Our friends at VDARE will be hosting their first ever "webinar," featuring VDARE regulars and AltRight contributors John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, Paul Kersey and James Kirkpatrick.
No word yet on whether the webinar will be graded.
Boys Are Not Shih Tzus
This anecdote on The Thinking Housewife really struck me:
As I watched, I became aware of something that’s been gnawing at me for some time now. The young fathers and the not-so-young granddaddies had a peculiar way of speaking to the male children. They squatted down to be on eye level with the lads, or they leaned way over to appear less tall. And when they spoke, the mens’ voices were…feminine. I don’t mean lisping or mincing or effeminate. I mean feminine. No matter how low the voice might have been naturally pitched, the men without exception raised the pitch of their voices and lowered the volume until they sounded like spinster Sunday School teachers, whispering in calming tones, asking questions and making observations.
[...]
And so I began to search my memory, and I could not recall a single adult male in my boyhood speaking to me or my friends in such tones. I cannot recall any men routinely squatting down or leaning over to make themselves appear closer to my own height. I cannot remember any men putting a breathless wheezing whisper into their words. I cannot bring to mind a single incident in which a grown man opened his eyes and mouth as wide as possible and talked to me like some grinning, masculine Norma Desmond. What I do remember are the grown men who picked me up and lifted me to their naturally imposing height, instead of lowering themselves to mine.
I don't spend much time around kids, but I have seen this out and about. There are tons of "emo dads" in NW Portland who talk to their children this way -- the way that lonely old women talk to lapdogs.
Like the man who wrote the comment, I can't remember my grandfathers ever speaking to me that way. They weren't cruel or abusive. They took me places and taught me things. They supported me even though I was an oddball. But they never spoke to me in baby talk. They were men. They were authoritative. And, to this day, years after lingering illnesses and deaths, they both maintain a certain command presence in my memory.
Kids pick up on weakness quickly and they learn how to exploit adult behavior. There's a joke in my family about how good my youngest sister was at fake crying. Even at five or six years old, she would turn on the tears -- and then smile devilishly at my sister and I as our parents reprimanded us.
Feminists and pop-psychologists may be telling men to be "softer," but I wonder if these young boys will ever truly respect their fathers. Boys will pick up on submissive behavior. Even dogs pick up on it.
"Dad was always nice, but he was kind of a pussy...I really did whatever I wanted to..."
This posture seems to be a post-Boomer cultural default. Modern Dad isn't supposed to be "The Man;" he's supposed to be your little friend and super-fun playmate.
But, if Dad isn't The Man in your life, who the hell else is going to be?
When you bend down to a boy's level and emasculate yourself, you're teaching him that boyhood is more important than manhood. Boys should look up to you and aspire to be more like you, not the other way around.
What's particularly helpful about this anecdote is that it offers an easy fix.
A grown man, even a small or otherwise unremarkable man, can still be a god-like giant to a little boy.
You don't have to be a dick. You don't have to make the kid feel small.
All you have to do is be big.
Instead of leaning over, make him look up or pick him up. Instead of talking down to him, make him talk up to you.
Be big, expansive, benevolent. Be authoritative. You can be playful without being a little boy.
I have three nephews, and while I don't see them often, this advice is going to stick in my head when I do. It's an easy way to make a powerful impression on a future generation -- to show them how to be a man.
Empire of Misery
From childhood on, most of us experience life through the denial of others. In the interest of all getting along, or making do with what we have, we ignore the overall direction of our society, which has been screaming downward like a burning plane for at least 200 years.
In school, they put a brave face on it by teaching us that The EnlightenmentTM was the period when we woke up from the grim “red in tooth and claw” past, and starting moving toward progress, which we’re not supposed to call Utopia. The idea was that we could “perfect” humanity.
Like many other human engineering experiments, this process is marked by dramatic failure until the right technology is found. The only problem is that, thanks to human denial, we have never stopped to re-assess whether our basic directional change back there in The EnlightenmentTM was right or not. We just keep trying new variations on the same old idea.
When we are young, adults seem to us to be denying life. They don’t care about existential joy, or happiness, but more mundane things, namely:
- Money
- Power
- Keeping up with the Joneses
There’s a practical reason for this: if you have the first two, and make a halfhearted stab (at least) toward the third, you fit into the herd and no one can tell that you might have any thoughts outside approval for how our society is.
Since we all know our society is in decay, we tend to fear those who speak that truth, and smash them down if we can. In any emergency, the best way to get torn apart by a lynch mob is to start doing what is sensible. Doing what is sensible requires risk; denial does not, psychologically at least.
To a teenager, say a junior in high school, adulthood is simple: people spend all their time on studying, which is really detail memorization to see how much you retain, and then spend all their time working, so they have money to enjoy life, which tends to occur when they’re very old and retired. It’s essentially death-worship.
Even more appalling is the grim fact that people are signaling blatant discontent. They jockey for power, and act like jerks to one another so that they feel that sense of importance that makes them think their lives are worthwhile.
Really, they’re just bitter that for 300+ days a year they’re going to the same office and doing the same dumb stuff, most of which is designed to accommodate dumb people and dumb regulations. They have become robots, mechanically going through the motions without a thought for how the situation could be improved or (gasp) made more fun.
Part of what drives them ahead is overpopulation. Since we keep producing people like mad, and none of us have any hereditary right to a job, we must constantly tread water harder and faster to keep ourselves from drowning. The problem with this is that then others compete by spending more time on it and wham, to compete, we must spend all our time on the same.
Some people live a gilded life, they think. They have found a good income and jobs they don’t terribly mind. Some of these are honestly well-situated. But for most, they’re bored, conscious of missing out on better options, angry and resentful. They become vandals against the system that traps them.
This vandalism occurs in little ways, but it’s nasty. They’ll cut you off on the road, cut ahead in line, abuse underlings, treat support staff badly, or even outright sabotage one another. Parents sabotage children by teaching them socially-acceptable lies, then using the children’s failure to seize control of their lives. People manipulate each other, even in families.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that it feels like some mythical “end times” from an ancient holy book. People have no faith in truth, in honor or in goodness. In the name of freedom and individualism, they act out of self interest and pass their destruction on to the whole group. When everyone does that, we must all dedicate all of our time to survival.
