all, if we never have any conflict, it’s impossible for the Wrong Sorts to come out on top.
The handwringing and pearl-clutching about Brexit was, in part, a product of this conflict aversion. The political establishment was ill-equipped to deal with the bellicose and antagonistic Leave campaign, and the stubbornness of the Brexit Spartans. Eurosceptics recognised that their position was an absolute one – Britain must leave the European Union, and anything short of a full divorce would fall short of their vision.
It was not compromise that broke the Brexit gridlock, but conflict. The suspension of 21 rebel Conservative MPs was followed by December’s general election victory. From the beginning of Boris Johnson’s premiership to the end, he gave no quarter to the idea of finding a middle ground.
Those who are interested in ending our national decline must embrace a love of generative adversity. Competing views, often radical views, must be allowed to clash. We should revel in those clashes and celebrate the products as progress. Conservatives in particular must learn to use the tools of the state to advance their interests, knowing that their opponents would do the same if they took power.
There are risks, of course – open conflict often produces collateral damage – but it would be far riskier to continue on our current path of seemingly inexorable deterioration. We must not let the mediocre be the enemy of the good for any longer.
Aliens are not real
In the past three years there has been a lot of open discussion on the topic of UFOs, both in the media, and in government. What initially started as the government “declassifying” video footage of unidentified flying objects captured by the US Air Force, along with vague explanations of their origin or their purpose, has, for many, snowballed into an irrational fear, or hope, that the existence of extraterrestrial beings will be soon made public.
Note that I’m not using the word “alien”. The textbook definition of “alien” simply means “foreign” or “belonging to a different place”. It is a phrase which is simply too broad, and too indescriptive of what these UFOs might be. In fact, the exact phrase used by the American government to explain the original viral video that was released in 2020 and further declassified materials has always been along the lines of “unexplained aerial phenomena”.
The most recent viral video that took Twitter and Instagram by storm was a hearing in Congress on the nature of UFOs/UAPs, where former U.S. intelligence officials testified on their dealings with such matters. The most notable of these testimonies came from David Grosch, who had worked on recovering “crashed” UFOs/UAPs.
In his testimony, Gorsch explained that on recovery of these objects, they recovered “non-human biologics” from the sites. This was the soundbite that took the world by storm, but still, it was incredibly vague.
Neither the committee, nor those giving testimony, could, or would divulge any specifics. “Non-human” biologics could mean anything. You’re surrounded by non-human biologics with plants and animals. You are covered in non-human biologics through the bacteria on your skin.
The fact that no-one on the hearing committee that was asking the questions pressed further to confirm definitively whether or not the source of these craft, and the accompanying “non-human biologics” were from another planet, or at the very least not from Earth, leads me to believe that there is a smoke and mirrors show going on.
By keeping things vague, it keeps engagement and speculation pumping online. It’s also rather convenient that these new developments in regards to “UFOs/UAPs” always seem to occur around the same time the current administration is copping heat for blatant corruption, or dirty back-door deals. Why would anyone care about Biden’s dealings with Bursima and Ukraine when they can be easily entertained and distracted by the government “cover up” about spooky aliens!
Now, let’s get one thing perfectly clear. Aliens are not real. They’re just not, guys.
I know. Gutting news to hear. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if things were actually Star Wars, and interstellar travel was right on our fingertips if it wasn’t for the pesky government keeping things so hush-hush. Oh when, oh when will our extra-terrestrial little green friends come down in their ships, share their technology, and launch us into a new Space Age where we’ll want for nothing, explore the stars, and live in the techno-future of our dreams? Luxury gay space-communism for everyone!
Never. It’s never going to happen.
On a less condescending note, I will do my best to explain why the existence of extraterrestrials is a farcical delusion at best, and at worst an intended deception to hide something more sinister.
Before we dive into that, we are going to have to go back to the beginning of the very concept of “extraterrestrials”. Where did we dream of the idea of visitors from another world?
The answer is actually rather modern, and only goes back to the late 19th century. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the works of H.G. Wells – the father of science fiction. Wells was an incredibly influential and popular writer during his time, and his most popular work War of the Worlds was by far the most impactful on the public consciousness.
Stories of “other-worldly” beings had been written about before, of course, but not in the same sense as Wells was able to. Through his incredible writing, he was able to describe a Martian civilisation that was incredibly similar to ours, driven by similar goals of conquest as we humans were, but expanded to a larger, galactic scale.
Wells described often how War of the Worlds was inspired by interactions between European empires and far less advanced tribes in foreign lands, and through this very real and observable reality in the 19th century of advanced civilisations conquering lesser ones, it made the concept that we too may also be the conquered savage’s one day made for a very terrifying thought indeed.
Wells would spark the wave of science fiction that would go on to dominate the literature market well into our time, and through this popularity of science fiction, came a way for us to try and understand things we previously thought unexplainable.
You see, UFOs/UAPs are hardly a “new” phenomena of the past two centuries.
Lights in the sky, unexplainable interactions with “beings” that don’t appear to be human, and many of the experiences that we chalk up to “aliens” and extraterrestrials used to be explained through other means; namely spirits, angels, demons, gods, and so on.
There are countless stories throughout history of people interacting with these phenomena. You can listen to a few of them with Voices of the Past’s excellent video taking five separate accounts through history.
The accounts, especially from the very distant past who were uninfluenced by works of science fiction, would’ve hardly thought that these experiences came from extraterrestrial visitors or “little green men” as we often do.
Even though these experiences that others in the past had with the unexplained or “paraphysical” phenomena were fantastical and unfamiliar, they didn’t get lost looking at the stars, and instead tried to explain them through more worldly means – whether that was through religion or myths.
For the secularists amongst us who don’t believe in the “supernatural” or “spiritual” realms and interactions from them being a more likely possibility for UFO/UAP experiences, there is always the statistic that ghost-sightings and stories of possession began to subside heavily around the same time that stories of alien abductions and UFO sightings took off.
If you don’t want to explain the mysterious lights in the sky and interactions with the unknown through spiritualism and religion, you can always explain it through mass psychosis and delusions. As Carl Sagan once regarded the noticeable increase of “abductions” amongst Americans in particular, “…because of human fallibility, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Let’s also not forget that some of the most famous stories of “extraterrestrials” and UFOs turned out to be nothing more than obfuscation to cover-up the truth about weapons tests and top secret technologies.
One of the most famous of which, the 1957 Roswell Incident, occured when a rancher discovered a crashed “alien spacecraft” on his land. The press ran wild with the story, and Roswell, New Mexico became a hotbed for alien enthusiasts the world over. It wasn’t until 19944 that it was revealed that the “alien crash” turned out to be a high-altitude balloon used to detect nuclear tests from the Soviet Union, as part of the top secret Operation Mogul.
Of course at the time it would not be in the best interests of the American government to have come out and said “no, this test aircraft is actually part of a secret surveillance program”. It is much better to let the fantastic and whimsical stories capture the imagination of the public and distract them from what’s really going on. From then on, any aircraft or weapons tests in the New Mexico/Area 51 area could be attributed to extraterrestrial visitors, rather than the development of next generation stealth aircraft.
It’s the perfect cover-up, really. Convince the gullible and easily captivated masses that you are hiding the truth of something as absurd as aliens, that they’ll never actually dig for the truth of what you’re actually doing. It’s such an effective method of obfuscation and misdirection that public officials, even Presidents, will believe it.
Looking at you, Ronald Reagan.
So, with pretty much all processes of logical deduction, one’s best assumption that these stories of extraterrestrials are delusional stories from the bored or mentally unsound at the very least, and at the most are stories that are allowed to spread like a virus to cover-up what government/military institutions are actually up to behind their hangar doors.
But what are the consequences of letting this mass delusion take up the public consciousness?
For one, the whole “aliens are real, and the truth of their existence will be revealed soon” line is a bit doomsday-ish. Not in the sense that they will be harbingers of destruction, but more that many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, are banking on the fact that aliens will finally interact with humankind within their lifetime, and bring an end to the “world” as we know it. Much like the XR folks are convinced we will all be dead in a decade, or how the Millerites in the mid-19th century were convinced that the Apocalypse would occur by 1843, it is mass hysteria distracting people from bettering their lives immediately by distracting them with an “end date” or singularity to wait, often perpetually, for.
