NOOOOOOOOO you have to have a sound and complete moral philosophy before you can do anything!!!!!!!11!!11!
That fagosophy will be used as a straight jacked against you. Total verbalisation of every ethical norm is impossible, and any attempts to do so is retarded. If a stable calibrated ethical norm has not been generated throughout all of human history, none shall ever be. There are no facts, only interpretations, and my interpretation will win because I want it to. Don't be cucked: lift heavy, eat stake, and have sex.
This is great. Surly the best way to covert these kiddies to Straussian bowtie conservatism is to berate them as poopyheads and wave away their concerns of globohomo tyranny. My position is for these young dudes to eat the bug, live in their pods, consoom the xenoestrogens. Oh and wank it to National Reiew. I salute you on your bravery, sir!
“ If we want to understand the singular success, not of Hitler, but of
those writers, we must cast a quick glance at their opponents who were at the same time the opponents of the young nihilists. Those opponents committed frequently a grave mistake. They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities. As a consequence, the very refutations confirmed the nihilists in their belief; all these refutations seemed to
beg the question; most of the refutations seemed to consist of pueris decantata, of repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart. Those young men had come to doubt seriously, and not merely methodically or methodologically, the principles of modern civilisation; the great authorities of that civilization did no longer impress them; it was evident that only such opponents would have been listened to who knew that doubt from their own experience, who through years of hard and independent thinking had overcome it. Many opponents did not meet that condition. “
OK... I'll bite. How does this address the reality that "BAPism" is steadily gaining traction in the West and also in many parts of Asia? Many young men and women I know in my country embrace part if not all of these ideas. Which are not so reactionary really.
This is just another piece of 20th century/Establishment journalism looking at something it doesn't understand and claiming it is Bad. How can encouraging men and women to celebrate Vitality, Life, Strength, and Beauty possibly be a bad thing? It is more disturbing and concerning to me that anyone could look at modernity's ugliness and say this is morally preferable.
Not at all. Aesthetics is Ethics. What is beautiful is by necessity ethical.
I say this not to disparage the present author, for I am sure you have tried hard. However.Any attempt to analyse BAP and BAPism is doomed to miss the mark unless analysis/critique is undertaken by someone who...
- lifts heavy
- runs fast
- loves enjoying life
- likes feeling mastery over his surroundings
By which point you will most likely affirm that he is, of course, correct.
"The good news is, of course, that it won’t ever be adopted here or anywhere else. You are living in a fantasy world if you think it will be. Instead, BAPism is a sometimes-amusing fad that will inevitably go the way of the dodo bird."
And that's why you've spent 15 months trying to figure out why this movement is gaining followers, while your Bowtie Conservatism gets nothing but scorn...
Vitalism: BAP deserves credit if only for this. One only has to juxtapose the pot bellied National Review types against the typical BAP stan Twitter account to realize why people mock you. Just put a picture of Tom Nichols, Jonah Goldberg, the author of this piece, any of their smarmy faces and physique next to @ieatorganmeat or Benjamin Braddock.
And the content that the two sides put out! NRO conservatism is constantly miserable, schoolmarmish, and wringing it's hands, where the Bapists are loving life, enjoying improvement in all areas, and doing what they can to ACTUALLY fight the Left.
BAP is a response to the feminization of American life, in school, at work, and in the culture, where men are presented as bad (white men especially) and unnecessary for society, and women are presented as good, and really the only creators of value. This idea is so ludicrous as to be immediately falsifiable, but like the Emperor with no clothes, everyone is so cowed into silence, that no one speaks up about this except those on the fringes. Sometimes you get Jordan Peterson. Sometimes you get Christina Hoff Summers. Sometimes you get Admiral McRaven. And sometimes you get BAP. As you said, men cannot grow up mentally healthy if they truly believe they are the epitome of evil in the modern world. They will turn to anyone who tells them they have moral worth as men.
You mentioned that the BAPers think the USA is finished, put a fork in it, it’s done. I happen to believe this too. The administration of justice is now completely arbitrary. “Laws” are made by bureaucratic decree, and enforced by goons fairly close to the gestapo. Talk of putting Trump supporters in concentration camps for “re-education” is no longer fringe on the left, but mainstream, with even some congressmen agreeing with media calls for this. Free speech is no longer possible outside of small groups. Anyone who repeats unapproved speech to a wide enough audience will be simultaneously banned by multiple communications and banking companies. There’s no American spirit left in Biden*’s America.
