"The Buddha was a blue-eyed blond man in apartheid India..."

Esoteric BAPism
@RoninoftheNight

The absolute state of American media

An interesting reply to this post (shared by Clossington) credited to a fellow named 'Aryan':

"Luddites are always small minded little pieces of shit.

There is literally nothing wrong with being faustian so long as you submit to religious doctrines, ethics, and morality and that also means departing completely with republicanism as the masses are too prone to being controlled by egalitarian idealists which are the real enemy.

This close minded hard determinist idea that modernity has to lead to the current hell escape we are in is just plain bullshit. The Right needs to get its shit together, be proactionary towards technology and reactionary in terms of social issues that's the only way if you care about order, you'd want correct decision making from top to bottom primitivism is not an option, it's just as retarded as pacifism. If your enemies have nukes you have every incentive in the book to create even more powerful weapons and means of eliminating the enemy all the anti-technology talk is bullshit what matters is who wields it and how the governing structure is organized.

Sooner or later AA will realize in order to defeat enemy you have to adopt a "by any means necessary" mindset otherwise you will lose or worse accomplish literally nothing the same problem lolberts have because their principles hold them back from going full kratocracy just to eliminate all of the left. So this talk of overcoming nature or being of nature is all a waste of time."

Of course I do disagree, but this is the problem we are in — we are caught in an arms race for power and so any idealism which opposes technology is rendered impossible, because then we will be conquered by those who do possess technology. The same applies to pacifism, as 'Aryan' has stated in his reply.

I made a similar point above with regards to Centralisation and Nationalism. We all desire our own ethnic homelands, but the current state of the world leaves little option except for centralising power and unifying nations together into federations or power blocs in order not to be conquered by a larger power blocs on the global stage. This means that Nationalism is, by definition, just as impossible as a simple, natural and more primitive life within the arms race of global Power?

But if that is the case, if history can only move towards ever growing centralised and industrial power — what is the point of anything? What do we fight for if we cannot push against the tide?

I understand 'Aryan's position here in terms of practicality, but on an existential level, are we all bound to a single fate which renders our own values meaningless from the beginning?

There is a common thread of various divergent paths, including;
* Christianity (linear time, universal faith, moving towards an eschatological telos),
* Faustianism (the endless striving in the soul towards limitless expansion),
* Progressivism (human society must progress towards of an utopian ideal),
* Globalism and Centralisation (the world must unify and a core of global power must be held at the centre of all this).

Some may disagree with whether any or all of these share a common direction, but I feel that these share a common and inevitable trajectory which I try to strive against, and which give a general outline of why I strive at all.

The most frustrating thing about post-Millennial politics is that people now how to painstakingly explain concepts to “experts” that would be transparently obvious to anyone born before 1970. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/you-should-have-kids?r=14efw&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

When I look for Conservative and Reactionary responses to infrastructure modernization, I see a three different positions.

The first is poetic/aesthetic. The quote above it attributed to GK Chesterton on trains although I have also found anti-car polemics written by Russell Kirk and JRR Tolkien. The thesis is that in a train or car, the world passes you by before you have the chance to aesthetically/spiritually internalize your surroundings. As an American, it is difficult to argue that highways/the suburbs have made America atomized and homogeneous. However, it is difficult to argue pragmatically that we return to small town communitarianism. Even in the 19th century, small towns did not subsist on aesthetics. Faith and aesthetics does not feed a man’s stomach, it replenishes a man’s soul. If there are no jobs in your dirt road community, you will find very few austere devotees. Aesthetic arguments are made by academics and Catholic distributists, not the plebs they speak for

The second argument is Libertarian and revolves around malinvestments and profiteering.

There were two 19th century railway speculative bubbles, one in the US and one in the UK. Stock market speculative bubbles fueled by reliable funding from the national governments resulted in the creation of more railroads than what was commercially viable because railways were deemed a strategic resource. To this day, private American railway companies only exist because of the business they do with the federal government and because of federal subsidies. Highways are entirely different beast. The interstate highway system is the creation of the federal government and apolitical AASHTO, not private-public corruption.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873

There are private engineering/construction megafirms that bid on federal and state DOT contracts just as there are private military contractors. The Northrop-Grumman and Raytheon highway equivalents are AECOM and Jacobs. Similar to PMCs, there is a professional revolving door for public to private engineers. Only suckers and the incompetent stay in public sector engineering jobs. The engineers that write the government design manuals are often apolitical professionals with experience in public service and private contracting jobs. The manuals are long and tedious because professional autists write them, not because the government approves them

The third and most convincing argument is that the second and third order effects of the interstate highway system have been disastrous.

Urban sprawl, urban blight, the fall of American public transportation, and the creation of islands of middle class suburban wealth. All awful. However, every single modern country has highways and railways. The goal of responsible infrastructure design and management is mitigating the worse aspects of modern living. If you want to have trucks cross state boundaries, you need more advanced infrastructure than dirt or brick roads and wooden bridges. I believe that you can have trucks and interstate roads without splitting urban black communities in half and completely destroying urban infrastructure.

Summary:

Aesthetics: it’s not a feasible argument, you’re getting roads and highways whether you like it or not
Malinvestment: public highways are not private (albeit highly subsidized) railways
Destruction of cities: fair enough, that is an engineering problem that the original highway planners did not anticipate but can be accounted for in the future

The Great Escape.
@EnjoyTheD

'Simplified human phylogenetic tree for selected anthropological types according to current research'

From http://humanphenotypes.net/methods.html#5

When I am emperor, seed oils and corn syrup will carry large cigarette style Surgeon General's warnings complete with pictures of lardasses riding Walmart scooters