-

But the truth is that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and Justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergence that one man may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostaticks or astronomy, but his moral and prudential character immediately appears.

Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’ (Lives of the English Poets)

Bad, horrific even, as my temp jobs were, I found them preferable to the prolonged, infant-like dependency of the dole, and I silently vowed never to return to welfare; it’s just as well it was silent, i.e. I never actually made the vow, as I am once more reduced to the lowest of all states, dolescum, a 50-year-old who can’t do any real work.

It’s not as humiliating as I’d expected. For one thing, I’m still working, it’s just that I only average about 3-4 hours a week, and it’s minimum wage so brings in next to nothing. However, I can puff myself up and tell people, if I actually ever talked to people IRL, “I’m busy on Wednesday afternoon, I have to teach a class”. Another difference: where in 2001 I thought there should be many worthwhile, well-paid jobs I could do, I’ve now completely given up on society; I know that aside from “the trades” there are almost no truly worthwhile jobs, as our intellectual class has turned towards degeneracy & lunacy. Even in my last year in academia, finishing my Master’s, I knew I had small chance of surviving a PhD, let alone beyond; and in the 21st-Century there are no jobs for those of a fundamentally academic bent, those drawn to Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, towards disinterested fact, eternal verities. Had I two working hands and the slightest practical aptitude I would have retrained in the trades, I would now be clad in a fascist boiler suit and drive a dusty white van; as it happens I’m now a cripple, and in any case I was always maladroit at anything physical, as if marked for uselessness from birth.

Men especially need work. Women seem able to just lounge about chatting, they find this fulfilling, I suppose because one of their roles is to maintain social communications; men go a bit crazy without something more substantial, they find much of their identity in their work, in being useful. Well, men as they once were: I know many who feel absolutely no need to be useful, whose highest ideal is the life of an oriental despot, enormously fat, reclining on gilded couches, gobbling curry, playing vidya and occasionally attempting sex with a drugged concubine. Despite my Glass Bead Game inclinations, as regards work I am closer to an old school miner as per Richard Burton:

I want to be able to do something others find of value, and when I say “others” I mean any sane human being, not a shrieking blue-hair.

Alas there seems no way to channel my character, my inadequacies, my skills, into any remotely useful work, anything others would pay for. When I was finishing my BA in 2000 I underwent a lengthy test offered by the university’s career service, the idea was it would present me with scores of potential careers; after hundreds of questions it presented me with three possibilities: lawyer, zoo keeper, flower arranger.

I have not embarked on any of these paths.

The problem is, I am useless at maths, computers, anything too abstract, I am highly introverted, quite neurotic, have a weird face and weird manner, worship pagan deities, dislike cities, offices, office-people. And so when I graduated and applied for entry-level graduate jobs, where they just need someone to work the photocopier and answer the phone, I obviously didn’t fit; no amount of interview preparation, memorising standard answers, practicing a Normal Smile, etc. would do — I was obviously a freak. If you want an idea, imagine any Christopher Walken character trying to get through a normie job interview.

Had I the same qualifications in STEM, like my old friend The Viking (a fantastically indolent Chemist), my irregular personality would most likely have been no issue; for an English Lit graduate, no hope. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?

After 3 years of unemployment (2001-4), totaling about 300 rejections, I began minimum wage temping in 2004, and then endured four and a half years of horror, hence the title of my temp-memoir, 4.5 (I only later realised its similarity to the original title for an earlier memoir, by a sensitive young man of some repute). These jobs were largely awful; some were objectively okay but became monstrous torture due to a peculiar weakness of mine: I experience everything via emotion, and so can’t handle boring repetitive work; after about 90 minutes I was utterly drained, very often I entered a theta state, incapable of language or cognition, unable to even raise my hands to the keyboard; only fear could momentarily spur me to concentrate, for a few minutes. I can take boredom for a while but 7+ hours a day, 5 days a week for years is more than a mild inconvenience, I experience it more like a stress position, as almost unbearable agony. If this sounds grandiose & exaggerated, I can only suggest that my character is somehow naturally grandiose & exaggerated; if you and I were set before a tree we would not perceive the same tree: for you it would just be a thing, for me it would be a slowly-flaming angel, a waterfall, a keeper of time, an Ent. I do not experience the world as you do. Imagine four and a half years in an underground cell, in a stress position, and that was my life then.

The closest I’ve come to worthwhile work: teaching English, and editing. I edited one of my old university tutor’s books in 2007, and though the publisher hacked all the best parts out, resulting in an incoherent, almost unreadable mess, I enjoyed the wasted work. I was at the time working as a medical secretary (objectively the best of my shit jobs), depressed by the monotony & deadening routine, but every evening I spent hours editing; one morning I was at the fax machine and a Rehab Assistant noted I seemed unusually chipper, that I was even humming to myself; taken aback, I realised that I was no longer depressed but actually quite cheerful, and traced this back to my unpaid evening work. It was then I realised that I needed meaningful work, just to feel able to bear the world & its weight.

Likewise, I remember teaching in Munich sometime around 2015 feeling unusually good, unburdened by fear & misery; I analysed this bizarre situation and realised that I had enough work to cover the bills, but no Horror Classes, that for once every class on my schedule was somewhere between bearable and enjoyable. Usually, I had at least one class I dreaded, a class which would ruin the entire day, not because the students were thick but malignant, hostile, just looking for reasons to complain about me. It wasn’t the entire class, usually just one or two malcontents, but that was enough. There was a period of about a month where I had no Horror Classes, and it was bliss.

In my decade in Germany, teaching was somewhat of a mixed bag, but overall I could just about survive financially (by eschewing health insurance & pension) and psychologically. I began the slow burn-out after 18 months, as do most teachers; this is typically the point where you realise almost none of your students improve, that you can’t save money, that you’re at best treading water financially & spiritually, and you should either escape, kill yourself, or just accept an inexorable decline in spirits, in finances, in health, in all possibilities.

In Germany, most students were already about B1, the point where the brain says “I understand enough, I don’t need more”, and it’s almost impossible to make real progress. I occasionally taught A1/2 and found this tough but usually rewarding, as you can actually see or rather hear the improvement. Otherwise, it was a pointless job. I taught at a gas company alongside an American colleague, on the s-bahn back to Munich we discussed our classes:

me: They’re nice, supposedly level 8 but most are really 2 or 3. Karl-Heinz, Hermann -

American: Oh those guys, yeah I taught them last year, level 7, yeah they’re all really beginners. I’ve got a level 6 class, I’ve had them every year since they began at level 2.

me: And, uh, what’s their real level now?

American [laughs]: Level 2! Yeah, whatever level they begin at, that’s their level till the end.

We all knew this, that almost none of our students made the slightest improvement. It was no failing of ours, it’s simply that B1 is where “the plateau effect” begins, beyond which it’s virtually impossible to progress, and since most of our students began at B1, the most you could hope for was to iron out some typical Denglischisms. After a year of teaching the Present Perfect to the same students, over & over again, not a word of it sinking in, teachers lose their zeal, they accept the job is akin to digging a hole in the morning and filling it in in the afternoon. Like most teachers I gave up on trying to teach grammar and focussed on getting the students to speak, & correcting their worst mistakes; at least that way they improved in fluency.

