Damian

About Damian

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Damian :

No Man But a Bloghead Ever Wrote Except for Money

By in socmed, writing No Comments

Alan Jacobs:

And while I don’t want to bring back the blogosphere, I definitely want to bring back the blog.

Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

Let’s bring back the blog. And leave all the bad things spawned by the blogosphere to social media, where they belong.

They already did that. It’s called Substack. That’s the big difference these days — most people who write at any length want to be paid for it. The “reply guys” on social media have never, and will never, have any interesting thoughts, let alone a desire to write about them. But seriously, what does this even mean, “bring back the blog”? What’s with this urge to proselytize? Just a few paragraphs earlier, he writes:

And while many of the old-school blogs are dead and gone, a surprising number of them remain active, and still have a multitude of commenters. It turns out that social media did not kill blogs, but just co-opted the discourse about blogs. Once journalists got addicted to Twitter, they stopped paying attention to what was happening elsewhere — but that didn’t stop it from happening.

Yes, exactly. Those gentlemen amateurs are still around, doing their thing. They just aren’t the object of media fascination anymore, and thank goodness. Why would anyone want that to return? At most, you’re just going to make blogs into another lo-fi status symbol, the vinyl records of online writing, and personally, I’d rather be ignored and overlooked. In a few years, when everyone has microchips implanted in their frontal lobes, there will probably be a new form of direct, wireless communication between brains, and the media will publish a thousand fawning pieces about how the kids are communicating by “brainwaving” these days, and the early adopters will hype how many problems will be solved by brainwaving, and maybe a decade or so later, the media will start obsessing about how brainwaving actually has a bunch of downsides that no one ever anticipated, and through it all, there will continue to be a small number of people who enjoy organizing their thoughts in the form of miniature essays, aphorisms, and epigrams, unconcerned by whatever shiny object the gens du monde are running after now, as it should be. Let sleeping blogs lie.

Books, Huh! What Are They Good For?

By in books, history 2 Comments

To put things in perspective, consider that in 1907 the Social-Democratic Party had a membership of around 150,000. The Skopts, a millennarian sect who believed that salvation would come once they had managed to castrate 144,000 people, had around 100,000 members during the same period. Even at its peak, then, Marxism was not that much more popular than crushing men’s testicles between hot plates, a method of castration practiced by the sect. By 1910, it was much less popular, as membership of the Russian Social-Democrats had dropped to 10,000: it took a combination of both its squabbling factions to equal a tenth of the Skopts’ total.

— Daniel Kalder, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy

I remember reading a review by Theodore Dalrymple of Kalder’s book some time ago, so when I saw a copy at a library sale this past spring, I grabbed it. I’m sorry I let so much time elapse before finally starting on it, because this book is hilarious. Kalder has such a mordant wit, which I suppose you need if you’re going to subject yourself to reading the literary output of 20th-century dictators and summarizing it. He started from the puzzlement over the fact that these men, who achieved levels of power and influence akin to minor deities, produced the most unimaginably tedious writings. How could these gods among men be so incredibly boring, so bereft of insight? He notices the curious fact that most dictators start as writers, to which he attributes the megalomaniacal obsession with the awesome significance of their own words. He makes the counterintuitive case against literacy, arguing that the history of last century would surely have been better had Stalin gone on to be a drunken yokel cobbler like his father, rather than be sent to seminary to learn to read and eventually discover the works of Marx and Lenin. I think his tongue is mostly in his cheek, but then again, looking around at so many overeducated mediocrities causing so much trouble, maybe he’s on to something. Anyway, I’m not even finished with it yet, but it’s already one of my favorite books of the year.

A Storm’s a-Brewin’

By in free speech, juxtapositions, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Canada’s justice minister is considering options raised by the independent adviser on unmarked graves, who says Indigenous leaders want Canada to move on criminalizing residential school denialism.

Kimberly Murray called on lawmakers to consider “legal mechanisms” that could address the practice of denying or minimizing the abuses Indigenous children suffered at residential schools in her interim report released back in June.

One way to do that is by amending the Criminal Code to criminalize such actions, Murray said in a recent interview, noting Ottawa did so last year on the issue of Holocaust denialism.

“We could do the same for Indigenous people,” she said. “Make it an offence to incite hate and promote hate against Indigenous people by … denying that residential (schools) happened or downplaying what happened in the institutions.”

“Everybody in leadership when I speak about this, Indigenous leadership, … all want that amendment to happen in the Criminal Code.”

