I guess I had a different experience of “the suburbs” than is alluded to.I grew up in the 90’s and 00’s somewhere that many people would classify as a suburb (perhaps an exurb) of a major city in the Midatlantic, but the way my locality was set up, it was envisioned as a small town and it functioned as one. We had our town fire department, and we were proud of it. Once a year they’d show off all of the engines. The cops were honest and lived in the town and were committed to keeping it safe and secure while also being quite reasonable, especially with neighborhood parties that went on past 10 PM. We had our annual 4th of July parade and carnival. We were proud of our park. We hated our rivals from the other towns when we played sports. Our town had a colonial history, and we knew it, talked about it, and were proud of it. The neighborhoods were decidedly “suburban” with split level houses and ranchers on 1/4 acre of land plots, but it still felt like there was community. We had a lot of athletic fields across the town, but we also had an athletic complex. The houses near the athletic complex were quite small and the driveways always had Camaros and jetskis in them drifting ever closer to their repo date. We also had some houses with rusted hulks in the yard, but these were always in the back yard due to draconian ordinances. We also had a borderline commune in the woods where the weirdos could live. There were poor people. There were wealthy people. There were a lot more people who were somewhere in between.I settled down in a state in the Midwest and now truly live in a rural area. I’ve found that what I miss most about the “suburbs” isn’t the prestige or “the best people.” When I set aside the homesickness, what I really miss is the parochiality of my small town in the suburbs. Out here, everybody keeps to themselves. There’s no real town events. You have your acres and your neighbor has theirs. Granted, when I go home, I’m disappointed to find that a lot of the community of my home town is gone too, but there’s still some there and people still think wistfully about it and try to recapture it. It’s the atomization of the age and the tragedy of the commons. They tore down one of the two elementary schools and put up an old folks home. That’s never a good sign for a society. But it still feels a lot more like a society than being out in the woods in isolation. I also hate how far everything feels. I miss the ability to hop in my car, drive 2 minutes to the grocery store, pick up a gallon of milk, and head home. Now that’s an hour round trip for me. You have to go into the moderately sized city to get anything of note, and that’s something I’m not used to doing. My small town was self-sufficient and self-contained. There was a sense of security in that. Where there’s security, there’s a better chance to find community. I think Bennett’s Phylactery and others were led to believe (by old media and our media) that rural country is full of old souls who like to tend to their fields and retreat to their chair to read Longfellow before tucking in for the night. That’s not the case. In a lot of ways, they’re as atomized and victimized by the modern age as everybody else. There’s just a lower chance of your kid learning about the 407 genders in school, unless the eye of Soros drifted onto your small town in particular (Spencer, Indiana is a good case study on this).We get along with a couple other families from the local church, but we’re pretty far away. Kids need a lot of things, and one of those is peers. I’ve met well-adjusted homeschoolers who are polite, well-socialized, and lack the stereotypical awkwardness portrayed by an admittedly hostile Hollywood. I’ve met homeschoolers who look like they came straight out of central casting for a sitcom as the mouthbreathing weirdos who can’t use Pythagorean theorem but can (and frequently do) quote every single episode of Veggie Tales by heart and who think it is normal to refer to adults as their first names. The difference between the two? The former had friends and peers they played with. Family should be the basis for morality and habits, but eventually, people have to interact with others outside the family and be aware of what constitutes normal social interaction and what is a family “quirk.” On the other hand, you don’t want your kids pal-ing around with kids from the family that lets theirs watch R-rated movies and you’re stuck explaining to your 10 year old what fellatio is.I think there’s a miasma hanging over everywhere in the West. Some people are better equipped for different environments, but it takes a personal decision to not let it get to you to find happiness anywhere.

OT I recently starting checking in to Scott Adam’s’ podcast. It appears the ass whipping he’s been through recently has placed him in the “No Fuchs given” column. If anyone has a theory as to why, I’d be curious to hear it. He’s poking several alphabet agencies, and I wonder if his ire is genuine. Listen to todays (Sundays podcast). He’s almost asking to be Swatted, and dropped in a joke in Leavenworth.

NAFTA destroyed middle America’s Middle Class. Millennials are too young to remember what was before. Until manufacturing is returned to the US, rural America will remain disfunctional.

