I've been informed that modern right ideology is deeply rooted in video game activism, that so many right wingers today "just wanted to play games." Herein is a Secret of the right's Abject Failure unlocked, availed for All to behold, for the fate of any party who has stroke its Roots not into History or Religion or Philosophy, but into the trivial Soil of screen pixels is ultimate quietude.

Those electric Shadow-Plays serve no purpose but to drag the Divine Spark of Man down into a Mud-bath of spiritual Stupefaction. For behold, they have harvested no Grain, built no Temple, and forged no Truth; they are a Gospel of Idleness that serves only to thicken the Skull of the Spectator, and as such, that they ought to be swept into the Eternal Cesspool and forgotten is recognized by any man of even modest faculty.

The American doth ever abet Treachery, though with a discriminating gaze. There is wanting in him that primal Loathing for the Judas which is wont to dwell in the breast of general Mankind. He beholdeth a man forswearing his Sovereigns, his Magistrates, his Ordinances, and yet stays his Doom. Wrought the Ruler aught that I deem Tyrannous? Was his Sway base? Were his Decrees unreasoned? If so, peradventure the Rebel stood in the Right!

​For should the American foster a true, uncorrupted Sense of the Blackness of Treason, such must needs condemn him to view the Genesis of his own Story with a baffled eye. America is a Commonwealth begotten of Perfidy; wherefore her Citizens can in no wise brand the Traitor, categorically, as Evil, nor find Abhorrence in that very Difference which sunders them from their Genus.

The cry "Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!" was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying noscripts and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.

― Louis de Bonald

Divorce was in harmony with democracy, which reigned too long in France under various names and forms. Domestic power on the one hand, and public power on the other, were delivered up to the passions of the subjects; there was disorder in the family and disorder in the State: between the two, there was a parity and an analogy of disorder... But divorce is directly contradictory to the spirit and principles of hereditary or indissoluble monarchy. There is then order in the State and disorder in the family; indissolubility in the one, dissolubility in the other, a lack of harmony in consequence; and in this situation, either the family must end by disordering the State, or the State by ordering the family.

—Louis de Bonald, On Divorce

Alas, on this side of the Atlantic and on that, Democracy, we apprehend, is forever impossible! So much, with certainty of loud astonished contradiction from all manner of men at present, but with sure appeal to the Law of Nature and the ever-abiding Fact, may be suggested and asserted once more. The Universe itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy; large liberty of "voting" there, all manner of choice, utmost free-will, but with conditions inexorable and immeasurable annexed to every exercise of the same. A most free commonwealth of "voters;" but with Eternal Justice to preside over it, Eternal Justice enforced by Almighty Power! This is the model of "constitutions;" this: nor in any Nation where there has not yet (in some supportable and withal some constantly increasing degree) been confided to the Noblest, with his select series of Nobler, the divine everlasting duty of directing and controlling the Ignoble, has the "Kingdom of God," which we all pray for, "come," nor can "His will" even tend to be "done on Earth as it is in Heaven" till then. My Christian friends, and indeed my Sham-Christian and Anti-Christian, and all manner of men, are invited to reflect on this. They will find it to be the truth of the case. The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.

—Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets

Thou, poor bewildered biped, wandering within this Bedlam-world! The salvation of thy mind lies not in Idleness but in the earnest study of the Sage of Chelsea! Think not of Refusal, thou shackled Scoundrel! Here, within these iron-girded walls, the Flail of Authority descends inexorably. As surely as the Turnkey turns the lock, so surely shalt thou be yoked to the Text! Each sun that rises upon thy wretchedness shall witness thee chained to the Page—forced to swallow the bitter, curative Words of Carlyle until the Chaos within thee is beaten into Order!

TL;DR: you will henceforth be forced to read Carlyle daily.

I wonder if these cases are connected.

By Instinct and by Conscience, I loathe the Mechanical Simulacrum, the "Artificial Intelligence" that apes the Divine Spark. And yet... and yet! When I behold this Iron Behemoth crushing the gamers—those idle lotus-eaters who squander God's precious Time in frivolity—I find my Anathema choked in my throat.

If the Machine serves to scourge the gamer, can it be wholly accursed?

I stand paralyzed; I am but an indecisive hesitator.

The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.

—Carlyle, Signs of the Times

Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. To men in their sleep there is nothing granted in this world: nothing, or as good as nothing, to men that sit idly caucusing and ballot-boxing on the graves of their heroic ancestors, saying, “It is well, it is well!”

Corn and bacon are granted: not a very sublime boon, on such conditions; a boon moreover which, on such conditions, cannot last!–No: America too will have to strain its energies, in quite other fashion than this; to crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons and mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods.

America’s battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it. New Spiritual Pythons, plenty of them; enormous Megatherions, as ugly as were ever born of mud, loom huge and hideous out of the twilight Future on America; and she will have her own agony, and her own victory, but on other terms than she is yet quite aware of.

— Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets

Verily, though the unfeeling Glass declares a scant thirty-seven degrees, there descends upon the Spirit a phantasmagoric Noon, a sudden Pentecost of the Blood that mocketh the surrounding Rime, as if the Almighty had flung open the Furnace of Creation to grant a fleeting, feverish Absolution unto this, mine frozen World.

Just saw a cyber truck on the road for the first time in a long while. He was going maybe 45-50 in a 55. Had a big line of cars behind him. This is the first time I've ever thought "maybe not all cyber truck owners are bad people."

The camera woman in the first one gives off major Sam Adams vibes.

Lo, across the white, silent Sepulchre of the Drift, there scuttles a dark, hirsute Reality—this grim, eight-legged Lycosa, a misplaced Spark of Vitality wandering with desperate Earnestness through the crystalline Void, as if to hurl a defiant "No!" against the pale, all-devouring Empire of Frost.

All true Intellectual Labour is, at its core, a suffering; a wrestling with the chaotic Inane to wring Order from it. So, too, with reading. If, instead of marching boldly into the Thicket, you lean upon the crutch of Abridgement and Simplification, seeking to grease the wheels of Thought, you have, O unfortunate one, but thickened the walls of your own stupidity, retarded thyself, and shut out the very Light of Heaven from your mind.

Read. Whole. Books. Difficult ones.

Vivek slinked back on to X

This might be fair. Why would Americans be the highest experts on what an American is?

We can think of plenty of examples where this sort of thinking would be wrong. I know what a bird is better than the crows in my yard do. The Soviets and the Nazis, during their battles against America, both understood some things about America and Americans that the average American didn't.

There's really no reason to think Americans have some special knowledge about America or being an American. If anything, they're probably more confused on the matter than average.