Author: VD

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Haruki Murakami has a new novel out. He gave an interview about it last month when it was released.

It’s hard to explain what The City and its Uncertain Walls is about. It opens with a guy whose job it is to read dreams. Those dreams are stored on shelves of a library. And that library exists in a town that is surrounded by a wall, with a Gatekeeper watching the one entry point. Oh, and each person has a shadow — one that can live independently from its…host? Source? Person?

It’s Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years. And it’s actually a re-visiting of a novella he wrote in 1980. In an interview conducted through a translator via email, he talked about his inspirations behind the new book, how he feels about getting older and his unyielding love for The Great Gatsby.

The City and its Uncertain Walls has its origins in a short story you wrote and published in 1980. The novel is also connected to a previous book you wrote, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. How do you feel when you’re revisiting work you wrote decades ago?

The 1980 novella I wrote, “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” is the only work of mine I haven’t allowed to be reprinted. It appeared in a magazine, but I didn’t let it be published in book format. The reason is that when it was published in the magazine, I felt it was still raw and immature. The theme I explored in that story was a very important one for me, and what I wrote about was, you might say, an inception point for me as a novelist. The problem was I lacked the requisite writing skills at the time to convey the story the way I thought I should. So I had decided that I would go back to it and do a complete rewrite once I had acquired the necessary experience and writing expertise.

In the meantime, however, other projects came up that I wanted to tackle, and some 40 years passed by (in the flash, it seemed) without me getting back to work on that story. By then I was in my 70s, and I thought maybe I don’t have all that much time remaining. So it’s a great relief to manage to finish writing this novel now, from a fresh perspective. I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I will, of course, be writing a review of it once I finish it. I was very pleased to find a hardcover edition under the tree this morning.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Limited Lessons of the Ukraine War

A lot of important lessons are being learned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “relearned” from the current war in Ukraine. But, as Anarchonomicon observes, a number of the various elements of this war are unique and unlikely to be repeated:

You have the resources of dozens of nations representing over half the world’s economy being poured into a country that can neither win nor negotiate, to fight its similar neighbor that also has to fight it out despite the cost due to the international strategic implications, both of whom are Slavic-white countries who both had strong reserves of nationalism and patriotism and avoided the kind of multi-culti mass-immigration that has zapped the willingness to fight for their country right out of every white man in the west, and because of a series of geostrategic accidents they spontaneously agreed to limit the fighting to stretch of land as narrow as that between the Swiss Border and the English Channel.

That’s a whole lot of conditions that will probably never hold again. Or at least certainly not for the next hundred years given the demographic crises everywhere and the pending death of the nation state.

  • If the smaller state doesn’t have allies who can fund it to the tune 50+% its annual GDP it can’t happen.
  • If either country has endured mass immigration/multiculturalism and doesn’t have an eastern european level paradoxical ultra-nationalism for their decaying shithole country…it can’t happen.
  • If either country isn’t being bribed/backed into a corner to refuse all negotiation, it can’t happen.
  • And if either country would rather just expand the war geographically and not fight an attritional trench war, it can’t happen.

The most important thing to note is that Ukraine is Clown World’s proxy. The entire Empire That Never Ended is fighting Russia, and is in the process of losing the war militarily, economically, and diplomatically. And once Clown World either contracts or collapses entirely, there isn’t a similar force on Earth capable of recreating it.

Which means any lessons about late-stage imperial proxy wars will probably not be relevant for another 200 years.

DISCUSS ON SG

Women in Tech Fail

The diversity crowd is going to have a tough time increasing the number of women in tech as long as the women are able to get paid more for their less-technical talents.

The draw of making content can overwhelm just about anyone. That includes a bioengineer who was working on her PhD. Last year, Zara Dar made headlines when she shot up to the 0.3% of creators on OnlyFans making content as the “hot science girl.” She was bringing in $30k a month while furthering her education at the University of Texas at Austin. A few days ago, she announced on YouTube, where she has more than 100,000 subscribers, that she had made the decision to become a PhD dropout in order to focus on creating content full-time.

The self-described “nerd with a passion for art, fitness, and reading” admitted that it was a difficult decision to make. Dar said, “I’ve dropped out of my PhD. I’ve cried so much over this decision to quit my PhD, you know, because it’s a stressful decision, not that I’m particularly sad about it… moving on to doing OnlyFans and content creation full-time, it’s not just a career choice, it feels kind of like a gamble on the direction of my entire life.”

This hot science girl is now a PhD dropout, taking her talents to the content game full-time. The draw of furthering her engineering career was strong, but not as strong as doing content. That and having her life tied to someone else’s vision while working for a company, spending her time doing things she didn’t want to do wasn’t what she wanted for herself.

It’s fascinating to observe how fast the social justice movement is destroying itself as well as every corporation, institution, and industry it touches.