Somewhat OT, it’s on. Nancy Pelosi just signed a letter demanding Biden end all aid to Israel over Gaza. Hilarity ensued.Point being is that the cities are very, very bad places to be now, and the suburbs are an easy target. Already MA and MI are “asking” people to house “immigrants.” Soon they will demand, and then just take. That’s easy in the atomized suburbs, where there are a lot of houses to take and not much social organization. All those houses are all together. The state can concentrate its forces and people cannot fight back. In the country, its different. The State will have to send everyone miles and miles to take houses, and will face local resistance.Now with WWIII pretty much guaranteed, with Blinken guaranteeing that Ukraine will join NATO and France and Germany announcing they are sending troops and instituting a draft (story this Weekend in the FT), assuming you are not nuked, and nukes do not fly, it is far, far better to be in the country. In the country, you can grow food.In WWII, there was strict rationing. No sugar, coffee, meat, fat, etc. People in the country with gardens, their own chickens, hogs, sheep etc. were OK. Being in the suburbs is a trap — the system that sustained it can no longer function. Trucks are going to be the first thing to go — even without WWIII, Biden has announced “green” mandates for electric trucks which means the end of the suburbs.People have been prepping for years, because they could subconciously understand what was going on, and see the vulnerability of worst: cities, and pretty bad: suburbs. You can grow your own food in the suburbs but at least one neighbor or drone system will rat you out and the authorities will come raid you for “hoarding” or what not. Much harder to do at scale in the country because of the tyranny of distance.Bottom line — you want to be where the State is not. Because they hate you and want you dead.

It’s a great thought that all our great conveniences and “suburban” lives entail accepting certain grubbiness and degeneracy. And fighting back against them might mean being tossed out into the void and losing that comfortable lifestyle. It seems like the westward movement pioneers had everything to gain and nothing to lose, while in our day and age, there is seemingly a lot to lose (selfishly) for perhaps ephemeral gains? Don’t get me wrong, drawing and quartering making a comeback would be fantastic…

I’ve mentioned this here before, but the podcast reminds me. Having read Marx in college and more recently having read/listened to Catholic critiques of modernity, I was looking at things in terms of materialism, and it wasn’t adding up. Then, a while ago, I went to the gas station, and the guy working the register was a tranny. It occurred to me it was easier for this guy to change his body than to change his mind, and that told me that while there are problems of materialism, the dominant issue today is idealism. Looking at it that way, things started to click.Seems like Z is hinting at this, saying that the point of burbs is to insulate suburbanites from the sausage-making of life. Iow, they’re rejecting the world because it doesn’t look like their ideal. Material excess and its tradeoffs are in service to chasing this ideal, which might explain why people can live with them.This all brings to mind Quigley’s description of the Puritan view rejecting the body and the material world as being ‘sinful and dangerous and, as such, something which must be sternly controlled by the individual’s will’. Further, the bit about 17th century methods being divorced from other-worldly goals and applied to this-worldly, materialistic 19th century goals.Perhaps these methods were, in some sense, reapplied to other-worldly goals in the 20th century. Maybe unconsciously and confusedly, because if Quigley is correct, the middle classes are a product of the 17th century and essentially Puritan, whatever they might profess. Notwithstanding the hangover of 19th century materialism and the contradictions that combination causes.

I didn’t clearly understand the post that was being discussed, but my immediate thoughts were 1) it doesn’t sound like he was in a community at all, at least not of like-minded people. Wouldn’t such plans entail at least moving out with a small group?2) To the argument of, well you’re going to have poor, drug-users, and fat kids watching netflix… ok sure. But why should those people have the same rights as the person whose kids are studying hard and whose dad has some functional contribution to the community, like being the blacksmith? If anything they should have less rights if they’re a drain or a criminal underclass. So maybe the objection is having to interact with them as equals?

The topic of this week’s podcast reminded me quite a bit of this recent writing by Walt Bismarck (remember him?):https://newaltright.substack.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist

Twenty-three verses here. Papist footnotes report that “This is the first of three poems on the forbidden woman, the ‘stranger’ outside the social boundaries”. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+5&version=NABRE https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+5&version=OJB The pumping muscle appears again in verse twelve. A writer named T.S. Flanders, a guy who has been bouncing around from sect to sect, asserts that “The heart and soul of Christendom is the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.” Does this not roll off the tongue better than would ‘Eucharistic Central Nervous System of Jesus’? https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/04/no_author/its-time-to-purchase-your-sacred-heart-flag-for-june/

If you have children, you probably don’t want them only around a bunch of kids who say you-uns. Such people are not necessarily salt of the earth, God fearing kind-hearted Christians just waiting to accept your family into their community.Mostly, they are fat, tatted, drug addled and not heading anywhere in life, except to get high. If you do find church going folks, woe to you if you disagree with them over not just religious matters but how the ladies should play patty cake at vacation Bible school. They are a closed club, and if you an’t from there and if you family doesn’t go back 7 generations forget about fitting in.Also, you do have set your kids apart. After all, they ideally will be better than their parents. Unfortunately, country often people look down on “book learning” (you read all them books?) and believe attempting to improve oneself in life or even simply have curiosity about the world makes on a snot with an attitude of “he thinks his shit don’t stink.”As a side note, I was raised among such people, worked with them worked, have members of my family are a redneck as they come, and, though some are indeed wonderful people, I am happy in general to be the hell away from them.Suburbs at their best are a fortress from the harder parts of society, and that is good thing. Since into literature, someone once wrote about good fences making good neighbors. Well, the suburb is supposed to provide that fence. On the other had, as Z says, such protection comes with a big price. Also, they have declined in so many ways (far from perfect going back to the 60s and 70s btw).Moving to Austin is not moving to the suburbs. It is moving to an overpriced, over crowded, crime ridden city, with terrible traffic and road construction, full of pinkos (why has that word gone out of style?) and druggies and winos. If you have enough money to insulate yourself from all that in Austin, good on you.Otherwise, a more modest suburb is probably a better bet for folks with family.For old, as has been pointed out here, better be close to a good hospital and those are increasingly scarce in the sticks. But, hey, we all gotta go sometime, so there’s that.

