As CS Lewis suggests in The Four Loves, by reducing friendship to sexual/romantic love you are not taking it higher but reducing it to something lower than what a great friendship can be.

One of the things I despise about modernity is the constant Freudian drive to reduce everything to the sexual dimension of human life.

Insisting that genuine friendships are really sexual (but somehow "platonic") destroys the friendship. Bonds between men are treated as homosexual relationships. Bonds between women have them looking for secret bisexuality. And I don't even want to get into what they do to children. It's disgusting.

"For still our ancient foe
does seek to work us woe;
his craft and power are great,
and armed with cruel hate,
on earth is not his equal."

A mighty fortress is our God

Consolidation of power is power's only goal. Ideology justifies power.

“When we look at the evidence from SWB [subjective well-being studies] we find that [Roger] Sherman was right, along with Montesquieu and Rousseau, while Hume and Madison were wrong. People in small countries are happier. Bigness is badness.”

-Francis Buckley, American Secession

You may think AA is exaggerating the War issue. But read Rothbard’s Betrayal of the American Right. Think of the America First movement that resisted entry into WWII and how they were defamed.

So this is an old story.

War is a key issue. They know it. Do you?

https://t.me/BertieBassett4Life/2609

"the people who are supposed to be protecting your rights care more about a country 6,000 miles away. This is a country many use to line their pockets to the tune of millions, and probably billions."

Peter R. Quiñones on our traitorous leaders.

https://petequinones.substack.com/p/borders-guns-and-nationalism?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=ios

Good ole' Coach Red Pill shared this. People may not have a name for it, but the Biological Leninism which poisons the country to it's foundations and up every corporate, government, military girder is visible plainly to people.

"Capital T Theory is important for the left because of their core belief in the perfectibility of man. All else flows from this."

Two essential posts from Academic Agent on Left and Right:

https://t.me/BertieBassett4Life/2610

https://t.me/BertieBassett4Life/2633

My roadtrips have tended to be to the east. To Florida to visit my maternal grandparents. To Tennessee to visit my paternal grandparents and my beloved second cousins.
And, as now, to Alabama to visit the Mises Institute.

So I have driven back west across Illinois so many, many times.

Each time I remember my parents telling about coming to St. Louis the first time when I was a baby... This metropolis rising on the horizon out of the flat plains of Illinois.

There's a funny thing about my city that my parents observed. People go away... for college, work, military. But, as people from Florida where everyone was a transplant from somewhere else, they noticed that folks tend to come eventually home.

I love to travel. But... I see the top of the Arch on the horizon... I always love coming home.

How much of a role does blackmail play in politics?

“We should reject the false doctrine of “collective security,” which makes every border disputes a world war.”

Lew Rockwell says to keep wars small.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/03/lew-rockwell/a-manufactured-world-crisis/

This post traumatized me. 🙃

The focus on “conspiracy” as an aspect of harmful content is definitely a paradigm shift to be sure. So too does the concept of a “harms bill” make my Gottfried/Francis senses tingle, the language is incredibly therapeutic.

Good info on the political character of the breakaway Ukrainian regions from Keith Woods.

I am surprised at this post by Counter Currents. They have, correctly, pushed back against those who would deny the Ukrainian people's right to self-determination either on the basis of their nations recognition by the Soviet regime or their current usefulness to either American foreign policy machinations or Western oligarchs.

But how then can ethnic Russians be denied the same right on the basis of either foreign support or communist imagery? I suppose the question is if the connection of Donetsk and Luhansk to Bolshevism goes beyond drawing from the well of Soviet nostalgia. Greg attaches a picture which he notes is of members of Spanish communists fighting for the Republics. This picture is from 2014, but there have indeed been such volunteers in East Ukraine. However, on the whole Anti-fascist groups in the West are on the side of Ukraine in this conflict ("tankies" are a small minority on the left), and I could post plenty of similar pictures of antifa volunteers supporting Ukraine, but I don't think it's fair to use images of foreign fighters as any kind of proof of the ideological character of either Ukrainian Nationalism or Russian separatism.

The post challenges the right to separation of the Republics on the basis that the Ukrainian minority there would have to live under Bolshevism - they "would kill and die not to be ruled by neo-Bolsheviks and foreign antifa"

How prevalent is Bolshevism in the Republics? We can look at representation in the People's Council of Donetsk, which is the breakaways Republic's legislature. The Communist Party of Donetsk does not have a single seat in the legislature. Instead, the seats are divided 68/32 between the Donetsk Republic Party and Free Donbas, both of which have Russian nationalist, socially conservative platforms.

