Of course women shouldn’t be considered as nothing more than sexual objects for consumption by the male gaze, or encouraged to act as such, that would be a tragic waste of potential.
Of course women should be considered as sexual objects for consumption by the male gaze, and encouraged to act as such, anything else would be a tragic waste of potential.
Okay, as I’ve established, I think Taylor Swift is a supergenius writer, the only one I consider my clear superior. But, I mean, have you heard those lyrics? Come on, right?
Okay, yes the vocabulary and grammatical structure is pitched at an eighth-grade reading level; her work is pitched at an eighth-grade audience. But that’s hardly to say there’s no depth to her lyrics, it’s just that a lot of it relies on semantic overloading, and particularly semantic overloading that specifically plays on her bridging of popular music genres. To simplify, pop-rock lyrics tend to set a mood while country lyrics tell a story, but Taylor Swift lyrics tend to craft an atmosphere in which individual lines suggest a story or multiple stories (which listeners can fill in, according to the specifics of their own lives or daydreams), which can in turn be taken as literal or as metaphors.
(A lot of her themes have traditionally been about the stock female coming-of-age, but they shouldn’t be taken as coming from personal experience - which makes them even more impressive. Remember that she spent her teenage years not going to school and dating but home-studying and establishing her career because, contra Fifteen, she knew exactly what she was going to be. And she does venture afield of this - Never Grow Up and The Best Day are about the experience of watching your child grow, and Innocent is about a 32 year old woman looking to distance herself from the things she’s done - “Taylor Swift lyrics as explications of manosphere/redpill themes” would be a pretty impressive series in its own right.)
Like, Mean, from Speak Now. It’s about bullies, right? That you’ll escape from when you leave this one-horse town and live in a big old city?
Or is it about abusive parents? I mean,
some day I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
Girl bullying isn’t really a “hitting” thing, plus
I bet you got pushed around, Somebody made you cold, But the cycle ends right now, cause you can’t lead me down that road
Or is it about critics, such as critics of pop-country star Taylor Swift?
Or yourself and your insecurity, as your own biggest critic? (cf. Tied Together With a Smile and A Place In This World from the debut)
The answer, of course, is “yes”.
And that’s not even adding in the reading where it’s about her and Kanye West at the VMAs - because Swift can wield her public celebrity tabloid persona to add more reading and layers of valence to her songs, in part through encoded messages in her liner notes. Like, the liner notes code isn’t hard to figure out - just take the letters incongruously capitalized. Because she’s pitching at an eighth-grade audience. And she’s pitching that audience encrypted intertextuality.
Okay, let’s look at another song, Long Live, from Speak Now.
For one, it works a sequel to “Change”, from previous album Fearless, with its blended imagery of supporting a relationship partner, general teenage pressure, and literal revolution (released two months after the first Hunger Games novel came out and shifted the dominant tone of YA from Twilight-era “supportive relationship” to “youth insurrection”).
It’s about triumph, in a supportive relationship, over general teenage pressure (with an aside about high school relationships not being long-term things, in a much more optimistic tone than the similarly themed White Horse and Fifteen), is it metaphorizing that through the recurrent imagery of a coronation, or is it telling a literal story about being named Prom King & Queen, and the answer of course is “yes”. And then the recurring line “bring on all the pretenders”.
I got 2 hrs of sleep last night and am about to fall asleep but there’s something I want to say about this tumblr, I guess because I don’t want to mislead people when I write soapbox posts like I did last night.
This is, and always has been, completely a personal blog….
In contrast, I will educate you, I do have important things to say, you should look to me as an authority.
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that’s what my grandfather told me, anyway.
As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “Savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?
Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”
Quoted from the essay “1941” written by Charles C. Mann, about the major impact that Native Americans had on the Americas (ecologically and culturally) before white people invaded, bringing their diseases and shoving Christianity down the Indians’ throats and murdering them and banning their cultures.
