Which is the true text order?

Here is an apt demonstration of what I meant when I said that postmodern literature is bad writing. Not only is it bad writing, but it isn’t even meant to be properly read at all, only skimmed for the surface impressions made by the words. In fact, it’s not even necessary for the words to be in any particular order from paragraph to paragraph.

The following three passages are the same string of words taken from the 1985 National Book Award winner. I divided the original passage into 15 strings based on the punctuation and randomized it twice. Now, without looking anything up on the Internet, see if you can tell which passage is in the correct order, Number 1, 2, or 3.
  1. We simply walk toward the sliding doors … This is not Tibet … sealed off … timeless. Code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering … Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet … Energy waves, incident radiation … Look how well-lighted everything is … Not that we would want to … Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think. Everything is concealed in symbolism… This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die … Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death …
  2. Everything is concealed in symbolism … The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation … code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering … Not that we would want to … This is not Tibet … Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die … We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death … We simply walk toward the sliding doors … Look how well-lighted everything is … sealed off … timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet … Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.”
  3. Energy waves, incident radiation … This is not Tibet …timeless. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think. We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death …Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet … Everything is concealed in symbolism… Look how well-lighted everything is … code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering … We simply walk toward the sliding doors … Not that we would want to … Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. Sealed off … This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die … The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. 

Mailvox: bad writing is cancer

This is an email from a Castalia House author who shall go unnamed, but obviously isn’t John C. Wright.

Well, now you’ve done it.

One of your strongest points in your discussion with Stefan on Crime and Punishment was how Dostoyevsky focused on the moral decay caused by material naturalism and did not and likely could not possibly have seen its system-wide effects.

Now, today’s post about bad writing makes a similar case that Modernism, and in particular its virulent Boomer strain – Postmodernism – is culture cancer.

Many people could see that Modernist literature was, at base and overall, simply not as deep or interesting as those books which had not gottenn caught up in Modernism’s well-crafted, insubstantial mopefests.

The clue that Modernism was a dead-end can be found in its best products: As I Lay Dying, The Wasteland, Invisible Man, Heart of Darkness and The Aspern Papers are ALL, at heart, about how writing from a Modernist perspective is a pointless, disjointed exercise that renders a man insignificant. Wait for death, write or don’t…in the end Material Man is a Hollow Man. If even Modernist novels don’t like Modernist novels, you know you’ve chanced on a Very Bad Idea.

When the reactionary Post-Modernism came along, the self-defeating problem became clear. There were plenty of sane readers who said, “Okay, that way lies madness. Taken to its logical conclusion, PM could lead to the end of literature!”

It is no coincidence that the era of the blockbuster genre novel exploded in a major response to academic Post-Modernism. Everybody read Dr. Zhivago or Sidney Sheldon. No one read Alphabetical Africa.

BUT…Post-Modernism clearly was not contained to academic literature. Sidney Sheldon’s soap operas were not merely pop-classic melodramas, but were materialist ones. The casting couch ultimately made starlets powerful, taboo relationships were taboo because of society’s evil, not personal sin. Ursula Le Guin’s adventure stories became feminist meditations. Stephen King’s pulp adventure horror veered badly into religious ignorance. John Updike was…Updikian.

Now, these books and hundreds more were still, in form, traditional, popular novels. They just had some spots of odd, discolored PostModern crust on them.

The spots showed up in movies and television: Laugh-In, All in the Family, the Brady Bunch, Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Heck, the massive blockbuster Jaws opened up with a nude girl being bitten, dragged, mauled and eaten by the literary aquatic symbol for Death incarnate, a “Great White” no less. That’s Post-modern action: no heroes, no villains, just young, bare, feminine annihilation.

But those spots are hardly noticed in the work by most people at the time, whether it is a bit of King’s “tornado-faced” lady (bad writing) or the now iconic but originally “ironic” “Episode IV” scroll in Star Wars.

But they got everywhere, and, while it occasionally worked (the unvarnished, unapologetic racism in The Godfather I and II was possible under a sort of Post-Modern “honesty” at the time), most of the time, these spots show up as an anachronism, a ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ or just bad dialogue.

