Thomas

History, politics, architecture, urbanism.

[Thomas @Thomasjbarnes]

@iohndee Cassius?

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

The "15 minute city" is the Western ideal of what a city or a village should be. It's literally "trad" to be in favor of walkable cities.

Some people will counter this by saying: "but 'they' are making 15-min cities that they won't let you leave!"

But I've never seen evidence of this, and when I've pressed such people to produce any, they seem patently unable to do so. There does not appear to be any concerted effort being made to make walkable cities where the authorities entrap citizens and prevent them from leaving as they wish, and so the hysteria seems totally bogus and possibly astroturfed.

The "15 minute city" people themselves seem merely to want to legalize forms of urban development that are presently illegal in the USA; so if anything they're more liberty-minded folks. I see no reason why any lover of freedom would ever screech and howl over more freedom to develop one's property or city how they like.

[O.W. Root @owroot]

You need to be skulking. Long slow walks across the grounds in a long overcoat. Swooping from side to side. Hands in the pockets. Confident. Deliberate. Thinking, brooding, scheming, dreaming.

This weekend, you need to be skulking in a long, heavy overcoat.

[O.W. Root @owroot]

A lot of the "kids are so expensive" thing comes from people who have a feature creep inflated idea of what makes a "good childhood" or "good life" - spoiler alert: it's not an endless supply of expensive things - and/or people who want to pay a bunch to cram them in XYZ so they can strive hard and make a lot of money working 60 hours a week with a TFR of .03 when they grow up. "Are ya winning son?"

It's almost impossible to overstate just how profound the negative impact of modern feature creep lifestyles (born out of consumerism) have had on TFR. It's this vicious spiral and cycle. No wonder the TFR is terrible among people who have more than enough to have kids. They will never ever feel like they have enough because they are stuck in the spiral.

Having kids is expensive if you are plugged into the whole keeping up with, consumerist, striver thing. You are kind of toast at that point anyway though so forget it. It is not expensive if you simply think like all your ancestors did, all the way up to the ones that existed like 50 years ago.

You will figure the money out, you'll adjust, you'll make do, sometimes it will suck, and sometimes it won't, you will cut back, you will get creative, you will live life, because that's all you have to do. And you will thank God that you have your kids. Money really isn't the most important thing in the world. Don't let it stop you from having a family.

[O.W. Root @owroot]

An underlying premise of the H1-B debate is that working yourself to the bone doing 70 hours a week as a worker bee for some corporation is some important thing to aspire to.

It's really not.

Having an endless supply of what amounts to modern slave laborers is a great deal for the slave owner with his own aspirations, but those goals aren't anyone else's and he really doesn't care about you. That's okay, we've all got our own priorities. His aren't yours. Lots of the rhetoric you hear about "working hard" by these types is a very dishonest kind of gaslighting.

Part of getting out of the toxic spiral (Lacking or absent Family life, low spiritual state, less and less fulfillment and meaning) that this detente encourages is extracting oneself from the frame of the corporation.

Being able to say "No, I really don't care about it enough." When hearing about how you need to sacrifice every waking hour if you want to "move up" etc...

Being able to say "No, I don't care about money that much."

That's the way out of a gaslighting frame that makes you lose by tricking you into thinking you are winning. The H1-B situation is an extremely acute example but this problem runs across the society.

Working hard is good. Very good. We need work. No one who achieves anything is against working hard. Hell I'm basically a workaholic myself, but it's all in service of my own enriching work, my business, my project etc...It is meaningful.

Being in some ridiculous slave race to some corp that demands you hollow out the rest of your life for nothing but a bigger paycheck clicking around isn't working hard in a fulfilling sense. It isn't worth it.

Being a faceless worker bee in a serf like race against every other person on earth who is willing to sacrifice every other meaningful aspect of their life just so they can make more money is not a good trade.

There are so many ways to have a meaningful life. The first step is stepping outside of a gaslighting frame that tricks you into losing by making you think you are winning.

[Charles A. Coulombe @RCCoulombe]

It is not just the blood of these four, but of the thousands who fought with or for them against evil whom we need to commemorate.

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

Russell Kirk said:

" ... the automobile is a mechanical Jacobin—that is, a revolutionary the more powerful for being insensate. [...] the automobile tears the old order apart."

Of course he is right. Those who favor automobiles favor the tearing apart of the old order; they prefer that the old America be paved over for the sake of aimless speed. They detest tradition in spite of whatever they claim. They watch and smile as the workmen fill in the old canals and tear down the old village blocks to erect yet-another Soviet-looking highway interchange; they blaze down the highway, their fat stomachs (fat from lack of exercise as they drive all day) bouncing over the bumps in the road as they suck on yet-another drive-thru Pepsi.

