This is again, done quickly as I restart school in less than two days. I will probably be writing a little less but alas, I will still be here. As before, you do not have to be familiar with all the texts, just the events contained therewithin.

1. Peter Brown — The World of Late Antiquity — Classical civilization → Christianity.

2. R. W. Southern — Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages — Medieval Christianity, Church, scholasticism, natural law.

3. C. S. Lewis — The Discarded Image — Medieval Christian worldview and mentality.

4. Diarmaid MacCulloch — The Reformation — Luther, Protestantism, Catholicism, religious wars.

5. Peter Gay — The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism — Enlightenment and secular modernity.

6. Eric Hobsbawm — The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 — French Revolution, Napoleon, nationalism, industrialization.

7. Frederick Beiser — The Fate of Reason — Kant → Hegel → post-Hegelian German philosophy.

8. Fritz Stern — The Politics of Cultural Despair — German anti-modernism, nationalism, cultural pessimism.

9. Orlando Figes — A People’s Tragedy — Russian intellectual history and the Revolution.

10. Eric Hobsbawm — Age of Extremes — WWI, communism, fascism, WWII, Cold War, 1968.

11. Charles Taylor — A Secular Age — Christian society → modern secular consciousness.

12. Eric Voegelin — The New Science of Politics — Secular ideologies as transformed religious/eschatological movements.

Happy Reading!

-J./Adolf Stalin

Once again, in a bit of a rush to print this (phone battery is dying). You do not have to be familiar with all of it (I only know most of it) but at least have had read some of it or familiarized yourself with the concepts beforehand.

Sociology

• Max Weber – Economy and Society / The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

• James Burnham – The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

• C. Wright Mills – The Power Elite

• Marc Bloch – Feudal Society (Annales School)

• Karl Mannheim – Ideology and Utopia

• Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann – The Social Construction of Reality

• Émile Durkheim – The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

• Antonio Gramsci – Selections from the Prison Notebooks

• Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish / The Order of Things

Theology

• St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologiae

• St. Augustine – The City of God / On Christian Doctrine

• Norman Tanner (Ed.) – Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Nicene Council)

• Hans Jonas – The Gnostic Religion

• Martin Luther – On the Freedom of a Christian / The Bondage of the Will

• John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion

• C. I. Scofield – The Scofield Reference Bible (Dispensationalism)

• Confucius – The Analects

• Baruch Spinoza – Ethics

Anthropology

• Larry Siedentop – Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

• James C. Scott – Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

• Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men

• Charles Darwin – The Descent of Man

• Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morality / Thus Spoke Zarathustra

• Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures / Local Knowledge

Psychology

• Sigmund Freud – Civilization and Its Discontents / Beyond the Pleasure Principle

• Carl Jung – The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious / Aion: Researches into the Phenomonology of the Self

• Heinz Kohut – The Analysis of the Self (Ego/Self Psychology)

• Gustave Le Bon – The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

book list: link

-J./Adolf Stalin

In the critique of antinatalism, the claim disintegrates at the zenith point of being born: since non-existence is unaware of itself, there is no desire to be had, and no voice, it cannot be a coercion, no pre-natal spirit waiting in the dark of the night to prevent its consent. Its no more an act of consenting from the act of birth to the act of conception to even the act of coitus, which is a picnic in the park for the maid, much less so for the maidenless, unless there is an application of force which for then claims of antinatalist arguments could henceforth be leveled. But as always, the lack of direct action produces a world of inertia which implodes upon itself slowly. When nothing is driving the will to explore, extract and exterminate - you can actually hear the world stop spinning. The inherent combined violence of the natural and human world is a feature, not a bug of our world, and to assume that because we've (in the west) evolved out of the more primal forms of it and think of ourselves above it does not mean the rest of the world, including the natural world, agrees with us in doing exactly that.

Many of the arguments of those who adopt philosophy against the consumption of meat, I hardly mean any offense to those do. They are within their rights to live as they choose - there always seems to be an underlying passivity towards the suffering of humanity in exchange for the priority of non-human entities, which when humans are removed from the scene there is often in an existential struggle for dominance between what remains. Philosophers ranging from Aquinas, who concluded that lower life forms support the higher ones or Locke, in the mixing of land and labor, would never put common tree moss over the primacy of human beings - unlike philosophers of our modern day, many who deny the ordering of nature into a teleological framework. We all know, according them, Charles Darwin didn’t think human, animal and plant life evolved in that manner as him and many that came after him there was no point of origin for life, so no clear direction for evolution.

But on the contrary: humans were merely a tiny branch in a giant tree, wholly insignificant. Many conservationists and those who adopt a pro-environmental viewpoint will always adjust their lives in accordance with those of the zoological and ecological variety, even if the preservation, rather than domestication of those environments contributes to the ratcheting upwards of animal upon animal violence, as you will never see a lion show mercy to a zebra in African plains, or in our domestic sphere, a cat against a rat. Human intervention, in the case of hunting deer to control overpopulation or the spaying of already domesticated dogs, there is an insistence that we not dominate the natural world and live in accordance with in it - if the advocates of animal rights and environmentalism would so much as have their way - human rights are always of second order importance to them.

However, there is a subset among those who do not only believe in the primacy of nature but go as far as believing that nature should come to dominate us - hopefully into extinction. Feminists will always conclude that the act of human procreation is a violence that men inflict upon women and on the natural world as to dominate everything and everyone in (his) path but considering the dearth of human life in the developed world, there is no will desiring its end as if Schopenhauer and his ilk, such as Eduard Von Hartmann and Julius Bahnsen have asserted, we have finally reached a point of collective human asceticism as the bonds of sexual honor have been broken and the two sexes retreat to their sides of separate beds. So unless there is a reawakening of the will to dominate nature and society at writ large there won't be a will to force certain people who think that their day of birth is a error in judgment like bringing up the celebration of that instance to a Jehovah's Witness. Human suffering to the antinatalist is their own beheading of John The Baptist, and thats why, just like Watchtower, they do not want to be reminded of it.

-J./Adolf Stalin

Oddly enough, today is my brother's birthday. Thirty-four years ago. Happy birthday, William. Sorry for our disagreement yesterday. It was a misunderstanding.

In David Hume’s first book in “A Treatise Of Human Nature”, divides normative statements or claims into two groups, namely what “is”, which asserts truth properties which are independent of human perception, and what “ought”, which asserts truth properties of human convention. His main verdict, after much deliberation, is that one cannot make something that human convention has created the reality of things outside of perception. In the history of philosophy, this claim has a long lineage stretching back to Descartes’ ideas of knowledge only known by thought, along with John Locke’s theory that truth claims are only known by observation. Since Hume was trying to deny that any knowledge - much like Locke - was known innately, he also countered Locke by assuming claims we know by observation were also worthy of scrutiny. Many philosophers of knowledge, also known as epistemologists before his time conflated (and I would say rightly so) truth by observation and truth by thought, as well correlating causes, the various thinkers since Aristotle’s time assumed that there was an existing reality beyond all human comprehension. As reason separated from sense and psychology from physicality - no one until then had suspected that philosophy would be getting off this train of progress any time soon.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, famed reformed theologian Cornelius Van Til, in order to prove that reality after the philosophers had effectively damaged the perception of reality beyond all repair, noticed that the decline in the primacy of revealed faith was at an all time high, no doubt damaged not only by philosophy’s attempt at trite skepticism but the evolutionary theories of Darwin notwithstanding, who claimed that man was not a descendent of Adam and Eve but rather a cousin of the chimpanzee and bonobo apes and apparently not the center of existence as previously thought but rather one piece of a giant tree of life which included animals, plants, fungi and other nondescript creatures. psychologist Sigmund Freud even attempted to claim that we were not even in control of our minds but rather our minds controlled us. So what is the relic of a bygone age supposed to do? In his case, the torrent of subjectivism following Darwin and Freud and related figures like Frederich Nietzsche, he came up with what he called presuppositional apologetics which claimed that these figures, who saw religion as something to be overcome as the very foundation of human existence and without it, nothing makes sense. While this is a wild claim, it created a bit of stir in the philosophical and theological departments. But overall, it was mostly laughed out of the academy as being unscientific at a time when science had gotten the upper hand on the intellectual forefront.

So if this is true, then what do we make of Hume’s skepticism? After all, we cannot trust everything we sense or know innately. That would be foolish. But if Van Til’s theory is true, this could open up a rabbit hole few are willing to go down. If there is no God, then reality is nonsense. But here comes the tricky part. We cannot make make an “is” an “ought” according to Hume. What is known by convention will never be what actually exists innately. But lets say in essence that Hume’s followers are trying to make an “ought” an “is” in their own special way, by assuming that skepticism is true and reality outside of our perception only exists as far as habit and custom. Then whence does the world of human things end and God things begin? If that too is merely conventional, then we cannot assume the grass beneath our feet, the trees outside our homes, the sun setting at dusk is real either. We simply agreed they do by convention. And if they really think that, then these things are really not things that are ontologically real, but rather figments of the imagination of the man of faith. The “ought” being implied here is an urge (and Hume knew well enough about urges, Schopenhauer took his theory and mutated it into a “blind, striving will” that governs all of existence). This sort of acts as a “death drive” that Sigmund Freud postulated in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, a will towards suicide - putting one’s self squarely in danger as to escape a material world on par with the Christian hell. The skeptic then, has a compulsion to escape the constraints of physical existence by asserting that all of the wonders of nature are simply not “there” and are simply mental constructs in which we order the world. And if there is no ontological center to ground these “constructs” then its a will to escape the plane of physical existence into nothingness.