I then taught a year in Italy and it was almost wholly Hell & Horror due to the Italian habit of complaining about everything, and their expectation that the teacher stands at the whiteboard talking at them the whole time: the complete obverse of modern language teaching methodology and what Germans expected. When I realised that Italians think that speaking English is a waste of time, that the students should instead sit there in silence, open-mouthed in awe as the teacher talks through the book at them, I adapted my style as best I could. That year half-destroyed me, I came out of it with a lifelong hatred of Italians and of language schools.

I now just chat with my students, correcting their mistakes. If they are willing to talk, great, I sit in silence and occasionally interject with a correction; if they won’t talk then I talk, at least that way they improve their listening comprehension. There’s absolutely no point even trying to teach grammar. I try not to too audibly sigh as I correct a 40-something German for the millionth time, as he says something retarded like “my woman don’t likes that I too many beer am drinking by evening”, or I laboriously explain that Meinung doesn’t mean meaning, that bekommen doesn’t mean to become, for the millionth time, knowing he will of course make the same mistake next week, because this job is totally pointless.

So anyway, that’s my work history, an absurd catalogue of failure & disaster. It is hard to accept that I was thrust into this world with absolutely nothing I could offer, nothing of value, that I can’t do sigma 6 backend cloudbased support Sales Manager 10 years’ experience managing international teams agile business analyst network administrator squalid Gregg’s pastry smeared into the pavement, but what indeed could a man such as myself ever do? After long contemplation, I think I would make an excellent deranged hermit, living somewhere in the woods, perhaps in a cave, clad in twigs and bits of bark, emerging to utter horrifying prophecies and fascist exhortations, perhaps some literary analysis, a spot of remedial grammar, I would be a hermit for all occasions, a hermit of note.

-

Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Even before I had any real political opinions I held Tolkien in high esteem, most likely because my character was already broadly Right-wing (preference for old buildings, the countryside, lack of trust in human nature). By contrast, I watched but didn’t particularly care for Star Trek, as I had no interest in technology or the future. A sword is obviously better than zhoop zhoop phasers that don’t even look like weapons, stalking through graveyards dressed like a Black Metal guitarist

is obviously better than creeping about schools in Star Trek paedogarb, and so on. The future is gay. Now about 40 years since I read The Hobbit, it’s interesting to see that Tolkien is popular among the Right, and Star Trek among the Left and paedophiles: we on the Right tend to envisage the past as the Shire, a kind of jolly ale-quaffing paradise of rolling hills & muttonchop-whiskered farmers; photos I took from near my hometown in 2015:

while for Leftists everything before their birth was as dark as a Ridley Scott film: a miserable existence, with mud-encrusted peasants oppressed & routinely slaughtered by snickering priests and syphilitic nobles. For the Leftist, all the old moral values were just a means of controlling the rabble: every marriage was unhappy, every Christian a hypocrite, and the more people talked of decency, virtue, goodness, the worse they actually were.

It’s true that Victorian London or Vienna were two-faced cities, on the surface all strict decorum & Christian virtue, perversely complemented with what tourist guides might call a thriving underground scene (of prostitution). The Leftist would argue that all our pasts were such — that no one was ever truly moral, because all morality was just a ruse to gull the proles. Joyce’s Dubliners stories would thus be taken as wholly representative accounts of life in a religious society: tales of squalid lust, stinking hypocrisy, all the vice & Irish depravity you could want.

Leftists are peculiarly reluctant to credit tales of non-Communist virtue, I think because they themselves are inveterate hypocrites & liars; many of us regular human beings have had the experience of chatting with Leftists, zir is burbling happily away about fairness and kindness and peace and love and tolerance and respect and humanity, then suddenly reveals a savage glee in Ann Widdecombe’s murder, or priests being tortured to death in the Spanish Civil War; or zir says we have to house infinity Bomalians, at first because they are poor stray puppies fleeing persecution and then So what if they rape and murder us, we deserve it for colonialism, the whole white race should be raped and murdered, that’s why we need open borders, to end the white race, which doesn’t even exist, by the way, diversity is our strength, I love a good curry and kebab, even better if a working class white girl was fed into the meat grinder and I’m now eating chunks of her flesh, I love a good balti, me. No wonder that Leftists assume any tale of virtue is a lie, for their whole identity is founded on lies and hypocrisy.

If the people of the lie are to be trounced & pelted with rotting turnips as they merit, if we are to avoid or even slow our terminal decline, we must restore much that was lost. Fortunately, a lot survives in living memory. I could imagine, for example, the bloated universities being reduced to their 1960s numbers, and the curricula and methodology restored from memory by elderly dons (in tweed); or retired coppers being brought back to restore the police force. But we also need to have some faith in the idea of the past — that people were genuinely more moral, that it wasn’t all just a wicked Capitalist lie.

Just from this life, my own sense is that people were generally better in the 80s and 90s than today. I say generally because there are things I definitely don’t miss, e.g. casual street violence; this seems now the work of our recent vibrant arrivals, where in the 80s it was more a habit of the white working class (and even so, I’d take 1986 England in a heartbeat over 2026 Yookay). Regardless, in the 80s and even 90s there was more of a sense that morality was real, that there was a standard above mercantile self-interest. Up until the late 90s most people seemed to have some residual belief in the Christian God; it might only come out in moments of crisis, but we grew up in a still somewhat religious atmosphere, and perhaps as young people today vaguely believe in climate change, so we half-believed in the Christian God, and Christian morality. I say this as a polytheist, a “neo-pagan” who is sympathetic to Christianity.

If there is to be a real standard, most people will be inadequate; but that does not invalidate the standard, it merely highlights human frailty. The dissident Right is full of childless men calling for white fertility & stable families, decrying degeneracy, etc. I won’t go into details, except to say that if you uphold a high standard you will probably fall short; and there are some, e.g. The Golden One, who seem to live that which they preach.

We should see societal morality as a spectrum, ranging from the minor & almost inevitable falling-short, to rampant & despicable hypocrisy. When I lived in an old Benedictine monastery, I was kind of relieved to find the monks human, all-too human: at least two were clearly veteran drinkers (I used to exchange knowing glances with one, when we were both in our cups), most were obviously homosexual, and the usual human pettiness abounded. This need not invalidate their religion or way of life, it merely provided a very human context.

Our reality will bear no absolute impress; we should not expect absolute compliance, for we are not robots. As an anonymous Zen master said, Smack the Robot, if you meet it on the road. The point of the moral standard is to drag things in a better direction; that e.g. a man will be less likely to steal or whore about, more likely to tell the truth. He will not be perfect, he will often fall from the standard, but he will be better, even if only a little. On the individual level this may seem very minor; but on a societal level such mass-distributed, tiny nudges can yield large effects. There is a huge difference between a society where e.g. putting small boys in drag is not merely acceptable but lauded, and a society where any degeneracy was rigorously excluded from the public sphere. What is public is normative, it is taken as the standard. In our society, the norm is a step away from open paedophilia.