With all the fever for revolution that a rabid communist might exhibit, they will mortgage everything their own grandfathers built for the sake of the thrill of flying down the pavement at seventy miles-per-hour -- going nowhere. They will gleefully rebuild the architecture of man's very mind -- toward convenience above all. Gleefully, they cover their inheritance in tar and asphalt and rock-dust; building an altar where 50,000 people will be sacrificed each year in a ghastly display of idolatry. And as they build, they will simply say: "It had to be this way. It was inevitable. We had no choice. It is a free country, and we had no choice."

And, to add insult to injury, they will even triumphantly declare that their forefathers would beam with pride at the destruction they've cheered on and wrought. Like the Leninist praising the Worker's State, they will dismiss the past as a backward time of regression and anguish -- contrasting it with their shimmering, high-speed, concrete future, which is to them the supreme achievement of mankind, whatever it may have cost.

In truth, there are almost no real conservatives left in America. We are an ultra-revolutionary, feverishly progressive country, and we have revolutionized the world in a manner far more intensive than the Soviets ever could have achieved. We beat them at their own game, in a sense. We have upended and destroyed the old ways so thoroughly that no one has even noticed what has been lost -- and we are now homeless in a mechanical hell.

But, like an elderly Czarist wandering the Uralian steppes in the Brezhnev years, I will continue to oppose these "mechanical Jacobins." Members of the Party will laugh and dismiss me; they will castigate me as if I were a fool for defending the old ways. They will speed by me, thinking they do so in victory -- but, of course, they are only speeding toward their own ruin.

[American-Rails.com @americanrails]

The 20th Century Limited menu from 1954.

https://t.co/0E8jL2qOWK

[NPRG @CptHastings1916]

Think I've more or less reached the point where I regard the British state as currently constituted as having no meaningful legitimacy or genuine authority. Britain I love very deeply, & it has my allegiance. But the state is just a great hideous toad squatting over it.

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

I'll never understand it. It's like a brain virus.

"Cars = freedom" might be the dumbest formulation I've ever heard of in my life. They're so "free" that you need government permission to use them, and they can take it away at any time. Forced to buy insurance, forced to buy cars with EPA computerized engines, monitored by AI-based plate-reader cameras, forced to register and inspect.

If this is "freedom," the word means absolutely nothing.

[O.W. Root @owroot]

Slobification in America reaches new lows every year.

It's become a race to the bottom. The best thing we can all do to reverse this is simply dress better ourselves. Our clothes are something we can all control, and it makes an impact slowly over time. That's how slobficiation worked and that's how re-dignification can work.

Yes, you will appear overdressed compared to the slobs at first, but the longer and more often you do it, the more entrenched and normal it becomes, and slowly - ever so slowly - an impact will be made. People won't tell you, but very slowly a gradual change can be made. That's how horizontal culture works. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we can all be the change we want to see.

[Sebastian Milbank 🥀🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @JSMilbank]

I just got back from visiting America — and it’s startling how little sense of American wealth there is in its physical and urban infrastructure, it’s just big cars and overflowing shelves, all consumption. It seemed very ephemeral

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“The struggle to preserve the old creeds, cultures & countries of the West is the new divide between Left & Right; this will define what it means to be a conservative. This is the cause of the 21st century & the agenda of conservatism for the remainder of our lives”

Pat Buchanan

[Western Exile @westernexile]

Remember when the overthrow of monarchies ushered in an idyllic age of peace and prosperity for all?

Oh yes, we actually got total war, absolute oligarchy, wage slavery and a full frontal assault on Christianity.

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

This photo from Britain is utterly gut-churning, encapsulating as it does England's total collapse

The world's former beacon of prosperity, civilization, and empire is now the Third World, a land of total decay and demolition

It's democracy that brought it to its sad state🧵👇

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.”

Evelyn Waugh, born 28th October 1903

[O.W. Root @owroot]

We want to feel human. Old, little streets make us feel human. That’s why we like them.

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“I represent a brand of Toryism, at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment.”

T.E. Utley

[𝓢𝓪𝓶 @samofsamshire]

“All brutalist buildings shall be consumed by the fire… all of them. Their architects too will suffer the same fate. Yes…Yes.”

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

This is exactly it.
I see nothing inherently virtuous about the isolated homestead that Americans often idealize.

Village life is civilization at its best. Townie life. Walking distance to Church, market, library, friends.

I know I'll never be a farmer, so why larp?