Oddly enough, it can be said this kind of philosophy is very much in tune with the same kind of thought that was condemned as heresy in the early days of Christianity, known as Gnosticism. the Valentinians, the Manicheans, the Bogomils, all saw the material world as inferior to the world of the mental. Of course it was the fault of Plato himself where the world of forms left a door open to allow skeptics crawl through unabated, denying the existence of the material realm (known as the demiurge), which Neoplatonists such as Plotinus thought to have course-corrected centuries down the road only for it begin rearing its ugly once again in the 17th and 18th century A.D., no doubt was this when mankind attempted to separate himself from the polis that was established by Aristotle (the first salvos of liberal thought). There can even be traces of this in many modern political religions such as Communism, which is God denying but world affirming, and Fascism, which is world denying but God affirming, though it depends on each variant. Neither are really Gnostic in the all pervasive way, even if certain people recently have claimed them as such. But it was Aristotle who grounded knowledge in the here and now contrary to Plato to which all tangible thought is to have been passed down to us, even if Plato himself was responsible for Aristotle’s own education. But as before, if all of the human and natural world is mere convention as stated by Hume, then there is nothing to say other than these beliefs contribute to the same suicidal impulse those very Gnostics had. We are all governed by impulse, like it or not; David Hume was not incorrect about that, but we must not take his beliefs to the logical conclusion of a world-denying asceticism, even if his life was anything but ascetic. After all, he’s a child of Epicurus.

-J./Adolf Stalin

apologies for the ai job, I’m multitasking and its a bit hard for me to get things arranged.

but here goes:

1. Classical Realism & Medieval Metaphysics

• Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics & Metaphysics: Essential for understanding virtue ethics, intentionality, the “golden mean,” and the epistemological realism that underpins the text’s core stance.

• St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologiae (Selected Questions): Crucial for the Thomistic framework of natural law, the synthesis of faith and reason, and the anti-nominalist realist foundation the text defends.

2. Moral Psychology & Existentialism

• David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature (Book I & III): Necessary to understand the text’s emotivist grounding—specifically Hume’s thesis that reason is secondary to passion and moral sentiment.

• Jonathan Haidt – The Righteous Mind: Provides the modern moral psychology foundation, detailing how intuitive, emotional reactions precede rational justification.

• William James – The Varieties of Religious Experience: Key for understanding how direct, unmediated personal/psychological experience initiates religious conversion prior to formal rationalization.

• Søren Kierkegaard – Fear and Trembling or Either/Or: Essential for the existentialist dimension of the text, particularly moral discernment, anxiety, and the personal leap of faith.

3. Modern Epistemology & Idealist Targets

• Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason: Primary reading to understand the transcendental idealism, a priori categories, and phenomena/noumena split that the text critiques as a form of world-denying Gnosticism.

• Baruch Spinoza – Ethics: Important for understanding hard determinism and rationalist metaphysics, both of which the text pushes against to preserve human intentionality.

4. Political Theology, Traditionalism & Anti-Modernity

• Edmund Burke – Reflections on the Revolution in France: Core foundation for the counter-revolutionary critique of abstract, top-down secular humanism.

• Joseph de Maistre – Considerations on France: Crucial for understanding traditionalist political theology, the rejection of Enlightenment progress, and the necessity of transcendent authority in social order.

• Eric Voegelin – The New Science of Politics: Essential for the diagnosis of modern secular ideologies (liberalism, Marxism, scientism) as modern variants of ancient Gnosticism.

• John Gray – Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals: Provides the anti-humanist, post-Enlightenment critique of the “Whig history” of linear progress and secularism.

5. Critical Theory & Deconstruction

• Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto & Capital (Selection): Required to track the text’s critique of materialist dynamics and economic reductionism.

• Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality: Necessary for understanding the analytical tools used in the text to deconstruct institutional power, discipline, and modern secular myths.

• Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer – Dialectic of Enlightenment: Key Frankfurt School text for understanding how Enlightenment reason can devolve into bureaucratic dominance and instrumental rationality.

this mostly reflects my recent thinking, as its the most relevant. I wouldn’t go as far as having read all of these but at least understanding the concepts contained therewithin is enough to grasp most of what I’m conveying at this particular juncture.

Goodreads: link

-J./Adolf Stalin

In recent debates over the primacy of reason versus faith and vice versa, one must not forget that famed YouTube skeptic Alex O’Connor backed down furiously when a Muslim challenged his lack of religious faith. I, myself do not watch his channel or care to debate him - he does indeed irk me quite a bit, whether its his weasel-like appearance or his mannerisms. Apart from our beloved O’Connor’s recently expatriation to panpsychism, albeit I sense it’s out of a genuine fear of confronting his past atheism or antitheism - I would shy from saying he’s exactly incorrect for doing so. Maybe its rooted in a failure to integrate his shadow properly or or an what Freud termed the “uncanny”, the primitive beliefs hidden underneath his subconscious brought on by a fear of existential confrontation with his polar opposite or a repression of a past of naively held beliefs coming back to the surface. Regardless, if anything, militant atheism is as - and this would probably aggravate David Hume - driven as much by passionate sentiment as any militantly held religious faith. The main difference is the urge to rebel against conventions, the same habits that Hume spoke of - is usually a product of someone who feels society represses his or her urge to violate social norms. But government and polite society repress this which is why only now due to political order's own permissiveness, has allowed the lunatics to leave the insane asylum.

However it may be, it’s a very unfortunate form of metaphysics with no abject historical significance (after all its modern analytic panpsychism and not Neoplatonic panpsychism - this should be blatantly obvious), In the sense it’s not rooted in hermeneutic understanding and interpretation of existing scriptures. Albert Schweitzer attempted to find the historical Jesus and came up empty, far from being guilty, the current state of Christian faith at the time was already on a weak foundation by the 19th century. Alex O’Connor's belief is mostly strategic, as he operates on a very Protestant-born ideology of faith alone for anything he adopts: be it religion or irreligion, which is ahistorical. The amount of literature traced from the Enuma Elish, which is pre-biblical to the Abrahamic Torah, can be traced into the succession of biblical books. From that to the Quran and independently developed folk religions and far Eastern faiths such as Buddhism and the Vedic traditions - could as well just as much function as a veritable Darwinian account on the evolution of faith, as its not exactly teleological but rather a giant branching tree of life. Protestantism and the cult of reason attempted to sever the the branches from the root in which faith was not tradition, but rather what one “feels” is right, and as such he adopts panpsychism as a defense against his previously held antitheism.

Almost all of intellectual history has underlying motivations towards systems of thought. Its just the revolutions in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries respectively attempted to dislodge belief from history and bring mythology and spiritual knowledge into the realm of the bourgeoisie marketplace where faith is a matter of opinion or a defense against opposing views. But ad hominem or even he such as himself is not the subject of this essay. Well, sort of. If Christianity (or other religions outside of Judaism or Islam - which profess militant adherents down the line) are to defend the faith, one must not look to the rational arguments of people such as Alvin Plantinga or in more recent memory, William Lane Craig, but rather internally - at our own sense of ethics. One thing that I reiterate time and time again, is that Aristotle promoted a moral philosophy which I think is apt to define most of Christian thinking since after Plato (albeit there was an interregnum in the middle ages where his thought virtually disappeared until Islam helped its revival in the west - thanks to thinkers like Averroes and Avicenna). This thought was then passed to St. Thomas Aquinas who made a pillar out of its core doctrine and fused it with the Christian faith of his time. Aristotle, know as a proponent of what is now known as “virtue ethics”, measured each ethical virtue against two opposing vices; to use an example he contrasted cowardice with foolhardiness, true bravery was found in the middle.

Many centuries later, no doubt furthered by Machiavelli’s separation of the ethical and political in the 15th century, further down - as recent as the end of the American Civil War, another philosopher, William James, spoke of what he termed as the “cash value” of beliefs. Meaning that every belief or acquired knowledge was true depending on its usefulness to the world, whether it be personal religious beliefs or ideas that would essentially bring order to political or social chaos. If the belief was detrimental to the person, like forcing someone to abstain from meat if they had a protein deficiency or knowledge that would disrupt a social order (Plato’s noble lie also comes to mind), there would be no “cash value” to the belief and it would be tossed aside as useless. Kant agreed that people were ends in themselves and that morality should be an end in itself. And it should be, regardless if one were to be an end in oneself both as people and morals, as we ought to treat others not just with honor but according to their feasibility, and not just be evaluated on their intents but their consequences as well. As too much reliance on intentionality is a vice in as much as too much reliance on consequences - just as excessive fawning nor excessive objectification. And at least, calling into question the practicality of it all should determine whether it leads to human flourishing. Such is the nature of an ideal public square. But as one famed German polymath declared this to be the best of all possible worlds, we no longer live in his Enlightenment landscape so Dr. Leibniz would find our current situation to have effectively shut the door on that particular thesis.