We should not therefore be too quick to suppose our ancestors were pusillanimous and self-interested, or that tales of virtue are mere fables, or that people have always been the same. A moral order may seem absurd, it may rankle, it may birth vast hypocrisies, but it may simultaneously keep an entire society from the abyss.

Is Artistry actually just a delusional daydream? All my musical effort was a mere waste of time? There are no treasures to be discovered in life? No mystery to muse upon? I just had to live for the advent of AI to have it all handed to me on a silver platter? It’s all just haphazard contingency? Can I smack the Robot now?

If you could become the world’s “greatest musician” by means of AI, you would just be the world’s greatest swindler: it’s not a title worth winning - not anymore. If you made the rules of the game so easy that anyone could win, who would play other than losers?

Sean’s Substack

Several times, I have tried to calm Riggs by pointing to his calm mother, and saying, “Look you little psycho, your mother is fine, why are you so scared?” To no avail. Whereas most human beings would think Well if my mother is okay with him, and nothing bad is happening to her, I guess it’s okay, the cats seem incapable of transmitting useful information to each other. And just try pointing at an item of interest, e.g. food: where a dog would immediately follow your finger to the indicated object, cats will just stare at you.

I was reminded of this recently, recalling a story my mother told me about 30 years ago: she and my stepfather were on the Pennine Way, he crossed a makeshift bridge and warned her it was rickety, in her words “I thought Well it looks okay to me!” and then sure enough she confidently stepped on it and was sent plummeting into a muddy ditch while my stepfather looked on, no doubt chuckling at female nature. I would guess my mother’s IQ is about 70-80, maybe lower; it’s difficult to be sure as her low cognitive capacity is paired with almost total lack of interest in others, and a pronounced disinclination to endure hardship or discipline, so she has always shied away from learning anything — for all I know she’s a genius who just happens to be too lazy and self-obsessed to ever think, a kind of Mycroft Holmes.

I wondered if higher intelligence correlates with an ability to learn from others. Obviously, complex information would require higher intelligence but perhaps even simple concepts, e.g. “this bridge isn’t stable” require higher intelligence. It’s not that my mother couldn’t understand the concept, it’s rather that she is largely incapable of receiving information of any sort. There may be a minimum cognitive level, below which people simply can’t learn from others, but rather have to experience everything themselves.

Human civilisation requires advanced knowledge transmission; otherwise the wheel would need to be invented from scratch every few years and we would all be living as were Africans when Europeans arrived on the so-called dark continent. Who knows, perhaps many supposedly European inventions had also appeared in Africa, it’s just that instead of rapidly spreading throughout the continent these innovations were limited to the inventor & his immediate family, and when he died everyone just shrugged and went back to smashing rocks together.

When average intelligence exceeds the transmissibility threshold, lore and technology can accumulate. There would be evolutionary advantage to not merely intelligence but the capacity to learn from others: under Darwinian conditions, people like my mother would be more likely to die out, from stepping on one too many unstable bridges, or eating the wrong berries; and those with the bare minimum intelligence and personality type would benefit from the innovations & experiences of others. My guess is, it’s a combination of intelligence and personality type, though there is probably a correlation between higher intelligence and the most adaptive personality type.

It should be possible to test this hypothesis, e.g. give test subjects a task and have one subject indicate a better technique; it could also be done with animals, since I presume there are methods to evaluate animal intelligence.

There are two ways to receive information: rational calculation, and instinct. The former requires what I shall term “cold intelligence”, the latter “lukewarm intelligence”, i.e. more of a sense for the social context, it would be more about who guarantees this information. I can imagine an Isaac Newton or Wittgenstein as exemplars of cold intelligence. For lukewarm intelligence: that Science Guy on tv said that eating glue is good, and then Timothy Chalamet was seen eating glue, so eating glue must be good!

Most knowledge-transmission is via social cues, and so requires lukewarm intelligence: one must as it were “read the room”, pick up the prevailing trend of public opinion and follow suit without bothering to evaluate, to sift & sort the data. If cold intelligence is essentially autistic, lukewarm intelligence is the opposite, and since autism is (per diagnosis) 80% male, 20% female, I suggest this heuristic: men are more prone to cold & objective analysis, women to pick up on social cues & go with the prevailing trends. So if Zendaya drinks a cup of sulphuric acid every morning, and some guy in a lab coat says sulphuric acid is full of nutrients, most women will rush to Amazon to purchase their very own sulphuric acid; where men will be more likely to pedantically dissect the data and form their own conclusions. Obviously, most human beings are highly conformist, so probably the vast majority of both sexes would be consuming sulphuric acid; but probably more women than men.

Those of lower intelligence would be largely impervious to received opinion, and so wouldn’t be drinking the acid. In times where societal authority is of value, the less intelligent would lag behind, they would be mud-encrusted peasants; in a wicked and corrupt age such as ours, they would be shielded from the worst of things, relying instead on centuries of tradition.

As for those doomed to higher intelligence in a wicked age, prospects are bleak: those who escape the propaganda tend to exceed a certain intelligence threshold, and to have autistic personality traits. They are filtered out of managerial roles, too autistic to pick up on social cues, too likely to focus on the truth. At best, they will be relegated to roles of very minor import; at worst they end up as janitors or homeless. Those a corrupt society holds up as “intelligent” will be the compliant, some for sure may be highly intelligent — but also highly feminine, highly compliant. Most will be midwits: glib, superficial, desperate for social status & approval, apple polishers of the first water.

In our age, it comes as no surprise that the more intelligent, especially women, are very silly. We are, after all, living in wicked and silly times.

-

The soul is only forged under the pressure of innumerable atmospheres of dreams.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Every Fantasy writer I’ve read is either copying Tolkien’s tropes, or reacting against them. There’s also an undeniable qualitative gap, e.g. it seems ridiculous to even try and compare Tolkien and George RR Martin — I read the first of the Game of Thrones novels, enjoyed almost nothing, began the second 900-page ordeal, and round about page 300 realised I hadn’t enjoyed a single page, and gave up.

So what exactly is the difference between Tolkien and the rest? Firstly, there’s the sheer depth of backstory: Tolkien began inventing elvish languages as a teenager, then wrote what would become The Silmarillion in his 20s, a good two decades before The Hobbit.

Later writers do not invent; they merely borrow: I remember reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books in my 20s, and noting that the names were either meaningless or outright purloined from Celtic mythology (e.g. the aes sedai); and that much had been taken from Dune. This is common in the genre.

Secondly, as I said above Tolkien was one of the first Fantasy writers, and so he had virtually no models, he had to rely on his own genius & learning, rather than just copying other writers. There is a kind of dizzying freedom in certain moments of literary history — I think of Shakespeare in the late 16th Century, Milton a little later, TS Eliot after the war — where a writer creates or exploits a largely untouched creative seam.

