Yes, I know I was supposed to go on this week to discuss downward mobility as a way to freedom, the next of the themes that took the three top spots in this month’s fifth Wednesday competition. It’s a topical subject, not least on account of the wrenching changes now under way in the political and economic spheres. Still, that can wait a week. What I want to talk about this week is a sign I’ve been expecting for a very long time. It’s here, and that means that in the years ahead, a lot of things are going to change in a hurry.
To explain what the sign is and what it means I’m going to have to get personal for a bit. Specifically, I need to talk about my financial situation. As all the readers of this blog ought to know by now, I’m a freelance writer; I support myself by writing fiction and nonfiction books, with side gigs as an online essayist and political astrologer. I’ve been doing that full time since 1996. Any reasonably competent and active writer who makes good use of his or her backlist, keeping old books in print and changing publishers when needed, can expect a slow but steady growth in income over time. For the first twenty years of my writing career, that was certainly the case for me.
Since 2016, however, that phrase “slow and steady” stopped applying to my career. My income has more than doubled over the decade since then, and the growth curve shows no signs of slowing down. It’s been a little unsettling, really. During the years when my late wife and I were living at or near the poverty line, I picked up frugal habits, and I kept them when her health began to fail and we had to worry about medical expenses. (Yes, we could have gotten health insurance. In the wake of the cruelly misnamed “Affordable Care Act,” the policies we could afford had $6000 annual deductibles and 40% co-pays, and the firms who offer them have a reputation for dismissing legitimate claims with the legalese equivalent of “Yeah, we know we’re supposed to pay that, but we’re not going to, and you can’t make us. Too bad, so sad.”)
Fast forward to the brink of 2026, and I still have the frugal habits—they’ve served me well—but my annual income passed the lower end of six figures some time ago and it’s still going up. The charities I support, and certain esoteric schools I favor, have benefited noticeably as a result. Until quite recently, though, I was pretty thoroughly perplexed by this turn of events. None of my books have become bestsellers; no one category of books, among the many fiction and nonfiction genres in which I work, has broken from the pack to explain the sudden rise in income; my Wikipedia entry is just as shoddy and inaccurate as ever, and my name is no closer to becoming a household word than it was a decade back.
What’s more, these days, my writing is the subject of fairly extensive boycotts from both ends of the political spectrum, which was not true ten years ago. It so happens that in 2016 I wrote some blog posts that successfully predicted Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, and tried to explain that his rise to power wasn’t a random event—that it was the inevitable blowback from decades of misguided bipartisan policies that destroyed the working classes and did nothing to help the poor and disadvantaged, while pouring unearned benefits into the lap of the already overprivileged upper middle classes. A few years later I published a book, The King in Orange, which talked about that and also explored the considerable role of magic on both sides of the 2016 US presidential campaign.
A great many people on the American left have never forgiven me for either of those things, and that’s where their end of the boycotts came from. On the right? Well, to begin with, I’m a polytheist who writes about magic, and so the Christian end of the American right drew a hard line right there. It also happens that my novels quite often feature sympathetically portrayed gay, lesbian, nonwhite, and mixed-race characters, which alienates another subset of the American right, and my one venture to date into the military-political thriller genre, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, violates all the rules of the genre by having the United States suffer the consequences of decades of really stupid decisions, rather than being saved at the last moment by improbable heroics. (Spoiler alert: at the end of the novel, the US no longer exists as a nation.)
The results have been a source of reliable amusement for me. There are, for example, two entirely separate circuits of science fiction conventions in the US these days. There are the old established conventions, which fell under the control of woke activists a while back and chased off all their conservative and moderate attendees, and there’s an emerging constellation of conservative science fiction conventions, organized by some of the people who were thrown out of the original set. I don’t get invites to either one.
I don’t have any contacts in the conservative circuit, so I can’t tell you for certain what’s behind their reaction. It may well be that I’m simply not conservative enough for them; as a moderate Burkean conservative who’s written an essay making a conservative case for same-sex marriage, and heartily approves of legal immigration (though not the illegal sort being pushed so hard by corporate interests these days), I may simply be too squishy-soft to be allowed within their hallowed halls. On the other hand, I’ve heard from friends that the organizers of the local H.P. Lovecraft convention here in Rhode Island, which is very woke, reacted very badly indeed to the suggestion that a local author who’s published eleven novels based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos might be a suitable invitee to their event. Inevitably, The King in Orange is what was cited as justification for their fury.
All this is happening, furthermore, at a time when by most measures, science fiction is at a very low ebb. Hugo Award-winning books are still praised to the skies in what remains of the fandom scene and in science fiction-related corporate media, but their authors routinely have to keep their day jobs or rely on a spouse’s income, as their book sales are quite often at levels that would have been considered disastrously low just a couple of decades back. Self-published e-books about galactic space navies and print-on-demand novels rehashing clichés from Robert Heinlein for the umpteenth time reliably outsell the loudly marketed products of the big corporate presses that dominate the official science fiction scene these days.
Meanwhile, I’m doing very well writing fantasy and science fiction novels that the big corporate presses consider unpublishable. That’s not just an intuition on my part, as it happens. The last novel I ever submitted to one of the big names in the industry, The Shoggoth Concerto, came back to me after the usual epic delays with a charmingly patronizing little note from one of the acquisitions editors telling me that it was “too quiet and too weird” for them, but that she’d be happy to see something more commercially viable from me. (I laughed, filed the note away for future amusement value, and sent the manuscript to a less constipated publisher, which snapped it up at once.) As I noted in an earlier post here, the big corporate publishers have embraced a failed business model that causes most of their new books to lose money. Even so, it’s intriguing to watch the extent to which the praise of critics and activists correlates with failure, and their active hostility and denunciation correlates with success.
It was just in the last few days, when I stopped and worked through the implications of all this, that I realized what had been staring me in the face the whole time.
To explain this realization, it will be useful to jump from my career to that of a vastly more successful author, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels and other works of popular fiction. She’s one of the world’s wealthiest writers these days. She’s also the target of organized and highly publicized boycotts from both ends of the political spectrum, on a much grander and more hysterically shrill scale than anything I’ve faced. Like me, she offended the right first, by writing a series of novels that featured magic (or, rather, fake magic, but we don’t have to get into that right now), thus annoying religious conservatives, and also embraced most of the clichés of turn-of-the-century mainstream leftism, thus annoying the rest of the right.
It’s a matter of history that none of this slowed down the spectacular commercial success of the Harry Potter books. What deserves attention here is that a far more vitriolic response by the left a little later on didn’t slow down Rowling’s success either. Her sin, in the eyes of today’s woke leftists, is that she retained the values of an ordinary turn-of-the-century British liberal feminist, rather than abandoning those for the latest upgrade once pressure groups backed by the medical industry and the corporate media insisted on redefining the word “woman” to include men who had, or claimed to have, gender dysphoria. Her failure to swap out her values on command netted her spectacular tantrums from the media and activist circles, and was followed by a boycott intended to silence Rowling once and for all, and return her to the grinding poverty from which her writing raised her all those years ago.
It’s been quite a few years now since that boycott got declared. I think we can all agree at this point that it’s been a stupendous failure. Rowling continues to publish books, and to rake in royalties on a scale that would have impressed old Scrooge McDuck. It was when I contemplated her continuing success, and my own far more modest but still gratifying prosperity, that the true irony of our shared situation lit up with incandescent intensity. We, and others like us, aren’t succeeding despite those equal and opposite boycotts from left and right. We’re succeeding because of the boycotts.
Let’s take this a step at a time. Opinion polls show that here in the United States, for example, only about 8% of the adult population supports the extreme liberal agenda being pushed by activists and their corporate and media allies. That’s around the share that supports, for example, allowing men to redefine themselves as women just by saying so, spending government funds to support unrestricted illegal immigration, and the rest of it. Meanwhile, maybe twice as large a share of adults supports the extreme conservative agenda being pushed by a different set of activists, and amplified by their own corporate and media allies: abolition of same-sex marriage, mass deportation of legal immigrants, and so on.
All in all, then, the collective dialogue of our time is being dominated by views that only a quarter or so of the electorate actually support. The other three-quarters? To say that their views aren’t welcome in public forums is to understate things considerably. Activists at both extremes have proven to be ready, willing, and able to suspend their bitter hatred of one another so they can cooperate in shutting out more moderate voices. It’s a common strategy of extremists, and it generates a predictable pattern of blowback.
When woke activists got control of the established science fiction conventions and drove out anyone who wasn’t willing to kowtow to their views, after all, those moderate and conservative readers and writers didn’t just disappear, like the Dark Lords of all those painfully derivative fantasy novels when the plucky protagonist finally gets around to wielding the Magic Macguffin. They simply stopped going to those science fiction conventions, and in due time some of the exiles began to organize their own. In exactly the same way, driving the opinions of three-quarters of the population out of the realm of public discourse doesn’t make the opinions disappear, and it also does nothing to convince the people who believe those opinions that they should change their minds. It simply means that they go elsewhere, and look for other ways to express themselves.
There’s a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect that’s received a certain amount of discussion in this light. In 2003, as many habitués of the internet know, Barbra Streisand tried to suppress an aerial photo of her seaside mansion in California. As a result of her efforts, the photo, which had previously been downloaded only six times, was viewed more than 420,000 times over the next month. It’s a common form of blowback against unpopular attempts to suppress information. I wondered at first if that effect might be behind the phenomenon I’ve outlined, but the facts simply don’t support that. On the one hand, Rowling already had worldwide name recognition when the boycott against her was proclaimed; on the other, I don’t have noticeably more name recognition now than I did ten years ago.
No, what’s going on is something considerably more interesting. It seems tolerably clear that at this point, when activists at either extreme of the political spectrum mount their soapboxes and, with the usual saliva-flecked rage, insist that this or that author be boycotted because they don’t grovel before this or that activist demand, a fair number of people in the excluded middle go out and buy at least one of that author’s books, as a way of expressing their unspoken disagreement with the ranting activist. I propose to name this remarkable phenomenon after its most obvious current beneficiary, and call it the Rowling Effect: the process by which bullying intended to enforce an extreme position boosts interest and support for more moderate views.
The Rowling Effect has relevance that reaches far beyond the careers of dissident writers, but that’s certainly one of the significant places it shows up these days, and it’s worth taking into account there. May I offer a bit of career advice to would-be authors, especially those who have become convinced that they can’t get their manuscripts into print because their views don’t align with either of the two extremes? Don’t worry about it. You’ll have to get by without a contract from any of the five huge corporate publishers that dominate the officially approved end of the book world, but you’re much likely to get a favorable response from one of the hundreds of small to midsized independent presses that also produce books, and they’ll offer you better contract terms anyway. The markets for alternative views are there; you just have to do an end run around the gatekeepers who try to shove everything into one or the other extreme viewpoint—and that’s becoming increasingly easy these days.
Yet it’s the broader political context that has me watching the Rowling Effect carefully just now, and counts as the sign I mentioned at the beginning of this post: the first clear indication that widespread rejection of the official political discourse of our time is beginning to drive active resistance. The three-quarters of the electorate whose views are excluded from that discourse, after all, make up a political resource of considerable scale and, at least potentially, explosive force. Recent elections here in the US, and in some other nations as well, have reliably confounded the pundits in two ways. First, there’s been a considerable mismatch between public opinion polls and the actual outcome of elections, and it’s always in the same direction: away from whatever the corporate-bureaucratic establishment wants. Very clearly, a significant share of people are refusing to tell pollsters what they really think, and wait until they can take action in the voting booth.
The second challenge to the pundits is that voting behavior doesn’t reliably fit into the partisan straitjacket into which the ruling classes keep trying to stuff it. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election confounded Democrats in exactly the same way that Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral election confounded Republicans. Neither outcome should have been any kind of surprise, however, because in both cases the voters turned to the candidate they thought was most likely to overturn business as usual.
That, not the usual partisan issues, is the unmentionable driving force behind the politics of our time. Nobody outside the airtight and oxygen-deprived bubbles of the overprivileged wants the status quo. Nobody, other than the current system’s kleptocratic beneficiaries and a gaggle of hangers-on begging for scraps from their masters’ tables, supports the dysfunctions with which politics as usual have saddled the nations of the industrial West. The first well-organized faction that takes over the abandoned center of politics, and offers the disaffected three-quarters what they want, will sweep everything else before it. The only requirement is that the faction really does have to move to the center. Insisting that the other side’s extremism is so bad that it’ll make people embrace your side’s equally unwelcome extremism is what got us into this situation in the first place.
As the last hours of 2025 slip away and 2026 dawns, then, I see the first stirrings of an unnoticed landscape of possibility. That is balanced, however, by certain equally unnoticed dangers. A crucial fact about the fascist regimes of the early 20th century that all sides have gone out of their way to suppress is that a great many of them seized power by offering electorates the commonsense policies that everyone outside the political class wanted and none of the established parties would discuss. That’s why the 25-Point Program of the Nazi party, for example, demanded such bland and reasonable steps as government food subsidies for pregnant women and children, reforms to make education available to all, and the expansion of old age pensions.
In the United States and a great many other countries in the industrial West, the future belongs to whichever political movement establishes itself most effectively in the abandoned center. If that movement is committed to civil liberties and the rule of law, well and good. If it is not, we could be in for a very rough quarter century or more. The bitter events of a century ago show clearly enough that if the elites in charge of democratic political systems insist on the preservation of an intolerable status quo in the teeth of widespread popular dissent, the people will turn to anybody who will overthrow the existing system—even if that means accepting jackboots and armbands. I can only hope that enough people in the political classes recognize what is happening in time to move to the center first, and prevent a repeat of that ghastly experience.
Dear John,
You deserve every penny that you have earned. I don’t comment much but I have followed you forever and always stop what I am doing if I hear that you are on some podcast or other. (I tend to listen because so much of my life involves keeping my eyes on screens or books.
Isn’t it Leonard Cohen who says “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”? I have kept a list of your “appropriate technologies” on my desktop and whenever I have an opportunity to influence some policy in that direction I do it. You have kept the light getting in to my life for 25 years.
Happy New Year and a job well done1!!
Hello JMG and commentarists:
I want to wish you all a Happy New Year 2026 in advance (at least from my own location local time).
Interesting post. “Extreme viewpoint fatigue” seems to be becoming a force. My sense is a socially conservative, economically liberal movement would sweep the field. But we’ll see.
Also, I’ll send a book recommendation (to your email address, I don’t want to name drop here) on successfully adapting to a life of prosperity for those who come from a situation of lack. It may be of use to you.
Glad to hear you are prospering financially, FWIW!
Right on point, as usual. You are not the only commentator drawing the parallels with the rise of totalitarianism in the 20’s and 30’s as a result of the failure of any European politicians to offer anything resembling a reasonable social program after WWI; Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism makes your points precisely, (although she takes 10s of thousands of words to do it, as a classical academic)
I think the challenges to having something reasonable emerge to inspire the middle are immensely more intense than 100 years ago. The internet, and its undermining of the distinction between reality and fantasy, the level of consumerism, and the reality that no reasonable way forward is possible without serious downward mobility (I look forward to that column) seem to me to mean that the peddlers of alternative realities and surrender of self along the lines of Hitler and Stalin may have an even easier course.
“When woke activists got control of the established science fiction conventions and drove out anyone who wasn’t willing to kowtow to their views”
Ah, it’s so regrettable that my one-time vote for entryism got zero traction. Because that is exactly the mechanism that brought all of the West to the current dismal situation. The example you mentioned was The Troth, and the ousting of its founder Diana Paxson; the example I’m thinking of was the hollowing-out and warping of the formerly conservative CDU by GDR wonder weapon Angela Merkel. I’d really love to read your thoughts on how to prevent one’s organization, party, or resistance movement from being taken over by moles.
Well, people who don’t like what you’re selling and tell you they’re not going to buy it – aren’t your customers and you don’t really have to think about them too much or respect them either. Customers do need to be respected though.
As an aside, I visited a local corporate chain bookstore recently to see if I could find Devon Eriksen’s Theft of Fire and I was a bit shocked at what I encountered. It seems physical brick and mortar chain bookstores these days only care about angry lonely single women and nobody else. I’ve also never seen so many things-that-aren’t-books being sold in a bookstore. And they didn’t carry his book either. I guess that’s the last time I visit a physical bookstore, it’s Big Slimy River from now on.
—
One way or another change is what we’ll get, whether we want it or not. It’s a question of who does the changing and how messy it is at this point. The people who think we can keep the status quo going forever are living in a dream world. Literally. My guess is that things have to go *flump* first. Brace for impact.
John, I’ve just read your today essay, and unsurprisingly, I agree. The echo chambers and cancelation culture by the two extremes of political spectrum (though until last times we in the western countries have to suffer more the woke b**t), have harmed near to a not recovery point the politics everywhere, with effects over culture, society…
It’s wry irony you’ve been rejected outside the woke and Christian right fortresses alike, but when you’re a Burkean Conservative polytheistic Druid, indeed it’s an uncomfortable view for political zealots. I understand your situation. I myself find me in a not equal situation like you, but also between the Scilla and Caribdis of nowadays current political tension (which in my country isn’t the same as in the USA, but it rhymes). Some times I’ve told you I’m a not very usual Christian who was a social-democrat in mu younger age, but now I’ve been pivoting towards what I call “Traditionalist Socialism”. I don’t want to proselitize you all, so I only will tell you I like William Morris socialism, the Situationists and post-Situ literature and another fringe thinkers. Well, this puts me in a fatal “sandwich” between wokeized “Socialists” of our “beloved” Madrid government (which probably it’s going to lose next general elections) and neoliberal/far extreme right coalition which probably will be next Spain government. We will check soon that the opposite of a bad idea is another bad idea.
You and me don’t think the same in politics and religion, but until some extent, we’re sailing in the same ship inside a stormy sea, John. We have chosen the “wrong” beliefs and thoughts mix to the current conventional “wisdom”.
I’m glad you sell more books than some years ago. I’m happy Harry Potter books keep being sold well in spite (thanks to) of their author failed cancellation attempt. Well, I don’t like that saga but it seems cancellation failure is always good for democracy.
We’ll see wether politicians end paying attention to the orphaned political center, and soon start to migrate from their extremists echo chambers, or a new kind if fascism would be born soon to fill that void. Of course, I’d like the first future. Happy 2026 for you all!
I spent yesterday evening with a couple I’m good friends with who just came back from AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona. They were full of stories about how encouraging it was to be in a huge sold-out convention centre full of people who are awake to the lies being pushed by the powers that be and who are talking openly about a brighter future. Apparently there was a great set of speakers sharing a diverse set of viewpoints, tons of young people, and those young people were dressed like they were going to prom.
My friends and I, by the way, are Canadian. This couple flew all the way to Phoenix to get excited about hopeful stirrings of change in *American* politics.
That’s the way it is now in the great North- my Boomer parents and their friends are choosing to boycott the Orange Man by giving up their snowbird time in Florida this coming winter, while several of my Gen X and Millennial friends are making active plans to gain or re-establish American citizenship. We still can’t get anyone here to listen about Covid overreach, but in Arizona they’re talking openly about it and half a dozen other taboo topics, and the Vice President and Speaker of the House are showing up to wish them well.
If Charlie Kirk were alive today I think he would wholeheartedly agree with you about the Rowling Effect. Becoming a martyr seems to have done precisely nothing to slow down his life’s work.
JMG:
I am glad to see that you are making good money writing. Your work is excellent and engaging.
What a good start to the new year. I read it and the quote from the movie popped into my head. I just double checked the book and it’s there, not just a movie abridgement.
“Your quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true.”
What a good sentiment for the times.
Here the year is ending becalmed but clear under a high pressure system. A storm is on the way for the weekend which is normal for the time of year.
Happy New Year.
I’ve seen the Rowling Effect play out many times in the women’s sex realist movement. A woman speaks, saying something blasphemous, and the mob try to cancel her. It doesn’t matter if she’s a writer, a speaker, an artist or what, but then other women say to each other, ‘Hm, that’s annoyed me enough that I’m going to buy her product/make a donation’ and if they already have the product, they’ll buy another one as a gift or make another donation and whoever the targeted woman is finds that, far from being ruined, she’s actually doing a good deal better than before the attempted cancellation. I’ve ended up buying a lot of books I might not otherwise have known about because of this effect. It works very well indeed.
JMG, “sympathetically portrayed gay, lesbian, nonwhite, and mixed-race characters”, also, I recall you stating that one of your characters, in fact a main character, is an asexual woman. Them’s fighting words for a certain male and female segment of the public, who devoutly take it for granted that sexuality is a given which does not vary person to person.
The effect you describe applies to more than books. I make a point of buying the occasional product from Eden Foods, when I can afford them. Eden Foods is an organic processor which supports local organic farming, hires local staff, and was one of the first to eliminate a certain dangerous chemical from it’s packaging. What’s not to like here? Seems that the owners are devout Catholics and the health insurance they offer their employees–please note they DO offer health insurance–won’t pay for abortion. Howls of outrage from feminists, who have forgotten that many of the founders of their movement themselves opposed legalization of the procedure. Eden products are still being offered at the health food store in my area, where the proprietor is known for summarily cancelling products he thinks don’t sell well enough. Upscale young mothers of all political persuasions have become a mainstay for the organic foods industry, not a constituency likely to be impressed by feminist outrage getting in the way of them sourcing the best possible products to feed their babies.
Inciteful and well stated. For some time now I have been refusing to talk politics with anyone who can’t answer the question “name one thing liberals did that helped elect Donald Trump”. It helps sort out those who are unwilling to look at both sides of the issue. Not surprisingly conservatives are much better at figuring out the answer than liberals.
Just wanted to let you know that your blog and books have helped me immensely in my life, both in finding my spirituality and bringing me to Freemasonry. Those two things in turn have brought a good number of positive people into my life and helped me find deeper meaning and purpose. I subscribe to your Astrology Patreon, not for the insights you provide, but as a small way that I can help support someone who has had a vast influence on my life, even if he may never meet me in person. Here’s to hoping the next year will be just as fruitful for you!
Jason, in what sense is “a socially conservative, economically liberal movement” different from the Republican party ca. 2015? Or the Canadian Conservative party both before and after 2015? Or the Tories? Or Merz’ CDU nowadays? I fail to see the novelty there (unless I am misunderstanding your use of “liberal”), and I note that none of these parties have achieved actual majorities with that program.
This is one of your most prescient posts ever, IMHO! “The Wind is changing!” as Ghân-Buri-Ghân said, and I think you have sensed something very important here.
I think it’s probably a good time to remind people that if something like fascism does come to the United States, one should not assume that one will be able to recognize it by assuming it will be goose-stepping down Main Street in jackboots and pillbox hats underneath banners with misappropriated Runic symbols on them. American fascism is likely to be every bit as American as apple pie and hot dogs!
I thought you already noted recently that every time political extremists screech about JKR, her book sales go up (I don’t remember where).
I wonder if anyone has quote-mined your essay “Hate Is The New Sex” to write or generate a hit piece against you.
And did you notice an uptick in book sales/blog views back when leftists were labelling you as an “ecofascist”?
It’s good to hear that you are doing so well financially. My favorites among your fiction are “Stars Reach” and “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.” And “A World Full of Gods” in non-fiction. (The Cthulu themed stuff has never appealed that much to me. )
I think the one dimensional liberal/left and conservative/right spectrum fails. We need at least a two dimensional space, maybe even a three dimensional space to describe US politics. The name “Kirk” seems to have be hijacked by Charlie and Erika. Hardly anyone thinks of Russel Kirk these days. That’s a shame. He’s a Burkean conservative, too, unless I’m mistaken.
Wonderful essay; you helped me sort out something.
I spent a couple of years reading in what is called revisionist history of World War II and Nazi Germany. I’ve read Mein Kampf in a good sympathetic modern translation and found it fascinating. I’ve also read a lot about Weimar Germany and was struck by how many parallels it has with America and Europe today. It struck me strongly that some – not all, but some – of what Hitler and the Nazis were proposing made an uncomfortable amount of sense.
It is unfortunately all-too-true that the kinds of reforms that Hitler wanted could only have been pushed through if he had total control of the government. If he had had to deal with the corrupt Weimar “democratic” process, his policies would have been stalled, obfuscated, buried in their congress, and tied up in the courts with stalling tactics – which again sounds far too uncomfortably similar to the situation in the Western “democracies” today.
I get the very uncomfortable feeling that, like mid-1930’s Germany, the corrupt democratic process in the West may be too far gone to be reformed in any sort of non-coercive way. I am sure I am not the only person to notice the dysfunctional state of so many levels of our government processes, and to be fed up with it.
That does not bode well at all.
EllenA, thank you for this! Cohen was right, of course.
Chuaquin, and likewise.
Jason, I’ll look forward to the recommendation. I don’t think that a socially conservative, economically liberal movement would accomplish much, as that niche has already been filled many times over. What about a socially and economically moderate movement?
Jerry, I’m sorry to say you may well be right — in addition to the factors you’ve noted, the collapse in the quality of education in recent decades also predisposes people to the kind of simplistic solutions the Hitlers and Stalins of the world have always peddled.
Athaia, I suspect part of that is that I’ve already written about entryism to some extent on my blog and my Dreamwidth journal. That said, I’m not sure entryism is the most important factor here. When Fortune 500 corporations are pushing these dysfunctions in lockstep, I think something rather broader is involved.
Other Owen, it really is interesting to see the extent to which the entire corporate world has stopped noticing that there are markets other than politically liberal, chronically depressed, white middle-aged single women in upper middle class corporate jobs. I wonder if they’ll wake up and notice reality before they slam face first into it.
Chuaquin, I don’t have to favor traditionalist socialism to be delighted that you’ve taken up something other than the two failed ideologies of the status quo. Huzzah for William Morris! 😉
Dylan, when a political, religious, or cultural movement starts martyring its opponents, it’s doomed. The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk went straight through him and hit corporate liberalism, dealing it a fatal wound; it’s just that, like so many other big and stupid dinosaurs, it hasn’t noticed the blood loss yet. I’m intrigued to hear that people are flying down from Canada to draw inspiration from our current political transformations; that may lead interesting places on your side of the border in the years ahead.
Chris, thank you!
Siliconguy, it is indeed from the book — Galadriel said it to the surviving members of the Fellowship in Caras Galadon. (Yes, I used to win trivia competitions at science fiction conventions; autism has its privileges!)
Bacon, I hadn’t encountered the term “sex realist” before — thank you. I’d say that the emergence of that movement is another good sign that the Rowling Effect is getting pretty fair traction these days.
Mary, that’s another good point; I also have an important character in another of my books who’s intersexed, which doubtless has somebody or other bent out of shape. As for Eden Foods, good heavens — they’re owned by a Catholic family these days? I remember when they were one of the main suppliers of the Zen macrobiotic movement. Yes, I used to follow that diet, and yes, I still buy Eden products tolerably often, as they’re good clean foodstuffs.
Brad, excellent! That makes a fine litmus test of the ability to think. I wonder what would happen, though, if you also asked people to name one thing conservatives did that helped elect Zohran Mamdani…
Trubrujah, thank you and I’m delighted to hear this.
Robert, thank you. Yeah, Ghân-Buri-Ghân’s been on my mind of late, too.
Mister N, exactly. American fascism, if it appears, will look patriotic, earnest, enthusiastic, and normal. That’s how the fascism of a century ago looked to people in the countries where it flourished.
Patrick, I haven’t seen a Hate is the New Sex hit piece yet, but yes, the claims that I’m an “ecofascist” were followed promptly by an uptick in my viewers and book sales.
Phutatorius, yes, Russell Kirk was mostly Burkean in his focus, and I found his book The Conservative Mind very helpful in sorting out my own political understandings.
Charlie, I know. It’s precisely the fact that most people who screech about fascism have no idea what it actually was, much less why it appealed to so many people, that makes a genuine recurrence of it so likely.
Brad Strand @ 13, I will take a whack at that. I can think of a lot of things the Dems did to get Trump elected, but what in particular stands out is that they stole the 2016 nomination from Bernie Sanders in favor of one of the (deservedly) most disliked women in the USA. Even our host, no fan of Sanders, was heard saying on a podcast in about 2017 or 18, that if we had had a fair election in 2016, Bernie would be the president.
@Phutatorius
We need at least a two dimensional space, maybe even a three dimensional space to describe US politics.
Unfortunately, the popular, 2-D Political Compass test is biased and designed to herd those who take the quiz into the Libertarian Socialist quadrant (while alleging Democrats and Republican politicians are in the opposite quadrant.
For those here who do enjoy Rowling’s work, I watched one episode of the BBC adaptation of her detective series and once was enough. Agreed, there were probably nuances only a British audience would understand, but I was left thinking what ever happened to best in the world British acting? The female lead was especially annoying, one of those baby-faced, mouthy types one sees in BBC productions. For me, her performance had no discernible relationship to Rowling’s character, and the male lead was only marginally better. Nor was this bad acting fest rescued by (formerly) legendary BBC production and scriptwriting.