And today?

We don’t even have personal pronouns anymore.

Our culture adopted a literature that had, at its core, an anti-communication ethic. The more obscure, the more personal, the more disconnected a “text” was from its meaning, the more “authentic” it was. The more “identity” it had.

Post-Modernism didn’t just end literature. It ended communication.

I think that’s why there are so many landmines of bad writing today. I think that’s why you can emerge from a writing program or college less literate than when you came in, even if you were borderline literate to begin with!

Bad writing is cancer.

SJWs always lie: Patreon edition

Patreon’s ludicrously lame excuse for canceling Lauren Southern’s account.

Hi Lauren,

My name is Max and I am a member of the Trust and Safety team at patreon.

Here at Patreon we believe in freedom of speech. We are creating a platform that empowers creators to share and debate ideas. When ideas cross into action, though, we sometimes must take a closer look at what our creators are doing with the funds they earn through Patreon.

It appears that you are currently raising funds in order to take part in activities that are likely to cause loss of life. We have therefore decided to remove your page from Patreon, and paid out your final balance of $95.00 to you.

We understand that this will come as a disappointment. Please know that we have come to this decision after a long review process and will not consider an appeal.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,

Patreon Trust+Safey

Never have anything to do with any organization with a “Trust and Safety” team. Fortunately, there are rock-solid alternatives on the way, as I will be announcing soon.

Modern literature is bad writing

Speaking of bad writing, this 2001 Atlantic essay on the form and purpose of modern literature is magnificent. The author, BR Myers, rightly crucifies several doyennes of modern literature, including one, Cormac McCarthy, whose popular appeal I have never understood in the slightest. Read the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s well worth it.

Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: “They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire”; “and they would always be so and never be otherwise”; “the captain wrote on nor did he look up”; “there rode no soul save he,” and so forth.

The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: “It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words … Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences … gather to a magic.” The key word here is “accumulation.” Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who’s will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who’s will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who’s will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. 
(All the Pretty Horses, 1992)

This may get Hass’s darkly meated heart pumping, but it’s really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who’s will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author’s mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn’t ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse’s bowels.

As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy’s life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special.

[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. 
(All the Pretty Horses)

It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But “wild animals” isn’t epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses’ perspective to the narrator’s, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.

No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense. Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among the most humorless writers in American history. In this excerpt the subject is horses.


He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold … Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal … Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.
(All the Pretty Horses)

The further we get from our cowboy past, the loonier becomes the hippophilia we attribute to it. More to the point, especially considering The New York Times’s praise of All the Pretty Horses for its “realistic dialogue,” is the stiltedness with which the conversation is reproduced. The cowboys are supposed to be talking to a Mexican in Spanish, which is a stretch to begin with, but from the tone in which the conversation is set down you’d think it was ancient Hebrew. And shouldn’t Grady satisfy our curiosity by finding out what a horse’s soul looks like, instead of pursuing a hypothetical point of equine theology? You half expect him to ask how many horses’ souls can fit on the head of a pin.

All the Pretty Horses received the National Book Award in 1992. “Not until now,” the judges wrote in their fatuous citation, “has the unhuman world been given its own holy canon.” What a difference a pseudo-biblical style makes; this so-called canon has little more to offer than the conventional belief that horses, like dogs, serve us well enough to merit exemption from an otherwise sweeping disregard for animal life. (No one ever sees a cow’s soul.) McCarthy’s fiction may be less fun than the “genre” western, but its world view is much the same. So is the cast of characters: the quiet cowboys, the women who “like to see a man eat,” the howling savages. (In fairness to the western: McCarthy’s depiction of Native Americans in Blood Meridian [1985] is far more offensive than anything in Louis L’ Amour.) The critics, however, are too much impressed by the muscles of his prose to care about the heart underneath. Even The Village Voice has called McCarthy “a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters.” Robert Hass wrote much of his review of The Crossing in an earnest imitation of McCarthy’s style:

The boys travel through this world, tipping their hats, saying “yessir” and “nosir” and “si” and “es verdad” and “claro” to all its potential malice, its half-mad philosophers, as the world washes over and around them, and the brothers themselves come to be as much arrested by the gesture of the quest as the old are by their stores of bitter wisdom and the other travelers, in the middle of life, in various stages of the arc between innocence and experience, by whatever impulses have placed them on the road.

