My plan for 2024 is to get out a bit more, do more stuff, and (I hope) lose an appreciable amount of rotundity. This will undoubtedly mean that I write less - but that’s probably not a bad thing as I find myself saying more or less the same things in slightly different ways.
We’ll see. I can say that, so far, every ‘resolution’ made at this time of the year has, in the past, been an utter and abject failure.
There are several key themes that I will probably not be able to stop writing about, however much more stuff I do away from the keyboard.
Enlightenment, Not Engarblement
It’s not possible to give a precise start date, and nor does it matter, but from around the 15th century (give or take) something remarkable happened in Europe. There was an outpouring of intellectual and artistic achievement. Although The Enlightenment as a distinct period in history is given a start date of sometime in the 17th century, I want to describe this whole period of intellectual growth as a process of enlightenment.
That this happened in Europe seems to really piss a lot of people off.
It ought to have happened in the Arabic world who were, at one point, some centuries ahead of Europe in their approach to thinking and scholarship. For some reason, which is probably all mixed up with religion and culture, this great scholarship never really went anywhere.
Ibn Al-Haytham, the great scientist and the world’s first true scientist in my view, was born around 965AD in what is present-day Iraq. Here’s the kind of thing he wrote:
There’s a whole industry grown up, and a very fashionable one, to suggest that everything the white man of Europe achieved was stolen from non-white non-European folk.
If that’s true, I take my hat off to those Europeans because they did it in such a way as to make the people they stole from forget all about those achievements and to prevent them from using any of them to progress further. Bloody miracle workers.
We visited Wakanda, stole all the ideas, and Wakanda forgot everything and slid into obscurity.
Of course we got inspiration from lots of places - including from people like Al-Haytham - but during the Enlightenment we took those ideas, along with ideas of our own, and developed them faster and further than ever before.
Yes, this new-found technical mastery also led to conquest and expansion of empire. So what?
For the woke weeny-wit this invalidates the technical mastery itself. And so we have “academics” who claim that maths is racist/white supremacist because accounting uses maths and the slave traders used accounting.
I am not making this up. Even I can’t make something that stupid up.
At Evergreen College in the US, that hotbed of engarblement but not, sadly, enlightenment, we had Bret Weinstein asking for evidence that Evergreen was awash with racism. He was viciously rounded on by another “academic” who told him that
asking for evidence of racism is racism with a capital R
Doubtless, this kind of absurd and anti-intellectual garbage existed at other institutions of “learning”.
We know it did, because one of the examples of a “microaggression” given by several universities in their indoctrination induction of students was the statement that
the best person should get the job
This was seen to be a racist microaggression.
There are different ideas about how this kind of nonsense has taken root, the most popular being some kind of “neo-Marxist/postmodern fusion”, but fundamentally it’s anti-Enlightenment, whatever its origins.
One of the biggest challenges we face in 2024, and beyond, is getting back to something akin to the Enlightenment.
The Medicalisation of the Mundane
One of the daftest examples of this comes, yet again, from academia. Universities seem to have transformed themselves into day-care centres for fragile kindergartners. Offering counselling/therapy for those who attend a lecture on Free Speech, something which at least one university did, defies rational analysis. I don’t have the vocab to plumb the unfathomable depths of that particular absurdity.
But it’s characteristic of a wider problem. Instead of feeling a bit nervous or a bit down - both very common states we all find ourselves in from time to time - we are now said to be “suffering” from anxiety or depression.
The state of “I feel a bit shitty today” is likely to prompt a visit to a therapist with the potential of a medicated outcome. The patient is happy because they’ve got some happy pills - some external fix for their ennui. The therapist is happy because they’ve made bank and sold some pills. And Pharma is delighted too.
Unruly kid in class? Has to be ADHD - drug the little bugger.
Now, obviously, there really are serious conditions called anxiety and depression - and these can be debilitating. ADHD might even be a thing - although I have some very serious doubts about its claimed prevalence. But these days I feel it’s kind of gotten a bit out of hand.
The number of people who claim they have been “traumatised” by something or other is ridiculous. We seem to take far too many of these absurd claims seriously.
We need to step back a bit and take a long, hard, look at the entirety of allopathic medicine (it’s not all bad, but it’s not all good either). It’s not going to happen, of course, because of the vested interests of the whole health industry - who are making far too much money to have any impetus to change.
The one caveat to this is that the rise of questionable stuff in our environment and diets, in particular endocrine disruptors, might well have induced a rise in pathological states. There has to be some reason why the testosterone levels in men have plummeted, for example - and it’s not likely to be that they all watch CNN.
Nowhere has this trend of medicalisation of the mundane been more evident than our covid response. Covid was definitely more on the mundane end of the spectrum. Dangerous for some unlucky few - absolutely. But not at all dangerous for the vast, vast majority. We simply lost our fucking marbles. There’s no polite way to say it. We just went completely off-the-scale batshit crazy for this mild to (very) moderate level threat.