I’m so glad you’re in the six figures income club, JMG. Congratulations! As with others here, my little SubscribeStar subscription will continue to be most happily paid, in gratitude for all you, and no doubt Sara as well, did and do to shine some light in the darkness. May your success continue into 2026 and beyond!
Have you an opinion on the citizen journalism phenomenon, launched by Nick Shirley? It seems the fraud he and his associate, David, have shown a spotlight on is an issue that the neglected middle rightly care about. I wonder if this is more about timing than content. The fraud is old, but the time is ripe for a public look at it.
OtterGirl
I think this analysis suffers from its low dimensionality assumption. Yes, if politics is reduced to the one-dimensional “Left-Center-Right” continuum, one can view the 3/4th of the population that doesn’t identify with either of the extremes as a kind of silent majority waiting to be activated. But actual political opinion is a very high dimensional space. What we call “far Left” or “far Right” are really two clusters of opinion on the hyperplane, and the 3/4ths of citizens which don’t fall in those two clusters don’t form a single coherent, third one that is “up for grabs”. They are spread out all over the place and in their own sub-clusters. And in many (most?) cases they have less in common with each other than they have with the closest of the two “far Left/Right” clusters, hence the seemingly unyielding persistence of the two party system.
“Grabbing the center” ends up not really being a viable option politically for the same reason that matchmakers who think their two “weird”, still single friends should necessarily be a good match for each other fail to make marriages. They should get together, since they are both “weird”, after all, right? But to butcher Tolstoy–normies are all normal in the same way, each weirdo is weird in his or her own way. So if anything the two weirdos are likely to be an even worse match for each other than they would be for another normal person. In politics, most “moderates” are really politically idiosyncratic, and likely to disagree with even another moderate on political issues as much or more than that with the “far Left/Right” cluster they most lean towards–at least so far as the discussion moves beyond just expressions of vague disaffection with the overall political system. The only thing that really aligns them as “normal” or “centrist” is that they don’t tend to care nearly so much about issues as the “radicals” do, but that also would serve to neuter them as a political block even if their collective opinions cohered.
I can speak to the “Conservative Science Fiction Convention” scene as someone who is a distant part of it.
By and large, we’re libertarian NOT Libertarian in government preferences, and conservative in personal and religious preference.
Most of us rub along really poorly with the conservatives who are likely to denounce you, and get denounced on the regular ourselves. I suspect the reason you are not getting invites is simply that almost no one in this set has heard of you. And for those who have, there is still in this group a very large belief in limitless exploration of the universe, and a limited to earth future does not resonate. I hesitate to throw your name out for that reason, and for the reason that the one I’m a founding member of is still 14 hours away and I don’t get there often. It would be absurd to suggest a guest if I’m not going to make it, and I’m not the funder of the convention.
Speaking of which, most of these tiny conventions are running on one person’s pocketbook, time, and energy. The guests are the people the person funding the convention wants to meet enough to pay their planes and hotels.
Also nobody, but nobody, knows how to effectively market, and . . . the individualists fail to organize. There’s no way there aren’t a hundred science fiction fans in a city that large, and yet . . . we haven’t cracked a hundred attendees yet and half of us are from out of state.
This does, however, stop entryism cold. LibertyCon is the “big, old, and known” convention, and it has a hard membership cap and sells out in a matter of minutes.
I usually read the entire essay before commenting, but I am just hung up on: “the local H.P. Lovecraft convention here in Rhode Island, which is very woke.”
Uh, have they read anything by, or about, um, H.P. Lovecraft?
I can understand the woke wanting to deplatform you, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around them simultaneously being fans enough of Lovecraft to organize a convention around his work. The mind boggles.
Over at this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 12/22). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Leslie Fish, wife of Bob Ralston, who passed away in early December, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to her next existence.
May Angelica, who has reason to believe she and her property are under physical threat, remain safe and protected, and her property unbothered.
May Corey Benton, who passed away on 12/10, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination.
May Satoko L in Kyoto, who is recovering at home after weeks of hospitalization for Acute Hepatitis while in a state of immunodeficiency, continue to heal quickly and safely, and return to full vitality.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Marko have the awareness and strength to constructively deal with the situation.
May the abcess in JRuss’s left armpit heal quickly.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s left ureter be restored to full function, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, continue to respond favorably to treatment; may he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Kevin whose sister is Cynthia, if you happen to read this, I hope all is well. I’d just like to let you know that your prayer listing will come down in the New Year unless I hear from you.
I think (far) right wing could imitate the toxic woke cancellation culture across western countries if they manage to replace the current leftist dominion over art and culture; however, I think it’s more probable the worst toxic subproduct of far right “culture” is the thriving online conspiracy theories. By the way, I guess those extremists nutted people would start a frantic vicious circle thanks to social media echo chambers and AI, until their conspiracy theories echo chamber eventually implodes.
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I told you in one of my comments within last JMG post, that spanish right parties are two, a far right party (Vox) and a Conservative one (PP). The first is growing with its populism, so the Conservatives are desperate trying to imitate their political allies (but not friends) into a harder speech and attitude, without falling into full extremist mode: they want to grasp voters into their corral. This tendence has made Conservatives turn from center-right into a full right mode IMHO. I don’t have serious evidences of it, but I think a good part of local economical
elites have been financing far right here to send Conservatives into a more extremist place within the political spectrum.
Far right isn’t the same as Fascism. If you look our national far right program, you’ll see they only want to end with illegal migration, which isn’t an unreasonable purpose. However, they apparently want to recentralize again this country (which in a context of Long Descent wouldn’t be good for local economy and society). Most of their proposals are part of their cultural war: a simetric mirrors game who praises the opposite to the woke…so you can do the math (opposite of a bad idea…). What a surprise, they are in favor of full neoliberalism, though a bit lesser rampant than Milei in Argentina. Vox foreign politics program seems awful to me: complete submission to EU/NATO orders (so a lot of Russophobia). However, on this electoral program point they share their disastrous geopolitical blindness with Conservatives and “Socialists” here.
Leftism here identifies Vox with Fascism, but after knowing its views (which I don’t share) I think leftist people is more saying a “shibboleth” for their agenda than a serious analysis of their apparent enemy.
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I’d like to tell you Antonio Turiel (the most influent activist in the tiny spanish Degrowth and “Peaker” online community) has written in his blog his usual old year analysis/new year predictions. This year has been grimmer than last years. In his view, we’re full ahead into the Long Descent. However, he criticises Trump but he doesn’t reach to grasp why the Orange Monster has succeed to have a second mandate in US. So Trump is simply bad and his voters maybe fool. It’s not strange. Turiel has become part of Degrowth activism, so until some extent, he’s under the woke spell like the rest of left here. So he’s not capable (or he doesn’t want?) to know the real reasons for a heck of American voters to choose Trump again. It’s evident the woke madness which has intoxicated the Democrat party has something in relation with this success, but it would be horrible to some leftist dogmas to be discovered by Turiel and others thinkers…
(I’d like to have linked his blog to my comment, but with my current smartphone I’m unable to link it to you).
JMG # 21:
Well, I wrote before we don’t have to agree necessarily in our respective points of view. I must to tell you I’m not at the end of my political journey yet, so I’ll probably changing slowly my views during the rest of my life, during the Long Decline. Oh, no argument here for William Morris…
One of the things that drove me out of the far-left and into the disaffected center was that you must agree with the left on every single ideological point and be completely willing to immediately accept whatever new ideological innovations happen in the future. For instance, one could be very leftist on economic issues, but if you deviate from orthodoxy on transgender ideology or abortion or immigration you’re a fascist and you’re not allowed in the club anymore.
Of course, this is what happened to Rowling and I think that her excommunication has weakened the left far more than it’s weakened her.
An example of the kind of power that can be unleashed when the Rowling Effect you describe is put in to action happened right here in blue Oregon.
Our very liberal LGTBQ style governor pushed across a new transportation funding bill over the extreme objections of both republicans and more centrist democrats. It involved over 4 Billion in new taxes mostly in the form of gas taxes and vehicle registration fees. It was so unpopular that it would not pass in regular session so they had to have a special session after the governor inacted draconian cuts to ordinary road maintenance and snow plowing. The Dems even had to drag two of their reps in off their death beds in the hospital to get the tax bill passed.
In Oregon we have a strong referendum process which allows legislation to be put on the ballot with the collection of enough signatures. The governor held signing the bill until the last minute, because by law, no signature gathering can start until until the legislation is signed. But a petition is limited to collecting the required number of signatures in a certain amount of time following the passing of the legislation not the signing of said legislation. That gave anyone willing to gather signatures to put the thing on the ballot only a very small amount of time to do it. An amount of time the official political wonks considered impossible.
But a small group of mostly republicans just set up a website and asked for volunteers when their small window opened. Thousands and thousands signed up to collect signatures. Instead of going door to door ,and the like, the volunteers just set up tables outside the public libraries and post offices. Within a week and a half they collected almost three times the number of signatures required and now the tax will have to wait for the ballot next November.
The interesting thing is all the mainstream media in the state ( 1 crappy newspaper and 4 TV stations along with the local outpost of NPR) tried to bury the effort to gather signatures so as not to give it any publicity. When the outcome was certain they chimed in with pearl clutching about evil republicans and pot hole disasters. The truth is, the reason for the tax was that the governor had moved much of the transportation budget in to green energy, EV rebates and such making old fashioned road maintenance depend on the new tax. People saw through that.
From what I saw at the signing location where I went the crowd was just what you described. Neither right or left, just the forgotten middle getting a chance to have their say.
Cogent analysis again. Being politically marooned myself, I have no problem feeling alienated from the current political climate. I have an aversion to Republicans because I have a working class background, but to see the Democrats turn their backs on their historical bedrock constituency has been one of the great farces of my lifetime. So, my bedrock philosophy is: does it work? And, who does it work for?
This cancellation mindset is such a poison. Are peoples ideas so weak that opposing viewpoints need to be shuttered and destroyed, or is it just standard issue tribalism? The baboon brain wants to know!
re: Murican fascism
The idea that a Fearless Leader could get this country marching lockstep in *any* direction, well, it’s not impossible but improbable. What I think is more likely to happen is this country blows apart into smaller chunks, at least two. Let’s call them the Socialist People’s Republic of NewYorkifornia and the Free Nation of Texida.
Again, some of those hairline cracks back in the good old days have turned into irreparable fractures now.
I’m not quite sure what could unite this country again, even a false flag or some other deception will be seen through in fairly short order.
Some of the people I have been close to for decades seem to have swung hard inflexible left during the pandemic at the same time I looked at the left and said ‘you have gone where I can’t follow’. This leads a) to not daring talk about certain topics with family members and remaining silent while they yap, and b) doing the same with a friend, or getting into big arguments.
I hung up on my friend. I’ve never done that to anyone who isn’t a telemarketer before. And I don’t feel nearly as guilty as I feel like I ought. I’m not sure I want them as a friend anymore. It’s being miserable, and I am so done with being talked down to and moralized at, and having ostensible ‘debates’ where I can’t even include half the evidence because they won’t admit it exists.
Round here the left-wing cancel culture is still pretty firmly in place locally. Everyone makes some very one-sided joke and everyone laughs and its just assumed you agree. Doesn’t seem to matter who I’m with or what group of hobby people I join, from musicians to
If you talk to people at church one on one it is sometimes different though. And there are conservative groups and so on, but it often feels like the wrong sort of conservative – I don’t want supports taken from poor citizens, or abortion banned, or trans people who aren’t the ones causing problems bothered.
What I want is MAID (euthanasia) restricted to stop people being bullied into it and an end to the effort to expand it to the mentally ill, an end to increasingly restrictive laws around religion and increasing censorship, and low wage temporary foreign workers in fields other than agriculture banned, and immigration more generally down to levels that don’t juice housing crises or unemployment among young people, and people who commit a crime be given the same legal penalty regardless of race, religion, or the effect on their immigration status.
JMG: Hearing you are far from broke comes to me as perfect timing. So now the announcement I planned to make is right on topic: I want your readers to know that two of your profoundly educational — and worldview shifting — nonfiction books can now be listened to freely on youtube: “The Wealth of Nature” and “The Long Descent.” Why is this important? As your first commenter, EllenA, wrote this morning, “I tend to listen because so much of my life involves keeping my eyes on screens or books..” That speaks for me, too. In the 90s I wrote and got commercially published 4 books, but I hardly read books anymore. Largely, for exactly the reason EllenA stated: All day my eyes are on-screen, and since I am long-retired, the onscreen time is mostly carrying forward my volunteer efforts in networking other guerrilla planters of the endangered Florida Torreya tree , webmastering the website that effort pertains to, and even wikipedia writing and editing (yes, your wikipedia page sucks; I improved by husband’s wiki page just two weeks before he died suddenly in 2023).
So, especially for those blog readers who are newbies and may be unaware of JMG’s 2008 “The Long Descent” and 2011 “The Wealth of Nature” — know that huge segments of the “center” folk (including those like myself who pay no attention to science fiction, the occult, and astrology) can point to those two books (and a half-dozen later ones) as being crucial for deeply grounding and shaping the worldviews we have migrated into today.
Indeed, my late husband Michael Dowd, was so grateful for the education brought to him by Greer’s early nonfiction writings (and Greer’s ADR blog that preceded this one), that he audio-recorded those books in their entirety and posted the recordings on Soundcloud. Alas, Google ignores Soundcloud, but does include youtube vids (which it owns) in Chrome searches. So I am hoping that more people, as yet unaware of Greer’s nonfiction, can thereby learn how to sort through the seeming craziness of these times to reach, what Dowd called, “clarity, calm, and compassionate love-in-action.” Easiest way to access these are to go to the Youtube channel named TheGreatStory (founded long ago by Dowd and myself) and scroll down to the playlist titled, “Dowd narrates books on collapse.” (Dowd is also the official narrator for the audiobook of Greer’s “Dark Age America,” but he took no money for it. And, frankly, there was so much emphasis on exact perfection that the recording lacks the authentic perkiness of how Dowd audiorecorded the earlier books, mistakes and all.)
Bottomline message to all: So go ahead and get educated by Greer in the most pleasant way possible. Feel free to multi-task, as I do when listening to Greer while cooking. Or just rest and listen while gazing out at a snowy landscape, as I have here in Michigan today, in this darkest time of year. Finally, don’t worry at all about depriving Master Greer of book royalties. He is way past that need in life now!
JMG, Canada and the US are such different beasts that political transformation will have to take very different paths in the two countries. Based on pub talk I was hearing this past summer, Albertan secession seems to be the most likely catalyst, in large part because Danielle Smith is the only Canadian politician I know of who calls it like it is. And she has the oil wealth behind her to make good on her threats. The Quebecois used to be the radical sceptics and dissidents in our country, but in the federal election earlier this year it was they that tipped the scales toward Carney and the Liberals, away from the Poilievre sweep that seemed poised on the brink of success. They were also the most extreme when it came to Covid repression.
The closest thing we have to a nationally focused, competent dissident movement here is the Nation Citizens’ Inquiry, which I spent some time observing closely earlier this summer, and it hasn’t gained nearly the traction that TPUSA has in the States.
Although I am feeling quite upbeat today after listening to my friends’ reports from AMFest, there is a quiet note of unease mixed in when I think about how openly Christian the conference was. Now, I am quite comfortable with Christian prayers and other God-talk in my private life, but it seems to me that the public sphere, especially the political sphere, ought to be a much more neutral zone. Wasn’t the US founded on the principle of the separation of church and state? My one friend didn’t have much of an answer to that, but the other friend has a Muslim background and knows exactly what I mean about the dangers of mixing religion and politics.
That’s the one thing TPUSA and the Canadian NCI seem to have in common- a willingness to use Christian language and concepts right out there in public. Although I’m happy to see people being open about their beliefs and commitments, I do wonder where it will lead in the political sphere, and some of the left’s fears begin to make sense to me.
How does a populist moderate movement for change stay moderate and not get taken over by opportunists? It’s not obvious to me at this point.
Dear Archdruid:
Your message about the end of our industrial civilization and the arrival of a dark age becomes you a party pooper for all political groups. Pure kryptonite. Even your tesis about catabollic collapse is a kill joy for the doomers.
Out of subject: I have watched a TV series named “The Outsider”, based in a novel of Stephen King, wich principal caracters are two demons; one, evil , who feed of the murdering and the suffering and the other , good, who worked like a medium for to aid in the solution of crimes. This made to remember comments of you about the existence of infinite number of spiritual entities who in certain cases were interested (evil/benefical )for the interaction with men.
If you are interested in translate some of your writings or books to the spanish I’ll be delighted in help you selfflessy.
JMG, you are truly the Voice of Reason among all the pundits and essayists that I read…and that is a VERY big crowd, from both sides of the spectrum. But I do wish you would publish these essays on Substack, so all of us who “live” there could restack your essays to get your wisdom to more eyeballs and hearts & minds! Ever considered it?
I watched a a clip of the movie about Hermann Goring, just to see how it would butcher the known facts about the Nuremberg Trials. An interrogator asked Goring why Hitler was so popular. The answer was, “He made us feel German again.” Feelings uber alles, indeed.
Congratulations on your success, and happy 2026.
I’m one of these guys who “never stopped writing”. My problem is I’m techno-illiterate and don’t know how to send my books to people who might want them.
“Hey click this random file from a stranger!” doesn’t sound too promising of a strategy.
How should us hobbyist authors these days promote our wares online?
Thanks!
I also had to search for “sex realism”. I chanced upon this article in First Things, which starts out a bit dry, but gives a fascinating historical overview from Plato to today.
Happy new year, dear JMG. As a denizen of a neighboring neck of the literary woods, I can report that have been observing similar patterns and signalling inversions. It was good to read to your take on the tumult as I consider my own strategies for 2026 and beyond. May your new year be one of health, prosperity, and splendid visits from the muses.
That’s exactly what I was thinking and analyzing: the movements that will take power, specifically in Spain, following the European defeat in Ukraine.
Regarding civil liberties and the rule of law, my question is, who defines what “rule of law” and “civil liberties” mean? But that’s a separate discussion. What I want to emphasize is that the West will likely be taken over by political movements that could be called “extremist” in many Western countries. Therefore, the concepts we call “civil liberties” and “rule of law” are very likely to collapse, and only a few countries will be spared.
In the West, there’s a breeding ground for extremist movements, very different from each other, that can come to power. For example, in Spain, there was the movement (Bastión Frontal, it seems to have dissolved) of Isabel Medina Peralta, a very real neo-fascist movement (in my opinion), and other neo-Nazi groups. Incidentally, Isabel was sentenced to a year in prison for hate crimes. I came across her by chance on YouTube because she’s a public figure and her interviews get quite a few views. I’d like to ask the Spanish people on this forum,what they think of her? specifically whether the movement is real(If anyone is interested in answering me, of course.)
What awaits us is quite a lot of pain.
Mary B. @ 22: I think the DNC’s action following Sanders’ victory in the Michigan primary did more than just put Trump in the White House. I think it permanently alienated some formerly faithful Democratic voters. No small matter.
Hi JMG,
Protests and Boycotts have truly passed the point of diminishing returns in many contexts. Why do people keep going through the motions of such things? I guess that for many, it is a ritual designed to make them feel morally superior. But how could one be superior while harming the cause one claims to support? Back in 2020 I was disgusted to see folks quoting MLK’s line “riot is a language of the unheard” to justify rioting while completely ignoring the context – that he was condemning rioting as counter-productive. How could someone possibly expect to change someone’s mind by blocking traffic for example? It happened to me once, and I came close to opposing the protesters’ goals just out of spite.
I like the coinage “The Rowling Effect” and look forward to seeing more examples of it in the future. Also, the counter-productivity of boycotts reminds me (and others I’m sure) of our enlightened leaders here in the “Free West” punishing our supposed enemies with sanctions which fail to significantly harm them but succeed in creating new economic ties and unions among them that render us increasingly irrelevant.
Thanks for another thought provoking essay,
Tyrell the First
I know I am over my limit, but here goes:
1) I have some friends that say they own all your books, but that they interpreted King in Orange as you going over to the dark side, and canceling you in their minds. I interpreted KIO as just you attempting to explain what was going on from BOTH sides.
2) While I adhere to a different religious practice and obviously disagree with you on many points, I really value your ability to think and explain unsafe (to the main stream) thoughts. There are just lots of surprises in life if you live your whole life in a bubble.
3) As far as Rowling, she often has battles of wit with unarmed foes. I consider her tweets a guilty pleasure.
Sorry, but I have to add one more thing:
4) As far as part of one of her big issues…Why must we disrobe semi-publicly for sports? (I suppose the Gym in Gymnasium provides a clue.) What would be the big deal about having small dressing areas with curtains above the knees and shower stalls instead of gang showers?
I’m friendly with a bunch of right wingers on substack, but a lot of them are not very friendly with me, as I also write about Tarot and the Zodiak. My forthcoming books will alienate them even more. I am entirely estranged from leftism generally.
As for your success, I assume that is something like Spengler’s second religiosity. I for one buy several of your books, several times a year – typically from your bookshop account, as I do not suppose you get any money from Thriftbooks, where I go for some older editions by deceased writers. Make haste, slowly.
Not a household name? Au Contraire, Mr. Greer! You in fact show up in DK’s A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult on page 273.
https://imgur.com/a/k5lMaYf
Granted it’s in the Neopagan section under “Druids, Wicca, nature and bygone ages” but for a 300 page book encompassing the whole of Magic history, I’d say that’s not nothing.
One of the things the left forgot in the 2010’s and the new right forgets at their peril is that there’s an asymmetry between those trying to change social mores to be what they want them to be and those trying to enforce the ones most people actually believe in. Namely, the latter gets much more leeway to use coercion, including both force of law, social shaming, and straightforward bullying. It’s not necessarily good that this is true, but it is true.
The upshot is that a social change movement’s ability to use coercion productively is directly proportional to the extent to which you are able to persuade the public non-coercively. Contra some right-wing pundits, the Civil Rights Act did not coerce the public at large into being racial egalitarians; instead I suspect its success revealed that most people, whatever their personal feelings about other races, were already sick of the segregationists telling them how to live their lives.
I’m too young to remember that battle, but I remember the fight over gay marriage quite well: the pro-gay-rights side discussed openly the need to persuade and soften people’s hearts while the anti-gay-rights side became increasingly shrill and demanding of purity. By the time SCOTUS enshrined same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, the sympathies of the public were against the pearl-clutchers and moralistic bullies, even among those who didn’t necessarily agree with the cause.
But throughout the 2010’s, the left increasingly became the pearl-clutchers and moralistic bullies, approaching every civil rights issue with the same failed strategies that had been employed against them. It worked so long as most people vaguely agreed with them (ex: sexual assault is bad) but as the demands became increasingly extreme, the pull-date for the bullying approached and past without any change in tactics from the left. But because they’ve seen the right using bullying tactics successfully on a few causes the public vaguely agrees with, they keep thinking they need to double-down on those same tactics, with the Gavin Newsom pre-campaign being the most obvious example.
In reading this halfway through the post: What you are saying is that we are the radical middle, and the majority, and those who end up with “A Plague on both your houses….” which means we’re forming a new community hidden in the decaying body of the old, and like the sourdough starter in the dough, we will rise, very quietly behind their backs, and simply ignore them to death.
Unless some canny emperor co-opts us.
Wowzamighty, that is strong meat indeed.
I believe that the fear of a true neo-Fascist resurgence is a concern well taken. I just read El Gato Malo’s latest:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/prebunking-the-prebunk-at-home-and
in which he argues that the Powers-Which-Soon-Will-Not-Be will not go peacefully, because they truly cannot. The moment they relinquish power, they are dead.
Can neo-Fascism be avoided? The one potentially hopeful sign I see, is that Charlie Kirk’s supporters did not take to the barricades after his assassination. They went to churches instead.
I say “potentially” because much depends upon the reasons for this religious resurgence. If it is simply a matter of Spengler’s Second Religiousness, in which people are embracing religion without conviction, because they are fleeing chaos, then it will only be a “speed bump” on the way to a neo-Fascist government.
On the other hand, if enough people have become motivated to seek “the Thuth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, so help me God, no matter what!”, then I am more hopeful. In the latter case, people will be able to accept the end of prosperity with more equanimity, and avoid knee-jerk political reactions.
Keeping my fingers crossed …..
There is also the flywheel effect of publishing. The more books you publish, the more books there are to buy for people who like one book and want to buy your other books. This is something I learnt from the fiction writer Dean Wesley Smith, who I believe traces it back to Robert Heinlein.
Example:
If you have 1 book, and 10 people buy a copy of one book, and 2 of those ten decide to buy all your works, they will be disappointed to find they cannot buy more, and so you still only have 10 sales.
If you have 5 books books in your backlog, and 10 people buy a copy of one book, and 2 of those ten decide to buy all your works, then you have sold 10 + 2 x 4 = 18 copies sold as a result of those 10 sales.
If you have 50, then that becomes 10 + 2 x 49 = 108 copies sold as a result of those 10 sales.
(This is also one of the reasons why I prefer to translate all the works of an author rather than just lots of single works of multiple authors.)
Another thing that occurred to me, looking at the photo of the lady with the bullhorn: in a society that expects other people to mostly be honest, a thousand people marching for a cause is an expression of passionate concern.
In a society where politics has become performance, it’s one more sideshow at the political circus. And not a very entertaining one.
Then when you find out that the sideshow is sponsored by big businesses and corrupt billionaires you start seeing activism as a reliable signal that whatever the activists want is probably going to be bad for you.
@Charlie Obert #20
Which version of Mein Kampf did you read? I’ve tried to read it four times and the prose is so turgid, I just can’t get through it.
JMG, You don’t think MAGA is, substantially, “The Center”™? While MAGA certainly includes many Christians, Christianity itself has declined dramatically over the decades, and I know many Christians who remain Democrat party loyalists. There are now more than a few “gay” men, including Thiel, who are presumably Republican.
Meantime — and I just double checked this — “The percentage of U.S. adults identifying as Democrats declined to 27% in 2023, down from 30% in 2020 and a high of 36% in 1998 and 2008, while Republican identification also fell to 27% in 2023, tying the Democratic share and marking the first time since 2005 that both parties had equal identification levels. This represents a drop for both parties”.
I don’t see what would be “Center” that would much depart from most of MAGA? Anti-war, Pro health, Pro-MIddle Class (at least in declared policies), Lower taxes (again, at least in declaration), Increased Common Sense Center in most policies, Less Toxic environment, More and Better Jobs. Bringing manufacturing back. Those things, it seems to me, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King would both support.
Seriously, what is the “Center” that you feel is being missed?
I agree with this article 100%
Which brings us to universal health care. Both “sides” are against universal health care and yet a super majority of Americans are for universal health care. Surveys consistently show 66% and higher support. I think that Bernie would have won simply on that alone if the DNC hadn’t sabotaged him. I remember when Hillary was first lady and supposedly was making a push for UHC which turned out to be pure theater. Ever since the Dems have been against it. Of course the conservatives are against it as well. (Admittedly the Dems aren’t all against UHC, but obviously a huge majority of Americans want it.) Mamdani running on making bus fares free fits right in with this strategy. And the Dems did everything in their power to try and stop him.
>What I want is MAID (euthanasia) restricted
If the gubmint gets the Bright Idea(tm) that it can save money by killing its own citizens, it will happily take that to its logical conclusion. The only question is how long it will take for them to come to it and how long it takes them to act.
Mr Nobody #17 and JMG, I continue to be perplexed — and admittedly disturbed — that people continue to fling around the term “Fascism” but few to nobody can agree what it means. And I also don’t see what “agreement” has to do with it: the TERM Fascist was created and DEFINED with great clarity by Mr Fascist himself, Musolini, and his chief economist, as the binding together of Government and big Corporate power.
Look. It is not that hard: the US and apparently all of industrial civilization is Fascist — by definition — pretty much through and through. I supposed the binding together (the Fascia) could be even stronger, but it is already much, much stronger than it was, in general, in 1940.
What is the benefit of ADDING to the confused use of this VERY clearly defined word? Well, actually, I understand the benefit: It benefits those who most want to propagandize and mislead rationality. But I don’t understand what either of you mean when you talk about “Fascism” while failing to recognize the word was CREATED with a VERY clear definition. Is it just that you don’t see the jackboots? Communism and Nazism had jackboots, too … or close enough equivalents. Jackboots are so out of style, anyway, when there are more effective means…. such as mRNA jabs and Cancelling.