At the risk of outing myself, let me suggest a place that combines good values and nice amenities: Rapid City, SD.

I saw paradise. The greatest place that ever was. Christchurch New Zealand, before the Earthquake. Even back then they would not take me (too White, pale, stale, and male I guess). Now its overrun by the Third World. Thomas Wolf was right. You can’t go home again.And here’s the thing. That nice safe suburb? Its gone man. Gone and not coming back, ever. That hipster city Austin? Its gone, its a violent hell-hole now with White guys being arrested and charged with murder for defending themselves against murderous street robberies by vibrants armed with guns. The amount of homeless in Austin is about that of Seattle, with predictable results. I have seen article after article portraying the crime and violence of Austin on a par with Downtown LA’s skid row.And the same for every other hipster hangout and city. They are getting hammered, with Open Border “migrants” from the Third World prisons poured out into Western streets. No matter if its Oslo or Salem Oregon or Martha’s Vineyard, even Malibu is going to have homeless, “migrants” and the sort of home invasions and squatting and take overs that characterize the invasion of the West by the Global South. LeBron is upset that his neighbors got squatted by a bunch of “migrants” who cause such security problems he needs 24/7 Armed security. He’s complained to Mayor Bass who is acquainted with him and there has been no results. He lives in the Hollywood Hills. “Average” home prices there are likely in the tens of millions.My own suburb, I have seen homeless sleeping rough not two blocks from my house. I have driven past homeless dudes overdosing in front of the local church within five minutes walking distance. Break ins and cars being stolen or having their catalytic converters ripped out is a common thing here, with one neighboring home selling for just under $1 million. So there is that. Physcally its a nice neighborhood. But the threat is always there, lurking. [Over in Irvine, home invasions are a weekly occurence. At least its not daily. They mostly target Asians who tend to keep cash on hand.]There is no more “safe suburb” — its not safe, no place is safe or immune from the sheer tidal wave of the Third World crashing down and making White people a discriminated, hated minority overnight.

As a Portlandite I’ve had this same issue. On the one hand I hate the politics of all the goodwhite twits around me, and extreme ends of liberal pretension are ridiculous. But I also get repulsed by the rural lower classes: the opiod/meth druggies, the obesity, the mudsharking, the strange pig-man face thing some of them have going, walmart… What I want is a group of sophisticated people who also enjoy classical music and aren’t shitlibs. Tarring the right with being declasse was probably the most effective thing the lefties ever did.

On Bennett’s Phylactery:1. I’ve enormous respect for any young man who values the well being of his children. Starting with having them in the first place. I’ve followed him for a bit on Twitter.2. The template of “the perfect suburb” is really just college for adult life. Great buildings, its own police force enforcing strict entry rules, massively hidden and subsidized infrastructure, and an all powerful bureaucracy that will nudge those who don’t fit with warnings, then excommunication.Suburbanites (and I am, regrettably, one of them) just want the college experience, only with our personal values expressed everywhere in our sight line. It can’t happen, because the college experience is itself a massively overpriced lie.3. B.P. is (I think) ex Mormon? Reading him I had the sense that he bailed out for whatever reason but still wanted the values and the community provided by the LDS.But you can’t have one without the other.Sad to see the LDS slowly go down. The cultural sludge and degeneracy that comes over a fiber optic pipeline is everywhere now. Running for the hills won’t shield you from it.

Growing up in the Deep South, I don’t remember that the Transcendentalists had much of an impact on me. I can’t remember any of Emerson’s poems or essays forced on us in High School. I’ve never read ‘On Walden Pond.’ From excerpts I can say it seems pretty hokey to me. Was Walt Whitman really a poet? I don’t think so. Learning more about Transcendentalism in college, I can’t say I’m impressed. If it’s fundamental to their thinking that human beings are inherently good, they’re flat out wrong. I’m much more impressed about the picture of human beings as described by Flannery O’Connor than by Emerson. And I’m not even Catholic. These utopian dreamers need to get out and smell the people. But they can’t face the reality of it.There was a time when the great mass of people were at least aspirational if only in superficial ways. They aspired to become better than their upbringing, at least the best of them did. I guess they were common-sense ‘transcendentalists’, if you will, but with a healthy dose of realism and scepticism when dealing with others. Often now the children of the middle-class aspire to the lowest common denominator. We’re moving closer to ‘Idiocracy’ every day, where anyone who aspires to a higher standard is a “fag.” The problem is they think they can be ‘good people’ without any effort at emulating the really superior people which historic America has provided countless examples of. It’s no wonder because of the illiteracy of their own teachers who have been indoctrinated on the ignorant educational theories prevalent in the teachers’ colleges.But there are bigger wheels grinding inexorably in the larger world. Yankee America has never had to face real defeat. As a consequence, they keep doubling down, by for example, insisting that Ukraine will join NATO. Their entire world is about to be upended.