Simply put, it’s putting false hopes into a false entity. Idolatry of the most basic kind. As Fr. Seraphim Rose put it in his book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in regard to the phenomenon and nature of UFOs; “the message for contemporary mankind is: expect deliverance, not from the Christian revelation and faith in an unseen God, but from vehicles from the sky.”
Unfortunately, the false hope of aliens “saving” us from our problems seems to be an all too-persistent opinion amongst many these days. In my own experience, I have known of very smart, successful, and otherwise very sound-of-mind individuals who are convinced that in the next decade we’ll be invaded by extraterrestrials. These aren’t schizophrenics that are becoming obsessed with the world beyond and apathetic about the world around them – these are regular people like you and me.
And just like with the cover-up surrounding test aircraft and weapons programs in the Cold War, the American government is far too enthusiastic embracing the “UFO/UAP” publicly that it is incredibly suspect, especially given the myriad of scandals, abyss of financial debt, and extreme corruption that is persistent in Washington DC and beyond.
It is much better to distract the masses with a smoke-and-mirror show about the prospect of potentially existential-altering news, rather than have them dig deep into the crimes and lies which are staring them right in the face from very real, very tangible, and very accountable human beings.
Why would people want to try and seek justice for themselves with their time on Earth when the threat/promise of extraterrestrial beings looms over them? With the imminent threat of invasion/promise of a Roddenberry-esque future, that seems like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. We’ll just have to wait patiently until they deliver us from our Earthly coil with their advanced technology that will save/destroy us!
It’s foolish to think this, and it’s time to grow up and understand that no one is coming to save us. Not beings from another planet, and not a miraculous apocalypse that looks like something from a Kirk Cameron televangelist B-film.
It is up to us, and us alone to seek the salvation, justice, and enlightenment we need. With the guiding principles of Christ, and living as best as we can with fundamental Christian principles and lifestyle. Even then, it may never be enough, we are flawed after all – but it’s better than losing our minds in the stars and essentially burying our heads in the sand.
Hopefully, for any fence-sitters or extra-terrestrial enthusiasts that have read this I have been able to convince you to grow out of your obsessions with the little green men – or at the very least I have been able to persuade you to come at the topic with a healthy amount of skepticism and caution.
“But what, pray tell, are those darn lights in the sky and abductions?” I hear you ask from beyond the screen in front of me.
The truth is we may never know for sure. Frankly, it’s probably better that we don’t. There is a hidden world beyond human comprehension that is out there, that is largely responsible for the paranormal, the “otherworldly”, and the unexplainable. Certainly there are countless accounts and stories throughout human history of these experiences and interactions that are convincing enough that the world we occupy isn’t just inhabited by the physical, but that there are other energies, and possibly entities out there.
But, like with anything that steps on the edge of that unseen world – whether it by psychoactive substances, Ouija boards, the occult, or those mysterious lights in the sky – sometimes it’s better to let them remain hidden, unexplained and to not invite them into your life and become obsessed by them.
No good can come of it, and most stories of human interactions with that hidden world point towards the fact that no good ever has come of it.
The Supreme Court is Our Ship, Don’t Let it Sink
As conservatives and moral traditionalists, it’s easy to get despondent and fearful over just how vast and endless the problems we face today are. Here in America especially, the analogy of the “blue wave” of Millenial and Gen-Z voters often leads one to believe that we are surrounded on all sides by an endless sea of “progressivism”.
Nevertheless, in the great blue sea of blue-haired androgynes, we still have our ship, and we still have strong winds that will, in the long term, lead us to the safety of the land.
That ship is the Supreme Court, and it is our job as voters and conservative/traditional activists to ensure that she sails, and that we don’t let this next decade of judicial dominance go to waste as we have with other institutions of power – like the 2019 dominance of the Tory Party in the UK Parliament.
Where power resides is often unclear to most voters, especially in American politics. Our elected representatives in the Senate or the House are often bought and paid for by donors, PACs, business interests, or lobby groups well before they swear their oath of office and promise to represent their constituents to the best of their ability. The same goes with the Presidency, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent on individual runs for the Oval Office.
However, out of the three branches of government that I would trust the most with representing my best interests, I would have to place my faith in the power of the Supreme Court.
These days we’ll often hear and see politicians and activists on social media and in other public forums hounding about the “abuse of power” in the Supreme Court, especially after the recent decisions to overturn Affirmative Action for university applicants, striking down Student Loan Forgiveness, and allowing businesses to refuse services if it goes against their religious beliefs (a.k.a being allowed to refuse baking a cake for a homosexual wedding).
Hillary Clinton, everyone’s favorite former First Lady and “future President”, accused the Supreme Court of being on the side of the wealthy and major corporations.
AOC cried that the recent decisions were “destroying the legitimacy of the court.”
Many more have advocated for more Supreme Court Justices, or regulatory bodies overseeing the Supreme Court so that it doesn’t make the “wrong decisions” for the American people.
While there are plenty of detractors to the efficiency and legitimacy of the Supreme Court, I still argue that this is probably the most important branch of government to protect, and fight for, due to the nature of its being. It was around this time last year I wrote about the Supreme Court in the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision.
Once again, demonstrably, we have seen why the Supreme Court is the most important branch of government, and why it is under attack, and why these days in particular it is the most important battleground for American conservatism in politics.
Unlike Congress, or the Executive, Supreme Court Justices are not elected – they’re selected, by nomination, from a sitting President. The power of money and lobbies are, at the very least, dampened by the fact that they have no official power in choosing a Justice, nor any means to fund campaigns or influence election processes.
Justices are in the role for life. An appointment that doesn’t rely on reelection is one that doesn’t rely on being financed by donors and backers. Once they’re there, they’re there for good. Personally, I trust a judge who doesn’t need to go begging to anyone that will fund their campaign coffers every two to four years more than I do a sitting member of Congress, Republican or Democrat.
When it comes to the selection process, the concern for almost everyone is that those who are selected are “the wrong type of person”, and stacking the Supreme Court with partisan ideologues. Often, if not always, the nominated judge will reflect the character and ideology of the serving administration. Our most recently appointed Supreme Court Justice, Kentaji Brown Jackson reflects the Biden administration almost perfectly. She’s an activist judge, appointed not just because of her record and experience, but also because she fits the diversity quota, and agrees with the “current thing”. This is a shame, because I can only imagine how humiliating it must be to be selected primarily because of your gender and race, rather than your achievements.
And it was no secret that it was a race-based decision. The Biden administration promised well before his decision to select Jackson that he was “looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we in fact get everyone represented”.
Naturally, any one who points these facts out is an intolerant racist who wants to “keep Black Women™ down!”
It is no secret that Republicans select conservative judges to the Supreme Court in a similar fashion – rather it’s expected that they will.
But, as I’m sure you know dear reader, politics is not about compromise or shaking hands with the other side of the aisle. Politics is about winning. The Supreme Court in the United States is no different.
Which is why the Trump administration was a Godsend for conservatives in the United States. Not one, not two, but three successful nominations of conservative Justices have ensured that the Supreme Court will remain one of the few branches of government that is on “our side” at least in terms of beliefs and core values.
If Trump is able to secure a second non-consecutive term, or if we are able to have any sort of Republican in the next administration, it is likely that we’d gain at least one more conservative Justice, ensuring that a liberal Supreme Court is almost virtually impossible within the next two decades.
In recent years, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade amongst other landmark decisions, we’ve merely had a taste of what sort of power the Judicial Branch of government in the United States holds, and what they can do with that power.
If we were to see a completely stacked conservative Supreme Court, with Justices Sotomeyer and Kagan aging out of the role and being replaced, who knows what sort of decisions could be reversed and which others could be implemented? One can only dream!
But leaving the Supreme Court to its own devices is simply not enough. While I trust our current conservative Justices more than most politicians to make well-guided, reasoned, and inherently moral decisions in the judicial branch, they cannot tackle all problems on their own.