So what does this have to do with debating skeptics or at least attempting to make them “shove off” our turf? Glad you asked, even if you really did not intend to. During the Crusades, many Christians (correct me if I’m wrong) attempted to seize Jerusalem for themselves. They did not do this by rationally engaging the other side in debate, they used violence. But it wasn’t pointless violence. As messengers sent by Rome, they were hellbent (probably a bad choice of words but I digress) on making Jesus Christ’s homeland part of the Christian dominion. But as with all, one cannot simply just engage in pointless barbarism - even if there was political and moral justification for such things. As many Christians have had a longstanding, complex relationship with Islam - we cannot stoop to the level of abject barbarism but rather understand that in order to promote Christendom there must be a calculated effort to balance (as per Aristotle) the barbaric and civilized aspects of culture, not fully leaning into one or other. Barbaric enough to put our foot down at people who mock our faith, but civilized enough to keep order.

In the philosophy of Pragmatism, this must also be used strategically, which ever the scale tips (towards barbarism or overt civilization - Spengler saw overt civilization as the end of culture) each mentality must be deployed to which brings the greatest fruit. A person like Alex O’Connor must tread carefully around us, but we ought to not act so barbaric that our culture cannot bear intellectual fruit either, going off the deep into Spartan territory, or become too intellectual like Athens, both cities which could be aligned as different forms of vice in Aristotle’s day, although I doubt Aristotle himself framed them as such. The Golden Mean, but applied to whatever bears the most fruit in terms of opposition to those that deny the faith. Debate should be strategic, not rational - more Arthur Schopenhauer, less Socrates - that is how you win. As faith is irrational in of itself, and many thinkers from Pascal to Kierkegaard to even James realized this, the only way is Eristic (but not without a moral compass), and should be practiced not just in our words, but our actions too.

-J/Adolf Stalin

(edited 7/19/26)

Riddle me this:

A billionaire philanthropist purchases 1000 acres of fertile land to create a self-sustaining haven for a chronically homeless and displaced population. Instead of merely abandoning them on raw soil, the philanthropist constructs a flawless infrastructural framework: modern housing, medical facilities, rehabilitation centers, and clean supply lines. Crucially, the government of this colony is not a top-down bureaucratic prison or an oppressive administrative state; it is a perfect, uncorrupted, direct democracy where the tenants themselves possess total sovereignty, equal voting rights, and absolute control over their own laws, resource allocation, and civic life. Despite having every material resource, perfect institutional scaffolding, and uncorrupted political freedom, the colony slowly fractures from within. Trust erodes into paranoia, factional gridlock stalls production, the civic maintenance is neglected due to collective exhaustion, and the community ultimately collapses into a state of destitution.

In a system where material scarcity, institutional corruption, and political oppression have been entirely eliminated, who is to blame for the collapse?

Is the landlord/philanthropist to blame for naively engineering a shallow spatial and political fix, expecting an instantaneous blueprint to overwrite deep-seated, multi-generational psychological trauma? Or are the tenants themselves to blame, proving the tragic classical truth that perfect external freedom is completely meaningless if the individuals lack the internal, habituated moral and psychological architecture required for self-governance?

You tell me.

- J./Adolf Stalin

1. Neurosis - Souls At Zero - my first real introduction to Neurosis after seeing them mentioned in the pages of a Rolling Stone advertisement in 1998 when I was in 10th grade. thick searing walls of noise rock guitar and doom metal riffs piled on top of tribal percussion and electronics, with a dual vocal attack. their one vocalist is no longer with them due to a criminal charge but they came back with the guy from Isis (no, not THAT Isis - common misconception, it dogged them back in the day) but hearing this record was like what it felt like going through a giant slow moving hurricane. No wonder one of their records was called “The Eye Of Every Storm”. Even had a hurricane on the cover.

2. Godflesh - Pure. I loved Streetcleaner and Selfless, but this is the record that made me a superfan. Just two guys from Black Sabbath’s hometown making industrial sludge. guitar, bass, drum machine, electronics, vocals. but on this one, they started to incorporate hip hop influences into their music to make it more upbeat which made it catchier than the debut, which was a total sludgefest.

3. Drive Like Jehu - s/t - bought this Senior year, after hearing them mentioned alongside the Jesus Lizard in a review of the Kansas City noise rock band Season To Risk. You can tell where early 2000s skramz and screamo got their main influences. At The Drive In and Refused wouldn’t exist without these guys, except these guys were much more angular and lo-fi. dense walls of dissonant guitar draped over drum patterns ripped from prior influences like Fugazi and The Minutemen, except proggier, with a vocalist that had the sassiest voice this side of San Diego. I still hate Thursday and Taking Back Sunday, though. no cap, on God.

4. Jesus Lizard - Head/Pure - a very austere record, first half the band used a drum machine, and then on side B (Pure) they get a real drummer by the name of Mack Macneilly. I found out about these guys from some dudes I knew in high school. They were a garage band with a rapper as frontman but the lead “rapper” guy (They sounded like Rage Against The Machine in all honesty…or should I say Rage For The Machine nowadays) was more into Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile noise rock, he used to have discs of bands like Cop Shoot Cop and White Zombie across his binder he took from class to class. He was a bit older than the rest of his bandmates, who were in my grade. But he was a senior. I do thank him for recommending me these guys, wherever you are. But on the topic of the music, very jangly, tinny guitar parts that dance around a very precise off time rhythm section and a vocalist who sounds like he’s howling while being smothered. lots of loud/soft dynamics too. I was hooked.

5. Sepultura - Beneath The Remains - one of the first “extreme” records I picked up thanks to hearing The Deftones, who got a second wind because of TikTok zoomettes. But Chino & Co. thanked these guys in the liner notes so I went to Disneyworld in Florida and bought most of their records. I was met with the pummeling sounds of Metallica and Slayer but with the gruff vocal delivery that sounded straight out of hell itself. “Inner Self” was life long anthem for me. From there, I discovered Obituary and went down the death metal rabbit hole.

6. Blue Oyster Cult - Cultosaurus Erectus - In my opinion, the Long Island boys’ finest hour, I finally got to see them last November in Cleveland (better now than never, they’re pushing 90). “Hungry Boys” is my favorite track, and this album is way more rock than their previous album, 1979’s Mirrors, which caused them to go in a weird soft rock/yacht rock territory (eck!). Many point to Fire Of Unknown Origin or the first three black & white (if they’re trying to be hipster) But this is the best they had on tap.

7. Big Black - The Rich Man’s 8-Track Tape - My soundtrack in vocational school and my first real taste of “transgressive music”. I like Naked Raygun a lot, but if I was feeling really pissed off from getting pushed around, I put this bad boy on (it was embarassing, a 20 year old getting shoved around by 17 year olds, all because I was short and autistic) Albini was the original chudjak of his time, and I looked the part as well back then. Black hair, pale skin, glasses. The ultimate paean to nihilism - from the racial tension of “Passing Complexion” to the domestic violence bruiser of “Fists Of Love”, I was drinking haterade 24/7. But all edgelords eventually get “trolls remorse” and he ended up bitching out and selling out as they all do. I’d imagine Seth Putnam would have too if he lived long enough. Strangely that never happened to me despite me also being a musician. these guys inspired Godflesh, as they used a drum machine in the live musician dominated Chicago punk scene, which aside from the WaxTrax! types was the standard guitar/bass/drums setup.

8. Fleetwood Mac - Tango In The Night - I know what you’re thinking (This record doesn’t belong here!) But I like the 80s nostalgia of this one. I was dating an ex-girlfriend at the time and I was in the throes of romance. I was also reading a lot of true crime books, but that’s irrelevant. This one’s here primarily for Nostalgia’s sake. Love the song “Everywhere”. Very Romantic.

9. Metal Church - s/t - my first proper introduction to traditional metal after years of just listening to punk and hardcore and hardcore-adjacent metal. I used to spit on Maiden, Priest, etc. Hated anthemic metal for not being edgy enough or fast enough. To me, hardcore punk filled that niche, and so did grindcore. But I accidentally downloaded this off Soulseek years ago and burned it on CD at a whim (zoomers don’t remember this era) and David Wayne’s wicked vocal delivery and the guitar riffs and pummeling drums, as well as excellent songwriting taught me metal could be heavy but also tuneful. Along with Blue Oyster Cult’s greatest hits and Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, this was my late 2000s soundtrack when I was getting tired of blastbeats and crust riffs and wanted something new.