In certain respects, Eric Hoffer could not be further from either a family man or a community builder. He lived as a transient laborer, by choice; he once wrote (I think it was in ‘The Temper of Our Time’) that he decided at an early age to remain poor and to work with his hands. By the time he became known, after the success of ‘The True Believer’, he was living in a small San Francisco apartment, working part-time as a longshoreman. Somewhere in his diary/memoir ‘Working and Thinking on the Waterfront’, Hoffer tells us what ingredients were necessary for his contentment; something along the lines of having his rent paid, a good book (and cigarettes) ready to hand, a notebook and a pen. I first encountered Hoffer’s writing in 1976, when his essay collection ‘In Our Time’ turned up at our house (I was sixteen). That same year I was reading Thoreau – Walden of course and his essay on Civil Disobedience – in high school. One obvious similarity between these two was that they were sure they didn’t have long to live, because of family history. (Thoreau died at 45; Hoffer surprised himself, dying at 80 or so). I figured that I did not have much time either, as I was certain – absolutely certain – that we’d all be obliterated in a nuclear war with the USSR. Ergo, what was the point of patiently building up a life, or a career, with family and deep interests? Why not bounce around and be, in effect, nothing? And what better place than the America of the time to do this? Hoffer himself wrote that America has elbow room for the common man; Thoreau built a hut in the woods (good luck doing that in Europe), “living life deliberately” as he put it. And in the back of your young mind you had Huck Finn telling you to “light out for the Indian Territory” when the going gets rough at home. All this built-in alienation is part of the American experience, because there is always a choice: You can be this or that, or nothing at all / You can live here or there, or nowhere at all.Of course in the present, the “suburban peasant” might live in the outskirts of any city at all, from Savannah to Detroit to Phoenix to Seattle, pick your cities, and the developments he’ll live in all are named “Valley Hill Estates” or “Forest Glen Hollow”, and within five miles there will be a Cracker Barrel, a Walmart, a Planet Fitness… and he’ll be more at home in any one of these transfer stations than he might have been moving twenty miles out of his previous suburb and living among the actual dirt people.

And I totally forgot – Zman, found this via link at WRSA – on a very similar theme – worth reading.https://www.highly-respected.com/p/an-independent-red-america-would

