Author: VD

I enjoyed WFB’s sense of humor, but I always suspected he was a bit of a charlatan. One can’t be a TV intellectual and not carry somewhat of the carnie in one’s veins. Pretending to knowledge that you don’t actually possess is one of the temptations of the highly intelligent and highly educated; because most people aren’t inclined to risk testing you, you can count on getting away with it most of the time.

Buckley enjoyed tossing literary references into the conversation; a habit not always guaranteed to make friends. Once, in answer to something I said, he injected, “As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.”

A fine and witty remark to be sure, but one you wouldn’t be wise to depend on as your opening gag in your nightclub act. And one I would guess he knew it might take the rest of us a moment to fully “get.” If then.

But that’s not what bothered me about it. A little voice in me whispered, “Is that Oscar Wilde?” In one of those bizarre coincidences life tickles us with, a French friend had given me, two days before, a volume of famous “Citations” (see tahss ee own) by French wits. Try real hard to believe that among the half dozen she had checkmarked as favorites was that one. Yes. The alleged Wilde.

A fair word of warning: I almost never bluff. I prefer to do the precise opposite of Buckley, which is to quote references without signaling the reader or the listener. I still can’t believe that no one has picked up on a totally appropriate TIA reference to the best song by one of the two greatest Wax Trax! bands. So few are bright enough to grasp the full extent of my brilliance….

Upon further review, make that three greatest. I forgot Laibach. Caribou! Anyhow, in general, always be dubious whenever someone attributes a quote to Wilde, Lincoln or Churchill, they seem to be three perennial favorites among quote-fakers. Whenever I’m dubious about the validity of a quote, I simply ask the quoter what work the quote first appeared in. This usually prompts a speedy admission that not only do they not know, but that they’re not actually sure the person quoted said whatever it was they were supposed to have said.

Public display via literary reference is somewhat of a stupid game anyhow. That’s why although I keep a few conventional showstoppers on hand, I prefer to rely on quoting one of history’s great philosophers, Chuck D of Public Enemy. There’s almost no situation in which a PE quote is not “in full E-F-F-E-C-T otherwise known as ‘effect'”. If “there’s a five-letter word to describe her character” doesn’t fit, “the reasons are several, most of them federal” probably will.

Or better yet, just make up something ludicrous and attribute it to someone wildly implausible. That works too.

Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that these sudden “revelations” that caused the afrocentric Rev. Jeremiah Wright to abandon his parishioners campaign have been around since the day that Sen. Obama first declared his candidacy?

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., condemned racially charged sermons by his former pastor Friday and urged Americans not to reject his presidential campaign because of “guilt by association.”

Obama’s campaign announced that the minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., had left its spiritual advisory committee after videotapes of his sermons again ignited fierce debate in news accounts and political blogs.

Drudge reports: “Superdelegates ‘growing increasingly concerned’…” Such a surprise! Yes, of course, those would be the superdelegates who will decide the Democratic nomination… now what part of “Obama is there to make it look like a race and provide Hillary with a triumphant comeback” did you not understand when I pointed it out months ago? When the rabbit forgets his place and doesn’t drop out as scheduled, the star runner doesn’t panic, he just keeps running his race and waits for someone to disqualify the rabbit.

It seems the second print-run has now worked its way through distribution, so if you’re still looking for TIA in hardcopy, they are available there for the first time in weeks.

It’s a lot less fun going down than it is going up:

It is becoming increasingly difficult for people who live in the real world to communicate with those who don’t, and there is an increasing number of those who don’t just simply because most people believe what they are told and the lies they are being told are now monumental. Astronomical in size. That’s one of those universal rules about human beings; the majority will always go along with whatever you tell them. That’s just the way it always has been and always will be. All good propagandists know that.

For those who do think for themselves and live in the real world however, everything that is happening today has been entirely predictable and even expected. I mean, the corporate media will say “no one ever saw this” or “they never saw that” and really the case is they just choose not to have those people appear.

This is one reason why I haven’t written much on economics for the last few years. The dichotomy between what is and what is reported probably hasn’t been this great since the Soviet Union lost control of its newspapers.

By the way, I think it’s too soon to short gold even for the traders. I was thinking we were getting close, but based on my estimates, there’s another 100-115 to go, depending on how fast we get there. R-DMA 200 is only at 1.29, it was 1.4 at the 6 May 06 peak. Of course, it only took eight trading days to get there from 1.27, so a decent opportunity may be presenting itself soon.

Cassy Fiano encourages women to stop stabbing their men in the back:

And this “harmless” disparagement of husbands among wives is not harmless either, ladies. It may seem like it’s just fun and games to put down your husband when you’re gossiping with your girlfriends, but it isn’t. Would you say that kind of stuff to his face? Would you tell your husband that he can’t take care of himself if his life depended on it, that he’s selfish and doesn’t pay enough attention to his family? If you wouldn’t, then don’t go around laughing about it with your girlfriends without a second thought.

I can’t speak for what goes on when the girls are gabbing, but this sort of thing in mixed company irritates me to no end. I especially despise those women who try to hide behind the passive-aggressive “I’m just joking” game. As Spacebunny says, this sort of behavior reflects badly on the man. But it reflects even worse on the woman. And it’s certainly inspired some piling on at Dr. Helen’s place.

This sums up the destructive, self-hating nihilism of the equalitarians:

The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls.