Check out the whole piece (which is rather long). (P.S thanks to @cazalis for sending me this great link)
another excerpt:
Human history, in Crosby’s interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing included. The Neolithic Revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world’s first civilization. Afterward Sumeria’s heirs in Europe and Asia frantically copied one another’s happiest discoveries; innovations ricocheted from one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating technological progress. Native Americans, who had crossed to Alaska before Sumeria, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do everything on their own,” Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.
When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the world’s two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requisite population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.
Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.
Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed agriculture there, too. “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Crosby says. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” Maize conquered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.
Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world’s largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was “so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people … [that] I would rather live here than any where.”
and another excerpt:
In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.
When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like “wow” and “gosh.” Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
Whatever happened to kids trying to run away from home, if nothing else, like, goddamn.
The hell do you get this from? See, this is why I pay attention to the cutting edge of trans tumblr. Trans tumblr is like 80% running away from home by volume.
At least 35% of the trend-power of gender transition is as a catalyst to running away from home.
Back around the time you were born, the Internet was a toddler too, and very little illustrates this like a game called Elf Bowling. This game from NStorm hit the web in 1998. Like many of the whack-a-mole games of that time, it was very simple and involved physical abuse.
In this case, Santa was bored and decided to go bowling, using his elves as pins while a reindeer watched.
The elves scream in high-pitched synchronized fear every time Santa bowls, and their crushed bodies are swept away into darkness by a giant squeegee.
Also, the game is really boring, like all bowling games.
Because the internet was still in diapers, of course it went completely viral in 1999.
And it kind of destroyed the Internet.
See, back in those days, most email users were using a program like Outlook Express to download messages to their computer.
This was before webmail was a thing. A majority of users at this time were still on dial-up (some were lucky enough to get a steady 56k connection, but many would be stuck at 33.6, or even worse, 18.8) and email systems were built to quickly move tiny text messages back and forth. A huge essay-like email to your mom explaining why you need more money? That’s a kilobyte or two in plain text and an email system blasts that out with no issues.
Elf Bowling is 1.1mb.
With a strong 56k connection, 1.1mb takes at least two and half minutes to download.
Outlook Express 5, which came with Windows 98, had a default server timeout of 60 seconds.
In 1999, everybody emailed it to everyone they know.
I was working as an internet tech support rep at the time, and here’s what happened:
Elf Bowling would appear in your inbox on the server.
You would attempt to download new messages.
Everything before Elf Bowling would download fine.
The server would time out trying to download the Elf Bowling file.
The email would not be deleted from the server or marked as downloaded.
Later on you’d try to get new messages and it would start to download Elf Bowling again, preventing new emails from getting through.
Eventually, it might download, or when you called tech support they had you increase the timeout, but then you’d play the stupid game and try to send it to every person you’ve ever met with an email address.
For the entire holiday season that year, email servers were under assault by this stupid game.
And that was only one half of the story. The file that was being sent around was elfbowling.exe.
People were downloading and running an unknown executable file.
Eventually, a chain email started going around, warning that elf bowling was a virus and it was going to delete all the information on your computer on Dec 25th at midnight, but this was determined to be a hoax.
There are two points here:
First off, fuck you, Elf Bowling
Secondly, kaanekii, marvel at where we have come in just your lifetime. I can watch Doctor Who streaming in HD on my phone, and just 16 years ago, one megabyte of Santa being a jackass almost destroyed the Internet’s email infrastructure.
So one way I could see monarchy returning to relevance in the Western world is through a renewed emphasis on personal union in the face of secession.
(Hi, I’m personal union. You may remember me from such historical powers as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Iberian Union. I’m here to remind you that the rule of distinct countries by the same human monarch is a form of government that exists even outside of the Europa Universalis game series.)
If the Scottish secession referendum passes, and/or regional secessionist movements in Spain achieve any success, I could see a movement to cede authority currently held by parliaments back to the respective monarchies as a way to hold on to geopolitical economies of scale in the face of civil disunion. That’s something the NRxics should be keeping their eye on.