The vagueness of that encomium must annoy McCarthy, who prides himself on the way he tackles “issues of life and death” head on. In interviews he presents himself as a man’s man with no time for pansified intellectuals—a literary version, if you will, of Dave Thomas, the smugly parochial old-timer in the Wendy’s commercials. It would be both unfair and a little too charitable to suggest that this is just a pose. When McCarthy says of Marcel Proust and Henry James, “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature,” I have a sinking feeling he’s telling the truth.

The essay finally made it clear to me what these modern literaturists – one hesitates to call them actual writers – are doing, and it’s not dissimilar to what the gammas are doing with their terrible, narcissistic metaphors. Their words are not meant to be read as words as such, but are meant to be lightly scanned, so that an impression is formed by that superficial contact.

That’s why there is so often no meaning to be found in their works, that there is neither action nor character to be found in the texts. No one actually reads these books! They are, instead, scanned, with no more comprehension of the empty contents surveyed than the whole language reader grasps the phonetics of the words he is reading.

America, the overfed

Readers here well understand that government science is as intrinsically unreliable as anything else being produced by the government. And the U.S. government’s dietary advice has been about as bad as it gets.

“The change in dietary advice to promote low-fat foods is perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history.”

Let’s say you want to lose some weight. Which of these foods would you choose: A skim-milk latte, or the same drink with whole milk? A low-cal breakfast bar or steak and eggs? A salad tossed in light dressing or the same salad doused with buttermilk ranch?

If you’re like most Americans, you either aren’t sure how to answer, or you’re very sure—but very wrong. And it’s not your fault. It’s the fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition advice—advice that was never based on solid science.

The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Recently, research has come out strongly in support of dietary fat and cholesterol as benign, rather than harmful, additions to person’s diet. Saturated fat seems poised for a similar pardon.

“The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong,” Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Tonic. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person’s diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence, Lustig said.

Just this week, some of Lustig’s colleagues at UCSF released an incendiary report revealing that in the 1960s, sugar industry lobbyists funded research that linked heart disease to fat and cholesterol while downplaying evidence that sugar was the real killer.

I have to admit, my father called this one in the early 1990s. He never bought the “eating fat makes you fat” line, kept a low-carbohydrate diet, and stayed much slimmer than most of his peers as a result.

The thing is, you can work out all you like, but once you pass 40, the combination of becoming more injury-prone and your body metabolism slowing down means that your diet is a necessary component of losing weight. I’ve always been in the gym or on the soccer field at least three days per week, and I’ve never been that overweight, but I’ve dropped 13 pounds as part of my quest to get back my six-pack and return to my old fighting weight of 175 – I have four more to go –  and it is entirely the result of eating less and eating fewer carbohydrates.

It’s not about major changes, just getting your caloric intake south of the energy usage line. In my case, that means a cup of yogurt for breakfast instead of a bowl of cereal, a mochacino after lunch instead of dessert, and a smaller portion at dinner, no seconds, and no snacking. I still have three cappucini – sometimes four, including the one mocha – dessert, and two glasses of wine per day. So, it’s not exactly torture, just reasonable exercise combined with a modicum of self-discipline.

Note, by the way, that it’s not just Americans who have been affected by this disastrous dietary science. Keep that in mind when you consider the “global climate change consensus”.

In a recent editorial appearing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researcher Zoe Harcombe from the University of the West of Scotland explains that obesity rates among British men and women rose from 2.7 percent in 1972 to 23 percent and 26 percent, respectively, by 1999.