10. Judas Priest - Stained Class - the ultimate Priest record, this was their transitional period where they began to adopt leather, both boots and jackets. it still has their feet in the 70s with the production but the record is looking towards the 80s, its very apparent. Downing and Tipton’s guitar playing and tone is unmatched and the energy is huge. and of course Halford’s vocals. I was in the midst of trying to get every Priest record up til Defenders Of The Faith (except Point Of Entry, that one kind of sucked), and I was going fullblown trad/power metal at the time, eventually getting to Manowar and of course, Iron Maiden. But this was the pivot towards complete embrace.

A Poem

In the whispering fields of rain

In the bubbling brooks of water

the ghost, the sun, the holy father

nature’s splendid glory plain

branches of trees etch the sky

as rivers etch the ground

light shines on the forest floor

make shadows all around

atop the highest mountain air

and the deepest cavern valley

the world of nature is my ally

I know I am in the best of care

branches of trees etch the sky

as rivers etch the ground

light shines on the forest floor

the forest filled with sound

-J./Adolf Stalin

With the rise of the term “media literacy” in the recent years, many in traditionally left-wing spaces, particularly the surface part of “the dark web” and universities alike have become despondent towards the recent influx of reactionary textual interpretation of certain philosophical and literary works. Now its probably been some time since authors like China Mieville have took to task the effervescent J.R.R Tolkien as being a symbol of patriarchal “backwardness” as his ilk are more or less content with raking in the muck as low-born house servants and find the heroic themes presented incompatible with the reality of “real” world injustice. With many forums being overtaken the last ten years with what the educated world termed as an intellectual backwater, the idea that the “village idiot” now has internet access, although I digress the third world in of itself has rendered this point moot. And its not even the tip of the iceberg with many current literary scholars trying to pin homosexuality on the ancient Greeks or making crass assumptions that Shakespeare was black in order to eventually erase the vestiges of Anglo Imperialism through its backdoor.

But its not exact their fault for doing this. The conservative tradition for years was to ignore high culture in favor of the low, trading bookstores for bread & circuses. Of course the 1960s counterculture revolution (but we all know Revolutions, dear reader, are never populist but in fact elite-driven…..one only has to look at the government connections of people from Rollins to Morrison, not to mention Russia in October of 1917). So whats the fuss of this sudden far right re-entry into the intellectual world. Well, for starters - we can look at the Eastern concepts of Tulpas (Tibetan Buddhist concepts filtered Western Spiritualism) Daoist Yaos and Egregores (something Guenon talked about), or if we’re stretching the concept a bit - has a western equivalency in concept such as Schopenhauer’s will, Durkheim’s collective unconscious or even the Marxist concept of reification.

In the early 1980s, people like the aforementioned Henry Rollins, or to use his more accurate, more political counterpart Jello Biafra, put out a magazine called “Maximum Rock N Roll”. Alongside reviews of hardcore punk shows and vinyl, there was cultural criticism sections likely where they would rail against Reagan, Nazis (which had been long dead, or at least had zero power or representation by 1981) and the Klan. Where I’m going with this is when a certain subculture makes constant references to something through repetitive speech acts and symbolism, it can manifest for real in the world itself. Such was the case with the American 80’s hardcore scene where the author of the book American Hardcore or someone that was interviewed said “There became so much of a perceived problem about alleged Nazis in the scene that by 1985, there became one”. That is an example of a Tulpa in action.

Similarly, we can go down a similar route from second wave to third wave feminism where the hatred of rapists and men in general (and the subsequent “war on women” histrionics conjured by middle-of-the-road news outlets in the early oughts which has been memoryholed by all but a select few people - including myself). This is what caused the incel movement to appear in the first place. It was a long time coming, but as usual talk about something or manifesting something by repeating mantras like “kill all men”, eventually what comes out is men that want to “kill all of you”. Which brings us to the image board crisis of so-called “election tourism”. Now verily, it was likely a chain reaction of events considering Reddit’s election of a CEO who had an axe to grind with the current user base notwithstanding, which led to the banning of r/TheDonald, but I digress. Most of this image board’s use of casual racism and sexism (often in an ironic manner) caused the real thing to eventually appear through manifestation.

So what does this all have to do with “media literacy”, you ask? Considering higher education and upward mobility tend to correlate with liberal worldviews (don’t shoot the messenger), they see themselves standing head and shoulders above the crass world of small town bigots who never leave their city and peak in high school. Oh, no they’re world travelers with cosmopolitan views and that’s why academic journals require a payout in the hundreds of dollars to access. very parochial, very closed off and not for the eyes of the small town idiots who might misinterpret the literature. But since piracy is so pervasive now (and we know the deepest, darkest corners of the internet were its biggest cheerleaders), any old Joe can download anything. And when you have a community built on ironic racism and sexism and now every small town schmuck can access any document, they need to find a place they can be themselves. so they found your community, and now you’re mad they ruined it. That’s probably why they’re trying so hard to decrease literacy in the developed world. So these hicks know their place and saying slurs is only okay if you’re doing it to be ironic. But, humor me for a minute. Maybe this wouldn’t happen if you didn’t play with fire and manifest it in the real world through your speech and actions. Sure, a lot of people on the left say that words are violence, but that’s a materialist explanation. I’m going deeper and saying: there’s a reason so many ancient people thought words carried power that couldn’t be explained by physical processes (curse words were seen as actual curses - one could even, with a slight bit of imagination, assume that blackface led to the civil rights movement and hordes of migrant waves). Were they wrong? I don’t think so.

-J./Adolf Stalin

Surely many people are aware of the Nation of Islam, its contributions to the work of people such as Malcolm X and the Million Man March which took place on October 16, 1995, which even attracted many celebrities. But what you may not know is in the beliefs of the Nation of Islam, there is a fundamental difference between doctrinaire Islam and the Nation of Islam itself. Many of the beliefs the Nation of Islam professes border on the lunatic fringe of religious and political philosophy and are not mainstream by any stretch of the imagination. One such belief, is their belief that Yakub (I’m not exaggerating here), being one of the many “Allahs” that rule over a given time, decided to go to an island off the coast of Greece and Turkey and create white people. After Moses attempted to integrate them into the civilization it was clear they could not be helped and they they grew to be very volatile, cunning and generally conniving and began to display a whiter skin tone than that of the original civilization of mankind. Yakub then shuttled them off to a faraway land so they could not disturb the civilization in the Afro-Asiatic homeland that they inhabited. Sound familiar?

Well, since there’s trouble in the middle east today, the inhabitants of Israel, as we know in these circles, faced a similar civilizational upbringing. So basically, this “Church” of sorts, which may or may not have been founded by someone who wasn’t even black to begin with, sees whites and Jews as fundamentally no different from one another. Immanuel Wallerstein, following in the footsteps of both Karl Marx and Frederic Bastiat, theorizes that the global south - as producers, is always taken advantage of by the northern imperialists - as plunderers. This kind of system, where the natural resources of developing countries are extracted surplus by the developed world - creates a feedback loop of exploitation. During the Cold War, Albania attempted to close off all international trade to become self-sufficient, and thus, became more economically unequal as a result of this policy. Since World Systems Theory (as Wallerstein calls it) is a self-perpetuating system, a developing country only has two options, both which keep it economically unequal no matter what, either the country bans international trade, or practice free trade where it gets extracted for resources by the developed world. The only way out of this conundrum is to simply have no resources worth extracting, but unfortunately the country remains poor because there is no way to turn a profit regardless.

In the middle east as we speak, a theory like Wallerstein’s would see Israel as a developing exploiter, and the Palestinian minority as part of the hapless global south, dependent on an economic system that punishes them for merely existing. as Wallerstein’s theory is part of the giant web of Marxist and Marxist-adjacent beliefs, not only is there an emphasis on structural and material determinism but also the theory, which mostly is the product of the post-Maoist era, that rural indigenous populations are always at the mercy of urban bourgeoisie. In a similar fashion, the Native American populations of the United States would be seen in a similar light to the settling English populations arriving from the old world.

As Oswald Spengler attested, Europeans are what he called “Faustian Man” who was trying to explore the entire global and then reach for the starts. He did not necessarily see this as a good thing and was quite pessimistic about it. He also did not group Russians in with them, seeing them as a separate civilization. But that’s neither here nor there, and its worth noting that Communism in its full realized form, first took root there as official state ideology. However, the revolutions in the Soviet Union inspired the revolutions abroad, especially in China, where the dialectic of the urban proletariat (Marx and Lenin's argument - taken from Hegel's master and slave, where the master's ultimate victory over the slave depends on the slave's recognition) flipped by Mao to the rural proletariat . But since Western European man was exploring the world after the 14th century, he began taking root in places that were not his and displacing other populations.