The sad thing is that this gratifies the resentful mind. They’d hate it more than anything if someone escaped the misery to which they have condemned themselves. They hate anyone who has more than they do, anyway, and they frequently petition politicians to take away what others have so they can have some of it.
But their biggest sabotage, by far, is remaining in denial. In denial that we’re wasting our time in this modern work-slavery that’s totally inefficient. In denial that people are miserable, or that society is slowly sinking like the Titanic. They use their denial to make you doubt your own perceptions, and to force you to suffer as they have..
If you can imagine a swirling vortex of hatred, reactionary backlash and sneering scorn, this is what humanity has become. It’s worst in the industrialized world, where we know we should be working less and enjoying more, but the opposite has occurred. We have formed ourselves an empire of our own misery, and we hate that anyone might escape.
Vanguard Podcast: Project Mayhem
Jack Donovan joins Colin, Richard, and Andy to discuss David Fincher's seminal mind-twisting masculinist cinematic epic, Fight Club.
Why I am Supporting the British Democratic Party
It is 60 years since I was first involved in Nationalist and European Nationalist politics, and over 60 years since I married my present wife. The result of our marriage supplies the reason why I am not content to sit back and take it easy. We have three granddaughters and three great-grandsons. It is for them that I am doing what I can to see that they have a future that is still British, still European, and does not become an ever expanding conglomeration of Third World liquorish allsorts, united only by our geographical boundaries.
Like many reading this, we once thought that in its growth years of 2006-2009 the BNP would give this nation salvation. But primarily through its inept leadership it has failed us. With only one tenth of the BNP membership of 2010, today the establishment media is happy to keep the BNP name in the public eye as a useful blind alley where they can coax potential nationalist support. The Griffin family are content with this as it will still provide some source of income.
Having carefully looked at the other nationalist – and so-called ‘nationalist’ - parties that have evolved mainly through the departure of former BNP activists, I soon appreciated that the only one with even a chance of ultimate success was the British Democratic Party. Not least because of the proven calibre of the people on the Steering Committee and because of its appreciation of the need to build up a party from the bottom, rather than from the top down.
One pieceof advice I would give is that a party of 100 per cent common opinion is a party of one. A party of two will have its left wing and its right wing. That is the nature of politics. This means that one does not have to support every single policy point of the BDP to vote for it and to work for it - as long as we are all united in support of the key issue of campaigning for the survival of our people of these Britannic islands and its common culture that has evolved over several millennia. We must also be united in withdrawing from the pernicious influence of the European Union – which does not mean that we are anti-European, hence there is also room for euro-nationalists like me.
The work of the Lib-Lab-Con and its kept media has seen the power of the multicultural globalists encouraging the British to reject their cultural heritage. As a result a country is being created of many equal civilisations, which has already led to the schizophrenic chaos of our major towns and cities. In place of our ancient rights of the individual they have substituted the rights of groups, defined largely in terms of ethnicity, gender and sexual preference.
I can see why some patriots suggest caution in referring to our ethnicity, because this is interpreted as racist by the media. Surely the point to emphasise is that we do NOT advocate superiority of any one race over another. What we are supporting is racial differences. It is this that has been responsible for the evolution of the world’s cultures, whether European, Arab, South Asian, East Asian or African. And we support the individuality of them all. We need to keep emphasising this.
We cannot, for example, follow the tactics of Gramsci and the Frankfurt school with the successful Marxist Long March Through the Institutions, for time is not on our side.
The long-term success by incremental steps of the Marxists and liberal-minded ‘useful idiots’ who have made up the bulk of our teachers at schools and universities over the past 30 years has encouraged the nation to rejects its cultural heritage without knowing it. This has resulted in our being colonised by a tsunami of Afro-Asian immigration. For immigration to continue, even at half of its present rate (as the Tories suggest they are aiming for) for another decade, could mean that the battle is lost. In 30 years at a ‘reduced’ rate it would definitely be lost. Therefore the policy of ending immigration is not negotiable under a reformed BNP or a new Nationalist party. It must take priority over all other aspects of policy.
We can recover from economic downturns and even from EU and United Nations political, cultural and economic interference. But once our ethnicity is altered it is altered for ever. Those who cannot accept this and would have us soften our opposition to immigration and make it a secondary issue to withdrawal from the EU or revitalising a Christian Britain, for example, should join either UKIP, the so-called right wing of the Conservatives, or a Monastery.
For full policy statement of the British Democratic Party go to http://nationalistunityforum.co.uk
White Countries R 4 Evry1
Not everything has to be a boring 5,000-word essay, namechecking Nietzsche and Evola, and invoking the Kali Yuga...
The beauty of the predicament of the White race is that it is becoming increasingly clear cut and compelling, even to the point that it can now be embodied in slogans that are both simple and true, and encapsulated in the potency of cheap music, as this piece or viral magic courtesy of the mysterious "DJ SoshulKonstrukt" demonstrates (see video tab).
Five Historical Hatefacts
The word "hatefact" seems to have been coined by VDARE's Peter Brimelow back in 2008. Speaking at an H.L. Mencken conference, he said that "hatefacts" are, "things that everybody knows are true but can't be said." They are the truisms behind so called "hate speech."
The concept of a hatefact is quite accurate, and deserves more traction. Gavin McInnes wrote an amusing piece on the matter for Taki's Mag a few months ago, but the hatefacts he listed were mostly focused on statistics and common sense. Although that is well and good, referring back to history should be the modus operandi of all conservatives. History's lessons manage to debunk nearly every theory and utopia the left can dream up and argue for. In that spirit, here are five hatefacts from America's history.
1) On Puerto Ricans and Crime
About two years ago Gabriel Giffords was nearly killed in an assassination attempt - and the media went nuts pretending to be detective-psychologists who would soon answer all questions surrounding it. Naturally no one was interested in discussing the history of congressmen being injured or killed in office. In looking over the facts, it becomes easy to understand why the topic was avoided by the powers that be.
In all of American history exactly nine members of congress have been wounded in office. (Compared to many other nations, this is an admirably low number, but that's an aside.) Puerto Ricans were responsible for 55.55 percent of this total. It is a chapter of history not often discussed, but on March 1st, in 1954, Puerto Rican terrorists stormed America's Congressional building and opened fire. The intent was to achieve independence using Black Hand style tactics. Blessedly, none of their targets were killed, however, five did sustain injuries. As for the four who were injured outside of this attack: one was shot by a wacko, another by some muggers, and the other two were beaten by other congressmen. (Those would be Giffords, Stennis, and Sumner as well as Grinnell, respectively.) Given America's current brouhaha about the supposed white male tendency to shoot up this place or that, now may be the time to remind people of this attack.