— CTV News

****

Riots broke out in Dublin on Thursday evening, after an Algerian immigrant stabbed a woman and three children outside an Irish-language school earlier in the day. Police arrested more than 30 rioters, some of whom looted shops and lit cars and buses on fire during their rampage through central Dublin. Ireland’s police chief blamed the rioting on a “lunatic, hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology,” which, however true of the property destruction, obscures the tensions that have been building for some time over Ireland’s generous immigration and asylum policies. From April 2022 to April 2023, Ireland, with a population just over 5 million, admitted more than 140,000 immigrants, and the foreign-born share of its population has risen from just over 6% in the mid-’90s to about 20% today. In February, Irish police reported an “exponential” increase in protests in 2023, many of them related to immigration.

Now the Irish government, led by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, is using the riots as an excuse to renew a push to pass a draconian hate-speech law that would criminalize, among other things, the possession of “hateful” content on personal electronic devices, which police would be empowered to seize and search. Irish police are also reportedly investigating Conor McGregor for a series of high-profile social media posts on Thursday in which the professional fighter criticized government immigration policy and the police response to the stabbing attack.

— The Scroll

****

The modern Left espoused a radical version of Jeffersonian individualism. Born at Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, it considered the primary threat to democracy to lie in the great hierarchical institutions like the university, the corporation, and government. The struggle pitted the individual against the machine-like inhumanity of the industrial age. Mario Savio, the movement’s leader, told his comrades: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop.”

A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.

Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.

— Martin Gurri

 

Talking In a Sane and Cheerful Way to the World

By in socmed, writing No Comments

Cal Newport:

Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts about the internet. “I love blogging. I blog less now in the era of microblogging,” Gaiman explained, referring to his famously long-running online journal hosted at neilgaiman.com. “I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.”

Newport and Gaiman hope for a return to the glory days of blogging. The practice of amateur essay writing will always be around in some form, but “blogging” per se was always a function of Web 2.0. It was trendy because the technological platform was trendy. Technology will move on, and the gens du monde will remain fascinated by it in whatever shiny new form it takes next, but they’re not going to become interested in blog posts again. Which is fine, of course — if you’re not after fame and riches, there’s absolutely no reason to want viral readership numbers. As we all should know by now, the rule for reading popular sites with comment sections is the same as the one for crossing swaying rope bridges: don’t look down.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to say is that “talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world” is a pretty good description of blogging at its best.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Conjoin ‘Em

By in foolosophy, ohferfucksake No Comments

I vaguely remember a wry observation that essentially said most internet thinkpieces can be reduced to two templates: “X is overrated,” or “X is underrated.” I would add a third, “Everyone is doing X wrong.” This is the formula chosen by Kathleen Stock for her contrarian take on gratitude, published at Thanksgiving for maximum provocation. Gratitude done properly, you see, requires a specific benefactor to whom you feel grateful. Stock, a former professor of philosophy who has done nothing to raise the discipline’s esteem in my eyes, thinks that being grateful in a bland, generic sense has become the trademark of yoga teachers, Instagram influencers, and people who want to humblebrag about their privilege — eew, those people. (Clear identification of the outgroup is also a necessary ingredient in this genre.) I mean, I’m sure there are vapid twits who invoke gratitude in a superficial way, but if you encounter so many of them, maybe this just says more about your online browsing habits than it does about significant trends. In any event, I guess I’m just glad that they’re trying, however ineptly, to model an appreciation for their good fortune. Fake it till you make it, and all that.

There are more sinister effects, though. It seems that hashtag-gratitude has an evil shadow:

It surely will not have escaped your notice that there is very little good news around — a state of affairs obviously not helped by awful wars, but not wholly caused by them either. Declinism and doom-mongering are in vogue everywhere you look; and, though they take on different flavours on the Left and Right, the net result is still bloody depressing. Whether it’s the collapse of the environment and the implacable rise of bigotry, or the collapse of Western civilisation and the implacable rise of cultural Marxism, there’s not much out there to put a spring in your step. In fact, it’s almost as if all the despairing and all the gratitude were two sides of the same psychically dysfunctional coin.

“Almost as if.” Nice hedge. She goes on to say:

When gratitude loses its moorings from a proper relation to another person’s intention and responsibility, we end up with nice vibes. When resentment does the same, we end up with increasing amounts of conspiratorial rage. And unfortunately for us, the former doesn’t seem to have the power to cancel out the latter.

