"But that’s not such a bad thing, is it? And pretty much sums up the Substack experience, at least for me.
I know we all dream, in our weaker moments, about making a ton of money from writing here. And congrats to those who do. But the biggest benefit for me so far is that I learned a ton, refined my ideas, changed some of my stances, and have grown quite a bit in the way I think and interact with others. Not to mention that I have made some great friends. As with most good things in life, this came completely unexpected."
I read wonderful material like this on Substack, then I check mainstream media and am appalled by how moronic it is. How gauche. How humourless. How pompous. It is like walking out of the sun and into a reeking cesspit.
What gets my blood boiling when consuming mainstream media isn't even the lies and spin doctoring. It's the unbelievable stupidity, the impoverishment of the human spirit, which reduces the human mind to a smelly sandcorn, forgotten in a pile of rubbish in a devestated corner of existence, inedible even to the vultures.
When the news entities no longer report on "scale accurately" they reveal themselves as entities whose purpose ought be rescinded because what is the purpose of media? Is it not to report on "scale" accurately, and I put forth that if media does not do this when its purported purpose is to share the "news", then such media ought have its permit revoked. This will only happen in a system where the media is aware of the will of the citizens as it ought be, but the purpose of media is to allow new ideas.....so if media does not report on "scale" accurately - suggest the media is beholden to other entities and that is a BIG problem. Because just to state the obvious of the present situation if the "media" is in the hands of a "few" they think amongst themselves they control the narrative, but little do they know that most of us don't consider ourselves cattle and so the power they think they wield is truly delusional and at the end of the day, the lies they tell one day after another will literally turn back upon them and then in the moment they will be punished for the large-scale harm they are directly responsible for - one at a time individually.
I find much of the stuff featured on many substack sites to be just as moronic and culturally illiterate as anything featured on mainstream media - even more so!
I got a SubStack place (click on it if you want)- I like the "Terms" of the SubStack place - here is a tidbit of the term and today is 8123 - August 1, 2023:
~~~~~~ SubStack "terms" tidbit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Posting Content on Substack
First and foremost, you own what you create. Any original content you post, upload, share, store, or otherwise provide to Substack remains yours and is protected by copyright and any other applicable intellectual property laws.
That includes newsletters, subscriber lists, any other text or photos you upload to your subdomain on Substack, and any information that you provide to obtain a Substack username and account. It also includes any comments posted on any current or future discussion board features on Substack.
~~~~
Now for me, as an "author" chooses not to request paid subscribers, I appreciate those terms. However, as a reader of many sites, I like to be a paid subscriber, as I am here. So, sometimes ideas take time to coalesce, but an idea sensed and then stewed upon prior to realization is a good thing in my book.
British journalist Melanie Phillips recently gave a talk at the London National Conservatism about the cultural revolution in the West; on the left there was a liberation of behaviour and on the right a liberation of the market. Both of these transformations have destroyed all civic life, as the idea that one has any obligation to anyone beyond the self is considered authoritarian. She notes that the very principals that has offered us our liberties and prosperity are doomed without intervention that returns us to tradition.
I highly recommend watching it. She also has a fantastic substack.
Yes, and if not exactly a return to traditions, a return to life in harmony with higher truth. I must say though that I'm somewhat sympathetic to the libertarian position as well. At the end of the day there will always be some tension between self-expression/ thinking for oneself and the need for some conformity, hopefully conformity based on sound principles. I hope we learn how to use that tension productively.
Agreed; as Phillips argues the greatest mistake of our culture is confusing the means with the end. The consensus today is that the goal of life is absolute liberty (especially from consequence or even reality); she aptly notes that instead, liberty should be the way in which we live, but in pursuit of meaning. Ie liberty must be bound by duty and obligation other else it inevitably will disappear from societal chaos
🗨 society, and the underclass most of all, has wholly absorbed to its detriment the philosophy of nonjudgmentalism[; ...] the religion of emancipation, that they have no personal limits, but they instead have unfettered freedom to do exactly as they please, to be funded by others if that freedom needs money.
Charles Haywood, the ur-prophet of Foundationalism, famously traces the roots of our sorry state of affairs back to—and lays the blame at the feet of—nigh-universally lauded Enlightenment. In misguided desperate quest for total emancipation from all unchosen bonds, our societies have been merrily driving 'emselves into a ditch. For quite some time & counting 😒
Personally I'm feeling most invigorated. Could be the month of August is one of gusto and being I was born in the middle of August, I don't sense what you are referring to....but that is just me.
So far August has been most mild, but if you want my opinion, some serious storms are on the way.
David Whyte frowns unpersuaded and offers a tad different take 😊
🗨 Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.
🗨 What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.
🗨 Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability... Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.
Anger is a part of the human experience and healthy, in the sense you describe it. Unfortunately there is little that is healthy about our current state of affairs: it's all off, vectored, messed up. And so our anger is easily manipulated; we get angry when we should self-control, and we get sick when we should express it. Social Media-fueled outrage can easily ruin our energy for the day, and in the long run catapult us into lala-land for good.
