Fake Deployment

 

Readers: Oh noes, Trump's PanzerArmee of North Virginia is rolling across the Rappahannock...

Herr Generalblogberst: No it isn't, even Armeeabteilung Steiner at the Battle of Berlin wasn't that much of a delusion.

Readers: But if it's completely imaginary, why are 25,000 National Guard and 4,000 US Marshals and thousands of police needed to garrison Washington, and the FBI to sift out disloyal elements and all the Hitlers...

Blogistorian: I think this is known as Fake Deployment. I wonder if it counts as passive-aggressive, if so the biggest such force in world history. Look out for the First US Gaslight insignia and shoulder patches.

Over the Pond and Far Away

 

The officer nodded, as if a question had been answered.

"Are there any adults - any grownups with you?"

William Golding, Lord of the Flies, ch12, 1954

Mistaken Identity

Obviously a Warrior's bison* headdress, and sported by a d00d from Arizona as it happens, so why is Curtis Yarvin going on about a "Viking pillage of the Senate", "Harald Hardrada and his merry men" &c?

A waggish mis-waggery? Curtis is Contemptuous

To be brutally frank, this is one of the problems with cheap history. People think they have a sense of history, when the oldest book they’ve read is something published in 2017 that explains the Byzantine Empire in terms of “Game of Thrones.” Maybe we need to ban the History Channel, until we can figure out what’s going on.

so one must assume he knows what he doesn't know what he's talking about.

*a bison has a beard, a buffalo does not, as almost everybody has pointed out.

Anyhow and meanwhile, there's this fascist coup (no, not the one advertised) going down and nobody much seems to care. Smiling and waving and looking so fine...

Will the old clown be allowed even to survive Inauguration Day? State of OrangeManBad declared, Martial Lawlessness...

Onwards and Upwards

A happy and prosperous New Year to all my reader

Reader: not me, haven't looked in for yonks

Blogista: well, to ME then

Into That Good Night

 

The longest night is nearly over and

Reader(s): and before the darkest dawn comes the dawn of dawn and

Blogista: we have KC Green to thank for this unconventional but eloquent doggie'n'zeitgeist combo. Thank you, KC.

Pejorocracy

 A note in Laudator Temporis Acti on Ezra Pound's coinage "pejorocracy", rule by the worse

One thing that puzzles me about pejorocracy is this — why the comparative degree and why not the superlative (pessimocracy, from Latin pessimus = worst)? 

There is also the delightful "kakistocracy", the Greek version of rule by the worst, with echoes of Musil's Kakania, of "catastrophe", of "caca".

Rule by the worse seems suitably lukewarm and half-baked, the pejorocracy not being capable of the superlative in any field.

I have the feeling that this year marks the end of the West as a going concern, its inmates abandoning the last of any functional understanding of "reality" or "civilisation", its pejorocrats fumbling their way to the rubbish heaps.

May Day

Sudden nostalgia for the 22nd May 2007 and a day when I was free, living in Brighton, rolling in money, drinking my head off when I felt like it...

...now life amid a vast miasma of torpor and ugliness, stupidity no longer impedance but become a galvanic industrial resource, of which "we" have limitless reserves.

Perhaps enlightenment is to be found in cliodynamics, and Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord for example, or somewhere in the pages of the great Valéry, with the Zürau Aphorisms always to hand. Perhaps I will just go down to the corner shop and buy a huge bag of sweets.

5 From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The goal, if there ever was one, is not the or any point. If I must reach the point of no turning back; then I am already at it: if it is a point I must reach, I cannot be at it. Per ardua ad ardua and so forth.