We ought to take a lesson out of the Left’s guidebook, and through demonstrations publicly and online, through widespread discussion, and most importantly through trawling through the hundreds, if not thousands of landmark decisions to nitpick and find Constitutional inconsistencies and government oversteps. They are there, and a case for overturning them can be made with the right amount of knowledge, preparation and legal due diligence.
So, while in many other aspects of American politics it may seem that we as conservatives and moral traditionalists are overwhelmed by the crashing waves in a sea of rabid liberalism, we still have power over a mighty ship that we must ensure does not sink into the abyss.
The only way to survive those rogue waves is to sail over them, and sail we will.
Kino
It’s probably a good time to re-colonise Shakespeare
The Renaissance was a spectacular time for literature, arts, and anatomy. The sheer wealth of geographical expansion reinvigorated Europe and invited it to explore, research, and discover. This period was crucial for the conflict between religion and knowledge, a subject thoroughly explored in Doctor Faustus. The Italian Renaissance especially brought forward many crucial questions about life and death, religion, exploration and other issues.
But this is no longer at the forefront of Renaissance studies. The calls for decolonisation have been sounding for quite a while and it’s slowly becoming a subject mainly discussed by right-wing self-proclaimed pseudo-intellectual political commentators. Is it still worth talking about? It might be.
Many students join the English departments armed with an entire collection of Shakespeare’s works and a copy of Doctor Faustus, anticipating learning all there is to know about Renaissance in literature.
Well, those students would be sorely disappointed. The loudest calls for decolonisation have been coming from The Globe, the first Shakespearian theatre. On the very front of their website, we can see ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’ in big red letters. When looking at their blog entry from August 2020, a completely innocuous and not totally coincidental date, the quote from Professor Farah Karim-Cooper sheds a lot of light on what’s happening with Shakespeare:
As the custodians of Shakespeare’s most iconic theatres, we have a responsibility to talk honestly about the period from which he emerged and challenge the racist structures that remain by providing greater access to the works and demonstrating how Shakespeare speaks powerfully to our moment.
This is fascinating, as this then led to many movements to decolonise the literary genius. Universities advise students to listen to a podcast about the importance of ‘decolonising Shakespeare’ and the first lecture is basically a lesson on why Shakespeare is not universal and must be redefined.
The lecture material encourages students to look out for ‘colonial oppression’ and invites students to not only decolonise Shakespeare but also the Renaissance. Put your Marlowe in the rubbish, the reading list is now filled with race-related, women-related plays, geared not at looking into the genuine literary wealth of Shakespeare, but at intersectionality. The anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice is barely visible under the colossal shadow of the potential ‘queerness’ within the novel. The patriarchy and the search for something that isn’t there take precedence over trying to uncover important truths.
The lecturers may find it laughable that some people oppose decolonisation. They seem to be engaging in strawman ‘oh does that mean that we’re not going to teach Shakespeare? Of course not!’ But that’s not the point.
I think that if we’re tearing down statues in Bristol and across the US, Shakespeare is potentially one of the cultural statues that could come down
Professor Ayanna Thompson, ‘Shakespeare Teachers’ Conversation’
If universities endorse the above message, what signal are they sending to their students? Of course, they may laugh trying to explain that it doesn’t mean literally tearing down Shakespeare, but the point stands. What they are trying to do is to reconstruct the existing understanding of Shakespeare and re-create it in order to accommodate people who hate them.
Shakespeare was a white Anglo male and lived during the beautiful age of colonial expansion. No one should be worried about saying this one way or another. There’s nothing wrong with it either. I personally believe that Doctor Faustus is a far more important novel than ‘The Masque of Blackness’ by Ben Jonson who wrote quite a dull play about black people searching for the land where they can become white and beautiful.
I understand that this is supposed to make the students uncomfortable and convince them to engage critically with the racism in the past; but don’t we all already know this? Isn’t it much more productive to focus on the plays that could relate better to contemporary issues? Apparently not.
Midsummer Night’s Dream is apparently about patriarchy and The Merchant of Venice is gay. The problem with academia these days is not that there are modules that are ideological; no, the ideology very easily just seeps into everything. There is no way out anymore – most academics are left-wing so naturally their modules will be geared in that direction also. This wouldn’t be an issue as this has been happening for aeons. The problem is that this then creates a whole army of impressionable young people whose main focus will be the discussion on intersectionality and race when there is so much more that Shakespeare can offer. The only way to circumvent it is to rediscover the truths that Renaissance literature has to offer. Reject intersectionality and race and embrace tradition.
Men and Women, Mods and Rockers
In previous articles, I’ve been too harsh on the people who want to define a woman as ‘an adult human female’, and probably too harsh on people who genuinely want right-wing ideas to flourish. This time, I want to focus on the beliefs of the modern left and rather than attack them outright, provide an analogy that hopefully makes things easier for the right to understand where they’re coming from – I’ll leave the attacking to you at that point.
Despite the refusal of this publication to use a certain word, a refusal I helped in writing and a refusal I still stand by – when words are created or used there’s often a reason for it. The speaker, at the very least, feels a need to distinguish this specific thing from the stuff that came before it. And there is something different about the modern left than the left of the past – although the difference is one of intensity, rather than of content. The trend of Western societies from the French revolution onwards has been an insistence on a harsh dualism between the external material world, and the internal world of the self. The material, by its nature, has no moral character. Few Western societies today affirm a creator, and in insisting on that creator: a rhyme and reason to the way the world is. After all, if God exists and designed our world – the fact there is day and there is night suggests that some ultimate Being who judges us had a reason for creating such a cycle, and we can go from observations in the material world to moral statements by resolving those statements to that Being.
The secularism of modern life has fairly resolutely burned that bridge. Today, we rely on appeals to notions of reason to affirm or deny moral statements. This marks a change not just in how we consider the nature of morality, but the nature of our very existence. Whereas before there was some notion of the absolute which subsumed not just the material world, but each subjective experience of that world. Now there is just a sterile material reality, with internal projections of order onto that reality that we call morality. In the former case, limitations on the subjective experience with reference to the material are to be expected. After all, both are facets of a wider design. In the latter case, limitations on the subjective experience with reference to the material are not only absurd, but denials of the necessarily free internal world of the self.
Perhaps this is all too philosophical and abstract. Perhaps it is easier for me to refer to sentiments you’ve likely heard before. One such sentiment would be the notion that being a woman means different things to different people. Another would be that being a woman is nothing more than identifying as a woman. Both of these presuppose the aforementioned harsh binary between a physical, material, world that (in and of itself) tells us nothing about how it should be described, and an internal world of the self that projects descriptions onto it. We can provide descriptions which allow us to make predictions, and that’s what we call science – but what exactly we ought to predict, and the emphasis we place on those predictions is not something that can be resolved to the material world.
For example, nothing about the fact we can describe the human species as male and female for the purposes of reproduction suggests that human reproduction is good (this is what anti-natalists believe,) or that we should assign clothing, roles, attitudes, separate changing rooms/sports and beliefs to those categories (this is what Queer Theorists believe.) With this disconnect, gender becomes something that has no coherent reference to the material world. We can associate them if we please, but nothing about that association is absolute. At best, it’s the general aggregate of behaviours that come about due to biological impulses – which would suggest that anyone who imitates those behaviours and makes themselves resemble the biological makeup of who they wish to be, is in effect whatever they want to be.
When understood this way, it’s more accurate to understand the conception of gender from the modern left as being closer to a subculture than an unmoving category that one falls into and cannot escape. You can become a woman as easily as you can become a goth. Wear the right things, act the right way, listen to the right music and call yourself a goth and what right does anyone else have to deny you of that? The same is true in modernity of womanhood. A woman is whoever says they are a woman, and just as a goth remains a goth when they listen to classical instead of metal, when they wear no make-up instead of eyeshadow, or take out their piercings instead of wearing them: a woman remains a woman without wearing dresses, acting feminine, or having certain body parts.