2) On Violence and the Left
The more acute readers of fact one are likely questioning its focus on congressmen wounded, rather than killed, in office. However, the list of killings only reveals more discomforting facts about who employs political violence.
Dixiecrat Larry McDonald was the most recent congressman to fall. What happened always sounds so farcical, but it really is true, in 1983 he was on a civilian plane that was shot down by Soviets.
Before him was Leo Ryan in 1978. The Jim Jones groupies in Guyana gunned him down. The People's Temple had been in his California district, and after they picked up stakes and fled the country, many family members of believers had asked Ryan to go down there and figure out what had happened. When Ryan arrived, he was killed. Yes, Jim Jones and his followers were insane, but quite progressive as well - and staunch supporters of Harvey Milk.
Next comes Robert Kennedy in 1968; who isn't familiar with the assassination of RFK? Unfortunately, in this context, "familiar" takes on the narrow definition of "aware that it occurred." Who killed him? Why? It has been forgotten, but the assassination was quite politically motivated. The killer was Sirhan Sirhan, a staunch anti-Zionist, and Bobby had come out in support of Israel during the 1967 war, so Sirhan shot him.
There are a few more, but most of them were brought about by duels or the Civil War, with some strange exceptions such David Brokerick who was killed by his insane son. Saying something like, "In the last half a century only leftists have killed congressmen," would not be "biased," it would be accurate.
3) On Foreign Aid
Antebellum America held great resentment towards Haiti and the 1804 slave revolt that gave her independence. For a long time the United States liked to act as if the nation did not exist or was illegitimate. Haiti's official recognition by the US did not come for while, and its timing does not come off as coincidence - 1862. It was never explicitly said, but it is hard to interpret this move as anything other than a somewhat desperate and somewhat friendly way of asking for aid. As any historian will tell you, 1862 was not a great year for the North in terms of military victories. But Haiti did nothing; apparently the quest to free several million slaves to their north was not considered worthy of a war effort. This did not change even when it was clear that the North was going to win. Autumn of 1864 could easily have seen a successful Haitian expeditionary force sent to New Orleans for a bit of looting and liberating. (To imply that there would have been looting is far from racist, ever heard of "Sherman's March to the Sea"?)
After Haiti's last devastating earthquake, some said that it was, "our moral responsibility to help," but if that is the case, than was it not Haiti's moral responsibility to aid the North a century and a half ago? Why does foreign aid always seem to be a one way street?
4) On Anti-Semitism
As opposed to Europe, America has never suffered from serious bouts of anti-Semitism. There was a bit with the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s and then into the '30s with Father Coughlin and his followers. But no anti-Semitic federal law has ever been passed, and even our most racist historical figures tend to at least refrain from anti-Semitism. What did Andrew Jackson think of Jews? It does not seem like he did. One of the highest cabinet members of the Confederacy was Jewish. George Wallace and Jesse Helms said countless vicious things about blacks and gays, but not a peep on Judaism and its adherents.
The one group of Americans who do seem to suffer from this ethnic prejudice is blacks, and this has been true throughout our history. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that, "The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron" in his book, "The Souls of Black Folks." Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam as a whole are certainly guilty of this as well, not to mention Stokely Carmichael. Some say Jesse Jackson would have gotten the Democratic Nomination back in 1984 had he not made those comments about "hymies" and where they live. Have you ever heard of American white gentiles rising up and rioting against the Jews in their neighborhood? (And no, Nazi lone wolfs and marches are not the same as neighborhood-wide riots.) It certainly happened against Catholics and many other groups, but the only anti-Semitic riot in America's history was the 1991 New York Crown Heights riot, committed almost entirely by blacks.
Can you imagine Walter Mondale (eventual winner of the 1984 Democratic nomination) having a single anti-Semitic bone in his body? Or how about Stephen Crane writing something openly anti-Semitic around the time Du Bois did. How about a white 1960s radical, like the much talked about Bill Ayers attacking the Jewish race? The trend continues too, have you ever heard of Congressmen Keith Ellison?
5) On Voter Rights
Many different "Voter ID" proposals were decided on this election season, and with that came countless tales about "voter suppression" and "voter disenfranchisement." This narrative disregards a key voting-block in America - the South. Leftists ignore the topic, but the South as a whole has a long history of being disenfranchised at the polls. Aside from the 2000 election, the three times in American history when a candidate became president despite losing the popular vote have been candidates the South almost uniformly voted against. The first instance was in 1824 when John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay kept Andrew Jackson out of office via clever congressional maneuvering. Jackson won all but three Southern states and Quincy won zero. The second instance was in 1876 when Rutherford Hayes was seated instead of Samuel J. Tilden, who like Jackson, won all but three Southern states. Finally we come to 1888 when Benjamin Harrison unseated Grover Cleveland, who won the entirety of the South without exception.
Another example of Southern disenfranchisement is the 1868 election. Three Southern states (Texas, Virginia, and Mississippi) were not allowed to participate in the election despite having been recently forced back in to the Union. The reasoning behind it was that they had not been sufficiently "reconstructed." It would seem as though the South merits the title, "disenfranchised."
These are five mini-history lessons, look into our past more deeply yourself and rest assured that you will find more. Every ounce of history disproves a pound of theory.
The Fight of the Century
Forget Frazier and Ali. The “Rumble in the Jungle” was just a sweaty love-in compared to the sparks that flew when the two ‘titans’ of the gun debate, Piers Morgan and Alex Jones, locked horns in a verbal duel on prime time TV (see video tab). The battle between the smug, self-important, insouciant Englishman and the barnstorming, bar-brawling, conspiracy-theorist Texan shock jock was enthralling stuff.
We knew it was going to get down and ugly as Morgan came out with his sneering eyes and minimalist aikido of the carefully prepared 'factoid' and faced Jones with his flagrant paranoia, flapping arms, encyclopedia of conspiracy. Both had their cunning strategies for a crushing victory. Morgan hoped to use his irritating smarm to ignite Jones into a self-conflagrationary fireball of redneck lunacy, but Jones had his own game plan to unsettle the Englishman with his hairdryer-megaphone verbal approach, “in-your-face-limey” attitude, and music hall comedy English accent.
