Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

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 Outis Niemand:

The Head of Some Old God

By in atheism, books, religion

I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: superficial they all seem to me, and shallow seas…Alas, I cast my net into their seas and wanted to catch good fish; but I always pulled up the head of some old god.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tyler Hummel:

Enter Spencer Klavan, the Oxford-educated classicist, editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and previous author of How To Save The West. His newest work Light Of The Mind, Light Of The World: Illuminating Science Through Faith directly dives into the bizarre transitionary moment we are living through, asking the same questions McGrath asked prematurely two decades ago with the added benefit of hindsight. Klavan is digging into the tidal movements of this moment and asking if the forces of secularism and materialism have become a spent force.

When a book review titled “Materialism on the Ropes” appeared in my inbox, I clicked on it with interest. Frankly, I’ve been feeling quite jaded and bored, intellectually speaking. I find it hard to escape the conviction that everything of interest has been thought and said already. So, did I miss some new developments in religious thought over the last lost decade of political idiocy? Did someone come up with a way to breathe new life into the old arguments over religion?

On this evidence, no. It was kind of fun to see some of my old opponents again, but they’re showing their age. The “God of the gaps” argument makes an appearance (quantum physics can’t be satisfactorily explained yet, therefore…monotheism must be true). There’s the old argument from consequences (materialism logically leads straight to totalitarianism and death camps). There’s even the appeal to (if not authority) fame that we saw a few weeks ago: several high-profile names have recently embraced Christianity (so therefore you should, too). Assuming the review is comprehensive and fair, Klavan’s book isn’t saying anything we haven’t heard before. There may well be some sort of religious revival as the center of cultural and political gravity swings back toward the right in the near future, but human beings are never content anywhere for very long. Faith or no faith, the human condition remains.

Is This Your Homework, Larry?

By in fresh hell, waiting for the barbarians

Ahahaha:

“They”? Are there no mirrors in Sabato’s house? Is there some reason he didn’t say something after having this scoop dropped in his lap, other than the same cowardice and partisan loyalty that motivated the rest of the Democrats? Oh no, not the cold shoulder!

You lied and dissembled and manipulated in the name of preventing a second Trump term, and you got it anyway. You failed your party and your country, and you irreparably stained your honor and integrity in the process. My old martial arts teacher committed honest-to-God literal seppuku in a public park after being outed as what the kids these days call a “sex pest.” He hadn’t committed any actual crimes, but, having publicly tarnished his reputation, he felt obliged to ritually atone for it. I don’t know what made me think of him after all these years…

When Accountants Attack

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies

Thank goodness this book exists. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been attacked at a suburban backyard barbecue by some crazed IT guy with a wrench and thought, “Damn, if only I had studied techniques for severing his femoral artery with my drop point knife!” It’s like a heart-pounding form of l’esprit de l’escalier. Well, next time I’ll be ready.

Lost In the Digital Taiga

By in writing

Erik Hoel:

And this same reaction of “I don’t even know where to look, or where to begin” in the viewer (here, reader) is what I think the very best of blogging should strive for. For you can’t read a very good blog all at once. It is the creation of something so ridiculously large in scope that you can only take it in a little bit at a time.

This is why Substack’s focus on email was more defining and important than even the founders knew, and why it triggered the new Silver Age of blogging. In Michelangelo’s chapel, it is the use of space by the artist that creates the overwhelming effect; filling in such a complex topography means there is detail in every curve and window and feature. In blogging, it is not space that separates the pieces, but time. One email update, one short read, one consideration, one detailed panel. Above it all, the ghost of a greater presence hovers unseen.

In 2025, I want to feel more ghosts of greater presences, here in the last mottes of the internet. It’s time for bloggers to step up.

Is Substack the renaissance of blogging? Then what have people like me been doing all these years, just freely giving our thoughts away for the sheer fun of writing them down? I guess we’re like the Lykov family, refusing to abandon the only way of life we know, and fleeing even deeper into the desolate Siberian hinterland.