To be fair, I do not necessarily see this as a bad thing, but rather just a consequence of history. Maoist theory always sees indigenous populations as the exploited and where or not you agree Palestinians were there first or the Jews, many people agree that the Jews are settlers plundering the land of the indigenous people of Palestine. And since Maoists see White Europeans as invasive and exploitative - who undermine the native populations -anyone who knows enough about the other group is they seem to exhibit the same behavioral characteristics. As an aside a lot of Marxist theoreticians, particularly on the neighboring Trotskyist quadrant - the intellectual fore-bearers of modern day Neoconservatives, employ plenty of imperialist justification for capitalism. As such, the preservation of the state of Israel, if viewed through Maoist lenses is how white supremacy is preserved. So not only do they preserve capitalism, they preserve white supremacy which is the handmaiden of capitalism, according to a combined Trotskyist and Maoist viewpoint. Only difference is that the former became double agents for the opposition, with one side enforcing one half of equation and the other side acting as its affirmation, in the aforementioned Hegelian “master-slave” dialectic-in-motion.

So putting all three together, they, just as the Nation of Islam, sees no fundamental difference between Israel, capitalism and whites. To use an analogy, it would be similar to telling a child with cancer that in order to remove the cancer they must “remove” them. And by “remove” them, I mean kill them. Its the classic guilty by association thing, only neither Maoists or the Nation of Islam see no fundamental difference between a Greenblatt and a Johnson. As intersectionality, being a common trait of left-wing thought to unite various historically discriminated individuals under shared banners, the classic narrative is that White Europeans, and especially White European males, have never been historically discriminated against (real scholars know this is inaccurate and contested). And there is no possible way we can oppose a united front of popular resistance (this includes women as a discriminated class), so the only option is to simply not participate in a system. One that, from the outset, is run by an entire bounded class of individuals united by a collective grievance project, and actively undermine in the way that people are saying Israel is doing to Palestine. This does not excuse Israel’s actions, but rather imploring the same tactics be used at home and abroad for our own, because those kinds of people don’t understand anything other than the exploitation they always are alleging they receive.

-J./Adolf Stalin

Consensus among women is a survival mechanism, that’s why they rarely form opinions independent of their own group. But the existence of what can either be known as crabs-in-a-bucket or tall poppy syndrome among women combined with this specific in-group preferences is going to destroy the gene pool. By tall poppy I mean dragging women down as what has become known as "pick me's" in social discourse when they dare question feminist orthodoxy. Which means equality based on situational convenience. When Immanuel Kant formulated his moral philosophy he stated as thusly "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law", also known as the categorical imperative. Women, as a general rule, seem incapable of holding onto such universal principles. Especially if said principles means disposing of one's rights so that others may use them to their advantage.

In one of my books, I assert that universal a priori (Kantian) ethics are very male-brained, whereas women, as a general rule, opt for emotivist and hedonist (Hume, Bentham, Mill - the last one very committed to the rights of women, to say nothing of their wrongs) frameworks. Women seek comfort and convenience over truth, simply because their weak constitution will put them in the path of danger. This is by design. And every situation they encounter, they assess what garners them the most pain or pleasure, instead of basing their ethical motivations on whether they're simply trying to do the right thing. To them, right means what makes them comfortable not what makes sense. "But what about women going after dangerous men?” you may ask. the thing is, a little danger towards her is a small price to pay for his dangerous attitude towards others. Being tough and aggressive is attractive to her because that means he'll protect her against weaker men. Never mind if she gets roughed up by him in the process. Again, its about assessing convenience. This is why women fall for tall, aggressive men.

However, that seems to be evolutionarily detrimental. Taller men live shorter lives. Aggressive men get killed easier. At the end of the day women just care about their own convenience over the convenience of others. Making men attack each other for their own amusement is what gets them off. Its the explanation behind the biggest psychological warfare campaigns in history - The White Feather Movement, which involved enacting psychological warfare against men who refused to fight physical warfare. As long as they are not the ones doing the heavy lifting and violence, they can stay back home, commit adultery, eat ice cream all day and binge watch reality TV. Their attitude of convenience over right action. This often extends towards their own offspring, as long term sustainability (Motherhood) is traded for short term convenience (being able to extend one’s youth, which means more endless parties and staying out late). And considering that women are very malleable by popular media, the obsession with youth is not merely a by-product of the current far right zeitgeist, but has been ingrained into heads of otherwise normal females, because if “rich and famous people are doing it, why can’t I?”

But now, this vanity has infected men, people who ought to know better and think that endless surgeries and skincare are the road to redemption. Frederich Nietzsche asserted the primacy of aesthetics as being prior to ethics. Today we have a worship of vanity that’s all consuming. There was once a time when great men of history did not care about how society perceived them. But now, just as with women have always done, A real man - in the present era - is measured not by his deeds but rather if what he says and does checks all the right social boxes and looks as plausibly pleasing to the right kinds of people (most notably the fairer sex). This is so he may ascend the social ladder and be received into the right side of history. But this is real end of history if so, not in Fukuyama’s 1991, but now. Nietzsche’s last man hath arrived.

-J./Adolf Stalin

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism Is A Humanism” one of the central tenets is that man, by his nature, is condemned to be free, forced to make choice that determine his or her life outcomes. With recent scholarship in neuroscience there is an increasing emphasis on the idea that the notion of choice is simply an illusion, and that anything we do, following the behaviorists, is conditioned by society and our essential personal makeup. Many philosophers have imparted various theories that certain concepts that human beings interpret are simply illusory, whether it was Hume who posited the self as being illusory or Kant simply stating that time was one of the many ways humans organize cognition which simply does not exist outside of that cognition. Marx, Feuerbach, even Freud saw religious belief as convenient lies. but going back to the Ancient Greeks, some thinkers even suggested that not only lies were convenient for upholding the social and political world, but even had a shred of truth to them. From the biblical flood myths of scripture to the Pagan entities of Greece and Rome, all of these suggested that the cosmos and the natural world, when violated, had real life consequences and could even spell death for someone who dared to tempt it. During the Enlightenment, many centuries later, these myths were cast aside as superstition and there were many attempts at crossing what once were sacred boundaries in search of the infinite. the 19th century was the height of this craze, and the attempt to justify the march towards endless progress saw no end in sight until Francis Fukuyama declared “The End Of History” when communism was defeated and the Berlin wall crumbled to the ground.

But the downside of all this was there was a school of thought emanating from the Francophone universities during this time who attempted to deny myths as well, through repeated attempts at getting to the most subjective, interpretive perspective one could possibly have. Everything suddenly became about “lived experience” (which is partially right, but not the full picture) and mentality of ever greater intersectional populations. But since both sides were busy tearing down old myths, what could possibly replace them but new ones, such as hegemonic ideas of class, race, sexuality - even disability - without considering these were no such replacements for myth but rather creating a new form of dogma, an institutionalized doctrinaire religion that was verboten to transgress. These were no longer entities unseen, but according to social and natural scientists, visible realities which can be observed through the senses. And since the days of John Locke, its all we have, the ideas of everlasting hell and heaven and eternal judgement are gone and replaced with notions of a culture that forbids people - especially those in the field of academia - to deny basic biology or insist anything that fails falsification to be simply expressions of opinion. And they implore them downstream, much like in Althusser’s RSAs and ISAs to a hapless population who must be abide by them or lose their social standing.

Since most of the learned world leans left or center left, religion is viewed with a hermeneutics of suspicion, to say nothing of individual texts and interpreted as nothing more than an “apparatus” of a failed regime that no longer stands. such is life since 1789. But if we’re talking about “lived experience”, then religion isn’t dogmatic at all, but rather divine intervention. William James knew this, and depending on the temperament of the individual, it could reach you or it could completely pass you by. Obviously much of this seems to smack of Protestant evangelism, so its spiritualism without institutional backing. A lot of post-Reformation Christianity ends up traveling down this path until you end up with a crazed man in a crack house spewing bible verses to an unwitting small congregation. Christianity (and many other religions, give or take) need structure to survive. Its why Rome outlasts Protestant offshoots before they splinter off again to what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences”. Pretty soon one congregation becomes five, and then becomes ten due to minor differences in Biblical interpretation. Much of modern philosophy and science tends in the same direction, with wildly different interpretations and sometimes outright denials and claims to prove a point about human nature. But if human nature has remain unchanged since we first became Homo Sapiens then why must we attempt to disenchant the world if some things have eternal value?

I would be led to believe much of it lies in the fact that mankind simply is a restless creature, unsatisfied with his lot. Schopenhauer makes a point about existence drifting between pain and boredom and much of his philosophy alleges that if man simply stopped striving, there would be no need to constantly shift reality (and its perception, both public and private) if one is constantly searching in vain for ultimate truth. Lies that bind, I assume, is what keeps society intact. Uncomfortable truths is what tears it to shreds. So let the religious and the spiritual believe their myths. I know I do, as people of the world have learned more from the Iliad and Gilgamesh than by simply asserting digits on a spreadsheet. the over-reliance on statistics simply has turned human beings into data, and not living, breathing souls with ideas and personalities of their own. its a straight line almost from the likes of Epicurus, who subsisted on a diet of bread and water and insisted people live a life avoiding pain (by extension, the pursuit of all that’s worthwhile, including glory and adventure) while denying anything other than material reality to Spinoza to A.J. Ayer and other such miscreants.