Everything became about health - our whole society was medicalised in the sense that covid was the only game in town for many, many months. People became afraid of the breath of other people and did their best impressions of Howard Hughes.
It ushered in a new era of tyranny and the removal of fundamental rights - all in the name of public ‘health’.
It was the global equivalent of setting up counselling for attending a lecture on free speech. Largely non-existent trauma ‘treated’ by completely over-the-top methods.
None of the ‘treatments’ worked, of course. Billions, maybe trillions globally, were wasted - and the various interventions turned out to be about as useful and insightful as one of Claudine Gay’s papers.
Although covid has, for most, been demoted from its bogeyman role, its legacy is still very much alive. The whole idea of tyrannical government overreach in the event of some proclaimed health ‘emergency’ has not been quashed.
The Grapes of Wrath
I’d like to draw some parallel here between the suffering of gender non-conforming people and Steinbeck’s bleak novel with the deprivations and institutional injustices faced by the Joads but, really, it was all a walk in the park compared to being misgendered.
At some point the mind-virus escaped from those bastions of engarblement, the universities, and infected enough people who now seem to believe that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.
The whole derangement that is represented by the word “gender” has taken root, and we’re being compelled, in some instances, to take this outrageous shit seriously. We can sum it all up, perhaps, in one picture
I hope, by the end of 2024, to have finally understood the word “gender” - although at the moment I think the term is fundamentally not capable of being understood because it doesn’t make sense. I have yet to find, or come up with, a definition of the word gender that does not fundamentally rely on examples of genders - which is of course circular.
There are so many examples of the absurdity induced by the gender mind-virus - some lesbians have penises, some men can menstruate and so on - it’s hard to pick one. But we do need to stop accommodating this engarblement nonsense
The Climate of Fear
We’ve lived through one climate of fear (covid) and they’re doing their level best to make us live, forever, in another. This time the climate of fear is the climate itself. Climate alarmism is nothing new - we’ve had the “doom is nigh” merchants screaming at us for the last 5 decades, at least. None of their predictions, like those of the “scientific” climate models, have come to pass.
Even the data that suggests the “climate” has warmed by something like a degree over the last century is not without its problems. The whole question of the urban heat effect, for example, has not been properly addressed (except in a recent paper which was, surprise, surprise, heavily criticized by the climate cultists). Personally, I also find the reduction of a complex issue to a single number, the average global temperature anomaly, to be somewhat suspect, too.
What is clear, however, is that we’re freaking out in all the wrong ways and implementing all the wrong “solutions”. They don’t make any technical sense. National power grids, for example, need to be reliable and balanced so that output matches demand - something that wind and solar can never achieve - unless you have a battery the size of Texas perhaps.
There’s a lot at stake - and I don’t mean the planet itself. What’s at stake are our fundamental freedoms and prosperity - which will all be sacrificed in the name of “saving” the planet. Which doesn’t need saving.
A serious solution, if one was interested in those kind of things, would involve heavy investment in nuclear power (both in implementation and research). But that’s not happening - and we can only speculate as to why.
We need to dial back the hysteria and apply the tools we learned in the Enlightenment, again.
STFU Pleb
All of these issues can only be properly addressed if we’re allowed to address them.
By far and away the biggest threat we face is the rise of global censorship in the name of combating “misinformation” or keeping people “safe” from online harms and “hate” speech.
Without the ability to argue through all these issues we’re not going to solve them.
But governments really do want to control what you can say and what you can read.
What’s scarier is that a significant number of people agree that governments should be able to do this, that they should have this power.
It’s as dystopian as fuck, but that’s where we’re at today and we need to fight back against this. Whilst we still can.
The last thing I want to leave you with is a product of the Enlightenment, and it’s a thing of beauty. Completed in 1753 by Giuseppe Sanmartino, The Veiled Christ is almost miraculous
It was probably stolen from some BiPoc artist, but it’s an amazing work of art. It invokes all sorts of emotions and thoughts.
Modern art can do that too. Here’s the recent Martin Luther King sculpture
Which makes me think of headaches or being guilty of some spectacular fuck-up at work. The genius of this sculpture is that from another angle we are enticed to think of something different.
Like a number that is 1 less than 70
I call it “the endarkenment”.
Good luck with the rotundity. In the past month or so I’ve accumulated a stack of nutrition books primarily because I find myself more and more interested in arguing about it with my increasingly orthorexic fellow mommies. Boy oh boy pardner (and autocorrect insensitively wanted to change that to Lardner), isn’t it a lovely coincidence that much of modern nutritional science comports perfectly with the recommendations of “climate experts”? I guess if you believe in the sort of hybrid all-things-are-connected-karma-is-real-earth-is-our-mother-water-flows-from-her-mammaries fad faith of the moderns, it makes sense that starving ourselves and eating only the fruits that drop from trees and have been picked over by our animal overlords would result in vibrant health and long lives (animal overlords willing). Anyway, I tried veganism as a teenager and am sad to report that I consequently expelled more methane gas than a herd of western cattle. (Ok, that was kind of a humblebrag.)