When to Read

By in books, lin yutang

One should read the classics in winter, because then one’s mind is more concentrated; read history in summer, because one has more time; read the ancient philosophers in autumn, because they have such charming ideas; and read the collected works of later authors in spring, because then Nature is coming back to life.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

This year, my big reading project is going to be The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant. I’ve encountered single volumes many times over the years, and I’ve always been impressed by the scope of the undertaking, as well as the prose style, which I like to call “mid-century middlebrow.” It’s from a time when it was naturally assumed to make sense to write an eleven-volume summary of Western civilization aimed at a general audience who would of course be interested to read such a thing for the sake of general knowledge. O tempora, o mores! Anyway, eleven volumes — one a month, to finish the whole thing this year? We’ll see.

Death Is Unanswered

By in atheism, religion, the geist of the zeit

Peter Savodnik:

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

When Savodnik contacted me a while back, he said he was writing an article about prominent secular intellectuals turning toward religion, and he wanted to know if I, an important philosopher and public intellectual, had any thoughts about it. I replied:

He sighed, and asked if I’d mind elaborating. Well, I said, no offense, but journalists are no better than marketing executives, and as such, I don’t take their proclamations seriously, whether the hot new thing is religion or those Stanley tumblers that people were fighting over in the aisles of Target. The media exists to create ephemeral narratives in a desperate attempt to stave off an unguarded moment of crushing self-awareness, and this one will soon be replaced by the next. Life will continue on much as it has. I don’t think there will be any significant return to that old-time religion, but if Crawford, Ferguson, and Hirsi Ali are satisfied with their new Christian outlook on life, good for them. As for me, I don’t feel like I’m lacking meaning, I still don’t believe in deities or immortal souls, and even if I calculate in utilitarian fashion that church attendance is a better thing for society overall than social justice activism, I think it would be a patronizing insult to go through the motions myself as a “faitheist.” As always, whatever the current enthusiasm, I just ask to be left out of it.

I see my remarks didn’t make the published article.

That’s All He Can Stands, He Can’t Stands No More

By in jests japes jokes jollies, music

“This is why Trump won! I mean, this is our culture now!”

Ben Shapiro? Hugh Hewitt? No, this was a friend of mine, a guy in his fifties who has a weekly late-night radio show on a local station, where he plays punk, alternative, post-punk, and weird music in general. To the extent that he’s political, it’s a typical Gen-X sort of liberalism, formed in the days when “alternative music” actually meant being a non-lucrative subculture in opposition to the mainstream. For many of my fellow Gen-Xers, their worldview was solidified by the early 1990s: Republicans as the racist, sexist Tartuffes, and Democrats as the easy-going, open-minded cool people who aren’t religiously opposed to having fun. So what could have inspired this Psalm 22ish lament?

Well, as I said, he’s a DJ, he plays in a band, and he’s constantly listening to all sorts of music. With the end of the year approaching, it’s almost time for his “Best of 2024” episode, his favorite of the year. This year, for some reason, he thought he’d listen to some of the year’s mainstream hits and see if his punk-rock snobbery had led him to miss any gems. It was then that the streaming algorithm produced Ice Spice’s “Think U The Shit” (Fart),” with its poetic refrain:

Think you the shit, bitch?
You not even the fart (Grrah)
I be goin’ hard (Grrah)
I’m breakin’ they hearts, like
Bitches be quick, but I’m quicker (Like)
Bitches be thick, but I’m thicker (Like)
She could be rich, but I’m richer (Damn)

“I love hip-hop! I consider myself a scholar! But this…” he sputtered. This is a guy who quit a ska band because he thought a couple of the other members were racist, as evidenced by the fact that they booed the mention of Barack Obama’s name from the stage at one show. I laughed and laughed, partially at the sub-moronic drivel coming from the bluetooth speaker, but mostly at his surprise. I feel like I’ve heard plenty of comparable garbage. Why was this the bridge too far?

The Hidden

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

I suppose the question boils down to whether you think that everything in life should be out in the open or whether some things should be concealed. I favour the second view, but I think I am now in the minority. It is not merely that, like everyone else (I assume) there are things about me that I would wish no one else to know: I think there are things about everyone I care for that I would not wish to know. The art is in knowing where to draw the line.

