There is a peculiar superstition in declining societies that saying something is approximately equivalent to doing something, and the superstition becomes stronger precisely as the society becomes less capable of accomplishing anything difficult. A committee announces a strategy and behaves as though it has pursued one; an institution publishes a declaration and congratulates itself for…
Tag: Civilization
Seeking Alignment with Leftists
One of the recurring errors made by people who build things is the assumption that everyone else is engaged in the same basic enterprise. The engineer sees a defective system and asks how it can be repaired; the activist often sees the same defect and asks what moral significance can be extracted from it, who…
Competing with China
The most useful way to think about American competition with China is not through the language of moral theater, which is how almost every domestic political question is now presented, but through the older and less flattering language of power. Civilizations rise because they accumulate capacity, and they decline because they lose it. Capacity means…
Restoring National Wealth
A nation is a lineage. The wealth is the lineage. Roads, courts, factories, and pension ledgers are residue. They last only while the people who built them still occupy the country and still treat it as theirs. The men who rule you treat the nation as a warehouse. They fill it. They call the filling…
Punishing Third World Migrants
The Great Replacement isn’t a crime. That’s the part that keeps people up at night looking for a villain with a cape. There is no cape. It’s a practical joke. A long one. The kind that starts when the room is still laughing and ends when the lights are already out. Western civilization got depressed….
Defunding Police
I always used to laugh at the whole “defund the police” idea. Not a cruel laugh. Just the quiet kind you get when somebody announces they’re going to solve world hunger by yelling at the sky. These folks simply cannot think past the first move on the chessboard. They see a fence and decide the…
Islam is a Paperclip Maximizer
The paperclip maximizer, as Nick Bostrom described it, is a thought experiment about blind optimization. It takes one goal, no matter how trivial, and relentlessly subordinates the world to it. The paperclip maximizer is not wicked for wickedness requires imagination. It has the focused simplicity of having only one end, and converts everything else into…
No Culture in the Third World
The most quietly devastating joke in the entire diversity regime is the one nobody is allowed to laugh at: the moment the third-world migrant steps off the plane and into the first world, he reveals with merciless clarity that he possesses no culture at all. Not “a different culture.” Not “an alternative tradition.” Nothing. The…
The Revolution Nobody Requested
People argue about communism as if it were mainly an economic doctrine. This is like arguing about a computer virus as if it were mainly a disagreement about typography. In practice it is more useful to treat communism as a method of governance. The doctrine is the justification layer, a marketing wrapper that promises moral…
Builders Again
My friends! Let’s speak plainly, the way people speak when they actually mean what they say. We are standing at a threshold. The world is reorganizing around intelligence – human intelligence amplified by machines – and the nations that thrive will be the nations that choose a direction and then build toward it with discipline….
Garbage Time
People talk about “garbage time” in basketball. The last couple minutes of a blowout, where the starters are sitting on the bench with warm towels, and the coach is sending in guys whose mothers don’t even recognize them on the court. And the points don’t matter. The game’s already decided. It’s not history, it’s bookkeeping….
Island restaurants
Island restaurants are absurd. There’s no other way to put it. You land in paradise, surrounded by shimmering water teeming with life, and what do they serve you? Alaskan king crab, farmed salmon that tastes like wet cardboard, and shrimp from Thailand—a globalized culinary catastrophe brought to you by frozen cargo. Somehow, they think that…