There are a lot of theories of morality, and many of them are fairly compatible in execution if not in theory. Right now I’d like to talk about my intuitive feelings about it, which are not rigorously defined but which help illustrate how I feel somewhat about morality. I’m an…
I think that there used to be a bit of that in American society. I see that polytheistic sensibility you talk about in the heyday of Art Deco— an aesthetic that turned everything it touched into a Greek God.
I’d like to assume (and in some sentimental way, genuinely hope) that the art of Rockefeller Center was a reflection of the spirit of its age, because taken as a whole it’s a gigantic Humanist Cosmogram, depicting all aspects of civilization emanating from the central figures of Wisdom and Prometheus.
Surrounding those central figures there are allegories of various industries…
A mural depicting Abraham Lincoln as symbol of men of action and Ralph Waldo Emerson as a symbol of philosophers….
Factory workers and Farmers….
Journalists…
transportation technology of all kinds (this was the Golden Age of Aviation after all)….
Elsewhere in the complex there’s a mural that depicts an Allegory of Thought, an androgynous, godlike figure sending out angels to carry knowledge into the world. The angels have labeled: News, Politics, Poetry, Physics, Biology, Hygiene, Philosophy, Music, Art— a cross section of the sciences and humanities.
And on the Dionysian side, the outer walls of Radio City display roundels symbolizing Song, Dance, and Music.
There it was: Machine Age Polytheism. Radio City, Rockefeller Center, and right across the street, St. Peter’s Cathedral: Dionysus, Apollo, and Christ.
In those old Art Deco building, facades announced the names of aspects of society like some kind of archetypal roll-call: “Art! Science! Law! Commerce! Religion! With your powers combined, I am Captain Civilization!“ And these aspects were depicted as a kind of pantheon. To put it bluntly, the message was “Look at this really wide variety of things that are all important!” It wasn’t exactly a guide of virtues to emulate, but a guide of valuable things to participate in. And while all those ‘valuable things’ were different from each other, they were not utterly alien to each other. Multiple expressions of the same spirit— I guess you could call it the Western Humanist spirit.
I can’t exactly trace any specific path from then to now, but it seems like nowadays that Polytheistic sensibility has split apart into various Monotheisms in conflict with one another. Instead of seeing different archetypes as expressions of the same unifying spirit, each one stands completely alone. There’s the Cult of the Activist, the Cult of the Entrepreneur, the Cult of the Celebrity, the Cult of the Soldier, the Cult of the Scientist/Engineer, etc. , each of them insisting that their own precious little archetype is the only one that matters. Each one of them vying for the title of “The Guy Everybody Else Depends On” —- perhaps, in some ways, each one betting that it will be what is optimized for when all other values are wiped out.
A pantheon requires a mythology— sensibility that unites the conflicting gods into a single overarching paradigm. The way the Western Humanist spirit united all the gods of Rockefeller center, the way the institution of Hogwarts unites the four houses— hell, even the way that in Bioshock Infinite, the mythos of the founding fathers unites George Washington as Archetypal Soldier, Ben Franklin as Archetypal Entrepreneur and Thomas Jefferson as Archetypal Scholar. if polytheism-flavored virtue ethics is ever going to make a comeback, we’re going to need a paradigm like that.
Corporatism. You are thinking of corporatism. Referring to corporations not in the sense of "chartered enterprises on the limited liability model” but in the Italian sense of para-tribes or -castes based not on genetic descent but on economic and social function, and enchanted each with their own symbology and rituals, as pioneered by Gabriele d'Annunzio at Fiume in the Charter of Carnaro.
These are the corporations Mussolini referred to when he said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” And an issue with that is that if you take and mythologize aspects of society, and embody them as humans, and posit a need for a “single overarching paradigm”, you end up mythologizing that force of unity, and embodying it as a human, a Leader.
Or, as translated into other languages, Duce (grok that “Tenth Corporation” then cf. Ledeen’s d'Annunzio biography, “The First Duce”), or Führer.
I’ve heard two things about the transition to agriculture:
it made a much larger population possible, but
it made the people much worse off, to the extent that archaeologists use signs of malnourishment as an indicator of whether a body is that of a forager or farmer.