So, who won? Opinion was initially divided. Some commentators felt that Jones had wasted a golden opportunity to showcase his calm, measured professorial side (and seemed to assume that he had one), and that he had instead been goaded like a bull to bray like a jackass. My take, however, is that Jones won hands down.
A polite discussion with a man he is campaigning to deport would have made him look like a phony (which he may well be), so sweeping Morgan’s questions aside and being abrasive made perfect sense. Jones got a lot of good info out, while Morgan ended up repeating the same small handful of phrases. Also it was clear that Jones wasn't really a backwoods wildman completely losing it or he would have sent Morgan sprawling off his high chair or pulled out his blunderbuss.
Finally, Jones landed plenty of clean hits on Morgan personally, reminding us that this “principled campaigner” is really just a sewer journalist who still has questions to answer back home in the UK about faking stories and hacking phones. In fact this is probably the best explanation for Morgan’s desperate attempts to climb aboard a contrived moral crusade in a country he still knows little about: the crusader's desire for the remission of past sins.
Fifty Shades of Misandry
As an author, I faithfully go wherever my flighty and unpredictable Muse leads me. This dedication to my ever-evolving, often elusive source of inspiration has led me down a winding and torturous path, lined with copious clusters of thorns, nettles, and poison ivy. It has most certainly not, thus far, brought me widespread recognition, fortune, fame, or glory. Yet I trust my Muse just the same, because really, when it comes to creative stimulation, who or what else do I have? Without her, I’m nothing.
I will not spill too much ink here investigating the identity, orientation, or overall reliability of the Muse, nor even exploring the question of whether she dwells within, capriciously stirring my consciousness when she feels the inexplicable urge (but always on her own terms) or if in fact she is a separate entity entirely, one who hovers above me, flitting about and occasionally whispering mischievous notions in my ear before withdrawing with a girlish giggle, darting away to a cleverly chosen hiding spot and teasingly mocking my efforts to find her again. Suffice to say that she moves in mysterious, and at times infuriating, ways. In the last couple of years, however, the Muse has proven to be a faithful helpmeet; she has sung to me freely, and I have translated her music into numerous works, some that I have managed to publish and others that have yet to find a suitable suitor.
A couple of years ago, for reasons unknown, my Muse became raunchy, ribald, and risqué: a saucy wench indeed. This is when I began writing literary erotica. In searching for possible publishers in this genre, I soon became aware of an undeniable fact: these days, erotica writers tend, overwhelmingly, to be women. This has certainly not always been so: men, in fact, created and helped to shape the course of this type of literature for centuries. (Forget De Sade; think of King Solomon, author of the most supremely sensual book of the Bible!) But today, male authors tend to write in other fields, and erotica has largely become a no-go zone for men.
It’s hard to say precisely why this trend has developed. But as a result of the clustering of female authors in this genre, a bewildering set of ideological assumptions have sprung up, usually unspoken, and laden with inconsistencies and double standards. Contemporary erotica is permeated with a feminist ethos, even as the subject matter of most popular erotic novels are strongly traditionalist when it comes to depictions of sex roles and gender relations. In spite of being a rather poorly written work, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Gray series has achieved immense popularity, and has spawned numerous imitators, all of which depict the beautiful heroine finding majestic joy and unbearable ecstasy submitting her body and soul to the whims of a dominant, powerful, exceedingly masculine man. Yet since the author of Fifty Shades and its knockoffs are all women, and since most of its readers are women as well, no disapproval is evinced from the cultural commissars of contemporary feminism. Instead, in writing and enjoying these books, women are seen as taking charge of their sexuality and embracing all of its fetishes and kinks: you go, girl! Never mind that what they are embracing is the very “antediluvian” notion of female submission, which apparently still seems to resonate with a great many women, perhaps largely because of its politically-incorrect “forbidden fruit” quality.
Yet, as I have learned, such exemptions are not granted to authors of stories with similar themes… if the author is a man. In fact, if my experiences are typical, and I strongly suspect they are, a man who writes explicitly sexual tales is largely treated with suspicion, if not thorough contempt. It matters not whether his stories are well-written, though of course reasonable people can disagree about the literary merit of any given piece. In my experience, even if the female reader/would-be publisher admits that the writing is good, the fact that a man would write such things is seen by her as deeply disquieting. The assumptions are rampant: he’s a despicable misogynist, a creepy pervert, perhaps a closet rapist or child molester. “He’s just writing to get himself off,” the scornful editors snort snidely, and that’s apparently a problem, since he’s a man; unlike female masturbation, which is a beautiful gesture of liberated womanhood (even if one is fantasizing about being dominated by a man), male self-stimulation is disgusting and perverted. No one is declaring “You go, boy! Embrace your sexuality, be liberated, throw off your chains of repression!” to the man who gets off on recording what turns him on; instead, he is just a sicko wanker: a loser, to be shunned and derided. The same encouraging “sex-positive” feminist, who fully approves of the Fifty Shades-esque fantasy indulged in by female authors, becomes a stern puritanical sex-negative schoolmarm, and a fierce and hatefully abusive bully to boot, when she discovers that a man is the author of the erotic work in question.
We hear a great deal these days from feminists who claim that men hate and fear “strong women,” and that open, frank depictions of female sexuality are anathema to our “patriarchal” culture. But in fact it is male sexuality that is commonly hated, feared, and anathematized. Far from being “phallocentric,” our culture today is in fact overwhelmingly phallophobic. We aren’t afraid of the turned-on woman, with her lovely, proud, wonderful feminine wetness between her legs; instead, it’s the horny dude with his awful, ugly, insufferable erection, that gives our misandric, feminist-indoctrinated culture the willies (pun intended). In short, feminists can only endure a sexually aggressive character with a penis if said character is written by an author with a vagina.
I will cop to some personal bitterness on this front: I have had (female) would-be editors greet my erotically-charged material with unjustified anger and defensiveness; they have treated me like a cad for even writing such stuff; how dare I? I don’t believe that interpretations of my work as woman-hating at all stand up to scrutiny, though admittedly an author isn’t necessarily the best judge of the meaning and message of his own stories.
I am thankful to www.erbooks.com (whose editor just happens to be a man… hmmm) for publishing my short story "Motel Memento Mori" as well as my novel Heart Killer. And I hope the future will reveal greater open-minded acceptance and less reflexive punitive derision for men who find their Muses leading them into gynocentric literary territory in the future. To use an ironically apt metaphor, I hope they don’t get dicked around like I was!