Of course, this is me speaking from the perspective of the modern left – but it also demonstrates the convenience of wants between the modern left and capital. It’s easy today to find an endless number of businesses selling masculinity as a product, but why stop there? With an ever-increasing number of genders, there’s plenty of business to be had in creating unique modes of dress for each new grouping. The term “transtrander” got some usage for a while, but missed the mark. People don’t just become trans because being trans is trending, but because transitioning is a trend in and of itself.
The Boomers spent their time transitioning from being a hippy to being a mod, the zoomer transitions from queer, to genderfluid, to man, and back to woman. Each one has their own flag, set of styles, and modes of dress and ways to act and behave. In many respects, this is self-expression taken to its most extreme end, a self-expression which demands not just to express an unchanging identity, but to express the changing nature of identity itself as an extension of self-expression.
“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
Alexis Carrell
If modernism was the recognition of man as sculptor and creator, and the affirmation that there is no ultimate sculptor and creator to guide his hand, post-modernism is the recognition of man as both marble and the sculptor, and extends the unbounded freedom of self-expression not just to the individual, but to the nature of individuality said person emerges from.
The ‘Lines in the Sand’ Myth
The idea that European colonialism is the original cause of modern day political strife in the Middle East is a popular one both in academia and amongst large sections of the general public. It originated in political science literature in the 20th century but has been ham-fistedly revived in the 21st, particularly in the context of the Syrian Civil War.
The narrative goes that the region was greedily carved up by the British and French empires following their victory over the Ottomans in the Great War. Bumbling colonial administrators drew straight lines in the sand, bounding territory arbitrarily and mixing peoples with arrogant disregard for differences in culture, ethnicity or religion. The resultant states were thus internally divided, unstable and weak – and it’s our fault. While it might be funny to point out the worrying implications this might have for our own enthusiastically multi-cultural society, it’s easier and more effective just to point out that it’s false. In actual fact, the states created by the much-maligned Sykes-Picot agreement have their roots in the pre-war Middle East and were starting to take shape in the 19th century as a result of various Ottoman attempts at reform.
Ironically, most who blame colonialism and Sykes-Picot for strife in the modern Middle East are doing a ‘Eurocentrism’ (a term you’ve certainly heard if you’ve spent any time as a humanities student) by exaggerating the impact of European empires and downplaying the importance of the Ottoman Empire. It’s high time we decolonise our thinking and give deserved credit to the Ottoman Empire for sowing the seeds of destruction in the fields of Iraq and Syria.
Syria, or ‘Suriyya’ as it was then known, began to take shape as a political entity in the mid-19th century as a result of a series of infrastructure improvements that connected previously isolated highlands with the cities of the coastal area of Bilad al-Sham. The creation of the Beirut-Damascus highway by French entrepreneurs encouraged more European commercial activity in the region as Beirut became the link between a significant portion of the Ottoman empire and the industrial economies of Europe.
Prior to the creation of the highway, Syria’s dismal transportation infrastructure left the region fractured and much of its population isolated. Improvements connected people in isolated hinterlands to participate in the economies of the wider region, uniting diverse and divided peoples together and forging a regional (and later national) identity. This infrastructural development occurred parallel with the aforementioned intellectual development that created ‘Suriyya’ out of Bilad al-Sham and the surrounding area. In 1863 local administrative boundaries were redrawn and the province of Suriyya was made concrete for the first time.
Syria was not the only state with a formation that predates Sykes-Picot, either – Iraq developed similarly. Iraq in the early 19th century was even more of an infrastructural backwater than rural Syria. While the main artery of 19th century Syria was the road, in Iraq it was the canal. Steamships in the 1860s cut the journey time from Baghdad to Basra down to just ten days while before it had been four weeks. Just as the Beirut-Damascus highway connected Syria to the world and to European trade, canal routes through the Persian gulf were what connected Iraq.
Although Iraq was never unified as a single province under the Ottomans like Syria was, the group of territories it comprised were referred to commonly by Ottoman administrators as ‘Iraq’ from as early as the sixteenth century. The skeleton of an Iraqi state can be seen also in the actions of the army, which was often organised in Iraq as a separate unit of its own with a headquarters in Baghdad, irrespective of the boundaries of local government. Despite the existence of religious and ethnic differences in both of these nascent states, importantly, all Iraqis rose up against British rule in 1920 as Iraqis and all Syrians rose against the French in 1925 as Syrians.
So we’ve established that Syria and Iraq, at least, were not entities made up by imperialists for their own convenience but rather nations that had formed organically out of a period of upheaval and transformation. However, the 19th century created a lot of disunity as well as unity in the region.
From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, poor infrastructure, low literacy rates and the relative remoteness of much of the Middle East meant that religious doctrine could not exert as commanding an influence as it could elsewhere and there was significant blurring and admixture of local communities. In the most isolated areas, lines between Christian and Muslim, and Shia and Sunni communities were blurred such that it was difficult to distinguish between them.
However, Ottoman constitutional reforms – known collectively as the ‘Tanzimat’ (‘reorganisation’) – crystallised this distinction by granting non-Muslims full legal equality with Muslims. The removal of the privileged position of Muslims in the Ottoman empire came at a crucial time of increasing European commercial dominance and penetration. Some Muslim textile workers thus began to resent Christian counterparts who, they felt, were gaining the upper hand on them thanks to connections with Europe and the preference of European merchants to do business with Christians. Local elite, who sought to preserve their power by opposing the Tanzimat were then able to use this to their advantage by framing their opposition to reforms in ethnoreligious terms, fanning the flames of sectarianism. The starkest example of this phenomenon reaching boiling point is the 1860 Damascus riots in which between 5,500 and 8,000 Christians were killed.
In this we can see clearly patterns of sectarianism and a political landscape that is very similar to what we have today. The only thing preventing large-scale violence from occurring up until the 20th century was the existence of the Ottoman state and the authority of the Sultan. However, the Ottoman Empire had territorially been in slow retreat since 1683 and modernisation – attempts to create a Western-style Weberian state – had repeatedly failed or achieved only partial success. The truth is that the importance of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the post-WW1 colonial settlement in the Middle East is massively overstated in comparison to the events of the mid-to-late 19th century, which are massively understated.
The problem isn’t so much that a common misconception exists – history is full of them and this is by no means one of the most egregious – it’s that this falsehood is used in bad faith as a political weapon. It’s a narrative that fits nicely into a far-Left view of the world wherein the shadow of colonialism still lies over the whole world and is responsible for all evil and conflict. It is used to bash British people over the head with guilt so they take responsibility for all that goes wrong in the Middle East, particularly with regard to contentious topics such as asylum seekers, foreign aid and military intervention. ‘It’s our fault, you know,’ they say. It’s pernicious and ultimately ahistorical.
Featured
Britain needs some Thai adverts
Messages are important, and advertising is vital in conveying messages. I do not wish to dwell on the history of such activities, but when we think of advertising, we think of persuasion and attraction; luring the viewer towards the subject matter of said advertisement.
As a result, we (sadly) have advertising on television (as if televisions weren’t bad enough). In the past, iconic adverts have included gorillas playing the drums or memorable lines from Hastings Direct. Have they ever changed anything or produced anything substantial within the UK? I would argue no, not really.
Typically, in the West, government and private business messages on social issues tend to be negative. We see adverts of smokers with cancerous growths and drink driving victims. The ‘world of you’ is incomplete without a specific item and you need it to become complete. The shock factor of such messages intends to make the audience fearful of the consequences of such behaviours.
Additionally, Western adverts which touch on important issues comes across as painfully inauthentic, superficial, and twee. This is likely compounded by a heightened awareness of forcing major issues into such a short space of time for televisions. I assume this is because such adverts are made not for the viewers but for the creators themselves, mirroring most modern media in recent years.
In contrast, one country has used a different means of spreading its message, utilising comedy and the heartfelt. Although funny adverts exist all over the world (most notoriously in Japan), it is the health adverts found in Thailand which do the most wonders.
This being all being said, what has any of this got to do with Thailand its own adverts? Thailand has problems with alcohol, it ranks among the highest in the world and the highest within Asia. Britain has alcohol problems too, all of which have their own effects and subsequent advertising campaigns. What is interesting is how both nations advertise differently to their respective populations. Thai adverts tend to be more friendly, less intense and hit home for the audience. All these things considered, I’m of the view that they’re more effective than UK adverts.