Here I am to piss in everybody’s punchbowl. (And this will be a long, tl;dr comment.) I thought Z’s stellar podcast used the theoretical (early American transcendentalists and fakers like Thoreau) to illustrate today’s physical and social dichotomy of suburban versus rural life. Everyone else seems to have gone off into the ether of American literature and what they read in junior high. Hint – I had to read all that stuff too – and I hated much of it. It’s why I was an English English major – better writers and thinkers, with much more panache. Plus I minored in Russian so that I, too, could pose as a deep and depressed thinker.Literary pretensions aside, let’s get back to the real world. The one of now not so sterile suburbs and rural shacks. Zman – Bravo. Everyone – I mean everyone – looks at the photos of our property and gushes “I would LOVE to live there!” Except, of course, that Betsy has her cheer camp and Bobby is in his SAT prep class, and Bob Senior relies on the local sports medicine guy, and Karen would be lost without her quilting group. They all have this sanitized vision of a rural paradise – a strange symbiotic cross between summer camp and their terribly sophisticated group of diverse numerkan neighbors. Or, as Zman put it, living the ideal suburban life but with a rural aesthetic.And that’s without mentioning the dreaded retirees – who think the world is their playground and everyone and everything exists to cater to their needs. They want a pastoral paradise – without the real, hard-working people who live and work here. Just who in the hell do they think built the roads through the wilderness and established the ‘first’ local mill or hardware store? Unlike the suburbs – with their shopping malls, multi-plex movie theaters, and ethnic restaurants – small towns were not built for anyone’s convenience or entertainment. They were built by the locals’ ancestors – to get their grain or animals to market, to share the cost of establishing electricity or schooling.Absolutely the suburbs have a hidden support network – not to mention the large, diverse, dangerous and decaying cities they cluster around. Our former suburb was rotten with corporate headquarters – all displaying a tasteful and non-religious Christmas ornament at the appropriate season, and a rainbow flag to sooth the social conscience. And the places were absolute ghost towns at the height of the scamdemic, as all the AWFLs and H-1bs cowered behind their masks in their McMansions.As Zman astutely notes, too many of these new rural fantasists genuinely believe “it takes a village,” in direct contradiction of their supposed race realism and genetic sophistication. People, you will have high IQ kids if you have the right genetics. And they still may be incredibly stupid about real life and lacking common sense, not to mention any concrete abilities. Hint: You can raise decent, competent kids without your oh-so-sophisticated crowd in Boulder or Austin. It just takes an old-fashioned thing known as parenting. My kids were the last in their private Christian schools to get cell phones, and they never saw the latest movie or tv show all the others were talking about. And yes, they resented me then, and thank me now. Environment does matter, but not in the way these new aesthetes think.It matters because one’s kids need to see and deal with real people and real life. To perhaps raise and love an animal, and still know it’s destined for one’s table and why. To know that one neighbor grades the road and another a mile away is the local dentist. To have a sense of rootedness. To know the volunteer firemen who rides his engine in the local Thanksgiving parade is the guy who sits next to you at church. To realize it takes people at the margins – poor and comfortable, blue collar and hipster – to make a real life community. And that supporting those margins – the bottom and top 10% – requires a lot of ordinary White people. Normal people. Not all brilliant, not all perfect – who do the day to day work of keeping civilization functioning for the divorced mom in the shack and the hipster with her local antique shop (yeah, met one of those from Rhode Island, for God’s sake – one place I will not be patronizing again).Of course, if you remain committed to the current paradigm, and plan on sending your kids to college and your princess to law school, then you do need to stay (oh please, please do) in the suburbs or city where all the sophisticated folks live. Fact: There are fewer resources (educational, entertainment, etc.) in a rural area. There isn’t a huge safety net. Working class people . . . work. And if you are extremely outgoing and like to host fancy parties, you may not like it in the country. Stay in Boulder or find a retirement community in Florida or Arizona. You will feel much more at home. And if you need/demand the latest medical tech and care, please stay home. I’m sick of reading of the 84 year old who embarked on a world cruise (and all the people say “You go girl! Live your best life!”) but forgot her medications. I’ve dealt with that reality as a consular officer. The world – the real one – is NOT your oyster. Stop growing old without growing up . . . Boomer.I’ve seen too many YT videos of people who moved to what they thought was their rural paradise, only to feel lonely and ‘excluded’ and to return home, complaining those rural people won’t ‘accept outsiders.’ I have no illusions that I will ever be a genuine oldtime local, but then I didn’t come here to visit or party on a pension. Yes, the original settlers/homesteaders had to deal with loneliness – and if you are expecting to immediately be invited to someone’s game night or ladies group, you will be disappointed. You are expected to take care of yourself, and your extended family. Everyone will lend a hand when needed, but you are not going to have anyone hold your hand and to gushingly make you feel welcome.One of our neighbor’s complaint about our predecessors was that they were constantly calling for help or advice. We call at times, too, but more often our neighbors check in with us to see if we are okay because we tend to keep to ourselves. My husband and I are . . . let’s call it emotionally self-sufficient. We enjoy each other’s company. We’ve already done the diplomatic dinner parties and fancy receptions. Now, we want to be away from people. Sure – my husband has his business trips and even his every-day remote job which provide more than enough interaction with other people. We miss our closest friends. But every time we return to the ‘burbs and the city, we cannot wait to get away and back home. Learn to enjoy the quiet and alone time – and don’t move here.In summation (I did warn this would be a long comment), don’t move without doing a cost/benefit analysis. What you are willing to give up, and what you will gain. What is an absolute necessity, and what is only a want. Know yourself and your genuine expectations. If you want the latest in cutting-edge tech and music and museums, if you want a top-ranked high school, then don’t move rural. Go somewhere like Austin . .. with its Jewish mayor, its homeless encampments, its increasing black and mestizo crime – and tell yourself you have the best of both worlds.I’ll stick with the woods and the bugs (which I don’t like) and the plain-spoken hillbillies. These are genuine people – and they do their jobs competently and with general good will – because that is who they are. I like that the men all open doors for me or tease me (with my grey hair) as “young lady.” I like that the cashier at the neighborhood store now greets me as a regular. I also know just how blessed we are – we can enjoy all the benefits of a rural life on a suburban salary, because my husband can work remotely. We live 3 miles off the paved road . . . but we have fiber optic internet. Rural relocation is a real thing, but look before you leap. We have not registered to vote or signed up at the local dem/repuke headquarters. But we have enjoyed a meal at the local VFW lodge and we don’t mock the service of anyone’s ancestor – because this is their community with its own history, traditions, and values. We appreciate being part of it – even on the margins – but we aren’t here to foster a revolutionary circle or radicalize the populace. I drop a few tidbits here and there, but I’m not here on a mission to change anyone.I treasure this remnant of heritage America, and I fear for its future. So call me an escapee or a refugee, but don’t come here and think you have the secret to establish an all new community of the like-minded. Communities don’t grow like that. And more importantly, they don’t last like that.