I enjoyed your essay and it takes an aspect of literature and publishing that I hadn’t thought about much. However, while your advice to authors seeking a publisher is no doubt valid, it doesn’t meet the test for satirists. Satire remains as unloved and unappreciated as ever unless it fits within the expectations of one camp or another and is deemed culturally safe. . I honestly think if Orwell, or Swift or Vonnegut showed up on the scene today they would be roundly ignored. Satire that critiques everyone seems to be tolerated only when it is safe or attacks a target so distant is not perceived as a threat. Publishers want alignment and audiences want conformation of their biases with jokes. As a satirist and I hope a real one, I mock whoever is lying and I critique all those in power no matter what costume they happen to be wearing in the moment. I challenge narratives left, right and middle. That means everyone that reads my work is bound to feel uncomfortable some of the time. You seem to be able to do that and get away with it and perhaps some of that is due to Rowling effect, but to even get there to be able enjoy some of that effect, you need to get past the gatekeepers, which even if you go it alone, is increasingly hard to do. I can’t even advertise my book ‘Crump the Cat’ on any of the usual platforms as it’s considered ‘political..’ Yes, it’s obviously Trump but it’s satirical humour! Honestly, you can’t win. It’s only the compulsion I feel that’s keeping me in the game.
As a result, right now I can only build my audience on Substack and hope for the best. What would your advice be for people like me? Maybe you should consider an article on the plight of satire in today’s world. I, for one, would be excited to read it. Thank you.
Nephyte # 33:
You’ve depicted the far left dogmatism well; it’s ironic they imitate so well (and even superate it) the Catholic Church dogma, with they usually hate so much.
————————
Zarcayce # 46:
From time to time, tiny neo-Fascist groups emerge between the shadows here, but they usually have a short live; not only because they can be punished by legal systems, but too because they rehash again and again the old fascist schemes (including the National-Bolshevism). If we see some future day a real new fascism thriving, it won’t repeat neoNazi usual style. And that will be horrible, because we won’t see them to come until maybe it’s going to be late.
I’d tell you before joining whatever “cool” activism/party, be careful which kind of real purposes and ideas it has.
I’m happy for your success JMG, you’re a symbol of hard work paying off. There aren’t many writers I can point to that are as practical as they are theoretical these days, it seems more than hard earned… Just thinking, a druid in a Lamborghini could go viral?? Time to enter the manosphere and flex your cash 😉
I kid.
Happy new year everyone.
It’s interesting that you would write about this phenomenon. I have been thinking about what kind of politician could actually inspire us, the population of this country, to trust in government for a change. What if someone stood up in public and talked reasonably (without blaming people they don’t like) about the real problems that face so many ordinary people in this country.
what if this person actually listened to various ideas to solve the unemployment of so many young people, or the problem that so many students graduate from school without being able to read or balance a checkbook, and what if they wanted to encourage schools to go back to really basic stuff, and also to help train young people to be able to do useful work. What if someone had gathered some practical ideas about why the health of Americans is so bad, and therefore expensive. What if parents had real support for raising their kids without having to work 80 hours a week. I could go on and on. I have worked for years at a food pantry, and have talked to so many people who face such insurmountable problems with housing, eating good food, transportation, etc. But instead we have war after war, and it goes on and on. Sorry, I’m ranting. I hope you’re right about the middle group being ready for something completely different. I’m not an optimist.
Answering AV in comment #57 – the Thomas Dalton translation. He also has an abridged edition.
The standard English translation is by Ralph Mannheim – Mannheim hated Hitler, translated it with literal German syntax to make it hard to read, and also tampered with the text to make it more inflammatory.
—
It occurred to me after I wrote my note that my wanting to read Hitler was likely the Rowling Effect – I figured if absolutely everyone warned me against this cat I needed to read him for myself.
Thank you for the links, JMG – fascinating reads both, but they left my question unanswered: is there an effective way to protect one’s group from entryism? There was one example (an admin of a Facebook group who wasn’t impressed of all the attempted woke guilt-tripping), but considering how wide-spread and successful leftist entryism has been over the past decade, I’d love to see something like a strategy be discussed…
Since it’s less than an hour to midnight where I am, a happy new year to all of you!
The Natsocs are running wild on Substack. My first impression was that it’s the glow squad trying to sew division and get people labeled as extremists so that they can be marginalized, but that only works if the marginalizing machinery is still functional. Israel is a perfect example of these diminishing returns. Every move they make is turning more people against them, and their recent attempt at reverse psychology (ie “we don’t need US money and the restrictions it comes with”) is no exception. My concern is that by sticking to the colonialist playbook the deep state is busy constructing the gallows that will inevitably be used to Epstein itself, and we will all have to live with the consequences of a fractured nation.
@The Other Owen,
they already have. A couple of the dumber government types pushing for expansion have said so out loud, too. There’s also been a lot of complaints about medical staff suggesting MAID to patients, and sometimes being pushy about it.
One thing I’m wondering is, given that over 16,000 people per year are now dying via MAID in Canada, if it were banned, would the healthcare system, such as it is, collapse completely?
And also, in a desire to ‘save the healthcare system’ under conditions of decline, how much further into flat-out murder is this going to go?
JMG
“…. it really is interesting to see the extent to which the entire corporate world has stopped noticing that there are markets other than politically liberal, chronically depressed, white middle-aged single women in upper middle class corporate jobs. I wonder if they’ll wake up and notice reality before they slam face first into it.”
At this point, I’ll admit I’m kind of hoping they don’t. 😉
>And also, in a desire to ‘save the healthcare system’ under conditions of decline, how much further into flat-out murder is this going to go?
In order to save the village, we must destroy the village…
Hi John Michael,
Man, I’m not even sure that I comprehend what an ‘ecofascist’ is. The entire concepts just seems weird and a mash of contradictory ideologies to me, but hey, what do I know. 🙂 Although, I am reminded of the farmer whom, I believe was in the UK, and had finally decided that keeping a herd of the Nazi cows was a bad idea. ‘Nazi cows’: British farmer Derek Gow forced to cull herd of aggressive aurochs-like Heck cattle. Please excuse the dodgy pun, but Heck (!), those aggressive bovines were probably ecofascists.
Congrats, and may you continue to be denounced both loudly and stridently, whilst deriving comfort from their ineffectual braying.
It’s very much of interest to me that sci-fi penned in the say, 1970’s and 1980’s were very much concerned about the environment, in a way that is largely ignored nowadays. Much like you do, it’s one of the reasons to enjoy that narrative space.
One of the interesting facets of the dominance of algorithms used by the big players, is that they shut down uncomfortable conversations, and now appear to be filling the void with dross. It’s an option, I guess, but hardly a wise move is it?
Cheers
Chris
@katherine
Henry Rollins had some warnings about such people – https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=GhKMVlHz9FQ
Well, I’ve already fielded one shrill, hate-filled, profanity-laced denunciation of this post, which made me smile. When that’s the response one of my posts gets, I know two things: first, the post landed squarely on its target, and second, the people who object to it don’t have any reasonable arguments against it — just shrieking childish rage.
Now, on to the adult responses:
Mary, I wish I could say I was surprised. I haven’t watched television since my teen years, but I talk to people who do, and they’ve discussed the total collapse in quality in British as well as American programs.
OtterGirl, thank you! I think Shirley has unleashed a whirlwind. Now that it’s painfully clear just how little concern the corporate media has with, you know, reporting the facts, ordinary citizens are picking up the abandoned art of journalism with gusto, and showing the flacks in the mainstream media how it used to be done. I’m not sure anyone anywhere is ready for the consequences.
Jon, fair enough — you’ve made your prediction, I’ve made mine. We’ll see who turns out to be right.
BoysMom, thank you for this! Yeah, I should have thought about the interplanetary-fantasy side of conservative SF. That makes a great deal of sense.
Jennifer, you’d think so, right? But it’s a fascinating point that quite a few of the dead writers who attract the most attention from today’s leftists were all way over on the far right. Tolkien, of course, is the most important example: a traditional Catholic and hardcore Tory whose work, riddled as it is with conservative racial and sexual themes, got turned into the beau ideal of the far left. Lovecraft is another beneficiary of the same process — and it’s all the more fascinating because most of the people who are involved in the woke Lovecraft scene either don’t know, or don’t talk about, the fact that he moved steadily leftwards over the course of his life. The hateful poems of his all the wokesters like to quote were from his teen years, when he was reeling from the deaths of both his parents in a madhouse; before his early death from cancer, he’d become a New Deal Democrat. Don’t try to tell most of his current fans that, though!
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Chuaquin, I’m sorry to say you’re probably right, and a right-wing cancel culture may well follow the collapse of wokery. I have some plans in mind to help people do an end run around that, but we’ll see. That’s fascinating, though not surprising, about Turiel.
Nephite, that’s certainly my take. Once you start throwing people out for a lack of total doctrinal orthodoxy, pretty soon your numbers dwindle to the point that you become weak…
Clay, that’s good to hear. I hope Nick Shirley’s style of citizen journalism gets some traction in Oregon; it would be interesting to see just where all that tax money is really going.
John, I think they know their ideas are weak. That’s what drives cancel culture: the half-conscious knowledge that even the people who believe in wokery can’t really justify it even to themselves.
Other Owen, I’m far from sure the corporate-managerial left is as strong or as popular as your proposal would imply. I live in a (theoretically) very blue state, and many people here have far more conservative attitudes than you’d think.
Pygmycory, thanks for the data points.
Connie, thanks for this.
Dylan, I admit I’m less than happy about the religious dimension of the populist right, but that’s really just a matter of reverting to normal; “separation of church and state” in the US, until the 1960s, meant that church hierarchies were restricted in their influence on government, not that Christian belief had no influence on the political sphere. Christian rhetoric and ideology were massive political forces for most of US history; the fascinating thing is that at that time, they were almost always left-wing phenomena. (Did you know that William Jennings Bryan, the leading left-wing radical in late 19th century US politics, was a diehard fundamentalist Christian and led the case for the prosecution in the famous Scopes monkey trial?) As for your question, that never happens; it’s purely a matter of whether the opportunists can be pressured into handing over some of what they promise.
Anselmo, thank you! If you want to translate any of these blog posts into Spanish and post them, you have my permission and my blessing to do so. If you want to translate any of my books, the translation rights are held by my publishers; if you can interest a Spanish language publisher in publishing them in translation, they can make arrangements with my publishers and take it from there .
Pat, the difficulty is simply that there aren’t enough hours in a day. I’m scrambling these days to keep up with all the work that my late wife used to do — she was my secretary, publicity manager, and bookkeeper, and took an enormous amount of labor off my shoulders so I could concentrate on writing. Setting up a Substack account, posting everything to it, and moderating the comments is more than I have time to do. We’ll see what happens, though; if I remarry, and my second wife has secretarial skills, it’s a possibility.
Bird, think also about what this says about the Allies’ demonization of the losing side in the First World War. Shrieking “It’s all your fault because you’re bad people!” isn’t necessarily a constructive strategy in the long run, however pleasant it feels at the moment.
Steven, the book you need is How To Get Happily Published by Judith Appelbaum. It walks you through the whole process of getting your writing into the hands of a publisher. Just remember that you don’t need an agent, and there are literally thousands of small to midsized publishers who want to hear from you.
Aldarion, thanks for this.
C.M., thank you and likewise!
Zarcayce, while it’s quite possible to get tangled up in fine details, when I say “civil liberties” I mean primarily that you can express your political opinions and disagree with your government without suffering legal penalties, and when I say “the rule of law” I mean simply that the same laws apply with equal effect to everyone. We don’t have the latter anywhere in the Western world these days, and Europeans don’t have the former.
Tyrell, the ugly secret of the “social change” movement is that they don’t actually want anything to change. They simply want to feel morally superior to the people who make their comfortable lifestyles possible.
Bradley, (1) Oh, I know. A lot of Pagan bookstores stopped carrying any of my books after The King in Orange saw print. Curiously enough, a lot of those stores are no longer in business. I don’t think it’s cause and effect, exactly, but it’s interesting, especially when lined up alongside Hollywood’s recent flops. (2) Thank you! (3) I’m not a fan of her novels but she unquestionably knows how to toss off a first-rate zinger. (4) You’d think so, right? I have no idea.
William, you may be on your way to the heights of success, then. I’ll know that the Rowling Effect has gone into overdrive when writers start going out of their way to irritate both extremes because they know it’ll boost their careers.
StarNinja, that book is hardly in every household. That said, thank you — it’s good to see some favorable publicity.
Slithy, that’s an extremely important point. Of course you’re quite correct; the campaigners for same-sex marriage won because they convinced people that it really didn’t matter that much to anyone but the same-sex couples who wanted to get hitched, while their opponents lost by getting deeper and deeper into self-righteous bullying. Nobody sympathizes with a scold.
Patricia M, good. Very good. You get it.
Michael, the Second Religiosity is more powerful than you realize. It typically becomes a powerful force, not least because it provides a robust alternative to chaos, and as such, it can readily draw in people who might otherwise turn to fascism or the equivalent.
KAN, that’s what drives the slow and steady increase in income I mentioned in the post. It doesn’t account for the way the curve of increase rounded a corner and took off for the stratosphere at the same time that I started being canceled.
Slithy, also a valid point.
Gnat, that’s a question for an entire post, not just a brief comment. I’ll consider discussing it down the road a bit.
Eric, given the sheer volume of bribery — er, “campaign contributions” — the medical and pharmaceutical industries pay to Congress, are you surprised?
Gnat, I discussed this very point in a triad of posts in the old blog:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-one-up-from.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-two.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-three-weimar.html
Anna, I don’t know much about the genre of satire, as it’s not something I write. I do know that self-publishing, if that’s how you’re releasing Crump the Cat, is an unforgiving way of publishing — but I’m not sure what venues might be open to the kind of satire you do.
Tobes, ha! No, I get considerably more delight out of messing with people’s expectations by living the life I want, not the life they think I should want.
Katherine, it won’t be a politician. It’ll be someone, or more likely several someones, from outside the political system entirely.
Athaia, I’ll consider a post, but it’s actually quite simple. You need somebody in charge of the venue who understands what entryism is and has the power to throw people out if they attempt it. It also helps if you talk openly about entryism — entryists routinely run away when this is done.
KVD, it’s a real possibility.
John, oh, granted, the schadenfreude factor would be very high.
Chris, what the Heck! 😉 “Ecofascist” is a shorter form of “how dare you disagree with your corporate overlords, you filthy Druid!”
I expect the McCarthy-Clinton Democratic establishment to continue spending large amounts of money to silence the Retro-Roosevelt Progressives in their party and continue to be surprised that Cuomo establishmentarians keep loosing to candidates that focus on affordability issues.
I do not see the Republican party ever turning against the folly of Friedman-Regan Neoliberalism. Maybe the conservatives in the Constitution party can pick up on what worked under Taft and Eisenhower, but I just don’t see it happening among Republicans.
JMG,
I think the citizen journalists are already on the job in your home state of Washington. I have read of several accounts of citizens fanning out over the Puget Sound area. I guess they have already discovered 539 ( or something like that) state registered day care centers who list their primary language as Somali. The governor has already admonished these journalists for harassing innocent business people. Which probably means they are on target.
I have not heard of much action here in Oregon. But in the process of building a fence for myself and one for my son, I have spent some time down at the town building permit center. Every time I have been their I observed one or more groups of Somalis attempting to get building permits for multi-room care homes. The interesting things is that they are always accompanied by a 30 something white lady who seems to be helping facilitate the process.
I would guess things will get going here soon.
I remember some social-justice oriented friends having a *very serious* discussion about whether it was OK to still like Rowling’s work. They solemnly concluded that they could still allow themselves to enjoy her past work, but only if they didn’t give her any more money, ever again.
😐
As they cannot (yet) force people into reeducation camps, I guess they do whatever they can to enforce the morality of the day to prevent anyone with an “unacceptable” opinion from encouraging others to have that opinion.
Bruce
“…it really is interesting to see the extent to which the entire corporate world has stopped noticing that there are markets other than politically liberal, chronically depressed, white middle-aged single women in upper middle class corporate jobs.” Well, they’re probably very likely to try to soothe their depression and loneliness by making a purchase – and who else has enough money to be milked that way?
Regarding “The King in Orange,” which I purchased and read, those who had hoped that DJT would be a peace president have not been made happy; now, LESS than ever (to mutilate Nixon’s slogan). Between HRC, DJT, the Green Party (whose platform was even more woke than that of the Dems) and the Libertarian Party (whose platform was predominately about increased liberties for large corporations) — it is any surprise that voters wanted a third political dimension into which they might retreat or hide themselves? Now, DJT, if I’m not mistaken, is the most compromised (and thus blackmail-able) President the US has had in my lifetime (going back to Truman). That could explain much about his policy choices. And as for the Libertarian Party, we forget that those unleashed corporations are legal constructs, that do not “occur in nature.” Corporations, as I’ve maintained before, are created by acts of governments, comparable in my opinion to golems or tulpas, that sometimes go on to attack or control their creators.
As an avid reader of your blog since it was the Archdruid Report, I can only really share the perspective of a certain other poster:
“As an avid believer in progress who thought that I would get to live on the moon, the realization that we will never get to the stars came with a profound sense of claustrophobia.”
Replace “getting to the stars” with “embracing the agency of transgender people” and you get a sense of the crashing realizations upon me now.
I speak only because I know people personally who are transgender, and I fear for them in what is to come, considering Trump’s actions as a once in a century cult of personality seriously threaten to do them real harm.
John, Wow! I just finished the first of the trilogy of your 10+ year old posts, and I am stunned. I somehow missed these when first written. Until now, I thought I had something relatively wise and insightful to say about Fascism and NewSpeak. Now, to twist the compliment a bit, “you have obviously forgotten more than I EVER knew”!
I highly recommend these posts to everyone. And, in fact, I think you should gather these together, along with others of your historical/ philosophical essays, and give them new life as a bound book. I would certainly buy that!
“Gnat, I discussed this very point in a triad of posts in the old blog:”
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-one-up-from.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-two.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-three-weimar.html
Re: Church-State Separation in America:
Secularists love a line of an obscure 1790s treaty which states that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” The text was not included in the final version of the treaty, according to a Patheos Atheist blogger I read several years ago. This shows how far modern secularists have to reach to make American history fit their narrative.
Phutatorius #79: Great post!
I agree with effectively everything you are saying. But when I start to rant about how Trump has disappointed me I am brought up short by the remembrance of JUST HOW UGLY “the future” looked just over a year ago.
So I am torn between my considerable disappointment with DJT in many regards and my gratitude to him for running and totally disrupting the game board of “You will own nothing, and you will be happy!” I am back to preparing, now, for hard times to come — even as I pray that humanity will find another way through and we won’t have to do this the REALLY hard way.
Slithy Toves @ 52, “most people, whatever their personal feelings about other races, were already sick of the segregationists telling them how to live their lives.”
Segregationists had become a national embarrassment, to put it mildly. They also were were openly flouting laws which the rest of us had to abide by.
JMG,
I have heard this “ecofascist” term bandied about the last few years I had not really looked in to it untill now. First of all, from all of your work I have read ,you are certainly not one. But I discovered that I am in fact one, as I once belonged to Earth First!, hung out with Dave Foreman, believed in Deep Ecology and read the works of Garret Hardin.
It seems that an ecofascist is someone who believes in the preservation of nature for its own sake and thinks that two many humans, including immigrants can be detrimental to nature.
My guess is that it is a made up term used to discredit the effective environmental groups that did sell out to the man, like the Sierra Club.
Moonwolf, I’m sorry to say I think you’re right.
Clay, interesting. I wouldn’t have expected that from Washington state.
Renaissance, I wonder if any of them has the least idea what the word “totalitarian” means.
Roldy, that’s certainly part of it!
Phutatorius, I think you’re misunderstanding the nature of what’s going on around Trump. It’s normal for the president who presides over the crisis phase of an elite replacement cycle to have to pull together a coalition out of contending forces, and to recognize the necessity of balancing their competing interests; you’ll find the same thing if you take a close look at the presidencies of Lincoln and FDR. The inevitable consequence is that each special interest group feels half betrayed.
JoeSchmoe, “a once in a century cult of personality” is an unhelpful exaggeration; I presume you don’t know who Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy were, and also somehow paid no attention to the extraordinary adulation lavished on Barack Obama. That said, yes, transgender people are going to be hurt by the backlash now under way. I also know transgender people — I have an aunt who used to be called an uncle, for example — and I know they’re in for a rough time. Unfortunately trying to push change too far and too fast for most of the electorate reliably generates blowback like this.
Gnat, thank you. I’ll consider that.
Patrick, the US government doesn’t have to be founded on the Christian religion to give preference to that religion on account of its cultural centrality. That was certainly the way things worked for most of the first two centuries of US history. That said, of course your point stands.
Clay, well, I not only read but have publicly praised the writings of Garrett Hardin; does that at least make me a fellow traveler? 😉
I believe the Rowling effect was predicted in PG Wodehouse‘s 1958 comic novel Cocktail Time. One of the ideas driving the plot is that there is nothing like being denounced from the pulpit to goose a book onto the bestseller lists.
JMG,
I guess so, because all the time I was reading him I had no clue Hardin was a ” white nationalist” and “eugenist”, and I am sure many other Baddity Bad things.
Seems like being one of those things cancels out any scholarship or creative works you might have had.
@JMG @Phutatorius
Underlying the boycott of Rowling is a belief (I have actually seen this stated as fact, though never with sources) that she is single-handedly funding the entire British anti-trans movement and that all British government restrictions on transition and trans rights are her doing. Therefore, anybody who does anything that puts money in her pocket is regarded as also contributing to the anti-trans movement.
“Rowling continues to publish books, and to rake in royalties on a scale that would have impressed old Scrooge McDuck.”
If Scrooge presents as male, then why is “he” not called “McDrake” ? Clearly the character is a transgender bird, Mr. Greer. I suspect that Ms. Rowling would not be impressed by your invidious comparison. Freudian slip or deliberate mischief?
Hey JMG
On the subject of Rowling-hate, I can personally attest to seeing it firsthand, since both of my half-sisters have it. They have expressed casual hatred for Rowling due to her anti-trans stance many times, and every time they do I am confused as to why they feel the need to be so passionate about such a trivial issue, since they often casually wish she was dead or injured. I often get the sense that they feel obligated to hate her if they want to be considered “good people ™️”, much as goths may feel a need to denigrate anything that isn’t gloomy or melancholy.
Ms. Rowling’s books have made waves far beyond what you may know about, especially in Romantasy. That’s the new name for fantasy romance, with the emphasis on our happy couple achieving their Happy Ever After in a florid, purple-prose fantasy.
Romantasy fans have major book conventions with tickets running into megabucks. Grimdark romantasy book conventions often begin and end with accusations of appalling behavior.
Now, thanks to Dramione fanfiction having the serial numbers filed off and rewritten enough to be traditionally published, Ms. Rowling can still get a card-carrying lefty feminist writer banned from a romantasy convention!
Dramione fanfiction (there’s a tsunami of it) is where a writer makes Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy into a couple. Which is understandable. Ron Weasley? Really? Hermione can do better so why not Draco?
Three authoresses (to my knowledge) are so successful with their Dramione fanfiction rewrites that they’ve rewritten them AGAIN and gotten big contracts and big sales.
I’ve read the first two and reviewed them on my Instagram account.
They are:
“Rose in Chains” by Julie Soto
“The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy” by Brigitte Knightley
and, finally,
“Alchemised” by SenLinYu.
Big contracts. Big sales. No secrets are made that the books are based on fanfiction.
Anyway, earlier this year, a big convention invited Julie Soto to be their headliner. She agreed and all was well until the blue-haired screamers showed up in force. The convention told Ms. Soto to take a hike, Ms. Soto made all the correct noises to no avail, and many people were upset. Authors pulled out to show solidarity. Ticket buyers didn’t get what they paid for. After all the trauma, Ms. Soto probably sold way more books.
Why was a new, female, feminist writer banned by a woman-positive organization? Not because she was repurposing her fanfiction instead of writing from scratch but because her book was based on Ms. Rowling’s characters and that might mean sales for the evil Rowling, support for the evil Rowling, and publicity for the evil Rowling.
If you didn’t KNOW “Rose in Chains” was Dramione fanfiction, you would never know. The only real tell is our hero’s white blond hair. And silly magic.
It was bemusing to watch from the sidelines, especially since all the contretemps did was give Rowling more publicity than ever, make the organizers look like bigoted fools, and upset a huge number of fans who didn’t care about Rowling’s stance on men using women’s locker rooms but they did care about getting their value for their expensive tickets.
J. K. Rowling has power far beyond mere mortal writers.
Great post JMG – topical, and as always, ahead of the curve.
We seem to be in the midst of many influences at this stage in the Long Descent. Certainly the masses catching on to the fact they’ve been lied to and played by the political and Uber-Wealthy classes for decades was brought starkly into the light during the Plandemic. Now it’s as if the fuse is burning on a keg of gunpowder, and everyone is trying to get clear of the blast zone. Unfortunately, binary thinking is still in great abundance, and confusion reigns.
The comparison to Germany of the 1920s and 1930s seems quite relevant for the U.S. – in a very scary sort of way. Most people don’t care or are ignorant of politics to the point they just want to outsource their beliefs to the marketing group that promises the most bennies, which of course makes them quite vulnerable to those marketing groups who have the most efficient herding methods. Many changes are on the way, and the most likely ones won’t be for the better.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and travel down a path with some upside, but getting there looks a bit bumpy.
I suspect the Rowling Effect kicked into high gear for Rowling herself when game journalists got so irrationally angry at the mere existence of the game Hogwarts Legacy — a game that features a highly diverse cast of supporting characters, including a transgender character — that one of them set up a website specifically for reporting which game streamers had the audacity to play the “wizard game” (they seriously couldn’t even bring themselves to say the name of it) so they could target doxxing efforts at them.
The message couldn’t have been clearer: “How dare you not do what we tell you!”
(Ironically, the game had essentially no involvement from Rowling herself and she earned a very low percentage of each sale in royalties, much less than nearly any other licensed product. If you were looking to hurt her financially, it was absolutely the wrong place to focus your efforts.)
Despite — or more likely because of — the howling condemnations, the game sold gangbusters and is fondly regarded by gamers from both sides of the culture wars. It’s apparently quite a solid game. (I did buy a copy just in protest but I have never played it.)
BTW, I’m quite happy to hear your income is doing so well! Congratulations.
I looked but I couldn’t find any email address for you anywhere (to send the book recommendation). Is there one I should use?
A truly socially and economically moderate society would probably work, if you can keep the fringes in line. But I think that economic liberalism fails when we see recipients of taxpayer funds as “other.” Whether that’s racially, ethnically, religiously, or culturally, people don’t mind if their taxes go to helping their own kind. But they do mind giving their tax money to outsiders. So when you have a socially conservative society, you have standards of behavior enforced enough that people can trust others to not violate them. People stop getting so upset at redistribution. Maybe I’m off base here, but to me that seems the only straightforward path to economic liberalism.
Archdruid, thank you for responding! Yes, upon reflection I am quite aware that certain indicators such as gifting Mr. “Drone Strike” Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, instead of, say, that one black man on the street who spent his life defusing alt right groups at the base (via the astoundingly novel method of making friends with them and giving them his trust) is something of a gaffe. Chalk it up to those same friends to whom Trump is the Great Satan and persons such as yourself and Rowling are Beelzebub and Azazel.
Personally, I’ve seen you lambasted in those same circles as an ecofascist as well, which I’m certain others have already stated. Still, it takes the most cursory read of any of your writing to realize you are not.
As an aside, how exactly do you define the term “woke”? Does it mean that same “”too much too soon”” backlash?
Dear John, Happy New Year and thanks for all these years of insight. Always much appreciated.
‘The King in Orange’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘The Weird of Hali’ series are indeed all great books. Some of my favorite. I’m glad for you if you can get some regular incomes from them. It’s fully deserved. And too bad for those convention guys if they can’t see beyond the ends of their noses…
About the political matters…
In France, we do have a president that got elected then re-elected pretending he would ‘save the country’ from the political extremists (whatever it means) by governing from the center with what he called ‘at the same time’ reasonable and sensitive policies. But right from the start, it was obvious he would govern to preserve the statu quo that favor the wealthy minority while running up an huge deficit to try and keep everyone else happy… And next election will quite probably see what the MSM keep calling the extremists and populist running the whole show. With a clear advantage for the right wing flavor, which is proposing measures that have been rejected until now despite the demands of a large part of the population.
Hi John
Delighted to hear that your long labours have resulted in a steady, lucrative income. You’ve earned it!
I think that you have steadily built up a loyal following based upon your clear writing and the exposition of an unconventional, but generally correct, view of the world.
I look forward to reading more of your work, you make this 69 y.o. boomer think.
JMG,
Speaking of giving people what they want, Netflix accidentally did so this year when they released Kpop Demon Hunters, an animated film about a female trio of Korean pop singers who keep demons at bay through the power of song and the energy they get from their fans, and also killing any demons who slip through the barrier between worlds. The plot is quite absurd, as the demons plot to break down the barrier that separates their world from our own by forming a boy band to steal fans from their girls.