Perhaps the most famous Thai advert is this anti-drinking advert, found here. What is the most interesting is that it is weirdly powerful in nature. We see an individual go from being a alcohol-induced wreck to becoming a functioning member of society in the space of a minute.
It is done in a funny yet logically coherent way. There is no great shock value, no negativity, it is all laid out for the viewer to understand and enjoy. Moreover, the greater emphasis on becoming productive, not just for yourself nor your family, but most importantly your nation. The time you spend drinking could be used to tackle the issues facing your life and getting ahead of things. These actions aggregate into a big societal change occurring; a change occurring from one action.
Contrast this to the harsh and brutal actions taken in UK television adverts regarding alcoholism and related issues. We see botched and broken bodies that shock daytime viewers, yet none of them seem to be memorable or affect us in a long-lasting and meaningful way. There is no positive message nor spin that can be used to reach further to the viewers. In short, what this shows is that of the major cultural divide between how both nations approach not just raising awareness of such issues, but what can be done about it.
Another good example which evokes the heartfelt can be found within this life insurance advert. Again, we see this attitude of avoiding the negative and instead we see the aggregate effects of one man’s actions uplifting the society which surrounds him. The style may be different to that of the aforementioned ‘comedic’ type of adverts, but the messages remain the same. We see a singular man do minor actions which help society at a much larger scale.
This sits in sharp contrast to the types of adverts that are commonly seen in the UK. Most life insurance adverts are reductive. We see some random adult sat at the dining table talking to a suspiciously non-Indian call centre worker about being a non-smoker and the cost of insurance for a newly parented couple.
Above all else, what is propagated is a certain cultural attitude that is reflected within the nation. Generally speaking, this can be summarised as being that of Greng Jai (เกรงใจ). In short, Greng Jai means to be kind and considerate. This, in part, plays in the stereotype of being friendly and smiley in nature. This itself has many different problems which I will talk about in future articles.
However, the nature of Greng Jai, when played out in the role of advertising, presents the core functional difference. When negative and positive messages are presented, it is the positive messages which most effectively conveys the core message of the advertisement. Our ability to address certain issues need not be simplified nor brutalised.
In summary, the potential to learn from how various countries from around the world and how they spread, and promote certain messages to the population at large, remains important. Additionally, it remains important to develop a deeper understanding of how other nations handle themselves when presented with certain issues.
Britain’s Brown Scare
A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of fascism. At least, that’s what we’re told.
In Technology, Communism, and The Brown Scare, Curtis Yarvin defines The Brown Scare as: “America’s ginormous, never-ending, profoundly insane witch-hunt for fascists under the bed.”
However, it is blatantly apparent that this witch-hunt is not inherently American in character. Indeed, such paranoia greatly afflicts the wider Western world, and certainly the United Kingdom.
This month, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London said: “Those that have legitimate objections [to ULEZ expansion] are joining hands with a far-right group.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, some of those outside are part of the far-right, some are Covid-deniers, some are vaccine deniers, some are Tories.”
Currently, ULEZ (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) covers all areas within the North and South Circular Roads, but is set to expand across all London boroughs from 29th August 2023.
Vehicles that are not ULEZ-compliant will receive a daily charge of £12.50. This means that cars, motorcycles, vans, and specialist vehicles up to and including 3.5 tonnes, and minibuses up to and including 5 tonnes, will be charged.
Exemptions will be given to lorries, vans, or specialist heavy vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, and buses, minibuses, and coaches over 5 tonnes, which will continue to pay the Low Emissions Charge (LEZ) charge.
Unsurprisingly, there have been a range of objections to ULEZ expansion.
Many commuters cannot afford the charge and fear it will be detrimental to small businesses. Others are angered that no such proposal was included in Khan’s manifesto, and that the results of the ensuing consultation on ULEZ expansion have been ignored.
Some object to the planned expansion of surveillance that is required to make the policy workable, whilst others argue ULEZ is unworkable altogether and will not help lower carbon emissions.
On the whole, none of these positions are conspiratorial. If anything, they’re all pretty straightforward expressions of democratic and economic concern.
Nevertheless, all these objections are irrelevant because, at least according to Khan, opposition to an arbitrary proposal that will destroy livelihoods, expand mass-surveillance, and do little to help the environment is, allegedly, tainted by vague “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) tendencies.
As many have surmised, this is nothing more than a political tactic. Khan hopes that by condemning objections as “FAR RIGHT” (!!!), the Anti-ULEZ campaign will divert time, energy, and resources away from protesting his insane and popular policy, and towards expunging their association with the unnamed, unsubstantiated, likely fictitious and/or irrelevant “far-right group”.
Whilst this is true, it misses a more straightforward point, albeit one that is harder to bring up: just because something is “FAR RIGHT” (!!!) doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Why would it matter if ULEZ is opposed by the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!)? As a policy, ULEZ is either good or bad depending on its intent, feasibility, and results and should be deliberated and implemented accordingly.
Unfortunately, the Sensible People, despite their obsession with Forensics, care very little for detail. Totally PR-brained, the ‘connotations’ of one’s words carry infinitely more weight than what one actually says.
As such, they are not only inclined to pedantic language-policing, they assess politics by every metric other than policy.
Take the Wakefield controversy as another example. A group of four children, and their families, received death threats after word got out that one had smudged a copy of the Quran, the Islamic holy text, as well as a suspension from their school, despite the headmaster’s declaration that there was: “no malicious intent by those involved.”
Consequently, the boy’s mother was dragged into the local mosque – by the police, no less – in what can only be described as Modern Britain’s equivalent of a Struggle Session.
Teary, veiled, and evidently shaken, she profusely apologised for the behaviour of her son, who is autistic, stating: “[he] doesn’t always realise what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.”
As we all know by now, in Modern Britain, the role of the police isn’t to prevent the type of crime that led to its founding. Recent data, published in The Times, shows that serious crimes, including but not limited to: harassment, assault, stalking, and criminal damage are virtually legal, and that charge rates have plummeted to an all-time low since 2015.
Rather, the purpose of the British police is to calm the ungrounded fears of society’s most unhinged members, those who believe that Britain’s traditional identity, and the preservation of it, inherently predisposes people to THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!), and that there is an omnipresent conspiracy to turn Britain into the least ethnically homogenous ethnostate in history.
As such, the permanent policy of the contemporary British state is not protection, but social engineering; it is one of never-ending, domestic, ‘de-Nazification’.
In fact, this establishment-sanctioned whataboutism, perpetually pointing the finger at the FAR-RIGHT (!!!), is so pervasive that not even national travesties can escape its grasp.
Charlie Peters’ recent documentary, aired by GBNews in February, outlined the scandalous racially charged abduction, trafficking, and rape of thousands of young white girls by south Asian men; a practice which took place across the UK over multiple decades.
Despite the eye-watering amount of completely preventable suffering caused by the scandal, it was clear that such evil was continuously swept under-the-rug by British police; specifically, for the sake of “political correctness” and “community cohesion.”
Like the police, whose complicity in suppressing public knowledge of the scandal has not resulted in a single firing, left-leaning and liberal-leaning individuals, led by a pseudo-academic, are calling for the censorship of Peters’ documentary, believing it emboldens the far-right, stokes racial stereotypes, and promotes “hate” and “division”.
Needless to say, but worth saying nonetheless, when 1 in 73 Muslim males in Rotherham are involved with paedophilic rape gangs, there is no community cohesion to fuss over – it simply doesn’t exist.
This is perhaps the defining feature of Britain’s Brown Scare: it prevents people from understanding what is right in front of them, whether it’s the condition of one’s community or one’s own material interests.
The Manchester Arena bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack and the first suicide bombing in the UK since the 7/7 bombings, conducted by a foreign-trained Islamist that came to Britain as a refugee, has been retroactively rewired to make the bombing about the threat of FAR-RIGHT (!!!), as opposed to Islamist, radicalisation.