The questions become obvious: 1) what type of society do we have today? (A plutocratic/kleptocratic oligarchy bared distinguishable from the masters in China, except the Chinese leadership is wicked smart while our Ruling Class could empty water from a boot with the instructions written on the heal.) 2) The American Constitution, brilliant though it was, did not prevent the descent into oligarchy, and indeed was not a stop to the unconstitutional actions of the first Congress. So the second question is, since it makes no sense to go back to the American Constitution—it didn’t prevent the formation of the first central bank or the federal bailouts of the states in the 1790s—so it’s hopeless for today, what form of government should we strive towards from an engineering perspective, even if we continue to agree with the principles of the Declaration? 3) And finally, what can be done to/for the 10s of millions of committed Marxists/communists/neo-Marxists/critical Race Theorists who, with the help of the oligarchs, really run this country. The answers are not pleasant, since changing their minds does not seem to be in the cards: kill them, expel them, Or isolate them in their own corner of American, then restrict travel and trade between the communist part and the feee part of the former USA. Since, as we discussed, America is done, as the rule of law no longer applies, violence is the only way this can fall out, whether any of us want peace or not. (I want peace, I predict war.) in the case of a future Civil War II, it will be fought between masculine, freedom-loving men and the women who love them on one side, and the soy-boy feminized communists plus any federal law enforcement and Regular troops they can con I to thinking their defense of the oligarchy is a defense of the constitution. I think BAP’s point is to strengthen the former faction in this future civil war To prevent the complete dominance of the latter faction. Will go power is what any rebellion needs, and what BAP is saying, echoing Jefferson, is that the US is in desperate need to water the tree of liberty.
This is a great article. I was telling my wife’s boyfriend how you are the Rick Wilson of the anti-Trumper Straussians. You will crush the Bapsters like Rick Wilson crushed cheato man. Dox, censor and fire them all.
The BAP ideology seems reminiscent of the idea from the late 19th century (though recurring throughout history) that a comfortable life breeds soft, unmanly men who let their civilization fall to pieces. I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Voltaire: "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up." Another is "bad times lead to strong men; strong men lead to good times; good times lead to weak men; weak men lead to bad times."
The BAPers seem to be saying "we have become a society of weak men. All this talk of ideals and universal truths is just Weak Men trying to justify their weakness and sap the Strong Men of their strength." In that frame, their inconsistency and shortsightedness makes more sense. If you ask "what policies are you trying to achieve?" they will say "asking for specific, detailed policies is a Weak Man thing. If we build a nation of Strong Men, then everything will take care of itself." If you say "isn't your ideology that you're against ideologies just another ideology?" they'll say "only Weak Men are concerned with such questions. Just be a Strong Man."
You need a picture of that creature in the Trump Insurrection with the horned Viking helmet to go along with the surprising and amusing Norman Rockwell painting.
If posting a picture is possible here, I will share a photograph of Mo Qua Daffy in lavender, complete with earrings. Just before he was killed by a mob, he was sodomized. BAP this!
The parade of history's losers that BAP seems to admire makes me wonder about his ultimate goal, which seems to be the enabling of mass self-destruction, i.e., nihilism.
I regret that I am late to this party. Well: here we go.
"...the BAP Boys’ logic collapses on itself when they suggest that the goal of this reawakening is none other than the “revitalization of the philosophy of the American founding”...the BAP Boys don’t seem to consider George Washington and America’s revolutionary founders or Lincoln as the kinds of leaders that they hope to call forth. Washington and Lincoln were, after all, guided first and foremost by a certain philosophy and moral principles...How, then, do the BAP Boys justify or rationalize the abandonment of principle, particularly the principles of the Declaration of Independence, for the will to power?"
Why don't I let The Father of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, do it for me?
"It is, in the first place, necessary that we distinguish between the means made use of to overthrow despotism, in order to prepare the way for the establishment of liberty, and the means to be used after the despotism is overthrown.