"I am not a number, I am a free man!"

- from the Prisoner, 1967, contained in the Iron Maiden song of the same name.

-J./Adolf Stalin

Mark Fisher, famous for his “slow cancellation of the future” doctrine posited that capitalism was inescapable and that consumerism would devour any prospects of a meaningful world. Inherently, he was purveyor of many of the ideas that were found in “early” humanistic Marx, who tended to have an ethical, utopian bent aimed at eliminating exploitation wherever it reared its ugly head. Contrary to Fisher, was someone like Louis Althusser, who saw simply saw history as an amoralistic force that in which the contradictions of capitalism would eventually destroy it and bring about a violent, painful realization of communism. However, he did not see the present as exhibiting the conditions for communism quite yet and simply alleged the state, when it exists, perpetuated capitalism through what he called RSAs and ISAs (Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses) in which, going from Spinoza’s hard determinism, wipes out human agency through two main channels: one which enforces ideology through social persuasion and the other which is the armed backup for the former group. Both inherently thought, or so I’m led to believe, that true existing communism was a rarity (In Althusser’s case) or nonexistent (in Fisher’s case).

Since Fisher was essentially a Trotskyist, as surprisingly he still has followers to this day on the left and the right (in the case of Neoconservatives who push his ideology with a different economic framework), Its amazing how one well-timed ice-pick didn’t kill it in the crib. Yet many in academia enjoy whitewashing his legacy considering his less insane counterpart Stalin (part of my namesake) had the good graces to keep socialism in one country. Now, I could be wrong here, but I very much believe many of the guerilla interventions in other countries during the Cold War only happened after Stalin’s death during the thaw (known as the de-Stalinization). Whether Brezhnev or Khrushchev knew it or even realized it, minute traces of Trotskyism seem to have found their way into their Soviet foreign policies in that time period.

But that’s getting a bit off track here, as if you ask any communist in the west and especially in the academic world, none of that actually matters. According to them, the USSR wasn’t true communism and neither was Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, or god forbid, Cambodia. Nope, all that was state capitalism, according to the professionals. In short, academic leftists fetishize failure, which is the real reason they attach themselves to decolonialist movements - case in point: Haiti, which in the 18th century threw off the chains of French legitimist rule thanks to one of the natives of the Island, centuries later - ended up becoming a place where actual existing leadership and government have still failed to take root (but nobody is allowed to talk about that because those people are minorities, which academic leftists see as their favorite pets).

As such, “Real existing socialism” is when you overthrow governments every decade over and over again and constantly purge party members until every body of water is filled with the blood of billions, according to the professionals. Some, like Juan Posadas, though we needed to throw nukes into the mix to achieve that kind of enlightenment. No matter how many revolutions, the satisfaction for a total end of exploitation is a thirst that cannot be quenched. The Academic Left cannot exist unless millions of papers are published (with peer review, of course) that there’s still much work to be done and that Stalin was a big, bad fascist. As in my earlier article on ethical history I explained that history cannot collapse into text (as with literary theorists and post-modernists) or Whig history, as in the case of Hegel, Mill, etc - as its very much verboten in the modern era, I declare that, rather, we must aim for a history of excellence. But Fisher, Althusser and related associates from Zizek to Jameson, aiming for higher ground is simply aristocratic - and therefore, wrong. Marxism, and by extension many other left-wing fellow traveler ideologues, from Anarchists to Social Democrats, is driven by an existential crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. What about the people on the ground, the ordinary people, average people like you and I?

Whataboutism, as explained in a much earlier article of mine, is a favorite tactic of the left, either used offensively or defensively - one such example is why you'll hear a lot of moral grandstanding from the left regarding American slavery but not a single peep about China colonizing Africa at this very moment (basically “its okay when we do it”) Granted the Marxist approach - known as “history from below” has it uses, but if one wants to make a society that actually accomplishes great things, It cannot just rest on great men alone, but the greatness of all of us. Unfortunately for many scholars in the Marxist tradition, that also entails that there needs to be an equality of opportunity, to say nothing of equality of outcome (more on that in a bit). However, that will always be a falsehood, as the dissolving of natural hierarchies creates a society of mediocrity (Jose Ortega Y Gasset pointed this out). I will attest to one thing, that I may humor for a brief moment. Equality of outcome is mostly associated with the left. Us on the right however, can appropriate it for our own ends.

At the end of the day, Every man should be able to have the essentials, such as a wife, kids, a plot of land and a purpose. So by that stretch, then medieval society already appropriated that concept long before the left even existed as an entity, long before the so-called “Glorious” Revolutions, which shifted political power from the landed peasants to the emerging merchant middle class which created the conditions for revolution in the first place (there is absolutely nothing glorious about any of it honestly). That’s not to say that men should not strive for excellence as a collective instead of expecting history to reward us by stripping of us obligations toward common decency. That kind of attitude, led us to Maximilien Robespierre and the Marquis De Sade.

-J./Adolf Stalin

(edited 8/9/2026)

Since the dawn of feminism, many feminists have used the bugbear of “patriarchy” to denote this ever present sense that society, in its current form and throughout time, has systematically oppressed women at every possible turn. Some even argue, that patriarchy with its visions of ennobled aristocrats also harms men through the subjugation of rights through King and court negatively impacts the quality of life of men who do not hold any power in society. The latter view, is one commonly held in Western Marxist variants of what constitutes “patriarchy”. Marx’s close associate, Frederich Engels, in his history (why “his” though, some may say - more on that in a bit) wrote a polemic of early human social development called Origins Of The Family And Private Property, which assumed the natural state of mankind (and womankind, in general) to be a verifiable classless society, free of oppression. noted Anarchist Fredy Perlman took it a step further in the title of his speculative story of the human past in “Against His-Story Against Leviathan” which is pretty eyebrow-raising to say the least - since the title seems to take the theory of the Anonymous Father at face value. Since the second view in which I described that patriarchy harms men, too - Marxists inherently believe a truly free man does not answer to a higher authority that attempts to control him through the garnishing of his wages and the exploitation his labor. Many modern feminists often claim that the reason men are miserable in this day and age is because this so-called “patriarchal society” makes men live up to unrealistic standards of human conduct, that no man ought to be a King but rather just a “decent human being”. However, if you - like me - know quite well that men and women are biologically different, you will know we are psychologically different as well. You cannot attempt to use strategies that work for women on men unless you are one of those types who parrot falsehoods like “one race, human race” or “no human is illegal” despite that genetic code is real and human beings have always had a sense of property relations. down the intellectual genealogy, Rousseau is an antecedent of Marx which informed his idea (many Marxists also allege that these aren’t ideas but rather material reality, so many aren’t beating the religious cult allegations) that “society was a problem” and therefore so was property ownership and there was once a mythical time such things never existed. But contrarian as always, I counter-argue this claim: I don’t think patriarchy ever existed. Not now, not in the bronze age, not in the early modern period nor the middle ages. Why?

Well, for one, I argue that 1) band level organization was dominated by an idea of an “Anonymous Father” where society was ruled by women and men simply existed to contribute to the gene pool and nothing else. 2) once what people thought of as Patriarchy was rather a society where men were simply obligated to provide for women and her offspring and were condemned if they failed to do so in this second stage of human development. Hence, men could never be both in power and at the same time, free to leave if they chose to and never actually could get to the point where women existed as pawns in a society. That which would not only guarantee that men could not only have the choice to have children, but also choose not to as well. Much of modern African-American behavior is somewhat reminiscent of this but at the most fundamental level are very matriarchal and will throw their friends under the bus when they’re “down bad”. And the modern state perpetuates the idea that men simply are just there as background characters in what Perlman alleges is “her-story”. The entirety of history seems to posit that since women are the primary caretakers that men completely are absolved of having any sense of free will but were forced to lay down their lives in war (no doubt by state leaders, who also see men as means to an end) and women were made to stay back home where the temptation of adultery was great and simply could remarry and forget about their deceased husband like he never existed. The only cultures that got this right were the Aztecs (who considered adultery equal to treason) and India (bride burning). A case could be made for the Khmer Rouge as well, although I’m a bit unsure of this. I would have to continue digging. Regardless, Patriarchy is a historical myth that needs to be put to bed once and for all. Women have never actually been oppressed in any meaningful or structural way except being mildly inconvenienced by not being able to vote which is irrelevant in the bigger picture sense because it changes nothing and anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that.