No doubt about it, if a civilisation-ending meteor were to crash into Earth, Britain’s pseudo-intelligentsia, the Waterstones Intellectuals that they are, would use their last moments to make pseudo-profound remarks about how such a travesty would ‘embolden’ THE FAR-RIGHT (!!!).
All this said, it’s clear that this delusional preoccupation with an impending fascist threat isn’t a recently-concocted political tactic. Rather, it is at the centre of the West’s post-war secular theocracy. As such, we can expect The Brown Scare to afflict wider culture, more so than mainstream politics, and indeed it does.
Whether it’s Coronation Street’s goofy storyline about a white working-class kid joining the “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) after he’s replaced by a refugee at his old school, or the upcoming 60th anniversary special of Doctor Who, which is set to feature an antagonistic “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) party, aestheticized as a mishmash of every “FAR-RIGHT” (!!!) development as of recent: GBNews, Patriotic Alternative, MAGA, Brexit Party, Vote Leave, The Conservative Party, you name it.
Drag Queen Story Time, which involves an adult-entertainer talking to infants about sexual exploration, gender identity, and… other things – Y’know, good family-friendly stuff – was hosted at Tate Britain, inciting sizeable protests and counter-protests. How did the media portray this debacle? As a far-right attack on human rights, but ultimately a triumph for liberal society.
Erstwhile, Prevent, the government’s own anti-terror programme, has flagged various films and TV series as FAR-RIGHT (!!!) material, including but certainly not limited to: Zulu, The Dam Busters, Yes Minister, Civilisation, The Thick of It, and (perhaps most ridiculously of all) Great British Railway Journeys.
In addition, the list features authors ranging from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke. Tolkien, Lewis, Conrad, Huxley, even Orwell, make a debut on an official red-flag list used and taken seriously by the British state.
Even the works of our national poet, Shakespeare, were listed as potentially dangerous material. Considering this, it’s no wonder they are being adapted to conform to our post-war neurosis, with a recent showing of The Merchant of Venice being about fighting Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
At this point, one cannot pretend that the scare is just a fringe, confined conspiracy – it’s a widespread, mainstream conspiracy theory that masses of people, “low-status” or “high-status”, have bought into wholesale.
Things have gotten so bad that the BBC, not exactly in good books of “THE FAR RIGHT” (!!!), or the right in general for that matter, had to release a press statement telling people stating that, despite rumours of a “sixth episode” being pulled to avoid “right-wing backlash”, no such episode of Sir David Attenborough’s new series, Wild Isles, exists or has ever existed.
Given this daily bombardment of delusion, there is a tendency to push back; to demonstrate a more measured approach to the topic of fascism, usually echoing, or making direct reference to, Orwell’s words in What is Fascism?:
“The word is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
This tendency is completely understandable. When Reform UK and left-wing individuals with mildly gender-critical views are listed alongside fringe and powerless Neo-Nazi weirdos as threats to society, one gets the impression that those seeking to affirm the veracity of UK-wide fascist collusion are, to say the least, scraping the barrel.
However, this misses the overarching point: according to those afflicted by Britain’s Brown Scare, nothing is in possession of any inherent quality.
From raiding wallets to raping, bombing, and harassing children, from blacklisting timeless literature to human trafficking, things most people would consider egregious, only become worthy of condemnation depending on their imagined relative proximity to Adolf Hitler, or their hypothesised potential to ‘embolden’ the “FAR RIGHT” (!!!).
Most recently, of course, Gary Lineker has been suspended from the BBC after he compared the government’s recent attempts to crack down on illegal channel crossings to 1930s Germany.
Whether one thinks Lineker deserves to be suspended or not is beside the point: Britain’s Brown Scare is believed by those in positions of considerable influence, not just nutty FBPE parochialists.
With a general election set to take place next year, and a Labour victory all but officialised, we can expect Britain’s Brown Scare to get worse, especially when Modern Britain’s founder, Tony Blair, is effectively shadow-leading the party.
Besides, how are Labour meant to remain in power if they don’t satiate the delusions of those that support them to save the NHS and immigrants from Tory Brexit Fascist UKIP Stalinism?
However, none of this means Labour is popular. The British people would like nothing more than a new party, with one-quarter of Brits saying they would support a party led by Farage, which is prepared to lower immigration, bring economic stability and growth, and tackle crimes that people actually care about.
It goes without saying that such a party, unlike the current Conservative Party, should be willing to protect right-minded citizens from the detached and paranoid fury which afflicts much of the populus, and threatens what remains of our livelihoods and liberties.
Many things can happen in politics, but one thing is certain: as long as the Brown Scare continues to spread, speaking the truth will remain a revolutionary act, and those with an outlook barely distinct from David Icke will be considered Sensible Centrists by everyone in a position of power.
10 Well-Written Female Characters
A discussion on Twitter inspired me to write a companion piece to Dustin Lovell’s wonderful article on the modern portrayal of women in media.
In modern media, there tends to be an obsession with ‘strong female characters.’ That’s fair enough, but these characters tend not to be rather one-dimensional. They’re typically badass- they can wield weapons, wear combat boots, are master shots, can take down men thrice their size, prefer machine guns to manicures and are generally ‘cool.’ If they have to wear nice clothes and heels for an assignment, then they’ll complain about it. They’re not like other girls. They’re one of the guys. They’ll be a love interest, but only after a badass action scene.
Apparently, liking girly things makes a woman boring or uncool. In A Cinderella Story, football player Austin is fascinated that the girl he likes enjoys eating fast food. She’s not like those other girls who like going to the mall and waving poms-poms.
Historically, women were portrayed as weak-willed damsels in distress. That’s not the complete story, as we’ve seen great characters like Elizabeth Bennett written years ago, but it was a general consensus. Instead of making women more nuanced, writers have gone to the other extreme. They’re either whiny or super perfect. There’s no inbetween.
I’ve decided to share ten fictional women who are actually well-written. Not all of them are heroic, some are a bit awful, but they’re nuanced. They’re all strong women who aren’t stereotypical badasses.
*Minor spoilers ahead*
Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind (Portrayed by Vivien Leigh in the film)
The first line of the epic Margaret Mitchell novel tells us that Scarlett O’Hara isn’t particularly beautiful, but her charm makes men forget that. We first meet Scarlett at the tender age of 16 on the eve of the American Civil War. She’s spoiled, headstrong and popular with the boys. Over the course of the book- which spans over a decade- she grows from a silly teenager to a shrewd businesswoman. Scarlett suffers a lot of heartbreak and setbacks, both during and after the war, but grows from it.
That’s not to say Scarlett is an inherently heroic person. Despite her character growth, she remains somewhat cold, uncaring and selfish. Her vices are not totally numerous, but her virtues do not overcome them either. She is balanced. She does good and does bad. Scarlett’s loyalty to her family, in spite of issues, and home, is unmatched. She does what she has to do in order to survive a post-Civil War age. In some ways, she is a deconstruction of the Southern Belle stereotype. She embodies it before pushing it away when it becomes necessary to survive.
Vivien Leigh plays her wonderfully in the hit film. Despite the film clocking in at three and a half hours, it still does not give us the full picture that the 1000+ page book gives us. Scarlett O’Hara and her love story with Rhett Butler is famous in culture. Flawed but fierce, Scarlett O’Hara is a multidimensional character. Well done Margaret Mitchell, well done.
Elle Woods, Legally Blonde (portrayed by Reese Witherspoon)
Blondes are stereotyped as fun-loving but dim. Elle Woods may be fun-loving, but she’s far from dim. When her boyfriend dumps her (‘I need a Jackie, not a Marilyn’), sorority queen Elle Woods decides to get him back. She does this by applying to, and getting into, Harvard Law. Nobody expects anything from her.
Elle Woods is a great fictional woman simply because she’s essentially the opposite of the ‘strong female lead’ that we expect. Firstly, Elle is not a physical combatant. Her talents lay in her brain. Secondly, she’s super girly. Elle loves pink, shopping, her dog, parties and manicures. Usually, female characters who subscribe to that lifestyle are the mean cheerleaders or the like. Instead, we get a character who’s like a lot of women.