The quotes you dropped earlier in this thread are spot on, but their insights require a degree of self-awareness to apply, and social media has a bad tendency to undermine self-awareness, leading to anger without the awareness to understand it and respond beneficially!
The Good Doctor(*) is very vocal about abominations of modern architecture: they're improvable only by demolition ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Neither he holds back on ruthless diagnosis: radical intersectional incompetence, both technical and aesthetic.
The Southern French used to build "pigeonniers" in the 19th century, literally pigeon sh*t houses, and they put more love and spirit into them than goes into most of today's homes. They are still preserved by enthusiasts today. Go figure.
While that picture is sort of beautiful in a way, something about it seems "fake" to me.....but I don't mind. Pigeons need somewhere to shit and myself - I'm a big fan of birds of all sorts. I'm particularly fond of crows and ravens and magpies and such.
L.P. KOCH - I know this is a bit "goofy" but I want you to know I "right-click" (or is it "left-click") on that image at the top of this article with all the fine stonework to get a closer look as I'm want to do and the greenery and the one plant pot on the far right side in a crevice is noticed more up close. One thing I tried to teach my daughters and they know this about me is sometimes if you look real close you can sense the situation better especially when you can see the whole picture as well.
I'm not sure how we have come to encounter one another, but I would like you to know I appreciate the views you share. I think this as well:
Together we are better - I mean seriously Kropotkin from the 19th century and so many other 19th century thinkers were on the precipice and then once again as history goes a new idea, this time one from a fellow named Darwin got contaminated for the sake of a few's interest....and frankly these effing elitist causing harm are on notice. I'm not kidding around and I appreciate your insights. There is no denying big changes are on the way and this can be melancholy but nothing wrong with that. What matters is the will of ideas better.
"But that’s not such a bad thing, is it? And pretty much sums up the Substack experience, at least for me.
I know we all dream, in our weaker moments, about making a ton of money from writing here. And congrats to those who do. But the biggest benefit for me so far is that I learned a ton, refined my ideas, changed some of my stances, and have grown quite a bit in the way I think and interact with others. Not to mention that I have made some great friends. As with most good things in life, this came completely unexpected."
Substack U is great.
I read wonderful material like this on Substack, then I check mainstream media and am appalled by how moronic it is. How gauche. How humourless. How pompous. It is like walking out of the sun and into a reeking cesspit.
What gets my blood boiling when consuming mainstream media isn't even the lies and spin doctoring. It's the unbelievable stupidity, the impoverishment of the human spirit, which reduces the human mind to a smelly sandcorn, forgotten in a pile of rubbish in a devestated corner of existence, inedible even to the vultures.
When the news entities no longer report on "scale accurately" they reveal themselves as entities whose purpose ought be rescinded because what is the purpose of media? Is it not to report on "scale" accurately, and I put forth that if media does not do this when its purported purpose is to share the "news", then such media ought have its permit revoked. This will only happen in a system where the media is aware of the will of the citizens as it ought be, but the purpose of media is to allow new ideas.....so if media does not report on "scale" accurately - suggest the media is beholden to other entities and that is a BIG problem. Because just to state the obvious of the present situation if the "media" is in the hands of a "few" they think amongst themselves they control the narrative, but little do they know that most of us don't consider ourselves cattle and so the power they think they wield is truly delusional and at the end of the day, the lies they tell one day after another will literally turn back upon them and then in the moment they will be punished for the large-scale harm they are directly responsible for - one at a time individually.
Hollywood as well. We readers are so rich here, even if the writers aren’t.
I find much of the stuff featured on many substack sites to be just as moronic and culturally illiterate as anything featured on mainstream media - even more so!
LucTalks being one notable exception.
Exactly. This is the kind of site I'm talking about.
I got a SubStack place (click on it if you want)- I like the "Terms" of the SubStack place - here is a tidbit of the term and today is 8123 - August 1, 2023:
~~~~~~ SubStack "terms" tidbit ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Posting Content on Substack
First and foremost, you own what you create. Any original content you post, upload, share, store, or otherwise provide to Substack remains yours and is protected by copyright and any other applicable intellectual property laws.
That includes newsletters, subscriber lists, any other text or photos you upload to your subdomain on Substack, and any information that you provide to obtain a Substack username and account. It also includes any comments posted on any current or future discussion board features on Substack.
~~~~
Now for me, as an "author" chooses not to request paid subscribers, I appreciate those terms. However, as a reader of many sites, I like to be a paid subscriber, as I am here. So, sometimes ideas take time to coalesce, but an idea sensed and then stewed upon prior to realization is a good thing in my book.
~~~
Thanks "Luc".
Ken
Luc, this was great! You've got so many helpful and memorably articulated pearls of wisdom in this post!
Thanks brother!
British journalist Melanie Phillips recently gave a talk at the London National Conservatism about the cultural revolution in the West; on the left there was a liberation of behaviour and on the right a liberation of the market. Both of these transformations have destroyed all civic life, as the idea that one has any obligation to anyone beyond the self is considered authoritarian. She notes that the very principals that has offered us our liberties and prosperity are doomed without intervention that returns us to tradition.