On bad writing

I was talking to one of our authors today, trying to understand why authors so often make a certain style of mistake that has puzzled me for years. He actually managed to articulate it, and I found the explanation to be rather fascinating as well as potentially useful to those who are trying to improve their literary style. I think it is something that separates bad writing from competent writing.

What we were discussing is the nonsensical metaphor or simile. Now, I have used a nonsensical simile at least once myself, although I did so knowingly, as it was an inside joke. Some old-school Ilk might remember the phrase “then it hit him, like a cheetah” from Rebel Moon. That was something my best friend’s brother used to say, because my best friend’s brother is a complete goofball who gloried in saying nonsensical things like that. The point is that I knew it was a silly simile and horrifically bad writing, although I suppose it is not a nonsensical simile from a technical perspective, since being hit by a cheetah at 60+ MPH would presumably be the sort of thing that would bowl one over.

However, as the writer explained, the mediocre writer doesn’t know that the metaphor or the simile is nonsensical. To him, it is an emotionally true connection, and therefore it makes sense, even when it objectively doesn’t. For the purposes of reference, here are the four examples from the rough draft to which the author, Johan Kalsi, is referring, a bizarre metaphor that completely mystified me, and not only because the author utilized it FOUR FREAKING TIMES in a single scene.

Jeckell’s broad, sleepy face held his lips in a strange smile, as if he had just caught a mouse between his teeth. 


Jeckell continued to chew on his mouse, doing nothing to wipe his face clean of its aura of smug supremacy.


Jeckell stopped gnawing the imaginary mouse for a moment.


Everyone gasped. Jeckell stood up and punched the table in front of him, his jaw clenched back down on the mouse.

I like to think that my editorial comments were polite, professional and helpful: “What the fuck is going on with this guy chewing on a nonexistent mouse? What does that even look like? Lose the fucking mouse!”

I mean, this was, by any measure, bad writing. Fine, everyone commits their clunkers from time to time. But this is a weird mistake, and one I see far too often these days, with authors using words they apparently don’t understand and images that simply don’t make any kind of sense. Fortunately, Mr. Kalsi was able to put this particular example into perspective that at least make a modicum of sense, and should help people avoid making this particular mistake.

  • I was trying to emulate Asimov’s long Q&A scene from Foundation, which I don’t like, and I was being lazy – I hadn’t figured out good words to make the bureaucrat both human and annoying, so I just wrote that mouse thing in, because I had an image in my head of this fat old barn cat I came across when I was a kid. I opened a bag of feed, and this cat was in there, chewing on a wriggling mouse. It was a disturbing, vivid, shocking thing, and I still remember that cat’s dead eyes looking at me like, “What, asshole? Just watch it wriggle.”
  • Emotionally, I thought of the bureaucrat like that – this perfectly harmless guy that the First Technocrat had known for decades, who suddenly held his life in his hands, and didn’t care a bit.
  • Of course, some random personal memory means nothing to you or any other reader, and that’s why it is such an annoying dig at the reader.
  • A bad writer or a lazy writer won’t see when he does this (I think it got mentioned 3 times in a page or something, and I didn’t even remember I had written it at all when you pointed it out to me.)
  • A gamma will cling to this personal image as a secret king thing – “Oh, the peasant reader doesn’t get me – I’m a genius!” and as an excuse thing when the criticism comes. – Delusional
  • The old big writers I can think of who did it a lot were Stephen King (the lady in Misery has “a face like a tornado” twice in two pages, for example – memorable for the wrong reasons) Piers Anthony and Philip Jose Farmer.
Kalsi is right. A face like a tornado makes no more sense than a man gnawing on a mouse. Remember, writing is communication. So, off-hand implied references to personal memories or associations that are not accessible to your readers is not going to make you look brilliant, it’s just going to make you a bad writer.

They’ve learned nothing

They are still lying about GamerGate, Trump supporters, and the Alt-Right.

The use of humor, irony and the destabilization of the truth is important. For years, my friends and I dismissed assholes in video game chat rooms spouting hateful rhetoric as performance artists and comedians. They didn’t mean anything by it, we told ourselves, they were just trying to get a laugh or a reaction.

