A Primer on Curtis Yarvin
Date: 2025 Oct 05
Words: 2446
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
To my readers: I am putting this out a bit prematurely because I am making Sunday my regular posting day. Because of this, there is a bit more material of this author I would like to read before I make claims about him (I have not finished one of his more well-known “books”, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives). When I do finish this, I am going to post an other version of this article. You can see both this version and the updated version when it is published by clicking the arrows in the “drafts” section above. I am doing a short series about different authors influential in certain political circles. Next I am going to be writing about “BAP”, who is connected to Curtis Yarvin and is influential in the same circles. I have been getting into Curtis Yarvin lately. An author who I previously described as “junk food compared to, like, a book” and “having no grounding in reality whatsoever”. And this may be correct, but, for what it is worth, he is one of the only people out there proposing anything even remotely pragmatic of what there is to be done. He previously wrote as “Mencius Moldbug” on the blog Unqualified Reservations from 2007 to 2014, and currently writes on Gray Mirror on Substack, that’s “gray” with an a. If you take the time to read him periodically you will stumble across something and go like, “oh...
Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America, Vol. 2
Date: 2025 Sep 22
Words: 2277
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
EQUALITY De Tocqueville had an egalitarian ideal of the United States, which would have been the view that naturally developed if his travel route was up around the Ohio River Valley and Kentucky. He expands countless pages talking about how there is no aristocracy in the United States, compared to a historical one in Europe that was then largely subsiding. But the irony of this was not lost to me. It was a strange thing that happened in history that de Tocqueville was describing, a land where the stratification of society was very limited for some time. The way he describes it, it seems that the citizenry really, seriously internalized the post-enlightenment ideals the founders had. But this condition seems to be a blip in history of barely a hundred years or so, because between the Gilded Age and the Wilson Era, a WASP elite aristocracy on the East Coast had taken control of the country. I suppose an egalitarian state of things cannot last long. The causes are outside the scope of de Tocqueville’s time, but it could have been predicted, in the same way he had incredibly accurate foresight and other predictions for America. If the white expansion was going to go all the way through the “second triangle”, there would have to be a powerful administration to rule over the filler-in-the-middle. But it probably didn’t occur to de Tocqueville because he was watching the aristocracies collapse in Europe, and was writing with tha...
Barry Lyndon
Date: 2025 Sep 14
Words: 1089
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Barry Lyndon and the
Sins of the Father
A God compassionate and gracious, Slow to anger, Abounding in
loyal love and faithfulness. He maintains loyal love for thousands,
Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sins. But he won’t declare
innocent the guilty. He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon
the third and the fourth.
Exodus 34:6-7
By what means Redmond Barry acquired the style and title of
Barry Lyndon
Opening Title Card of Barry Lyndon
SPOILERS, if you care about those
things
—–
The sins of the father live on with the son.
Recently I watched Barry Lyndon written by Stanley Kubrick.
It came up on my recommended, I didn’t realize it was a Kubrick film
immediately, and I decided to watch it because I have always been
intrigued by the ways of life of Old Europe.
There seem to be some “unwritten rules” of what to
do in life. Things that are partially taught and handed down through the
generations, and partially instinctively encoded in the genomes (or some
superset thereof) of people. Things that are not things that are easily
“called forth” or spoken directly, and to do so requires much study and
self reflection. But Stanley Kubrick, if any writer and director, was
one who could “call forth” these things.
This story written by Stanley Kubrick raises important questions
a...
Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America, Vol. 1
Date: 2025 Aug 25
Words: 944
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Every generation, there are a few authors who are able to simply say things as they are, and who have near perfect descriptive, causal analysis, and predictive abilities. Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America in the early 1830s, was one. Tocqueville, a Frenchman, had the external perspective on America that a native citizen could not have about himself, which he recognized. His work sets out to capture America in the stage about a generation after the Union’s formation, long enough into the history of the nation to give judgement on what qualities of the people will persist for the rest of the country’s history. His work remains a definitive analysis of American society that has maintained its relevance for nearly two centuries, and stands as an early work of sociology and political science. Beyond capturing the qualities of the new nation at the time, he consistently brings himself back to how democracy, in America, is relevant to his main audience, France and broader Europe. Standout points of his in the first volume that are relevant to today’s discourse on subjects include: The Federal Government of the United States can only be run by a people that has their particular self-governance traditions at the local levels re-implemented at the federal level. This is particularly important to keep in mind because as immigration from countries with significantly different governance traditions increases into the United States, interpersonal knowledge transf...
Bertrand Russell — Autobiography
Date: 2025 Aug 24
Words: 345
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
I read this autobiography over the course of a few months. Finished it today, started it in May (really, started reading it the first time in December 2022, but never finished it). Gives a good template as to how an honest-to-whatever modern thinker is to live their life - travel, various organizations, writing, love interests, civil disobedience, national honors. But mainly serves to point to other works of his… a catalog with surrounding context… and he was very prolific. A couple ideas of his that didn’t carry much weight into the future could have been very impactful if someone had implemented them. Ideas about a one world government, which were apparently very popular in the 50s and were seriously considered by some including Russell; extracting the weapons of warfare and the weaponization of science to a single organization so that man may not use them against eachother; pacifist education of children to prevent future warmongering; changing the ideals of courage to mean exploration on the moon instead of conquering your neighbors. These are from the 15th chapter of the autobiography. There are not many Russell-ites today. The most engagement I see with Bertrand Russell now is people citing him in their respective fields when he talks about something there, not him as a holistic figure. There is a website for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation that does not look like it’s been updated since 2021; but ...