Now, I’m not a former, current, or future professor of philosophy, so I don’t know if there’s an already-named fallacy on display here, but it seems to me that if you want to say that unfocused gratitude is somehow directly related to unfocused resentment, with one perhaps causing the other, or both springing from the same source, you’d have to offer some sort of actual argument. Instead, she relies on what I think of as the “argument from aesthetic symmetry” — i.e., you just claim that these two things are “two sides of the same coin,” perfectly balanced and inseparable. Or you portray them as two combatants in a zero-sum battle. The rhetorical image does all the work of argument (what little of it there is in such an impressionistic piece). Many of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams use that same formulaic symmetry to give the illusion of depth. Speaking of which, be sure to read more in my upcoming essay on Unherd, “Why Oscar Wilde Is Overrated.”

Happy Thanksgaining

By in battling personal entropy 2 Comments

Originally, I planned to squat 405 pounds back in the spring, but a Baker’s cyst behind my knee, and possibly a small meniscus tear, forced a delay in proceedings. It’s fitting that I finally accomplished it tonight, I suppose.

Againstism

By in the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Why isn’t this a problem? I find this question genuinely fascinating. What is it about those ideas being expressed by someone foreign — someone who can plausibly (albeit stupidly) be cast as a victim — that causes otherwise exquisitely sensitive people to completely gloss over them? In quotidian American politics, the most inconsequential of sentiments are routinely cast as being a part of the “white, male, cisgendered hegemony.” But Osama bin Laden starts talking about the evils of homosexuality and fornication, about the fusing of church and state, and about “complete submission to His Law,” and it’s just . . . ignored.

This same trend has been on display at many of the anti-Israel protests, where I’ve seen quite a lot of people wearing T-shirts that read, “Queers for Palestine” or “LGBT for Hamas” or what you will. It’s utterly delusional — almost to the point of pride. This is your brain on intersectionality. How to fight back remains anyone’s guess.

I feel like I’ve seen this a lot lately: people peering into the void of wokeness and attempting to discern the core of it, the ruling principle. But I’m here to tell them to stop wasting their time. There’s nothing there beyond what I think of as “againstism.” The emotional fuel of it, as Nietzsche always said, is resentment. But intellectually, there’s nothing of substance there. The point is simply to be against anything perceived to be established, successful, dominant, or powerful — whiteness, heterosexuality, capitalism, America, the West, etc. It’s the perpetual rage of the spoiled adolescent who has never had to consider how much comfort and security he takes for granted even as he blindly flails against it. Why do we find Western libertines supporting Islamic terrorism? Because it’s also against everything they resent. Why do we find trust-fund brats advocating for Communism? Say it with me now: it’s also against everything they resent. What the hell does it mean when we see signs about “reproductive justice” at anti-Israel protests, or when a kid famous for refusing to go to school anymore leads a chant of “no climate justice on occupied land”? It just means that countless resentments can fit inside a pinhead. We’re against it all! The Coalition of the Oppressed is made up of multiple marriages of convenience with nothing in common but an enemy, marriages which can be annulled on a whim. Jews are favored against right-wing populists, but disfavored against Muslims, who in turn become villains when they protest against gender ideology in schools. That same gender ideology trumps the TERFs formerly known as feminists, who were in favor when battling against patriarchy. It’s an intersectional version of rock, paper, scissors, or maybe musical chairs, or perhaps Calvinball. If the Western white male capitalist didn’t exist, he’d have to be invented just to act as a centripetal force.

The Things We Do For Love

By in atheism, foolosophy, religion No Comments

Man must either fall in love
with Someone or Something,
or else fall ill.

— W.H. Auden

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

We had the annual charity women’s powerlifting event at the gym yesterday. The Lady of the House handled the spreadsheet duties, as usual, and this year she generously volunteered my services to help with spotting and loading the bar. A good time was had by all, though it was a bit disconcerting for me, an average student in math, to have the other guys ask me to check behind them to make sure they loaded the correct plates. Still, under my stewardship, the weights were all correct and the squat rack was adjusted to the correct height each time, so it was a personal success.