“It is an extremist movement built on destabilizing meanings, making people distrust their senses and doubt reality, and deny responsibility by pretending to be joking or just playing,” Cross said. “Gaming culture, which has long shielded its native abuses by cleaving to the idea that it’s all ‘just a game’ was an ideal seedbed for this classic fascist two-step.”

It’s a tactic we’ve seen Trump employ repeatedly both on the campaign trail and in his presidency. Aside from the violence, the nasty rhetoric and the death threats, this destruction of objective truth is the biggest threat Gamergate and the alt-right represent — they make us doubt our senses and our sensibilities.

Which is why we have to fight. I love video games and, for years, I’ve muted or ignored the vile communities festering there. Most of the people, and I believe most of the men, playing video games aren’t racist, sexist or mean. But for too long, gamers have allowed the worst of us to represent the entire community. For too long, we’ve muted the racists instead of challenging their ideas. For too long, we turned the other way when someone creeped on women on the Counter-Strike server.

We can’t afford to do that anymore. We had the opportunity to shut these bastards down for decades and we didn’t and now they’ve spread from the chat rooms, message boards and online shooters into the real world. They’ve shut down public speeches, tortured journalists and run politicians out of public life.

Fans of video games watched the birth of a new fascist movement and we didn’t even realize it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we have to do our part to stop it. When you’re playing a game and someone’s acting like an ass, let them know. If someone threatens to gas the Jews or rape a female player, report them. If you’re brave enough, engage with them and try to dismantle their ideas.

If we don’t fight them online, and now, we may have to fight them in the streets.

It’s amusing that they are still pretending, nearly two years later, that they haven’t been fighting us online and in the media as viciously as they know how. It’s a little less amusing, though not at all surprising, that they are not honest about the way we are simply using their tactics against them.

Regardless, we know them. They do not know us. They simply refuse to acknowledge the truth about either us or themselves, which only works to our advantage.


If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
– Sun Tzu

To paraphrase something I wrote around the time I published SJWAL, both their history and their rhetoric is incoherent. They have to cling to the idea that their enemy is stupid – to do otherwise would risk harming their fragile self-esteem – but somehow this “abysmally stupid” opponent is a dangerous risk. This can only be explained by attributing the danger to evil that goes well beyond the pedestrian variety, and reaches the level of disturbing malignity.

So, they choose to believe in a very stupid, very malignant enemy rather than an intelligent and legitimate opposition. Needless to say, this violates the first principle mentioned above, which is to know your enemy. And they can’t afford to be sufficiently honest with themselves to do that.

Brainstorm tomorrow

The member’s only session for July is tomorrow night, at 7 PM. Invites have gone out, and what I’d like you to contemplate in the meantime is what sort of video lectures you would be interested in seeing me produce.

What my Periscopes have taught me is that there is an entire body of people who much prefer to learn by watching rather than reading. As with rhetoric and dialectic, you cannot hope to reach these video-learners with books or blog posts. Furthermore, it is evident that this is increasingly how the younger generation prefers to intellectually explore. And there is little point to rewards such as books when I am already an author and the editor of a publishing house.

So, I’ve selected a video artist from the Dread Ilk and the focus of my future pseudo-Patreon will be producing several videos each month, in lieu of my nightly Periscoping, which I’ll cut to 2-3 times per week. The question is, what topics would be of most interest to people and how long should they be?

I assume between 30-45 minutes would be ideal, which means that more complicated topics such as inflation or credit money or responding to atheist evangelicals, or listing the many errors of Sam Harris would need to be multi-video series, whereas simpler topics like the idea of time-to-civilization or omniderigence might only require a single video. Anyhow, I’d welcome hearing what people think here, and then we’ll discuss the various ideas that come out of this at Brainstorm tomorrow night.

No, you can’t be Chinese

Said the Chinese woman who calls herself an American.

A white scholar’s recent op-ed suggests he might need some lessons on his own privilege.

