Timeless Wisdom

On this website, I have said time and time again that the reason I look so closely at British politics and society is that what happens Over There inevitably follows Over Here.

So I beseech you with all my heart to watch the discussion entitled The Fall Of England, between historian professor David Starkey and comedians (!) Konstantin Kisin  and Francis Foster. 

It is a very long discussion — over an hour and a half — because to be quite frank, it’s a topic that absolutely cannot be encapsulated in bullet points and bumper stickers.

And you should then understand the absolute magnitude of the task that faces us MAGA folks, because in some regards we are worse off than the Brits.  The only thing in our favor right now is the fact that we may have elected our equivalent of Argentina’s Milei — I hope — whereas Britain (England) has no such figure either present or on the horizon.  The Margaret Thatchers of England don’t come along that often to save the day, and to be honest, we don’t get them that often either.

Listen, and learn.

A Taste Of Nock

I could call this the Quote Of The Day, but I think I’ll just start a category entitled as above, because Albert J. Nock should be required reading in schools, let alone on a small blog like this.  Fat chance of the former happening, however, when you get impious thoughts like this:

“Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, Communism, and you have no troubles getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike — the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing.”  — Journal.

Which reminds me:  I need to schedule a meeting with my tax preparer.

If You Don’t Use It…

…of course you’re going to lose it.  This post on Musk-X triggered a train of thought from me:

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words – basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.

“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.

This concerns me, because it’s been an ongoing topic of conversation between the Son&Heir (a devout apostle of A.I.) and me (a very skeptical onlooker of said thing).

I have several problems with A.I., simply because I’m unsure of the value of its underlying assumption — its foundation, if you will — which believes that the accumulated knowledge on the Internet is solid:  that even if there were some inaccuracies, they would be overcome by a preponderance of the correct theses.  If that’s the case, then all well and good.  But I am extremely leery of those “correct” theses:  who decides what is truth, or nonsense, or (worst of all) highly plausible nonsense which only a dedicated expert (in the truest sense of the word) would have the knowledge, time and inclination to correct.  The concept of A.I. seems to be a rather uncritical endorsement of “the wisdom of crowds” (i.e. received wisdom).

Well, pardon me if I don’t agree with that.

But returning to the argument at hand, Greg Isenberg uses the example of the calculator and its dolorous effect on mental arithmetic:

Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?

And here I agree, wholeheartedly.  It’s bad enough to think that at some point, certain (and perhaps important) underpinnings of A.I. may turn out to be fallacious (whether unintended or malicious — another point to be considered) and large swathes of the A.I. inverted pyramids’ points may have been built, so to speak, on sand.

Ask yourself this:  had A.I. existed before the reality of astrophysics had been learned, we would have believed, uncritically and unshakably, that the Earth was at the center of the universe.  Well, we did.  And we were absolutely and utterly wrong.  After astrophysics came onto the scene, think how long it would take for all that A.I. to be overturned and corrected — as it actually took in the post-medieval era.  Most people at that time couldn’t be bothered to think about astrophysics and just went on with their lives, untroubled.

What’s worse, though, is that at some point in the future the human intellect, having become flabby and lazy through its dependence on A.I., may not have the basic capacity to correct itself, to go back to first principles because quite frankly, those principles would have been lost and our capacity to recreate them likewise.

Like I said, I’m sure of only two things in this discussion:  the first is the title of this post, and the second is my distrust of hearsay (my definition of A.I.).

I would be delighted to be disabused of my overall position, but I have to say it’s going to be a difficult job because I’m highly skeptical of this new wonder of science, especially as it makes our life so much easier and more convenient:

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain.

It’s like losing the muscle capacity to walk, and worse still the instinctive knowledge of how to walk, simply because one has come to depend completely on an external machine to carry out that function of locomotion.


P.S.  And I don’t even want to talk about this bullshit.

Just Visitors

The other night I re-watched the brilliant Matt Damon movie The Good Shepherd, and as I’d forgotten a great deal of the dialogue, this little exchange between Damon and Joe Pesci hit me hard:

It is a brutal yet honest summary of our American society.  (And no doubt, the Usual Suspects will indulge themselves in their typical Fainting Goat hysterical response to anything brutal yet honest.)  Here’s what Wilson is saying:  at the heart of our American society and way of life lie the bedrock principles of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, as embodied by the Mayflower settlers, their behavior and government.  Much later, of course, these principles evolved into the still-better bedrock of our nation:  the Constitution.

Another of those principles was that of the family.  Yes, in reading the above script, we can say that family per se  is not at all the sole provenance of White Anglo-Saxon heritage, as witnessed by the gangster Palmi’s little aside about the Italians.  But think about what Palmi’s “family” has been twisted and perverted into:  the Mafia — hardly the stuff of the White Anglo-Saxon concept of family, is it?

Consider the picture I posted on Thanksgiving a couple days ago:

And likewise, the very epitome of American life is the institution of Thanksgiving — a holiday unlike any other in the world (although often copied), it can truly be called the most sacrosanct of our social institutions.

But let me differ from one aspect of Wilson’s little statement above:  Thanksgiving is not the sole preserve of of White Anglo-Saxons, although the tradition was certainly begun by them.  All kinds of people celebrate Thanksgiving:  Blacks, Jews, Italians (just to mention the groups mentioned above) as well as most of the rest of this vast patchwork of peoples that this wonderful country encompasses.

Now let’s look at the people in America who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.  Who are they?

They don’t believe in the freedom of speech, unless it’s speech they (and by extension, the State) approve of.  Everything else is lies or fake news and / or dangerous because individuals can’t be trusted.  Recognize the Constitutional Amendment this involves?

They don’t want the public to be armed — only the State and its minions — because individuals can’t be trusted to possess firearms.  Don’t let that silly outdated Constitutional Amendment tell you otherwise.

In fact, go right down the Bill of Rights, and the chances are that they want to abolish every single amendment — because of course that irrelevant old document is a brake on State power, so of course they want no part of it.

These are people for whom the very concept of Thanksgiving is rooted in wrongdoing:  the colonization of America, the “stealing” of the land from the peoples whom they call “Native” (but whose only claim to the land is that they arrived here earlier than the Pilgrims), and you know the rest of the dreary diatribe because it’s screamed at us constantly by these people every year at this time.

But it’s not just that.  Unsurprisingly, when you follow a socio-political system that posits that the State is everything — more important than family, than friendship and all the ties that bind a society together — and actively work to institute that horrible system here in the United States, anything that embodies tradition and family is fair game for destruction.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Try this one:

”A Yale psychiatrist suggested that leftists ditch Thanksgiving and the holidays with family members who voted for Trump — and members of my generation are buying into this nonsense. They can’t stand to be around their Trump-supporting family members. I don’t know, the turkey’s not vegan, Grandma’s house isn’t a safe space — so Gen Z is saying that they’re ditching it.”

My only quibble is that I’m pretty sure that it’s not just Gen Z;  given the depth of the hysteria from the Left, it’s a multi-generational thing.  In other words, Thanksgiving is just another political instrument for them to show their frustration and childish rage, and not a beloved institution.

And this is what Edward Wilson is talking about when he talks about “just visiting”:  these people have no roots in our society, and they’re trying to undermine those of the rest of us who do.

It’s not a group of “Italians, Jews and niggers”;  in fact it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity at all:  it’s a pathological segment of our society who are “just visiting”, a segment that is linked not by race or heritage, but by their failed, broken ideology.

It is they, and not we, who are on the wrong side of history (as they so often scream at us).

They’re not Americans.  Just visitors.