Despite the absurdity of the plot and not being released in movie theaters, Kpop Demon Hunters went on to become the defining cultural pop event of 2025. Not only was it the most watched Netflix movie for months on end by a wide margin, but the songs (which are mostly in English with Korean thrown in) dominated the billboards, hilariously both the boy band and girl band songs, mimicking the plot of the movie. Every kid from preschool on up has watched it at least ten times, along with their parents.
Why? Well, having kids who begged to see it, I gave in and ended up watching it 20 or so times. And I got to tell you, the reason it took off is obvious. No woke themes. Strong female characters who aren’t girl bosses at all, but girly, quirky, and neurotic like real women, making them relatable people you want to cheer for. Hot, competent male characters that, despite being evil demons, make women swoon. A love story that doesn’t feel forced. No political agenda. A powerful, emotional ending. Letting your strong female characters be vulnerable instead of all powerful. Super catchy songs that both myself and my five year old memorized, although the demon boy band song lyrics are particularly insidious (Soda Pop comes off as a love song but is actually about drinking people’s souls, for example).
I don’t know how it got made honestly, especially by Netflix which often pushes woke garbage, except that it’s a passion project by a female minority and that fact alone probably got it greenlit.
But the fact that the majority is so starved for what it wants that this movie, of all movies, took off like a rocket ship is telling. Biggest change to the Spectacle we got in America in 2025.
Hi, JMG:
This is an excellent and encouraging post and comments. Glad to know I am not alone in following Patricia Mathews’ #53 tactics.
I echo Chris #9’s well-wishes; this is very good news indeed. You’ve certainly put in the miles to get here!
Clay Dennis #34, I believe you have just broken another big story. I hope it goes viral also. Is there Somali-scamming happening everywhere?? =80
On another note, I would not be too surprised if there are lurkers of an “orange” persuasion reading your essays here and on Dreamwidth. I hope that team finds your advice useful to keep us out of the worst potholes. Certainly, the Changer seems to be operating at a high RPM these days.
And lastly, Happy New Year, everyone!
JMG, I’m happy you’re successful, but wonder if your explanation for it may be off the mark. To begin with, you write that your income has doubled since 2016, but surely some of that is the result of inflation (or have you sold twice as many books?).
It seems to me that you have multiple audiences, though with some crossover. For example, books aimed at the neopagan / magic market seem likely to perform differently than books with a more socio-political emphasis. The first are more likely to be perennials, while the second can be expected to fluctuate with public interest in (for example) Peak Oil or Trump. Have you noticed any patterns along those lines?
I doubt that protests had anything to do with your success, any more than they did for Rowling (whose controversies began well after HP fandom had peaked). Your protesters on the neopagan Left are quite obscure, and unlikely to influence anybody–you’re not getting any Streisand Effect from them.. Even if you’ve lost some stores and publicity opportunities, I see you all over YouTube. You’re getting pretty good coverage relative to other authors. If you are seeing an uptick of book purchases after accusations of ecofascistry or something, maybe the explanation is not that the purchasers are reacting to the protesters, but that both are caused by one of your YouTube / podcast appearances. (Just spit-ballin’ here.)
My suspicion is that your success has been organic, and fueled primarily by your internet presence. Your blog reaches a lot of people, who tell other people about you. Since you’ve been doing this for three decades now, it makes sense that interest would snowball. Of course, people had to like what they read in order for this to work. I think Kan (no. 55) is also right in pointing to a “flywheel effect.”
I’m not clear on the exact point of this post.
Athaia does raise an interesting post – does an organization keep entryists out while preserving the ability to fill the big tent? My childhood offers a good example of what not to do. The church my ancestors founded in the 19th century and attended through the 1990s was a very centrist mainstream Protestant one, and a large and successful one because of those traits. Unfortunately, an odious strain of Evangelicalism popped up here around 1980. Due to a series of missteps, my ancestors’ church tried to keep the Evangelicals out instead of domesticating and absorbing them. The result was the systematic driving out of everyone who wasn’t directly opposed to the Evangelical agenda – far left Democrats. Problem – they tend not to be churchgoers on top of rejecting non-clones. Now, a lovely old church has a scrap of a congregation that can barely afford to keep the pipes from freezing. So… how does an organization keep the big tent big?
I think everyone here might enjoy this rather good satire about modern zealotry and ideological capture:
https://www.eye-books.com/products/the-end-of-the-world-is-flat
Guess which social movement it’s lampooning….
Anna #62: somehow, it managed to get published. Maybe there is hope.
Athaia #5: entryism in action…
This seems to me like astute observation. But most critically how can I, an artist, benefit from the Rowling effect? That is the question to which I really want an answer.
(Off topic) This year New Year celebrations were discrete in my neighbourhood; after this 2026 started, there were only a few drunk young men singing aloud in the streets. No rockets. However, I’ve told in another neighbourhoods here there was more noise.
JMG # 74:
Yes, a right wing cancelation culture is the next step as answer to the woke censorship hegemony until now in cultural wars. Now, the tide is changing across every western country. The mirrors game goes and goes.
I’d point my last opinion about Turiel activism. He has his right to write about whatever topic he wants in his blogs and books, but outside his scientist job as an oceanographist/climatologist (I think he knows a lot in this matters), his thoughts are at the same level as the average citizen…unless we think he’s Plato king philosopher. So I respect his scientist views when he acts as a scientist, but I’m able to see his flaws, especially in geopolitics and local politics, me think, outside his proffessional tasks. He even voted in the farcical referendum for the Catalonia independence, commited by secessionist parties, cough cough.
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I’ve said several times before my current comment that culture (high culture and counterculture alike) is usually in the hands of leftism, within modern and democratic countries until the present. Spain nowadays regime fits in the predictable tendence, a few years after the dictatorship died in bed, the “Movida” started in music and fashion, it was fastly coopted by the new Socialist (socialdemocrat) government.
However, there are strange cases in which a lonely author with a right wing bias is adopted by leftist tendence culture. John has remembered Tolkien and Lovecraft. I also want to remember a myth for the western counterculture like Charles Bukowsky. He himself in his self biography told us he wanted to join in the American Nazi party before the WW2, under the subterfuge of his German ancestors (though his last name was very Polish); indeed, he met some US fascists, cough cough. I don’t have evidences of his engagement with Nazi activism after these risky friendships, but I bet he maybe hadn’t any regrets for it. Why the counterculture has pardoned him?
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The term “ecofascism” has been into this current debate: well, if we must use it as a descriptive term more than a mere thoughstopper throwed by woke hordes, I think it could be gently used for the German Green Party in its anti Russian crussade, and reckless support to Kiev regime. This “green” militarism doesn’t care about the dirty “secret” for example, that Ukraine government has forbidden the Communist local party and the rest of Ukrainian left parties, with the subterfuge of being Russophiles, since the war started. Well, we’re supporting democracy against Putin dictatorship…
Of course, German Socialists and Conservatives supports this Spectacle too, but I see the Green leaders are yelling the loudest this Narrative.
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Tris # 98:
What I see from my country about France politics is that there’s a heck of tension and bipolarization like everywhere, but you have the Macron phenomenon. I call him half kidding “little Napoleon”. I think he has been ruling the Hexagon pointing at the bogey man of extremism; ironically I think he’s been hardening his politics into a shameful right wing direction, especially in his foreign politics following the antiRussian agenda even with more “enthusiasm” than another EU leaders. We’ll see how and when extremists narratives would be imposed in French political arena…
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The separation between State and Religion(s) is IMHO a hot red line for western democracies. I think (if I’m not wrong) this line in the USA is thinner than in Europe, because of the Christian origins of first people who went to the original English colonies. But it exists too.
After our dictatorship (which was a regime where the State were itself Catholic), our current Constitution makes the State “not confessional”, which I think it’s an euphemism for “laicism”(maybe to not get the Catholic Church upset when this First Law was written).
Until now, this mild laicism has been respected by every government here, me think. However, the birth and fast growing of far right populism maybe would put in risk this red line. Growing anti-muslim “public” rites and obssession with the “Christian culture” within Vox party has pushed spanish Conservatives to imitate them until some extent in this “Christian” bias to mix religion and ideology; so I’m afraid that democratic red line is going to be crossed soon here.
Katherine (#65) highlighted one of the major problems of our time when she asked, “what kind of politician could actually inspire us, the population of this country, to trust in government for a change.?”
That seems to me to be beyond the power of any single politician or any political party. Trust, once broken in any personal relationship, is extremely hard to restore; and all the more so in any political relationship. And there is no question that the government of the US has proven itself unworthy of trust by the populace for quite a number of decades now.
This is the natural consequence of the government’s ever increasing power over the same decades. As a wise British politician observed more than a century ago: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men” (John E. E. Dalberg-Acton). The more power the US government — or any government — has, the more corrupt it tends to become, and the less trustworthy.
Human nature being what it is, no powerful government can remain trustworthy over the centuries, not can it recover trust once “great men” (including great women, of course — Acton was writing when the word “men” could still include women) have figured out how to corrupt it. There is no going back, ever. The already corrupt will always be able to squash anyone who shows real signs of ending their corruption — even a head of state with almost absolute power.
It is corruption, not some rose-hued fantasy of progress, that always drives human history in the long range. Fortunately for our species, there is a strong countering force, too. Successful large-scale corruption eventually begets hubris, and hubris is always followed by nemesis. After nemesis, the survivors pick themself up out of the ruins and start trying to rebuild. However, success at rebuilding requires trust among the survivors.
And so the whole cycle of rebuilding>trust>power>corruption>hubris>nemesis>destruction>rebuilding repeats over and over, and has repeated since the dawn of human history,
>I do not see the Republican party ever turning against the folly of Friedman-Regan Neoliberalism
The Republicans don’t turn. They don’t do anything. Not anymore. “Let’s not be too hasty” is their rallying cry. Or maybe it’s “The 50 year mortgage will fix it”. Bold new paths to nowhere, I tell you.
Happy New Year to us all.
I’d like to complete my previous comment about the strange case of Charles Bukovski and the (leftist) counterculture, pointing he always said his favorite writer was Celine. It can be casual, or maybe not, this French writer had fondness for Fascist ideology, and even I think he was a Collaboracionist when the Nazis invaded France, during WW2. However, counterculture freaks usually don’t pay any attention with this Chinaski/Bukowsky literary devotion. A blind spot?
A straw in the wind from last night: at supper, the table’s loudmouth said something about Trump, and another woman said she hated watching the news and was about to stop doing so. I said that was a very good idea, and added, truthfully, that my political stance these days was “A Plague on both their houses.” And – to my surprise – she agreed with me!
About your problem with all the things Sara used to do for you, I have an idea, though I think you’ll need help doing this: let it be known that you are looking for help with administrative matters and want to hire an assistant “for now.” When you find one that seems to click, do so, at a better wage than most admins get today. And have a CPA and a lawyer you trust as backup, good auditors being worth their weight in real dollars. Rinse and repeat.
I’m lucky to have daughters to handle these things for me, however bossy they can get, and grandsons to help with the technical ends, but Ashley the Admin in The Village has been an invaluable help to me. I hope this helps.
Joan @ 89: Did I say or imply anything about Rowling? Not that I recall. I don’t intend to do so, either. She’s barely on my “radar.”
Patricia M. # 113:
Speaking (badly or well) about Trump in a supper is IMHO a very bad taste choice. At table, old fashioned politeness rules said it’s unpolite to chatter there about politics, religion and sex. I’m relatively proud to follow at home these “outdated”
not written rules, so I tend to avoid smartly these hot argument topics, especially in these kind of celebrations.
Happy New Year! And thank you! Good to see rising appreciation for your insightful analysis and thoughtful imagination. I find it quite encouraging to hear of recent acceleration..
Perhaps more people are shifting from the denial/bargaining phase of decline/grief towards acceptance and more constructive action. Politically, independents are the ones growing, while the status quo parties shrink (in membership, but eventually hopefully in statesmen too). This may suggest more interest and follow up actions for self/local reliance, and withdrawal of support for senile elites (including using/funding the monopolies/surveillance/welfare-corporations that pick pockets for them). Bypassing ultra-processed foods, and learning about gardening and herbs, helps one defund the medical complex. Some Gen Z are going back to “dumber phones” and phone-off parties, and LP’s are re-appearing at some stores. Blue books (for handwritten in-person student testing) and repairing clothes (sashiko) are quietly on the rise.
Clay Dennis @ 86 and others above, it has been known “on the streets” for decades that the welfare agencies are highly corrupt. This state of affairs has been tolerated for a variety of reasons. Woke ideology is one, sure, but don’t forget that govt. benefits get spent, on housing, utility bills, clothing, food, etc. Ask yourself how many grocery stores remain in business because of SNAP purchases.
I once asked a locally prominent Slow Foods activist what about laws that would allow renters to have home gardens? The answer was some sneering comments about how the average tenancy is only a year and a half. My first experience of faux leftism..
Wow, I felt my ears burning on this one. I am an author and my first non-fiction book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home, was picked up by Aeon Books. It will hit bookshelves this spring. I never submitted a single query letter. I was actually approached by Aeon after they found me on Substack. My Substack runs the gamut from magical topics to the war of the sexes. Recently, I wrote an anti-plastic surgery essay called Chopped. A single sentence that compared sex change surgeries to butchery on the level of medieval treppanning drew a flurry of woke trolls. Their insanity drove the algorithm to promote my essay on every corner of Substack. My average essay there gets about 2000 views. Chopped got 15,000 and is still going. That said, Sacred Homemaking is just about the most undramatic, wholesome sort of magic book that exists, and mainly has to do with cleaning and talking to land spirits. Nobody could ever accuse me of being consistent in my tone. I sense a big shift too. In early 2024, I wrote an essay destigmatizing the word “retarded”. https://open.substack.com/pub/kimberlysteele/p/the-retardation-of-woke Less than a year later, Donald Trump was once again not canceled for calling Tim Walz a retard. I could go on and on on this topic. Thank you for crystallizing it with this essay.
LOL and by less than a year, I mean less than two years. I am retarded at math and if I have not had caffeine, it’s even worse.
michael bloom #103: “I’m not clear on the exact point of this post.”
I think part of the point is “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Per Joan #87 the Rowling effect was predicted in PG Wodehouse‘s 1958 comic novel Cocktail Time: there’s nothing like a denunciation from the pulpit to increase book sales (or sell movie tickets). In Annapolis MD in 1980 there was a bakery that was making – um – anatomically correct gingerbread men. Some religious leaders denounced this, and of course the bakery’s sales went through the roof.
Incidentally, Wodehouse is a wonderful antidote to contemporary craziness! He never fails to make me laugh, and the writing style is superb.
@Chauquin #112: Celine and Bukowski? Hmmm. Celine merited a mention in Guy Debord’s situationist book; he was just about the only writer/artist mentioned there whose name resonated for me at all. Have you read his trilogy about escaping through Germany to neutral Denmark at the end of WWII? With his wife, his Italian actor pal and the most famous cat in literature, Bebert? And Bukowski. I had a CD of him reading his poetry, and picking fights with the audience. Some of it was recorded at MSU in East Lansing. I thought it was infantile and tried to resell it at a store in East Lansing that buys used CDs. They rejected it, telling me that they don’t buy “new age” material. I thought, Bukowski? New Age? Bukowski would be shocked to learn that he is considered “new age.”
@ Ottergirl and @ JMG
I think the response to what Nick Shirley shared, has started something, but he certainly is not the first citizen journalist to attempt something of that nature.
I know, for a fact, that I have watched videos produced by a similar citizen journalist who doorstepped people (and was likewise blocked, impeded and reported to police) at various migrant halfway houses (often run by religious orders, and federally funded) in Texas and other southern states. I have also watched a citizen journalist knock at the doors of purported, but fake, “citizen” donors to ActBlue with similar viral impact.
For the life of me I cannot remember the names of either of these individuals, but perhaps others here might know who they were/are, and if they are still active.
The muckraker is dead! Long live the new muckraker! 🙂
“I’m scrambling these days to keep up with all the work that my late wife used to do — she was my secretary, publicity manager, and bookkeeper, and took an enormous amount of labor off my shoulders so I could concentrate on writing… if I remarry, and my second wife has secretarial skills, it’s a possibility.”
If I may, I might venture to suggest that you have (by your own account) gotten to where you are well placed to fill your secretarial and administrative needs in the more usual way – by hiring a suitable candidate with the requisite skills and entering into a contract of employment with them.
This may even remove an unnecessary obstacle to finding the right marriage partner, as not all suitable marriage partners are ALSO suitable administrators.
Possibly, separating these roles might be a productive move.
(and, with apologies for unsolicited advice, I shall now step back and shush).
Be well, stay free!
It’s strange the famous crooner Julio Iglesias has never been cancelled until today. He had and he has everything to suffer woke cancelation: he’s been always a Conservative in politics, he’s very rich, he loves American way of (high class) life, and of course he’s been a real macho (his own legend says he’s made love with between 400 to 3000 women). It’s near incredible he hasn’t been cancelled by feminists nor another artists (who invariably are leftists across western world), in USA nor in Spain. Even he sang in a concert a lot years ago with a known spanish singer who usually has made electoral campaigns here in favor of Commies (well, then changed to “Socialists”). My personal theory about Julio immunity against cancel culture is Julio, as alpha male, hasn’t never bullied nor harassed women to get them, so he hasn’t labelled never as sexual predator.
Joan, ha! If my late wife was still around to help me hone my ideas in dinner table conversations, I wouldn’t have missed that — she was a great Wodehouse fan. Still, “the Rowling effect” sounds better than “the Uncle Fred effect,” don’t you think?
Clay, I still have no clue that Hardin is those things. I thought it was simply that he denied the omnipotence of liberal sentimentality.
Joan, one of these days I’ll figure out what’s behind this obsessive notion that everything the left doesn’t like must be the fault of some one omnipotent villain. I hear this constantly — if only Trump, or Putin, or Rowling, or whoever, was gone, everything would be wonderful! Not so, of course, but I’m far from sure where this embarrassingly stupid insistence on personalizing opposition comes from.
Zemi, too funny. The reason he’s “McDuck,” of course, is that the Disney corporation runs its affairs on the basis of that famous quote by H.L. Mencken: “No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of tthe American public.” Your common or garden variety village idiot doesn’t know the word “drake,” and so Disney doesn’t use it.
J.L.Mc12, I’m pretty sure that’s it, exactly. It’s a form of fashion-consciousness — certain people, things, and ideas are fashionable to hate just now, and everyone who wants to impress their friends follows those fashions.
Teresa, and I bet every one of those writers insists at the top of their lungs that women in real life don’t have a thing for bad boys. 😉 I have to admit, though, “Dramione” makes me think of Dramamine, the drug you take to keep from throwing up.
Drhooves, I wish I could disagree. The one thing that gives me hope is the extent to which people these days aren’t just sitting around waiting to be told what to believe. Watching Nick Shirley’s video on fraudulent day care centers pick up 130 million views in a matter of days, and cause a small army of copycat citizen reporters to launch similar projects in other states, strikes me as a good sign.
Slithy, thanks for this. I don’t follow video games — I’ve actually never played one — so didn’t know about this twist of the Rowling Effect.
Jason, I don’t give out my email address, to keep a lid on the amount of crazy mail I get. Please put the recommendation in a comment of its own headed “NOT FOR POSTING;” I’ll copy down the info and delete the comment. As for moderate policies, why, if you only engage in a moderate amount of redistribution — say, directing help solely to people who genuinely need it, rather than flinging money around wholesale as is currently done — you only need a moderate degree of behavioral consensus to keep people from being unhappy about it.
JoeSchmoe, thanks for this. I’m flattered to be given the title of Beelzebub, as that suggests a fairly notable rank in what CS Lewis called the “lowerarchy” of Hell. I’d be more likely to rate myself as something much more humble — say, Titivillus, the very minor demon who, in medieval lore, was supposed to gather up the errors of monastic scribes in a bag each day and carry them to Satan. As for the word “woke,” why, as with most words, I really do recommend looking it up in a dictionary.
Tris, thank you! Yeah, it’s been intriguing to watch the trends in European politics. Thanks for the report from the trenches.
Raymond, thank you for that!
Dennis, okay, that’s absurd enough to be important. Many thanks for the data point.
Cicada Grove, one of the things that delights me about my commentariat is that it covers so wide a range of viewpoints — yes, very much including the orange end of the spectrum. I hope everyone gets something useful out of my ramblings.
Ambrose, my book sales and income from other streams are all up steeply since I became persona non grata in activist circles, without any change in the frequency of my appearance in podcasts or the like. Equally, while it’s true that Potterdom peaked some time ago, Rowling’s income continues very high — not what you’d expect when somebody’s main cash cow is getting very long in the teeth (pardon the mixed metaphor). There’s certainly an organic dimension to my success, judging from the slow but steady increase in income that happened before then, but clearly something else is also at work.
Michael, fair enough. You might try rereading it. If that doesn’t work, you might be better off reading someone else.
Rhydlyd, I wish I knew.
Sidaway, ha! That’s genuinely funny.
Kevin, well, you might start by making a list of potential ways to get denounced, and then experinment with a few of them.
Chuaquin, Rhode Island being Rhode Island, there was a random display of fireworks somewhere west of me around 8:30 pm, but other than that it was very, very quiet. New Years celebrations have gotten remarkably hushed of late. Thanks for the reference to Bukowski — yes, he’s another good example.
Robert, I wish I could find a reason to disagree.
Patricia M, good heavens. That’s a wonderful sign. If the current obsession with partisan politics starts to bore people, the chasms dividing our society may yet have the chance to heal.
Gardener, here’s hoping!
Kimberly, excellent! I’ve thought for a while now that you have a very successful career as an author ahead of you, and the Rowling Effect will likely be a major help to that.
Scotlyn, maybe so, but I tend to favor the family business model, and the indirect costs of hiring someone in today’s US are sky-high — laws and policies made to favor large businesses at the expense of small ones make life very difficult for sole proprietors who want to hire a single employee. Besides — well, it’s an unusual kink, I know, but to me, competent women are sexy.
Chuaquin, oh, the cancel mob only targets those they think are vulnerable. During the RaceFail ’09 fracas in science fiction — a cancel-culture donnybrook that finished the process of turning organized SF fandom into a woke preserve — it wasn’t successful, moderate or conservative white male writers who were targeted. It was white female authors who were sympathetic to the left, and so could be lured into an endless series of show trials where they could be bullied, in some cases until they attempted suicide. Watching the mob in question gloat publicly over the suicide attempts was the thing that divested me of the last trace of sympathy I had for the left. Lionesses chase down the strong; it’s the work of jackals to go after the weak.
A great line I read today – “the actual process of communing with the subtle realms” I mostly disagree with the author of that line but he nailed it in those words. May the New Year be filled with that knowing.
@JMG
Re: People (including leftists) insisting that one all-powerful figure or society causes all the evils in the world
I’ve wondered if the stereotypical conspiracy theory* ultimately stems from Christian eschatology. This is the Endtimes. The Antichrist and his Marked followers are indeed here and ruling the world, but are working behind the scenes. The conspiracy theorist is part of the Remnant and will be rewarded when the conspiracy is busted.
*Less extreme claims, that in a situation the government, media, and other institutions are lying to the public and are corrupted by under-the-table or overt bribes, often turn out to be true and can be considered low-grade conspiracy theories.
Wishing everyone a happy New Year.
Got my collard & mustard greens, and black eyed peas prepped for dinner later today.
I am glad to see you return to the theme of the abandoned middle John. I very much appreciated your old post on the Alt-Right, Ctrl-Left and the Escape Center. The moderate middle really has been abandoned, and I have what @Jason #3 called “extremism fatigue.” I really do feel politically homeless. The extremists on each side have me shake my head.
There was an editorial in County Highway newspaper that suggested instead four ideological camps for Americans ( a nice tetrad) these days. These the editor David Samuels says supersede the old left-right divide.
First are the Illusionists who claim the old reality is still real and our institutions still healthy/ good.
Second are Revisionists whose mode is conspiracy theory.
Third are Revanchists who dream of establishing the one true Church or reverting back ti some golden age in the past etc. ( 1950s America, the gold standard, et puke cetera).
Fourth are tech bro Futurists, transhumanists etc.
Those 4 camps stayed with me as a metaphor at least…
As a theta-Arachnist and someone who was in some Chaos magic adjacent circles for a time, the chaos star that goes out in eight directions might be a good symbol. Call my alignment chaotic neutral if you will.
—
Re: Bukowski, he isnt as popular on the left as he once was. I think his novels are great and far superior to hus poetry. Though I enjoy reading him from time to time, dont care to emulae him.
JMG,
A balanced centrist type of politics is not some unattainable pie in the sky. I believe we had such a thing here in Oregon in the 1970’s. Our two senators ( Hatfield and Packwood) were pro business, anti-war republicans who would not be welcome in todays republican and democratic parties. We had a republican governor ( Tom McCall) who championed cleaning up the pollution in the Willamette river, made the beachfront on the entire Oregon coast public property, and created Americas first bottle and can recycling bill.
If you dropped such old-school centrists in todays political scene they would probably be chewed up by special interests before they got any power but a time might come.
It seems to me that one of the very bad things ( among others) about the woke revolution is ( at least for a time) blocked us from pointing to examples of politics and government in the past that worked.
If today I went to the floor of the Portland City Council ( god forbid) and promoted the idea that the policies of these men of the past be revisited to stave off the downward spiral the city finds itself in I would be tarred and feathered because of course any such man from this period would be considered to be a white supremest for even existing in the dark world of the past. The trope that only the present and the glorious future can be viewed in a positive light is a giant handicap to making any improvements.
If you will receive my blessings, then, may your search for the right partner in the family business be blessed! 🙂 🙂
I always thought “ecofascist” meant those people who are trying to force me to do what they want me to do, against my will, in order to “save the Earth”. Like force me to drive an electric car even though I have no way to charge it at work or at home. Please just leave me alone.
As for New Year’s Eve, I’ve never seen it so quiet as last night. My little city was a ghost town. Much quieter than even an average Wednesday night. I guess people aren’t too excited about the coming year.
PS. I am glad to hear of your financial stability! I don’t want you worrying about money; to my mind you have more important things to think about.
PPS. I also find competent women attractive.
Also, I’ve uploaded another article I wrote from New Maps, sure to offend the musical and/or religious sensibilities of someone!
In this article I look at the potential for future alternative religious movements that might evolve around musicians and their fans. I use the examples of Psychic TV and TOPY, Jimmie Rodgers and the cargo cult around his recodings that evolved into worship of a spirit in Africa, the Ambient Church movement, Deadheads, and the avantgarde disciples who surrounded classical Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath, who in turn gave birth to minimalism and aspects of the “world music” phenomenon.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/cults-of-music
It’s funny to me to read about the Rowling affect. I guess I have operated on some version of it all my life. I have never bought anything I saw advertised: something I wanted anyhow and saw was on sale being the exception.
Stephen
Off topic
Atmospheric River
The place I was telling you about last week has an interesting new video on the groundwater and overall situation in the Cuyama Valley. quailsprings.org
stephen
Apologies for being late to the New Year’s party, but I swore to give myself a break from writing anything for ten days, and nearly succeeded. Happy New Year and congratulations on your well-deserved success, JMG.
I thought I’d chip in because behind your piece is one of the great spectres of politics for the last century, the wish for a party of nice, moderate, sensible people, who will rescue the country from the alleged extremes of Left and Right. This has never happened in practice, and I don’t think it’s going to now, for the simple reason that politics doesn’t exist on a spectrum, but at least on two axes (think of the x and y axes of a graph, as a start.) Thus, in many European countries, the working class and older immigrant communities still often vote for the notional “Left” but are much less “woke” than many of their wealthier compatriots who vote for parties of the notional “Right.” As a result, the “Centre” isn’t really a Centre, but a collection of people of different views dissatisfied with the system, but agreeing on very little else.
As Tris has mentioned, this is where we are in France, with a pseudo-centrist President with his own party, who have incarnated moderate opinion if you take that the be woke start-up owners and bond-dealers, who want cleaners they can pay in cash. The result has been the destruction of the French political system as it used to be. But there’s actually a better example from Britain. After several false starts, in 1981 the “moderate” wing of the Labour Party broke away and formed the Social Democrats, attracting support from all those tired of the “extreme” politics of the day (everything is relative) and soon joined with the old centrist Liberal Party. This was going to change the face of British politics: it did, but not in the way they expected. The new alliance split the centre-left vote in two, handing Thatcher enormous and unearned majorities throughout the 80s. Successive declines in support fo the Tories, and profound dislike of Thatcher’s policies did them no harm, because the opposition to the Tories was busy fighting among itself. Eventually, Thatcher destroyed the old Tory Party, just as Blair destroyed the old Labour Party when the Social Democrats finally imploded under the weight of their own contradictions. They left the British system the wreckage it is today. So be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
Very helpful post, thank you, JMG!
While I have been able to write as a daily practice for months on end I eventually gave up. Figuring out a “niche” has been a block for me in various endeavors for a very long time, including writing. So many squirrels so little time I suppose.
