Category: Modernism

Kiddies

Modernism

I’ve opined on this situation before, mostly when it comes to topic of the success of comic-book movies among so-called grownups:

The Democratic Party’s vision of the American future is a kind of permissive classroom, no doubt appealing to its base of spoiled children. It is not a place where real work will ever get done. Democrats tell their voters there is nothing they cannot have, and that if they complain and demand loud enough the stingy, bad parent (the Republicans, the rich, Old White People©) will be forced to give them treats. They are led to believe that anyone who does not give them what they want freely (free health care, free college, reparations, housing, jobs) is doing so out of malice.This jejune political rhetoric is mirrored on social media in the left’s call for people to be deplatformed. Censorship is the demand for teacher to restore order in the classroom and punish the disagreeable pupils. Unanimous agreement on all the big questions is a precondition for playing in the same nursery.
…
Going beyond politics, the infantilization of America is unmistakable by the success of Disney. As a film company, they’re on a hot streak almost unparalleled in Hollywood history. Within any given year they drop new releases in Star Wars, Marvel superheroes, children’s cartoons, and live-action remakes of children’s cartoons. These movies do well with children and with adults. It sucks the satire out of another Onion headline, “Rising Disney World Ticket Costs Prompting Many Parents To Leave Children At Home.”
This trend is also evidenced by the numerous toys geared for adults. Electronic toys and video games for men are extremely popular. Equally ridiculous is the number of adult women who have an affinity for Disney princesses.
Millennials (born 1980–1994) and Gen-Zers (1995–2009) don’t seem to realize that video games, toys, and the like were things you were only supposed to be into until you were old enough to drive, date, get married, and be an adult. But millennials don’t drive, they don’t date, they don’t marry, and they don’t really grow up. So it’s no surprise they are stuck in a preadult world [].

Don’t even get me started on supposedly-adult men of voting age who are infatuated with My Little Pony  (a.k.a. “Bronies”).  Great Napoleon’s bleeding ulcers, it actually turns my stomach to read about these fucking losers.

At the risk of sounding all White Christian Male and stuff [irony alert], allow me to remind everyone of this excellent precept from Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Except that men aren’t doing any of that.  Instead, they’re clinging to the artifacts of their childhood, hoping that Mommy will be there to keep the Big Bad Wolf/Zombies away.

What will inevitably happen is calamity.  As Charles Norman puts it:  “The world is running out of grown-ups. It will probably take tragedies and a prolonged era of diminished affluence for people to grow up.”

Like I said:  calamity.

Pointless Existence

Modernism

I was going to wrote a long article about why I think we have more young men indulging in mass shootings than before in our history.  But David Goldman (a.k.a. “Spengler”) beat me to it, and explained it more briefly.

They are individuals cut off from society, destabilized by change and despairing of their own place in the world.

That’s a pretty good summation of the problem. What’s more interesting is the underlying cause:

Everyone used to matter. No-one matters anymore, not at least in the postmodern dystopia of invented identity.

And if nobody matters, of course, then killing another person, or a group of people (in the mind of the shooter) is of no consequence — and more chillingly, can be triggered by just about any event that “traumatizes” these people.

Stood up for yet another date?  Load up Mom’s AR and head for the mall.  Cut off in traffic?  Start shooting at random cars from an overpass.  Hear some politician say something that upsets you?  Oh, look: a primary school.  And so on.

What’s frightening about all this is that these fragile snowflakes can be set off by literally anything — sheesh, a dropped connection on their phone call could lead to ten innocent people dead.

And if there’s no chance of escape, then it’s small wonder that these shooters commit suicide because, as Goldman so accurately notes, if literally nobody’s life means anything, then your own is just another worthless existence.

What this means is that we’re seeing the end game of post-modernism and the anomie it creates — and it’s small wonder that the most outraged at its manifestation are those who have engendered the mindset.

Read the whole article at the link.  Kevin Williams also points out that America didn’t get an escalation of terrorist attacks after 9/11 from Al-Qa’eda:

We got it from a lot of dysfunctional young white guys from suburbia.

