Amerika-in-Exile (the Tulio Baars Homepage)

We live in a time of invisible insanity . On the surface, we have wealth, power, and technology; underneath, we see how a lack of social order has made people revert to the cruder ways of existence and become manipulative. There is very little trust because people do not share values in common, an identity, or even a sense of purpose; everyone exists for himself alone and denies any order larger than the human individual. Individualists hate social order because as soon as you have standards, you have a hierarchy based on who meets those standards. This means that social order tells people NO! in response to some actions they might contemplate, and they hate that, because the individualist in humanity resents any order -- even nature, logic, and fact -- above that of their own intentions. People have an inbuilt backdoor to their minds. We are self-pitying because we are aware of mortality and the smallness of our existence, including the limited amount of effect that we can have...

This Memorial Day weekend, it seems everyone is staying at home. The sales at the stores are not great, nor does there seem to be much excitement, but a fair number of people seem to be buying alcohol. The cookouts that made this such an odd holiday are gone as well; no more groups of neighbors, watery overpriced beer in hand, standing around a smoking grille and talking as if they knew each other. We cannot claim to be surprised by this, really, since national holidays have sort of faded away over the past couple years. It started with Halloween, when the people from outside the neighborhood drove so many kids to get candy that our subdivision basically just turned on the sprinklers and turned off the lights. Then other holidays faded too. We had nothing in common, so why celebrate them? To your average "American" at this point, Memorial Day means a four-day weekend and nothing more. Soldiers who died fighting for -- well, what, really? Abstractions like freedom and de...

Long ago, Asia wanted to conquer the West. Its first foray, through Mongols, had gone well until it became clear that resistance would be too strong and thus, the invasion too costly. In the grand tradition of plotting over tea and chess, the overlords of Asia met with clasped hands and faintly glowing dark eyes. "We cannot challenge them directly, so instead we will follow the most devious of strategies: we will turn them against themselves," said one Minister from deep in the rolling hills. "How can this be done?" asked another. The Minister from the city spoke up: "We will use two strokes of the axe: first, we will spread the worst of our own society to them, and then, we will turn them against themselves by making them compete against us to be more like us." As he explained his plans, the others agreed: this was indeed a subterfuge of many subtle layers, misdirections, deceptions, deflections, camouflage, and obfuscation! It made them feel in...

On the Right, Jordan Peterson proves contentious. He came from the same generation of what we might call "Alt Lite Plus" figures who argue for expanded classical liberalism, meaning that we should tolerate non-Leftist opinion as well as politically correct ones. This proved enough to set the Regime on the defensive, since his approach mirrors the one they used to force their way into all the institutions of the West: he says that, if the Left are in favor of freedom and equality, they should be perfectly happy allowing conservative lives to matter, too. An effective gambit in an early stage of an argument, Peterson's theory basically says, "Hey, we all agree on equality. Since you agree, you will allow us to be conservative and talk about it in public, too?" He is attacking that zone of ambiguity caused by the fact that freedom and equality require one another. For people to have freedom, we have to believe in equality or admit that the lower half of soci...