Tolkien was drawing on his deep knowledge of European myth, from Beowulf to Icelandic sagas; later writers drew largely from…Tolkien.

Most Fantasy is of course crap, but here are some exceptions:

Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), or rather the first of her Earthsea novels (A Wizard of Earthsea), the rest tend to an arid & dispiriting Feminism. Le Guin manages to avoid elves/dwarves/orcs, dark lords, magic swords, and crafts more of a psychological thriller about initiation, knowledge, self-mastery, with beautiful prose.

David Gemmell (1948-2006): One of my favourites, as he is avowedly just a writer of exciting masculine tales, with no pretensions to literary merit or depth, yet his prose is pleasingly taut, his characters well-drawn, and profundity does indeed manifest. My favourites: the Waylander trilogy; the Jon Shannow trilogy; the Stones of Power series. Very little influence from Tolkien!

Katharine Kerr (1944-): Her Deverry series, set in a kind of Dark Age Europe, uses reincarnation as a plot device. She takes elves and dwarves from Tolkien but otherwise seems free of his influence. Incidentally, her presentation of reincarnation is quite accurate, with the larger personal themes and the curious little motifs which occur across lives.

Susan Cooper (1935-): The Dark is Rising Sequence is very much its own thing, I would say it owes nothing to Tolkien, it begins as something like a children’s adventure and then takes on mythic depth. Very powerful.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (1948-/1955-): This duo are the only good writers I came across from the Dungeons & Dragons milieu; their books are largely developed from D & D campaigns and so often bear the impress of the gaming mechanics. Their Dragonlance and Twins books arise from D & D but take on a life of their own, largely through the character of Raistlin, a pleasingly twisted magician who is the stand-in for every gamma-male reader (such as I was, though to be generous perhaps I was more of an omega).

Stephen Donaldson (1947-): A genuinely disturbing talent, I came across the first of his 6-volume Thomas Covenant series when I was maybe 14 or 15, and threw it down in disgust, only reluctantly taking it back up because there was absolutely nothing else to read, nothing on TV, and all my computer games were crap. The first volume, the unfortunately-titled Lord Foul’s Bane, is by far the weakest, though it interestingly recasts Tolkienian themes into a Dostoevskian drama: the protagonist, in our world, is a leper; drawn into a Fantasy world (Narnia-style) he thinks he has gone insane & refuses to believe any of it is real. The second book, The Illearth War, is for me one of the best Fantasy novels I’ve read, and indeed the original 6 books are all somewhere between good and superb. He then wrote another quartet, many years later; I read the first with absolutely no enjoyment and decided to skip the rest so as not to spoil my memories.

Good as these all are, Tolkien seems of a different calibre altogether. It is not merely his originality, the depth of backstory; over the years, I’ve increasingly found something prophetic in his works, on both a cultural/political level, and in my personal life. For example, a Jew-obsessed friend, or rather ex-friend, reminded me strongly of Denethor, with his pride, his mental rigidity, his spiritual despair, the sense of a mind wrecked by monomania & hatred. Just as Denethor turns on Gandalf and even his own son, so he turned his bile on me, accusing me of "loving the Jews” and snarling “maybe your island should be sunk” merely because I don’t spent every waking second raging against the Jews. The palantir did not lie to Denethor: it merely presented things in a certain light, and his haughty vain spirit then worked its own destruction.

Another example: I lent my LotR to Bob the Coward, an apple polisher I knew at university; in the ‘Council of Elrond’ I had annotated “idiot” next to Boromir’s dismissal of the hobbits; Bob then wrote a letter to me, angrily explaining how Boromir as a skilled administrator & leader of men is no idiot but rather a canny, prudent political operator. After graduation, Bob embarked on a career in “Communications” and even ran for political office. Naturally, he would take Boromir as a role model, though he probably disapproved of his physicality & courage.

On the larger scale, ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ chapter seems uncannily prescient today, with the gentle Shire under the thumb of a tyrannical bureaucracy, enforced by an alien race. There are many occasions where I find myself likening our struggle to passages in the legendarium, and indeed my self-initiation into Germanic paganism came after reading of Turin: I dozed and had a hypnagogic vision of a land ruled by racial enemies and orcs, and of Wotan stalking & slaying these vermin.

Or this passage, which seems eerily prescient as our rulers fantasise about the eradication of the white race, a glorious multiracial world ruled over by an unaccountable “elite”; Gandalf confronted by Saruman:

“For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!’’

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘ ‘‘I liked white better,’’ I said.

‘ ‘‘White!’’ he sneered. ‘‘It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.’’

‘ ‘‘In which case it is no longer white,’’ said I.

Well, there it is. The elite class whereto Bob the Coward aspired would find little strange in Saruman’s worldview & ambition:

‘He drew himself up then and began to declaim, as if he were making a speech long rehearsed. ‘‘The Elder Days are gone. The Middle Days are passing. The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.

A little light editing and this would pass in Davos.

On the subject of The Smiths, here’s my current favourite Morrissey, note the angelic vocals as he sings “You need a good straight smack in the head”, if that doesn’t cheer you up nothing will.

-

The demands of honour increase with the rank of the obligations and soon seem extravagant to plebeian souls.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

This second edition has sold quite well, 13 copies, most of those last December. I was especially pleased to discover some positive & intelligent reviews on Lulu. The platform doesn’t notify creators of new reviews so they came as a very pleasant surprise, 4 months late.

The 2008 edition was also read & reviewed — I agreed with all the reviews, that the book was quite good but patchy, a typically flawed first novel. The 2025 reviews are very different: unambiguously favourable for one thing, but they all also surprised me, I felt that each reviewer was reading a slightly different novel. For example, Laeth describes the university scenes as “dystopian”, quite the opposite of my intention; he also hated the Viking character, who for me is in some ways the true protagonist, God’s holy fool. Speaking of the real-life Viking, although he hasn’t read it and never will, because he’s too ADHD to read books, his wife has and found it amusing; as he messaged me:

Mrs Viking extends her thanks regarding the Better Maker

She got to the scene where the Wrath of the Lamb descends upon the English Dept. and was paralysed with laughter, she said she hadn’t laughed as hard in a year,

This pleased me immensely; there’s something both bizarre & apt about the Viking’s real-life wife reading this novel, and of course she would have to be amused by his fictive antics, or she couldn’t possibly tolerate the real thing at close quarters.

Even where I totally agreed with the new reviews, they somehow still surprised me. Comparing the 2008 and 2025 reviews, it’s as if the first were of a flattened, inert object; and the 2025 reviews are of an uncontainably dynamic & mysterious event.

Grandiose perhaps; however, I hasten to add: I don’t think it’s a great novel: it’s not The Brothers Karamazov or The Portrait of a Lady or Lord Jim; but I think it is a good novel, i.e. head & shoulders above most of the crap lauded by regime media. Over the last 30-odd years I have read dozens of new novels which were very well-reviewed, lauded, bespattered with cum even, and mine is simply better.