"Red Pill" State
In this first installment of "Masterpieces of Bad Right-Wing Cinema," Andy, Colin, and Richard discuss two "paranoid" films that bookend the 1990s: They Live (1988) and The Matrix (1999). Topics of discussion include the "conspiratorial" impulse, the nature of reality and the virtual, trans-humanism, and anti-Semitism and the "power elite."
For show notes, visit Vanguard Radio.
How to Start a Gang: The Co-op Gym
In The Way of Men, I argued that to create a legitimate honor culture, you need to create an honor group. It’s easy to assemble groups of like-minded men on the Internet, on forums and blogs and social networking groups, but a true honor culture must be proximate and “real-world.” Men need face time and history to develop trust, inter-dependency and a sense of fraternity based on more than empty platitudes. In his recent article “How and Why to Revive Manly Honor in the Twenty-First Century,” Brett McKay from Art of Manliness came to a similar conclusion, and put together some of his own theories about what men need to create an honor culture. Only face-to-face can you create an environment where men feel accountable to each other and develop a “healthy sense of shame.”
Creating a positive honor gang in the real world presents some logistical problems. Most men—and especially men who have families—have very little free time to spare for group activities. Further, mainstream American culture herds men into bars, or into mixed-sex and “inclusive” business ventures like gyms, martial arts studios, shooting clubs, etc. All of these things are fine, but because they are profit-oriented, the owners will try to cater to everyone. For-profit public gyms and clubs have turnover, and they always need more members. They can’t afford to discriminate or offend anyone, because they need to pay employees and keep the lights on. This is how bourgeois capitalism (in its broadest, least politicized sense) undermines fraternity. There’s nothing particularly insidious about it or the men engaged in such ventures, but they will have to follow the money to compete in the marketplace.
An honor culture can’t be “inclusive.” The male gang is by nature exclusive. It’s about creating an “us” that is differentiated from a real or abstract “them.” There has to be a member-operated gateway separating who is “in” from who is “out.”
In a recent series on Nietzsche, Sparta, fascism and the anti-bourgeois body, Mark Dyal wrote about the importance of transforming both the body and the mind. Nietzsche and the ancients understood that the link between cultivating the mind and the body simultaneously. With this timeless model in mind, I believe a cooperative private gym could provide a solution for restarting honor cultures in a modern context.
This is an open source idea. I’m going to lay out a loose framework, and many different types of men could theoretically make use of it to cultivate a gang of men with a shared philosophy and identity.
The Co-op Gym
The idea itself is fairly simple. It’s the basic, pre-commercial concept of the “health club” or “martial arts club.”
Rent the Gym
Get two or three founding “anchor” members together and rent a space together that could be used as a gym. It could be a house, an apartment, a garage, a commercial space, a storage facility, a barn, etc. All you really need is a solid floor, a wide open space, and a working bathroom.
As long as they can convince a landlord that they can afford the rent, and that one or two guys will be legally responsible for the space, any two guys can rent a space. Obviously, they’ll have to be men who are financially stable enough to carry the space by themselves. Alternately, you could just try to convince Lou to let you use the basement.
Furnish the Gym
To start, follow the CrossFit “box” model. You don’t need a bunch of expensive machines. Really, you just need some Olympic bars, some collars, a few benches, a very sturdy squat rack (weld one!) and a lot of Olympic weight plates. You can do almost any exercise worth doing with this much equipment. A lot of this can be picked up used from Craigslist. Weight plates are weight plates. Additional equipment can be bought or purchased based on the needs of the men involved. Start a bookshelf and bring in books on lifting, etc. to be used for reference.
A mod for this idea is a large wrestling mat. In fact, you may want to create a gym that is only for martial arts—in which case you need even less equipment. Commercial martial arts gyms tend to come with their own culture, and these days, that culture will be feel-good and all-inclusive, for reasons mentioned above. However, if you pay an outside instructor to teach what you want to learn in your own space, you get to control the culture.
Establish Some Basic Ground Rules
The founding members who made the initial investment need to establish some ground rules for use of the space and the equipment. Also, set up some basic guidelines for what kind of guys will be invited to participate, what kinds of behaviors will be acceptable and unacceptable, and what kinds of behaviors will get members kicked out. Formalize this and post it.
Recruit Members
The nice thing about a gym is that no one really has to sign on 100% to some kind of ideological platform. You’re going there to work out, first. If a prospect is OK with the basic rules of the co-op, that’s good enough. There are tons of guys who are grossed out by the corporate gym “scene” but who find working out at home boring or impractical. Invite men with similar fitness goals and similar ideas about the world. As the club grows, you may want to have the group vote in new members—as with old fraternities, etc.
Each new member should contribute to the collective treasury to help cover rent and utilities. You may want to sponsor some members who are “the right kind of guy” but who are unemployed and/or make less money. They may be asked to help with cleanup, etc.
Since you aren’t operating for profit, you don’t need contracts or much in the way of accounting or official documentation. You’re just two guys and their pals renting a space for personal purposes. It’s nobody’s business.
Develop a Culture
Cultures develop organically as men build friendships and shared histories, but you can influence the culture by adding elements into the mix. What these elements are will depend on what kind of culture you want to develop. The posters on the wall, the music, the shared library, what’s on TV (of there is one)—all of these cultural elements will give shape to the culture of the club. You can introduce moral and ideological elements to the group as it seems appropriate, but not in a heavy handed, dictatorial way, because most men won’t respond to that). Those who are amenable will stick around; some may become uncomfortable and leave. That’s OK, because this isn’t about making money—it’s about founding a brotherhood.
Benefits
The co-op gym model offers several benefits:
It’s Under the Radar – Starting some kind of official organization draws attention, and it will probably keep away people who are wary of that attention. A private, informal, not-for-profit association offers a way to nurture a counterculture under the public’s radar. No one will have much of a right to say anything about the rules or culture of your informal, private association.