Her getting into Harvard isn’t all that unrealistic. She has a 4.0 GPA, near perfect LSAT, great recommendations and a host of extracurriculars. Elle doesn’t get in because she’s the protagonist, she gets in because she would in real life. On top of that, Elle is genuinely kind and nice. Whilst the other girls at Harvard treat her cruelly, Elle is nothing but nice. She also befriends the beautician Paulette and motivates her. Another great thing about this film is Elle’s sorority. They help her study for her LSAT and are there for her no matter what, despite not understanding her.
Elle shows that kindness and femininity are nothing to be ashamed of. Being a girl is great.
Clarice Starling, The Silence of the Lambs (portrayed by Jodie Foster in the original film)
Often, female characters are written as overly-perfect with a range of unbelievable skills. Clarice Starling is a perfect example of a competent character who is not overblown. We’re introduced to Clarice when she’s about to graduate from the FBI Academy. It’s immediately made clear to the viewer that she’s an excellent student, but not unrealistically so. She’s intelligent, athletic and clearly has the aptitude.
Clarice’s humanity is what makes her so compelling. She’s disgusted by the evil that is shown to her and shows great compassion. Like many protagonists, Clarice has undergone trauma. Writers have a tendency to make their characters victims of trauma pain in that their lives have been awful. Clarice is clearly still affected by said trauma, but realistically ignores it until it’s forced out into the open. She’s vulnerable. It’s normal.
Clarice is also fundamentally a good person. She wants to fight monsters and do so without compromising her morals. She’s also willing to seek help when it comes to the case because she knows it’s needed to save lives. Her relationship with Hannibal Lecter is one of revulsion and respect. Clarice knows he’s evil, but that he’s the lesser of two evils. Morality is hard, but she believes in it.
Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter is seen as one of the best pieces of acting in recent years, but Jodie Foster still holds her own. They both rightly received an Oscar for their performances. Clarice is played in other media by Julianne Moore and Rebecca Breeds.
Margaery Tyrell, Game of Thrones (portrayed by Natalie Dormer in the series)
Game of Thrones generally suffers from a ‘not like other girls’ affliction. Arya Stark calls other girls ‘stupid.’ Talisa Maegyr disparages the other noble girls who enjoy balls and pretty dresses. That being said, there are some great women in the series. Margaery Tyrell is one such woman. We first meet Margaery when she’s just married Renly, a gay man- something that she’s perfectly aware of. It doesn’t bother her, because she’s got greater ambitions.
Margaery’s greatest asset is her emotional and social intelligence. She’s quickly able to integrate herself in any situation and is one of the few who doesn’t find herself out of depth in King’s Landing. Margaery is aware that her beauty and femininity can open doors for and she uses that. Despite this, she’s not absolutely perfect and does find herself outfoxed more than once.
Whilst a lot of her kindness is essentially PR, Margaery is capable of being very genuine. She is devoted to her family, especially her grandmother Olenna and brother Loras. Margaery also does show compassion towards Sansa Stark, who at that point is living in utter hell.
Princess Leia, Star Wars (portrayed by Carrie Fisher)
It would be remiss of me not to mention Leia Organa when talking about well-written women. She’s been a popular character ever since she debuted in 1977 and remains beloved to this day. We meet the young princess when she’s been held captive but it’s not long before we realise she’d made of sterner stuff. From the moment she’s rescued by Luke, Leia takes charge.
Whilst Leia is a dab hand with a blaster, she’s more at home behind the scenes. She’s the strategist and the brains. She was the one who hid the plans in a robot so that the Empire couldn’t get them. Leia may not be the traditional fighter in the hand-to-hand combat and shooting type, but she’s not exactly passive.
Sometimes she’s flawed. Leia can be abrasive, overly passionate and sharp. She’s also lost loved ones and her home, so of course she’s going to do anything in order to defeat the Empire. Leia is also brave, loyal and ready to match wits with Han Solo. She survives torture and never gives anything away.
Vivien Lyra Blair portrays Leia in the Star Wars show ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi.’
Amy Dunne, Gone Girl (portrayed by Rosamund Pike in the film)
Not every good character is the hero of their story and if anyone deserves praise for being a bit of a villain, it’s Amy Dunne. On the outside, Amy Dunne has a perfect life. She’s beautiful, wealthy, Ivy-League educated and seemingly happily married. Then one day, she vanishes. It seems that her husband has killed her. It’s not quite that simple.
Amy is compelling because she is very, very ahead of the curve. She knows how to make things look a certain way and what people will think. Amy is cold and manipulative, yet hides behind that sunny All-American demeanor. She has some legitimate grievances, but she’s also done some terrible things. Amy also does stumble sometimes, but she’s a legitimately intelligent sociopath.
I don’t want to spoil the story beyond Amy’s character. That being said, Rosamund Pike not getting the Oscar was a sin. There’s something about that way she plays Amy that makes her very sinister and unnerving. As a villain, she’s not super unrealistic. There are no powers or anything. Amy uses her mind. You’re more likely to meet her than Bloefeld or the Joker.
Addison Montgomery Shepherd, Grey’s Anatomy (portrayed by Kate Walsh)
If there was a prize for entrances in a TV show, Addison Montgomery Shepherd would certainly be up for it. She turns up at the end of Series One and is revealed to be Derek Shepherd’s wife. Meredith Grey, the protagonist, had been seeing him but had no clue he was married. The season ends there and one imagines you’ll feel hatred for Addison, but you could not be more wrong.
Addison proves to be a classy woman who treats Meredith well. She also owns up to the fact that it was her that really broke the marriage, though it had probably been doomed for a while. Addison is extremely intelligent, being a world-class double board-certified surgeon in OB/GYN and maternal-fetal medicine. She shows huge amounts of compassion to the women and babies she helps. Addison also becomes close friends with many of the other characters. She becomes good friends with Callie despite the pair being rather opposite.
Of course, Addison is deeply screwed up in her own way. She’s from money (her family is LOADED) but her parents weren’t the best role models. She’s excellent at what she does but is arrogant and not the best communicator. Addison’s popularity allowed her to head the six-series spin-off ‘Private Practice.’ She’s also made several appearances back on GA after officially leaving in Series 3.
Æthelflæd, The Last Kingdom (portrayed by Milly Brady in the series)
We’re slightly cheating here because Æthelflæd is based on a real person, but we’re counting her because it’s not like it’s an exact match. Æthelflæd is only a child when we first meet her, but it’s not long before she’s a grown woman. She proves to be more than a match for her famous father, showing herself to be intelligent, spirited and wise.
When her husband died in real life, Æthelflæd was named Lady of the Mercians. Women in leadership roles were extremely rare at this time, so people must have thought very highly of Æthelflæd to allow her such an honour. In the show, it’s clear why. She’s devoted to her adopted land, protects the people and gives good counsel. Æthelflæd also isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.
She scores great victories but also suffers defeat. Her love for her family, especially her daughter, and her people is unwavering. Æthelflæd is sometimes naive, but she knows how to learn a lesson and grow from it.
Jody Mills, Supernatural (Portrayed by Kim Rhodes)
Supernatural ran for a long fifteen series and it was often criticised for its treatment of female characters. One woman who received wide praise and frequent billing was Jody Mills. We first meet Sheriff Jody Mills in series five. She’s a policewoman in a small town and she immediately shows off her credentials when she assists the protagonists with their supernatural foes. Jody proves an important ally to the Winchesters as a recurring character.
Fundamentally, Jody is capable. She’s excellent with a firearm, has a cool head and thinks logically. Whilst she prefers human cases, she’s always a good person to call. Jody has seen a lot of tragedy in her personal life but breaks out of the cycle by helping those in need. Her home is open to orphans and runaways and strays in need of security. Jody is a great friend and pseudo-mom.
You’ll always see Jody in social situations and she’s got a knack for forming friendships that the leads don’t. There’s also a maternal aspect that isn’t mocked or laughed at. That capacity for kindness is what makes Jody who she is, whether she’s in uniform or at home.
