Atop The Cliffs - Occidental Poetry Journal

People sometimes shy away from reductionist arguments because they think it is too simple, not smart enough. But what if it really is just the one thing? https://magdalene.substack.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones This substack from the normie side of the Great Divide is on the money. "Maybe we want to say social media or the Internet are the real culprits here, but when we talk about phone usage this is exactly what we’re talking about. Smart phones have allowed us to have constant access to social media and the rest of what the Internet offers — including porn — and is now the dominant form through which we do so. There’s an asinine XKCD comic strip people love to cite detailing how every new form of media consumption throughout history has been blamed for the end of socialization. Books, newspapers, television, walkmans have all been cited as reasons why people don’t talk to each other anymore. And yes, maybe the phenomenon of people talking to strangers in public has been dying for hundreds of years now, but there remains something entirely contemporary about what phones are doing to us now. People were not collectively spending up to ten hours every single day reading. They were not habitually choosing books over real people en masse. Even when people did begin spending hours every day on television and video games, the broader trends in time spent with others did not drastically shift. In 1950, the typical American household already watched four and a half hours of TV per day. People have been consuming copious quantities of media for decades now, but it wasn’t until the smart phone, a device we carry with us at nearly every moment, that we began to be so alone. Neither books nor television simulate socialization in the way our phones do." As a group of people who have 'found' each other online and now use phones to stay in touch this is a poignant reminder of their ill effects on society. I do wonder if we didn't have phones with instant parasocial community and connection all the time if we'd be more dangerous towards the regime powers? Would we be more organized in the real world?

NobleRed - an English poet wrote this and I'm cross posting it from Twitter to here.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1765898289432449059 Important lessons here.

Bell curve of enjoying The Iliad

Rishi Sunak was in the news againt recently decrying 'extremism' reminded me of a poem I wrote a while ago. Rishi’s Rivers of Blood Oh, Enoch, Enoch What you warned has come to pass How could you know It would be your Tories heaping up the gas We’re all Wolverhampton’s white widows now Racialist Racialist Racialist The picaninnies in charge chant The Tiber long burst its banks Rivers of blood, pooled White children told to give thanks What a legacy of shame ‘Conservative’ only in name. ------- Available in my book if you've not picked up a copy yet: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CT64TKJM?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_46J7MSJ8Z8TZBWHVW9G9_1

TradCaths remain the single most cringe larpy people online. And I say this as someone who has met many good ones irl. The larp here is an example of using a 'based' take - WE MUST RESTORE THE HOLY CHURCH to effectively do nothing and be useless. Unserious people always reveal themselves.

This video is from a German MMA gym. The members run past saying where they are from. This is why myself and others strongly recommend you get training yourself. Especially pertinent in light of some of the recent horror videos coming out of Ireland.

Please buy my friends new book! I wrote a review here you you to read https://arthurpowell.substack.com/p/the-future-is-the-past "Improvidence is not a long read but it is certainly an enjoyable one and for anyone who sees the future and far future as more unstable than stable this is a worthy addition to their bookshelf. Herod's story is a quintessential coming of age in the wilderness tale, a journey. These stories are some of the oldest we have in our canon"

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere. – Guillaume Apollinaire

AVOID THIS FILM. Midwit nonsense dressed up in period dress. We get the 'muh racial minority' angle via a Romany gypsy girl which is mildly more accurate but somehow even more painful than just shoehorning in some random black. Bit of a shame really it held promise but was crap in almost every regard.

The ring of house-carls round the stricken king was now shrinking fast. Yet the tradition of five hundred years held; the flower of the English infantry went on fighting, after all hope of victory had faded, for something more than a victory. "The valour of the English" wrote a Norman, "and all their glory raged" ."In the English ranks" wrote the Norman chronicler "the only movement was the dropping of the dead; the living stood motionless...They were ever ready with their steel, those sons of the old Saxon race, the most dauntless of men." - Sir Arthur Bryant narrating the death of Harold Godwinson

"NO, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man." "The horrors of modern 'pleasure' arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile." "Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and personal initiative. They listened, for example, to Othello, King Lear and Hamlet—apparently with pleasure and comprehension. They sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the peasants went through the traditional rites—the dances of spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest home—appropriate to each season of the year. Their pleasures were intelligent and alive and it was they who, by their own efforts, entertained themselves. We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions —distractions which demand from pleasureseekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. " All excerpts from an essay by Aldous Huxely called 'Pleasures'

Counterpoint: Don't let anything prevent you from reading

White men attempt to abandon certain libertarian priors = challenge impossible. We're all children of modernity and in particular a strain of individualism that is pernicious and sees us willing to accept wider harm to our people if we think we can handle a certain state of affairs. There are many areas this appears in and how can we truly escape from it? I would suggest the notion of sacrifice. Sacrifice exists in both Christian and Heathen tradition. The notion that I sacrifice elements of my freedom for the good of the people or folk or community was a binding principle. It extended beyond the public and into the private - this is one reason we have a problem with guilt culture. It has been misplaced In truth though sacrifice is a necessary condition for a collective group to survive and thrive.

”But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass”

Old Nights It seems like a simple night Without life-hunting frights, Only the welcoming dark: A bone-faced woman of undead arts. Another dream then comes: Reality around undone, I saw again your joyful eyes Carried far away as the dream dies. Cosmos created worlds, Weaving like hair curls, Throwing minds into space Of unconscious streams of lost days. And each night I swim in those To remember my days of old.

I wrote about this in my article The Answer Machines: https://arthurpowell.substack.com/p/the-answer-machines "When technology was more crude it prompted more from the user. The engagement required to use an older computer was higher than a smart phone today. Like all technologies it has bred out toughness or curiosity, as it has gotten easier and more intuitive to use we have become weaker and stupider. The future of the internet is going to trend towards these Answer Machines - it will be disruptive to the people who made money off of websites yes but it will also serve to reassert an element of control being lost. Information control will be a lot easier when served up by Machines of Loving Grace."

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1760344101356974478 This is amusing but also why the open AI models threaten the regime so much. Google is a regime asset - completely in control and all these images popping up people are finding out what the future of centralized control will look like.

Technology creates dependencies that are hard to see when everything works well but all it takes are a few cracks for dramatic failure. For example many offices grant access today via app and electronic systems. This means the failure points expand massively - The app could break on your smartphone - Your smartphone could break - Local wifi could go down - Local power could go down - The app's servers could go down Complex systems keep all those elements functioning and when it does yeh you tap an app on your phone and the doors unlock. It's highly vulnerable though. What isn't vulnerable - what works no matter what? Keys. Actual keys and actual locks. This is why I'm bullish on the technodystopia state sputtering to failure instead of the alternatives. These systems are weak and fragile.

Sound familiar? "They turned active and self respecting citizens into inert and selfish ones. They discouraged the capitalism form thrift and foresight, the trader from enterprise, the craftsman from his hereditary skill, the husbandman from pride in the soil, the mother from maternity, and the soldier from courage and self-sacrifice. They made the moral shell that protected society so soft that it could protect it no longer. A creeping inertiat paralysed everyone and everything. Even before the barbarians broke in, the elegant cities had begun to crumble, trade to die for want of purchasers, learning, art, and even bureaucratic efficiency to disappear for lack of men of ability. The middle-class was exterminated. Civilization slowly gave place to barbarism at the Empire's heart". Sir Arthur Bryant