Our World
The Return of Generational Warfare
As last week’s midterms demonstrated, young people appear poised to drive American politics, and particularly the Democratic Party, further to the left. This is particularly true in big cities. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected last year with crucial support from younger voters, while in Los Angeles, preelection surveys showed democratic socialist (and now Mayor-elect) Nithya Raman leading by almost five to one among voters in their thirties and by more than four to one among voters aged 18 to 29.
Welcome to the Age of Yookay Hieroglyphics
One of the markers future historians will use when describing the New Dark Ages will be the collapse in the use of the alphabet in favour of ‘Yookay Hieroglyphics’. A demoralising development has emerged: a whole new form of pictographic language whereby children and young adults engage in hours-long online conversations with each other without the need for any letters, texts or words. Such conversations largely occur on gaming platforms, Snapchat and WhatsApp, and mark a classic regressive step in civilisational decline.
Would you raise your kids where you grew up?
A century ago, almost every child lived where their ancestors did. They were born into large families who inhabited the same homes, streets, and towns for generations. Relatives, neighbors, and churches were integral parts of their social lives. In this tight-knit high-trust society, they would find spouses in the local community and repeat the cycle of life with their own children.
There will never be another Norm Macdonald
The new Norm Macdonald documentary, Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald, directed by Judd Apatow, is excellent. That is partly because Macdonald, the Canadian comedian and actor, was such an extraordinary talent: a man with a distinctly novelistic personality, full of hidden depths, profundity, moral courage, pathos and wit. But also because the Nineties and early 2000s, when he was culturally prominent, were simply richer than today’s America. They were more fun, less paranoid, freer and, somehow, more human.
Not the new doc …
Western civilisation at risk of ‘atrophy, servitude and decline’, Rubio says
Standing before the Acropolis in Athens, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio swept through the history of ancient Greece to the rise of American industry in a speech on Wednesday that portrayed western civilisation at risk of decline.
Rubio said the world was at an “inflection point”. Nations, particularly in Europe, should return to ancient Greek values and “rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together”.
“We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was here millennia ago,” he said.
The Way To Defeat The West: Turn Us Against Ourselves
The West possesses extraordinary military, economic, and technological power that our adversaries increasingly realize they can’t confront directly. Paradoxically, we live in a moment when we are forced to choose which of our principles matter most, pitting ourselves against one another instead of focusing with laser precision on our threats, playing our opponents’ game rather than our own.
Lost in the Wilderness: The True Roots of Male Demoralization
Nowadays, young men are treated as either victims of intense sociological anxiety or the objects of thinly veiled ideological derision. To their critics on the progressive left, young men are creatures of “fragile masculinity,” clinging to (and failing to live up to) arbitrary, patriarchal norms that must be therapeutically deconstructed if we are to achieve a more equitable future. To secular cultural commentators, they are caricatures of apathy; stalled adolescents lingering in their childhood bedrooms, checked out of the labor force, alienated from civic life and hopelessly anesthetized by the digital world.
The diagnosis from both camps is remarkably similar: the modern young man suffers from a fundamental failure of character. A refusal or inability to grow up is merely the predictable effect.