The real problem with this guy is that Appalachia didn’t “just happen.” The things he is looking for caused Appalachia. They caused Kensington ave. They caused all the awful things we see across the US. He’s not escaping Appalachia, he’s CAUSING it.When he’s bellyaching about the social problems he sees in others, he should remember them when he’s hiring some brown guy to mow his lawn, some brown woman to babysit his kids and buys some made in China junk in the bigbox corporations sucking wealth out of communities across the US. The people he complains about are the former middle class. Now they’re the underclass with all the problems of the underclass.Not to mention the movement of people. Everyone is from somewhere else now. How many of the people in Austin are from Austin? Probably very few have been there a full generation, let alone 3. This sucks talent out of small localities. Where before they work in the town’s big company as an engineer or management, now they just move to somewhere else. Anyone who can gets out of town and the only thing left are the people who can’t leave.

As a guy working at an industrial plant as a maintenance tech, I think my co-workers and operators would agree that we want management to stay as far away from us as possible. So the feeling between the managerial class and us is mutual. They stay in their admin building and we stay here.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an interesting essay on Thoreau that is well worth reading as a skeptical take: https://digital.nls.uk/rlstevenson/browse/archive/90445557

Excellent podcast today. Loads of wisdom were dispensed. Zman’s voice has always settled quite well on the ears, yet it was notably soothing during this episode. He has carved out a remarkable niche of his own among sociopolitical commentators. Dare I say he “transcends” the standard rhetoric of this age?

Great podcast, now let’s go deeper into root causes.Affluent civilization begets the death of hardship, existential gauntlets, and the culling that drives fitness evolution. Absence of culling enables pathogens and parasites to thrive, and ultimately pose a lethal threat to the host. And yes, this model applies at the societal level, not just for individuals and tribes.We need environments (towns, villages, cities) that reinvigorate culling in some palatable form such that our DNA improves with each succeeding generation. And how to get there is no easy problem. Education, persuasion, and voting have been failing spectacularly for centuries now, so persistence on this path will only delay the inevitable colony collapse. There is a better way.The solution begins with the acknowledgement that the pathogens are now in charge. And parasites always prioritize their survival above all else.

There’s another line from Emerson to our thing, nothing like what we think of when we remember transcendentalism from school. My teachers were boomers, so Emerson, like all historical good guys, was a hippie. And some current righty trad stuff is reminiscent of that*. But also, the genealogy of “right-accelerationism” is Emerson > Nietzsche > Deleuze > Land > any variation of “Collapse is necessary and will necessitate (or at least whisper, to some) what’s next.”That’s not how anyone actually got here. Deleuze is a car-sized pothole in that road. His most ardent disciples don’t read him. But that’s the essay. Enterprising youth, take this log and build a Substack innawoods!*Some leftists have noticed this and gone back, re-revising hippiedom to represent patriarchy/whiteness/Germany—as it has before. Looking for a way to condemn the sexual revolution for helping ugly dudes get laid, gen x feminists spotted the origin of “the sixties” in proto-nazi nature boy stuff**. All must retvrn.**Academic feminism is “My professor lied when he said he’d leave his wife for me” turned into a field of study.

A family is not a 20 year event. You have to find a spouse for your children so that your progeny is elevated instead of immiserated. It must be somewhere that your kids can join you and you can be a grandparent, and hopefully a great grandparent, instead of an occasional casual visitor. You must be a good custodian of your family heritage by sowing your seed in a fertile field, not casting it upon the rocks or amongst the thornbushes. You have to be somewhere where there is a sufficient pool of quality people for your sons and daughters to find a mate. Deliberately finding and keeping that is a huge task and burden. Kudos to that guy for trying (tho we looked at and rejected Austin bc a different judgment on where TX and Austin are headed, ie mestizo anarchy).So Zman; walk a mile in his shoes first. The future is for those who show up, and it sounds like his family’s progeny will show up.Frankly, we have a Daniel Penny problem. The white underclass is not yet racially on-sides yet. Once the trailer doors are never locked because an IRA man may be running from the Dublin Constabulary, then cohesive communities will be possible. As it is, the underclass will happily tell the rainbow Gestapo who is hiding naughty thoughts in their attic.

10 REM PUFF DIDLEY DINT KILL HISELF20 GOTO 10

This is a sales post. He is a consultant abd ge is Hopi g to fund his lifestyle off it. But this is a great topic Z. That question “why”? Is spot on. But it’s cleared up when you realize he is selling a fantasy at 80$ a month I’m pretty sure he has mixed race kids. So he only goes so far.