Being a good novel, it has a roundness to it.

This is one of the differences between a real work of art and a formulaic production: the former has a weird, incalculable energy; the latter is always drably what was intended, what you would expect. Even a merely-good work, such as mine, is unpredictable, irreducible to formula, and hence unmarketable and unpublishable, and will most likely never have more than 20 or 30 readers.

It occurred to me recently, that one way to think of god is not as Buddy Christ or the choleric Nobodaddy, or even as a good father, but as a creator. It would make sense of His whimsical, even volatile temperament. After all, far from being a warrior protector, a kind of Jesus-with-spear, Odin is known as Bǫlverkr (evil-doer), infamous for betraying his warrior followers in order to harvest souls for Valhalla. Artists of all stripes are notably prone to mental illness and personality disorders, and so why should god the creator be otherwise? Our strange and perilous world makes more sense when you suppose a tormented genius working with recalcitrant and perhaps even evil materials; as Will Tell wrote:

Tolkien repeatedly hints that the “nameless things” beneath the world are older than the organized architecture of evil represented by Sauron or Morgoth. In that sense, one could argue that Tolkien unintentionally approaches a metaphysical idea found in certain mystical and theological traditions: that the Deadly Sins are not merely human moral failings, but primordial principles or monstrous archetypes latent within creation before history itself.

Just as we lesser creators cannot simply conjure art out of thin air, but must struggle with our means, so too perhaps for god — presupposing a god who is not omnipotent, who didn’t create ex nihilo; or if the latter then the nihil is a contrary power, and there is necessary violence in creation, a rupturing and rending and reworking.

I think that god would also be most pleased when his works take on the roundedness whereof I wrote, as it were the statue coming to life and having a will and a fate of its own; so Aulë, having illicitly created the dwarves, offers to destroy them as recompense:

Then Aulë took up a great hammer to smite the Dwarves; and he wept. But Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility; and the Dwarves shrank from the hammer and were afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to Aulë: 'Thy offer I accepted even as it was made. Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices? Else they would not have flinched from thy blow, nor from any command of thy will.'

This is a feeling I often had while labouring on The Better Maker: I thought of just deleting it and (as my friend Bonehead advised) turning my mind to other projects, but the malformed, awkward thing seemed to flinch from the blow, to have its own as yet unrealised will & fate. Its future self called to me, as it were assuring me, Keep working, draw me closer to my future being.

Perhaps we appeal to our creator likewise, as wretched broken things which can yet be remade. Envisioning god as creator, just as I was pleased by these reviews — for most of my writing has sunk without trace — so god would like us to appreciate his work, to respond, to communicate, to be subcreators in our lust.

If the creation does not exceed the creator’s vision, of what use is it? If it is always and exactly what was envisioned & intended, the physical corresponding point to point to the imagined, why create at all, why not merely imagine? The creation must have the capacity to rebel; if not, what is the universe but an array of perfect mannequins performing their perfect, predictable dance?

When he got to Cochran’s room which was attached to the sheep shed, Cochran was fully dressed and packed and sat as if in a trance on the edge of his bed. Mauro sat down in a chair and folded his hands in thought; he realized the gravity of the man’s mission, and wished to go along and protect him as his new friend seemed to be too much of a dreamer to deal with the hard facts of killing. Then the door began to open and Cochran was up in a flash with the gift knife extended but it was only Mauro’s mother bringing them coffee and pan dulce. Cochran apologized at his welcome saying that he didn’t recognize her footsteps which made Mauro happy—a man who memorized footsteps can’t be that much of a dreamer.

Jim Harrison, Revenge

A quite enjoyable film, occasionally powerful & odd. Plot: Michael Sanders, a supposed American, ex-military, is in an unspecified European country taking care of his late father’s real estate empire, and inexplicably ends up moonlighting as a vigilante, largely specialising in Muslim migrant criminals.

The flaws: the film seems to have been written with only the vaguest sense of how the world works, so you have mainstream media sympathetically covering an anti-migrant vigilante, when in reality they present any white as suspect & indeed vile just for existing, any non-white as an innocent refugee in need of endless love; an Interpol chief, who has appeared on TV, personally surveilling Sanders in a bar from just a few meters away; SWAT teams who seem suicidally ill-prepared and are then slaughtered by Sanders with seemingly no consequences. But then, you don’t watch this kind of film expecting Michael Mann levels of realism.

You watch this kind of film to see violence, violence enacted by a 6’5” beast, a beast called HAMMER.

This HAMMER is also allegedly a cannibal rapist.

The film owes a great deal to Armie Hammer’s performance; the cannibal rapist thing might even lend a slight unsettling edge to his enigmatic character. And Michael Sanders is a strange strange figure: supposedly American but he’s unlike any American I’ve ever met: he is reticent, dour, blunt, aloof; he comes across more as some kind of old world aristocrat than a modern man. He doesn’t even come across as human, exactly. He’s more like an embodied principle of justice left to its own devices, or a robot gone a little haywire. He is animated, driven, by a need for justice, for things to be done right, for the system to run correctly, for tenants to pay their rent, for apartments to be well-maintained, for criminals to be punished, but all as if from a slightly non-human standpoint. There is some overlap between his concept of justice and ours, but then he goes and causes a car crash, killing a total stranger, just to make a rhetorical point.

As he explains, “Human beings are such sheep. Even when you push them to the limit, they will obey the law, even if their own lives are in danger.” So, for all Sanders is a stickler for doing things the right way, he ultimately disregards or even despises our legal system. Or the “human” legal system…there could be two reasons Sanders says “human beings” rather than “people”: the first is that he feels so alienated from his fellow man that he no longer feels particularly human; the second is that he isn’t actually human.

The film plays with this ambiguity. There is a Kafka-esque strangeness; a supernatural parable is superimposed on a straightforward, rather clumsy vigilante story, however this mythic shading never quite resolves into straightforward allegory. Sanders is haloed with religious suggestion, but is also just a rich American looking after his real estate. I was reminded of Othello: Iago increasingly seems diabolical, Satanic, without ever resolving into a simple “oh, he really is the devil” as in crap like Devil’s Advocate. Sanders has something weird about him, this sense of an extra-human element, but Boll maintains a soft focus, contenting himself with odd little details.

Sanders was estranged from his late father, and has now taken over his empire. So his father was essentially a landlord, which invites one to ask, Was he an “absentee landlord”, to use the phrase popularised in Devil’s Advocate? From The Christian Science Monitor:

A common view of God is that He is something like an absentee landlord. Although He is supposed to have set the universe in motion, He pretty much stays out of the picture. Yes, occasionally He has made spectacular appearances, but that was mostly long ago in Bible times.

Today, according to this view, if a poor mortal pleads hard enough, God just might intervene and, so to speak, fix the plumbing or get the roof repaired. But then again, He might not, and if He doesn’t, this is supposedly evidence of His inscrutable wisdom. In any event, man is thought to be pretty much on his own.