After some prayer and affirmations recently, a few pieces of the puzzle began to appear. While binge watching comedians on Netflix over Christmas though something clicked. (Wife was away over the holiday. So I was home alone too tired to study hanging out with the dogs. )
Dave Chappelle in particular really helped me dial it in. So much to learn from how he does his thing. Observing what comedians choose for topics and how they structure their monologues has been very enlightening.
Yes! I can share my reflections on reality I am experiencing unfolding around me. I don’t have to be an academic, or a guru, or anything else. Just be me sharing what I experience and see going on about me. Sounds obvious now but not so much before.
Share about what? The occult? Politics? Argh, the niche thing again!
Reading your article it finally clicked.
Much of my life I have been a bit of an oddball. Outside the mainstream of pretty much everything. What if my perspective or way of seeing and experiencing reality IS my niche?!?!?
The next block was fear of being attacked online. BUT I will say that living through events of the last 5 years, honing in on my 60th birthday this coming year, and daily meditation have been quite effective at eventually dissipating that fear.
As a first go at this idea of sharing my non-lunatic-aligned perspectives, last night I wrote a Substack note listing my views on a variety of topics. Included were the butchering of children in the name of gender affirming care, Covid Vax murder, Aliens, the religion of science, eating animals, loving my gay and straight friends and family, and gun rights. And many more.
As of this morning I note I haven’t, unfortunately, been attacked. Though the day is young. But I do have a new subscriber.
Thank you, again! Off to explore more reflections that give lunatics indigestion.
Zerohedge has year end wrap up which has a yarnball graph of the incestuous AI relationships in play. It’s about 1/4 down. Apple missed the ball so bad they aren’t even on it.
Near the end paragraph is good too.
“We don’t know: as our frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try, despite repeat baseless allegations that we constantly forecast the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2025 when all the experts predicted soaring inflation as a result of Trump’s tariffs, alongside a sharp drop in the stock market… only to flip-flop and concede that not only is tariff inflation not coming but the market is set to close at fresh record highs…”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/2025-greatest-hits-most-popular-articles-past-year-and-look-ahead
For my husband Mike and me it was the Unaffordable Care Act. When I checked into it, although we could have gotten a subsidy on the basis of income, we had too much in savings to qualify for the subsidy. Premiums for the lowest-cost, highest-deductible bronze plan were far in excess of what we could afford to pay. Fortunately they were enough above what the government thought we could afford to pay that we didn’t owe extra money on our federal tax for not having the insurance, so we continued to do without it as we had for more than a decade before the Act went into effect. Medicare plus Medigap, on the other hand, is affordable – so far. But I’m not sure how much longer we can continue to pay for Medigap, which accounts for more than half of the combined cost even though it’s only paying for the 20% that Medicare doesn’t cover.
I have a data point that suggests that the excluded middle is organizing its own events. There have been a number of comments wondering where the events to celebrate the US’ 250th birthday are. I can tell you that some of them are in Missouri, and I’ll be part of one of them. The Missouri Alliance for Art Education has a series of programs in 2026 under the banner Celebrate 250: The Spirit of the Arts & America. One of the programs is Dulcimer Day at the Capitol, in April, in which mountain and hammer dulcimer players will gather at the Missouri State Capitol for stage performances and a jam session. I’ll be there and expect to play mountain dulcimer in the jam session. Here’s the website: https://www.moaae.org/programs/fine-arts-education-week/Dulcimer-Day-at-the-Capitol . Anyone who enjoys old time music played by ordinary people will enjoy this event – and we’ll bring awareness of both kinds of dulcimer to members of the public and hopefully entice a few of them to take up playing music themselves.
“Ron Weasley? Really? Hermione can do better so why not Draco?”
In the books, Draco is a bad person and not even courageously or powerfully so. He is a Death Eater Ron Weasley.
In real life, apparently the Hermione actress got along quite well with the Draco actor.
The level of Rowling hatred described is quite amazing. All I can figure is that people feel betrayed by a childhood hero. On the other hand, the current Internet does function as though designed to amplify the most immature, least admirable voices.
>my book sales and income from other streams are all up steeply since I became persona non grata in activist circles
Is it better to be hated than loved, I wonder.
So would it be apt to call the fed ip people the “Mercutian” center? What would be the correct term?
Brother John Michael,
As someone who is a writer’s assistant, actually, I may be able to offer some advice on it. Ignore as you see fit, as always with unsolicited advice.
I am not full time, not even half time. My writer doesn’t need that. Two to three hours a week, scattered between “Did you finish the story for anthology yet?”, “Did you reserve your hotel for the convention yet?”, blog comment moderation (by far the most time consuming), and usually a week a year in person full time. Most communication is asynchronus electronic: I send a note of what I’m tracking, my writer sends back notes as things get done or things need adding to the list.
Given that, if you think you want to try an assistant, I’d suggest asking around the local Lodge scene and see if any of the secretary types are interested in picking up a few hours. It’s not my primary income, and I am payed as a contractor. This solves a lot taxwise–think of me more like a plumber than live-in home help. Since I have multiple small income streams–3 different Schedule Cs–it works as smoothly as anything does when the government gets a say.
I suggest local simply because it is a right pain when, say, my writer gets author copies and then needs to mail them to me so I can get them to appropriate recipients to review. There’s not a lot that requires either, but what there is tends to drag out til the next time I’m there.
I also do some editing, and particularly have cleaned up old out of print rights reverted books which had the most appalling edits done by house editors for republishing, but that’s a separate thing from the assistant work.
Jason: “So when you have a socially conservative society, you have standards of behavior enforced enough that people can trust others to not violate them.”
I think that this is why Scandinavian countries have been able to have extensive social safety nets. It is also why that has been breaking down in Sweden as the number of new Swedes rises. The suppression of discussion of the problems of immigration of folks from very different cultures into a fairly homogeneous society has not helped.
This says nothing negative about the immigrants or the natives who didn’t welcome them. It was the mixing and the specifics of how that was done that created the problems.
>On the other hand, the current Internet does function as though designed to amplify the most immature, least admirable voices.
The internet to some degree is whatever you want it to be. If you want it to be an insane asylum full of the most odd and grotesque, it will oblige. If you want it to be your physics teacher, it will oblige. If you want it to show you how to fix a car or how to cook, it will oblige. It’s whatever you’re looking for.
In the immediate aftermath of the shocking assassination of TPUSA founder, Charlie Kirk, it seemed that the US was about to suffer an even deeper progressive/conservative divide. However, something shifted, and , in a way that I could not have foreseen, the event has, instead, created a massive wedge issue within MAGA’s broad tent coalition. The issue? the right to speak freely if that speech expresses any criticism of one specific foreign country.
Those who oppose such speech have been wielding the epithet “anti-semitic” in their attempts to shut it down, implying that speech critical of a foreign country is indistinguishable from hate speech against a specific American demographic.
However, the Rowling effect appears to be in full effect here, because, it turns out that wielding the “anti-semitism” epithet is increasingly becoming an audience-shrinker, while speaking freely in the face of the “anti-semitism” epithet being hurled at one, is becoming an audience-grower.
This may be because the concentrated weight of studious attempts to wield the epithet against ANY criticism of this specific foreign state, is turning the right to freely utter such critical speech into a wedge issue in the broad coalition initially brought together under the MAGA tent.
Phutatorius # 121:
Yes, Bukowski and Celine both they were good writers. But I think you’ve missed my point of view about them. In a previous comment I had pointed both had fondness for Fascism, but Bukowski in some moment during last century second half, became one of the holy cows fir the counterculture, which is obviously leftist. Chinaski/Bukowski wrote without doubt when he was young he flirted with the American Nazi Party (at least for a while), but this “sin” seems to have been pardoned/ignored by his countercultural fans, so he’s never been cancelled. In the other hand, Celine (suspiciously the Bukowski favorite novelist), who was accused of collaborationism with German Nazis during the WW2 occupation, though he hasn’t been cancelled until now, indeed he was a controverted author since the postwar time (he’s not welcome by the left hegemonic in western cultural world). I think there’s some relation between writers biography (and ideology!) and their books; though I’m not proposing to cancel them, but to read them carefully.
By the way, I’ve read more of Bukowski than Celine’s. I only read from him the spanish translation of “Viaje al final de la noche”(its English title would be roughly: “Journey towards the end of the night”), and I liked it.
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JMG # 125:
Thanks for your short depiction of how did you see New Year celebrations in your town
**********
Yes, Bukowski is a good example of an author saved from woke cancellation “by miracle”. Maybe his bizarre self referential writings, full of women and alcohol, has made him transgressive to the countercultural freaks eyes. Who knows?
***********
Oh, I hadn’t realized cancellation hordes were brave only against vulnerable targets. That explains a lot of attitudes of wokesters everywhere. It’s very sad what you’ve told us about white female writers being harassed by those new inquisitors.
Hey JMG and Commentariat
On the subject of people who have both skewered a lot of mainstream wisdom, and have written about how denunciation can make authors more popular, I just discovered that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has his own Substack page now.
https://nntaleb.substack.com/
I have to admit, though, “Dramione” makes me think of Dramamine, the drug you take to keep from throwing up.
You are not alone!
Justin P. # 128:
I don’t have the impression Bukowski myth is losing its appeal here, but I guess there are fashions in literature too, maybe depending of countries and potential readers. What I also see is this Alpha Male of counterculture has managed to survive the woke cancel culture era…
@ Jessica #139
You are correct about Draco in the novels.
In the films, which far more people saw, Draco is blond, bad, and sexy-hot as the actor matures into his late teens.
I believe that’s where the urge to match Hermione and Draco comes from. Poor Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley). He never stood a chance. The films make him look foolish.
It seems that a similar effect to what’s going on in the literary world, where consumers are turning their backs on books marketed by the big publishers that exclusively cater to the conventional wisdom, is happening in the video game market as well. I’ve heard countless stories about how the games made and marketed by the biggest producers (“AAA games”, in their terminology) are shallow and uncreative, and how the games made by the smaller creators are where true innovation is to be found. To me, this is another sign of the cultural shift going on in the modern landscape, where both readers and players recognize that they’re not interested in anything geared to the tastes of the managerial elite. I’d be curious to hear if a similar shift is going on with radio and TV; if the recent success of David and Disney’s financial woes are anything to go by, it certainly seems to be happening with movies.
It’s still TBD on whether or not the American “free spirit” in terms of freedom of speech can persist. For the moment, attempts to cancel those who speak/write against the official narratives appear to have been less successful here in the U.S. versus other parts of the world, but the attempts to police speech and the press continue. Certainly any increase in the number of people reporting on issues outside the MSM narratives helps.
Another side effect from the Plandemic was the backlash from closing of church services. Americans seem a bit more sensitive on being told how to think, and are touchy about being told what to believe. Many that weren’t paying attention to the trends have come to realize that .gov is a poor substitute over making your own choices in faith, and the Religions of .Gov and Progress may not be the answer.
Since the “Rowling Effect” as you’ve described seems to be based mainly on an emotional response, I wonder how long it will last as the Long Descent continues? I would guess that there will be less concern about the issues of the fringe of importance as things get worse, but there’s been a lot of “issues” that have been whacky (IMHO) that continue to chew up precious bandwidth these days.
The unfolding citizen investigation in to child care fraud in Washington State has drawn an interesting reaction from the government. The state attorney general has threatened to prosecute citizen journalists for hate crimes for looking in to fraudulent day cares. How clueless can they be to think this will work for them.
Another interesting aspect of the citizen journalist investigations so far, that is different from Minnesota is that most of the Somali owned day cares listed by the state and visited by citizens seem to be located in large (Mcmansion) style houses in the suburbs, with no noticeable signage.
It also seems to be spreading to Ohio, Massachusetts , Maine and California.
Excellent post!! Nail on the head as usual!
As an unpublished writer, I have just received a contract from one of the fringe publishers for a post- apocalyptic novel to be published 4/27. You have quite a few of your older books in print with this particular house. Once again, your wisdom is appreciated, as it is seeing your work there, that led me to them!!!
You richly deserve what comes your way, keep shining the light of truth.
Dylan (#8) RE: Canadians looking to gain American citizenship.
My wife and I are Gen X and we somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously talk about moving to the States from Canada because it’s a complete gong show here and no one in politics is willing to address the core issues of our time (affordability being topmost).
Do you have any resources on gaining US citizenship?
Hi John Michael,
Agreed. Competent women are awesome. 🙂
Let’s be brutally honest about this matter. I’ve observed both men and women, enjoying a misplaced pride in being being unable to do basic domestic and other tasks well. There was a song on the radio a few years ago where the lady proudly proclaimed that she didn’t have to: cook or clean. Sorry to say it, but someone needs to do that work in a household. And, I’ve been at those tasks, and other domestic stuff since the age of 12 with a befitting level of competence, so it need not follow traditional gender based lines. Growing up in a single parent household, I saw the downsides of adults being unable to manage basic stuff, and it was awful to witness.
Pride, it should be noted, is the devil. Get it together people! I would avoid a relationship with a lady who had such misplaced pride. Long after the limerence effect wore off, you’ve still gotta eat and be presentable in public.
Oooooo, am I ranting?
Cheers
Chris
JMG,
I’m a bit surprised you haven’t put these pieces together in this way before now. For quite some time, I have found denunciations (or, as you very colorfully put it “the usual saliva-flecked rage”) by certain persons and/or entities (of both the “right” and the “left”, if those terms still have useful meaning) to be one very useful guide as to what I should be reading and who I should be paying attention to.
I am launching (re-launching?) my very modest writing career, and I would love to get a flying-spittle type of raging denunciation from certain public figures; it would be by far the best advertising I can hope for. In the absence of that, though, I will just point your commentariat toward my official introductory post, and hope that some people find it worth reading. Here it is: https://royedwardsmith.substack.com/p/introduction
JMG
I’m glad for your success, as you’ve paid your dues to get to that level. There is definitely something to the Rowling Effect, as most people don’t totally align with one extreme or the other and just want to live their lives as they choose not as they are commanded.
I first came upon your work in regards to peak oil and environmentalism, where I saw your views as very reasonable and logical. I did a few interviews with KMO and other guests, before he abandon those issues, and your thoughts were always brought up as reasoned and with thought out by those people. I’ve purchased many of your books, even some on magic, which was totally off my radar, as I thought that if someone as sane and rational as you is into magic, there must be something to it and it peaked my curiosity.. I completed a permaculture design course, with Geoff Lawton earlier this year and found that the observational exercises were very similar to those in “Mystery Teachings of the Living Earth”.
When I was reading the comments, I burst out laughing when I came across this:
“it’s an unusual kink, I know, but to me, competent women are sexy.”
I think competence is sexy too, so either not so unusual or I share the same kink :)!
Bob
@92 Teresa Peschel
@139 Jessica
Hermione can do better
In the books, Hermione was nerdy, bossy, and not very attractive (messy hair, buck teeth). So I’m not sure if she could have “done better” until she became famous enough that men would pursue her for that reason.
@ Patrick #159
It’s the films that make the pairing likely.
The novel characters aren’t nearly as attractive as their movie-star avatars.
But that’s what Hollywood ALWAYS does.
Normal people become stunningly beautiful.
Ugly people become merely pretty while everyone in the film or TV show insists they’re unattractive.
Chauquin @ 146 Celine’s first novel was translated “Journey to the End of the Night” in English. I’ve read it at least 3 times. So, only “Dhalgren” rates higher in my scale of how many times I’ve read and re-read a particular novel. His second novel, “Death on the Installment Plan” (in English) is also very good. In my opinion, the segment where the narrator attends an English boarding school is excellent. But Celine is an acquired taste. His prose is idiosyncratic, at the very least. I was first alerted to him by my faculty adviser at Cal State, who was Jewish but who regarded Celine very highly. I don’t doubt that Celine held anti-semitic views. He was equal-opportunity; he hated everybody except his cat.
Interesting that people are saying they had a quieter than usual New Year. Totally opposite here: louder -more gunfire especially – and went on longer. Past couple years they mostly quit by 1215 but this year were still going after 1 am. (If you’re collecting data points: mid-sized Texas city, neighborhood within walking distance of downtown, lower end working class and don’t ask about the neighbors immigration status)
No black eyed peas for me – I’ve had better luck with a variety of cowpea called Whippoorwill that is extremely productive, and having always hated collards and with this year’s planting of swiss chard being only about 5 inches tall right now, I made do with dandelion greens (which I grow deliberately as a supplement to my chickens’ diet).
BeardTree, thank you! May it happen.
Patrick, that’s certainly plausible.
Justin, those four camps do certainly identify four flavors of extremism in today’s society; I suspect, though, that the great majority of people fall into none of them. Me, I tend toward chaotic good.
Clay, oh, it’s entirely possible that once the rubble stops bouncing, some such centrist arrangement will be possible again. A lot of people forget that during the last elite replacement cycle, the one that peaked in 1936, partisan hatreds were just as bitter as they are now; once the cycle ran its course, things calmed down again.
Scotlyn, thank you.
Slink, that definition of “ecofascist” is at least logical. As for competent women, interesting. Maybe it’s not as odd of a kink as I thought.
Justin, thanks for this.
Stephen, delighted to hear it.
Aurelien, nah, I’m not suggesting the coming of a party of nice, moderate, sensible people. I’m suggesting that we may well see a party of ordinarily corrupt and power-hungry politicians who realize that appealing to those subgroups who are shut out from the political discourse is a ticket to power. The Social Democrats are a good cautionary example, but my take is that they were simply too early; Blair went the same direction a decade later and took the whole Labour Party with him.
Eric, excellent! That’s basically the model I use for blogging — I write about the things that interest me, whether or not they have anything to do with each other and with zero regard for what other people think. It’s always worked well for me.
Siliconguy, they’re right, of course; assume that the experts are wrong and you’ll be correct more often than not.
SLClaire, delighted to hear about the dulcimer jam! As for the ACA, I think it had that impact on a lot of people. I’ve never had medical insurance; it’ll be interesting to experience Medicare in another two years, but I suspect I’ll cover the gap with a health savings account and let the insurance industry squirm.
Other Owen, it’s better to be hated than to be one of those dull faux-celebrities whose public presence is pure media-generated smoke and mirrors.
Candace, as in Mercutio’s “A plague o’ both your houses”? Yes, “Mercutian center” will do very well – -thank you!
BoysMom, so noted and thank you. I’ll consider that.
Scotlyn, I’ve been watching that as well.
Chuaquin, it does explain a lot, doesn’t it?
J.L.Mc12, hmm! I gather everyone’s heading to Substack these days.
Ethan, that’s good to hear. Anything that weakens the grip of the corporate consensus on popular culture is a step in the right direction.
Drhooves, that’s an interesting question I can’t yet answer. The Rowling Effect depends on the mismatch between the extremist minorities hogging collective discourse and the unrepresented majority, and it’s anyone’s guess how long that will continue.
Clay, that is to say, the state attorney general has just identified himself as the chief suspect once the investigation moves from the fraudulent day care centers themselves to the politicians who are getting a share of the take in exchange for letting the looting proceed unhindered. Gotcha.
Tom, delighted to hear it. May your book sell like hotcakes!
Chris, rant away! Me, I just find people who can deal competently with everyday life more pleasant to be around, irrespective of whether I benefit from their work.
Roy, I must be slow on the uptake or something. Congrats on the (re)launch!
Bob, thank you. Okay, clearly it’s not as rare a kink as I thought. Good!
Piglet, dandelion greens certainly count, and they’re delicious.
Good gods. I’ve just read that Tony Dokoupil, the anchor of CBS News, said the following on the air in one of today’s news broadcasts:
“On too many stories, the press has missed the story, because we’ve taken into account the perspectives of advocates rather than the average American. Or we’ve put too much weight on the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
Seems to me that the Rowling Effect may just have gone into hyperdrive…
I have long argued that the Transgender Community would be better off just ignoring Rowling, or making the joke that Harry Potter was written by a time-travelling Earl of Oxford or something. Boycotting is fine of course, but the woman already had enough money to buy Neptune before she revealed her views on Transgenderism, and as such any boycott would only ever be symbolic. Note that Neil Gaiman is now subject to a literary boycott at a level far greater than Rowling’s, and I very much doubt he will be starving any time soon – it is simply that when you are that wealthy, working (in this case writing) really becomes optional, given existing investments. Moreover, while Gaiman is now persona non grata, Rowling could literally write anything, no matter how poor in quality, and the publisher would snap it up – Too Big to Edit and all that.
Bearing in mind however: the Rowling/Transgender thing has several peculiar facets.
(1). Rowling keeps trying to update her story after the fact, to add things that just weren’t there when the story was written. I have no problems with the conception of Dumbledore being homosexual, but outing the character via interview, when book-Dumbledore simply doesn’t have a sexuality, was just silly. More importantly though, it does mean that Rowling has a fetish for trying to earn political brownie points for things she didn’t really write – which implicitly draws her into contemporary culture-war silliness.
(2). Many in the Transgender community grew up with the Harry Potter books, and feel quite hurt the author they placed so much emotional investment in has proved so hostile to them. They would be better off invoking Death of the Author, of course, and just straight-out ignoring Rowling, but Rowling already makes it harder to invoke Death of the Author when she keeps imposing herself upon her work in a way other creators don’t (again, Dumbledore’s sexuality). Anti-Transgenderism is not a quirk of Rowling the woman at this point, but an obsession.
(3). Rowling cheerfully uses her immense wealth to go after her critics (threatened legal action being a staple). Given the power differential, of a millionaire Blairite Establishment Liberal on one hand (with vast armies of corporate lawyers at her disposal, and a publishing/movie industry that will churn out whatever Rowling sends them), and the Transgender Community on the other, the thing indeed evokes an Elite/Non-Elite split, but an altogether different one than what is implied above. Sometimes the people you rail about are not the ones wielding the real power in the contemporary West.
I just listened to an audio book where the protagonist, an author, sold out, so took the opposite route you took. This was a bit of an over the top black comedy I guess ( for a while I wondered if it was going to take a darker murderous turn). Since it was purposefully over the top, he not only sold out, was told how to make a best seller, bastardized his writing to comply, he used a pseudonym, which later they then decided he could not tour or be out as the author,he didnt “look the part” of the approchable author they wanted to sell those books, so they hired an actor and hid him away, then having him commited for delusions in claiming he was the author, only to be played by them again while in the private hospital ( if it was one) he is befriended by a fellow patient and they escape and he comes up with a new story line, and when he is done working, it turns out she was a hired plant and his idea was co-opted yet again…… Much better to stay true to yourself….. even if the story was a slight exaggeration of the industry
@Tim PW #155: I wish I had something useful to offer you. Legal immigration to the US has been challenging for a long time, and it’s not exactly getting easier these days. Since you’re already married, the most straightforward option of marrying a US citizen is closed to you.
My friends who actually have a chance are Canadians who inherited their US citizenship from an American-born parent; they themselves have never actually resided in the US, and are having to do some legwork now to get citizenship granted to their own (Canadian-born) children. Another friend has entered the diversity lottery, which apparently still exists but likely won’t for much longer. Another is a hot-shot tech worker with an American girlfriend. None of these options are available for me, so I don’t spend much time thinking about it, and instead I focus on hunkering down to live like Lil’ Abner as our country deteriorates, as our host described a couple of weeks ago.
@Robert Mathiesen #109: Yes!!!!! rebuilding>trust>power>corruption>hubris>nemesis>destruction>rebuilding is basically the summary of historical process I’ve been coming to grips with for the last several years. It really does sum up most available theories of civilizations’ rise and fall. Trust is the most powerful agent in the cohesion of human aggregates and its lack is the most significant factor in their corrosion. When you look at history through this lens, everything suddenly makes a lot more sense.
When you then replace that simple word ‘trust’ with the almost-equivalent but so-very-different word ‘faith’, you get the spiritual history of a civilization. When you replace it with the not-so-equivalent but tellingly-related word ‘fiat’, you get the economic history of a civilization. As Spengler saw clearly, these things are deeply, deeply interrelated.
JMG, it would be fascinating to do a deeper dive into the history of the idea of ‘separation of church and state’. Maybe that can be a future post, down the line? It may end up being true that there never really has been such a thing- when Christian churches in the West were curtailed from having overt influence over government policies, the churches of Progress and Scientism stepped in to fill the gap. For instance, the historical period 2020-22 can be read as the first round of an Inquisition promulgated by a religious elite only just passing the apex of its power. That is to say, we’ve always had a state religion, complete with mass rituals and fervent missionaries trolling through Africa. We’ve simply replaced catechisms and communion wafers with compulsory schooling and vaccines.
I think true separation of church and state is possible in more decentralized societies, like your fictional Retrotopia, or like modern-day Kurdistan, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians have lived with religious diversity for a long time. Maybe both examples are simply born of a need to unite against powerful external enemies, but then again, that need has often driven the opposite strategy of purging internal dissent. I would love to know of more examples and/or counter-examples.
I have witnessed first-hand the very positive effects that sincere Christian faith can have on political activism. My American Christian friends are almost all left-leaning, though they would probably eschew that label in favour of ‘living and working alongside the dispossessed’. I get excited when I see that sort of religious impulse animating political activities in the US, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the VP talking about Jesus from a podium. It’s just not in his job description, and is far better left to someone else.
Thank you so much, JMG. I will try my best to keep delivering interesting things to read. I would like to echo BoysMom that you should try to find a local writer’s assistant and possibly go beyond that and find a local or remote person/people to take care of other tasks that Sara used to manage. I’m guessing it would take more than one person to do all of the things she did for you so selflessly. If I could afford to hire a “rough proofreader” to check my essays before they went live, I would totally do it. The very minute I can budget that person, I will be doing it. Personally, I would also hire a person to upload my sheet music arrangements to my various online sheet music web profiles. By farming out the work, I would be helping myself out tremendously and also helping someone who is organized and detail-oriented to get fairly paid for what they do very well.
I meant chaotic neutral in terms of a political axis, but I’d try to align chaotic good in my general life.
Yeah, I can see those camps as being extremes themselves. … it was an editorial after all !
Interesting synchronicity about the MSM comment. Hope the attitude proves contagious.
From what I can tell, the title “ecofascist” is handed out to environmentalists who concern themselves with either overpopulation (a concern which has within my lifetime lead to mass forced sterilizations in various countries including this one) or immigration, which is actually fed by two issues. One is the idea (which I have seen articulated in so many words) that borders are fake and everybody should have absolute freedom of choice when it comes to where they live. The other is a more narrow, specific and passionately held subset of that, which is that poor people ought to be allowed to move in order to escape poverty.
Now, it’s been some decades since I read Hardin, so I don’t remember whether this applies to him, but I have definitely read and heard the words of environmentalists whose motivation was to preserve a particular beloved wild place, or wild places in general, no matter the cost to the rest of the world. They wanted to close the borders to reduce consumer demand, especially housing demand, so that there would be no economic motivation to clearcut forests for land to build houses and factories and so forth. The implication was that these environmentalists, while wanting to hang onto their own middle class lifestyles, also wanted the poor to stay poor because if they rose into the middle class they’d increase consumer demand.
This goes beyond the hypocrisy you’ve pointed out so often. It amounts to wanting to impose hardship on masses of strangers so that wild lands can be preserved as, well, I’m sure they don’t think of it this way but what it amounts to is, ecotourism parks for their own class. While it may be a bit of a stretch to call that fascism, it’s definitely an ugly flavor of elitism.
Just to chime in: I have always been attracted to competent women, never to helpless girly, girl types.
On eco fascist: I have only ever heard it used as a snarl word against any kind of ecological protection, or on specific environmental issues by people who were opposed to them, usually right wing BAU types whose projects or positions were opposed by environmentalists., I suppose as fascist is usually used.Granted some of the environmentalists can go a bit overboard at times.
Stephen
DS, as long as the corporate media and big government take the side of transgender people, as of course they do in much of the Western world. I’m not at all sure it’s valid to portray the situation, as you’re trying to do here, as Big Powerful Rowling stomping on Poor Helpless Trans People.
Atmospheric, funny! A slight exaggeration…
Dylan, I’ll consider it! The crucial point is that there’s a difference between the separation of church and state, on the one hand, and the separation of faith and state on the other.
Kimberly, thanks for this.
Justin, what I want to see is whether CBS follows through on it. If they do, and their ratings soar, it may soon be all over for the censorship-industrial complex.
Joan, that wasn’t Hardin’s focus. He simply pointed out the destructive consequences of unrestricted immigration in a world where population was increasing exponentially in some areas, and more slowly in others. He argued that unless something changed, that exponential increase would necessarily lead to mass dieoff, and the question was whether the dieoff and its hideous ecological consequences would be worldwide, or restricted to those areas that had unlimited population growth. As it happens, that’s not the way things are turning out; population growth is flattening out or collapsing worldwide, but nobody in his time anticipated that.
Stephen, hmm! Okay, not so odd a kink. I get that; a competent, confident, capable woman is just more attractive.