What’s troubling is that I don’t see how we can reverse post-modernism quickly without a series of totalitarian solutions.  Leftists, of course, want to enact their own  series of totalitarian “solutions”:  gun control / confiscation, First Amendment limitations (like this one), and even Fourth- and Fifth Amendment encroachment (e.g. red flag legislation), when all but the most dense people know full well that these won’t solve anything.  (For Lefties, of course, that doesn’t matter because for them, intention is all that counts:  outcome is irrelevant.)

Ignoring the loonies above, it seems clear that what our society needs is a return to First Principles:  Honor, Family, Love Of Country, and so on.  How to get there, even gradually, is not easy and I don’t think we can do it.

I just wish we had people of the stature of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to create and guide the process.  What I’m afraid we’re going to get instead is Robespierre, Lenin and Pol Pot — and all the squalling from the media aside, those three are going to come from the Left.

I think I’m going to go and buy another gun.  From an individual, not a FFL.  You all know why.  Something small, handy and pretty, but effective.  Like this Henry lever rifle in .357 Magnum (so I don’t have to stock up with yet another  caliber):

What worries me is that no sooner will I get it than it will be lost in an unforeseeable canoeing accident.  What a waste…

Old-Fashioned? Me?

Beauty, Modernism

I am often accused of being an old-fashioned man.  This, despite the fact that I’m using a keyboard to enter my thoughts into a digital medium via a thing called the Internet.  And hey, I prefer brass cartridges over muzzle-loading, so I’m not that  old-fashioned (unlike some of my Readers, who believe that this brass thing is just a passing fad).

If you want to know what gets me going, however, consider the following pics, and guess why I tend to prefer tradition over modernity.  We’ll open with the modern ones:

Interior design:

Cars:

Handguns:

Women:

Men’s appearance:

Foods:

And you all know about my preferences in architecture:

So yeah, I guess I am old-fashioned.  Feel free to envy me.

Not An Improvement

Modernism

If London is trying to make itself into some kind of copy of Manhattan, it’s looking like a roaring success — if, that is, you’re going for the “soulless, impersonal, could-be-any-city” look.

Of course, I think it looked better back when I were a nipper:

That looks like London.  The other looks like shit.

Monstrosities

Modernism

…and I’m not just talking about the Modernist buildings, either.  My own loathing of this architectural form is, I think, well documented (here, here).

What Theodore Dalrymple talks about is how awful the first actual Modernist architects were:  Gropius, Van Der Rohe and of course, the execrable Le Corbusier (to name but three) were all either pure totalitarians (Le Corbusier) or Nazi sympathizers and supporters.  But we all knew that.

What Dalrymple explains further is how this “school” of architectural thought has turned into the leitmotif  of all modern architectural teaching (just as Marxism has infected the liberal arts disciplines):

[He] knows that he is arguing not against an aesthetic, but against an ironclad ideology. The architectural Leninists have been determined so to indoctrinate the public that they hope and expect a generation will grow up knowing nothing but modernism, and therefore will be unable to judge it. (All judgment is comparative, as Doctor Johnson said.) In Paris recently, I saw an advertisement on the Métro (a few days before the fire in Notre-Dame) to the effect that Paris would not be Paris without the Centre Pompidou—which, of course, has a good claim to be the ugliest building in the world. In the face of such an advertisement promoted by the cultural elite, what ordinary person would dare demur?

That description of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, by the way, is not egregious:

…and that’s the “pretty” side. Here’s the hideous one:

I am also heartened by Dalrymple’s characterization of the horrible Tour Montparnasse  as “said to be the most hated building in Paris” (and with good reason):

Never a jihadi-piloted airliner when you need one…

Read the Dalrymple piece for the full horror.

Scum On The Left

Modernism, Two-Minute Hate

From Patricia McCarthy:

Our left has done such terrible damage over the years.  They have destroyed academia, especially our once great universities.  Few of them today permit free speech or freedom from the forced acceptance of all things politically correct.  They no longer value critical thinking, so they do not teach it.  They indoctrinate. Students who deviate from the new rules that seem to have leapt off the pages of Orwell’s 1984 will be harassed, punished.  They have terrorized the young with their frightening exhortations of man-caused global warming hysteria.  They are working hard to obliterate the absolute truth of gender.  Science and biology be damned.

Kinda sounds a lot like the Preamble to the Declaration Of Independence, doesn’t it?  Let’s hope that words like this can spark a similar reaction among normal, decent people.

And the article is a LOT better than this small excerpt.