The means made use of in the first case are justified by necessity. Those means are, in general, insurrections; for whilst the established government of despotism continues in any country it is scarcely possible that any other means can be used. It is also certain that in the commencement of a revolution, the revolutionary party permit to themselves a *discretionary exercise of power* regulated more by circumstances than by principle, which, were the practise to continue, liberty would never be established, or if established would soon be overthrown. It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France, and injured the character of the revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next. All these things have followed from the want of a constitution; for it is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, THUS FAR SHALT THOU GO AND NO FARTHER. But in the absence of a constitution men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
—Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795)
Do go read the whole thing (the Dissertation, that is). Then read it again.
Do we have a ruling party of spiteful, backward children, gleefully eager to impeach, to punish, to humiliate, to make men pay what they do not owe? A party that will ensconce itself in a fortress against its people, but permits murders, riots, lawlessness, homelessness, and rampant drug abuse in the streets of once-great cities? That has seen fit to trample on both constitutional and unalienable rights with capricious lockdowns, dubious legal diktats, aristocratic hypocrisy, and other indignities?
...Are we now the proud inheritors and possessors of government-by-principle in the United States?
No. It is as you say: we were born of a corpse; but it is also we who have learned and remember! We revere those who risked all, who sacrificed to give the country its life, while it lived! We know of the bitter cold of Valley Forge, the nakedness, the hunger, the disease, the bloody feet, the dead and dying in pursuit of a glorious ideal! Go and ask the next thousand Leftist political prostitutes what they can tell you about the Barbary pirates, or the Seminole Wars, or Antietam, or the Alamo! Go and ask our Congress of sorrows!
Our modern self-styled masters, creatures of a thousand corrupt political bargains, motherless enemies of a history they neither know nor understand, seek disunity; and they need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, because they have chosen to make monsters of us.
"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts."
reason huh? how many times in life have you known the truth, the right answer, the right move instantly, but then second guessed yourself, reasoned it away, and then failed? "reason is king" = "I was born on third base, live protected from my own folly, so can still afford to pretend reason leads to truth or happiness."
NOOOOOOOOO you have to have a sound and complete moral philosophy before you can do anything!!!!!!!11!!11!
That fagosophy will be used as a straight jacked against you. Total verbalisation of every ethical norm is impossible, and any attempts to do so is retarded. If a stable calibrated ethical norm has not been generated throughout all of human history, none shall ever be. There are no facts, only interpretations, and my interpretation will win because I want it to. Don't be cucked: lift heavy, eat stake, and have sex.
Subscribe to Caribbean Rhythms.
This is great. Surly the best way to covert these kiddies to Straussian bowtie conservatism is to berate them as poopyheads and wave away their concerns of globohomo tyranny. My position is for these young dudes to eat the bug, live in their pods, consoom the xenoestrogens. Oh and wank it to National Reiew. I salute you on your bravery, sir!
"Over the course of the last 15 months, I have taken a deep dive into... a sometimes-amusing fad that will inevitably go the way of the dodo bird."
If that's how you choose to spend your time...
“ If we want to understand the singular success, not of Hitler, but of
those writers, we must cast a quick glance at their opponents who were at the same time the opponents of the young nihilists. Those opponents committed frequently a grave mistake. They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities. As a consequence, the very refutations confirmed the nihilists in their belief; all these refutations seemed to
beg the question; most of the refutations seemed to consist of pueris decantata, of repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart. Those young men had come to doubt seriously, and not merely methodically or methodologically, the principles of modern civilisation; the great authorities of that civilization did no longer impress them; it was evident that only such opponents would have been listened to who knew that doubt from their own experience, who through years of hard and independent thinking had overcome it. Many opponents did not meet that condition. “
OK... I'll bite. How does this address the reality that "BAPism" is steadily gaining traction in the West and also in many parts of Asia? Many young men and women I know in my country embrace part if not all of these ideas. Which are not so reactionary really.
This is just another piece of 20th century/Establishment journalism looking at something it doesn't understand and claiming it is Bad. How can encouraging men and women to celebrate Vitality, Life, Strength, and Beauty possibly be a bad thing? It is more disturbing and concerning to me that anyone could look at modernity's ugliness and say this is morally preferable.
Not at all. Aesthetics is Ethics. What is beautiful is by necessity ethical.
I say this not to disparage the present author, for I am sure you have tried hard. However.Any attempt to analyse BAP and BAPism is doomed to miss the mark unless analysis/critique is undertaken by someone who...
