Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “Straining to Care About This Year’s Election,” on why he’s going to be sitting out this year’s presidential election. (more…)
Tag: Left-Right dichotomy
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Now that we’ve taken off our holiday party masks and furtively tiptoed into 2024, the presidential election looms only ten months away.
I find myself violently uninterested in the whole sorry affair. I can’t recall a time in my life when I cared less about the candidates or the outcome.
It wasn’t always this way.
I was barely out of diapers when Lyndon Johnson thrashed Barry Goldwater in 1964, so I can’t be faulted for not doing my civic duty and paying attention to that election. (more…)
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There were many factors that decided Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Republican primary and general election: his panache (both figurative and literal), his appeal to independents, and his anti-establishment and national populist attitude all set him apart from the other candidates. But what also stood out and magnified those other aspects were his new ideas, or at least ideas that both sides of the political establishment had tacitly agreed to avoid. (more…)
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December 3, 2023 Jim Goad
Using Politics to Segregate the Sexes
Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “Using Politics to Segregate the Sexes,” where he asks whether men and women being pulled apart by being artificially divided into Left and Right. (more…)
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It seems like a million years ago that men and women would have sex and start popping out babies without ever thinking about politics.
Nowadays, men and women hardly talk to one another because politics gets in the way.
If you’ve been unlucky enough to find yourself anywhere near a computer over the past ten years, you’ve seen headline after headline announcing that politics are cockblocking men and women from getting together and getting it on: (more…)
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Any power struggle is preceded by a verification of images and iconoclasm. This is why we need poets — they initiate the overthrow, even that of titans. — Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage
Generations of dissident nationalists and their work have cultivated a thriving philosophical and intellectual ecosystem both online and in print. The Internet in particular has provided fertile terrain for countless blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and more. (more…)
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Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part II here, Chapter 1 Part 1 here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
Let us sum up. Man is a “social animal” whose existence is consubstantial with that of society. Justice in the first instance is not a matter of rights but of measure; i.e., it is only defined as a relation of equity between persons living in society, so there are no holders of rights outside social life, and within it there are only those to whom rights are attributed. (more…)
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Part 2 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part III here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
Now, for liberalism, man — far from being constituted as such by his bonds with others — must be thought of as an individual unbound by any constitutive form of belonging; i.e., outside any cultural or socio-historical context. (more…)
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Part 1 of 3 (Introduction Part II here)
Translated by F. Roger Devlin
When liberalism is said to be the dominant ideology of our time, there are always those who protest by citing, for example, the amount of public expenditures or the level of taxation in our country. But this is looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. A liberal society is not exactly the same thing as a liberal economy. (more…)
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Jim Goad has produced a short video to accompany his latest essay, “Being White, Despite “Left’ and ‘Right’,” on why standing up for yourself as a white person doesn’t — and shouldn’t — necessarily have anything to do with embracing entire ideologies that are classified as either “Left” or “Right.” See below. (more…)
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F. Roger Devlin talks about translating Alain de Benoist’s The Populist Moment as well as about how populism developed out of the traditional Left-Right dichotomy in this video from the 2023 Counter-Currents Spring Retreat. The text of the talk is here. (more…)
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Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
Speaking as a white man, I have no problem with being a white man.
What I don’t understand is how this automatically makes me a member of the political “Right.” (more…)
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The following is the text of a talk that was given at the recent Counter-Currents Spring Retreat.
The term populism has been on people’s lips in the United States since Donald Trump’s rise, and its popularity goes back a bit farther in Europe, where it had already gained currency as a kind of curse word for anti-immigration protest parties. Following the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election, books on populism began proliferating in the English-speaking world. I expect many of these were solicited by the publishers, hoping to capitalize on a suddenly fashionable subject. During the Winter of 2018-19, Counter-Currents published a series of reviews of these new titles; I contributed four. (more…)