It’s Constructive – Most of the “countercultural” activities that men do together are self-destructive. Yeah, it’s great fun to go bar-hopping with a bunch of guys, and there’s something to be said for the collective suffering of hangovers and the bizarre circumstances that result from heavy drinking, but you’re basically uniting to make yourselves sick—to make yourselves worse. Gyms are about making each other better. When men try to improve themselves, the first thing they do is abandon their drinking buddies, who perpetuate dissolution and excess. When men want to improve themselves, they’ll naturally move toward guys at the gym who are also improving themselves. It’s a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one, and it’s more likely to inspire long-term loyalty. You’re building on success
It’s In Tune with The Way of Men – Women bond while talking and sharing in some kind of “sewing circle.” Men also bond through talking and sharing, but in a different context. Men tend to bond shoulder to shoulder, while doing some kind of work together, on the same team. As Lionel Tiger would say, they need to “aggress” together against something. A gym creates a regular, recurring opportunity for that kind of male social dynamic to take place within the context of the modern world, without it being overly “forced” or artificial—as it would be in some sort of formal club or intellectual discussion group. Lifting is also interactive and conversational. I’ve noticed men getting together in groups to go biking (for instance) but they will be separate and alone on their own bikes for most of the time. Gyms provide more time for interaction.
It’s Attractive and Accessible – We’re not talking about building a church or a compound, we’re talking about renting a space and buying some gym equipment. In many areas, you could probably rent an adequate space for less than $1000 a month. If you get 15 or 20 guys paying in, they’ll be paying the same price as belonging to a corporate gym. Also, while only certain personality types are going to be attracted to the idea of joining some sort of ideological club or organization, many types of men (and men of all ages) are interested in getting stronger or getting in better shape.
It Unifies the Mind and the Body – Men of ideas tend to stick with ideas, and end up separating themselves from men of action, and many men of action stick with action. So you end up with coffee house revolutionaries and meat-heads.
Wouldn’t it be better to have revolutionary meat-heads?
Liberal Conscience Justifies Unfairness
On 2 January, the Daily Mail reported:
In a scathing assessment, the respected centre-Right think tank Civitas accuses the Prime Minister of using billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to ‘rebrand his party and cement the coalition with the Liberal Democrats’.
The study warns that the wasteful Department for International Development is almost beyond reform and suggests it should be effectively shut down.
. . .
[It] calls for Mr Cameron’s ‘exorbitant and self-indulgent’ target to spend 0.7 per cent of Britain’s income on aid to be scrapped, saying there is no evidence it will help the world’s poor.
The findings come as ministers prepare to increase the aid budget by a staggering 30 per cent in the coming year in order to meet the Prime Minister’s target.
Total aid spending will rise from £8.65billion in the 2012-2013 financial year to £11.3billion in 2013-2014 – an increase of £2.65billion. [my emphasis]
Today, the BBC reports:
David Cameron has said the decision to remove child benefit from better-off families is “the right approach”.
Changes coming into effect from Monday will see families with one parent earning more than £50,000 lose part of their child benefit.
It will be fully withdrawn where one parent earns above £60,000.
. . .
Defending the policy, Mr Cameron said: “I'm not saying those people are rich, but I think it is right that they make a contribution.
“This will raise £2bn a year. If we don’t raise that £2bn from that group of people—the better off 15% in the country—we would have to find someone else to take it from.” [my emphasis]
Now, I do not disagree with the need for cuts and I was pleased the coalition government in the United Kingdom decided to embark on deficit reduction. What I disagree with is, as is the case with many, the government’s priorities and the reasons behind them.
Never mind that £60,000 ($100,000) is not a huge income when there are children, given that, in reality, taxation in this country means the take-home amount is £41,500, or £799 a week, or £159 a day. Never mind that. The fact is that money that could go to help support families with children in this country is being taken away from them, plus some more, in order for it to be sent to Africa to palliate the feelings of guilt that afflict White liberals in the West.
Such policies make sense only in a context where equality is regarded as a moral good, for there is no logical justification for keeping open, and indeed increasing the budget for, a Department for International Development, an organisation predicated on the White man’s guilt at being better off than folk elsewhere in the world, in an age when deficit reduction is a priority and citizens are being forced to make sacrifices, paying higher taxes in exchange for less—or, to put it more bluntly, being forced to foot the bill for the ignorance, incompetence, profligacy, dishonesty, and base opportunism of a handful of spectacularly useless politicians.
Given the incessant talk of fairness we hear from proponents of the egalitarian ideologies of liberalism and Marxism, it is ironic that the profoundly unfair situation highlighted above has its root precisely in egalitarian morality.
Or is it really? Because seems to me that unfairness is part and parcel of the pursuit of equality, because equality cannot be attained without being unfair to someone.
A Potemkin Village of Individual Delusions
When a Russian general wanted to fool an Empress, he constructed fake villages that showcased an idyllic life for their inhabitants and concealed the less pleasant actuality. Culturally, the world has accepted a Potemkin village as the concept that those in power can craft a fake reality in order to dissuade oversight.
However, we live in a postmodern age. Starting with Nietzsche’s critique of language in On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, and accelerating through French interpretations of that idea, postmodernism is defined by the lack of a narrative. There is no one truth. There is no king. There is no culture. There is only personal whim and group need.
What makes this fascinating is that it induces us to create our own Potemkin villages. Like a good salesperson, the postmodern state tells us all about our “freedom.” This fills our heads with visions of joys, pleasures and distractions. We then do what we are told is necessary in order to achieve that end.
As time goes on, we realize this world is a Potemkin village in that it is false functionality that isn’t even needed. To include everyone at the office, we have divided jobs into tiny roles. Because we have made tons of regulations, so that anyone can just follow the instructions and do almost any job, it is a mind-numbing maze of the stuff that makes life least fun: paperwork, explaining difficult concepts to disinterested people, confrontation, waiting. How many of these jobs are necessary? How many could we combine into one, and send everyone else home? And yet money is freedom, so we all want them, which makes them pay less and thus, makes each one require less engagement from us.
What about our great society? Its art is a wasteland. Its culture is products for the distracted. While there are many good people out there, they appear as a minority while we circumnavigate the selfish, distracted, delusional, resentful and hopeless cases who wander around like ghosts. Where are the great joys of this life? Were all of those good things part of the Potemkin village?
Yes: they got us to look in the wrong places. Joy does not come from social interaction, nor from owning things. Work is not what other people tell you to do, but what you notice needs doing. Public behavior is not about what you can get, or get away with, but how to make sure you get what you give, and thus that you give enough to have goodwill wherever you go.