-J./Adolf Stalin

In 1996, there was a thesis penned by Benjamin Barber, called “Jihad Versus McWorld”. Many other works followed from Charles Taylor’s “buffered” versus “porous” selves into Samuel Huntington’s multi-polar “clash of civilizations” thesis. Globalization seems to erode traditional modes of being, which are often the result of what David Hume called conventions of society, which are only existent upon agreement between persons. Or so one could say so. Prior to the “invention” of philosophy, men looked to the Gods for answers to life’s toughest questions, anything regarding law or the nature of the universe to what makes fire burn. Since Socrates took what those such as Democritus, Heraclitus and Parmenides pondered about the universe and the natural world and directed it to the world of human concerns, ending with him perishing from ingesting hemlock as punishment for “the corruption of the youth” in Athens, the direction of philosophy as a practice has been increasingly devoted to the individual, the practical, the democratic, what Diogenes Of Sinope’s ideal person was - the cosmopolitan (Max Stirner would be a culmination of this, and to a more bourgeois parallel, John Stuart Mill and figures like Ayn Rand). However, one can see that often when a globalized world meets an undiscovered territory, where old customs still reign - globalism attempts to make them part of the growing global order. Unfortunately for them, a psychological reaction takes place in the inhabitants of this older order, they grow more militant in their ways and it ends up that they become violent. This is how they preserve their old ways in the light of growing globalism. But it comes at a price. As Samuel Huntington stated in Clash Of Civilizations:

“Somewhere in the Middle East a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.”

This is all to very similar to theories put forth by Ronald David Laing, a British psychiatrist who claimed that modernity creates a fractured self, where one is torn between the customs of their families and the new, exciting world of globalization and McDonald’s. But residues of their older traditions can’t be let go of so quickly, as there is still a part of them that must do good by these customs or they end up feeling left out. Similar (not the same albeit) parallels can be drawn to the “crabs in a bucket” mentality of urban blacks who excise out someone of their own community for getting an education or Amish rumspringa and excommunication when someone transgresses taboos. Of course this is more or less related to the overall attitudes of taboo breaking found in anthropological studies of a much more academic character.

I am not at all saying that philosophy and the various social sciences was a mistake and that Socrates deserved his punishment, although it could be said that his trial and execution were to secular philosophy like Jesus’ crucifixion was to Christianity - but I would rather not veer too close to heresy. But the more universal and cosmopolitan a society becomes the more various cultures end up retreating into tribalism, we’ve seen in the Middle East, we’ve seen it in America - with the extreme ideological factionalism. So what’s to do? I mean we cannot stop globalization. That genie is out of the bottle. I think one of the biggest issues is the growing amount of institutionalized finance (I refuse to use the term capitalism as I am not a communist, but rather more or less something in between). The disrespect of not only national borders but community borders by eminent domain projects and mass corporate planning schemes (the same kind that James C. Scott talks about) which destroys small time communities. The encroaching land seizure is likely what (indirectly) contributes to tribalism, breeds NIMBY sentiments and puts people who live in those areas in a state of a state of psychological disarray. Which, on one hand supports the mono-culture while internally fighting for the native one like what [Carl] Jung - and I’m modifying it here - a battle between one’s one ego and the collective unconscious. Where [in Freud’s terms] certain behaviors become oppressed and produce counterintuitive actions as a way of redirecting impulses. But on the other hand, we cannot simply tell their corporate overlords to stop hoarding land and wealth so I propose that the only way to avoid this extreme tribalism from becoming prescient is simply look at it this way - the more you take the more you have to give back, an idea that goes all the way back to Paine’s agrarian reforms.

As far as the social sciences encroaching towards empiricism, the lack of mysticism and mythology in modern ideas is probably why reactionary culture is so strong these days, especially in Palestine and even in the US Heartland alike. Everything is about results, in a very utilitarian manner. The kind of calculative, English-minded - no doubt due to Empire, reductionism that Frederich Nietzsche scorned. Like, Charles Taylor, to use an example, is a North American academic with foothold in both the Analytic and Continental worlds. Fields such as Hermeneutics, seem to be dominated by mostly Continental philosophers and social scientists. I wager, that ought to change. But the field in which social scientists operate, would see this as crossing from facts into values. We are not supposed to derive prescriptions from the field of interpretation. But at the same time, maybe the ancients could teach us through this methodology things that in their time that may have been have been temporal to be actual instances of the eternal. I would even go as far as the need to bring back classical philology and reject modern notions of “historical linguistics”. That’s all speculative, however. Its just one of the many dreams I have. And Freud and Jung themselves were very much into dreams as being a world in where wishes one has in their wakened state lay dormant and the conscious world melds with the unconscious. There would be no need for a reactionary counterculture if the educated world learned, so to speak, to accept these subaltern beliefs - even from people they supposedly don’t like - back into their frameworks and models instead of what they think “ought” to be. Because what “is”, ain’t working for us. Hume contra Hume: reducing convention - whether born of contract in Locke or fear in Hobbes - to assent, but what appears as assent in stability reveals itself as identity under force.

-J./Adolf Stalin

In the classical world, the field of ethics usually speaks of either in unification of reason, spirit and appetite (in Plato’s case) or maintaining a balance between extreme opposing vices. I will focus on the latter, which is something that was proposed by what many who came after him as “The Philosopher”. This man is Aristotle. While Aristotle never truly had a formalized philosophy of history, he did advocate for a position that German historian Leopold Von Ranke would emphasize nearly 2,000 years later (and the Annales School with their “longue durée” approach a hundred more). History, for Aristotle and Ranke alike attempted to explain the past “as it was”. Ranke, in his time was essentially opposed to an actual existing “philosophy of history”, instead preferring strictly empirical, scientific methods to studying past societies. Counter to Ranke was Hegel, who was on the other end of the argument who believe history was a build up to the ultimate realization of reason by human society. So going from that, one can say that while [Aristotle] did not have a formalized philosophy of history, he did have an ethical philosophy.

In the Nichomachen Ethics Aristotle talks of a middle ground between two existing vices. whether its between foolhardiness or cowardice, extreme fear or extreme confidence, one could achieve virtue by walking a balance between the two extremes in a reasonable manner. Now if we look at Hegel’s conception of history, it has been taken by many in his wake, including its inversion by Karl Marx, The one who took it the most at face value is still alive today, and wrote his thesis in 1990 with his declaration that since the Berlin Wall had fallen, Fascism was defeated, Communism was defeated and liberal democracy triumphant. He called this the “End Of History”. On the extreme opposite end of this kind of thinking you get relativists who deny individuality, deny the subject, and reduce history to narrative. This is exemplified with post-structuralists the most and even shows up in Arthur Schopenhauer’s total condemnation of history as an entire discipline. However, some people - such as Nietzschean thinkers think that we can transcend all of this where history not only becomes a God himself yet negates human existence in a post-human world. Its no longer a history of “great men” but “great gods” in which by going forwards actually sets humanity back before the time of Homer (around the Bronze age and before, but more on that in a bit). This is the domain of transhumanists, to which I’m wholly opposed to in most ways. Rather history should aim for objective reality, not virtual reality. Unfortunately, we seem to be inching towards the latter. These people say “Who needs a past when you can just simulate one?” I’d answer: “what would be the point if no one can be around to see it?”

But since we’re discussing Aristotle as the main subject of this piece, not only was he adamant that history be judged by what “actually happened”, both these latter approaches simply are also what I assume to be not only historical unethical but also historically irresponsible. One is suggested that Hegel’s philosophy of history points toward the foolhardy assumption that we are getting more intelligent. Current data suggests the exact opposite, with plummeting literacy rates. But that’s mostly because of external technological and racial issues, setting us back to that mythical pre-Bronze age mentality where few knew how to write, let alone record history - as it was all oral. The other assumes that the past not only did not exist but neither did the human subject, so human beings never had a single narrative but rather various competing narratives, all of which could be true or all of which could be completely false, or somewhere in between. Both of these narratives fail at what I like to term “ethical history”. Surely not all cultures are equal, and there is not always a single narrative to be had but we should also be able to say that the movement of history points us to greater heights.

Denial of the past or simply thinking we can rebuild Babel to reach God - are two avenues of avarice. Being grounded, humble but hopeful in our assessment of how our story unfolds is the only truly ethical approach to history, one that reaches towards the clouds but keeps our feet in the soil, like a redwood tree - That is what humanity should aim to be. Redwoods are some of the biggest trees in the Pacific Northwest, and their environment is splendid - after all, its the only temperate rain forest to exist. All of human history and culture should resemble that forest: Thick, thriving, biologically hardy and able to withstand the bulldozers of global conflicts and revolutions. Impenetrable and healthy. An ecology of human culture, built on the architecture of knowledge. That, is the human flourishing that of a truly ethical, virtuous history of mankind. A truly ecological human narrative.

-J./Adolf Stalin

from a piece of writing regarding writer and novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine, walking in Paris with his then girlfriend:

“One evening in Holland he took me to a certain street where these young women were selling their beautiful children. They’d walk up and down the street with their children, then hand the child to a customer, always a man [...] The man would give the mother a dollar bill and both the mother and child would go in. He would do whatever he pleased with the child. Louis would ask me:

- You see how vicious life is?