In the legislature of the Luhansk People's Republic there is still no sign of the red menace - seats are divided 37/13 between the groups Peace for Luhansk Region and Luhansk Economic Union. The former is a centrist/moderate Russian Nationalist party, while Luhansk Economic Union is a center-right party founded by wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs in the region.

This paper argues that "the official ideology of the DNR and the LNR, which developed under the influence of Russian far-right activists, is largely right wing, conservative and xenophobic in character", noting that "Anti-Semitism and homophobia play a lesser, though still significant role in public rhetoric"

Interestingly the report also concludes that the use of right-wing radicals has been far more important to the Russian separatist struggle in Eastern Ukraine than it has been for the Ukrainians - the former has been supported by a variety of nationalist and far-right groups like Slavic Union and Movement Against Illegal Immigration (both banned by the Kremlin).

This article concludes: "despite their neo-Stalinist paraphernalia, many of the Russian-speaking nationalists Russia supports in the Donbass are just as right-wing as their counterparts from the Azov Battalion."

We can also look at the constitution of the Donetsk People's Republic. The constitution enshrines the right to private property (Article 28.1), entrepreneurship (27.1) and intellectual propety (37.1), while defining Novorossiya as a "Social state" which will keep key strategic resources nationalised for the common good.

Socially, the constitution upholds a traditional view of marriage and the family (4.3) and Article 31.3 states: "Any forms of perverted unions between people of the same sex are not acknowledged not allowed and will be prosecuted in DPR.” Article 9.2 upholds the dominance of the Orthodox Church and 4.2 defends traditional social values.

The character of this document seems a world away from Bolshevism or anything we would associate with Antifa in the West to me, and could probably be best described as Social Nationalist. I would treat Ukrainians calling these movements Bolshevik with as much seriousness as I do when Russians call the Zelensky-regime Nazi.

Fascinating intro to the Russian political spectrum, where Communists (pro-Soviet) are the conservatives.

Focusing so much on Russia of late has redpilled me on how fundamentally different the Russian "political spectrum" is to the contemporary West's. This is interesting not simply because Russia is a compelling nation whatever you may think of it, but because it demonstrates how historically contingent political categorization is.

The description given in this article for example is compelling: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/03/14/the-great-russian-restoration-iv-the-state-of-opposition-nationalist-politics-in-russia/

Consider American politics, which are based on the White/Black divide. Conservatives are the de-facto White party and the Democrats are the explicitly pro-POC party. All debate revolves around race and its relation to America’s history and the current socio-economic situation in the country. This is not unique to the United States—all countries have fault lines of political debate around which all politicking revolves. In Russia, for the last 30 years, the debate has revolved around endless debates about the Soviet Union and its legacy. In other words, your attitude to the Soviet Union determines where you fit on the political spectrum.

So, the Liberals and the Nationalists are at one end of the spectrum and vocally attack the Soviet Union and everything that it stood for while the Communists, as one would guess, are pro-USSR. Putin and his people fit in the middle of his spectrum and try to reconcile the Soviet past with the Imperial legacy and the Russian present.
As a result, Communists accuse Putin of being too Liberal and Capitalist and the “Nats-Libs” accuse him of being a secret Communist.

The pro-Soviet crowd are much older, socially conservative and economically “left” in the sense that they support large government programs, national industry and economic protectionism. The Nats-Libs are younger, more libertine and believe in the promise of the global, integrated, “free” market.
With all this in mind, it should be clear why it is so difficult for Westerners to wrap their head around the political situation in Russia, especially members of the formerly Anglo-Saxon world, where these camps are literally inverted.

Again, in America, the social-conservatives are also defenders of the free market. Even more bafflingly, the Communist Party in Russia is pro-Orthodox and you’d be hard-pressed to find a Gennadiy Zyuganov rally without a priest present at it on stage, microphone and crucifix in hand. It took me many years to wrap my head around this phenomenon as well, and for the longest time I thought that all these politically active personalities and parties in Russia had simply lost their marbles. But then, upon further analysis, I was forced to conclude that the political camps in America were just as absurd. After all, what does Jesus have to do with free markets and climate change skepticism? Well, the answer is that political apparatchiks “bundled” a bunch of different, unrelated positions into one united political platform. Over time, this political bundle of positions became solidified in the mass consciousness and simply became dogma.

That Russian and American political identity-relativity can be so radically incongruent only brings the right-left lightswitch brain into further disrepute in my eyes. Current year American political categories are the problem, and you reproduce them by taking a position within them. We need to think outside the box if we want to genuinely challenge the system.

Paul Gottfried has hammered this point home: The mainstream conservatives/right are leftists.

This was most obvious with the Neocons but it is true of pretty much every other personality or institution that is allowed to be the face of conservatism or the right.