The hidden is, in part, what makes life interesting. To say that someone is an open book is also to imply that they are shallow. There are many things that should be skirted over or even brushed under the carpet.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Nothing But Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture

• While talking to a college kid we have working for us during his winter break, I offhandedly mentioned my wish for a widespread ethos of “digital modesty,” in which people refrain from oversharing. I thought this was a banal remark, but he seemed quite struck by it. Has no one else ever offered him that perspective before? It just serves as a reminder of the quotation misattributed to André Gide: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

• While listening to Christmas music, I was reminded of a coworker from my days in the newspaper business, a guy from the island of Truk, in Micronesia. I worked with this guy almost every day from 1993-2011; in particular, this song called to mind one Christmas morning when we were two of the few people who still had to come in to work rather than take a day off. He was everyone’s ideal employee: hardworking and always cheerful, but he was somewhat quiet, owing partially to his basic command of English. We only had a few real conversations over those couple of decades. The last time I talked to him was in the summer of 2013, when we discussed him doing some side-work for me. Upon Googling him last weekend, I found that he died of cancer almost a decade ago, in February 2015. He was only 46. Did I ever really know him? Did I need to?

• At present we regard it as a matter of propriety not to be anxious either to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that the good God is everywhere present? ” asked a little girl of her mother: “I think that is indecent”: a hint to philosophers! One should have more reverence for the shame-facedness with which nature has concealed herself behind enigmas and motley uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not showing her reasons? Perhaps her name is Baubo, to speak in Greek?… Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: for that purpose it is necessary to keep bravely to the surface, the fold and the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in forms, tones, and words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – from profundity!

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Obiter Scripta, no. 130

By in books, obiter scripta

From an early age he sunbathed naked on Welsh hillsides (when there was sun), which did not endear him to the preachers of the local chapels. He believed himself to be a druid, wrote in an archaic Welsh all his own, and wore red trousers, a green tunic, and a complete fox skin on his head. He grew a long white beard and refused to wear socks. He was a vegetarian, claiming that to eat the flesh of animals was to take on their characteristics (exactly what a vegetarian cousin of mine claimed a century later), and was an anti-vaccinationist. He was in favour of free love and fathered a child at the age of 87.

He was the father of British cremation, believing burial to be unhygenic and wasteful. In 1884 he tried to cremate his 5 month old son (called Jesus Christ Price) but was arrested in the attempt. A howling mob attacked his home for his blasphemy, but at his trial—Dr. Price always defended himself—he was acquitted by the judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, author of the classic riposte to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and uncle of Virginia Woolf. Henceforth cremation was permissible under UK law. The howling mob changed its mind too. Around 20,000 people attended Dr. Price’s own cremation, nine years later.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Nothing But Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture

This potent little capsule biography reminds me of a similar one by Bill Bryson. Again, it seems to me that a full biography would be disappointing in comparison. On the one hand, it’s sobering to imagine one’s own life summarized, however deftly, in a couple short paragraphs. On the other hand, we can only hope for a Dalrymple or Bryson to memorialize us in such a charming way. Nudity seems to be a common theme with these eccentrics. I guess I need to start going around naked more often if I’m going to be worthy of an amusing eulogy.

Obiter Scripta, no. 129

By in books, obiter scripta

Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I have never gone trouserless in order to buy a book, but I have known the pleasure of using credit card points to that purpose. Groceries, business supplies, and other mundane necessities, through some abstract alchemy, become a new hardcover on my nightstand.

Take Another Bite

By in extraordinary popular delusions, jests japes jokes jollies, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit

Oliver Bateman:

But the mask always cracks eventually. Maybe the creator changes political teams and the commenters revolt. Maybe the audience demands ever-nuttier content the creator won’t provide. Maybe fellow creators smell weakness and move in for the kill. Or maybe, just maybe, the creator realizes anyone dumb enough to blindly follow him while paying for the privilege is an absolute lunatic. The result is always the same: blood in the digital water.

The comments fill with betrayal. How could you do this to us? We supported you. We believed in you. We were your frens. The creator’s response reveals the truth both sides denied: this was always a parasocial transaction, never a genuine “I/thou” relationship.