DISCUSS ON SG

95 Percent Vaccinated Deaths

They could lie to you, gaslight you, and coerce you. They could disemploy you, and threaten you, and turn your friends and family against you. They could do everything but hide the bodies.

Official data released by the UK government has exposed an alarming explosion of deaths that only impacted people who received Covid mRNA “vaccines.” The data shows that the vaccinated population suffered a huge surge in deaths compared to the unvaccinated.

In the UK, approximately 30 percent of the population has never received a dose of the Covid “vaccine.” According to the UKHSA’s figures, 63.4 million people were eligible for vaccination at that point. 34 percent were not double vaccinated, and 50 percent were not triple vaccinated.

However, the vaccinated population accounted for 95 percent of all COVID-19 deaths between January and May 2023.

The unvaccinated population, meanwhile, accounted for just five percent of Covid deaths.

The vast majority of the deaths are among those vaccinated four times. This quad-vaxxed population accounts for 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and 83 percent of all Covid deaths among the vaccinated.

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All “Success” is Manufactured

Indeed. What are the odds? And looking at them, what are the chances that they aren’t related in some way? Once you grasp the basic concept of its reality, the outlines of Clown World become clearer and clearer over time. It’s a club, you’re not in it, and more importantly, if you value your immortal soul, you do not want to be in it or even have anything to do with it.

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False Marketing

Women’s athletes and the Texas Attorney General are waging a war against baphometism and Clown World institutions like the NCAA:

San Jose State women’s volleyball star Brooke Slusser warned the NCAA after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the organization over transgender inclusion in women’s sports. Paxton filed the lawsuit on Sunday, accusing the organization of deceptive marketing practices for allowing transgender women to compete against biological females. Paxton said in a news release the NCAA violated the Texas Trade Practices Act “which exists to protect consumers from businesses attempting to mislead or trick them into purchasing goods or services that are not as advertised.”

Slusser, who was a part of a lawsuit against her own school and the NCAA for allowing a transgender woman on the Spartans’ roster this season, posted about Paxton’s suit.

“Hey NCAA, just in case you haven’t realized yet this fight will just keep getting harder for you until you make a change!” Slusser wrote on X.

Paxton accused the NCAA of “engaging in false, deceptive, and misleading practices by marketing sporting events as ‘women’s’ competitions only to then provide consumers with mixed sex competitions where biological males compete against biological females.”

“The NCAA is intentionally and knowingly jeopardizing the safety and well-being of women by deceptively changing women’s competitions into co-ed competitions,” Paxton said in a statement. “When people watch a women’s volleyball game, for example, they expect to see women playing against other women – not biological males pretending to be something they are not. Radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports.”

Paxton said he was seeking a court to grant a permanent injunction to prohibit the NCAA from allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports in Texas or “involving Texas teams, or alternatively requiring the NCAA to stop marketing events as ‘women’s’ when in fact they are mixed sex competitions,” the news release said.

The false marketing angle against men who compete in women’s sports is a much better and more legally powerful angle than the “fairness” angle that was borrowed from feminism. Because a man is not a woman, it is easy to demonstrate that a man is not a woman, and it is obviously false marketing to claim that coed sports are “women’s sports”.

Lawfare is a side that cuts both ways, but it needs to be intelligently applied, and it must be kept in mind that the rhetoric for one side is seldom as effective for the other.

DISCUSS ON SG

This is Not a School Failure

This tragedy is a specific parental failure, not a general systemic one:

The parents of a 10-year-old boy who took his own life after being bullied at school for his glasses and teeth have filed a lawsuit that includes photos of his injuries. Sammy Teusch’s family moved to Greenfield, Indiana, in November 2022, where he was relentlessly bullied at Weston Elementary and later at Greenfield Intermediate

Sammy repeatedly sought help from teachers, but no action was taken

Sammy took his own life in May. His 13-year-old brother discovered his asphyxiated body at home

The lawsuit includes photos of injuries and a text message from a bully appearing to confess to driving Sammy to suicide. The parents accuse the school district of showing “callous indifference” and failing to protect Sammy despite their repeated pleas for intervention.

It’s bad enough that parents force their children to go to public schools, in which “callous indifference” is designed from the start. But to ignore the suffering of a child who is a square peg in the round hole, and expect the school to eliminate it, or even mitigate it, is a complete dereliction of parental duty. Especially when homeschooling the child is an easy and legal option.

Indiana homeschool families are not required to register with the state and do not have to do any testing or reporting.

If your child is being bullied at school, don’t hesitate to pull him or her out of school immediately and keep him out until the matter is well and truly sorted. And never, ever, rely upon the school authorities to do anything whatsoever to defend your child; even the kindest-hearted schoolteacher or school administrator has responsibilities that do not permit them to do much, if anything, to prevent one or more schoolchildren from bullying or otherwise preying upon another child.

Far too many parents are quite happy to abandon their own responsibilities in the false belief that the schools operate in loco parentis. They never have and they never will.

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