Daniel Bell, a white dean at China’s Shandong University, recently penned a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Why Anyone Can Be Chinese.” In it, he laments how he’s not considered Chinese despite his self-proclaimed dedication to the culture.

China, he argues, should look at identity as cultural rather than racial, concluding the piece with his ultimate hope:

“President Xi Jinping describes his broad agenda for the country as the ‘China dream,’” Bell writes. “My own China dream is more modest: to be viewed as a Chinese not just in my own mind but in the minds of my fellow Chinese.”

Bell claims to have respect for the Chinese. But his piece shows that he’s not looking at identity through the lens of the Chinese, John Kuo Wei Tchen, associate professor and director of Asian/Pacific/American Institute, NYU, told HuffPost.

Bell begins his piece, making comparisons between himself and a Chinese-American who “doesn’t speak Chinese or identify in any way with Chinese culture,” and “forcefully rejects” the label “Chinese.”

But the connections Bell makes are apples to oranges. Bell, a white man from Canada, ignores the real, human experiences that Chinese people live through, Tchen noted.

Bell isn’t someone whose family has been brought up in China through generations, communicating through insider references. His ancestors haven’t lived through events like the Opium Wars or the Cultural Revolution that have shaped the population’s outlook. Bell is a white man whose roots and values come from elsewhere.

Do you see, civic nationalists, what chaos and confusion inevitably must follow your incoherent madness? You denied that America was an actual nation, thinking that the nonsense would magically stop there. But it didn’t, and now we’re seeing your fellow proposition nationalists claim that England and Sweden have always been nations of immigrants, and that anyone can be Chinese as well as American.

The truth is that civic nationalism is a lie. Proposition nationalism is a lie. There is no melting pot and nations are groups of genetically related people sharing a common language, common traditions, common religion, and common experiences.

Everything else is just empire and ethnic conflict by another name. A reader who lives in China, but unlike the deranged academic, does not claim that makes him Chinese, adds his observations.

One of your daily readers here. I live in China and I’m writing to share some observations that you might find of interest. There have been some comments recently about the foundations of national identity on your site, which involve common language, blood, religion, and traditions or customs. A comparison of China and the US in light of this shows that they are moving in almost opposite directions, the former toward unification and the latter toward disintegration.

China is “diverse” in the sense that there are multiple ethnicities that reside within its borders. What’s more, every province has its own dialect of the Chinese language, many of which are unintelligible to outsiders. People from Hunan Province speak “Hunan language” which is very different from Guangdong language which is very different from Shanghai language and so on. However, the state surmounts this problem by the institution of Mandarin (Putonghua, which means “common language”) as the official language of the nation, which everyone in every province is required to learn. Even Hong Kong people are now required to learn it since the handover, whereas before there was very little Mandarin spoken there. Contrast this to America’s increasing multilingualism, bilingual education programs, and the view of many people that we “can’t have an official language.” The only multilingualism that the Chinese are interested in is having large numbers of their educated people learn English, and this is for purely pragmatic reasons.

The dominant ethnic majority is of course the Han, and most Chinese would regard them as the standard of what it means to be Chinese. Of the other ethnic groups, there don’t seem to be too many feelings of separateness, with the exceptions of the Tibetans and the Uighur people in Xinjiang. In both cases, religious differences are a key factor of why this exists. The Chinese government deals with this dissent and disagreement in their usual way – they crush it. Of the people who live within Chinese territory, they are taught that they are Chinese and that they owe their allegiance to the state and its rulers. Of those who do not reside in China, they are all “foreigners” (laowai) if not “foreign devils” (yang guizi). They particularly hate the Japanese because multiple generations have been raised on propaganda about the Sino-Japanese war i.e. WW2.