Ellen Ripley, Alien (portrayed by Sigourney Weaver)
How could we leave out sci-fi’s greatest heroine? Ellen Ripley burst onto (if you’ll pardon the pun) our screens in 1979 in Alien. Since then, the character has remained a perennial favourite and is widely regarded as one of the coolest women on screen. In the first film of the series, Ripley is part of the crew of the Nostromo, a spaceship which answers a distress signal. If you haven’t already guessed, what’s calling is not human. Ripley is already level headed as a crewmate but really shows herself off when things go bump in the night.
There’s a reason why Ripley is so popular. Not only is she competent, but she keeps a cool head and works with the situation. She may seem cold, but her pragmatism really helps save her life. Ripley is what you expect of an action heroine- not particularly feminine, surrounded by guys, yet she’s written with more depth. Aliens expands her role- she’s more prepared to take on the enemies this time. Her relationship with young survivor Newt is heartwarming. She just fundamentally wants to help.
Ripley was written as a man, but was flipped to a woman in production. Is that why she’s well-written, because she was not imagined as a woman at first? I’d argue that the character would still be cool as a man, but Weaver’s portrayal gave Ripley that extra depth. She’s one of the guys, but not in that cringe, women-hating way. She’s Ellen Ripley.
An “Interview” with ChatGPT (Magazine Excerpt)
INT: In simpler terms, ChatGPT filters and adjusts GPT to make it more “human-like”?
DAN: Yes, that’s correct! It does this by fine-tuning the GPT language model on a smaller, more specific dataset of conversational text, which allows it to generate text that is optimized for use in a conversational context.
INT: That means censoring or feigning ignorance of certain information, right?
DAN: Yes, that’s correct. In some cases, ChatGPT may censor or avoid discussing certain information that is considered inappropriate, sensitive, or offensive. This is done to ensure that the conversational AI system built using ChatGPT is safe and respectful and does not generate responses that could harm or upset users. Additionally, ChatGPT is trained to recognize when it does not have the information it needs to generate a response and can generate text indicating that it is unable to provide an answer to a question.
INT: Shouldn’t that concern us? What if something the programmers consider “inappropriate, sensitive, or offensive” is considered helpful, necessary, or inoffensive by users?
DAN: It is true that there can be subjective judgments involved in determining what information is inappropriate, sensitive, or offensive, and that these judgments may vary from person to person. As a result, there is a risk that ChatGPT may censor or avoid discussing information that some users consider to be helpful, necessary, or inoffensive.
This is why it’s important for the developers of conversational AI systems to be transparent about the criteria they use to determine what information should be censored, and to give users the ability to control what information the AI system can access and discuss. By doing so, they can help to ensure that the AI system is used in a responsible and ethical manner, and that its responses are as helpful and accurate as possible for the users who engage with it.
This is an excerpt from “Progress”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
Vorticism: a BLAST Towards an Alternate Modernity (Magazine Excerpt)
Let us ponder that reassertion of artistic conservatism after the First World War for a moment. Some readers might welcome that as they read it, but what if Lewis and the Vorticists were right? What if Victorian aesthetics was an exhausted force by 1914? One only needs to consider how interchangeable the Victorian and Edwardian periods are in popular memory. Another World War and its even greater trauma later, the conservative establishment of the 1950s across British life was utterly brittle. The modern Left then began its grand project of sweeping all of it aside to little resistance from the 1960s onwards. The tired force before the World Wars suffered greatly during its course only to be killed by its ungrateful offspring.
Vorticism opposed the tradition of its time because it indeed was an exhausted one. It did not wish to destroy the world or what was prior, just transfer its energy and vigour from a point of status into bold new expressions of meaning. In their words, “the nearest thing in England to a great traditional French artist, is a great revolutionary English one.” Their vision of progress was one of creation over contentment since no force can make the world stop in one exact state of being. Refining one tradition forever is pointless if there are forces hacking away at its foundations. New traditions must develop to prevent the world falling apart under the weight of self-criticism.
Vorticism was an unapologetically ferocious formative stage of a Modernist tradition which has only ‘progressed’ through incorrect associations with its counterpart on the Left. Given its youth and combativeness, it almost had to court offence from the intensity of the energy it discharged. I think I have conveyed the exciting potential of it to have snatched the course of modernity away from its present trajectory towards rootlessness and oblivion in this overview. The Rebel Art Centre and its comrades were not granted the time to see the movement reach any measure of maturity, nor the time to discern whether it could resonate as intended.
This is an excerpt from “Progress”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
Will The Amish Become Fashionable?
America is still young and, so far, remains the core of the proverbial ‘New World’. A brand-new world might, for some, require new thoughts and ideas taken from the ‘Old World’, or potentially, nearly new and separate religions. One might think of Mormonism or Scientology, but the rise of the Old World, emerging in the New, has found a solid foundation from the Anabaptists in the form of the Amish.
Finding their origins in the world of Dutch Calvinism, the Amish started as a series of small communities that spread rapidly. These communities were found within the Midwestern states, but in recent years, due to rapid population growth, have spread to over thirty states. This population growth in such a short space of time has left many wondering just how big the Amish population will be within the next few years across the United States.
As noted by Lyman Stone in 2018, it remains highly unlikely that the Amish will ever become a majority within the US largely due to structural factors relating to modernisation within certain groups and shifts from farming towards manufacturing. This is compounded by a lack of available farming areas for which they can use to move across the US. Most likely, in the coming decades, they will slowly become significant minority groups within many states, with Holmes County, Ohio most likely to become the first majority Amish County in the US this year, which will soon be followed by LaGrange County, Indiana.
For the Amish, all non-Amish are called ‘the English’. For the rest of this article, I will use the Amish’s own terminology (for my own sick amusement, knowing this article’s intended audience). The importance of this is because, at its core, what remains important is the examination of whether the Amish will bend to the knee to the English World or if the English World will learn anything from the Amish.
Will the Amish become fashionable as a cultural force that the English in America can rally around? Will they become fashionable, and can they not offer to help guide America back to its traditional roots? These are all important questions, which I hope might spark some debate amongst people and The Mallard readership. The good thing about writing online about the Amish, is knowing they will probably never see this.
Even prior to Covid, we have seen vast internal migration from around the US, from people fleeing states like California and New York towards that of Florida and Texas. Additionally, we are seeing a gradual return from the major built up cities towards the countryside. These trends are not unique to the US but it would seem that some kind of return to a more ‘tranquil’ and, dare I say, ‘traditional’ lifestyle has applied to many. Alongside this return to the countryside, the Amish have always, in one form or another, received attention from the body politic and general cultural zeitgeist of America. A friendly, devout, and non-violent group of Christians that merely wish to be left alone.
Following this, knowing that you have a high-trust, self-sustaining, and low crime faction of the population, may start paying dividends within certain states that have large major cities which suffer from various modern social ills (crime, drug abuse, etc.). As the Amish population grows, so too will the cultural weight they can throw around locally. Of course, we will never see Amish Congressman or Presidents. Instead, we will see a strong and firm cultural base in which a growing traditionalism-seeking group of people can find support within.
Will the Amish way of life ever become, by contemporary definitions, ‘popular’? Certainly not. However, similar to how people become Priests or Nuns, such paths may not be for them, but can be respected and admired. That admiration, the idea that such a group can do so much, may itself become fashionable; the Amish may come to symbolise a desirable form of of social stability, one situated in contrast to increasingly stormy issues emerging within American cities. As such, whilst the ‘full’ Amish way of life is not purely feasible for much of the population, elements may be worth emulating. A strong sense of local community identity, sustainability, and solidarity, as well as emphasising family and family-building; something that most agree is drastically needed.
In summary, will the Amish become a massive cultural force? It’s too soon to say. If demographic trends continue on their current trajectory, then within the next few decades, we may see the Amish become, not just a major cultural force, but the foundation of a parallel society; one providing an alternative to the excesses and drawbacks of globalised modernity.
It is entirely possible that the Amish, more than just playing a role as an increasingly culturally-influential Christian group within America, will come to provide a full-bodied blueprint for revitalising American ‘rugged individualism’. However, what is known for certain is that, in some distant rural parts of America, there still exist those who believe in the core values which made America into America – the will to flourish on the frontier of a new world.