I highly recommend watching it. She also has a fantastic substack.
Yes, and if not exactly a return to traditions, a return to life in harmony with higher truth. I must say though that I'm somewhat sympathetic to the libertarian position as well. At the end of the day there will always be some tension between self-expression/ thinking for oneself and the need for some conformity, hopefully conformity based on sound principles. I hope we learn how to use that tension productively.
Agreed; as Phillips argues the greatest mistake of our culture is confusing the means with the end. The consensus today is that the goal of life is absolute liberty (especially from consequence or even reality); she aptly notes that instead, liberty should be the way in which we live, but in pursuit of meaning. Ie liberty must be bound by duty and obligation other else it inevitably will disappear from societal chaos
Now only the easy part is left yet to go: to metamorph the aspirational 'should' into the actual 'is' 😏
The eternal back-n-forth between anarchies of personal desire and tyrannies of social convention 🙂
🗨 society, and the underclass most of all, has wholly absorbed to its detriment the philosophy of nonjudgmentalism[; ...] the religion of emancipation, that they have no personal limits, but they instead have unfettered freedom to do exactly as they please, to be funded by others if that freedom needs money.
Charles Haywood, the ur-prophet of Foundationalism, famously traces the roots of our sorry state of affairs back to—and lays the blame at the feet of—nigh-universally lauded Enlightenment. In misguided desperate quest for total emancipation from all unchosen bonds, our societies have been merrily driving 'emselves into a ditch. For quite some time & counting 😒
theworthyhouse.com 🔥👌
I find Melanie Phillips to be beyond-the-pale atrocious - so too with much of the company that she keeps.
It must be summer. I've also experienced a noticeable lack of inspirational fire, and I know others have been struggling, too.
Interesting.
Personally I'm feeling most invigorated. Could be the month of August is one of gusto and being I was born in the middle of August, I don't sense what you are referring to....but that is just me.
So far August has been most mild, but if you want my opinion, some serious storms are on the way.
May the best ideas prevail...
BK
Definitely will be reading and rereading all of these thought provoking quotes Luc. Thank you for sharing them!
Righteous anger is a thing. But it’s not worth a toot.
I get where you are coming from, but some of my favourite music is fuelled by righteous anger.
It can get us moving, taking risks, taking action and connect with deep corners of our soul, certainly.
David Whyte frowns unpersuaded and offers a tad different take 😊
🗨 Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.
🗨 What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.
🗨 Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability... Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.
Anger is a part of the human experience and healthy, in the sense you describe it. Unfortunately there is little that is healthy about our current state of affairs: it's all off, vectored, messed up. And so our anger is easily manipulated; we get angry when we should self-control, and we get sick when we should express it. Social Media-fueled outrage can easily ruin our energy for the day, and in the long run catapult us into lala-land for good.
😳 Bcuz (anti)social media is a multiverse of unhinged lala-lands hoovering our souls wholesale 😟
The quotes you dropped earlier in this thread are spot on, but their insights require a degree of self-awareness to apply, and social media has a bad tendency to undermine self-awareness, leading to anger without the awareness to understand it and respond beneficially!
Whew! I gotta sit down after reading these quotes, think over them, and read them again! Really fantastic insights!
The Good Doctor(*) is very vocal about abominations of modern architecture: they're improvable only by demolition ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Neither he holds back on ruthless diagnosis: radical intersectional incompetence, both technical and aesthetic.
--
(*) aka Theodore Dalrymple aka Anthony Daniels
The Southern French used to build "pigeonniers" in the 19th century, literally pigeon sh*t houses, and they put more love and spirit into them than goes into most of today's homes. They are still preserved by enthusiasts today. Go figure.
Went figure --> p3.storage.canalblog.com/31/54/1308568/100554007.jpg <-- found nuthin not to like 🤸
Great find, stole that for a post on Notes :)
While that picture is sort of beautiful in a way, something about it seems "fake" to me.....but I don't mind. Pigeons need somewhere to shit and myself - I'm a big fan of birds of all sorts. I'm particularly fond of crows and ravens and magpies and such.
L.P. KOCH - I know this is a bit "goofy" but I want you to know I "right-click" (or is it "left-click") on that image at the top of this article with all the fine stonework to get a closer look as I'm want to do and the greenery and the one plant pot on the far right side in a crevice is noticed more up close. One thing I tried to teach my daughters and they know this about me is sometimes if you look real close you can sense the situation better especially when you can see the whole picture as well.
I'm not sure how we have come to encounter one another, but I would like you to know I appreciate the views you share. I think this as well:
Together we are better - I mean seriously Kropotkin from the 19th century and so many other 19th century thinkers were on the precipice and then once again as history goes a new idea, this time one from a fellow named Darwin got contaminated for the sake of a few's interest....and frankly these effing elitist causing harm are on notice. I'm not kidding around and I appreciate your insights. There is no denying big changes are on the way and this can be melancholy but nothing wrong with that. What matters is the will of ideas better.
BK