Before we started, everyone involved gathered in the group fitness room for a few quick words of encouragement, followed by a brief prayer. The gym owner thanked the Lord for our health and the ability to “do what we love here today,” and asked to keep us safe (given the date, there were words of thanks for our veterans as well). Of course, I’m all for expressions of gratitude, even if I don’t believe in the literal existence of the intended recipient. The ritual, the habit, of being appreciative is good enough for me. I looked at the two ladies in front of me, their heads bowed, one woman’s arm across the other’s shoulder, their other hands clasping those of the women beside them, and thought However we got here, it’s good to see it. Personally, I can reinterpret Christian ideas and practices in a symbolic or metaphorical way, but one way in which I differ from the spiritual-not-religious is that I think it would be condescending to act as if I understand the true symbolic essence of the faith, while all those devout believers are just benighted. I respect the truth claims enough to openly say I disagree with them and call myself an atheist, even if that raises someone’s ire, rather than act like a cuckoo, secretly laying my eggs in Christian nests.

I’m sure Hirsi Ali’s announcement will ruffle some rational feathers. Stuart Ritchie calls it “daft” and wonders how she could possibly be ignorant of all the obvious rebuttals to these silly, uniformly terrible arguments. Well, I don’t know exactly how one would go about arguing decisively, pro or con, that the West is becoming dangerously decadent, self-loathing, and incapable of withstanding challenges from its enemies. How would one “prove” that our nation has used up its allotted great deal of ruin, except after the fact? Likewise, as with Athens and Jerusalem, what does argument have to do with a desire for spiritual solace?  There are certainly many conversations to be had there, but what do I care if we ultimately arrive at different conclusions? She may be incorrect, but is she wrong? I’ll resist the urge to elaborate and trust that you get the distinction I’m making.

If Hirsi Ali were a friend of mine, I would say something like this: most of what you see as good and beautiful, I do, too. I can’t tell you how to handle your need for solace; all I can say is that in my own case, my resolution to the existential angst of my youth didn’t come in the form of an answer, like a religious doctrine, but in the realization that I’d been asking all the wrong questions. The angst disappeared on its own, just like the frustration before I realized I’d been reading the instructions wrong while trying to assemble the bookcase. Of course that bolt doesn’t fit there! This may be more of a logical or intellectual approach than you’re looking for, but hey, there’s a spiritual version of that, too.

As for the meaning and purpose of life, well, I think it’s partially the wrong question, in the sense that meaning and purpose aren’t “out there,” pre-existing, waiting to be discovered or commanded to us. They do exist. In fact, we all largely recognize them when we see them. But no, I don’t think they are inherent to existence. Some assembly is required. On a biological level, it’s all just fighting, feasting and fornicating until we die. Humans, though, ask “Why?” and set about providing justifications. All of those provisional answers — art, music, writing, sport, religion, communal tasks, and the basic care and maintenance of the conditions necessary for them — are something we create and share with each other. Those things all exist and have meaning as long as we keep them alive by practicing them. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of meaning and purpose, you might say. It may seem bleak to say that, no, I don’t think there are any guarantees involved. Good and beautiful things can disappear forever, especially if we fail to work for their preservation. All I can say is, well, you know me. I don’t find it depressing or demoralizing. And anyway, whatever you believe, you still have to show up and put in the necessary work.

So we gather together and do the things we love. We put aside self-centeredness and petty concerns and create something beautiful and meaningful to share. I think that’s good enough.

There’s Something About You, Baby, So Right

By in foolosophy No Comments

Rob Henderson:

In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people. When you interact with people, you can tell who reads seriously and who doesn’t. This isn’t just a matter of mental ability or intelligence. There is a difference between raw cognitive horsepower and time spent immersed in complex and intricate ideas. You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow. The former often demonstrates a subtle understanding that weaves together insights from various domains. The latter, though sharp and quick-minded, lacks the same depth of perspective or the ability to see beyond the immediate conversation or the Current Thing. This is becoming increasingly apparent among obviously bright young adults who don’t read or read nonsense despite paying large sums of money for what should have been a decent education.

Back in my days of installing satellite television, I had a buddy in the crew named Frank, a country boy from Kentucky who had served in Iraq as a sniper. (Interestingly, one of my other buddies was Mundher, an Iraqi refugee. If you can believe it, we all got along fine without needing DEI strictures and an HR department.) Anyway, during one of our conversations, Frank asked how I’d met the Lady of the House. I said that we were both amateur writers, which perked him up. “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “I knew there was just something about the way you talk!” I can’t recall verbatim how he elaborated, but the gist of it was that I just gave off an impression of being studious and thoughtful even when I wasn’t saying much. I was just happy to have a piece of counter-evidence to the more numerous assumptions I’d encountered throughout my life that I was anywhere from rude to mute to retarded.

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