I don’t really understand how those things go together. How was it possible for foragers to be well-nourished? Surely their population would simply grow until people were going hungry, in classic Malthusian style? Surely having the means to make more food per head should mean that people are better fed on average?
I don’t mean “I don’t believe it”, I’m pretty sure the experts know what they’re talking about, I mean I actually don’t understand it, and I’d like to.
gonna register a guess: agriculture created more calories which meant more people, but not enough protein or iron or other nutrients for those people
It’s not necessarily the case food availability* was the constraint on hunter-gatherer population growth, if fertility is limited by other constraints and prereproductive mortality is high.
Multiple sources mention that birth spacing is greater in hunter-gatherer than in early agricultural societies. It’s noted here that weening occurs earlier in agricultural societies.
*Particularly if you mean “food availablity” in the purely Malthusian sense, ie in terms of how large a population can be supported by a given area of land. Even if the land could support more maximally efficient hunter-gatherers, the food production ability of a hunter-gatherer band may not be able to support more than a certain fraction of children at a given time.
One source suggests that childhood mal/undernutrition may be common in hunter-gather societies. Though it’s comparing modern hunter-gatherers with other moderns so it may not be the best comparison to early agriculturalists
Another source seems to suggest that women’s food gathering ability is significantly reduced while they have a young child (though I didn’t track down the original citation).
Population carrying capacity isn’t determined by average food availability, it’s determined by food availability at the narrowest bottleneck - for forager populations that would be winter, and specifically a winter in which game is particularly scarce - say from a drought suppressing flora growth which in turn caused die-offs or low reproduction in prey animals, combined with competition from rival apex predators (wolves, say) at a high point in their population cycle.
The switch from foraging to farming allowed for food preservation - grains can be stored and preserved (brewing didn’t just allow for drunkenness, it didn’t just allow for the purification and thus use of tainted water sources, it also rendered grain into a form that resisted spoilage from vermin and fungus [by spoiling it under controlled conditions, basically]), sedentary lifestyles allow for storehouses of salted/smoked meat, etc. This supplemented the existing technology of feasting (eating past satiation in times of high availability so as to preserve food as body fat) in allowing food availability to be “averaged out” over the course of a year/multi-year famine cycles, which made bottlenecks not as severe.
Anonymous asked: If you like the Norse aesthetic become a Teutonic Knight. They kicked pagan ass.
Well this came in a while ago, but it’s referencing something even older. Someone was archive diving, took me a while to even find that one to link. That you, lovegodsmashtyrants? morosombrero?
Eh. I don’t believe in any gods, but I do practice worship of the local gods wherever I go. Down in Echo Park I gave offerings to Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde, when I was up in the Idaho Panhandle the whole place was clearly sanctified to Jesus so I gave thanks to him. I don’t think any divinities have established clear dominion over Portland, but the Germanic forest gods seem to have as strong a claim as anyone.
One of the (two or three) religions I’ve had it in my head to found eventually is Library Judaism.
(I grew up around Philadelphia, where the local Jewish community stretches back to colonial merchant families for whom it essentially became the Hebrew-ethnic branch of mainline Protestantism, Reform before Reform or even Mendelssohn; there was some immigration later on but the existing population set up settlement houses right quick to assimilate them lest the old guard be tainted by an association of Jewishness with yokeldom. The generation or two before me the community shifted to, and then from Freudian Judaism, by my youth the local Jewish families were mostly distinguished by taking their children seriously and having all walls of least one room of their house lined with books and I wanted in on that. Later on with more experience and further travels I encountered Orthodox [Modern and otherwise] Judaism; grievance-mongering Shoah Judaism; and the ethnochauvinist Staten Islanders, equivalent to the Boston Irish and Jersey Italians; those communities and styles impressed me less.)
The idea being that each house of worship would consist on one hand of a library, secular in orientation, housing humanistic works - a core canon plus whatever the particular congregation saw fit to focus on. And on the other hand a temple including a shrine to one particular diety drawn from any religious or representative tradition that the congregation would be named for, plus two lesser “junior” shrines.