Several months ago, I read an old analysis of Rowling’s birth chart which went over some themes in her life. Apparently, her father had wanted a boy, and let her know that she should have been a boy. If that is true, it largely explains her anti-trans stance, in my mind: if gender ideology had existed back then and was supported by powerful interests, she might be thinking, her father might have gaslit her into believing she was a trans male, and put her on puberty blockers.
@Dylan (#167):
You’re quite right about the very close relationship between trust and faith. The Greek verb pisteúō means “to trust,” and its derived noun pístis means “trust.” But when Greek Christian creeds were translated into Latin, the Greek verb was rendered by credō “to believe” and the Greek noun by fides “faith,” both of which mistranslations shift things from the social sphere (trust) into the intellectual one (belief). And we in the West have been stuck with that unfortunate shift ever since.
And all this only been amplified by deploying modern techniques of propaganda, which weaponize deceit to shape behavior and gain power, but destroy trustworthiness. Which brings us to the time-honored con-artist’s rule: “Sincerity is your most useful tool. People rely on sincerity more even than on their own senses. If you can fake sincerity, you can get most people to do most anything you want them to.”
John Michael–
New Year congratulations! And especially for your opportunity to begin the year with awareness of auctorial good fortune.
A propos of something auctorial, I will mention here something that might also be mentioned as a Magic Monday. Last night I had a rather odd dream, about a pre-publication party at which you were showing me an advance copy of a book it seemed you’d been commissioned or contracted to write, about the back-story of Israel Regardie’s first publication of the Golden Dawn / Stella Matutina ritual corpus.
The book essentially laid out the process by which the publication had come about, which involved the covert collaboration and sponsorship of several occult figures (writers, practitioners, etc), for whom Regardie was acting as a front-man and cut-out. The book was copiously illustrated, with photographs, facsimiles of letters and memos, and so on. Although the book had a certain speculative quality, it was ultimately so convincing (as I read through it) that it was hard to believe the possibility had never been floated before. It pointed out the implausibility of a lone figure collating, editing, typing out the texts (no doubt in a lonely garret, by candlelight!) getting the four volumes published between 1937 and 1940 in Chicago. Certainly Aries Press, an established occult publisher, must have talked about the whole project with potentially interested parties.
The assembled documentation was so clear, and so complete, that I found myself wondering why no one had raised the issue before. I mentioned this to you, and I realized that many of the other people at the party were surprised that I was surprised — that this was one of those matters that everyone had long known, but had never had publicly rigorously demonstrated (what oft was thought, but ne’er so precisely expressed, so to speak).
I was somewhat taken aback to find that I was, once again, so late to the party, just finding out what everyone had long known about. And at that point, I woke up, still in a mood of conviction about the basic claim. I wondered if this were some sort of cryptomnesia, the correlation of fragments of previously encountered facts in a single dream. But I haven’t managed to pull the data from my memory, such as it is.
So there it is. I’m quite willing to believe I’ve missed the boat on this matter. On the other hand, perhaps you will be receiving some similar commission at some point in the coming year, marking in inflection point in the historiography of the GD.
At any rate, all the best in the coming year!
First, I was very pleased to read that you have been rewarded materially for your persistence and great work.
Second, I would like to join the chorus in praise of competent, intelligent women, I have been blessed with three: my wife, my daughter and a dear friend. Life doesn’t get much better than that.
Third, and a bit off-topic, your recent response to someone in the commentariat: “None of use ever really gets out from under what we really are” resonated with me personally at just the right time for its full significance to hit home.
Now I’m off to try and find some bad publicity!
Buon’anno nuovo, tutti!
Interesting. The funny thing is that you can see a reverse-Rowling Effect in a lot of places, whether in traditional or new media: someone starts losing their audience, try to fix it by pandering to the loudest voices, lose more people again, pander even harder, and so on, to the point of eventually becoming a caricature of what they used to be.
@Chris at Fernglade #156 (if I may):
There’s little that’s mysterious about people being ‘proud’ of being incompetent at basic chores – it’s pure class-signaling. In more “traditional” societies like you’d find in Asia, Latin America, or Africa, that means you have hired staff to do all the menial work. In “modern” Western societies, that means you’re an “enlightened” (i.e. educated, liberal, PMC) person who’s not tethered to “old fashioned norms” like “gender roles” and other “societal expectations” – but you still have to eat and get your stuff clean or fixed, and those jobs get farmed out to the “gig economy” via an app on your iPhone.
Dylan (no. 167) ” and are having to do some legwork now to get citizenship granted to their own (Canadian-born) children. ”
Those children may not thank their parents for it. See: http://isaacbrocksociety.ca
JMG *no. 125) ” Your common or garden variety village idiot doesn’t know the word “drake,” and so Disney doesn’t use it.”
Au contraire! Darkwing Duck’s secret identity is “Draka Mallard.”
Scotlyn # 145:
The “anti-semitic” thoughtstopper is losing fast its effect, partly because it’s been used so widely as the term “fascist” (another thoughtstopper which has lost its meaning thanks to its abusive use).
————————-
Phutatorius # 161:
Well, being a real antisemitic and a mysantrope doesn’t make Celine a bad novelist, but he deserves a careful look in his views, me think.
————————
JMG # 163:
Yes, it explains a lot…No argument here.
What happened when a Literature Nobel Prize said he liked Hitler and he wanted to be his friend? It’s the Knut Hamsun case. This Norwegian writer won the Nobel Prize, I think with reasons for it (I’ve read his novels “Hunger” and “Pan” and I liked them); but in his old age years during ‘30s and ‘40s his right wing tendences started approaching him towards German Nazism. Even when Germans invaded Norway, he kept supporting Hitler like a friend. Of course, he was called for a trial
when WW2 was finished, but ironically he didn’t wanted to be seen as a case of senility dementia (which some people thought he had to excuse his attitude towards Fascism) He died not very years after 1945. There’s a not very old movie about this novelist, whose main character was Max Von Sidow, which depicts IMHO well this writer late life.
It’s interesting to point that Hamsun fame was eclipsed by his ugly “friendship” after the WW2 end, by evident reasons. I wouldn’t like to say he was cancelled, but the effect was similar to that thing. However, since some years ago there’s been growing more interest in his works. Indeed, he’s been re-published again, at least here in Spanish translations. Maybe the movie which I told you has helped to recover his appreciation (of course, taking into consideration his biased views too).
>Tony Dokoupil, the anchor of CBS News, said the following on the air in one of today’s news broadcasts
Dear Tony,
Go away. If you had said this 5-10 years ago, you might have had a chance. But now? I’d rather get my news from here. I’d rather get my news from Kiwifarms. Yeah, you heard me. Kiwifarms: Your Trusted News Source. At least trusted more than you, Tony.
As it stands, any time I hear some MSM journalist has died from getting shot at, for any reason, I shrug my shoulders and think “Someone did the world a favor” or “And nothing of value was lost”.
Once again, Tony, Go Away and Do Something Else.
And unlike in the case of ‘A King In Orange’, another one of JMG’s books has been meticulously adapted; the equipment is ready, and the country producing it is the correct one from the book:
https://x.com/i/status/2007050758781297013
It is entirely possible that the political class is setting up the harsh duality on purpose, with the express goal of creating an inviting excluded center, so that once it is ready (like a throne kept warm) they can put their rump (i.e, a representative masquerading as a rebel) on it and rule with absolute power and public approval at the same time.
My 2¢ on competence: I really don’t understand why anybody would not want a competent partner because the alternative is, well, incompetence. I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I really don’t need more of that in my life.
—David P.
@Atmospheric River 166: “…as the author,he didnt “look the part” of the approchable author they wanted to sell those books, so they hired an actor and hid him away…”
Like this? https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?searchID=PB400210
Zarcaicey#46
About Isabel Medina, there is a nazi intellectual called Jaume Farrerons (Marca Hispanica)who thinks that she works for an Intelligence service performing the job of fake activist. Mr. Farrerons thinks that all the far-right movements except his own are controlled by Intelligence services.
On Christmas and New Year’s unauthorized fireworks: In my suburban county near Washington DC, ALL kinds of fireworks are illegal. (I have been known to strike a match, and toss it in the air in mock defiance). Many of my neighbors speak Spanish, or have Hispanic names painted on their trucks, and our local elementary school was majority Hispanic 20 years ago when my son was a student. Therefore, I suspect that the greatly diminished amount of fireworks that I heard in 2025 were a response to ICE enforcement actions, directly or indirectly. (Either the noisy celebrants have left the area, or are keeping a low profile.) If this indicates a more general turn toward respect for the Rule of Law, I’m all for it.
@ Dylan #168
“…when Christian churches in the West were curtailed from having overt influence over government policies, the churches of Progress and Scientism stepped in to fill the gap. For instance, the historical period 2020-22 can be read as the first round of an Inquisition promulgated by a religious elite only just passing the apex of its power.”
Perfectly said!
“a competent, confident, capable woman is just more attractive”
For me, I’m more likely to want to get to know anyone competent, male or female. An incompetent person of either sex is unattractive in many ways, especially as they make more work for the competent people around them who have to keep rescuing them. I’ve known a few people like this and they puzzle me greatly – thinking of a woman I once knew who claimed to be a genius but didn’t start learning to cook until she was 47 and still didn’t know how to make a pot of tea. It’s just plain weird that anyone with a fully functioning body would be proud of being, for example, unable to feed themselves by, y’know, cooking for themselves rather than relying on someone else to do it for them. It’s so liberating being able to do things yourself and denying oneself that independence is strange to me.
I’ve wondered sometimes what the ancients, most of whom could likely turn their hands to anything, would think of some people today.
Much of the rhetoric around certain environmentalists being fascists or racists or xenophobes and the like stems from a split in Earth First! about 1990. What happened was that some of the Earth Firsters in Oregon and California had begun advocating for a more social justice approach to saving wild places and the ecosystem. This was headed by Mike Roselle and Judi Bari. They were opposed by Dave Foreman who believed in the preservation of wild places for their own sake without compromise. Dave Foreman called the other faction the WOO WOO’s.
Dave and the Earth First fundamentalists mostly ignored the Woo Woo’s and this seemed to anger them as they began to take on more and more of the characteristics of the yet to be born ” woke movement”.
The Woo Woo’s began to denounce the their opponents with various now familiar tropes. This was fed by a famous statement by Dave Foreman something like,” let the earth sort our its human population problems.” None of the positions of the fundamentalists was extreme or unusual but they were blown up and used to attack them.
I personally believe the WOO WOO’s had sold out to the compromised main stream environmental organizations and were being used by the establishment to attack the un compromised ( and much larger) portion of the movement. This was evidenced by Mike Roselle taking a job with Greenpeace at that same time. They also sought to discredit much of the thinking which led to the ” fundamentalists” or ” Deep Green” environmental movement including such thinkers as Hardin.
Thank you for an excellent and thought-provoking post. The enantiodromia will hopefully stop swinging back with swingeing retaliation, if we can all find the golden mean of internal and international neighbourliness.
For those who may be interested, the “sex realist” or “gender critical” position is discussed at length on the British parenting site Mumsnet. This is a big site with many boards about all parenting matters and lots else besides, of which the feminist ones are a small part.
There is a lot of high-quality depth discussion of the conflict between women’s rights and trans ideology (as well as the usual dross, and quite a bit of humour).
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights
“Sex realist” is considered to be a more self-explanatory term (i.e. biological sex is real and it matters) than the alternative “gender critical” (i.e. critical of the notion of ‘gender’ as being something other than just old-fashioned stereotypes).
You have to understand that sex and gender are two different things in this discussion: sex is the biology, gender is the social presentation or social stereotyping, as well as the ‘inner feeling’ if you subscribe to the trans view.
Archdruid,
I found this interesting and thought you and some of your readers would enjoy it. Happy New Year!
https://youtu.be/Z3z-OSCslYY
The omens often fly thick around the New Year. One way of divination I use is when an approaching train is crossing my path. If I get a clear bit of graffiti I will use it as a message. Today’ message was the tag name: SENTR
Dear Archdruid, well if you may permit a little wag, it seems you are quite woke– woke to the religion of progress and the nonsensical state of the modern industrialist social order, that is!
Thanks for your responses (the demon of typos is a new one to me) and I would also like to note that the use of religious metaphor was in no way incidental– in a very real way the social spaces that the left has to offer have reverted to medieval norms, complete with high clergy and Inquisitors.
ChristineS, I’ve been on the FWR boards for some years now and you’re right, the discussion there is high quality and in depth. We also have resident lawyers and scientists who have shared vast amounts of knowledge over the years. If anyone wanted to get the full picture on gender ideology it’s a good place to start.
‘Sex realist’ is a much clearer term than ‘gender critical’ and is self-explanatory, which I appreciate.
Anselmo # 187:
I guess the neofascist groups often can help as bogey men for intel services not confessable purposes; like the other freaks (far left tiny groups) they can easily infiltrated and manipulated. “Si non é vero é ben trovato”.Well, would we do an act of faith to believe the only not infiltrated group is Mr Farrerons one? I don’t know if I’d bet for it.
Patrick, as I noted in an earlier post here, I was kind of a janegirl growing up, and I’m well aware that if I’d been born forty years later there’s a very good chance that I would have been bullied and wheedled into defining myself as a girl, so that the medical, pharmaceutical, and psychiatric industries could profit off me. So you may well be right about Rowling.
LeGrand, good heavens. What a fascinating dream. That I know of, nobody’s yet looked into how Regardie’s The Golden Dawn came about, but your dream-hypothesis seems very plausible, and I’ve seen claims that Dion Fortune funneled a great deal of GD-related material to Regardie when he was in England. I may look into that.
Belacqua, thanks for this, and a happily denounced new year to you and yours!
Carlos, that’s one of the odd things about all this. I’ve seen the flight to the fringes in action for a while now, of course; seeing that begin to reverse is, as I noted, one of the signs I’ve been watching for.
Ambrose, so noted!
Chuaquin, interesting. I may have to read Hamsun one of these days.
Other Owen, you’re kinder than I am. I’m savoring the guy’s public humiliation. Imagine what must have been going through his mind as he made himself say those things!
Michaelz, I read about that. I just hope the US doesn’t decide to contribute to the adaptation.
Rajarshi, it’s possible, but if so they’ve arguably waited too long. Others are moving into the abandoned throne, and may be hard to displace.
David, you’d think so, right? But a lot of guys apparently like the babbling-airhead type of female. Me, I find those vacuous and dull.
Bacon, I have no idea either — well, unless (as Carlos M. has suggested) it’s pure class signaling.
Clay, thanks for the reminder — I watched that struggle from a distance, mostly by reading ecological periodicals in the Seattle Public Library. (The downtown branch carried the Earth First! journal among others.) I think you’re quite right about this.
Caitlín, thanks for this — I hope you’re right. (And I trust that as a writer, you’re also benefiting from the Rowling Effect.)
Christine, thanks for this. I’ve heard legends about Mumsnet, some of them rather unsettling, but I may just make time to lurk there, as I do in a good many other settings.
Mr. H, I’ll pass on the video, but others are welcome.
Justin, ha! Here’s hoping.
JoeSchmoe, Titivillus deserves more press than he’s gotten these last five hundred years. Spread the, er, wrod! 😉
“I’ve heard legends about Mumsnet, some of them rather unsettling, but I may just make time to lurk there”
It’s not for nothing it’s known as a Nest of Vipers, you have been warned 😉 Saying that, it can be absolutely hilarious.
You could start on this thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me?page=1
I think that is dificult that Marca Hispánica , the group of Farrerons could be infiltrated because I count only two members..
@Robert Mathiessen #175: I agree with you about the Greek words. I do think the Latin translations are more ambiguous than you suggest. Credo has a strong moral and personal aspect, which still shows in expressions like “I give him credit for that” or “on credit”. Likewise, fides has a strong connotation of personal trustworthiness and loyalty, such as in fidus Achates. The Hebrew aman, which these words translate in Christian contexts, is used originally for expressions like “I trust him to have worked well” or “I trust this construction to be solid”.
I watched some videos from an ecofascist Youtuber, Sam Mitchell, who compared humans to ticks infected with lyme disease and hopes that civilization survives while he lives, and collapses as soon as he dies. He has another channel where (I infer from the videos I watched a minute of, or from the titles) he screams profanity because he can’t get laid, or it’s too cold outside, or other trivial issues. He got past the censors because only a few dozen people regularly watch his rants.
@ Phutatorious
yes, pretty much. They made good use of their marketing research and hired an Australian man, accent and all, to go do the tours and interviews, all calculated to make more sales. It was all about the sales.
About separation of church and state. We tend to forget, effects of American public non-education, that in the 17thC, much of western Europe was almost literally torn apart by religious wars. Many in the North American colonies had arrived in flight from religious persecution. Massachusetts was founded as a refuge for Puritans, Pennsylvania for Quakers, and Maryland for Catholics. I think the provision Congress shall make no laws…(regarding religion) was intended to prevent similar conflict in North America.
It is easy to forget how revolutionary was the American Constitution when it was first written and ratified. The very idea that ordinary nobodies, even with a property qualification for voting, could govern themselves was almost unheard of, contrary to nature in the minds of many capable and educated people.
I remember the Earth First! battles as well. I hated it when they spiked trees, not only because of the act of pounding metal into trees rubbed me the wrong way, but I easily imagined the working people operating machinery in the woods suffering the consequences rather than the perpetrators of industrial scale logging.
I also remember the millions of board feet of logs that headed down Highway 42 to Coquille Oregon, to be loaded onto container ships and sent overseas. This was in the Reagan Eighties, a reaction to the forest managment Seventies. The environmental movement suddenly seemed to be weaponized against itself, used as a scapegoat by the companies who were downsizing anyway. “It’s not us, it’s the environmental CRAZIES that want to kill your lifestyle. SPOTTED OWLS WILL NOT REPLACE US!”
I remember meeting environmental activists in my Eugene, Oregon days. Most of them seemed like rich kid dilettantes who had never worked with their hands. Some of them were true believers, but I didn’t trust any of their motives.
JMG # 199:
Hamsun’s worth to be read, me think, in spite of his dead Spectacle (indeed, like every writer: I know it). He suffered a lot of problems in his life, which doesn’t justify his biased but helps to understand him.
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Another far right guy whose writings I like was Yukio Mishima. This Japanese writer was another Traditionalist who had nostalgia for old samurai times, but also he was supposedly bisexual (even he wrote openly a novel with gay characters), so I think he wasn’t welcome (in addition to the Japanese left) between some of his theoric ideological comrades. He managed to form a private army, if you didn’t know that fact. His last controverted decision was to lead a bizarre coup d’état to revive the full political role of the Emperor; of course he and his supporters failed in it, which according some sources was the perfect subterfuge to kill himself with the traditional “seppuku”(maybe he didn’t like modern postwar Japan, he was feeling too old or the two motives alike). It’s said he could have won the Literature Nobel Prize during the ‘60s, but his controverted histrionic personality and far right ideology could have prevented the Swedish to give him that IMHO hypothetically well won Nobel. Well, it wasn’t cancelled, but he didn’t reach the writers Olympus neither.
If you haven’t seen yet, there’s an American biopic about Mishima; this movie from the ‘80s was forbidden in Japan during some years because of exciting far right nationalists feeling across that country. There’s another more recent movie, made in Japan, which I also saw some years ago, and I think it’s worth to watch it (as introduction to Mishima life and works).
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Another case of right wing writer who was outside the leftist intellectual culture hegemony was the Spanish (and Catalan) Josep Plá. He was a smart Conservative, but when the Italian Fascism reached power after its March towards Rome, he felt into admiration for fascists and their leader, until some extent. However, when he personally met with Mussolini, he declared after talking with him, the Duce was an arrogant and egocentric jerk (well, he wrote that impression with more polite words, but he hadn’t good memories of the Italian dictator). I can say that in ‘20s and ‘30s, every people who wasn’t Communist (or far leftist) was attracted more or less towards fascists ideas and Spectacle, by fear to the repetition of Soviet Revolution in European countries. I don’t want to justify Plá short flirting with Mussolini, but to understand him.
>I’m far from sure the corporate-managerial left is as strong or as popular as your proposal would imply. I live in a (theoretically) very blue state, and many people here have far more conservative attitudes than you’d think.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/minnesota-mandate-k-12-ethnic-studies-instruction-2026
It doesn’t look like that from where I’m sitting. And then Mamdani comes out talking about the warm mandatory embrace of collectivism. All that’s missing is Newsom clapping like some retarded seal. People’s Socialist Republic of NewYorkifornia. And I want nothing to do with any of it.
I never thought I’d see In-n-out in Nashville of all places. Welcome to the 21st century.
>I hated it when they spiked trees, not only because of the act of pounding metal into trees rubbed me the wrong way, but I easily imagined the working people operating machinery in the woods suffering the consequences rather than the perpetrators of industrial scale logging.
To save the village, we must destroy the village.
If you’ve thought I only like to read right wing writers, thanks to my last comments, you’re wrong. I like to read leftist authors too. Sometimes I read poetry, so from time to time, I usually read again foreign and spanish poets. Between them, I like Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado. However, I’ve got mixed feelings about them, or to say better, their use by local left here.
These two poets case is a paradigmatic example of artists been used politically.
Lorca and Machado supported the Second Spanish Republic when it arrived in 1931. Both of them kept their support to it: Machado was more politically engaged than Lorca, whose support was mainly cultural. Lorca was killed by Nationalist right in 1936, so he was soon a secular martyr for the Republic. Machado survived (like a propagandistic Republican icon) until he died a short time he was into exile in 1939.
During the Franco dictatorship, of course there was a heck of censorship against leftist writers (dead and alive). “Cancellation” term wasn’t in use then…
As soon as nowadays democratic system was implemented, and even more, when socialist party won its first mandate in 1982, full leftist cultural hegemony was a hard fact. So Lorca and Machado returned again as martyrs of democracy, and showed in public as part of the “evident” cultural and moral left supremacy. I think Lorca and Machado were hijacked especially by the socialists. Well, Machado , without doubt, can be a good leftist icon because of his compromise with the old Republic (whose last days weren’t very democratic, ahem). However, Lorca was a bit more problematic one. According some historical sources, he was killed really more by his notorious gay sexuality than for supporting the left. A funny fact well known about Lorca is his fondness for bullfighting, which can’t seem very suitable for nowadays woke animalism…Well, nobody’s perfect to fit into the narrative.
These poets use by Socialists hasn’t never really been challenged by the local right parties, because they shamefully know they’re weaker in high culture. What artist could they have opposed to the left hegemony? Maybe Julio Iglesias?(cough cough). Even when Conservative governments have ruled my country, they haven’t dare to change this situation. However, I’m afraid this status quo (inferiority complex) ends when (soon or later), conservatives and populist far righters manage to rule alike Spain. Pendulum law can do they would be tempted to rettalliate of leftist cultural hegemony with their own cancellation culture. It isn’t a paranoia, because far right party (ruling in coalition with conservatives in several towns and regional govts) have been playing the culture war game, less and less shyly until now. For example, in my town they’ve withdraw municipal public money to left wing artists fundations, with economical subterfuges; though their real reasons to do it are very clear, me think. I wonder which would be the new cultural holy cows of right wing, if they manage to break the left cultural hegemony (which I doubt).
Anselmo # 201:
I didn’t know that fact. It’s difficult a two members group would be in the intelligence services radar. By the way, that tiny sized group reminds me the right version of the famous Monty Python parody of far left groups in “The Life of Brian”…
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Mary B. # 205:
You’re right. There’s a correlation between religion wars in Europe and several religious minories fleeing into the “new” English colonies. Indeed, when the USA were born, religious freedom was one of the new measures which had never seen before. However, US religion freedom is different of European laicism, especially the French (which it mustn’t surprise us, because France was a Catholic country except a small Protestant minority). Religion freedom to European laicism seems more than worship the god(s) you want without mixing with the government, the anticlerical wish to not worship any god (letting religions to the private sphere as a shameful remnant). I think it’s not the same view about State and Religion(s) separation.
A Atmospheric River: Misuse of the mental health system is a good topic for fiction and real life:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, fiction by Ken Kesey
The Looney Bin Trip by Kate Millet, non-fiction
And there’s an example in my own family; my grandmother’s sister was committed for life by her less-educated husband (a railroad man) who probably just wanted to be rid of her.
@Chauquin: Re Hamsun: another “bingo.” Back in the 70s I read a lot more of Hamsun’s stuff than just the two novels you mentioned. I thought of him as a sort of Norwegian Jack Kerouac. But I think he was a bad influence on my own life choices. I was considering studying computer programing after I got out of the USAF in 1971. But Hamsun dissuaded me. I’d have been good at it too, suitably eccentric for the profession (I’d have fit in well) and the timing would have been perfect. That’s why I haven’t retired to my ranch in Montana: Because I don’t have a ranch in Montana.
>a competent, confident, capable woman is just more attractive
It depends on the guy and what he values. And what his station in life is at too. What’s the old saying? The average guy can see better than he can think? We are all hostages to biology, DNA compels us. And here’s the science.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=6YJ91FKZHI0
That’s a video where Mythbusters vary breast size and see how tips change. Not surprising, tips go up with breast size. Women tip more than men if the cashier is well endowed, however. Significantly more. Science, I tell you, science. The moar you know.
That all being said, I’d rather trade off some looks if the woman has some practical skills. Especially skills that complement. Especially facing collapse. What’s the old gamer saying? No room to be carried?
Hi Carlos,
There is that. Our esteemed host remarked long ago that: Every automation, is an amputation.
Have to laugh, I avoid using the gig economy on principle. For the record, I hold an under graduate and post graduate qualifications, and yet am happy to dig a ditch. As the comedian Rodney Dangerfield once quipped in the embarrassing (in my opinion) film: Caddyshack – “Son. The world needs ditch diggers too”
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Best wishes for your journey. It’s been a fascinating discussion this week, and if I may chuck in some hard won wisdom on the subject of partners (please excuse the brutal honesty as it is a unfortunate side effect of my personality. Yes, I disappoint even myself sometimes! 😉 ). Here goes:
If a person cannot look after their own interests, it is too much to expect them to even consider yours.
Cheers
Chris
A few folks have called Rowling anti-trans. I have never seen her say anything like that. I have heard her say that biological males should not be allowed in women’s shelters or prisons, and perhaps that they should not compete in women’s sports. I find both of those positions quite reasonable. Otherwise it seems she is quite supportive of transgender people.
It’s interesting to me that one of the other big occultists who has done well over the last 10 years or so, while having very different beliefs and practices than you, is doing basically the same thing, but from a centric liberal perspective: Jason Miller. He often criticizes the progressive left and gets a lot of flack on his posts, but seems to be doing better than ever.
It also seems to me that you’ve been intentionally using the Rowling Effect (while not coined yet) for a long time, is that not true?
I struggle to use it myself. I find it hard to have strong beliefs about politics at all any more, to me discussions about politics seem just like a lot of “farts in the wind” blowing around as they say… but I wonder if I could do a similar thing with other topics, like saying “not all non-native plants are bad” and getting native plant purists to attack me aggressively.
@Robert Mathiessen #175 and Aldarion #202:
Thank you! That’s a hunch I’ve held for a long time but don’t have the linguistic skills to prove independently. It seems to me that all those guys running around excitedly in the book of Acts weren’t persuading people to believe IN God (few people in the first century needed persuading of the existence of divinities) but to BELIEVE God. As in, believe the message He has for you right now, and that His plan is solid.
I am re-reading the Gospel of John, slowly, and that gospel in particular leaves out much of the social and ethical teaching of Jesus in favour of a tense, tightly focused drama centred on the question, is this guy for real? Does anybody in this story believe that Jesus is who he says he is, and if so, what are their grounds for doing so? There was clearly a lot of room for doubt, and Jesus talks about that issue almost as much as he talks about the spiritual power and sustenance he has come to impart.
@Scotlyn #189: Thank you! It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, as you know.
@Ambrose #179: Thanks for that tip. I have heard of this phenomenon before, and I trust my friends have too. I think they’re really that concerned about the way things are going here in Canada.
Other Owen #209
You know, I had that in my head when I wrote it.
As long as the numbers look good at the end of the quarter, we are golden.,
I appreciate this post as it encourages me to more actively follow through on a project I’ve been busy with this winter. Years ago I started developing a future fiction setting for the Merigan Tail’s writing competition. While at that time I couldn’t manage much of a short story in the setting, it’s had about a decade to mature and diverge from that world. A redcurrant source of material to dwell on during my winter sabbaticals sheep herding on the Navajo reservation, and in that time its developed into a ttprg setting I’ve managed to run some decent campaigns in. As a write this post a friend at the same dinner table is reviewing a 10,000 word setting guide, and I am taking a break from reviewing a rules set to the point were it is fit to share with friends for feedback. So far the feed back I’ve gotten on the setting is very promising concerning content, though it seems I have a decent bit of work to do modifying the arrangement for clarity.
