Why New Age puritans are the enemies of progress.

This is an unexpectedly great article. I didn’t think really anyone had completely caught on to the newly-developing culutural zeitgeist save me (and lord, please do save me from it), but Rachel has nailed it, and how we should react to it. The whole thing is a gem but here is one highlight.

As the risk has receded owing to the vaccine rollout, that power is proving hard to relinquish. An IpsosMORI poll published in June found that a significant minority of Brits would like certain restrictions such as closing nightclubs (26 per cent) and imposing a 10pm curfew (19 per cent) to be enforced permanently regardless of Covid risk. Even when the question specified there were no safety grounds for the restrictions, a quarter of people still wanted to stop everyone else enjoying themselves.

I saw that poll, too. It applies to the US just as well. And though what I cited mentions Covid, the piece is more than just about how the New Puritans have seized onto the particular crisis of the pandemic. Instead it, as I’ve seen no writer do except me, ties this priggishness all together with degrowth nonsense, seuxal shaming (on both sides of the political aisle) and even weight loss. In other words she understands deeply what’s happening at the sociocultural systems level and that it’s not one political movement that is foisting all this on us. No, it is in fact every party and political assemblage that are roughly on the same ideological ground, just refracting neo-puritanism through their peculiarities and proclivities. It’s not a monopolar problem. It’s a society-wide problem and it can only be addressed and defeated as such.

Of course I like this piece partially because when I brought this up years ago — well before Covid — more than a few people told me it wasn’t happening, I was imagining it, it was fake, etc. But it is happening and it’s worsening. Rachel is the first mainstream writer I’ve seen who understands the parts and pieces all interacting and how it’s not just one group, one party, that has moved this way. It’s everywhere now, and not going away soon.

If you believe you are acting without philosophy, or acting apolitically, you are then in fact enacting someone else’s philosophy, and executing someone else’s politics.

Philosophy and politics are foundational to human affairs. They are the codification of of the intractability of the real. There is no act without abstraction; ergo, there is no human thing without philosophy and without politics, for these are the social strata of the construction of the human project.

One of the rare times I did try to chat up a girl at a bar it didn’t go that well, for strange reasons. We’d already been talking for a while so it started out just fine. She was engaged and interested. But then she asked me what I did.

Her: So, what do you for a living?

Me: I’m a photojournalist and a paratrooper. I jump out of planes and do stories in the Army, 82nd Airborne Division.

Her: Oh, come on! You can tell me what you really do. You don’t have to impress me. Just tell me.

Me: That’s what I really do. I like it most of the time. But it can be a hard life.

Her: *shakes her hands in front of her* Ugh, I’ve just had it with all these guys making up these cockamamie stories to impress me! It’s just so lame!

Me: ????

Then she stormed off. No great loss, I’ll warrant. But still, funny. At least I got a story out of it. Should’ve told her I was an accountant or something, though.

No exit for Democrats: Mitch has them trapped, and the path ahead is darker than ever.

Hahahaha! No! Mitch has fucking nothing to do with it. They trapped themselves by refusing to govern, refusing to make their recalcitrant members fall into line, and being unwilling to actually wield power.

So I see we’re back to the Obama-era excuses that the Dems are just helpless li’l babies who have no choice but to wallow in their loserdom. Convenient narrative, but that also won’t win elections. And frankly, the Dems deserve to lose.

My dad has an officially tested IQ of 146 and believes evolution is a lie. Being smart often doesn't make you right, it mostly makes you more effective at believing what you believe.

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) September 22, 2021

Indeed. I had a friend whose IQ was officially tested in the 160+ range and who didn’t wear seatbelts because he believed it was safer to be thrown free of the car. He cited all sorts of things quite encyclopedically to “prove” this absolute insanity was true.

Model is Sara Malakul Lane. Photographer unknown. Even apart from the fact that Sara is very attractive, that’s such a well-lighted, well-composed and empathetic work. As a photographer myself (though I tend to shoot mostly bugs and stuff), I’m impressed.

Great cover of probably the Rolling Stones’ best song. Orianthi on guitar just burns the house down on this one, and the girl in pigtails on the right rocks those vocals. That’s a very, very difficult song if you do it like the Stones did it (and they do).

I watched it twice.