The American Renaissance is probably the era of American writing I know the most about. I would not say that Emerson rejected empiricism; rather, I contend her perceived the shortcoming as the industrial era continued to reshape society. I believe that this message is essential in the current moment, for the inability to trust intuition and individual experience of profundity is one of the disabilities the average American possesses.To be fair, I haven’t listened to the podcast yet (Google Podcast stopped working today, so I must find another app), but I hope you recognize the value of the Romantics. The belief that exists an ideal beyond the pale of the everyday, material (in both senses of that word) experience is one of the medicines for the modern world.Romanticism, of which Transcendentalism is a byproduct of, is the rejection of the materialism that Marx founded his history upon, and which we base our modern morality, such as it is, on.

Spectacular, Z. You are right – there is a LOT of fuzzy thinking going on in the prepper/off grid/parallel society camps and you hit the nail right on the head with all of them.But… I wonder if maybe you missed the boat with our young exile with the Twatter poast? Is he seeking an impossible Utopia? Or is he seeking his tribe? People in the country towns get clannish and mistrustful of outsiders and it takes a certain personality profile to parachute into their communities and make a go of it. (You could do it, I would suspect).I dunno about you but I started looking around at my circle 10 or 15 years ago… and I started seeing aliens. Over time they morphed into what you describe as “spiteful mutants”. As the glorious New World Order has unfurled they got weirder and weirder. These are not stupid people either – they’re affluent, successful technical and professional people. I had to get away; they lived on a different plane of existence than I did. My inlaws became virtue signaling authoritarian communists. My parents became eccentric and erratic. Us younger ones started breaking away from our families and each other. Then our kids broke away from us. And curiously there was no happy middle ground for any of us to tolerate each other. It is a point of pride for me to say I was first to get banished from Hive World – but then they started exiling each other and it was all so mean and nasty. I dunno what in hell happenedI’ve thought along the same lines as you in that our affluent lifestyle is corrupting us. None of this would ever have happened in the Before Times. It was too important to keep the family together for the welfare of all… but all that is gone now, Women can flip off their husbands and cash in or at least count on the welfare state. Kids don’t learn anything at school and any concept of discipline was thrown out 50 years ago. We are so rich and wealthy that some of us have nothing better to do than obsess over our genitals and annoy our neighbours with them.Perhaps we’re all right? You are correct in saying our concept of Utopia doesn’t exist and that any life we make for ourselves has to have pro and con aspects. Torba is right in that we need to starve our enemies and strengthen ourselves and our brothers? And the kid on Twatter is right in seeking a tribe that aligns with his worldviews and opinions.Have a great weekend dissidents.

Great show Zman! I actually enjoyed the more off the cuff shows from time to time.One absolutely vital subtopic from the entire show is the ignorance that most folks under 40 have of the origin of the history of Western thought, culture, and philosophy. Perhaps I am living among the hoi polloi, but I know very few people who own or read books at all.When folks come by to visit they are always shocked by the number of books I own. Inevitably they ask, “Have you read all these?” It really blows their mind when I assure them that not only have I read every single one of the thousands of books in my domicile, but I have read all of them multiple times. I would not own a copy of a book if it was not worth re-reading!Of course I recognized the opening quote in the show immediately. But then in high school (a very run of the mill public school mind you in a small Southern town) we read Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Faulkner, Longfellow, Hardy, Dickens, Scott, Shakespeare, Frost, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Poe, etc. just to name a few.I had a jarring experience at work the other day when I mentioned to a group of under 40’s that the “writing was on the wall” regarding a certain situation. Do you know not a single person got the reference to the book of Daniel? And when I said: “You know Mene Mene Tekel Uparsin!”, they stared at me like a mule looking at a new gate (as they say around here).To paraphrase: Those who do not study the history of Western culture are doomed to make the same mistakes made in the past. Over and over and over.

All BMW SUVs are already built in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Many of Michelin tires going on them are also made nearby. Volvo says they are also building a plant in the area too (not sure if will be for cars or trucks). Part of it is a relatively low cost, right-to-work state. Probably just as important, South Carolina has 4 nuclear power stations – making electricity costs affordable and stable, unlike Germany.

Where can we go for retirement? IIRC, Someone said there were two places left in the US that were massively majority white, sort of like the 1950s. But I can’t remember what they were, and I can’t locate the comment. Does anyone know? I need to do like Zman pretty soon. Any good candidate rural locations? Thanks in advance!

My wife and chose to pack up and move to a semi-rural area of the South. One difference between the South and New England is the distance between the classes. New England and New Jersey has it’s rich towns and neighborhoods well separated from the working poor. It’s become a running joke with us – drive past a beautiful luxurious house, and in less than a mile you will pass a shack or trailer.