And sects could form around one of the junior focuses and eventually calve off from the parent church, and it would be possible to use the shrines to syncretize with any existing religion - you could have a God the Father//Christ the Son/Holy Spirit setup for example, which wouldn’t be orthodox trinitarianism obviously but “imperfectly orthodox” and “new syncretic religion” kind of go hand in hand you know.
(And obviously it’s a stretch to call it Judaism to begin with, but I mean, “claiming continuity with traditional Judaism” is a pretty successful strategy for a startup religion - look at Christianity, and Islam, and Mormonism, and Adventism, or even say Reform, or even Rabbinical Judaism, to say nothing of the variants in the previous parenthetical paragraph.)
And then I thought on it a bit more, and the Google-equivalent in my brain was like
You searched for:pan-Western humanistic religion with strong elements of syncretism
Did you mean: the Roman Catholic Church?
But the thing is, I was raised Catholic, ish, enough. Taken to weekly Masses, was in CCD but kicked out before I could be confirmed which fair enough, I don’t, and didn’t, believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who came upon the apostles at Pentecost, in the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, and was honest enough that I would have told the bishop so.
And oh, well, of course that’s just the fault of the degraded post-Vatican II church that drained the mystery and magic from Catholicism, that can’t catechize for shit, yada yada yada, right?
But I honestly find all the enthusiastic traditionalist-bordering-on-sedevacantists who peddle that line a little ridiculous. For one, because the idea of communicants being so obsessed with recovering and upholding The Proper Theology in the face of a church corrupted by concessions to the fallen world is more Prot than any modern Protestantism I’ve ever encountered, which tends to focus more on charisma and the born-again experience.
For two, their obsessive hate of On Eagle’s Wings. I loved On Eagle’s Wings, it was my favorite song in church. Precisely because it wasn’t as intricate as the ~beautiful~ choral music they fetishize, anyone with no particular training could just belt it out and feel part of something. (If you had put me on the spot to guess where it had come from, I would have said maybe a 19th century Boston Protestant hymn.)
Because my father, the guy who even tried to raise me Catholic in the first place, was an altar boy back before Vatican II. He told me what those old Latin Masses were actually like - a series of posture changes set to bells, while a priest spoke inaudibly to a wall in a dead language and the real energy was in the pews, where veiled widows from the old country rocked back and forth clutching at their fetishes and wailing prayers, basically attempting to cast magic spells.
And he told me of how he and an Italian altar boy (who would later be my godfather, and operate a motel just over the Philly border known for hosting prostitutes and outlaws, with an impressive pool/gym complex in the basement that I only ever saw used by him and my father and I on Friday nights, though I hear it was open to members of the local police as a courtesy) would get assigned to all the high-tipping funeral and wedding Masses, in return for kicking back some of their share to the priest, a genial old Irishman of the drunken, gambling, whoremongering type.
Because like, that’s what “true” Catholicism always was - as a practice, thinly whitewashed peasant paganism; as an institution, a collection of corrupt local elites, no different from your typical backwater courthouse gang, only with priests for lawyers and the parish for the county.
The scholasticist tradition the neotraditionalists hark back to was never more than a sideshow (albeit one that could occasionally accomplish something when by chance a power vacuum opened up to be filled by someone who took it seriously) conducted by a bunch of ivory-tower monks and minor nobility who were looking for an alternative hierarchy they could scramble to the top of. And the whole Chesterbelloc, Inklings thing was never more than an arcadian fantasia by a bunch of podunk punks too in love with themselves to notice that the sedate, “properly ordered” rural landscape and society they loved so much wasn’t a remnant of the good old days but the very product of the enclosure and industrialization that had driven all the peasants and all the productive activity to the dirty, squalid cities they recoiled from. Nothing more than a bunch of pompous pipe-smokers smoking each others’ pipes over how wise and noble they must be for rising to the top of this backwater society when the truth was there was nothing and no one left to rule over and no one of any ambition and competence could be bothered to compete.