I’ve found that it takes some pretty careful presentation of ideas not to provoke players to some very narrow cliches of post-apocalyptic fiction. For players not to want to run around being violent in a wasteland in the style of certain unnamed video game franchises I’ve had to resort to so drastic of means as making a rule set for the game that plays the setting as a Jane Austin style story of manners. Pretending to be posh, well mannered, peak dwelling elites guiding a sheep herding nomadic culture in the throws of a cultural renaissance by fending off the promotion of people of plane character into their elevated halls, be it through romantic unions or nepotism, has so far proved to be surprisingly escapist and engaging for my core friend group of orkish working class rural young men. Also it finall broke them of treating the resurrection of our cultures technology and values as the only topic to seek or prevent.
Peaks of Pride certainly features some takes on religion, prejudice, and gender which together should be objectionable enough to the offical political camps, but I think can be taken in good fun. Your post makes me feel more confident to try it. Once I have the manuscript put together I need to decide to look for a publisher, or try self publishing, in either case my hope for promoting it would be to record games with my local friend group.
Bacon, “nest of vipers” is very nearly the kindest thing I’ve heard said about MumsNet! That said, thank you for the intro. 😉
Patrick, alternatively, he may be allowed past the censors because he does such a good job of making his cause look stupid.
Mary, er, states were allowed to set their own qualifications for voting until well into the 20th century, and until the Jacksonian movement of the early 19th century, most states had a property qualification to vote. Our republic is indeed a radical experiment, and one of the things most radical about it is that it’s set up to reshape itself in an organic fashion over time.
John, yes, I remember the same thing. I also remember how many people I knew who claimed to be passionate supporters of Earth First!, but would bristle like anything if you asked about the resource and pollution footprint of their own lifestyles…
Chuaquin, yes, I know quite a bit about Mishima — Seattle, where I grew up, has a very large Asian population and my stepmother was born in Tokyo, so Japanese culture and literature were fascinations of mine since I was small. (I was a weeaboo before there were weeaboos.) Josep Plá, on the other hand, I haven’t heard of — thank you. (And he was right about Mussolini, btw. Did you know that Mussolini wrote a novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress? It’s dreadful. here it is if you want to savor its awfulness.)
Other Owen, you’re talking about what the politicians say. I’m talking about what ordinary people say. These are not the same thing. As for biology, cough, cough, replication crisis, cough, cough. I take it you don’t talk to a lot of guys; I know men who prefer, and go out of their way to date, women with small breasts.
Chris, there’s that!
Phil, oh, she’s not anti-trans at all. She’s opposed to the groups who are using trans people as a stalking horse for agendas that have nothing to do with trans people and their interests.
Isaac, I’ve made a point of placing myself in the abandoned center, certainly, but I didn’t expect it to make me prosperous — just to allow me to say things that need to be said. As for getting assailed by native plant purists, that would be an excellent career move, but just make sure that you also get the pro-invasive people riled at you as well. How about a post that lists five invasive plants we should all cheer on and five more to exterminate with fire and sword?
Ray, do that thing! It sounds like a fun project.
Chuaquin, JMG et al
This may well be appocraaphyl, but I was in Japan at the time of Mishima’s death and had a couple of friends who were quite into him. The story I got was that he and some of his followers entered an army barracks at lunch time and took the colonel hostage. He started to harangue the troops with a patriotic lecture which they ignored. He then said if they didn’t pay attention he would kill the colonel. They more or less told him to kill the colonel if he wanted, but to leave them alone to their lunch.. He then committed seppuku. If this story is true, I would not have wanted to be the soldiers after the colonel was released. He must have been very displeased with them.
From the movie about Lorca, I seem to remember that he was killed by militia from his own side when he went to visit his family in an un -occupied part of Andalusia. They basically said they didn’t want any queers in their republic., the irony being that he had worked very hard for the republic in Madrid.. Maybe this is just the movie or my faulty memory.
Stephen
I hear comments made by Gen Z that their own generation is split between extreme political ideologies. They can be fiery about their politics, express pride in having their name attached to the rebellion in Nepal. Iran seems to be going through something as well right now.
They havent had opportunity to understand what a Centrist government looks like and may not have reason to want to put their weapons down. In Ontario they were locked down for two years straight and there is a lot we dont understand still about that period of time. Alot of grooming on online Discord forums to start with. Youth unemployment is pretty high right now here so mass initiation into the corporate working world is not happening. Military recruitment is up.
@Dylan #218 Jesus is introduced in each of the Gospels as someone who can give you the Holy Spirit inside you which is also how he is presented in Acts. Paul in 1st Corinthians which was written around 20 years after Jesus body left the earth refers to Jesus’s present ministry as being a “life giving spirit”. Have fun!
Non-native garlic mustard should be fought with fire and sword. Ii even invades the ground cover of mid western old growth forests and replaces the native flowers and herbs. It did that to a woods my mother used to take us in the spring to view a spectacular display of various “spring ephemerals” flowers that bloom before the leafy canopy closes. It is now an unrelieved carpet of green garlic mustard. It outcompetes native plants even changing the soil chemistry in its favor. There is now concern its presence will block the growth of tree seedlings. Unfortunately through its growth and reproductive strategies and tactics once established it is pretty much fire and sword proof. They are considering bringing in its pests from Europe but those could bring their own problems. Sometimes reality happens to generate long term sucky predicaments.
@Chris at Fernglade #215:
I’m over-educated myself, with a post-graduate degree to my name. Growing up in the Philippines straddling the lower end of the middle classes and eventually getting a corporate PMC job and marrying into a traditionally more upper-class family, it’s very interesting to be standing at several crossroads: those between the working- and upper-classes, and that of traditional Filipino/Asian cultures and modern Western ones.
When I was a kid, my mom inherited a piece of land on which my parents built a house. As a result, we moved from Manila to my mom’s hometown. I went from being just another lower-middle class kid to being the school’s rich kid, and remember getting mercilessly teased by my classmates for not knowing how to do certain chores. Nowadays, I look at the kids from the elite schools, and notice a similar dynamic – they’d be all spoiled and pampered at home, but would pick on the kid who’s the least competent.
I’ve had hired help myself at some point a few years back. The most interesting comment/compliment I’ve heard from a housemaid was that I was strange – she’s never seen the man of the house do housework himself. I replied by saying there’s too many things to do and not enough people to do it, which is why I hired them to begin with. They’ve left for (hopefully) greener pastures a long time ago. We no longer have house staff; the kids are old enough for me to teach them basic chores, it helps that I also found a working dishwasher for what basically amounts to $70 USD – very rare and a total luxury in my country!
One thing I’ve found curious is that many upper-class families are so dependent on their staff so as to be completely crippled when they go on leave. They would often tolerate all sorts of petty and often abusive behavior from the staff (usually directed at other household staff, but sometimes also towards the children) – basically anything short of actual crimes being committed, for fear of the help leaving. I’ve remarked to my wife that often I don’t know who really owns the household: is it the madame, or her most senior maid?
A wise older friend once told me, whose daughter was being approached by a young man from a well-off family, that he advised her that the young man wasn’t rich – his *family* was; and that in his judgment said young man didn’t quite have the chops for him to be confident that he’d stay rich. We have a word in Tagalog, diskarte, which is a bit difficult to translate. Having diskarte means that someone is competent, resourceful, cunning, and displays creativity in new or difficult situations. Another wise (slightly older) lady friend told me years back that (smart) girls don’t look for “rich guys”, they look for those that have diskarte.
Funnily enough, I often see educated Filipinos downplay or even deride the idea of diskarte as just a way for people to justify cheating behavior and getting one over each other. I mean, I get it, con artists need diskarte too, but the good guys need it in order to fight or get around bad guys as well! The same crowd also attack the idea of resilience the same way, alleging that praising someone for resilience (in the face of tragedy) is just conditioning the masses to settle for less-than-ideal situations in life. The way I see it, diskarte and resilience are good things, and one or both tend to be lacking in many people among the educated elite classes.
Phutatorius # 212:
A good choice. Hamsun deserved the Nobel Prize he won, but Traditionalist and Anglophobe views made him approach to certain Austrian mediocre painter…However, he’s worth to be read.
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JMG # 221:
I’m pleased you know Mishima works. I think he was a controversial and contradictory man (for example, being a Traditionalist and writing a gay topic novel), but his own contradictions made him a great novelist and theatrical author.
Plá became lesser famous, and he only is mainly known here in Spain. He managed to run away the Fascism “charm” in the last moment, me think. Another writers couldn’t do that wise decision, like it happened with D’Annunzio…There’s a spanish series about Pla life, but it was broadcasted a long time ago. Pla was very Catalan, but not a Catalan nationalist. He was never cancelled by hegemonic Catalonia regional governments during the nowadays democracy, but indeed he’s been mildly despised by secessionists.
I didn’t know Mussolini wrote a novel. I’m not eager to read it, but thanks for the link you offer me. I don’t find strange the Duce had literary ambitions: he had been journalist before becoming a full time politician, and a former Socialist. That mixing can make a man wants to write something, but I guess Mussolini big Ego made him not very ready for the necessary writer self criticism…
More about Josep Plá:
John, I’m not very surprised you don’t know not read Josep Plá.
I think it’s not well known outside Spain not only because he was a Conservative man (outside the intellectual left hegemony), but because he wrote more in Catalan than in Spanish (he was more comfortable writing in his mother language). This preference didn’t make attractive to right wing spanish nationalist people, ironically, and prevented him to be more known across the spanish language countries. His Conservatism and not being openly Catalanist didn’t made him a cultural icon for Catalonia nationalists/secessionist, neither.
He was a journalist so he could met a lot of people and know interesting places. He wrote a heck of travel books and essays. The TV series about him is named “Homenots”(Great Men), I think it’s available in “Rtve play”(I’m sorry but I can’t link it from my crappy smartphone). By the way, Homenots is a book in which he depicts some celebrities in literary portraits. I’ve only read Plá’s “El quadern gris”(The Grey Notebook), though Catalan isn’t my mother language. He had fondness for writing diaries.
Another Catalan (and Spanish) man who is despised like Plá by Catalan Nationalists/Secessionist, is Salvador Dalí. This Surrealist painter was far more famous than the writer I wrote earlier, but Catalan Nationalist and a lot of Spanish leftists don’t like it. Their not very well hidden hatred against Dali has a real base. After his American adventure, he and his wife/muse Gala returned to Spain, which was under Franco regime then. Dalí (who apparently had pivoted towards the right politics and Christianism) indeed was comfortable living within the dictatorship. His convenience “friendship” with Franco is often pointed in the sense that he was used by Franco; but it seems to me Dali also used Franco regime to thrive, me think. Of course, in spite of his dirty side, Dalí was a genius beyond ideologies. So he has never been cancelled until today (but despised by cultural spanish left and Catalonia nationalism).
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Some words about Ecofascism topic: Someone has written there’s a real online Ecofascist guy who blames mankind for being a microbe plague. If that statement is evidence to be an Ecofascist, I’m afraid sometimes, some “peakers” in the old good times of Peak Oil fashion, (at least in my country) have written the supposed analogy between human species and viruses/bacteria plague (if I remember well them). Although this can be understood like a mere analogy, I think this comparation implies a deep contempt (fascist or not) against human culture.
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About the gender/sex debate: I think we’re a mix between biology/genetics and ambient/education, maybe 50/50. Biological determinism lead into totalitarian views, me thinks; and denying our biological base leads towards the woke nonsense. So we’ve got a cultural tendence towards gender binary, but biological base (chromosomical and hormones) cannot be hidden by ideology/dogma.
JMG and male commentators, many of you gentlemen have expressed your praise of competent women. Even though I am personally in post romantic seniorhood, I do appreciate the sentiment. Thank you.
But, romantic attachment isn’t really the issue. Most of you voted for and continue to with some reservations think well of the current president. While I don’t question your right to do so, I do note that In his administration the ratio of competent, knows what they are doing women, Suzy Wiles, to fluff brained lookers is about 1/20. Maybe the likes of Kristie Noem has handlers and aids to do the work and make the decisions while she is doing photo shoots, but those photo shoots and associated travel are taking up a not insignificant amount of taxpayer cash.
Why is it so difficult for youse guys to understand that the ladies who don’t attract you are not necessarily baddity bad people, and do also need to be able to make a living? Why is it that Miss Cute and Congeniality 19 out of 20 times gets the job, the promotion and your vote? I , a socially inept hermit, am able to establish cooperative and social relationships with men whom I wouldn’t dream of climbing in bed with. This is not a peculiarly female trait. It is a matter of you do what you have to do.
JMG,
An update to. my story about the signature drive to put the governors gas tax and registration fee hike on the ballet in Oregon. Now the local public radio affiliate and national owned liberal newspaper are running stories about how grandma can’t get a bus to her doctors appointments cause of the mean gas tax scrooges.
Since you know the area, their big example story will ring especially hollow with you. They use the poor folks living in an unincorporated community called ” Deschutes River Woods” some miles south of Bend. Apparently these citizens who live on 5 acre lots in the forested subdivision ,platted as a recreational development in the 1960’s, will be inconvenienced by the cuts in bus service.
Two things become apparent. Our local media is as corrupt as our national media. And also this make apparent that as we slide down the slope of collapse you don’t want to live a car-free lifestyle on a 5 acre lot in the Central Oregon Forest ( not farmland folks). These same folks will also act surprised and outraged when their fire insurance rates become unaffordable.
The Feast of Fools – in a good sense- is alive and well in Gainesville.
Today is the 3rd annual Flying Pig Parade, the name being a tribute to Gainesville’s hog-farming past —>Hogtown—->(Hoggetowne as in the annual medieval Faire.)
Featured will be The Cell Phone Zombies, and puppets of Donald Trump, Mother Earth, and the Pope. Live entries include a professor dressed as a government official, with the Epstein Files, a dance troupe of inflatable dinosaurs, a large sculpted spine “that Congress lost last year,” the skeleton Mister Bones and 35 gravediggers, and a “Power to the People,” addressed to the chronically disorganized and perpetually re-organized Gainesville Regional Utilities, and a garage punk band, “Mama Trish vs. Godzilla.” And from the Duckpond neighborhood Association, marchers dressed as flying ducks calling themselves The Wacky Quackers.”
The 2023 one had a bunch of local officials with a sign saying “A Pack of Purple Pork-pie Politicians Playing Percussion.”
“If we didn’t laugh, we would all go insane….”
@ Dykan, Robert Mathiesen, and Aldarion, the same is true of the Norse. The translation of one line in one of the poems should go, “For Ottar ever *trusted* the goddesses,” rather than the usual “Believed in.”
In my retirement, I took a course in “Viking Mythology” every year, with every year a different professor and a different focus, and that issue was raised in one of the later ones. “To have faith in” meant to “trust.”
Dear JMG
I had a happy afternoon in Glastonbury today and so was reminded of our delightful gathering last June. I’d like to wish you and everyone here a Happy New Year. Warmest wishes to all.
Spain’s politics was brought up by some commenters (Anselmo, Chuaquin). I don’t like to discuss politics because I usually manage to annoy everyone but, since it’s tangentially related to this week’s post, here we go. I don’t believe Vox is a dangerous far right force. Indeed, I consider it a form of controlled dissent. Please allow me to elaborate.
Firstly, its leaders are not outsiders. They are, for the most part, people who took part in the current status quo. Having benefited from it, they have no incentive to aim for its destruction.
Moreover, I took the time to read their proposals and even the most radical ones, such as getting rid of regional governments or establishing a semi-private pension system, would pose no threat to the current system as a whole. Should they be implemented (which would be politically viable in the case of a grave crisis only), they will merely reform present day’s unsustainable arrangements just enough to prolong their shelf life a few more years while the most privileged groups stay that way.
What’s more, lots of their controversial proposals (abortion, LGBT…) are not that far from what PP (the self-appointedly conservative side of the uniparty) would endorse three decades ago. Not coincidentally, the whole political spectrum drifted leftwards during that period, which alienated millions of right wing voters who found no way to channel their claims. I won’t go into whether those demands are valid or not, what matters is the fact that they existed long before Vox was a thing and someone would eventually take advantage of them.
Heck, they don’t even want to suppress immigration, which has been at unsustainable levels for years. They propose to keep bringing in immigrants, but exclusively from Hispanic America instead, and are even developing propaganda in favor of this. Have you not noticed the recent flurry of ‘conservative’ influencers pushing Hispanism? They try to redefine our history and cultural identity in relation to our former territories in the Americas while denying its (archetypally, in my view) European nature. We are, according to them, exactly the same as people from those lands and should have no objection to accepting even more millions of them.
Besides, because today’s left wing parties programs are generally devoid of content beyond wokeism, they need to define themselves by what they oppose (which Vox also does). After people realized Franco’s body has been noticeably cold for half a century and PP refused to contradict the left’s principles, leftists required a new opponent to mobilize their voters against, and Vox plays that role wonderfully.
To sum up, the emergence of Vox is, from the point of view of the system, a perfectly healthy and normal response to the void at the right end of the political spectrum and benefits most parties. People loyal to the status quo saw an opportunity and filled the gap before one of those marginal groups that regularly pop up on the fringes of the right took off and a real threat coalesced around it.
Meanwhile, right wing voters believe they’re heroes that will save the country from its accelerated decline (or free fall, from my point of view) and the left is convinced they’re brave warriors fighting the Austrian painter’s new wave of minions. Whereas, business as usual goes on and the elites cash in while we get impoverished. Using terms from recent posts, everyone got caught in their own spectacle. Just my opinion.
Re my own of #122 and others discussing Nick Shirley’s efforts, I have just remembered who it was that made those doorstop videos at migrant shelters in Texas and other southern states… it was James O’Keefe, of Project Veritas.
Mr O’Keefe has also investigated voter fraud in Minnesota since 2012, further to which, in 2021, he won a defamation case against the New York Times. The NYT had labelled Project Veritas’ investigation into illegal ballot harvesting in Minnesota during the 2020 election cycle as “deceptive.”
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/victory-court-delivers-huge-win-for-project-veritas-against-the-new-york
In relation to the daycare center fraud, it seems that Mr Shirley’s video has dramatised, and thereby drawn attention to, a matter that the wheels of oversight have – slowly, slowly, slowly – been turning upon for more than 10 years.
As this – https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-day-care-fraud-warning-records/ – CBS news report says:
QUOTE:
“In 2019, a report by the Office of the Legislative Auditor showed that the Minnesota Department of Human Services established an investigatory team to go after child care providers suspected of fraud in 2013. The office reviewed explosive claims of fraud from 2013 to 2018, ultimately finding that prosecutors were able to “prove” between $5 to $6 million worth of fraud in those years.
“More than a dozen Minnesotans were charged in state and federal cases, but not everyone was convicted. The OLA could not provide an exact estimate, but the agency believed that the true extent of the fraud was greater than the $6 million figure. The OLA spoke to prosecutors who said that there were sometimes issues with the quality of evidence gathered by DHS.
“The OLA stated in this audit that the review had a “limited scope … We did not evaluate CCAP, nor did we fully assess the state’s efforts to prevent, detect, and investigate CCAP fraud.”
“Consistent across both reports is the recommendation to install electronic attendance gathering tools to ensure that numbers are recorded in real time, reducing the ability for centers to report false numbers. ”
END QUOTE
I know that few people watch CBS these days, and also that CBS has not bothered giving much coverage to this story at any time during those 10+ years, but still… this report appears to have dug in just a wee bit more into the background records than it otherwise might have, perhaps because of Mr Shirley’s video.
@ Bacon Rolypoly #200
Looking at the mums net site (which I never have looked at before), I am rather surprised to find that none of the topics listed under any of the drop down menus include “breastfeeding”. 🙂
Mums? Mothering-related topics? Hmmm… strikes me as odd…
Stephen, that sounds about right! Thank you for the story.
Chuaquin, I’m certainly familiar with Dali! Plá sounds interesting; I’ll see if I can find any of his work in a language I can read.
Mary, I have plenty of congenial business relationships with women who I don’t intend or expect to bed, and there also I prefer competence — which is not always something one can expect in the publishing field. You might be interested to know that the problem you’ve sketched out isn’t unique to men. One publisher I once worked with had a lesbian CEO, rather butch, who surrounded herself with a small army of fluffy blondes with fluffy brains and very little capacity to do much of anything but giggle and wiggle. The staff at other publishers (including a great many women) used to roll their eyes and call them “the girlies.”
Clay, no surprises there. State radio — er, “public radio” — does what it’s told to do.
Patricia M, ha! Glad to hear it.
Falling, delighted to hear it, thank you, and likewise.
Scotlyn, it’s becoming increasingly clear that very large parts, and perhaps the whole, of the US social-welfare system is riddled with fraud. The question is what happens next.
Jason (offlist), got it and thank you.
Dear JMG,
This is off topic but, since you discussed translations, I’ll mention it.
A few months ago I came across a Spanish translation of one of your books (The Druid Path, to be precise) in a physical store for the first time. I leafed through it for a few minutes and I happened to read a couple of messily translated terms.
I remember one because it hurt my eyes. ‘Golden Dawn’ was translated as ‘Aura Dorada’ (Golden Aura) instead of the correct ‘Aurora Dorada’. I wouldn’t say it’s unreadable, just sloppy, perhaps confusing for an inexperienced reader.
I haven’t read the whole book, so I can’t say if I was just very unlucky or there are more examples I didn’t see. Other than that, it’s a very beautiful book.
I have no idea if you, as an author, have a say about the translations of your books. Just letting you know in case you decide to ask your publisher to hire a better translator next time if that’s possible at all.
I’m watching the Trump press conference, and note that the opposite of a bad idea is often an equally bad idea.
We have just gone from a “rules based international order” to a new, rule-less, “wild west international order”.
Of course, the Monroe Doctrine may be held to be a “rule.”
Of course, IF the Monroe Doctrine is the new rule,
…well THEN Ukraine is certainly within Russia’s “backyard”,
…and THEN Taiwan is certainly within China’s “backyard”,
…and THEN Israel is certainly within Iran’s “backyard.”
The world just got more “interesting”… in the old Chinese sense…
@Carlos M. #226: “Diskarte” seems a bit similar to “dar um jeito” (verb) or “jeitinho” (noun) in Brazilian Portuguese. These are also ambiguous about the legality of the solution found!
Interesting article on the history of English prose for any budding writers.
“English prose has become much easier to read. But shorter sentences had little to do with it.”
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-logical-triumph-of-english/
“Consider the famous reminder of native English speakers’ strong sense of intuitive word order: we all know that you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, but that any change of the order there makes the writer sound crazy.”
The recently reported decline in semicolons is also noted.
The writing style I used for logs and reports in the navy had to be seriously revised to pass English 101 and 102 in college, then that was seriously revised in the technical writing class two years later.
PS – to Rolypoly… Ok, I just found one slightly related topic – “best breast pumps”.
…although since I never used one of those, I might not have considered this topic to be the place for raising any questions I had about breastfeeding generally.
PS – the three physically embedded experiences of menstruating, becoming pregnant/giving birth, and breastfeeding, were the entire core of what has informed my own “inner” sense of myself as a sexed human being. I’m afraid I missed out on most of the cues that spell feminine “gender”, though – could never get the hang of high heels or make-up or handbags or hairstyles, or any of that sort of thing… 😉
Stephen P. # 222:
You’re right about Mishima last hours, but not about Lorca death. Mishima commited with a few of his militarized supporters a very bizarre coup d’état against Japanese government “to revive the old Emperor power”. It was evident they wouldn’t succeed, so his biographers say it was a subterfuge to the seppuku ritual suicide. In honor to him and his men, they didn’t kill the officer who hijacked.
Lorca death was commited by Nationalists right men, probably the Falangists (who were the most similar Italian Fascist group in 1936 Spain), they were against the Republic. Lorca has praised the 2nd Republic, but he was also an openly declared gay. Even he wrote a poem about gay men. I think he was killed more by his sexual life than by political reasons. A Falangist named Sánchez Mazas (an influent man in Granada right wing) tried to prevent rebel authorities to kill Lorca, but he failed in saving him. Lorca was shot near Granada with some other anonymous people, but his corpse has never been found until today.
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Miguel # 235:
In one of the last Open Post comments I wrote: I guessed Vox is a controlled opposition party against the declining woke left block. My personal view is Vox isn’t a Fascist party (it’s OK what you wrote as them as a bogey man for the leftists: an Spectacular antifascism me think). Vox is useful to economical elites who have been financing them to lead the Conservatives (PP) towards a harder right wing place in the political spectrum (competing for the right wing voter with similar demagogy…cough cough speech). I have no evidences of it, but its effects are very clear to me. “Cui prodest?”
I’ve written before about Vox electoral program to show that beyond the cultural wars spectacle they replicate near every Conservative view, with a more aggresive pose. So you can see we don’t disagree very much in our respective views, even I could tell you: no argument here…
@JMG “one of the acquisitions editors telling me that it was “too quiet and too weird” for them, but that she’d be happy to see something more commercially viable from me.”
I would imagine that if you took their advice, your book would become entirely commercially non-viable. Big publishing houses have a real knack for shooting themselves in the foot.
As for one other point, “Opinion polls show that here in the United States, for example, only about 8% of the adult population supports the extreme liberal agenda” . I get the feeling even that number is higher than reality. Alas, the extreme liberals took some reasonably good ideas and made them entirely toxic for their own gain. Not the first time, won’t be the last.
Scotlyn #237..
Perhaps those um, ‘mums’, are actually mummies: too old & shriveled to produce sustenance for ANYONE, let alone infants!
I haven’t checked out that site .. afraid that my eyes might bleed profusely. Do they all carry the KAREN moniker?
Miguel # 235:
Your reference to the apparent right bloc here towards the “Hispanity” has made to remember Col. Baños term “GeoHispanidad”. I’ve written some words about this geopolitical possible new paradigm in Spain foreign policies, and I see positive in theory, though I pointed before this current commentary I’m not so naïve to think Mr. Baños hasn’t his own Spectacle and agenda. Of course, he maybe knows more than he shows in public. He’s also a influencer within some right wing circles, we’ll see if he can (or he’s allowed to) persuade the Right block (PP and Vox) to turn towards the former spanish colonies. I’ve got my doubts, because spanish right today has very hard bonds with EU/NATO and USA, but nobody knows really the future.
By the way, I think black beast to the spanish right wingers are the Muslim migrants, so it’s possible they see with better eyes the South and Central
America migrants (I’ve guessed if they look at them as future stormtroopers against North African migrants, but I’m speculating too much here).
Saludos…
@240 Scotlyn
Israel will be supported for as long as supporting it remains feasible, due to the powerful Jewish & Evangelical Christian lobbies & voter blocs. Of course, there might not be an Israel for much longer…
Ukraine and Taiwan will be abandoned before long. Neocons care about their role in containing Russia & China, but the American public largely doesn’t.
Mr. Greer & Clay Dennis .. Me thinks that said Wa. State AG is about to get hit with a giant rowling wave of streisand, deservingly so. His either extremely tone-deaf .. or corrupt – part of the skim/scam! Definitely one with the Wokerati. Speaking as a rational citizen of this state, one can’t hate the Olympian RETARDS enough!
“How about a post that lists five invasive plants we should all cheer on and five more to exterminate with fire and sword?” – that’s a great idea, I may just use it, thanks!
Stephen #222 & Chuaquin # 22
According with the next video (subtitles in english) of D.Santiago Armesilla , a materialist philosopher disident of the School of Philosophy of Oviedo. Lorca was shoot by the revenge of certain parents whom he had exposed in public shame with his theater play called ” Weddings of Blood”, and with the pretext of his leftist and masonic militance . And his bones are Stored in “El Instituto de Medicina Legal” (Madrid) expecting for the day in wich the Lorca’s heirs will reclaim It.
Excuse me :
The vídeo of Armesilla https://youtu.be/T390wmouGc8?si=U0IThu1TJcY9j8WV
RE : CBS News actually trying to be news.
It would be a pleasant change to see. Things like Herman and Chompsky’s ‘Manufactured Consent’ gave main stream media outlets the impression that they were an unstoppable controlling force of the world. But they took it for granted and folks eventually started to turn their back. Looking at their viewer numbers, it gives another angle on ‘long decent’. 😉
@ JMG “I haven’t watched television since my teen years”
Complete aside, when I moved into my current home the previous tenants did a great thing by completely ripping out all the cables to the TV antenna. I only found out a year in, when under the house working on the plumbing.
@ Chris #72 “Man, I’m not even sure that I comprehend what an ‘ecofascist’ is. ”
I see others have also come to the same conclusion on this.
An ecofascist a label someone gives to anyone that talks about ecology that doesn’t give them infinite growth and the dream of having everything. This is why so many on the more switched on folks in the environmental scene are well aware of the long term human population problem do not dare talk about it in the open because it is a fast track to cancellation. I have noticed that those that try to do the cancelling are typically projecting their own desires. That is, if they had to make a change in the world it can only be done by force.