After 1.2 seconds of consideration, the answer is yes, fucking totally. This without any sarcasm whatsoever.

Those must be some really great Powerpoint presentations… it will be interesting to see how many people still feel this way once the housing crash and recession seriously get rolling.

David Brooks paints a vivid image of a character type:

Every society produces its own distinct brand of social misfits, I suppose, but our social structure seems to produce significant numbers of people with rank-link imbalances…. They rack up great grades and develop that coating of arrogance that forms on those who know that in the long run they will be more successful than the beauties and jocks who get dates.

Then they go into one of those fields like law, medicine or politics, where a person’s identity is defined by career rank. They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference; the willingness to stand too close to other men while talking and touching them in a manly way. And, of course, these people succeed and enjoy their success. When Bigness descends upon them, they dominate every room they enter and graciously share their company with those who are thrilled to meet them….

These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Because of disuse, their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels.

I’ve occasionally wondered what sort of developmentally stunted freak wants to spend most of his time being surrounded by adoring, wide-eyed fans. I mean, while I very much appreciate those who think well of my writing, I’d rather socialize with my friends. Half of them know that I write but don’t read my stuff, the other half are vaguely aware that I occasionally write now and then, but most have no idea what it is. None of them play my games either. On the other hand, I don’t spend much time investing in their portfolios, going over their code, using the products they manufacture or reading their legal briefs either.

Other than SB, the White Buffalo and the Original Cyberpunk, no one even reads this blog. And that’s not only fine, that’s normal. This is the best line from Brooks’s column: “Maybe they’d be O.K. if somewhere along the way they’d had true friends, defined as a group of people who share a mutual inability to take each other seriously.”

Life is too short and too crazy to take yourself seriously all the time. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you deserve the laughter that will eventually come your way.

Daniel Hannan points out the irony of the way in which the Fourth Reich’s second annexment of Austria is actually less democratic than the Third Reich’s was:

Two anniversaries are marked this week. Fifty years ago, the European Parliament met for the first time; seventy years ago, Austria was annexed by Hitler. The first anniversary is the subject of official self-congratulation; the second of official obloquy.

It’s funny how things look in retrospect. Both the Treaty of Rome and the Anschluss were acts of political integration. But whereas the Anschluss was endorsed by 99.8 per cent of Austrian voters in a referendum, European treaties are habitually rejected in referendums. The odd thing is that we are expected to deplore the former and applaud the latter in the name of democracy.

I’m very skeptical of democracy. But I’m even more dubious of non-democratic conquests hidden behind a faux-democratic veil. One needn’t be a Christian eschatologist to see that the EU is not going to end much better than Europe’s last totalitarian takeover.

My complete response to Kelly’s initial broadside is posted on the TIA forum. Feel free to comment either here or there. Here’s a snippet:

Day starts his list of the evils of atheism by blaming the philosophers of the Enlightenment era for paving the way for “the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and dozens of other massacres in the name of human progress,” which I find to be amusing given that were it not for such revolutions, we would still be living in feudal societies and caste systems quite antithetical to his own libertarian ideals. I wonder where he got those ideas regarding man’s free will and right to exercise it. Could it be…the Enlightenment? The irony is almost overwhelming. This is a point he brings up often. The philosophers of the time certainly did effect the populace, but not by advocating war or revolution. Senseless killing is certainly not rational, nor is being swept away in nationalistic fervor. If waking people up to the reality of their circumstance by giving them a vision of hope for a better tomorrow is a crime, it is one that should be committed more often. The people of the Enlightenment era were simply alerted to the fact that, to paraphrase Rousseau, despite being born free, they were “everywhere in chains.” The people reacted to this knowledge with revolution, and violence is an unfortunate byproduct of the overthrow of established regimes. If these things had not taken place, there would be no United States of America, no democracy, and certainly no libertarianism. Vox Day himself could be similarly vilified by the benefactors of his philosophy for espousing such views, assuming we lived in a world where the Enlightenment had never occurred.

As with the five atheists analyzed in TIA, history is not Kelly’s strong point. Feudalism and caste systems were not ended by the Enlightenment, indeed, the former is largely a fictional concept of medieval governmental structure popularized by Montesquieu in the 18th century and is as historically dubious as the long-discredited concept of “the Dark Ages”. The caste system never existed in Christendom and it still exists today in a number of Asian countries. Kelly’s statement about free will reveals a shocking ignorance of the concept, as it is not an Enlightenment idea in any way, shape, or form, it is a Christian one. In fact, its very existence is denied today by New Enlightenment thinkers such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Were she even slightly familiar with Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, or Augustine, or Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, she’d realize that she is, in a very Harrisian manner, demonstrating the precise opposite of what she wishes to prove. The Enlightenment free will of Hume and Rousseau is holdover from the Christian traditions of their Christian societies, it was far from a new concept. Democracy predated the Enlightenment by literal millenia, and the statement that “senseless killing is certainly not rational” is a meaningless tautology that says nothing about the fact that most of the mass killing committed by atheist revolutionaries is perfectly rational given their stated goals of remaking human society according to the precepts of their new and shinier morality.

My publisher informs me that I’ll be a guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s show on Radio America today around noon EST. I don’t know if we’re talking about TIA, homeschooling or Title IX, but feel free to tune in if you happen to get it in your area.

Here is the MP3 from today’s show.