Contrast this Han standardization to the extreme denigration of America’s former core identity, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Their immigration policy reflects this distinction between “us” and “them.” People that are not ethnically Chinese simply CANNOT become Chinese. In any way. Ever. You can get a visa for an extended stay, through work or marriage, but you cannot become a citizen, which means that you get zero state benefits. There are foreigners that have worked here for decades, some of whom have even made important contributions to Chinese society in one way or another, who will nonetheless only be able to retire in China on their own dime, if they are allowed to stay at all. On the other hand, ethnic Chinese in the diaspora can be granted Chinese citizenship, if they renounce whatever other citizenship they have, since China does not allow dual citizenship. Contrast this to American immigration policies and multicultural ideology.

As for common religion, this is perhaps their weakest link, since they’re officially atheist, though somewhat tolerant of religion. Christianity is growing here, and they’re worried about it, both because they see it as Western, and because it’s subversive (from their perspective of maintaining their own power). The state under Xi Jinping (by the way, his name is pronounced like the English pronoun “she”) has been promoting Confucianism again, which isn’t really a religion, but is one of the “three traditions” of China along with Buddhism and Taoism. Some Chinese are “cultural Buddhists” the way Americans are “cultural Christians,” but for the most part they seem to be an irreligious people. The state seems most comfortable promoting Chinese identity as the highest metaphysic, but they’re willing to include watered-down versions of their historic religions within that identity. The anti-religion of the Mao years was even more severe than the anti-Christianity of contemporary America, but the Chinese seem to be recovering from the worst of it.

The somewhat disparate customs and traditions of the different regions in the country are easily homogenized by television and the internet, which gives the same “culture” to everyone. What they worry about in this regard is the influence of foreign media, both cultural and academic. Foreign films are officially banned except for those that are given permission (and censored beforehand) but realistically they’re all available on the internet and pirate dvd shops, which are everywhere in every major city. However, their own film and television industry is YUGE, and increasingly it is Hollywood that kowtows to Beijing in order to have access to this market. Chinese-made films tend to be incredibly nationalistic, as opposed to Hollywood films (can we really call them “American” films?) which are often subversive and degenerate in one way or another. Where the Chinese have a weakness here is that, while they are incredibly sensitive to negative portrayals of China, and make their censorship decisions largely based on that, they are not as wise to the influence of cultural degeneracy that comes packaged in Hollywood films. You can already see the effects of it on the younger generations. Nonetheless, coming from America, it’s remarkable how much less degeneracy there is here at present.

So – one country, one people, one language. They know that this means strength, and so it’s what they’re working towards, and have been for decades now.

One last thing – their economic nationalism. Despite being in the WTO for almost twenty years, China is protectionist and aggressively privileges their own businesses over those of foreigners. Part of the reason why Facebook and Google and Twitter are blocked here (along with Vox Popoli!) is that it forces Chinese people to use the local alternatives (which are also, of course, censored and controlled by the state). So Baidu is the go-to search engine, Weibo and QQ and WeChat are the social media giants. It keeps the money in China. Zuckerberg was here last year, pleading to have Facebook unblocked. Xi met with him, and said simply, “No.” Why should they let them in, when it will mean loss of revenue for Chinese companies AND likely use by foreign agents to foment dissent and problems, as in the Arab Spring?

I’m not trying to shill for the Chinese. I live here, and I see their problems at the ground level. I could write a whole other piece on that. But I can’t help but notice that, in regards to the above, they’re doing a lot of things right, and they’re exactly the things that the West is doing wrong. What that will mean in the future remains to be seen.

Diasporans, cucks, and free speech

This is a bit disjointed, but that is an unavoidable consequence of the second article’s lurching from one topic to another. First, demographics has its consequences: the inevitable divide between increasingly religious right-wing Israelis and increasingly secular left-wing Diasporans in the US is growing, if Haaretz is to be believed.

The basis for Netanyahu’s diplomatic activism is his assessment that America is growing weaker and gradually withdrawing from the Middle East. The visit to Haifa Port by the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, the first such visit since the beginning of the second intifada, doesn’t change the overall trend.

Oil is cheaper, and America no longer depends on the Middle East for its supply. Public opinion is isolationist, opposed to wars far from home. America’s internal rifts are deep and getting wider, and Netanyahu has taken the conservative side without even a pretense of bipartisanism. Perhaps bipartisan support is no longer even possible when Americans are so divided over everything. It’s better to have the Republicans’ support, since their control of Congress seems unassailable.