- lifts heavy
- runs fast
- loves enjoying life
- likes feeling mastery over his surroundings
By which point you will most likely affirm that he is, of course, correct.
"The good news is, of course, that it won’t ever be adopted here or anywhere else. You are living in a fantasy world if you think it will be. Instead, BAPism is a sometimes-amusing fad that will inevitably go the way of the dodo bird."
And that's why you've spent 15 months trying to figure out why this movement is gaining followers, while your Bowtie Conservatism gets nothing but scorn...
Vitalism: BAP deserves credit if only for this. One only has to juxtapose the pot bellied National Review types against the typical BAP stan Twitter account to realize why people mock you. Just put a picture of Tom Nichols, Jonah Goldberg, the author of this piece, any of their smarmy faces and physique next to @ieatorganmeat or Benjamin Braddock.
And the content that the two sides put out! NRO conservatism is constantly miserable, schoolmarmish, and wringing it's hands, where the Bapists are loving life, enjoying improvement in all areas, and doing what they can to ACTUALLY fight the Left.
BAP is a response to the feminization of American life, in school, at work, and in the culture, where men are presented as bad (white men especially) and unnecessary for society, and women are presented as good, and really the only creators of value. This idea is so ludicrous as to be immediately falsifiable, but like the Emperor with no clothes, everyone is so cowed into silence, that no one speaks up about this except those on the fringes. Sometimes you get Jordan Peterson. Sometimes you get Christina Hoff Summers. Sometimes you get Admiral McRaven. And sometimes you get BAP. As you said, men cannot grow up mentally healthy if they truly believe they are the epitome of evil in the modern world. They will turn to anyone who tells them they have moral worth as men.
You mentioned that the BAPers think the USA is finished, put a fork in it, it’s done. I happen to believe this too. The administration of justice is now completely arbitrary. “Laws” are made by bureaucratic decree, and enforced by goons fairly close to the gestapo. Talk of putting Trump supporters in concentration camps for “re-education” is no longer fringe on the left, but mainstream, with even some congressmen agreeing with media calls for this. Free speech is no longer possible outside of small groups. Anyone who repeats unapproved speech to a wide enough audience will be simultaneously banned by multiple communications and banking companies. There’s no American spirit left in Biden*’s America.
The questions become obvious: 1) what type of society do we have today? (A plutocratic/kleptocratic oligarchy bared distinguishable from the masters in China, except the Chinese leadership is wicked smart while our Ruling Class could empty water from a boot with the instructions written on the heal.) 2) The American Constitution, brilliant though it was, did not prevent the descent into oligarchy, and indeed was not a stop to the unconstitutional actions of the first Congress. So the second question is, since it makes no sense to go back to the American Constitution—it didn’t prevent the formation of the first central bank or the federal bailouts of the states in the 1790s—so it’s hopeless for today, what form of government should we strive towards from an engineering perspective, even if we continue to agree with the principles of the Declaration? 3) And finally, what can be done to/for the 10s of millions of committed Marxists/communists/neo-Marxists/critical Race Theorists who, with the help of the oligarchs, really run this country. The answers are not pleasant, since changing their minds does not seem to be in the cards: kill them, expel them, Or isolate them in their own corner of American, then restrict travel and trade between the communist part and the feee part of the former USA. Since, as we discussed, America is done, as the rule of law no longer applies, violence is the only way this can fall out, whether any of us want peace or not. (I want peace, I predict war.) in the case of a future Civil War II, it will be fought between masculine, freedom-loving men and the women who love them on one side, and the soy-boy feminized communists plus any federal law enforcement and Regular troops they can con I to thinking their defense of the oligarchy is a defense of the constitution. I think BAP’s point is to strengthen the former faction in this future civil war To prevent the complete dominance of the latter faction. Will go power is what any rebellion needs, and what BAP is saying, echoing Jefferson, is that the US is in desperate need to water the tree of liberty.
This is a great article. I was telling my wife’s boyfriend how you are the Rick Wilson of the anti-Trumper Straussians. You will crush the Bapsters like Rick Wilson crushed cheato man. Dox, censor and fire them all.
The BAP ideology seems reminiscent of the idea from the late 19th century (though recurring throughout history) that a comfortable life breeds soft, unmanly men who let their civilization fall to pieces. I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Voltaire: "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up." Another is "bad times lead to strong men; strong men lead to good times; good times lead to weak men; weak men lead to bad times."