In this reading, Boll presents a world where God has died or otherwise departed, and one of His supernatural creatures, perhaps some kind of angel, has taken up aspects of the role. Given Sanders’ humourless, merciless approach I was put in mind of the sephira of Gevurah, representing Justice or Severity. Certainly, when he visits rape victims he seems totally devoid of compassion; he isn’t there because he feels sorry for them, but because an injustice has come to his attention, and as he puts it: “The universe demands balance.” He seems to need their permission to act, as if he is bound by his own laws, much as a robot might only be able to act under certain conditions.

There is something oddly legalistic and quibbling, almost Talmudic, about Sanders. While he has contempt for our legal system, he is not lawless: much like Kafka’s characters he seems to answer to another, inscrutable system of law. When he takes the hand of Elsa, one of the rape victims, it’s not in sympathy — it’s a handshake, as if she has just signed a contract.

What kind of being was his father, in this reading? His office is full of stag antlers and hunting scenes; Sanders says, “Never went hunting with my dad”. I have the impression of certain aspects of the Old Testament god, mixed with pagan deities like Herne the Hunter or Cernunnos or even Odin as leader of the Wild Hunt. The religious echoes about Sanders never fully resolve; he seems to inhabit some Jungian zone of raw, mythic suggestion. When he comes across the trio of bus fare-dodgers, tormenting another boy & stealing his phone, he stomps the two males (the female simply disappears), specifically their hands & wrists; I was inevitably reminded of stigmata, of Christ’s nail wounds; and then the scene ends with this shot, the two criminals left groaning by the shadow of a tree, crossed by a park bench:

Perhaps Boll intended the two thieves crucified alongside Christ. In any case, I doubt the imagery, coming right after a close-up of their bloodied wrists, is accidental.

Whatever Sanders is, he isn’t like us. I suspect, when he says, “I’m an American, I’m just here on an extended vacation”, he means “I’m from a far-away place”, that were he operating in America he would say, “I’m European”. Perhaps he is Saint Michael gone off the rails, perhaps he is Satan, perhaps he is some unnamed, unknown force of cosmic justice, whose maker was a hunter. His slightly autistic, almost robotic manner put me in mind of a specifically Jewish legend — the Golem. Tellingly, in the brothel scene we see he has a huge aleph tattoo; in folklore, Rupert Lowe, sorry, uh, Rabbi Loew, created the golem from clay then carved three letters into its body: aleph, mem, and tav, spelling emet (Truth), thus bringing the creature to life; and when the time came to decommission the golem he erased the aleph, and its life ceased. In the film, Sanders’ aleph tattoo is huge, unmistakeable: I think Boll is suggesting the protagonist’s nature: that he is so autistic & odd because he is not a living being like you or I, but a thing created for a specific purpose, animated by an aleph, and now left to his own devices. Whatever law he obeys, whatever concept of justice he fulfills, it is not exactly ours; it overlaps with ours but then Sanders has no qualms about causing a fatal car crash just, well, just because; he isn’t human, his justice isn’t really ours, but since we have no justice at all, we welcome his.

-

All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political dimension. The others, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phantom attempts, to simulated murders. But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

As best I can judge, it’s a problem with old drivers — I tried to update them, just got error messages, the crashes continue apace. I was just now editing my latest play (a supernatural horror comedy) when the machine crashed; upon restarting it turned out I’d lost all my changes, very frustrating, I gnash my teeth, I hiss, I beseech the gods, I clench my remaining fist, I contemplate buying a cheap refurbished laptop, I contemplate my bank account, I weep, I weep, I weep.

I was thinking of getting one of these:

I want something that comes pre-installed with Linux, after I destroyed my last laptop, and given my terrible history with computers I would hesitate to buy a full £1000+ rig, even if I had the money. The above options look affordable, but of course I am totally focken broke, even more than usual.

Until last month, I had four sources of income: money from my father; disability money for my hand; my so-called job (teaching English online); lastly, 3 of my readers generously donate of their munificence. My father’s bank just froze his account (to do with possible fraud & him being a compulsive shopper & half-senile) so I’m now able to pay my huge credit card interest, my mobile phone contract, Zoom Professional, cat health insurance, and…that’s it. Nothing left for food, or booze. I was surviving on money my mother gave me for Christmas and my birthday, alas that’s now almost wholly exhausted. I’ve tried getting more teaching work but it’s been drying up for the last few years, and the platform I use has demoted me to the point any prospective student would have to spend hours scrolling through teachers to find me. This week I have four hours of work - that comes to about £40 in total.

So you can see why I can’t afford a new laptop.

This blog only has 84 subscribers, and my posts average about 40 views, so I’m not too optimistic. However, if any of you happen to have stacks of money lying about, suitcases full of heroin in the bath, stolen artworks piled up in the hallway, you stumble over heaps of gold and diamonds and Lugers, it’s really becoming a nuisance, you keep telling yourself, “I should declutter, I should give some of this away, find a good cause, some worthy fascist with a heart of gold, a one-handed man of no means, a man despised & rejected of the algorithm, a man of tech-sorrow, acquainted with debt” then here’s the link.

If I can get about £150-200 I’ll aim to get one of the above models, obviously in the unlikely event of getting more I’ll see if there are better options, or maybe just go for a cheapo and use the remaining money for food etc.

Times are hard!

Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,
Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips

True, it is rather grotesque, overwrought. In its fullness:

A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,
And all unlooked-for from your Highness’ mouth.
A dearer merit, not so deep a maim
As to be cast forth in the common air,
Have I deservèd at your Highness’ hands.
The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo;
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,
Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips,
And dull unfeeling barren ignorance
Is made my jailor to attend on me.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native
breath?

The context: Henry Bolingbroke accused Mowbray of treason and murder:

Further I say, and further will maintain
Upon his bad life to make all this good,
That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death,
Suggest his soon-believing adversaries,
And consequently, like a traitor coward,
Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of
blood,
Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth
To me for justice and rough chastisement.

they were about to duel then the king interrupted the proceedings and banished both men from England.

Richard II is an especially politically-charged work, with a very Machiavellian understanding of power, in all its sinister mendacity; appropriately, the play is said to have been performed for the Earl of Essex prior to his attempted coup against Elizabeth I.

Mowbray, it seems, was King Richard’s assassin, or at least arranged the needful, and was tasked to take out the Duke of Gloucester, Richard’s uncle. Thus, as Mowbray prepares to duel Bolingbroke, Richard might well be apprehensive: that whether due to divine justice or martial skill Bolingbroke will triumph, thus condemning not merely Mowbray but implicating Richard himself. What if Mowbray is wounded and in a sudden fit of contrition publicly confesses all? What if he dies and, since everyone at least suspects the King, this is taken as confirmation from God, that he did indeed have Gloucester killed?

Mowbray knows why he is being banished: he is being silenced. He complains he will henceforth have to live among foreigners, to speak a foreign tongue; but he is also, in the simile Wittgenstein so disliked, saying, You have silenced me, lest I implicate you.

Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,
Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips

I think the simile is purposefully grotesque, simply bad as Wittgenstein thought, because Mowbray is drawing attention to his new status: as a man silenced; later, it is revealed that he dies in exile, no doubt to Richard’s relief, much as a mob boss would be relieved to hear one of his henchmen, under federal investigation, had fallen in front of a bus. Mowbray is making a deliberately bad simile, not merely to antagonise Wittgenstein, but to draw attention to his lot, to say, “I am now a prisoner, because of what I could say.”

So Wittgenstein was right to object, but was missing the point.

Thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramses to ensure his extermination by museumification. Because mummies don’t rot from worms: they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums, our order, which no longer masters anything, which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science. Irreparable violence toward all secrets, the violence of a civilization without secrets, hatred of a whole civilization for its own foundation.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

As a result, I feel like a man out of time in the age of microaggressions. In Italy in 2019 I even fell foul of a BPD “poetess” colleague because I wasn’t offended by the usual words, and hadn’t reported another teacher for using the dreaded N-word: she actually tried to get me fired just for this, for not caring. Her poems were shit, by the way.

Back in my teaching days in Munich, I worked with a black American who was, amusingly, a literal pimp: he was a charming, muscular New Yorker who was said to somehow receive income from his US hoes. We got on quite well, e.g. one day I was wearing new blue suede boots and they had worn my heel so badly my socks were sodden with blood, it was rather painful but just something to endure; the pimp entered the teacher room and said, “Yo Walt, how you doing?” and I, grimacing at my feet, said with macabre relish, “My boots are full of blood.” He laughed heartily. Months after the pimp left, an elderly black American teacher told me the pimp had said I was the only genuine teacher there, that all the others (wiggers and AWFLs) were insincere but I just said whatever I thought. I was reminded of Thomas777 remarking that he gets on fine with hood blacks, he just carries himself as a white man and they respect that.

And so on to the Henry Nowak murder. The whole thing is grotesque; however, I was particularly disgusted at the Sikhs muttering indignantly about racism as Nowak was dying on the cold December ground, handcuffed for maximum discomfort & humiliation; at the trial the Sikhs also wailed accusations of racism at the judge and the Nowak family. As best I can determine, from Millennial Woes’ detailed account, Nowak had merely jested “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on”, and then Digwa stabbed him 5 times.

When the police arrived, the whole Sikh family immediately accused the clearly injured Nowak of racism, and the mother had apparently already taken the murder weapon home to clean off any DNA evidence. The whole thing has a strangely rehearsed quality: I’m pretty sure that if I stabbed someone and called my family they would firstly demand to know what the fuck was wrong with me, and then advise me to turn myself into the police and hope for a lenient sentence. I get the feeling the mother had done this before, though most likely this was the first time the victim died.

There’s something disgusting about the subterfuge and especially the orchestrated mumblings of “he raciss he hate brown man he raciss he raciss”. I’m reminded of a Varg Vikernes anecdote from his 15-year stretch for killing Euronymous, dialogue with an Arab prisoner:

Arab: Why you here?

Varg: I killed a man.

Arab: You use gun?

Varg: No, a knife.

Arab [face lighting up]: Very good! Very good!

That is the way: if you kill, just admit it. My old schoolmate Bonehead (aka Knucklehead) told me his class were so unruly & psychopathic that they developed a form of group sacrifice; whenever one of the class had e.g. set fire to the curtains or thrown a table out of a sixth-floor window, and the teacher demanded the culprit, someone would spontaneously blame an innocent pupil, who would then take on the group’s guilt, stand and hold his wrists out, and say sadly, “It’s a fair cop.” The scapegoat was innocent of this particular infraction but had of course committed others, as the entire class were the scum of the earth.

At the trial, the Sikh family shouted accusations of racism at the Nowak family and the judge. I find this baffling. Did they expect the judge to pause and say, “I didn’t realise we were being racist! My God! Let the prisoner go at once!” Likewise, when they told the police Nowak had injured himself climbing over a fence for some reason, did they seriously expect that the subsequent investigation wouldn’t uncover the five stab wounds? Or did they expect the coroner to handwave these away, because the Sikhs had already cast the R-word spell?

So what exactly do these people mean, when they accuse whites of Racism? Do they seriously believe that the only reason Vickrum Digwa was found guilty of murder, after stabbing Nowak five times without provocation, is racism? Do they suppose that a totally race-blind judge & jury would say it’s perfectly acceptable to stab someone to death without cause? Or do they regard light banter as just cause to murder someone?

Would the Sikhs have accused a Pakistani judge of racism? Or a black judge? I doubt it. For these people, whites have this one weakness, like the Death Star’s exhaust vent: the magic word, RACIST. When swarthoids mutter or shout “u raciss u raciss” what they mean is “we should not be held accountable for our actions, we should be given a lifelong pass to steal, rape, murder, we are superior to you, you exist only to serve us, anything we do to you is justified because of our inherent superiority, we will trample on you and take everything you have, we will rape and kill you and you have to take it, because to do otherwise is RACIST.”

For such people, anything that doesn’t go their way is racist. The word does not relate to any meaningful concept, as whites would understand it; it is more like a cat’s miaow, which means “I want something you can give me”. A cat’s miaow sounds a lot like a human baby’s cry; the cat would not miaow at a dog or a raccoon. The word means “our clan have been disadvantaged in some way, and white people are somehow involved” — even if the involvement consists of a white teenager being stabbed to death.

Apart from Europeans, most of the people on this planet have no conception of objective truth, of honesty, of fairness or justice. For the vast majority of human beings, such as they wretchedly are, what is good for them is true, what benefits them is fair and just, and there are no depths to which they will not stoop. For these people, racism means, simply, “you whites haven’t yet given us everything you have, and this is unjust because we deserve everything, because we are us and you are you.”

I look forward to a better future, a world where accusations of “racism” prompt snorts of derision.

The word needs to be withdrawn like an adulterated coin, the whole concept must be rethought. As things stand, it is a weapon that can only be applied against whites, since only whites flinch from it, and so the word “racist” is itself racist — which is obviously a terrible thing to be, in our enlightened multicultural age. Anyone who accuses someone of racism is therefore a priori racist; when the Sikhs rang the police to accuse the dying Nowak of racism, the constables should have immediately arrested the Sikhs for deploying the racist concept of racism.

Obviously, we want to retain our multicultural sensibilities, to be tolerant and respectful so I suggest that Vickrum Digwa share a pit with Axel Rudakubana and the recent Sudanese beheader, all three armed of course, and they can settle the racism question between themselves, the survivor gets a lifetime subscription to the Guardian and a set of decorative spoons.

The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The comments are almost wholly right-wing chud, e.g. the latest video shows an American high school graduation turning into a violent melee; it has currently 14 comments, all pointing out that the brawling participants are black. Occasionally, a Left-wing commentator steps in but these comments are often so parodically progressive that I can imagine they are planted simply to generate argument (and so, more views).