Once upon a time, we had a single society. Appearance fit reality because the purpose of that society was to tie parts of reality together using concepts of divinity and natural order. Then our egos rose up, and we decided that we wanted no order to rule over us, even a natural and detached one, and so we came up with a civilization based on every person doing what they want. We sold it to each other with Potemkin images, symbols, language and concepts.
It ended up being fake like all other such illusions. We believed because we wanted to, and now in the span of only two centuries we have seen our societies go from elegant to crass, our people from stout-hearted to craven and resentful, and our daily experience of life from real to a fake and meaningless repetition. Clearly, we outsmarted ourselves.
STIHIE: When Donkeys Mate With Elephants
People had better get used to it: Ramzpaul is never going to run out of material for his hilarious videos (see video tab). This is because America has long since passed the point of no return on the road to Absurdistan.
In this latest case, a sperm donor is being forced to pay child support to a lesbian couple even though the three of them had signed a contract in which the biological "father" had been excluded from parental rights and exempted from financial liabilities. A legal technicality means that the state was able to stick the donor with the child support tab. But the real funny thing here is that this is yet another example of Red State traditional family values being sheet-welded onto Blue State sexual liberation identitarianism.
Once upon a time, gay liberation used to be about freeing oneself from the necessity of "living lies" and having to "act straight," but now it increasingly means homos behaving like heteros, which means they think they have to get married and raise families with actual kids! Before the sperm donation – a limited reversion to the natural order – these two lesbians were fostering a number of children, with each of them taking on a different parental role: Ma Lesbian and Pa Lesbian. Not surprisingly, their relationship broke down when Ma Lesbian took things to the next logical step, and found an actual man.
America is the land of the freewheeling Democrat donkey, but it is also the land of the culturally conservative Republican elephant. As the fiscal cliff agreement so recently demonstrated, these two beasts are occasionally thrown into godless union. In gender politics, too, it seems that the Elephant has lain down with the Donkey, spawning yet more, ugly, misshapen, mutant offspring to darken the face of the Earth.
A Modest Proposal for Gun-Shunners
In his article “Police State Progressives,” Jack Donovan echoes so many of my own thoughts on the post-Newtown American Zeitgeist that I am tempted to quip that he stole my gunfire on the subject. Liberals, he finds, don’t really care for the notion of power being granted to “the people”—they have learned to stop worrying and love the state. Of course, were the face of Big Brother still revealed in the smirking frat-boy features of George W. Bush instead of the shining, godlike countenance of mulatto rainbow wonderboy Barack Obama, chances are the libs would have a far harder time carrying on their love affair. (Even though the policies of the two men aren’t markedly different, image is indeed everything when it comes to today’s facile state-smitten progressives.)
Pointing out the smelly hypocrisy of liberal-left rhetoric, of course, is a full-time job, and I am already gainfully employed, so I won’t delve too deeply into the bogus and tiresome invitations to take part in a “national conversation” on guns. Suffice to say that I respectfully decline the offer to join this so-called “dialogue,” because I know specious, disingenuous blather when I hear it. When media and academic elites wish to conduct town hall meetings in some quaint invocation of populist democracy, it’s easy enough to catch a whiff of the ubiquitous, proverbial rat. Liberals don’t want a “dialogue” on guns any more than they have ever really wanted to engage in a “dialogue” on race. Rather, they want to lecture us benighted ones (be we gun owners or race realists) on the error of our ways, and help us to see the light that they so graciously carry for our benefit.
In short, were the standard liberal more prone to enter into this “dialogue” with an open mind—i.e., with the idea that maybe, just maybe, he might learn something from the non-liberal, rather than merely entering the fray with the aim of being a “consciousness-raiser,” a conduit through which his enemy, whom he loathes and smugly regards as a stupid gun-toting racist redneck-- finally gets enlightened, then the prospect of engaging in a dialogue with said liberal would seem slightly more enticing. Until such time, I’d just as soon engage in “dialogue” with one of my gun range targets.
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It is in the psychology of the self-righteous to be prone to rhetorical overreach. The Newtown massacre has brought out the human tendency towards scapegoating and witch-hunting which gets freely and hyperbolically indulged after a horrifying and traumatic event takes place. In a way, such reactions are understandable, and as a parent myself, I am willing to cut fellow raisers of children some slack on this front. No one wants to feel helpless, and everyone wants to “do something,” to “demand a plan,” particularly when we fear for the safety of the most vulnerable among us. Thus, when a upstate New York newspaper recently published the names and addresses of state-registered gun-owning residents in the area, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Why not shame these law-abiding people for being part of America’s “gun culture,” and thus complicit in the mass murder of 20 children by a deranged psychopath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut? We have to “do something,” after all!
It probably surprised the originators of this idea when they discerned the massive backlash they’d provoked, and the likely harm they did to their cause, by treating gun owners as if they were vile people to be shunned and ostracized, something like child molesters. Reports on the story afterwards from other news outlets were a display in damage control: perhaps it was an error in judgment to run the report “outing” area gun owners, we were told, but after all, the news outlet meant well, so please forgive them!
We see a case-in-point here of hysterical sanctimony run amok, but of course as usual the controversy generates more heat than light. Much as this news station attempted to shame and vilify its “targets,” they probably did these people a service.
After all, for all of the tired talk of American “gun culture” being to blame for the random violent acts of lunatics, chances are that in a society experiencing upheaval, tumult, and chaos, having a gun handy in fact enhances one’s security a good deal. And I strongly suspect that, deep down, even the most vociferous gun-control advocates know that bad men, be they disreputable outlaws or tyrannical agents of the state, are far more likely to victimize and oppress the unarmed than those with a means of protecting themselves and their families from attack. Thus, in outing the dastardly possessors of firearms and attempting to tar them with an aura of ignominy, the overzealous New York newsmen inadvertently gave word to the criminal element: if you’re a ruthless, amoral creep with a yen to break into someone’s house to rob, rape, or otherwise wreak havoc, then for heaven’s sake don’t visit any of these addresses. You might, after all, get shot before you can carry out your depredations!
