Category: What He Said

“Why did you do this?”

New Right Media Putin Ukraine What He Said 69 Comments

The Tucker Carlson interview of Vladmir Putin.

30 minutes in, this is a fascinating watch.

59 minutes in, Canada gets a shout out!

1:21: Whoo boy, the undermining of the USD as the world’s reserve currency comes up and it’s brutal.

Pretty good interview, unless you still retained a faint hope that our Western leaders were Putin’s intellectual equal, then … whoo boy.

Update: The interview has nearly 45 million views on X in 4 hours.

QOTD

What He Said 29 Comments

In the long civilizational struggle — especially in the West — between the “progressive” forces of “Why not?” and the protective “Why?” of conservatives, the victory of the former always signals the death not only of the latter but of both parties. Like the scorpion stinging the rescuing frog to death in the middle of the pond, thus dooming them both, they simply cannot help themselves. It’s in their nature to tear down, ransack, and destroy, even at the cost of their own existence. This weakness-from-within is how civilizations fall (Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, speaks of it as “effeminacy”) and it’s repeated itself so many times over the course of the past two thousand-plus years you’d think we’d learn by now. But you would be wrong.

The Iron Rule

Basic Dictatorship What He Said 17 Comments

Another good essay at Anarchonomicon: On the Origin of All Political Authority

You lose to tony Soprano in a game of cards, can’t afford to pay him?

He sets an interest rate. Still won’t Pay?

He’ll show up to bust out your business make you take out loans you can’t pay to pay him, make you purchase good online for him to resell, and make you destroy your life in fraudulent loans, til nothing is left…

And if you refuse or lie to him he’ll get violent. He’ll beat you, and if you over violence in turn and resist… maybe even win the fistfight with him and his goons…

He’ll either shoot you then and there, or he’ll leave and you’ll be shot by a henchman who can’t be tied to him.

Featured Comments

What He Said 23 Comments

From this thread, posted earlier today.

I spent many years with the MOF Initial Attack in the BC interior and live there still. It’s difficult to describe how much things have changed from the days when all able-bodied males could be drafted to fight fire. Your choice was go to the fire or go to jail. Thankfully that doesn’t happen anymore but the old idea that you had to establish control on a fire by 10:00 has gone out the window as official policy. This allows fires to build up quite nicely as heat of the day progresses. Also, no one can set foot on a fire until an official has examined it for any safety problems. My friends in the logging industry can’t legally touch a fire except maybe one that starts on the landing, but lightning strikes – no way.

So, those are just a few of the myriad of problems that I have seen in the last several years which result in fires burning for weeks without anyone around and then when the wind kicks up like it did in BC in the last few weeks and days all hell breaks loose. This is a disaster that has been brewing for years and has now blown up. Of course, after the last Kelowna fire an inquiry was held and things got worse, not better. Will the latest round result in changes? I honestly don’t know.

This one, too.

I was a professional forester and worked in the forest industry on the Coast since 1974. When I started, we were progressively clear cutting which meant that we could design a logging block adjacent to a previous block only after it had been considered “abated” which means the fine fuels in the slash had either been burned off or decayed and “greened up” to where there was little chance of a ground fire spreading. We could continue to do this up until we came up to the next primary fire break which consisted of an old growth vertical corridor half a mile wide transecting an entire valley (spaced every few miles) which slowed or stopped most fires quite well. We burned a lot of slash which lowered the risk of fire spread. It meant that during fall and increasingly in the spring there was fire smoke around. As the public complained, we did less burning until we eventually did virtually none and as of 5 years ago the regulations around air quality made broadcast burning next to impossible. Successive governments pressured by the public forced cut blocks to become smaller and more scattered which may have looked better but resulted in more wind felled and destroyed timber, less opportunity to safely burn slash and higher risks from pests. The industry has lost most of its people who had fire fighting experience and rely more on government forest service to take that on. My only advice is that people need to know that they can choose their poison: more smoke in the off season or a lot more smoke and damage during the fire season. I did a consulting project a few years after the last major fire fried the Eastern hills of Kelowna on the status of municipal progress in fire-proofing communities and one of my conclusions was that the public didn’t want to see the kind of measures taken that could address some of the risk. Politicians scramble to get in front of the mob.

DARVO

Groomers The Tolerant Left What He Said 24 Comments

James Lindsay (9 minutes).

There’s an abusive tactic commonly used by abusers, both intentionally and unintentionally, that goes by the name “DARVO.” DARVO is an acronym that means “Deny, Attack, Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender,” and it is very common with narcissists, psychopaths, and borderline personalities. A huge amount of Woke Marxist activism and Theory is DARVO, hence the solidity of the “Iron Law of Woke Projection.” In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay explains DARVO and its relevance to Woke Marxism. Join him to learn to stop being abused by it.

Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence

Historical Events Trump What He Said 35 Comments

“Pokemon-Go-to-the-polls”

Oratory is pretty much a dead art. The idea that great speeches could somehow change the world seems laughably quaint now, something adult-cartoons like South Park use as an absurd 4th Wall Break/Dues Ex Machina to wrap up a 20 minute episode.

You’ll read historical accounts of some great speech defining an era, or being recorded by eager hands that it might be printed, purchased, and read across a country or oceans, or actively moving a crowd or parliament such that history is changed by the speech… And it’s almost completely incomprehensible to anyone today.

Sure we’ll read or watch Shakespeare and experience Marc Antony launch a coup by moving the crowds, or we’ll watch a Hollywood movie and see Aragorn, or some lesser character rally an army…

But these are fantastical stories for children. This isn’t Hollywood. Speeches don’t move history. It’s not some impassioned words by whatever State Department asset before congress that determines whether the American military will start a “police action” or whether we’ll have “Diplomacy”… its whether Raytheon and Lockheed Martin donated enough to right politicians last cycle.

And, in the back of our mind, we pretty much believe this is how its always been.

Sure historians might say Marc Antony actually did rally a crowd that was against him, or a a king rally a failing army; But we find it far more plausible to imagine they placed their chosen men and thugs to enforce their will, or that they bribed the right people at the right time.

This is the best thing I’ve read since I don’t know when. Grab a coffee and settle in for some fun.

“Against the dehumanization of art”

The Arts What He Said 70 Comments

“Bumped”, I suppose you could say. Because I was reminded of it.

This post was originally published April 19, 2008. The New Criterion link has expired, but you can still read it here. Take your time. Read the comments, too.

“When I was in the army, many years ago, I was an infantryman, and in the course of what I saw, and did, and came to understand, I was broken. Sometime after I had returned to the United States and my life had resumed, I rounded a corner in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw a painting I had known all my life but which I had not until that moment been able to understand. This was Winslow Homer’s masterfully restrained portrait of a veteran returning to his fields. The generation touched by fire in the Civil War understood the great import of this painting, they knew why the veteran had his back turned to the painter, why he was alone, why he worked in utter quiet, why the light was so clear, the scene so tranquil. After years of war and destruction, they understood, and after having passed this painting for the first time as a man, so did I.”

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