- It can’t be all over the world like that, maybe it’s just the Dutch who like that kind of thing.

-No, it goes on in Paris too, but not quite in the same way.

- Why don’t you do something about it? If you think it’s so terrible, why don’t you try to make it illegal?

-Oh, but it is illegal. They could get in bad trouble if caught, but on certain streets you can walk up and down and the gendarme or policemen will look the other way.’

This was all too much for the well-brought-up young lady to bear. She questioned why they were even looking, especially if he was not willing to do anything about it. Céline, however, refused to budge: - I just wanted you to know. You who think that everybody is so beautiful and nice, that life is so simple, that all you have to do is have a happy attitude and life will be a beautiful journey??”

This piece of writing, regarding novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine, where he takes his then girlfriend, who believes in the natural beauty of life, to witness mothers prostituting their children in a Paris slum. What can be conveyed here, in terms of moral aptitudes, is that the mothers themselves value not starving over caring for their children. Bringing to mind, if I have any American Generation X readers in the audience, the line in Nirvana’s “In Bloom” where Kurt Cobain utters the line “sell your kids for food, weather changes moods, spring is here again, reproductive glands” Now I am uncertain that Kurt knew Celine but he was likely a very literary person. A bit of a personal anecdote, I don’t think that my mother would ever do that, but we’ve never gotten to that level of poverty - we’ve always been relatively middle class (in fact we were upwardly mobile if anything) as the 1990s rolled on, we got richer over time, not poorer. And even at one point, we owned 72 acres of land - but we had to sell some back a few years ago. We have an above ground swimming pool, and we’ve had cable since the 80s. Now conversely, my one friend (who shall remain anonymous), has always been kind of poor, was forced to steal for his family while high on drugs running from the cops. Day in, day out. He spent a lot of time in jail. He has been homeless before.

Unlike (some) people, I don’t usually judge people on their economic or class backgrounds. I usually judge them by how decent of a person they are, especially towards me or my family (sister not included, but that’s neither here nor there) Marxists (of which I only share part of my political DNA) who seem to be the biggest “class warfare” aggregates, will never shake the dirty hand of a coal miner, janitor, truck driver, factory worker, etc. Maybe there was a time when they did so, but that time is yesterday’s news. Most of them (not all, mind you - I’m speaking in averages here) tend to come from upper class backgrounds which enable them to adopt such ideologies in the first place. Most working class and working poor just don’t want to starve. political theory is for those who can afford to engage in it. I should consider myself lucky, as not only do I have the housing I do, I still occasionally struggle with allowances on cash. I have room, board, food, all taken care of. The only pertinent issue seem to be transportation and money most of time, to which I have very little left over per week or month.

This is just my perspective, But I think why America, in particular, doesn’t have a large amount of “class consciousness” mostly comes from the fact we’re individualists at heart. friendships are more important than solidarity. Besides, I’m technically middle class and my friend is what Marx would have called a “lumpenprole”. Actual Marxists would try and make an example out of us. Not to mention neither of us are employed at the moment and are likely to remain so. Most workers in the US tend not like socialism, or at least brand advertised here, at all for very noticeable reasons. Some of these reasons are historical (going back decades) and others more on a political level, as in the fact most Marxists straight up here do not like the so-called “Settler” class - and that flies in the face of what they hold dear, most of which are not indigenous, considering most of that population has been wiped away (my friend has said to be half, but who knows what qualifies anymore). Its a complete lose-lose situation, an exercise in futility. and the historical reasoning is part conditioning (no doubt brought upon the purveyors of domestic political culture - whether you agree its upwardly mobile or trickles down like “Reagonomics” was supposed to do) and part existential fear of the “other” the “other” being the USSR. But there is no USSR anymore, however the damage has been done.

So, was Celine at fault or the girl? I'd say neither. The mother's? also no. Its society's fault for making people so despondent they have to underhanded acts in order to survive. However, that does not mean that people should be penalized for seeking out their own advantage. Society shouldn't punish those who try and make it in a "dog eat dog" world, but when third parties are involved, its much worse. Its the same thing with abortion. Anti-natalists like David Benatar or close fellows like Peter Singer, believe that human life is net negative for the rest of living species. There also seems to be a strange fellowship between Marxists and English utilitarians in which both deny a fundamental human nature. Celine (and other pessimistic writers and thinkers - such as Emil Cioran and Arthur Schopenhauer) do not deny there is a fundamental human nature, its just this nature is ugly and unforgiving. Marxist and utilitarians, on the other hand, deny human nature outright. Rather than fix this erroneous nature at its core, they deny its very “ground of being” and suggest the only solution is through calculation or the classic antagonism of the rich versus poor. Never mind anything suggesting that humans are involved in both society and history. Nonesuch, man is secondary to his material conditions or the maximization of pleasure, the homo economicus. Or so people like Singer (who acknowledges a debt to Marx, he literally wrote a book on him) According them people are defined by money and base desires. And that alone. No fundamental ontology beyond drives. Its a debate that will never get resolved, because women, after liberation, meant the right to seek their own advantage except they’re the carriers of life, so its conditional. We (I’m speaking of us men) do not have that problem. But it only seems like one sex is aware of responsibility. Women do not have to live in fear of being attacked by other people for seeking their own advantage, Men however do.

-J./Adolf Stalin

In the late 19th century, two thinkers (although there a few others) named Carl Vogt and Rudolph Wagner (no relation to Richard…I think) were embroiled in what was to be known as the materialism controversy. This was in a time of rapid scientific advancement in which natural science, as it was known then was primed to take over or eliminate philosophy entirely as a practice. Up until then, many people believed the earth was only a few thousand years old and Adam and Eve really existed. Now I consider myself pretty religious (I do believe in God) but nowadays the relationship between evolutionism and creationism is old hat, and that many modern theologians and religious studies scholars have found much more creative ways to enjoin the two disparate worldviews. Going back to Vogt and Wagner, peeling back the layers a bit, not only was this debate philosophical but political. Vogt was a virulent leftist who hung around Proudhon and Bakunin in Paris cafes and Wagner was a resolute monarchist who wanted to preserve the German crown. As it is known in prior engagements with this subject, as with the pantheism controversy itself, there can be a direct line connecting Epicurean doctrines to Spinoza into the beliefs that Vogt and other materialists like Feuerbach and Bauer, who were antecedents of what was to be known as critical theory, the Neo-Hegelians. These group of men believed that in accordance with absolute idealism and also contrary to it (in classical dialectical fashion) that the realization of reason comes with the casting off anything which alienates man from himself, whether it be the worlds of religion or profane ideology. Reason can only be achieved through radical self-ownership. (Max) Stirner was the most radical of these postulates. He went beyond Feuerbach in the assertion that belief in God alienated man from himself, but ‘man’ to Stirner was another fiction believing that the self (and other selves) were the only legitimate subjects and things like allegiance to nation, state and church could be safely discarded if they didn’t serve the self first and foremost. Not just God was a target, but everything besides the self. and only the self. Which on its surface seems like radical Machiavellianism. But in reality, since Stirner’s thought led nowhere, it was Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin and Freud who were the original four horseman of atheism.

In the ensuing years following the controversy, empirical materialism basically won, with Charles Darwin and his cohorts dealing the final death blow. Anything that wasn’t provable by the scientific method was safely discarded. But unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, the 20th century had some interesting developments take place which started to criticize the very foundations of this “hard settled science”. It seems the history of philosophy follows a very Hegelian unfolding, which lends some credence to his theories. Following structuralism, a view that saw philosophy take a very Cartesian dualist framework, setting the social sciences back to the 17th century, in which all social phenomena can be explained by two equal but polar opposite halves, the post-structuralists attempted to undermine the assumption that all things were composed in say, “male/female” or “light/dark” or “upper/lower class” and declared it all to be an illusion. Reality, according to them, was not so simple and there was hidden power relations inherent in splitting society and the universe in neat categories. and categories, according its biggest acolyte Michel Foucault were an oppression in of itself, real liberation comes from dissolution of categorization altogether. So the old Humean framework comes back to the fore. Its no longer about rationality but the psychological drive towards sentiment and personal appetite. According to some, we may be in the works for a new Romantic era, and they very well could be right. Its also worth noting that while certain thinkers might assume society moves right to left, it could be also said that the left’s (the post-structuralists all mostly began as Marxists) insistence on inverting on the hard materialist stances of the old Left gave reactionaries a lot of philosophical and political ammunition. However, hidden behind this new vitalism is what were seeing in society now: an upsurge in religious converts lately, to what Oswald Spengler termed “the second religiousness”. According to him, this is the point where an empire or civilization is in its death throes. Its probably a bit of stretch to assume this, but what he called the west was essentially akin to Faust, a character in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s epic poem who makes a pact with Satan. This second religiousness could very well be our attempt to redeem ourselves after trying so hard to spit on the existence of God. I don’t think he’s going to forgive us this time.

J./Adolf Stalin