Netanyahu sees the Christian community as Israel’s most important bastion of support in America, alongside Orthodox Jews. His recent decisions against the Reform and Conservative movements – canceling the Western Wall deal and advancing the conversion bill – reflect a strategic disengagement from liberal American Jews.

This wasn’t a caprice caused by momentary pressure from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties, but a calculated decision that won almost wall-to-wall support in the cabinet. Netanyahu’s circle sees liberal Jewry as a transient phenomenon that will disappear on its own in another generation due to intermarriage and disinterest in Jewish tradition or Israel.

For years, liberal Jews have threatened to break with Israel if it continues discriminating against their denominations, and some have also vocally opposed the unending occupation of the territories. They didn’t expect a right-wing Israeli government to break with them first.

Whether the divide is real or not – and it probably is, many liberal Diasporans hate Netanyahu as much as they hate Trump – Netanyahu would be well-advised to rein in AIPAC and encourage the Israel Firsters in the U.S. Senate and Congress to abandon the proposed anti-American law S. 720, presently co-sponsored by 43 U.S. Senators of both parties, and supported by 234 Representatives. It is a tone-deaf action that is absolutely guaranteed to backfire on Israel… unless Netanyahu is playing a deep game and intends to make life in the USA less comfortable for the diaspora.

Amazingly, even the pro-Israel cucks at National Review understand that the proposed law is a terrible idea, and to their credit, have come out against it. Of course, they couldn’t help but try to take the opportunity to tangent into taking shots at the pro-free speech Alt-Lite in the meantime.

Sometimes in the course of our political life, someone proposes something so mind-bogglingly stupid that it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it. Senate Bill 720 is one of those things. Over the past few years, a small but prominent movement has cropped up, using the age-old tactic of boycott to protest what it sees as Israel’s unjust occupation of territories that are assumed to belong rightfully to the Palestinians. Called “BDS” (boycott, divest, sanction) after the strategy it employs against the state of Israel and goods produced therein, it has acquired a certain notoriety on college campuses, not least for its uncomfortable associations with veritable anti-Semites.

Israel’s supporters in the Senate, justifiably seeing this as a problem, have come up with an innovative solution: Make participation in BDS or other boycotts of Israel a felony, punishable by enormous fines and up to two decades in prison. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act enjoys remarkable bipartisan support: It’s not often you can get Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse to sign onto a measure alongside Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Its proponents number 43 in the Senate and 234 in the House….

And, yes, when it comes to Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos or Tomi Lahren, that’s more or less correct; they really are distasteful hypocrites who care not one bit about free speech and who use the principle instead to advance their particular cause. They are of the new breed of conservatism that views its primary goal as melting special snowflakes and doesn’t give much of a damn about anything beyond that. But we knew that already; we’ve always known they’re unprincipled actors seeking only to aggrandize themselves.

Their silence on Lisa Durden tells us nothing new or interesting about their character. Their place in the intellectual debate over free speech is marginal in any case, and what really matters is not what they think but what the more rational, principled minds of the Right and center say.

I tend to suspect their “silence on Lisa Durden” is because a) what is an Essex College? and b) who is Tyler Lisa Durden? There are massive violations of free speech every single day; most of us are far more concerned about Patreon shutting down Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone for their defense of Europe than we are about some employee of a minor college that no one has ever heard of being held accountable by her employer. Why aren’t these more rational, principled minds of the right and center speaking out against Patreon? I guess they must be distasteful hypocrites who care not one bit about free speech….

And it is downright bizarre to see National Review – NATIONAL REVIEW – questioning the principles of others who actually fight the Left when their only observed principles involve a) gracefully going down to noble defeat and b) not overly upsetting the editorial page of the New York Times. But to return to the point, if you’ve lost the cucks, you’ve lost everyone.

The Alt-Right is inevitable, even in Israel, as it is in every nation that wishes to survive the 21st century.