If you’re going through hell, keep going. –Winston Churchill —– We hardly need Arnold Schwartzenegger to tell us our freedom is screwed. As determined as we freedomistas may be to uphold our mental and philosophical freedoms, our political freedoms and economic freedoms are gone-gone-gone. They’ve been going for decades of course. But we now live under a regime that in eight months has ruled via a combination of ever-shifting whim, diktat, incompetence, and a complete disregard for reason, principle, or constitutional law. When you’re ruled by capricious madmen, your external freedoms are moot. Here today, gone tomorrow, partially restored for…
55 CommentsCategory: War
Who’s in denial about our current cultural and political state of collapse? Most everybody. Millions of ordinary people who think bad times are always temporary are in denial. Oligarchs and plutocrats who believe we ordinary people are eternally tractable and malleable are in denial. Intellectuals who believe increasing quantities of fashionable nonsense are in denial. Politicians and their handlers who believe they can rule by fiat without consequences are in denial. Fools who imagine “the science” is a religion and that dissent from any statement by a high priest government-approved scientist is heresy are in denial. I’ve been in denial…
22 CommentsOver the years, when people have asked me, “Is it time yet, Claire?” my response has always been something like this: It may be moral to ‘shoot the bastards’ who kill freedom, but this isn’t the time. It doesn’t make tactical or strategic sense. Violence now will only make things much, much worse. That’s still my strong conviction. To any members of the Deep State trolling the ‘Net desperately searching for those elusive “domestic terrorists” they’re so determined to locate invent: I’m a useless target for you. I don’t advocate violence except in self-defense and I dread seeing anybody, especially…
39 CommentsAs a Western-hyphen-American (bitterly clinging to the Pacific coast as I do), I never thought I’d see this storied place. But here I stood. At first as I approached along the path I thought I’d cry for the wonder of being here where it all began. Just as quickly I realized I might cry for the sorrow of being here in the days of its ending. (We came to the statue under a blazing noonday sun. No angle allowed a good photograph until I surrendered to the understanding that I could get only a silhouette — and got this grand…
17 CommentsI’m suffering the sudden onset of optimism. Don’t worry, the condition probably won’t be fatal or chronic. I’ll be back to my normal, healthy, pessimistic self in a week or two. But meanwhile I can’t get rid of this feeling that everything may turn out okay out there in the world. Well, not everything. But outcomes of the current madness may be better than we expect. I feel this way precisely because everything’s falling apart. And all kinds of people are recognizing that everything’s falling apart or has already fallen and can’t be raised back up. That’s the part that…
31 CommentsI just re-read Rod Dreher’s FAQ on the Benedict Option. I love it. Although Dreher is talking exclusively to Christians (though inclusively among varieties of Christians), there’s a lot there for the rest of us, as well. He opens with a quote from his inspiration, social critic and historian Alasdair MacIntyre, that says in part: A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What…
23 CommentsI’m working on the conclusion to last week’s Freedomista symbiosis blog. With luck you’ll see it tomorrow or Wednesday. Meanwhile, walking to town to clear my brain and organize my thoughts, I picked this up at the post office: It looks like an intriguing and maybe instructive book. It’s in great shape. It even came with a handwritten note from the seller, thanking me effusively (with exclamation points and red underlines) for the order. Except I didn’t. Order it, that is. The one thing it didn’t come with was a note naming the giver. It’s clearly from someone who already…
12 CommentsI’m working on the next blogosaurus. The topic will be the symbiosis in hard times between those freedomistas who retreat (Galt’s Gulch style, monastic-style, solo, or within everyday communities) and those who fight. Their relationship may not be easy or even always mutually respectful, but it is symbiotic — and necessary. Meanwhile, I had company for a week and my houseguest courteously brought unseasonably warm and dry weather. We brainstormed this topic one morning and I paused for an hour that day to make notes. But mostly this was the background to the week’s intellectual labors: All we lacked was…
9 CommentsIt’s spring. The weather warms. The blossoms bloom. And a cloud of doom lowers over our heads. You feel it. I feel it. Random strangers on the street feel it. Commentators (those who haven’t drunk gallons of the Kool-Aid) feel it. Redditors buying GameStop and Dogecoin feel it. Heaven knows, anyone who’s studied Austrian economics must feel it (and while that’s only a few people in THE world, it’s a lot of people in our freedomista world, and some of the smartest). It’s there, looming over us like a green or orange sky blotched with mammatus clouds (and if you’ve…
22 CommentsWell, I’m back from the travels detailed in my “decline of civilization” post. The KIA appears to be its old self again. Though things didn’t go easy (and it took my local insurance agent helping me get the boss’s boss on the case), the claims people finally talked turkey with the KIA service center. Once that happened, everything came together nicely. I even had a great time on the part of my trip not dedicated to tweaker thieves, destruction, and insurance claims. Even on the bad days, I — as usual — got by with a little, or a lot,…
15 Comments