But perhaps I am wrong on this score. Maybe, in fact, those most zealous to disarm and render vulnerable their fellow citizens truly believe that being defenseless makes them safer. If this is so, I’d like to issue an open invitation to all gun-control enthusiasts. Stand up and be counted, oh annointed ones! Lead by example! If you wish to bring about universal disarmament, then in the comment section below, please let the world know who you are, where you live, and a full list of the valuables you store in your home. Please make it absolutely clear that you have no guns whatsoever anywhere on your person or your property... Surely you have nothing to fear in speaking up thusly, if, as you constantly tell us, the presence of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens only makes the world more unsafe, and the absence of guns discourages the commission of violent crime!
Reflections, Ritalin and Resolutions
Much as I felt the call of Scrooge in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I was thwarted by great friends, a loving family, and a few events that conspired to defeat my inner curmudgeon. As enjoyable as Christmas proved to be for me, my favorite time is the week between Christmas and the New Year. This period is marked by a deep quiet that lends itself to reflection and plans for the coming year. Being American I have a terribly short attention span, so I found myself reflecting mostly on this last month of the year.
Shortly before Christmas I was treated to a concert put on by the famous YouTube duet, The Piano Guys. The audience was 99.9% homogenous - white and Mormon to the core. I suspect I was the only non-Mormon there. Besides the racial component, the evening was significant to me because it was the first night of the Christmas season that I actually felt a twinge of that thing they call the Christmas spirit. Toward the end of the show the audience began singing Silent Night, and I couldn’t help but hear that every one of the two-thousand people there meant every word they sang. It was beautiful, truly. I won’t delve into the problems I have with Mormonism but it is impressive how this group, through their own fantasy view of Jesus and the early Americas, is doing exactly what white nationalists of all stripes can’t seem to advance beyond the planning phase with all of their studies, statistics, and supporting news articles – that is, building a Whitopia.
December was also marred by the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school. As a parent, the sympathy I felt for the mothers and fathers of the twenty slain children ran deep, and yet I know what I imagine of their horror doesn’t come close to what those men and women feel today and for the rest of their days. To have those emotions battered around by calls for gun control, re-examination of mental health in this country, and critiques of the influence of media and video games on children must be maddening. But it is inevitable.
Like everyone, my disgust for Adam Lanza runs through to my core. If any carcass deserves to be run through a wood-chipper and dumped in the local landfill it’s his. And yet I can’t help but wonder, was Adam Lanza a closet Traditionalist? I won’t call him a young man because manhood is discouraged in our society and I expect this was especially so in his case. He was an animal that finally broke his chain. From the sound of it he did this often to his captors, his parents and mother in particular, in less dramatic ways but in ways that prompted the woman to explore institutionalizing her son. I know I risk playing armchair psychologist here but it seems to me Adam Lanza did not have a disease, he had a cage.
The Modern world assigned a label to a boy; a label that didn’t exist when many of us were kids. It determined that this kid suffered a pathology, as it has done with hundreds of thousands of (mostly) boys in the West. Never did we stop to ask if these kids were just reacting normally to a pathological society. The Traditionalists have known this to be the case all along.
Then we learn of Lanza’s main means of escape; he was an avid video game player. ADDICTED, no doubt! The sheep begin to bleat, “Video games must cause anti-social behavior.” There might be a case to make for that, but is it also possible that in an anti-social world where casual conversation must be internally monitored by PC-programming, where wishing someone a Merry Christmas can get you fired from your job, where expressing attraction toward the wrong person can land you in court, that maybe video game worlds are just the market’s way of providing a virtual world where a kid, or adult for that matter, can finally, freely, express himself?
It’s interesting to me, and keep in mind I am largely unfamiliar with the gaming world being from the Pong and Space Invaders generation, that the games I seem to hear about most are either first-person shoot ‘em up games, representing a chance to vent against dehumanized humans, or fantasy worlds decorated generously with Traditionalist themes – hierarchy, rites of passage, heroism, monarchy, holy or elite orders, priest and warrior castes, and the existence of extra-material worlds and beings. Some of the biggest franchises in the video gaming industry, HALO and The Elder Scrolls being two that I am aware of, are overflowing with the Traditional. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are many more. Unfortunately, there will be many more Adam Lanzas because these kids haven’t figured out how to vent the way we have against this sick world. The contrast between the world they feel “should be” and the one they live in is too much for some of them. I imagine being at a tender age where fitting in with your peers is important just compounds the stress. The rest of us write, we Facebook, we pray, we learn to be at peace with the Kali Yuga, we research, discuss and argue. They play their video games, but then what? And why those games? We can’t dismiss it all to marketing can we? Fortunes are spent advertising games attached to otherwise successful movies and comics that go nowhere in the gamer world. Why?
Mormons making Whitopias while playing multiculty ball with our elites . . .
Video game companies either turning these kids into Throne and Altar types, or exposing them for the Throne and Alter types they already are (without any real world thrones or altars to kneel before) . . .
What’s going on here?
Despite all of our lamentations and commentary I believe there is reason for the Alternative Right community to feel some hope. Without even trying, real entities are capitalizing on our worldview, not because they like our arguments, but because they, and we, value what Nature demands. The video gamers see in their games a world of truth. They know equality is bunk. They know real living means setting yourself apart from the crowd through discipline and perseverance, by climbing the ranks. They know a real life if not one lived for yourself but one lived in service to your God, your people, your community, and your family. The Mormons talk a good talk about multiracialism, but when it comes down to it they are strictly monocultural and that culture is one that attracts whites and repels non-whites. It’s as simple as that. They do this despite ridicule and protests. They don’t let the shower of scorn beat them down. Instead they build businesses, they live, and they have lots of children who they pass these values down to.
In 2013 I’ll continue to rend and gnash, via the pen, because that’s what I like to do. But I see now that our future is not as hopeless as I had once believed, so I’ll resolve to make note of these triumphs, as accidental as they may be. I see also that we have more support for our worldview than I had once thought, even if the supporters are unaware of us or our cause just now. New avenues of escape for these lost, suffering kids can be created with a little Mormon tenacity and a little willingness to live those Traditional truths, quirky as they may seem to Modern eyes, so I’ll resolve to not just write of a path but to actually get around to building one this year. Resolutions are born partly of determination and partly of hope. It is my hope that many of you join me or resolve to build some avenues of your own in 2013.
Happy New Year to you all!
The End of the World -- 2013 Edition
To celebrate 2013, Andy, Colin, and Richard look back on the year that was and forward to that which will be. Highlights include a tribute to Jonathan Bowden, lists of favorite books and movies of 2012, and predictions for 2013—as well as a discussion of the nature of prediction itself.
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