I wondered if I’d accidentally subbed to a Right-wing Liveleak, but I suspect not. For one thing, FBI crime statistics tend to confirm the prevalence of melanated perpetrators, so I’m not sure a Left-wing Liveleak would even be possible, unless the whole thing was AI-generated (gangs of WASP stockbrokers beating up Mexican mothers on the subway, etc.).

My guess is that Leftists have no interest in these videos. My own interest is largely of a rubbernecking character: it’s just fascinating to see e.g. a Hiroshima-esque gas explosion in a Chinese city, or daily ghetto life in Baltimore. I also sub to a street fight channel; I like to try and discern which of the two fighters is going to win (it’s usually not the one who is ripping his shirt off and screaming). I’ve also found Liveleaks useful for the raw footage behind many news stories; e.g. people were presenting the death of the poetess Renee Good as out & out murder, but the video clearly shows her trying to run over the ICE agent who then shot her. I never bother arguing with Leftists, especially boomers, but I find it odd they will weigh in on such stories without ever viewing the freely-available footage. Months after the Covington kids story had been deboonked, I had to sit in the McLingua teacher room back in Munich, listening to a sour-faced American colleague whining the mainstream media lies at me, as part of a diatribe about Trump; I briefly considered pulling up the YouTube videos of the event, which clearly showed up her narrative as bullshit, but instead just grunted, “Hmm, yes, how awful” because I’d by then realised most of my female colleagues were mentally ill and I didn’t want her coming at me with a pair of scissors or accusing me of rape or fascism.

Fundamentally I think that Leftists don’t want to see the raw footage, they want events carefully prepared like sushi and presented to them as part of a Leftist narrative. They want a digestible Huffington Post article about how ICE are randomly slaughtering poetesses; they don’t want to actually see the video and realise that the poetess in question tried to severely injure or kill the man who shot her (although, being a woman it’s possible she imagined he would just be somehow bumped back a few feet like a character in a computer game with poor interaction dynamics: another thing I’ve learnt from Liveleak and Street Fights is that women often have no idea what even a slap feels like, let alone being hit by a car).

Leftists don’t want to imagine the situation from the ICE agent’s point of view: sent to arrest and detain an illegal immigrant who most likely is also wanted for rape, murder, narcotics etc.; hounded and impeded by shrieking lesbians and poetesses who then try to run you over. This would all be too complicated for the Leftist; it would be crass, vulgar, only a Right-wing conspiracy theorist would actually be so macabre, so gauche, as to view the raw footage. The Leftist is above such things, he sits at his Apple laptop, sipping his frappuccino, and reads a curated narrative, because he is smart, he is cultured, he is educated. The actual facts would be not so much irrelevant as tasteless, impositions from some strange desert outland full of mutants and monsters, mere event without narrative, without ideology, without a progressive direction.

Those on the Right don’t need narratives; we can simply observe that our homeland is suddenly full of foreigners, many of whom seem hostile, and that things were, broadly speaking, much better 30 years ago. You can construct a narrative, about e.g. (((Marxist))) subversion, but this is unnecessary for most; it suffices to compare 2026 with 1996, or even summer 2026 with summer 2015. Conservatives or reactionaries or whatever term is fashionable this season are anchored in a remembered or demonstrable past, a sense that things were better in even the recent past. Leftists have their utopian vision, but for some reason every communist regime has failed to achieve the worker’s paradise, and so there is a spectral, imaginal quality to Leftism, in contrast to the solidity of “my town was quite nice 30 years ago.”

Thus the curious fondness, among progs, for Harry Potter and Star Wars. They are always the brave Rebel alliance fighting Voldemort, every enemy is Vader or Voldemort, they are always Harry Potter or a Jedi. They seem to need this narrative reassurance, to see everything in cartoonish terms.

I had a Communist student in Italy, a very intelligent, very well-read young man; he was in many ways a typical commie, e.g. he hated his rich, landowning family, viscerally hated Christianity, seemed to regard Marx as an infallible prophet, Marxism as “science”; but he was also one of my favourite students: for one thing he actually had a talent for languages, remembered what we’d gone over in the last class (unlike most students); and we had an amusing exchange when the group went out for a pizza at the end of the course, I ordered the Number 88 pizza, purely because it sounded awesome (and it was), and he burst out laughing, “Is this some Nazi thing?” to the bemusement of the other students, who had no idea what was going on. I generally tried to avoid political topics in class, because most of my Italian students were Leftists, but in one lesson for some reason we were talking about Eastern Europe and gypsies, and since one of my friends is married to a child psychologist who mostly deals with gypsies, I said that there seem to be hard genetic differences, e.g. apparently gypsy babies don’t respond well to eye tests, as they don’t track whatever object is waved before them, but rather focus on the face of the doctor, unlike non-gypsy babies. That is presumably genetic, not cultural. My student exploded angrily, “That is bullshit! It’s bullshit!” and not wanting to be fired I just shrugged affably, as is my fascist wont.

For the Leftist, narrative (race is a “social construct”, genetics is “pseudo-science”, IQ research is Nazism) will always trump data, whether anecdotal or scientific. Thus the odd but amusing appellation “hate facts” for anything the more honest Leftist concedes to be true; it essentially means “reality is racist and Right-wing and we choose to live in fantasy, because we’re better than you.”

Plato would have banned poets from his ideal city state: by presenting a false view of reality, they would have degraded philosophical, civic virtue. We need not go so far — for one thing, almost nobody today reads poetry; but it is well to regard fantasy with a cold eye, to distrust the imagination. It’s not so much that the imagination is baleful as it is totally neutral, totally amoral: it can inspire Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, or a serial killer’s elaborate fantasies.

My Communist student said John Lennon was one of his heroes, and my heart sank: I thought of the ghastly ‘Imagine’, of Lennon’s pinched, angry face, the sour look of a lace-curtain-twitching spinster, of a Bolshevik commissar executing a kulak. It’s not that Lennon made bad music, as that he had no interest in reality; and indeed, perhaps to write songs like ‘I Am the Walrus’ it’s necessary to live wholly in the imaginal, to eschew the real.

I relish the visionary, the unreal, yet some part of me always wants data, facts, reality. Our society is one of largely malign or lunatic fantasy, most likely because the Left have taken over the media, publishing, television & film, and so the only narratives on offer are deranged and monstrous. I wouldn’t take the hard line of Warhammer 30k’s God Emperor, and forbid “sorcery”; as in the Horus Heresy books, that simply leaves us unprotected against the Immaterium. We require, we cannot get away from, the imaginal, vision, narrative. But we must not live in fantasy; where the narrative dismisses reality as “hate facts”, the narrative must be thrown out, its purveyors must be discredited, put in stocks, pelted with rotten food and jeered at, quite without mercy.

Were I a tyrant, I would not exile the poets. Let them fabulate their fabulations, whimsical as may be; but I would also have them study Engineering, I would have them design and build real things; I would have them test all their works, all poems, stories, all narratives, against the unyielding measure of things as they are; even if they play a blue guitar.

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'

The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

And they said then, 'But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.'