Tag: culture

Johan Huizinga, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

2,902 words

Johan Huizinga
Homo Ludens
Groningen, Netherlands: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1938

After writing last week about Tarot considered as a game, I kept with the subject of gaming for a while longer. I realized I didn’t really know what Game Theory was, for example, so I swotted up on that. I also came across a book I had never heard of by a writer whose name rang only the vaguest of bells, although readers may be more familiar. Homo Ludens was published in 1938 by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and has turned out to be a complete delight. (more…)

Iranians marching in Tehran cheer at an airstrike ahead of them.

1,530 words

In the run up to the 2026 Iran War, I described how the most straightforward and optimistic path to victory for the US was:

1. A flawless conventional military victory, followed by
2. A successful Persian insurrection, followed by
3. Pahlavi running a corruption free illiberal democracy.

I generously gave each of these conditions a 10% chance of happening, and thus a 1/1000 chance of success overall. (more…)

2,310 words

A society can become technologically modern while remaining intellectually pre-modern. Satellites may be launched into space while superstition governs everyday decisions. The result is not progress but instability—a condition that can be described as second-hand modernity.

How can a society produce seemingly world-class engineers and nuclear scientists while remaining deeply irrational? (more…)

2,035 words

Modern people—particularly the university-educated, raised in predictable urban environments in relative comfort—live inside a powerful illusion: the belief that societies can change quickly.

We are surrounded by examples that condition us to think this way. Within a few decades, countries have gone from wretched poverty and primitive existence to rapid economic growth, and from illiteracy to seeming technical sophistication. (more…)

2,420 words

Garett Jones
The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left
Stanford University Press, 2022

It has often been argued that mass immigration is a matter of putting too much value on the economy. Business interests, so the argument goes, inevitably lobby for more immigration because it means cheap labor for them. Economists and politicians see no problem with the results because the line on a graph of GDP continues to rise. (more…)

3,945 words

Dwight Macdonald (ed. by John Summers)
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
New York: New York Review Books, 2011

Long before Paul Fussell’s Class, or Jilly Cooper’s Class, or such dubious offerings of social criticism as The Preppy Handbook and The Yuppie Handbook, we had Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult, a long essay originally written for the Partisan Review and published as a slight volume in 1961. More recently (2011) it was republished as a New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics title, bound together with an Introduction by Louis Menand and a collection of pointed and frothy Macdonald writings from the same era, originally published as Against the American Grain. (more…)

Photo courtesy of GoodFon.

1,762 words

As black violence increasingly plagues American society, even the most milquetoast moderate whites are beginning to concede that something is amiss with blacks. But most are yet unwilling to identify the true source of the problem and instead cite things such as “Democrat-run cities” or “inner-city violence.” Other, more daring moderates argue that “black culture” contributes to the rising violence in our cities and must therefore be addressed. Both viewpoints are wrong. (more…)

2,734 words

Renaud Camus
Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings
Blowing Rock, N. C.: Vauban Books, 2023

Enemy of the Disaster is the first extensive English-language collection of Renaud Camus’ writings in opposition to what he was the first to name “the Great Replacement” of France’s — and Europe’s — people. The book consists of ten pieces written between 2007 and 2017. Co-translator Louis Betty also provides a useful introduction, though marred by his compulsion to triangulate against shadowy “white supremacists.” (more…)

José de Madrazo y Agudo, La muerte de Viriato, jefe de los lusitanos (1807)

2.209 palabras

English original here

En el estado de confusión actual, promovido por la tribu que domina los medios de comunicación, el pueblo ignora las diferencias de significado de estas dos palabras, y frecuentemente son empleadas como sinónimos, cuando en realidad pueden ser y son partes contrapuestas. (more…)

Ted Kaczynski teapot by Charles Krafft

6,103 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

The following is an edited transcript of the conversation between Greg Johnson and Richard Houck on the subject of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, that was broadcast on Counter-Currents Radio in April 2021. You can listen to the recording here.

Greg Johnson: I’m Greg Johnson. Welcome to Ted Talk. I am joined here today by Rich Houck, and we’re going to be talking about Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future. Rich, welcome to the show. (more…)

2,500 words

George Friedman
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
New York: Anchor Books, 2009

George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years is an intriguing forecast of how the twenty-first century will play out. Friedman gets a lot of things wrong, but there is nevertheless a method to his analysis, and we have much to learn from what the broader center-Left, of which Friedman is a part, gets right. It’s also interesting because glowing reviews in the mainstream media suggests that the book has been guiding the establishment’s thinking, and thus explains some of their odd decisions. (more…)

José de Madrazo y Agudo, The Death of Viriatus (1807), one of the Lusitanian leaders who resisted Roman expansion into the Iberian Peninsula.

2,058 words

Spanish version here

In the present state of confusion, promoted by the tribe that dominates the mass media, the people ignore the differences in the meaning of these two words, and they are frequently used as synonyms, when in fact they can be — and are — opposites. (more…)

1,357 words

While the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth were in their official period of mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participated in a crass publicity stunt that outraged many. Two days before the Queen’s funeral, Trudeau was recorded singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a London pub. (more…)