The alienation of whites from themselves has to be one of the most beastly products of the modern age. As someone who grew up in a mixed income small town, I am routinely dismayed at the corrosive effects of suburban life on its denizens, who simply cannot imagine life outside their income bracket. On white females this has induced the cuckoo effect, in which the care and consideration they would have bestowed on the less fortunate in their own communities has been forcibly transferred to ‘the other’, while in white males this has transferred hero worship of their own ancestors and confederates to stranger worship, with predictable results. Until whites learn to divest themselves of this alienation, they are doomed.

As a man who grew up in a rural area in a lower class home then moving up in class and raising children in the suburbs i find as i get older a longing to go back to that small community i left behind years ago, it helps that my wife was also raised in that rural area.The good thing is that there is already a people and a community that we are familiar with, the bad thing is our children we raised have no affinity toward it.That small home town community does not have cool restaurants and coffee bars it has farmers, ranchers and some white people living in trailers here and there.Its a foreign country to my kids.Which gets to the Z’s essay, the community we go to or we build from scratch has to be an organic community with both people who smell nice and we people whom don’t, but the white trailer park people are still our people.The suburbs and their coffee shops and easy access to the good things keep us in our own comfortable world.Not everyone was built to be a pioneer in our past and not everyone is built to be a pioneer in our present.I sometimes wish that i would have found a way to stay in that rural world and have raised my family there. I think its a better upbringing, but that is just me.

Lived in Austin and a lot of other fashionable and very unfashionable places. My advice to the young man- don’t be a snob.

Society can’t totally corrupt the individual. There’s too much fire, too much passion, being built in the individual’s chest to be swamped by the cold water of society. Even in Japan — the most conformist, ass-licking society in the world — the individual manages to eke out an existence. All hope is not lost for the individual.

From you and Ed Dutton I’m getting these points:1.) Normie, by nature, can’t “wake up”2.) Elites, by nature, rule civilizations3.) The traits that distinguish normies and elites can’t be repressed by environment (or hopeful wishes)4.) Our outstanding civilizational achievements have come, and will always come, with dysfunctional trade-offs because such is the nature of the human condition I don’t disagree, exactly, but then what is the point of engaging with politics at all? Why care about events whose outcomes are the predetermined outputs of a massive biological calculator?

At whatever age I have attempted his writings — and I’m 60+ now — I have always found Emerson to be completely unreadable. It’s like wrestling with fog. Some time ago, it became clear to me that the newly independent United States felt an urgent need of what would now be called a public intellectual, and Emerson was one of several in New England who fit the profile — Channing was another.Thoreau is at his best in his travelogues: the Maine woods, Cape Cod, canoeing the Assabet, Concord, and Merrimack rivers. Walden is mostly annoying, especially when you find out that he walked home for meals.

Homeboy sounds like he wants to recreate the weird Yankee communal movement of the 19th century that was intimately tied up with the Transcendentalists- one that led to little bible thumping New Englands full of sober, industrious abolitionist Protestants further and further West. The kind of people who did not like Appalachian Dirt People migrating west. None of these guys will have the stones to defend their fantasy “community”, though, because sterile suburban bugmen can’t fathom doing that. Invented communities of trad hipsters will cave when the Gaystapo comes to town. They, unlike Dirt People, can renounce their heresy and reintegrate into Globohomo.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM&ab_channel=PulpVEVO

Based on Bennett’s link, his profile image, and some other in-joke looking references, I don’t think the phylactery he’s referring to is the Orthodox Jewish one. Fantasy author and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons used the same word to be the kept soul of an undead sorcerer, like the needle that Russian mythological character Koschei the Deathless kept his soul in, which meant that he couldn’t be killed except by the destruction of the needle. In Gygax’s incarnation, the destruction of the phylactery. (Off topic aside)

I’m about 3/4 through the episode so please forgive me if I end up repeating a point that was made in the conclusion. My initial reaction, as you pointed out the contradictions, is that this man wants Bethesda, before Betty Friedan ruined it. Which is admirable. My neighborhood would be idyllic if not for the AWFLs.

The pioneer spirit is lost. You don’t have to go far either. Old mill towns outside of cities but within metro areas are waiting for revitalization. They usually have infrastructure already built. What is lacking is the will and time. The will of the “leftover” population but also newcomers who would still pay a fortune to be around an already built trendy restaurant instead of fostering and developing new ones. If you can go to far, start with the frontier next door.

You mentioned doing a show on Karl Popper at some point. Still planning on doing that one?

America is steeped in Gnosticism and European occultism of various kind, has been since well before its official founding.Gnosticism’s cults and various schools (mind-mold academies) went strato in the centuries after Christ, with endless permutations and metastases, complex and tricksy narrative tracts, including Mary as a foundational, celestial deity. All foul, all attractive, all lies, full of pretty words and images to capture the human mind.America is archetypally Gnostic. Those cults no longer are underground, but serve as fundament and religious focus of the nation. The spiritual air that Americans breathe. D.C. is little more than a vast cult center, a coven, with objects of pagan worship all over the place, should one wish to look.

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