And yet the reality is that many who are trying to avert issues are doing it by demonstrating a different path forward, one that people want to go towards rather than forced. Hasn’t been that successful but I suspect has high resource society keeps sliding down the hill of decent, it will become much more viable in decades to come.
When Ted Kaczynski died, I was tasked with writing an essay about his impact on the world. It went unpublished as many didn’t want to touch it on subject alone. In summary, the means he used single handedly pushed back any meaningful chance of a movement by decades merely for his own selfish gain. But the key point I wanted to make was that ‘I fear the children of Ted’. Those that actually will be true Ecofascists, who rather than trying to convince people by being the cliche of ‘Be the change’ and taking another path, just decide to make change via explosives and assassinations. It would just be a collective negative as typically, change via force usually dies by force. As various forms of climate blow back occur combined with hyper fanaticism, it could mean that those who take up that task will start to arise later this century. Lets hope we take the higher ground on this. The seeds for where we go are being planted now, Ecosophia being one of many of that takes the high road to a peaceful path forward.
JMG # 238:
Dalí was far more “mediatic”’than Plá. I don’t know exactly which part of Dalinian words and acts was true and which one was his bizarre pose. For example, his apparent political views “cassually” inoffensive or even friendly to Franco regime. I can guess maybe Dali thought the last great figurative painter, the last heir of Velázquez, Rubens…He really hated cubism and abstraction. So he thought he was the last genius over the Earth, and he deserved to be rich and famous, and even to be sponsorized by the government (he didn’t mind its origins).
I want to tell you about J. Plá; I think there are some Spanish translations of his Catalan works, but I don’t know possible French or English translations.
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Miguel # 239:
After reading your comment, I remember the Italian expression: “Traduttore traitore”(translator traitor).
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Scotlyn # 240:
(Going towards off topic, but…) Venezuela thing: I think the Socialist Revolution Spectacle has been replaced by the American Democracy Spectacle (sooner than I thought, Trump has beaten harder its fists in his cheast). By the way, I’ve seen some hundred Venezuelans in a demonstration of happiness in my town. I’ve also seen some local right wing politicians, eager to have their photos taken (local Spectacle meets International Spectacle me think).
Hi John Michael,
It’s common sense, although maybe an unpalatable concept for many. If a person is unable, or unwilling to exercise their will upon themselves, then you could potentially be involved in an energy depleting situation. Just sayin. Really depends upon what a person’s goals are, and also what is considered acceptable.
Speaking of unexpected turns of event, you read the news today? Cleaning up the backyard, and making sure the energy flows is a good move.
Cheers
Chris
Anselmo # 251:
“Si non é vero é ben trovato”. I’d like to point a part if his family (I think it was a socially conservative family) hated him, maybe by his “Weddings of Blood” theatrical work, but I think more he was shoot because of his evident and open gay tendence, which everybody knew in Granada and beyond his town. I’m puzzled when I’ve read his bones are supposedly classified in Madrid. It seems to me near incredible this secular martyr supporters in the several leftists governments here hadn’t been tempted to show Lorca bones on public. Which makes this statements nearer to a conspiracy theory, me think.
Hello John,
I totally missed wishing you a happy Jöll or Winter Solstice. So I don’t miss the second opportunity to wish you a happy new year with my now yearly comment. I couldn’t help reading your essay early in the day remembering Twilight Last Gleaming which is my fav’ novel from you with Retrotopia. And then, I went to my groceries at the market listening to the radio and learning that the US somehow put themselves in the quagmire of the century. Well. You convinced me years ago. Let’s see how it comes.
As a side note, something I wanted to ask for times. Years ago, I lent my copy of your book (Twilight Last Gleaming) and never got it back, do you know by chance a bookstore in Providence I can contact to arrange for a signed copy if you happen to do that? I can arrange for shipment as I live in France.
And the irony that as a living Lovecraftian, you get ostracized in that very town of Providence R.I. Fhtagn! You have my forever sympathy.
Hi Michael Gray,
It’s a fair concern, and the ancient grand master of strategy suggested that it is unwise to back an opponent into a corner with no way out.
Surely, I’ve recounted the parable of the greenpiece charity mugger? Dude, it was a pivotal moment. Quick precis, so I’m on Lonsdale Street up near Swanston St waiting to cross the road, and he’s hitting me up for mad cash. The roads are busy, people everywhere, tall buildings, cars, trams etc. With a sweep of the hand to encompass it all, I made the observation: “None of this is sustainable”. Bam! Thought the point had been won, but no. He retorts with: “I feel sorry for you.”
Told me everything I needed to know, right there. 😉
Cheers and hope you’re having a good Christmas break?
Chris
I (hope I) understand your point of view, but even accepting it at face value, I am still disturbed by the trend:
1. The sheer fact that people feel emboldened to attempt to destroy each other over political views that may or may not even be related to the output at hand (e.g. JKRowling’s view on transgender has nothing to do with Harry Potter or Cormoran Strike novels) is, to me at any rate, absolutely horrifying. I have very strong views about some things (e.g. legalizing/illegalizing drugs, euthanasia, right to bear arms, religion, death penalty, abortion, fiscal spending, monetary policies, etc.) but would never, ever decide to read your site (or books) based on the fact that you may hold different views–let alone try to organize some mob rampage to “deal with you” based on my views. I mean, unless you are running for public office, I am not even sure that it is any of my business.
2. Even if people are “quietly” buying your book (or supporting some object of public derision), the mere fact that at least some of those people who do so feel that they need to do so quietly is, again, just outright lunacy.
3. Even if boycott calls, etc., do not impact all intended targets (or even any of them) doesn’t change the fact that it actually deters others from expressing their own views publicly if those views run contrary to the trend du jour (which basically changes and contradicts itself every few years anyway). This is, in fact, the likely intent of these idiotic “megaphone diplomacy” tactics, and it is, IMO, enormously destructive to the fabric of society.
As an aside, this mentality expresses itself in many other ways, often benign. For example, I have many conservative and liberal acquaintances who will laugh at the stupidest comedic jokes imaginable, not because they are witty, but because they align with what they consider to be “their tribe’s views” (and who somehow find something not funny if it runs against their political views, no matter how witty). I don’t know if this was always the case and I am just now old enough to recognize it, but I just really don’t understand it, even if it makes absolutely no difference to me whether somebody chooses to laugh or not.
JMG “one of the acquisitions editors telling me that it was “too quiet and too weird” for them, but that she’d be happy to see something more commercially viable from me.”
“Michael Gray says: I would imagine that if you took their advice, your book would become entirely commercially non-viable. Big publishing houses have a real knack for shooting themselves in the foot.”
–>I could be wrong (JMG would know far more about this because he is in the industry), but I don’t think this is really an editor being judgmental, but rather being extremely risk-averse, which tends to happen in any bureaucracy or organization that runs itself by metrics. It is just a matter of incentives:
1. if I pass on a “weird” book that becomes wildly successful, nobody knows and I am not punished (unless I am a shareholder in the firm).
2. If I accept a “weird” book that flops, I get fired (on top of all the ridicule I have to deal with between accepting the book and it flopping).
3. However, if I accept a “normal” book that flops, I can dismiss it as part of the “standard gamble” or Pareto rule.
4. If I accept a “normal” book that succeeds, I get some bragging rights, but my salary doesn’t increase by much.
Since my risk/reward heavily skews towards promoting mediocrity, that is where I would go. Again, it isn’t nefarious; just clueless. Industries that are less oligopolistic do not have the luxury of structuring themselves this way and are therefore more dynamic (which eventually leads to consolidation, which leads to mediocrity, which leads to eventual disruption, etc.–although often major shifts in technology or social patterns are needed to dislodge incumbents)
Miguel, regrettably, I have no influence over who publishers choose to translate my books. The best thing to do is drop a note to the Spanish language publisher and comment on the bad translation — they may hire somebody more competent next time.
Scotlyn, I’m pretty sure that what’s going on is something a little subtler than that. My working guess is that our government and that of Russia cut a deal: we get Venezuela, securing our “near abroad, and they can have Ukraine, securing theirs. Don’t be too surprised if Zelensky’s regime suffers a very sudden collapse in the near future.
Siliconguy, thanks for this! I’d tend to expect a silver French whittling knife, btw, as the alternative makes it sound like there’s something called “French silver.”
Michael, no doubt. The thing I find funniest about the whole thing is that The Shoggoth Concerto is about as close to woke as any of my fiction ever gets. The main character is a mixed-race young woman who finds love in a very unconventional relationship when she gets dumped by her sexist boyfriend, after all — what could be more woke than that? 😉
Polecat, it’s going to be fun to watch, no question.
Isaac, have fun with it.
Michael, exactly. The fact that CBS seems to have noticed the collapse in their audience and influence strikes me as a very good sign.
Chuaquin, a case could probably be made that Dalí really was the last great painter in the classic Western tradition, at least so far. Unlike most of what passes for art these days, his creations show genuine skill.
Chris, it seems likely that what’s going on is the restructuring of the world order into a set of distinct blocs, with the US backing out of its global-hegemon role to resume its historic role as dominant New World power, and Russia letting go of its New World holdings in exchange for a free hand in eastern Europe. But we’ll see.
Sébastien, thank you! I’m sorry to say I don’t know of any local bookstore that carries my books — one reason among many that I’ll be relocating soon. Perhaps the next time I’m in Britain or elsewhere in Europe I can arrange to sign a copy for you.
House, oh, I freely grant that it’s unpleasant. I simply remind myself that human beings are social primates with delusions of intelligence; for all our preening and posturing, most of what we do is indistinguishable from the behavior of baboons. Thus I don’t take it personally when members of some other baboon troop hoot threateningly and bare their canines at me.
JMG @ 221, referencing Il Duce’s “The Cardinal’s Mistress”: well, the guy had a way with words; ya gotta give him big props for penning sentences such as “The caress of an invisible hand curled the wavelets of the lake which with a weary murmur licked the foliage of the ancient willows forever casting their tresses upon the water.” Yikes! What a trove of ‘treasure’; a big, fetid, odiferous, eye-staining, brain-straining PILE of ‘treasure.’ Plop!
JMG and commentariat: I have to wonder how the Rowling effect is playing out on the world stage right now in reference to the events in Venezuela. An amazing example: just look at the reactions compiled by Reuters in this still-being-updated listing: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/world-reacts-us-strikes-venezuela-2026-01-03/
It seems to be this government services fraud scandal now unfolding in Minnesota and elsewhere has several dimensions. The political and financial corruption is one. Then there is the fear that the woke Jacobins put in to ordinary people scaring them out of doing anything that might be considered racist.
One that no one is taking about is that since covid large percentages of state, and local government administrative employees work from home, or mostly work from home. This has made them very ineffective and accomplishing anything that does not involve zoom calls or filling out computer forms. I would guess the portions of Minnesota state government that should have been more diligent in looking in to these day cares, feeding programs and care homes are asleep at the switch at home in their pajamas.
In the old days, even if the higher ups were corrupt, the folks on the ground meeting providers in real life, talking to each other in person, and visiting sites would have created a commotion that was too hard to ignore.
When all the employees are online, it is easy to reroute soon meeting, hide emails and keep something like this under wraps.
I think this will not be the first problem that we will experience caused by government employees barely working from home.
I always thought that about Shogoth concerto — and I did put in a request to the library because of that, but, of course, with only one person requesting it, and not on the big 3 publisher must buy this season list — I cant even talk to our library buyer in person, the counter workers at teh local branch do not influence it, or at least they say they cant. Anyway, I would have thought it would be the kind of story they would love to carry for the young adult female readers, but they will never know.
@ JMG
I’m delighted to hear that, remember I promised you a hearty beverage and a visit to the Phalanstère de Guise the next time you come to visit my ancestral land 🙂
I’ll be ordering a new copy of Twilight Last Gleaming soon with a side order of tentacles as well, let’s see.
At least the title of Musolini’s novel sounds promising. Churchill wrote a Ruritanian novel, “Savrola” (and was its harshest critic), plus a couple of short stories (they’re pretty good), and won the Nobel for his nonfiction (though that may be because they couldn’t very well have awarded him the Peace Prize).
Mary Bennet (no. 230), for the same reason we keep picking tall men to be our leaders. We’re talking about very deep-rooted evolutionary behavior.
Lookism is hard to defend, but where do we draw the line? Nobody much doubts that actors can be hired on this basis, but what about wait staff? (Hooters actually went to court over this. The central issue was whether what they were selling was primarily the steak or the sizzle, so to speak.) A bit further back, US flight attendants protested over rules requiring them to be young and pretty. (Other countries still have such rules.) Of course lookism is broader than female beauty–there are issues like, the prospective banker whether it’s okay to expect employees to be clean-shaven, not have too many piercings, etc.–and shades into racism, since not every ethnic norm is considered equally beautiful, and even within the same ethnicity, people with lighter skin color often receive preference.
In terms of US politics, I think first of McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. He knew he wanted a woman, and had a number of suitable female Republicans in some prominent position, but chose the post photogenic (and perhaps didn’t ask enough questions about gravitas). It’s similar to Bush Sr.’s choice of Dan Quayle–he wanted somebody young and charismatic, kind of like Newt Gingrich, but he hated Newt Gingrich, and so chose somebody who seemed superficially similar.
Scotlyn #237
I believe the reason that breastfeeding isn’t included is because the forum attracts fetishists.
Sébastien Louchart wrote, “do you know by chance a bookstore in Providence I can contact to arrange for a signed copy if you happen to do that? I can arrange for shipment as I live in France.”
Where are you in France? Ces derniers temps, je passe la moitié de l’année en France, entre Paris et le Haut-Var. Mais je reviens toujours aux États-Unis à temps pour le dîner-partage chez Peter. Si vous pouvez attendre jusqu’en octobre prochain, je demanderai à John Michael de vous dédicacer un exemplaire de Twilight’s Last Gleaming, et je l’apporterai avec moi. Et d’autres titres aussi, si vous le souhaitez. If you’re near Dijon, Lyon, or Avignon, I could likely hand deliver it to you. Otherwise, I’ll just pop it in the poste.
Si cela vous tente, envoyez-moi un email à cpgates7 à yahoo point com.
> there’s a real online Ecofascist guy who blames mankind for being a microbe plague.
Mankind is a real microbe plague, but it doesn’t affect what you think it does. The Martians with their advanced science and technology have figured it out.
What on Earth! The Automobile Inherits the Planet.
Well, yes, of course… it may well be that what informs this immediate application of the Monroe doctrine may well be an outright deal between two strong powers (Russia and the US) with small, pesky, non-co-operative countries in their own back yards (Ukraine and Venezuela) they each wish to take under a closer wing.
However, I fully expect *other* strong powers with small, pesky, non-co-operative countries in their backyards – like China, and Iran – to observe and take note. 🙂
@ Polecat #246 😉
@ Patrick #248
Well, yes, you may well be right as to what American people will or will not support in other parts of the world… as to “feasible”, I would note that there is a peculiarity in the American character that renders Americans very easily subject to ignoring what “is” because of the splendour of their “ought” which covers and obscures it. (As an American myself, who is equally subject to this peculiarity, I do feel qualified to lay it out in this way).
Some examples:
-the (IS) of children who are made sick, or maimed, or die of experimental, untested, often mandated, pharmaceutical interventions, continues to hide in the space made for it by the (OUGHT) of our purported technological mastery over the scourge of childhood infectious disease.
– the (IS) of bureaucratic corruption and theft of public funds, continues to hide in the space made for it by the (OUGHT) of political platforms centered on compassion and care for those less well off.
– the (IS) of a regime which is intensely at odds with its native Christian minority, and which continues to bomb Christian churches, some of them ancient, continues to hide in the space made for it by the (OUGHT) of American Christian cultural identification with the land held to be holy because of its associations with the very origins of Christianity.
@ Chuaquin #254
Yes, it is Spectacles all the way down…
I do believe the evident relief being expressed by many Venezuelans right now is genuine. However, after tearing down comes the building up, and the US does not have a good track record in this regard (one might compare the before and after condition of countries such as Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, to see what I mean). Fingers crossed that building up happens in the Venezuelan case, rendering its “after” condition better than its “before” condition in the long term, if for no other reason that it is better to have neighbours that are prosperous, than not. They will be less likely to want to migrate, for one thing. 🙂
Your newly minted Rowling Effect reminds me of an amusing moment in the hysterical ramp-up to total covid lockdown back in March 2020. A few desperately under-socialized girls in the US took it upon themselves to record their antics opening and licking ice cream containers in big box stores. Their videos went viral and started a total pearl-clutching panic in the obedient classes.
Although their inspired act didn’t involve the purchasing if any books per se, it did quite effectively protest all the consensus clamoring being hurled hither and yon by the activist classes from their mighty soapboxes. Perhaps these were the kind if girls who had long been licking ice-cream tubs or spitting in drinks at their fast-food jobs, but they had not yet gone to the trouble to film their charming behavior until a fringe clique of power-hungry bureaucrats began demanding complete and total subservience from them — “Don’t go out! Don’t touch anyone! Wear a muzzle! Do as we tell you!” God bless their disobedient little hearts… and tongues. You know, sometimes you just really want to taste every single one of the ice-cream flavors before deciding which to buy — puts a whole new meaning on “buyer beware”, n’est-ce pas?
So, I would like to offer this up as a distractingly illiterate counterpart to the notably literate Rowling Effect. When the saliva-flecked denunciations begin churning out in lockstep, how exactly are the illiterate to join in the merry mayhem? By surreptitiously purchasing books they can’t read? No, it’s so much more satisfying to simply invent one’s own style of saliva-flecked critiques in response… and then let them drip ever so glisteningly from one’s tongue.
@ambrose, thanks for introducing me to the term “Ruritanian”! Now I have a handle and a context for Ursula LeGuin’s land of Orsinia. I once started reading Malafrena, set in Orsinia in the 19th century, but soon lost interest. There was no space for actual invention or world-building, just slightly rearranged items from Austria-Hungary.
Another viewpoint on looks vs competence in jobs. First, it often works the other way, that a woman especially is not taken seriously if she is very good looking. There is alot of prejudice to overcome that a person can be both good looking and intelligent and competent. A very good looking woman in less public professional fields ( not anchor women, lawyer or politics, say engineering or a surgeon) has alot to overcome to be taken seriously ! The most pushback on this is from other women, which may be part of what I read upthread, instead of just stating with examples or facts what actions/speech or lack thereof show incompetence for said woman, it is just, they must have been hired for their looks. Leading to , second, a reinforcement of this stereotype when people stating that the women must have been hired just for looks which explains the actions seen, opposed to if it were a male, they might just say that they are a product of the “peter principle” ( promoted until at that level one level up from their competence) or that they must have been a political hire or … many other things not blaming it just on looks. Third, in jobs that seem to require alot of time in public, in the news, publicity, etc….. the women in those jobs, or aspiring for those jobs ( and politics is very much in the public eye) will take more steps, spend more money on personal appearance, and as they climb the ladder, with professional help in wardrobe, makeup, etc… alot of what we perceive as better looking is heavily influenced by this. Alot of us women would also stand out with that kind of help ( skirt length should be here, 2 inch difference, color like this to go better with skin tone or to de-emphasize shortness, this cut is more flattering, this haircut and glasses is much better suited to face shape…..) So these women may feel that their job in the public eye demands this level of care. And fourth, they would be correct in most cases. It is a no win situation, if they take alot of care and help, they are said to be skating on their looks, but if they dont, well, if they dont they would be talked about even worse. Realy they just wouldnt be there. You cant get into those positions not shaving and not wearing makeup etc… so this is also our collective shallowness feeding into the issue.
Certainly it is also true that in some cases people are hired for looks or DEI etc… and not the most competent candidate.
A couple of comments:
1) Part of the recent decline of Charles Bukowski’s fame has come from the antics of John Martin. Martin has spent much of the past thirty-plus years editing out the rougher edges of Bukowski’s works, cutting down on the drinking and misogyny – much to the chagrin of the hardcore Bukowski fans.
2) As to competency being sexy, I remember giving a ride to an older legal secretary who told me that many lawyers and other bosses of downtown businesses would use their secretary position to seek out a wife – the idea being that if a woman could handle the pressures of the office, she would be able to handle the pressures of being the wife of an upwardly-mobile husband and their children. Granted the woman would have been comely enough to start off, but the idea of the woman having to prove herself implies a desire for competence on top of her looks.
I remember going to a student conference a long time ago where there was a very light-hearted (and alcohol-fueled) formal set of debates. The resolution was “Be it resolved that a short skirt trumps a long resume.”
The arguments on this thread are perhaps more informed, but not nearly as much fun.
@ Donald 276: I worked as an attorney for a short time. I wasn’t really “cut out” for it. There was a legal secretary from across the hall who used to stand a little bit too close to me in the copier room. Not bad. Not bad at all. What was wrong with me that I didn’t take advantage of that?
“Perhaps those um, ‘mums’, are actually mummies: too old & shriveled to produce sustenance for ANYONE, let alone infants! I haven’t checked out that site .. afraid that my eyes might bleed profusely. Do they all carry the KAREN moniker?”
Them sounds like fightin’ words mister!
I have seen men start posts on mumsnet with ‘Man here…’ when they want to explain to women why they are wrong – it never ends well. Although I suppose it depends on how one defines ‘ends well’. If one finds amusement in seeing some bloke wearing his testicles as a hat as his arse is kicked out the door, then perhaps there is a sort of je ne sais quio.
Probably some of it is trolling by incels and the like – apparently the fetishist posts get deleted in short order while others get left like chum in the water – like some of the posts JMG lets through here when enradishment seems in order.
IIRC mumsnet has millions of users so the odds don’t look good for random drive-by abuse. Not my kind of place but I admit I’d be interested to hear how you get on if you took your sentiment from the safety here and try that on the women over there. Look forward to reading the after-action report.
gah – typos, typos…
Look forward to reading the ̶a̶f̶t̶e̶r̶-̶a̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ coroner’s report.
Also – Check out ‘sac-attach’ from Nads ‘r’ Us
…I’ve found it a lifesaver! 😉
Sort of kind of related to the Rowling Effect: Is all the Harry Potter fanfiction forming an egregore? There’s a *lot* of it, and much is better written than you’d think.
@281 Nemo
In a MM, there was a discussion over people failing to get results from invoking the Valar of the LOTR ‘verse. I asked about a group changing some of the details of the mythology to form a seperate egregore from Tolkien’s Legendarium, and JMG said they would have to invent a new pantheon of psuedo-Norse deities in order to have a seperate egregore. I guess this means that HP fanfiction fanon is adding alternative characterizations to the original Harry Potter egregore., rather than forming new egregores. Perhaps Tara Gilisbe’s “masterpiece” My Immortal is an exception since nobody’s in character and their names are all mispelled.
@Aldarion #241:
Jeitinho, at least per dictionary definitions I could find online, appears to be an almost direct translation of diskarte. The verb form is dumiskarte. Apparently, it’s derived from the Spanish descarte, which is to discard/throw out (your fears, preconceptions, conventional wisdom, and especially “the rules” whether official or not).
If the Brazilians also use the concept to refer to a man’s attempts to get the affections of a lady he’s interested in, then it’s a 1:1 translation!
A related proverb in Filipino is “Kung gusto, may paraan; kung ayaw, may dahilan.” The first part of that means “if there’s a will, there’s a way” in English, the second part could be translated to “if there isn’t, there are always excuses”.
@Chuaquin #31–
Earlier today, I was reading a scholarly article* from the mid 1990s by Sabina Magliocco entitled “Ritual is My Chosen Art Form: The Creation of Ritual as Folk Art Among Contemporary Pagans”.
Ritual has been my chosen art form for a half century.
When I read your sentence:
“I think (far) right wing could imitate the toxic woke cancellation culture across western countries if they manage to replace the current leftist dominion over art and culture; however, I think it’s more probable the worst toxic subproduct of far right “culture” is the thriving online conspiracy theories ”
it struck me that the creation of conspiracy theories is a contemporary folk art form with an appreciative audience. No wonder it’s thriving.
*Published in Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, James R. Lewis, Editor, State University of New York Press, 1996
Thanks again. The insight that the abandoned middle is selected by people as a protest against the oppressive extremes is right on target. And so is the insight that a revolution to restore common sense values of the middle can be just as disastrous as a revolution by the extremes. The mystery is in how leadership can arise that gains enough respect and power to create a viable middle option politically. Many of the common sense paths to do this have been coopted by various actors who came to lead one extreme or the other. It is easier for an author to create their space in which to protest the extremes than it is for a political leader to gain power from the center. I might guess it is slightly more likely that we’ll be stuck with leaders like Trump or Mamdani who build a coalition on an extreme. But I like your optimism.
Congrats on your success. I’ve purchased and read a number of your non-fiction books, but don’t understand your support for even the LGB end of the alphabet soup.
I was once their ally, but that movement has demonstrated over the past decade that they don’t want to be left alone. They want power, and to use that power to destroy heteronormativity and queer all social norms. Even without the TQ (the worst of it), they are still as much a menace as both the woke crowd and the Christian right.
But I’m not boycotting you, just your works that promote LGB (and their family-destroying ally, feminism).
“There was a legal secretary from across the hall who used to stand a little bit too close to me in the copier room. Not bad. Not bad at all. What was wrong with me that I didn’t take advantage of that?”
You remembered the laws about sexual harassment in the workplace and decided that being economically destroyed wasn’t worth a quickie?
Your sense of self-preservation overrode your hormones. Be grateful.
@282 Patrick
Lord have mercy, there’s no telling what the fans of Warhammer 40K are building.
‘Heteronormativity’…
“Paging Mr. Vico… Paging Mr. Giambattista Vico”
“That’s why the 25-Point Program of the Nazi party, for example, demanded such bland and reasonable steps as government food subsidies for pregnant women and children.”
And in 2025 the US fedgov welfare state budget topped $1.5 trillion, primarily for women and children. That’s reasonable?
Besides you (for decades), I follow writer and satirist CJ Hopkins, who has been marked for cancellation by both left and right, in much the same fashion as you have – but with serious criminal charges prosecuted against him in Germany, where he lives. I bought one of his books exactly because I saw that as a way to support him, and make some small protest against his tormenters.
Thank you for your insights, and I hope the Rowling effect stays strong for all of you.
What an interesting coincidence that I, a trans woman, should happen upon this post a very short time after starting to question the mandatory beliefs of the left about us. In brief, shortly before New Year’s I started questioning in earnest the idea that “trans women are women”. This inquiry required that I poke my head up out of the echo chamber I’d set up for myself on Mastodon, and once I did that, I then discovered the widespread child abuse being inflicted under the guise of trans medical care. That was the dealbreaker for me; no matter what else, I wasn’t going to be with the people who supported *that*. And once I broke with them, it was pretty easy to recognize that the only way in which trans women are women is in a strictly honourary way, on a case by case basis, and contingent on certain things. I also don’t have to support trans women in sports anymore so I don’t, and I’m more than willing to see the controversy of women’s spaces settled in their favour, although I hope alternate accommodations could be made for us.
This entire post has been quite fascinating and it’s kind of a funny coincidence that I should come across it just now. I’d been realizing as well recently: I don’t think I have any actual disagreement with JK Rowling anymore! Gosh, I feel like apologizing to her, even though I’ve never said anything to her. And I’m glad to return to the (as yet?) unrepresented middle, where we get to have our own thoughts, and to have a little humour about ourselves, and to find things *funny* sometimes!!
One final note: Some of us might be getting our defiant protest books at the library if we can’t afford to buy them. I myself just put a hold on “Trans” by Helen Joyce. And ok, I’m going on kind of long, I’ll stop now. Sorry.
Hi JMG
I’m a bit late to this post but like so much of your writing, illuminating!
I’ve been submitting poems to some of the big British and American periodicals and comps for years, and one thing I’ve noticed is that they always have very woke disclaimers. Its always seemed totally antithetical to me to have such such an overt political mission statement in an arts magazine, as the whole point of art (for me) is to dissolve the ideological boundaries in which political opinions and identities exist. Surely there must be some great poetry being written from moderate and conservative standpoints? You wouldn’t think it from a glance at the poetry landscape. And I say that as someone who is self admittedly pretty woke about most issues, and certainly to the left of the political spectrum -though I’ve always been allergic to the anti Rowling mob and tend to just go quiet when my lefty friends (which is most of them) inevitably mention her. I’ve never been able to work out what exactly she has said that is so bad? Even if her views are not necessarily the same as someone else’s. Also so many of the winning poems in big comps are clearly picked for their political angle and not the craft and vision of the piece itself. But I could go on all night about the decline of poetry since the days of Yeats and Eliot…
I’m glad to hear that you are prospering! I have a few of your books on my shelf and will continue to add to that collection as time and money permit. Which small to mid size presses would you recommend for fiction submissions? I have a couple of novellas I’m working on right now which really aren’t suitable for the big mainstream publishers – one is a collection of short stories which combines the concept of Joyce’s Dubliners with Spenglerian theories of civilizational decline, tracking the decline across the period of several centuries in Scotland.
Wishing you a very belated happy new year!