A creator’s audience will defend them against any criticism, until the moment they don’t. Then the same passionate defenders become even more passionate attackers. The parasocial delusion breaks, but the intensity remains. Hell hath no fury like a follower scorned.

There’s been a lot of talk about the ongoing political realignment, in which the left/right coalitions that have held since the mid-20th century have fallen apart and reassembled along different lines. A minor variation on that theme, one which I am enjoying greatly, is liberals becoming the equivalent of the toothless rasslin’ fans of yore going apoplectic at the shenanigans in the ring. The internet made it impossible for fans of sports entertainment to earnestly believe in it, but somehow, it seems to have made political marks even more gullible.

Shake the slab of flesh
Taunting for a fetch
Time to ring the chime
Whet the appetite
Teeth are grinding tight
Reinforcing life
Drooling down the side
Eyes are bulging wide
Yes, the price is right
The cut is very tough
Gristle’s good enough
They all need a bite
The cut is very tough, you bit the big bluff
Take another bite

— Prong, “Prime Cut“

Better Late Than Never

By in books

Fellow fans of Theodore Dalrymple’s essays, rejoice; for I have made a serendipitous discovery. Nothing but Wickedness: Idleness, Madness, and the Culture of Decline, his out-of-print? never-printed? long-delayed? book, is finally being released this week. I pre-ordered my copy from Blackwell’s. Hurry up and get one before it disappears into limbo again.

What Toys We Are

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the geist of the zeit

“And what he thinks — and what I think, too — is that it just shows what toys we are in the hands of Fate, if you know what I mean. I mean to say, it’s no good worrying and trying to look ahead and plan and scheme and weigh your every action, if you follow me, because you never can tell when doing such-and-such won’t make so-and-so happen — while, on the other hand, if you do so-and-so it may just as easily lead to such-and-such.”

— P.G. Wodehouse, “Fate,” Young Men in Spats

ElectionSlam!

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

How long have I been preaching to you guys about the trickster deity who loves us and wants us to be amused? Well, I don’t know about you, but my cup is about to runneth over here. You see, if you had popped through an interdimensional portal around 2004 and informed me that in twenty years, the Democratic nominee for president would be publicly thanking the Cheney family for their endorsement, I would have stared at you in mute disbelief. If you had then told me that Digby, one of the most popular Democrat bloggers of the early ’00s who wrote thousands of posts ranting about the enormity of the Bush administration and Darth Cheney in particular, joined in the praise, I would have assumed that the time travel had scrambled your brains. But here we are, El Oh El.

“Kayfabe” is a term that refers to the old code of professional wrestling, back in the days before it became “sports entertainment.” Wrestlers went out of their way to protect the business by refusing to do anything in public that would indicate that the matches were staged. No breaking character in front of fans, no traveling to the next show with other wrestlers who were supposedly sworn enemies, etc. Of course, that all changed on Vince McMahon’s watch, and for the last few decades, wrestling — sorry, sports entertainment — has embraced the understanding that the fans don’t have to believe the athletic competition is real in order to appreciate the bombast, drama, and campy humor.

Political discourse is no more real than old wrestling promos. The only difference is the “marks” aren’t wise to it. Liz Cheney can swear for years that Kamala the Radical Liberal will destroy the country, before turning babyface in order to team up with her against The Orange Miscreant at the next pay-per-view. Digby can spend several years telling us that Dick Cheney was the original election thief and a sociopath who orchestrated a phony war for the benefit of Halliburton stock prices, before gladly accepting this sociopath’s help to “protect democracy” from “fascism.” Words mean nothing, convictions mean nothing. It’s all bullshit. I’d rather watch old videos of Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes screaming at each other. At least they were entertaining.

All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XXI)

By in so many books, so little time

Erik Hoel:

I think bookstores turned out to be weirdly sticky simply because people like being in bookstores. Going to a bookstore is an aesthetic experience. It’s fun. It’s something to do with your family. It is a pleasant feeling to be surrounded by physical books. It is a pleasant feeling to browse. It is a pleasant feeling to be the kind of person who goes into a bookstore and browses.

Against all economic odds, bookstores remain. My own mother’s bookstore remains.

From a library sale, not a bookstore, but still, his point remains.

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