The BAPers seem to be saying "we have become a society of weak men. All this talk of ideals and universal truths is just Weak Men trying to justify their weakness and sap the Strong Men of their strength." In that frame, their inconsistency and shortsightedness makes more sense. If you ask "what policies are you trying to achieve?" they will say "asking for specific, detailed policies is a Weak Man thing. If we build a nation of Strong Men, then everything will take care of itself." If you say "isn't your ideology that you're against ideologies just another ideology?" they'll say "only Weak Men are concerned with such questions. Just be a Strong Man."
You need a picture of that creature in the Trump Insurrection with the horned Viking helmet to go along with the surprising and amusing Norman Rockwell painting.
Your first error was in believing that the claims made in the US Declaration of Independence are self evidently true, when they patently are not.
You might want to read some British or Loyalist responses and then you'll find out whether they are really self evident.
> BAP has publicly praised ...Muammar Gaddafi.
If posting a picture is possible here, I will share a photograph of Mo Qua Daffy in lavender, complete with earrings. Just before he was killed by a mob, he was sodomized. BAP this!
The parade of history's losers that BAP seems to admire makes me wonder about his ultimate goal, which seems to be the enabling of mass self-destruction, i.e., nihilism.
Thanks, Brad, this is the best analysis of "right-wingers" I have seen.
I regret that I am late to this party. Well: here we go.
"...the BAP Boys’ logic collapses on itself when they suggest that the goal of this reawakening is none other than the “revitalization of the philosophy of the American founding”...the BAP Boys don’t seem to consider George Washington and America’s revolutionary founders or Lincoln as the kinds of leaders that they hope to call forth. Washington and Lincoln were, after all, guided first and foremost by a certain philosophy and moral principles...How, then, do the BAP Boys justify or rationalize the abandonment of principle, particularly the principles of the Declaration of Independence, for the will to power?"
Why don't I let The Father of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, do it for me?
"It is, in the first place, necessary that we distinguish between the means made use of to overthrow despotism, in order to prepare the way for the establishment of liberty, and the means to be used after the despotism is overthrown.
The means made use of in the first case are justified by necessity. Those means are, in general, insurrections; for whilst the established government of despotism continues in any country it is scarcely possible that any other means can be used. It is also certain that in the commencement of a revolution, the revolutionary party permit to themselves a *discretionary exercise of power* regulated more by circumstances than by principle, which, were the practise to continue, liberty would never be established, or if established would soon be overthrown. It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France, and injured the character of the revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next. All these things have followed from the want of a constitution; for it is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, THUS FAR SHALT THOU GO AND NO FARTHER. But in the absence of a constitution men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
—Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795)
Do go read the whole thing (the Dissertation, that is). Then read it again.
Do we have a ruling party of spiteful, backward children, gleefully eager to impeach, to punish, to humiliate, to make men pay what they do not owe? A party that will ensconce itself in a fortress against its people, but permits murders, riots, lawlessness, homelessness, and rampant drug abuse in the streets of once-great cities? That has seen fit to trample on both constitutional and unalienable rights with capricious lockdowns, dubious legal diktats, aristocratic hypocrisy, and other indignities?
...Are we now the proud inheritors and possessors of government-by-principle in the United States?
No. It is as you say: we were born of a corpse; but it is also we who have learned and remember! We revere those who risked all, who sacrificed to give the country its life, while it lived! We know of the bitter cold of Valley Forge, the nakedness, the hunger, the disease, the bloody feet, the dead and dying in pursuit of a glorious ideal! Go and ask the next thousand Leftist political prostitutes what they can tell you about the Barbary pirates, or the Seminole Wars, or Antietam, or the Alamo! Go and ask our Congress of sorrows!
Our modern self-styled masters, creatures of a thousand corrupt political bargains, motherless enemies of a history they neither know nor understand, seek disunity; and they need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, because they have chosen to make monsters of us.
"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts."
—Heinrich Heine
reason huh? how many times in life have you known the truth, the right answer, the right move instantly, but then second guessed yourself, reasoned it away, and then failed? "reason is king" = "I was born on third base, live protected from my own folly, so can still afford to pretend reason leads to truth or happiness."